the qualities which he condemns. He inveighs against poets and their myths, and proceeds to add one to the number of poets and hundreds to the number of myths. He complains of the priests (who go about preaching hell and offering redemption from it for a consideration—cf. The Republic, 364), but he himself is a priest, a theologian, a preacher, a supermoralist, a Savonarola denouncing art and inviting vanities to the fire. He acknowledges, Shakespeare-like, that "comparisons are slippery" (Sophist, 231), but he slips out of one into another and another and another; he condemns the Sophists as phrase-mongering disputants, but he himself is not above chopping logic like a sophomore. Faguet parodies him:
"The whole is greater than the part?—Surely.—And the part is less than the whole? Yes—. . . Therefore, clearly, philosophers should rule the state?—What is that?—It is evident; let us go over it again."[1]
But this is the worst that we can say of him; and after it is said, the Dialogues remain one of the priceless treasures of the world.[2] The best of them, The Republic, is a complete treatise in itself, Plato reduced to a book; here we shall find his metaphysics, his theology, his ethics, his psychology, his pedagogy, his politics, his theory of art. Here we shall find problems reeking with modernity and contemporary savor: communism and socialism, feminism and birth-control and eugenics, Nietzschean problems of morality and aristocracy, Rousseauian problems of return to nature and libertarian education, Bergsonian élan vital and Freudian psychoanalysis—everything is here. It is a feast for the élite, served by an unstinting host. "Plato is philosophy, and philosophy Plato," says Emerson; and awards to The Republic the words
- ↑ Pour qu'on lise Platon, Paris, 1905, p. 4.
- ↑ The most important of the dialogues are: The Apology of Socrates, Crito, Phædo, The Symposium, Phadrus, Gorgias, Parmenides, and The Statesman. The most important parts of The Republic (references are to marginally-numbered sections, not to pages) are 327–32, 336–77, 384–5, 392–426, 433–5, 441–76, 481–3, 512–20, 572–94. The best edition is Jowett's; the most convenient is in the Everyman series. References are to The Republic unless otherwise stated.
