Strona 264 z 1391

1. Of the higher method of knowledge in Plato we have only a

glimpse. Neither here nor in the Phaedrus or Symposium, nor yet

in the Philebus or Sophist, does he give any clear explanation of

his meaning. He would probably have described his method as

proceeding by regular steps to a system of universal knowledge,

which inferred the parts from the whole rather than the whole

from the parts. This ideal logic is not practised by him in the

search after justice, or in the analysis of the parts of the

soul; there, like Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues

from experience and the common use of language. But at the end of

the sixth book he conceives another and more perfect method, in

which all ideas are only steps or grades or moments of thought,

forming a connected whole which is self-supporting, and in which

consistency is the test of truth. He does not explain to us in

detail the nature of the process.