question, and how much even that is beautiful in appearance several persons together may throw off without ever understanding one another, and how on the contrary, the dialogistic form brings the true meaning of every one to light, traces out the point of distinction, and, provided only that it is not met on one side by total absence of all meaning, discovers the original error; co-ordinately with all this, by means of the continually renewed expositions of the subject from all sides, the causes are always and continually developing themselves, which must prevent the sophists from attaining a better method, and which made them well content to frame a worse. And these causes are the absence of the genuine philosophical impulse and the base enterprises and purposes for sake of which they chiefly exercised their art. And this harmony which must work its effect, like all that is beautiful in art, even though it is not recognised upon its own grounds, is certainly for the most part the source of the extreme delight which most readers take in this perfect work. Thus the first speech of Protagoras at once discovers his self-conceit and avarice-thus in the very first piece of dialogue, where he is content to oppose the reverse of discretion to knowledge also, it becomes evident, when virtue is to be divided, and consequently the distinction between the theoretical and practical eminently obtains, that he is totally destitute of all perception of it. If however this was a piece of dulness wantonly attributed by Plato to this man, it would in that case be sufficiently devoid of art. But it refers undoubtedly to something which Plato and his contemporaries had before their eyes, it matters not whether relatively to Protagoras or some one else. For that philosopher is here less himself than the representative

of his sect. In like manner the scquel further discovers that it fares no better with Protagoras in regard of the distinction between the pleasant and the good. And if, at the conclusion, when Socrates exposes to him the great contradiction in which he is involved, we learn that he has not reflected even in the slightest degree upon the conditions necessary for the instruction of others, or upon the notion of virtue in which he would instruct them; we have been meanwhile convinced how far removed he must continue from that method, the grand principle of which consists in bringing the nursling of philosophy to self-consciousness, and compelling him to independent thought. Such a method, then, has the dialogistic proved itself meanwhile to be; it is a method which brings all this to view, and applies those testing points, offering them for recognition or rejection, by overlooking which, Protagoras discovers himself to be a person who has never recognised moral truth, and consequently has never endeavoured to attain moral objects as the end of his philosophy. And it is the projection of these points and the trial whether the right can in any way be found which is the aim of the manifold artificial and dialectic turns which Socrates makes, which can only be falsely accounted as technicalities and sophisms in him, by one totally unacquainted with the Platonic method. On the contrary, if we compare them with the execution of the Phædrus, they are the very points which at once constitute a clear proof of Plato's advancement as a philosophical artist. For in the Phædrus we do indeed find that indirect process which forms as it were the essential character of all Plato's dialogues, particularly those not immediately constructive, we find it, I say, sufficiently predom

inant in the whole of the composition, but only very sparingly applied in the details; but in this we have it pursued no less in the details than in the whole generally, so that the Protagoras is upon the whole a more perfect attempt to imitate in writing the living and inspired language of the wise man. As also the dialectic maxims of deception and undeception delivered in the Phadrus, are put into practice with that laborious industry with which able pupils in an art, who have already made considerable progress, or rising masters in the same, seek every tolerable opportunity in their exercises for exhibiting any of the secrets they have discovered before the eyes of the skilful adept. But it is not only the practical dialectics, and the commendatory recognition of the genuine form of philosophical art which appears here further advanced than in the Phædrus, but also the scientific bearing is improved. The proposition indeed that virtue is the knowledge of what is to be done or chosen, and, consequently, that vice is only error, this proposition, however serious Plato may have been in making it, is not here put into a definite form and brought forward directly as his opinion, but, left as it is indefinite, it belongs rather to the web in which he entangles those who have not yet possessed themselves of the true idea of the good; which results in part from the evidently ironical treatment of the whole proposition, partly from the connection into which it is so easily placed with that utterly un-Socratic and un-Platonic view that the good is nothing but the pleasant, partly also from the resulting application of what in virtue might be knowledge and science to the arts of measuring and arithmetic. But at all events we here find some indirect notices tending towards what certainly must precede the

decision of the question, the more accurate definition namely of the idea of knowledge. Thus the apparent

contradiction which Socrates himself detects, involved in the fact that he disputes the communicability of virtue, and yet maintains that it is knowledge, this is evidently an enticement held out to reflect upon the relation of knowledge to teaching, after consideration of what had been already said in the Phædrus upon the nature of ideas. The opposition in reference to the School of Heraclitus between being (rò elva) and becoming (To yiyveolai) although at the same time ironical as regards the Protagoras, has a similar tendency. As also the subordinate question of the unity or plurality of virtue is only a particular case belonging to the more general investigation into the nature of unity or plurality, or the manner in which the general ideas communicate with particulars, so that the doctrine of ideas here begins to pass from the mythical province into the scientific, and by the very principles brought forward in it, the Protagoras contains, over and above its own immediate object, the germs of several succeeding works of Plato, and that in such a manner that it is at once clear even from this that it is of an earlier date than all other dialogues in which these questions are treated more at length.

Now as to the myth brought forward by Protagoras, there is no need to number it as some have done, goodnaturedly raising it to an exalted rank, among those of Plato's own; on the contrary, if not the property of Protagoras himself, as seems likely, though there is no evidence to confirm the supposition, yet the manner in which Plato applies it makes it much more probable that it is at all events composed in his spirit. For precisely as is natural to one of a coarsely materialistic mode

of thinking, whose philosophy does not extend beyond immediate sensuous experience, the reasoning principle in men is only viewed as a recompence for their deficient corporeal conformation, and the idea of right with the feeling of shame as requisites for a sensuous existence, and as something not introduced into the minds of men until a later period. Hence also the proof contained in this myth, because Plato could not give any other colouring to such a view, is very oratorically stated, as he does not so much spare investigations upon principles as make the want of them perceptible, since even what he has properly to explain is not connected with the course of the narrative, but is only adduced as a command of Zeus. It appears also strange on that account in respect of the style, and probably imitated after Protagoras. And, as to Socrates' opinion of the poem of Simonides, of which nothing but this fragment is preserved to us, namely, that it must be a censure upon the apophthegm of Pittacus, this is not to be taken merely as a jest. At least we are in possession of another poem generally ascribed to Simonides, in which the resemblance in manner and style to this is not to be mistaken, which stands in a similar polemical relation to the epigram of Cleobulus quoted in the Phædrus, who was also himself one of the seven wise men.

IV. LACHES.

AMONG the smaller dialogues immediately dependent upon the Protagoras, the Laches will stand the first, because it so nearly resembles the former that it can only be looked upon as an appendix to, or enlargement

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