Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/25

 II. ON THE INTERPRETATION OF PLATO'S PAR MEN IDES. (III.) BY A. E. TAYLOR. Hypothesis 3. If the second hypothesis is the most elaborate and difficult, the third, which is in substance a continuation of the second, may be said to be the most perplexing part of the dialogue. It is not that there is any difficulty of inter- pretation ; the argument is simple, straightforward, and entirely free from the taint of more or less conscious sophistication which hangs about some steps of hypothesis 2. But the very serious difficulty which besets this new hypothesis is the difficulty of seeing how it in any way adds to the understanding of the puzzles about unity and diversity. Viewed as an analysis of the conception of " change " the passage has much acuteness and value, but it is hard to see how it advances our knowledge of the nature of unity and plurality beyond the stage we have already reached. It seems almost as if Plato, having once been led by the recognition of motion and change as some- how qualifying reality to the analysis of the notion of change itself, found himself unable to resist the temptation to set out the puzzles and contradictions it involves at length, in spite of the interruption of the main argument of the dialogue which this proceeding en tails. For, while it is manifest that these two pages of Plato already contain in a more condensed form the substance of what Aristotle was afterwards to say on the same subject in Physics 5, it is equally clear that the episode is an artistic blemish. This hypothesis absolutely refuses to fit into the antithetical framework upon which the others are constructed ; in order to set out the whole of the hypotheses in symmetrical form as antinomies it is necessary with Zeller in the Platonische Studien to treat 3 simply as a further development of 2, while yet Plato himself formally closes 2 at 155 E and opens the new argument with the express assertion of its independence, ert 8rj TO rpirov Xe'7&>/iei/. Thus what is in