Cherniss's views on this question, however, are summarized in The Riddle of the Early Academy. The Riddle of the Early Academy (1945) The vigorous polemic contained in this small volume (109 pp.) significantly shaped later Plato scholarship and began the process that split much of English-language and Continental Plato research into two communities. The unitarianism of Shorey and Cherniss holds that Plato's dialogues are both a consistent and complete exposition of Plato's system. Cherniss saw both contentions under attack by the "higher critics" of Plato scholarship in his day. Burnet, Taylor, and others argued for radical changes in Plato's theories and an esoteric mathematical ontology taught orally in the Academy. According to Cherniss: … although few if any of the "higher critics" of Platonism accept the Burnet-Taylor hypothesis, all of them adopt explanations which differ from that hypothesis only in degree… accepting Aristotle's testimony concerning the idea-numbers, they find themselves constrained to assert that the theory of ideas underwent at Plato's hands a radical alteration or a radical development and that this new form of the theory … was never committed to writing by Plato and can be recovered only from the reports of Aristotle … The first of Cherniss's three Sather Lectures defended the completeness of the dialogues as an account of Plato's philosophy by attacking the external evidence for Plato's "Lecture on the Good" and his supposed "unwritten doctrines": The riddle of the early Academy is epitomized in the discrepancy between Aristotle's account of Plato's theory of ideas and that theory as we know it from Plato's writings. To explain that discrepancy, scholars have constructed the hypothesis of an oral Platonic doctrine. I have tried to show that that hypothesis is unsatisfactory not only because the evidence for Plato's one attested lecture fails to support it, but also because the inconsistency in Aristotle's testimony itself appears to contradict it… In Lecture II, Cherniss defended the consistency of the dialogues by arguing that Plato's supposed late development of a mathematical ontology is a misinterpretation imposed by Aristotle on material found in the dialogues: "… the theory of idea-numbers which Aristotle ascribes to Plato is just Aristotle's own interpretation of the necessary consequences [he finds] implied in the doctrine of the Platonic dialogues …" Thus there is no reason, for example, to see a critique of an "early" Theory of Forms in the dialogues that was remedied by a later