Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/538

524 J. A. STEWART : respect due to him as a sagacious editor of Plato's text, and a, learned and acute commentator on the Fragments of the Early Greek Philosophers and on Aristotle's Ethics. 1. Prof. Burnet says : " He [i.e. the present writer] indeed thinks that it is ' going too far ' to say, with Couturat, that the whole doctrine of tSe'ai is mythical ; but I do not see how he can escape that conclusion, or why on his view of myth, he should desire to do so ". Surely it is Prof. Burnet who cannot escape Couturat 's conclusion ; for it is Prof. Burnet who says : " The relation of the individual soul to the Ideas must be mythically expressed ". ' The relation of the individual soul to the Ideas * means, I suppose, our apprehension of them. Qua apprehended by us, then, the Ideas must be mythically expressed, according to Prof. Burnet. Yet he tells us that " for Plato everything is mythical except the Ideas (and, in a secondary sense, the mathe- matical sciences) ". This can only mean that per se, apart from our apprehension of them, they are not mythical. But surely, if they are mythical qua apprehended by us, much more are they mythical qua not apprehended by us imagined for we cannot say ' conceived ' as eternal substances existing per se in another world. As such they are indeed the creations of mythology which Aristotle seems to have found them. The truth is that in Prof. Burnet's view that the relation between the individual soul and the Ideas must be mythically expressed we have a striking in- stance of the confusion which comes of that neglect of the psy- chology and, consequently, of the methodological significance of, the Doctrine of Ideas which we have to deplore in so many of its scholarly exponents. The ' Ideas ' in methodology are points of view, concepts-in-use, and the relation between the Man of Science and his conceptual instruments need not (although, of course, it may) be ' mythically expressed ' ; and, as a matter of fact, is so expressed by Plato only in a few passages (which it con- cerned me specially to notice in dealing with his Myths) against the many in which it is expressed in plain language described as a case of coming to see that a particular 'participates in,' or 're- sembles ' its ' Idea ' as a case, tnao is to say, of discovering the hitherto unknown law ' involved in ' the particular, or of recognis- ing the particular as ' an instance ' of the operation of a known law. So long as the methodological significance of the Doctrine of Ideas is neglected, so long will it be plausible to say with M. Couturat that the whole, doctrine, of iSt'ai is mythical ; and so long as the psychology of that experience for which the ' Idea ' is a ' real presence ' is neglected, so long will that part of the Doctrine which is really mythical be misunderstood regarded either as ' Plato's fun ' Prof. Burnet dwells much on myth as mere -rraiSid or else as his bad science which seems to be the view of Prof. Natorp. 2. Prof. Burnet says: "The Soul, the World, and God are the proper subjects of myth . . . not because, like the Ideas, they