[Footnote 555: ][ (return) ] "Phædo," § 50-56.
[Footnote 556: ][ (return) ] "Phædrus," § 58.
[Footnote 557: ][ (return) ] See note on p. 349.
All knowledge of truth and reality is, therefore, according to Plato, a REMINISCENCE (ἀνάµνησις)--a recovery of partially forgotten ideas which the soul possessed in another state of existence; and the dialectic of Plato is simply the effort, by apt interrogation, to lead the mind to "recollect" [558] the truth which has been formerly perceived by it, and is even now in the memory though not in consciousness. An illustration of this method is attempted in the "Meno" where Plato introduces Socrates as making an experiment on the mind of an uneducated person. Socrates puts a series of questions to a slave of Meno, and at length elicits from the youth a right enunciation of a geometrical truth. Socrates then points triumphantly to this instance, and bids Meno observe that he had not taught the youth any thing, but simply interrogated him as to his opinions, whilst the youth had recalled the knowledge previously existing in his own mind. [559]
[Footnote 558: ][ (return) ] "To learn is to recover our own previous knowledge, and this is properly to recollect."--"Phædo" § 55.
[Footnote 559: ][ (return) ] "Meno," § 16-20. "Now for a person to recover knowledge himself through himself, is not this to recollect."
Now whilst we readily grant that the instance given in the "Meno" does not sustain the inference of Plato that "the boy" had learnt these geometrical truths "in eternity," and that they had simply been brought forward into the view of his consciousness by the "questioning" of Socrates, yet it certainly does prove that there are ideas or principles in the human reason which are not derived from without--which are anterior to all experience, and for the development of which, experience furnishes the occasion, but is not the origin and source. By a kind of lofty inspiration, he caught sight of that most important doctrine of modern philosophy, so clearly and logically presented by Kant, that the Reason is the source of a pure à priori knowledge--a knowledge native to, and potentially in the mind, antecedent to all experience, and which is simply brought out into the field of consciousness by experience conditions. Around this greatest of all metaphysical truths Plato threw a gorgeous mythic dress, and presented it under the most picturesque imagery. [560] But, when divested of the rich coloring which the glowing imagination of Plato threw over it, it is but a vivid presentation of the cardinal truth that there are ideas in the mind which have not been derived from without, and which, therefore, the mind brought with it into the present sphere of being. The validity and value of this fundamental doctrine, even as presented by Plato, is unaffected by any speculations in which he may have indulged, as to the pre-existence of the soul. He simply regarded this doctrine of pre-existence as highly probable--a plausible explanation of the facts. That there are ideas, innate and connatural to the human mind, he clung to as the most vital, most precious, most certain of all truths; and to lead man to the recognitions of these ideas, to bring them within the field of consciousness, was, in his judgment, the great business of philosophy.
And this was the grand aim of his Dialectic--to elicit, to bring to light the truths which are already in the mind--"a µαίευσις" a kind of intellectual midwifery [561]--a delivering of the mind of the ideas with which it was pregnant.
[Footnote 560: ][ (return) ] As in the "Phædo," §§ 48-57; "Phædrus," §§ 52-64; "Republic," bk. x.
[Footnote 561: ][ (return) ] "Theætetus," §§ 17-20.