ariation
in an individual man, horse, bed, etc., than in the class man, horse,
bed, etc.; nor is the truth which is displayed in individual instances
less certain than that which is conveyed through the medium of
ideas. But Plato, who is deeply impressed with the real importance of
universals as instruments of thought, attributes to them an essential
truth which is imaginary and unreal; for universals may be often false
and particulars true. Had he attained to any clear conception of the
individual, which is the synthesis of the universal and the particular;
or had he been able to distinguish between opinion and sensation, which
the ambiguity of the words (Greek) and the like, tended to confuse, he
would not have denied truth to the particulars of sense.

But the poets are also the representatives of falsehood and feigning
in all departments of life and knowledge, like the sophists and
rhetoricians of the Gorgias and Phaedrus; they are the false priests,
false prophets, lying spirits, enchanters of the world. There is another
count put into the indictment against them by Plato, that they are
the friends of the tyrant, and bask in the sunshine of his patronage.
Despotism in all ages has had an apparatus of false ideas and false
teachers at its service--in the history of Modern Europe as well as of
Greece and Rome. For no government of men depends solely upon force;
without some corruption of literature and morals--some appeal to the
imagination of the masses--some pretence to the favour of heaven--some
element of good giving power to evil, tyranny, even for a short time,
cannot be maintained. The Greek tyrants were not insensible to the
importance of awakening in their cause a Pseudo-Hellenic feeling; they
were proud of successes at the Olympic games; they were not devoid of
the love of literature and art. Plato is thinking in the first instance
of Greek poets who had graced the courts of Dionysius or Archelaus: and
the old spirit of freedom is roused within him at their prostitution of
the Tragic Muse in the praises of tyranny. But his prophetic eye extends
beyond them to the false teachers of other ages who are the creatures of
the government under which they live. He compares the corruption of his
contemporaries with the idea of a perfect society, and gathers up
into one mass of evil the evils and errors of mankind; to him they are
personified in the rhetoricians, sophists, poets, rulers who deceive and
govern the wor