ed. Although the connexion between
them is sometimes accidental, it is often real. The same questions
are discussed by them under different conditions of language and
civilization; but in some cases a mere word has survived, while nothing
or hardly anything of the pre-Socratic, Platonic, or Aristotelian
meaning is retained. There are other questions familiar to the moderns,
which have no place in ancient philosophy. The world has grown older in
two thousand years, and has enlarged its stock of ideas and methods of
reasoning. Yet the germ of modern thought is found in ancient, and we
may claim to have inherited, notwithstanding many accidents of time and
place, the spirit of Greek philosophy. There is, however, no continuous
growth of the one into the other, but a new beginning, partly
artificial, partly arising out of the questionings of the mind itself,
and also receiving a stimulus from the study of ancient writings.

Considering the great and fundamental differences which exist in ancient
and modern philosophy, it seems best that we should at first study them
separately, and seek for the interpretation of either, especially of the
ancient, from itself only, comparing the same author with himself and
with his contemporaries, and with the general state of thought and
feeling prevalent in his age. Afterwards comes the remoter light which
they cast on one another. We begin to feel that the ancients had the
same thoughts as ourselves, the same difficulties which characterize all
periods of transition, almost the same opposition between science and
religion. Although we cannot maintain that ancient and modern philosophy
are one and continuous (as has been affirmed with more truth respecting
ancient and modern history), for they are separated by an interval of
a thousand years, yet they seem to recur in a sort of cycle, and we are
surprised to find that the new is ever old, and that the teaching of the
past has still a meaning for us.

III. In the preface to the first edition I expressed a strong opinion
at variance with Mr. Grote's, that the so-called Epistles of Plato were
spurious. His friend and editor, Professor Bain, thinks that I ought to
give the reasons why I differ from so eminent an authority. Reserving
the fuller discussion of the question for another place, I will shortly
defend my opinion by the following arguments:--

(a) Because almost all epistles purporting to be of the classical age
of Greek literature