Note 97 — Chapter VIII · PLATONIC COMPOSITIONS GENERALLY.

Xenoph. Memor. i. 1, 12-15. I transcribe the following passage from an article in the Edinburgh Review (April, 1866, pp. 325-326), on the first edition of the present work: an article not merely profound and striking as to thought, but indicating the most comprehensive study and appreciation of the Platonic writings:—

“The enemy against whom Plato really fought, and the warfare against whom was the incessant occupation of his life and writings, was — not Sophistry, either in the ancient or modern sense of the term, but — Commonplace. It was the acceptance of traditional opinions and current sentiments as an ultimate fact; and bandying of the abstract terms which express approbation and disapprobation, desire and aversion, admiration and disgust, as if they had a meaning thoroughly understood and universally assented to. The men of his day (like those of ours) thought that they knew what Good and Evil, Just and Unjust, Honourable and Shameful, were — because they could use the words glibly, and affirm them of this or that, in agreement with existing custom. But what the property was, which these several instances possessed in common, justifying the application of the term, nobody had considered; neither the Sophists, nor the rhetoricians, nor the statesmen, nor any of those who set themselves up, or were set up by others, as wise. Yet whoever could not answer this question was wandering in darkness — had no standard by which his judgments were regulated, and which kept them consistent with one another — no rule which he knew and could stand by for the guidance of his life. Not knowing what Justice and Virtue are, it was impossible to be just and virtuous: not knowing what Good is, we not only fail to reach it, but are certain to embrace evil instead. Such a condition, to any one capable of thought, made life not worth having. The grand business of human intellect ought to consist in subjecting these terms to the most rigorous scrutiny, and bringing to light the ideas that lie at the bottom of them. Even if this cannot be done and real knowledge attained, it is already no small benefit to expel the false opinion of knowledge: to make men conscious of the things most needful to be known, fill them with shame and uneasiness at their own state, and rouse a pungent internal stimulus, summoning up all their energies to attack those greatest of all problems, and never rest until, as far as possible, the true solutions are reached. This is Plato’s notion of the condition of the human mind in his time, and of what philosophy could do to help it: and any one who does not think the description applicable, with slight modifications, to the majority of educated minds in our own time and in all times known to us, certainly has not brought either the teachers or the practical men of any time to the Platonic test.”

The Reviewer farther illustrates this impressive description by a valuable citation from Max Müller to the same purpose (Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series, pp. 520-527). “Such terms as Nature, Law, Freedom, Necessity, Body, Substance, Matter, Church, State, Revelation, Inspiration, Knowledge, Belief, &c., are tossed about in the war of words as if every body knew what they meant, and as if every body used them exactly in the same sense; whereas most people, and particularly those who represent public opinion, pick up these complicated terms as children, beginning with the vaguest conceptions, adding to them from time to time — perhaps correcting likewise at haphazard some of their involuntary errors — but never taking stock, never either enquiring into the history of the terms which they handle so freely, or realising the fulness of their meaning according to the strict rules of logical definition.”