guish between them, their transcendental character is lost; ideas
of justice, temperance, and good, are really distinguishable only with
reference to their application in the world. If we once ask how they
are related to individuals or to the ideas of the divine mind, they are
again merged in the aboriginal notion of Being. No one can answer the
questions which Parmenides asks of Socrates. And yet these questions are
asked with the express acknowledgment that the denial of ideas will be
the destruction of the human mind. The true answer to the difficulty
here thrown out is the establishment of a rational psychology; and
this is a work which is commenced in the Sophist. Plato, in urging the
difficulty of his own doctrine of Ideas, is far from denying that some
doctrine of Ideas is necessary, and for this he is paving the way.

In a similar spirit he criticizes the Eleatic doctrine of Being, not
intending to deny Ontology, but showing that the old Eleatic notion,
and the very name 'Being,' is unable to maintain itself against the
subtleties of the Megarians. He did not mean to say that Being or
Substance had no existence, but he is preparing for the development
of his later view, that ideas were capable of relation. The fact that
contradictory consequences follow from the existence or non-existence
of one or many, does not prove that they have or have not existence,
but rather that some different mode of conceiving them is required.
Parmenides may still have thought that 'Being was,' just as Kant would
have asserted the existence of 'things in themselves,' while denying the
transcendental use of the Categories.

Several lesser links also connect the first and second parts of the
dialogue: (1) The thesis is the same as that which Zeno has been already
discussing: (2) Parmenides has intimated in the first part, that the
method of Zeno should, as Socrates desired, be extended to Ideas: (3)
The difficulty of participating in greatness, smallness, equality is
urged against the Ideas as well as against the One.

II. The Parmenides is not only a criticism of the Eleatic notion of
Being, but also of the methods of reasoning then in existence, and
in this point of view, as well as in the other, may be regarded as an
introduction to the Sophist. Long ago, in the Euthydemus, the vulgar
application of the 'both and neither' Eristic had been subjected to a
similar criticism, which there takes the form of banter and irony, here
of il