ON THE FIRST PART OF PLATO S PARMENIDES. 3 and the Phcedo, with which dialogue the Republic is uni- versally admitted to be in complete accord. What difference there is is simply due to the fact that the Parmenides expressly recognises and attempts to answer questions of which the earlier dialogue simply presupposed the solution. If this can be established it will follow that the Republic must still possess for us the central position which it has always hitherto held in the exposition of Platonic philosophy, and the various recent theories which see a revision rather than a development of its teaching in the later dialogues will have to be abandoned. My purpose, as far as the Parmenides is concerned, will be accomplished if I can show that both the problems and the results of the dialogue are inevitably pre- supposed by the view taken in the Phcedo of knowledge and its objects. In arguing this point I desire to confine myself in the main to the earlier portion of the dialogue (pp. 126-136), in which Parmenides states his objections to the doctrine of Ideas as formulated by the youthful Socrates. Of the longer and more perplexing second half of the dialogue I have previously propounded an interpretation, 1 in the main agree- ing with that of Zeller, but very different from that suggested by Mr. Benn. From his silence I infer that he does not think the principle of that interpretation worth examination, while I for my part am as strongly convinced as ever of its general rightness ; hence controversy on the point would probably be useless. As however the key to the second part, in my judgment, lies in a right understanding of what goes before, it will be enough for my purpose to deal with the. introduction, as we may call it, to the dialogue, which was rather too perfunctorily treated in my former papers. For the right understanding of Plato it is most important to realise from the first that the antithesis between a period of "transcendent " and another of "immanent " Ideas in his philosophy is a false one. If you mean by the "transcend- ence " of the Idea, no more than that it is asserted to be other than the objects of sense, and differently apprehended, then transcendence is taught in the Ph&do and Republic, but it is equally taught, and on precisely the same grounds, in the Timaus. And if you mean anything more than this, it is not taught anywhere in Plato. In the Phcedo, for instance, the Idea is " present " in an unexplained way to the sensible ^See MIND, N.S., Nos. 19, 20, 21. Subsequent study of the dialogues, and more especially the perusal of M. Milhaud's Les Philosophes-geometres de la Grece, has satisfied me that, while the general character of the inter- pretation there advocated is correct, insufficient attention was given to the mathematical bearings of the dialogue.
