meaning when they are incorporated in a principle which is above them
(Republic). In modern language they might be said to come first in the
order of experience, last in the order of nature and reason. They are
assumed, as he is fond of repeating, upon the condition that they shall
give an account of themselves and that the truth of their existence
shall be hereafter proved. For philosophy must begin somewhere and may
begin anywhere,--with outward objects, with statements of opinion, with
abstract principles. But objects of sense must lead us onward to the
ideas or universals which are contained in them; the statements of
opinion must be verified; the abstract principles must be filled up and
connected with one another. In Plato we find, as we might expect, the
germs of many thoughts which have been further developed by the genius
of Spinoza and Hegel. But there is a difficulty in separating the germ
from the flower, or in drawing the line which divides ancient
from modern philosophy. Many coincidences which occur in them are
unconscious, seeming to show a natural tendency in the human mind
towards certain ideas and forms of thought. And there are many
speculations of Plato which would have passed away unheeded, and
their meaning, like that of some hieroglyphic, would have remained
undeciphered, unless two thousand years and more afterwards an
interpreter had arisen of a kindred spirit and of the same intellectual
family. For example, in the Sophist Plato begins with the abstract and
goes on to the concrete, not in the lower sense of returning to outward
objects, but to the Hegelian concrete or unity of abstractions. In the
intervening period hardly any importance would have been attached to the
question which is so full of meaning to Plato and Hegel.

They differ however in their manner of regarding the question. For Plato
is answering a difficulty; he is seeking to justify the use of common
language and of ordinary thought into which philosophy had introduced
a principle of doubt and dissolution. Whereas Hegel tries to go beyond
common thought, and to combine abstractions in a higher unity: the
ordinary mechanism of language and logic is carried by him into another
region in which all oppositions are absorbed and all contradictions
affirmed, only that they may be done away with. But Plato, unlike Hegel,
nowhere bases his system on the unity of opposites, although in the
Parmenides he shows an Hegelian subtlety in the