same law in small things and in great.

But now as to the nature of these Ideas. What, Parmenides asks, is the
relation of these, as eternally existing in the mind of God, to the
same ideas as possessed by individual men? Does each individual
actually _partake_ in the thought of God through {158} the ideas, or
are his ideas only _resemblances_ of the eternal? If he partakes, then
the eternal ideas are not one but many, as many as the persons who
possess them. If his ideas only resemble, then there must be some
basis of reference by which the resemblance is established, a _tertium
quid_ or third existence resembling both, and so _ad infinitum_.
Socrates is puzzled by this, and suggests that perhaps the Ideas are
only notions in our minds. But to this it is replied that there is an
end in that case of any reality in our ideas. Unless in some way they
have a true and causal relation with something beyond our minds, there
is an end of mind altogether, and with mind gone everything goes.

This, as Professor Jowett remarks, "remains a difficulty for us as well
as for the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ, and is the
stumbling-block of Kant's _Critic_, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation
of Kant as well as of the Platonic ideas. It has been said that 'you
cannot criticise Revelation.' 'Then how do you know what is
Revelation, or that there is one at all?' is the immediate rejoinder.
'You know nothing of things in themselves.'--'Then how do you know that
there are things in themselves?' In some respects the difficulty
pressed harder upon the Greek than upon ourselves. For conceiving of
God more under the attribute of knowledge than we do, he was more under
the necessity of {159} separating the divine from the human, as two
spheres which had no communication with one another."

Next follows an extraordinary analysis of the ideas of 'Being' and
'Unity,' remarkable not only for its subtlety, but for the relation
which it historically bears to the modern philosophic system of Hegel.
"Every affirmation is _ipso facto_ a negation;" "the negation of a
negation is an affirmation;" these are the psychological (if not
metaphysical) facts, on which the analysis of Parmenides and the
philosophy of Hegel are both founded.

We may pass more rapidly by the succeeding dialogues of the series: the
_Theaetetus_ (already quoted from above, p. 89), which is a close and
powerful investigation of the nature of knowledge on famili