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NOTES AND COEBESPONDENCE. 143 attached by Socrates to the proposition ' that no one is voluntarily bad,' the words I have italicised would suggest this solution of the paradox ; but as we do know this, there does not seem to me the shadow of an excuse for gravely charging Plato with a " preference of voluntary pravity to in- voluntary" on the ground of this dialogue ; especially as he adopts the above-mentioned proposition as the basis of his main argument in the Gorgias a dialogue regarded as clearly later than the Hippias Minor by all who admit the genuineness of the latter. But Dr. Martineau replies that his charge is justified by a passage " from the latest stage of Plato's development ; being found in the Re- public, 535 E". 1 must observe, in passing, that the unqualified emphasis he lays on the word "latest" suggests an imperfect acquain- tance with recent Platonic criticism ; since the current of critical opinion has for some years been setting steadily against the old view that the Republic represents the "latest" stage of Plato's development. But I will not lay stress on this now ; since whether the passage in the Republic is late or early it does not afford the least support to Dr. Martineau's charge ; in taking it to give such support he has committed a double ignoratio elenchi. For (1) the passage he quotes contains nothing whatever about preference of voluntary falsehood to involuntary ; it simply says that ' it is a crippled soul' which hates the former and does not also hate the latter. And (2) the most express preference of voluntary deception to involuntary would not in the least prove a preference of voluntary pravity ; since there is no reason why the deception should be supposed to be known to be bad by the deceiver and chosen in spite of this knowledge. Indeed I need hardly remind readers of the Republic that Plato regards deception under certain circumstances as good and useful ; it is, he says, a useful medicine, though too dangerous for private persons to meddle with ; it should be left to the rulers of the State. There is no affinity whatever between this position, and that which Dr. Martineau mistakenly supposes to have been seriously maintained in the Hippias Minor. But the failure of Dr. Martineau to understand the full importance, in Plato's ethical view, of the Socratic identification of virtue with knowledge, vice with ignorance, is still more startlingly shown in his reply to me on another point. I criticised in my review his extraordinary suggestion that Plato, when treating of the cardinal virtues in the Republic, may have "felt that Intellect as such could not after all be put upon the seat of guidance, but must itself be made available in the career of life, by a power over it, resolved to lash it to its work," which we may identify with " Conscience or the proper Moral Faculty ". I urged that it was opposed to the very essence of Plato's philosophy to conceive of any natural lord or ruler of the soul other than the philosophic reason. Dr. Martineau answers that his interpretation was not intended to depose the philosophic reason ; " it only claims for that Reason, in Plato's later conception, a function, missing in the earlier, other than that of simple Intelligence, and approxi- mating to that which we assign to Conscience. There would be no occasion to dispossess the word vovs of its supremacy ; provided it were invested with the meaning not only of ' knowing the true,' but of ' ordering the right'." This explanation is, in my opinion, even more extraordinary than the original suggestion. Is there not overwhelming proof that at no period of Plato's development could he conceive of the Philosophic Reason as knowing the good without ordering its realisation, so far as possible, in human life? And, even admitting for the sake of argument that this might be true of Plato at some time in his development, is it not manifestly inverting the fundamental order of evolution of his thought to identify that time with his earlier and therefore more Socratic period ? And