[Footnote 48: Plato, Parmenid. ad fin. [Greek: Ei)rê/sthô toi/nun tou=to/ te kai\ o(/ti, ô(s e)/oiken, e(\n ei)/t' e)/stin ei)/te mê\ e)/stin, au)to/ te kai\ ta)/lla kai\ pro\s au(ta\ kai\ pro\s a)/llêla pa/nta pa/ntôs e)sti/ te kai\ ou)k e)sti kai\ phai/netai/ te kai\ ou) phai/netai.]] [Side-note: Different judgments of Platonic critics respecting the Antinomies and the dialogue generally.] The demonstrations or Antinomies in the last half of the Parmenides are characterised by K. F. Hermann and others as a masterpiece of speculative acuteness. Yet if these same demonstrations, constructed with care and labour for the purpose of proving that the same premisses will conduct to double and contradictory conclusions, had come down to us from antiquity under the name either of the Megaric Eukleides, or Protagoras, or Gorgias--many of the Platonic critics would probably have said of them (what is now said of the sceptical treatise remaining to us under the name of Gorgias) that they were poor productions worthy of such Sophists, who are declared to have made a trade of perverting truth. Certainly the conclusions of the demonstrations are specimens of that "Both and Neither," which Plato (in the Euthydemus[49]) puts into the mouth of the Sophist Dionysodorus as an answer of slashing defiance--and of that intentional evolution of contradictions which Plato occasionally discountenances, both in the Euthydemus and elsewhere.[50] And we know from Proklus[51] that there were critics in ancient times, who depreciated various parts of the Parmenides as sophistical. Proklus himself denies the charge with some warmth. He as well as the principal Neo-Platonists between 200-530 A.D. (especially his predecessors and instructors at Athens, Jamblichus, Syrianus, and Plutarchus) admired the Parmenides as a splendid effort of philosophical genius in its most exalted range, inspired so as to become cognizant of superhuman persons and agencies. They all agreed so far as to discover in the dialogue a sublime vein of mystic theology and symbolism: but along with this general agreement, there was much discrepancy in their interpretation of particular parts and passages. The commentary of Proklus attests the existence of such debates, reporting his own dissent from the interpretations sanctioned by his venerated masters, Plutarchus and Syrianus. That commentary, in spite of its prolixity, is curious to read as a specimen of the fifth century, A.D., in one of its most eminent representatives. Proklus discovers a string of theological symbols and a mystical meaning throughout the whole dialogue: not merely in the acute argumentation which characterises its middle part, but also in the perplexing antinomies of its close, and even in the dramatic details of places, persons, and incidents, with which it begins.[52]