PHILEBUS. 16

the science of eternal being and possesses the purest mind and reason. The lower sciences, including the mathematical, are akin to opinion rather than to reason, and are grouped together in the fourth class of goods. The relationship in which they stand to dialectic is obscure in the Republic and is not clarified in the Philebus.

V. Thus far we have only reached the vestibule or ante-chamber of the good; for there is a good exceeding knowledge and exceeding essence which, like Glaucon in the Republic (p. 509), we find difficult to grasp. This good is now to be exhibited to us under various aspects and gradations. The relative dignity of pleasure and knowledge has been determined, but they have not yet received their exact position in the scale of goods. Some difficulties occur to us in the enumeration: First, how are we to distinguish the first class of goods from the second, or the second from the third? Secondly, why is there no mention of the supreme mind? Thirdly, what is the nature of the fourth class? Fourthly, what is the seeming allusion to a sixth class, which is not further investigated?

Plato seems to proceed in his table of goods from the more abstract to the less abstract—from the objective to the subjective—until, at the lower end of the scale, we descend into the realm of human action and feeling. To him, the greater the abstraction, the greater the truth, and he is always tending to see abstraction within abstraction, like the ideas in the Parmenides, which appear one behind another. Hence, we find a difficulty in following him into the sphere of thought he is seeking to attain. First in his scale of goods he places "measure," in which he finds the eternal nature; this would be more naturally expressed in modern language as "eternal law," and it seems akin both to the finite and to the mind or cause, which were two of the elements in the former table. Like the supreme nature in the Timaeus, like the ideal beauty in the Symposium or the Phaedrus, or like the ideal good in the Republic, this is the absolute and unapproachable being. But (2) this being is manifested in symmetry and beauty everywhere—in the order of nature and of mind, and in the relationships between people. For the word "measure," he now substitutes the word "symmetry," as if intending to express measure conceived as relationship. (3) He proceeds to regard the good no longer in an objective form, but as human reason seeking to attain truth by the aid of dialectics; such, at least, we naturally infer to be his meaning when we consider that both here and in the Republic, the sphere of νοῦς (mind/reason) is assigned