These " minor Socratic schools" were, however, pre- mature and imperfect developments. The truths which they distorted were embodied at a later time in more reasonable forms. Plato alone (B.C. 430-347), by the breadth and nobleness of his teaching, was the true suc- cessor of Socrates; with fuller detail and greater elab- orateness of parts, his philosophy was as many-sided as that of his master. Thus it is impossible to construct a consistent Platonic system, though many Platonic doc- trines are sufficiently marked. Plato, indeed, possessed two commanding powers, which, though apparently in- compatible, are in the highest sense complementary : a matchless destructive dialectic, and a creative imagina- tion. By the first he refuted the great fallacies of the Sophists on the uncertainty of knowledge and right, carrying out in this the attacks of Socrates ; by the other he endeavored to bridge over the interval between appearance and reality, and gain an approach to the eternal. His famous doctrines of Ideas and Recollection (ava/ivrimg) are a solution by imagination of a logical difficulty. Socrates had shown the existence of general notions; Plato felt constrained to attribute to them a substantive existence (Arist. Met. xiii, 4). A glorious vision gave completeness to his view. The unembodied spirits were exhibited in immediate presence of the " ideas" of things (Phcedr. p. 247) ; the law of their em- bodiment was sensibly portrayed ; and the more or less vivid remembrance of supramundane realities in this life was traced to antecedent facts. All men were thus supposed to have been face to face with truth : the ob- ject of teaching was to bring back impressions latent but uneffaced.
VIII. -I
The '; myths" of Plato, to one of the most famous of which reference has just been made, play a most impor- tant part in his system. They answer in the philosopher to faith in the Christian. In dealing with immortality and judgment he leaves the way of reason, and ventures, as he says, on a rude raft to brave the dangers of the ocean (PAcedr. p. 85, D ; Gory. p. 523, A). ;' The peril and the prize are noble and the hope is great" (Phadr. p. 114, C, D). Such tales, he admits, may seem puerile and ridiculous; and if there were other surer and clearer means of gaining the desired end, the judgment would be just (Gory. p. 527, A). But, as it is. thus only can he connect the seen and the unseen. The myths, then, mark the limit of his dialectics. They are not merely a poetical picture of truth already gained, or a popular illustration of his teaching, but real efforts to penetrate beyond the. depths of argument. They show that his method was not commensurate with his instinctive de- sires; and point out in intelligible outlines the subjects on which man looks for revelation. Such are the rela- tions of the human mind to truth (P/tcedr. p. 246-49) ; the pre-existence and immortality of the soul (Meno, p. 81-3; Pha-dr. p. 110-12; :THH.p.41); the state of future retribution (Gory. p. 523-25; Pep. p. 614-16); the rev- olutions of the world (Polit. p. 269. Comp. also Si/mpos. p. 189-91, 203-5; Zeller, Philos. d. Griech. p. 361-63, who gives the literature of the subject).
The great difference between Plato and Aristotle (B.C. 384-322) lies in the use which Plato thus made of im- agination as the exponent of instinct. The dialectics of Plato is not inferior to that of Aristotle, and Aristotle exhibits traces of poetic power not unworthy of Plato; but Aristotle never allows imagination to influence his final decision. He elaborated a perfect method, and he used it with perfect fairness. His writings con- tain the highest utterance of pure reason. Looking back on all the earlier efforts of philosophy, he pro- nounced a calm and final judgment. For him many of the conclusions which others had maintained were val- ueless, because he showed that they rested on feeling, and not on argument. This stern severity of logic gives an indescribable pathos to those passages in which he touches on the highest hopes of men ; and perhaps there is no more truly affecting chapter in ancient literature than that in which he states in a few unimpassioned sentences the issue of his inquiry into the immortality of the soul. Part of it may be immortal, but that part is impersonal (Be An. iii, 5). This was the sentence of reason, and he gives expression to it without a word of protest, and yet as one who knew the extent of the sac- rifice which it involved. The conclusion is, as it were, the epitaph of free speculation. Laws of observation and argument, rules of action, principles of government remain, but there is no hope beyond the grave.
It follows necessarily that the Platonic doctrine of ideas was emphatically rejected by Aristotle, who gave, however, the final development to the original concep- tion of Socrates. With Socrates " ideas" (general defi- nitions) were mere abstractions; with Plato they had an absolute existence; with Aristotle they had no exist- ence separate from things in which they were realized, though the form (fiop<p>i), which answers to the Platonic idea, was held to be the essence of the thing itself (comp. Zeller, Philos. d. Griech. i, 119, 120).
There is one feature common in essence to the sys- tems of Plato and Aristotle which has not yet been no- ticed. In both, ethics is a part of politics. The citizen is prior to the man. In Plato this doctrine finds its most extravagant development in theory, though his life, and, in some places, his teaching, were directly op- posed to it (e. g. Gory. p. 527, D). This practical in- consequence was due, it may be supposed, to the con- dition of Athens at the time, for the idea was in complete harmony with the national feeling; and, in fact, the absolute subordination of the individual to the body includes one of the chief lessons of the ancient world. In Aristotle the " political" character of man is defined