also converted the idea of Being into an abstraction of Good, perhaps with
the view of preserving a sort of neutrality or indifference between the
mind and things. As if they had said, in the language of modern
philosophy: 'Being is not only neither finite nor infinite, neither at
rest nor in motion, but neither subjective nor objective.'

This is the track along which Plato is leading us. Zeno had attempted to
prove the existence of the one by disproving the existence of the many, and
Parmenides seems to aim at proving the existence of the subject by showing
the contradictions which follow from the assertion of any predicates. Take
the simplest of all notions, 'unity'; you cannot even assert being or time
of this without involving a contradiction. But is the contradiction also
the final conclusion? Probably no more than of Zeno's denial of the many,
or of Parmenides' assault upon the Ideas; no more than of the earlier
dialogues 'of search.' To us there seems to be no residuum of this long
piece of dialectics. But to the mind of Parmenides and Plato, 'Gott-
betrunkene Menschen,' there still remained the idea of 'being' or 'good,'
which could not be conceived, defined, uttered, but could not be got rid
of. Neither of them would have imagined that their disputation ever
touched the Divine Being (compare Phil.). The same difficulties about
Unity and Being are raised in the Sophist; but there only as preliminary to
their final solution.

If this view is correct, the real aim of the hypotheses of Parmenides is to
criticize the earlier Eleatic philosophy from the point of view of Zeno or
the Megarians. It is the same kind of criticism which Plato has extended
to his own doctrine of Ideas. Nor is there any want of poetical
consistency in attributing to the 'father Parmenides' the last review of
the Eleatic doctrines. The latest phases of all philosophies were fathered
upon the founder of the school.