[Footnote 9: In some of the Platonic Dialogues these four varieties are not understood as exhausting the sum total of Virtue: [Greek: ê( o(sio/tês] is included also; see Lachês, p. 199 D, Protagoras, p. 329 D, Euthyphron, pp. 5-6. Plato does not advert to [Greek: to\ o(/sion] in the Republic as a separate constituent, seemingly because on matters of piety he enjoins direct reference to Apollo and the Delphian oracle (Rep. iv. p. 427 B).]
[Side-note: All the four are here assumed as certain and determinate, though in former dialogues they appear indeterminate and full of unsolved difficulties.]
But let us pause for a moment to ask, how these professions harmonise with the dialogues reviewed in my preceding volumes. No reader will have forgotten the doubts and difficulties, exposed by the Sokratic Elenchus throughout the Dialogues of Search: the confessed inability of Sokrates himself to elucidate them, while at the same time his contempt for the false persuasion of knowledge--for those who talk confidently about matters which they can neither explain nor defend--is expressed without reserve. Now, when we turn to the Hippias Major, we find Sokrates declaring, that no man can affirm, and that a man ought to be ashamed to pretend to affirm, what particular matters are beautiful (fine, honourable) or ugly (mean, base), unless he knows and can explain what Beauty is.[10] A similar declaration appears in the Menon, where Sokrates treats it as absurd to affirm or deny any predicate respecting a Subject, until you have satisfied yourself that you know what the Subject itself is: and where he farther proclaims, that as to Virtue, he does not know what it is, and that he has never yet found any one who _did_ know.[11] Such ignorance is stated at the end of the dialogue not less emphatically than at the beginning. Again, respecting the four varieties or parts of Virtue. The first of the four, Prudence--(Wisdom--Knowledge)--has been investigated in the Theætêtus--one of the most elaborate of all the Platonic dialogues: several different explanations of it are proposed by Theætêtus, and each is shown by Sokrates to be untenable; the problem remains unsolved at last. As to Courage and Temperance, we have not been more fortunate. The Lachês and Charmidês exhibit nothing but a fruitless search both for one and for the other. And here the case is more remarkable; because in the Lachês, one of the several definitions of Courage, tendered to Sokrates and refuted by him, is, the very definition of Courage delivered by him in the Republic as complete and satisfactory: while in the Charmidês, one of the definitions of Temperance, refuted, and even treated as scarcely intelligible, by Sokrates ([Greek: to\ pra/ttein ta\ e(autou=]) is the same as that which Sokrates in the Republic relies on as a valid definition of Justice.[12] Lastly, every one who has read the Parmenidês, will remember the acute objections there urged against the Platonic hypothesis of substantive Ideas, participated in by particulars: of which objections no notice is taken in the Republic, though so much is said therein about these Ideas, in regard to the training of the philosophical Chiefs.