Christianity and Greek Philosophy Part 32

Thus the soul (????) as a composite nature is on one side linked to the eternal world, its essence being generated of that ineffable element which const.i.tutes the real, the immutable, and the permanent. It is a beam of the eternal Sun, a spark of the Divinity, an emanation from G.o.d.

On the other side it is linked to the phenomenal or sensible world, its emotive part[550] being formed of that which is relative and phenomenal.

The soul of man thus stands midway between the eternal and the contingent, the real and the phenomenal, and as such, it is the mediator between, and the interpreter of, both.

[Footnote 550: T?e?d??, the seat of the n.o.bler--?p????t????, the seat of the baser pa.s.sions.]

In the allegory of the "Chariot and Winged Steeds"[551] Plato represents the lower or inferior part of man's nature as dragging the soul down to the earth, and subjecting it to the slavery and debas.e.m.e.nt of corporeal conditions. Out of these conditions there arise numerous evils that disorder the mind and becloud the reason, for evil is inherent to the condition of finite and multiform being into which we have "fallen by our own fault." The present earthly life is a fall and a punishment. The soul is now dwelling in "the grave we call the body." In its incorporate state, and previous to the discipline of education, the rational element is "asleep." "Life is more of a dream than a reality." Men are utterly the slaves of sense, the sport of phantoms and illusions. We now resemble those "captives chained in a subterraneous cave," so poetically described in the seventh book of the "Republic;" their backs are turned to the light, and consequently they see but the shadows of the objects which pa.s.s behind them, and they "attribute to these shadows a perfect reality." Their sojourn upon earth is thus a dark imprisonment in the body, a dreamy exile from their proper home. "Nevertheless these pale fugitive shadows suffice to revive in us the reminiscence of that higher world we once inhabited, if we have not absolutely given the reins to the impetuous untamed horse which in Platonic symbolism represents the emotive sensuous nature of man." The soul has some dim and shadowy recollection of its ante-natal state of bliss, and some instinctive and proleptic yearnings for its return.

[Footnote 551: "Phaedrus," -- 54-62.]

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Has had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar, Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory, do we come From G.o.d, who is our home."[552]

[Footnote 552: Wordsworth, "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality," vol.

v.]

Exiled from the true home of the spirit, imprisoned in the body, disordered by pa.s.sion, and beclouded by sense, the soul has yet longings after that state of perfect knowledge, and purity, and bliss, in which it was first created. Its affinities are still on high. It yearns for a higher and n.o.bler form of life. It essays to rise, but its eye is darkened by sense, its wings are besmeared by pa.s.sion and l.u.s.t; it is "borne downward, until at length it falls upon and attaches itself to that which is material and sensual," and it flounders and grovels still amid the objects of sense.

And now, with all that seriousness and earnestness of spirit which is peculiarly Christian, Plato asks how the soul may be delivered from the illusions of sense, the distempering influence of the body, and the disturbances of pa.s.sion, which becloud its vision of the real, the good, and the true?

Plato believed and hoped this could be accomplished by _philosophy_.

This he regarded as a grand intellectual discipline for the purification of the soul. By this it was to be disenthralled from the bondage of sense[553] and raised into the empyrean of pure thought "where truth and reality shine forth." All souls have the faculty of knowing, but it is only by reflection, and self-knowledge, and intellectual discipline, that the soul can be raised to the vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty--that is, to the vision of G.o.d. And this intellectual discipline was the _Platonic Dialectic_.

[Footnote 553: Not, however, fully in this life. The consummation of the intellectual struggle into "the intelligible world" is death. The intellectual discipline was therefore e??t? ?a?at??, _a preparation for death_.]

CHAPTER XI.

THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (_continued_.)

THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (_continued_).

PLATO.

II. THE PLATONIC DIALECTIC.

The Platonic Dialectic is the Science of Eternal and Immutable Principles, and the _method_ (???a???) by which these first principles are brought forward into the clear light of consciousness. The student of Plato will have discovered that he makes no distinction between logic and metaphysics. These are closely united in the one science to which he gives the name of "_Dialectic_" and which was at once the science of the ideas and laws of the Reason, and of the mental process by which the knowledge of Real Being is attained, and a ground of absolute certainty is found. This science has, in modern times, been called _Primordial_ or _Transcendental Logic_.

We have seen that Plato taught that the human reason is originally in possession of fundamental and necessary ideas--the copies of the archetypal ideas which dwell in the eternal Reason; and that these ideas are the primordial laws of thought--that is, they are the laws under which we conceive of all objective things, and reason concerning all existence. These ideas, he held, are not derived from sensation, neither are they generalizations from experience, but they are inborn and connatural. And, further, he entertained the belief, more, however, as a reasonable hypothesis[554] than as a demonstrable truth, that these standard principles were acquired by the soul in a pre-existent state in which it stood face to face with ideas of eternal order, beauty, goodness, and truth.[555] "Journeying with the Deity," the soul contemplated justice, wisdom, science--not that science which is concerned with change, and which appears under a different manifestation in different objects, which we choose to call beings; but such science as is in that which alone is indeed _being_.[556] Ideas, therefore, belong to, and inhere in, that portion of the soul which is properly ??s?a--_essence_ or _being_; which had an existence anterior to time, and even now has no relation to time, because it is now in eternity--that is, in a sphere of being to which past, present, and future can have no relation.[557]

[Footnote 554: Within "the e???t?? ???? ?d?a--the category of probability."--"Phaedo."]

[Footnote 555: "Phaedo," -- 50-56.]

[Footnote 556: "Phaedrus," -- 58.]

[Footnote 557: See note on p. 349.]

All knowledge of truth and reality is, therefore, according to Plato, a REMINISCENCE (?????s??)--a recovery of partially forgotten ideas which the soul possessed in another state of existence; and the _dialectic_ of Plato is simply the effort, by apt _interrogation_, to lead the mind to "_recollect_"[558] the truth which has been formerly perceived by it, and is even now in the memory though not in consciousness. An ill.u.s.tration of this method is attempted in the "_Meno_" where Plato introduces Socrates as making an experiment on the mind of an uneducated person. Socrates puts a series of questions to a slave of Meno, and at length elicits from the youth a right enunciation of a geometrical truth. Socrates then points triumphantly to this instance, and bids Meno observe that he had not taught the youth any thing, but simply interrogated him as to his opinions, whilst the youth had recalled the knowledge previously existing in his own mind.[559]

[Footnote 558: "To learn is to recover our own previous knowledge, and this is properly to _recollect._"--"Phaedo" -- 55.]

[Footnote 559: "Meno," -- 16-20. "Now for a person to recover knowledge himself through himself, is not this to _recollect_."]

Now whilst we readily grant that the instance given in the "_Meno_" does not sustain the inference of Plato that "the boy" had learnt these geometrical truths "in eternity," and that they had simply been brought forward into the view of his consciousness by the "questioning" of Socrates, yet it certainly does prove that _there are ideas or principles in the human reason which are not derived from without--which are anterior to all experience, and for the development of which, experience furnishes the occasion, but is not the origin and source_. By a kind of lofty inspiration, he caught sight of that most important doctrine of modern philosophy, so clearly and logically presented by Kant, _that the Reason is the source of a pure_ a priori _knowledge_--a knowledge native to, and potentially in the mind, antecedent to all experience, and which is simply brought out into the field of consciousness by experience conditions. Around this greatest of all metaphysical truths Plato threw a gorgeous mythic dress, and presented it under the most picturesque imagery.[560] But, when divested of the rich coloring which the glowing imagination of Plato threw over it, it is but a vivid presentation of the cardinal truth that _there are ideas in the mind which have not been derived from without_, and which, therefore, the mind brought with it into the present sphere of being.

The validity and value of this fundamental doctrine, even as presented by Plato, is unaffected by any speculations in which he may have indulged, as to the pre-existence of the soul. He simply regarded this doctrine of pre-existence as highly probable--a plausible explanation of the facts. That there are ideas, innate and connatural to the human mind, he clung to as the most vital, most precious, most certain of all truths; and to lead man to the recognitions of these ideas, to bring them within the field of consciousness, was, in his judgment, the great business of philosophy.

And this was the grand aim of his _Dialectic_--to elicit, to bring to light the truths which are already in the mind--"a a?e?s??" a kind of intellectual midwifery[561]--a delivering of the mind of the ideas with which it was pregnant.

[Footnote 560: As in the "Phaedo," ---- 48-57; "Phaedrus," ---- 52-64; "Republic," bk. x.]

[Footnote 561: "Theaetetus," ---- 17-20.]

It is thus, at first sight, obvious that it was a higher and more comprehensive science than the art of deduction. For it was directed to the discovery and establishment of First Principles. Its sole object was the discovery of truth. His dialectic was an _a.n.a.lytical_ and _inductive method_. "In Dialectic Science," says _Alcinous_, "there is a dividing and a defining, and an a.n.a.lyzing, and, moreover, that which is inductive and syllogistic."[562] Even _Bacon_, who is usually styled "the Father of the Inductive method," and who, too often, speaks disparagingly of Plato, is constrained to admit that he followed the inductive method.

"An induction such as will be of advantage for the invention and demonstration of Arts and Sciences must distinguish the essential nature of things (naturam) by proper rejections and exclusions, and then after as many of these negatives as are sufficient, by comprising, above all (super), the positives. Up to this time this had not been done, nor even attempted, _except by Plato alone, who, in order to attain his definitions and ideas, has used, to a certain extent, the method of Induction_."[563]

[Footnote 562: "Introduction to the Doctrines of Plato," vol. vi. p.

249. "The Platonic Method was the method of induction."--Cousin's "History of Philosophy," vol. i. p. 307.]

[Footnote 563: "Novum Organum," vol. i. p. 105.]

The process of investigation adopted by Plato thus corresponds with the inductive method of modern times, with this simple difference, that Bacon conducted science into the world of _matter_, whilst Plato directed it to the world of _mind_. The dialectic of Plato aimed at the discovery of the "laws of thought;" the modern inductive philosophy aims at the discovery of the "laws of nature." The latter concerns itself chiefly with the inquiry after the "causes" of material phenomena; the former concerned itself with the inquiry after the "first principles" of all knowledge and of all existence. Both processes are, therefore, carried on by _interrogation_. The a.n.a.lysis which seeks for a law of nature proceeds by the interrogation of nature. The a.n.a.lysis of Plato proceeds by the interrogation of mind, in order to discover the fundamental _ideas_ which lie at the basis of all cognition, which determine all our processes of thought, and which, in their final a.n.a.lysis, reveal the REAL BEING, which is the ground and explanation of all existence.

Now the fact that such an inquiry has originated in the human mind, and that it can not rest satisfied without some solution, is conclusive evidence that the mind has an instinctive belief, a proleptic antic.i.p.ation, that such knowledge can be attained. There must unquestionably be some mental initiative which is the _motive_ and _guide_ to all philosophical inquiry. We must have some well-grounded conviction, some _a priori_ belief, some pre-cognition "ad intentionem ejus quod quaeritur,"[564] which determines the direction of our thinking. The mind does not go to work aimlessly; it asks a specific question; it demands the "_whence_" and the "_why_" of that which is.

Neither does it go to work unfurnished with any guiding principles. That which impels the mind to a determinate act of thinking is the possession of a _knowledge_ which is different from, and independent of, the process of thinking itself. "A rational antic.i.p.ation is, then, the ground of the _prudens quaestio_--"the forethought query, which, in fact, is the prior half of the knowledge sought."[565] If the mind inquire after "laws," and "causes," and "reasons," and "grounds,"--the first principles of all knowledge and of all existence,--"it must have the _a priori_ ideas of "law," and "cause," and "reason," and "being _in se"_ which, though dimly revealed to the mind previous to the discipline of reflection, are yet unconsciously governing its spontaneous modes of thought. The whole process of induction has, then, some rational ground to proceed upon--some principles deeper than science, and more certain than demonstration, which reason contains within itself, and which induction "draws out" into clearer light.

[Footnote 564: Bacon.]

[Footnote 565: Coleridge, vol. ii. p. 413.]

Now this mental initiative of every process of induction is the intuitive and necessary conviction _that there must be a sufficient reason why every thing exists, and why it is as it is, and not otherwise_;[566] or in other words, if any thing begins to be, some thing else must be supposed[567] as the ground, and reason, and cause, and law of its existence. This "_law of sufficient_ (or _determinant) reason_"[568] is the fundamental principle of all metaphysical inquiry.

It is contained, at least in a negative form, in that famous maxim of ancient philosophy, "_De nihilo nihil_"--"?d??at?? ???es?a? t? ??

?de??? p???p?????t??." "It is impossible for a real ent.i.ty to be made or generated from nothing pre-existing;" or in other words, "nothing can be made or produced without an efficient cause."[569] This principle is also distinctly announced by Plato: "Whatever is generated, is necessarily generated from a certain a?t?a?"--_ground, reason_, or _cause_; "for it is wholly impossible that any thing should be generated without a cause."[570]

[Footnote 566: "Phaedo," -- 103.]

[Footnote 567: _Suppono_, to place under as a support, to take as a ground.]

[Footnote 568: This generic principle, viewed under different relations, gives--

1st. _The principle of Substance_--every quality supposes a subject or real being.

2d. _The principle of Causality_--every thing which begins to be must have a cause.

3d. _The principle of Law_--every phenomenon must obey some uniform law.

4th. _The principle of Final Cause_--every means supposes an end, every existence has a purpose or reason why.