PLATO 195 times was for hours, in a catalepsy of reverie (see SOCRATES). When he appeared in the market-place about midday, ready to single out his man for questioning, he had already spent some hours in the wrestling-schools, conversing with the youth. This was not, as it appeared to his contempo raries, mere idleness or mental dissipation (dSoAecr^ta), but the exercise of his self-chosen profession. There is no reason to doubt the general truth of the assertion which Plato attributes to him in the Apologia. He felt a divine vocation to examine himself by questioning other men. Gifted with an iron frame, and having trained himself to have fewer wants than a soldier or a slave, he could devote all his time to this one object, without engaging in remunerative business, or setting hours apart for recrea tion, since he was indefatigable alike in body and mind. He was really doing for the Athenians, whether they would or no, what the sophist professed to do for his adherents, and what such men as Protagoras and Prodicus had actually done in part. One obvious difference was that he would take no fee. But there was another and more deep-lying difference, which distinguished him not only from the contemporary sophists but from the thinkers of the previous age. This was the Socratic attitude of inquiry. The sceptical movement had confused men s notions as to the value of ethical ideas. 1 " If right is one thing in Athens and another at Sparta, why strive to follow right rather than expediency 1 The laws put restraint on Nature, which is prior to them. Then why submit to law? " And the ingenuities of rhetoric had stirred much unmean ing disputation. Every case seemed capable of being argued in opposite ways. Even on the great question of the ultimate constitution of things, the conflicting theories of absolute immutability and eternal change appeared to be equally irrefragable and equally untenable. Now Socrates first of all maintained imperturbably the simple habits of an ordinary Athenian citizen, observing scrupulously even minute religious customs, entering also unreservedly into the lightest pastimes of his associates, while the plain and strenuous tenor of his own peculiar life remained unaffected. But into all he carried the same irre pressible, insatiable spirit of search, to which nothing human was alien or uninteresting. Taking men and women as he found them, and conversing casually, as it appeared, on the topic which chanced to interest his hearer, he had not gone far before he had unmasked some vain pretence, cut folly to the quick, or raised some doubt of wide significance. And, though he often ended with negation, his negative achievements had a positive aim. For there underlay the process even when most ironical the conviction, not less profound because implicit, that in spite of false appearances, in spite of error, there are realities not undiscoverable, and whatsoever is real is good. His hearers had been confused by contradictory voices, one crying "All is motion," another " All is rest"; one " The absolute is unattainable," another "The relative alone is real"; some upholding a vague sentiment of traditional right, while some declared for arbitrary convention and some for the " law of nature. " Some held that virtue was spontaneous, some that it was due to training, and some paradoxically denied that either vice or falsehood had any meaning. The faith of Socrates, whether instinctive or inspired, remained untroubled by these jarring tones. He did not ask " Is virtue a reality 1 " or " Is goodness a delusion 1 " But, with perfect confidence that there was an answer, he asked himself and others " What is it 1 " (TL eVrt) ; or, more particularly, as Xenophon testifies, "What is a state? What is a statesman ? What is just ? What is unjust ? 1 See Caird, Hegel, p. 168. What is government ? What is it to be a ruler of men ? " In this form of question, however simple, the originality of Socrates is typified; and by means of it he laid the first stone, not only of the fabric of ethical philosophy, but of scientific method. The secret of his success lay in the combination of a deep sense of human ignorance with a confidence not less deep in the power of reason. The first result, and, as the Platonic Socrates declares, the only result he had obtained, was the consciousness of knowing nothing. But he who knows that he knows nothing is disposed to seek, and only those who seek will find. And the seeking mind attains, if not to knowledge, yet to a new standard of knowing. So long as results are contradictory, so long as negative instances are success fully applied, the searcher may make progress but is still to seek. For the aim of inquiry is the universal. Human life and experience the sphere of search; truth and good, regarded as identical, the end of it ; universality the test of reality, conversation the method, rational thought the means, these are the chief notes of the dialectic of Socrates. Applying the native strength of his intelligence directly to the facts of life, he revealed their significance in countless ways, by unthought-of generaliza tions, by strange analogies, combining what men had not combined, distinguishing what they had not distinguished, but always with the single aim of rousing them to the search after eternal truth and good. The spirit which led on towards this unseen goal was not less practical than speculative. Socrates desired not only that men might know, but that they might know and do. Utility is the watchword no less of the Socratic than of the Baconian induction. But Socrates never doubted that if men once know they will also do. His own conscious conviction of the unity of truth and good he believed to be unconsciously the basis of all men s actions. They erred, he thought, from not seeing the good, and not because they would not follow it if seen. This is expressed in the Socratic dicta, "Vice is ignorance," "Virtue is knowledge." Men therefore must be brought to see the good and true, and that they may see it they must first be made aware that they do not see. This lifelong work of Socrates, in which the germs of ethics, psychology, and logic were contained, after it had been sealed by the death in which he characteristically at once obeyed his countrymen and convinced them of error, was idealized, developed, dramatized first embodied and then extended beyond its original scope in the writings of Plato, which may be described as the literary outcome of the profound impression made by Socrates upon his greatest follower. These writings (in pursuance of the importance given by Socrates to conversation) are all cast in the form of imaginary dialogue. But in those which are presumably the latest in order of composition this imaginative form interferes but little with the direct expression of the philosopher s own thoughts. The many-coloured veil at first inseparable from the features is gradually worn thinner, and at last becomes almost imperceptible. Little more will be attempted in the following pages than to give a general outline of these immortal works in the order which is on the whole most probable, omitting those whose claim to authenticity is weakest, and passing lightly over some which, although genuine, are less import ant than the rest, or have less to do with the main current of Plato s thought. The Platonic dialogues are not merely the embodiment The of the mind of Socrates and of the reflexions of Plato, dialogues. They are the portraiture of the highest intellectual life of
Hellas in the time of Plato, a life but distantly related to