importance, that the beginner in exegetical study should be freed from his embarassments, and led in a path on which the light is shining, and where is little or nothing that will perplex him as to finding his way. A few simple principles, well digested and thoroughly understood, will serve as an effectual compass, when mist or night may supervene. The whole subject lies within a moderate compass, and might be satisfactorily and effectually exhibited in a short course of Lectures. One can scarcely tell, how many conceits and whimsies and phantasies the double sense has developed, when indulged in by ardent and visionary interpreters. The vлóvoa or occult sense becomes immeasurably more important than the plain, obvious and common-sense meaning; and he who is most expert in finding or making secondary and occult senses, thinks himself the most expert interpreter. Paul had no very good opinion of occult senses. He says (1 Cor. 14: 19): "I had rather speak five words in the church by my understanding, that I might instruct others, than ten thousand words in an obscure language."

ARTICLE II.

THE PLATONIC DIALOGUE THEAETETUS WITH A TRANSLATION OF THE EPISODAL SKETCH OF THE WORLDLING AND THE PHILOSOPHER.

By Tayler Lewis, LL. D., Prof. of Greek, Union College, Schenectady, N. Y.

THE Platonic dialogue entitled Theaetetus, is a discussion of the question: What is knowledge? an inquiry which will appear profound or superficial, according to the aspect under which it is viewed, and the habit of thought in him who contemplates it. What is knowledge? What do we do, or suffer, when we are said to know? or, in other words, is there a knowledge of knowledge itself, just as there is a knowledge of those things which are ordinarily regarded as its objects? The principal speakers are Socrates and a boy on whom he is represented as trying his maieutical powers in the parturition, development, or bringing to the birth, of the right idea with which the soul travails in the attempt to answer the great inquiry. The youth

of Theaetetus, the junior speaker, modifies the whole style of the dialogue, without at all detracting from its interest and profoundness. It is, indeed, a boy to whom the questions are addressed, and whose answers are so closely analyzed. To a superficial reader, therefore, the style may sometimes assume the aspect of the puerile—an appearance for which the principal speaker occasionally apologizes— and yet this boy-talk, as he styles it, is evidently adopted as the best means of bringing out some of those starting queries in psychology that are as puzzling to the man as to the child, and in respect to which all the advantage an Aristotle, a Kant, or a Locke may posress, consists in being able to state intelligently the immense difficulty attending them.

The dialogue throughout may be ranked among those that have been entitled tentative (nɛıqαorixoi), and which have all, more or less, a sceptical aspect. The great question with which it begins, and which is never lost sight of, is after all left without a satisfactory solution. The curtain drops, and still we know not what it is to know. There have been, however, negative results of a most useful and practical kind. The grand idea has not, indeed, been born; but many a spurious birth has been tested; many an abortion has been cast away; counterfeit travail of the soul has been distinguished from the genuine; or, to adopt another metaphor, which is also employed in the dialogue, falsehood and false knowledge, have been hunted out of their dark hiding places, and their disguised deformity clearly brought forth to light.

The first answer of our young respondent is, that knowledge is sense, or sensation. This is analyzed into its ultimate element of mere feeling (alonois). And all sense is feeling, and all feeling is ultimately resolvable into motion, the sole result of which is phantasy or seeming. Knowledge, on this ground, is feeling. To know is to feel, and to feel is to know. The quantity and quality of the one must correspond exactly with the quantity and quality of the other, and in neither can there be anything aside from such a principle of measurement. Any seemingly higher element is only resolvable into another feeling, and this again into another, without ever actually getting out of the region of the sense. The assumption of the rigid truth of this first answer, is employed by Socrates in the examination of the old Ionic doctrine. as maintained by Protagoras, namely that man is the measure of all things another mode of saying that which appears is, or rather that nothing is but what appears, and that what appears is ever true. In other words, there is no perducing being aside from ever-flowing

phenomena, and the ever-flowing affections that correspond to them. Hence there is, on the other hand, nothing false; for the real existence of falsehood would involve the real existence of something true per se, or, to use the language of the Protagorean school, something that stands, irrespective of phenomena, or objective seemings, on the one hand, and ever varying affections, or subjective phantasies on the other.

This first answer, or first birth of the boy's soul, to preserve the favorite figure of the dialogue, is closely examined, its features carefully scanned, its capacities analyzed, its consequences cautiously traced; after which it is either pronounced an abortion, a false conception, a wind-egg (wòv áveμuatov), or else, cast away as a monster that should not have seen the light, and ought not to be permitted to live.

And so with every successively developed answer. Knowledge is not sense or feeling. It is not seeming. It is not belief. It is not opinion (8óa). It is not even true opinion, where this happens to exist without loyos or reason. Nay more, it is not true opinion even, though accompanied in certain cases with reason, or what may be called reason. This, too, has its difficulties. For this reason, or 2óyos, on close analysis, runs down ultimately into sense, or opinion as before defined, without knowledge, or into elemental facts which run out at last into particular seemings or notices of sensation,-in short, supposes a knowledge of something, and this knowledge, when thus treated, involving all the same old difficulties over again,— thus running round continually through an endless circle, in which we are ever striving to get out of or above the sense, and yet ever finding ourselves immersed in it. It is just as λóyos, or speech, in its most literal meaning, dissolves itself, on analysis, into sentences, sentences into words, words into syllables, and syllables into letters, which, as oτoizɛia, or elements, either of sound or sight, are supposed to be alogal, that is, have no reason, but are simply objects of sense, without anything else about them that the mind perceives as distinct from the sensation. On this account, if sense is not knowledge, the ultimate elements of things are not only aλoya, but ayroora, absolutely unknowable. They may be felt but not known. The lowest material element, and the essence, or immaterial entity of any object alike, on the one hypothesis or the other, elude the grasp of science.

Along with these come in collateral inquiries, once famous topics of discussion, and which may have some interest for thinking minds even in this practical age; although, as presented in the Socratic irony, they may have a slight tinge of the humorous, and even of the

ludicrous. They are such as these: Whether knowledge necessarily implies the true being of what is known, and, if so, Whether it can be of anything else, or lower, than ovoía, or essential existence? Whether if this be unknown, anything else can be said to be known? Whether we can be truly said ever to think a lie (τὸ δοξάζειν ψευδῆ), and if so, how it is, and what it is? Whether we can be said to know, in any sense, and in what sense, what we do not know? and if not, How can there be allodoxy, or a false judgment that one thing is another, such allodoxy being necessarily confined to the three cases when we judge one thing we know to be another thing we know, or one thing we know to be another thing we know not, or one thing we know not to be another thing we know not, the first seeming to present a contradiction, the last two to involve the very paradox that forms the strange query? Whether, if sense is knowledge, memory is sense, so that a thing remembered is a thing known? Whether there may be a knowledge unknown, or how far a man may be said to possess a knowledge which he has not, or has not in actual exercise? Whether falsehood, pure or mixed, or as far as it is falsehood, is identical with not-being? etc.

In respect, however, to the main question: What is knowledge? the dialogue closes unsatisfactorily. Whatever clue may be presented in other Platonic writings, no answer is here given. From beginning to end it is occupied in pulling down and not in building up. The same scepticism prevails throughout. It is not, however, on these accounts, any the less a discussion of the deepest interest to the most matured intellects, and none the less useful as an exercise to the young soul that is just beginning to travail with thought. There is a good as well as an evil scepticism; and of these, the first kind is that which so often appears in the Platonic dialogues. It is a scepticism which only produces a stronger belief in the reality of fixed and absolute truth, by the very difficulty of finding it in our own experience of our own subjective states, or of the flowing nature around us. By exhausting the sense and the understanding or reason regarded as occupied simply with the phenomena of sense, it diminishes our confidence in the substantiality and finality of physical science, regarded (as it ever must be by the school that boasts the most of it) as the knowledge of facts, or of laws that ever run out into series of facts, and these again, in the last resort, into seemings, feelings, or the merest notices of sensation. It takes away that conceit which tends to rest in such a knowledge as the highest portion of the soul; and it is on this account that the Theaetetus, and similar dialogues, have

been called cathartic (xadagrixoí) purgative, producing a necessary evacuation of false knowledge, that the soul may wait in purified preparation for the advent of the true. Such a moral effect is admirably and impressively set forth by Socrates, in his closing address to his youthful pupil: "If after this, my dear boy, you ever again conceive other spiritual offspring, then one of two results will follow. Should a genuine conception actually take place, it will be something of a better kind in consequence of the present close examination; but should it turn out an abortion, you will be less harsh to those with whom you converse, more gentle, and not only more gentle, but more sober also, because you will not then be inclined to think you know what you do not know." To the same effect in another place (187. c): "And thus, my dear Theaetetus, ought we to be ever earnest and never discouraged in the search of truth. For if we persevere, there will be one of two things: either we shall find that which we are after, or we shall learn not to think we know what we know not. And yet even this would be no small reward for our pains."

It was one great charge against Socrates that he corrupted the youth by making them doubt (άzoqɛiv), in other words, by throwing them into perplexity, and thus unsettling their confidence in former opinions. This, however, may be said to be the spirit of the Socratic scepticism, when viewed by that higher light which gives us an advantage over Socrates and Plato, in interpreting the rich suggestiveness of their own teachings. Theirs was a good and useful scepticism which unsettles and takes down that it may the more firmly build; which drives one to faith, and to a faith in the highest degree rational, by showing the darkness and insecurity that, without it, must belong to everything called science. It is a scepticism that purges the soul of error, that there may be room and a clear space for truth; which leads us from "the things seen and temporal to the things unseen and eternal;" in other words, to a communion with the "immutable righteousness," and to that "assimilation to the Divine," which, in the remarkable passage contained in the extract that follows, the writer presents as the great end of the philosophic life. It is a scepticism which has characterized some of the brightest ornaments of the Christian Church. It was its negative power which, more than other human means, led Augustine to faith. It appears everywhere in the life and "Thoughts" of Pascal. No one can carefully read the writings of Baxter without perceiving how strong an element it was of his religious experience. Edwards would seem to belong to the more positive order of believers, and yet his works, in many places, reveal