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 ON THE INTERPRETATION OF PLATO'S PARMENIDES. 37 on this point, the advantage, as far as consistency is con- cerned, is not with Socrates. The first Megarians, accord- ing to all accounts, held pretty much the same notion of Ideas as that which Socrates here puts forward, but they soon discovered the impossibility of getting from such Ideas an explanation of the sensible world. That, with the con- sistency of despair, they, like the Eleatics, gave up as the merely illusory. And a similar act of intellectual " happy despatch " would be the inevitable outcome of Socrates' theory, were he determined to carry it through. He is not however prepared to face such a consequence, and on its being pointed out to him that the presuppositions of his Ideal theory exclude the derivation of the sensible world from the Ideas he is disposed to modify the theory. In the second part of the dialogue, on the other hand, that inter- pretation of el TO ev <TTI which leads to the Nihilistic con- clusions of the first and fifth hypotheses seems to be Megarian- isrn unalloyed. No better comment could be made on the meaning and consequences of the assumption " the One is," in the sense in which it is there made, than is contained in the three following passages which sum up the Megarian ontology. (I quote from Eitter and Preller.) " They held that reality is one, and the unreal is what is other than the One, and that there is no such thing as genesis, or decay, or motion." (r/^iovv ovrot ye TO ov ev elvai, nal TO prj ov erepoi/ elvat, fATjBe yei'va6eipecr6ai fj-tiBe Kivei<T0ai rb Trapdirav . Aristocles Peripateticus quoted in Eusebius, Praeparat. Evang., 14, 7.) " He (Eucleides) denied the reality of what is opposed to the ' Good,' saying that it does not exist" (Diog. Laert., 2, 106). "These theories (Megarian views about 8vva/j.is and evepyeia) destroy both motion and becoming. What is once at rest will according to them be always at rest, and what once sits down must always remain seated " (Aristotle, Met. [i.e., Bk. 6} 1047al4). It is true that we cannot be sure that the Megarian doctrine about Swaths is as old as Eucleides, but it is at any rate a natural and obvious deduction from the principle, " what is, is, and what is not, is not, and there is no intercom- munion of being and not-being," which was common to him with the Eleatics. It would seem then that it is not unreasonable to state the argument of the Parmenides from a historical point of view thus. Parmenides exhibits to Socrates the latent Megarianism of his first ideal theory (part 1) ; the Megarian principle is then followed con- sistently to its conclusion, and proved (hyp. 1 and 5) to be as untenable as the opposite theory of sensationalism (7, 9),