tetus he is designedly held back from arriving at a conclusion.
For we cannot suppose that Plato conceived a definition of knowledge to
be impossible. But this is his manner of approaching and surrounding a
question. The lights which he throws on his subject are indirect, but
they are not the less real for that. He has no intention of proving a
thesis by a cut-and-dried argument; nor does he imagine that a great
philosophical problem can be tied up within the limits of a definition.
If he has analyzed a proposition or notion, even with the severity of
an impossible logic, if half-truths have been compared by him with
other half-truths, if he has cleared up or advanced popular ideas, or
illustrated a new method, his aim has been sufficiently accomplished.

The writings of Plato belong to an age in which the power of analysis
had outrun the means of knowledge; and through a spurious use of
dialectic, the distinctions which had been already 'won from the void
and formless infinite,' seemed to be rapidly returning to their original
chaos. The two great speculative philosophies, which a century earlier
had so deeply impressed the mind of Hellas, were now degenerating into
Eristic. The contemporaries of Plato and Socrates were vainly trying to
find new combinations of them, or to transfer them from the object to
the subject. The Megarians, in their first attempts to attain a severer
logic, were making knowledge impossible (compare Theaet.). They were
asserting 'the one good under many names,' and, like the Cynics, seem
to have denied predication, while the Cynics themselves were depriving
virtue of all which made virtue desirable in the eyes of Socrates and
Plato. And besides these, we find mention in the later writings of
Plato, especially in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Laws, of certain
impenetrable godless persons, who will not believe what they 'cannot
hold in their hands'; and cannot be approached in argument, because they
cannot argue (Theat; Soph.). No school of Greek philosophers exactly
answers to these persons, in whom Plato may perhaps have blended some
features of the Atomists with the vulgar materialistic tendencies of
mankind in general (compare Introduction to the Sophist).

And not only was there a conflict of opinions, but the stage which the
mind had reached presented other difficulties hardly intelligible to
us, who live in a different cycle of human thought. All times of mental
progress are times of confus