metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in any
other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained. The
sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many instruments
of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and
Plato. The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy
of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents
of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and
conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent,
and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and
unnecessary--these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be
found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato. The
greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy
are most apt to lose sight, the difference between words and things, has
been most strenuously insisted on by him (cp. Rep.; Polit.; Cratyl),
although he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own
writings (e.g. Rep.). But he does not bind up truth in logical formulae,--
logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and the science which he imagines to
'contemplate all truth and all existence' is very unlike the doctrine of
the syllogism which Aristotle claims to have discovered (Soph. Elenchi).

Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a still
larger design which was to have included an ideal history of Athens, as
well as a political and physical philosophy. The fragment of the Critias
has given birth to a world-famous fiction, second only in importance to the
tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is said as a fact to have
inspired some of the early navigators of the sixteenth century. This
mythical tale, of which the subject was a history of the wars of the
Athenians against the Island of Atlantis, is supposed to be founded upon an
unfinished poem of Solon, to which it would have stood in the same relation
as the writings of the logographers to the poems of Homer. It would have