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promised to give of the order and genuineness of the Platonic writings (vol. iii. p. 571). The issue, it may be said in passing, depends very much upon the possibility of explaining the various characteristics of these dialogues as intermediate between those of the earlier works on the one hand, and the Timæus and "Laws" on the other.*

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us to find that the gradual and spontaneous growth of Plato's system out of the ideas of Socrates may be traced, to some extent, in the "Platonic Dialogues." It is true that we have little or no external evidence to fix the order in which they were written, and that the internal criteria, as in the case of most great writers, are of an unusually subtle nature. Few, indeed, of the tasks of philology have been as laborious The Euthydemus ". a broad caricaas that of determining the canon of the Pla- ture of the verbal puzzles so curiously tonic writings, and distributing them over prominent in the age of Plato is placed the wide space of his philosophical life. by Mr. Jowett after the " Protagoras.” Mr. Jowett is far from claiming the char- Dr. Thompson, in a graceful review of the acter of finality for his own arrangement. book, makes this collocation one of the few Many points in it, however; may be con- exceptions to his general agreement with sidered as ascertained. A considerable Mr. Jowett's arrangement. Perhaps the group of dialogues, for instance, is distin- best defence in the case of the "Euthyguished by features which agree with demus" is to be found in the epilogue, those of the historical, as opposed to the where an attack is made on the writers of Platonic or ideal, Socrates. Of these dia- speeches as amphibious animals, who belogues the "Protagoras" is the most strik- ing half philosophers and half politicians, ing example. The search for definitions, succeed in combining the drawbacks of the simple form of the doctrine that Vir- both. The passage could hardly have tue is knowledge, the seeming readiness been written if Plato had then foreseen, to identify Pleasure with the Good, the even in a dream, his own conception of absence of the Platonic theory of Ideas - the philosopher-king as it appears in the these are so many indications of a compar-" Republic" and the "Statesman." atively Socratic, and therefore early stage of Plato's philosophy. At the other end of the series, external and internal testi

Of the endless points of view from which different dialogues may be compared, and their relative place didactic or chrono

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mony concur in placing the " Laws" a logical more or less plausibly deter

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work in which the figure of Socrates does mined, it will be found that the most usenot appear, and in which the theory of ful are those which are derived immediideas, though still affirmed, is set aside-ately from the theory of Ideas. as inapplicable to the practical wants of the time. Earlier again than the "Laws," and not earlier than the meridian of Plato's genius, must be placed his great constructive effort, the " Republic." These are the three cardinal points of Platonic chronology, with reference to which the place of the remaining dialogues has to be determined.

The chief novelty of Mr. Jowett's arrangement (compared, for example, with that which was proposed by Zeller) appears in the number of dialogues placed after the "Republic." Besides the "Gorgias" (which closely resembles the "Republic," and probably belongs to the same period of Plato's life) and the "Theatetus," already mentioned, we find the "Philebus," "Parmenides," Sophist," and Statesman." Some modern critics, of whom Professor Schaarschmidt, of Bonn, is the chief representative, have doubted or denied the Platonic authorship of this whole group. The question is one which we shall not attempt to discuss at length, especially as Mr. Jowett has reserved it for the detailed examination which he has

history of that theory is in reality the history of Plato's lifelong speculation; and no one has seen this truth more clearly than Mr. Jowett, or has applied it more subtly to the various aspects of Platonism. It is impossible, in the course of a brief summary such as we shall now attempt, to give a just notion of the finish and delicacy of his treatment of the subject; and it is especially difficult to avoid the fault from which he is most free, that of giving effect to a statement by exaggerating one or two points of view. Nevertheless it is necessary, in order to gain an idea of the main result of the book, that we should reproduce in some shape the impression which it conveys of what Platonism is in its essence, and what is its place in the general course of human thought.

Socrates, according to the well-known saying, brought down philosophy from heaven to earth. The current of speculation, which in earlier times busied itself chiefly with nature and the universe, was

• Mr. Campbell's Introduction to his edition of the " Sophist" and "Statesman" contains a valuable contribution to this part of the question.

diverted by his teaching to the moral and political questions, that in various forms had been more and more perplexing the active world of Greece. The example of the heroic age was still the main source, apart from the laws of the several states, to which men turned for direction. But in Homer, beyond a sense of the splendour of certain human qualities and a respect for the sacredness of existing custom, there is nothing which can be called morality. There is no moral system, however simple no classification of actions as right or wrong. In the time of the Peloponnesian War the traditional maxims became more than ever inadequate. They barely sufficed within the most stable communities, or for those who, like Cephalus in the "Republic," were favoured by nature and circumstances. They utterly failed in the wider sphere of action in which the larger units," the Greek states themselves, had to deal as moral agents with each other. "The Spartans," says Thucydides, are the best of men at home, but abroad they know no duty except their own interest." It is enough to allude to the darker pictures which he gives of other parts of Greece.

Platonic language) he is inferior in dialectics. He has faith in goodness, and uses his great powers of persuasion in its cause; but he is wanting in the scientific methods and aims which belonged to Socrates. The weakness attributed (in the "Gorgias ") to the rhetoricians Gorgias and Polus is of the same kind. Gorgias is refuted because he is unwilling to admit that rhetoric can be wholly separated from justice and injustice (vol. iii. p. 6). The Sophists-if we inay judge by the greatest names among them -fail because, instead of quarrelling with the world, they are content to represent the better mind of the world to itself.

ernment — had none of these characteristics of knowledge. He himself was not wiser than others, but he knew his own ignorance; and he was convinced that a science of conduct was yet to be attained which would change the face of the moral world.

Socrates took a different course. He undertook at once to defend and to explain morality by applying to it the conception of knowledge. He sought for the universal element in each class of cases— that which answers the question, What is such and such a virtue? He easily convicted his countrymen of the want of this knowledge. They were in the habit of pronouncing actions good or bad, but without knowing why. They knew how to make shoes and build temples, for they could tell in what the goodness of a shoe The overturning of ancient landmarks, or a temple consisted; and they could the fierce passions roused, the demoraliza- teach the knowledge as an art of shoetion which follows alike victory and de- making or of architecture. The arts of feat, combined with the intellectual activ-life-justice, housekeeping, rhetoric, govity of the time to bring about the crisis in morality which, in the minds of most readers of Greek history, is associated with certain teachers of wisdom" called the Sophists. We shall now enter upon the question between Mr. Grote and Mr. Jowett as to the existence of a distinct class bearing that name-a question The course of thought which led from which brings out to peculiar advantage the Socratic position to the Platonic theothe subtlety and exactness of Mr. Jowett's ry of Ideas has been often analyzed, but critical powers (see especially vol. iii. pp. 448 ff.). For the present it will be enough to glance at two leading Sophists. The picture of Protagoras, which is given in the dialogue of the same name is full of friendly and even admiring touches. Protagoras is the venerable missionary of virtue; one whose preaching (as it may almost be termed) exposes him to some danger from the blind upholders of existing things, but who scorns to hide it under the veil of other kinds of instruction, glorying rather in the despised name of Sophist. Moreover, his opinions are far from being sophistical," in the worst sense of the word. As Mr. Jowett observes, there is quite as much truth on the side of Protagoras as on that of Socra

tes.

The difference is that (to speak in

can hardly ever cease to afford the materials of interesting inquiry. It may be regarded as the result of two distinct processes distinct in theory, but always perhaps combined in fact: first, the natural development of Socratic principles; secondly, the contact of Plato's mind with other philosophies, chiefly, as we shall see, those of Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and Parmenides, but including the later systems, which owed their rise, like his own, to the Socratic impulse. The scientific ethics of Socrates led directly to a new and more profound metaphysics. He saw that knowledge is the apprehension of the universal, of something that is true of a class of things; and he had applied this conception, gained from the arts of everyday life, to the whole of human conduct. It

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was left to others to ask in what this ap- put forward in a tentative manner as the prehension of the universal itself consists, tale of certain Egyptian priests the and to extend it to branches of knowledge Phædo, and the Phædrus. Mr. Jowett which he had neglected or undervalued. well says that "it is a fragment of a formPlato is distinguished among the followers er world," which has no place in the philosof Socrates by the comprehensive spirit ophy of modern times. But Plato had in which he undertook this new and great the wonders of psychology just opening enquiry, and the zeal with which he pur- to him, and he had not the explanation of sued it through the theories and sciences them which is supplied by the analysis of his time. In particular, he returned of language and the history of the huwith new aims and methods to the earlier man mind. The question, Whence come doctrines. In successive dialogues we our abstract ideas?' he could only anfind him supplementing or explaining one swer by an imaginary hypothesis" (vol. saying or opinion of an older philosopher i. p. 394). by another, testing them in turn by the questioning method, and using all his strength against principles which seemed to stand in the way of scientific progress. Hence the unique value of the study of Plato for the history of philosophy. It was in the mind of Socrates that the moral perplexities of Greece gave birth to the idea of a science in which they should find their solution; but it was Plato who took up again the threads of earlier speculation, and wrought them with the teaching of Socrates into a single fabric.

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TheRepublic" - by common consent the greatest monument of Plato's genius is the first constructive dialogue. By "constructive" is meant one in which a definition is attained by dialectic and applied to the realization in practice of the thing defined. The Republic" is also the work in which the fundamental Platonic contrast of the "real" and the "phenomenal" is exhibited with the greatest fulness of statement and illustration. It is, therefore, the work in which that central position of Platonism may be best studied, not only in its various aspects as a theory, but also in its application to education and life.

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The great step which was thus made in advance of the Socratic mode of thinking -one not confined to Plato, as indeed it was contained implicitly in earlier theo- It is difficult to express in any language ries, but which was turned by him to the but Greek the connexion between the difgreatest account as a basis of further ferent perceptions, feelings, and beliefs speculation was the identification of the which Plato grouped together as unreal or universal or ideal with the "really exist- uncertain, in opposition to real or certain ent." The general notions which Socrates knowledge. Sensations, in the first place, had sought for as the objects of true moral were confounded with the inferences deknowledge were now regarded as deriving rived from them - the error which was their value from a truth or reality which first cleared up by Bishop Berkeley. they possessed in themselves, independ- Thus the immediate judgments (pavracía) ently of the instances under which they which sight enables us to form of distance were presented to experience. Further, and the like were regarded as sensethis conception of knowing as the contem-knowledge, and their inaccuracy was conplation of a super-sensuous or abstract ob- trasted with the results of the "science" ject was extended to all things capable of measurement. Again, the attributes of being known, physical and mathemati- which depend upon a relation between obcal as well as moral. Everywhere alike jects such as great and small-were the contrast was traced between the uni- pronounced to be fleeting and uncertain, versal as the "knowable" or " real," and because they were not true of the same the particular as the sensible or "phe- object in different relations. Similarly it nomenal knowledge arose by the con- was observed that an act of justice detact of the mind with the former; the op- pends on relations, on the circumstances posite of knowledge ignorance, error, of the moment; whereas the idea of uncertainty were inseparably connected justice is the same for an infinite variety with the latter. of cases. Again, desire is distinguished The celebrated doctrine of Reminiscence from rational choice by its direct connexis a phase of this conception a particu- ion with sense or feeling (aloonow), and lar way of representing the separate ex-by being dependent on a single moment of istence of the "knowable." Constantly excitement; whereas it is characteristic of associated with Plato's name, it is nevertheless found in a very small number of his dialogues, viz., the Meno-where it is

-

reason to neglect sense and to look beyond the present. Finally, many of these associations entered into the notion of " seem

66

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ing" or "opinion (dóga); the uncer- immediately before Socrates that the tentainty of inference from experience, the dencies to which it is due first began to relativity of particulars to circumstances, assume a distinct shape. A passage in the the illusion of the feelings - all which are brilliant and exhaustive Introduction points of contrast with knowledge which. Mr. Jowett has prefixed to the (ἐπιστήμη). Thus several things which" Timæus" describes vividly, and in language which pierces to the quick of Platonism, the new power which abstractions were then gaining, and the manner in which they affected the course of speculation:

to us seem quite distinct sense, opinion,
relativity, desire - were blended together
by the opposition which they present to a
true or universal element. This list, how-
ever, by no means exhausts the categories
under which the opposition might be pre-
sented. The "universal nature in each
case"
- is

called the Ideal or "Form"

At the same

"An inner world of ideas began to be created, more absorbing, more overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, ward, seemed to pale before them, retaining only which to the eye of the philosopher looking ina faint and precarious existence. time, the minds of men parted into the two great divisions of those who saw only a principle of motion, and of those who saw only a principle of rest in nature and in themselves; there were born Heracliteans or Eleatics as there have been in later ages born Aristotelians or Platonists."vol. ii. p. 505.

the One, opposed to the Many, or to the infinite or indefinite; it is "being," or essence, opposed to "becoming," generation; it is the permanent, opposed to the mutable. In practical life, the opposition shows itself as that of the philosopher to the sophist, the dialectician to the rhetorician and poet, the true statesman to the common political leader. The peculiarity of the Greek language, by which the same word (ɛiká(w) means "to make like," and also "to conjecture" (the connexion of "likeness" and "likelihood" in English form, was is somewhat the same), led to a favourite unity of these opposite "moments." The metaphorical way of representing it as the Ideas preserved the conception of knowlrelation of substance and shadow, or origi-edge from disappearing in the Heraclitean nal and copy. The notion of the Ideas as "flux" of sensible things, and at the same time "clear" (cans), suggested another comgave meaning and content to the thin parison, of which great use is made in the Eleatic abstraction of Unity or Being. In "Republic". that of knowledge and ig- earlier philosophies "there was a gulf" norance to light and darkness. between abstractions and sensible things, "and no one could pass from one to the other." In the scheme of education

The meaning of this doctrine and its various corollaries cannot be summed up better than in Mr. Jowett's aphorism

that

"the modern and ancient philosophical world are not agreed in their conception of truth and falsehood; the one identifies truth almost exclusively with fact, the other with ideas."

As he puts it elsewhere

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Plato, who is deeply impressed with the real importance of universals as instruments of thought, attributes to them an essential truth which is imaginary and unreal, for universals may be often false and particulars true."- vol. ii. p. 132.

Plato's philosophy, even in its simplest a reconciliation in a higher

founded upon the Ideas, and drawn out in the "Republic," the process is shown by which the soul is to be led, in Platonic language, from the shadowy half-lights of sense and opinion up to the unchanging day of truth and reality. The bridge over the gulf from particulars to the universal is found by Plato in the mathematical sciences.

Although it is only in the latest works of Plato that Pythagoreanism becomes a dominant influence, so as almost to extinguish the Socratic side of his philosophy, yet from the first he attaches a high value to mathematics. Protagoras is evidently ridiculed for boasting that he teaches his Plato, in short, confused the method of pupils" what they come to learn," and not science with science itself; and this fallacy" calculation, and astronomy, and geomewill be found underlying every part of his system.

The origin of the theory of Ideas -or, as we may now say, the theory of the selfexistence and absolute value of abstractions reaches far back into the mythical periods of Greece; but it was in the age

try, and music " (Protag. p. 318 E); and in the "Meno" the truths of geometry are taken as the types of knowledge. In the " "Republic "mathematical science becomes a stage in the progress towards dialectical or absolute knowledge, as distinguished by the character of its methods

rather than by its object-matter (as mod-explains this term, must make assumptions ern writers speak of a geometrical method (the odd and even, the three kinds of in politics). It is easy to see the associa- angles, and the like), and argue "downtion which led Plato to such a view. Arith- wards" from them; whereas in the higher metic and geometry offered, in the highest division, that of dialectics, the soul uses no degree, the characteristics which belonged "images," and rises above hypotheses to to knowledge-certainty, independence something not hypothetical, arriving ultiof preconceived opinion, and independence mately at the first principle of all (the Idea of the senses. Other sciences which had of good), and descending again from it to these qualities less completely-such as the other Ideas. The mathematical diviastronomy and music. were seen by Pla- sion is further described as bearing the to to be capable of becoming more and same relation to the dialectical as a shadow more "pure," i. e., independent of observa- or reflection bears to the sensible object; tion. Such a mode of conceiving science by which probably nothing more is meant was greatly encouraged, if not created, by than that in mathematics the axioms rethe Pythagorean discovery of the harmonic main unproved, whereas in dialectics they ratios. This was the first great instance are expected to lead to higher abstractions of the reduction to mathematical expres- - in Platonic language, to knowledge of a sion of a "law," or uniformity of external more real and absolute order.* nature. To the enthusiasm of the first inquirers it presented itself as the key destined to unlock the whole secrets of Nature; it seemed at least to remove the field of investigation from outer experience to the abstractions of their own minds. The science of Harmonics was henceforth treated by the Pythagorean school as capable of being deduced, like Geometry, from a few suppositions, to wit, the "harmonic" progressions. In the same spirit Plato treats experiments on musical strings, for the purpose of determining intervals, much as we should treat measurements made to verify the theorems of Euclid. In the age in which he wrote, it could hardly be otherwise than that Philosophy, seeking ever to idealize Science, should be guided towards the part of science in which the greatest progress had been made; and it is for the same reason that modern philosophy finds its metaphysics in the field of experience and com

mon sense.

The relation of mathematics to dialectics is noticed in a passage of the "Euthydemus." "The geometers, and astronomers, and calculators (who all belong to the hunting class, for they do not make their diagrams, but only find out that which was previously contained in them) - they, I say, not being able to use, but only to catch their prey, hand over their inventions to the dialecticians, to be applied by them, if they have any sense in them (p. 290). This agrees, so far as it goes, with the locus classicus of the "Republic" (p. 510). Mathematics is there made to be the lower of two sub-divisions of the "intellectual" world, that in which the soul uses the figures given by the senses (e.g. diagrams) as images, and in which the inquiry must be "hypothetical," i.e., as Plato

The statement of the Ideal theory in the "Republic" is further distinguished from its earlier forms by the stress laid upon the Idea of good; that Idea is to the “intelligible" what the sun is to the visible world-not only the highest being, but also the cause of existence and knowledge. Dialectic is a "way up and down;" up to the Idea of good, using hypotheses as "steps and points of departure;" and down when in the light of that Idea all knowledge has become absolute and self-proving. This seems to mean, translated into modern language, that philosophy starts with induction, not from facts in the scientific sense, but from the conceptions given in particular sciences, in language, and in common opinion. By questioning and reflexion the inquirer or "dialectician" seeks to determine the relations between these "hypothetical" notions- -a process which results in successive definitions and classi

* A valuable article in the "Journal of Philology" (vol. ii. No. 3, pp. 96-108), by Mr. Henry Sidg with the passage in the Republic." He points out wick, discusses this point among others connected that Aristotle (Met. i. 6) offers an explanation which is exactly what we want," but which is not supbe little doubt, therefore, that he is right in refusported in any way by Plato's language. There can ing to adopt it, and in doubting whether Plato, when he wrote the Republic,' had clearly separated object." But Plato had separated the mathematical from the classified method; and the confusion of object and method is one that runs throughout his system. As Mr. Sidgwick observes, When Plato says that geometers suppose the odd even, figures,' &c., he means, that they suppose both the existence of of their definitions. objects corresponding to these terms, and the truth We have suggested above, that a similar remark will account for the further Ideas; namely, that in this as in other cases, Plato difliculty of the relation of the "hypotheses" to does not sufficiently distinguish, or even purposely explains away, the distinction between the certainty with which a thing is proved, the clearness with which it is apprehended, and the order of reality" to which it belongs.

in his mind the mathematical from the dialectical

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