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fact; and, on the other, it is easy to point generally to the progress which even at this period the philosophy itself of Plato had made towards perfection, and to the influence it had upon the form of his works; so that without total separation, there yet prevails in all of them a preponderating antithetical character, and the Symposium and Phædon are most naturally connected together, exactly in the same manner as the Gorgias and Theætetus are. One may even venture to say, that in the dialogue we are now considering, this influence is particularly reflected in the description of the opposition between soul and body, two things which, regarded from without, are quite distinct enough; but still, when the fact itself speaks, can never be completely disconnected from one another. For the rest, however, it would be a strange misunderstanding of what has been said, if any reader were to understand this so strictly and literally, as to suppose that the two dialogues constitute the third part of the trilogy which was promised in the Sophist, as if Plato, fearing the frequent repetition of the same form, had now determined to exhibit the philosopher in a different way, and because, instead of the somewhat dry ironical subdivision, he had again chosen the most elegant dramatic form, he was by that perhaps induced to divide his subject, and thus constructed the two dialogues with one another, and sketched them at the same time. For this would be too dry and mechanical a process for us to think of maintaining it. But Plato may easily have let the trilogy go unfinished, thinking that his readers might now turn a speech in the Phædrus to the construction of a philosopher after the manner of the second part of the trilogy, combining much both earlier

and later in point of composition, to which he might mentally refer them. But even supposing this to have been the case, still, and this is all, properly speaking, which we maintain, in his progress or his career as an author the same problem must necessarily have returned upon him under another form. For our two dialogues form the first, as the Philebus forms the second point of transition from the dialogues that have preceded, and were characterized by the indirect process to those that follow, which belong to the immediately constructive class. And, when Plato was upon the point of adopting another method, and wished yet once for all to connect together what he had surveyed by the one already used, and what, although without every where enunciating the results with equal precision, he had also in reality taught and established, when he wished to conclude the old matter as well as prepare the way for the new, what could be a more natural result than that he should describe the process of a philosopher as a purely mental process, as he had practised it according to his own inclination and judgment; for the description of his own mode of operation would now for the first time come in his way? It must, indeed, always remain a remarkable circumstance, and one that might point to an earlier period for the composition of this dialogue, that that dramatic character, which in the dialogues immediately preceding had almost vanished, and in the Philebus again is likewise much suppressed, comes out in such strong relief in these two, as it were in its last and highest glory. But, in the first place, every reader must see that there is no other dialogue, and least of all is it the case with the earliest, as the Phædrus and Protagoras,

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in which the dramatic character is so completely part and parcel of the subject, or so intimately identified with it as in this dialogue, and it could therefore never display itself in its full splendour with more perfect right. And again, a variety of other circumstances may have given occasion to this display; in the Symposium, first, which we know certainly upon other grounds not to belong to the earlier works of Plato, that apologetic tendency which cannot be denied to exist in it, and for which a living representation of the Socratic mode of life must have been of great advantage; in the Phædon, probably, Plato's recollection of his own Sicilian affairs, and the wish to show how impossible it was that a cowardly fear of death should exist in the breast of a true disciple of Socrates. is therefore by no means the close connection with the Symposium that alone determines this as the proper place for the Phædon in the works of Plato. Rather should we say, that it is that combination of all that has preceded, which is so manifest, and to which we especially refer all who would be convinced upon this point; and then, whether that particular relation presents itself in a light more or less clear, can make but little difference as regards the principal question.

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And first of all, it must be evident to every one, that it is only on the transition from the previous works to those that are to come, that the account would be in its proper place, which Plato in the person of Socrates here gives us of his own advances in speculation, and of the turns in his philosophical career; how, for instance, he begun with Anaxagoras; how, from the study of that philosopher, the idea of the good, and the supremacy of reason as the highest norma of

all cosmical contemplation, first shot upon him; how by the dialectic method he convinced himself of the unsoundness of the Empedoclean doctrine of physics, and therefore, so long as his own ideas were not sufficiently clear and distinct to follow them out consistently and plenarily as principles, he could not proceed otherwise than critically and hypothetically; and this applies particularly to his speculations upon the Eleatic and Heraclitic philosophy, and to the result of those speculations, which taught him that in the eternal forms alone is found the constant as connected with the changeable, and real unities as connected with pluralities, and that it is only upon them, and the relation of things to them, that knowledge or science of anything whatever can be constructed. And this principle is here for the first time established so totally without restraint, and with so much reference made to the construction of science, that every reader who is familiar with the Platonic turns, and the value of Platonic expressions, must very easily see that when Plato wrote this, the idea of the good had ceased to be too strange to him, or too obscure to prevent him any longer from constructing in connection with that principle the two sciences which are here alluded to. But every really attentive reader must feel in this place the most decided inclination to pass at once from the Phædon to the Timæus, until he reflects that in Plato's speculations the ethical generally precede the physical, and on the other hand, that the idea of the good itself was still susceptible of more accurate explanation, and indeed, more especially on account of disputed questions, at that time still unsettled, even required it; and we have, therefore, yet to pass through the Philebus

and the Republic, of both of which the germs manifestly appear in this place in the Phædon. And again, it can hardly escape any one of sound and unprejudiced mind, that the doctrine of the soul is in our dialogue still imperfect, though in its last stage of developement, no longer in a mythological chrysalis' sheath, as in the Phædrus, but like the just emergent butterfly, whose wings only want to grow to maturity, a process which a few moments may complete. And this circumstance in the case of the Phædrus, points very nearly to the Timæus. For the manner in which the soul is here described as producing life generally, and as related to immutable essence, does indeed, approximate to strict definition, but still is not definition itself; and we observe here exactly the appearance of an author's only producing so much of one subject, to which a particular investigation is to be devoted, to bear upon another, as every reader must grant without more ado.

As then all these allusions to what is still to come, assign the Phædon its place before the last great works of Plato, though in such a manner as to bring it near to them, so also, all references to the dialogues already given determine its place after them. For, if we look to the dialogues forming the second part, in the order in which they are here published, we find that in that arrangement the connection which obtains between the Platonic doctrine of knowledge and that of immortality has not as yet been indicated by decisive strokes, but only in a vague and sketchy manner, inasmuch as, wherever perfect and immutable existence is spoken of, in opposition to that which is imperfect and mutable, mention is also made in some way or

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