so-called
special sciences. Even the scientists themselves, says Plato,

"only dream about being, but never can behold the waking
reality so long as they leave the hypotheses they use
unexamined, and are unable to give an account of them. For
when a man knows not his own first principle, and when the
conclusion and intermediate steps are also constructed out of
he knows not what, how can he imagine that such a conventional
statement will ever become science?"[330:9]

Within the science of dialectics we are to understand the connections
and sequences of ideas themselves, in the hope of eliminating every
arbitrariness and conventionality within a system of truth that is pure
and self-luminous rationality. To this science, which is the great
interest of his later years, Plato contributes only incomplete studies
and experiments. We must be satisfied with the playful answer with
which, in the "Republic," he replies to Glaucon's entreaty that "he
proceed at once from the prelude or preamble to the chief strain, and
describe that in like manner": "Dear Glaucon, you will not be able to
follow me here, though I would do my best."

But a philosophical system has been projected. The real is that perfect
significance or meaning which thought and every interest suggests, and
toward which there is in experience an appreciable movement. It is this
significance which makes things what they really are, and which
constitutes our understanding of them. In itself it transcends the steps
which lead to it; "for God," says Plato, "mingles not with men." But it
is nevertheless the meaning of human life. And this we can readily
conceive. The last word may transform the sentence from nonsense into
sense, and it would be true to say that its sense mingles not with
nonsense. Similarly the last touch of the brush may transform an
inchoate mass of color into a picture, disarray into an object of
beauty; and its beauty mingles not with ugliness. So life, when it
finally realizes itself, obtains a new and incommensurable quality of
perfection in which humanity is transformed into deity. There is frankly
no provision for imperfection in such a world. In his later writings
Plato sounds his characteristic note less frequently, and permits the
ideal to create a cosmos through the admixture of matter. But in his
moment of inspiration, the Platonist will have no sense for the
imperfect. It is the darkness behind his bac