MR. R. D. ARCHER-HIND'S EDITION OF PLATO'S " TIM - A - PIUS."

THE surpassing merits of this edition of the Timaeus are un- mistakable, and we make little doubt that it will soon be translated into more than one Continental language. We make quite as little doubt, though, that it will prove caviare to the majority of its English readers. For the Timaeus is, what Professor Jowett calls it, the most obscure and repulsive of all

Plato's dialogues ; and there are, we believe, not more than two Englishmen who could criticise this lucid and attractive edition of that dialogue as the editor thinks, and rightly

thinks, that it ought to be criticised. We, at least, can do little more than express sincere admiration for the erudition and acuteness of his notes and introduction, and for the accuracy and beauty of his translation. Whether, indeed, Plato does or does not talk at random and con- tradict himself occasionally in the Timaeus, is a question that we cannot answer. But we would far rather accept the editor's postulate that Plato does not commit either of these sins, than we would try to measure the plummet-line with which he sounds "the ocean of idealism," as he calls it, "into which Plato's thought finally expanded." The Timaeus enables him, he says, "to recognise Platonism as a complete

and coherent scheme of monistic idealism." And certainly Mr. Archer-Hind's exposition of Plato's exuberant fancies is beyond

our powers of criticism. When we read that "the givTO civeceido is the ideas, and the ideas are the phenomena, which are merely

a mode of their manifestation to finite intelligence," we comfort our incapacity by remembering that Aristotle treated Plato's " ideas " as peremptorily as Sir Peter Teazle treated the " sentiments " of Joseph Surface. Yet, in spite of this, it must be admitted that Mr. Archer-Hind's almost equally peremptory condemnation of Aristotle's numerous criticisms

of isolated passages in the Timaeus is perfectly just. And as he has stated with perfect fairness the reason why the dialogue which he admires so much has been so severely

neglected by modern scholars, we are glad to repeat that reason in his own words :—

" The exceeding abstruseness of its metaphysical content," he says, "rendered yet more recondite by the constantly allegorical mode of exposition ; the abundance of a praori speculation in a domain which experimental science has now claimed for its own; the vast and many-sided comprehensiveness of the design,—all have conspired to the end that only a very few of the most zealous students of Plato's philosophy have left us any considerable work on this dialogue. It has been put on one side as a fantastic, if ingenious and poetical, cosmogonical scheme, mingled with oracular fragments of mystical metaphysic, and the crude imaginings of scarcely yet infant science."

Now, we are strongly of opinion that the reason here stated will commend itself to all but the staunchest of staunch Platonists, even after an attentive perusal of Mr. Archer-Hind's book. But we refrain with prudent timidity from cavilling at the details of his defensive exposition, and can only try on general grounds to invalidate the claims which he makes with such confidence on behalf of "this magnificent and now too much neglected dialogue." We can thoroughly understand the importance which he gives to it, since he holds that without it "a complete

whole in Platonism" is quite undiscoverable. But when he says of the Timaeus that it is second in interest as well as in

importance to none of the Platonic writings, we join issue with him at once. It is studded, rather sparsely, with some of Plato's "profoundest thoughts and sublimest utterances."

But its interest, in comparison with the interest which the Republic excites, is "as moonlight unto sunlight, or as water unto wine." There are riddles, no doubt, in the Republic itself which it were labour lost to attempt to solve too curiously.

But from Mr. Archer-Hind's contention that the metaphysical teaching of that dialogue is superseded by the more advanced ontology of the Timaeus, it follows as a corollary that the Timaeus swarms with riddles, or "parables," that defy all solution. Whether "each finite soul," e.g., "is a complete miniature copy of the great, or cosmic, soul herself," is a question that human reason may raise indeed, but can never answer. In its efforts to do so, it needs help ab extra, like a lame dog in front of a stile, and Plato's illustrative similitude, from

which we find "that the Circle of the Other is constructed of soul which is composed both of Same and of Other," is, in J. S. Mill's language, not so much erroneous as unmeaning.

• The Timaeus of Plato. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by R. D. Archer-Hind, M.A., Fellow of Trinity college, Cambridge. London : Macmillan and Co. 1888. There is a, great deal in the notes of this edition which is full of interest. But speaking broadly, we may say with a full con- viction that if Mr. Archer-Hind's genius and energy succeed for a time in stimulating English students to try once more "to unaphere the spirit of Plato" by the aid of his Timaeus, the effects of that stimulation will inevitably be transitory. Let the reader look, for instance, at the praise which is lavished on the theory of space propounded in chap. xviii. "Its profound originality and importance," says Mr. Archer-Hind, "can hardly be over-estimated." And now let the reader turn to the note at p. 182, and see if he can think out Plato's meta- physical idea of space (pa) in contrast with Aristotle's physical definition of space (rka-00. Plato reduces matter in its ultimate analysis to space, and Aristotle is bantered by Zeller—with Mr. Archer-Hind's warm approval—for making Plato say that space is matter.

Here, however, we are transgressing the rule which we felt compelled to lay down for our guidance at the beginning of this article, and shall turn to another aspect of. the Timaeus on which we can speak with more confidence. For be the metaphysical interest and importance of this dialogue what they may, its literary interest and import- ance are far indeed below those of the Republic. If that dialogue had been the only one of Plato's that time and chance had spared, his fame would have been as immortal, humanly speaking, as it now is, and the loss of its companions would have been mourned by all lovers of the language and literature of Greece. But if the Timms had held the place which we have hypothetically imagined, for the Republic, the result would have been that modern readers would regard Plato as a singularly over-praised philosopher. And if the truth of these suppo- sitions should be denied by better judges than we can pretend to be, we should fall back on the fact that a very large proportion of the Timaeus is terribly tedious. We insist upon this with some satisfaction, because no reader can say of Mr.. Archer-Hind's exposition and annotations that they are open to a similar charge. He is lively and energetic to the last line of this tremendous dialogue, and although we are not convinced by his arguments in favour of woryfroi: for roiroa in its last sentence, we quote with pleasure, from his note in defence of the reading which he adopts, his own characteristic assurance that "nothing can be more thoroughly characteristic of Plato than that, after talking parable throughout, he should, at the very end of the dialogue, drop a word, 061146Y averroiat, which was to, open our eyes to the fact that he did speak in parables that if we desire to understand the philosopher, we must be in sympathy with the poet." Yes, that is the word Platowas beyond all question one of the greatest poets that the world has seen, and it is as a poet, and not at all as a cosmogonist or ontologist, that he still "rules men's spirits from his urn."

From the influence of her examinations, or from some other cause, Oxford has never produced such brilliant Platonists as Cambridge. Mr. Archer-Hind, by his editions of the Phae,do and the Timaeus, takes a high place in a very dis- tinguished band of scholarly specialists; and the pleasure that his search after Plato's line of thought has given us makes us refrain from doing more than smile at the wilful misspelling which makes him place Proklos side by side with Timaeus, and Sokrates side by side with Thucydides.