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But it may be useful here to throw a glance of comparison, not upon the Parmenides alone, but upon the remaining dialogues, with the view of availing ourselves of the opportunity of testing from this important point the arrangement we have hitherto pursued. First, then, the Sophist is manifestly the crown of all that is antisophistic in the Platonic dialogues, and no dialogue of which this is a principal component part can be conceived to have been written subsequently to the present, for it would have been as unseasonable in the author as putting the salt on after supper. So complete a process as we have here, by which the subject has its place assigned in the order of things, must from its nature be the last member in the investigation, and conclude the whole. For a work in which the dramatic character is so predominant as it is in the Protagoras, must precede a dialogue like the present, as far as mythical expositions elsewhere precede the productions of purely dialectic speculation. Moreover, the Protagoras supplies us with yet another, although subordinate point, of comparison. For what was said in that dialogue about baseness and vice is here manifestly intended to be illustrated, and protected from misconception, by the instancing of two species of it, so that we may say that, in this point of view, on the one hand, the Sophist brings the Protagoras into agreement with the Gorgias, and on the other, that it forms the transition to that ethical character which predominates in the books upon the Republic. In the Gorgias, which is indeed more anti-rhetorical than antisophistical, we find the application of the terms idea, type, and imitation, in order to explain from them the nature of what is false and bad, manifestly with the

appearance of being earlier than it is here, because it is there put only hypothetically, while here it is regularly deduced and established. Moreover, the Sophist appeals to the notion of the semblance of the just as to a thing known, and sets up a connection between rhetoric and sophistry, such that they both coincide in the idea of mere appearance. And as the Euthydemus generally is presupposed in the Sophist, and every thing in which Plato could appeal to that dialogue is briefly dispatched, as, for example, that non-existence cannot be ever made the predicate of a proposition, and that it is self-evident, that when a man asserts falsely about a thing, he does not speak of the thing at all; so also, any one may easily see that much that was too shortly touched upon in the Euthydemus, is here demonstrated more at length. If we compare further what the Cratylus and Sophist have in common, we can scarcely doubt that the illustrations about types and imitations preceded the application here made of the same thought; especially if we notice the easy way in which the stranger is satisfied with the explanation, that a type is a second reality made to resemble a first, while in the Cratylus we find extensive explanations as to how the type can only be externally and in part the same with the archetype; and even in the manner in which in the Sophist the idea of a type is first introduced, we may easily observe the reference to the Cratylus. In like manner, Plato could scarcely have expressed himself so briefly as to the relation between thought and language, if he had not himself already represented words to be immediate imitations of things and actions. From these points, certainly, every appearance of an inverted order in

the arrangement of the dialogues will easily admit of being destroyed. And how should Plato, just at the beginning of this dialogue, have come to consider all knowledge, not as resulting from an act of production, but of appropriation? and how, with his accuracy, should he thus have allowed himself to maintain this point without further discussion, if he could not reckon upon what the Menon was supposed to have made clear to his readers?

This short analysis will, it is hoped, suffice with reference now to much that has been already said on former occasions, fully also to justify the separation of the Sophist from the Theatetus, notwithstanding the two are placed so closely in connection with one another. For while, with regard to some of the dialogues introduced between these two, the manner of their connexion with the Theætetus has been made more clear, and how they develope themselves from it, and again with regard to others, how they are presupposed by the Sophist; these two circumstances taken in conjunction, become too evident in the case of every one of these dialogues to allow a doubt to arise as to their place with reference to these. But it is also immediately certain, that the Sophist rests upon the Theatetus, and would be perfectly unintelligible without the distinction previously established between knowledge and conception, and the suggestions in the Theætetus respecting the first, which constitute in fact a sufficient foundation for what is here said, and no other is essentially necessary. Let any one, however, conceive the Sophist to have followed immediately upon the Theaetetus, and consequently to have contained in itself all that he can now take for granted out of the Menon, and

Euthydemus especially, and then say whether it would not necessarily have been a shapeless work for Plato to have composed, and if to its present difficulties such superabundance and complexity of matter had been further added, whether it would not then have been perfectly unintelligible. Only it is not here intended to be said, that in completing the plan of this dialogue, Plato projected in his mind those other dialogues purposely with a view to the future; but this is only to be understood in the sense in which one may reasonably speak of the natural course of the development of inward conceptions from one another. Hence, as to the assignation made at the end of the Theætetus and the continuous connection at the beginning of the Sophist, it is scarcely worth while entering into a more accurate explanation, as any reader, not satisfied with that given in the Introduction to the Meno, can do this for himself.

VII. THE STATESMAN.

It must be at once self-evident to every reader how the Statesman, as the second part of the trilogy announced in the Sophist, is connected with that dialogue. But although it takes place among the same persons, and annexes itself in a continued conversation as it were with the investigation concerning the Sophist, it would be too much to think of viewing the two as in reality and on that account one dialogue. There

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is, on the contrary, reason to believe that some time intervened between the publication of the two, especially if we are to give any weight to several particular sentiments in our dialogue, which have fully the appearance of being intended to defend the Sophist. Hence, we have not hesitated to follow with the greater confidence, the old method of separating the two dialogues from one another under the titles that have come down to us, notwithstanding their intimate connection. indeed the similarity of the two is of such a nature as to direct us rather to place them in juxta-position as counterparts, than to admit of our conjoining them as parts of a whole. For they do in fact, correspond to one another in their whole construction more accurately than any other two dialogues of Plato; and whatever difference is to be met with appears only to be the result of the general distinction, that in the Sophist the immediate object of the speculation is an object of aversion; in the Statesman, on the contrary, it is something genuine and excellent. Although even in this respect our dialogue approximates again to the Sophist, for collaterally with the meritorious object, it at the same time, and with great pains, deduces and describes the reverse; just as in the Sophist also the meritorious object, namely, the philosopher, is at all events sketched out collaterally with the elaborate description of its opposite. Thus then our dialogue justly occupies the middle place in the designed trilogy, as it does in fact form a middle term between the Sophist and the promised description of the Philosopher, as near as we can conceive what the character of the latter is to be.

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