Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/95

] a half ago in the Contemporary, and is a model appreciation of the spirit of the founder of idealism. A lecture follows on the "Doctrine of Plato," wherein the theory of ideas and the Dialectic are handled. The eighth is a clever essay on Lacedæmon, and the ninth treats the Republic. The series is concluded by a short chapter on the æsthetics of Plato. Pater, in pursuing the historic method of criticism, as distinguished from what he calls the dogmatic and eclectic, describes the evolution of Plato's philosophical ideas from the earliest Greek philosophy. He puts Plato before us in his literary and intellectual 'environment,' exhibits him as the natural historical product of what had gone before. So his aim is not apologetic nor propagandic, but is simply "to put Plato in his natural place," as a result of antecedent and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek life generally; and all this Pater does in very graceful, if not very exhaustive manner. The influence of Herakleitos on Plato (in early life, under the tuition of Kratylos, Plato is said to have been a follower of Herakleitos) was, according to Pater, one of antagonism or reaction. This, though partly true, is not the whole truth, and if not absolutely incorrect is very open to misunderstanding. The influence of Herakleitos is hardly more one of antagonism than is that of Parmenides. Plato sees in the visible world only the transitory, the perpetual "Flux," the "Becoming" of Herakleitos, and it is only in a transcendental, supersensual world that Plato finds the permanent, the unchanging, the "one" of Parmenides. The world, as it appeared to the eyes of Herakleitos, was in continuous transition, in unceasing process of "becoming." In so far Plato agrees with Herakleitos, only he goes farther. Unsatisfied with such fleeting, uncertain objects of knowledge (which, as something certain, implies a correspondingly fixed object) he created in his metaphysics a constant world of ideas corresponding to the constant in our notion. This influence, therefore, is not antagonistic; on the contrary, the Herakleitean Doctrine is incorporated by Plato in his own, only Plato's metaphysics do not stop here, but, taking a further step with Parmenides, he discovers his permanent, unchanging world of ideas. In his metaphysic Plato as little takes sides with Parmenides, whom he revered as "father," as he does with the philosopher of Ephesus, but he accepts the position of both and makes them supplement each other, finding the flux of Herakleitos in the fleeting shadows of the sensible world—and the Parmenidean "one" in the unchanging world of eternal ideas. And these two conceptions, one-sided when