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The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may

be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point (cp,

especially in Books V, VI, VII) to which ancient thinkers ever

attained. Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon among the moderns,

was the first who conceived a method of knowledge, although

neither of them always distinguished the bare outline or form

from the substance of truth; and both of them had to be content

with an abstraction of science which was not yet realized. He was

the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in

him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future

knowledge are contained. The sciences of logic and psychology,

which have supplied so many instruments of thought to after-ages,

are based upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato.