SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE METHODS 



disclosing in that work, he became more and 

 more settled in the conviction that it was final, 

 so far as it had gone. Measuring all his newly 

 framed hypotheses solely by their congruity 

 with the general system of his conceptions, he 

 gradually lost the scientific habit. He ceased 

 to take into account the fact that what seemed 

 a necessary inference to him would not neces- 

 sarily seem so to minds differently moulded, 

 unless sustained by the requisite proofs. Thus 

 he emerged from the scientific into a pontifical 

 state of mind, in which, just as with Plato in 

 his old age, it was enough that an opinion 

 seemed true to him for him straightway to pro- 

 claim it as binding on all men.^ Moreover it 



^ In its initial scientific attitude, and in its final grotesque 

 vagaries, the career of Plato' s mind may be instructively com- 

 pared vv^ith that of Comte's. In his earlier dialogues Plato 

 professes to be, like Sokrates, a mere investigator of the meth- 

 ods by which trustworthy knowledge is obtained ; just as 

 Comte, in his first great work, is simply a coordinator of sci- 

 entific methods and doctrines. In the Parmenides and Theai- 

 tetos, indeed, we may find, as strikingly presented as in any 

 modern treatise, the antinomies or alternative impossibihties 

 which, like the lions before Palace Beautiful, confiront the pil- 

 grim on either hand whenever he seeks to cross the barrier 

 which divides the realm of science from that of metaphysics. 

 But at a later period we find Plato, like Comte, renouncing the 

 scientific attitude, and setting himself up as the founder of an 

 ideal Community, in which the pervading tendencies which 

 have shaped actual societies were to be ignored or overridden, 

 and in which existence was to be made intolerable to all per- 

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