Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/564

554 possible to form ethics into a science by sufficiently multiplying those fragmentary investigations into which he was drawn in discussing the received opinions on the subject. The same law of progression was involuntarily retained in his school. For Plato, though he descends into all the sciences, still lays the principal stress on the establishment of principles, and expati- ates in details only so far as they are necessary, and so much the less as he has to draw them from without : it is Aristotle who first revels in their multiplicity.

This appears to me as much as can be said with certainty of the worth of Socrates as a philosoper. But should any one proceed to ask, how far he elaborated the idea of science in his lessons, or in what degree he promoted the discovery of real knowledge in any other province by his controversial discus- sions, and his dialectic assays, there would perhaps be little to say on this head, and least of all should I be able to extricate any thing to serve this purpose from the works of Plato taken by themselves. For there in all that belongs to Plato there is something of Socrates, and in all that belongs to Socrates some- thing of Plato. Only if any one is desirous of describing doc- trines peculiar to Socrates, let him not, as many do in histories of philosophy for the sake of at least filling up some space with Socrates, string together detached moral theses, which, as they arose out of occasional discussions, can never make up a whole, and as to other subjects, let him not lose sight of the above quoted passage of Aristotle, who confines Socrates'* philosophical speculations to principles. The first point therefore to examine would be, whether some profound speculative doctrines may not have originally belonged to Socrates, which are generally considered as most foreign to him, for instance, the thought which is unfolded by Plato in his peculiar manner, but is exhi- bited in the germ by Xenophon himself (Mem. i. 4. 8.), and is intimately connected with the great dialectic question as to the agreement between thought and being : that of the general dif- fusion of intelligence throughout the whole of nature. With this one might connect the assertion of Aristocles (Euseb. Præp. xi. 3), that Socrates began the investigation of the doc- trine of ideas. But the testimony of this late Peripatetic is suspicious, and may have had no other foundation than the language of Socrates in the Parmenides.