Parmenides | Page 8

also which follow from the denial of
the hypothesis. For example, what follows from the assumption of the
existence of the many, and the counter-argument of what follows from
the denial of the existence of the many: and similarly of likeness and
unlikeness, motion, rest, generation, corruption, being and not being.
And the consequences must include consequences to the things

supposed and to other things, in themselves and in relation to one
another, to individuals whom you select, to the many, and to the all;
these must be drawn out both on the affirmative and on the negative
hypothesis,--that is, if you are to train yourself perfectly to the
intelligence of the truth.' 'What you are suggesting seems to be a
tremendous process, and one of which I do not quite understand the
nature,' said Socrates; 'will you give me an example?' 'You must not
impose such a task on a man of my years,' said Parmenides. 'Then will
you, Zeno?' 'Let us rather,' said Zeno, with a smile, 'ask Parmenides, for
the undertaking is a serious one, as he truly says; nor could I urge him
to make the attempt, except in a select audience of persons who will
understand him.' The whole party joined in the request.
Here we have, first of all, an unmistakable attack made by the youthful
Socrates on the paradoxes of Zeno. He perfectly understands their drift,
and Zeno himself is supposed to admit this. But they appear to him, as
he says in the Philebus also, to be rather truisms than paradoxes. For
every one must acknowledge the obvious fact, that the body being one
has many members, and that, in a thousand ways, the like partakes of
the unlike, the many of the one. The real difficulty begins with the
relations of ideas in themselves, whether of the one and many, or of any
other ideas, to one another and to the mind. But this was a problem
which the Eleatic philosophers had never considered; their thoughts
had not gone beyond the contradictions of matter, motion, space, and
the like.
It was no wonder that Parmenides and Zeno should hear the novel
speculations of Socrates with mixed feelings of admiration and
displeasure. He was going out of the received circle of disputation into
a region in which they could hardly follow him. From the crude idea of
Being in the abstract, he was about to proceed to universals or general
notions. There is no contradiction in material things partaking of the
ideas of one and many; neither is there any contradiction in the ideas of
one and many, like and unlike, in themselves. But the contradiction
arises when we attempt to conceive ideas in their connexion, or to
ascertain their relation to phenomena. Still he affirms the existence of
such ideas; and this is the position which is now in turn submitted to
the criticisms of Parmenides.
To appreciate truly the character of these criticisms, we must remember

the place held by Parmenides in the history of Greek philosophy. He is
the founder of idealism, and also of dialectic, or, in modern
phraseology, of metaphysics and logic (Theaet., Soph.). Like Plato, he
is struggling after something wider and deeper than satisfied the
contemporary Pythagoreans. And Plato with a true instinct recognizes
him as his spiritual father, whom he 'revered and honoured more than
all other philosophers together.' He may be supposed to have thought
more than he said, or was able to express. And, although he could not,
as a matter of fact, have criticized the ideas of Plato without an
anachronism, the criticism is appropriately placed in the mouth of the
founder of the ideal philosophy.
There was probably a time in the life of Plato when the ethical teaching
of Socrates came into conflict with the metaphysical theories of the
earlier philosophers, and he sought to supplement the one by the other.
The older philosophers were great and awful; and they had the charm
of antiquity. Something which found a response in his own mind
seemed to have been lost as well as gained in the Socratic dialectic. He
felt no incongruity in the veteran Parmenides correcting the youthful
Socrates. Two points in his criticism are especially deserving of notice.
First of all, Parmenides tries him by the test of consistency. Socrates is
willing to assume ideas or principles of the just, the beautiful, the good,
and to extend them to man (compare Phaedo); but he is reluctant to
admit that there are general ideas of hair, mud, filth, etc. There is an
ethical universal or idea, but is there also a universal of physics?--of the
meanest things in the world as well as of the greatest? Parmenides
rebukes this want of consistency in Socrates, which he attributes to his
youth. As