Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/54

38 A. E. TAYLOR : while the true or Platonic ideal doctrine is shown (2-4, 6, 8) to be the real solution of the problem. If our interpretation of the hypotheses be accepted as in the main sound, still an ultimate doubt seems to remain. How, it may be said, has our conclusion gone beyond the point from which w r e set out ? Our original difficulty was to understand how the one Idea could spread itself out, so to speak, over a plurality of particulars ; that this must somehow take place we saw from the first, but the difficulty was to see how it could come about, and we do not seem to be any nearer an understanding now. For all that we have learned from the hypotheses amounts to this, that the in- conceivable union of unity with plurality must really happen, which is no more than we knew before. It is no answer to the question how the unthinkable happens to say, as Par- menides virtually does : " Well, you see it does happen ". To such a doubt one may, however, reply that whether the demonstration is satisfactory or not, it is all that can be had. If it does not content us to be convinced that unity and plurality not merely " come together " in sensible things, but cannot even be thought of in separation from one another, it is hard to see what would. What is necessarily pre- supposed in every act of judgment and thought must most certainly be real, whether we can picture it to ourselves or not ; or, if any one thinks this is an insufficient ground of certainty, he may, as Aristotle remarks in a different con- nexion, "be called on to produce a better ". I should like, lastly, to end this essay with a double apology, firstly, for what I have not said, and next, for something of what I have. It may seem strange that I should scarcely have made more than a passing reference to Zeller's instructive essay on the Parmenides in the Platon- isclie Studien. The omission is due to two reasons. Partly I am not clear how far Zeller would still maintain any of the views there set forth, and partly I hope that my analysis will of itself indicate the extent to which I feel able to adopt his conclusions. I may, perhaps, just say that, while the view taken by Zeller in the Studien of the general purport of the hypotheses seems to me eminently just, I cannot acquiesce in his assumption that the " One " of the second hypothesis is identical with that of the first, nor consequently in his statement that the Platonic solution of the puzzle is only indirectly suggested. To the late Dr. Maguire's edition of the Parmenides I probably owe more than to Zeller. In fact I think it most likely that it is to Dr. Maguire's marginal analysis of the