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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: 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
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