realizing the eternal existence of them and of the human minds which were
associated with them, in the past and future than in the present. The
difficulty was not how they could exist, but how they could fail to exist.
In the attempt to regain this 'saving' knowledge of the ideas, the sense
was found to be as great an enemy as the desires; and hence two things
which to us seem quite distinct are inextricably blended in the
representation of Plato.

Thus far we may believe that Plato was serious in his conception of the
soul as a motive power, in his reminiscence of a former state of being, in
his elevation of the reason over sense and passion, and perhaps in his
doctrine of transmigration. Was he equally serious in the rest? For
example, are we to attribute his tripartite division of the soul to the
gods? Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men?
The latter is the more probable; for the horses of the gods are both white,
i.e. their every impulse is in harmony with reason; their dualism, on the
other hand, only carries out the figure of the chariot. Is he serious,
again, in regarding love as 'a madness'? That seems to arise out of the
antithesis to the former conception of love. At the same time he appears
to intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno, and elsewhere, that there
is a faculty in man, whether to be termed in modern language genius, or
inspiration, or imagination, or idealism, or communion with God, which
cannot be reduced to rule and measure. Perhaps, too, he is ironically
repeating the common language of mankind about philosophy, and is turning
their jest into a sort of earnest. (Compare Phaedo, Symp.) Or is he
serious in holding that each soul bears the character of a god? He may
have had no other account to give of the differences of human characters to
which he afterwards refers. Or, again, in his absurd derivation of mantike
and oionistike and imeros (compare Cratylus)? It is characteristic of the
irony of Socrates to mix up sense and nonsense in such a way that no exact