ON THE INTERPRETATION OF PLATO'S PARMENIDES. 39 dialogue that I owe the first hints for my own essay. I gladly take the opportunity of acknowledging the debt ; though, as will have been seen in the course of my exposi- tion, I cannot follow Dr. Maguire in reading the Hegelian system into Plato. The second part of my apology relates to the somewhat free way in which I have at times interpreted Plato in the language of modern philosophy. And on this score I would plead that for the most part these interpretations are intended rather as illustrations for the modern reader than as professed translations. Moreover, if we would form any sort of understanding of ancient thought, some process of this kind seems unavoidable, and the most we can do in order to guard against misrepresentation is to perform the process carefully and conscientiously. And of all the Platonic dialogues there is none in which this kind of interpretation can do less mischief than in the Parmenides. For its main result, as I have tried to show, is to arrive at the conception of the world as a systematic unity or whole, making almost entire abstraction from the concrete character of its contents, and there can be no assignable reason for thinking that this conception of abstract system appeared to Plato any other- wise than it does to us, though, no doubt, his notion of what the system contained was in many respects widely divergent from our own. Hence I can hardly suppose that even the freest of my restatements of Parmenidean arguments seriously vitiates my theory of the general purport of the dialogue ; and the general drift and purport of the whole is all I undertook to explain.
