Dialogues

measure and symmetry (66 A, B); and though a hint is given that the divine mind has the first place (22 C), nothing is said of this in the final summing up. The relation of the goods to the sciences does not appear; though dialectic may be thought to correspond to the highest good, the sciences and arts and true opinions are enumerated in the fourth class. At 50 D, 67 B, We seem to have an intimation of a further discussion, in which some topics lightly passed over were to receive a fuller consideration. The various uses of the word “mixed,” for the mixed life, the mixed class of elements, the mixture of pleasures, or of pleasure and pain, are a further source of perplexity. Our ignorance of the opinions which Plato is attacking is also an element of obscurity. Many things in a controversy might seem relevant, if we knew to what they were intended to refer. But no conjecture will enable us to supply what Plato has not told us; or to explain, from our fragmentary knowledge of them, the relation in which his doctrine stood to the Eleatic Being or the Megarian good, or to the theories of Aristippus or Antisthenes respecting pleasure. Nor are we able to say how far Plato in the “Philebus” conceives the finite and infinite (which occur both in the fragments of Philolaus and in the Pythagorean table of opposites) in the same manner as contemporary Pythagoreans.

There is little in the characters which is worthy of remark. The Socrates of the “Philebus” is devoid of any touch of Socratic irony, though here, as in the “Phaedrus” (235 C), he twice attributes the flow of his ideas to a sudden inspiration (20 B, 25 B, C). The interlocutor Protarchus, the son of Callias, who has been a hearer of “Gorgias” (58 A), is supposed to begin as a disciple of the partisans of pleasure, but is drawn over to the opposite side by the arguments of Socrates. The instincts of ingenuous youth are easily induced to take the better part. Philebus, who has withdrawn from the argument, is several times brought back again (18, 19, 22, 28), that he may support pleasure, of which he remains to the end the uncompromising advocate. On the other hand, the youthful group of listeners by whom he is surrounded, “Philebus’ boys” as they are termed, whose presence is several times intimated (16 A, B, 19 D, 67 B), are described as all of them at last convinced by the arguments of Socrates. They bear a very faded resemblance to the interested audiences of the “Charmides,” “Lysis,” or “Protagoras.” Other signs of relation to external life in the dialogue, or references to contemporary things and persons, with the single exception of the allusions to the anonymous enemies of pleasure (44 B, C), and the teachers of the flux (43 A), there are none.

The omission of the doctrine of recollection, derived from a previous state of existence, is a note of progress in the philosophy of Plato. The transcendental theory of preexistent ideas, which is chiefly discussed by him in the “Meno,” the “Phaedo,” and the “Phaedrus,” has given way to a psychological one. The omission is rendered more significant by his having occasion to speak of memory as the basis of desire. Of the ideas he treats in the same sceptical spirit (15 A, B) which appears in his criticism of them in the “Parmenides” (131 and following). He touches on the same difficulties and he gives no answer to them. His mode of speaking of the analytical and synthetical processes (16 B and following) may be compared with his discussion of the same subject in the “Phaedrus” (265, 6); here he dwells on the importance of dividing the genera into all the species, while in the “Phaedrus” he conveys the same truth in a figure, when he speaks of carving the whole, which is described under the image of a victim, into parts or members, “according to their natural articulation, without breaking any of them.” There is also a difference, which may be noted, between the two dialogues. For whereas in the “Phaedrus,” and also in the “Symposium,” the dialectician is described as a sort of enthusiast or lover, in the “Philebus,” as in all the later writings of Plato, the element of love is wanting; the topic is only introduced, as in the Republic, by way of illustration (compare 53 D, Republic V 474 D, E). On other subjects of which they treat in common, such as the nature and kinds of pleasure, true and false opinion, the nature of the good, the order and relation of the sciences, the Republic is less advanced than the “Philebus,” which contains, perhaps, more metaphysical truth more obscurely expressed than any other Platonic dialogue. Here, as Plato expressly tells us, he is “forging weapons of another make” (23 B), i.e. new categories and modes of conception, though “some of the old ones might do again.”

But if superior in thought and dialectical power, the “Philebus” falls very far short of the Republic in fancy and feeling. The development of the reason undisturbed by the emotions seems to be the ideal at which Plato aims in his later dialogues. There is no mystic enthusiasm or rapturous contemplation of ideas. Whether we attribute this change to the greater feebleness of age, or to the development of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry in Plato’s own mind, or perhaps, in some degree, to a carelessness about artistic effect, when he was absorbed in abstract ideas, we can hardly be wrong in assuming, amid such a variety of indications, derived from style as well as subject, that the “Philebus” belongs to the later period of his life