And as we find there a [7] sort of storehouse of all physical theories,
so in reading the Parmenides we might think that all metaphysical
questions whatever had already passed through the mind of Plato. Some
of the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone,
are of the structure of his philosophy. They are everywhere in it, not
as the stray carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here or
there amid the new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic
life in the very stone he builds with. The central and most intimate
principles of his teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not
merely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master--to Socrates,
who survives chiefly in his pages--but to various precedent schools of
speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these into
that age of poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic
apprehension had hardly understood themselves; beyond that unconscious
philosophy, again, to certain constitutional tendencies, persuasions,
forecasts of the intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would
seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the older civilisations of India
and of Egypt, as they still exercise their authority over ourselves.

The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we find it so
again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we pass from him
to them) are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had
their earlier [8] proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading
him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite
obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary
world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of
his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely
new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human
genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of
which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame