Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/93

] what may be most charitably called 'misprints' runs up into the hundreds or thousands. The breathings and diphthongs are invariably wrong, and as for accents, it would have been far better to omit them altogether in the fearless old fashion of Ruskin and Schopenhauer. But this is not the worst. Sentences are left devoid of meaning or syntax by omission of the keystone word; whole phrases are so pied that even conjectural restoration is impossible; and if the reader in despair endeavors to consult the Platonic text, not infrequently the reference is too vague for verification or is itself misprinted. Technical expressions not employed by Plato are invented by false analogy, and words and forms unknown to the Greek language are recklessly coined; e. g., for  as correlate of,  as feminine of. The printing of the few German and Latin citations is not much better. It is incomprehensible how a scholar with a reputation to lose, and a publishing house of good standing, could send forth a scientific book in this condition.

Pater's book on Plato and Platonism, like all of Pater's books, unites very exact scholarship with the nicest sense of artistic form. The author of Appreciations and Imaginary Portraits has approached the writings of Plato not so much in the spirit of a philosopher as in that of a student and expounder of the æsthetic. And herein he shows a skilful hand. It is the literary aspects of these ten lectures rather than the exposition of Plato's philosophy, that give the book its chief charm and value, though the student of philosophy, too, will find the volume suggestive, especially on Plato's philosophy of government and æsthetics, which latter Pater finds intimately connected with Platonic Ethics. In fact, for the Greeks as a people the notions of beauty and the good were indissolubly connected. So in the Republic, Plato conceives virtue to be a sort of harmony and beauty of the soul, and the discovery and appreciation of this harmony, music, beauty in the world without and within, is, as Pater supposes, the essence of Plato's philosophy. It is "but the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of things." And "to trace that thread of physical color, entwined throughout, and multiplied sometimes into large tapestried figures," is the business of the