t to be when they have
but a slender experience of facts. The correlation of the sciences, the
consciousness of the unity of nature, the idea of classification, the
sense of proportion, the unwillingness to stop short of certainty or to
confound probability with truth, are important principles of the higher
education. Although Plato could tell us nothing, and perhaps knew that
he could tell us nothing, of the absolute truth, he has exercised
an influence on the human mind which even at the present day is not
exhausted; and political and social questions may yet arise in which the
thoughts of Plato may be read anew and receive a fresh meaning.

The Idea of good is so called only in the Republic, but there are traces
of it in other dialogues of Plato. It is a cause as well as an idea, and
from this point of view may be compared with the creator of the Timaeus,
who out of his goodness created all things. It corresponds to a certain
extent with the modern conception of a law of nature, or of a final
cause, or of both in one, and in this regard may be connected with the
measure and symmetry of the Philebus. It is represented in the Symposium
under the aspect of beauty, and is supposed to be attained there by
stages of initiation, as here by regular gradations of knowledge. Viewed
subjectively, it is the process or science of dialectic. This is the
science which, according to the Phaedrus, is the true basis of rhetoric,
which alone is able to distinguish the natures and classes of men and
things; which divides a whole into the natural parts, and reunites the
scattered parts into a natural or organized whole; which defines the
abstract essences or universal ideas of all things, and connects them;
which pierces the veil of hypotheses and reaches the final cause or
first principle of all; which regards the sciences in relation to the
idea of good. This ideal science is the highest process of thought,
and may be described as the soul conversing with herself or holding
communion with eternal truth and beauty, and in another form is
the everlasting question and answer--the ceaseless interrogative of
Socrates. The dialogues of Plato are themselves examples of the nature
and method of dialectic. Viewed objectively, the idea of good is a power
or cause which makes the world without us correspond with the world
within. Yet this world without us is still a world of ideas. With Plato
the investigation of nature is another department of kn