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reasoner; but who will imagine that he was sincere?

The following brief sketch of the moral systems supported by Aristotle and Plato may be of service in determining the question whether the ancients generally believed that truth and utility did not coincide. Notwithstanding the

subtlety of their speculative discussions, in which the distinctions and divisions are often merely verbal, it was evidently the object of both philosophers to elevate, and as far as possible perfect, the mind and faculties of man. They both maintained that the happiness which nature had taught the desires of the soul to aim at, as its ultimate end and object, would consist in the perception of truth. Plato considered this truth to be altogether intellectual and speculative. Hence it is that he enjoins the purest moral precepts; the entire subjugation, or rather annihilation of the passions P, not because moral virtue was a direct means to happiness, but because the purification of the soul was necessary to the perception of intellectual truth, in which alone human felicity would be found. For the same reason he commands the extinction of imagination also 9; it is a faculty which cheats and deludes us with the image of P Vid. Phædo, passim. 4 Republic, book iii. x.

truth instead of the reality. Poetry and painting and all the fine arts are to be banished, as obscuring and impeding the exercise of reason in aspiring after its substantial good. But though our nature while on earth, by thus endeavouring to destroy passion and imagination, might make gradual progress towards the enjoyment of happiness and the perception of truth, their full perfection could never be attained till the soul was emancipated from the body, when the shadow of knowledge would be changed into the substance, and we should see essential truth as it really is, uniform, unchangeable, and eternal.

Aristotle, on the contrary, does not consider intellectual truth alone as the only knowledge to which the human faculties are to be trained and directed. Regarding man as a being possessed of passion, imagination, and reason, he provides for the due exercise and perfection of them all. Truth with him is not one and indivisible, but distinguished into truth in morals, truth in the fine arts, and truth in questions of science and wisdom, purely abstract and speculative. These different kinds of knowledge are not inseparably united and confounded". He who possesses that, moral perfection which teaches him to think, feel, and act on all occasions as becomes a virtuous

r Aristot. Ethics, lib. iii. iv. v. vi.

man, a good citizen, or a friend in the ordinary intercourse of society; he who habitually sees with the intuitive eye of taste the beautiful and the true in architecture, sculpture, and painting, may yet want that intellectual excellence employed in perceiving abstract truth. Refined and masterly as this theory unquestionably is, and more just and better adapted than Plato's to the wants and capacities of man, it is still inferior to that of the rival system in one striking and important feature. Aristotle (whatever were his sentiments respecting a future state) seems to propose the truth, which he teaches us to pursue, as belonging in its perfection to our present condition, as if the powers of the soul could here be fully developed; whereas Plato uniformly represents it as a foretaste of knowledge, whose fulness was yet to come; a system to be commenced on earth, but to be perfected in heavens.

While speaking on the doctrines of these philosophers, it may perhaps be allowable to make an observation on a difficult passage in another part of Aristotle's works, not entirely unconnected with the subject, the meaning of which is still disputed among critics. I allude to the definition

s Or rather in some better part of the earth, (v.) This present habitation of ours, according to Plato, being only one out of many divisions of it. Vid. Phædo, ad fin.

of tragedy in the Poetics, in which he insists upon its moral tendency. Plato had banished poets from the republic, because he considered the images which they presented as calculated to strengthen the passions of pity and fear, and thus oppose that perfect kábαpois, or purification of the soul, which he believed to constitute the excellence of our nature. Aristotle, it is probable, had this theory in his eye when he declared that the pity and fear excited by the scenic representations, so far from strengthening the passions, would have a tendency to weaken them, and purify the soul from their more powerful and pernicious effects.

Plato teaches that the pleasure resulting from tragedy would be injurious to our moral constitution. Aristotle therefore felt it necessary to declare that this pleasure would have a directly contrary effect, and become an instrument of virtue and thus he has gone a little out of his way in adding the moral effects of tragedy to a definition already sufficiently complete.

G.

Many authors have done themselves little credit in the attempt to degrade the character of Socrates by bringing together calumnies founded upon the representation of later writers, in whom little confidence is to be placed. Those who have

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examined his opinions, as recorded by his own disciples, will understand the bold expressions of an illustrious modern scholar, "Sancte Socrates, "ora pro nobis." The vices attributed to him are disproved by the testimony of Alcibiades in the very treatise, the Convivium of Plato, most frequently cited to establish the contrary opinion: and it should be recollected, that the immoral sentiments contained in this treatise are put into the mouth of Aristophanes, and are censured by Socrates himself as evidences of a debased mind. In other parts of Plato's writings the same vices are reprobated: thus in the first book of the Laws the τὸ παρὰ φύσιν τόλμημα is an expression in which Socrates strongly marks the infamy of the crime. The latter part of the Convivium may be consulted, from which the following sentences are selected: Alcibiades, describing his reverence for his master, observes, Πέπονθα δὲ πρὸς τοῦτον μόνον ἀνθρώπων, ὃ οὐκ ἄν τις οἴοιτο ἐν ἐμοὶ ἐνεῖναι, τὸ αἰσχύνεσθαι ὁντινοῦν.

Οἷος γὰρ Αχιλλεὺς ἐγένετο, ἀπεικάσειεν ἄν τις καὶ Βρασίδαν καὶ ἄλλους, καὶ οἷος αὖ Περικλῆς, καὶ Νέστορα καὶ ̓Αντήνορα", εἰσὶ δὲ καὶ ἕτεροι· οἷος δὲ οὑτοσὶ γέγονε τὴν ἀτοπίαν ἄνθρωπος, καὶ αὐτὸς καὶ οἱ λόγοι αὐτοῦ, οὐδ ̓ ἐγγὺς ἂν εὕροι τις ζητῶν, οὔτε τῶν νῦν οὔτε τῶν παλαιῶν. Οὐδὲν περιττότερον καταδεδαρθηκὼς ἀνέστην μετὰ Σω t Convivium, Bekker, p. 454. u Bekker, p. 465.

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