virtues. It is a genuine development of Socratic thought. And it is this more than any other single feature which gives the Republic a prophetic significance as “an attempt towards anticipating the work of future generations.”[1]
Other aspects of the great dialogue, the Dorian framework, so inevitable in the reaction from Ionian life, the traces of Pythagorean influence, the estimate of oligarchy and democracy, the characters of the interlocutors in their bearing on the exposition, have been fully treated by recent writers, and for brevity's sake are here passed over.
There are other points, however, which must not be omitted, because they are more intimately related to the general development of Plato's thoughts.
1. The question debated by Proclus has been raised before and since, whether the proper subject of the Republic is justice or the state. The doubt would be more suggestive if put in a somewhat different form: Is Plato more interested in the state or the individual? That he is in earnest about both, and that in his view of them they are inseparable, is an obvious answer. And it is almost a truism to say that political relations were prior to ethical in the mind of a Greek. Yet if in some passages the political analogy reacts on moral notions (as in the definition of temperance), in others the state is spoken of in language borrowed from individual life. And it remains questionable whether the ethics or the politics of the Republic are less complete. On the whole Plato himself seems to be conscious that the ideal derived from the life-work of Socrates could be more readily stamped on individual lives than on communities of men (see especially Rep. vii. 528 A, ix. 592).
2. The analogy of the individual is often used to enforce the requirement of political unity and simplicity (see especially v. 462 C). This is also to be referred, however, to Plato's general tendency to strain after abstractions. He had not yet reached a point of view from which he could look steadily on particulars in the light of universal principles. He recurs often to experience, but is soon carried off again into the abstract region which to him seemed higher and purer.[2] “It has been said that Plato flies as well as walks, but this hardly expresses the whole truth, for he flies and walks at the same time, and is in the air and on firm ground in successive instants” (Jowett). Plato's scheme of communism had been suggested to him partly by Dorian institutions and partly by the Pythagorean rule. But it was further commended by the general consideration that the state is a higher and more abstract unity than the family. The lower obligation must give way to the higher; the universal must overrule the particular bond.
3. Similarly it may be argued that, while the subordination of music to state discipline, and the importance attached to rhythm and harmony in education, had likewise a connexion with Sparta and the Pythagoreans severally, Plato's deliberate attitude towards poetry and art could hardly be other than it is. Philosophy, while still engaged in generalization, could not assign to the imagination its proper function. “Aesthetik” could not enter into her purview. For a moment, in the Symposium, the ancient quarrel of poetry and philosophy had seemed to be melted in a dominant tone, but this was only a fond anticipation. Plato, if man ever did so, had felt the siren charm, but he is now embarked on a more severe endeavour, and, until the supreme unity of truth and good is grasped, vagrant fancy must be subdued and silent.
4. In the early education of the guardians a place is found for the unconscious virtue acquired through habit, which the Protagoras and Meno stumbled over and the Phaedo treated with disdain. In the ideal state, however, this lower excellence is no longer a wild plant, springing of itself through some uncovenanted grace of inspiration, but cultivated through an education which has been purified by philosophy so as to be in harmony with reason. But if Plato were cross-questioned as to the intrinsic value of habits so induced as a preservative for his pupils against temptation, he would have replied, “I do not pretend to have removed all difficulties from their path. Enough of evil still surrounds them to test their moral strength. I have but cleared the well-springs of the noxious weeds that have been fatal to so many, in order that they may have little to unlearn, and be exposed only to such dangers as are inevitable.”
5. It is a singular fact, and worth the attention of those who look for system in Plato, that the definition of justice here so laboriously wrought out, viz. the right division of labour between the three classes in the state and between the three corresponding faculties in the individual soul, is nowhere else repeated or applied, although the tripartite division of the soul recurs in the Timaeus, and the notion of justice is of great importance to the arguments of the Politicus and the Laws.
6. Before leaving the Republic, it is important to mark the stage which has now been reached by Plato's doctrine of ideas. The statements of the Republic on this subject are by no means everywhere consistent.
a. Towards the end of bk. v. philosophers are defined as lovers of the whole, who recognize the unity of justice, goodness, beauty, each in itself, as distinguished from the many just or good or beautiful things. The former are said to be objects of knowledge, the latter of opinion, which is intermediate between knowledge and ignorance. Knowledge is of being, ignorance of the non-existent, opinion of that which is and is not.
b. In bk. vi. there is a more elaborate statement, implying a more advanced point of view. The “contemplation of all time and all existence” is a riper conception than “the love of each thing as a whole.” Ignorance and nonentity have now disappeared, and the scale is graduated from the most evanescent impression of sense to the highest reach of absolute knowledge. And in the highest region there is again a gradation, rising to the form of good, and descending from it to the true forms of all things. In the application of this scheme to the theory of education in bk. vii. there are still further refinements. The psychological analysis becomes more subtle, and more stress is laid on the connexion of ideas.
c. The doctrine reverts to a cruder aspect in bk. x., where we are told of an ideal bed, which is one only and the pattern of all the many actual beds.
d. A yet different phase of idealism presents itself in bk. ix. (sub fin.), in the mention of a “pattern” of the perfect state laid up in heaven which the philosopher is to make his rule of life.
What is said above concerning Plato's mode of composition has some bearing on these inconsistencies of expression. And that bks. vi., vii., as being the most important, were finished last is a not untenable hypothesis. But that Plato, in preparing the way for what he had in contemplation, should content himself with provisional expressions which he had himself outgrown, or that in a casual illustration (as in bk. x.) he should go back to a crude or even childish form of his own theory, is equally conceivable and in accordance with his manner elsewhere. Socrates in the Parmenides confessedly wavers on this very point. And there are “ideas” of the four elements in the Timaeus.
VI. Euthydemus, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman, Philebus (the dialectical dialogues).—Even in the most advanced metaphysics of the Republic there is a hyperbolical, transcendental tendency, from which Plato ultimately to some extent worked himself free. But it was not in conversation with “dear Glaucon,” or “between the lines” of an ethico-political writing, that this partial emancipation could be effectually attained. We have now to consider a series of dialogues, probably intended for a narrower circle of readers, in which Plato grapples directly with the central difficulties of his own theory of knowing and being. It is not necessary to assume that all of these are later than the Republic. The position of the Euthydemus and Parmenides in the order of composition is very uncertain. The Theaetetus has points of affinity with the Republic. The Sophist, Politicus and Philebus are in a later style. But, on account of their cognate subject-matter, these six dialogues may be conveniently classed together in a group by themselves. And the right place for such a group is intermediate between the Republic and the Laws.
The unity of the object of definition, the identity of virtue and knowledge, the existence of an absolute good, which would be universally followed if universally known, and of a standard of truth which is implied in the confession of ignorance, were postulates underlying the Socratic process, which in so far made no claim to be a “philosophy without assumptions.” These postulates, when once apprehended, drew Plato on to speculate concerning the nature, the object and the method of knowledge. Now, so far as we have hitherto followed him, his speculation has either been associated with ethical inquiry, or has been projected in a poetical and semi-mythical form. In the Phaedrus however, the vision of ideas was expressly conjoined with an outline of psychology and a foreshadowing of scientific method. And, while the opposition of ideas to phenomena and of knowledge to opinion has been repeatedly assumed, it has also been implied that there is a way between them, and. that the truth can only be approached by man through interrogation of experience. For it is nowhere supposed that the human inquirer is from the first in a position to deduce facts from ideas. Much rather, the light of the ideas is one which fitfully breaks in upon experience as men struggle towards the universal.
But it is not less true that the metaphysical aspirations from which Socrates had seemed to recall men's thoughts had been reawakened in consequence of the impulse which Socrates
