The quarrel has arisen from confounding ideas, universals, genera and species, and abstractions or generalizations, and treating them all as if pertaining to the same category. These three things are different, and cannot be scientifically treated as if they were the same; yet nominalists, realists, and conceptualists recognize no differences among them, nor do the Platonists. These hold all the essential qualities, properties, or attributes of things to be ideas, objective and real. Hippias visits Athens, and proposes during his stay in the city to give the eager Athenians a discourse, or, as they say nowadays, a lecture, on beautiful things. Socrates is delighted to hear it, and assures Hippias that he will be one of his audience; but as he is slow of understanding, and has a friend who will be sure to question him very closely, he begs Hippias to answer beforehand a few of the questions this friend is certain to ask. Hippias consents. {150} You propose to discourse on beautiful things, but tell me, if you please, what are beautiful things? Hippias mentions several things, and finally answers, a handsome girl. But that is not what my friend wants to know. Tell me, by what are beautiful things beautiful? Hippias does not quite understand. Socrates explains. All just things, are they not just by participation of justice? Agreed. And all wise things by participation of wisdom? It cannot be denied. And all beautiful things by participation of beauty? So it seems. Now tell me, dear Hippias, what is beauty, that which is so not by participation but in itself, and by participation of which all beautiful things are beautiful? Hippias, of course, is puzzled, and neither he nor Socrates answers the question.