r wholes?

Indeed, he said, you have asked a question which is not easily answered.

Well, said Parmenides, and what do you say of another question?

What question?

I imagine that the way in which you are led to assume one idea of each
kind is as follows:--You see a number of great objects, and when you
look at them there seems to you to be one and the same idea (or nature)
in them all; hence you conceive of greatness as one.

Very true, said Socrates.

And if you go on and allow your mind in like manner to embrace in one
view the idea of greatness and of great things which are not the idea,
and to compare them, will not another greatness arise, which will appear
to be the source of all these?

It would seem so.

Then another idea of greatness now comes into view over and above
absolute greatness, and the individuals which partake of it; and then
another, over and above all these, by virtue of which they will all
be great, and so each idea instead of being one will be infinitely
multiplied.

But may not the ideas, asked Socrates, be thoughts only, and have no
proper existence except in our minds, Parmenides? For in that case each
idea may still be one, and not experience this infinite multiplication.

And can there be individual thoughts which are thoughts of nothing?

Impossible, he said.

The thought must be of something?

Yes.

Of something which is or which is not?

Of something which is.

Must it not be of a single something, which the thought recognizes as
attaching to all, being a single form or nature?

Yes.

And will not the something which is apprehended as one and the same in
all, be an idea?

From that, again, there is no escape.

Then, said Parmenides, if you say that everything else participates
in the ideas, must you not say either that everything is made up of
thoughts, and that all things think; or that they are thoughts but have
no thought?

The latter view, Parmenides, is no more rational than the previous one.
In my opinion, the ideas are, as it were, patterns fixed in nature, and
other things are like them, and resemblances of them--what is meant by
the participation of other things in the ideas, is really assimilation
to them.

But if, said he, the individual is like the idea, must not the idea also
be like the individual, in so far as the individual is a resemblance of
the idea? That which is like, cannot be conceived of as other than the
like of like.

Impossible