as introductory to this second class of Plato's collective works, and if it be immediately applied to the dialogue before us, and its position justified in accordance with the theory, all will be said that can be adduced beforehand to facilitate its comprehension.

The intuition of the true and perfectly existent, in other words, of the eternal and unalterable, with which, as we have seen, every exposition of Plato's philosophy commenced, has its opposite pole in the equally general, and to common thought and being no less original and underived, intuition of the imperfectly existent, everflowing and mutable, which yet holds bound under its form all action and thought as they can be apprehended in actual, tangible, reality. Therefore the highest and most general problem of philosophy is exclusively thisto apprehend and fix the essential in that fleeting chaos, to display it as the essential and good therein, and so drawing forth to the full light of consciousness the apparent contradiction between those two intuitions, to reconcile it at the same time. This harmonizing process necessarily resolves itself into two factors, upon whose different relation to each other rests the difference of the methods. Setting out from the intuition of the perfectly existent, to advance in the exposition up to the semblance, and thus, simultaneously with its solution, for the first time to awaken and explain the consciousness of this contradiction; this is, in relation to philosophy, the immediate way of proceeding. On the other hand, starting from the consciousness of the contradiction as a thing given, to advance to the primary intuition as the means of its solution, and to lead up by force of the very necessity of such a mean towards it, this is the method which we have named the indirect or mediate,

and which being for many reasons especially suited to one who commençes on ethical ground, is here placed by Plato in the centre, as the true mean of connexion and progressive formation from the original intuition, his elementary starting-post, to the constructive exposition, the goal of his systematic conclusion.

Now the relation which, in the sphere of nature, being and semblance or sensation bear to one another in this antithesis, is the same as that which in ethics exists between good, and pleasure or feeling. Therefore the principal object for the second part of Plato's works, and their common problem, will be to show, that science and art cannot be discovered, but only a deceitful semblance of both must be ever predominant, so long as these two are exchanged with each other, being with appearance, and good with pleasure. And advances are made to the solution of this problem naturally in a twofold way; yet without holding each course entirely apart in different writings: on the one hand, namely, that which hitherto had past for science and art is laid bare in its utter worthlessness: on the other, attempts are made, from the very position of knowing and acknowledging that antithesis to develop rightly the essence of science and art and their fundamental outlines. The Gorgias stands at the head of this class, because it rather limits itself, as preparatory, to the former task, than ventures upon the latter; and starting entirely from the ethical side, attacks at both ends the confusion existing herein, fixing on its inmost spirit, as the root, and its openly displayed arrogance as the fruits. The remaining dialogues observe this general distinction, they partly go farther back in the observation of the scientific in mere seeming, partly farther forwards in the idea

of true science, and partly contain other later consequences of what is here first advanced in preparation.

From this point, then, we observe a natural connection between the two main positions demonstrated to the interlocutors with Socrates in this dialogue. The first, that their pretensions to the possession of an art properly so called in their art of speaking are entirely unfounded; and the second, that they are involved in a profound mistake in their confusion of the good with the pleasant. And from the same point likewise the particular manner in which each is proved, and the arrangement of the whole, may be explained. For when it is the good that is under consideration, and the ethical object is predominant, Truth must be considered more in reference to art than science, if, that is, unity is to be preserved in the work generally. And moreover, it is art in its most general and comprehensive form that is here discussed, for the dialogue embraces every thing connected with it, from its greatest object, the state, to its least, the embellishment of sensuous existence. Only, as his custom is, Plato is most fond of using the greater form as the scheme and representation of the general, and the less, on the other hand, as an example and illustration of the greater; that no one may lose himself, contrary to Plato's purpose, in the object of the latter, which can never be anything but a particular. For rhetoric, it is to be observed, is here used to represent the whole would-be art of politics, but still only to represent it, and on that account especially, the introduction to the Protagoras is here repeated, verbally one might almost say, in order to draw attention the more certainly, by this change in the application of the word, to the more closely drawn variation from the earlier usage of it in that dialogue

and the Phædrus, and further, to what is notwithstanding here more intimated than expounded or systematised, the separation of rhetoric from sophistics, so that the former, regarded as an art under the category of the science of semblance, is to contain whatever refers to the greatest object of all art, the state, while sophistics, as is further explained elsewhere, contain the semblance of communicating with the principles themselves. For though Socrates compares rhetoric only with the administration of justice, and sophistics on the contrary with legislation, the proper sense of this indisputably is, that sophistics are to be supposed to imitate the knowledge of the first principles, from which certainly original composition and conformation proceed, and rhetoric the application of them to a given subject. The case is exactly the same, according to the ancient ideas, with gymnastics, in which outward perfection of the human body is one and the same with the principles of its preservation and production; rhetoric, on the contrary, like politics in the ordinary sense, can never be anything but a remedial art, and applies those principles to a given corruption. Here then, to discover and expose the utter superficiality of the art of speaking, Socrates has to deal with the artists themselves, Gorgias and Polus. The confusion of the pleasant with the good is shown on the other hand in Callicles, whom a similarity in disposition had made a pupil of the other two; and then in the last section in which Socrates recapitulates all that had preceded, both sets of principles are shown to originate in the same one vicious principle, and to point to the same deficiency. Still, as it is not natural to Plato to make any decisive divisions in his general plan, so neither do we here find them in particular in the different sections.

In the first, then, of these, Socrates shows to Gorgias, to whom Plato, we know not with what justice, ascribes at the outset a somewhat limited purpose in his instructions, representing that that purpose tends only to a proper conduct of political life, and in no way to the cultivation of virtue-Socrates proves to him from his own method, and that of the other rhetoricians, that justice and injustice, which nevertheless he is obliged to recognise as the objects of his art, can never be consciously contained in it, or given by it. To Polus however the

nature and relations of the art of semblance are still more accurately exposed, and he is shown in particular that in the idea of the beautiful, which he still refuses to give up as unmeaning, and persists in assigning to it a province of its own, the commission of injustice proves to be worse than the sufferance of it, which leads immediately to a distinction between the good and the pleasant. Here again the comparison with the Protagoras comes very near, that we may be enabled to see the use which in his indirect investigations Plato makes of the idea of the beautiful; I mean, that he propounds it formally and hypothetically only, and, allowing it to be entered as an abstract and exclusive notion, explains dialectically its relation to other homogenous ideas as to which men are substantially agreed. In the Protagoras, now, the apparent supposition of the unity of the good and the pleasant had been made the ground-work of the argument, and there remained therefore no other instrument of distinction, but mediateness or immediateness of the pleasant and unpleasant in time, which however can constitute no such instrument, as is so multifariously explained in the Protagoras itself and the dialogues connected with it. In the dialogue with Polus the identity