| <Saturday Review 5 April 1856: Lewes>
| <The History of Ancient Philosophy>
| The volumes before us have been waited for with 
| expectation. They will be read by many with interest; and 
| on several accounts they must be judged, even where they 
| are least admirable, with sympathy and respect. They are 
| the posthumous work of a very able man, who seems also 
| to have been a very interesting character, and whose life 
| was cut short just as he was in the bloom of his genius, at 
| the early age of thirty-seven. Professor Archer Butler is 
| best known to the world in general as a controversialist in 
| theology, and as a preacher. His <hi> Letters on 
| Development, </hi> in answer to Dr. J.H. Newman, excited 
| universal attention; and a volume of his sermons, 
| published by this friend and literary executor, the Rev. 
| Thomas Woodward, in 1849, has been recently placed by 
| a critic on a level with those of Dr. Guthrie and of Arthur 
| Stanley. Prefixed to that volume, we find a Memoir of 
| Professor Butler, which, it must be said, is disappointingly 
| meagre. The life itself was marked, no doubt, by few 
| external events; but it was a life on which the higher 
| faculties of the biographer might have found scope to 
| exercise themselves. It was a life of intense inward activity, 
| change, and progress, of all which we should gladly have 
| had some fuller record. Archer Butler was bred up a 
| Roman Catholic, and thus had changed sides with 
| Newman before engaging him in controversy. He had by 
| nature much of the poet’s sensibility, and in his latter days 
| associated on terms of intimacy with Wordsworth. The 
| present volumes prove him to have been an eager and 
| enterprising student. He passed with brilliant credit through 
| the Dublin University, and as he came to the close of his 
| youthful career, a good genius was found, in the shape of 
| Dr. Lloyd, the Provost, to establish a chair of Moral 
| Philosophy, expressly to be filled by him. He entered upon 
| the duties of his honourable position at the early age of 
| twenty-five, and the present lectures seem to have been 
| composed during the first four years of his professorship.
| The very choice of his subject was no small merit in the 
| young Professor. It has been too often thought incumbent 
| on men occupying Chairs of Philosophy to present their 
| hearers with an original system. Whatever value, in 
| themselves, such systems may have had, it may safely be 
| said that, for the purposes of education, a course of the 
| history of philosophy will almost always be more useful. 
| The history of philosophy is a necessary preliminary to all 
| sound speculation. Without it, we cannot properly 
| understand even the common formulas and terms which 
| we shall have to use. It must not be regarded as a mere 
| dry record of successive lives or dogmas. It is rather the 
| picture of our own thoughts at their various stages of 
| gradual development ~~ the seed, the flower, and the 
| fruit-time of language ~~ the psychology of the mind of all the 
| world, traced from childhood to maturity. Perhaps there is 
| no one idea which will prove more rich in results, and in 
| various applications, than this ~~ that philosophy, or in 
| other words, human thought, has had an historical 
| development. This, in fact, is in itself a sufficient answer to 
| all shallow attacks upon the study of the ancients. If for no 
| other reason, they must be studied as forming part of the 
| history of our own thoughts. For by degrees we come to 
| see that we cannot fully understand existing systems of 
| morals, of metaphysics, or of theology, without the 
| knowledge of what has led to them ~~ any more than we 
| can be said to comprehend the constitution of our country 
| without some knowledge of constitutional history. Fully to 
| carry out this idea is, indeed, one of the last results of a 
| higher kind of education. To be able to lay aside all modern 
| associations, and take the standing-ground of an old 
| philosopher ~~ to know when by-gones are by-gones, and 
| when the old thinkers and teachers were thinking like 
| ourselves ~~ is what few attain to. Most people are totally 
| unconscious of the fact that there has been any history at 
| all in thought or language.
| In asking how Professor Butler has treated the subject 
| which he selected, we may remember that two kinds of 
| excellence might be looked for, separately or conjointly, in 
| lectures upon such a topic. The one is depth in conception 
| of the subject as a whole ~~ the other is accuracy in details 
| with regard to particular schools and doctrines. Either of 
| these qualities would render a book on the History of 
| Philosophy praiseworthy and valuable. The first is the 
| higher and the rarer ~~ it comes like a sort of inspiration to 
| the mind of the student or the reader, and is fruitful in 
| generating new thoughts. This is the great excellence of 
| Hegel’s Lectures. <reg orig=“No one”> No-one </reg> can 
| say that they are minutely and irreproachably exact in all 
| facts and details about the various philosophies; but eh 
| idea which predominates over the whole is essentially 
| great and true. Critical exactness with regard to the 
| ancients ~~ especially with regard to those whose works 
| have come down to us in fragments, and of whom our 
| knowledge is partly derived from the untrustworthy writers 
| of the Empire ~~ this is what can only be gradually and 
| approximately arrived at. Every ten years makes a great 
| difference in the conclusions upon the subject; and 
| therefore we may at once say that this last excellence is 
| not to be expected in the Lectures of Professor Butler. 
| They were composed between the years 1837 and 1840; 
| they were the work of a young man between twenty-five 
| and thirty, who at the same time was imperfectly 
| acquainted with German; and they were perhaps the 
| earliest attempt of the kind in English. 
| <reg orig=“Every one”>  Everyone </reg> knows that 
| a Professor’s first course upon a subject is 
| rather a trial of his <p> “’prentice 
| hand,” </p> than the perfection of his method; and 
| nowhere are time and familiarity more productive of new 
| results than in the study of philosophy. Unfortunately, we 
| have the first essays, and not the ultimate achievements, 
| of Professor Butler. When he had familiarized himself with 
| his subject he ceased to write his lectures, and therefore 
| we lose his opinions just as they had become most 
| valuable.
| Both in point of conception and of details, nothing could be 
| more unequal than the lectures before us. It is easy to 
| observe how the Professor grew and improved as he went 
| on with his work. The first volume contains an introductory 
| series on the Science of Mind. These lectures are poor and 
| rhetorical. Then follows a discourse upon Ancient and 
| Modern Histories of Philosophy. In this it cannot be said 
| that a really scientific account is given; for the lecturer’s 
| main source of information is M. Degerando’s <hi> Historie 
| Comparee, </hi> and there are some inaccuracies. The 
| lecture that succeeds, on “The Province and Functions of a 
| Historian of Philosophy,” shows a limited grasp of the true 
| importance of the subject. And the subsequent account of 
| early Greek philosophers, from Thales to Socrates, is not 
| to be compared with the account of the same period in the 
| German histories of Zeller or Brandis, or with the finished 
| and able little work, entitled <hi> Manuel de Philosophie 
| Ancienne, </hi> of M. Renouvier, or with the articles in the 
| <hi> Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography. </hi> or 
| with Mr. Grote’s chapters on the Sophists and Socrates. It 
| is indeed remarkable that Professor Butler, with so 
| extensive a knowledge and high appreciation of Plato as 
| he afterwards manifests, should have passed over the <p> 
| “moment” </p> of the Sophists and of Socrates in so 
| superficial and unheeding a manner. This is only one proof 
| among many that, while he taught, he was learning. It is 
| only when he comes to his third series of lectures ~~ that, 
| namely, on the Megarians, the Cynics, and the Cyrenaics 
| ~~ that he seems to have attained any real hold on his 
| subject. Were it not for this series, we should be inclined to 
| say that the whole of the first volume is only valuable for 
| the notes which it contains by the learned and 
| accomplished editor, Professor Thompson. These notes 
| display a wide range of reading connected with the ancient 
| philosophies, and they for the most part serve to bring up 
| Professor Butler’s remarks to the level of the last results of 
| criticism. But notes have their limits. They can only 
| legitimately follow the lead of the text ~~ they cannot 
| introduce a new point of view, or move the discussion into 
| new spheres. And even Professor Thompson might be 
| caught tripping sometimes, as for instance when he speaks 
| of Cicero as possessing an <p> “extensive knowledge” 
| </p> of the writings of the Aristotle, and informs us that 
| Cicero <q> </q> (vol. i. p. 194.) Or again, when he talks of 
| <hi> Quintessence </hi> as being a term <p> “of 
| Aristotelian extraction,” </p> <q> </q> ~~ in support of 
| which Professor Thompson refers us to the spurious work, 
| <hi> De Mundo! </hi> (vol. i. p. 316.) However, we have no 
| wish to disparage the labours of the learned editor, which 
| have been performed in a most scholarlike way. Amongst 
| other services, he has stood sponsor for some very spirited 
| and accurate translations from Plato, about which we are 
| left in uncertainty how much is due to the Dublin, and how 
| much to the Cambridge Professor.
| In short, the most valuable part of Archer Butler’s lectures 
| ~~ that which can be read and criticised without the 
| necessity of any indulgence ~~ is the representation of 
| Plato’s philosophy in vol. ii. The lecturer here comes upon 
| a subject for which he has a natural affinity. He seizes, in a 
| fresh and unsophisticated spirit, upon the Platonic 
| dialogues ~~ he reads them with his own eyes. His 
| exposition of them, though occasionally marred with 
| rhetoric, often catches the true point of view, and is always 
| broad and interesting. His account of the <hi> Physics 
| </hi> of Plato ~~ in other words, his analysis of the <hi> 
| Timaeus </hi> is by far the best thing of the kind in English. 
| A few sentences extracted from this may give our readers 
| a fair impression, not of the best kind of writing (which we 
| hold of secondary importance), but of the best kind of 
| reflections which these volumes contain: ~~
| <q> </q>
| Want of space renders it impossible to do justice to these 
| lectures on the Physics of Plato. The above extracts may 
| serve to show those who are acquainted with the subject, 
| that Professor Butler was in the right direction. It is perhaps 
| to be regretted that his literary executors did not content 
| themselves with publishing <hi> one </hi> volume of his 
| lectures, containing those on the Socratic schools and on 
| Plato. Taking a glance at the whole of the present volumes 
| as they lie before us, we cannot but acknowledge they are 
| unripe fruit; yet we feel that, under the circumstances, they 
| are highly creditable to their author, and even as they are, 
| we are glad to possess them.