Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/521

NOTE IN REPLY TO MR. A. W. BENN. I SHOULD like to take this opportunity of saying a few words in answer to Mr. A. W. Benn's ' Note in Reply ' to myself which appeared in MIND, N. S., No. 46. In doing so I will confine myself, not merely for reasons of brevity, to the ' business ' part of Mr. Benn's note, to the exclusion of the quips and cranks from Moliere, Sheridan, and Dr. Johnson which may be called its ' limbs and outward flourishes '. To begin with I think I may reasonably protest against Mr. Benn's general description of my attitude towards himself in the article of which he complains (" On the First Part of Plato's Parmenides," MIND, N.S., 45). According to Mr. Benn I have tried ' to discredit him in public estimation by citing a number of alleged inaccuracies and oversights from his. own article in MIND, N.S., 41. I submit that Mr. Benn's complaint does me an unconscious injustice. I certainly did call attention to some statements in Mr. Benn's article which I thought, and still think, inaccurate ; but with the object, not of ' discrediting ' Mr. Benn, but of getting a hearing for my own views. To have made a mistake or fallen into an oversight can hardly in itself be regarded as ' discrediting ' any man except one who formally claims infallibility, a claim which I do not understand Mr. Benn to advance. Mr. Benn's reputation as a brilliant and suggestive expositor and critic of the Greek philosophers is too securely founded to be seriously endangered by the detection of a few in- accuracies in his work. And now as to the particular allegations, of my article to which Mr. Benn takes exception. (1) I spoke of Mr. Benn's statement that Parmenides identified space with pure reason as a remarkable assertion ; Mr. Benn says, he does not know to which of the implications of this sentence I object. I will do my best to inform him. I object (a) to the ana- chronistic term 'pure reason ' (in which of many conceivable senses r by the way, does Mr. Benn mean the adjective to be understood?) as a translation of Parmenides' voetv. Such a translation has no meaning except such as it derives from the epistemological distinc- tion between the processes of reasoning and sensation, a distinction which does not make its appearance in Greek philosophy for at least a generation after Parmenides, and possibly not till later. As Theophrastus very properly says of Parmenides, with explicit reference to Fr. 146 ff., TO yap alo-Odvto-Oai KOL TO tfrpovtiv u>s TCU-TO A.eyet