analyzed, can be imagined to have proceeded from the hand or mind of
Plato. The other testimonies to the voyages of Plato to Sicily and the
court of Dionysius are all of them later by several centuries than the
events to which they refer. No extant writer mentions them older
than Cicero and Cornelius Nepos. It does not seem impossible that so
attractive a theme as the meeting of a philosopher and a tyrant, once
imagined by the genius of a Sophist, may have passed into a romance
which became famous in Hellas and the world. It may have created one of
the mists of history, like the Trojan war or the legend of Arthur, which
we are unable to penetrate. In the age of Cicero, and still more in
that of Diogenes Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered
around the personality of Plato,--more voyages, more journeys to visit
tyrants and Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten
in supposing, they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we
cannot agree with him in also supposing that they are of any historical
value, the rather as there is no early independent testimony by which
they are supported or with which they can be compared.
IV. There is another subject to which I must briefly call attention,
lest I should seem to have overlooked it. Dr. Henry Jackson, of Trinity
College, Cambridge, in a series of articles which he has contributed to
the Journal of Philology, has put forward an entirely new explanation of
the Platonic 'Ideas.' He supposes that in the mind of Plato they took,
at different times in his life, two essentially different forms:--an
earlier one which is found chiefly in the Republic and the Phaedo, and
a later, which appears in the Theaetetus, Philebus, Sophist, Politicus,
Parmenides, Timaeus. In the first stage of his philosophy Plato
attributed Ideas to all things, at any rate to all things which
have classes or common notions: these he supposed to exist only by
participation in them. In the later Dialogues he no longer included in
them manufactured articles and ideas of relation, but restricted them to
'types of nature,' and having become convinced that the many cannot be
parts of the one, for the idea of participation in them he substituted
imitation of them. To quote Dr. Jackson's own expressions,--'whereas
in the period of the Republic and the Phaedo, it was proposed to pass
through ontology to the sciences, in the period of the Parmenides and
the Philebus, it is proposed to pass through the sciences to ontology':
or, as he repeats in nearly the same words,--'whereas in the Republic
and in the Phaedo he had dreamt of passing through ontology to the
sciences, he is now content to pass through the sciences to ontology.'