Plato Taylor

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PLATOBy

A. E. TAYLOR

NEW YORKDODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY

214-220 EAST 23RD STREET


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r\

Printed in Great Britain byT. and A. Constable, Printers to His I^Iajesty

at ihe University Press, Edinburgh


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3296.

FOREWORDThe following sketch makes no claim to beconsidered as a complete account of the philo-sophy of Plato. Many topics of importance havebeen omitted altogether, and others only treatedwith the utmost attainable brevity. I have alsothought it necessary to avoid, as far as possible,all controversial discussion, and have therefore inmany cases followed my own judgment on disput-able points without attempting to support it bythe detailed reasoning which would be indispens-able in a work of larger scope. My object hasbeen to sit as loose as possible to all the tradi-tional expositions of Platonism, and to give inbroad outline the personpJ impression of thephilosopher's thought which I have derived fromrepeated study of the Platonic text. The list ofworks useful to the student, though it merelycomprises a few of those which I have myselffound useful or important, will give myreader the opportunity to form his own judgmentby comparing my interpretations with those of


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PLATOothers. Those who are most competent to con-demn the numerous defects of my little book will,I hope, be also most indulgent in their verdict onan attempt to compress into so small a compassan account of the most original and influential ofall philosophies.

A. E. T.


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CONTENTSCHAP. FAOE

I, Life and Writings , 1

^Knowledge and its Objects . . * , 34III. The Soul of ManPsychology, Ethics, and

Politics ,73IV. Cosmology ..-..,,, 137

Select Bibliography 149


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PLATOCHAPTER I

LIFE AND WRITINGSThe tradilional story of the life of Plato is onein which it is unusually difficult to distinguishbetween historical fact and romantic fiction. Ofthe ' Lives ' of Plato which have come down to usfrom ancient times, the earliest in date is thatof the African rhetorician and romance-^vriterApuleius, who belongs to the middle and laterhalf of the second century a.d. There is a longerbiography in the scrap-book commonly known asthe Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes ofLaerte, a compilation which dates, in its presentform, from a time not long before the middleof the third century a.d., though much of itsmaterial is taken from earlier and better sources.The remaining 'Lives' belong to the latest ageof Neo-Platonism, i.e. the sixth century afterChrist and later. Thus the earliest extant bio-


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PLATOgraphy of the philosopher comes to us from atime four hundred years after his death, andmust be taken -;g i^epresent the Platonic legendas it was current in a most uncritical age. Whenwe try to gat behind this legend to its basis inwell-accredited fact, the results we obtain aresingularly meagre. Plato himself has recordedonly two facts about his own life. He tells us,in the Aioology, that he was present in court atthe trial of his master Socrates, and that he wasone of the friends who offered to be surety forthe payment of any fine which might be imposedon the old philosopher. In the Phaedo he addsthat he was absent from the famous death-scenein the prison, owing to an illness, a statementwhich may, however, be no more than an artisticliterary fiction. His contemporary Xenophonmerely mentions him once in passing as a mem-ber of the inner Socratic circle. From Aristotlewe further learn that Plato, as a young man,apparently before his intimacy with Socrates,had been a pupil of the Heraclitean philosopherCratylus. A few anecdotes of an unfavourablekind are related by Diogenes of Laerte on theauthority of Aristoxenus of Messene, a pupil ofAristotle, and a well-known writer on music,whose credibility is, however, impaired by his


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LIFE AND WRITINGSunmistakable personal animus against Socratesand Plato, and his anxiety to deny them allphilosophical originality. The dates of Plato'sbirth and death are, moreover, fixed for us bythe unimpeachable authority of the Alexandrianchronologists, whose testimony has been pre-served by Diogenes. We may thus take it ascertain that Plato was born in the year 427 B.C.,early in the great Peloponnesian war, and died in346, at the age of eighty-one. The way in whichXenophon, in his one solitary statement, couplesthe name of Plato with that of Charmides, aleader of the oligarchy of the ' Thirty,' set up bythe Spartans in Athens at the close of the Pelo-ponnesian war, taken together with the promi-nence given in the Platonic dialogues to Charmidesand Critias as friends of Socrates, confirms thelater tradition, according to which Plato himselfwas a near relative of the two ' oligarchs,' a factwhich has to be borne in mind in reading hissevere strictures upon Athenian democracy.

There remains, indeed, a further source of in-formation, which, if its authenticity could beregarded as established, would be of the veryhighest value. Among the writings ascribed toPlato and preserved in our ancient manuscriptsthere is a collection of thirteen letters, purport-


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PLATOing to be written by the philosopher himself,some of which ostensibly contain a good deal ofautobiographical detail. In particular the seventhletter, the longest and most important of thegroup, professes to contain the philosopher's ownvindication of his life-long abstention from takingpart in the public life of his country, and, ifgenuine, absolutely confirms the later story, pre-sently to be narrated, of his political relationswith the court of Syracuse. As to the history ofthis collection of letters, all that we know forcertain is that they were in existence and wereregarded as Platonic early iji tYie first centuryA.D., when they were included by the scholarThrasyllus in his complete edition of the worksof Plato. This, however, is not of itself proof oftheir genuineness, since the edition of Thrasylluscontained works which we can now show to bespurious, such as the Theages and Frastae. Wefurther know from Diogenes of Laerte that cer-tain 'letters* had been included in the earlieredition of Plato by the famous scholar Aristo-phanes, who was librarian of the great museumof Alexandria towards the end of the secondcentury B.C. ; but we are not told which or howmany of our present collection Aristophanesrecognised. When we examine the extant letters


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LIFE AND WRITINGSthemselves, we seem led to the conclusion thatthey can hardly all be genuine works of Plato,since some of them appear to allude to character-istic doctrines of the Neo-Pythagoreanism whicharose about the beginning of the first centurybefore Christ. It is not surprising, therefore,that Grote has stood alone, or almost alone,among recent scholars in maintaining thegenuineness of the whole set of thirteen lettersadmitted into the collection of Thrasyllus. It isanother question whether some at least of thecollection, and notably the seventh, the onlyletter of real importance, may not be the workof Plato, and the problem must be said to beone upon which competent scholars are not asyet agreed. On the one side, it may be urgedthat the incidents related in the seventh letterare in no way incredible, and that their occur-rence, as we shall see directly, would explain acertain increase of pessimism in Plato's laterwritings on political philosophy. On the other,it is suspicious that the letter appears to quotedirectly from at least four Platonic dialogues(the Apology, PhaedOy Republic, Lysis), and that,apart from the account of Plato's relations withSyracuse, it contains nothing which might nothave been put together with the help of the


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PLATOdialogues. And we must remember that thedesire to exhibit Plato, the great political theorist,actually at work on the attempt to construct astate after his own heart, would at any time havebeen a sujfficient motive for the fabrication. Still,the style of the composition shows that, if aforgery, it is at least an early forgery, and weshall hardly be wrong in treating the narrativeas being, at any rate, based upon a trustworthytradition.Having premised this much as to the sources

of our information, we may now proceed to nar-rate in outline the biography of Plato, as it wascurrent early in the Christian era, omitting whatis evidently myth or mere improving anecdote.Plato, the son of Ariston and Perictione, was borneither in Athens or, according to another account,in Aegina, in the year 427 B.C. On the mother'sside he was closely related to Critias and Char-mides, members of the oligarchy of the * Thirty,'and the former the leader among its more violentspirits, the family going back through Dropides, arelative of the great lawgiver Solon, to a divinefirst ancestor, the god Poseidon. On the father'sside, too, his origin was no less illustrious, sinceAriston was a descendant of Codrus, the last kingof Athens, who was himself sprung from Poseidon.


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LIFE AND WRITINGSEven this origin, however, was not thoughtexalted enough for the philosopher by hisadmirers, and Plato's own nephew, Speusippus, iscited as an authority for the belief that the realfather of Perictione's son was the god Apollo.(The relationship between Plato and the familyof Critias and Charmides is, as we have said,made probable by the philosopher's own utter-ances, and he is also himself the authority for thedescent of Critias from Dropides. The furtherassertions about the eminent descent of Dropidesare hardly w^orthy of credit, since it seems clearthat Solon the lawgiver was really a middle-classmerchant. But the connection with Solon ofitself shows that the family was one of the highestdistinction as families went in the Athens of thelate fifth century.) As a^ lad, the future philo-sopher was ambitious of poetical fame, and hadeven composed a tragedy for public performance.But when he came under the influence ofSocrates, he devoted himself entirely to philo-sophy and burned all his poems. (That so greatan imaginative writer as Plato should have begunhis literary career as a poet is likely enough, andthere is no reason why some of the epigramsascribed to him in the Greek Anthology shouldnot be genuine, but the story of the burnt tragedy


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PLATOlooks like a fabrication based upon the severecondemnation of poetry in general and the dramain particular in the Republic ; nor must we for-get that, according to Aristotle's statement,Plato got his introduction to philosophy notfrom Socrates, but from Cratylus.) The firstassociation between Plato and Socrates took placewhen Plato was twenty years old, and their con-nection lasted eight years, since the death ofSocrates falls in 399 B.C. After the death of themaster, Plato retired from Athens and spentsome years in foreign travel. The accounts ofthe extent of these travels become more andmore exaggerated as the narrators are increas-ingly removed in date from the actual events.'The seventh ' letter ' speaks merely of a voyageto Italy and Sicily undertaken apparently in con-sequence of the writer's disgust with the proceed-ings of the restored Athenian democracy, whichhad inaugurated its career by the condemnationof Socrates. Cicero, who is the earliest authorityfor the story of the travels, apart from the' letters,' makes Plato go first to Egypt, afterwardsto Italy and Sicily. The later Platonic legendprofesses to know more, and relates an entireromance on the subject of Plato's adventures.According to this story Plato withdrew from


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LIFE AND WRITINGSAthens on the death of Socrates, and resided for awhile at the neighbouring city of Megara withhis friend and fellow-disciple Eucleides. He thenvisited Gyrene, to enjoy the society of the mathe-matician Theodorus, Egypt, where he learned thewisdom of the priests, and Italy, where he asso-ciated with the members of the Pythagoreanschool who had survived the forcible dissolutionof the political power of the sect. (The tale ranthat he further purposed to visit the PersianMagi, but that this scheme failed, though somewriters professed to know that Plato had met withMagians and learned their doctrines in Phoenicia.)From Italy the legend brings Plato to Sicily,where he is said, on the authority of the seventhletter, to have arrived at the age of forty; i.e.after twelve years of continuous travel. Here hevisited the court of the vigorous ruler of Syracuse,Dionysius i., and so displeased that arbitrarymonarch by his freedoms of speech that he causedhim to be kidnapped by a Spartan ambassadorwho put him up for sale in the slave-market ofAegina, where, by a singular coincidence, thepeople had passed a resolution that the firstAthenian who should land on the island shouldbe put to death. Plato was, however, saved fromhis danger by a man of Gyrene, who ransomed


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PLATOhim and sent him home to Athens. (How muchtruth there may be in this story, the details ofwhich are differently given by the differentnarrators, it is impossible to say with certainty.The story of the kidnapping, in particular, is toldwith a good deal of discrepancy in the detailsmany features of it are highly singular, and itappears entirely unknown to both Cicero and thewriter of the seventh ' letter.' Hence there isevery ground to regard it as pure romance. Thesame must be said of the story of the twelveyears' unbroken travel, and the association ofPlato with Oriental priests and magicians.Stories of this kind were widely circulated fromthe beginning of the first century before Christonward, when the gradual intermingling of Eastand West in great cities like Alexandria hadgiven rise to the fancy that Greek science andphilosophy had been originally borrowed fromOriental theosophy, a notion invented by Alex-andrian Neo-Pythagoreans and eagerly acceptedby Jews and Christians, whom it enabled torepresent the Greek sages as mere pilferers fromthe Hebrew scriptures. Even the alleged resi-dence in Megara and the voyage to Cyrene, may beno more than inventions based on the facts thatthe dialogue Theaetetus is dedicated to Plato's


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LIFE AND WRITINGSfriend Eucleides of Mcgara and that the Cyrcnianmathematician Theodorus is one of its dramatispersonae. So again the frequent allusions in thedialogues to Egypt and Egyptian customs may bedue to reminiscences of actual travel in Egypt,but can hardly be said to show more knowledgethan an Athenian might have acquired at homeby reading Herodotus and conversing withtraders from the Nile Delta. On the other hand,the story of the visit to Italy and Sicily is con-firmed by the fact that Plato's works, as is wellknown, show considerable familiarity both withPythagorean science and with the Pythagoreanand Orphic theological ideas, and that the firstdialogue in which this influence is particularlynoticeable is the Gorgias, the work in which, as isnow generally recognised, Plato speaks for thefirst time in the tone of the head of a philo-sophical school or sect. It is thus probable thatPlato's final settlement at Athens as a philo-sophical teacher was actually preceded, as thetradition dating at least from the seventh ' letterasserts, by a visit to the home of Pythagoreanism,the Greek cities of Sicily and Southern Italy.)We have to think of Plato, then, as definitelyestablished, from about 887 B.C., in Athens as therecognised head of a permanent seat of learning,


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PLATOa university, as we might call it in our modernterminology. The home of this institution wasin the north-western suburb of Athens known asthe Academy, in consequence of the presence thereof a shrine of the local hero Academus. HerePlato possessed a small property, which was per-haps (the words of the legend as preserved byDiogenes are obscure,) purchased for him byhis foreign friends. From this circumstance thephilosophical school founded by Plato came to beknown in later days as the ' Academy.' It was notthe first institution of the kind ; Plato's contem-porary and rival, the rhetorician and publicistIsocrates, had already gathered round him asimilar group of students, and the writings ofboth authors bear traces of the rivalry betweenthem. Their educational aims were, in fact,markedly different. Isocrates desired, first andforemost, to turn out accomplished and capablemen of action, successful orators and politicians.Plato, on the other hand, was convinced thatthough the trained intelligence ought to directthe course of public life in a well-ordered society,the equipment requisite for such a task must firstbe obtained by a thorough mastery of the prin-ciples of science and philosophy, and was not tobe derived from any superficial education in


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LIFE AND WRITINGS'general culture.' Thus, while Plato, in well-known passages, describes the pupils of Isocratesas ' smatterers ' and * pretenders to philosophy,'Isocrates, on his side, depreciates those of Plato asunpractical theorists. Of the precise nature of theteaching in Plato's Academy, unfortunately, littleis known, but the reports of later tradition, suchas they are, indicate that the author of the Re-public carried his theories of education intopractice, and made the thorough and systematicstudy of exact mathematical science the founda-tion of all further philosophic instruction. Thestory that the door of the Academy bore theinscription * Let none unversed in geometry comeunder this roof,' is, indeed, first found in theworks of a mediaeval Byzantine, but its spirit isthoroughly Platonic.The outward peculiarity, it must be remem-bered, by which the education given by both

Plato and Isocrates differed from that afforded bythe eminent ' sophists ' of the last half of the fifthcentury, was that their teaching was more con-tinuous, and that it was, in theory at least,gratuitous. The great sophist of the past hadusually been a distinguished foreigner whose taskof making his pupils ' good men, able to managetheir own private affairs and the affairs of the


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V PLATOnation well/ had to be accomplished in the courseof a flying visit of a few weeks or months, and hehad also been a professional educator, dependingupon his professional fees for his livelihood, andtherefore inevitably exposed to the temptation tomake his instruction attractive and popular,rather than thorough. Plato and Isocrates, onthe other hand, were the heads of permanentschools, in which the education of the pupil couldbe steadily carried on for a protracted period, andwhere he could remain long after his time ofpupilage proper was over, as an associate in thestudies of his master. They were, moreover, notdependent for subsistence upon payments bytheir pupils, and were hence free from the neces-sity to make their teaching popular in the badsense of the term, though it is only fair to addtha'b neither had any objection to the occasionalreception of presents from friends or pupils, andthat Isocrates, at least, required a fee from foreignstudents. It is in virtue of this permanent andorganised pursuit of intellectual studies, and thisabsence of ' professionalism ' from their teaching,that we may call Plato and Isocrates the jointcreators of the idea of what we now understandby university education. The remark I have justmade about the absence of ' professionalism ' from


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LIFE AND WRITINGStheir scheme of instruction will, I hope, explainthat persistent objection to the sophists' practiceof demanding a fee for their courses which Grotefound so unreasonable on the part of Plato andAristotle.

Plato's long life of quiet absorption in his self-chosen task as a director of scientific studies anda writer on philosophy, was destined to be once atleast disastrously interrupted. The details of hisabortive attempt to put his theories of govern-ment into practice at Syracuse must be soughtin the histories of Greece. Here it must sufficeto recapitulate the leading facts, as related inthe 'letters,' and, apparently without any otherauthority than the ' letters,' in Plutarch's life ofDion. In the year 367 B.C., when Plato was aman of sixty and had presided over the Academyfor twenty years, Dionysius i. of Syracuse died,leaving his kingdom to his son Dionysius ii., aweak but impressionable youth. The actualdirection of affairs was, at the time, mostly in thehands of Dion, the brother-in-law of Dionysius i.and an old friend and admirer of Plato. Platohimself had written in his Republic that trulygood government will only be possible when aking becomes a philosopher, or a philosophera king, i.e. when the knowledge of sound prin-


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PLATOciples of government and the power to embodythem in fact are united in the same person.Dion seems to have thought that the circum-stances at Syracuse offered a favourable oppor-tunity for the realisation of this ideal. Whyshould not Dionysius, under the instructions ofthe great master, become the promised philoso-pher-king, and employ the unlimited power athis command to convert Syracuse into somethingnot far removed from the ideal state of Plato'sdream ? To us, such a project seems chimericalenough, but, as Professor Bury has properlyreminded us, the universal belief of Hellas wasthat a not very dissimilar task had actually beenachieved by Lycurgus for Sparta, and there was noa priori reason for doubting that what Lycurgushad done for Sparta could be done for Syracuseby Plato. Plato was accordingly invited to Syra-cuse to undertake the education of the youngprince. His reception was, at first, most promis-ing, but the thoroughness with which he setabout accomplishing his work foredoomed it tofailure. It was the first principle of his politicalsystem that nothing but the most thoroughtraining of intelligence in the ideas and methodsof science will ever fit a man for the work ofgoverning mankind with true insight. Accord-


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LIFE AND WRITINGSingly he insisted upon beginning by putting hispupil through a thorough course of geometry.Dionysius, naturally enough, soon grew weary ofthis preliminary drill, and began to revolt againstthe control of his preceptors. An opportunitywas found for banishing Dion, and though Diony-sius would have liked to keep Plato with him,the philosopher recognised that his scheme hadfailed, and speedily pressed for permission toreturn to Athens. A year or two later he paidanother visit to Syracuse, apparently in the hopeof reconciling Dion and Dionysius, but withoutresult. The sequel of the story, the rapiddevelopment of Dionysius into a reckless tyrant,the expedition of Dion which led to the downfalland flight of Dionysius, the assassination of Dionby Callippus, another pupil of Plato, who then sethimself up as tyrant, but was speedily overthrownin his turn by the half-brother of Dionysius,belongs to the history of Sicily, not to the bio-graphy of Plato. It is not unlikely that thedisastrous failure of the Syracusan enterprise,and the discredit which subsequent events castupon the members of the Academy, have muchto do with the relatively disillusioned and pes-simistic tone of Plato's political utterances inthe Theaetetus and Politicus as contrasted with


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PLATOthe serenity and hopeful spirit of the greaterpart of the Republic. Yet, even in his old age,Plato seems to have clung to the belief that theexperiment which had failed at Syracuse mightbe successful elsewhere. In his latest work, theLaivs, which was possibly not circulated untilafter his death, he still insists that the onechance for the establishment of a really soundform of government lies in the association of ayoung and high-spirited prince with a wise law-giver.

Nothing is recorded of the life of Plato afterhis last return from Syracuse, except that he diedlegend says at a wedding-feastin the year347-6, at the age of eighty-one. His will, whichis preserved by Diogenes, and is likely enough tobe genuine, provides for a 'child Adeimantus,'who was probably a relative, as the same namehad been borne by one of his half-brothers.Nothing further is known which throws anylight on the question whether Plato was evermarried or left any descendants. The scurrilousgossip collected by writers like Athenaeus, andthe late Neo-Platonic traditions v/hich make himinto a celibate ascetic, are equally worthless. Theheadship of the Academy passed first for a fewyears to Speusippus, a nephew of Plato, and


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LIFE AND WRITINGSthen to Xenocrates of Chalcedon, another of themaster's immediate pupils. The one man of realgenius among the disciples, Aristotle of Stageira,took an independent course. For ten or elevenyears after the death of the master, of whoseschool he had been a member from about 367-6B.C. until 346, he was absent from Athens, beingemployed for part of the period (343-336 B.C.) astutor to the future Alexander the Great, thenCrown Prince of Macedonia. On his return in335 he broke away from the Academy, andorganised a new school with himself as its head.The formal reverence which Aristotle expressesin his writings for his predecessor was combinedwith a pugnacious determination to find him inthe wrong on every possible occasion. Yet, inspite of the carping and unpleasantly self-satisfiedtone of most of the Aristotelian criticism of Plato,the thought of the later philosopher on all theultimate issues of speculation is little more thanan echo of the larger utterance of his master,and it is perhaps as much by inspiring thedoctrine of Aristotle as by his own utterancesthat Plato has continued to our own day to exer-cise an influence in every department of philo-sophic thought, which is not less potent for beingmost often unsuspected. Of the direct and enor-


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PLATOmously important influence of Platonism on thedevelopment of Christian theology this is perhapshardly the place to speak.The works of Plato, we have reason to believe,

have come down to us absolutely entire and com-plete. This is, no doubt, to be explained by thefact that the original manuscripts were carefullypreserved in the Platonic Academy ; thencecopies, as Grote has argued, would naturally findtheir way into the great library at Alexandria. Itdoes not, however, follow that everything whichour extant manuscripts of Plato contain mustnecessarily be Platonic. It would be quite easy,in course of time, for works incorrectly ascribedto Plato, or deliberately forged in his name, tobe imposed upon the Alexandrian librarians, andto acquire a standing in the library, side by sidewith genuine writings derived directly from theoriginal manuscripts preserved at first in theAcademy at Athens. Indeed, the very anxietyof the Ptolemies, and their imitators the kingsof Pergamus, to make their great collections ofbooks as complete as possible, would furnish apowerful incentive to the unscrupulous to pro-duce alleged copies of works by famous authors.As it happens, we do not know either how longthe original manuscripts of Plato continued to


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LIFE AND WRITINGSexist undispersed (indeed, the very statementthat they were kept in the Academy is an infer-ence from the probabilities of the case, and doesnot rest upon direct ancient testimony), nor whatworks of Plato were originally included in theAlexandrian library. The first trace which hasbeen preserved of the existence of an edition ofPlato in that library is the statement of Diogenesthat the scholar Aristophanes of Byzantiummade an arrangement of the works of Plato, inwhich certain of the dialogues were groupedtogether in 'trilogies,' or sets of three, after thefashion of the tragic dramas of the fifth century.Diogenes gives the names of fourteen dialogues,which, together with a collection of ' letters,' hadbeen thus divided by Aristophanes into five tri-logies, and adds that the grouping was not carriedout 'for the rest/ Unfortunately, he does nottell us the titles of the * rest,' so that we have noright to assert that everything now included inour manuscripts was recognised as Platonic atAlexandria in the time of Aristophanes. At amuch later date, the grammarian Thrasyllus, wholived in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius {i.e.in the early part of the first century a.d.), madea new classification of the Platonic dialogues into* tetralogies,' or groups of four, on the analogy of the


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PLATOold tragic tetralogy of three tragedies followed bya satyric play. The Platonic canon of Thrasylluscontained nine of these tetralogies, i.e. thirty-five dialogues with a collection of thirteen ' letters,'the same as those we now possess. Of works im-properly ascribed to Plato he reckoned ten, fiveof which are still extant.No one now supposes that anything which was

rejected by Thrasyllus is a genuine work of Plato,but there has been during the last sixty years agood deal of discussion as to whether all that wasincluded by Thrasyllus may safely be accepted.The extreme view that nothing contained in thecanon of Thrasyllus is spurious has found no im-portant defender except Grote, whose reasoningis vitiated by the double assumption that every-thing accepted as genuine by Thrasyllus musthave been guaranteed by the Alexandrian library,and that the Alexandrian librarians themselvescannot have been misled or imposed upon. Onthe other hand, the scepticism of those Germancritics of the last half of the nineteenth century,who rejected as spurious many of the most im-portant dialogues, including, in some instances,works (e.g. the Laws) which are specifically namedas Plato's by Aristotle, has proved itself evenmore untenable. Our surest guide in the matter,


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LIFE AND WRITINGSwherever obtainable, is the evidence of Aristotle,and an increasingly careful study of the Aris-totelian text has now enabled us to say that,though some of the chief dialogues are neveractually cited by Aristotle in express words,there is none of them, with the doubtful excep-tion of the Parinenides, which is not alluded toby him in a way in which, so far as we can dis-cern, he never makes use of any works exceptthose of Plato. There is thus at present a generalagreement among scholars that no considerablework in the canon of Thrasyllus is spurious. Thefew dialogues of his list which are either certainlyor possibly spurious are all of them, from thephilosophical point of view, insignificant, and nodifference is made to our conception of Platonismby our judgment upon them.A more important question than that of the

genuineness or spuriousness of the few minordialogues about which it is still permissible todoubt is presented by the problem of the orderof composition of the leading dialogues. Untilsome conclusion has been established as to theorder in which Plato's principal works were com-posed, it is impossible to form any intelligibletheory of the development of Plato's thought.Now it so happens that the only positive piece of


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PLATOinformation on this point which has come downto us from antiquity, is the statement of Aristotlethat the Laws was a later work than the Bepublic.The dialogues themselves enable us to supplementthis statement to a slight extent. Thus theSophistes and Politicus are expressly repre-sented as continuations of the conversation con-tained in the Theaetetus, and must therefore belater than that dialogue, and for a similar reasonthe Timaeus must be later than the earlier booksof the Republic, since it recapitulates in its open-ing the political and educational theories ofRepublic ii.-v. And further, a dialogue whichquotes from another, as the Republic appears todo from the Phaedo, and the Phaedo from theMeno, must, of course, be later than the dialoguequoted. But the results which can be won byconsiderations of this kind carry us only a littleway, and, in the main, students of Plato were untilforty years ago about as devoid of the meansof forming a correct conception of the develop-ment of Plato's thought as students of Kantwould have been of the means of writing thehistory of Kantianism, if the works of Kant hadcome down to us entirely undated. Each scholarhad his own theory of the order of the dialogues,founded upon some fanciful principle of arrange-


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LIFE AND WRITINGSment for which no convincing grounds could begiven. The first step towards the definite sohitionof the problem by rational methods was takenby Professor Lewis Campbell in 1867 in hisedition of the Sophistes and Foliticus. Startingfrom the universally recognised fact that theLaws must, on linguistic grounds, as well as onthe strength of ancient tradition, be regarded asPlato's latest composition, Professor Campbellproposed to treat the amount of stylistic resem-blance between a given dialogue and the Laws, asascertained by minute linguistic statistics, as acriterion of relative date. The method of investi-gation thus pointed out has been since followedby a number of other scholars, and notably, andwith the greatest wealth of detail, by W. Lutos-lawski in his work on The Origin and Growth ofPlato's Logic. At the same time, much additionallight has been thrown on the subject by themore careful investigation of the numerous half-concealed polemical references in Plato toIsocrates, and in Isocrates to Plato. The resultis that while we are still by no means able toarrange the works of Plato in an absolutelycertain serial order, there is, in spite of some indi-vidual points of disagreement, a growing consensusamong scholars as to the relative order of succes-


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PLATOsion of the principal dialogues. For a full accountof the methods just referred to and the resultsto which they lead, the reader may be referred tothe recent work of Hans Raeder, Flaton's Philo-sophische Entwickelung. I shall content myselfhere with a statement of what appear to be themain results.

Plato's genuine writings fall on examinationinto four main classes. These are: (1) Earlydialogues, marked by the freshness of thedramatic portraiture, the predominant preoccupa-tion with questions of ethics, and the absenceof the great characteristic Platonic psychological,epistemological, and metaphysical conceptions,particularly of the famous theory of ' Ideas.' Tothis group belong the dialogues which have oftenbeen called par excellence * Socratic,' such as theApology, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Euthyphro,Euthydemus, and probably Cratylus. The mostimportant members of the group are the Prota-goras and Gorgias, the latter being almostcertainly the last of the series. There is reason,as already said, to regard the Gorgias as probablycomposed soon after 387, when Plato was beginninghis career as president of the Academy. (2) Agroup of great dialogues in which Plato's literarypower is at its height, and which are all marked by


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LIFE AND WRITINGSthe central position given in them to the ' theoryof Ideas,' with its corollary, the doctrine thatscientific knowledge is recollection. The Meno ap-pears to furnish the connecting link between thisgroup and the preceding ; the other members of itare the Syinjjosiuin, Phaedo, Republic, Phaedrus.Of these the Phaedrus has been shown, conclu-sively as I think, by Raeder, and, on independentgrounds, by Lutoslawski, to be later than theRepublic, which, in its turn, is pretty certainly laterthan the other two. Since the Phaedrus appearsto allude to the Panegyricus of Isocrates, whichwas published in 380 B.C., the ' second period ' ofPlato's activity as a writer must have extended atleast down to that year. (3) A group of dialoguesof a * dialectical ' kind, in which the primaryobjects of consideration are logical questions, thenature of true and of false predication, the problemof the categories, the meaning of negation, theprocesses of logical division and definition. Anexternal link is provided between the dialoguesof this group by the exceptional prominencegiven in them all to the doctrines of the greatEleatic philosopher Parmenides. The groupconsists of four great dialogues, Thcaetetus,Pa/mienides, Sophistes, Politicus. The last twoare undoubtedly later than the others. They are,


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PLATOin form, continuations of the conversation begunin the Theaetetus, and are shown to be later thanthe Parmenides both by linguistic evidence andby the presence in the Sophistes of an explicitallusion to the arguments of the Parmenides.Whether the Theaetetus is also later than theParmenides is still an open question, though italso contains what looks like a distinct referenceto that dialogue.

(4) Three important works remain which form,linguistically, a group by themselves and mustbe referred to the latest years of Plato's life : thePhilehus, the maturest exposition of Platonicethics; the Timaeus (with its fragmentary con-tinuation, the Critias), concerned in the mainwith cosmology and physics, but including a greatdeal that is of high metaphysical and ethicalimportance; and the Laws, in which the agedphilosopher, without abandoning the ideals of theRepublic, undertakes the construction of such a' second-best ' form of society as might be actuallypracticable not for * philosophers,' but for averagefourth-century Greeks. Actual dates can hardlybe determined in connection with these two lastgroups. We can only say that the seven worksmentioned must have been written between 380(the earliest possible date for the Phaed/i'us) and


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LIFE AND WRITINGS847-6, the year of Plato's death, and that thedifference of tone between the third and secondgroups of dialogues makes it almost certain thatthe earliest works of the third group fall at leastsome years later than the Phaedrus. It is tempt-ing to go a step further, and say, with Lutos-lawski, that the bitter expressions of theTheaetetus about the helplessness of the philo-sopher in practical affairs contain a personalallusion to the failure of Plato's own interventionat Syracuse, in which case the TJieaetetus and allthe following dialogues must be later than 367-6,but the inference is far from certain.

This chapter may conveniently end with someibrief observations on the form of the Platonic'writings, and the difficulties which that formcreates for the interpreter of Plato's thought. Inform, the philosophical w^orks of Plato are alldramatic ; they are, one and all, BtaXoyoc, conver-sations. This is true even of the Apology, whichis, in point of fact, no set speech, but a series ofcolloquies of Socrates with his accuser and hisjudges. It is true that the dramatic elementbecomes less prominent as we pass from theearlier works to the later. In the dialogues ofour last two groups, the function of the minorpersonages becomes less and less important.


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PLATOThey tend, more and more, to serve as mereinstruments for giving the chief speaker his cue,until in the Timaeus the conversation becomes amere prelude to the delivery of a consecutive andunbroken cosmological discourse, and in the Lawsthe two minor characters have little more to dothan to receive the instructions of their com-panion with appropriate expressions of agreement.We note, too, that in general the position of chiefspeaker is assigned to Socrates, though in threeof the later dialogues (the Sophistes, Politicus,and Timaeus) he recedes into the background, asthough Plato felt that he was passing in theseworks definitely beyond the bounds of the Socraticinfluence, while in the Laws he disappearsaltogether (probably because the scene of thedialogue is laid in Crete, where the introductionof the home-keeping son of Sophroniscus wouldhave been incongruous), and his place is taken bya 'stranger from Athens,' who is palpably noother than Plato himself Plato's reasons forchoosing the dialogue as the most appropriatevehicle of philosophical thought are not hard todiscover. It was the natural mode of expres-sion for a philosophic movement which originatedin the searching and incisive conversation ofSocrates. Most of the ' Socratic men ' expressed


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LIFE AND WRITINGStheir ideas in the guise of Socratic dialogue, andPlato may not have been the originator of thepractice. Moreover, Plato, as he himself tells us,had a poor opinion of written books as provoca-tive of thought, in comparison with the actualface-to-face discussion of problems and examina-tion of difficulties between independent seekersfor truth. The dialogue form recommendeditself to him as the nearest literary approximationto the actual contact of mind with mind ; itenabled him to examine a doctrine successivelyfrom the points of view of its adherents and itsopponents, and thus to ensure thoroughness inthe quest for truth. And finally, the dialogue,more than any other form of composition, givesfull play to the dramatic gifts of portrayal ofcharacter and humorous satire in which Platotakes rank with the greatest comic and tragicmasters. At the same time, Plato's choice of thedialogue as his mode of expression has createda source of fallacy for his interpreters. If wewould avoid serious errors, it is necessary alwaysto remember that the personages of one of Plato'sphilosophical dialogues are one and all charactersin a play. * Protagoras ' or ' Gorgias,' in aPlatonic dialogue, is not the historical Professorof that name, but a fictitious personage created by


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PLATOPlato as a representative of views and tendencieswhich he wishes to criticise. Mingled withtraits drawn from the actual persons whose namesthese characters bear, we can often find in thepicture others which can be known or suspectedto belong to the writer's contemporaries. Andthe same thing is true, though the fact is com-monly forgotten, of the protagonist of the drama,the Platonic ' Socrates.* ' Socrates ' in Plato isneither, as some of the older and more uncriticalexpositors used to assume, the historical Socrates,nor, as is too often taken for granted to-day, thehistorical Plato, but the hero of the Platonicdrama. The hero's character is largely modelledon that of the actual Socrates, his opinions areoften those of the historical Plato, but he is stilldistinct from them both. In particular, it is agrave mistake of interpretation to assume that aproposition put forward by * Socrates ' must neces-sarily represent the views of his creator, or thatwhere ' Socrates ' declares himself baffled by a pro-blem, Plato must always have been equally at aloss. Plato shares to the full that gift of Attic* irony ' which is so characteristic of the greatAthenian tragedians, and, as any attentive read-ing of the Protagoras will show, he has noobjection to exercising it, on occasion, at the


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LIFE AND WHITINGSexpense of his principal personage. In determin-ing which of the views of his hero are putforward as his own, we, who are deprived of theoral instructions dispensed to the students of theAcademy, have to observe much the same con-ditions and practise much the same precautionsas are required for similar interpretation of agreat dramatist or novehst.


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CHAPTER II^KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTS

The word 'philosophy,' which to us has cometo mean no more than a body of theories andinquiries, has for Plato a more living and subjec-tive sense. Philosophy is, as its name declares,the love of wisdom, the passionate striving aftertruth and light which is, in some degree, thedower of every human soul. It belongs, theSymposium tells us, neither to the mind thatis wholly wise, nor to that which is merely andcomplacently stupid. It is the aspiration of.^_e_partly illuminated, partly confused and perplexed,soul towards a complete vision in which its 'pvez^sent doubts and difficulties may vanish. Accord-ing to the Theaetetus and Republic, philosophybegins in wonder, or more precisely in the mentaldistress we feel when confronted by conflictingperceptions, each apparently equally well ac-credited. In a famous passage this state ofdistress, in which the soul is, so to say, in travail


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSwith a half-formed idea, is likened to the painsof child-birth, and the philosopher is presented,in his relation to his disciples, as the midwifeof the spirit. His task -is not to think forother men, but to help them to bring theirown thoughts to the bu*th. , This conceptionof philosophy and its function is far from beingnarrowly 'intellectualist' in a bad sense. Philo-sophy is, in Plato's eyes, a ' way of life,' a disciplinefor character no less than for understandinsr.But it is his conviction that there is a deep truthenshrined in the crude saying of the old physi-ologists that ' like is known by like.' { His theoryof education is dominated by the thought thatthe mind itself inevitably ' imitates ' the characterof the things it habitually contemplates. | Justbecause the aspiration after wisdom is the funda-mental expression of the mind's true nature, itcannot be followed persistently without resultingin a transfiguration of our whole character JTtsultimate effect is to reproduce in the individualsoul those very features of law, order, and rationalpurpose which the philosopher's contemplationreveals as omnipresent in the world of genuineknowledge. Yet the starting-point of the wholeprocess is an intellectual emotion, a passion forinsight into truthT^The upward pilgrimage of


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PLATOthe soul begins for Plato not, as for Bunyan,with ' conviction of sin/ but with that humiliatingsense of ignorance which Socrates aimed at pro-ducing in those who submitted to his cross-questioning. \Insight and enhghtenment are thefirst requisites for sound morality, no less thanfor science, i In action as well as in speculation,VBthat distinguishes the 'philosopher' from othermen is the fact that where they have mere'opinions' he has 'knowledge,' i.e. convictionswhich have been won by free intellectual inquiryand can be justified at the bar of reason. The ' theory of knowledge' is thus the very

centre of Plato's philosophy. He takes his standupon the fundamental assumption that therereally is,suekatMng as ' science,' i.e. as a body ofknowable truth which is valid alwavg and_ahgol-ujely and for every thinking mind. The problemhe sets before himself in his metaphysics is to^find the answer to the question ' How is sciencepossible ? ' ' What is the general character whichmust be ascribed to the objects of our scientificknowledge?' Plato may, therefore, in spite ofKant's hasty inclusion of him among the dog-matists, be ^ truly said to be a great 'critical'philosoplier, and, indeed, with a partial reservationin favour of his revered predecessor Parmenides,


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSthe earliest critical philosopher of Europe. Indeed,it is not too much to say that Plato's fundamentalproblem is essentially identical with that ofKant in the Critique of Pure Reason, thoughPlato's solution of it differs strikingly in somerespects from Kant's. (X^ja.-Kan t, -he finds hispoint of departure in the broad contrast betweenthe world of everyday unsystematised * experience,'and that of science. The world as it appearsto th^ everydayjUTigp.iAnt.ifip. mflTi is a. f^rpriPi of_strange disorder and confusion; his so-calledexperience is made up of what Plato calls"' opinions,' a multitude of conflicting and changingbeliefs, some of which are of^en actually contra-

_

dictory of others ; he can give no satisfactorygrounds for regarding them as true, and canoften be persuaded out of them by appeals toirrational emotion. [ Science, on the other hand,is a body of consistent and fixed convictions,a system of truths, valid absolutely, always, andfor every^jone^_jn^which^ t^ members |are connected by a bond of logical necessityin a Iword, a body of reasoned deductions from true /prmciples. What then is the relation betweenthese apparently so diverse worlds, that of' opinionand that of * science'? In more modern lan-guage, of what nature are the objects cognised by


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PLATOthe universal propositions of science, and howare they related to the particular percepts ofsense? iPlato's answer to this question is con-tained 'in his famous '.Theory ofjdeas,' which isthus, according to its author's intention, neither* dogmatic ' metaphysics nor poetical imagery,but a logical doctrine of the import of universalpropositions.The real . character of this central Platonic

doctrine, asjmmarily^a theory of predication, isweir brought out by the succinct account of itsmeaning and its logical connection with previousGreek thought given by Aristotle in his Meta-physics. \ According to Aristotle, the doctrine wasa logical consequence from two premises, takenone from Heracliteanism, the other from Socrates.From Heracliteanism Plato had learned that allthe kinds of things which our senses perceive are,'in .flux,' i.e. are constantly undergoing all sortsof incalculable changes, and consequently that nouniversal truths can be formulated about them.(Cf. Locke's doctrine that all our certain know-ledge of 'nature' is 'barely particular/) FromSocrates, whose methods, though used by himselfonly in the discussion of 'matters of conduct,'were really of universal application, he furtherlearned that without universal truths there can


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSbe no science. Hence j since therejs_siicli a thin^âs science, PTato inferred that the objects whichscience defines, and about which she undertakes_^to prove nmversally valid conckisions, cannot b^the indefinitely variable thinp^s of the sensiblephysical world. There is therefore a supra- .physical world of entities, eternal and immutableând it is thes^ unchanging entities, called by Plato'TLaeas,' wnicn are the ob]ects with which thedefinitions and universal truths of exact scienceare concerned.,/]The relation between this world_~""ot pure logical concepts and the world of every-day sensible" experience is that the things ot the ^;;;^sensible world are approximate and imperfectresemblances of the^corresponding conceptualentitiesômjvhich they get their various class- ~~names. / This relation Plato calls ' participation inthe Ideas, a phrase to which Aristotle objectsthat it is no more than a misleading imaginativemetaphor.^ Such is the preliminary accountwhich Aristotle prefixes to his ' smashing ' attackon the Platonic metaphysics.

i When we turn to the great dialogues, such asthe Phaedo, Republic, Timaeus^ in which thedoctrine of Ideas is most prominent, we find thisaccount, so far as it goes, fully borne out. IiLthcTimaeus, in the only passage where Plato ever


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PLATOdirectly raises the question whether the 'Ideas'actually exist or not, their existence is said to bea necessary" im^Ecation (^^^^^ of thedistinction between ' true opinion ' and ' science/If science is no more than true opinion, thereneed be no objects except those of the physicalnd sensible world ; if science is other than trueopinion, there must be a corresponding differencebetween objects of which we can only have trueopinion and objects of which we can have

^scientific knowledge. But science is assuredlysomething more than true opinion ; it deals with

|

things which cannot be perceived by the senses, Jn Plato^s(_theory of Ideas we have a^conception of scieiica.wiiich rests upon the view that mathematics isthe one and only true science^ a consistent work-ing out of the thought expressed by Kant in hissaying that every study contains only so muchjof science as it contains of pure mathematics.!That Plato's doctrine of knowledge should thushave arisen primarily from reflection upon theconcepts and methods of pure mathematics isin accord not only with the special prominencegiven both in the dialogues and, so far as we canlearn, in the oral teaching of the Academy, tomathematical study, but also with the historicalfact that jpure mathematics was in Plato's timethe only scientific study in which certain andwell-established results had been attained.

These same considerations also explain why theanswer given by Plato to the question ^ How isscLentific truth possible ? ' differs so greatly fromthe answer given by Kant and his followers tothe same problem. For Plato the great Kantianproblem 'How is pure d priori natural sciencepossible ? ' does not exist, ' Natural science,' inthe sense of proved universal laws of physicalprqcess, had for him no being. A true 'science


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PLATOscience, but as, at best, a 'probable account.'The physical world is thus the proper object of' opinion,' and any account of its developmentmust be, like the narrative of Timaeus, largelymythical. (Compare once more Locke's doctrineof the extent of our knowledge of ' real existenceof sensible things, and the position of thoseeminent logicians who hold that * induction ' fromobserved facts is unable to lead to results whichare more than probable.) Hence while Kantdenounces all ' transcendent ' employment of thefundamental concepts of science, and confinesknowledge within the limits of 'possible experi-

- ence,'! Pkto, io put JJhe matter quite plainly, holds, that all true science is ' transcendent ' and dealsi with objects which lie entirely beyond the rangeI

of any possible 'experience' of sense. Where.

^' experience ' begins, science, in his opinion, leavesoff. That Kant does not come to the same con-

^ elusion seems to be due to his assumption thatI the sciences of Arithmetic and Geometry deal< with objects which are not analysable into purely* logical concepts, but involve an element of irra-'4 tional sensuous ' intuition.' ^t is this assumption1 which Plato is really denying^ by anticipation

when he says in the Republic that the diagramsof the geometers are mere aids to the imagination,


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSand not themselves the objects of geometricalreasoning, and again in the Timaeus that space isapprehended not by sense but by a ' kind ofbastard thought.'^"We have seen, then, what is the general char-acter ofJh^_sjstem.âlJ?latouic Ideas^ the, trueobject of scientific knowledge*. .Itîs a world ofexactly defined logical concepts, each standing in

relations to the rest. Further lightis thrown upon the internal structure of thissystem by a famous passage at tlê end of thesixth book of the Republic, which, taken along withthe exposition of it in the following book, is byfar the most important single text for thewhole of Plato's epistemology. In this passagePlato is concerned to distinguish four grades ofcognition, and to provide each with its appropriateclass of objects. He illustrates his meaning bywhat is, in point of fact, a diagram. He takesa vertical line, and begins by dividing it intoan upper and a lower segment, the upper segmentJ^g^resenting knowledge or science,, the lower'opinion.' Each segment is then, in turn, oncemore divided into an upper and a lower part, inthe same ratio in which the whole Hne wasoriginally divided. We thus get an inferior anda superior form of 'opinion' and of knowledge

6

/


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PLATOrespectively, the inferior, ia each case, standing,in respect of its truth and certainty to tha.higher,, in the same relation in 3vhich ' opinion^'as a whole stands to knowledge. The lowest type

\ of cognition of all, the inferior forzn of ôpinion,'\ Plato calls eUaaia, ' guess-work/ with a punning

allusion to the eiKoveî or ' images ' which arejtsappropriate objects._ It is the state of mind inwhich reflections in water and the imagery ofdreams^_ê notâs^jgt^^stinguiêd from thesplid_^^caJ_ealities^Q^îmages^ the mental condition of the savage orchild at the mercy of * primitive credulity,' whoaccepts every presentation, so long as it lasts,

^ as equally true with any other, and has not yetlearned to know the shadow from the substance.A more developed and truer form of cognition is4?^ represented by Tr/o-ri?, belief, the state of mind ofthe man who, while still recognising the existenceof nothing but the sensible, has learned to dis-tinguish physical things from their mere shadowsor reflections or dream-images, and thus to makea distinction helween the truth-values of the twokinds of presentation, Such a man, though asyet not possessed of proved and universal scientifictruth, has already a fair stock of tolerably system-atised and trustworthy convictions about the


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSempiricaL course of things, and, as we have seen,Plato holds that this is the highest degree of truthwhich can be a^tj-ined in^ the study^ of the actualphysical world. Thus irlaTL^ corresponds exactlyto what we should call sensible ^xperience^ andthe knowledge based on induction from suchexperience. A ^further step Is taken towardsthe ideal of genuine knowledge when we pass fromthe higher Jorm of ' opinion ' to the lower form_.of science.. ' Plato's name for this inferior grade ofscience is Scdvota, which we may loosely render' understanding /:' and it is declared to be theknowledge supplied by ' geometry and the kindredarts,* i.e. mathematics as usually studied. Being'science,' these studies have for their objectconcepts of a purely rational kind^ and hencePlato observes that they use diagrams and models,'which for 'opinion ' are realities as mere imagesof the higher realities with which they are con-cerned. But he finds two defects in the^rocedureof ordinary mathematics :~"je_^athematicianenoiploys sensiblea,ids, even if he uses them onlyas aids to his imagination; he also makes usaof a host of notions which he has not definedand postulates which he has not^j)rove^. HencePlato maintains that there Jnust be ajtill moreperfect realisation of the.. ideal of knowledge,

X


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1

PLATOwhich is given by ja science nflllftfl by him 'dia-leotic^'j^Eich has for its objects * Ideas ' or ' Form sthemselves, and studies them without the aidof any sensuous^ftpr^sftTit.at.mnR whaiftgor 1 Theprocedure of ' dialectic/ as he describes it, is two-

^/fold: a_^process_._of_,aJ:ialysi^_fol^^j^V synthesis.^The 'dialectician will start in his turn

'with the axioms and indefinables of the ordinarymathematician, but he will not regard them asultimate. He will treat them as literally 'hypo^

- theses,^ bases or starting-points from which hemay asceiiiJ^o^lL^t^renje^first^ principle whichjs-.' unhypotheticgl' ;^tlie]^^X>iiXihe.cognition of^this^first principle hejirni_^nce__D9LQi:_ifisc^ni^regular gradation to the Jkncjwledga-jQfLjts ,.con-^sequences, pro^ngfifling thrnnghmit _^Jrnm fpfmA-^JUL forms without _ the_aid_xit anything_3ensiblfii 1(That is, it seems, the dialectitian is to comparethe principles assumed as ultimate by the variousbranches of mathematics, and as a result of thecomparison to arrive at some still more ultimate

\ firstprinciple of a logical character which is self^j evidently^Jrue^ Having done this, he is then

to deduce the supposed ultimates of the ordinarymathematician, and through them their conse-quences, from his own supreme and self-evidentaxiom. Only when this has been done shall we


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTShave realised the ideal of scientific investigation;^the reduction _ofJyaawiL trutkto asjstematicôdy_ôf logical deduction^ i):oia true and ultimate.

It is clear from this that Plato's conception isclosely akin to the ideal of the growing school ofmathematicians who maintain that the whole ofpure mathematical science is a body of deduc-tions from a few ultimate premises which are allof a purely logical kind^ and require for theirstatement no primary notions except those offormal logic. Could he have met with such awork as the Formnlaire of Professor Peano, orthe Grv/adgesetze der Arithmetik of ProfessorFrege, he would plainly have felt that his con-ception of 'dialectic' was there very largely justi-fied and realised. But there are also veryimportant differences between the 'dialectic' ofPlato and the ' logistic ' of our contemporaryphilosophical mathematicians. For one thing,

^Plato, like Leibniz after him, dreamed of thededuction of all pure science from a single 1ultimate principle/ while the development of '^êxact logic has definitely shown that the prin-ciples of logic themselves form a body ofmutually independent postulates, the number ofwhich the old traditional logic, with its three


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PLATOlaws of thought, seriously underestimated. Astill more important difference appears when waasS^what^ in Plato's opinion, is the character of-the supreme principle itself. He tells us that itis ' the^ gpod^ or the / Idea of the good/ whjch is ito the world of concepts what * its offspring ' the-sun is to the sensible world. / Now, in the*sensible world, the sun has a double function. It is the source of the light by which the eyebeholds both the sun itself and everything else ;it is also, as the source of heat, the cause of.growth and vitality. Sp^in the world of concepts,V tlifi_l.gaiid/__is at once the source of knowledge fir.and illumination to the ^^^^ and the ':source of reality and being to the objects of its ;knowledge.*; And all the time, just as the sun is)'not itself light or growth, so the 'good' is not :itself Being or Truth, but the transcendent source :

^^of both. Plato's meaning in this famous passageJis far from easy to grasp with precision, as hehimself seems to admit, but his general sense mayperhaps be divined by a comparison with well-known passages of other dialogues. There is afjtnious page of the Fhaedo which professes, it ishard to say with what degree of accuracy, to tracethe mental biography ol Socrates.; After re-counting his youthful dissatisfaction with the


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSmutually conflicting theories of various earlyphysicists about the universe,! Socrates is madeto say that he hailed with rapture the saying ofAnaxagoras that it is Mind which is the cause of

"^order_ and_st_rucjtui:e_m universe. "' This he 'took to mean that if mind. is. responsibleJbr theuniverse, its existing arrangements must be thosewhich are best, and he eagerly procured the bookof Anaxagoras in the hope that he would findthere a theory of the universe in which everydetail would be justified by a proof that it wasbetter for things to be as the writer said than tobejn any other wa}^ -f On reading the work hewas, however, disgusted to find that Anaxagorasdid not live up to his own principles, but for themost part accounted for existing facts by hypo-theses of mechanical causation, only appealing toMind as the universal cause when he was at aloss for some more specific mechanical explana-tion of a fact. '. This criticism of Anaxagoras, inwhich Aristotle emphatically concurs, is thenmade the opportunity for drawing an impor- \^tant distinction between the true cause of athing and subordinate accessory conditions,' without which the cause would not be a cause.'c " . .

^ The true cause of every arrangement in nature iis^ that/ it is best that things should be so';| ^


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PLATOr^the alleged mechanical * causes ' of the men ofscience are merely accessory conditions in theabsence of which the efficacy of ,lhe true cause

"^ would be destroyed. We find this distinctioncarefully observed in the half-mythical cosmo-y gony of Plato's own Timae^s. The true reasonor cause of the existence of the universe is the

I goodness of God, who, being good Himself,^ desired that His work too should be as good asy possible p the accessory conditions are provided

for by the character of the disorderly materialout of which the universe is moulded by God.,Thus we see that for Plato, as for the Greek mindin general, tpJ)e^oc)(^ means to be good for som^en.d or.purpose,- to be the expression of a rationaleaim or interest, i Evil, on the other hand, is pre-cisely that which is disorderly! which hampers orfrustrates the execution of rational purpose. ^ (Andhence, by the way, there is, on Plato's principles,an irreducible element of evil in the physicaluniverse, precisely because that universe courtains, as the system of pure concepts does not, anirrational and incalculable factor.)rtutting all this together, we may say that therecognition of the ' good,' as the supreme source jfrom which the * Ideas ' derive their being, wouldappear to mean that the whole body of truejj


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSscientific concepts forms an organic unity inwhich each member is connected with the restteleologically by the fact that some of them point

- forward, or logically lead up, to it, while it, in itsturn, leads up to others/1 The objective unity ofthe system of scientific concepts is thus thecounterpart of the unity of aim and purposewhich it is the mission of philosophy, accordingto Plato, to bring about in the philosopher's inner

^In the great series of dialectical dialogues,which we may safely follow the all but unanimousopinion of the latest scholars in regarding asposterior to the Phaedo-Repuhlic group, Plato m,the main turns away from his original problem ofthe relation between the individual thing and theintension of the class to which we refer it, to deal Iwjthjurther .questions^ of logic and epistemology.WThis. [does not mean, as has sometimes beenjjsupposed, that he has abandoned or come to make|Jserious modifications in his doctrine of ' Ideas,' aSjlmay be seen both from the reappearance of tliefamiliar theory in the Tionaeus and from themanifestly bona fide ignorance of Aristotle as toany difference in principle between an earlier anda later Platonism. What it means is simply that .'.the whole theory of knowledge is not exhausted


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PLATO^QL-S^t-S-bX-^^^J ^^^K^^^ ^9^^'?iM- ^ It is preciselyin this group of dialogues that/we find Platoanticipating the achievement of Aristotle in thecreation of a scientific logical terminology to adegree which entitles him fairly to be called^rather than any other one man, the creator oflogic^

*^-^ In the Parmenides, Theaetetus, and Sophides'wemeet, among other things, the first attempt toconstruct a table of the categories, or leadingscientific conceptions required for the ordering of vexperience. 7 Plato's list varies slightly according ^J^as his immediate purpose demands greater or lesscompleteness. Tln^ the Theaetetus, where_liisj-object is primarily to argue thatrthe categories!are not products of sense-perception, but are!perceived ' directly by the soul herself withoutthe aid of bodily instruments/ i.e. are, as weshould say, purely intellectual a priori forms ofrelation, in accord with which mind organises thematerial of its experience, we find him includingin the list being, sameness, difference, likeness,unlikeness, beaut}^ ugliness, goodness, badness,number.T All these^ just because they can be pre-dicated of subjects of all kinds, he contends,cannot be cognised by the activity of any special;

^ sense. The same dialogue provides us, among^other contributions to logical theory, with tho


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSimportant distinction between two kinds of'change' (klvtjo-l^), local motion, or change of /position ((j)opd), and alteration, or cliangc of /quality (aWotcoa-i^;), and with a searching andacute inquiry into the nature of definition, andthe conditions under which definition is possible.Among its contributions to terminology we notethe new words 'quality' (7rofOT?;


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PLATOM..{Jprmally the TJieaetetus deals with the question^ '' What is knowledge ? ' and aims at showing thatknowledge can neither be identified with sense-

perception, as, according to Plato, had been heldby Protagoras, nor more generally with 'true

^ (belief' ; the Sophistes professes to be an attemptIto illustrate the process of logical rJP.fJTiit.inn byfinding a satisfactory definition of the class

' sophists.' The actual ' knot ' of both dialogues is,however, provided by a paradox of Plato's fellow-Socratic, Antisthenes the Cynic, who had main-tained that no term^jcan be truly predicated of \any other, -i.e. that the only .true propositions^ 1

' ^. are identities. Plato had already touched upon 'this paradox in earlier dialogues, the Eutkydemiisand Cratylus, where, however; he treats it as amere extravagance and a fit subject for banterand parody. In the * dialectical ' dialogues heshows himself aware of its real significance forthe whole theory of knowledge. Perceiving thatthe very possibility of science depends upon the Ipossibility of making true propositions in which

\

the subject and predicate are not identical, ha isets himself to work to furnish a serious refu-tation of the doctrine of Antisthenes. ^ An

> fimmediate consequence of that doctrine is thatgenuine error, or 'false opinion,' is impossible.)


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSYou cannot think ' what is not ' (i.e. of anygiven subject A you can only think '^ is ^ ' ; youcannot think 'A is B' or 'A is C if all predica-tion is strictly identical). Hence the problem asto the nature of error becomes fundamental forthe inquiry of the Theaetetus: In _ suggestingthat knowledge is the same thing as true belief,it is implied that there may be false beliefs, butthis is exactly what the doctrine of Antisthenes Idenied/; So in trying to define the 'sophist,* wefind ourselves obliged to speak of him as a manwho inculcates false beliefs for purposes of gainbut what if the sophist should protest that thereis no such thing as a false belief? In the-Theaetetus the question how error is possible isleft unsolved, with the consequence that thedialogue reaches no positive conclusion. '^ We arefound, in fact, to have been committing anillogicality in discussing the nature of false beliefbefore arriving at any insight into the natureof truth. One important result is, however,obtained. It is elaborately shown that error mayoccur not only in judgments which involve areference to facts of sense-experience, but in thosein which both terms belong to the class which thesoul ' perceives by herself/ as e.g. if a man shouldmistakenly believe the proposition '5 -[-7= 11/


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PLATOWe are thus prepared for the purely logicaLinquiry into the natureôX errpr which meets usîn the Sophistes. ' Plato there finally solves thepuzzle by calling attention to the distinctionbetween absolute and relatiYe denial. The* sophistic' view that to think what is false isimpossible had arisen from the argument thatthinking what is false means thinking 'what isnot/ but to think ' what is not ' is impossible,since mere non-entity cannot even be the objectof any thought. Plato's reply is that when Ithink 'A is not B,' I do not mean to assert that Ais nothing at all, but merely that it is somethingother than B; ' whatîsngt/in the sense in whicha denial can be said to involve thinking of ' whatis not,* is simply that which is ' different from *something else, and hence significant deniaJs,-both true and false, can be made about anysubject. In Platonic language, the ' chief kinds,'or categories, * have communion ' with one an-other, or can be predicated of one another, andthus significant non-identical predication, asdemanded by science, is logically unobjectionable.The familiarity of this result does not in the leastdetract from its importance in the history ofthought, as we may see by reflecting that thefundamental problem of Kant's chief work is the


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSsame as Plato's, viz. to justify the_ universal* synthetic ' propositions of pure science.r In the account given by Aristotle in his Meta-physics of 'Plsito's doctrine of 'Ideas/, we are toldmuch that is not explicitly laid down anywhere inthe dialogues/ and suspicion has accordingly beencast upon the trustworthiness of Aristotle's repre-sentations. Such suspicion, however, seems to beexcluded when we remember that Aristotle's oldfellow-pupil Xenocrates was expounding Platonismat Athens during the whole period of Aristotle'sactivity as a teacher, and that polemical misre-presentation of Plato's views would, in such cir-cumstances, have been suicidal. According toAristotle, who appears to be basing his state-ments upon Plato's more advanced oral teaching,the doctrine of ' Ideas ' was presented in a quasi-mathematical forpa^ the * Ideas ' being actuallyspoken of as ' numbers/ though Plato was carefulto distinguish these numbers from the ordinaryintegers which we use in counting.-] Each ideawas further held to be composed of two factors,the ^One,' which was also identified with the*(jood,' and an element of indetermination andplurality called the 'Indeterminate Duality,' orthe 'Great-and-Small.' In virtue of the 'participa-tion^' of sensible things in the ' Ideas/ these two

y


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PLATOelements, the One and the Great-and-Sniall,iira.thus ultimately the constituents of the universe.XAristotle adds that Plato regarded the objects ofthe ordinary mathematical studies as forming a.class * intermediate ' between the supreme ' Ideas*or *Numbers ' and physical things. They resemble^physical things in so m?. .as. there are mai^^fj^hemii (many different squares, or circles, and soforth), whereas there is only one 'Idea' of eachkind ; they resemble the * Ideas/ and differ fromphysical things, in being eternally immutable.Thus it would seem that, in the last resort, theconcepts or definables of science all presupposetwo primarily indefinable notions, that of Unity(which must be carefully distinguished, by theway, from the notion of the integer 1), and that ofMultitude (which, again, must not be confusedwith the notion of cardinal number). Everydefinable concept can be exhibited as arising by a"special mode of combination of these two com-ponents. (To illustrate crudely what is plainlymeant, consider the character of an ordinarydefinition. Suppose, e.g., we have man defined asa rational mortal being. The class so defined is,on the one hand, one term, or object of thought,the determinate aggregate corresponding to aspecific class-concept ; on the other, it is equated


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSbj the definition with the common part of aplurality (in this case two) of other aggregates.The defined class is thus at once one and many,or rather, a perfectly specific combination of theone and the many.) Since the objects of defini-tion are thus always combinations of the oneand the many, we readily see why Plato shouldhave called them * numbers,' and since the * oneand 'many' of which they are combinationsare not * the whole number 1 ' and ' the series ofwhole numbers,' but the simpler and prior-logical concepts of * a term ' and * terms ' (in theplural), we also see why he distinguished theseprimary 'ideal' numbers from the members of theseries of ordinary integers. The whole doctrine,in fact, ceases to be the puzzle that Aristotlefound it, when we bring to the study of it someacquaintance with the modern philosophy ofnumber, as expounded by writers like Peano,Frege, and Russell, and bear in mind that some-thing like the red.u.ctijon of pure mathematics toexact logic effected by these writers was avow-edly the goal at which Plato was aiming in his'dialectic.',. "The nearest approximation to the conceptions

ascribed to Plato by Aristotle which can betraced in the dialogues must be sought in the


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PLATOTimaeus and, as has been specially shown byDr. Henry Jackson, in the Philehus. /In theTimaeus what specially concerngûs is the oêscrip-tion of the formation of the ' soul of the universe,'and, at a later stage, of the souls of human beings,out of a combination of two ultimate elements,the * Same,' which symbolises the eternally self-identical, and the 'Other,' which stands forindeterminate mutability and variability;^ A still'Closer correspondence is presented by thePhilehus, in which * all things that are ' aresummed up under four categories: (1) theindeterminate, i.e. everything that is capable ofindefinite variation in number, degree, quantity(2) _ê_*liniit,' i.e. quantitative and numericaldetermination ; (3) the * mixture of the two,' i.e,precisely determined magnitudes and quantities,such as a melody, or an organism ; (4) tlxe. ' cause-of the rQixture/ which appears, in the Philehus,

' to be identified with purposive intelligence. Intothe discussion of the difficulties which have beenraised as to the significance of this classificationit is impossible to enter in a work like thepresent. But it should be noted that, to judgefrom the examples given of the four 'classes,'

t Pla,to is thinking in the Philehus, as in the pas-sage of the Timaeus just referred to, of the world


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KNOWLEDGE AND ITS OBJECTSof everyday 'things 'jcather than of that of purec^n^epts/yHence it is probably a mistake toidentify any of the four ' classes ' with the * Oneand the 'Indeterminate Duality/ or to ask in^hich class we are to look for the ' Ideas.' Weshould rather expect to find in his classes factorswhich are analogous to, but not identical with,those of which the ' Ideas ' are composed, andwhich hold towards 'sensible things' the samerelation as that held by the components of the' Ideas ' to the system of scientific concepts. And,in fact, if we identify the ' mixture ' with themeasured magnitudes of the sensible world, the' indeterminate ' and the ' limit ' will be found tooccupy towards those magnitudes exactly theposition ascribed by Aristotle to the ' One ' andthe 'Duality' in reference to the ' Ideas.' /^go

Cagain, in the Timaeus, while the * Same ' and' Other ' in the composition of the soul are not tobe identified with the 'One' and the 'DuaUty,'they have clearly the same functions ; they areto that particular 'mixture' which results fromthem what ' the One ' and ' the Duahty ' are tothej)ure logical conce^tTJ) '^^T2uauDa-p, then, Plato's doctrine of 'Ideas' f^seems to culminate in the thought that the wholeexisting universe forms a system exhibiting that


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PLATOcharacter of precise and determinate order andlaw of which we find the ideal type in the inter-connected concepts of a perfected deductivescience. When he says that sensible things are' copies ' of the Ideas which are the true objectsof science, what he means is that they exhibiteverywhere what we now speak of as ' conformityto law.' But for Plato, we must remember, theconformity is never complete in the sensibleworld ; there is an element in all actual sensibleexperience which defies precise measurement andcalculation. Absolute and exact ' conformity tolaw * is to be found only in the ideal constructionsof a pure conceptual science. Or, in other words,so far as such uniformity is actually ' verifiablein * experience,' it is only approximate ; so far asit is exact and complete, it is always a 'tran-scendent ' ideal/ And here, again, his conclusiondoes not se6m to be very different from that ofthe profoundest modern reflection upon scienceand her method^


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CHAPTER IIITHE SOUL OF MANPSYCHOLOGY, ETHICS,AND POLITICS

To understand Plato's scheme of moral and^^political philosophy, it is necessary first of all tobe acquainted with his general conception of then^ure of the soul. And this conception is, again,best approached by starting from the simpleethics and psychology of Socrates. The ethical ycand psychological doctrine of Socrates, as we canreconstruct it by comparison of the works ofPlato and Xenophon and the notices which havecome down to us of the views of the other 'Socraticmen,* may be summed up in the one propositionthat 'virtue^ is knowledge.' Primarily this pro-position may be said to be a p^chological oneT? /It means that the one and only function ofmental life is cognition; the mind is just a'knowing and perceiving subject,' and nothingmore._i From this it follows at once that there is ^one, and only one, * virtue ' or ' excellence ' possible


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PLATOto mind, the adequate performance of its charac-teristic function of knowing, and one and only

v/ one defect _or J^yice/ or mal-performance offunction, viz. intellectual error.) Hence we can

^ immediately deduce all theifamiliar paradoxes ofthe ^cratic morality ; that all the ' virtues ' are

f really one, that all wrongdoing is simply error of( judgment, that no man can know what is good,

for him without doing it, and that wrong action" is consequently always involuntary. 1 The ethical

advances made by Plato upon Socrates and thoseSocratics who, like Antisthenes the Cynic, clungto the simple psychology of the master, are allconnected with the discovery that mental life isin reality a much more complex thing thanSocrates had supposed.

It is interesting to trace the way in which Platois gradually led to replace the Socratic conceptionof the soul by a view which is more complex anddoes more justice to the facts of moral experience.

' 'The earliest group of the dialogues are, as wehave seen, in the main concerned with the pecn-;.Ikrly Socratic problem of a^rriving at definitiojiS,

" of the commonly received moral 'virtues.' /Thecourse of the investigation, in most cases, pro-ceeds as follows. ' It is proposed to determine theexact meaning of some currently used name of a


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THE SOUL OF MANvirtue or moral excellence, sucli as ' self-control ' /(in the Charmides) or ' courage ' (in the Laches).Usually the respondent of the dialogue beginsby falling into the mistake of propounding anenumeration of different instances of the virtuein question. Then, upon his attention beingcalled by Socrates to the difference between theenumeration of the members of a class and thedefinition of the class-concept, he proceeds to pro-pound one or more definitions of a loose andpopular kind. H These definitions are tested by 'comparison with some example of the virtue inquestion to which they will manifestly not apply,and thus shown to be insufficient, as e.g. in Book i.

j

of the Republic, where the tentative definitionsI

of 'justice' as 'paying what one owes/ or 'doingi good to one's friends and harm to one's enemies,'

are shown to be defective by the reflections thatj there are cases in which it would not be unjust towithhold repayment of a deposit, and that a virtu-ous man as such will never willingly do harm toany one. In the purely Socratic type of dialogue,Socrates usually next leads up to a definition inwhich the virtue under examination is identifiedwith some form of knowledge, as when 'self-control' or 'temperance' is identified in theCharmides with self-knowledge, or true courage,


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PLATOin the Laches, with knowledge of wliat is and what,is not formidable. On closer examination, how-eYef, it is found that we are unable to say whatparticular form of knowledge corresponds to theparticular virtue in question, so that the identi-fication of virtue with knowledge leads to aninability to distinguish any one special moralexcellence from virtue in general. (Thus in theLaches, when courage has been defined as * know-ledge of what is and is not formidable/ it ispointed out that a formidable thing simply meansa future or impending evil, so that the definitionreally amounts to the statement that courage is' knowledge of what is and what is not really evil,'and hence fails to apply to courage in particularas distinguished from other morally excellentqualities.) The formal result in such dialoguesis thus the merely negative one that we havelearned our own ignorance about matters of thegravest import with which we believed ourselvesto be perfectly acquainted, but it is easy to readbetween the lines that the true source of the diffi-culty has been the one-sided Socratic reductionof all mental activity to cognition. - It is thi.s_over-simplification of the psychological facts whichhas made it impossible to distinguish one form ofmoral excellence from another.


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THE SOUL OF MANNowhere is the defect of the Socratic moral

psychology more clearly brought out than in theProtagoi^as, the literary masterpiece of Plato'searliest period. Here the original question pro-pounded is whether jnoralyirtue can be taught,by^ jnaster to a pupil, .as. of Xiourse should bepossible if virtue is simply a form of knowledge.Protagoras is, as becomes a professional teacherof morals, quite sure that it can ; Socrates feels adoubt, due to the facts that persons who are mostcareful about the education of their childrenmake no attempt to provide them with expertinstruction in 'virtue,' as in other accomplish-ments, and that the public assembly, which ingeneral refuses to take the advice of a laymanagainst that of a specialist in any branch ofknowledge, regards the opinion of any onecitizen as to the morahty of a proposed course ofaction as being equally valuable with that of anyother. In the course of the discussion whichfollows, the original question is, by an apparentirrelevance, replaced by the problem whetliervirtue is one or many, Protagoras strongly advo-cating the popular view that there are a varietyof entirely distinct types of virtue, and that thesame man may possess one of them, e.g. justice,in a high degree, and yet be sadly deficient in


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PLATOanother, e.g. courage; So^crates, for higs part,champions the doctrine that there is only ona.kind of virtue, which is knowledge, by expound-

,' ing the now familiar doctrine of egoistic Hedon-Ijsm. Virtue is the right estimation of the/pleasurable and painful consequences of our/ actions ; vice is always miscalculation, and arisesI from miscomputation of the relative amounts of\ pleasure and pain to which a given act will lead.Thus, as Plato is careful to point out, at the endof the discussion the two parties have changedplaces. Protagoras, who had been sure thatvirtue can be taught like any science or art, isequally sure that it is a paradox to identify itwith knowledge; Socrates, who was inclined todeny its teachability, is found to be maintainingthat it is knowledge and nothing else. Theapparently lame conclusion of the dialogue hascaused much embarrassment to interpreters whohave failed to sympathise with Plato's dramatic

^ irony. But the real point which Plato is anxiousto make is clear. If Protagoras, by treating eachmoral excellence as altogether different in kindfrom every other, has made it impossible to frameany single conception of 'virtue' as a whole,Socrates, by treating virtue as simply identicalwith knowledge, has equally failed to make any


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THE SOUL OF MANdiscrimination^possible between the different* virtues.L,*!We are taken a step further towards a more

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