'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 stumblingblock 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