he
relations of pleasure and knowledge to each other and to the good are
authoritatively determined; the Eleatic Being and the Heraclitean Flux
no longer divide the empire of thought; the Mind of Anaxagoras has
become the Mind of God and of the World. The great distinction between
pure and applied science for the first time has a place in philosophy;
the natural claim of dialectic to be the Queen of the Sciences is once
more affirmed. This latter is the bond of union which pervades the whole
or nearly the whole of the Platonic writings. And here as in several
other dialogues (Phaedrus, Republic, etc.) it is presented to us in a
manner playful yet also serious, and sometimes as if the thought of it
were too great for human utterance and came down from heaven direct. It
is the organization of knowledge wonderful to think of at a time when
knowledge itself could hardly be said to exist. It is this more than any
other element which distinguishes Plato, not only from the presocratic
philosophers, but from Socrates himself.

We have not yet reached the confines of Aristotle, but we make a
somewhat nearer approach to him in the Philebus than in the earlier
Platonic writings. The germs of logic are beginning to appear, but they
are not collected into a whole, or made a separate science or system.
Many thinkers of many different schools have to be interposed between
the Parmenides or Philebus of Plato, and the Physics or Metaphysics of
Aristotle. It is this interval upon which we have to fix our minds if we
would rightly understand the character of the transition from one to the
other. Plato and Aristotle do not dovetail into one another; nor does
the one begin where the other ends; there is a gulf between them not to
be measured by time, which in the fragmentary state of our knowledge
it is impossible to bridge over. It follows that the one cannot be
interpreted by the other. At any rate, it is not Plato who is to be
interpreted by Aristotle, but Aristotle by Plato. Of all philosophy
and of all art the true understanding is to be sought not in the
afterthoughts of posterity, but in the elements out of which they have
arisen. For the previous stage is a tendency towards the ideal at which
they are aiming; the later is a declination or deviation from them, or
even a perversion of them. No man's thoughts were ever so well expressed
by his disciples as by himself.

But although Plato in the Philebus does not come into any close
c