PLATO 601 became more thoroughly conversant with the tenets of that philosophy. Hence in part probably his fondness for mathematical phys- ics, for mythical and allegorical imagery, and possibly for political speculation, while its fun- damental doctrine of unity developing itself in multiplicity furnished an admirable solution of the conflict between the Eleatic and the Heraclitan doctrines. Plato's general mode of philosophizing was in antiquity regarded as strongly Pythagorean. After about 12 years of foreign residence and travel he returned to Athens, and opened a school in his garden near the Academy, where he expounded his doc- trines in conversation and formal lectures to a large number of pupils, among whom were women disguised as men. He also devoted a portion of his time to composing and revising his works. His life thus flowed on in an even tenor, broken only by two visits to Syracuse, neither of them attended by very flattering results. One was made apparently in the vain hope of realizing through the newly crowned younger Dionysius his ideal republic. Plato never married, never mingled in public affairs, and seems to have regarded the constitution and character of his native city with disfavor and almost despair. He spent a tranquil old age, his mental faculties to the last scarcely perceptibly decayed. The writings of Plato have come down to us in a state of unusual completeness and purity. The genuineness of many of the pieces which bear his name has been disputed, but in the case of most of them with little approach to unanimity on the part of the assailants, A few of the smaller pieces, together with the letters, are undoubtedly spu- rious, but the genuineness of all the more im- portant works there is no good reason to doubt. They are all in the form of dialogues ; in near- ly all Socrates is the chief speaker, and the exponent of the author's sentiments. Their composition extended over a large part of his life, and they are probably to be regarded rather as marking different stages of his philo- sophical development, than as expositions of a perfectly matured and rounded system. The methods of philosophy Plato seems to have settled with great definiteness; but in regard to the subject matter to which those methods were applicable, he to the last regarded him- self as an inquirer. Numerous attempts have been made to arrange his dialogues on some clear principle of classification, either logical or chronological. Aristophanes of Byzantium arranged a part of them together in trilogies ; and Thrasyllus, in the time of Tiberius, divi- ded the whole number into tetralogies, which arrangement has been adopted by K. F. Her- mann in his edition of Plato's works (1851). No one of these plans or modes of arrange- ment, however, has been entirely successful or acceptable to scholars. The dialogues bear no clear internal marks of the time when they were written, and they usually admit no sharp division according to their contents. We may perhaps most satisfactorily class them accord- ing to the leading epochs in the life of Plato. Thus some of the smaller dialogues on specific ethical points may be referred to his first or more strictly Socratic period. To his residence in Megara we may refer, doubtless, the noble tetralogy of " Theeetetus," the " Sophist," the Statesman,' 1 and "Parmenides;" and finally, to the period of his establishment in the Acad- emy those noble compositions, " Phsedrus," the "Symposium," "Gorgias," "Phgedo," "Phi- lebus," the "Republic," " Timseus," and the "Laws;" though in what order it is impossi- ble to decide, except that we may naturally re- gard "Phaedrus" as the earliest work of this period, while the "Laws," by unanimous con- sent, is among the latest. Plato is one of the most fascinating writers that ever undertook to expound the enigmas of philosophy. He spreads the charms of an exhaustless fancy over the subtlest controversies of the dialecti- cian. He is at once poet and philosopher, with no small measure of the sweet flow of diction, the richness of invention, the exuberant im- agery, the never failing vivacity, and we may add the garrulity, of Homer. One of the high- est charms of his writings is their thorough- ly dramatic character ; they are dialogues not merely in form but in spirit. A light, buoyant humor, irony, sarcasm, banter, now broad and now delicate, picturesque illustration, and occa- sionally elaborate and gorgeous fable, alternate with and relieve the stern dialectical processes. It is necessary to any exposition of the phi- losophy of Plato to keep in -view his historical position. The field of science had received as yet no formal divisions, but the several schools before Socrates had, each for itself, sought to solve the problem of universal being. Socrates discarded the whole body of these speculations as aiming at what was unattainable, and worth- less if attained. He threw himself entirely on questions of political and personal morality, as those which alone had an immediate interest for man, and investigated these by that search- ing process of question and answer in which he sought to draw forth an exact conception of the subject, and to distinguish it from all related or unrelated ideas. Definition and generalization were the essential elements of the Socratic method, which Plato adopted to the full and developed scientifically. But he readmitted those elements of speculation which Socrates had discarded, bringing to bear upon them his new dialectical weapons, and thus made his system the embodiment and repre- sentative of all the wisdom of his time. Plato makes no formal division of science. He evi- dently, however, regards it substantially under the threefold division of dialectics, physics, and ethics or politics. Dialectics, which with Aristotle became the mere instrument of sci- ence, logic, was with Plato the science of sciences, the science of absolute being. Phys- ics and ethics are sciences only so far as they connect themselves with dialectics. Strictly
