Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 16.djvu/130

* PLATO. 102 PLATO. The pathos of Plato's old age has been beautifully expressed hy Wihiiiiowitz (AristoltUn mid AUicii, vol. i.. p. 330). But credible anecdotes illu.stia- tivc of the esteem and love in whieh be was held by his fellow citizens and numerous pupils soften the picture. If some illusions were gone, the grasp of thought and the synoptic command of experience remained to the end, and in reading his later works we feel that, like the aged Cepba- lus in the liciniblic, the man stands on the heights of a noble life "with a glimpse of a height that is higher." The Lairs lacks the inimitable Attic grace of the iSymposiiuii and the I'htvihi, but the thoughtful reader finds compensation in the breadth of its survey of human life and Greek institutions, its intense moral and religious eaniestness, the solemn detachment of its re- signed and stately melancholy. As Jowett finely says: "The wings of his imagination have begun to droop, but his experience of life remains, and he turns from the contemplation of the eternal to take a last sad look at human affairs." Plato's extant writings (including probably all he ever pul)lished) are arranged by the rhetor Thrasyllus (first century A.D. ) in nine tetralo- gies or groups of four. One mendier of the ninth group is constituted by the thirteen letters which are almost certainly spurious, though some his- torians now defend the genuineness of the seventh epistle becaiise of the interesting and jdausible acccmnt which it gives of Plato's relations with the court of Syracuse. Of the thirty-five dialogues, the IHiiiniichiis, on the love of gain: the Eruslcv and the Thiniirs. on philosophy; the Minos, on law; and the IJpinomis, a sort of sup])lement to the Imus, .are generally acknowledged to be spu- rious. Many reputable scholars still doubt the genuineness of the Alcihiades I., on the nature of man; the Alcibindcs II., on prayer; the llippkis /., on the beautiful; the Hippias II., on false- hood ; the Ion, on Homer and poetical inspiration ; the .l/f)Krr)i».s or Funeral Oration; and the Kid- tophoii, a fragment. The acceptance or rejection of these seven minor works ati'ects very slightly our total impression of Plato's thought and art. The dialogues vary in length from the twenty- two pages of the Crilo to the four hindred and eighteen pages of the La us, and in manner from the lively dramatic representation of a possible conversation in a Greek gAMunasium (the Lysis on Friendship, the Cliiiniiidts on Temperance), to the didactic exposition in ])erfunctory dramatic form of an obscure ])roblcm of logic or nieta- physic {Sophislcs, I'ainn aides), a theory of the universe (Timwus) or a project for the reforma- tion of society, education, and law { Republic, Laws). The dialogue form arose naturally out of the Greek drama, the Athenian habit of dis- cussion, and its practice by Socrates. Its his- f tory has been written by Hirzel {Der Dialog, Leipzig. 1.SII.5). It was employed by other disci- ples of Socrates as well as by Plato, and speci- mens of such dialogiies are included in Xeno- phon's Mcmornbilin of S<xTates. The form is sometimes purely <lramatie, as in the Euthiiphro on holiness, or the (lorgias on rhetoric: some- times, as in the liepublic, it is that of a narrated dialogue, which permits description and comment as in the modern novel. Socrates is the principal speaker in all except the f^d/diistes, Politirus. I'ar- menides. Timfriis, fritias. and the Laios, in which last he does not appear at all. One of the chief problems of recent Platonic scholar.ship is the determination of the dates of the dialogues tinougb statistical stuily of the style (IjUtoslawski, Oriyin and (iroath of Plain's Logic), by tracing the development of Plato's thought, or by the aid of casual historical allu- sions. The results, though aftii'med with confi- dent dogmatism, cannot be verified. The Laas and Timccus are known to be late. The Republic belongs to Plato's middle age. The minor dra- matic dialogues are presumably as a whole early. The severely metaphysical Xnpliisles, I'olilieiis, and I'hilcbus probably follow the Republic rather than precede it, as older scholars believed. But the unity and consistency of Plato's thought as a whole, and the tradition that he revised and corrected his greater works to the end, lessen the significance of these researches. The perennial charm of Plato resides precisely in the ballling combination which he presents of eonsunuuato artist and subtle metaphysician. We may say roughly that the dialogues have three chief aims: (1) The ideal (lortraiture of the mas- ter Socrates (see Socrates) ; (2) the dramatic portrayal of the practice of discussion, the ■g:uiie of question and answer,' as it has been called, which played so large a part in Athenian life; (3) the exposition of doctrine. Plato is the Shakespeare of ideas. All ideas are allowed to speak for themselves on his stage with something of the dramatic fairness that seems to justify every personage, from his own point of view, upon the stage of Shakespeare. And though it is not so dilticult to determine in this dramatic conflict of ideas the beliefs seriously defended by Plato as it is to observe the habitual preferences that define Shakespeare's personality, it is still vei'^' difficult. The hasty reader will accept as Platonic definitions distinctions, arguments, and fallacies that have a purely dramatic significance. He will interpret as markini; stages in the devel- opment of Plato's own thought professions of ignorance or bewildertnent which the Socratic irony employs merely to ensnare pretentious self- sutliciency, to stimulate youthful thought, or as a dramatic prelude to the favorite Socratic moral: "Let us re-examine the whole question to- gether." He w'ill take literally Socrates's aflfecta- tion of following whithersoever the wind of discus- sion ma.v blow, and. dazzled by the kaleidoscopic shiftings of suggestion and interesting ideas, he will be skeptical of the existence of an}' underly- ing unity of thought and purpose. Instead of falsifying Plato's teaching by forc- ing it into the framework of an artificial .sys- tem, it is better simply to enumerate a few of the dominant conceptions and aims that preserve its unity and consistency amid all its apparent varia- tions. There is first dialectic — the faith which he shared with Socrates in the value of rational discussion, if not as the organon of absolute truth, at least as the only protection against the errors and confusions of untested opinion. Both Plato and Socrates believe that, as .John Stuart Mill phrases it. "there is no knowledge, and no assurance of right belief, but with him who can both confute the opposite opinion and successfully defend his own against confutation." Many of the most entertaining passages of the dialogues are mere dramatic illustrations of the inability not only of the average man. but of the most brilliant sophists and rhetoricians of the day to do this (Gorgias, Protagoras). They could bandy abstractions implying praise or