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The position is somewhat similar to that of a modern philosopher who attempts to think out the psychological problem of Human Will in relation to Almighty and Over-ruling Providence. One may very clearly see the psychological difficulties, without ceasing to believe either in the one or the other as facts. The first of the 'psychological dialogues, as we have called them, is the Philebus.
The Psychology of Pleasure and Pain is given at length in the Philebus. IV. With regard to the scheme of Duty. In Plato, we find the first statement of the four Cardinal Virtues. As to the Substance of the Moral Code, the references above made to the Republic and the Laws will show in what points his views differed from modern Ethics. Benevolence was not one of the Cardinal Virtues.
The Republic is an enlargement of the lessons of the Politikus without the dialectic discussion. The postulate of the One Wise man is repeated in KRATYLUS, on the unpromising subject of Language or the invention of Names. The PHILEBUS has a decidedly ethical character. It propounds for enquiry the Good, the Summum Bonum.
There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence.
"The Furies seize upon your 'Philebus'!" thundered Agias. "Keep quiet, if you've nothing good to tell! Oh, Agias, Agias! where are your wits, where is your cunning? What in the world can I do?" And so he poured out his distress and anger. But, after all, there was nothing to be done that night.
Of the four first of these manuscripts, three of which are folio volumes, I have complete copies taken with my own hand; and of the copious extracts from the others, those from Olympiodorus on the Gorgias were taken by me from the copy preserved in the British Museum; those from the same philosopher on the Philebus, and those from Hermeas on the Phaedrus, and Damascius Peri Archon, from the copies in the Bodleian library.
At a later stage of the Platonic philosophy we shall find that both the paradox and the solution of it appear to have been retracted. The Phaedo, the Gorgias, and the Philebus offer further corrections of the teaching of the Protagoras; in all of them the doctrine that virtue is pleasure, or that pleasure is the chief or only good, is distinctly renounced.
"No," replied the still amazed Pisander. "I did not hear the whole conversation. There was something about 'a very few days, and then Pratinas began to condole with Calatinus over being beaten for the tribunate after having spent so much money for the canvass. But why are you so stirred up? As Plato very admirably observes in his 'Philebus' "
And though in a later dialogue, the Philebus, he goes further than this, and would exclude from the perfect life all pleasures except those which he describes as "pure," that is those which attend upon the contemplation of form and colour and sound, or which accompany intellectual activity; yet here, no doubt, he is passing beyond the sphere of the practicable ideal, and his distinct personal bias towards asceticism must be discounted if we are to take him as representative of the Greek view.
Long ago, in the Euthydemus, the vulgar application of the 'both and neither' Eristic had been subjected to a similar criticism, which there takes the form of banter and irony, here of illustration. The attack upon the Ideas is resumed in the Philebus, and is followed by a return to a more rational philosophy.
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