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With the Timaeus is associated another dialogue called the
Critias,
which remains only as a fragment. In it is contained a description of the
celebrated visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the pillars of
Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury and power, a land also of gentle
manners and wise orderliness. “The fiction has exercised a great influence
over the imagination of later ages. As many attempts have been made to find
the great island as to discover the country of the lost tribes. Without
regard to the description of Plato, and without a suspicion that the whole
narrative is a fabrication, interpreters have looked for the spot in every
part of the globe—America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Sardinia,
Sweden. The story had also an effect on the early navigators of the
sixteenth century” (Jowett, Plato, vol. iii. p. 679).
We now come to a series of highly important dialogues, marked as a whole by
a certain diminution in the purely artistic attraction, having less of vivid
characterisation, less humour, less dramatic interest, less perfect
construction in every way, but, on the other hand, peculiarly interesting as
presenting a kind of after-criticism of his own philosophy. In them Plato
brings his philosophic conceptions into striking relation with earlier or
rival theories such as the Eleatic, the Megarian, the Cyrenaic, and the
Cynic, and touches in these connections on many problems of deep and
permanent import.
The most remarkable feature in these later dialogues is the disappearance,
or even in some cases the apparently hostile criticism, of the doctrine of
Ideas, and consequently of Reminiscence as the source of knowledge, and
even, apparently, of Personal Immortality, so far as the doctrine of
Reminiscence was imagined to guarantee it. This, however, is perhaps to push
the change of view too far. We may say that Plato in these dialogues is
rather the psychologist than the metaphysician; he is attempting a revised
analysis of mental processes.
A History of Greek Philosophy /
PLATO
