Plato and Platonism Part 8

He belonged to what was just then the discontented cla.s.s, and might well have taken refuge from active political life in political ideals, or in a kind of self-imposed exile. A traveller, adventurous for that age, he certainly became. After the Lehr-jahre, the Wander-jahre!--all round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as Sicily. Think of what all that must have meant just then, for eyes which could see. If those journeys had begun in angry flight from home, it was for purposes of self-improvement they were continued: the delightful fruit of them is evident in what he writes; and finding him [148] in friendly intercourse with Dionysius the elder, with Dio, and Dionysius the younger, at the polished court of Syracuse, we may understand that they were a search also for "the philosophic king," perhaps for the opportune moment of realising "the ideal state." In that case, his quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that he was disappointed.

For the future he sought no more to pa.s.s beyond the charmed theoretic circle, "speaking wisdom," as was said of Pythagoras, only "among the perfect." He returns finally to Athens; and there, in the quiet precincts of the Academus, which has left a somewhat dubious name to places where people come to be taught or to teach, founds, not a state, nor even a brotherhood, but only the first college, with something of a common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library with the authentic text of his Dialogues upon the shelves: we may just discern the sort of place through the scantiest notices. His reign was after all to be in his writings. Plato himself does nothing in them to r.e.t.a.r.d the effacement which mere time brings to persons and their abodes; and there had been that, moreover, in his own temper, which promotes self-effacement. Yet as he left it, the place remained for centuries, according to his will, to its original use. What he taught through the remaining forty years of his life, the method of that teaching, whether it [149] was less or more esoteric than the teaching of the extant Dialogues, is but matter of surmise. Writers, who in their day might still have said much we should have liked to hear, give us little but old, quasi-supernatural stories, told as if they had been new ones, about him. The year of his birth fell, according to some, in the very year of the death of Pericles (a significant date!) but is not precisely ascertainable: nor is the year of his death, nor its manner.

Scribens est mortuus, says Cicero:--after the manner of a true scholar, "he died pen in hand."

NOTES

127-28. +Transliteration: Synesometha pollois ton neon autothi. Pater's translation: "We shall meet a number of our youth there." Plato, Republic 328a.

133. +Transliteration: Kai hos eipen erythriasas, ede gar hypephaine ti emeras oste kataphane auton genesthai. E-text editor's translation: "And he blushed as he spoke, for presently the day began to break, so as to make him visible." Plato, Protagoras 312a.

134. +Transliteration: Ta erotika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.

136. +Transliteration: ta erotika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.

136. +Transliteration: hetton ton kalon. Pater's translation: "subject to the influence of fair persons;" more literally, "yielding to beauty." Plato, Meno 76c.

140. +Transliteration: ta erotika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.

140. +Transliteration: theoria. Liddell and Scott definition: "a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection."

Plato, Republic 486a.

146. +Transliteration: theoria. Liddell and Scott definition: "a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection."

Plato, Republic 486a.

CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

I. THE THEORY OF IDEAS

[150] PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a tendency, a group of tendencies--a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of himself and his own mental complexion. Those tendencies combine and find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather than Plato, have called the "theory of ideas," itself indeed not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of general terms, such as Useful or Just; of abstract notions, like Equality; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City; of all those terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the particular presentations of our individual experience; or, to use Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed [151] from his old Eleatic teachers, which reduce "the Many to the One."

What the nature of such representative terms and notions, genus and species, cla.s.s-word, and abstract idea or ideal, may be; what their relationship to the individual, the unit, the particulars which they include; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic.

Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and pa.s.s out of it, as also of the particular mind which entertains it:-- that is one of the fixed and formal answers to this question; and Plato is the father of all realists. Realism, as such, in the sense just indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or transcendental theory; but rises, again and again, at least in a particular cla.s.s of minds, quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question. Taking our own stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the conceptualist:--See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here (giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common [152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between general and particular, between our individual experience and the common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to a.s.sist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, "an intellectual world," as Plato calls it, a true noetos topos +. So much for the modern view; for what common sense might now suggest as to the nature of logical "universals."

Plato's realism however--what is called "The Theory of Ideas"--his way of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say about "the Many and the One," is often very difficult; though of various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds.

From the simple and easily intelligible sort of realism attributed by Aristotle to Socrates, seeking in "universal definitions," or ideas, only a serviceable instrument for the distinguishing of what is essential from what is unessential in the actual things about him, Plato pa.s.ses by successive stages, which we should try to keep distinct as we read him, to what may be rightly called a "transcendental," what to many minds has [153] seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of thought, regarding those abstractions, which indeed seem to become for him not merely substantial things-in-themselves, but little short of living persons, to be known as persons are made known to each other, by a system of affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, h.o.m.oion h.o.m.oio +, like to like--these persons const.i.tuting together that common, eternal, intellectual world, a sort of divine family or hierarchy, with which the mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable, or really knows, is in communion or correspondence. And here certainly is a theory, a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about which the difficulties are many.

Yet as happens always with the metaphysical questions, or answers, which from age to age preoccupy acuter minds, those difficulties about the Many and the One actually had their attractiveness for some in the days of Plato.--

Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is, that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely, embodied in one general term) which--hypo logon +--under the influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language, become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to everything of which existence is a.s.serted from time to time.

This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun; but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us. And whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy; he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in motion-- kinei + --every definition [154] --logos+--every conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particulari- ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular, till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first, and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter.

Philebus, 15.+

The Platonic doctrine of "the Many and the One"--the problem with which we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato--is not precisely the question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes nothing less than the standard of what is uninteresting, as such, to its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much [155] what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells. Plato and Platonism we shall never understand unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about "the Many and the One."

Plato's peculiar view of the matter, then, pa.s.ses with him into a phase of poetic thought; as indeed all that Plato's genius touched came in contact with poetry. Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such; to notions, we might think, carefully deprived of all the incident, the colour and variety, which fits things--this or that--to the const.i.tution and natural habit of our minds, fits them for attachment to what we really are. We cannot love or live upon genus and species, accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses. Take a seed from the garden. What interest it has for us all lies in our sense of potential differentiation to come: the leaves, leaf upon leaf, the flowers, a thousand new seeds in turn. It is so with animal seed; and with humanity, individually, or as a whole, its expansion into a detailed, ever-changing, parti-coloured history of particular facts and persons.

Abstraction, the introduction of general ideas, seems to close it up again; to reduce flower and fruit, odour and savour, back again into the dry and worthless seed. We might as well be colour-blind at once, and there [156] is not a proper name left! We may contrast generally the mental world we actually live in, where cla.s.sification, the reduction of all things to common types, has come so far, and where the particular, to a great extent, is known only as the member of a cla.s.s, with that other world, on the other side of the generalising movement to which Plato and his master so largely contributed--a world we might describe as being under Homeric conditions, such as we picture to ourselves with regret, for which experience was intuition, and life a continuous surprise, and every object unique, where all knowledge was still of the concrete and the particular, face to face delightfully.

To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal cla.s.ses, under general notions, and with--yes! with written labels fluttering on the stalks, instead of blossoms--a botanic or "physic" garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. And yet (it must be confessed on the other hand) what we actually see, see and hear, is more interesting than ever; the nineteenth century as compared with the first, with Plato's days or Homer's; the faces, the persons behind those masks which yet express so much, the flowers, or whatever it may happen to be they carry or [157] touch. The concrete, and that even as a visible thing, has gained immeasurably in richness and compa.s.s, in fineness, and interest towards us, by the process, of which those acts of generalisation, of reduction to cla.s.s and generic type, have certainly been a part. And holding still to the concrete, the particular, to the visible or sensuous, if you will, last as first, thinking of that as essentially the one vital and lively thing, really worth our while in a short life, we may recognise sincerely what generalisation and abstraction have done or may do, are defensible as doing, just for that--for the particular gem or flower--what its proper service is to a mind in search, precisely, of a concrete and intuitive knowledge such as that.

Think, for a moment, of the difference, as regards mental att.i.tude, between the naturalist who deals with things through ideas, and the layman (so to call him) in picking up a sh.e.l.l on the sea-sh.o.r.e; what it is that the subsumption of the individual into the species, its subsequent alliance to and co-ordination with other species, really does for the furnishing of the mind of the former. The layman, though we need not suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain impressions, is in fact still but a child; and the sh.e.l.l, its colours and convolution, no more than a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him. Let him become a schoolboy about it, so to speak. The toy he puts aside; his mind is [158] drilled perforce, to learn about it; and thereby is exercised, he may think, with everything except just the thing itself, as he cares for it; with other sh.e.l.ls, with some general laws of life, and for a while it might seem that, turning away his eyes from the "vanity" of the particular, he has been made to sacrifice the concrete, the real and living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract product of the mind. But when he comes out of school, and on the sea- sh.o.r.e again finds a fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it, he may see what the service of that converse with the general has really been towards the concrete, towards what he sees--in regard to the particular thing he actually sees. By its juxtaposition and co- ordination with what is ever more and more not it, by the contrast of its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper and perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circ.u.mjacent world, concentrated upon, or as it were at focus in, it. By a kind of short-hand now, and as if in a single moment of vision, all that, which only a long experience, moving patiently from part to part, could exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of nature, is legible upon it, as it lies there in one's hand.

So it is with the sh.e.l.l, the gem, with a glance of the eye; so it may be with the moral act, [159] with a condition of the mind, or a feeling. You may draw, by use of this coinage (it is Hobbes's figure) this coinage of representative words and thoughts, at your pleasure, upon the acc.u.mulative capital of the whole experience of humanity.

Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating the concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with the joint perspective, the significance, the expressiveness, of all other things beside. What broad-cast light he enjoys!--that scholar, confronted with the sea- sh.e.l.l, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circ.u.mstances which may never precisely so occur again; in the contemplation of that single phenomenon, or object, or situation. He not only sees, but understands (thereby only seeing the more) and will, therefore, also remember. The significance of the particular object he will retain, by use of his intellectual apparatus of notion and general law, as, to use Plato's own figure, fluid matter may be retained in vessels, not indeed of unbaked clay, but of alabaster or bronze. So much by way of apology for general ideas--abstruse, or intangible, or dry and seedy and wooden, as we may sometimes think them.

"Two things," says Aristotle, "might rightly be attributed to Socrates: inductive reasoning, [160] and universal definitions." Now when Aristotle says this of Socrates, he is recording the inst.i.tution of a method, which might be applied in the way just indicated, to natural objects, to such a substance as carbon, or to such natural processes as heat or motion; but which, by Socrates himself, as by Plato after him, was applied almost exclusively to moral phenomena, to the generalisation of aesthetic, political, ethical ideas, of the laws of operation (for the essence of every true conception, or definition, or idea, is a law of operation) of the feelings and the will. To get a notion, a definition, or idea, of motion, for example, which shall not exclude the subtler forms of it, heat for instance--to get a notion of carbon, which shall include not common charcoal only, but the diamond, a thing superficially so unlike it, and which shall also exclude, perhaps, some other substance, superficially almost indistinguishable from it: such is the business of physical science, in obedience to rules, outlined by Bacon in the first book of the Novum Organum, for securing those acts of "inclusion" and "exclusion," inclusiones, exclusiones, naturae, debitae, as he says, "which the nature of things requires," if our thoughts are not to misrepresent them.

It was a parallel process, a process of inclusion, that one's resultant idea should be adequate, of rejection or exclusion, that this idea should be not redundant, which Socrates applied [161] to practice; exercising, as we see in the Platonic Dialogues, the two opposed functions of synagoge and diairesis,+ for the formation of just ideas of Temperance, Wisdom, Bravery, Justice itself--a cla.s.sification of the phenomena of the entire world of feeling and action. Ideas, if they fulfil their proper purpose, represent to the mind such phenomena, for its convenience, but may easily also misrepresent them. In the transition from the particulars to the general, and again in the transition from the general idea, the mental word, to the spoken or written word, to what we call the definition, a door lies open, both for the adulteration and the diminution of the proper content, of our conception, our definition. The first growth of the Platonic "ideas,"

as we see it in Socrates, according to the report of Aristotle, provided against this twofold misrepresentation. Its aim is to secure, in the terms of our discourse with others and with ourselves, precise equivalence to what they denote. It was a "mission" to go about Athens and challenge people to guard the inlets of error, in the pa.s.sage from facts to their thoughts about them, in the pa.s.sage from thoughts to words. It was an intellectual gymnastic, to test, more exactly than they were in the habit of doing, the equivalence of words they used so constantly as Just, Brave, Beautiful, to the thoughts they had; of those thoughts to the facts of experience, which it was the business of those [162] thoughts precisely to represent; to clear the mental air; to arrange the littered work-chamber of the mind.

In many of Plato's Dialogues we see no more than the ordered reflex of this process, informal as it was in the actual practice of Socrates.

Out of the accidents of a conversation, as from the confused currents of life and action, the typical forms of the vices and virtues emerge in definite outline. The first contention of The Republic, for instance, is to establish in regard to the nature of Justice, terms as exactly conterminous with thoughts, thoughts as exactly conterminous with moral facts, as the notion of carbon is for the naturalist, when it has come to include both charcoal and the diamond, on the basis of the essential law of their operation as experience reveals it. Show us, not merely accidental truths about it; but, by the doing of what (Ti poiousa)+ in the very soul of its possessor, itself by itself, Justice is a good, and Injustice a bad thing. That ill.u.s.trates exactly what is meant by "an idea," the force of "knowledge through ideas," in the particular instance of Justice. It will include perhaps, on the one hand, forms of Justice so remote from the Justice of our everyday experience as to seem inversions of it; it will clearly exclude, on the other hand, acts and thoughts, not it, yet, phenomenally, so like it, as to deceive the very G.o.ds; and its area will be expanded sufficiently to include, not the individual [163] only, but the state. And you, the philosophic student, were to do that, not for one virtue only, but for Piety, and Beauty, and the State itself, and Knowledge, and Opinion, and the Good. Nay, you might go on and do the same thing for the physical, when you came to the end of the moral, world, were life long enough, and if you had the humour for it:--for Motion, Number, Colour, Sound. That, then, was the first growth of the Platonic ideas, as derived immediately from Socrates, whose formal contribution to philosophy had been "universal definitions," developed "inductively,"

by the twofold method of "inclusion" and "exclusion."

Aristotle adds, however, that Socrates had stopped at the point here indicated: he had not gone on, like some others, to make those universal notions or definitions "separable"--separable, that is to say, from the particular and concrete instances, from which he had gathered them. Separable: choristos + (famous word!) that is precisely what general notions become in what is specially called "the Platonic Theory of Ideas." The "Ideas" of Plato are, in truth, neither more nor less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and shadows, in the singularly const.i.tuted atmosphere, under the strange laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of thought. By its peculiarities, subsequent thought--philosophic, [164]

poetic, theological--has been greatly influenced; by the intense subjectivities, the accidents, so to speak, of Plato's genius, of Plato himself; the ways const.i.tutional with him, the magic or trick of his personality, in regarding the intellectual material he was occupied with--by Plato's psychology. And it is characteristic of him, again, that those peculiarities of his mental att.i.tude are evidenced informally; by a tendency, as we said, by the mere general tone in which he speaks of Beauty, for instance, "as it really is," of all that "really is," under its various forms; a manner of speaking, not explicit, but veiled, in various degrees, under figures, as at the end of the sixth book of The Republic, or under mythological fantasies, like those of the Phaedrus. He seems to have no inclination for the responsibilities of definite theory; for a system such as that of the Neo-Platonists for instance, his own later followers, who, in a kind of prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism, developed as definite philosophic dogma, hard enough in more senses than one, what in Plato is to the last rather poetry than metaphysical reasoning--the irrepressible because almost unconscious poetry, which never deserts him, even when treating of what is neither more nor less than a chapter in the rudiments of logic.

The peculiar development of the Socratic realism by Plato can then only be understood [165] by a consideration of the peculiarities of Plato's genius; how it reacted upon those abstractions; what they came to seem in its peculiar atmosphere. The Platonic doctrine of "Ideas," as was said, is not so much a doctrine, as a way of speaking or feeling about certain elements of the mind; and this temper, this peculiar way of feeling, of speaking, which for most of us will have many difficulties, is not uniformly noticeable in Plato's Dialogues, but is to be found more especially in the Phaedo, the Symposium, and in certain books of The Republic, above all in the Phaedrus. Here is a famous pa.s.sage from it:--

There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and s.p.a.ce) there, at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul.

For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the highest point, pa.s.sed out and stood (as you might stand upon the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky.

And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries them round; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky.

That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily. And thus it is: for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate, especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking. For the colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason alone as one's guide. Centered about that, the generation, or seed, genos,+--the people, of true knowledge inhabits this place. As, then, the intelligence of G.o.d, which is nourished by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akerato,+ unmixed with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also, which is about to receive that which properly belongs to it, beholding, after long interval, that which is, loves [166] it (that's the point!) and by the vision of truth is fed; and fares well; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings it round again to the same place. And in that journey round it looks upon justice itself; it looks upon Temperance, upon Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of becoming (the law of change, namely, of birth and death and decay) attaches; nor that which is, as it were, one in one thing, another in another, of those things which now we speak of as being; but the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is (ten en to ho estin on ontos epistemen ousan)+ and having beheld, after the same manner, all other things that really are, and feasted upon them, being pa.s.sed back again to the interior of the sky, the soul returned home. Phaedrus, 247.+

Only, as Plato thinks, that return was, in fact, an exile.

There, in that attractive, but perhaps not wholly acceptable, sort of discourse, in some other pa.s.sages like it, Plato has gone beyond his master Socrates, on two planes or levels, so to speak, of speculative ascent, which we may distinguish from each other, by way of making a little clearer what is in itself certainly so difficult.

For Plato, then, not by way of formal theory, we must remember, but by a turn of thought and speech (while he speaks of them, in fact) the Socratic "universals," the notions of Justice and the like, are become, first, things in themselves--the real things; and secondly, persons, to be known as persons must be; and to be loved, for the perfections, the visible perfections, we might say--intellectually visible--of [167]

their being. "It looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon Temperance; upon Knowledge."

Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations, serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason. With Plato, they are the creators of our reason--those treasures of experience, stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance, or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking things. For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the instruments by which we tabulate and cla.s.sify and record our experience--mere "marks" of the real things of experience, of what is essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by a certain common name; but are themselves rather the proper objects of all true knowledge, and a pa.s.sage from all merely relative experience to the "absolute." In proportion as they lend themselves to the individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they reproduce the eternal reason for him. For Socrates, as Aristotle understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond. For Plato, for Platonists, they are become--Justice and Beauty, and the perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if we are to apprehend sensible [168] instances thereof, but which no two equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree, every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever--separate (choristos)+ separable from, as being essentially independent of, the individual mind which conceives them; as also of the particular temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they remain for ever--those eternal "forms," of Tree, Equality, Justice, and so forth.

That, then, is the first stage, or plane, of Platonic transcendentalism. Our common ideas, without which, in fact, we none of us could think at all, are not the consequence, not the products, but the cause of our reason in us: we did not make them; but they make us what we are, as reasonable beings. The eternal Being, of Parmenides, one and indivisible, has been diffused, divided, resolved, refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple, numerous, stellar world, so to call it--abstract light into stars: Justice, Temperance as it is, Bravery as it is. Permanence, independency, indefectible ident.i.ty with itself--all those qualities which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality--belong to every one of those ideas severally.

It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a return of the many G.o.ds of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love, [169] Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the modern anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls "animism." Animism, that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every object, almost in every circ.u.mstance, which impresses one with a sense of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest ill.u.s.tration is primitive man adoring, as a divine being endowed with will, the meteoric stone that came rushing from the sky. That condition "survives" however, in the negro, who thinks the discharging gun a living creature; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits; in the pantheism of Goethe; and in Sch.e.l.ling, who formulates that pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory. Such "animistic"

instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato's mental const.i.tution,--the instinctive effort to find anima, the conditions of personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it remembered, of which the various functions, as we reckon them, imagination, reason, intuition, were still by no means clearly a.n.a.lysed and differentiated from each other, but partic.i.p.ated, all alike and all together, in every single act of mind.

And here is the second stage of the Platonic idealism, the second grade of Plato's departure [170] from the simpler realism of his master, as noted by Aristotle, towards that "intelligible world," opposed by him so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to follow him at all, and in which the "ideas" become veritable persons.

To speak, to think, to feel, about abstract ideas as if they were living persons; that, is the second stage of Plato's speculative ascent. With the lover, who had graduated, was become a master, in the school of love, but had turned now to the love of intellectual and strictly invisible things, it was as if the faculty of physical vision, of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre of intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas themselves became animated, living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes. And it is, as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary reinforcing cause, of this mental condition, that the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the central idea; the permanently typical instance of what an idea means; of its relation to particular things, and to the action of our thoughts upon them. It was to the lover dealing with physical beauty, a thing seen, yet unseen--seen by all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one and not by another, as if through some capricious, personal self- discovery, by some law of affinity between the seer and what is seen, the knowing and the known--that the nature and function of an idea, as such, would come home most clearly. [170] And then, while visible beauty is the clearest, the most certain thing, in the world (lovers will always tell you so) real with the reality of something hot or cold in one's hand, it also comes nearest of all things, so Plato a.s.sures us, to its eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason, the eternal idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, ant.i.types, out of all proportion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any copy, left here with us, of Justice, for instance, or Equality, or the Perfect State. The typical instance of an abstract idea, yet pre- occupying the mind with all the colour and circ.u.mstance of the relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of ideas, the a.s.sociations which belong properly to such relationships only. A certain measure of caprice, of capricious preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the commerce of men's minds with what really is, with the world in which things really are, only so far as they are truly known. "Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is--impa.s.sioned lovers": Tou ontos te kai aletheias erastas tous philosophous.+ They are the cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state--those impa.s.sioned lovers, erastas,+ of that which really is, and in comparison wherewith, office, wealth, honour, the love of which has rent Athens, the world, to pieces, will be of no more than secondary importance.

[172] He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another will--this lover of the Ideas--attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated, in a long discipline, that "ascent of the soul into the intelligible world," of which the ways of earthly love (ta erotika)+ are a true parallel. His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by another, by which those "animistic" old Greeks explained natural madness. That philosophic enthusiasm, that impa.s.sioned desire for true knowledge, is a kind of madness (mania)+ the madness to which some have declared great wit, all great gifts, to be always allied--the fourth species of mania, as Plato himself explains in the Phaedrus. To natural madness, to poetry and the other gifts allied to it, to prophecy like that of the Delphic pythoness, he has to add, fourthly, the "enthusiasm of the ideas."

The whole course of our theory hitherto (he there tells us) relates to that fourth form of madness; wherein, when any one, seeing the beauty that is here below, and having a reminiscence of the true, feels, or finds, his wings (pterotai)+ fluttering upwards, in his eagerness to soar above, but unable, like a bird looking towards the sky, heedless of things below, he is charged with unsoundness of mind. I have told how this is the most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession) both to its possessor and to him who partic.i.p.ates in it; how it comes of the n.o.blest causes; and that the lover who has a share of this madness is called a lover of the beautiful. For, as has been said, every soul of man, by its very nature, has seen the things that really are, otherwise it would not have come into this form of life (into a human body). But to rise from things here to the recollection of those, is not an easy matter [173]

for every soul; neither for those which then had but a brief view of things there; nor for such as were unlucky in their descent hither, so that, through the influence of certain a.s.sociations, turning themselves to what is not right, they have forgotten the sacred forms which then they saw. Few souls, in truth, remain, to which the gift of reminiscence adequately pertains. These, when they see some likeness of things there, are lost in amazement, and belong no longer to themselves; only, they understand not the true nature of their affection, because they lack discernment. Now, of Justice, and of Temperance, and of all those other qualities which are precious to souls, there is no clear light in their semblances here below; but, through obscure organs, with difficulty, very few, coming to their figures, behold the generation (genos,+ the people) of that which is figured. At that moment it was possible to behold Beauty in its clearness, when, with the choir of the blessed following on, ourselves with Zeus, some with one, some with another, of the G.o.ds, they looked upon a blissful vision and view, and were made partakers in what it is meet and right to call the most blessed of all mysteries; the which we celebrated, sound and whole then, and untouched by the evil things that awaited us in time to come, as being admitted to mystic sights, whole and sound and at unity with themselves, in pure light gazing on them, being ourselves pure, and unimpressed by this we carry about now and call our body, imprisoned like a fish in its sh.e.l.l.

Let memory be indulged thus far; for whose sake, in regret for what was then, I have now spoken somewhat at length.

As regards Beauty, as I said, it both shone out, in its true being, among those other eternal forms; and when we came down hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our bodily senses, gleaming with utmost brightness. For sight comes to us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom is not seen by it. Marvellous loves, in truth, would that (namely, Wisdom) have afforded, had it presented any manifest image of itself, such as that of Beauty, had it reached our bodily vision--that, and all those other amiable forms. But now Beauty alone has had this fortune; so that it is the clearest, the most certain, of all things; and the most lovable. Phaedrus, 249.+