was the manner in which Plato treats his subjects; the infinite variety of the lights in which he places them; the subtle way in which he leads us on to the verge of proof, only to discover that we have taken a wrong path, or are face to face with some insuperable difficulty. With such methods Jowett had the greatest sympathy; he knew that on many subjects certainty was impossible; he disliked systems and formulae. The thoughts of many men in many ages-how can they be brought within the compass of a single mind, or embodied in a series of axioms? We cannot say that ideas are false because inconsistent with one another, or that discussions are without value because they lead to no final result. Every system has its day, and ceases to be; it is but a broken part of the whole, which is greater than all systems. Of this whole Jowett strove never to lose sight: and here, once more, he was in sympathy with Plato.

Often too the words of Plato seemed to Jowett to anticipate the thoughts which arose in his own mind out of his experience of life. In this last edition he has added a page to the introduction to the Philebus, in which are collected a 'few inspired sayings or oracles of Plato which receive their full interpretation only from the history of philosophy in later ages.' Among them are these: 'The power and faculty of loving the truth and of doing all things for the sake of the truth.'-'Shall we then agree with them of old time, and merely reassert the notions of others without risk to ourselves; or shall we venture also to share in the risk and bear the reproach which will await us?' ('A sentence full of meaning to reformers of religion,' Jowett observes.) In the divine nature of Zeus there is the soul and mind of a king, because there is in him the power of the cause.' In words such as these we may trace Jowett's own sentiments:-a love of truth

which prevented him from repeating what he did not believe; an apprehension of the storms which attend any attempt to reform religious feeling; a never-failing faith in the divine government of the world.

To the last Jowett seems to have contemplated an essay on the genuineness and order of the Platonic Dialogues' (introd. to the Statesman, vol. iv. p. 449), and in the long interval (1871-1892) which separated the first and the third editions of his work his views on the position of certain Dialogues became much more clear and fixed'. It was also his intention to write a comprehensive account of Plato's philosophy. But his sense of the uncertainty of the available evidence, his dislike of constructive criticism, and above all his unwillingness to force upon the Platonic writings a unity which he felt that they did not possess, kept him back. When he found the theories of others so unsatisfactory, it was natural that he should hesitate to add a new one to the list. He preferred to enlarge the introductions to the various Dialogues, by discussing at greater length the subjects of them, or introducing short essays on features of the Platonic method, such as the 'ideas' or 'myths,' or reviewing modern aspects of Platonic difficulties. By these additions his work has become much more than a translation of Plato, it is a storehouse of criticism of philosophy and philosophers-and of life too, for even more striking than the philosophical discussions are the criticisms of life in its various relations which are scattered through the volumes.

This method of dealing with philosophy was characteristic of Jowett. For, as I have already observed, he was more critical than speculative, more intuitive than systematic. Many penetrating and sagacious aphorisms,

1 See esp. in ed. 3, introduction to Philebus (vol. iv. pp. 570 ff.).

especially about psychological and ethical matters, will be found in his writings; from many sides he casts keen glances on his subject which pierce to the heart of it, but he did not attempt to correlate his own ideas and bring them into a system. And perhaps it may be said that his sense of the practical was too keen to allow him to do full justice to a philosopher who was primarily a philosopher. Yet his criticism was also a philosophy.. It was not merely that he criticized systems and their founders; he went deeper still, reaching down to the relation of language to thought, and of both to experience. He was wont to argue that any philosophy which neglects the study of language and the history of the mind is unsatisfactory. Words tend to outrun facts and become the symbols of ideas, which in their turn transcend experience. These dominate the mind and prevent it from seeing facts as they are. Facts too are constantly changing, but words remain the same, and acquire a false show of certainty. Again: he contended that the subtlety of the mind is such that its operations cannot be expressed in language. We allow that the truth lies between opposites, yet the intermediate steps are often difficult to define, and men cling to broad distinctions in their desire to be consistent or maintain a clear position. Language is pressed into the service of philosophy, yet the lessons which we learn from language are not moral or metaphysical, but historical. Hence any philosophy in which the present state of knowledge tends to become fixed and arrêtée, seemed to Jowett in his later years at least unphilosophical.

To illustrate this. Utilitarianism is condemned by Jowett mainly because it destroys the ideal meaning of such words as truth, justice, honesty, virtue, &c., words 'which have a simple meaning and have become sacred

to us, the word of God written in the human heart. To no other words can the same associations be attached ; we cannot explain them adequately on principles of utility; in attempting to do so we rob them of their true character' (Philebus, Introd. vol. iv. p. 562). On the other hand, words such as development, evolution, law, and the like are constantly put in the place of facts, even by writers who profess to base truth entirely upon fact.' 'We do not understand how difficult it is to prevent the forms of expression which are ready made for our use from outrunning actual observation and experiment.' 'Along period in the history of philosophy was a barren tract, not uncultivated, but unfruitful, because there was no inquiry into the relation of language and thought.' It is for want of such a study that philosophers have wasted their time over nominalism' and 'realism,' and theologians have disputed about substance' (Parmenides, Introd. vol. iv. p. 39; Meno, Introd. vol. ii. p. 24).

From this point of view Jowett criticizes in more than one passage the philosophy of the Eighteenth Century. "The philosophy of Berkeley,' he says, 'could never have had any meaning, even to himself, if he had first analyzed from every point of view the conception of matter.' 'The philosophy of Hume was nothing more than the analysis of the word "cause" into uniform sequence.' 'And it was followed by a philosophy which, equally regardless of the history of the mind, sought to save mankind from scepticism by assigning to our notions of "cause and effect," "substance and accident," "whole and part a necessary place in human thought without any attempt to analyze the various senses in which the word "cause' or "substance" may be employed' (Parmenides, Introd. vol. ii. p. 23; cf. Meno, Introd. vol. ii. p. 40).

Words then, if we are to have a true use of them, must

be constantly corrected by a reference to facts. Such criticism does not necessarily lead to rationalism; ideas still remain, so far as they are true and a part of our nature. When we have carried our criticism to the furthest point these (religious) ideas still remain, a necessity of our moral nature, better known and understood by us because we are now aware of their imperfection.' Without ideas philosophy is impossible. There is no philosophy of experience; 'it is the idea of experience rather than experience itself with which the mind is filled.' Locke's system is indeed based upon experience, but with him experience includes reflection as well as sense.

On the other hand Jowett is fully aware of the difficulties which attend an abstract idealism. No passage in Plato impressed him more than the philosopher's criticism of his own ideas in the Parmenides, in which he points out the almost insuperable difficulty of connecting the abstract idea, if conceived as having a real existence, and the concrete individual (Parmenides, Introd. vol. iv. p. 5). Ideal philosophy, Jowett repeats, is at fault because it cannot be fitted to experience. 'Socrates (Plato) and Spinoza are both equally far from any real experience or observation of nature. And the same difficulty is found in both when we seek to apply their ideas to life and practice' (Meno, Introd. vol. ii. p. 22.)

Ideas, experience, thought, and sense, all are inadequate as a basis of philosophic method. Are we then to acquiesce in ignorance or resign ourselves to doubt? Not for one moment would Jowett have accepted such a conclusion; on the contrary, the knowledge of failure in the past is the best hope of success in the future.

'We are still,' he says, 'as in Plato's age, groping about for a new method more comprehensive than any of those which now prevail, and also more permanent. And we seem to see