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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 with being, 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” 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