include consequences to the things supposed and to other things, in
themselves and in relation to one another, to individuals whom you select,
to the many, and to the all; these must be drawn out both on the
affirmative and on the negative hypothesis,--that is, if you are to train
yourself perfectly to the intelligence of the truth.' 'What you are
suggesting seems to be a tremendous process, and one of which I do not
quite understand the nature,' said Socrates; 'will you give me an example?'
'You must not impose such a task on a man of my years,' said Parmenides.
'Then will you, Zeno?' 'Let us rather,' said Zeno, with a smile, 'ask
Parmenides, for the undertaking is a serious one, as he truly says; nor
could I urge him to make the attempt, except in a select audience of
persons who will understand him.' The whole party joined in the request.

Here we have, first of all, an unmistakable attack made by the youthful
Socrates on the paradoxes of Zeno. He perfectly understands their drift,
and Zeno himself is supposed to admit this. But they appear to him, as he
says in the Philebus also, to be rather truisms than paradoxes. For every
one must acknowledge the obvious fact, that the body being one has many
members, and that, in a thousand ways, the like partakes of the unlike, the
many of the one. The real difficulty begins with the relations of ideas in
themselves, whether of the one and many, or of any other ideas, to one
another and to the mind. But this was a problem which the Eleatic
philosophers had never considered; their thoughts had not gone beyond the
contradictions of matter, motion, space, and the like.

It was no wonder that Parmenides and Zeno should hear the novel
speculations of Socrates with mixed feelings of admiration and displeasure.
He was going out of the received circle of disputation into a region in
which they could hardly follow him. From the crude idea of Being in the
abstract, he was about to proceed to universals or general notions. There