ideas of hair, mud, filth, etc. There is an ethical universal or idea, but
is there also a universal of physics?--of the meanest things in the world
as well as of the greatest? Parmenides rebukes this want of consistency in
Socrates, which he attributes to his youth. As he grows older, philosophy
will take a firmer hold of him, and then he will despise neither great
things nor small, and he will think less of the opinions of mankind
(compare Soph.). Here is lightly touched one of the most familiar
principles of modern philosophy, that in the meanest operations of nature,
as well as in the noblest, in mud and filth, as well as in the sun and
stars, great truths are contained. At the same time, we may note also the
transition in the mind of Plato, to which Aristotle alludes (Met.), when,
as he says, he transferred the Socratic universal of ethics to the whole of
nature.

The other criticism of Parmenides on Socrates attributes to him a want of
practice in dialectic. He has observed this deficiency in him when talking
to Aristoteles on a previous occasion. Plato seems to imply that there was
something more in the dialectic of Zeno than in the mere interrogation of
Socrates. Here, again, he may perhaps be describing the process which his
own mind went through when he first became more intimately acquainted,
whether at Megara or elsewhere, with the Eleatic and Megarian philosophers.
Still, Parmenides does not deny to Socrates the credit of having gone
beyond them in seeking to apply the paradoxes of Zeno to ideas; and this is
the application which he himself makes of them in the latter part of the
dialogue. He then proceeds to explain to him the sort of mental gymnastic
which he should practise. He should consider not only what would follow
from a given hypothesis, but what would follow from the denial of it, to
that which is the subject of the hypothesis, and to all other things.
There is no trace in the Memorabilia of Xenophon of any such method being
attributed to Socrates; nor is the dialectic here spoken of that 'favourite