Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/48

32 dicates can both be true, if reality do not exclude the reality of.

6 and 8 show that may have negatives attached to it and yet predication remain possible. In particular, 6 shows that can have predicates of a positive kind, even though it have also negative ones ; 8, that even if be thought of as negatively determined, or be not rightly apprehended, yet so long as its existence is not absolutely denied, things will have an apparent unity, and admit of assertions being made about them, though these assertions will not rise to the level of real knowledge.

Bringing these various results together, I think we may venture to say that the object of the second part of the Parmenides has now been shown to be this : to demonstrate that the crude Idealism which places reality in a mere undiversified unity, and the crude Sensationalism which finds it in mere chaotic diversity, alike end, when thought out, in speculative Nihilism, and to justify against both, as the true interpretation of the world, a theory which, while refusing to regard the multiplicity and change of sense-perception as the ultimate truth of things, yet looks upon it as a necessary and indispensable element in the whole. The truth of things lies in the Ideas, but they are not, as the opposite view supposed, in a world of their own, nor is the phenomenal world simply unreal ; it is the sphere in which the Ideas manifest themselves, and, just as the sensible world would be nothing but for its "participation" in the Ideas, so the Idea would be equally nothing but for its permeating presence in the actual world of experience. In the Parmenides, in fact, as in the Sophistes, we find Plato defending his own view of the world against attack from two quarters. He has to answer (a) the philosophers .who recognise the sensible as the only reality, and attempt to dispense altogether with the Ideas. And in the Parmenides the refutation on this side must be sought in the eighth and ninth hypotheses. In 8, where we have, as I have shown in the proper place, Plato's own account of, we see the perplexities to which the neglect of the Idea (cf. Soph., 246, ) and in 9 the ultimate speechlessness to which its consistent rejection must lead. Plato has also (b) to meet the believers in the "changeless and moveless" bodiless Idea as the sole reality, and it is to them that the chief part of the dialogue (hyp. 1-6) is allotted. And the moral of the whole cannot