OF THE FIFTH CENTURY, B.C. 663 



meddle with the matter at all. Incidental errors, such as the confounding 

 of Socrates with the mass of public teachers, of which he was one, do not 

 affect the fundamental truth of the case. The " Clouds" is a play against the 

 Sophists, not against Socrates. 



But, however slight the value which a grave man may be inclined to give to 

 the testimony of a great public humorist on a question of philosophy, if it stood 

 alone, the case is completely altered the moment that his laughing testimony is 

 confirmed by the serious witness of a professional thinker. The error which the 

 greatest thinker and the greatest humorist of the age agree in condemning is 

 not likely to have been an imagination. No doubt, in such a case, a great deal 

 depends on the character of the philosopher ; and Plato is not a name likely to 

 forestall favour with a class of minds largely represented in this land, which 

 rejoices to call itself pre-eminently practical, and shares in a more than Napo- 

 leonic hatred of all ideology. But let us distinguish. Plato undoubtedly had 

 his crotchets : he was in some things a most unpractical man, and knew that he 

 was so ; unquestionably, also, his theory of ideas may often have been stated in 

 exaggerated language, and with a paradoxical air, which were justly provocative 

 of the opposition which, ever since Aristotle, it has encountered. But the 

 testimony of the philosopher in reference to the Sophists is a thing much broader, 

 and rooted much more deeply, than any of his crotchets about methodising the 

 sexual instinct, or the possibility of his ideal polity. Here we have the fact that 

 a great philosopher of all-commanding mind, the founder of a great and perma- 

 nent school of thinking, who stood to his age in the same relation that Bacon 

 does to ours, makes it the business of his life to write against, and represents his 

 great master, Socrates, as having made it the business of his life, to speak 

 against, a class of men who professed certain principles generally esteemed per- 

 nicious, but which, according to Mr Grote's view of the truth, were, in fact, 

 most excellent and laudable. And this testimony, so given, was accepted by the 

 universal voice of antiquity. It met, in fact, no decided contradiction till the 

 epiphany of Mr Grote. Now, there is nothing altogether impossible in the 

 supposition that Mr Grote may be right. It may sometimes be given to a 

 Niebuhr, after a lapse of 2000 years, to reconstruct a history of Rome ; but we 

 are not to start with a prepossession in favour of such brilliant novelties. They 

 are rather to be looked on with suspicion, and require strong backing. Plato, 

 moreover, it must be borne in mind, with all his tendency to one-sided exaggera- 

 tions, was by no means a narrow-minded, an ungenerous, much less a spiteful or 

 ill-natured man. No man was more in the habit of looking at both sides of a 

 question, and more unlikely to create a man of straw for an adversary. His 

 treatment of Protagoras, Gorgias, and other Sophists, is what we would call 

 gentlemanly in the highest degree, and gives the reader a sort of guarantee 

 that what he alleges against the general body to which he belonged had some 



