Page:Plato or Protagoras.djvu/11

 It is further clear that these positions are not unconnected. For if the current view that the positions taken up in the Speech are disposed of in the progress of the argument can be shown to be untenable, if it is demonstrable that the arguments of the Speech are neither refuted nor even correctly represented in the sequel, it becomes highly probable that Plato has not understood it aright, and that therefore it is not really of his own invention.

I.
If then the substance of the Speech is not Plato’s, whose is it? Surely Protagoras’s claim to it should take precedence over any other. Attempts have been made to attribute its arguments to Aristippus, on the ground that his is probably the philosophy attacked in the earlier parts of the Theætetus. But if our conception of the real relation of Socrates to the thought of his contemporaries be right, the humanistic strain in Aristippus may well have come down to him from his master Socrates, on whom the spirit of the fifth century was doubtless operative, though Plato has done his utmost to erase all trace thereof from his picture of their common master. Hence an agreement between the doctrines of Protagoras and Aristippus is in no wise inexplicable, nor would it prove that the Speech belonged to the latter.

As for the invention of imaginary Protagoreans against whom Plato is imagined to be so eager to contend as to ignore their master, that surely is too desperate an expedient to be sanctioned by any sane principles of historical criticism. In some cases, as in palliating the clearly deliberate misrepresentation of Plato by Aristotle, such an expedient may commend itself to the timidity of reconcilers reluctant to admit that one great thinker may fail to appreciate another, though in this case we know at least that there was a Platonic School on which to impose the burden Aristotle falsely fastens on to Plato, and though even then the hypothesis does not cover all the facts. But in general a master contends with masters and not with disciples. Moreover,