The Republic · ¶5058

Idea. [The Idea of Good is an abstraction, which, under that name at least, does not elsewhere occur in Plato’s writings. But it is probably not essentially different from another abstraction, ‘the true being of things,’ which is mentioned in many of his Dialogues [cp. passages cited s. v. Being]. He has nowhere given an explanation of his meaning, not because he was ‘regardless whether we understood him or not,’ but rather, perhaps, because he was himself unable to state in precise terms the ideal which floated before his mind. He belonged to an age in which men felt too strongly the first pleasure of metaphysical speculation to be able to estimate the true value of the ideas which they conceived (cp. his own picture of the effect of dialectic on the youthful mind, 7. 539). To him, as to the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, an abstraction seemed truer than a fact: he was impatient to…

Plato · translated by Benjamin Jowett · composite transcription based on the 1888 third edition
Benjamin Jowett, revised third edition (1888), with Stephanus numbering from the 1908 edition; composite transcription, Project Gutenberg #55201
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