By such criticisms much light has been thrown on the dialogues in detail. It is always interesting to read the different views taken by many scholars, all careful students of Plato, respecting the order and relations of the dialogues: especially as the views are not merely different but contradictory, so that the weak points of each are put before us as well as the strong. But as to the large problem which these critics have undertaken to solve — though several solutions have been proposed, in favour of which something may be urged, yet we look in vain for any solution at once sufficient as to proof and defensible against objectors.
The problem incapable of solution. Extent and novelty of the theory propounded by Schleiermacher — slenderness of his proofs.
It appears to me that the problem itself is one which admits of no solution. Schleiermacher was the first who proposed it with the large pretensions which it has since embraced, and which have been present more or less to the minds of subsequent critics, even when they differ from him. He tells us himself that he comes forward as Restitutor Platonis, in a character which no one had ever undertaken before.[44] And he might fairly have claimed that title, if he had furnished proofs at all commensurate to his professions. As his theory is confessedly novel as well as comprehensive, it required greater support in the way of evidence. But when I read the Introductions (the general as well as the special) in which such evidence ought to be found, I am amazed to find that there is little else but easy and confident assumption. His hypothesis is announced as if the simple announcement were sufficient to recommend it[45] — as if no other supposition were consistent with the recognised grandeur of Plato as a philosopher — as if any one, dissenting from it, only proved thereby that he did not understand Plato. Yet so far from being of this self-recommending character, the hypothesis is really loaded with the heaviest antecedent improbability. That in 406 B.C., and at the age of 23, in an age when schemes of philosophy elaborated in detail were unknown — Plato should conceive a vast scheme of philosophy, to be worked out underground without ever being proclaimed, through numerous Sokratic dialogues one after the other, each ushering in that which follows and each resting upon that which precedes: that he should have persisted throughout a long life in working out this scheme, adapting the sequence of his dialogues to the successive stages which he had attained, so that none of them could be properly understood unless when studied immediately after its predecessors and immediately before its successors — and yet that he should have taken no pains to impress this one peremptory arrangement on the minds of readers, and that Schleiermacher should be the first to detect it — all this appears to me as improbable as any of the mystic interpretations of Iamblichus or Proklus. Like other improbabilities, it may be proved by evidence, if evidence can be produced: but here nothing of the kind is producible. We are called upon to grant the general hypothesis without proof, and to follow Schleiermacher in applying it to the separate dialogues.
[44] Schleiermacher, Einleitung, pp. 22-29. “Diese natürliche Folge (der Platonischen Gespräche) wieder herzustellen, diess ist, wie jedermann sieht, eine Absicht, welche sich sehr weit entfernt von allen bisherigen Versuchen zur Anordnung der Platonischen Werke,” &c.
[45] What I say about Schleiermacher here will be assented to by any one who reads his Einleitung, pp. 10, 11, seq.
Schleiermacher’s hypothesis includes a preconceived scheme, and a peremptory order of interdependence among the dialogues.
Schleiermacher’s hypothesis includes two parts. 1. A premeditated philosophical scheme, worked out continuously from the first dialogue to the last. 2. A peremptory canonical order, essential to this scheme, and determined thereby. Now as to the scheme, though on the one hand it cannot be proved, yet on the other hand it cannot be disproved. But as to the canonical order, I think it may be disproved. We know that no such order was recognised in the days of Aristophanes, and Schleiermacher himself admits that before those days it had been lost.[46] But I contend that if it was lost within a century after the decease of Plato, we may fairly presume that it never existed at all, as peremptory and indispensable to the understanding of what Plato meant. A great philosopher such as Plato (so Schleiermacher argues) must be supposed to have composed all his dialogues with some preconceived comprehensive scheme: but a great philosopher (we may add), if he does work upon a preconceived scheme, must surely be supposed to take some reasonable precautions to protect the order essential to that scheme from dropping out of sight. Moreover, Schleiermacher himself admits that there are various dialogues which lie apart from the canonical order and form no part of the grand premeditated scheme. The distinction here made between these outlying compositions (Nebenwerke) and the members of the regular series, is indeed altogether arbitrary: but the admission of it tends still farther to invalidate the fundamental postulate of a grand Demiurgic universe of dialogues, each dovetailed and fitted into its special place among the whole. The universe is admitted to have breaks: so that the hypothesis does not possess the only merit which can belong to gratuitous hypothesis — that of introducing, if granted, complete symmetry throughout the phenomena.
[46] Schleiermacher, Einleitung, p. 24.
Assumptions of Schleiermacher respecting the Phædrus inadmissible.
To these various improbabilities we may add another — that Schleiermacher’s hypothesis requires us to admit that the Phædrus is Plato’s earliest dialogue, composed about 406 B.C., when he was 21 years of age, on my computation, and certainly not more than 23: that it is the first outburst of the inspiration which Sokrates had imparted to him,[47] and that it embodies, though in a dim and poetical form, the lineaments of that philosophical system which he worked out during the ensuing half century. That Plato at this early age should have conceived so vast a system — that he should have imbibed it from Sokrates, who enunciated no system, and abounded in the anti-systematic negative — that he should have been inspired to write the Phædrus (with its abundant veins, dithyrambic,[48] erotic, and transcendental) by the conversation of Sokrates, which exhibited acute dialectic combined with practical sagacity, but neither poetic fervour nor transcendental fancy, — in all this hypothesis of Schleiermacher, there is nothing but an aggravation of improbabilities.