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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: reference to their application in the world. If we once ask how they are
related to individuals or to the ideas of the divine mind, they are again
merged in the aboriginal notion of Being. No one can answer the questions
which Parmenides asks of Socrates. And yet these questions are asked with
the express acknowledgment that the denial of ideas will be the destruction
of the human mind. The true answer to the difficulty here thrown out is
the establishment of a rational psychology; and this is a work which is
commenced in the Sophist. Plato, in urging the difficulty of his own
doctrine of Ideas, is far from denying that some doctrine of Ideas is
necessary, and for this he is paving the way.
In a similar spirit he criticizes the Eleatic doctrine of Being, not
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