The pathos of Plato's old age has been beautifully expressed by Wilannow its (.tristob b s um/ .t then, vol. i., p. 330). But credible anecdotes illustra tive of the esteem and lo\ e in which he was held by his fellow citizens and numerous pupils soften the picture. If sonic illusions were gone, the grasp of thought and the s;snoptic command of experience remained to the end, and in reading his later works we feel that, like the aged Cepha lus in the Republic, the inan stands on the heights of a noble life "with a glimpse of a height that is higher.'' The Laws lacks the inimitable Attic grace of the Symposium and the Piordo, but the thoughtful reader finds compensation in the breadth of its survey of human life and Creel: institutions, its intense moral and religious earnestness, the solemn detachment of its re signed and stately melancholy. As .Jowctt finely says: wings of his imagination have begun to droop, but his experience of life remains, and he turns from the contemplation of the eternal to take a last sad look at human affairs." Plato's extant writings (including probably all lie ever published) are arranged by the rhetor Thrasyllus century A.D.) in nine tetralo gies or groups of four. One member of the ninth group is constituted by the thirteen letters which are almost certainly spurious, though sonic his torians now defend the genuineness of the seventh epistle because of the interesting and plausible account which it gives of Plato's relations with the court of Syracuse. Of the thirty- five dialogues, the II ippareb us, on the love of gain; the Erastw and the Theages, on philosophy: the Minos, on law: and the Epinomis, a sort of supplement to the Laws, arc generally acknowledged to be spu rious. Many reputablo scholars still doubt the genuineness of the .1 lribiailes I., on the nature of man; the Alcibiades 11, on prayer; the II ippias I., on the beautiful; the Hypias II., on false hood ; the Ion, on Homer and poetical inspiration; the .1/cnt.ren us or Funeral Oration: and the Klei tophon, a fragment. The acceptance or rejection of these seven minor works affects very slightly our total impression of Plato's, thought and art.
The dialogues vary in length from the twenty two pages of the ('Tito to the four hundred and eighteen pages of the Laws, and in manner from the lively dramatic representation of a possible conversation in a Creek (the Lysis on Friendship, the charm ides on Temperance), to the didactic exposition in perfunctory dramatic form of an obscure problem of logic or meta physic (.sophistes, men ides), a theory of the universe ( Tinio-us) or a project for the reforma tion of society. education, and law (Republic, Laws). The dialogue form arose naturally out of the Creek drama. the Athenian habit of dis cussion, and its practice by Socrates. Its his tory has been written by Hirzel (Der Dialog, Leipzig, 1895). It was employed by other disci ples of Socrates as well as by Plato, and speci mens- of such dialogues are included in Xeno phon's Memorabilia of Six-rates. The form is sometimes purely dramatic. as in the Euthyphmo on holiness, or the Gorgias on rhetoric; some times, as in the Repub/ic, it is that of a narrated dialogue, which permits description and comment as in the modern novel. Socrates is the principal speaker in all except the Polit lens, Par menides, Timer-us, Crit ias, and the Laws, in which last he does not appear at all.
One of the chief problems of recent Platonic scholarship is the determination of the dates of the dialogues through statistical study of the style (Lutoslawski, Origin and Growth of Plato's Logic.), by tracing the development of Plato's thought, or by the aid of casual historical allu sions. The results, though affirmed with dent dogmatism, cannot be verified. The Lairs and Tinurus arc known to be late. The Republic belongs to Plato's middle age. The minor dra matic dialogues are presumably as a whole early. The severely metaphysical Soph isles, Politicos, and Phi/ebas probably follow the Republic rather than precede it, as older scholars believed. But the unity and consistency of Plato's thought as a whole, and the tradition that lie revised and corrected his greater works to the end, lessen the significance of these researches.
The perennial charm of Plato resides precisely in the baffling combination which lie presents of consummate artist and subtle metaphysician. \l'e may say roughly that the dialogues have three chief aims: (I) The ideal portraiture of the mas ter Socrates (see SOCRATES) ; (2) the dramatic portrayal of the practice of discussion, the 'game of question and answer,' as it has been called, which played so large a part in Athenian life; (3) the exposition of doctrine. Plato is the
Shakespeare of ideas. All ideas are allowed to speak for themselVes on his stage with something of the dramatic fairness that seems to justify every personage, from his own point of view, upon the stage of Shakespeare. And though it is not so difficult to determine in this dramatic conflict of ideas the beliefs seriously defended by Plato as it is to observe the habitual preferences that define Shakespeare's personality, it is still very difficult. The hasty reader will accept as Platonic definitions distinctions, arguments, and fallacies that have a purely dramatic significance. Be will interpret as marking stages in the devel opment of Plato's own thought professions of ignorance or bewilderment which the Socratic irony employs merely to ensnare pretentious self sufficiency, to stimulate youthful thonght, or as a dramatic prelude to the favorite Socratic moral: "Let us re-examine the whole question to gether." He will take literally Socrates's affecta tion of following whithersoever the wind of discus sion may blow, and. dazzled by the kaleidoscopic shifting.% of suggestion and interesting ideas. he will be skeptical of the existence of any underly ing unity of thought and purpose.
Instead of falsifying Plato's teaching by forc ing it into the framework of an artificial sys tem. it is better simply to enumerate a few of the dominant conceptions and aims that preserve its unity and consistency amid all its apparent varia tions. There is first dialectic—the faith which lie shared with Socrates in the value of rational discussion, if not as the organon of absolute truth, at least as the only protection against the errors and confusions of untested opinion. Both Plato and Socrates believe that, as John Stuart Mill phrases it. "there is no knowledge, and no assurance of right belief, but with him who can both confute the opposite opinion and successfully defend his own against confutation." Many of the most entertaining passages of the dialogues are mere dramatic illustrations of the inability not only of the average man, but of the most brilliant sophists and rhetoricians of the day to do this (Oorgias, Protagoras). They could bandy abstractions implying praise or blame, and discourse eloquently of virtue and the education that fitted men for life. But they could not define the terms they used, or defend the coherency and consistency of their opinions against objectors. They were unable to make the preliminary distinctions and classifications requi site for the intelligent discussion of such ques tions as 'Can virtue he taught?Vienof or 'Is pleasure or knowledge the good?' (Ph ileb us) . They had opinions, but no knowledge. Dialectic was said to have been 'invented' by Zeno, the au thor of the famous fallacies disproving motion; and the Athenians of the fifth century were subtle and skillful disputants. But the rules of the game (the principles of elementary logic) had never been formulated, and Socrates was the first to play it with system and conscious mastery. He demanded definitions of general terms and confirmed or refuted them by apt induction and generalization from simple pertinent instances. So great was his skill that, as Xenophon affirms and Plato illustrates, he could deal with an oppo nent as he pleased. None could escape the net work of argument which he wove. Plato inherited from Socrates his intense conviction of the dif ference between untested opinion and reasoned knowledge, and, starting from the Socratic logic of the definition and simple induction, he worked out in concrete examples the details of the logic of consistency so that all that remained for Aristotle codify them and add the formu las of the syllogism. In the prosecution of this task Plato was confronted by certain quibbles about being and not being, the one and the many, the whole and the part, rest and motion, the real ity or unreality of abstract ideas, which from one point of view are mere verbal fallacies, from another are problems of psychology and meta physics. To interpret aright the more metaphys ical and abstract dialogues, we must remember that, whether Plato succeeded or failed in solving metaphysical problems which are still debated, he never lost sight of his main object. the removal of the verbal fallacies from the pathway of prac tical logic. Familiarity with the Aristotelian logic makes this seem a trifle to us. But to ac complish it for the first time was one of the greatest achievements of human genius.