Note 6 — PREFACE.

Since the publication of the first edition of this work, there have appeared valuable commentaries on the philosophy of the late Sir William Hamilton, by Mr. John Stuart Mill, and Mr. Stirling and others. They have exposed inconsistencies, both grave and numerous, in some parts of Sir William Hamilton’s writings as compared with others. But no one has dreamt of drawing an inference from this fact, that one or other of the inconsistent trains of reasoning must be spurious, falsely ascribed to Sir William Hamilton.

Now in the case of Plato, this same fact of inconsistency is accepted by nearly all his commentators as a sound basis for the inference that both the inconsistent treatises cannot be genuine: though the dramatic character of Plato’s writings makes inconsistencies much more easily supposable than in dogmatic treatises such as those of Hamilton.