thrown a light on many parts of human knowledge, and has solved many
difficulties. We cannot receive his doctrine of opposites as the last word
of philosophy, but still we may regard it as a very important contribution
to logic. We cannot affirm that words have no meaning when taken out of
their connexion in the history of thought. But we recognize that their
meaning is to a great extent due to association, and to their correlation
with one another. We see the advantage of viewing in the concrete what
mankind regard only in the abstract. There is much to be said for his
faith or conviction, that God is immanent in the world,--within the sphere
of the human mind, and not beyond it. It was natural that he himself, like
a prophet of old, should regard the philosophy which he had invented as the
voice of God in man. But this by no means implies that he conceived
himself as creating God in thought. He was the servant of his own ideas
and not the master of them. The philosophy of history and the history of
philosophy may be almost said to have been discovered by him. He has done
more to explain Greek thought than all other writers put together. Many
ideas of development, evolution, reciprocity, which have become the symbols
of another school of thinkers may be traced to his speculations. In the
theology and philosophy of England as well as of Germany, and also in the
lighter literature of both countries, there are always appearing 'fragments
of the great banquet' of Hegel.



SOPHIST

by

Plato