In arranging the quintuple scale of elements or conditions of the Good, Plato adopts the following descending order: I report them as well as I can, for I confess that I understand them very imperfectly.
1. Measure; that which conforms to Measure and to proper season: with everything else analogous, which we can believe to be of eternal nature. — These seem to be unchangeable Forms or Ideas, which are here considered objectively, apart from any percipient Subject affected by them.[155]
2. The Symmetrical, Beautiful, Perfect, Sufficient, &c. — These words seem to denote the successive manifestations of the same afore-mentioned attributes; but considered both objectively and subjectively, as affecting and appreciated by some percipient.
3. Intelligent or Rational Mind — Here the Subject is brought in by itself.
4. Sciences, Cognitions, Arts, Right Opinions, &c. — Here we have the intellectual manifestations of the Subject, but of a character inferior to No. 3, descending in the scale of value relatively to truth.
5. Lastly come the small list of true and painless pleasures. — These, being not intellectual at all, but merely emotional (some as accompaniments of intellectual, others of sensible, processes), are farther removed from Good and Measure than even No. 4 — the opining or uncertain phases of the intellect.[156]
The four first elements belong to the Kosmos as well as to man: for the Kosmos has an intelligent soul. The fifth marks the emotional nature of man.
[155] Plato, Philêbus, p. 66 A.
The Appendix B, subjoined by Mr. Poste to his edition of the Philêbus (pp. 149-165), is a very valuable Dissertation, comparing and explaining the abstract theories of Plato and Aristotle. He remarks, justly contrasting the Philêbus with the Timæus, as to the doctrine of Limit: “In the Philêbus the limit is always quantitative. Quality, including all the elementary forces, is the substratum that has to receive the quantitative determination. Just, however, as Quality underlies quantity, we can conceive a substratum underlying quality. This Plato in the Timæus calls the Vehicle or Receptacle (τὸ δεκτικόν), and Aristotle in his writings the primary Matter (πρώτη ὕλη). The Philêbus, however, does not carry the analysis so far. It regards quality as the ultimate matter, the substratum to be moulded and measured out in due quantity by the quantitative limit” (p. 160).
I doubt whether the Platonic idea of τὸ μέτριον is rightly expressed by Mr. Poste’s translation — a mean (p. 158). It rather implies, even in Politikus, p. 306, to which he refers, something adjusted according to a positive standard or conformable to an assumed measure or perfection: there being undoubtedly error in excess above it and error in defect below it — but the standard being not necessarily mid-way between the two. The Pythagoreans used καιρὸς in a very large sense, describing it as the First Cause of Good. Proklus ad Plat. Alkib. i. p. 270-272, Cousin.