But whether much or little of this and other doctrines belonged to Socrates himself, the general idea already described cannot fail to suggest a more correct mode of conceiving, in what light it is that Plato brings forward his master in his works, and in what sense his Socrates is to be termed a real, or a fictitious personage. Fictitious, in the proper sense, I hold, he is not, and his reality is not a merely mimic one, nor is Socrates in those works merely a convenient person who affords room for much mimic art, and much cheerful pleasantry, in order to temper the abstruse investigations with this agreeable addition. It is because the spirit and the method of Socrates are everywhere predominant, and because it is not a merely subordinate point with Plato to adopt the manner of Socrates, but is as truly his highest aim, that Plato has not hesitated to put into his mouth what he believed to be no more than deductions from his fundamental ideas. The only material exceptions we find to this (passing over several more minute which come under the same head with the anachronisms) occur in later works, as the Statesman and the Republic; I mean doctrines of Plato foreign to the real views of Socrates, perhaps indeed virtually contradicting them, and which are nevertheless put into his mouth. On this head we must let Plato appeal to the privilege conferred by custom. But on the whole we are forced to say, that in giving Socrates a living share in the propagation of that philosophical movement which took its rise from him, Plato has immortalized him in the noblest manner, that a disciple can perpetuate the glory of his master; in a manner not only more beautiful, but more just, than he could have done it by a literal narrative.
