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The first discourse assigned by Plato to Sokrates professes to be placed in competition with the discourse of Lysias, and to aim at the same object. But in reality it aims at a different object: it gives the dissuasive arguments, but omits the persuasive--as Phaedrus is made to point out: so that it cannot be fairly compared with the discourse of Lysias. Still more may this be said respecting the second discourse of Sokrates: which is of a character and purpose so totally disparate, that no fair comparison can be taken between it and the ostensible competitor. The mixture of philosophy, mysticism, and dithyrambic poetry, which the second discourse of Sokrates presents, was considered by a rhetorical judge like Dionysius as altogether inconsistent with the scope and purpose of reasonable discourse. In the Menexenus, Plato has brought himself again into competition with Lysias, and there the competition is fairer: for Plato has there entirely neglected the exigencies enforced in the Phaedrus, and has composed a funeral discourse upon the received type; which Lysias and other orators before him had followed, from Perikles downward. But in the Phaedrus, Plato criticises Lysias upon principles which are a medley between philosophy and rhetoric. Lysias, in defending himself, might have taken the same ground as we find Sokrates himself taking in the Euthyd?mus. "Philosophy and politics are two distinct walks, requiring different aptitudes, and having each its own practitioners. A man may take whichever he pleases; but he must not arrogate to himself superiority by an untoward attempt to join the two together."

Though knowledge cannot be first communicated by written matters, yet if it has been once communicated and subsequently forgotten, it may be revived by written matters. Writing has thus a real, though secondary, usefulness, as a memorandum. And Plato doubtless accounted written dialogues the most useful of all written compositions, because they imitated portions of that long oral process whereby alone knowledge had been originally generated. His dialogues were reports of the conversations purporting to have been held by Sokrates with others.

One remark yet remains to be made upon the doctrine here set forth by Plato: that no teaching is possible by means of continuous discourse spoken or written--none, except through prolonged and varied oral dialectic. To this doctrine Plato does not constantly conform in his practice: he departs from it on various important occasions. In the Timaeus, Sokrates calls upon the philosopher so named for an exposition on the deepest and most mysterious cosmical subjects. Timaeus delivers the exposition in a continuous harangue, without a word of remark or question addressed by any of the auditors: while at the beginning of the Kritias Sokrates greatly commends what Timaeus had spoken. The Kritias itself too is given in the form of continuous exposition. Now, as the Timaeus is more abstruse than any other Platonic writing, we cannot imagine that Plato, at the time when he composed it, thought so meanly about continuous exposition, as a vehicle of instruction, as we find him declaring in the Phaedrus. I point this out, because it illustrates my opinion that the different dialogues of Plato represent very different, sometimes even opposite, points of view: and that it is a mistake to treat them as parts of one preconceived and methodical system.

We thus find, in Plato's philosophical character, two extreme opposite tendencies and opposite poles co-existent. We must recognise them both: but they can never be reconciled: sometimes he obeys and follows the one, sometimes the other.

If it had been Plato's purpose to proclaim and impose upon every one something which he called "Absolute Truth," one and the same alike imperative upon all--he would best proclaim it by preaching or writing. To modify this "Absolute," according to the varieties of the persons addressed, would divest it of its intrinsic attribute and excellence. If you pretend to deal with an Absolute, you must turn away your eyes from all diversity of apprehending intellects and believing subjects.

PARMENIDES.

In the dialogues immediately preceding--Phaedon, Phaedrus, Symposion--we have seen Sokrates manifesting his usual dialectic, which never fails him: but we have also seen him indulging in a very unusual vein of positive affirmation and declaration. He has unfolded many novelties about the states of pre-existence and post-existence: he has familiarised us with Ideas, Forms, Essences, eternal and unchangeable, as the causes of all the facts and particularities of nature: he has recognised the inspired variety of madness, as being more worthy of trust than sober, uninspired, intelligence: he has recounted, with the faith of a communicant fresh from the mysteries, revelations made to him by the prophetess Diotima,--respecting the successive stages of exaltation whereby gifted intelligences, under the stimulus of Eros Philosophus, ascend into communion with the great sea of Beauty. All this is set forth with as much charm as Plato's eloquence can bestow. But after all, it is not the true character of Sokrates:--I mean, the Sokrates of the Apology, whose mission it is to make war against the chronic malady of the human mind--false persuasion of knowledge, without the reality. It is, on the contrary, Sokrates himself infected with the same chronic malady which he combats in others, and requiring medicine against it as much as others. Such is the exact character in which Sokrates appears in the Parmenides: which dialogue I shall now proceed to review.

Passing over the dramatic introduction whereby the personages discoursing are brought together, we find Sokrates, Parmenides, and the Eleatic Zeno , engaged in the main dialogue. When Parmenides begins his illustrative exercise, a person named Aristotle , still younger than Sokrates, is made to serve as respondent.

Sokrates is one among various auditors, who are assembled to hear Zeno reading aloud a treatise of his own composition, intended to answer and retort upon the opponents of his preceptor Parmenides.

Plato now puts into the mouth of Parmenides--the advocate of One absolute and unchangeable Ens, separated by an impassable gulf from the sensible world of transitory and variable appearances or phenomena--objections against what is called the Platonic theory of Ideas: that is, the theory of an intelligible world, comprising an indefinite number of distinct intelligible and unchangeable Forms--in partial relation and communication with another world of sensible objects, each of which participates in one or more of these Forms. We thus have the Absolute One pitted against the Absolute Many.

mean objects and esteemed objects being placed side by side.

, &c.

Parmenides now produces various objections against the Platonic variety of dualism: the two distinct but partially inter-communicating worlds--one, of separate, permanent, unchangeable, Forms or Ideas--the other, of individual objects, transient and variable; participating in, and receiving denomination from, these Forms.

Here are some of the objections, Sokrates , which beset your doctrine, that there exist substantive, self-standing, Forms of Ideas, each respectively definable. Many farther objections might also be urged. So that a man may reasonably maintain, either that none such exist--or that, granting their existence, they are essentially unknowable by us. He must put forth great ingenuity to satisfy himself of the affirmative; and still more wonderful ingenuity to find arguments for the satisfaction of others, respecting this question.

Nevertheless, on the other side , unless we admit the existence of such Forms or Ideas--substantive, eternal, unchangeable, definable--philosophy and dialectic discussion are impossible.

Here then, Parmenides entangles himself and his auditors in the perplexing dilemma, that philosophical and dialectic speculation is impossible, unless these Forms or Ideas, together with the participation of sensible objects in them, be granted; while at the same time this cannot be granted, until objections, which appear at first sight unanswerable, have been disposed of.

The acuteness with which these objections are enforced, is remarkable. I know nothing superior to it in all the Platonic writings. Moreover the objections point directly against that doctrine which Plato in other dialogues most emphatically insists upon, and which Aristotle both announces and combats as characteristic of Plato--the doctrine of separate, self-existent, absolute, Forms or Ideas. They are addressed moreover to Sokrates, the chief exponent of that doctrine here as well as in other dialogues. And he is depicted as unable to meet them.

It is true that Sokrates is here introduced as juvenile and untrained; or at least as imperfectly trained. And accordingly, Stallbaum with others think, that this is the reason of his inability to meet the objections: which , though ingenious and plausible, yet having no application to the genuine Platonic doctrine about Ideas, might easily have been answered if Plato had thought fit, and are answered in other dialogues. But to me it appears, that the doctrine which is challenged in the Parmenid?s is the genuine Platonic doctrine about Ideas, as enunciated by Plato in the Republic, Phaedon, Phil?bus, Timaeus, and elsewhere--though a very different doctrine is announced in the Sophist?s. Objections are here made against it in the Parmenid?s. In what other dialogue has Plato answered them? and what proof can be furnished that he was able to answer them? There are indeed many other dialogues in which a real world of Ideas absolute and unchangeable, is affirmed strenuously and eloquently, with various consequences and accompaniments traced to it: but there are none in which the Parmenidean objections are elucidated, or even recited. In the Phaedon, Phaedrus, Timaeus, Symposion, &c., and elsewhere, Sokrates is made to talk confidently about the existence and even about the cognoscibility of these Ideas; just as if no such objections as those which we read in the Parmenid?s could be produced. In these other dialogues, Plato accepts implicitly one horn of the Parmenidean dilemma; but without explaining to us upon what grounds he allows himself to neglect the other.

Socher has so much difficulty in conceiving that Plato can have advanced such forcible objections against a doctrine, which nevertheless in other Platonic dialogues is proclaimed as true and important,--that he declares the Parmenid?s not to be genuine, but to have been composed by some unknown Megaric contemporary. To pass over the improbability that any unknown author should have been capable of composing works of so much ability as these--Socher's decision about spuriousness is founded upon an estimate of Plato's philosophical character, which I think incorrect. Socher expects to find in Plato a preconceived system and a scheme of conclusions to which every thing is made subservient.

In most philosophers, doubtless, this is what we do find. Each starts with some favourite conclusions, which he believes to be true, and which he supports by all the arguments in their favour, as far as his power goes. If he mentions the arguments against them, he usually answers the weak, slurs over or sneers at the strong: at any rate, he takes every precaution that these counter arguments shall appear unimportant in the eyes of his readers. His purpose is, like that of a speaker in the public assembly, to obtain assent and belief: whether the hearers understand the question or not, is a matter of comparative indifference: at any rate, they must be induced to embrace his conclusion. Unless he thus foregoes the character of an impartial judge, to take up that of an earnest advocate; unless he bends the whole force of his mind to the establishment of the given conclusion--he becomes suspected as deficient in faith or sincerity, and loses much in persuasive power. For an earnest belief, expressed with eloquence and feeling, is commonly more persuasive than any logic.

Now whether this exclusive devotion to the affirmative side of certain questions be the true spirit of philosophy or not, it is certainly not the spirit of Plato in his Dialogues of Search; wherein he conceives the work of philosophy in a totally different manner. He does not begin by stating, even to himself a certain conclusion at which he has arrived, and then proceed to prove that conclusion to others. The search or debate has greater importance in his eyes than the conclusion: nay, in a large proportion of his dialogues, there is no conclusion at all: we see something disproved, but nothing proved. The negative element has with him a value and importance of its own, apart from the affirmative. He is anxious to set forth what can be said against a given conclusion; even though not prepared to establish any thing in its place.

Such negative element, manifested as it is in so many of the Platonic dialogues, has its extreme manifestation in the Parmenid?s. When we see it here applied to a doctrine which Plato in other dialogues insists upon as truth, we must call to mind that a case may always be made out against truth as well as in its favour: and that its privilege as a certified portion of "reasoned truth," rests upon no better title than the superiority of the latter case over the former. It is for testing the two cases--for determining where the superiority lies--and for graduating its amount--that the process of philosophising is called for, and that improvements in the method thereof become desirable. That Plato should, in one of his many diversified dialogues, apply this test to a doctrine which, in other dialogues, he holds out as true--is noway inconsistent with the general spirit of these compositions. Each of his dialogues has its own point of view, worked out on that particular occasion; what is common to them all, is the process of philosophising applied in various ways to the same general topics.

Those who, like Socher, deny Plato's authorship of the Parmenid?s, on the ground of what is urged therein against the theory of Ideas, must suppose, either that he did not know that a negative case could be made out against that theory; or that knowing it, he refrained from undertaking the duty. Neither supposition is consistent with what we know both of his negative ingenuity, and of his multifarious manner of handling.

The negative case, made out in the Parmenid?s against the theory of Ideas, is indeed most powerful. The hypothesis of the Ideal World is unequivocally affirmed by Sokrates, with its four principal characteristics. 1. Complete essential separation from the world of sense. 2. Absolute self-existence. 3. Plurality of constituent items, several contrary to each other. 4. Unchangeable sameness and unity of each and all of them.--Here we have full satisfaction given to the Platonic sentiment, which often delights in soaring above the world of sense, and sometimes in heaping contemptuous metaphors upon it. But unfortunately Sokrates cannot disengage himself from this world of sense: he is obliged to maintain that it partakes of, or is determined by, these extra-sensible Forms or Ideas. Here commence the series of difficulties and contradictions brought out by the Elenchus of Parmenides. Are all sensible objects, even such as are vulgar, repulsive, and contemptible, represented in this higher world? The Platonic sentiment shrinks from the admission: the Platonic sense of analogy hesitates to deny it. Then again, how can both assertions be true--first that the two worlds are essentially separate, next, that the one participates in, and derives its essence from, the other? How can the essence be separated from that of which it is the essence? How can the Form, essentially One, belong at once to a multitude of particulars?

Two points deserve notice in this debate respecting the doctrine of Ideas:--

, &c. Simplikius alludes to the Eretrian philosophers and Theopompus, who considered as , &c.

The following passage in the learned work of Cudworth bears on the portion of the Parmenid?s which we are now considering. Cudworth, Treatise of Immutable Morality, pp. 243-245.

"But if any one demand here, where this , these immutable Entities do exist? I answer, first, that as they are considered formally, they do not properly exist in the Individuals without us, as if they were from them imprinted upon the Understanding, which some have taken to be Aristotle's opinion; because no Individual Material thing is either Universal or Immutable. . . . Because they perish not together with them, it is a certain argument that they exist independently upon them. Neither, in the next place, do they exist somewhere else apart from the Individual Sensibles, and without the Mind, which is that opinion that Aristotle justly condemns, but either unjustly or unskilfully attributes to Plato. . . . Wherefore these Intelligible Ideas or Essences of Things, those Forms by which we understand all Things, exist nowhere but in the mind itself; for it was very well determined long ago by Socrates, in Plato's Parmenid?s, that these things are nothing else but Noemata: 'These Species or Ideas are all of them nothing but Noemata or Notions that exist nowhere but in the Soul itself'. . . .

"And yet notwithstanding, though these Things exist only in the Mind, they are not therefore mere Figments of the Understanding. . . .

"It is evident that though the Mind thinks of these Things at pleasure, yet they are not arbitrarily framed by the Mind, but have certain, determinate, and immutable Natures of their own, which are independent upon the Mind, and which are blown away into Nothing at the pleasure of the same Being that arbitrarily made them."

Plato has not followed out the hint which he has here put into the mouth of Sokrates in the Parmenid?s--That the Ideas or Forms are conceptions existing only in the mind. Though the opinion thus stated is not strictly correct , as falling back too exclusively on the subjective--yet if followed out, it might have served to modify the too objective and absolute character which in most dialogues he ascribes to his Forms or Ideas: laying stress upon them as objects--and as objects not of sensible perception--but overlooking or disallowing the fact of their being relative to the concipient mind. The bent of Plato's philosophy was to dwell upon these Forms, and to bring them into harmonious conjunction with each other: he neither took pains, nor expected, to make them fit on to the world of sense. With Aristotle, on the contrary, this last-mentioned purpose is kept very generally in view. Amidst all the extreme abstractions which he handles, he reverts often to the comparison of them with sensible particulars: indeed Substantia Prima was by him, for the first time in the history of philosophy, brought down to designate the concrete particular object of sense: in Plato's Phaedon, Republic, &c, the only Substances are the Forms or Ideas.

What sort of exercise must I go through? asks Sokrates. Zeno has already given you a good specimen of it in his treatise, when he followed out the consequences flowing from the assumption--"That the self-existent and absolute Ens is plural". When you are trying to find out the truth on any question, you must assume provisionally, first the affirmative and then the negative, and you must then follow out patiently the consequences deducible from one hypothesis as well as from the other. If you are enquiring about the Form of Likeness, whether it exists or does not exist, you must assume successively both one and the other; marking the deductions which follow, both with reference to the thing directly assumed, and with reference to other things also. You must do the like if you are investigating other Forms--Unlikeness, Motion, and Rest, or even Existence and Non-Existence. But you must not be content with following out only one side of the hypothesis: you must examine both sides with equal care and impartiality. This is the only sort of preparatory exercise which will qualify you for completely seeing through the truth.

You propose to me, Parmenides , a work of awful magnitude. At any rate, show me an example of it yourself, that I may know better how to begin.--Parmenides at first declines, on the ground of his old age: but Zeno and the others urge him, so that he at length consents.--The process will be tedious ; and I would not ask it from Parmenides unless among an audience small and select as we are here. Before any numerous audience, it would be an unseemly performance for a veteran like him. For most people are not aware that, without such discursive survey and travelling over the whole field, we cannot possibly attain truth or acquire intelligence.

Of these demonstrations, one characteristic feature is, that they are presented in antagonising pairs or Antinomies: except the third, which professes to mediate between the first and second, though only by introducing new difficulties. We have four distinct Antinomies: the first and second, the fourth and fifth, the sixth and seventh, the eighth and ninth, stand respectively in emphatic contradiction with each other. Moreover, to take the demonstrations separately--the first, fifth, seventh, ninth, end in conclusions purely negative: the other four end in double and contradictory conclusions. The purpose is formally proclaimed, of showing that the same premisses, ingeniously handled, can be made to yield these contradictory results. No attempt is made to reconcile the contradictions, except partially by means of the third, in reference to the two preceding. In regard to the fourth and fifth, sixth and seventh, eighth and ninth, no hint is given that they can be, or afterwards will be, reconciled. The dialogue concludes abruptly at the end of the ninth demonstration, with these words: "We thus see that--whether Unum exists or does not exist--Unum and Caetera both are, and are not, all things in every way--both appear, and do not appear, all things in every way--each in relation to itself, and each in relation to the other". Here is an unqualified and even startling announcement of double and contradictory conclusions, obtained from the same premisses both affirmative and negative: an announcement delivered too as the fulfilment of the purpose of Parmenides. Nothing is said at the end to intimate how the demonstrations are received by Sokrates, nor what lesson they are expected to administer to him: not a word of assent, or dissent, or surprise, or acknowledgment in any way, from the assembled company, though all of them had joined in entreating Parmenides, and had expressed the greatest anxiety to hear his dialectic exhibition. Those who think that an abrupt close, or an abrupt exordium, is sufficient reason for declaring a dialogue not to be the work of Plato , are of course consistent in disallowing the Parmenides. For my part, I do not agree in the opinion. I take Plato as I find him, and I perceive both here and in the Protagoras and elsewhere, that he did not always think it incumbent upon him to adapt the end of his dialogues to the beginning. This may be called a defect, but I do not feel called upon to make out that Plato's writings are free from defects; and to acknowledge nothing as his work unless I can show it to be faultless.

The demonstrations or Antinomies in the last half of the Parmenides are characterised by K. F. Hermann and others as a masterpiece of speculative acuteness. Yet if these same demonstrations, constructed with care and labour for the purpose of proving that the same premisses will conduct to double and contradictory conclusions, had come down to us from antiquity under the name either of the Megaric Eukleides, or Protagoras, or Gorgias--many of the Platonic critics would probably have said of them that they were poor productions worthy of such Sophists, who are declared to have made a trade of perverting truth. Certainly the conclusions of the demonstrations are specimens of that "Both and Neither," which Plato puts into the mouth of the Sophist Dionysodorus as an answer of slashing defiance--and of that intentional evolution of contradictions which Plato occasionally discountenances, both in the Euthydemus and elsewhere. And we know from Proklus that there were critics in ancient times, who depreciated various parts of the Parmenides as sophistical. Proklus himself denies the charge with some warmth. He as well as the principal Neo-Platonists between 200-530 A.D. admired the Parmenides as a splendid effort of philosophical genius in its most exalted range, inspired so as to become cognizant of superhuman persons and agencies. They all agreed so far as to discover in the dialogue a sublime vein of mystic theology and symbolism: but along with this general agreement, there was much discrepancy in their interpretation of particular parts and passages. The commentary of Proklus attests the existence of such debates, reporting his own dissent from the interpretations sanctioned by his venerated masters, Plutarchus and Syrianus. That commentary, in spite of its prolixity, is curious to read as a specimen of the fifth century, A.D., in one of its most eminent representatives. Proklus discovers a string of theological symbols and a mystical meaning throughout the whole dialogue: not merely in the acute argumentation which characterises its middle part, but also in the perplexing antinomies of its close, and even in the dramatic details of places, persons, and incidents, with which it begins.

. Jamblichus declared that Plato's entire theory of philosophy was embodied in the two dialogues, Parmenides and Timaeus: in the Parmenides, all the intelligible or universal Entia were deduced from

The various explanations of it given by more recent commentators may be seen enumerated in the learned Prolegomena of Stallbaum, who has also set forth his own views at considerable length. And the prodigious opposition between the views of Proklus , who extols the Parmenides as including in mystic phraseology sublime religious truths--and those of the modern Tiedemann, who despises them as foolish subtleties and cannot read them with patience--is quite sufficient to inspire a reasonable Platonic critic with genuine diffidence.

In so far as these different expositions profess, each in its own way, to detect a positive dogmatical result or purpose in the Parmenides, none of them carry conviction to my mind, any more than the mystical interpretations which we read in Proklus. If Plato had any such purpose, he makes no intimation of it, directly or indirectly. On the contrary, he announces another purpose not only different, but contrary. The veteran Parmenides, while praising the ardour of speculative research displayed by Sokrates, at the same time reproves gently, but distinctly, the confident forwardness of two such immature youths as Sokrates and Aristotle in laying down positive doctrines without the preliminary exercise indispensable for testing them. Parmenides appears from the beginning to the end of the dialogue as a propounder of doubts and objections, not as a doctrinal teacher. He seeks to restrain the haste of Sokrates--to make him ashamed of premature affirmation and the false persuasion of knowledge--to force upon him a keen sense of real difficulties which have escaped his notice. To this end, a specimen is given of the exercise required. It is certainly well calculated to produce the effect intended--of hampering, perplexing, and putting to shame, the affirmative rashness of a novice in philosophy. It exhibits a tangled skein of ingenious contradiction which the novice must somehow bring into order, before he is in condition to proclaim any positive dogma. If it answers this purpose, it does all that Parmenides promises. Sokrates is warned against attaching himself exclusively to one side of an hypothesis, and neglecting the opposite: against surrendering himself to some pre-conception, traditional, or self-originated, and familiarising his mind with its consequences, while no pains are taken to study the consequences of the negative side, and bring them into comparison. It is this one-sided mental activity, and premature finality of assertion, which Parmenides seeks to correct. Whether the corrective exercises which he prescribes are the best for the purpose, may be contested: but assuredly the malady which he seeks to correct is deeply rooted in our human nature, and is combated by Sokrates himself, though by other means, in several of the Platonic dialogues. It is a rare mental endowment to study both sides of a question, and suspend decision until the consequences of each are fully known.

, or exercise in the method and perplexities of philosophising : but I do not agree with him, when he says that the objections urged by Parmenides against the separate substantiality of Forms or Ideas, though noway answered in the dialogue itself, are sufficiently answered in other dialogues , especially in the Sophistes . Zeller, on the other hand, denies that these objections are at all answered in the Sophistes; but he maintains that the second part of the Parmenides itself clears up the difficulties propounded in the first part. After an elaborate analysis of the Antinomies or contradictory Demonstrations in the concluding part of the dialogue, Zeller affirms the purpose of them to be "die richtige Ansicht von den Ideen als der Einheit in dem Mannichfaltigen der Erscheinung dialektisch zu begr?nden, die Ideenlehre m?glichen Einw?rfen und Missverst?ndnissen gegen?ber dialektisch zu begr?nden" . This solution has found favour with some subsequent commentators. See Susemihl, Die genetische Entwickelung der Platon. Philosophie, pp. 341-353; Heinrich Stein, Vorgeschichte und System des Platonismus, pp. 217-220.

To me it appears that it requires all the acuteness of so able a writer as Zeller to detect any such result as that which he here extracts from the Parmenidean Antinomies--from what Aristeides calls "the One and Many, the multiplied twists and doublings, of this divine dialogue". I confess that I am unable to perceive therein what Zeller has either found or elicited. Objections and misunderstandings , far from being obviated or corrected, are accumulated from the beginning to the end of these Antinomies, and are summed up in a formidable total by the final sentence of the dialogue. Moreover, none of these objections which Parmenides had advanced in the earlier part of the dialogue are at all noticed, much less answered, in the concluding Antinomies.

The general view taken by Zeller of the Platonic Parmenides, is repeated by him in his Phil. der Griech. vol. ii. pp. 394-415-429, ed. 2nd. In the first place, I do not think that he sets forth exactly the reasoning as we read it in Plato; but even if that were exactly set forth, still what we read in Plato is nothing but an assemblage of difficulties and contradictions. These are indeed suggestive, and such as a profound critic may meditate with care, until he finds himself put upon a train of thought conducting him to conclusions sound and tenable in his judgment. But the explanations, sufficient or not, belong after all not to Plato but to the critic himself. Other critics may attach, and have attached, totally different explanations to the same difficulties. I see no adequate evidence to bring home any one of them to Plato; or to prove that any one of them was present to his mind when he composed the dialogue.

Schwegler also gives an account of what he affirms to be the purpose and meaning of the Parmenides--"The positive meaning of the antinomies contained in it can only be obtained by inferences which Plato does not himself expressly enunciate, but leaves to the reader to draw" .

A learned man like Schwegler, who both knows the views of other philosophers, and has himself reflected on philosophy, may perhaps find affirmative meaning in the Parmenides; just as Sokrates, in the Platonic Protagoras, finds his own ethical doctrine in the song of the poet Simonides. But I venture to say that no contemporary reader of Plato could have found such a meaning in the Parmenides; and that if Plato intended to communicate such a meaning, the whole structure of the dialogue would be only an elaborate puzzle calculated to prevent nearly all readers from reaching it.

The fundamental thought of the Parmenides is, that the One is not conceivable in complete abstraction from the Many, nor the Many in complete abstraction from the One,--that each reciprocally supposes and serves as condition to the other. Not so: for if we follow the argumentation of Parmenides , we shall see that what he principally insists upon, is the entire impossibility of any connection or participation between the One and the Many--there is an impassable gulf between them.

Is the discussion of

If however we suppose that Plato must have had the key present to his own mind, he might still think it right to employ, in such a dialogue, reasonings recognised by himself as defective. It is the task imposed upon Sokrates to find out and expose these defective links. There is no better way of illustrating how universal is the malady of human intelligence--unexamined belief and over-confident affirmation--as it stands proclaimed to be in the Platonic Apology. Sokrates is exhibited in the Parmenides as placed under the screw of the Elenchus, and no more able than others to extricate himself from it, when it is applied by Parmenides: though he bears up successfully against Zeno, and attracts to himself respectful compliments, even from the aged dialectician who tests him. After the Elenchus applied to himself, Sokrates receives a farther lesson from the "Neither and Both" demonstrations addressed by Parmenides to the still younger Aristotle. Sokrates will thus be driven, with his indefatigable ardour for speculative research, to work at the problem--to devote to it those seasons of concentrated meditation, which sometimes exhibited him fixed for hours in the same place and almost in the same attitude--until he can extricate himself from such difficulties and contradictions. But that he shall not extricate himself without arduous mental effort, is the express intention of Parmenides: just as the Xenophontic Sokrates proceeds with the youthful Euthydemus and the Platonic Sokrates with Lysis, Theaetetus, and others. Plausible subtlety was not unsuitable for such a lesson. Moreover, in the Parmenides, Plato proclaims explicitly that the essential condition of the lesson is to be strictly private: that a process so roundabout and tortuous cannot be appreciated by ordinary persons, and would be unseemly before an audience. He selects as respondent the youngest person in the company, one still younger than Sokrates: because such a person will reply with artless simplicity, to each question as the question may strike him--not carrying his mind forward to the ulterior questions for which his reply may furnish the handle--not afraid of being entangled in puzzling inconsistencies--not solicitous to baffle the purpose of the interrogator. All this betokens the plan of the dialogue--to bring to light all those difficulties which do not present themselves except to a keen-sighted enquirer.

here enjoined by the Platonic Parmenides is so prodigious, that no one after Plato employed it .

We must remark farther, that the two hypotheses here handled at length by Parmenides are presented by him only as examples of a dialectical process which he enjoins the lover of truth to apply equally to many other hypotheses. As he shows that in the case of Unum, each of the two assumptions can be traced through different threads of deductive reasoning so as to bring out double and contradictory results--Both and Neither: so also in the case of those other assumptions which remain to be tested afterwards in like manner, antinomies of the same character may be expected: antinomies apparent at least, if not real--which must be formally propounded and dealt with, before we can trust ourselves as having attained reasoned truth. Hence we see that, negative and puzzling as the dialogue called Parmenides is, even now--it would be far more puzzling if all that it prescribes in general terms had been executed in detail. While it holds out, in the face of an aspirant in philosophy, the necessity of giving equal presumptive value to the affirmative and negative sides of each hypothesis, and deducing with equal care, the consequences of both--it warns him at the same time of the contradictions in which he will thereby become involved. These contradictions are presented in the most glaring manner: but we must recollect a striking passage in the Republic, where Plato declares that to confront the aspirant with manifest contradictions, is the best way of provoking him to intellectual effort in the higher regions of speculation.

Schleiermacher has justly observed, that in order to understand properly the dialectic manoeuvres of the Parmenides, we ought to have had before us the works of that philosopher himself, of Zeno, Melissus, Gorgias, and other sceptical reasoners of the age immediately preceding--which have unfortunately perished. Some reference to these must probably have been present to Plato in the composition of this dialogue. At the same time, if we accept the dialogue as being a string of objections and dialectical problems, we shall take care not to look for any other sort of merit than what such a composition requires and admits. If the objections are forcible, the problems ingenious and perplexing, the purpose of the author is satisfied. To search in the dialogue for some positive result, not indeed directly enunciated but discoverable by groping and diving--would be to expect a species of fruit inconsistent with the nature of the tree.

--Topica, iv. p. 127, a. 28. , Physica, i. p. 185, b. 6.

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