Parmenides

Ceph. And yet, Socrates, said Parmenides, these difficulties and many more besides are inseparable from the ideas, if these ideas of things exist and we declare that each of them is an absolute idea. Therefore he who hears such assertions is confused in his mind and argues that the ideas do not exist, and even if they do exist cannot by any possibility be known by man; and he thinks that what he says is reasonable, and, as I was saying just now, he is amazingly hard to convince. Only a man of very great natural gifts will be able to understand that everything has a class and absolute essence, and only a still more wonderful man can find out all these facts and teach anyone else to analyze them properly and understand them. I agree with you, Parmenides, said Socrates, for what you say is very much to my mind. But on the other hand, said Parmenides, if anyone, with his mind fixed on all these objections and others like them, denies the existence of ideas of things, and does not assume an idea under which each individual thing is classed, he will be quite at a loss, since he denies that the idea of each thing is always the same, and in this way he will utterly destroy the power of carrying on discussion. You seem to have been well aware of this. Quite true, he said. Then what will become of philosophy? To what can you turn, if these things are unknown? I do not see at all, at least not at present. No, Socrates, he said, for you try too soon, before you are properly trained, to define the beautiful, the just, the good, and all the other ideas. You see I noticed it when I heard you talking yesterday with Aristoteles here. Your impulse towards dialectic is noble and divine, you may be assured of that; but exercise and train yourself while you are still young in an art which seems to be useless and is called by most people mere loquacity; otherwise the truth will escape you. What, then, Parmenides, he said, is the method of training? That which you heard Zeno practising, said he. However, even when you were speaking to him I was pleased with you, because you would not discuss the doubtful question in terms of visible objects or in relation to them, but only with reference to what we conceive most entirely by the intellect and may call ideas. Yes, he said, that is because I think that in that way it is quite easy to show that things experience likeness or unlikeness or anything else.