Page:Philosophical Review Volume 9.djvu/244

228 can be conceived as the fruit of the close and indissoluble union, the intimate and reciprocal penetration, and, more briefly, the eternal marriage of the infinite virtuality everywhere present and the innumerable multitude of material elements everywhere spread broadcast" (p. 505). Is this a page from Dickens? At last Mr. Vincent Crummies has unburdened himself of a treatise on metaphysics! We are somewhat relieved to learn that this "ultimate secret of the nature of things" is not put forward as a certainty, or even as a strong probability, but only as possessing a certain degree of verisimilitude (p. 503). Comment is hardly necessary. Certainly this attempt to extract a philosophy from the latest returns of the sciences has given us some very interesting mythology. The work is conceived in the spirit of eighteenth century French philosophy but thinly disguised by its veneer of modern scientific phraseology. [Could Diderot or Holbach, for example, have more naïvely told the story of creation than M. Ribert has done? (v. pp. 509 ff).] Like the work of the last century again, it is encyclopædic in its scope. No field is overlooked. Indeed, the motto of the book might well be: de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis.

In Plato's Theætetus we have the first step in his later theory of knowledge and of being, by which the questions raised by earlier philosophers received Plato's final answer, and the attacks of the Sophists on the foundations of knowledge and right were once for all satisfactorily met. The first part of the present volume "seeks to give Plato's portrait, account, and criticism of Protagoras and his followers and at the same time—such is Plato's peculiar method—it serves as an outline of one large and important section of Plato's own philosophy." The idea of such a volume is a singularly happy one; unfortunately the execution of the plan is not equal to its conception.

The first chapter contains some very good observations on Plato's style; the account of his method is very inadequate, and in some points confused. In the next two chapters, the author treats of Plato and Protagoras, and of Plato and the Protagoreans. The argument is acute, but not sufficient weight is given to the fact that the positions assigned to the Protagoreans in contrast with Protagoras, are put into the mouth of Protagoras himself when Plato makes him defend his own doctrines (168B). To the Protagoreans the author assigns the identification of sense-perception with knowledge, and the declaration that false opinion is impossible. I cannot find that Plato credits either Protagoras or the Protagoreans with the latter position. Rather Plato asks where we are to find false opinion if knowledge is identified with right opinion; and he argues against this identification because