of the good and the pleasant is left less definite, and only the difference between the pleasant and useful more strongly laid down, without its being decidedly assumed (what indeed had been already contradicted in previous dialogues), that this distinction would depend only upon time. Whence, as soon as the distinction between the good and the pleasant is made out, the result comes out of itself, that the idea of the useful is immediately connected with the good.

In the conversation with Callicles Socrates' immediate purpose is chiefly to awaken the consciousness of that opposition, and to force his interlocutor to allow that the proposition, that all good is exhausted in the pleasant, has no support in internal consciousness, but that this hypothesis compels us to place yet a further good beyond the sphere of the pleasant. And the attempts which in conjunction with Callicles Socrates makes for accomplishing this end, and which, moreover, are especially remarkable on account of the admixture, the first as yet, of Italian wisdom, might fairly be allowed to constitute in themselves the most ingenious part of this work. I mean, when we further take into consideration the manner in which they fail and the necessity for this failure, which is as nicely calculated as from the whole description of Callicles' character it is beautifully applied, and the way in which Socrates, without having neglected, as he would have been most glad to have done, the excitement of the feeling, guards against the objection of giving himself pliable opponents; and returning to his own peculiar philosophical organ of dialectics, adduces a most important exposition of the true nature of pleasure, that it is something in perpetual flux, and can only be conceived as arising in the

transition from one becoming state to another.

All this is in fact far too ingenious, far too fully worked out and too accurately treated to allow of our considering it as only collateral matter occasionally touched upon, and the political part alone as the peculiar object of the work.

This explanation, as soon as Callicles has admitted a distinction between the pleasant and the good, though only quite in general terms, is followed by the third section, which connects and comprehends the two preceding. In this, then, Socrates, in accordance with the ethical and preparatory nature of the work, concludes with a development resting upon the disposition of the mind, and expressing it mythically. Now if a comparison is to be instituted also between this myth and that in the Phædrus, and there is to a certain extent much resemblance between the two, in so far as even this has been celebrated as a fundamental myth, it must be remembered that the future bears exactly the same relation to the will and to art in this, as the past does to science and knowledge in that, and that in the one as well as the other Time is only an image, while the essential point consists in the consideration of mind divested of personality. And thus Plato is so far from intending to set such a value upon the mythical part as might lead us to take it historically, that he connects it with the popular mythology. Nor, moreover, does the Gorgias leave the subject of love unnoticed, but in this dialogue love is quite as much the guiding principle of the political art, as it is in the Phædrus of the cultivation of the individual; only, as we must at all events suppose, relying upon the investigations pursued in the Lysis, it has already divested itself of its mythical dress.

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But we need not pursue particular comparisons of this kind; only we may observe in general that a comparison with what has preceded brings us to our second result: I mean that with reference to the proof which the form may supply, the Gorgias not only belongs to the second part, but also occupies the first place in it. For in that which constitutes the main subject of the dialogue, the mode in which the particular instance, rhetoric, that is, as an example of mere semblance in art, is combined with the more general object of the whole exposition, the endeavour to investigate upon the practical side the opposition between the eternal and the mutable, in this the Gorgias, notwithstanding all its apparent similarity with the Phædrus, bears entirely the character of the second part. For in that dialogue, where philosophising was only spoken of as an impulsive feeling, and knowledge as inward intuition, the method, as a thing external, could only serve for illustration. But now when the Parmenides has so prepared the way, that it is rather the reality of knowledge together with its objects, that are to be discussed, instead of mere method, art is set up as something formed and finished, and the connection between the arts as something external, and the investigation is pursued rather with a view of discovering whether they have an object, and what it is. Nay, if we look to the mere structure, a decided transition may be pointed out from the Phædrus through the Protagoras to the Gorgias, and from this to the Euthydemus and Sophist, in which the form of utter negation comes out most strongly.

And in like manner all these dialogues are penetrated throughout by a germ, continually growing and treated only as an indirect object, of the positive, in the indi

cation of true science and art and the objects of them, until at last it leaves this connection with the negative and comes out alone, when at the same time the whole of the indirect treatment passes into one of an opposite form. Thus, while the Gorgias clearly proves itself to belong to this series, it is quite as manifestly the first member of it, partly on account of the similarity already mentioned to the earlier method of instruction, partly because the last-mentioned combination of the negative object with the positive is far from being so ingenious and complicated as in the subsequent dialogues, the Euthydemus for instance, and Sophist. Moreover, the subdivision of the investigation under several heads, and the apparently frequent return to the commencement of the subject, are forms which appear more often in the sequel and become most important features, to which the Lysis and the little dialogues connected with the Protagoras afford but slight approximations.

Add to this, in order to fix the place of the Gorgias still more decisively, the ingenious manner in which almost all the earlier dialogues are again taken up in it, and sometimes particular points out of them, sometimes their actual results are more or less clearly interwoven with it, and, on the other hand, the perfectly unintentional way, though the skilful reader cannot overlook it, in which the germs of the following dialogues of this series already lie folded up in this. The former point has been already touched upon in general with reference to the Phædrus and Protagoras, but might still be pursued much further, and still more numerous references might be discovered in detail. Thus from the Phædrus the objection might be especially brought against Plato by other Socraticians,

that notwithstanding his apparent intention in that dialogue of correcting the method of that species of rhetoric which tends only to delude, and his depreciation of it, he still allows it to hold such a place, that a person might look upon it as an object of desirable attainment. And it is precisely for this, that in the Gorgias its only possible use, according to moral principles, and of the necessary connection between method and thought, appears in so emphatic a form, and is so multifariously repeated, in order to show how impossible it is, starting from his principles, to come to any view, with regard to this subject, different from that here projected. And in the Protagoras the description of sophistical self-complacency might easily be thought exaggerated, and the game too easy, when the writer of the dialogues attributes to his opponent such follies and absurdities. Hence in this dialogue, when Gorgias finds himself similarly circumstanced with Protagoras, he proves far more pliant and docile with regard to the turnings of the dialogue, and draws less ridicule upon himself. But, on the contrary, Plato shews afresh in Polus at all events, that there is no doubt that rhetorical undialectic sophists are incapable of accomplishing anything in that art of conducting a dialogue upon which his Socrates prides himself; a serious play with the method which, though certainly in some degree an echo from the first series, manifestly stands here in a far more subordinate relation than the similar one in the Protagoras. Thus again from the Lysis; not only is the notion of the neither good nor bad taken up as a thing granted and acknowledged, but also what we find in that smaller dialogue upon the subject of love, predominant as it is, in a confined