very far toward maturity. Such a pause as this, however, we cannot avoid making: the earlier philosophy which we designate by the names of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Hera- clitus, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, &c. has evidently a common type, and the later, in which Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno are the conspicuous names, has likewise one of its own, w^hich is very different from the other. Nothing can have been lost between them, which could have formed a gradual transi- tion : much less is it possible so to connect any of the later forms with any of the earlier, as to regard them as a continu- ous whole. This being so, nothing remains to be done, but to subject the case of Socrates to a new revision, in order to see whether the judges he has met with among posterity have not been as unjust, in denying his philosophical worth, and his merits in the cause of philosophy, as his contemporaries were in denying his worth as a citizen, and imputing to him imaginary offences against the commonwealth. But this would render it necessary to ascertain somewhat more distinctly, wherein his philosophical merit consists.
But this new inquiry naturally leads us back in the first instance to the old question, whether we are to believe Plato or Xenophon in their accounts of what Socrates was ; a ques- tion, however, which only deserves to be proposed at all, so far as these two authors are really at variance with each other, and which therefore only admits of a rational answer, after it has been decided whether such a variance exists, and where it lies. Plato nowhere professes himself the historian of Socrates; with the exception perhaps of the Apology, and of insulated passages, such as the speech of Alcibiades in the Banquet. For it would certainly have been in bad taste, if here, where Plato is making contemporaries of Socrates speak of him in his presence, he had exhibited him in a manner that was not substantially faithful, though even here many of the details may have been introduced for the sake of playful exaggeration. On the other hand, Plato himself does not warrant any one to consider all that he makes Socrates say in his dialogues, asi his real thoughts and language; and it would be rendering him but a poor service to confine his merit to that of having given a correct and skilful report of the doctrines of Socrates. On the contrary, he undoubtedly means his philosophy to
