istence"; but they were precritical or dogmatic philosophers, to whom it had not occurred to define the requirements of philosophy. They knew no perfect knowledge other than their own actual knowledge. They defined being and interpreted life without reflecting upon the quality of the knowledge whose object is being, or the quality of insight that would indeed be practical wisdom. But when through Socrates the whole philosophical prospect is again revealed after the period of humanistic concentration, it is as an ideal whose possibilities, whose necessities, are conceived before they are realized. Socrates celebrates the rôle of the philosopher without assigning it to himself. The new philosophical object is the philosopher himself; and the new insight a knowledge of knowledge itself. These three types of intellectual procedure, dogmatic speculation concerning being, humanistic interest in life, and the self-criticism of thought, form the historical preparation for Plato, the philosopher who defined being a the ideal of thought, and upon this ground interpreted life.

There is no more striking case in history of the subtle continuity of thought than the relation between Plato and his master Socrates. The wonder of it is due to the absence of any formula

tion of doctrine on the part of Socrates himsel He only lived and talked; and yet Plato created: system of philosophy in which he is faithfullembodied. The form of embodiment is the dialogue, in which the talking of Socrates is perpetated and conducted to profounder issues, and in which his life is both rendered and interpreted. But as the vehicle of Plato's thought preserves and makes perfect the Socratic method, so the thought itself begins with the Socratic motive and remains to the end an expression of it. The presentiment of perfect knowledge which distinguished Socrates from his contemporaries becomes in Plato the clear vision of a realm of ideal truth.

Reality as the

Absolute Ideal

§ 160. Plato begins his philosophy with the philosopher and the philosopher's interest. The Platonism: philosopher is a lover, who like all lovers longs for the beautiful. But he is or Good. the supreme lover, for he loves not the individual beautiful object but the Absolute Beauty itself. He is a lover too in that he does not possess, but somehow apprehends his object from afar. Though imperfect, he seeks perfection; though standing like all his fellows in the twilight of half-reality, he faces toward the sun. Now it is the fundamental proposition of the Pla

tonic philosophy that reality is the sun itself, or the perfection whose possession every wise thinker covets, whose presence would satisfy every longing of experience. The real is that beloved object which is "truly beautiful, delicate, perfect, and blessed." There is both a serious ground for such an affirmation and an important truth in its meaning. The ground is the evident incompleteness of every special judgment concerning experience. We understand only in part, and we know that we understand only in part. What we discover is real enough for practical purposes, but even common-sense questions the true reality of its objects. Special judgments seem to terminate our thought abruptly and arbitrarily. We give "the best answer we can," but such answers do not come as the completion of our thinking. Our thought is in some sense surely a seeking, and it would appear that we are not permitted to rest and be satisfied at any stage of it. If we do so we are like the sophists-blind to our own ignorance. But it is equally true that our thought is straightforward and progressive. We are not permitted to return to earlier stages, but must push on to that which is not less, but more, than what we have as yet found. There is good hope, then, of understanding what

the ideal may be from our knowledge of the dire tion which it impels us to follow.

But to understand Plato's conception of the progression of experience we must again catch uṛ the Socratic strain which he weaves into every theme. For Socrates, student of life and man kind, all objects were objects of interest, and al interests practical interests. One is ignorant when one does not know the good of things; opinionative when one rates things by conventional standards; wise when one knows their real good In Platonism this practical interpretation of experience appears in the principle that the object of perfect knowledge is the good. The nature of things which one seeks to know better is the good of things, the absolute being which is the goal of all thinking is the very good itself. Plato does not use the term good in any merely utilitarian sense. Indeed it is very significant that for Plato there is no cleavage between theoretical and practical interests. To be morally good is to know the good, to set one's heart on the true object of affection; and to be theoretically sound is to understand perfection. The good itself is the end of every aim, that in which all interests converge. Hence it cannot be defined, as might a special good, in

terms of the fulfilment of a set of concrete conditions, but only in terms of the sense or direction The following passage occurs in

of all purposes. the "Symposium":

"The true order of going or being led by others to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is."

66

§ 161. There is, then, a true order of going," and an order that leads from one to many, from thence to forms, from thence to moral

The Progres

sion of

Experience

ity, and from thence to the general obtoward God. jects of thought or the ideas. In the

Republic," where the proper education of the philosopher is in question, it is proposed that he shall study arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and dialectic. Thus in each case mathematics is the first advance in knowledge, and dialectic the nearest to perfection. Most of Plato's examples are drawn from mathematics. This science replaces the variety and vagueness of the forms of experience with clear, unitary, definite, and eternal natures,

Plato: Symposium, 211. Translation by Jowett.