pology, cosmology, and theology. I have endeavored to show elsewhere that this part of the Platonic philosophy is to be interpreted in the main as a poetical expression of Plato's moral and æsthetic preferences and repugnances. It is not to be scrutinized as a closely-reasoned, scientific system, but as a fancy sketch of a literary artist whom the undeveloped science of his time left free to fill in the details of his picture of the world according to his pleasure. The task of the critic here is merely to show how ingeniously Plato employed the conjectural science of his time in his polemic against Democritean materialism, or for the symbolic expression of certain favorite moral and æsthetic ideas. To catalogue and classify this poetic symbolism as so much science, is futile.
The third part, entitled ethical and practical philosophy, is the longest and most readable portion of the book. It deals with ethics proper, politics, and, in an appendix, with education and æsthetics. But even here we find a mechanical system of Plato's literal statements, rather than a free exposition of the central genetic thoughts that lend to his works their permanent interest. We do not really understand Plato the better for being told after Zeller that the idea of good is the basis of the Platonic ethics, or that the object of the Republic is to create by thought the image of the perfect State. But the Platonic ethics acquires a real significance when we study it as the first attempt to solve what is still the crux of our latest systems of ethics, namely, the problem of finding, through psychology and the study of social conditions, theoretically adequate and dialectically consistent ethical sanctions for minds no longer accessible to the sanctions of custom and the traditional religion. And the Republic becomes something more than the day-dream of a visionary, when we read it as the despairing protest of a superior type of Carlyle or Ruskin,—idealizing the rigid conservatism of a rival state in his passionate reaction against the unbridled individualism of a democracy that actually did 'shoot Niagara' within ten years of his death.
Nevertheless, in spite of their many limitations, these chapters will be found very serviceable to those who wish a systematic summary of Plato's utterances. The English or German student will hardly need them, having better books in his own language; but the book will doubtless prove useful in France. Before it can be safely put into the student's hands, it must be reprinted. The printing of the Greek quotations that adorn, or rather disfigure, these pages is a disgrace to French scholarship. The number of
