theory of a substantially altered 'later' theory. The theory he mainly combats is the old one; he parades all the old objections of the Parmenides' without a doubt of their complete relevance, nay, with an air of having invented them himself.† As Professor Gomperz says (iii, 328), to suppose that Aristotle misunderstood Plato's fundamental doctrine is a monstrous assumption. And, we may add, a futile one. For it makes out Aristotle to have been either a fool, if he could not understand it, or a knave, if he knowingly misrepresented it. Or rather, in this case, he would have been a fool as well as a knave if he supposed that his iniquitous procedure could escape the censure of Plato's other pupils.

The later theory of Ideas' appeals essentially to internal evidence. But here also its case is none too strong. Professor Gomperz, who is a friendly critic and accepts the order of the Platonic dialogues which the theory demands, has to call attention to the persistence of phrases characteristic of the earlier' theory, even in the ‘Timæus.' And Dr Horn boldly challenges the fashionable placing of the 'dialectical' dialogues after the 'Republic.' Far from agreeing with Professor Gomperz (iii, 357) that the latest of them, the 'Statesman,' is 'manifestly the bridge leading from the "Republic" to the "Laws," he argues forcibly that it is quite a preliminary sketch, which would have been pointless after the 'Republic.' And the logical point involved when the same author treats the same subject twice with more and less fullness clearly does not admit of absolute decision. The later version may be either an elaboration of an earlier sketch or a succinct reference to a fuller treatment. It is fallacious, also, to assume that, because a

His objection that the Ideas are not efficient causes would be particularly curious and inept if Plato had adhered to the alleged discovery of the Sophist' (247) that substance is activity, and had thereby anticipated Aristotle's own conception of évépyeia.

+ If we can put the 'Parmenides' so late as 360 B.C., it is just possible that he did. For we can then read this puzzling dialogue as an attempt by Plato to abate the conceit of his obstreperous pupil by narrating a fictitious parallel to an existing situation in the form of a discussion between the venerable Parmenides and the youthful Socrates. In the self-criticism of 'Parmenides' which follows, an earlier Aristotle' is satirically made to give his later namesake a lesson in manners by prettily and an iably answering just what is required, because he is too 'young' to raise vexatious objections. But the dates seem an insuperable obstacle.

theory has been remodelled, it has been improved. So here. Even Professor Gomperz, who believes in a 'later' theory, but holds that it did not answer the 'Parmenides,' and amounted really to 'consigning the Ideas to a sphere of dignified repose in conferring upon them divine rank' (iii, 181), has to admit that in some respects its transformation was retrograde (iii, 173).

This possibility is the less negligible because the 'later theory of Ideas comes out very badly under logical examination. Its advocates seem unable to show us how it escapes from the dilemmas of the Parmenides.' How does the suggestion that the Ideas are models for sensible phenomena to imitate bridge the dualistic chasm between the worlds of 'reality' and of appearance'? If Ideas' and 'things' are different in essence and unrelated in function, how can they be so connected that the things can take cognisance enough of the Ideas to imitate them? In the Timæus' Plato escapes the difficulty by the divine fiat of his Demiurge; but this expedient the modern friends of the Ideas' would certainly consider 'mythical.' The question is the more urgent because somewhere or other it reappears in all systems of conceptual Idealism.

Moreover it would seem that this later version of the Ideas is very fatal to their logical function. If phenomena become intelligible only by being subsumed under concepts, there must be Ideas of everything that can be predicated, of relations and of artefacts, of hair and dirt and evil, of doubleness and if-ness; their restriction to 'natural kinds,' despite its metaphysical attractiveness, is the grossest logical inconsequence. And that a desire to justify the procedures of predication and to explain the nature of knowledge was one of the main motives of the Ideal Theory is undeniable, although Plato does not make this as explicit as its metaphysical aspect. Nor can we be wrong in thinking that he intended it logically also as a via media between Eleaticism and Heracliteanism, both of which seemed to him to render significant assertion incomprehensible. But, to serve this logical purpose, the Ideas had to be conceived after the fashion of his earlier' theory. They had to be single, stable, self-identical predicates common (i.e. applicable) to an infinite plurality of particulars. They had to live in a

world apart, in order to transcend the Flux that would otherwise have swamped them. They had to have communion inter se, in order that the connexions of our predications might be absolutely validated by conforming to those of their eternal archetypes. They had to be immutable: for how else could truth be absolute?

Whatever the difficulties, therefore, which they might seem to involve, they could not be disavowed without, in Plato's way of thinking, abolishing the very notion

of truth and all knowledge of reality. It is quite against probable therefore that, despite the 'Parmenides, he who never really made concessions to criticism; and that all trend of the objections he encountered only seemed to him to Pat's argue logical incapacity to grasp the cogency of the uterests grounds on which his theory reposed. And in a manner the he was right. The logical cohesion of the fabric of his pay of

thought was such that no one who had once attributed to concepts a reality superior to that of the phenomena they interpret could question it without succumbing ultimately to the very difficulties brought against himself. †

The only real escape from his embarrassments lay

in a direction in which he could not and would not look Stewart's for it, viz. in a radical recognition of the functional and eck. instrumental nature of the Concept. But this would have involved a rehabilitation of the senses and of immediate experience, and a complete remodelling of Plato's conceptions of truth and reality. Even if by some strange chance he had caught a glimpse of this way out, he would have averted his eyes from the impious spectacle. The view that concepts are not unalterable and are only relatively constant (like mere material things), being essen

The only way of accounting for the 'Parmenides' and for the reiteration of its arguments by Aristotle, which is compatible with a belief on Plato's part that the Ideal Theory was still sound, would be so to conceive his theory that it would seem manifestly open to such criticism in Aristotle's eyes (and ours), but not in Plato's; thus precluding Plato from giving any other but the indirect reply which he gives to what he thought a culpable, and we must think an inevitable, misunderstanding. Such an interpretation is not, perhaps, as difficult as it looks; but this is not the place to give it.

† It is significant in this connexion that Aristotle, after all his denunciation of Plato's χωρισμός, has to conceive his own vous as χωριστός, has to postulate a transcendent deity who is really quite dissevered from the universe and acts upon it only by the magic of its inherent desire, and is quite unable to explain how the 'universal' becomes immanent in the 'particular.'

tially tools slowly fashioned by a practical intelligence for the mastery of its experience, whose value and truth reside in their application to the particular cases of their use, and not in their timeless validity nor in their suprasensible otium cum dignitate in a transcendent realm of abstractions, would have seemed to him as paradoxical and monstrous and unsatisfying as it still does to his belated followers. And yet it is this notion of truth, this insight into the function of Ideas, which the working of science has slowly brought to light after many centuries of incessant and by no means always successful struggle against the glamour of the gorgeous castles which Platonism has erected in and out of the air.

.

And so, with Professor Gomperz, we stop, for the present, short of Aristotle, the great consolidator of Platonism, and the greatest and most ungrateful pupil a great philosopher was ever troubled with. It was fitting that, after the master of all who aspire, should come the master of those who know,' and establish an empire over the thoughts of men as lasting as that of the Cæsars, and as essentially Greek as the latter was essentially Roman. For, even as 'the divine Julius' won a power which the soberer genius of Augustus was needed to organise, so the revelations of the divine Plato' had to be condensed into the technical formulas of Aristotle. And, as the keen insight of Hobbes truly detected in the papacy but the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,' so the whole phantasmagoria of modern philosophy often suggests to us little but a confused reminiscence of the great philosophic dynasty of Greece. Quite recently, indeed, the banner of what may prove to be a final revolt has visibly been raised; but is it not still inscribed with the hallowed Hellenic watchwords of Γνώθι σεαυτόν and *Ανθρωπος μέτρον ?

F. C. S. SCHILLER.

Art. V.-FANNY BURNEY.

Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay (1778-1840), as edited by her niece, Charlotte Barrett. With preface and notes by Austin Dobson. Six vols. London:

Macmillan, 1904-5.

sex.

It will soon be a hundred years since the author of 'Evelina' died; and her fame can never again be what it was after she achieved that sudden and surprising success. And yet there is a sense in which Miss Burney is, after Miss Austen, the very first and greatest of her Other women have done greater things. In literature, for instance, the art which above all others seems to smile upon women, no one will rank her with Sappho, or with Charlotte or Emily Brontë; few perhaps will rank her with George Eliot. And there are several French women who would claim to be more than her equals. But then the things by which these great names shinethe passion of Sappho, for instance, and her final felicity of phrase, the angry energy of soul of the Brontës, the large wisdom and wide humanity of George Eliot-are not things specially feminine at all. They are in fact things not so often found in women as in men. triumph in these cases, then, consists in showing that women can enter the fields that belong to men and dispute the prize. But Fanny Burney's triumph and Jane Austen's are something quite different from that. It is their special gift to keep us always at our ease in their parlour, and yet to win and interest us as much as those who carry us over all the seas of human power or passion; that is to say, their triumph lies in showing that they can rival men without once leaving their own peculiar field.

The

This is even truer of Miss Burney than of her greater successor. Was there ever any one who, in her books and in her life, began, continued, and ended more narrowly a woman than she? A shyness that is almost morbid, a shrinking from notice that is almost ridiculous, a timidity in speech and action that is almost contemptible-such is her character as it is laid bare in her Journal; and, beautiful as people with a certain feminine ideal may hold it, what could seem more certain to be ineffectual?