philosophy into dialectic, physics, including religion, and ethics, with a supplementary chapter on æsthetics. This, I think, is a judicious compromise between the purely abstract, systematic scheme of Zeller, and Grote's disconnected analyses of the several dialogues. Extended résumés and quotations of the more important dialogues can easily be fitted into this scheme, and we are not obliged to abstract altogether from the concrete literary form in which the thought of Plato is embodied. These larger divisions are broken up into chapters and paragraphs answering to every topic and problem of the Platonic philosophy, and the compartments thus provided are filled up with a selection of notes taken mainly from the author's French predecessors, from Zeller, Teichmüller, and Grote. This, at least, is my judgment of the genesis of the book. One would not be surprised to learn that it is in the main a reproduction of old cahiers dictated to the professor's pupils. The result is as sound and sensible a compendium of Platonism as could be compiled by an intelligent literary craftsman unendowed with any special, delicate critical tact, penetrating, philosophic insight, or independent, first- hand scholarship.
The least adequate portion of Mr. Bénard's exposition is naturally the dialectic, dealing with the Platonic logic and metaphysics. Mr. Pater has given us an incomparable impressionist picture of the theory of ideas as it affects an intelligent modern student. And German scholars have reproduced it with all the categories and technicalities of an indefatigable erudition. It remains only to connect this philological presentation of the doctrine with the philosophical interpretation that naturally suggests itself when it is studied in the light of the history of philosophy and the results of modern psychology,—to correlate the two, not by fantastic analogies, but in definite, intelligible fashion. We must not merely repeat that Plato hypostasized general terms, or reproduce pedantically his mythology. We must learn to appreciate the psychological necessity that drove him to these paradoxes in the attempt to solve those ultimate epistemological problems that make confusion worse confounded of much of the literature of the new psychology to-day. In view of the voluminous existing literature of the subject, any new interpretation that does not accomplish this is a mere waste of words.
Under the head of physics M. Bénard presents a convenient résumé (chiefly from the Timaeus, the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, and the Republic) of what in heavy modern phrase we call Plato's anthro-
