the subject of the second part, the more correct notions, namely, brought forward respecting the true nature of the art of speaking. This view, which has even been already adopted by several persons, is favoured by an at least half-seriously intended declaration of Socrates, that he brings forward the speeches only as examples, and that, setting aside the correct method employed, every thing else in them is to be taken only as jest: According to that, then, we should have to pay especial attention, from the beginning throughout, to what is paradigmatic in these speeches, and we must endeavour perfectly to understand every relation existing between them and the theory advanced in the second part, which consists in the main of the three following points. Plato first attempts to make quite clear what is the proper business of the art of speaking. For, as is clearly seen from the rules adduced in the second part, and the inventions of the most celebrated rhetoricians of that most ancient school, this art was treated by the artists and teachers of that day in an exclusively empirical manner. To blind the understanding of the hearers by sophistical means, and then, in particular passages, to excite their minds emotionally—this was their whole object; as likewise an extremely deficient and uniform method of instruction in composition, with uselessly accumulated subdivisions and technical terms, and some maxims upon the use of language, leading at most only to harmony and fulness of sound, or to the production of striking and brilliant effect, made up the whole secret. And thus the art was altogether devoid of internal substance. All this then, which up to this time had passed for the art itself, is degraded by Plato to the rank of technical knack, and while he exposes in its nakedness the principle of the

sophistical rhetoricians, that he who would convince need not himself know the true and right, he shews, that in order really to produce conviction, that is, to compel as it were others to certain thoughts and judgments, if this is to be done at all, however without reference to the truth, yet with that degree of certainty which alone can lay claim to the name of art-he shews, I say, that an aptitude at deceiving and undeceiving is requisite, an art of logical semblance, which can itself rest on nothing but a scientific method of comprehending similar notions under higher; and a like knowledge of the difference of notions, that dialectics, therefore, must be the true foundation of rhetoric, and that only what is connected with its principles, properly belongs to the art. With this, then, the second position stands in close connection. All those technicalities, he says, which were given out for art were borrowed only from practice in the courts of law and the popular assemblies, and referred to them, so that their trifling value must at once appear, even if they were only put forward as particular kinds, and no longer considered as the whole province of the art. Hence, therefore, Plato maintains that the art of speaking is universally the same, not only in these places, but also in written productions and oral discussions of every kind, as well scientific as civil, nay, even in the common usage of social life. By means of this extension and establishment of its province, now comprehending every species of philosophical communication, beyond its hitherto too narrowly drawn limits, on the one hand rhetoric is cleared from many grounds of reproach, and compelled to seek its principles for all these various branches far deeper, and on the other the rising artist reveals himself in the process, while a great archetype, emblematical of the species which he almost created,

floats before him in his mind, and he subjects himself to strict conditions, which according to the general view he might have avoided. But as by this very extension, rhetoric, in the sense in which the word was hitherto used, is in a manner destroyed, Plato clears himself, prophetically, as it were, of the accusation of diluting it away and letting it vanish into the indefinite, which, among the moderns at least, might easily be charged upon him by those who bring with them to this investigation the common incorrect conception of Plato's hatred to the art in general. And this he does best by that declaration of his views according to which he sets up rhetoric, notwithstanding its maintained dependency upon dialectics, and even by virtue of it, to be art in a higher sense For true art, according to him, is nothing but that practice of which again a true science, or, as our own countrymen usually call it, a theory can be made: for it is thus that Plato distinguishes art and artless dispatch. Now such a science can arise only when the classified variety, dialectically exhibited as resulting from the central notion of the art, is connected in a systematic and perfectly exhaustive manner with what results from the whole range of the means and objects. Accordingly, he demands from the art of speaking, that it enumerate all the different kinds of speeches, and fix every one and each to correspond to all the different kinds of minds, in order thus to define how every speech, under given circumstances, can and must be fashioned according to the rules of art.

From this point of view thus taken up, much contained in this work may be now more correctly understood. From it, first of all, the necessity of the examples, at least for a living composition like that of Plato's, becomes

evident, and these examples could only be either completely or as good as completely finished speeches. Whence the propriety of their position before the theoretical part, and the necessity of a fiction for the purpose of introducing them, naturally follows. But in order to facilitate the comparison, Plato needed an example of the common illogical method no less than one of his own, and after the last again he was obliged to accomplish ends of an opposite nature if he wished to shew the influence of the peculiar tendency of that period upon the whole discussion, and at the same time to produce that logical semblance which leads unobserved from one contradiction to another. On this account, therefore, no one, we conceive, would wish to overlook the first of the two Socratic speeches from a preference for the second, as it is only by the most accurate comparison that both can be understood aright. Thus the entirely different tone of each, according to its purpose, will become evident. For in the one we have the pervading direction of the speech to the understanding and to sober worldly-mindedness, the expression moreover, notwithstanding all the rhythmical accumulation of words, preserved transparent and cold— thus it indisputably is that a mind must be treated which it is intended to lead to a contempt of passion by directing its views to a late future; in the other, on the contrary, we have the inspired tone, the exaltation of beauty to an equal rank with the highest moral ideas, and its close connection with the Eternal and Infinite; the manner moreover in which indulgence is demanded for the sensuous system, without however concealing that it is only indulgence; thus it is that with indulgence to the imagination a young and noble mind must be wrought upon, which, like that of a growing Hellenic boy, springs

fresh out of the school of the poetic art. Truly it could not easily be better proved than is done by this collocation, how necessary on every occasion it is to consider in what way a given mind can be influenced to a given object. In like manner from this point of view it will appear natural that these examples should be taken from a subject appertaining to Philosophy, because in a subject of this description Plato found himself most on his own peculiar ground, and because this was at the same time necessary, in order as well to verify, practically, as it were, the theory of the extension of the Art of Speaking beyond the circle of political and civil affairs, as to suggest a fitting rule for comparison between that more narrow province, and this the more extended, the sphere of the production of splendid philosophical works. Now if Plato had determined to start from an example actually given, and that example one which had already submitted to the laws of rhetoric, it will not be risking too much as to the range of his knowledge and reading at that time, to say, that his choice must have been extremely limited. For except the declamations of the Sophist, which were indeed works so unsound that for Plato with such views and principles to place himself in comparison with them would have been productive of no honour, and which moreover, as soon as Rhetoric and Sophistry began to separate, lost their consequence more and more from that point of view, there could be little else for him to choose but these erotic rhetorical essays of Lysias, who moreover, from possessing to a certain degree fundamental principles, was a more worthy opponent than ever an orator out of the poeticising school of Gorgias.