These precepts are not forgotten, either in the “Sophist” or in the “Statesman.” The “Sophist” contains four examples of division, carried on by regular steps, until in four different lines of descent we detect the “Sophist.” In the “Statesman” the king or statesman is discovered by a similar process; and we have a summary, probably made for the first time, of possessions appropriated by the labour of man, which are distributed into seven classes. We are warned against preferring the shorter to the longer method;—if we divide in the middle, we are most likely to light upon species; at the same time, the important remark is made, that “a part is not to be confounded with a class.” Having discovered the genus under which the king falls, we proceed to distinguish him from the collateral species. To assist our imagination in making this separation, we require an example. The higher ideas, of which we have a dreamy knowledge, can only be represented by images taken from the external world. But, first of all, the nature of example is explained by an example. The child is taught to read by comparing the letters in words which he knows with the same letters in unknown combinations; and this is the sort of process which we are about to attempt. As a parallel to the king we select the worker in wool, and compare the art of weaving with the royal science, trying to separate either of them from the inferior classes to which they are akin. This has the incidental advantage, that weaving and the web furnish us with a figure of speech, which we can afterwards transfer to the State.
There are two uses of examples or images—in the first place, they suggest thoughts—secondly, they give them a distinct form. In the infancy of philosophy, as in childhood, the language of pictures is natural to man: truth in the abstract is hardly won, and only by use familiarized to the mind. Examples are akin to analogies, and have a reflex influence on thought; they people the vacant mind, and may often originate new directions of enquiry. Plato seems to be conscious of the suggestiveness of imagery; the general analogy of the arts is constantly employed by him as well as the comparison of particular arts—weaving, the refining of gold, the learning to read, music, statuary, painting, medicine, the art of the pilot—all of which occur in this dialogue alone: though he is also aware that “comparisons are slippery things,” and may often give a false clearness to ideas. We shall find, in the “Philebus,” a division of sciences into practical and speculative, and into more or less speculative: here we have the idea of master-arts, or sciences which control inferior ones. Besides the supreme science of dialectic, “which will forget us, if we forget her,” another master-science for the first time appears in view—the science of government, which fixes the limits of all the rest. This conception of the political or royal science as, from another point of view, the science of sciences, which holds sway over the rest, is not originally found in Aristotle, but in Plato.
The doctrine that virtue and art are in a mean, which is familiarized to us by the study of the Nicomachean Ethics, is also first distinctly asserted in the “Statesman” of Plato. The too much and the too little are in restless motion: they must be fixed by a mean, which is also a standard external to them. The art of measuring or finding a mean between excess and defect, like the principle of division in the “Phaedrus,” receives a particular application to the art of discourse. The excessive length of a discourse may be blamed; but who can say what is excess, unless he is furnished with a measure or standard? Measure is the life of the arts, and may some day be discovered to be the single ultimate principle in which all the sciences are contained. Other forms of thought may be noted—the distinction between causal and cooperative arts, which may be compared with the distinction between primary and cooperative causes in the “Timaeus” (46 D); or between cause and condition in the “Phaedo” (99); the passing mention of economical science; the opposition of rest and motion, which is found in all nature; the general conception of two great arts of composition and division, in which are contained weaving, politics, dialectic; and in connection with the conception of a mean, the two arts of measuring.
In the “Theaetetus,” Plato remarks that precision in the use of terms, though sometimes pedantic, is sometimes necessary. Here he makes the opposite reflection, that there may be a philosophical disregard of words. The evil of mere verbal oppositions, the requirement of an impossible accuracy in the use of terms, the error of supposing that philosophy was to be found in language, the danger of word-catching, have frequently been discussed by him in the previous dialogues, but nowhere has the spirit of modern inductive philosophy been more happily indicated than in the words of the “Statesman”:—“If you think more about things, and less about words, you will be richer in wisdom as you grow older” (261 E). A similar spirit is discernible in the remarkable expressions, “the long and difficult language of facts” (278 D); and “the interrogation of every nature, in order to obtain the particular contribution of each to the store
