hist). Nor in what may be termed
Plato's abridgement of the history of philosophy (Soph.), is any mention
made such as we find in the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics,
of the derivation of such a theory or of any part of it from the
Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the Heracleiteans, or even from Socrates. In
the Philebus, probably one of the latest of the Platonic Dialogues,
the conception of a personal or semi-personal deity expressed under the
figure of mind, the king of all, who is also the cause, is retained. The
one and many of the Phaedrus and Theaetetus is still working in the mind
of Plato, and the correlation of ideas, not of 'all with all,' but of
'some with some,' is asserted and explained. But they are spoken of in
a different manner, and are not supposed to be recovered from a former
state of existence. The metaphysical conception of truth passes into a
psychological one, which is continued in the Laws, and is the final
form of the Platonic philosophy, so far as can be gathered from his own
writings (see especially Laws). In the Laws he harps once more on the
old string, and returns to general notions:--these he acknowledges to
be many, and yet he insists that they are also one. The guardian must be
made to recognize the truth, for which he has contended long ago in the
Protagoras, that the virtues are four, but they are also in some sense
one (Laws; compare Protagoras).

So various, and if regarded on the surface only, inconsistent, are the
statements of Plato respecting the doctrine of ideas. If we attempted to
harmonize or to combine them, we should make out of them, not a system,
but the caricature of a system. They are the ever-varying expression
of Plato's Idealism. The terms used in them are in their substance and
general meaning the same, although they seem to be different. They
pass from the subject to the object, from earth (diesseits) to
heaven (jenseits) without regard to the gulf which later theology and
philosophy have made between them. They are also intended to supplement
or explain each other. They relate to a subject of which Plato himself
would have said that 'he was not confident of the precise form of his
own statements, but was strong in the belief that something of the kind
was true.' It is the spirit, not the letter, in which they agree--the
spirit which places the divine above the human, the spiritual above the
material, the one above the many, the mind before the body.

The strea