A History of Greek Philosophy / PLATO

Page 21

But now as to the nature of these Ideas. What, Parmenides asks, is the relation of these, as eternally existing in the mind of God, to the same ideas as possessed by individual men? Does each individual actually partake in the thought of God through the ideas, or are his ideas only resemblances of the eternal? If he partakes, then the eternal ideas are not one but many, as many as the persons who possess them. If his ideas only resemble, then there must be some basis of reference by which the resemblance is established, a tertium quid or third existence resembling both, and so ad infinitum. Socrates is puzzled by this, and suggests that perhaps the Ideas are only notions in our minds. But to this it is replied that there is an end in that case of any reality in our ideas. Unless in some way they have a true and causal relation with something beyond our minds, there is an end of mind altogether, and with mind gone everything goes.

This, as Professor Jowett remarks, “remains a difficulty for us as well as for the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ, and is the stumbling-block of Kant’s Critic, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation of Kant as well as of the Platonic ideas. It has been said that ‘you cannot criticise 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.”

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