is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the
mental process there, as he might witness a game of skill; better
still, as in reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The
Republic, to watch, for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a
powerful, of a sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex
group of conditions which can never in the nature of things occur
again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary
monument. To put Plato into his natural place, as a result from
antecedent and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek
life generally: such is the proper aim of the historic, that is to say,
of the really critical study of him.

At the threshold, then, of The Republic of Plato, the historic spirit
impresses upon us the fact that some of its leading thoughts are partly
derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom we happen to possess
independent information. From that brilliant and busy, yet so
unconcerned press of early Greek life, one here another there stands
aside to make the initial act of conscious philosophic reflexion. It
is done with something of the simplicity, the immediate and visible
effectiveness, of the visible world in action all around. Among
Plato's many intellectual [12] predecessors, on whom in recent years
much attention has been bestowed by a host of commentators after the
mind of Hegel, three, whose ideas, whose words even, we really find in
the very texture of Plato's work, emerge distinctly in close connexion
with The Republic: Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the
philosophy of number and music; Parmenides, "My father Parmenides," the
centre of the school of Elea; Heraclitus, thirdly, author of the
doctrine of "the Perpetual Flux": three teachers, it must be admitted
after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost degree
fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of giving that knowledge