Page:Philosophical Review Volume 6.djvu/229

213 No. 2.] NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 213 reproducing in them its own essential features of thinking and being thought. This principle in Platonism was borrowed, as Mr. Cook believes, from " my father Parmenides " (cf. Ritter and Preller, Farm. 94-96). When this is applied to Plato's idealism, it means that he posited "a single really existent Mind as basis and conditioning cause of a series of really existent Minds called Ideas" (p. 16). He further discusses, with the Sophist as his text, the question of and its relation to.

All Being passes from a higher to a lower phase, and the method of this transition Mr. Cook thinks he finds in a disputed passage of Aristotle's Psychology (404 b, 8). According to this passage, in the philosophy of Empedocles, just as the percipient soul is constructed from the same six elements that go to form the percepts of his system, so Plato forms both and out of the same elements, i.e., Plato constructs the subject and object of cognition out of the same constituents. In the evolu- tion of the Idea as known, there are four stages, with which are correlated four stages in the evolution of the Idea as knowing. We have this for the ground plan of the universe, as the Parmenides, Sophist, and Aristotle's Psychology have been interpreted for us. There is a single which multiplies itself into a series of. Mind is, therefore, a unity which unfolds itself into an aggregate of minds, and these are Ideas objectively regarded. The Ideas are the partial minds into which the universal Mind multiplies itself. Furthermore, Mind passes out of its own state of immutable thought into the transitory phases of knowledge, opinion, and sensation, and thereby into particulars subjectively regarded. This is, in outline, Mr. Cook's exposition of the Platonic theory of the relation of Mind and Idea. The metaphysical is the diffraction of the One into the manifold ; the ethical is the, through ,, and (p. 127). Plato's ethical theory is, then, a sort of " moral synthesis of a metaphysical analysis, the return of Unity to itself." There is not much that is strikingly new or original in all this, or that can be said to offer any real furtherance to Platonic scholarship. Besides, I very much question the serviceableness, in general, of such work, where an immense amount of learned ingenuity is occupied with painfully mining out a heap of sheer artificialities and scholastic matter that have no possible bearing on latter-day scholarship or life. In saying this, I do not view the work from the standpoint of vulgar utilitarianism, but one would like to have something besides mere logical subtleties. This does not hinder the reviewer, however, from conceding to the author of the volume under discussion a vast amount of critical acumen. W A H