Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/362

 ON PLATO'S PHAEDO. 361 metaphors with as full a consciousness as possible. It is metaphors which escape notice that are dangerous. Besides being subject to this common necessity of human thought, Plato is essentially a poet ; and thus to him the language of myth is natural. His notions clothe themselves readily in sensuous imagery. And we cannot make a sharp distinction between Plato the poet and Plato the philosopher (as Teich- muller tries to do, Studien, p. 158). As already said, we cannot separate the form and the content of his thinking. We can no longer hold, as used often to be held, that there is a fundamental antithesis between Plato and Aristotle. The agreement between them is far more fundamental than the difference. The severe and often captious criticisms of Aristotle must not blind us to the fact that almost every Aristotelian doctrine is to be found implicitly in Plato. As Sir A. Grant admirably said, "Aristotle codified Plato". In that phrase there is an expression at once of the essential agreement in thought and of the obtrusive difference in manner. There is of course a Platonic system of philosophy, in the sense in which every great philosopher, every thinker who is more than a mere brilliant penseur, has a system ; but Plato's manner of working, not merely his manner of writing, is artistic rather than scientific. The difference between Plato and Aristotle is not that Plato is an idealist and Aristotle a realist Aristotle is as much an idealist as Plato but that Plato is a religious poet and Aristotle a scientifi- cally trained physician. Let us recognise, then, as fully as possible, that the philo- sophic truth of Plato is to be found in Aristotle. But it does not therefore follow that Plato himself would have accepted Aristotle's doctrines as his own. The student of Kant feels that Kant himself did not fully recognise the philosophic significance of many of his own positions. He retained much of the phraseology, and along with it not a little of the way of thinking, of the Leibnizo-Wolfnan School, and would not have admitted the interpretation given to his doc- trines by Fichte and Hegel. So too in Plato there is retained much Pythagorean phraseology belonging to a stage of thought beyond which he had really advanced, and he would certainly not have recognised the Aristotelian developments as his own. I am quite aware that this is a way of treating the history of philosophy which does not commend itself to a great many, especially the English, students of philo- sophy, but it seems to me the only way in which the history of philosophy nay, in which any history becomes intelli- gible at all. Eousseau might not have recognised his own