Chapter VIII.**--Those who expect from Plato a coherent system in

which affirmative dogmas are first to be laid down, with the evidence in their favour--next, the difficulties and objections against them enumerated--lastly, these difficulties solved--will be disappointed. Plato is, occasionally, abundant in his affirmations: he has also great negative fertility in starting objections: but the affirmative current does not come into conflict with the negative. His belief is enforced by rhetorical fervour, poetical illustration, and a vivid emotional fancy. These elements stand to him in the place of positive proof; and when his mind is full of them, the unsolved objections, which he himself had stated elsewhere, vanish out of sight. Towards the close of his life (as we shall see in the Treatise De Legibus), the love of dialectic, and the taste for enunciating difficulties even when he could not clear them up, died out within him. He becomes ultra-dogmatical, losing even the poetical richness and fervour which had once marked his affirmations, and substituting in their place a strict and compulsory orthodoxy.

[Side-note: Contrast between the philosopher and the practical statesman--between Knowledge and Opinion.]

The contrast between the philosopher and the man engaged in active life--which is so emphatically set forth in the Theætêtus[144]--falls in with the distinction between Knowledge and Opinion--The Infallible and the Fallible. It helps the purpose of the dialogue, to show what knowledge is _not_: and it presents the distinction between the two on the ethical and emotional side, upon which Plato laid great stress. The philosopher (or man of Knowledge, _i.e._ Knowledge viewed on its subjective side) stands opposed to the men of sensible perception and opinion, not merely in regard to intellect, but in regard to disposition, feeling, character, and appreciation of objects. He neither knows nor cares about particular things or particular persons: all his intellectual force, and all his emotional interests, are engaged in the contemplation of Universals or Real Entia, and of the great pervading cosmical forces. He despises the occupations of those around him, and the actualities of life, like the Platonic Sokrates in the Gorgias:[145] assimilating himself as much as possible to the Gods; who have no other occupation (according to the Aristotelian[146] Ethics), except that of contemplating and theorising. He pursues these objects not with a view to any ulterior result, but because the pursuit is in itself a life both of virtue and happiness; neither of which are to be found in the region of opinion. Intense interest in speculation is his prominent characteristic. To dwell amidst these contemplations is a self-sufficing life; even without any of the aptitudes or accomplishments admired by the practical men. If the philosopher meddles with their pursuits, he is not merely found incompetent, but also incurs general derision; because his incompetence becomes manifest even to the common-place citizens. But if _they_ meddle with his speculations, they fail not less disgracefully; though their failure is not appreciated by the unphilosophical spectator.

[Footnote 144: Plato, Theætêt. pp. 173-176. Compare Republic, v. pp. 476-477, vii. p. 517.]

[Footnote 145: See above, chap. xxiv. p. 355.]

[Footnote 146: Ethic. Nikomach. x. 8, p. 1178, b. 9-25.]

The professors of Knowledge are thus divided by the strongest lines from the professors of Opinion. And opinion itself--The Fallible--is, in this dialogue, presented as an inexplicable puzzle. You talk about true and false opinions: but how can false opinions be possible? and if they are not possible, what is the meaning of _true_, as applied to opinions? Not only, therefore, opinion can never be screwed up to the dignity of knowledge--but the world of opinion itself defies philosophical scrutiny. It is a chaos in which there is neither true nor false; in perpetual oscillation (to use the phrase of the Republic) between Ens and Non-Ens.[147]

[Footnote 147: Plato, Republic, v. pp. 478-479.

The Theætêtus is more in harmony (in reference to [Greek: do/xa] and [Greek: e)pistê/mê]) with the Republic, than with the Sophistês and Politikus. In the Politikus (p. 309 C) [Greek: a)lêthê\s do/xa meta\ bebaiô/seôs] is placed very nearly on a par with knowledge: in the Menon also, the difference between the two, though clearly declared, is softened in degree, pp. 97-98.

The Alexandrine physician Herophilus attempted to draw, between [Greek: pro/r)r(êsis] and [Greek: pro/gnôsis], the same distinction as that which Plato draws between [Greek: do/xa] and [Greek: e)pistê/mê]--The Fallible as contrasted with the Infallible. Galen shows that the distinction is untenable (Prim. Commentat. in Hippokratis Prorrhetica, Tom. xvi. p. 487. ed. Kühn).

Bonitz, in his Platonische Studien (pp. 41-78), has given an instructive analysis and discussion of the Theætêtus. I find more to concur with in his views, than in those of Schleiermacher or Steinhart. He disputes altogether the assumption of other Platonic critics, that a purely negative result is unworthy of Plato; and that the negative apparatus is an artifice to recommend, and a veil to conceal, some great affirmative truth, which acute expositors can detect and enunciate plainly (Schleiermacher, Einleit. zum Theætêt. p. 124 seq.) Bonitz recognises the result of the Theætêtus as purely negative, and vindicates the worth of it as such. Moreover, instead of denouncing the opinions which Plato combats, as if they were perverse heresies of dishonest pretenders, he adverts to the great difficulty of those problems which both Plato and Plato's opponents undertook to elucidate: and he remarks that, in those early days, the first attempts to explain psychological phenomena were even more liable to error than the first attempts to explain physical phenomena (pp. 75-77). Such recognition, of the real difficulty of a problem, is rare among the Platonic critics.]