Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/28

14 D. G. RITCHIE : smaller side currents coming indirectly from them also but through Neoplatonic and Christian mystics. It is not only from Kant's Antinomies and from the philosophical method of Fichte, but directly from Plato and Aristotle that Hegel derived his dialectic ; and it was from them, far more than from any modern philosopher, that he derived his ideas of the relation between philosophy and its history. None of Hegel's modern predecessors, except Leibniz, had appreci- ated the thought of the past in a catholic spirit ; and Leibniz treats previous philosophical systems rather eclectically, accepting suggestions from many diverse sources but not applying the categories of continuity and of organic growth to the history of human thought in the same thoroughgoing way in which he applied them to the phenomena of the physical world. In his use of the word "dialectic" Hegel may be said to "bring it back to Plato's signification, in order to escape the deadlock into which Kant had brought metaphysics. In Plato the suggestions for a dialectic movement in the history of thought are slight, but they are not wanting. I have referred already to the relation in which Plato expressly puts his own doctrine of ideas to Heracleiteanism on the one side and to Eleaticism on the other ; and Plato evidently regarded the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers as a " propae- deutic " for his own theory. But even in the simpler "" conversations " of Socrates we may find the germs of what we may call a dialectical interpretation of the history of thought. The beginning of the Bepublic seems to me a clear example of that method of seeking to arrive at truth through the conflict and clash of preceding opinion which is common to Plato, Aristotle and Hegel. In the old man Cephalus and his son Polemarchus, both living in the stage of pro- verbial morality and submission to the sacred authority of the poets, in the rhetorical sophist Thrasymachus and Plato's brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, educated young Athenians who have come under the sway of the " Sophistic " rational- ism but are dissatisfied with it in these persons of the dialogue we have a series of types representing the develop- ment of Greek thought and the preparation for Socrates. Against the definitions of Justice which the first two give very superficial we might say "sophistical" arguments suffice. The contradictions easily show themselves. The thesis of Thrasymachus requires a harder struggle before it can be made to disclose its incoherence and refute itself and, it is to be noted, the Socratic method is always dialectical, it is to make an inadequate theory when carried out into its