ignificances, they acquire individuality
and specific importance only through interaction with the constantly
varying social situations in which they arise, on which they operate,
and by which they are in turn operated on. Philosophy has perhaps
suffered most of all from nescience of those and from devoting itself,
at a minimum, to the satisfaction of that passion for oneness, for
"logical consistency" without which philosophic "systems" would never
arise, nor the metaphysical distinction between "appearance" and
"reality"; and with which the same systems have made up a historic
aggregate of strikingly repugnant and quarrelsome units. It is this
pursuit of consistency as against correctness which has resulted in the
irrelevance of philosophy that the philosopher, unconscious of his
motives and roots, or naively identifying, through the instrumentality
of an elaborate dialectic, his instinctive and responsive valuations of
existence with its categoric essences, confuses with inward autonomy and
the vision of the "real." Consequently, the systems of tradition begin
as attempts to transvalue social situations whose existence is
troublesome and end as utterances of which the specific bearing, save to
the system of an opponent, is undiscoverable. The attempt to correct the
environment in fact concludes as an abolition of it in words. The
philosophic system becomes a solipsism, a pure lyric expression of the
appetites of human nature.

For this perversity of the philosophic tradition Plato is perhaps, more
than any one else, answerable. He is the first explicitly to have
reduplicated the world, to have set existences over against values, to
have made them dependent upon values, to have assigned absolute reality
to the compensatory ideals, and to have identified philosophy with
preoccupation with these ideals. Behind his theory of life lay far from
agreeable personal experience of the attitude of political power toward
philosophic ideas. Its ripening was coincident with the most distressing
period of the history of his country. The Peloponnesian War was the
confrontation of two social systems, radically opposed in form, method,
and outlook. Democracy, in Athens, had become synonymous with
demagoguery, corruption, inefficiency, injustice and unscrupulousness in
every aspect of public affairs. The government had no consistent policy
and no centralized responsibility; divided counsel led to continual
disaster without, and party p