Title: Theaetetus
Author: Plato


INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.

Some dialogues of Plato are of so various a character that their
relation to the other dialogues cannot be determined with any degree of
certainty. The Theaetetus, like the Parmenides, has points of similarity
both with his earlier and his later writings. The perfection of style,
the humour, the dramatic interest, the complexity of structure, the
fertility of illustration, the shifting of the points of view, are
characteristic of his best period of authorship. The vain search, the
negative conclusion, the figure of the midwives, the constant profession
of ignorance on the part of Socrates, also bear the stamp of the early
dialogues, in which the original Socrates is not yet Platonized. Had we
no other indications, we should be disposed to range the Theaetetus with
the Apology and the Phaedrus, and perhaps even with the Protagoras and
the Laches.

But when we pass from the style to an examination of the subject,
we trace a connection with the later rather than with the earlier
dialogues. In the first place there is the connexion, indicated by Plato
himself at the end of the dialogue, with the Sophist, to which in
many respects the Theaetetus is so little akin. (1) The same persons
reappear, including the younger Socrates, whose name is just mentioned
in the Theaetetus; (2) the theory of rest, which Socrates has declined
to consider, is resumed by the Eleatic Stranger; (3) there is a similar
allusion in both dialogues to the meeting of Parmenides and Socrates
(Theaet., Soph.); and (4) the inquiry into not-being in the Sophist
supplements the question of false opinion which is raised in the
Theaetetus. (Compare also Theaet. and Soph. for parallel turns of
thought.) Secondly, the later date of the dialogue is confirmed by the
absence of the doctrine of recollection and of any doctrine of ideas
except that which derives them from generalization and from reflection
of the mind upon itself. The general character of the Theaetetus is
dialectical, and there are traces of the same Megarian influences which
appear in the Parmenides, and which later writers, in their matter of
fact way, have explained by the residence of Plato at Megara. Socrates
disclaims the character of a professional eristic, and also, with a sort
of ironical admiration, expresses his inability to attain the Megarian
precision in the use of terms. Yet he too employs a similar sophistical
skill in overturning every conceivable theory of knowledge.

The direct indications of a date amount to no more than this: the
conversation is said to have taken place when Theaetetus was a youth,
and shortly before the death of Socrates. At the time of his own death
he is supposed to be a full-grown man. Allowing nine or ten years for
the interval between youth and manhood, the dialogue could not have been
written earlier than 390, when Plato was about thirty-nine years of age.
No more definite date is indicated by the engagement in which Theaetetus
is said to have fallen or to have been wounded, and which may have taken
place any time during the Corinthian war, between the years 390-387.
The later date which has been suggested, 369, when the Athenians and
Lacedaemonians disputed the Isthmus with Epaminondas, would make the
age of Theaetetus at his death forty-five or forty-six. This a little
impairs the beauty of Socrates' remark, that 'he would be a great man if
he lived.'

In this uncertainty about the place of the Theaetetus, it seemed better,
as in the case of the Republic, Timaeus, Critias, to retain the order in
which Plato himself has arranged this and the two companion dialogues.
We cannot exclude the possibility which has been already noticed in
reference to other works of Plato, that the Theaetetus may not have
been all written continuously; or the probability that the Sophist and
Politicus, which differ greatly in style, were only appended after a
long interval of time. The allusion to Parmenides compared with the
Sophist, would probably imply that the dialogue which is called by his
name was already in existence; unless, indeed, we suppose the passage in
which the allusion occurs to have been inserted afterwards. Again,
the Theaetetus may be connected with the Gorgias, either dialogue from
different points of view containing an analysis of the real and apparent
(Schleiermacher); and both may be brought into relation with the Apology
as illustrating the personal life of Socrates. The Philebus, too, may
with equal reason be placed either after or before what, in the language
of Thrasyllus, may be called the Second Platonic Trilogy. Both the
Parmenides and the Sophist, and still more the Theaetetus, have points
of affinity with the Cratylus, in which the principles of rest and
motion are again contrasted, and the Sophistical or Protagorean theory
of language is opposed to that which is attributed to the disciple
of Heracleitus, not to speak of lesser resemblances in thought and
language. The Parmenides, again, has been thought by some to hold an
intermediate position between the Theaetetus and the Sophist; upon this
view, the Sophist may be regarded as the answer to the problems about
One and Being which have been raised in the Parmenides. Any of these
arrangements may suggest new views to the student of Plato; none of them
can lay claim to an exclusive probability in its favour.

The Theaetetus is one of the narrated dialogues of Plato, and is
the only one which is supposed to have been written down. In a short
introductory scene, Euclides and Terpsion are described as meeting
before the door of Euclides' house in Megara. This may have been a
spot familiar to Plato (for Megara was within a walk of Athens), but no
importance can be attached to the accidental introduction of the founder
of the Megarian philosophy. The real intention of the preface is to
create an interest about the person of Theaetetus, who has just been
carried up from the army at Corinth in a dying state. The expectation
of his death recalls the promise of his youth, and especially the famous
conversation which Socrates had with him when he was quite young, a few
days before his own trial and death, as we are once more reminded at the
end of the dialogue. Yet we may observe that Plato has himself forgotten
this, when he represents Euclides as from time to time coming to Athens
and correcting the copy from Socrates' own mouth. The narrative, having
introduced Theaetetus, and having guaranteed the authenticity of the
dialogue (compare Symposium, Phaedo, Parmenides), is then dropped. No
further use is made of the device. As Plato himself remarks, who in this
as in some other minute points is imitated by Cicero (De Amicitia), the
interlocutory words are omitted.

Theaetetus, the hero of the battle of Corinth and of the dialogue, is
a disciple of Theodorus, the great geometrician, whose science is thus
indicated to be the propaedeutic to philosophy. An interest has been
already excited about him by his approaching death, and now he is
introduced to us anew by the praises of his master Theodorus. He is a
youthful Socrates, and exhibits the same contrast of the fair soul and
the ungainly face and frame, the Silenus mask and the god within, which
are described in the Symposium. The picture which Theodorus gives of
his courage and patience and intelligence and modesty is verified in
the course of the dialogue. His courage is shown by his behaviour in the
battle, and his other qualities shine forth as the argument proceeds.
Socrates takes an evident delight in 'the wise Theaetetus,' who has more
in him than 'many bearded men'; he is quite inspired by his answers. At
first the youth is lost in wonder, and is almost too modest to speak,
but, encouraged by Socrates, he rises to the occasion, and grows full of
interest and enthusiasm about the great question. Like a youth, he has
not finally made up his mind, and is very ready to follow the lead of
Socrates, and to enter into each successive phase of the discussion
which turns up. His great dialectical talent is shown in his power of
drawing distinctions, and of foreseeing the consequences of his own
answers. The enquiry about the nature of knowledge is not new to him;
long ago he has felt the 'pang of philosophy,' and has experienced the
youthful intoxication which is depicted in the Philebus. But he
has hitherto been unable to make the transition from mathematics to
metaphysics. He can form a general conception of square and oblong
numbers, but he is unable to attain a similar expression of knowledge
in the abstract. Yet at length he begins to recognize that there are
universal conceptions of being, likeness, sameness, number, which the
mind contemplates in herself, and with the help of Socrates is conducted
from a theory of sense to a theory of ideas.

There is no reason to doubt that Theaetetus was a real person, whose
name survived in the next generation. But neither can any importance be
attached to the notices of him in Suidas and Proclus, which are probably
based on the mention of him in Plato. According to a confused statement
in Suidas, who mentions him twice over, first, as a pupil of Socrates,
and then of Plato, he is said to have written the first work on the Five
Solids. But no early authority cites the work, the invention of which
may have been easily suggested by the division of roots, which Plato
attributes to him, and the allusion to the backward state of solid
geometry in the Republic. At any rate, there is no occasion to recall
him to life again after the battle of Corinth, in order that we may
allow time for the completion of such a work (Muller). We may also
remark that such a supposition entirely destroys the pathetic interest
of the introduction.

Theodorus, the geometrician, had once been the friend and disciple of
Protagoras, but he is very reluctant to leave his retirement and defend
his old master. He is too old to learn Socrates' game of question and
answer, and prefers the digressions to the main argument, because he
finds them easier to follow. The mathematician, as Socrates says in the
Republic, is not capable of giving a reason in the same manner as the
dialectician, and Theodorus could not therefore have been appropriately
introduced as the chief respondent. But he may be fairly appealed to,
when the honour of his master is at stake. He is the 'guardian of his
orphans,' although this is a responsibility which he wishes to throw
upon Callias, the friend and patron of all Sophists, declaring that
he himself had early 'run away' from philosophy, and was absorbed in
mathematics. His extreme dislike to the Heraclitean fanatics, which may
be compared with the dislike of Theaetetus to the materialists, and his
ready acceptance of the noble words of Socrates, are noticeable traits
of character.

The Socrates of the Theaetetus is the same as the Socrates of the
earlier dialogues. He is the invincible disputant, now advanced in
years, of the Protagoras and Symposium; he is still pursuing his divine
mission, his 'Herculean labours,' of which he has described the origin
in the Apology; and he still hears the voice of his oracle, bidding him
receive or not receive the truant souls. There he is supposed to have
a mission to convict men of self-conceit; in the Theaetetus he has
assigned to him by God the functions of a man-midwife, who delivers men
of their thoughts, and under this character he is present throughout the
dialogue. He is the true prophet who has an insight into the natures
of men, and can divine their future; and he knows that sympathy is the
secret power which unlocks their thoughts. The hit at Aristides, the son
of Lysimachus, who was specially committed to his charge in the Laches,
may be remarked by the way. The attempt to discover the definition
of knowledge is in accordance with the character of Socrates as he
is described in the Memorabilia, asking What is justice? what is
temperance? and the like. But there is no reason to suppose that he
would have analyzed the nature of perception, or traced the connexion
of Protagoras and Heracleitus, or have raised the difficulty respecting
false opinion. The humorous illustrations, as well as the serious
thoughts, run through the dialogue. The snubnosedness of Theaetetus, a
characteristic which he shares with Socrates, and the man-midwifery
of Socrates, are not forgotten in the closing words. At the end of the
dialogue, as in the Euthyphro, he is expecting to meet Meletus at the
porch of the king Archon; but with the same indifference to the result
which is everywhere displayed by him, he proposes that they shall
reassemble on the following day at the same spot. The day comes, and
in the Sophist the three friends again meet, but no further allusion is
made to the trial, and the principal share in the argument is assigned,
not to Socrates, but to an Eleatic stranger; the youthful Theaetetus
also plays a different and less independent part. And there is no
allusion in the Introduction to the second and third dialogues, which
are afterwards appended. There seems, therefore, reason to think that
there is a real change, both in the characters and in the design.

The dialogue is an enquiry into the nature of knowledge, which is
interrupted by two digressions. The first is the digression about the
midwives, which is also a leading thought or continuous image, like the
wave in the Republic, appearing and reappearing at intervals. Again and
again we are reminded that the successive conceptions of knowledge are
extracted from Theaetetus, who in his turn truly declares that Socrates
has got a great deal more out of him than ever was in him. Socrates is
never weary of working out the image in humorous details,--discerning
the symptoms of labour, carrying the child round the hearth, fearing
that Theaetetus will bite him, comparing his conceptions to wind-eggs,
asserting an hereditary right to the occupation. There is also a serious
side to the image, which is an apt similitude of the Socratic theory
of education (compare Republic, Sophist), and accords with the ironical
spirit in which the wisest of men delights to speak of himself.

The other digression is the famous contrast of the lawyer and
philosopher. This is a sort of landing-place or break in the middle of
the dialogue. At the commencement of a great discussion, the reflection
naturally arises, How happy are they who, like the philosopher, have
time for such discussions (compare Republic)! There is no reason for the
introduction of such a digression; nor is a reason always needed, any
more than for the introduction of an episode in a poem, or of a topic in
conversation. That which is given by Socrates is quite sufficient, viz.
that the philosopher may talk and write as he pleases. But though not
very closely connected, neither is the digression out of keeping with
the rest of the dialogue. The philosopher naturally desires to pour
forth the thoughts which are always present to him, and to discourse of
the higher life. The idea of knowledge, although hard to be defined, is
realised in the life of philosophy. And the contrast is the favourite
antithesis between the world, in the various characters of sophist,
lawyer, statesman, speaker, and the philosopher,--between opinion and
knowledge,--between the conventional and the true.

The greater part of the dialogue is devoted to setting up and throwing
down definitions of science and knowledge. Proceeding from the lower to
the higher by three stages, in which perception, opinion, reasoning are
successively examined, we first get rid of the confusion of the idea of
knowledge and specific kinds of knowledge,--a confusion which has been
already noticed in the Lysis, Laches, Meno, and other dialogues. In
the infancy of logic, a form of thought has to be invented before the
content can be filled up. We cannot define knowledge until the nature of
definition has been ascertained. Having succeeded in making his meaning
plain, Socrates proceeds to analyze (1) the first definition which
Theaetetus proposes: 'Knowledge is sensible perception.' This is
speedily identified with the Protagorean saying, 'Man is the measure
of all things;' and of this again the foundation is discovered in the
perpetual flux of Heracleitus. The relativeness of sensation is then
developed at length, and for a moment the definition appears to be
accepted. But soon the Protagorean thesis is pronounced to be suicidal;
for the adversaries of Protagoras are as good a measure as he is, and
they deny his doctrine. He is then supposed to reply that the perception
may be true at any given instant. But the reply is in the end shown to
be inconsistent with the Heraclitean foundation, on which the doctrine
has been affirmed to rest. For if the Heraclitean flux is extended to
every sort of change in every instant of time, how can any thought
or word be detained even for an instant? Sensible perception, like
everything else, is tumbling to pieces. Nor can Protagoras himself
maintain that one man is as good as another in his knowledge of the
future; and 'the expedient,' if not 'the just and true,' belongs to the
sphere of the future.

And so we must ask again, What is knowledge? The comparison of
sensations with one another implies a principle which is above
sensation, and which resides in the mind itself. We are thus led to look
for knowledge in a higher sphere, and accordingly Theaetetus, when again
interrogated, replies (2) that 'knowledge is true opinion.' But how is
false opinion possible? The Megarian or Eristic spirit within us revives
the question, which has been already asked and indirectly answered in
the Meno: 'How can a man be ignorant of that which he knows?' No answer
is given to this not unanswerable question. The comparison of the mind
to a block of wax, or to a decoy of birds, is found wanting.

But are we not inverting the natural order in looking for opinion before
we have found knowledge? And knowledge is not true opinion; for the
Athenian dicasts have true opinion but not knowledge. What then
is knowledge? We answer (3), 'True opinion, with definition or
explanation.' But all the different ways in which this statement may be
understood are set aside, like the definitions of courage in the Laches,
or of friendship in the Lysis, or of temperance in the Charmides. At
length we arrive at the conclusion, in which nothing is concluded.

There are two special difficulties which beset the student of the
Theaetetus: (1) he is uncertain how far he can trust Plato's account of
the theory of Protagoras; and he is also uncertain (2) how far, and in
what parts of the dialogue, Plato is expressing his own opinion.
The dramatic character of the work renders the answer to both these
questions difficult.

1. In reply to the first, we have only probabilities to offer. Three
main points have to be decided: (a) Would Protagoras have identified
his own thesis, 'Man is the measure of all things,' with the other,
'All knowledge is sensible perception'? (b) Would he have based the
relativity of knowledge on the Heraclitean flux? (c) Would he have
asserted the absoluteness of sensation at each instant? Of the work of
Protagoras on 'Truth' we know nothing, with the exception of the two
famous fragments, which are cited in this dialogue, 'Man is the measure
of all things,' and, 'Whether there are gods or not, I cannot tell.' Nor
have we any other trustworthy evidence of the tenets of Protagoras, or
of the sense in which his words are used. For later writers, including
Aristotle in his Metaphysics, have mixed up the Protagoras of Plato, as
they have the Socrates of Plato, with the real person.

Returning then to the Theaetetus, as the only possible source from which
an answer to these questions can be obtained, we may remark, that Plato
had 'The Truth' of Protagoras before him, and frequently refers to the
book. He seems to say expressly, that in this work the doctrine of the
Heraclitean flux was not to be found; 'he told the real truth' (not
in the book, which is so entitled, but) 'privately to his
disciples,'--words which imply that the connexion between the doctrines
of Protagoras and Heracleitus was not generally recognized in Greece,
but was really discovered or invented by Plato. On the other hand,
the doctrine that 'Man is the measure of all things,' is expressly
identified by Socrates with the other statement, that 'What appears to
each man is to him;' and a reference is made to the books in which the
statement occurs;--this Theaetetus, who has 'often read the books,' is
supposed to acknowledge (so Cratylus). And Protagoras, in the speech
attributed to him, never says that he has been misunderstood: he rather
seems to imply that the absoluteness of sensation at each instant was
to be found in his words. He is only indignant at the 'reductio ad
absurdum' devised by Socrates for his 'homo mensura,' which Theodorus
also considers to be 'really too bad.'

The question may be raised, how far Plato in the Theaetetus could
have misrepresented Protagoras without violating the laws of dramatic
probability. Could he have pretended to cite from a well-known writing
what was not to be found there? But such a shadowy enquiry is not worth
pursuing further. We need only remember that in the criticism which
follows of the thesis of Protagoras, we are criticizing the Protagoras
of Plato, and not attempting to draw a precise line between his real
sentiments and those which Plato has attributed to him.

2. The other difficulty is a more subtle, and also a more important one,
because bearing on the general character of the Platonic dialogues. On
a first reading of them, we are apt to imagine that the truth is only
spoken by Socrates, who is never guilty of a fallacy himself, and is the
great detector of the errors and fallacies of others. But this natural
presumption is disturbed by the discovery that the Sophists are
sometimes in the right and Socrates in the wrong. Like the hero of a
novel, he is not to be supposed always to represent the sentiments
of the author. There are few modern readers who do not side with
Protagoras, rather than with Socrates, in the dialogue which is
called by his name. The Cratylus presents a similar difficulty: in
his etymologies, as in the number of the State, we cannot tell how
far Socrates is serious; for the Socratic irony will not allow him
to distinguish between his real and his assumed wisdom. No one is the
superior of the invincible Socrates in argument (except in the first
part of the Parmenides, where he is introduced as a youth); but he is by
no means supposed to be in possession of the whole truth. Arguments are
often put into his mouth (compare Introduction to the Gorgias) which
must have seemed quite as untenable to Plato as to a modern writer.
In this dialogue a great part of the answer of Protagoras is just
and sound; remarks are made by him on verbal criticism, and on the
importance of understanding an opponent's meaning, which are conceived
in the true spirit of philosophy. And the distinction which he is
supposed to draw between Eristic and Dialectic, is really a criticism of
Plato on himself and his own criticism of Protagoras.

The difficulty seems to arise from not attending to the dramatic
character of the writings of Plato. There are two, or more, sides to
questions; and these are parted among the different speakers. Sometimes
one view or aspect of a question is made to predominate over the rest,
as in the Gorgias or Sophist; but in other dialogues truth is divided,
as in the Laches and Protagoras, and the interest of the piece consists
in the contrast of opinions. The confusion caused by the irony of
Socrates, who, if he is true to his character, cannot say anything
of his own knowledge, is increased by the circumstance that in the
Theaetetus and some other dialogues he is occasionally playing both
parts himself, and even charging his own arguments with unfairness. In
the Theaetetus he is designedly held back from arriving at a conclusion.
For we cannot suppose that Plato conceived a definition of knowledge to
be impossible. But this is his manner of approaching and surrounding a
question. The lights which he throws on his subject are indirect, but
they are not the less real for that. He has no intention of proving a
thesis by a cut-and-dried argument; nor does he imagine that a great
philosophical problem can be tied up within the limits of a definition.
If he has analyzed a proposition or notion, even with the severity of
an impossible logic, if half-truths have been compared by him with
other half-truths, if he has cleared up or advanced popular ideas, or
illustrated a new method, his aim has been sufficiently accomplished.

The writings of Plato belong to an age in which the power of analysis
had outrun the means of knowledge; and through a spurious use of
dialectic, the distinctions which had been already 'won from the void
and formless infinite,' seemed to be rapidly returning to their original
chaos. The two great speculative philosophies, which a century earlier
had so deeply impressed the mind of Hellas, were now degenerating into
Eristic. The contemporaries of Plato and Socrates were vainly trying to
find new combinations of them, or to transfer them from the object to
the subject. The Megarians, in their first attempts to attain a severer
logic, were making knowledge impossible (compare Theaet.). They were
asserting 'the one good under many names,' and, like the Cynics, seem
to have denied predication, while the Cynics themselves were depriving
virtue of all which made virtue desirable in the eyes of Socrates and
Plato. And besides these, we find mention in the later writings of
Plato, especially in the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Laws, of certain
impenetrable godless persons, who will not believe what they 'cannot
hold in their hands'; and cannot be approached in argument, because they
cannot argue (Theat; Soph.). No school of Greek philosophers exactly
answers to these persons, in whom Plato may perhaps have blended some
features of the Atomists with the vulgar materialistic tendencies of
mankind in general (compare Introduction to the Sophist).

And not only was there a conflict of opinions, but the stage which the
mind had reached presented other difficulties hardly intelligible to
us, who live in a different cycle of human thought. All times of mental
progress are times of confusion; we only see, or rather seem to see
things clearly, when they have been long fixed and defined. In the
age of Plato, the limits of the world of imagination and of pure
abstraction, of the old world and the new, were not yet fixed. The
Greeks, in the fourth century before Christ, had no words for 'subject'
and 'object,' and no distinct conception of them; yet they were always
hovering about the question involved in them. The analysis of sense, and
the analysis of thought, were equally difficult to them; and hopelessly
confused by the attempt to solve them, not through an appeal to facts,
but by the help of general theories respecting the nature of the
universe.

Plato, in his Theaetetus, gathers up the sceptical tendencies of his
age, and compares them. But he does not seek to reconstruct out of them
a theory of knowledge. The time at which such a theory could be framed
had not yet arrived. For there was no measure of experience with which
the ideas swarming in men's minds could be compared; the meaning of
the word 'science' could scarcely be explained to them, except from the
mathematical sciences, which alone offered the type of universality and
certainty. Philosophy was becoming more and more vacant and abstract,
and not only the Platonic Ideas and the Eleatic Being, but all
abstractions seemed to be at variance with sense and at war with one
another.

The want of the Greek mind in the fourth century before Christ was
not another theory of rest or motion, or Being or atoms, but rather a
philosophy which could free the mind from the power of abstractions
and alternatives, and show how far rest and how far motion, how far the
universal principle of Being and the multitudinous principle of atoms,
entered into the composition of the world; which could distinguish
between the true and false analogy, and allow the negative as well as
the positive a place in human thought. To such a philosophy Plato, in
the Theaetetus, offers many contributions. He has followed philosophy
into the region of mythology, and pointed out the similarities of
opposing phases of thought. He has also shown that extreme abstractions
are self-destructive, and, indeed, hardly distinguishable from one
another. But his intention is not to unravel the whole subject of
knowledge, if this had been possible; and several times in the course
of the dialogue he rejects explanations of knowledge which have germs of
truth in them; as, for example, 'the resolution of the compound into the
simple;' or 'right opinion with a mark of difference.'

...

Terpsion, who has come to Megara from the country, is described as
having looked in vain for Euclides in the Agora; the latter explains
that he has been down to the harbour, and on his way thither had met
Theaetetus, who was being carried up from the army to Athens. He was
scarcely alive, for he had been badly wounded at the battle of Corinth,
and had taken the dysentery which prevailed in the camp. The mention of
his condition suggests the reflection, 'What a loss he will be!' 'Yes,
indeed,' replies Euclid; 'only just now I was hearing of his noble
conduct in the battle.' 'That I should expect; but why did he not remain
at Megara?' 'I wanted him to remain, but he would not; so I went with
him as far as Erineum; and as I parted from him, I remembered that
Socrates had seen him when he was a youth, and had a remarkable
conversation with him, not long before his own death; and he then
prophesied of him that he would be a great man if he lived.' 'How true
that has been; how like all that Socrates said! And could you repeat the
conversation?' 'Not from memory; but I took notes when I returned home,
which I afterwards filled up at leisure, and got Socrates to correct
them from time to time, when I came to Athens'...Terpsion had long
intended to ask for a sight of this writing, of which he had already
heard. They are both tired, and agree to rest and have the conversation
read to them by a servant...'Here is the roll, Terpsion; I need
only observe that I have omitted, for the sake of convenience, the
interlocutory words, "said I," "said he"; and that Theaetetus, and
Theodorus, the geometrician of Cyrene, are the persons with whom
Socrates is conversing.'

Socrates begins by asking Theodorus whether, in his visit to Athens, he
has found any Athenian youth likely to attain distinction in science.
'Yes, Socrates, there is one very remarkable youth, with whom I have
become acquainted. He is no beauty, and therefore you need not imagine
that I am in love with him; and, to say the truth, he is very like you,
for he has a snub nose, and projecting eyes, although these features are
not so marked in him as in you. He combines the most various qualities,
quickness, patience, courage; and he is gentle as well as wise, always
silently flowing on, like a river of oil. Look! he is the middle one of
those who are entering the palaestra.'

Socrates, who does not know his name, recognizes him as the son of
Euphronius, who was himself a good man and a rich. He is informed by
Theodorus that the youth is named Theaetetus, but the property of his
father has disappeared in the hands of trustees; this does not, however,
prevent him from adding liberality to his other virtues. At the desire
of Socrates he invites Theaetetus to sit by them.

'Yes,' says Socrates, 'that I may see in you, Theaetetus, the image
of my ugly self, as Theodorus declares. Not that his remark is of any
importance; for though he is a philosopher, he is not a painter, and
therefore he is no judge of our faces; but, as he is a man of science,
he may be a judge of our intellects. And if he were to praise the mental
endowments of either of us, in that case the hearer of the eulogy ought
to examine into what he says, and the subject should not refuse to be
examined.' Theaetetus consents, and is caught in a trap (compare the
similar trap which is laid for Theodorus). 'Then, Theaetetus, you will
have to be examined, for Theodorus has been praising you in a style of
which I never heard the like.' 'He was only jesting.' 'Nay, that is not
his way; and I cannot allow you, on that pretence, to retract the assent
which you have already given, or I shall make Theodorus repeat your
praises, and swear to them.' Theaetetus, in reply, professes that he is
willing to be examined, and Socrates begins by asking him what he learns
of Theodorus. He is himself anxious to learn anything of anybody; and
now he has a little question to which he wants Theaetetus or Theodorus
(or whichever of the company would not be 'donkey' to the rest) to find
an answer. Without further preface, but at the same time apologizing
for his eagerness, he asks, 'What is knowledge?' Theodorus is too old
to answer questions, and begs him to interrogate Theaetetus, who has the
advantage of youth.

Theaetetus replies, that knowledge is what he learns of Theodorus,
i.e. geometry and arithmetic; and that there are other kinds of
knowledge--shoemaking, carpentering, and the like. But Socrates rejoins,
that this answer contains too much and also too little. For although
Theaetetus has enumerated several kinds of knowledge, he has not
explained the common nature of them; as if he had been asked, 'What is
clay?' and instead of saying 'Clay is moistened earth,' he had answered,
'There is one clay of image-makers, another of potters, another of
oven-makers.' Theaetetus at once divines that Socrates means him to
extend to all kinds of knowledge the same process of generalization
which he has already learned to apply to arithmetic. For he has
discovered a division of numbers into square numbers, 4, 9, 16, etc.,
which are composed of equal factors, and represent figures which have
equal sides, and oblong numbers, 3, 5, 6, 7, etc., which are composed of
unequal factors, and represent figures which have unequal sides. But
he has never succeeded in attaining a similar conception of knowledge,
though he has often tried; and, when this and similar questions were
brought to him from Socrates, has been sorely distressed by them.
Socrates explains to him that he is in labour. For men as well as
women have pangs of labour; and both at times require the assistance of
midwives. And he, Socrates, is a midwife, although this is a secret; he
has inherited the art from his mother bold and bluff, and he ushers into
light, not children, but the thoughts of men. Like the midwives, who are
'past bearing children,' he too can have no offspring--the God will not
allow him to bring anything into the world of his own. He also reminds
Theaetetus that the midwives are or ought to be the only matchmakers
(this is the preparation for a biting jest); for those who reap the
fruit are most likely to know on what soil the plants will grow. But
respectable midwives avoid this department of practice--they do not want
to be called procuresses. There are some other differences between the
two sorts of pregnancy. For women do not bring into the world at one
time real children and at another time idols which are with difficulty
distinguished from them. 'At first,' says Socrates in his character of
the man-midwife, 'my patients are barren and stolid, but after a while
they "round apace," if the gods are propitious to them; and this is due
not to me but to themselves; I and the god only assist in bringing their
ideas to the birth. Many of them have left me too soon, and the result
has been that they have produced abortions; or when I have delivered
them of children they have lost them by an ill bringing up, and have
ended by seeing themselves, as others see them, to be great fools.
Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, is one of these, and there have been
others. The truants often return to me and beg to be taken back; and
then, if my familiar allows me, which is not always the case, I receive
them, and they begin to grow again. There come to me also those who have
nothing in them, and have no need of my art; and I am their matchmaker
(see above), and marry them to Prodicus or some other inspired sage who
is likely to suit them. I tell you this long story because I suspect
that you are in labour. Come then to me, who am a midwife, and the son
of a midwife, and I will deliver you. And do not bite me, as the women
do, if I abstract your first-born; for I am acting out of good-will
towards you; the God who is within me is the friend of man, though he
will not allow me to dissemble the truth. Once more then, Theaetetus,
I repeat my old question--"What is knowledge?" Take courage, and by the
help of God you will discover an answer.' 'My answer is, that knowledge
is perception.' 'That is the theory of Protagoras, who has another way
of expressing the same thing when he says, "Man is the measure of all
things." He was a very wise man, and we should try to understand him.
In order to illustrate his meaning let me suppose that there is the same
wind blowing in our faces, and one of us may be hot and the other cold.
How is this? Protagoras will reply that the wind is hot to him who is
cold, cold to him who is hot. And "is" means "appears," and when you
say "appears to him," that means "he feels." Thus feeling, appearance,
perception, coincide with being. I suspect, however, that this was only
a "facon de parler," by which he imposed on the common herd like you and
me; he told "the truth" (in allusion to the title of his book, which
was called "The Truth") in secret to his disciples. For he was really
a votary of that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be
relative; nothing is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all
is in motion and mixture and transition and flux and generation, not
"being," as we ignorantly affirm, but "becoming." This has been the
doctrine, not of Protagoras only, but of all philosophers, with the
single exception of Parmenides; Empedocles, Heracleitus, and others, and
all the poets, with Epicharmus, the king of Comedy, and Homer, the king
of Tragedy, at their head, have said the same; the latter has these
words--

"Ocean, whence the gods sprang, and mother Tethys."

And many arguments are used to show, that motion is the source of life,
and rest of death: fire and warmth are produced by friction, and living
creatures owe their origin to a similar cause; the bodily frame is
preserved by exercise and destroyed by indolence; and if the sun ceased
to move, "chaos would come again." Now apply this doctrine of "All
is motion" to the senses, and first of all to the sense of sight. The
colour of white, or any other colour, is neither in the eyes nor out of
them, but ever in motion between the object and the eye, and varying in
the case of every percipient. All is relative, and, as the followers of
Protagoras remark, endless contradictions arise when we deny this; e.g.
here are six dice; they are more than four and less than twelve; "more
and also less," would you not say?' 'Yes.' 'But Protagoras will retort:
"Can anything be more or less without addition or subtraction?"'

'I should say "No" if I were not afraid of contradicting my former
answer.'

'And if you say "Yes," the tongue will escape conviction but not the
mind, as Euripides would say?' 'True.' 'The thoroughbred Sophists, who
know all that can be known, would have a sparring match over this, but
you and I, who have no professional pride, want only to discover whether
our ideas are clear and consistent. And we cannot be wrong in saying,
first, that nothing can be greater or less while remaining equal;
secondly, that there can be no becoming greater or less without addition
or subtraction; thirdly, that what is and was not, cannot be without
having become. But then how is this reconcilable with the case of the
dice, and with similar examples?--that is the question.' 'I am often
perplexed and amazed, Socrates, by these difficulties.' 'That is because
you are a philosopher, for philosophy begins in wonder, and Iris is
the child of Thaumas. Do you know the original principle on which the
doctrine of Protagoras is based?' 'No.' 'Then I will tell you; but we
must not let the uninitiated hear, and by the uninitiated I mean the
obstinate people who believe in nothing which they cannot hold in their
hands. The brethren whose mysteries I am about to unfold to you are far
more ingenious. They maintain that all is motion; and that motion
has two forms, action and passion, out of which endless phenomena are
created, also in two forms--sense and the object of sense--which come to
the birth together. There are two kinds of motions, a slow and a fast;
the motions of the agent and the patient are slower, because they move
and create in and about themselves, but the things which are born of
them have a swifter motion, and pass rapidly from place to place.
The eye and the appropriate object come together, and give birth to
whiteness and the sensation of whiteness; the eye is filled with seeing,
and becomes not sight but a seeing eye, and the object is filled with
whiteness, and becomes not whiteness but white; and no other compound of
either with another would have produced the same effect. All sensation
is to be resolved into a similar combination of an agent and patient.
Of either, taken separately, no idea can be formed; and the agent may
become a patient, and the patient an agent. Hence there arises a general
reflection that nothing is, but all things become; no name can detain or
fix them. Are not these speculations charming, Theaetetus, and very good
for a person in your interesting situation? I am offering you specimens
of other men's wisdom, because I have no wisdom of my own, and I want
to deliver you of something; and presently we will see whether you
have brought forth wind or not. Tell me, then, what do you think of the
notion that "All things are becoming"?'

'When I hear your arguments, I am marvellously ready to assent.'

'But I ought not to conceal from you that there is a serious objection
which may be urged against this doctrine of Protagoras. For there are
states, such as madness and dreaming, in which perception is false; and
half our life is spent in dreaming; and who can say that at this instant
we are not dreaming? Even the fancies of madmen are real at the time.
But if knowledge is perception, how can we distinguish between the true
and the false in such cases? Having stated the objection, I will now
state the answer. Protagoras would deny the continuity of phenomena;
he would say that what is different is entirely different, and whether
active or passive has a different power. There are infinite agents and
patients in the world, and these produce in every combination of them a
different perception. Take myself as an instance:--Socrates may be ill
or he may be well,--and remember that Socrates, with all his accidents,
is spoken of. The wine which I drink when I am well is pleasant to
me, but the same wine is unpleasant to me when I am ill. And there
is nothing else from which I can receive the same impression, nor can
another receive the same impression from the wine. Neither can I and the
object of sense become separately what we become together. For the one
in becoming is relative to the other, but they have no other relation;
and the combination of them is absolute at each moment. (In modern
language, the act of sensation is really indivisible, though capable of
a mental analysis into subject and object.) My sensation alone is true,
and true to me only. And therefore, as Protagoras says, "To myself I
am the judge of what is and what is not." Thus the flux of Homer and
Heracleitus, the great Protagorean saying that "Man is the measure of
all things," the doctrine of Theaetetus that "Knowledge is perception,"
have all the same meaning. And this is thy new-born child, which by my
art I have brought to light; and you must not be angry if instead of
rearing your infant we expose him.'

'Theaetetus will not be angry,' says Theodorus; 'he is very
good-natured. But I should like to know, Socrates, whether you mean to
say that all this is untrue?'

'First reminding you that I am not the bag which contains the arguments,
but that I extract them from Theaetetus, shall I tell you what amazes me
in your friend Protagoras?'

'What may that be?'

'I like his doctrine that what appears is; but I wonder that he did
not begin his great work on Truth with a declaration that a pig, or a
dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a measure
of all things; then, while we were reverencing him as a god, he might
have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he was no
wiser than a tadpole. For if sensations are always true, and one man's
discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own judge,
and everything that he judges is right and true, then what need of
Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why should we
be less knowing than he is, or have to go to him, if every man is the
measure of all things? My own art of midwifery, and all dialectic, is
an enormous folly, if Protagoras' "Truth" be indeed truth, and the
philosopher is not merely amusing himself by giving oracles out of his
book.'

Theodorus thinks that Socrates is unjust to his master, Protagoras; but
he is too old and stiff to try a fall with him, and therefore refers him
to Theaetetus, who is already driven out of his former opinion by the
arguments of Socrates.

Socrates then takes up the defence of Protagoras, who is supposed to
reply in his own person--'Good people, you sit and declaim about the
gods, of whose existence or non-existence I have nothing to say, or you
discourse about man being reduced to the level of the brutes; but what
proof have you of your statements? And yet surely you and Theodorus had
better reflect whether probability is a safe guide. Theodorus would be
a bad geometrician if he had nothing better to offer.'...Theaetetus is
affected by the appeal to geometry, and Socrates is induced by him to
put the question in a new form. He proceeds as follows:--'Should we say
that we know what we see and hear,--e.g. the sound of words or the sight
of letters in a foreign tongue?'

'We should say that the figures of the letters, and the pitch of the
voice in uttering them, were known to us, but not the meaning of them.'

'Excellent; I want you to grow, and therefore I will leave that answer
and ask another question: Is not seeing perceiving?' 'Very true.' 'And
he who sees knows?' 'Yes.' 'And he who remembers, remembers that which
he sees and knows?' 'Very true.' 'But if he closes his eyes, does he not
remember?' 'He does.' 'Then he may remember and not see; and if seeing
is knowing, he may remember and not know. Is not this a "reductio ad
absurdum" of the hypothesis that knowledge is sensible perception? Yet
perhaps we are crowing too soon; and if Protagoras, "the father of the
myth," had been alive, the result might have been very different. But he
is dead, and Theodorus, whom he left guardian of his "orphan," has not
been very zealous in defending him.'

Theodorus objects that Callias is the true guardian, but he hopes that
Socrates will come to the rescue. Socrates prefaces his defence by
resuming the attack. He asks whether a man can know and not know at the
same time? 'Impossible.' Quite possible, if you maintain that seeing is
knowing. The confident adversary, suiting the action to the word, shuts
one of your eyes; and now, says he, you see and do not see, but do
you know and not know? And a fresh opponent darts from his ambush, and
transfers to knowledge the terms which are commonly applied to sight.
He asks whether you can know near and not at a distance; whether you can
have a sharp and also a dull knowledge. While you are wondering at his
incomparable wisdom, he gets you into his power, and you will not escape
until you have come to an understanding with him about the money which
is to be paid for your release.

But Protagoras has not yet made his defence; and already he may be heard
contemptuously replying that he is not responsible for the admissions
which were made by a boy, who could not foresee the coming move, and
therefore had answered in a manner which enabled Socrates to raise a
laugh against himself. 'But I cannot be fairly charged,' he will say,
'with an answer which I should not have given; for I never maintained
that the memory of a feeling is the same as a feeling, or denied that a
man might know and not know the same thing at the same time. Or, if you
will have extreme precision, I say that man in different relations is
many or rather infinite in number. And I challenge you, either to show
that his perceptions are not individual, or that if they are, what
appears to him is not what is. As to your pigs and baboons, you are
yourself a pig, and you make my writings a sport of other swine. But
I still affirm that man is the measure of all things, although I admit
that one man may be a thousand times better than another, in proportion
as he has better impressions. Neither do I deny the existence of wisdom
or of the wise man. But I maintain that wisdom is a practical remedial
power of turning evil into good, the bitterness of disease into the
sweetness of health, and does not consist in any greater truth or
superior knowledge. For the impressions of the sick are as true as the
impressions of the healthy; and the sick are as wise as the healthy. Nor
can any man be cured of a false opinion, for there is no such thing;
but he may be cured of the evil habit which generates in him an evil
opinion. This is effected in the body by the drugs of the physician, and
in the soul by the words of the Sophist; and the new state or opinion
is not truer, but only better than the old. And philosophers are not
tadpoles, but physicians and husbandmen, who till the soil and infuse
health into animals and plants, and make the good take the place of the
evil, both in individuals and states. Wise and good rhetoricians make
the good to appear just in states (for that is just which appears just
to a state), and in return, they deserve to be well paid. And you,
Socrates, whether you please or not, must continue to be a measure.
This is my defence, and I must request you to meet me fairly. We are
professing to reason, and not merely to dispute; and there is a great
difference between reasoning and disputation. For the disputer is always
seeking to trip up his opponent; and this is a mode of argument which
disgusts men with philosophy as they grow older. But the reasoner is
trying to understand him and to point out his errors to him, whether
arising from his own or from his companion's fault; he does not argue
from the customary use of names, which the vulgar pervert in all manner
of ways. If you are gentle to an adversary he will follow and love you;
and if defeated he will lay the blame on himself, and seek to escape
from his own prejudices into philosophy. I would recommend you,
Socrates, to adopt this humaner method, and to avoid captious and verbal
criticisms.'

Such, Theodorus, is the very slight help which I am able to afford to
your friend; had he been alive, he would have helped himself in far
better style.

'You have made a most valorous defence.'

Yes; but did you observe that Protagoras bade me be serious, and
complained of our getting up a laugh against him with the aid of a boy?
He meant to intimate that you must take the place of Theaetetus, who may
be wiser than many bearded men, but not wiser than you, Theodorus.

'The rule of the Spartan Palaestra is, Strip or depart; but you are like
the giant Antaeus, and will not let me depart unless I try a fall with
you.'

Yes, that is the nature of my complaint. And many a Hercules, many a
Theseus mighty in deeds and words has broken my head; but I am always at
this rough game. Please, then, to favour me.

'On the condition of not exceeding a single fall, I consent.'

Socrates now resumes the argument. As he is very desirous of doing
justice to Protagoras, he insists on citing his own words,--'What
appears to each man is to him.' And how, asks Socrates, are these words
reconcileable with the fact that all mankind are agreed in thinking
themselves wiser than others in some respects, and inferior to them in
others? In the hour of danger they are ready to fall down and worship
any one who is their superior in wisdom as if he were a god. And the
world is full of men who are asking to be taught and willing to be
ruled, and of other men who are willing to rule and teach them. All
which implies that men do judge of one another's impressions, and think
some wise and others foolish. How will Protagoras answer this argument?
For he cannot say that no one deems another ignorant or mistaken. If you
form a judgment, thousands and tens of thousands are ready to maintain
the opposite. The multitude may not and do not agree in Protagoras'
own thesis that 'Man is the measure of all things;' and then who is to
decide? Upon his own showing must not his 'truth' depend on the number
of suffrages, and be more or less true in proportion as he has more or
fewer of them? And he must acknowledge further, that they speak truly
who deny him to speak truly, which is a famous jest. And if he admits
that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, he must admit that
he himself does not speak truly. But his opponents will refuse to admit
this of themselves, and he must allow that they are right in their
refusal. The conclusion is, that all mankind, including Protagoras
himself, will deny that he speaks truly; and his truth will be true
neither to himself nor to anybody else.

Theodorus is inclined to think that this is going too far. Socrates
ironically replies, that he is not going beyond the truth. But if the
old Protagoras could only pop his head out of the world below, he would
doubtless give them both a sound castigation and be off to the shades
in an instant. Seeing that he is not within call, we must examine the
question for ourselves. It is clear that there are great differences in
the understandings of men. Admitting, with Protagoras, that immediate
sensations of hot, cold, and the like, are to each one such as they
appear, yet this hypothesis cannot be extended to judgments or opinions.
And even if we were to admit further,--and this is the view of some who
are not thorough-going followers of Protagoras,--that right and wrong,
holy and unholy, are to each state or individual such as they appear,
still Protagoras will not venture to maintain that every man is equally
the measure of expediency, or that the thing which seems is expedient
to every one. But this begins a new question. 'Well, Socrates, we have
plenty of leisure. Yes, we have, and, after the manner of philosophers,
we are digressing; I have often observed how ridiculous this habit of
theirs makes them when they appear in court. 'What do you mean?' I mean
to say that a philosopher is a gentleman, but a lawyer is a servant.
The one can have his talk out, and wander at will from one subject
to another, as the fancy takes him; like ourselves, he may be long or
short, as he pleases. But the lawyer is always in a hurry; there is the
clepsydra limiting his time, and the brief limiting his topics, and his
adversary is standing over him and exacting his rights. He is a servant
disputing about a fellow-servant before his master, who holds the cause
in his hands; the path never diverges, and often the race is for his
life. Such experiences render him keen and shrewd; he learns the arts of
flattery, and is perfect in the practice of crooked ways; dangers have
come upon him too soon, when the tenderness of youth was unable to meet
them with truth and honesty, and he has resorted to counter-acts of
dishonesty and falsehood, and become warped and distorted; without any
health or freedom or sincerity in him he has grown up to manhood, and is
or esteems himself to be a master of cunning. Such are the lawyers; will
you have the companion picture of philosophers? or will this be too much
of a digression?

'Nay, Socrates, the argument is our servant, and not our master. Who is
the judge or where is the spectator, having a right to control us?'

I will describe the leaders, then: for the inferior sort are not worth
the trouble. The lords of philosophy have not learned the way to the
dicastery or ecclesia; they neither see nor hear the laws and votes of
the state, written or recited; societies, whether political or festive,
clubs, and singing maidens do not enter even into their dreams. And the
scandals of persons or their ancestors, male and female, they know no
more than they can tell the number of pints in the ocean. Neither
are they conscious of their own ignorance; for they do not practise
singularity in order to gain reputation, but the truth is, that the
outer form of them only is residing in the city; the inner man, as
Pindar says, is going on a voyage of discovery, measuring as with line
and rule the things which are under and in the earth, interrogating the
whole of nature, only not condescending to notice what is near them.

'What do you mean, Socrates?'

I will illustrate my meaning by the jest of the witty maid-servant, who
saw Thales tumbling into a well, and said of him, that he was so eager
to know what was going on in heaven, that he could not see what was
before his feet. This is applicable to all philosophers. The philosopher
is unacquainted with the world; he hardly knows whether his neighbour is
a man or an animal. For he is always searching into the essence of man,
and enquiring what such a nature ought to do or suffer different from
any other. Hence, on every occasion in private life and public, as I was
saying, when he appears in a law-court or anywhere, he is the joke, not
only of maid-servants, but of the general herd, falling into wells
and every sort of disaster; he looks such an awkward, inexperienced
creature, unable to say anything personal, when he is abused, in answer
to his adversaries (for he knows no evil of any one); and when he hears
the praises of others, he cannot help laughing from the bottom of
his soul at their pretensions; and this also gives him a ridiculous
appearance. A king or tyrant appears to him to be a kind of swine-herd
or cow-herd, milking away at an animal who is much more troublesome and
dangerous than cows or sheep; like the cow-herd, he has no time to be
educated, and the pen in which he keeps his flock in the mountains is
surrounded by a wall. When he hears of large landed properties of ten
thousand acres or more, he thinks of the whole earth; or if he is
told of the antiquity of a family, he remembers that every one has had
myriads of progenitors, rich and poor, Greeks and barbarians, kings
and slaves. And he who boasts of his descent from Amphitryon in the
twenty-fifth generation, may, if he pleases, add as many more, and
double that again, and our philosopher only laughs at his inability to
do a larger sum. Such is the man at whom the vulgar scoff; he seems to
them as if he could not mind his feet. 'That is very true, Socrates.'
But when he tries to draw the quick-witted lawyer out of his pleas and
rejoinders to the contemplation of absolute justice or injustice in
their own nature, or from the popular praises of wealthy kings to the
view of happiness and misery in themselves, or to the reasons why a man
should seek after the one and avoid the other, then the situation is
reversed; the little wretch turns giddy, and is ready to fall over the
precipice; his utterance becomes thick, and he makes himself ridiculous,
not to servant-maids, but to every man of liberal education. Such are
the two pictures: the one of the philosopher and gentleman, who may be
excused for not having learned how to make a bed, or cook up flatteries;
the other, a serviceable knave, who hardly knows how to wear his
cloak,--still less can he awaken harmonious thoughts or hymn virtue's
praises.

'If the world, Socrates, were as ready to receive your words as I am,
there would be greater peace and less evil among mankind.'

Evil, Theodorus, must ever remain in this world to be the antagonist of
good, out of the way of the gods in heaven. Wherefore also we should fly
away from ourselves to them; and to fly to them is to become like them;
and to become like them is to become holy, just and true. But many
live in the old wives' fable of appearances; they think that you should
follow virtue in order that you may seem to be good. And yet the truth
is, that God is righteous; and of men, he is most like him who is most
righteous. To know this is wisdom; and in comparison of this the wisdom
of the arts or the seeming wisdom of politicians is mean and common. The
unrighteous man is apt to pride himself on his cunning; when others
call him rogue, he says to himself: 'They only mean that I am one who
deserves to live, and not a mere burden of the earth.' But he should
reflect that his ignorance makes his condition worse than if he knew.
For the penalty of injustice is not death or stripes, but the fatal
necessity of becoming more and more unjust. Two patterns of life are set
before him; the one blessed and divine, the other godless and wretched;
and he is growing more and more like the one and unlike the other. He
does not see that if he continues in his cunning, the place of innocence
will not receive him after death. And yet if such a man has the courage
to hear the argument out, he often becomes dissatisfied with himself,
and has no more strength in him than a child.--But we have digressed
enough.

'For my part, Socrates, I like the digressions better than the argument,
because I understand them better.'

To return. When we left off, the Protagoreans and Heracliteans were
maintaining that the ordinances of the State were just, while they
lasted. But no one would maintain that the laws of the State were always
good or expedient, although this may be the intention of them. For
the expedient has to do with the future, about which we are liable to
mistake. Now, would Protagoras maintain that man is the measure not
only of the present and past, but of the future; and that there is no
difference in the judgments of men about the future? Would an untrained
man, for example, be as likely to know when he is going to have a fever,
as the physician who attended him? And if they differ in opinion,
which of them is likely to be right; or are they both right? Is not a
vine-grower a better judge of a vintage which is not yet gathered, or a
cook of a dinner which is in preparation, or Protagoras of the probable
effect of a speech than an ordinary person? The last example speaks 'ad
hominen.' For Protagoras would never have amassed a fortune if every man
could judge of the future for himself. He is, therefore, compelled to
admit that he is a measure; but I, who know nothing, am not equally
convinced that I am. This is one way of refuting him; and he is refuted
also by the authority which he attributes to the opinions of others, who
deny his opinions. I am not equally sure that we can disprove the truth
of immediate states of feeling. But this leads us to the doctrine of
the universal flux, about which a battle-royal is always going on in the
cities of Ionia. 'Yes; the Ephesians are downright mad about the
flux; they cannot stop to argue with you, but are in perpetual motion,
obedient to their text-books. Their restlessness is beyond expression,
and if you ask any of them a question, they will not answer, but dart at
you some unintelligible saying, and another and another, making no way
either with themselves or with others; for nothing is fixed in them
or their ideas,--they are at war with fixed principles.' I suppose,
Theodorus, that you have never seen them in time of peace, when they
discourse at leisure to their disciples? 'Disciples! they have none;
they are a set of uneducated fanatics, and each of them says of the
other that they have no knowledge. We must trust to ourselves, and not
to them for the solution of the problem.' Well, the doctrine is old,
being derived from the poets, who speak in a figure of Oceanus and
Tethys; the truth was once concealed, but is now revealed by the
superior wisdom of a later generation, and made intelligible to the
cobbler, who, on hearing that all is in motion, and not some things
only, as he ignorantly fancied, may be expected to fall down and worship
his teachers. And the opposite doctrine must not be forgotten:--

     'Alone being remains unmoved which is the name for all,'

as Parmenides affirms. Thus we are in the midst of the fray; both
parties are dragging us to their side; and we are not certain which of
them are in the right; and if neither, then we shall be in a ridiculous
position, having to set up our own opinion against ancient and famous
men.

Let us first approach the river-gods, or patrons of the flux.

When they speak of motion, must they not include two kinds of motion,
change of place and change of nature?--And all things must be supposed
to have both kinds of motion; for if not, the same things would be at
rest and in motion, which is contrary to their theory. And did we not
say, that all sensations arise thus: they move about between the agent
and patient together with a perception, and the patient ceases to be a
perceiving power and becomes a percipient, and the agent a quale instead
of a quality; but neither has any absolute existence? But now we make
the further discovery, that neither white or whiteness, nor any sense
or sensation, can be predicated of anything, for they are in a perpetual
flux. And therefore we must modify the doctrine of Theaetetus and
Protagoras, by asserting further that knowledge is and is not sensation;
and of everything we must say equally, that this is and is not, or
becomes or becomes not. And still the word 'this' is not quite correct,
for language fails in the attempt to express their meaning.

At the close of the discussion, Theodorus claims to be released from the
argument, according to his agreement. But Theaetetus insists that they
shall proceed to consider the doctrine of rest. This is declined by
Socrates, who has too much reverence for the great Parmenides lightly
to attack him. (We shall find that he returns to the doctrine of rest
in the Sophist; but at present he does not wish to be diverted from
his main purpose, which is, to deliver Theaetetus of his conception of
knowledge.) He proceeds to interrogate him further. When he says that
'knowledge is in perception,' with what does he perceive? The first
answer is, that he perceives sights with the eye, and sounds with the
ear. This leads Socrates to make the reflection that nice distinctions
of words are sometimes pedantic, but sometimes necessary; and he
proposes in this case to substitute the word 'through' for 'with.' For
the senses are not like the Trojan warriors in the horse, but have
a common centre of perception, in which they all meet. This common
principle is able to compare them with one another, and must therefore
be distinct from them (compare Republic). And as there are facts of
sense which are perceived through the organs of the body, there are also
mathematical and other abstractions, such as sameness and difference,
likeness and unlikeness, which the soul perceives by herself. Being is
the most universal of these abstractions. The good and the beautiful are
abstractions of another kind, which exist in relation and which above
all others the mind perceives in herself, comparing within her past,
present, and future. For example; we know a thing to be hard or soft by
the touch, of which the perception is given at birth to men and animals.
But the essence of hardness or softness, or the fact that this hardness
is, and is the opposite of softness, is slowly learned by reflection and
experience. Mere perception does not reach being, and therefore fails of
truth; and therefore has no share in knowledge. But if so, knowledge
is not perception. What then is knowledge? The mind, when occupied
by herself with being, is said to have opinion--shall we say that
'Knowledge is true opinion'? But still an old difficulty recurs; we
ask ourselves, 'How is false opinion possible?' This difficulty may be
stated as follows:--

Either we know or do not know a thing (for the intermediate processes
of learning and forgetting need not at present be considered); and in
thinking or having an opinion, we must either know or not know that
which we think, and we cannot know and be ignorant at the same time; we
cannot confuse one thing which we do not know, with another thing which
we do not know; nor can we think that which we do not know to be that
which we know, or that which we know to be that which we do not know.
And what other case is conceivable, upon the supposition that we either
know or do not know all things? Let us try another answer in the sphere
of being: 'When a man thinks, and thinks that which is not.' But would
this hold in any parallel case? Can a man see and see nothing? or hear
and hear nothing? or touch and touch nothing? Must he not see, hear, or
touch some one existing thing? For if he thinks about nothing he does
not think, and not thinking he cannot think falsely. And so the path of
being is closed against us, as well as the path of knowledge. But may
there not be 'heterodoxy,' or transference of opinion;--I mean, may not
one thing be supposed to be another? Theaetetus is confident that this
must be 'the true falsehood,' when a man puts good for evil or evil
for good. Socrates will not discourage him by attacking the paradoxical
expression 'true falsehood,' but passes on. The new notion involves a
process of thinking about two things, either together or alternately.
And thinking is the conversing of the mind with herself, which is
carried on in question and answer, until she no longer doubts, but
determines and forms an opinion. And false opinion consists in saying to
yourself, that one thing is another. But did you ever say to yourself,
that good is evil, or evil good? Even in sleep, did you ever imagine
that odd was even? Or did any man in his senses ever fancy that an ox
was a horse, or that two are one? So that we can never think one thing
to be another; for you must not meet me with the verbal quibble that
one--eteron--is other--eteron (both 'one' and 'other' in Greek are
called 'other'--eteron). He who has both the two things in his mind,
cannot misplace them; and he who has only one of them in his mind,
cannot misplace them--on either supposition transplacement is
inconceivable.

But perhaps there may still be a sense in which we can think that
which we do not know to be that which we know: e.g. Theaetetus may know
Socrates, but at a distance he may mistake another person for him. This
process may be conceived by the help of an image. Let us suppose that
every man has in his mind a block of wax of various qualities, the gift
of Memory, the mother of the Muses; and on this he receives the seal or
stamp of those sensations and perceptions which he wishes to remember.
That which he succeeds in stamping is remembered and known by him as
long as the impression lasts; but that, of which the impression is
rubbed out or imperfectly made, is forgotten, and not known. No one can
think one thing to be another, when he has the memorial or seal of both
of these in his soul, and a sensible impression of neither; or when he
knows one and does not know the other, and has no memorial or seal of
the other; or when he knows neither; or when he perceives both, or one
and not the other, or neither; or when he perceives and knows both,
and identifies what he perceives with what he knows (this is still more
impossible); or when he does not know one, and does not know and does
not perceive the other; or does not perceive one, and does not know
and does not perceive the other; or has no perception or knowledge
of either--all these cases must be excluded. But he may err when he
confuses what he knows or perceives, or what he perceives and does not
know, with what he knows, or what he knows and perceives with what he
knows and perceives.

Theaetetus is unable to follow these distinctions; which Socrates
proceeds to illustrate by examples, first of all remarking, that
knowledge may exist without perception, and perception without
knowledge. I may know Theodorus and Theaetetus and not see them; I
may see them, and not know them. 'That I understand.' But I could not
mistake one for the other if I knew you both, and had no perception of
either; or if I knew one only, and perceived neither; or if I knew
and perceived neither, or in any other of the excluded cases. The only
possibility of error is: 1st, when knowing you and Theodorus, and having
the impression of both of you on the waxen block, I, seeing you both
imperfectly and at a distance, put the foot in the wrong shoe--that
is to say, put the seal or stamp on the wrong object: or 2ndly, when
knowing both of you I only see one; or when, seeing and knowing you
both, I fail to identify the impression and the object. But there could
be no error when perception and knowledge correspond.

The waxen block in the heart of a man's soul, as I may say in the words
of Homer, who played upon the words ker and keros, may be smooth and
deep, and large enough, and then the signs are clearly marked and
lasting, and do not get confused. But in the 'hairy heart,' as the
all-wise poet sings, when the wax is muddy or hard or moist, there is
a corresponding confusion and want of retentiveness; in the muddy and
impure there is indistinctness, and still more in the hard, for there
the impressions have no depth of wax, and in the moist they are too
soon effaced. Yet greater is the indistinctness when they are all jolted
together in a little soul, which is narrow and has no room. These are
the sort of natures which have false opinion; from stupidity they see
and hear and think amiss; and this is falsehood and ignorance. Error,
then, is a confusion of thought and sense.

Theaetetus is delighted with this explanation. But Socrates has no
sooner found the new solution than he sinks into a fit of despondency.
For an objection occurs to him:--May there not be errors where there is
no confusion of mind and sense? e.g. in numbers. No one can confuse
the man whom he has in his thoughts with the horse which he has in his
thoughts, but he may err in the addition of five and seven. And observe
that these are purely mental conceptions. Thus we are involved once more
in the dilemma of saying, either that there is no such thing as false
opinion, or that a man knows what he does not know.

We are at our wit's end, and may therefore be excused for making a
bold diversion. All this time we have been repeating the words 'know,'
'understand,' yet we do not know what knowledge is. 'Why, Socrates,
how can you argue at all without using them?' Nay, but the true hero
of dialectic would have forbidden me to use them until I had explained
them. And I must explain them now. The verb 'to know' has two senses,
to have and to possess knowledge, and I distinguish 'having' from
'possessing.' A man may possess a garment which he does not wear; or he
may have wild birds in an aviary; these in one sense he possesses, and
in another he has none of them. Let this aviary be an image of the mind,
as the waxen block was; when we are young, the aviary is empty; after
a time the birds are put in; for under this figure we may describe
different forms of knowledge;--there are some of them in groups, and
some single, which are flying about everywhere; and let us suppose
a hunt after the science of odd and even, or some other science. The
possession of the birds is clearly not the same as the having them in
the hand. And the original chase of them is not the same as taking them
in the hand when they are already caged.

This distinction between use and possession saves us from the absurdity
of supposing that we do not know what we know, because we may know in
one sense, i.e. possess, what we do not know in another, i.e. use. But
have we not escaped one difficulty only to encounter a greater? For how
can the exchange of two kinds of knowledge ever become false opinion?
As well might we suppose that ignorance could make a man know, or that
blindness could make him see. Theaetetus suggests that in the aviary
there may be flying about mock birds, or forms of ignorance, and we
put forth our hands and grasp ignorance, when we are intending to grasp
knowledge. But how can he who knows the forms of knowledge and the forms
of ignorance imagine one to be the other? Is there some other form of
knowledge which distinguishes them? and another, and another? Thus we go
round and round in a circle and make no progress.

All this confusion arises out of our attempt to explain false opinion
without having explained knowledge. What then is knowledge? Theaetetus
repeats that knowledge is true opinion. But this seems to be refuted by
the instance of orators and judges. For surely the orator cannot convey
a true knowledge of crimes at which the judges were not present; he
can only persuade them, and the judge may form a true opinion and truly
judge. But if true opinion were knowledge they could not have judged
without knowledge.

Once more. Theaetetus offers a definition which he has heard: Knowledge
is true opinion accompanied by definition or explanation. Socrates has
had a similar dream, and has further heard that the first elements are
names only, and that definition or explanation begins when they are
combined; the letters are unknown, the syllables or combinations
are known. But this new hypothesis when tested by the letters of the
alphabet is found to break down. The first syllable of Socrates' name
is SO. But what is SO? Two letters, S and O, a sibilant and a vowel,
of which no further explanation can be given. And how can any one
be ignorant of either of them, and yet know both of them? There is,
however, another alternative:--We may suppose that the syllable has a
separate form or idea distinct from the letters or parts. The all of the
parts may not be the whole. Theaetetus is very much inclined to adopt
this suggestion, but when interrogated by Socrates he is unable to
draw any distinction between the whole and all the parts. And if the
syllables have no parts, then they are those original elements of which
there is no explanation. But how can the syllable be known if the letter
remains unknown? In learning to read as children, we are first taught
the letters and then the syllables. And in music, the notes, which
are the letters, have a much more distinct meaning to us than the
combination of them.

Once more, then, we must ask the meaning of the statement, that
'Knowledge is right opinion, accompanied by explanation or definition.'
Explanation may mean, (1) the reflection or expression of a man's
thoughts--but every man who is not deaf and dumb is able to express his
thoughts--or (2) the enumeration of the elements of which anything is
composed. A man may have a true opinion about a waggon, but then, and
then only, has he knowledge of a waggon when he is able to enumerate
the hundred planks of Hesiod. Or he may know the syllables of the name
Theaetetus, but not the letters; yet not until he knows both can he be
said to have knowledge as well as opinion. But on the other hand he may
know the syllable 'The' in the name Theaetetus, yet he may be mistaken
about the same syllable in the name Theodorus, and in learning to read
we often make such mistakes. And even if he could write out all the
letters and syllables of your name in order, still he would only have
right opinion. Yet there may be a third meaning of the definition,
besides the image or expression of the mind, and the enumeration of the
elements, viz. (3) perception of difference.

For example, I may see a man who has eyes, nose, and mouth;--that will
not distinguish him from any other man. Or he may have a snub-nose and
prominent eyes;--that will not distinguish him from myself and you and
others who are like me. But when I see a certain kind of snub-nosedness,
then I recognize Theaetetus. And having this sign of difference, I have
knowledge. But have I knowledge or opinion of this difference; if I
have only opinion I have not knowledge; if I have knowledge we assume
a disputed term; for knowledge will have to be defined as right opinion
with knowledge of difference.

And so, Theaetetus, knowledge is neither perception nor true opinion,
nor yet definition accompanying true opinion. And I have shown that the
children of your brain are not worth rearing. Are you still in labour,
or have you brought all you have to say about knowledge to the birth? If
you have any more thoughts, you will be the better for having got rid of
these; or if you have none, you will be the better for not fancying that
you know what you do not know. Observe the limits of my art, which, like
my mother's, is an art of midwifery; I do not pretend to compare with
the good and wise of this and other ages.

And now I go to meet Meletus at the porch of the King Archon; but
to-morrow I shall hope to see you again, Theodorus, at this place.

...

I. The saying of Theaetetus, that 'Knowledge is sensible perception,'
may be assumed to be a current philosophical opinion of the age. 'The
ancients,' as Aristotle (De Anim.) says, citing a verse of Empedocles,
'affirmed knowledge to be the same as perception.' We may now examine
these words, first, with reference to their place in the history of
philosophy, and secondly, in relation to modern speculations.

(a) In the age of Socrates the mind was passing from the object to the
subject. The same impulse which a century before had led men to form
conceptions of the world, now led them to frame general notions of the
human faculties and feelings, such as memory, opinion, and the like. The
simplest of these is sensation, or sensible perception, by which Plato
seems to mean the generalized notion of feelings and impressions of
sense, without determining whether they are conscious or not.

The theory that 'Knowledge is sensible perception' is the antithesis of
that which derives knowledge from the mind (Theaet.), or which assumes
the existence of ideas independent of the mind (Parm.). Yet from their
extreme abstraction these theories do not represent the opposite poles
of thought in the same way that the corresponding differences would
in modern philosophy. The most ideal and the most sensational have a
tendency to pass into one another; Heracleitus, like his great successor
Hegel, has both aspects. The Eleatic isolation of Being and the Megarian
or Cynic isolation of individuals are placed in the same class by Plato
(Soph.); and the same principle which is the symbol of motion to one
mind is the symbol of rest to another. The Atomists, who are sometimes
regarded as the Materialists of Plato, denied the reality of sensation.
And in the ancient as well as the modern world there were reactions from
theory to experience, from ideas to sense. This is a point of view from
which the philosophy of sensation presented great attraction to the
ancient thinker. Amid the conflict of ideas and the variety of opinions,
the impression of sense remained certain and uniform. Hardness,
softness, cold, heat, etc. are not absolutely the same to different
persons, but the art of measuring could at any rate reduce them all
to definite natures (Republic). Thus the doctrine that knowledge is
perception supplies or seems to supply a firm standing ground. Like the
other notions of the earlier Greek philosophy, it was held in a very
simple way, without much basis of reasoning, and without suggesting the
questions which naturally arise in our own minds on the same subject.

(b) The fixedness of impressions of sense furnishes a link of connexion
between ancient and modern philosophy. The modern thinker often repeats
the parallel axiom, 'All knowledge is experience.' He means to say that
the outward and not the inward is both the original source and the final
criterion of truth, because the outward can be observed and analyzed;
the inward is only known by external results, and is dimly perceived
by each man for himself. In what does this differ from the saying of
Theaetetus? Chiefly in this--that the modern term 'experience,' while
implying a point of departure in sense and a return to sense, also
includes all the processes of reasoning and imagination which have
intervened. The necessary connexion between them by no means affords a
measure of the relative degree of importance which is to be ascribed to
either element. For the inductive portion of any science may be small,
as in mathematics or ethics, compared with that which the mind has
attained by reasoning and reflection on a very few facts.

II. The saying that 'All knowledge is sensation' is identified by Plato
with the Protagorean thesis that 'Man is the measure of all things.'
The interpretation which Protagoras himself is supposed to give of these
latter words is: 'Things are to me as they appear to me, and to you as
they appear to you.' But there remains still an ambiguity both in the
text and in the explanation, which has to be cleared up. Did Protagoras
merely mean to assert the relativity of knowledge to the human mind? Or
did he mean to deny that there is an objective standard of truth?

These two questions have not been always clearly distinguished; the
relativity of knowledge has been sometimes confounded with uncertainty.
The untutored mind is apt to suppose that objects exist independently
of the human faculties, because they really exist independently of the
faculties of any individual. In the same way, knowledge appears to be
a body of truths stored up in books, which when once ascertained are
independent of the discoverer. Further consideration shows us that these
truths are not really independent of the mind; there is an adaptation of
one to the other, of the eye to the object of sense, of the mind to the
conception. There would be no world, if there neither were nor ever
had been any one to perceive the world. A slight effort of reflection
enables us to understand this; but no effort of reflection will enable
us to pass beyond the limits of our own faculties, or to imagine the
relation or adaptation of objects to the mind to be different from that
of which we have experience. There are certain laws of language and
logic to which we are compelled to conform, and to which our ideas
naturally adapt themselves; and we can no more get rid of them than we
can cease to be ourselves. The absolute and infinite, whether explained
as self-existence, or as the totality of human thought, or as the
Divine nature, if known to us at all, cannot escape from the category of
relation.

But because knowledge is subjective or relative to the mind, we are
not to suppose that we are therefore deprived of any of the tests or
criteria of truth. One man still remains wiser than another, a
more accurate observer and relater of facts, a truer measure of the
proportions of knowledge. The nature of testimony is not altered, nor
the verification of causes by prescribed methods less certain. Again,
the truth must often come to a man through others, according to the
measure of his capacity and education. But neither does this affect the
testimony, whether written or oral, which he knows by experience to
be trustworthy. He cannot escape from the laws of his own mind; and
he cannot escape from the further accident of being dependent for his
knowledge on others. But still this is no reason why he should always be
in doubt; of many personal, of many historical and scientific facts he
may be absolutely assured. And having such a mass of acknowledged truth
in the mathematical and physical, not to speak of the moral sciences,
the moderns have certainly no reason to acquiesce in the statement
that truth is appearance only, or that there is no difference between
appearance and truth.

The relativity of knowledge is a truism to us, but was a great
psychological discovery in the fifth century before Christ. Of this
discovery, the first distinct assertion is contained in the thesis of
Protagoras. Probably he had no intention either of denying or affirming
an objective standard of truth. He did not consider whether man in the
higher or man in the lower sense was a 'measure of all things.' Like
other great thinkers, he was absorbed with one idea, and that idea was
the absoluteness of perception. Like Socrates, he seemed to see that
philosophy must be brought back from 'nature' to 'truth,' from the world
to man. But he did not stop to analyze whether he meant 'man' in the
concrete or man in the abstract, any man or some men, 'quod semper quod
ubique' or individual private judgment. Such an analysis lay beyond
his sphere of thought; the age before Socrates had not arrived at these
distinctions. Like the Cynics, again, he discarded knowledge in any
higher sense than perception. For 'truer' or 'wiser' he substituted
the word 'better,' and is not unwilling to admit that both states and
individuals are capable of practical improvement. But this improvement
does not arise from intellectual enlightenment, nor yet from
the exertion of the will, but from a change of circumstances and
impressions; and he who can effect this change in himself or others may
be deemed a philosopher. In the mode of effecting it, while agreeing
with Socrates and the Cynics in the importance which he attaches to
practical life, he is at variance with both of them. To suppose that
practice can be divorced from speculation, or that we may do good
without caring about truth, is by no means singular, either in
philosophy or life. The singularity of this, as of some other
(so-called) sophistical doctrines, is the frankness with which they are
avowed, instead of being veiled, as in modern times, under ambiguous and
convenient phrases.

Plato appears to treat Protagoras much as he himself is treated by
Aristotle; that is to say, he does not attempt to understand him from
his own point of view. But he entangles him in the meshes of a more
advanced logic. To which Protagoras is supposed to reply by Megarian
quibbles, which destroy logic, 'Not only man, but each man, and each
man at each moment.' In the arguments about sight and memory there is a
palpable unfairness which is worthy of the great 'brainless brothers,'
Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, and may be compared with the egkekalummenos
('obvelatus') of Eubulides. For he who sees with one eye only cannot be
truly said both to see and not to see; nor is memory, which is liable
to forget, the immediate knowledge to which Protagoras applies the
term. Theodorus justly charges Socrates with going beyond the truth;
and Protagoras has equally right on his side when he protests against
Socrates arguing from the common use of words, which 'the vulgar pervert
in all manner of ways.'

III. The theory of Protagoras is connected by Aristotle as well as Plato
with the flux of Heracleitus. But Aristotle is only following Plato,
and Plato, as we have already seen, did not mean to imply that such a
connexion was admitted by Protagoras himself. His metaphysical genius
saw or seemed to see a common tendency in them, just as the modern
historian of ancient philosophy might perceive a parallelism between
two thinkers of which they were probably unconscious themselves. We must
remember throughout that Plato is not speaking of Heracleitus, but of
the Heracliteans, who succeeded him; nor of the great original ideas of
the master, but of the Eristic into which they had degenerated a hundred
years later. There is nothing in the fragments of Heracleitus which at
all justifies Plato's account of him. His philosophy may be resolved
into two elements--first, change, secondly, law or measure pervading
the change: these he saw everywhere, and often expressed in strange
mythological symbols. But he has no analysis of sensible perception such
as Plato attributes to him; nor is there any reason to suppose that
he pushed his philosophy into that absolute negation in which
Heracliteanism was sunk in the age of Plato. He never said that 'change
means every sort of change;' and he expressly distinguished between
'the general and particular understanding.' Like a poet, he surveyed
the elements of mythology, nature, thought, which lay before him, and
sometimes by the light of genius he saw or seemed to see a mysterious
principle working behind them. But as has been the case with other great
philosophers, and with Plato and Aristotle themselves, what was really
permanent and original could not be understood by the next generation,
while a perverted logic carried out his chance expressions with an
illogical consistency. His simple and noble thoughts, like those of the
great Eleatic, soon degenerated into a mere strife of words. And when
thus reduced to mere words, they seem to have exercised a far wider
influence in the cities of Ionia (where the people 'were mad about
them') than in the life-time of Heracleitus--a phenomenon which, though
at first sight singular, is not without a parallel in the history of
philosophy and theology.

It is this perverted form of the Heraclitean philosophy which is
supposed to effect the final overthrow of Protagorean sensationalism.
For if all things are changing at every moment, in all sorts of ways,
then there is nothing fixed or defined at all, and therefore no sensible
perception, nor any true word by which that or anything else can be
described. Of course Protagoras would not have admitted the justice
of this argument any more than Heracleitus would have acknowledged the
'uneducated fanatics' who appealed to his writings. He might have said,
'The excellent Socrates has first confused me with Heracleitus, and
Heracleitus with his Ephesian successors, and has then disproved the
existence both of knowledge and sensation. But I am not responsible
for what I never said, nor will I admit that my common-sense account of
knowledge can be overthrown by unintelligible Heraclitean paradoxes.'

IV. Still at the bottom of the arguments there remains a truth, that
knowledge is something more than sensible perception;--this alone would
not distinguish man from a tadpole. The absoluteness of sensations
at each moment destroys the very consciousness of sensations (compare
Phileb.), or the power of comparing them. The senses are not mere holes
in a 'Trojan horse,' but the organs of a presiding nature, in which they
meet. A great advance has been made in psychology when the senses
are recognized as organs of sense, and we are admitted to see or feel
'through them' and not 'by them,' a distinction of words which, as
Socrates observes, is by no means pedantic. A still further step has
been made when the most abstract notions, such as Being and Not-being,
sameness and difference, unity and plurality, are acknowledged to be the
creations of the mind herself, working upon the feelings or impressions
of sense. In this manner Plato describes the process of acquiring them,
in the words 'Knowledge consists not in the feelings or affections
(pathemasi), but in the process of reasoning about them (sullogismo).'
Here, is in the Parmenides, he means something not really different
from generalization. As in the Sophist, he is laying the foundation of a
rational psychology, which is to supersede the Platonic reminiscence of
Ideas as well as the Eleatic Being and the individualism of Megarians
and Cynics.

V. Having rejected the doctrine that 'Knowledge is perception,' we now
proceed to look for a definition of knowledge in the sphere of opinion.
But here we are met by a singular difficulty: How is false opinion
possible? For we must either know or not know that which is presented
to the mind or to sense. We of course should answer at once: 'No; the
alternative is not necessary, for there may be degrees of knowledge; and
we may know and have forgotten, or we may be learning, or we may have a
general but not a particular knowledge, or we may know but not be able
to explain;' and many other ways may be imagined in which we know and do
not know at the same time. But these answers belong to a later stage of
metaphysical discussion; whereas the difficulty in question naturally
arises owing to the childhood of the human mind, like the parallel
difficulty respecting Not-being. Men had only recently arrived at the
notion of opinion; they could not at once define the true and pass
beyond into the false. The very word doxa was full of ambiguity, being
sometimes, as in the Eleatic philosophy, applied to the sensible world,
and again used in the more ordinary sense of opinion. There is no
connexion between sensible appearance and probability, and yet both
of them met in the word doxa, and could hardly be disengaged from one
another in the mind of the Greek living in the fifth or fourth century
B.C. To this was often added, as at the end of the fifth book of the
Republic, the idea of relation, which is equally distinct from either of
them; also a fourth notion, the conclusion of the dialectical process,
the making up of the mind after she has been 'talking to herself'
(Theat.).

We are not then surprised that the sphere of opinion and of Not-being
should be a dusky, half-lighted place (Republic), belonging neither
to the old world of sense and imagination, nor to the new world of
reflection and reason. Plato attempts to clear up this darkness. In
his accustomed manner he passes from the lower to the higher, without
omitting the intermediate stages. This appears to be the reason why he
seeks for the definition of knowledge first in the sphere of opinion.
Hereafter we shall find that something more than opinion is required.

False opinion is explained by Plato at first as a confusion of mind and
sense, which arises when the impression on the mind does not correspond
to the impression made on the senses. It is obvious that this
explanation (supposing the distinction between impressions on the mind
and impressions on the senses to be admitted) does not account for all
forms of error; and Plato has excluded himself from the consideration of
the greater number, by designedly omitting the intermediate processes
of learning and forgetting; nor does he include fallacies in the use of
language or erroneous inferences. But he is struck by one possibility
of error, which is not covered by his theory, viz. errors in arithmetic.
For in numbers and calculation there is no combination of thought and
sense, and yet errors may often happen. Hence he is led to discard the
explanation which might nevertheless have been supposed to hold good
(for anything which he says to the contrary) as a rationale of error, in
the case of facts derived from sense.

Another attempt is made to explain false opinion by assigning to error
a sort of positive existence. But error or ignorance is essentially
negative--a not-knowing; if we knew an error, we should be no longer in
error. We may veil our difficulty under figures of speech, but these,
although telling arguments with the multitude, can never be the real
foundation of a system of psychology. Only they lead us to dwell upon
mental phenomena which if expressed in an abstract form would not be
realized by us at all. The figure of the mind receiving impressions is
one of those images which have rooted themselves for ever in language.
It may or may not be a 'gracious aid' to thought; but it cannot be
got rid of. The other figure of the enclosure is also remarkable as
affording the first hint of universal all-pervading ideas,--a notion
further carried out in the Sophist. This is implied in the birds, some
in flocks, some solitary, which fly about anywhere and everywhere. Plato
discards both figures, as not really solving the question which to us
appears so simple: 'How do we make mistakes?' The failure of the enquiry
seems to show that we should return to knowledge, and begin with that;
and we may afterwards proceed, with a better hope of success, to the
examination of opinion.

But is true opinion really distinct from knowledge? The difference
between these he seeks to establish by an argument, which to us appears
singular and unsatisfactory. The existence of true opinion is proved
by the rhetoric of the law courts, which cannot give knowledge, but
may give true opinion. The rhetorician cannot put the judge or juror in
possession of all the facts which prove an act of violence, but he may
truly persuade them of the commission of such an act. Here the idea of
true opinion seems to be a right conclusion from imperfect knowledge.
But the correctness of such an opinion will be purely accidental; and is
really the effect of one man, who has the means of knowing, persuading
another who has not. Plato would have done better if he had said that
true opinion was a contradiction in terms.

Assuming the distinction between knowledge and opinion, Theaetetus, in
answer to Socrates, proceeds to define knowledge as true opinion, with
definite or rational explanation. This Socrates identifies with another
and different theory, of those who assert that knowledge first begins
with a proposition.

The elements may be perceived by sense, but they are names, and cannot
be defined. When we assign to them some predicate, they first begin to
have a meaning (onomaton sumploke logou ousia). This seems equivalent
to saying, that the individuals of sense become the subject of knowledge
when they are regarded as they are in nature in relation to other
individuals.

Yet we feel a difficulty in following this new hypothesis. For must not
opinion be equally expressed in a proposition? The difference between
true and false opinion is not the difference between the particular and
the universal, but between the true universal and the false. Thought may
be as much at fault as sight. When we place individuals under a
class, or assign to them attributes, this is not knowledge, but a very
rudimentary process of thought; the first generalization of all, without
which language would be impossible. And has Plato kept altogether clear
of a confusion, which the analogous word logos tends to create, of a
proposition and a definition? And is not the confusion increased by the
use of the analogous term 'elements,' or 'letters'? For there is no real
resemblance between the relation of letters to a syllable, and of the
terms to a proposition.

Plato, in the spirit of the Megarian philosophy, soon discovers a flaw
in the explanation. For how can we know a compound of which the simple
elements are unknown to us? Can two unknowns make a known? Can a whole
be something different from the parts? The answer of experience is that
they can; for we may know a compound, which we are unable to analyze
into its elements; and all the parts, when united, may be more than all
the parts separated: e.g. the number four, or any other number, is more
than the units which are contained in it; any chemical compound is more
than and different from the simple elements. But ancient philosophy
in this, as in many other instances, proceeding by the path of mental
analysis, was perplexed by doubts which warred against the plainest
facts.

Three attempts to explain the new definition of knowledge still remain
to be considered. They all of them turn on the explanation of logos. The
first account of the meaning of the word is the reflection of thought in
speech--a sort of nominalism 'La science est une langue bien faite.' But
anybody who is not dumb can say what he thinks; therefore mere speech
cannot be knowledge. And yet we may observe, that there is in this
explanation an element of truth which is not recognized by Plato; viz.
that truth and thought are inseparable from language, although mere
expression in words is not truth. The second explanation of logos is the
enumeration of the elementary parts of the complex whole. But this is
only definition accompanied with right opinion, and does not yet attain
to the certainty of knowledge. Plato does not mention the greater
objection, which is, that the enumeration of particulars is endless;
such a definition would be based on no principle, and would not help us
at all in gaining a common idea. The third is the best explanation,--the
possession of a characteristic mark, which seems to answer to the
logical definition by genus and difference. But this, again, is equally
necessary for right opinion; and we have already determined, although
not on very satisfactory grounds, that knowledge must be distinguished
from opinion. A better distinction is drawn between them in the Timaeus.
They might be opposed as philosophy and rhetoric, and as conversant
respectively with necessary and contingent matter. But no true idea of
the nature of either of them, or of their relation to one another, could
be framed until science obtained a content. The ancient philosophers
in the age of Plato thought of science only as pure abstraction, and to
this opinion stood in no relation.

Like Theaetetus, we have attained to no definite result. But an
interesting phase of ancient philosophy has passed before us. And the
negative result is not to be despised. For on certain subjects, and in
certain states of knowledge, the work of negation or clearing the ground
must go on, perhaps for a generation, before the new structure can begin
to rise. Plato saw the necessity of combating the illogical logic of
the Megarians and Eristics. For the completion of the edifice, he makes
preparation in the Theaetetus, and crowns the work in the Sophist.

Many (1) fine expressions, and (2) remarks full of wisdom, (3) also
germs of a metaphysic of the future, are scattered up and down in
the dialogue. Such, for example, as (1) the comparison of Theaetetus'
progress in learning to the 'noiseless flow of a river of oil';
the satirical touch, 'flavouring a sauce or fawning speech'; or the
remarkable expression, 'full of impure dialectic'; or the lively images
under which the argument is described,--'the flood of arguments pouring
in,' the fresh discussions 'bursting in like a band of revellers.'
(2) As illustrations of the second head, may be cited the remark of
Socrates, that 'distinctions of words, although sometimes pedantic, are
also necessary'; or the fine touch in the character of the lawyer,
that 'dangers came upon him when the tenderness of youth was unequal to
them'; or the description of the manner in which the spirit is broken
in a wicked man who listens to reproof until he becomes like a child; or
the punishment of the wicked, which is not physical suffering, but the
perpetual companionship of evil (compare Gorgias); or the saying, often
repeated by Aristotle and others, that 'philosophy begins in wonder,
for Iris is the child of Thaumas'; or the superb contempt with which
the philosopher takes down the pride of wealthy landed proprietors by
comparison of the whole earth. (3) Important metaphysical ideas are: a.
the conception of thought, as the mind talking to herself; b. the notion
of a common sense, developed further by Aristotle, and the explicit
declaration, that the mind gains her conceptions of Being, sameness,
number, and the like, from reflection on herself; c. the excellent
distinction of Theaetetus (which Socrates, speaking with emphasis,
'leaves to grow') between seeing the forms or hearing the sounds of
words in a foreign language, and understanding the meaning of them; and
d. the distinction of Socrates himself between 'having' and 'possessing'
knowledge, in which the answer to the whole discussion appears to be
contained.

...

There is a difference between ancient and modern psychology, and we
have a difficulty in explaining one in the terms of the other. To us the
inward and outward sense and the inward and outward worlds of which they
are the organs are parted by a wall, and appear as if they could never
be confounded. The mind is endued with faculties, habits, instincts, and
a personality or consciousness in which they are bound together. Over
against these are placed forms, colours, external bodies coming into
contact with our own body. We speak of a subject which is ourselves,
of an object which is all the rest. These are separable in thought, but
united in any act of sensation, reflection, or volition. As there are
various degrees in which the mind may enter into or be abstracted from
the operations of sense, so there are various points at which this
separation or union may be supposed to occur. And within the sphere
of mind the analogy of sense reappears; and we distinguish not only
external objects, but objects of will and of knowledge which we contrast
with them. These again are comprehended in a higher object, which
reunites with the subject. A multitude of abstractions are created by
the efforts of successive thinkers which become logical determinations;
and they have to be arranged in order, before the scheme of thought is
complete. The framework of the human intellect is not the peculium of
an individual, but the joint work of many who are of all ages and
countries. What we are in mind is due, not merely to our physical, but
to our mental antecedents which we trace in history, and more especially
in the history of philosophy. Nor can mental phenomena be truly
explained either by physiology or by the observation of consciousness
apart from their history. They have a growth of their own, like the
growth of a flower, a tree, a human being. They may be conceived as of
themselves constituting a common mind, and having a sort of personal
identity in which they coexist.

So comprehensive is modern psychology, seeming to aim at constructing
anew the entire world of thought. And prior to or simultaneously with
this construction a negative process has to be carried on, a clearing
away of useless abstractions which we have inherited from the past. Many
erroneous conceptions of the mind derived from former philosophies
have found their way into language, and we with difficulty disengage
ourselves from them. Mere figures of speech have unconsciously
influenced the minds of great thinkers. Also there are some
distinctions, as, for example, that of the will and of the reason, and
of the moral and intellectual faculties, which are carried further than
is justified by experience. Any separation of things which we cannot see
or exactly define, though it may be necessary, is a fertile source of
error. The division of the mind into faculties or powers or virtues is
too deeply rooted in language to be got rid of, but it gives a false
impression. For if we reflect on ourselves we see that all our faculties
easily pass into one another, and are bound together in a single mind or
consciousness; but this mental unity is apt to be concealed from us by
the distinctions of language.

A profusion of words and ideas has obscured rather than enlightened
mental science. It is hard to say how many fallacies have arisen from
the representation of the mind as a box, as a 'tabula rasa,' a book,
a mirror, and the like. It is remarkable how Plato in the Theaetetus,
after having indulged in the figure of the waxen tablet and the decoy,
afterwards discards them. The mind is also represented by another class
of images, as the spring of a watch, a motive power, a breath, a stream,
a succession of points or moments. As Plato remarks in the Cratylus,
words expressive of motion as well as of rest are employed to describe
the faculties and operations of the mind; and in these there is
contained another store of fallacies. Some shadow or reflection of the
body seems always to adhere to our thoughts about ourselves, and mental
processes are hardly distinguished in language from bodily ones. To see
or perceive are used indifferently of both; the words intuition, moral
sense, common sense, the mind's eye, are figures of speech transferred
from one to the other. And many other words used in early poetry or in
sacred writings to express the works of mind have a materialistic sound;
for old mythology was allied to sense, and the distinction of matter and
mind had not as yet arisen. Thus materialism receives an illusive aid
from language; and both in philosophy and religion the imaginary figure
or association easily takes the place of real knowledge.

Again, there is the illusion of looking into our own minds as if our
thoughts or feelings were written down in a book. This is another figure
of speech, which might be appropriately termed 'the fallacy of the
looking-glass.' We cannot look at the mind unless we have the eye
which sees, and we can only look, not into, but out of the mind at
the thoughts, words, actions of ourselves and others. What we dimly
recognize within us is not experience, but rather the suggestion of an
experience, which we may gather, if we will, from the observation of the
world. The memory has but a feeble recollection of what we were saying
or doing a few weeks or a few months ago, and still less of what we
were thinking or feeling. This is one among many reasons why there is
so little self-knowledge among mankind; they do not carry with them
the thought of what they are or have been. The so-called 'facts of
consciousness' are equally evanescent; they are facts which nobody ever
saw, and which can neither be defined nor described. Of the three laws
of thought the first (All A = A) is an identical proposition--that is to
say, a mere word or symbol claiming to be a proposition: the two others
(Nothing can be A and not A, and Everything is either A or not A) are
untrue, because they exclude degrees and also the mixed modes and double
aspects under which truth is so often presented to us. To assert that
man is man is unmeaning; to say that he is free or necessary and cannot
be both is a half truth only. These are a few of the entanglements which
impede the natural course of human thought. Lastly, there is the fallacy
which lies still deeper, of regarding the individual mind apart from
the universal, or either, as a self-existent entity apart from the ideas
which are contained in them.

In ancient philosophies the analysis of the mind is still rudimentary
and imperfect. It naturally began with an effort to disengage the
universal from sense--this was the first lifting up of the mist. It
wavered between object and subject, passing imperceptibly from one or
Being to mind and thought. Appearance in the outward object was for a
time indistinguishable from opinion in the subject. At length mankind
spoke of knowing as well as of opining or perceiving. But when the word
'knowledge' was found how was it to be explained or defined? It was not
an error, it was a step in the right direction, when Protagoras said
that 'Man is the measure of all things,' and that 'All knowledge is
perception.' This was the subjective which corresponded to the objective
'All is flux.' But the thoughts of men deepened, and soon they began
to be aware that knowledge was neither sense, nor yet opinion--with or
without explanation; nor the expression of thought, nor the enumeration
of parts, nor the addition of characteristic marks. Motion and rest were
equally ill adapted to express its nature, although both must in some
sense be attributed to it; it might be described more truly as the mind
conversing with herself; the discourse of reason; the hymn of dialectic,
the science of relations, of ideas, of the so-called arts and sciences,
of the one, of the good, of the all:--this is the way along which Plato
is leading us in his later dialogues. In its higher signification it was
the knowledge, not of men, but of gods, perfect and all sufficing:--like
other ideals always passing out of sight, and nevertheless present to
the mind of Aristotle as well as Plato, and the reality to which they
were both tending. For Aristotle as well as Plato would in modern
phraseology have been termed a mystic; and like him would have defined
the higher philosophy to be 'Knowledge of being or essence,'--words to
which in our own day we have a difficulty in attaching a meaning.

Yet, in spite of Plato and his followers, mankind have again and again
returned to a sensational philosophy. As to some of the early thinkers,
amid the fleetings of sensible objects, ideas alone seemed to be fixed,
so to a later generation amid the fluctuation of philosophical opinions
the only fixed points appeared to be outward objects. Any pretence
of knowledge which went beyond them implied logical processes, of the
correctness of which they had no assurance and which at best were only
probable. The mind, tired of wandering, sought to rest on firm ground;
when the idols of philosophy and language were stripped off, the
perception of outward objects alone remained. The ancient Epicureans
never asked whether the comparison of these with one another did not
involve principles of another kind which were above and beyond them. In
like manner the modern inductive philosophy forgot to enquire into
the meaning of experience, and did not attempt to form a conception of
outward objects apart from the mind, or of the mind apart from them.
Soon objects of sense were merged in sensations and feelings, but
feelings and sensations were still unanalyzed. At last we return to
the doctrine attributed by Plato to Protagoras, that the mind is only a
succession of momentary perceptions. At this point the modern philosophy
of experience forms an alliance with ancient scepticism.

The higher truths of philosophy and religion are very far removed from
sense. Admitting that, like all other knowledge, they are derived from
experience, and that experience is ultimately resolvable into facts
which come to us through the eye and ear, still their origin is a
mere accident which has nothing to do with their true nature. They
are universal and unseen; they belong to all times--past, present, and
future. Any worthy notion of mind or reason includes them. The proof of
them is, 1st, their comprehensiveness and consistency with one another;
2ndly, their agreement with history and experience. But sensation is of
the present only, is isolated, is and is not in successive moments. It
takes the passing hour as it comes, following the lead of the eye or
ear instead of the command of reason. It is a faculty which man has in
common with the animals, and in which he is inferior to many of them.
The importance of the senses in us is that they are the apertures of the
mind, doors and windows through which we take in and make our own the
materials of knowledge. Regarded in any other point of view sensation
is of all mental acts the most trivial and superficial. Hence the term
'sensational' is rightly used to express what is shallow in thought and
feeling.

We propose in what follows, first of all, like Plato in the Theaetetus,
to analyse sensation, and secondly to trace the connexion between
theories of sensation and a sensational or Epicurean philosophy.

Paragraph I. We, as well as the ancients, speak of the five senses, and
of a sense, or common sense, which is the abstraction of them. The
term 'sense' is also used metaphorically, both in ancient and modern
philosophy, to express the operations of the mind which are immediate or
intuitive. Of the five senses, two--the sight and the hearing--are of
a more subtle and complex nature, while two others--the smell and the
taste--seem to be only more refined varieties of touch. All of them
are passive, and by this are distinguished from the active faculty of
speech: they receive impressions, but do not produce them, except in so
far as they are objects of sense themselves.

Physiology speaks to us of the wonderful apparatus of nerves, muscles,
tissues, by which the senses are enabled to fulfil their functions. It
traces the connexion, though imperfectly, of the bodily organs with the
operations of the mind. Of these latter, it seems rather to know the
conditions than the causes. It can prove to us that without the brain we
cannot think, and that without the eye we cannot see: and yet there is
far more in thinking and seeing than is given by the brain and the eye.
It observes the 'concomitant variations' of body and mind. Psychology,
on the other hand, treats of the same subject regarded from another
point of view. It speaks of the relation of the senses to one another;
it shows how they meet the mind; it analyzes the transition from sense
to thought. The one describes their nature as apparent to the outward
eye; by the other they are regarded only as the instruments of the mind.
It is in this latter point of view that we propose to consider them.

The simplest sensation involves an unconscious or nascent operation
of the mind; it implies objects of sense, and objects of sense have
differences of form, number, colour. But the conception of an object
without us, or the power of discriminating numbers, forms, colours,
is not given by the sense, but by the mind. A mere sensation does not
attain to distinctness: it is a confused impression, sugkechumenon ti,
as Plato says (Republic), until number introduces light and order
into the confusion. At what point confusion becomes distinctness is a
question of degree which cannot be precisely determined. The distant
object, the undefined notion, come out into relief as we approach
them or attend to them. Or we may assist the analysis by attempting
to imagine the world first dawning upon the eye of the infant or of a
person newly restored to sight. Yet even with them the mind as well
as the eye opens or enlarges. For all three are inseparably bound
together--the object would be nowhere and nothing, if not perceived by
the sense, and the sense would have no power of distinguishing without
the mind.

But prior to objects of sense there is a third nature in which they
are contained--that is to say, space, which may be explained in various
ways. It is the element which surrounds them; it is the vacuum or void
which they leave or occupy when passing from one portion of space to
another. It might be described in the language of ancient philosophy, as
'the Not-being' of objects. It is a negative idea which in the course
of ages has become positive. It is originally derived from the
contemplation of the world without us--the boundless earth or sea, the
vacant heaven, and is therefore acquired chiefly through the sense of
sight: to the blind the conception of space is feeble and inadequate,
derived for the most part from touch or from the descriptions of others.
At first it appears to be continuous; afterwards we perceive it to be
capable of division by lines or points, real or imaginary. By the
help of mathematics we form another idea of space, which is altogether
independent of experience. Geometry teaches us that the innumerable
lines and figures by which space is or may be intersected are absolutely
true in all their combinations and consequences. New and unchangeable
properties of space are thus developed, which are proved to us in a
thousand ways by mathematical reasoning as well as by common experience.
Through quantity and measure we are conducted to our simplest and purest
notion of matter, which is to the cube or solid what space is to
the square or surface. And all our applications of mathematics are
applications of our ideas of space to matter. No wonder then that they
seem to have a necessary existence to us. Being the simplest of our
ideas, space is also the one of which we have the most difficulty in
ridding ourselves. Neither can we set a limit to it, for wherever we
fix a limit, space is springing up beyond. Neither can we conceive a
smallest or indivisible portion of it; for within the smallest there
is a smaller still; and even these inconceivable qualities of space,
whether the infinite or the infinitesimal, may be made the subject of
reasoning and have a certain truth to us.

Whether space exists in the mind or out of it, is a question which has
no meaning. We should rather say that without it the mind is incapable
of conceiving the body, and therefore of conceiving itself. The mind may
be indeed imagined to contain the body, in the same way that Aristotle
(partly following Plato) supposes God to be the outer heaven or circle
of the universe. But how can the individual mind carry about the
universe of space packed up within, or how can separate minds have
either a universe of their own or a common universe? In such conceptions
there seems to be a confusion of the individual and the universal. To
say that we can only have a true idea of ourselves when we deny the
reality of that by which we have any idea of ourselves is an absurdity.
The earth which is our habitation and 'the starry heaven above' and
we ourselves are equally an illusion, if space is only a quality or
condition of our minds.

Again, we may compare the truths of space with other truths derived from
experience, which seem to have a necessity to us in proportion to the
frequency of their recurrence or the truth of the consequences which may
be inferred from them. We are thus led to remark that the necessity
in our ideas of space on which much stress has been laid, differs in a
slight degree only from the necessity which appears to belong to other
of our ideas, e.g. weight, motion, and the like. And there is another
way in which this necessity may be explained. We have been taught it,
and the truth which we were taught or which we inherited has never been
contradicted in all our experience and is therefore confirmed by it. Who
can resist an idea which is presented to him in a general form in every
moment of his life and of which he finds no instance to the contrary?
The greater part of what is sometimes regarded as the a priori intuition
of space is really the conception of the various geometrical figures of
which the properties have been revealed by mathematical analysis. And
the certainty of these properties is immeasurably increased to us by our
finding that they hold good not only in every instance, but in all the
consequences which are supposed to flow from them.

Neither must we forget that our idea of space, like our other ideas,
has a history. The Homeric poems contain no word for it; even the later
Greek philosophy has not the Kantian notion of space, but only the
definite 'place' or 'the infinite.' To Plato, in the Timaeus, it is
known only as the 'nurse of generation.' When therefore we speak of
the necessity of our ideas of space we must remember that this is a
necessity which has grown up with the growth of the human mind, and
has been made by ourselves. We can free ourselves from the perplexities
which are involved in it by ascending to a time in which they did not
as yet exist. And when space or time are described as 'a priori forms or
intuitions added to the matter given in sensation,' we should consider
that such expressions belong really to the 'pre-historic study' of
philosophy, i.e. to the eighteenth century, when men sought to explain
the human mind without regard to history or language or the social
nature of man.

In every act of sense there is a latent perception of space, of which
we only become conscious when objects are withdrawn from it. There are
various ways in which we may trace the connexion between them. We may
think of space as unresisting matter, and of matter as divided into
objects; or of objects again as formed by abstraction into a collective
notion of matter, and of matter as rarefied into space. And motion may
be conceived as the union of there and not there in space, and force
as the materializing or solidification of motion. Space again is the
individual and universal in one; or, in other words, a perception and
also a conception. So easily do what are sometimes called our simple
ideas pass into one another, and differences of kind resolve themselves
into differences of degree.

Within or behind space there is another abstraction in many respects
similar to it--time, the form of the inward, as space is the form of the
outward. As we cannot think of outward objects of sense or of outward
sensations without space, so neither can we think of a succession of
sensations without time. It is the vacancy of thoughts or sensations,
as space is the void of outward objects, and we can no more imagine
the mind without the one than the world without the other. It is to
arithmetic what space is to geometry; or, more strictly, arithmetic may
be said to be equally applicable to both. It is defined in our minds,
partly by the analogy of space and partly by the recollection of events
which have happened to us, or the consciousness of feelings which we are
experiencing. Like space, it is without limit, for whatever beginning or
end of time we fix, there is a beginning and end before them, and so
on without end. We speak of a past, present, and future, and again the
analogy of space assists us in conceiving of them as coexistent. When
the limit of time is removed there arises in our minds the idea of
eternity, which at first, like time itself, is only negative, but
gradually, when connected with the world and the divine nature, like
the other negative infinity of space, becomes positive. Whether time is
prior to the mind and to experience, or coeval with them, is (like
the parallel question about space) unmeaning. Like space it has been
realized gradually: in the Homeric poems, or even in the Hesiodic
cosmogony, there is no more notion of time than of space. The conception
of being is more general than either, and might therefore with greater
plausibility be affirmed to be a condition or quality of the mind. The a
priori intuitions of Kant would have been as unintelligible to Plato as
his a priori synthetical propositions to Aristotle. The philosopher of
Konigsberg supposed himself to be analyzing a necessary mode of thought:
he was not aware that he was dealing with a mere abstraction. But now
that we are able to trace the gradual developement of ideas through
religion, through language, through abstractions, why should we
interpose the fiction of time between ourselves and realities? Why
should we single out one of these abstractions to be the a priori
condition of all the others? It comes last and not first in the order of
our thoughts, and is not the condition precedent of them, but the last
generalization of them. Nor can any principle be imagined more suicidal
to philosophy than to assume that all the truth which we are capable of
attaining is seen only through an unreal medium. If all that exists
in time is illusion, we may well ask with Plato, 'What becomes of the
mind?'

Leaving the a priori conditions of sensation we may proceed to consider
acts of sense. These admit of various degrees of duration or intensity;
they admit also of a greater or less extension from one object, which is
perceived directly, to many which are perceived indirectly or in a less
degree, and to the various associations of the object which are latent
in the mind. In general the greater the intension the less the extension
of them. The simplest sensation implies some relation of objects to
one another, some position in space, some relation to a previous or
subsequent sensation. The acts of seeing and hearing may be almost
unconscious and may pass away unnoted; they may also leave an impression
behind them or power of recalling them. If, after seeing an object we
shut our eyes, the object remains dimly seen in the same or about the
same place, but with form and lineaments half filled up. This is the
simplest act of memory. And as we cannot see one thing without at
the same time seeing another, different objects hang together in
recollection, and when we call for one the other quickly follows. To
think of the place in which we have last seen a thing is often the
best way of recalling it to the mind. Hence memory is dependent on
association. The act of recollection may be compared to the sight of an
object at a great distance which we have previously seen near and seek
to bring near to us in thought. Memory is to sense as dreaming is to
waking; and like dreaming has a wayward and uncertain power of recalling
impressions from the past.

Thus begins the passage from the outward to the inward sense. But as
yet there is no conception of a universal--the mind only remembers
the individual object or objects, and is always attaching to them some
colour or association of sense. The power of recollection seems to
depend on the intensity or largeness of the perception, or on the
strength of some emotion with which it is inseparably connected. This is
the natural memory which is allied to sense, such as children appear to
have and barbarians and animals. It is necessarily limited in range, and
its limitation is its strength. In later life, when the mind has become
crowded with names, acts, feelings, images innumerable, we acquire
by education another memory of system and arrangement which is both
stronger and weaker than the first--weaker in the recollection
of sensible impressions as they are represented to us by eye or
ear--stronger by the natural connexion of ideas with objects or with one
another. And many of the notions which form a part of the train of our
thoughts are hardly realized by us at the time, but, like numbers or
algebraical symbols, are used as signs only, thus lightening the labour
of recollection.

And now we may suppose that numerous images present themselves to the
mind, which begins to act upon them and to arrange them in various
ways. Besides the impression of external objects present with us or just
absent from us, we have a dimmer conception of other objects which have
disappeared from our immediate recollection and yet continue to exist in
us. The mind is full of fancies which are passing to and fro before it.
Some feeling or association calls them up, and they are uttered by the
lips. This is the first rudimentary imagination, which may be truly
described in the language of Hobbes, as 'decaying sense,' an expression
which may be applied with equal truth to memory as well. For memory and
imagination, though we sometimes oppose them, are nearly allied; the
difference between them seems chiefly to lie in the activity of the one
compared with the passivity of the other. The sense decaying in memory
receives a flash of light or life from imagination. Dreaming is a link
of connexion between them; for in dreaming we feebly recollect and also
feebly imagine at one and the same time. When reason is asleep the
lower part of the mind wanders at will amid the images which have been
received from without, the intelligent element retires, and the sensual
or sensuous takes its place. And so in the first efforts of imagination
reason is latent or set aside; and images, in part disorderly, but also
having a unity (however imperfect) of their own, pour like a flood over
the mind. And if we could penetrate into the heads of animals we should
probably find that their intelligence, or the state of what in them is
analogous to our intelligence, is of this nature.

Thus far we have been speaking of men, rather in the points in which
they resemble animals than in the points in which they differ from
them. The animal too has memory in various degrees, and the elements
of imagination, if, as appears to be the case, he dreams. How far their
powers or instincts are educated by the circumstances of their lives
or by intercourse with one another or with mankind, we cannot precisely
tell. They, like ourselves, have the physical inheritance of form,
scent, hearing, sight, and other qualities or instincts. But they
have not the mental inheritance of thoughts and ideas handed down by
tradition, 'the slow additions that build up the mind' of the human
race. And language, which is the great educator of mankind, is wanting
in them; whereas in us language is ever present--even in the infant the
latent power of naming is almost immediately observable. And therefore
the description which has been already given of the nascent power of
the faculties is in reality an anticipation. For simultaneous with their
growth in man a growth of language must be supposed. The child of two
years old sees the fire once and again, and the feeble observation of
the same recurring object is associated with the feeble utterance of the
name by which he is taught to call it. Soon he learns to utter the name
when the object is no longer there, but the desire or imagination of it
is present to him. At first in every use of the word there is a colour
of sense, an indistinct picture of the object which accompanies it. But
in later years he sees in the name only the universal or class word, and
the more abstract the notion becomes, the more vacant is the image
which is presented to him. Henceforward all the operations of his mind,
including the perceptions of sense, are a synthesis of sensations,
words, conceptions. In seeing or hearing or looking or listening the
sensible impression prevails over the conception and the word. In
reflection the process is reversed--the outward object fades away into
nothingness, the name or the conception or both together are everything.
Language, like number, is intermediate between the two, partaking of the
definiteness of the outer and of the universality of the inner world.
For logic teaches us that every word is really a universal, and only
condescends by the help of position or circumlocution to become the
expression of individuals or particulars. And sometimes by using words
as symbols we are able to give a 'local habitation and a name' to the
infinite and inconceivable.

Thus we see that no line can be drawn between the powers of sense and
of reflection--they pass imperceptibly into one another. We may indeed
distinguish between the seeing and the closed eye--between the sensation
and the recollection of it. But this distinction carries us a very
little way, for recollection is present in sight as well as sight
in recollection. There is no impression of sense which does not
simultaneously recall differences of form, number, colour, and the like.
Neither is such a distinction applicable at all to our internal bodily
sensations, which give no sign of themselves when unaccompanied with
pain, and even when we are most conscious of them, have often no
assignable place in the human frame. Who can divide the nerves or great
nervous centres from the mind which uses them? Who can separate the
pains and pleasures of the mind from the pains and pleasures of the
body? The words 'inward and outward,' 'active and passive,' 'mind and
body,' are best conceived by us as differences of degree passing into
differences of kind, and at one time and under one aspect acting in
harmony and then again opposed. They introduce a system and order into
the knowledge of our being; and yet, like many other general terms, are
often in advance of our actual analysis or observation.

According to some writers the inward sense is only the fading away or
imperfect realization of the outward. But this leaves out of sight one
half of the phenomenon. For the mind is not only withdrawn from
the world of sense but introduced to a higher world of thought and
reflection, in which, like the outward sense, she is trained and
educated. By use the outward sense becomes keener and more intense,
especially when confined within narrow limits. The savage with little
or no thought has a quicker discernment of the track than the civilised
man; in like manner the dog, having the help of scent as well as of
sight, is superior to the savage. By use again the inward thought
becomes more defined and distinct; what was at first an effort is made
easy by the natural instrumentality of language, and the mind learns to
grasp universals with no more exertion than is required for the sight of
an outward object. There is a natural connexion and arrangement of them,
like the association of objects in a landscape. Just as a note or two of
music suffices to recall a whole piece to the musician's or composer's
mind, so a great principle or leading thought suggests and arranges a
world of particulars. The power of reflection is not feebler than the
faculty of sense, but of a higher and more comprehensive nature. It not
only receives the universals of sense, but gives them a new content by
comparing and combining them with one another. It withdraws from the
seen that it may dwell in the unseen. The sense only presents us with
a flat and impenetrable surface: the mind takes the world to pieces and
puts it together on a new pattern. The universals which are detached
from sense are reconstructed in science. They and not the mere
impressions of sense are the truth of the world in which we live; and
(as an argument to those who will only believe 'what they can hold in
their hands') we may further observe that they are the source of our
power over it. To say that the outward sense is stronger than the
inward is like saying that the arm of the workman is stronger than the
constructing or directing mind.

Returning to the senses we may briefly consider two questions--first
their relation to the mind, secondly, their relation to outward
objects:--

1. The senses are not merely 'holes set in a wooden horse' (Theaet.),
but instruments of the mind with which they are organically connected.
There is no use of them without some use of words--some natural or
latent logic--some previous experience or observation. Sensation, like
all other mental processes, is complex and relative, though apparently
simple. The senses mutually confirm and support one another; it is hard
to say how much our impressions of hearing may be affected by those
of sight, or how far our impressions of sight may be corrected by the
touch, especially in infancy. The confirmation of them by one another
cannot of course be given by any one of them. Many intuitions which are
inseparable from the act of sense are really the result of complicated
reasonings. The most cursory glance at objects enables the experienced
eye to judge approximately of their relations and distance, although
nothing is impressed upon the retina except colour, including gradations
of light and shade. From these delicate and almost imperceptible
differences we seem chiefly to derive our ideas of distance and
position. By comparison of what is near with what is distant we learn
that the tree, house, river, etc. which are a long way off are objects
of a like nature with those which are seen by us in our immediate
neighbourhood, although the actual impression made on the eye is very
different in one case and in the other. This is a language of 'large and
small letters' (Republic), slightly differing in form and exquisitely
graduated by distance, which we are learning all our life long, and
which we attain in various degrees according to our powers of sight or
observation. There is nor the consideration. The greater or less strain
upon the nerves of the eye or ear is communicated to the mind and
silently informs the judgment. We have also the use not of one eye only,
but of two, which give us a wider range, and help us to discern, by the
greater or less acuteness of the angle which the rays of sight form,
the distance of an object and its relation to other objects. But we are
already passing beyond the limits of our actual knowledge on a subject
which has given rise to many conjectures. More important than the
addition of another conjecture is the observation, whether in the case
of sight or of any other sense, of the great complexity of the causes
and the great simplicity of the effect.

The sympathy of the mind and the ear is no less striking than
the sympathy of the mind and the eye. Do we not seem to perceive
instinctively and as an act of sense the differences of articulate
speech and of musical notes? Yet how small a part of speech or of music
is produced by the impression of the ear compared with that which is
furnished by the mind!

Again: the more refined faculty of sense, as in animals so also in man,
seems often to be transmitted by inheritance. Neither must we forget
that in the use of the senses, as in his whole nature, man is a social
being, who is always being educated by language, habit, and the teaching
of other men as well as by his own observation. He knows distance
because he is taught it by a more experienced judgment than his own; he
distinguishes sounds because he is told to remark them by a person of
a more discerning ear. And as we inherit from our parents or other
ancestors peculiar powers of sense or feeling, so we improve and
strengthen them, not only by regular teaching, but also by sympathy and
communion with other persons.

2. The second question, namely, that concerning the relation of the mind
to external objects, is really a trifling one, though it has been made
the subject of a famous philosophy. We may if we like, with Berkeley,
resolve objects of sense into sensations; but the change is one of name
only, and nothing is gained and something is lost by such a resolution
or confusion of them. For we have not really made a single step towards
idealism, and any arbitrary inversion of our ordinary modes of speech is
disturbing to the mind. The youthful metaphysician is delighted at his
marvellous discovery that nothing is, and that what we see or feel is
our sensation only: for a day or two the world has a new interest to
him; he alone knows the secret which has been communicated to him by the
philosopher, that mind is all--when in fact he is going out of his mind
in the first intoxication of a great thought. But he soon finds that
all things remain as they were--the laws of motion, the properties of
matter, the qualities of substances. After having inflicted his theories
on any one who is willing to receive them 'first on his father and
mother, secondly on some other patient listener, thirdly on his dog,'
he finds that he only differs from the rest of mankind in the use of a
word. He had once hoped that by getting rid of the solidity of matter he
might open a passage to worlds beyond. He liked to think of the world as
the representation of the divine nature, and delighted to imagine angels
and spirits wandering through space, present in the room in which he is
sitting without coming through the door, nowhere and everywhere at the
same instant. At length he finds that he has been the victim of his own
fancies; he has neither more nor less evidence of the supernatural than
he had before. He himself has become unsettled, but the laws of the
world remain fixed as at the beginning. He has discovered that his
appeal to the fallibility of sense was really an illusion. For whatever
uncertainty there may be in the appearances of nature, arises only out
of the imperfection or variation of the human senses, or possibly from
the deficiency of certain branches of knowledge; when science is able to
apply her tests, the uncertainty is at an end. We are apt sometimes
to think that moral and metaphysical philosophy are lowered by the
influence which is exercised over them by physical science. But any
interpretation of nature by physical science is far in advance of such
idealism. The philosophy of Berkeley, while giving unbounded license to
the imagination, is still grovelling on the level of sense.

We may, if we please, carry this scepticism a step further, and
deny, not only objects of sense, but the continuity of our sensations
themselves. We may say with Protagoras and Hume that what is appears,
and that what appears appears only to individuals, and to the same
individual only at one instant. But then, as Plato asks,--and we must
repeat the question,--What becomes of the mind? Experience tells us by a
thousand proofs that our sensations of colour, taste, and the like,
are the same as they were an instant ago--that the act which we are
performing one minute is continued by us in the next--and also
supplies abundant proof that the perceptions of other men are, speaking
generally, the same or nearly the same with our own. After having slowly
and laboriously in the course of ages gained a conception of a whole and
parts, of the constitution of the mind, of the relation of man to God
and nature, imperfect indeed, but the best we can, we are asked to
return again to the 'beggarly elements' of ancient scepticism, and
acknowledge only atoms and sensations devoid of life or unity. Why
should we not go a step further still and doubt the existence of the
senses of all things? We are but 'such stuff as dreams are made of;'
for we have left ourselves no instruments of thought by which we can
distinguish man from the animals, or conceive of the existence even of a
mollusc. And observe, this extreme scepticism has been allowed to spring
up among us, not, like the ancient scepticism, in an age when nature and
language really seemed to be full of illusions, but in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, when men walk in the daylight of inductive
science.

The attractiveness of such speculations arises out of their true nature
not being perceived. They are veiled in graceful language; they are not
pushed to extremes; they stop where the human mind is disposed also to
stop--short of a manifest absurdity. Their inconsistency is not observed
by their authors or by mankind in general, who are equally inconsistent
themselves. They leave on the mind a pleasing sense of wonder and
novelty: in youth they seem to have a natural affinity to one class of
persons as poetry has to another; but in later life either we drift
back into common sense, or we make them the starting-points of a higher
philosophy.

We are often told that we should enquire into all things before we
accept them;--with what limitations is this true? For we cannot use
our senses without admitting that we have them, or think without
presupposing that there is in us a power of thought, or affirm that all
knowledge is derived from experience without implying that this first
principle of knowledge is prior to experience. The truth seems to be
that we begin with the natural use of the mind as of the body, and
we seek to describe this as well as we can. We eat before we know the
nature of digestion; we think before we know the nature of reflection.
As our knowledge increases, our perception of the mind enlarges also. We
cannot indeed get beyond facts, but neither can we draw any line which
separates facts from ideas. And the mind is not something separate
from them but included in them, and they in the mind, both having a
distinctness and individuality of their own. To reduce our conception of
mind to a succession of feelings and sensations is like the attempt to
view a wide prospect by inches through a microscope, or to calculate a
period of chronology by minutes. The mind ceases to exist when it loses
its continuity, which though far from being its highest determination,
is yet necessary to any conception of it. Even an inanimate nature
cannot be adequately represented as an endless succession of states or
conditions.

Paragraph II. Another division of the subject has yet to be considered:
Why should the doctrine that knowledge is sensation, in ancient times,
or of sensationalism or materialism in modern times, be allied to the
lower rather than to the higher view of ethical philosophy? At
first sight the nature and origin of knowledge appear to be wholly
disconnected from ethics and religion, nor can we deny that the ancient
Stoics were materialists, or that the materialist doctrines prevalent
in modern times have been associated with great virtues, or that both
religious and philosophical idealism have not unfrequently parted
company with practice. Still upon the whole it must be admitted that the
higher standard of duty has gone hand in hand with the higher conception
of knowledge. It is Protagoras who is seeking to adapt himself to
the opinions of the world; it is Plato who rises above them: the one
maintaining that all knowledge is sensation; the other basing the
virtues on the idea of good. The reason of this phenomenon has now to be
examined.

By those who rest knowledge immediately upon sense, that explanation of
human action is deemed to be the truest which is nearest to sense. As
knowledge is reduced to sensation, so virtue is reduced to feeling,
happiness or good to pleasure. The different virtues--the various
characters which exist in the world--are the disguises of self-interest.
Human nature is dried up; there is no place left for imagination, or in
any higher sense for religion. Ideals of a whole, or of a state, or of a
law of duty, or of a divine perfection, are out of place in an Epicurean
philosophy. The very terms in which they are expressed are suspected of
having no meaning. Man is to bring himself back as far as he is able to
the condition of a rational beast. He is to limit himself to the pursuit
of pleasure, but of this he is to make a far-sighted calculation;--he is
to be rationalized, secularized, animalized: or he is to be an amiable
sceptic, better than his own philosophy, and not falling below the
opinions of the world.

Imagination has been called that 'busy faculty' which is always
intruding upon us in the search after truth. But imagination is also
that higher power by which we rise above ourselves and the commonplaces
of thought and life. The philosophical imagination is another name for
reason finding an expression of herself in the outward world. To deprive
life of ideals is to deprive it of all higher and comprehensive aims and
of the power of imparting and communicating them to others. For men are
taught, not by those who are on a level with them, but by those who rise
above them, who see the distant hills, who soar into the empyrean. Like
a bird in a cage, the mind confined to sense is always being brought
back from the higher to the lower, from the wider to the narrower view
of human knowledge. It seeks to fly but cannot: instead of aspiring
towards perfection, 'it hovers about this lower world and the earthly
nature.' It loses the religious sense which more than any other seems to
take a man out of himself. Weary of asking 'What is truth?' it accepts
the 'blind witness of eyes and ears;' it draws around itself the curtain
of the physical world and is satisfied. The strength of a sensational
philosophy lies in the ready accommodation of it to the minds of men;
many who have been metaphysicians in their youth, as they advance in
years are prone to acquiesce in things as they are, or rather appear to
be. They are spectators, not thinkers, and the best philosophy is that
which requires of them the least amount of mental effort.

As a lower philosophy is easier to apprehend than a higher, so a lower
way of life is easier to follow; and therefore such a philosophy seems
to derive a support from the general practice of mankind. It appeals to
principles which they all know and recognize: it gives back to them in a
generalized form the results of their own experience. To the man of the
world they are the quintessence of his own reflections upon life. To
follow custom, to have no new ideas or opinions, not to be straining
after impossibilities, to enjoy to-day with just so much forethought as
is necessary to provide for the morrow, this is regarded by the greater
part of the world as the natural way of passing through existence. And
many who have lived thus have attained to a lower kind of happiness
or equanimity. They have possessed their souls in peace without ever
allowing them to wander into the region of religious or political
controversy, and without any care for the higher interests of man. But
nearly all the good (as well as some of the evil) which has ever been
done in this world has been the work of another spirit, the work of
enthusiasts and idealists, of apostles and martyrs. The leaders
of mankind have not been of the gentle Epicurean type; they have
personified ideas; they have sometimes also been the victims of them.
But they have always been seeking after a truth or ideal of which they
fell short; and have died in a manner disappointed of their hopes that
they might lift the human race out of the slough in which they found
them. They have done little compared with their own visions and
aspirations; but they have done that little, only because they sought to
do, and once perhaps thought that they were doing, a great deal more.

The philosophies of Epicurus or Hume give no adequate or dignified
conception of the mind. There is no organic unity in a succession of
feeling or sensations; no comprehensiveness in an infinity of separate
actions. The individual never reflects upon himself as a whole; he can
hardly regard one act or part of his life as the cause or effect of any
other act or part. Whether in practice or speculation, he is to himself
only in successive instants. To such thinkers, whether in ancient or in
modern times, the mind is only the poor recipient of impressions--not
the heir of all the ages, or connected with all other minds. It
begins again with its own modicum of experience having only such vague
conceptions of the wisdom of the past as are inseparable from language
and popular opinion. It seeks to explain from the experience of the
individual what can only be learned from the history of the world. It
has no conception of obligation, duty, conscience--these are to the
Epicurean or Utilitarian philosopher only names which interfere with our
natural perceptions of pleasure and pain.

There seem then to be several answers to the question, Why the theory
that all knowledge is sensation is allied to the lower rather than to
the higher view of ethical philosophy:--1st, Because it is easier to
understand and practise; 2ndly, Because it is fatal to the pursuit of
ideals, moral, political, or religious; 3rdly, Because it deprives us of
the means and instruments of higher thought, of any adequate conception
of the mind, of knowledge, of conscience, of moral obligation.

...

ON THE NATURE AND LIMITS Of PSYCHOLOGY.

     O gar arche men o me oide, teleute de kai ta metaxu ex ou me
     oide sumpeplektai, tis mechane ten toiauten omologian pote
     epistemen genesthai; Plato Republic.

     Monon gar auto legeiv, osper gumnon kai aperemomenon apo ton
     onton apanton, adunaton.  Soph.

Since the above essay first appeared, many books on Psychology have been
given to the world, partly based upon the views of Herbart and other
German philosophers, partly independent of them. The subject has gained
in bulk and extent; whether it has had any true growth is more doubtful.
It begins to assume the language and claim the authority of a science;
but it is only an hypothesis or outline, which may be filled up in many
ways according to the fancy of individual thinkers. The basis of it is
a precarious one,--consciousness of ourselves and a somewhat uncertain
observation of the rest of mankind. Its relations to other sciences
are not yet determined: they seem to be almost too complicated to be
ascertained. It may be compared to an irregular building, run up hastily
and not likely to last, because its foundations are weak, and in many
places rest only on the surface of the ground. It has sought rather to
put together scattered observations and to make them into a system than
to describe or prove them. It has never severely drawn the line between
facts and opinions. It has substituted a technical phraseology for the
common use of language, being neither able to win acceptance for the one
nor to get rid of the other.

The system which has thus arisen appears to be a kind of metaphysic
narrowed to the point of view of the individual mind, through which, as
through some new optical instrument limiting the sphere of vision, the
interior of thought and sensation is examined. But the individual mind
in the abstract, as distinct from the mind of a particular individual
and separated from the environment of circumstances, is a fiction only.
Yet facts which are partly true gather around this fiction and are
naturally described by the help of it. There is also a common type of
the mind which is derived from the comparison of many minds with one
another and with our own. The phenomena of which Psychology treats are
familiar to us, but they are for the most part indefinite; they relate
to a something inside the body, which seems also to overleap the limits
of space. The operations of this something, when isolated, cannot be
analyzed by us or subjected to observation and experiment. And there is
another point to be considered. The mind, when thinking, cannot
survey that part of itself which is used in thought. It can only
be contemplated in the past, that is to say, in the history of the
individual or of the world. This is the scientific method of studying
the mind. But Psychology has also some other supports, specious rather
than real. It is partly sustained by the false analogy of Physical
Science and has great expectations from its near relationship to
Physiology. We truly remark that there is an infinite complexity of
the body corresponding to the infinite subtlety of the mind; we are
conscious that they are very nearly connected. But in endeavouring to
trace the nature of the connexion we are baffled and disappointed. In
our knowledge of them the gulf remains the same: no microscope has ever
seen into thought; no reflection on ourselves has supplied the missing
link between mind and matter...These are the conditions of this very
inexact science, and we shall only know less of it by pretending to
know more, or by assigning to it a form or style to which it has not yet
attained and is not really entitled.

Experience shows that any system, however baseless and ineffectual, in
our own or in any other age, may be accepted and continue to be studied,
if it seeks to satisfy some unanswered question or is based upon some
ancient tradition, especially if it takes the form and uses the language
of inductive philosophy. The fact therefore that such a science exists
and is popular, affords no evidence of its truth or value. Many who have
pursued it far into detail have never examined the foundations on which
it rests. The have been many imaginary subjects of knowledge of which
enthusiastic persons have made a lifelong study, without ever asking
themselves what is the evidence for them, what is the use of them, how
long they will last? They may pass away, like the authors of them, and
'leave not a wrack behind;' or they may survive in fragments. Nor is it
only in the Middle Ages, or in the literary desert of China or of India,
that such systems have arisen; in our own enlightened age, growing up
by the side of Physics, Ethics, and other really progressive sciences,
there is a weary waste of knowledge, falsely so-called. There are sham
sciences which no logic has ever put to the test, in which the desire
for knowledge invents the materials of it.

And therefore it is expedient once more to review the bases of
Psychology, lest we should be imposed upon by its pretensions. The
study of it may have done good service by awakening us to the sense of
inveterate errors familiarized by language, yet it may have fallen into
still greater ones; under the pretence of new investigations it may be
wasting the lives of those who are engaged in it. It may also be found
that the discussion of it will throw light upon some points in the
Theaetetus of Plato,--the oldest work on Psychology which has come down
to us. The imaginary science may be called, in the language of ancient
philosophy, 'a shadow of a part of Dialectic or Metaphysic' (Gorg.).

In this postscript or appendix we propose to treat, first, of the true
bases of Psychology; secondly, of the errors into which the students of
it are most likely to fall; thirdly, of the principal subjects which
are usually comprehended under it; fourthly, of the form which facts
relating to the mind most naturally assume.

We may preface the enquiry by two or three remarks:--

(1) We do not claim for the popular Psychology the position of a science
at all; it cannot, like the Physical Sciences, proceed by the Inductive
Method: it has not the necessity of Mathematics: it does not, like
Metaphysic, argue from abstract notions or from internal coherence. It
is made up of scattered observations. A few of these, though they may
sometimes appear to be truisms, are of the greatest value, and free
from all doubt. We are conscious of them in ourselves; we observe them
working in others; we are assured of them at all times. For example, we
are absolutely certain, (a) of the influence exerted by the mind over
the body or by the body over the mind: (b) of the power of association,
by which the appearance of some person or the occurrence of some event
recalls to mind, not always but often, other persons and events: (c)
of the effect of habit, which is strongest when least disturbed by
reflection, and is to the mind what the bones are to the body: (d) of
the real, though not unlimited, freedom of the human will: (e) of the
reference, more or less distinct, of our sensations, feelings, thoughts,
actions, to ourselves, which is called consciousness, or, when in
excess, self-consciousness: (f) of the distinction of the 'I' and 'Not
I,' of ourselves and outward objects. But when we attempt to gather up
these elements in a single system, we discover that the links by which
we combine them are apt to be mere words. We are in a country which
has never been cleared or surveyed; here and there only does a gleam of
light come through the darkness of the forest.

(2) These fragments, although they can never become science in the
ordinary sense of the word, are a real part of knowledge and may be of
great value in education. We may be able to add a good deal to them from
our own experience, and we may verify them by it. Self-examination
is one of those studies which a man can pursue alone, by attention to
himself and the processes of his individual mind. He may learn much
about his own character and about the character of others, if he will
'make his mind sit down' and look at itself in the glass. The great, if
not the only use of such a study is a practical one,--to know, first,
human nature, and, secondly, our own nature, as it truly is.

(3) Hence it is important that we should conceive of the mind in the
noblest and simplest manner. While acknowledging that language has been
the greatest factor in the formation of human thought, we must endeavour
to get rid of the disguises, oppositions, contradictions, which
arise out of it. We must disengage ourselves from the ideas which the
customary use of words has implanted in us. To avoid error as much as
possible when we are speaking of things unseen, the principal terms
which we use should be few, and we should not allow ourselves to be
enslaved by them. Instead of seeking to frame a technical language,
we should vary our forms of speech, lest they should degenerate into
formulas. A difficult philosophical problem is better understood when
translated into the vernacular.

I.a. Psychology is inseparable from language, and early language
contains the first impressions or the oldest experience of man
respecting himself. These impressions are not accurate representations
of the truth; they are the reflections of a rudimentary age of
philosophy. The first and simplest forms of thought are rooted so deep
in human nature that they can never be got rid of; but they have been
perpetually enlarged and elevated, and the use of many words has been
transferred from the body to the mind. The spiritual and intellectual
have thus become separated from the material--there is a cleft between
them; and the heart and the conscience of man rise above the dominion
of the appetites and create a new language in which they too find
expression. As the differences of actions begin to be perceived, more
and more names are needed. This is the first analysis of the human mind;
having a general foundation in popular experience, it is moulded to
a certain extent by hierophants and philosophers. (See Introd. to
Cratylus.)

b. This primitive psychology is continually receiving additions from the
first thinkers, who in return take a colour from the popular language
of the time. The mind is regarded from new points of view, and becomes
adapted to new conditions of knowledge. It seeks to isolate itself
from matter and sense, and to assert its independence in thought. It
recognizes that it is independent of the external world. It has five
or six natural states or stages:--(1) sensation, in which it is almost
latent or quiescent: (2) feeling, or inner sense, when the mind is just
awakening: (3) memory, which is decaying sense, and from time to time,
as with a spark or flash, has the power of recollecting or reanimating
the buried past: (4) thought, in which images pass into abstract notions
or are intermingled with them: (5) action, in which the mind moves
forward, of itself, or under the impulse of want or desire or pain,
to attain or avoid some end or consequence: and (6) there is the
composition of these or the admixture or assimilation of them in various
degrees. We never see these processes of the mind, nor can we tell the
causes of them. But we know them by their results, and learn from other
men that so far as we can describe to them or they to us the workings of
the mind, their experience is the same or nearly the same with our own.

c. But the knowledge of the mind is not to any great extent derived
from the observation of the individual by himself. It is the growing
consciousness of the human race, embodied in language, acknowledged
by experience, and corrected from time to time by the influence of
literature and philosophy. A great, perhaps the most important, part of
it is to be found in early Greek thought. In the Theaetetus of Plato it
has not yet become fixed: we are still stumbling on the threshold.
In Aristotle the process is more nearly completed, and has gained
innumerable abstractions, of which many have had to be thrown away
because relative only to the controversies of the time. In the interval
between Thales and Aristotle were realized the distinctions of mind and
body, of universal and particular, of infinite and infinitesimal, of
idea and phenomenon; the class conceptions of faculties and virtues, the
antagonism of the appetites and the reason; and connected with this, at
a higher stage of development, the opposition of moral and intellectual
virtue; also the primitive conceptions of unity, being, rest, motion,
and the like. These divisions were not really scientific, but rather
based on popular experience. They were not held with the precision of
modern thinkers, but taken all together they gave a new existence to the
mind in thought, and greatly enlarged and more accurately defined man's
knowledge of himself and of the world. The majority of them have been
accepted by Christian and Western nations. Yet in modern times we have
also drifted so far away from Aristotle, that if we were to frame a
system on his lines we should be at war with ordinary language and
untrue to our own consciousness. And there have been a few both in
mediaeval times and since the Reformation who have rebelled against the
Aristotelian point of view. Of these eccentric thinkers there have been
various types, but they have all a family likeness. According to them,
there has been too much analysis and too little synthesis, too much
division of the mind into parts and too little conception of it as a
whole or in its relation to God and the laws of the universe. They have
thought that the elements of plurality and unity have not been duly
adjusted. The tendency of such writers has been to allow the personality
of man to be absorbed in the universal, or in the divine nature, and to
deny the distinction between matter and mind, or to substitute one for
the other. They have broken some of the idols of Psychology: they have
challenged the received meaning of words: they have regarded the mind
under many points of view. But though they may have shaken the old, they
have not established the new; their views of philosophy, which seem like
the echo of some voice from the East, have been alien to the mind of
Europe.

d. The Psychology which is found in common language is in some degree
verified by experience, but not in such a manner as to give it
the character of an exact science. We cannot say that words always
correspond to facts. Common language represents the mind from different
and even opposite points of view, which cannot be all of them equally
true (compare Cratylus). Yet from diversity of statements and opinions
may be obtained a nearer approach to the truth than is to be gained
from any one of them. It also tends to correct itself, because it is
gradually brought nearer to the common sense of mankind. There are
some leading categories or classifications of thought, which, though
unverified, must always remain the elements from which the science or
study of the mind proceeds. For example, we must assume ideas before we
can analyze them, and also a continuing mind to which they belong;
the resolution of it into successive moments, which would say, with
Protagoras, that the man is not the same person which he was a minute
ago, is, as Plato implies in the Theaetetus, an absurdity.

e. The growth of the mind, which may be traced in the histories of
religions and philosophies and in the thoughts of nations, is one of the
deepest and noblest modes of studying it. Here we are dealing with the
reality, with the greater and, as it may be termed, the most sacred part
of history. We study the mind of man as it begins to be inspired by a
human or divine reason, as it is modified by circumstances, as it is
distributed in nations, as it is renovated by great movements, which go
beyond the limits of nations and affect human society on a scale still
greater, as it is created or renewed by great minds, who, looking down
from above, have a wider and more comprehensive vision. This is an
ambitious study, of which most of us rather 'entertain conjecture'
than arrive at any detailed or accurate knowledge. Later arises the
reflection how these great ideas or movements of the world have
been appropriated by the multitude and found a way to the minds of
individuals. The real Psychology is that which shows how the increasing
knowledge of nature and the increasing experience of life have always
been slowly transforming the mind, how religions too have been modified
in the course of ages 'that God may be all and in all.' E pollaplasion,
eoe, to ergon e os nun zeteitai prostatteis.

f. Lastly, though we speak of the study of mind in a special sense, it
may also be said that there is no science which does not contribute to
our knowledge of it. The methods of science and their analogies are new
faculties, discovered by the few and imparted to the many. They are
to the mind, what the senses are to the body; or better, they may be
compared to instruments such as the telescope or microscope by which the
discriminating power of the senses, or to other mechanical inventions,
by which the strength and skill of the human body is so immeasurably
increased.

II. The new Psychology, whatever may be its claim to the authority of a
science, has called attention to many facts and corrected many errors,
which without it would have been unexamined. Yet it is also itself
very liable to illusion. The evidence on which it rests is vague and
indefinite. The field of consciousness is never seen by us as a whole,
but only at particular points, which are always changing. The veil
of language intercepts facts. Hence it is desirable that in making an
approach to the study we should consider at the outset what are the
kinds of error which most easily affect it, and note the differences
which separate it from other branches of knowledge.

a. First, we observe the mind by the mind. It would seem therefore that
we are always in danger of leaving out the half of that which is the
subject of our enquiry. We come at once upon the difficulty of what is
the meaning of the word. Does it differ as subject and object in the
same manner? Can we suppose one set of feelings or one part of the mind
to interpret another? Is the introspecting thought the same with the
thought which is introspected? Has the mind the power of surveying its
whole domain at one and the same time?--No more than the eye can take in
the whole human body at a glance. Yet there may be a glimpse round the
corner, or a thought transferred in a moment from one point of view to
another, which enables us to see nearly the whole, if not at once,
at any rate in succession. Such glimpses will hardly enable us to
contemplate from within the mind in its true proportions. Hence the
firmer ground of Psychology is not the consciousness of inward feelings
but the observation of external actions, being the actions not only of
ourselves, but of the innumerable persons whom we come across in life.

b. The error of supposing partial or occasional explanation of
mental phenomena to be the only or complete ones. For example, we are
disinclined to admit of the spontaneity or discontinuity of the mind--it
seems to us like an effect without a cause, and therefore we suppose the
train of our thoughts to be always called up by association. Yet it is
probable, or indeed certain, that of many mental phenomena there are no
mental antecedents, but only bodily ones.

c. The false influence of language. We are apt to suppose that when
there are two or more words describing faculties or processes of the
mind, there are real differences corresponding to them. But this is not
the case. Nor can we determine how far they do or do not exist, or
by what degree or kind of difference they are distinguished. The same
remark may be made about figures of speech. They fill up the vacancy of
knowledge; they are to the mind what too much colour is to the eye; but
the truth is rather concealed than revealed by them.

d. The uncertain meaning of terms, such as Consciousness, Conscience,
Will, Law, Knowledge, Internal and External Sense; these, in the
language of Plato, 'we shamelessly use, without ever having taken the
pains to analyze them.'

e. A science such as Psychology is not merely an hypothesis, but
an hypothesis which, unlike the hypotheses of Physics, can never be
verified. It rests only on the general impressions of mankind, and there
is little or no hope of adding in any considerable degree to our stock
of mental facts.

f. The parallelism of the Physical Sciences, which leads us to analyze
the mind on the analogy of the body, and so to reduce mental operations
to the level of bodily ones, or to confound one with the other.

g. That the progress of Physiology may throw a new light on Psychology
is a dream in which scientific men are always tempted to indulge. But
however certain we may be of the connexion between mind and body, the
explanation of the one by the other is a hidden place of nature which
has hitherto been investigated with little or no success.

h. The impossibility of distinguishing between mind and body. Neither
in thought nor in experience can we separate them. They seem to act
together; yet we feel that we are sometimes under the dominion of the
one, sometimes of the other, and sometimes, both in the common use of
language and in fact, they transform themselves, the one into the good
principle, the other into the evil principle; and then again the 'I'
comes in and mediates between them. It is also difficult to distinguish
outward facts from the ideas of them in the mind, or to separate the
external stimulus to a sensation from the activity of the organ, or this
from the invisible agencies by which it reaches the mind, or any process
of sense from its mental antecedent, or any mental energy from its
nervous expression.

i. The fact that mental divisions tend to run into one another, and that
in speaking of the mind we cannot always distinguish differences of kind
from differences of degree; nor have we any measure of the strength and
intensity of our ideas or feelings.

j. Although heredity has been always known to the ancients as well as
ourselves to exercise a considerable influence on human character, yet
we are unable to calculate what proportion this birth-influence bears to
nurture and education. But this is the real question. We cannot pursue
the mind into embryology: we can only trace how, after birth, it begins
to grow. But how much is due to the soil, how much to the original
latent seed, it is impossible to distinguish. And because we are certain
that heredity exercises a considerable, but undefined influence, we must
not increase the wonder by exaggerating it.

k. The love of system is always tending to prevail over the historical
investigation of the mind, which is our chief means of knowing it. It
equally tends to hinder the other great source of our knowledge of the
mind, the observation of its workings and processes which we can make
for ourselves.

l. The mind, when studied through the individual, is apt to be
isolated--this is due to the very form of the enquiry; whereas, in
truth, it is indistinguishable from circumstances, the very language
which it uses being the result of the instincts of long-forgotten
generations, and every word which a man utters being the answer to some
other word spoken or suggested by somebody else.

III. The tendency of the preceding remarks has been to show that
Psychology is necessarily a fragment, and is not and cannot be a
connected system. We cannot define or limit the mind, but we can
describe it. We can collect information about it; we can enumerate the
principal subjects which are included in the study of it. Thus we are
able to rehabilitate Psychology to some extent, not as a branch of
science, but as a collection of facts bearing on human life, as a
part of the history of philosophy, as an aspect of Metaphysic. It is a
fragment of a science only, which in all probability can never make any
great progress or attain to much clearness or exactness. It is however
a kind of knowledge which has a great interest for us and is always
present to us, and of which we carry about the materials in our own
bosoms. We can observe our minds and we can experiment upon them, and
the knowledge thus acquired is not easily forgotten, and is a help to us
in study as well as in conduct.

The principal subjects of Psychology may be summed up as follows:--

a. The relation of man to the world around him,--in what sense and
within what limits can he withdraw from its laws or assert himself
against them (Freedom and Necessity), and what is that which we suppose
to be thus independent and which we call ourselves? How does the inward
differ from the outward and what is the relation between them, and where
do we draw the line by which we separate mind from matter, the soul
from the body? Is the mind active or passive, or partly both? Are its
movements identical with those of the body, or only preconcerted and
coincident with them, or is one simply an aspect of the other?

b. What are we to think of time and space? Time seems to have a nearer
connexion with the mind, space with the body; yet time, as well as
space, is necessary to our idea of either. We see also that they have
an analogy with one another, and that in Mathematics they often
interpenetrate. Space or place has been said by Kant to be the form of
the outward, time of the inward sense. He regards them as parts or
forms of the mind. But this is an unfortunate and inexpressive way of
describing their relation to us. For of all the phenomena present to the
human mind they seem to have most the character of objective existence.
There is no use in asking what is beyond or behind them; we cannot get
rid of them. And to throw the laws of external nature which to us are
the type of the immutable into the subjective side of the antithesis
seems to be equally inappropriate.

c. When in imagination we enter into the closet of the mind and withdraw
ourselves from the external world, we seem to find there more or less
distinct processes which may be described by the words, 'I perceive,' 'I
feel,' 'I think,' 'I want,' 'I wish,' 'I like,' 'I dislike,' 'I fear,'
'I know,' 'I remember,' 'I imagine,' 'I dream,' 'I act,' 'I endeavour,'
'I hope.' These processes would seem to have the same notions attached
to them in the minds of all educated persons. They are distinguished
from one another in thought, but they intermingle. It is possible to
reflect upon them or to become conscious of them in a greater or less
degree, or with a greater or less continuity or attention, and thus
arise the intermittent phenomena of consciousness or self-consciousness.
The use of all of them is possible to us at all times; and therefore
in any operation of the mind the whole are latent. But we are able to
characterise them sufficiently by that part of the complex action which
is the most prominent. We have no difficulty in distinguishing an act
of sight or an act of will from an act of thought, although thought is
present in both of them. Hence the conception of different faculties or
different virtues is precarious, because each of them is passing into
the other, and they are all one in the mind itself; they appear and
reappear, and may all be regarded as the ever-varying phases or aspects
or differences of the same mind or person.

d. Nearest the sense in the scale of the intellectual faculties
is memory, which is a mode rather than a faculty of the mind, and
accompanies all mental operations. There are two principal kinds of it,
recollection and recognition,--recollection in which forgotten things
are recalled or return to the mind, recognition in which the mind finds
itself again among things once familiar. The simplest way in which we
can represent the former to ourselves is by shutting our eyes and trying
to recall in what we term the mind's eye the picture of the
surrounding scene, or by laying down the book which we are reading and
recapitulating what we can remember of it. But many times more powerful
than recollection is recognition, perhaps because it is more assisted by
association. We have known and forgotten, and after a long interval the
thing which we have seen once is seen again by us, but with a different
feeling, and comes back to us, not as new knowledge, but as a thing to
which we ourselves impart a notion already present to us; in Plato's
words, we set the stamp upon the wax. Every one is aware of the
difference between the first and second sight of a place, between a
scene clothed with associations or bare and divested of them. We say to
ourselves on revisiting a spot after a long interval: How many things
have happened since I last saw this! There is probably no impression
ever received by us of which we can venture to say that the vestiges are
altogether lost, or that we might not, under some circumstances, recover
it. A long-forgotten knowledge may be easily renewed and therefore is
very different from ignorance. Of the language learnt in childhood not
a word may be remembered, and yet, when a new beginning is made, the
old habit soon returns, the neglected organs come back into use, and the
river of speech finds out the dried-up channel.

e. 'Consciousness' is the most treacherous word which is employed in
the study of the mind, for it is used in many senses, and has rarely,
if ever, been minutely analyzed. Like memory, it accompanies all mental
operations, but not always continuously, and it exists in various
degrees. It may be imperceptible or hardly perceptible: it may be the
living sense that our thoughts, actions, sufferings, are our own. It
is a kind of attention which we pay to ourselves, and is intermittent
rather than continuous. Its sphere has been exaggerated. It is sometimes
said to assure us of our freedom; but this is an illusion: as there
may be a real freedom without consciousness of it, so there may be a
consciousness of freedom without the reality. It may be regarded as a
higher degree of knowledge when we not only know but know that we know.
Consciousness is opposed to habit, inattention, sleep, death. It may be
illustrated by its derivative conscience, which speaks to men, not only
of right and wrong in the abstract, but of right and wrong actions in
reference to themselves and their circumstances.

f. Association is another of the ever-present phenomena of the human
mind. We speak of the laws of association, but this is an expression
which is confusing, for the phenomenon itself is of the most capricious
and uncertain sort. It may be briefly described as follows. The simplest
case of association is that of sense. When we see or hear separately
one of two things, which we have previously seen or heard together, the
occurrence of the one has a tendency to suggest the other. So the sight
or name of a house may recall to our minds the memory of those who once
lived there. Like may recall like and everything its opposite. The parts
of a whole, the terms of a series, objects lying near, words having
a customary order stick together in the mind. A word may bring back a
passage of poetry or a whole system of philosophy; from one end of the
world or from one pole of knowledge we may travel to the other in an
indivisible instant. The long train of association by which we pass from
one point to the other, involving every sort of complex relation, so
sudden, so accidental, is one of the greatest wonders of mind...This
process however is not always continuous, but often intermittent: we can
think of things in isolation as well as in association; we do not mean
that they must all hang from one another. We can begin again after an
interval of rest or vacancy, as a new train of thought suddenly arises,
as, for example, when we wake of a morning or after violent exercise.
Time, place, the same colour or sound or smell or taste, will often
call up some thought or recollection either accidentally or naturally
associated with them. But it is equally noticeable that the new thought
may occur to us, we cannot tell how or why, by the spontaneous action of
the mind itself or by the latent influence of the body. Both science and
poetry are made up of associations or recollections, but we must observe
also that the mind is not wholly dependent on them, having also the
power of origination.

There are other processes of the mind which it is good for us to study
when we are at home and by ourselves,--the manner in which thought
passes into act, the conflict of passion and reason in many stages, the
transition from sensuality to love or sentiment and from earthly love to
heavenly, the slow and silent influence of habit, which little by little
changes the nature of men, the sudden change of the old nature of man
into a new one, wrought by shame or by some other overwhelming impulse.
These are the greater phenomena of mind, and he who has thought of
them for himself will live and move in a better-ordered world, and will
himself be a better-ordered man.

At the other end of the 'globus intellectualis,' nearest, not to earth
and sense, but to heaven and God, is the personality of man, by which
he holds communion with the unseen world. Somehow, he knows not how,
somewhere, he knows not where, under this higher aspect of his being he
grasps the ideas of God, freedom and immortality; he sees the forms of
truth, holiness and love, and is satisfied with them. No account of the
mind can be complete which does not admit the reality or the possibility
of another life. Whether regarded as an ideal or as a fact, the highest
part of man's nature and that in which it seems most nearly to approach
the divine, is a phenomenon which exists, and must therefore be included
within the domain of Psychology.

IV. We admit that there is no perfect or ideal Psychology. It is not a
whole in the same sense in which Chemistry, Physiology, or Mathematics
are wholes: that is to say, it is not a connected unity of knowledge.
Compared with the wealth of other sciences, it rests upon a small number
of facts; and when we go beyond these, we fall into conjectures and
verbal discussions. The facts themselves are disjointed; the causes of
them run up into other sciences, and we have no means of tracing
them from one to the other. Yet it may be true of this, as of other
beginnings of knowledge, that the attempt to put them together has
tested the truth of them, and given a stimulus to the enquiry into them.

Psychology should be natural, not technical. It should take the form
which is the most intelligible to the common understanding, because it
has to do with common things, which are familiar to us all. It should
aim at no more than every reflecting man knows or can easily verify for
himself. When simple and unpretentious, it is least obscured by words,
least liable to fall under the influence of Physiology or Metaphysic.
It should argue, not from exceptional, but from ordinary phenomena. It
should be careful to distinguish the higher and the lower elements of
human nature, and not allow one to be veiled in the disguise of the
other, lest through the slippery nature of language we should pass
imperceptibly from good to evil, from nature in the higher to nature in
the neutral or lower sense. It should assert consistently the unity of
the human faculties, the unity of knowledge, the unity of God and law.
The difference between the will and the affections and between the
reason and the passions should also be recognized by it.

Its sphere is supposed to be narrowed to the individual soul; but it
cannot be thus separated in fact. It goes back to the beginnings of
things, to the first growth of language and philosophy, and to the whole
science of man. There can be no truth or completeness in any study of
the mind which is confined to the individual. The nature of language,
though not the whole, is perhaps at present the most important element
in our knowledge of it. It is not impossible that some numerical laws
may be found to have a place in the relations of mind and matter, as in
the rest of nature. The old Pythagorean fancy that the soul 'is or has
in it harmony' may in some degree be realized. But the indications
of such numerical harmonies are faint; either the secret of them lies
deeper than we can discover, or nature may have rebelled against the use
of them in the composition of men and animals. It is with qualitative
rather than with quantitative differences that we are concerned
in Psychology. The facts relating to the mind which we obtain from
Physiology are negative rather than positive. They show us, not the
processes of mental action, but the conditions of which when deprived
the mind ceases to act. It would seem as if the time had not yet arrived
when we can hope to add anything of much importance to our knowledge
of the mind from the investigations of the microscope. The elements of
Psychology can still only be learnt from reflections on ourselves, which
interpret and are also interpreted by our experience of others. The
history of language, of philosophy, and religion, the great thoughts or
inventions or discoveries which move mankind, furnish the larger moulds
or outlines in which the human mind has been cast. From these the
individual derives so much as he is able to comprehend or has the
opportunity of learning.





