Page:Philological Museum v2.djvu/557

maxims, which Xenophon distinctly delivers as those of Socrates: and what must he have been, to give Plato a right, and an inducement, to exhibit him as he has done in his dialogues? Now the latter branch of this question inevitably leads us back to the historical position from which we started; that Socrates must have had a strictly philosophical basis in his composition, so far as he is virtually recognized by Plato as the author of his philosophical life, and is therefore to be regarded as the first vital movement of Greek philosophy in its more advanced stage ; and that he can only be entitled to this place by an element, which, though properly philosophical, was foreign to the preceding period. Here however we must for the present be content to say, that the property which is peculiar to the post-Socratic philosophy, beginning with Plato, and which henceforward is common to all the genuine Socratic schools, is the coexistence and intercommunion of the three branches of knowledge, dialectics, physics, ethics. This distinction separates the two periods very definitely. For before Socrates either these branches were kept entirely apart, or their subjects were blended together without due discrimination, and without any definite proportion: as for instance ethics and physics among the Pythagoreans, physics and dialectics among the Eleatics; the Ionians alone, though their tendency was wholly to physics, made occasional excursions, though quite at random, into the region both of dialectics and of ethics. But when some writers refuse Plato himself the honour of having distinguished and combined these sciences, and ascribe this step to Xenocrates, and think that even Aristotle abandoned it again; this in my opinion is grounded on a misunderstanding, which however it would here lead us too far to explain. Now it is true we cannot assert^ that Socrates was the first who combined the characters of a physical, ethical, and dialectic philosopher in one person, especially as Plato and Xenophon agree in taking physics out of his range; nor can it be positively said that Socrates was at least the author of this distribution of science, though its germ may certainly be found from the Memorabilia. But we may surely inquire whether this phenemenon has not some simpler and more internal cause, and whether this may not be found in Socrates. The