Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/551

No. 5] as here employed defensible. "The Ideas of Plato, then, fall under two main categories, which may be designated as the rational and ethical (p. 167). ... We must set apart notions derived from the similarity perceived in a group of objects or from quantitative relations. With these must be placed also those aesthetic and ethical notions which are equally derived by generalizing from observation, and which include ugliness as well as beauty, unrighteousness as well as righteousness. All these are Ideas in a way and have their own reality; but they are intellectual in their origin and pertain to the scientific rather than to the philosophic life. The difference lies in this, that in the procedure of science we are interested in acquiring a knowledge of the ideas, whereas in the procedure of philosophy we are interested in possessing the ideas themselves. Ideas, as Plato was supremely concerned in them, and as they constitute the essence of what the world has rightly known as Platonism, are not derived intellectually, but are an emphatic assertion of the unchanging reality behind moral forces, a natural development of the Socratic affirmation of spiritual truth" (pp. 177, 178). The significance of "possessing the Ideas themselves" is apparently that these ethical ideas are transmuted into convictions or become in a peculiar sense personal and affect our being and conduct, whereas the function of the ideas of the intellectual category is exhausted in knowledge or theory. If this is the meaning, the distinction is of questionable validity. Certainly Plato's general theory of the world structure, his metaphysics and cosmogony, is not thus divorceable from his ethics. On the contrary, his views of the moral life in the individual and the state have their roots in his general theory of reality, and similarly the entire system of Stoic ethics is unthinkable apart from its pantheistic setting or, in other words, apart from metaphysical or intellectual ideas. Reality is 'of a piece' and it is not possible to separate ethical and intellectual notions into completely watertight compartments. Further, it is not quite plain how these ethical ideas are "an emphatic assertion of the unchanging reality behind moral forces." Such assertion must find its justification in the deliverances of the discursive reason or intuition.

In defining the Platonic ideas as "imaginative projections of the facts of moral consciousness" (I would omit "moral"), More gives us a very suggestive point of view. This part of Chapter VI was evidently written con amore and is on a lofty plane both in its philosophical insight and its literary expression. One of the most interesting parts of the volume is the recondite discussion of that intricate puzzle, the Parmenides, in the chapter on