This etext was produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.
1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion: 5-262. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest: 27-503. Plato and the Doctrine of Number: 51-744. Plato and Socrates: 75-985. Plato and the Sophists: 99-1236. The Genius of Plato: 124-1497. The Doctrine of Plato—I. The Theory of Ideas: 150-173II. Dialectic: 174-1968. Lacedaemon: 197-2349. The Republic: 235-26610. Plato's Aesthetics: 267-283, end
[5] WITH the world of intellectual production, as with that of organicgeneration, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura nihil facit persaltum; and in the history of philosophy there are no absolutebeginnings. Fix where we may the origin of this or that doctrine oridea, the doctrine of "reminiscence," for instance, or of "theperpetual flux," the theory of "induction," or the philosophic view ofthings generally, the specialist will still be able to find us someearlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. The mostelementary act of mental analysis takes time to do; the mostrudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so simple thatwe can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow, and withdifficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation,its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerfulgeneralisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as [6] that ofHeraclitus—"Panta rhei,"+ all things fleet away—may startle aparticular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because allalong its root was somewhere among the natural though but half-developed instincts of the human mind itself.
Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator ofphilosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude orturbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or theEleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophicalliterature. His encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge ismore than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, forcompass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato'sachievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning ofthe mind's history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into wasalready almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by theoppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and theprocesses of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air hebreathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.
In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures lessas the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic ofolder ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory.And as we find there a [7] sort of storehouse of all physical theories,so in reading the Parmenides we might think that all metaphysicalquestions whatever had already passed through the mind of Plato. Someof the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone,are of the structure of his philosophy. They are everywhere in it, notas the stray carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here orthere amid the new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organiclife in the very stone he builds with. The central and most intimateprinciples of his teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, notmerely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master—to Socrates,who survives chiefly in his pages—but to various precedent schools ofspeculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these intothat age of poetry, in which the fir