and another without end. The difficulty belongs in fact to the Megarian
age of philosophy, and is due to their illogical logic, and to the
general ignorance of the ancients respecting the part played by language
in the process of thought. No such perplexity could ever trouble
a modern metaphysician, any more than the fallacy of 'calvus' or
'acervus,' or of 'Achilles and the tortoise.' These 'surds' of
metaphysics ought to occasion no more difficulty in speculation than a
perpetually recurring fraction in arithmetic.

It is otherwise with the objection which follows: How are we to bridge
the chasm between human truth and absolute truth, between gods and men?
This is the difficulty of philosophy in all ages: How can we get beyond
the circle of our own ideas, or how, remaining within them, can we have
any criterion of a truth beyond and independent of them? Parmenides
draws out this difficulty with great clearness. According to him, there
are not only one but two chasms: the first, between individuals and the
ideas which have a common name; the second, between the ideas in us and
the ideas absolute. The first of these two difficulties mankind, as
we may say, a little parodying the language of the Philebus, have long
agreed to treat as obsolete; the second 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 Kritik, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation
of Kant, as well as of the Platonic ideas. It has been said that 'you
cannot criticize 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 separating the divine from the human, as two spheres which had no
communication with one another.

It is remarkable that Plato, speaking by the mouth of Parmenides,
does not treat even this second class of difficulties as hopeless or
insoluble. He says only that they cannot be explained without a long and
laborious demonstration: 'The teacher will require superhuman ability,
and the learner will be hard of understanding.' But an attempt must be
made to find an answer to them; for, as Socrates and Parmenides both
admi