Note 34 — Chapter XXVII · PARMENIDES.
Reading edition
Compare Republic, v. p. 476 B. ὁ γιγνώσκων γιγνώσκει τὶ ἢ οὐδὲν; Γιγνώσκει τί, &c.
The following passage in the learned work of Cudworth bears on the portion of the Parmenidês which we are now considering. Cudworth, Treatise of Immutable Morality, pp. 243-245.
“But if any one demand here, where this ἀκίνητος οὐσία, these immutable Entities do exist? I answer, first, that as they are considered formally, they do not properly exist in the Individuals without us, as if they were from them imprinted upon the Understanding, which some have taken to be Aristotle’s opinion; because no Individual Material thing is either Universal or Immutable.… Because they perish not together with them, it is a certain argument that they exist independently upon them. Neither, in the next place, do they exist somewhere else apart from the Individual Sensibles, and without the Mind, which is that opinion that Aristotle justly condemns, but either unjustly or unskilfully attributes to Plato.… Wherefore these Intelligible Ideas or Essences of Things, those Forms by which we understand all Things, exist nowhere but in the mind itself; for it was very well determined long ago by Socrates, in Plato’s Parmenidês, that these things are nothing else but Noemata: ‘These Species or Ideas are all of them nothing but Noemata or Notions that exist nowhere but in the Soul itself’.…
“And yet notwithstanding, though these Things exist only in the Mind, they are not therefore mere Figments of the Understanding.…
“It is evident that though the Mind thinks of these Things at pleasure, yet they are not arbitrarily framed by the Mind, but have certain, determinate, and immutable Natures of their own, which are independent upon the Mind, and which are blown (quære not blown) away into Nothing at the pleasure of the same Being that arbitrarily made them.”
It is an inadvertence on the part of Cudworth to cite this passage of the Parmenidês as authenticating Plato’s opinion that Forms or Ideas existed only in the mind. Certainly Sokrates is here made to express that opinion, among others; but the opinion is refuted by Parmenidês and dropped by Sokrates. But the very different opinion, which Cudworth accuses Aristotle of wrongly attributing to Plato, is repeated by Sokrates in the Phædon, Republic, and elsewhere, and never refuted.