THE SOPHISTES OF PLATO.*
Tins work is a remarkable protest on behalf of speculative philosophy to a public clamouring for useful knowledge. Mr. Mackay presents to English readers one of the least popular of Plato's dialogues, dealing with questions of the most abstract and at first sight of the moat frivolous nature, with the express intent of reminding them that those questions are neither frivolous nor obsolete; but that, on the contrary, they lie at the root of all science, moral and social, as well as physical, and that withoutfacing them it is impossible to have a clear insight into the claims of conflicting theories of morals and education. This view, in which we cordially agree, is put forward in a very able introduction discussing the general state of opinion and teaching in Plato's time, and pointing out the parallel circumstances of modern society. As then, so now, we find superficial resemblances concealing fundamental difference which involves " the crisis between scepticism and idealism, between true education and false." And here, by the way, let us express our sympathy with the assertion implied in this alternative, that between scepticism on the one band, and idealism on the other, there is no tenable halting-place for speculation.
The insufficiency of a register of phenomena as a substitute for philosophy is touched on in the following passage :—
" It may be said that tho ablest philosophers—even of physical investigators—from Aristotle to Bacon and Claude Bernard, disclaim tho
superficial denunciation of metaphysics moreover, that no step, even in physical discovery, can be made without the aid of ideas and assumptions borrowed from this much-abused department. Materialists and Positivists talk metaphysics without knowing it, their metaphysics being only the more presumptuous and frivolously incorrect from this very circumstance. They discourse freely of nature, matter, cause, law, force, space, and time, in innocent unconsciousness of the metaphysical nature of what they assume as the foundation of their reasonings Little is the Positivist aware that while denouncing metaphysics, he secretly cherishes a metaphysic of his own, but one of the coarsest and most trivial kind."
These may seem hard words, but they are justified by such strange inconsistencies as that of an acute and scientific historian of philosophy who proclaims first his firm belief in an independent external world and then, a few sentences later, his equally firm conviction that ontology is futile, as if his former assertion were not every whit as ontological as the proppsitions of the most transcendent idealism. Not less strange is it, and even more instructive, to find Cotute's illustrious disciple and biographer confessing that three essential departments are still wanting iu the Positive philosophy, one of which is " the subjective theory of humanity," comprising morality, a3sthetics, and psychology. Now the object of this psychology is defined as " the formal conditions of knowledge." And how those conditions are to be investigated without committing the unpardonable offence which M. Littrd elsewhere in the same work calls " rentrer dans pleine metaphysique" is not explained, nor by any means made to appear.
The fact is that every human being who thinks at all and is not an absolute sceptic hus metaphysical notions of some kind ; and if we attempt to shut our eyes to that fact, we only substitute for acknowledged difficulties a latent confusion which inheres in all our subsequent proceedings, and emerges unexpectedly in the midst of our triumph at our fancied emancipation. And among these unavoidable questions (or should we say the various aspects of the one question ?) not the least is that old one which forms the burden of the Sophistes. If the Universe is one, whence the diversity we experience ? if it is many, whence the inability of the mind to rest without seeking for unity? The problem of the One and the Many was not new iu Plato's time, and it presents itself to us at this day very much the same as he found it. "Let not any one imagine" (we quote from Mr. Mackay's note on p. 126) " that now that we are arrived at the happy epoch of so-called positive philosophy, these problems as to the many and the one are definitely settled or obsolete." They might indeed lie dormant while science was occupied in ascertaining truths of a subordinate order of generality, but now that the lower generalizations are everywhere being gathered up into higher ones, and that the highest generalities of the several sciences themselves seem to bo on the eve of converging to some still higher unity, this tendency, far from leading to the suppression of ultra-phenomenal questions, brings again into full light the very perplexities by which the earliest physicists were beset in their indefinite and unverifiable conjectures.
But it may still be thought that such things have surely nothing to do with the ordinary concerns of unscientific people. Not so ; for the conduct of men's ordinary affairs must be guided by some rule
or other, and though it is not necessary that every one should understand the grounds of such rule, it is necessary that some one should, on peril of moral principles breaking down for want of sanction when the moment of trial comes ; and the ultimate ground of every system of morality cannot help being explicitly or implicitly ultra-phenomenal. Utilitarianism professes to steer clear of metaphysic, but its apparent simplicity is due to its quietly assuming at the outset a position of vital importance which is very open to attack, namely, the commensurability of all pleasures. For, if the choice between pleasures or avoidances of pain of different orders is not the same process as choice between pleasures or avoidances of pain of the same order,—that is, if all pleasures are not commensurable, then the greatest happiness ceases to mean the greatest sum of pleasure, and the quantitative scheme of utilitarianism fails. At this point, therefore (as Plato has pointed out in the Philebus), is the real stress of the controversy, and it can hardly be settled without going into metaphysics to some extent.
Mr. Mackay's introduction goes on to speak of the influence of philosophy on ethics and politics, of the sophistical tendencies of the present time, and of the analogy between them and those which Socrates and his disciple denounced. It contains much felicitous and acute criticism, though here and there something too imperious in its summary way of putting down everything that does not conform to idealism.
We can notice but briefly the translation itself, which, after all, is the less important part of the work. Whether it will find many readers except as an aid to the study of the original may well be doubted, for Mr. Grote's analysis is for most people a sufficient account of the matter of Plato ; and even if any translation could be adequate to render his style, one would not choose this dialogue as an attractive specimen. The argument is well and closely followed by the translator ; in the more discursive passages he is leas careful of niceties, and the diction is hardly equal to that of the versions of detached pieces given in the notes to Mr. Campbell's edition.
In p. 240 B we find the complication of negatives which stands in the ordinary text as 05x '61, apce o5x gym; iceriv 'o'vrw; ;iv 7.i7o,ckiv thava; ("1Vhat we call an iroage is really, without having reality, an unreal thing :"—Mr. Campbell) simplified, and the requisite sense obtained by reading 05x i'av 4 on v Zvrwc iariY 41,r4;, &c., and translating " The image of the real is then a really existing unreal thing ?" On the other hand, in a more perplexed place, p. 244 ll, Mr. Mackay is not so happy in following Stallbaum, whose remedy is the least Platonic and the least consonant to the context of all that have been proposed.
Before we quit the subject, we should observe that those who do not read through the text of the translation, should at least turn it over for the sake of the notes, as they are written with no less ability than the introduction, and throw further light on several of the points treated of in it.
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