Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/854

 Rep. bk. vii. It is in conversation with Theodorus that Socrates impressively contrasts the lives of the lawyer and the philosopher. The Theaetetus marks a great advance in clearness of metaphysical and psychological expression. See for example the passage (184-186) in which the independent function of the mind is asserted, and ideas are shown to be the truth of experience. There is also a distinct approach towards a critical and historical method in philosophy, while the perfection of style continues unimpaired, and the person of Socrates is as vividly represented as in any dialogue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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