e great influence exercised upon Greece and upon the world by
Aristotle and his philosophy. But on the other hand almost every one who
is capable of understanding the subject acknowledges that his writings
have not come down to us in an authentic form like most of the dialogues
of Plato. How much of them is to be ascribed to Aristotle's own hand,
how much is due to his successors in the Peripatetic School, is a
question which has never been determined, and probably never can be,
because the solution of it depends upon internal evidence only. To
'the height of this great argument' I do not propose to ascend. But one
little fact, not irrelevant to the present discussion, will show
how hopeless is the attempt to explain Plato out of the writings of
Aristotle. In the chapter of the Metaphysics quoted by Dr. Jackson,
about two octavo pages in length, there occur no less than seven or
eight references to Plato, although nothing really corresponding to them
can be found in his extant writings:--a small matter truly; but what a
light does it throw on the character of the entire book in which they
occur! We can hardly escape from the conclusion that they are not
statements of Aristotle respecting Plato, but of a later generation of
Aristotelians respecting a later generation of Platonists. (Compare
the striking remark of the great Scaliger respecting the Magna
Moralia:--Haec non sunt Aristotelis, tamen utitur auctor Aristotelis
nomine tanquam suo.)

(2) There is no hint in Plato's own writings that he was conscious of
having made any change in the Doctrine of Ideas such as Dr. Jackson
attributes to him, although in the Republic the platonic Socrates speaks
of 'a longer and a shorter way', and of a way in which his disciple
Glaucon 'will be unable to follow him'; also of a way of Ideas, to
which he still holds fast, although it has often deserted him (Philebus,
Phaedo), and although in the later dialogues and in the Laws the
reference to Ideas disappears, and Mind claims her own (Phil.; Laws).
No hint is given of what Plato meant by the 'longer way' (Rep.), or 'the
way in which Glaucon was unable to follow'; or of the relation of Mind
to the Ideas. It might be said with truth that the conception of the
Idea predominates in the first half of the Dialogues, which, according
to the order adopted in this work, ends with the Republic, the
'conception of Mind' and a way of speaking more in agreement with modern
terminology, in the latt