[Side-note: The Parmenidês is the extreme manifestation of the negative element. That Plato should employ one dialogue in setting forth the negative case against the Theory of Ideas is not unnatural.] Such negative element, manifested as it is in so many of the Platonic dialogues, has its extreme manifestation in the Parmenidês. When we see it here applied to a doctrine which Plato in other dialogues insists upon as truth, we must call to mind (what sincere believers are apt to forget) that a case may always be made out against truth as well as in its favour: and that its privilege as a certified portion of "reasoned truth," rests upon no better title than the superiority of the latter case over the former. It is for testing the two cases--for determining where the superiority lies--and for graduating its amount--that the process of philosophising is called for, and that improvements in the method thereof become desirable. That Plato should, in one of his many diversified dialogues, apply this test to a doctrine which, in other dialogues, he holds out as true--is noway inconsistent with the general spirit of these compositions. Each of his dialogues has its own point of view, worked out on that particular occasion; what is common to them all, is the process of philosophising applied in various ways to the same general topics. Those who, like Socher, deny Plato's authorship of the Parmenidês, on the ground of what is urged therein against the theory of Ideas, must suppose, either that he did not know that a negative case could be made out against that theory; or that knowing it, he refrained from undertaking the duty.[27] Neither supposition is consistent with what we know both of his negative ingenuity, and of his multifarious manner of handling. [Footnote 27: Plato, Philêbus, p. 14, where the distinction taken coincides accurately enough with that which we read in Plato, Parmenid. p. 129 A-D. Strümpell thinks that the Parmenidês was composed at a time of Plato's life when he had become sensible of the difficulties and contradictions attaching to his doctrine of self-existent Forms or Ideas, and when he was looking about for some way of extrication from them: which way he afterwards thought that he found in that approximation to Pythagorism--that exchange of Ideas for Ideal numbers, &c.--which we find imputed to him by Aristotle (Gesch. der Griech. Phil. sect. 96, 3). This is not impossible; but I find no sufficient ground for affirming it. Nor can I see how the doctrine which Aristotle ascribes to Plato about the Ideas (that they are generated by two [Greek: stoichei=a] or elements, [Greek: to\ e(/n] along with [Greek: to\ me/ga kai\ to\ mikro/n]) affords any escape from the difficulties started in the Parmenidês. Strümpell considers the dialogue Parmenidês to have been composed "ganz ausdrücklich zur dialektischen Uebung," ib. s. 96, 2, p. 128.]