THE SOPHISTA OF PLATO, &c. 



163 



as Plato acknowledges, be more or less successful in proportion to the insight and knowledge of 

 the person employing it. The specimens with which he favours us in these dialogues may be 

 arbitrary, injudicious, or even grotesque: but as logical exercises they are regular — and 

 logic looks to regularity of form rather than to truth of matter, which must be ascertained by 

 other faculties than the discursive. And even in judging of these particular divisions, we must 

 bear in mind the object in view. In the Sophista it is Plato's professed intention to dis- 

 tinguish the Sophist from the Philosopher, the trader in knowledge from its disinterested 

 seeker : surely no unimportant distinction, nor one without its counterpart in reality, either in 

 Plato's day or in our own. The ludicrous minuteness with which the successive genera 

 and sub-genera of the " acquisitive class " are made out in detail, would not sound so strange 

 to ears accustomed to the exercises of the Schools ; while it subserves a purpose which 

 the philosophic satirist takes no pains to conceal, that, namely, of lowering in the estimation of 

 his readers classes or sects for which he harboured a not wholly unjust or unfounded dislike 

 and contempt. It serves, at the same time, to heighten by contrast the dignity and importance 

 of the philosophic vocation, and in either point of view must be regarded as a legitimate 

 artifice of controversy in a dialogue unmistakeably polemical. 



APPENDIX I. 



In the foregoing discussions it is assumed that the method of Division sketched in the 

 Phcedrus is the same with the Dichotomy or Mesotomy of which examples are furnished in the 

 Sophista and Politicus. This I had never doubted, until the Master of Trinity gave me 

 the opportunity of reading his remarks on the subject, in which a contrary opinion is 

 expressed. I have therefore arranged in parallel columns the description of the process of 

 Division, as given in the Phcedrus, and in the two disputed dialogues ; from which it will 

 appear that the onus probandi, at any rate, lies with those who deny that the processes meant 

 are the same. I must premise that the Master of Trinity's question, " If this," viz. the 

 method in the Sophista, "be Plato's Dialectic, how came he to omit to say so there .^" has 

 been already answered by anticipation in p. l6, note 1, but more fully in Soph. 235, quoted 

 presently. 



Where it is implied that all ♦tendance" is either corporal or 

 mental; that all tendance of the body is comprised in the 

 " antistrophic arts" of the gymnast and tlie physician, and all 

 tendance of the soul in those ot the legislator and the judge. 

 There is, therefore, no room under either for the four pretended 

 arts of the sophist, the rhetorician, the decorator of the person, 

 and the cuisinier. In Politicus, 302 E, the dichotomy is com- 

 prised in a single step: iu Taurais S,] tA wapdtio/iou sui 

 evvofjLOi/ knaaTtiv StxoTo/iel Toy-rwi/. 



I ttust I shall not be understood as consciously advancing 



opinions contrary to those of the Master of Trinity on the 

 subject of Classification. But so far as I comprehend his views 

 they do not seem necessarily inconsistent with my own. The 

 tyjiical principle of Classification seems, in its spirit at least, 

 strikingly Platonic; but it surely involves physical or meta- 

 physical ideas which transcend the limits of formal Dialectic, 

 lie this as it may, 1 should be sorry to have it supposed that 

 1 conceive my opinion on such a subject to be of any value in 

 comparison with that of the historian of Inductive Science. 

 This would be to " lecture Hannibal on the Art of War." 



21—2 



