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The Republic by Plato
page 82 of 789 (10%)

There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by 'the longer
way': he seems to intimate some metaphysic of the future which will not be
satisfied with arguing from the principle of contradiction. In the sixth
and seventh books (compare Sophist and Parmenides) he has given us a sketch
of such a metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for the final revelation of the
idea of good, he is put off with the declaration that he has not yet
studied the preliminary sciences. How he would have filled up the sketch,
or argued about such questions from a higher point of view, we can only
conjecture. Perhaps he hoped to find some a priori method of developing
the parts out of the whole; or he might have asked which of the ideas
contains the other ideas, and possibly have stumbled on the Hegelian
identity of the 'ego' and the 'universal.' Or he may have imagined that
ideas might be constructed in some manner analogous to the construction of
figures and numbers in the mathematical sciences. The most certain and
necessary truth was to Plato the universal; and to this he was always
seeking to refer all knowledge or opinion, just as in modern times we seek
to rest them on the opposite pole of induction and experience. The
aspirations of metaphysicians have always tended to pass beyond the limits
of human thought and language: they seem to have reached a height at which
they are 'moving about in worlds unrealized,' and their conceptions,
although profoundly affecting their own minds, become invisible or
unintelligible to others. We are not therefore surprized to find that
Plato himself has nowhere clearly explained his doctrine of ideas; or that
his school in a later generation, like his contemporaries Glaucon and
Adeimantus, were unable to follow him in this region of speculation. In
the Sophist, where he is refuting the scepticism which maintained either
that there was no such thing as predication, or that all might be
predicated of all, he arrives at the conclusion that some ideas combine
with some, but not all with all. But he makes only one or two steps
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