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livered may always be supported by its Father and receive his protection, and that not only against the objections of one who thinks otherwise, but also against the intellectual stubbornness of one as yet ignorant, while the written sentence has no answer to make to any further inquiries. Whence it is at once clear, in passing, what a degree that man has forfeited all right to utter even a single word about Plato who could take up with a notion that that Philosopher, in his esoteric and oral instruction could have availed himself of the Sophistical method of long and continuous discourses, when, even by his own declaration, such a method appears to Plato farthest removed from that preeminence which he gives to its opposite. But in every way, not accidentally only, or from practice and tradition, but necessarily and naturally Plato's was a Socratic method, and indeed, as regards the uninterrupted and progressive reciprocation, and the deeper impression made upon the mind of the hearer, to be certainly as much preferred to that of his master, as the scholar excelled him as well in constructive Dialectics, as in richness and compass of subjective intuition. As then, notwithstanding this complaint, Plato wrote so much from the period of his early manhood to that of his most advanced age, it is clear that he must have endeavoured to make written instruction as like as possible to that better kind, and he must also have succeeded in that attempt. For even if we look only to the immediate purpose, that writing, as regarded himself and his followers was only to be a remembrance of thoughts already current among them; Plato considers all thought so much as spontaneous activity, that, with him, a remembrance of this kind of what has been already acquired, must necessarily be so of the first and

original mode of acquisition. Hence on that account alone the dialogistic form, necessary as an imitation of that original and reciprocal communication, would be as indispensable and natural to his writings as to his oral instruction. Meanwhile this form does by no means exhaust the whole of his method, as it has been often applied both contemporaneously and at a later period to philosophical objects, without a trace of the spirit of Plato, or of his great adroitness in the management of it. But even in his oral instruction, and still more in the written imitation of it, when we consider further, that Plato's object was to bring the still ignorant reader nearer to a state of knowledge, or that he at least felt the necessity of being cautious with regard to him not to give rise to an empty and conceited notion of his own knowledge in his mind, on both accounts it must have been the Philosopher's chief object to conduct every investigation in such a manner from the beginning onwards, as that he might reckon upon the reader's either being driven to an inward and self-originated creation of the thought in view, or submitting to surrender himself most decisively to the feeling of not having discovered or understood anything. To this end, then, it is requisite that the final object of the investigation be not directly enunciated and laid down in words, a process which might very easily serve to entangle many persons who are glad to rest content, provided only they are in possession of the final result, but that the mind be reduced to the necessity of seeking, and put into the way by which it may find it. The first is done by the mind's being brought to so distinct a consciousness of its own state of ignorance, that it is impossible it should willingly continue therein. The other is effected either by an enigma

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being woven out of contradictions, to which the only possible solution is to be found in the thought in view, and often several hints thrown out in a way apparently utterly foreign and accidental which can only be found and understood by one who does really investigate with an activity of his own. Or the real investigation is overdrawn with another, not like a veil, but, as it were, an adhesive skin, which conceals from the inattentive reader, and from him alone, the matter which is to be properly considered or discovered, while it only sharpens and clears the mind of an attentive one to perceive the inward connection. Or when the exposition of a whole is the object in view, this is only sketched by a few unconnected strokes, which, however, he who has the figure already before him in his own mind, can easily fill up and combine. These are something like the arts by which Plato succeeds with almost every one in either attaining to what he wishes, or, at least, avoiding what he fears. And thus this would be the only signification in which one could here speak of an esoteric and exoteric, I mean, as indicating only a state of the reader's mind, according as he elevates himself or not to the condition of one truly sensible of the inward spirit; or if it is still to be referred to Plato himself, it can only be said that immediate instruction was his only esoteric process, while writing was only his exoteric. For in that certainly, after he was first sufficiently assured that his hearers had followed him as he desired, he could express his thoughts purely and perfectly, and perhaps even regularly work out in common with those hearers, and according to outlines framed in common with them, the particular philosophical sciences, after having first grasped in his mind their higher ground and connection. Meanwhile, since in the writings of Plato

the exposition of Philosophy is in the same sensé progressive from the very first excitement of the original and leading ideas, up to an all but perfected exposition of particular sciences, it follows, what has been above said being presumed, it follows, I say, that there must be a natural sequence and a necessary relation in these dialogues to one another. For he cannot advance further in another dialogue unless he supposes the effect proposed in an earlier one to have been produced, so that the same subject which is completed in the termination of the one, must be supposed as the beginning and foundation of another. Now if Plato ended with separate expositions of the several philosophical sciences, it might then be supposed that he had also advanced each for itself in gradual progression, and we should be compelled to look for two separate classes of dialogues, an ethical and a physical series. But as he represents them as a connected whole, and it is ever his peculiar theory to conceive of them generally as essentially connected and inseparable, so also are the preparations for them united in like manner, and made by considering their common principles and laws, and there are therefore not several unconnected and collaterally progressing series of Platonic Dialogues, but only one single one, comprehending every thing in it.

The restoration then of this natural order is, as every one sees, an object very far distinct from all attempts hitherto made at an arrangement of the works of Plato, inasmuch as these attempts in part terminate in nothing but vain and extravagant trifling, and in part proceed upon a systematic separation and combination according to the established divisions of Philosophy, in part also, only take particular points into

consideration here and there, without having anything like a whole in view. The classification into tetralogies, which Diogenes has preserved for us after Thrasyllus, manifestly rests merely upon the almost dramatic form of these dialogues, which gave occasion to arrange them in the same manner as the works of the Tragic Poets spontaneously arranged themselves according to the regulations of the Athenian festival, and even on this poor chance-work the classification was ill kept and so ignorantly executed, that for the most part, no reason whatever can be discovered why, in particular instances, the results of it are at all as we find them. Not even is the resemblance carried on so far as that, as every dramatic tetralogy ended with a satirical piece, so also in this case the dialogues in which irony and epideictic polemics are most strongly preeminent, were assigned to the concluding portions; on the contrary, they are all heaped together in two tetralogies. Quite as little regard was had to an old tradition, and one, in itself, at first sight extremely probable, that Plato, when actually a pupil of Socrates, made some of his dialogues public; for how otherwise could those which refer to the condemnation and death of Socrates be the first, and the Lysis and Phædrus, which the ancients regard as works of so early a date, be thrown far into the middle of all? The only trace of an intelligent notion might perhaps be found in the fact that the Clitophon is placed before the Republic, as a justifying transition from the so-called investigative dialogues, and in appearance sceptical, to those that are immediately instructive and exponential, and in this case it is almost ridiculous that so suspicious a dialogue can boast of having suggested this solitary idea. The Trilogies