to obtain pleasure, but to steel himself against pain. Thus in the end the Cyrenaic doctrine blends with the Cynic.

PLATO, the 'deus philosophorum' (N. D. II 32), was born at Athens 428 B.C. and became a disciple of Socrates in 408 B.C. After the death of his master he left Athens and lived at Megara with Euclides. From thence he visited Cyrene, Egypt, Magna Graecia and Sicily. After nearly ten years of travelling he took up his residence again at Athens and began to lecture in the gymnasium of the Academia. He died in his eightieth year.

Building on the foundation of Socrates, he insists no less than his master on the importance of negative Dialectic, as a means of testing commonly received opinions; indeed most of his Dialogues come to no positive result, but merely serve to show the difficulties of the subject discussed and the unsatisfactory nature of the solutions hitherto proposed. As he makes Socrates the spokesman in almost all the Dialogues, it is not always easy to determine precisely where the line is to be drawn between the purely Socratic and the Platonic doctrine, but the general relation of the one to the other may be stated as follows.

In his theory of knowledge Plato unites the Socratic definition with the Heraclitean Becoming and the Eleatic Being. Agreeing with Heraclitus that all the objects of the senses are fleeting and unreal in themselves, he held that they are nevertheless participant of Being in so far as they represent to us the general terms after which they are named. Thus we can make no general assertion with regard to this or that concrete triangular thing: it is merely a passing sensation: but by abstraction we may rise from the concrete to the contemplation of the Ideal triangle, which is the object of science, and concerning which we may make universal and absolutely true predications. If we approach the Ideal from below, from the concrete particulars, it takes the form of the class, the common name, the definition, the concept, the Idea; but this is an incomplete view of it. The Ideal exists apart from, and prior to, all concrete embodiment. It is the eternal archetype of which the sensible objects are the copies. It is because the soul in its pre-existent state is already familiar with this archetype that it is capable of being reminded of it when it sees its shadow in the phenomenal existences

which make up the world of sense*. All knowledge is reminiscence. What cannot be traced back to this intuitive consciousness in the soul itself is not knowledge, but mere opinion. Dialectic is the means by which the soul is enabled to recover the lost consciousness of the Ideal. The highest Ideal, which is the foundation of all existence and all knowledge is the Ideal Good, personified as God. He, as the Creator or Demiurgus, formed the universe by imprinting the ideas on the formless chaotic Matter. The process of creation is described in the Timaeus under the form of a myth, Plato holding, like Parmenides, that it was not possible to arrive at more than a symbolical adumbration of physical truth. The cause and ground of creation is the goodness of God, who seeks to extend his own blessedness as widely as possible. He begins his work by constructing the soul of the world out of the two elements before him, the immutable harmonious Ideals and changing discordant Matter. This soul he infuses into the mass of matter, which thereupon crystallizes into the geometrical forms of the four elements, and assumes the shape of a perfect sphere rotating on its axis. The Kosmos thus created is divine, imperishable and infinitely beautiful. Further, each element is to have living creatures belonging to it. Those belonging to the element of fire are the Gods, both the heavenly bodies and those of whom tradition tells us. All these were fashioned by the Demiurgus himself, but the creatures belonging to the other elements, including the mortal part of man, were the work of the created gods. The immortal part of man,

the reason, is of like substance with the soul of the world, and was distributed by the Demiurgus amongst the stars till the time came for each several particle to enter the body prepared for it by the created gods, where it combined with two other ingredients, the

* The reader will remember the magnificent ode in which Wordsworth has embodied Plato's sublime conception. The fact which underlies it was well illustrated by the late Prof. Sedgwick, commenting on Locke's saying that “the mind previous to experience is a sheet of white paper" (the old rasa tabula), "Naked he comes from his mother's womb, endowed with limbs and senses indeed, well fitted to the material world, yet powerless from want of use: and as for knowledge, his soul is one unvaried blank; yet has this blank been already touched by a celestial hand, and when plunged in the colours which surround it, it takes not its tinge from accident, but design, and comes forth covered with a glorious pattern.”—Discourse p. 53. The Common-sense Philosophy of the Scotch and the à priori judgments of Kant are other forms of the same doctrine.

M. C.

appetitive (τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν) and the spirited (τὸ θυμοειδές) which it had to bring into subjection. If it succeeded, it returned to its star on the death of the body; if it failed, it was destined to undergo various transmigrations until its victory was complete. In all these physical speculations Plato was much influenced by the Pythagoreans.

We have now to speak of his ethical doctrines, which were based upon the psychological views mentioned above. The soul is on a small scale what the State or city is on a large scale: it is a constitution which is in its right condition when its parts work harmoniously together, when the governing reason is warmly supported by its auxiliary the heart, and promptly and loyally obeyed by the appetites. Thus perfect virtue arises when wisdom, courage and temperance are bound together by justice. The highest good is the being made like to God; and this is effected by that yearning after the Ideal which we know by the name of Love (N. D. 1 18-24, 30 al.).

Aristotle (longe omnibus-Platonem semper excipio—praestans et ingenio et diligentia, Tusc. 1 22) was born at Stagira, a Greek colony in Thrace, in the year 385 B.C. He came to Athens in his 17th year and studied under Plato for twenty years. In 343 B.C. he was invited by Philip, King of Macedon, to superintend the education of his son Alexander, then a boy of 13. When Alexander set out on his Persian expedition Aristotle returned to Athens and taught in the Lyceum. As he lectured while walking, his disciples were called Peripatetics. On the death of Alexander, Aristotle left Athens escape from a charge of impiety, and settled at Chalcis in Euboea, where he died 322 B.C.

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Aristotle's philosophy may be roughly described as Plato put into prose and worked out in detail. The vague mysticism, the high poetic imagination, of the master was altogether alien to the scholar, but the main lines of the two systems are the same. Plato's Dialectic method was developed by Aristotle into the strict technical science of Logic: Plato's Ideas were shorn of their separate supra-mundane existence and became the first of the four famous Causes of Aristotle, the formal, the material, the efficient, the final, which are really four kinds of antecedent conditions required for the existence of each thing. For instance, in order to the production of a marble statue by Phidias there is needed (1) the pre

existence in his own mind of the ideal form which is subsequently impressed upon the stone; (2) the existence of the stone; (3) the process of carving; (4) the motive which induced the sculptor to make the statue, as for instance the desire to do honour to the God whose statue it is. But the opposition of form and matter is not confined to such simple cases-it covers the whole range of existence from the First Matter, which is mere potentiality of being at the one extreme, to the First Form which is pure immaterial actuality, the Divine Being, at the other extreme. The intermediate links in the chain are matter or form according as they are viewed from above or below, as marble for instance is form in reference to stone generally, matter in reference to statue; vitality is form in reference to the living body, matter in reference to rationality. God the First Form, is also the First Mover, the cause of the upward striving of the universe, of the development of each thing from the potential into the actual; and this not by any act of creation, for He remains ever unmoved in His own eternity, but by the natural tendency which all things have towards Him as the absolutely Good, the object and end of all effort, of all desire. The universe itself is eternal, a perfect sphere, the circumference of which is composed of the purest element, ether, and is carried round in circular motion by the immediate influence of the Deity. In it are the fixed stars, themselves divine. The lower planetary spheres have a less perfect movement and are under the guidance of subordinate divinities. Furthest removed from the First Mover comes the earth which is fixed in the centre, and composed of the four inferior elements. Still it exhibits a constant progressive movement from inorganic into organic, from plant into animal, from life which is nutritive and sensitive only into life which is locomotive and finally rational in man. The human soul is a microcosm uniting in itself all the faculties of the lower orders of animated existence, and possessing besides, the divine and immortal faculty of reason. As each thing attains its end by fulfilling the work for which it is designed by nature, so man achieves happiness by the unobstructed exercise of his special endowment, a rational and virtuous activity. Pleasure is the natural accompaniment of such an activity. Virtue, which may be described as perfected nature, belongs potentially to man's nature, but it becomes actual by the repetition of acts in accordance with reason. It is subdivided into intellectual and moral, according as it is a habit of the purely rational part of the soul, or as it is

a habit of the emotional part which is capable of being influenced by reason, but not itself rational. Every natural impulse is the potential basis of a particular virtue which may be developed by repeated actions freely performed in accordance with the law of reason so as to avoid either excess or defect. Since man is by nature gregarious, his perfection is only attainable in society, and ethical science is thus subordinate to political science (N. D. 1 33, II 42, 44, 95, al.).

The later Peripatetics are of no great importance. Cicero mentions in the N. D. Aristotle's immediate follower Theophrastus (N. D. 1 35), whose treatise on Friendship is copied in the Laelius; and Strato (N. D. 1 35), who succeeded Theophrastus as head of the school in the year 288 B.C. Critolaus was one of the three philosophers who were sent by the Athenians as ambassadors to Rome in the year 155 B.C., and whose coming first introduced the Romans to the new world of philosophy. Cratippus presided over the school during the lifetime of Cicero, who sent young Marcus to Athens to attend his lectures.

To return now to the Academy, this is divided into three schools, the Older, the Middle and the New Academy*. To the first belong the names of Speusippus (1 32), Xenocrates (1 34) and Polemo, who successively presided over the school between 347 and 270 B.C., as well as those of Heraclides of Pontus (1 34), Crantor and Crates. They appear to have modified the Platonic doctrines mainly by the admixture of Pythagorean elements. Crantor's writings were used by Cicero for his Consolatio and Tusculan Disputations. The chief expounders of the Middle Academy were its founder Arcesilaus 315-241 B.c. (1 11, 70), Carneades of Cyrene 214-129 B.C. (I 4, II 65, III 44), one of the Athenian ambassadors to Rome in 155 B.C., and Clitomachus of Carthage, his successor in the presidency. They neglected the positive doctrine of Plato, and employed themselves mainly in a negative polemic against the dogmatism of the Stoics, professing to follow the example of Socrates, though

* Cicero only recognized the Old and the New Academy, the latter corresponding to what is above called the Middle Academy, but including Philo. Antiochus himself claimed to be a true representative of the Old Academy. Later writers made five Academic schools, the 2nd founded by Arcesilas, the 3rd by Carneades, the 4th by Philo, the 5th by Antiochus.