1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Plato

​PLATO, the great Athenian philosopher, was born in 427 B.C., and lived to the age of eighty. His literary activity may be roughly said to have extended over the first half of the 4th century B.C. His father's name was Ariston, said to have been a descendant of Codrus; and his mother's family, which claimed descent from Solon, included Critias, one of the thirty tyrants, and other well-known Athenians of the early 4th century B.C. That throughout his early manhood he was the devoted friend of Socrates, that in middle life he taught those who resorted to him in the grove named Academus, near the Cephisus, and there founded the first great philosophical school, that (with alleged interruptions) he continued to preside over the Academy until his death, are matters of established fact. It is said by Aristotle that he was at one time intimate with Cratylus the Heraclitean. Beyond this we have no authentic record of his outward life. That his name was at first Aristocles, and was changed to Plato because of the breadth of his shoulders or of his style or of his forehead, that he wrestled well,^[1] that he wrote poetry^[2] which he burnt on hearing Socrates, fought in three great battles,^[3] that he had a thin voice, that (as is told of other Greek philosophers) he travelled to Cyrene and conversed with priests in Egypt, are statements of Diogenes Laertius, which rest on more or less uncertain tradition. The express assertion—which this author attributes to Hermodorus—that after the death of Socrates Plato and other Socratics took refuge with Euclides in Megara, has a somewhat stronger claim to authenticity. But the fact cannot be regarded as certain, still less the elaborate inferences which have been drawn from it. The romantic legend of Plato's journeys to Sicily, and of his relations there with the younger Dionysius and the princely but unfortunate Dion, had obtained some degree of consistency before the age of Cicero, and at an unknown but probably early time was worked up into the so-called Epistles of Plato, now all but universally discredited. Nor is there sufficient ground for supposing, as some have done, that an authentic tradition is perceptible behind the myth.

The later years of the Peloponnesian War witnessed much mental disturbance and restlessness at Athens. More than at any timeAntecedent Conditions. since the age of Cleisthenes, the city was divided, and a man's foes were often men of his own tribe or deme. Contention in the law courts and rivalries in the assembly had for many men a more absorbing interest than questions of peace and war. Hereditary traditions had relaxed their hold, and political principles were not yet formulated. Yet there was not less scope on this account for personal ambition, while the progress of democracy, the necessity of conciliating the people, and the apportionment of public offices by lot had a distracting and, to reflecting persons, often a discouraging effect. For those amongst whom Plato was brought up this effect was aggravated by the sequel of the oligarchical revolution, while, on the other hand, for some years after the restoration of the democracy, a new stimulus had been imparted, which, though of short duration, was universally felt.

These events appear in two ways to have encouraged the diffusion of ideas. The ambitious seem to have welcomed them as a means of influence, while those who turned from public life were the more stimulated to speculative disputation. However this may have been, it is manifest that before the beginning of the 4th century B.C. the intellectual atmosphere was already charged with a new force, which although essentially one may be differently described, according to the mode of its development, as (1) rhetorical and (2) theoretical and “sophistical.” This last word indicates the channel through which the current influences were mostly derived. A new want, in the shape both of interested and of disinterested curiosity, had insensibly created a new profession. Men of various fatherlands, some native Athenians, but more from other parts of Hellas,^[4] had set themselves to supplement the deficiencies of ordinary education, and to train men for the requirements of civic life. More or less consciously they based their teachings on the philosophical dogmas of an earlier time, when the speculations of Xenophanes, Heraclitus or Parmenides had interested only a few “wise men.” Those great thoughts were now to be expounded, so that “even cobblers might understand.”^[5] The self-appointed teachers found a rich field and abundant harvest among the wealthier youth, to the chagrin of the old-fashioned Athenian, who sighed with Aristophanes for the good old days when men knew less and listened to their elders and obeyed the customs of their fathers. And such distrust was not wholly unfounded. For, amidst much that was graceful and improving, these novel questionings had an influence that, besides being unsettling, was aimless and unreal. A later criticism may discern in them the two great tendencies of naturalism and humanism. But it may be doubted if the sophist was himself aware of the direction of his own thoughts. For, although Prodicus or Hippias could debate a thesis and moralize with effect, they do not appear to have been capable of speculative reasoning. What passed for such was often either verbal quibbling or the pushing to an extreme of some isolated abstract notion. That prudens quaestio which is dimidium scientiae had not yet been put. And yet the hour for putting it concerning human life was fully come. For the sea on which men were drifting was profoundly troubled, and would not sink back into its former calm. Conservative reaction was not less hopeless than the dreams of theorists were mischievously wild. In random talk, with gay, irresponsible energy, the youth were debating problems which have exercised great minds in Europe through all after time.

Men's thoughts had begun to be thus disturbed and eager when Socrates (q.v.) arose. To understand him is the most necessary preliminary to the study of Plato. There is no reason to doubt ​the general truth of the assertion, which Plato attributes to him in the Apologia, that he felt a divine vocation to examine himself by questioning other men.Socrates. He was really doing for Athenians, whether they would or no, what the sophist professed to do for his adherents, and what such men as Protagoras and Prodicus had actually done in part. One obvious difference was that he would take no fee. But there was another and more deep-lying difference, which distinguished him not only from the contemporary sophists but from the thinkers of the previous age. This was the Socratic attitude of inquiry. The sceptical movement had confused men's notions as to the value of ethical ideas.^[6] If “right is one thing in Athens and another in Sparta, why strive to follow right rather than expediency? The laws put restraint on nature, which is prior to them. Then why submit to law?” And the ingenuities of rhetoric had stirred much unmeaning disputation. Every case seemed capable of being argued in opposite ways. Even on the great question of the ultimate constitution of things, the conflicting theories of absolute immutability and eternal change appeared to be equally irrefragable and equally untenable. Men's minds had been confused by contradictory voices—one crying “All is motion,” another “All is rest”; one “The absolute is unattainable,” another “The relative alone is real”; some upholding a vague sentiment of traditional right, while some declared for arbitrary convention and some for the law “of nature.” Some held that virtue was spontaneous, some that it was due to training, and some paradoxically denied that either vice or falsehood had any meaning. The faith of Socrates, whether instinctive or inspired, remained untroubled by these jarring tones. He did not ask “Is virtue a reality?”or “Is goodness a delusion?” But, with perfect confidence that there was an answer, he asked himself and others “What is it?” (τί ἐστί); or, more particularly, as Xenophon testifies, “What is a state? What is a statesman? What is just? What is unjust? What is government? What is it to be a ruler of men?” In this form of question, however simple, the originality of Socrates is typified; and by means of it he laid the first stone, not only of the fabric of ethical philosophy, but of scientific method, at least in ethics, logic and psychology. Socrates never doubted that if men once knew what was best, they would also do it. They erred, he thought, from not seeing the good, and not because they would not follow it if seen. This is expressed in the Socratic dicta: “Vice is ignorance,” “Virtue is knowledge.” This lifelong work of Socrates, in which the germs of ethics, psychology and logic were contained, was idealized, developed, dramatized—first embodied and then extended beyond its original scope—in the writings of Plato, which may be described as the literary outcome of the profound impression made by Socrates upon his greatest follower. These writings (in pursuance of the importance given by Socrates to conversation) are all cast in the form of imaginary dialogue. But in those which are presumably the latest in order of composition this imaginative form interferes but little with the direct expression of the philosopher's own thoughts. The many-coloured veil at first inseparable from the features is gradually worn thinner, and at last becomes almost imperceptible.

Plato's philosophy, as embodied in his dialogues, has at once an intellectual and a mystical aspect; and both are dominated by a pervading ethical motive.Plato's Dialogues. In obeying the Socratic impulse, his speculative genius absorbed and harmonized the various conceptions which were present in contemporary thought, bringing them out of their dogmatic isolation into living correlation with one another, and with the life and experience of mankind. His poetical feeling and imagination, taking advantage of Pythagorean and Orphic suggestions, surrounded his abstract reasonings with a halo of mythology which made them more fascinating, but also more difficult for the prosaic intellect to comprehend. Convinced through the conversations of Socrates that truth and good exist and that they are inseparable, persuaded of the unity of virtue and of its dependence upon knowledge, he set forth upon a course of inquiry, in which he could not rest until the discrepancies of ordinary thinking were not only exposed but accounted for, and resolved in relation to a comprehensive theory. In this “pathway towards reality,” from the consideration of particular virtues he passed to the contemplation of virtue in general, and thence to the nature of universals, and to the unity of knowledge and being. Rising still higher on the road of generalization, he discussed the problem of unity and diversity, the one and the many. But in these lofty speculations the facts of human experience were not lost to view. The one, the good, the true, is otherwise regarded by him as the moral ideal, and this is examined as realized both in the individual and in the state. Thus ethical and political speculations are combined. And as the method of inquiry is developed, the leading principles both of logic and of psychology become progressively more distinct and clear. Notwithstanding his high estimate of mathematical principles, to him the type of exactness and certitude, Plato contributed little directly to physical science. Though he speaks with sympathy and respect of Hippocrates, he had no vocation for the patient inductive observation of natural processes, through which the Coan physicians, though they obtained few lasting results, yet founded a branch of science that was destined to be beneficently fruitful. And he turned scornfully aside from the Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, whose first principle, the basis of so much in modern physics, appeared to him to be tainted with materialism. Yet his discursive thought, as in later years he held high intercourse with Archytas and other contemporary minds, could not fail, unlike his master's, to include a theory of the Cosmos in its purview. In this regard, however, the poet-philosopher brought imagination to the aid of reason, thus creating a new mythology, of which the Timaeus is the most conspicuous example.

Amidst great diversity, both of subject and of treatment, Plato's dialogues are pervaded by two dominant motives, a passion for human improvement and a persistent faith in the power and supremacy of mind. What is commonly known as his doctrine of Ideas is only one phase in a continuous progress towards the realization of a system of philosophy in which the supreme factor is reason guiding will. But the objectivity, which from the first was characteristic of all Greek thinking, and his own power of poetic presentation, obscured for a time, even for Plato himself, the essential spirituality of his conceptions, and at one time even threatened to arrest them at a stage in which the universal was divorced from the particular, the permanent from the transient, being from becoming, and in which the first principles of reality were isolated from one another as well as from the actual world. Gradually the veil was lifted, and the relation between the senses and the intellect, phenomena and general laws, the active and the contemplative powers, came to be more clearly conceived. The true nature of abstraction and generalization, and of predication and inference, began to be discerned, and speculation was verified through experience. The ideas were seen as categories, or forms of thought, under which the infinite variety of natural processes might be comprised. And thus the dialogues present, as in a series of dissolving views, a sort of model or compendium of the history of philosophy. Plato's system is nowhere distinctly formulated, nor are the views put forward in his dialogues always consistent with each other, but much especially of his later thought is systematized, and as it were crystallized in the treatises of Aristotle; by whom the point of view which Plato had approached, but not finally attained, was made the starting-point for more precise metaphysical determinations and carried into concrete theories having the stamp of a more rigid logical method. The departments of ethics and politics, of dialectic and of psychology, of physics and metaphysics, thus came to be more clearly distinguished, but something was lost of the unity and intensity of spiritual insight which had vitalized these various elements, and fused them in a dynamic harmony.

The student of philosophy, whatever may be the modern system to which he is most inclined, sensational, intuitional, conceptional, transcendental, will find his account in returning ​to this well-spring of European thought, in which all previous movements are absorbed, and from which all subsequent lines of reflection may be said to diverge. As was observed by Jowett (St Paul, 1855), “the germs of all ideas, even of most Christian ones, are to be found in Plato.”

Two great forces are persistent in Plato: the love of truth and zeal for human improvement. In the period culminating with the Republic,Historical Influence of Plato. these two motives, the speculative and the practical, are combined in one harmonious working. In the succeeding period, without excluding one another, they operate with alternate intensity. In the varied outcome of his long literary career, the metaphysical “doctrine of ideas” which has been associated with Plato's name underwent many important changes. But pervading all these there is the same constant belief in the supremacy of reason and the identity of truth and good. From that abiding root spring forth a multitude of thoughts concerning the mind and human things—turning chiefly on the principles of psychology, education and political reform—thoughts which, although unverified, and often needing correction from experience, still constitute Plato the most fruitful of philosophical writers. While general ideas are powerful for good or ill, while abstractions are necessary to science, while mankind are apt to crave after perfection, and ideals, either in art or life, have an acknowledged value, so long the renown of Plato will continue. “All philosophic truth is Plato rightly divined; all philosophic error is Plato misunderstood”—is the verdict of one of the keenest of modern metaphysicians.^[7]

Plato's followers, however, have seldom kept the proportions of his teaching. The diverse elements of his doctrine have survived the spirit that informed them. The pythagorizing mysticism of the Timaeus has been more prized than the subtle and clear thinking of the Theaetetus. Logical inquiries have been hardened into a barren ontology. Semi-mythical statements have been construed literally and mystic fancies perpetuated without the genuine thought which underlay them. A part (and not the essential part) of his philosophy has been treated as the whole. But the influence of Plato has extended far beyond the limits of the Platonic schools. The debt of Aristotle to his master has never yet been fully estimated. Zeno, Chrysippus, Epicurus borrowed from Plato more than they knew. The moral ideal of Plutarch and that of the Roman Stoics, which have both so deeply affected the modern world, could not have existed without him. Neopythagoreanism was really a crude Neoplatonism. And the Sceptics availed themselves of weapons either forged by Plato or borrowed by him from the Sophists. A wholly distinct line of infiltration is suggested by the mention of Philo and the Alexandrian school (cf. section in Arabian Philosophy, ii. 26bc, 9th edition), and of Clement and Origen, while Gnostic heresies and even Talmudic mysticism betray perversions of the same influence. The effect of Hellenic thought on Christian theology and on the life of Christendom is a subject for a volume, and has been pointed out in part by E. Zeller and others (cf. Neoplatonism). Yet when Plotinus in the 3rd century (after hearing Ammonius), amidst the revival of religious paganism, founded a new spiritualistic philosophy upon the study of Plato and Aristotle combined, this return to the fountain head had all the effect of novelty. And for more than two centuries, from Plotinus to Proclus, the great effort to base life anew on the Platonic wisdom was continued. But it was rather the ghost than the spirit of Plato that was so “unsphered.” Instead of striving to reform the world, the Neoplatonist sought after a retired and cloistered virtue. Instead of vitalizing science with fresh thought, he lost hold of all reality in the contemplation of infinite unity. He had skill in dealing with abstractions, but laid a feeble hold upon the actual world.

“Hermes Trismegistus” and “Dionysius Areopagita” are names that mark the continuation of this influence into the middle ages. The pseudo-Dionysius was translated by Erigena in the 9th century.

Two more “Platonic” revivals have to be recorded—at Florence in the 15th and at Cambridge in the 17th century. Both were enthusiastic and both uncritical. The translation of the dialogues into Latin by Marsilio Ficino was the most lasting effect of the former movement, which was tinged with the unscientific ardour of the Renaissance. The preference still accorded to the Timaeus is a fair indication of the tendency to bring fumum ex fulgore which probably marred the discussions of the Florentine Academy concerning the “chief good.” The new humanism had also a sentimental cast, which was alien from Plato. Yet the effect of this spirit on art and literature was very great, and may be clearly traced not only in Italian but in English poetry.

The “Cambridge Platonists” have been described by Principal Tulloch in his important work on Rational Theology in England in the 17th century, and again by Professor J. A. Stewart in the concluding chapter of his volume on the Myths of Plato. Their views were mainly due to a reaction from the philosophy of Hobbes, and were at first suggested as much by Plotinus as by Plato. It is curious to find that, just as Socrates and Ammonius (the teacher of Plotinus) left no writings, so Whichcote, the founder of this school, worked chiefly through conversation and preaching. His pupils exercised a considerable influence for good, especially on English theology; and in aspiration if not in thought they derived something from Plato, but they seem to have been incapable of separating his meaning from that of his interpreters, and Cudworth, their most consistent writer, was at once more systematic and less scientific than the Athenian philosopher. The translations of Sydenham and Taylor in the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th are proofs of the continued influence of Platonism in England.

The critical study of Plato begins from Schleiermacher, who did good work as an interpreter, and tried to arrange the dialogues in the order of composition.Critical History. His attempt, which, like many efforts of constructive criticism, went far beyond possibility, was vitiated by the ground-fallacy of supposing that Plato had from the first a complete system in his mind which he partially and gradually revealed in writing. At a considerably later time Karl Friedrich Hermann, to whom all students of Plato are indebted, renewed the same endeavour on the far more plausible assumption that the dialogues faithfully reflect the growth of Plato's mind. But he also was too sanguine, and exaggerated the possibility of tracing a connexion between the outward events of Plato's life and the progress of his thoughts. This great question of the order of the dialogues, which has been debated by numberless writers, is one which only admits of an approximate solution. Much confusion, however, has been obviated by the hypothesis (first hinted at by Ueberweg, and since supported by Lewis Campbell and others) that the Sophistes and Politicus, whose genuineness had been called in question by Joseph Socher, are really intermediate between the Republic and the Laws. The allocation of these dialogues, not only on grounds of metaphysical criticism, but also on philological and other evidence of a more tangible kind, supplies a point of view from which it becomes possible to trace with confidence the general outlines of Plato's literary and philosophical development. Reflecting at first in various aspects the impressions received from Socrates, he is gradually touched with an inspiration which becomes his own, and which seeks utterance in half-poetical forms. Then first the ethical and by and by the metaphysical interest becomes predominant. And for a while this last is all absorbing, as he confronts the central problems which his own thoughts have raised. But, again, the hard-won acquisitions of this dialectical movement must be fused anew with imagination and applied to life. And in a final effort to use his intellectual wealth for the subvention of human need the great spirit passed away.

It may not be amiss to recapitulate the steps through which the above position respecting the order of the dialogues has become established.Order of Dialogues. Lovers of Hegel had observed that the point reached in the Sophistes in defining “not being” was dialectically in advance of the Republic. But Kantian interpreters might obviously have said ​the same of the Parmenides: and Grote as a consistent utilitarian looked upon the Protagoras as the most mature production of Plato's genius. It seemed desirable to find some criterion that was not bound up with philosophical points of view. Dr Thompson, the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, had vindicated the genuineness of the Sophistes against the objections of Socher, but had not accounted for the peculiarities of language, which that acute critic had perceived. By comparing those peculiarities with the style of the Laws, Plato's latest work, and with that of the Timaeus and Critias, which presupposed the Republic, Lewis Campbell argued in 1867 that the Sophistes and Politicus, with the Philebus, were in chronological sequence intermediate between the Republic and the Laws. Thus a further defence of their authenticity was at the same time a long step towards the solution of the problem which Schleiermacher had proposed. Many years afterwards the more detailed stylistic investigations of W. Dittenberger, Constantin Ritter and others arrived independently at the same conclusion. It was vehemently supported by W. Lutoslawski in his work on Plato's Logic, and has been frankly accepted with ample acknowledgments by the high authority of Dr Theodor Gomperz (see especially the Notes to his Greek Thinkers, iii. 310, 315 of English translation).

The Platonic dialogues are not merely the embodiment of the mind of Socrates and of the reflections of Plato. They are the portraiture of the highest intellectual life of Hellas in the time of Plato—a life but distantly related to military and political events, and scarcely interrupted by them. Athens appears as the centre of the excitable Hellenic mind, profoundly stirred by the arrival of great sophists, and keenly alive to the questions of Socrates, although in the pages of Plato, even more than in reality, he only “whispers with a few striplings in a corner.” For, in the Platonic grouping, the agora, which was the chief scene of action for the real Socrates, retires into the background, and he is principally seen consorting with his chosen companions, who are also friends of Plato, and with the acquaintances whom he makes through them. The scene is narrowed (for the Academy was remote from the bustle of resort, and Plato judged the Hellenic world securely from the vantage-ground of partial retirement)—but the figures are distinct and full of life. In reading the dialogues we not only breathe the most refined intellectual atmosphere, but are also present witnesses of the urbanity, the freedom, the playfulness, the generous warmth of the “best society” in Athens. For Plato has a numerous repertory of dramatis personae, who stand in various relations to his chief character—the impetuous Chaerephon, Apollodorus the inseparable weak brother, old Crito the true-hearted, Phaedo the beloved disciple, Simmias and Cebes, who have been with Philolaus, the graceful and ingenuous Phaedrus, the petulant Philebus, Theaetetus of the philosophic nature, who is cut off in his prime, and the incorrigible Alcibiades; then Plato's own kinsmen—Glaucon the irrepressible in politics, in quarrel and in love; Adeimantus, solid and grave; Critias in his phase of amateur philosopher, and not as what he afterwards became; Charmides, not in fiery manhood, but in his first bloom of diffident youth; and many others who appear as mere acquaintances, but have an interest of their own—the accomplished Agathon, the gay Aristophanes, Eryximachus the all-worthy physician; Meno, light of spirit; Callias, entertainer of sophists; Callicles the wilful man of the world; Cephalus the aged father of Lysias; and Nicias the honoured soldier. All these appear, not as some of them do on the page of history, in sanguinary contention or fierce rivalry, but as peaceful Athenians, in momentary contact with Socrates, whose electric touch now benumbs and now exhilarates, and sometimes goads to frenzy of love or anger. Still more distantly related to him, as it were standing in an outer circle, are the imposing forms of Gorgias and Protagoras, surrounded with the lesser lights of Hippias, Prodicus and Polus. Thrasymachus, Euthydemus, Dionysodorus hang round like comic masks, adding piquancy to the design. The adversaries Anytus and Meletus are allowed to appear for a moment, but soon vanish. The older philosophers, though Socrates turned away from them, also make their entrance on the Platonic stage. Parmenides with his magnificent depth is made to converse with the imaginary Socrates, who is still quite young. A stranger from Elea plays an important part in some later dialogues, and Timaeus the Pythagorean is introduced discoursing of the creation of the world. In these dialogues Socrates is mostly silent; in the Philebus he has lost himself in Plato; and in the twelve books of the Laws, where an unnamed Athenian is the chief speaker, even the Platonic Socrates finally disappears.

Now, in evolving his philosophy from the Socratic basis, Plato works along three main lines—the ethical and political, the metaphysical or scientific, and the mystical. All three are often intimately blended, as in the close of Rep., bk. vi., and even where one element is uppermost the others are not wholly suppressed. But this distinction, like that sometimes made in modern philosophy between the good, the true and the beautiful, is one which, if not unduly pressed, may be usefully, borne in mind.

Having noted this once for all, we pass to the more detailed. consideration of the several dialogues.

I. Laches, Charmides, Lysis.—In this first group Socrates is dealing tentatively with single ethical notions. The result in each case is a confession of ignorance, but the subject has been so handled as to point the way to more fruitful discussions in the future. And suggestions are casually thrown out which anticipate some of the most far-reaching of Plato's subsequent contemplations.

The Laches is a vigorous sketch, in which the characters of the soldier, the aged citizen, and the prudent general are well preserved; and Socrates is seenLaches. conversing with his elders, although with reference to the treatment of the young. The question raised is the definition of courage; and the humour of the piece consists in showing that three men, all of whom are unquestionably brave, are unable to give an account of bravery, or to decide whether courage is an animal instinct or a mental accomplishment.

Similarly, in the dialogue which bears his name, the temperate Charmides, of whom all testify that (as Aristophanes has it),^[8] he “fills up the gracious mould of modesty,” is hopelesslyCharmides. embarrassed when challenged by the Socratic method to put in words his conception of the modesty or temperance which he possesses, and which, as Socrates assures him, is a priceless gift. The Charmides contains some hints of Platonic notions, such as that of knowledge as self-consciousness, and of virtue as “doing one's own business.”

The graceful little dialogue which bears the name of Lysis ends, like the two former, with a confession of failure. Socrates, Lysis and Menexenus are all friends, and thinkLysis. highly of friendship, yet after many efforts they are unable to tell “what friendship is.” Yet some of the suggestions which are here laid aside are afterwards allowed to reappear. The notion that “what is neither good nor evil loves the good because of the presence of evil” is expanded and emphasized in the Symposium. And the conception of an ideal object of friendship, an αὐτὸ φίλον (though rejected as in the criticism of Aristotle by the characteristic reductio ad infinitum), is destined to have a wider scope in the history of Platonism.

II. Protagoras, Io, Meno.—The previous dialogues have marked the distinction between unconscious and conscious morality, and have also brought out the Socratic tendency to identify virtue with the knowledge of good. Now, the more strongly it is felt that knowledge is inseparable from virtue the more strange and doubtful appears such unconscious excellence as that of Laches, Charmides or Lysis. Hence arises the further paradox of Socrates: “Virtue is not taught, and that which is commonly regarded as virtue springs up spontaneously or is received unconsciously by a kind of inspiration.”

Protagoras, in the dialogue named after him, is the professor of popular, unscientific, self-complacent excellence; while ​Socrates appears in his life-long search after the ideal knowledge of the best. The two men are naturally at cross purposes. Protagoras contends that virtue is taught by himselfProtagoras. and others more or less successfully, and is not one but many. Socrates disputes the possibility of teaching virtue (since all men equally profess it, and even statesmen fail to give it to their sons), but affirms that, if it can be taught, virtue is not many, but one. The discussion, as in the former dialogues, ends inconclusively. But in the course of it Plato vividly sets forth the natural opposition between the empiric and scientific points of view, between a conventional and an intellectual standard. He does full justice to the thesis of Protagoras, and it is not to be supposed that he was contented to remain in the attitude which he has here attributed to Socrates. In his ideal state, where the earlier training of the best citizens is a refinement on the actual Hellenic education, he has to some extent reconciled the conceptions which are here dramatically opposed.

The preparations for the encounter and the description of it include many life-like touches—such as the eagerness of the young Athenian gentleman to hear the sophist, though he would be ashamed to be thought a sophist himself; the confusion into which the house of Callias has been thrown by the crowd of strangers and by the self-importance of rival professors; the graceful dignity of the man who has been forty years a teacher, the graphic description of the whole scene, the characteristic speeches of Prodicus and Hippias (from which some critics have elicited a theory of their doctrines), and the continued irony with which Socrates bears them all in hand and soothes the great man after disconcerting him.

Socrates has observed that rhapsodists and even poets have no definite knowledge of the things which they so powerfully represent (cf. Apol. 22; Phaed., 245 A.; Rep. iii. 398 A).Io. He brings the rhapsode Io to admit this, and to conclude that he is the inspired medium of a magnetic influence. The Muse is the chief magnet, and the poet is the first of a series of magnetic rings. Then follow the rhapsode and the actor, who are rings of inferior power, and the last ring is the hearer or spectator.

The Meno raises again the more serious question, Can virtue be taught? Socrates here states explicitly the paradox with which the Protagoras ended.Meno. “Virtue is knowledge; therefore virtue can be taught. But virtue is not taught. Therefore (in the highest sense) there can be no virtue.” And he repeats several of his former reasons—that Athenian statesmen failed to teach their sons, and that the education given by sophists is unsatisfying. (The sophists are here denounced by Anytus, who is angered by Socrates's ironical praise of them.) But the paradox is softened in two ways: (1) the absence of knowledge does not preclude inquiry, and (2) though virtue cannot be taught, yet there is a sense in which virtue exists.

III. Euthyphro, Apologia, Crito, Phaedo.—There is no ground for supposing that these four dialogues were written consecutively, or that they belong strictly to the same period of Plato's industry. But they are linked together for the reader by their common reference to the trial and death of Socrates; no one of them has been proved to be in the author's earliest or latest manner; and they may therefore fitly end the series of dialogues in which the personal traits of the historic Socrates are most apparent, and Plato's own peculiar doctrines are as yet but partially disclosed.

The little dialogue known by the name of Euthyphro might have been classed with the Laches, Charmides and Lysis, as dealing inconclusively with a single notion.Euthyphro. But, although slight and tentative in form, it has an under tone of deeper significance, in keeping with the gravity of the occasion. Plato implies that Socrates had thought more deeply on the nature of piety than his accusers had, and also that his piety was of a higher mood than that of ordinary religious men.

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In Plato's Apology the fate of Socrates is no longer the subject of mere allusions, such as the rage of Anytus at the end of the Meno, and the scene and occasionApology. of the Euthyphro. He is now seen face to face with his accusers, and with his countrymen who are condemning him to death.

What most aggravated his danger (after life-long impunity) is thus stated by James Riddell, in the introduction to his edition of the dialogue: “The ἐπιείκεια” (clemency) “of the restored people did not last long, and was naturally succeeded by a sensitive and fanatical zeal for their revived political institutions. Inquiry into the foundations of civil society was obviously rather perilous for the inquirer at such a time. Socrates knew the full extent of his danger. But, according to Xenophon (Mem. iv. c. 8, § 14), he prepared no defence, alleging that his whole life had been a preparation for that hour.”

The tone of the Platonic Apology is in full accordance with that saying; but it is too elaborate a work of art to be taken literally as a report of what was actually said. Jowett well compares it to “those speeches of Thucydides in which he has embodied his conception of the lofty character and policy of the great Pericles.” Yet “it is significant that Plato is said to have been present at the defence, as he is also said to have been absent at the last scene of the Phaedo. Some of the topics may have been actually used by Socrates, and the recollection of his very words may. have rung in the ears of his disciple.”

Is the love of truth consistent with civic duties? Is the philosopher a good citizen? are questions which are sure to arise where the truth involves practical improvement. Crito. In the Apology Socrates appears as an intrepid reformer; the Crito gives an impressive picture of him as a loyal and law-abiding Athenian.

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The Meno referred to the immortality and pre-existence of the soul as a traditional doctrine, and it was there associated with the possibility of inquiry.Phaedo, In the Phaedo Plato undertakes to substantiate this belief and base it anew by narrating the last hours of Socrates, who is represented as calmly discussing the question with his friends when his own death was immediately at hand. The argument turns chiefly on the eternity of knowledge, and is far from satisfying. For, granting that eternity of knowledge involves eternity of mind, does the eternity of mind assure continued being to the individual?^[15] Yet no unprejudiced reader of the Phaedo can doubt that Plato, at the time of writing it, sincerely believed in a conscious personal existence after death. The words of Socrates, when he declares his hope of going to be with other friends, are absolutely unambiguous, and his reply to Crito's question, “How shall we bury you?” has a convincing force beyond all dialectic: “I cannot persuade Crito that I here am Socrates—I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse. He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and by, a corpse.” This and similar touches not only stamp the Phaedo as a marvel of art, but are indisputable evidence of the writer's profound belief. They may be inventions, but they have nothing “mythical” about them, any more than the charge of Socrates to his friends, that they would best fulfil his wishes by attending to their own lives.

In the Phaedo, more than elsewhere, Plato preaches withdrawal from the world. The Delian solemnity is to Socrates ​and his friends a period of “retreat,” in which their eyes are turned from earthly things to dwell on the eternal. The theory of ideas here assumes its most transcendental aspect, and it is from portions of this dialogue and of the Phaedrus and Timaeus that the popular conception of Platonism has been principally derived. But to understand Plato rightly it is not enough to study isolated passages which happen to charm the imagination; nor should single expressions be interpreted without regard to the manner in which he presents the truth elsewhere.

It has already been shown (1) that Socratic inquiry implied a standard of truth and good, undiscovered but endlessly discoverable, and to be approached inductively; and (2) that in Plato this implicit assumption becomes explicit, in the identification of virtue with knowledge (Lach., Charm.) as an art of measurement (Protag.), and in the vision (towards the end of the Lysis) of an absolute object of desire. The Socratic “self-knowledge” has been developed (Charm.) into a science of mind or consciousness, apart from which no physical studies can be fruitful. (3) Co-ordinate with these theoretical tendencies there has appeared in Plato the determination not to break with experience. In the Phaedo, a long step is made in the direction of pure idealism. The ordinary virtue, which in the Protagoras and Meno was questioned but not condemned, is here rejected as unreal, and the task proposed to the philosopher is less to understand the world than to escape from it. The universal has assumed the form of the ideal, which is supposed, as elsewhere in Plato, to include mathematical as well as moral notions. The only function of perception is to awaken in us some reminiscence of this ideal. By following the clue thus given, and by searching for clearer images of truth in the world of mind, we may hope to be emancipated from sensation, and to lay hold upon the sole object of pure reason.

It is obvious that when he wrote the Phaedo Plato conceived of universals as objective entities rather than as forms of thought. The notion of “ideal colours” (though occurring in the myth) is an indication of his ontological mood. Yet even here the εἴδη are not consistently hypostatized. The notion of “what is best” has a distinctly practical side, and the “knowledge through reminiscence” is in one aspect a process of reflection on experience, turning on the laws of association.^[17] It is also said that objects “partake” of the ideas, and some concrete natures are regarded as embodiments or vehicles of some of them. Still if regarded as a whole, notwithstanding the scientific attitude of Socrates, the Phaedo is rather a meditation than an inquiry—a study of the soul as self-existent, and of the mind and truth as coeternal.

IV. Symposium, Phaedrus, Cratylus.—Socrates is again imagined as in the fullness of life. But the real Socrates is becoming more and more inextricably blended with Platonic thought and fancy. In the Apology there is a distinct echo of the voice of Socrates; the Phaedo gives many personal traits of him; but the dialogues which are now to follow are replete with original invention, based in part, no doubt, on personal recollections.

The Symposium admits both of comparison and of contrast with the Phaedo. Both dialogues are mystical, both are, spiritual,Symposium. but the spirituality in either is of a different order. That is here immanent which was there transcendent; the beautiful takes the place of the good. The world is not now to be annihilated, but rather transfigured, until particular objects are lost in universal light. Instead of flying from the region of growth and decay, the mind, through intercourse with beauty, is now the active cause of production. Yet the life of contemplation is still the highest life, and philosophy the truest μουσική.

​

The philosopher of the Symposium is in the world and yet not of it, apparently yielding but really overcoming. In the Phaedo the soul was exhorted to “live upon her servant's loss,” as in Shakespeare's most religious sonnet; this dialogue tells of a “soul within sense” in the spirit of some more recent poetry. By force of imagination rather than of reason, the reconciliation of becoming (γένεσις) with being (οὐσία), of the temporal with the eternal, is anticipated. But through the bright haze of fancy and behind the mask of irony, Socrates still appears the same strong, pure, upright and beneficent human being as in the Apology, Crito and Phaedo.

The impassioned contemplation of the beautiful is again imagined as the beginning of philosophy. But the “limitless ocean of beauty” Phaedrus. is replaced by a world of supramundane forms, beheld by unembodied souls, and remembered here on earth through enthusiasm, proceeding by dialectic from multiform impressions to one rational conception, and distinguishing the “lines and veins” of truth. The Phaedrus records Plato's highest “hour of insight,” when he willed the various tasks hereafter to be fulfilled. In it he soars to a pitch of contemplation from whence he takes a comprehensive and keen-eyed survey of the country to be explored, marking off the blind alleys and paths that lead astray, laying down the main roads and chief branches, and taking note of the erroneous wanderings of others. Reversing the vulgar adage, he flies that he may walk.

The transcendent aspiration of the Phaedo and the mystic glow of the Symposium are here combined with the notion of a scientific process. No longer asking, as in the Protagoras, Is virtue one or many? Plato rises to the conception of a scientific one and many, to be contemplated through dialectic—no barren abstraction, but a method of classification according to nature. This method is to be applied especially to psychology, not merely with a speculative, but also with a practical aim. For the “birth in beauty” of the Symposium is here developed into an art of education, of which the true rhetoric is but the means, and true statesmanship an accidental outcome.

Like all imaginative critics, Plato falls to some extent under the influence of that which he criticizes. The art of rhetoric which he so often travestied had a lasting effect upon his style. Readers of his latest works are often reminded of the mock grandiloquence of the Phaedrus. But in this dialogue the poetical side of his genius is at the height. Not only can he express or imitate anything, and produce any effect at will, but he is standing behind his creation and disposing it with the most perfect mastery, preserving unity amidst profuse variety, and giving harmony to a wildness bordering on the grotesque.

The person of Socrates is here deliberately modified. He no longer (as in the Symposium) teaches positive wisdom under the pretence of repeating what he has heard, but is himself caught by an exceptional inspiration, which is accounted for by the unusual circumstance of his finding himself in the country and alone with Phaedrus. He has been hitherto a stranger to the woods and fields, which would tempt him away from studying himself through intercourse with men. But by the promise of discourse—especially of talk with Phaedrus—he may be drawn anywhither.

The Phaedrus anticipates much that Plato afterwards slowly elaborated, and retains some things which he at last eliminated. (1) The presence of movement or impulse in the highest region is an aspect of truth which reappears in the Sophistes and other later dialogues. It has been thought strange that it should be found so early as in the Phaedrus. But does not this remark imply an unwarrantable assumption, viz. that Plato's idealism took its departure from the being of Parmenides? Is it not rather the fact that his own theory was formulated before the Megarian ascendancy led him to examine the Eleatic doctrine, and that it was by a tendency from the first inherent in Platonism that that doctrine was modified in his final teaching? (2) The ​outlines of method which are thrown out at white heat in the Phaedrus are a preparation for the more sober treatment of the ideas in the dialectical dialogues. In these, however, the conception of classification is somewhat altered through contact with Eleaticism. (3) The Phaedrus aims, not merely at realizing universals, but at grasping them in and through particulars. This is an ideal of knowledge which was “lost as soon as seen,” but one which in some of his latest dialogues, such as the Politicus and Philebus, Plato again endeavoured to work out. (4) The Phaedrus contains the elements of that true psychology into which the ontological theory of the ideas is gradually transmuted in Plato's more advanced writings, when the difficulties of his ideal doctrine in its cruder forms have been clearly felt and understood. (5) Plato here appears as a professor of education preferring oral intercourse to authorship. In this paradox he at once exalts the work of Socrates and avows his own vocation as a teacher. The passage throws an interesting light upon the form of dialogue in which his works are cast. But it is not to be supposed that he remained long unconscious of the influence he was destined to wield by writing. In executing a great task like the Republic, he practically diverged from the untenable view asserted here; and in the Laws he recommends his longest and least dramatic work as a suitable basis for the education of the future. (6) It must always appear strange, even to those most familiar with the conditions of Hellenic life, that in portraying the idealizing power of passionate love Plato should have taken his departure from unnatural feeling.

On this subject he has sung his own “palinode” in the Laws, which he intended as his final legacy to mankind.^[18] Not that he ceased to exalt genius and originality above mere talent, or to demand for philosophy the service of the heart as well as the head nor yet that friendship was less valued by him in later years. All this remained unchanged. And in the Republic the passion of love is still distantly referred to as the symbol of ideal aspiration. But a time came when he had learned to frown on the aberration of feeling which in the Symposium and Phaedrus he appears to regard as the legitimate stimulus of intellectual enthusiasm. And already in the Theaetetus not love but wonder is described as the only beginning of philosophy.

While calling attention to this change of sentiment, it is right to add that Platonic love in the “erotic” dialogues of Plato is very different from what has often been so named, and that nothing even in the noble passage of the Laws above referred to casts the slightest shadow of blame on the Socrates of the Symposium. Such changes are, amongst other things, a ground for caution in comparing the two steeds of the Phaedrus with the spirit (θυμός) and desire (ἐπιθυμία) of the Republic and Timaeus. The Phaedrus, in common with these dialogues, asserts the existence of higher and lower impulses in human nature, but there is no sufficient ground for supposing that when Plato wrote the Phaedrus he would have defined them precisely as they are defined in the Republic.

The Cratylus is full of curious interest as marking the highest point reached by the “science of language” in antiquity; but, as this dialogueCratylus. “hardly derives any light from Plato's other writings,”^[19] so neither does it reflect much light on them. It deals slightly with the contrast between Heracliteanism and Eleaticism, the importance of dialectic, the difficulty about the existence of falsehood, and ends with a brief allusion to the doctrine of ideas—but these topics are all more fully discussed elsewhere.

V. Gorgias, Republic.—In the Symposium and Phaedrus Plato largely redeems the promise implied in the Phaedo, where Socrates tells his friends to look among themselves for a charmer who may soothe away the fear of death. But he was pledged also to a sterner duty by the warning of Socrates to the Athenians, in the Apology, that after he was gone there would arise others for their reproof more harsh than he had been. To this graver task, which he had but partially fulfilled with the light satire upon Lysias or the gentle message to Isocrates, the philosopher now directs his powers, by holding up the mirror of what ought to be against what is, the principles of truth and right against the practice of men. For the good has more than one aspect. The beautiful or noble when realized in action becomes the just. And to the question, What is just? are closely allied those other questions of Socrates—What is a state? What is it to be a statesman?

In the Gorgias Plato asserts the absolute supremacy of justice through the dramatic portraiture of Socrates in his opposition to the world; in the Republic he strives at greater length to define the nature of justice through the imaginary creation of an ideal community.

In the Gorgias the Platonic Socrates appears in direct antagonism with the Athenian world. The shadow of his fate is impending. Chaerephon (who is still alive)Gorgias. understands him, but to the other interlocutors, Gorgias, Polus, Callicles, he appears perversely paradoxical. Yet he effectively dominates them all. And to the reader of the dialogue this image of “Socrates contra mundum” is hardly less impressive than that other image of Socrates confronting death.

Management of |

Soul. |

Body. |

Real. |

Pretended. |

Real. |

Pretended. |

πολιτική.

|

α

β'

α

β

α'

β'

Sophistic.

Rhetoric.

Gymnastic.

Medicine.

Cosmetic.

Confectionery.

α

β

Legislation.

Jurisprudence.

| Flattery.

​

is a word that cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.”

The value of justice has been shown. But what is justice? Is the life upheld by Socrates sufficiently definite for practical guidance?Republic. The views of Callicles have been overborne; but have they been thoroughly examined? Socrates claims to be the only politician. But how can that deserve the name of policy which results in doing nothing? These and cognate questions may well have haunted Plato when he planned the Republic, the greatest of his works. For that which lay deepest in him was not mere speculative interest or poetic fervour, but the practical enthusiasm of a reformer. The example of Socrates had fired him with an ideal of wisdom, courage, temperance and righteousness, which under various guises, both abstract and concrete, has appeared and reappeared in the preceding dialogues. But the more vividly he conceived of this ideal life, the more keenly he felt its isolation in the present world—that of the restored Athenian democracy. For to a Greek mind above all others life was nothing without the social environment, and justice, of all virtues, could least be realized apart from a community. Hence it became necessary to imagine a form of society in which the ideal man might find himself at home, a state to which the philosopher might stand in harmonious relationship, no longer as an alien sojourner, but as a native citizen, not standing aloof in lonely contemplation, but acting with the full consent of other men and ruling in the right of wisdom. Plato did not regard his own republic as a barren dream. He believed that sooner or later in the course of time a state essentially resembling his ideal commonwealth would come into being. Still more firmly was he convinced that until then mankind would not attain their highest possible development. To ignore this real aspect of his most serious work is to lose much of the author's meaning. Yet it is hardly less erroneous to interpret a great imaginative creation au pied de la lettre, as if examining a piece of actual legislation. Even in his Laws, a far more prosaic writing, Plato himself repeatedly protests against such criticism. In his most aspiring flights he is well aware of the difference between the imaginary and actual embodiment of an ideal,^[20] although as a literary artist he gives to his creations, whether in anticipation or retrospect, an air of sober reality and matter-of-fact. He is more in earnest about principles than about details, and if questioned would probably be found more confident with regard to moral than to political truth. He may have been wholly unconscious of the inconsistencies of his scheme, but it would not have greatly disconcerted him to have discovered them, or to have been told that this or that arrangement would not “work.” He would have trusted the correction of his own rough draft to the philosopher-kings of the future.

In speculating about the composition of the Republic (as is the fashion of some interpreters) it is important to bear in mind the general character of Plato's writings.

It should be added, that as Dialectic was still a “world not realized,” and he was continually conscious of using imperfect methods, he was not solicitous to bind himself to any one method, or to watch carefully over the logical coherence of his work. “Sailing with the wind of his argument,” he often tacks and veers, changing his method with his subject-matter, much as a poet might adopt a change of rhythm. Absorbed as he is in each new phase of his subject, all that precedes is cancelled for the time. And much of what is to come is deliberately kept out of view, because ideas of high importance are reserved for the place where their introduction will have most effect. Another cause of apparent inconsequence in Plato is what he himself would call the use of hypothesis. He works less deductively and more from masses of generalized experience than Platonists have been ready to admit. And in the Republic he is as much engaged with the criticism of an actual as with the projection of an ideal condition of society. If we knew more of the working of Attic institutions as he observed them, we should often understand him better.

These general considerations should be weighed against the inequalities which have led some critics to suppose that the “first sketch of the state” in bks. ii.-iv. is much earlier than the more exalted views of bks. v.-vii.^[22] If in these later books new conditions for choosing the future rulers are allowed to emerge, if in discussing the higher intellectual virtues the simple psychology of bk. iv. is lost sight of (it reappears in the Timaeus), if the “knowledge of the expedient” at first required falls far short of the conception of knowledge afterwards attained, all this is quite in keeping with Plato's manner elsewhere, and may be sufficiently accounted for by artistic and dialectical reserve. It can hardly be an altogether fortuitous circumstance that the culminating crisis, the third and highest “wave” of difficulty—the declaration that philosophers must be kings and kings philosophers—comes in precisely at the central point of the whole long work.

The great principle of the political supremacy of mind, though thus held back through half the dialogue, really dominates the whole. It may be read between the lines all through, even in the institution of gymnastic and the appraisement of the cardinal ​virtues. It is a genuine development of Socratic thought. And it is this more than any other single feature which gives the Republic a prophetic significance as “an attempt towards anticipating the work of future generations.”^[23]

VI. Euthydemus, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus (the dialectical dialogues).—Even in the most advanced metaphysics of the Republic there is a hyperbolical, transcendental tendency, from which Plato ultimately to some extent worked himself free. But it was not in conversation with “dear Glaucon,” or “between the lines” of an ethico-political writing, that this partial emancipation could be effectually attained. We have now to consider a series of dialogues, probably intended for a narrower circle of readers, in which Plato grapples directly with the central difficulties of his own theory of knowing and being. It is not necessary to assume that all of these are later than the Republic. The position of the Euthydemus and Parmenides in the order of composition is very uncertain. The Theaetetus has points of affinity with the Republic. The Sophist, Politicus and Philebus are in a later style. But, on account of their cognate subject-matter, these six dialogues may be conveniently classed together in a group by themselves. And the right place for such a group is intermediate between the Republic and the Laws.

The unity of the object of definition, the identity of virtue and knowledge, the existence of an absolute good, which would be universally followed if universally known, and of a standard of truth which is implied in the confession of ignorance, were postulates underlying the Socratic process, which in so far made no claim to be a “philosophy without assumptions.” These postulates, when once apprehended, drew Plato on to speculate concerning the nature, the object and the method of knowledge. Now, so far as we have hitherto followed him, his speculation has either been associated with ethical inquiry, or has been projected in a poetical and semi-mythical form. In the Phaedrus however, the vision of ideas was expressly conjoined with an outline of psychology and a foreshadowing of scientific method. And, while the opposition of ideas to phenomena and of knowledge to opinion has been repeatedly assumed, it has also been implied that there is a way between them, and. that the truth can only be approached by man through interrogation of experience. For it is nowhere supposed that the human inquirer is from the first in a position to deduce facts from ideas. Much rather, the light of the ideas is one which fitfully breaks in upon experience as men struggle towards the universal.

But it is not less true that the metaphysical aspirations from which Socrates had seemed to recall men's thoughts had been reawakened in consequence of the impulse which Socrates ​himself had given. From asking, Is virtue one? Can virtue be taught? Plato passes on to ask, What is unity? What are knowledge and being? From criticizing imperfect modes of teaching virtue, he has begun to speculate about the right and wrong uses of the intellect, and from dramatic portraits of the individual Protagoras or Gorgias goes on to the ideal delineation of the sophist. He has entered upon the “longer way,” and is no longer contented with mere “hypotheses.” With this demand for scientific precision his conception of the ideas themselves is modified, and he strives anew to conceive of them in relation to one another, to the mind, and to the world. As the balance of ethical truth was restored by admitting an unconscious (or inspired) conformity to reason, so now a fresh attempt is made on the intellectual side to bridge the gulf between sense and knowledge.

This endeavour involves, not only an expansion of the method of Socrates, but an examination of the earlier philosophies from which Socrates had turned away. Their influence on Plato has been traceable in the preceding dialogues, though, except in the case of Pythagoreanism (Gorg., Phaed., Rep.) it has been mostly indirect and casual. But in these dialectical dialogues he manifests his serious conviction that the contemporary fallacies which formed the chief hindrance to inquiry were deeply rooted in forms of thought created by earlier thinkers, above all by Heraclitus and Parmenides. To the exclusiveness of their first principles as held by their followers Plato attributed the barrennesss and impracticable unreality of many discussions, which put shadow-fighting and controversy in the place of real investigation, and led men to think that truth was unattainable. He therefore enters into conversation, as it were, with the great minds of former times, and in the spirit of Socrates compels each of them to yield up his secret, and to acknowledge a supplemental truth. To this effort he may very probably have been stimulated by the dialectical activity of his Socratic friends at Megara, whose logical tastes had drawn them towards Eleaticism. But, unlike them, while strengthening his metaphysical theory, he was also led to give to his political speculations a more practical turn.

The Euthydemus is a treatise “De Sophisticis Elenchis” in the form of a farce, and may serve to introduce the five other dialogues,Euthydemus. as the encounter with Thrasymachus introduces the serious part of the Republic. Under the mask of mockery there is more of concentrated thought, and also more of bitterness, in this dialogue than in the Protagoras or the Gorgias.

A sample of educational dialectic—in which Socrates draws out of young Cleinias the admissions (1) that a philosophy is needed, (2) that the highest philosophy is a science of kingcraft, which remains for the present undefined—is contrasted with a series of ridiculous sophisms, propounded by Dionysodorus and his brother Euthydemus, in which absolute and relative notions, whether affirmative or negative, object and subject, universal and particular, substance and attribute, action and modality, are capriciously confused. Crito, to whom Socrates narrates the scene, is moved to contempt. But Socrates warns him not on this account to despair of philosophy. In conclusion, Isocrates, or some one else, who prematurely mixes up philosophy with practical politics, is cautioned against spoiling two good things.

Such puzzles as—How can I learn either what I know or what I do not know?^[25] How can things become what they are not? How is falsehood or denial possible?—although treated jocularly here, will be found returning afterwards to “trouble the mind's eye.”

Plato appears in the same act to have become aware of his affinity with Parmenides, and to have been led to reconsider the foundations of his own doctrine.Parmenides. The one being of Parmenides was a more abstract notion than justice, beauty or the good. And the Zenonian method had more pretension to exactness than the Socratic. But it remained barren, because contented to repeat its own first essays in the destructive analysis of experience, without rising to the examination of its own first principles. For this higher criticism, of which he himself also stood in need, Plato looks up from the disciples to the master Parmenides. The appeal to him is put into the mouth of Socrates, as a very young man, who has framed for himself a theory of ideas, and would gladly see the Zenonian process applied to the notions of sameness, difference, likeness, unlikeness, unity and being.

Parmenides, whom Plato treats with tender reverence not unmixed with irony, proposes to the youth a series of questions which reveal the crudity of the doctrine of εἴδη. (z) Are there ideas of trivial things?^[26] (2) How do things “partake” of them? (3) Must not idealism proceed in infinitum? (4) If ideas are thoughts, do they and their participants think? (5) If they are patterns, and things resemble them, must there not be a pattern of the resemblance, and so on in infinitum? (6) If absolute, are they thinkable by man?

These difficulties are real, and yet to deny ideas is to destroy philosophy. (As the paradoxical doubts in the Protagoras do not shake the faith of Socrates in the existence of good, so neither does Plato here intend for a moment to derogate from the belief in the existence of the One and the True.)

The second part of the Parmenides may be regarded as an experiment in which Plato “assays to go” in Eleatic armour. Yet the strange web is “shot” with colours of original thought. The mode of conceiving time and becoming, and the vision of nothingness towards the end, may be noted as especially Platonic. These passages may be regarded in the same light as the wise words of Protagoras or the sober truths which occur amidst the wild fancies of the Cratylus. They should not mislead the interpreter into a search for recondite meanings.

The Zenonian method has been carried out to the utmost in application to the highest subject, and has led the mind into a maze of contradiction.Theaetetus. It remains to call in question the method itself, and the notion of absolute identity and difference on which it hinges, and so to lay anew the foundation-stone of thought. Before this can be attempted, however, another set of difficulties have to be met, and another set of philosophers examined. For the current scepticism had undermined the conception of knowledge as well as that of being, and the fame of Heraclitus was hardly second to that of Parmenides. Protagoras appeared in a former dialogue as the champion of ordinary morality; he is now made the exponent of ordinary thinking. His saying “Man the measure” is shown to rest on the unstable basis of the Heraclitean flux. By an elaborate criticism of both theories knowledge is at last separated from the relativity of sense; but the subsequent attempt to distinguish on abstract grounds between true and false opinion, and to define knowledge as true opinion with a reason (cf. Meno), proves ineffectual. Plato still shows traces of Megarian influence. But the disjunctive method of the Parmenides is not resumed. The indirect proofs are so arranged as to exhibit the skill of Socrates in “bringing to the birth” the germs of thought in a richly endowed and “pregnant” young mind. Theaetetus is the embodiment of the philosophic nature described in Rep. bk. vi., and has already been trained by Theodorus of Cyrene in geometry and the other preparatory sciences of ​Rep. bk. vii. It is in conversation with Theodorus that Socrates impressively contrasts the lives of the lawyer and the philosopher. The Theaetetus marks a great advance in clearness of metaphysical and psychological expression. See for example the passage (184-186) in which the independent function of the mind is asserted, and ideas are shown to be the truth of experience. There is also a distinct approach towards a critical and historical method in philosophy, while the perfection of style continues unimpaired, and the person of Socrates is as vividly represented as in any dialogue.

Notwithstanding the persistence of an indirect and negative method, the spirit of this dialogue also is the reverse of sceptical. “Socrates must assume the reality of knowledge or deny himself” (197 A). Perhaps in no metaphysical writing is the balance more firmly held between experience, imagination and reflection. Plato would seem to have made a compact with himself to abstain rigidly from snatching at the golden fruit that has so often eluded his grasp, and to content himself with laboriously “cutting steps” towards the summit that was still unsealed.

With Plato, as with other inventive writers, a time seems to have arrived when he desired to connect successive works in a series.Sophist. Thus in planning the Sophistes he linked it to the Theaetetus (which had been written without any such intention), and projected a whole tetralogy of dialectical dialogues, Theaetetus, Sophistes, Politicus, Philosophus, of which the last piece seems never to have been written.

After an interval, of which our only measure is a change of style, the philosopher returns to the great central question of knowledge and being. The obstacle in his path, on which he has often played with light satire, dramatic portraiture and indirect allusion, is now to be made the object of a seriously planned attack. He has made his approaches, and the enemy's fortress is to be forthwith sapped and overthrown. This hostile position is not merely the “Sophistik” which, as some tell us, is an invention of the Germans, and as Plato himself declares is only the reflection or embodiment of the average mind,^[28] but the fallacy of fallacies, the prime falsehood (πρῶτον ψεῦδος) of all contemporary thought. This is nothing else than the crude absoluteness of affirmation and negation which was ridiculed in the Euthydemus, and has been elsewhere mentioned as the first principle of the art of controversy.^[29] For dramatic purposes this general error is personified. And the word “sophist,” which had somehow become the bête noire of the Platonic school, thus for the first time fixedly acquires the significance which has since clung to the name. That Plato himself would not adhere pedantically to the connotation here implied is shown by the admission, at the opening of the dialogue, that amongst other disguises under which the philosopher walks the earth the sophist is one.

In the Sophistes, as in the Parmenides, a new method is introduced, and again by an Eleatic teacher. This method is repeated with improvements in the Politicus, and once more referred to in the Philebus. It bears a strong resemblance to the “synagogē” and “diaeresis” of the Phaedrus, but is applied by the “friend from Elea” with a degree of pedantry which Socrates nowhere betrays. And the two methods, although kindred, have probably come through different channels—the classifications of the Phaedrus being Plato's own generalization of the Socratic process, while the dichotomies of the Sophistes and Politicus are a caricature of Socrates cast in the Megarian mould. Plato seems to have regarded this method as an implement which might be used with advantage only when the cardinal principles on which it turned had been fully criticized.

Negation, falsity, contradiction, are three notions which Plato from his height of abstraction does not hold apart. This position is the converse of the Spinozistic saying, “Omnis determinatio est negatio.” According to him, every negative implies an affirmative. And his main point is that true negation is correlative to true affirmation, much as he has said in the Phaedrus that the dialectician separates kinds according to the “lines and veins of nature.” The Sophistes is a standing protest against the error of marring the finely-graduated lineaments of truth, and so destroying the vitality of thought.

The idealists whom the Eleatic stranger treats so gently have been identified with the Megarians. But may not Plato be reflecting on a Megarian influence operating within the Academy?

Here, as partly already in the Parmenides and Theaetetus, the ideas assume the nature of categories, and being is the sum of positive attributes, while negation, as the shadow of affirmation, is likewise finally comprehended in the totality of being.

The remark made incidentally, but with intense emphasis, that the universe lives and moves “according to God,”^[30] is an indication of the religious tone which reappears increasingly in the Politicus, Philebus, Timaeus and Laws.

In passing on to consider the statesman, true and false, the Eleatic stranger does not forget the lesson which has just been learned. While continuing his methodPoliticus (Statesman). of dichotomies, he is careful to look on both sides of each alternative, and he no longer insists on dividing between this and not-this when another mode of classification is more natural. A rule not hitherto applied is now brought forward, the rule of proportion or right measure (τὸ μέτριον), as distinguished from arbitrary limitations. Nor is formal logical treatment any longer felt to be adequate to the subject in hand, but an elaborate myth is introduced. On the ethico-political side also a change has come over Plato. As he has stripped his ideas of transcendental imagery, so in reconsidering his philosopher-king he turns away from the smiling optimism of the Republic and looks for a scientific statesmanship that shall lay a strong grasp upon the actual world. He also feels more bitterly towards the demagogues and other rulers of Hellas. The author of the Politicus must have had some great quarrel with mankind. But so far as they will receive it he is still intent on doing them good.

​

			1. Constitutional monarchy.
			2. Constitutional oligarchy.
			3. Law-abiding democracy.
			4. Law-breaking democracy.
			5. Law-defying oligarchy.
			6. Tyranny.

The four preceding dialogues have shown (1) the gradual transformation of the Platonic ideas (while still objective) into forms of thought, (2) the tendency to group them into series of categories, (3) a corresponding advance in psychological classification, (4) an increasing importance given to method, (5) the inclination to inquire into processes (γενέσεις) as well as into the nature of being.

Meanwhile Plato's approach to the Eleatics, though in the way of criticism, has brought into prominence the notions of unity,Philebus. being, sameness, difference, and has left some what in abeyance the idea of good. To this “highest of all studies” Plato now returns, equipped with his improved instruments, and ready to forge new ones in the same laboratory, or in some other, should occasion serve. His converse with Parmenides ended in his assertion of an element of difference pervading all things—in other words, of an indeterminate element underlying all determinations. This brings him again into relation with the Pythagoreans, who had similarly asserted the combination of finite and infinite in the universe. Taking advantage of their help, he gains a more advanced (but still ideal) conception of the concrete harmony of things, and approaches the definition of that which in the Republic he but shadowed forth. With this most serious inquiry there is combined (as in the Sophistes and Politicus) an ironical and controversial use of dialectic, by which the juggler and false pretender (who is in this case the goddess of pleasure), after claiming the highest place, is thrust down to the lowest.

It must be admitted that the style of the Philebus is far from brilliant, or even clear. In the effort of connecting abstractions Plato's movement is more laboured than in his first glad realization of them.

Instead of attempting here to follow the windings of the dialogue, it must suffice to state the main result. Neither pleasure nor knowledge is the highest good, and the good eludes definition; but the shrine, or habitation, of the good is a complex life of which the elements are, in order of merit: (1) measure, the cause of all right mixture; (2) (a) beauty, the effect, and (b) reality, the inseparable condition; (3) intellect; (4) science, art and right opinion; (5) pure pleasure unaccompanied with pain. “Not all the animal kingdom shall induce us to put pleasure first.”

The Philebus introduces us to the interior of the Academy in the lifetime of the master. More than any other of the dialogues it recalls Aristotle's description of Plato's teaching. But, while his followers seem early to have fallen under the dominance of the latest phase of his doctrine, Plato himself, even in the Philebus, is still detached from any servitude to the creations of his own mind. He manipulates them as the medium for expressing his fresh thoughts, but they are not yet crystallized into a system.

“I will remind you,” Socrates, “of what has been omitted,” says Protarchus at the conclusion of this dialogue. The last (presumably) of Plato's metaphysical writings thus fitly ends with a confession of incompleteness. But if, as Renan says, “the most fatal error is to believe that one serves one's country by calumniating those who founded it,” neither is it for the interest of science to ignore these imperfect anticipations. By methods elaborated in the course of centuries, and far more sure than any which Plato had at his command, mankind have gained an extent of knowledge which he dreamt not of.^[31] But the Greek metaphysician is none the less a pioneer of knowledge,^[32] while the special sciences of ethics and psychology had been carried from infancy to adolescence in a single lifetime.

VII. Timaeus, Critias [Hermocrates].—As the Sophistes and Politicus were written in continuation of the Theaetetus, so, at some uncertain time, Plato conceived the design of writing a great trilogy, for which the ideal state depicted in the Republic should be the point of departure. The grand outline there sketched by Socrates was now to be filled up by Critias and Hermocrates. The form set up by reasoning should be made alive, the “airy burghers” should be seen “making history.” As a prelude to this magnificent celebration, Timaeus, the Pythagorean philosopher, who is present at the Panathenaea, is invited to discourse of the origin of all things, and to bring down the glorious theme to the creation of man. What should have followed this, but is only commenced in the fragment of the Critias, would have been the story, not of a fall, but of the triumph of reason in humanity.

In the Philebus (59 A, cf. 62 D) Plato speaks with a touch of contempt of the life-long investigation of nature, as being concerned only with this visible universe, and immersed in the study of phenomena, whether past, present or to come, which admit of no stability and therefore of no certainty. “These things have no absolute first principle, and can never be the objects of reason and true science.”

Yet even this lower knowledge is there admitted as an element of that life which is the habitation of the good. And there are not wanting signs in his later dialogues that Plato's imagination had again been strongly drawn towards those physical studies which, as the Phaedo shows, had fascinated him in youth. That nature and the world proceed “according to God and not according to chance” is the belief of the Eleatic stranger, to which he perceives that Theaetetus will be irresistibly drawn as he grows older (Soph. 265 D). In the midst of dialectical abstractions, the processes of actual production (γενέσεις) have been increasingly borne in mind. And the myth in the Politicus turns on cosmological conceptions which, although differing from those in the Timaeus, and more accordant with Plato's bitterest mood, yet throw a new light on the deeper current of ​his thoughts. In the same passage (272 C) there occurs the first clear anticipation of an interrogatio naturae.

The impulse in this new direction, if not originated, was manifestly reinforced, through closer intercourse with the Pythagorean school. And the choice of Timaeus the Pythagorean as chief speaker is an acknowledgment of this obvious tendency. If in the course of the dialogue there occur ideas apparently borrowed from the Atomists, whom Plato persistently ignored, this fact ought probably to be referred to some early reaction of Atomic on Pythagorean doctrine. It is important to observe, however, that not only the Timaeus, but the unfinished whole of which it forms the introduction, is professedly an imaginative creation. For the legend of prehistoric Athens and of Atlantis, whereof Critias was to relate what belonged to internal policy and Hermocrates the conduct of the war, would have been no other than a prose poem, a “mythological lie,” conceived in the spirit of the Republic, and in the form of a fictitious narrative. And, therefore, when Timaeus professes to give only a probable account of shadowy truths, he must be taken at his word, and not criticized in too exacting a spirit. His descriptions have much the same relation to the natural philosophy of Plato's time that Milton's cosmology has to the serious investigations of Galileo or Copernicus—except that all physical speculation hitherto partook in some measure of this half-mythological character, and that Plato's mind, although working in an unfamiliar region, is still that of a speculative philosopher.

As Parmenides, after demonstrating the nonentity of growth and decay, was yet impelled to give some account of this non-existent and unintelligible phenomenal world,Timaeus. so Plato, although warned off by Socrates, must needs attempt to give a probable and comprehensive description of the visible universe and its creation. In doing so he acknowledges an imperfect truth in theories which his dialectic had previously set aside. In examining the earlier philosophers he has already transgressed the limits prescribed by Socrates, and the effort to connect ideas has made him more and more conscious of the gap between the ideal and the actual. He cannot rest until he has done his utmost to fill up the chasm—calling in the help of imagination where reason fails him. His dominant thought is still that of a deduction from the “reason of the best,” as in the Phaedo, or “the idea of good,” as in the Republic. But both his abstract idealism and his absolute optimism were by this time considerably modified, and, although not confounding “causes with conditions,” as he once accused Anaxagoras of doing, he yet assigns more scope to “second causes” than he would then have been willing to attribute to them. This partly comes of ripening experience and a deepening sense of the persistency of evil, and partly from the feeling—which seems to have grown upon him in later life—of the distance between God and man.

VIII. The Laws.—The two series of dialogues, the dialectical and the imaginative—Sophistes, Politicus, Philosophus—Timaeus, Critias, Hermocrates—were left incomplete. For Plato had concentrated his declining powers, in the evening of ​his life,^[35] upon a different task. He was resolved to leave behind him, if he could so far overcome the infirmities of age,^[36] a code of laws, conceived in a spirit of concession, and such as he still hoped that some Hellenic state might sanction. The motive for this great work may be gathered from the Politicus. The physician in departing is to give a written prescription, adapted as far as possible to the condition of those from whom he goes away. This is the second-best course, in the absence of the philosopher-king. And, as the Hellenic world will not listen to Plato's heroic remedy, he accommodates his counsel to their preconceptions.Laws. He returns once more from abstract discussions to study the application of ideas to life, and though, by the conditions of the problem, his course is “nearer earth and less in light,” this long writing, which is said to have been posthumous,^[37] has a peculiar interest. The ripeness of accumulated experience and the mellowness of wise contemplation make up for the loss of prophetic insight and poetic charm.

The form of dialogue is still retained, and an aged Athenian is imagined as discoursing of legislation with the Lacedaemonian Megillus and the Cretan Cleinias, who has in view the foundation of a new colony, and is on his way with his two companions from Cnossus to the temple and oracle of Zeus.

Plato now aims at moderating between Dorian and Ionian law, freely criticizing both, and refining on them from a higher point of view. “The praise of obedience, the authority assigned to elders, the prohibition of dowries, the enforcement of marriage, the common meals, the distribution and inalienability of land, the institution of the Crypteia, the freedom of bequest to a favourite son, the dislike of city walls - all reflect the custom of Sparta.” . . . “The use of the lot, the scrutiny of magistrates, the monthly courses of the council, the pardon of the forgiven homicide, most of the regulations about testaments and the guardianship of orphans, the degrees of consanguinity recognized by law, correspond to Athenian laws and customs” (Jowett).

The philosopher's own thoughts come out most strongly in the “preludes” to the laws,^[38] and in the regulations concerning education, marriage and the punishment of impiety (i.e. 1st, atheism; 2nd, denial of providence; 3rd and worst, immoral superstition). The difficulty which is met in the Politicus by the abandonment of the world for a time, and in the Timaeus by the lieutenancy of lower gods, here leads to the hypothesis of an evil soul. The priority of mind (often before asserted) and the increased importance attached to numbers are the chief indications of Plato's latest thoughts about the intelligible world. But it must be remembered that the higher education (answering to Rep. vi., vii.) is expressly reserved.^[39] Had Plato written his own Epinomis, the proportions of the whole work (not then “acephalous”) might have been vastly changed.

The severity of the penalties attached to the three forms of heresy, especially to the third and worst of them, has led to the remark that Plato, after asserting “liberty of prophesying,” had become intolerant and bigoted in his old age (Grote). But the idea of toleration in the modern sense was never distinctly present to the mind of any ancient philosopher. And, if in the Laws the lines of thought have in one way hardened, there are other ways in which experience has softened them. Plato's “second-best” constitution contains a provision, which was not admissible in the “perfect state,” for possible changes and readaptations in the future. The power of self-reformation is hedged round indeed with extreme precautions; and no young or middle-aged citizen is ever to hear a word said in depreciation of any jot or tittle of the existing law. But that it should be provided, however guardedly, that select commissioners, after travelling far and wide, should bring back of the fruit of their observations for the consideration of the nocturnal council, and that a power of constitutionally amending the laws should thus be admitted into the state, is sufficiently remarkable, when the would-be finality of ancient legislation is considered. Plato even comes near to the reflexion that “constitutions are not made, but grow” (iv. 709 A).

Plato in the Laws desists finally from impersonating Socrates. But he is in some ways nearer to his master in spirit than when he composed the Phaedrus. The sympathy with common life, the acceptance of Greek religion, the deepening humanity, are no less essentially Socratic than the love of truth which breathes in every page. And some particular aspects of Socratism reappear, such as the question about courage^[40] and that concerning the unity of virtue.^[41]

Doubtful and Spurious Works.—Of the dialogues forming part of the “Platonic canon,” and not included in the preceding survey, the Lesser Hippias, First Alcibiades and Menexenus are the most Platonic, though probably not Plato's. The Greater Hippias and the Clitophon are also admitted to have some plausibility. The Second-Alcibiades (on Prayer), the Hipparchus (touching on Peisistratus and Homer), Minos (“de lege”), Epinomis, Erastae, Theages, are generally condemned, though most of them are very early forgeries or academic exercises.^[42] And the Axiochus (though sometimes prized for its subject, “the contempt of death”), the De justo, De virtute, Demodocus, Sisyphus, Eryxias (a not-uninteresting treatise on the use of money), together with the so-called Definitions, were rejected in ancient times, and are marked as spurious in the MSS.