ONE:Aristotle is more successful when he proceeds to discuss the imagination. He explains it to be a continuance of the movement originally communicated by the felt object to the organ of sense, kept up in the absence of the object itself;as near an approach to the truth as could be made in his time. And he is also right in saying that the operations of reason are only made possible by the help of what he calls phantasmsthat is, faint reproductions of sensations. In addition to this, he points out the connexion between memory and imagination, and enumerates the laws of association briefly, but with great accuracy. He is, however, altogether unaware of their scope. So far from using them to explain all the mental processes, he does not even see that they account for involuntary reminiscence, and limits them to the voluntary operation by which we recall a missing name or other image to consciousness.
THREE:Plato seems to have felt very strongly that all virtuous action tends towards a good exceeding in value any temporary sacrifice which it may involve; and the accepted connotation of ethical terms went entirely along with this belief. But he could not see that a particular action might be good for the community at large and bad for the individual who performed it, not in a different sense but in the very same sense, as involving a diminution of his happiness. For from Platos abstract and generalising point of view all good was homogeneous, and the welfare of the individual was absolutely identified with the welfare of the whole to which he belonged. As against those who made right dependent on might and erected self-indulgence into the law of life Plato occupied an impregnable position. He showed that such principles made society impossible, and that without honour even a gang of thieves cannot hold together.140 He also saw that it is reason which brings each individual into relation with the whole and enables him to understand his obligations towards it; but at the same time he gave this232 reason a personal character which does not properly belong to it; or, what comes to the same thing, he treated human beings as pure entia rationis, thus unwittingly removing the necessity for having any morality at all. On his assumption it would be absurd to break the law; but neither would there be any temptation to break it, nor would any unpleasant consequences follow on its violation. Plato speaks of injustice as an injury to the souls health, and therefore as the greatest evil that can befall a human being, without observing that the inference involves a confusion of terms. For his argument requires that soul should mean both the whole of conscious life and the system of abstract notions through which we communicate and co-operate with our fellow-creatures. All crime is a serious disturbance to the latter, for it cannot without absurdity be made the foundation of a general rule; but, apart from penal consequences, it does not impair, and may benefit the former.After resolving virtue into knowledge of pleasure, the next questions which would present themselves to so keen a thinker were obviously, What is knowledge? and What is pleasure? The Theaettus is chiefly occupied with a discussion of the various answers already given to the first of these enquiries. It seems, therefore, to come naturally next after the Protagoras; and our conjecture receives a further confirmation when we find that here also a large place is given to the opinions of the Sophist after whom that dialogue is named; the chief difference being that the points selected for controversy are of a speculative rather than of a practical character. There is, however, a close connexion between the argument by which Protagoras had endeavoured to prove that all mankind are teachers of virtue, and his more general principle that man is the measure of all things. And perhaps it was the more obvious difficulties attending the latter view which led Plato, after some hesitation, to reject the former along206 with it. In an earlier chapter we gave some reasons for believing that Protagoras did not erect every individual into an arbiter of truth in the sweeping sense afterwards put upon his words. He was probably opposing a human to a theological or a naturalistic standard. Nevertheless, it does not follow that Plato was fighting with a shadow when he pressed the Protagorean dictum to its most literal interpretation. There are plenty of people still who would maintain it to that extent. Wherever and whenever the authority of ancient traditions is broken down, the doctrine that one mans opinion is as good as anothers immediately takes its place; or rather the doctrine in question is a survival of traditionalism in an extremely pulverised form. And when we are told that the majority must be rightwhich is a very different principle from holding that the majority should be obeyedwe may take it as a sign that the loose particles are beginning to coalesce again. The substitution of an individual for a universal standard of truth is, according to Plato, a direct consequence of the theory which identifies knowledge with sense-perception. It is, at any rate, certain that the most vehement assertors of the former doctrine are also those who are fondest of appealing to what they and their friends have seen, heard, or felt; and the more educated among them place enormous confidence in statistics. They are also fond of repeating the adage that an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory, without considering that theory alone can furnish the balance in which facts are weighed. Plato does not go very deep into the rationale of observation, nor in the infancy of exact science was it to be expected that he should. He fully recognised the presence of two factors, an objective and a subjective, in every sensation, but lost his hold on the true method in attempting to trace a like dualism through the whole of consciousness. Where we should distinguish between the mental energies and the physical processes underlying them, or between the207 elements respectively contributed to every cognition by immediate experience and reflection, he conceived the inner and outer worlds as two analogous series related to one another as an image to its original.
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