This etext was produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. PLATO AND PLATONISM (1910) WALTER HORATIO PATER CONTENTS 1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion: 5-26 2. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest: 27-50 3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number: 51-74 4. Plato and Socrates: 75-98 5. Plato and the Sophists: 99-123 6. The Genius of Plato: 124-149 7. The Doctrine of Plato-- I. The Theory of Ideas: 150-173 II. Dialectic: 174-196 8. Lacedaemon: 197-234 9. The Republic: 235-266 10. Plato's Aesthetics: 267-283, end CHAPTER 1: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION [5] WITH the world of intellectual production, as with that of organic generation, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura nihil facit per saltum; and in the history of philosophy there are no absolute beginnings. Fix where we may the origin of this or that doctrine or idea, the doctrine of "reminiscence," for instance, or of "the perpetual flux," the theory of "induction," or the philosophic view of things generally, the specialist will still be able to find us some earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency. The most elementary act of mental analysis takes time to do; the most rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so simple that we can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow, and with difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful generalisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as [6] that of Heraclitus--"Panta rhei,"+ all things fleet away--may startle a particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half- developed instincts of the human mind itself. Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of philosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or the Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical literature. His encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge is more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for compass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's achievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of the mind's history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.