John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XI - Essays on Philosophy and the Classics [1828]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XI - Essays on Philosophy and the Classics, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by F.E. Sparshott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

Author: John Stuart Mill

Editor: John M. Robson

Introduction: Francis Edward Sparshott

About this title:

Vol. 11 of the 33 vol. Collected Works contains a number of Mill’s essays on philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, and the history of Greece.

Copyright information:

The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.

Fair use statement:

This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.

LIBERTY FUND, INC.

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, non-profit, educational foundation established in 1960 by Pierre F. Goodrich to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. The Foundation develops, supervises, and finances its own educational activities to foster thought and encourage discourse on the nature of individual liberty, limited and constitutional government, the free market, and peace. This is done through the implementation of different programs such as:

conducting each year over 150 conferences throughout the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Europe.

publishing about 12 - often classic - books each year. There is an online catalog [external link] where these books can be ordered.

producing video and audio tapes including The Intellectual Portrait Series of videotapes and video DVDs which record conversations with some of the most significant thinkers of our time. The DVDs of this series can be purchased from the online catalog [external link].

hosting websites such as the Library of Economics and Liberty (Econlib) [external link], the Online Library of Liberty (OLL) [external link], and The Library of Law and Liberty [external link].

These programs focus on the place individual liberty has in an intellectual heritage evident from ancient times and continuing through to the present. The programs are intended to enrich understanding and appreciation of the complex nature of a society of free and responsible individuals and to contribute to its preservation.

As a tax-exempt, private operating foundation, Liberty Fund’s purposes are educational. It does not, therefore, engage in political action of any kind. It fulfills its mission by conducting programs, not by awarding grants to outside organizations or individuals.

For more information, please visit Liberty Fund’s main web site at www.libertyfund.org or the Online Library of Liberty at oll.libertyfund.org.

The cuneiform inscription that appears in the logo and serves as a design element in all Liberty Fund books and websites is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash.

LIBERTY FUND, INC.
8335 Allison Pointe Trail, Suite 300
Indianapolis, Indiana 46250-1684
U.S.A.
Phone no.: 1.800.955.8335

THE ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY

The text you are currently reading comes from Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty (OLL) oll.libertyfund.org. The OLL was established in 2004 in order to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc, namely "to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals". It is a multi-award winning website which makes available at no charge to the public outstanding resources for teaching and learning about the humanities and the social sciences.

The OLL website contains the following material and resources:

AUTHORS

The works of hundreds of authors from Ancient Sumeria to the present are represented. They are organized by author, historical period, and schools of thought. The latter includes the French Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers, 19th century natural rights theorists, the Austrian School of Economics, and many others.

TITLES

The OLL contains over 1,400 volumes in multiple formats which are organized by subject areas, topics, and debates. Highlights include the complete scholarly editions of the works of David Ricardo, J.S. Mill, Frédéric Bastiat; the collected works of Jefferson, Madison, J. Adams, & many others; and over 200 titles published by Liberty Fund.

LIBERTY MATTERS ONLINE FORUM

Every two months the OLL hosts Liberty Matters, an online forum for scholars to discuss the significance of some of the key works in the OLL collection. A lead article on the topic is posted which is followed by 3 or more response essays and then open debate. Topics covered so far include Eric Mack on "John Locke on Property," Geoffrey Brennan on "James Buchanan: An Assessment," and Roderick Long on “Gustave de Molinari’s Legacy for Liberty”.

AUDIO/VIDEO

The OLL contains in mp3 format interviews with 26 scholars from the Intellectual Portrait Series: Conversations with Leading Classical Liberal Figures of Our Time (also available in DVD). These include interviews with leading political theorists and economists such as Armen A. Alchian, James M. Buchanan, Milton Friedman, and Anthony de Jasay. There is also a series of lectures on The Legacy of Friedrich Hayek.

EPUB & KINDLE FORMATS OF OUR TITLES

Most OLL titles are available in ePub and Kindle formats designed to be read on portable reading devices. Two special collections are The Best of Bastiat and The Best of the OLL which are designed for use in the classroom. The latter collection includes classic works by Hume, Mill, Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Kirzner and many others.

SEARCHING

A powerful search engine enables the user to search all books, all works in a given subject area, all the works by a particular author, all the works in a collection, or just one book! Search filters allow you to limit searches by various categories & the results show the full paragraph in which the search term is located. For example, you can search all 32 volumes of the collected works of John Stuart Mill for every occurrence of the phrase “perfect freedom.” [Note: there are 23 occurrences of the phrase.]

RESOURCES FOR TEACHERS

The OLL contains many resources to use in teaching and learning about Liberty, such as biographies, bibliographies, timelines, reading lists, essays, key documents. Most of these can be found in The Forum section of the OLL. Of special note are our collections “The Best of the OLL” and “The Best of Bastiat” which contain chapter length extracts in convenient pamphlet format [PDF, ePub, and Kindle].

QUOTATIONS ABOUT LIBERTY AND POWER

Each week a new quote is added to the front page of the OLL. It highlights a key idea about liberty or power by one of our authors. The collection now totals over 400 quotes which are categorized by topics such as free trade, money, abolition, law, literature, politics, war & peace, despots, etc.

IMAGES OF LIBERTY AND POWER

In this collection of images we explore the sometimes hidden political meanings and references contained in portraits, etchings, caricatures, title pages of books, and other images. We have examined so far a comparison of portraits of George Washington and Napoleon, propaganda of the anti-slavery movement, the etchings made by the Earl of Shaftesbury, James Gillray on war and taxes during the War against Napoleon, and ration books and government propaganda in WW2.

LIBERTY FUND BOOKS

Many of the books published by Liberty Fund are also available online at the OLL website. See a complete selection visit the online book catalogue. [External link]

Awards

The OLL has won a number of international awards for its outstanding collection of online material in the humanities and social sciences. It has been recognised by

the Library of Congress for its Minerva archiving project

the National Endowment for the Humanities

the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, and

the International Political Science Association.

THE PORTABLE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY

The Portable Library of Liberty (PLL) is a data DVD which, in version 7.0 (September 23, 2018), contains 1,088 titles in various E-Book formats (text-based PDF, ePub, and Kindle/Mobi) drawn from Liberty Fund’s web site, The Online Library of Liberty (OLL) . The main Web site [http://oll.libertyfund.org] also has the titles in additional formats, such as a facsimile PDF version so scholars can see what the original looked like, an HTML version for searching and ease of use, and a variety of eBook versions such as text-based PDF, ePub, and Kindle.

The books on the PLL DVD are designed to be read on both computers and handheld reading devices like the iPad, the Nook, or the Kindle. The EBook PDFs can be read within a web browser by using a plugin such as Adobe’s PDF Reader or they can be opened and read in a stand-alone PDF reader such as Adobe’s Acrobat Reader (a free download) or Apple’s Preview. Many handheld devices can also read PDFs (such as the iPad). The ePub and Kindle versions can be read on a variety of devices. The ePub format has been widely adopted by device manufacturers, except for the Kindle which is limited to the Mobi format. Other devices, such as the iPad can also read Kindle formatted texts when a Kindle reader app has been installed.

Liberty Fund encourages the use of these texts for academic and educational purposes as long as due regard is given to the copyright and fair use conditions stated below as well as on the front page of each title, and as long as proper attribution is given to Liberty Fund’s website or DVD as the source of this material when it is cited.

Request a complimentary copy of the Portable Library of Liberty DVD by emailing the editor at [oll@libertyfund.org]. Please include your postal address so the DVD can be shipped to you.

Copyright symbol Copyright and Fair Use Statement

There are four different types of texts which Liberty Fund has put online as part of the Online Library of Liberty:

public domain texts published before 1923. These texts are no longer under copyright and are in the public domain. We have put them online in order to further the educational aims of Liberty Fund.

texts to which the Liberty Fund has electronic rights, such as the books published by Liberty Fund in both print and various electronic formats

other texts to which Liberty Fund has acquired the electronic rights from third parties, such as the journal Literature of Liberty (from the Institute for Humane Studies)

titles which are put online under license from third parties, such as the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

For titles in the first three categories listed above, no special permission from Liberty Fund is required for quoting material in papers and essays, or for limited photocopying and distribution for academic or other educational or non-profit purposes. The only requirements are that you include proper attribution on the first page of the document being distributed - e.g. for John Locke’s The Two Treatises of Government you would say either of the following:

if using the OLL website - "This material originally appeared on the Online Library of Liberty hosted by Liberty Fund, Inc. URL: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/222 and accessed on 2010-01-22." This information can be found in the "Citation" button on the title’s table of contents page.

or if using the copy on the PLL DVD - "This material originally appeared in the Portable Library of Liberty published by Liberty Fund, Inc. URL: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/222 and PLL v7.0 (generated September 23, 2013)." This information can be found in the footer of the EBook PDF or the title page of the ePub.

or if using the ePub version on a portable reading device: "This material is part of the collection of ePub titles in the Online Library of Liberty website hosted by Liberty Fund, Inc. Source Text URL http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/222 accessed on 2013-04-20." This information can be found on the "Introduction to the Book" page in this file.

For titles in category two and three, any reprint of material "for profit", such as a chapter or a substantial section of an online book for inclusion in a book or other publication for sale, requires written permission from Liberty Fund.

For titles in the fourth category you must follow the specific requirements of the copyright holder whose work we publish online under license. In the case of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill published under license from the University of Toronto Press, for reprint or copying permission you need to contact the University of Toronto Press directly. Under our contractual obligations with the University of Toronto Press we have placed the following declaration on the front page of every book and section of the online version of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill:

The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.

Thus, for reprint or copying permission you need to contact the University of Toronto Press directly. Liberty Fund cannot grant you this permission because it is not the copyright holder.

Specific copyright information for each title can be found on the information page for that book.

The Collected Edition of the works of John Stuart Mill has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee appointed from the Faculty of Arts and Science of the University of Toronto, and from the University of Toronto Press. The primary aim of the edition is to present fully collated texts of those works which exist in a number of versions, both printed and manuscript, and to provide accurate texts of works previously unpublished or which have become relatively inaccessible.

Editorial Committee

j. m. robson,General Editor

v. w. bladen, alexander brady, j. cairns

j. b. conacher, d. p. dryer, francess halpenny

s. hollander, m. jean houston, m. jeanneret

f. r. mcrae, f. e. l. priestley

Introduction

F. E. SPARSHOTT

compilers of collected works must garner the rough with the smooth, and a volume that consists largely of book reviews must be expected to hold much that has turned to no such aureate earth as, buried once, men want dug up again. But Mill did not share this expectation. Such zombies as his massive reviews of Grote were called up to walk the pages of Dissertations and Discussions. The quality of the works reviewed here tends to justify the disinterment: of them all, perhaps only those of William Smith and Gustav Wiggers have quite dropped out of scholarly sight. Grote’s Greece and Plato, Fraser’s Berkeley, and Whately’s Logic hold their places on our shelves, though we leave them there to gather undisturbed their kindred dust.

I propose to introduce this gallimaufry disjointedly, saying a little about the background of each component in turn, though not quite in the chronological order, spanning more than four decades, in which they are printed here. It will be seen that some themes recur; but it seems idle to pretend to impose a systematic order on these mostly occasional pieces.

WHATELY AND FORMAL LOGIC

of all the writings reprinted here, the review of Whately has attracted most attention from commentators, both for its intrinsic interest and as a forerunner of the System of Logic. Alexander Bain called it “a landmark not merely in the history of [Mill’s] own mind, but in the history of logic.” Yet Mill himself exempted it from the general resurrection in Dissertations and Discussions. Why? Partly, no doubt, because it was superseded by the System of Logic: of the works in this volume that Mill did reprint, none falls within the scope of a later treatise. Whately was only one of a series of logicians whose work Mill discussed in 1827 with that “Society of Students of Mental Philosophy” which had begun to meet at the Grotes’ in Threadneedle Street two years before; and it was from those discussions that the opening books of the Logic began. But the Whately review was not merely superseded; in the one place in the Logic where he cites this earlier work, Mill describes it as “containing some opinions which I no longer entertain,” And Kubitz suggests that the main reason for not reprinting the article was that he had recanted its views on the significance of deductive method. The scope of this recantation, which went with a reversal in his views on the possibility of an inductive logic, will occupy us shortly. But the decisive factor could have been one that had little to do with any shift in doctrine. For Mill, perhaps more than for most reviewers even in that polemical age, a review was a political act, serving to encourage or chasten the righteous and to dismay the adversary. In 1831 Whately was “one of the fittest men in the country to hold a high station in a national church such as I conceive it should be”; but by the time the first two volumes of Dissertations and Discussions were published in 1859, though Bailey, Grote, and Bain were still around to be admonished and cheered, Whately as Archbishop of Dublin had long confined his activities to spheres where reviewers could neither help nor harm.

Mill’s failure to reprint the Whately review, however explained, must be regretted by his posthumous friends. His reputation as a logician has suffered among the philosophical laity because the doctrine of the syllogism developed in the Logic has been taken for a general theory of syllogistic logic as such. Mill’s belated care in distinguishing the logic of truth from the logic of consistency, and his insistence that only the former concerns him, has not compensated for his failure to provide a coherent exposition of the latter; in fact, he seems to blend an exposition of syllogistic in terms of consistency with a justification in terms of truth. But the Whately review makes it clear that Mill understood the nature and value of formal logic as a study of the form of valid arguments and a device for testing them. In fact, his vindication of this study against its recent neglect is couched in terms rather like those used by careless readers nowadays against his own Logic. But though this vindication saves Mill’s popular credit by giving meaning to the provisos with which the doctrine of the Logic is hedged, it does not explain that doctrine itself. If syllogism is proper to the analysis of proofs, why should it figure at all in an account of discovery? An examination of Whately’s book yields a possible answer.

Mill’s polemic (5-6 below) against those who supposed there could be a separate inductive logic (as opposed to procedural rules for inductions) is a reflection of Whately’s own arguments. Syllogism, he urged, is the unique form of valid argument. Therefore induction, in so far as it is a form of argument, must be syllogistic; in so far as it is not syllogistic it cannot be a form of argument at all, but a mere process of inquiry that as such must fall outside the scope of logic. An inductive argument is nothing but a syllogism in barbara with the suppressed major premise: “What belongs to the individual or individuals we have examined, belongs to the whole class under which they come.” So now we have two syllogisms, an inductive one:

Mortality is a property of Socrates and Coriscus

All properties of Socrates and Coriscus are properties of all men

--------------------

Mortality is a property of all men;

and a deductive one:

All men are mortal

The Iron Duke is a man

--------------------

The Iron Duke is mortal.

But the deductive one merely carries out a decision, or exemplifies a commitment, we made in the inductive one—and the decision is the implausibly sweeping one that whatever is true of the men we know is probably true of all men (and hence of Wellington).

The position implied by this move of Whately’s, and apparently endorsed by Mill, is a very strange one. Inductive reasoning is subsumed under the logic of consistency, and the consistency required is that of abiding by the commitment made in the extravagant major premise of the inductive syllogism. But all this syllogistic machinery is quite useless: if in any case we are going to start with Coriscus and his friends, and end up with Arthur Wellesley, there is no point in making a detour through “all men.” Accordingly, Mill was to write in the Logic (CW, VII, 162) that in “Reasoning or Inference properly so called,” “We set out from known truths, to arrive at others really distinct from them.” Small wonder, then, that he did not reprint the Whately review, in which he proclaimed the impossibility of the condition on which the Logic was to be constructed, and excluded from the proper sphere of logic the whole of “Reasoning or Inference properly so called”!

But it was a serious and genuine impasse that confronted Whately and the young Mill alike. Whately observes: “The justly celebrated author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric, and many others, have objected to the syllogism altogether, as necessarily involving a petitio principii; an objection which, of course, he would not have been disposed to bring forward, had he perceived that, whether well or ill-founded, it lies against all arguments whatever.” Well, perhaps; but the consequence—with which Whately in the ensuing pages vainly grapples—is either to expel reasoning from the province of discovery or to reduce discovery to the rearrangement of terms. It was precisely for freeing logicians from this impasse that the doctrine of the syllogism in Mill’s Logic was to be praised by Whewell. Mill’s final solution, in which all real reasoning is from particulars to particulars, amounts to saying that the appearance of syllogism in the processes of reasoning is only an appearance. What looks like a major premise (“All men are mortal”) is really no such thing: it is only a sort of aide-mémoire, serving two purposes. It reminds us that a number of objects have been examined and found both human and mortal, and registers a decision to let these examined cases stand as sufficient evidence for the inference that, when anything else is found to be human, it can be expected to be perishable. If syllogisms are what formal logic studies, this is not syllogism but pseudo-syllogism, for the warrant for an inference is not the same as a premise in an argument. Unfortunately, Mill had not emancipated himself sufficiently from Whately and company to make this distinction clear. William Kneale seems to be right in tracing the difficulties in Mill’s account to his “failure to realize the incompatibility of a good new insight with a bad old tradition in which he had been educated.” But Kneale seems not to have attended to quite the relevant parts of the bad tradition—his book does not mention Whately at all—and allows himself to be baffled by Mill’s contention that the major premise of a syllogism can serve two purposes: a contention which, we have seen, becomes intelligible when it is seen as the solution to a problem posed by Whately and his peers.

The story I have now unfolded is not the whole story. Mill had begun studying logic ten years before, at the age of twelve, not with Aldrich and Whately’s other predecessors as text-book writers, but with Aristotle’s Organon, accompanied by the scholastics whom he extols in his review, and followed by Hobbes. And it could have been from Aristotle that he learned how different a syllogism in investigation could be from a syllogism in analysis. But he shows no sign of having noted what Aristotle has to say about syllogisms in investigation. To turn from Whately to the Posterior Analytics is to enter a different and saner world, in which the conclusion of a scientific syllogism is not a proposition like “The Duke of Wellington is mortal” but one like “The moon suffers eclipse,” and the inquiry which it concludes does not take the form of discovering classes to which its subject belongs but that of discovering causal relations in which it is involved. The “discovery of middle terms” is not the unfolding of a system of class-inclusions (Wellington is a Duke, is a Briton, is a man, is a mammal, is an animal), but a reference to “the failure of light through the earth’s shutting it out,” involving the discovery that the moon is a body shining by reflected light and the means of that light’s occlusion. And the conclusion is not so much “Thus we may infer that the moon will undergo eclipse” as “So that explains why it is that the moon undergoes eclipse.” The eclipse of the moon, whose occurrence is affirmed in the conclusion, is neither datum nor discovery, but problem. Science is conceived not as observing and classifying individuals, but as probing the workings of systems and mechanisms. Kneale, very reasonably, asks why Mill even ignores the possibility that a major premise might state a connection of attributes rather than record a summary of cases. But apparently he does ignore it. This whole side of Aristotle’s logic must have seemed to him meaningless or hopelessly archaic. Why? Part of the reason appears in what he says in the Logic about propositions: “The first glance at a proposition shows that it is formed by putting together two names” (CW, VII, 21). It is true that syllogistic logic relies on the supposed reducibility of any proposition to the copulation of two terms, but that is a far cry from asserting that every proposition is evidently composed of two names. Why “names”? Why two? In what sense “putting together”? This unintelligible assertion harks back to the theory of language attempted by Hobbes; in Mill’s time it must have seemed very antiquated indeed. But Mill, like many revolutionaries—the men of Thermidor saw themselves as ancient Romans; Mazzini slept with Tacitus under his pillow—was in some things very old-fashioned, using the far past as a lever to unseat the near past, as his passionate Graecophilia and the defiant championing of the school logic sufficiently attest. After all, what made his father the apostle of progress in psychology was his revival of Hartley against the new-fangled Germanism. To this defiant antiquarianism belongs the Locke-like atomism of the doctrine of propositions, with the analogous reductivism that makes all reasoning go from particulars to particulars and also, in the controversy with Bailey, the inability to come to terms with any treatment of the facts of vision that does not reduce them to the association of simple percepts. A recent book argues persuasively that the whole of Mill’s philosophical activity is designed to subsume all subject matters under a single method, analysing them into components that retain their identity and are linked (like “names” in a proposition) in a merely mechanical unity by relations of addition and subtraction. This claim is so far true that, as we shall see later, Mill uses the analogy of chemical combination, in which compounds have properties not derivable from those of their admitted elements, to justify his insistence that such an analysis shall be deemed performable even in cases where it cannot in fact be carried through. If this was indeed his ambition, it seems one more proper to the seventeenth century than to the nineteenth.

The retention of an appearance of duplication in the logics of truth and of consistency, with what looks like the same syllogistic form prevailing in both, is more than merely a hangover from Whately’s theory of induction. Something like it seems to be required by the contention that logic is an art as well as a science. This is a point on which Mill endorses Whately’s position against Hamilton; and in Whately it may well reflect the systematic preoccupations of the compilers of the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, who placed his article in Part I among the pure sciences, separated by a great distance from the arts and applied sciences of Part IV among which Whately conceded that his contemporaries might have expected to find it. But of what is logic the art?

Logic . . . may be considered as the Science, and also as the Art, of reasoning. It investigates the principles on which argumentation is conducted, and furnishes rules to secure the mind from error in its deductions. Its most appropriate office, however, is that of instituting an analysis of the process of the mind in Reasoning; and in this point of view it is, as has been stated, strictly a Science: while, considered in reference to the practical rules above mentioned, it may be called the Art of reasoning.

Mill’s review (8-9) contains the materials for a different account, according to which the science of logic would lie in the analysis of the principles whereby arguments are determined to be valid, and the art would lie in the use of these principles to evaluate arguments; but in the end, while repudiating the “commonsense” tradition that would equate logic with a sort of mental hygiene, he slips like Whately into making the art of logic the art of reasoning. But if that is what logic is, and if true reasoning must lead to new knowledge, and if the rules of an art and the doctrines of the corresponding science differ only in that the art determines the end to which the science establishes the means, and yet the syllogism (on which the science of logic depends) can never lead to new knowledge, we are landed in an impasse from which only desperate measures could free us. Such a desperate measure might be Mill’s device whereby the logic of truth is constructed on the basis of something that looks like syllogism but really is not.

Syllogistic logic, though not so formulated by its inventor, only works smoothly if stated in terms of class-membership and class-inclusion. It is thus especially suited to Mill’s preferred nominalistic metaphysics of juxtaposed particulars. Whately, who preferred to speak in terms of “essences,” is rightly censured by Mill for the appalling mess he made of the doctrine of predicables. As Mill says (3), he was better talking about logic than expounding logic itself, and posterity has assented to Mill’s later judgment that his distinction lay not in any contribution to logical theory, but in doing “more than any other person to restore this study to the rank from which it had fallen in the estimation of the cultivated class in our own country.” His qualities of mind were better shown in training his spaniel to climb a tree before an admiring audience in Christ Church Meadows, and to dive thence into the Cherwell, than in ordering coherently the relations of term, proposition, and argument. In fact, as Mill hints, the offending exposition of the predicables was cribbed word-for-word from the Latin of the wretched Aldrich. Mill’s own account of the matter in his review, confessedly a restatement of traditional doctrine in terms of a purified nominalism, is admirably clear, precise, and consistent.

The saving nominalism that brought light to the murk of the predicables is also responsible for the major positive contribution of Mill’s review, his scouting of Whately’s familiar and superficially plausible but ultimately unworkable distinction between nominal and real definitions (27-8). All definitions, he says, define verbal expressions, but some are and some are not accompanied by the claim that the defined term stands for an existent. This laying of an ancient ghost, the only passage retained and quoted in the Logic, was historically of decisive importance. Even the Archbishop saw the light; by the eighth edition, scarcely a trace of the offending doctrine is allowed to remain. By this time, too, Whately is apologizing for and virtually dissociating himself from the doctrine of predicables, in terms that can be explained only by supposing that he had studied Mill’s animadversions and appreciated their justice.

Whately’s treatment of fallacies departs from his forerunners’ and accords with modern pedagogical practice in seeking to relate logical analysis to the kinds of arguments and subject matters encountered in the world at large. But Mill’s praise of this treatment as abounding with “apt examples and illustrations drawn from almost all the most interesting subjects in the range of human knowledge” (29-30) might mislead a modern reader. As a man of the cloth. Whately takes a third of his examples—43 out of 119, on a rough count—from theological controversy. This may be more than personal predilection. In theology, where observation can do so little, one has to reason a priori, and the place of deduction is assured. In the sciences, where reality keeps creeping in, reasoning a posteriori can hardly be resisted; and the total lack of interest in theology, so untypical of his place and time, that Mill avowed in later life may go far to explain why he never wrote the handbook on traditional formal logic that at the age of twenty-one he showed himself so well equipped to compile.

Mill’s long and powerful vindication of logical analysis (5-14), with which nothing in the Logic is at variance, is followed by an assertion with which the Logic seems more at odds: “The province of reasoning in the investigation of truth is immense.” For by “reasoning” here he means that strictly deductive argumentation which he was later to stigmatize as mere verbal rearrangement and hence not worthy of the name of reasoning at all. This deductive element, described as playing a dominant part in every science but chemistry and physiology (14), is in fact mathematics, which one must admit does not look much like that reasoning based on the dictum de omni et nullo to which Mill’s argument would require its reduction. Alan Ryan ascribes this vindication of deductive reasoning in part to a desire to show the importance of systematic reasoning in economics, in part (following the lead of the Autobiography, 94-7) to a wish to champion his father’s aprioristic Essay on Government against Macaulay’s empiricist critique; but probably the main reason why Mill says it is that it is plainly true. But it does pose a problem, to which Mill felt he lacked the solution. Since geometry deduces unexpected conclusions from its axioms and definitions (33), deduction must be able to serve as a heuristic device. But how can it be so? What is deduced from premises must be contained in them, so that what one seems to discover must be what one in some sense already knew without knowing it. The 1828 solution to this difficulty, which is that one might have failed to put two and two together, seemed to leave “a mist still hanging over the subject” (Autobiography, 109); it was in 1830-31, the Autobiography tells us, that reflection on Dugald Stewart led him to the realization, expressed in the Logic, that in scientific reasoning it is the general propositions themselves that are the heuristic devices, the nerve of the reasoning lying always in the progression from particular cases to particular cases. With this fateful step comes a repudiation of the pure nominalism adumbrated in 1828: class-membership and class-inclusion as the basic relations in syllogism are rejected in favour of the transitive relation of being-a-mark-of, and geometry becomes in effect the methodology of engineering. But, of course, the transitivity of being-a-mark-of is useful in investigation only if there are real kinds in nature. As we remarked in discussing the predicables, formal logic must treat classifications as arbitrary; but arbitrary classifications are heuristically null. It follows that a logic of investigation must repudiate formal logic. And that is what the Logic does.

If contemporary notions of formal logic are correct, Mill had a juster and clearer view of the matter in 1828 than appears in the Logic. The young whippersnapper was justified in the arrogance he showed in his censure of a rival critic: “A good critic on Whately should have laid down as a standard of comparison, the best existing or the best conceivable exposition of the science, & examined how far Whately’s book possesses the properties which should belong to that.” Mill clearly implies that his own recently-published review had shown him able to do what George Bentham had failed to do. And he was right. But it is a mistake to think of the Logic as a giant stride in the wrong direction. The Logic had to turn its back on the logic of consistency in order to devote itself to the logic of truth. Even the notorious account of mathematics becomes less scandalous if one sees it as sketching a mathematics of truth rather than of consistency. The issues remain vexed to this day. Jevons’s much-quoted remark that “Mill’s mind was essentially illogical” was at best a half-truth. He had the talent but lacked the will. At twenty-one he was already in a position to expound, organize, restore, and clarify the traditional formal logic, and intended to do so. A year or two later he decided to do something else instead.

Mill lived to see the beginnings of the great revival of formal logic that has marked so deeply the face of philosophy in the last century. In this revival he took no part, partly for the reasons we have seen and partly no doubt because formal logic is a young man’s game. What is more surprising is that he did not approve of it. It was too complicated. Logic was a necessary art, and therefore should be plain and simple, as Whately’s had been. The elaboration of formal calculi was a distraction from the serious business of the mind. But that, after all, is the sort of thing elderly savants usually say about what the bright young men are doing.

THE PLATO VERSIONS

mill “was, quite as much as Grote, a Greece-intoxicated man”; and, unlike the historian, had twice tasted the intoxicant himself, travelling the country from end to end. Two aspects of the Greek past he found especially heady: Athenian democracy and Platonic philosophy. His first public testimony to the latter infatuation was the series of “Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato” published in the Monthly Repository in 1834-35. The origin of these notes—ill-named, since they are in fact translations with relatively minor omissions and comments —is obscure. He tells Carlyle they were written “long ago,” and says in his Autobiography that they were written “several years earlier” than their publication. But when and why were they written? The paper on which the unpublished ones were written is almost all watermarked 1828 (a few sheets being 1825), which provides a terminus post quem at least for these copies. Richard Garnett, who had access to W. J. Fox’s correspondence as editor of the Repository, seems to date them to 1830, but this appears to be a mistake. Packe (136) puts them “probably after his depression of 1826, when he was attempting to rescue Greek humanism and the Socratic method of analysis from the ruins of his father’s teaching,” but this is only a guess, and if they played an important part in his therapy it is strange that a fact so germane to the theme of his Autobiography should not be mentioned there. He says (42) they were made for his own satisfaction; but why? An accomplished Greek scholar, as Mill was, might make a translation to settle the meaning of a text in his own mind; but even those that were never printed are written in a manner that suggests an intended public other than the writer himself. Mill’s complaint (39-40) about the contemporary state of Platonic studies in England would justify the publication of all nine versions in book form, but if that was intended one does not see why it was not done—there was no improvement in the situation to make the need less pressing. But if they were meant neither for the public nor for Mill himself, for whom? Possibly for his siblings, for whose education he maintained a lively concern. The only other likely person who might profit from such reading and evoke the labour of preparing it would be the fascinating and brilliant but imperfectly educated Mrs. Taylor, whom Mill met in 1830, the date putatively assigned to the translations by Garnett. But Mill says they were already old when she saw them.

Why were these nine dialogues selected for translation? There need be no answer, for Mill may have meant to do more, but he suggests one (adapted from Schleiermacher): they are those dialogues of manageable length in which we observe in action “the service rendered to philosophy by Socrates” in advancing the methodology of the moral sciences (41). Socrates appears in them not as teacher but as debater, or (in the Apology) as champion of his methods in debate, and concerned with political and moral questions rather than with the natural sciences. Such a selection would suit Mill’s lifelong preoccupation, already clearly marked, with the need for a methodical science and philosophy of practice. Like his praise of the unfashionable scholastics in the Whately review, his rescue of the unfashionable sceptic from the fashionable dogmatist and dreamer in Plato belongs to a campaign to resurrect the methodical and empirical side of all western thought. That this was the basis of selection is confirmed by Mill’s practice of omitting or summarizing those passages in which Plato forsakes the presentation of argument for the description of action, and faithfully rendering all the logic-chopping. If I had begun a series of translations thus motivated I would have begun with the Meno and would have done the Crito before the Laches; but omissions mean nothing.

A different ground of selection, however, gives an even closer fit. Mill’s title refers to “Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato.” This gives us pause. In what sense can the Parmenides have been “more popular” than, say, the Symposium? The only plausible answer is to be found in Schleiermacher’s attempt to establish both a canon and a systematic order (supposed, with dire effects on the Platonic scholarship of the following decades, to coincide with the order of composition) for Plato’s output. Schleiermacher divided the corpus into three groups, each with an appendix of minor works. With one exception, the dialogues translated by Mill constitute the whole of Schleiermacher’s first, or “elementary” group, plus the Apology, the first dialogue in its appendix. The one exception, the Gorgias, is the first of the second (“preparatory”) group, but its insistence on the distinction between art and mere practice makes it so central to Mill’s concerns as to explain its being taken out of order.

Whatever its source, Mill’s choice of dialogues was probably not based on a direct study of Schleiermacher’s Introduction. Though Mill claims to have learned German around 1825, there is little evidence that he often exercised this skill, and he never cites Schleiermacher otherwise than in Thirlwall’s translations. The introductory note to the Protagoras attributes to Schleiermacher the view that the value of the Socratic dialogues lies in their method of inquiry, and not in any results that the discussion may reach or (more typically) fail to reach (41; compare the note on the Phædrus, 62). But this note, like the corresponding notes to the other dialogues, must have been added to the original translation at the time of publication. For, at the time when they were first written, Mill was oblivious to this methodological possibility. The unpublished versions of the Charmides, Laches, Euthyphro, and Lysis all end with a dismissive remark to the effect that because the dialogue ends with no Q.E.D. it is to be considered as “a mere dialectical exercise” (italics added).

If the translations were made or exhumed with a view to Mrs. Taylor’s edification, their appearance in the Monthly Repository needs no further explanation: Mill’s connection with the magazine, to which he began to contribute in 1832, came about through Harriet’s membership in the congregation and intellectual circle of its editor, W. J. Fox. Nor is it hard to explain the discontinuation of the series, despite its favourable reception: by the summer of 1835 Fox was losing interest in the Repository, and at the same time Mill was becoming more involved with the London Review (the first number appeared in July of that year), the burden of which being made heavier for him by his father’s failing health. In fact, the Plato versions are almost the last things he contributed to the Repository —soon the boot was on the other foot and he was soliciting Fox for contributions. Nor, again, does the order of presentation raise any problem: those left to the last and ultimately excluded are (besides the forbidding Parmenides) those devoted to particular areas of conduct and hence contributing least directly to Mill’s methodological concerns.

Mill’s strictures on the condition of Platonic studies in England at this time have been more often quoted than evaluated, but they appear to be just. Schleiermacher’s translation inaugurated the critical study of Plato, which by this time was in full swing in Germany. Yet the English works mentioned by Mill are virtually all there had been since 1750. Nor did matters improve much. Except for Wayte’s Protagoras (1854), there were no serious English contributions to Platonic studies until the sixties, when a stream of editions and commentaries began to flow that has not yet dried up. Grote’s Plato is in fact one of the first fruits of this revival. For the complete translation desiderated by Mill the English had to wait for Benjamin Jowett, who finally (in Lewis Campbell’s phrase) “succeeded in making Plato an English classic” in 1871. This English Plato was the Plato of the Republic (of which Jowett began to work on his never-to-be-completed edition in 1856), not of the Protagoras; the élitist, not the methodologist. But no doubt this Plato also would have been welcome at India House.

Among the most striking themes in the introductory notes that Mill provides is the defence of the sophists against the strictures of the “Tory perverters of Grecian history” in the Quarterly Review. Mill’s characterization of Plato’s attitude to Protagoras seems eminently just; he is indeed treated as a respectable inquirer with an imperfect technique, not as a disreputable agitator. But the issue is joined on political grounds: the sophists, like the Benthamites, believed in seeking rational solutions to moral and political problems; their conservative opponents believed, like good tory squires, that what was good enough before the war was good enough now, and regarded the sophists as dangerous and subversive meddlers. It is in the latest and longest of Mill’s treatments of this theme, in the Plato review (387-404), that he first fully expounds the contemporary animus behind his defence. The full case the radicals had to meet was that Athenian morals steadily declined from the time of Marathon on; that this decline was a consequence of the rise of democracy and its concomitant, the attempt to ground morals on reason; that the only true source of morality is the intuition of a rustic aristocracy; and that any criticism of the squirearchy is an attempt to make the worse appear the better cause. The student of Greek literature cannot but recognize in this thesis a misreading of Aristophanes’ Clouds (read by Mill at the age of eight) by someone with naïve notions about the methods of comic writers, and it is visibly an apologia for the sort of tory politics Mill had been programmed by Bentham and his father to overthrow.

Mill’s long excursus on the sophists in the Plato review is substantially a rehearsal of Grote’s own account in his History, which Mill extols in his review of that work (328-9). Mill’s estimate of Grote’s achievement seems justified. In his article on Grote in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.), J. M. Mitchell remarks that Grote valued the sophists more highly than anyone had before or would again; but that, had it proved true, would still have missed the point. What Grote does is present massive evidence on which his reappraisal rests, and with which any reversal of his verdict must reckon; and those who have disagreed with him have for the most part merely repeated opinions whose untenability Grote had conclusively proved. But the battle still continues: the sophists are still endowed with “every virtue under heaven” by all good liberal democrats seeking ancestry. Such historical shadow-boxing has its ironies, however. What to Mill is an imperfect rationalism, valued as a step towards Plato’s profounder analysis and away from the traditionalism that remained the real enemy, is in some modern eyes a praiseworthy empiricism to be pitted against the evil technocratic totalitarianism of Plato.

Besides the attraction of its presentation of the sophists, Mill is drawn to the Protagoras by finding in Socrates a champion of the principle of utility (61). To those who nowadays call themselves utilitarians, and think of utilitarianism as concerned to promote the good of all, this comes as a shock, since what Socrates advocates against Protagoras is a strictly egoistic hedonism: the possibility that a man might consider anyone else’s welfare is not even mooted. The shock was shared by Grote, since we find Mill writing to him (in what connection we do not know): “[P. S.]—As you truly say the Protagorean Socrates lays down as the standard, the happiness of the agent himself; but his standard is composed of pleasure and pain, which ranges him, upon the whole, on the utilitarian side of the controversy.” But in fact Mill seems to be fairly consistent in equating the principle of utility, as he does here, with “the doctrine that all things are good or evil, by virtue solely of the pleasure or the pain which they produce.” An equivalent account is given in “Professor Sedgwick’s Discourse” in 1835, and again in the second chapter of Utilitarianism (where, as here, the names of Epicurus and Bentham are conjoined); that the happiness sought should be that of the “greatest number” is called for not by the “principle of utility” but by the “Greatest-happiness Principle.”

The notes on the Phædrus afford interesting sidelights on what we found to say about the views on logic and philosophy expressed and implied in the Whately review. Plato’s method of collection and division is subtly revamped to become “decomposition and recomposition,” a method of “philosophical analysis” (93) that is proclaimed as the unique method of philosophy and common to all “systems of logic.” This answers to what Ryan identifies as Mill’s own preference in method; but Plato’s own account, which speaks of a classificatory process of collection followed by one of sorting, seems at least to be of a different kind. In the same connection, Mill writes here as if to claim objective backing for a classificatory scheme were necessarily to ascribe to a class some substantive individuality separate from that of the objects classified (94). It is just this equation that Mill gave up when, as we saw, he abandoned nominalism in his Logic. Meanwhile, it has the interesting consequence that Mill defends something like the “ordinary language” philosophy of the late J. L. Austin: since nothing exists save spatio-temporal particulars, investigations of mental and moral phenomena reduce to the clarification of concepts, and this in turn to the examination of how words are used.

The notes on the Gorgias reflect the same bias that led Mill to describe his omission of the dramatic portions of the dialogues as regrettable only on aesthetic grounds (42). As in his review of Grote’s Plato (406-7), he assumes that Plato’s concern is with the intellectual structure of knowledge, and that Socrates is a seeker of definitions rather than an examiner of lives. It is in this purely negative dialectic that Plato’s value for the nineteenth century is mainly to be found (382-3). Many years later, the accident of Grote’s order of composition in his uncompleted Aristotle, which gave the Topics a more prominent place than he probably intended, gave Mill his last and best opportunity to sing the praises of abstract debate as an intellectual discipline, whose value he learned in Grote’s house as a young man among the Brangles (508-10). This love of logic-chopping might seem at odds with Mill’s determined empiricism, but is actually of a piece with it. Rigorous inductive procedures, the discovery of which in the moral and mental sciences was Mill’s chief intellectual enterprise, depend on the unremitting endeavour to overthrow one’s own cherished beliefs; and it is just this that the lost art of dialectic—so curiously prevalent in the dogmatic middle ages, and abandoned in the sceptical revival of letters—sought to encompass. Meanwhile, however, the assumption that Plato’s interest in the epistemology of morals is confined to the use of argument in the service of moral persuasion leads Mill to make heavy weather of the Gorgias, which he finds to be a tissue of fallacies (149, 395). Plato’s version of the Socratic equation of virtue with knowledge, identified by Mill as the key to his thought on these matters (60), had nothing to do with the kind of understanding that is devoid of personal commitment. Mill says, rightly, that no intellectual demonstration can show that “a life of obedience to duty is preferable, so far as respects the agent himself, to a life of circumspect and cautious selfishness” (149), and that Plato might have furnished Socrates’ interlocutors with rebuttals of his arguments. But what happens in the Gorgias is something else. Socrates discovers internal contradictions, not in abstract hedonism, but in the complex values by which ambitious Polus and proud Callicles believe themselves to live. Their lives are shown to be unintelligible to themselves—a point that is evident only when one considers the dramatic settings of the dialogues, which Mill omits. Even in the reading of the dialectic itself Mill’s strictures show a misunderstanding, in their use of such unplatonic language as “a life of obedience to duty.” Mill presupposes that the moral choice is always one between devotion to self and service to others, idealism and virtue being identified with the latter. It is simply a matter of whose interests shall be served. But the Callicles of the Gorgias is an idealist of a sort, a sort that our twentieth-century relativism makes it easier for us to see pervading Greek culture and that Nietzsche was the first in modern times to detect and extol.

Honesty, as Mill says, is not the best policy, and Socrates in the Gorgias is not arguing that it is. But Mill’s normally cool tone takes on an oddly histrionic pathos as he sings the misfortunes of the virtuous in this wicked world. The tone is that of a man who feels that his own virtue has been unjustly despised and rejected, and whose toil has been without reward. Is this perhaps a memory of those dreadful days of 1826 when Mill first found that the life-work for which he was predestined meant nothing to him? Or can it be only that the world’s reception of his innocent liaison with Mrs. Taylor (as of W. J. Fox’s matrimonial ventures) had shown little comprehension and less generosity?

Among the unpublished translations, that of the Parmenides alone incorporates commentary, and its treatment is in other ways untypical. For the opening section, in which Socrates figures in his habitual manner, Mill follows his usual practice of rendering the argumentative bits and omitting the rest—even, rather misleadingly, the passage where Zeno explains why he has done what he did (128a1-e5). But in the notoriously baffling second part of the dialogue, in which Socrates is silent, Mill abandons his usual practice because, as his comments show, he does not take the discussion (and hence the task of translating it) seriously. Reasonably rejecting the would-be profundities of the neoplatonic commentators, for whom it plumbs metaphysical depths, he takes the alternative to be that it is a mass of quibbles. Still looking for the results overtly established at the end of a dialogue, rather than at what is effectively achieved in the course of it, he inevitably finds this one futile: that it might contribute vastly though indirectly to the clarification of such concepts as “one,” whose ambiguity reduced the earlier discussion between Socrates and Parmenides to incoherence, does not occur to him. The result is that Mill’s abbreviations and omissions reflect no opinion of the purpose of the dialogue and prevent the reader from forming his own. Thus Mill omits a large part (136c5-137c3) of the conversation in which Parmenides clarifies his attitude to the “laborious game” he is to play, and substitutes his own denigration of the proceedings as “verbal quibbles.” Equally unfortunate is his handling of the passage in which Parmenides introduces the concept of an “instant” in time that is not a part of time but has no duration, surely one of the most fruitful suggestions in the history of thought. Mill interrupts his translation here (from 156c1 to 157b5), and substitutes a paraphrase in which he suppresses Parmenides’ assertion that when a thing starts to move there can be no period of time during which it is neither in motion nor at rest, misrepresents the claim that the beginning of movement must be instantaneous as saying that the thing “is for an instant neither in motion nor at rest, but between both,” and then sarcastically refers to his own misrepresentation as “This happy idea” (235).

Mill’s actual omissions in this part of the dialogue seem to be due to mounting fatigue and disgust—and, no doubt, a courteous unwillingness to bore possible readers. As far as 147c1 his translation is only slightly condensed, except that he omits (as F. M. Cornford was later to do) the replies of Parmenides’ respondent, in the hope that they would make no difference. At this point he breaks off, with the caustic comment, “It is unnecessary to adduce more than a specimen of this mode of enquiry” (235), and resorts to brief summary. But he starts translating again at 155e2, resorts to summary at 156c1, resumes translation for 157b5 to 159b2, omits a transitional sentence there, gives a slightly shortened version of 159b5 to 160b2—though what he says Parmenides concludes at that point is not what Plato says he concludes!—and from then on merely summarizes what he takes to be the general drift.

Mill’s opening attempt to characterize in general terms the class of theories to which Plato’s theory of “Ideas” belongs is not so much a comment on the purport of the Parmenides as a vain attempt to explain it away. It is not surprising that Mill was baffled. In his day the materials for any sort of comprehension of pre-platonic philosophy were not accessible, as is abundantly shown by his description of Parmenides as “a Pythagorean philosopher” (222) and his supposition that the Way of Truth rested on the assumption that there was a “mysterious virtue in the word one” (223). This is not so much a mistake as a reflection of an ignorance Mill had no ready means of remedying. As for Plato’s dialogue itself, any comprehension of that was virtually precluded by Schleiermacher’s supposition that it was an early work of Plato’s, rather than one intermediate in date between the Republic and the Sophist.

Mill’s final remark, that the second part of the Parmenides is unfit for its purported purpose of “mental gymnastics” because it exploits ambiguities of language rather than removing them, may or may not be true. That judgment probably depends on whether one expects readers to rest content in a mass of mutually contradictory conclusions without seeking to extricate themselves. True or false, the remark leaves one puzzled. Why spend so much time on a work whose upshot one deplores and whose intentions one does not even profess to understand? Why not stop translating at the point where Socrates bows out? But perhaps only the attempt revealed that it was not worth doing.

Whether to expose, to analyse, or to exploit, the second part of the Parmenides is undoubtedly concerned with ambiguities. That fact in itself is a good reason for not translating it, if one is not obliged to, and in any case not translating it without the sort of incidental explication that Mill eschews. For part of the point of the whole affair must be that the initial hypothesis does not mean, as Mill renders it, “Unity exists.” “ Ἑν ἐστι,” unaccented as Plato wrote it, is ambiguous between “One is,” “One exists,” and “It is one,” at least. “Unity exists” would not seem to be a plausible alternative; but if we assume, as Mill assumes, that a mystification of the sort he describes is intended, “Unity exists” would be the appropriately mystifying phrase. Thus do we deceive ourselves.

Our strictures on Mill’s handling of this very odd dialogue imply no criticism of Mill himself. On the contrary. What he did he did for private purposes of his own, and had the good sense not to publish the results. For this abstention he is to be commended. We may deplore the work, but have no right to blame the workman.

GROTE AND GREECE

george grote, twelve years older than Mill, was one of his closest associates and allies. “ ‘Mill, the elder,’ she [Mrs. Grote] would say, ‘had seized him at the most enthusiastic time of life, and narrowed him, under the idea that he was emancipating him.’ ” Scion of a Tory banking family of German extraction, he had been at school with Connop Thirlwall at Charterhouse, and formed there an enthusiasm for classical letters that he never lost. But on leaving school, in the intervals of keeping up the family end of the bank for his squire-playing father, his inquiring mind led him to the study of that modish subject, political economy; and it was in David Ricardo’s house, early in 1819, that he met James Mill. The meeting changed his life by converting him to the radical cause, though it was not until his father’s death in 1830 that he felt able to play an active part in politics.

Grote’s first and greatest service to the radical cause was to embark on a history of ancient Greece. In the culture of the time, classical civilization was paradigmatic, and the available history was that of Mitford, full of errors and fuller of anti-democratic prejudice. Any reasonably accurate and ample history could be sure to supersede it. But in the meantime, as we have noted, an attack on the sophists was an allegorical attack on philosophical radicals everywhere, and a repetition of Aristophanes’ diatribes against Cleon was a blow against any democrat of the day.

The polemical intent to write a counterblast against Mitford is avowed in Grote’s Preface to his first volume. But in a way the work is a natural outgrowth of an earlier study of Greek mythology, inspired by the notion (not then a usual one) that mythology has historical value as, and only as, a revelation of the self-image of the people who made up and preserved the myths. It was some months later that his wife claims to have given him the idea (quite impracticable at the time, in view of his business and family commitments) of writing a history. But nagging has its limitations and, despite Harriet’s scheme of priorities, the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832 inspired Grote to forsake literature for activism. He presented himself as candidate for the City of London in the radical interest, was elected, and for ten years laid the history aside. By 1838 it was plain that the parliamentary radicals were falling apart, and Grote lost interest, but did not yet feel ready to resume the history. He filled in the time reading Aristotle. In June 1841 he did not stand for re-election and planned to resume work on the “Opus Magnum” in the spring of 1842. In 1843 we find him working at it eight hours a day; that summer he retired from the family bank, and from that time on the History and its successors poured forth in a majestic, if sluggish, torrent.

As an expert and respected businessman, a working politician in troubled times, a polyglot and indefatigable master of contemporary scholarship, and (for the later volumes) an expert on the affairs of Switzerland, whose geographical and political divisions afforded such striking analogies with those of ancient Greece, Grote was outstandingly equipped to make realistic sense out of the biased and fragmentary traditions of Greek historiography. His history won immediate acceptance as a standard work. But time was unkind. Within twenty years, Schliemann’s excavations had raised hopes for the reconstruction of early history that Grote hoped he had shown could never be fulfilled; and in the decades to come the deciphering, dating, and interpreting of the inscriptions with which the Greeks had loved to deface their environment was to emancipate Greek history for ever from that haggling over written records to which Grote and his coevals had been confined. Grote lacked the sharpness of mind and style that in a like situation saved Gibbon from oblivion, and his history ceased to be valuable as soon as it ceased to be indispensable.

Grote awaited the reception of his first two volumes with anxiety. George Cornewall Lewis had offered to review them for the Edinburgh, but it was too late: Mill had asked first, and the books were already in his hands. Harriet was disappointed. She had tried to enlist Nassau Senior’s support in ensuring the suitability of the Edinburgh’s reviewer, with a hint that Lewis would be acceptable. It is true that Lewis had a special interest in the mythological questions that occupy most of these volumes, and Mill had none; it is also true that Mrs. Grote tended to value people for their social standing, and Lewis was in line for a baronetcy. But in any case a certain coolness had developed between Mill and the Grotes, partly for personal reasons, and partly because Mill was struggling to free himself from what he saw as the doctrinaire narrowness of their radical orthodoxy. But Mill retained his admiration and affection for Grote as a person and as a hellenist, and his review proved to be “in every sense, a labour of love; love of the subject, love of the author, and admiration of the work.” It took Mill four days to write and three to re-write, “but I had to read and think a good deal for it first.” This reading included the Iliad and Odyssey for his discussion of the “Homeric question.” Mill throws himself into the cultural game of classical philology with adept enthusiasm, and his disagreement with Grote on the Iliad points the contrast between the two men that divided them politically: Grote relies on mechanical criteria of consistency, whereas Mill emphasizes the organic bonds of feeling that unite the whole. This is plainly the Mill who tempered Bentham with Coleridge.

Mill holds the Greek experience to be exemplary not only because our epigonic civilization looks back to it for instances and excuses, but because the Greeks invented what we think of as civilization, raising themselves from barbarism by their own efforts and invention. That is why such a “philosophical history” as Grote was attempting (but Thirlwall was not) was so important. Their secret, if we could find it, might hold the clue of that mental and moral science that should tease out of the smoky squabbles of the nineteenth century the utilitarian millennium of liberty and happiness. Between the lines of Mill’s review we read that Grote had not unveiled that secret. It is just on the crucial point of how a merely traditional theology and mythology give way to rationalizing ones that Mill finds Grote wanting. Of course there is a sense in which the Greek myths were arbitrary inventions, but Grote seemed blind to the way in which a story can be both known to be invented and believed to be true, exemplary rather than allegorical, and showing in the character of its narrative a response to a need of the mind, as yet inarticulate, for explanations that should have a certain pattern. It is to this quest for the explanatory character of mythology, which the modern reader finds reminiscent of Lévi-Strauss rather than of Grote, that Mill is presumably alluding when he tells Bain that his review has “introduced no little of the Comtean philosophy of religion.”

A student of Mill’s ethical theory will note his interest in the institutions of Sparta as illustrating “the wonderful pliability, and amenability to artificial discipline, of the human mind” (302), as well as the limitations of such disciplines as soon as their constraints are removed. This belief is important to the moralist in Mill, concerned with an education that should instil in everyone the artificial motive of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” By psychological necessity, men act in such a way as to maximize their pleasures, though the mechanisms of sympathy include among these a delight in the welfare of one’s associates. But this psychological law places no restriction on what may be desired; it only means that men must be effectively trained to take pleasure as they should. The Spartan experience shows what improbable results such training can achieve. But Sparta has a second lesson for us, in the glamour this horrid régime held for Greeks born under happier institutions. How to explain the fascination of evil? Doubtless the admirers of Sparta, second-rate sensitive minds, overlooked its character as a whole and noted only its freedom from those political and social vices from which they suffered in their own cities. The observation, perhaps a commonplace, seems just, though our contemporaries might trace the admiration for totalitarianism to urges buried deeper; it is also familiar to the hellenist, being precisely the explanation Plato offers in his Republic for the dynamics of political degeneration. Also in the Republic, whatever its Comtian ancestry, is a large part of the argument on how myths are invented, propagated, and believed. In all his moral and political thought, Mill shows himself very deeply a Platonist: not in the foolish modern sense that he “believes in” the “theory of ideas,” but in the way in which the very detail and texture of his thought reflects that of Plato.

Seven years later, Mill had another go at Grote in the Edinburgh. When he saw this second review in print he said it read “slighter & flimsier than I thought it would,” but Grote was pleased:

It seems to me executed in John’s best manner. It is (as you say) essentially and throughout a review of the book; keeping the author, and not the reviewer, constantly in the foreground. It is not, certainly, a review of the eleventh volume; so far “Fish” was right in the remarks which he made on it; but I do not think he did anything like justice to its merits, either as a composition or as a review. It is certainly complimentary to me, in a measure which I fear will bring down upon me the hand of the reactionary Nemesis. . . .

One has the impression that Lewis at least, though not Grote, felt that Johannes Fac-Totum was thrusting himself in again. Whatever Grote may say, Mill’s review, for all its compliments and quotations, is a survey of Greek history in relation to Mill’s well-known preoccupations, which could be dressed up as a review only because the political interests of radical author and radical reviewer so largely coincided. Among these common concerns we have already noted the vindication of those philosophic radicals, the sophists; in this review we find its counterpart, an exposition of the military, moral and intellectual failings of the pious and plutocratic Nicias that serves to show the rottenness of squirearchies everywhere—and no doubt, by indirection, of that venerable scandal of the British army, the purchase of commissions.

Grote had to admit that Mill had not really reviewed the volumes he purported to deal with. The situation in this regard is scarcely changed by Mill’s inclusion in the Dissertations and Discussions version of extracts (amounting to some 30 per cent of the whole) from his reviews of earlier volumes. The reason is that the exemplary function Mill ascribed to the Greeks was fulfilled only by the Athenians at the time of their political and cultural supremacy, with which the present volumes were not concerned. Mill’s Athenophilia is shown already by his inclusion of the long quotation from Neibuhr in the otherwise trivial review he printed in 1840 (241-3). The present manifestation of it, with its almost ludicrous encomium on the fun-loving Athenian populace, reveals not only the thrust of Mill’s political programme but the structure of his personal values. Genius and joy, personal freedom and intellectual culture flourish only in an atmosphere that exacts public service but ignores idiosyncracies of word and act, an atmosphere that requires political institutions such as only “a succession of eminent men” could devise. In such a society Mill would be praised for his engagement in public affairs and not censured for his private affair with Mrs. Taylor; in such a society such men as Bentham and the Mills secure freedom and joy for their fellows. Mill shows less sign of misgiving now than he had in the 1840 review that the values modern times have added to the Athenian scheme of functional democracy—internationalism, kindness, mildness of manner, bureaucratic efficiency and the techniques of political representation—might be incompatible with the vivid individualism of the Athenians; but this insouciance is consistent with his methodological atomism. Relations of cause and effect, means and ends, are of course recognized in the world of values, so that we see how (for example) a prerequisite of the flourishing of genius is a lack of inhibition; but the positive goods at which society aims are dealt with in the breathtakingly arithmetical fashion familiar to readers of Utilitarianism. The sum of two goods is a good. Mill seems not to want to admit that, just as when my interests and yours conflict we must compromise or fight, a society may have to sacrifice parrhesia to mild manners or mild manners to parrhesia.

Within the encomium on Athens, a certain tension may be felt. Its democratic institutions are praised as the work of a “succession of eminent men”; yet the failings of its operations are excused on the ground that its policies did not express the sound heart of the Athenian working stiff, since the “conduct of affairs was habitually in the hands of the rich and great” (331). Does this statement mean that eminent men, not popular movements, create democratic institutions; but within such institutions popular movements are good and eminent men are bad? Perhaps it does mean that—and perhaps it is true. In any case, the tension is relieved when we infer from the context that the praised eminence is one of ability, the bad greatness merely one of wealth and family. Yet when we reflect on the individuals thus involved in praise and dispraise—Solon, Cleisthenes, Miltiades, Pericles, Nicias, Cleon, Alcibiades—we may think that this review at least takes no clear stand on that most intractable of political issues, the proper relation of outstanding individuals to a democratic constitution.

One feature of Mill’s praise of Athens may strike the modern reader as strange: his readiness to condone Athenian imperialism, on the excuse that force may be necessary to inaugurate the reign of reason. This apologia—considerably toned down, on Harriet’s protest, from the version in a Spectator review —comes oddly, we may think, from so staunch a champion of the liberties of women and slaves. But Mill’s position is necessitated by that belief in Progress whose absence he was to deplore in Aristotle (505). His attitude is coloured, at least, by his experience as an official of the East India Company, as appears sufficiently from the reference in his earlier review (290) to Sleeman’s Indian observations as a revelation of primitive mentality; but his opinion is articulated more clearly in the remarks on Indian affairs in his personal papers. The local “native” régime may be a set of interlopers or usurping tyrants; but an Imperial government, remote from local squabbles, has no other concern than the welfare of all its charges. Besides, in most cases if not in all, the powers of the central government are those ceded to it by the local authorities in the interests of efficiency, economy, or political advantage. Of the ruling notions of modern anti-colonialism, that all cultures are created equal and that no Indian can be an alien anywhere in the subcontinent, Mill shares neither. It is in fact the gravest charge against Nicias that his failure in the unprovoked aggression against Syracuse betrayed the cause of Athenian imperialism:

If the Athenians had succeeded they would have added to their maritime supremacy all the Greek cities of Sicily & Italy. . . . Even if they had failed & got away safe, Athens could never have been subdued by the Peloponnesians. . . . Perhaps the world would have been now a thousand years further advanced if freedom had thus been kept standing in the only place where it ever was or could then be powerful. I thought & felt this as I approached the town till I could have cried with regret & sympathy.

Although Grote’s work has been left far behind by the advance of scholarship, the patience and amplitude with which he set out all the evidence he did have and teased out the last shred of its significance gave his work some permanent value as a guide to the historiographical tradition. In fact, he goes far to justify Mill’s strong claim “that there is hardly a fact of importance in Grecian history which was perfectly understood before his re-examination of it” (328). This residual value is a function of his patient prolixity. Writing of Macaulay’s history a few years later, Mill summed up: “What a difference between it & Grote’s Hist. of Greece, which is less brilliant, but far more interesting in its simple veracity & because, instead of striving to astonish he strives to comprehend & explain” —provided, of course, that we bear in mind that the simple veracity is that of a proselytizing radical.

The review of Grote’s Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates is, if anything, less of a review than those of his History. The fault, if fault it be, is not all Mill’s. A comprehensive survey of an author’s work can hardly be reviewed otherwise than by measuring it against the standard view of that work, and we have seen that the state of British Platonism was still such that no standard view could be said to exist. Mill’s opening description of Grote’s achievement suggests an additional reason. Grote’s picture of Plato, though painstakingly traced, is anything but sharply delineated. Years before, Mill had remarked that Plato was taking Grote “a length of time only to be warranted by using the opportunity to speak out very plainly on the great subjects—a thing I rather wish than expect he will be found to have done. . . . ” And if Mill could at last find much in Grote to praise, it was not because these misgivings were unjustified. The three laborious volumes are a remarkable compendium of scholarly opinion and philological lore, full of sagacity, and embodying just such an abstract of the several dialogues as Mill had thought proper to prepare himself. But it is hard to believe that even in their day they can have afforded much moral or metaphysical excitement, and only the loyal eye that discerned the genius of Harriet Taylor could have detected in their author one of the leading metaphysicians and psychologists of his age.

As its scale might suggest, Mill’s review was long premediated, and he warned Grote that he would be using the book as a springboard for his own considered view of Plato’s achievement. He re-read the whole of Plato, in Greek, to prepare himself, and to good effect: he provides a majestic survey, a truly remarkable synthesis even with Grote before him, revealing once more his gift for the even-handed presentation of a mass of fact. “I have seldom given so much time and pains to a review article,” he told Grote. Yet, though steadily enlightened, one is seldom astonished. Mill, now almost sixty, treads the round of his Platonic preoccupations: the merits of the sophists, the value of a negative dialectic, the praise of intellectual independence and a high moral tone, the preference of methods over results and the antipathy to dogma. But he is able to indulge these preferences because Grote shares them. As with the History, Mill thinks Grote’s Plato important as the first systematic treatment of its subject from the point of view of the “experience philosophy”—from which it follows, again as with the History, that since this is the only true philosophy Grote’s treatment is the first that really illuminates its subject. Up to now, Plato’s achievement had been obscured by the orientalizing neoplatonists and German transcendentalists who preferred the obscurantism of his senility to the inquisitiveness of his vigorous youth. These two schools of Platonism, the disputatious and the arcane, are with us still; and, in so far as Anglo-American academic orthodoxy is still wedded to one or another form of the “experience philosophy,” the Platonism of Grote and Mill is substantially that still imparted to most anglophone undergraduates. But in one fundamental way all Platonists of that age are sundered from all those of today, by a crippling defect of which Mill is well aware (385-7). They had no way of dating Plato’s dialogues otherwise than by circular inference from a conjectural development in his thought. Just two years after Grote’s first edition, such a method was discovered and published, and despite many problems its main results are unchallenged. One of the points agreed on is the first to be established, and suffices to undermine Grote’s whole structure: the Sophist and Statesman must be later than the Republic. This makes it impossible to think of Plato as steadily degenerating from dialectical maturity to dogmatic dotage (or, as the opposing school would have it, wading from shallow scepticism into mystic profundity). At the same time, the discovery that the critique of the “theory of ideas” in the Parmenides is later than the dialogues which argue most unequivocally in favour of that theory has made today’s scholars reluctant to accept the view assumed by Mill and his coevals, that the theory of ideas was a simple-minded doctrine in which Plato basked content.

The effect of establishing an unexpected order for the composition of the dialogues is not only to rewrite Plato’s intellectual biography. It makes Plato a much more difficult writer than Mill and Grote took him for: whatever he is up to, it cannot be the straightforward things we used to think, and we have to read him with much greater caution. Mill and Grote acknowledge the difficulty of interpreting the meanings of the dialogues as total compositions, but suspect no difficulty in their parts. It is noteworthy that though Mill affirms broadly that all the arguments of the Gorgias and the Phædo are fallacious he does not specify the fallacies. He does not even analyze the arguments. And the attribution of the “theory of ideas” to an “imperfect conception of the processes of abstraction and generalization” (421) rests on no serious consideration of what the Platonic Socrates says and the reasons he actually gives for saying it. This sort of superficiality, however, was probably inevitable in the then state of Platonic studies, even without the disconcerting results of stylometry: only after the sort of overview established by Grote had become thoroughly familiar would it be feasible for a more penetrating critique to look into the actual fine structure of the arguments. Indeed, much of the work has yet to be done. If classical studies are moribund, they will die in their infancy. Meanwhile Mill and Grote, true apostles of Progress, assume that Plato’s thought belongs to the childhood of the race and that contemporary thought has nothing to learn from him (see 421): he is to be judged by how close he has come to the position reached by nineteenth-century empiricist radicals. For that reason it seemed suitable to make a study of Plato an opportunity for speaking out on the great questions of the day. Mill, just like the transcendentalist interpreters he complains of, will let Plato inspire him but not disquiet him.

Because Mill is not prepared to discover that Plato’s thoughts are other and better than his own, he is apt to say that Plato has “failed to grasp” a point on which they are at odds. Thus he blames Plato for his thinking that techniques of measurement were a sufficient guard against error, and for “overlooking that it is not the act of measurement which rectifies them, but the perceptions of touch which the measuring only ascertains” (420). Plato is not overlooking this belief; he is denying it. The disagreement is radical. Plato’s Socrates is clearly presented as believing that getting one’s sums right can be a significant moral passion, and that it is the moral passion of the just man. The appeal to a method is essential. Indeed, it is rather strange that Mill does not recognize here a reliance on calculation akin to that of a Benthamite legislator. But his remarks on the handling of “justice” in the Republic are full of puzzling things. How can he say that Plato’s ethic allows no place for that paradigm of Athenian justice, Aristides, whose “justice” lay in his unfaltering adherence to the highest convictions of his own place and time? The Republic locates such a man very precisely, as the man of moral courage, in a passage where Plato also affirms another essential point that Mill accuses him of denying, that such tenacity of one’s proposals is a precondition of any “justice” based on independent intellectual comprehension. Again, we wonder how Mill can accuse Plato of ignoring the fact that justice has to do with the rights of other people (419), when the fact that justice is “another’s good” is a key point in the case Socrates is called on to meet. It seems strange that Mill should have missed so much of what is going on, especially as his remarks on the discrepancies between the “mixed modes” of Greek and English thought show him so well aware of the dangers of relying on the customary associations of English terms when discussing Greek philosophy. Part of the explanation may be found in the final chapter of Utilitarianism, where justice figures as a set of entrenched principles and patterns of behaviour exempted from felicific calculation and calling on its own special set of instinctual resources. The whole arrangement of thought is quite alien from Plato’s. Mill is so deeply imbued with the sort of moral psychology inaugurated by Hobbes that he is unable to entertain the very different moral psychology envisaged, on grounds no better and no worse than his, by Plato.

The praise of Athenian democracy in the review of Grote’s History should prepare us for a denunciation of Plato, whose ideal institutions in the Republic seem designed to remove not only what Mill sees as the incidental vices of that polity but, very specifically, each of its merits. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to find Plato praised for recognizing “that the work of government is a Skilled Employment” (436), even though this praise is tempered with censure for having gone too far and denied the unskilled any say in the direction of their affairs. Perhaps the surprise is mitigated when we read in Mill’s diary for 20 March, 1854: “The Reform Bill of the present year and the plan of opening the Civil Service of Government to universal competition, are the most wonderful instances of unsought concession to the democratic principle—the former in its ordinary, the latter in its best, sense—which a reformer had imagined even in his dreams.” In a reformer’s dreams, apparently, the institutions of Plato’s Republic are, in the best sense, democratic.

With Plato finally squared amply away, Grote was free to turn to his beloved Aristotle. It would be an understatement to say that he did not live to complete his task. No lifetime would suffice to write, scarcely to read, a treatise of the majestic proportions implied by the two stout volumes he left for Bain and Robertson to edit. And, as the scale of his writings increased, Grote himself was slowing down. He was in his late seventies and, though he secluded himself faithfully in the mornings, Harriet would find him snoozing over his papers. Though the treatment of the logical works is lucid as ever, his discussion of the principle of contradiction as expounded in the Metaphysics, which is the last completed portion of his work, betrays a gently wandering mind.

Grote himself thought the account of Aristotle’s psychology, written independently for the third edition of Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect in 1868, was the best thing he had done; but the learned world soon consigned the whole of his Aristotelian studies to a common oblivion. Mill’s review is a most delicate act of piety. He praises the book in general terms, without specifying how Grote has advanced the understanding of his subject. He subtly maintains the pretence that almost all he knows about Aristotle he knows from reading Grote, while in taking issue with his views on Protagoras he implies that the old man’s mind was still worth arguing against. In fact, however, there is more of interest in Mill’s review than in all of Grote’s two volumes.

In his review of the Plato, Mill had urged that Aristotle was easier than Plato for modern readers to understand. But many of his own remarks strike us as showing a lack of comprehension of what Aristotle is up to that is not paralleled in his treatment of Plato. In fact, though he knows Aristotle’s logical works intimately, and has studied his political, ethical, and rhetorical writings at first hand, his remarks on the psychological, physical, and metaphysical writings show only such knowledge as one might derive from an article in an inferior encyclopedia. Thus he castigates Aristotle for erecting “chance” and “spontaneity” into independent causative principles (482-3), whereas what Aristotle is doing in the relevant passage (Physics, II, which Mill had not read) is analyzing the nature of the error committed by those who make that supposition. For the most part, his misunderstandings are of two kinds. In the first place, he supposes that whenever Aristotle discusses such topics as “matter,” “form,” or “privation,” he is isolating components of the universe, as though he were carrying out the sort of metaphysical analysis that (we have suggested) Mill himself thought proper; whereas one of Aristotle’s avowed aims is to refute the Platonic thesis that such terms as “form” and “soul” denote separate entities. In the second place, more generally, he pays little attention to Aristotle’s actual arguments, and hence regularly misconstrues the type of explanation that Aristotle purports to offer. The complaint that analyses in terms of matter and form “give no power of prediction” (503) presupposes that Aristotle’s “First Philosophy” is either an abortive attempt at physical theory or a misguided failure even to make the attempt; but to presuppose that is to debar oneself from considering what Aristotle actually says, hence what he might mean by what he says, and hence again what might be the point of saying it. The diatribe against the German “transcendentalists” in the Plato review shows a similar blind antipathy to every dimension of understanding save one, that expounded in the Logic, and attacks just those qualities in German thought that were already enabling German scholars to take the first significant steps in the re-discovery of Aristotle. When he blames Aristotle and the other Greeks for not believing in Progress, the attack is two-edged. Aristotle’s contemporaries had not opened their minds to that form of understanding that might conduce to an endless series of changes in human arrangements, but Mill’s mind is still closed (as in his unregenerate Benthamite youth) to any form of understanding not so directed. Nothing in Mill is so disconcerting as the combination of his air of massive tolerance, the breadth and judiciousness of his surveys of the intellectual scene, with a crippling dogmatic narrowness in metaphysical method.

Some aspects of Mill’s treatment of the logical issues have been noted already. In this area, too, Mill construes Aristotle as addressing himself with greater or less success to Mill’s concerns, without seriously considering whether Aristotle might not legitimately have different concerns of his own. Mostly on the basis of the Topics, Aristotle is said to have shown a reliance on simple induction that was possible for him only because its failures were not yet apparent—it was the failure of simple induction that enabled Bacon to look for something better. But the Topics is not concerned with induction. Aristotle is only laying down a rule for debates: generalizations must be allowed to stand unless actual counter-examples can be produced. And in the Analytics there is no place for a logic of induction at all, but only a process in which one leaps to a conclusion about the way things are. Neither Mill nor Grote alludes to that celebrated image of the rallying of a routed army, in which Aristotle shows how very far his concerns in the matter are from theirs. But perhaps Mill should be understood to mean only that if Aristotle had had a logic of induction, it could only have been one based on simple induction; and that would probably be true, for “Mill’s Methods” are well named.

The discussion of the principle of contradiction reveals a more complex disagreement. Grote’s treatment is confused, and it is not clear what he thought Aristotle’s doctrine really was, but Mill finds in Grote himself the doctrine that the principle can be established only by induction from particular instances in which it is conceded to hold. As Mill points out, the question is a vital one for a convinced inductivist. But Mill misses Grote’s point, which is the perfectly reasonable one that this is how the sort of ad hominem refutation that Aristotle relies on would have to proceed. However, Grote himself seems to be mistaken in supposing that Aristotle is speaking of an argument that one could use against someone who denied the principle of contradiction. Aristotle’s position seems rather to be only that anyone who makes a definite statement must in fact rely on the principle, whatever he may say, because the meaningfulness of his statement rests on the denial of the contradictories of the definitions of the words he uses—if a man abjures statement, he cannot of course be refuted, but he cannot be agreed with either: he forswears communication. The position that Mill takes up against Grote, and in effect against Aristotle, is approximately that which a modern logician would adopt, that the principle of contradiction simply embodies the rule for the correct use of negative terms: a proposition and the negation of its negation are the same proposition. But in going on to say, “the axioms in question . . . have their root in a mental fact which makes it impossible to contravene them” (499-500), Mill courts disaster. If he is to maintain his particularism, a mental fact must be a fact about the mind of some individual on some specific occasion. But about whose mind, at what time, is it a fact that the principle of contradiction cannot be contravened? Worse, to write thus is to imply that what is impossible is not that a proposition and its contradictory should both be true, but that they should both be believed to be true by the same person at the same time. But, since no mental fact prevents me from changing my mind about something I am saying even while I am saying it, our sole ground for saying that such a combination of beliefs is impossible is that they are logically incompatible. This lapse into an indefensible and misplaced psychologism comes strangely from Mill, who as we shall see had elsewhere insisted that a proposition was not proved true by the impossibility of disbelieving it, and it is interesting to find it in such close proximity with the extensive footnote in which Mill fires the last shot in his long campaign against Grote’s subjectivist reading of Protagoras (500n-501n). Mill’s pretence that in this matter his difference from Grote is merely a verbal one is charitable, but untenable: if Grote was unmoved by Mill’s annihilating argument in the Plato review (426 ff.), he was incorrigible. Mill could not reconcile himself to the existence in the world of men, otherwise apparently rational, who believed themselves to believe that whatever a man believes “is true for him.”

In a letter to Pasquale Villari on 28 February, 1872, Mill wrote: “You judged truly that the loss of Mr. Grote leaves a great blank in my life. He was the oldest & by far the most valued of my few surviving old friends.” Four months after his review of the Aristotle appeared, Mill joined the majority.

BERKELEY AND BAILEY

the review of fraser’sBerkeley has an impressive air of omnicompetence. As the reviewer follows his subject through the realms of metaphysics, mathematics, medicine, and political economy, he never admits or reveals himself to be at a loss. He compliments Berkeley on the early completion of his system with the sympathetic respect of one who, like him, had known everything at an age when his contemporaries had yet to learn that they knew nothing. In Berkeley, as in Plato, Mill finds a kindred spirit. All three men had put their intellects at the service of a moral passion; had disguised the subtleties of their arguments in an easy and eloquent style where cogency and sophistry intertwined; had used a single intellectual method and style to bring a wide range of phenomena within the compass of a single system; had preferred the manner of the debater to that of the expositor, though Mill published no dialogues. Nonetheless, one is surprised when Mill claims that Berkeley excelled all metaphysicians in “philosophic genius,” and bases his claim on a revolution he effected in the state of philosophy. Surely Berkeley’s impact was less than Plato’s, who found philosophy brick and left it marble, and no greater than that of the other luminaries Mill enumerates. But one glance at Mill’s list of Berkeley’s major innovations makes all plain. Berkeley made the Mills, father and son, possible, and it is only because this seems a lesser feat to us than it did to Mill that we esteem him less. Bailey wrote shrewdly when he attributed the blind vehemence of Mill’s defence of Berkeley’s theory of vision to filial piety. It may even be that Bailey’s taunt opened Mill’s eyes to the relationship, for the Bailey review states reservations about Berkeley’s technical competence that the Fraser review expressly withdraws.

Fruitful and suggestive as they are, the three theses that Mill singles out as founding “the true analytic method of studying the human mind” seem neither cogent nor clear. The first one states that “the connection between our impressions of sight and the facts they indicate can be discovered only by direct experience” (457). This view seems odd. What could this independent order of indicated facts be? How is it discovered? If we have independent access to it, how do we decide that its status is that of something indicated rather than indicating? Indeed, Berkeley’s point was that there are no such ultimate and privileged facts: all experiences can be related to all other experiences, and the reality to which they are to be referred is nothing but the complex internal structure of the world of experience itself. This point will occupy us later. Meanwhile, the second thesis singled out by Mill is that there can be no abstract general ideas: all ideas are particular, and are ideas of particulars. But what are ideas (Mill speaks here as if they were pictures one stored in one’s head), and how are they to be individuated? Mill takes up this problem in connection with the third thesis, but seems unaware of its urgency in relation to the second. Berkeley, indeed, might think there was no problem. If a man can use the phrase “a horse” with reference to a collectivity of experiences which, though its structure is indescribably complex, is familiar enough to work with, there may be no difficulty in principle in his using the phrase “my idea of a horse” in similar vague reliance on his capacity to find his way around his head. But this is, precisely, not an analytic method. Mill here offers a sketch for an analytic version that relies on his distinction (first expounded in the Whately review, 24) between the denotation and connotation of terms. It is baffling in its brevity. A name is “common to an indefinite multitude of individual objects,” but “is a mark for the properties . . . which belong alike to all these objects” (458). So it seems that only individual substances exist; but properties are identical in all their instantiations, and words are identical on all occasions of their utterance. Plato’s beard, it seems, is far from closely trimmed; and it is not clear just what Mill thinks Berkeley’s denial of general ideas has achieved, or what relation he sees between Berkeley’s contention that every idea must refer to an individual and his own contention that every word must stand for an indefinite number of particulars—a contention which it is easier to harmonize with Wittgenstein’s later notions about following rules than with earlier empiricist theories of reference. But these are tangled issues, and Mill’s own footnote at this point shows that they cannot be effectively broached in so restricted a context as this.

The third thesis is that of immaterialism itself: that the system of appearances is self-sufficient, and that nothing is gained by postulating any unobservable “matter” to sustain it. Mill, like most commentators, thinks Berkeley failed to rise to the height of his own argument when he substituted a divine will and consciousness for the missing material substratum. All we need postulate, says Mill in Heracleitean vein, is the permanent possibility of sensations, “or, to express it in other words, a law of uniformity in nature, by virtue of which similar sensations might and would have recurred, at any intermediate time, under similar conditions” (464). Mill states the fundamental objection to Berkeley’s move with admirable vigour and succinctness, though he recognizes that it was for the sake of this move that the pious undergraduate devised his system: the same argument that shows ideas to be inseparable from minds also shows that each idea is inseparable from the mind that conceives it and from the occasion of its conception; and the “notion” whereby an idea is held to imply the presence of a spiritual force apt to produce it is groundless. But he shows himself rather insensitive to the reasons that support Berkeley’s unfortunate postulate. For we may ask, as many have asked, what could be meant by a “permanent possibility.” Philosophers since Aristotle have agreed that the word “possibility” cannot be understood as standing for any independent reality or state of affairs, but only for the potentialities of some actual system or structure. Nor does one make the idea of a permanent possibility any more plausible by equating it with a law of nature. A law of nature, one might think, could be no more than a description of a sequence of phenomena, unless that sequence itself is a sample of a coherent reality, or a partial manifestation of a coherent will. Mill underrates the stubbornness of this question. But the argument is probably irresoluble, and there will always be four parties to the debate: those, like Berkeley, who boggle at reducing the fabric of nature to a hypothesis about the minute patch of the fabric that someone has perceived or will perceive; those, like Mill, who cannot surmount the impossibility of specifying what such a reality would be otherwise than in terms of what would in certain circumstances be perceived; those who see both parties as victims of obsessive verbal ideologies whose practical consequences must be identical and which accordingly cannot merit allegiance; and those, the happy majority, with neither the will nor the wit to grapple with the issues involved.

In contrast with the special pleading in relation to the three metaphysical theses, the overall assessment of Berkeley’s activity is impressively just and broadly based. The range and keenness of Mill’s mind seldom appear to better advantage. The review of Bailey—written, like the first of the Grote reviews, with astonishing speed —and the reply to Bailey’s rejoinder have the same air of reasonableness, sympathy, and force. They convince one that the unfortunate autodidact, of whom Mill speaks with more sorrow than anger, has met with justice tempered with as much mercy as the case allowed; and Packe, for one, takes his word for it that Bailey was demolished. Yet an uneasy suspicion may enter. The weight of prejudice is now on the other side, and the informed modern reader finds Berkeley’s theory of vision as incomprehensible as Bailey found it. Could it be that he had seen something that Mill overlooked? After all, Mill’s account of what Bailey said is not very full. A reading of Bailey confirms our suspicions.

Bailey sometimes expresses himself loosely, but builds a formidable argument against the Berkeleian position. So far from answering it, Mill seems not to have grasped it; certainly one could not guess from reading Mill what the argument was. The misunderstandings between the two men are far-reaching, and the issues themselves dismayingly complex. I fear that my attempt to clarify the issues will only add new confusions. But an attempt seems necessary.

Since the publication of Berkeley’s Commonplace Book, as Mill recognizes in his 1871 review, it has been clear that the separate publication of the New Theory of Vision was merely a tactical manœuvre. Berkeley was already in possession of the arguments whereby the Principles of Human Knowledge would show that sensations of touch are as certainly “in the mind” as are sensations of vision. But the New Theory of Vision had argued that whereas visual sensations are “in the mind” the sense of touch gives us direct knowledge of an external world, so that by associating our visual sensations with tactile ones we can refer them to the external world that is their cause. This is an absurd position. As Bailey insists, citing Berkeley’s own later works, the five senses are on precisely the same footing in the matter of external reference. Yet, as Mill says (453-4), most philosophers had accepted the theory of vision and rejected general immaterialism, as though the arguments for the former would not sustain the latter. How was this logical monstrosity possible? Partly, as we shall soon see, because of the compelling attractiveness of one particular image; partly, according to Bailey, because Berkeley’s supporters confused the issue of how we judge distances with the quite separate issue of how we initially form the notion of an external world; but partly, no doubt, because if any of the senses is to have the status of sole testimony to reality, it can only be the sense of touch. But the argument demonstrating the priority of touch is an old Aristotelian one from speculative biology, and rests on taking the initial distinction between self and other for granted: an organism must sustain itself by interaction with its environment, and this interaction takes place at the surface of the body, so that the distance senses must refer in a general way to what might impinge on the skin. But this is a far cry from the epistemological reduction in which tangible properties alone are ascribed to reality, and in which the proper objects of vision are held to be subjective phenomena that have the proper objects of touch as their sole objective referent.

The argument of Bailey’s book rests on a foundation that Mill never mentions. This is the distinction between externality, the fact that we locate the objects of vision in a world outside ourselves, and distance, the fact that we locate them within that world at various distances from ourselves. He urges that the distinction between inner and outer is not one that could be learned from any experience, but must be presumed innate: after all, a newly-hatched turtle immediately makes for the water, which it must therefore perceive as “outside.” In any case, the alleged priority of touch over sight in this matter is a myth: “When an object is printed on the retina, the object is seen to be external as directly and immediately as the object is felt to be external.” The location of objects at various distances from the observer, on the other hand, is indeed learned in experience, if not actually from experience (Bailey finds the last point hard to determine, because human infants are less fully developed at birth than the young of other species, and hence are slower in the development of all their faculties). But the relevant experience is not exclusively tactile, and need not be tactile at all, for visual space is a self-contained system that is generated by the complex structure of appearances as the eyes change conformation and viewpoint. Nor is it the case, as some Berkeleians supposed, that change of viewpoint is a tactual matter because it depends on the muscular sensations of perambulation: children have the full use of their eyes at an age when they lack effective use of their legs and are carried everywhere by their mothers. This visual space is of course correlated with tactile space, but if it were not a space in its own right there could be no correlation. And, again, the initial correlations between the spaces must be intuitive, because they could not be learned. Mill counters this last move by citing the experience of people who have recovered their vision by surgery and at first cannot interpret what they see. Unfortunately he relies on the Cheselden case (264), which does not support him: it is that of a boy who has to catch his cat and hold her before he can tell she is not his dog. But, as Bailey points out, the terms in which Cheselden describes this episode show that the boy could already recognize the feline shape as constant through its various occurrences and transformations, and, apparently, that he could use visual cues to help him catch the cat; what he could not do was correlate this recognized form with a familiar tactile form—in Cheselden’s words, he “often forgot which was the cat, and which the dog.”

Mill’s appeal (262) to the structure of the eye as conclusive evidence for the Berkeleian hypothesis tends to confirm Bailey’s claim that the hypothesis rests essentially on a single argument: that distance must be invisible, because the three-dimensional world projects on the retina a two-dimensional image. This image “painted on our retina,” in the significant phrase used by Mill (253) and unwisely accepted by Bailey, is the true object of vision. It is as though there were a second organ of vision gazing at the retina, which is envisaged as a tiny screen set up inside the head, like a camera obscura. And the image on this screen is thought of as like the image of a pinhole camera: flat, simultaneously clear and detailed and sharp in all its parts. It is astonishing that this entirely fictitious notion of the facts of vision should have dominated the psychology of the senses for so long. It is plainly derived, in Mill’s give-away phrase, from “as much of optics as is now commonly taught in children’s books” (253), and in particular from a simple diagram showing how light-rays pass in straight lines from solid objects through the pupil to their images “in the fund of the eye”: in these diagrams, distance is indeed represented by what Berkeley so unintelligibly says it is, “a line directed endwise to the eye” and projecting a single point on the retina. This is gibberish. Optical diagrams do not represent the processes of vision. Bailey points out that only a material line (a thin wire, or something of the sort) could project anything in the fund of the eye, and then only if it stopped short of the eye itself; and if it did project anything in the fund of the eye it would have to be visible. If what Berkeley is talking about is the line we draw in our diagrams when we are explaining the laws of optics, this is not the sort of thing that can either project or fail to project anything. As Bailey says, “The distance of an object from us is not a line presented endwise to the eye: distance is not represented on the retina by a point. These are phrases which describe no real facts.” And to Mill’s unfortunate contention (254)—“the distances of objects from us are represented on our retina in all cases by single points; and all points being equal, all such distances must appear equal, or rather, we are unable to see them in the character of distances at all”—he responds, unanswerably: “If distances are seen, and seen to be equal, and yet not seen in the character of distances at all, will the critic be obliging enough to say in what character they are seen?” Mill does not help himself by saying (267) that objects, the spaces between objects, and the distances between objects and the eye, are all projected on the retina in the same way: it only becomes more obvious that he is using a language that is quite inappropriate to the phenomena. Yet Bailey wins only a debating victory. For the reason why Mill is so bewildered by Bailey’s obtuseness in failing to see the obvious is that he is not thinking about the implications of the language he is using: he is simply reminding Bailey of characteristics that the pinhole-camera image and the optical diagram really do have. And Bailey has no right to object, since he himself accepts the language of “painting on the retina” that makes Mill’s remarks seem apposite.

Bailey seems always about to discover the delusive nature of the optical diagram as a representation of the facts of vision, but never quite succeeds. Because the retinal image is literally inside the head, and because visual imagery is in a sense subjective and in that sense “in the mind,” the Berkeleians wrote as if the visual world were originally seen to be inside the head. Bailey sees that this is absurd: “If an external object can be perceived by sight as such, it must be perceived also to be distant; to stand apart, or occupy a different portion of space from the being which perceives it.” But he cites the Berkeleian argument in a way that shows he has missed the essential point, that if there are such things as primordial and uninterpreted data of sensation they must be seen neither “as” inside nor “as” outside, since it is from such data that the concepts of inside and outside must themselves be constructed or derived. Similarly, though the retinal image is two-dimensional, our visual data can be neither two-dimensional nor three-dimensional, since those terms derive their meaning from reference to a space within which both solid and flat objects can be distinguished. Bailey recognizes and remarks that within this visual world flat things may be mistaken for solid ones and solid things for flat ones, and that in both cases (whatever Mill may say) the correction is less likely to be supplied by the sense of touch than by a closer look; but he quotes Berkeley’s own fundamental observation, that visibilia must in themselves be neither plane nor solid but have figure and shape in another mode, only to reject it as involving a contradiction.

The crucial consideration, that the clear and distinct retinal image is a fiction, is hidden from Bailey and Mill alike. The closest they come to recognizing it is in their discussion of Wheatstone’s recent (1838) demonstration of the stereoscopic mechanisms of binocular vision. It is amusing to see how the two theorists deal with these facts. Bailey attributes the muscular sensations derived from the accommodation of the two eyes to the sense of sight; Mill, for whom only what can be read from the optical diagram can be visual, associates the same sensations with the sense of touch. If Mill’s position seems ridiculous, this is not because Bailey is right, but because this analytical method of dividing labour among the senses and the intellect and other “faculties” cannot be made to work. Bailey claims that the stereoscopic phenomena themselves show that the perception of “geometrical solidity” does not depend on inference; but Mill has only to reply that he never denied there were distinctive visual phenomena associated with distance, he only said that the fact of their association must be inferred. And after all, he says, Wheatstone’s researches show no more than that we have to do with two retinal images, not one. Neither theorist shows any awareness that because of the indistinctness of peripheral vision, the shallow field of the lens of the eye, and so on, a viewer must be restlessly active in constructing a visual field that would have the characteristics they attributed to the retinal image. Seeing is a complex activity, not a passive reception of stimuli. Bailey comes a little way towards realizing this fact; Mill does not even begin.

The issue between Mill and Bailey resists clarification, not merely because they are victims of a common delusion, but because each is involved in a hopeless confusion of terms. What do they mean by “distance”? Mill speaks as if it were a sort of visible object, the ghost of a dimension; Bailey as if it were a homonymous term referring to disparate properties of visual and tactile spaces. What makes their controversy so hard to follow is that they both assume that the term “distance” must function as the name of an object, of which it might make sense to assert or deny that it was visible; whereas in actuality the word functions in a much more various and elusive way, alluding to a complex and pervasive aspect of our experience, and to the mass of heterogeneous procedures that go by the name of “measurement.”

One aspect of this terminological vagueness and confusion was clear to Mill. He complains of Bailey’s question-begging use of the term “perception,” a term that combines a clear reference to sensory experience with a quite indeterminate claim of some sort of real status for the objects of that experience. Bailey makes facile fun of this legitimate and serious complaint by quoting James Mill—an authority, as he maliciously observes, that every Westminster Reviewer is bound to respect—as saying, “I believe that I see distance and form; in other words, perceive it by the eye, as immediately as I perceive the colour.” “Who does not see that the word thus employed has a precise meaning?” he asks, and explains: “When I speak, without any qualifying adjunct, of perceiving an object by sight, I simply mean seeing it; when I speak of perceiving an object by touch, I simply mean feeling it.” But distance, form, and colour, which are what James Mill says he perceives, are not objects at all in what seems to be Bailey’s sense. The whole question turns on what one may properly be said to “see,” and what one should mean when in the context of a psychological discussion one says that a subject “sees” something. And on this subject Bailey complacently wallows in a slough of confusion. Mill, he insists, is wrong to say that when we mistake a plane for a solid “our error consists in inferring that it is solid,” for “The perception of solidity, or, if the phrase be preferred, the undoubting belief that we see a solid object is, in both cases, equally an impression produced at once upon the mind through the eye, without any process of reasoning or suggestion”; it is an affection of the optic nerve that produces “a certain affection of the mind called seeing an object,” so that “the third dimension of space is seen” whether one is looking at a real solid thing or being deceived by a trompe-l’œil—“The only difference is, that, in one case, the solidity is real, in the other illusory.” But how can a belief be an impression produced through the eye? And how can “seeing an object,” which presupposes that there is an object to be seen, be called an affection of the mind? Even Bailey sees that this is going too far, and adds a cautionary—but, unfortunately, nonsensical—footnote: “We cannot, of course, in the common acceptation of terms, say that we see what does not really exist. . . . It is scarcely necessary to warn the reader that in this discussion geometrical solidity alone is intended”; and adds on the next page that such illusions cannot be dispelled simply by the information that they are illusions, “although we no longer infer that the appearance before us is attended with the usual accompaniments of solidity.” One sees what is intended—that the discrimination of shapes by the eye is a purely visual skill, learned by exercising the eye, and that inference is involved only when we suppose that other sorts of sensory experience would be correlated with the visual data—but Mill is hardly to be blamed if he treats such bumbling with contempt. Mill, for his part, uses the word “see” in a programmatic way that is consistent both with itself and with his project of analytic reduction: one can be said to “see” only what can be distinguished on the retinal image in the optical diagram that purports to show how the eye works. Everything else is attributed, on principle and without further ado, to the inferential and associative activities of the intellect, even though (as Bailey justly remarks) no inference can be detected, the grounds and conclusion of the alleged inference cannot be isolated, and no known or conceivable process of association could have the results claimed. Never mind. What the retinal image cannot contain must be contributed by the intellect. It is as though Mill were committing an aggravated form of the error he was later to stigmatize in his father’s Analysis, supposing that the word “see” contained a reference to the physical organ of sight as part of its meaning.

Although Mill is right when he says that Bailey’s use of the word “perception” fogs all the issues, Bailey seems justified in rejoining that to adopt Mill’s vocabulary and speak of “sensation” and “inference” would be “to adopt the theory which I controvert,” since the whole question at issue is whether the alleged distinction can be made. And he might have added that the word “sensation” itself is fraught with ambiguities. Berkeley, as quoted by Bailey, uses “sensations” to mean “objects purportedly perceived,” for he gives the sun and the stars as examples of sensations; Bailey uses “sensations” rather as some later philosophers have used the phrase “sense data”; Mill uses the word to mean “acts of sensing.” The trouble is not that the wrong words are used, but that there is no consistent use of any set of words to make all the necessary distinctions.

On the main issue, Bailey has much the best of the argument. If “distance is in reality a mere tactual conception,” it seems impossible that this could be “mistaken for a visual perception.” Surely “We cannot believe we have any particular sensation, unless we either have it or have had it at some prior period.” It is absurd to argue, as Mill does (259), that our neglect of the tactile content of our visual percepts is like our failure to attend clearly and distinctly to the meanings of familiar words: for, of course, we can distinctly recall the meaning of any familiar word, if we choose to attend to it, but we cannot by any analogous feat of attention recover the alleged tactile content of our visual impressions of distance. Mill admits that our notions of tactile space are much vaguer and less consistent than our notions of visual space. This admission in itself gives his contention that three-dimensional space is fundamentally tactile a wildly paradoxical air. Unfortunately, he also accepts that “the mind . . . does not dwell upon the sign, . . . but rushes at once from the sign to the thing signified” (257). But then, asks Bailey in triumph, “In what state must the mind be when we are looking at external objects? What is it that the understanding is engaged with? A neglected sign and an indistinct idea, between which the mind is thus bandied about, must assuredly produce a very obscure and unsteady discernment, while, in point of fact, nothing can be clearer or firmer than our perception of space in all directions, when we look round the room or out of the window.” But Bailey is still using that word “perception” in a way that begs the question at issue. The confusion is hopeless. Mill’s protégé Alexander Bain managed to clarify some of the issues, as we shall now see, but it is doubtful whether Mill fully appreciated his contribution.

BAIN AND PSYCHOLOGY

samuel johnson took care, when writing his parliamentary reports, “that the Whig Dogs should not have the best of it.” Mill and his associates took a similarly functional view of the periodical press, and the review of Bain is no more a work of dispassionate judgment than the reviews of Grote. Bain supplied Mill with up-to-date scientific data for his Logic, and reviewed it in 1843 in the Westminster, to which he had begun to contribute in 1840. In 1846 he was a summer guest of the Grotes at Burnham Beeches; Mill recommended him for the Examinership in Logic and Mental Philosophy at the University of London; Grote got him appointed to the new chair of English and Logic at Aberdeen, and supplied an account of Aristotle’s psychology for the third edition of The Senses and the Intellect as well as a history of ancient psychology and ethics for Bain’s Mental and Moral Science of 1868; Bain and Grote joined Mill in annotating James Mill’s Analysis. Bain wrote a life of one Mill and an appreciation of the other, and edited Grote’s posthumous works. It seems a small world these intellectual radicals came to move in. In the circumstances, Mill’s suggestion (342n) that he only decided to review Bain after carefully weighing the respective merits of his work and Spencer’s seems disingenuous—especially when we learn that Mill had advised Parker to publish Bain’s first volume, and joined Grote in guaranteeing him against loss in publishing the second. In the Autobiography, issued posthumously under Mill’s own name, the pretence of impartiality was dropped.

Mill’s review makes much of a distinction between a priori and a posteriori schools of psychology. Bain does not mention this distinction, and it is a puzzling one. Psychologists of both persuasions seem equally a posteriori in their methods: they seek to uphold their views by citing facts in approximately the same amounts—though not always the same facts. If anything, for reasons that will appear, it is the supposed apriorist who is more ready to appeal to experience, the self-styled aposteriorist who relies on dogma. Basically, as Mill insists they must, both follow the same method: that of reducing the complex operations of a living organism to the development in experience, in accordance with regular and predictable processes, of the simplest possible original operations. All and only what cannot be acquired must be assigned to instinct. Where the two schools differ is in what they say when confronted by a complex phenomenon of which neither can demonstrate the analysis. They then dogmatize in different directions. The apriorists, instead of acknowledging a pragmatic limit to analysis, announce the discovery of an ultimate and forever irreducible intuition or instinct; the aposteriorists invent a spurious analysis in terms of whatever entities their method postulates. Mill indeed recognizes (350) the existence of this temptation and the importance of resisting it; but in fact neither he nor Bain shows any scruples in the way they invoke the “principle of association” which Mill claims “extends to everything” (347).

As an example of the divergent dogmatisms of the two schools we may consider the alleged infinity of time and space. Apriorists, Mill says, claim that the mind’s belief in this infinity is instinctive, on no better ground than that nothing in our experience can be infinite; but the true explanation is not far to seek. Because we have no experience of a spatial or temporal point without neighbours, whenever we imagine such a point we imagine it (from force of habit) as neighboured; hence, we can imagine no limits to time and space, and therefore find their finitude unthinkable and call them “infinite” (345-7). But, we may ask, from what experience does the alleged association proceed? We know places where there are things, and places where there are no things; times when things happen, and times when nothing much happens. But in what sort of experience do moments of time and points of space, as such, form elements? What is supposed to be the difference between a time when time ends and a time after which there is infinite time in which nothing happens? The alleged extrapolation from “experience” seems plausible only if one allows virtually any relation between any sort of real or ideal units to count as a case of “association.”

Bain, though this hardly appears from the review, was not prepared to fudge his psychology as Mill did. His attempt to anchor his associationism to the physiology of the nervous system effectively prevented him from doing so. The “chemical union” which Mill praises Hartley for introducing (347) allows one, as Bailey complained, to use the term “association” of almost any form of explanation that relates an experience to previous experiences or alleged constituents. Bain’s speculative account of the processes of the nervous system eschews such vagueness. Knowledge is produced by the accumulation of patterns of electrical discharges, each of which records something known and figures in memory simply by being repeated. The patterns can combine mechanically, but cannot fuse. Bain is thus committed, as Mill was not, to the programme of actually discerning and disentangling the elements whose association is postulated. In the end, this scrupulous atomism makes associationism implausible by multiplying the required number of brain traces beyond credibility; but at least we can guess what form an associationist explanation should take, which with Mill remains forever mysterious.

It was because Mill admitted “chemical” unions that he could with a good conscience invoke the “complete Baconian induction” whereby the apparently visual phenomena of distance are shown to be ultimately tactual in purport. As early as Leibniz’s Nouveaux Essais apriorists had complained against the aposteriorist assumption that an “innate” faculty must be one manifested in infancy: the point, they said, is not the moment in time at which an ability is first displayed, but whether it admits of being analyzed without remainder into elements previously given in experience. But to say that a “chemical” union has taken place is to admit that such an analysis is in principle impossible; the issue can then be settled, if at all, only by appealing (as Mill does) to the circumstances in which an idea is first manifested.

It is true that Bain, who lacks Mill’s excuse, himself sometimes makes the assumption against which Leibniz complained. But Bain’s logical acumen was rather blunt. In fact, though a man of great learning and industry and a strong sense of fact, he had little gift for philosophical analysis. The pieces of his work are generally sober and well-informed, but are not always consistent among themselves; and this is nowhere more evident than in what he says of visual perception. In the Book on “The Senses,” where his account is firmly linked to the physiology of eye and brain, the Berkeleian doctrine of the priority of touch has no place, and colour appears among visibilia as merely one of the means of differentiation of visible objects. But in the Book on “The Intellect” colour is back in its old place as the unique visibile, and statements requiring the Berkeleian doctrine are interspersed with others more compatible with the doctrine worked out earlier.

Yet there can be little doubt as to what the overall theory is to which his account tends, and it differs far more widely from Mill’s than Mill is aware, even though the difference is less plainly marked in the first edition than in the later revisions. First, the “retinal image” as the static quasi-object of vision vanishes, and with it vanishes the independent significance of the findings of optics. “The optical sensibility does not give even visible form”; the visual presentations at any moment “are but the hint to a mental construction” to which we carelessly attribute the qualities of a static picture; in fact, temporal and spatial distinctions are revealed by movements, those involving vision being not parasitic upon but parallel to those involving touch. The “suggestion of locomotive effort” is at the heart of our sense of real distance; but the notion of extension “when full grown is a compound of locomotion, touch, and vision, any one implying and recalling all the others.” Thus “extension, or space, as a quality, has no other origin and no other meaning than the association of these different sensitive and motor effects.” Here is Berkeley’s Berkeley, restored to intelligibility, with the opticians’ Berkeley relegated to limbo at last; and Bain is able to recognize without embarrassment that our spatial sensibility incorporates such ineluctably visual elements as a sense of expansive compresence.

Another vast area of confusion vanishes on the very first page. The old controversy had assumed that there was a problem about how we get from subject to object, from inner experience to outer world. But now we read that subject and object, outer and inner, are concepts that can only be acquired in contradistinction from each other; and the baffling talk about “inside the mind” and “outside the mind,” as though the mind were the skull, is set aside just as firmly, though rather less clearly. This done, we are free to return to the commonsense view that the notion of an external world rests on the experience of resistance to our bodies —a factor which, Bain noted with mild surprise as soon as it was safe to do so, Mill was “almost singular” in overlooking.

Mill notes as one of the merits of Bain’s work that it rests on a solid account of neural activity. But his version of the theory of vision, in which he virtually claims that Bain agrees with him despite some over-emphasis on the activity of the eye muscles, shows how far he is from appreciating the difference this makes. For example, Mill still feels able to talk about the retinal image as a picture. But, whether Bain was aware of it or not, the ground rules for such discussions had changed. From now on, one had a choice. Either one took account of the central nervous system, in which case the old-fashioned compartmentalization of the senses became irrelevant, or one confined oneself to epistemology and phenomenology, in which case Mill’s style of generic analysis became inappropriate. Psychology could never be the same again.

Mill remarks shrewdly on the different levels on which the different sections of Bain’s work proceed. The Book on “The Emotions,” as he justly observes (361), is no more than a natural history; that on “The Will” is a sustained effort at reductive analysis in the old style of James Mill and the eighteenth century generally. But the Book on “The Senses” belongs to a new age, in which psychology would be turned into a positive science by recognizing that its first task was to establish what is in fact the case. Because of this disparate character of its parts, Bain’s work could be regarded equally as a late production of speculation or an early product of science. Mill, naturally enough, can see it only as a continuation of his own work with new aids. Yet we should be careful not to make too much of the differences between the two men. There is one essential point in the theory of vision that is common to both: that visual data are originally “signs” whose interpretation must be learned in experience and whose meaning is to be explicated in terms of experience. This point holds true whether or not new-born animals have inborn tendencies to react to stimuli, of whatever kind.

It is in the Book on “The Will,” as Mill suggests (354), that Bain shows his originality as a psychologist of the old school by trying to reduce all the phenomena of animal action to the terms of a new and very simple model: all skills are acquired by the modification of an original entirely random and generalized activity of the nervous system and hence of the muscles, and the modification is effected by simple reinforcement or inhibition through pleasure or pain. This implausible model seems to rely excessively on the singular helplessness of the neonate human. It is curious to see the enthusiasm with which Mill seizes on the description of the new-born lambs (358-9), a description which is made to support Bain’s case only by the observer’s gratuitous insistence on the randomness of the motions he describes. One wonders how many lambs would survive if their lives depended on such a series of chance contacts as is here supposed, without any initial tropism or IRM’s. And one wishes Bain had indicated how he would have accounted for Bailey’s new-born turtles, trekking to the sea. It is precisely in this sort of model-building that Bain is weakest. It is his combination of unimaginativeness and implausibility (together, of course, with the obsoleteness of all old science) that explains why we no longer read him but still read Hobbes, who knew so much less but suggested so much more.

Mill gravely understates (364) the oddness of one aspect of Bain’s account of volition, his version of the development of the moral ideas. This is very different from Mill’s own. Bain thinks of morality as wholly negative, a system of inhibitions built up in the first instance entirely by corporal punishment. His dourness seems appropriate to the reputation of the calvinist and granitic city where he spent most of his life. From this point of view Mill’s utilitarianism is not a theory of morals at all, but of something else. The phrase “moral approval” is explicitly called a misnomer, on the grounds that only disapproval can be moral.

I have already noted Bain’s account of the origin of our sense of the externality of the world. He ends his work by citing an account of the physical world tantamount to Mill’s notorious formula, “permanent possibility of sensation”—cited, not from Mill, but from the Idéologie of Destutt Tracy. This fits in with the basic principle of Bain’s work, played down in Mill’s review: the principle of relativism, that consciousness can only be consciousness of differences and changes. It follows immediately from this principle that the mind can have no knowledge of any “absolute.” This relativism goes naturally with the discovery of the ceaseless activity of the nervous system, and it is plainly hard for Mill to adjust to it. The older philosopher is hampered by the empiricist traditions of atomism and reification, which turn the mind into a warehouse of ideas, and knowledge into an assemblage of separate facts about separate things. Thus he has little to say (beyond a faint protest) about Bain’s doctrine of belief. “As, in my view,” says Bain, “Belief is essentially related to the active part of our being, I have reserved the consideration of it to the conclusion of the Treatise on the Will.” To believe anything is to act as if it were the case; hence, by extension, to have a propensity to act so; or, in cases where (as in believing that one would have enjoyed living in ancient Rome) no prospect of action arises, to be in a disposition that would have led to action had the occasion arisen. Mill is understandably puzzled to understand how such a position could be consistently developed and defended, and it must be admitted that (like much of Bain’s work) it raises no fewer problems than it purports to solve, but it is at least clear that it forms part of a philosophy of process in which Bain feels so much at home that the details of its statement do not trouble him much. Precisely the same difference in mental set appears in Mill’s later exchange with Bain on the subject of “potential energy.” Mill, with impeccable logic, and citing Hamilton for his definitions, points out that what is called “potential energy” is really potential motion. If it is anything at all it is a real force; but it seems to be postulated only as a fiction, to reconcile the observed phenomena with the dogma of the conservation of energy. But working scientists are notoriously insensitive to considerations of this sort.

Mill’s support (365-7) of Bain’s determinism also conceals a difference in approach, though not one that Bain emphasizes. Bain, like Mill, allows no validity to the “consciousness” of freedom, and for the reasons that Mill gives. But what is hidden from consciousness for Bain is not best described, as it is by Mill, as a hidden law obeyed by our volitions. For Bain, mental and neural phenomena run in parallel and do not interact. To every mental state answers a brain state. And the brain is an electrical machine, whose later states are accordingly a function of its earlier states and inputs. In fact, as many later writers were to point out, consciousness in Bain’s theory is fundamentally misleading.

Mill’s comment on Ruskin’s inadvertent aposteriorism in Modern Painters, apparently a casual aside in his treatment of the classification of emotions, is more important than it looks. Aesthetic feelings and artistic practice have been strongholds of apriorists at least since Hutcheson published his Inquiry, and perhaps since the neoplatonists and Plato himself: a sense of beauty seems to resist derivation from or analysis into any other mental phenomenon. Bain spends a surprising amount of space on various attempted reductions, but he shows little aptitude for these topics, and his later editions rely with relief on the authority of Sully. Ruskin, though some disparage his taste and reasoning power, has never been accused of deficiency in the amount of his aesthetic sensitivity. Perhaps Mill (himself found deficient in such sensibility—by Bain!) is hinting that it is not only philistine Scots who are prepared to reduce the aesthetic sense to a more general form of susceptibility.

What Mill says about the necessarily negative nature of the evidence for apriorism (349) sheds some light on a puzzling argument in Utilitarianism. Mill there argues that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof in the strict sense, but that the fact that each man desires his own happiness affords the sole possible proof that the happiness of all men is desirable. Apparently, then, Mill is speaking of “proof” in some restricted or metaphorical sense, but it is not clear just what this sense should be. In the present passage, where Mill uses almost the same language, the nerve of the argument is exposed: that the failure to disprove a thesis for which there is prima facie empirical evidence, though not proving the thesis true, must be allowed to serve in lieu of demonstration in all cases where it is logically impossible that anything better could be found. That would make good sense in the Utilitarianism passage. The things that ought to be desired must be among those things that can be desired, and the only logically possible way of showing that a thing can be desired is to show that it is in fact desired. “Ought” implies “can,” and possibility is parasitic on actuality. It always remains logically possible that someone should discover an actual, and hence possible, and hence possibly proper, object of desire that is not reducible to a component of happiness; but no one has yet, despite all endeavours, managed to do so. Until they do, some form of utilitarianism must hold the field. It is not, admittedly, clear that Mill means to argue to this effect in Utilitarianism, but his general aim of making the moral sciences truly scientific would lead us to expect him to follow the same lines in ethics as in psychology generally. And, just as in general psychology his analyses are rendered nugatory by his admission of canons of association according to which anything may be “chemically” analyzed into anything, so in ethics his argument becomes trivial because (as Bain complained) even the most self-abnegatory actions are interpreted as self-seeking through an analogously magical sort of transformation.

TAINE AND THE UNDERSTANDING

taine was forty-two when Hachette published his grande pâtée philosophique in April, 1870, but he had been meditating it for twenty years: a theoretical underpinning for the historical works by which he is better remembered. If one can show that all knowledge comes from experience, differences in style should reflect differences in experience: literary, artistic, and social histories should be explicable in terms of cultural traditions that could in turn be ultimately explained by such factors as climate and terrain—Taine had nothing but contempt for George Grote, whose history treated politicians as free agents.

Like Mill, Taine was something of an outsider in relation to the cultural establishment of his country. But whereas Mill and associates could use the forces of Scottish irredentism and northern nonconformism, not to mention the private empire of India House, and set up University College in Gower Street to be a counterweight to the port-sodden churchmanship of the ancient universities, Taine was up against a more tightly knit and centrally controlled cultural empire. Outside the official establishment there was nothing: one had to choose between taking it over oneself, and finding a niche in which to pursue (as so many French intellectuals have done since) one’s private intellectual aims in the abundant leisure its ample rhythms afforded. As a youth, Taine was denied the prizes and professorships he sought, being thought too flashy in his brilliance and too unstable in his politics: but at thirty-five his growing literary fame won him appointment first as Examiner to Saint-Cyr and later (in succession to Viollet-le-Duc) as professor of aesthetics at the École des Beaux-Arts—though even then an attempt by the military authorities to terminate the controversial appointment had to be circumvented by the interposition of the Emperor himself. Nonetheless, the two men shared a feeling of being in an embattled minority. Thanking Taine for his series of articles on the Logic in the Revue des Deux Mondes, Mill says that when he began to publish he was almost alone in his views, and that even now the empiricist philosophers were outnumbered twenty to one; while Taine predicted that his own psychological work would find only a hundred readers in France and a hundred in the rest of Europe.

Both in his review and elsewhere, Mill treats this split in the philosophic community as following national lines, suggesting that both Cousin’s idealism and Hamilton’s apriorism, against which Taine and he were pitting themselves, were Germanic in inspiration. But his letter to Taine repudiates this ascription of national affiliations to schools of thought. The French think of empiricism as peculiarly English, the English as typically French. In reality, intuitionism and empiricism are related dialectically: the dominance of either calls forth the other as its antithesis. Which of them happens to prevail in any particular milieu at any particular time is quite fortuitous; at the time of writing, Germany itself is swinging towards the empiricist pole. And Taine himself at one time spoke of Mill’s philosophy as a re-working of Kant.

Mill’s review of Taine, like that of Bain, is not the first meeting of the two minds, but an episode in a long relationship. At first, Taine had not been deeply impressed: he found Jowett more progressive. “On vante beaucoup ici,” he wrote in 1860, “la Logique de Stuart Mill et la Psychologie physiologique de Bain. Il y a du mérite, mais ce ne sont pas des génies.” But in 1861 he devoted to the Logic a series of articles which he later published as a monograph, and in the preface to the latter version he sings to another tune: “En ce moment, la scène est vide en Europe. . . . Dans ce grand silence, et parmi ces comparses monotones, voici un maître qui s’avance et qui parle. On n’a rien vu de semblable depuis Hegel.” Mill acknowledged the accuracy of Taine’s account of his views, which appeared yet again as part of the History of English Literature; and much of it was incorporated, sometimes with little change even in the wording, in Taine’s own account of induction in De l’Intelligence. It is therefore not surprising that Mill finds little in this part of the book to quarrel with.

Mill’s review, with its reference to the foundation of knowledge on images, might mislead the uninitiated into thinking that Taine’s background in associationism is the antiquated French ultra-Lockianism of Condillac, rather than the North-British neo-Hartleianism of the Mills and Bain. Taine himself thought otherwise: his original Preface acknowledges a debt to Condillac for one point only, and claims Mill, Bain, and Herbert Spencer as his chief creditors. The fourth edition of 1883 supplements this general avowal with three specific acknowledgements: to Condillac, for the theory that all general ideas “se réduisent à des signes”; to Mill, for the theory of induction; and to Bain, for the account of the perception of space. A letter of January, 1873, gives the reason for this explicitness: the British had treated his book as a mere re-hash of their own work. He virtually accuses Spencer of plagiarizing his views for the revised edition of Principles of Psychology and falsely claiming that Taine got them from him. He continues:

Il dit dans sa seconde préface que L’Intelligence “a fait connaître en France quelques-unes de ses maîtresses conceptions.” Cela est inexact. Ceux à qui j’ai emprunté sont John Stuart Mill et Bain (Induction, sensation musculaire donnant l’idée de l’étendue), et je les ai cités tout au long. Je n’ai emprunté à Spencer qu’une phrase. . . .

Pardonnez-moi ces revendications; je me suis aperçu en lisant les Revues anglaises que l’on faisait de mon livre une simple imitation, une transcription française des théories anglaises.—M. Stuart Mill, dans un article de juin 1870, a bien voulu que mon travail était entièrement original, et, à mon sens, cela se voit par la méthode employée, par les théories de détail et par les théories d’ensemble.

The “article of June 1870” is of course the review included in this volume, from which, unlike Taine, I would have gathered that Mill was less impressed by the book’s intrinsic merits than by its significance as portending a possible change in the climate of French opinion. Certainly he specifies no respect in which the book has advanced the study of its subject, treating its chief departure from his own views as a mere abandonment of the book’s own principles. But were the abandoned principles Taine’s, or Mill’s? A letter of 1872 suggests that Taine’s intentions were far from empiricist, for one of the chief matters in which he claims originality is his metaphysical reduction of the individual to a mere series of events, “tous les événements de la nature n’étant que des formes diverses de la pensée.” And his earlier essay on Mill had strikingly contrasted Mill’s approach with his own: “This theory of science is a theory of English science. . . . The operations, of which he constructs science, are those in which the English excel all others, and those which he excludes from science are precisely those in which the English are deficient more than any other nation. He has described the English mind whilst he thought to describe the human mind.”

Acknowledging Taine’s thanks for his review, Mill apologizes both for its brevity and for its uninformativeness. “Je sais combien cette notice est insuffisante mais j’ai voulu, au premier moment possible, attirer l’attention des hommes éclairés sur un livre dont la publication en France me paraît destinée à faire époque. Votre livre n’a pas besoin d’être interprété. Il suffit qu’on le lise, car vous possédez parmi tant d’autres qualités, le génie de la clarté.” And he goes on to explain more fully where he differs from Taine about the status of axioms. His account of this doctrine had indeed been compressed to the point of unintelligibility, and seems in fact to have been derived from the earlier and cruder version in the monograph on Mill (according to which “abstraction” affords “an intermediate course between intuition and observation, capable of arriving at principles, as it is affirmed that the first is, capable of arriving at truths, as we find that the second is”) rather than from the more refined version adumbrated in De l’Intelligence. Taine’s mature doctrine seems to be as follows. The empirical concepts and generalizations reached by induction, even when based on intelligible relationships and not merely on observed regularities, can never be extrapolated to remote situations with more than probability (449). But the concepts that figure in the axioms of the exact sciences are not so much abstractions from experience as anticipations of experience, ideals to which experience can never be shown to conform (414). The laws of the exact sciences are disguised analytic statements, depending for their truth on the analyses and reconstructions on which the concepts contained in them ultimately depend (485). The laws of geometry and mechanics therefore have to do not with actual but with possible things. Their axioms depend not, as in Mill’s empiricism, on likenesses recognized through an associative process, but on the identity of formal properties (480-6). In explicit contrast with Mill, Taine opposes the perceived likeness of two geometrical figures to the recognized identity of a geometrical construction. The repetition with which science deals is identical recurrence and not repeated likeness: we can thus be certain that identical causes will have identical effects, and in this sense the principle of induction is proved. But it is for experience to decide whether what we are confronted with is the same cause (540); scientific laws are universally applicable, but it is for observation to decide when they are exemplified (484-6). This position is indeed, as Taine claims, very far from Mill’s. He agrees with Mill against the Germans in going from the particular to the general, instead of starting with a Weltanschauung and hoping that there will be somewhere for the chips to fall; but his work cannot be brought within the boundaries of associationism. It seems to foreshadow the more sophisticated empiricism of such theorists as Nagel, for whom a scientific theory has the “necessity” of a mathematical equation but needs to be supplemented by less formal understandings as to how far any real situation may be deemed to conform to its specifications. In particular, Mill seems to be wrong in accusing Taine of exploiting the ambiguity of the concept of sameness: on the contrary, his theory rests on contrasting resemblance with identity. But, although Mill may have missed the point of Taine’s main argument, what he says is perfectly true of some of the incidental discussions. In a passage on geometrical proofs, Taine does indeed confuse identity with exact likeness, and derives the mathematical concept of equality from just this ambiguous notion of “the same.”

Perhaps from sheer incredulity, Mill disregards Taine’s point that axioms about triangles are always valid and would always be applicable even if nothing came near enough to being triangular for this applicability to be very useful. The difference between Taine’s language and Mill’s is instructive: Mill, in his letter, speaks of the concepts of the exact sciences as idealizations of experience; Taine calls them anticipatory constructions. It is this seemingly trivial difference in terminology that enables Mill to say, “if the concept itself is the product of experience, the truth of the properties comes to us from the same source” (446). Taine, like most later thinkers, regards concepts as constructs rather than as products; and, if “product” were indeed the right word for them, whether the consequences alleged by Mill would follow must depend on the manner of their “production.” Here again, however, Taine’s carelessness or inconsistency lays him open to an objection that Mill makes more clearly in his letter than in his review. Even if one admitted the a priori character of such concepts as that of a straight line, he says, so that its properties were revealed to intuition rather than drawn from experience, “on peut dire que cette observation directe ne pourrait nous révéler que les propriétés du produit regardé comme conception mentale, c.à.d. des faits psychologiques, et qu’elle ne nous dit rien sur les lois générales de l’univers.” For Taine had written, “The propositions of these sciences are not merely probable but certain beyond our little world; at all events, we believe it to be so, and, moreover, are unable to believe or conceive that it is otherwise” (450). Is this not just that “inconceivability of the opposite” whose adequacy as a test of truth Mill had challenged fourteen years before? Not quite, perhaps, for what Taine says we cannot doubt is not that something is true but that its truth is necessary. But what sort of necessity is he really invoking? Logical, or merely psychological? Mill would concede the latter but deny its relevance. A mere habit of expectation has no evidential force, and Taine’s programme had been to substitute something stronger. Nor is this a momentary lapse of Taine’s pen. Years later we find him affirming that Kant’s question about the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori is a psychological one, to be settled by observation in the manner of Bain and Mill (not to mention himself), and that such observation shows them to be of two sorts. Some are disguised analytic statements: “Les autres ne sont pas valables; ils ne sont que des généralisations ou des anticipations de l’expérience; a priori, ils sont dépourvues [sic] de toute autorité; l’autorité qu’ils ont leur est conférée toute entière a posteriori par les expériences qui les confirment.” What sort of psychological test could show whether a statement is a generalization from experience or an axiom in a deductive science one cannot imagine, and Taine’s attempt at a novel solution to Kant’s problem breaks down after all in total confusion. If Taine really did wish to found his epistemology on psychology, Mill was right after all: the claim of unrestricted validity for the axioms is as false to Taine’s principles as it is to Mill’s, though not exactly in the way Mill has in mind.

MILL AND THE OPEN MIND

Scattered and occasional as they have been, our remarks seem to have tended after all towards one general conclusion. Mill prided himself on his open-mindedness, and Bain concurred. But on the topics covered in this volume this claim seems hardly justified. We saw him missing the main points in Bailey, misrepresenting Bain, using Grote as a peg to hang his own pet notions on, scrutinising Taine merely for possible agreements and disagreements, and professing, at the start of his review of Bain, an impartiality between schools of psychology that the associated correspondence belies. Again, though early a champion of traditional formal logic against the psychologizers, he was so far from seeing the significance of the transformation of logic that began with Boole and was already under way in his middle years that Jevons could see his prestige as the main obstacle to logical reform. This judgment casts no discredit on Mill. A man of his precocity cannot be expected or required to be an innovator in old age, and the head-start of twenty-five years that he claims his father’s forcing methods gave him could end by leaving him with too much to unlearn. Besides, open-mindedness is not soft-headedness. A man, unlike a government, is not called on to condone manifest errors, and all the incidental blindnesses and dogmatisms we have noted stem from his resolute opposition to a doctrine he believed to be fraught with immediate moral and political dangers. All the same, a tension remains between the dogmatism he shows and the receptivity he claims. That this claim is so widely conceded is partly to be accounted for by the marvellous, almost hypnotic, breadth and equanimity of his expository style: his unexampled air of unruffled comprehensiveness and imperturbable reasonableness. Bain, a dull writer, completely missed this quality: “The language faculty in him was merely ordinary,” he says. But Mill himself knew how much he owed to the discipline of the civil service, which taught him so to cast a controversial minute that its recommendations would seem acceptable and even inevitable to his reluctant masters. Alan Donagan has commented on the perfect expressiveness of Mill’s controversial style, in which passion never appears as a fatty layer over the sinew of argument; but in taking this wiry force as index of a sincere heart he fails to note that it may represent a dexterity that distracts the eye from the workings of a devious mind. When we consider the great speed at which some of these pieces were written we can only be astonished at the smooth force with which facts and arguments seem to conspire together in a natural order to draw Mill’s conclusions for him. Only an independent reference to the books reviewed and the facts alleged can reveal the strong acids that were needed to blend such heterogeneous nutrients.

Textual Introduction

J. M. ROBSON

Philosophy and the classics were life-long passions of John Stuart Mill. In his time philosophy had not been professionally categorized, and his writings tend to ignore the boundaries of logic, the philosophy of mind, and ethics, and to reflect his training in the classics. His major philosophical work, of course, is to be found in his System of Logic which, with Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, has more direct interest for philosophers than his other writings. But it is a mistake to ignore such essays as those here gathered, for they give a rich context to the major philosophical works and illuminate central aspects of his non-philosophical writings.

Mill’s only major collection of his essays, Dissertations and Discussions, does not segregate them by subject-matter, but reprints in chronological order (as was customary in the nineteenth century) those he believed to have most abiding interest. In this edition we have gathered essays on related issues for the convenience of readers, but the overlap of subjects in his writings, and the exigencies of volume size, make decisions about inclusion and exclusion both necessary and difficult. For example, to exclude the two mainly historical reviews of Grote’s History of Greece would separate them from his reviews of Grote’s Plato and Aristotle, and both Mill and Grote thought of these writings as a coherent corpus; the essays on modern philosophy find themselves sharing a volume with those of specific classical interest since neither set alone would be sufficient for a volume. The most unfortunate exclusion is that of Mill’s Preface and notes to his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, which could not be accommodated here because of their length. In any case, cross-references among the volumes of the Collected Works is inevitable and desirable.

The present collection, spanning Mill’s career from 1828 to 1873, the year of his death, has many unifying characteristics. The links are obvious among the essays on Greek history and philosophy, and the interest there manifested in dialectic and logic bears upon the discussion of Whately’s Logic, while the concern for empiricism and utilitarianism is brought out more directly in the reviews of Bailey, Bain, Berkeley, and Taine. The interlocking interests and careers of Grote, Bain, and Mill provide yet another strong connection, which is even more apparent when one looks at Mill’s edition of his father’s Analysis, to which Bain and Grote contributed extensive notes. The title of this volume might cause disappointment for some classicists: Mill commented very little on Roman history and literature; for him the classics that spoke most clearly and strongly to the nineteenth century were Greek.

All the items in this volume, except for five of the “Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato,” which are here published for the first time, appeared in periodicals. Four appeared in the Westminster Review (the reviews of Whately, the two publications on Plato, Bailey’s book on Berkeley’s theory of vision, and Bailey’s reply to Mill’s review). The other four “Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato” were published in the Monthly Repository. The Edinburgh Review published four reviews (the two of Grote’s History, that of Bain, and that of Grote’s Plato), and the Fortnightly Review three (those of Taine, Berkeley, and Grote’s Aristotle). Of the total, six (the two on Bailey from the Westminster, and the four from the Edinburgh) were republished by Mill in Dissertations and Discussions; the three from the Fortnightly were included by Helen Taylor in the fourth (posthumous) volume of Dissertations and Discussions. Apart from the unpublished Platonic dialogues, there are no known extant manuscripts, except for a fragment of the Taine review and (uniquely) the draft and press-copy manuscripts of the review of Grote’s Aristotle. No proof sheets have survived.

The texts in this edition are those of the last edition which Mill supervised, with variants and corrections established by collation of all versions which appeared in his lifetime; the copy-texts for the final three essays in this volume derive from the periodical versions, but are collated with the text of 1875 to test readings; they have no variants recorded from that reprinting, though the last, “Grote’s Aristotle,” has variants deriving from the collation of its manuscripts.

Reserving mention of specific variants for the discussion of the individual items, one may make a few comments about the changes in the six republished essays. In general, there are more, and more significant, changes in essays written before 1840 (about which time Mill apparently first thought of a collection of them), and, as might be expected, there is a gradual reduction in re-writing as one moves from the earlier essays to those first published in the late 1850s just before the first two volumes of Dissertations and Discussions appeared in the spring of 1859. When he revised those volumes for a second edition in 1867, he introduced few further changes, and revised very lightly the essays published between 1859 and 1866 that were collected in the third volume of Dissertations and Discussions, which was first published in 1867 (with the second edition of Volumes I and II). As the six relevant items (the last two of which appeared in that third volume) have dates of 1842, 1843, 1846, 1853, 1859, and 1866, there are not many substantive variants, and few that reveal more than a desire for semantic or syntactic clarity or elegance.

Accidental variants—basically changes in punctuation, spelling, and initial capitalization—are not here recorded. In general, the frequency of such changes parallels that of the substantives, there being more in the earlier essays, and very few deriving from the second edition of Dissertations and Discussions. In punctuation, the most frequent alteration is the addition of commas, fifty single commas or pairs being added in “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision” in Dissertations and Discussions (only one of them for the 1867 version); seventeen were deleted (none in 1867). No other changes appear to permit valid summary, except perhaps the alteration of commas to semi-colons, which is surprisingly frequent in the essays reprinted only in 1867; there is a total of twenty-two instances in the three relevant items, with only one instance of the reverse change. That the printed versions do not tell the full story is brought out in the collation of the manuscripts of “Grote’s Aristotle” with the version in the Fortnightly: for example, 111 commas or pairs were added in the press-copy manuscript, and a further seventy-five in the printed version, and there is considerable evidence of hesitation about the propriety of colons and semi-colons, there being a total of forty-three changes back and forth. (These counts cannot be considered as exact, for some manuscript readings are uncertain and Mill often omits punctuation at the right margin.) In general, initial capitalization is reduced (especially for abstract nouns) as one moves from manuscript through the printed versions, but no inference seems justifiable from the evidence in this volume (except that Mill’s hand must, in some cases—as is evident also in spelling and such substantives as “of,” “or,” and “&”—have given trouble to the printers). Similarly, no valid conclusion seems available from the changes in spelling, many of which, like the punctuation variants, undoubtedly reflect printing-house practice, except that (despite Mill’s inconsistency) the evidence here, and in other cases, suggests that he habitually wrote “chuse” rather than “choose,” “shew” rather than “show,” and in verbals and their cognates favoured “z” over “s” (e.g. “generalize” rather than “generalise”).

The individual essays are fully discussed in Francis E. Sparshott’s Introduction; to that account only a few details need here be added, without apology for the occasional echoing of matters more adequately treated in that Introduction.

The review of Whately, the first published fruit of Mill’s meditations on logic, was not republished by Mill and is not mentioned in his Autobiography, which does however contain reference to Whately’s Logic, an important work in the development of his thought. The existence of the review is signalled in his later works only by the interesting quotation from it found in his System of Logic (Collected Works, VII, 143-4), where he indicates that some of the views therein contained are no longer held by him. (A collation of the quotation reveals the trivial variants recorded on 28.) An examination of the references in the essay supports Mill’s account in the Autobiography of his logical studies in the 1810s and 1820s, with specific allusion to Du Trieu’s Manuductio ad logicam, which he and his friends had reprinted in 1826 for careful study. One correction of a reference may be noted: Mill, probably unconsciously repeating his phrasing at 30 in the footnote on 21, alludes to the Preface to Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric, rather than to page 105n of that work. (References are corrected in this edition, as indicated below.)

The “Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato” fall textually into two groups, though there is no reason to think they were not written at the same time and for the same, presumably pedagogic, purpose. (See the Introduction, xviii-xix above.) The first group of four, those published in the Monthly Repository in 1834 and 1835, does not survive in manuscript and was not republished by Mill. These are mentioned in the Autobiography where, commenting that his writings in the years 1832-34, excluding those in newspapers, “amount to a large volume” (indicating that the collection bound together in the Somerville College Library, gold-stamped on the spine, “J.S.M./1832-4,” had probably been put together by the time the Early Draft of the Autobiography was written), he says: “This, however, includes abstracts of several of Plato’s Dialogues, with introductory remarks, which, though not published until 1834, had been written several years earlier; and which I afterwards, on various occasions, found to have been read, and their authorship known, by more people than were aware of anything else which I had written, up to that time.” The earliest extant reference to the dialogues is in a letter of 10 October, 1833, to W. J. Fox, editor of the Monthly Repository, in which Mill, clearly implying a prior discussion, says: “I . . . send three numbers of the Plato for your inspection and judgment. They cannot in any case be used until I return [from Paris] for it is necessary they should be carefully looked over, some passages altered, and some preliminary matter written.” And on 22 November, 1833, he asked Fox to return them so that he could “make them fit” for the Monthly Repository. Some general knowledge of them and their authorship may have come from Carlyle, to whom he wrote on 2 March, 1834, saying they were “mostly written long ago,” but “might be of some interest & perhaps use, chiefly because they do not speculate and talk about Plato, but shew to the reader Plato himself.”

The second group of five dialogues survives only in manuscript. Though these manuscripts have pencilled numbers, presumably Mill’s, on their first folios, it has not proved possible to discern the rationale of the ordering, and so we have printed the first group in the order they appeared in the Monthly Repository, and the second group in alphabetical order of the titles. The manuscripts are written on East India Company paper, all folios watermarked 1828 (except the first six of the Lysis, which are 1825). Each was sewn together near the top left corner with green ribbon (now removed). The folios are about 20.7c. by 20c.; Mill folded them lengthwise, and wrote the text on the right half (recto and verso), leaving the left half blank for notes, corrections, and additions, of which there are several in each manuscript. (See the illustration facing 175.) He did not number the folios, of which there are sixteen in the Charmides (16v blank), thirteen in the Euthyphron, seventeen in the Laches, thirteen in the Lysis, and twenty-six in the Parmenides (26v blank).

As F. E. Sparshott comments above, the title “Notes on Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato” is misleading, for the bulk is translation, with some notes and commentary (much of it undoubtedly added, in the first group, for publication in 1834, as the dates of the references in the commentary indicate). The translations are not complete, except for the Apology (as Mill notes, 152), there being considerable summary (sometimes signalled by indirect discourse) and many omissions. In general, passages descriptive of action are omitted, while the dialectic is followed closely. The following summary, which gives the major features of Mill’s treatment, will serve as a rough guide for those who wish to compare Mill’s versions with the originals or other translations. It should be noted that the categories are not exact: passages “summarized” (indirect discourse) sometimes include brief direct translations; passages “translated” (direct discourse) similarly may include short summary elements; “condensed” means that while the passage is rendered in direct discourse, some responses and/or questions are omitted or shortened.

Protagoras: 309a to 310a omitted; to 311b (45.4-11) summarized; to 312a (45.24) condensed; to 314b (46.31) translated; to 317c (47.31) summarized; to 318d (48.7) condensed; to 320c (48.32) condensed; to 322d (49.22) summarized; to 323c (49.38) translated; to 328c (51.36) condensed; to 329b (52.7) summarized; to 330a (52.22) translated; to 330c omitted; to 331c (52.28) condensed; to 332a (53.3) translated; to 334c (54.16) summarized; to 338e omitted; to 343b (55.3) condensed; to 343c (55.12) translated; to 346c (55.31) condensed; to 347c omitted; to 349d (56.8) summarized; to 351e (57.15) translated; to 352a omitted; to 353a (57.37) translated; to 353b omitted; to 354d (58.23) translated; to 355a omitted; to 356c (59.5) condensed; to 357b (59.26) condensed; to 358a omitted; to 358d (59.28) summarized; to 360d (60.19) condensed; to 361d (60.30) summarized; to 362a (60.37) translated.

Phædrus: 227a to 227c (62.22-63.7) summarized; to 227d (63.13) translated; to 229c (63.22) summarized; to 230b (64.2) condensed; to 230d (64.7) summarized; to 235b (67.10) translated; to 235c (67.14) summarized; to 235d (67.21) translated; to 235e omitted; to 236b (67.33) translated; to 237c (67.41) summarized; to 241d (70.24) translated; to 241e (70.28) summarized; to 242a (70.36) condensed; to 242c (71.2) summarized; to 243b (71.17) translated; to 243c omitted; to 243e (71.26) translated; to 244a omitted; to 250b (76.25) translated; to 250e omitted; to 252b (77.9) translated; to 252c omitted; to 253b (77.31) translated; to 253d omitted; to 255d (78.20) condensed; to 256b omitted; to 257a (79.8) condensed; to 257c (79.14) summarized; to 259d (80.29) condensed; to 259e omitted; to 260a (80.32) condensed; to 262c (82.30) translated; to 263a (82.40) summarized; to 263e (83.22) translated; to 264b omitted; to 279c (93.3) translated.

Gorgias: 447a to 447d (98.1-10) summarized; to 451b (100.26) translated; to 451d omitted; to 458b (104.34) translated; to 458e (104.37) summarized; to 471a (113.32) translated; to 471d (113.36) summarized; to 476c (116.41) translated; to 476d (117.2) condensed; to 492e (127.29) translated; to 493d (127.33) condensed; to 501e (133.3) translated; to 502c (133.6) condensed; to 506a (135.17) translated; to 506e (135.35) summarized; to 507e (136.18) condensed; to 508b omitted; to 523a (146.24) translated; to 524b (147.1) summarized; to 526d (148.4) condensed; to 527e (149.3) translated.

Apology: translated throughout.

Charmides: 153a to 156b (175.1-176.3) summarized; to 161b (177.25) condensed; to 161d (177.29) summarized; to 162c (178.10) translated; to 163b omitted; to 163d (178.20) condensed; to 164e (179.10) translated; to 165c (179.17) condensed; to 168e (181.20) translated; to 169a omitted; to 169c (181.31) translated; to 169d (181.34) summarized; to 176c (186.11) translated; to 176d (186.13) summarized.

Euthyphron: 1a to 1b (187.5-8) summarized; to 3e (188.26) translated; to 5a (189.9) condensed; to 6e (190.25) translated; to 7a (190.30) summarized; to 11b (193.15) translated; to 12a (193.20) summarized; to 16a (196.20) translated.

Laches: 178a to 181e (197.4-198.5) summarized; to 182d (198.13) condensed; to 183c (193.37) translated; to 184b omitted; to 184c (199.12) translated; to 184d (199.4) summarized; to 187b (200.36) translated; to 187e (201.5) summarized; to 189c (201.40) translated; to 189d omitted; to 189e (202.3) summarized; to 201c (209.8) translated.

Lysis: 203a to 205d (210.1-18) summarized; to 206b (211.5) translated; to 206d (211.11) summarized; to 207c omitted; to 210e (213.16) translated; to 211b (213.25) summarized; to 211c (213.33) translated; to 211d omitted; to 222e (221.9) translated; to 223a omitted; to 223b (221.12) translated.

Parmenides: 126a to 127d omitted; to 128a (224.4-9) summarized; to 129a omitted; to 130a (225.4-32) translated; to 130b (225.34) condensed; to 133b (228.17) translated; to 133c (228.20) condensed; to 135a (229.19) translated; to 135b omitted; to 136c (230.13) translated; to 137c (230.19) summarized; to 142b (232.36) translated*; to 147c (232.41-235.2) translated*; to 155e (235.16) summarized; to 160b (237.5) translated*; to 166c (238.22) summarized. (In passages marked with an asterisk, Mill—like some other translators—omits Aristoteles’ responses.)

The next item, Mill’s review of two publications on Plato, was not reprinted by him, and it is not mentioned in his Autobiography. The bulk of it, indeed, is quotation. After virtually severing his connection with the Westminster in 1840, Mill decided to contribute mainly to the Edinburgh Review. In writing to Macvey Napier, the editor of the Edinburgh, Mill presumably has this review in mind when he says that he had intended (before writing his review of Bailey on Berkeley—the next item in this volume) to give the Westminster nothing “more than one of the small-print notices which that review usually contains.” Though slight, it touches on some of his abiding concerns, such as the value of a classical education and the need for social order. One might also note his use of the word “Philistine” (241).

The next item, following Mill’s practice in Dissertations and Discussions, combines his review of Samuel Bailey’s A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision and his reply to Bailey’s rejoinder to that review, A Letter to a Philosopher, in Reply to some recent attempts to vindicate “Berkeley’s Theory of Vision.” Writing to Sarah Austin (22 August, 1842), Mill says:

. . . I have been writing again for the old Westminster: Bailey of Sheffield has published a book to demolish Berkeley’s theory of vision: & I have answered him, feeling it my special vocation to stand up for the old orthodox faith of that school. I will send the article to Mr Austin for it will have a chance of interesting him, though few people else. It is the first fruits of my partial recovery from a three months illness, or rather out-of-health-ness, & it at least helps to pay my debt to Hickson [the editor of the Westminster] who used to write for the review without pay when I had it.

On 3 October, 1842, Mill mentioned to Macvey Napier his “metaphysical article” in the just-published number of the Westminster, and asked if articles of that sort would suit the Edinburgh. Napier replied, commending the “Bailey,” and Mill responded on 15 October:

I do not know whether your approval of the article in the Westr, especially as to the composition, may not have a bad effect upon me by encouraging me to write hastily as the article was written in three days & was never meant to be a thing of any pretension. I should hardly have thought it worthy of the Ed. but I should probably have given you the refusal of it, if I had not been committed to the Westr. . . .

Bain recounts in his biography Mill’s telling him of the three-day composition, during a weekend in the country. (Mill was much occupied at this time in making the final revision of his Logic—see the Textual Introduction, CW, VII, lxvii ff.) Mentioning Bailey’s being “much hurt at the time” by some of Mill’s language in the review, Bain goes on to quote the conclusion of Mill’s “Rejoinder” (269 below), where tolerance of the frank expression of intellectual differences is demanded; Bain says that such was Mill’s “principle of composition throughout his polemical career, and he never departed from it. Of Bailey’s reply on this occasion, he [Mill] remarked—‘The tone of it is peevish. But Bailey is, I know, of that temper—or rather I infer it from sundry indications.’ ” That the controversy remained in Mill’s mind may be seen by his references to Bailey’s views in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (4th ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1872), 226, 301n, 308n, 323n, and in his edition of his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), I, 345n, 441.

There are forty-one variants in “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” thirty-five arising from the revision for the first edition (1859) of Dissertations and Discussions, and six from that for the second edition (1867); there are six in the “Rejoinder to Mr. Bailey’s Reply,” all from 1859. Using a rough classification (which is followed also in the discussion of variants in the other essays, and in the other volumes of this edition), these may be seen as falling into four types, reflecting (1) a change of opinion or correction of fact (including relatively large expansions, deletions, or revisions); (2) the difference in time or provenance between the separate publications; (3) qualifications and minor semantic shifts; and (4) minor verbal, tonal, and syntactic changes. Here all but five may be placed, in almost equal numbers, in the final two categories. Typical of the third category is the change from “his language implies” to “his language seems to imply” (255p-p); compare the change (260c-c) from “restored to sight” to “rendered capable of sight.” One of the less interesting of the fourth type of variant may be seen at 249b, where Mill deleted “or,” before “in other words” in 1859; more interesting (and typical of his revisions in the early 1850s of the Principles of Political Economy and the Logic, as well as of those for the first edition of Dissertations and Discussions) is his substitution at 251c-c of “person” for “man.” Changes of the first type are here minor as well as infrequent: see, for example, 257x, where the deletion in 1859 implies a revised interpretation of Bailey’s argument, probably related to the footnote to 255, added in 1859, which calls attention to the time between the versions and so may be placed in the second category. One further variant, that at 267n-n, deserves citation; the change in 1859 from “an eye” to “our eye” (the earlier version probably resulting from the printer’s misreading of Mill’s hand) is indicated in Mill’s copy of the 1843 article in the Somerville College collection.

The next item is Mill’s review of the first two volumes of Grote’s History of Greece, a review that was, in Bain’s words, “in every sense, a labour of love; love of the subject, love of the author, and admiration of the work.” “I hope the first two volumes of the History will soon be out,” Mill wrote to Grote (1 January, 1846); “I long to see them.” Interrupting his writing of the Principles of Political Economy, he wrote a review of the volumes for the Spectator (4 April, 1846, 327-8), and contracted for the Edinburgh article before April. Mentioning these reviews in a letter to Harriet Grote, he says: “I have taken my extracts from the 2nd vol., which has not yet been quoted, I believe, people not having had time to master it. You will see by the article [in the Spectator] that I like it very much. I was excessively sorry when I got to the end of it, and am impatient for the next volume.” He also expressed regret that he had pre-empted the review in the Edinburgh from George Cornewall Lewis, who he hoped would review it elsewhere. (Lewis, in fact, contributed a review of the next volumes of Grote’s History to the Edinburgh Review, XCI [Jan., 1850], 118-52.) In September he told Bain that he had corrected the proofs of the Edinburgh article; in it, he said, there was “no little of the Comtean philosophy of religion. Altogether I like the thing,” he added, “though I wrote it in exactly four days, and re-wrote it in three more, but I had to read and think a good deal for it first.”

Because Mill does not directly quote from his Spectator review of Grote’s first volumes, no variants derive from that source; however, the two reviews are organized similarly, many passages are parallel, and the references are frequently duplicated. Of the twenty-three substantive variants in this essay, only two derive from the revision for the second edition of Dissertations and Discussions. Of the twenty-three, four (type [1]) reflect a change of opinion or correction of fact, and three (type [2]) reflect the difference in time or provenance between the versions. Of the first type is 275b, the footnote dealing with Grote’s use of “feminine” and “masculine” in the Preface to his History. Mill presumably deleted the note in 1859 because Grote modified the objectionable passage in his second edition; Grote’s revision, however, would not seem sufficient to remove Mill’s annoyance, for “sentimental” was substituted for “feminine” and “vigorous” added to “masculine.” The deletion of the long last paragraph of the 1846 version (see 304-5w), which I have counted as type (1), might well be classed under (2); the change was probably motivated less by a change of mind than by the feeling that the criticism of Grote’s orthography, long after the fact, served no useful purpose. Minor softenings of criticism may also be seen at 293l-l and 294m. Unequivocal instances of the second type of variant may be seen at 275a and 304v, the references to the publication of Thirlwall’s History and Grote’s remaining volumes being outdated in 1859.

Mill’s favourable notice of Grote’s History is continued in the next item, ostensibly a review of Volumes IX, X, and XI, which also was reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions. He actually includes in it discussion of material from Volumes III-VIII, especially in sections incorporated in 1859 from the reviews of those volumes that he had written for the Spectator in the years between his two Edinburgh notices.

Bain comments that in this review Mill “enters with enthusiasm into Grote’s vindication of the Athenians and their democratic constitution,” being, he adds, “quite as much as Grote, a Greece-intoxicated man.” Mill had promised to review the ninth and tenth volumes for the Edinburgh, but, feeling that “they hardly afforded sufficient material,” was happy to add the eleventh. “I think with you,” he writes to G. C. Lewis, “that there is now matter enough for an article, though more might have been made of the subject if there had been a greater amount of dissertation and discussion in the volumes.” Glad that Lewis did not want the article for the July, 1853 number, Mill had completed and submitted it by 24 August, commenting to Lewis that it “is as much a review of the book generally as of the last three volumes, but it gives a tolerably full account of their contents; and as the history of Athenian greatness is concluded in them, the occasion is a natural one for surveying the whole history.” He goes on to request proofs as soon as possible, as he planned to be away from London in mid-September.

In spite of the laudatory nature of his review, Mill was not in 1853 as Grote-intoxicated as he was Greece-intoxicated, largely because of his and his wife’s recent animosity towards Harriet Grote which inevitably coloured Mill’s relations with the historian. Harriet Taylor Mill obviously took an interest in this review, and, as she frequently did in these years, suggested changes. Writing to her on the day he sent the review to Lewis, Mill says he had revised it “on all points,” and continues: “I have cut the knot of ‘the grandest passage’ by making it ‘the most celebrated’ & have altered the two ‘greatests’ to greatest commonwealth & most distinguished citizen—in the other. The ‘political education’ place which I said I would try to strengthen in ideas instead of in words, I have done so—I hope the proof will come in time for full consideration. . . .” The proof must have arrived in time, for he undoubtedly returned it to Lewis with his letter of 19 September, in which he replies to Lewis’s comments:

I am glad that you are so well pleased with the article on Grote. More might certainly have been said about the Sicilian history, & the Anabasis, but as those parts of the history do not illustrate anything very important, I proposed passing rapidly to those which did. I would however have given the quintessence of the chapter on Dion if it had been possible to do it in any moderate space.

You will see what I have done in consequence of your various suggestions. As you say, the tendency of [the] Athenian alliance must have been to favor democracy, but Grote has pointed out several instances in which one is surprised to find important members of the alliance under the government of oligarchies. I have made a little alteration in the paragraph about Greek slavery, but it might look too much like an apology for slavery.

The coolness to Harriet Grote comes out fully in a later letter to his wife: “Grote is vastly pleased with the article in the Edinburgh—& a propos I found here a letter from Mrs Grote, of complimentation on the article, which though little worthy of the honour of being sent to you I may as well inclose. The impudence of writing to me at all & of writing in such a manner is only matched by the excessive conceit of the letter. Grote alluded to it saying Mrs Grote had written to me after reading the article—I merely answered that I had found a note from her on arriving.” Perhaps this experience lies behind his reaction to the review when it appeared in print; he comments to Harriet that it “reads, to my mind, slighter & flimsier than I thought it would.” Nonetheless, he was pleased to receive £25 for it, and seems to have had no hesitation in reprinting it in Dissertations and Discussions in 1859, the year after Harriet Mill’s death.

There are some forty-five variants in this essay, five of them dating from the revision for the second edition of Dissertations and Discussions. The total is high for an essay of this date, artificially high, in fact, for it includes about twenty resulting from the incorporation in 1859 of the passages from Mill’s notices of Grote in the Spectator. These substantially alter the effect of the review, which, as mentioned above, did not deal only with the later volumes of Grote, and after 1859 was even less confined to them. Of the other variants, one might notice 328d, where Mill in 1859 deleted, for unknown reasons that tempt speculation, this sentence: “We have chosen our instances according to our own estimate of their importance, rather than according to their fitness to display the merits of the book.” Also enigmatic, though perhaps belatedly reflecting the influence of his late wife’s objections to his praise of the Greeks, is the deletion at 334w of his characterization of the Athenians as “the greatest people who have yet appeared on this planet.” Several type (2) changes, reflecting time and provenance, are to be found: see 331m, 331o-o, and especially the long passage at 336-7y. One may also mention the note (319n) signalling Mill’s departures from Grote’s translation from Thucydides of Pericles’ Funeral Oration alluded to in the Introduction, xxxiiin above.

The next essay, “Bain’s Psychology,” was reprinted in Volume III of Dissertations and Discussions (1867), having been published first in the Edinburgh Review in October, 1859, during the key period in Mill’s life when, after partially recovering from the devastating shock of his wife’s death at the end of 1858, he strenuously engaged in writing, revision, and publishing. In 1859 appeared On Liberty, Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, the first two volumes of Dissertations and Discussions, and three important articles, “Recent Writers on Reform,” “A Few Words on Non-Intervention,” and this review of Bain. Of this last, he says in the Autobiography: “In the course of the same summer [of 1859] I fulfilled a duty particularly incumbent upon me, that of helping (by an article in the Edinburgh Review) to make known Mr. Bain’s profound treatise on the Mind, just then completed by the publication of its second volume” (155). He had, in fact, earlier made a more material effort, in conjunction with Grote, to make the work known. Parker was reluctant to publish The Emotions and the Will because The Senses and the Intellect, the first part of Bain’s “treatise on the Mind,” had been selling slowly since its publication in 1855, and Mill “intimated to Parker that Grote and he would take the liability of any loss [up to £50 each] that the immediate publication would incur, after a reasonable time allowed for sale.” Parker agreed, but the sales were such that there was no call on Grote and Mill.

The connections among Bain, Grote, and Mill of course went back further, and were to continue. They read one another’s works in manuscript, and then reviewed them, consulted and collaborated, and, as appropriate, aided one another’s careers. In this specific instance, Bain says that Mill went over the manuscript of The Emotions and the Will “carefully, and made occasional annotations,—which were, of course, valuable. Grote did the same. . . .” Mill corresponded with Bain about his review, expressing pleasure at Bain’s approbation of its contents, and at its appearance as the first article in the number of the Edinburgh. “It is a considerable thing,” he says, “to have got the Ed. to say that the experience philosophy & the association psychology are getting up again, & to praise & recommend a book on that side of the question.”

Textually the review is uncomplicated. Appearing after the publication of the first edition of Dissertations and Discussions, it is typical of those that were republished in Volume III of that work in having few variants (only seven in all), none of them reflecting a change of opinion except perhaps 346a-a (“inseparable association” substituted for “indissoluble association”), which more probably was prompted by a desire for greater precision.

As F. E. Sparshott indicates (xxxviii above), the next item, the review of Grote’s Plato, was long contemplated, Mill having seen the work in manuscript and reread the whole of Plato in Greek as preparation. Though beset by proof corrections of his own works, he had read Volume I of the Plato by 11 March, 1865, and continued to read the other volumes as they came off the press. He had hoped to finish the review before the end of the year, in time for the January number of the Edinburgh, but 1865 was, as far as publishing is concerned, the busiest year of his later life. He also made an unplanned and undesired return from Avignon to take part in his successful election campaign, which caused a hiatus in his work from late June till late August. Henry Reeve, the editor of the Edinburgh, agreed to wait until the April number, and Mill continued his study, rereading Grote, and also the crucial Platonic dialogues. He had not started writing by 10 November but, showing his usual dispatch, had written “a great part” of it by the 26th; it was in Reeve’s hands by 30 January, 1866 (at which time Mill consulted Grote about the propriety of viewing the Apology as Socrates’ actual defence), and appeared in the Edinburgh in April. Forgetting how busy the year had been, he wrote to Grote before the article was finished, in language surely more than polite: “The chief occupation of this year has been with Plato, Sokrates, and you: and there could not have been, to me, a pleasanter one.” As he also said to Grote, he had “seldom” (had he ever?) taken “so much time and pains” over a review, but felt it worthwhile if he had “done any tolerable justice to the subject.” It is in fact, even by the crude measure of length, one of his most significant articles.

Given the date of his essay, only one year before the publication of Volume III of Dissertations and Discussions, the number of variants (twenty) is even larger than the length of the review can quite explain. They are, however, almost all of type (4), minor adjustments of syntax and tone such as those seen at 412i-i andj-j. Indeed, given his other preoccupations at the time, and the speed with which the review was written, it may be that these minor changes should be seen as merely the kind that he normally made in manuscript.

The last three items in the volume derive from the final, all too brief, period of Mill’s life from his electoral defeat at the end of 1868 to his death in early May, 1873. While far from lazy, he wrote and published less than in the preceding busy years, and what he did write (apart from “Theism”) has received little attention. His review of Taine, like the two further items in this volume, the reviews of Fraser’s Berkeley and Grote’s Aristotle, is not mentioned in his Autobiography (where Grote’s Plato gets only a passing mention). One must not conclude that he thought them unimportant, for the last section of the Autobiography was written in the winter of 1869-70, before their publication. Bain does not refer to the Taine review (nor, surprisingly, to the two other late reviews) in his John Stuart Mill; and there is only one mention in Mill’s extant correspondence. Taine and Mill were, however, well aware of and respected one another’s work, as F. E. Sparshott points out, lxix-lxxi above. Textually the article is interesting in that a manuscript fragment has survived. Though it apparently is part of a rough draft, there are no substantive variants (in sixteen places the manuscript has initial capitals, usually on abstract nouns, that were reduced in the Fortnightly). Again like the next two items, it was republished by Helen Taylor in the fourth volume of Dissertations and Discussions in 1875, after Mill’s death.

We know similarly little of the composition of Mill’s “Berkeley’s Life and Writings,” which reflects strongly another of his abiding philosophic interests. Aware of Fraser’s work on the edition as early as December, 1864, he planned to begin writing a review (already promised to the Fortnightly) after his return to Avignon from a Swiss tour on 21 August, 1871, and was working on it a month later, when he writes to Cairnes that the subject is “very interesting” to him, Berkeley being “one of our greatest names in philosophy.” He must have completed it shortly thereafter, for it had to be sent to England and it appeared in the November issue of the Fortnightly. In this essay, there being no manuscript nor reprint in Mill’s lifetime, there are no variants.

His last review, “Grote’s Aristotle,” was also written in Avignon. Mill of course had long known that Grote was writing on Aristotle, and there can be no doubt that he also knew that Bain and Robertson were preparing an edition following Grote’s death. In any event, while reading Brentano’s work (in German) on Aristotle in April, 1872, he was eagerly awaiting the completion of the printing of Grote’s book and mentioned to Brentano that his attention was “in an unusual degree invited to Aristotle.” Though on 5 October he had still not received a copy, by 9 December his review was finished and in the printer’s hands. As he then knew that it would be in the Fortnightly for January (as it was), and since the press-copy manuscript has a notation that the proofs should be sent to John Morley, the editor of the Fortnightly who retained the manuscript (see below), it would be reasonable to assume that Mill did not read proof, were it not that some of the changes between the press-copy and the printed version can hardly be editorial.

This article is unique textually, in that two manuscripts, a draft and the press-copy, have survived. The draft (Houghton Library, Harvard, MS Eng 1105) is bound with other Mill manuscript fragments, the collection having been donated by Professor George Herbert Palmer, who bought it in Avignon at the sale by the bookseller J. Romanille of those of Mill’s books and papers that were not taken back to England when Helen Taylor returned in 1905. The manuscript is written recto on unwatermarked light blue sheets (c. 40c. × 25c., folded to make 30 folios, 20c. × 25c.), unfolioed by Mill, with the facing versos used for notes, additions, and corrections. The last two folios are a fair copy, in another hand, of the concluding matter, which is not present in draft form. The press-copy (Library of Congress, Andrew Carnegie Papers, Box 259) was given to Carnegie by John Morley. The unwatermarked purple-blue paper (c. 40.6c. × 26.7c., folded to make 34 folios, c. 20.3c. × 26.7c.), is unfolioed by Mill, who again, as was his practice, wrote the text recto, using the facing versos for notes, additions, and corrections. The first folio shows a direction to the printer to set down the quotations (“extracts”), and there are printer’s signatures throughout, indicating the “takes.”

Because there are so few extant complete manuscripts of Mill’s periodical essays, we have included all the substantive variants between the draft manuscript and the press-copy manuscript, and the latter and the text in the Fortnightly, to give a sense of the kind of revision undoubtedly habitual to Mill. (Were there manuscripts of all his essays, a different policy would be appropriate, as some readers will find the notes disturbingly frequent; we trust that those who do not wish to consult the revisions will find it possible to ignore the indicators.) In all, there are over 560 substantive changes, all but thirty-four of them arising from the rewriting of the draft for the press-copy (which is virtually a fair copy, with very few cancellations). By far the largest number (about 60 per cent) are of type (4), minor changes in syntax and tone; a further 34 per cent are of type (3), qualifications and minor semantic shifts. These are not, of course, without interest of various kinds: see, for example, 475m-m, where Mill, in regretting Grote’s death, refers in the draft to his feeling as “a complaint against the general conditions of our earthly existence”; he substitutes in the press-copy “only one among the many inherent imperfections of our existence on earth.” Mill’s hesitant carefulness is typified at 485w-w, where “fairly” was cancelled in the draft, and then restored in the press-copy. Perhaps a hint of his objection to intrusions on personal matters is to be seen in his insertion of “private” with reference to a letter of Grote published by his editors (489n-n). The substition of “valid” for “true” at 495x-x is paralleled elsewhere by other verbal refinements of semantic weight. Further, the lengthy addition at 479z-z is of philosophic interest, as are such additions as that at 505n-n, where Mill broadens the implications of his discussion to include contemporary philosophic issues. And so on—the selection of pertinent instances is best left to individual taste and insight; to adapt Mill’s suppressed sentence concerning his examples from Grote (see lxxxviii above), “We have chosen our instances according to our estimate of their importance, rather than according to their fitness to display the merits of Mill’s mind or of our methods.” The main general conclusion, in any case, is that the essay was significantly altered and improved by the detailed revision in manuscript.

PRINCIPLES AND METHODS

as throughout theCollected Works, the copy-text for each item in this volume is that of the final version supervised by Mill. Details concerning the provenance of the texts and related matters are given in headnotes to each item.

Method of Indicating Variants. All the substantive variants are governed by the principles enunciated below. “Substantive” here means all changes of text except spelling, initial capitalization, hyphenation, punctuation, typographical errors, and such printing-house concerns as type font, etc. Changes involving the terminal punctuation of sentences are recorded, as are additions or deletions of parentheses and italics (except in titles). The only substantive changes not recorded are changes from “upon” to “on” (four instances, all in “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision”); “although” to “though” (two instances), and “a” to “an” before words beginning with an “h” (five instances, all in “Grote’s History of Greece [I]”). The changes are of three kinds: addition of a word or words, substitution of a word or words, deletion of a word or words. The following illustrative examples are drawn from “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision.”

Addition of a word or words: see 249a-a. In the text, the passage “colour and outline which” appears as “colour aand outlinea which”; the variant note reads “a-a+59, 67”. Here the plus sign indicates that the words “and outline” were added; the numbers following (“59, 67”) indicate the editions of this particular text in which the addition appears. The editions are always indicated by the last two numbers of the year of publication; here 59=1859 (the 1st ed. of Volumes I and II of Dissertations and Discussions); 67=1867 (the 2nd ed. of these volumes). Information concerning the use of this system of abbreviation is given in each headnote, as required. Any added editorial information is enclosed in square brackets and italicized.

When the example above is placed in context, therefore, the interpretation is that when first published (1842) the reading was “colour which”; in 1859 this was altered to “colour and outline which”, and the altered reading was retained in 1867.

Substitution of a word or words: see 255p-p. In the text the passage “language seems to imply that” appears as “language pseems to implyp that”; the variant note reads “p-p42 implies”. Here the word following the edition indicator (“implies”) is that for which “seems to imply” was substituted; when the same rules are applied and the variant is placed in context, the interpretation is that when first published (1842) the reading was “language implies that”; in 1859 this was altered to “language seems to imply that”, and (as is obvious from the text) the altered reading was retained in 1867 (the copy-text).

In this volume there are very few examples of passages that were altered more than once: an example is found at 256u-u. The text reads “will be urecognised asu such”; the variant note reads “u-u42 deemed to be] 59 perceived to be”. Here the different readings, in chronological order, are separated by a square bracket. The interpretation is that the original reading in 1842, “will be deemed to be such”, was altered in 1859 to “will be perceived to be such”, and in 1867 to “will be recognised as such”.

Deletion of a word or words: see 254i. In the text, a single superscripti appears centred between “argument” and “proves”; the variant note reads “42 proves, and”. Here the words following the edition indicator are those deleted; when the same rules are applied and the variant is placed in context, the interpretation is that when first published (1842) the reading was “Berkeley’s argument proves, and proves conclusively”; in 1859 this was altered (by deleting “proves, and”) to “Berkeley’s argument proves conclusively”, and the reading of 1859 was (as is clear in the text) retained in 1867.

Dates of footnotes: see 255n. Here the practice is to place immediately after the footnote indicator, in square brackets, the figure indicating the edition in which the footnote first appeared. In the example cited, “[59]” indicates that the note was added in 1859 (and retained in 1867). If no such figure appears, the note is in all versions.

Punctuation and spelling. In general, these are not normalized, and changes between versions are not recorded. Those changes which occur as part of a substantive variant are included in that variant, and the superscript letters in the text are placed exactly with reference to punctuation. Changes between italic and roman type are treated as substantives, except in foreign phrases and titles of works (which are normalized in italics).

Other textual liberties. Some of the titles of Mill’s essays have been adapted from running titles or otherwise modified for easier identification; full information about the titles is in the headnotes. The dates added are those of first publication. The original footnotes to the titles of the periodical essays, giving bibliographic information, have been incorporated in the headnotes.

Typographical errors and manuscript slips of the pen have been silently corrected in the text; the note below lists them. Corrections to conform to sources Mill quotes are made only when the sense supports the change and there is corroborating evidence, or a prima facie likelihood, that the printer misread Mill’s hand. To avoid annoyance, “[sic]” is not used to indicate oddities such as inconsistent spellings. In the headnotes the quotations from Mill’s bibliography, the manuscript of which is a scribal copy, are also silently corrected; again, the note below gives the corrections. While the original punctuation and spelling of each item are retained, the style has been made uniform: for example, periods are added, where necessary, after such abbreviations as Mr.; accents on Greek words are normalized; and italic punctuation following italic passages has been made roman.

Also, in accordance with modern practice, all long quotations have been set in reduced type (and occasionally short ones have been set in normal type). In consequence, it has been necessary occasionally to add square brackets; there is little opportunity for confusion, as editorial insertions (except volume and page references) are in italics. Footnote indicators are placed after punctuation throughout, and dashes when coupled with other punctuation before quotations are deleted. Double quotation marks replace single; in the translations of Plato’s dialogues, where necessary, quotation marks appear at the beginning of a paragraph when the speech is continued from the preceding one. Other changes were specially required in the Platonic dialogues for ease of reading and consistency. Because Mill usually omits the names of the speakers, his practice of using a dash to indicate a transition from one speaker to another has been adopted and made uniform (in the first four, which were published, editorial changes for correctness are included as typographical errors in the list above). Quotation marks for direct speech are used throughout (again only those altered to correct an attribution are considered as typographical errors); they are not in the manuscript dialogues. In those dialogues a few punctuation points have been added (or, rarely, modified) for sense; Mill frequently uses the end of the line for punctuation, and some marks are ambiguous. Also, in the few cases where the immediate context suggests a slip of the pen, initial capitals have been added or deleted. The only other changes made are the italicization of “quâ” (220.34), and those listed as slips of the pen in the note above. Other minor individual changes are listed in the note below.

Mill’s references to sources have been normalized, and additional editorial references (in square brackets) added. For consistency, his references, when they appear at the beginning of passages, have been moved to the end. Where necessary, his references have been silently corrected; a list of the corrections and alterations is given in the note below.

Appendix A, the Bibliographic Index, provides a guide to Mill’s citations of individuals, works, and quotations, with notes concerning the separate entries, and a list of substantive variants between his quotations and their sources. Including citations taken from other authors by Mill, there are references to nearly two hundred persons (plus some sixty referred to only in Mill’s translations from Plato) and about two hundred and twenty works (twelve of which are reviewed, and a further sixty-eight quoted from directly or indirectly). In these terms—as in others—Plato is the hero of the volume, there being references (including those to collected works) to thirty-four works; fifteen of Aristotle’s works are mentioned. Indeed, a majority of the references are Classical, with a great preponderance of Greek over Latin. The citations also, when studied in detail, demonstrate the care with which Mill read Grote and Bain, especially the former.

This Appendix serves as an index to persons, works, and statutes (of which, exceptionally, only one is mentioned), so references to them are omitted from the Index proper, which has been prepared by Dr. Bruce L. Kinzer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

for permission to publish the manuscripts of Mill’s translations of Plato’s Charmides, Euthyphron, Laches, Lysis, and Parmenides we are indebted to the National Provincial Bank (residual legatees of Helen Taylor), and to the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations. For the use of manuscript versions of essays, we thank the British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, and the Library of Congress. As always, I am deeply indebted to members of the Mill Committee, and to the staff of the University of Toronto Press, especially Rosemary Shipton, the copy-editor of this volume. A Major Editorial Project Grant from the Canada Council has made it possible for us to produce this volume; I am especially grateful because the grant has enabled me to work with a most congenial and diligent group of research assistants, to whom much of the credit, and none of the discredit, is due: Marion Filipiuk, Bruce L. Kinzer, Martin Kreiswirth, and Rea Wilmshurst. The assessor team and the staff of the Canada Council were also very helpful in discussions of the edition as a whole, and I should like to express my thanks particularly to Meriel Bradford and Marie Cordeau. The librarians and staffs of many institutions have aided in their normal generous way; our special gratitude to those of the British Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, Harvard University Library, Knox and Trinity Colleges, Toronto, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, Somerville College Library, the University of London Library, the University of Toronto Library, and the Victoria University Library. Major contributions to our work have been made by Judith LeGoff and Francis Sparshott; other individuals who have aided in various ways include Frank Collins, Roland Hall, Patricia Kennedy, Anne McWhir, Richard Mohr, Penelope Nettlefold, Ann Christine, John, and William Robson, Germaine and John Warkentin, and John Yolton. My wife has, as is her wont and my joy, contributed materially to this volume, not least by giving me an understanding of σωϕροσύνη, the quality Mill, not having in Harriet a living exemplar, found such difficulty in translating.

ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHY AND THE CLASSICS

WHATELY’S ELEMENTS OF LOGIC

1828

EDITOR’S NOTE

Westminster Review, IX (Jan., 1828), 137-72, headed: “Art. VII:—1. Elements of Logic. Comprising the Substance of the / Article in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, with additions, &c. By / Richard Whately, D. D., Principal of St. Alban’s Hall, and late / Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. London. Mawman. 1826. / 2. The Second Edition of the same. 1827.” Running head: “Whately’s Elements of Logic.” Unsigned. Not republished. Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of Whately’s Elements of Logic, in the 17th number of the Westminister Review” (MacMinn, 9). There is no separate copy of this article in the Somerville College Library.

A significant portion of the text is quoted in JSM’s System of Logic. In the footnoted variants that derive from that quotation, the manuscript of the Logic is indicated by “MS” and its editions by the last two figures of their dates. For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, vii-xvii and lxxx above.

Whately’s Elements of Logic

“a very slow progress towards popularity,” says Dr. Whately in his Preface, “is the utmost that can be expected for such a treatise as I have endeavoured to make the present.” [P. xxxvi.] In these times, in which the very thought of writing for posterity seems to be abandoned—in which immediate reputation and immediate profit appear to be the sole ends of authorship, instead of usefulness and permanent fame; this readiness on the part of an author to wait for popularity, is of itself a title to praise.

We believe, however, that even the immediate success of Dr. Whately’s work has exceeded the anticipations which the author, judging from the strong prejudices it had to encounter, deemed himself entitled to form. Nor is this surprising. We have long been convinced, that the time was come when a work containing a clear exposition of the principles of the Syllogistic Logic, and vindicating it against the contemptuous sarcasms of some modern metaphysicians, might make its appearance with almost a certainty of success. The authority of the Scotch philosophers (as Dr. Reid and his followers are termed), whose writings have been for the last fifty years the great stronghold of the enemies of Logic, has been for some time on the decline; and has at last fallen so low, that nothing, save the non-appearance of any worthy antagonist in the field of controversy, enables them to maintain any ground in public estimation. And there are various signs apparent to keen observers, shewing that a reaction has commenced in favour of what is really valuable in the ancient philosophy, and that the time when the whole of it could be dismissed with indiscriminate contempt, is at an end. Logic, as it is by far the most important branch of that philosophy, is accordingly recovering its proper rank the most rapidly; but such a work as that of Dr. Whately was still required, to direct, as well as stimulate, the study of that invaluable science, in the cultivation of which we believe it is very generally felt to have already constituted an æra.

Were we, however, required to state precisely wherein we think that the merit of Dr. Whately more peculiarly consists, we should say of him (what has been said of another writer, and on another subject), that he has rather written excellently concerning logic, than expounded in the best possible manner the science itself. His vindication of the utility of logic is conclusive: his explanation of its distinguishing character and peculiar objects, of the purposes to which it is and is not applicable, and the mode of its application, leave scarcely any thing to be desired: on incidental topics his observations are generally just, and not unfrequently original; but, considering his work as what it professes to be, an exposition of the Elements of Logic, it is impossible not to wish that it had contained a clearer explanation, and a fuller development, of several very important topics. We trust that it may be permitted to us to say thus much, without incurring the imputation of being wanting in deference to an author whom we so highly esteem. The whole tenor of our observations will, we hope, protect us from the suspicion of not setting a sufficiently high value upon this important contribution to philosophy, and will sufficiently distinguish us from those carping critics, who, while they freely allow to an author in generals, all the merit he can claim, shew by their whole tone and manner when they descend to particulars, that the most trifling defect has occupied a larger place in their thoughts than all the excellencies which they have so liberally conceded to him. If we hazard any suggestions for the improvement of the work, they are offered rather to the author himself than to the public. If we make any observations tending to shew what Dr. Whately has failed of doing, they will be such as we cannot expect to be even understood by any who have not gone through all the processes of thought necessary for completely mastering, and perfectly appreciating, the whole of what he has done. If we presume to judge the author’s ideas, we are willing to take him for the judge of ours; and we shall be more than satisfied if he should derive one hundredth part of the instruction from our criticism, which we have received from his work.

Before we enter into a minute examination of Dr. Whately’s book, we shall premise a few remarks on the importance of Logic, and the causes which may account for the little cultivation of that branch of knowledge in modern times. It will be seen, that in these observations we have borrowed largely from our author, although our ideas have not flowed precisely in the same channel with his.

Dr. Whately establishes in his preface the utility of the syllogistic philosophy, by the following argument à priori:

If it were inquired what is to be regarded as the most appropriate intellectual occupation of man,as man, what would be the answer? The statesman is engaged with political affairs; the soldier with military; the mathematician with the properties of numbers and magnitudes; the merchant with commercial concerns, &c.; but in what are all and each of these employed? Evidently in Reasoning. They are all occupied in deducing, well or ill, conclusions from premises, each concerning the subject of his own particular business. If, therefore, it be found that the process going on daily in each of so many different minds is, in any respect, the same, and if the principles on which it is conducted can be reduced to a regular system, and if rules can be deduced from that system for the better conducting of the process, then, it can hardly be denied that such a system and such rules must be especially worthy the attention, not of the members of this or that profession merely, but of every one who is desirous of possessing a cultivated mind. To understand the theory of that which is the appropriate intellectual occupation of man in general, and to learn to do that well, which every one will and must do, whether well or ill, may surely be considered as an essential part of a liberal education.

(Pp. x-xi.)

But, unfortunately for logic, men do not commonly form their opinion of the utility of any branch of knowledge, from such general considerations. They judge of its value chiefly from the need which they find of it, as measured by the disadvantages which they feel themselves to labour under from ignorance of it. But it is a peculiarity of logic, that it is impossible any man should ever discover its utility in this way, since the benefit which it affords consists in being freed from a defect, which no man who possesses it ever knows that he possesses. Every man knows what he loses by being ignorant of astronomy, because he feels his inability to determine a latitude, or foretel an eclipse. Men in general are perfectly well aware that they cannot do these things, and consequently no one ever doubted that there was a science of astronomy; just as no man can possibly doubt the necessity of a rule for extracting the cube-root, because no man can persuade himself that he knows how to extract the cube-root when he does not. But men may easily persuade themselves that they are able to reason although they are not; because the faculty which they want, is that by which alone they could detect the want of it. The proof, à posteriori, of a man’s inability to reason, would be, that he is deceived by inconclusive arguments; and this may be evidence to others that he stands in need of logic, but it can be no evidence to him. Hence it is, that they who are ignorant of logic, never can be made, by any efforts, to comprehend its utility. They either reason correctly without it, or they do not: if they do, they are in no need of it; and as for those who reason incorrectly for want of it, they never find out their deficiency until it is removed.

It is not wonderful, therefore, that the doctrine of the syllogism should number among its detractors all who are ignorant of it. But to these must, we are sorry to say, be added, some who are, and many more who fancy themselves, acquainted with it.

The impugners of the school logic, as they term it, may be divided into two classes. The first class consists of men not untinctured with philosophy, including even some writers of considerable eminence in the science of mind; men who are more or less acquainted with the principles of the system, so far at least as to have a general, though often by no means an accurate, conception of its nature and object. These, being persons of cultivated and inquiring minds, who have known what it is to doubt, and to discover themselves in error, and have learned not to repose an unlimited confidence in the unassisted powers of their own minds, are in general sufficiently impressed with the utility of rules to direct the mind in the investigation of truth. They object to the rules of the syllogistic logic as not effecting that end; they maintain, not that logic is useless, but that the doctrine of the syllogism is not logic; and they talk in high-flown language, not always conveying very precise ideas, of a supposed system of inductive logic, which is to supersede the syllogistic, and really to accomplish still more than the other even attempts.

It is against the objections of these philosophers, that our author’s defence of the Aristotelian logic is mainly directed. We apprehend, however, that they are chiefly formidable, by the countenance which they afford to another and a much larger class of the enemies of the science. This second class consists of those who are entirely ignorant of it, and consequently do not reject it under the idea that the rules which it gives are not the best possible, but that no rules, for any such purpose, are necessary at all. If these persons were to observe carefully, and state candidly, what passes in their minds when they bring in their verdict of inutility against the syllogistic system, their account of their own train of ideas would probably amount to this—that it is impossible a knowledge of logic can be of any use, seeing that they themselves do so well without it; nor could they ever perceive that the men who had studied logic reasoned better than their neighbours:—forgetting, that in the very supposition of the utility of logic it is implied that they themselves, who have not studied it, are not, in all cases, competent judges of good reasoning; forgetting, too, that in nine cases out of ten, the evidence on which they pronounce either a logician or another man guilty of bad reasoning is the nonconformity of his conclusions with theirs; which is, to say the least, just as likely to be the effect of bad reasoning on their side, as on his.

The following excellent passage from Dr. Whately’s preface is addressed particularly to this class of the impugners of logic, and may be read by them with great profit:

Many who allow the use of systematic principles in other things are accustomed to cry up Common-Sense as the sufficient and only safe guide in Reasoning. Now by Common-Sense is meant, I apprehend (when the term is used with any distinct meaning), an exercise of the judgment unaided by any Art or system of rules; such as we must necessarily employ in numberless cases of daily occurrence; in which, having no established principles to guide us, no line of procedure, as it were, distinctly chalked out, we must needs act on the best extemporaneous conjectures we can form. He who is eminently skilful in doing this, is said to possess a superior degree of Common-Sense. But that Common-Sense is only our second-best guide—that the rules of Art, if judiciously framed, are always desirable when they can be had, is an assertion, for the truth of which I may appeal to the testimony of Mankind in general; which is so much the more valuable, inasmuch as it may be accounted the testimony of adversaries. For the generality have a strong predilection in favour of Common-Sense, except in those points in which they respectively possess the knowledge of a system of rules; but in these points they deride any one who trusts to unaided Common-Sense. A sailor, e.g. will perhaps despise the pretensions of medical men, and prefer treating a disease by Common-Sense; but he would ridicule the proposal of navigating a ship by Common-Sense, without regard to the maxims of nautical art. A physician, again, will, perhaps, contemn Systems of Political Economy, of Logic, or Metaphysics, and insist on the superior wisdom of trusting to Common-Sense in such matters; but he never would approve of trusting to Common-Sense in the treatment of diseases. Neither, again, would the architect recommend a reliance on Common-Sense alone in building, nor the musician in music, to the neglect of those systems of rules, which, in their respective arts, have been deduced from scientific reasoning aided by experience. And the Induction might be extended to every department of practice. Since, therefore, each gives the preference to unassisted Common-Sense only in those cases where he himself has nothing else to trust to, and invariably resorts to the rules of art wherever he possesses the knowledge of them, it is plain that mankind universally bear their testimony, though unconsciously and often unwillingly, to the preferableness of systematic knowledge to conjectural judgments.

(Pp. xii-xiv.)

Upon the other and more philosophical class of objectors, Dr. Whately’s attacks are far more frequent; indeed, a running fire is kept up with them through the whole of the work. We shall indulge ourselves with one quotation, which admits of a more easy separation from the context than any of the numerous other passages of a similar tendency. It occurs near the beginning of the work, and abounds in instructive observations with regard to the nature and objects of the science:

Logic has usually been considered by these objectors as professing to furnish a peculiar method of reasoning, instead of a method of analyzing that mental process which must invariably take place in all correct reasoning: and accordingly they have contrasted the ordinary mode of reasoning with the syllogistic, and have brought forward with an air of triumph the argumentative skill of many who never learned the system; a mistake no less gross than if any one should regard Grammar as a peculiar Language, and should contend against its utility, on the ground that many speak correctly who never studied the principles of Grammar. For Logic, which is, as it were, the Grammar of Reasoning, does not bring forward the regular syllogism as a distinct mode of argumentation, designed to be substituted for any other mode; but as the form to which all correct reasoning may be ultimately reduced; and which, consequently, serves the purpose (when we are employing Logic as an art) of a test to try the validity of any argument; in the same manner as by chemical analysis we develope and submit to a distinct examination the elements of which any compound body is composed, and are thus enabled to detect any latent sophistication and impurity.

Complaints have also been made, that logic leaves untouched the greatest difficulties, and those which are the sources of the chief errors in reasoning; viz. the ambiguity, or indistinctness of Terms, and the doubts respecting the degrees of evidence in various Propositions: an objection which is not to be removed by any such attempt as that of Watts, to lay down “rules for forming clear ideas, and for guiding the judgment;” but by replying that no art is to be censured for not teaching more than falls within its province, and indeed more than can be taught by any conceivable art. Such a system of universal knowledge as should instruct us in the full meaning or meanings of every term, and the truth or falsity—certainty or uncertainty—of every proposition, thus superseding all other studies, it is most unphilosophical to expect, or even to imagine. And to find fault with Logic for not performing this, is as if one should object to the science of Optics for not giving sight to the blind; or as if (like the man of whom Warburton tells a story in his Div. Leg.) one should complain of a reading-glass for being of no service to a person who had never learned to read.

In fact, the difficulties and errors above alluded to are not in the process of Reasoning itself (which alone is the appropriate province of logic) but in the subject-matter about which it is employed. This process will have been correctly conducted if it have conformed to the logical rules, which preclude the possibility of any error creeping in between the principles from which we are arguing, and the conclusions we deduce from them. But still that conclusion may be false, if the principles we start from are so. In like manner, no arithmetical skill will secure a correct result to a calculation, unless the data are correct from which we calculate: nor does any one, on that account, undervalue Arithmetic; and yet the objection against logic rests on no better foundation.

There is, in fact, a striking analogy in this respect between the two sciences. All numbers (which are the subject of arithmetic) must be numbers of some things, whether coins, persons, measures, or any thing else; but to introduce into the science any notice of the things respecting which calculations are made, would be evidently irrelevant, and would destroy its scientific character: we proceed therefore with arbitrary signs respecting numbers in the abstract. So, also, does Logic pronounce on the validity of a regularly-constructed argument, equally well, though arbitrary symbols may have been substituted for the terms; and, consequently, without any regard to the things signified by those terms. And the possibility of doing this (though the employment of such arbitrary symbols has been absurdly objected to, even by writers who understood not only Arithmetic but Algebra) is a proof of the strictly scientific character of the system.

(Pp. 11-14.)

In the second paragraph of this passage, otherwise so remarkable both for precision of thought and felicity of illustration, Dr. Whately hardly does justice to the science of which he has constituted himself the defender. He says, with truth, that it is most unreasonable to quarrel with logic for not instructing us in the meaning of every term, and the truth or falsity, certainty or uncertainty, of every proposition which we have occasion to employ in our reasonings, since this is, in each case, the business of the particular science to which the subject-matter of the argument belongs, and is much more than can possibly be effected by any single science. But this remark, though just, scarcely conveys an adequate idea of the extreme futility of the objection, since the fact is, that the syllogistic logic really does all that can be done by any one science, towards the above end; inasmuch as the analysis, to which it subjects every process of reasoning, affords the readiest and the most certain means by which a latent ambiguity in any of the terms employed, or the tacit assumption of any false or doubtful proposition, can be detected. Common observation verifies this fact; since the appellation of an expert logician seems, by the usage of language, peculiarly appropriated to those who are thought to be eminently skilful in the detection of such fallacies; which seems to shew that mankind in general have observed (what indeed is easy enough of observation), that they who have studied logic, and who are familiar with its practical application, are less liable than other men to be imposed upon by an assumption or an ambiguity.

With regard to those who maintain, that to perform the logical analysis of an argument, in the manner pointed out by the doctrine of the syllogism, is not the best means of discovering whether it contain a flaw; it may fairly be demanded of them, first, whether they imagine, that, when an argument is inconclusive, its inconclusiveness is always apparent at the first glance? When they answer, as they must necessarily do, that it is not (because otherwise people could never be deceived by inconclusive arguments), and that the fallacy is often visible only upon a close inspection, it will be proper to ask them, whether they intend that it should be inspected in the lump, or piecemeal;—all at once, or step by step, beginning with the first step, and proceeding onward to the last? We imagine there is no one who would not reply, that this last mode comes nearest to his idea of a close inspection. It seems then that even according to the objectors, an analysis of the argument is requisite, in order to try its validity; but that for the performance of this analysis, common-sense, as they term it, is sufficient. Let us however press these disputants a step further, and ask them in what manner common-sense proceeds to analyse an argument, in order to form a judgment whether it is sound or fallacious. If they had any distinct ideas on the subject, they would probably answer, that it proceeds by first separating the propositions which contribute to the establishment of the conclusion (in common language, those which are essential to the argument) from all irrelevant propositions with which they may happen to be mixed up; next, by stating in words, and explicitly, all propositions, also essential to the argument, which may have been assumed tacitly, instead of being declared verbally; thirdly, (having thus effected the separation and enumeration of the premises of the argument), by arranging all these propositions in that order, which (so strongly does ordinary language corroborate our view of the case) is termed their logical order; that is to say, by bringing every conclusion, and the premises from which it is deduced, close together, and taking care that the step by which the truth of a proposition is established, shall precede all those in which that proposition is made use of as a premiss for the establishment of other propositions: when all this is done, then, they will tell you, a child could judge of the correctness or fallacy of the argument. Possibly so: but what is all this? It is neither more nor less than to perform the logical analysis of the argument. When all is done which has been here supposed, the argument is actually reduced to a series of syllogisms: so that the all-sufficiency of common-sense amounts only to this, that, if the man of common-sense makes use of the same means which logic supplies, he may attain the same end. This is true, certainly; but will he do so? and, if he should attempt it, which of the two is most likely to perform the analysis correctly—the man who does it by rule, or the man who does it by guess; the man who knows the principle of the operation which he is performing, or the man who trusts to extemporaneous sagacity alone?

Had the philosophers who treated with so much contempt the idea of trying the validity of an argument by resolving it into a series of syllogisms, been aware that there is no other way in which its validity can be tried, and that this, and no other, is the process actually performed, so far as is found necessary for the purpose, whenever a fallacy in argument is discovered and pointed out, they would probably have spared some portion of the ridicule which they have heaped upon the syllogistic theory. We do not, of course, mean to assert, that the analysis is always carried to its utmost limit; that every step in a ratiocination is set forth at full length; every implied assertion laid down, which, if it were untrue, would vitiate the argument; every syllogism formally resolved into its two premises and its conclusion: although some of the impugners of logic have supposed, absurdly enough, that all this would be necessary if the syllogistic theory were true: and, indeed, all this would be necessary, were it not that, in practice, the fallacy almost always becomes manifest long before the analysis has been carried to this ultimate point. As near an approximation to the syllogistic form as is employed in mathematics (which scarcely differs more from a complete series of syllogisms than that abridged form of syllogistic argumentation, known to logicians by the name of a Sorites) is commonly sufficient. But whatever portion of the analysis it is found necessary to perform, is performed upon syllogistic principles; and it would be a singular specimen of argumentation, to contend that the rules of logic do not conduce to the correct performance of a part of the operation, because they conduce also to the performance of the whole. Dr. Whately has aptly compared the logical analysis of a fallacious argument to the chemical analysis of an adulterated mixture [p. 31]:—to pursue this illustration somewhat further;—although the substance under an analysis of the latter description is certainly a compound of some of the primary elements, or simple substances, as oxygen, carbon, &c.; and, although its bad qualities are undoubtedly to be ascribed to the presence, either of a wrong element, or of some element in an improper proportion,—it is seldom necessary, for the purpose of detecting the adulteration, to effect the complete separation of all these primary ingredients, because the undue admixture generally becomes manifest, and the adventitious particles are separated at a much earlier stage of the proceeding. And yet, nobody would pretend that a man unacquainted with the properties of simple substances would be perfectly capable of performing such an analysis, or that the knowledge of the ultimate elements of bodies was of no service to the chemist. The same observations apply, mutato nomine, to the logician, and the syllogism.

Had the considerations which we have now adduced, suggested themselves to Mr. Dugald Stewart and others, those writers would scarcely have thought it a sufficient refutation of the syllogistic theory, to say (what indeed is very true), that if we were habitually to employ, in stating an argument, those forms which are only useful when it is to be scrutinized, the complexity of the expression, by lengthening the process, and distracting the attention, would cause more fallacies than it would prevent. As opposite arguments not unfrequently converge to the same conclusion, other men, or the same men at other times, have pronounced the syllogism useless on the contrary ground, viz. because a fallacious argument, exhibited as logicians exhibit it, in the form of a syllogism, is so palpably fallacious as to deceive nobody. This we may admit: the difficulty is over, when the argument is reduced to that form. But how are we taught to bring it into that form? By logic surely: and what higher compliment can be paid to the doctrine of the syllogism, than to say, that the same fallacy, in the form of a syllogism, deceives nobody, which “may deceive half the world if diluted in a quarto volume.”

Fallacious reasonings, [says Dr. Whately,] may be compared to a perplexed and entangled mass of accounts, which it requires much sagacity and close attention to clear up, and display in a regular and intelligible form; though when this is once accomplished, the whole appears so perfectly simple, that the unthinking are apt to undervalue the skill and pains which have been employed upon it.

(Ibid.)

We agree with Dr. Whately in ascribing the little esteem, in which the doctrine of the syllogism has been held by modern metaphysicians, to its being confounded with the absurdities of the schoolmen; who certainly dressed up much elaborate trifling in syllogistic forms, and deduced, by reasoning, and consequently by syllogism, from false premises, many very absurd conclusions. Modern philosophers, perceiving this, fancied that it was produced by the employment of the syllogism in lieu of induction; and concluded that, in order to avoid similar errors, it was necessary to discard the syllogism, which they thought was one method of reasoning, and confine ourselves to induction, which they imagined was another. All this while, the truth was, that the schoolmen not only did not neglect induction, but entertained a far more accurate and certainly a more distinct conception of the difference between its function and that of syllogism, than seems to have been entertained by any philosopher who has succeeded them. They saw clearly that the process of philosophizing consisted of two parts; the ascertainment of premises, and the deduction of conclusions. They knew that the rules of the syllogism concerned only the second part of the business (which alone is properly called Reasoning), and could only prevent them from drawing any conclusions which their premises did not warrant, but could not furnish any test of the truth of those original premises, which are not deductions from any prior truths. The evidence of these, which they termed ἀρχαι, principia, was derived from experience, and the process of the mind in attaining to them was termed induction. Τὰς μὲν ἀρχὰς τὰς περὶ ἔκατον, ἐμπειριας ἐτὶ παραϕου̑ναι, are the words of Aristotle himself: and both his Analytica Priora and Posteriora are full of proofs, that he considered experience, in other words, induction, to be the ultimate foundation of all knowledge: the ἀρχαι or first principles of every science being ascertained by induction, and all other truths being deduced from them.

That this should have been overlooked by those who style themselves the inductive philosophers of modern times, is the more surprising, inasmuch as it did not escape the observation of their prototype and idol, Lord Bacon. That great writer, whom it is now fashionable to style the founder of the inductive philosophy, a title which he himself would have been the foremost to disclaim, imputes the errors of Aristotle and the schoolmen, not to their neglecting induction,—for he had read them—but to their performing it ill. They knew that all knowledge must be ultimately derived from the observation of nature; but they were bad observers, and had even (as was remarked by lord Bacon) fundamentally wrong ideas with respect to the proper mode of directing their observations. They consequently generalized on insufficient evidence, and arrived, by an incorrect induction indeed, but yet by induction, at general principles, which were not true, but which, if they had been true, would have warranted all the conclusions which they deduced from them. The merit, therefore, of Bacon, did not consist in teaching mankind to employ induction instead of syllogism, but in pointing out to them the insufficiency of the mode of induction which they had hitherto relied on, and communicating some useful hints for the formation of a better. Since his time, a more efficacious mode of interrogating nature (to borrow a happy expression of his own) has established, that throughout some of the most extensive departments of natural philosophy, there does not exist that sort of connexion between different truths, which would enable us to deduce one of them from another as the schoolmen attempted to do. We cannot collect the ductility or specific gravity of a body which we have never seen, from the mere knowledge of its chemical composition, as we can deduce all the other properties of a triangle from that of having three sides. But we are not even now entitled to blame the schoolmen, as Dr. Whately himself has done, for “regarding the syllogism as an engine for the investigation of nature,” in other words, for applying general reasoning to the discovery of physical truth; since this is precisely what we ourselves very properly do, throughout the vast field of astronomy, and of mechanical philosophy. It is unnecessary to remind any one who is acquainted with logic, that since every mathematical demonstration consists of a series of syllogisms, the application of the syllogism must be at least coextensive with that of mathematics. Throughout the extensive sciences just named, modern philosophers have operated (though with more success) in the very same mode which the schoolmen attempted: they have ascertained by induction certain very general facts; the laws of motion, that of gravitation, of the reflection and refraction of light, &c. and have deduced from these, by a series, sometimes a very long series, of syllogisms, innumerable conclusions with respect to past, present, and even future, physical facts. Surely it is time that the practice of reproaching the schoolmen for doing precisely what we do ourselves, should cease. The schoolmen erred, not because they overlooked the necessary limits of that portion of the process of investigating truth, to which the syllogism is subservient, but because they did not perform the other and equally necessary part of that process with the same unrivalled skill, with which, by the aid of logic, they performed that part of it with which alone logic is conversant.

The province of reasoning in the investigation of truth is immense. It comprises the whole of the process of investigating mathematical truths, by far the greater part of the process of investigating the truths of astronomy, and mechanical philosophy in all its branches, a very large part in respect of the truths of morals, politics, and the philosophy of the human mind: to chemistry and physiology alone it has but a limited application. Upon reasoning depends the correctness of our inferences; upon induction, the evidence of those truths from which our inferences are drawn. The philosophers who have spoken in such high terms of the desirableness of an inductive logic, meaning thereby rules for performing induction, have said no more than the truth; but the rules of correct deduction are not less essential, nor is it any objection to the Aristotelian logic that, professing only to give rules for one of these necessary operations, it affords no means of dispensing with the other. An inductive logic would be highly useful as a supplement to the syllogistic logic, not to supersede it. “A plough,” says Dr. Whately, “may be a much more ingenious and valuable instrument than a flail, but it never can be substituted for it” (p. 236). Induction has usually been performed in a manner so empirical, that it is almost surprising that so many useful truths should have been ascertained by means of it; but if our rules of induction were as specific and precise, as all those which we have hitherto possessed are vague and general, they would not contribute, in the slightest degree, to the correctness of our reasoning. The syllogistic logic affords the only rules which can possibly be of any service to that end. It is, to use Dr. Whately’s words, not an art of reasoning, but the art of reasoning; “the logician’s object being, not to lay down principles by which one may reason, but by which all must reason, even though they are not distinctly aware of them:—to furnish rules, not which may be followed with advantage, but which cannot possibly be departed from in sound reasoning” (p. 22). The syllogism is not “a peculiar method of reasoning,” but “a method of unfolding and analyzing our reasoning” (p. 21). Syllogistic reasoning is not a kind of reasoning, for all correct reasoning is syllogistic: and to reason by induction is a recommendation which implies as thorough a misconception of the meaning of the two words, as if the advice were, to observe by syllogism.

We shall now attempt a short summary of the contents of Dr. Whately’s volume, together with such observations as may most effectually display its merits, and at the same time exhibit plainly one or two imperfections which we have already glanced at; and which, though trifling in comparison with the general excellencies of the work, contribute, nevertheless, to render it both a less clear and a less perfect exposition of the syllogistic logic, than it might have been made.

After an Introduction, consisting of a brief history of the science, with some remarks upon its utility, the most interesting portion of which we have already extracted, Dr. Whately prepares the reader for the study of his Compendium of Logic, by what he terms an Analytical Outline of the Science. This appears to us an extremely happy idea. In expounding a science which, like logic, professes to teach what are the parts which go to the composition of any given whole, that may be termed the synthetical mode of teaching, which commences with the separate parts, and, after a sufficient explanation of their nature, proceeds to shew in what manner they must be put together in order to form that whole, which it is the object of the science to analyse: while that method, on the other hand, may properly be termed analytical, which begins at the opposite extreme, examining the whole as it exists in nature, and, by means of observation and experiment, detecting in that whole the several parts; thus teaching the science in the very order in which it must have been originally discovered. The first method, which begins by exhibiting the simple elements, and makes the learner familiar with them in their separate state, before any of their combinations are introduced to his notice, is generally the best adapted for teaching him the science; but the second is better calculated for persuading him to learn: because it commences with what is already familiar to him in actual practice, and, gradually leading him back to first principles, enables him to perceive, at each step in the analysis, the practical tendency and application of that step: whereas in the first mode he is made to go through the whole science before he reaches the point at which it comes into contact with his own practice, and, therefore, often fails of perceiving that it has any practical application at all. We are inclined to ascribe very much of the unpopularity of logic as a science, to the circumstance, that writers on the subject have almost universally employed the synthetical mode of exposition, to the exclusion of the analytical; a practice which can be advantageously adopted, only where there exists, as in the case of geometry, a predisposition in favour of the science proposed to be communicated. So long as the mode in which logic was invariably taught rendered it necessary to have thoroughly mastered the whole science before arriving at the evidence of its practical utility, it was, perhaps, scarcely to be wondered at, that all who did not possess this perfect knowledge of the subject should hold a science to be useless, of the usefulness of which the proof had never reached their minds.

This obstacle to the right appreciation of the importance of logic, Dr. Whately has for ever removed. The masterly sketch which he has given of the whole science, in the analytical form, previously to entering upon a more detailed exposition of it in the synthetical order, constitutes one of the greatest merits of this volume, as an elementary work.

In every instance, [says he,] in which we reason, in the strict sense of the word, i.e. make use of arguments, whether for the sake of refuting an adversary, or of conveying instruction, or of satisfying our own minds on any point, whatever may be the subject we are engaged on, a certain process takes place in the mind, which is one and the same in all cases, provided it be correctly conducted.

(P. 18.)

On this important psychological or metaphysical fact, depends the whole title of logic to be considered as a science; and our author, accordingly, is at great pains to illustrate it, and to refute the error (fostered by the prevailing language on the subject) of supposing that mathematical reasoning, and theological, and metaphysical, and political, and moral, are so many different kinds of reasoning. Whereas, in reality, what is different in these different cases is not the mode of reasoning, but the nature of the premises, or propositions from which we reason; precisely, as in arithmetic, the process of calculation is the same, whether the numbers, upon which the calculation is performed, be numbers of men, of miles, or of pounds.

In pursuing the supposed investigation, it will be found, that every conclusion is deduced, in reality, from two other propositions (thence called Premises); for though one of these may be, and commonly is, suppressed, it must nevertheless be understood as admitted, as may easily be made evident by supposing the denial of the suppressed premiss, which will at once invalidate the argument.—An argument thus stated regularly and at full length, is called a Syllogism; which, therefore is evidently not a peculiar kind of argument, but only a peculiar form of expression, in which every argument may be stated.

(Pp. 23-4.)

Having advanced so far in the investigation of the subject, as to ascertain that every conclusion is deduced from two premises, the next step is, to examine, whether the nature of the premises which are required to support a given conclusion is subject to any general law. Pursuing this investigation, Dr. Whately shews, that in one of the premises, something is always affirmed or denied of a class, in which class it is affirmed, in the other premiss, that something else is contained; from which two assertions it is, in every case of correct reasoning, concluded, that what was so affirmed or denied of the class, may be affirmed or denied of that which was stated to be comprehended in the class. As every valid argument may be reduced to this form, the principle upon which the above conclusion is drawn, and which is termed by logicians the dictum de omni et nullo, is the universal principle of all reasoning. It may be stated in the following form, the three propositions of the syllogism being distinguished by figures.

“1. Any thing whatever, predicated of a whole class,

2. Under which class something else is contained,

3. May be predicated of that which is so contained.” (P. 36.)

Every valid argument is a case of this general principle; every fallacy is a case which, while it seems to fall under the principle, really does not.

Having thus analysed every process of reasoning into the propositions of which it is composed, the next step is the analysis of a proposition into its two terms, its subject and predicate. And here, from the inquiry, what predicates are applicable to what subjects, arises the whole theory of classification, and of general and particular names. But having already followed our author sufficiently far in his Analytical Outline, to give an adequate conception of his mode of proceeding, we shall stop here, particularly as we do not think him quite so successful in the latter part of the analysis, as in the earlier.

Having thus analysed the process of ratiocination into its simple and ultimate elements, Dr. Whately commences a fuller exposition of the science in the inverse order; and this, in contradistinction to his Analytical Outline, he terms a Synthetical Compendium.

As every argument consists of propositions, and every proposition of terms, it has been usual with writers on logic, to treat their subject under three heads, namely, Terms, Propositions, and Syllogism. As this principle of distribution arises obviously out of the nature of the subject, Dr. Whately has adopted it; and his Synthetical Compendium consists of three parts. On the third part, which treats of arguments, little need be said, except that it is equal, if not superior, to any other exposition extant, of this branch of the science. The supplementary account of hypothetical arguments deserves higher praise; it is almost entirely new: comparatively little having been done by Aristotle or his followers, either for reducing the theory of that kind of arguments to fixed principles, or for devising rules to ensure correctness in the practice. We do not think by any means so highly of the two introductory parts, on Terms and Propositions. On these important subjects it appears to us that Dr. Whately not only has not improved upon the expositions given in former treatises on logic, but has not even availed himself of all the useful matter which those works afford.

We shall, before we proceed further, endeavour to give a general conception of what was done by the Aristotelian logicians in these two departments of the science.

It is sometimes said, and in a certain sense with truth, that these philosophers considered Propositions and Terms solely with reference to their employment in Reasoning; and treated of them, in their books of logic, no further than was necessary for expounding the doctrine of the Syllogism. But if by this it be meant, that they laid down no doctrines respecting terms and propositions, except what were required to enable them to analyse the process by which conclusions are drawn from premises, and establish rules for performing that process correctly, we believe it will be found that this character applies to a small part only of what is commonly taught in logical treatises under these two heads. For the mere purposes of the syllogism,—for securing that our conclusions shall be such as really follow from our premises,—very little of the theory of terms and propositions is necessary, except the division of terms into General and Individual, of propositions into Universal and Particular, Affirmative and Negative; with the rules which relate to what logicians very inappropriately call the Distribution of Terms; to which we may, perhaps, add, the Conversion and Æquipollency of propositions. This is all that is strictly necessary by way of introduction to the theory of the syllogism; and it is but just to state that on all these points Dr. Whately’s exposition is completely satisfactory.

But the Aristotelian logicians did not stop here, nor confine within these narrow bounds the dominion of their science. They appear to have included in their idea of logic, not only the principles of reasoning, but all the instructions which philosophy could furnish towards the right employment of words, as an instrument for the investigation of truth. That principles may be laid down and rules devised to that end, sufficient in number and importance to constitute a science, we hold to be indisputable; though we are aware that in this opinion Dr. Whately does not concur. Whether that science should be regarded as a part of logic, is a mere question of nomenclature, and one which common usage has long since decided in the affirmative. But, however we may decide with respect to the names, it is in the first two parts of the treatises of the Aristotelian philosophers on logic, that we find all which they thought it necessary to lay down with reference to the employment of words, generally, as an instrument of thought; and in this there was much, which, however it might conduce to the truth or accurate wording of the premises from which we reason, contributed nothing to the correctness of the ratiocination itself.

The Aristotelians did not carry this department of what they considered as logic, to a degree of perfection approaching to that which the theory of the reasoning process attained in their hands. But they made in it no contemptible proficiency; and notwithstanding all the assistance which might have been derived from the discoveries of Locke and Brown, for the improvement of this branch of philosophy, modern metaphysicians are far from having yet followed out all the important hints, which the so much ridiculed schoolmen afforded. It is true, that their classification of names according to the nature of the things which they signify, has little merit in the outline, though much in some of the details; but their classification of names according to the mode of their signification (of which the doctrine of the Predicables forms a part) when purified from the taint of Realism which adheres to the expression but without infecting the substance, constitutes a prodigious step in the theory of naming; a step which few among their modern successors have known even how to appreciate, far less to surpass. Their classification of the modes of predication, co-ordinate with, and founded on the above classification of terms, and the further division of propositions according to the nature of the evidence on which they rest (for such in reality are the distinctions of essential and accidental, necessary and contingent, propositions) clearly prove them to have seen, not indeed to the bottom of the subject, but deeper into it than the generality of those who have constituted themselves, in modern times, the contemptuous assailants of the school logic. If we add to what has been enumerated, their observations on Definition and Division, which though extremely imperfect, contain the germs of many truths which are still waiting to be developed, we shall have a body of materials, not, indeed, entirely adequate to the purpose contemplated by Watts, and so severely condemned by our author, of laying down “rules for forming clear ideas, and for guiding the judgment,” but containing much which is highly conducive to that end, and which, if expanded, systematized, and in some few points corrected, by a hand competent to the task, would effect nearly all that any body of instructions or system of rules can possibly accomplish, in a direct way, towards the purpose which Watts had in view.

In the Compendium of Aldrich, commonly called the Oxford Logic, the greatest part of this important branch of the Aristotelian philosophy is omitted, and the remainder most lamely, imperfectly, and in some points even incorrectly, given. This Treatise, the whole of which, except the mere technical account of the rules of the syllogism, is utterly contemptible, has been for many years the text book in use at the only academical institution in England at which logic forms any part of the established course of education. The University of Oxford did not always thus confine her alumni to the worse book extant on the science which she still compels them to pretend to learn; for the very best account which we have ever seen, in a small compass, of the Aristotelian logic (a work written by a Jesuit, Du Trieu, for the use of the college at Douay) was printed at Oxford in 1662. This circumstance, and the degeneracy which it evinces, form an appropriate comment upon the benefits of richly-endowed seminaries of education, and of institutions generally, in which the quantity of service does not regulate the quantity of reward. But what we would particularly observe is, that this treatise of Aldrich is almost the only work, professing to be an exposition of the Aristotelian logic, with which Dr. Whately appears to be acquainted. He admits himself [p. vii] to have taken more from that treatise than from any other; and we are sorry to say, that nearly the whole of his Synthetical Compendium (the supplement and a few passages excepted) is little more than a paraphrase of Aldrich. The exposition of the syllogism in Aldrich is clear and accurate, and that of our author, accordingly, is entitled to the same praise: but in the remainder, though he has corrected some of the minor oversights of his predecessor, he has in general followed him so closely in his worst parts, that it is almost as impossible to gain from the one, as from the other, a single clear idea.

We cannot select any passage from Dr. Whately’s work, which so forcibly illustrates all that we have advanced, as his account of the Predicables. This, as logicians are aware, is an attempt to classify general terms, i. e. names which, by virtue of their signification, are applicable in one and the same sense to an indefinite number of individuals. In the doctrine of the Predicables, these terms are considered as capable of being predicated, which is as much as to say affirmed, of some individual thing or things. The problem is, how many kinds of general names, all of them differing in their mode of signification, may be predicated of, and may therefore be said to be names of, one and the same set of individual objects. Logicians have determined that five different kinds of general names may be so predicated; and have called them Genus, Species, Differentia, Proprium, and Accidens. These are called Predicables, and our author, after Aldrich, has defined them as follows:

Whatever term can be affirmed of several things, must express either their whole essence, which is called the Species; or a part of their essence (viz. either the material part, which is called the Genus, or the formal and distinguishing part, which is called Differentia, or in common discourse, characteristic) or something joined to the essence; whether necessarily (i. e. to the whole species, or, in other words, universally, to every individual of it), which is called a Property [Proprium]; or contingently (i. e. to some individuals only of the species), which is an Accident.

(P. 62.)

To render this intricate and involved sentence less unintelligible, Dr. Whately subjoins [ibid.] a synoptical table of the Predicables, for which we must refer our readers to the work itself.

If it be the object of a definition to render that clear, which was before obscure, our author can scarcely flatter himself that what he has here given, is entitled to the name. If his readers had any thing approaching to a distinct conception of the predicables before (as they probably had of Genus and Species) such an explanation as this would be almost sufficient to throw back the whole subject into inextricable darkness and confusion.

What is meant by the essence of a thing? What by its whole essence? In what sense can the word man, which is the name of a species, be said to express the whole essence of John and Thomas? Dr. Whately admits elsewhere, that classification is arbitrary; we may therefore constitute our species as we will; have we the same arbitrary power over the essences of things? Supposing the essence understood, what are we to understand by the material part, what by the formal or distinguishing part of the essence? and what is meant by something joined to the essence? The reader will probably imagine that Dr. Whately cannot have employed so many unusual expressions, without somewhere explaining their meaning; but no explanation is attempted; it is throughout assumed that the reader perfectly understands all these phrases, most of which he probably now hears of for the first time. The only part of this account of the predicables which is intelligible, is incorrect: we mean the distinction drawn between Proprium and Accidens, which conveys ideas totally different from those which logicians have always attached to the terms, nor is it true that they, or, indeed, any other philosophers or writers whatsoever, have used the word necessary as it is here employed, synonymously with universal. That crows are black, is a universal proposition, and a true proposition, but did any person ever before dream of calling it a necessary one? Black, as applied to a crow, is the very word most commonly given by logicians as an example of an inseparable accident; yet our author classes it as a Proprium, without seeming to be aware that he is altering the established classification.

All this while, if Dr. Whately had looked into any of the more celebrated treatises on the Aristotelian logic, he would have there found the doctrine of the predicables placed upon a perfectly distinct and intelligible foundation, and the materials so well prepared for a thoroughly philosophical explanation of general terms, that, with all the aids which modern discoveries afford, and with the power of original thinking which he has elsewhere displayed, he might have had the merit of carrying this important branch of the philosophy of the human mind almost to perfection.

But we are not entitled to find fault with Dr. Whately’s explanation of the Predicables as insufficient, without showing, by an experiment of our own, that a better explanation might be made. We shall therefore make the attempt, giving due notice to those who may think the following dissertation too dry, that if they please they may pass it over.

With respect to Genus and Species, we shall drop the unmeaning phrases copied by our author from Aldrich, and which do not bear the remotest analogy to any thing in Aristotle, or Porphyry, or any of the more distinguished of their followers, and shall content ourselves with saying that any class, considered as comprehended in a larger class, is a species; and vice versâ, the larger class, considered as comprehending the smaller, is a genus. This we take to be the ordinary and received meaning of the terms, and it accords with the sense in which the Aristotelian logicians used them. There was, indeed, one sort of species which they held to be the species κατ’ ἐξοχὴν, more peculiarly a species than any other, species specialissima as they termed it, and that was, the lowest species in any given classification; a species which they fancied could not be any further subdivided into species, but only into individuals. This notion was evidently a result of the fundamental error of the Aristotelian philosophers, which consisted in not perceiving that classification is arbitrary. They did not consider, that we may erect any set of individual things into a species, which have any quality in common among themselves, distinguishing them from others; they did not see that it depends upon our choice what shall be the lowest species, but fancied, that, when they had proceeded to a certain length in the division, they reached the lowest species, and that there, by the necessity of nature, they were compelled to stop. This was their error; from which it is difficult to suppose, that the inventor of the maxim that the species expresses the whole essence of a thing, could be altogether free.

When this appendage is detached from it, the distinction between Genus and Species is nothing more than the difference between a larger class and a smaller. There is a broader line of distinction between these two predicables and the other three, Differentia, Proprium, and Accidens; between such words as animal, or man, and such words as white, carnivorous, or rational.

All nomenclature is connected with some classification: and in all classification there are two ideas involved, that of the properties or attributes which form the basis of the classification, and that of the things which compose the classes themselves. Thus, when animals are divided into birds, beasts, fishes, and so forth, we are to consider, with regard to the word fish for example, first, the things comprised in the class (which are sharks, lampreys, eels, salmon, &c.), and next, the qualities common to all these things (that of being cold-blooded, breathing by gills, living in the water, &c.), on account of which they are erected into a class, and which are implied in the name of the class, since any animal, or other object, not possessing all these qualities, would not be termed a fish. The Aristotelian logicians did not overlook this important distinction between the two constituent parts which make up the signification of a name, the things which it is imposed upon, and the properties on account of which it is imposed. They called the former the significatum materiale of the term, the latter its significatum formale; and they sometimes said that it denoted the one, and connoted the other. The word man denotes John, Thomas, and all other men; it connotes rationality, the human form, and whatever other may be the qualities which the name imports, and in the absence of which it would be withheld. The word white connotes the property of whiteness; it denotes snow, silver, milk, and all other things which, in consequence of their possessing that property, we term white.

Now, although all names which denote classes of things (and such are all the predicables) signify both the class itself, and the attributes which constitute it a class; or, to speak technically, denote the class, and connote the attributes;—there is this difference, that in the case of Genus and Species the idea of the class itself is the leading idea; in the other three predicables, it is the idea of the attribute. When we hear the word man, our attention is directed, first to the object, and from that to the qualities which are implied in the name, and but for which it would not have received the name; when, on the contrary, we hear the words rational, or white, the quality of rationality or whiteness is the first idea which is suggested to the imagination, and the idea of the white or rational thing is merely secondary. So perfectly is the idea of the quality here the leading idea, that adjectives are frequently described to be the names of qualities, which, in reality, they are not; all names of qualities, as goodness for example, being substantives. Adjectives are names of things, considered as having qualities; but in which, the quality being fixed, and the things variable, the idea of the quality predominates over that of the thing.

It remains to show in what manner the three adjective predicables, Differentia, Proprium, and Accidens, are distinguished from one another; how we are to decide whether any name, in which the idea connoted, that of the attribute, is the principal idea, should be considered as a Differentia, a Proprium, or an Accidens, of a given class. We say a class, because we do not consider the first two of these terms to be applicable to an individual.

Now here, as it appears to us, the definitions of the schoolmen are precise, and their classification perfect. The attributes, according to them, might be either

1. Essential, and then the term connoting it was a Differentia; 2. Accidental, but necessary, and then the term connoting it was a Proprium; or 3. Accidental and not necessary, and then the term connoting it was an Accidens.

To render this classification intelligible, it is necessary that we should explain what was here meant by essential and accidental, necessary and contingent.

1. By the essence, and the essential properties, of a class, were meant the properties which, as we have already explained, are implied in its name, or, to use the technical expression, connoted by it. The essence of the class man consists, according to this definition, of life, the power of voluntary motion, rationality, and the human form. There are many other properties which are both common to all mankind, and peculiar to them, but they are not essential, because, if a race were discovered destitute of these properties, they would yet, according to the established meaning of the word man, be called men, if they possessed the other attributes which we have named. All this is plainly implied, though not clearly expressed, in the scholastic definition of essence. All properties, says the definition, are of the essence of man, without which man can neither be, nor be conceived to be; that is, without which, an object, whatever may be its other properties, will not be called man.

It is obvious, that, as classification is arbitrary, and nomenclature equally so, the word man might, if we had so chosen, have implied any other properties, instead of these. What should or should not be essential properties of man, depended upon the will of those who framed the class, and imposed the name. But the convenience of framing such a class, and giving it a common name, has been so obvious, that all mankind have concurred in the classification; and so long as we profess to adhere to the established nomenclature, it does not depend upon us what shall be the essential properties of the class, because it does not belong to us, but to the usage of language, to fix what is implied in the name.

Every property which was of the essence of a species, every property implied in the name of a species, might be termed, according to the schoolmen, a Differentia of that species. But there was this further distinction, that, as some of the properties which were common to the species, and implied in its name, might also be common to some larger class or Genus, including the species, and might be implied in the name of that likewise, these properties were said to constitute a Generic Difference, with respect to the species, while the remainder of its essential properties, which were implied in the name of the species but not implied in that of the genus, and which served consequently to distinguish the given species from other species of the same genus, were termed its Specific Difference. Of the four properties above enumerated as essential to the class man,—life, and the power of voluntary motion, are implied, not only in the name of that class, but in the name of the superior genus, animal, and are therefore termed the Differentia Generica of man, while rationality and the human figure, not being implied in the word animal, serve to distinguish the species man from the other species of that genus, and are called its Differentia Specifica.

2. All properties or attributes which were possessed by the thing, but not implied in the name, and were therefore excluded from the rank of essential properties, were called accidental properties of the class, and were said to be predicated of it by accident, κατα συμβεβηκὸς, because it was only by accident that they were true of the whole class, not having been in any degree taken into account when the class was framed, and the objects which were to be comprised in it parcelled out.

Accidental properties were further subdivided into those which were necessary and those which were not necessary; which were, as it is otherwise expressed, contingent. The first kind of property (or rather the name which connotes it) was called Proprium, the second Accidens. We shall endeavour to explain this remaining distinction without reference to our author’s strange misunderstanding of the meaning of the word necessary, as applied to a property or a proposition.

Of the properties of a class, there are some which, as we have before seen, are implied in its name, and these are called its essential properties; but there are some also, which, although not implied in the name of the species, are capable of being demonstratively deduced from those which are: and these were the properties to which the followers of Aristotle applied the name Proprium. Thus the property of being bounded by three straight lines is implied in the name of the class Triangle, and is one of its essential properties: the property of having the sum of its angles equal to two right angles may be shown, by demonstration, to follow from this essential property, but is not itself an essential property, not being implied in the name; for, if we were to discover that Euclid’s demonstration is incorrect, and that the two properties are not co-extensive, the name would certainly follow the former property, not the latter. Being an accidental property, therefore, and yet a necessary property, because the supposition of its being taken away, while the essential properties of a triangle remain, “implicat manifestam contradictionem,” it is termed a Proprium. All other accidental properties are called simply by the name of Accidens.

All the five Predicables, with their distinguishing characteristics, may be exhibited in a Synoptic Table of the following form:

PREDICABLES, or GENERAL TERMScapable of being predicated of a Class

1 | 2 | 3 |  |
The name of the class itself, | The name of any larger class which includes it, | Any property implied in the name of the class, | Any property belonging to the class, but not implied in its name
Species | Genus | Differentia |  |
|  | Implied likewise in the name of the larger class. Generic Difference | Implied in the name of the given class, but not in that of the larger class, Specific Difference | 4. | 5
|  | Capable of being deduced by demonstration from some property implied in the name of the class, | Not capable of being so deduced,
|  |  |  | Proprium | Accidens.

When thus expressed, the Aristotelian classification of general terms has, at least, the advantage of being intelligible. It is also evident, that the classification is complete; that it comprehends every thing which can be truly predicated of a class. It does not belong to this place to afford any illustrations or proofs of its vast utility, especially in all questions relating to the original foundation of human knowledge, and the different kinds of evidence on which it rests. But we may have occasion hereafter, in touching upon that more extensive subject, to follow out some of the above observations to their ulterior consequences: and, in the mean time, it may be sufficient, as a protection against the accusation of elaborate trifling, to observe, that to point out, and make plain and intelligible, distinctions which really exist, whether it be attended with immediate practical consequences or not, at least conduces always to the clearness of our ideas.

We shall not here set forth the manner in which the unfortunate confusion, in our author’s mind, between the words necessary and universal, has vitiated a great part of what he has said on the subject of Propositions. But there is one point remaining—a point of very great importance—on which we think that Dr. Whately has profited little by the discoveries of modern metaphysicians; it is the subject of Definition.

A Nominal Definition, [says he,] (such as are those usually found in a dictionary of one’s own language) explains only the meaning of the term, by giving some equivalent expression, which may happen to be better known. Thus you might define a “Term,” that which forms one of the extremes or boundaries of a proposition; and a “Predicable,” that which may be predicated; “decalogue,” ten commandments; “telescope,” an instrument for viewing distant objects, &c. A Real Definition is one which explains and unfolds the nature of the thing; and each of these kinds of definition is either accidental or essential. An essential Definition assigns (or lays down) the constituent parts of the essence (or nature). An accidental definition (which is commonly called a description) assigns the circumstances belonging to the essence, viz. Properties and Accidents (e.g. causes, effects, &c.) thus, “man” may be described as “an animal that uses fire to dress his food, &c.”

(Pp. 71-2.)

We do not intend to comment upon the obscurity and confusion of the latter part of this passage, occasioned by the unhappy imperfection of our author’s explanation of the predicables; but to observe, that distinction between nominal and real definitions, between definitions of words and what are called definitions of things, although conformable to the ideas of most of the Aristotelian logicians, cannot, as it appears to us, be maintained. We apprehend that no definition is ever intended to “explain and unfold the nature of thing.” It is some confirmation of our opinion, that none of those writers who have thought that there were definitions of things, have ever succeeded in discovering any criterion by which the definition of a thing can be distinguished from any other proposition relating to the thing. The definition, they say, unfolds the nature of the thing: but no definition can unfold its whole nature; and every proposition in which any quality whatever is predicated of the thing, unfolds some part of its nature. The true state of the case we take to be this:—All definitions are of names, and of names only: but, in some definitions, it is clearly apparent, that nothing is intended except to explain the meaning of the word; while, in others, besides explaining the meaning of the word, it is intended to be implied that there exists a thing corresponding to the word. Whether this be or be not implied in any given case, cannot be collected from the mere form of the expression. “A centaur is an animal with the upper parts of a man and the lower parts of a horse;” and “A triangle is a rectilineal figure with three sides,” are, in form, expressions precisely similar; although in the former it is not implied that any thing, conformable to the term, really exists, while in the latter it is; as may be seen by substituting, in both definitions, the word means for is. In the first expression, “a centaur means an animal,” &c., the sense would remain unchanged: in the second, “a triangle means,” &c. the meaning would be altered, since it would be obviously impossible to deduce any of the truths of geometry from a proposition expressive only of the manner in which we intend to employ a particular sign.

There are, therefore, expressions, commonly passing for definitions, which include in themselves more than the mere explanation of the meaning of a term. But it is not correct to call an expression of this sort a peculiar kind of definition. Its difference from the other kind consists in this, that it is not a definition, but a definition and something more. The definition above given of a triangle, obviously comprises, not one, but two propositions, perfectly distinguishable: the one is, “There may exist a figure bounded by three straight lines:” the other, “and this figure may be termed a triangle.” The former of these propositions is not a definition at all; the latter is a mere nominal definition, or explanation of the use and application of a term. The first is susceptible of truth or falsehood, and may therefore be made the foundation of a train of reasoning: the latter can neither be true nor false; the only character it is susceptible of is that of conformity or disconformity to the ordinary usage of language.a

We have much to say, likewise, on Dr. Whately’s Essential and Accidental Definitions, his Separable and Inseparable Accidents, &c. But we have said enough, perhaps more than enough, in the tone of criticism, upon his Synthetical Compendium. In our examination of the remainder of his work, we shall have the less invidious office of displaying merits rather than of detecting faults.

The latter half of the volume consists of a Treatise on Fallacies, and a Dissertation on the Province of Reasoning.

The subject of Fallacies has not been disregarded by logical writers. In most treatises of logic, a chapter has been devoted to the enumeration and classification of them. But logicians have not, hitherto, elicited much that is recondite or valuable on this subject. They seem to have exhausted the whole vigour of their intellects in laying down principles and rules, by the application of which a fallacy, if any exist in an argument, may be detected; and to have expended little philosophy in devising the means of distinguishing what kind of fallacy it was, in what cases such a fallacy was most to be apprehended, and by what previous habits the mind might be, with the greatest probable efficacy, protected against its approach. Perceiving clearly, in this division of the subject, the ineptitude of Aldrich, whose deficiencies, however, in this instance are no greater than those of much abler writers, Dr. Whately has left the beaten track of his predecessors, and applied his own powers of thought to the task of describing, characterizing, and classing, fallacies.

The reader who should expect to find, in this excellent dissertation, a dry catalogue of names or a string of technical definitions, would be most agreeably disappointed in its perusal. It abounds with apt examples and illustrations drawn from almost all the most interesting subjects in the range of human knowledge, and is interspersed with many just and acute observations on the errors of controversialists, the mental habits by which the liability to be deceived by fallacies is heightened or decreased, and the general regulation of the intellectual faculties.

From the examples here given of fallacious arguments, much instruction may be derived of a nature not strictly logical; since the refutation of a sophism, be it in what science it may, is in itself a good, independently of its use as an exercise, to fit the mind for detecting and avoiding others. In the Preface to his Elements of Rhetoric, lately published, Dr. Whately complains [pp. viii-x] that some have blamed him for availing himself of these examples as a vehicle for opinions of his own, in which the persons by whom he is thus criticized do not concur. We know not who are the persons thus alluded to, but the objection, by whomsoever made, is (as it seems to us) extremely unreasonable. If logic be of use for the establishment of any truths, they must be truths which need establishment—truths which there is at least a chance that some of those to whom they are presented may not immediately admit. For the settlement of a dispute, it is a necessary condition that the dispute should exist, or at least be capable of existing. There is little use in trying an argument by logical rules when it is sufficiently clear already whether it be valid: and, in point of fact, we are firmly persuaded, that the extremely familiar and obvious arguments by which logical writers have in general illustrated the doctrine of the syllogism, have contributed not a little to the low estimation in which the science is commonly held by superficial persons, who, finding that from the beginning to the end of a work professing to deliver the Art of Reasoning, that art is never once employed to establish a single truth of which any man could doubt, or refute one sophism by which he could for an instant be deceived, had some colour for representing logic as a mere nomenclature, and applying to it what was wittily said of a sister science, that

All a rhetorician’s rules

Teach nothing but to name his tools.

In adopting, however, the more judicious course, of illustrating the principles of logic by means of arguments of which the soundness or fallacy could not so readily be perceived without the aid of those principles, the teacher of that science exposes himself to another danger, from which we cannot say that, in our opinion, Dr. Whately has always been quite successful in guarding himself. It has been already remarked, that the most unerring skill in the application of logical rules will not protect the reasoner from false conclusions if his premises are unsound. Now, although his error, when it proceeds from such a cause, is in no wise imputable to logic, its apparent absurdity is not a little heightened by the scientific apparatus with which he has so cautiously protected himself from falling into any conclusion but that to which his false premises legitimately lead. So likewise if, in order to refute opponents, a logician permits himself to fill up a suppressed link of their argument with a proposition which they allow to be false, when one which they affirm to be true would equally have sufficed to support their conclusion, and by this method gains an easy victory over an argument which was never maintained—the adversary, being perhaps ignorant of logic, and thinking himself logically confuted when his reason tells him that he is not substantially so, is likely enough to conclude that the rules of logic afford no criterion whatever of the validity of an argument. Thus Dr. Whately says,

If a man expatiates on the distress of the country, and thence argues that the government is tyrannical, we must suppose him to assume either that “every distressed country is under a tyranny,” which is a manifest falsehood, or merely that “every country under a tyranny is distressed,” which, however true, proves nothing, the middle term being undistributed.

(P. 137.)

With submission, we would observe, that the supposed reasoner need not maintain either the false proposition, or that which does not prove the conclusion: he might assume, not that “every distressed country is under a tyranny,” but that every country which is blessed with a fertile soil, rich mineral productions, a situation highly favourable to commerce, and an orderly, intelligent, and industrious, population, may, if it be distressed, impute its miseries to the tyranny, or, at least, to the vices, of its government. And it might be, that the circumstances of the country in question were in accordance with the above hypothesis. Dr. Whately has therefore, with much ostentation of logic, failed in his attempt to refute this argument: which, indeed, like many other arguments in which the premises only are disputable, and not the justness of the illation, may or may not be a sophism according to circumstances, and consequently does not admit of any general refutation. We are sure that our author cannot justly impute so flagrant an abuse of logical principles to Mr. Bentham, upon whose Book of Fallacies he is somewhat unnecessarily severe (p. 194n). We mention these things merely because we think it right to shew that they have not escaped our observation. We should deserve contempt if such faults as these, in matters only incidental to the main subject, could affect our estimation of the work as a scientific treatise, or even materially alter our feelings towards the author. For the man who labours, whether from superstition or self-interest, to keep back the progress of the human mind, we reckon it no apology that the evil which he does he is besotted enough to mistake for good: but every one who is really and efficiently engaged in enlightening mankind, we regard, howsoever we may dissent from some of his views, as a confederate and brother in arms, a fellow labourer in the same great cause with ourselves. If our advances are not met with equal cordiality, that does not affect our duty; the admirable purpose of this volume, and the immense good which it is effecting, would be a sufficient atonement for twenty times the number of trespasses against candour and the rules of fair and honourable controversy, which can be discovered in it. The number of bigots and knaves in the world is not so small, nor the friends of improvement so numerous, that any portion of the indignation due to the first can, with any justice, be diverted to the second.

The Dissertation on the Province of Reasoning exhibits a greater reach of thought, and power of original investigation, than is shewn in any other part of the volume. It is divided into five chapters. 1st, On Induction. 2nd, On the Discovery of Truth. 3rd, On Inference and Proof. 4th, On Verbal and Real Questions. 5th, On Realism.

In the chapter on Induction, it is the chief object of our author to prove that induction is not, as it seems to be generally considered, a distinct kind of argument from the syllogism.

This mistake, [he observes,] seems chiefly to have arisen from a vagueness in the use of the word induction, which is sometimes employed to designate the process of investigation, and of collecting facts; sometimes the deducing an inference from those facts. The former of these processes (i.e. that of observation and experiment) is undoubtedly distinct from that which takes place in the Syllogism; but then it is not a process of argument; the latter, again, is an argumentative process; but then it is, like all other arguments, capable of being Syllogistically expressed. (P. 208.)

In the process of reasoning, [he continues,] by which we deduce, from our observation of certain known cases, an inference with respect to unknown ones, we are employing a syllogism in Barbara with the major Premiss suppressed; that being always substantially the same, as it asserts, that “what belongs to the individual or individuals we have examined, belongs to the whole class under which they come;” e.g. from an examination of the history of several tyrannies, and finding that each of them was of short duration, we conclude, that “the same is likely to be the case with all tyrannies;” the suppressed major Premiss being easily supplied by the hearer; viz. “that what belongs to the tyrannies in question is likely to belong to all.”

[Pp. 208-9.]

This is a just, and, so far as we are aware, an original remark; and its consequences are extremely important. Deliberate consideration does not indeed shew it to be so complete an answer as it at first appears, to those writers who set up Induction in opposition to Syllogism; for if this were the only reply that could be made to them, they might with justice allege, that although, in the inductive process, the only part which can be correctly termed reasoning is syllogistic, that part is, however, extremely simple and obvious, the inductive syllogism being one and the same in all cases; and that in a case of vitious induction, it is not in this step of the process that the mistake ever lies. The importance, therefore, of Dr. Whately’s observation consists rather in the more clear conception which it gives of the nature of Induction itself: in confirmation of which, it may be stated, that this one remark would have sufficed to correct the erroneous notion which the ancients had of induction, and to which Lord Bacon justly ascribes the gross errors they committed in the investigation of nature. They in fact mistook altogether the inductive syllogism, completing it by the addition of a minor, instead of a major; as is shown by Dr. Whately in the note to the above passage.

The object of the next chapter, on the Discovery of Truth, is to inquire, how far reasoning, that is, syllogism, affords the means by which any new truths are brought to light. The author was incited to this inquiry by the frequency of the accusation against logic, that it is wholly unserviceable in the investigation of truth: he refutes this imputation most triumphantly, and his ideas on the entire subject are philosophical and just. He says, that it is true, reasoning does not enable us to discover truths which were not implied and contained in any thing previously known; but that many truths, virtually involved in propositions which we have already assented to, might practically, unless elicited by a process of reasoning, have remained for ever as completely unknown, as if they did not result from the knowledge we previously possessed. Of this fact, the whole science of mathematics is a perpetual proof. All geometry is in reality implied in the axioms and definitions, and all mechanics in the three laws of motion, and that of the composition and resolution of forces; but if it had not been for the ratiocinative process by which we compel these elementary truths to bring forth the fruit which is in them, they would have remained for ever barren; mankind would, it is true, in a certain sense, have possessed these magnificent sciences, but no otherwise than as the ore in an undiscovered mine is possessed by the owner of the ground wherein it lies.

Metaphysicians have found it a very difficult problem, to explain on philosophical principles this seeming paradox; to prove that possible, which experience certifies to be true; that mankind may correctly apprehend and fully assent to a general proposition, yet remain for ages ignorant of myriads of truths which are embodied in it, and which, in fact, are but so many particular cases of that which, as a general truth, they have long known. We do not think that our author has advanced much nearer than his predecessors to the solution of the mystery: but he has illustrated the fact itself most elegantly and instructively; and that person must be far advanced in this kind of knowledge, who can read the chapter without deriving from it an important addition to his stock of valuable ideas.

The same remark applies, though in a less degree, to the two succeeding chapters, on “Inference and Proof,” and on “Verbal and Real Questions.” In the first of these, our author points out the distinction between the function of the philosopher, and that of the advocate; of him who combines together premises with no other view than that of arriving by means of them at some new and useful conclusion, and him whose conclusion is given, and who has to seek for premises, by the combination of which, he may be enabled to demonstrate that particular conclusion and no other. In the next chapter, Dr. Whately defines more clearly and in more precise and logical language than former writers, the distinction between what are called Verbal, and Real, questions. His remarks on this subject, when once stated, appear almost too simple to require statement; but the frequency with which differences affecting merely the application of a word, are mistaken for real diversities of opinion respecting matters of fact, and the latter in their turn (for this too is no unfrequent case) stigmatized, from a misapprehension of the point at issue, as merely verbal disputes, renders the clear statement of the distinction, however obvious it may appear, no unimportant service.

Lastly, Dr. Whately enters into an examination of the notion of the Realists, that genera and species are real things, having an independent existence; that to every general name there corresponds an actually existing thing, distinct as well from the individuals contained in the class, as from the qualities belonging to these individuals, which were the occasion of their being formed into a class. Dr. Whately observes, and his experience is borne out by our own, that although few persons, if any, in the present day, avow and maintain this doctrine, those who are not especially on their guard are perpetually sliding into it unawares; and he proceeds with much acuteness to set forth several circumstances not previously noticed, which have contributed in no trifling degree to the prevalence of this error.

We have now brought our critical observations on Dr. Whately’s work to a close. But we cannot dismiss the subject, without expressing a hope that the powers of philosophizing, of which he has afforded an earnest in this work, may not lie idle, nor be diverted to any other subject, until he has accomplished some part of what is still wanting to the elucidation of this. A large portion of the philosophy of General Terms still remains undiscovered; the philosophical analysis of Predication, the explanation of what is the immediate object of belief when we assent to a proposition, is yet to be performed: and though the important assistance rendered by general language, not only in what are termed the exact sciences, but even in the discovery of physical facts, is known and admitted, the nature of the means by which it performs this service is a problem still to a great extent unsolved. Let Dr. Whately carry to the investigation of these subjects, the knowledge he possesses of the science which he has so usefully expounded, together with the acquaintance, which he either possesses or might acquire, with the discoveries of modern metaphysicians in this field of inquiry, and we feel confident that he would produce a work which would contribute even more to the advancement of knowledge, and entitle him to still higher permanent fame, than the excellent Treatise, of which we here close our examination.

NOTES ON SOME OF THE MORE POPULAR DIALOGUES OF PLATO

1834–35

EDITOR’S NOTE

Four of the following nine commentary-translations appeared in the Monthly Repository in instalments from Feb., 1834, to March, 1835, signed “A”; the other five have not previously been published. The published ones are identified in JSM’s bibliography as “Notes on some of the more Popular Dialogues of Plato, published in various numbers of the Monthly Repository: viz.” (MacMinn, 37), followed by the entries given in the Editor’s Notes to the separate items below.

For discussions of these translations see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xvii-xxviii and lxxx-lxxxiii above.

The Protagoras

[Monthly Repository, VIII (Feb., and March, 1834), 89-99, and 203-11. Not republished; signed “A.” Running heads: “Plato’s Dialogues; the Protagoras.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography (after the general heading cited on 38 above) as “No I. The Protagoras: part 1 in the M.R. for Febry 1834 / : part 2 in the M.R. for March 1834” (MacMinn, 37). In the copy in the Somerville College Library, a correction of “Socrates” to “Pythagoras” is indicated, probably not in JSM’s hand, at 43.28; at 44n.6 inked corrections in that copy change ψυχὴαν to ψυχὴν and παρτὰς to παρὰ τὰς.

For comments on this and the other translations, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xvii-xxviii and lxxx-lxxxiii above.]

considering the almost boundless reputation of the writings of Plato, not only among scholars, but (upon their authority) among nearly all who have any tincture of letters, it is a remarkable fact, that of the great writers of antiquity, there is scarcely one who, in this country at least, is not merely so little understood, but so little read. Our two great “seats of learning,” of which no real lover of learning can ever speak but in terms of indignant disgust, bestow attention upon the various branches of classical acquirement in exactly the reverse order to that which would be observed by persons who valued the ancient authors for what is valuable in them: namely, upon the mere niceties of the language first; next, upon a few of the poets; next, (but at a great distance,) some of the historians; next, (but at a still greater interval,) the orators; last of all, and just above nothing, the philosophers. An English bookseller, by the aid of a German scholar, recently produced an excellent edition of Plato; the want of sale for which, by the way, is said to have been one of the causes of his insolvency. But, with the exception of the two dialogues edited by Dr. Routh, we are aware of nothing to facilitate the study of the most gifted of Greek writers, which has ever emanated from either of the impostor-universities of England; and of the young men who have obtained university honours during the last ten years, we are much misinformed if there be six who had even looked into his writings. If such be the neglect of the best parts of classical learning among those whose special vocation and whose positive duty it is to cultivate them, what can be expected from others? Among those who are engaged in the incessant struggle which, in this country, constitutes more and more the business of active life—every man’s time and thoughts being wholly absorbed in the endeavour to rise, or in the endeavour not to fall, in running after riches, or in running away from bankruptcy—the tranquil pursuit not only of classical, but of any literature deserving the name, is almost at an end. The consequence is, that there are, probably, in this kingdom, not so many as a hundred persons who ever have read Plato, and not so many as twenty who ever do.

Among those, again, who, in the present or in former ages, have been more or less acquainted with the productions of the master-mind of antiquity, extremely conflicting and extremely vague notions have been entertained concerning the nature of his opinions, and the scope or purpose of his works. It is, in truth, extremely difficult to ascertain what were, and were not, Plato’s own opinions. We have all heard of Platonists, and the Platonic philosophy; but though, out of detached passages of his writings, philosophic systems have been subsequently manufactured, it is to this day a problem whether Plato had a philosophy: if he had, it certainly was not the philosophy of those who have called themselves Platonists. This uncertainty arises from a variety of causes. In the first place, the author never speaks in his own person, but affects to be the mere narrator of conversations stated to have taken place between other and known individuals. When, too, the dialogue is of a controversial kind, as is almost always the case, the interlocutor to whom the victory is invariably assigned, not only is not the author himself, but is not even a man of straw, who might be supposed to be the author’s representative; but a philosopher of the highest merit and reputation, who had decided and known opinions of his own—the author’s master, Socrates. It can only be conjectured, with more or less probability, whether any part of these conversations actually took place as alleged; and if not, how far they were invented as mere specimens of argumentation and inquiry—how far to illustrate the opinions of Socrates—and how far to inculcate those of Plato himself. The difficulties of arriving at any certain solution, are further complicated by the preference which is shown in most of the dialogues for overthrowing the various doctrines already in vogue, rather than for setting up any others in their room; and the frequent use of that “irony” for which Socrates was celebrated, and which superadds to the doubt whether the entire discourse has any serious purpose, a still further question how much of the particular passage is intended to be taken seriously.

If we might be permitted to mention the hypothesis respecting Plato’s own opinions and purposes, which appears to ourselves the most probable, it is one which has been suggested to us by a little essay of the celebrated Schleiermacher, on the Character of Socrates as a Philosopher; a translation of which, with the addition of some valuable remarks, has recently been put forth by one of the few genuine scholars of whom our country can still boast, the Rev. Connop Thirlwall, in his periodical work, the Philological Museum, published at Cambridge. Dr. Schleiermacher’s view of the nature of the service rendered to philosophy by Socrates, is that it consisted not in the truths which he actually arrived at, but in the improved views which he originated respecting the mode in which truth should be sought: and this appears to us to be, with some modifications, applicable likewise to Plato. No doubt, the disciple pushed his mere inquiries and speculations over a more extended surface, and to a much greater depth below the surface, than there is any reason to believe that his master did. But though he continually starts most original and valuable ideas, it is seldom that these, when they relate to the results of philosophic inquiry, are stated with an air of conviction, or as if they amounted to fixed opinions. But when the topic under consideration is the proper mode of philosophizing—either the moral spirit in which truth should be sought, or the intellectual processes and methods by which it is to be attained; or when the subject matter is not any particular scientific principle, but knowledge in the abstract, the differences between knowledge and ignorance, and between knowledge and mere opinion; then the views inculcated are definite and consistent, are always the same, and are put forward with the appearance of earnest and matured belief. Even in treating of other subjects, and even when the opinions advanced have least the semblance of being seriously entertained, the discourse itself has generally a very strong tendency to illustrate the conception which does seem to be really entertained of the nature of some part or other of the process of philosophizing. The inference we would draw is, that, on the science of the Investigation of Science, the theory of the pursuit of truth, Plato had not only satisfied himself that his predecessors were in error, and how, but had also adopted definite views of his own; while on all or most other subjects, he contented himself with confuting the absurdities of others, pointing out the proper course for inquiry, and the spirit in which it should be conducted, and throwing out a variety of ideas of his own, of the value of which he was not quite certain, and which he left to the appreciation of any subsequent inquirer competent to sit in judgment upon them. With respect to many of his most interesting speculations, that inquirer is yet to come; so far have the penetration and sagacity of the man of genius outstripped the slow and halting march of positive science.

Of a writer of this character it is, of course, impossible to convey any notion by an enumeration of his tenets or a compendium of his philosophy, since he has nothing which can be called, with any assurance, tenets or a philosophy. Unhappily, the only complete translation which exists in our own language is full of faults, and often with difficulty understood even by those who can read the original. In the absence of the only tolerable substitute for a knowledge of the author himself, some conception, however distant and imperfect, of what he is, may, perhaps, be derived from a very full abstract of some of the more interesting of his dialogues. It is in this hope that the following notes, made originally for the writer’s personal satisfaction in the course of his private studies, shown, after the lapse of years, to one or two friends who were unacquainted with the writings of Plato, and unexpectedly found to be interesting to them, are now laid before a wider circle of readers. In the execution they have no pretension to any other merit than that of fidelity. Of the dramatic excellencies of the dialogues (which the finest specimens of the higher comedy have hardly equalled, and certainly not surpassed) little could be preserved in these sketches compatibly with any degree of abridgement. But the more important and interesting of the argumentative portions of each dialogue are very little curtailed, and in other respects approach as near to literal translations as the writer, consistently with producing such English as could be expected to be understood, knew how to make them.

The dialogue with which it is proposed to commence is the Protagoras; supposed to be one of the earlier productions of the author. There is no work of Plato which more obviously appears to have been intended rather as an exercise in the art of investigating truth, than to inculcate any particular set of philosophical opinions. Many ingenious and some profound thoughts are, indeed, thrown out in the course of the discussion. But even if we had to form our judgment of this dialogue without the light thrown upon it by the other works of Plato, we should be compelled to draw one of two conclusions; either that the author had not yet made up his opinions on the topics treated in the dialogue, or that he did not think this a proper place for unfolding them.

Protagoras, who along with Socrates is the chief interlocutor in the dialogue, was one of the people called Sophists; and seems to have been the first who avowedly took the title. Many of Plato’s writings are directly aimed against the Sophists; and those writings have been the chief cause why, in modern times, a designation, which originally meant “a teacher of wisdom,” has become significative of quibbling and deceit. Certain Church of England writers, in the Quarterly Review and other publications, have, for the base purpose of discrediting free institutions and freedom of inquiry, on the one hand exaggerated grossly the mischievous tendency of what the Sophists taught; and on the other, represented them as enjoying great favour and importance in the free States of Greece, and particularly at Athens; just as the same writers have represented the persons called Sycophants (that is, people who stirred up vexatious prosecutions in the Athenian courts of justice) as especial favourites with the “sovereign multitude,” in the face of the overwhelming evidence which the whole mass of Athenian literature affords, that these persons were as odious to the people as the lowest class of pettifogging attorneys, or even common informers, in our own country. With regard to the Sophists, this very dialogue of Plato affords (as will be seen) strong evidence that when he began to write, they were already in very ill repute; while all that is really known of them tends to throw great doubt upon their having, as a class, really deserved that degree of obloquy. All inquirers into abstract truth, except mathematicians—all who were afterwards called Philosophers, (a term of which Pythagoras is believed to have been the inventor,) had, before his time, been confounded together under that older name: and such are seldom popular with the mass of mankind; witness the House of Commons, and most public assemblies in this country. Among the Sophists were comprised all the earlier inquirers into physical nature, along with all the earliest moralists and metaphysicians; and though there were among the latter, as was inevitable in the infancy of science, as there are in Plato himself, much fallacy and verbal quibbling, there by no means appears to have been a greater proportion of doctrines having a pernicious tendency, than has existed in all ages.

It does not seem to be the object of the present dialogue to expose the errors or false pretensions of the Sophists in general, or of Protagoras in particular; for although Protagoras is confuted, and made to contradict himself again and again, after the usual manner of Plato, and is occasionally made somewhat ridiculous, for being only able to harangue, and not to discuss; (the complaint which Plato never ceases to urge against the Sophists;) yet, when he is suffered to state his sentiments at length, what he utters is by no means either absurd or immoral, but, on the contrary, sound and useful good sense, forcibly expressed, or, at the lowest, an able pleading in favour of the side he espouses, on whatever question the discussion happens for the moment to turn upon; and this, too, although the opinions of Protagoras on the nature, sources, and limits of human knowledge, are, in other places, the subject of Plato’s warm, but not disrespectful, attacks. If it be possible, therefore, to assign any specific and decided purpose to this dialogue, it would appear to be intended not to hold up the Sophists either to ridicule or obloquy, but to show that it was possible to go much beyond the point which they had attained in moral and political philosophy; that, on the whole, they left the science of mind and of virtue in an extremely unsatisfactory state; that they could not stand the test of the rigorous dialectics which Socrates carried into these inquiries; and that the truth could only be ascertained by that more accurate mode of sifting opinions, which the dialectic method (or that of close discussion between two persons, one of whom interrogates, and the other answers) furnishes, but which speech-making, and the mere delivery of doctrines from master to student (the practice of the Sophists) absolutely preclude.

A brief abstract of the dialogue will, I think, confirm this notion of its scope and object, by showing that Socrates merely plays with opinions throughout.

A young man, named Hippocrates, having heard, late in the evening, that Protagoras has come to Athens, hurries to Socrates in the morning, before it is light, and presses him to go with him to Protagoras, expressing the most earnest desire to become the scholar of so wise a man, and obtain a participation in his wisdom. Socrates consents; but as it is too early to visit Protagoras at that hour in the morning, they pass the intermediate time in conversation. Socrates then, in order, as he says, to try the strength of Hippocrates, begins to question him as follows: “If you were desirous of receiving the instructions of your namesake Hippocrates of Cos, and were asked in what capacity, and in order to become what, you would answer, In the capacity of a physician, and in order that you might become a physician. If you offered money to Polycleitus or Pheidias, that they might take you under their tuition, and were asked the same question, you would answer, In the capacity of statuaries, and in order that you might become a statuary. Now if any one should ask you in what capacity you are seeking the instructions of Protagoras, what would be your answer?”—“In the capacity of a Sophist.”—“And what do you expect to become through his instructions?” Hippocrates blushed; and answered, “If this be like the two preceding cases, I must expect to become a Sophist.”—“Should you not, then, be ashamed,” said Socrates, “to hold yourself forth as a Sophist to the Greeks?” He confessed that he should. (This is one of the passages from which it may be clearly inferred, that the profession of a Sophist was a disreputable one in Greece before Plato wrote.)

Socrates, however, supplied Hippocrates with a defence, by telling him that he supposed he did not intend going to Protagoras as he would go to a physician or an artist, to learn his profession, but as he would go to a writing-master, a gymnast, or a music-master, not in order to become himself a music-master, &c. &c., but to learn so much of these arts as belonged to a liberal education. Hippocrates assenting, Socrates continued: “Do you know what you are about to do? You are about to give your soul to be trained into the hands of this man, whom you call a Sophist; but what a Sophist is, I should be much surprised if you knew; and yet, if you do not, you must be ignorant whether you are doing a wise act or a foolish one. What do you suppose a Sophist is?”—“As the word implies, a man who knows wisdom.”—“You might say as much of a painter or an architect—he knows wisdom; but if we were asked what wisdom, we should answer, the wisdom which relates to the taking of likenesses, and so forth. What is the wisdom which the Sophist knows? What can he teach you to do?”—“He can teach me to speak well.”—“This may be a true answer, but not a sufficient one. On what subject can he teach you to speak well? for a musician can teach you to speak well on the subject which he knows, viz. music. What can a Sophist teach you to speak well upon? Upon that which he knows?”—“Certainly.”—“And what is it which he knows?”—Hippocrates confessed that he could not tell. “See, then, to what a danger you expose yourself. If you meditated putting your body into the hands of any one, at the risk of its well-being, you would consider for a long time before you made your resolution, and would take counsel with your friends and relations; but what you value much more than your body—your spiritual nature —on the good or bad condition of which your well or ill-doing entirely depends, you are going to put under the care of a man whom you only know to be a Sophist, not knowing, as it appears, what a Sophist is, and this without taking even an hour’s time for consideration, or asking the advice of anybody. Is not a Sophist a dealer in those wares which the mind subsists upon?”—“And what does the mind subsist upon?”—“Upon instruction. Let us not, then, suffer the Sophist to impose upon us by praising the quality of his wares. Other dealers praise their wares, although they are no judges what is good for the sustenance of the body, nor their customers either, unless such as happen to be physicians or gymnasts. So these men, who hawk their instructions from city to city, praise all they sell, and yet some of these may very likely be quite ignorant whether what they offer is good or bad for the mind, and the purchasers equally so, unless some of them happen to understand the medicine of the mind. If, therefore, you are a judge of good and bad instruction, you may safely buy instruction of Protagoras or any other person; but if not, take care that you do not endanger what is dearest to you. You risk much more in buying instruction than food. Food you may take home in another vessel, and have it examined by qualified persons before you take it into your stomach; but instruction is taken at once into the mind, and the benefit is reaped, or the injury incurred, on the spot.”

After this conversation, they proceed together to the house where Protagoras is living, and find him there with two other Sophists—Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis—who are several times introduced as personages in the drama, though not called to participate in the discussion. It may be gathered from what is said of these persons, and by them, in the course of the work, that Hippias taught physics more particularly than morals or politics, and that the science of Prodicus consisted chiefly in drawing frivolous and hair-breadth distinctions between the significations of terms which were commonly considered synonymous. This propensity of Prodicus is displayed in different parts of the dialogue in a very amusing manner, and several touches in his part might be quoted as admirable specimens of the higher comedy.

Socrates opens to Protagoras the object of their visit, by telling him that Hippocrates, a young man of high rank and excellent capacity, desired to become conspicuous in his country, and thought that this would be more easily attainable through the instructions of Protagoras. The Sophist having asked whether Hippocrates would wish to speak with him alone, or before the numerous company there assembled, and Socrates having left it to his option, Protagoras commended Socrates for his discretion, saying, that a stranger, who travels about and draws round him the most promising young men of every state, making them leave their other pursuits and associates, and attach themselves to him for the sake of their own improvement, has need of caution, since such a proceeding must necessarily excite jealousy and ill-will; and, for this reason, all the ancient Sophists—for the profession, he contended, was ancient—had disguised their real pursuit for fear of consequences, and had professed poetry, the science of divine worship, and even music or gymnastics, as a cover. But he himself did not follow their example, thinking that they never effected their purpose: the disguise did not conceal their real object from the leading men in the various cities, for whose eyes alone this veil was intended, since the common people merely repeat what they say; and an unsuccessful attempt at concealment only made the matter worse, by causing hypocrisy to be added to their other imputed offences. Protagoras, therefore, openly avowed himself a Sophist, and thought this a much safer plan than to deny it; and by this and various precautions he had so managed, that, although he had practised the profession for many years, no harm had ever come to him in consequence of it. He, therefore, preferred that his conversation with Socrates and Hippocrates should take place before the whole company.

“Suspecting,” says Socrates (who is the supposed narrator of the whole) “that he wished to make himself glorious in the eyes of Prodicus and Hippias, from our seeking his society, I proposed inviting them, and those who were conversing with them, to join in our conversation.” Accordingly they all assembled, and Protagoras told Socrates that he might now state his business.

Socrates accordingly repeated what he had already said, that Hippocrates wished to receive the instructions of Protagoras, and was anxious to know of what nature was the benefit which he would derive from them. Protagoras answered, that he would every day improve, and return home better than he was the previous day. “So,” said Socrates, “he would, if he were to attend on the painter Zeuxippus—he would return home improved in painting, and a better painter; or if he were to attend Orthagoras, the flute-player, he would every day return home a better flute-player than the day before. In what respect, if he attends on you, will he every day return home improved?” Protagoras commended the question, and answered, “He will not be treated by me in the same manner as by other Sophists, who spoil young men by putting them back into geometry and astronomy, and the other arts, the very things which they had previously fled from. I teach them what they come to learn, viz., how they may best manage their own families, and how best to speak and act in the affairs of the state.”—“You teach politics then, and profess to make men good citizens.”—“I do so.”—“You possess an admirable art, if you do indeed possess it, which I know not how to disbelieve. But hitherto I had imagined that what you profess to teach is not capable of being taught, or delivered from men to men. For the Athenians, who are a wise people, if in their assembly they are deliberating on ship-building, send for the ship-builders to advise them, and will hear nobody else; if about building a house, they will listen to nobody but architects; and if any one else, however noble or rich, attempt to speak, they scoff and drive him away. But when the discussion is upon anything which concerns the general management of the state, they listen to persons of all ranks and professions without distinction, and never think of reproaching any man for presuming to advise on the subject when he has never studied it, or learned it of a master. It is evident, therefore, that they do not think it capable of being taught; and the best and wisest citizen, as Pericles for example, though he teaches his sons excellently whatever a master can teach, cannot succeed in teaching them the wisdom and virtue in which he himself excels; in this they are no better than ordinary individuals. For these reasons,” says Socrates, “I have hitherto doubted that virtue can be taught; but if Protagoras can prove the possibility, I beseech him to do so.”

Protagoras consents, and asks whether he shall teach by a μυ̑θος, (which I am inclined to translate a legend), like an old man instructing the young, or by a discourse (λόγος). They give him his choice, and he prefers to tell them a story. If, as this circumstance would indicate, it was a frequent mode with the Sophists to deliver their doctrines in this way, it would account for the μυ̑θοι which are scattered through the writings of Plato, and which, appearing to be related half in jest, half in earnest, it is not very easy otherwise to explain.

The story is, that when the gods made men and animals, they gave it in charge to Prometheus and Epimetheus to endow them; that Epimetheus solicited the task from his brother, and having obtained it, proceeded to distribute the endowments of strength, swiftness, &c., among the various animals, on the principle of compensation; but when he had exhausted all the endowments which he had to give, he found that man was left unprovided for. Prometheus, to remedy this blunder, stole τὴν ἔντεχνον σοϕίαν (scientific wisdom) from heaven, and with it fire, without which it was of no use, and bestowed these upon man. On this account was it that man, being akin to the gods, alone of all animals acknowledged their existence; and, by means of art, acquired the faculty of speech, made to himself clothes and houses, and procured food. But as there were no towns, and no human society, for want of the art of Polity, the human race were in danger of being extirpated by wild beasts; when Jupiter, in compassion, sent Mercury from heaven to make a present to mankind of Shame and Justice, in order that there might be mutual bonds among men, and that society might be possible. Mercury asked whether he should confer these gifts upon all mankind, or whether, like Medicine and the other arts, they should be given to a few only, for the benefit of all. Jupiter ordered him to give them to all; for if a few only possessed them, political society would be impossible; and bade him establish a law, as from Jupiter, that he who was incapable of shame and justice should, as a disease in the state, be extirpated.

“For this reason,” continued Protagoras, “the Athenians and others, who on architecture or any other manual art will hear only the few who possess it, are ready, when the subject is social virtue, which depends wholly upon justice and prudence, to listen to all advisers; because of this virtue all should be partakers, or states cannot exist.

“And to prove that in reality all men do believe that justice and the other social virtues ought to belong to all, observe this: If a man pretends to be a good musician, and is not so, all men ridicule him, and his friends admonish him as a man out of his senses. But when justice and the social virtues are the matter in question, although they well know that a man is unjust, yet if he tells the truth and publicly avows it, what in the other case they considered to be good sense, is here thought madness; they maintain that all men should profess to be just, whether they are so or not, and that he who does not profess it is a madman, because the man who does not, in some degree, partake of the quality of justice, is unfit to live amongst mankind.

“It seems, then, that mankind in general think all persons qualified to advise concerning these virtues, since all are required to possess them. But further, they think that these virtues are not natural and spontaneous, but the result of study and of teaching. For those evils which are supposed to come upon men by nature or ill fortune, no man ever thinks of reproaching another for: who ever reprimanded, much less punished, another, for being of low stature, weak, or deformed? such evils are regarded as an object only of pity. Men admonish, and censure, and punish one another, for the absence of those good qualities only, which they deem to be acquired by study and art; and for this reason only it is that they so deal with the unjust. Let us but consider what punishment does, and we shall see that, in the opinion of mankind, virtue may be acquired. No man punishes another because he has done wrong; this would be the blind vengeance of the irrational animals. Rational punishment is not on account of the past act, which, having been done, cannot be undone; it is for the sake of the future; it is in order that this offender, and those who witness his punishment, may be warned against offending hereafter. The Athenians, therefore, and others, since they do punish the unjust man, do so with this intent; they do so because they think that virtue may be acquired, and that punishment is a means whereby men are induced to acquire it.

“To the other argument of Socrates, that good men, although they teach to their children other things, fail of teaching them to be good, the following is the answer:—If it be true that there is something which, unless every member of the state possesses, the state cannot exist; and if this something be not architecture or pottery, or any mechanical art, but justice, prudence, holiness, in short, manly virtue; if all men, and women too, and children, whatever else they have, must have this, or be punished until they acquire it, or, if incapable of acquiring it, must be sent out of the country or put to death; and if, nevertheless, good men, teaching their children other things, do not teach them this, they are unworthy the name of good men. For that it can be taught we have clearly shown. Is it credible, then, that men should teach their sons those things, to be ignorant of which carries with it no evil consequences, and not attempt to teach them that, which, if they do not learn, death, banishment, confiscation, destruction of their fortunes and prospects, will fall upon them? Not so. From infancy upwards they instruct their children in these things; they tell them what is just and unjust, honourable and dishonourable, holy and unholy; they bid them practise the one and avoid the other; and if they disregard the admonition, correct them by threats and blows. And in placing them with teachers, they enjoin care of the child’s morals still more earnestly than of his learning; and the teachers make them read and commit to memory those passages of poets and other authors, by preference, which commend virtue and reprove vice. Music also is taught them, chiefly to soften the mind and accustom it to harmony, and order, and proportion; and they are delivered to the gymnast, in order that their bodies, being in good order, may be fitter to obey the commands of a well-ordered mind. When they leave school, the State requires them to learn its laws, and regulate their lives by them, as those who learn to write follow the copy which is set to them by the writing-master; and if they deviate from this rule they are punished; and the very name given to punishment indicates its object—it is termed correction.

“Nor is it wonderful, notwithstanding this, that good fathers should have sons of no particular merit. If there were any other branch of knowledge, the cultivation of which by every citizen were necessary to the being of the state; if society could not exist unless all could play on the flute, and if all were taught to play, and reproached if they played ill, instead of being envied for playing well—(as at present men are not envied for being just and virtuous, since it is every man’s interest that others should be just and virtuous, for which reason we are all eager to teach justice and virtue to all men)—do you suppose that the sons of good flute-players would be better players than other men? Not so. Whoever had the best natural disposition for music would be the best player: a good player’s son would often play ill—the son of a bad player, well; but all would be competent players, compared with those who knew nothing of music whatever. In like manner all civilized men, even the most unjust, if compared with men among whom there is no training, no tribunals, no laws, with the wild men of whom poets tell us, would appear a perfect master in virtue: and after mixing with such men, you would be delighted to meet with the greatest villains of our own country. But now you are fastidious, and because all are teachers of virtue, you will not allow that any are so: just as if you were to inquire in this city who teaches Greek, you would find nobody; or if you sought somebody competent to teach the son of a mechanic his father’s art, which he had learned in his father’s shop as well as his father could teach it, you might find nobody; but of men who could teach those who were totally ignorant of the art, you would find abundance. It is thus with virtue: all men teach it; and we may think ourselves fortunate if we find one who is a little more capable than others of advancing men towards it. Such a man I profess to be; and I am willing that my scholars should judge of my pretensions. Accordingly, the terms of my contract with them are, that when they have received my instructions, they shall either pay me the amount of my demand, or, if they think this too much, shall pay me according to their own estimate, made in a temple and upon oath, of the value of the instructions.”

Protagoras here ceased speaking: and Socrates, after making many acknowledgments and professing himself almost convinced, said that one little difficulty still remained in his mind, which no doubt Protagoras could easily remove. “For if a man were to apply to Pericles, or any other of the famous orators, he might hear from them as fine a speech as that which Protagoras had made: but if he were to put a question to them, they could no more answer, or ask again, than an inanimate book; but, like brass, which if struck makes a long reverberation unless we lay our hands upon it and stop it, they make answer to a short question by an inordinately long harangue. Protagoras, however, is able not only to make a long speech, but to give a short answer to a short question: I therefore wish to have one difficulty explained. You say that virtue can be taught; and you have several times put together justice, prudence, temperance, and holiness, and called them collectively by the one word virtue. Is virtue then one thing, and are all these parts of it, or are they all names for one and the same thing?” Protagoras answers—“Virtue is one, and all these are parts of it.”—“Are they such parts as the parts of gold, all of them exactly resembling the whole, and one another? or (like the parts of the face, viz. eyes, nose, ears, and mouth) extremely unlike?”—“They are like the parts of the face.”—“May the same man have one of these parts of virtue, and be destitute of the others?”—“Yes: many are courageous, but unjust, and many are just but unwise.”—“Then wisdom and courage are also parts of virtue?”—“Yes.”—“And unlike each other, as you said of the other parts?”—“Yes.”

“Let us consider further of this matter. Is justice a just thing or an unjust one? surely it is a just thing.”—“Undoubtedly.”—“Is holiness a holy or an unholy thing? most assuredly a holy one.”—“Yes.”—“But you say that the different parts of virtue are unlike one another. Then since justice is a just thing, and holiness is not like justice, is holiness an unjust thing? Since holiness is a holy thing, and justice is not like holiness, is justice an unholy thing? I should affirm the contrary; that justice and holiness are either the same, or very nearly alike, and that nothing is so holy as justice, nor so just as holiness.”—“It does not appear to me,” replied Protagoras, “so simple and obvious that justice and holiness are the same thing. There seems to me to be a difference; but let us call them the same thing, if you will.”—“I have no use,” said Socrates, “for ‘if you will.’ I do not desire to examine or confute an ‘if you will,’ or an ‘if you think so,’ but what you think, and what I think, leaving out the ‘if.’ ”—“No doubt,” said Protagoras, “justice and holiness are somewhat alike: all things, even black and white, hard and soft, and all other contraries, are alike in some respects. The parts of the face, which were the comparison we used, are somewhat alike. You might prove, in this way, all things to be alike. We must not call things like or unlike merely because they have some little points of resemblance or of difference.”—“Do you then consider holiness and justice to have only some little points of resemblance?”—“Not exactly so, but yet not as you seem to think.”—“Since this discussion seems to displease you, let us consider another part of what you said.”

Socrates, accordingly, dropping the subject of justice and holiness, but still endeavouring to drive Protagoras to an acknowledgment of the identity of all the virtues, now chooses as his example σωϕροσύνη. This word, which was in very popular use, and which conveyed to the mind of a Greek associations of the highest praise, is untranslatable into English, because we have no single word by which we are accustomed to express the same combination of qualities and of feelings. Names of what Locke calls mixed modes, and especially the names of moral attributes, have very rarely any exact synonymes in another language. There are few things by which so much light would be thrown upon the ideas and feelings of a people, as by collecting from a large induction, and clearing up by an accurate analysis, the niceties of meaning of this important portion of their popular language. We should thus learn what moral and intellectual qualities the people in question were accustomed to think of in conjunction, and as forming part of one and the same character; and what, both in kind and in the degree of strength, were the habitual sentiments, which particular moral or intellectual qualities excited in their minds. How great would be the difficulty of making an ancient Greek understand accurately what the nations of modern Europe mean by honour; a Frenchman, what the English mean by the feelings of a gentleman; any foreigner, what we mean by respectability. It is equally difficult for an Englishman to enter into the conception of σωϕροσύνη, and throw himself into the feelings which that word excited in a Greek mind. Sometimes it seems as if it ought to be translated prudence, sometimes temperance, sometimes decency or decorousness, sometimes more vaguely, considerateness, sometimes good sense. The French word sagesse has nearly the same ambiguities, and expresses nearly the same mixture of moral and intellectual qualities. The connecting tie among these various attributes seems to be this: The word σωϕροσύνη denoted, in the mind of a Greek, all the qualities or habits which were considered most contrary to licentiousness of morals and manners, in the largest sense of the term. In a state of society in which the control of law was as yet extremely weak, in which the restraints of opinion, even in the democratic states, acted with little force upon any but those who were ambitious of public honours, and in which everywhere (even at Athens, where person and property were far more effectually protected than in the other states of Greece) the unbridled excesses of all sorts committed by the youth of the higher classes, endangered the personal security and comfort of every man, it is not wonderful that self-restraint, and the habits of a thoughtful, regulated life, should be held in peculiarly high esteem.

The great difficulty to an English reader, of following an argumentative discussion which turns chiefly upon the meaning of a word having no synonyme in English, will scarcely in this instance be rewarded by the intrinsic merit of the discussion itself. Socrates forces Protagoras successively to admit, that σωϕροσύνη is the same thing with wisdom, that it is the same thing with justice, or at least inseparable from it, and is pressing him still further, when Protagoras flies off into a long speech, filled with illustrations from the material universe, on a topic very distantly connected with the subject which they were discussing. At the conclusion of this oration he was loudly applauded.

Socrates hereupon observed, that he had a short memory, and if a man made a long speech to him, he always forgot what it was about. As, therefore, if he were deaf, Protagoras would think it necessary to speak to him in a louder than his ordinary voice; so, as he was forgetful, he hoped that Protagoras would shorten his answers, and accommodate their length to his capacity. Protagoras demurred to this, and lost his temper; and there are several pages of excellent comic dialogue, at the end of which the matter is accommodated by the intervention of the bystanders; and it is agreed, at the instance of Socrates, that Protagoras should interrogate and Socrates answer, in order that Socrates might afford a specimen of what he thought the proper mode of answering. It turned out an unhappy specimen, however, for Socrates was led by it to make as long a speech as any in the dialogue.

Protagoras, who appeared anxious to change the subject, said, that he thought criticism on poetry to be one of the most important parts of instruction, and he would interrogate him concerning poetry, keeping, however, on the subject which they were discussing, that of virtue. Simonides, in one of his poems, says, “It is difficult to become a good man.” In the same poem he afterwards expresses his dissent from a saying of Pittacus, Χαλεπὸν ἐσθλὸν ἔμμεναι, (it is difficult to be a good man). Is not this inconsistent with what he had himself affirmed in the previous passage?

Socrates pretends at first to be puzzled by this question, and calls in Prodicus, with his nice distinctions, to help him in finding a difference between γενέσθαι (to become) and εἰ̑ναι (to be), and in finding a double meaning for the word χαλεπὸν. After playing with the subject for some time, he gives his own account of the matter thus:

“The scope and object,” says he, “of the poem of Simonides, is obviously to overthrow the dictum of Pittacus, ‘It is difficult to be a good man.’ The wisdom of the ancients,” continues he, “was couched in these little pithy sentences, like those of the Lacedæmonians in our own day, of whose institutions and mode of education the sages of old were great admirers. This sentence of Pittacus, among others, was much quoted and praised, and Simonides thought that if he could demolish it, he would obtain the same sort of reputation which is obtained by defeating a celebrated athlete.”

Socrates then adduces some philological proofs, that the sense of Simonides was as follows:—It is difficult to be becoming a good man,—to be in progress towards it; but it is not, as Pittacus says, merely difficult to be a good man—it is impossible; the gods alone are capable of actually realizing the conception of goodness. He adduces subsequent passages of the poem in support of this interpretation. They are to this effect: “Every man upon whom an irretrievable misfortune falls, becomes bad. I will not seek for that impossible thing, an entirely blameless man: I praise and love those (willingly) who do not commit any thing evil.” “Here,” says Socrates, “he cannot mean, according to the ordinary collocation, I praise and love those who do not willingly commit any thing evil. Simonides was too wise to suppose that any man willingly commits evil: he knew that they who commit evil commit it involuntarily. He meant, I praise and love willingly those only, who do not commit any thing evil: meaning that a good man sometimes forces himself to praise and love those whom he does not love willingly; as for instance, an ill-doing parent, or his country when ill doing: and the poet accordingly adds,—‘I am satisfied when I find a man not wicked, nor entirely inactive, and well versed in civil justice. I will not blame him: there are enough of fools to blame.’ ”

Socrates having made this commentary upon the poem of Simonides, invites Protagoras to resume the former discussion; saying, that to converse on poems seems to him like the resource of men of vulgar minds, who, at their social meetings, being unable, from ignorance, to converse with their own voices, call in singing women and musical instruments, and use their voices in the room of conversation. But men such as most of us profess to be, do not need the voices of others, nor poets, whom we cannot interrogate about their meaning, and may dispute about it for ever. Let us rather discuss with each other, and make trial of our own powers, and of the possibility of our attaining truth. Having softened Protagoras by some compliments, and by disclaiming any design in conversing with him, except that of facilitating the attainment of truth, by seeking for it in conjunction with the wisest man whom he knows, he at length prevails upon Protagoras to make answer to his interrogations: and again asking Protagoras whether he adheres to his opinion, that wisdom, temperance, courage, justice, and holiness, are different things, he receives this answer,—That four of the five are very closely allied, but that courage is altogether different from the others, since there are many men who are extremely unwise, intemperate, unjust, and unholy, but highly courageous.

“By the courageous,” said Socrates, “you mean the daring?”—“Yes; those who will encounter what others are afraid to face.”—“Virtue is a beautiful thing, is it not?”—“The most beautiful of all things.”—“Is all virtue beautiful, or only some virtue?”—“All, and in the highest degree.”—“Who are they who dive daringly?”—“Divers.”—“Is it because they understand diving?”—“It is.”—“Who fight on horseback daringly? good riders or bad?”—“Good riders. In short,” said Protagoras, “those who know most are the most daring.”—“Are you acquainted with persons who, although they know nothing of all these matters, are yet extremely daring?”—“But too much so.”—“Are these to be deemed courageous?”—“Courage would not be a beautiful thing if they were, since they are out of their senses.”—“Then if those who dare without knowledge are not courageous, but are out of their senses, while the wise are not only daring but courageous, are not wisdom and courage by this account the same thing?”

“You have not,” said Protagoras, “correctly remembered what I said. I affirmed that the courageous were daring, but not that the daring were courageous: had you asked this, I should have answered, Not all of them; and you have not shown me to have been wrong in affirming that the courageous were daring. You conclude that wisdom is the same thing with courage, because those who know are more daring than those who know not: but in this manner you might prove bodily strength to be the same thing with courage; for the strong in body, it cannot be denied, are powerful; and those who know how to wrestle, being undoubtedly more powerful than those who do not, you might infer that they were more muscular. But I do not admit that the powerful are strong in body; only, that the strong in body are powerful. Power is not the same thing with bodily strength; power may proceed from knowledge, from passion, or from insanity; but bodily strength, from nature, and good acquired habits of body. In like manner, I say that daring is not the same thing with courage. Daring may proceed from scientific skill, from passion, or from insanity; courage, from nature, and good acquired habits of mind.”

Here commences the last, and most interesting and most philosophical, of the discussions in this dialogue:—On the true nature of courage; and, incidentally, on the proper test of virtue and of vice.

“Do not some men,” asks Socrates, “live well, and others ill?”—“Without doubt.”—“Does a man live well if he lives in pain and vexation?”—“No.”—“But if he passes his life pleasantly to its very termination, he lives well?”—“He does so.”—“To live pleasantly then is good, to live unpleasantly is evil?”—“If he lives pleasantly by honest pleasures.”—“You call then some pleasant things evil, and some painful things good, like the generality of mankind?”—“I do.”—“But are not all pleasant things good, in so far as they are pleasant, and all painful things bad, in so far as painful?”—“I am not sure,” answered Protagoras, “whether it can be universally maintained, that all pleasant things are good, and all painful things evil. I think that I should answer in a manner more safe for the present discussion, and more conformable to the tenour of my life, if I were to say that some pleasant things are not good, some painful things not evil, and some are neither good nor evil.”—“Are not pleasant things those which cause, or which partake of, pleasure?”—“Undoubtedly.”—“And is not pleasure a good?”—“Let us inquire, and determine whether the good and the pleasant are identical.”—“Unfold, then, to me another part of your mind, and as we have seen how you are minded on the subject of the good and the pleasant, let us see whether your opinion on the subject of Knowledge is the same with that of the common of mankind. Knowledge, according to the vulgar opinion, is not a controlling and governing principle. Whatever may be a man’s knowledge, it is not that, they think, which governs him, but sometimes he is governed by anger, sometimes by pleasure, sometimes by pain, or love, or fear; and knowledge is dragged about by all these, and used by them as their slave. Is this your opinion; or do you, on the contrary, think that knowledge is a grand and ruling principle, which, wherever it exists, governs; and that he who knows what is good and evil is overmastered by nothing, but does that which his knowledge commands?”—“I think as you now say; and it would be disgraceful to me, if to any one, to maintain that wisdom and knowledge were not the most commanding of all human possessions.”—“You speak nobly and truly. But the common herd do not agree in your opinion; they say that many who know what is best, and have the power to practise it, do not; and if you ask why, the answer is, Being overpowered by pleasure, or by pain, or so forth.”—“Men say this, as they say many other foolish things.”—“Let us then instruct them what that state is, which they style, being overcome by pleasure.

“When you say, my good friends, that a man is overpowered by pleasure, you mean, that, being overpowered by delicious meats and drinks and other delightful objects of sense, knowing that these things are bad, he yet partakes of them?”—“Certainly.”—“Let us then ask them, In what view do you say that these things are bad? Is it because they are pleasant, and afford immediate delight; or because they afterwards occasion diseases and poverty? If they only conferred enjoyment, and produced none of these remote effects, would they be bad merely by causing enjoyment? They would surely answer, that these things are not bad for the immediate pleasure they afford, but for the diseases and want which flow from them in the end.”—“They would.”—“But diseases and want are painful things?”—“They are.”—“It seems then that these things are bad only because they produce pains, and deprive us of other pleasures?”—“It appears so.”—“And when, again, you say that there are good things which are painful, you mean such things as bodily exercises and the toils of military service, the painful operations of surgery, and the like?”—“Certainly.”—“And are these good, on account of the acute suffering with which they are immediately attended, or on account of the health and good habits of body, and the public safety, empire, and wealth, which are their ultimate consequence?”—“On account of the last.”—“They are good, therefore, because they terminate in pleasure, and in the prevention of other pains; and there is nothing on account of which things can be called good, except pleasure and pain.”—“Admitted.”—“Then pleasure is the same thing with good, and pain with evil: and if a pleasure is bad, it is because it prevents a greater pleasure, or causes a pain which exceeds the pleasure: if a pain is good, it is because it prevents a greater pain, or leads to a greater pleasure. For, if this were not so, you could point out some other end, with reference to which, things are good or evil: but you cannot.”—“Granted.”

“But if all this be true, (still addressing the vulgar,) how absurd, we may tell them, was the opinion you expressed, that a man often, although knowing evil to be evil, practises it nevertheless, being overpowered by pleasure? How ridiculous this is, will be plainly seen if we drop some of the terms which we have hitherto used, and since the pleasant and the good are but one thing, call them by one name; as likewise, the painful and the bad. You say, that knowing evil to be evil, a man yet practises it, being overpowered; by what? They cannot now say, by pleasure; since we have now another name for it, viz. good. Being overpowered by good! It is strange, and absurd, if a man practises evil, knowing it to be evil, being overpowered by good. If we ask whether the good is worthy or not worthy to overpower the evil, they must answer, Not worthy; for, otherwise, to be so overpowered would be no fault. How, then, we must answer, can good be unworthy to overpower evil, or evil to overpower good, but by reason of its smaller amount? It is clear, then, that what you call, to be overpowered by pleasure, is to choose a greater evil for the sake of a less good. If we now drop the words good and evil, and resume the words pain and pleasure, we find, in like manner, that he who is said to be overpowered by pleasure, is overpowered by a pleasure which is unworthy to overpower: and a pleasure is unworthy to overpower a pain, only by being less in amount. For, if it be said, The immediately pleasant differs greatly from the ultimately so, I answer, only in the degree of pleasure and pain. If we sum up the pleasure and the pain, and place them in opposite scales, we ought to choose the greater pleasure, or the less pain, whether they are immediate or remote.

“Now, is it not true that magnitudes appear smaller at a distance, greater when close at hand? that sounds appear louder when nearer, fainter when more distant, and the like?”—“Undoubtedly.”—“If, then, our well-doing depended upon our possessing great magnitudes, and avoiding small ones, what would our safety depend upon? Upon the faculty of seeing things merely as they appear, which leads to perpetual errors in the estimation of magnitudes; or upon the art of measurement, which teaches us to detect false appearances, and ascertain the real magnitudes of bodies?”—“Upon the latter.”—“If our safety in life depended upon always choosing the larger number, and eschewing the less, what would be our safeguard? surely knowledge: one of the kinds of knowledge of measurement, since it relates to excess and defect; and (since it relates to numbers), the knowledge of arithmetic?”—“Undoubtedly.”

“Since, then, it is upon the proper choice of pleasures and pains that our well doing in life depends, viz. upon choosing always the greater pleasure, or the smaller pain, what we here stand in need of is likewise measurement, since this also relates to excess and defect. But if it be measurement, it is art, and knowledge. What particular art and knowledge it is, we shall hereafter inquire; but that it is knowledge, we have clearly shown, in opposition to that opinion of the vulgar which we set out with combating.”—Protagoras, and all others who were present, assented, and it was agreed that doing evil always arose from ignorance, and doing well from knowledge.

“Since, then, no one chooses evil, knowing it to be evil, but mistakingly supposing it to be good, no one, who is compelled to choose between two evils, will knowingly choose the greatest.”—“Allowed.”—“But what is fear? Is it not the expectation of some evil?”—“It is.”—“Let Protagoras then defend himself, and show that he did not err, when he said that courage differed greatly from the other virtues. Did he not say, that the courageous were they who will encounter what others are afraid to face?”—“Yes.”—“Who will encounter not merely what the coward will encounter?”—“Certainly not.”—“The coward will encounter only what is safe; the courageous man what is formidable?”—“So men say.”—“They do: but do you say, that the courageous man will encounter what is formidable, knowing it to be formidable?”—“Your previous argument has shown this to be untenable.”—“It has: for, if we have reasoned correctly, no man encounters that which is formidable, knowing it to be so: for to be overpowered, and lose command of himself, we have shown to be a mere case of ignorance.”—“We have.”—“But all, whether brave or cowardly, are ready to encounter what they consider safe.”—“Very true: but the brave man and the coward differ even to contrariety in what they encounter. The brave man will encounter war, the coward will not.”—“War being a noble or an ignoble thing?”—“A noble thing.”—“And, if noble, good?”—“Certainly.”—“And, if noble and good, then, by our admission, pleasant?”—“Granted.”—“Are cowards, then, unwilling to do what they know to be the better and the more pleasant?”—“To admit this would be to contradict our former admissions.”—“But the courageous man; he too does what is better and more pleasant?”—“He does.”—“The courageous man, in short, is neither bold when he ought not, nor fearful when he ought not; cowards are both.”—“Yes.”—“But if cowards are bold, and are fearful, when they ought not, is it not from ignorance?”—“It is.”—“Then men are cowards from not knowing what is formidable?”—“They are.”—“But what makes men cowards, must be cowardice?”—“Agreed.”—“Then cowardice is the ignorance of what is and is not formidable; courage, being the contrary of cowardice, consists merely in the knowledge of what is, and what is not, formidable.”—Protagoras with much difficulty allowed that this consequence followed from what they had previously agreed upon.

Socrates finally remarked what a whimsical turn their discussion had taken. Protagoras and he had changed parts in the course of it. He had begun by denying that virtue could be taught, and yet had engaged himself in a long argument to prove that all virtue consisted in knowledge, and therefore could be taught; while Protagoras, who had begun by asserting that virtue is capable of being taught, had as strenuously laboured to show that it is not knowledge, and therefore not teachable. “Seeing all this,” said Socrates, “I am entirely thrown into confusion, and would be most eager to engage in further discussion, and clear up the question of what virtue is, and whether it can be taught.” Protagoras applauded his wish, and complimenting him on his powers of argument, said, “I consider myself not to be in other respects a bad man, and least of all an envious one. I have already said to many persons that I admire you above all whom I have met, especially above those of your own age; and I should not be surprised if you became one of those who are celebrated for their wisdom. We will pursue the discussion which you suggest another time; but now other business calls me away.” And thus the conversation terminated.

It is the object of these papers not to explain or criticise Plato, but to allow him to speak for himself. It will not, therefore, be attempted to suggest to the reader any judgment concerning the truth or value of any of the opinions which are thrown out in the above dialogue. Some of them are so far from being Plato’s own opinions, that the tendency of his mind seems to be decidedly adverse to them. For instance, the principle of utility,—the doctrine that all things are good or evil, by virtue solely of the pleasure or the pain which they produce,—is as broadly stated, and as emphatically maintained against Protagoras by Socrates, in the dialogue, as it ever was by Epicurus or Bentham. And yet, the general tone of Plato’s speculations seems rather to be favourable to the opinion that certain qualities of mind are good or evil in themselves, independently of all considerations of pleasure or pain. That such was the predominant tendency of his mind is, however, all that can be affirmed; it is doubtful whether he had adopted, on the subject of the original foundation of virtue, any fixed creed.

But we have already remarked, that when the subject-matter of the discussion is the nature and properties of knowledge in the abstract, the opinions of Plato seem never to vary, but to proceed from a mind completely made up. And of this the above dialogue is an exemplification. For, whatever are the particular arguments used as media of proof, there appears throughout the dialogue, as there does in the other works of Plato, a distinct aim towards this one point, the inseparableness, or rather absolute identity, of knowledge and virtue: an attempt to establish, that no evil is ever done (as he expresses it both in this dialogue and elsewhere) voluntarily; but always involuntarily, from want of knowledge, from ignorance of good and evil; that scientific instruction is the source of all that is most desirable for man; that whoever had knowledge to see what was good, would certainly do it; that morals are but a branch of intelligence. It may with some certainty be affirmed that this was Plato’s deliberate and serious creed.

The Phædrus

[Monthly Repository, VIII (June, and Sept., 1834), 404-20, and 633-46. Not republished; signed “A.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography (after the general heading cited on 38 above) as “No II. The Phædrus: part 1 in the M.R. for June 1834 / : part 2 in the M.R. for Septb. 1834” (MacMinn, 37). In the copy in the Somerville College Library the Greek phrase οὐσία ὄντος οὐ̑σα is indicated in pencil for insertion as a note at 74.8.

For comments on this and the other translations, see the Introduction and Textual Introduction, xvii-xxviii and lxxx-lxxxiii above.]

this is the most miscellaneous of all the longer dialogues of Plato. The subjects on which it touches are very numerous, and are held together by a very slight thread of connexion. It is not a controversial dialogue, part of it being in long discourses, while even in the part which consists of conversations, Socrates does not combat the opinion of Phædrus, but states his own. None of the works of Plato tends more strongly to confirm the opinion, that the design of his speculations was rather to recommend a particular mode of inquiry, than to inculcate particular conclusions. Whatever in this dialogue has reference to methods of philosophizing, (which is the case with a great and the most instructive portion of it,) appears perfectly serious and in earnest, while in the remainder there is an appearance of sportiveness, and sometimes almost of mockery.

The dramatic merits of the Phædrus are very great. It may be pronounced a model of lively and familiar conversation between two intimate acquaintances, Athenian gentlemen in the best sense of the term, accomplished up to the highest standard of their age.

The dialogue derives an additional interest, from its containing, in the form of an allegory, those doctrines, or rather ideas, on the subject of love, which, by giving rise to the vulgar expression “Platonic love,” have made the name of Plato familiar to the ear of thousands, who otherwise might probably never have heard of his existence.

Socrates meets his friend Phædrus, coming from a visit to Lysias, the celebrated orator, and going out to walk. He asks Phædrus, what was the subject of discourse between him and Lysias; and Phædrus promises to give him an account of it if he will accompany him in his walk.

Socrates having complied, Phædrus tells him that Lysias had read to the company a written discourse on the subject of love, πειρώμενόν τινα τω̑ν καλω̑ν, οὐχ ὑπὸ ἐραστου̑ δέ, i. e. a letter, or speech, (whichever we choose to call it,) containing a proposal, of a nature which would commonly be called an amatory one, but without professing to be in love. This last circumstance, continues Phædrus, is the cream of the matter; for he maintains, that one who is not in love ought to be preferred, as to the matter in question, to one who is. “He is a fine fellow,” said Socrates: “I wish he would maintain that a poor man should be preferred to a rich man, an old man to a young, and so on, going through all the qualities which I and most others possess: his discourse would then be of great public utility.” He then presses Phædrus very earnestly to relate the discourse: Phædrus pretends want of memory, and coquets a little, whereupon Socrates rallies him, and says, that he knows he is dying to relate it, and sooner than lose the opportunity would end by compelling him to listen. Phædrus was preparing accordingly to give an account of the discourse, when Socrates asks him to let him see what he has got under his cloak; which turns out to be the very discourse itself. When the mirth and pleasantry excited by this discovery have subsided, they agree to read the manuscript together, as soon as they can find a convenient place for sitting down.

As they are walking along the banks of the Ilissus in quest of such a spot, Phædrus asks Socrates whether this is the place from which Boreas is said to have carried off Oreithya. “No,” replied Socrates, “it is a little lower down.”—“Do you believe this story,” asked Phædrus, “to be true?”—“It would be nothing extraordinary,” said Socrates, “if, like the wise men, I disbelieved it. I might then say, that the north wind blew this girl over the adjoining rocks while she was diverting herself in the meadows, and that for this reason she was said to have been carried off by Boreas. According to my notion, however, all these things are very entertaining, but they would make life exceedingly laborious and troublesome: for one would next have to explain the Centaurs, and then the Chimæra, and a whole crowd of Gorgons and Pegasuses; which if one were to disbelieve, and attempt to bring back to probability, it would be the business of a life. I have not leisure for these things, and I will tell you the reason: I am not yet able, according to the Delphic injunction, to know myself; and it appears to me very ridiculous, while ignorant of myself, to inquire into what I am not concerned in. I therefore leave these things alone, and believe with the vulgar; not searching into such matters, but into myself, and inquiring whether I am a beast, of a more complicated structure and more savage than Typhon, or a tamer and simpler animal, whose nature partakes of divinity.”

Saying these things, they arrive at the spot which Phædrus had selected for sitting down to read the manuscript. Socrates begins to look about him with wonder, and praises the beauty of the place. Phædrus laughs at him, and tells him that he is more like a stranger than a native, and never goes out of the town at all. Socrates begs to be pardoned for the omission; “for,” says he, “I like to learn: the fields and trees cannot teach me any thing, the men in the town can. But you have found a cure for this fault of mine: for, as they lead hungry cattle by carrying a branch of a tree before them, so, by holding a book in your hand, you might make me follow you all over Attica.”

After these preliminaries Phædrus reads the discourse; which is in the form of a love-letter, if that can be called a love-letter which disclaims love. The following is the substance, and almost an exact translation:

“You know how it is with me, and that I think this affair would be advantageous to us: but I claim, not to be rejected because I do not love you. A lover, when his desire ceases, repents of all that he has done for you: the other has no cause for repentance, for the good he does you was not done from irresistible impulse, but from choice, and deliberation. A lover, too, reckons up the benefits he has conferred upon you, the trouble and anxiety he has undergone for your sake, the damage which he has suffered in his private affairs by reason of his love, and thinks that by all this he has long ago made a sufficient return to you for your favours; but he who does not love, can neither pretend to have neglected his own concerns on account of his love, nor to have undergone labour or anxiety, nor to have quarrelled with his relations, so that nothing is left but to be eager and assiduous in doing whatever will give you pleasure. Again, if it is a reason for valuing a lover, that he is more attached to the person whom he loves than to any person else, and is ready both by word and deed to incur the enmity of others, in order to gratify the object of his love, it clearly follows that if he should afterwards love another, he will do as much for that other, and will be willing, for the gratification of the other, to quarrel with his first love. And how can it be reasonable to grant such a favour to one who is under a calamity, which they who know what it is will not even attempt to cure? for the men themselves confess that they are in an unsound state of mind, and know their own folly, but cannot conquer it. How then can they, when they come to their senses, judge that to be well done which they determined upon when in such a state? Further, if you select from among your lovers even the very best, your choice must be made from a small number; but if you choose from among all persons whatever, except lovers, the one who is most suitable to yourself, there is a much greater chance of your finding a person deserving of your attachment.

“If, moreover, you stand in awe of common opinion, and fear lest if it be known it should be a reproach to you; a lover, expecting to be thought as happy by others as he thinks himself, cannot restrain himself from boasting, and making a display to the world that he has not laboured in vain: but he who is not in love has command of himself, and can choose what is really best, in preference to the mere opinion of men. Many persons must unavoidably see and hear of the lovers who run after you, and if you are even seen talking with them, it is supposed that there either is, or shortly will be, an intrigue between you: but from your associating with a person who is not in love, no such inference will be drawn, because people are aware that you must associate with somebody, either from friendship or for some other pleasure. Further, if you are alarmed by a consideration of the instability of all attachments, and by the reflection that under any other circumstances a quarrel would be an equal misfortune to both, but after you have given away what you most value, it is a most severe calamity to you; then you have reason to be more especially fearful of lovers: for they are most easily offended, and consider the slightest thing an injury to them. For which reason they wish to divert the object of their attachment from all other society; fearing those who have wealth, lest they should outbid them in money; those who have instruction, lest they should outshine them in intellect; and, in short, fearing all who have any desirable possession or quality whatever. Wishing, therefore, to alienate you from all such persons, they leave you without friends; and if you endeavour to make friends, and so provide better for your own interest, you will provoke them. But those who are not in love, but have obtained their wishes on account of their good qualities, are not jealous of those who seek your society, but, on the contrary, dislike those who care not for it, thinking that you are scorned by the latter, but benefited by the former; so that you are more likely to make friends than enemies through their means.

“Lovers, moreover, frequently desire your person before they are acquainted with your manners and character, so that it is uncertain whether they will continue attached to you when their desires are at an end: but those who are not in love, but have obtained your favours in consequence of previous friendship, are not likely to be less your friends in consequence of the favours they have received, but rather to consider those favours as a pledge of future friendship. And, moreover, it is more for your mental improvement to comply with my wishes, than with those of a lover; for lovers praise all you say or do, however unreasonable, partly from fear of your displeasure, and partly because their own judgment is warped by their desire. For such is the effect of love: if unfortunate, it makes that a source of pain which gives no pain to other persons; if fortunate, it makes the lover applaud, in the person he loves, what is really no cause for satisfaction: so that lovers deserve our pity far more than our envy. But if you yield yourself to me, I shall not serve you for present pleasure, but for future good; not over-mastered by love, but retaining command over myself; not vehemently provoked by slight causes, but tardily excited to moderate resentment even by great provocations; pardoning all involuntary offence, and endeavouring to dissuade you from that which is voluntary: these are the signs of what will be a lasting friendship. But if you suppose that there cannot be a strong attachment, save from love, consider that if that were true, we should not love our children, nor our parents, nor possess faithful friends, who have become so from other causes than sexual desire. It may be said that you should confer favours upon those most who need them most. But, if this were true, it would follow that you should select for the objects of your benefits, not the best, but the most destitute; and that in your entertainments you should invite, not your friends, but beggars and the hungry: for they will come the most eagerly, and will be most delighted and most grateful, and will invoke innumerable blessings upon your head.

“But the persons fittest to receive favours are not they who most need them, but they who can make the best return: not lovers only, but all who are worthy; not they who will merely enjoy you during the season of your beauty, but they who when you grow old will continue their benefits; not they who will ostentatiously display their successes to others, but they who will preserve a modest silence; not they who will pay court to you for a short time, but they who will remain your friends during your whole life; not they who when their desires have ceased, will look out for an excuse to quarrel with you, but they whose excellence will then be most perceived, when their pleasures are over. Remember, then, all these things; and consider that lovers are continually remonstrated with by their friends, as giving in to an evil practice, but he who loves not, was never for that reason censured by any friend, as consulting ill for his own affairs. You may perhaps ask me, whether I advise you to gratify all who do not love you? But neither do I think that a lover would bid you comply with the desires of all your lovers, for it would diminish the value of the favour to him who receives it, and would increase the difficulty of concealment. Now, harm ought not to arise to either party from the connexion, but advantage to both.”

Having read this discourse, Phædrus asks Socrates whether he does not admire it exceedingly, both in other respects, and for the excellence of the language? Socrates replies, “Wonderfully so: for I was looking at you all the while, and you seemed so delighted, that I, thinking you know more about these things than I do, was delighted along with you.” Phædrus begged that there might be a truce with jesting, and that Socrates would tell him seriously, whether he thought there was any other man in Greece who could say so much, and all of it so excellent, on the same subject? “What!” said Socrates: “must we praise the discourse for the value of the thoughts, as well as for the language? For my part, I only attended to it as a specimen of composition, for I did not suppose that Lysias himself would imagine that he was equal to the proper treatment of the subject. And, moreover, he seemed to me to repeat the same thing two or three times over, as if he had not a very great deal to say: perhaps he did not mind this, but only desired to show that he could say the very same thing in several ways, and always excellently.”

Phædrus did not like this mode of treating the discourse, and persisted that nothing which was fit to be said had been left out, and that nobody could say any thing more or better on the same subject, after what Lysias had said. This Socrates declared he could not concede; or many old writers, both men and women, would rise up and bear witness against him. “Who?” asked Phædrus.—“I cannot say,” rejoined Socrates, “but I must have read something in Sappho, or Anacreon, or some other writer, for I find myself quite full of matter which I could repeat to you on the subject, nowise inferior to what you have just now read. Knowing my own ignorance, I am certain that I could not have thought of all this by myself, I must therefore have learnt it from somebody else, but from my silliness I have even forgotten from whom.” Phædrus insisted that he should prove his assertion, by speaking as much on the same subject as was in the manuscript, and better in quality. “Do not suppose,” said Socrates, “that I affirm Lysias to have missed the mark altogether, or pretend that it is possible to treat the subject omitting every thing which he has said. How, do you suppose, would it be possible to argue that one who is not in love should be favoured in preference to a lover, abstaining altogether from praising reasonableness and sanity of mind, and from blaming the want of it. This, any one who treats the subject cannot avoid saying, and nothing could be said to the purpose without it. But this kind of things must be taken for granted, and of such we must not praise the invention, but the arrangement; while of those things which, instead of being impossible to miss, are difficult to find, we may praise the invention and the arrangement too.”—Phædrus assents, and says he will allow him to make use of that one principle of Lysias, that a lover is in a less sane state of mind than one who is not in love: but insists that he shall compose a discourse, all the rest of which shall be longer and better than the rest of the discourse of Lysias. Socrates now pretends to have been in jest, and after playfully refusing for some time, which gives rise to some very amusing conversation, he in a mock heroic manner invokes the Muses, and begins to relate the following as a discourse actually held on an occasion of the kind supposed:

“There is but one mode of beginning for those who would deliberate well; viz. to know what the thing, about which they are to deliberate, really is. The vulgar are not aware that they are ignorant of the essence of every thing: conceiving themselves, therefore, to know the inmost nature of the thing which they are about to discuss, they do not come to a mutual explanation respecting it at the commencement of their inquiry, but pass it over, and proceed to employ merely probable arguments. That we may not fall into the error which we condemn in others, let us—who have to inquire whether a lover, or one who is not a lover, should be preferably indulged—begin by ascertaining what love is, and what is its operation; that we may keep this in view, when we subsequently examine whether it produces good or hurt.

“That love is a kind of desire, is clear to all; on the other hand, that persons who are not in love may have physical desire, we know. How then do we distinguish the lover from him who is not in love? We must consider that in each of us there are two principles which lead and govern us; the one, a natural desire for pleasure; the other, an acquired judgment, which seeks that which is best. These two principles sometimes are in harmony with each other, sometimes in opposition; and in the latter case sometimes one is the stronger, sometimes the other. Now, Judgment, which guides us, by means of reason, to the best, when it is the superior in strength, receives the name of Prudence: Desire, which drags us irrationally to pleasure, when it governs us, is called Incontinence. Incontinence, again, has many names, for there are many species of it; and whichsoever of these predominates, gives its own name, and that an opprobrious one, to the person whom it rules. If the desire of the pleasures of the palate predominates over reason, and over the other desires, it is called gluttony, and the person who is affected by it is termed a glutton: if the desire of intoxication similarly preponderates, we know what name it receives. We now see what that desire is, respecting which we are inquiring. The desire which (being independent of reason, and being victorious over right judgment) tends towards the pleasure of beauty, is called love.”

Here Socrates interrupts himself, and jocularly pretends to be inspired by the deities of the spot; “what I am now speaking,” says he, “is not far removed from dithyrambics.”

“We have now,” continues he, “settled what the thing is, about which we are speaking; and keeping this in view, we can inquire what benefit or hurt arises respectively from a lover, and from one who is not a lover, to the person who complies with their desires. Now, he who is governed by desire, and the slave of pleasure, must of necessity attempt to make the object of his love a source of as much pleasure to him as possible. But, to a person who is in an unsound state, that is pleasant which opposes to him no resistance; that which is his equal or his superior, is disagreeable to him. A lover, therefore, cannot endure that the object of his passion should be either superior or equal to him: he will strive all he can to make it inferior and feebler. Now, the ignorant are feebler than the wise; the cowardly, than the brave; he who is unable to speak, than an orator; a slow person, than a ready one. A lover, therefore, must of necessity rejoice that the object of his love should labour under these disadvantages, and must do all he can to superinduce them if they do not already exist, or else he will be deprived of what gives him immediate pleasure. He must of necessity be jealous; and the object of his love will suffer great evil from him, by being withheld from much useful intercourse; and above all, from that which produces the greatest wisdom—philosophy. From this, a lover must above all things withhold the person whom he loves, lest, in consequence of it, he himself should be despised; and must endeavour all he can to make that person be ignorant of every thing, and by depending for every thing upon the lover, be a source of the greatest amount of pleasure to him, and of evil to the beloved object itself.

“If a man who is in love, is so ill a superintendent and associate in the affairs of the mind, he is not less so in what concerns the body. He who prefers the pleasant to the good, will prefer a habit of body soft and relaxed, bred up, not in the clear sunshine, but in the shade, unused to labour and hardy exercise, accustomed only to delicate and effeminate living; such a state of body, in short, as in all great exigencies would give confidence to an enemy, fear and anxiety to a friend, and to the lover himself.

“Every one, but a lover especially, must see, that he would wish the person he loves to be destitute of all which is most dear, most affectionate, and most divine: to be deprived of father, mother, relations, and friends, lest they should censure and obstruct the intercourse with him; to be destitute of property, those who possess it being neither so easily obtained, nor, when obtained, so easily managed: to be unmarried, childless, and to remain for as long a period as possible undomesticated and without a home, in order to remain as long as possible subservient to his pleasures. Again; there are many other things which are in themselves bad; but in most of them there is an admixture of immediate pleasure: A flatterer is a most dangerous and mischievous animal, but nature has mixed up in him, a pleasure not entirely illiberal; a courtezan, and many other of the most pernicious things, are in daily intercourse the most pleasant; but a lover is not only pernicious, but the most unpleasant of all things in daily intercourse. For it is an old saying, that persons of the same age like one another: equality of age, producing similarity of tastes, causes friendship, by reason of resemblance: but even of their intimacy, there is such a thing as satiety; and moreover, in every thing, and to all persons, what they cannot get rid of, becomes a burthen. Now, both these are inconveniences which are suffered above all from a lover; who is likely to be much superior in age to the object of his love, and, hurried by an irresistible impulse, is so assiduous in running after and engrossing the person whom he loves, that he can in no way be got rid of.

“And not only is he thus disagreeable and detrimental while he loves, but unfaithful when he has ceased to love. He was only endured in the first instance, on account of his many promises and vows of future benefits. When, however, these are to be fulfilled, he is changed, and has recovered his reason. The person whom he loves, not knowing this, reminds him of his past words and deeds: he is ashamed to say that he has changed, and knows not how, when in his senses, to perform the promises which he made and swore to when in a state of temporary madness, lest, acting as he did before, he should again be what he then was. He therefore flies off from his promises, and from the society of the person whom he formerly loved; who has then the ungrateful task of pursuing, and resenting; having been unfortunately ignorant that the attachment of a lover is not a feeling of good will, but an appetite which seeks merely its own gratification, and that the love of a lover is like that of the wolf to the lamb.”

Here Socrates breaks off his discourse: and Phædrus tells him, that as yet he has only done half what he had undertaken; he has only censured the lover, and not pointed out the good which arises from an intimacy with one who is not a lover; why therefore does he stop? Socrates jocularly answers, “Did you not perceive that I had already got beyond dithyrambics, and into heroics, and that too, when vituperating,” (for which purpose the poets generally employed the dithyrambic measure). “What do you suppose would happen if I were to commence a panegyric? I should be in a state of absolute enthusiasm; completely inspired by the nymphs of the place, to whose influence you have premeditatedly exposed me. I will be satisfied with saying in one word, that by reversing all that we have said against the lover, you will find all the good qualities which distinguish the other.”

Having discoursed to the above effect, Socrates pretended to be going away, lest Phædrus, whom he rallies upon his extreme fondness for an argument, should compel him to make another discourse; but presently he affects to perceive what he calls the divine and customary sign, which, he says, is continually stopping him when he is about to undertake any thing; and to hear a voice, which will not allow him to depart, until he has expiated an offence which he has committed against the divinity. “I am a prophet,” he continues; “not a very good one, but (like a man who writes a bad hand-writing) good enough for my own use. The soul is in some sort a prophet; and mine pricked me while I was speaking, and made me even then afraid that I was offending the gods for the sake of honour among men; and I now perceive what my offence is. You have yourself brought, and have made me utter, two most horrible and impious discourses. Is not Love the son of Venus, and one of the gods?”—“So it is said,” replied Phædrus.—“Not by Lysias, however,” rejoins Socrates, “nor by your speech, which you by your incantations contrived to utter through my lips. If Love is, as he is, a god, or something divine, he cannot be anything evil. Both our speeches, however, represented him as such. I therefore must purify myself; and, as Stesichorus, who had been struck blind like Homer for calumniating Helen, recovered his sight by making a recantation, I will make my Palinodia, more wisely, before I have yet suffered anything from the anger of the god whom I have maligned. Do you not think, indeed, that any person of a generous and a civilized disposition, who either loves or has loved, if he were to hear us saying that lovers contract strong enmities from slight causes, and behave jealously and injuriously towards the object of their love, would suppose that we had been bred up at sea, and had never seen any liberal and generous attachment; and would be far indeed from admitting the justice of the censures which we have cast upon Love?”—“Perhaps,” said Phædrus, “he would.”—“For this reason,” said Socrates, “and for fear of the god himself, I will endeavour to efface my reproaches by a panegyric; and I would advise Lysias to make haste and do the same.

“It is a fallacy to maintain that one who loves not, should be favoured in preference to a lover, because the one is in his senses, and the other not. If madness were always and of necessity an evil, this would be very just; but it happens that the very greatest of blessings come to us through madness; madness given, it is true, by the divinity. The prophetesses at Delphi and Dodona, and elsewhere, have rendered to Greece, both individually and publicly, when frantic, the greatest services, but none that I know of when in their sober senses. There would be no end to the enumeration of those who have foretold future events correctly, prophesying by a frenzy inspired from heaven. Those ancients who invented our language, certainly thought madness no disgrace, or they would not have given to the noblest of arts, that of predicting the future, the name of μανική (madness,) which we have ignorantly corrupted into μαντική, (prophesy). In like manner, the inquiry into the future, when conducted by those who are in their senses, by observation of the flight of birds, and other signs, received from the ancients (to indicate that it operated by means of thought and intellect) the name οἰονοϊστικη, which the moderns have corrupted into οἰωνιστική, (the science of omens). In so much then as the prophetic art excels that of augury and omens, in so much do the ancients testify that the madness which comes from God, excels the wisdom which comes from men. Many again, on whom, by the anger of the gods, great calamities and diseases have fallen, have been cured by the supervention of madness, which operating upon them in a manner similar to divination, indicated to them the proper prayers and adorations of the gods, by which they were purified, and became free from their previous evils. A third kind of madness is that, which, coming from the Muses, awakens the mind, and stirs it up to pour itself forth in odes and other kinds of poetry; and by adorning the deeds of the ancients, instructs their posterity. For he who, without madness inspired by the Muses, knocks at the door of poetry, thinking that he can become an adequate poet by mere art, fails of his purpose, and his poetry is thrown into the shade by that of the inspired madmen.

“Such, and yet more, are the good works which proceed from madness inspired by the gods. Let us not, therefore, be disturbed by any argument which inculcates the preference of a sane above an insane mind. Let us first require proof, that love is not sent by the gods, for the benefit both of the lover and of the person loved. We ourselves will show that, on the contrary, this kind of madness is given by the gods for the greatest possible felicity of mankind. The proof will be very unsatisfactory to merely clever people, but convincing to the really wise. We must, with this view, first institute an inquiry concerning the soul, both of men and of gods; what are its affections, and what its acts.

“All souls are immortal; for that which is always in motion must be immortal. (That which is set in motion by something else, may cease to be moved, and may therefore cease to live. But that which is self-moving, as it never quits itself, never ceases moving, but is the source and beginning of motion to all other things which are moved. But that which is a beginning, is not itself generated: a thing which is generated may be traced up to a beginning, but that beginning would not be the beginning if it could be traced to anything prior. Not being generated, it is not susceptible of destruction; for, if the beginning were destroyed, every thing which is generated from it would be destroyed with it; if that which is self-moving were destroyed, since it is the cause of all other motion, there would be no motion whatever.) Since, therefore, that which is self-moving is immortal, immortality is the essence of life; for, all bodies which require to be moved from without, are termed lifeless; those which are moved from within are said to have life. Life, therefore, is the principle of self-motion, and is consequently ungenerated, and immortal. Life is immortal; or in other words, the soul is immortal.

“Respecting the immortality of the soul, this is sufficient. About its form, we shall speak as follows. What it is, would be the matter of a long inquiry, and would require divine aid; but to show what it resembles, is in human power, and requires not so long an exposition. We may compare it to a chariot, with a pair of winged horses and a driver. In the souls of the gods, the horses and the driver are entirely good: in other souls, only partially so, one of the horses excellent, the other vicious. The business, therefore, of the driver, is extremely difficult and troublesome.

“Let us now attempt to show how some living beings came to be spoken of as mortal, and others as immortal. All souls are employed in taking care of the things which are inanimate; and travel about the whole of heaven, in various forms. Now, when the soul is perfect, and has wings, it is carried aloft, and helps to administer the entire universe; but the soul which loses its wings, drops down until it catches hold of something solid, in which it takes up its residence; and having a dwelling of clay, which seems to be self-moving on account of the soul which is in it, the two together are called an animal, and mortal. The phrase, immortal animal, arises not from any correct understanding, but from a fiction: never having seen, nor being able to comprehend a deity, men conceived an immortal being, having a body as well as a soul, united together for all eternity. Let these things, then, be as it pleases God; but let us next state from what cause a soul becomes unfledged.

“It is the nature of wings to lift up heavy bodies towards the habitation of the gods; and of all things which belong to the body, wings are that which most partakes of the divine. The divine includes the beautiful, the wise, the good, and every thing of that nature. By these, the wings of the soul are nourished and increased; by the contraries of these, they are destroyed.

“Jupiter, and the other gods, divided into certain bands, travel about in their winged chariots, ordering and attending to all things, each according to his appointed function; and all who will, and who can, follow them. When they go to take their repasts, they journey up hill, towards the summit of the vault of heaven. The chariots of the gods, being in exact equilibrium, and therefore easily guided, perform this journey easily, but all others with difficulty; for one of the two horses, being of inferior nature, when he has not been exceedingly well trained by the driver, weighs down the vehicle, and impels it towards the earth.

“The souls which are called immortal, (viz. the gods,) when they reach the summit, go through, and standing upon the convex outside of heaven, are carried round and round by its revolution, and see the things which lie beyond the heavens. No poet has ever celebrated these super-celestial things, nor ever will celebrate them as they deserve. This region is the seat of Existence itself: Real Existence, colourless, figureless, and intangible Existence, which is visible only to Mind, the charioteer of the soul, and which forms the subject of Real Knowledge. The minds of the gods, which are fed by pure knowledge, and all other thoroughly well-ordered minds, contemplate for a time this universe of ‘Being’ per se, and are delighted and nourished by the contemplation, until the revolution of the heavens bring them back to the same point. In this circumvolution, they contemplate Justice itself, Temperance itself, and Knowledge, not that knowledge which has a generation or a beginning, not that which exists in a subject which is any of what we term beings, but that Knowledge which exists in Being in general; in that which really Is. After thus contemplating all real existences, and being nourished thereby, these souls again sink into the interior of the heavens, and repose.

“Such is the life of the gods. Of other souls, those which best follow the gods, and most resemble them, barely succeed in lifting the head of the charioteer into the parts beyond the heavens, and being carried round by the circumvolution, are enabled with difficulty to contemplate this universe of Self-Existences. Others, being encumbered by the horses, sometimes rising and sometimes sinking, are enabled to see some Existences only. The remainder only struggle to elevate themselves, and by the unskilfulness of their drivers, coming continually into collision, are lamed, or break their wings, and after much labour go away without accomplishing their purpose, and return to feed upon mere Opinion.

“The motive of this great anxiety to view the super-celestial plain of Truth, is, that the proper food of the soul is derived from thence, and in particular, the wings, by which the soul is made light and carried aloft, are nourished upon it. Now it is an inviolable law that any soul, which, placing itself in the train of the gods, and journeying along with them, obtains a sight of any of these self-existent Realities, remains exempt from all harm until the next circumvolution; and if it can contrive to effect this every time, it is for ever safe and uninjured. But if, being unable to elevate itself to the necessary height, it altogether fails of seeing these Realities, and, being weighed down by vice and oblivion, loses its wings and falls to the earth, it enters into and animates some Body. It never enters, at the first generation, into the body of a brute animal; but that which has seen most, enters into the body of a person who will become a lover of wisdom, or a lover of beauty, or a person addicted to music, or to love: the next in rank, into that of a monarch who reigns according to law, or a warrior, or a man of talents for command: the third, into a person qualified to administer the state, and manage his family affairs, or carry on a gainful occupation: the fourth, into a person fond of hard labour and bodily exercises, or skilled in the prevention and curing of bodily diseases: the fifth, into a prophet, or a teacher of religious ceremonies: the sixth, into a poet, or a person addicted to any other of the imitative arts: the seventh, into a husbandman or an artificer: the eighth, into a sophist, or a courtier of the people: the ninth, into a despot and usurper. And in all these different fortunes they who conduct themselves justly will obtain next time a more eligible lot; they who conduct themselves unjustly, a worse.

“The soul never returns to its pristine state in less than 10,000 years, for its wings do not grow in a shorter time; except only the soul of one who philosophizes with sincerity, or who loves with philosophy. Such souls, after three periods of 1000 years, if they choose thrice in succession this kind of life, recover their wings in the three thousandth year, and depart. The other souls, at the termination of their first life, are judged, and having received their sentence, are either sent for punishment into the places of execution under the earth, or are elevated to a place in heaven, in which they are rewarded according to the life which they led while here. In either case they are called back on the thousandth year, to choose or draw lots for a new life. Then a human soul often passes into the body of a beast, and that of a beast, if it has ever been human, passes again into the body of a man. For a soul which has never seen the Truth at all, cannot enter into the human form, it being necessary that man should be able to apprehend things according to kinds, which kinds are composed of many perceptions combined by reason into one. Now this mode of apprehending is neither more nor less than the recollecting of those things which the soul formerly saw when it journeyed along with the gods, and, disregarding what we now call beings, applied itself to the apprehension of Real Being. It is for this reason that the soul of the philosopher is re-fledged in a shorter period than others: for it constantly, to the best of its power, occupies itself in trying to recollect those things which the gods contemplated, and by the contemplation of which they are gods; by which means, being lifted out of, and above, human cares and interests, he is, by the vulgar, considered as mad, while in reality he is inspired.

“It will now appear, on consideration, that the fourth kind of madness of which we were before speaking, the madness of one who is a lover of beauty, is the best and most beneficial of all the enthusiasms which are inspired from heaven. For, as we have already said, every human soul has actually seen the Real Existences, or it would not have come into a human shape. But it is not easy for all of them to call to mind what they then saw: those especially, which saw that region for a short time only, and those which, having fallen to the earth, were so unfortunate as to be turned to injustice, and consequent oblivion of the sacred things which were seen by them in their prior state. Few, therefore, remain who are adequate to the recollection of those things. These few, when they see here any image or resemblance of the things which are there, receive a shock like a thunderbolt, and are in a manner taken out of themselves; but from deficiency of comprehension, they know not what it is which so affects them. Now, the likenesses which exist here of Justice and Temperance, and the other things which the soul honours, do not possess any splendour; and a few persons only, with great difficulty, by the aid of dull, blunt, material organs, perceive the terrestrial likenesses of those qualities, and recognise them. But Beauty was not only most splendid when it was seen by us forming part of the heavenly procession or quire, but here also the likeness of it comes to us through the most acute and clear of our senses, that of sight, and with a splendour which no other of the terrestrial images of super-celestial existences possess. They, then, who are not fresh from heaven, or who have been corrupted, are not vehemently impelled towards that Beauty which is aloft, when they see that upon earth which is called by its name; they do not, therefore, venerate and worship it, but give themselves up to physical pleasure, after the manner of a quadruped. But they who are fresh from those divine objects of contemplation, and who have formerly contemplated them much, when they see a godlike countenance or form, in which celestial beauty is imaged and well imitated, are first struck with a holy awe, and then, approaching, venerate this beautiful object as a god, and, if they were not afraid of the reputation of too raving a madness, would erect altars, and perform sacrifices to it. And the warmth and genial influence derived from the atmosphere which beauty generates around itself, entering through the eyes, softens and liquefies the inveterate induration, which coats and covers up the parts in the vicinity of the wings, and prevents them from growing: this being melted, the wings begin to germinate and increase, and this, like the growing of the teeth, produces an itching and irritation which disturbs the whole frame of the soul. When, therefore, by the contemplation of the beautiful object, the induration is softened, and the wings begin to shoot, the soul is relieved from its pain and rejoices; but when that object is absent, the liquefied substance hardens again, and closes up the young shoots of the wings, which consequently boil up and throb, and throw the soul into a state of turbulence and rage, and will neither allow it to sleep nor remain at rest, until it can again see the beautiful object, and be relieved. For this reason it never willingly leaves that object, but for its sake deserts parents and brothers and friends, and neglects its patrimony, and despises all established usages and decorums on which it valued itself before. And this affection is Love.

“Now, those who in their former state followed in the train of Jupiter, can, when seized by love, more patiently bear the burthens occasioned by it; but those who served and followed Mars, when they fall in love, and think themselves wronged by the person whom they love, are ready to resort to violence, and immolate both the loved person and themselves. And every other soul, both in its loves and in all its other pursuits, follows to the best of its power the example and model of the god on whom it formerly attended. But those who attended on Jupiter seek to have for the object of their love one who resembles Jupiter in soul—one who is a philosopher, and fitted by nature to lead; and strive all they can that the object of their love, if not so already, shall become so. And if they themselves have not before applied to study, they do so, and endeavouring to image to their recollection the god to whom they were attached, model their habits and dispositions, as far as is in human power, from him. And ascribing this change in themselves to the object of their love, they become still fonder of that object, and communicate to it a share of what they themselves draw from Jupiter, and make the beloved person resemble as much as possible the god whom they imitate. In like manner, those who had been attendants upon Juno look out for a person of a regal disposition; those of Apollo, and all the other gods, similarly look out for an object of love who is as like their god as possible, and if not so already they endeavour that it shall become so.

“We formerly distinguished the soul into three parts, two of them resembling horses, the third a charioteer. One of these horses we said was good, the other vicious. The better of the two is an upright noble animal, a lover of honour, sensible to shame, and obeying the word of the driver without the lash. The other is crooked, headlong, fiery, insolent, deaf, and with difficulty yielding even to whip and spur. Now, when the driver is inflamed by love and desire for some beautiful human being, the tractable horse holds himself back, and restrains himself all he can from attempting any sensual enjoyment of the beloved object; but the other, setting whip and rein at defiance, struggles on, and compels his companion and the driver to rush towards the desired object, and consent to unchaste intercourse. When they come into its presence, and the charioteer, beholding it, is reminded of the ideal beauty which he has formerly seen, and sees it with his mind’s eye joined with Continence and Purity in the super-celestial region, he is struck dumb, and falling backward in adoration, draws back the reins so violently, that both horses are forced back upon their haunches, the one willingly and unresisting, the other with a great struggle. After many vain attempts, in which the vicious beast suffers great torture, he is at length subdued and humbled, and when he comes into the presence of the beloved object, is so overcome with fear as to be easily governed.

“The mind of the lover being brought into this state, his constant attendance upon, and as it were worship of, the beloved object, in time inspires the latter with a corresponding affection: and the same stream of beauty and desire which has entered into the soul of the lover through his eyes, rebounds as from a wall when he is full, and enters into the person from whom it at first proceeded, in whom it in like manner melts the induration about the roots of the wings, and enables them to sprout. Thus both partake of love; and if, by orderly habits of life, and by philosophy, the better part of their nature retains the ascendency, they lead a happy and united life, retaining command over themselves, being in strict subjection so far as regards the vicious part of their souls, and in full freedom in respect of the virtuous part. And after their death, being light and winged, and having achieved one of the three great victories, they have accomplished the greatest good which either human wisdom or divine madness can confer upon a human creature. But if their mode of life is more rude, and they are attached to the pursuit of honour rather than of wisdom, perhaps in a moment of forgetfulness the incontinent horse of each of them, finding their souls unguarded, may bring them together, and cause them to accomplish what common persons celebrate as the summit of happiness. And this having been done, they subsequently persevere in the same intercourse, but sparingly, as doing what is not approved by the whole of their minds. These persons, too, are dear to one another, although less so than those of whom we formerly spoke: and both while their love continues and when it has ceased, they consider themselves as having given and received the greatest of pledges, which it would be impious to violate by becoming alienated. When these persons die, they quit the body, without wings indeed, but having them in an incipient state, and they have therefore no trifling reward for their love; for those who have once commenced the journey towards heaven cannot again descend into the subterranean darkness, but live happily together in the clear light, and when they recover their wings, recover them together.

“Such is the attachment of a lover. But that of a person who is not a lover, being a mere compound of mortal prudence, is sparing and no more than mortal in what it dispenses: it produces in the soul of the person who is the object of attachment, nothing but illiberality, which the vulgar praise as virtue. A soul so affected will be tossed about for 9000 years, on the earth and under it.”

Here Socrates terminates his long discourse, winding it up by a prayer to Love, to whom he offers the discourse as a Palinodia; and whose pardon he implores for having blasphemed against him, and lays the whole blame upon Lysias, whose mind he beseeches the god to turn to philosophy.

Phædrus warmly applauded this discourse, which he allowed to be greatly superior to that of Lysias. “I am afraid,” said he, “that Lysias would appear but poor, even if he attempted to write another speech against it. And, by the way, one of our politicians the other day inveighing against him, reproached him through the whole of his invective with being a λογογράϕος, or speech-writer. Perhaps, therefore, he may, from care of his own estimation, give up the practice.” Socrates laughed, and told Phædrus that he mistook his friend if he thought him so fearful of censure. “So you think,” he added, “that the man who thus reproached him meant what he said?”—“It seemed so,” answered Phædrus, “and you are yourself aware that the men of importance and gravity in a state are ashamed to write speeches, and leave written memorials of themselves behind them, being afraid lest they should hereafter be reputed sophists.” Socrates replied jocularly, that on the contrary none were fonder of leaving written memorials behind them, and of being thought good writers, than politicians: “for when they write any thing, they are so fond of those who applaud it, as always to name them at the very beginning of the writing. Do not their writings always begin, Resolved by the senate, or by the people, or by both, on the proposition of such a one, meaning very gravely the writer himself; and does he not then go on showing off his own wisdom to his applauders, to the end of sometimes a very long paper? And if this be blotted out from the tablet on which it is inscribed, do not the composer and all his friends go away dissatisfied; and if it be thought worthy of being written and permanently recorded, is he not pleased? and if any of these men, either by his ascendency as an orator, or by authority as a king, obtains the power of Lycurgus, or Solon, or Darius, which enables him to become a writer for immortality, does he not appear both to himself, and to posterity who read his writings, almost a god? It is evident, therefore, that such a man, if he reproaches Lysias, does not reproach him for being a writer. To write, therefore, is not disgraceful. To write ill, is so. What then is the manner of writing well or ill? Shall we ask this of Lysias, or any other writer who ever wrote either in poetry or prose?”—“Shall we?” says Phædrus—“what else do we live for, but for such pleasures as these? Not certainly for those pleasures, to the enjoyment of which a previous state of pain is necessary; which is the case with almost all the bodily pleasures; for which reason they are justly called servile.”—“We have leisure,” answered Socrates, “and the cicadæ who are chirping and conversing with one another, in the trees over our heads, would despise us if we, like the vulgar, instead of conversing, were to sleep out the hot part of the day, being lulled by their note through vacancy of mind. They would suppose that we were like cattle, who come down at mid-day to drink at the stream, and fall asleep. But if they see us conversing, and passing them by, like the Syrens, unfascinated, they will be pleased with us, and will, perhaps, confer on us the gift which they have from the gods to bestow upon men.”—“Have they such a gift?” asked Phædrus, “for I never heard of it.”—“A lover of the Muses,” replied Socrates, “ought not to be ignorant of this. It is said that the cicadæ were men, before the Muses existed; but when the Muses were born, and song commenced, some of the men of that time were so engrossed by delight, that they passed their time in singing, and neglected to take food until they died. From them the race of the cidadæ are sprung; and possess the gift from the Muses, not to need food or drink, but to sing continually until they die, and afterwards going to the abodes of the Muses, report to them who among mortals gives them honour.”

Socrates and Phædrus agreed accordingly to continue their conversation, and that the subject should be, what constituted good speaking and writing.

We left Socrates and Phædrus on the point of commencing a new inquiry, viz., “What constitutes Good Speaking and Writing.”

“Is it not necessary,” asked Socrates, “in order to speak well, that the speaker should in his own mind know the truth, in respect to the subject concerning which he is to speak?”

“I have heard it said,” answered Phædrus, “that an orator need not know what is really just, but only what will appear so to the multitude who are to decide; and that he need not know what is really good, or beautiful, but what will appear so: for persuasion is produced by means of the apparent, not the true.”

“We must not,” said Socrates, “reject without examination what wise men affirm; we must inquire whether there is anything in it.

“Suppose that I wanted to persuade you to buy a horse in order to go forth and meet the enemy; and that we were both of us entirely ignorant of a horse, but I happened to know of you, that you believed a horse to be the most long-eared of all domestic animals.”—“It would be ridiculous,” answered Phædrus.—“Not yet,” replied Socrates; “but what if I were seriously to set about persuading you, by composing a speech on the ass, calling it a horse, and celebrating it as the finest of animals for domestic use, for military service, for carrying goods, and a hundred other things?”—“It would be highly ridiculous.”—“Is it not better to be ridiculous, than a dangerous and pernicious friend?”—“Certainly.”—“But when an orator, being himself ignorant of good and evil, and finding a people equally so, sets about persuading them, not by a panegyric upon the ass under the name of the horse, but upon Evil under the name of Good; and having studied the opinions of the multitude, succeeds in persuading them to do what is bad instead of what is good, what sort of a harvest do you think that an oratory of this sort will reap?”—“But an indifferent one.”

“Perhaps, however,” resumed Socrates, “we are too severe upon oratory. She may, perhaps, turn upon us, and say, You are trifling, my good friends—I do not compel any one to learn to speak, who is ignorant of the truth—I bid him learn the truth first, and resort to me afterwards—The ground of my pretensions is, that without me, though a man were to know all possible truths, he would be no nearer to possessing the art of persuading.”—“And in saying this, does she not speak truth?”—“Yes, if the arguments which are coming should testify that she is an Art; but I in a manner hear the rustle of several arguments approaching, which assert that she is an impostor, and no Art, but an unartificial Routine.”—“Call these arguments forth, then, and let us interrogate them.”—“Come forth, I beg you, and persuade Phædrus that unless he philosophize sufficiently, he will never be capable of speaking on any subject. Question Phædrus, and he will answer. Is not the art of oratory, taken in a general sense, the influencing of the mind by discourse, not merely in courts of justice and public assemblies, but also in private life, whether on great subjects or on small?”—“Not entirely so. It is generally on the occasion of trials in courts of justice that men speak and write by art; and in deliberative assemblies they speak by art: but otherwise not.”—“Have you then heard tell only of the arts of oratory which were composed by Nestor and Ulysses at Troy, but not those of Palamedes?”—“No, nor of Nestor either, unless you call Gorgias Nestor, and Thrasymachus or Theodorus Ulysses.”—“Tell me, then, what do adversaries in a court of justice do? Do they not debate?”—“Yes.”—“About the just and unjust?”—“Yes.”—“He who does this by art, can make the same thing appear to the same persons, either just or unjust?”—“Yes.”—“And in deliberative assemblies, he can make the same thing appear as he pleases, either good for the state, or the contrary?”—“He can.”—“And do we not know that Palamedes of Elea could speak by art, in such a manner that his hearers should think the same things either like or unlike, one or many, stationary or moved?”—“Yes.”—“The art of debate therefore, is not confined to courts of justice and public assemblies; but if it be an art, there is but one single art which, whatever be the subject of discourse, can make all things appear similar, which are capable of so appearing, and which, if another person does the same thing deceptively, can expose the deception.

“Is deception more likely to happen in those things which differ much, or in those which differ little?”—“In those which differ little.”—“You will more easily get round from a thing to its contrary, by insensible steps than all at once?”—“No doubt.”—“He, then, whose business it is to deceive another, and not to be deceived himself, must know accurately the resemblances and differences of things?”—“He must.”—“Can he, not knowing the real nature of a thing itself, distinguish the degree of resemblance which other things bear to that thing?”—“It is impossible.”—“Since then, those who are deceived, and take up a false opinion, must have been led to it by some sort of resemblance, (verisimilitude or likeness to the truth,) it is clear, that a man cannot bring round another by little and little, through a chain of resemblances, from the truth to its contrary, or avoid being himself dealt with in the same manner, unless he knows the real natures of things; and the man who does not know the truth, but hunts after mere opinion, has got a ridiculous and very unart-like art of speaking.” Phædrus could not deny this; and Socrates proposed that they should look again at the discourse of Lysias, and see whether it contained evidence of art or no. Phædrus assented, saying, that as yet they were somewhat bare, not having a sufficiency of examples. “It is perhaps lucky,” rejoined Socrates, “that these discourses have been spoken, since they afford an example, how he who knows the truth may, in mere sport, mislead his audience by a speech.”

Phædrus now, according to agreement, begins to read the discourse of Lysias from the commencement. Before he has completed the second sentence, Socrates stops him, in order to point out already a proof of want of art.

“Is it not clear that about some things we are all of one mind, about others we differ?”—“I think I understand you, but nevertheless explain yourself more clearly.”—“When we use the words silver, or iron, we all of us mean the same thing by them. But when we speak of what is just, or of what is good, we all go off in different directions, and are at variance both with each other and in ourselves.” Phædrus assented. “In which of these two kinds of things are we most easily deceived, and in which is the power of oratory the greatest?”—“In those in which we wander without fixed principles.”—“He, then, who seeks to acquire an art of oratory, should first be able properly to distinguish and characterize these two kinds of things, those in which the multitude must of necessity wander, and those in which they need not.”—“This would be an admirable discovery.”—“And next, he must be able to distinguish and clearly perceive, without mistake, whether that of which he is about to speak, belongs to the one class or to the other.”—“Granted.”

“Now, should love be considered to be one of these disputable things?”—“Undoubtedly: how else could you have made, as you did, two long speeches, one to show that love is injurious both to the lover and the loved, the other, that it is the greatest of blessings?”—“You say truth; but now tell me (for I, on account of the state of inspiration in which I was, do not recollect,) whether I began by defining love?”—“You did, most accurately.”—“How much more skilled, then, in the oratorical art, must be the Nymphs and Pan, by whom I was inspired, than your friend Lysias! for he obliged us to begin by supposing, and not inquiring, what love is, and then grounded his entire discourse on a mere supposition.

“Does not, too, the discourse appear to you to be thrown together quite at random? Can it be said that what is placed second, for example, or in any other position, is placed there from any peculiar necessity? To me, who know nothing, he seemed to say, most undauntedly, whatever came into his head: but can you point out any oratorical necessity which compelled him to arrange his thoughts into that particular order?”—“You are very good, to suppose that I am capable of so accurately judging what such a man as Lysias composes.”—“But this I think you will allow, that a discourse should be like an organized creature, having a body of its own, neither headless nor footless, but having a middle, and extremities, fitted to one another, and to the whole.”—“Without doubt.”—“But does anything of this kind appear in your friend’s discourse?—look, and you will find it very like the inscription which they ascribe to Midas the Phrygian, which might be read either backwards or forwards without altering the sense.”—“You are now only laughing at the discourse.”—“Let us then, in order not to offend you, let alone this oration, although it seems to me to contain a variety of examples, by the consideration of which one might be improved. Let us pass to the other discourses: for in them too there were some things worth observing to those who are considering Discourse. There were two discourses; the one in disparagement, the other in eulogy of love.”—“There were.”—“We affirmed that love was a sort of madness; did we not?”—“We did.”—“And said that there are two sorts of madness; one coming from human disease, the other from a divine influence. This last we divided into four kinds: viz., prophetic inspiration” [here, for the first time, the very word inspiration, or afflatus (ἐπιπνοία) is used,]—“the origin of which we ascribed to Apollo; mystico-religious, (τελεστική), to Bacchus; poetic, to the Muses; and finally, that of which we are speaking, the inspiration or enthusiasm of Love.”—“We did.”—“Let us now try whether we can catch the manner in which our discourse changed from blame to praise.”—“What do you mean?”—“To me it appears, that all the rest of what was said, was in reality no more than sport; but that if one could obtain by art, the power or capacity of these two kinds of operations, which in this instance we have performed by mere chance, it would be not unpleasant.”—“What things?”—“To collect together a multitude of scattered particulars, and viewing them collectively, bring them all under one single idea, and thereby be enabled to define, and so make it clear what the thing is which is the subject of our inquiry. As, for instance (in our own case,) what we said (whether it was well said or ill) with a view of defining love: for this was what enabled the subsequent discourse to be clear, and consistent with itself.”—“You have described one of the two operations which you spoke of; what is the other?”—“To be able again to subdivide this idea into species, according to nature, and so as not to break any part of it in the cutting, like a bad cook. Thus, for example, our two discourses agreed in taking for their subject, insanity of mind: but in the same manner as the body has two parts, which are called by the same name in all other respects, but one called the left side and the other the right, so our two discourses, taking insanity as one single idea existing in us, one of them cut down on the left side, and continued subdividing until it came to something sinister which bore the name of Love, and inveighed against it very deservedly; the other taking us to the right side, found another Love, a namesake of the first, but of a divine origin and nature, which it held forth and praised as the cause of our greatest blessings.

“I, then,” continued Socrates, “being a lover of these compositions and decompositions, in order that I may be able to speak and to think; if I find any one whom I think capable of apprehending things as one and many, I run after him and follow his footsteps as I would those of a god. Those who can do this, whether I call them rightly or not God knows, but at present I call them dialecticians: but what are we to call those who learn from you and Lysias? Is this, of which we have been talking, the same with that Art of Speaking by the aid of which Thrasymachus and the rest have become wise in speaking, and have made others so, who pay tribute to them as to kings?”—“They are kingly people,” said Phædrus, “but they are not acquainted with that of which you spoke. I think that you are right in calling this method dialectics; but it does not seem to me that we have yet found out what oratory is.”—“Indeed!” replied Socrates: “it must be something curious, if, being different from what we have been speaking of, it is nevertheless an art. Let us then see what else oratory consists of.”—“Of a great many things, which we find in the books of rhetoric.”—“I thank you for putting me in mind. You mean such things as these; that the exordium should come first, then the narration and the testimony, then the positive circumstantial proofs, then the probable ones: and next, I believe the Byzantine Theodorus talks of confirmation and super-confirmation, refutation and super-refutation, and how all these things should be managed, both in accusation and in defence. And why should we leave out that excellent person, Euœnus of Paros, who first invented ὑποδήλωσις and παρεπαίνοι.” (The first untranslatable, the second we suppose means incidental praise.) “Some say he also has παραψόγοι,” (incidental vituperation,) “which he has put into verse for the aid of memory; for he is a wise man. Can we omit, moreover; Tisias and Gorgias, who saw that the plausible was to be honoured above the true, and who, by force of speaking, can make great things appear small, and small things great, new things old, and old things new, and who have found out the way to speak either briefly or to an interminable length on all subjects? Prodicus once, when I related this to him, laughed, and said he was the first person who had found out how to speak according to art: for the speech should be neither short nor long, but moderate.”—“Very wise indeed.”—“Neither must we leave out Hippias of Elis, who I should think would be of the same opinion: and Polus, too, who invented διπλασιολογία, and γνωμολογία, and εἰκονολογία, and so forth.”—“And did not Protagoras do something of the same kind?”—“He was skilled in ὀρθοέπεια, and many other fine things. He excelled every body in speeches of the lugubrious kind, about old age and poverty: he was a terrible man for enraging people, and then cooling them, and the first of all men in inveighing and in replying to invective. About the concluding part of a speech they all seem to agree; some of them call it recapitulation, and others give it some other name.”—“You mean, summarily reminding the audience of what you have said.”—“That is what I mean. Have you anything else to relate which forms part of the art of oratory?”—“There is very little else.”—“Let us then leave that very little alone, and examine these things a little more closely, that we may see what power the art has.”—“Very great power indeed in a popular assembly.”—“Let us see.

“If any one were to come to your friend Eryximachus, or to his father, Acumenus, and say, I know how to produce any effect I please upon the body, I can cool it or heat it, give it an emetic or a purge, and I therefore think myself a physician, and capable of making others so, what would they say?”—“They would ask him whether he likewise knows upon whom to produce these different effects, and when, and to what degree.”—“And what if he were to answer—By no means; I insist that he who has learned from me what I before mentioned, will have that other sort of knowledge as a matter of course.”—“They would reply, The man is mad, and because he has accidentally discovered or read of some drug or other, fancies himself a physician, knowing nothing at all of the art.”—“And what if a man should go to Sophocles or Euripides, and say, I know how to make a long speech on a small matter, and a short one about a great matter, and I can make a pathetic speech, or a menacing one, or a fearful one, and being able to teach all this I can enable any man to write a tragedy?”—“They too would laugh at the absurdity of supposing that tragedy consists in any thing but the putting together of these things so as to be suitable to one another and to the whole.”—“And if a musician met with a man who thought himself a harmonist because he could draw from the strings the most acute and the gravest sounds possible, he would not say to him fiercely, You stupid fellow! you are out of your wits; but, as being a musician, and therefore of a softer and less inflammable temperament, he would answer, My good friend, it is necessary for a harmonist to know these things, but a man may know all that you know and be not the least of a harmonist notwithstanding. You possess those acquirements which are preliminary to harmony, but not harmony itself.”—“Very right.”—“Sophocles would say, in like manner, You know the preliminaries to tragedy, but not tragedy itself: and Acumenus would say, You know the preliminaries to medicine, but medicine itself you know not.”—“Most true.”

“What then do you think that the sweet-voiced Adrastus or Pericles would say, if they heard recited these splendid inventions which we were just now talking of, βραχυλογίαι and εἰκονολογίαι and the like? Would they, like us, say something sharp and coarse to those who write and teach these things under the name of oratory? or would they, as being wiser than we, reprove us for our violence, and say, O Phædrus and Socrates, we ought not to be angry, but should excuse, if there be persons who, being unversed in dialectics, are unable to define what oratory is, and therefore, being possessed only of those acquirements which it is necessary should precede the art, fancy that they have found an art of oratory, and, teaching these things to others, think that they have taught them oratory itself; but think nothing of the power of doing each of these things persuasively, and of putting them together into a whole, and hold it unnecessary for their scholars to learn this from their tuition.”

“I am afraid,” observed Phædrus, “that this art of oratory, as they call it, is indeed no better than you represent it. But from whence might one derive the art of the real orator—the power of persuasion?”

“The power,” replied Socrates, “if possessed to the degree which constitutes a perfect orator, is probably, or perhaps necessarily, governed by the same laws as any other power. If you have natural capabilities you may become an eminent orator, by the aid of knowledge and study; if you are wanting in any of these respects, you will be so far imperfect. But so much of it as is Art, appears to me to be acquired by a method not similar to that which Lysias and Thrasymachus use.”—“How then?”—“Pericles is perhaps the most complete orator ever known.”—“What then?”—“All the greater arts require the study of the abstruser parts of nature: from which alone loftiness and potency of intellect are derived: the qualities which, together with great natural aptness, Pericles possessed. He acquired them, as I imagine, by his intercourse with Anaxagoras, by whom he was introduced into the higher parts of knowledge, and penetrated to the nature of the thinking and the unthinking faculties of man, the subject which Anaxagoras chiefly treated of; and from this Pericles drew, for the art of speaking, as much as was applicable to it.”—“How so?”—“The art of oratory resembles that of medicine. In both, it is necessary to distinguish and subdivide the nature of body on the one hand, of mind on the other; if you intend to follow art, and not a mere empirical routine, in giving health and strength to the former by medicine and sustenance, and producing in the latter, by speech and precept, virtue and any persuasion which you desire.”—“This seems reasonable.”—“But is it possible to comprehend well the nature of Mind, except by comprehending the nature of the universe?”—“If Hippocrates is to be believed, even the body can be understood only by that method.”—“He speaks well: but besides Hippocrates, it is proper to interrogate likewise the argument, and discover whether it also will assent. Let us see then. Is not this the proper mode of examining into the nature of any thing—first to consider whether it is simple or manifold: then, if it is simple, to examine into its powers, that is, what affections it is capable of causing in other things, and other things in it: if, on the contrary, it consists of a variety of sorts, to enumerate them, and make the same inquiry with respect to each of the sorts; viz. in what manner it acts upon, and is acted upon by, other things?”—“Undoubtedly.”—“Any other method would be like a blind man’s walk. But it is clear, that he who would teach another the art of speaking, must teach him accurately the nature of that which his speaking is intended to act upon; and this is, the mind.”—“Agreed.”—“It is obvious, therefore, that Thrasymachus, and any other who seriously attempts to teach oratory, must first examine and explain very carefully, whether the mind is one thing, perfectly resembling itself, or like the body, of many different kinds: since this is what we found to be the meaning of what we call unfolding its nature. Next, he must teach in what manner the mind, by its nature, affects, and is affected by, other things: and, thirdly, classing the different kinds of mind, the different modes of speaking, and the various properties of both, he must adapt the one to the other, and show, what sort of mind, is or is not persuaded, by what sort of speech, and why.”—“Most true; and in no other way is it possible either to speak or write according to art.”

“Since, in short, the end of speech is to influence the mind, he who understands oratory as an art, must know what are the different kinds of mind; what are the different modes of speaking; and, that a mind of such and such a sort, is likely to be persuaded by such and such a mode of speaking, but not likely to be persuaded by such and such another mode, and this for such and such a reason. And when he has mastered all this, unless he be also a ready observer of what actually goes on in the world, he will still know nothing but precisely what he has learned. But if he knows what sort of man is persuaded by what sort of speaking, and is able besides to distinguish in real life whether the man whom he is to persuade is that sort of man or not, then he will know what is the proper time for using your figures of rhetoric, your βραχυλογία and ἐλεεινολογία, and δείνωσις, and the rest; and then and not till then will he be a master of the art. Can you think of any other mode?”—“No.”—“Let us strive all we can to find whether there by any shorter and smoother road to the oratorical art, that we may not take a roundabout way when there is a shorter cut. Can you recollect any thing of that sort which you have heard from Lysias?”—“I do not.”—“Shall I tell you then what I have sometimes heard people say? for it is said that even the wolf ought to have a fair hearing?”—“By all means.”

“They say, then, that there is no need to make oratory so various a matter, or go so far back in order to arrive at it. The orator has nothing to do with what is just or good, either in things or men: it is not the true which any one cares for in a court of justice, but the plausible: and probability is all which he who speaks according to art, needs attend to. It is not proper even to assert what actually happened, if the story be not a probable one: and in short the probable, and not the true, should be our aim in accusation or defence, and the art of attaining it is the only art of oratory required.”

“This,” replied Phædrus, “is what those say who profess to understand the art of speaking.”—“You have read Tisias: does not Tisias understand by the probable, that which accords with the opinion of the multitude?”—“He does.”—“This, then, is his wise invention; that if a feeble but brave man is brought to trial for knocking down and robbing a robust coward, neither of them should speak the truth, but the coward should say, that more than one man attacked him; the other denying this and proving that they were alone, should ask, How could so weak a person as I, think of attacking so strong a man? whereupon the first should not plead his own cowardice, but should invent some other falsehood to confute that of his adversary.”—“A clever and recondite art truly.”—“But did we not before agree that this Probable, which Tisias aims at, is probable (that is, is believed by the multitude) only on account of its similitude to the truth? and that he who knows the truth, is the best judge of degrees of resemblance to it? We shall therefore continue to believe, as we before said, that without understanding the nature of the different sorts of hearers, and being able to distinguish things into their kinds, and again to aggregate a number of particulars into one whole, it is impossible to attain the highest excellence which man is capable of, in the art of speaking. All this, however, cannot be learned without great study; which study a wise man ought to perform, not for the mere sake of speaking and transacting among men, but in order to be able to speak and act agreeably to the gods. Men wiser than we, have said that we ought not to make it our object to please our fellow-servants, except as a work of supererogation: but to please good masters. It is no wonder, therefore, if the course is long and roundabout: for there is a great purpose to be served by making this circuit—a far greater purpose than that which Tisias aims at; though even that is to be attained most effectually by the same means.

“So much then on the subject of the art of speaking. It remains to consider in what consists propriety or impropriety of writing.

“Do you know what mode of dealing with discourse is most agreeable to a divinity?”—“No: do you?”—“I can relate what has been heard from the sages of old. Whether it is true, the gods themselves alone know. But if we could find this, should we, after that, care for the opinions of men?”—“It would be ridiculous: but pray tell us what you say you have heard.”—“I have heard that at Naucratis in Egypt, there resided one of the ancient gods of that country, named Theuth, who first invented numbers, and calculation, and geometry, and astronomy, and dice-playing, and, among other things, writing. Now, Thamos being king in Egypt, who is likewise a god, and whom the Greeks call Ammon, Theuth went to him and expounded to him these arts, and spoke of the great advantage of communicating them to the other Egyptians. The other asked him the use of each art, and praised or blamed it according to the answer he received. Now when the art of writing came under consideration, Theuth said, ‘This art will make the Egyptians wiser, and will aid their memory: for it is a help to memory and to wisdom.’ The other answered, ‘Most sage Theuth, it is one thing to be able to invent an art, and another to judge of its beneficial or hurtful effects: and now you, who are the inventor of writing, have ascribed to it, from partiality, an effect the exact opposite of its real one: this art will produce forgetfulness in those who learn it, by causing them to trust to written memoranda, and neglect their memory. What you have discovered, therefore, is an aid not to memory, but to recollection; and you will give to your scholars the opinion of wisdom, not the reality: for hearing much from you, without really learning it, they will appear men of great acquirements, though really for the most part ignorant and incapable.’ ”

Phædrus here observed, “You very easily invent Egyptian tales, or tales of any country you please.”—“They say,” replied Socrates, “that the first prophecies, those at Dodona, were delivered by an oak. The men of those days, not being so wise as we moderns, were so silly as to be content to listen to an oak or a stone, provided it did but speak the truth: but to you perhaps it is of importance who the speaker is, and from whence he comes: for you do not consider merely whether the fact is or is not so.”—“Your reproof is just.”—“He then who thinks that he can leave behind him an art in a book, and he who learns it out of a book, and thinks he has got something clear and solid, are extremely simple, and do not know the saying of Ammon, or they would not suppose that a written book could do any thing more than remind one who knows already.

“Writing is something like painting: the creatures of the latter art look very like living beings; but, if you ask them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. Written discourses do the same: you would fancy, by what they say, that they had some sense in them; but, if you wish to learn, and therefore interrogate them, they have only their first answer to return to all questions. And when the discourse is once written, it passes from hand to hand, among all sorts of persons,—those who can understand it, and those who cannot. It is not able to tell its story to those only to whom it is suitable; and when it is unjustly criticised, it always needs its author to assist it, for it cannot defend itself.

“There is another sort of discourse, which is far better and more potent than this.”—“What is it?”—“That which is written scientifically in the learner’s mind. This is capable of defending itself; and it can speak itself, or be silent, as it sees fit.”—“You mean the real and living discourse of the person who understands the subject; of which discourse the written one may be called the picture?”—“Precisely. Now, think you that a sensible husbandman would take seed which he valued, and wished to produce a harvest, and would seriously, after the summer had begun, scatter it in the gardens of Adonis, for the pleasure of seeing it spring up and look green in a week? or, do you not rather think that he might indeed do this for sport and amusement, but, when his purpose was serious, would employ the art of agriculture, and, sowing the seed at the proper time, be content to gather in his harvest in the eighth month?”—“The last, undoubtedly.”—“And do you think that he who possesses the knowledge of what is just, and noble, and good, will deal less prudently with his seeds than the husbandman with his?”—“Certainly not.”—“He will not, then, seriously set about sowing them with a pen and a black liquid; or, (to drop the metaphor,) scattering these truths by means of discourses which cannot defend themselves against attack, and which are incapable of adequately expounding the truth. No doubt, he will, for the sake of sport, occasionally scatter some of the seeds in this manner, and will thus treasure up memoranda for himself, in case he should fall into the forgetfulness of old age, and for all others who follow in the same track; and he will be pleased when he sees the blade growing up green. When others play and amuse themselves in other ways, soaking themselves with wine, and so forth, he will choose this as his amusement.”—“And a far better one than the other.”—“Assuredly; but it is a far better employment still, when any one, employing the dialectical art, and finding a mind which affords a suitable soil, sows and plants therein, with knowledge, discourses which can defend themselves and him who sows them, and which are not barren, but in their turn bear seed, from whence other discourses being reared up in other minds, can make their truths immortal, and can give to those who possess them, as much happiness as man is capable of.

“We have now, then, found what we were seeking for; viz., to be enabled to judge whether it is justly a reproach to Lysias to be a writer of discourses; and what was the difference between discourses according to art, and those which are without art.

“On the subject of art, we have come to the conclusion, that unless a man knows the truth on the subject on which he speaks or writes, and can define the subject itself, and divide it into kinds until he reaches the indivisible; and, unless he understands the nature of Mind, and having found out what kind of discourse is suitable to each kind of mind, adapts his discourse accordingly (giving to minds of complex and diversified structure, discourses of the same kind, and to simple minds, simple discourses)—unless he does all this, he does not possess, in the greatest perfection, the art of discourse, whether his end in discoursing be to instruct, or only to persuade.

“And we can now answer the other question, whether to be a writer of discourses is a reproach. If either Lysias, or any other man, composes a written discourse on political affairs, and fancies that there is much of clearness and solidity in it, this is a reproach to the writer, no doubt; for, not to know what is valuable and what is otherwise, in respect to justice and injustice, good and evil, is a reproach, even though the crowd should be unanimous in their applause of it. But a person who thinks that what is said upon any subject in a written treatise can be no better than sport, and that nothing worthy of very serious attention was ever written or delivered in a speech, and that the best of them are nothing more than memoranda to remind those who already know, and that there is nothing satisfactory or complete, or worthy to be seriously considered, but in the discourses which are really taught and learnt and written in the mind; and that such discourses are the legitimate offspring of ourselves, first the one which is in our own minds, (if we have found one, and planted it there,) and next those brothers or children of it, which have sprung up at the same time in other minds of other persons; this is such a person as you, Phædrus, and I, should wish to be.” Phædrus assented.

“Do you, then, tell Lysias, that we two came down here, to the fountain of the nymphs, and that the nymphs bid us tell him and all other speech writers, Homer and all other poets, Solon and all others who write what they call laws, that if they composed these writings knowing what the truth is, and being able to maintain a discussion on the matters of which they wrote, and to make, by what they speak, what they have written appear insignificant, they ought not to be named from this lighter pursuit, but from their more serious occupation.”—“What name would you give them?”—“Wise appears to me too assuming a name, and fit only for a God; but Seeker of Wisdom” (ϕιλόσοϕος, whence the modern word “philosopher”) “would be a more suitable and decorous appellation.”—“Agreed.”—“He, on the other hand, who has not in himself anything of a higher and more perfect kind than what he puts down in writing, he may be justly called a poet, or a speech-writer, or a law-writer.”—“Allowed.”—“Then tell this to your friend.”

They here end their discourse; but before they quit the spot, Socrates suggests the propriety of addressing a prayer to the deities of the place. His prayer is as follows: “O Pan, and whatever other gods preside over this spot, grant to me to be beautiful inwardly; and let my outside, whatever it is, be suitable to what I have within. The rich man, in my estimation, is the man who is wise; but of gold, let me have so much as can be sufficient to no one save the prudent and temperate.

“Is there anything else which we are in want of, Phædrus? My wants have been tolerably well cared for in this prayer.”—“Offer up the same prayer for me: friends have all their affairs in common.”—“Let us depart.”

It will have been remarked that Socrates himself treats the whole of this conversation as of no serious moment, (sport, as he terms it,) except the concluding discussion; the object of which is one that is incessantly aimed at in the writings of Plato. This is, in the first place, to enforce the absolute necessity, as the foundation for all safe practice, of a just and unambiguous definition of the subject-matter; and, secondly, to show that this definition can only be arrived at by an operation which we should call a philosophical analysis, and which he describes as a process of composition and decomposition, or rather decomposition and recomposition; first distinguishing a whole into its kinds or parts, and then looking at those kinds or parts attentively, in such a manner as to extract from them the idea of the whole. This two-fold process of analysis and synthesis is the grand instrument of Plato’s method of philosophising. In the comprehension of the general ideas thus obtained, (or, as he expresses it in this dialogue, the apprehension of the same thing as One and as Many,) philosophy, according to him, consisted. And this principle is the corner-stone, not only of his logic, but of his metaphysics.

All who possess the faculty of recognising identity of thought notwithstanding diversity of language, (which, with the converse power of detecting difference of meaning under identity of expression, is the first characteristic of an intellect fit for philosophy,) will perceive that this principle of Plato’s is one on which all systems of logic are substantially in accordance. Bacon, Locke, Condillac, Stewart, and Kant, (we need not prolong the enumeration,) have concurred, both in using and in recommending the method of philosophising which Plato inculcates; though they are distinguished from one another by the different degree of clearness which the Platonic principle had assumed in their own minds, and the diversity of the substructure of metaphysical doctrines (for systems of metaphysics, like some birds’ nests, are built downwards, not upwards) which they have constructed underneath it.

When, for instance, Bacon, in defining the scope of all inquiries into the phenomena of nature, directs the inquirer to collect and compare all the accessible instances in which any phenomenon (say heat or cold, hardness or softness) manifests itself, and thence to deduce the nature, or as he calls it, the form, of Heat in general, Cold in general, Hardness and Softness in general, (forma calidi aut frigidi, &c.) wherein does this view of philosophic method differ from Plato’s? Where, again, a disciple of Locke or Condillac describes philosophy as consisting in abstraction and generalization, in the distribution of the objects of nature into convenient classes, and (by comparison of the different objects composing each class) framing general propositions expressive of the distinguishing properties of the class; this too is identical with Plato’s process of arriving at the knowledge of a thing by apprehending it as Many and as One. To apprehend it as Many, is to survey the various objects comprised in the class, and note their resemblances and differences. To apprehend it as One, is to evolve from this comparison a general definition of the class, omitting none of the properties by which as a class it is characterized.

When, however, these various philosophers, not content with cultivating the field of Logic, (or the science of the investigation of truth,) have dug down into that region of metaphysics which lies under logic, as it does under all the other sciences, and which must be examined before we can be sure that any of them are securely placed; the different explorers have brought up very different reports of what they have found there. While all agree in representing it as at least one of the principal aims of philosophy, to determine with precision the ideas as they are termed by Plato, the essences as others have called them, of those great genera and species under which we necessarily or habitually arrange all the objects of our knowledge; philosophers have differed, even to contrariety, in their notions of the real nature of those genera and species. Some have ascribed to them an objective reality, as things existing in themselves; others, more philosophically, have considered them as merely subjective, the creatures of our own minds. To state the same thing more clearly—some, including the greater number of the philosophers of the last two centuries, consider classification to be conventional, subject to no laws but those which convenience prescribes; while others, including most of the ancients, and the prevailing sect among the Aristotelian schoolmen of the middle ages, thought that genera and species exist by nature; that every individual thing naturally belongs to a certain species, and cannot be subjected to any other classification; and that as there are individual substances, so there are also universal substances, corresponding to our general or class names, and with which the individual substances which we rank under those classes are in a sort of mysterious communion. Thus, there are not only individual men, and individual stars, but there is also Man in general, and Star in general; which do not consist of individual men or stars considered in the aggregate, but are entities existing per se. John, Peter, or Paul are only constituted men by participating, in some strange way, in this universal essence of humanity.

We have stated this doctrine in its most systematic form and in its extreme extent, as it was conceived by that portion of the schoolmen called the Realists, who, however, had little warrant for it from the oracle in which they implicitly confided, their master Aristotle. To the same school, though in a somewhat qualified sense, the speculations of Plato decidedly assimilate him. His tendencies (for opinions, let us once more repeat, are not on such subjects to be ascribed to him) led him to attribute self-existence to genera and species. In the present dialogue he adverts only to those genera which form the basis of our great moral and emotional (or as the Germans say, æsthetic) classifications. The Just, the Brave, the Holy, the Beautiful (in English we more readily personify these abstractions by the words Justice, Courage, Holiness, Beauty) existed according to him as essences or Ideas, of which all sublunary things which we decorate by these names were but resemblances or copies: a doctrine shadowed forth in the mythos which occupies so conspicuous a place in the present dialogue. But the Ideas or essences of all other things had equally, in his view, an independent existence; and to these pre-existent ideas as his types or exemplars, the Creator fashioned all that he called into existence by his will. This is the doctrine more or less vaguely alluded to by those who speak of the Platonic or as it is sometimes called the Divine Idea.

Views not indeed the same but analogous to these, are professed at this day by most German philosophers, and by their followers in France and England. It is natural that persons holding such opinions, should deem these Ideas (for they have endeavoured to bring back the Platonic word to its Platonic sense) to be the objects of the highest knowledge; the knowledge to which the term Philosophy ought to be confined; and that to apprehend an idea “as One and as Many,” to detect and distinguish it when “immersed in matter” and clothed in innumerable circumstances, should be in their estimation, the triumph and the test of philosophic inquiry.

The more rational metaphysics which prevail among most English and French philosophers, lead to logical results not so different from these as the difference of the premises might lead one to suppose. Though classification be conventional, all science consists in generalization, and our attainments in science may be measured by the number of general truths which we are acquainted with, that is, by the amount of what we are able to predicate of classes. And, as we are at liberty to take any of the properties of an object for principles of classification, we can only know the essences of all possible classes by knowing all that is to be known concerning objects. In this sense, all science may be said, even by a follower of Locke or Condillac, to consist in knowing the essences of classes.

To apprehend with accuracy and distinctness all that is included in the conception of the classes which we have formed for ourselves, or which have been formed for us by our predecessors, does not according to this theory as according to Plato’s, constitute philosophy; but whoever takes this as his object, will scarcely fail of attaining all the other results which philosophy proposes to itself; at least in the field of morals and psychology; where the desideratum is not so much new facts, as a more comprehensive survey of known facts in their various bearings, all which are sure to be successively forced upon the attention by a well-conducted and unbiassed inquiry into the meaning of established terms, or, what is the same thing, into the essences of established classes. And this is the substance of Plato’s analytic method.

The Gorgias

[Monthly Repository, VIII (Oct., Nov., and Dec., 1834), 691-710, 802-15, and 829-42. Not republished; signed “A.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography (after the general heading cited on 38 above) as “No III. The Gorgias: part 1 in the M.R. for Octob. 1834 / part 2 in the M.R. for Nov. 1834 / part 3 in the M.R. for Decemb. 1834” (MacMinn, 37). In the Somerville College copy, inked corrections at 108n.1 change Καλὸνν to Καλὸν and Αἰσχρὸ to Αἰσχρὸν.

For comment on this and the other translations, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xvii-xxviii and lxxx-lxxxiii above.]

the dialogue on which we are now about to enter is among the most celebrated of Plato’s works, and deserves peculiar attention, as one of those on which his fame as an ethical writer is principally founded. The perusal of it is well fitted to suggest many reflections on the nature of ethical writing in general, and on the principles by which our estimation of a moralist ought to be guided; for some of which reflections we may, perhaps, find room at the conclusion of this notice. We shall now, without further delay, introduce the reader to Plato himself; merely premising as to the tendencies of the dialogue, that its whole drift and scope is to discredit mere worldly-minded men, and the teachers of those arts, or rather pursuits, (for our author uniformly refuses to them the name of arts,) which conduce only to worldly success; and to enforce, by all manner of considerations, the superior dignity and eligibility of a virtuous life, compared with the most successful achievements of a life of mere ambition, in which no moral obligations are recognized, or in which, if recognized, they are not regarded.

As this dialogue is one of the finest specimens both of Plato’s dialectical powers, and of his extraordinary dramatic talent, our abstract of it shall be fuller than usual.

Gorgias, of Leontium, the celebrated rhetorician, and a younger teacher of the same art, named Polus, are sojourning at Athens, in the house of Callicles, a man not otherwise known to us, but who seems to have been what is called a politician, (πολιτικός), a frequenter of, and speaker at, the public assemblies, the great object of whose life was the attainment of influence in public affairs. To this house Socrates, with his friend Chærephon, pays a visit, and finds that Gorgias has just terminated a long exposition, or lecture. Socrates, however, expressed a hope that Gorgias would still consent to expound to him; as he was desirous to hear from himself, what was the power of his art, and what it was he professed to teach: the remainder of his exposition might be postponed to another time. Callicles replied, that there was nothing like asking the man himself; and that he had, in fact, undertaken to answer whatever questions any one thought fit to ask. Socrates therefore requested Chærephon, who was previously acquainted with Gorgias, to ask. “Ask what?” said Chærephon.—“Ask him what he is.”—“How?”—“So that, if he made shoes, he would answer that he is a shoemaker: do you understand me?”—“Yes,” answered Chærephon, and addressed Gorgias thus: “Is it true, O Gorgias, as Callicles tells me, that you offer to answer any sort of questions?”—“It is. I said so just now; and no one, for many years past, has asked me any question which was new to me.”—“Then you must be very ready at answering.”—“You have it in your power to try me.”—“Yes,” (said Polus, interposing in the conversation,) “and me likewise, if you like: for Gorgias seems to me to be tired, having just now spoken at great length.”—“Do you think,” said Chærephon, “that you can answer better than Gorgias?”—“Of what consequence is that, if I can answer well enough for you?”—“Answer then. If Gorgias were skilled in the same art as his brother Herodicus, what ought we to call him?”—“What his brother is; a physician: is it not so?”—“Certainly.”—“If he were acquainted with the same art as Aristophon, what ought we to call him?”—“A painter.”—“But now, since he is skilled in some art, what is the name that we ought to give him?”—“O Chærephon,” answered Polus, “there are among men many arts, skilfully derived from skill. Skill makes our lives pass according to art; want of skill according to chance. Some partake of some of these arts, others of others: the best persons partake of the best arts; of whom Gorgias is one, and partakes of the noblest of arts.”

Socrates now interposes, and addressing Gorgias, observes, that Polus seems to be well provided with words, but that he has not performed what he promised to Chærephon. “What is that?” answered Gorgias.—“He does not answer the question which was put to him.”—“Suppose that you were to question him yourself.”—“If you will permit me, I would much rather question you: for it is clear to me, from what Polus said, that he has bestowed more attention upon what is called rhetoric, than upon the art of discussion,” (or dialectics).—“How so?” asked Polus.—“Because, when Chærephon asked you what was the art which Gorgias taught, you panegyrized the art, as if somebody had censured it, but what it was you did not tell.”—“Did I not say that it was the noblest of arts?”—“Very true: but nobody asked you what was the quality of Gorgias’s art, but what was the nature of it, and what Gorgias ought to be called. As then Chærephon put his first questions well, and you answered well and briefly, so now answer me what is the art of Gorgias, and what he is to be called: or rather, Gorgias, do you yourself tell us what art it is which you practise.”—“Rhetoric,” answered Gorgias.—“You are, then, a rhetorician?”—“A good one, if, as Homer says, you call me that which I boast of being.” —“and you are capable of making others so?”—“I profess to be capable.”

Soc. “Should you, Gorgias, be willing to continue questioning and answering as we have now begun, and to let alone, until another occasion, that length of discourse which Polus began with? If, however, you promise, do not fail to perform, but answer with brevity what is asked.” Gor. “Some answers it is impossible to give, except at considerable length: but I will attempt to do it as briefly as possible: for this, too, is one of the things which I profess; that no one can say the same thing in fewer words than myself.” S. “This is what there is now occasion for: be pleased, therefore, to exemplify your brevity now, and your power of enlarging another time.

“Since rhetoric is the thing you are skilled in, what is the subject-matter which rhetoric relates to? Weaving relates to the making of clothing; does it not?” G. “Yes.” S. “And music is about the making of songs?” G. “Yes.” S. “What, then, is rhetoric about?” G. “About discourse.”

S. “What sort of discourse? that which teaches the sick by what regimen they may get well?” G. “No.” S. “Rhetoric, then, does not relate to all sorts of discourse.” G. “It does not.” S. “But it makes men able to speak.” G. “It does.” S. “And on the matters on which it makes them able to speak, it makes them able likewise to think.” G. “Certainly.” S. “Now, does not the art of medicine enable people to speak and think concerning the sick?” G. “Undoubtedly.” S. “Then medicine likewise relates to discourse; viz., discourse on the subject of diseases.” G. “It does.” S. “And gymnastics relate to discourse; viz., discourse on the subject of good and bad habits of body.” G. “Without doubt.” S. “And the same thing may be said of all other arts: each of them relates to discourse; viz., discourse respecting the subject with which that particular art is conversant.” G. “It appears so.” S. “Why, then, do you not call the other arts rhetoric, being on the subject of discourse, if you call that which is on the subject of discourse by the name of rhetoric?” G. “Because the other arts relate, in a manner, entirely to manual operations, and such like things: but rhetoric has nothing to do with manual operations; it whole agency and force are by means of discourse.”

S. “Now I partly understand what you mean; but I hope to understand it still better. Are there not two kinds of arts? In the one kind, the greater part of the art lies in action, and these arts have occasion for but little discourse; some of them require none at all, and might be performed in silence, such as painting, sculpture, and so forth. This is the class to which you say that rhetoric does not belong: do you not?” G. “You understand me rightly.” S. “But there is another kind, which perform all by discourse, and require no action, or very little, such as arithmetic and geometry, and many others, some of which have about an equal share of action and of discourse, but the greater part have scarcely anything except discourse, and effect all their purposes by means of it: and I understand you to say that rhetoric is one of these.” G. “True.” S. “But you do not call any of the arts which I have mentioned, rhetoric? although in words you said as much, saying that rhetoric is the art of which the whole power consists in discourse; and if any one wished to cavil, he might ask, Do you, then, call arithmetic rhetoric? But I do not believe that you call either arithmetic or geometry by that name.” G. “You think rightly.” S. “Then finish the answer to my question. Since rhetoric is one of the arts which chiefly employ discourse, and since there are others which do the same, explain to me on what subject it is that rhetoric employs discourse. Thus, if any one asked me, What is arithmetic? I might answer as you did, It is one of the arts whose force consists in discourse. And if he should further inquire, On what subject? I should reply, On the subject of numbers. Since, then, rhetoric is one of the arts which effect their end wholly by means of discourse, what is the subject of the discourse which rhetoric employs?” G. “The greatest and best of the concerns of man.”

“But this answer,” observed Socrates, “is disputable and ambiguous. I suppose you have heard at entertainments the old song, Health is the best of all things, beauty the second best, and the third is to be rich without guilt.” G. “I have: but to what purpose is this?” S. “Because the providers of the three things which are praised in the old song, viz. the physician, the teacher of gymnastics, and the man of business, might start up, and, first, the physician might say, Gorgias deceives you, Socrates: it is not his art, but mine, which relates to the greatest and best concerns of man. And if I asked, Who are you who speak in this manner, he would answer, A physician. And if I rejoined, How do you prove the object of your art to be the greatest good? How can it be otherwise? he would reply: What greater good is there to man than health? In like manner the gymnast, and the man of business, would each set up the claim of his art to be the art which is conversant with the greatest good. I should answer, But Gorgias contends that his art produces a greater good to man than yours. They would then reply, And what is this good? Let Gorgias answer. Consider yourself, then, to be interrogated both by them and by me, and answer, what is this which you consider the greatest good to man, and of which you profess to be the artist?”

“It is,” replied Gorgias, “that which is really the greatest good, and which both enables men to be themselves free, and enables each, in his own state, to govern the rest.” S. “And what is this?” G. “The ability to persuade, by discourse, either judges in a tribunal, or senators in a council-house, or voters in a meeting of the people, and in every other political assembly. If you have this power, you will have the physician for your slave, the gymnast for your slave, and the man of business will transact business for the profit, not of himself, but of you who are able to speak and persuade the multitude.”

“Now,” replied Socrates, “you appear to me to come near to an explanation what art you consider rhetoric to be. If I understand you, rhetoric is that which works persuasion; and its whole agency is summed up and terminates in that. Or can you point out anything which rhetoric can do, more than to produce persuasion in the minds of the hearers?” G. “No: you seem to me to define it adequately.”

“Hear me, then,” said Socrates. “I persuade myself, that if there is any person who converses with another wishing to arrive at a real knowledge of the thing which the discussion relates to, I am such a person: and I wish you to be so.” G. “What then?” S. “I will tell you. What, and on what topics this persuasion is, which you say results from rhetoric, I do not clearly know; and though I certainly suspect, I will nevertheless ask you. Now, why do I, suspecting it myself, question you, and not myself declare it? Not on your account, but for the sake of the discussion, that it may proceed in such a manner as to make that about which we are talking clearest to us. Consider then whether I interrogate you fairly. If I were to ask you, what painter is Zeuxis? and you were to answer, The man who paints animals; might I not fairly ask you, What animals, on what material?” G. “Certainly.” S. “Because there are other painters who paint other animals.” G. “Yes.” S. “But if nobody had ever painted animals except Zeuxis, your answer would have been right.” G. “Certainly.” S. “Now then, on the subject of rhetoric, tell me, whether rhetoric is the only art which produces persuasion? What I mean is this: when a man teaches any thing, does he persuade people of that which he teaches, or not?” G. “He persuades more than any body.” S. “To return to our former examples—does not arithmetic, and does not the arithmetician, teach us the properties of numbers?” G. “Yes.” S. “Then they persuade us.” G. “Yes.” S. “Then arithmetic also works persuasion.” G. “So it seems.” S. “Then if we are asked, What persuasion, and respecting what; we should answer, The persuasion, which instructs us respecting the properties of numbers. And in like manner we can show what persuasion, and on what matter, is wrought by each of the other arts which we mentioned.” G. “Yes.” S. “Then rhetoric is not the only worker of persuasion?” G. “True.” S. “Then we may ask you, what persuasion, and on what matter, is wrought by rhetoric.” G. “The persuasion of courts of justice and other assemblies, and on the subject of the just and the unjust.”

S. “I suspected that you meant this kind of persuasion, and on this subject. But that you may not be surprised if I should hereafter ask you something which, like this, appears obvious, I do so in order that the argument may be carried straight through: not on your account, but that we may not accustom ourselves to anticipate each other’s meaning by guess; and that you may complete your exposition in your own manner.” G. “You do very right.” S. “Let us then consider this. There is such a thing as to learn?” G. “Yes.” S. “And such a thing as to believe?” G. “Yes.” S. “To believe and to learn, are these the same thing, or different things?” G. “Different things, I conceive.” S. “You conceive rightly, as may be known from this: If you were asked whether there are true belief and false belief, you would say, Yes.” G. “I should.” S. “But are there true knowledge and false knowledge?” G. “No.” S. “Then they are not the same thing?” G. “They are not.” S. “But they who have learnt, and they who only believe, are both of them persuaded?” G. “They are.” S. “Shall we say, then, that there are two kinds of persuasion, the one affording belief without knowledge, the other affording knowledge?” G. “Yes.” S. “Which sort of persuasion does rhetoric produce in courts of justice and other assemblies, respecting the just and the unjust? The sort which produces belief without knowledge, or that which produces knowledge?” G. “Evidently that which produces belief.” S. “Rhetoric, then, works the persuasion of belief, not the persuasion of knowledge, respecting the just and the unjust?” G. “Yes.” S. “The orator then does not instruct courts of justice and other assemblies respecting the just and the unjust, but only persuades them: for he could not, in a short time, instruct a large assembly in such great matters?” G. “Certainly not.” S. “Let us see then what we are to think of rhetoric; for I do not know what to say about it. When an assembly is called together for the choice of physicians, or of ship builders, or any other sort of artists, will the rhetorician then not offer his opinion? for it is clear that in every election, whoever is the greatest master of the art ought to be chosen. If the question relate to the building of walls, or the construction of ports or docks, will the advisers be not the rhetoricians, but the engineers? If it relate to the choice of generals, or the operations of warfare, will the men versed in military affairs advise, and the rhetoricians not? or how is it? for since you say that you are a rhetorician, and can make others so, it is right to ask of you what belongs to your art. Consider me to be advancing your own interests also: for there are perhaps some persons here who wish to become your disciples. Imagine that you are asked by them, What shall we get by your instructions? on what subject shall we be able to advise the State? on the just and the unjust only, or on the other matters also, which Socrates just now mentioned?”

“I will endeavour,” answered Gorgias, “to unfold to you clearly the whole power of rhetoric; for you have well led the way. You know that the walls, and docks, and harbours of Athens were constructed by the advice of Themistocles and of Pericles, not by that of the workmen.” S. “They say so of Themistocles; and Pericles I have myself heard.” G. “And when there is a choice to be made on these matters, you see that the orators are those who prevail, and carry the people along with them.” S. “It is the wonder which this excites in me, that makes me so anxious to find out what is the power of rhetoric; for, when considered in this light, it appears a thing of astonishing greatness.” G. “If you knew all, you would see that it comprises and holds subject to itself almost all other powers. I will give you a remarkable proof:—Often have I gone, with my brother and other physicians, to visit a sick man who would not take medicine or undergo an operation; and when the physician could not persuade him, I persuaded him, by no other art than rhetoric. I affirm, that, in any city you please, if a rhetorician and a physician were to contend, by discourse, in an assembly or meeting, as competitors for appointment to any office, the physician would be thought nothing of; the able speaker would be chosen, if he wished it: and if he became the rival of any other artist whatever, he would persuade them to choose him in preference to the other; for there is no subject on which a rhetorician would not speak more persuasively than any other person, to a multitude. Such and so great is the power of the art. It should, however, be used like any other power of subversion and overthrow. Such power ought not, because we possess it, to be therefore used against all persons indiscriminately. It does not follow, because a man has learnt to box, or to wrestle, or to fence, so as to be more than a match for friend or foe, that he should beat, and wound, and slay his friends: neither, if when, by gymnastic exercises, a man has acquired strength and skill, he beats his father, or his mother, or any of his relations or friends, ought we therefore to abhor and expel from the state the teachers of gymnastics and the fencing masters. They communicated the art, that it might be used justly, against the enemy and against wrongdoers, defensively, not for purposes of aggression; but their pupils pervert the faculty, and turn their strength and their art to an improper use. We are not, however, to impute this, and the criminality of it, to the art or to the teachers of the art, but to those who employ it ill. The like is true with rhetoric. An orator is able to speak to all men and on any subject, so as to persuade the multitude; but he ought not to employ this faculty in depriving physicians or artificers of their reputation, merely because he has the power to do so: he should use rhetoric, like any other power, with justice: and if, having become a rhetorician, he employs his power and his art to do wrong, we should not abhor and banish the teacher, who gave the art for a good purpose, but him who employs it for a bad one.”

Socrates thus replied: “I think, Gorgias, that you have had experience of many discussions, and must have perceived this, that men seldom know how jointly to examine and mark out the things about which they attempt to discuss; and having learnt and instructed themselves, so to break off the conversation. But if they dispute on any matter, and one of them charges the other with not speaking rightly, or not clearly, they are angry, and think that it is said in envy, and not in the pursuit of the proposed object of discourse; and they sometimes end by shamefully reproaching one another, and bandying such words as make the bystanders ashamed of themselves for having desired to listen to such men. Why do I say this? Because, what you now say, appears to me not very consistent with what you previously said concerning rhetoric. Now, I am afraid to confute you, lest you should suppose that I do it not from zeal to find the thing which we are in quest of, but in the spirit of contention against you. Now, if you are such a person as I am, I should like to go on interrogating you; if not, I will let it alone. And what sort of a man am I? One, who would gladly be refuted, if I affirm what is not true; and who would gladly refute, when another person does so; but who would just as gladly be refuted as refute; for I think it a greater good, by so much as it is a greater thing, to be ourselves relieved from the greatest of evils, than to relieve another person; and I conceive that there is no human evil so great as false opinion on the subject of which our present discourse treats. If, then, you are a person of the same sort, let us continue; but if you think we had better leave off, we will.”

“I,” said Gorgias, “profess to be such a person as you describe; but perhaps we should consider the wish of those who are present.” They, however, unanimously begged that the argument might proceed; and Gorgias said it would be disgraceful for him, especially after he had undertaken to answer all questions, not to be willing to continue.

“Hear, then,” resumed Socrates, “something in your discourse which surprises me. You say that you can make any person, who receives your instructions, an orator, capable of persuading a multitude; not producing knowledge in their minds, but belief. You said that, on the subject of the healthful or unhealthful, an orator would be more capable of persuading than a physician.” G. “Certainly; in a multitude.” S. “In a multitude, is as much as to say, among those who do not know; for those who do know, will not be persuaded by him better than by a physician.” G. “Certainly.” S. “Then, if he is more persuasive than a physician, he is more persuasive than one who knows?” G. “Undoubtedly.” S. “Not being himself a physician?” G. “No.” S. “And, therefore, being ignorant of those things which the physician knows?” G. “Yes.” S. “When, then, the orator is more persuasive than the physician, one who does not know is more persuasive among those who do not know, than one who does know?” G. “This certainly follows.” S. “So it is, then, in all other arts. The orator and his art need not know how things really are; but they have invented a contrivance of persuasion, by which, among those who do not know, they appear to know more than those who do know.” G. “Is it not, then, a great privilege, not learning any other art, but only this one, to be nowise inferior to the artists themselves?”

“Whether,” replied Socrates, “the orator is inferior or not inferior to other people, we shall examine by-and-bye. At present let me inquire this:—Is the rhetorician situated in the same manner with respect to the just and unjust, the noble and disgraceful, the good and evil, as he is with respect to health, and the other subjects of the different arts; viz., himself, not knowing what is good or evil, just or unjust, but having a contrivance of persuasion, so as to appear, among those who do not know, to be more knowing than those who do? Or is it necessary that he should really know these things, and should have learnt them before he comes to learn rhetoric from you? And pray, will you, the teacher of rhetoric, if you find him ignorant of these things, not teach him them, but only enable him, not knowing them, to seem to the vulgar to know them, and appear a good man without being so? Or, are you not able to teach him rhetoric at all, unless he knows the real nature of these things beforehand? Or how is it? And pray unfold to me, as you just now said, the whole power of the art.” G. “I conceive, that if he happened not to know these things, he would learn these likewise from me.” S. “If, then, you are to make any person a rhetorician, it is necessary that he should know the just and the unjust, either beforehand, or by your instructions?” G. “Yes.”

S. “Now, is not he who has learnt architecture, an architect?” G. “Yes.” S. “He who has learnt music, a musician?” G. “Yes.” S. “He who has learnt medicine, a physician; and, to speak generally, he who has learnt anything, is that which the science he has learnt causes men to be.” G. “Certainly.” S. “Then, by this reasoning, he who has learnt justice is just.” G. “Certainly.” S. “Then a rhetorician must be just.” G. “Yes.” S. “But a just man acts justly.” G. “Yes.” S. “And a just man must necessarily wish to act justly?” G. “So it seems.” S. “Then a just man will never wish to do injustice.” G. “No.” S. “But we said that a rhetorician must be just.” G. “Yes.” S. “Then a rhetorician will never wish to do injustice.” G. “It appears not.”S. “Do you remember now, that you said a short time ago, that as a gymnast ought not to be blamed nor expelled from the State if a boxer or wrestler makes an ill use of his art, so if an orator uses rhetoric for a bad purpose, we ought not to reproach or banish the teacher of rhetoric, but the person who perverts it to unjust purposes.” G. “I did.” S. “But now it seems that a rhetorician cannot be unjust.” G. “It seems so.” S. “And it was observed before, that the subject of rhetoric is discourse; not discourse on numbers, but discourse on the just and the unjust.” G. “Yes.” S. “When you said this, I imagined that rhetoric could not be an unjust thing, since all its discourse is of justice; but when you afterwards said that an orator might employ rhetoric unjustly, I wondered, and thinking the two assertions inconsistent, I said, that if you, like myself, thought it a benefit to be refuted, it was worth while to continue the argument, but if not, it was better to leave it alone. And now, on further inquiry, we have admitted that a rhetorician cannot possibly use rhetoric unjustly, or wish to do injustice. To discover how this is, would require not a little conversation and discussion.”

Here Polus breaks in; and, as we have seen in the preceding part of the dialogue how Socrates could conduct a respectful and well-bred disputation, we shall now see in what manner he could beat back an overweening and petulant assailant.

“What!” said Polus: “do you really think, on the subject of rhetoric, what you say? Do you not perceive that the advantage you have assumed over Gorgias is only owing to his shamefacedness, because he did not like to confess the truth? He was ashamed not to profess that a rhetorician knows what is really just, and good, and noble, and that he, Gorgias, if any one comes to him ignorant of these things, can teach them. In consequence of this admission, something like a contradiction, perhaps, arose in his discourse; the thing which always delights you. Who do you suppose would not, if asked, affirm that he knows what is just, and can teach it? But it is extremely unfair and ill-bred to drive any one into such a dilemma.”

“Most excellent Polus,” replied Socrates, “the great use of having friends or sons is, that when we grow old and fall into error, you younger men may set us right. If, therefore, Gorgias and I have made any mistake, do you correct it: and if any of our admissions appear to you improper, we will retract it, if you will only guard against one thing.” P. “What thing?” S. “That lengthiness of discourse which you began with.” P. “What! Shall I not be allowed to say as much as I please?” S. “You would be extremely ill used, my good friend, if coming to Athens, where there is greater freedom of speech than in any other city in Greece, you alone should not be suffered to participate in it. But consider this on the other hand: If you make long speeches, and do not choose to answer the question that is put to you, should not I also be very ill used if I were not allowed to go away and not listen to you? If you have a real regard for the discussion which has been commenced, and wish to rectify what was wrong in it, take back any of the concessions that have been made, and by questioning and answering, refute and be refuted; for you profess to know what Gorgias knows, do you not?” P. “I do.” S. “Then you also invite persons to put questions to you, and undertake to answer them?” P. “Certainly.” S. “Then do which you please; interrogate, or answer.”

P. “So I will. Tell me, Socrates, since you think that Gorgias cannot tell what rhetoric is, pray what do you consider it to be?” S. “Do you ask me what art I consider it to be?” P. “I do.” S. “No art at all, to tell you the truth.” P. “What thing, then, do you call it?” S. “A thing which you, in a book which I lately read, profess to erect into an art.” P. “And what is it?” S. “A kind of skill.” P. “Rhetoric, then, according to you, is a kind of skill?” S. “Yes, if you have no objection.” P. “Skill in what?” S. “In gratification, and the production of pleasure.” P. “Is not rhetoric, then, a fine thing, since it is capable of causing gratification?” S. “What, Polus! have I yet told you what I say it is, so that you should already ask me whether I do not think it a fine thing?” P. “Did you not tell me that it was a kind of skill?” S. “Since you set such a value on gratification, will you gratify me a little?” P. “I will.” S. “Ask me, then, what art I consider cookery to be.” P. “I ask you, what art is cookery?” S. “None at all.” P. “What is it then?” S. “A kind of skill.” P. “Skill in what?” S. “In gratification, and the production of pleasure.” P. “Are cookery and rhetoric, then, the same thing?” S. “No; but they are branches of the same pursuit.” P. “What pursuit is that?” S. “I am afraid it would be ill bred to say the truth: I do not like to say it, on Gorgias’s account, lest he should think that I am satirizing his profession. I do not know whether this is the rhetoric which Gorgias professes: for we could not make out clearly in the former discussion what he understands by it: but what I call rhetoric, is a branch of a thing which is not very admirable.” “What thing?” asked Gorgias. “Speak; and do not have any reluctance on my account.”

S. “I think, Gorgias, that it is a pursuit, not governed by art, but belonging to a mind of great tact and boldness, and greatly fitted by nature for intercourse with men: and I call it, in one word, Adulation. Of this pursuit there are many other branches, and cookery is one, which is thought to be an art, but, in my opinion, is no art, but a skill, and a routine. I call rhetoric, and cosmetics, (the toilet,) and the pursuit of the sophist, other species of the same pursuit. There are thus four branches of it, conversant with four different things. If Polus wishes to question me further, let him do so; for I have told him that I consider rhetoric to be a branch of adulation, but not what branch; and he has overlooked that I have not yet answered his first question, though he goes on pressing me with a second, and asks me whether I think rhetoric a fine thing, before I have answered what it is. This is not fair, Polus; if you wish to know, ask me what branch of adulation I affirm rhetoric to be.” P. “I do ask; answer what branch it is?” S. “Do you think you shall understand my answer? Rhetoric, in my view of the matter, is the counterfeit of a branch of politics.” P. “Well then, do you call it a noble or an ignoble thing?”S. “An ignoble thing; for all bad things I call ignoble: since I must answer you as if you already understood what I have been saying.” “By Jupiter!” said Gorgias, “neither do I myself understand what you mean.” S. “And no wonder, for I have not yet explained myself at all clearly; but Polus is young and sharp.” “Leave him alone,” resumed Gorgias, “and tell me how you consider rhetoric to be the counterfeit of a branch of politics.”

“I will try,” said Socrates, “to explain what rhetoric seems to me to be: and, if it be not so, Polus will refute me. There are such things as body and mind?” Gorgias answered, “There are.” S. “There is such a thing as a good habit of body, or of mind?” G. “There is.” S. “And there is such a thing as an apparently good habit, which is not really so. Many persons seem to be in a good state of body, and no one but a physician or a gymnast could readily perceive that they are not so.” G. “True.” S. “There are things, moreover, which cause the body and the mind to be apparently in a good state, without really improving their condition at all.” G. “There are so.”

S. “Now, then, I can more clearly explain my meaning. These two things, body and mind, form the subjects of two arts. The art which relates to the mind, I call Politics, or the Social Art. The art which relates to the body, I cannot call by any single name; but the culture of the body, being itself one, has two branches, which are, gymnastics and medicine. Politics consists of the art of legislation, which corresponds to gymnastics, and the art of judicature, which corresponds to medicine. Gymnastics and Medicine, as they relate to the same subject, have some things in common with each other, as have likewise Judicature and Legislation; but they nevertheless have some differences. These, then, are four arts, which serve the body and the mind, always having in view their greatest good. Adulation, perceiving this, I do not say knowing, but divining it, separates itself into four branches, and, decking itself in the garb of these four arts, pretends to be that which it counterfeits; not paying any regard to the greatest good, but baiting its hook with the greatest pleasure, so as to deceive the unreflecting, and appear the most valuable of all things. Cookery puts on the semblance of medicine, and pretends to know what kinds of food are best for the body; and if a physician and a cook had to appear before children, or before men who are as unthinking as children, that it might be decided which of them best understood good and bad diet, the physician would starve for want of employment. This I call adulation, and I hold it to be a disgraceful thing, Polus, because it aims at the pleasant only, without regarding the greatest good; and I affirm that it is not an art, but a mere skill, because it cannot give any account of the real nature of the things which it employs, nor, consequently, can it explain the cause of the effects which it produces. I do not give the name of art to that which cannot render a reason for what it enjoins. If you doubt this, I am willing to contest it with you. Cookery, then, counterfeits medicine. In like manner, Cosmetics counterfeits Gymnastics, being a tricky, ignoble, and illiberal practice, which deceives by artificial colour and smoothness and figure and dress; and, by giving factitious beauty, produces neglect of our own natural beauty, which is the result of gymnastics. Not to be lengthy, I will say to you in geometrical language, that, as Cookery is to Medicine, so is Cosmetics to Gymnastics; or, rather, as Cosmetics to Gymnastics, so is the pursuit of the sophist to the art of Legislation; and, as Cookery to Medicine, so is Rhetoric to the art of Judicature. These distinctions, at any rate, are real; although their pursuits, being nearly allied, are not unfrequently blended together, and it is not possible always to distinguish accurately which of them is practised by any particular individual.

“Now, if the body were not governed by the mind, but governed itself; if Cookery and Medicine were not surveyed and discriminated by the mind, but were to be judged by the body, taking its own gratification for the standard; no doubt the things which conduce to health, and those which conduce to the palate, the things which belong to Medicine, and those which belong to Cookery, would be all confounded together. You now therefore know what I assert Rhetoric to be: The counterpart of Cookery. Rhetoric is to the mind what Cookery is to the body.

“Perhaps, now, I have acted unaccountably, inasmuch as I would not let you make a long speech, and I have made one myself. But you ought to excuse me, for when I spoke concisely you did not understand me, nor could make any use of my answer: you needed a long dissertation. If, then, you find that I cannot understand, or make use of your answers, do you also prolong your discourse; but, if I can, permit me to do so, for that is but just. And now, if you can make any thing of my present answer, do so.”

“What!” asked Polus, “Do you affirm rhetoric to be Adulation?” S. “I said, a branch of Adulation.” P. “Do good orators appear to you to be of mean account in a state, as being adulators?” S. “Do you mean this as a question, or is it the beginning of a speech?” P. “As a question.” S. “They do not seem to me to be of any account at all.” P. “How, of no account? Are they not the most powerful persons in a state?” S. “Not if you mean that to be powerful is a good thing for the powerful person.” P. “But I do.” S. “Then orators appear to me to be less powerful in a state than any other persons whatever.” P. “What! Do they not, like despots, put to death whomsoever they desire, and deprive of his property and expel from the state whomsoever they think fit?” S. “I am continually in doubt whether you are giving these things as your own opinion, or asking me for mine.” P. “I am asking you.” S. “Then you are asking me two questions at once.” P. “How so?” S. “Did you not say, that orators, like despots, put to death whomsoever they desire, and deprive of his property and expel from the state whomsoever they think fit?”P. “I did.” S. “These I call two questions; and I will answer both of them. I say that orators, and despots too, have scarcely any power at all in a state, inasmuch as they accomplish scarcely any of the things which they desire; but they certainly effect what they think fit.” P. “But this surely is to be powerful.” S. “Not on your showing.” P. “Not on my showing? but it is on my showing.” S. “Not so indeed, since you said that to be powerful was a good thing for the powerful person.” P. “I say so still.” S. “Do you think it a good thing for a person to accomplish what he thinks fit, if he is without good sense? and is this what you call being powerful?” P. “Not I.” S. “Then if you would refute him, you must show that orators have good sense, and that rhetoric is an art, not an adulation. But though you should leave me unrefuted, orators and despots who do whatever they think fit in a state, will be never the better for it. Power, you say, is something good. But to effect what we think fit, being without good sense, you yourself allow to be a bad thing.” P. “I do.” S. “How then can orators or despots be powerful in a state, unless you prove against me that they effect what they desire?” P. “What a man!” S. “I say, they do not effect what they desire.” P. “Did you not admit that they effect what they think fit?” S. “I admit it still.” P. “Then they effect what they desire.” S. “I say not.” P. “Although they effect what they think fit?” S. “Yes.” P. “You talk nonsense.” S. “Do not inveigh against me, most worthy Polus: but if you have any questions to put, show that I am wrong; if not, do you yourself answer.” P. “I am willing to answer, that I may know what it is you mean.”

S. “Does it seem to you that people, on each occasion, desire the thing itself which they do, or the thing for the sake of which they do it? For instance, does a person who takes medicine, desire the actual thing which he does, viz. to drink the potion and suffer pain, or the thing for the sake of which he does it, viz. to be in health?” P. “Evidently, to be in health.” S. “And navigators, or other men of business, do not desire the actual thing which they do (for who would desire all sorts of trouble and danger?) but they desire the thing for the sake of which all this is done, viz., to be rich?” P. “Very true.” S. “And the case is the same with every thing, is it not? When we do one thing for the sake of another, what we desire is not the thing which we do, but the thing for the sake of which we do it.” P. “Certainly.” S. “Now are not all things either good or bad, or between the two, neither good nor bad?” P. “Certainly.” S. “Wisdom, health, riches, and so forth, you call good, and their opposites bad.” P. “Undoubtedly.” S. “And the things which are neither good nor bad, are those which sometimes partake of good, sometimes of bad, sometimes of neither; as to sit, or to walk, or to run, or to sail, or as wood and stone, and so forth.” P. “True.” S. “Do we perform these indifferent things for the sake of the good things, or the good things for the sake of the indifferent things?” P. “We perform the indifferent things for the sake of the good things.” S. “Then, when we walk, we do so in pursuit of good, and when we stand, it is for the same reason.” P. “Yes.” S. “And if we kill any one, or banish him, or confiscate his property, it is because we think it better to do so, than not.” P. “Certainly.” S. “Those then who do these things, do them for the sake of good.” P. “Granted.” S. “But we admitted that we desire, not those things which we perform for the sake of other things, but those other things, for the sake of which we perform them.” P. “Most true.” S. “Then we do not desire simply to kill men or banish them, or to deprive them of their property: but we desire to do these things if they be beneficial, and not to do them if they be hurtful. For, as you say, we desire the things which are good, but do not desire those which are indifferent, or bad. Do I say true? Why do you not answer?” P. “It is true.” S. “Then, this being granted, if any one, being an orator or a despot, kills another or takes any of his property or banishes him, thinking it to be a good thing for him to do so, when in reality it is a bad thing, this person does what he thinks fit?” P. “Yes.” S. “But does he do what he desires, if these things are in reality bad? Why do you not answer?” P. “It appears that he does not do what he desires.” S. “Can such a person then be said to be powerful in a state, if to be powerful be, as you say, a good thing?” P. “He cannot.” S. “Then I said truly when I affirmed that it was possible to effect in a state whatever we think fit, and yet not to be powerful, nor effect what we desire.”

P. “So, then, Socrates, you would not like that it should be allowed you to accomplish in the state whatever seems fit to you, nor do you feel envy when you see a man killing, or imprisoning, or depriving of their property whomsoever he pleases.”

“Do you mean,” answered Socrates, “justly or unjustly?” P. “In whichever way it is done, is it not enviable?” S. “It is not proper to envy the unenviable nor the miserable, but to pity them.” P. “What! do you think it is thus with the persons whom I describe?” S. “Undoubtedly.” P. “Does he who kills whomsoever it seems best to him, and kills them justly, appear to you miserable and pitiable?” S. “No, but neither does he appear enviable.” P. “Did you not, just now, call him miserable?” S. “Him who kills unjustly, I called miserable, and pitiable too; him who kills justly, unenviable.” P. “Certainly he who is killed unjustly is pitiable and miserable.” S. “Less so than his slayer, and less so than he who is slain justly.” P. “How so?” S. “Because to do injury is the greatest of evils.” P. “The greatest? Is it not a still greater evil to be injured?” S. “By no means.” P. “Would you prefer to be injured, rather than do an injury?” S. “I should not prefer either, but if one or the other were unavoidable, I should choose rather to be injured than to injure.” P. “Would you not consent to be a despot?” S. “If by being a despot you mean what I mean, I should not.” P. “I mean, as I said before, being allowed to do in the state whatever we think fit; to kill, and banish, and do every thing according to our will.” S. “Most excellent person, listen to me. Suppose that I were to go out into the market-place when it is full, with a poniard under my arm, and to say to you, Polus, I have obtained a splendid despotism; for if it seem good to me that any one of all these men should die, he will die upon the spot; if I will that he should be wounded, he will be wounded; if that his cloak should be torn, it will be torn; so great is my power in this state. And suppose that, you being incredulous, I were to show you my poniard. You would probably answer, that by this account every body must be powerful, for in this way any one might set fire to any house, or to the docks and all the vessels in the harbour, if he thought fit. But to be powerful does not consist in being able to do what we think fit.” P. “Not in this manner, certainly.” S. “Now can you tell what is your objection to this power?” P. “Surely.” S. “What is it?” P. “That a person who acts thus must inevitably be punished.” S. “And to be punished is an evil?” P. “Certainly.” S. “Then it again appears to you, that to be powerful is good, only when, doing what we think fit, we do what is for our benefit; and this is what is meant by being powerful: without this, it is evil, and is not power but impotence.

“Let us consider further in this manner. It is sometimes better to do the thing which we were talking about, to kill, and confiscate, and banish; and sometimes not?” P. “Undoubtedly.” S. “This we are both of us agreed in?” P. “We are.” S. “In what cases do you say it is better, and in what otherwise? Tell me where you draw the line.” P. “Do you, Socrates, answer this question yourself.” S. “If you prefer to be a listener, I say, that when it is done justly it is better, and when unjustly, it is worse.” P. “Could not a child refute what you now assert?” S. “I shall be very thankful to the child, and equally so to you, if you refute me, and free me from error. Do not be tired of doing a service to a friend, but refute.” P. “There is no occasion to go very far back in order to refute you. What happened only the other day is sufficient to prove that many unjust persons are happy.” S. “What are these things?” P. “Do you see Archelaus, the king of Macedonia?” S. “If I do not see him I have heard of him.” P. “Does he appear to you happy or miserable?” S. “I do not know, for I have never conversed with the man.” P. “What! could you know that he was happy by conversing with him, and not otherwise?” S. “Certainly not.” P. “Then you will say that you do not know whether the Great King (of Persia) is happy?” S. “And I shall say truly; for I do not know in what condition he is with respect to mental cultivation and justice.” P. “What! Does all happiness consist in this?” S. “As I say, it does; for I affirm that an excellent man or woman is happy, an unjust and wicked one wretched.” P. “Then Archelaus is wretched, by your account?” S. “If he be unjust.” P. “But how can it be denied that he is unjust?” and here Polus relates a series of crimes by which Archelaus had risen to the throne, intermixing much sarcastic irony on the notion of Socrates that he was unhappy, and ends by saying, “and do you suppose there is so much as a single Athenian, beginning with yourself, who would not rather be Archelaus than any other of the Macedonians?”

Socrates replied, “At the commencement of our conversation I praised you for being well versed in rhetoric, but said that you had neglected discussion. Is this the argument with which a child could confute me? Does this, in your opinion, refute my assertion that an unjust man is not happy? How, pray? for I do not admit a word of what you have said.” P. “Because you will not; for you in reality think as I say.” S. “My good friend, you attempt to refute me rhetorically, in the manner of what is called refutation in the courts of justice. In those courts, one man thinks that he refutes another, if he can produce many witnesses of good reputation in behalf of what he says, while his adversary can produce only one, or none at all. But this sort of refutation is good for nothing as respects truth: for it sometimes happens that a great number of witnesses, and people who are thought to be of some worth, bear false witness. And now, on the subject of which you are speaking, very nearly all the Athenians, and foreigners too, will join in your assertion, and if you wish to produce witnesses in proof that I am wrong, you may have Nicias, if you please, and Aristocrates, and the whole family of Pericles, and, in short, any one you please in this city. But I, who am but one man, do not acknowledge it; for you do not compel me to do so, but attempt to bear me down and deprive me of my substance, of the Truth, by producing false witnesses against me. I, on the contrary, think I have done nothing, unless I can produce you, yourself, who are but one, as a witness on my side. Nor do I think that you have accomplished any thing, unless I, one single person, bear witness in your behalf, without regard to any of the others. Yours is one kind of refutation, as you and many others think; there is another kind, as I think. Let us compare them, and see whether they differ from one another. The things respecting which we are disputing are no trifling things, but are nearly those respecting which it is most honourable to know, and most disgraceful to be ignorant; for it is, in short, to know or not to know, who is and who is not happy. You think, that a person who is unjust, and acts unjustly, may be happy?” P. “I do.” S. “I say that it is not possible. This, then, is one point in dispute. Next, will a person who commits injustice be happy if he be brought to justice and punishment?” P. “By no means; in that case he would be most wretched.” S. “But if he do not suffer punishment, he is happy?” P. “Yes.” S. “In my opinion, he who is unjust and commits injustice, is in any case miserable; but more miserable if he be unjust and escape from punishment, than if he be brought to justice and suffer punishment. You have refuted my first opinion, have you not?” P. “Yes.” S. “Will you refute the second, too?” P. “That, truly, is still more difficult to refute than the first!” S. “Not difficult, but impossible; for the truth cannot be refuted.” P. “How! If a man is detected aiming unjustly at the tyranny, and being detected, is put to the rack and hewed in pieces, and has his eyes burnt out, and after suffering both in himself and in his wife and children the uttermost insult and contumely, is at last impaled or crucified, will he be more happy than if he succeeds in his enterprise, and attaining despotic power, continues master of the state to the end of his days, envied and felicitated both by his countrymen and by foreigners? Is this what you say it is impossible to refute?” S. “You are inveighing now, and not refuting, as a little while ago you were calling witnesses. But pray refresh my memory; are you supposing him to aim unjustly at the tyranny?” P. “Certainly.” S. “Then neither of them, neither he who is punished nor he who escapes, is the more happy; for of two miserable persons it cannot be said that either is the happier; but he who escapes and attains the tyranny, is the more wretched. What is this, Polus; do you laugh? Is this another mode of refutation, when any thing is asserted, to laugh, instead of answering it?” P. “Do you not think yourself answered, when you say what no person in the world would say except yourself? Ask any of the bystanders.”

Socrates replied, “I am no politician, and last year, when it fell to me by lot to be a member of the Council of Five Hundred, and when the turn came for my tribe to preside, and it was my duty to take the votes, I was laughed at for not knowing how to do it. Do not, therefore, bid me take the votes of the bystanders; but if you cannot produce a better refutation of what I asserted than this, let me take my turn, and try to show you what I consider to be a refutation; for I know how to produce one witness in proof of my assertion, viz., the person with whom I am speaking; but the large number I let alone. I know how to take the vote of one person, but with the many I do not converse. Let us see, therefore, whether you are willing, in your turn, to submit yourself to refutation, by answering the questions which are asked of you. For my opinion is, that both you and I, and all men, consider it a greater evil to do an injury than to suffer one, and to be unpunished than to be punished.” P. “And I say that neither I nor any other person is of that opinion. Would you yourself rather be injured than injure?” S. “And you, too, and every one.” P. “No such thing.” S. “Then will you answer?” P. “Yes; for I greatly desire to hear what you will find to say.”

S. “Suffer me then to interrogate you, beginning from the very commencement. Do you think it a greater evil to be injured, or to injure?” P. “To be injured.” S. “Which do you think the more ignoble, to be injured or to injure? answer me.” P. “To injure.” S. “Then if it be more ignoble, it is more evil.” P. “By no means.” S. “I understand: you do not, it seems, consider Noble and Good, Ignoble and Evil, to be the same things?” P. “Certainly not.”

S. “Listen then. When you call any thing noble, as a noble countenance, or air, or figure, or voice, or conduct; what is it that you look to in calling them noble? Do you not, for instance, affirm of a man, that he has a noble person, either on account of some use, to which his person is subservient, or of some pleasure which it produces to those who see it? Can you assign any other reason?” P. “I cannot.” S. “And are not all noble voices, and persons, and so forth, called so, either on account of some pleasure, or some utility, or both?” P. “Yes.” S. “And what is noble in conduct and action, is called noble on no other account, but either because it is useful, or agreeable, or both.” P. “So it appears to me. And you define the noble well, when you define it by the Pleasant and the Good.” S. “Then the ignoble must be defined by the contraries of these, Pain and Evil.” P. “Of necessity.” S. “When, therefore, of two noble things, one is the nobler, it is so because it excels the other in pleasantness, or usefulness, or in both.” P. “Certainly.” S. “And when, of two ignoble things, the one is more ignoble than the other, it is so, by exceeding it either in pain, in evil, or in both.” P. “Yes.”

S. “Let us now call to mind what was said respecting Injuring and Being Injured. Did you not say, that to be injured was more evil, but to injure, more ignoble?” P. “I did.” S. “Then, if to injure be more ignoble than to be injured, it must either be more painful, or more evil, or both.” P. “No doubt.” S. “Let us then consider, in the first place—Is to injure, more painful than to be injured? Does the person who does an injury suffer more pain than he who undergoes it?” P. “Certainly not.” S. “It does not then exceed in painfulness.” P. “No.” S. “If not in painfulness, certainly not in both.” P. “So it seems.” S. “Then it must exceed in evil.” P. “It appears so.” S. “Then to injure is more evil than to be injured.” P. “It is evident.” S. “It was admitted some time ago by you, in behalf of yourself, and of mankind in general, that to injure is more ignoble than to be injured?” P. “Yes.” S. “And now it has appeared to be more evil.” P. “It has.” S. “Would you then prefer that which is more ignoble and more evil, to that which is less so? Do not fear to answer, for you will receive no hurt, but nobly give yourself up to the argument as to a physician, and either admit or deny my proposition.” P. “I would not prefer it.” S. “Would any one?” P. “According to this argument it would appear not.” S. “I spoke truth, then, when I said that neither you, nor I, nor any one, would choose rather to do than to suffer an injury; for it is a greater evil.” P. “It seems so.” S. “You see, then, the difference between this mode of refutation and the other. You had the suffrages of all the world, except me; but I am contented with the suffrage and testimony of you alone, and, having taken your vote, I have nothing to say to the others. So much for this. Let us now consider the other question, Whether to commit injustice, and be punished, is, as you thought, the greatest of evils, or, as I thought, a less evil than impunity. To commit injustice, and be punished, is the same thing as to be punished justly, is it not?” P. “It is.” S. “Can it be denied, that whatever is just is noble, in so far as it is just? Consider and say.” P. “It seems to me that it is so.” S. “And consider this likewise: if any thing acts, is it not necessary that there should be something which is acted upon?” P. “Certainly.” S. “And is not the one acted upon in the same manner in which the other acts? For example, if you strike, there must be something which is struck?” P. “Yes.” S. “And if you strike hard, the thing which is struck is struck hard.” P. “Certainly.” S. “Then that which is acted upon, is affected in the same manner in which the thing which acts affects. Whatever the agent acts, the patient suffers the same.” P. “I admit it.” S. “Now, whether is to suffer punishment, a mode of acting, or of being acted upon?” P. “Of being acted upon.” S. “Of being acted upon, then, by some agent?” P. “Certainly, by the punisher.” S. “But he who punishes rightly, punishes justly.” P. “Yes.” S. “Then he acts justly.” P. “Certainly.” S. “Then he who is punished, is punished justly. But what is just, we have agreed is noble.” P. “We have.” S. “Then the agent who punishes does what is noble, and the patient who is punished suffers what is noble.” P. “Yes.” S. “But, if he suffers what is noble, he suffers what is good, for noble must mean either pleasant or useful.” P. “Of necessity.” S. “Then he who suffers punishment, suffers what is good.” P. “So it seems.” S. “Then he is benefited.” P. “Yes.” S. “In what way? I suppose by becoming in a better state of mind, if he is punished justly.” P. “It is probable.” S. “Then he who suffers punishment gets rid of the vice of the mind.” P. “Yes.” S. “Does he not then get rid of the greatest of all evils? Let us look at it thus:—Is there any possible vice or badness in our pecuniary condition, except poverty?” P. “None.” S. “In our bodily condition is there any possible defect, except weakness, and disease, and deformity, and so forth?” P. “None.” S. “Is there not also a vicious state of the mind?” P. “There is.” S. “And does not this consist of injustice, and ignorance, and cowardice, and so forth?” P. “Yes.” S. “Then you have enumerated the three characteristic vices of the estate, the body and the mind; and these are, poverty, disease, and injustice?” P. “Yes.” S. “And which of these vices is the most ignoble? Is it not injustice, and, generally speaking, the vice of the mind?” P. “By far.” S. “And if it is the most ignoble, it is the worst?” P. “How so?” S. “The most ignoble is either the most painful, the most detrimental, or both; as results from our previous admissions.” P. “Certainly.” S. “But injustice, and, generally, the vice of the mind, have been granted by us to be the most ignoble of all kinds of vice?” P. “Yes.” S. “Then it must be either the most painful, or the most pernicious, or both.” P. “It must.” S. “Now, is injustice, or intemperance, or cowardice, or ignorance more excruciating than poverty or sickness?” P. “I apprehend not.” S. “Then the vice of the mind must surpass the vices of the body and of the estate, to an extraordinary degree in mischievousness, since it does not surpass them in painfulness.” P. “So it seems.” S. “But that which surpasses all things in mischievousness must be the greatest of evils.” P. “Yes.” S. “Then injustice, and intemperance, and, in a word, the vice of the mind, is the greatest of evils.” P. “So it appears.”

S. “What art is it which cures us of poverty? Is it not that of the man of business?” P. “It is.” S. “And what art cures us of disease? Is it not medicine?” P. “Undoubtedly.” S. “And what art cures us of wickedness and injustice? If this be not immediately obvious, let us look at it in another way. To whom do we hand over those whose bodies are disordered?” P. “To the physician.” S. “And to whom do we hand over those who are unjust and lawless?” P. “You mean, to the magistrate.” S. “In order to suffer punishment?” P. “Yes.” S. “And those who punish rightly, do so by the exercise of justice.” P. “They do.” S. “The art of the man of business, then, rids us of poverty, medicine rids us of disease, legal justice rids us of injustice and intemperance?” P. “So it seems.” S. “Which of these three, then, is the most noble?” P. “Justice, by far.” S. “Then it either produces the greatest pleasure, or the greatest benefit, or both?” P. “Yes.” S. “Is it a pleasant thing to be under the hands of the physician?” P. “No.” S. “But it is useful?” P. “Yes.” S. “For it cures us of a great evil; so that it is for our good to suffer the pain, and receive health.” P. “Undoubtedly.” S. “But whether is he most happy who undergoes medical treatment, or he who has not been ill at all?” P. “Certainly the latter. For happiness is not to get rid of an evil, but never to have had it.” S. “But of two persons who have a malady, either of the body or of the mind, which is the most miserable, he who undergoes medical treatment and is cured, or he who undergoes no medical treatment and continues ill?” P. “The last is the most miserable.” S. “But to suffer punishment was, we admitted, to be freed from the worst of evils, viz., wickedness.” P. “It was.” S. “For punishment chastens men, and makes them more just, and is a kind of medicine for the vice of the mind.” P. “Yes.” S. “He then is happiest who has not the vice of the mind: the next happiest is he who is cured of it, viz., he who is reproved, and undergoes punishment. He who is afflicted with injustice, and is not cured, has the worst life of all; and that is, he who commits the greatest crimes, with the greatest success, and escapes all reproof, and all punishment; as you say is the case with Archelaus, and other despots and orators.” P. “So it appears.” S. “For their case is like that of a person afflicted with the worst diseases, who should so manage as never to be punished by physicians for the vicious state of his body, by undergoing medical treatment; being afraid, like a child, of cutting and burning, because it is painful. Do you not think so?” P. “I do.” S. “And being ignorant, it would seem, of the value of health, and the excellence which belongs to the body, those who fly from punishment appear, from our admissions, to be in a similar situation: they see the painfulness of it, but are blind to the utility, and know not how much more wretched it is to be afflicted with an unsound mind, than with an unsound body. They therefore use all means which may aid them in escaping from punishment and from cure, by collecting money, and obtaining friends, and acquiring the power of persuasion. But if our admissions were correct, do you see what follows, or shall we state it particularly?” P. “If you have no objection.” S. “Is not injustice and doing injury the greatest of evils, punishment the cure of it, impunity the permanence of it, to be unjust and be punished the greatest of all evils, except one, to be unjust with impunity the greatest of all?” P. “So it appears.” S. “If this be the case, what, then, is the great use of rhetoric? It appears from our admissions, that it is most of all incumbent upon every one to guard himself against the evil of injustice.” P. “Certainly.” S. “But if he, or any one in whom he takes interest, should commit injustice, he ought voluntarily to court a speedy punishment, and go to the magistrate, as he would to the physician, as fast as he can, in order that the disease may not become inveterate by age, and taint his constitution, and be incurable. Does not this necessarily follow from our former admissions?” P. “What else can we say?” S. “Rhetoric, then, is of no use to us for defending our own injustice, or that of our friends, or our country. We ought, on the contrary, to accuse ourselves in the first instance, and next our relatives and our friends, and not to conceal our transgressions, but bring them to light, that we may suffer punishment, and be restored to health; not caring for the pain, but, if we have merited stripes, giving ourselves up to the stripe; if imprisonment, to the prison; if death, to death; and employing rhetoric for the accusation of ourselves, and of those who are dear to us, that their guilt may be made manifest, and they may be freed from the greatest of evils, that of injustice.—Is it not so?” P. “It appears to me extremely paradoxical, but, from our previous admissions, it cannot perhaps be escaped from.” S. “Then we must either refute our admissions, or grant these conclusions.” P. “Yes.” “On the other hand,” (continued Socrates,) “if we wish to do evil to any one, to an enemy for instance, we ought indeed to avoid being ourselves injured by him; but, if he injure any other person, we ought to exert ourselves in every manner, by word and deed, to save him from being brought to justice; and, if he be indicted, we should contrive that he may escape, and not suffer punishment; but, if he has possessed himself wrongfully of much wealth, may not be compelled to refund it, but may expend it on himself and his connexions unjustly and impiously; and, if he has committed crimes worthy of death, that he may not die: if possible, never, but may be immortal in his wickedness; but, if not, that he may live as long in it as he can. For such purposes rhetoric may be of use; but, for one who is not to commit injustice, I cannot see that it can be of any great utility.”

The dramatic unity of the Gorgias is so perfect, that it must suffer much by being divided, and it is to be regretted that space compels us to postpone a part of our abstract till next month. As a sudden turn takes place in the dialogue at this point, and a new interlocutor is introduced, this seems the most convenient place at which we can for the present terminate.

In the discussion, first with Gorgias, and afterwards with Polus, Socrates had remained the victor, and had forced the latter most reluctantly to acknowledge that to do injustice is a greater evil than to suffer it, and that to do injustice and escape unpunished is a greater evil than to suffer punishment: and Polus seems to have been effectually reduced to silence, for he takes no further part in this dialogue. But Socrates has still to encounter a more daring and less scrupulous antagonist than either of the two former.

Callicles, the host of Gorgias, at whose house the dispute was carried on, could now no longer contain himself. “Tell me,” said he, (addressing Chærephon,) “is Socrates in earnest, or in jest?” “He appears to me,” answered Chærephon, “to be remarkably in earnest: but there is nothing like asking himself.” “By the Gods,” resumed Callicles, “I have a mind to do so. Tell me, Socrates, are we to consider you as serious, or in jest? for if you are serious, and if what you now say is true, all human life is at present topsy-turvy, and we are all doing the very contrary of what we ought.”

“If, O Callicles,” answered Socrates, “men did not resemble one another in their modes of being affected; if one of us had an affection peculiar to himself, he could not very easily make another man comprehend it. I say this, because you and I are affected in the very same manner, being both of us in love, but with different objects; myself with Philosophy, you with the Athenian People. And I perceive that you, clever as you are, never know how to contradict any thing which your mistress affirms, but change backwards and forwards along with its changes. If you say any thing in the assembly, and the Athenian people say otherwise, you give it up, and say what the people desire; for you are unable to resist the will and the words of your mistress. So that if, when you say any of the things which you say for your love’s sake, any person should be surprised at the strangeness of them, you would say to him, if you had a mind to speak the truth, that unless somebody will stop your mistress from saying these things, he will never be able to stop you. Imagine, then, that I am in the same situation with yourself, and do not be surprised that I say these things, but stop my mistress, Philosophy, from saying them: for she still continues to say the things which you are now wondering at; and you yourself were present when they were said. Either, then, confute her, by proving, that to be unjust, and being so, to escape punishment, is not, as I affirm, the worst of evils; or if you leave this unrefuted, Callicles will never agree with you, O Callicles, but will be in contradiction to you all your life. I should think it better that my lyre should be discordant, or that the choral dance led by me should be out of time, or that all mankind should be out of harmony with me, rather than that I myself should be out of tune, and not consonant with myself.”

Callicles replied, “You are a true haranguer, and you have now made this triumphant harangue, merely because Polus has done what he himself charged Gorgias with doing. When you asked Gorgias whether, if a person who wished to learn rhetoric, came to him ignorant of justice, he would teach it to him, Gorgias said Yes, because he was ashamed to say No, on account of the custom of men, because they would be indignant if he said that he would not; and Polus remarked this, and said, that this admonition was what forced Gorgias to contradict himself, and that this is what delights you: and he ridiculed you, at that time, as I thought, very justly. But now the same thing has happened to himself. What I do not admire in Polus is, that he admitted that to injure is more ignoble than to be injured. It was by this admission that he was entangled, and had his mouth shut up, being ashamed to say what he thought. For you, pretending to pursue truth, always drive the argument to an invidious appeal to common prejudices, making it turn upon the things which are not noble by nature, but only by institution. These two things, nature and institution, are, for the most part, contrary to one another: and if a man is ashamed, and does not dare to say what he thinks, he is forced to contradict himself. But the wise invention which enables you to force him to contradict himself is a mere quibble: when a man is speaking of institution, you interpret it of nature, and when of nature, you interpret it of institution. For instance, on this subject of injuring and being injured, Polus spoke of what was more ignoble by institution, and you met him with what was more ignoble by nature. By nature, to be injured is not only worse, but also more ignoble, than to injure: by institution only is it more ignoble to injure. To be injured is not the attribute of a man, but of a slave, fitter to die than to live, who, if he is wronged or insulted, is not capable of protecting himself nor those whom he cares for. But the makers of institutions are the Many, and the weak. They make their laws, and dispense their praise and blame, with a view to themselves, and to their own advantage. Fearing lest the more energetic, who are capable of attaining superiority, should attain it over them, they call it base and unjust to take more than other people, and even affirm that this is precisely what constitutes injustice. For they, being the feebler, are contented with equality. By institution, therefore, to aim at superiority is unjust and ignoble, and is termed, to do injury. But Nature herself shows that it is just for the better to take more than the worse, and the stronger than the weaker. She shows, in the other animals, and in whole nations and races of men, that, for the stronger to govern the weaker, and to take the larger share, is true justice. With what justice did Xerxes make war on Greece, or his father, Darius, on the Scythians? They did what was just by nature, and by the laws of nature, not by those which we devise, catching the best and strongest among us, like lions, when they are young, and enslaving them by fictions and old songs, telling them that nobleness and justice consist in equality. But if a man arises, adequately endowed by nature, he breaks through, and shakes off these fetters, and, trampling upon our statutes and our charmed words, and all institutions contrary to nature, rises up our master, no longer our slave, and the justice of nature shines forth in him. Pindar indicates this, in the ode in which he says that Hercules took away the oxen of Geryon, neither buying them nor receiving them by gift; this being natural justice, and all the possessions of the worse and the weaker, belonging of right to the better and the stronger. This is true; and you will know it, if you abandon philosophy, and apply yourself to greater pursuits. Philosophy is a graceful thing, when it is moderately cultivated, in youth; but if any one occupies himself with it beyond the proper age, it ruins him. For, however great may be his natural capacity, if he philosophizes too long, he must of necessity continue inexperienced in all those things which one who would be a great and eminent man ought to be experienced in. He must be unacquainted with the laws of his country, and with the mode of influencing other men in the intercourse of life, whether private or public, and with the pleasures and passions of men; in short, with human character and manners. And when such men are called upon to act, whether on a public or private occasion, they expose themselves to ridicule, just as politicians do when they come to your conversations, and attempt to cope with you in argument. For every man, as Euripides says, occupies himself with that in which he finds himself superior; that in which he is inferior he avoids, and speaks ill of it, but praises what he excels in, thinking that in doing so he is praising himself. The best thing, in my opinion, is to partake of both. It is good to partake of philosophy, by way of education, and it is not disgraceful in a young man to philosophize. But if he continues to do so when he grows older, he becomes ridiculous, and I feel towards him as I should towards a grown person who lisped, and played at childish plays. When a child does so, in whom it is becoming, I am pleased, and it appears to me graceful, and suitable to his age; and if I hear a child speaking plain, like a grown person, it is disagreeable to me, and has a servile appearance. But if I hear a grown person lisp, or see him at play, I think it unmanly and contemptible. So I think of those who philosophize. When I see a young man philosophizing, I think it commendable and becoming, and consider him as of a liberal mind, and hold that he who does not philosophize at that age, is vulgar-minded, and will never feel himself capable of any thing noble and exalted. But when I see an old man still continuing to philosophize, I think he deserves to be flogged. However great his natural talents, he is under the necessity of avoiding the assembly and public places, where, as the poet says, men become eminent, and to hide himself, and pass his life whispering to two or three striplings in a corner, but never speaking out any thing great and bold and liberal. I, Socrates, feel towards you as your friend, and am inclined to say to you what Zethus says to Amphion in Euripides, that you neglect what you ought to attend to, and waste a mind by nature so powerful, in trifling and child’s play. Do not be angry, for I speak solely from good will towards you. Does it not seem to you a disgraceful thing to be as you are, and as those others are who make philosophy their occupation? If any one should charge you with some crime, which you had not committed, and carry you off to prison, you would gape and stare, and would not know what to say; and when brought to trial, however contemptible and weak your accuser might be, if he chose to indict you capitally, you would perish. Can this be wisdom, which, if it takes hold of a gifted man, destroys the excellence of his nature, rendering him incapable of preserving himself or others from the greatest dangers, enabling his enemies to plunder him of all his property, and reducing him to the situation of those who, by the sentence of a court of justice, have been deprived of their civil rights? so that (though it may sound harshly) a man might even strike him a blow with impunity. Be persuaded by me: give up confutation, leave these clevernesses to others, and do not emulate those who gain these petty victories, but those who have wealth and reputation, and the other blessings of life.”

Socrates replied, “If my soul were golden, do you not think that I should be glad to discover one of those touchstones with which they try the purity of gold, that I might try my soul by it, and if it stood the test, I might know that I am as I should be, and need no further test?” C. “Why do you ask this question?” S. “Because I think that I have found such a treasure in you.” C. “How?” S. “I know that whatever of my opinions you give your assent to, must be true. He who is capable of serving as a touchstone on the subject of right and wrong modes of life, must have three qualities, all of which you possess: knowledge, good will, and frankness. I meet with many persons who are not capable of bringing me to the test, because they are not wise as you are. Others are wise, but are not willing to speak the truth to me, because they do not care for me as you do. Our friends Gorgias and Polus are wise, and well disposed toward me, but deficient in frankness, and more shamefaced than they should be. For how can they be otherwise, they who are so much ashamed, that they are driven by shame to contradict themselves before a numerous company, and on the most important subjects. But you possess all the qualities which others are destitute of. You are adequately instructed, as many of the Athenians would aver. You are well-disposed towards me; and how do I know this? Because I am aware that you and three others, Tisander, Andron, and Nausicydes, carry on your studies in common, and I have heard you discussing together, how far wisdom ought to be pursued; and I know that the opinion which prevailed among you, was, that you should not be too eager to philosophize accurately, and should be on your guard not to be spoilt by becoming more wise than is advisable. When therefore I find you giving me the same advice which you give to your most intimate friends, it is a sufficient proof of your good will towards me. Again, that you are capable of speaking out, boldly and without shame, you yourself say, and the speech you just now made is a proof of it. I am therefore satisfied that if you are brought to agree with me in any thing which I say, it is sufficiently tried, and does not need any further test. For you would not admit it either from deficiency of wisdom, or excess of shame; nor would you concede it with the intent to deceive me; for you are, as you yourself say, my friend. Our agreement, therefore, will be the final establishment of truth. This inquiry, in the course of which I have incurred your animadversions, the inquiry what a human being should be, and with what he should occupy himself in youth and in age, is the noblest of all inquiries. If I, in the regulation of my life, do any thing which I should not do, be assured that I do not err intentionally, but from ignorance. Do not then relax in your admonitions, but persevere, and show me what it is which I ought to practise, and in what manner I may best attain to the practice of it. And if you find me now admitting what you say, but subsequently not acting conformably to what I have admitted, think me spiritless and worthless, and never take the trouble to correct me again.

“Repeat to me, then, from the beginning, what you affirmed to constitute the Justice which is not merely of institution, but of nature. You said, if I remember right, that Natural Justice is, for the better to command the worse, and the more excellent to take more than the more worthless. Said you not so?” C. “I did, and do.” S. “Do you consider the better, and the stronger, to be synonymous? You appeared to indicate something of this sort when you said that great states attack small ones by the justice of nature, because they are the stronger. Is it possible, then, to be the better, but at the same time the weaker; or the stronger, but at the same time the worse? Or, are the stronger and the better, equivalent expressions?” C. “They are equivalent.” S. “And are not many by nature stronger than one? You yourself said that the many give laws to the one.” C. “Certainly.” S. “Then the institutions of the many are those of the stronger.” C. “Yes.” S. “And therefore, by your account, of the better.” C. “Certainly.” S. “Then the institutions of the many are by nature noble, since the many are the stronger.” C. “Granted.” S. “Now, do not the many think, as you before observed, that Equality is just, and that it is more ignoble to injure than to be injured? Do not you, too, suffer yourself to be entrapped by shamefacedness. Do not the many think that justice consists in equality, and not in superiority? and that to injure is more ignoble than to be injured? Do not deny me an answer, in order that, if you agree with me, I may consider my opinion established by the admission of a competent judge.” C. “The many are of this opinion.” S. “To injure, then, is more ignoble than to be injured, not by institution only, but likewise by nature: and you were wrong when you accused me, saying that Institution and Nature are contrary to one another, and that I, knowing this, quibble in argument, interpreting of Institution that which is affirmed of Nature, and of Nature what is affirmed of Institution.”

C. “This man will never have done trifling. Are you not ashamed, Socrates, at your age, to cavil at words, and triumph if any one makes a mistake in a name? Did I not tell you expressly that by the stronger, I meant the better? Do you think I meant that if a crowd be collected, of slaves and all kind of persons having no good quality except perhaps physical force, that whatever they affirm should be right?” S. “This then is your meaning?” C. “It is.” S. “I conjectured before that this was what you meant, and I only question you in order to understand you more clearly. For I do not suppose that you consider two to be better than one, or your slaves better than yourself because they are stronger. But pray begin again at the beginning, and tell me whom you mean by the better, since you do not mean the stronger. And let me intreat you to instruct me in a milder manner, lest I should withdraw from your tuition.” C. “You are pleased to be sarcastic.” S. “I swear by Zethus, in whose name you were so sarcastic upon me, that I am not. But pray tell me whom you mean by the better.” C. “The worthier.” S. “Do you not perceive that you yourself are merely paying us in words, and telling us nothing? Will you not say whether by the better and the stronger, you understand the more intelligent?” C. “Yes, surely.” S. “Then one intelligent person is superior to a thousand who are not intelligent, and ought to rule over them, and to have a larger share than they? Tell me (and I am not cavilling at words) whether this is your meaning?” C. “It is. And this is what I call natural justice; that the better and more intelligent should govern the worse, and be preferred to them.”

S. “Pray explain yourself further. If there were many of us assembled together, possessing in common a great supply of food and drink; and if we were people of all descriptions, some of us strong and others weak, but one of us, being a physician, was more intelligent than the rest on the subject of diet; would not he be better and superior, as compared with the rest of us, so far as these things were concerned?” C. “Certainly.” S. “Ought he, then, as being the better, to have a larger share of food than the rest? or ought he to be intrusted, indeed, with the distribution, but not permitted to take a greater quantity for his own use than any other, on pain of punishment?” C. “You talk of food, and drink, and physicians, and such stuff, but that is not what I mean.” S. “Do you not say that the more intelligent are the better?” C. “I do.” S. “And that the better ought to have the larger share?” C. “Not of food or of drink.” S. “I understand: of clothing, perhaps. The man who understands most of weaving, ought to have the largest coats and the finest, and to walk about with the greatest number of them on his body.” C. “Why will you talk about coats?” S. “It is of shoes then, that the person who is most intelligent respecting them, ought to have the largest share. The shoemaker should wear the largest shoes, and the greatest number of them at once.” C. “What stuff is this about shoes!” S. “Or, perhaps, you mean that he who is intelligent and skilful in agriculture, ought to have the largest quantity of seed, and employ most of it on his own land.” C. “You always say the same thing.” S. “On the same subject, I always do.” C. “You will not cease speaking of tanners and fullers and cooks and physicians, as if that were what we are talking about.” S. “Will you not tell me, then, what is the subject in which those who are most intelligent are justly entitled to superiority? Will you neither tell me, nor suffer me to guess?” C. “I have told you long ago. Those whom I call the superior and the better, are not shoemakers, nor cooks, but those who are intelligent in the affairs of the state, and in the proper mode of administering it; and not only intelligent but courageous, capable of accomplishing what they devise, and not faltering by effeminacy of soul.”

S. “Your complaint of me, and mine of you, are very different. You blame me for always saying the same thing; I, on the contrary, blame you, for never saying the same thing on the same subject. You first defined the better to be the stronger; then, the more intelligent; and now you say that they are the more courageous. Pray tell me, once for all, who they are.” C. “I have told you, that they are the more intelligent in public affairs, and the more courageous. These are the persons who are entitled to govern the state; and it is just that these should have a larger share than the rest, since they command, and the others are commanded.” S. “Do you imply that they should command themselves as well as others? Or is it not necessary for any one to command himself, but only other people?” C. “What do you mean by commanding himself?” S. “Only what the vulgar mean, to be temperate and sober, governing his own pleasures and desires.” C. “How pleasant you are! You describe a simpleton, and call him a sober person. How can a person be happy if he is a slave to any thing? I freely tell you, that what is noble and just by nature, is that he who would live well, should allow his desires to attain the greatest possible strength, and never restrain them; and should be capable, by his courage and talents, of ministering to his desires, and satisfying them, however great they may be. But of this the many are incapable; and therefore do they censure such conduct, to hide their own impotence; and pretend that self-indulgence is a vile thing; and because they are not capable of ministering to their own appetites, they praise temperance and justice from mere unmanliness. For, in reality, to those who are born to a throne, or who are capable, by their natural endowments, of raising themselves to despotic power, what can be more ignoble or more contemptible than self-controul? Should those who have the means of enjoying every pleasure without hinderance from anybody, erect the law of the many, and their praise and blame, into a master over themselves? They would be well off in good truth, by your nobleness, and your justice, and your self-restraint, if they were prevented by it from giving any preference to their friends over their enemies, although possessing absolute power in the state. The truth (which you say is your object) is, that luxury and self-indulgence, if our means be adequate, are real virtue and happiness: and all other virtue and happiness are mere pretence, and human devices and conventions contrary to nature.”

“You keep your promise,” replied Socrates, “to be frank with me; for you plainly speak out, what other people think, but do not like to say. I beg you not to relax, until it is clearly established, according to what rule we ought to live. You say that we ought not to restrain our desires, but allowing them to be as violent as possible, we should provide the means of their gratification; and that this is virtue.” C. “I do.” S. “The common saying then, that those are happy who want nothing, is incorrect.” C. “Stones, and the dead, would by this account be the happiest.” S. “But even on your theory, life is a troublesome thing. Some poet of old compared the soul to a pitcher, and that of a fool to a pitcher which leaks at the bottom, and is unable to hold anything: implying that a continent and contented life is preferable to an insatiable and self-indulgent one. But I suppose you are not very likely to be convinced by an old song.” C. “Your last observation has more truth in it.” S. “I will give you another illustration from the same source. Let us typify the life of the temperate and that of the self-indulgent, by the image of two persons, each of whom has a large number of pitchers. The one has them all sound, and filled with honey, and wine, and milk, and many other things: the streams which supply these different liquids being scanty, and the supply being obtainable only by prodigious labour. The one, having filled his pitchers, has no more trouble, nor any occasion to turn any further streams into his cellar. The other has it in his power, like the first, to obtain the supply, though with great difficulty; but his vessels are leaky and unsound, and he is obliged to employ night and day in filling them, or suffer the most dreadful torture. Such being the lives of the temperate and the intemperate man, do I convince you that the former is more eligible than the latter?” C. “You do not convince me. For the first man, when he has filled his pitchers, has no longer any pleasure, but lives, as I said before, like a stone, inanimate, with neither pleasure nor pain. Pleasure consists in having as great a stream as possible always pouring in.” S. “Then if much is poured in, much must run out, and the leaks must be very large?” C. “Certainly.” S. “This is not the life of a dead man or a stone, but it is the life of a funnel.”

S. “You say, it is happiness to be hungry, and, being hungry, to eat.” C. “Yes.” S. “To be thirsty, and, being thirsty, to drink.” C. “Yes, and to have all other appetites, and to be able to satisfy them.” S. “I commend you, for you go on as you have begun. Do not be ashamed. Neither ought I, apparently, to be shamefaced. And first tell me, whether to itch constantly, and having the means of scratching, to pass our whole lives in that operation, would be to live happily?” C. “How unfair you are, and how fond of appealing to the vulgar.” S. “And therefore did I embarrass Polus and Gorgias, and make them ashamed; but be not you ashamed, who are a bold man, but answer me.” C. “I answer then, that the scratcher would live agreeably.” S. “But if agreeably, then happily.” C. “Certainly.” S. “See what you will have to answer, if you are pressed with all the questions which would naturally follow these. Is not the life of a catamite vile and miserable? Or will you venture to say, that he too is happy, if all his wants are plentifully supplied?” C. “Are you not ashamed to lead the argument to such things?” S. “Is it I who lead it thither, or you, who affirm sweepingly that all who enjoy themselves, no matter how, are happy; and make no distinction between good pleasures and bad ones? Tell me again, whether Pleasant and Good are the same, or whether there is any thing pleasant which is not good?” C. “That my discourse may not be inconsistent with itself if I say they are different, I will say that they are the same.” S. “You destroy the whole argument, and are no longer fitted for inquiring into truth, if you speak differently from what you think.” C. “It is what you yourself do.” S. “If I do so, I do wrong, and so do you. But consider whether it be not true, that Good is not synonymous with Enjoyment, of whatever kind; for if this were so, the shameful consequences already indicated would follow, and many others besides.” C. “In your opinion.” S. “Do you in reality adhere to this opinion?” C. “I do.” S. “Shall we argue upon the supposition of your being in earnest?” C. “Undoubtedly.”

S. “Tell me then. There is such a thing as knowledge?” C. “Yes.” S. “You spoke just now of courage accompanied with knowledge.” C. “I did.” S. “Courage, then, is something different from knowledge?” C. “Very different.” S. “Are pleasure and knowledge the same thing, or different?” C. “Very different, most wise man.” S. “And courage is different from pleasure?” C. “Yes.” S. “You, then, say that Pleasant and Good are the same thing, but that knowledge and courage are different from each other, and different from good. And I, do I admit this, or not?” C. “You do not.” S. “Nor do you either, when you interpret yourself rightly.

“Is not to be in a good state, the contrary of being in a bad state?” C. “It is.” S. “Then if they are contrary states, they, like health and disease, cannot exist together, neither can they both together cease to exist.” C. “How?” S. “When a man’s eyes are diseased, they are not in health?” C. “No.” S. “And when he gets rid of the disease, he does not at the same time get rid of health; for this would be absurd.” C. “Exceedingly so.” S. “He receives the two things by turns, and gets rid of them by turns.” C. “Yes.” S. “And the like with strength and weakness, swiftness and slowness?” C. “Undoubtedly.” S. “Is this likewise the case with Good and Happiness, and their opposites, Evil and Misery? Are these acquired and lost, not simultaneously, but alternately?” C. “Certainly.” S. “Then if we find two things, both of which we begin to possess together, and both of which we cease to possess together, it is evident that these things cannot be identical with Good and Evil. Consider well before you answer.” C. “I perfectly agree with you.” S. “Let us now return to our first admissions. Is hunger pleasant or painful? I mean, hunger in itself.” C. “Hunger is painful: but to eat when we are hungry is pleasant.” S. “I understand: but to be hungry is in itself painful.” C. “Yes.” S. “And to be thirsty?” C. “Yes.” S. “And is not all want, and all desire, painful?” C. “I acknowledge it.” S. “Good. But to drink when you are thirsty is pleasant.” C. “Yes.” S. “When you are thirsty, is as much as to say, when you are in pain.” C. “Yes.” S. “But to drink, is to satisfy the desire, and therefore to be pleased.” C. “Yes.” S. “Then to drink when you are thirsty, is to be pleased when you are in pain: and both these things may happen at the same time, whether in the body or in the mind.” C. “They may.” S. “But it was not possible, you said, to be at the same time in a good state and in a bad state.” C. “I said so.” S. “Then to be pleased is not the same thing as to be in a good state, nor to be in pain, the same as to be in a bad state, and Pleasant and Good are not the same thing but different things.” C. “I do not understand your sophisms.” S. “You do, but you feign stupidity. Let us go on a little further, that you may see how wise you are, who take me to task. Do we not, when we cease to be thirsty, cease at the same time to receive pleasure from drinking?” C. “I do not know what you are talking about.”

Gorgias here interposed, and begged Callicles, for his sake, and that of the bystanders, not to refuse to answer, in order that the discussion might not be cut short. Callicles replied, that it was always the way with Socrates, to ask these petty and frivolous questions. “Of what consequence is that to you?” replied Gorgias; “the blame is not yours. Pray permit Socrates to carry on the argument as he pleases.” “Ask then those little frivolous questions of yours,” said Callicles to Socrates, “since Gorgias wishes it.” “You are fortunate,” answered Socrates, “in having been initiated into the greater mysteries before the smaller ones: I thought that it was not lawful. Do not our thirst, and our pleasure in drinking, cease together?” C. “They do.” S. “And so with all our other desires, and the pleasure of their gratification?” C. “Yes.” S. “Then our pain and our pleasure both terminate at the same time?” C. “Yes.” S. “But Good and Evil, you said, do not.” C. “What then?” S. “It follows, that Good and Pleasant cannot be the same thing, nor Evil and Painful.

“Let us put the argument in another way. People are called good, from the presence of good in them, as they are called beautiful from the presence of beauty in them: are they not?” C. “Certainly.” S. “You do not call the foolish and the cowardly, good? You said, I think, that the courageous and intelligent were so.” C. “Undoubtedly.” S. “A foolish child is sometimes pleased?” C. “Yes.” S. “And a foolish man?” C. “I should think so; but what of that?” S. “Nothing, only answer me. And a rational man is sometimes pleased, and is also sometimes vexed.” C. “Yes.” S. “Whether are foolish persons, or rational persons, pleased and vexed in the highest degree?” C. “I do not think there is much difference.” S. “That is enough. You have seen cowards in war?” C. “Certainly.” S. “Whether were the cowards, or the brave men, most pleased at the retreat of the enemy?” C. “Much the same.” S. “It is sufficient. Then cowards and foolish people are sometimes pleased. But when the enemy advance, are the cowards alone vexed, or the brave men also?” C. “Both.” S. “Both equally?” C. “The cowards, perhaps, in the greatest degree.” S. “And on the enemy’s retreat, are not the cowards also the most pleased?” C. “Perhaps.” S. “Then rational people and foolish people, brave men and cowards, are pleased, you say, nearly in the same degree, or cowards more so than brave men.” C. “Yes.” S. “But brave and rational people are good, foolish people and cowards are bad.” C. “Yes.” S. “Then good people and bad people are pleased and vexed alike.” C. “Yes.” S. “Are good people and bad people good and bad alike? or bad people rather more good and bad than good people?” C. “I do not understand you.” S. “Did you not say, that good people are good by the presence of Good in them, and bad people by the presence of Evil, and that Good is Pleasure, and Evil is Pain?” C. “I did.” S. “Then a person who is pleased, has Good present in him, since pleasure is Good.” C. “Certainly.” S. “Then he is a good man.” C. “Yes.” S. “And a person who is vexed, has Evil present in him, since pain is Evil.” C. “Yes.” S. “But men are bad men by the presence of Evil in them. Do you not say so?” C. “I do.” S. “Then good men are those who are pleased, and bad men are those who are vexed.” C. “Certainly.” S. “Those are more good or bad, who are more pleased or vexed; those who are less, less; those who are equally, equally.” C. “Yes.” S. “Did you not say, that rational people and foolish people, brave people and cowards, were pleased and vexed tolerably equally, or cowards even more so than the brave?” C. “I did.” S. “See then what follows. The good man is the rational and brave man, the bad man is the foolish man and the coward. But the good man is also the man who is pleased, the bad man he who is vexed. And the good and the bad man are pleased and vexed equally, or the bad man rather more so than the good man. It follows therefore, that the bad man is equally good and equally bad with the good man, or rather more so. Is not this inevitable, if the Good and the Pleasant are the same?”

“I have listened to you,” answered Callicles, “for a long time, and admitted all that you said, being aware that if one concedes anything to you even in jest, you eagerly seize hold of it like a raw youth. Do you suppose that I, or any body else, do not think that some pleasures are better, and others worse?” “You treat me,” replied Socrates, “like a child, sometimes affirming one thing, sometimes a different thing, and deceiving me. I did not think at first that you, who are my friend, would deceive me intentionally. But now I suppose I must, according to the old saying, make the best of what I can get. You say, then, that some pleasures are good, and others evil.” C. “I do.”

S. “Are the good pleasures those which are beneficial, the bad ones those which are hurtful?” C. “Yes.” S. “By beneficial, you mean those which are causes of some good; by hurtful, those which are causes of evil.” C. “I do.” S. “For instance, as to the bodily pleasures of eating and drinking, if some of these produce in the body health or strength or some other good bodily quality, these are good, but those which produce the contraries of these effects are bad.” C. “Certainly.” S. “Among pains, likewise, there are some good and others bad, in the same manner.” C. “Undoubtedly.” S. “Then we ought to choose the good pleasures and pains, and avoid the bad?” C. “Clearly.” S. “For it was agreed between Polus and me, that Good was the end of all our actions; and that all other things were done for the sake of Good, not Good for the sake of other things. Do you agree in this?” C. “I do.” S. “Then the pleasant ought to be done for the sake of Good, not Good for the sake of the pleasant.” C. “Certainly.” S. “Now, are all of us capable of distinguishing those pleasant things which are good, from those which are bad, or is any art requisite for that purpose?” C. “An art is requisite.” S. “Let us then call to mind what I said to Polus and Gorgias. I said, that there are some pursuits which have only pleasure in view, knowing nothing of good and evil, and others which know what is good and what is evil: cookery (which is a skill, and not an art) I placed in the first class; the art of medicine, in the second. And do not think it allowable to sport with me, and to answer whatever comes into your head, differently from what you think; nor, on the other hand, consider me to be in sport. For we are on a subject which even the most unthinking person would consider as the most serious of all subjects, viz. In what manner we ought to live; whether in the manner to which you exhort me, practising rhetoric, and occupying ourselves with public affairs, or in the opposite manner of life, according to philosophy; and in what respect this mode of life differs from the other.

“It is perhaps best to go on as I began, and attempt to discriminate the two modes of life from each other, and determine whether they are different, and in what respect, and which of them should be adopted. You do not, perhaps, yet know what I mean.” C. “I do not.” S. “I will be more perspicuous. We have agreed, have we not, that Pleasant and Good are not one thing but two things, and that there is a certain method for the acquisition of each.” C. “We have.” S. “Now then tell me whether you agree in what I said to our two friends. I said that cookery is only a kind of skill, but that medicine is an art: because medicine has considered the nature of the thing which it aims at producing, and the causes of the operations which it enjoins, and can render an account of them; but cookery has not considered the nature or the causes of Pleasure, which is its sole end, but goes to work empirically and unscientifically, a mere uncalculating routine, the mere memory of what has often happened. Consider then, first, whether you think that this is true, and that there are also with respect to the mind two methods similar to these; one kind which are arts, and have some forethought of what is best for the mind, another kind which disregard this, and consider only the pleasures of the mind, and the means of producing them, never considering or caring for the difference between a better pleasure and a worse. This, whether it relates to the body, to the mind, or to any thing else, I call adulation, provided it considers only pleasure, without regarding good or evil. Do you concur in this?” C. “I do not, but I will admit it, that your argument may be completed, and that Gorgias may be gratified.” S. “Whether is this true of a single mind only, and not true of two or more?” C. “It is true of two, or of any number.” S. “Then it is possible to gratify a number of minds collected together, without regarding their greatest Good.” C. “True.” S. “What, then, are the pursuits which do this? First of all, let us consider the art of playing the flute. Does it not seem to you to pursue pleasure only, and to care for nothing else?” C. “Yes.” S. “And that grave and magnificent art, tragic poetry, what is its aim? Simply to gratify the spectators? Or, if any things occur to it which are pleasant but bad, does it take care not to say them; and if there be any thing disagreeable but useful, does it make a point of saying or singing this to the spectators, whether they are pleased with it or not?” C. “It is evident that it chiefly aims at pleasure, and the gratification of the spectators.” S. “This, however, we designated as adulation.” C. “We did.” S. “Now, then, if you take away from poetry the rhythm and the metre and the music, is there any thing remaining but discourse?” C. “Nothing.” S. “And this discourse is addressed to the assembled people.” C. “It is.” S. “Then poetry is a kind of oratory.” C. “So it seems.” S. “But rhetoric is oratory. Do not poets appear to you to rhetorize, upon the stage?” C. “Yes.” S. “Now then we have found out a kind of rhetoric, addressed to a popular assembly, composed of men, women, and children, slaves and freemen, which we do not much admire. We call it a kind of adulation.” C. “We do.”

S. “What then shall we say of the rhetoric which is addressed to the assembly of the Athenian people, or the people of any other state, consisting of freemen only? Do the orators seem to you to have in view constantly the greatest good; aiming solely at making the people as good as possible by their discourses? Or do they, too, aim only at gratifying the citizens, neglecting the public interest for the sake of their own private concerns, and treating the people like children, attempting only to gratify them, and not caring whether they are made better or worse by the gratification?” C. “This is not a simple question. There are some who address the people really caring for them; there are others such as you describe.” S. “It is sufficient. If this thing be of two kinds, one of them is adulation, and disgraceful, the other is laudable, contriving always that the minds of the citizens may become as good as possible, and always persisting in saying what is best, whether it be pleasing to the hearers or not. But you do not know any instance of this kind of rhetoric. Can you mention any orator who has acted in this manner?” C. “I cannot mention any orator of the present day.” S. “Can you mention any one of the ancient orators, by whose means the Athenians became better than they were before he began to harangue them? I do not know of any.” C. “What! have you never heard of Themistocles, and Cimon, and Miltiades; and Pericles, whom you yourself have seen? all of whom were good men.” S. “Yes, if Good consists in what you at first called it, the satisfaction of our own desires and those of others: but if, as we afterwards were forced to admit, there be some desires the satisfaction of which makes us better, and others which make us worse, and that the distinguishing of these from each other is an art; can you affirm that any of the men you named, practised that art?” C. “I cannot tell.” S. “But if you consider well, you will see. It is not true, that a good man, who speaks with the greatest Good always in view, will not speak at haphazard, but with reference to some end? All other artists employ their various means, not picking them up at hazard, but looking to the nature of the work which they have to accomplish, and endeavouring that it may assume a certain shape. The painter, the architect, the shipbuilder—each of these, places his materials in a certain order, and contrives that one thing shall be fit and suitable to another, until the whole is completed, a regulated and ordered thing: Is it not so?” C. “It is.” S. “A house which has regulation and order is a good house; a disordered house is a bad one.” C. “Yes.” S. “And a ship?” C. “Yes.” S. “And our own bodies?” C. “Yes.” S. “And our minds?” C. “This must be admitted from the preceding admissions.” S. “What name do we give to that which arises in the body, from order and regulation?” C. “You mean, health and strength.” S. “And what is the name of that which arises in the mind, from order and regulation?” C. “Why do not you yourself answer?” S. “If it pleases you, I will. If you agree with me, say so, if not, refute me. I hold, that the order of the body is termed healthiness, from whence health and all other good qualities of the body proceed; and that the order and regulation of the mind is termed lawfulness, by which men become orderly and obedient to law: and this is as much as to say, justice and self-restraint. Do you assent?” C. “Be it so.” S. “Then a good orator, an orator according to art, in all which he says and all which he does to those to whom he addresses himself, in all which he gives to them and all which he takes away from them, will have constantly in view, in what manner justice may be produced in their minds and injustice removed, self-controul produced and self-indulgence removed, all virtue produced and vice removed.” C. “Granted.” S. “For of what use is it to bestow upon a sick and ill-ordered body abundant and agreeable food or drink, which will do it no good, but often much harm?” C. “Be it so.” S. “For it is not beneficial to man, to live with his body in a bad state; that would be to live badly.” C. “Yes.” S. “Physicians, then, usually permit a person to satisfy his desires, by eating as much as he pleases when he is hungry and drinking when he is thirsty, so long as he is in health; but when he is sick, they do not allow him to enjoy what he desires. Do you grant this?” C. “I do.” S. “And is not the same thing equally true of the mind? While it is in a bad state, while it is silly, and unjust, and impious, and incapable of self-controul, it should be kept from what it desires, and not permitted to do any thing except what will make it better.” C. “Granted.” S. “For this is better for the mind.” C. “Yes.” S. “But to keep it from what it desires, is to punish it?” C. “It is.” S. “Then punishment is better for the mind than impunity.” C. “I do not know what you are talking about. Ask some one else.” S. “This man cannot bear to be benefited, by suffering the very thing we are talking about, punishment.” C. “I do not care for what you say: I have answered you only on Gorgias’s account.” S. “Well: what shall we do? Shall we break off the argument in the middle?” C. “Judge for yourself.” S. “But it is not lawful, they say, to leave even a story half finished, without putting a head to it, that it may not go about headless. I beg you therefore to continue answering, that our argument may have a head put to it.” C. “How obstinate you are. If you will be persuaded by me, you will drop this discussion, or discuss with somebody else.” S. “Will anybody else, then, carry on the discussion?” C. “Cannot you carry it on by yourself, either speaking continuously, or making answer to yourself?” S. “It seems that there is nothing else to be done. But we are all of us alike concerned in pushing the inquiry, what view of this subject is the true one. I shall therefore state the matter according to my own notions: but if any of you should think that I concede to myself what is not correct, he ought to interrupt and refute me. What I say, I do not say from knowledge; I am only inquiring, in common with yourselves; and if my opponent appears to me to say any thing just, I shall be the first to acknowledge it. If then you wish the argument to proceed, I will continue it; if not, let us leave off, and retire.”

Gorgias assured Socrates, both in his own name and in that of the bystanders, that they were all anxious for the discussion to proceed. It did proceed: but the conclusion, the most interesting part of the whole dialogue, we must, though with regret, postpone to the next number.

Callicles having, as we saw in the last number, declined to take any further part in the argument, Socrates requested him, if he would not join in the discussion, at least to listen and stop him if he said any thing incorrect. “If you refute me,” continued Socrates, “I shall not be angry with you, as you are with me, but shall account you my greatest friend.” Socrates then recapitulated the preceding argument, questioning and answering himself. That Pleasant and Good are not synonymous; that the Pleasant is to be pursued for the sake of Good, not Good for the sake of the pleasant: That the Pleasant is that, the presence of which makes us pleased. Good, that, the presence of which makes us good. But we, like all other things that are made good, are made so by the presence of some kind of excellence; and our excellence, like that of all other things, is not brought about by haphazard, but by order, and regulation, and art. “That, therefore, which, when it exists in any thing, makes it good, is some kind of order. An ordered mind, consequently, is better than an unregulated one. But an ordered mind is a considerate one; a considerate mind therefore is good, and its opposite, a mind which never resists any impulse, is bad. But a considerate mind will always do what is fitting, both towards gods and men; or it would not be considerate. But a mind which does what is fitting towards men, is a just mind; towards gods, a pious one. And courageous likewise: for a considerate person will neither seek nor avoid what he ought not: he will seek, and avoid, and endure, those things, those persons, those pleasures, and those pains, which he ought. A considerate person, or what is the same thing, a person possessed of self-command, is therefore, as we said before, of necessity just, and brave, and pious. And a good man does all things well, and is happy; a bad man does ill, and is miserable; and this is, the man without self-restraint, whom you praised. If all this be true, he who would be happy must practise self-restraint, and fly from self-indulgence; he must endeavour above all things not to require punishment, but if he, or his friends, or his country, be in need of punishment, he must inflict it upon them. Such, it seems to me, is the scope and end of a good life: to produce justice and self-control in him who would be happy; not to let his desires be uncontrolled, and make it the object of his life to satisfy them—an endless ill, the life of a pirate: for such a person cannot be loved by God or man, for he cannot be in any sympathy or communion (κοινωνία) with them.

“Either this argument, which proves that the happy are happy by the possession of justice and self-control, the wretched wretched by the possession of vice, must be refuted; or if this be true, we must consider what are the conclusions from it. The conclusions are, all those which you asked whether I was serious in asserting; that we ought to accuse ourselves and our friends, and bring ourselves to justice, if we commit any injury; and that this is the proper employment of rhetoric. And what you thought that Polus admitted from shamefacedness, was true, viz. that to injure is more ignoble, and consequently a greater evil, than to be injured; and likewise what Polus said that Gorgias admitted from shamefacedness, that he who would be rightly a rhetorician, must be just, and must understand justice.

“This being the case, let us consider whether there was any ground for your reproof of me, when you said that I am not able to protect myself or any of my friends from the greatest dangers; but that, like those who have been deprived of their civil rights by the sentence of a court of justice, I am at the mercy of any one who chooses, as you expressed it, to strike me a blow, or to take away my property, or to banish me from the state, or even to kill me: and that to be thus situated is, of all things, as you said, the most ignoble. But I have said often, and there is no reason against saying it again, that the most ignoble of all things is not to be struck unjustly, or to be robbed or put to death unjustly. To do all these things unjustly, or to injure me in any way whatever, is both a more ignoble and a worse thing to the person who injures, than to me who am injured. This has been established by arguments strong as iron and adamant; which, unless you or some stouter man can refute, it is impossible to speak reasonably, speaking otherwise than I do. For I always say the same thing, viz. that I do not myself know how these things are; that, however, no one, speaking in opposition to what has occurred to me on this subject, is able to avoid absurdity. I therefore lay down these things as true.

“If however they be true; if injustice be the greatest of evils to the unjust man, but impunity in injustice a still greater evil if possible; what kind of protection is it, which, to be unable to render to one’s self or one’s friends, is really contemptible? Is it not that which averts the greatest evil? Is not the nobleness of being able to protect, and the ignobleness of being unable, proportional to the greatness of the evil to be averted?” “Certainly,” replied Callicles. S. “Here then are two evils: to injure, and to be injured: the first a greater evil, the latter a less. What ought we to provide ourselves with, if we mean to protect ourselves against these two evils? Power, or merely will? For example, to escape from being injured, is it sufficient that we should will not to be injured, or is power required for that purpose?” C. “It is evident that power is required.” S. “And to injure:—Is it sufficient to prevent us from doing injustice, that we should will not to do it, or is it necessary for this purpose also, to have provided ourselves with a power, with an art, which if we do not learn, and exercise, we shall do injustice? Did you think that Polus and I were right when we agreed that no one commits injustice willingly, but always unwillingly?” C. “Be it so, that you may complete your argument.” S. “An art, and a power, therefore, are required, in order not to do injustice.” C. “Yes.” S. “What, now, are the means by which a person may contrive that he should be never injured, or as little as possible? To me, it seems that it would be requisite for him either to be a despotic ruler in the state, or to associate himself with the existing government.” “Do you see,” asked Callicles, “how ready I am to praise you if you say any thing good? What you now say appears to me extremely well said.” S. “Consider whether you approve also of what I shall say next. It seems to me, that, as the old sages used to say, each man loves most those who most resemble himself. Do not you think so?” C. “I do.” S. “Then, wherever the government is in the hands of a savage and uncultured despot, if there be any person in the state who is much better than he, the despot will be afraid of him, and will never be able to love him with all his heart.” C. “Agreed.” S. “Neither would he love any one who is much worse than himself; for he would despise him.” C. “This likewise is true.” S. “No one therefore remains to be his friend, except such as, being of a similar disposition to him, praising and blaming the same things which he does, are willing to be his subjects and be governed by him. Any person of this sort will be extremely powerful in the state, and no one will injure him without being the worse for it.” C. “Yes.” S. “If then, in the state in question, any young man would contrive by what means he may become very powerful, and no one may injure him, his best plan is, to accustom himself from his youth upwards to have the same pleasures and pains with his master, and to resemble him as much as possible.” C. “Yes.” S. “By this method he will have attained the one object, of not being injured.” C. “He will.” S. “But will he have attained the other object, not to injure? or the very opposite? having made himself to resemble the ruler, who is unjust, and having attained influence with him? It seems to me that he will have accomplished, on the contrary, the means of doing the greatest possible quantity of injustice, and escaping with impunity.” C. “So it seems.” S. “Then he will be afflicted with the greatest of evils, being evil in mind, and being corrupted by power, and by the imitation of his master.” C. “I do not know how you twist and turn the argument backwards and forwards. Do you not know that this imitator will, if he pleases, be able to destroy the nonimitator, and take his property?” S. “Surely I do, most excellent Callicles, if I am not deaf, having heard it so often from you and Polus, and from nearly every other person in the town. But do you also listen to me, who say that it is true he will kill him if he pleases, but if so, a bad man will kill a good one.” C. “And is not this the very thing which is to be complained of?” S. “Not by any rational person, as the argument has shown. Do you think that a person should make it the object of all his exertions, to live as long as he can, and to study all the arts which can preserve us from dangers, such, for instance, as that rhetoric which you advised me to study, which saves our lives and fortunes in a court of justice?” C. “And very good advice it was.” S. “Pray, does the faculty of swimming appear to you a very grave and dignified one?” C. “No, indeed.” S. “And yet it saves men’s lives, when they are in circumstances in which that faculty is needed. If this should appear to you a trifling instance, I will give you a greater one, the art of navigation; which not only saves our lives but our property from the greatest of dangers, like rhetoric. And yet this art is unassuming and modest, and does not take honour to itself as having effected something splendid, but if it has brought you safe from Ægina hither, it charges two oboli, and if from the distance of Pontus or Egypt, having saved youself, your wife, your children, your fortune, it lands you here and charges two drachmæ; and the man whose art has accomplished all this, goes down to the beach, and walks about his ship with a humble dress and demeanour. For he is aware, I take it, that it is impossible to tell whom among his passengers he has benefited and whom he has harmed by not suffering them to be drowned, knowing that he has landed them no better men than he took them on board, either in body or mind. He considers that if any one, being afflicted with great and incurable bodily diseases, has been saved from shipwreck, he is unfortunate in not having perished, as from having received any benefit: and if any one has many incurable diseases in what is of greater price than the body, his mind, it is no benefit to this man to be saved from death, whether by sea or by the executioner; since it is not good for the bad man to live, for he must live badly. Therefore a pilot is not held in reverence, though he saves our lives. Nor an engineer either, who is sometimes as potent a preserver as either a pilot or a general; for he occasionally saves whole cities. Do you think as highly of him as you do of a rhetorician? And yet, if he were to exalt his profession after your fashion, and call upon all men to become engineers, on account of the exalted excellence of the art, he would have enough to say. But you, in spite of all this, despise him and his art, and would call him an engineer as a term of disdain, and would not give your daughter to his son, or allow your son to marry his daughter. And yet, by your own account of yourself, what ground have you for looking down upon the engineer, and the other people whom I have mentioned? I know you would say, you are better, and of a better sort. But if to be better does not consist in what I said; if all excellence consists in being able to preserve ourselves and what belongs to us, no matter what sort of men we are; then your disdain of the engineer and the physician, and of the other arts which have our preservation in view, is ridiculous. But observe whether nobleness and goodness do not consist in something quite different from saving and being saved: for a true man should not make it his study to live as long as possible, but should commit this to God, and believing what the women say, that no man can escape his destiny, should consider in what manner, so long as he does live, he may live best. Should he assimilate himself to the government under which he lives? and should you now study to resemble the Athenian people, that you may be a favourite with them, and may be powerful in the state? Let us consider well, lest we should purchase this power at the expense of what we most value. For if you think that any one can teach you an art which will make you powerful in this state, being dissimilar to the government of it, whether for better or worse, you are mistaken. You must be, not even an imitator of it, but actually similar to it in your own nature, if you would have any success in courting the favour of the Athenian people. Whoever, therefore, shall make you most like to the Athenian people, will make you such a politician and rhetorician, as you desire to become: for every person is pleased with discourse conformable to his own disposition, and displeased with that which is unconformable to it. Can you say any thing against this?” C. “You seem to me, I do not know why, to speak well: but I am like most people, I am not much persuaded by you.” S. “The passion for the people, with which your soul is filled, resists me. But if we consider the subject better, and frequently, you will perhaps be persuaded.

“Remember, now, that we said there were two methods of ministering either to the body or the mind; the one having in view Pleasure, the other aiming at the greatest Good, whether producing pleasure or pain.” C. “We did.” S. “That which aims at pleasure, is ignoble, and no better than adulation.” C. “Let it be so if you please.” S. “The other aims at what is best for that which it serves, be it the body or the mind.” C. “Yes.” S. “Ought we not then to attach ourselves to the service of our country and our countrymen, with a view to make them as good as we can? For without this, as we have found before, it is of no use to render them any other benefit, since if their minds are not well ordered, it does them no good to obtain either wealth or authority or any other power. Is it not so?” C. “If you will.”

S. “If then we were exhorting one another to apply ourselves to the public works, the building of walls, or temples, or docks, ought we not to examine ourselves, and see, in the first place, whether we understand the art of architecture or not, and under what master we have studied it?” C. “Certainly.” S. “And next, whether we have ever constructed any private edifice, for ourselves or any of our friends, and whether it be a good or a bad one. For if, examining ourselves, we found that we had studied under good and celebrated teachers, and had erected many admirable edifices, first under our masters, and afterwards by ourselves when we had left our masters, we should then act like reasonable beings in undertaking the public works. But if we could not name any person who had been our teacher, nor point to any buildings which we had erected, or to any that were not worthless, it would be senseless in us to take upon ourselves the construction of any public work, and to exhort each other to do so. Is this rightly said or not?” C. “It is.” S. “And so likewise if we were about to practise as physicians, or were inviting one another to do so, you and I ought to consider of one another thus: Pray how is Socrates himself in respect to health? Has any one been ever cured of an illness through his means? And I should ask the same questions respecting you. And if we could not discover that any one, foreigner or citizen, man or woman, had been brought into a better state of body by our means, would it not be ridiculous in us to attempt, as the proverb says, to learn pottery in the pot itself, and endeavour to practise for the public before we had tried in private, failed often and succeeded often, until we have sufficiently exercised ourselves in the art?” C. “It would.” S. “Now, then, since you have recently begun to transact the affairs of the state, and are calling upon me and reproaching me because I do not follow your example, let us examine one another: Pray has Callicles ever made any of the citizens a better man? Is there any person, foreigner or citizen, slave or freeman, who, having been previously unjust and intemperate and thoughtless, has been made a good man by Callicles? If any one were to ask you this question, what would you say? Do you not like to answer whether you have accomplished any achievement of this sort while yet in a private station, before you attempted to practise publicly?” C. “You are reproachful.” S. “I do not ask the question from any wish to reproach you, but from a real wish to know in what way you think that men ought to conduct themselves in public life, and whether you, in your public conduct, will be intent upon anything else, than that we, the citizens, may be as good as possible. Have we not frequently agreed that this is what a politician should do? Have we agreed or not? Answer. We have agreed: I will answer for you.

“If, then, this be what a good man should do for his country, pray look back and tell me, whether Pericles and Cimon, and Miltiades and Themistocles, still appear to you to have been good citizens.” C. “They do.” S. “Then, if they were so, each of them must have made his countrymen better than they were before. Did they, or not?” C. “They did.” S. “Then, when Pericles began to speak in the public assemblies, the Athenians were worse men than they were when he last addressed them?” C. “Perhaps so.” S. “Not perhaps, but they positively must, if he was a good citizen; by our former admissions.” C. “What then?” S. “Nothing: but tell me this, whether the Athenians are said to have been made better by Pericles, or, on the contrary, to have been corrupted by him. For I hear it said that Pericles made the Athenians idlers and cowards, and gossips and covetous, being the first who accustomed them to receive pay.”C. “Those who told you so are Spartans at heart.” S. “One thing, however, I was not told, but we both of us know it; that Pericles was in high reputation, and never was condemned on any disgraceful charge by the Athenians, at first, when they were comparatively bad men; but after he had made them virtuous men, towards the end of his life, they found him guilty of peculation, and were near passing sentence of death upon him.” C. “What then? Does this prove Pericles a bad statesman?” S. “A superintendent of asses, at least, or of horses or oxen, would be thought a very bad one, if the animals did not kick, and start, and bite, when they were intrusted to him, but did all this when they quitted his charge. Is not that person, in your opinion, a bad guardian of any animal, who sends him forth more savage than he received him?” C. “I will say yes, to please you.” S. “Will you also please me by answering whether man is an animal or not?” C. “Unquestionably.” S. “And Pericles was a superintendent of men.” C. “Yes.” S. “Ought they not then, if he, their superintendent, had been a good politician, to have become more just, not more unjust, under his care?” C. “Yes.” S. “But the just, as Homer says, are gentle. What say you?” C. “The same.” S. “Now, he left them more ferocious than he received them, and that too towards himself, towards whom he least desired it.” C. “Do you wish me to agree with you?” S. “If you think I speak the truth.” C. “Be it so, then.” S. “And if more ferocious, then more unjust, and worse.” C. “Be it so.” S. “Then Pericles was not a good statesman.” C. “So say you.” S. “And you too, from your own admission. And what of Cimon? Did not those whom he served banish him by ostracism, that for ten years they might not hear his voice? And did they not banish Themistocles, and sentence Miltiades to a dungeon? If these had been good statesmen, they would not have been so treated. A good coachman does not at first keep his seat, but after he has trained his horses, and learned to be a better driver, then fall off. This does not happen either in driving or in any thing else: does it, think you?” C. “No.” S. “Then we were right in saying that we knew of no man who had been a good statesman in this nation. You allowed that there was none in our own day, but affirmed that there were such persons formerly, and instanced these men. But these, it appears, are on a level with those of the present day; so that, if they were rhetoricians, they neither possessed the true rhetoric, nor even that which is a kind of adulation, otherwise they would not have been so unsuccessful.” “But,” said Callicles, “no one in the present day has approached to these men in the works which they accomplished.” “Neither do I disparage them,” replied Socrates, “in the character of ministrators to the people’s inclinations; I think that they were much more skilful ministrators than the men of our day, and more capable of providing for the nation what it desired. But in respect of changing its desires, and not giving way to them, but exhorting and impelling the nation to those courses by which the citizens might become better men, they did not differ from our own contemporaries: and this alone is the business of a good citizen. In providing ships, and walls, and docks, and so forth, I grant that these men were abler than ours.

“You and I are acting very ridiculously. All this time we continually return to the same point, and never know each other’s meaning. I think you have often admitted that there are two kinds of pursuits relating to the body and the mind, one of them merely ministrative, which can provide food for our bodies if they are hungry, drink if they are thirsty, clothes if they are cold, and in short whatever the body desires. I purposely repeat the same illustrations constantly, that you may the more easily understand me. It is no wonder that any one who is capable of providing these things, whether he be a dealer or a producer, a cook, or weaver, and so forth, should think himself and be thought by others to be the proper guardian of the body; so long as they do not know that there is, besides all this, an art of gymnastics and medicine, which is the real guardian of the body; and which it is fit should govern all these other arts, and make use of them as instruments, because this art knows what food or drink is good and bad, with reference to the excellence of the body, but the others do not know; for which reason these are all slavish and illiberal, and simply ministerial, and gymnastics and medicine ought in justice to be sovereign over them. You sometimes appear to know, that I assert this to be true likewise of the mind, and you assent, as if you understood my meaning: but you presently turn back, and say that there have been excellent citizens in this state, and when I ask who, you name to me exactly such a kind of politicians, as if, when I asked you what good gymnasts and superintendents of the body there are or have been, you were gravely to answer, Thearion the baker, and Mithæcus the author of the cookery book, and Sarambus the tavern keeper, saying that these were surprisingly good in the care and treatment of the body, by providing excellent bread, and meat, and wine. You would perhaps be angry, if I were to answer, My friend, you know nothing of gymnastics; you tell me of people who can only minister to me and supply my desires, having no sound knowledge respecting them: and who perhaps, after swelling and fattening men’s bodies, and being praised by them, will end by destroying even their original flesh. They, indeed, from inexperience, will not perhaps lay upon these men who crammed them, the blame of their diseases and loss of flesh; but when their former repletion, not being of a healthy kind, shall long after produce diseases, they will reproach and punish those who happen to be attending on them and advising them at that time, but will eulogize the original authors of their ills. You, Callicles, now do precisely the same thing. You eulogize the men who, having feasted the Athenians and crammed them with what they desire, are said to have made them a great nation, because it is not perceived that the commonwealth is tumid and hollow, through those men of antiquity: for, without making us just or temperate, they have crammed us with ports, and docks, and fortifications, and revenues, and such trumpery. When the crisis arrives, the Athenians will lay the blame upon their then advisers; they will eulogize Themistocles, and Cimon, and Pericles, the authors of their calamity; but when they have lost their original possessions as well as those more recently acquired, perhaps they will revenge themselves upon you, if you do not take care, and upon my friend Alcibiades, who were not the original authors of their evils, although perhaps you may have assisted in producing them.

“And by the way, I observe that something which is very usual, is very unreasonable. When the state takes hold of any of its statesmen, and treats them as criminals, they are indignant, and represent themselves as ill used men, who having rendered many great services to the state, are unjustly destroyed by it. This is all imposture. A leading man in a state cannot be unjustly destroyed by the state of which he is the leader. Those who call themselves politicians, resemble those who call themselves sophists. The sophists, in other respects wise men, do one thing which is very absurd: Calling themselves teachers of virtue, they often reproach their disciples for wronging them by not paying their hire, and not showing them gratitude for the good they have done them. What can be more senseless than this, that men who have become virtuous and just, men who have been purified from injustice by their teacher, and imbued with justice, should be unjust? Do you not think this absurd? You have forced me really to harangue, Callicles, not being willing to answer.” C. “Cannot you speak, unless some one will answer you?” S. “It seems I can; for I have been speaking for a long time, since you will not answer. But tell me, in the name of friendship: Do you not think it very absurd, that he who says he has made some one a good man, should blame him, that having been made by him, and still being, a good man, he is nevertheless a bad one?” C. “I think so.” S. “And do you not hear those who profess to instruct men in virtue, speaking in this manner?” C. “I do. But why do you talk about men who are good for nothing?”S. “And what will you say of those, who, professing to have been at the head of the nation, and to have managed it so that it should become as good as possible, afterwards turn round and reproach it as being wicked? Do you think that such persons are any better than those whom you despise? A sophist, and a rhetorician, are the same thing, or very much alike, as I said to Polus. But you, from ignorance, think the one a fine thing, and despise the other. In reality, the pursuit of the sophist is nobler than that of the rhetorician, as the art of Legislation is nobler than the art of Judicature, and Gymnastics than Medicine. I, for my part, thought that orators and sophists were the only persons who were not entitled to accuse their scholars of behaving ill to them; for in the same breath they would be accusing themselves of having done no good to those whom they undertook to improve. Is it not so?” C. “It is.” S. “And they alone should have it in their power to bestow their particular kind of service without pay. A person who has received any other service, who has, for instance, acquired swiftness by the instructions of a gymnast, might perhaps be ungrateful to the gymnast, unless he previously made a contract with him for the payment of hire. For men are not unjust by slowness, but by injustice.” C. “Yes.” S. “Then if any one frees them from this quality of injustice, there is no danger of their being unjust to him. If he can really make men good, he alone may with safety cast this benefit at random.” C. “He may.” S. “Therefore, it is no disgrace to take money for giving advice on any other subject, as on building, for example.” C. “No.” S. “But on this subject, how one may become most virtuous, and may best administer one’s family or the state, it is considered disgraceful to say that we will not give advice unless we are paid for it.” C. “Yes.” S. “And why? Because of all services, this is the only one which of itself inspires the person benefited with a desire to repay the obligation: so that it is a sign of having performed this service well, if we are requited for it, ill, if we are not. Is not this true?” C. “It is.”

S. “To which, then, of these kinds of service do you exhort me? As a physician, to strive that the Athenians may become as good as possible? Or as a mere ministrative officer, to wait upon their desires? Speak out boldly.” C. “I say, then, as a ministrative officer.” S. “You call upon me, then, to become an adulator.” C. “Had you rather be called a Mysian? as you certainly will, if you do not follow this advice.” S. “Do not say, as you have said so often, that any one who pleases may put me to death; least I should answer, that if so, a bad man will put to death a good one. Nor that he will deprive me of my substance; lest I should reply, that if he does, he will not be able to use it for his good; but, as he acquired it unjustly, so he will use it unjustly; if unjustly, ignobly; and if ignobly, perniciously to himself.” C. “How confident you seem to be that you are in no danger of these things! as if you could not be brought into danger of your life, even perhaps by a worthless fellow.” S. “I must be very foolish, if I did not know that in this state any one whatever may be so treated. This, however, I well know, that if I should, as you say, be charged with a criminal offence, it will be a bad man who charges me; for no good man would indict a man who does no wrong. And it will be no wonder if I should be put to death. Shall I tell you why I think so?” C. “If you please.” S. “I think that I, with a very few other Athenians, (not to say I alone,) cultivate the true art of politics, and that I alone, among the men of the present day, am a politician in the true sense of the word. Since then I say whatever I do say, not for the gratification of any one, but aiming at what is best, not at what is most agreeable, and not choosing to do those fine things which you recommend, I shall not know what to say in a court of justice. What I said to Polus, would apply to myself. I shall be judged as a physician would, if tried before children, on the accusation of a cook. What could such a person say in his defence? Suppose his accuser to say, See what evils this man has inflicted upon you, cutting and burning and emaciating you, giving you bitter draughts, and forcing you to fast; not like me, who have feasted you with every thing that is delightful. What could the physician say to all this? If he said the truth, ‘I did all these things for your health,’ do you not think that such judges would hoot him down?” C. “Probably.” S. “And I myself, I well know, should be treated in a similar manner, if I were brought before a court of justice. For I shall not be able to remind the judges of any pleasures that I have procured for them, which are what they understand by benefits. But I do not envy either the providers or those for whom they provide. And if any one should say that I corrupt the youth by unsettling their minds, or libel the older men by bitter speeches, either in private or in public, I shall neither be able to say the truth, viz. ‘I say and do all these things justly, and therefore for your good,’ nor shall I have any other defence; so that I must be content to undergo my fate.” C. “Does a man, then, who is thus situated, so unable to protect himself, appear to you to be as he should be?” S. “If that be in him, of which we have so often spoken: if he have protected himself, by never having said or done anything unjust, either towards men or gods. For this is, as we have frequently admitted, the best sort of self-protection. If, therefore, any one should convict me of being incapable of affording this protection to myself or others, I should be ashamed, whether I were convicted in the presence of many, or of one only; and if I were to perish from this kind of incapability, I should be grieved; but if I should die for want of Adulatory Rhetoric, I should bear my death very easily. Death itself no one fears, who is not altogether irrational and unmanly; but to commit injustice is an object of rational fear, for to arrive in the other world with the soul loaded with crimes, is the greatest of evils. I will, if you please, set forth to you in what manner this happens. I will relate to you a history, which you will, as I think, consider a fable, but I shall state it to you as true.”

Socrates then introduces a mythos or legend, of the description so frequent in Plato, and which he never seems to deliver as truth, but as a symbol of some truth. This mythos relates to a future state, and a general judgment of mankind. Formerly (he says) men were judged on the day on which they were destined to die, and were tried by living judges: but Pluto and the guardians of Elysium complained to Jupiter, that people frequently were sent to them who were undeserving; for, being tried while yet alive, they were tried with their mortal garments not stripped off; and many whose souls were evil, had dressed them out in a handsome body, and rank and wealth, and when the trial came on, they produced many witnesses, to assert that they had led a just life: and the judges were imposed upon by these means, more especially as they also were still alive, and gross material organs obstructed the clearness of their mental sight. On this account it was ordered that men should no longer foresee their own death; and that they should be tried naked, that is, not till they were dead, and by judges who were likewise dead and naked. Æacus, Rhadamanthus, and Minos, therefore, judge mankind, at the place where the two roads to Tartarus and to Elysium separate. “Death,” added Socrates, “is merely the separation of the body and the soul: each of them remains the same in its own nature. The body, for some time at least, continues of the same figure and aspect, and with the same marks upon it, as during life; and the soul likewise, when stripped of the body, discloses its natural state, as well as all the artificial impressions which have been made upon it by the habits acquired during life. These judges, therefore, when the souls come to them, know not whose souls they are, but often take hold of the soul of the Great King, or any other monarch, or powerful man, and finding nothing sound in it, but seeing it branded and imprinted with the stigmas of perjury and injustice, which the practices of the man during his life have left upon it, and finding it crooked and awry from having been nurtured in falsehood and deception, and full of baseness and disorderliness from habits of luxury and insolence and self-indulgence, they dismiss it to the place of torment. All punishment, when properly inflicted, is designed either to benefit the sufferer by making him better, or to be a warning to others, and render them better by the terror of the example. Those whose vices are curable, are benefited by their torments; such benefits can only arise from suffering, either here or in Tartarus; for there are no other means of being cured of injustice. But those whose crimes are of the deepest dye, and who are consequently incurable, are made examples of, and are not benefited by their punishment, being incurable, but serve to benefit the beholders, being hung up as an example to those vicious men who come there. Of these Archelaus will be one, if Polus has told truth respecting him. I apprehend that most of these examples are yielded by despots and powerful statesmen; for they, from the greater license which they possess, commit the greatest crimes. Homer bears witness to this, for he has represented those who suffer eternally in hell as all of them kings, Tantalus, and Sysiphus, and Tityus: he has not placed Thersites, or any other wicked private individual, among those who suffer the great punishments, as being incurable; for it was not in the power of these men to commit the greater crimes: by so much the happier they. It is not, however, absolutely impossible even for statesmen and powerful men, to be virtuous; and they who are so, are highly to be extolled: for it is difficult to live justly with much liberty of committing injustice, and few are they who do so. There have been such men, however, and probably there will be again, both here and elsewhere, whose greatness consists in performing justly that which is intrusted to them: and one very notable instance throughout all Greece, was Aristides. When, on the contrary, the judges behold a soul which has lived in holiness and truth, (usually, as I affirm, that of a philosopher, who has minded his own affairs, and not taken much part in active life,) they commend him, and dismiss him to Elysium.

“I, therefore, make it my study so to act, that I shall appear before my judge with my soul in the soundest possible state. Letting alone the honours which the Many confer, and pursuing the Truth, I endeavour to live well, and when the time shall come, to die well. And to the best of my ability I call upon all men to do the same; and I exhort you, in my turn, to this mode of life, and this struggle, which is worth all the struggles here: and I tell you, that you will not be able to protect yourself, but when Æacus calls you before him, you will gape and stare as much as I should here, and perhaps some one will strike you a blow, and insult you with every kind of contumely.

“Perhaps you may despise all this, and think it an old woman’s tale. And there would be nothing wonderful in despising it, if, by seeking, we could find any thing better and more true. But now you see that you, the three wisest men now living in Greece, you, and Polus, and Gorgias, are not able to show that any other course of life should be pursued, than that which this story pronounces to be for our interest in a future state; but amid so many refutations, this conclusion alone rests undisturbed, that to injure should be more guarded against than to be injured, and that it ought to be our greatest study not to appear good, but to be good, both in private and in public; and that if in any respect we become wicked, we should be punished, and that the next best thing to being just, is to become so by being punished; and that all adulation, whether of ourselves or of others, of a few or of many, should be avoided, and rhetoric, and every thing else, should be employed for the purposes of justice only. Be advised by me, therefore, and follow me thither, where, if you arrive, you will be happy both in life and after death. And suffer any man to despise you as a fool, and to insult you if he will, aye, and to strike you even that disgraceful blow: for you will suffer nothing by it if you are really excellent, and practise virtue. And having thus practised it in common, we will then, if we see fit, apply ourselves to public life, or adopt any course to which our deliberations may lead us, being then fitter for deliberation than we are now. For it is shameful, being as it seems we are, to value ourselves as being somebody; we who never think the same thing on the same subject, and that the greatest of all subjects; so ignorant are we. Let us use, therefore, as our guide, the argument which we have now investigated; which tells us, that the best mode of life, is to live and die in the practice of justice, and of all other virtue. This road let us follow, and to this let us exhort all others; not that to which you exhorted me; for it is good for nothing, O Callicles.”

The reader has now seen the substance of what the greatest moralist of antiquity finds to say in recommendation of a virtuous life. His arguments, like those of moralists in general, are not of a nature to convince many, except those who do not need conviction; there are few of them which Polus and Callicles, had the author endowed them with dialectical skill equal to his own, might not easily have parried. But is not this an inconvenience necessarily attending the attempt to prove the eligibility of virtue by argument? Argument may show what general regulation of the desires, or what particular course of conduct, virtue requires: How to live virtuously, is a question the solution of which belongs to the understanding: but the understanding has no inducements which it can bring to the aid of one who has not yet determined whether he will endeavour to live virtuously or no. It is impossible, by any arguments, to prove that a life of obedience to duty is preferable, so far as respects the agent himself, to a life of circumspect and cautious selfishness. It will be answered, perhaps, that virtue is the road to happiness, and that “honesty is the best policy.” Of this celebrated maxim, may we not venture to say, once for all, without hesitation or reserve, that it is not true? The whole experience of mankind runs counter to it. The life of a good man or woman is full of unpraised and unrequited sacrifices. In the present dialogue, which, though scanty in conclusive arguments, is rich in profound reflections, there is one remark of which the truth is quite universal—that the world loves its like, and refuses its favour to its unlike. To be more honest than the many, is nearly as prejudicial, in a worldly sense, as to be a greater rogue. They, indeed, who have no conception of any higher honesty than is practised by the majority of the society in which they live, are right in considering such honesty as accordant with policy. But how is he indemnified, who scruples to do that which his neighbours do without scruple? Where is the reward, in any worldly sense, for heroism? Civilization, with its laissez-aller and its laissez-faire which it calls tolerance, has, in two thousand years, done thus much for the moral hero, that he now runs little risk of drinking hemlock like Socrates, or like Christ, of dying on the cross. The worst that can well happen to him is to be everywhere ill spoken of, and to fail in all his worldly concerns: and if he be unusually fortunate, he may, perhaps, be so well treated by the rest of mankind, as to be allowed to be honest in peace.

The old monk in Rabelais had a far truer notion of worldly wisdom: “To perform your appointed task indifferently well; never to speak ill of your superiors; and to let the mad world go its own way, for it will go its own way.”

All valid arguments in favour of virtue, presuppose that we already desire virtue, or desire some of its ends and objects. You may prove to us that virtue tends to the happiness of mankind, or of our country; but that supposes that we already care for mankind or for our country. You may tell us that virtue will gain us the approbation of the wise and good; but this supposes that the wise and good are already more to us than other people are. Those only will go along with Socrates in the preceding dialogue, who already feel that the accordance of their lives and inclinations with some scheme of duty is necessary to their comfort; whose feelings of virtue are already so strong, that if they allow any other consideration to prevail over those feelings, they are really conscious that the health of their souls is gone, and that they are, as Plato affirms, in a state of disease. But no arguments which Plato urges have power to make those love or desire virtue, who do not already: nor is this ever to be effected through the intellect, but through the imagination and the affections.

The love of virtue, and every other noble feeling, is not communicated by reasoning, but caught by inspiration or sympathy from those who already have it; and its nurse and foster-mother is Admiration. We acquire it from those whom we love and reverence, especially from those whom we earliest love and reverence; from our ideal of those, whether in past or in present times, whose lives and characters have been the mirror of all noble qualities; and lastly, from those who, as poets or artists, can clothe those feelings in the most beautiful forms, and breathe them into us through our imagination and our sensations. It is thus that Plato has deserved the title of a great moral writer. Christ did not argue about virtue, but commanded it: Plato, when he argues about it, argues for the most part inconclusively; but he resembles Christ in the love which he inspires for it, and in the stern resolution never to swerve from it, which those who can relish his writings naturally feel when perusing them. And the present writer regrets that his imperfect abstract is so ill fitted to convey any idea of the degree in which this dialogue makes the feelings and course of life which it inculcates commend themselves to our inmost nature, by associating them with our most impressive conceptions of beauty and power.

The Apology of Socrates

[Monthly Repository, IX (Feb., and March, 1835), 112-21, and 169-78. Not republished; signed “A.” at 152.16, the end of the introductory paragraphs, rather than at the end of the article, presumably to mark what follows as a full translation, instead of an abstract, as are the other dialogues in the Monthly Repository. Identified in JSM’s bibliography (after the general heading cited on 38) as “No IV. The Apology of Socrates: part 1 in the M.R. for Febry 1835 / part 2 in the M.R. for March, 1835” (MacMinn, 37). There are no marks in the Somerville College copy.

For comments on this and the other translations, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xvii-xxviii and lxxx-lxxxiii above.]

we have given several specimens of the philosophy of Socrates, as exhibited, and doubtless improved, by Plato, in those of his works which there is no reason to consider as having any foundation in real incidents, or conversations actually held between the supposed interlocutors. It will now be interesting to the reader to be introduced to Socrates as described by himself, in the work which stands among Plato’s writings under the title of The Apology of Socrates, and in the form of a speech delivered before his judges, on the celebrated trial for blasphemy, which terminated in his capital condemnation. It has been a question among the critics, whether this speech is the work of Socrates himself, or of Plato under his master’s name. But the discerning Schleiermacher, and a scholar and critic not unworthy to be named even with Schleiermacher, the Rev. Connop Thirlwall, have adduced reasons which, in our judgment, leave little doubt that a speech, substantially identical with that which is now about to engage our attention, was actually delivered by Socrates at his trial; and that Plato, in this case, aimed only at being a faithful reporter of what his master had thought fit to say in his own vindication, when prosecuted for his life on the accusation of corrupting the youth, and of being an unbeliever in the gods of his country.

An abstract, such as those we gave of the three dialogues which have successively occupied our attention, would entirely fail to give any conception of this singular performance: and after some consideration, we have resolved upon attempting an exact translation. It would, however, require a Plato, so to translate Plato as to render the ideas intelligible to an English reader, in the exact shape in which they were presented by an Athenian speaker to an Athenian audience, preserving, at the same time, all the energy and beauty of the style. We have been obliged to confine ourselves to one or the other object: either to put something like the matter of this discourse into the best English we could command, sacrificing all that is characteristic of the manner of Socrates, and of the notions and feelings of the Athenian public; or else, to retain the very thoughts of Socrates, and his very mode of stating and illustrating those thoughts, but to exchange Plato’s eloquent Greek for an English style at once bald and verbose. We have preferred the latter course, as more conducive to the objects we have in view in these papers.

SPEECH OF SOCRATES BEFORE HIS JUDGES

In what manner, O Athenians, you have been affected by my accusers, I know not; I myself, in listening to them, almost forgot that I was myself, so plausibly did they speak. Although, of what they said, not one word, I may say, was true. Among the many falsehoods which they told you, one in particular excited my astonishment; when they said that you should beware lest you be deceived by me, who am a powerful speaker. For, their not being ashamed to be immediately contradicted by the fact, when I am seen to be not at all a powerful speaker, appeared to me most shameless. Unless, indeed, they call him a powerful speaker who speaks the truth. If so, I admit myself to be an orator of a different kind from them. They, as I affirm, have spoken no truth; from me you will hear all the truth. Not, indeed, O Athenians, a speech like theirs, all tricked out with fine words and phrases: what I say, will be said unstudiedly, in such words as offer themselves. For I am convinced that all which I say is just; none of you need expect any thing else of me. Nor would it become these years, O Athenians, to appear before you spinning phrases like a stripling. And this, O Athenians, I especially solicit of you; that if you hear me make my defence in the very same style of language in which I am accustomed to speak in the streets and public places, where most of you have heard me, and elsewhere, you will neither be surprised nor clamorous. For the fact is this: At the age of seventy and more, I now for the first time appear in a court of justice; I am, therefore, a complete stranger to the ways of speaking in this place. As then, if I were really a stranger, you would have pardoned me for speaking in the language and style in which I was brought up, so I now ask of you this justice, as it appears to me, that you will disregard the manner of my speech—which perhaps may be better, perhaps worse—but consider and attend to this, whether what I say is just or not. For that is the excellence of a judge; an orator’s is to speak the truth.

I have to defend myself first, O Athenians, from the first false accusations against me, and from my first accusers; and afterwards from the more recent ones. For I have had many accusers; who have spoken falsely of me now for many years: whom I fear more than Anytus and his associates, although these also are formidable; but those are still more so, O Athenians, who have begun with most of you from your childhood upwards, and poured into your ears false accusations of me, saying that there is one Socrates, a wise man, who has explored the things which are in the sky and under the earth, and who makes the worse appear the better reason. They, O Athenians, who have spread such a character of me, are my really dangerous accusers; for their hearers believe that those who are addicted to such inquiries do not even believe in gods. These accusers, too, are numerous; they have now spoken ill of me for a long time, and to many of you in the most credulous time of your lives, when you were children, or mere lads, and with all the advantage of an undefended cause, no one replying to them. And, what is hardest of all, one cannot so much as know the names of any of these people, except, perhaps, a play-writer or so. Neither they who, by calumnies and invidious speaking, have wrought upon you, nor they who, being themselves persuaded, have persuaded others, can be cited to appear in this place. I cannot confute them, but must fight, as it were, with shadows, and refute when there is no one here to answer my questions. Consider, then, that I have to do with two sets of accusers, my present ones, and those ancient ones whom I have mentioned; and observe, that I must reply to the old accusers first, for you heard them first, and during a much longer time than these later ones.

Be it so, then; I must defend myself, and endeavour to expel from your minds, in so short a time, the calumny which has had so long a time to fix itself there. I should be glad (if it be for your good and my own) that this were possible; but I think it is difficult; I do not conceal from myself the weightiness of the task. The event, however, must be as the god pleases. I must obey the law, and make my defence.

Let us go back, then, to the beginning, and see upon what accusation has been founded that prejudice against me, in reliance on which Melitus has brought the present impeachment. What, then, did my assailants allege? for we must consider them as accusers, and read the words of their indictment. “Socrates is guilty of occupying himself with frivolous and criminal pursuits; exploring the things which are under the earth and in the sky; and making the worse appear the better reason; and teaching others to do the same.” Something of this sort is what they impute to me; and you have yourselves seen, in the comedy of Aristophanes, a certain Socrates, who professes to walk the air, with much other trifling, about which I do not understand one jot. And I do not speak in disparagement of such knowledge, if there be any one who is wise in these matters; but I have no concern with them. And I call most of yourselves to witness, and beg you to inform and to ask each other, (those of you who have ever heard me converse,) and there are many of them among you: tell to one another, if any of you has ever heard in my conversation anything, great or small, on such subjects; and by this you will know, that all the other things which are vulgarly said about me are of the same value. Again, if you have heard any one say that I undertake to instruct people, and receive money for it, neither is this true. I think it a fine thing, no doubt, if any one is capable of instructing people, as Gorgias of Leontium does, and Prodicus of Ceos, and Hippias of Elis. Each of these, going to one city after another, is able to draw round him the young men, who, though they are at liberty to converse gratis with whomsoever they please of their own citizens, are persuaded to quit the society of these, and, resorting to the new-comers, converse with them, not only paying them money, but rendering gratitude to them besides. There is now in this very town a wise man from Paros, whose arrival I happened to hear of; for I was accidentally in company with a man who has paid more money to sophists than all other men put together, Callias, the son of Hipponicus. I said to him, (for he has two sons,) “O Callias, if your sons had been colts or steers, we could have found and hired a proper superintendent of their education, who could have formed them to all the good qualities befitting their nature; but now, since they are men, what superintendent have you in view for them? Who is there that is knowing in the good qualities of a man and a citizen? for I suppose that you must have considered the matter, having sons to bring up. Is there such a person,” said I, “or not?” “There is,” he answered. “Who,” asked I, “and of what country, and for what price does he teach?” “Euenus of Paros,” replied he; “and his price is five minæ.” And I felicitated Euenus, if he in reality possesses this art, and is so zealous in the practice of it. I, too, therefore, should be proud, and make much of myself, if I knew these matters; but I do not know them, O Athenians.

Some of you may, perhaps, answer, “But, O Socrates, what, then, is your affair? and whence did these accusations arise? for you would not have been so much heard of or talked about, if you had done nothing strange, or different from other people: tell us, therefore, what it is, that we may not be left to conjecture.” This appears to me a very fair question; and I will try to explain to you what it is which has made me so talked about, and so calumniated. Listen, then: and perhaps some of you may think I am in jest; be well persuaded, however, that I am telling you the whole truth. I, O Athenians, have acquired this reputation, from no other cause than a certain wisdom. What kind of wisdom? That which, perhaps, is the true human wisdom; and the fact seems to be that I possess this wisdom: they whom I have just spoken of have perhaps a wisdom greater than that of man; but I certainly do not possess it, and whoever says so speaks falsely, and wishes to slander me. And do not clamour, O Athenians, even if I seem to speak boastfully; for what I am about to say does not come from myself, but from a source worthy of your attention. I shall produce the Delphic god as a witness to you respecting my wisdom, whether I have any, and of what sort. You knew Chærephon, doubtless. He was my associate from youth, and was also an associate of the Athenian many; he quitted his country with you, and returned with you. And you know what kind of a man was Chærephon, how energetic in whatsoever he engaged in. He once, going to Delphos, had the boldness to put this question to the oracle; (do not clamour, O Athenians;) he asked whether there existed any person wiser than I? And the oracle answered that there was no person wiser. And to this, since Chærephon himself is dead, his brother will bear witness before you.

Observe now why I mention this; for I am now going to show you how the prejudice against me arose. Hearing the response of the oracle, I considered with myself, What can it mean? what is its hidden significance? for I am not conscious to myself of being wise in any thing, great or small; what, then, can the god mean by calling me the wisest of men? for his words cannot be falsehoods. And for a long time I was puzzled, but at last, with much difficulty, I hit upon a way of examining the matter. I went to one of those who are esteemed wise, thinking that here, if anywhere, I should prove the oracle to be wrong, and be able to say to it, “Here is a man wiser than I.” After examining this man, (I need not mention his name, but he was one of the politicians,) and conversing with him, it was my opinion that this man seemed to many others, and especially to himself, to be wise, but was not so. Thereupon I tried to convince him that he thought himself wise, and was not. By this means I offended him, and many of the bystanders. When I went away I said to myself, “I am wiser than this man: for neither of us, it would seem, knows any thing valuable; but he, not knowing, fancies he does know: I, as I really do not know, so I do not think I know. I seem, therefore, to be, in one small matter, wiser than he, viz. in not thinking that I know what in truth I know not.” After this I went to another, who was esteemed still wiser than he, and came to the same result; and by this I affronted him too, and many others. I went on in the same manner, perceiving, with sorrow and fear, that I was making enemies; but it seemed necessary to postpone all other considerations to the service of the god; and, therefore, to seek for the meaning of the oracle, by going to all who appeared to know any thing. And, O Athenians, (for I must speak the truth,) the impression made on me was this: The persons of most reputation seemed to me to be nearly the most deficient of all; other persons, of much smaller account, seemed much more rational people.

I must relate to you my wanderings, and the labours I underwent, that the truth of the oracle might be fairly tested. When I had done with the politicians, I went to the poets, tragic, dithyrambic, and others, thinking that I should surely find myself less knowing than they. Taking up those of their poems which appeared to me the most laboured, I asked them (that I might at the same time learn something from them) what these poems meant? I am ashamed, O Athenians, to say the truth, but I must say it; there was scarcely a person present who could not have spoken better than they, concerning their own poems. I soon found, that what the poets do, they accomplish, not by wisdom, but by a kind of natural turn, and an enthusiam like that of prophets and those who utter oracles; for these, too, speak many fine things, but do not know one particle of what they speak. The poets seemed to me to be in a similar case. And I perceived, at the same time, that, on account of their poetry, they fancied themselves the wisest of mankind in other things, in which they were not so. I left them, therefore, thinking myself to have the same superiority over them which I had over the politicians. Lastly, I resorted to the artificers; for I was conscious that I myself knew, in a manner, nothing at all, but I was aware that I should find them knowing many valuable things. And in this I was not mistaken; they knew things which I knew not, and were so far wiser than I. But they appeared to me to fall into the same error as the poets; each, because he was skilled in his own art, insisted upon being the wisest man in other and the greatest things; and this mistake of theirs overshadowed what they possessed of wisdom. So that when I asked myself, by way of verifying the oracle, whether I would rather be as I now am, equally without their wisdom and their ignorance, or take the one with the other, I answered that it was better for me to be as I am.

From this search, O Athenians, the consequences to me have been, on the one hand, many enmities, and of the most formidable kind, which have brought upon me many false imputations; but, on the other hand, the name and general repute of a wise man. For the bystanders, on each occasion, imagine that I myself am wise in those things in which I refute the false pretensions of others. The truth, however, O Athenians, is (I suspect) that the god alone is wise, and that his meaning in the oracle, was, that human wisdom is worth little or nothing: the name of Socrates seems to have been introduced, not for commendation, but for a mere example, as if it had been said, He, O men, is the wisest among you, who, like Socrates, knows that all his attainments in wisdom amount in reality to nothing. Meanwhile, I still, for the honour of the god, continue my search, and examine every one, whether a citizen or a stranger, whom I think likely to be a wise man: and when I find that he is not so, I prove that he is not, and so justify the oracle: and by reason of this occupation, I have no leisure to transact any business of moment, either for the state or for my own private benefit, but am in the depth of poverty from having devoted myself to the service of the god.

Besides this, the young men, those who have most leisure, the sons of the rich, take pleasure in following me, liking to hear the men probed and sifted; and they themselves often imitate me, and attempt to examine others; and they find, I imagine, great abundance of persons who fancy themselves knowing, but who really know either very little, or nothing. Those who are thus examined, are angry with me, not with themselves, and say that there is one Socrates, a wicked man, who corrupts the youth. And when any one asks them, by what practices, or by what instructions? they have nothing to say; for they do not know: but, not to seem at a loss, they are ready with the imputations which are always at hand to be cast upon all who philosophize, of studying the sky, and the parts under ground, and not believing in gods, and making the worse appear the better reason. They do not, I fancy, like to say the truth, that they have been convicted of pretending to knowledge without having any. Being, however, jealous of their reputation, and being much in earnest, and many in number, and speaking with premeditation and in a plausible manner about me, they have filled your ears with false notions of me, from an early period. Of these people, Melitus, Anytus, and Lycon, are those who have now set upon me: Melitus to avenge the cause of the poets, Anytus that of the artificers and the politicians, Lycon that of the orators. So that, as I said at first, I shall wonder if I am able, in so short a time, to expel from your minds a prejudice of such long standing.

This, O Athenians, is the truth; and I have said it, neither dissembling nor disguising any thing, great or small, although I know that to this very freespokenness I owe my enemies; which is a sign that I speak truth, and that the causes of the prejudice against me are those I have mentioned. And if, either now or hereafter, you examine into the matter, so you will find it.

To the accusations, then, which were brought against me by my first accusers, let this be a sufficient reply. I will now attempt to reply to Melitus, the good and patriotic, as he professes himself; and the rest.

These being a new set of accusers, let us look at their charges, as we did at those of the others. “Socrates,” they say, “is guilty of corrupting the youth, and not acknowledging the gods whom the state acknowledges, but other new δαιμόνια,” (divinities, dæmons, or things relating to dæmons,) such is the charge: and of this charge let us examine each separate part. He says, then, that I am guilty of corrupting the youth. But I, O Athenians, say that Melitus is guilty of solemn trifling; bringing men with so much levity before a criminal tribunal, and pretending to be earnestly concerned about things which he never paid the slighest attention to. That this is so, I will endeavour to prove to you.

Come hither, O Melitus, and answer me: You are very anxious that the young may be as good as possible?

Melitus.

I am.

Socrates.

Come then, tell the tribunal, who is it that makes them good? for it is plain that you know, since you are so concerned about them. You have found who it is that corrupts them, you say, and have pointed him out and brought him hither: now point out who makes them better. Do you see, O Melitus, that you are silent and cannot tell? Is not this shameful, and a sufficient proof that, as I say, you have never concerned yourself about the matter? But say, my good friend, who it is that makes them better?

M.

The laws.

S.

That was not what I meant, O most excellent person. I asked what man? a man who in the first place, knows the very thing you mention, the laws.

M.

These, O Socrates, whom you now see; the judges.

S.

How, O Melitus? Are these people able to educate the young and make them better?

M.

Most certainly.

S.

All of them? or only some?

M.

All.

S.

You say well, by Juno, and there is an ample supply of benefactors. And the bystanders? Are they also instructors of youth?

M.

They also.

S.

And the senators?

M.

The senators likewise.

S.

And the members of the assembly of the people? they do not corrupt the youth? or do they too, one and all, make them better?

M.

They do.

S.

Then it seems, all the Athenians make the youth good and virtuous except me; I alone corrupt them. Do you assert this?

M.

Most certainly I do.

S.

I am a very unlucky person, according to you. And tell me: do you think this is also the case with horses? Are those who make them better, all mankind; and is there one single person who spoils them? Or is the case quite the reverse; one, or a very few (those who have attended to the subject) capable of making them better; the many, if they try their hand upon horses, spoiling them? Is it not so, O Melitus, both with regard to horses and all other animals? Certainly, whether you and Anytus say so or not. It would be a very happy thing for the youth if there were but one person who spoils them, and all others benefited them. But you have sufficiently shown, O Melitus, that you never bestowed a thought upon the instruction of youth; but have yourself been utterly indifferent to the matters about which you accuse me.

Tell us again, O Melitus; is it better to have good, or wicked people for our fellow-citizens? Answer, friend; the question I ask is not difficult. Are not the wicked always doing some evil to those who are nearest to them, the good always doing some good?

M.

Undoubtedly.

S.

Is there any one who would rather be hurt than benefited by those he associates with? Answer, most excellent person: for the law, too, bids you answer. Does any one wish to be hurt?

M.

No, certainly.

S.

Well, then: do you bring me here on the charge of corrupting the youth, and making them wicked, intentionally, or unintentionally?

M.

Intentionally.

S.

What! are you, O Melitus, at your age, so much wiser than I at mine, that you know the wicked to be always doing some hurt, the good always some good, to those who are nearest to them; but I am so ignorant as not to know that if I make any of those with whom I associate wicked, I am in danger of suffering some evil from them, and, therefore, as you affirm, intentionally do this great evil? I do not believe this, O Melitus, nor, I think, will any other human being. Either I do not corrupt the youth, or if I do, it is unintentionally, and either way you are a calumniator. But if I corrupt them unintentionally, it is not the law to bring men here for such offences when unintentional, but to instruct them and admonish them in private; for it is evident that what I do unintentionally, I shall cease doing if I am taught better. But you avoided conversing with me and instructing me, and have now brought me here, whither the law ordains to bring those who require punishment, not teaching.

What I affirmed, O Athenians, is already evident, that Melitus never gave himself a moment’s concern about these matters. But yet tell us, O Melitus, how you say that I corrupt the youth? In the manner which you mention in the indictment, viz., by teaching them not to acknowledge the gods whom the state acknowledges, but other new δαιμόνια?

M.

Most certainly, I affirm it.

S.

By those gods, O Melitus, who are now in question, I pray you explain yourself more clearly. I cannot make out which of two things you say. Is it that I teach the youth to believe that there are gods, and am myself not altogether an atheist, but believe in gods, though not the same whom the state acknowledges, but others; and is this your charge against me, that I believe in other gods? or do you assert that I do not believe in any gods at all, and that I teach others the same?

M.

That is what I assert; you believe in no gods at all.

S.

Most wonderful Melitus, what is this you say! I do not, then, like the rest of mankind, believe the sun and moon to be gods?

M.

No, by Jupiter, O Athenians: for he says that the sun is of stone, and the moon of earth.

S.

You fancy you are accusing Anaxagoras, most worthy Melitus: and you have such a contempt for these judges, and think them so ignorant of letters, as not to know that the writings of Anaxagoras, of Clazomene, are full of this sort of doctrines. So, then, the youth learn from me, what they may buy sometimes at the theatre for one drachma, and may then laugh at Socrates if he pretend that they are his, especially being so paradoxical. So you really think that I do not believe in any gods?

M.

In none at all.

S.

You are incredulous, O Melitus; you do not even give credence to your own word. This man, O Athenians, seems to me to be exceedingly self-willed and insolent, and to have brought this prosecution against me from self-will and insolence, and youthful levity. It looks like a trial of ingenuity; as if he had said to himself: Will the wise Socrates find out the inconsistency in what I say, or shall I succeed in cheating him, and the rest of them? For he contradicts himself in the very words of the accusation; saying, in fact, this “Socrates is guilty of not believing in gods, but believing in gods.” This looks like a jest. Attend then, O Athenians, that you may know what I mean: and do you answer, O Melitus. You, O Athenians, as I begged you at first, remember not to be clamorous if I speak in my own usual manner.

Is there any one, O Melitus, who believes that there are human things, but does not believe that there are men? Answer, O Athenians, and do not clamour. Does any one believe that there are things relating to horses, but not believe that there are horses? or that there are things relating to music, but not musicians? Nobody, O best of men; for if you will not answer, I will answer to you and to the judges. But answer the next question. Does any one believe that there are (δαιμόνια) things relating to dæmons, but not believe in dæmons?

M.

No.

S.

How much good you have done, by answering with so much reluctance, and not until the judges obliged you. You say then, that I believe, and teach, that there are things relating to dæmons, no matter whether new or old. I therefore, according to you, believe in things relating to dæmons, and this you have sworn to in the indictment. But if I believe in the existence of things relating to dæmons, I must needs believe in the existence of dæmons: is it not so? It is: for as you will not answer, I consider you as assenting. But do we not regard dæmons as either gods or the offspring of gods? Do we, or not?

M.

Yes.

S.

Then if I believe in dæmons, as you say; and if dæmons are a kind of gods, this is the riddle I said you were playing off upon us, saying that I, not believing in gods, do nevertheless believe in gods, since I believe in dæmons. But if dæmons are the offspring of the gods, by the nymphs, as they say, or in any other way, what human creature can believe that there exists offspring of gods, but no gods? It would be as absurd as to believe that there exists offspring of horses and asses, namely mules, but that there are no horses or asses. It is impossible, O Melitus, that you can have brought such an accusation for any purpose but to try us, or because you could find nothing true to accuse me of. That you should be able to persuade any person in his senses that the same person can think that there are things belonging to dæmons and gods, and yet no dæmons, nor gods, nor demigods, is impossible.

That I am not guilty, O Athenians, according to the accusation of Melitus, does not seem to need much proof: what I have said is sufficient. But what I have already told you, that I am in much odium, and with many persons, you well know to be true. And this is what will cause my condemnation, if I be condemned: not Melitus nor Anytus, but the prejudice and calumny in the minds of the many: which has been the cause of condemnation to many other and good men, and will continue to be so, and there is no fear that I shall be the last.

Perhaps, now, some one may say, “Art thou not then ashamed, O Socrates, of practising a pursuit from which thou art now in danger of death?” To such a person I may justly make answer, “Thou speakest not well, O friend, if thou thinkest that a man should calculate the chances of living or dying (altogether an unimportant matter); instead of considering this only, when he does anything, whether what he does be just or unjust, the act of a good or of a bad man. For by thy way of thinking, the demigods who perished at Troy are worthy of no admiration; even the son of Thetis, who so despised danger in comparison with any dishonour, that when his mother, a goddess, said to him when eager to slay Hector, ‘My son, if thou avenge thy friend Patroclus, and destroy Hector, thou thyself wilt die,’ he, fearing much more to live unworthy and not avenge his friends, than to die, answered, ‘May I die immediately, after punishing the man who has injured me, that I may not remain the scoff of my countrymen, a burthen to the earth.’ ”

Thus it is, O Athenians: wheresoever our post is,—whether we choose it, thinking it the best, or are placed in it by a superior,—there, as I hold, we ought to remain, and suffer all chances, neither reckoning death nor any other consequence as worse than dishonour. I, therefore, should be greatly in the wrong, O Athenians, if when I was commanded by the superiors whom you set over me, at Potidæa and Amphipolis and Delium, I remained (like other people) where those superiors posted me, and perilled my life; but when, as I believed, the god commanded me, and bade me pass my life in philosophizing, and examining myself and others, then, fearing either death or anything else, I should abandon my post. Then, indeed, might I with justice be brought before the tribunal, and accused of not believing in gods; if I disobeyed their oracles, and feared death, and thought myself wise, not being so. To be afraid of death, O Athenians, is to fancy ourselves wise, not being so; for it is to fancy that we know what we do not know. No one knows whether death is not the greatest possible good to man. But people fear it, as if they knew it to be the greatest of evils. What is this but the most discreditable ignorance, to think we know what we know not? I, O Athenians, differ perhaps in this from persons in general, (and if I am wiser than any other person it is probably in this,) that not knowing sufficiently about a future state, I do not fancy I know. This, however, I do know; that to do injustice, and to resist the injunctions of one who is better than myself, be he god or man, is evil and disgraceful. I shall not, therefore, fly to the evils which I know to be evils, from fear of that which, for aught I know, may be a good.

If, therefore, you were to acquit me, (in spite of the predictions of Anytus, who said that either I ought not to have been tried, or if tried, it is impossible not to put me to death, since if I escape, all your sons will practise the instructions of Socrates, and be ruined); if, to prevent these consequences, you should say to me, “O Socrates, we will now, in spite of what Anytus said, let you off, but upon condition that you shall no longer persevere in your search, in your philosophizing; if you are again convicted of doing so, you shall be put to death”—If, I say, you should let me off on these conditions, I should say to you,—O Athenians, I love and cherish you, but I will obey the god rather than you; and as long as I breathe, and it is not out of my power, I will not cease to philosophize, and to exhort you to philosophy, and point out the way to whomsoever among you I fall in with; saying, as I am wont, “O most worthy person, art thou, an Athenian, of the greatest city and the most celebrated for wisdom and power, not ashamed that thou studiest to possess as much money as possible, and reputation, and honour, but concernest not thyself even to the smallest degree about Intellect, and Truth, and the well-being of thy mental nature?” And if any of you shall dispute the fact, and say that he does concern himself about these things, I will not let him off, or depart, but will question him, and examine, and confute him; and if he seem to me not to possess virtue, but to assert that he does, I will reproach him for valuing least what is highest worth, and highest what is most worthless. This will I do both to young and old, whomsoever I meet with; to citizen and stranger, but most to my fellow-citizens, as connected with me by a nearer tie. For these, as you well know, are the commands of the god. And to me it appears, that no good can happen to the state greater than my service of the god: for I pass my whole time doing nothing whatever but inciting you, both the young and the old, to care neither for body nor estate in preference to, nor in comparison with, the excellence of the soul; telling you that wealth does not produce virtue, but virtue wealth, and all other good things, to mankind, both collectively and individually. If, then, saying these things, I corrupt the youth, these things must be noxious: for if any one asserts that I say any other things than these, he speaks falsely. I say, therefore, O Athenians, whether you believe Anytus or not, whether you acquit me or not, let it be with the knowledge that I shall do no other things than these—not though I should die many deaths.

Do not clamour, O Athenians, but abide by what I requested of you, not to bawl out against what I say, but to listen to it; and I think you will be the better for hearing it. I have still some other things to say, at which you will, perhaps, cry out; but I exhort you not to do so. Know well, O Athenians, that if you put me to death, being such as I describe myself, you will not hurt me more than you will hurt yourselves. Me Anytus and Melitus will not hurt; they cannot. It is not permitted that a better man should be hurt by a worse. Kill me, or exile me, or deprive me of civic rights, they may. And these, to Melitus, perhaps, and to others as well as him, may appear great evils; but not to me. To do what he is now doing, to attempt to kill another man unjustly, seems to me a far greater evil. Nor am I now, O Athenians, as you may perhaps suppose, pleading for myself,—far from it,—but for you; that you may not, by condemning me, commit a crime against the gift which the god has given to you. For if you kill me, you will not easily find another person like me, who in sober truth (though it may sound ridiculous) am sent by the god to this city, as to a strong and generous horse, who is somewhat sluggish from his size, and requires to be stimulated by a stinging insect. The god, as it seems to me, has given me to you as such an insect, to goad you by persuasions and reproaches, settling upon one of you after another. You will not, O Athenians, easily find another such man: and therefore, if you take my advice, you will spare me. But you, perhaps, being angry, like sleepers awakened, will strike at me, and being persuaded by Anytus, will inconsiderately put me to death; and then pass the remainder of your lives in slumber, unless the god in his care for you should send to you some one else.

That I am such a person as one bestowed on you by the god might be expected to be, you may judge from this: it is not like the ways of mere humanity, to neglect all my own concerns, and let my private affairs be so many years uncared for, devoting myself to your interests; seeking each of you, as if I were his father or his elder brother, and inciting him to the pursuit of virtue. If I gained anything by it, and gave these exhortations for pay or reward, there would be something intelligible in it. But now you yourselves see, that my accusers, shameless as they have shown themselves in all their other accusations, could not carry their shamelessness so far as to affirm, producing testimony, that I ever took or asked reward from any one: for I have truly a good and sufficient witness to my assertion, my poverty.

Perhaps it may appear strange that I go about and busy myself with giving these exhortations in private, but do not venture to come forward in public and advise the people in the public assembly. The cause of this is, what you have often heard me speak of; that I have a divine (or dæmonic) monitor; which Melitus alluded to in the indictment, and ludicrously perverted. This is, a voice, which from my childhood upwards has occasionally visited me, always to dissuade me from something which I was about to do, but never instigating me to any thing. It is this voice which opposes my meddling in public affairs. And rightly, in my opinion, has it done so: for know, Athenians, that if I had long ago attempted to interfere in politics, I should long ago have perished, and done no good either to you or myself. And be not angry with me for saying the truth. It is impossible that any human being should escape destruction, who sincerely opposes himself to you, or to any other multitude, and strives to prevent many injustices and illegalities from being transacted in the state. He who means really to contend for the right, if he would be unharmed for even a short time, must keep to private, and avoid public life.

I will produce to you signal proofs of this; not words, but, what you most honour, deeds. Hear, then, the things which have happened to me; that you may know that I would never, from the fear of death, have succumbed to any one contrary to justice, and not succumbing, would inevitably have been destroyed. What I will tell you, may sound arrogant and presuming; but it is true.

The only office I ever held in the state, O Athenians, was that of a member of the Senate of Five Hundred; and it fell to my tribe (the tribe Antiochis) to preside, when you decided that the ten generals, accused of not taking up the bodies of the slain in the seafight, should be tried collectively; an illegal decision, as since that time has become the opinion of you all. On that occasion, I alone of the Prytanes resisted your doing any thing contrary to law. The orators cried out to indict me instantly and drag me to prison, and you assented by acclamation; but I preferred to run all risks on the side of justice and the law, rather than to join with you in an unjust resolve from fear of chains or death. This happened while the state was under a democracy. When an oligarchy succeeded, the Thirty sent for me and four others to the Tholus, and commanded us to proceed to Salamis and bring from thence Leon, the Salaminian, that he might be put to death. They at that time gave such commands to many persons, wishing to compromise the greatest number of persons possible as accomplices in their proceedings. I then, not by word but by deed, proved that I do not care one jot for death, but every thing for avoiding any unjust or impious action. That government, powerful as it was, did not intimidate me into any act of injustice; but when we quitted the Tholus, the other four went to Salamis and brought Leon from thence, but I returned home. Perhaps this would have cost me my life, had not that government soon after been overthrown. To these facts I can produce many witnesses.

Do you think, then, that I could have lived so many years, if I had mingled in public affairs, and, as befits a good man, had always given my aid to the just cause, and made that, as I ought, my grand object? Far from it, O Athenians; neither I nor any other man. But I, throughout my whole life, and in whatever public transaction I may have been engaged in, shall always be found such as I am in private, never tolerating the slightest violation of justice, either in any one else, or in those whom my calumniators assert to be my disciples. But I have never been any one’s teacher; though if any one, whether young or old, desired to stand by and listen to me, speaking and following my own path, I never grudged to allow him. Neither is it my practice to converse with people when they pay me money, and not otherwise; but I permit rich and poor alike to question me, or if they please, to answer my questions, and to hear what I have to say. And whether any of these turn out a good or a bad man, I cannot justly be held accountable, since I never taught nor undertook to teach them anything. If any one affirms that he ever learnt or heard from me in private, any thing but what all other persons have heard, be assured that he speaks falsely.

But why, then, do some persons take pleasure in frequenting my society? You have already heard, O Athenians; I have told you the whole truth; they like to hear those persons exposed, who fancy themselves wise and are not; for it is not unpleasant. But to me, as I affirm, it has been enjoined by the god to do this,—enjoined in oracles, and in dreams, and in every other way in which Divine ordinance commands anything to a human being.

These things, O Athenians, are true; and could easily be disproved, if they were not. For if I corrupt some of the young men, and have already corrupted others, they, if any of them growing older have perceived that I had given them evil counsels when young, ought to appear now, and charge me with it, and punish me; or if they were unwilling, some of their relations, their fathers or brothers, if these people have suffered any evil from me, should remember it now. There are many such persons present, whom I now see; Criton, my contemporary and member of the same ward, the father of Critobulus, here present; Lysanias, the father of Æschines, who is present; Antiphon, the father of Epigenes; others, again, whose brothers have kept company with me; Nicostratus, the son of Theodotides, brother of Theodotus; (Theodotus himself is dead, and therefore cannot have dissuaded his brother from appearing against me;) Paralus, the son of Demodocus, whose brother Theages was; Adeimantus, the son of Ariston, and brother of Plato here; Æantodorus, brother of this Apollodorus; and many others I could mention. Some one of these, Melitus should have produced as a witness; and if he then forgot, let him produce them now, and I will give place. But you will find the very contrary of this, O judges; they are all eager to assist me—the corrupter and injurer of their relatives, as Melitus and Anytus affirm. Those indeed, who have themselves been corrupted by me, might naturally enough be supposed to take my side: but the uncorrupted, some of them elderly men, the relatives of the others—what reason can they have for aiding me, but the right and just one, their knowledge that Melitus is a calumniator, and that I speak the truth?

These things, O Athenians, and such as these, are what I have to say in my defence. Perhaps some one among you may be displeased with me, when he bethinks himself that in the trial which preceded mine, the accused, though he had less at stake, entreated the judges, with many tears; and brought hither, to excite their pity, his children, and others of his relations and friends; while I shall do nothing of the kind, although the penalty which, as it may seem, I am in danger of, is the severest of all. Some of you, perhaps, thinking of these things, may feel harshly towards me, and may give an angry vote. If any one among you feels thus, which I hope is not the case, I think I may very properly hold the following discourse to him. I too, most worthy person, have relatives: I am not (as Homer says) sprung from an oak tree, or from a rock, but from human beings; and I have not only relations, but three sons, O Athenians; one of them a youth, the two others still children. Nevertheless, I shall not, bringing any of them here, implore you to acquit me. And why? Not from pride, O Athenians, nor from disdain of you; but for this reason: whether I look upon death with courage or with fear is another matter: but with a view to our reputation, both mine and yours, and that of the city itself, it does not seem to me honourable that I should do such things at my age, and with such a name as I have, whether merited or not. Men certainly believe that Socrates is in some way superior to the multitude of mankind. It would be shameful if those among you who are esteemed superior to the rest, whether in wisdom or in courage, or in any other virtue, should conduct themselves like so many others whom I have seen on their trial, and who might have been taken for people of some account, but who moved heaven and earth to be acquitted, as if it were something dreadful to die; as though they expected to be immortal unless you should put them to death. Such persons appear to me to bring discredit on the city; a foreigner might conclude that the most virtuous among the Athenians, they whom the Athenians select from themselves as the worthiest, for public offices and other honours, are in nothing superior to women. Such things, O Athenians, we, who are thought to be of some account, ought neither to do, nor if we did, ought you to suffer us, but, on the contrary, to show that you will much rather condemn those who enact these pathetic dramas, and make the city ridiculous, than those who refrain from them. And besides the discredit, it does not seem to me even just, to supplicate the judge, and escape by supplication, but to instruct and convince him. For the judge does not sit here to make a favour of justice, but impartially to inquire into it; and he has sworn not to gratify whomsoever he pleases, but to judge according to the laws. We, therefore, should not accustom you, nor should you let yourselves be accustomed, to violate your oaths: it would be impiety in both of us. Do not then, O Athenians, demand of me to do such things towards you as I deem to be neither beautiful, nor just, nor holy; especially as I am actually on trial for impiety. If I should work upon you and influence your decision by supplications, when you have sworn to do justice, I should indeed teach that you do not believe in gods, and my defence of myself would be an accusation against myself that I believe not in them. But far is this from the truth. I believe in them, O Athenians, as not one of my accusers does. And I commit to you and to the god to decide concerning me, in whatever way shall be best for you and for me.

AFTER THE VERDICT OF CONDEMNATION

Among many things, O Athenians, which prevent me from feeling indignant at your having condemned me, one is, that what has happened was not unexpected by me. Much rather do I wonder at the number of votes in my favour. I did not expect to be condemned by so small a majority, but by a large one: it now, however, appears, that if but thirty of the votes had been given differently, I should have escaped. As far as Melitus is concerned, I have escaped as it is: and it is even clear to every one, that if Anytus and Lycon had not appeared as my accusers, he would have been liable to the penalty of one thousand drachmæ, not having obtained a fifth part of the votes.

The penalty proposed by my accuser is death. What penalty shall I, on my part, propose? surely that which I deserve. Well, then, what do I deserve to suffer or to pay, because I never relaxed in instructing myself, but neglecting what the many care for, money-getting and household management, and military commands, and civil offices, and speech-making, and all the political clubs and societies in the city; thinking myself, in fact, too honest to follow these pursuits and be safe; I did not go where I could be of no use either to you or to myself, but went to each man individually, to confer on him the greatest of all benefits; attempting to persuade every one of you, to think of none of his own concerns till he had looked to making himself as good and as wise as possible; nor of the city’s concerns till he had looked to making the city so; and to pursue all other things in a similar spirit. What, then, ought to be done to me for such conduct? Some good, O Athenians, if I am really to be treated according to my deserts; and a good of such a kind as beseems me. What, then, beseems a man in poor circumstances, your benefactor, and requiring leisure to prosecute his exhortations? There is nothing, O Athenians, which would be so suitable for such a man to receive, as a maintenance at the public expense. It would befit him much better than any of you who may have carried away the prize of horse or chariot-racing at the Olympic contests. For, such a man makes you only seem happy, but I make you be so: and he does not require a maintenance, but I do. If, therefore, I must estimate myself justly according to my deserts, I rate myself at a maintenance in the Prytaneum.

Perhaps I seem to you, in saying this, as in what I said about supplication and entreaty, to be influenced by pride. The fact, however, is not so: but rather, as I am now about to tell you. I know that I do not intentionally injure any one; but I am not able to convince you of it; for we have conversed together but a short time: if, indeed, it were the law with you, as in other countries, not to terminate capital trials in one day, but continue them through several, you could then have been convinced; but now, it is not easy, in a short time, to conquer strong prejudices. I, then, being convinced that I wrong no one, cannot consent to wrong myself, by affirming that I am worthy of any evil, and proposing that any evil should be inflicted upon me as a penalty. From what fear should I do so? From the fear lest I should suffer what Melitus proposes? when I affirm that I know not whether it be an evil or a good? Shall I, then, choose something which I well know to be an evil, and propose that as the penalty? Imprisonment, for example? And why should I seek to live in a prison, at the mercy of every successive police officer? A fine? and imprisonment until I pay it? That would be the same thing; for I have no means of paying it. Shall I propose banishment? for perhaps you might sentence me to that. But I must be very fond of life, O Athenians, if I am so bad a calculator as not to compute that if you, who are my countrymen, have not been able to bear my ways and my sayings, but have found them burthensome and invidious, and now seek to get rid of them, it is not likely that other people will bear them easily. Far from it, O Athenians. It would be an unworthy life for me, exiled at my age, to live in perpetual wanderings and banishments from one city to another. For, I well know, that whithersoever I go, the young men will listen to my discourses as they do here. And if I repel them, they, by their influence with the older people, will drive me from the place: but if I admit them, their fathers and relations will do it for their sake. Perhaps somebody may say, But canst thou not, O Socrates, going into exile, live there in peace and silence? Here it is that I have the hardest task to persuade you; for, if I say that this would be to disobey the god, and that I, therefore, cannot remain silent, you will think it ironical, and disbelieve it. And if, again, I say that the greatest good possible for man is, to discuss daily concerning virtue, and the other matters on which you hear me converse and examine myself and others, and that to live an unexamined life is not endurable, you will still less believe me. The fact, however, is as I say, but it is not easy to make it apparent.

I am not used to pronounce myself deserving of any evil. If I had money, I would estimate my penalty at as much money as I was able to pay, for it would have been no damage to me; but now—I have none; unless you are willing to fix the penalty at what I am able to pay. Perhaps I could pay as much as a silver mina: at this, therefore, I rate the penalty. Plato here, and Criton, and Critobulus, and Apollodorus, O Athenians, bid me rate it at thirty minæ, and they undertake to be my sureties. I do so, therefore, and their security is adequate.

AFTER THE DECLARATION OF THE SENTENCE

It is for the sake of but a short span, O Athenians, that you have incurred the imputation, from those who wish to speak evil against the city, of having put to death Socrates, a wise man, (for those who are inclined to reproach you, will say that I am wise even if I am not). Had you waited a short time, the thing would have happened without your agency; for you see my years; I am far advanced in life, and near to death. I address this not to all of you, but to those who have voted for the capital sentence. And this too I say to the same persons: Perhaps you think that I have been condemned from want of skill in such modes of working upon your minds, as I might have employed with success if I had thought it right to employ all means in order to escape from condemnation. Far from it. I have been condemned, not for want of things to say, but for want of daring and shamelessness; because I did not choose to say to you the things which would have been pleasantest to you to hear, weeping and lamenting, and doing and saying other things which I affirm to be unworthy of me; as you are accustomed to see others do. But neither did I then think fit, because of my danger, to do anything unworthy of a freeman; nor do I now repent of having thus defended myself; I would far rather have made the one defence and die, than have made the other and live. Neither in a court of justice, nor in war, ought we to make it our object, that, whatever happen, we may escape death. In battle, it is often evident that a man may save his life by throwing away his arms, and imploring mercy of his pursuers; and in all other dangers there are many contrivances by which a person may get off with life, if he dare do or say everything. The difficulty, O Athenians, is not to escape from death, but from guilt; for guilt is swifter than death, and runs faster. And now I, being old, and slow of foot, have been overtaken by death, the slower of the two; but my accusers, who are brisk and vehement, by wickedness, the swifter. We quit this place, I having been sentenced by you to death, but they, having sentence passed upon them by Truth, of guilt and injustice. I submit to my punishment, and they to theirs. These things, perhaps, are as they should be, and for the best.

But I wish, O men who have condemned me, to prophesy to you what is next to come; for I am in the position in which men are most wont to prophesy, being at the point of death. I say, then, O you who have slain me—that immediately after my death there will come upon you a far severer punishment than that which you have inflicted upon me. For you have done this, thinking by it to escape from being called to account for your lives. But I affirm that the very reverse will happen to you. There will be many to call you to account, whom I have hitherto restrained, and whom you saw not: and being younger they will give you more annoyance, and you will be still more provoked. For if you think, by putting men to death, to deter others from reproaching you with living amiss, you think ill. That mode of protecting yourselves is neither very possible, nor very noble: the noblest and the easiest too, is not to cut off other people, but so to order yourselves, as to obtain the greatest excellence. Having prophesied thus to those who have condemned me, I leave them.

With those who voted for my acquittal, I would gladly, while the officers are busy, and I am not yet going to the place where I am to be put to death, converse a little about this which has happened. Stay with me, my friends, until then; for I would explain to you, as my well wishers, the meaning of what has now happened to me. There has occurred to me, O judges, (for you I may rightly call by that name,) something surprising. My accustomed dæmonic warning has, in all former times, been very frequent, and given on small occasions, if I was about to do any thing not for my good. But now, as you see, those things have happened to me, which are generally esteemed the worst of evils; yet the divine monitor did not warn me, neither when I left my home in the morning, nor when I came up hither to the judgment-seat, nor at any time when I was speaking; though on other occasions I have often, while speaking, experienced the warning, and been checked in what I was about to say. But in neither word nor deed connected with this business, have I been checked by the sign. What do I suppose to be the cause? I will tell you. This which has happened is most likely a good; and those of us who think death an evil are probably in the wrong. For the accustomed warning would certainly have been given to me, if what I was about to do had not been for my good.

We may also, from the following considerations, conclude that there is much hope of its being a good. For death must be one of two things: either the dead are incapable of feeling or perceiving anything; or death is, as we are told, a change of abode, a passage of the soul from this to some other place. Now, if after death there be no sensation, but it be like a sleep in which there are no dreams, death is a mighty gain. For if any one were to choose from his life, a night in which he had slept without dreaming, and comparing with this all the other nights and days of his life, were required to say in how many of them he had lived better and more pleasantly than in that night, I imagine that not a private man merely, but the Great King, would find that such days and nights were soon counted. If then this be death, it is a gain: since all eternity would not thus appear longer than one night. But if death be to quit this place for another, and if it be true as is affirmed, that in that other place is the abode of all the dead; what greater good can there be, O judges, than this? If, arriving in the other world, and leaving these people who call themselves judges, we shall see the real judges, who are said to judge there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Æacus and Triptolemus, and all other demigods who lived justly while they were alive, would it not be a noble journey? What would not any of you give to converse with Orpheus, and Musæus, and Hesiod, and Homer? I would gladly die many times if this be true; since to me it would be a delightful residence when I had met with Palamedes, and the Telamonian Ajax, and any other of the ancients who perished in consequence of an unjust judgment. To compare my own fate with theirs, would not, I think, be disagreeable: and best of all, to live examining and interrogating the people there, as I have done here, to discover who among them are wise, and who think themselves so, but are not. How much would not one give, O judges, for an opportunity of examining him who led the great expedition to Troy; or Ulysses, or Sysyphus, or ten thousand others whom one could mention, both men and women; with whom to converse and associate there, and to examine them, would be the height of happiness. They do not, there, put one to death for such things; for the people there are happier than the people here, both in other things, and in this, that when once there they are immortal; if what we are told is true.

It behoves you, O judges, to be of good cheer concerning death; and to fix this truth in your minds, that to a good man, whether he die or live, nothing is evil, nor are his affairs neglected by the gods; neither did what has happened to me occur spontaneously, but it is evident to me that to die, and come to an end now, was most for my good. For this reason was it that the sign did not interpose to check me; and I do not much complain of my accusers, nor of those who condemned me. Though they, indeed, accused and condemned me not with any such intention, but purposing to do me harm: and for this it is fit to blame them.

Thus much, however, I beg of them: When my sons grow up, punish them, O Athenians, by tormenting them as I tormented you, if they shall seem to study riches, or any other ends, in preference to virtue. And if they are thought to be something, being really nothing, reproach them as I have reproached you, for not attending to what they ought, and fancying themselves something when they are good for nothing. And if you do this, both I and my sons shall have received what is just at your hands.

It is now time that we depart, I to die, you to live; but which has the better destiny is unknown to all, except the god.

>The first folio of the MS of “Notes on the Charmides of Plato” Berg Collection, New York Public Library

The Charmides

[Holograph MS, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, entitled “Notes on the Charmides of Plato.” Paper watermarked 1828. Not mentioned in JSM’s bibliography. For details concerning the manuscript and the transcription, see the Textual Introduction, lxxxi-lxxxii above; for a discussion of this and the other translations of Plato, see also the Introduction, xvii-xxviii above.]

the subject of this dialogue is σωϕροσύνη, which includes the two ideas of prudence and temperance, with a sort of etymological reference to thought, and good sense, and may perhaps in general be best translated by the word considerateness, as when we speak of considerate conduct, and a considerate character or disposition. To the purposes however of the present dialogue, the words good sense seem better adapted.

The interlocutors are Socrates, Critias (afterwards the head of the Thirty Tyrants, though long a disciple of Socrates) and a young man named Charmides, who appears to have been celebrated for his personal beauty, the effect of which upon the bystanders and even upon Socrates himself, that philosopher (who is the narrator of the conversation) describes in terms which to our modern ideas appear singularly high-flown.

Socrates seeing, at the Taurean palæstra, the exceeding beauty of this young man, & being told by his cousin & guardian, Critias, that he was equally excellent in mind, expressed a desire to converse with him. Critias offered to bring this about, & called upon Charmides to approach, pretending to have found a physician who could cure him of a headach which he had complained of. Socrates, being asked whether he was this physician, pretended that he was, and that his remedy was a certain herb, but that its efficacy depended upon its being used together with a particular incantation: the power of which was not confined to the head, but gave health to the whole man. “You must have heard,” he continued, “from good physicians, that if a man comes to them with diseased eyes, they cannot cure the eyes separately, but in order to remedy the complaint of the eyes they must make applications to the whole body. It is the same with respect to this incantation. I was taught it by some Thracian physicians, whose power is said to extend even to conferring immortality. They told me, that the Grecian physicians were right in that maxim of theirs, which I just mentioned, but the Thracian god Zalmoxis had taught, that as the eyes could not be cured without the head nor the head without the body, so neither can the body without the mind, & that the reason why most diseases prove too strong for the Greek physicians, is, that they attempt to treat one part of the human being, being unacquainted with the nature of the whole. All good & all evil come originally from the mind, & that must be in a proper state before the condition of any other part of the system can be rectified. But the appliances which keep the mind in a proper state, are of the nature of incantation, to wit, Doctrine, Discussion, Argument. By these, σωϕροσύνη, or good sense, is generated, & where that exists, it is easy to procure health for the body. This physician, therefore,” added Socrates, “who taught me the remedy for headach, made me swear solemnly never to suffer any one to prevail upon me to apply it to his head unless he will first allow me to apply the incantation to his mind. If therefore you, Charmides, will first place your mind under my care that I may administer the incantation, I will apply the remedy to your head; if not, I can do nothing for you.”

Critias observed, that the headach which Charmides was afflicted with, would be an excellent thing for him if it forced him to improve his mental health also for the sake of the bodily: that however he already excelled his contemporaries not less in this very quality of good sense than in personal beauty. “If so,” said Socrates, “he has no occasion for the incantation, & we may proceed at once to administer the remedy for headach: but if he is still deficient in σωϕροσύνη, we must begin with the incantation.” He therefore asked Charmides whether he deemed himself to possess a sufficiency of this quality or not. Charmides not liking either to say that he did, or to admit that he did not, Socrates proposed a mode of examining him, so as to ascertain the point.

“If,” said he, “you possess good sense, you must have some opinion on the subject of it. For if this quality is in you, it must make its existence perceptible in some manner, from which you must be enabled to form some opinion, what, & what kind of thing it is.”—“Certainly,” answered Charmides.—“Can you then tell what in your opinion it is?”—Charmides, after some hesitation, answered, that he thought it consisted in doing every thing in an orderly and quiet manner, as for instance, walking quietly, & talking quietly, and so forth. In short, it seemed to him he said to be a certain tranquillity. The idea which he seemed to wish to express, was that of a kind of external decency, & personal reserve.

Socrates proceeded to catechize him further, asking him whether he did not consider good sense to be an admirable thing?—“Certainly,” replied he.—“Whether, now, in learning to write, is it more admirable to write copies rapidly, or quietly?”—“Rapidly.”—“And to read, rapidly or slowly?”—“Rapidly.”—“To play on the harp? To box, or wrestle? To run? To learn? To teach? To recollect?” In all these operations, Charmides was forced to admit, that quickness was more meritorious than slowness, or tranquillity; and moreover in thinking, he admitted that sagacity consisted in quickness & sharpness of mind, not slowness and tranquillity: So again in deliberation, that the greater excellence was in him who could deliberate quickest, not him who did it most slowly and quietly. Good sense, therefore, did not consist in tranquillity, and it was necessary that Charmides should consider again & give another answer.

He answered, that good sense made men sensible to shame, & seemed to be much the same thing with modesty. To this Socrates answered, by asking him whether he did not admit that sense was a good quality?—“Yes.”—“And do you not think that Homer is in the right, when he says, that it is not good for a needy man to be ashamed?” —“I do.”—“Then there is good shame and bad shame.”—“Yes.”—“But sense is always good.”—“It is.”—“Then sense is not the same thing with sensibility to shame.”

Charmides assented, & suggested another definition of sense which he had just recollected to have heard, viz. that it consisted in confining oneself to one’s own business.

Socrates compared this definition to a riddle; “for,” said he, “it cannot have been meant in the literal sense of the words. Do you think that a grammarian, or teacher of languages (γραμματιστής) in teaching children to read & write their own or any other tongue, reads and writes nothing but his own name, & taught you when you were a child to read & write nothing but your own name? Did you not write the names of friends & enemies indiscriminately?”—“We did.”—“Did you act contrary to good sense in so doing?”—“No.”—“But you were not confining yourselves to your own business.”—“True.”—“And to give medical attendance, to build, to weave, in short to practise any art, is to transact some business, is it not?”—“Yes.”—“But would a state be well administered if the law were, that each man should weave & dye his own coat, & make his own shoes, &c. and not meddle with other men’s business?”—“No.”—“But if it were sensibly administered it must be well administered.”—“Yes.”—“Then sense does not consist literally in confining oneself to one’s own business.”—“So it seems.”—“Then the person who gave you this definition, meant it, as I said before, as a riddle: or was he some very silly person?”—“No,” answered Charmides, “he was a very wise person.”—“Then it must have been meant as a riddle, because it was difficult to guess what was meant by confining oneself to one’s own business. Can you tell what it is?”—“No,” answered Charmides, “nor perhaps could the author himself,” looking at Critias, & smiling.

Critias, who was evidently the person meant, though he had disclaimed it, interposed in behalf of the definition, and said, that he did not consider these handicraft occupations to be entitled to the name of business. “For Hesiod,” said he, “declares, that business is no disgrace. Do you think he meant that shoemaking & sausageselling were no disgrace? Work is a different thing from business: Work may be a reproach, but that only is business which is noble and useful. This therefore ought to be considered one’s own business; & all mischievous things, should be considered as foreign to us. In this signification, Hesiod & other wise men thought that the sensible man is he who confines himself to his own business.”

“I thought from the first,” answered Socrates, “that by one’s own, you meant all good things and by business all good works. I have heard Prodicus make a hundred such verbal distinctions. But you may impose names in whatever way you please, only let us know to what thing, each of your names is applied. Let us begin again from the beginning. Sense, you say, is the doing of good things.”—“Yes.”—“He who does evil then is not sensible, you think?”—“And do not you?”—“The question is not what I think, but what you say.”—“I say, that he who does good & avoids evil is sensible, he who does evil & not good, is not sensible, & I am willing to define sense, as the doing of what is good.”—“May be so. But I am surprised if you think that men may be sensible without knowing that they are so.”—“But I do not think so.”—“Do you not think that a physician, in curing a sick man, does what is beneficial both to himself & to the person cured?”—“Yes.”—“Then he does what is right.”—“But he who does what is right, is sensible.”—“Yes.”—“Now, must a physician necessarily know, whether he has done a benefit by curing or not? And in general, must any workman know, as a matter of course, whether the work he has accomplished will or will not turn out beneficial to himself?”—“Perhaps not.”—“Then a physician may sometimes act beneficially or detrimentally, without knowing that he has done so, & may therefore, by your definition, be sensible without knowing it.”

“This,” answered Critias, “is impossible: & if any of my former admissions leads necessarily to this, I had rather retract the admission, than allow that a person may be sensible, not knowing himself. For I think that good sense chiefly consists in self-knowledge, & that the celebrated inscription at Delphi, Know thyself, was intended as a salution from the God, not according to the usual form, Rejoice, but equivalent to this, Be sensible, being a more proper exhortation on meeting, than to rejoice. I will therefore give up all that has been said, in which perhaps you were right, & perhaps I, though neither of us said any thing very clear. But I am now ready to maintain if you deny it that good sense is, to know ourselves.”

Socrates told Critias that he was not to consider him as knowing any thing about the matter, so as either to deny or admit, but that he was ready to join in enquiring into it.

“You say that good sense is to know oneself. Now if it is to know, it is a sort of knowledge.”—“Yes.”—“The knowledge of something.”—“Yes, of oneself.”—“Medicine is the knowledge of what is conducive to health, is it not?”—“Yes.”—“If you were to ask me, what was the use of medicine, or the knowledge of what conduces to health, & what effect it produces, I should answer, It is of great use, for it produces an admirable thing, viz. health.”—“Yes.”—“And if you asked me what is the effect produced by Architecture, or the knowledge of building, I should answer, Edifices; & so forth. Now you ought to be able to tell me, what is the excellent effect produced by good sense, which you say, is the knowledge of oneself.”

“This,” replied Critias, “is not a right question. For good sense is not like other branches of knowledge, nor are they like each other; but you interrogate as if they were. Can you shew any effect produced by arithmetic, or geometry, or many other arts, in the manner in which cloth is produced by weaving, or houses by architecture? You cannot.”—“True. But I can shew you in each of these branches of knowledge, something, different from the knowledge itself, something which is the subject of the knowledge, something which it is the knowledge of. For instance, arithmetic is the knowledge of number, which is not the same thing with arithmetic: Statics, is the knowledge of the specific gravities of bodies, which are a different thing from Statics itself.”—“True.”—“What, then, is Good Sense the knowledge of, different from Good Sense itself?”

“You mistake again,” answered Critias, “in the same way: You have hit upon the very point which distinguishes good sense from all other kinds of knowledge, & you are looking for a resemblance between them. All other kinds of knowledge, are knowledge of other things, but not of themselves: Good Sense, is a knowledge likewise of itself. And you know this well, but you are doing what you just now disclaimed, you are attempting to refute me, not regarding the subject itself.”—“You are wrong,” answered Socrates, “in supposing that even if I do refute you, I do so on any other account than that which would induce me, in a similar case, to enquire into the grounds of my own notions, that I might not fancy that I knew the subject when I did not. And I am now enquiring into this subject, chiefly for my own sake, next perhaps for that of my friends. Do you not think it a common advantage to all men, that the nature of all things should be explained & cleared up?”—“Extremely so.”—“Answer, then, & do not mind whether you or I be refuted, but attend to the argument & see whether that can be refuted & what is the consequence if it be.”—“I will do so, for what you say appears reasonable.”—“Tell me, then, what you say with respect to Good Sense?”

“I say,” answered Critias, “that it alone of all kinds of knowledge, is knowledge of itself & of the other kinds of knowledge.”—“Then if it be a knowledge of knowledge, it is likewise a knowledge of ignorance?”—“Yes.”—“Then, the sensible man alone will know himself, & will be able to distinguish, what he knows & what he does not know; and likewise, he & no other will be able to judge of other men, what they know, & what they fancy they know when they really do not. And Good Sense & self-knowledge consist in knowing what we know & what we are ignorant of. Is this your meaning?”—“Yes.”—“Let us then first enquire, whether it be a possible thing or not, to know what we know & what we are ignorant of: & next, if it be possible, what would be the use of it to us.”—“Certainly.”—“I, then,” said Socrates, “am puzzled. Is this knowledge, of which you are speaking, the knowledge of nothing whatever but of itself & of other kinds of knowledge, & of ignorance?”—“Certainly.”—“This is very paradoxical: for if you make the same supposition in other things, it will appear to you impossible.”—“How?”—“Do you think, that there is a faculty of sight, which is not the sight of any visible object, but of itself & other faculties of sight & of non-sight, & which does not see any colour, but sees itself & other seeing faculties?”—“Certainly not.”—“Or is there any hearing faculty, which hears, not any sound, but only itself & other hearing faculties?”—“No.”—“Or any desire, which desires, not any pleasure, but itself & other pleasures?”—“No.”—“Or any will, which wills, not any good, but itself & other wills?”—“No.”—“Or any love, which loves, not any lovely object, but itself & other loves?”—“No.”—“Or any fear, which fears itself & other fears, but does not fear any danger?”—“No.”—“Or any thinking faculty, which thinks itself & other thinking faculties, but does not think any particular thought?”—“No.”—“But there is a Knowledge which is not the knowledge of any Acquirement, but of itself & other knowledges.”—“There is.”—“Is not this paradoxical? Let us not however for that reason pronounce it untrue, but enquire whether it is true or no.”

“This knowledge is the knowledge of something.”—“Yes.”—“That which is larger, too, must be larger than something.”—“Yes.”—“Than something smaller.”—“Undoubtedly.”—“Then if we could find any larger thing, which is larger than itself & other larger things, but is not larger than those things than which other things are larger, would not this thing if it be larger, be also smaller, than itself?”—“Of necessity.”—“And if there be any thing, which is double of all other doubles & of itself, it must likewise be half of itself: for whatever is double, is the double of a half. And what is more than itself, must be less than itself, what is heavier must be lighter; what is older, must be younger, &c.; in short, whatever is itself the object to which its distinguishing quality is referred, must likewise have in itself the opposite & correlative quality or object. For instance, hearing, is always relative to a voice.”—“It is.”—“Then if hearing hears itself, it hears itself hearing a voice.”—“Yes.”—“And if sight sees itself, sight must have some colour: for that which has no colour cannot be seen.”—“Certainly.”—“In the case of some of the things, therefore, which we have supposed to be their own objects, or correlatives, the supposition is clearly impossible; & in the remainder it appears extremely unlikely. We need, therefore, a man equal to the task of deciding, whether there is nothing which is capable of being the object to which its own distinguishing property is relative; or whether some things are capable & others not; & if some things are capable, whether knowledge is one of them, which, in that case, we have termed Good Sense. I do not esteem myself to be equal to this task. And I can neither affirm there may be a Knowledge of knowledge, nor if there is, can I admit that it is the same thing with Good Sense, until I have examined whether a knowledge of this sort would benefit us or not. For I conceive Good Sense to be something noble & beneficial. Do you therefore shew, first, that there can be a Knowledge of knowledge & of ignorance, next that besides being possible, it is likewise useful.”

Critias being puzzled & talking obscurely to hide his embarrassment, Socrates proposed that they should for the sake of the argument, allow that such a thing as Knowledge of knowledge may exist. “Supposing this to be possible, how would it enable a man the more to know what things he knows and what he is ignorant of? For we said that in this consists Self-knowledge, and good sense.”—“Surely,” answered Critias. “If a man has that knowledge which knows itself, he becomes such as this knowledge, which he has. When a man has swiftness, he is swift; when he has beauty, he is beautiful; when he has knowledge, he is knowing. When therefore he has that knowledge which is knowledge of itself, he comes to know himself.”—“I do not doubt that: When he has that which is self-knowing, he will know himself: But will he therefore know what things he knows & of what he is ignorant?”—“That is the same thing.”—“Perhaps: but I am just as I was before, still puzzled: for I do not understand, that to know what things we know, is the same as to know of what we are ignorant.”—“What do you mean?”—“I mean this. Will the knowledge of knowledge, be capable of any thing more than to distinguish that this is knowledge & that is not knowledge?”—“Nothing else.”—“And is the knowledge & ignorance of the Salubrious, the same as the knowledge & ignorance of the Just?”—“No.”—“The one is Medicine, the other Politics, but we are speaking only of Knowledge. Now we must suppose a person who does not know the Salubrious, nor the Just, but only knows Knowledge. This person will be able to discern, whether or not he knows something, & has some knowledge, and the same of any one else.”—“Yes.”—“But how can he, merely by this knowledge, distinguish what it is which he knows? For the Salubrious is to be known not by good sense, but by Medicine, the Harmonious, not by good sense but by Music; the Architectural, not by good sense but by Architecture.”—“So it seems.”—“If therefore good sense be only the Knowledge of knowledge, how can he by means of it, know that he knows the Salubrious, or the Architectural?”—“Not at all.”—“Then he who is ignorant of these separate sciences will not know what he knows, but only that he knows something.”—“So it appears.”—“Then good sense does not consist in knowing what things he knows & does not know, but only in knowing that he does know or does not know.”—“It would seem so.”—“Neither then will he be able to put to the test any other man who asserts that he knows something, & distinguish whether he really knows what he says he knows, or not: He will only know, that the man has some knowledge, but Good Sense will not enable him to know of what.”—“Allowed.”—“Then he will not be able to distinguish a real from a pretended physician, & so on. This may be seen from the following circumstance. If a sensible man, or any other man, wishes to distinguish a real from a sham physician, what will he do?—He will not enter into conversation with him on the subject of Medicine; for the physician understands only the Salubrious & the Insalubrious: he knows nothing about Knowledge; that we have assigned to good sense alone.”—“We have.”—“But Medicine is Knowledge; therefore the physician knows nothing on the subject of Medicine.”—“True.”—“The sensible man will therefore know, that the physician has some knowledge; but if he wishes to try what knowledge, will he not enquire, What things it is the knowledge of? Do we not after having ascertained that what is in question is some Knowledge, ascertain what knowledge by asking what is it the knowledge of?”—“Yes.”—“Medicine is distinguished from other kinds of knowledge, by its being the knowledge of the Salubrious & the Insalubrious.”—“It is.”—“Then he who wishes to examine Medicine, must examine it in these things, in which it exists, not in those in which it does not exist.”—“True.”—“Then he who wishes to examine the physician, must examine him in the Salubrious and the Insalubrious.”—“So it seems.”—“And he examines him in order to try whether what he says on these subjects is true, & what he does, proper?”—“Certainly.”—“Can he do this, but by means of Medicine?”—“No.”—“Nobody then but the Physician can do it; not the sensible man; for he would need to be a Physician into the bargain.”—“Yes.”—“If, then, Good Sense is the knowledge only of Knowledge and Ignorance, it cannot distinguish a real from a pretended physician, nor the man who really knows any other thing, from a pretender, except those of one’s own art, whom, of course, all artists can distinguish.”—“So it appears.”—“What, then, is the use of good sense, thus defined? For if, as we at first supposed, the sensible man knew that he knows what he really does know, & that he knows not, what he really does not know, it would be a great advantage to be sensible: for we, & all over whom we had influence, would lead an unerring life: we should never attempt what we knew not how to do, but would find out those who knew, & entrust it to them; nor should we ever permit those whom we could influence, to do any thing but what they could do well, i.e., what they had the knowledge of. A family or a state, or any thing else which was governed by this sort of Good Sense, would be well governed, for every thing in it would be well done, & those who do all things well are happy. These were the effects which we expected from Good Sense, when we thought that it was the knowledge of what we know & know not.”—“Yes.”—“But it now appears that no such knowledge exists.”—“It does.”—“Perhaps, the use of this Good Sense, which is the knowledge of Knowledge & of Ignorance, is only, that he who possesses it is enabled to learn every thing else more easily, & that every thing appears more clearly to him, in as much as, besides the particular thing which he learns, he perceives his knowledge of it likewise. And he will be better able to judge of other men’s knowledge of those particular things which he also has learnt, than those who merely know the particular thing without knowing the knowledge. Is this the advantage which is to be derived from good sense, & have we been looking out for some thing greater than is really to be found?”—“Perhaps it may be so.”

“Perhaps it may,” resumed Socrates: “but perhaps we are wrong altogether. I judge by something extremely strange which occurs to me, respecting good sense, if it is what we now affirm it to be. Let us, if you will grant that it is possible to know knowledge, & that the knowledge of knowledge, would enable us as we supposed at first, to know what things we know & do not know. Granting the possibility of all this, let us enquire whether it would be of any utility. For I think that we were wrong in admitting that sense, if it consisted in this, would be a great good.”—“How?”—“It was a rash admission, that mankind would be greatly benefitted if each man were to perform only what he knows, & to resign what he knows not, to others who know it.”—“Is not this right?”—“I think not.”—“This is strange indeed.”—“So it seems to me. But I think, that if good sense consists in this, it is not clear that it does us any good whatever.”—“Let us hear what you have to say.”—“I dare say that I am wrong; but nevertheless if we have any regard for ourselves, we must examine the thoughts which occur to us, & not carelessly pass them by.”—“True.”—“If good sense, such as we have defined it, governed our actions, every thing would be done according to knowledge, & no sham pilot, or physician or general, pretending to know what he did not, would deceive us. Our bodies would be more healthy than now, we should be exposed to fewer dangers at sea & in war, & all our furniture, clothes, & effects would be constructed by good workmen. If you think fit, we will add a prophetic knowledge of the future, and Good Sense shall be supposed to reject all imposters & induce us to give our confidence to genuine soothsayers & prophets. That the human race, thus directed, would live according to knowledge, I allow: for Good Sense, would not suffer Ignorance to intrude itself. But that, acting according to knowledge, we should act well & be happy, I cannot yet understand.”—“But you will not easily find any other characteristic of acting well, except acting according to knowledge.”—“Instruct me then a little farther. According to what knowledge? The knowledge of shoemaking?”—“Certainly not.”—“Of working in brass?”—“No.”—“In wool, or in timber, & so forth?”—“No.”—“Then we give up the doctrine, that he is happy who lives according to knowledge: for it seems that there may be people living according to knowledge whom you do not call happy. Your happy man, it seems, must live according to the knowledge of some particular subject. Perhaps you mean, the man I mentioned before, who knows the future, the prophet. Do you mean him, or somebody else?”—“Both him & somebody else.”—“Whom? Do you mean, him who besides the future, should know all the past & the present, & be ignorant of nothing? You cannot say that there is any person more knowing than he.”—“Certainly not.”—“I desire, then, to know, what branch of knowledge it is, which makes him happy? All equally?”—“Not equally.”—“Which does it most? Of what past, present, & future things is it the knowledge? Of chess-playing?”—“No.”—“Of number?”—“No.”—“Of the Salubrious?”—“More so.”—“And what most of all?”—“Of Good & Evil.”—“See how you have been drawing me round in a circle, disguising from me that what makes us act well & be happy, is not to live according to Knowledge, though it were the knowledge of all other things, but only according to the single knowledge of Good & Evil. For, take this away, & Medicine will still give us health, Shoemaking, shoes, Weaving, garments. Navigation will save us from drowning, & Generalship will protect us in war. But to accomplish these things well & beneficially, will be wanting.”—“True.”—“Good sense, therefore is not what we said it was; it is that which would be beneficial. It is not the knowledge of knowledge & ignorance, but the knowledge of good & evil.”—“But would not the former be beneficial? For, suppose that Good Sense is the knowledge of knowledges: it would thus survey & rule over all other knowledges, & among others the knowledge of good & evil, & would therefore benefit us.”—“Pray would it give us health, or would that be the result only of medicine? Would it produce all those things, which are the result of the other arts? or would that be reserved for those arts themselves? Did we not admit, that Good Sense is the knowledge solely of knowledge & ignorance, not of any thing else?”—“True.”—“Then it would not give us health.”—“No.”—“That belongs to another art.”—“Yes.”—“Neither then, would it give us Good: for that we have assigned to a different art.”—“We have.”—“How then can Sense be useful, since it does not cause us any good?”—“Not at all, it would seem.”

“You see, then,” added Socrates, “that, as I feared, we are quite wrong, or we never should have come to the conclusion that what is acknowledged to be the noblest of all qualities is useless. We are therefore defeated, & cannot discover to what existing thing the name, Good Sense, was given by its inventor. And yet, we have made many admissions, which the argument did not compel us to. We admitted, that there may be a knowledge of knowledge, though the argument made against it; & we admitted that this knowledge would know the things, which are the subjects of the other kinds of knowledge (tho’ the argument would not allow this either) in order that a sensible man might know what things he knows, & of what he is ignorant. This we admitted, not considering the contradiction of supposing, that what a man is ignorant of, he nevertheless in some sort knows, since he knows himself to be ignorant of it. But with all this readiness of concession we could not discover the truth, but continued to give the name of Good Sense to something which turned out to be useless. I do not mind this so much for myself, but I am vexed on account of you, Charmides, if having not only so much beauty but extraordinary good sense, you will be never the better for it, nor will be in any way benefitted by it in your life: And I am vexed on account of the incantation which the Thracian taught me, that I learned with much trouble a thing which is good for nothing. I cannot believe that this is so, but rather conclude, that I am an unskilful enquirer, that Good Sense is in reality a great good, & that if you possess it you are fortunate. But see whether you have it, & do not require the incantation: for if you have it, I would advise you to think me a trifler & unable to investigate any thing, but to think yourself the more sensible you are, by so much the happier.”

Charmides answered, “I do not know whether I have it or not: how can I, since even you two are not able to discover what it is? But for all that, I am not persuaded by you; I think myself to have much need of the incantation, & I have no objection to have it administered by you as often as you please.”—“It will,” said Critias, “be to me a proof of your Good Sense, if you do allow Socrates to administer it, without intermission.”—“It would be very wrong,” answered Charmides, “if I did not obey you, who are my guardian.” And the dialogue ends with some lively conversation between Socrates & the other two, at the conclusion of which Socrates consents to do what they require.

This dialogue, therefore, like the Laches, terminates without any definite result, & can only be considered, like so many other works of Plato, to be a mere dialectical exercise, in which various ideas are thrown out, but no opinion definitely adhered to or maintained.

The Euthyphron

[Holograph MS, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, entitled “Notes on the Euthyphron of Plato.” Paper watermarked 1828. Not mentioned in JSM’s bibliography. For details concerning the manuscript and the transcription, see the Textual Introduction, lxxxi-lxxxii above; for a discussion of this and the other translations of Plato, see also the Introduction, xvii-xxviii above.]

the subject of this dialogue is Piety. Like the Laches & the Charmides, it belongs to the class to which the epithet πειραστικός has been added; to express that its sole object is to make an adversary expose himself, & to refute false notions, without establishing true ones.

Euthyphron, who seems to have been a prophet, or diviner, & theologian, by profession, meets Socrates returning from one of the courts of justice, and expresses his surprise at finding him in a situation so unusual with him. “Have you a suit before the Archon,” (he asks) “as I have?”—“They do not call it a suit,” replied Socrates, “but an indictment.”—“What! Has any person indicted you? for I am certain that you have not indicted any person.”—Socrates assented.—“Who is your accuser?”—Socrates answered that he was named Melitus: he did not know much about him; he seemed young & obscure; & describing his person, asked Euthyphron if he knew him. Euthyphron said he did not. “But what charge has he brought against you?”—“No mean one,” answered Socrates. “For it is no bad sign of a young man to be conversant with so great a matter. He, it seems, knows in what manner the youth are corrupted, & who they are that corrupt them. And he will prove, no doubt, to be some sage, who, perceiving my errors, by which I corrupt those who are his equals in years, comes & accuses me before the state, as our common mother. And he alone appears to me to commence politics at the right end: for the right way is to look after the young men first, as a good husbandman first takes care of the young plants, & afterwards of the others. And Melitus probably has a mind to begin by clearing away us who destroy the young shoots of society, as he says; after that it is clear that he will take care of the old men, & will be the casue of great good to the state, as may be presumed from so happy a commencement.” Euthyphron answered, that from such a commencement he should rather fear that Melitus would continue all his life to do evil to the state. “But by what means does he say that you corrupt the youth?”—“It is strange to hear. For he says that I am a fabricator of gods, & indicts me for making new gods, & not recognizing the old.”—“I understand; it is because of what you say about your supernatural warnings. He therefore indicts you as innovating in religion, knowing that such charges find a ready belief. And I too, when I speak in the assembly on religious matters, foretelling the future, am laughed at as a madman. And yet all my predictions have come true. But they envy all of us who know these matters. We must not mind them, but pursue our course.”—“It is no great matter,” answered Socrates, “to be laughed at. The Athenians, as it seems to me, do not greatly mind if they think a man clever, provided he does not propagate his wisdom: but those who they think are not only wise themselves but make others so, they are angry with, be it from envy, as you say, or from some other cause.”—“I have no great mind to try what are their sentiments of me in this respect.”—“Perhaps you are thought to hold yourself scarce, & to be unwilling to communicate your wisdom: but I am afraid that I, from philanthropy, am thought by them to say to every body without reserve whatever I have in me, not only without being paid, but being glad even to pay others for hearing me, if it were required. If, now, they were only to laugh at me, as you say they do at you, it would not be unpleasant to pass some time in laughter & fun before the court; but if they are serious, nobody knows what will be the issue, except you, who are prophets.”—“Perhaps, after all, it will come to nothing, & you will come off to your satisfaction, as I think I shall.”—Socrates hereupon asked Euthyphron what was the suit in which he was engaged. Euthyphron explained, that he was prosecuting his own father, for homicide. Socrates expressed surprise, & said, that he supposed the murdered person was a near relation of Euthyphron, since he would not have prosecuted him for the murder of a stranger.—“What difference does it make,” answered Euthryphron, “whether he was a stranger or a relation? The only question is, whether he was justly killed or not, although his slayer should be united to you by the closest ties; for the pollution, if you associate knowingly with such a person, & do not purify yourself & him by bringing him to justice, is just the same. The slain person was a bailiff of mine at Naxos, who in a fit of intoxication killed one of our slaves. My father put him in irons & in a dungeon, & sent hither to enquire of the ἐξηγητής what he ought to do. In the meantime the man died from the effects of confinement & neglect. Now my father & my relations are indignant because I prosecute my father for the death of this homicide: saying that he did not put him to death, & that if he did it was no justification, for it is impious in a son to indict his father of murder. They do not know correctly the doctrine of religion on the subject of piety and impiety.”—“And do you, Euthyphron, in the name of Jupiter, understand religion, & piety & impiety so well, that in the circumstances you have mentioned, you are not afraid to prosecute your father, lest you should be committing an impious action?”—“I should be nobody, & should have no claim to superiority over other men, if I did not know all these things accurately.”—“It would be for my good, most excellent Euthyphron, to become a disciple of yours, & before my trial comes on, to represent to Melitus, that I have always set a high value on religious knowledge, & now, since he says that I have erred when I promulgated my own notions & attempted to innovate in religion, I have become your pupil. And I will say to him, If you admit that Euthyphron is wise & sound in these matters, think the same of me, & do not prosecute me: but if not, indict my master first, as a corrupter of the old men, viz. me, & his own father, myself by his instructions, his father by admonition & punishment. And if this does not prevail upon him to drop the prosecution or to indict you instead of me, I will say the same thing before my judges.”—“Aye,” said Euthyphron, “if he makes any attempt upon me, I will find out his weak side, & the court shall have more to say about him, than about me.”—“This is the reason,” replied Socrates, “why I wish to become your disciple, knowing that Melitus & others do not seem to take notice of you, but he sees me so clearly that he has indicted me for impiety. Now, then, pray expound to me what you said that you clearly understand: what piety & impiety consist in, both in respect to homicide & to every thing else. Is not piety one & the same thing in all the different acts which receive that name, & impiety, again, the contrary of piety, but in itself always one & the same thing? Is there not one single idea which belongs to every thing which is impious, in so far as it is impious?” —“Certainly.”—“Tell us then, what you mean by the Pious, & the Impious.”

“The pious,” answered Euthyphron, “is what I am now doing, to prosecute those who are guilty either of homicide, or spoliation of temples, or any thing of that sort; whether the offender be your father or your mother, or any person whatever: And not to prosecute him, is impious. And see what a great proof I will give you that this is the case. It is believed by men that Jupiter, the best & justest of the Gods, put his father Saturn in confinement because he unjustly devoured his children; & that Saturn himself mutilated his own father, for a similar reason. And yet they are angry with me for prosecuting my father when he commits a crime. They are therefore inconsistent with themselves.”

“The very reason,” answered Socrates, “why I am indicted is, because when any one tells me these stories about the Gods, I find it difficult to credit them. But now, if you who know all about these matters, are of this opinion, I must of necessity assent: for what can I say, who myself admit that I know nothing of the matter? But tell me, in the name of friendship: Do you really believe that these things happened?”—“And many things still more surprising, of which the vulgar are ignorant.”—“And you really think that there are wars, & mutual enmities & battles among the Gods, as poets say & painters represent to us?”—“Not only so, but I will relate to you if you please many other things on the subject of religion, which I am sure will astonish you.”—“I should not wonder. But you will tell me all this another time. At present, try to explain more distinctly what I have already asked you. For when I asked, what Piety is, you did not give me an adequate answer, but told me that what you are now doing, prosecuting your father, is pious.”—“And I said truly.”—“Perhaps. But you say, that many other things likewise are pious.”—“True.”—“You remember, then, that I did not ask you to tell me one or two of the numerous things which are pious, but to tell me the single Idea, by which all pious things are pious. For you said, that impious things are impious, & pious things pious, by one common character of piety or impiety.”—“I did.”—“Explain to me, then, this general Idea, in order that, keeping it in mind, & using it as an archetype, I may call those things pious which agree with it & those not pious, which do not agree.”

Euthyphron, being thus pressed, made answer that what is pleasing to the Gods is pious, what is not pleasing to them, impious. Socrates commended this mode of answering, which he said, conformed to his intention in putting the question; & proposed to examine whether the answer was true.

“You say, that the things, & the men, that are pleasing to the Gods, are pious; those that are hateful to them, are impious: the pious, & the impious, not being the same thing, but directly contrary.”—“True.”—“And you said, that the Gods differ & dispute, & are at enmity among themselves.”—“I did.”—“Now, what differences are they which produce enmity & anger? For example: If you & I should differ on the subject of number, which was the greater of two numbers, would this difference make us enemies, and offended with each other? Or should we soon get rid of our difference by coming to a calculation?”—“We should.”—“And if we differed about the comparative size of two objects, we should soon settle our difference by measuring.”—“Yes.”—“And if we differed about the comparative weight of two bodies, we should come to a decision by weighing.”—“Certainly.”—“On what subject differing, & to what decision being unable to come, should we quarrel, & become enemies? Perhaps you cannot at once say. Do you not think, that the Just & Unjust, the Noble & Vile, the Good & Evil, are the subjects on which when men differ, being unable to come to a satisfactory decision of the dispute, they are apt to become enemies?”—“Agreed.”—“If the Gods, then, ever differ, it must be on these subjects.”—“It must.”—“By your account, then, some of the Gods differ from others in what they consider just, and unjust, good & evil, noble & vile: for if they did not differ on these subjects, they would never quarrel.”—“True.”—“But each of them is pleased with what he thinks just, good, & noble, and hates the contrary.”—“Yes.”—“What some of them think just, others think unjust.”—“True.”—“Then, the very same things are both loved & hated by Gods; the same things are at once pleasing to the Gods, & hateful to them.”—“So it seems.”—“By this account, then, the same things are both pious & impious.”—“It would appear so.”—“You did not, therefore, answer my question. And it would not be wonderful if, in acting as you now do, prosecuting your father, you were doing what is pleasing to Jupiter, but hateful to Saturn & Uranus, & pleasing to Vulcan, but hateful to Juno or some other.”

“But,” replied Euthyphron, “I do not think that the Gods differ from each other on this point, that he who slays another unjustly ought to be punished.”—“Did you ever hear any man contending that he who does anything unjustly ought not to be punished?”—“They contend for it incessantly, in the courts of justice & elsewhere: for committing all sorts of injustice, they say & do every thing to escape punishment.”—“Do they confess that they have committed injustice, & nevertheless declare that they ought not to suffer punishment?”—“That, it is true they do not.”—“Then they do not say & do every thing: for, it seems, they do not venture to say, that if they have committed injustice they should not be punished. They say that they have not committed injustice.”—“True.”—“Then they do not dispute whether he who commits injustice ought to be punished, but they perhaps dispute on the point, who the man is who commits injustice, & what injustice consists in.”—“True.”—“Then the Gods, likewise, if they dispute, as you say, about the just & the unjust, & accuse each other of injustice, do not, any of them, venture to affirm, that he who commits injustice ought not to be punished; but they differ & dispute respecting the justice or injustice of some particular act.”—“Certainly.”—“Teach me, then, in order that I may become wiser, by what token you know that all the Gods consider him to have died unjustly, who, being a labourer, & slaying a man, is put in confinement by the master of the murdered man, & dies in consequence of his confinement, before it can be ascertained from the ἐξηγητής what ought to be done with him? & that they think it right for a son to indict his father of murder on such grounds?”—“It would perhaps require no little time; but I could prove it to you very clearly.”—“I perceive that you think me a harder scholar than the judges; since you will of course prove to them, that the act is unjust, & odious to all the Gods.”—“Very clearly, if they will listen to me.”—“But they will listen, if you appear to speak well. It occurs to me, however, that if you were to make it ever so clear to me that all the Gods think the death of this man unjust, I should not have learnt from you the more, what Piety and Impiety are. I should only know, that this act was hateful to the Gods. But this did not appear to us an adequate definition of Impiety, for the same thing, it appeared, was at once pleasing to the Gods, & hateful to the Gods: I excuse you therefore, from this: & if you will, let all the Gods think this unjust, & let all of them abhor it. But shall we correct our definition, & say, that what all the Gods hate, is impious, what they all are pleased with, is pious, what some of them are pleased with & others hate, is neither, or both? Shall this be our definition of the pious, & the impious?”—“Why should it not?”—“I have no objection; but do you consider whether you will be most easily able to teach me what you promised, by this supposition.”—“I should say, that the Pious is that which all the gods are pleased with; & the contrary, that which they all hate, is Impious.”—“Shall we examine, then, whether this is right, or shall we take things upon our own authority or that of others, & believe whatever is asserted?”—“We should examine. But I think that what we have now said is correct.”

“Is the Pious pleasing to the Gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is pleasing to the Gods?”—“I do not understand you.”—“When a thing is carried, is it carried because somebody carries it, or for some other reason?”—“For this reason.”—“When a thing is driven, it is because somebody drives it, & when seen, because somebody sees it.”—“Yes.”—“It is not true that somebody sees it because it is seen; but, on the contrary, it is seen because somebody sees it. Somebody does not carry it because it is carried, but it is carried because somebody carries it. In short, that which becomes any thing, or undergoes any thing, does not become it or undergo it because it is becoming or undergoing, but it is in the state, called becoming or undergoing, because it becomes or undergoes.”—“True.”—“Now, to be loved, is either to become something or to undergo something.”—“It is.”—“Then it is with this as with the other things which we have mentioned. Somebody does not love a thing because it is loved, but it is loved because somebody loves it.”—“Yes.”—“The Pious, you say, is loved by all the Gods.”—“Yes.”—“Do they love it because it is Pious, or for some other reason?”—“For that reason.”—“Then it is not Pious because they love it but they love it because it is Pious.”—“So it seems.”—“What is pleasing to the Gods, however, is pleasing to them because they love it.”—“Certainly.”—“Then Pious, & Pleasing to the Gods, are not the same thing?”—“How?”—“Because we have admitted, that the Gods love the pious, because it is pious; it is not pious because they love it. But they do not love what is Pleasing to them because it is pleasing; on the contrary it is called pleasing to them by reason of their loving it.”—“True.”—“But if Pious, and Pleasing to the Gods, were identical, then, if the Gods loved the Pious because it is Pious, they would have loved what is Pleasing to them because it is Pleasing to them: Or if what is Pleasing to the Gods, were pleasing to them because they love it, the Pious would have been Pious because they loved it. But you see that these two things are entirely different, & oppositely affected: the one is what it is, because it is loved; the other is loved, because it is what it is. And when I asked you what the Pious is, you seem not to have been willing to explain to me its essence, but have told me one of its attributes, which is, to be loved by all the Gods: what it is, you have not told me. But by all means tell me now.”

Euthyphron complained that he could not express what he thought, since whatever they laid down, always ran away from them, & would not remain where they placed it. And after some lively conversation, in the usual Socratic strain of irony, Socrates proposed to shew him in what manner he ought to explain to him the nature of Piety. “Do you not think that whatever is Pious, must necessarily be Just?”—“Yes.”—“And is every thing which is Just, also Pious? Or is the Pious, universally Just, but the Just not universally Pious, but part of it Pious, and part of it something else?”—“I do not follow you.”—“And yet you are younger as well as wiser than I: but you are lazy from abundance of wisdom. But pray exert yourself: for it is not difficult to comprehend what I mean. I mean the contrary of what the poet means, who says, ‘You will not speak of Jove who created all things, for where there is fear, there is awe.’ I differ from this Poet. It does not appear to me that where there is fear, there is awe. For many persons fear diseases, & poverty, & various other things, and stand in no awe of the things which they fear. Do you not think so?”—“I do.”—“But where there is awe, there is fear. For when a man is extremely overawed & ashamed, does he not stand in fear of censure?”—“He does.”—“It is not right, then, to say, Where there is fear there is awe; but, Where there is awe, there is fear. For fear is more extensive than awe: Awe is part of fear, as Odd Numbers, of Number in general: It cannot be said where there is Number there is Odd-number, but where there is odd-number there is number.”—“Yes.”—“In the same sense, I asked you, whether, where there is justice there is piety, or whether, where there is piety, there is justice, but where there is justice, there is not always piety, but piety is a part of justice. Is it a part, think you?”—“I think it is.”—“Let us proceed then to the next step. Since the Pious is a part of the Just, we must next enquire, what part. If you asked me, what part Even-number was of Number, I should answer, that which is divisible into two equal parts. Should I not?”—“Yes.”—“Endeavour then to explain to me in a similar manner, what part of the just, the pious composes, that I may bid Melitus not to prosecute me further for impiety, as having sufficiently learned from you what is & is not pious.”

Euthyphron answered, “The Pious seems to me to be that part of the Just, which relates to the service of the Gods. The remaining part of the Just, is that which regards the service of men.”

“You seem to me to say well,” resumed Socrates. “But I still desire something more: I do not yet understand what service you mean. For you do not mean a service with respect to the Gods, similar to the services which relate to other things. As for example, we say, it is not every one who can serve a horse properly, but only a groom.”—“True.”—“Grooming, then, is the service of horses.”—“Yes.”—“And it is not every one who can serve dogs properly, but only a dog-keeper.”—“True.”—“Dog-training, then, is the service of dogs.”—“It is.”—“And piety, of the Gods?”—“Yes.”—“But all service is for the same end, viz. the good & advantage of that which is served: Horses, for instance, are benefitted, & made better, by grooming.”—“They are.”—“And dogs, by training, & so on. Or do you think that service is for the injury of what is served?”—“Certainly not.”—“But for the benefit.”—“Yes.”—“Is piety, then, which is the service of the Gods, for the benefit of the Gods, & does it make them better? And do you grant, that when you do a pious act, you make one of the Gods better than he was before?”—“Certainly not.”—“Neither did I suppose you did. But what kind of service of the Gods is piety?”—“That which servants render to their masters.”—“I understand. It is a kind of working for them.” —“True.”—“Now can you tell, for the accomplishment of what effect the physician’s kind of work is performed? Is it not for the accomplishment of health?”—“It is.”—“And the shipbuilder’s kind of work, for the accomplishment of what effect is it performed?”—“Of a ship.”—“And the builder’s, of a house?”—“Yes.”—“Tell me then: for the accomplishment of what effect does the kind of work which we called working for the Gods, take place? You must know, since you say that you are of all men the most versed in divine things.”—“And I say true.”—“Tell me then, what is this admirable effect which the Gods accomplish by employing us to work for them?”—“Many & excellent things.”—“So do military commanders: but yet it may all be summed up by saying that they accomplish victory in war. May it not?”—“Yes.”—“And husbandmen, too, accomplish many and excellent things: but nevertheless, the sum total of them is, the raising of food from the earth.”—“True.”—“And what is the sum total of the many & excellent things which the Gods accomplish?”—“I told you before, that it would be a long piece of business to explain all these matters accurately; but I will tell you simply, that if any person knows how to say & do things pleasing to the Gods, by prayer & sacrifice, this is pious, & is the salvation both of families & of states: the contrary is impious, & destroys them.”—“You could have told me what I asked in much fewer words if you had chosen: but you do not wish to instruct me; it is clear: & now you have turned off when you were just at the point: If you had answered perhaps by this time I should have learnt from you what piety is. But now, since the questioner must follow wherever the answerer chuses to lead, What do you define the Pious, & Piety to be? Is it not, the knowledge how to sacrifice & to pray?”—“It is.”—“To sacrifice is to make offerings to the Gods, to pray is to ask something from them.”—“True.”—“Piety, by this account, is the knowledge of Asking from the Gods, & giving to them.”—“You have understood me very well.”—“For I am desirous of your wisdom, & attend to it, so that what you say will not fall to the ground. You say that the service of the Gods, consists in asking of them, & giving to them.”—“I do.”—“To ask of them rightly, is to ask them for what we need from them.”—“Yes.”—“And to give to them rightly, is to give them in return what they need from us. For it would be an unskilful mode of bestowing gifts, to give to any one what he has no occasion for.”—“You say true.”—“Then piety is, as it were, an Art of Traffic between the Gods & men.”—“Of Traffic, if it pleases you so to call it.”—“But it does not please me, if it is not true. Tell me, then, what is the benefit arising to the Gods from the gifts which they receive from us: As respects what they give, the case is clear: for we have nothing good which we do not derive from them. But what benefit do they receive from what we give them? Or have we so much the best of this traffic, that we receive every thing that is good from them & they nothing from us?”—“Do you think, Socrates, that the Gods are benefitted by what we offer to them?”—“What do we offer it for?”—“What do you suppose it is, except marks of honour & reverence, & what I said before, things grateful to them?”—“The Pious, then, is something grateful to the Gods, but not beneficial or pleasing.”—“In the highest degree pleasing, I should think.”—“The Pious, then, is that which is pleasing to the Gods.”—“It is.”—“Are you surprised, if the argument should, as you said before, not stand still, but run away, when you yourself appear to have made it run round in a circle? Do you not see that we have returned again to the same point? Do you not remember that Pious, & Pleasing to the Gods, appeared to us to be not the same, but exceedingly different?”—“I do.”—“And now, you say again, that the Pious, is that which is pleasing to the Gods. Either, therefore, we were wrong before, or if right before, we are wrong now.”—“So it seems.”—“Let us then resume the consideration from the beginning. For I will not voluntarily give it up until I am instructed. And now by all means pay attention & tell me the truth. For if you did not clearly understand the Pious & the Impious, you certainly would not have prosecuted your old father for murder, on account of a labouring man; you would have feared to offend the Gods, & disgrace yourself before men, in case you were wrong. I am sure, therefore, that you perfectly know the Pious and Impious: Tell it to me therefore, & do not disguise it from me.”—“Another time, then: for now I am in a hurry to go away.”—“See what you are doing! You go away, having cast me down from a great hope which I had, of learning from you the nature of Piety, & getting rid of Melitus & his indictment, by convincing him that I had been made wise in divine things by Euthyphron, & that I would not any longer from ignorance promulgate crude ideas & innovate in religious matters, but would hereafter lead a better life.”

Here ends the dialogue; which, if it has any purpose, further than as a specimen of confutation, seems intended chiefly to discredit the most pernicious parts of the Greek mythology, & the corruptions which it had introduced into the moral ideas of the people.

The Laches

[Holograph MS, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, entitled “Notes on the Laches of Plato.” Paper watermarked 1828. Not mentioned in JSM’s bibliography. For details concerning the manuscript and the transcription, see the Textual Introduction, lxxxi-lxxxii above; for a discussion of this and the other translations of Plato, see also the Introduction, xvii-xxviii above.]

this little dialogue is an expansion of one of the arguments in the Protagoras.

The characters in it are Lysimachus and Melesias, two Athenians of rank; Nicias and Laches, the celebrated captains; & Socrates. The conversation originated in the wish of Lysimachus & Melesias to ask the advice of Nicias and Laches, respecting the education of their sons, who were now adolescent, & to whom they were extremely desirous to give every kind of instruction which could enable them to distinguish themselves. Among other things, it had been suggested by some one, that the exercise of the heavy-armed was a proper and useful branch of education for a young man; & on this subject they consulted Laches and Nicias. Both expressed their readiness to give their best advice; but Laches expressed his surprise, that Lysimachus should have called in Nicias & himself as his advisers in this matter, & should have passed over Socrates, who was present, & whose life was devoted to the consideration, what studies and modes of training were eligible. Lysimachus hereupon observed that Sophroniscus, the father of Socrates, had been an old friend of his, but that as, from his age, he seldom went out, he had not kept up the acquaintance of Socrates himself, & was not aware that he was the same Socrates of whom he frequently heard his son & the other young man speak in commendation. Now however being informed of the reputation of Socrates, & hearing from Laches great praise of the conduct of Socrates in the battle of Delium, & from Nicias, that he had recommended to him as a teacher of music for his son, Damon, a man not only excellent in his art, but in every respect a worthy tutor for a young man, he assured him of his warm friendship & begged him to resume his intimacy with the family for the sake of the two young men, and to join with Nicias and Laches in giving his advice on the point on which their opinion was now requested.

Socrates having expressed a wish first to hear the opinions of the two others who were his seniors, Nicias proceeded to declare his opinion, which was favorable to the study of the heavy-armed exercise: on the ground that to the advantages of the other gymnastic exercises, it added the recommendation of being an exercise in the very operation for which those exercises were intended: to prepare the body, viz. actual warfare: that when the line was broken either in pursuit or in flight, he who had learnt this exercise would be better able to cope with the enemy single-handed; that it is a preparation for, & incitement to, all other martial exercises & studies; that it increases personal courage, & even improves the personal appearance, & renders the aspect of the warrior more formidable.

Laches, being next asked for his opinion, gave it the other way, saying, “It is hard to say of any branch of knowledge that it is not worth learning; for it is good to know every thing. And if this is, as the teachers of it affirm, really a branch of knowledge, it is very fit to learn it: but if they are imposters, & it is not a branch of knowledge, or if it be a branch, but a trifling & insignificant one, what occasion is there to learn it? Now, if it were really good for any thing, it would not have escaped the notice of the Lacedæmonians, who occupy themselves with scarcely any thing in life but the means of obtaining military superiority: And at all events, the teachers of this art are well aware that the Lacedæmonians pay more attention to military affairs, than all the other Greeks, & that a man would be able to gain most money from the other Greeks as a teacher of military exercises if he were in reputation on that account at Lacedæmon; as a tragic poet would, if in reputation at Athens: Accordingly whoever thinks he can compose a good tragedy comes straight to Athens to try his fortune; but these teachers of the heavy-armed exercise seem to regard Lacedæmon as an inaccessible sanctuary, & never go near it, but prefer exhibiting their talents any where else, & particularly in those places of which the inhabitants would themselves admit that the Lacedæmonians were much their superiors in warfare. Besides,” continued Laches, “I have seen some of these men in actual combat: In every thing else, those who obtain the greatest name, are those who have studied & practised the thing in question; but it so happens that not one of the men who have practised this exercise as a profession, ever acquired a name as a warrior. My opinion of the matter is this, that a man otherwise a coward, studying this exercise, will probably have more confidence & therefore obtain more frequent opportunities of exposing himself; and if a brave man practises it, he will be so watched that if he makes even a slight mistake he will be vehemently censured: for the pretension to such knowledge excites jealousies, & a man must be very much the superior of other men in the military virtues, if he would escape ridicule & contempt, professing to have made this his study.”

Lysimachus now called upon Socrates, saying that as the other two had given opposite opinions, it depended upon Socrates to decide.—“What,” answered Socrates: “Will you take whichever side obtains the greatest number of our suffrages?”—“What else can I do?” replied Lysimachus.—“And you, Melesias,” resumed Socrates: “If you were considering what exercises your son should learn, would your decision be governed by the proportionate numbers of our suffrages, or by the opinion of that one among us who had been trained under the best gymnast?”—“By the latter, in preference.”—“You would pay more attention to him, than to all four of us.”—“Perhaps so.”—“For in order to decide rightly, the decision should be governed by knowledge rather than by numbers.”—“Certainly.”—“You ought, then, first to consider, whether there is or is not any one of us who possesses a scientific knowledge of the subject, & if so, to be guided by him, & leave the others alone; if not, to seek another adviser. For you have now at stake, not some trifle, but your greatest possession, for such as your sons are, such will be the whole of your domestic economy.”—“True.”—“How then should we enquire, in order to know which of us has the most scientific knowledge on the subject of exercises? Would not the answer be, he who had learned, & practised, under good teachers?”—“Yes.”—“Teachers of what?”—“What do you mean?”—“It seems to me that we have not yet determined, what is the subject on which we are considering which of us has acquired scientific knowledge, under a master, & which has not.”—“Are we not,” said Nicias, “considering the subject of the heavy-armed exercise, whether a young man should learn it or not?”—“True,” answered Socrates. “But when we are considering respecting any particular ointment for the eyes, whether it should be applied or not, do you think that we are deliberating on the subject of the ointment, or on that of the eyes?”—“On the eyes.”—“And when we consider whether a bridle should be laid upon a horse or not, we are considering on the subject of the horse, not of the bridle.”—“Yes.”—“And in one word, when we are considering of one thing for the sake of another thing, the real subject of our deliberation is the thing for the sake of which we consider, not the thing which we consider for its sake.”—“Certainly.”—“Then we should, in the choice of an adviser, consider whether he has a scientific knowledge of the management of that for the sake of which we are considering.”—“True.”—“But we are considering of a branch of instruction for the sake of the minds of these young men.”—“Yes.”—“Then we must consider, whether any of us has a scientific knowledge of the management of the mind, & can manage it well, & has had good teachers.”—“But,” interrupted Laches, “have you not known men who have attained greater scientific knowledge without teachers, than with them?”—“I have,” replied Socrates: “but if these men said that they were good artists, you would not believe them unless they could shew you well executed works, each in his particular art.”—“True.”—“We then,” said Socrates, addressing Laches & Nicias, “since we have been called in to advise Lysimachus & Melesias with a view to the proper training of the minds of their sons, ought to produce our own teachers, men who have trained many other minds & trained them well before teaching us; & if any of us says that he has had no teacher, he should, if he can, produce his own acts, & shew who among Athenians or foreigners, slaves or freemen, has become a good man by his means: And if we can do neither of these things we should not run the risk of injuring the minds of the sons of our best friends, but should bid them seek other advisers. I, for my own part, say at once, that I have not had any teachers in this matter, although from my earliest youth I have desired to be instructed in it. But I have not money to give to the sophists, who alone professed to be able to make me a good & eminent man: And I have not up to this time been able to discover the art for myself. But I should not wonder if Nicias and Laches had learnt it or discovered it: for they are richer than I, & were therefore able to learn it from others, & older, so that they are more likely to have found it out. And they seem capable of educating a man; for they would not have given their opinion so confidently respecting good & bad modes of instructing youth if they had not confidence in the sufficiency of their own knowledge. I therefore confide in them in other respects, but wonder at their differing from one another. And I exhort you, Lysimachus, to interrogate Nicias & Laches, & say to them, Tell us whether you know the art of educating youth by having learnt it from some one else, or by having discovered it for yourselves, & if by learning it from others, who were your teachers, & what other teachers there are of the same art, that if your attention is engrossed by the affairs of the state, we may go to the teachers, & prevail with them by gifts or prayers to train our sons & yours, & if you have yourselves discovered the art tell us what persons besides you have made good & great men by your training. For if you are only now beginning to practise the art, consider lest you should be making experiments, not upon a worthless material but upon your sons & those of your friends, & learning pottery, as the proverb says, in the pot itself.”

Lysimachus, with great simplicity, declared that Socrates was in the right, & requested Nicias & Laches to let Socrates interrogate them, & to make answer as he proposed. Nicias hereupon remarked that it was easy to see that Lysimachus knew Socrates only by his father & not personally, or not since he was a child.—“How so?” answered Lysimachus.—“Because you do not seem to know that whoever gets into conversation with Socrates, is sure, whatever they might be talking about at first, to be twisted round by Socrates until he is forced to give an account of himself, what sort of a life he leads & has heretofore led; & when he has got upon this subject, Socrates never lets him go until all this has been fully examined & soundly criticized. I,” continued Nicias, “am accustomed to him, & know that it is impossible to avoid undergoing all this from him, & that I shall not be able to avoid it now: for I like to converse with the man, & think that there is no harm in being reminded of any thing which we have done, or are doing, improperly, & that a man will be the more careful in his after life if he does not fly from this, but is willing & desirous (as Solon says) to learn as long as he lives, & does not think that age brings good sense along with it as a matter of course. I therefore have no objection to be taken to task by Socrates, & I knew before, that, Socrates being present, the discourse would not turn upon the young men but upon ourselves. Let us hear what Laches says on the subject.”

“My case is very simple,” answered Laches; “or rather not simple but double, for I may sometimes be thought to love discussion & sometimes to hate it. When I hear a man discoursing on the subject of virtue or wisdom, who is a true man, and worthy of the language he holds, I am pleased, seeing that the speaker & what he says are suitable to, & in unison with each other, & that such a man is the best of musicians, having the true harmony not of sounds but of life. I delight so much therefore in the discourses of such a man, that I might seem to any one, fond of discussion: But a man who acts ill, the more excellently he talks, annoys me the more, & makes me appear a hater of discussion. I have not yet tried Socrates in words, but I have tried him in acts, & found him worthy of the finest discourses & the greatest freedom of speech. I therefore should be delighted to be examined by such a man, & to learn from him, for I too am desirous, with Solon, to grow old constantly acquiring knowledge, but on condition, that my teachers shall be worthy men. This therefore must be granted to me: but whether my teacher is younger than myself, or not yet in repute, & so forth, I do not care. Since that day, Socrates, when I made trial of you in peril, & proved your virtue, I am willing that you should instruct me & refute me as much as you please.”

Socrates therefore proposed that instead of enquiring what teachers they had respectively had in this sort of instruction, & what persons they had themselves rendered worthier than before, they should enter into another enquiry which tended to the same end, but commenced higher up, & nearer to first principles.

“If we knew, respecting any thing, that if it were communicated to another thing it made that other thing better than it was before; & if we also had power to cause it to be so communicated; we must evidently know that thing, concerning which we are able to advise, how it might best & most easily be acquired. To explain myself more clearly; if we happen to know that sight, when it is communicated to the eyes, makes them better than they would otherwise be, & if besides, we have the power of communicating sight to the eyes, it is evident that we must know what sight is, or we should be very ill qualified to advise how the eyes might acquire it.”—“True,” answered Laches.—“And we are now asked, in what way the minds of these young men may, by the acquisition of virtue, be made better.”—“Certainly.”—“Is it not, then, necessary that we should know, what virtue is? for if we did not know what it is, how should we be capable of giving advice, how it may best be acquired?”—“Not at all.”—“We profess, then, to know what it is.”—“We do.”—“And if we know, we can tell.”—“Certainly.”

“Let us not, then, consider respecting the whole of virtue at once, but some part of it. It will then be easier to discover, whether we sufficiently understand it.”—“Be it so.”—“What part shall we chuse? That part, probably, to which the exercise of the heavy-armed appears to tend. It is thought by most persons to tend to courage.”—“It is.”—“Let us first then, endeavour to shew, what courage is: next, in what manner young men may acquire it, so far as it is capable of being acquired by study & training. Try, therefore, to say, what courage is.”—“It is not difficult. If a man is willing to remain in his rank and resist the enemy, & does not run away, he is a courageous man.”—“You say well; but probably by my fault, & the indistinctness of what I said, you have not answered what I had in mind, but something else.”—“How?”—“I will tell you. He is courageous who remains in his rank & fights.”—“He is.”—“But what do you say of him who runs away & fights, instead of remaining in his rank?”—“How runs away?”—“Like the Scythians, who are said to fight flying, as well as pursuing; & the horses of Æneas & Æneas himself are praised in Homer, for being good in flight, as well as in pursuit.” —“And very properly, for Homer was speaking of chariots: & what you say of the Scythians relates to cavalry. For their cavalry fight in that manner; but the heavy infantry of the Greeks, in the manner I speak of.”—“Except perhaps the Lacedæmonians, who are said to have won the battle of Platæa in full retreat, & only to have turned round & pursued when the enemy were fairly broken.”—“True.”—“This then is what I meant, in saying that I had caused you to make a wrong answer, by putting a wrong question. I meant to ask you, not only respecting those who are courageous in the heavy infantry, but in the cavalry, & all modes of warfare, & not only in war, but in danger by sea, or in disease, or in endurance of poverty, or in political affairs, & not only those who are courageous with respect to pain or fear, but to desires & pleasures, being able to fight against them. For some are courageous in such things.”—“Extremely so.”—“All these, then, are courageous, but some of them are so in pleasure, others in pain, some in desire, others in fear. And some are cowardly in each of these things.”—“Yes.”—“Let us then enquire what these two qualities are. And first, let us consider, what courage is; being, as it is, one & the same thing in all these matters. Do you understand me?”—“Not exactly.”—“As if I were to ask you, what quickness is; the case being, that we may have quickness in running, in playing the harp, in speaking, in learning, & in many other things: In short, it may exist in the operations of the hands, the legs, the voice, or the mind. Now if I were asked what this is, which is called quickness in all these operations, I should answer, that the power which effects much in a short time is quickness, whether it exists in the voice, in running, or in any thing else.”—“Right.”—“Do you, then, try to say, what power it is, which, being one & the same in pleasure, in pain, & in all the other things which we have mentioned, is called courage.”

“It seems to me,” answered Laches, “that courage, if it is common to all these things, is a certain determination of soul.”

“You do not,” (replied Socrates,) “I suspect, give to all determination of soul, the name of courage. For I am pretty sure that you consider courage as an admirable thing.”—“One of the most admirable.”—“Then, considerate determination is admirable.”—“It is.”—“But inconsiderate determination? Is not this, on the contrary, hurtful & mischievous?”—“Yes.”—“What is hurtful, you do not call admirable?”—“Certainly not.”—“Then you do not call this sort of determination, courage.”—“No.”—“Considerate determination, then, is what you consider to be courage.”—“So it seems.”—“Considerate, then, upon what? Upon all things, great or small? For example, if any one spends money with determination, in a considerate manner, knowing that it will bring him an ample return, do you call him courageous?”—“Certainly not.”—“If a physician, his son being ill & desiring to eat or drink some thing, refuses it to him with determination, do you call him courageous?”—“Nor him either.”—“If a man fights with determination in battle, reflecting considerately, that he will receive assistance & has superiority of numbers & of ground, do you consider him more courageous than the man in the opposite army, who determinedly resists?”—“The latter is the more courageous.”—“But his courage is more inconsiderate than that of the other.”—“True.”—“And you consider him who fights on horseback with determination, being a skilful rider, or with bows & arrows, being a good archer, or who dives with determination being expert in the art, less courageous than those who do all these things being less skilful?”—“Yes.”—“But all these persons shew determination, & incur danger, more inconsiderately than they who do these things with art.”—“They do.”—“But we decided, that inconsiderate boldness & determination was hurtful, & disgraceful.”—“We did.”—“And that courage was admirable.”—“Yes.”—“But now we say that this disgraceful thing, inconsiderate determination, is courage.”—“So it seems.”—“Are we right, then?”—“Certainly not.”—“We are not, to use your expression, in unison, for our deeds, & our words, are not in harmony with each other. In deed, it seems, you & I might be said to be courageous, but in words, if one were to judge by our present discourse, he would say we were not.”—“True.”—“Shall we then listen to our own discourse?”—“What discourse?”—“That which bids us have determination. Let us proceed in a determined manner with the investigation, lest Courage itself should laugh at us for not seeking for it courageously, if courage be determination.”—“I am ready,” answered Laches, “although unused to such discussions. But a kind of contentiousness has seized me, & I am angry if I am not able to speak according to my own thoughts: I seem to myself to conceive what courage is, but it slipt through my fingers, I know not how, & I could not seize it in words & explain it.”—“A good hunter, then, should persevere, & not relax the pursuit.”—“Certainly.”—“Shall we call in Nicias to aid us in the pursuit, if he have any resource which we have not?”—“Certainly.”—“Come, then, Nicias, assist your friends who are in difficulties. You see that we are at a loss; if you can tell what courage is, you will relieve us from our embarrassment and confirm your own views.”

“I thought all along,” answered Nicias, “that you were not defining courage rightly; because you made no use of something very good which I have often heard you say.”—“What was that?”—“You have often said that each of us is good, in those things wherein he is wise, & bad in those wherein he is ignorant.”—“It is very true.”—“Then if a courageous man is good, he must be wise?”—“Do you hear, Laches?” said Socrates.—“Yes,” answered Laches, “but I do not quite understand him.”—“I think I do,” said Socrates, “& that he affirms courage to be a kind of wisdom.”—“What kind?” rejoined Laches.—Socrates begged Nicias to answer; “what sort of wisdom it is which constitutes courage. Certainly not that which relates to flute-playing.”—“No.”—“Nor to harp-playing.”—“No.”—“What sort of wisdom is it, then? What is it the knowledge of?”—Laches commended this mode of interrogation, & Nicias answered, “The knowledge of what is dangerous, & what is safe, both in war and in other things.”

“How strangely he talks!” said Laches.—“In what respect?” asked Socrates.—“Surely wisdom & courage are very different things.”—“Nicias says not.”—“He does, & therein he talks nonsense.”—“Let us instruct him then, & not abuse him.”—“Laches,” said Nicias, “seems to desire that I too should appear to have nothing to say, because he himself is in that predicament.”—“Yes,” answered Laches, “& I think I can shew it. Do not physicians know what is dangerous in diseases? Or do you say that the courageous men know it? Or, do you say that physicians, & courageous men, are the same thing?”—“Not at all.”—“Nor husbandmen either, I suppose. And yet, they know what is dangerous in husbandry; & all other workmen know what is dangerous & what is safe in their several arts; but they are not the more courageous.”

“What do you think, Nicias,” asked Socrates, “of the remark of Laches? There seems to be something in it.”—“There is something in it, but not the truth.”—“How?”—“Because he fancies that physicians know something more about the sick, than what is productive of health, & what of disease. They, however, know merely this. Whether health is not more dangerous to some people than sickness, do you suppose they know that? Or do you not think that to some it is better not to recover from illness than to recover? Tell me, Laches: Do you affirm that it is better for all to live, or do you not say, that for many it is better to die?”—“It is.”—“Do you think that the same things can be considered dangers, to those for whose benefit it would be to die, and to those for whom it would be good to live?”—“No.”—“Do you give to the physicians the office of discriminating these things? or to any other man of science, except to the man who knows what is & is not dangerous, whom I call courageous?”

“Do you understand, Laches, what he means?” asked Socrates.—“Yes,” replied Laches: “his courageous man is a prophet: for who else can tell whether it is better for a man to die or to live? And pray, Nicias, do you affirm yourself to be a prophet, or admit yourself not to be a brave man?”—“Do you think,” answered Nicias, “that it belongs to a prophet to know what is dangerous & what is safe?”—“To whom else?”—“Much rather to the man I am speaking of. A prophet is only supposed to know the signs of future events; whether a person will die, or be ill, or lose his property, or be victorious or vanquished: but which fate would be most beneficial to any individual, it no more belongs to a prophet to judge, than to any body else.”—“I do not understand him, Socrates,” answered Laches: “The person whom he calls courageous, is neither a physician, nor a prophet, nor any body else whatever, unless he means some God. It appears to me that Nicias is not willing boldly to confess that he has nothing to say, but twists backward and forward to conceal his perplexity. You & I could have twisted in the same manner, if we had wished to avoid apparently contradicting ourselves. If we had been pleading in a court of justice, there might have been some reason in this: but why should a man seek to dignify himself by vain talk in a conversation like this?”—“Certainly,” answered Socrates: “but perhaps Nicias thinks there is something in what he says, & does not say it merely for the sake of talk. Let us therefore question him more particularly about his meaning, that if there be any thing in it, we may agree with him, if not, instruct him.”—“Do you then interrogate him if you will: I have interrogated him enough.”—“I have no objection; & I will interrogate for you & me jointly.

“You say, Nicias, that courage is the knowledge of what is dangerous & what is safe.”—“I do.”—“To know this, does not belong to all men, since neither a physician nor a prophet knows it nor is courageous, unless he acquires this knowledge too.”—“Certainly.”—“Then, as the proverb says, it is not every sow that knows it, & is courageous.”—“No.”—“Then you do not consider even the famous sow of Crommyon to be courageous. I do not speak this in jest; but one who holds your opinion cannot allow any brute animal to be courageous, since it cannot be admitted that any brute, a lion or a panther or a goat, is so wise as to know what few men know, from the difficulty of learning it. A lion & a deer, a bull & a monkey, are absolutely on a level in respect to courage, if it be what you say it is.”—Laches was delighted with this remark, & triumphantly asked Nicias whether he affirmed that these beasts, which all admit to be courageous, are wiser than men, or, contrary to universal opinion, denied them to be courageous?

Nicias answered, “I do not call any thing courageous, but silly, which does not fear what is really dangerous, from mere ignorance. Do you suppose I call every child courageous, which, from ignorance, fears nothing? Fearless, & courageous, are not synonymous. Very few persons in my opinion possess courage & forethought, but many, both men, women, children & brutes, are bold, & daring, & fearless, without forethought. These then, which you & the multitude call courageous, I call bold, but I call those only courageous who have thought.”—“You see, Socrates,” said Laches, “how he as he thinks, dignifies himself by his argument, but those whom all admit to be courageous, he attempts to deprive of that honour.”—“Be of good heart,” answered Nicias; “I say that you, & Lamachus, & many other Athenians, are wise, if you are courageous.”—Hereupon Socrates either in jest or in earnest says to Laches, that he did not seem to be aware that Nicias had learnt this wisdom from Damon, who had conversed much with Prodicus, who was esteemed the cleverest of the sophists in making verbal distinctions.—“These subtleties,” answered Laches, “are more suitable to a sophist than to a man whom the state thinks worthy of presiding in its councils.”—“And yet,” observed Socrates, “he who presides in the greatest things ought to have the greatest wisdom. It seems to me that Nicias deserves to have what he says examined, & his reasons for defining courage as he does, explored.”—They accordingly agree to question Nicias further, which Socrates does, as follows.

“We began the examination of courage, considering it to be a part of virtue.”—“Certainly.”—“If you distinguished this as one part, there must be other parts.”—“There are.”—“Are these other parts what I call them? viz. justice, & temperance, & so on.”—“Certainly.”—“So far we are then agreed. Let us now consider whether we all mean the same thing by Dangerous, & Safe. We call those things dangerous which excite fear, safe which do not. But the things which excite fear, are not past or present evils, but future ones: for fear is the expectation of a future evil. Do you not think so, Laches?”—“Entirely so.”—“We, then, Nicias, mean by dangerous things, future evils; by safe things, future things which are not evil, or which are good. Do you think the same?”—“I do.”—“The knowledge of these things, then, you term courage.”—“I do.”—“Now, Laches & I think, that on any subject on which there is knowledge, there is not one knowledge about the thing when it is past, viz. the knowledge how it did happen, another about it when present, how it is happening & a third, how that which has not yet happened, may best happen; but that all this knowledge is one. For instance, respecting health, one single branch of knowledge, viz. medicine, considers both of what has conduced to health, of what does conduce to it, & what will: The same may be said of husbandry: and of the military art. The art of generalship considers both of past, present, & future, & is not subordinate to the art of prophecy, but uses that art as subordinate to itself, considering itself to know best the future as well as the past, in respect to war. Is this right, Laches?”—“It is.”—“Do you agree with us, Nicias, that the knowledge of the future, of the past & of the present, are all the same?”—“I do.”—“But courage, you say, is the knowledge of the dangerous, & the safe.”—“Yes.”—“The dangerous means, future evil, the safe, future good.”—“Yes.”—“And of the same thing, whether past, present, or future, there is but one & the same knowledge.”—“Yes.”—“Courage, then, is not merely the knowledge of the dangerous & the safe: for it does not only understand respecting future good & evil, but likewise past & present, like all other branches of knowledge.”—“So it seems.”—“Then you only told us one third part of courage, instead of the whole. And now, it seems, courage is not merely the knowledge of the dangerous & the safe, but nearly of all good & evil whatever. Can you say otherwise?”—“I cannot.”—“Then, if a man know how all that is good & all that is evil has been produced, is produced, & will be produced, of what virtue would he be destitute? Do you think that he would need any further justice or piety, he who would be able to provide all that is good and avoid all that is evil both in respect to gods & men?”—“There seems to be some reason in what you say.”—“Courage then at this rate is not a part of virtue, but the whole.”—“So it seems.”—“But we said that it is only a part.”—“We did.”—“Then we have not yet found out what courage is.”—“It appears, we have not.”—“I thought,” said Laches, “that you would find it out, since you despised my answers to Socrates: I had great hopes that by the wisdom you derived from Damon you would discover it.”—“So,” answered Nicias, “you think it nothing that you have been shewn to know nothing about courage, but are satisfied if I appear equally ignorant, & it will make no difference to you now, it seems, that both you & I are utterly ignorant of what a man who thinks anything of himself ought to know. You appear to me to do what is very common, to look not to your own mind, but to the opinion of others: for my part, I think that I have answered very tolerably on this subject, & that if any part of what I have said is not sufficient, I shall be able hereafter to correct it, by discussion both with Damon, whom you pretend to laugh at without ever having seen him, & with other people. And when I have mastered the subject, I will not grudge to instruct you upon it; for you seem to me to have very great occasion to learn.”—“For you yourself are a wise man,” answered Laches. “But for all that, I would advise Lysimachus & Melesias to let you & me alone about the education of their sons, but, as I said at first, not to let go their hold of Socrates: for if my own sons were old enough, I would do the same thing.”—“I agree with you,” said Nicias, “that if Socrates would consent to take charge of the young men no other person needs be sought for: I would most gladly commit my son Niceratus to his care, if he would consent: but whenever I mention the subject he recommends other people to me, but will not himself consent.”—Lysimachus begged Socrates nevertheless to take charge of the two youths & join in making them as excellent as possible.

“It would be shameful,” replied Socrates, “not to be willing to join in making any one as excellent as possible. If therefore in our conversation just now, I had appeared to know & these two to be ignorant, it would have been just to call me in particular to this work: but as we were all equally at a loss, which of us could any one prefer? None of us, as it appears to me. Hear therefore what I would advise: That we should all of us jointly seek out the best teacher for ourselves in the first place, & afterwards for our children; neither sparing money nor any thing else. But to be contented as we are now, I do not advise. And if any one laughs at us for putting ourselves to school at our age, we can quote Homer against him. That poet says, that it is not good for a needy man to be ashamed. Let us therefore, without minding what people may say, attend both to ourselves & to the young men, at once.”—Lysimachus expressed his satisfaction, & said, the older he was, the more ready he would be to learn with the young men; & he invited Socrates to come the next day, that they might resume the deliberation. Socrates consented, and in this manner, without settling any one of the questions which they had been discussing, the dialogue breaks off.

The Lysis

[Holograph MS, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, entitled “Notes on the Lysis of Plato.” Ff. 1-6 watermarked 1825; the remainder, 1828. Not mentioned in JSM’s bibliography. For details concerning the manuscript and the transcription, see the Textual Introduction, lxxxi-lxxxii above; for a discussion of this and the other translations of Plato, see also the Introduction, xvii-xxviii above.]

the subject of this dialogue is friendship: and it is one of the numerous dialogues of Plato which are merely tentative, examining and rejecting a variety of opinions without adopting any. One indirect purpose seems to be, to ridicule several of the wise saws of the sophists, & naturalists, Empedocles & others.

Hippothales, a friend of Socrates, was attached to a very young man named Lysis. Ctesippus, another friend of Hippothales, rallied him in the presence of Socrates, on the extraordinary degree in which he was absorbed by the idea of this young man, & the extravagances which he performed in order to recommend himself to him. Socrates enquired what particular mode he took of winning the favour of Lysis: and Ctesippus again laughed at him for finding nothing to say except commonplaces which every child knew, making verses on the divine descent & heroic actions of Lysis’s progenitors & so forth, which all the town had in its mouth. Socrates hereupon asked Hippothales, why he composed an encomium on himself before he had gained the prize. Hippothales not understanding this, Socrates continued, “All these verses of yours tend directly to yourself. For, if you succeed in winning the object of your love, all these encomiums on him will be encomiums on yourself, for having succeeded with so distinguished a person: But if you fail, the more you have puffed the object of your pursuit, the greater good will you be thought to have lost, & will be laughed at accordingly. A person therefore who is wise in love affairs, takes care not to praise the beloved object until he has won it, for fear of what may happen. Besides, if you praise them, they are puffed up with conceit & self-will: & the more self-willed they become, the more difficult it is to gain them. But what sort of a hunter should you think him who made his game wilder & more difficult to catch; or him who by his songs & incantations did not sooth, but stir up? Take care that you do not resemble those persons.”

Hippothales admitted the justice of all this, & begged Socrates to advise him, what words or deeds he thought would most recommend him to the object of his affection. Socrates saying that he could not tell unless he could converse with Lysis himself, Hippothales and Ctesippus obtained for him an opportunity of entering into conversation with Lysis, in company with another young man of the same age, named Menexenus.

Socrates said to Menexenus, “Which of you two is the elder?”—“We doubt.”—“Then you must dispute, which is the more noble.”—Menexenus assented.—“And which is the handsomer.”—They both smiled.—“You will not dispute which is the richer; for you are friends; & friends have all things in common, if what they say of friendship is true, so that there can be no difference between you in this respect.”—They agreed.—Socrates was about to ask them, which of them was the most just & wise, when Menexenus was called away, and Socrates addressed himself to Lysis.

“Do your father & mother love you extremely?”—“They do.”—“Then they wish you to be happy.”—“Certainly.”—“Is a person happy, who is a slave, & allowed to do nothing which he desires?”—“No.”—“Then your parents, I suppose, allow you to do as you please, and never admonish or restrain you.”—“Indeed they do, very often.”—“What! do they wish you to be happy, & not let you do as you like? If you desired to drive one of your father’s chariots at the public contests, would they not permit you?”—“Certainly not.”—“But whom would they permit?”—“My father has a charioteer to whom he pays wages.”—“So they permit a hired servant to do what he pleases with the horses, & will not permit you. And they even pay him money for doing it.”—“What then?”—“But I suppose they allow you to drive the team of mules, & whip them too, if you have a mind.”—“Certainly not.”—“What! Is nobody allowed to whip them?”—“Certainly: the carter.”—“Is he a slave or a freeman?”—“A slave.”—“So it seems they value a slave more than you, their son, & commit their affairs to him rather than to you, & allow him to do as he pleases, but will not allow you. Answer me another question. Do they allow you to govern yourself, or do they not even trust you with that?”—“They do not.”—“Who governs you?”—“My tutor.”—“Is he a slave?”—“Yes, he is one of our slaves.”—“It is a shame that a freeman should be governed by a slave. What does this tutor do to you?”—“He takes me to school.”—“Does the schoolmaster govern you too?”—“Undoubtedly.”—“It seems then, your father voluntarily sets a great number of masters over you. And pray when you come home to your mother, does she let you do as you please with her loom and her web, that you may be happy? Of course, she does not prevent you from meddling with her distaff or spindle & the rest of her spinning apparatus.”—Lysis laughed, & said, he should be punished, if he ventured to touch them.—“Indeed! Pray, have you offended your father or your mother?”—“Not I.”—“What is the reason, then, that they prevent you from being happy, & make you pass your whole time in slavery to some person or other, doing hardly any thing of what you desire? So that it seems you are never the better for all your wealth (for every body has more power over it than you have) nor for your fine person, for even that is placed under the tutelage of another man: you have power over nobody, & nothing.”—“Because I am not yet old enough.”—“That is no hindrance; for there are some things, I suppose, which your father & mother permit you to do, without waiting till you grow older. When they want any body to read or write for them, I dare say you are the first person whom they apply to: and when you take up the lyre, they do not hinder you from striking what chords you please.”—“They do not.”—“What, then, is the reason that in these things they do not prevent you, but in the other things which we were talking about, they do?”—“I suppose it is because I understand these things & do not understand the others.”—“Then it is not age which your father waits for in order to entrust you with his affairs, but sense: & the day he thinks you have more sense than he, he will commit himself & his affairs to your care.”—“I suppose so.”—“And will not your neighbour do the same? Will he not entrust to you the management of his household, as soon as he thinks you understand domestic economy better than himself? And will not the Athenians entrust their affairs to you, when they see that you have sufficient understanding?”—“Yes.”—“And the Great King? Would he rather, think you, permit his own eldest son & heir to the throne, to put what he pleased into the pot where the meat is boiling, or us, if we could convince him that we knew more about cookery than his son?”—“Us.”—“He would not suffer his son to put in any thing; but he would let us empty the salt-box into it, if we thought fit.”—“Certainly.”—“And if his son had sore eyes, would he allow him to touch them himself, if he did not think him skilled in medicine?”—“Certainly not.”—“But us, if he thought us skilful physicians, he would allow even to open the eyes and throw in ashes, if we liked.”—“True.”—“He would entrust us in preference to himself or his son, with every thing in which he considered us as wiser than them.”—“He would.”—“It seems then that all Greeks or foreigners, men or women, will trust us in those things with which we are well acquainted; & we may do what we please in them, nobody will willingly resist us, we shall be ourselves free, & shall govern others, & these things will be ours, for we shall be benefitted by them. But in those things of which we possess no understanding, no one will suffer us to do what we please, but will throw every possible obstacle in our way; not only strangers, but our own father & mother; & in these things we shall be subject to others, & these things will be foreign to us, for we shall derive no benefit from them.”—“Granted.”—“Shall we be loved by any body in those things in which we are useless?”—“Certainly not.”—“Then at present, neither your father loves you, nor does any one love any one, in so far as he is useless.”—“Allowed.”—“If then you become wise, every one will be your friend & every one will be attached to you, for you will be useful & good; but if not, neither any one else, nor even your father & mother & relations, will be attached to you. Do you think, then, that it is possible to think much of oneself, in those things in which one is without thought?”—“It is not.”—“But if you need a schoolmaster, you are as yet without thought.”—“True.”—“Then you do not think much of yourself.”—“I do not think that I do.”

Socrates, who is the narrator of this dialogue, says, that he here thought of Hippothales, & had a mind to say to him, that this was the proper way to address a beloved object, humbling & chastening it rather than exalting & puffing it up.

At this moment Menexenus returned, & Lysis boyishly whispered to Socrates, to say the same things to Menexenus which he had said to him. Socrates bid Lysis himself repeat them to him; which Lysis promised that he would, but begged Socrates to say something else to Menexenus, that he himself might hear. “I must,” replied Socrates, “if you bid me. But mind that you come to my assistance if Menexenus attempts to refute me. Do you not know that he is extremely disputatious?”—“That is the very reason,” rejoined Lysis, “why I wish you to talk to him.”—“That I may make myself ridiculous?”—“No; that you may correct him.”—“That is no easy matter; he is a formidable person, a pupil of Ctesippus: & do you not perceive that Ctesippus himself is here to assist him?”—“Never mind that, but talk to him.”—Socrates at last consented, & addressed Menexenus thus.

“From my childhood upwards there is one thing which I have always desired to become possessed of. Other men have other fancies; one wishes for horses, another for dogs, another for money, another for honours. For my part, I am tolerably indifferent to these things, but am extremely passionate for the acquisition of friends, & would rather have a good friend, than the very best pigeon or cock in the world, or even horse or dog; aye, rather than all the gold of Darius, or Darius himself. When, therefore, I look upon you & Lysis, I felicitate you on having been able while yet so young to acquire easily & quickly so excellent a thing, while I am so far from possessing it, that I do not even know in what manner one person is made the friend of another, but would wish to question you on this subject, as being a person experienced in it. Tell me, then, which of the two becomes the other’s friend, he who loves, or he who is loved? Or is there no difference?”—“It seems to me that there is no difference.”—“What? Do they both become friends if only one of them loves the other?”—“I think so.”—“May not a person love & be not loved in return? May he not even be hated? Lovers at least say so.”—“True.”—“Then which of the two is the friend? he who loves (whether he be loved in return, or hated)? Or he who is loved? Or is neither of them the friend of the other unless they both love one another?”—“It would seem so.”—“Then nothing is dear to any one which does not love him in return. And nobody is fond of horses unless the horses love him in return, nor yet of dogs, nor of wine, nor of bodily exercises, no one is a lover of wisdom (ϕιλόσοϕος) unless wisdom loves him in return. Or do men love these things not being dear to them?”—“I think not.”—“Then that which is loved, is dear to him who loves, whether it loves him in return or not. For instance, young children, some of them not yet loving their parents, others positively hating them when their father or mother has punished them, are nevertheless dearer to their parents at that time than at any other.”—“Yes.”—“Then the friend is not he who loves, but he who is loved.”—“It seems so.”—“And the enemy, not he who hates, but he who is hated.”—“So it appears.”—“Then many are loved by their enemies, & hated by their friends, & are therefore the friends of their enemies & the enemies of their friends, if the friend be he who is loved & not he who loves. But this would be absurd.”—“True.”—“Then if this be absurd, it follows that the friend is he who loves, not he who is loved.”—“It does.”—“And the enemy is he who hates.”—“Yes.”—“But here the same consequence follows, that a person is often the friend of one who is not his friend, who is even his enemy, if he loves one who loves him not, or who hates him; & he is often the enemy of one who is not his enemy, who is even his friend, if he hates one who does not hate him, or who loves him.”—“True.”—“What shall we do, then, if neither they who love are friends, nor they who are loved, nor both those who love & those who are loved? Whom can we name besides, who can be called friends?”—“I do not know.”—“Perhaps we have pursued a wrong method of enquiry.”—Lysis here observed that he thought they had: & Socrates, addressing himself to Lysis, resumed:

“Let us follow, then, another course, seeking the assistance of the poets, who are as it were our fathers & guides in wisdom. They say that friends are brought together by the deity himself, who always brings like to like. And the wise men, who have written on Nature & the Universe, say the same thing; that like is always fond of like. Do they say true?”—“Perhaps.”—“Perhaps one half of it is true, perhaps the whole; but we do not understand it. To us it seems, that bad men, the nearer they come together & the more intimately they associate, become the greater enemies. For they injure one another: & the Injurer & the Injured cannot be friends.”—“Yes.”—“By this account, then, one half of the adage cannot be true; for bad men are like each other.”—“Very true.”—“The meaning therefore, I suppose, is, that good men are like each other, & are friends, but that bad men, as is sometimes said of them, are never even like themselves, but vacillating and uncertain: & what is unlike itself, can scarcely be like any thing else. Do you not think so?”—“I do.”—“Those, then, who say that like is fond of like, wish to hint, that good men alone are friends; that a bad man never forms a true friendship either with a good man or a bad one.”—Lysis assented.—“We know, then, at last, who friends are: they are those who are good.”—“So it seems.”—“But I have a difficulty still. Like, is friendly to like, in proportion to the likeness: Is it useful to its like, in the same proportion? Can a thing which is exactly like another, possibly do that other any good or harm which it could not do to itself? And if not, how can such things love one another, which can be of no service to one another?”—“In no way.”—“And where there is no love, how can there be friendship?”—“There cannot.”—“Then like is not friendly to like: and a good man is friendly to a good man, not quâ like, but quâ good.”—“Perhaps.”—“But what! Is not a good man, quâ good, sufficient to himself?”—“Yes.”—“But he who is sufficient to himself, is in want of nothing.”—“True.”—“And he who is in want of nothing can love nothing.”—“No.”—“And he who does not love, is no friend.”—“It seems not.”—“How then can the good man be the friend of the good, since neither when absent do they desiderate each other (for they are sufficient to themselves when apart) nor when present have they any occasion for one another? How can such persons set much value upon each other?”—“In no way.”—“But they who do not set much value upon each other, are not friends.”—“True.”

“But observe, Lysis, how we are going wrong. We are mistaken in our whole course.”—“How?”—“I now recollect to have heard somebody say, that like is the greatest enemy of like, & the good, of the good. And he quoted Hesiod, who says, that potter has a grudge against potter, bard against bard, beggar against beggar. He said, that like things must be full of envy & jealousy & hatred of each other, & that only unlike things are friendly. The poor man is of necessity friendly to the rich, the weak to the strong, for the sake of his assistance, the sick man to the physician, & all who do not know, love those who know. And, far from its being true that like is fond of like, the fondest things are direct contraries. Each thing desires its contrary, not its like. Dry desires wet, cold desires heat, bitter desires sweet, sharp desires blunt, what is empty desires fullness, what is full, emptiness, & so on: for contraries are the food of each other, but nothing has any enjoyment of its like. He seemed a clever fellow who said this: What do you think of it?”—“It sounds very well,” replied Menexenus.—“Shall we say then that contraries are fondest of each other?”—“Yes.”

“But will not those wise persons the disputants attack us here, & ask us, whether friendship & enmity are not direct contraries? Must we not acknowledge, that they are?”—“We must.”—“But, they will say, is a friend fond of an enemy, or an enemy of a friend?”—“No.”—“Is a just man, the friend of an unjust, a temperate man, of an intemperate, a good man, of a bad?”—“I should think not.”—“But they should, if contraries are the best friends.”—“True.”—“Then neither like things, nor contrary things, are friends.”—“It seems not.”

“Let us further consider whether we have not entirely missed the nature of friendship, & whether that which is neither good nor bad, be not the friend of what is good.”—“How?”—“I do not know; I am perplexed by the difficulty of the discussion. I suspect that according to the old proverb, τὸ καλὸν ϕίλον ἐστί; for it must be something soft and smooth & slippery, so easily does it slip through our fingers.

“Things may be divided into three classes, may they not? the Good, the Bad, & that which is neither good nor bad.”—“True.”—“And the good is not the friend of the good, nor the bad of the bad, nor the good of the bad, as our former arguments have shewn. There remains therefore only what is neither good nor bad, which must be the friend either of the good, or of something of its own class: for nothing can be the friend of the bad.”—“True.”—“But we said just now, that like was not the friend of like.”—“We did.”—“What is neither good nor bad, cannot therefore be the friend of any thing of its own kind.”—“It cannot.”—“Then it only remains, for what is neither good nor bad to be the friend of what is good.”—“It seems so.”

“Let us see, then, whether we are right in our conclusion. A body in health has no need of medicine: a man in health, therefore, will not be friendly to the physician by reason of his health.”—“He will not.”—“But a sick man will, by reason of his disease.”—“Yes.”—“Disease is bad, Medicine is useful and good.”—“Yes.”—“But the body, quâ body, is neither good nor bad.”—“True.”—“The body is forced to love & attach itself to medicine, by reason of disease.”—“It is.”—“Then what is neither good nor bad, becomes friendly to what is good, by reason of the presence of what is bad.”—“It seems so.”—“Evidently, before it is itself rendered bad by the evil which is in it. For it would not, after becoming evil, still continue to desire & love what is good; for we said it was impossible for what is bad, to be friendly to what is good.”—“True.”

“Consider then what I am going to say. I say, that some things themselves become such as that thing is which is present to them; others do not. For example, if any thing is smeared over with any particular dye, the thing which is smeared over it is present to it.”—“Certainly.”—“When this is the case, is the thing itself of the colour of the dye, or not?”—“I do not understand.”—“If one were to sprinkle over your yellow hair with flour, would it be white or only appear so?”—“It would only appear.”—“And yet whiteness would be present to it.”—“True.”—“And nevertheless it would not be white.”—“True.”—“But when old age gives it the same colour, then, by the presence of white, it will really become white, the colour of that which is present to it.”—“No doubt.”—“I ask you, then, will that to which any thing is present, be similar to the thing which is present to it? Or will it be so only if the thing be present in a particular way, & not otherwise?”—“The latter.”—“And what is neither good nor bad, if evil be present to it, sometimes is not yet bad, sometimes it has already become so.”—“Yes.”—“When, in the presence of evil it is not yet evil, that very presence causes it to desire good; but that presence of evil in it, which makes it evil, puts an end to its desire & love of good, for it then is no longer neither good nor bad, but bad: & what is bad cannot be friendly to what is good.”—“Certainly.”—“We may therefore say, that those who are already wise, (whether they be men or Gods) no longer philosophize (love wisdom), & on the other hand, neither do those philosophize who are so ignorant as to be bad. For no bad & inept person philosophizes. There remain only those who have this evil, ignorance, but are not yet rendered silly or inept by it,—who still think themselves not to know what they really do not know. Therefore, those philosophize who are not yet either good nor bad: Those who are good, & those who are bad, do not philosophize; for, as we have seen, contraries are not fond of contraries, nor like of like.”—Menexenus & Lysis assented.—“Now,” said Socrates, “we have found out what are & are not friends. We have found, that, whether in body, in mind, or in any thing else, what is neither good nor bad is the friend of what is good, by the presence of evil.”—They both concurred, & Socrates, in telling the story, says, that he was extremely delighted, like a hunter who had secured his game. But soon, a troublesome suspicion seized him, that the things they had assented to were wrong, & he told them, he was afraid their wealth was visionary. “When a person is a friend, he must be the friend of somebody.”—“He must.”—“Is he so, for the sake of & in consequence of nothing, or for the sake of & in consequence of something?”—“For the sake of & in consequence of something.”—“And that something, for the sake of which one man is the friend of another, is it an object of friendship or neither of friendship nor of hatred?”—“I do not quite follow you.”—“I am not surprised: you will perhaps follow me better this way—&I shall understand myself better. The sick man, we said, has a friendship for the physician.”—“Yes.”—“In consequence of disease, & for the sake of health.”—“Yes.”—“Disease is an evil.”—“It is.”—“Health; is it an evil, a good, or neither?”—“A good.”—“We said, that the body being neither good nor evil, is friendly to medicine, in consequence of disease, that is, in consequence of evil; medicine being a good. And medicine became the object of this friendship for the sake of health; health being a good.”—“Yes.”—“Is health an object of friendship, or of hatred?”—“Of friendship.”—“Disease is an object of hatred.”—“Yes.”—“Then what is neither good nor evil is, (in consequence of what is evil & odious,) friendly to good, for the sake of what is good & an object of friendship.”—“It seems so.”—“Then every object of friendship, is so for the sake of some object of friendship & in consequence of some object of hatred.”—“So it seems.”—“Well then, since we have come to this point, let us see that we be not deceived. I let alone that what is friendly, has been found to be so to something friendly, & like, to be friendly to like, which we said was impossible. But let us consider this, that we may not be deceived in what we are now saying. Medicine, we say, is an object of friendship for the sake of health.”—“Yes.”—“Then health is an object of friendship.”—“Certainly.”—“But if it be so, it is so for the sake of something.”—“Yes.”—“Of some object of friendship, then, if it is to agree with our former admissions.”—“Yes.”—“Then that also will be an object of friendship for the sake of some other object of friendship.”—“Yes.”—“Then is it not necessary that we should stop somewhere in this progression, & arrive at some principle, which will no longer be referred back to some other object of friendship, but which is itself the primary object of friendship, & for the sake of which we say, that all other things are so?”—“It is.”—“Now I suspect, that all these other things which we say are objects of friendship for the sake of this first principle, are mere copies & semblances of it, which impose upon us; & there is no real object of friendship except that. Let us consider thus. Suppose that a person values any particular thing exceedingly, as for instance a father sometimes values his son above all other possessions: Might not such a man value some other thing much, by reason of his valuing his son supremely? For instance if his son had taken poison, & wine were an antidote, he would value wine exceedingly.”—“What then?”—“And consequently, the vessel in which the wine is.”—“Certainly.”—“Could it be said, however, that he valued an earthen pot, or half a pint of wine, as much as his own son? Or is not the case rather this, that what he really cares for in all his trouble & anxiety, is not those things which are provided for the sake of something else, but that something else, for the sake of which they are provided. It is true, we often say, that we greatly value money; but the truth is not so: What we really value supremely, is that for the sake of which money & all other things that we provide, are provided.”—“True.”—“Then we shall say the same about friendship. Those things which are dear to us for the sake of something else, we shall call by some other name: that alone is really an object of friendship, in which all these other attachments terminate.”—“So it seems.”—“Then what is really an object of friendship, is not so for the sake of some other object of friendship.”—“True.”—“Then this we have set at rest. But is good an object of friendship?”—“It seems to me to be so.”—“Is, then, Good an object of friendship on account of evil, & does the case stand thus, If, of the three things which we have mentioned, Good & Evil & what is neither good nor evil, two were left, but the third, viz. Evil, were absolutely extirpated & did not exist in any body or any mind or in any of the things which we call Good & Evil in themselves, would Good in that case be of no use to us? for if nothing any longer hurt us, we should not stand in need of any benefit. And in this manner it would be obvious that we loved Good on account of Evil, to wit as a medicine for it, Evil being a disease; & where there is no disease there needs no medicine. Is this then the case, that Good is loved by us, who are between good & evil, on account of evil, but is of no use in itself?”—“It seems to be so.”—“Then that primary object of friendship, in which all those things terminate, which we said were objects of friendship for the sake of something else, is not at all like those things themselves. For they, it appeared, were objects of friendship for the sake of an object of friendship. But the primary & real object of friendship has turned out to be in the contrary case: it is an object of friendship on account of an object of hatred: for if there were no objects of hatred, there would, it appears, be no objects of friendship left.”—“It would appear so from our last argument.”—“If, then, Evil were extirpated, should we no longer be hungry or thirsty or any thing of that sort? Or would there still be hunger, (if there be men & animals) but not detrimental? & likewise thirst & other desires, but not evil desires, evil being destroyed? Or is it a ridiculous question, what there would be or would not be in such a case; for who can tell? But we know this, that at present it is possible to be hungry detrimentally to ourselves, & it is also possible to be so beneficially.”—“True.”—“And so of thirst & all other such desires: we may have the desire beneficially, we may have it detrimentally, we may have it neither way.”—“Certainly.”—“Now, if evil is destroyed, why should those things which are not evil, be destroyed with it?”—“They need not.”—“Then those desires which are neither good nor evil, will still subsist.”—“It seems so.”—“Can we desire, & love a thing, without its being the object of our friendship?”—“I should think not.”—“Then if all evil things were destroyed, there would still be some objects of friendship.”—“Yes.”—“But if Evil were the cause of any thing’s being an object of friendship, there could be no objects of friendship after it was destroyed: for the cause ceasing, the effect would cease.”—“True.”—“But we had concluded, that whatever is friendly, was friendly to some thing, & in consequence of some thing: & we thought, that what is neither good nor evil, was friendly to good, in consequence of evil.”—“We did.”—“But now it seems that there is some other cause of friendship.”—“It seems so.”

“Is then, in reality, as we said just now, desire the cause of friendship? And is that which desires, friendly to that which it desires, at the time when it desires it? & was all the account we before gave of friendship, mere trifling?”—“It must be.”—“But that which desires, desires something which it is in want of.”—“True.”—“Then, that which is wanting, is an object of friendship to that which it is wanting to.”—“Yes.”—“But it is wanting, to that from which it is taken away.”—“Certainly.”—“It seems then, that love, & friendship, & desire, are for what is part of ourselves.”—“Agreed.”—“And if you two, Menexenus & Lysis, are friends, you must be of kindred natures.”—“Granted.”—“And if one person desires, or loves another, he would not have done so if he had not been akin to the person he loves, either in mind, or at least in some habit or disposition of the mind, or in form.”—“Certainly,” answered Menexenus: but Lysis was silent.—“And we found, that what is akin to us by nature, was necessarily an object of attachment to us.”—“It seems so.”—“Then a genuine, & not a pretended lover, must of necessity be an object of attachment to the person whom he loves.”—Lysis & Menexenus with some difficulty assented, while Hippothales, says the narrator, turned all sorts of colours with delight.

Socrates however resumed: “If kindred be not the same thing with like, what we are now saying about friendship may amount to something: But if kindred, & like, be the same thing, it is not easy to get rid of our former argument, that like, quâ like, is useless to its like; & what is useless cannot possibly be an object of friendship. Shall we therefore concede, that kindred is not the same thing with like?”—“Yes.”—“Shall we say, then, that Good is akin to every thing, Evil foreign to every thing? Or is Evil akin to evil, & good to good, & what is neither, to what is neither?”—“As you said last.”—“We have fallen back then to our first doctrines respecting friendship, which we have rejected. For by this account, the unjust & the wicked would be no less a friend to the unjust & wicked, than the good to the good.”—“So it appears.”—“If, on the other hand, we say that Good & Kindred are the same, the good man would be the only friend.”—“Yes.”—“But this, we thought we had refuted: do not you remember?”—“We do.”—“What then shall we do with the argument? Nothing at all? For if neither those who love, nor those who are loved, nor those who are like, nor those who are unlike, nor those who are good, nor those who are kindred, nor all the others whom we mentioned, for there were more of them than I remember;—if none of these be an object of friendship, I do not know what to say. Now, Lysis & Menexenus, we have all of us made ourselves ridiculous, I, an old man, & you. For the bystanders will report that we think we are each other’s friends, (for I account myself as one of you) but that we have not been able to find out what a friend is.”

And having thus as usual thrown the whole subject into a puzzle and then laughed at himself for doing so, he breaks off.

The Parmenides

[Holograph MS, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, entitled “Notes on the Parmenides of Plato.” Paper watermarked 1828. Not mentioned in JSM’s bibliography. For details concerning the manuscript and the transcription, see the Textual Introduction, lxxxi-lxxxii above; for a discussion of this and the other translations, see also the Introduction, xvii-xxviii above.]

In this dialogue, Socrates is not the principal interlocutor. The narrator is Cephalus, who professes to repeat what had been told him by Antiphon, who himself did but repeat what had been told him by Pythodorus, respecting a conversation carried on in the presence of this last, between Parmenides, a Pythagorean philosopher; his disciple Zeno of Elea, also a philosopher of reputation, said to have been the first person who employed the dialectic method of exposition and controversy; & Socrates, then in early youth.

The first part of this dialogue is on the subject of what Plato termed εἴδη or ἰδέαι, which may be translated species, or sorts, or, if you please, universals, which it appears from this & various other dialogues of Plato, that he considered to have an objective existence. His notions (for that they were fixed opinions in his mind is more than can be affirmed, all that is certain being that his speculations tended that way) were, that whenever a number of things were with propriety ranked together under one name, in other words, formed into a class, it was on account of some one thing, which was common to all the many things included under the class, & which existed in them, or was in some manner united with them all: This he called the ἰδέα, or εἰ̑δος of the class, & supposed it to be a totally different thing from any or all of the individual things, composing the class. Had this been all, there would not have been much difference between his notions and those of Locke, or any of those thinkers who have received the name of Conceptualists in modern times,—the believers in abstract ideas. But Plato did not consider his ἰδέα or εἰ̑δος, to be a mere thought, or mental phenomenon, or in any way the creation of the mind. He conceived that it had an independent existence, that it was a thing in itself, not perceptible by the senses, but cognizable by the intellect, & which being mysteriously united with every individual object in the class, gave to those objects a participation of its nature which entitled them to be ranked under the class.

The existence or non-existence of these εἴδη, appears to have been a vexata quæstio among the philosophers anterior to Plato, and Parmenides would seem to have maintained the negative: At least, that is the part which he performs in this dialogue, the occasion of which is furnished by a discourse of Zeno, read by him to the assembled company. The subject of this discourse affords an amusing example of the unmeaning mysticism which, in the first stage of philosophy, appears in all nations to have been dignified with the name of wisdom. Parmenides, it seems, had written a discourse to prove ὅτι ἕν ἐστι τὸ πα̑ν, that the Whole, or the universe, is one. It is evident, that no one would have supposed this proposition to convey a scientific truth, who did not imagine, that there was some mysterious virtue in the word one. A person who knew that general names are only, as particular names are, a mode, tho’ a different mode, of marking individual things, would have seen, that the word one was ambiguous, and might be applied to any number of things collected together, for the purpose of speaking of them as distinct from other things not included in the collection; that the same thing, consequently, might be at the same time one, with respect to all things external to it, and many, as respected the parts of which it was itself composed. But to those who supposed that a thing was called a stone because it participated of the abstract essence of a stone, that a thing was called round, or large, or heavy because it possessed the abstract essence of rotundity, or magnitude, or weight, & that a thing was called one or many because it was in mysterious union with the abstract essences of unity or of multitude, no distinction being made in this respect between relative & absolute terms, it was not an unnatural mistake to imagine that as one & many were opposites, the abstract essence of unity must be incompatible with the abstract essence of multitude, & that the same thing could not participate of both, & be, accordingly, both one & many: by denying the possibility of which, they were driven of course into a thousand absurdities and contradictions, which instead of convincing them of the absurdity of the psychological theory from which these absurdities proceeded, appear to have been regarded by them as containing the quintessence of wisdom, and affording a sublime exemplification of the tendency of philosophy to exalt its votaries above the delusions of sense, & the vulgar, confined modes of thinking of the ignorant multitude. Such at least, whether it was or was not the opinion of Plato’s predecessors, was very firmly that of his later followers, the Alexandrine & other Platonists, who have composed many voluminous commentaries upon the Parmenides, in which the self-contradictory assertions & verbal quibbles that fill the latter part of this dialogue, & which were evidently never intended by Plato himself to be taken seriously, are unfolded at much length & set forth with the utmost gravity, as the deepest & most occult truths of Ontology and Cosmology.

The work which Zeno had been reading to the company on this occasion, was composed for the purpose of upholding the tenet of Parmenides, that the universe is One, by shewing, that numerous contradictions would arise if it were many. The principal of these contradictions was, that if there were many existences, they must be at the same time like & unlike, which he said was impossible, for what is like cannot be unlike, nor what is unlike, like. This involves, it is easy to see, the same want of perception of the difference between absolute & relative terms, to which most of the absurdities which will meet us in the remainder of this dialogue are to be ascribed. What is white cannot be black, what is round, cannot be square, & so forth: Great & Small, Equal & Unequal, Like & Unlike, &c. are contraries, just as much as white & black, or round & square are; indeed much more so: Therefore, thought these philosophers, as the same thing cannot be, at the same time, white & black, or round & square, so it cannot be, at the same time, great & small, equal & unequal, like & unlike: the thought never having occurred to them that these were relative terms, & that the same thing might therefore be great compared with a molehill, small compared with a mountain; that the same thing might be equal to an acre, & unequal to a square inch or mile; like to a cloud, & yet extremely unlike a whale. These obvious thoughts, as they appear to us, the notion of εἵδη which was floating in the minds of all these philosophers, whether they admitted it or not, precluded. That notion led them to suppose that if a thing was great, equal, or like, it was rendered so by participating in the nature of Magnitude, Equality, or Likeness: which being the contraries of Smallness, Inequality, and Unlikeness, the thing in question could not also participate in these latter essences, nor, therefore, could it be small, unequal, or unlike. The contradictions to which they were driven by this strange mistake will be exemplified copiously in the sequel of the dialogue before us. From these premisses indeed they could avowedly prove both sides, the affirmative & the negative, of every question which they thought of discussing: & it was in the power of demonstrating, & of believing both at once, that the excellence of philosophy seemed to them to be peculiarly manifested.

Zeno, however, having maintained that what was like could not be unlike, nor what was unlike, like, & that as this consequence could not be avoided if it were allowed that there were many existences, it followed there could be no more than one; Socrates attempted, although modestly, & in the way of inquiry alone, to combat this ratiocination by arguments drawn from the same notion of εἴδη, or specific essences, more clearly expressed. He asked, “Do you not think that there is an εἰ̑δος, or abstract essence, of likeness, & that there is another abstract essence, that of unlikeness, which is the contrary of it; & that you & I, & all other things, which we call Many, participate in these; & that those things which participate of Likeness, become in so far as they participate, Like, & those which participate of Unlikeness, Unlike; and if all things partake of both these essences, what wonder is it if all things are at once like & unlike? If Likeness itself had been affirmed to be Unlikeness, or Unlikeness to be Likeness, it would no doubt, have been absurd; but not if we say, that the things which partake of both essences, are both like & unlike: Nor is it wonderful, if All things are One, by participating of Unity, and Many, by participating likewise of Multitude: The absurdity would be, if Unity itself were said to be Multitude, or Multitude to be Unity. The same may be said of all other things: If the genera & species were affirmed to unite in themselves contrary affections, I should be surprised: but what wonder is it if the individual I be said to be at once One & Many? Many, in the sense that my right side is different from my left, my anterior from my hinder parts, my upper, from my lower: for I participate in Multitude: One, in the sense, that of us seven, I am one man, participating in Unity: so that both are true. If, therefore, any one attempts to shew that Many & One are the same, we will say, that he proves stones & trees & so forth to be both One & Many, which we should all admit: not One itself to be Many, or Many One. But if any one should take the εἴδη or specific essences by themselves, such as Likeness & Unlikeness, Unity & Multitude, Motion & Rest, & so forth, & could shew that these are capable of participating in the nature of each other, I should be greatly astonished. What you have done is very well; but I should admire much more any one who should expound the same puzzles & difficulties in the specific essences, in the objects of intellection, which you have expounded in those of sense.”

Parmenides hereupon called in question the whole doctrine of specific essences, or εἴδη. “Do you think,” asked he, “that it is possible to distinguish, as you say, the species, from the things which participate in it? Do you suppose that there is such a thing as Likeness, distinct from the Likenesses which exist among us; & so of Unity & Multitude, & the like?”—“I do,” replied Socrates.—“And do you think that there are self-existent essences or εἴδη of the Just, the Beautiful, the Good, & so forth?”—“Yes.”—“And is there a self-existent essence of Man, distinct from us & all other individual men? or of Fire, or Water?”—“I have often been puzzled,” answered Socrates, “to determine whether the same thing can be affirmed of these last, as of the preceding.”—“And what do you say of things, which it may seem ludicrous to allude to; hair, & mud, & filth, & every thing that is ignoble & worthless? Do you doubt whether there is or is not a specific self-existent essence of each of these things, distinct from what we handle?”—“Not at all,” answered Socrates: “These things are merely what we see them; it would perhaps be absurd to suppose that there were εἴδη of these. I have been puzzled before now with doubts whether the assertion is true of all things: When I come to this point, I stop short, & run away, being afraid that I may fall into some abyss of absurdity; I return to those things which we affirmed some time ago to have εἴδη, & occupy myself with the consideration of them.”—“You are young as yet,” answered Parmenides, “& philosophy has not yet possessed you as I predict that it one day will; you will not then despise any object as being trivial: But now, being young, you regard the opinions of men.

“Tell me, then: You think that there are Specific Essences, which other things participating in, are called by the specific names, e.g. those which participate in Likeness, are like, in Magnitude, large, in Beauty or Justice, beautiful & just.”—“Certainly.”—“Then, that which participates in the Specific Essence, must participate either in the whole of the Essence, or in a part of it: no third case is possible.”—“True.”—“Does it seem to you, that the whole of the Specific Essence, being One, exists in each of the many individuals?”—“Why should it not be One?”—“Then, being One & the same, the whole of it exists in many individuals separate from, & external to, one another: It must therefore be separate and external to itself.”—“Not so,” replied Socrates. “A day, remaining one & the same day, is in many places at once, & yet it is not separate from & external to itself. The same may be the case with a Specific Essence.”—“You make one & the same thing exist in many places at once, in the same manner as if you were to spread a sail cloth over the heads of a crowd of people, & say that One cloth is over many men.”—“Perhaps so.”—“Would the whole cloth be over every man, or part over one & part over another?”—“Part only.”—“Then the Specific Essences consist of parts, & those things which participate in them participate in a part only, & the whole of the Essence does not exist in each individual, but only a part in each.”—“So it seems.”—“Can you, however, say, that the One Specific Essence has parts? Having parts, can it still be One?”—“No.”—“If you divide Magnitude, & say that each of the many Large things which exist, is large by being endowed with a part of Magnitude, less than Magnitude itself, will it not be absurd?”—“It will.”—“If, again, any thing is endowed with a part, some small part, of Equality, will it, by possessing some thing which is less than Equality, become Equal to any thing?”—“It is impossible.”—“And if any thing is endowed with a part of Smallness: Smallness itself, must be larger than this part of itself: Smallness, therefore, will be larger, & yet the thing which participates in it, thereby becomes smaller.”—“This cannot be.”—“In what manner, then, will things participate in the Specific Essences, since they neither participate in the whole of them nor in their parts?”—“It is not easy to determine.”

“Consider this likewise. What leads you to conclude that there is one single Specific Essence of every thing, is, I suppose, this. When you see a great number of things which are large, it seems to you, looking at them, that there is something common to them all, a single Idea (ἰδέα) & you therefore think that Magnitude is One.”—“Very true,” answered Socrates.—“What do you say then, of Magnitude itself, & the individual Great things? If you contemplate them together, does it not seem to you that as there was something common to all the individuals, on account of which they were called Great, which you term the Specific Essence, so there must be something common to the Specific Essence itself and the Individuals, on account of which they are called by the same name?”—“So it seems.”—“Then there must be another Specific Essence of Magnitude, besides Magnitude itself & the things which participate in it: & still another which is common to all these, & so on: So that each Species has not one Specific Essence only but multitudes of Specific Essences.”—“But,” answered Socrates, “may not each of these Specific Essences be a mere Thought, which does not exist any where but in the mind? If so, each of them would be only One, & the consequences now mentioned would not follow.”—“What?” answered Parmenides. “Is each of them a Thought, & at the same time the Thought of nothing?” —Socrates answered, “It is impossible.”—“It is the thought of something, then.”—“It is.”—“Of something existing, or not existing?”—“Existing.”—“Is it not, then, the thought of some one thing which this thought thinks about, viz. a single Idea (ἰδέα)?”—“Yes.”—“Then this thing, common to the many individual things, which is thought to be One, is the Specific Essence?”—“It must be.”—“Do you not see, then, that if you affirm other things to participate in the Specific Essences, you either suppose every thing to be made up of thoughts, or that there can be thoughts which are thoughts about nothing?”

“This,” replied Socrates, “is impossible. But what occurs to me is this. These specific essences are as it were exemplars in nature, & all other things resemble & are copies of them: And what is called participating in the specific essences, is neither more nor less than resembling them.”

“If, then,” answered Parmenides, “the thing is like the specific essence, the specific essence must be like the thing.”—“It must.”—“But things which are alike, must participate in some one εἰ̑δος, species, or specific essence, common to them both?”—“Certainly.”—“That, by participating in which, things are made to resemble one another, must be a specific essence?”—“It must.”—“The thing cannot then be like the specific essence, nor the specific essence like the thing: Otherwise, besides the specific essence there will be another specific essence, & if that be like any thing, another still, & so on to infinity.”—“True.”—“Things do not, then, participate in specific essences by being like them; it is necessary to find some other mode of participation.”—“It appears so.”

“You see, then,” continued Parmenides, “what difficulties arise if we admit any self-existent essences. But these are not the greatest difficulties which follow from that supposition. If we suppose that every thing has one single specific essence, it would not be easy to refute any person who might affirm that these essences were not knowable.”—“How?”—“You, & any one who supposes self-existent specific essences of things, would admit that none of these essences exists among us.”—“How else could it be self-existent?”—“Then, those specific essences which are, what they are, to each other, (or, which are essentially relative) are relative to other specific essences, & not to those copies of them (or whatever name we call them by) by participation in which, the things which we perceive, are denominated, what they are. And conversely, the things which are perceived by us, & which bear the same name with these specific essences, are relative not to the essences but to one another.”—“What do you mean?”—“For instance, if one of us be a master, or a servant, he is not the servant of the specific essence Dominion, nor the master of the specific essence servitude, but he is a man, & the servant of a man, or a man, & the master of a man: Dominion in itself, however, is what it is, of servitude in itself; & servitude in itself, of dominion in itself.”—“I understand.”—“Then knowledge in itself, is the knowledge of truth in itself; and every particular knowledge is the knowledge of some particular thing in itself.”—“Yes.”—“Our knowledge, however, is the knowledge of our truth; & each of our knowledges, is the knowledge of some one of the things which are among us.”—“True.”—“But the specific essences, you admitted, do not & cannot be among us.”—“I did.”—“The different classes of things in themselves are known by the specific essence of knowledge?”—“Yes.”—“Which we have not.”—“No.”—“Then we cannot know any of the specific essences, not being possessed of knowledge in itself.”—“So it seems.”—“Then the Beautiful in itself, & the Good in itself, & all the other specific essences are unknown to us.”—“I fear so.”

“There is something still worse than this.”—“What?”—“If there is a specific essence, of knowledge, or Knowledge in itself, must it not be far more certain than the knowledge which we possess?”—“Yes.”—“Then if this Knowledge can be possessed by any being, the Deity, most of all, may be pronounced to possess it.”—“He may.”—“Then will the Deity be able to know the things which exist among us?”—“Why not?”—“Because we admitted that the specific essences, are referred not to the things among us, but to each other.”—“We did.”—“Then, if the Deity has that most exalted Dominion, & that most certain Knowledge, he does not by that Dominion become our master, nor does he by that knowledge know us, or any thing which is among us, nor do we by our knowledge know any thing of the deity. The Gods, therefore, are not our masters, nor know any thing of human affairs.”—“But it would be too strange a conclusion, to deprive the Deity of knowledge.”—“Yet,” answered Parmenides, “all these things must follow, if there are independent specific essences of things, one for each species.”—“I allow it,” replied Socrates.—“But yet,” resumed Parmenides, “if we deny that there are specific essences of things, & that each species has one unchangeable essence, we shall have nothing to rest upon, there will be nothing fixed, & no possibility of discussion. This you seem to me to be still more aware of.”—“True.”—“What then shall you do for philosophy?”—“I do not very clearly see at present.”—“Because you begin too early to define & distinguish the Beautiful in itself, the Just in itself, the Good in itself, & the other species, before having sufficiently exercised your intellect. The impulse which urges you to speculation is noble & divine, but you should while you are young, strengthen your faculties by what is thought to be worthless, & is called by the multitude disputation, otherwise the truth will escape you.”—“What is this exercise which you recommend?”—“That which you have heard from Zeno. I however approve of what you said before, that the subject proposed in these exercises should not be visible or perceptible things, but those which are most comprehensive & most to be considered as specific essences.”—“For it seems to me,” answered Socrates, “to be not difficult to shew in this manner, that things are either like or unlike, or any thing else.”—“True,” answered Parmenides. “And it is right not only to suppose that a thing is true, & see what consequences flow from that hypothesis, but also to suppose the same thing to be false, & see the consequences of that supposition also, for better exercise.”—“How?”—“For instance, if you make this supposition which Zeno made, that there are many existences, & see what will in that case follow with regard to these many, as respects themselves & as respects Unity, & to Unity as respects itself & as respects the many: Then again, if there are not many existences, see again what will follow with respect to Unity & to the many, as respects themselves & each other: And then again, suppose that Likeness exists, or does not exist, & see what follows in either case: & the same of motion & rest, generation & corruption, & even existence itself & non-existence. In a word, whatever you suppose to exist or not to exist, or to be affected in any other way, you must observe what happens to it as respects itself & other things, & other things as respects themselves & as respects it, if you wish to go through a complete course of mental gymnastics, & be capable of discovering the truth.”

The whole party now joined in requesting Parmenides to give them a specimen of the intellectual gymnastics which he recommended, & he being at last induced to comply, & determining to take Unity, the subject of his own dissertation, for the subject also of his discourse, presented them, in the way of question and answer, with the following series of verbal quibbles.

“The first supposition is, that Unity exists. If it exists, it cannot be Many. Therefore it cannot have parts, nor consequently be a whole: for a whole, is that of which none of the parts are wanting, consequently what has no parts is not a whole; & what has parts, is many & not one. Unity therefore is not a whole, & has no parts. But a beginning, middle & end are parts, therefore it has no beginning, middle, or end. But the beginning & the end of a thing are its bounds; therefore it is boundless. And it has no shape. For it can neither be round nor straight; since the meaning of round, is having its extremes in all directions equally distant from the middle: & the meaning of straight, is, having the middle directly between the two extremes: whether therefore Unity were round or straight, it must have parts, & be not one but many. It therefore has no shape. Nor is it in any place. For it is neither in itself nor in any thing else. If it were in any thing else, it would be surrounded by that in which it is, & would touch it in many directions: which that which is one, & indivisible, & not circular, cannot do. And if it were in itself it would surround itself; for it is not possible for a thing to be in any thing which does not surround it. But the thing which surrounds & that which is surrounded must be different; for one & the same thing cannot all of it do both these things. So that unity by this account would be not one but two. It therefore is neither in itself nor in any thing else, & consequently is nowhere. And it neither moves nor is at rest. For the only kinds of motion, are, locomotion & change. If it were changed, it would no longer be itself, and therefore no longer unity. If it underwent locomotion it must either revolve about itself in the same place, or change its place: That which revolves about itself must have a centre & parts which move round the centre; but Unity has no parts: That which changes its place, comes from one thing into another. Now we have seen that Unity cannot be in any thing. It consequently can still less come into it. For that which is coming into a thing, must be not yet entirely in it, nor entirely out of it: that is, it is partly in, & partly out; therefore it must have parts. That which has no parts, & is not a whole, can neither be partly, nor wholly in a thing, therefore it cannot be coming into it, nor, therefore, can it change its place. In every way, therefore, Unity is immovable. But we said, that it cannot be in any place. Therefore it cannot be in the same place. For it if was in the same place, that place must be some place, & it would be in a place. Therefore Unity is never in the same place. But what is never in the same place is not at rest. Therefore Unity is neither in motion nor at rest. Moreover, it is not the same with itself nor with any thing else, nor different from itself or from any thing else. For if it were different from itself, it would be different from Unity, & would not be Unity: If it were the same with any thing else, it would be that something else, & would not be itself, Unity: It cannot be different from any thing else: for it is Unity; & it is not by Unity, but by Difference, that one thing differs from another: It is not, therefore, different from any thing else by being Unity; but if not by being Unity, not by being itself: & if not by being itself, not at all. Neither can it be the same with itself: for the nature of Unity, is not the nature of Sameness: A thing which becomes the same with any thing, does not thereby become One; for if it became the same with many, it would become many, not one: If however Unity & Same did not differ from each other, whenever any thing became the same, it would become one, & when it became one, it would become the same. If therefore Unity were the same with itself, it would not be one with itself, it would be Unity & not Unity, which is absurd. Unity therefore is neither the same with itself nor with any thing else, nor different from itself nor from any thing else. Neither is it like nor unlike to itself or to any thing else. For like, means, having the same attributes: but Unity, & Same, we found, were distinct: And if Unity had any attributes besides that of being One, it would be more things than one, which is impossible: It has not therefore the same attributes with itself nor with any thing else, & consequently is not like itself nor any thing else. Neither however can Unity have different attributes: for so likewise it would be more things than one; But that which is unlike any thing, is that which has different attributes from it: Consequently Unity is not unlike itself nor any thing else: therefore it is neither like nor unlike. Further, it is neither equal nor unequal to itself nor to any thing else. For that is equal to another thing, which contains the same measure the same number of times. That is greater or less, among commensurables, which contains the same measure a greater or a less number of times; among incommensurables, which contains a greater or a less measure, the same number of times. Now, that which does not in any way participate in Sameness, cannot contain the same measure; it therefore cannot be equal to itself or to any thing else: That which contains any measure a greater or a less number of times, has that number of parts, & therefore is not Unity, but that particular number: If it contains the measure only once, it is equal to its measure; which we have seen to be impossible. Unity therefore not only is not equal, but it is not greater or less than itself, or than any thing else. Again, it cannot be older, or younger, or of the same age. For that which is of the same age either with itself or with any thing else, participates of equality (viz. equality of time), and of likeness; which unity does not. But we also said, that Unity does not participate of unlikeness or inequality: how therefore can it be older, or younger, than any thing? Unity therefore cannot be in time. For that which is in time, is perpetually becoming older than itself. But that which is older, is older than something which is younger: Therefore, becoming older than itself it becomes younger than itself, or it would not have any thing to become older than: For as that which is the one, of any two correlatives, is it of something which is the other, so that which has been, or is about to be, or comes to be, i.e. becomes the one, has been or is about to be or becomes it of something which has been or is about to be or becomes the other. Whatever, therefore, is in time, has always, (as of course it must have,) the same age with itself, & is always becoming older & younger than itself. But Unity has none of these attributes. Therefore it does not participate in time, nor is in any time. But was, & came to be, & has come to be, & was coming to be, & will be, & will come to be, & is, & comes to be, all express participation of past, future, or present time. Since therefore Unity does not participate of time, it never came to be, nor ever was, nor now is, nor comes to be, nor ever will be or come to be. It therefore in no way participates of existence, nor in any way can it be said to be. It cannot therefore even be said to be Unity: for that would be, to be. Unity therefore is not Unity, & is not at all. But there cannot be any thing of or concerning that which is not. There is therefore no name of it, nor discourse of it, nor knowledge, nor perception, nor opinion. Unity therefore is neither named, nor spoken of, nor thought of, nor known, nor does any creature perceive it.”

Parmenides here recommences, & proceeds to demonstrate by equally cogent arguments the direct contraries of these assertions. Having here shewn that if there is such a thing as Unity it neither is the one nor the other of a variety of contradictories, he now shews that if there is such a thing it is both.

“If there be such a thing as Unity, it must participate of Existence. There must be therefore an Existence of Unity, existence not being the same thing with unity. For, if it were the same thing there could not be an Existence of Unity, nor could Unity participate of Existence; to say Unity exists, & Unity is Unity, would have been the same thing: But we are not deducing the consequences of the supposition that Unity is Unity, but that Unity exists. Existence, & Unity, therefore are different. Now, from this, if we suppose that Unity exists, we shall find that it has parts. For it follows that there is such a thing as One Being; of which Unity, & Existence are two attributes, not being identical with each other: One Being, therefore, must be a whole, Unity & Existence its parts. But each of these parts is predicable of the other part: for Unity Exists, & existence is one. Each of the parts therefore is again divisible with the same parts, & so on for ever, since Unity has always the attribute of Existence & Existence that of Unity; wherefore, becoming always two, it is never one. Unity therefore is infinite in multitude. But even if we consider Unity by itself, without that of which we have said that it participates, we shall find that it is many. For if it participates of existence, without being existence, its existence must be one thing, & itself, another. But if existence, & Unity, are different, Unity is different from Existence not by being Unity, nor Existence from Unity by being Existence, but by being Other, & Different. Difference is not the same thing with Unity, or Existence. We may use the term both, in speaking of Difference & Unity, or of Difference & Existence, or of Unity & Existence; we may therefore use the word two. But when there are two, each of them must be one. Each of these therefore is one, & all together consequently they make three. But if there is two, & three, there is twice, & thrice, since two is twice one, & three, thrice one. If there is two, & twice, there is twice two, & in short there are all numbers, & all numbers are. But if number is, multitude is, & participates of existence. But if number in the aggregate participates in existence, each part of it does so. Existence, therefore, may be predicated of all things, great & small, forming a multitude. Existence therefore is divided into great & small parts, infinite in number. But each of these parts, as it cannot be no part, must be one part. Unity, therefore, is predicable of every part, great or small, of existence. It, therefore, being one, is in many places. But it cannot be wholly in each of these places. It therefore is divisible, & into an infinite number of parts. Not only, therefore One Being is many, but One, or Unity without the Being, is so. But as the parts are parts of a whole, Unity must be bounded by that whole: for the whole must comprehend all the parts. Unity, therefore, is one, & many, a whole & parts, bounded & infinite. But if it is bounded, it has extremities: if it is a whole, it has a beginning, middle, & end; for if any of these are taken away, it would no longer be whole. But the middle must be at an equal distance from the extremes, or it would not be the middle. Unity therefore has some kind of shape. It also is both in itself & in something else. For all the parts must be in the whole, & none of them out of it: But all the parts taken together, are Unity, & the whole is Unity: it therefore is in itself. But the whole cannot be in the parts, either in all of them or in any one: for if it is in all, it must be in one, else how could it be in all? but it cannot be in one or any number, else the greater would be in the less: but if it is neither in one nor in several nor in all of its parts, it must be in something else, or not be any where. But if it were not any where it would not be any thing. In so far, therefore, as it is a whole, it is in something else: In so far as it is the aggregate of its parts, it is in itself. Again, it is both in motion & at rest. For if it is in itself, it must be at rest; for being in One, & never going out of it, it is always in the same place, & therefore is at rest: But as it is always in a different thing, it can never be in the same thing & consequently is not at rest, but in motion; As therefore it is always in itself & always in a different thing, it is always both in motion & at rest. Further, it is the same with itself, & different from itself, & the same with other things, & different from them: For every thing must be to another in one of four ways: it must be the same; or different; or if it be neither the same nor different, it is either a part of the other or the other is a part of it. Now Unity is not a part of itself; neither therefore is itself, a part of it. And it is not different from itself. Therefore it must be the same with itself. But that which is in a different place from itself, must be different from itself: now this is the case with Unity which, as we have seen, is both in itself & in something else; Unity, therefore, is different from itself. But whatever is different, is so from something which is different from it. Those things therefore which are not Unity, are different from Unity, & Unity is different from them. Unity, therefore, is different from other things. But Sameness & Difference are contraries: Sameness therefore cannot ever reside in what is Different, nor Difference, in what is the Same: If however Difference cannot reside in what is the same, it cannot be in any thing for any time; for if it were, it would, during that time, be in the Same. Difference therefore never is in any thing, consequently neither in Unity nor in other things: Unity therefore cannot be different from Other things nor other things from Unity, by Difference; & if not by Difference, certainly not by themselves; therefore not at all. Unity, therefore, is not different from other things. But other things do not participate in Unity, otherwise there would be a sort of Unity in them, & they would not be Other things: Nor are Other things a number; for having number, they could not be entirely without participation in Unity. And other things are not parts of Unity; for so too they would participate in it; nor is Unity, a part of them; for the same reason. But that which is neither different from another, nor is to it as a part to the whole or as a whole to a part, must be the same. Unity, therefore, is the same with other things. It is therefore the same with itself & with other things, & different from itself & other things.”

It is unnecessary to adduce more than a specimen of this mode of enquiry. By similar processes of reasoning to the foregoing it is proved, that Unity is both like & unlike, to itself & to other things; that it touches itself & other things, & does not touch them; that it is equal to itself & to other things, & likewise greater than itself & than other things, & likewise less; that it participates in time, & is & is always becoming older than itself & other things, & younger, & of the same age; & finally, that since it participates in time, it is capable of pastness, presentness, & futurity, it is, has been, & will be, it does come, has come, & will come to be, & there consequently may be knowledge, opinion, perception, naming, & discourse of it: in short, the contradictories of all the propositions which were proved before.

It would not seem very easy to find still another way of applying these same predicates to this same subject: this however is done: “If Unity is neither one nor many, and participates in time, it must, since it is unity, participate sometimes of existence, & since it is not, sometimes not participate in it. It is impossible that it should at the same time participate & not participate. Therefore, it must participate in existence at one time, & not participate in it, at another. There must therefore be a time at which it comes into existence, & another at which it goes out of existence. But the one of these is to be generated, the latter to be destroyed. Unity therefore is capable of generation & destruction. Again, being both One & Many, when it becomes One it ceases to be Many, when Many it ceases to be One; it is therefore divided & reunited. When it becomes like it ceases to be unlike, when unlike to be like: It therefore is assimilated & unassimilated. When it becomes greater, equal or less, it is increased, equalized, & lessened. In the same manner it is shewn, that since it moves & is at rest, & cannot do both at once, it changes from motion to rest. But in this case it is for an instant neither in motion nor at rest, but between both.” This happy idea throws light upon the previous examples, & it may be said with equal reason, that while changing from One to Many it is neither one nor many, & therefore is neither divided nor reunited; & in the same manner, the contradictories of the assertions previously made, may be proved: that in the transition from one of its attributes to another, it is not assimilated nor unassimilated, increased, equalized or diminished, as the case may be. “All this,” Parmenides resumed, “will be true of Unity, if there be such a thing as Unity.”

He then proceeds to enquire, “If there be such a thing as Unity, what will happen to Other things. Since they are Other than Unity, Unity cannot be Other things. But neither are they entirely deprived of Unity, but participate of it in some sort: for they must have parts, otherwise they would be only one, or Unity: These parts, must be parts of a whole: That whole, must be one: for if a thing was a part of many of which itself was one, it must be a part of itself, which is impossible, & also a part of each of the rest; since if there was one which it was not a part of, it would be a part not of all of them but of all except that one. A part, therefore, must be a part of some one thing, composed of all the parts which we term a whole. If Other things, therefore, have parts, they partake of unity & of totality, & are One complete whole having parts. The same must be the case with each of the parts: it too must participate in Unity. For when we say each, we denote some one thing, distinguished from the rest, & standing by itself. But it will participate in Unity, without being Unity, for nothing but Unity itself can be Unity. Both the whole, therefore, & the part, participate in Unity, being different from Unity. But what are different from Unity, must be many, for if they were neither one nor more than one, they would be nothing. They must, even, be infinite in number. For, when they come to participate in unity, they do so, not being unity nor yet participating in it. They are therefore a multitude, in which there is no unity. Take therefore the smallest part of this multitude, & even this part, as unity is not in it, is multitude & not unity. Other things, therefore, are infinite in multitude. But when each part of this multitude becomes a part, & therefore participates in unity, it becomes bounded by the whole & by the other parts, & the whole becomes bounded by the parts. Other things, therefore, when they come to participate in Unity, become bounded—but in their own nature they are boundless. They are therefore bounded, & boundless. They are also like & unlike, to themselves & to one another: Like, inasmuch as they are all boundless in their nature, & all participate in limitation: but in so far as they are bounded & boundless, they are contrarily affected, & therefore unlike to themselves & to each other. In like manner they may be shewn to be the same with, & different from each other, to be in motion & at rest, & in short in every respect contrarily affected.

“Again, to recommence. When we have said, Unity & Other things, we have said all. There is no third thing, in which both Unity & Other things may be. Unity, & Other things, therefore, are never in the same thing, they are consequently apart. Unity moreover has no parts. It therefore is not in Other things, nor is it the whole of which they are parts; since it is completely apart from them, & is indivisible. Other things therefore can in no respect participate in Unity, neither wholly or partially. Other things therefore are not one: neither are they many: for if so, each of them would be a part of the whole, which would be one. Not having unity in them, they cannot be two, nor three, nor any other number. Neither are other things like nor unlike to Unity, nor have they in themselves, Likeness or Unlikeness; for if they had, here would already be two; & that cannot participate in two, which does not participate in one. In like manner, Other things are neither the same nor different, in motion nor at rest, Generated or Destroyed, Greater, Equal, or Less. For if they are any of these, they would participate in One, two, & three. If, therefore,” (concludes Parmenides) “there is such a thing as Unity, all things are, & are not, One.”

He now puts the contrary hypothesis, that there is no such thing as Unity, or that Unity is not. He concludes, first, that if it is not, it must be a subject of knowledge, otherwise it would not be known what is meant when we say that it is not. Next, Other things must be different from it & it from them: It consequently has the attribute of difference; & (as he continues to shew) that of unlikeness (to other things) & of likeness (to itself) and of inequality (for if it were equal to other things, it must exist) & therefore of greatness and smallness, since inequality consists of these parts: But if it has these two things, it must have what is between them, viz. equality. It must even have existence in some sort, since we affirm that it is a non-entity, in which the affirmation that it is, is contained. And since it has, both existence and non-existence, it must change: & change is motion: it therefore moves. But it likewise does not move. For as it does not exist, it is in no place; it therefore cannot change one place for another, & is not susceptible of progressive locomotion: Nor of rotatory locomotion; for that is to move in the same place: But the same, is something which exists, & Unity, we suppose, does not exist, & therefore cannot be in any thing which does exist. Nor is it capable of change; for if it were changed, it would no longer be the thing we are talking of, viz. unity. It therefore does not move; & is consequently at rest. It therefore is both in motion & at rest. He proceeds to shew, that it is changed & not changed, generated & destroyed, & not generated or destroyed: All this on the supposition that it does not exist.

He then recommences, & proves the contradictories of these propositions: That if Unity is not, it does not in any way partake of existence, nor of generation & destruction, nor of change, nor of motion nor rest, nor of greatness, littleness or equality, nor of likeness or unlikeness, nor of sameness or difference, nor of pastness, presentness nor futurity, & that there can be no knowledge or opinion or perception or naming or discourse of it, & finally that it can have no attributes: All which follows clearly enough from its non-existence.

He next enquires, if Unity does not exist, what becomes of Other Things. If they are other, they are different: if different, different from something: Not from unity, since that does not exist: from each other therefore. But they cannot differ from each other one by one, since there is no one: but multitude by multitude; each cluster being really infinite in multitude, however small it may appear; but each of them seems to be one, though it is not. From this he concludes, that the clusters will seem to have number, that there will seem to be a smallest cluster, that each larger cluster will seem to be equal to the sum of several smaller ones, so that there will be an apparent equality among the clusters, & an apparent beginning, middle, & end, but looking closer we shall see that there is another beginning before the beginning, an end after the end, & a middle more middle than the middle, so that they will seem bounded on a hasty, boundless on a closer view. In like manner he shews that Other things would appear both One, & Many, both Like & Unlike, both the same with, & different from each other, separate & in contact, in motion & at rest, generated & destroyed, & so forth.

He then recommences, & says, “Other things are not Unity: neither are they Many, for to constitute many there must be one. There is therefore neither Unity nor Multitude; & as both are non-entities, there can be no semblance or opinion of them, for we cannot think of a non-entity: If therefore Unity is not, no Other thing can be thought to be either one or many. In like manner,” says he, “Other things cannot either be, or seem to be like or unlike, the same or different, separate or in contact, nor any of the things just enumerated, unless Unity exists. And finally if Unity do not exist, nothing exists.”

He sums up the results by saying, “It therefore appears, that whether Unity exists or not, Unity & Other Things are & are not, & seem & seem not, as respects themselves & each other, in every way whatever.”

Thus ends this singular dialogue: on the purpose of which, much difference of opinion has existed and does exist. The first, or controversial part of it, may be considered as a tolerably fair statement of the arguments for and against the existence of εἴδη or abstract essences of species, as they occurred to Plato. The concluding part, in which Parmenides exhibits the specimen of his mental gymnastics, as he terms it, may perhaps have been seriously designed for that end, to which it is scarcely necessary to observe that it is not at all adapted, since it accustoms the mind not to detract & discard, but to cherish & be led, by the ambiguities of language. If, on the other hand, it be intended as a jeu d’esprit, to ridicule the subtleties of the sophists, it is certainly very well suited to that purpose. The chief argument against this view of the intention of the dialogue, is that we occasionally find subtleties of the same kind in works of Plato which cannot possibly have been written with any purpose of ridicule: though nowhere do we find them in the singular shape or to the remarkable extent which is the character of the Parmenides.

TWO PUBLICATIONS ON PLATO

1840

EDITOR’S NOTE

London and Westminster Review, XXXIV (Sept., 1840), 489-91, where it appears under “Classical Literature” in the section devoted to “Critical and Miscellaneous Notices”; headed: “Plato: The Apology of Socrates, the Crito, and part of the Phædo; with Notes from Stallbaum, and Schleiermacher’s Introductions [Ed. William Smith].—A Life of Socrates, by Dr. G. Wiggers. Translated from the German, with Notes. Both published by Taylor and Walton. [London,] 1840.” Not republished: signed “A.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A short notice of two publications on Plato, in the Miscellaneous Notices of the Westminster Review for Sept. 1840. (No 67)” (MacMinn, 52). No copy in the Somerville College Library.

For comment on the essay, see the Textual Introduction, lxxxiii above.

Two Publications on Plato

the youth of this country, who are accustomed to devote so large a portion of the time employed in education to the partial and imperfect acquisition of the learned languages, have hitherto received little encouragement to attend to any but the least useful parts of ancient literature; and school-books intended to facilitate the study of even the easier parts of the writings of Plato are still almost a desideratum among us. This deficiency the little publications now under review, so far as they go, are a laudable attempt to supply. The portions of Plato which are selected are those which are, on reasonable grounds, believed to contain the authentic particulars of the trial, last days, and dying moments of Plato’s great master, Socrates. To these the editor has not only added the introductions which that great scholar and divine, Schleiermacher, prefixed to them in his translation of Plato’s works, but has also published in a separate volume a short life of Socrates, by a Dr. Wiggers, of Rostock. This piece of biography is interesting, because whatever relates to Socrates must be so; but Dr. Wiggers cannot be denied to be somewhat of a “Philistine,” as well as (what was less to be expected) occasionally at fault in his knowledge of Athenian institutions. Thus he represents the Council of Five Hundred as the product of popular election, whereas it was really chosen by lot. This oversight leads Dr. Wiggers to undervalue the undeviating consistency of purpose, characteristic of Socrates. To have held any office which was the result of election would have been inconsistent with his avowed principle of abstinence from public affairs; while to accept and discharge functions which devolved upon him by lot, and were therefore compulsory, was the necessary consequence of that other principle no less rigidly adhered to by him, of inflexible obedience to the laws; a principle of which his refusal to make his escape from prison (the subject of the Crito) was so noble an example. Whoever knows what Grecian society was (or indeed any society consisting of an active and spirited people, in an imperfect state of the social union) is well aware that lawlessness, in such a society, is the prevailing mischief, the great moral and political danger to be combated against; and that the duty of obedience to lawful authority, even when unjustly exercised, is a principle to the assertion of which the best of men might not unworthily make the voluntary sacrifice of that life, which he had already perilled in opposition to the very same power when illegally exerted, and which he was so often called upon to lay down at the same bidding for the comparatively petty interest of some frontier dispute.

To Dr. Wiggers’s rather meagre and by no means philosophical performance, the editor has added the life of Socrates by Diogenes Laertius, in the original Greek, and a reprint of Schleiermacher’s excellent dissertation “On the Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher,” translated (and originally published in the Philological Museum) by the Rev. Connop Thirlwall, whom we may now with exultation designate as Bishop Thirlwall. The editor’s own notes, though sparing in number and for the most part only quotations, are not the least valuable part of the book. We cannot help quoting from one of them a noble passage of the great historian Niebuhr, in vindication of the Athenian Demos. For the translation of this passage the English public are also indebted to Bishop Thirlwall, whose History of Greece is throughout conceived in a kindred spirit:

Evil without end may be spoken of the Athenian constitution, and with truth; but the common-place stale declamation of its revilers would be in a great measure silenced, if a man qualified for the task should avail himself of the advanced state of our insight into the circumstances of Athens, to show how even there the vital principle instinctively produced forms and institutions by which, notwithstanding the elements of anarchy contained in the constitution, the commonwealth preserved and regulated itself. No people in history has been so much misunderstood, and so unjustly condemned as the Athenians; with very few exceptions, the old charges of faults and misdeeds are continually repeated. I should say, God shield us from a constitution like the Athenian! were not the age of such states irrevocably gone by, and consequently all fear of it in our own case. As it was, it shows an unexampled degree of noble-mindedness in the nation, that the heated temper of a fluctuating popular assembly, the security afforded to individuals of giving a base vote unobserved, produced so few reprehensible decrees; and that, on the other hand, the thousands among whom the common man had the upper hand, came to resolutions of such self-sacrificing magnanimity and heroism, as few men are capable of except in their most exalted mood, even when they have the honour of renowned ancestors to maintain as well as their own.

I will not charge those who declaim about the Athenians as an incurably reckless people, and their republic as hopelessly lost, in the time of Plato, with wilful injustice, for they know not what they do. But this is a striking instance how imperfect knowledge leads to injustice and calumnies; and why does not every one ask his conscience, whether he is himself capable of forming a sober judgment on every case that lies before him; a man of candour will hear the answer in a voice like that of the genius of Socrates. Let who will clamour and scoff; for myself, should trials be reserved for my old age, and for my children, who will certainly have evil days to pass through, I pray only for as much self-control, as much temperance in the midst of temptation, as much courage in the hour of danger, as much calm perseverance in the consciousness of a glorious resolution which was unfortunate in its issue, as was shown by the Athenian people, considered as one man. We have nothing to do here with the morals of the individuals: but he who, as an individual, possesses such virtues, and withal is guilty of no worse sins in proportion than the Athenians, may look forward without uneasiness to his last hour.

The ancient rhetoricians were a class of babblers, a school for lies and scandal; they fastened many aspersions on nations and individuals. So we hear it echoed from one declamation to another, among the examples of Athenian ingratitude, that Paches was driven to save himself by his own dagger from the sentence of the popular tribunal. How delighted was I last year to find, in a place where no one will look for such a discovery, that he was condemned for having violated free women in Mitylene at its capture. The Athenians did not suffer his services in this expedition, or his merit in averting an alarming danger from them, to screen him from punishment.

The fathers and brothers who, in the epigraph of the thousand citizens who fell as freemen at Chæronea, attested with joy that they did not repent of their determination, for the issue was in the hands of the gods, the resolution the glory of man,—who conferred a crown of gold on the orator by whose advice the unfortunate attempt had been made which cost them the lives of their kinsmen, without asking whether they were provoking the resentment of the conqueror,—the people who, when Alexander, fresh from the ashes of Thebes, demanded the patriots, refused to give them up, and chose rather to await his appearance before their walls,—who, while all who flattered or feared Philip warned them not to irritate him, condemned citizens to death for buying slaves that had fallen into the hands of the Macedonians by the capture of Greek cities which had been hostile to Athens; the people whose needy citizens, though predominant in the assembly, renounced the largess which alone afforded them the luxury of flesh on a few festivals, though on all other days throughout the year they ate nothing but olives, herbs, and onions, with dry bread and salt fish,—who made this sacrifice to raise the means of arming for the national honour;—this people commands my whole heart and my deepest reverence. And when a great man turned away from this noble and pliable people, though certainly it did not appear every day in its holiday clothes, and was not free from sins and frailties, he incurred a just punishment in the delusion which led him to attempt to wash a blackamoor white; to convert an incorrigible bad subject like Dionysius, and through his means to place philosophy on the throne in the sink of Syracusan luxury and licentiousness; and in the scarcely less flagrant folly of taking an adventurer so deeply tainted with tyranny as Dion, for a hero and an ideal. A man who could hope for success in this undertaking, and despaired of a people like the Athenians, had certainly gone great lengths in straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

BAILEY ON BERKELEY’S THEORY OF VISION

1842, 1843

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, II (1867), 84-119, which reprints two articles from the Westminster Review, XXXVIII (Oct., 1842), 318-36, and XXXIX (May, 1843), 491-4, both signed “A.” The first, which has “Bailey / On Berkeley’s Theory of Vision” as running-titles, is headed: “Art. II.—A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, designed to show the Unsoundness of that Celebrated Speculation. By Samuel Bailey, Author of ‘Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions.’ &c. [London:] Ridgway, 1842.” The second, which has “Mr. Bailey’s Reply to / The Westminster Review” as running-titles, is headed: “Art. IX.—A Letter to a Philosopher, in Reply to some recent Attempts to vindicate ‘Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,’ and in further Elucidation of its Unsoundness. By the Author of ‘A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,’ ‘Essays on the Formation and Publication of Opinions,’ &c. [London:] Ridgway, 1843.” In reprinting them in D&D, JSM gives, in footnotes to the titles, reference to the original publication of the reviews, and repeats (minus publisher and dates) the information of the original headings; he also gives the second the title here used, “Rejoinder to Mr. Bailey’s Reply.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of Bailey’s ‘Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision’ in the Westminster Review for October 1842 (No. 75),” and “A review of Bailey’s ‘Letter to a Philosopher respecting Berkeley’s Theory of Vision’; in the Westminster Review for May 1843 (No. 77).” (MacMinn, 55, 56.) There are no alterations or corrections in the copy of the first article in the Somerville College Library; in the copy of the second, an inked correction of “an” to “our” is made (see 267n-n).

In the footnoted variants (all of which derive from the two articles in the Westminster), “67” indicates D&D, II (2nd ed., 1867), “59” indicates D&D, II (1st ed., 1859), “43” indicates the second Westminster article, and “42” the first. For comment on the composition of the essays and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xlv-lvii and lxxxiii-lxxxv above.

Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision

the doctrine concerning the original and derivative functions of the sense of sight, which, from the name of its author, is known as “Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” has remained, almost from its first promulgation, one of the least disputed doctrines in the most disputed and most disputable of all sciences, the Science of Man. This is the more remarkable, as no doctrine in mental philosophy is more at variance with first appearances, more contradictory to the natural prejudices of mankind. Yet this apparent paradox was no sooner published, than it took its place, almost without contestation, among established opinions; the warfare which has since distracted the world of metaphysics, has swept past this insulated position without disturbing it; and while so many of the other conclusions of the analytical school of mental philosophy, the school of Hobbes and Locke, have been repudiated with violence by the antagonist school, that of Common Sense or innate principles, this one doctrine has been recognised and upheld by the leading thinkers of both schools alike. Adam Smith, Reid, Stewart, and Whewell (not to go beyond our own island) have made the doctrine as much their own, and have taken as much pains to enforce and illustrate it, as Hartley, Brown, or James Mill.

This general consent of the most contrary schools of thinkers in support of a doctrine which conflicts alike with the natural tendencies of the mind, and with the peculiar ones of the larger half of the speculative world, certainly does not prove the doctrine true. But it proves that the reasons capable of being urged in behalf of the doctrine, are such as a mind accustomed to any sort of psychological inquiry must find it very difficult to resist. If the doctrine be false, there must be something radically wrong in the received modes of studying mental phenomena. It is difficult to imagine that so many minds of the highest powers, so little accustomed to agree with one another, should have been led (the majority in opposition to the whole leaning and direction of their scientific habits) into this rare and difficult unanimity, by reasonings which are a mere tissue of paralogisms and ignorationes elenchi.

Such, however, is the thesis which Mr. Bailey, in the volume before us, has undertaken to defend; and Mr. Bailey is one who, on any subject on which he thinks fit to write, is entitled to a respectful hearing. He is entitled on this occasion to something more—to the thanks which are due to whoever, in the style and spirit of sober and scientific inquiry, calls in question a received opinion. The good which follows from such public questioning is not indeed without alloy. It fosters scepticism as to the worth of science, and by creating difference where there previously was agreement, enfeebles the authority of cultivated intellects over the ignorant. But, on the other hand, such a break in the line of scientific prescription applies a wholesome stimulus to the activity of thinkers; it counteracts the tendency of speculation to grow torpid on the points on which general agreement has apparently been attained; and by not permitting philosophers to take opinions upon trust from their predecessors or from their former selves, constrains them to recal their attention to the substantial grounds on which those opinions were first adopted, and must still be received.

If the result of this re-examination be unfavourable to the received opinion, science is happily weeded of a prevailing error; if favourable, it is of no less importance that this too should be shown, and the dissentient, if not convinced, at least prevented from making converts. It is for the interest of philosophy, therefore, that a bold assault, by a champion whom no one can despise, upon one of the few doctrines of analytical psychology which were supposed to be out of the reach of doubt, should not be let pass without a minute examination and deliberate judgment.

It is necessary to begin by a clear statement of the doctrine which Mr. Bailey denies; especially as we think that an indistinct mode of conceiving and expressing the doctrine is the source of most of his apparent victories over it.

The theory of vision, commonly designated as Berkeley’s, but in fact the received doctrine of modern metaphysicians, may be stated, then, as follows.

Of the information which we appear to receive, and which we really do, in the maturity of our faculties, receive through the eye, a part only is originally and intuitively furnished by that sense; the remainder is the result of experience, and of an acquired power. The sense of sight informs us of nothing originally, except light and colours, and a certain arrangement of coloured lines and points. This arrangement constitutes what are called by opticians and astronomers apparent figure, apparent position, and apparent magnitude. Of real figure, position, and magnitude, the eye teaches us nothing; these are facts revealed exclusively by the sense of touch; but since differences in the reality are commonly accompanied by differences also in the appearance, the mind infers the real from the apparent in consequence of experience, and with a degree of accuracy proportioned to the correctness and completeness of the data which experience affords.

Further, those coloured appearances which are called visual or apparent position, figure, and magnitude, have existence only in two dimensions; or, to speak more properly, in as many directions as are capable of being traced on a plane surface. A line drawn from an object to the eye, or, in other words, the distance of an object from us, is not a visible thing. When we judge by the eye of the remoteness of any object, we judge by signs; the signs being no other than those which painters use when they wish to represent the difference between a near and a remote object. We judge an object to be more distant from us by the diminution of its apparent magnitude, that is, by linear perspective; or by that dimness or faintness of colour which generally increases with the distance, in other words by aërial perspective.

Thus, then, the powers of the eyesight are of two classes, its original and its acquired powers; but the things which it discovers by its acquired powers seem to be perceived as directly as what it sees by its original capacities as a sense. Though the distance of an object from us is really a matter of judgment and inference, we cannot help fancying that we see it directly with our eyes; and though our sight can of itself inform us only of apparent magnitudes and figures, while it is our mind which from these infers the real, we believe that we see the real magnitudes and figures, or what we suppose to be so, not the apparent ones. A mistake occasioned by that law of the human mind (a consequence and corollary of the law of association) whereby a process of reasoning, which from habit is very rapidly performed, resembles, so closely as to be mistaken for, an act of intuition.

But although opposed to first impressions and common apprehension, the doctrine in question is confirmed by a great mass of common experience. Visible objects, seen through a clear atmosphere, as travellers in southern countries never fail to remark, seem much nearer to us; because they are seen with less diminution of their customary brightness, than has generally been the case at that distance in our previous experience. A known object, seen through a mist, seems not only farther off, but also larger than usual—a most convincing instance; for in this case the visual magnitude of the object, depending on the size of its picture on the retina, remains exactly the same; but from the same apparent size we infer a larger real size, because we have first been led by the dimness of the object to imagine it farther off, and at this greater distance there is need of a larger object to produce the same visual magnitude. So powerful, however, is the law of mind, by virtue of which a rapid inference seems to be an intuition, that when we look through a mist we cannot hinder ourselves from fancying that we actually see things larger; although their visual magnitude, which alone even Mr. Bailey contends that we see, remains, and must remain, precisely the same.

Again, where we have no experience, our eyesight gives us no information either of distance or of real magnitude. We cannot judge by the eye, of the distance of the heavenly bodies from us, nor does any one of them appear nearer or farther off than another; because we have no means of comparing their brightness or their apparent magnitude as it is, with what it would be at some known distance. As little do we fancy we can judge by the eye of the magnitudes of those bodies; or if a child fancies the moon to be no larger than a cheese, it is because he forgets that it is farther off, and draws from the visual appearance an inference, which would be well grounded if the moon and the cheese were really at an equal distance from him.

Our purpose, however, in this place, was not to illustrate or prove the theory, but to state it. In a few words, then, it is this: That the information obtained through the eye consists of two things—sensations, and inferences from those sensations: that the sensations are merely colours variously arranged, and changes of colour; that all else is inference, the work of the intellect, not of the eye; or if, in compliance with common usage, we ascribe it to the eye, we must say that the eye does it not by an original, but by an acquired power—a power which the eye exercises, through, and by means of, the reasoning or inferring faculty.

This is the “Berkeleian Theory of Vision,” accurately stated; and this statement of it comprises the essence of that to which the subsequent schools of psychology have unanimously assented.

But with the doctrine in this simple form we cannot find that Mr. Bailey has in any one instance really grappled. He has gone back to the primitive phraseology in which the theory was propounded by Berkeley and his immediate successors; men to whom the glory belongs of originating many important discoveries, but who seldom added to this the easier, yet still rarer, merit, of expressing those discoveries in language logically unexceptionable. No one can read the metaphysicians of the last two centuries, especially those of our own country, without acknowledging that (with one or two exceptions, among whom the great name of Hobbes stands preeminent) the very best of them are often wanting either in the determinateness of thought, or the command over language, which would make their words express shortly, precisely, and unambiguously, the very thing they mean. Accordingly, there are few of the great truths of psychology which are not, in almost all writings antecedent to the present century, wrapped up in phrases more or less equivocal and vague, through which one may clearly see what is really within, but another, of perhaps equal powers, will, in the words of Locke, instead of “seizing the scope” of the speculation, “stick in the incidents.”

Upon such vague phrases Mr. Bailey has wasted his strength, never placing the truth which they represented plainly and unambiguously before his mind; and he imagines himself to have triumphed over the doctrine, while he has been kept from contact with it by a rampart of words which he himself has helped to raise.

One of the principal of these phrases is Perception, a word which has wrought almost as notable mischief in metaphysics as the word Idea. The writer who first made Perception a word of mark and likelihood in mental philosophy was Reid, who made use of it as a means of begging several of the questions in dispute between himself and his antagonists. Mr. Bailey, with, we admit, good warrant from precedent, has throughout his book darkened the discussion, by stating the question, not thus:—What information do we gain, or what facts do we learn, by the sense of sight? but thus:—What do we perceive by the eye, or what are our perceptions of sight? The word seems made on purpose to confuse the distinction between what the eye tells us directly, and what it teaches by way of inference; and we shall presently see how completely, in our author’s case, the cause has produced its effect.

It is in the first section of his second chapter that the author enters upon his argument; and in this he inquires whether “outness” (as it is termed by Berkeley) is “immediately of itself perceived by sight?” —in other words, whether we naturally, and antecedently to experience, see things to be external to ourselves.

Berkeley alleged that to a person born blind, and suddenly to see, all objects would seem to be in his eye, or rather, in his mind. It would be a more correct , however, of the theory, to say that such a person would at first have no conception of in or out, and would only be conscious of colours, but not of objects. When by his sense of touch he became acquainted with objects, and had time to associate mentally the objects he touched with the colours he saw, then, and not till then, would he begin to see objects. Or, adopting Mr. Bailey’s summary statement of Berkeley’s views,

Outness is not immediately of itself perceived by sight, but only suggested to our thoughts by certain visible ideas and sensations attending vision. . . . By a connexion taught us by experience, visible ideas and visual sensations come to signify and suggest outness to us, after the same manner that the words of any language suggest the ideas they are made to stand for.

To this Mr. Bailey replies, that the law of mind by which one thing suggests another, cannot produce any such effect as the one here ascribed to it. If we have had an internal feeling A, at the same time with an external sensation B, and this conjunction has occurred often, the two will in time suggest one another: when the internal feeling occurs, it will bring to mind the external one, and vice versâ. But Berkeley’s theory, he says, demands more than this. Berkeley maintains that because the internal feeling has been found to be accompanied by the external one, it will, when experienced alone, not only suggest the external sensation, “but absolutely be regarded as external itself, or rather, be converted into the perception of an external object;” —just as if one were to assert that the sound “rose,” by suggesting the visible flower, became itself visible. “It may be asserted,” says Mr. Bailey, “without hesitation, that there is nothing in the whole operations of the human mind analogous to such a process:” and it may be asserted as unhesitatingly that Berkeley’s theory implies no such absurdity.

The internal feeling which, when received by sight, becomes a sign of the presence of an external object, is a sensation of colour. Does Berkeley pretend, or is it a fact, that this sensation is ever regarded as external? Certainly not. What we regard as external is not the sensation, but the cause of the sensation—the thing which by its presence is supposed to give rise to the sensation: the coloured object, or the quality residing in that object, which we term its colour. Berkeley is not, as Mr. Bailey supposes, bound to show that the sensation of colour is “converted into the perception of an external object,” since nobody is bound to prove a proposition which nobody can understand. Expressed in unequivocal language, what Mr. Bailey calls the perception of an object is simply a judgment of the intellect that an object is present. Berkeley is not called upon to show that the sensation of colour can be “converted” into this judgment, because his theory requires no such conversion. It requires that the judgment should follow as an inference from the sensation, and Berkeley is bound to show that this is possible. And this he can do, since there is no law of mind more familiar than that by which, when two things have constantly been experienced together, we infer from the presence of the one the presence of the other.

Thus it is, that from using the obscure word “perception” instead of the intelligible words “sensation” and “judgment” or “inference,” our author leaves his antagonist unanswered, and triumphs over a shadow. It is true that Berkeley and Berkeley’s adherents have set him the example of this misleading phraseology. But Mr. Bailey lives in a more accurate age, and should use language more accurately.

In the second section (we pass over some observations in the first, to which the answer is obvious) the author proceeds to inquire whether we naturally see things at different distances, or whether our perception by the eye of distance from us, results (as Berkeley contends) from an association, formed by experience, between the usual signs of distance, and ideas of space originally derived from the touch.

And here Mr. Bailey has to confute an assertion of Berkeley, that “Distance of itself and immediately cannot be seen. For distance being a line directed endwise to the eye, it projects only one point in the fund of the eye, which point remains invariably the same, whether the distance be longer or shorter;” or, as Adam Smith has completed the expression of the idea, the distance of an object from the eye “must appear to it but as one point.”

It is not easy to comprehend how the meaning of this argument can be unintelligible, we do not say to a person of Mr. Bailey’s acquirements, but to any one who knows as much of optics as is now commonly taught in children’s books. Our author, however, professes himself unable to understand it, but surmises that it proceeds on the fallacy of supposing that we “see the rays of light” come from the object, it is evident we do not.

The argument supposes no such thing. The argument is this. We cannot see anything which is not painted on our retina; and we see things alike or unlike, according as they are painted on the retina alike or unlike. The distance between an object to our right and an object to our left is a line presented sideways, and is therefore painted on our retina as a line; the distance of an object from us is a line presented , and is represented on the retina by a point. It seems obvious, therefore, that we must be able, by the eye alone, to discriminate between unequal distances of the former kind, but not of the latter. Unequal lines drawn across our sphere of vision, we can see to be unequal, because the lines which image them in the eye are also unequal. But the distances of objects from us are represented on our retina in all cases by single points; and all points being equal, all such distances must appear equal, or rather, we are unable to see them in the character of distances at all.

This argument, which involves no premises but what all admit, does positively prove that distance from us cannot be seen in the way in which we see the distances (or rather apparent distances) of objects from one another, namely, by the original powers of the sense of sight. Berkeley’s argument proves conclusively that distance from the eye is not seen, but inferred. It cannot be seen as other things are seen, because it projects no image on the retina; it must be seen indirectly, that is, not seen, but judged of from signs,—namely, from those differences in the appearance of an object, whether in respect of magnitude or colour, which are physically consequent upon its being at a greater or a smaller distance.

And here, so far as concerns one principal part of the question at issue, the argument might close. It is demonstrated that the distance of an object is not “perceived” directly, but by means of intermediate signs; not seen by the eye, but inferred by the mind. And this is not only the most essential, but the only paradoxical part of Berkeley’s theory.

It is true, there remains a supposition which our author may adopt, and which, from occasional expressions, it be concluded that he is willing to adopt. He may give up the point of actually seeing distance, and admitting that we do not see it, but judge of it from evidence, he may maintain that the interpretation of that evidence is intuitive, and not the result of experience. He may say that we do not see an object to be off, but infer it to be so from its looking smaller; not, however, because we have heretofore observed that such is the case, but by a natural instinct, which precedes experience, and anticipates its results.

There are thus two possible forms of our author’s doctrine. He may affirm that we are apprised of distance through the eye, by actually seeing it; or he may say with Berkeley, that remoteness is not seen, but inferred from paleness of colour and diminution of apparent magnitude,—but may differ from him by asserting that the inference is instinctive, instead of the slow result of gradual experience. The former doctrine is demonstrably false; the latter not so; it may perhaps be refuted, but cannot be taxed with absurdity.

author, however, from the imperfect way in which he has conceived the question, seems never to have finally made his choice between these two suppositions. When he draws near to close quarters (he never comes quite close), and is compelled to express himself with a nearer than usual approach to precision, his language that the perception of distance from us is not a process of sense, but an instinctive inference of the mind. But he cannot have consciously elected this doctrine, to the exclusion of the other, or he would scarcely make the large use he does, for confirming his theory, of its supposed conformity to the “universal impressions of mankind.” To those natural impressions his doctrine, thus understood, is as repugnant as Berkeley’s. Mankind, when they use their eyesight to estimate the distance of an object, do not fancy themselves to be interpreting signs; they are not conscious that they are judging by the apparent smallness of the object, and by the loss of brilliancy which it sustains from the intervening atmosphere. If their unreflecting opinion goes for anything, it goes to prove that we actually see distance; for they are unaware of any difference between the process of seeing the distance of the tree from the house, and seeing the distance of the house from their eye.

If the author, abandoning his claim to common prejudices on his side, should finally acquiesce in the opinion that what he calls our perception of nearness and remoteness by the eye, is an instinctive interpretation of those variations in colour and apparent magnitude which really do accompany varieties of distance; his doctrine will then lie open to only one objection—the superfluousness of assuming an instinct to account for that, which knowledge derived from experience will so well explain. Long before a child gives evidence of distinguishing distances by the eye with any approach to accuracy, he has had time more than enough to learn from experience the correspondence between greater distance to the outstretched arm, and smaller magnitude to the eye. At any age at which a child is capable of forming expectations from past experience, he must have had experience of this correspondence, and must have learnt to ground expectations upon it.

Mr. Bailey next takes notice of the argument which Berkeley’s followers have drawn from the effect of pictures; from the fact that things may be so represented on a flat surface as to deceive the sight. They conclude from this, that though we appear to see solidity, we in truth only infer it from signs; because we equally appear to see it when the solidity is no longer present, provided the signs are. This argument, therefore, aims at proving no more than that what we call seeing solidity is inferring solidity, a proposition which, as we have already observed, our author could afford to admit. Nevertheless, he understands this argument no better than he understood the one which preceded it. He says it is “Virtually arguing that because planes can be made to look solid, solid objects are originally seen plane. . . . Solid objects, they say, must be originally seen as plane, because they may be delineated on a plane surface so as to look whichs, as he justly says, would be an unwarranted inference.

But Mr. Bailey misconceives the scope of the argument to which he fancies that he is replying. The fact that a plane may be mistaken for a solid, is not urged to show that a solid must, but only that it may, be seen originally as a plane. Since even a plane, so coloured as to make the same image on the retina which a solid would , is mistaken for a solid, without doubt an actual solid will be such, even if it be seen in no other manner than as the plane is. The fact that we recognise a solid as a solid, is no proof that so far as the mere eye is concerned we do not see it as a plane; since a picture, which is seen only as a plane, is yet a solid, and appears to the person himself to be seen as such.

We proceed to another of our author’s arguments. If it were true, he says, that we originally see all objects in a party-coloured plane, but afterwards find by experience that this visual appearance is uniformly connected with a tangible object, we should indeed associate the two ideas, but this subsequent association would not alter the original perception. If we before saw a party-coloured plane, we should continue to see it. Though the idea of a tangible object would be uniformly suggested, the impression of sight which suggested it would in no wise be changed. As no touching or handling can make us see the images in a mirror to be on the surface, but we cannot help seeing them beyond it, so if all objects, near and remote, appeared to the sight to be at the same distance, all the touching or feeling in the world could not make us see them to be at various distances.

Here, again, the author has permitted a set of indefinite phrases to intercept his view of the position which he has undertaken to subvert. It is quite true that no association between the sight and the touch will ever make us see anything that the eyesight has not the power of showing us. If we originally see only a party-coloured plane, no touching or handling will ever make us see anything more. But touching and handling may well make us infer something more; and, according to Berkeley’s theory, this is all it needs to do. The very pith and marrow of the theory is, that what Mr. Bailey calls seeing things at various distances is, in truth, inferring them to be so, and that neither at first nor at last do we actually see anything but the colours. Berkeley, therefore, is under no necessity of affirming that experience or association alters the nature of our perceptions of sense. All that belongs to sense, according to him, remains the same; what experience does is to superadd to the impression of sense an instantaneous act of judgment.

In what we have already written we have answered the essential part of so much of our author’s argument, that we may forbear to follow him into the various modes of statement by which he endeavours to adapt his refutation to the varieties of Berkeley’s language. The same radical misconception pervades them all—that of representing Berkeley as pretending that a conception derived from touch is actually transmuted into a perception of sight. It is still, as before, the word perception which disguises from our author the point in issue. He cannot see that what he calls a perception of sight is simply a judgment of the intellect, inferring from a sensation of sight the presence of an object. The idea of an object, being an idea derived from touch, ideas of touch are the foundation of this judgment of the intellect; but it is not therefore necessary to consider them as being, in any sense whatever of the term, “transmuted,” either into a judgment or into a perception.

Mr. Bailey’s next argument is the statement of a psychological fact, which, as a fact, is correct, and a necessary completion and explanation of the theory with which he imagines it to conflict. According to Berkeley’s doctrine, says Mr. Bailey, what takes place when we appear to ourselves to see distance, is merely a close and rapid suggestion of tangible distance, called up by certain visual appearances or signs; and the mind (as is its custom) does not dwell upon the sign, nor remember even the next minute that precise appearance of the object, which indicated the distance, but rushes at once from the sign to the thing signified. And accordingly, a person learning to draw, finds it very difficult to recall accurately the visual appearance, or, even when the scene is before his eyes, to imitate on paper the apparent positions and figures, without ever altering them by the substitution of the real ones. So inveterate is the habit of neglecting the sign and attending only to the thing signified, that it is a hard and difficult task to delineate objects as we see them; our tendency is always to delineate them as we know them to be.

Now, if these doctrines be true, argues our author—if visible appearances are mere signs, which the mind rapidly glides over, and hurries to the tactual perceptions with which they are associated, we ought surely to be very distinctly conscious of the tactual reminiscences supposed to be thus suggested. Yet the fact is, that when we look at objects, and judge of their positions and distances, we have so little consciousness of any tactual ideas, that it is almost questionable whether any are suggested at all. It is, in fact, with great difficulty that we recall this particular class of tactual impressions. Our ideas of tangible distance, form, and magnitude, instead of being peculiarly distinct, are peculiarly vague and shadowy; for the simple reason, that we are not in the habit of attending to those particular sensations of touch. And accordingly, our consciousness testifies that when we correct an erroneous visual impression of distance, we do so by comparing and collating it, not with tactual impressions, but with visual impressions received under different circumstances. When, in looking along an avenue of trees, the more remote of the trees appear to my eye to be close together, and when I correct this impression, and judge them to be farther apart than they appear, the thought which I recall is not the idea of a tangible space, but the recollection of the visible space which I saw intervening between them on some nearer view, or which I have seen to lie between the adjacent trees of other similar avenues.

In this argument, to which we have endeavoured to do no injustice in the mode of stating it, the facts alleged are indisputable. It is true that our ordinary processes of thought and judgment respecting outward objects are carried on, not by means of tactual ideas, but of visual ideas which have acquired a tactual signification; and that this extensive supersession of the function of tactual ideas renders many of them dim, confused, and difficult to be recalled. But these facts, in themselves interesting and worthy of notice, are of no avail to prove that the visual ideas, which thus become our main symbols of tangible objects, have their tactual signification naturally, or obtain it from any other source than experience. At the age at which a child first learns that a diminution in brightness and in apparent magnitude implies increase of distance, the child’s ideas of tangible extension and magnitude are not faint and faded, but fresh and . As for the subsequent fact, that when the suggesting power of the sign has been often exercised, our consciousness not only of the sign itself, but of much of what is signified by the sign, becomes much less acute, so accomplished a metaphysician as Mr. Bailey cannot be ignorant that this is the nature of all signs. It will not, for example, be asserted that the words of any language are significant by nature, or derive their power of suggesting ideas from any cause but association alone; yet nothing can be more notorious than that a word with which we are very familiar, is heard or uttered, and does its work as a sign, with the faintest possible suggestion of most of the sensible ideas which compose its meaning. For example, the word “country:” a politician may reason, or an orator may expatiate, with the utmost cogency and effect, on the interests of the country, the prospects of the country; but in doing this have they distinctly present to the mind’s eye the cornfields and meadows, the workshops and farmhouses, the thronged manufactories and family circles, which are the real concrete signification of the word? Assuredly not: words, as used on common occasions, suggest no more of the ideas habitually associated with them, than the smallest portion that will enable the mind to do what those common occasions require; and it is only to persons of more than ordinary vividness of imagination, that the names of things ever recall more than the meagrest outline of even their own conceptions of things.

Now if this be true of words, which are conventional signs, it is not less true of natural signs, such as our sensations of sight, which derive their power of suggestion not from convention, but from always occurring in conjunction with the things which they suggest. When once the visual appearances, from long experience, suggest the tactual impressions with extreme readiness and familiarity, it would be contrary to all we know of association to suppose that they will continue to suggest them with the original vivacity and force. As the mind, without attending to the sign, runs on to the thing signified, so does it also, without attending to the thing signified, run on to whatever else that thing suggests. Those vivid sensations of the touch and of the muscular frame from which the infant learned his first ideas of distance, would, when the necessity has ceased for actively attending to them, be more and more dimly recalled, while enough only would be distinctly suggested to enable the mind to go on to what it has next to do. The amount of distinct suggestion, and its precise nature, probably differ in different individuals; and in each the visual sign suggests, not so much the tangible distance, as the measure by which, with that person, tangible distances are accustomed to be estimated. In our own experience we should say, that when we look at an object to judge of its distance from us, the idea suggested is commonly that of the length of time, or the quantity of motion, which would be requisite for reaching the object if near to us, or walking up to it if at a distance.

The indistinctness, therefore, of our ideas of tactual extension and magnitude, and the fact of our carrying on most of our mental processes by means of their visual signs, without distinctly recalling the tactual impressions upon which our ideas of extension and magnitude were originally grounded, is no argument against Berkeley’s theory, but is exactly what, from the laws of association, we should expect to happen supposing that theory to be true. And our author has failed, by this as much as by his other arguments, to strike an effective blow at the theory.

We may here close our examination of the controversial, and properly argumentative part of the book. The remainder of it is an attempt to show, by actual observation, that distances are distinguished by the eye before there has been time to form any association between the sight and the touch, and even before the sense of touch has been sufficiently exercised to be capable of yielding accurate ideas.

The facts adduced are of three kinds: relating to human infants, to the young of the lower animals, or to persons born blind, and afterwards sight.

Our author’s facts relating to human infants are singularly inconclusive. They are chiefly intended to show that the sense of sight in a child is developed earlier than the sense of touch, because a child recognises persons and objects by the sight, when his expertness in using his hands so as to acquire tactual ideas is still of the very lowest order. From this Mr. Bailey infers, or seems to infer, that the infant judges of objects by the sense of sight, before he has sensations of touch whereby to judge of them. It is singular that so able a thinker should not have adverted to the fact, that the child may experience sensations of touch from two sources, namely, either from the objects which he touches, or from those which touch him. A child six months old is not very skilful in handling objects so as to acquire an accurate notion of their distance and shape; but persons and things are continually touching the child, and seldom without his experiencing simultaneously some peculiar visual appearance. It cannot, therefore, be long before he associates at least those contacts which are pleasurable or painful, with the corresponding visual sensations; and when this association is formed, he will, on seeing the visual appearances, give signs of intelligence; not from recognising the object, for as an object there is not a shadow of proof that he yet recognises it, but simply because the sensation of sight excites the expectation of the accustomed pleasure or pain. That anything beyond this takes place in an infant’s mind at an age at which it has not yet acquired tactual notions of distance and magnitude, Mr. Bailey has not proved, and would find it difficult to prove.

The facts relating to the young of the lower animals are more to the point, and have been long felt to be a real stumbling-block in the way of the theory.

It is manifest, [says Mr. Bailey,] by the actions of many young animals, that they see external objects as soon as they are born, and before they can possibly have derived any assistance from their powers of touch or muscular feeling. The duckling makes to the water as soon as it has left its shell; the lamb moves about as soon as dropped; the young turtles and crocodiles, says Sir Humphry Davy, hatched without care of parents, run to the water; the crocodile bites at a stick, if it be presented to it, the moment it is hatched.

Again,

Their running about, their snatching at objects presented to them as soon as born, their seeking the teats of the dam, their leaping from one spot to another with the greatest precision, all show not only that they can see objects to be at different distances, but that there is a natural consent of action between their limbs and their eyes; that they can proportion their muscular efforts to visible distances.

It is asserted, and we know of no reason to doubt the fact, that chickens will pick up corn without difficulty as soon as they are hatched.

These are strong facts, and though we cannot confirm them from our own knowledge, still, as they are denied by no one, we presume they must be received as unquestionable. Some of the strongest adherents of Berkeley’s doctrine, particularly Dugald Stewart and Brown, have felt compelled by these facts to allow, that, in many of the lower animals, the perception of distance by the eye is connate and instinctive. In this admission these philosophers saw no inconsistency, it being an acknowledged truth that brutes have many instincts, of which man is reduced to supply the place by acquired knowledge. Mr. Bailey, however, goes further, and says, here is proof that the eye is at least an organ capable of a direct and intuitive perception of distance. Here, therefore, is at all events a complete refutation of Berkeley, who asserts that such a direct perception is organically impossible.

This is one of the passages which never quite settled with himself whether the “perception of distance” by the eye is a real function of that organ, or is that very process of interpreting visible signs which Berkeley contends for, except that it is instinctive instead of being the result of experience. It is against the former hypothesis only that is directed. To refute him, therefore, it would be necessary to show, not only that animals can distinguish distance as soon as they are born, but that they distinguish it by the sight itself, and not by interpretation of signs. Yet the other hypothesis is the one which, in order to treat our author fairly, we obliged to suppose him to adopt.

If the eye of a brute is a different kind of organ from a human eye, there is no reasoning from one to the other; brutes may be capable of seeing distance and solidity, and yet this will be no reason for supposing that men are capable. But if in a brute, as in a man, it be a necessary condition of vision that an image corresponding to the object be formed on the retina, then in a brute, as in a man, it is impossible that two lines should seem of unequal length, which are both alike represented on the retina by points. There will be no resource either in man or beast for judging of remoteness, except from difference in the degrees of brightness and of visible magnitude; and the only doubt will be whether these natural signs are interpreted instinctively, or by virtue of previous experience.

Now if brutes have really an instinct for interpreting these appearances,—if they are intuitively capable of drawing, without experience, the inferences which experience would warrant—we allow it is physiologically probable that some vestige of a similar instinct exists in human beings; although, as in many other cases, the instinctive property, which might perhaps be observable in idiots, is overruled and superseded by the superior force of that rational faculty which grounds its judgments upon experience. But in truth, our knowledge of the mental operations of animals is too imperfect to enable us to affirm positively that they have this instinct. We know to a certain extent the external acts of animals, but know not from what inward promptings, or on what outward indications, those acts are performed. For example, as a judicious critic in the Spectator newspaper has remarked, some of the motions which are supposed to show that young animals can see distance immediately after birth, are performed equally by those which are born blind; kittens and puppies seek the teat as well as calves and lambs. We are not aware if the experiment was ever tried whether a blind duckling will run to the water; it would not be more surprising than many facts in the history of the lower animals which are well known to be true. Those animals have to us an inexplicable facility both of finding and of selecting the objects which their wants require, without, as far as we can perceive, any sufficient opportunities of experience. But it is a question which we should like to see examined by a good observer, to what extent it is their eyesight which guides them to the performance of these At all events, man has not these same facilities; man cannot build in hexagons by an instinctive faculty, though bees can.

We do not wish to evade a question which we are unable to solve, or to blink the fact that the case of the lower animals is the most serious difficulty which the theory of Berkeley has to encounter. But we maintain that it is a difficulty only, not a refutation; and that, even granting the full extent of what is contended for, the theory would still be practically true for human beings. Mr. Bailey allows that infants do not manifest that early perception of distance which some animals do; he imputes this, plausibly enough, to the comparative immaturity of their organs at the period of birth. But before the time when, according to him, the organs have attained sufficient maturity for manifesting this original power, experience has furnished impressions and formed associations, which, without supposing any such power, will account for all which the eyes can do in the way of observation; and there is ample evidence that our judgments of outward things from visual signs are practically, throughout life, regulated by these acquired associations.

The facts which relate to young children and the young of the lower animals being disposed of, there remain those derived from persons born blind, and relieved from blindness at a mature age. These, if well authenticated, would be the most valuable facts of all, for the human species. They exhibit to us, in the very act of learning to see, not children or brutes, but persons capable of observing and describing their impressions, and whose judgments of objects from touch are already accurate and steady. It is a disagreeable reflection, to how great an extent these rare and valuable opportunities have been lost; how slightly and carelessly cases so interesting to science have been observed, and how scanty and insufficient is the information which has been recorded concerning them.

The best known case, that of the youth who was couched by Cheselden, has always been deemed strongly confirmatory of Berkeley’s doctrine. Mr. Bailey has however attempted, we cannot think with any success, to maintain the contrary. Cheselden’s patient said that all objects seemed to touch his eyes, as what he felt did his skin. There has been much discussion (in which our author takes an active part) as to what the boy may have meant by touching his eyes; we think quite needlessly. That the objects touched him was obviously a mere supposition, which he made because it was with his eyes that he perceived them. From his experience of touch, perception of an object and contact with it were, no doubt, indissolubly associated in his mind. But he would scarcely have said that all objects seemed to touch his eyes, if some of them had appeared farther off than others. The case, therefore, as far as anything can be concluded from one instance, seems to prove completely that we are at first incapable of seeing things at unequal distances. Our author curiously argues that the boy might have expressed himself as he did without regarding all visible objects as equally near; for, says he, the boy compared his visual impressions to impressions of touch, and we do not consider all tangible objects as equally near. True, we do not; but if we were to say that all objects seemed simultaneously to touch our hand, it would require some ingenuity to reconcile this assertion with the fact that we were, at that very moment, them to be at different distances from it.

Another specimen of our author’s power of explaining away evidence, is to be found in his remark, that in the whole of Cheselden’s narrative “There is nothing from which we can learn or infer—not a whisper of evidence to prove—that the boy’s subsequent perceptions of visible distance had been acquired by means of the touch.”

What thinks Mr. Bailey of this passage, quoted by himself:

He knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude; but upon being told what things were, whose form he before knew from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he might know them again; but having too many objects to learn at once, he forgot many of them; and (as he said) at first he learned to know, and again forgot, a thousand things in a day. One particular only, though it may appear trifling, I will relate. Having often forgot which was the cat, and which the dog, he was ashamed to ask; but catching the cat (which he knew by feeling), he was observed to look at her steadfastly, and then, setting her down, said, “So, puss, I shall know you another time.”

Mr. Bailey will shelter himself under the subterfuge that the process of learning to see, which Cheselden here so graphically describes, has reference to form only, and not to distance. Cheselden exhibits the boy actively engaged in teaching himself by the touch to judge of forms by the eye; and in this process he could not avoid learning also to judge of distances: much more rapidly, indeed, than of forms, the ideas concerned being much simpler.

After this example, the reader may dispense with our entering into the details of five other cases which our author discusses. Some of these cases are more, others less, favourable in appearance to Berkeley’s theory; but, as our author himself remarks, they all bear evidence that the observers were not duly aware of the psychological difficulties of the problem. The point which Mr. Bailey most dwells on as conclusive in his favour, is that two of the patients could distinguish by the unassisted eye whether an object was brought nearer or carried from them. This, indeed, would be decisive of the question, if the experiments had been fair ones. But in one of these cases the patient was of mature years, and the trial not made till the eighteenth day after the operation, by which time a middle-aged woman might well have acquired the experience necessary for distinguishing so simple a phenomenon. In the other of the two cases, the patient, a boy seven years old, had been capable, before the operation, of distinguishing colours “when they were very strong and held close to the eye;” and had probably, therefore, had the capacity of observing, antecedently to the operation, that colours grow fainter when the coloured object is removed further off.

On the whole, then, it will probably be the opinion of the reader, that neither by his facts nor by his arguments has Mr. Bailey thrown any new light upon the question, but has left Berkeley’s Theory precisely as he found it, subject, as it has always been, to the acknowledged difficulty arising from the motions of young animals, but otherwise unshaken, and to all appearance unshakeable.

* * * * *

Mr. Bailey having published a reply to the preceding criticism, it is right to subjoin the following

REJOINDER TO MR. BAILEY’S REPLY

in this pamphlet Mr. Bailey replies to our article of last October, and to a paper in Blackwood’s Magazine on the same subject. Between Mr. Bailey and the writer in Blackwood we are not called upon to interfere. Of what he has said in answer to our own comments, our respect for him, as well as the scientific interest of the subject, compel us to take some notice; but we cannot venture to inflict upon our readers that detailed analysis of his arguments which would be necessary to satisfy him that we had duly considered them. We prefer resting our case on what we have already written, and on a comparison between that and what is offered in reply to it. We are really afraid lest in any attempt to state the substance of Mr. Bailey’s arguments, we should unwittingly leave out something which perhaps forms an essential part of them; so little do we feel capable of comprehending what it is which gives them the conclusiveness they possess in his eyes. And it is the more desirable that the reader should not take our word respecting Mr. Bailey’s opinions, as it appears that on one important point we have, in sheer love of justice and courtesy to Mr. Bailey, misrepresented them.

We remarked that a dissentient from Berkeley’s doctrine might adopt either of two theories; he might assert that we actually see distance, which is one doctrine; or he might admit that we only infer the distance of an object, from the diminution of its apparent size and apparent brilliancy, but might say that this inference is not made from experience, but by instinct or intuition. We surmised that Mr. Bailey was in a state of indecision between these two theories, but with a leaning towards the latter. In this it seems we were wrong, for he not only holds steadily to the former of the two doctrines, but finds it “inexplicable how any one of honesty and intelligence” could so far misunderstand him as to imagine otherwise, “except on the supposition of greater haste than was compatible with due examination.” We can assure Mr. Bailey that our mistake—since mistake it was—arose solely from an honest desire to do him justice. Of the two opinions, we, in all candour, attributed to him the one which appeared to us least unreasonable, and most difficult satisfactorily to refute. It would have abridged our labour very much if we had thought ourselves at liberty to ascribe to him the opinion he now avows. That opinion we thought, and continue to think, palpably untenable, being inconsistent with admitted facts, while the other, from the nature of the case, can only be combated by negative evidence.

The notion that distance from the eye can be directly seen, needs, we conceive, no other refutation than Berkeley’s. We can see nothing except in so far as it is represented on our retina; and things which are represented on our retina exactly alike, will be seen alike. The distances of all objects from the eye, being lines directed endwise to the retina, can only project themselves upon it by single points, that is to say, exactly alike; therefore they are seen exactly alike. This, which is Berkeley’s argument, Mr. Bailey, in his pamphlet, disposes of by saying that it supposes the distances to be “material or physical lines,” since “imaginary or hypothetical lines can project no points on the retina.” We must again reiterate our fear of misrepresenting Mr. Bailey, for we can scarcely suppose him to mean (what he seems to say) that only bodies can be represented on the retina, and not the blank spaces between bodies; or else, that we indeed see bodies when, and only when, they are imaged on the retina, but see the spaces between them without any such optical equivalent. The fact surely is, that we see bodies and their distances by precisely the same mechanism. We see two stars, if they are imaged on the retina, and not otherwise; we see the interval between those stars, if there is an interval on the retina between the two images, and if there is no such interval we see it not. Now, as the interval between an object and eye has not any interval answering to it on the retina, we do not see it. Surely this argument does not depend upon an implied assumption that the intervals between objects are physical lines joining them.

This is Mr. Bailey’s answer to one of our he has succeeded any better in replying to the remainder of them, we must leave it to others to judge.

Mr. Bailey, in his reply, insists very much on a point which we passed over in our former article—the confirmation which to derive from Wheatstone’s discoveries respecting binocular vision, exhibited in the phenomena of the stereoscope. We think Mr. Bailey must admit, on further consideration, that these phenomena (as he himself says of Cheselden’s observations) are equally consistent with both theories. The stereoscope makes us see, or appear to see, solidity; it makes us look upon a flat picture of an object, and have, more completely than we ever had before, the semblance of seeing the object in three dimensions. But how is this done? Merely by imitating on a plane, more exactly than was ever done before, the precise sensations of colour and visible form which we habitually have when a solid object, a body in three dimensions, is presented to us. The stereoscope produces a more complete illusion than a mere picture, because it does what no previous picture ever did—it allows for, and imitates, the two different sets of ocular appearances which we receive from an object very near to us when we look at it with both our eyes. If either theory could derive support from this experiment, it would surely be that which supposes our perceptions of solidity to be inferences rapidly drawn from visual impressions confined to two dimensions. But we do not insist upon this, as we deem the argument from pictures, in any of its forms, only valid to prove, not the truth of Berkeley’s theory, but its sufficiency to explain the phenomena; or, as we before expressed it [p. 256 above], that a solid may, not that it must, be seen originally as a plane.

In the course of his remarks, Mr. Bailey takes frequent opportunities of animadverting on the tone of our article, in a manner evincing at least as much sensitiveness to what he deems hostile criticism, as is at all compatible with the character of a philosopher. We were so entirely unconscious of having laid ourselves open to this kind of , as to have flattered ourselves that the style and tone of our criticism on a single opinion of Mr. Bailey, bore indubitable marks of the unfeigned respect which we entertain for his general powers; nor are we aware of having shown any other “bluntness,” “confidence,” or “arrogance,” than are implied in thinking ourselves right, and, by consequence, Mr. Bailey wrong. We certainly did not feel ourselves required, by consideration for him, to state our difference of opinion with pretended hesitation. We should not have written on the subject unless we had been able to form a decided opinion on it; and, having done so, to have expressed that opinion otherwise than decidedly would have been cowardice, not modesty; it would have been sacrificing our conviction of truth to fear of offence. To dispute the soundness of a man’s doctrines and the conclusiveness of his arguments, may always be interpreted as an assumption of superiority over him: true courtesy, however, between thinkers, is not shown by refraining from this sort of assumption, but by tolerating it in one another; and we claim from Mr. Bailey this tolerance, as we, on our part, sincerely and cheerfully concede to him the like.

GROTE’S HISTORY OF GREECE [I]

1846

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, II (1867), 283-334, where under the title, “Early Grecian History and Legend,” appears “(A Review of the first Two Volumes of ‘Grote’s History of Greece.’*)” with the footnote reading “Edinburgh Review, October 1846.” Reprinted from ER, LXXXIV (Oct., 1846), 343-77, unsigned, where it is headed “Art. III.—A History of Greece.—I. Legendary Greece.—II. Grecian History to the Reign of Peisistratus of Athens. By George Grote, Esq. Two vols. 8vo. London: [Murray,] 1846”; running heads “Grote’s History of Greece.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of the first two volumes of Grote’s History of Greece in the Edinburgh Review for October 1846.” (MacMinn, 60.) There are no corrections or alterations in the copy of the Edinburgh article in the Somerville College Library.

In the footnoted variants, “59” indicates D&D, II (1st ed.); “67” indicates D&D, II (2nd ed., the copy-text); “46” indicates Edinburgh Review. For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xxviii-xxxiii and lxxxv-lxxxvi above.

Grote’s History of Greece [I]

the interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible. As a mere story, hardly any other portion of authentic history can compete with it. Its characters, its situations, the very march of its incidents, are epic. It is an heroic poem, of which the personages are peoples. It is also, of all histories of which we know so much, the most abounding in consequences to us who now live. The true ancestors of the European nations (it has been well said) are not those from whose blood they are sprung, but those from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance. The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings. If the issue of that day had been different, the Britons and the Saxons might still have been wandering in the woods.

The Greeks are also the most remarkable people who have yet existed. Not, indeed, if by this be meant those who have approached nearest (if such an expression may be used where all are at so immeasurable a distance) to the perfection of social arrangements, or of human character. Their institutions, their way of life, even that which is their greatest distinction, the cast of their sentiments and development of their faculties, were radically inferior to the best (we wish it could be said to the collective) products of modern civilization. It is not the results achieved, but the powers and efforts required to make the achievement, that measure their greatness as a people. They were the beginners of nearly everything, Christianity excepted, of which the modern world makes its boast. If in several things they were but few removes from barbarism, they alone among nations, so far as is known to us, emerged from barbarism by their own efforts, not following in the track of any more advanced people. If with them, as in all antiquity, slavery existed as an institution, they were not the less the originators of political freedom, and the grand exemplars and sources of it to modern Europe. If their discords, jealousies, and wars between city and city, caused the ruin of their national independence, yet the arts of war and government evolved in those intestine contests made them the first who united great empires under civilized rule—the first who broke down those barriers of petty nationality, which had been so fatal to themselves—and by making Greek ideas and language common to large regions of the earth, commenced that general fusion of races and nations, which, followed up by the Romans, prepared the way for the cosmopolitism of modern times.

They were the first people who had an historical literature; as perfect of its kind (though not the highest kind) as their oratory, their poetry, their sculpture, and their architecture. They were the founders of mathematics; of physics; of the inductive study of politics, so early exemplified in Aristotle; of the philosophy of human nature and life. In each they made the indispensable first steps, which are the foundation of all the rest—steps such as could only have been made by minds intrinsically capable of everything which has since been accomplished. With a religious creed eminently unfavourable to speculation, because affording a ready supernatural solution of all natural phenomena, they yet originated freedom of thought. They, the first, questioned nature and the universe by their rational faculties, and brought forth answers not suggested by any established system of priestcraft; and their free and bold spirit of speculation it was, which, surviving in its results, broke the yoke of another enthralling system of popular religion, sixteen hundred years after they had ceased to exist as a people. These things were effected in two centuries of national existence: twenty and upwards have since elapsed, and it is sad to think how little comparatively has been accomplished.

To give a faithful and living portraiture of such a people; to show what they were and did, and as much as possible of the means by which they did it—by what causes so meteor-like a manifestation of human nature was produced or aided, and by what faults or necessities it was arrested; to deduce from the qualities which the Greeks displayed collectively or individually, and from the modes in which those qualities were unconsciously generated or intentionally cultivated, the appropriate lessons for the guidance of our own world—is an enterprise never yet attempted systematically, nor attempted successfully at all. Such is the declared object of the work of which the first two volumes lie before us. “First, to embody in his own mind, and next to lay out before his readers, the general picture of the Grecian world,” is Mr. Grote’s description of his task.

The historian, [he says,] will especially study to exhibit the spontaneous movement of Grecian intellect, sometimes aided but never borrowed from without, and lighting up a small portion of a world otherwise clouded and stationary; and to set forth the action of that social system, which, while ensuring to the mass of freemen a degree of protection elsewhere unknown, acted as a stimulus to the creative impulses of genius, and left the superior minds sufficiently unshackled to soar above religious and political routine, to overshoot their own age, and to become the teachers of posterity.

In this undertaking there is work for a succession of thinkers; nor will it be brought to completeness by any one historian or philosopher. But the qualifications of Mr. Grote, and the contents of these two volumes, give assurance that he will be remembered not only as the first who has seriously undertaken the work, but as one who will have made great steps towards accomplishing it. In ascribing to him the first attempt at a philosophical history of Greece, we mean no disparagement to the very valuable labours of his predecessor and friend, Bishop Thirlwall. That distinguished scholar has done much for the facts of Grecian history. Before him, no one had applied to those facts, considered as a whole, the most ordinary canons of historical credibility. The only modern historian of Greece who attempted or even affected criticism on evidence, Mr. Mitford, made almost no other use of it than to find reasons for rejecting all statements discreditable to any despot or usurper. Dr. Thirlwall has effectually destroyed Mitford as an historical authority; by substituting (though so unostentatiously as to give no sufficient idea of the service rendered) a candid and impartial narrative, for the most prejudiced misrepresentation by which party passion has been known to pervert the history of a distant time and a foreign people. But Dr. Thirlwall’s, though highly and justly esteemed as a critical, does not attempt to be a philosophical history; nor was such an attempt to be expected from its original purpose. And though, in its progress, it has far outgrown in bulk, and still more in amplitude of scope and permanent value, its primitive design, the plan has not been fundamentally altered; and the most important part of Mr. Grote’s undertaking has not been, in any respect, forestalled by it.

The portion which Mr. Grote has completed, and which is now published, appears at some disadvantage, from its not including even the beginning of the part of Grecian history which is of chief interest either to the common or to the philosophical reader. Mr. Grote, in his preface, laments that the religious and poetical attributes of the Greek mind appear thus far in disproportionate relief, as compared with its powers of acting, organizing, judging, and speculating. He might have added, that the religion and the poetry are only those of the most primitive period, the time before which nothing is known. A volume and a half are devoted to the legendary age; and the remaining half volume does not carry us much beyond the first dawn of real history.

The Legends of Greece Mr. Grote relates at greater length than has been thought necessary by any of his predecessors. This is incident to the design, which no one before him had seriously entertained, of making the history of Greece a picture of the Greek mind. There is no more important element in the mind of Greece than the legends. They constituted the belief of the Greeks of the historical period, concerning their own past. They formed also the Grecian religion; and the religion of an early people is the groundwork of its primitive system of thought on all subjects. Mr. Grote makes no distinction between the legends of the Gods and those of the Heroes. He relates the one and the other literally, as they were told by the poets, and believed by the general public, down to the time of the Roman empire. He makes no attempt to discriminate historical matter in the stories of heroes, no more than in those of the gods. Not doubting that some of them do contain such matter—that many of the tales of the heroic times are partially grounded on incidents which really happened—he thinks it useless to attempt to conjecture what these were. The siege of Troy is to him no more an historical fact than the births and amours of the gods, as recorded in Hesiod. The only thing which he deems historical in either is, that the Greeks believed them, and the poets sung them. Whether they were believed from the first, as they were afterwards, on the authority of poets, or the poets grounded their narratives on stories already current, we have no means of ascertaining; in some cases the one thing may have happened, in some the other; in Mr. Grote’s view it is immaterial, since neither the poems nor the so-called traditions bear, in his eyes, the smallest character of historical evidence.

This is essentially the doctrine of Niebuhr; and, in the hands of that eminent investigator of antiquity, it has, by English scholars, generally been accepted as subversive of the previously received view of Roman history. But no one, not even the translator of Niebuhr, Dr. Thirlwall, had applied this doctrine in the same unsparing manner to the Greek legends. Unqualified rejection has been confined to the stories of the gods. Between them and those of the heroes, a Greek would have been unable to see any difference. To his mind, both rested on the same identical testimony; both were alike part of his religious creed; supernatural agency, and supernatural motives and springs of action, are the pervading soul as much of the heroic as of the divine legends; the gods themselves appear in them quite as prominently, and even the heroes are real, though inferior, divinities. By moderns, however, the supernatural machinery (as it is called by critics profoundly ignorant of the spirit of antiquity) has been treated as a sort of scaffolding which could be taken down, instead of the main framework and support of the structure. The history of the Trojan war has been written on the authority of the Iliad, suppressing only the intervention of the gods, and whatever seemed romantic or improbable in the human motives and characters. As much credit is thus accorded to the poet, in all but the minute details of his narrative, as is given to the most veracious witness in a court of justice; since even with him we do no more than believe his statements where they are neither incredible in themselves, nor contradicted by more powerful testimony. With this mode of dealing with legendary narratives, Mr. Grote is altogether at war. His discussion of the credibility of what are called traditions is eminently original, evolving into distinctness principles and canons of evidence and belief, which, by Niebuhr, are rather implicitly assumed than directly stated.

The following passages will give a clear idea of Mr. Grote’s main position:

In applying the semi-historical theory to Grecian mythical narrative, it has been often forgotten that a certain strength of testimony, or positive ground of belief, must first be tendered before we can be called upon to discuss the antecedent probability or improbability of the incidents alleged. The belief of the Greeks themselves, without the smallest aid from special or witnesses, has been tacitly assumed as sufficient to support the case, provided only sufficient deduction be made from the mythical narratives to remove all antecedent improbabilities. It has been assumed that the faith of the people must have rested originally upon some particular historical event, involving the identical persons, things, and places, which the original mythes exhibit, or at least the most prominent among them. But when we examine the psychagogic influences predominant in the society among whom this belief originally grew up, we shall see that their belief is of little or no evidentiary value, and that the growth and diffusion of it may be satisfactorily explained without supposing any special basis of matters of fact.

The general disposition to adopt the semi-historical theory as to the genesis of Grecian mythes, arises in part from reluctance in critics to impute to the mythopœic ages extreme credulity or fraud, and from the presumption that where much is believed, some portion of it must be true. There would be some weight in these grounds of reasoning, if the ages under discussion had been supplied with records, and accustomed to critical inquiry. But amongst a people unprovided with the former and strangers to the latter, credulity is necessarily at its maximum, as well in the narrator himself as in his hearers: the idea of deliberate fraud is moreover inapplicable, for if the hearers are disposed to accept what is related to them as a revelation from the muse, the œstrus of composition is quite sufficient to impart a similar persuasion to the poet whose mind is penetrated with it. The belief of that day can hardly be said to stand apart by itself as an act of reason: it becomes confounded with vivacious imagination and earnest emotion; and in every case where these mental excitabilities are powerfully acted upon, faith comes unconsciously and as a matter of course.

It is, besides, a presumption far too largely and indiscriminately applied, even in our own advanced age, that where much is believed, something must necessarily be true—that accredited fiction is always traceable to some basis of historical truth. The influence of imagination and feeling is not confined simply to the process of retouching, transforming, or magnifying narratives originally founded on fact; it will often create new narratives of its own, without any such preliminary basis. Where there is any general body of sentiment pervading men living in society, whether it be religious or political—love, admiration, or antipathy—all incidents tending to illustrate that sentiment are eagerly believed, rapidly circulated, and (as a general rule) easily accredited. If real incidents are not at hand, impressive fictions will be provided to satisfy the demand: the perfect harmony of such fictions with the prevalent feeling stands in the place of certifying testimony, and causes men to hear them, not merely with credence, but even with delight: to call them in question and require proof, is a task which cannot be undertaken without incurring obloquy. Of such tendencies in the human mind, abundant evidence is furnished by the innumerable religious legends which have acquired currency in various parts of the world—legends which derived their origin, not from special facts misreported and exaggerated, but from pious feelings pervading the society, and translated into narrative by forward and imaginative minds—legends in which not merely the incidents, but often even the personages are unreal, yet in which the generating sentiment is conspicuously discernible, providing its own matter as well as its own form. Other sentiments also, as well as the religious, provided they be fervent and widely diffused, will find expression in current narrative, and become portions of the general public belief: every celebrated and notorious character is the source of a thousand fictions exemplifying his peculiarities. And if it be true, as I think present observation may show us, that such creative agencies are even now visible and effective, when the materials of genuine history are copious and critically studied—much more are we warranted in concluding, that in ages destitute of records, strangers to historical testimony, and full of belief in divine inspiration, both as to the future and as to the past, narratives purely fictitious will acquire ready and uninquiring credence, provided only they be plausible, and in harmony with the preconceptions of the auditors.

(Vol. I, pp. 572-3, 576-9.)

The two points here insisted upon are, the large space which sheer and absolute fiction still occupies in human beliefs—a place naturally larger as we recede further into a remote and uncritical antiquity; and the tendency of any strong and widely diffused feeling to embody itself in fictitious narratives, which pass from mouth to mouth, and grow into traditions.

These points have been illustrated in a more quotable, because a more condensed form, in a fugitive publication, of which Mr. Grote here acknowledges the authorship. From this we borrow an illustration, too apt to be dispensed with,—a modern mythe, caught in the act of formation. Among the “numerous fictions” which, in the words of Mr. Moore’s “Life of Byron,” have been “palmed upon the world” as his “romantic tours and wonderful adventures in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed,” one is thus recounted, in a review of the poem of Manfred, by no less a person than Goethe.

He [Byron] has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. There are, properly speaking, two females whose phantoms for ever haunt him, and in this piece also perform principal parts—one under the name of Astarte; the other without form or presence, and merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence which took place with the former, the following is related:—When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her husband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one to whom suspicion could be attached. Lord Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits haunted him all his life after. This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by innumerable allusions to it in his poems.

On this Mr. Grote comments as follows:

The story which Goethe relates of the intrigue and double murder at Florence is not a misreported fact: it is a pure and absolute fiction. It is not a story of which one part is true and another part false, nor in which you can hope, by removing ever so much of superficial exaggeration, to reach at last a subsoil of reality. All is alike untrue, the basis as well as the details. In the mind of the original inventor, the legend derived its birth, not from any erroneous description which had reached his ears respecting adventures of the real Lord Byron, but from the profound and vehement impression which Lord Byron’s poetry had made, both upon him and upon all others around him. The poet appeared to be breathing out his own soul and sufferings in the character of his heroes—we ought rather to say, of his hero, πολλω̑ν ὀνομάτων μορϕὴ μία —he seemed like one struck down as well as inspired, by some strange visitation of destiny. In what manner, and from what cause, had the Eumenides been induced thus to single him out as their victim? A large circle of deeply-moved readers, and amongst them the greatest of all German authors, cannot rest until this problem be solved: either a fact must be discovered, or a fiction invented for the solution. The minds of all being perplexed by the same mystery, and athirst for the same explanation, nothing is wanted except a prima vox. Some one, more forward and more felicitous than the rest, imagines and proclaims the tragical narrative of the Florentine married couple. So happily does the story fit in, that the inventor seems only to have given clear utterance to that which others were dimly shadowing out in their minds: the lacerated feelings of the poet are no longer an enigma—the die which has stamped upon his verses their peculiar impress, has been discovered and exhibited to view. If, indeed, we ask what is the authority for the tale—to speak in the Homeric language, it has been suggested by some god, or by the airy-tongued Ossa, the bearer of encouragement and intelligence from omniloquent Zeus—to express the same idea in homely and infantine English, it has been whispered by a little bird. But we may be pretty well assured, that few of the audience will raise questions about authority—the story drops into its place like the keystone of an arch, and exactly fills the painful vacancy in their minds—it seems to carry with it the same sort of evidence as the key which imparts meaning to a manuscript in cipher, and they are too well pleased with the acquisition to be very nice as to the title. Nay, we may go further and say, that the man who demonstrates its falsehood will be the most unwelcome of all instructors; so that we trust, for the comfort of Goethe’s last years, that he was spared the pain of seeing his interesting mythus about Lord Byron contemptuously blotted out by Mr. Moore.

Suppose that there had never been any authentic biography of Byron, and that his own works and the various testimonies about his personality having all perished, his name were carried down to a remote age exclusively by this writing of Goethe. The case would then be parallel with that of the heroic age of Greece; and the following passage describes what would probably have happened.

In former days, the Florentine intrigue, and the other stories noticed by Mr. Moore, would have obtained undisputed currency as authentic materials for the life of Lord Byron; then would have succeeded rationalizing historians, who, treating the stories as true at the bottom, would have proceeded to discriminate the basis of truth from the accessories of fiction. One man would have disbelieved the supposed murder of the wife, another that of the husband; a third would have said that, the intrigue having been discovered, the husband and wife had both retired into convents, the one under feelings of deep distress, the other in bitter repentance, and that the fleshly lusts being thus killed, it was hence erroneously stated that the husband and wife had themselves been killed. If the reader be not familiar with the Greek scholiasts, we are compelled to assure him that the last explanation would have found much favour in their eyes, inasmuch as it saves the necessity of giving the direct lie to any one, or of saying that any portion of the narrative is absolutely unfounded. The misfortune is, that though the story would thus be divested of all its salient features, and softened down into something very sober and colourless, perhaps even edifying, yet it would not be one whit nearer the actual matter of fact. Something very like what we have been describing, however, would infallibly have taken place, had we not been protected by a well-informed biographer, and by the copious memoranda of a positive age.

The feelings to which the early Grecian legends addressed themselves, and to which they owed not their currency only, but most of them probably their very existence, were sentiments most strong and pervading; the religious feelings of the people, and their ancestorial feelings. The two, indeed, may be reduced to one, for the ancestorial were also in the most literal sense religious feelings. The legendary ancestors of each family, tribe, or race, were the immediate descendants of deities—were immortal beings, with supernatural powers to destroy or save, and worshipped with the rites and honours paid to gods. The difference between them and the gods was chiefly this, that they had once been men, and had performed exploits on earth which were the pride and glory of other men still living, who honoured them as patrons and guardian divinities—a distinction in no way tending to abate the thirst for wonderful tales respecting the heroes.

If a story harmonized with the prevailing sentiment, to doubt its truth would never occur to any one, not even to the inventors themselves; since, in a rude age, the suggestions of vivid imagination and strong feeling are always deemed the promptings of a god. The inspiration of the muse was not then a figure of speech, but the sincere and artless belief of the people; the bard and the prophet were analogous characters; Demodocus, at the court of King Alcinous, could sing the Trojan war by revelation from Apollo or from a Muse; and Hesiod, in the Theogony, could declare respecting himself that he knew, by the favour of the Muses, the past, the present, and the future. Herodotus expressly says that Hesiod and Homer “were the authors of the Greek Theogony, gave titles to the gods, distinguished their attributes and functions, and described their forms;” that until taught by them, the Greeks were ignorant “whence each of the gods sprang, and whether all of them were always existing, and what were their shapes.” Plato invariably assumes the same thing. The poems were a kind of sacred books, like the Ramayun and the Mahabharat.

It may perhaps be said, that the eager interest here supposed in the exploits of ancestors, implies the ancestors to be at least real persons, surviving in the memory of those to whom the tales were told; and that therefore most of the heroes of legend must have really existed, however much of the marvellous in their adventures may be due to the imagination of their descendants. This doctrine would not be without plausibility, were it not the known practice of the early Greeks to create not only imaginary adventures of ancestors, but imaginary ancestors. It was the universal theory of Greece that every name, common to an aggregation of persons, indicated a common progenitor. Whether it was the name of a race, as Dorians, Ionians, Achæans; of a people, as Thessalians, Dolopians, Arcadians, Ætolians; of any of the numerous political divisions of a people, or of those other divisions not made by laws, but held together by religious rites and a traditional tie, the γένη or gentes (representing probably the units by the aggregation of which the community had, at some early period, been formed); all these, names of towns and localities, were believed to be etymologically derived from a primeval founder and patriarch of the whole tribe. Even names of which the origin was obvious, did not escape the application of the theory. The names of the four tribes in the primitive Athenian constitution, Geleontes, Hopletes, Argades, and Aigikoreis, appellations so evidently derived from their occupations, were ascribed, according to custom, to four Eponymi, sons of Ion, the general ancestor of the race, whose names were Geleon, Hoples, Argades, and Aigikores. No one now makes any scruple of rejecting the whole class of Eponymi, or name-heroes, from the catalogue of historical personages. Among the Greeks, however, they were the most precious of any; they were as firmly believed in, and their existence and adventures as justly entitled to the name of tradition, as any Grecian legend whatever.

But grant that the personages of the heroic legends were real, as doubtless some warriors and rulers must have left behind them an enduring memory, to which legends would not fail to attach themselves;—could we distinguish among the names, those which belonged to actual persons, would it follow that the actions ascribed to them bore a resemblance to any real occurrences? We may judge from a parallel instance. In the earlier Middle Ages, the European mind had returned to something like the naïf unsuspecting faith of primitive times. It accordingly gave birth to a profusion of legends: those of saints, in the first place, almost a literature in themselves, of which, though very pertinent to our purpose, we say nothing here. But the same age produced the counterpart of the tales of Hercules and Theseus, of the wanderings of Ulysses and the Argonautic expedition, in the shape of romances of chivalry. Like the Homeric poems, the romances announced themselves as true narratives, and were, down to the fourteenth century, popularly believed as such. The majority relate to personages probably altogether fictitious; Amadis and Lancelot we are nowise called upon to believe in; and of King Arthur, as of King Agamemnon, we have no means of ascertaining if he ever really existed or not. But the uncertainty does not extend to all these romantic heroes. That age, unlike the Homeric, notwithstanding its barbarism, preserved written records; and we know consequently from other evidence than the romances themselves, that some of the names they contain are real. Charlemagne is not only an historical character, but one whose life is tolerably well known to us; and so genuine a hero, both in war and peace—his real actions so surprising and admirable—that fiction itself might have been content with ornamenting his true biography, instead of fitting him with another entirely fabulous. The age, however, required, to satisfy its ideal, a Charlemagne of a different complexion from the real monarch. The chronicle of Archbishop Turpin, a compilation of poetic legends, supplied this want. Though containing hardly anything historical, except the name of Charlemagne and the fact of an expedition into Spain, it was declared genuine history by Pope Calixtus the Second; was received as such by Vincent de Beauvais, who, for his great erudition, was made preceptor to the sons of the wise King, Saint Louis of France; and from this, not from Eginhard or the monk of St. Gall, the poets who followed drew the materials of their narrative. Even, then, if Priam and Hector were real persons, the siege of Troy by the Greeks may be as fabulous as that of Paris by the Saracens, or Charlemagne’s conquest of Jerusalem. In the poem of Ariosto, the principal hero and heroine are Ruggiero and Bradamante, the ancestors, real or imaginary, of the Dukes of Ferrara, at whose court he lived and wrote. Does any one, for this reason, believe a syllable of the adventures which he ascribes either to these or to his other characters? Another personage of legend, who is also a personage of history, is Virgil. If the author of the Æneid were only known to us by the traditions of the Middle Ages, in what character would he have been transmitted to us? In that of a mighty enchanter. Such is the worth of what is called tradition, even when the persons are real, and the age not destitute of records. What must it be in times anterior to the use of writing?

It is now almost forgotten, that England, too, had a mythic history, once received as genuine; and neither has this wanted the consecration of the highest poetical genius, in the instances at least of Lear and Cymbeline.

If we take the history of our own country, as it was conceived and written, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, by Hardyng, Fabyan, Grafton, Hollinshed, and others, we shall find that it was supposed to begin with Brute the Trojan, and was carried down from thence, for many ages, and through a long succession of kings, to the times of Julius Cæsar. A similar belief of descent from Troy, arising seemingly from a reverential imitation of the Romans, and of their Trojan origin, was cherished in the fancy of other European nations. With regard to the English, the chief circulator of it was Geoffrey of Monmouth, and it passed with little resistance or dispute into the national faith. The kings, from Brute downwards, were enrolled in regular chronological series, with their respective dates annexed. In a dispute which took place during the reign of Edward I ( 1301), between England and Scotland, the descent of the Kings of England from Brute the Trojan was solemnly embodied in a document put forth to sustain the rights of the crown of England, as an argument bearing on the case then in discussion; and it passed without attack from the opposing party; an incident which reminds us of the appeal made by Æschines, in the contention between the Athenians and Philip of Macedon respecting Amphipolis, to the primitive dotal rights of Akamas, son of Theseus; and also of the defence urged by the Athenians, to sustain their conquest of Sigeium against the reclamations of the Mitylenæans, wherein the former alleged that they had as much right to the place as any of the other Greeks who had formed part of the victorious armament of Agamemnon.

The tenacity with which this early series of British kings was defended, is no less remarkable than the facility with which it was admitted. The chroniclers, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, warmly protested against the intrusive scepticism which would cashier so many venerable sovereigns, and deface so many noble deeds. They appealed to the patriotic feelings of their hearers, represented the enormity of their setting up a presumptuous criticism against the belief of ages, and insisted on the danger of the precedent, as regarded history generally. Yet, in spite of so large a body of authority and precedent, the historians of the nineteenth century begin the history of England with Julius Cæsar. They do not attempt either to settle the date of King Bladud’s accession, or to determine what may be the basis of truth in the affecting narrative of Lear.

(Vol. I, pp. 639-40, 642.)

We will add, before taking our leave of this part of the subject, one argument more, which we conceive to be in itself almost decisive. Authentic history, as we ascend the stream of time, grows thinner and scantier, the incidents fewer, and the narratives less circumstantial;—shading off through every degree of twilight into the darkness of night. And such a gradual daybreak we find in Greek history, at and shortly before the first Olympiad ( 776), the point from which the historical Greeks commenced their computation of time. We cannot be far wrong in fixing this as the epoch at which written characters began to be regularly employed by public authority, for the recordation of periodical religious solemnities—always the first events systematically recorded, on account of the fearful religious consequences attaching to any mistake in the proper period their celebration.

But if, beyond the darkness which bounds this early morning of history, we come suddenly into the full glare of day—an island of light in the dark ocean of the unrecorded past, peopled with majestic forms, and glittering with splendid scenery—we may be well assured that the vision is as unreal as Plato’s , and that the traditions and the poems which vouch for its past existence, are the offspring of fancy, not of memory. True history is not thus interrupted in its course; it does not, like the Arcadian rivers, sink into the ground, and, after a long disappearance, rise again at a remote point. Light first, and darkness afterwards, may be the order of invention, but it is seldom that of remembrance.

The elaborate chapter in which Mr. Grote traces the progress of opinion among instructed Greeks, respecting their own legends, is important, not only in reference to the question of credibility, but as a part of the history of the human mind. Originating in a rude age, by which they were naïvely and literally believed, the legends descended into a period of comparative knowledge and culture. With the tone of that later age, or at least of the instructed portion of it, they were no longer in harmony. Several things conspired to produce this divergence. As communications grew more frequent, and travelled men became acquainted with legends for which they had acquired no early reverence, the mutually contradictory character of the stories themselves tended to undermine their authority. The characters and actions ascribed to the gods and heroes, contained much that was repugnant to the altered moral feelings of a more civilized epoch: already Xenophanes, one of the earliest Grecian philosophical inquirers, composed poems to denounce, in the most vehement terms, the stories related of the gods by Hesiod and Homer, “the universal instructor,” as he terms him. But, more than all, the commencement of physical science and intelligent observation of nature, introduced a conception of the universe, and a mode of interpreting its phenomena, in continual conflict with the simplicity of ancient faith: accustoming men to refer to physical causes and natural laws, what were conceived by their ancestors as voluntary interventions of supernatural beings, in wrath or favour to mortals.

This altered tone in the more cultivated part of the Grecian mind, did not, however, proceed to actual disbelief in the legendary religion of the people. Mankind do not pass abruptly from one connected system of thought to another: they first exhaust every contrivance for reconciling the two. To break entirely with the religion of their forefathers, would have been a disruption of old feelings, too painful and difficult for the average strength even of superior minds; and could not have been done openly, without incurring a certainty of the fate which, with all the precautions they adopted, overtook Anaxagoras and Socrates. But even of the philosophers, there were at first very few who carried the spirit of freethinking so far. In general, they were unable to emancipate themselves from the old religious traditions, but were just as little capable of believing them literally. “The result was a new impulse, partaking of both the discordant forces—one of those thousand unconscious compromises between the rational convictions of the mature man, and the indelible illusions of early faith, religious as well as patriotic, which human affairs are so often destined to exhibit.” The legends, in their obvious sense, were no longer credible; but it was necessary to find for them a meaning in which they could be believed. And hence a series of efforts, continued with increasing energy from the first known prose historian, Hecatæus, to the Neoplatonic adversaries of Christianity in the school of Alexandria, to which the nearest parallel is the attempts of Paulus and the German rationalists to explain away the Hebrew Scriptures. Rejected in their obvious interpretation, the narratives were admitted in some other sense, which stripped them of the direct intervention of any deity. They were represented either as ordinary histories, coloured by poetic ornament, or allegories, in which moral instruction, physical knowledge, or esoteric religious doctrines, were designedly wrapt up. The succession of these rationalizing explanations is recounted at length, with great learning and philosophy, by Mr. Grote.

His opinion of the historical system of explanation has been seen in the preceding extracts. Without being more favourable, on the whole, to the allegorical theory, he yet makes a concession to it, with which, if we rightly understand his meaning, we are compelled to disagree. He says, “Though allegorical interpretation occasionally lands us in great absurdities, there are certain cases in which it presents intrinsic evidence of being genuine and correct—i.e. included in the original purport of the story;” and he instances the tale of Ate and the Litæ, in the ninth book of the Iliad, which, he says, no one can doubt, carries with it an intentional moral. Now, it seems to us that this remark allows either too much to allegory, or not enough.

Every reader of the Iliad, even in translation, must be familiar with this fine passage; in which Ate is represented as a gigantic figure, who stalks forth furiously, diffusing ruin; and Litæ, or Prayers, daughters of Zeus or Jupiter, as slowly limping after her to heal the wounds she has made. Now, if the poet did not believe the personal existence of Ate and the Litæ;—if he employed what he knew to be a mere figure of speech, as a means of giving greater impressiveness to a general remark respecting the course of human affairs,—the passage is then rightly termed allegorical. But if, as we conceive, such employment of the language of polytheism in a merely figurative sense, neither existed nor could exist until polytheism was virtually defunct; if the use of religious forms as a simple artifice of rhetoric, would have appeared to Homer (supposing the idea to have presented itself at all) an impious profanation; if the poet, in the full simplicity of his religious faith, accepted literally the personality and divinity of Ate and the Litæ, there is then no place for the word “allegory,” in its correct acceptation. That a moral meaning accompanied in his mind the religious doctrine, and even suggested it, we at once admit: but he personified and deified the moral agencies concerned; and the story, as Müller says of the legend of Prometheus and Epimetheus (Forethought and Afterthought), is not an allegory, but a mythe. Otherwise, we must go much further, and affirm a substratum of allegory in the whole Greek religion; for the majority of its deities, including nearly all the more conspicuous of them, are undoubtedly personifications of either the physical or the moral powers of nature; and, this granted, the attributes ascribed to them would necessarily shadow forth those which observation pointed out in the phenomena over which they were supposed to preside.

The natural history of Polytheism is now well understood. Religion, though ex vi termini preternatural, is yet a theory for the explanation of nature; and generally runs parallel with the progress of human conceptions of that which it is intended to explain; each step made in the study of the phenomena determining a modification in the theory. The savage, drawing his idea of power from his own voluntary impulses, ascribes will and personality to every individual object in which he beholds a power beyond his control; and at once commences propitiating it by prayer and sacrifice. This original Fetishism, towards natural objects which combine great power with a well-marked individuality, was prolonged far into the period of Polytheism proper. The Gaia of Hesiod, mother of all the gods, was not a goddess of the earth, but the earth itself; and her physical are blended with her divine attributes in a singular medley. The sun and moon, not deities residing therein, were the objects of the ancient Grecian worship: their identification with Apollo and Artemis to a much later age. The Hindoos worship as a goddess the river Nerbudda—not a deity of the river, but the river itself; and, if they ascribe to it sex, and other attributes inconsistent with the physical characteristics of the natural object, it is from inability to conceive the idea of personality, except in conjunction with the ordinary human impulses and attributes. The Homeric Scamander is scarcely other than the animated river itself; and the god Alpheus, who pursues Arethusa through the ocean, is the actual river, flowing through the salt waves without mixing with them, and at length combining its waters in indissoluble union with those of the fountain it loves.

But where natural objects are not thus strikingly individualized—where the mind can at once recognise, in a multitude of things, one and the same power of affecting human interests—its tendency is not to deify the objects, but to place a deity over them, who, invisible, rules from a distance a whole class of phenomena. Bread and wine are great and beneficent powers, but the blindest fetish-worshipper never probably offered prayer or sacrifice to an individual loaf or wine-flask, but to an invisible Bacchus or Ceres, whose body, being unseen, is naturally assimilated to the human, and who is thenceforth handed over to the poets to exalt and dignify. Thus the first and most obvious step in the generalization of nature, by arranging objects in classes, is accompanied by a corresponding generalization of the gods. Fire, being a more mysterious as well as a more terrible agent, has, in some religions, been an object of direct worship; but in Homer we find the transition completely effected from the worship of fire to that of the fire-god, . Thunder, the most awful of all, was universally received as the attribute of the most powerful of deities, the ruler of gods and men. As thought advanced, not only all physical agencies capable of ready generalization, as Night, Morning, Sleep, Death, together with the more obvious of the great emotional agencies, Beauty, Love, War, but by degrees also the ideal products of a higher abstraction, as Wisdom, Justice, and the like, were severally accounted the work and manifestation of as many special divinities.

It became, [as Müller expresses it,] a general habit to concentrate every form of spiritual existence, whose unity was recognised, into an apex, which necessarily appeared to the mind as a personal entity. Can it be imagined that Δίκη, θέμις, Μη̑τις, Μου̑σα, Χάρις, Ἥβη, Ἐριννύς, Ἔρις, could have attained a generally believed reality, and even in some measure divine worship, otherwise than through a necessity, grounded on the epoch of mental development, to contemplate in this manner as a unity, not only every aspect of nature, but also of human life? How were it possible to pray to Charis, if she were only viewed as a predicate of human or higher natures? It is even wrong to consider the worship paid by the Romans to Virtus, Felicitas, &c. as allegorical in the strict sense; for then it could be no worship at all.

Assuredly, these objects of worship were not conceived as ideas, but as persons, whose fundamental attributes, however, necessarily ran in close analogy to those of the ideas which they embodied. Such is the primitive type of polytheism—a thing of no human invention, but, in the strictest sense of the word, natural and of spontaneous growth. Afterwards, indeed, poets and priests did invent stories concerning the gods, more or less connected or consistent with their original attributes, which stories became incorporated with religion; and the most popular deities were those concerning whom the most impressive stories had been feigned. But the legends did not make the religion; the basis of that was a bonâ fide personification and divinization of the occult causes of phenomena. In these views we have no reason to think that we at all differ from Mr. Grote; but if there is any point in which his expositions do not quite satisfy us, it is, that they do not bring out strongly enough this part of the case; that the Greek religion appears in them too much as a sort of accident, the arbitrary creation of poets and storytellers; its origin in the natural human faculties and the spontaneous tendencies of the uncultivated intellect, being indicated indeed, but not placed in a sufficiently strong light.

With this exception, we can hardly bestow too much praise on this portion of Mr. Grote’s performance. He has overcome the difficulty, so great to a modern imagination, of entering intelligently into the polytheistic frame of mind and conception of nature. In no treatise which we could mention, certainly in no work connected with Grecian history, do we find so thorough a comprehension of that state of the human intellect in which the directly religious interpretation of nature is paramount—in which every explanation of phenomena, that refers them to the personal agency of a hidden supernatural power, appears natural and probable, and every other mode of accounting for them incredible—where miracles are alone plausible, and explanation by natural causes is not only offensive to the reverential feelings of the hearer, but actually repugnant to his reason, so contrary is it to the habitual mode of interpreting phenomena. A state of mind made perfectly intelligible by our knowledge of the Hindoos; and nowhere better exhibited than in the pictures given by near observers of that curious people, who reproduce in so many respects the mental characteristics of the infancy of the human race.

Though many topics discussed in Mr. Grote’s volumes are more important, there is none more interesting, than the authorship of the Homeric poems; regarded by all antiquity as the production of one great poet (or at most two, for the Iliad and Odyssey), but which the scepticism of a recent period has pronounced to be compilations made as late as the time of Pisistratus, from a multitudinous assemblage of popular ballads. Now, however, that the Wolfian hypothesis seems nearly abandoned in the country in which it arose, the notion that such productions could have been manufactured by piecing and dovetailing a number of short poems originally distinct, may be ranked along with many other conceits of learned ingenuity, in the class of psychological curiosities. We are aware of no argument on the Wolfian side of the controversy which really deserves any weight, except the difficulty of conceiving that such long poems could have been composed and handed down to posterity by memory alone; for that they were produced prior to the use of writing, is certain, from many considerations, and especially from the absence of the smallest allusion to such an art in the whole eight-and-forty books; though so full of notices and descriptions of almost every useful or ornamental process which can be supposed to have been in existence in that early age, that they have been said to be a summary of all the knowledge of the time. The preservation of such works without help from writing, is no doubt, at the first aspect of the matter, surprising; but only because in this, as in so many other things, we antedate our modern experience, and apply to early ages the limited standard of our own. It is well said by Plato in the Phædrus, that the invention of letters was the great enfeebler of memory. In our time, when the habit is formed of recording all things in permanent characters, and when every one relies, not on memory, but on the substitutes for it, we can scarcely form an idea of what its intrinsic powers must have been, when exercised and cultivated as a thing to be solely depended upon. Between the remembering faculties of the Homerids of Chios, and those of our degenerate days, there was doubtless as great a difference, as between the powers of eye and ear of a North American Indian and those of a London citizen. Nor was it, after all, more difficult to retain a single poem of twenty-four books, than twenty-four poems of one book each, which is much less than must have formed the stock in trade of any celebrated ἀοιδὸς. As for the poet himself, he doubtless, as he proceeded in the composition, wrote his poem, as it were, on the memory of the younger bards, by whom it is consonant to the manners of that age that he should have been surrounded.

Those who assert the essential unity of the Homeric poems, by no means deny that there may have been, and probably were, interpolations, and even additions of some length, made either by the same or by other poets, to the original plan. This is the ground taken by Mr. Grote. He rejects the Pisistratean hypothesis. He maintains, from internal evidence, the complete unity of plan and authorship in the Odyssey. He claims a like unity for the greater part of the Iliad; but argues for an amount of subsequent addition to the poem, greater than we can bring ourselves to consider probable. We shall give, in his own words, what is peculiar to his theory.

The first book, together with the eighth, and the books from the eleventh to the twenty-second inclusive, seem to form the primary organization of the poem, then properly an Achilleis: the twenty-third and twenty-fourth books are additions at the tail of this primitive poem, which still leave it nothing more than an enlarged Achilleis: but the books from the second to the seventh inclusive, together with the tenth, are of a wider and more comprehensive character, and convert the poem from an Achilleis into an Iliad. The primitive frontispiece, inscribed with the anger of Achilles and its direct consequences, yet remains, after it has ceased to be co-extensive with the poem. The parts added, however, are not necessarily inferior in merit to the original poem; so far is this from being the case, that amongst them are comprehended some of the noblest efforts of the Grecian epic. Nor are they more recent in date than the original; strictly speaking, they must be a little more recent, but they belong to the same generation and state of society as the primitive Achilleis.

Nothing can be more striking than the manner in which Homer concentrates our attention, in the first book, upon Achilles as the hero, his quarrel with Agamemnon, and the calamities of the Greeks, which are held out as about to ensue from it, through the intercession of Thetis with Zeus. But the incidents dwelt upon from the beginning of the second book down to the combat between Hector and Ajax in the seventh, animated and interesting as they are, do nothing to realize this promise; they are a splendid picture of the Trojan War generally, and eminently suitable to that larger title under which the poem has been immortalized; but the consequences of the anger of Achilles do not appear until the eighth book. The tenth book, or Doloneia, is also a portion of the Iliad, but not of the Achilleis; while the ninth book appears to be a subsequent addition (I venture to say, an unworthy addition), nowise harmonizing with that main stream of the Achilleis, which flows from the eleventh book to the twenty-second. The eighth book ought to be read in immediate connexion with the eleventh, in order to see the structure of what seems the primitive Achilleis; for there are several passages in the eleventh and the following books, which prove that the poet who composed them could not have had present to his mind the main event of the ninth book—the outpouring of profound humiliation by the Greeks, and from Agamemnon especially, before Achilles, coupled with formal offers to restore Briseïs, and pay the amplest compensation for past wrong. The words of Achilles (not less than those of Patroclus and Nestor) in the eleventh and following books, plainly imply that the humiliation of the Greeks before him, for which he thirsts, is as yet future and contingent; that no plenary apology has yet been tendered, nor any offer made of restoring Briseïs, while both Nestor and Patroclus, with all their wish to induce him to take arms, nevertheless view him as one whose ground of quarrel stands still the same as it did at the beginning. Moreover, if we look at the first book—the opening of the Achilleis—we shall see that this prostration of Agamemnon and the chief Grecian heroes before Achilles, would really be the termination of the whole poem; for Achilles asks nothing more from Thetis, nor Thetis anything more from Zeus, than that Agamemnon and the Greeks may be brought to know the wrong that they have done to their capital warrior, and humbled to the dust in expiation of it. We may add, that the abject terror in which Agamemnon appears in the ninth book, when he sends the supplicatory message to Achilles, as it is not adequately accounted for by the degree of calamity which the Greeks have experienced in the preceding (eighth) book, so it is inconsistent with the gallantry and high spirit with which he strives at the beginning of the eleventh. The situation of the Greeks only becomes desperate when the three great chiefs, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Diomedes, are disabled by wounds; this is the irreparable calamity which works upon Patroclus, and through him upon Achilles. The ninth book, as it now stands, seems to me an addition by a different hand to the original Achilleis, framed so as both to forestal and spoil the nineteenth book, which is the real reconciliation of the two inimical heroes. I will venture to add, that it carries the ferocious pride and egotism of Achilles beyond all admissible limits, and is shocking to that sentiment of Nemesis which was so deeply seated in the Grecian mind. We forgive any excess and fury against the Trojans and Hector after the death of Patroclus, but that he should remain unmoved by restitution, by abject supplications, and by the richest atoning presents tendered from the Greeks, indicates an implacability more than human, and certainly such as neither the poet of the first book, nor the poet of the last twelve books, seeks to portray.

(Vol. II, pp. 235-6, 238-45.)

We are able to go so far with the distinction drawn by Mr. Grote, as to admit that he has discriminated well between those parts of the Iliad which have been additions to the original plan, and those which possibly may. If the poem does consist of an original basis and a subsequent enlargement, the books which he has pointed out, or some of them, must be the parts superadded. But that they, or even the ninth, to which he takes such vehement exception, really were such subsequent additions , he has not succeeded in convincing us.

It is true, the books from the second to the seventh inclusive, in no way forward the action of the poem, as dependent on the anger of Achilles: and it is remarkable that, during that interval, Zeus not only suspends the performance of his promise to Thetis in the first book, but seems absolutely to have forgotten it, and directs his conduct and counsels by totally different considerations. This last is a serious blemish in the construction of the story; but imperfection of workmanship does not prove plurality of workmen; and if the poet intended to make his poem an Ilias as well as an Achilleis, there would have been in any case a difficulty of this sort to surmount, which it is not necessary to suppose that he must have surmounted successfully. But, if not strictly belonging to the plan of the Achilleis, these books conduce in a remarkable degree to the effect of those parts of the poem which do belong to it. In no epic is the interest centred exclusively in one individual; even in the Achilleis, not Achilles only, but the Greeks generally, and even the Trojans, inspire a keen sympathy; and how much that sympathy is promoted by the preliminary books, needs hardly be pointed out. Not only does the success of the Greeks in the fourth and fifth books greatly deepen the sense of their subsequent disaster, by giving it the character of a turn of fortune; while the exploits of the principal heroes, especially Diomedes and Ulysses, augment the impression of their difficulties when those heroes are disabled; but, above all, it is in those books that we become acquainted with, and interested in, most of the leading characters of the subsequent epos. Hector especially, on whom the poet evidently intended that a strong personal interest should rest—what ground should we have had for sympathising with him, were it not for the beautiful scenes with Paris and Helen in the fourth book, Andromache and Hecuba in the sixth, and Ajax in the seventh? Without the books which Mr. Grote strikes from the original plan, there would be, if we except the amiable characters of Patroclus and Sarpedon, scarcely anything in the poem which excites a really personal interest.

With regard to the ninth book, we allow there are difficulties. The principal is the speech of Achilles to Patroclus in the eleventh book, which certainly seems to imply that no atonement had yet been offered, or supplication made. Mr. Grote quotes several other passages, which apparently carry a similar implication; but none which, we think, it would be difficult to get over, if this were disposed of. On the other hand, there are difficulties in his own theory. He gets rid of three subsequent allusions to the transactions of the ninth book, by pronouncing them to be interpolations; but he has overlooked one of greater importance in the sixteenth, where Achilles says to Patroclus, that the time has come at which he had said that his revenge would cease, since the enemy has now reached the ships. He had said this nowhere, as the text now stands, except in his answer to the embassy. If it be suggested that this passage may also be an interpolation, we shall still urge that it is not consonant to the character of Achilles, to suppose that he would have so far renounced his anger as to send aid to the Greeks even in that extremity, if he had received no offer whatever of atonement or restitution;—if Agamemnon and the Greeks had not yet acknowledged their fault, and humbled themselves before him. With respect to the argument from the more than human ferocity manifested by Achilles, and its conflict with the Greek sentiment of Nemesis, we cannot see the matter in the same light. It is with great hesitation that we should question any opinion of Mr. Grote on a point of Greek erudition; but we know not what evidence he has that the peculiar Greek idea of Nemesis—manifested in the famous speech of Solon to Crœsus, and which afterwards acted so leading a part in the Athenian drama—had already begun to exist in the Homeric age. We rather believe it to have been one of the points of difference between the more solemn and gloomy theology of the historic age of Greece, and the lively anthropomorphism of the Homeric Pantheon. We find no traces of it in Homer or Hesiod. We find, indeed, severe vengeance taken on mortals by the Homeric deities, not for pride or arrogance generally, but for some special affront to their own dignity; and particularly for any presumptuous attempt to dispute their pre-eminence. It is on such provocation that Thamyris is struck blind by the Muses, and the children of Niobe destroyed by the arrows of Apollo and Artemis. But no such offence is offered by Achilles in the ninth book; nor any disobedience to the divine powers. No god goddess had commanded him to lay aside his wrath, as Pallas, in the first book, restrains him from drawing his sword, and Zeus, in the twenty-fourth, enjoins him, through Thetis, to restore the body of Hector. To these intimations he is at once obedient, and is represented throughout as an eminently pious hero. Nor are we at all inclined to admit that his implacability exceeds what the sentiment of that age would allow of, in a character of vehement passion. He is not intended for a faultless hero; nor does he show any ferocity in the ninth book, at all comparable to that which he displays in the sixteenth; where, in the very act of sending forth Patroclus to aid the Greeks, he utters a fervent wish that not one Greek or Trojan might be left alive, but they two might alone survive to conquer Troy. Nor can we forget that several of the nobler characteristics of Achilles are nowhere so effectually manifested as in the ninth book; the princely courtesy, rivalling the best conceptions of chivalrous romance, in his reception of the embassy; and that abhorrence of disguise, also more resembling the knightly than the model, but so necessary to the ideal of his character, which he emphatically announces in the lines so often quoted:

Ἐχθρὸς γάρ μοι κει̑νος, ὁμω̑ς ἀΐδαο πύλησιν,

Ὅς χ’ ἕτερον μὲν κεύθει ἐνὶ ϕρεσίν, ἅλλο δε βάζει.

With regard to the tenth book, we think there is weight in what the critics have urged, that the successful nocturnal enterprise of Diomed and Ulysses is skilfully interposed, not only to break the rapid succession of one battle upon another, but to reanimate the spirits and courage of the Greeks after the disasters of the eighth book. We cannot coincide in Mr. Grote’s unwillingness to believe “that the author of the fifth book (or Aristeia of Diomedes) would condescend to employ the hero whom he there so brightly glorifies—the victor even over Ares himself—in slaughtering newly-arrived Thracian sleepers, without any large purpose or necessity;” since to kill men who were defenceless, provided they were enemies, and not ἱκέται or suppliants, had little that was repugnant to Greek feeling, even in a more advanced age; while an ambush is invariably spoken of in the Iliad as the most dangerous service, and the most decisive test of courage to which a warrior could be exposed. An Homeric audience would see, in this unchivalrous massacre, only the real intrepidity of the two heroes, in venturing alone, and for so perilous a purpose, into the camp of their sleeping enemies; and, in the Homeric point of view, it was doubtless an exploit worthy of the most distinguished warriors.

That Mr. Grote should think it possible for the two concluding books to be additions, we confess surprises us. We cannot imagine how, with the ideas of the Greeks, both in the Homeric age and subsequently, respecting the rites of sepulture, the action of a Greek epos could ever have been complete until the two heroes, whose successive deaths formed the catastrophe of the poem, had received the accustomed funeral honours. Nor would a Greek audience, we think, have tolerated that Hector, the beloved of Zeus, whose death he so unwillingly concedes to Destiny and the public opinion of Olympus, should have been abandoned by him when dead to the ignominious fate designed, and in part executed, by Achilles. We need not point out how much the character of Achilles himself would lose of its interest, without the exquisite manner in which its softer elements are called forth by the interview with though it may be true that “the Homeric man would enter fully into the thirst of revenge felt by Achilles,” excessive and brutal as that revenge was, it is assuming too much to suppose that the Homeric man would have sympathized with Achilles exclusively. Such, certainly, was not Homer’s purpose, as there are evidences enough even in the Achilleis to prove.

The chapter on the “State of Society and Manners as exhibited in Grecian legend,” is sound and judicious; but on this subject previous writers had not left so much to be performed. A point of originality in Mr. Grote’s treatment of it is the comparison kept up between the characteristics of the heroic and those of the historical period. Thus, for example, the sense of obligation in the Homeric period is exclusively of a personal kind: “Personal feelings, either towards the gods, the king, or some near and known individual, fill the whole of a man’s bosom; out of them arise all the motives to beneficence, and all the internal restraints upon violence, antipathy, and rapacity; and special communion, as well as special solemnities, are essential to their existence;” while, in the conceptions of the citizen of historical Athens, “the great impersonal authority called The Laws, stood out separately both as guide and sanction, distinct from religious duty or private sympathies.” In the Council of Chiefs, and the Agora or Popular Assembly, which, though with no definite function or authority, habitually accompany the Homeric kings, Mr. Grote sees the pre-existing elements of the subsequent republican governments. The following is an important remark:

There is yet another point of view in which it behoves us to take notice of the Council and the Agora as integral portions of the legendary government of the Grecian communities. We are thus enabled to trace the employment of public speaking as the standing engine of government and the proximate cause of obedience, to the social infancy of the nation. The power of speech in the direction of public affairs becomes more and more obvious, developed, and irresistible, as we advance towards the culminating period of Grecian history—the century preceding the battle of Chæroneia. That its development was greatest among the most enlightened sections of the Grecian name, and smallest among the more obtuse and stationary, is matter of notorious fact; and it is not less true, that the prevalence of this habit was one of the chief causes of the intellectual eminence of the nation generally. At a time when all the countries around were plunged comparatively in mental torpor, there was no motive sufficiently present and powerful to multiply so wonderfully the productive minds of Greece, except such as arose from the rewards of public speaking. The susceptibility of the multitude to this sort of guidance, their habit of requiring and enjoying the stimulus which it supplied, and the open discussion, combining regular forms with free opposition, of practical matters, political as well as judicial, are the creative causes which formed such conspicuous adepts in the art of persuasion. Nor was it only professed orators who were thus produced. Didactic aptitude was formed in the background, and the speculative tendencies were supplied with interesting phenomena for observation and combination, at a time when the truths of physical science were almost inaccessible. If the primary effect was to quicken the powers of expression, the secondary, but not less certain result, was to develope the habits of scientific thought. Not only the oratory of Demosthenes and Pericles, and the colloquial magic of Socrates, but also the philosophical speculations of Plato, and the systematic politics, rhetoric, and logic of Aristotle, are traceable to the same general tendencies in the minds of the Grecian people; and we find the germ of these expansive forces in the senate and agora of their legendary government.

(Vol. II, pp. 104-6.)

Incidental remarks of this nature, on the influence of circumstances in forming the peculiar Grecian character and civilization, occur largely in the first two chapters on historical Greece, viz. on its geography, and on “the Hellenic people generally in the early historical times.” Mr. Grote does not give these speculations for more than they are worth. He does not affect to exhaust the subject, nor pretends that the causes he assigns account for the whole of the effect; but points out the natural tendencies of each influential fact, as it successively passes under his review. The following is a favourable specimen:

The configuration of the Grecian territory, so like in many respects to that of Switzerland, produced two effects of great moment upon the character and history of the people. In the first place, it materially strengthened their powers of defence; it shut up the country against those invasions from the interior which successively subjugated all their continental colonies; and it at the same time rendered each fraction more difficult to be attacked by the rest, so as to exercise a certain conservative influence in assuring the tenure of actual possessors. But, in the next place, while it tended to protect each section of Greeks from being conquered, it also kept them politically disunited, and perpetuated their separate autonomy. It fostered that powerful principle of repulsion, which disposed even the smallest township to constitute itself a political unit apart from the rest, and to resist all idea of coalescence with others, either amicable or compulsory. To a modern reader, accustomed to large political aggregations, and securities for good government through the representative system, it requires a certain mental effort to transport himself back to a time when even the smallest town clung so tenaciously to its right of self-legislation. Nevertheless, such was the general habit and feeling of the ancient world, throughout Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul: among the Hellenes it stands out more conspicuously, for several reasons—first, because they seem to have pushed the multiplication of autonomous units to an extreme point, seeing that even islands not larger than Peparethos and Amorgos had two or three separate city communities; secondly, because they produced, for the first time in the history of mankind, acute systematic thinkers on matters of government, amongst all of whom the idea of the autonomous city was accepted as the indispensable basis of political speculation; thirdly, because this incurable subdivision proved finally the cause of their ruin, in spite of pronounced intellectual superiority over their conquerors; and, lastly, because incapacity of political coalescence did not preclude a powerful and extensive sympathy between the inhabitants of all the separate cities, with a constant tendency to fraternise for numerous purposes, social, religious, recreative, intellectual, and æsthetical. . . .

Nor is it rash to suppose that the same [geographical] causes may have tended to promote that unborrowed intellectual development for which they stand so conspicuous. General propositions respecting the working of climate and physical agencies upon character are indeed treacherous; for our knowledge of the globe is now sufficient to teach us that heat and cold, mountain and plain, sea and land, moist and dry atmosphere, are all consistent with the greatest diversities of resident men. . . . Nevertheless, we may venture to note certain improving influences, connected with their geographical position, at a time when they had no books to study, and no more advanced predecessors to imitate. We may remark, first, that their position made them at once mountaineers and mariners, thus supplying them with great variety of objects, sensations, and adventures; next, that each petty community, nestled apart amidst its own rocks, was sufficiently severed from the rest to possess an individual life and attributes of its own, yet not so far as to subtract it from the sympathies of the remainder; so that an observant Greek, commercing with a great diversity of half-countrymen, whose language he understood, and whose idiosyncracies he could appreciate, had access to a larger mass of social and political experience than any other man in so unadvanced an age could personally obtain. The Phœnician, superior to the Greek on ship-board, traversed wider distances and saw a greater number of strangers, but he had not the same means of intimate communion with a multiplicity of fellows in blood and language: his relations, confined to purchase and sale, did not comprise that mutuality of action and reaction which pervaded the crowd at a Grecian festival. The scene which here presented itself was a mixture of uniformity and variety highly stimulating to the observant faculties of a man of genius,—who at the same time, if he sought to communicate his own impressions, or to act upon this mingled and diverse audience, was forced to shake off what was peculiar to his own town or community, and to put forth matter in harmony with the feelings of all.

(Vol. II, pp. 298-301.)

In the six concluding chapters of the second volume, Mr. Grote comprises the sum of what is known respecting the early condition of those Grecian States which have properly no history prior to the Persian invasion; and brings down the history of to the age of Crœsus and Pisistratus. The fragmentary nature of the information, and the conscientious integrity of the author, who scruples to supply the deficiency of certified facts by theory and conjecture, render these chapters, with one exception, somewhat meagre. The exception is the chapter which treats of the Legislation of Lycurgus, the earliest Grecian event of first-rate historical importance.

Although of the personality of Lycurgus scarcely anything can be said to be known, Mr. Grote entertains no doubt that such a person existed, and that the peculiar Spartan institutions were the work of a single legislator. Indeed, extraordinary as it may seem that one man, or even a combination of men, should have had power not merely to introduce, for that is little, but to give enduring vitality to so singular a system of manners and institutions, the system itself is so intensely artificial, that any more commonplace origin would be still more improbable; it bespeaks in every part systematic design.

The received view, however, of the Lycurgean reforms, and even of the Spartan institutions, Mr. Grote shows to be, in one important point, erroneous; the supposed equal division of landed property. He rejects this, not on the score of improbability, for it is not in itself so hard to believe as what Lycurgus really effected; but because no mention of it is to be found in any Greek author who lived while the Lycurgean institutions were still in force; and there is ample proof that neither Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Isocrates, Plato, nor Aristotle knew of any such equal division, either as connected with Lycurgus or with Sparta. It rests on the sole testimony of Plutarch; and Mr. Grote believes it to have been an historic fancy, generated long after by the regrets and aspirations of the patriotic party of which the reforming kings, Agis and Cleomenes, were at the head.

Taking the condition of the city as it stood in the time of Agis III (say about 250 ), we know that its citizens had become few in number, the bulk of them miserably poor, and all the land in a small number of hands—the old discipline and the public mess (as far as the rich were concerned) degenerated into mere forms—a numerous body of strangers or non-citizens (the old xenêlasy, or prohibition of resident strangers, being long discontinued) domiciled in the town, and forming a powerful moneyed interest; and lastly, the dignity and ascendancy of the state amongst its neighbours altogether ruined. It was insupportable to a young enthusiast like king Agis, and to many ardent spirits among his contemporaries, to contrast this degradation with the previous glories of the country; and they saw no other way of reconstructing the old Sparta except by again admitting the disfranchised poor citizens, redividing the lands, cancelling all debts, and restoring the public mess and military training in all their strictness. Agis endeavoured to carry through these subversive measures, (such as no demagogue in the extreme democracy of Athens would ever have ventured to glance at,) with the consent of the senate and public assembly, and the acquiescence of the rich. His sincerity is attested by the fact, that his own property, and that of his female relatives, among the largest in the state, was cast as the first sacrifice into the common stock. But he became the dupe of unprincipled coadjutors, and perished in the unavailing attempt to realize his scheme by persuasion. His successor Kleomenês afterwards accomplished by violence a change substantially similar, though the intervention of foreign arms speedily overthrew both himself and his institutions.

Now it was under the state of public opinion which gave birth to these projects of Agis and Kleomenês at Sparta, that the historic fancy, unknown to Aristotle and his predecessors, first gained ground, of the absolute equality of property as a primitive institution of Lycurgus. How much such a belief would favour the schemes of innovation, is too obvious to require notice; and, without supposing any deliberate imposture, we cannot be astonished that the predispositions of enthusiastic patriots interpreted according to their own partialities an old unrecorded legislation from which they were separated by more than five centuries. The Lycurgean discipline tended forcibly to suggest to men’s minds the idea of equality among the citizens,—that is, the negation of inequality not founded on some personal attribute—inasmuch as it assimilated the habits, enjoyments, and capacities of the rich to those of the poor; and the equality thus existing in idea and tendency, which seemed to proclaim the wish of the founder, was strained by the later reformers into a positive institution which he had at first realized, but from which his degenerate followers had receded. . . . We shall readily believe that [this hypothesis] would find easy and sincere credence, when we recollect how many similar delusions have obtained vogue in modern times far more favourable to historical accuracy—how much false colouring has been attached by the political feeling of recent days to matters of ancient history, such as the Saxon Wittenagemote, the Great Charter, the rise and growth of the English House of Commons, or even the Poor-law of Elizabeth.

(Vol. II, pp. 527-30.)

The peculiarity of Sparta was not equality of fortunes, but a consistent attempt to make rich and poor live exactly alike; and live not for themselves, but as the creatures and instruments of the ideal being called the State. The expedient used by the legislator to effect this, was to destroy, not private property itself, but the possibility of any separate enjoyment of it. By a stated contribution in kind from every citizen, public tables were maintained, at which all Spartans, from childhood to death, took regularly the same frugal meal. The Spartan citizen

lived habitually in public, always either himself under drill, gymnastic and military, or a critic and spectator of others—always under the fetters and observances of a rule partly military, partly monastic, estranged from the independence of a separate home, seeing his wife during the first years after marriage, only by stealth, and maintaining little peculiar relation with his children. The surveillance not only of his fellow citizens, but also of authorised censors or captains nominated by the state, was perpetually acting upon him; his day was passed in public exercises and meals, his night in the public barrack to which he belonged. . . .

The parallel of the Lycurgean institutions is to be found in the Republic of Plato, who approves the Spartan principle of select guardians, carefully trained and administering the community at discretion; with this momentous difference indeed, that the Spartan character formed by Lycurgus is of a low type, rendered savage and fierce by exclusive and overdone bodily discipline, destitute even of the elements of letters, immersed in their own narrow , and taught to despise all that lay beyond, possessing all the qualities requisite to procure dominion, but none of those calculated to render dominion popular or salutary to the subject; while the habits and attributes of the guardians, as shadowed forth by Plato, are enlarged as well as philanthropic, qualifying them not simply to govern, but to govern for purposes protective, conciliatory, and exalted. Both Plato and Aristotle conceived as the perfection of society something of the Spartan type, a select body of equally privileged citizens, disengaged from industrious pursuits, and subjected to public and uniform training; both admit (with Lycurgus) that the citizen belongs neither to himself, nor to his family, but to his city; both at the same time note with regret, that the Spartan training was turned only to one portion of human virtue, that which is called forth in a state of war; the citizens were converted into a sort of garrison, always under drill, and always ready to be called forth either against Helots at home, or against enemies abroad. . . . When we contemplate the general insecurity of Grecian life in the ninth or eighth century before the Christian era, and especially the precarious condition of a small band of Dorian conquerors in Sparta and its district, with subdued Helots on their own lands, and Achæans unsubdued all around them . . . the exclusive aim which Lycurgus proposed to himself is easily understood; but what is truly surprising is the violence of his means, and the success of the result. He realised his project of creating in the 8000 or 9000 Spartan citizens unrivalled habits of obedience, hardihood, self-denial, and military aptitude—complete subjection on the part of each individual to the local public opinion, and preference of death to the abandonment of Spartan maxims—intense ambition on the part of every one to distinguish himself within the prescribed sphere of duties, with little ambition for anything else. In what manner so rigorous a system of individual training can have been first brought to bear upon any community, mastering the course of the thoughts and actions from boyhood to old age—a work far more difficult than any political revolution—we are not permitted to discover; nor does even the influence of an earnest and energetic Herakleid man, seconded by the still more powerful working of the Delphian god behind, upon the strong pious susceptibilities of the Spartan mind, sufficiently explain a phenomenon so remarkable in the history of mankind, unless we suppose them aided by some combination of co-operating circumstances which history has not transmitted to us, and preceded by disorders so exaggerated as to render the citizens glad to escape from them at any price.

(Vol. II, pp. 505, 516-19.)

There is indeed no such instance of the wonderful pliability, and amenability to artificial discipline, of the human mind, as is afforded by the complete success of the Lacedæmonian legislator, for many generations, in making the whole body of Spartan citizen at Sparta exactly what he had intended to make them. At Sparta, it must be said; for a Spartan out of Sparta, at least during his country’s ascendancy, was not only the most domineering and arrogant, but in spite of, or rather by a natural reaction from his ascetic training, the most rapacious and corrupt of all Greeks: no one fell so easy a victim to the temptations of luxury and splendour. Yet such habitual abnegation of ordinary personal interests, and merging of self in an idea, were not compatible with pettiness of mind. Most of the anecdotes and recorded sayings of individual Lacedæmonians breathe a certain magnanimity of spirit; although the Lacedæmonian State, which was the object of this worship, and was accustomed not to give but to receive sacrifices, was memorable for the peculiar pettiness of its political conduct—a selfishness so excessive, as, by the blindness and even the un-Spartan cowardice which it engendered, perpetually to frustrate its own ends.

Such were the Spartans; those hereditary Tories and Conservatives of Greece; objects of exaggerated admiration to the moralists and philosophers of the far nobler as well as greater and wiser Athens; because the second-rate superior minds of a cultivated age and nation are usually in exaggerated opposition against its spirit; and lean towards the faults contrary to those against which they are daily contending. To men who felt called upon to stand up for Law against Will, and for traditional wisdom against the subtleties of sophists and the arts of rhetoricians, Sparta was the standing model of reverence for law, and attachment to ancient maxims. The revolutions which incessantly menaced every other Grecian state, and from which even Athens was not wholly secure, never threatened Sparta. The steadiness of the Spartan polity, and the constancy of Spartan maxims, were to the Greeks highly imposing phenomena. “It was the only government in Greece which could trace an unbroken peaceable descent from a high antiquity, and from its real or supposed founder;” and this, we think with Mr. Grote, was one of the main causes

of the astonishing ascendancy which the Spartans acquired over the Hellenic mind, and which they will not be found at all to deserve by any superior ability in the conduct of affairs. The steadiness of their political sympathies—exhibited at one time by putting down the tyrants or despots, at another by overthrowing the democracies—stood in the place of ability; and even the recognised failings of their government were often covered by the sentiment of respect for its early commencement and uninterrupted continuance.

(Vol. II, p. 477.)

The reader who is conversant with the existing state of knowledge respecting the Grecian world, will gather from what has been laid before him, that as a contribution to that knowledge, the present work is of high performance and still higher promise. The author is not surpassed even by German scholarship, in intimate and accurate acquaintance with the whole field of Greek literature and antiquity; while none of his predecessors have approached to him in the amount of philosophy and general mental accomplishment which he has brought to bear upon the subject.

It has been made an objection to the volumes now published, that they contain a greater amount of dissertation than of history. To such objectors it may be replied, that for the times here treated of, a continuous stream of narrative is not possible; that those who desire nothing from history but an amusing story, may find such abundantly provided elsewhere; that it is as much an historian’s duty to judge as to narrate, to prove as to assert; and that the same critics would be the first to reproach a writer who should substitute for the commonly received view of the facts a view of his own, without showing by what evidence he was prepared to substantiate it. There is in this case, too, the further peculiarity, that what is brought forward as matter of evidence, is itself almost always part and parcel of the exposition of the Greek mind; and on this score alone, no one who wishes to understand what Greece was, would desire to see one page of Mr. Grote’s argumentative chapters expunged.

In the present volumes the style is clear, unaffected, and often very apt and vigorous. If we have a complaint to make, it would be of the too frequent employment of words of Greek or Latin origin; some of them recognised English words, though not in common use, but others purely of his own invention, and unintelligible except to scholars. In some cases, doubtless, the words are needed, and carry their explanation along with them: such a word as “autonomous,” conveying a political idea not exactly expressed by any modern word or phrase, is its own sufficient justification; and the same may be said of “gens,” a word borrowed from Roman history, to express a combination of religious and political ideas familiar to antiquity, and the same, substantially, which Niebuhr has proved that the term denoted at Rome. But many cases would be found in a careful revisal of these volumes, in which similar hard words are used to convey a meaning which might be perfectly expressed by phrases generally intelligible.

GROTE’S HISTORY OF GREECE [II]

1853

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, II (1867), 510-54, where under the title, “Grote’s History of Greece,” appears “Vols. IX. X. XI.” Reprinted from Edinburgh Review, XCVIII (Oct., 1853), 425-47, where it is headed “Art. V.—History of Greece. By George Grote, Esq. Vols. ix, x, xi. London: [Murray,] 1852-53”; running heads “Grote’s History of Greece, Vols. IX. X. XI.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of vols. 9, 10 & 11 of Grote’s History of Greece, in the Edinburgh Review for October 1853” (MacMinn, 79). There are no corrections or alterations in the copy of the Edinburgh article in the Somerville College Library.

In the footnoted variants, “59” indicates D&D, II (1st ed.); “67” indicates D&D, II (2nd ed., the copy-text); “53” indicates Edinburgh Review. JSM quotes in several places from his earlier Spectator reviews of Grote’s History, and elsewhere paraphrases passages from those reviews. The relevant passages are indicated as variants, with the particular issue of the Spectator given in the note covering the whole passage; in the variants within quoted passages “S” indicates the Spectator, without date. For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xxxiii-xxxvii and lxxxvi-lxxxix above.

Grote’s History of Greece [II]

in his eighth volume, Mr. Grote brought the narrative of Grecian History to its great turning point—the subjugation of Athens by the Spartans and their confederates; including, as the immediate sequel of that event, the sanguinary tyranny of the Thirty—the rapid reaction in Grecian feeling—the return of the exiles under Thrasybulus, subsequently known at Athens by the designation of “those from Phyle” or “those from Piræus”—the restoration of Athens, under the tolerance of Sparta, to internal freedom though denuded of empire, and the inauguration of a new era of concord by the healing measures which made the archonship of Euclides memorable to succeeding generations. The recital of these stirring events was immediately followed by those admirable chapters on the Sophists and on Socrates, which may be pronounced the most important portion yet written of this History; whether we consider the intrinsic interest of their subjects—the deep-rooted historical errors which they tend to dispel—or the great permanent instruction contained in their display of the characteristics of one of the most eminent men who ever lived—a man unique in history, of a kind at all times needful, and seldom more needed than now.

The three volumes which we have here to notice contain no delineations belonging to the same elevated rank with that which closed so impressively the volume immediately preceding. The exposition and estimate of Plato, which alone would have afforded similar opportunities, though falling within the chronological period comprised in the eleventh volume, is not included in it, but reserved for one yet to come; except in so far as the philosopher is personally involved in the series of Sicilian transactions, through his connexion with Dion, whose remarkable and eminently tragic character and career form the centre of interest in the most striking chapter of these volumes. There is little scope in this portion of the work for bringing prominently forward any great ethical or philosophical ideas; and the illustrations it contains of Grecian character and institutions relate principally to points which the author had largely illustrated before. In no other part of the book is the continuity of the narrative so little broken by dissertation or discussion; but in the rapid succession of animating incidents, and the living display of interesting individual characters, these volumes are not inferior to any of the preceding.

They commence with the expedition of Cyrus, and the retreat of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand: an episode fertile in exemplifications of Grecian and of Asiatic characteristics, and especially valuable as being the only detailed account of the personal adventures of any body of Greeks, or even of any individual Greek, which has been directly transmitted to us by an eye-witness and actor. Next follows the history of the short-lived Lacedæmonian ascendancy; its deplorable abuse, and the conspicuous Nemesis which fell on that selfish and domineering community, by the irreparable prostration of her power through the arms of Thebes, so many years the firm ally of Sparta, and for her treacherous conduct to whom, even more than for any other of her misdeeds, she, in the general opinion of Greece, deserved her fate. The chapters which describe this contest, relate also the resurrection of Athens, and her reattainment, in diminished measure and for a brief period, of something like imperial dignity. At this halting-place Mr. Grote suspends the main course of his narrative, and takes up the thread of the history of the Sicilian Greeks; the most interesting part of whose story is included in the present volumes. He illustrates, by the conduct and fortunes of the elder Dionysius, the successive stages of the “despot’s progress.” Here, too, the avenging Nemesis attends; but, as usual with the misdeeds of rulers, the punishment is vicarious. The younger Dionysius, a weak and self-indulgent, but good-natured and rather well-meaning inheritor of despotic power, suffered the penalty of the usurpation and the multiplied tyrannies of his energetic and unscrupulous father. The decline and fall of the Dionysian dynasty, and the restoration of Sicilian freedom, are related by Mr. Grote in his best style of ethical narrative, and with a biographical interest equal to the historical. For, as the chapters on the fall of Sparta are animated and exalted by the great qualities of Epaminondas—the first of Greeks in military genius, surpassed only by Pericles in comprehensive statesmanship, yet even more honourably distinguished among Grecian politicians by the unostentatious disinterestedness of his public virtue, and the gentleness and generosity of his sentiments towards opponents; so the Sicilian chapters are lighted up, first by the high-minded but chequered, and even in his errors eminently interesting, character of Dion, and afterwards by the steadier and more unmixed brilliancy of the real liberator of Sicily, the wise, just, and heroic Timoleon.

Last comes that gloomy period of Grecian history, the age of Philip of Macedon: during which, enfeebled by the long and destructive wars which had successively prostrated every one of her leading states, Greece fell a prey to an able and enterprising neighbour, who, at the head of a numerous population of hardy warriors implicitly obedient to his will, was enabled to turn her own military arts and discipline against herself. At the time when Philip commenced his career of aggrandisement, the only Grecian state in a condition to meet him with anything like equality of strength was Athens; still free and prosperous, but so lowered in public spirit and moral energy, that she threw away all her opportunities, and only rallied with a vigour worthy of her ancestors when it was too late to do more than perish honourably. These sad events, so far as their course can be traced through the extreme imperfection of our information, are related by Mr. Grote down to the fatal day of Chæroneia. And neither is this melancholy recital destitute of the relief afforded by the appearance on the scene of an illustrious character. Even in that age Athens possessed a man, of whom posterity has ratified the proud boast, drawn from him in self-vindication, that if there had been one such man in every state of Greece, or even in Thessaly and Arcadia , the attempts of Philip to reduce the Greeks to subjugation would have been frustrated. What one man, of boundless energy, far-reaching political vision, and an eloquence unmatched even at Athens, could do to save Greece from an inevitable doom, Demosthenes did. His life was an incessant struggle against the fatality of the time, and the weaknesses of his countrymen. And though he failed in his object, and perished with the last breath of the freedom for which he had lived, he has been rewarded by that immortal fame, which, as he reminded the Athenians in the most celebrated passage of his greatest oration, is not deserved only by the successful; and which he merited not more by his unequalled oratorical eminence, than by the fact, that not one mean, or selfish, or narrow, or ungenerous sentiment is appealed to throughout those splendid addresses, in which he strove to rouse and nerve his countrymen to the contest, or proudly mourned over its unsuccessful issue.

The Chæroneian catastrophe closes the epoch of Grecian history. Though much that is highly interesting remains, its interest is derived from other sources; the diffusion of Greek civilization through the Eastern nations by the expedition of Alexander and its consequences, and a few noble but vain efforts, against insuperable obstacles, in Greece itself, to regain a freedom and national independence irrecoverably lost. Of the period of Grecian greatness, we have now from Mr. Grote the completed history. We have the budding, the blossoming, and the decay and death. The fruits which survived—the permanent gifts bequeathed by Greece to the world, and constituting the foundation of all subsequent intellectual achievements—these he has not yet, or has only partially, characterised. But he has produced a finished picture of the political and collective life of Greece, and the distinctive characters of the form of social existence, during and by means of which she accomplished things so far transcending what has ever elsewhere been achieved in so marvellously short a space of time. From the legislation of Solon to the field of Marathon, a hundred years of preparation; from Marathon to Chæroneia, barely a hundred and fifty years of maturity:—that century and a half is all that separates the earliest recorded prose writing from Demosthenes and Aristotle, all that lies between the first indication to the outer world of what Greece was destined to be, and her absorption by a foreign conqueror. A momentous interval, which decided for an indefinite period the question, whether the human race was to be stationary or progressive. That the former condition is far more congenial to ordinary human nature than the latter, experience unfortunately places beyond doubt; and history points out no other people in the ancient world who had any spring of unborrowed progress within themselves. We have no knowledge of any other source from which freedom and intellectual cultivation could have come, any other means by which the light never since extinguished might have been kindled, if the world had been left, without any elements of Grecian origin, to be fought for between the unlettered Romans and the priest-led and despot-governed Asiatics. The people and the period on which this depended, must be important to posterity as long as any portion of the past continues to be remembered: and by the aid of Mr. Grote, we are now enabled to see them with a clearness and accuracy, and judge them with a largeness of comprehension, never before approached.

To disparage what mankind owe to Greece, because she has not left for their imitation a perfect type of human character, nor a highly improved pattern of social institutions, would be to demand from the early youth of the human race what is far from being yet realized in its more advanced age. It would better become us to consider whether we have, in these particulars, advanced as much beyond the best Grecian model, as might with reason have been expected after more than twenty centuries; whether, having done no more than we have done with all that we have inherited from the Greeks, and all that has been since superadded to their teachings, we ought not to look up with reverent admiration to a people, who, without any of our adventitious helps, and without the stimulus of preceding example, moved forward by their native strength at so gigantic a pace, though in an earlier portion of the path. It is true, that in institutions, in manners, and even in the ideal standard of human character as existing in the best minds, there is an improvement. All the great thinkers and heroic lives, from Christ downward, would have done little for humanity, if after two thousand years no single point could be added to the type of excellence conceived by Socrates or Plato. But it is not the moral conceptions of heroes or philosophers which measure the difference between one age and another, so much as the accepted popular standard of virtuous conduct. Taking that as the criterion, and comparing the best Grecian with the best modern community, is the superiority wholly on the side of the moderns? Has there not been deterioration as well as improvement, and the former perhaps almost as marked as the latter? There is more humanity, more mildness of manners, though this only from a comparatively recent date; the sense of moral obligation is more cosmopolitan, and depends less for its acknowledgment on the existence of some special tie. But we greatly doubt if most of the positive virtues were not better conceived, and more highly prized, by the public opinion of Greece than by that of Great Britain; while negative and passive qualities have now engrossed the chief part of the honour paid to virtue; and it may be questioned if even private duties are, on the whole, better understood, while duties to the public, unless in cases of special trust, have almost dropped out of the catalogue: that idea, so powerful in the free States of Greece, has faded into a mere rhetorical ornament.

In political and social organization, the moderns, or some of them at least, have a more unqualified superiority over the Greeks. They have succeeded in making free institutions possible in large territories; and they have learnt to live and be prosperous without slaves. The importance of these discoveries—for discoveries they were—hardly admits of being overrated. For want of the first, Greece lost her freedom, her virtue, and her very existence as a people; and slavery was the greatest blot in her institutions while she existed. It is sufficient merely to mention another great blot, the domestic and social condition of women (on which point, however, Sparta, in a degree surprising for the age, formed an honourable exception); since, in this respect, the superiority of modern nations is not so much greater as might be supposed. Even on the subject of slavery there are many, and not inconsiderable palliations. Slavery in the ancient, as in the Oriental world, was a very different thing from American or West Indian slavery. The slaves were not a separate race, marked out to the contempt of their masters by indelible physical differences. When manumitted, they mixed on equal terms with the general community; and though, in Greece, seldom admitted, any more than other aliens, to the complete political franchise of their patron’s city, they could generally become full citizens of some new colony, or be placed on the roll of some old commonwealth recruiting its numbers after a disaster. The facility with which, in these small territories, slaves could escape across the frontier, must, at the worst, have been a considerable check to ill usage. The literature of the Athenians proves that they not only cultivated, but counted on finding, moral virtues in their slaves, which is not consistent with the worst form of slavery. Neither, in Greece, did slavery produce that one of its effects by which, above all, it is an obstacle to improvement—that of making bodily labour dishonourable. Nowhere in Greece, except at Sparta, was industry, however mechanical, regarded as unworthy of a freeman, or even of a citizen; least of all at Athens, in whose proudest times a majority of the Demos consisted of free artisans. Doubtless, however, in Greece as elsewhere, slavery was an odious institution; and its inherent evils are in no way lessened by the admission, that as a temporary fact, in an early and rude state of the arts of life, it may have been, nevertheless, a great accelerator of progress. If we read history with intelligence, we are led to think concerning slavery as concerning many other bad institutions, that the error was not so great of first introducing it, as of continuing it too long.

Though Grecian history is crowded with objects of interest, all others are eclipsed by Athens. Whatever in Greece most merits the gratitude of posterity, Athens possessed in fullest measure. If the Hellenic nation is in history the main source and most conspicuous representative of progress, Athens may claim the same honourable position in regard to Greece itself; for all the Greek elements of progress, in their highest culmination, were united in that illustrious city. This was not the effect of an original superiority of natural endowments in the Athenian mind. In the first exuberant outpourings of Grecian genius, Athens bore no more than her share, if even so much. The many famous poets and musicians who preceded the era of Marathon, the early speculators in science and philosophy, and even the first historians, were scattered through all the divisions of the Greek name; with a preponderance on the side of the Ionians of Asia Minor, the Sicilian and Italian Greeks, and the islanders, all of whom attained prosperity much earlier, as well as lost it sooner, than the inhabitants of Continental Greece. Even Bœotia produced two poets of the first rank, Pindar and Corinna, at a time when Attica had only yet produced one. By degrees, however, the whole intellect of Greece, except the purely practical, gravitated to Athens; until, in the maturity of Grecian culture, all the great writers, speakers, and thinkers were educated, and nearly all of them were born and passed their lives, in that centre of enlightenment. Of the other Greek states, such as were oligarchically governed contributed little or nothing, except in a military point of view, to make Greece illustrious. Even those among them which, like Sparta, were to a certain degree successful in providing for stability, did nothing for progress, further than supplying materials of study and experience to the great Athenian thinkers and their disciples. Of the other democracies, not one enjoyed the Eunomia, the unimpeded authority of law, and freedom from factious violence, which were quite as characteristic of Athens as either her liberty or her genius; and which, making life and property more secure than in any other part of the Grecian world, afforded the mental tranquillity which is also one of the conditions of high intellectual or imaginative achievement.

While Grecian history, considered philosophically, is thus almost concentrated in Athens, so also, considered æsthetically, it is an epic, of which Athens, as a collective personality, may be called the hero. The fate of Athens speaks to the imagination and sympathies like that of the Achilles or Odysseus of an heroic poem; absorbing into itself even the interest excited by the long series of eminent Athenians, who seem rather like successive phases under which Athens appears to us, than individuals independent and apart from it. Nowhere does history present to us a collective body so abounding in human nature as the Athenian Demos. In them all the capacities, all the impulses and susceptibilities, the strength and the infirmities, of human character, stand out in large and bold proportions. There is nothing that they do not seem capable of understanding, of feeling, and of executing; nothing generous or heroic to which they might not be roused; and scarcely any act of folly, injustice, or ferocity into which they could not be hurried, when no honest and able adviser was at hand to recal them to their better nature. Ever variable, according to the character of the leading minister of the time; alike prudent and enterprising under the guidance of a Pericles; carelessly inert or rashly ambitious when their most influential politicians were a Nicias and an Alcibiades; yet never abdicating their own guidance, always judging for themselves, and, though often wrong, seldom choosing the worst side when there was any one present capable of advocating the better. Light-hearted too, full of animal spirits and joyousness; revelling in the fun of hearing rival orators inveigh against each other; bursting with laughter at the mingled floods of coarse buffoonery and fine wit poured forth by the licensed libellers of their comic stage against their orators and statesmen, their poets, their gods, and even themselves—“that angry, waspish, intractable little old man, Demos of Pnyx,” the well-known laughing-stock of one of the most successful comedies of Aristophanes. They are accused of fickleness; but Mr. Grote has shown on how false an estimate of historical facts that imputation rests, and that they were much rather remarkable for the constancy of their attachments. They were not fickle, but (a very different quality, vulgarly confounded with it) mobile; keenly susceptible individually, and of necessity still more collectively, to the feeling and impression of the moment. The Demos may be alternately likened to the commonly received idea of a man, a woman, or a child, but never a clown or a boor. Right or wrong, wise or foolish, Athenians are never ἀπαίδευτοι; theirs are never the errors of untaught or unexercised minds. They are always the same Athenians who have thrilled with the grandeur and pathos of Æschylus and Sophocles, who were able to ransom themselves from captivity by reciting the verses of Euripides, who have had Pericles or Demosthenes for their daily instructor and adviser, and have heard every species of judicial case, public and private, civil and criminal, propounded for their decision, in the most finished compositions ever spoken to a public assembly. They are the same Athenians, too, who live and move among the visible memorials of ancestors, the greatest of whose glories was that they had dared and suffered all things rather than desert the liberty of Greece. Their just pride in such progenitors, and their sense of what was due to the dignity and fame of their city, were ever ready to be evoked for any noble cause. Even at the last, when their energies, too late aroused, had been insufficient to save them, and they lay crushed at the feet of a conqueror, they earned the admiration of posterity by bestowing, instead of displeasure, additional distinctions on the author and adviser of the struggle which had preserved their honour, though not their safety or their freedom.

In every respect Athens deserved the high commendation given her by Pericles in his Funeral Oration, of being the educator of Greece. And we cannot better set forth the characteristics of this great commonwealth at its greatest period, than by following Mr. Grote in quoting some passages from that celebrated discourse.

We live under a constitution such as noway to envy the laws of our neighbours—ourselves an example to others rather than imitators. It is called a democracy, since its aim tends towards the Many, and not towards the Few; in regard to private matters and disputes, the laws deal equally with every one; while in respect to public dignity and importance, the position of each is determined, not by class influence, but by worth, according as his reputation stands in his particular department; nor does poverty or obscure station keep him back, if he has any capacity of benefiting the state. social march is free, not merely in regard to public affairs, but also in regard to of each other’s diversity of pursuits. For we are not angry with our neighbour for what he to please himself, nor do we put on those sour looks, which .e Thus conducting our private social intercourse with reciprocal indulgence, we are restrained from misconduct in public matters by fear and reverence of our magistrates for the time being, and of our laws, especially such laws as are instituted for the protection of the wronged, and such as, though unwritten, are enforced by a common sense of shame. Besides this, we have provided for our minds numerous recreations from toil, partly by our customary solemnities of sacrifice and festival throughout the year, partly by the elegance of our private arrangements, the daily charm of which banishes pain and annoyance. From the magnitude of our city, the products of the whole earth are brought to us, so that our enjoyment of foreign luxuries is as much our own and assured, as of those which we produce at home. In respect to training for war, we differ from our opponents (the Lacedæmonians) on several material points. First, we lay open our city as a common resort; we apply no xenelasy to exclude any one from any lesson or spectacle, for fear lest an enemy should see and profit by it: for we trust less to manœuvres and artifices, than to native boldness of spirit, for warlike efficiency. Next, in regard to education, while the Lacedæmonians even from their earliest youth subject themselves to an irksome exercise for the attainment of courage, we, with our easy habits of life, are not less prepared than they to encounter all perils within the measure of our strength. . . .

We combine taste for the beautiful with frugality of life, and cultivate intellectual speculation without being enervated: we employ wealth for the service of our occasions, not for the ostentation of talk; nor is it disgraceful to any one who is poor to confess himself so, though he may be blamed for not actively bestirring himself to get rid of his poverty. Our politicians are not exempted from attending to their private affairs, and our private citizens have a competent knowledge of public matters; for we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from politics, not as a blameless person, but as a useless one. Far from accounting discussion an impediment to action, we think it an evil not to have been instructed by deliberation before the time for execution arrives. For, in truth, we combine in a remarkable manner boldness in action with full debate beforehand on that which we are going about: whereas with others ignorance alone imparts daring, debate induces hesitation. Assuredly those ought to be regarded as the stoutest of heart, who, knowing most accurately both the terrors of war and the sweets of peace, are still not the less willing to encounter peril.

This picture, drawn by Pericles and transmitted by Thucydides, of ease of living, and freedom from social intolerance, combined with the pleasures of cultivated taste, and a lively interest and energetic participation in public affairs, is one of the most interesting passages in Greek history: placed, as it is, in the speech in which the first of Athenian statesmen professed to show “by what practices and by what institutions and manners the city had become great.” This remarkable testimony, as Mr. Grote has not failed to point out, wholly conflicts, so far as Athens is concerned, with what we are so often told about the entire sacrifice, in the ancient republics, of the liberty of the individual to an imaginary good of the state. In the greatest Greek commonwealth, as described by its most distinguished citizen, the public interest was held of paramount obligation in all things which concerned it; but, with that part of the conduct of individuals which concerned only themselves, public opinion did not interfere: while in the ethical practice of the moderns, this is exactly reversed, and no one is required by opinion to pay any regard to the public, except by conducting his own private concerns in conformity to its expectations. On this vital question of social morals, Mr. Grote’s remarks, though belonging to an earlier volume than those which we are reviewing, are too valuable, as well as too much to the purpose, to require any apology for quoting them.

stress which he lays upon the liberty of thought and action at Athens, not merely from excessive restraint of law, but also from practical intolerance between man and man, and tyranny of the majority over individual dissenters in taste and , deserves serious notice, and brings out one of those points in the national character upon which the intellectual development of the time mainly depended. The national temper was indulgent in a high degree to all the varieties of positive impulses: the peculiar promptings in every individual bosom were allowed to manifest themselves and bear fruit, without being suppressed by external opinion, or trained into forced conformity with some assumed standard: antipathies against any of them formed no part of the habitual morality of the citizen. While much of the generating causes of human hatred was thus rendered inoperative, and while society was rendered more comfortable, more instructive, and more stimulating, all its germs of productive fruitful genius, so rare everywhere, found in such an atmosphere the maximum of encouragement. Within the limits of the law, assuredly as faithfully observed at Athens as anywhere in Greece, individual impulse, taste, and even eccentricity, were accepted with indulgence, instead of being a mark, as elsewhere, for the intolerance of neighbours or of the public. This remarkable feature in Athenian life will help us in a future chapter to explain the striking career of Socrates; and it presents to us under another face, a great part of that which the censors of Athens denounced under the name of “democratical licence.” The liberty and diversity of individual life in that city were offensive to Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle—attached either to the monotonous drill of Sparta, or to some other ideal standard, which, though much better than the Spartan in itself, they were disposed to impress upon society with a heavy-handed uniformity. That liberty of individual action, not merely from the over-restraints of law, but from the tyranny of jealous opinion, such as Pericles depicts in Athens, belongs more naturally to a democracy, where there is no select One or Few to receive worship and set the fashion, than to any other form of government. But it is very rare even in democracies: nor can we dissemble the fact, that none of the governments of modern times, democratical, aristocratical, or monarchical, presents anything like the picture of generous tolerance towards social dissent, and spontaneity of individual taste, which we read in the speech of the Athenian statesman. In all of them, the intolerance of the national opinion cuts down individual character to one out of a few set types, to which every person, or every family, is constrained to adjust itself, and beyond which all exceptions meet either with hatred or with derision. To impose upon men such restraints, either of law or of opinion, as are requisite for the security and comfort of society, but to encourage rather than repress the free play of individual impulse subject to those limits, is an ideal which, if it was ever approached at Athens, has certainly never been attained, and has indeed comparatively been little studied or cared for, in any modern society.

(Vol. VI, pp. 200-2.)l

The difference here pointed out between the temper of the Athenian and that of the modern mind, is most closely connected with the wonderful display of individual genius which made Athens illustrious, and with the comparative mediocrity of modern times. Originality is not always genius, but genius is always originality; and a society which looks jealously and distrustfully on original people—which imposes its common level of opinion, feeling, and conduct, on all its individual members—may have the satisfaction of thinking itself very moral and respectable, but it must do without genius. It may have persons of talent, who bring a larger than usual measure of commonplace ability into the service of the common notions of the time; but genius, in such a soil, is either fatally stunted in its growth, or if its native strength forbids this, it usually retires into itself, and dies without a sign.q

The ambitious external policy of Athens is one of the points in Greek history which have been most perversely misjudged and misunderstood. Modern historians seem to have succeeded to the jealous animosity of the Corinthians, and other members of the Spartan alliance, at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, though by no means at one with them in the reasons they are able to assign for it. The Athenians certainly were not exempt from the passion, universal in the ancient world, for conquest and dominion. It was a blemish, when judged by the universal standard of right; but as a fact, it was most beneficial to the world, and could not have been other than it was without crippling them in their vocation as the organ of progress. There was scarcely a possibility of permanent improvement for mankind, until intellect had first asserted its superiority, even in a military sense, over brute force. With the barbarous part of the species pressing in all , to crush every early germ of improvement, all would have been lost if there had not also been an instinct in the better and more gifted portions of mankind to push for dominion over the duller and coarser. Besides, in a small but flourishing free community like Athens, ambition was the simple dictate of prudence. No such community could have had any safety for its own freedom, but by acquiring power. Instead of reprobating the Athenian maritime empire, the whole of mankind, beginning with the subject states themselves, had cause to lament that it was not much longer continued; for that the fate of Greek civilization was bound up with it, is proved by the whole course of history. When the jealousies of the other Greek states stripped Athens of her empire, and nominally restored the subject allies to an independence which they were wholly incapable of maintaining, Greece lost her sole chance of making successful head against Macedonia or Rome. And considering what the short period of Athenian greatness has done for the world, it is painful to think in how much more advanced a stage human improvement might now have been, if the Athens of Pericles could have lived on in undiminished spirit and energy for but one century more.

The Athenian empire was the purest in its origin of all the empires of antiquity. It was at first a free and equal confederacy for defence against the Persians, organized by Aristides with a justice worthy of his name. It never would have become anything else, but that the majority of the allies, consisting of the comparatively unwarlike and Greeks, chose to make their contribution in money instead of personal service, preferring to pay Athens for protecting them, rather than protect themselves. Even the removal of the treasury of the confederacy from Delos to Athens was no act of the Athenians, but of the synod of the confederacy, on the proposition of Samos. When, at a later date, some of the states attempted to secede from the alliance, and enjoy the peace and security which it afforded, without sharing in the cost, the general sentiment of the confederates at first went along with Athens in bringing back the recusants by force of arms. But, with these small town communities, to be defeated was to be conquered, and the conquered, by the universal custom of antiquity, received the law from the conqueror. That law, in the case of Athens, was only occasionally either harsh or onerous; yet thus, by degrees, the once equal allies sunk into tributaries. The few who had neither revolted, nor commuted personal service for pecuniary payment, retained their naval and military force, and their immunity from tribute, and had nothing to complain of, but that, like the dependencies of England or of any modern nation, they were compelled to join in the wars of the dominant state, without having any voice in deciding them. They do not seem to have alleged any other practical grievances against the Athenian community: their complaints, recorded by Thucydides, turn almost solely upon offence to the Grecian sentiment of city independence and dignity. Under the protection of the powerful Athenian navy, the allied states enjoyed a security never before known in Greece, and which no one of them could possibly have acquired by its own efforts. Many of them grew rich and prosperous. With their internal government Athens, as a general rule, did not interfere; in Mr. Grote’s opinion, not even to make it democratical, when it did not happen to be so already. Like all the weak states of antiquity, whether called independent or not, they were liable to extortion and oppression; not, however, from the Athenian people, but from rich and powerful Athenians in command of expeditions, against whom the Demos, when judicially appealed to, was ready to give redress. The most express testimony is borne to this general fact by the able oligarchical conspirator Phrynichus, as reported by the oligarchically inclined Thucydides, in his account of that remarkable incident in Athenian history, the revolution of the Four Hundred. The historian represents Phrynichus as reminding his fellow-conspirators that they could expect neither assistance nor good-will from the allies, since these well knew that it was from the oligarchical Athenians they were liable to injury, and looked upon the Demos as their protector. The reality of the protection is exemplified by the case of Paches, the victorious general who had just before captured Mitylene. The resentment of the Athenians against that revolted city was such, that they were (as is well known) persuaded by Cleon to pass a decree for putting the whole military population to death, though they recalled the mandate before it had been executed. Yet, Paches having abused his victory by violating two women of Mitylene was prosecuted by them before the Athenian dicastery, and the facts being proved, was so overwhelmed by the general burst of indignation, that he slew himself in open court. This incident (which until its real circumstances had been hunted out by Niebuhr, was one of the stock examples of Athenian and popular ingratitude) is a striking illustration of the difference between the Athenian empire and the Lacedæmonian; for when Spartan citizens, in repeated instances, committed similar enormities, not against conquered enemies but friendly allies, no redress could be obtained. It required the field of Leuctra to avenge the daughters of Skedasus, or appease the manes of the victims of the harmost Aristodemus.

However unpopular the dominion of Athens may have been among her subjects, though it appears to have been so with the leading men rather than with the majority, they had reason enough to regret it after it was at an end; for not only was the little finger of Lacedæmon heavier than the whole body of Athens, but many of them only exchanged Greek dominion for that of the barbarians. Sparta was never able, for more than a few years, to protect the Asiatic Greeks even against Persia; and at the height of her power, as soon as the obligation of defending them became inconvenient, she, by the peace of Antalcidas, actually ceded the whole of that great division of Greece to the Persian king, to whom it remained subject until the invasion of Alexander. Several of the most prosperous of the islanders fared no better: Cos, Chios, and Rhodes, when by the Social War they succeeded in detaching themselves from the second Athenian empire, fell almost immediately into dependence on the Carian despot Mausolus, against whom the Rhodians had soon to appeal again to their enemy, Athens, for assistance. So mere a name was that universal autonomy, which was used so successfully to stir up the feelings of the Hellenic world against its noblest member; so entirely did the independence of Greece turn on the maintenance of some cohesion among her multifarious particles, while the political instincts of her people obstinately rejected the merging of the single city-republic in any larger unity.

The intellectual and moral pre-eminence which made Athens the centre of good to Greece, and of the good to after-generations of which Greece has been the medium, was wholly the fruit of Athenian institutions. It was the consequence, first of democracy, and secondly, of the wise and well-considered organization, by which the Athenian democracy was distinguished among the democratic constitutions of antiquity. The term democracy may perhaps be deemed inapplicable to any of the Grecian governments, on account of the existence of slavery; and it is inapplicable to them, in the purest and most honourable sense of the term. But in another sense, not altogether inappropriate, those governments, the first to which the word democracy was applied, must be considered entitled to the name; in the same manner as it is given to the northern States of America, although women are there excluded from the rights of citizenship; an exclusion which, equally with that of slaves, militates against the democratic principle. The Athenian Constitution was so far a democracy, that it was government by a multitude, composed in majority of poor persons—small landed proprietors and artisans. It had the additional democratic characteristic, far more practically important than even the political franchise; it was a government of boundless publicity and freedom of speech. It had the liberty of the bema, of the dicastery, the portico, the palæstra, and the stage; altogether a full equivalent for the liberty of the press. Further, it was the only government of antiquity which possessed this inestimable advantage in the same degree, or retained it as long. Enemies and friends alike testify that the παῤῥησία of Athens was paralleled in no other place in the known world. Every office and honour was open to every citizen, not, as in the aristocratic Roman republic (or even the British monarchy), almost nominally, but really: while the daily working of Athenian institutions (by means of which every citizen was accustomed to hear every sort of question, public and private, discussed by the ablest men of the time, with the earnestness of purpose and fulness of preparation belonging to actual business, deliberative or judicial) formed a course of political education, the equivalent of which modern nations have not known how to give even to those whom they educate for statesmen. To their multitudinous judicial tribunals the Athenians were also indebted for that habitual love of fair play, and of hearing both sides of a case, which was more or less a quality of the Greeks generally, but had so firm a hold on the Athenians that it did not desert them under the most passionate excitement. The potency of Grecian democracy in making every individual in the multitude identify his feelings and interests with those of the state, and regard its freedom and greatness as the first and principal of his own personal concerns, cannot be better described than in the words of Mr. Grote. After quoting a remarkable passage from Herodotus, descriptive of the unexpected outburst of patriotic energy at Athens after the expulsion of the Pisistratidæ and the establishment of the Cleisthenean constitution, Mr. Grote proceeds as follows.

Democracy in Grecian antiquity possessed the privilege, not only of kindling an earnest and unanimous attachment to the constitution in the bosoms of the citizens, but also of creating an energy of public and private action such as could never be obtained under an oligarchy, where the utmost that could be hoped for was a passive acquiescence and obedience. Mr. Burke has remarked that the mass of the people are generally very indifferent about theories of government: but such indifference (although improvements in the practical working of all governments tend to foster it) is hardly to be expected among any people who exhibit decided mental activity and spirit on other matters; and the reverse was unquestionably true, in the year 500 , among the communities of ancient Greece. Theories of government were there anything but a dead letter; they were connected with emotions of the strongest as well as of the most opposite character. The theory of a permanent ruling One, for example, was universally odious; that of a ruling Few, though acquiesced in, was never positively attractive, unless either where it was associated with the maintenance of peculiar education and habits, as at Sparta, or where it presented itself as the only antithesis to democracy, the latter having by peculiar circumstances become an object of terror. But the theory of democracy was pre-eminently seductive; creating in the mass of the citizens an intense positive attachment, and disposing them to voluntary action and suffering on its behalf, such as no coercion on the part of other governments could extort. Herodotus, in his comparison of the three sorts of government, puts in the front rank of the advantages of democracy “its most splendid name and promise”—its power of enlisting the hearts of the citizens in support of their constitution, and of providing for all a common bond of union and fraternity. This is what even democracy did not always do: but it was what no other government in Greece could do: a reason alone sufficient to stamp it as the best government, and presenting the greatest chance of beneficent results. . . . Among the Athenian citizens, certainly, it produced a strength and unanimity of positive political sentiment, such as has rarely been seen in the history of mankind; which excites our surprise and admiration the more, when we compare it with the apathy which had preceded, and which is even implied as the natural state of the public mind in Solon’s famous proclamation against neutrality in a sedition. Because democracy happens to be unpalatable to most modern readers, they have been accustomed to look upon the sentiment here described only in its least honourable manifestations—in the caricatures of Aristophanes, or in the empty commonplaces of rhetorical declaimers. But it is not in this way that the force, the earnestness, or the binding value of democratical sentiment at Athens is to be measured. We must listen to it as it comes from the lips of Pericles, while he is strenuously enforcing upon the people those active duties for which it both implanted the stimulus and supplied the courage; or from the oligarchical Nikias in the harbour of Syracuse, when he is endeavouring to revive the courage of his despairing troops for one last death-struggle, and when he appeals to their democratical patriotism as to the only flame yet alive and burning even in that moment of agony. From the time of Kleisthenes downward, the creation of this new mighty impulse makes an entire revolution in the Athenian character; and if the change still stood out in so prominent a manner before the eyes of Herodotus, much more must it have been felt by the contemporaries among whom it occurred.

(Vol. IV, pp. 237-9.)

The influences here spoken of were those of democracy generally. For the peculiar and excellent organization of her own democracy, Athens was indebted to a succession of eminent men. The earliest was her great legislator, Solon; himself the first capital prize which Athens drew in the dispensations of the Destinies; a man whose personal virtue ennobled the city which he was chosen to legislate, and the merit of whose institutions was a principal source of the deep-rooted respect for the laws, which distinguished Athens beyond any other of the ancient democracies. The salutary forms of business established by Solon, and calculated to secure as much caution and deliberation as compatible with ultimate decision by a sovereign Ecclesia, lived through the successive changes by which the Constitution was rendered more and more democratic. And though it is commonly supposed that popular passion in a democracy is peculiarly liable to trample on forms when they stand between it and its object—which is indeed, without question, one of the dangers of a democracy—there is no point in the character of the Athenians more remarkable, than their respect and attachment to the forms of their Constitution. In the height of their anger against Pericles, for not leading them out to defend their lands and houses from the ravages of the Peloponnesians—because he, standing on his privilege as a magistrate, abstained from calling an assembly, no assembly met. There is indeed but one marked instance known to us in Athenian history, of that violation of forms which was the daily practice of most of the oligarchical governments. That one was a case of great and just provocation, the “cause célèbre” of the six generals who neglected to save their drowning countrymen after the sea fight of Arginusæ: and there was, as Mr. Grote has shown, no injustice in the fact of their condemnation by the people, though there was a blameable violation of the salutary rules of criminal procedure established for the protection of the innocent. It was in this case that the philosopher Socrates, accidentally that month a senator of the presiding tribe, as firm against the “civium ardor prava jubentium” as afterwards against the “vultus instantis tyranni,” singly refused to join in putting the question to the assembly contrary to the laws; adding one to the proofs that the man of greatest intellect at that time in Athens was also its most virtuous citizen.

After Solon (omitting the intervening usurpation of Pisistratus), the first great constitutional change was the reformation of Cleisthenes, an eminent man, to whose character and historical importance no one before Mr. Grote had done justice. The next was that in which the immediate mover was Aristides, at the re-establishment of the city after the Persian war, when the poorest class of citizens was first admitted to share in public employments. The final measures which completed the democratic constitution were those of Pericles and Ephialtes; more particularly the latter, a statesman of whom, from the unfortunate absence of any cotemporary history of the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars except the brief introductory sketch of Thucydides, we have to lament that too little is known, but of whom the recorded anecdotes indicate a man worthy to have been the friend of Pericles. Ephialtes perished by assassination, a victim to the rancorous hatred of the oligarchical party. Assassination afterwards disappears from Athenian public life, until reintroduced on a regular system by the same party, to effect the revolution of the Four Hundred. The Athenian Many, of whose democratic irritability and suspicion we hear so much, are rather to be accused of too easy and goodnatured a confidence, when we reflect that they had living in the midst of them the very men who, on the first show of an opportunity, were ready to compass the subversion of the democracy by the dark deeds of Peisander and Antiphon, and when they had effected their object, perpetrated all the villanies of Critias and his associates. dark background to the picture of the Athenian republic, but as an active power in ita.z were no obscure private individuals, but men of rank and fortune, not only prominent as politicians and public speakers, but continually trusted with all the great offices of state. Truly Athens was in more danger from these men than from the demagogues: they were indeed themselves the worst of the demagogues—described by Phrynichus, their confederate, as, for their own purposes, the leaders and instigators of the Demos to its most blameable actions, ποριστὰς καὶ ἐσηγητὰς τω̑ν κακω̑ν τῳ̑ δήμῳ, ἐξ ὠ̑ν τὰ πλείω αὐτοὺς ὠϕελει̑σθαι.

These are a few of the topics on which a flood of light is let in by Mr. Grote’s History, and from which those who have not read it may form some notion of the interest which pervades it, especially the part relating to the important century between 500 and 400 The searching character of Mr. Grote’s historical criticism is not suspiciously confined to matters in which his own political opinions may be supposed to be interested. Though the statement has the air of an exaggeration, yet after much study of Mr. Grote’s book we do not hesitate to assert, that there is hardly a fact of importance in Grecian history which was perfectly understood before his re-examination of it. This will not seem incredible, to those who are aware how new an art that of writing history is; how very recently it is that we possess histories, of events not cotemporary with the writer, which, apart from literary merit, have any value otherwise than as materials; how utterly uncritical, until lately, were all historians, even as to the most important facts in history, and how much, even after criticism had commenced, the later writers merely continued to repeat after the earlier. In our own generation, Niebuhr has effected a radical revolution in the opinions of all educated persons respecting Roman history. Grecian events, subsequent to the Homeric period, are more authentically recorded; but there, too, a very moderate acquaintance with the evidence was sufficient to show how superficially it had hitherto been examined.

That the Sophists, for example, were not the knaves and profligates they are so often represented , could be gathered even from the statements of the hostile witnesses on whose authority they were condemned. The Protagoras alone, of their great enemy Plato, is a sufficient document. . It is most unjust to the Sophists to adopt, as the verdict of history upon them, the severe judgment of Plato, although from Plato’s point of view they deserved it. He judged them from the superior elevation of a great moral and social reformer: from that height he looked down contemptuously enough, not on them alone, but on statesmen, orators, artists—on the whole practical life of the period, and all its institutions, popular, oligarchical, or despotic; demanding a reconstitution of society from its foundations, and a complete renovation of the human mind. One who had these high aspirations, had naturally little esteem for men who did not see, or aspire to see, beyond the common ideas of their age; but, as Mr. Grote remarks, to accept his judgment of them would be like characterizing the teachers and politicians of the present time in the words applied to them by Owen or Fourier. Even Plato, for the most part, puts the immoral doctrines ascribed to the Sophists (such as the doctrine that might makes right) into the mouths not of Sophists, but of ambitious active politicians, like Callicles. The Sophists, in Plato, almost always express themselves not only with decorum, but with good sense and feeling, on the subject of social duties; though always succeeds in puzzling them, and displaying the confusion of their ideas, or rather of the common ideas of mankind, of which they are the exponents.hg

Again, the Athenian democracy had been so outrageously, and without measure, misrepresented, that whoever had read, as so few have done, Thucydides and the orators with decent intelligence and candour, could easily perceive that the vulgar representation was very wide of the truth; just as any one who had read Livy could see, and many did see, that the Agrarian law was not the unjust spoliation that was pretended: but as it required Niebuhr to detect with accuracy what the Agrarian law actually was, so no less profound a knowledge of Greek literature than that of Mr. Grote, combined with equal powers of reasoning and reflection, would have sufficed to make the effective working of the Athenian Constitution as well known to us as it may now be pronounced to be. The mountain of error which had accumulated and hardened over Greek history, the removal of which had been meritoriously commenced by Dr. Thirlwall, has not only been shaken off, but the outlines of the real object are now made visible. And so cautious and sober is Mr. Grote in the of evidence, so constantly on his guard against letting his conclusions outrun his proofs, as to make it a matter of wonder that among so much that is irreparably lost, his researches have enabled him to arrive at so considerable an amount of positive and certifiable result.

This conscientious scrupulousness in maintaining the demarcation between conjecture and proof, is more indispensable than any other excellence in a historian, and above all in one who sets aside the common notion of many of the facts which he relates, and replaces it by a version of his own. Without this quality, such an innovator on existing beliefs inspires no reliance, and can only, at most, unsettle historical opinion, without helping to restore it. Anybody can scrawl over the canvas with the commonplaces of rhetoric or the catchwords of party politics; and many, especially in Germany, can paint-in a picture from the more or less ingenious suggestions of a learned imagination. But Mr. Grote commands the confidence of the reader by his sobriety in hypothesis, by never attempting to pass off an inference as a fact, and, when he differs from the common opinion, explaining his reasons with the precision and minuteness of one who neither desires nor expects that anything will be taken upon trust. He has felt that a history of Greece, to be of any value, must be also a running commentary on the evidence, and he has endeavoured to put the reader in a position to judge for himself on every disputable point. But the discussions, though to a historical taste as interesting as the narrative, are not carried on at its expense. Wherever the facts, authentically known, allow a consecutive stream of narrative to be kept up, the story is told in a more interesting manner than it has anywhere been told before, except in the finest passages of Thucydides.

We are indeed disposed to assign to this history almost as high a rank in narrative as in thought. It is open, no doubt, to minute criticism; and many writers are superior to Mr. Grote in rapidity, grace, and picturesqueness of style. But even in these respects there is no such deficiency as amounts to a fault, while in two qualities, far more important to the interest, not to say the value, of his recitals, he has few equals and probably no superior. The first is, that at each point in the series of events, he makes it his primary object to fill his own mind and his reader’s with as correct and complete a conception as can be formed of the situation; so that we enter at once into the impressions and feelings of the actors, both collective and individual . Niebuhr had already, in his Lectures on Ancient History , carried his characteristic liveliness of conception into the representation of the leading characters of Greek history, depicting them, often we fear with insufficient warrant from evidence, like persons with whom he had long lived and been familiar; but, for clearness and correctness in conceiving the surrounding circumstances, and the posture of affairs at each particular moment, we do not think him at all comparable to Mr. Grote.

, into the hands of what advisers Athens had already fallen. And, mark well, these evil advisers were not the demagogues, but the chiefs of the aristocracy, the richest and most highborn men in the republic—Nicias and Alcibiades. Mr. Grote had already shown grounds for believing that Cleon, and men of his stamp, had been far too severely dealt with by historians; not that they did not frequently deserve censure, but that they were by no means the worst misleaders of the Athenian people. The demagogues were, as he observes, essentially opposition speakers. The conduct of affairs was habitually in the hands of the rich and great, who had by far the largest share of personal influence, and on whose mismanagement there would have been hardly any check, but for the demagogues and their hostile criticism. These opinions receive ample confirmation from the course of affairs, when, there being no longer any lowborn Cleon or Hyperbolus to balance their influence, Nicias and Alcibiades had full scope to ruin the commonwealth. The contrary vices of these two men, both equally fatal, are exemplified in the crowning act of their maladministration; the one having been the principal adviser of the ill-starred expedition to Syracuse, while the other was the main cause of its ruinous failure, by his intellectual and moral incapacity.n

This genuine realization of the successive situations, renders the narrative itself a picture of the Greek mind. Carrying on, throughout, the succession of feelings concurrently with that of events, the writer becomes, as it were, himself a Greek, and takes the reader along with him. And hence, if every discussion or dissertation in the book were omitted, it would still be wonderfully in advance of any former history in making the Greeks intelligible. For example, no modern writer has made the reader enter into the religious feelings of the Greeks as Mr. Grote does. Other historians let it be supposed that, except in some special emergencies, beliefs and feelings relating to the unknown world counted for very little among the determining causes of events; and it is a kind of accredited opinion, that the religion of the ancients sat almost as lightly on them, as if it had been to them, what it is in modern literature, a mere poetical ornament. But the case was quite otherwise: religion was one of the most active elements in Grecian life, with an effect, in the early rude times, probably on the whole beneficial, but growing more and more injurious as civilization advanced. Mr. Grote is the first historian who has given an adequate impression of the omnipresence of this element in Grecian life; the incessant reference to supernatural hopes and fears which pervaded public and private transactions, as well as the terrible power with which those feelings were capable of acting, and not unfrequently did act, on the Hellenic susceptibilities. While our admiration is thus increased for the few superior minds who, like Pericles and Epaminondas, rose above at least the vulgarer parts of the religion of their country, or, like Plato, probably rejected it altogether, we are enabled to see the explanation of much that would otherwise be enigmatical, and to judge the Greeks with the same amount of allowance for errors produced by their religion, which in parallel cases is always conceded to the moderns.

The other eminent quality which distinguishes Mr. Grote’s narrative is its pervading ἤθος; the moral interest, which is so much deeper and more impressive than picturesque interest, and exists in portions of the history which afford no materials for the latter. The events do not always admit of being vividly depicted to the mental eye; and when they do, the author does not always make use of the opportunity: but one thing he never fails in—the moral aspect of the events and of the persons is never out of sight, and gives the predominating character to the recital. We use the word moral not solely in the restricted sense of right and wrong, but as inclusive of the whole of the sentiments connected with the occasion. Along with the clear light of the scrutinizing intellect, there is the earnest feeling of a sympathizing contemporary. This rich source of impressiveness in narration is often wanting in writers of the liveliest fancy, and the most brilliant faculty of delineating the mere outside of historical facts .

figure which most brightly illuminates of Mr. Grote’s history is Pericles—“the Thunderer”—“the Olympian Zeus,” as he was called by his libellers, the comic dramatists of Athens. Seldom, if ever, has there been seen in a statesman of any age, such a combination of great qualities as were united in this illustrious man: unrivalled in eloquence; eminent in all the acquirements, talents, and accomplishments of his country; the associate of all those among his who were above their age, either in positive knowledge or in freedom from superstition; though an aristocrat by birth and fortune, a thorough democrat in principle and conduct, yet never stooping to even the pardonable arts of courting popularity, but acquiring and maintaining his ascendancy solely by his commanding qualities; never flattering his countrymen save on what was really admirable in them, and which it was for their good to be taught to cherish, but the determined enemy of their faults and follies; ever ready to peril his popularity by giving disagreeable advice, and when not appreciated, rising up against the injustice done him with a scornful dignity almost amounting to defiance. Such was Pericles: and that such a man should have been practically first minister of Athens during the greatest part of a long political life, is not so much honourable to him as to the imperial people who were willing to be so led; who, though in fits of temporary irritation and disappointment, excusable in the circumstances, they several times withdrew their favour from him, always hastened to give it back; and over whom, while he lived, no person of talents and virtues inferior to his was able to obtain any mischievous degree of influence. It is impossible to estimate how great a share this one man had in making the Athenians what they were . A great man had, in the unbounded publicity of Athenian political life, extraordinary facilities for moulding his country after his own image; and seldom has any people, during a whole generation, enjoyed such a course of education, as forty years of listening to the lofty spirit and practical wisdom of Pericles must have been to the Athenian Demos.

As the next in this gallery of historical portraits, we quote the character of another but a far inferior Athenian statesman, whom Mr. Grote is, we think, the very first to appreciate correctly, and bring before us in the colours and lineaments of life.

Though Nikias, son of Nikeratus, had been for some time conspicuous in public life, and is said to have been more than once Strategus along with Pericles, this is the first occasion on which Thucydides introduces him to our notice. He was now one of the Strategi or generals of the commonwealth, and appears to have enjoyed, on the whole, a greater and more constant personal esteem than any citizen of Athens, from the present time down to his death. In wealth and in family, he ranked among the first class of Athenians: in political character, Aristotle placed him, together with Thucydides son of Melesias, and Theramenes, above all other names in Athenian history—seemingly even above Pericles. Such a criticism from Aristotle deserves respectful attention, though the facts before us completely belie so lofty an estimate. It marks, however, the position occupied by Nikias in Athenian politics, as the principal person of what may be called the oligarchical party, succeeding Kimon and Thucydides, and preceding Theramenes. In looking to the conditions under which this party continued to subsist, we shall see that during the interval between Thucydides (son of Melesias) and Nikias, the democratical forms had acquired such confirmed ascendancy, that it would not have suited the purpose of any politician to betray evidence of positive hostility to them, prior to the Sicilian expedition and the great embarrassment in the foreign relations of Athens which arose out of that disaster. After that change, the Athenian oligarchs became emboldened and aggressive, so that we shall find Theramenes among the chief conspirators in the revolution of the Four Hundred: but Nikias represents the oligarchical party in its previous state of quiescence and torpidity, accommodating itself to a sovereign democracy, and existing in the form of common sentiment rather than of common purposes. And it is a remarkable illustration of the real temper of the Athenian people, that a man of this character, known as an oligarch but not feared as such, and doing his duty sincerely to the democracy, should have remained until his death the most esteemed and influential man in the city. He was a man of a sort of even mediocrity, in intellect, in education, and in oratory; forward in his military duties, and not only personally courageous in the field, but also competent as a general under ordinary circumstances: assiduous in the discharge of all political duties at home, especially in the post of Strategus or one of the ten generals of the state, to which he was frequently chosen and rechosen. Of the many valuable qualities combined in his predecessor Pericles, the recollection of whom was yet fresh in the Athenian mind, Nikias possessed two, on which, most of all, his influence rested—though, properly speaking, that influence belongs to the sum total of his character, and not to any special attributes in it. First, he was thoroughly incorruptible as to pecuniary gains—a quality so rare in Grecian public men of all the cities, that when a man once became notorious for possessing it, he acquired a greater degree of trust than any superiority of intellect could have bestowed upon him: next, he adopted the Periclean view as to the necessity of a conservative or stationary foreign policy for Athens, and of avoiding new acquisitions at a distance, adventurous risks, or provocation to fresh enemies. With this important point of analogy, there were at the same time material differences between them even in regard to foreign policy. Pericles was a conservative, resolute against submitting to loss or abstraction of empire, as well as refraining from aggrandizement. Nikias was in policy faint-hearted, averse to energetic effort for any purpose whatever, and disposed not only to maintain peace, but even to purchase it by considerable sacrifices. Nevertheless, he was the leading champion of the conservative party of his day, always powerful at Athens: and as he was constantly familiar with the details and actual course of public affairs, capable of giving full effect to the cautious and prudential point of view, and enjoying unqualified credit for honest purposes—his value as a permanent counsellor was steadily recognised, even though in particular cases his counsel might not be followed.

Besides these two main points, which Nikias had in common with Pericles, he was perfect in the use of those minor and collateral modes of standing well with the people, which that great man had taken little pains to practise. While Pericles attached himself to Aspasia, whose splendid qualities did not redeem in the eyes of the public either her foreign origin or her unchastity, the domestic habits of Nikias appear to have been strictly conformable to the rules of Athenian decorum. Pericles was surrounded by philosophers, Nikias by prophets—whose advice was necessary both as a consolation to his temperament, and as a guide to his intelligence under difficulties: one of them was constantly in his service and confidence; and his conduct appears to have been sensibly affected by the difference of character between one prophet and another, just as the government of Louis XIV and other Catholic princes has been modified by the change of confessors. To a life thus rigidly decorous and ultra-religious—both eminently acceptable to the Athenians—Nikias added the judicious employment of a large fortune with a view to popularity. Those liturgies (or expensive public duties undertaken by rich men each in his turn, throughout other cities of Greece as well as in Athens) which fell to his lot, were performed with such splendour, munificence, and good taste, as to procure for him universal encomiums; and so much above his predecessors as to be long remembered and extolled. Most of these liturgies were connected with the religious service of the state; so that Nikias, by his manner of performing them, displayed his zeal for the honour of the gods, at the same time that he laid up for himself a store of popularity. Moreover, the remarkable caution and timidity—not before an enemy, but in reference to his own fellow-citizens—which marked his character, rendered him pre-eminently scrupulous as to giving offence or making personal enemies. While his demeanour towards the poorer citizens generally was equal and conciliating, the presents which he made were numerous, both to gain friends and to silence assailants. We are not surprised to hear that various bullies, whom the comic writers turn to scorn, made their profit out of this susceptibility: but most assuredly, Nikias as a public man, though he might occasionally be cheated out of money, was greatly assisted by the reputation which he thus acquired.

[Vol. VI, pp. 385-90.]

We have the more willingly extracted this passage, because, like many others in these volumes, it contains lessons applicable to other times and circumstances than those of Greece; Nicias being a perfect type of one large class of the favourites of public opinion, modern as well as ancient. And the view here incidentally presented of some points in the character and disposition of the Athenian Many, will afford to readers who only know Athens and Greece through the medium of writers like Mitford, some faint idea of how much they have to unlearn.s

With regard to style, in the ordinary sense, what is most noticeable in Mr. Grote is, that his style always rises with his subject. The more valuable the thought, or interesting the incident, the apter and more forcible is the expression; as is generally the case with writers who are thinking of their subject rather than of their literary reputation. We can conscientiously say of him what, rightly understood, is the highest praise which, on the score of mere composition, a writer in the more intellectual departments of literature can desire or deserve; that everything which he has to express, he is always able to express adequately and worthily.

BAIN’S PSYCHOLOGY

1859

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, III (1867), 97-152, where the title is footnoted: “Edinburgh Review, October 1859.—1. ‘The Senses and the Intellect.’ By Alexander Bain, A.M. [London: Parker,] 1855. 2. ‘The Emotions and the Will.’ By the same Author. [London: Parker,] 1859.” Reprinted from the Edinburgh Review, CX (Oct., 1859), 287-321, where the article (unsigned) is headed: “Art. I.—1. The Senses and the Intellect. By Alexander Bain, A.M. London: [Parker,] 1855. 2. The Emotions and the Will. By Alexander Bain, A.M., Examiner in Logic and Moral Philosophy in the University of London. London: [Parker,] 1859”; the running heads are “Bain’s Psychology.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of Bain’s two treatises on the Mind, in the Edinburgh Review for October 1859” (MacMinn, 92). An unsigned offprint of the article in the Somerville College Library, paged 1-35, titled “Bain’s Psychology,” with “[From theEdinburgh Reviewof October 1859]” printed under the title, has no corrections or alterations in the text; the bibliographic information in the headings is slightly expanded.

In the footnoted variants, “59” indicates Edinburgh Review (not, as is normally the case, D&D, 1st ed., because this article appeared after the publication of that edition); “67” indicates D&D, III (1st ed., 1867, the copy-text). For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, lviii-lxvii and lxxxix-xc above.

Bain’s Psychology

the sceptre of psychology has decidedly returned to this island. The scientific study of mind, which for two generations, in many other respects distinguished for intellectual activity, had, while brilliantly cultivated elsewhere, been neglected by our countrymen, is now nowhere prosecuted with so much vigour and success as in Great Britain. Nor are the achievements of our thinkers in this obstinately-contested portion of the field of thought, merely one-sided and sectarian triumphs. The two conflicting schools, or modes of thought, which have divided metaphysicians from the very beginning of speculation—the à posteriori and à priori schools, or, as they are popularly rather than accurately designated, the Aristotelian and the Platonic—are both flourishing in this country; and we venture to affirm that the best extant examples of both have been produced within a recent period by Englishmen, or (it should, perhaps, rather be said) by Scotchmen.

Of these two varieties of psychological speculation, the à posteriori mode, or that which resolves the whole contents of the mind into experience, is the one which belongs most emphatically to Great Britain, as might be expected from the country which gave birth to Bacon. The foundation of the à posteriori psychology was laid by Hobbes (to be followed by the masterly developments of Locke and Hartley), at the very time when Descartes, on the other side of the Channel, was creating the rival philosophical system; for the French, who are so often ill-naturedly charged with having invented nothing, at least invented German philosophy. But after having initiated this mode of metaphysical investigation, they left it to the systematic German thinkers to be followed up; themselves descending to the rank of disciples and commentators, first on Locke, and more recently on Kant and Schelling. In England, the philosophy of Locke reigned supreme, until a Scotchman, Hume, while making some capital improvements in its theory, carried out one line of its apparent consequences to the extreme which always provokes a reaction; and of this reaction, another Scotchman, Reid, was the originator, and, with his eminent pupil, Stewart, also a Scotchman, introduced as much of the à priori philosophy as could in any way be made reconcilable with Baconian principles. These were succeeded by Dr. Thomas Brown (still a Scotchman), who drew largely and not unskilfully from both sources, though, for want of a patience and perseverance on a level with his great powers, he failed to effect a synthesis, and only produced an eclecticism. Meanwhile, the more elaborate form of the à priori philosophy which the whole speculative energy of Germany had been employed in building up, and which the French had expounded with all the lucidity which it admitted of, was in time studied also among us; and, according to what now seems to be the opinion of the most competent judges, this philosophy has found in a Scotchman, Sir William Hamilton, its best and profoundest representative. But the great European philosophical reaction, was to have its counterreaction, which has now reached a great height in Germany itself, and is taking place here also; and of this, too, in our island, the principal organs have been Scotchmen. Mr. James Mill, in his Analysis of the Human Mind, followed up the deepest vein of the Lockian philosophy, that which was opened by Hartley, to still greater depths: and now, in the work at the head of this article (we say work, not works, for the second volume, though bearing a different title, is in every sense a continuation of the first), a new aspirant to philosophical eminence, Mr. Alexander Bain, has stepped beyond all his predecessors, and has produced an exposition of the mind, of the school of Locke and Hartley, equally remarkable in what it has successfully done, and in what it has wisely refrained from—an exposition which deserves to take rank as the foremost of its class, and as marking the most advanced point which the à posteriori psychology has reached.

We have no intention to profess ourselves partisans of either of these schools of philosophy. Both have done great things for mankind. No one whose studies have not extended to both, can be considered in any way competent to deal with the great questions of philosophy in their present state. And though one of the two must be fundamentally the superior, there can be no doubt that, whichever this is, it has been greatly benefited by the searching criticisms which it has sustained from the other. But as the Lockian, or à posteriori, psychology has for some time been under a cloud throughout Europe, from which it is now decidedly emerging, and giving signs that it is likely soon again to have its turn of ascendency, there may be use in making some observations on the general pretensions of this philosophy, its method, and the evidence on which it relies, and in helping to make generally known a work which is the most careful, the most complete, and the most genuinely scientific analytical exposition of the human mind which the à posteriori psychology has up to this time produced.

In these remarks no complete comparison between the two modes of philosophizing is to be looked for. Psychology, with which we are here concerned, is but the first stage in this great controversy—the arena of the initial conflict. The account which the two schools respectively render of the human mind is the foundation of their doctrines; but the crowning peculiarity of each resides in the superstructure. That the constitution of the mind is the key to the constitution of external nature—that the laws of the human intellect have a necessary correspondence with the objective laws of the universe, such that these may be inferred from those—is the grand doctrine which the one school affirms and the other denies; and the difference between this doctrine and its negation, is the great practical distinction between the two philosophies. But this question is beyond the compass of psychology. The à priori philosophers, when they inculcate this doctrine, do so not as psychologists, but as ontologists; and some distinguished thinkers, who, so far as psychology is concerned, belong essentially to the à priori school, have not thought it necessary to enter, except to a very limited extent, on the ground of ontology. Among these may be counted Reid and Stewart, as well as other more recent names of eminence. Indeed, the grand pretension of the à priori school in its extreme development, that of arriving at a knowledge of the Absolute, has received its most elaborate and crushing refutation from two philosophers of that same school—Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Ferrier: the à posteriori metaphysicians having in general thought that the essential relativity of our knowledge could dispense with direct proof, and might be left to rest on the general evidence of their analysis of the mental phenomena. Yet the philosophers whom we have named are not the less, up to a certain point, ontologists. They all hold, that some knowledge, more or less, of objective existences and their laws, is attainable by man, and that it is obtained by way of inference from the constitution of the human mind. Reid, for example, is decidedly of opinion that Matter—not the set of phenomena so called, but the actual Thing, of which these are effects and manifestations—is cognizable by us as a reality in the universe; and that extension, solidity, and other fundamental attributes of visible and tangible Nature, known to us by experience, are really and unequivocally qualities inherent in this actual thing; the evidence of which doctrine is, that we have, ineradicable from our minds, conceptions or perceptions of these various objects of thought, of which conceptions or perceptions the existence is inexplicable, save from the reality of the things which they represent. Thus far Reid: who is therefore in principle as much an ontologist as Hegel, though he does not lay claim to as minute a knowledge of the constitution of “Things in themselves.” On the legitimacy of this mode of reasoning, the other school is at issue with them. The possibility of ontology is one of the points in dispute between the two. It is one into which we do not here enter.

On the ground of simple psychology, the distinction between the two philosophies consists in the different theories they give of the more complex phenomena of the human mind. When we call the one philosophy à priori, the other à posteriori, or of experience, the terms must not be misunderstood. It is not meant that experience belongs only to one, and is appealed to as evidence by one and not by the other. Both depend on experience for their materials. Both require as the basis of their systems, that the actual facts of the human mind should be ascertained by observation. It is true they differ to some extent in their notion of facts; the à priori philosophers cataloguing some things as facts, which the others contend are inferences. The fundamental difference relates, however, not to the facts themselves, but to their origin. Speaking briefly and loosely, we may say that the one theory considers the more complex phenomena of the mind to be products of experience, the other believes them to be original. In more precise language, the à priori thinkers hold, that in every act of thought, down to the most elementary, there is an ingredient which is not given to the mind, but contributed by the mind in virtue of its inherent powers. The simplest phenomenon of all, an external sensation, requires, according to them, a mental element to become a perception, and be thus converted from a passive and merely fugitive state of our own being, into the recognition of a durable object external to the mind. The notions of Extension, Solidity, Number, Magnitude, Force, though it is through our senses that we acquire them, are not copies of any impressions on our senses, but creations of the mind’s own laws set in action by our sensations; and the properties of these ideal creations are not proved by experience, but deduced à priori from the ideas themselves, constituting the demonstrative sciences of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statics, and dynamics. Experience, instead of being the source and prototype of our ideas, is itself a product of the mind’s own forces working on the impressions we receive from without, and has always a mental as well as an external element. Experience is only rendered possible by those mental laws which it is vainly invoked to explain and account for. A fortiori do all our ideas of supersensual things, and all our moral and spiritual judgments and perceptions, proceed from our inherent mental constitution. Experience is the occasion, not the prototype, of our mental ideas, and is neither the source nor the evidence of our knowledge, but its test; for as what we call experience is the outward manifestation of laws which are not to be found in experience, but which may be known à priori, and as the effects cannot be in contradiction to the cause, it is a necessary condition of our knowledge that experience shall not conflict with it.

We are now touching the real point of separation between the à priori and the à posteriori psychologists. These last also for the most part acknowledge the existence of a mental element in our ideas. They admit that the notions of Extension, Solidity, Time, Space, Duty, Virtue, are not exact copies of any impressions on our senses. They grant them to be ideas constructed by the mind itself, the materials alone being supplied to it. But they do not think that this ideal construction takes place by peculiar and inscrutable laws of the mind, of which no further account can be given. They think that a further account can be given. They admit the mental element as a fact, but not as an ultimate fact. They think it may be resolved into simpler laws and more general facts; that the process by which the mind constructs these great ideas may be traced, and shown to be but a more recondite case of the operation of well-known and familiar principles.

From this opinion, which ascribes an ascertainable genesis to that part of the more complex mental phenomena which derives its origin from the mind itself, instead of regarding it, with the à priori psychologists, as something ultimate and inscrutable, there arises necessarily a wide difference between the two as to what are called by the à priori philosophers necessary elements of thought. M. Cousin, one of the ablest, and (Fichte excepted) quite the most eloquent teacher of the à priori school, deems it the radical error of Locke and his followers to have raised the question of the origin of our ideas at the opening of the inquiry, without first making a complete descriptive survey of the ideas themselves; which if they had done, he thinks they must have recognised, as involved in all our thoughts, certain necessary assumptions, inconsistent with the origin which Locke ascribes to them. The difference, however, between the two theories, is not as to the fact that these assumptions are made, but as to their being necessary assumptions. The Lockians think they are able to show how and why the mind is led to make these assumptions. They believe that it is not obliged by any necessity of its nature to make them. They think that the cause of our making the assumptions lies in the conditions of our experience; that those conditions are often accidental and modifiable, and might be so modified that we should no longer be led to make these assumptions; and even when the assumptions depend upon conditions of our experience which do not, so far as our faculties can judge, admit of actual modification, yet if by an exercise of thought we imagine them modified, the supposed necessity of the assumptions will disappear. For example: the transcendentalist examines our ideas of Space and Time, and finds that each of them contains inseparably within itself the idea of Infinity. We can of course have no experimental evidence of infinity: all our experiences, and therefore, in his opinion, all our ideas derived from experience, are of things finite. Yet to conceive Time or Space otherwise than as things infinite is impossible. The infinity of Space and Time he therefore sets down as a necessary assumption: and if his philosophy leads him (which Kant’s did not) to regard Space and Time as having any existence at all external to the mind, he proceeds, as an ontologist, to infer from the necessity of the assumption, the infinity of the things themselves. The à posteriori psychologist, on his part, also perceives that we cannot think of Space or of Time otherwise than as infinite; but he does not consider this as an ultimate fact, or as requiring any peculiar law of mind or properties of the objects for its explanation. He sees in it an ordinary manifestation of one of the laws of the association of ideas,—the law, that the idea of a thing irresistibly suggests the idea of any other thing which has been often experienced in close conjunction with it, and not otherwise. As we have never had experience of any point of space without other points beyond it, nor of any point of time without others following it, the law of association makes it impossible for us to think of any point of space or time, however distant, without having the idea irresistibly realized in imagination, of other points still more remote. And thus the supposed original and inherent property of these two ideas is completely explained and accounted for by the law of association; and we are enabled to see, that if Space or Time were really susceptible of termination, we should be just as unable as we now are to conceive the idea. This being once seen, although the mental element, Infinity, still remains attached to the ideas, we are no longer prompted to make a “necessary assumption” of a corresponding objective fact. We are enabled to acknowledge our ignorance, and our inability to judge whether the course of Things, in this respect, corresponds with our necessities of Thought. Space or Time may, for aught we know, be inherently terminable, though in our present condition we are totally incapable of conceiving a termination to them. Could we arrive at the end of space, we should, no doubt, be apprised of it by some new and strange impression upon our senses, of which it is not at present in our power to form the faintest idea. But under all other circumstances the association is indissoluble, since every moment’s experience is constantly renewing it.

In this example, which is the more significant as the case is generally considered one of the main strongholds of the à priori school, the two leading doctrines of the most advanced à posteriori psychology are very clearly brought to view: first, that the more recondite phenomena of the mind are formed out of the more simple and elementary; and, secondly, that the mental law, by means of which this formation takes place, is the Law of Association. Though not the first who pointed out this law, Locke was the author of its first great application to the explanation of the mental phenomena, by his doctrine of Complex Ideas. The idea of an orange, for example, is compounded of certain simple ideas of colour, of visible and tangible shape, of taste, of smell, of a certain consistence, weight, internal structure, and so forth: yet idea of an orange is to our feelings and conceptions one single idea, not a plurality of ideas; thus showing that when any number of sensations have been often experienced simultaneously or in very rapid succession, the ideas of those sensations not only raise up one another, but do this so certainly and instantaneously as to run together, and seem melted into one. In this example, however, the original elements may still, by an ordinary effort of consciousness, be distinguished in the compound. It was reserved for Hartley to show that mental phenomena, joined together by association, may form a still more intimate, and as it were chemical union—may merge into a compound, in which the separate elements are no more distinguishable as such, than hydrogen and oxygen in water; the compound having all the appearance of a phenomenon sui generis, as simple and elementary as the ingredients, and with properties different from any of them: a truth which, once ascertained, evidently opens a new and wider range of possibilities for the generation of mental phenomena by means of association.

The most complete and scientific form of the à posteriori psychology, is that which considers the law of association as the governing principle, by means of which the more complex and recondite mental phenomena shape themselves, or are shaped, out of the simpler mental elements. The great problem of this form of psychology is to ascertain, not how far this law extends, for it extends to everything; ideas of sensation, intellectual ideas, emotions, desires, volitions, any or all of these may become connected by association under the two laws of Contiguity and Resemblance, and when so connected, acquire the power of calling up one another. Not, therefore, how far the law extends, is the problem, but how much of the apparent variety of the mental phenomena it is capable of explaining; what ultimate elements of the mind remain, when all are subtracted, the formation of which can be in this way accounted for; and how, out of those elements, and the law, or rather laws, of association, the remainder of the mental phenomena are built up. On this part of the subject there are, as might be expected, many differences of doctrine; and the theory, like all theories of an uncompleted science, is in a state of progressive improvement.

This mode of interpreting the phenomena of the mind is not unfrequently stigmatised as materialistic; how far justly, may be seen when it is remembered that the Idealism of Berkeley is one of the developments of this theory. With materialism in the obnoxious sense, this view of the mind has no necessary connexion, though doubtless not so directly exclusive of it as is the rival theory. But if it be materialism to endeavour to ascertain the material conditions of our mental operations, all theories of the mind which have any pretension to comprehensiveness must be materialistic. Whether organisation alone could produce life and thought, we probably shall never certainly know, unless we could repeat Frankenstein’s experiment; but that our mental operations have material conditions, can be denied by no one who acknowledges, what all now admit, that the mind employs the brain as its material organ. And this being granted, there is nothing more materialistic in endeavouring, so far as our means of physiological explanation allow, to trace out the detailed connexions between mental manifestations and cerebral or nervous states. Unhappily, the knowledge hitherto obtainable on this subject has been very limited in amount; but when we consider, for example, the case of all our stronger emotions, and the disturbance of almost every part of our physical frame, which is occasioned in these cases by a mere mental idea, no rational person can doubt the closeness of the connexion between the functions of the nervous system and the phenomena of mind, nor think any exposition of the mind satisfactory, into which that connexion does not enter as a prominent feature.

It is undoubtedly true that the Association Psychology does the higher mental states as in a certain sense the outgrowth and offspring of the lower. But in other cases, philosophers have not considered as degrading, the formation of noble products out of base materials, and have rather been disposed to celebrate this, as one of the exemplifications of wisdom and contrivance in the arrangements of Nature. Without undertaking to determine what portion of truth lies in this philosophy, and how far any of the nobler phenomena of mind are really constructed from the materials of our animal nature, it is certain that, to whatever extent this is the fact, it ought to be known and recognised. If these nobler parts of our nature are not self-sown and original, but are built or build themselves up, out of no matter what materials, it must be highly important to the work of the education and improvement of human character, to understand as much as possible of the process by which the materials are put together. These composite parts of our constitution (granting them to be such) are not for that reason factitious and unnatural. The products are not less a part of human nature than their component elements. Water is as truly one of the substances in external nature, as hydrogen or oxygen; and to suppose it non-existent would imply as great a change in all we know of the order of things in which we live. It is only to a very vulgar type of mind, that a grand or beautiful object loses its charm when it loses some of its mystery, through the unveiling of a part of the process by which it is created in the secret recesses of Nature.

The aim, then, which the Association Psychology proposes to itself, is one which both schools of mental philosophy should equally desire to see vigorously prosecuted. It is important, even from the point of view of transcendentalists, that all which can be done by this system for the explanation of the mental phenomena should be brought to light. For, in the first place, all admit that there is much which can be so explained. The law of association, every one allows, is real, and a large number of mental facts are explicable thereby. But further, the sole ground upon which the transcendental mode of speculation in psychology can possibly stand, is the failure of the other. The evidence of the à priori theory must always be negative. There can be no positive proof that oxygen, or any other body, is a simple substance. The sole proof that can be given is, that no one has hitherto succeeded in decomposing it. And nothing can positively prove that any particular one of the constituents of the mind is ultimate. We can only presume it to be such, from the ill success of every attempt to resolve it into simpler elements. If, indeed, the phenomena alleged to be complex manifested themselves chronologically at an earlier period than those from which they are said to be compounded, this would be a complete disproof, at least of that origin. But the fact is not so: on the contrary, the higher mental phenomena are so well known to unfold themselves after the lower, that sensational experience, which is so violently repudiated as their origin and source, is, from the necessity of the case, admitted as the occasion which calls into action the mental laws that develop them. The first question, therefore, in analytical psychology ought to be, how much of the furniture of the mind will experience and association account for? The residuum which cannot be so explained, must be provisionally set down as ultimate, and handed over to observation to determine its conditions and laws.

On the other hand, it is necessary to be exigeant as to the evidence for the validity of the analysis by which a mental phenomenon is resolved into association. Much has been tendered on this subject, even by powerful thinkers, as proved truth, to which it is impossible soberly to assign any higher value than that of philosophical conjecture. The rules of inductive logic must be duly applied to the case. When the elements can be recognised by our consciousness as distinguishably existing in the compound, there is no difficulty. When they are not thus distinguishable, the gradual growth and building up of the complex phenomenon may be a fact amenable to direct observation. In the case of the higher intellectual and moral phenomena of our being, the observation may be practised on ourselves. In the case of those of our acquisitions which are made too early to be remembered, the observation may be of children, of the young of other animals, or of persons who are, or were during a part of life, shut out from some of the ordinary sources of experience; persons like Caspar Hauser, brought up in confinement and solitude; persons destitute of sight or hearing; especially those born blind and suddenly restored to sight. This last is a precious source of information, which unfortunately has been very scantily made use of. In the case of children and young animals, our power is very limited of ascertaining what actually passes within them. But in so far as we are able to interpret their outward manifestations, we have some means of ascertaining what, in their minds, precedes can often, by sufficiently close observation, perceive a mental faculty forming itself by gradual growth; and in some cases we can, to a certain extent, ascertain the conditions of its formation, which are often such as to bring it within the known laws of association. Though the product may, to our consciousness, appear sui generis, not identical in its nature with any or with all of the elements, yet if the mode of its production be invariably found to consist in bringing certain sensations or ideas to pass through the mind simultaneously, or in immediate succession, and if the effect is produced pari passu with the number of repetitions of this conjunction, we may conclude with considerable assurance that the apparently simple phenomenon is a compound of those ideas, united by association. For we know that it is the effect of repetition to knit all conjunctions of ideas closer and closer, until they so coalesce as to leave no trace in our consciousness of their separate existence. One of the most familiar cases of this remarkable law, is the case of what are called the acquired perceptions of sight. It is admitted by nearly all psychologists, that when we appear to see distance and magnitude by the eye, we do not really see them, but see only certain signs, from which, by a process of reasoning, rendered so rapid by practice as to have become entirely unconscious, we infer the distance or magnitude which we fancy we see. No alleged transformation of mental phenomena by association can be more complete, or more extraordinary, than this. Yet it is one of the few results of psychological analysis which can be brought to the test of a complete Baconian induction: for the case admits of an ample range of experiments; and the result of them is, that wherever the signs are the same, our impressions of distance and magnitude are the same, and wherever the signs are different, our impressions are different, although the real distance and magnitude of the object looked at remain all the while exactly as they were. Hardly any theory of the formation of a mental phenomenon by association can deserve, after this, to be rejected in limine, for inherent incredibility, or inconsistency with our consciousness. There is hardly any mental phenomenon (except those which association itself presupposes) of which we can say that, from its own nature, it could not possibly have been produced by association. But, from the intrinsic possibility of its having been so produced, to its actually being so, is a wide step; and unless the case admits of actual experiment, or unless there be something in the observed development of the individual mind to bear out the conjecture, it can be ranked only as an hypothesis, of no present value except to suggest points for further verification.

There is, however, a large class of cases—and these are among the most important of all—in which the explanation by way of association is not attended with any of these difficulties and uncertainties. The mental fact which is the subject of dispute may be, not any one mental phenomenon, but a conjunction between phenomena. The thing to be explained often is no other than the fact that some one idea is suggested by, and apparently involved in, another; and the point to be decided is, whether this happens necessarily, and by an inherent law; as infinity is said to be inherently involved in our ideas of time and space, and externality in our ideas of tangible objects. In such cases the evidence of origin in association may often be complete; and it is in such that the greatest triumphs of the Association Psychology have been achieved. A conjunction, however close and apparently indissoluble, between two ideas, is not only an effect which association is able to produce, but one which it is certain to produce, if the necessary conditions are sufficiently often repeated without the intervention of any fact tending to produce a counter-association. It is, therefore, in these cases, sufficient if we can show, that there has really existed the invariable conjunction of sensible phenomena in experience, which is necessary for the formation of an inseparable association between the corresponding ideas. If, as in the case of Time and Space, already examined, this can be shown to be the fact, then that conjunction of sensible experiences is the real cause: formation by association is the true theory of the phenomenon, and it is in the highest degree unphilosophical to demand any other.

These few observations on the nature and scope of the Association Psychology generally, were necessary for fixing the position of Mr. Bain’s treatise in mental science. Belonging essentially to the association school, he has not only, with great clearness and copiousness, illustrated, popularised, and enforced by fresh arguments, all which that school had already done towards the explanation of the phenomena of mind, but he has added so largely to it, that those who have the highest appreciation and the warmest admiration of his predecessors, are likely to be the most struck with the great advance which this treatise constitutes over what those predecessors had done, and the improved position in which it places their psychological theory. Mr. Bain possesses, indeed, an union of qualifications peculiarly fitting him for what, in the language of Dr. Brown, may be called the physical investigation of mind. With analytic powers comparable to those of his most distinguished predecessors, he combines a range of appropriate knowledge still wider than theirs; having made a more accurate study than perhaps any previous psychologist, of the whole round of the physical sciences, on which the mental depend both for their methods, and for the necessary material substratum of their theories: while those sciences, also, are themselves in a far higher state of advancement than in any former age. This is especially true of the science most nearly allied, both in subject and method, with psychological investigations, the science of Physiology: which Hartley, Brown, and Mill had unquestionably studied, and knew perhaps as well as it was known by any one at the time when they studied it, but in a superficial manner compared with Mr. Bain; the science having in the meanwhile assumed almost a new aspect, from the important discoveries which had been made in all its branches, and especially in the functions of the nervous system, since even the latest of those authors wrote.

Mr. Bain commences his work with a full and luminous exposition of what is known of the structure and functions of the nervous system. What may be called the outward action of the nervous system is twofold,—sensation and muscular motion; and one of the great physiological discoveries of the present age is, that these two functions are performed by means of two distinct sets of nerves, in close juxtaposition; one of which, if separately severed or paralysed, puts an end to sensation in the part of the body which it supplies, but leaves the power of motion unimpaired; the other destroys the power of motion, but does not affect sensation. That the central organ of the nervous system, the brain, must in some way or other co-operate in all sensation, and in all muscular motion except that which is actually automatic and mechanical, is also certain; for if the nervous continuity between any part of the body and the brain is interrupted, either by the division of the nerve, or by pressure on any intermediate portion, unfitting it to perform its functions, sensation and voluntary motion in that part cease to exist. That the memory or thought of a sensation formerly experienced has also for its necessary condition a state of the brain, and of the same nerves which transmit the sensation itself, does not admit of the same direct proof by experiment; but is, at least, a highly probable hypothesis. When we consider that in dreams, hallucinations, and some highly excited states of the nervous system, the idea or remembrance of a sensation is actually mistaken for the sensation itself; and also that the idea, when vividly excited, not unfrequently produces the same effects on the whole bodily frame which the sensation would produce, it is hardly possible, in the face of all this resemblance, to suppose any fundamentally different machinery for their production, or any real difference in their physical conditions, except one of degree. The instrumentality of the brain in thought is a more mysterious subject; the evidence is less direct, and its interpretation has given rise to some of the keenest controversies of our era, controversies yet far from being conclusively decided. But the general connexion is attested by many indisputable pathological facts: such as the effect of cerebral inflammation in producing delirium; the relation between idiocy and cerebral malformation or disease; and is confirmed by the entire range of comparative anatomy, which shows the intellectual faculties of the various species of animals bearing, if not an exact ratio, yet a very unequivocal relation, to the development in proportional size, and complexity of structure, of the cerebral hemispheres.

However imperfect our knowledge may still be in regard to this part of the functions of the nervous system, it is certain that all our sensations depend upon the transmission of some sort of nervous influence inward, from the senses to the brain, and that our voluntary motions take place by the transmission of some sort of nervous influence outward, from the brain to the muscular system; these two nervous operations being, as already observed, the functions of two distinct systems of nerves, called respectively the nerves of sensation and those of motion. It is now necessary to notice another physiological truth, brought to light only within the present generation, viz. the different functions of the two kinds of matter of which the nervous system is compounded. The nerves consist partly of grey vesicular or cell-like matter, partly of white fibrous matter. Physiologists are now of opinion that the function of the grewy matter is that of originating power, while the white fibrous matter is simply a conductor, which conveys the influence to and from the brain, and between one part of the brain and another. With this physiological discovery is connected the first capital improvement which Mr. Bain has made in the Association Psychology as left by his predecessors; the nature of which we now proceed to indicate.

Those who have studied the writings of the Association Psychologists, must often have been unfavourably impressed by the almost total absence, in their analytical expositions, of the recognition of any active element, or spontaneity, in the mind itself. Sensation, and the memory of sensation, are passive phenomena; the mind, in them, does not act, but is acted upon; it is a mere recipient of impressions; and though adhesion by association may enable one of these passive impressions to recall another, yet when recalled, it is but passive still. A theory of association which stops here, seems adequate to account for our dreams, our reveries, our casual thoughts, and states of mere contemplation, but for no other part of our nature. The mind, however, is active as well as passive; and the apparent insufficiency of the theory to account for the mind’s activity, is probably the circumstance which has oftenest operated to alienate from the Association Psychology any of those who had really studied it. Coleridge, who was one of these, and in the early part of his life a decided Hartleian, has left on record, in his Biographia Literaria, that such was the fact in his own case. Yet, no Hartleian could overlook the necessity, incumbent on any theory of the mind, of accounting for our voluntary powers. Activity cannot possibly be generated from passive elements; a primitive active element must be found somewhere; and Hartley found it in the stimulative power of sensation over the muscles. All our muscular motions, according to him, were originally automatic, and excited by the stimulus of sensations; as, no doubt, many of them were and are. After a muscular contraction has been sufficiently often excited by a sensation, then, in Hartley’s opinion, the idea or remembrance of the sensation acquires a similar power of exciting that same muscular contraction. Here is the first germ of volition: a muscular action excited by an idea. After this, every combination of associated ideas into which that idea or remembrance enters, and which, therefore, cannot be recalled without recalling it, obtains the power of recalling also the muscular motion which has come under its control. This is Hartley’s notion of the point of junction between our intellectual states and our muscular actions, which is the foundation of the theory of Volition. It involves two assumptions, both of which are merely hypothetical. One is, that all muscular action is originally excited by sensations; which has never been proved, and which there is much evidence to contradict. The other is, that between the primitive automatic character of a muscular contraction, and its ultimate state of amenability to the will, an intermediate condition is passed through, of excitability by the idea of the sensation by which the motion was at first excited: that the intervention of this idea is necessary in all cases of voluntary power; and that the recalling of it is the indispensable machinery of voluntary action. This is a mere hypothesis, which consciousness does not vouch for, and which no evidence has been brought to substantiate.

Mr. Bain has made a great advance on this theory. Those who are acquainted with the French metaphysical writers of this century, or even with the first paper of M. Cousin’s Fragments Philosophiques, will remember the important modification made by M. Laromiguière in Condillac’s psychological system. M. Laromiguière had noted in Condillac the same defect which has been pointed out in the Association philosophers; and as Condillac had placed the passive phenomenon, Sensation, at the centre of his system, M. Laromiguière corrected him by putting instead of it the active phenomenon, Attention, as the fundamental fact by which to explain the active half of the mental phenomena. Mr. Bain’s theory (the germ of which is in a passage cited by him from the eminent physiologist, Müller), stands in nearly the same relation to Hartley’s as Laromiguière’s to that of Condillac. He has widened his basis by the admission of a second primitive element. He holds that the brain does not act solely in obedience to impulses, but is also a self-acting instrument; that the nervous influence which, being conveyed through the motory nerves, excites the muscles into action, is generated automatically in the brain itself, not, of course, lawlessly and without a cause, but under the organic stimulus of nutrition; and manifests itself in the general rush of bodily activity, which all healthy animals exhibit after food and repose, and in the random motions which we see constantly made without apparent end or purpose by infants. This doctrine, of which the accumulated proofs will be found in Mr. Bain’s first volume (The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 73-80), supplies him with a simple explanation of the origin of voluntary power. Among the numerous motions given forth indiscriminately by the spontaneous energy of the nervous centre, some are accidentally hit on, which are found to be followed by a pleasure, or by the relief of a pain. In this case, the child is able, to a certain extent, to prolong that particular motion, or to abate it; and this, in our author’s opinion, is the sole original power which we possess over our bodily motions, and the ultimate basis of voluntary action. The pleasure which the motion produces, or the pain which it relieves, determines the detention or relinquishment of that particular muscular movement. Why there is this natural tendency to detain or to get rid of a muscular contraction which influences our sensations, as well as why that tendency is towards pleasure and from pain, instead of being the reverse, cannot be explained. The author’s reason for considering this to be our only original power over our bodily movements, is not that the supposition affords any help in clearing up the mystery, or possesses any superiority of antecedent probability; for it is just as likely à priori that we should be able, by a wish, to select and originate a bodily movement, as that we should merely be able to prolong one which has already been excited by the spontaneous energies of our organisation. Mr. Bain’s reason for preferring the latter theory, is merely that the evidence is in its favour; that no other is consistent with observation of children and young animals. We will exhibit a part of the exposition in his own words.

Dr. Reid has no hesitation in classing the voluntary command of an organ, that is, the sequence of feeling and action implied in all acts of will, among instincts. The power of lifting a morsel of food to the mouth is, according to him, an instinctive or pre-established conjunction of the wish and the deed; that is to say, the emotional state of hunger coupled with the sight of a piece of bread, is associated through a primitive link of the mental constitution with the several movements of the hand, arm, and mouth concerned in the act of eating. This assertion of Dr. Reid’s may be simply met by appealing to the facts. It is not true that human beings possess at birth any voluntary command of their limbs whatsoever. A babe of two months old cannot use its hands in obedience to its desires. The infant can grasp nothing, hold nothing, can scarcely fix its eyes on anything. Dr. Reid might just as easily assert that the movements of a ballet-dancer are instinctive, or that we are born with an already established link of causation in our minds between the wish to paint a landscape and the movements of a painter’s arm. If the more perfect command of our voluntary movements implied in every art be an acquisition, so is the less perfect command of these movements, that grows upon a child during the first years of life. . . .

But the acquisition must needs repose upon some fundamental property of our nature that may properly be styled an instinct. It is this initial germ or rudiment that I am now anxious to fasten upon and make apparent. There certainly does exist in the depths of our constitution a property, whereby certain of our feelings, especially the painful class, impel to action of some kind or other. This, which I have termed the volitional property of feeling, is not an acquired property. From the earliest infancy a pain has a tendency to excite the active organs, as well as the emotional expression, although as yet there is no channel prepared whereby the stimulus may flow towards the appropriate members. The child whose foot is pricked by a needle in its dress is undoubtedly impelled by an active stimulus, but as no primitive link exists between an irritation in the foot and the movement of the hand towards the part affected, the stimulus is wasted on vain efforts, and there is nothing to be done but to drown the pain by the outburst of pure emotion. It is the property of almost every feeling of pain to stimulate some action for the extinction or abatement of that pain; it is likewise the property of many emotions of pleasure to stimulate an action for the continuance and increase of the pleasure; but the primitive impulse does not in either case determine which action . . . .

If at the moment of some acute pain, there should accidentally occur a spontaneous movement, and if that movement sensibly alleviates the pain, then it is that the volitional impulse belonging to the feeling will show itself. The movement accidentally begun through some other influence, will be sustained through this influence of the painful emotion. In the original situation of things, the acute feeling is unable of itself to bring on the precise movement that would modify the suffering; there is no primordial link between a state of suffering and a train of alleviating movements. But should the proper movement be once actually begun, and cause a felt diminution of the acute agony, the spur that belongs to states of pain would suffice to sustain this movement. . . . The emotion cannot invite, or suggest, or waken up the appropriate action; nevertheless, the appropriate action, once there, and sensibly telling upon the irritation, is thereupon kept going by the active influence, the volitional spur of the irritated consciousness. In short, if the state of pain cannot awaken a dormant action, a present feeling can at least maintain a present action. This, so far as I can make out, is the original position of things in the matter of volition. It may be that the start and the movements resulting from an acute smart, may relieve the smart, but that would not be a volition. In volition there are actions quite distinct from the manifested movements due to the emotion itself; these other actions rise at first independently and spontaneously, and are clutched in the embrace of the feeling when the two are found to suit one another in the alleviation of pain or the effusion of pleasure.

An example will perhaps place this speculation in a clearer light. An infant lying in bed has the painful sensation of chillness. This feeling produces the usual emotional display—namely, movements, and perhaps cries and tears. Besides these emotional elements there is a latent spur of volition, but with nothing to lay hold of as yet, owing to the disconnected condition of the mental arrangements at our birth. The child’s spontaneity, however, may be awake, and the pained condition will act so as to irritate the spontaneous centres, and make their central stimulus flow more copiously. In the course of a variety of spontaneous movements of arms, legs, and body, there occurs an action that brings the child in contact with the nurse lying beside it; instantly warmth is felt, and this alleviation of the painful feeling becomes immediately the stimulus to sustain the movement going on at that moment. That movement, when discovered, is kept up in preference to the others occurring in the course of the random spontaneity. . . .

By a process of cohesion or acquisition, coming under the law of association, the movement and the feeling become so linked together, that the feeling can at after times waken the movement out of dormancy; this is the state of matters in the maturity of volition. The infant of twelve months, under the stimulus of cold, can hitch nearer the side of the nurse, although no spontaneous movements to that effect happen at the moment; past repetition has established a connexion that did not exist at the beginning, whereby the feeling and action have become linked together as cause and effect.

(The Senses and the Intellect, pp. 292-6.)

In confirmation and illustration of these remarks, we quote from another part of the same volume the following “notes of observation made upon the earliest movements of two lambs seen during the first hour of their birth, and at subsequent stages of their development.”

One of the lambs, on being dropped, was taken hold of by the shepherd and laid on the ground so as to rest on its four knees. For a very short time, perhaps not much above a minute, it kept still in this attitude; a certain force was doubtless exerted to enable it to retain this position; but the first decided exertion of the creature’s own energy was shown in standing up on its legs, which it did after the pause of little more than a minute. The power thus put forth I can only describe as a spontaneous burst of the locomotive energy, under this condition—namely, that as all the four limbs were actuated at the same instant, the innate power must have been guided into this quadruple channel in consequence of that nervous organisation that constitutes the four limbs one related group. The animal now stood on its legs, the feet being considerably apart, so as to widen the base of support. The energy that raised it up continued flowing in order to maintain the standing posture, and the animal doubtless had the consciousness of such a flow of energy, as its earliest mental experience. This standing posture was continued for a minute or two in perfect stillness. Next followed the beginnings of locomotive movement. At first a limb was raised and set down again, then came a second movement that widened the animal’s base without altering its position. When a more complex movement of its limbs came on, the effect seemed to be to go sideways; another complex movement led forwards; but at the outset there appeared to be nothing to decide one direction rather than another, for the earliest movements were a jumble of side, forward, and backward. Still, the alternation of limb that any consecutive advance required, seemed within the power of the creature during the first ten minutes of life. Sensation as yet could be of very little avail, and it was evident that action took the start in the animal’s history. The eyes were wide open, and light must needs have entered to stimulate the brain. The contact with the solid earth, and the feelings of weight and movement, were the earliest feelings. In this state of uncertain wandering with little change of place, the lamb was seized hold of and carried up to the side of the mother. This made no difference till its nose was brought into contact with the woolly skin of the dam, which originated a new sensation. Then came a conjunction manifestly of the volitional kind. There was clearly a tendency to sustain this contact, to keep the nose rubbing upon the side and belly of the ewe. Finding a certain movement to have this effect, that movement was sustained; exemplifying what I considered the primitive or fundamental fact of volition. Losing the contact, there was yet no power to recover it by a direct action, for the indications of sight at this stage had no meaning. The animal’s spontaneous irregular movements were continued; for a time they were quite fruitless, until a chance contact came about again, and this contact could evidently sustain the posture or movement that was causing it. The whole of the first hour was spent in these various movements about the mother, there being in that short time an evident increase of facility in the various acts of locomotion, and in commanding the head in such a way as to keep up the agreeable touch. A second hour was spent much in the same manner, and in the course of the third hour the animal, which had been entirely left to itself, came upon the teat, and got this into its mouth. The spontaneous workings of the mouth now yielded a new sensation, whereby they were animated and sustained, and unexpectedly the creature found itself in the possession of a new pleasure; the satisfaction first of mouthing the object—next, by-and-by, the pleasure of drawing milk; the intensity of this last feeling would doubtless give an intense spur to the coexisting movements, and keep them energetically at work. A new and grand impression was thus produced, remaining after the fact, and stimulating exertion and pursuit in order to recover it.

Six or seven hours after birth the animal had made notable progress, and locomotion was easy, the forward movement being preferred but not predominant. The sensations of sight began to have a meaning. In less than twenty-four hours the animal could, at the sight of the mother ahead, move in the forward direction at once to come up to her, showing that a particular visible image had now been associated with a definite movement; the absence of any such association being most manifest in the early movements of life. It could proceed at once to the teat and suck, guided only by its desire and the sight of the object. It was now in the full exercise of the locomotive faculty; and very soon we could see it moving with the nose along the ground in contact with the grass, the preliminary of seizing the blades in the mouth. . . .

The observations proved distinctly three several points—namely, first the existence of spontaneous action as the earliest fact in the creature’s history; second, the absence of any definite bent prior to experienced sensation; and third, the power of a sensation actually experienced to keep up the coinciding movement of the time, thereby constituting a voluntary act in the initial form. What was also very remarkable, was the rate of acquisition, or the rapidity with which all the associations between sensations and actions became fixed. A power that the creature did not at all possess naturally, got itself matured as an acquisition in a few hours; before the end of a week the lamb was capable of almost anything belonging to its sphere of existence; and at the lapse of a fortnight, no difference could be seen between it and the aged members of the flock.

(Pp. 404n-406n.)

The larger half of Mr. Bain’s first volume is occupied by the exposition of Association. His exemplification and illustration of this fundamental phenomenon of mind, in its two varieties—adhesive association by contiguity in time or place, and suggestion by resemblance—are quite unexampled in richness, clearness, and comprehensiveness. The whole of the intellectual phenomena, as distinguished from the emotional, he considers as explicable by that law. But to render this possible, the law must be conceived in its utmost generality. Association is not between ideas of sensation alone. The following is the author’s statement of the two laws of association, the law of Contiguity, and that of Similarity:

Actions, sensations, and states of feeling, occurring together or in close succession, tend to grow together or cohere in such a way that when any one of them is afterwards presented to the mind, the others are apt to be brought up in idea. (P. 318.)

Present actions, sensations, thoughts, or emotions, tend to revive their like among previous impressions.

(P. 451.)

One of the leading features in Mr. Bain’s application of these laws to the analysis of phenomena, is the great use he makes of the muscular sensations, in explaining our impressions of, and judgments respecting, things physically external to us. The distinction between these sensations and those of touch, in the legitimate sense of the word, and the prominent part they take in the composition of our ideas of resistance or solidity, and extension, were first pointed out by Brown, and were the principal addition which he made to the analytical exposition of the mind. Mr. Bain carries out the idea to a still greater length, and his developments of it are highly instructive, though he sometimes, perhaps, insists too much upon it, to the prejudice of other elements equally or more influential. Thus, in his explanation of the acquired perception of distance and magnitude by sight, he lays almost exclusive stress on the sensations accompanying the muscular movements by which the eyes are adapted to different distances from us, or are made to pass along the lengths and breadths of visible objects. That this is one of the sources of the acquired perceptions of sight, cannot be doubted; but that it is the principal one, no one will believe, who considers that all the impression of unequal distances from us that a picture can give, is produced not only without this particular indication, but in contradiction to it. The signs by which we mainly judge are the effects of perspective, both linear and aerial; in other words, the differences in the actual picture made on the retina: the imitation of which constitutes the illusion of the painter’s art, and which we should have been glad to see illustrated by Mr. Bain, as he is so well able to do, instead of being merely acknowledged by a quotation in a note (pp. 380n-382n). We regret that our limits forbid us to quote (pp. 372-6) his explanation of the mode whereby, in his opinion, the feeling of resistance, a result of our muscular sensations, generates the notion, often supposed to be instinctive, of an external world.

Respecting the law of Association by Contiguity, so much had been done, with such eminent ability, by former writers, that this part of Mr. Bain’s exposition is chiefly original in the profuseness and minuteness of his illustrations. To bring up the theory of the law of Similarity to the same level, much more remained to do, that law having been rather unaccountably sacrificed to the other by some of the Association psychologists; among whom Mr. James Mill, in his Analysis, even endeavoured to resolve it into contiguity; an attempt which is perhaps the most inconclusive part of that generally acute and penetrating performance, association by resemblance being, as Mr. Bain observes, presupposed by, and indispensable to the conception of, association by contiguity. The two kinds of association are indeed so different, that the predominance of each gives rise to a different type of intellectual character; an eminent degree of the former constituting the inductive philosopher, the poet and artist, and the inventor and originator generally; while adhesive association gives memory, mechanical skill, facility of acquisition in science or business, and practical talent so far as unconnected with invention.

To the long chapters on Contiguity and Similarity, Mr. Bain subjoins a third on what he terms Compound Association; “where several threads, or a plurality of links or bonds of connexion, concur in reviving some previous thought or mental state” (ibid., p. 544); which they consequently recall more vividly: a part of the subject too little illustrated by former writers, and which includes, among many others, the important heads of “the singling out of one among many trains,” [p. 562,] and what our author aptly terms “obstructive association.” [P. 564.] The subject is concluded by a chapter on “Constructive Association,” analysing the process by which the mind forms “combinations or aggregates different from any that have been presented to it in the course of experience,” and showing this to depend on the same laws [p. 571]. We are unable to find room for the smallest specimen of these chapters, which are marked with our author’s usual ability, and fill up what is partially a hiatus in most treatises on Association.

Mr. Bain’s exposition of the Emotions is not of so analytical a character as that of the intellectual phenomena. He considers it necessary, in this department, to allow a much greater range to the instinctive portion of our nature; and has exhibited what may be termed the natural history of the emotions, rather than attempted to construct their philosophy. It is certain that the attempts of the Association psychologists to resolve the emotions by association, have been on the whole the least successful part of their efforts. One fatal imperfection is obvious at first sight: the only part of the phenomenon which their theory explains, is the suggestion of an idea or ideas, either pleasurable or painful—that is, the merely intellectual part of the emotion; while there is evidently in all our emotions an animal part, over and above any which naturally attends on the ideas considered separately, and which these philosophers have passed without any attempt at explanation. It is a wholly insufficient account of Fear, for example, to resolve it into the calling up, by association, of the idea of the dreaded evil; since, were this all, the physical manifestations that would follow would be the same in kind, and mostly less in degree, than those which the evil would itself produce if actually experienced; whereas, in truth, they are generically distinct; the screams, groans, contortions, &c., which (for example) intense bodily suffering produces, being altogether different phenomena from the well-known physical effects and manifestations of the passion of terror. It is conceivable that a scientific theory of Fear may one day be constructed, but it must evidently be the work of physiologists, not of metaphysicians. The proper office of the law of association in connexion with it, is to account for the transfer of the passion to objects which do not naturally excite it. We all know how easily any object may be rendered dreadful by association, as exemplified by the tremendous effect of nurses’ stories in generating artificial terrors.

We must not, therefore, expect to find in the half volume which Mr. Bain has dedicated to this subject, any attempt at a general analysis of the emotions. He has not even (except in one important case, to which we shall presently advert) entered, with the fulness which belongs to his plan, and which marks the execution of every other part of it, into the important inquiry, how far some emotions are compounded out of others. He gives a general indication of his opinion on the point; but his illustrations of it are scattered, and mostly incidental. He has, however, written the natural history of the emotions with great felicity, in a manner at once scientific and popular; insomuch that this part of his work presents attractions even to the unscientific reader. Mr. Bain’s classification of the emotions is different from, and more comprehensive than, any other which we have met with. He begins with “the feelings connected with the free vent of emotion in general, and with the opposite case of restrained or obstructed outburst;” the feelings, in short, of liberty or restraint in the utterance of emotion; which he regards as themselves emotions, and entitled, on account of their superior generality, to be placed at the head of the catalogue. He next proceeds to one of the simplest as well as most universal of our emotions—Wonder. The third on his list is Terror. The fourth is “the extensive group of feelings implied under the title of the Tender Affections.” The consideration of these feelings is by most writers blended with that of Sympathy; which is carefully distinguished from them by our author, and treated separately, not as an emotion, but as the capacity of taking on the emotions, or mental states generally, of others. A character may possess tenderness without being at all sympathetic, as is the case with many selfish sentimentalists; and the converse, though not equally common, is equally in human nature. From these he passes to a group which he designates by the title, Emotions of Self: including Self-esteem, or Self-complacency, in its various forms of Conceit, Pride, Vanity, &c., which he regards as cases of the emotions of tenderness directed towards self, and has largely illustrated this view of them. The sixth class is the emotions connected with Power. The seventh is the Irascible Emotions. The eighth is a group not hitherto brought forward into sufficient prominence, the emotions connected with Action. “Besides the pleasures and pains of Exercise, and the gratification of succeeding in an end, with the opposite mortification of missing what is laboured for, there is in the attitude of pursuit, a peculiar state of mind, so far agreeable in itself, that factitious occupations are instituted to bring it into play. When I use the term plot-interest, the character of the situation alluded to will be suggested with tolerable distinctness.” This grouping together of the emotions of hunting, of games, of intrigue of all sorts, and of novel-reading, with those of an active career in life, seems to us equally original and philosophical. The ninth class consists of the emotions caused by the operations of the Intellect. The tenth is the group of feelings connected with the Beautiful. Eleventh and last, comes the Moral Sense.

Of these, the four first are regarded by Mr. Bain as original elements of our nature, having their root in the constitution of the nervous system, and not explicable psychologically. The remaining seven he considers as generated by association from these four, with the aid of certain combinations of circumstances. Though, as already remarked, he does not discuss this question in the express and systematic manner which his general scheme would appear to require, he has said many things which throw a valuable light on it, together with some which we consider questionable. But we still desiderate an analytical philosophy of the emotional, like that which he has furnished of the intellectual, part of our constitution. Much of the material is ready to his hand, and only requires co-ordination under the universal law of mind which he has so well expounded. For example, the most complicated of all his eleven classes, the æsthetic group of emotions, has been analysed to within a single step of the ultimate principle, by thinkers who did not see, and would not have accepted, the one step which remained. Mr. Ruskin would probably be much astonished were he to find himself held up as one of the principal apostles of the Association Philosophy in Art. Yet, in one of the most remarkable of his writings, the second volume of Modern Painters, he aims at establishing, by a large induction and a searching analysis, that all things are beautiful (or sublime) which powerfully recall, and none but those which recall, one or more of a certain series of elevating or delightful thoughts. It is true that in this coincidence Mr. Ruskin does not recognise causation, but regards it as a pre-established harmony, ordained by the Creator, between our feelings of the Beautiful and certain grand or lovely ideas. Others, however, will be inclined to see in this phenomenon, not an arbitrary dispensation of Providence, which might have been other than it is, but a case of the mental chemistry so often spoken of; and will think it more in accordance with sound methods of philosophizing to believe, that the great ideas so well recognised by Mr. Ruskin, when they have sunk sufficiently deep into our nervous sensibility, actually generate, by composition with one another and with other elements, the æsthetic feelings which so nicely correspond to them.

The last of our author’s eleven classes, that of Moral Emotion, is the only one on which, in relation to the problem of its composition, he puts forth his whole strength. The question whether the moral feelings are intuitive or acquired—a point so often and so warmly contested between the rival schools of Psychology—has never before, we think, been so well or so fully argued on the anti-intuitive side. This masterly chapter would serve better than any other to give a correct idea of Mr. Bain’s philosophical capacity and turn of mind; but, unfortunately, either extracts or an abridgment would do it injustice, as they would impair the argument by mutilating it. Mr. Bain’s theory is, that the moral emotions are of an extremely complicated character; a compound, into which the social affections, and sympathy (which is a different thing from the social affections), enter largely, as well as, in many cases, the almost equally common fact of disinterested antipathy. But the peculiar feeling of obligation included in the moral sentiment, Mr. Bain regards as wholly created by external authority. He considers this character as impressed upon the feeling entirely by the idea of punishment. The purely disinterested character which the feeling assumes after appropriate cultivation, he holds to be one of the numerous instances of a feeling transferred by association to objects not containing in themselves that which originally excited it. This general conception of the origin of the moral sentiment is nothing new; but there is considerable novelty, as well as ability, in the mode in which it is worked out: and without, on the present occasion, expressing any opinion on this vexata quæstio, we can safely recommend Mr. Bain’s dissertation to the special study of those who wish to know the theory entertained on this subject by the Association school, and the best which they have to say in its support.

From the Emotions, Mr. Bain proceeds to the Will; and if, on the former subject, the reader who has previously gone through Mr. Bain’s first volume finds less of psychological analysis than he probably expected, such a complaint will not be made on the topic which succeeds. By no previous psychologist has the Volitional part of our nature been gone into with such minute detail, and the whole of the phenomena connected with it set forth and analysed with such fulness and such grasp of the subject. We have already stated the view taken by our author of the origin, or first germ, of our voluntary powers, which he conceives to be grounded, first, on “the existence of a spontaneous tendency to execute movements independent of the stimulus of sensations or feelings;” and, secondly, of a power to detain and prolong, or to abate and discontinue, a present movement, under the stimulus of a present pleasure or pain. If this be correct, the original power of the will over our muscles is much the same in extent, as it is and always remains over our thoughts and feelings; for over them, the only direct power we have is that of detaining them before the mind, or (it would perhaps be more correct to say) of producing any number of immediate mental repetitions of them, which is the meaning of what we call Attention. Through ten successive chapters Mr. Bain expands and applies this idea, showing how, in his belief, all the phenomena of volition are erected by Association on this original basis. The titles of some of the chapters and sections will show the comprehensiveness of the scheme:—The Spontaneity of Movement; Link of Feeling and Action; Growth of Voluntary Power; Control of Feelings and Thoughts; Motives or Ends; the Conflict of Motives; Deliberation, Resolution, Effort; Desire; the Moral Habits; Prudence, Duty, Moral Inability. It is only in the eleventh chapter, after the analysis of the phenomena is completed, that the author encounters the question which usually, in the writings of metaphysicians, usurps nearly all the space devoted to the phenomena of Will: we need hardly say that we refer to the Free-Will controversy. Mr. Bain is of opinion that the terms Freedom and Necessity are both equally inappropriate, equally calculated to give a false view of the phenomena. He thinks the word Necessity “nothing short of an incumbrance” in the sciences generally. But he adheres, in an unqualified manner, to the universality of the law of Cause and Effect, or the uniformity of sequence in natural phenomena, to which he does not think that the determinations of the will are in any manner an exception. He holds that men’s volitions and voluntary actions might be as certainly predicted, by any one who was aware of the state of the psychological agencies operating in the case, as any class of physical phenomena may be predicted from causes in operation. We quote, not as the best passage, but as the one which best admits of extraction, a portion of the controversial part of this chapter, being that in which the author examines the appeal made to consciousness as an infallible criterion in all psychological difficulties:

A bold appeal is made by some writers to our consciousness, as testifying in a manner not to be disputed the liberty of the will. Consciousness, it is said, is our ultimate and infallible criterion of truth. To affirm it erring, or mendacious, would be to destroy the very possibility of certain knowledge, and even to impugn the character of the Deity. Now this infallible witness, we are told, attests that man is free, wherefore the thing must be so. The respectability and number of those that have made use of this argument compel me to examine it. I confess that I find no cogency in it. As usual, there is a double sense in the principal term, giving origin to a potent fallacy. . . . For the purpose now in view, the word [consciousness] implies the knowledge that we have of the successive phases of our own mind. We feel, think, and act, and know that we do so; we can remember a whole train of mental phenomena mixed up of these various elements. The order of succession of our feelings, thoughts, and actions is a part of our information respecting ourselves, and we can possess a larger or a smaller amount of such information, and, as is the case with other matters, we may have it in a very loose or in a very strict and accurate shape. The mass of people are exceedingly careless about the study of mental co-existences and successions; the laws of mind are not understood by them with anything like accuracy. Consciousness, in this sense, resembles observation as regards the world. By means of the senses, we take in, and store up, impressions of natural objects,—stars, mountains, rivers, plants, animals, cities, and the works and ways of human beings,—and according to our opportunities, ability, and disposition, we have in our memory a greater or less number of those impressions, and in greater or less precision. Clearly, however, there is no infallibility in what we know by either of these modes, by consciousness as regards thoughts and feelings, or by observation as regards external nature; on the contrary, there is a very large amount of fallibility, fallacy, and falsehood in both the one and the other. Discrepancy between the observations of different men upon the same matter of fact, is a frequent circumstance, the rule rather than the exception. . . . If such be the case with the objects of the external senses, what reason is there to suppose that the cognizance of the mental operations should have a special and exceptional accuracy? Is it true that this cognizance has the definiteness belonging to the property of extension in the outer world? Very far from it; the discrepancy of different men’s renderings of the human mind is so pronounced, that we cannot attribute it to the difference of the thing looked at, we must refer it to the imperfection in the manner of taking cognizance. If there were any infallible introspective faculty of consciousness, we ought at least to have had some one region of mental facts where all men were perfectly agreed. The region so favoured must of necessity be the part of mind that could not belong to metaphysics; there being nothing from the beginning to controvert or to look at in two ways, there could be no scope for metaphysical disquisition. The existence of metaphysics, as an embarrassing study, or field of inquiry, is incompatible with an unerring consciousness.

(The Emotions and the Will, pp. 555-7.)

Mr. Bain then proceeds to show, but at too much length for quotation, that the only fact testified to by any person’s consciousness is an instantaneous fact—“the state of his or her own feelings at any one moment:” that when the person proceeds to speak of a past, and merely remembered feeling, fallibility begins: that when he speaks of sequences, and the law of a feeling, even in himself, much more in mankind generally, he transcends the dominion of consciousness altogether, and enters on that of observation, which, whether introspective or external, is subject to a thousand errors. Now the free-will question is emphatically one of , and can be determined only by deep philosophizing, not by a brief appeal to the fancies of an individual concerning himself. A man’s consciousness can no more inform him what laws his volitions secretly obey, than his senses, when he beholds falling bodies, furnish him with the corresponding information respecting the law of gravitation.

The work concludes with two chapters on special subjects, the one on Belief, the other on Consciousness; subjects discussed separately, and in the last stage of the exposition, in consequence of the peculiar view taken of them by Mr. Bain, which differs from that of all previous metaphysicians.

Belief is, of all the phenomena usually classed as intellectual, that which the Association psychologists have hitherto been the least successful in analysing; though it has given occasion to some able and highly instructive illustrations, by Mr. James Mill and Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the power of indissoluble association. But the opinion which these authors have advanced, that belief is nothing but an indissoluble association between two ideas, seems an inadequate solution of the problem; because, in the first place, if the fact were so, belief itself must always be indissoluble; which, evidently, it is not; and, in the second place, one does not see what, on this theory, is the difference between believing the affirmative and the negative of a proposition, since in either case (if the theory be true), the idea expressed by the subject of the proposition must inseparably and irresistibly recall the idea expressed by the predicate. The doctrine of these philosophers would have been irrefragable, had they limited it to affirming that an indissoluble association (or let us rather say, an association for the present irresistible), usually commands belief; that when such an association exists between two ideas, the mind, especially if destitute of scientific culture, has great difficulty in not believing that there is a constancy of connexion between the corresponding phenomena, considered as facts in nature. But, even in the strongest cases of this description, a mind exercised in abstract speculation can reject the belief, though unable to get over the association. A Berkeleian, for example, does not believe in the real existence of matter, though the idea is excited in his mind by his muscular sensations as irresistibly as in other people.

Mr. Bain’s opinion is, that the difficulty experienced by the Association psychologists in giving an account of Belief, and the insufficient analysis with which they have contented themselves, arise from their looking at Belief too exclusively as an intellectual phenomenon, and disregarding the existence in it of an active element. His doctrine is, that Belief has no meaning, except in reference to our actions; that the distinctive characteristic of Belief is that it commands our will.

An intellectual notion or conception is indispensable to the act of believing; but no mere conception that does not directly or indirectly implicate our voluntary exertions, can ever amount to the state in question. (Ibid., p. 568.)

The primordial form of belief is expectation of some contingent future, about to follow on an action. Wherever any creature is found performing an action, indifferent in itself, with a view to some end, and adhering to that action with the same energy that would be manifested under the actual fruition of the end, we say that the animal possesses confidence, or belief, in the sequence of two different things, or in a certain arrangement of nature, whereby one phenomenon succeeds to another. The glistening surface of a pool or rivulet, appearing to the eye, can give no satisfaction to the agonies of thirst; but such is the firm connexion established in the mind of man and beast between the two properties of the same object, that the appearance to the eye fires the energies of pursuit no less strongly than the actual contact with the alimentary surface. An alliance so formed is a genuine example of the condition of belief.

(Ibid., pp. 569-70.)

No one will dispute that “the genuineness of the state of belief is tested by the control of the actions” (pp. 570-1). If we really believe a statement, we are willing to commit ourselves in conduct, on the prospect of finding the result accord with our belief. And there is no doubt that it is this command over the actions, which gives all its importance to that particular state of mind, and leads to its being named and classed separately. Yet the question remains, what is that state of mind? The action which follows is not the belief itself, but a consequence of the belief. Where there is an effect to be accounted for, there must be something in the cause to account for it. Since the willingness to commit ourselves in conduct occurs in some cases, and does not occur in others, there must be some difference between the former set of cases and the latter, as regards the antecedent phenomena. What is this difference? According to Mr. Bain, it does not lie in the strength of the tie of association between the ideas of the facts conceived.

I can imagine the mind receiving an impression of co-existence or sequence, such as the coincidence of relish with an apple, or other object of food; and this impression repeated until, on the principle of association, the one shall, without fail, at any time suggest the other; and yet nothing done in consequence, no practical effect given to the coincidence. I do not know any purely intellectual property that would give to an associated couple the character of an article of belief; but there is that in the volitional promptings which seizes hold of any indication leading to an end, and abides by such instrumentality if it is found to answer. Nay more, there is a tendency to go beyond the actual experience, and not to desist until the occurrence of a positive failure or check. So that the mere repetition of an intellectual impress would not amount to a conviction without this active element, which, although the source of many errors, is indispensable to the mental condition of belief. The legitimate course is to let experience be the corrector of all the primitive impulses; to take warning by every failure, and to recognise no other canon of validity. . . . We find after trials, that there is such a uniformity in nature as enables us to presume that an event happening to-day will happen also to-morrow, if we can only be sure that all the circumstances are exactly the same. . . . It is part of the intuitive tendencies of the mind to generalize in this way; but these tendencies, being as often wrong as right, have no validity in themselves; and the real authority is experience. The long series of trials made since the beginning of observation, has shown how far such inferences can safely be carried; and we are now in possession of a body of rules, in harmony with the actual course of nature, for guiding us in carrying on these operations.

(Ibid., pp. 585-6.)

So that, after all, Mr. Bain regards belief as a case of “intuitive tendency;” but not a case sui generis. He considers it as included under the general law of Volition. The spontaneous activity of the brain, combined with the original property inherent in a painful or pleasurable stimulus, makes us seize and detain all muscular actions which of themselves, and directly, bring pleasure or relief; those actions, in consequence, become, through the law of association, producible by means of our ideas of pleasure or pain; and it is, in the author’s view, by an extension of the same general phenomenon, that actions which only remotely, and after a certain delay, attain our ends, come similarly under the command of our ideas of those ends. When this command is established, then, according to him, the phenomenon, Belief, has taken place; namely, belief in the efficacy of the action to promote the end. This is our author’s theory of Belief. An obvious objection to it is, that we entertain beliefs respecting matters in regard to which we have no wishes, and which have no connexion with any of our ends. But to this Mr. Bain answers (and his answer is just), that in such cases there is always a latent imagination that we might have some object at stake on the reality of the fact we believe, and a feeling that if we had, we should go forward confidently in the pursuit of any such object. We quote the following passage for the practical lesson conveyed in it:

A single trial, that nothing has ever happened to impugn, is able of itself to leave a conviction sufficient to induce reliance under ordinary circumstances. It is the active prompting of the mind itself that instigates, and in fact constitutes, the believing temper; unbelief is an after product, and not the primitive tendency. Indeed, we may say, that the inborn energy of the brain gives faith, and experience scepticism. . . . We must treat it [belief] as a strong primitive manifestation, derived from the natural activity of the system, and taking its direction and rectification from experience. The “anticipation of nature,” so strenuously repudiated by Bacon, is the offspring of this characteristic of the mental system. In the haste to act, while the indications imbibed from contact with the world are still scanty, we are sure to extend the application of actual trials a great deal too far, producing such results as have just been named. With the active tendency at its maximum, and the exercise of intelligence and acquired knowledge at the minimum, there can issue nothing but a quantity of rash enterprises. That these are believed in, we know from the very fact that they are undertaken. . . . The respectable name “generalization,” implying the best products of enlightened scientific research, has also a different meaning, expressing one of the most erroneous impulses and crudest determinations of untutored human nature. To extend some familiar and narrow experience, so as to comprehend cases most distant, is a piece of mere reckless instinct, demanding the severest discipline for its correction. . . . Sound belief, instead of being a pacific and gentle growth, is in reality the battering of a series of strongholds, the conquering of a country in hostile occupation. This is a fact common both to the individual and to the race. . . . The only thing for mental philosophy to do on such a subject, is to represent, as simply and clearly as possible, those original properties of our constitution that are chargeable with such wide-spread phenomena. It will probably be long ere the last of the delusions attributable to this method of believing first and proving afterwards can be eradicated from humanity. For although all those primitive impressions that find a speedy contradiction in realities from which we cannot escape, cease to exercise their sway after a time, there are other cases less open to correction, and remaining to the last as portions of our creed.

(Ibid., pp. 582-4.)

It is assuredly a strange anomaly, that so many authors, after having applied the whole force of their intellects to prove the existence in the human mind of intellectual or moral instincts, proceed, without any argument at all, to legitimate and consecrate everything which those instincts prompt, as if an instinct never could go astray; a consecration not usually extended to our physical instincts, though even there we often notice a certain tendency in the same direction, not sufficient to persuade when there is no predisposition to believe, but amounting to a considerable makeweight to weak arguments on the side of an existing prepossession. This grave philosophical, leading to still graver practical error, is always (as in the passage quoted) duly rebuked by the author. As a portion, however, of the theory of Belief, we desiderate a more complete analysis of the psychological process by which ulterior experience, or a more correct interpretation of experience, modifies the original tendency so powerfully described by the author, and subdues belief into subordination and due proportion to evidence.

It only remains to speak of Mr. Bain’s theory of Consciousness, which is the subject of his final chapter. He regards it as being simply the same thing with discrimination of difference. Consciousness is only awakened by the shock of the transition from one physical or mental state to another. Hobbes had remarked, that if any one mode of sensation or feeling were always present, we should probably be unconscious of its existence.

There are notable examples to show that one unvarying action upon the senses fails to give any perception whatever. Take the motion of the earth about its axis, and through space, whereby we are whirled with immense velocity, but at a uniform pace, being utterly insensible of the circumstance. So in a ship at sea, we may be under the same insensibility, whereas in a carriage we never lose the feeling of being moved. The explanation is obvious. It is the change from rest to motion that awakens our sensibility, and conversely from motion to rest. A uniform condition as respects either state is devoid of any quickening influence on the mind. Another illustration is supplied by the pressure of the air on the surface of the body. Here we have an exceedingly powerful effect upon one of the special senses. The skin is under an influence exactly of that nature that wakens the feeling of touch, but no feeling comes. Withdraw any portion of the pressure, as in mounting in a balloon, and sensibility is developed. A constant impression is thus to the mind the same as a blank. Our partial unconsciousness as to our clothing is connected with the constancy of the object. The smallest change at any time makes us sensible or awake to the contact. If there were some one sound, of unvarying tone and unremitted continuance, falling on the ear from the first moment of life to the last, we should be as unconscious of the existence of that influence as we are of the pressure of the air. Such a sonorous agency would utterly escape the knowledge of mankind, until, as in the other case, some accident, or some discovery in experimental philosophy, had enabled them to suspend or change the degree of the impression made by it. Except under special circumstances, we are unconscious of our own weight, which fact nevertheless can never be absent. It is thus that agencies might exist without being perceived; remission or change being a primary condition of our sensibility. It might seem somewhat difficult to imagine us altogether insensitive to such an influence as light and colour; and yet if some one hue had been present on the retina from the commencement of life, we should incontestably have been utterly blind as far as that was concerned.

(Ibid., pp. 615-16.)

We perceive (in short) or are conscious of, nothing but changes, or events. Consciousness partakes always of the nature of surprise.

Following out this line of thought, Mr. Bain regards knowledge as virtually synonymous with consciousness, and points out that we never have knowledge of one thing by itself. Knowing a thing, means recognising the differences or agreements between that thing and another or others.

To know a thing, is to feel it in juxtaposition with some other thing differing from it or agreeing with it. To be simply impressed with a sight, sound, or touch, is not to know anything in the proper sense of the word; knowledge begins when we recognise other things in the way of comparison with the one. My knowledge of redness is my comparison of this one sensation with a number of others differing from or agreeing with it; and as I extend those comparisons, I extend that knowledge. An absolute redness per se, like an unvarying pressure, would escape cognition; for supposing it possible that we were conscious of it, we could not be said to have any knowledge. Why is it that the same sensation is so differently felt by different persons—the sensation of red or green to an artist and an optician—if not that knowledge relates not to the single sensation itself, but to the others brought into relation with it in the mind? When I say I know a certain plant, I indicate nothing, until I inform my hearer what things stand related to it in my mind as contrasting or agreeing. I may know it as a garden weed, that is, under difference from the flowers, fruits, and vegetables cultivated in the garden, and under agreement with the other plants that spring up unsought. I may know it botanically, that is, under difference and agreement with the other members of the order, genus, and species. I may know it artistically, or as compared with other plants on the point of beauty of form and colour. As an isolated object in my mind, I may have a sensation or a perception, although not even that in strict truth, but I can have no knowledge regarding it at all. Thus it is that in the multifarious scene and chaos of distinguishable impressions, not only do different minds fasten upon different individual parts, but fastening on the same parts, arrive at totally different cognitions. Like the two electricities, which cannot exist the one without the other, or the two poles of the magnet, which rise and fall together, no mental impression can exist and be called knowledge, unless in company with some other, as a foil wherewith to compare it. Left to a single unit of consciousness, the mental excitement vanishes. In the intellect, as in the emotions, we live by setting off contrasted states, and consequently no impression can be defined or characterized, except with reference to its accompanying foil. We see how difficult it is in language to make a meaning explicit by a brief announcement; interpretation, as applied to laws, contracts, testaments, as well as to writing generally, consists in determining what things the writer excluded as opposites to, and looked at as agreements with, the thing named. It is thus everywhere in cognition. A simple impression is tantamount to no impression at all. Quality, in the last resort, implies relation; although, in logic, the two are distinguished. Red and blue together in the mind, actuating it differently, keep one another alive as mental excitement, and the one is really knowledge of the other. So with the red of to-day and the red of yesterday, an interval of blank sensation, or of other sensations, coming between. These two will sustain one another in the cerebral system, and will mutually be raised to the rank of knowledge. Increase the comparisons of difference and agreement, and you increase the knowledge, the character of it being settled by the direction wherein the foils are sought.

(Ibid., pp. 638-40.)

Such is a brief account of a remarkable book; which, once known and read by those who are competent judges of it, is sure to take its place in the very first rank of the order of philosophical speculation to which it belongs. Of the execution, a very insufficient judgment can be formed from our extracts. The book is, indeed, a most difficult one to extract from; for as scarcely any treatise which we know proceeds so much by the way of cumulative proof and illustration, any extract of moderate dimensions is much the same sort of specimen as, we will not say a single stone, but a single row of stones, might be of a completed edifice. We hope that we may have assisted in directing the attention of those who are interested in the subject, to the structure itself; assuring those who belong to the opposite party in philosophical speculation, that so massive a pile, so rich in the quantity and quality of its materials, even if they are not disposed to take up their abode in it, cannot be used even as a quarry without abundant profit.

GROTE’S PLATO

1866

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, III (1867), 275-379, where the title, “Plato,” is footnoted: “Edinburgh Review, April, 1866.” Reprinted from the Edinburgh Review, CXXIII (April, 1866), 297-364, where the article (unsigned) is headed: “Art. I.—Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates. By George Grote, F.R.S., &c. 8vo. 3 vols. London: [Murray,] 1865”; the running heads are “Grote’s Plato.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of Grote’s ‘Plato and the other Companions of Socrates’ in the Edinburgh Review for April 1866” (MacMinn, 97). An unsigned offprint of the article in the Somerville College Library, paged 1-68, is titled “Plato / and the other / Companions of Socrates. / By / George Grote, F.R.S., &c.”; JSM has added under the title in ink “(Edinburgh Review, 1866)”—his habitual indication when an article was to be reprinted; there are no alterations or corrections in the offprint.

In the footnoted variants, “66” indicates Edinburgh Review, “67” indicates D&D, III, 1st ed. (the copy-text). For an account of the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xxxvii-xli and xc-xci above.

Grote’s Plato

the readers of Mr. Grote’s History of Greece were not likely to forget the hope held out in its concluding volume, that he who had so well interpreted the political life of Hellas would delineate and judge that great outburst of speculative thought, by which, as much as by her freedom, Greece has been to the world what Athens according to Pericles was to Greece, a course of education. It might have been safely predicted, that the same conscientious research, the same skilful discrimination of authenticated fact from traditional misapprehension or uncertified conjecture, and the same rare power of realizing different intellectual and moral points of view, which were conspicuous in the History, and nowhere more than in the memorable chapters on the Sophists and on Sokrates, would find congenial occupation in tracing out the genuine lineaments of Plato, Aristotle, and their compeers. But the present work does more than merely keep the promise of Mr. Grote’s previous achievements—it reveals new powers: had it not been written the world at large might never have known, except on trust, the whole range of his capacities and endowments. Though intellects exercised in the higher philosophy might well perceive that such a book as the History of Greece could not have been produced but by a mind similarly disciplined, the instruction which lay on the surface of that great work was chiefly civic and political; while the speculations of the Grecian philosophers, and emphatically of Plato, range over the whole domain of human thought and curiosity, from etymology up to cosmogony, and from the discipline of the music-school and the gymnasium to the most vast problems of metaphysics and ontology. Many even of Mr. Grote’s admirers may not have been prepared to find, that he would be as much at home in the most abstract metaphysical speculations as among the concrete realities of political institutions—would move through the one region with the same easy mastery as through the other—and would bring before us, along with the clearest and fullest explanation of ancient thought, mature and well-weighed opinions of his own, manifesting a command of the entire field of speculative philosophy which places him in the small number of the eminent psychologists and metaphysicians of the age.

The work of which we now give an account, though complete in itself, brings down the history of Greek philosophy only to Plato and his generation; but a continuation is promised, embracing at least the generation of Aristotle; which, by the analogy of the concluding chapters of the present work, may be construed as implying an estimate of the Stoics and Epicureans. If to this were added a summary of what is known to us concerning the Pythagorean revival and the later Academy, no portion of purely Greek thought would remain untreated of; for Neoplatonism, an aftergrowth of late date and little intrinsic value, was a hybrid product of Greek and Oriental speculation, and its place in history is by the side of Gnosticism. What contact it has with the Greek mind is with that mind in its decadence; as the little in Plato which is allied to it belongs chiefly to the decadence of Plato’s own mind. We are quite reconciled to the exclusion from Mr. Grote’s plan, of this tedious and unsatisfactory chapter in the history of human intellect. But such an exposition as he is capable of giving of Aristotle, will be hardly inferior in value to that of Plato. The latter, however, was the most needed; for Plato presents greater difficulties than Aristotle to the modern mind; more of our knowledge of the master, than of the pupil, is only apparent, and requires to be unlearnt; and much more use has been made of what the later philosopher can teach us, than of the earlier.

Though the writings of Plato supply the principal material of Mr. Grote’s three volumes, the portion of them which does not relate directly to Plato is of great interest and value. The first two chapters contain as full an account as our information admits, of the forms of Greek philosophy which preceded Sokrates; and the two which conclude the work recount the little which is known (except in the case of Xenophon it is very little) of the other “Socratici viri” and their speculations: the Megaric school, commencing with Eukleides, the Cynic, with Antisthenes, the Cyrenaic or Hedonistic, with Aristippus. All these were personal companions of Sokrates, and their various and conflicting streams of thought did not flow out of a primitive intellectual fountain opened by him, but issued from the rock in different places at the touch of his magical wand; for it was his profession and practice to make others think, not to think for them. Concerning Sokrates himself, though in one sense nearly the whole book relates to him, there is no express notice in these volumes, the narrative and estimate which we read in the History of Greece being sufficient.

Some knowledge of the earlier Hellenic thinkers is necessary to a full understanding of Plato. Unfortunately the materials are defective, and almost wholly second-hand, a few fragments only of the original authors having been preserved by the citations of later writers. We are in possession, however, of what were regarded by their successors as the fundamental doctrines of each; but there is some difficulty in knowing what to make of them. These first gropings of the speculative intellect have so little in common with modern scientific habits, that the modern mind does not easily accommodate itself to them. The physical theories seem so absurd, and the metaphysical ones so unintelligible, that there needs some stress of thought to enable us to perceive how eminently natural they were. Multiplied failures have taught us the unwelcome lesson, that man can only arrive at an understanding of nature by a very circuitous route; that the great questions are not accessible directly, but through a multitude of smaller ones, which in the first ardour of their investigations men overlooked and despised—though they are the only questions sufficiently simple and near at hand, to disclose the real laws and processes of nature, with which as keys we are afterwards enabled to unlock such of her greater mysteries as are really within our reach. This process, which human impatience was late in thinking of, and slow in learning to endure, is an eminently artificial one; and the mind which has been trained to it has become, happily for mankind, so highly artificialized, that it has forgotten its own natural mode of procedure. The natural man, in the words of Bacon’s emphatic condemnation, naturam rei in ipsa re perscrutatur. He neither can nor will lay a regular siege to his object, approach it by a series of intermediate positions, and possess himself first of the outworks; he will make but one leap into the citadel: and since, to his freshly awakened curiosity, no inquiry seems worth pursuing which promises less than an explanation of the entire universe, he makes a plausible guess which explains or seems to explain a few obvious facts, and stretches or twists this into a theory of the whole. Such theories were thrown up in considerable number and variety by the early Hellenic mind. Mr. Grote has recounted what is known of them, and by the application of a clear philosophic intellect to the results of his own and of German erudition, has made out as much of their meaning as any one can well hope to do. To render that meaning intelligible without a considerable effort of thought, exceeds even his powers; for the terms which embody it have no exact equivalents in modern language, which, having fitted itself to more definite conceptions of the problems, and to a certain number of ascertained solutions, has got rid of many of the vaguenesses and ambiguities to which the early conjectural solutions were principally indebted for such plausibility as they possessed.

These early theories, as we said, may be distinguished into physical and metaphysical, though the physical hypotheses could not always dispense with metaphysical aid, and the metaphysical ones were employed to account for physical phenomena. In the physical, some one or more substances familiar to experience were assumed as the element or elements which, variously transformed, are the material of the entire universe; and all the phenomena of nature were supposed to be produced by the powers, properties, or essences of these elements, or by hidden forces residing in them. Thales ascribed this cosmic universality to water, Anaximenes to air: we must remember that the ancients called many things water and air which are not so styled in modern physics. Empedokles explained all things by the mixture and mutual action of earth, water, air, and fire. These material substances were usually supposed to require the concurrence of certain abstract entities called Wet and Dry, Cold and Hot, Soft and Hard, Heavy and Light, &c., which were the immediate if not ultimate agents in the generation of phenomena. It would be a mistake were we to imagine that these and similar hypotheses were really absurd, until proved so by the subsequent course of inductive investigation. A more artful examination of nature has since shown that the supposed elements are not real elements but compounds, and that the generalized properties, which were mistaken for causative agencies, are the products of incorrect generalization and abstraction—notiones temerè à rebus abstractæ. But this was not, and could not be, known at the time when the hypotheses were framed. In the meanwhile, they served as first steps in that comparison of phenomena in respect of their likenesses and differences, which is the preparation for the discovery of their laws; and the process of applying the hypotheses to the explanation of facts other than those which had suggested them, was continually bringing into view fresh points of likeness and difference, and laying the foundation for less imperfect hypotheses. The metaphysical theories, on the other hand, which grounded their conception of the universe not on physical agencies, but on the largest and vaguest abstractions—the One, the Same, the Different, that which Is, that which Becomes—seem, to us, not so much erroneous as unmeaning: we find it difficult to conceive what can have been in the thoughts of men who could offer matter like this as an explanation of anything. By we, must be understood the physicists, the experimentalists, the Baconians; since the German Transcendentalists find much more signification in these than in the physical hypotheses. For, indeed, their Ontology is essentially a return to this first stage of human speculation—a reproduction of the same methods, the same questions, and to a great degree the same answers, sometimes under a superficial varnish of modern inductive philosophy. Hegel moves among the same vague abstractions as the earliest tyros in metaphysical thought; his dialectics recall the Parmenides of Plato’s dialogue, while his substantive doctrines are in great part a reproduction of Herakleitus. If we turn back to Anaximander, the earliest known speculative philosopher after his townsman Thales, we find already the fundamental notions of Transcendentalism.

He adopted as the foundation of his hypothesis a substance which he called the Infinite or Indeterminate. Under this name he conceived Body simply, without any positive or determinate properties, yet including the fundamental contraries Hot, Cold, Moist, Dry, &c., in a potential or latent state, including further a self-changing and self-developing force, and being moreover immortal and indestructible. By this inherent force, and by the evolution of one or more of these dormant contrary qualities, were generated the various definite substances of nature—Air, Fire, Water, &c.

We have here the fundamental antithesis of the Transcendentalists, Matter and Form; while the conception of an abstract Body, devoid of properties, but with a potentiality of evolving them from itself by an indwelling force, is the transcendental Noumenon, as contrasted with Phænomenon. Again, the Ens of Parmenides, Being in General, “which is always, and cannot properly be called either past or future,” which is not “really generated or destroyed, but only in appearence to us, or relatively to our apprehension,” which “is essentially One, and cannot be divided,” what is it (as Mr. Grote remarks) but the Absolute of the modern Ontologists? a little in advance of them however, for the Eleatic philosopher left to his Absolute one quality cognisable by man, that of Extension, but the Transcendentalists refuse it even that, and yet maintain (some of them at least) that it is knowable. Even the almost Asiatic mysticism of Pythagoras respecting Number, has, as Mr. Grote points out, its exact equivalent in German nineteenth-century philosophy. When numbers, mere abstract properties of things, are mistaken for actual things, they are soon supposed to exert powers, and have as good a chance as anything else of finding a philosopher to instal them as the ruling power of the universe.

Both these veins of speculation—the physical and the metaphysical—were temporarily thrown into the shade by the new turn given to the philosophic mind by Sokrates: but for a short time only; for the ambitious striving for a theory of the universe reappears in its most metaphysical form in the later productions of his greatest disciple, Plato. The originality of Sokrates, which was of the highest order, consisted chiefly in his method. Yet his principal instrument had been in part prepared for him by the pupil of Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, “who stands announced on the authority of Aristotle as the inventor of dialectic; that is, as the first person, of whose skill in the art of cross-examination and refutation conspicuous illustrative specimens were preserved.” The speciality of Zeno consisted in bringing prominently forward the difficulties and objections to which a theory was liable: not in the modern manner, by producing facts inconsistent with it, but rather by tracing its consequences, and reducing it to a logical contradiction; a mode of arguing which he more particularly employed against those who opposed his master’s doctrine of the Absolute and Indivisible One, and maintained with Herakleitus that the universe is not One but Many. The celebrated paradoxes by which Zeno is best known, his arguments against the reality of Motion, Mr. Grote considers neither as sceptical fallacies nor logical puzzles, but as bonâ fide arguments, not intended to disprove motion as a phenomenal fact, but to assert its relative character, as a state of our own consciousness—incapable of being, in any true and consistent meaning, predicated of the Ens Unum, or Absolute, which the Parmenidean doctrine regarded as immoveable. However this may be, these arguments were quite in keeping with the vocation of Zeno for what Mr. Grote happily terms the negative arm of philosophy —that which tests the truth of theories by the difficulties which they are bound to meet; and if he often mistook verbal difficulties for real, this was inevitable at first, and Plato frequently did the same.

It was reserved for Sokrates, and for Plato, who, whether as the interpreter or continuator of Sokrates, can never be severed from him, to exalt this negative arm of philosophy to a perfection never since surpassed, and to provide it with its greatest, most interesting, and most indispensable field of exercise, the generalities relating to life and conduct. These great men originated the thought, that, like every other part of the practice of life, morals and politics are an affair of science, to be understood only after severe study and special training; an indispensable part of which consists in acquiring the habit of considering, not merely what can be said in favour of a doctrine, but what can be said against it; of sifting opinions, and never accepting any until it has emerged victorious over every logical, still more than over every practical objection. These two principles—the necessity of a scientific basis and method for ethics and politics, and of rigorous negative dialectics as a part of that method, are the greatest of the many lessons to be learnt from Plato; and it is because the modern mind has in a great measure laid both these lessons, especially the latter of them, aside, that we regard the Platonic writings as among the most precious of the intellectual treasures bequeathed to us by antiquity. Mr. Grote is of the same opinion, and has rendered, by the work before us, an inappreciable service, in facilitating the study to those who can read the original, and making the results accessible to those who cannot.

He first relates the biography of Plato, as far as it can be constructed from the extant authorities. He then treats of the Platonic Canon; and after a comparison and ponderation of evidence, equal in merit to any in his History, accepts as works of Plato the entire list recognised by the Alexandrian critics, and admitted by all scholars until for the first time disputed by German editors and commentators in the present century. A chapter is next devoted to a general view of the Platonic writings; and the remainder of the work (except the final chapters on the minor Sokratics), consists of a minute analysis and compte rendu of each dialogue separately. In this analysis are comprehended the following elements, which are far from being kept as separate in fact as we must keep them in description. First, a complete abstract of the dialogue, omitting no idea, and no important development. Attention is next drawn to the light which the dialogue throws on Plato’s doctrine or method, and the bearing which it has upon the author’s general conception of Plato and his writings. Lastly, the thoughts on which the particular dialogue turns, or which are struck out in the course of it, are disentangled from the context, and critically examined, sometimes at considerable length, both from Plato’s point of view and from the author’s; and when the verdict is adverse, we are shown the author’s own view of the same questions, and its justification. The book is thus a perfect treasury of instructive discussions on the most important questions of philosophy, speculative and practical; while at the same time it is a quite complete account of Plato. Plato himself, not anybody’s interpretation of him, is brought before us. Nothing needs be taken on trust, except the fidelity of the abstract, which is perfect. We lose, of course, Plato’s dramatic power, his refined comedy, and the magic of his style, the reproduction of which (could any one hope to succeed in it) would be the work, not of an expositor, but of a translator. But the thoughts are there, exactly as they are, and exactly where they are, in the Platonic writings. The account of each dialogue is thus a kind of complete work in itself—a plan necessarily involving much repetition, as the same idea or Platonic peculiarity, being manifested in several dialogues, gives fresh occasion for the same line of remark. These repetitions have been censured by some critics from a literary point of view, as signs of want of skill in composition; but this is to mistake the author’s purpose. He does not lay himself open to the reproach from carelessness or awkwardness; he altogether disregards and defies it. What would be imperfections in a picture of Plato addressed to the imagination, are merits in what is meant to be an aid or substitute for the study of the philosopher in detail. Mr. Grote intended the reader to judge of Plato for himself—to find in each chapter what he would have found in the corresponding dialogue, together with all that is necessary for understanding it and estimating its value. His own opinions on Plato and the Platonic topics turn up often, because every dialogue contains fresh evidence bearing on them. The alternative was indeed open to him of using references instead of repetitions; and had he cared more for his literary reputation, and less for his subject, he would have adopted it. But those who read for instruction will generally prefer that the things they need to be reminded of should be told over again in a form and language adapted to the special occasion, rather than be compelled to search for them in another chapter, where they are exhibited in a quite different framework of circumstances. Even in an artistic point of view, it is too narrow a conception of art, to exclude that which produces its effect by an accumulation of small touches. Besides, many of Mr. Grote’s views being contrary to received opinion, he was bound to give some idea of the mass of evidence on which they rest. Those who find it tiresome to have this evidence noted en passant where it occurs, would have far more reason to complain if it had been culled out and laid in a single heap, in which case we may surmise that few of them would have taken the trouble even to look at it.

In truth, there are few, if any, ancient authors concerning whose mind and purpose so many demonstrably false opinions are current, as concerning Plato; and there is probably no writer, of merit comparable to his, and of whom so many writings survive, who leaves us in so much real uncertainty respecting his opinions. His works—except a few letters, which (allowing them, with Mr. Grote, to be authentic) were written late in life, and have mostly a biographic rather than a philosophical interest—are exclusively in the form of dialogue; and he himself is never one of the interlocutors. Not one of the opinions contained in them is presented as his own, nor in any connexion with himself. There certainly is, in almost every dialogue, one principal speaker, who either as confuter or instructor carries off the honours of the discussion. But this chief speaker, in the great majority of cases, is not a fictitious or unknown person, who could only be looked on as the author’s own spokesman, but a philosopher with a well-marked intellectual individuality of his own, and regarded by Plato himself with the deepest reverence. The question arises, how far the opinions put into the mouth of Sokrates are those of the real Sokrates, or of Plato speaking in his name? and if the former, whether Plato desired to be considered as adopting them? But, again, Sokrates, though generally the leading speaker, is not always so. In one dialogue, the Parmenides, he takes part in the discussion, but only to be powerfully confuted by that veteran philosopher. In the Sophistes and the Politikos he is a mere listener, while the place usually filled by him is occupied by a nameless stranger from Elea; though these two dialogues are an avowed continuation of the Theætetus, in which Sokrates takes the leading part. In Timæus and Kritias, the persons bearing those names are the teachers, and Sokrates an approving and admiring hearer. In the Leges and Epinomis he does not appear at all. Some reason there must have been for these diversities, but it neither shows itself in the dialogues, nor is known by external evidence. All this would have been of little consequence, if the dialogues had exhibited a consistent system of opinions, always adhered to and always coming out victorious. But so far is this from being the case, that the result of a large proportion of them is merely negative, many opinions in succession being tried and rejected, and the question finally left unsolved. When an opinion does seem to prevail, it almost always happens that in some other dialogue that same opinion is either refuted, or shown to involve difficulties which, though frequently passed over, are never resolved. Some of the ancient critics were hence led to suspect that Plato had, as his master professed to have, no positive opinions; a supposition for which plausible arguments might be drawn from many of the dialogues, but which is quite inconsistent with the spirit of others. Besides, a philosopher who for nearly forty years lectured in open school to numerous audiences, must have had something positive to teach them: mere negation and confutation raise up imitators, but not disciples.

To these various puzzles the German editors and critics add another—namely, which of the writings ascribed to Plato are really his own. They relieve their author from the responsibility of contradictory opinions, by rejecting many dialogues as spurious, on account of something in them that is inconsistent with what is said in some other dialogue, or with what the critic is of opinion that Plato must have thought, or on the mere ground of inferior merit as a composition; for of Plato alone among writers or artists it seems to be imagined that he cannot have produced any work not equal to his finest. Mr. Grote gains a triumphant victory over these critics, by exhibiting the overwhelming strength of the external testimony; showing that the rejections grounded on internal evidence proceed on an ideal of Plato which is a mere imagination of the critic; and pointing out that what are deemed evidences of unauthenticity in the rejected dialogues, are equally found in those which no one rejects, or could reject, since they are the type itself, which the others are thrown out for not conforming to. If we could add to our knowledge of what Plato’s writings were, any authentic information respecting the order in which they were written, their inconsistencies might be found to correspond with successive stages of the progress of his own mind. But we have nothing on this subject save conjectures, each founded on an antecedent theory of the very matter which it is intended to clear up. The imperfect publicity which ancient writings obtained at their first appearance, consisting chiefly in being read aloud by the author, or by some one whom he had allowed to take a copy, makes it impossible to fix the chronological succession of a writer’s works, when they are at all numerous. Several dialogues, by their allusions to historical events, give indication of a date to which it is supposed that they must have been subsequent; but even this supposition is uncertain, since, as we are informed by Dionysius, Plato retouched and corrected his writings up to the latest period of his life. When a dialogue professes to be a continuation of another dialogue, it was probably, though not certainly, the latest composed of the two. There is a presumption that the dialogues of mere search preceded those which expound and enforce some definite doctrine; though, as one of the best German critics of Plato remarks, this must be taken with a limitation, since he may have continued to produce dialogues of search after those of exposition began. Finally, direct testimony combines with internal probability in placing the Leges after the Republic, and near the end of Plato’s career. This is nearly all the help which the works themselves give towards ascertaining the order of their composition; but we have a precious though limited item of information from Aristotle, respecting some metaphysical doctrines taught by Plato in his latest lectures, varying considerably from those we read in any of the dialogues, but towards which the line of thought in several of them seems to be leading up. We may, therefore, place those particular dialogues among the last of his compositions, and in the order of their approach to what we are told of his final teachings. This indication, agreeing with other internal evidence, gives the following as the latest terms of the series:—Republic, Timæus (with its unfinished appendage Kritias), Leges, with its supplement the Epinomis—the first probably separated by a considerable interval of time from the two last; and the Philebus, which we believe to be later than the Republic, probably coming in at some intermediate point.

Such being the paucity of direct evidence of Plato’s opinions and purposes, there was no check to the latitude which readers and admirers might give themselves in deducing theories from the general tone of his writings. Much, no doubt, may be thence inferred, but it requires more than a knowledge of Plato to distinguish what. Great men and great writers outlive the ideas and most of the monuments of their time, and descend to posterity disjoined from the element in which they lived, and by which their thoughts ought to be interpreted. This is especially the case with great reformers. How continually we should misunderstand the deliverances of Luther, of Fichte, of Bentham, of Voltaire, of Rousseau, Fourier, Owen—may we add of Carlyle? if we knew nothing of their age, and of the men and things they attacked, but what they themselves tell us. Men who are in open quarrel with the whole body of their contemporaries, do not make the discriminations which posterity is bound to make; and their sweeping denunciations do not imply, from them, what such statements would mean from persons perhaps greatly their inferiors, but not standing so far off from the rest of the world as to efface all differences of distance. This caution has been disregarded and ignored in Plato’s case; yet none of the great thinkers and writers who have come down to us require it more. When Plato says hard things of his countrymen, or of any class or profession among them, he is judging them by their divergence from his own standard, which was, no doubt, in many respects superior to theirs (though by no means so in all respects), but which he himself proclaimed to be a new and original one, and which certainly differed as widely from the modern European or English standard as from the Athenian. But the denunciations which he levels at them from his own point of view, are almost always interpreted as from ours, and we fancy that their conduct and feelings, if known to us in detail, would appear to us as blameable and contemptible as Plato deemed them; whereas we should find them, with a few superficial differences, very like our own; and it is most certain that Plato, if he returned to life, would be to the full as contemptuous of our statesmen, lawyers, clergy, professors, authors, and all others among us who lay claim to mental superiority, as he ever was of the corresponding classes at Athens; while they, on their part, would regard him very much as they regard other freethinkers, socialists, and visionary reformers of the world.

The opinion which commonly prevails about Plato is something like the following. The Athenians, and the other Greeks, had become deeply demoralized by a set of impostors called Sophists—pretenders to universal knowledge, and adepts at disconcerting simple minds by entangling them in a mesh of words—who corrupted young men of fortune, by denying moral distinctions, and teaching the art of misleading a popular assembly. The lives and intellectual activity of Sokrates and Plato had for their chief object to counteract the doctrines and influence of these men. They devoted themselves to vindicating the cause of virtue against immoral subtleties; but they came too late; the evil was too far advanced for cure, and the ruin of Greece was ultimately the consequence of the corruption engendered by the Sophists. In Philosophy proper, the speculations of Plato are supposed to have been guided by a similar purpose. He was the founder and chief of the Idealist or Spiritualist school, against the Materialistic or Sensational, which under the auspices of the Sophists, is asserted to have been generally prevalent; and was the champion of the intuitive or à priori character of moral truth, against what is regarded, by most of the Platonic critics, as the low and degrading doctrine of Utility.

Readers of Mr. Grote’s History are acquainted with the strong case which is there made out against this common theory. Mr. Grote disbelieves the alleged moral corruption as a fact; and denies positively that the Sophists were the cause of it, or that the persons so called had any doctrines in common, much less the immoral ones imputed to them. He affirms that there is no evidence that any one of them taught the opinions alleged, and full proof that some taught the reverse: That the Sophists were not a sect, but the general body of teachers by profession, and, as is everywhere the case with professional teachers as a class, the moral and prudential opinions they taught were the common and orthodox ones of their country: That Plato’s quarrel was precisely with those common opinions, and his antagonism to the Sophists a mere consequence of this; and his testimony, were it far stronger than it is, has no value against them, unless we are willing to extend our condemnation, as he did, to the ways of mankind in general. These views of Mr. Grote, which we are satisfied are true to the letter, receive continual confirmation from his survey of the Platonic writings; and we think it possible even to strengthen his argument, by showing that the case presented against the Sophists on Plato’s authority, is contradicted by Plato’s own representation of them.

First, who were the Sophists? In the more lax use of the word, it was a name for speculative men in general. All the early philosophers whose theories are presented in Mr. Grote’s first two chapters, were Sophists in ordinary parlance; especially when, as was probably the case with all of them, they taught orally, and took money for their teaching. M. Boeckh says of one of Plato’s cotemporaries, the famous mathematician Eudoxus, “he lived as a Sophist, which means, he taught and gave lectures.” Against these men, as a body, no accusation is brought, nor had Plato any hostility to them. But the Sophists, emphatically so called, were those who speculated on human, as distinguished from cosmic, questions; who made profession of civil wisdom, and undertook to instruct men in the knowledge which qualifies for social or political life. As one whose whole time was passed in discussing these topics, Sokrates was counted among Sophists, both during his life and after his death. Æschines, in the oration against Timarchus, gives him that title. Isokrates, himself called a Sophist in an oration of Demosthenes, alludes distinctly to Plato as being one. A Sophist named Mikkus is introduced in the Platonic Lysis as a companion and eulogist (ἐπαινέτης) of Sokrates. But the most conspicuous Sophists cotemporary with Sokrates, the supposed chiefs of the immoral and corrupting teachers against whom he is said to have warred, were Protagoras, Prodikus, and Hippias. They are all three introduced into the great and many-sided Platonic composition called Protagoras, and are often referred to by name in other dialogues, Hippias even having two to himself. Now, while there is an undisguised purpose on Plato’s part to lower the reputation of these men, and convict them of not understanding what they professed to teach, not a thought or a sentiment is ascribed to them of any immoral tendency, while they often appear in the character of serious and impressive exhorters to virtue.

With regard to Protagoras in particular, the discourse which he is made to deliver on the moral virtues is justly considered by Mr. Grote as “one of the best parts of the Platonic writings.” It springs out of a doubt raised, seriously or ironically, by Sokrates, whether virtue is teachable, on the ground that there are no recognised teachers of it, as there are of other things. Protagoras admits the fact, and says that the reason why there are no express teachers of virtue is that all mankind teach it. Artistic or professional skill in any special department needs only be possessed by a few, for the benefit of the rest; but social and civic virtue, consisting in justice and self-restraint, is indispensable in every one; and as the welfare of each imperatively requires this virtue in others, every one inculcates it on all. A highly philosophical as well as eloquent exposition follows,

of the growth and propagation of common sense—the common, established, ethical and social sentiment among a community; sentiment neither dictated in the beginning by any scientific or artistic lawgiver; nor personified in any special guild of craftsmen apart from the remaining community; nor inculcated by any formal professional teachers; nor tested by analysis; nor verified by comparison with any objective standard; but self-sown and self-asserting, stamped, multiplied, and kept in circulation by the unpremeditated conspiracy of the general public—the omnipresent agency of King Nomos and his numerous volunteers.

This common standard of virtue Protagoras fully accepts. He takes it “for granted that justice, virtue, good, evil, &c., are known, indisputable, determinate data, fully understood and unanimously interpreted.” He pretends not to set right the general opinion, but “teaches in his eloquent expositions and interpretations the same morality, public and private, that every one else teaches; while he can perform the work of teaching somewhat more effectively than they:” and “what he pretends to do, beyond the general public, he really can do.” Sokrates (or Plato under his name) not accepting this common standard, and not considering justice, virtue, good, and evil, as things understood, but as things whose essence, and the proper meaning of the words, remain to be found out, of course contests the point with Protagoras; and bringing to bear on him the whole power of the Sokratic cross-examination, convicts him of being unable to give any definition or theory of these things; an incapacity which, in Platonic speech, goes by the name of not knowing what they are. The inability of Protagoras to discuss, and of his opinions to resist logical scrutiny, is driven home against the Sophist with great force. But it is remarkable that Protagoras, in answering the questions of Sokrates, whenever required to choose between two opinions, one of which is really or apparently the more moral or elevating, not only chooses the loftier doctrine, but declares that no other choice would be agreeable to his past life, to which he repeatedly appeals as not permitting him to concede anything that would lower the claims or dignity of virtue; thus proving (as far as anything put into his mouth by Plato can prove it), not only that he had never taught other than virtuous doctrines, but that he had an established reputation both for virtuous teaching, and for an exemplary and dignified life. Finally, it is Sokrates who, in this dialogue, maintains the “degrading” doctrine of Utilitarianism—at least the part most odious to its impugners, the doctrine of Hedonism, that Pleasure and the absence of Pain are the ends of morality; in opposition to Protagoras, to whom that opinion is repugnant; a reversal of the parts assigned to the two teachers by the German commentators, very embarrassing to some of them, who, rather than impute to Plato so “low” a doctrine, resort to the absurd supposition that one of the finest specimens of analysis in all his writings is ironical, intended to ridicule a Sophist who is not even represented as agreeing with it. Let us add, that though at first sore under his confutation by Sokrates, Protagoras parts with him on excellent terms, and predicts for him, at the conclusion of the dialogue, great eminence in wisdom.

Prodikus of Keios has no dialogue devoted to himself, nor is Sokrates ever introduced as confuting him. Except a few touches of good-humoured ridicule on his subtle verbal distinctions, chiefly found in the Protagoras, and probably intended not so much for disparagement as to heighten the dramatic interest of that eminently dramatic dialogue; and except that he comes in for his share of the raillery kept up against the Sophists generally about the money they took from their pupils, Prodikus is treated by Plato with marked respect. Sokrates not only confesses intellectual obligations to him, but speaks of him more than once, at least semi-seriously, as his teacher; and is made to say in the Theætetus, that in conversing with young men, he is apt at discerning those to whom he can be of no use, and judging by whom they will be benefited, and that he has handed over many to Prodikus—a sure proof that in Plato’s opinion Prodikus was not only no corrupter of youth, but improving to them. As a matter of fact, we know that Prodikus was the author of the celebrated mythe or apologue called “The Choice of Hercules,” one of the most impressive exhortations in ancient literature to a life of labour and self-denial in preference to one of ease and pleasure. The substance of this composition is preserved by Xenophon, who, in his Memorabilia, introduces Sokrates repeating it to Aristippus, and declaring that it was a favourite lecture of Prodikus, one of those which he oftenest delivered; and it bears a nearer resemblance than anything in Plato to the moral teachings ascribed by Xenophon to the real Sokrates. Prodikus, therefore, is out of the question in any charge against the Sophists of immoral teaching or influence.

Hippias, a man conspicuous among his cotemporaries for the rare variety of his accomplishments, is treated by Plato more disrespectfully. The two dialogues called by his name not only exhibit him as (like Protagoras) unable to cope with Sokrates in close discussion, or give a philosophic theory of the subjects on which he was accustomed to discourse, but load him with ridicule, of a less refined character than usual with Plato, for his naïf vanity and self-confidence. It is possible that the real Hippias may have been open to ridicule on this account; but from any vestige of immoral or corrupt teaching the Hippias of Plato is as clear as his Protagoras and his Prodikus. In the Second Hippias, that Sophist is introduced as having just finished delivering, with great applause, an encomium on the character of Achilles in the Iliad, as contrasted with Ulysses in the Odyssey, asserting the great moral superiority of the former. Now, even the better Greeks did not usually give so marked a preference to the direct, frank, and outspoken type of character, over one which aimed at good objects by skilful craft and dissimulation; so that Hippias stands represented by Plato as one whose moral standard, so far as it differed from the common one, was exceptionally high and noble—as that of Sophokles is shown to have been by the character of Neoptolemus, contrasted with that of Ulysses in the Philoktetes. The Sophist maintains this high estimate of veracity and sincerity throughout the dialogue; while the only ethical doctrine which is malè sonans is assigned to Sokrates himself, who, by a series of arguments which Hippias is totally unable to refute, contends that one who speaks falsehood knowingly is less bad than one who speaks it unknowingly, and (as a general thesis) that “those who hurt mankind, or cheat, or lie, or do wrong wilfully, are better than those who do the same unwillingly.” Mr. Grote may well say that

if this dialogue had come down to us with the parts inverted, and with the reasoning of Sokrates assigned to Hippias, most critics would probably have produced it as a tissue of sophistry, justifying the harsh epithets which they bestow upon the Athenian Sophists, as persons who considered truth and falsehood to be on a par—subverters of morality, and corrupters of the youth of Athens. But as we read it, all that which in the mouth of Hippias would have passed for sophistry, is here put forward by Sokrates; while Hippias not only resists his conclusions, and adheres to the received ethical sentiment tenaciously, even when he is unable to defend it, but hates the propositions forced upon him, protests against the perverse captiousness of Sokrates, and requires much pressing to induce him to continue the debate.

It is obvious what advantage Melêtus and Anytus might have derived from this thesis of Sokrates, if they had brought it up against him before the Dikasts; though it is merely a paradoxical form which, as we know from Xenophon, the real Sokrates gave to one of his favourite opinions, adopted and strenuously maintained by Plato, that the root of all moral excellence is knowledge.

Except these three distinguished men, the only other Sophists, in the more limited sense, who are shown up by Plato, or brought by him into collision with Sokrates, are the two brothers in the Euthydemus; who are not represented as persons of any celebrity (though somebody of the name of Euthydemus is mentioned in the Kratylus in connexion with a philosophical paradox), but as old men who have passed their lives in teaching gymnastic and military exercises, together with rhetoric, and have only quite lately turned their attention to dialectics, or the art of discussion. We know nothing otherwise of these persons, who may have been entirely fictitious, and in any case the care taken to describe them as novices in their art precludes the supposition of their being intended as representative men. The purpose of the dialogue is obviously to rebut the accusation brought against Sokrates, and doubtless also against Plato, of being jugglers with words, and dealers in logical puzzles; which is done by exhibiting, on the one hand, a caricature of the most absurd logical juggling in the persons of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, and on the other, an illustrative specimen of Plato’s ideal of the genuinely Sokratic process—real Dialectic, contrasted with Eristic; the one merely embarrassing and humiliating an ingenuous student, by involving him through verbal ambiguities in obvious absurdities; the other, encouraging and stimulating him to vigorous exercise of his own mind in clearing his thoughts from confusion. Mr. Grote’s comments on this dialogue, as on most of the others, are singularly interesting and valuable. It suffices here to observe that the purpose of the Euthydemus is not to discredit anybody, but to repel the attacks made on dialectic, by exhibiting the good form of it in marked opposition to the bad.

There is thus absolutely nothing in Plato’s representation of particular Sophists that gives countenance to the reproaches usually cast upon them. There is, however, another class of teachers on whom he is more severe, and into whose mouth he does, though but in one instance, put immoral doctrines. These are the Rhetoricians, or teachers of oratory; a vocation sometimes combined with that of Sophist, but carefully distinguished from it by Plato, in that one of his works in which rhetoric is most depreciated. The types exhibited of the class are Gorgias, Polus, and Thrasymachus, all of whom Sokrates is introduced as triumphantly confuting. As there is thus something more of foundation for the common interpretation of Plato’s attacks on the rhetoricians, than of those on the Sophists, it is worth showing how very little that something amounts to.

Rhetoric, being the art of persuasion, is necessarily open to the reproach that it may be used indifferently in behalf of wrong and right, and may avail to “make the worse appear the better reason.” But so far was it in Greece from being taught or recommended for this purpose by its popular teachers, that Gorgias, the most celebrated of them, in the dialogue bearing his name, and intended to lay rhetoric and the rhetoricians prostrate in the dust, is represented as emphatically deprecating such a use of it. After extolling, in magnificent terms, the value of his art, the general power it gives of attaining objects, and the ascendancy it confers in the State, he proceeds to say that, like all other powers, it should be used justly; and as gymnastic teachers are not blamed, or expelled from the city, if any one trained by them abuses the bodily strength he has acquired, by assaulting his parents or his friends, so the teachers of rhetoric are not in fault if their pupils make an unjust use of the valuable talent bestowed upon them; “for they (the teachers) bestowed it to be rightly used, against the enemies of the State and against evil-doers, not in aggression, but in defence.” Thus far Gorgias; who, even in this most polemic dialogue, is treated with considerable respect, and has his dignity saved by being withdrawn from the Sokratic cross-examination when the conflict begins to grow serious. We may fairly presume that his teaching was as far above all moral reproach as that of Isokrates, the most famous and successful Grecian rhetorical teacher whose works have come down to us—to whose earnest and impressive inculcation of the moral virtues it is sufficient to allude.

The dispute is taken up by Polus, another teacher of rhetoric, represented as a much younger and very petulant man, between whom and Sokrates there is a discussion of a very dramatic character, with much vehemence on one side, and sarcasm and irony on the other. Sokrates asserts that to do injustice is the greatest of evils—a far worse one than to be unjustly done by: while Polus maintains, on the contrary, that an unjust man who escapes punishment, and practises injustice on so great a scale as to achieve signal success—especially he who can make himself despot of his city—is supremely enviable. Now this, which seems to be evidence on the side of the common theory, is really a strong confirmation of Mr. Grote’s; for no reader of Plato can be unaware that what Polus here expresses (though disclaimed by the Platonic Protagoras as a vulgar prejudice) was the received opinion and established sentiment of the Grecian world. Polus appeals to it, and says—“Ask any of the persons present:” to which Sokrates answers—“Instead of refuting me by argument, you, like a pleader in a court of justice, overwhelm me with witnesses. No doubt all the testimony is on your side. If you ask Nicias” (the most morally respected citizen and politician of his time), “or Aristokrates, or the whole family of Pericles, or any family you think fit—in short, any Athenian or any foreigner, they will all assent; but I, one man, do not assent, and the only witness I will call is yourself; unless I can convince you that I am in the right, I shall consider myself to have done nothing.” Similar evidence of the universal opinion appears at every turn in the Platonic dialogues. Whether it is the ambitious and unprincipled Alcibiades, or the youthful and inquiring Theages, or the two grave and reverend elders from Crete and Lacedæmon who figure in the Leges, they all speak with the same voice: the usurping despot, and every one who is eminently successful in injustice, is a man to be envied—such a man (they usually add) as we, and all the world, and you yourself, Sokrates, if you could, would wish to be. Sokrates claims complete originality in the contrary opinion, that injustice is an evil, and the greatest that can befall any one—a doctrine which, through the teachings of Plato himself, of the Stoics, and of some of the forms of Christianity, has grown so familiar to us, that it has become a truism, and even a cant; and moderns are ready to conclude offhand that not to profess it implies a denial of moral obligation. But look at Polus himself in the dialogue. He is asked by Sokrates—“You think it a worse thing (κάκιον) to be injured than to injure. Do you also think it a baser, or more shameful thing (αἴσχιον)?” Polus acknowledges the reverse: and Sokrates goes on to prove (by a fallacious argument, however), that whatever is more αἰσχρόν must be more κακόν. Now this distinction of Polus is exactly that which the Greeks drew. Their opinion, that a wicked man would be happy if he could succeed in his wickedness, did not make them less abhor the bad man. He was to be restrained, punished, and, if need be, extirpated, not because his guilt was an evil to himself, but because it was an evil to others. He was looked upon as one who sought, and, if successful, obtained, good to himself by the damage and suffering of other people, and who was therefore not to be tolerated by them unless on compulsion. This is a different doctrine from the common one of modern moralists, but not an immoral doctrine; and even if it were, the Sophists and rhetoricians did not invent it, but found it universal. The speeches of Glaukon and Adeimantus, in the Second Book of the Republic, set forth this view of the case. Both these speakers strenuously disapprove the unjust life, and are anxious to be convinced that it is a calamity to the evil-doer. But, according to them, all mankind, even those who most inculcate justice, inculcate it as self-sacrifice, describing the life of the just man as hard and difficult, that of the unjust as pleasant and easy. The very best of them represent justice as personally desirable only on account of the good reputation and social consideration which attend it, implying that one who could acquire the reputation and rewards of justice without the reality, would be supremely fortunate, possessing the prize without the sacrifices, while he who had the reality, but missed the rewards, would be utterly miserable. Any man would be unjust if he possessed the ring of Gyges, which rendered the wearer invisible at pleasure. With this memorable testimony as to what was the general belief, it is mere ignorance to throw the responsibility on the Sophists and rhetoricians. We may add that even Polus is so far from being put in an odious light, that his petulance abates under the Sokratic cross-examination; he is not uncandid, does not obstinately resist conviction, and ends by confessing himself refuted. The speaker in this dialogue who really professes immoral doctrines, who denies that injustice is αἰσχρόν, and asserts that right and wrong are matters of convention, is Kallikles: neither a Sophist nor a rhetorician, but an active and ambitious political man, who, though he frequents the rhetoricians, proclaims his contempt of the Sophists, and represents a type of character doubtless frequent among Grecian politicians, though we may doubt their having ever publicly professed the principles they acted on.

The other rhetorical teacher shown up by Plato is Thrasymachus in the Republic, who is presented as rude, overbearing, even insolent in his manner of discussing, and who undoubtedly is made to profess, with a not very material difference, essentially the same immoral doctrine as Kallikles. He is accordingly confuted and put to shame; but even Thrasymachus ends better than he began, and though he takes no share in the long sequel of the dialogue, joins with others in pressing Sokrates to go on, and parts with him on friendly terms. This single exhibition of Thrasymachus, made, not by himself, but by Plato when he wants a spokesman for an immoral doctrine, is the solitary case that can be cited from Plato in support of the opinion which imputes immoral teaching to the Sophists; and Thrasymachus was not a Sophist, but a rhetorician.

Nevertheless, it neither needs nor can be denied, not only that Plato had an unfavourable opinion of the Sophists generally, but that his writings contain much evidence of their being looked upon, in Athenian society, with a widespread sentiment of aversion. Their unpopularity may be accounted for, without supposing it to have been, in a moral point of view, deserved. In the first place, the disapprobation was far from being unanimous. Though the name Sophist was already a term of reproach, it was also one of praise: Plato himself speaks of “the genuine Sophistic art” (ἡ γένει γενναία σοϕιστική) as a thing which he cannot completely distinguish from something laudable, and asks, “Have we not, in seeking for the Sophist, unexpectedly found the Philosopher? In another place, when speaking of the skilful adaptations of Creative Power, he says that the gods are admirable Sophists. The term, when applied to any one, was an insult or a compliment according to the person who used it; like metaphysician, or political economist, or Malthusian, in our own day. And this double tradition was prolonged into the latest period of Grecian culture. It lasted even after the word philosopher had come into use as the designation which all kinds of speculative men took to themselves; when this name might have been expected to engross all the favourable associations, leaving only the unfavourable to the word sophist. In one of the dialogues of Lucian, who was cotemporary with Marcus Aurelius, the sophist is identified with the philosopher, and described as the chosen and professional inculcator and guardian of virtue. Those who are chiefly brought forward by Plato as thinking ill of the Sophists, are either practical politicians, whose contempt for theorists is no rare or abnormal phenomenon in any age, or elderly and respectable fathers of families, who had passed through life with credit and success without the acquirements which they now found the younger generation running after. The character in Plato who exhibits the strongest example of mingled hatred and contempt for the Sophists, is Anytus, in the Menon. This man, a politician of influence and repute, no sooner hears them mentioned than he bursts into a torrent of abuse, calling them people whom it is madness to have anything to do with, and whose presence no city ought to tolerate; though he admits, when questioned, that he has never conversed with any of them, nor has any personal knowledge of what they taught, but does not the less indignantly denounce them as “corrupters of youth,” the charge on which afterwards, in conjunction with Melêtus, he indicted Sokrates, with result we all know. It is worth mentioning, that Xenophon relates, on the authority of Sokrates himself, the origin of the offence which Anytus had taken against him: it was because he criticized the education which Anytus was giving to his son, saying that a man who sought for himself the greatest honours of the state ought to have brought up this promising youth to a higher occupation than his own business of a tanner. This is probably a fair example of the feeling which indisposed respectable elderly Athenians towards “Sokrates the Sophist,” and towards the other Sophists. When the charge of corrupting youth comes to be particularized, it always resolves itself into making them think themselves wiser than the laws, and fail in proper respect to their fathers and their seniors. And this is a true charge: only it ought to fall, not on the Sophists, but on intellectual culture generally. Whatever encourages young men to think for themselves, does lead them to criticize the laws of their country—does shake their faith in the infallibility of their fathers and their elders, and make them think their own speculations preferable. It is beyond doubt that the teaching of Sokrates, and of Plato after him, produced these effects in an extraordinary degree. Accordingly, we learn from Xenophon that the youths of rich families who frequented Sokrates, did so, for the most part, against the severe disapprobation of their relatives. In every age and state of society, fathers and the elder citizens have been suspicious and jealous of all freedom of thought and all intellectual cultivation (not strictly professional) in their sons and juniors, unless they can get it controlled and regulated by some civil or ecclesiastical authority in which they have confidence. But it had not occurred to Athenian legislators to have an established Sophistical Church, or State Universities. The teaching of the Sophists was all on the voluntary principle; and the dislike of it was of the same nature with the outcry against “godless colleges,” or the objection of most of our higher and middle classes to any schools but denominational ones. They disapproved of any teaching, unless they could be certain that all their own opinions would be taught. It mattered not that the instructors taught no heresy; the mere fact that they accustomed the mind to ask questions, and require other reasons than use and wont, sufficed at Athens, as it does in most other places, to make the teaching dangerous in the eyes of self-satisfied respectability. Accordingly, respectability, as Plato himself tells us, looked with at least as evil an eye on Philosophers as on Sophists. Sokrates, in the Apologia, speaks of the reproach of atheism, of making the worse appear the better cause, and so forth, as the charges always at hand to be flung at those who philosophize; τὰ κατὰ πάντων τω̑ν ϕιλοσοϕούντων πρόχειρα ταυ̑τα. Xenophon also calls the teaching of an art of words “the common reproach of the multitude against philosophers.” There is nothing in all Plato more impressive than his picture, in the Gorgias and the Republic, of the solitary and despised position of the philosopher in every existing society, and the universal impression against him, as at best an useless person, but more frequently an eminently wicked one (παμπονήρους, κακοὺς πα̑σαν κακίαν). He takes pains to point out the causes which gave to this unfavourable opinion of philosophers a colour of truth, and admits that it was not unfrequently justified by the conduct of those who were so called; which is more than he ever says of the Sophists.

Plato’s own dislike of the Sophists was probably quite as intense as that to which he testifies on the part of the Athenian public: but was it of the same nature? Did he regard them as corruptors of youth? Not if the Sokrates of the Republic expresses Plato’s opinions. In one of the most weighty passages of that majestic dialogue, Sokrates is made to say—People fancy that it is Sophists and such people that are corruptors of youth; but this is a mistake. The real corruptor of the young is society itself; their families, their associates, all whom they see and converse with, the applauses and hootings of the public assembly, the sentences of the court of justice. These are what pervert young men, by holding up to them a false standard of good and evil, and giving an entirely wrong direction to their desires. As for the Sophists, they merely repeat the people’s own opinions.

Do you imagine [he asks], like the many, that young men are corrupted by Sophists—that there are private Sophists who corrupt them in any degree worth talking about (ὅτι καὶ ἄξιον λόγου)? Are not the very men who assert this, themselves the greatest Sophists, educating and training in the most thorough manner both young and old, men and women, to be such as they wish them to be? Those fee-taking individuals whom they call Sophists, and regard as their rivals, teach nothing but these very opinions of the multitude, and call them wisdom.

And it is these false opinions of the multitude, as he proceeds to show, which corrupt so many minds originally well fitted for philosophy, and divert them to the paths of vulgar ambition. If there is a class from whom he deems the multitude to have imbibed these false opinions, and whom he consequently makes accountable for them, it is the poets, who, in the religion of Hellas, were also the theologians.

Why, then, is Plato so merciless in running down the Sophists? The reasons are plain enough in many parts of his writings: let us look for them where we may be sure of finding them, in the dialogue devoted to defining what a Sophist is. The Sophistes is an elaborate investigation into the Sophist’s nature and essence, and, besides its direct purpose, is intended as an example of the most thorough mode of conducting such investigations. From a succession of different points of view, Plato arrives at several definitions of the Sophist, some of which want so little of being complimentary, that he confesses a difficulty in distinguishing the Sophist from the Dialectician. Others are condemnatory, but the grounds of condemnation which emerge are limited to two; the same which compose the definition by his pupil Aristotle, of a Sophist in the unfavourable sense: χρηματιστὴς ἀπὸ ϕαινομένης σοϕίας ἀλλ’ οὐκ οὔσης. The first and principal topic of disparagement (which recurs in almost every dialogue where they are mentioned) is that they took money for their teaching. And everything proves that whatever antipathy he had to the Sophists specially, as distinguished from other influential classes in Greece, was grounded on that circumstance alone. This will perhaps be hardly credible to many readers. In modern times, when everybody takes pay for everything (legislators and county magistrates alone excepted), and it is thought quite natural and creditable that men should be paid in money even for saving souls, it is difficult to realize the point of view from which Plato and Sokrates looked on this subject. Sokrates, we are told by Xenophon, compared those who sell their wisdom to those who sell their caresses, and maintained that both alike ought only to be given in exchange for love. Nor is this inconsistent with the fact that Plato certainly, and Sokrates probably, though they took no fees, accepted presents from their admirers: for to minister to the needs of a friend was a duty of friendship; and the Platonic Sokrates expresses his whole sentiment on the question by saying, that the teachers of any special art may consistently and reasonably demand payment for their instructions, because they profess to make people good artists or artificers, not good men; but that it is the height of inconsistency in a professed teacher of virtue to grumble because those whom he has pretended to instruct do not pay him sufficiently, since his complaint of their injustice is the clearest proof that the instruction has been of no use. Nor is it difficult to find arguments, tenable even from the modern point of view, which might be, and have been, brought to prove the mischief of erecting the commerce of ideas into a money-getting trade. In the brilliant dialogue entitled Gorgias, in which the hardest things are said that are to be found in all Plato both against the sophistic and the rhetorical profession, he classes them as two branches of one comprehensive, not art but knack, that of adulation (κολακεία). They attain their purposes, he affirms, not by making people wiser or better, but by conforming to their opinions, pandering to their existing desires, and making them better pleased with themselves and with their errors and vices than they were before. And is not this the really formidable temptation of all popular teaching and all literature? necessarily aggravated when these are practised for their pecuniary fruits. We may picture to ourselves Plato, judging from this point of view the teachers of the present day. established clergy, he might say, are directly bribed to profess an existing set of opinions, whether they believe them or not, and however remote they may be from truth. The ministers of every non-established sect are no less bound by their pecuniary interest to preach, not what is true, but what their flocks already believe. Of lawyers it is unnecessary to speak, who must either give up their profession, or accept a brief without scruple from what they know to be the wrong side. Schoolmasters, and the teachers and governors of universities, must, on every subject on which opinions differ, provide the teaching which will be acceptable to those who can give them pupils, not that which is really the best. Statesmen, he might say, have renounced even the pretence that anything ought to be required from them but to give to the public, not what is best for it, but what it wishes to have. The press, especially the most influential part of it, the newspapers and periodicals—by what incessant evidence does it prove that it considers as its business to be of the same mind with the public; to court, assent to, adulate, Public Opinion, and instead of disagreeable truths, ply it with the things it likes to There is so much groundwork of reality for a representation like this, that some in our own day draw the same practical inference with Plato, and think there should be no law of copyright, that writers may no longer be tempted to prepare opinions for the market, and no one may write aught but what he feels impelled to put forth from pure zeal for his convictions. We think this opinion wrong, not because nothing can be said for it, but because there is much more to be said on the opposite side. It is, however, a substantially correct expression of Plato’s sentiments, and shows that his bitterness against the Sophists for being paid teachers was far from being the mere sentimentality which we might be apt to think it.

The other ground of disapproval of the Sophists which comes out in the Sophistes, and wherever else Plato discusses them, is, that the doctrines in which they dealt were apparent, not real wisdom; Opinion only, and not Knowledge. Whoever is aware of what Plato meant by knowledge, and of the attitude which he and his master assumed towards what passed for such among their cotemporaries, will admit that what is here said of the Sophists was true; but not truer of them than of all other persons in that age. If there is one thing more than another which Plato represents Sokrates as maintaining, it is that knowledge, on the subjects most important to man, did not yet exist, though everybody was living under the false persuasion of possessing it. He, Sokrates, did not pretend to know anything, except his own ignorance; but inasmuch as other people did not know even that, Sokrates, who did, deserved the palm of wisdom assigned to him by the Delphian Oracle. In the Apologia, which is either the real speech of Sokrates, or Plato’s idealization of his life and character, he represents himself as driven by a religious obligation to cross-examine all men, and discover if any of them had attained that real knowledge which he himself was conscious of not possessing. For this purpose, as he says, he sought the conversation of those who seemed, or were considered, wise; beginning with the politicians, all of whom he found to be in a state of gross ignorance, and in general more profoundly so in proportion to their reputation, but puffed up in the extreme by a false opinion of their own knowledge. He next tested the poets, but found that though they composed splendid things, doubtless by a divine afflatus, they were unable to give any rational account of the works which, or of the subjects on which, they composed. Last, he tried the artificers, and these, he found, did possess real knowledge, each concerning his special art; but fell into the error of imagining that they knew other things besides, which false opinion put them on the whole in a worse condition than his own conscious ignorance. It is noticeable that he does not here mention the Sophists among those whom he had cross-examined, and convicted of not knowing what they pretended to know. It is evident, however, that one who had this opinion concerning all the world, would come first and most into collision with the teachers. Those who not only fancied that they knew what they knew not, but professed to teach it, would be the very first persons whom it would fall in his way to convict of ignorance; and this is the exact position of Plato with regard to the Sophists. He attacks them not as the perverters of society, but as marked representatives of society itself, and compelled, by the law of their existence as its paid instructors, to sum up in themselves all that is bad in its tendencies.

The enemy against whom Plato really fought, and the warfare against whom was the incessant occupation of the greater part of his life and writings, was not Sophistry, either in the ancient or the modern sense of the term, but Commonplace. It was the acceptance of traditional opinions and current sentiments as an ultimate fact; and bandying of the abstract terms which express approbation and disapprobation, desire and aversion, admiration and disgust, as if they had a meaning thoroughly understood and universally assented to. The men of his day (like those of ours) thought that they knew what Good and Evil, Just and Unjust, Honourable and Shameful, were, because they could use the words glibly, and affirm them of this and of that, in agreement with existing custom. But what the property was, which these several instances possessed in common, justifying the application of the term, nobody had considered; neither the Sophists, nor the rhetoricians, nor the statesmen, nor any of those who set themselves up or were set up by others as wise. Yet whoever could not answer this question was wandering in darkness; had no standard by which his judgments were regulated, and which kept them consistent with one another; no rule which he knew, and could stand by, for the guidance of his life. Not knowing what Justice and Virtue are, it was impossible to be just and virtuous; not knowing what Good is, we not only fail to reach it, but are certain to embrace Evil instead. Such a condition, to any one capable of thought, made life not worth having. The grand business of human intellect ought to consist in subjecting these general terms to the most rigorous scrutiny, and bringing to light the ideas that lie at the bottom of them. Even if this cannot be done, and real knowledge be attained, it is already no small benefit to expel the false opinion of knowledge; to make men conscious of their ignorance of the things most needful to be known, fill them with shame and uneasiness at their own state, and rouse a pungent internal stimulus, summoning up all their mental energies to attack these greatest of all problems, and never rest until, as far as possible, the true solutions are reached. This is Plato’s notion of the condition of the human mind in his time, and of what philosophy could do to help it; and any one who does not think the description applicable, with slight modifications, to the majority even of educated minds in our own and in all times known to us, certainly has not brought either the teachers or the practical men of any time to the Platonic test.

The sole means by which, in Plato’s opinion, the minds of men be delivered from this intolerable state, and put in the way of obtaining the real knowledge which has power to make them wise and virtuous, is what he terms Dialectics; and the philosopher, as conceived by him, is almost synonymous with the Dialectician. What Plato understood by this name consisted of two parts. One is, the testing every opinion by a negative scrutiny, eliciting every objection or difficulty that could be raised against it, and demanding, before it was adopted, that they should be successfully met. This could only be done effectually by way of oral discussion; pressing the respondent by questions, to which he was generally unable to make replies that were not in contradiction either to admitted fact, or to his own original hypothesis. This cross-examination is the Sokratic Elenchus; which, wielded by a master such as Sokrates was, and as we can ourselves appreciate in Plato, no mere appearance of knowledge without the reality was able to resist. Its pressure was certain, in an honest mind, to dissipate the false opinion of knowledge, and make the confuted respondent sensible of his own ignorance, while it at once helped and stimulated him to the mental effort by which alone that ignorance could be exchanged for knowledge. Dialectics, thus understood, is one branch of an art which is a main portion of the Art of Living—that of not believing except on sufficient evidence; its function being that of compelling a man to put his belief into precise terms, and take a defensible position against all the objections that can be made to it. The other, or positive arm of Plato’s dialectics, of which he and Sokrates may be regarded as the originators, is the direct search for the common feature of things that are classed together, or, in other words, for the meaning of the class-name. It comprehends the logical processes of Definition and Division or Classification; the theory and systematic employment of which were a new thing in Plato’s day: indeed Aristotle says that the former of the operations was first introduced by Sokrates. They are indissolubly connected, Division being, as Plato inculcates, the only road to Definition. To find what a thing is, it is necessary to set out from Being in general, or from some large and known Kind which includes the thing sought—to dismember the kind into its component parts, and these into others, each division being, if possible, only into two members (an anticipation of Ramus and Bentham), marking at each stage the distinctive feature which differentiates one member from the other. By the time we have divided down to the thing of which we are in quest, we have remarked its points of agreement with all the things to which it is allied, and the points that constitute its differences from them; and are thus enabled to produce a definition of it, which is a compendium of its whole nature. This mode of arriving at a definition is elaborately exemplified, first on an insignificant subject, then on a great and difficult one, in the Sophistes and Politikos; two of the most important of the Platonic dialogues, because in both of them the conception of this part of the process of philosophizing is purely Baconian, unincumbered by the ontological theory which Plato in other writings superinduces on his pure logic. Without this theory, however, a very insufficient conception would be formed of the Platonic philosophy. The bond of union among the particulars comprised in a class, as understood by Plato, is not a mental Concept, framed by abstraction, and having no existence outside the mind, but a Form or Idea, existing by itself, belonging to another world than ours—with which Form or Idea, concrete objects have a communion or participation of nature, and in the likeness of which (though a very imperfect likeness) they have been made. When this mode of conceiving the process of generalization had been received into Plato’s mind, he was led to think that the Ideas were the real existences, which were alone permanent, alone the object of knowledge. Individual objects, if they could be said to be knowable at all, were only knowable through the Ideas, which, therefore, it was the characteristic function of the philosopher to cognise; thus exalting the philosopher to a region above nature and the earth, and making him of kin to the gods, who, being the possessors of supreme wisdom, must live in the perpetual contemplation of these glorious and superterrene existences. We have here reached the mystical and poetical side of Plato’s philosophy; and the dialectic process being the only road by which an earthly nature can approach these divine essences (for he by no means their apprehension as intuitive), we begin to understand how that process acquires the poetical and religious halo which surrounds it in his mind; how the dialectician becomes a kind of divine person—the nearest approach possible for man to the celestial nature.

The real merits, however, of the Platonic dialectics are not dependent on this religious and metaphysical superstructure; and before we follow Plato farther on that slippery ground, we must dwell a little on the debt mankind owe to him for this, incomparably his greatest gift.

The larger half of the Platonic compositions is directly devoted to the exemplification and application of the dialectic art; the investigation, in conversation between two persons, of the definition of some term in general use, connected with emotional sentiments and practical impulses and restraints. Sometimes the inquiry takes the shape of confutation of an opinion maintained by some admired teacher, or self-confident dogmatist: sometimes the interlocutor is a friend or companion, usually an ingenuous youth, who is encouraged to attempt a definition, and as the definitions he hazards are successively shown to be insufficient, looks out for another, free from the particular fault which has been pointed out. An idea of the variety of topics embraced by these inquiries may be conveyed to those unacquainted with Plato, by the following catalogue:

Euthyphron. | —What is Holiness?
Laches. | —What is Courage?
Charmides. | —What is Temperance (or self-restraint, or moderation, or orderliness, or sobriety)?
Lysis. | —What is Friendship (or affection, or liking, or attachment, or attraction, or preference)? Or rather, what is the natural object of this sentiment?
Hippias Major. | —What is the Beautiful (or the Honourable, or the Fine, or the Admirable)?
Erastæ. | —What is Philosophy?
Hipparchus. | —What is τὸ ϕιλοκερδές (meanness, sordidness, graspingness, greed of gain)?
Minos. | —What is a Law?
Menon. | —What is Virtue?
Theætetus. | —What is Knowledge?
Sophistes. | —What is a Sophist?
Politikos. | —What is a Statesman?

All these dialogues have for their sole object the investigation of Definitions, either in the way of confutation or of simple search. If we add those of which an important part is directed to this purpose, though the dialogue has other objects besides, we include the four greatest masterpieces of Plato’s genius:

Protagoras.—A manifold and magnificent display of the Sokratic and Platonic mind, a great part of which consists of an inquiry into the definitions of the cardinal virtues, and especially of Courage.

Phædrus.—Equally multifarious; part of which is a discussion respecting the nature and definition of Rhetoric.

Gorgias.—What is Rhetoric? With this inquiry the dialogue sets out, but leads through it into an ethical controversy on the superiority of the just over the unjust life.

Republic.—The inquiry, What is Justice? is the starting point of this great work, which widens out into a complete treatise on the Platonic ethics, and on the constitution of a perfect commonwealth.

A series of investigations worthy to be attributed to the philosopher who, as we hear from Xenophon, “never ceased considering, along with his companions, what each existing thing is,” being of opinion “that those who know what each thing is, are able to exhibit it to other people; but when men know it not, it is no wonder that they themselves go astray, and mislead others.”

In casting our eyes over this list, we are forcibly reminded what a curious thing Mixed Modes are; if we may venture to borrow from the Lockian psychology a phrase which has fallen into undeserved disuse, signifying those complex ideas which the mind makes up for itself, not by directly copying an original in nature, but by combination of elements more or less arbitrarily selected from experience. Of this kind are the various concepts connected with praise and blame, which, being mostly compounded of elements having little to hold them together except a common emotion, are differently composed in different ages and countries, and the words which represent them in one language have no synonyms in another. We found it impossible to express the subjects of several of Plato’s dialogues in English, except by heaping together a number of names, no one of which is an exact equivalent of the Greek word, and which even in combination are only an approximate expression of the same collection of attributes. The subject of the Lysis is ϕιλία, translated Friendship; and the inquiry into the nature of ϕιλία has to give an account of friendship; but it has also to give an account of a man’s ϕιλία for horses, and dogs, and wine, of the ϕιλία of a sick body for health and medicine, that of a philosopher for wisdom, even the imaginary attraction of Dry for Moist, Cold for Hot, Bitter for Sweet, Empty for Full, and contraries in general for one another. Σωϕροσύνη, the subject of the Charmides, is one of the most difficult words to translate in the whole Greek language. The common rendering, Temperance, corresponds to a part of the meaning, but is ridiculously inadequate to the whole. Continence, Modesty, Moderation, are all short of the and Self-Control are better, but imply the coercion of the character by the will, while what is required is rather a character not needing coercion. There is also in the Greek word an implied idea of order, of measure, and, as may be seen from this very dialogue, of deliberateness, which are wanting in the nearest English equivalents. Unobtrusiveness, too, is an essential part of the concept; and there is a connotation besides of Judgment or Intelligence (let us say Reasonableness); otherwise Plato could not, as he does in the Protagoras, found an apparent argument on the antithesis between σωϕροσύνη and ἀϕροσύνη. Sobriety, a word used several times in this connexion by Mr. Grote, perhaps comes nearest to the Greek word in its variety of applications; but even this hardly admits of being substituted for it in discourse, without a perpetual running comment. A still more illustrative case, interesting as an example of the relation between national language and national character, is the Greek employment of the words which we translate by Beautiful and Ugly: καλόν and αἰσχρόν. These terms, derived from purely physical characteristics, and never ceasing to carry that meaning, became the symbols, both in speculation and in daily life, of the æsthetic or artistic view of human actions and qualities, as distinguished from the useful and the simply dutiful; an aspect prominent, and even predominant, in the susceptible Grecian mind, but which, to our exclusively practical turn of thought, confirmed by monachism and puritanism, is scarcely intelligible, and our translators bungle with their “honourable” and “shameful” in a vain attempt to express the complicated sentiment of the Greeks on matters of conduct and character, or to understand what their writers meant. The French, whose ethical sentiment retains more of the æsthetic element, sometimes indeed out of due proportion to the prudential and the dutiful, realize better the Hellenic feeling, and can often, even in moral discussion, translate τὸ καλόν by “le beau;” though there is no similar correlation of “le laid” with αἰσχρόν.

In spite, however, of these divergences between Plato’s world and our own in the composition of the complex ideas to which emotions are attached, whoever has a due value for the Method will often learn as much from these cases, as from the more frequent ones in which the subject of inquiry is a Mixed Mode identical or very similar to one familiar to ourselves; as Virtue, Justice, Courage, Knowledge, Law.

In many of these investigations, the person questioned does not at first exactly know what is expected from him, and instead of a genuine definition, replies by specimens of particular things commonly included under the name; the pretentious and practised teacher Hippias, as represented in the dialogue, being as unfamiliar with the sort of investigation intended, and more inexpert and clumsy when he attempts it, than the respectable and competent man of action Laches, the opulent Thessalian patrician Menon, or the youth Theætetus. Sokrates labours, by a profusion of illustrative examples (showing how little familiar the notion then was), to make them understand that what is wanted is not any particular cases of the beautiful, or of virtue, or of knowledge, but what Beauty, or Virtue, or Knowledge, in themselves are. The respondent is then encouraged, or, if in an antagonistic position, compelled, to point out some feature or circumstance which is always present along with the notion or predicate into the meaning of which they are inquiring. The part of Sokrates is, to show either that this feature or circumstance is not present in all the cases, or, more frequently, that it is present in many more than the cases, to which the word is applicable; thus obliging the respondent either to withdraw his definition and try another, or to limit the first by some circumstance, intended to exclude the particulars which had been unguardedly left within the boundary. Many definitions are tried, and shown to be untenable, and the dialogue often concludes without any result but the confession of ignorance. Even when one of the definitions examined seems to be accepted in one dialogue, it is often contested, and apparently refuted, in another; so that the result, on the whole, is rather one of method than of doctrine; though striking fragments of truth come to the surface, in the general turning up of the subject which the process involves. The confutations, too, though of marvellous ingenuity, are frequently, to us, obvious fallacies. Yet the process is the true and only mode of acquiring abstract notions which are both clear, and correspond to points of identity among real facts; and the manifold and masterly exemplification of it in the Platonic dialogues is a discipline in precise thinking, to which there is even now nothing simile aut secundum in philosophy. To suppose that dialectic training only trains dialecticians, is great ignorance of its power and virtue. Such training is an indispensable education for dogmatic thinkers: and it is quite in the course of nature that Plato should have been the master of Aristotle. But the many first-rate minds which have owed much of their clearness and vigour to the Platonic dialectic, have shown what it had done for them by the fruits it brought forth in themselves, rather than by creating any fresh models of it. The dialogues, therefore, are the still unrivalled types of the dialectic process; made captivating by all the grace and felicity of execution which gave to the author the title of the Attic Bee; and afford an example, once in all literature, of the union between an eminent genius for philosophy and the most consummate skill and feeling of the artist.

Much, however, as the modern world owes to the Platonic dialectics, it is seldom duly sensible of the obligation. The testing and cross-examining process is never popular.

In the natural process of growth in the human mind, belief does not follow proof, but springs up apart from and independent of it; an immature intelligence believes first, and proves (if indeed it ever seeks proof) afterwards. This mental tendency is further confirmed by the pressure and authority of King Nomos; who is peremptory in exacting belief, but neither furnishes nor requires proof. The community, themselves deeply persuaded, will not hear with calmness the voice of a solitary reasoner, adverse to opinions thus established; nor do they like to be required to explain, analyse, or reconcile those opinions. They disapprove especially that dialectic debate which gives free play and efficacious prominence to the negative arm.

“Nothing can be more repugnant to an ordinary mind than the thorough sifting of deep-seated, long familiarized notions.” Scarcely any modern would endure to submit himself to the Sokratic interrogation, which, to Plato’s apprehension, was so emphatically the only sufficient Elenchus or test, that he entertained a very poor opinion of the value either of long speeches, or of written discourse, where the discourser was not at hand to be questioned and to question—διδόναι καὶ δέχεσθαι λόγον. Even such approach to the Sokratic method as written composition admits of, the confutation of adversaries behind their backs, is seldom regarded with much favour; even those who agree with the writer caring little for it, beyond what pleasure they may take in seeing their opponents humiliated. For themselves, they are content to be convinced by their own reasons, without troubling themselves about counter-arguments which they are sure must be fallacious. Yet truth, in everything but mathematics, is not a single but a double question; not what can be said for an opinion, but whether more can be said for it than against it. There is no knowledge, and no assurance of right belief, but with him who can both confute the opposite opinion, and successfully defend his own against confutation. But this, the principal lesson of Plato’s writings, the world and many of its admired teachers have very imperfectly learned. We have to thank our free Parliament, and the publicity of our courts of justice, for whatever feeling we have of the value of debate. The Athenians, who were incessantly engaged in hearing both sides of every deliberative and judicial question, had a far stronger sense of it.

The other, or positive half of the Platonic dialectic, is equally far from being appreciated; that, namely, whereby the vague generalities which serve as the standard of censure or applause in common discourse, are put on the logical rack, and compelled to declare what definite signification lies in them. This twofold obligation, to be able to maintain our opinions against the criticism of opponents and refute theirs, and never to use a term in serious discourse without a precise meaning, has always been odious to the classes who compose nearly the whole of mankind; dogmatists of all persuasions, and merely practical people. Hence it is that human intellect improves so slowly, and, even in acquiring more and more of the results of wisdom, grows so little wiser. In things that depend on natural sagacity, which is about equally abundant at all times, we are not inferior to our forefathers; in knowledge of observed facts we are far beyond them; but we cast off particular errors without extirpating the causes of error; the Idols of the Tribe, and even of the Den, infest us almost as much as formerly; the discipline which purges the intellect itself, it from false generalization, inconclusive inference, and simple nonsense, on subjects which it imperfectly knows, is still absent from all but a few minds. We have been disabused of many false and pernicious opinions by the evidence of fact, but not by correcting the mental habits which them; and we are almost as ready as ever to receive new errors, when our senses and memory do not supply us with truths which those particular erroneous opinions would contradict.

It is singular that Plato himself did not fully profit by the principal lesson of his own teaching. This is one of the inconsistencies by which he is such a puzzle to posterity. No one can read many of the works of Plato, and doubt that he had positive opinions. But he does not bring his own opinions to the test which he applies to others. “It depends on the actual argumentative purpose which Plato has in hand, whether he chooses to multiply objections and give them effect, or to ignore them altogether.” “The affirmative Sokrates only stands his ground because no negative Sokrates is allowed to attack him.” Or, what is worse, Plato applies the test, and disregards its indications; states clearly and strongly the objections to the opinion he favours, and goes his way as if they did not exist. If there is a doctrine which is the guide of his deepest speculations, which he invests with all the plausibility that his wonderful power of illustration can give, and clothes in the most brilliant colours of his poetic imagination, it is the theory of Self-Existent Ideas—the essential groundwork of some of his grandest dialogues, especially the Phædrus, the Phædon, and an important portion of the Republic. Yet there is in his writings no specimen of logical confutation more remarkable than that by which Parmenides, in the dialogue so called, overthrows this very doctrine, put into the mouth of the youthful Sokrates. Some of the Platonic critics consequently decide the Parmenides not to be a work of Plato, but one directed against Plato, by a disciple of the Eleatic school; forgetting that Parmenides, in the dialogue, gives an equally peremptory refutation of his own principal doctrine, the Unity of Being, and moreover winds up his refutation of the theory of Ideas by saying that, liable as it is to these great difficulties, philosophy and dialectics would be impossible unless it were admitted. One would expect that so important a theory would not be left in this predicament, suspended between opposite reasons deemed equally irresistible. We should have supposed that the great master of dialectics, since he accepted the doctrine, would have held himself bound to refute its seeming refutation. Yet he never does this, and, we venture to think, could not have done it. The objections are repeated, in a more abridged form, in the Philebus, and are equally left unanswered, Sokrates merely remarking, that the subject will probably always continue to be a theme for the ingenuity of young dialecticians. The dogmatic Plato seems a different person from the elenctic Plato:

The two currents of his speculation, the affirmative and the negative, are distinct and independent of each other. Where the affirmative is especially present (as in Timæus) the negative altogether disappears. Timæus is made to proclaim the most sweeping theories, not one of which the real Sokrates would have suffered to pass without abundant cross-examination; but the Platonic Sokrates hears them with respectful silence, and commends afterwards. When Plato comes forward to affirm, his dogmas are altogether à priori; they enunciate preconceptions or hypotheses, which derive their hold upon his belief not from any aptitude for solving the objections which he has raised, but from deep and solemn sentiment of some kind or other—religious, ethical, æsthetical, poetical, &c., the worship of numerical symmetry or exactness, &c. The dogmas are enunciations of some grand sentiment of the divine, good, just, beautiful, symmetrical, &c., which Plato follows out into corollaries. But this is a process of itself; and while he is performing it, the doubts previously raised are not called up to be solved, but are forgotten or kept out of sight.

Plato was sceptic, dogmatist, religious mystic and inquisitor, mathematician, philosopher, poet (erotic as well as satirical), rhetor, artist, all in one, or, at least, all in succession, throughout the fifty years of his philosophical life. At one time his exuberant dialectical impulse claims satisfaction, manifesting itself in a string of ingenious doubts and unsolved contradictions; at another time he is full of theological antipathy against those who libel Helios and Selênê, or who deny the universal providence of the gods: here we have unqualified confessions of ignorance, and protestations against the false persuasion of knowledge, as alike wide-spread and deplorable; there we find a description of the process of building up the Kosmos from the beginning, as if the author had been privy to the inmost purposes of the Demiurgus. In one dialogue the erotic fever is in the ascendant, distributed between beautiful youths and philosophical concepts, and confounded with a religious inspiration and furor which supersedes and transcends human sobriety (Phædrus); in another, all vehement impulses of the soul are stigmatized and repudiated, no honourable scope being left for anything but the calm and passionless Nous (Philêbus, Phædon). Satire is exchanged for dithyramb and mythe, and one ethical point of view for another (Protagoras, Gorgias). The all-sufficient dramatizing power of the master gives full effect to each of these multifarious tendencies. On the whole—to use a comparison of Plato himself—the Platonic sum total somewhat resembles those fanciful combinations of animals imagined in the Hellenic mythology—an aggregate of distinct and disparate individuals, which look like one because they are packed in the same external wrapper.

The most important, though not the whole, of these varieties of tone and sentiment, seem to us to be explained by the philosopher’s advance in years, and growth in positive convictions. The first alone will account for much. There needs little argument to prove that the warfare against the intenser pleasures, and condemnation of all mental perturbations, of the Philebus, the Leges, and even the Republic, belong to a later time of life than the amatory enthusiasm of the Phædrus and the Symposion. Again, the works which bear the strongest marks of having been written in Plato’s later years, show a great modification in his estimation of the Elenctic process. He had apparently met the not unfrequent fate of great reformers, so strikingly exemplified in the career of Luther, who, precisely because he had succeeded beyond all reasonable expectation in his original purpose, had to expend his principal energies during the latter part of his life in driving back followers who had outrun their leader. In the dialogues of mere Search, which were probably written by Plato while the influence of Sokrates over his mind was still predominant, there is nothing he oftener repeats, in the person of his hero, than that the mere awakening of a sense of ignorance, the mere destruction of the false persuasion of knowledge which is universal among mankind, is in itself, though nothing further come of it, a highly valuable result of Dialectics. But as he advanced in life, and acquired a persuasion of knowledge of his own; when, to use a metaphor of Mr. Grote’s, he ceased to be leader of opposition, and passed over to the ministerial benches, he came to think that the Sokratic cross-examination is a dangerous edge-tool. Already in the Republic we find him dwelling on the mischiefs of a purely negative state of mind, and complaining that Dialectics are placed too early in the course of education, and are taken up by “immature youths, who abuse the licence of interrogation, find all their home-grown opinions uncertain, and end by losing all positive convictions.” In the Platonic commonwealth, this pursuit only commences at the age of thirty, in order that Plato’s own dogmatic opinions may have a long start before being exposed to the dangers of the elenctic test. Dialectic, with its logical cross-examination, is still, however, the grand instrument of philosophizing, and those trained in it are alone considered fit to rule. But as Plato advanced still further in years and in dogmatism, he seems to have lost his relish and value for Dialectic altogether. In his second imaginary commonwealth—that of the Leges—it is no longer mentioned; it forms no part of the education either of the rulers or of the ruled, but in lieu of it is substituted a rigid and immutable orthodoxy of Plato’s own making, any disloyalty to which, or any dream of trying it by the Elenchus, is repressed with Torquemada-like severity. With regard to his omission to fortify his opinions in his own mind, against the difficulties raised by himself, our suspicion is, that he had come to despair of the efficacy of the dialectic process as a means of discriminating truth; that his inability to solve his own objections had brought him to the persuasion that objections insoluble by dialectics could be made against all truths; and, the ethical and political tendencies of his mind becoming predominant over the purely speculative, he came to think that the doctrines which had the best ethical tendency should be taught, with little or no regard to whether they could be proved true, and even at the risk of their being false.

There are thus, independently of minor discrepancies, two complete Platos in Plato—the Sokratist and the Dogmatist—of whom the former is by far the more valuable to mankind, but the latter has obtained from them much the greater honour. And no wonder; for the one was capable of being a useful prop to many a man’s moral and religious dogmas, while the other could only clear and invigorate the human understanding.

There is, indeed, ample justification for the homage which all cultivated ages have rendered to Plato simply as a moralist—as one of the most powerful masters of virtue who have appeared among mankind. Amid all his changes, there is one thing to which he is ever constant—the transcendent worth of virtue and wisdom (which he invariably identifies), and the infinitely superior eligibility of the just life, even if calumniated and persecuted, over the unjust, however honoured by men, and by whatever power and grandeur surrounded. And what he thus feels, no one ever had a power superior to his of making felt by his readers. It is this element which completes in him the character of a Great Teacher. Others can instruct, but Plato is of those who form great men, by the combination of moral enthusiasm and logical discipline. “Aristotle,” says Mr. Grote, “in one of his lost dialogues, made honourable mention of a Corinthian cultivator, who in reading the Platonic Gorgias, was smitten with such vehement admiration, that he abandoned his fields and his vines, came to Athens forthwith, and committed himself to the tuition of Plato.” It was not, we may be assured, by its arguments, that the Gorgias produced this striking manifestation of psychagogic efficacy; for they are nearly all of them fallacies, and could not have resisted the first touch of the cross-examining Elenchus, so unsparingly applied to their impugners. This great dialogue, full of just thoughts and fine observations on human nature, is, in mere argument, one of the weakest of Plato’s works. It is not by its logic, but by its ἠ̑θος, that it produces its effects; not by instructing the understanding, but by working on the feelings and imagination. Nor is this strange; for the disinterested love of virtue is an affair of feeling. It is impossible to prove to any one Plato’s thesis, that justice is supreme happiness, unless he can be made to feel it as such. The external inducements which recommend it he may be taught to appreciate; the favourable regards and good offices of other people, and the rewards of another life. These considerations, however, though Plato has recourse to them in other places, are not available in the Gorgias. The posthumous recompense he only ventures to introduce in the form of a mythe; and the earthly one is opposed to the whole scheme of the dialogue, which represents the virtuous and wise man as, in every existing society, a solitary being, misjudged, persecuted, and having no more chance with the Many against their adulators, than (to use Plato’s comparison) a physician would have, if indicted before a jury of children by a confectioner for giving them nauseous drugs instead of delicious sweetmeats. It is precisely this picture of the moral hero, still tenax propositi against the hostility and contempt of the world, which makes the splendour and power of the Gorgias. The Sokrates of the dialogue makes us feel all other evils to be more tolerable than injustice in the soul, not by proving it, but by the sympathy he calls forth with his own intense feeling of it. He inspires heroism, because he shows himself a hero. And his failures in logic do not prevent the step marked by the Gorgias from being one of the greatest ever made in moral culture—the cultivation of a disinterested preference of duty for its own sake, as a higher state than that of sacrificing selfish preferences to a more distant self-interest.

In the Republic, the excellence and inherent felicity of the just life are as impressively insisted on, and enforced by arguments of greater substance. But, as Mr. Grote justly remarks, those arguments, even if conclusive, are addressed to the wrong point; for the life they suppose is not that of the simply just man, but of the philosopher. They are not applicable to the typical just man—to such a person as Aristeides, who is no dialectician, soars to no speculative heights, and is no nearer than other people to a vision of the Self-Existent Ideas, but who, at every personal sacrifice, persistently acts up to the rules of virtue acknowledged by the worthiest of his countrymen. It is not obvious what place there was for Aristeides in the Platonic theory of virtue, nor how he was to be adjusted to the doctrine of Plato and of the historical Sokrates, that virtue is a branch of knowledge, and that no one is unjust willingly. Aristeides probably had the same notions of justice as his cotemporaries, and could as little as any of them have answered Sokratic interrogatories by a definition of it which would have been proof against all objections. The conformity of his will to it, the never being unjust willingly, was probably the chief moral difference between him and ordinary men. Plato might indeed have said that Aristeides had the most indispensable point of knowledge—he knew that the just man must be the happiest. But Aristeides was not the kind of man of whom Plato has, more or less successfully, proved this; and the true Platonic doctrine is that it is impossible to be just, without knowing (in the high Platonic meaning of knowledge) what justice is.

When we try Plato, as a moralist, by this test of his own; when, from the inspired apostle of virtue, we pass to the philosophic teacher of it, and ask for his criterion of virtue, we find it different in different works. In the Protagoras, it is completely utilitarian, in all that is stigmatized by some people as “low” and “degrading;” though justly condemned by Mr. Grote from the utilitarian point of view, because destitute of the unselfish element. According to the Sokrates of the Protagoras, there is nothing good as an end except pleasure and the absence of pain; all other good things are but means to these. Virtue is an affair of calculation, and the sole elements of the calculation are pains and pleasures. But the elements computed are the agent’s own pains and pleasures, omitting those of other people, and of mankind. The system is thus a selfish one; though only theoretically , since its propounder would have held fast to the doctrine that the just is the only happy life, i.e. (according to the theory of this dialogue) the one which affords to the agent himself the greatest excess of pleasure over pain. The standard of the Protagoras agrees with that of the historical Sokrates, who throughout the Memorabilia inculcates the ordinary duties of life on hedonistic grounds, and recommends them by the ordinary hedonistic inducements, the good opinion and praise of fellow-citizens, reciprocity of good treatment, and the favour of benevolent deities. Even in the Leges, Plato affirms that people will never be persuaded to prefer virtue unless convinced of its being the path of greatest pleasure, and that whether it is so or not (though he fully believes that it is), they must not only be taught to believe this, but no approach to a doubt of it must be tolerated within the country. The Sokrates of the Gorgias, however, dissents both from the Sokrates of the Protagoras and from the real Sokrates. Good is, with him, no longer synonymous with Pleasurable, nor Evil with Painful. To constitute anything a Good, it must be either pleasurable or beneficial (ὠϕέλιμον), and Justice belongs to the category of Beneficial; but beneficial to what end, is not explained, except that the end certainly is not Pleasure. Justice is assimilated to the health of the soul, injustice to a disease: and since the health of the body is its greatest good, and disease its greatest evil, the same estimate is extended by analogy to the mind. There is no attempt, in the Gorgias, to define Justice. In the Republic, which has this definition for its express purpose, and travels through the whole process of constructing an ideal commonwealth to arrive at it, the result is brought out, that Justice is synonymous with the complete supremacy of Reason in the soul. The human mind is analysed into the celebrated three elements, Reason, Spirit or Passion (τὸ θυμοειδές, another troublesome Mixed Mode) and Appetite. The just mind is that in which each of the three keeps its proper place; in which Reason governs, Passion makes itself the aid and instrument of Reason, and the two combined keep Appetite in a state of willing subjection. In the Philebus, which is professedly De Bono (or rather De Summo Bono), the subject is more discriminatingly scrutinized. After a long discussion, in which those who uphold Pleasure, and those who contend for wisdom or intelligence (ϕρόνησις), as the ultimate end, are both confuted; Good, or that which is worthy of being desired, is found to consist of five things, desirable in unequal degrees. We shall not quote the whole list, as, from the vagueness of some of the conceptions, and the extremely abstract nature of the phraseology, even Mr. Grote confesses how hard it is to be understood. The first four, however, have exclusive reference to the rational elements of the mind, while the fifth, placed far below the others, consists of the few pleasures which are gentle and unmixed with pain; all others, and especially the intenser pleasures, having been eliminated, as belonging to a distempered mental condition. All these theories lay themselves open to Mr. Grote’s criticism, by defining virtue with reference to the good only of the agent himself; even justice, pre-eminently the social virtue, being resolved into the supremacy of reason within our own minds: in disregard of the fact that the idea and sentiment of virtue have their foundation not exclusively in the self-regarding, but also, and even more directly, in the social feelings: a truth first fully accepted by the Stoics, who have the glory of being the earliest thinkers who grounded the obligation of morals on the brotherhood, the συγγένεια, of the whole human race. The grand defect of Plato’s ethical conceptions (excellently discussed in Mr. Grote’s remarks on the Republic) was in overlooking, what was completely seized by Aristotle—that the essential part of the virtue of justice is the recognition and observance of the rights of other people.

It is noticeable that even in the Republic, the governing and controlling principle of the mind, which we have translated Reason, and whose unresisted authority constitutes the essence of virtue, is τὸ λογιστικόν—literally the calculating principle (λογιστική being used by Plato himself, in the Gorgias, to denote a portion of Arithmetic). This is the very doctrine of the Protagoras, except that the elements to be calculated are different. And, through the whole series of the dialogues, a Measuring Art, μετρητικὴ τέχνη, as a means of distinguishing the truth of things from their superficial appearance, is everywhere desiderated as the great requisite both of wisdom and of virtue. When, however, the test of Pain and Pleasure is abandoned, no other elements are shown to us which the Measuring Art is to be employed to measure. Of course it has to measure our minds and actions themselves; but we measure anything, to make it conform to, or agree with, the dimensions of something else; and Plato does not tell us of what else. Our life is to be regulated, but we are not told what it is to be regulated by. The measuring process is supposed to have a virtue in itself. The analogy used is that of the untrue magnitudes and proportions of objects as seen by the eye, and their rectification by measurement; Plato overlooking that it is not the act of measuring which rectifies them, but the perceptions of touch which the measuring only ascertains. The idea of Measure as a good in itself, independent of any end beyond it, seems to have grown upon Plato as he advanced in life. Mere conformity to a fixed rule, especially if accompanied by regularity of numerical proportion, became his principal standard of excellence. This answered to a powerful sentiment in the Hellenic mind, which, combining with vehement impulses a high sense of personal dignity, demanded harmonious proportion in mind and deportment as much as in architecture, and to which anything inordinate, dissonant, unrhythmical, even in voice or demeanour, was not only distasteful, but seemed an indication of an ill-regulated mind; as it is expressly affirmed to be by Plato in the Republic. In Plato’s own mind we know that Measure and Regularity were the very footprints of divinity; that they, and only they, were the marks of design in the Kosmos, and where they ceased, the share of Deity ended too; the Kosmos altogether being but a compromise with ἀνάγκη or Necessity; which, by an inversion of the modern idea, stood for the capricious portion of the agencies in Nature—those in which the same consequent did not invariably follow the same antecedent. In the Philebus, Measure and the Measured, μέτρον καὶ τὸ μέτριον καίριον, stand as the first elements of Good, even Intelligence being only the third, and Pleasure (limited to the unexciting pleasures) the fifth and hindmost. In Plato’s later speculations, from the Republic to the Epinomis, the sciences of measure and proportion, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy, gradually take the place of Dialectics as the proper education of a ruler and philosopher. We learn from Aristotle that this was even more emphatically the case in his lectures, during the latter years of his life. Those which he delivered on the Ipsum Bonum, or Idea of Good, to the surprise of hearers, turned on transcendental properties of numbers. Number was resolved into two elementary factors—The One, and the Dyad or Two, this last being identified with the Indeterminate; and the Good was affirmed to be identical with the One, while Evil was the Unbounded or Undetermined, ἀόριστον and ἄπειρον. Thus did the noble light of philosophy in Plato go out in a fog of mystical Pythagoreanism.

In this Pythagorean morass, as we learn from the same authority, the brilliant doctrine of Ideas was submerged and quenched. Yet that doctrine stands, and will stand to posterity, as the purest type of the Platonic metaphysics. It is true of Plato, as of all his countrymen with the partial exception of Aristotle, that while their moral and political thoughts abound in a wisdom both practical and of permanent application, their metaphysical speculations are only interesting as the first efforts of original and inventive minds to let in light on a dark subject. The Platonic Ideas are nothing more; but, of all theories which have arisen in ingenious minds from an imperfect conception of the processes of abstraction and generalization, they are surely among the most plausible as well as beautiful. Men already abstracted and generalized before Plato wrote, or they would not have been human beings; but they did so by an unconscious working of the laws of association, which resembled an instinct: no theory of operations was in existence till Plato formed one, and the mere direction of consciousness upon the processes themselves was a new thing, which, as we see in many of the dialogues, even an intelligent pupil required to be assisted to do by a great prodigality of illustration. Now a contemplative mind soon perceived that all the objects of sense, whether substances, attributes, or events—and the noblest objects most—are that which they are, in only an imperfect manner, and suggest to the mind a type of what they are, far more perfect than themselves; a “something far more deeply interfused,” which eye has not seen nor ear heard, but of which that which can be seen or heard is an imperfect, and often very distant, resemblance. Psychology in its infancy did not yet enable men to perceive that the mind itself creates this more perfect type, by comparison and abstraction from the imperfect materials of its experience; but they perceived that the types embodied the unattainable perfection of all other things, and were the models which Nature itself seemed to strive to approach. What, then, could be more natural than to regard the types as real objects, concealed from sense, but cognisable directly by the mind—which, once conceived as external to us, seemed more real than anything else, all other things resembling imperfect attempts to copy them? The Self-Beautiful, the Self-Good, which not only were to all beautiful and good things as the ideal is to the actual, but united in themselves the separate perfections of all the various kinds of beauty and goodness—these forms or essences, from a participation in which all concrete things derive what they possess of goodness and beauty, but paled and disfigured by the turbid element in which they are immersed—these existences, so vastly more splendid than their feeble earthly representatives, and not, like them, subject to injury or decay—must not they be Realities in a far higher sense than the particulars which are within sensible cognisance? particulars which indeed are not realities: for there is no particular good or beautiful or just thing, which is not, in some case that may be supposed, unjust, evil, and unbeautiful. Was it not then to be presumed that the part of our nature which apprehends these Real Existences would perceive them far more clearly, but for the veil of sense interposed; and that it is only when the veil is removed, that we pass out of the world of images and likenesses into that of the Things themselves, and contemplate the splendid vision in all its brightness? But even in this world of shadows, the mind of the philosopher, trained by the dialectic process to see “the One in the Many,” can achieve, by arduous labour, such a perception of the Ideal Forms, as qualifies him for admission to a nearer and more satisfactory view of them in a life after death.

The mode in which Plato was led, by the same train of thought, to another of his opinions, the famous doctrine of Reminiscence, is not left for us to divine. It is shown to us in the Menon, in which more that is characteristic of Plato is brought together in a smaller space than in any other dialogue: if the Phædon and the Gorgias are noble statues, the Menon is a gem. Why is it, asks Sokrates, that when we seek for something we do not know, we yet know what we are seeking? and how comes it that we are able to recognise it when found? This, it seems, had been one of the puzzles of these early thinkers, resembling others of which great notice is taken in the Platonic writings: not quibbles of captious sophists, as commentators and historians of philosophy pretend, but difficulties really embarrassing to those who were trying to understand their own mental operations. Why does truth (so hard to find) when found, approve itself to us, often instantaneously, as truth? He can think of no explanation, but that we had known it in a former life, and need only to be reminded of our knowledge. Modern thinkers who have stopped short at Plato’s point of view, resolve the difficulty by pronouncing the knowledge to be intuitive. But Plato could not put up with this explanation; he knew too well how slowly, painfully, and at last imperfectly, the knowledge is acquired. The whole process of philosophizing was conceived by him as a laborious effort to call former knowledge back to mind. His doctrine is related to that of Wordsworth’s ode, erroneously called Platonic, not as identical but as opposite: with Wordsworth our life here is “a sleep and a forgetting,” with Plato it is a recollecting. We at once perceive the support which this doctrine gives to Plato’s conception of the process of instruction (a conception supremely important in his own and in all time) that “teaching and learning are words without meaning;” that knowledge is “to be evolved out of the mind, not poured into it from without.” The intimate connexion between the doctrine of Reminiscence and that of Ideas, even were it not obvious, would be shown by the Phædon, in which the Reminiscence theory is maintained on the express ground that every existing thing, in itself incomplete, brings to mind a type of its own nature more perfect than itself; and as we can only be reminded of that which we once knew, we must have known the type in a former life. The two doctrines are inseparably blended in the poetic mythe delivered by Sokrates in the Phædrus; and when in Plato’s later years the one doctrine drops out of his speculations, so does the other.

The doctrine of Pre-existence is naturally connected with that of Immortality; and in the Phædon the arguments for the latter are mostly grounded on the former. That wonderful dialogue, which divides with perhaps the Gorgias alone, the honour of being the most finished and consummate prose composition in Plato, if not in all literature—which combines in itself more sources of the grandest interest, more artistically fused together, than any other of Plato’s works—contains not one argument which is not a fallacy, or which could convince any one not anxiously desirous to be convinced. Plato himself, when he approaches the subject in other dialogues, resorts to quite different arguments, more resembling those on which recent schools of metaphysics have grounded the doctrines of Spiritualism. For instance, in the Leges, he argues that Mind or Soul, the principle of Life, is the only thing which originates motion—inanimate objects only carrying on and transmitting force communicated to them from elsewhere; that Mind, therefore, rules Matter, and must be anterior to it (πρεσβύτερον), and not subject to its laws. This argument, though adduced only as proof of a Divine government, is available for the other purpose, and though we are far from thinking it conclusive, is worth all those of the Phædon put together. As Mr. Grote remarks, though the personal incidents of the Phædon are Sokratic, and are probably those which really happened, its doctrines and arguments are exclusively Platonic. Sokrates, it is well known, professed no dogmatic certainty about another life. It is all the more worthy of note, that Plato had not yet abandoned the Sokratic canon of belief—viz. that it ought to be the genuine, unbiassed, untampered with, conviction of the individual reason, after giving an impartial hearing to every argument that can be thought of. As the Gorgias proclaims, with an energy and solemnity never surpassed, the rights of the individual intellect, and the obligation on every one, though the whole world should be on the contrary side, to stand firm, he alone, in asserting what recommends itself to his own reason; so in the Phædon, as Mr. Grote observes in one of his many valuable remarks on that dialogue:

Freedom of debate and fulness of search, the paramount value of “reasoned truth”—the necessity of keeping up the force of individual reason by constant argumentative exercise—and the right of independent judgment for hearer as well as speaker—stand emphatically proclaimed in these last words of the dying philosopher. He does not announce the immortality of the soul as a dogma of imperative orthodoxy; which men, whether satisfied with the proofs or not, must believe, or make profession of believing, on pain of being shunned as a moral pestilence, and disqualified from giving testimony in a court of justice. He sets forth his own conviction, with the grounds on which he adopts it. But he expressly recognises the existence of dissentient opinions; he invites his companions to bring forward every objection; he disclaims all special purpose of impressing his own conclusions upon their minds; nay, he expressly warns them not to be biassed by their personal sympathies, then wound up to the highest pitch, towards himself. He entreats them to preserve themselves from being tinged with misology, or the hatred of free argumentative discussion, and he ascribes this mental vice to the early habit of easy, uninquiring, implicit belief; since a man thus ready of faith, embracing opinions without any discriminating test, presently finds himself driven to abandon one opinion after another, until at last he mistrusts all opinions, and hates the process of discussing them, laying the blame on philosophy instead of upon his own intellect. . . .Sokrates is depicted as having not only an affirmative opinion, but even strong conviction, on a subject of great moment; which conviction, moreover, he is specially desirous of preserving unimpaired, during his few remaining hours of life. Yet even here he manifests no anxiety to get that conviction into the minds of his friends, except as a result of their own independent scrutiny and self-working reason. Not only he does not attempt to terrify them into believing, by menace of evil consequences if they do not, but he repudiates pointedly even the gentler machinery of conversion, which might work on their minds through attachment to himself and reverence for his authority. His devotion is to “reasoned truth;” he challenges his friends to the fullest scrutiny by their own independent reason; he recognises the sentence that they pronounce afterwards as valid for them, whether concurrent with himself or adverse. Their reason is for them what his reason is for him; requiring, both alike (as Sokrates here proclaims) to be stimulated as well as controlled by all-searching debate, but postulating equal liberty of final decision for each one of the debaters.

One of the things for which Plato has been most applauded by those modern schools which pique themselves on counting him among their precursors, is the warfare which he is supposed to have made on a sceptical philosophy, attributed, totally without evidence, to the Sophists generally, and considered as one of the means by which they demoralized the Greeks. The doctrines meant are two. One is the special tenet of Herakleitus (who was not a Sophist, except in the loose sense in which all speculative thinkers were so called), that the universe is in a state of perpetual flux, in which nothing is, but all things become (εἰ̑ναι, γίγνεσθαι; the Hegelian Seyn and Werden). The other is the doctrine of Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not. As things appear to me, so they are to me: as they appear to you, such they really are to you.” In other words, the doctrine of the Subjective nature of truth: which is a scandal to philosophers, as seeming to make all opinions equally true, and truth “that which each man troweth.”

Now, what the Herakleitean doctrine affirms of all things, is what Plato himself believed of the phenomenal world—of things cognisable by sense. The only thing which he regarded as really existing, τὸ ὄντως ὄν, was the Intelligible World, the world of Self-existent Forms; the extramundane prototypes of that, in the visible universe, which seems, but is not, real existence, and which is considered by him as something intermediate between Ens and Non-Ens. Herakleitus did not believe in these Forms, and that was the amount of difference between him and Plato. When they both refused to the world of sense what they called Real Existence, they did not mean to deny what we . What they denied of the visible universe, was Existence in a transcendent sense—the Existence per se which Plato ascribed to his Ideas, and Xenophanes and Parmenides to their Ens Unum. In modern phrase, Herakleitus denied the Absolute; though his doctrine of a really existent Principle of Change, and his other tenet of an Universal Reason apart from individual minds, a doctrine much in favour with some modern Transcendentalists, reintroduced an Absolute of another kind. Now it may safely be affirmed that no scepticism, limited to the Absolute, ever did anybody harm, or made the smallest practical difference to any human being. The doctrine of Protagoras requires a little more consideration. Though we may reasonably suppose that Plato, in the Theœtetus, gives it in that Sophist’s words, we are ignorant by what reasons Protagoras defended it, or in what sense he explained it. Sir William Hamilton considered it to mean his own doctrine of the Relativity of human knowledge, and placed Protagoras at the head of his list of early authorities in support of that doctrine. Mr. Grote interprets the maxim Homo Mensura in the same sense, but includes also in its meaning the autonomy of the individual intellect. That everything is true to me, which appears so to me, he understands to mean, that my reception of it as truth depends, and ought to depend, on the impression which the evidence makes upon my own mind. Mr. Grote, therefore, defends the Protagorean doctrine against the Sokrates of the Theœtetus; but his defence, though useful and instructive, does not satisfy us, and is the only important point in the whole work on which we find ourselves differing from Mr. Grote. For the truth of an opinion, even to myself, is a different thing from my reception of it as true, since it implies reference to an external standard. My mind, on the evidence before it, may accept as truth that I am five miles from London; but when I set out to walk the distance, and find it ten, the ten miles were all along as true for me as for other people. Protagoras cannot well have intended to deny this, but he cannot be acquitted of an incorrect and misleading mode of expression. His proposition is valid as to our present feelings or states of consciousness, the truth of which has no meaning except that we are actually feeling them; and this is probably the reason why Plato (erroneously in Mr. Grote’s opinion) identifies it with the doctrine that knowledge is sensible perception (αἴσθησις), the truth of the one doctrine being coextensive with the sphere of the other. But it is not true of the past, the future, the absent, or anything present except the feeling in our mind. It is invalid as to all that are called matters of belief or opinion: for a belief or opinion is relative not only to the believing mind, but to something else—namely, the matter of fact which the belief is about. The truth of the belief is its agreement with that fact. Mr. Grote says: “To say that all men recognise one and the same objective distinction between truth and falsehood, would be to contradict palpable facts. Each man has a standard, an ideal of truth in his own mind; but different men have different standards.” Of the proof of truth, yes: but not, we apprehend, of truth itself. No one means anything by truth, but the agreement of a belief with the fact which it purports to represent. We grant that, according to the philosophy which we hold in common with Mr. Grote, the fact itself, if knowable by us, is relative to our perceptions—to our senses or our internal consciousness; and our opinion about the fact is so too; but the truth of the opinion is a question of relation between these two relatives, one of which is an objective standard for the other. Justice is not done to Plato’s attack on “Homo Mensura” without considering this aspect of the matter; the rather as he himself brings forward these very arguments. Sokrates asks, Since man is the measure of all things, and has the criterion of truth in himself, whatever he thinks or perceives being true to him, will the criterion serve for things yet to come? If he thinks he shall catch a fever and feel hot, and a physician thinks the contrary, will he be feverish and hot to himself, but not to the physician? A fair reductio ad absurdum, and a just criticism on Protagoras, though, if Mr. Grote is right in his interpretation of the Protagorean dictum, the error is in language, not in thought. But in philosophy, especially where it touches the ultimate foundations of our reason, wrong language is as misleading as a wrong opinion.

This dialogue, the Theætetus, though it ends without any conclusion, leaving the question proposed in it unanswered, is one of the most suggestive in all Plato by the number of points of view it brings forward; and is among the finest examples in his writings of genuine honest Search, in which the confutation of any one, even when it falls in his way, is only incidental, and even then the greatest pains are taken to put, in the most forcible manner, whatever the confuted person could say. In arguing against Protagoras (who is treated with a respect in marked contrast with the manner in which the Herakleiteans, and some materialistic philosophers, supposed to be the school of Demokritus, are referred to), Sokrates laments the necessity of disputing his opinion when he is not present nor even alive to defend it; says that as he and his friends are not here to help their doctrine, the obligation lies on their adversaries to do it; and fulfils that obligation by a discourse of some length, which, like those of Glaukon and Adeimantus in the Republic, is a monument of the essential fairness of Plato’s mind. The Theætetus contains some of Plato’s acutest examinations of certain speculative questions which often recur in other dialogues: among others the difference between Knowledge and True Opinion, ὀρθή or ἀληθὴς δόξα. This distinction gave Plato great trouble, and the whole subject of the truth and falsity of opinions was full of intricacy and logical embarrassment to him and to his cotemporaries. Among other points, it appears to have been a serious puzzle to them, in what manner false opinions could be possible; how we can think that which is not—a non-entity—any more than we can touch, or eat, or drink that which is not. It is surprising how often Plato returns to this perplexity. More than half the Sophistes is devoted to the discussion of it, merely in a parenthesis. As a specimen of the stumbling-blocks which the early metaphysical inquirers found in their path, as well as a striking example of the diversity of the points of view of different dialogues, we will quote a passage from Mr. Grote on this subject:

How is a false proposition possible? Many held that a false proposition and a false name were impossible, that you could not speak the things that is not, or Non-Ens (τὸ μὴ ὄν): that such a proposition would be an empty sound, without meaning or signification; that speech may be significant or insignificant, but could not be false, except in the sense of being unmeaning. Now this doctrine is dealt with in the Theætêtus, Sophistês, and Kratylus. In the Theætêtus, Sokratês examines it at great length, and proposes several different hypotheses to explain how a false proposition might be possible; but ends in pronouncing them all inadmissible. He declares himself incompetent, and passes on to something else. Again, in the Sophistês, the same point is taken up, and discussed there also very copiously. The Eleate in that dialogue ends by finding a solution which satisfies him—(viz. that τὸ μὴ ὄν = τὸ ἕτερον του̑ ὄντος). But what is remarkable is, that the solution does not meet any of the difficulties propounded in the Theœtêtus; nor are these difficulties at all adverted to in the Sophistês. Finally in the Kratylus, we have the very same doctrine, that false affirmations are impossible,—which both in the Theætêtus and in the Sophistês is enunciated, not as the decided opinion of the speaker, but as a problem which embarrasses him—we have this same doctrine averred unequivocally by Kratylus as his own full conviction. And Sokratês finds that a very short argument, and a very simple comparison, suffice to refute him. The supposed “aggressive cross-examiner,” who presses Sokratês so hard in the Theætêtus, is not allowed to put his puzzling questions in the Kratylus.

How are we to explain these three different modes of handling the same question by the same philosopher? If the question about Non-Ens can be disposed of in the summary way which we read in the Kratylus, what is gained by the string of unsolved puzzles in the Theætêtus, or by the long discursive argument in the Sophistês, ushering in a new solution no way satisfactory? If, on the contrary, the difficulties which are unsolved in the Theætêtus, and imperfectly solved in the Sophistês, are real and pertinent,—how are we to explain the proceeding of Plato in the Kratylus, when he puts into the mouth of Kratylus a distinct averment of the opinion about Non-Ens, yet without allowing him, when it is impugned by Sokratês, to urge any of these pertinent arguments in defence of it? If the peculiar solution given in the Sophistês be the really genuine and triumphant solution, why is it left unnoticed both in the Kratylus and the Theætêtus, and why is it contradicted in other dialogues? Which of the three dialogues represents Plato’s real opinion on the question?

To these questions, and to many others of like bearing, connected with the Platonic writings, I see no satisfactory reply, if we are to consider Plato as a positive philosopher, with a scheme and edifice of methodized opinions in his mind; and as composing all his dialogues with a set purpose, either of inculcating these opinions on the reader, or of refuting the opinions opposed to them. This supposition is what most Platonic critics have in their minds, even when professedly modifying it. Their admiration for Plato is not satisfied unless they conceive him in the professorial chair as a teacher, surrounded by a crowd of learners, all under the obligation (incumbent on learners generally) to believe what they hear. Reasoning upon such a basis, the Platonic dialogues present themselves to me as a mystery. They exhibit neither identity of the teacher, nor identity of the matter taught: the composer (to use various Platonic comparisons) is Many, and not One—he is more complex than Typhôs.

There is a similar discrepancy in the view taken by Plato, in different dialogues, of the distinction between True Opinion and Knowledge. In the Menon, it would seem as if the two were much the same, except that Opinion is “evanescent, and will not stay in the mind, while Knowledge is permanent and ineffaceable.” True Opinion is converted into Knowledge, when bound down (δεδεμένον) “by a chain of causal reasoning” (αἰτίας λογισμῳ̑). This binding process, it is added, is ἀνάμνησις, or reminding, and can only be accomplished by questioning, sufficiently repeated and diversified. What the ἀνάμνησις does is rather differently defined in the Phædrus; it there generates the apprehension of the general Concept, which in that dialogue means the Self-existent Idea. In other dialogues the view taken is very similar, minus the idea of Reminiscence. Knowledge is that of which a rational explanation can be given; that which is guaranteed by both arms of the dialectic process, being able to resist all confutation, and having been arrived at by a correct use of the logical process of Division, διαίρεσις κατ’ εἴδη, terminating in an unimpeachable Definition. Anything short of this is only Opinion. We here have what is rightly regarded as the characteristically Platonic view of the subject; but it is remarkable that this very definition of knowledge, ἀληθὴς δόξα μετὰ λόγου, is one of those propounded by Theætetus, and, after a long discussion between him and Sokrates, abandoned. The most elaborate, but the obscurest exposition we find of this subject, is in the sixth and seventh books of the Republic. We cannot give it at length, but its leading point is, that knowledge is of Forms or Ideas, while Opinion relates to the world of sense, composed of mere images of those Forms. But the knowledge of Forms is only to be acquired by Dialectics.

Among views so contradictory, and in which no common conviction or purpose appears, what worth, it may be asked, is there to us in the investigations? Besides the worth of their Method, they have, though in unequal degrees, a value in their substance;

not in the conclusion, but in the premises for and against it. In this sense all the dialogues have value, and all the same sort of value, though not all equal in amount. In different dialogues, the same subject is set before you in different ways; with remarks and illustrations sometimes tending towards one theory, sometimes towards another. It is for you to compare and balance them, and to elicit such result as your reason approves. The Platonic dialogues require, in order to produce their effect, a supplementary responsive force, and a strong effective reaction, from the individual reason of the reader: they require moreover that he shall have a genuine interest in the process of dialectic scrutiny (τὸ ϕιλομαθές, ϕιλόλογον), which will enable him to perceive beauties in what would be tiresome to others.

As regards Plato himself, the probability is that there was a period in his life when he was, on merely speculative points, a real Seeker, testing every opinion, and bringing prominently forward the difficulties which adhere to them all; and that during this period many of his principal dialogues were written, from points of view extremely various, embodying in each the latest trains of thought which had passed through his mind on the particular subject. That the difficulties of his own suggesting, even after he had definitively identified himself with the opinions to which they apply, are hardly ever solved, seems only explicable on the supposition that he had ceased to care about solving them, having come to think that insoluble difficulties were always to be expected. He certainly, if we trust his Seventh Epistle, was then of opinion that no verbal definition of anything can precisely hit the mark, and that the knowledge of what a thing is, though not attainable till after a long and varied course of dialectic debate, is never the direct result of discussion, but comes out at last (and only in the happier natures) by a sort of instantaneous flash. He probably became indifferent to speculation for its own sake, ceased to expect that any theoretical position would be found unassailable, and no longer cared for anything but practical results. In his latest compositions there is no abatement of ethical earnestness, but “the love of dialectic, and the taste for enunciating difficulties even when he could not clear them up, died out within him.” He almost became infected with the misology so impressively deprecated in his own Phædon, and an example among many, that this misology is not always, as there represented, the road to scepticism, but still oftener to the most intolerant affirmative dogmatism.

The ethical and political doctrines of Plato are really the only ones which can be regarded as serious and deeply-rooted convictions. At the head of these, or only second after his faith in the exclusive eligibility of the just life, must be placed the opinion common to him with Sokrates, that Virtue is a branch of Intelligence, or Knowledge. His best argument for this opinion is, that not only all the external things we value, such as health, strength, and pecuniary means, but all that we regard as virtues—courage, temperance, and the rest—may be so used as to do harm instead of good: they all require a discriminating faculty to decide when they ought to be employed and when not; and this, which is the distinctive element of virtue, is a part of Knowledge. Though the premises of this argument are profoundly true, they only prove that the knowledge in question is one of the conditions of virtue, but not that it is virtue itself; something else besides the knowledge of what is right being necessary to induce us to practise it. We know what would have been Plato’s answer to this objection. He would have said, that the further condition required is also a knowledge, the knowledge that to do right is good; no one desires evil knowing it to be evil; it is desired because it is believed to be good. But even if Plato had proved, as completely as he thought he had, that to do wrong is the greatest evil which can befall the wrong-doer, it would have remained a question whether the habitually vicious man is capable of having this belief impressed upon him; whether the evidence that happiness is to be found in virtue alone, can reach a mind not prepared for it by already possessing the virtues of courage, temperance, &c., not to mention justice, the most fundamental of all.

This exaltation of Knowledge—not Intellect, or mere mental ability, of which there is no idolatry at all in Plato, but scientific knowledge, and scientifically-acquired craftsmanship, as the one thing needful in every concern of life, and pre-eminently in government—is the pervading idea in Plato’s practical doctrines. He derived it from Sokrates, who (says Xenophon) “considered as kings and rulers not those who wield the sceptre, or those who have been chosen by the incompetent (ὑπὸ τω̑ν τυχόντων), nor those who have drawn the successful lot, or who by force or deceit have got into the highest place, but those who know how to rule.” What constitutes the man who knows how to rule, is the subject of an important dialogue, the Politikos. We there learn that he is one of the rarest of human beings; that the greatest concern of a State is to obtain such a man, and place him at the head of it; that when so placed, his power cannot be too absolute; to limit him by laws, even of his own making, being as absurd as if a scientific physician were required never to deviate from his own prescriptions. This exclusive right of the most capable person to rule—a principle strenuously asserted by Plato against the theory and practice of all governments (modern as well as ancient); and the doctrine that when this Capable Person has been obtained, the rest of the community have nothing to do but to obey him—form a theory of government which must be quite to the taste of Mr. Carlyle; but he is probably less pleased with the further proposition added by Plato, that the depositary of this divine right is not found, but made, and that his qualification is Science; a philosophic and reasoned knowledge of human affairs—of what is best for mankind. When this is possessed, it is a far surer guide than laws, which cannot possibly be adapted to all individual cases; but when this scientific wisdom cannot be had, laws are better than any mere counterfeit of it: “The true government of mankind is the scientific or artistic; whether it be carried on by one, or a few, or many—whether by poor or rich, by force or consent—whether according to law, or without law.” But

true science or art is not attainable by many persons, whether rich or poor; scarcely even by a few, and probably by One alone; since the science or art of governing men is more difficult than any other science or art. But the government of this One is the only true and right government, whether he proclaims law or governs without law, whether he employs severity or mildness—provided only he adheres to his art, and achieves its purpose, the good and improvement of the governed. He is like the true physician, who cuts and burns patients, when his art commands, for the purpose of curing them. He will not be disposed to fetter himself by fixed general laws; for the variety of situations and the fluctuation of circumstances is so perpetual, that no law can possibly fit all cases. He will recognise no other law but his art. If he lays down any general formula or law, it will only be from necessity, because he cannot be always at hand to watch and direct each individual case; but he will not hesitate to depart from his own formula whenever Art enjoins it. That alone is base, evil, unjust, which he with his political science or art declares to be so. If in any particular case he departs from his own declaration, and orders such a thing to be done, the public have no right to complain that he does injustice. No patient can complain of his physician if the latter, acting upon the counsels of his art, disregards a therapeutic formula. All the acts of the true Governor are right, whether according or contrary to law, so long as he conducts himself with art and intelligence—aiming exclusively to preserve the people, and to render them better instead of worse. How mischievous would it be . . . if we prescribed by fixed laws how the physician and the steersman should practise their respective arts; if we held them bound to peremptory rules, punishing them whenever they departed from those rules, and making them accountable before the Dikastery, whenever any one accused them of doing so—if we consecrated these rules and dogmas, forbidding all criticism or censure upon them, and putting to death the free inquirer as a dreaming, prosy Sophist, corrupting the youth and inciting lawless discontent! How absurd, if we pretended that every citizen did know, or might or ought to know, these two arts; because the matters concerning them were enrolled in the laws, and because no one ought to be wiser than the laws! Who would think of imposing any such fetters on other arts, such as those of the general, the painter, the husbandman, the carpenter, the prophet, the cattle-dealer? To impose them would be to render life, hard as it is even now, altogether intolerable. Yet these are the trammels under which in actual cities the political Art is exercised.

Such are the mischiefs inseparable, in greater or less degree, from fixed and peremptory laws. Yet grave as these mischiefs are, there are others yet graver, which such laws tend to obviate. If the Magistrate appointed to guard and enforce the laws, ventures to break or contravene them, simulating, but not really possessing, the Art or Science of the genuine Ruler, he will make matters far worse. The laws at any rate are such as the citizens have been accustomed to, and such as give a certain measure of satisfaction. But the arbitrary rule of this violent and unscientific Governor is a tyranny, which is greatly worse than the laws. Fixed laws are thus a second-best; assuming that you cannot obtain a true scientific, artistic Governor. If such a man could be obtained, men would be delighted to live under him. But they despair of ever seeing such a character, and they therefore cling to fixed laws, in spite of the numerous concomitant mischiefs. These mischiefs are indeed so serious, that when we look at actual cities, we are astonished how they get on under such a system; and we cannot but feel how firm and deeply-rooted a city naturally is. We see therefore . . . that there is no true polity—nothing which deserves the name of a genuine political society—except the government of one chief, scientific or artistic. With him laws are superfluous, and even inconvenient. All other polities are counterfeits; factions and cabals rather than governments, delusions carried on by tricksters and conjurors. But among these other polities or sham-polities, there is a material difference as to greater or less badness; and the difference turns upon the presence or absence of good laws. Thus, the single-headed government, called monarchy (assuming the Prince not to be a man of science or art) is the best of all the sham-polities, if the Prince rules along with and in observance of known good laws; but it is the worst of them all, if he rules without such laws, as a despot or tyrant. Oligarchy, or the government of a few, if under good laws, is less good than that of the Prince under the same circumstances—if without such laws, is less bad than that of the despot. Lastly, the government of the many is less good under the one supposition, and less bad under the other. It is less effective, either for good or for evil. It is in fact less of a government; the administrative force being lost by dissipation among many hands for short intervals; and more free play being thus left to individuals. Accordingly, assuming the absence of laws, democracy is the least bad or most tolerable of the six varieties of sham-polity. Assuming the presence of laws, it is the worst of them.

The ideal of government expressed in this passage, though expanded and minutely applied in other works, is never materially varied. Of the two detailed treatises on Government, in the dialogue form, which we have from Plato, the Republic and the Leges, the former is a delineation of his best form of society, under the unrestricted authority of one or a very small number, scientifically trained and fitted for the function of rulers. The Leges must be understood (and that is its best excuse) as a set of directions for the construction and preservation of his second-best State, in which, the scientific ruler not being forthcoming, an imperfect substitute is provided in the form of laws, which he seems to have thought would only answer the purpose by being not only inviolable but unalterable. Accordingly, in the ideal commonwealth of the Republic, there is no responsibility of any kind—no provision for written laws or courts of justice; the wisdom of the scientific rulers being wholly trusted to, for doing without such things, or providing them as far as required. The whole energy of Plato’s constructive intellect is concentrated on the means of sifting the most gifted natures out of the body of citizens, and educating them from the earliest infancy to the age of fifty, by which time, and not before, it is expected that a very few, or at least one, competent scientific governor may be met with among them. This, and the intellectual and emotional training of the remainder of the people, so that they shall willingly obey and second these rightful chiefs, compose the whole machinery of the Republic. In Leges, on the contrary, where no such scientific rulers are looked for, there is an elaborate and minute system of positive laws, carrying legal regulation down to the details of common life, and accompanied by all the ordinary apparatus of courts of justice; magistrates of various kinds chosen for short periods, by processes from which even the democratic Lot is not wholly excluded—and systematic accountability of all persons in office, in the Athenian manner, after the expiration of their term, to an authority in which the whole body of citizens have a qualified participation. The author does not disguise that his government is not the abstractedly best; and records his persistence, on some principal points, in those doctrines of the Republic which are put in abeyance in the Leges, where the community ostensibly contemplated is an actual Cretan colony.

While Plato has thus two independent plans for the constitution of a political society, his notion of the end to be aimed at never varies. The business of rulers is to make the people whom they govern wise and virtuous. No political object but this is worth consideration. the other things usually desired by men and communities, he does not indeed always maintain the scornful tone assumed in the Gorgias, where all the statesmen of Athens, even the eminent ones of old—Miltiades, Themistokles, Kimon, Perikles—are reproached for having “filled the city with harbours, and docks, and fortifications, and tributes, and similar rubbish” (ϕλυαριω̑ν), instead of improving their desires, “the only business of a good citizen.” In other places (as in the Second Alcibiades, Euthydemus, Menon, Leges), he contents himself with saying, that it is better not to have such things at all, than to have them, if devoid of the wisdom without which they cannot profit the possessor; or, with Sokrates in the Apologia, that wealth does not produce virtue, but virtue wealth, and all other things that are desirable. But, either as the sole desirable thing, or as the means of obtaining all others, the wisdom and virtue of the citizens (considered as identical) are the only proper end of government.

In the political theory thus conceived by Plato—confining ourselves to his scheme of the ideally best, and neglecting his compromise with existing obstacles in the comparatively tame production of his decline—there are two things specially deserving of remark. First, the vigorous assertion of a truth, of transcendent importance and universal application—that the work of government is a Skilled Employment; that governing is not a thing which can be done at odd times, or by the way, in conjunction with a hundred other pursuits, nor to which a person can be competent without a large and liberal general education, followed by special and professional study, laborious and of long duration, directed to acquiring, not mere practical dexterity, but a scientific mastery of the subject. This is the strong side of the Platonic theory. Its weak side is, that it postulates infallibility, or something near it, in rulers thus prepared; or else ascribes such a depth of comparative imbecility to the rest of mankind, as to unfit them for any voice whatever in their own government, or any power of calling their scientific ruler to account. The error of Plato, like most of the errors of profound thinkers, consisted in seeing only one half of the truth; and (as is also usual with such thinkers) the half which he asserted, was that which he found neglected and left in the background by the institutions and customs of his country. His doctrine was an exaggerated protest against the notion that any man is fit for any duty; a phrase which is the extreme formula of that indifference to special qualifications, and to the superiority of one mind over another, to which there is more or less tendency in all popular governments, and doubtless at Athens, as well as in the United States and in Great Britain, though it would be a mistake to regard it in any of them as either universal or incurable.

But though Plato had no hesitation in allowing absolute power to the scientific ruler when he had got one, the superiority of his genius is displayed in his clear perception of the difficulties with which this scheme of government was beset, and in the boldness with which he grappled with the problem; daring all things, however opposed to the common notions of his time (and of ours), if he could see his way to removing the rocks and shoals which threatened to be fatal to his commonwealth. The mental superiority which gives the divine right to rule, did not, in his opinion, consist in being able forcibly to seize the powers of government, and retain them by sternly repressing all active opposition and silencing every disapproving voice. This was a common enough phenomenon in Plato’s time, not quite unknown in ours; but the superiority which Plato required in his ruler was of a very different kind. According to him, it was precisely the young men most gifted by nature, and most capable of being trained to the character of genuine rulers, that when perverted by the false standard of good and evil prevailing in existing society, and delivering themselves up to selfish and lawless ambition, fall into the deep-dyed iniquity of the Tyrannus. In that combination of profound philosophy with sublime eloquence and rich poetic imagination which composes the later books of the Republic, there is a moving picture of the mode in which society, by its temptations and its wrongly-placed applauses and condemnations, corrupts these originally fine natures: and the portraiture of the full-blown Tyrannus, in the consummation of his guilt, his hatefulness to gods and men, the depth of his inward misery, and the retribution that awaits him, generally in this life, but certainly in a world to come, is one of the best known and most impressive passages in Plato. The Platonic ruler or rulers, as already remarked, are not found, but made; and the problem of making them was conceived by him in all its magnitude and difficulty. It could only be achieved by centering upon them, and upon the class from whom they were to be selected, every kind of tuition and training, intellectual, emotional, and practical, that could help to form the character required, and withdrawing them utterly from the influence of those conditions of ordinary life, which give rise to inclinations and to a type of character disqualifying for the pure and noble use of irresponsible power.

To this purpose belongs the proscription of all such tales and legends of the gods (legends as sacred to the Greeks as the narratives of the Old and New Testaments to the ordinary Christian) as represented them to be the authors of any evil, or imputed to them unjust commands, or human weaknesses, or ascribed to them, or their descendants the Heroes, any acts which would be wicked or disreputable if done by ordinary human beings. These stories, Plato affirms, are not true; but were they so, they should not be suffered to be repeated and believed. Other legends, of a moral and elevating character, should be composed (a thing considered by him quite within the competence of Government), and the people brought up in the belief of them from their first childhood. To the same head belongs the exclusion from the Republic, not (as is sometimes asserted) of all poets, but of those who will not consent to the expurgation from their poems of all sentiments and opinions which the philosophic rulers deem injurious: for instance, that death, or the life after death, is fearful and horrible; and especially that most pernicious opinion, that there can be happiness without virtue, or that virtue is not itself the summit of happiness. Certain kinds of poetry however, the epic and dramatic, are absolutely banished, in common with all other indiscriminately mimetic or imitative arts. Art ought not to represent, either to the senses or to the mind, the likeness of anything but what is good and noble; nor ought the citizens to recite, or read, or hear recited, an imitation of the thoughts, feelings, or conduct, or bad, or degraded, or weak and foolish persons. The same severe restrictions were placed on music, a most important agent of good or evil in the estimation of Greeks, whose popular education (except the gymnastic and military elements) was chiefly emotional. No tunes or measures were tolerated in the Republic, but such as were licensed by the authorities, by whom all that were of a wailing, a relaxing, or a voluptuous character must be forbidden, those only being retained which soothe and mitigate the violent emotions, or which inspire active energy. To the same educational purpose belong the peculiar institutions of Plato respecting property and marriage, which have given some scandal to posterity, and would probably have given much more, if Plato had been suspected of a penchant for scepticism and materialism, instead of being admired as their chief enemy. The explanation of this portion of his scheme is very simple. It was not intended for the citizens generally, but for the ϕύλακες or military profession, from whom the prince or the ruling elders were selected, and who were the executors of their orders and the instruments of their government. This armed body having the remaining citizens entirely at their mercy, all was lost if they preferred their private interest to that of the public; and Plato well knew, even with the most perfect education he could give them, how little chance they had of escaping this perversion. Since it did not consort with his idea of scientific government to give the unscientific multitude even a joint authority in their own affairs, there was only one mode of protection left; those in command must have no private interests of their own to care for. The other citizens have each their family and property, but the guardians must have nothing which they can call their own. Their maintenance must be temperately provided at a common table by the State; they must have no private possessions, and must not know their own children. The object is that which the Catholic Church seeks to obtain by the celibacy of its clergy, and the communism of its monastic orders; exclusive devotion to the purposes of their institution. Whatever else may be justly said against this Platonic conception, it deserves any name rather than that of a toleration of licentiousness; for it leaves less to individual inclination than any existing practice, the public authorities deciding (within the age appointed for “producing children for the city”) who should be united with whom. Mr. Grote truly remarks, that with the customs of the Platonic commonwealth, and the Platonic physical and mental education common to both sexes, the passion between them would be likely to be reduced to its very lowest degree of power; a result decidedly intended and calculated on by Plato in the Leges.

Though not expressly remarked, it is continually visible in Mr. Grote’s book, as well as in the works themselves, how strong a hold the idea of the Division of Labour had taken on Plato’s mind. He propounds it as explicitly as Adam Smith, at the beginning of his delineation of the natural constitution and growth of a State; and it governs all the arrangements of his ideal Republic. To use his own phrase, there shall be no double or triple men in the commonwealth; each does one thing, and one only; in order that every one may have that to do for which he has greatest natural aptitude, and that each thing may be done by the person who has most studied and practised it. Civil justice in a commonwealth, which furnishes him with the type and illustrative exemplar of justice in an individual mind, consists in every person’s doing his own appointed business, and not meddling with that of another. An artificer must not usurp the occupation of another artificer; rulers alone must rule, guardians alone fight, producers alone produce and have the ownership of the produce. When these limits are observed, and no one interferes in the legitimate business of some one else, the community is prosperous and harmonious; if not, everybody has something which concerns him more nearly than the true discharge of his own function; the energies of the different classes are distracted by contests for power, and the State declines into some one of the successive gradations of bad government, which a considerable portion of the Republic is employed in characterizing. The demand for a Scientific Governor, not responsible for any part of his conduct to his unscientific fellow-citizens, is part of this general conception of Division of Labour, and errs only by a too exclusive clinging to that one principle.

It is necessary to conclude; though volumes might easily be occupied with the topics on which Plato’s compositions throw light, either by the truths he has reached, by the mode of his reaching them, or by his often equally instructive errors. We would gladly also have quoted more copiously from Mr. Grote; having said little or nothing of the important discussions, on all the principal topics of Plato, which he has incidentally contributed to the philosophy of the age from the stores of his richly endowed mind. The point of view from which these topics are treated, as all acquainted with Mr. Grote’s writings would expect, is that of the Experience philosophy, as distinguished from the Intuitive or Transcendental; and readers will esteem the discussions more or less highly, according to their estimation of that philosophy; but few, we think, will dispute that Mr. Grote, by this work, has placed himself in a distinguished rank among its defenders, in an age in which it has been more powerfully and discriminatingly defended than at any former time. For further knowledge we must refer to the work itself, which will not only be the inseparable companion of Plato’s writings, but which no student, of whatever school of thought, can read without instruction, and no one who knows anything of philosophy or the history of philosophy, without admiration and gratitude.

TAINE’S DE L’INTELLIGENCE

1870

EDITOR’S NOTE

Fortnightly Review, n.s. VIII (July, 1870), 121-4, headed (under the general heading, “Critical Notice”), “De l’Intelligence. Par H[ippolyte] Taine. Two vols. 8vo. Paris [: Hachette], 1870.” Signed “J. S. Mill.” The essay was reprinted in the posthumous 4th vol. of Dissertations and Discussions (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1875), 111-18. Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A notice of Taine’s book ‘de l’Intelligence’ in the Fortnightly Review of July 1, 1870” (MacMinn, 99). There is no copy of the essay in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

A manuscript fragment of part of the text (see 444a-a) is in the Mill-Taylor Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science; there are no substantive variants between it and the printed text. For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, lxviii-lxxiv and xci-xcii above.

Taine’s De l’Intelligence

m. taine is one of the most known in England—at least by repute—of the present generation of thinkers and writers in France. The fact that one of his principal writings is a History of English Literature, has made his name, in a certain degree, familiar to the readers of our periodicals; and some are aware that his work contains ingenious and original views on the philosophy of literature. But so slender is the interest of most English readers in the philosophy of literature, or in any but the biographic and anecdotic portion of its history; and so excessive is the English distrust of all theories on the subject, that M. Taine’s work, notwithstanding its special relation to England, would probably be found to have obtained a greater amount of intelligent recognition, and even of intelligent criticism, in France. A fortune the reverse of this may be prophesied for the able and striking treatise which he has just published. It is fitted to obtain an earlier and higher appreciation in England than in France. The Philosophy of Mind at present excites greater interest, and is more studied, on this side the Channel, than at any former period of our history, except the brief interval which began with Locke and terminated with Hume and Reid; and M. Taine’s treatment of it has more in common with the best English speculation than with any of the philosophies now prevalent in France. Psychology and metaphysics have, it is true, a greater amount of nominal cultivation in France than in England; they are part of the curriculum of all the public establishments for higher instruction, which educate a far larger proportion of the better-off classes than our universities. But the official doctrine of those establishments is the effete philosophy of Royer-Collard, Jouffroy, and Cousin—no longer made stimulating to the intellect by the genius and vigour with which the doctrines of the school were originally given forth by its founders. The long ascendancy of Cousin in the University of France has filled all the chairs of philosophy with disciples, twice or thrice removed, of himself and of the Germans, with the practical effect of alienating most of the minds which have received any scientific training from the study of psychology altogether. M. Comte, the founder of the only rising philosophic movement in France, treated all scientific study of the mind, except through the medium of the brain—we might even say of the skull—as altogether irrational. Those, indeed, of his followers who adhere to the banner of M. Littré, have thrown off this with many other prejudices of their master, and are raising up readers and pupils for the English psychologists and for M. Taine. With the exception, however, of a very meritorious volume by M. Mervoyer, M. Taine’s is the first serious attempt to supply the want of a better than the official psychology. His book has a freshness, a vigour, and a scientific spirit, to which we have been long unaccustomed in works of French origin respecting the mind; and though its ultimate influence will probably be great, it will for the present meet with no countenance from any of the recognised representatives of that department of French cultivation. But we feel certain that it will be welcomed, as soon as known, by the most advanced school of English mental science; for, while it has a marked and original distinctive character of its own, unlike any other treatise on the subject, it is in harmony and close alliance with many of the most thorough-going speculations of the Association school of psychology. It diverges from them only in the two concluding chapters, which, in our judgment, overleap the bounds of really scientific inference, and, without even the warrant of supposed intuition à priori, claim absolute validity through all space and time for generalisations of human thought, which we can only admit under the inherent limitations of human experience.

The method of M. Taine’s work is correctly described in his preface. He there

The work, therefore, consists of two parts—an Analytic and a Synthetic. The first, or analytic part, entitled “The Elements of Knowledge,” is divided into four books—on Signs, on Images, on Sensations, and on the Physical Conditions of Mental Events. By signs, M. Taine does not mean exclusively names, but anything mental by means of which we think of things not present to our senses. A sign, he says, is always an image, more or less vague or faded. We think of an individual object by what is called our remembrance of it, that is, by a mental image, which, in the normal state, is very much vaguer and fainter than the impression of which it is a copy. We think of classes of objects by what is called a general idea, or general notion; this, however, is again an image, still more vague in the greater part of its contents, but in which the characters common to the whole class have been made artificially predominant and distinct, by being associated with a name. So that we always, in reality, think by means of images; but we can make a very faint and imperfect image do the work; and it is the instrument of naming, properly used, which alone, in any but the most simple cases, enables us to do this with safety. M. Taine gives a very instructive exposition of the mode in which (as pointed out by Leibnitz, Condillac, and others) these imperfect images do duty in our reasoning processes symbolically, in lieu of complete representations of objects. And he shows how, by the artifice of general names, which enables us to ensure the presence, in those mutilated images, of all such characters of the objects as are essential to the reasoning, we are able to arrive at true and definite conclusions respecting objects of which we cannot have a perfectly distinct conception—such as very high numbers, polygons with a thousand sides, and so forth.a

All our thoughts, then, being really images, our mental images form the subject of the second book. Their nature, and the laws of their recurrence, and of their decay or obliteration, are copiously illustrated by interesting experiences, drawn both from the healthy and from various morbid conditions. Images, again, being sensations more or less faded or weakened, sensations are next treated of; they are classified and analysed agreeably to the latest physiological discoveries and the most advanced psychology, until the most simple and elementary sensations, or what seem to be such, are arrived at. From sensations the author proceeds to their physical conditions, the constitution and functions, so far as ascertained, of the nervous system.

The analysis of our knowledge having thus been carried down to the simplest elements that can at present be reached, the second part—the Synthesis—commences. This also is divided into four books: Of the different kinds of Knowledge; the Knowledge of Bodies; the Knowledge of Mind; the Knowledge of what is general (des choses générales).

The first three of these books, and a great part of the fourth, are highly instructive reading to the student of analytical psychology. The distinction between the original and the acquired perceptions of our different senses, the origin and composition of our ideas of external objects, the ultimate analysis of the ideas of matter and mind, and many cognate subjects, are expounded, with great metaphysical acumen, a judicious avoidance of many wrong turnings into which previous thinkers have wandered, and a talent of exposition which adds as much to the substantial value as it does to the attractiveness of the treatise. All these subjects are illustrated by new and characteristic observations and experiences. M. Taine has profited largely by the speculations of the English thinkers with whom he most nearly agrees, and he fully acknowledges the debt; but his conception of the subject has only been enriched, not suggested by them; what they have taught him seems merely to have fallen into its place in a system of thought commenced within himself. The mutual support which he and they lend to one another is the accordance of independent thinkers.

When, in the fourth book, M. Taine arrives at the subject of our acquisition of general knowledge, he agrees fully, as to the principles of generalisation from experience, with the English writers on the logic of induction, and gives an excellent outline of the doctrines which he holds in common with them. But, as already intimated, there is another part of this final book in which he is at issue with those who are in general his nearest allies, namely, on the evidence of axioms, which he does not, like them, hold to be grounded on experience, and limited by its conditions. Neither does he, however, even in the case of the axioms of geometry, agree with those who consider them to be a peculiar class of truths, known à priori, or intuitively evident. He thinks that they may be demonstrated, and classes them among “analytic propositions”—that is, truths latently included in the ideas which are the subject of them, to be proved by evolving them out of the ideas; and he does, ingeniously and quite legitimately, demonstrate some of them in this way. But this does not seem to us at all to advance his main position. The fundamental properties of a straight line may be, and are, contained in our concept of a straight line; but if the concept itself is the product of experience, the truth of the properties comes to us from the same source. The concept can only be made up of properties which we observe: we put the properties into the concept, and what we have put into it there is nothing surprising in our afterwards finding in it. If, then, our idea of a straight line is derived from observation (and we are not sure that M. Taine denies it to be so), all that he maintains respecting the proof of the axioms of geometry may be, and much of it must be, admitted. In acquiring by observation the idea of a straight line, we necessarily acquire, and include in the idea, the knowledge that two straight lines joining the same two points coincide altogether; in other words, do not enclose any space. This property must be, expressly or by implication, a part of any sufficient account we can give of the concept which experience has left in our minds. But a straight line, and this property of it, become known to us simultaneously, and from the same source. When M. Taine goes on to claim for the first principles of other sciences—for instance, of mechanics—a similar origin and evidence to what he claims for those of geometry, and on the strength of that evidence attributes to them an absolute truth, valid for the entire universe, and independent of the limits of experience, he falls into what seem to us still greater fallacies; partly, as we think, by confounding the two meanings of the word Same—Identity, and Exact Similarity. But of this we must leave M. Taine’s readers to judge. The merits of his book are such as to command an unprejudiced consideration of that small part of it in which, according to our individual judgment, he has been deserted by that perception of the true conditions of scientific evidence which has guided him through the greater part of his course. The book deserves to be, and we hope will be, universally read by real students of psychology.

BERKELEY’S LIFE AND WRITINGS

1871

EDITOR’S NOTE

Fortnightly Review, n.s. X (Nov., 1871), 505-24, where the title is footnoted: “ ‘The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, including many of his writings hitherto unpublished. With Prefaces, Annotations, his Life and Letters, and an Account of his Philosophy.’ By Alexander Campbell Fraser, M.A., Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. In four vols., 8vo. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press. 1871.” Signed “J. S. Mill.” The essay was reprinted in the posthumous 4th vol. of Dissertations and Discussions (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1875), 154-87. Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “An article on Berkeley’s Life and Writings, in the Fortnightly Review for November 1871” (MacMinn, 101). There is no copy of the essay in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xlv-xlviii and xcii above.

Berkeley’s Life and Writings

professor fraser, and the University of Oxford, have done a good service to philosophy, in recalling the attention of students to the writings of a great man, by the publication of a new, and the first complete, edition of his works. Every tiro in metaphysics is familiar with the name of Berkeley, and thinks himself perfectly well acquainted with the Berkeleian doctrines: but they are known, in most cases, so far as known at all, not from what their author, but from what other people, have said of them, and are consequently, by the majority of those who think they know them, crudely conceived, and their most characteristic features misunderstood. Though he was excelled by none who ever wrote on philosophy in the clear expression of his meaning, and discrimination of it from what he did not mean, scarcely any thinker has been more perseveringly misapprehended, or has been the victim of such persistent ignoratio elenchi; his numerous adversaries having generally occupied themselves in proving what he never denied, and denying what he never asserted. If the facilities afforded by Professor Fraser’s labours induce those who are interested in philosophy or in the history of philosophy to study Berkeley’s speculations as they issued from his own mind, we think it will be recognised that of all who, from the earliest times, have applied the powers of their minds to metaphysical inquiries, he is the one of greatest philosophic genius: though among these are included Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, and Hume; Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Kant. For, greatly as all these have helped the progress of philosophy, and important as are the contributions of several of them to its positive truths, of no one of them can it be said as of Berkeley, that we owe to him three first-rate philosophical discoveries, each sufficient to have constituted a revolution in psychology, and which by their combination have determined the whole course of subsequent philosophical speculation; discoveries, too, which were not, like the achievements of many other distinguished thinkers, merely refutations of error, and removal of obstacles to sound thinking, but were this and much more also, being all of them entitled to a permanent place among positive truths. These discoveries are—

1. The doctrine of the acquired perceptions of sight: that the most important part of what our eyes inform us of, and in particular externality, distance, and magnitude, are not direct perceptions of the sense of sight, but judgments or inferences, arrived at by a rapid interpretation of natural signs; the signification of which signs is taught to us neither by instinct nor reason, but by experience.

2. The non-existence of abstract ideas; and the fact that all the general or class notions by means of which we think or reason, are really, whether we know it or not, concrete ideas of individual objects.

3. The true nature and meaning of the externality which we attribute to the objects of our senses: that it does not consist in a substratum supporting a set of sensible qualities, or an unknown somewhat, which, not being itself a sensation, gives us our sensations, but consists in the fact that our sensations occur in groups, held together by a permanent law, and which come and go independently of our volitions or mental processes.

The first-mentioned of these three speculations was the earliest great triumph of analytic psychology over first appearances (dignified in some systems by the name of Natural Beliefs); and at once afforded a model and set an example to subsequent analysts.

The second corrected a misconception which darkened the whole theory of the higher operations of intellect, making impossible any real progress in the analysis of those operations until the error had been got rid of. The Conceptualists stopped the way in philosophy, as at an earlier period the Realists had done. Berkeley refuted them, and, while adopting what was true in the doctrines of Nominalism, laid the foundation of a theory of the action of the mind in general reasoning, far ahead of anything which the Nominalists had arrived at.

Thirdly and lastly, the speculations of Berkeley concerning our notion of the external world, besides their psychological importance as an analysis of perception, were the most memorable lesson ever given to mankind in the great intellectual attainment of not believing without evidence. From that time a new canon of belief, and standard of proof, were given to thinkers, on all the abstruser subjects of philosophical inquiry.

The three together have made Berkeley the turning-point of the higher philosophy in modern times. As a matter of historical fact, this admits of no dispute. Psychology and metaphysics before and after Berkeley differ almost like ancient and modern history, or ancient and modern physics. His first two discoveries have been the starting-point of the true analytic method of studying the human mind, of which they alone have rendered possible the subsequent developments; while his reasonings on Matter have confessedly decided the direction of all succeeding metaphysical thought, alike in those who accepted, wholly or partially, the doctrine of Berkeley, and in those who fought against it.

When to all this it is added that, in mere literary style, he can take rank among the best writers of an age not unjustly regarded as in that respect the great age of English prose literature, there is reason enough that a knowledge of his doctrines should be sought in his own works, and that the present edition of them should not rest idly on library shelves, but should be part of the familiar reading of all serious students of the philosophy or history of the human mind.

In reading Berkeley’s writings as a connected whole, one is forcibly struck with the completeness with which all his characteristic doctrines had been wrought out in his mind, before he gave publicity to any of them. In the very interesting common-place book (or rather note-book) kept by Berkeley when a student at the University of Dublin, and which Professor Fraser has had the good fortune and merit of bringing to light, every opinion distinctive of Berkeley is already found, even down to his points of dispute with the mathematicians; and found, not in germ merely, but almost as complete in point of mere thought, as in any of his subsequent writings. What is called his idealism, or disbelief in Matter, had not only been reached by him, but had become a fixed habit of thought at that early age. This fact is not without psychological interest, as explaining the sincere astonishment manifested in many passages of his writings, that his interpretation of sensible phenomena should not, as soon as understood, be seen to be the self-evident and common-sense view of them. Such examples of the mental law—that a mode of representing things to ourselves with which we have grown familiar, however opposed it may be to common opinion, tends to become, in our own minds, apparently self-evident—should not, when they come before us, be dismissed as the eccentricities of an individual, but should make us reflect how much more likely it is that the common opinion itself may also be indebted for its apparent self-evidence to its still greater degree of familiarity, often unbroken by the suggestion, even to fancy, of anything contradictory to it.

The doctrine of Berkeley’s first psychological work, the Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, seems, and indeed is, quite independent of immaterialism; and has been accepted by the great majority of subsequent psychologists, most of whom have adopted a hostile attitude towards his idealism. But, though he published the theory of the acquired perceptions of sight before his main doctrine (which it only preceded by a year), in his own mind there was an intimate connection between them. For, the form in which he liked to represent to himself those visual appearances of linear and aërial perpective, and those muscular sensations attending movements of the globes of the eyes, which, being interpreted, inform us of tangible distance and magnitude, was that of a language in which God speaks to us, and the meaning of which, derived solely from his will, is taught to us, not by direct instruction, but by experience. Now, Berkeley’s idealism was an extension of this notion to the whole of our bodily sensations. As considered by him, all these are the direct act of God, who by his divine power impresses them on our minds without the intervention of any passive external substance, and who has established among them those constant relations of co-existence and successions required for our guidance in life, which suggest to us the unfounded idea of objects external to us, other than minds or spirits. The doctrine of the Essay on Vision might be conceived as a first step towards this system, and derived, no doubt, an additional recommendation to Berkeley from fitting so well into it; but in itself it rests on evidence strictly its own, and is equally compatible with either opinion as to the externality and substantiality of physical nature. Accordingly, it received almost unanimous assent from philosophers of both opinions, until, in our time, some unsuccessful attempts have been made to overthrow it. Among physiologists, indeed, many have remained strangers to it; for physiologists have had in full measure the failing common to specialists of all classes: they have been bent upon finding the entire theory of the phenomena they investigate within their own speciality, and have too often turned a deaf ear to any explanation of them drawn from other sources.

And here, since the question of the acquired perceptions of sight has of late been called up for rehearing, it is pertinent to remark, that the evidence of the doctrine is of that positive and irrefragable character which cannot often be obtained in psychology; it amounts to a complete induction. In general, the analytic argument by which states of consciousness, supposed to be original, are proved to be acquired, is of the nature of negative evidence. It is shown that mental laws exist which would account for their being acquired; that the known facts are consistent with the supposition of their having been so acquired; and it is maintained, with reason, that when a phenomenon may have been, and was even antecedently likely to be, produced by known causes, there is no warrant for ascribing their existence to a distinct principle in nature. But the case of the acquired perceptions of sight does not require this negative argument. It rests on positive experiment. It did so, even before its corroboration by the direct evidence of Cheselden’s and Nunneley’s patients. The signs by which, according to the theory, we judge of distance and magnitude, are the proportion of the visual field which the image occupies, the clearness or indistinctness of its outline, the brightness or faintness of its colours, the number of visible objects which seem to intervene, and the amount of muscular sensation experienced in making the eyes converge so that they both point to the object. Now the connection of all these things with our perceptions of distance and magnitude by the eye, is proved by the same evidence which proves the connection between other causes and their effects: viz., when the causes are present, the effects follow; when the causes are absent, the effects do not take place; and when the causes are altered, the effects are altered. Thus, when we look at a terrestrial object through a telescope, the merely optical effect of the instrument is, that the image occupies a larger portion of the field of vision than when we look at the object with the naked eye; and because of this, we cannot help thinking that we see it larger, and because larger, therefore nearer, than with the unassisted sight. In a hazy atmosphere, when the image of a mountain reaches us fainter in colour and with a less definite outline than at other times, we seem to see it farther off, and therefore (since the size of the image is the same as usual) more lofty, than we know it to be. The reverse takes place in a peculiarly clear atmosphere, when all distant objects appear nearer and smaller than at other times. When none of the criteria supposed in the theory are present, we do not see distance from us at all; as in the case of the heavenly bodies, of the distances of which we have no perception, and all of which, therefore, appear equally distant. We are also without perception of their magnitude, saving that those which produce the largest image in the eye appear the largest, and that all of them appear larger when near the horizon than when at a greater elevation, partly because the images are less bright, and partly because they are seen across a multitude of objects, while in the more elevated position no object of known distance intervenes between us and them. In all these cases, the difference is not in our conscious judgments, but in our apparent perceptions. The conscious judgment often does not share in the illusion. The man or the tree that we look at through the telescope is of a size and distance which may be accurately, and is always approximately, known; and the knowledge is not in the least shaken by any number of observations with the telescope. Yet we cannot express what we know to be an untrue appearance, in any less strong terms than by saying that we seem to see the things as we know them not to be. These experiments fulfil the conditions of a true induction. That what seems perception is a rapid interpretation of signs, is not a matter of doubtful argument, but rests on the same evidence, both in kind and in degree, as the truths of physical science.

The only part of this subject which is still really open to discussion, is the precise nature of the visual signs by which we discern extension in two dimensions, and plane figures, and of the relation between those signs and the facts which they signify. Much argument has been expended, we are far from saying uselessly, in maintaining that we must certainly have, by the mere sense of sight, some perception of superficial extension and figure. But these arguments in no way touch Berkeley’s theory; since he admits that we have distinctive impressions of sight corresponding to differences of tactual extension and figure, which impressions we may call, if we please, and he himself often does call (for want of a better designation), visible extension and figure. We could not be made aware by the sign, of differences in the things signified, unless there were concomitant differences in the sign itself. But Berkeley’s position is, that visible extension and figure, or what we choose to call by those names, have nothing in common with the tactual, or what we consider as the real, extension and figure which they serve to indicate; that the tie between them is entirely arbitrary, derived from the appointment of God; and that, far from visible extension and tactual extension being the same quality, we never should have suspected that there was any connection between them if experience had not disclosed it. In his opinion, a person born blind, and afterwards, when grown up, made to see, would not at first, on being shown a cube and a sphere, know whether the one or the other is the cube or sphere already known to him by touch. And this opinion is borne out by the best recorded instances. But the theory does not need this extreme conclusion; for though visible extension or figure may have, and indeed can have, no positive resemblance to tactual, there may be between them an analogy, or resemblance of relations—that is, the parts of the one may have mutual relations resembling those between the parts of the other. For example, both the visible and the tangible cube have corners; a sort of singular points, which do not exist in either the visible or the tangible sphere; and this similarity of relations might cause a person born blind, and afterwards couched, to suspect (though he could not at first know) that the visible cube, if it corresponds to anything tangible, corresponds to a tangible cube rather than to a tangible sphere. This analogy, however, does not seem to have afforded any guidance either to Cheselden’s patient or to Nunneley’s.

The originality of Berkeley is not so complete in this, the first of his three distinctive doctrines, as in the other two. The doctrine has been, by all who followed him, traced up to his Essay, in which it was for the first time pressed home, and defended against objections, so as to gain it admission among established truths. But he was not the first thinker to whom the idea had presented itself. As pointed out by Professor Fraser, not only had Malebranche, with whose philosophy Berkeley was familiar, made considerable approaches to it, but the fundamental doctrine is stated, in terms which Berkeley himself might have subscribed to, in a passage of Locke’s essay, first inserted in the fourth edition, and a part of which is quoted by Berkeley in his treatise. Locke himself not improbably received the idea from his friend Molyneux, to whom is due even the illustration from the sphere and cube. Berkeley, therefore, has not the merit of the conception; but he has that of raising it from a surmise to a scientific truth.

It also deserves remark, that the impossibility of seeing distance from the eye (inasmuch as, whether great or small, it projects but one point on the retina)—though often supposed to be one of the principal novelties in Berkeley’s theory—neither was, nor professed to be, a novelty, but was assumed by him, in the very beginning of his Essay, as an admitted truth. The writers on optics had already discerned thus much; but the error into which they had fallen, and which it was the aim of Berkeley to correct, was, that we judge of distances by a necessary inference of reason, from geometrical considerations which, as Berkeley says with truth, we are totally unconscious of, and which the great majority of mankind know nothing about. The whole stress of his argument is directed to showing that the inference is not one of reason, but of empirical association, and that the connection between our impressions of sight and the facts they indicate can be discovered only by direct experience. It is this which makes Berkeley’s analysis of vision the leading and model example of the analytic psychology. The power of the law of association in giving to artificial combinations the appearance of ultimate facts was then for the first time made manifest.

The second of Berkeley’s great contributions to philosophy—his theory of general thought—is, that it is carried on, not, as even Locke imagined, by means of general or abstract ideas, but by ideas of individuals, serving as representatives of classes. All ideas, it was maintained by Berkeley, are concrete and individual, which yet is no hindrance to our arriving, by means of them, at truths which are general. When, for example, we prove the properties of triangles, the idea in our mind is not, as Locke supposed, the abstract idea of a triangle which is nothing but a triangle—which is neither equilateral, isosceles, nor scalene—but the concrete idea of some particular triangle, from which, nevertheless, we may conclude to all other triangles, if we have taken care to use no premises but such as are true of any triangle whatever. This doctrine, which is now generally received, though perhaps not always thoroughly comprehended, was undoubtedly, like that of the acquired perceptions of sight, intimately connected in Berkeley’s mind with his ideal theory; for he regarded the notion of matter, apart from sensations in a mind, as the supreme instance of that absurdity, an abstract idea. As in the theory of vision, so in this, Berkeley broke the neck of the problem. He for the first time saw to the bottom of the Nominalist and Realist controversy, and established the fact that all our ideas are of individuals; though he left it to his successors to point out the exact nature of the psychological machinery (if the expression may be allowed) by which general names do their work without the help of general ideas. The solution of this, as of so many other difficulties, lies in the connotation of general names. A name, though common to an indefinite multitude of individual objects, is not, like a proper name, devoid of meaning; it is a mark for the properties, or for some of the properties, which belong alike to all these objects, and with these common properties it is associated in a peculiarly close and intimate manner. Now—though the name calls up, and cannot help calling up, in addition to these properties, others in greater or smaller number which do not belong to the whole class, but to the one or more individual members of it which, for the time being, are serving as mental types of the class—these other ingredients are accidental and changeable; so that the idea actually called up by the class name, though always that of some individual, is an idea in which the properties that the name is a mark of are made artificially prominent, while the others, varying from time to time, and not being attended to, are thrown into the shade. What had been mistaken for an abstract idea, was a concrete image, with certain parts of it fluctuating (within given limits) and others fixed, these last forming the signification of the general name; and the name, by concentrating attention on the class-attributes, prevents the intrusion into our reasoning of anything special to the individual object which in the particular case is pictured in the mind.

The third of Berkeley’s distinctive doctrines, and that by which his name is best known, is his denial of Matter, or rather of Matter as defined by philosophers; for he always maintained that his own opinion is nearer to the common belief of mankind than the doctrine of philosophers is. Philosophers, he says, consider matter to be one thing, and our sensible impressions, called ideas of sense, another: they believe that what we perceive are only our ideas, while the Matter which lies under them and impresses them upon us is the real thing. The vulgar, on the contrary, believe that the things they perceive are the real things, and do not believe in any hidden thing lying underneath them. And in this I, Berkeley, differ with the philosophers, and agree with the vulgar, for I believe that the things we perceive are the real things, and the only things, except minds, that are real. But then he held with the philosophers, and not with the vulgar, that what we directly perceive are not external objects, but our own ideas; a notion which the generality of mankind never dreamed of. Accordingly, at the conclusion of his fullest and clearest exposition of his own doctrine (the Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous), Berkeley says that the truth is at present “shared between the vulgar and philosophers: the former being of opinion that those things they immediately perceive are the real things; and the latter, that the things immediately perceived are ideas which exist only in the mind.”

It was enough for Berkeley to say, and this he was fully justified in saying, that he did not deny the validity of perception, nor of consciousness; that he affirmed the reality of all that either the vulgar or philosophers really perceive by their senses, and denied only what was not a perception, but a rapid and unconscious inference, like the inference which is mistaken for perception when we judge of externality and distance by the eye; with the difference, however, that in this last case the inference is legitimate, having experience to rest upon, while in the case of matter there is no ground in experience or in anything else for regarding the sensations we are conscious of as signs of the presence of anything, except potentialities of other sensations. Berkeley might say with truth, and in his own language he did say, that he agreed with the common opinion of mankind in all that they distinctly realise to themselves under the notion of matter. For he agreed in recognising in the impressions of sense a permanent element, which does not cease to exist in the intervals between our sensations, and which is entirely independent of our own individual mind (though not of all mind). And he was quite right in maintaining that this is all that goes to make up the positive notion which mankind have of material objects. The point at which he diverged from them was where they add to this positive notion a negative one—viz., that these objects are not mental, or such as can only exist in a mind. Without including this, it is impossible to give a correct account of the common notion of matter; and on this point an unmistakeable difference existed between Berkeley and the common mind. It was competent to Berkeley to maintain that this part of the common notion is an illusion; and he did maintain this, in our opinion successfully. He was not equally successful in showing how the illusion is produced, and in what manner it grows into a delusion. He gives as a sufficient explanation “that men knowing they perceived several ideas, whereof they themselves were not the authors—as not being excited from within, nor depending on the operation of their wills—this made them maintain those ideas or objects of perception had an existence independent of and without the mind, without ever dreaming that a contradiction was involved in those words.” It is not surprising that this explanation should not be accepted as sufficient. For our thoughts, also, do not always depend on our own will; and therefore, on this theory, our thoughts, as well as our sense-perceptions, should sometimes be considered to be external to us. Berkeley escapes from this difficulty by greatly exaggerating the dependence of the thoughts upon the will. He also adds, as another distinction between sensations and thoughts, that the former are “not excited from within.” But the very notions of without and within, in reference to our mind, involve belief in externality, and cannot, therefore, serve to account for the belief. Berkeley left this part of his theory to be completed by his successors. It remained for them to show how easily and naturally, when a single sensation of sight or sound indicates the potential presence, at our option, of all the other sensations of a complex group, this latent though present possibility of a host of sensations not felt, but guaranteed by experience, comes to be mistaken for a latent cause of the sensations we actually feel; especially when the possibilities, unlike the actual sensations, are found to be common to us with other minds. This has been shown, perhaps more fully and explicitly than ever before, in the present generation. That it could not be so distinctly pointed out by Berkeley, was partly because he had not thoroughly realised the fact, that the permanent element in our perceptions is only a potentiality of sensations not actually felt. He saw indeed, quite clearly, that to us the external object is nothing but such a potentiality. “The table I write on,” he says in the Principles of Human Knowledge, “I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed—meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit does perceive it.” But in itself the object was, in his theory, not merely a present potentiality, but a present actual existence, only its existence was in a mind—in the Divine Mind. This is the positive side of his theory, not so generally known or attended to as the negative side, and which involves, we think, some serious logical errors.

It must here be observed, that Berkeley was not content with maintaining that the existence of a material substratum is neither perceived by the senses, nor proved by reason, nor necessary to account for the phenomena, and is therefore, by the rules of sound logic, to be rejected. He thought that it could be disproved. He considered the notion of matter to involve a contradiction: and it was true that the notion as defined by many philosophers did so. For their definition of matter affirmed it to be purely passive and inert; yet they regarded material objects as the exciting causes of our sensations. There was no refuting Berkeley when he said that what is passive and inert cannot cause or excite anything. To the notion of philosophers that the causes of our sensations might be “the configuration, number, motion, and size of corpuscles,” he replied by an appeal to consciousness. Extension, figure, and motion, he said, are ideas, existing only in the mind; “but whoever shall attend to his ideas, whether of sense or reflection, will not perceive in them any power or activity; there is, therefore, no such thing contained in them. A little attention will discover to us that the very being of an idea implies passiveness and inertness in it, insomuch that it is impossible for an idea to do anything, or, strictly speaking, to be the cause of anything. Whence it plainly follows that extension, figure, and motion cannot be the cause of our sensations.” From this he deduces that as our sensations must have a cause, and as this cannot be other sensations (or ideas), and as there exists no physical thing except sensations (or ideas), the cause of our sensations must be a spirit. He thus anticipates the doctrine of which so much use has been made by later philosophers of a school opposed to his own; that nothing can be a cause, or exert power, but a mind.

It would have been well if the thinker who was almost the founder and creator of the Experience philosophy of mind, had contented himself with (in the language of Kant) a criticism of experience—with distinguishing what is and what is not a subject of it: instead of, as we find him here, dispensing with experience, by an à priori argument from intuitive consciousness. For it is in vain to consult consciousness about the existence of a power. Powers are not objects of consciousness. A power is not a concrete entity, which we can perceive or feel, but an abstract name for a possibility; and can only be ascertained by seeing the possibility realised. Intuitive perception tells us the colour, texture, &c., of gunpowder, but what intuition have we that it can blow up a house? True it is that all we can observe of physical phenomena is their constancies of co-existence, succession, and similitude. Berkeley had the merit of clearly discerning this fundamental truth, and handing down to his successors the true conception of that which alone the study of physical nature can consist in. He saw that the causation we think we see in nature is but uniformity of sequence. But this is not what he considers real causation to be. No physical phenomenon, he says, can be an efficient cause; but our daily experience proves to us that minds, by their volitions, can be, and are, efficient causes. Let us be thankful to Berkeley for the half of the truth which he saw, though the remainder was hidden from him by that mist of natural prejudice from which he had cleared so many other mental phenomena. No one, before Hume, ventured to think that this supposed experience of efficient causation by volitions is as mere an illusion as any of those which Berkeley exploded, and that what we really know of the power of our own volitions is only that certain facts (reducible, when analysed, to muscular movements) immediately follow them. Berkeley proceeded to argue, that since our sensations must be caused by a mind, they must be given to us by the direct action of the Divine Mind, without the employment of an unintelligible inert substance as an intermediate link. Having no efficacy as a means, this passive substance could only intervene, if at all, not as a cause, but as an occasion, determining the Divine Being to give us the sensations: a doctrine actually held by Malebranche and other Cartesians, but to Berkeley inadmissible, since what need can the Deity have of such a reminder? Indeed, Malebranche admitted that on his theory there would be no necessity for believing in this superfluous wheel in the machinery, if its existence had not been, as he supposed it to be, expressly affirmed in Scripture. Therefore, thought Berkeley, all that is termed perception of material objects is the direct action of God upon our minds, and no substance but spirit has any concern in it.

But Berkeley did not stop here. That which is the immediate object of perception according to previous philosophers, and the sole object according to Berkeley, was our ideas—a much-abused term, never more unhappily applied than when it was given as a name to sensations and possibilities of sensation. These ideas (argued Berkeley) are admitted to have a permanent existence, contrasted with the intermittence of actual sensations; and an idea can have no existence except in a mind. They exist in our own minds only while we perceive them, and in the minds of other men only while those other men perceive them; how then is their existence sustained when no man perceives them? By their permanently existing in the mind of God. This appeared to Berkeley so conclusive an argument for the existence of a Supreme Mind, that it might well take the place of all the other evidences of natural theology. There must be a Deity, because, if there were not, there would be no permanent lodging-place for physical nature; since it has no existence out of a mind, and does not constantly and continuously exist in any finite mind. And he sincerely believed that this argument put a final extinguisher upon “atheism and scepticism.” All that we perceive must be in a mind, and when no finite being is perceiving it, there is only the Divine Mind for it to abide in. This quaint theory presents a distant and superficial resemblance to Plato’s doctrine of ideas; and in Siris, which in its metaphysical part contains the latest of Berkeley’s statements of his opinion, he presses Plato and the Platonists (who, as Coleridge says, should rather be called the Plotinists) into the service of his theory; leading Professor Fraser to believe that the theory itself had undergone modifications, and had been developed in his later years into something more nearly akin to Realism. To our mind the passages in Siris do not convey this impression. There is a wide chasm between Berkeley’s doctrine and Plato’s, and we do not believe that Berkeley ever stepped over it. The Platonic Ideas were self-existent and immaterial, but were as much external to the Divine Mind as to the human. The gods, in their celestial circuits, so imaginatively depicted in the Phædrus, lived in the perpetual contemplation of these Ideas, but were neither the authors, nor were their minds the seat and habitation of them; their sole privilege above mankind was that of never losing sight of them. Moreover Plato’s Ideas were not, like Berkeley’s, identified with the common objects of sense, but were studiously and most broadly distinguished from them, as being the imperishable prototypes of those great and glorious attributes—beauty, justice, knowledge, &c.—of which some distant and faint likeness may be perceived in the noblest only of terrestrial things. We see no signs that Berkeley ever drew nearer to these opinions; and it seems to us that his citations of the Platonists were not an adoption of their doctrines, but an attempt to show that they had, in a certain sense, made an approximation to his, at least to the extent of throwing off the vulgar opinions.

The part of Berkeley’s theory on which he grounded what he deemed the most cogent argument for a Deity, is obviously the weak and illogical part of it. While showing that our sensations, equally with our thoughts, are but phenomena of our own mind, he recognised, with the rest of the world, a permanent element in the sensations which does not exist in the thoughts; but he had an imperfect apprehension of what that permanent element is. He supposed that the actual object of a sensible perception, though, on his own showing, only a group of sensations, and suspended so far as we are concerned when we cease to perceive it, comes back literally the same the next time it is perceived by us; and, being the same, must have been kept in existence in another mind. He did not see clearly that the sensations I have to-day are not the same as those I had yesterday, which are gone, never to return; but are only exactly similar; and that what has been kept in continuous existence is but a potentiality of having such sensations, or, to express it in other words, a law of uniformity in nature, by virtue of which similar sensations might and would have recurred, at any intermediate time, under similar conditions. These sensations, which I did not have, but which experience teaches me that I might have had at any time during the intermission of my actual sensations, are not a positive entity subsisting through that time: they did not exist as sensations, but as a guaranteed belief; implying constancy in the order of phenomena, but not a spiritual substance for the phenomena to dwell in when not present to my own mind. Professor Fraser, in several of his annotations, expresses the opinion that Berkeley did not mean, when a sensation comes back after an interval, that it is numerically the same, but only that it is the same in kind. But if the same only in kind, how can it require to be kept individually in existence during the interval? When the momentary sensation has passed away, the occurrence, after a time, of another and exactly similar sensation, does not imply any permanent object, mental any more than material, to keep up an identity which does not really exist. If Berkeley thought that what we feel is retained in actual, as distinguished from potential, existence, when we are no longer feeling it, he cannot have thought that it is nothing more than a sensation. And in truth, by giving it the ambiguous and misleading name Idea, he does leave an opening for supposing it to be more than a sensation. His Ideas, which he supposes to be what we perceive by our senses, are nothing different, and are not represented by him as anything different, from our sensations: he frequently uses the words as synonymous: yet he doubtless would have seen the absurdity of maintaining that the sensation of to-day can be really the same as the sensation of yesterday, but he saw no absurdity in affirming this of the idea. By means of this word he gives a kind of double existence to the objects of sense: they are, according to him, sensations, and contingencies, or permanent possibilities, of sensation, and yet they are also something else; they are our purely mental perceptions, and yet they are independent objects of perception as well; though immaterial, they exist detached from the individual mind which perceives them, and are laid up in the Divine Mind as a kind of repository, from which it almost seems that God must be supposed to detach them when it is his will to impress them on us, since Berkeley rejects the doctrine of Malebranche, that we actually contemplate them in the Divine Mind. This illogical side of Berkeley’s theory was the part of it to which he himself attached the greatest value; and he would have been much grieved if he had foreseen the utter neglect of his favourite argument for Theism. For it was for this, above all, that he prized his immaterial theory. Indeed, the war against freethinkers was the leading purpose of Berkeley’s career as a philosopher.

Besides Berkeley’s properly metaphysical writings, some notice must be taken of his strictly polemical performances—his attacks on the freethinkers, and on the mathematicians. The former controversy pervades more or less all his writings, and is the special object of the longest of them, the series of dialogues entitled Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher. Of this it may be said with truth, that were it not the production of so eminent a man, it would have little claim to serious attention. As a composition, indeed, it has great merit; and, together with the dialogues on Matter, entitle Berkeley to be regarded as the writer who, after Plato, has best managed the instrument of controversial dialogue. The opinions, however, which he puts into the mouths of freethinkers are mostly such as no one would now think worth refuting, for the excellent reason that nobody holds them; it may be permitted to doubt whether they were even then held by any one worth answering. The freethinkers in the dialogues are two in number—Alciphron, who is intended to represent a disciple of Shaftesbury; and Lysicles, a follower of Mandeville, or rather a man of pleasure who avails himself of Mandeville in defending his own way of life. Alciphron stands for sentimental, Lysicles for sensual infidelity; the latter (with whom Alciphron also at first seemed to agree) denying all moral distinctions, and professing a doctrine of pure selfishness. Now Mandeville himself did neither of these, nor are such doctrines known to have been ever openly professed, even by those who, so far as they dared, acted on them. It is most likely that Berkeley painted freethinkers from no actual acquaintance with them, and in the case of “sceptics and atheists” without any authentic knowledge of their arguments; for few, if any, writers in his time avowed either scepticism or atheism, and, before Hume, nobody of note had attempted, even as an intellectual exercise, to set out the case on the atheistical side. Like most other defenders of religion in his day, though we regret to have it to say of a man of his genius and virtues, Berkeley made no scruple of imputing atheism on mere surmise—to Hobbes, for example, who never speaks otherwise than as a believer in God, and even in Christianity; and to the “god-intoxicated” Spinoza. We may judge that he replied to what he supposed to be in the minds of infidels, rather than to what they anywhere said; and, in consequence, his replies generally miss the mark. Indeed, with the exception of his own special argument for Theism, already commented upon, he has much more to say for the usefulness of religion than for its truth; and even on that he says little more than what is obvious on the surface. A noticeable thing, not only in his controversy with the freethinkers, but through all his miscellaneous writings, is the firm persuasion he expresses of the spread and growth not only of religious unbelief, but, in addition to that, of immorality of all kinds, from the dissipations and profligacies of men about town, to robberies on the highway; and in particular he held that political corruption had surpassed all previous bounds, and that the very idea of public spirit, or regard for the public interest, was treated with contempt. No doubt, the settlement of the old questions which had strongly interested the multitude—while the new ones, which date from the American and French revolutions, had not yet come in—made the reigns of the two first Georges a time of political indifference, always favourable to the venality of politicians. Yet, when we carry back our thoughts to the courts and parliaments of the last two Stuarts, or further off, to those of James I, or earlier still, of Henry VIII, we shall not easily believe that such change as had taken place was in any direction but that of improvement. However this be, Berkeley was under a strong belief, more frequent than well-founded in the case of many good men at all periods, that the nation was degenerating; and he felt it his peremptory duty to do what in him lay towards checking that degeneration, by reasserting and fortifying with new arguments the old doctrines of religion and morals. It would have greatly astonished him to be told that, as a philosopher, he would in a future age be accounted the father of all subsequent scepticism; while, as a moralist, he would be under the ban of the next spiritualist revival, since, like nearly all the theologians of his time, he was distinctly and absolutely an utilitarian—one of Paley’s sort, who believed that God’s revealed Word is the safest guide to utility.

Berkeley’s controversy with the mathematicians has far more pith and substance, and may even now be read with considerable profit. This, too, was conceived by himself as part of his warfare against freethinkers, being an argument ad hominem addressed to “an infidel mathematician,” to the effect that as he, in mathematics, believed mysteries, and things contrary to reason, it was not open to him to reject Christianity because it contained mysteries above reason. The mathematical mysteries in question were the doctrines relating to infinites, and specially those on which the differential or infinitesimal calculus was grounded. The conclusions arrived at by this process Berkeley did not dispute, inasmuch as they were often confirmed by experience, and had not, in any case, been contradicted by it; but he maintained that the rational grounds of the theory were quite untenable, and at variance with the boasted exactness and demonstrative character of mathematical reasoning. And it is difficult to read, without parti pris, The Analyst, and the admirable rejoinder to its assailants, entitled A Defence of Free-thinking in Mathematics (the latter one of the finest pieces of philosophic style in the English language), and not to admit that Berkeley made out his case. It was not until later that the differential calculus was placed on the foundation it now stands on—the conception of a limit; which is the true basis of all reasoning respecting infinitely small quantities, and, properly apprehended, frees the doctrine from Berkeley’s objections. Nevertheless, so deeply did those objections go into the heart of the subject, that even after the false theory had been given up, the true one was not (so far as we are aware) worked out completely, in language open to no philosophical objection, by any one who preceded the late eminent Professor De Morgan, who combined, with the attainments of a mathematician, those of a philosophic logician and psychologist. Though whoever had mastered the idea of a limit could see, in a general way, that it was adequate to the solution of all difficulties, the puzzle arising from the conception of different orders of differentials—quantities infinitely small, yet infinitely greater than other infinitely small quantities—had not (to our knowledge) been thoroughly cleared up, and the meaning that lies under those mysterious expressions brought into the full light of reason, by any one before Mr. De Morgan.

Berkeley was not solely a speculative philosopher and theologian; he also wrote on things directly practical, as was to be expected from his keen interest in the welfare of mankind, and specially of his own Ireland. The labours and the years of life which he devoted to the attempt to found a college at Bermuda, chiefly for the education of missionaries—a scheme which, solely through the influence of his personal character, got so far as to obtain a (for the time) large subscription list, and an address from the House of Commons, followed by the grant of a charter and a promise of £20,000 from the minister, but which, when the fascination of his presence had been removed, was quietly let drop—need not here be further dwelt upon. In his writings on practical subjects there is much to commend, and a good deal to criticise. One of them is a vindication of Passive Obedience, or the Christian doctrine of not resisting the Supreme Power. It is an impressive lesson of tolerance, to find so great a man as Berkeley a thoroughly convinced adherent and defender of a doctrine not only so pernicious, but by that time so thoroughly gone by. The reader of the tract perceives that the writer was misled by an exaggerated application of that cardinal doctrine of morality, the importance of general rules. As it was acknowledged that the cases in which it is right to disobey the laws or rebel against the Government are not the rule but the exception, Berkeley threw them out altogether, for his moral rules admitted of no exceptions. The most considerable and best known of his writings on practical interests is the Querist, wherein opinions are propounded in a form to which Berkeley was partial, that of queries. It is in this that we find his celebrated query, “Whether, if there was a wall of brass a thousand cubits high round this kingdom, our natives might not nevertheless live cleanly and comfortably, till the land, and reap the fruits of it.” The majority of the queries, like this, are on subjects of political economy. Their chief merits are the strong hold which the author has of the fundamental truths, that the industry of the people is the true source of national wealth, and luxurious expenditure a detriment to it; and the distinctness with which he perceived, being therein much in advance of his age, that money is not in itself wealth, but a set of counters for computing and exchanging wealth, and, in his own words, “a ticket entitling to power, and fitted to record and transfer this power.” Had he followed up this idea, he might have anticipated the work of Adam Smith; but he held, apparently, to the conclusions of what is called the mercantile system, while rejecting its premises, and seems to have thought the consumption of foreign luxuries vastly more injurious to the national wealth than that of luxuries produced at home.

Few of Berkeley’s writings have been so much heard of, though in our days none, probably, so little read, as Siris—originally published under the title of Philosophical Reflections and Inquiries concerning the virtues of Tar-Water, and divers other subjects connected together and arising one from another—a work which begins with tar-water and ends with the Trinity, the intermediate space being filled up with the most recondite speculations, physical and metaphysical. It may surprise some persons when we say that the part of this which is best worth reading is that which treats of tar-water. Berkeley adduces a mass of evidence, from much experience of his own and of others, to the powers of tar-water both in promoting health and in curing many diseases, and thinks it probable, though without venturing to affirm, that it is an universal medicine. All this is often supposed to be a mere delusion of the philosopher, by those who do not know that the efficacy he ascribes to his remedy is in part real, since creosote, one of the ingredients of tar-water, is used with success both as a tonic and for the relief of pain, not to mention the disinfecting and other virtues of another ingredient, the now much talked-of carbolic acid. In any case, it is a valuable lesson to see how great, and seemingly conclusive, a mass of positive evidence can be produced in support of a medical opinion which yet is not borne out, except to a very limited extent, by subsequent experience. Having, as he thought, established à posteriori the restorative virtues of tar-water, Berkeley, like a philosopher as he was, endeavoured to investigate the cause, or general principle of these virtues; but he sought for evidence both of the possibility of a panacea, and of the probability of this being such, in the doctrines of an erroneous, and now thoroughly exploded, chemistry, and through them, in the mixed physical and metaphysical theories of the ancient philosophers. One of the points he strove to make out was, that fire is the vital force, or principle of life; having first, as he thought, established, from his antiquated chemistry, a peculiar connection between tar and the element of fire. But as it was not consistent with Berkeley’s philosophy to let it be supposed that fire, or anything except mind, could be a real agent, he ascends through this apparently humble subject to his own highest speculations. “It is neither acid, nor salt, nor sulphur, nor air, nor æther, nor visible corporeal fire—much less the phantom fate or necessity—that is the real agent, but, by a certain analysis, a regular connection or climax, we ascend through all those mediums to a glimpse of the First Mover, invisible, incorporeal, unextended, intellectual source of life and being.” And the ancient philosophers, whom he had already cited in confirmation of his physics, are now invoked to give what support they can to his theology, very unsuccessfully in our opinion. Professor Fraser attaches great value to Siris, saying, that “the scanty speculative literature of these islands in last century contains no other work nearly so remarkable,” and that “every time we open its pages we find fresh seeds of thought. It breathes the spirit of Plato and the Neoplatonists in the least Platonic generation of English history since the revival of letters.” We confess we see in it no connection but with what is least valuable in Plato, his mystical cosmogony, that which is really common to him with the Neoplatonists; and while we do not think it adds anything of the smallest value to Berkeley’s thoughts elsewhere expressed, it overloads them with a heap of useless and mostly unintelligible jargon, not of his own but of the Plotinists.

Professor Fraser has fulfilled the duties of an editor with intelligence and fidelity. He has in general contented himself with explaining and elucidating his author, and has been more sparing in comment of his own, even in the way of defence, than might perhaps have been expected from the valuable services of this kind which he has rendered to the Berkeleian doctrines in other writings. The chapter, however, which he has devoted to “The Philosophy of Berkeley,” contains much useful matter in explanation and recommendation of Berkeley’s main thoughts, with some hints at what he deems shortcomings, which, to be properly judged, would require much more expansion. The biography which he has contributed, incorporating a great number of letters of Berkeley not previously known, is a work both of labour and of love, for which thanks are due to Professor Fraser. Unhappily the letters, being mostly to his man of business, Mr. Thomas Prior, do not bring to light anything very novel in the life or character of the philosopher; but both they and the biography will be always welcome to his admirers, by admitting them to such imperfect acquaintance as is still obtainable with the daily life of so excellent and eminent a man.

GROTE’S ARISTOTLE

1873

EDITOR’S NOTE

Fortnightly Review, n.s. XIII (Jan., 1873), 27-50, where the title is footnoted: “Aristotle. By George Grote. Edited by Alexander Bain, Professor of Logic in the University of Aberdeen, and G. Croom Robertson, Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Logic in University College, London. In two volumes. London [: Murray], 1872.” Signed “J. S. Mill.” The essay was reprinted in the posthumous 4th vol. of Dissertations and Discussions (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1875), 188-230. Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “An article on Grote’s Aristotle in the Fortnightly Review for January 1st 1873” (MacMinn, 101). There is no copy in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

There are, exceptionally, two complete manuscripts of the essay, one a draft (Harvard), the other the press-copy (Library of Congress). These have been collated with the text; in the footnoted variants “H” indicates the Harvard manuscript; “C”, the Library of Congress manuscript; “73”, the Fortnightly Review. The variants also give the few places where the final text returns to a cancelled reading in the Harvard MS. For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xlii-xlv and xcii-xciv above.

>The first folio of the draft MS of “Grote’s Aristotle” Houghton Library, Harvard University

>The first folio of the press-copy MS of “Grote’s Aristotle” Library of Congress

Grote’s Aristotle

a book which should for Aristotle what the author of the present volumes had for Plato; which should an accurate and exhaustive account of all his multifarious works, with a critical appreciation of them, both from the philosophical point of view and from the historical; would be as welcome to philosophers and scholars as the work by which Mr. Grote expounded Plato to English readers ; and would have been, perhaps, even more difficult to execute with that thoroughness which alone would have contented the eminent author. Seldom has more cause to lament the shortness of human life, and the impossibility of extending beyond the allotted limits lives valuable to mankind, than this work, in its present unfinished condition, exhibits. For Mr. Grote’s death was not, in the ordinary of the word, premature; he lived to the ripe age of seventy-six years; but this, his production, down to the very chapter in which his pen was interrupted by fatal illness, shows an undiminished vigour of intellect and perseverance of mental industry, which raise sad thoughts of how much work he might if the merely animal and nutritive organs of his bodily frame had been capable of as long a of life and health as the properly human organ, the reasoning and thinking brain. , however, that this is , and that a work of such magnitude, commenced after the age of seventy, was likely never to be completed, let us turn to the two goodly volumes which are the of the labours of those last years, and rather rejoice that so much has been given, and this of so excellent a quality, than mourn over what might have been if the of human life had been different.

For the work, though unfinished, is not a mere fragment: a part only of the task has been performed, but what is done is thoroughly done; a portion only of the ground has been covered, but what has been built on that portion is a completed structure in itself. The account of the logical writings of Aristotle, and of his position as a thinker on logic, is this includes, as is known, by far the greater part of what is permanently valuable in his contributions to the sum of human knowledge, as distinguished from the value, in an historical point of view, of his speculations, regarded as steps in the development of human thought. In the natural order of succession, the psychology and metaphysics follow the logic; but on these time was only given to Mr. Grote to make a commencement. One is all that he had prepared on to form part of the present treatise. But as far as regards the mere exposition of Aristotle, apart from criticism and comment, the blank is in a measure supplied by a full abstract, and, in part, translation, of the six principal books of the Metaphysica (as well as of two books of the De Cœlo, intimately connected with them), which Mr. Grote had made to himself, not for publication, but which the editors have, very properly, printed in an appendix. An account of Aristotle’s psychology, contributed in 1868 to the third edition of Professor Bain’s work, The Senses and the Intellect, is reprinted as the last chapter of the treatise. The appendix contains two other papers, also written and there published, in which Mr. Grote gives hisz view of Aristotle’s doctrines . One is which was the subject of his controversy with Plato, the nature of Universals; the other is that of First Principles. Both essays are as thorough and as highly finished as any part of the treatise itself. To these are now added compositions for the first time—one, a correction of the mistakes of Sir William Hamilton respecting the relation of Aristotle to what is called the philosophy of Common Sense ; and two short but valuable papers on Epicurus and on the Stoics, some account of whom was to included in the work on Aristotle, as the earlier schools, the Megarics, Cynics, and Cyrenaics (what little is known of them) were comprehended in on Plato. The matter , together with the lucid exposition of some main points of his doctrine in the two chapters which stand as parts of the work itself, are a most valuable contribution to knowledge and of Aristotle as a psychologist and metaphysician, and will not only lighten the labour of such as may take up the task after Mr. Grote, but will to guide them into the true path. the greatest value of the work will reside in the part which is completed, the analysis and appreciation of the treatises composing the Organon; a name and classification not of Aristotle’s making, but introduced by his to distinguish the logical treatises, those on the of philosophizing, from the greater number which aimed at some of the results of philosophy.

When Aristotle is the founder of logic, this is not to be understood solely of the doctrine of the syllogism. Of this, however, he expressly the creator. In one of the few passages of his voluminous writings which reference to himself, he declares that on this subject he had no helps, and no precursors. rhetoric, on which there existed theory and precept, inherited from predecessors and accumulated by successive traditions,g in dialectic (he says)—

I had to begin from the beginning, and to make good the first step myself. The process of syllogizing had never yet been analysed or explained by any one; much less had anything been set forth about the different applications of it in detail. I worked it out for myself, without any assistance, by long and laborious application. . . . The syllogism as a system and theory, with precepts founded on that theory for demonstration and dialectic, has originated first with me. Mine is the first step, and, therefore, a small one, though worked out with much thought and hard labour: it must be looked at as a first step, and judged with indulgence. You, my readers, or hearers of my lectures, if you think that I have done as much as can fairly be required for an initiatory start, compared with other more advanced departments of theory, will acknowledge what I have achieved, and pardon what I have left for others to accomplish.

In such modest terms does Aristotle speak of what he had done for a theory which, in the judgment even of , he did not, commence, but completed, far as completeness can be affirmed of scientific doctrine. The theory, as it came from his hands, has proved its sufficiency by the practical rules which he grounded on it, and which have been found to cover every case and suffice for every purpose for which they were ( ) none of the attempts have been made, even by men of great knowledge and ability (some of the most notable of them in our own age), to give greater extension and precision to the syllogistic theory, have been able to make good their claim to any that of a school exercise. Opinion, indeed, has varied, during the two thousand and more years , respecting the utility of any such rules, and of the syllogistic theory itself. After having been long deemed the key to all science it came to be a mere incumbrance, and has only of late subject of rational estimation. All, however, that has been discovered or invented by modern thought has not invalidated the claim of the syllogism to be a correct analysis of the process of reasoning by general terms—the operation which establishes a conclusion by showing that it comes within the scope of a generalisation been assented to on evidence deemed the rules grounded on this analysis do all that rules can do to insure the correct performance of the operation: they point out the conditions for correctness, and distinguish with scientific precision the modes of error.

But the merits of Aristotle in regard to logic are not confined within this, the narrowest acceptation in which the term is used; they extend to the widest. There are none of the operations of the intellect in the pursuit of truth to which his services were not considerable. He cannot indeed be credited with being the permanent legislator of any of the other departments of logic, as he was of the syllogism. Yet it will, we think, be found that he did as much for them as was compatible with the very early stage which scientific studies had then reached; for it was only after considerable trial of all the paths which , that mankind could discover which it is that leads to the desired end. As Aristotle was far from completing any logical theory save that of the syllogism, so he not claim to have originated any other. He says expressly that the inventor of definition and of induction was Socrates. What exactly it which he intended by these impressions to ascribe to Socrates, . We know, both from the dramatic representation by Plato of the mode of discussion Socrates, and from the direct testimony of the more commonplace Xenophon, that it mainly consisted in attempting to ascertain “what” each of the facts or ideas which figure in the talk of the market-place and in the of the public assembly “is;” in other words, in . And though it is neither known, nor at all likely, that any rules for this investigation were laid down either by Socrates or by Plato, most of the Platonic dialogues are practical exemplifications of it. the induction which Aristotle placed to the credit of Socrates, was the establishment of definitions by generalisation from an enumeration of particulars.m The Platonic of dividing down to the thing which is the subject of inquiry, by Bacon as the nearest approach to a true method of induction to be found among the ancients, because it by simple enumeration, but by rejectiones et exclusiones debitas Plato practised this method only in inquiring into definitions: and, to that investigation, Aristotle completely it; the doctrine that a definition must be per genus et differentiam being its theoretic generalisation, and the Predicamental Tree its paradigm.

did for induction the had to be done for it— the only great thing could be done for it in the then state of science; in doing which he had not, so far as we know, been anticipated by Socrates, while his chief adversary: he pointed out that induction is the ultimate ground and evidence of all knowledge. In we argue from general truths; but the general truths which are the ἀρχαὶ or ultimate premises of our must be experience. His practice to have been very insufficiently by his own doctrine; but he was consistent in upholding the theory. And recognition of it to his perspicacity, inasmuch as the only science in which, , any considerable achievement had been made, was mathematics; a science in which the inductions that constitute the first premises are truths for intuitions are, in fact, the example principally relied on by those who, down to and in our own , deny Aristotle’s principle. In eyes, however, the axioms laid down in geometry, and those implied in arithmetic, are all learnt from sense: not to the mind, which afterwards perceives them to rest on a higher evidence, but actually proved by sense. If, by one of the schools between which philosophy is still divided, this is imputed to him as an error, the other, and in our opinion better, school sees in it a far-sighted anticipation of the ultimate verdict of philosophy.

Having thus put induction in its place, as the foundation and evidence of the truths from which all others flow, Aristotle does not inquire further into it, nor attempt to any scientific criterion bad. His mind to have travelled beyond the primitive conception of induction, by Bacon as “Inductio per enumerationem simplicem, ubi non reperitur instantia contradictoria:” and he probably considered this sufficient for scientific, as he certainly did for dialectic purposes; for, in the Topica, he lays it down that if one party in the discussion produces a number of instances in support of a generalisation, and the other party is unable to produce any in contradiction to , he must be held to admit it. That Aristotle should not have seen his way to the scientific tests of correct and incorrect induction, will not be surprising, if we consider that grounded upon the universality of the Law of Causation, not known nor admitted in Aristotle’s , nor considered . That the same phenomena always, without exception, whenever a determinate set of conditions is exactly realised, was a truth which had not dawned upon his mind; . Aristotle not only believed that some of laws of nature are true invariably, and others only for the most part, but as positive causes in nature two agencies of which uniformity could not in any sense be predicated, τύχη and τὸ αὐτομάτον, chance and spontaneity. It is not, however, not have seen as much of the matter as Bacon saw; for Bacon also lived at a time when physical science had made few of its modern achievements, and such of them as it had made (those of Galileo) he ignorant of. Accordingly Bacon, no more than Aristotle, was able, by his mere sagacity, to arrive at the true rules and tests of induction. But he did, by that rare sagacity, perceive that such tests and rules must be grounded on the application to the investigation of nature, of that comparison of affirmative and negative instances which Socrates and Plato had introduced and Aristotle had adopted for the investigation of definitions . may seem a great derogation from Aristotle’s that he should have left it to Bacon to make this step. But we should consider that though Bacon had no experience of the success of the modern induction, he had two thousand years’ experience of the failure of the ancient. There had that the results arrived at by spontaneous generalisation from be relied on. Such reliance was in Aristotle’s time. For he was the very first who put that primitive , by using it systematically for scientific purposes; making a vast collection of such facts or facts as he could procure, and trying what in the way of generalisation from them. be felt until after the natural mode failed; and it was the failure of that mode, after an ample trial by such a man as Aristotle, that awakened but all the most advanced minds in an age of intellectual activity, to the of a safer inductive method.

These considerations ought to be borne in mind in judging of the numerous cases in which the appearance of being false to his own fundamental principle, that all knowledge is derived from experience. In Mr. Lewes’s book on Aristotle far as the present writer’s knowledge of Aristotle enables him to judge, of exemplary fairness; but which, warmly acknowledging the great genius of Aristotle, yet dealing chiefly with his crude physical speculations, unavoidably gives a much stronger feeling of his defects than of his superiority),e there are to be found abundant examples of conclusions drawn by him from premises which, to our , do not seem grounded what he himself specially warns others against—preconceptions originating in the mind. We , however, that Aristotle, if these assumptions had been questioned, would have unhesitatingly claimed for them the character of inductions from experience. he frequently assumes as a principle from which be drawn facts, that nature always aims at the best. Nothing, indeed, can be less scientific, or less by a true knowledge of nature, than this generalisation; but would have had no difficulty in citing as evidence of it, among other facts, all those adaptations which writers on natural theology as marks of benevolent design; and though he must have known of many apparently pointing the other way, he could not then know how deeply that penetrates into the most intimate constitution of nature, and doubtless that they all admitted of explanations which would reconcile them with the theory. premises the connection of which with observed fact is, to modern apprehension, far more distant still find him proceeding on some analogy, or apparent analogy, to some of the experiences of sense. These are not grounds on which he can be charged with abandoning his principle. Rather, this mode of proceeding seems the inevitable first stage of the attempt to make a and far-reaching application of principle. For it is now well understood that science collection of materials, but by using , as fast as collected, in provisional generalisations, fitted to give a definite direction to further inquiry, . The first set of provisional generalisations were naturally and properly drawn from the most obvious facts. Generalisation “ex his tantummodo quæ præsto sunt pronuncians,” so deservedly by Bacon of scientific procedure, is its first stage; and if the provisional character of generalisations was lost sight of, and they were mistaken for , the responsibility does not lie with Aristotle, who took the stock of facts, and who desired that his speculations should be accepted as infallible. It is true, he can hardly have imagined how very far his generalisations would prove to be from a genuine interpretation of nature. For he did not know, nor did any one then know, that the most familiar parts of nature are often the most intricate and complex, and that there are none of which the ultimate laws from anything which first appearances give indication of.

Neither let us for not having more carefully sifted the evidence of his facts. It is against him that in the natural history of fishes, for example, he down as facts were told to him as such by fishermen, some of which were real observation, while others were popular superstitions; but he had of distinguishing the one from the other. Had he devoted his time, like Mr. Buckland, to a careful personal observation of the character and habits of fishes, he would have become, doubt, a very remarkable ichthyologist; but could he have written even the History of Animals, not to the Organon, the Ethics, or the Rhetoric? In his day, the greatest service which any one could do to physical science, was to make the largest possible collection of facts, and it to the future to eliminate those which the more observation thus directed to them did not confirm. Aristotle did this, with an industry and often an intelligence deserving high praise; nor is it imputable to him that a dictum of his came to be thought, by a succession of , better evidence of truth than the use of their eyes.

Intimately connected with his opinion respecting the foundation of all our knowledge in sensible experience, is his view of the nature of Universals; which those who succeeded him than his doctrine of Induction, and contributed to make him be considered as the founder and chief of the school of sensible experience, in opposition to the Platonic or school. Plato, it is well known, gave great prominence in many of his principal Dialogues, to the doctrine, that all individual and sensible objects being in a perpetual change, never being, butbecoming, there could be no knowledge, in , of them, but only of certain archetypes or Forms, cognisable by intellect alone; which Forms the attributes in their , an imperfect semblance of which we recognise in the best objects of sense. These Forms had a separate existence of their own, quite apart from gods lived in the constant contemplation of them, which the human mind after a thorough training in philosophy, and only in a life after death. These were the only real Entia, or beings; the world of sense was half-way between Entity and Non-Entity. Such is the doctrine Universals which is called, and justly called, Platonic; though Plato also left very forcible statements of its difficulties, and the objections to which it was liable; coupled, however, with the declaration that in spite of all these, unless the doctrine is admitted, no knowledge is possible. Against this theory Aristotle carries on polemic; and gives, in considerable detail, his reasons for rejecting it. But, being a constructive as well as a critical thinker, he sets up a counter theory. According to this, individual objects of sense, instead of not being Entia at all, are so . He calls them, and them alone, First Substances. Genera and Species substances also (Second Substances), but not self-existent, like Plato’s Forms; on the contrary, he denies them all existence, except in, and as implicated with, some First Substance. Attributes . Without going the length of the Nominalist doctrine, which holds nothing to be universal but names, Aristotle takes up a middle position, analogous to that of the modern Conceptualists; in this, that Universals as notions in the mind, made up from the world of sense by the intellect itself through a process of abstraction, Aristotle regarded them as having a real external existence; , however, not as entities, but as inseparable elements of the objects perceived by sense. The antagonism between this and Plato’s, of objective reality at opposite poles, the one in individuals, the other in the highest generalities, accounts for the character assigned to Aristotle the head and front of the à posteriori, as Plato is of the à priori metaphysics. But it is that in the hands of the , who assuredly looked up to Aristotle with an almost servile deference, grew into a well-defined system of Realism, from which it was reserved to . Mr. Grote was of opinion that this was in a measure owing to the very imperfect possession of Aristotle’s writings the early Middle Ages. In a letter quoted by the editors in their preface, says that he should be able to show “how much the improved views of the question of Universals depended on the fact that more and more of the works of Aristotle, and better texts, became known to Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and their successors. During the centuries immediately succeeding Boethius, nothing of Aristotle, except the Categories and the treatise De Interpretatione, was known, and these in a Latin translation. Most fortunately, the Categories was never put out of sight; and it is there that the doctrine of Substantia Prima stands clearly proclaimed.”

But though the doctrine of Substantia Prima, in the book on the Categories, thoroughly excludes Plato’s form of realism, that of Substantia Secunda, which is there combined with it, afforded a basis on which it was possible to erect another realistic doctrine. Universals, as understood by Aristotle, were not indeed, like Plato’s, extra rem, but they were in re, and not solely in the cognising mind. The difference, no doubt, . As conceived by Aristotle, universals would perish if there were no particulars to predicate them of:

The subject, or First Substance, which can never become a predicate, is established as the indispensable ultimate subject for all predicates; if that disappears, all predicates disappear along with it. The particular thus becomes the keystone of the arch whereon all universals rest. Aristotle is indeed careful to point out a gradation in these predicates: some are essential to the subject, and thus approach so near to the First Substance that he calls them Second Substances; others, and the most in number, are not thus last are Concomitants or Accidents, and some of them fall so much short of complete Entity, that he describes them as near to Non-Entia. But all of them, essential or unessential, are alike constituents or appendages of the First Substance or Particular Subject, and have no reality in any other character.

This was advance on the doctrine, that the only reality, and the only in a sphere altogether apart from particulars the admission of general substances, though only as embodied in individual substances, gave loop-hole could creep in; and a world of argument and discussion was found necessary again to dislodge it. The favoured by some of the leading doctrines of Aristotle in proper: especially by two distinctions, which run through his “Philosophia Prima”—the analysis of every object of perception or thought into two ingredients, Matter and Form, and the cognate distinction between Potential and Actual being; the matter of a thing being only potentially the thing, until the superinduction of the form makes it actually so. These forms, which he does not call ἰδέαι, like but εἴδη, which are in reality the attributes of objects, are thus the actual creators of objects as they exist in ἐντελεχεία or completedness; and of a kind of active power, made it difficult to avoid them as substantive entities: whether existing outside the individual thing or only in it, seeming from that point of view to be of little consequence. makes it one of his reproaches against Plato’s Ideas, that from their immobility in themselves, and complete severance from individual bodies, they could not have moving force, whereby anything can be made to become; whereas his εἴδη were actual causes.g

The real expulsion to be effected by the Nominalist schoolmen, towards the end of the Middle Ages: since which the only dispute remaining open is between the pure Nominalism of Hobbes, and the Conceptualism of Locke and Brown; the one seeing nothing in general names but a collection of resembling objects and a word; the other superadding a mental representation, called an abstract idea, a general notion, or a concept. Nevertheless, though Aristotle did not finally accomplish the work, he will always be honourably recognised as the thinker who began it; from the path which could only lead, , to making philosophy a jingle of mystical

In the remaining of logic, those which relate to propositions, and to the of signification of terms, the services of Aristotle . Before him, the expression of the operations of the mind in language had scarcely received the merest commencement of analysis: we see by Plato that technical terms did not yet exist even for the subject and predicate of a proposition, still less for the differences of (so-called) quantity and quality in propositions, the equivalence or non-equivalence of different forms, and the modes of opposition propositions—a proof that these distinctions, elementary as they , had not yet excited sufficient attention to to their being generalisedx shows a curious want of perception of some of them; his predecessors and some of his cotemporaries were in many puzzles, from which they no means of extrication but through some absurdity. logical instruments were duly fashioned,d to appreciate the debt due to those who first gave to such of those instruments as are now the most familiar, the precision for their work. This merit may justly be claimed for Aristotle, in to almost all the terminology and distinctions of formal logic. Of the “positive theory of propositions which we read in his treatise De Interpretatione,” Mr. Grote remarks:

It is, so far as we know, the first positive theory thereof that was ever set out—the first attempt to classify propositions in such a manner that a legitimate Antiphasis could be assigned to each; the first declaration that to each affirmative proposition there belonged one appropriate negative, and to each negative proposition one appropriate counter-affirmative, and one only—the earliest effort to construct a theory for this purpose, such as to hold ground against all the puzzling questions of acute disputants. The clear determination of the Antiphasis in each case—the distinction of Contradictory antithesis from Contrary antithesis between propositions—this was an important logical doctrine never advanced before Aristotle; and the importance of it becomes manifest when we read the arguments of Plato and Antisthenes, the former overleaping and ignoring the contradictory opposition, the latter maintaining that it was a process theoretically indefensible. But in order that these two modes of antithesis should be clearly contrasted, each with its proper characteristic, it was requisite that the distinction of quantity between different propositions should also be brought to view, and considered in conjunction with the distinction of quality. Until this was done, the Maxim of Contradiction, denied by some, could not be shown in its true force or with its proper limits. Now we find it done, for the first time, in the treatise before us. Here the Contradictory antithesis (opposition both in quantity and quality) in which one proposition must be true and the other false, is contrasted with the Contrary (propositions opposite in quality, but both of them universal). Aristotle’s terminology is not in all respects fully developed; in regard, especially, to the quantity of propositions it is less advanced than in his own later treatises; but from the theory of the De Interpretatione all the distinctions current among later logicians take their rise.

It is another , that he was the first largely and systematically of the ambiguities of terms; and (though not unfrequently misled by them himself) made a practice, through all his writings, of distinguishing the various senses in which the principal terms of philosophy were used, and even discriminating between meanings are wholly different and those which are connected by some tie of analogy with one another. Of this last distinction he makes frequent use in the generalities of his example, he says that Ens though predicable of all the categories (substance, quantity, quality, &c.) is not predicated of them as a species, in one and the same sense; quality, for instance, is not a Being in the same sense as a Substance is; it is called a Being by a kind of analogy: and some Beings, therefore, may be more or less Beings than others; less fully Beings, Beings in a less complete degree. In connection with this, let us mention that, as Mr. Grote points out, Aristotle anticipated the acute remark of Hobbes, first brought into its due position of importance by James Mill, respecting the double meaning of ; “first, per se, as meaning existence; next, relatively, as performing the function of copula in predication. . . . We may truly say Homer is a poet” (copula), “but we cannot truly say Homer is” (existence). “He tells us, in reply either to Plato or to some other contemporaries, that though we may truly say Non-Ens est opinabile, we cannot truly say Non-Ens est, because the real meaning of the first of these propositions is Non-Ens est opinabile non esse.” We see in some of Plato’s dialogues what an amount of verbal fallacy, and even of genuine perplexity, arose from this double meaning.

In the book on the Categories, Entia or Beings, in the extension which Aristotle to the term (an including whatever can be thought or spoken about ), are distinguished, and arranged under heads; but only in respect of their capacity of entering into a proposition. kind of Ens, the individual object, or Substantia Prima, is unfit to be predicated of anything except itself, and can enter into a proposition only as a subject. Genera and Species, or Second Substances, may be predicates as well as subjects; and they, as well as all the other Categories, communicate some special kind of information respecting the subject of which they are predicated. Substance is the answer to the question, What . Ad aliquid, or Relation, to What character has it in reference to something else. And so with the other Categories—Where, When, Posture, Dress or Equipment, Action, and Being acted upon. There has been an endless amount of writing for, against, and in explanation of, the validity of this classification. Mr. Grote, while himself criticizing it from the point of view of the Relativity of human knowledge, defends it, not without success, against some of the minor criticisms which have been made the present writer. The best which can be said in favour of it will be found in the acute work of Dr. Franz Brentano, on the different meanings of ens according to Aristotle; a and highly appreciated by Mr. Grote. Dr. Brentano attempts to the logical process was led to constitute precisely those ten Categories; and though (as Mr. Grote thinks) he may not have that Aristotle reach them by that path, he has undoubtedly shown that they might have been so reached, and that the classification from the Aristotelian point of view. Dr. Brentano has also, we think, completely proved (what has sometimes been denied) that although, in the scheme of the Categories, the idea of predication was predominant, Aristotle did also regard them as the Summa Genera in a classification of Things. To have made the first attempt at a classification of Things in general in their logical aspect, external realities and mental abstractions together, was so a step, that one may more justly wonder that its defects are not greater, than at their being so great as they are. The detailed Categories brings out various properties and distinctions which are permanently , and have passed into modern thought.

Thus far of Aristotle as a logician: in which character the highest honour which it has been in the power of any one to deserve in that science. As a psychologist and metaphysician he stands on a much lower level . Except an incidental remark here and there, any real contribution to positive knowledge on those subjects the share he had in laying the foundation of the doctrine of Association. The amount of that share is much disputed. Sir William Hamilton, in one of the elaborate dissertations appended to his edition of Reid, claims for Aristotle to have been “at once the founder and finisher of the theory of association:” meaning, of course, the laws of association itself, not the modern applications of it to the explanation of the more mental phenomena . He that in order to establish is necessary to correct , bequeathed by the first, have been inherited by the last of Aristotle’s interpreters.” “Aristotle,” he says, “has been here so long misapprehended only because he was so far ahead of his expositors. Nor is there a higher testimony to his genius than that it required a progress in philosophy of two thousand years before philosophers were prepared to apprehend his meaning, when the discovery of that meaning was abandoned to their own intelligence.” out a strong case. Mr. Grote has shown, in a paper of putting a meaning into passages of Aristotle says, in more measured language, that “displays an acute and penetrating intelligence of the great principles of the Association of Ideas,” reference to reminiscence Had we possessed from Mr. Grote that examination of the treatise on Memory and Reminiscence which would doubtless have formed part of his work on Aristotle, instead of the brief notice of it in the essay contributed to Bain, we should have been better able to judge how far, if at all, in this case (as, according to Mr. Lewes, in many branches of physics) modern knowledge has been read into Aristotle’s words.

The of Aristotle’s writings known as the Metaphysica did not receive that name from the philosopher himself; it was invented by his Greek editors, and signified merely the position which they assigned to those writings in their arrangement of his works. Aristotle’s own name for the subject matter of them was ἡ πρώτη ϕιλοσοϕία, a phrase adopted from him by Bacon and Hobbes as a name for the highest generalities of philosophy. It was in this sense that Aristotle used it, and what he included it consisted of all that to Being as such— Ens quatenus Ens; together with—

the axioms and highest generalities of syllogistic proof or demonstration. He announces, [says Mr. Grote,] as the first principle of these axioms—as the highest and foremost of all principles—the Maxim of Contradiction: The same predicate cannot both belong and not belong to the same subject, at the same time, and in the same sense; or, You cannot both truly affirm and truly deny the same predicate respecting the same subject; or, The same proposition cannot be at once true and false. This Axiom is by nature the beginning or source of all the other Axioms. It stands first in the order of knowledge, and it neither rests upon nor involves any hypothesis.

This principium contradictionis, Law of Contradiction, has ever since been recognised as the ultimate principle of reasoning; the validity of which the fact that to deny the conclusion, the premises, involves a contradiction; and is to keep our particular judgments consistent, and inconsistent, with the general propositions to which we have previously given our assent. The distinct laying down of this axiom was the necessary completion of the theory of the syllogism.

The question arises, what is the ground of axioms themselves; and Aristotle does not blink this question. There were thinkers in and before his time, Herakleitus and his followers, who denied the axiom of contradiction. Aristotle

goes at length into the case against them, as well as against others, who agreed with him in affirming the maxim, but who undertook also to demonstrate it. Any such demonstration Aristotle declares to be impossible. The maxim is assumed in all demonstrations; unless you grant it, no demonstration is valid; but it cannot be itself demonstrated. He had already laid down in the Analytica that the premises for demonstration could not be carried back indefinitely, and that the attempt so to carry them back was unphilosophical. There must be some primary undemonstrable truths; and the Maxim of Contradiction he ranks among the first. . . .In attempting any formal demonstration of the maxim, you cannot avoid assuming the maxim itself, and thus falling into Petitio Principii. [Nevertheless,] Aristotle contends that you can demonstrate it in the way of refutation, relatively to a given opponent, provided such opponent will not content himself with simply denying it, but will, besides, advance some affirmative thesis of his own as a truth in which he believes; or, provided he will even grant the fixed meaning of words.

Mr. Grote gives a full of Aristotle, but himself dissents from it, observing that the of falling into another contradiction which, by maintaining that a self-contradiction false, he declared himself willing to face. In Mr. Grote’s opinion, the proof of the Axiom of Contradiction, like that of all other axioms, inductive. “All that can really be done in the way of defence is, to prove the Maxim in its general enunciation by an appeal to particular cases. If your opponent is willing to grant these particular cases, you establish the general Maxim against him by way of induction; if he will not grant them, you cannot prove the general Maxim at all.” This is indeed hunting the doctrine of à priori knowledge from its last refuge: and we should be heartily glad if we were able to agree with Mr. Grote . But it seems to us that though the meaning of of Contradiction and Excluded Middle, like that of all other propositions expressed in general terms, is only understood by means of particular cases, stand, in one respect, on a different ground from axioms in general. the judging one the other to be false are not two different acts . We assent with like readiness to the statement that they cannot both be false, because the judging either to be false is the very same mental act with judging the other to be true. This identity of the mental operation constitutes the words in which the axioms are it is impossible to understand the words “true” and “false,” the words “is” and “is not,” . For this reason it seems to us that the axioms in question do not need the support of a they have their root in a mental fact which makes it impossible to contravene them —a fact implied in†

We have now reached the limits of the portion of Aristotle’s ontology and psychology which is fully explained and by Mr. Grote. To go on to the remainder with no more of that invaluable assistance than the abstract of the Metaphysica in the appendix, and the analysis of the DeAnimâ written for Professor Bain’s treatise, would be an undertaking after a study of the original . The difficulty of finding a meaning, intelligible to modern habits of thought, in trains of speculation so our methods, expressed in phraseology irremediably confusing, is extreme; and the result is seldom, unless in an historical point of view (nor always even in that), of a value commensurate with the difficulty. The Metaphysica, or such part of it as has come down to us (for its fragmentary appearance has struck the commentators, and been completed), turns upon the two antitheses , that of Matter and Form, and that of Potential and Actual. Everything is composed of Matter and Form, except First Matter which has no Form, and a Form which has no Matter, and is the Divine Intelligence. But those composite objects are all of them Matter in relation to any different or additional which they are capable of taking on. Everything potentially whatever it is capable of becoming, and it becomes what it does become. are produced, not by a Form, but by the Privation of a Form; thus, he sickness as the privation of health; a sick man, from being potentially well, becomes actually so by the Form of Health; but a healthy man becomes sick, not a Form of Sickness, but through Privation of the Form of Health.s These notions, and the minutiæ and subtleties into which they are followed out, even were they liable to no other objection, would tell us nothing of the laws of phenomena; they a particular mode of restating the to be explained. To say that it is the union of the form of health with which makes the man healthy, is to say, in technical language, that he is made healthy by health. If an imaginary entity conjured up out of an abstraction, and supposed to be immanent in all things the property it is the form of; as, in a still earlier stage of speculation, gods were thought to be immanent in rivers, and nymphs in trees.

of Aristotle is a theory of the various souls, or living principles, which he recognises as existing in nature, and regards as the Forms or Active Principles of life in its different degrees; though he hardly regards them as objectively distinct from one another, but rather as modifications of Principle, successively superinduced by the addition of attributes. The first is the Nutritive Soul, common to animal and vegetable life. The second is the Sensitive Soul, common to all animals. The third and highest is the Noëtic, or Intellectual Soul, belonging to man alone. This last, again, he finds it necessary to subdivide into the passive, or merely receptive intelligence, and the active intelligence, or νου̑ς ποιητικός; the latter of which is the moving force, which what is merely potential in the passive intelligence becomes actual. No part of the speculations of Aristotle is more obscure than the theory of νου̑ς ποιητικός, which he regarded as a part of the universal νου̑ς of the universe, independent of the bodily frame, and of surviving it, though whether or not with a personal immortality matter of dispute. The subject is slightly touched on in the essay by Mr. Grote which the last chapter of his treatise. A full and elaborate treatment of it, grounded on a comprehensive view of Aristotle’s metaphysical doctrines, by a writer already mentioned, Dr. Franz Brentano,On the Psychology of Aristotle, especially with reference to the νου̑ς ποιητικός, which, , does not seem to have been known to Mr. Grote when he wrote his essay which it has been his fortune to meet with.

The Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric of Aristotle are not by Mr. Grote, and the present occasion for We may besides its special worth in to its particular subject, which is even now considerable, is one of the repositories of incidental remarks on human nature and the ancients have bequeathed to this consists also, in our judgment, the principal value of the Ethics and Politics, which, as treatises on subjects, have for their most marked dread of extremes and of the adventurous anticipations of genius the mode of thinking of a Liberal Conservative, or rather, of a moderate aristocratical politician, at Athens. In the main, is a philosophic consecration of existing facts (witness its strange defence of slavery), choosing by preference among those facts tend towards stability, rather than towards improvement.

There remains one work of Aristotle, which is copiously analyzed and by Mr. Grote, and which is of great importance to correct understanding of the Greek mind: the treatise which . Both the detail of this work puzzle, and, when not properly understood, scandalize, the modern mind. It is a treatise on Dialectic Reasoning, as distinguished from Demonstrative, which last had been elaborately treated in the , as there understood, is the art of arguing for victory, not for truth, object of the treatise. In order justly to appreciate such , and to perceive how it could coexist, as in Aristotle’s case the whole collection of his writings witnesses that it did, with an indefatigable ardour in the pursuit of truth, it is necessary to remember how large a place in Grecian life was occupied by contests of skill between individuals, in matters both physical and intellectual. When we the vast honour understood to , not only , by his gaining a prize in the Olympic festival , and the minor of a similar kind in the various Greek states, that after Dialectics, or regulated discussion by question and answer, had been introduced by Zeno of Elea, and brought to perfection by Socrates and Plato, this also should have become extensively popular as a game of skill. In this game, a thesis, usually on some , was propounded for discussion, to defend it against all questions to him, which must be such as admitted of answer by yes or no, nor was any other kind of answer permissible. In this intellectual exercise no wrong was done to truth, not to disprove the thesis, but to test the disputant’s ability to defend it against objections. How completely was the sole object is shown in this, that the assailant of the thesis was not allowed to propound positive arguments against it; he could only put questions to the respondent, and must derive his refutation from the respondent’s own answers. There is nothing immoral in arguing for victory when that is the , and the only wrong be committed in the case a violation of the rules of the game. These rules were of course framed with a view to render such contests possible, to make them intelligible and interesting to an audience, and to secure a fair field and fair play to both why the premises introduced by the arguers were required to be ἔνδοξα, (in the language of the casuists, borrowed no doubt from Aristotle, probable opinions), that is, they must be opinions either by mankind, or maintained by some respected authority. However true they might be, if they were recondite, and remote from common apprehension, the respondent could not reasonably be expected to be prepared for them; while, if they had good authority on their side, it was not even necessary that the person using them should believe them to be true, truth not being the object, but to reduce the respondent to an inconsistency, and it always open to him . The same thing explains why it was lawful, even in the opinion of Aristotle, to entrap the respondent into an admission, which on calm reflection he would not have made; for this equally answered the purpose of testing his skill and knowledge. On the other hand, the licenses allowed by the game might be pushed too far, and the allowable kinds and degrees of artifice might be exceeded in such a manner as to defeat the legitimate , Aristotle says, was of a litigious disposition; and the concluding book, , is composed of warnings against malpractices.

, he said, of great utility in reference to the pursuit of truth. “First” ( quote from Mr. Grote) “the debate is a valuable and stimulating mental exercise.” “Secondly, it is useful for our intercourse with the multitude: for the procedure directs us to note and remember the opinions of the multitude, and such knowledge will facilitate our intercourse with them; we shall converse with them out of their own opinions, which we may thus be able beneficially to modify.” This is as indicating Aristotle’s opinion that the philosopher ought not to keep from the multitude, and the duty of advising them for their good by arguments drawn their own opinions. “Thirdly, dialectic debate has an useful though indirect bearing even upon the processes of science and philosophy, and upon the truths thereby acquired. For it accustoms us to study the difficulties on both sides of every question, and thus assists us in detecting and discriminating truth and falsehood.” Of this benefit dialectic exercise, Aristotle’s own practice affords a : for he very commences his investigation of a difficult question by enumeration and statement of the ἀπορίαι, the difficulties or puzzles, which affect it; and there is no way in which his method of studying a subject sets a more beneficial example. In this respect in advance not only of his own time, but of ours. His general advice for exercise and practice in Dialectic the training of one’s own mind the pursuit of truth. “You ought to test every thesis by first assuming it to be true, then assuming it to be false, and following out the consequences on both sides.” .p

When you have hunted out each train of arguments, look out at once for the counter-arguments available against it. This will strengthen your power both as questioner and respondent. It is, indeed, an exercise so valuable, that you will do well to go through it by yourself, if you have no companion. Put the different trains of argument bearing on the same thesis into comparison with one another. A wide command of arguments, affirmative as well as negative, will serve you well both for attack and defence. The same accomplishment will be of use, moreover, for acquisitions even in science and philosophy. It is a great step to see and grasp in conjunction the trains of reasoning on both sides of the question; the task that remains—right determination which of the two is the better—becomes much easier.

We are far from asserting that the dialectic contests of the Greeks, or the public disputations of the Middle Ages which them, had never any but a beneficial ; that they had not their snares and their temptations, and that the good they effected might not be still better attained by other means. But the fact remains that no such means have been provided, and that the old disappeared, even from the Universities, without having been by any other. There is no reason why a practice so useful for the pursuit of truth should not be employed when the of truth is the object. We have known this most effectually done by a set of young students of philosophy, assembling on certain days to read regularly through some standard book on psychology, logic, or political economy; suspending the reading whenever any one had a difficulty to propound or an idea to start, and carrying on the discussion from day to day, if necessary for weeks, until the point raised had been searched to its inmost depths, and no difficulty or obscurity capable of removal by discussion remained. The intellectual training given by these debates, and especially the habit they gave of leaving no dark corners unexplored—of searching out all the ἀπορίαι, and never passing over unsolved difficulty—has been felt, by those who took part, to have been invaluable to them as a mental discipline. There would be nothing impracticable in making exercises of this kind a standing element of the course of instruction in the higher branches of knowledge; if the teachers had any of the want which such discussions would supply, or thought it any part of their business to form thinkers, instead of “principling” their pupils (as Locke expresses it) with ready-made knowledge. But the saying of James Mill, in his essay on Education, is as true now as when it was written—that even the theory of education is far behind the progress of knowledge, and the practice lamentably behind even the theory.

We now take our leave of Aristotle, referring the reader for fuller knowledge to Mr. Grote’s book; which, as a guide to all the parts of Aristotle’s speculations that are included in it, fulfils the expectations excited by his work on Plato, and leaves nothing to regret but that the remainder of the Aristotelian writings have not had the benefit of the same clear exposition and philosophical criticism, and that a general estimate of Aristotle and of what he did, by so competent a judge, has not been bestowed on us. Besides the matter already spoken of, the work contains a life of Aristotle, and a discussion of the canon of his writings; in both of which, the use made of scanty materials is worthy the author of the History of Greece. It is a curious and almost unique accident, that although many of the writings of Aristotle have been lost, we are actually in possession of some, and those among the most important, which were not accessible to his followers for many generations after the death of his immediate successor, Theophrastus. The collection of manuscripts made by Aristotle and enlarged by Theophrastus, which contained the most precious of the Aristotelian treatises, remained near a century and a half in a hiding place under ground, at Skepsis in Asia Minor, to prevent their being seized by the kings of Pergamus to enrich the royal library; and they emerged from thence after the extinction of the Attalid dynasty, so injured by damp and worms that many passages had to be restored conjecturally: first by anincompetent editor, Apellikon; afterwards more intelligently, but necessarily with increase of difficulty, by Andronicus of Rhodes, somewhat later than the time of Cicero, in whose early youth the books were brought to Rome from Athens by Sylla. So narrowly did posterity escape the loss of one of the chief treasures of Grecian antiquity; many of the treatises having only come down to us through these damaged manuscripts: the condition of which is probably responsible for much of the obscurity which has given so much trouble to commentators and to students: for Aristotle’s literary style, though often awkward (being both prolix and elliptical) is by no means, in his best preserved works, deficient in clearness.

Appendix

Bibliographic Index of Persons and Works Cited in the Essays, with Variants and Notes

mill, like most nineteenth-century authors, is somewhat cavalier in his approach to sources, his identifications being often vague and his quotations not exact. This Appendix is intended to help correct these deficiencies, and to serve as an index of names and titles (which are consequently omitted in the analytic Index). Included also, at the end of the Appendix, is the one reference to British statute law, under the heading “Statutes.” The material otherwise is arranged in alphabetical order, with an entry for each author and work quoted or referred to in the text. Both the speakers and those persons referred to in JSM’s translations of Plato’s dialogues are included in this Appendix, with an indication in the notes of the instances when the references and quotations occur in the translation and summary—i.e., when they are Plato’s—but not when they appear in JSM’s comments on the dialogues. (Legendary figures do not appear in this Index.) Similarly, the notes indicate which references and quotations are taken by JSM from other sources.

The entries take the following form:

1. Identification: author, title, etc., in the usual bibliographic form.

2. Notes (if required) giving information about JSM’s use of the source, indication if the work is in his library, and any other relevant information.

3. Lists of the pages where works are reviewed, quoted, and referred to.

4. A list of substantive variants between JSM’s text and his source, in this form: page and line reference to the present text. Reading in the present text] Reading in the source (page reference in the source).

The list of substantive variants also attempts to place quoted passages in their contexts by giving the beginnings and endings of sentences. Omissions of two sentences or less are given in full; only the length of other omissions is given. In a few cases, following the page reference to the source, cross-references are given to footnoted variants in the present text. When the style has been altered by setting down quotations, the original form is retained in the entries. There being uncertainty about the actual Greek texts used by JSM, the Loeb editions of the Classics are used when possible, and the quotations are not collated.

Acumenus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 86

Adeimantus.

note: the reference at 167 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167, 396

Adrastus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 86

Æantodorus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Ælian, Claudius.Varia Historia Epistolae Fragmenta. Ed. Rudolph Hercher. Leipzig: Teubneri, 1866.

referred to: 327n.

Æschines.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

— Against Timarchus, in The Speeches of Æschines (Greek and English). Trans. Charles Darwin Adams. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1919, 4-155.

quoted: 398

referred to: 389

— On the Embassy, in ibid., 162-301.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 284

Æschylus.

referred to: 317

— Prometheus Bound, in Æschylus (Greek and English). Trans. Herbert Weir Smyth. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963, I, 214-315.

note: the quotation is in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 280

Agis III (of Sparta).

note: the reference at 300 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 300, 337n

Albertus Magnus.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 489

Alcæus. Referred to: 315n

Alcibiades.

note: the reference at 143 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 143, 166n, 316, 331, 395

Aldrich, Henry.Artis logicæ compendium. Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1691.

note: a copy of the 2nd ed. (ed. H. L. Mansel [Oxford: Graham, 1852]), which the reference antedates, in JSM’s library, Somerville College; in that ed. the quotation is on 91; the reference at 23 is on 24 ff. The quotation (a translation) is in a quotation from Whately. The work, frequently reprinted and translated, is also known as Artis logicæ rudimenta and (as JSM indicates at 20) “the Oxford Logic.”

quoted: 32

referred to: 20, 23, 29

32n.2-3 “This . . . all.”] [translated from:] 2. Inductio; in qua ponitur quantum opus est de singulis, & deinde assumitur de universis; ut Hic, & illa & iste magnes trahit ferrum; Ergo omnis. [The passage continues:] Est igitur Enthymema quoddam; nempe Syllogismus in Barbara, cujus minor reticetur. (23)

Alexander (the Great).

note: the reference at 243 is in a quotation from Niebuhr.

referred to: 243, 312, 323, 336n

Anacharsis. Referred to: 397n

Anacreon.

note: the reference at 67 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 67, 315n

Anaxagoras.

note: the reference at 87 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus, that at 160 in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 87, 160, 286, 397n

Anaximander. Referred to: 381

Anaximenes. Referred to: 380

Andron.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 124

Andronicus (of Rhodes). Referred to: 510

Anon. “Bailey’s Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” Spectator, XV (8 Jan., 1842), 41-2.

referred to: 262

Antalcidas. Referred to: 323

Antiphon.

note: the reference at 167 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology, that at 222 is to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Parmenides.

referred to: 167, 222, 327

Antisthenes (the Cynic).

note: the reference at 492 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 378, 492

Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius. Referred to: 397

Anytus.

note: the references at 153-71 passim are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 153, 158-9, 162-4, 167, 169, 171, 393, 398

Apellicon (Apellikon). Referred to: 510

Apollodorus.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167, 171

Aratus. Referred to: 337n

Archelaus.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 113, 118, 147

Ariosto, Ludovico.Orlando Furioso. 3 vols. Orleans: Couret de Villeneuve, 1785.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 284

Aristeides (Aristides) (the Just).

note: the reference at 147 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 147, 322, 327, 333, 416, 417n

Aristippus (the Cyrenaic). Referred to: 378, 392

Aristocrates.

note: the reference at 114 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 114, 395

Aristodemus. Referred to: 323

Ariston.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Aristophanes.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 326

— Acharnians, in Aristophanes (Greek and English). Trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers. 3 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960, I, 2-117.

quoted: 333

— The Clouds, in ibid., I, 262-401.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 153, 153n, 154

— The Knights, in ibid., I, 120-259.

quoted: 317

Aristophon.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 98

Aristotle.

note: the references at 298, 300, 302, 320, 334, 415 are in quotations from Grote. The Loeb eds. of Aristotle are used throughout for ease of reference. Various Greek eds. of different works are in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 12, 23, 26, 84n, 95, 274, 298, 300, 302, 310n, 313, 320, 334, 336n, 377-8, 382, 386, 410, 415, 419, 421, 475-510 passim

— Analytica Priora, in The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics (Greek and English). Trans. Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938, 198-530.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 12

referred to: 498

— Analytica Posteriora, in Posterior Analytics, Topica (Greek and English). Trans. Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960, 24-260.

referred to: 12, 505

— The “Art” of Rhetoric (Greek and English). Trans. J. H. Freese. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1926.

referred to: 486, 504-5

— Categories, in The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics (Greek and English). Trans. Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938, 12-108.

referred to: 489, 494

— De Anima, in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath (Greek and English). Trans. W. S. Hett. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935, 8-202.

referred to: 501-2, 504

— De Cœlo. See On the Heavens.

— De Interpretatione, in The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics (Greek and English). Trans. Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938, 114-78.

referred to: 489, 492-3, 492n-493n

— Historia Animalium (Greek and English). Trans. A. L. Peck. 3 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965-70.

referred to: 486

— The Metaphysics (Metaphysica) (Greek and English). Trans. Hugh Tredennick. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1933.

note: the quotations all derive from Grote; those at 489-90 and 498 are indirect.

quoted: 380n, 489-90, 497-8

referred to: 476, 488, 497-502

— The Nicomachean Ethics (Greek and English). Trans. H. Rackham. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1926.

referred to: 486, 504-5

— On the Heavens (Greek and English). Trans. W. K. C. Guthrie. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939.

referred to: 476

— On Sophistical Refutations, in On Sophistical Refutations, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away, On the Cosmos (Greek and English). Trans. E. S. Forster and D. J. Furley. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955, 10-154.

note: the quotation at 478 is a translation from Grote.

quoted: 400, 478

referred to: 505, 507

— Organon.

note: the Organon consists of The Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topica and On Sophistical Refutations.

referred to: 477, 486, 505

— The Physics (Greek and English). Trans. Philip H. Wickstead and Francis M. Cornford. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963.

referred to: 483

— The Poetics, in Aristotle, The Poetics, “Longinus,” On the Sublime, Demetrius, On Style (Greek and English). Trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe and W. Rhys Roberts. London: Heinemann: New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1927, 4-116.

referred to: 504

— Politics (Greek and English). Trans. H. Rackham. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1932.

referred to: 504-5

— Sophistici Elenchi. See On Sophistical Refutations.

— Topica, in Posterior Analytics, Topica (Greek and English). Trans. Hugh Tredennick and E. S. Forster. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960, 272-738.

referred to: 482, 505

Aristoxenus.Elements of Harmony.

note: as the references derive from Grote (Plato, I, 217n), no ed. is cited.

referred to: 386n, 421n

Artaxerxes II (Mnemon). Referred to: 323

Aspasia.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 335

Bacchylides. Referred to: 315n

Bacon, Francis. Referred to: 12, 93, 310n, 341, 483, 497

— De Augmentis Scientiarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. 14 vols. London: Longman, et al., 1857-74, I, 415-840.

note: for ease of reference this ed., which is in JSM’s library, Somerville College, is used, though JSM’s references antedate it. Most of JSM’s phrasal quotations are paraphrases, and that at 482 is undoubtedly summary, so no collation is given (cf. Novum Organum, same reference). The quotations at 12-13 and 93 are indirect.

quoted: 12-13, 12n-13n, 93, 482

referred to: 33

12n.7-13n.3 Siquidem . . . delitescere aliquid] Qui enim modum acute introspexerit quo ros iste æthereus scientiarum, similis illi de quo loquitur poëta,

—aërei mellis cœlestia dona,

colligatur, (cum et scientiæ ipsæ ex exemplis singulis, partim naturalibus partim artificialibus, tanquam prati floribus et horti, extrahantur,) reperiet profecto animum suapte sponte et nativa indole Inductionem solertius conficere, quam quæ describitur a dialecticis; siquidem . . . delitescere aliquod (620)

— Novum Organum, in ibid., I, 119-365.

note: for ease of reference this ed., which is in JSM’s library, Somerville College, is used, though JSM’s references antedate it. No collation is given for 482 which is undoubtedly summary (cf. De Augmentis, same reference). The quotation at 93 is indirect, as is that at 370, which is in a quotation from Bain.

quoted: 93, 310n, 370, 379, 380, 480, 482, 485

referred to: 411

310n.11-12 “Opinio copiæ” . . . “maxima causa inopiæ est.”] Atque cum opinio copiæ inter maximas causas inopiæ sit; quumque ex fiducia præsentium vera auxilia negligantur in posterum; ex usa est, et plane ex necessitate, ut ab illis quæ adhuc inventa sunt in ipso operis nostri limine (idque relictis ambagibus et non dissimulanter) honoris et admirationis excessus tollatur; utili monito, ne homines eorum aut copiam aut utilitatem in majus accipiant aut celebrent. (125)

310n.13-14 notiones temere a rebus abstractas.] Itaque si notiones ipsæ (id quod basis rei est) confusæ sint et temere a rebus abstractæ, nihil in iis quæ superstruuntur est firmitudinis. (158)

310n.23-4 “intellectus sibi permissus,”] Quod vero attinet ad notiones primas intellectus; nihil est eorum quæ intellectus sibi permissus congessit, quin nobis pro suspecto sit, nec ullo modo ratum, nisi novo judicio se stiterit et secundum illud pronuntiatum fuerit. (138)

379.22 naturam rei in ipsa re perscrutatur.] Nemo enim alicujus rei naturam in ipsa re fœliciter perscrutatur, sed ampliande est inquisitio ad magis communia. (180)

380.22 notiones temerè à rebus abstractæ] [see entry at 310n.13-14]

480.23 rejectiones et exclusiones debitas] At Inductio quæ ad inventionem et demonstrationem scientiarum et artium erit utilis naturam separare debet, per rejectiones et exclusiones debitas; ac deinde, post negativas tot quot sufficiunt, super affirmativas concludere; quod adhuc factum non est, nec tentetum certe, nisi tantummodo a Platone, qui ad excutiendas definitiones et ideas, hac certe forma inductionis aliquatenus utitur. (205)

485.24 “ex . . . sunt pronuncians,”] Inductio enim quæ procedit per enumerationem simplicem res puerilis est, et precario concludit, et periculo exponitur ab instantia contradictoria, et plerumque secundum pauciora quam par est, et ex . . . sunt, pronunciat. (205)

Bailey, Samuel.A Letter to a Philosopher, in reply to some recent attempts to vindicate Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, and in further elucidation of its unsoundness. London: Ridgway, 1843.

reviewed: 265-9

quoted: 266, 267, 268

referred to: 255n, 265

266.26-7 ‘inexplicable how any . . . intelligence’ . . . ‘except] [paragraph] How any . . . intelligence, with such explicit declarations before him, could write in the following strain is inexplicable, except (49)

267.9 ‘material or physical lines,’ since ‘imaginary or hypothetical lines] [paragraph] It will be acknowledged by all that the major premiss of the first syllogism, if it has any meaning at all, must signify material or physical lines. If it meant anything else, it would be palpably inadmissible, since imaginary or hypothetical lines (36)

268.25 ‘bluntness,’ ‘confidence,’ or ‘arrogance,’] If they [Mill and Ferrier] do not always avoid an approach to a needless tone of bluntness and asperity, perhaps of arrogance; if the suaviter in modo is principally wanting, as commonly happens, when its absence is not compensated by the fortiter in re; if confidence is sometimes most conspicuous where diffidence would have been most appropriate—these are faults we all of us naturally fall into when we come in our turn to seat ourselves in the critical chair. (4)

— A Review of Berkeley’s Theory of Vision, designed to show the unsoundness of that celebrated speculation. London: Ridgway, 1842.

reviewed: 247-65

quoted: 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 261, 264, 265

251.26-7 “outness” . . . “immediately . . . sight?”] Outness, he affirms, is not immediately . . . sight, but only suggested to our thoughts by certain visible ideas and sensations attending vision. (20)

252.3-7 [paragraph] Outness . . . vision. . . . By a . . . for.] [no paragraph; see above 251.26] [ellipsis indicates 1-page omission] He tells us, in the passage already quoted, that by a . . . for. (20-1)

252.16-18 “but . . . object;”] He maintains, that because the internal feeling has been found to be accompanied by the external one, it will, when experienced alone, not only suggest the external sensation, but . . . object. (21)

252.19-21 [paragraph] “It . . . asserted,” . . . “without . . . process:”] [no paragraph] It . . . asserted, without . . . process. (21)

252.31-2 “converted . . . object,”] [see above 252.16-18]

253.18-21 [paragraph] Distance of . . . shorter;] [paragraph] “It is, I think, agreed by all, that distance of . . . shorter.” (38; Bailey is quoting Berkeley’s An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, q.v.)

253.22-3 “must appear . . . point.”] “If we consider that the distance of any object from the eye is a line turned endways to it, and that this line must consequently appear . . . point, we shall be sensible that distance from the eye cannot be the immediate object of sight, but that all visible objects must naturally be perceived as close upon the organ, or more properly, perhaps like all other sensations, as in the organ which perceives them.” (39; Bailey is quoting Adam Smith’s “Of the External Senses,” q.v.)

253.29 “see the rays of light”] [paragraph] If this is to be considered as a true interpretation of Berkeley’s language, his sole argument is founded on the fallacy that we see the ends of the rays of light coming from an object to the retina, but not the length of the rays. (39-40)

255.12 “universal impressions of mankind.”][paragraph] As this is a doctrine wholly contrary to the universal and natural impressions of mankind, we should expect it to be supported by an appeal to facts of every description likely to throw light upon the subject. (37)

256.10-13 [paragraph] Virtually . . . plane. . . . Solid . . . solid:”] This is virtually . . . plane—an argument in which there is no connection between premises and conclusion. Let us, however, take it literally as it is put. Solid . . . solid. (44-5)

261.7 [paragraph] It is manifest [ . . . ,] by] [no paragraph] It is manifest by (29)

261.7 many young animals] many of them (29)

261.10-11 dropped; the young . . . crocodiles, says Sir Humphry Davy, hatched] dropped. “The young . . . crocodiles,” says Sir Humphry Davy. “hatched (29)

261.12 water; the] water. The (29)

261.13 hatched.] hatched*.” [footnote: *Life of Sir H. Davy, by John Davy, M.D., vol. ii, p. 80.](29)

264.22-3 [paragraph] “There is] [no paragraph] In the whole of this celebrated narrative there is (183)

264.27-35 [paragraph] He . . . time.] [no paragraph] “He . . . time.” (178; Bailey is quoting Cheselden; he omits the closing quotation marks)

265.19 “when . . . eye;”] [paragraph] Mr. Ware’s patient was a boy seven years old (Master W—), and antecedently to the operation could distinguish colours when . . . eye, but not forms*. [footnote: *Philosophical Transactions for 1801, p. 382.] (193)

Bain, Alexander.The Emotions and the Will. London: Parker, 1859.

reviewed: 341-73, esp. 361-71

quoted: 362, 363, 365, 366, 367, 368, 368-9, 369-70, 371, 371-2

362.27 “the] [paragraph] I. We shall begin with the (58)

362.27 vent of emotion] vent of emotion (58)

362.28 outburst;”] outburst. (58)

362.33-4 “the extensive] [paragraph] IV. The extensive (58)

362.34-5 Tender Affections.”] Tender Affections constitute a well-marked order or family of emotion.” (58)

365.9 “the] These [two fundamental component elements of the Will] are, first, the (327)

365.11 feelings;”] feelings; and, secondly, the link between a present action and a present feeling, whereby the one comes under the control of the other. (327)

365.33 “nothing . . . incumbrance”] I consider the word ‘necessity’ as nothing . . . incumbrance in the sciences of the present day.* [footnote omitted] (549)

366.6 [paragraph] A] [no paragraph] A (555)

366.14 fallacy. . . . For the] fallacy. I am not inquiring minutely at present into all the meanings of the term consciousness, a task reserved for the dissertation that is to conclude this volume; it is enough to remark, that for the (555)

366.14 word [consciousness] implies] word implies (555)

366.30 nature; on] nature. On (556)

366.33 exception. . . . If] [ellipsis indicates 1-page omission] (556-7)

367.2 “the . . . moment:”] The only case of this sort that I am able to specify is the testimony that each individual gives as to the . . . moment. (558)

368.13 An intellectual] We shall see that an intellectual (568)

368.13 is indispensable] is likewise indispensable (568)

368.17 on an] on our (569)

368.28 “the] In all such cases the (570)

368.28 tested] tested (570)

368.29 actions”] actions, and the subject matter of it is some supposed fact, or occurrence, of nature. (570-1)

368.42 [paragraph] I] [no paragraph] I (585)

369.14 validity. . . . We] validity. This does not exclude the operations termed induction, deduction, analogy and probable inference; because these are to be pursued exactly to the length that experience will justify, and no farther. We (586)

369.14 after trials] after many trials (586)

369.16 same. . . . It] same. I cut down a tree and put a portion of it into water observing that it floats; I then infer that another portion would float, and that the wood of any other tree of the same species would do so likewise. It (586)

369.22 operations.] [long footnote, referring to JSM’s Logic, omitted] (586)

369.43 [paragraph] A] [no paragraph] A (582)

370.3 scepticism. . . . We] [ellipsis indicates 3-sentence omission] (582-3)

370.3 it [belief] as] it rather as (583)

370.5 The “anticipation] ‘The anticipation (583)

370.12 undertaken. . . . The] undertaken. In an opposite condition of things, where intellect and knowledge have made very high progress, and constitutional activity is feeble,—a sceptical, hesitating, incredulous temper of mind is the usual characteristic. The (583)

370.16 cases most] cases the most (583)

370.17 correction. . . . Sound] [ellipsis indicates 3-sentence omission] (583)

370.20 race. . . . The] race. Observation is unanimous on the point. The (583-4)

371.7 [paragraph] There] [no paragraph] There (615)

371.13 awakens] wakens (615)

371.34 concerned.] concerned. *[footnote omitted] (161)

371.41 [paragraph] To] [no paragraph] To (638)

372.26 no impression] no one impression (639)

372.34 knowledge of] knowledge to [printer’s error?] (640)

— Mental and Moral Science. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1868.

note: the appendices, separately paginated, are in the first volume; the reference is to App. A, “History of Nominalism and Realism,” 1-24, and App. B, “The Origin of Knowledge,” 34-48, which Grote contributed to Bain’s volumes, and which were reprinted, slightly modified, in Grote’s Aristotle as Appendices I and II.

referred to: 476

— The Senses and the Intellect. London: Parker, 1855.

note: see also 3rd ed., below.

reviewed: 341-73, esp. 352-61

quoted: 356-8, 358-9, 359-60, 360, 361

356.22 an organ] our organs (292)

356.23 instincts. The] instincts. (See his chapter on Instincts, Essays on the Active Powers.) The (293)

356.28 eating. This] eating. [paragraph] This (293)

356.38-9 years of life. . . . [paragraph] But] year of life. At the moment of birth, voluntary action is all but a nonentity. [paragraph] 28. According to this view, therefore, there is a process of acquirement in the establishing of those links of feeling and action that volition implies: this process will be traced and exemplified in the following Book, and also, at some future time, in a detailed discussion of the whole subject of volition. But (293)

357.13-14 action. . . . [paragraph] If] [ellipsis indicates 4-sentence omission] (294)

357.23 movement. . . . The] movement. Once assume that the two waves occur together in the same cerebral seat—a wave of painful emotion, and a wave of spontaneous action tending to subdue the pain,—there would arise an influence out of the former to sustain and prolong the activity of the latter. The (295)

357.47-8 spontaneity. . . . [paragraph] By] [ellipsis indicates 1-paragraph omission] (295-6)

357.48 acquisition, coming under the law of association, the] acquisition, which I shall afterwards dwell upon, the (296)

358.7 “notes of observation] The following are notes of observations (404n)

358.8-9 of their birth] after birth (404n)

358.12 attitude; a] attitude. A (405n)

358.26-7 of its limbs] with two limbs (405n)

358.43 was yet] was as yet (405n)

359.14-15 progress, and locomotion] progress. Locomotion (406n)

359.24-5 mouth. . . . [paragraph] The] mouth. [paragraph] I am not able to specify minutely the exact periods of the various developments in the self-education of those two lambs, but the above are correct statements to the best of my recollection. The (406n)

359.25 three] these (406n)

359.27 sensation] sensations (406n)

360.4 Present] Present (451)

360.4 like] Like (451)

361.14-16 “where . . . state”] It remains for us yet to consider the case where . . . state. (544)

361.18-19 “the . . . trains,”] the . . . trains. [a heading] (562)

361.20 “obstructive association.”] obstructive associations. [a heading] (564)

361.22-3 “combinations . . . experience,”] By means of association, the mind has the power to form combinations . . . experience. (571)

— 3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green, 1868.

referred to: 476,502; see Grote, “Psychology of Aristotle.”

Bekker, Immanuel.

referred to: 39; see Plato, Platonis et quæ vel Platonis. . . .

Bentham, Jeremy. Referred to: 61, 387, 405

— Book of Fallacies. London: Hunt, 1824.

note: in Works, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: Tait, 1843), II. The work was edited by Peregrine Bingham.

referred to: 31

Berkeley, George. Referred to: 348, 465

— The Works of George Berkeley, D. D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, including many of his writings hitherto unpublished, With Prefaces, Annotations, his Life and Letters, and an Account of his Philosophy. Ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871.

note: though the references and quotations, 247-69 passim, to An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision antedate this ed., it is used for ease of reference.

reviewed: 451-71

— Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher, in Works, II, 13-339.

referred to: 465-6

— The Analyst: A discourse addressed to an infidel mathematician, in Works, III, 253-98.

referred to: 467

— Commonplace Book, in Works, IV, 419-502.

referred to: 453

— A Defence of Free-thinking in Mathematics, in Works, III, 299-336.

referred to: 467

— An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in Works, I, 25-112.

quoted: 251, 253

referred to: 247-69 passim, 453-7

251.26 “outness”] 46. From what we have shewn, it is a manifest consequence that the ideas of space, outness, and things placed at a distance are not, strictly speaking, the object of sight; they are not otherwise perceived by the eye than by the ear. (I, 55)

253. 18-21 Distance . . . shorter;] 2. It is, I think, agreed by all that distance . . . shorter. (I, 35)

— Passive Obedience, or the Christian doctrine of not resisting the Supreme Power, in Works, III, 103-39.

referred to: 468

— Querist, in Works, III, 351-405.

quoted: 469

469.13-14 “a ticket . . . this power.”] And whether its true and just idea be not that of a ticket . . . transfer such power? (III, 391)

— Siris: A chain of Philosophical reflexions and inquiries concerning the virtues of Tar-water, and divers other subjects connected together and arising one from another, in Works, II, 359-508.

quoted: 470

referred to: 463

470.16 connection or] connexion and (II, 479)

— Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of Human Knowledge, the incorporeal nature of the Soul, and the immediate providence of a Deity: in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists. Also to open a method for rendering the sciences more easy, useful, and compendious, in Works, I, 255-360.

quoted: 459, 465n, 466

459.18 “shared] My endeavours tend only to unite and place in a clearer light that truth which was before shared (I, 359)

459.18 philosophers:] the philosophers:—(I, 359)

459.19-20 those things . . . real things;] [in italics] (I, 359)

459.20-1 the things . . . mind.] [in italics] (I, 359)

465n.7-8 “to apply . . . perceived”] Words are of arbitrary imposition; and, since men are used to apply . . . perceived, and I do not pretend to alter their perceptions, it follows that, as men have said before, several saw the same thing, so they may, upon like occasions, still continue to use the same phrase without any deviation either from propriety of language, or the truth of things. (I, 343-4)

465n.8-9 “philosophers . . . identity,”] But if the term same be used in the acceptation of philosophers, . . . identity, then, according to their sundry definitions of this notion (for it is not yet agreed wherein that philosophic identity consists), it may or may not be possible for divers persons to perceive the same thing. (I, 344)

465n.9 “all . . . word.”] But who sees not that all . . . word? to wit, whether what is perceived by different persons may yet have the term same applied to it? (I, 344)

465n.10 “Suppose] Or, suppose (I, 344)

465n.16 abstracted idea of identity] [in italics] (I, 344)

466.17 “sceptics and atheists”] [see title]

— A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge wherein the chief causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, with the grounds of scepticism, atheism, and irreligion, are inquired into, in Works, I, 131-238.

quoted: 460, 461, 463

460.8 “that] To this I answer, that (I, 184)

460.20 “not excited from within”] [see above, 514.9-14]

461.1 spirit does] spirit actually does (I, 157)

461.16-17 “the configuration . . . corpuscles,”] To say, therefore, that these are the effects of powers resulting from the configuration, . . . corpuscles, must certainly be false. (I, 168)

461.19 “but] For, since they and every part of them exist only in the mind, it follows that there is nothing in them but what is perceived: but (I, 168)

461.24 anything. Whence] anything: neither can it be the resemblance or pattern of any active being, as is evident from sect. 8. Whence (I, 168)

463.7 “atheism and scepticism.”] [see full title]

Bible. New Testament. Referred to: 437

— I Corinthians.

note: the quotation (of 2:9) is indirect.

quoted: 421

— Luke.

note: the indirect quotation (of 23:34) is in a quotation from Thirlwall’s translation of Niebuhr.

quoted: 242

— Matthew.

note: the indirect quotation (of 23:24) is in a quotation from Thirlwall’s translation of Niebuhr.

quoted: 243

— Old Testament. Referred to: 437

— I Samuel.

note: the reference, which is in a quotation from Bacon, is to Chap. 16.

referred to: 13n

Boeckh, August.Ueber die vierjährigen Sonnenkriese der Alten, vorzüglich den Eudoxischen. Berlin: Reimer, 1863.

note: the quotation (from p. 150), in JSM’s translation, derives from Grote.

quoted: 388-9

388.39-389.1 “he . . . lectures.”] [translated from Grote’s quotation:] Dort lebte er als Sophist, sagt Sotion: das heisst, er lehrte, und hielt Vorträge. (Grote, Plato, I, 123n; Boeckh, 150.)

Boethius.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 489

Brentano, Franz.Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom νου̑ς ποιητικός. Mainz: Kirchheim, 1867.

referred to: 504

— Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg: Herder’sche Verlagshandlung, 1862.

referred to: 494-5

Brown, Thomas. Referred to: 19, 247, 341, 352, 491

— Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Tait; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820.

note: concerning the reference at 352, it may be noted that Brown frequently uses the term “mental physiology.”

referred to: 261, 352, 360

Buckland, Frank. Referred to: 486

Burgerdicius. See Burgersdyk, Francis.

Burgersdyk, Francis.Institutionam logicarum libri duo. Cambridge: Field, 1660.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 27n

Burke, Edmund.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 325

Butler, Samuel.Hudibras. Ed. Zachary Grey. 2 vols. London: Vernor and Hood, et al., 1801.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 30

30.31 —“All] For rhetoric, he could not ope / His mouth, but out there flew a trope: / And when he happen’d to break off / I’ th’ middle of his speech, or cough, / H’ had hard words ready to shew why, / And tell what rules he did it by; / Else, when with greatest art he spoke, / You’d think he talk’d like other folk: / For all (Part I, Canto I, lines 80-90; I.12-13)

Byron, George Gordon.

note: the references derive from Grote.

referred to: 279

— The Works of Lord Byron. Ed. Thomas Moore. 17 vols. London: Murray, 1832-33, XI.

note: formerly in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation is a translation from Goethe, which was possibly made by Goethe himself and sent by him to Byron (see Byron’s Works, XI, 71n, immediately preceding the passage from which the quotation is taken); Moore also gives the reference to the German printed version in Kunst und Altherthum; the reference given on 279 is to the edition of Goethe’s Werke in JSM’s library, Somerville College. Actually JSM takes the quotation from Grote’s “Grecian Legends and Early History”; cf. the collation s.v.

quoted: 279

referred to: 280

279.15 [paragraph] He [Byron] has] [no paragraph] He has (72)

279.15 him. There] him. He has repeatedly portrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating. There (72)

279.16 and in] and which, in (72)

279.18 or presence] or actual presence (72)

279.19 lady.] lady.* [footnote omitted; it is from this footnote that Grote quotes Moore’s comment which is quoted (from Grote) by JSM at 279.10-13] (72)

279.21 to whom suspicion] on whom any suspicion (72)

279.22 after. This] after. [paragraph] This (72)

— “Manfred,” in ibid., XI, 2-75.

note: the reference, which concerns Goethe’s comments on Byron, derives from Grote’s “Grecian Legends and Early History,” q.v.

referred to: 279

Cæsar, Claudius.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grey used by Grote.

referred to: 285n

Cæsar, Julius.

note: the references are in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 284

Calixtus II (Pope). Referred to: 283

Callias (son of Hipponicus).

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 154

Callicles.

note: the references at 97-150 passim are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias, in which Callicles is a character.

referred to: 97-150 passim, 396, 397n

Carlyle, Thomas. Referred to: 387, 433

— “Novalis,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 5 vols. London: Fraser, 1840, II.

note: this ed. probably was in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation is from von Hardenberg (q.v.), but there can be little doubt that JSM took it from Carlyle.

quoted: 466

Cephalus.

note: the references at 222 are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Parmenides, in which Cephalus is a character.

referred to: 222

Chærephon.

note: the references at 97-150 passim are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias, in which Chærephon is a character; that at 155 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 97-150 passim, 155

Charlemagne. Referred to: 283-4

Charles II (of England). Referred to: 467

Charmides.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Charmides, in which Charmides is a character.

referred to: 175-8, 185-6

Cheselden, William. “An Account of some Observations made by a young Gentleman, who was born blind, or lost his Sight so early, that he had no Remembrance of ever having seen, and was couch’d between 13 and 14 Years of Age,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, XXXV (1728), 447-50.

note: the quotation and references derive from Bailey; Cheselden’s “Account” is reprinted by Fraser in his edition of Berkeley’s Works (q.v.), I, 444-6.

quoted: 264

referred to: 263-4, 267, 267n-268n, 454, 457 .

264.27 He] When he first saw, he was so far from making any Judgment about Distances, that he thought all Objects whatever touch’d his Eyes, (as he express’d it) as what he felt, did his Skin; and thought no Objects so agreeable as those which were smooth and regular, tho’ he could form no Judgment of their Shape, or guess what it was in any Object that was pleasing to him: He (448)

264.32 relate. Having] relate; Having (448)

264.35 “So, puss, I . . . time.”] So Puss! I . . . Time. (448)

Christ. See Jesus.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Referred to: 510

— Letters to Atticus (Latin and English). Trans. E. O. Winstedt. 3 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1912.

note: this ed. used for ease of reference. The Elzevir ed. of 1642 is in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 378

378.28 “Socratici viri”] O Socrates et Socratici viri! numquam vobis gratiam referam. (III, 230; xiv.9)

Cimon (Kimon).

note: the references at 133, 141, 143 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias; that at 334 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 133, 141, 143, 334, 435

Cleisthenes (Kleisthenes).

note: the reference at 326 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 326-7

Cleomenes (Kleomenes) (of Sparta).

note: the reference at 300 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 300, 337n

Cleon. Referred to: 323, 331

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor.Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions. 2 vols. in 1. London: Rest Fenner, 1817.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 354

— “Notes on John Smith,” in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge. 4 vols. London: Pickering, 1836-39, III, 415-19.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation is indirect.

quoted: 463

Comte, Auguste. Referred to: 443

Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de. Referred to: 93, 94, 95, 355, 445

Conington, John. “Grote’s History of Greece,” Edinburgh Review, XCIV (July, 1851), 204-28.

referred to: 309n

Cooper, Anthony Ashley.

note: i.e., the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.

referred to: 466

Corinna. Referred to: 315, 315n

Cousin, Victor. Referred to: 443

— Cours de philosophie. Histoire de la philosophie du dix-huitième siècle. École sensualiste—Locke. 2 vols. Brussels: Hauman, 1836.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 345

— Fragments philosophiques. Paris: Sautelet, 1826.

referred to: 355

— Trans. Œuvres de Platon. See under Plato.

— See also Plato, Lachès, ou du courage, in Œuvres, trans. Cousin.

Crackanthorp. See Crakanthorp.

Crakanthorp, Richard.Logicæ libri quinque: de prædicabilibus, de prædicamentis, de syllogismo, de syllogismo demonstrativo, de syllogismo probabili. London: Teage, 1622.

note: JSM’s spelling is Crackanthorp; his reference to Cap. 5 is mistaken, the passage being in Cap. 6.

quoted: 26

referred to: 27n

26.34 “implicat manifestam contradictionem,”] Hoc enim cogitare implicat manifestam contradictionem: nam in eo ipso quòd est rationalis, habet in se radicem ac necessariam causam à quâ fluit, & in quâ implicite continetur potentia ridendi: quare si quis cogitare posset hominem carere hâc potentia, æque cogitare posset hominem esse rationâlem, & non esse rationalem, vel esse Hominem & non esse hominem. (29)

Cratylus (Kratylus).

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 429

Critias.

note: the references at 175-86 passim are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Charmides, in which Critias is a character.

referred to: 166n, 175-86 passim, 327, 385

Critobulus.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167, 171

Criton.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167, 171

Crœsus. Referred to: 295, 299

Ctesippus.

note: the references at 210-21 passim are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Lysis, in which Ctesippus is a character.

referred to: 210-21 passim

Cyrus. Referred to: 311

Damon.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches.

referred to: 197, 206, 208

Darius.

note: the reference at 80 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; that at 121 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias; that at 213 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Lysis.

referred to: 80, 121, 213

Davy, Humphry. See Davy, John.

Davy, John, ed. The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. 9 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1839-40.

note: the reference (actually an indirect quotation), which is in a quotation from Bailey, is to a passage from Humphry Davy’s notebooks quoted in John Davy’s “Memoirs of the Life of Sir Humphry Davy,” Vol. I of The Collected Works.

referred to: 261

Demetrius Phalereus. Referred to: 336n

Democritus (Demokritus). Referred to: 44n, 428

Demodocus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

De Morgan, Augustus. Referred to: 468

Demosthenes.

note: the reference at 243 is in a quotation from Niebuhr; that at 298 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 243, 298, 312-13, 317

— Contra Lacritum (“Against Lacritus”), in Private Orations (Greek and English). Trans. A. T. Murray. 3 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936, I, 278-314.

referred to: 389

— De Corona, in De Corona and De Falsa Legatione (Greek and English). Trans. C. A. Vince and J. H. Vince. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1926, 18-228.

referred to: 312

Descartes, René. Referred to: 341, 451

Diogenes Laertius.Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Greek and English). Trans. R. D. Hicks. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1925.

note: the “Life of Socrates” referred to at 242 is in Vol. I, 148-76. One of the passages quoted at 44n is also quoted at 425.

quoted: 44n, 425

referred to: 242, 382

Dion.

note: the reference at 243 is in a quotation from Niebuhr.

referred to: 243, 311

Dionysius (the elder, of Syracuse). Referred to: 311

Dionysius (the younger, of Syracuse).

note: the reference at 243 is in a quotation from Niebuhr.

referred to: 243, 311

Dionysius (of Halicarnassus). On Literary Composition: Being the Greek Text of De Compositione Verborum (Greek and English). Trans. W. Rhys. London: Macmillan, 1910.

note: this ed. used for ease of reference.

referred to: 386

Dionysodorus. Referred to: 393

Du Trieu, Philippus.Manuductio ad logicam, sive dialectica studiosæ juventuti ad logicam præparandæ. London: printed McMillan, 1826.

note: this reprint, which was formerly in JSM’s library, Somerville College (Grote’s copy is in the University of London Library), of the 1662 edition (Oxford: Oxlad and Pocock; also formerly in JSM’s library, Somerville College) was made for the group, including JSM, studying at Grote’s house in the 1820s (see Autobiography, ed. Stillinger, 74).

referred to: 20, 20n, 27n

Edward I (of England).

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 284

Eginhard.Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of St. Gall. Trans. and ed. by A. J. Grant. London: Chatto and Windus, 1922.

note: the reference is general; this ed. is cited merely for the title.

referred to: 283

Elizabeth I (of England).

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 301

Empedocles (Empedokles). Referred to: 210, 380

Epaminondas. Referred to: 311, 332

Ephialtes. Referred to: 327

Epicurus. Referred to: 61, 477

Epigenes.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Eryximachus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 86

Eucleides (Eukleides) (the Megaric). Referred to: 378

Euclid. Referred to: 26

Euclides (the archon). Referred to: 309

Eudoxus. Referred to: 388

Euœnus (of Paros).

note: the reference at 85 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; that at 155 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 85, 155

Euripides.

note: the reference at 86 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; that at 160n is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 86, 160n, 317

— Antiope.

note: this drama is not extant; the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 122

Euthydemus. Referred to: 393

Euthyphron.

note: the references are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Euthyphron, in which Euthyphron is a character.

referred to: 187-96 passim

Fabyan, Robert.The New Chronicles of England and France. In Two Parts. Named by Himself the Concordance of Histories. Ed. Henry Ellis. London: Rivington, 1811.

note: the reference, which is in a quotation from Grote, is general; this ed. cited merely for the title.

referred to: 284

Ferrier, James Frederick. Referred to: 343

—“Berkeley and Idealism,” Blackwood’s Magazine, LI (June, 1842), 812-30.

referred to: 266

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Referred to: 345, 387

Fourier, Charles. Referred to: 329, 387

Fraser, Alexander Campbell, ed. The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., formerly Bishop of Cloyne, including many of his writings hitherto unpublished, With Prefaces, Annotations, his Life and Letters, and an Account of his Philosophy. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871.

reviewed: 451-71; see also Berkeley, Works.

quoted: 470

470.21-5 “the . . . remarkable,” . . . “every . . . thought. It . . . letters.”] On the whole, the . . . remarkable; although curiously it has been much overlooked even by those curious in the history and bibliography of British philosophy. Every . . . thought. There is the unexpectedness of genius in its whole movement. It . . . letters, and it draws this Platonic spirit from a thing of sense so commonplace as Tar. (II, 343-4)

Funccii. See Funck.

Funck, Johann.Chronologia. Hoc est, omnium temporum et annorum ab initio mundi, usque ad annum a nato Christo 1552. Wittenberg: Hoffmann, 1601.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grey that JSM quotes from Grote’s History. The reference to anno mundi 4017 is on p. 94 of this edition. The reference to anno mundi 3105 is not in this, or the 1st ed. (Basil, 1554); it is, however, the date given in Holinshed’s Chronicles (in the History, Bk. II, Chap. v).

referred to: 285n

Galileo, Galilei. Referred to: 483

Geoffrey of Monmouth.The British History of Geoffrey of Monmouth. In 12 Books. Trans. A. Thompson. A new ed. rev. and collected by A. J. Giles. London: Bohn, 1842.

note: the reference, which is in a quotation from Grote, is general; this ed. cited merely for the title.

referred to: 284

George I (of England). Referred to: 467

George II (of England). Referred to: 467

Gibbon, Edward.The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776-88.

referred to: 337n

Glaucon. Referred to: 396

Goethe, Wolfgang von. “Manfred, a dramatic poem by Lord Byron,” in Werke. 55 vols. Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1828-33, XLVI, 216-20.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College. In this ed. the essay appears in the section “Englische Literatur.” The quotation (in translation) and references are taken from Grote’s “Grecian Legends and Early History”; Grote took them from Moore (s.v. Byron, Works).

quoted: 279

referred to: 280

Gorgias (of Leontium).

note: the reference at 85 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; those at 97-150 are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias, in which Gorgias is a main character; that at 154 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 85, 97-150 passim, 154, 394

Grafton, Richard.Grafton’s Chronicle; or, History of England, from the Year 1189 to 1558 inclusive. London: Johnson, 1809.

note: the reference, which is in a quotation from Grote, is general; this ed. cited merely for the title.

referred to: 284

Grey, Zachary.Critical, Historical and Explanatory Notes on Shakspeare. 2 vols. London: Manby, 1754.

note: the quotation is in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 285n

Grote, George.Aristotle. Ed. Alexander Bain and G. Croom Robertson. 2 vols. London: Murray, 1872.

note: at 476 Mill is referring to Appendix I, pp. 243-68, and Appendix II, pp. 284-300, of the Aristotle, which were first published, in slightly different form, as appendices to Bain’s Mental and Moral Science (1868), q.v.

reviewed: 475-510

quoted: 478, 489, 492-3, 494, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500n, 501n, 508, 509

478.4-6 “A . . . of theory . . . traditions,”] To him [Tisias] succeeded Thrasymachus, next Theodorus, and various others; from each of whom partial improvements and additions were derived, until at length we have now (it is Aristotle that speaks) a . . . of rhetorical theory . . . traditions. (II, 131) [cf. 478g-g,h]

478.10-11 application. . . . The syllogism] application. [ellipsis indicates 4-sentence omission] The Syllogism (II, 132-3)

489.7 “how much] If I had time to carry the account farther, I should have been able to show how much (I, vii)

494.3-5 “first . . . predication. . . . We . . . is”] So, too, we . . . is. We see by this last remark, how distinctly Aristotle assigned a double meaning to est: first . . . predication. (I, 181-2)

496.22-4 “displays . . . Ideas,” . . . “and] In this account of Memory and Reminiscence, Aristotle displays . . . Ideas. But these principles are operative not less in memory than in reminiscence; and (II, 217)

497.16 the axioms] But, along with these, Aristotle includes another matter also: viz., the critical examination of the Axioms (II, 140)

497.18 foremost] firmest (II, 140)

498.2-3 (“and . . . Middle”)] Thus it is, that he introduces us to the Maxim of Contradiction, and . . . Middle. (II, 141)

498.12 goes] Yet he nevertheless goes (II, 143)

498.19 first. . . . In] first. Still, though in (II, 143)

498.21 Principii.” . . . “Aristotle] Principii, Aristotle (II, 143)

498.25 words.] words, defining them in a manner significant alike to himself and to others,—each word to have either one fixed meaning, or a limited number of different meanings, clear and well defined. (II, 144)

500n.24 “true to the believer, false to the disbeliever”] He proclaimed that each man was a measure for himself alone, and that every opinion was true to the believer, false to the disbeliever; while they criticize him as if he had said—Every opinion is alike true and false; thus leaving out the very qualification which forms the characteristic feature of his theory. (II, 150-1)

501n.7-8 “the autonomy . . . himself;”] This is an appeal to other men, as judges each for himself and in his own case: it is a tacit recognition of the autonomy . . . himself. (II, 150)

508.1-3 “First . . . exercise.” . . . “Secondly] First . . . exercise; and, if a methodized procedure be laid down, both parties will be able to conduct it more easily as well as more efficaciously. Secondly (II, 391)

508.7-12 modify.” . . . “Thirdly] modify. Thirdly (I, 391)

508.26-509.1 sides.” . . . “When] sides. When (I, 63-4)

509.5 one another] each other (I, 64)

509.7 defence. The same] defence. [paragraph] This same (I, 64)

— “Grecian Legends and Early History,” Westminster Review, XXXIX (May, 1843), 285-328.

note: the article is ostensibly a review of B. G. Niebuhr’s Griechische Heroen Geschichten; it is reprinted in Grote’s Minor Works (London: Murray, 1873), 75-134, where the relevant passage occurs on 80 ff. JSM’s Byron, Goethe, and Moore references (q.v.) derive from this passage, in which Grote quotes Moore and Goethe (in translation), the Goethe passage deriving from Moore.

quoted: 279, 279-80, 280-1, 286-7

referred to: 279

279.10-13 “numerous fictions” . . . “palmed upon the world” as his “romantic . . . existed,”] To these exaggerated, or wholly false, notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic . . . existed, have no doubt considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representations of his life and character long current on the Continent, that it may be questioned whether the real ‘flesh and blood’ hero of these pages—the social, practical-minded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron—may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear but an ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage.” (289; Grote is quoting Moore’s Life of Byron, q.v.)

279.15 He [Byron] has] He has (289; here and for the next four entries, Grote is quoting from Goethe as translated in Moore’s edition of Byron)

279.16 and in] and which (we cite the translation as we find it) in (289)

279.17 Astarte] Astarté (289)

279.19-23 When . . . after.] [in italics] (289)

279.21 to whom] on whom (289)

280.1 hero] hero (290)

280.9 vox. Some] vox: some (290)

280.9 forward and] forward or (290)

280.16 god] God (291)

280.17 omniloquent Zeus] Omniloquent Zeus* [footnote omitted] (291)

280.42 being] having been (293)

281.7 nearer the] nearer to (293)

287.3 exhibit.”] exhibit—γιγνομενα μὲν, κὰι ἀεὶ ἐσόμενα, ἕως ἂν ἡ ἀυτὴ ϕύσις τω̑ν ἀνϕρώπων ἠ̑: (305)

— History of Greece. 12 vols. London: Murray, 1846-56.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College, heavily (for JSM) annotated, esp. in Vols. I and II, but throughout, even in Vol. XII (1856), which he did not review. Vols. I and II (1846) are the subject of JSM’s first major review (273-305 above); Vols. IX and X (1852), and XI (1853) are ostensibly the subject of his second major review (309-37 above), but he also deals in large part with the intervening volumes (III and IV, 1847; V and VI, 1849; VII and VIII, 1850), which he had reviewed in the Spectator (see the Textual Introduction, lxxxv-lxxxvi above). Grote’s work is divided into two very unequal parts: Part I, “Legendary Greece” (Vol. I; Vol. II, 1-277), and Part II, “Historical Greece” (Vol. II, 279-615; Vols. III-XII).

reviewed: 273-305 (Vols. I & II), 309-37 (Vols. IX, X, XI)

quoted: 274, 275n, 277-8, 284-5, 287, 292-3, 296, 296-7, 297, 297-8, 298, 298-9, 300-1, 301-2, 303, 311, 316-17, 318-19, 319-20, 325-6, 334-6

referred to: 377, 378, 383, 388, 510

274.30-2 “First, to . . . readers, the general picture of the Grecian world,”] [paragraph] It is that general picture which an historian of Greece is required first to . . . readers;—a picture not merely such as to delight the imagination by brilliancy of colouring and depth of sentiment, but also suggestive and improving to the reason. (I, vii)

274.33 “The historian,” he says, “will] Not omitting the points of resemblance as well as of contrast with the better-known forms of modern society, he will (I, vii)

274.35-6 stationary; and to set forth the action] stationary. He will develope the action (I, vii)

274.38 inferior] superior (I, viii) [treated as typographical error]

275n.8 “feminine” . . . “masculine”] And it must be confessed that what may be called the feminine attributes of the Greek mind—their religious and poetical vein—here [in the first two volumes] appear in disproportionate relief, as compared with the masculine capacities—with those powers of acting, organising, judging, and speculating, which will be revealed in the forthcoming volumes. (I, xvii; see the Textual Introduction, lxxxvi above)

277.30 ground] grounds (I, 572)

277.33 cotemporary] contemporary (I, 572)

277.35-6 improbabilities. It] improbabilities; it (I, 572)

278.2-3 fact. [paragraph] The ] fact. [no paragraph; 3-page omission; paragraph] The (I, 573, 576)

278.5 the presumption] the usual presumption, (I, 576)

278.11 inapplicable,] [footnote omitted] (I, 576)

278.17-18 course. [paragraph] It] course. How active and prominent such tendencies were among the early Greeks, the extraordinary beauty and originality of their epic poetry may teach us. [paragraph] It (I, 577)

278.20 truth.] [footnote omitted which contains reference to Grote’s “Grecian Legends and Early History,” q.v.] (I, 577)

278.26 eagerly believed] eagerly welcomed (I, 578)

278.34 world—legends] world, and of which no country was more fertile than Greece—legends (I, 578)

284.22 nations. With] nations: with (I, 639)

284.24 faith. The] faith: the (I, 639)

284.24 downwards,] downward (I, 639)

284.27 Kings] kings (I, 639)

284n.4 p.131] p.131, note. [corresponding to p.128n in the ed. here cited] (I, 639n)

284n.5 Francus, the son] Francus son (I, 640n)

284.36 Agamemnon.] [footnote omitted] (I, 640)

285.4 deface] efface (I, 640)

285.5 deeds. They] deeds: they (I, 640)

285.6 their setting] thus setting [printer’s error?] (I, 640)

285.7 generally. Yet, in spite] generally². [footnote and 1 1/2 pages omitted] [paragraph] Yet in spite of the general belief of so many centuries—in spite of the concurrent persuasion of historians and poets—in spite of the declaration of Milton, extorted from his feelings rather than from his reason, that this long line of quasi-historical kings and exploits could not be all unworthy of belief—in spite (I, 640-2)

285.10 King] king (I, 642)

285n.3 anachronisms] anachronisms (I, 642n)

285n.4 anno mundi . . . anno mundi] anno mundi . . . anno mundi (I, 642n)

287.19-22 “Though . . . story;”] For though . . . story. (I, 570)

292.6 The] [no paragraph] The (II, 235)

292.13 Iliad.] [footnote omitted] (II, 235)

292.20 Achillêis. [paragraph] Nothing] [concluding sentence of paragraph, and further 2 pages omitted] (II, 236-8)

292.23 calamities of] calamities to (II, 238)

292.31 to be] to me (II, 239)

292.36 books,] [16-paragraph footnote omitted] (II, 239)

292.41 and following] and in the following (II, 243)

293.7 strives] shines [printer’s error?] (II, 244)

293.10 wounds;] [footnote omitted] (II, 244)

293.13 spoil] to spoil (II, 244)

293.14 heroes. I] heroes: I (II, 244)

293.16 excess and] excess of [printer’s error?] (II, 244)

296.10-14 “that . . . necessity;”] The tenth book, or Doloneia, though adapted specially to the place in which it stands, agrees with the books between the first and eighth in belonging only to the general picture of the war, without helping forward the march of the Achillêis; yet it seems conceived in a lower vein, and one is unwilling to believe that . . . necessity¹. [footnote omitted] (II, 267-8)

296.36-297.1 “the . . . Achilles,”] Nor is the reasoning of Nitzsch of much force to rebut the presumptions hence arising; for the . . . Achilles, and would have no painful feeling, requiring to be relieved, in leaving off at the moment in which it is gratified. (II, 266)

297.14-15 antipathy, and] antipathy, or [printer’s error?] (II, 108)

297.16 existence;”] existence. (II, 108)

297.17-19 “the . . . The Laws . . . sympathies.”] In view of the latter [the citizen of historical Athens], the . . . “The Laws” . . . sympathies: but of this discriminated conception of positive law and positive morality³ [footnote omitted], the germ only can be detected in the Homeric poems. (II, 110-11)

298.2 produced. Didactic] produced: didactic (II, 105)

298.27 possessors. But] possessors: for the pass of Thermopylæ between Thessaly and Phocis, that of Kithærôn between Bœotia and Attica, or the mountainous range of Oneion and Geraneia along the Isthmus of Corinth, were positions which an inferior number of brave men could hold against a much greater force of assailants. But (II, 298)

298.40-1 city communities] city-communities¹ [footnote omitted] (II, 299)

299.6 æsthetical. . . .] æsthetical. For these reasons, the indefinite multiplication of self-governing towns, though in truth a phænomenon common to ancient Europe as contrasted with the large monarchies of Asia, appears more marked among the ancient Greeks than elsewhere: and there cannot be any doubt that they owe it, in a considerable degree, to the multitude of insulating boundaries which the configuration of their country presented. (II, 299)

299.7 same [geographical] causes] same causes (II, 299)

299.13 men. . . .] men: moreover the contrast between the population of Greece itself, for the seven centuries preceding the Christian æra, and the Greeks of more modern times, is alone enough to inculcate reserve in such speculations. (II, 300)

299.18 rocks] rocks¹ [footnote omitted] (II, 300)

300.20 [paragraph] Taking [paragraph] The present is not the occasion to enter at length into that combination of causes which partly sapped, partly overthrew, both the institutions of Lycurgus and the power of Sparta; but taking (II, 527)

300.29 of the] of their (II, 527)

301.8 of inequality] of all inequality (II, 528)

301.13 receded. . . . We] receded. It was thus that the fancies, longings, and indirect suggestions of the present assumed the character of recollections out of the early, obscure, and extinct historical past. Perhaps the philosopher Sphærus of Borysthenês (the friend and companion of Kleomenês¹ [footnote omitted] and the disciple of Zeno the Stoic), author of works now lost both on Lycurgus and Socrates and on the constitution of Sparta, may have been one of those who gave currency to such an hypothesis; and we (II, 529)

301.13 that [this hypothesis] would] that if advanced, it would (II, 529)

301.18 Poor-law] Poor Law (II, 530)

301.28 Lived] From the early age of seven years throughout his whole life, as youth and man no less than as boy, the Spartan citizen lived (II, 505)

301.35 night] nights (II, 505)

301.35-6 belonged. . . . [paragraph] The] belonged. [ellipsis indicates 11-page omission] [no paragraph] The (II, 505, 516)

301.39 character] character¹ [footnote omitted] (II, 517)

302.3 conceived] conceive (II, 517)

302.8 war] war¹ [footnote omitted] (II, 518)

302.10 abroad. . . . When] abroad. Such exclusive tendency will appear less astonishing if we consider the very early and insecure period at which the Lycurgean institutions arose, when none of those guarantees which afterwards maintained the peace of the Hellenic world had as yet become effective—no constant habits of intercourse, no custom of meeting in Amphiktyony from the distant parts of Greece, no common or largely frequented festivals, no multiplication of proxenies (or standing tickets of hospitality) between the important cities, no pacific or industrious habits anywhere. When (II, 518)

302.14 them . . . the] them—we shall not be surprised that the language which Brasidas in the Peloponnesian war addresses to his army in reference to the original Spartan settlement, was still more powerfully present to the mind of Lycurgus four centuries earlier—“We are a few in the midst of many enemies, we can only maintain ourselves by fighting and conquering².” [footnote omitted] [paragraph] Under such circumstances, the (II, 518-19)

302.30 us] us¹ [footnote omitted] (II, 519)

303.18-20 founder;” . . . “of] founder. Now this was one of the main circumstances (among others which will hereafter be mentioned) of (II, 477)

311.22 “despot’s progress.”] [paragraph] Thus was consummated the fifth or closing act of the despot’s progress, rendering Dionysius master of the lives and fortunes of his fellow-countrymen. (X, 616)

316.41-317.1 “that . . . Demos of Pnyx,”*] A hundred years hence, we shall find that sentiment unanimous and potent among the enterprising masses of Athens and Peiræeus, and shall be called upon to listen to loud complaints of the difficulty of dealing with “that . . . Dêmus of Pnyx”—so Aristophanes¹ [footnote gives, inter alia, the same text and reference as JSM’s footnote] calls the Athenian people to their faces, with a freedom which shows that he at least counted on their good temper. (IV, 138)

318.2 than imitators] than mere imitators [concerning all the variant readings from here to 319.3 see JSM’s footnote, 319n] (VI, 193)

318.3 its aim] its permanent aim (VI, 193)

318.4 one;] man: (VI, 193)

318.4-6 while in . . . by worth] while looking to public affairs and to claims of individual influence, every man’s chance of advancement is determined not by party-favour but by real worth (VI, 193)

318.6 his particular] his own particular (VI, 193)

318.7 back] back² [footnote omitted] (VI, 193)

318.7-8 he . . . state] he really has the means of benefiting the city (VI, 193)

318.9 intolerance] tolerance (VI, 193) [treated as typographical error]

318.9-10 tastes and pursuits] daily pursuits (VI, 193)

318.10 does] may do (VI, 193)

318.11 we put] we ever put (VI, 193)

318.11 looks] looks³ [footnote omitted] (VI, 193)

318.11-12 which are offensive . . . damage.] Which, though they do no positive damage, are not the less sure to offend. (VI, 193-4)

318.13 misconduct in] wrong on (VI, 194)

318.15-16 of the wronged, and such as, though unwritten, are] of wrongful sufferers, and even such others as, though not written, are (VI, 194)

318.19 arrangements] establishments (VI, 194)

318.19 pain and annoyance] the sense of discomfort (VI, 194)

318.21-2 as of those] as those (VI, 194)

318.22 produce] grow (VI, 194)

318.24 any one] even an enemy either (VI, 194)

318.25 or spectacle . . . it:] or any spectacle, the full view of which he may think advantageous to him; (VI, 194)

318.26 artifices . . . spirit,] quackery than to our native bravery, (VI, 194)

318.30-2 strength. . . . [paragraph] We combine taste for the beautiful with frugality of life, and cultivate intellectual speculation] strength. [ellipsis indicates 5-sentence omission] [no paragraph] For we combine elegance of taste with simplicity of life, and we pursue knowledge (VI, 195)

318.32 enervated] enervated¹ [footnote omitted] (VI, 195)

318.32-3 for the service . . . talk;] not for talking and ostentation, but as a real help in the proper season: (VI, 195-6)

318.34 himself so] his poverty (VI, 196)

318.34-5 may . . . his] may rather incur reproach for not actually keeping himself out of (VI, 196)

318.35-7 Our . . . matters;] The magistrates who discharge public trusts fulfil their domestic duties also—the private citizen, while engaged in professional business, has competent knowledge on public affairs: (VI, 196)

318.37-8 politics . . . one. Far from] these latter not as harmless, but as useless. Moreover, we always hear and pronounce on public matters, when discussed by our leaders—or perhaps strike out for ourselves correct reasonings about them: far from (VI, 196)

318.39-40 think . . . arrives] complain only if we are not told what is to be done before it becomes our duty to do it (VI, 196)

318.40-1 a . . . action] the most remarkable manner these two qualities—extreme boldness in execution (VI, 196)

318.42 daring, debate induces] boldness—debate introduces (VI, 196)

319.1 ought] men are properly (VI, 196)

319.2 accurately] precisely (VI, 196)

319.24 [paragraph] The stress which he [Pericles] lays] [paragraph] But even making allowance for this [Pericles’ contrast of Sparta and Athens], the stress which he lays (VI, 200)

319.27 pursuits,] pursuit— (VI, 200)

320.17 Xenophon] Xenophon¹ [footnote omitted] (VI, 201)

325.13 [paragraph] Democracy] [no paragraph] Democracy (IV, 237)

325.32 Herodotus] Herodotus¹ [footnote omitted] (IV, 238)

325.38-9 results. . . . Among] results, for a Grecian community. Among (IV, 238)

326.4 sedition] sedition² [footnote omitted] (IV, 238)

326.10 Pericles] Periklês¹ [footnote omitted] (IV, 239)

326.15 agony] agony² [footnote omitted] (IV, 239)

334.32 Pericles] Periklês¹ [footnote omitted] (VI, 386)

335.12 circumstances] circumstances¹ [footnote omitted] (VI, 387)

335.18 it. First] it: First (VI, 387)

335.27 aggrandizement. Nikias] aggrandisement: Nikias (VI, 388)

335.46 another] another¹ [footnote omitted] (VI, 389)

— Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates. 3 vols. London: Murray, 1865.

note: some of the quotations are indirect. In a note (not quoted by JSM) to the passage cited on 417-18, Grote, while praising JSM’s Utilitarianism, criticizes him for calling Socrates’ doctrine Utilitarian.

reviewed: 377-440

quoted: 380n, 381, 382, 389, 390, 390n, 392, 392-3, 410, 411, 412, 413, 413-14, 414, 415, 423, 424-5, 427, 428-30, 430, 431, 433-4

referred to: 500n-501n, 510

380n.1-2 “an axiom” . . . “occupying] [paragraph] This axiom is to be noted as occupying (I, 15n)

381.11 He adopted] Not thinking that water, or any other known and definite substance fulfilled these conditions, he adopted (I, 5)

381.14 further] farther (I, 5)

381.15-16 force, . . . indestructible.] [two footnotes omitted] (I, 5)

381.23-6 “which . . . future,” . . . “really . . . apprehension,” . . . “is . . . divided,”] We talk of things generated or destroyed—things coming into being or going out of being—but this phrase can have no application to the self-existent Ens, which . . . future. [footnoteomitted] Nothing is really . . . apprehension. [footnote omitted] In like manner we perceive plurality of objects, and divide objects into parts. But Ens is . . . divided. [footnote omitted] (I, 21)

382.4 “who] [paragraph] It is Zeno who (I, 96)

389.23-4 “one . . . writings.”] I think it is one . . . writings, as an exposition of [continued in next quotation] (II, 45)

390.5 “of] [see previous entry] (II, 45)

390.11 general] [footnote omitted] (II, 46)

390n.5 received] conceived (I, 252n)

390n.6 and] the (I, 252n) [cf. 390b-b]

390n.7 antipathy,’ &c.] antipathy, &c. (I, 252n) [treated as typographical error]

390.13 “for] He has sailed along triumphantly upon the stream of public sentiment, accepting all the established beliefs, appealing to his hearers with all those familiar phrases, round which the most powerful associations are grouped; and taking for (II, 47)

390.16-19 “teaches . . . they:”] He describes instructively the machinery operative in the community for ensuring obedience to what they think right: he teaches, . . . they. (II, 73)

390.19 “what he] What he (II, 77)

392.31 “those] I [Socrates] think that those (I, 390)

392.32 wilfully,] wilfully— (I, 390)

392.32 unwillingly.”] unwillingly. (I, 390)

392.34 if this dialogue had] [paragraph] Now, if the dialogue just concluded had (I, 394)

393.1 Athens.] [footnote omitted] (I, 394)

410.33 [paragraph] In] [no paragraph] In (I, 258)

410.35 afterwards.] [footnote omitted] (I, 258)

410.36 further] farther (I, 258)

410.40 opinions.] [footnote omitted] (I, 258)

411.2 notions.”] notions— τὸ γὰρ ὀρθου̑σθαι γνώμαν, ὀδυνᾳ̑. (II, 12)

412.13 on] upon (II, 108)

412.15-16 “The affirmative Sokrates only stands his] In those dialogues where Plato makes him attempt more (there also, against his own will and protest, as in the Philêbus and Republic), the affirmative Sokrates will be found only to stand his (I, 323)

413.15 afterwards. When] afterwards. The declaration so often made by Sokrates that he is a searcher, not a teacher—that he feels doubts keenly himself, and can impress them upon others, but cannot discover any good solution of them—this declaration, which is usually considered mere irony, is literally true. [footnote omitted] The Platonic theory of Objective Ideas separate and absolute, which the commentators often announce as if it cleared up all difficulties—not only clears up none, but introduces fresh ones belonging to itself. When (I, 270)

413.21 &c.] [footnote omitted] (I, 271)

413.26 one,] [footnote omitted] (I, 214)

414.1 himself] [footnote omitted] (I, 215)

414.3 individuals] individualities (I, 215)

414.31 “immature] It is important that such Dialectic exercises should be deferred until this advanced age—and not imparted, as they are among us at present, to immature (III, 103)

414.32-3 convictions.] [footnote omitted] (III, 103)

415.31 “Aristotle,” . . . “in] [chapter opening] Aristotle, in (II, 90)

415.32 in] on [printer’s error?] (II, 90)

423.18 “teaching and . . . meaning;”] Teaching and . . . meaning: the only process really instructive is that of dialectic debate, which, if indefatigably prosecuted, will dig out the omniscience buried within. [footnote omitted] (II, 18)

423.19 “to] [paragraph] When we come to the Menon and the Phædon, we shall hear more of the Platonic doctrine—that knowledge was to (I, 230n)

424.24 [paragraph] Freedom of] [paragraph] Indeed this freedom of (II, 154)

424.30 or make] or must make (II, 155)

424.40 discriminating] discriminative (II, 155)

425.1 on] upon (II, 155)

425.2 intellect. . . .] [ellipsis indicates omission of footnote and one page of text (mostly translation from Plato’s Phædon, with another footnote)] (II, 155-6)

425.4 specially] especially (II, 156)

425.9 on] upon (II, 157)

425.12 that] which (II, 157)

425.12-13 for them] for them (II, 157)

427.23 “To say] Nevertheless, to say (II, 512)

428.37 [paragraph] How] [no paragraph] How (II, 549)

429.1 is not] is not (II, 549)

429.4 unmeaning. Now] [footnote and paragraph break omitted] (II, 549)

429.5 Theætêtus,] [footnote omitted] (II, 549)

429.9 copiously] [footnote omitted] (II, 549)

429.12 these] those [printer’s error?] (II, 549)

429.18 him.] [footnote omitted] (II, 549)

429.20 Kratylus.] [footnote omitted] (II, 550)

429.25 no way] noway (II, 550)

430.2 Typhôs.] [footnote omitted] (II, 551)

430.6 “evanescent] But the difference [between right actions and right opinions] is, that they [right opinions] are evanescent (II, 10)

430.8 “by . . . reasoning”] They are exalted into knowledge, when bound in the mind by . . . reasoning: [footnote omitted] that is, by the process of reminiscence, before described. (II, 10; this sentence follows immediately that last quoted)

431.1 not] The value of them [all the dialogues] consists, not in the result, but in the discussion—not (II, 551)

431.9 ϕιλόλογον),] [footnote omitted] (II, 551)

431.10 be] appear (II, 551)

431.30 “the] Towards the close of his life (as we shall see in the Treatise De Legibus), the (II, 394)

433.7 [paragraph] “The] [no paragraph] The [setting altered in this edition] (II, 483)

433.11 true] True (II, 483)

433.13 art.] [footnote omitted] (II, 483)

433.16 governed.] [footnote omitted] (II, 483)

433.20 art.] [footnote omitted] (II, 484)

433.23 it.] [footnote omitted] (II, 484)

433.23-4 base, evil, unjust,] [in italics] (II, 484)

433.28 formula.] [footnote omitted] (II, 484)

433.30 worse. How] worse. [paragraph] How (II, 484)

433.31 be . . . if] be (continues the Eleate), if (II, 484)

433.31 and] or [printer’s error?] (II, 484)

433.34 whenever] when (II, 484)

433.37 discontent!] [footnote omitted] (II, 484)

433.40 laws!] [footnote omitted] (II, 485)

433.44 exercised.] [footnote omitted] (II, 485)

434.5 tyranny,] [footnote omitted] (II, 485)

434.6 second-best;] [footnote omitted] (II, 485)

434.9 mischiefs.] [footnote omitted] (II, 485)

434.12 is. We] is. [footnote omitted] [paragraph] We (II, 485)

434.12 therefore . . . that] therefore (the Eleate goes on) that (II, 485)

434.15 governments,] [footnote omitted] (II, 486)

434.30 them.] [footnote omitted] (II, 486)

— “Psychology of Aristotle.” Appendix to Alexander Bain. The Senses and the Intellect, 3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green, 1868, 611-67.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 476-7, 502, 504

Hamilton, William. Referred to: 342-3, 477, 501n

— “Contribution towards a history of the doctrine of mental suggestion or association” (Note D**), in Works of Thomas Reid. Ed. William Hamilton. Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart; London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1846, 889-910.

quoted: 495, 496

495.28-9 “at once . . . theory of association:”] It is, in consequence of his very manifest meaning having been here not merely misunderstood, but actually reversed, by his interpreters, that Aristotle’s doctrine did not exert its merited influence; and that he himself has not as yet, been universally acknowledged, at once, . . . theory of Association. (901)

496.5-6 “which . . . interpreters.”] I shall likewise translate what, (but only what,) of any moment, is to be found in the relative commentary of Themistius; because this, both in itself and in reference to Aristotle, is, on the matter in question, a valuable, though wholly neglected, monument of ancient philosophy;—because, from the rarity of its one edition, it is accessible to few even of those otherwise competent to read it;—but, above all, because we herein discover the origin of those misconceptions, which . . . interpreters. (891)

— Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform. Chiefly from the Edinburgh Review; corrected, vindicated, enlarged, in Notes and Appendices. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans; Edinburgh: Maclachlan and Stewart, 1852.

note: the reference, which derives from Grote’s Plato, is to Appendix I, “Philosophical,” part 2, “Testimonies to the more special fact, that all our knowledge, whether of Mind or of Matter, is only phænomenal,” which is an appendix to the 1st essay, “On the Philosophy of the Unconditioned.”

referred to: 426

Hardenberg, Friedrich Leopold von.Novalis Schriften. Ed. Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Schlegel. 2 vols. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1805.

note: the quotation (which JSM almost certainly took from Carlyle’s review [Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (London: Fraser, 1840), Vol. II] of the 4th ed. of Novalis Schriften) is from “Moralische Unsichten,” the 3rd of the “Fragmente vermischten Inhalts.”

quoted: 466

466.25 “God-intoxicated” Spinoza] [paragraph] Spinoza ist ein Gott-trunkener Mensch. (II, 362)

Hardyng, John.The Chronicle of John Hardyng. Ed. Henry Ellis. London: Rivington, 1812.

note: the reference, which is in a quotation from Grote, is general; this ed. is cited merely for the title.

referred to: 284

Hartley, David. Referred to: 247, 341-2, 347, 352, 354-5, 451

Hauser, Caspar. Referred to: 350

Hecatæus. Referred to: 287

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Referred to: 344, 381, 425, 500n

Henry VIII (of England). Referred to: 467

Heraclitus (Herakleitus). Referred to: 381-2, 425-6, 498, 500n

Herodicus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 98

Herodotus.Herodotus (Greek and English). Trans. A. D. Godley. 4 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1921.

note: this edition used for ease of reference. Two Greek and Latin editions (9 vols., Glasgow: Foulis, 1761; 7 vols., Edinburgh: Laing, 1806) formerly in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation at 325 is in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 282n, 325, 325n, 390n

referred to: 295

Hesiod.

note: the reference at 173 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 173, 276, 286, 288, 295

— “Eoiai.”

note: a “lost” poem of Hesiod (see Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns, pp. xxii-xxiv); the reference is to Grote’s spelling of the title, “Eœæ.”

referred to: 305n

— Theogony, in Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns and Homerica (Greek and English). Trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964, 78-154.

referred to: 281

— Works and Days, in ibid., 2-64.

note: the quotation at 178, which is indirect, is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Charmides; that at 215 is in his translation of Plato’s Lysis.

quoted: 178, 215

Hippias.

note: the references at 46 ff. are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras, in which Hippias is a character; that at 85 is to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; that at 154 is to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology; that at 392-3 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 46 ff., 85, 154, 389, 392, 392-3, 409, 417n

Hippocrates (the physician, of Cos).

note: the reference at 45 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras; that at 87 is to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 45, 87

Hippocrates.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras, in which Hippocrates is a character.

referred to: 45 ff.

Hipponicus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 154

Hippothales.

note: the references at 210-21 passim are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Lysis, in which Hippothales is a character.

referred to: 210-21 passim

Hobbes, Thomas. Referred to: 247, 250, 341, 451, 466, 491, 497

— “Computation or Logic.” Part I of Elements of Philosophy: The First Section, Concerning Body, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes. Ed. William Molesworth. 11 vols. London: Bohn, 1839-45, I, 1-90.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 494

— “Physics, or the Phenomena of Nature.” Part IV of Elements of Philosophy: The First Section, Concerning Body, in ibid., 387-532.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College. JSM’s reference is vague, but the doctrine referred to is covered in the passage cited. The quotation is indirect.

quoted: 371

Holinshed, Raphael.Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 6 vols. London: Johnson, 1807.

note: the reference, which is general, is in a quotation from Grote in which it is spelled “Hollinshed”; this ed. cited merely for the title.

referred to: 284

Homer.

note: the references at 71, 92 are in JSM’s translations of Plato; the reference at 141 is not to be found in the received text of Homer.

referred to: 71, 92, 141, 173, 286, 494

— Iliad (Greek and English). Trans. A. T. Murray. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954.

note: a two-volume Greek ed. of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Oxford, 1800) is in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The references at 292-3 are in a quotation from Grote; the quotations at 99 and 123 are from JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias; that at 162 is from his translation of Plato’s Apology; and that at 202 is from his translation of Plato’s Laches.

quoted: 99, 123, 162, 202, 294n, 296

referred to: 277, 283, 287-97, 316, 392

— Odyssey (Greek and English). Trans. A. T. Murray. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960.

note: a two-volume Greek ed. of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Oxford, 1800) is in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation at 167 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology; that at 177 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Charmides; those at 209 (the same as that at 177) and 214 are in his translation of Plato’s Lysis; all are indirect.

quoted: 167, 177, 209, 214

referred to: 147, 281, 283, 290-2, 294, 316, 392

Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus). “Carmina,” Liber III, iii, in The Odes and Epodes (Latin and English). Trans. C.E. Bennett. London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914, 178-84.

note: this ed. is used for ease of reference. Opera (Glasgow: Mundell, 1796) is in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 327, 416

327.8-9 “civium ardor prava jubentium” . . . “vultus instantis tyranni,”] Iustum et tenacem propositi virum / non civium ardor prava iubentium, / non vultus instantis tyranni / mente quatit solida necque Auster, / dux inquieti turbidus Hadriae, / nec fulminantis magna manus Iovis; / si fractus in labatur orbis, / in pavidum ferient ruinae. (178; II. 1-8)

416.17 tenax propositi] [cf. previous entry]

Horne Tooke. See Tooke, John Horne.

Hume, David. Referred to: 44n, 341, 443, 451, 462, 466

Hyperbolus. Referred to: 331

Isocrates. Referred to: 300, 394

—Oratio ad Philippum (“To Philip”), in Isocrates (Greek and English). Trans. George Norlin. 3 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1928, I, 246-338.

note:Opera omnia (Paris: Auger, 1782) formerly in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 389

James I (of England). Referred to: 467

James II (of England). Referred to: 467

Jesus. Referred to: 149, 150, 314

Johnson, Samuel. See under Boswell.

Jouffroy, Théodore. Referred to: 443

Kallikles. See Callicles.

Kant, Immanuel. Referred to: 93, 341, 346, 451, 461

Laches.

note: the references at 197-209 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches, in which Laches is a character.

referred to: 197-209, 409

Lagrange, Louis. Referred to: 468n

Lamachus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches.

referred to: 206

Laromiguière, Pierre.Leçons de philosophie sur les principes de l’intelligence ou sur les causes et sur les origines des idées. 6th ed. 2 vols. Paris: Fournier, 1844.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 355

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. Referred to: 445, 451

note: JSM always uses the spelling Leibnitz.

Leitch, John. See Müller, Karl Otfried, Introduction.

Leon (of Salamis).

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 166

Lewes, George Henry.Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science, including analyses of Aristotle’s scientific writings. London: Smith, Elder, 1864.

referred to: 484, 497

— “Mr. Grote’s Plato,” Fortnightly Review, II (Sept., 1865), 169-83.

referred to: 383-4

Lewis, George Cornewall. “Grote’s History of Greece,” Edinburgh Review, XCI (Jan., 1850), 118-52.

referred to: 309n

Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott.A Greek-English Lexicon, based on the German work of Francis Passow. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1843.

referred to: 493n

Littré, Emile. Referred to: 444

Livy (Titus Livius). Referred to: 329

Locke, John. Referred to: 19, 84n, 93, 94, 95, 222, 247, 341-2, 345, 347, 443, 451, 457-8, 491

— Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in Works. New ed. 10 vols. London: Tegg, Sharpe, Offor, Robinson, and Evans, 1823, I-III.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation is indirect; the reference is to Locke’s indebtedness to Molyneux.

quoted: 53

referred to: 457

— “Several Letters to Anthony Collins, Esq.,” in ibid., X, 260-98.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The passage cited contains explicitly the second of the two phrases, but the sense of the first is also present; a somewhat similar passage appears in “Some Familiar Letters,” ibid., IX, 303.

quoted: 251

— Of the Conduct of the Understanding, in ibid., III, 203-89.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 510

510.3 “principling”] [paragraph] There is, I know, a great fault among all sorts of people of principling their children and scholars, which at last, when looked into, amounts to no more but making them imbibe their teacher’s notions and tenets by an implicit faith, and firmly to adhere to them whether true or false. (277)

Louis IX (Saint Louis, of France). Referred to: 283

Louis XIV (of France).

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 335

Lucian. “Anacharsis, or Athletics,” in Lucian (Greek and English). Trans. A. M. Harmon. 8 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1925, IV, 1-69.

note: this ed. used for ease of reference. Opera Omnia (Amsterdam and Utrecht, 1843-6) is in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 397n-398n

Luther, Martin. Referred to: 387, 414

Lycan.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 158, 169, 171

Lycurgus.

note: the reference at 80 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; those at 301-2 are in quotations from Grote.

referred to: 80, 299-302

Lysanias.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Lysias.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 62-96 passim

Lysimachus.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches, in which Lysimachus is a character.

referred to: 197-209 passim

Lysis.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Lysis, in which Lysis is a character.

referred to: 210-21 passim

Mahabharat. Referred to: 282

Malebranche, Nicolas. Referred to: 462, 465

— Recherche de la vérité, in Œuvres. Ed. Jules Simon. 2 vols. Paris: Charpentier, 1842, II.

referred to: 457

Mandeville, Bernard. Referred to: 466, 466n

Marcus Aurelius. See Antoninus.

Mausolus. Referred to: 324

Melesias.

note: the references at 197-209 passim are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches, in which Melesias is a character; that at 334 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 197-209 passim, 334

Meletus (Melitus).

note: the references at 151-74 passim are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology; those at 187-96 passim are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Euthyphron; it is not known why JSM uses the incorrect spelling “Melitus” in these translations.

referred to: 151-74 passim, 187-96 passim, 393, 398

Menexenus.

note: the references are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Lysis, in which Menexenus is a character.

referred to: 210-21 passim

Menon. Referred to: 409

Mervoyer, Pierre Maurice.Étude sur l’association des idées. Paris: Durand, 1864.

referred to: 444

Midas (the Phrygian).

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 83

Mikkus. Referred to: 389

Mill, James. Referred to: 247, 352

— Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. 2 vols. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1829.

note: in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 342, 361, 367, 494

— 2nd ed. Ed. John Stuart Mill. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869.

referred to: 458n

— “Education,” in Essays. London: printed by J. Innes, n.d.

note: this is the earliest collection (only fifty copies were printed) of reprints of James Mill’s articles for the Supplement to the Encyclopædia Britannica; the articles are separately paginated. The quotation is indirect.

quoted: 510

— A Fragment on Mackintosh. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1835.

referred to: 466n

Mill, John Stuart. “Bailey on Berkeley’s Theory of Vision,” Westminster Review, XXXVIII (Oct., 1842), 318-36.

note: i.e., the essay printed at 247-65 above; the references are in JSM’s “Rejoinder” to Bailey’s reply to this article.

referred to: 266-8

— An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1865.

referred to: 458n

— “Gorgias,” Monthly Repository, VIII (Oct., Nov., and Dec., 1834), 691-710, 802-15, and 829-42.

note: i.e., the essay printed at 97-150 above.

referred to: 152

— “Grote’s History of Greece [Vols. V and VI],” Spectator, XXII (3 March, 1849), 202-3.

quoted: 333-6

333.22 The] But the (202) [cf. 333t-t]

333.22 the middle period] this division (202) [cf. 333u-u]

333.28 cotemporaries] contemporaries (202) [cf. 333v-v]

334.14 were.] were, the greatest people who have yet appeared on this planet. (202) [cf. 334w]

334.23 [centred heading] character of nicias (203) [cf. 334x]

— “Grote’s Greece—Volumes V and VI,” Spectator, XXII (10 March, 1849), 227-8.

quoted: 318-19, 319-20

318.8 And our] Our (227) [cf. 318f-f]

318.9 tolerance] intolerance [printer’s error in S?] (227) [cf. 318g-g]

318.9 tastes and] daily (227) [cf. 318h-h]

318.10 does] may do (227) [cf. 318i-i]

318.11 we] we ever (227) [cf. 318j]

318.11-12 are offensive, though they do no positive damage] though they do no positive damage, are not the less sure to offend (227) [cf. 318k-k] .

319.24 [paragraph] The] [no paragraph] But even making allowance for this, the (227) [cf. 319m-m]

319.24 he [Pericles] lays] he lays (227) [cf. 319n-n]

319.27 pursuits] pursuit (227) [cf. 319o-o]

320.15 farther] further (227) [cf. 320p-p]

320.38 [paragraph] The] [paragraph] There have been few things lately written more worthy of being meditated on than this striking paragraph. The (227) [cf. 320r]

— “Grote’s Greece—Volumes VII and VIII,” Spectator, XXIII (16 March, 1850), 255-6.

quoted: 309n-310n, 327-8, 329, 331-2

309n.8 give the] give the briefest analysis of a dissertation so rich in matter, or the (256) [cf. 309b]

310n.7 case with] case in (256) [cf. 310c-c]

327.35 These men ought] In all these points the Athenian people were honourably distinguished, not only from the Greek oligarchies, but from their own oligarchichal party; who showed during two intervals of ascendancy, the periods of the Four Hundred and of the Thirty, of what enormities they were capable; and who ought (256)

328.1 as a] as the (256) [cf. 328b-b]

328.2 it.] it: for during the whole of its existence, such men as Critias and his compeers were prominent in the first ranks of public discussion, and continually filled the high offices of the state. (256)

329.27 his hero Socrates] by his Socratic dialectics he (256) [cf. 329i-i]

331.22 seventh volume] present volumes (256) [cf. 331o-o]

— “Phædrus,” Monthly Repository, VIII (June, and Sept., 1834), 404-20, and 633-46.

note: i.e., the essay printed at 62-96 above.

referred to: 152

— Preface and Notes to James Mill’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1869.

referred to: 458n

— “Protagoras,” Monthly Repository, VIII (Feb., and March, 1834), 89-99, and 203-11.

note: i.e., the essay printed at 39-61 above.

referred to: 68n, 106n, 135n, 152

— A System of Logic. London: Parker, 1843.

note: in Collected Works, Vols. VII and VIII.

referred to: 494

Milman, Henry Hart. “Grote’s History of Greece,” Quarterly Review, LXXVIII (June, 1846), 113-44.

referred to: 303

Miltiades.

note: the references at 133, 141 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 133, 141, 317n, 435

Milton, John.Paradise Lost, in The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton. London: Tonson, 1695, 1-343.

note: in all these quotations Mill is alluding to Aristophanes’ The Clouds; the wording of the translation of Plato’s Apology, however, echoes the Milton passage here cited.

quoted: 153, 154, 157, 394

394.13 “make . . . reason.”] But all was false and hollow; though his tongue / Dropt manna, and could make . . . reason, to perplex and dash / Maturest counsels. (31; II, 110-13)

Mitford, William.The History of Greece. 10 vols. London: Cadell and Davies, 1818-20.

note: formerly in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 275, 305n, 336

Mithæcus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 143

Molyneux, William.

referred to: 457; see Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

The Monk of St. Gall.Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of St. Gall. Trans. and ed. A. J. Grant. London: Chatto and Windus, 1922.

note: the reference is general; this ed. cited merely for the title.

referred to: 283

Moore, Thomas. “Life of Lord Byron.” See Byron, Works.

Mueller, Carl Otfried. See Müller, Karl Otfried.

Mueller, Johannes Peter. See Müller, Johannes Peter.

Müller, Friedrich Max.Lectures on the Science of Language, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February, March, April, & May, 1863. 2nd Series. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864.

quoted: 404n

404n. 1-2 Nature . . . Belief] [in italics] (526)

Müller, Johannes Peter.Elements of Physiology. Trans. William Baly. 2 vols. London: Taylor and Walton, 1837, 1842.

note: the pagination in the two vols. is consecutive.

referred to: 355

Müller, Karl Otfried.History of the Literature of Ancient Greece. 2 vols. Trans. George Cornewall Lewis and John William Donaldson. London: Baldwin, 1840-42.

note: this ed., whose page references correspond to JSM’s, published in the “Library of Useful Knowledge” by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The work was later reprinted in 3 vols.; JSM’s library contains the vol. subtitled “to the Period of Isocrates” (trans. Lewis; London: Baldwin, 1847). Grote gives the reference (to Chap. iv, §5) in the passage here also cited by JSM.

referred to: 291n

— Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology. Trans. John Leitch. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844.

note: formerly in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 289

referred to: 288

289.26-8 every . . . entity] [in italics] (61)

Müller, Max. See Müller, Friedrich Max.

Myrtis. Referred to: 315n

Nausicydes.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 124

Nero Claudius Cæsar.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grey used by Grote.

referred to: 285n

Newton, Isaac. Referred to: 310n

Niceratus (Nikeratus).

note: the reference at 208 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches; that at 334 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 208, 334

Nicias (Nikias).

note: the reference at 114 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias; those at 197-209 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches, in which Nicias is a character; the references at 326, 334-6 are in quotations from Grote. For the quotation at 319n, s. v. Thucydides.

referred to: 114, 197-209, 316, 319n, 326, 331, 334-6, 395

Nicostratus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Niebuhr, Barthold Georg.The History of Rome. 3 vols. Trans. Julius Charles Hare and Connop Thirlwall (Vols. I and II); William Smith and Leonhard Schmitz (Vol. III). London (Vols. I and II printed Cambridge): Taylor, 1828 (Vol. I), 1832 (Vol. II); Taylor and Walton, 1842 (Vol. III).

note: a German ed., 3 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1827-32 [Vol. II is of the 1836 ed.]), is in JSM’s library, Somerville College, as are the two vols. of lectures ed. Schmitz (London: Taylor and Walton, 1844) that complete Niebuhr’s History.

referred to: 276, 277, 304, 328, 330

— Lectures on Ancient History, from the earliest times to the taking of Alexandria by Octavianus. Comprising the History of the Asiatic Nations, the Egyptians, Greeks, Macedonians and Carthaginians. Trans. Leonhard Schmitz. 3 vols. London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1852.

referred to: 331

— “On Xenophon’s Hellenica.” Trans. Connop Thirlwall. Philological Museum, I (1832), 485-98.

note: the quotation and the reference are both to the passage (494-6) that Smith quotes in a note to Wiggers’ Life of Socrates (for the collation, see Wiggers). Concerning Niebuhr’s claim to originality (accepted by JSM at 323), see also Connop Thirlwall, “Death of Paches,” Philological Museum, II (1833), 236-40.

quoted: 242-3

referred to: 323

“Novalis.” See Hardenberg.

Nunneley, Thomas.On the Organs of Vision: Their Anatomy and Physiology. London: Churchill, 1858.

note: Fraser reprints the relevant passage in his edition of Berkeley’s Works (q.v.), I, 446-8.

referred to: 454, 457

Octavia (Julius Cæsar’s daughter).

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grey used by Grote.

referred to: 285n

Orthagoras (the flute player).

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras.

referred to: 48

Owen, Robert. Referred to: 329, 387

Paches.

note: the reference at 243 is in a quotation from Niebuhr.

referred to: 243, 323

Paley, William. Referred to: 467

Paralus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Parmenides.

note: the references at 222-38 passim are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Parmenides.

referred to: 222-38 passim, 381-2, 412, 426

Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob. Referred to: 287

Peisander. Referred to: 327

Pericles.

note: the references at 48, 52, 395 are in JSM’s translations of Plato’s Protagoras; those at 86-7 are in his translation of Plato’s Phædrus; those at 103, 114, 133, 141, 143 are in his translation of Plato’s Gorgias, and that at 435 derives from the Gorgias; those at 298, 319-20, 326, 334-5 are in quotations from Grote.

referred to: 48, 52, 86, 87, 103, 114, 133, 141, 143, 298, 311, 316-17, 319-21, 326-7, 331-5, 395, 435

— Funeral Oration. See Thucydides, History.

quoted: 318-19

referred to: 377, 397n

Phædrus.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus, in which he is a character.

referred to: 62-96 passim

Pheidias.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras.

referred to: 45

Philip (of Macedon).

note: the reference at 243 is in a quotation from Niebuhr; that at 284 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 243, 284, 312

Philopœmen. Referred to: 337n

Phocion. Referred to: 336n

Phrynichus.

note: the quotation is from Thucydides, History, q.v.

quoted: 328

referred to: 322

Pindar.

note: the quotation derives from Herodotus, q.v.

quoted: 390n

referred to: 315, 315n

— The Odes of Pindar Including Principal Fragments (Greek and English). Trans. John Sandys. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946.

note: the indirect quotation is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

quoted: 122

Pisistratus. Referred to: 291, 299, 327

Pittacus.

note: the quotation is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras.

quoted: 54

Plato.

note: the Loeb eds. of Plato are used for ease of reference. Bekker’s ed. [11 vols. (London: Priestley, 1826)] is in JSM’s library, Somerville College; the references at 167, 171 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology; those at 242-3 are in a quotation from Niebuhr; those at 298, 301-2, 320, 492, 494 are in quotations from Grote; that at 470 is in a quotation from Fraser.

referred to: 39-45, 61-2, 84n, 93-6, 167, 171, 186, 210, 222-4, 238, 241-3, 282, 298, 300-2, 310, 310n, 314, 320, 329, 332, 336n, 377-440 passim, 451, 463, 466, 470, 475-7, 480, 483, 487-94, 506; see also Routh.

— Platonis et quæ vel Platonis esse feruntur vel Platonica solent comitari scripta Græce omnia ad codices manuscriptos. With notes by Immanuel Bekker. 11 vols. London: Priestley, 1826.

note: this ed. is in JSM’s library, Somerville College. JSM’s reference is to an “English bookseller” (Richard Priestley) who, aided by a “German scholar” (Bekker), “recently produced an excellent edition of Plato,” and subsequently (in 1827) became bankrupt. Vols. X and XI of the edition have as title Platonis dialogi Latine juxta interpretationem Ficini aliorumque.

referred to: 39

— The Works of Plato, viz. his fifty-five Dialogues and twelve Epistles. Trans. F. Sydenham and Thomas Taylor. 5 vols. London: Taylor, 1804.

referred to: 42

— Œuvres de Platon. Trans. Victor Cousin. 13 vols. Paris: Bossange, 1822-40.

note: the reference (in 1834) is to the work as in progress.

referred to: 42n

— Platonis Euthydemus et Gorgias (Greek and Latin). Ed. Martin Joseph Routh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1784.

referred to: 39

— Apology (Apologia), in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo, Phædrus (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917, 68-144.

translated with commentary: 151-74

quoted: 153n, 399

referred to: 403, 435

— The Apology of Socrates, the Crito, and Part of the Phædo, with Notes from Stallbaum and Schleiermacher’s Introductions. [Ed. William Smith.] London: Taylor and Walton, 1840.

note: Stallbaum’s notes are trans. by Gillespie, Schleiermacher’s Introduction to the Apology by Thirlwall (originally for the Philological Museum, II [1833], 556-61), Schleiermacher’s Introduction to the Crito presumably by Smith.

reviewed: 241-3

— Charmides, in Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955, 8-90.

translated with commentary: 175-86

referred to: 53n, 187, 407, 408, 439n

— Cratylus (Kratylus), in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914, 6-190.

note: the references at 429 are in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 393, 429

— Critias (Kritias), in Timæus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles (Greek and English). Trans. R. G. Bury. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1929, 258-306.

referred to: 385-6

— Crito (Kriton), in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo, Phædrus (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1914, 150-90.

referred to: 241, 417n

— Epinomis, in Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1927, 426-86.

referred to: 385-6, 421

— Erastæ (The Lovers), in ibid., 312-38.

referred to: 407

— Euthydemus, in Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1924, 378-504.

referred to: 393, 435; see also Platonis Euthydemus et Gorgias.

— Euthyphron, in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo, Phædrus (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1914, 6-58.

translated with commentary: 187-96

referred to: 406

— Gorgias, in Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953, 258-532.

note: the references at 413, 415 are in quotations from Grote; many of the quotations are summary or indirect.

translated with commentary: 97-150

quoted: 106n, 390n, 394, 395, 401, 419, 435

referred to: 394-6, 399, 401, 407, 413, 415-16, 418, 422-4; see also Platonis Euthydemus et Gorgias.

— Greater Hippias (Hippias Major), in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914, 336-422.

referred to: 389, 392, 407, 409

— Hipparchus, in Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1927, 278-304.

referred to: 407

— Kratylus. See Cratylus.

— Kritias. See Critias.

— Kriton. See Crito.

— Laches, in Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1924, 6-82.

translated with commentary: 197-209

referred to: 186, 187, 406, 409

— Lachès, ou du courage, in Œuvres de Platon. Trans. Victor Cousin. 13 vols. Paris: Bossange, 1822-40, V.

note: Vol. V has 1823 on the title page (though Vol. IV has 1827, and Vol. VI, 1831).

quoted: 203n

203n.2 “Constance”] Il me semble que le courage est une certaine constance de l’âme, puisqu’il faut en donner une définition générale et applicable à tous les cas. (369)

— Laws (Greek and English). Trans. R. G. Bury. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1926.

quoted: 397n

referred to: 385-6, 395, 414, 417n, 418, 424, 434-5, 438

— Leges. See Laws.

— Lesser Hippias (Second Hippias), in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914, 428-74.

referred to: 389, 392-3

— Lysis, in Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1925, 6-70.

translated with commentary: 210-21

referred to: 389, 407, 408

— Meno (Menon), in Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952, 264-370.

quoted: 398, 422, 430

referred to: 398, 407, 409, 430, 435

— Minos, in Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1927, 388-420.

referred to: 407

— Parmenides, in Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914, 198-330.

translated with commentary: 222-38

referred to: 381, 385, 412-13, 508

— Phædo (Phædon), in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo, Phædrus (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947, 200-402.

note: the references at 413 and 424-5 are in quotations from Grote.

referred to: 412-13, 422-5, 431

— Phædrus, in ibid., 412-578.

note: the references at 413 and 430 are in quotations from Grote.

translated with commentary: 62-96

quoted: 430n

referred to: 291, 407, 412-14, 423, 430, 463

— Philebus, in The Statesman, Philebus, Ion (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler and W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1925, 202-398.

note: the reference at 413 is in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 420

referred to: 387, 413-14, 418

— Politicus (Politikos). See The Statesman.

— Protagoras, in Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952, 92-256.

note: the reference at 413 is in a quotation from Grote.

translated with commentary: 39-61

referred to: 106n, 197, 328-91, 395, 401n, 407-8, 413, 417-19

— Republic (Greek and English). Trans. Paul Shorey. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946.

note: the reference at 301-2 is in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 399, 400, 411, 438

referred to: 77n, 285, 301-2, 386, 396-7, 407, 412, 414, 416, 418-21, 426n, 428, 430, 434-9, 505

— Second Alcibiades, in Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1927, 228-72.

referred to: 435

— Second Hippias. See Lesser Hippias.

— Seventh Epistle, in Timæus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles (Greek and English). Trans. R. G. Bury. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1929, 476-564.

referred to: 405n, 431

— Sophist (Sophistes), in Theætetus, Sophist (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1921, 264-458.

note: the references and the quotation at 429 are in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 397, 426n, 429

referred to: 385, 400-2, 405, 407, 428

— The Statesman (Politicus, Politikos), in The Statesman, Philebus, Ion (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler and W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1925, 4-194.

note: the references at 433-4 are in a quotation from Grote in which part of the dialogue is summarized.

referred to: 385, 405, 407, 432-4

— Symposium (Symposion), in Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias (Greek and English). Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1925, 80-244.

referred to: 414

— Theætetus, in Theætetus, Sophist (Greek and English). Trans. H. N. Fowler. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1921, 6-256.

note: the references at 429 are in a quotation from Grote.

quoted: 430

referred to: 385, 391, 407, 409, 417n, 426, 428-30, 501n

— Timæus, in Timæus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles (Greek and English). Trans. R. G. Bury. London: Heinemann, New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1929, 16-252.

note: the reference at 413 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 385-6, 413, 420n

Plutarch.Lives (Greek and English). Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. 11 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914.

note: the reference at 326 concerns Solon’s proclamation against neutrality.

referred to: 300, 326

Polus.

note: the reference at 85 is to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; those at 97-150 passim are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias, in which Polus is a character.

referred to: 85, 97-150 passim, 394-6

Polycleitus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras.

referred to: 45

Porphyry. Referred to: 23

Priestley, Richard.

referred to: 39; see Plato, Platonis et quæ vel Platonis. . . .

Prior, Thomas. Referred to: 471

Prodicus (Prodikus).

note: the reference at 46 ff. are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras, in which Prodicus is a character; that at 85 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; that at 154 is in his translation of Plato’s Apology; that at 178 is in his translation of Plato’s Charmides; that at 207 is in his translation of Plato’s Laches.

referred to: 46 ff., 85, 154, 178, 207, 389, 391-2

— “The Choice of Hercules.” See Xenophon, Memorabilia.

referred to: 329, 391

Protagoras.

note: the references at 42-61 passim are to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras, in which he is a character; that at 85 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; the quotations are from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, q.v.

quoted: 44n, 425

referred to: 42-61 passim, 85, 389, 392-3, 395, 401n, 426-8, 501n

Pythagoras. Referred to: 381

Pythodorus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Parmenides.

referred to: 222

Quarterly Review.

note: the references are to “Church of England writers” who unjustly criticize the Sophists; no specific reference seems justified, but apposite are articles by Thomas Mitchell (XXI [1819], 281-6; XXVII [1822], 385-8—mentioned by Francis Sparshott in his Introduction, above xxiin—and XXXIII [1826], 332-56), J. G. Lockhart (XXVII [1828], 32-50), and H. N. Coleridge (XLIV [1831], 389-414).

referred to: 43, 47n

Rabelais, François.

note: the passage is not in Rabelais, though traditionally ascribed to him. See, e.g., Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau, ed. Jean Fabre (Geneva: Droz, 1963), 9. Cf. also the first sentence of Voltaire’s Ce qu’on ne fait pas et ce qu’on pourrait faire (1742), and Paul-Louis Courier’s “Lettre à Messieurs de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres” (1819). None of these gives the whole, or the exact notion, of the passage JSM cites; presumably there is a source for all which we have not located.

quoted: 149

Ramayun. Referred to: 282

Ramus, Peter. Referred to: 405

Reid, Thomas. Referred to: 3, 247, 251, 341, 343, 443, 477

— Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind. 3 vols. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1803.

note: the references at 13n and 343-4 are to the first part, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, which is in Vols. I and II; that at 356, which is in a quotation from Bain, is to the second part, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind.

referred to: 13n, 343-4, 356

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Referred to: 387

Routh, Martin Joseph. See Plato, Platonis Euthydemus et Gorgias.

Royer-Collard, Pierre Paul. Referred to: 443

Ruskin, John.Modern Painters. 5 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1851-60.

note: the reference is to Vol. II, which consists of Part III, “Of Ideas of Beauty.”

referred to: 363-4

St. Thomas Aquinas.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 489

Sappho.

note: the reference at 67 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 67, 315n

Sarambus (the tavern keeper).

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 143

Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. Referred to: 341

Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst. “Introduction to Plato’s Apology of Socrates.” Trans. Connop Thirlwall. Philological Museum, II (1833), 556-61.

referred to: 151, 151n; see also Plato, The Apology, the Crito . . . , ed. Smith.

— “On the Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher.” Trans. Connop Thirlwall. Philological Museum, II (1833), 538-55.

note: the German essay appeared in Berlin Transactions, 1815.

referred to: 41, 241-2; see also Wiggers.

Scott, Robert. See Liddell.

Shaftsbury (3rd Earl of). See Cooper.

Shakespeare, William.Cymbeline.

note: as the reference is general, no ed. is cited.

referred to: 284

— Hamlet.

note: the quotation is indirect. The comparative passage is taken from the Variorum Edition of Horace H. Furness.

quoted: 224

224.22 like to a cloud, & yet extremely unlike a whale.] Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? / Polonius. By the mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed. / Hamlet. Methinks it is like a weasel. / Polonius. It is backed like a weasel. / Hamlet. Or like a whale? / Polonius. Very like a whale. (III, ii, 359-65)

— King Lear.

note: the quotation is in a quotation by Grote from Grey. The comparative passage is taken from the Variorum Edition of Horace H. Furness.

quoted: 285n

referred to: 284

285n.2 Nero . . . darkness,] Edgar. Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero . . . darkness. (III, vi, 6-7)

Shelley, Mary.Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 3 vols. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, et al., 1818.

referred to: 348

Simonides. Referred to: 315n

— “Human Imperfection,” in Anthologia Lyrica Graeca. Ed. Ernestus Diehl. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubneri, 1925, II, 62-6.

note: the quotation, which is indirect, is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras.

quoted: 54

Skedasus (daughters of). Referred to: 323

Sleeman, William Henry.Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official. 2 vols. London: Hatchard, 1844.

note: in the Preface to the 2nd ed. (1849) of Vols. I and II of his History of Greece, Grote says JSM’s “excellent notice” of the History in the Edinburgh brought Sleeman’s book to his attention, and he added references to it in his notes.

referred to: 288n, 290n

Smith, Adam. Referred to: 247, 469

— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. With a Commentary by the Author of “England and America” [E. G. Wakefield]. 4 vols. London: Knight, 1835-39.

note: for ease of reference this ed. is used. In Somerville College there are the 2-vol. 8th ed. (London, 1796), the 2-vol. ed., ed. Rogers (Oxford, 1869), and a gift copy of J. R. McCulloch’s ed. (4 vols. Edinburgh: Black, Tait, 1828), Vol. I inscribed: “To John Mill Esq / This copy of the edition of a / work to the value of which / he has essentially contributed / is presented by his friend / the Editor”.

referred to: 439

— “Of the External Senses,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. London: Cadell and Davies; Edinburgh: Creech, 1795, 195-244.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation, which JSM takes from Bailey, appears in the fifth section, “On the Sense of Seeing.”

quoted: 253

253.22-3 “Must appear . . . point.”] But if we consider that the distance of any object from the eye, is a line turned endways to it; and that this line must consequently appear . . . point; we shall be sensible that distance from the eye cannot be the immediate object of Sight, but that all visible objects must naturally be perceived as close upon the organ, or more properly, perhaps, like all other Sensations, as in the organ which perceives them. (216)

Smith, Sydney. “Female Education,” Edinburgh Review, XV (Jan., 1810), 299-315.

quoted: 275n-276n

276n.10-11 action. There] action: there (299)

Smith, William. See Plato, The Apology, the Crito . . . , ed. Smith; and Wiggers.

Socrates.

note: the references at 39-238 passim are to JSM’s translations of Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates is the main character; that at 241 is in a quotation from Niebuhr; those at 298 and 320 are in quotations from Grote.

referred to: 39-238 passim, 241, 242, 286, 298, 309, 309n-310n, 314, 320, 327, 329, 336y, 377-440 passim, 480, 481, 483, 506

Solon.

note: the references at 80, 92 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus; those at 201 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches; the first at 326 is in a quotation from Grote. For Solon’s Speech to Crœsus, referred to at 295, see Herodotus; for his proclamation against neutrality, referred to at 326, see Plutarch.

referred to: 80, 92, 201, 295, 313, 326-7, 397n

Sophocles.

note: the reference at 86 is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 86, 317

— Philoctetes, in Sophocles (Greek and English). Trans. F. Storr. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1919, II, 361-493.

referred to: 392

Sophroniscus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Laches.

referred to: 197

Spencer, Herbert.Principles of Psychology. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855.

note: by “the dissertation prefixed” to the work, JSM presumably refers (342n) to Part I, “General Analysis,” which is based on Spencer’s “The Universal Postulate,” Westminster Review (Oct., 1853). As to 367, while Spencer generally has different aims and uses different language. JSM would appear to have in mind such arguments as those in Part II, Chap. v, and Part IV, passim (see, e.g., 517, 529, 580).

referred to: 342n, 367

Spinoza, Baruch. Referred to: 451, 466

Stasinus. Fragment 20, in Epicorum Græcorum Fragmenta. Ed. Godofredus Kinkel. Leipzig: Teubneri, 1877, 30-1.

note: the quotation is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Euthyphron.

quoted: 193

Statutes. See below 561.

Stesichorus. Referred to: 71

Stewart, Dugald. Referred to: 93, 247, 261, 341, 343, 477

— Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind. Vol. I, London: Strahan and Cadell; Edinburgh: Creech, 1792; Vol. II, Edinburgh: Constable; London: Cadell and Davies, 1814; Vol. III, London: Murray, 1827.

referred to: 11, 261

Sulla. See Sylla.

Swift, Jonathan.Gulliver’s Travels, in The Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin; containing additional letters, tracts, and poems, not hitherto published; with notes and a life of the author. Ed. Walter Scott. 19 vols. Edinburgh: Constable; London: White, Cochrane, and Gale, Curtis and Fenner; Dublin: Cumming, 1814, XII.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The indirect quotation, which is in a quotation from Grote, is from Voyage IV (“A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms”), Chap. iii. (As the phrase recurs in Swift, no page reference is given.) In Swift, saying “the thing which was not” is equivalent to lying or expressing falsehood.

quoted: 429

— A Tale of a Tub, in ibid., XI, 1-211.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College. The quotation is indirect.

quoted: 493n

493n.6-8 Lord Peter had studied the works of Aristotle, and . . . wonderful treatise . . . which teaches . . . find a . . . except itself.] But about this time it fell out, that the learned brother aforesaid had read Aristotle’s dialectica, and . . . wonderful piece . . . which has the faculty of teaching . . . find out a . . . but itself; like commentators on the Revelations, who proceed prophets without understanding a syllable of the text. (85)

Sylla (Sulla). Referred to: 510

Taine, Hippolyte.Histoire de la littérature anglaise. 4 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1863-4.

referred to: 443

— De l’Intelligence. 2 vols. Paris: Hachette, 1870.

reviewed: 443-7

quoted: 444

444.24-37 Under . . . these.] [translated from:] Si je ne me trompe, on entend aujourd’hui par intelligence, ce qu’on entendait autrefois par entendement et intellect, à savoir la faculté de connaître; du moins, j’ai pris le mot dans ce sens. [paragraph] En tout cas, il s’agit ici de nos connaissances, et non d’autre chose. Les mots faculté, capacité, pouvoir, qui ont joué un si grand rôle en psychologie ne sont, comme on le verra, que des noms commodes au moyen desquels nous mettons ensemble, dans un compartiment distinct, tous les faits d’une espèce distincte; ces noms désignent un caractère commun aux faits qu’on a logés sous la même étiquette; ils ne désignent pas une essence mystérieuse et profonde, qui dure et se cache sous le flux des faits passagers. C’est pourquoi je n’ai traité que des connaissances, et, si je me suis occupé des facultés, c’est pour montrer qu’en soi et à titre d’entités distinctes, elles ne sont pas. [paragraph] Une pareille précaution est fort utile. Par elle, la psychologie devient une science de faits; car ce sont des faits que nos connaissances; on peut parler avec précision et détails d’une sensation, d’une idée, d’un souvenir, d’une prévision, aussi bien que d’une vibration, d’un mouvement physique; dans l’un comme dans l’autre cas, c’est un fait qui surgit; on peut le reproduire, l’observer, le décrire; il a ses précédents, ses accompagnements, ses suites. De tout petits faits bien choisis, importants, significatifs, amplement circonstanciés et minutieusement notés, voilà aujourd’hui la matière de toute science; chacun d’eux est un spécimen instructif, une tête de ligne, un exemplaire saillant, un type net auquel se ramène toute une file de cas analogues; notre grande affaire est de savoir quels sont ces éléments, comment ils naissent, en quelles façons et à quelles conditions ils se combinent, et quels sont les effets constants des combinaisons ainsi formées. [paragraph] Telle est la méthode qu’on a tâché de suivre dans cet ouvrage. Dans la première partie, on a dégagé les éléments de la connaissance; de réduction en réduction, on est arrivé aux plus simples, puis de là aux changements physiologiques qui sont la condition de leur naissance. Dans la seconde partie, on a d’abord décrit le mécanisme et l’effet général de leur assemblage, puis, appliquant la loi trouvée, on a examiné les éléments, la formation, la certitude et la portée de nos principales sortes de connaissances, depuis celle des choses individuelles jusqu’à celle des choses générales, depuis les perceptions, prévisions et souvenirs les plus particuliers jusqu’aux jugements et axiomes les plus universels. (I, 3-5)

Tennyson, Alfred. “Eleänore,” in Poems. London: Moxon, 1833, 25-32.

quoted: 420n

420n.11 melody.] melody, / Which lives about thee, and a sweep / Of richest pauses, evermore / Drawn from each other mellow-deep, / Who may express thee, Eleänore? (28; 13-17)

Thales. Referred to: 380-1

Theætetus. Referred to: 409, 430

Theages.

note: the reference is to JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167, 395

Thearion (the baker).

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 143

Themistocles.

note: the references at 103, 133, 141, 143 are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 103, 133, 141, 143, 333, 435

Theodorus.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 82, 85

Theodotides.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Theodotus.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Apology.

referred to: 167

Theophrastus. Referred to: 510

Theramenes.

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 334

Thirlwall, Connop. Referred to: 41

— The History of Greece. New Ed. 8 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1845-52.

note: the work first appeared, in 8 vols., in Dionysius Lardner’s The Cabinet Cyclopædia (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1835 ff.), to which the references at 242 and 275n are relevant.

quoted: 281-2

referred to: 242, 275, 275n, 330

281.34-282.1 “were . . . Theogony . . . forms;” . . . “whence . . . shapes.”] [paragraph] Before we make any remark on this hypothesis, we must consider the view which Herodotus takes of the change introduced by native poets into the Greek mythology: Whence . . . shapes, on these points the knowledge of the Greeks may be said to be but of yesterday. And he subjoins, as a reason, the comparatively late age of Homer and Hesiod; who, as he says, were . . . theogony . . . forms. (I, 211)

— Trans. B. G. Niebuhr’s History of Rome. See Niebuhr.

— Trans. B. G. Niebuhr’s “On Xenophon’s Hellenica.” See Niebuhr, and Wiggers.

— Trans. F. D. Schleiermacher’s Introduction to The Apology of Socrates. See Plato, The Apology, the Crito . . . , ed. Smith.

— Trans. F. D. Schleiermacher’s “On the Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher.” See Schleiermacher.

— “Socrates, Schleiermacher, and Delbrueck,” Philological Museum, II (1833), 562-87.

referred to: 151n

Thrasybulus. Referred to: 155n, 309

Thrasymachus.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 82, 85, 87, 394, 396-7, 397n

Thucydides (son of Melesias).

note: the references are in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 334

Thucydides. Referred to: 300, 329, 330

— Thucydides (Greek and English). Trans. Charles Foster Smith. 4 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969.

note: the references at 377, 397n and the quotations at 318-19, 319 are to Pericles’ funeral oration, which is recorded by Thucydides (I, 318-40; II, 35-46); the passage quoted at 328 is contained in that quoted at 323n.

quoted: 317n, 318-19, 319, 319n, 323n, 328

referred to: 322, 327, 377, 397n

Timæus.

note: the reference at 413 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 385, 413

Timarchus. Referred to: 389

Timoleon. Referred to: 311

Tisander.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 124

Tisias.

note: the references are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Phædrus.

referred to: 85, 89

Tooke, John Horne. Επεα πτεροεντα. Or, The Diversions of Purley. 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Johnson, 1798, 1805.

note: although the precise words are not used by Tooke, the doctrine is averred.

quoted: 425

425.31-2 “that which each man troweth.”] [paragraph] True, as we now write it; or trew, as it was formerly written; means simply and merely—That which is trowed. [footnote omitted] (II, 403; cf. ibid., “. . . every man . . . should speak that which he troweth. . . .”)

Torquemada, Juan de. Referred to: 415

Turpin (Archbishop of Rheims). History of Charles the Great and Orlando, ascribed to Archbishop Turpin. Trans. T. Rodd. 2 vols. London: Todd, 1812.

note: the reference is general; this ed. is cited merely for the title.

referred to: 283

Ueberweg, Friedrich.Untersuchungen über die Echtheit und Zeitfolge Platonischer Schriften, und über die Hauptmomente aus Platos Leben. Vienna: Gerolds Sohn, 1861.

note: the reference, to p. 81, derives from Grote.

referred to: 386

Vincent de Beauvais.Speculum historiale fratris Vincencii. 2 vols. Strasburg: Mentelin, 1473.

note: the reference is general; this ed. cited merely for the title.

referred to: 283

Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro). Referred to: 284

— Aeneid.

note: as the reference is general, no ed. is cited; Opera, ed. C. G. Heyne (London: Priestley, 1821), is in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

referred to: 284

Voltaire, François Marie Arouet. Referred to: 387

Warburton, William.The Divine Legation of Moses, in The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, Lord Bishop of Gloucester. 7 vols. London: Cadell, 1788, I-III.

note: the passage referred to, which is in a quotation from Whately, is not in the 1st ed. (3 vols., London: Gyles, 1738-41).

referred to: 8

Wardrop, James. “Case of a Lady born blind, who received sight at an advanced age by the formation of an artificial pupil,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, CXVI (1826), Pt. 3, 529-40.

note: the reference, to “a middle-aged woman,” derives from Bailey.

referred to: 265

Ware, James. “Case of a young Gentleman, who recovered his Sight when seven Years of Age, after having been deprived of it by Cataracts, before he was a Year old; with Remarks,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, XCI (1801), Pt. 2, 382-96.

note: the reference, to “a boy seven years old,” derives from Bailey.

referred to: 265

Warton, Thomas.The History of English Poetry. 3 vols. London: Dodsley, Walter, Becket, Robson, Robinson, and Bew; Oxford: Fletcher, 1774-81.

note: the quotation is taken from Grote’s History, where the ed. is not cited; Grote’s page references to Warton, I, 131 and 140, correspond to I, 128n and 137 in the 1st ed., here used.

quoted: 284n

284n.5 the son] a son (I, 137)

Watts, Isaac.Logick: Or, the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth, with A Variety of Rules to guard against Error, in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, as well as in the Sciences. London: Clark, Hett, Matthews, and Ford, 1725.

note: the quotation at 8 (repeated at 19), which is in a quotation from Whately, would appear to be a summary paraphrase; the exact wording has not been found, but many passages approximate to it (e.g., 124-5, 365, 368, 371).

quoted: 8, 19

referred to: 20

Whately, Richard.Elements of Logic. Comprising the substance of the article in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana: with additions, &c. London: Mawman, 1826.

— 2nd ed. London: Mawman, 1827.

note: the page references given are to the 1st ed. The 1st and 9th eds. are in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

reviewed: 3-35

quoted: 3, 4-5, 6-7, 7-8, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 21, 27-8, 31, 32, 32-3, 32n

3.1-2 progress towards popularity,” . . . “is] progress, therefore, towards popularity is (xxvi)

4.34 [paragraph] If] [no paragraph] If (x)

4.38 all and] all and (x)

6.32 [paragraph] Many] [no paragraph] But many (xii)

7.9 never would] would never (xiii)

11.27 “may] [paragraph] Moreover, it should be remembered that a very long discussion is one of the most effectual veils of Fallacy; sophistry, like poison, is at once detected, and nauseated when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a Fallacy which when stated barely, in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may (151)

11.29 [paragraph] Fallacious reasonings, [. . . ,] may] [no paragraph] Or again, fallacious reasoning may (151)

13.18-19 “regarding the syllogism . . . nature,”] A more curious and important one is the degeneracy of Astronomy into judicial Astrology; but none is more striking than the misapplication of Logic, by those who have treated of it as “the art of rightly employing the rational faculties,” or who have intruded it into the province of natural philosophy, and regarded the Syllogism . . . nature: while they overlooked the boundless field that was before them within the legitimate limits of the science; and perceived not the importance and difficulty of the task, of completing and properly filling up the masterly sketch before them. (7)

14.34-5 plough,” . . . “may] plough may (236)

14.36 flail] flail (236)

15.2 “the] They have in short considered logic as an art of reasoning; whereas (so far as it is an art) it is the art of reasoning; the (22)

15.4 furnish] lay down (22)

15.6-7 “a . . . reasoning,” but “a . . . reasoning”] [paragraph] Others again, who are aware that the simple system of Logic may be applied to all subjects whatever, are yet disposed to view it as a . . . reasoning, and not, as it is, a . . . reasoning: whence many have been led (e.g. the author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric [George Campbell]) to talk of comparing syllogistic reasoning with moral reasoning, taking if for granted that it is possible to reason correctly without reasoning logically; which is in fact as great a blunder as if any one were to mistake grammar for a peculiar language, and to suppose it possible to speak correctly without speaking grammatically. (21-2)

16.19 instance,” . . . “in] instance in (18)

16.23 one . . . same] [no italics] (18)

16.38 argument.—An] argument: e.g. if any one from perceiving that “the world exhibits marks of design,” infers that “it must have had an intelligent author,” though he may not be aware in his own mind of the existence of any other premiss, he will readily understand, if it be denied that “whatever exhibits marks of design must have had an intelligent author,” that the affirmative of that proposition is necessary to the validity of the argument. An (24)

21.18 Property [Proprium];] Property; (62)

27.20 [paragraph] A Nominal Definition, [says he,] (such] [no paragraph] A Nominal Definition (such (71)

28.3 proposition;] “proposition;” (71)

28.4 ten commandments;] “ten commandments;” (71)

28.11 described] described (72)

28.11 food, &c.”] food,” &c. (72)

31.15 [paragraph] If a] [no paragraph] Nay, from the elliptical form in which all reasoning is usually expressed, and the peculiarly involved and oblique form in which Fallacy is for the most part conveyed, it must of course be often a matter of doubt, or rather, of arbitrary choice, not only to which genus each kind of Fallacy should be referred, but even to which kind to refer any one individual Fallacy: for since, in any course of Argument, one Premiss is usually suppressed, it frequently happens, in the case of a Fallacy, that the hearers are left to the alternative of supplying either a Premiss which is not true, or else, one which does not prove the Conclusion; e.g. if a (136-7)

32.23 [paragraph] This mistake, [he observes,] seems] [no paragraph] This inaccuracy seems (208)

32.25 deducing an] deducing of an (208)

32.30 reasoning, [he continues,] by] Reasoning by (208)

— Elements of Rhetoric. Comprising the substance of the article in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana: with additions, &c. Oxford: Parker; London: Murray, 1828.

note: JSM’s reference at 22n is mistakenly to the “preface” and so has been altered; the close parallel between the wording of the two references suggests a lapse of mind. The passage JSM refers to at 22n does not appear in later eds. of Whately’s Rhetoric.

referred to: 22n, 30

Wheatstone, Charles. “Contributions to the Physiology of Vision.—Part the First. On some remarkable, and hitherto unobserved, phenomena of binocular vision,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, CXXVIII (1838), 371-94.

note: “Part the Second” appeared ibid., 1852. The reference derives from Bailey.

referred to: 267

Whewell, William. Referred to: 247

Wiggers, Gustav Friedrich.A Life of Socrates. Trans. with Notes [by William Smith]. London: Taylor and Walton, 1840.

note: the volume also includes the Greek text of Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Socrates, and F. D. Schleiermacher’s “On the Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher,” translated from the Berlin Transactions (1815) by Connop Thirlwall (which first appeared in the Philological Museum, II [1833], 538-55). The quotation, which occurs in one of Smith’s notes, is taken by him, with acknowledgment, from Thirlwall’s translation of Niebuhr, “On Xenophon’s Hellenica” (the translation appeared in the Philological Museum, I [1832], 485-98; the quoted passage is on 494-6); see also 323, where part of the same passage is referred to. The book is paginated throughout in small roman numbers.

reviewed: 241-3

quoted: 242-3

242.39 him; a] him? A (lxxvi)

243.5 man. We] man: we (lxxvi)

243.20 gods] Gods (lxxvi)

Wolf, Friedrich August.

note: the reference is to “the Wolfian hypothesis” concerning the authorship of Homer.

referred to: 291

Wordsworth, William. “Lines, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour,” in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. 1st collected ed. 5 vols. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827, II, 179-86.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 421

421.36-7 “something far more deeply interfused,”] And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things. (183; 96-105)

— “Ode. Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in ibid., IV, 346-55.

note: this ed. in JSM’s library, Somerville College.

quoted: 423

423.15 “a sleep and a forgetting,”] Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere it’s [sic] setting, / And cometh from afar: / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy! (349; Stanza 5, 1-9)

Xenophanes. Referred to: 426

— Fragment 9, in Anthologia Lyrica Graeca. Ed. Ernestus Diehl. Leipzig: Teubneri, 1954, I, 68.

quoted: 286

Xenophon.

note: the reference at 320 is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 300, 320, 378

— Anabasis, in Hellenica, Books VI & VII, Anabasis, Books I-III. Trans. Carleton L. Brownson. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961, 242-492.

referred to: 311

— Apology, in Anabasis, Books IV-VII, Symposium and Apology (Greek and English). Trans. O. J. Todd. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961, 488-508.

referred to: 398

— Memorabilia, in Memorabilia and Œconomicus (Greek and English). Trans. E. C. Marchant. London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1923, 2-358.

quoted: 392n, 399, 401n, 407, 417n, 432

referred to: 166n, 393, 399, 409n, 418, 480

Xerxes.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 121

Zeno (of Elea).

note: the references at 222-38 passim are in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Parmenides, in which Zeno is a character.

referred to: 222-38 passim, 382, 506

Zeuxippus (the painter).

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Protagoras.

referred to: 48

Zeuxis.

note: the reference is in JSM’s translation of Plato’s Gorgias.

referred to: 101

STATUTES

43 Elizabeth, c.2. An Act for the reliefe of the poore (1601).

note: the reference is in a quotation from Grote.

referred to: 301