mind alone.* Such, for instance, is geometry, and such are the ideas of a perfect circle, of asymptotes, and the like. I have thus assigned the first place in the science of method to law; and first of the first, to law, as the absolute kind which comprehending in itself the substance of every possible degree precludes from its conception all degree, not by generalization but by its own plenitude. As such, therefore, and as the sufficient cause of the reality correspondent thereto, I contemplate it as exclusively an attribute of the Supreme Being, inseparable from the idea of God; adding, however, that from the contemplation of law in this its only perfect form, must be derived all true insight into all other grounds and principles necessary to method, as the science common to all sciences, which in each, in the words of Plato, Tuyxável öv ǎλλo avτns Tñs Érishuns. Alienated from this intuition or stedfast faith, ingenious men may produce schemes conducive to the peculiar purposes of particular sciences, but no scientific system. But though I cannot enter on the proof of this assertion, I dare not remain exposed to the sus * Here I have fallen into an error. The terms, idea and law, are always correlative. Instead of geometrical ideas, I ought to have said theorems;—not theories-but JewpŃpara, the intelligible products of contemplation, intellectual objects in the mind, and of and for the mind exclusively. 1829. picion of having obtruded a mere private opinion, as a fundamental truth. The authorities are such that my only difficulty is occasioned by their number. The following extract from Aristocles (preserved with other interesting fragments of the same writer by Eusebius of Cæsarea) is as explicit as peremptory. Ἐφιλοσόφησε δὲ Πλάτων, εἰ καί τις ἄλλος τῶν πώποτε, γνησίως καὶ τελείως. Ηξιόν δὲ μὴ δύνασθαι τὰ ἀνθρώπινα κατιδεῖν ἡμᾶς, εἰ μὴ τὰ θεῖα πρότερον ὀφθείη.* And Plato himself in his Republic, happily still extant, evidently alludes to the same doctrine. For personating Socrates in the discussion of a most important problem, namely, whether political justice is or is not the same as private honesty, after many inductions, and much analytic reasoning, he breaks off with these words—καὶ εὖ γ ̓ ἴσθι, ὦ Γλαύκων, ὡς ἡ ἐμὴ δόξα, ἀκριβῶς μὲν τοῦτο ἐκ τοιούτων μεθόδων, οἵαις νῦν ἐν τοῖς λόγοις χρώμεθα, οὐ μή ποτε λάβωμεν ἀλλὰ γὰρ μακροτέρα καὶ πλείων ὁδὸς ἡ ἐπὶ τοῦτο ayovoat-not however, he adds, precluding the * Præparat. Evangel. xi. c. 3.—Ed. Plato, who philosophized legitimately and perfectively, if ever any man did in any age, held it for an axiom, that it is not possible for us to have an insight into things human (that is, the nature and relations of man, and the objects presented by nature for his investigation), without a previous contemplation or intellectual vision of things divine; that is, of truths that are to be affirmed concerning the absolute, as far as they can be made known to us. + De Republica, iv. But know well, O Glaucon, as my former (the analytic, and inductive, to wit) which have their place likewise, in which (but as subordinate to the other) they are both useful and requisite. If any doubt could be entertained as to the purport of these words, it would be removed by the fact stated by Aristotle,* that Plato had discussed the problem, whether in order to scientific ends we must set out from principles or ascend towards them in other words, whether the synthetic or analytic be the right method. But as no such question is directly discussed in the published works of the great master, Aristotle must either have received it orally from Plato himself, or have found it in the aypapa dóyuara, the private text-books or manuals constructed by his select disciples, and intelligible to those only who like themselves had been entrusted with the esoteric, or interior and unveiled, doctrines of Platonism. Comparing this therefore with the writings, which he held it safe or not profane to make public, we may safely conclude, that Plato considered the investigation of truth a posteriori as that which is employed in explaining the results of a more scientific process firm persuasion, that by such methods, as we have hitherto used in this inquisition, we can never attain to a satisfactory insight for it is a longer and ampler way that conducts to this. * Εὖ γὰρ καὶ Πλάτων ἠπόρει τοῦτο καὶ ἐζήτει, πότερον ἀπὸ τῶν ἀρχῶν, ἢ ἐπὶ τὰς ἀρχάς, ἐστιν ἡ ὁδός.—Ethic. Nicom. I. c. 2.-Ed. to those, for whom the knowledge of the results was alone requisite and sufficient; or in preparing the mind for legitimate method, by exposing the insufficiency or self-contradictions of the proofs and results obtained by the contrary process. Hence therefore the earnestness with which the genuine Platonists afterwards opposed the doctrine (that all demonstration consists of identical propositions) advanced by Stilpo, and maintained by the Megaric school, who denied the synthesis and, like Hume and others in recent times, held geometry itself to be merely analytical. The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according to Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is this: for all that exists conditionally (that is, the existence of which is inconceivable except under the condition of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system. For the relation common to all being known, the appropriate orbit of each becomes discoverable, together with its peculiar relations to its concentrics in the common sphere of subordination. Thus the centrality of the sun having been established, and the law of the distances of the planets from the sun having been determined, we possess the means of calculating the distance of each from the other. But as all objects of sense are in continual flux, and as the notices of them by the senses must, as far as they are true notices, change with them, while scientific principles or laws are no otherwise principles of science than as they are permanent and always the same, the latter were appropriated to the pure reason, either as its products or as* implanted in it. And now the remarkable fact forces itself on our attention, namely, that the material world is found to obey the same laws as had been deduced independently from the reason; and that the masses act by a force, which cannot be conceived to result from the component parts, known or imaginable. In magnetism, electricity, galvanism, and in chemistry generally, the mind is led instinctively, as it were, to regard the working powers as conducted, transmitted, or accumulated by the sensible bodies, and not as inherent. This fact has, at all times, been the strong hold alike of the materialists and of the spiritualists, equally solvable by the two contrary hypotheses, and fairly solved by neither. In the clear and masterly+ • Which of these two doctrines was Plato's own opinion, it is hard to say. In many passages of his works, the latter (that is, the doctrine of innate, or rather of connate, ideas) seems to be it; but from the character and avowed purpose of these works, as addressed to a promiscuous public, therefore preparatory, and for the discipline of the mind, rather than directly doctrinal, it is not improbable that Plato chose it as the more popular representation, and as belonging to the poetic drapery of his philosophemata. + I can conceive no better remedy for the overweening |