.

[Sidenote: The Historical Preparation for Plato.]

Sect. 159. The character and method of Socrates have their best foil in
the sophists, but their bearing on the earlier philosophers is for our
purposes even more instructive. Unlike Socrates these philosophers had
not made a study of the task of the philosopher. They _were_
philosophers--"spectators of all time and all existence"; but they were
precritical or dogmatic philosophers, to whom it had not occurred to
define the requirements of philosophy. They knew no perfect knowledge
other than their own actual knowledge. They defined being and
interpreted life without reflecting upon the quality of the knowledge
whose object is being, or the quality of insight that would indeed be
practical wisdom. But when through Socrates the whole philosophical
prospect is again revealed after the period of humanistic concentration,
it is as an ideal whose possibilities, whose necessities, are conceived
before they are realized. Socrates celebrates the role of the
philosopher without assigning it to himself. The new philosophical
object is the philosopher himself; and the new insight a knowledge of
knowledge itself. These three types of intellectual procedure, dogmatic
speculation concerning being, humanistic interest in life, and the
self-criticism of thought, form the historical preparation for Plato,
the philosopher who defined being as the ideal of thought, and upon this
ground interpreted life.

There is no more striking case in history of the subtle continuity of
thought than the relation between Plato and his master Socrates. The
wonder of it is due to the absence of any formulation of doctrine on
the part of Socrates himself. He only lived and talked; and yet Plato
created a system of philosophy in which he is faithfully embodied. The
form of embodiment is the dialogue, in which the talking of Socrates is
perpetuated and conducted to profounder issues, and in which his life is
both rendered and interpreted. But as the vehicle of Plato's thought
preserves and makes perfect the Socratic method, so the thought itself
begins with the Socratic motive and remains to the end an expression of
it. The presentiment of perfect knowledge which distinguished Socrates
from his contemporaries becomes in Plato the clear vision of a realm of
ideal truth.

[Sidenote: Platonism: Reality as the Absolute Ideal or Good.]

Sect. 160. Plato begins his philosophy with the philosopher and the
p