Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/96

80 taken alone, Plato carries into his political philosophy and theory of state, as Pater suggestively points out. The fluid, mobile, inconstant Herakleitean element Plato finds in the Athenian government, and the stable, fixed, Parmenidean he finds exemplified in the Spartan State; it is the contrast of the 'centrifugal,' dissolving, changing character of the Ionian, with the 'centripetal,' unifying, conservative character of the Dorian. This parallel in Platonic metaphysics and the Platonic theory of Government, the consistent correspondence of the two, as Pater notes it in his chapter on Lacedæmon, though not exactly a new interpretation, is most instructively and luminously handled.

In the matter of translations which Pater has made from the Dialogues and which he uses without stint, one is somewhat disappointed. They fall much below the rest of the volume. After reading Jowett one will not care for the rendering of Pater. In a quotation from the Republic (p. 97) Pater translates: " Some very small number then (says the Platonic Socrates) is left, of those who in worthy fashion hold converse with philosophy: either, it may be, some soul of in-born worth and well brought up, to which it has happened to be exiled in a foreign land, holding to philosophy by a tie of nature, and through lack of those who will corrupt it; or when it may chance that a great soul comes to birth in an insignificant state, to the politics of which it gives no heed, because it thinks them despicable: perhaps a certain fraction also, of good parts, may come to philosophy from some other craft, through a just contempt of that." This very crooked sentence is typical of much of Pater's translating, and the large number of phrases (most of them happy and exact in themselves) strung thus together lead the reader a tortuous road that is hard travelling. "Spray beneath a driven wind" (p. 98) is less intelligible than with the active form of the participle. Pater has a way of giving a certain energy to his style by the device of the interjection, and although it is skilfully used in many instances, one nevertheless feels that it is of the nature of a trick, and this juggling impresses the reader as unworthy of so high and serious an exponent of literary art.

The author makes some clear-sighted observations on the Sophists, whom he, like most writers since Grote, takes somewhat under his protection. He finds the chief fault of Sophistry, in the mind of Plato, was "that for it no real things existed." He further regards the Sophists as the products of the Athenian spirit rather than as the makers of it; and it is patent that they were the legitimate