Progress and History Part 2

Now what is the bearing of these somewhat scanty data on the question of progress? It is not easy to extract from them more than the general impression that, as time went on, the breed made persistent headway as regards both the complexity of its organization and the profusion of its forms. After all, we must not expect too much from this department of the subject. For one thing, beyond the limits of North-western Europe the record is almost blank; and yet we can scarcely hope to discover the central breeding-place of man in what is, geographically, little more than a blind alley. In the next place, Physical Anthropology, not only in respect to human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The systematic study of heredity as it bears on the history of the human organism has hardly begun. Hence, it would not befit one who is no expert in relation to such matters to antic.i.p.ate the verdict of a science that needs only public encouragement in order to come into its own. Suffice it to suggest here that nature as she presides over organic evolution, that is, the unfolding of the germinal powers, may be conceived as a kindly but slow-going and cautious liberator. One by one new powers, hitherto latent, are set free as an appropriate field of exercise is afforded them by the environment. At first divergency is rarely tolerated. A given type is extremely uniform. On the other hand, when divergency is permitted, it counts for a great deal. The wider variations occur nearest the beginning, each for a long time breeding true to itself.

Later on, such uncompromising plurality gives way to a more diffused multiplicity begotten of intermixture. Mongrelization has set in. Not but what there may spring up many true-breeding varieties among the mongrels; and these, given suitable conditions, will be allowed to const.i.tute lesser types possessed of fairly uniform characters. Such at least is in barest outline the picture presented by the known facts concerning the physical evolution of man, if one observe it from outside without attempting to explore the hidden causes of the process. Some day, when these causes are better understood, man may take a hand in the game, and become, in regard to the infinite possibilities still sleeping in the transmitted germ, a self-liberator. Nature is but a figurative expression for the chances of life, and the wise man faces no more chances than he needs must. Scientific breeding is no mere application of the multiplication table to a system of items. We must make resolutely for the types that seem healthy and capable, suppressing the defectives in a no less thorough, if decidedly more considerate, way than nature has been left to do in the past. Here, then, along physical lines is one possible path of human progress, none the less real because hitherto pursued, not by the aid of eyes that can look and choose, but merely in response to painful proddings at the tail-end.

Our remaining task is to take stock of that improvement in the arts of life whereby man has come gradually to master an environment that formerly mastered him. For the Early Palaeolithic Period our evidence in respect of its variety, if not of its gross quant.i.ty, is wofully disappointing. Not to speak of man's first and rudest experiments in the utilization of stone, which are doubtless scattered about the world in goodly numbers if only we could recognize them clearly for what they are, the Ch.e.l.lean industry by its wide distribution leads one to suppose that mankind in those far-off days was only capable of one idea at a time--a time, too, that lasted a whole age. Yet the succeeding Acheulean style of workmanship in flint testifies to the occurrence of progress in one of its typical forms, namely, in the form of what may be termed 'intensive' progress. The other typical form I might call 'intrusive'

progress, as happens when a stimulating influence is introduced from without. Now it may be that the Acheulean culture came into being as a result of contact between an immigrant stock and a previous population practising the Ch.e.l.lean method of stone-work. We are at present far too ill-informed to rule out such a guess. But, on the face of it, the greater refinement of the Acheulean handiwork looks as if it had been literally hammered out by steadfastly following up the Ch.e.l.lean pattern into its further possibilities. Explain it as we will, this evolution of the so-called _coup-de-poing_ affords almost the sole proof that the human world of that remote epoch was moving at all. If we could see their work in wood, we might discern a more diversified skill or we might not. As it is, we can but conclude in the light of our very imperfect knowledge that in mind no less than in body mankind of Early Palaeolithic times displayed a fixity of type almost amounting to that of one of the other animal species.

During Middle Palaeolithic times the Mousterian culture rules without a rival. The cave-period has begun; and, thanks to the preservation of sundry dwelling-places together with a goodly a.s.sortment of their less perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate notion of the home-life of Neanderthal man. I have already alluded to my excavations in Jersey, and need not enter into fuller details here. But I should like to put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such first-hand experience as I have had that cultural advance in Mousterian days was almost as portentously slow as ever it had been before. The human deposits in the Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet thick, and the fact that they fall into two strata separated by a sterile layer that appears to consist of the dust of centuries points to a very long process of acc.u.mulation. Yet though there is one kind of elephant occurring amid the bone refuse at the bottom of the bed, and another and, it would seem, later kind at the top, one and the same type of flint instrument is found at every level alike; and the only development one can detect is a certain gain in elegance as regards the Mousterian 'point', the reigning subst.i.tute for the former _coup-de-poing_. Once more there is intensive progress only, so far at least as most of the Jersey evidence goes. One _coup-de-poing_, however, and that hardly Acheulean in conception but exactly what a hand accustomed to the fashioning of the Mousterian 'point' would be likely to make by way of an imitation of the once fashionable pattern, lay at lowest floor-level; as if to remind one that during periods of transition the old is likely to survive by the side of the new, and may even survive in it as a modifying element. As a matter of fact, the _coup-de-poing_ is frequent in the earliest Mousterian sites; so that we cannot but ask ourselves how it came to be in the end superseded. Whether the Mousterians were of a different race from the Acheuleans is not known. Certain it is, on the other hand, that the industry that makes its first appearance in their train represents a labour-saving device. The Mousterian had learned how to break up his flint-nodule into flakes, which simply needed to be trimmed on one face to yield a cutting edge. The Acheulean had been content to attain this result more laboriously by pecking a pebble on both faces until what remained was sharp enough for his purpose. Here, then, we are confronted with that supreme condition of progress, the inventor's happy thought. One of those big-brained Neanderthal men, we may suppose, had genius; nature, the liberator, having released some latent power in the racial const.i.tution. Given such a culture-hero, the common herd was capable of carrying on more or less mechanically for an aeon or so. And so it must ever be. The world had better make the most of its geniuses; for they amount to no more than perhaps a single one in a million. Anyway, Neanderthal man never produced a second genius, so far as we can tell; and that is why, perhaps, his peculiar type of brow-ridge no longer adorns the children of men.

Before we leave the Mousterians, another side of their culture deserves brief mention. Not only did they provide their dead with rude graves, but they likewise furnished them with implements and food for use in a future life. Herein surely we may perceive the dawn of what I do not hesitate to term religion. A distinguished scholar and poet did indeed once ask me whether the Mousterians, when they performed these rites, did not merely show themselves unable to grasp the fact that the dead are dead. But I presume that my friend was jesting. A sympathy stronger than death, overriding its grisly terror, and converting it into the vehicle of a larger hope--that is the work of soul; and to develop soul is progress. A religious animal is no brute, but a real man with the seed of genuine progress in him. If Neanderthal man belonged to another species, as the experts mostly declare and I very humbly beg leave to doubt, we must even so allow that G.o.d made him also after his own image, brow-ridges and all.

The presence of soul in man is even more manifest when we pa.s.s on to the Late Palaeolithic peoples. They are cave-dwellers; they live by the chase; in a word, they are savages still. But they exhibit a taste and a talent for the fine arts of drawing and carving that, as it were, enlarge human existence by a new dimension. Again a fresh power has been released, and one in which many would seem to have partic.i.p.ated; for good artists are as plentiful during this epoch as ever they were in ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. They must have married-in somewhat closely, one would think, for this special apt.i.tude to have blossomed forth so luxuriantly. I cannot here dwell at length on the triumphs of Aurignacian and Magdalenian artistry. Indeed, what I have seen with my own eyes on the walls of certain French caves is almost too wonderful to be described. The simplicity of the style does not in the least detract from the fullness of the charm. On the contrary, one is tempted to doubt whether the criterion of complexity applies here--whether, in fact, progress has any meaning in relation to fine art--since, whether attained by simple or by complex means, beauty is always beauty, and cannot further be perfected. Shall we say, then, with Plato that beauty was revealed to man from the first in its absolute nature, so that the human soul might be encouraged to seek for the real in its complementary forms of truth and goodness, such as are less immediately manifest? For the rest, the soul of these transcendently endowed savages was in other respects more imperfectly illuminated; as may be gathered from the fact that they carved and drew partly from the love of their art, but partly also, and, perhaps, even primarily, for luck. It seems that these delineations of the animals on which they lived were intended to help them towards good hunting. Such is certainly the object of a like custom on the part of the Australian aborigines; there being this difference, however, that the art of the latter considered as art is wholly inferior. Now we know enough about the soul of the Australian native, thanks largely to the penetrating interpretations of Sir Baldwin Spencer, to greet and honour in him the potential lord of the universe, the harbinger of the scientific control of nature. It is more than half the battle to have willed the victory; and the picture-charm as a piece of moral apparatus is therefore worthy of our deepest respect. The chariot of progress, of which the will of man is the driver, is drawn by two steeds, namely, Imagination and Reason harnessed together. Of the pair, Reason is the more sluggish, though serviceable enough for the heavy work. Imagination, full of fire as it is, must always set the pace. So the soul of the Late Palaeolithic hunter, having already in imagination controlled the useful portion of the animal world, was more than half-way on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he mistook the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting the value out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor, the scientific reason as yet lay dormant in his soul. But his dream was to come true presently.

The Neolithic Period marks the first appearance of the 'cibi-cultural'

peoples. The food-seekers have become food-raisers. But the change did not come all at once. The earlier Neolithic culture is at best transitional. There may even have been one of those set-backs in culture which we are apt to ignore when we are narrating the proud tale of human advance. Europe had now finally escaped from the last ravages of an Arctic climate; but there was cruel demolition to make good, and in the meantime there would seem, as regards man, to have been little doing.

Life among the kitchen-middens of Denmark was sordid; and the Azilians who pushed up from Spain as far as Scotland did not exactly step into a paradise ready-made. Somewhere, however, in the far south-east a higher culture was brewing. By steps that have not yet been accurately traced legions of herdsmen and farmer-folk overspread our world, either absorbing or driving before them the roving hunters of the older dispensation. We term this, the earliest of true civilizations, 'neolithic', as if it mattered in the least whether your stone implement be chipped or polished to an edge. The real source of increased power and prosperity lay in the domestication of food-animals and food-plants.

The man certainly had genius and pluck into the bargain who first trusted himself to the back of an unbroken horse. It needed hardly less genius to discover that it is no use singing charms over the seed-bearing gra.s.s in order to make it grow, unless some of the seed is saved to be sowed in due season. Society possibly brained the inventor--such is the way of the crowd; but, as it duly pocketed the invention, we have perhaps no special cause to complain.

By way of appreciating the conditions prevailing in the Later Neolithic Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the Dolmen-builders of our Western coast-lands. I was privileged to a.s.sist, on the sh.o.r.e of the Lake of Neuchatel, in the excavation of a site where one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently been destroyed by fire, and at some later date, just falling within the Stone Age, had been replaced by another. Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of the march of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those of the older settlement being ill-a.s.sorted and slight, whereas the later structure was regularly built and heavily timbered. It was clear, too, that the first set of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their worldly goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the other hand, their successors wore sh.e.l.ls from the Mediterranean and amber beads from the Baltic among their numerous decorations; while for their flint they actually went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in West-Central France, the mines of which provided the b.u.t.ter-like nodules that represented the _ne plus ultra_ of Neolithic luxury. Commerce must have been decidedly flourishing in those days. No longer was it a case of the so-called 'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes with fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison on a rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those of his dangerous neighbours, and stealing back later on to see if the red ochre for which he pines has been deposited in return on the primitive counter. The Neolithic trader, on the other side, must have pushed the science of barter to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was not already in vogue.

When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate their h.o.a.ry sanctuaries, we are back among the problems raised by the philosophic conception of progress as an advance in soul-power. Is any religion better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message of hope and comfort, seems to me to have been worth the achievement at almost any cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do not think that progress in religion is progress towards its ultimate abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the light of its earlier history, must be treated as the parent source of all the more spiritual activities of man; and on these his material activities must depend.

Else the machine will surely grind the man to death; and his body will finally stop the wheels that his soul originally set in motion.

The panorama is over. It has not been easy, at the rate of about a millennium to a minute, to present a coherent account of the prehistoric record, which at best is like a jig-saw puzzle that has lost most of the pieces needed to reconst.i.tute the design. But, even on this hasty showing, it looks as if the progressive nature of man were beyond question. There is manifest gain in complexity of organization, both physical and cultural; and only less manifest, in the sense that the inwardness of the process cannot make appeal to the eye, is the corresponding gain in realized power of soul. In short, the men of the Stone Age a.s.suredly bore their full share in the work of race-improvement; and the only point on which there may seem to be doubt is whether we of the age of metal are as ready and able to bear our share. But let us be optimistic about ourselves. As long as we do not allow our material achievements to blind us to the need of an education that keeps the spiritual well to the fore, then progress is a.s.sured so far as it depends on culture.

Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's chances, I believe, would be bettered by as much again or more. But how is this to be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason to the mind. Man may be an a.s.s on the whole, but nature is even more of an a.s.s, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. So let us hope that one day people will marry intelligently, and that the best marriages will be the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is not born of the sickly; and at any rate should be prepared to make trial of such a working principle in my New Republic.

So much for the practical corollaries suggested by our flying visit to Prehistoric Europe. But, even if any detailed lessons to be drawn from such fragmentary facts have to be received with caution, you need not hesitate to pursue this branch of study for its own sake as part of the general training of the mind. Accustom yourselves to a long perspective.

Cultivate the eagle's faculty of s.p.a.cious vision. It is only thus that one can get the values right--see right and wrong, truth and error, beauty and ugliness in their broad and c.u.mulative effects. a.n.a.lytic studies, as they are termed, involving the exploration of the meaning of received ideas, must come first in any scheme of genuine education. We must learn to affirm before we can go on to learn how to criticize. But historical studies are a necessary sequel. Other people's received ideas turn out in the light of history to have sometimes worked well, and sometimes not so well; and we are thereupon led to revise our own opinions accordingly. Now the history of man has. .h.i.therto stood almost exclusively for the history of European civilization. Being so limited, it loses most of its value as an instrument of criticism. For how can a single phase of culture criticize itself? How can it step out of the scales and a.s.sess its own weight? Anthropology, however, will never acquiesce in this parochial view of the province of history. History worthy of the name must deal with man universal. So I would have you all become anthropologists. Let your survey of human progress be age-long and world-wide. You come of a large family and an ancient one. Learn to be proud of it, and then you will seek likewise to be worthy of it.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

W. J. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives_, 2nd edition, 1915.

E. A. Parkyn, _Introduction to the study of Prehistoric Art_.

R. R. Marett, _Anthropology_ (Home University Library).

J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_ (Home University).

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Presidential Address to the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, p. 9.

III

PROGRESS AND h.e.l.lENISM

F. MELIAN STAWELL

To speak the truth about national characteristics it is often necessary to speak in paradoxes, for of all unities on earth nothing contains so many contradictions as a nation. So it is here: it may be said quite truly that the Greeks had at once the most profound conceptions about Progress and no faith in it: that they were at once the most hopeful and the most despairing of peoples. Let me try to explain. When we speak of a faith in Progress, whatever else we mean, we must mean, I take it, that there is a real advance in human welfare throughout time from the Past to the Future, that 'the best is yet to be', and that the good wine is kept to the last. But if we are to have a philosophy underlying that faith we must be able to say something more. What, in the first place, do we mean by 'a real advance'? Or by 'human welfare'? Progress, yes, but progress towards what? What is the standard? And if we cannot indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one life is any better than another? The life of the scientific man any better than the life of the South Sea Islander--content if only he has enough bananas to eat? Or than the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or a Tamberlaine--exultant if he has enough human heads before him? Or, indeed, any of these rather than the blank of Nirvana or the life of a vegetable?

Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for good over and above the conflicting opinions of men, and some idea as to what that standard implies.

And the next question is, why we should hold that any of this good is going to be realized in human life at all? If it is, there must be some connexion of cause and effect between goodness and human existence. What is the nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope that this goodness is realized more and more fully as time goes on?

The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so many, with extraordinary daring and penetration and with an intimate mixture of sadness and hope.

They themselves, of all nations known to us in history, had made the greatest progress in the shortest s.p.a.ce of time. A long course of preparation, it is true, underlay that marvellous growth. The cla.s.sical Greeks,--and when I speak of h.e.l.lenism I mean the flower of cla.s.sical Greek culture,--the cla.s.sical Greeks entered into the labours of the island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or not, had built up from neolithic times a great civilization, the major part of which they could, and did, a.s.similate. They found the soil already worked. None the less it is to their own original genius that we owe those great discoveries of the spirit which, to quote a recent writer, 'created a new world of science and art, established an ideal of the sane mind in the sane body and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and made moral ends supreme over national in the State.'[6]

But these practical achievements of theirs have been already summed up by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture[7] at this school last year, and it is to that lecture that I would refer you. I will take it as a basis and proceed for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions about progress. Those conceptions were complex, and, speaking roughly, we may say this: if belief in real progress implies belief in three things, namely, (1) an absolute standard apprehended, however dimly, by man, (2) a causal connexion between existence and perfection, and (3) a persistent advance through time, then the Greeks held to the first two and doubted, or even denied, the third. Their two great thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, worked out systems based on the conviction that there really was an absolute standard of perfection, that man could really apprehend something of this perfection, and that the effort towards it was essential to the very existence of the world, part of the stuff, as it were, that made the universe. These systems have had an effect not to be exaggerated on the whole movement of thought since their day.

Moreover, many of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions that underlie them are calculated, one would say, to lead at once to a buoyant faith in progress. But with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they did not so lead. The Greeks could not feel sure that this effort towards perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle, was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise definite reasons in their own history for this recurring note of discouragement. But let us first look at the positive side, and first in Plato. Plato came to his system by several lines of thought, and to understand it we ought to take account of all.

1. In the first place no thinker, I suppose, ever felt more keenly than he felt the desire for an absolute standard of truth, especially in matters of right and wrong, if only to decide between the disputes of men. And, in Greece men disputed so boldly and so incessantly that there was no possibility of forgetting the clash of opinion in any 'dogmatic slumber'. Thus Plato is always asking, like Robert Browning in 'Rabbi Ben Ezra',--

Now, who shall arbitrate?

Ten men love what I hate, Shun what I follow, slight what I receive; Ten who in ears and eyes Match me: we all surmise, They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?

In one of his very earliest dialogues, the 'Euthyphro', Plato puts the question almost in so many words. What is it, he asks (7 A-E), that men quarrel over most pa.s.sionately when they dispute? Is it not over the great questions of justice and injustice, of beauty, goodness, and the like? They do not quarrel thus over a question of physical size, simply because they can settle such a dispute by reference to an unquestioned standard, a standard measure, let us say.

If there is no corresponding standard for right and wrong, if each man is really the judge and the measure for himself, then there is no sense, Plato feels, in claiming that one man is wiser than another in conduct, or indeed any man wiser than a dog-faced baboon (_Theaet._ 161 C-E).

2. Again, Plato feels most poignantly the inadequacy of all the goodness and beauty we have ever actually seen in this world of s.p.a.ce and time, compared with the ideal we have of them in their perfection. How can we have this sense of deficiency, he asks, unless somehow we apprehend something supreme, over and above all the approaches to it that have as yet appeared? (_Phaedo_, 74 E).

This vision of an absolute perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own, that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an exquisite translation of a typical pa.s.sage in our Poet Laureate's Anthology, _The Spirit of Man_ (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study of this world that our apprehension of that perfection is awakened at all:--

'He who has thus been instructed in the science of Love, and has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the absolute Beauty ... he will see a Beauty eternal, not growing or decaying, not waxing or waning, nor will it be fair here and foul there ... as if fair to some and foul to others ... but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither increase nor diminution, nor any other change' (_Symp._ 211).

All beautiful things remind man, Plato tells us in his mythological fashion, of this perfect Beauty, because we had seen it once before in another life, before our souls were born into this world, 'that blissful sight and spectacle' (_Phaedrus_, 250 B) when we followed Zeus in his winged car and all the company of the G.o.ds, and went out into the realm beyond the sky, a realm 'of which no mortal poet has ever sung or ever will sing worthily'.

3. But, beside this pa.s.sion for the ideal, Plato was intensely interested in our knowledge of the actual world of appearances around us. And one of the prime questions with which he was then concerned was the question, what we mean when we talk about the nature or character of the things we see, a plant, say, or an animal, or a man. We must mean something definite, otherwise we could not recognize, for example, that a plant _is_ a plant through all its varieties and all the different stages of its growth. Plato's answer was, that in all natural things there is a definite principle that copies, as it were, a definite Type or Form, and this Type he calls an Idea. Thus in some sense it is this Type, this Idea, this Form, that brings the particular thing into being.

4. But it was not enough for Plato to say that every natural thing had in some sense a certain type for its basis, unless he could believe that this type was good, and that all the types were harmonious with each other. He could only be satisfied with the world, in short, if he could feel that it came about through a movement towards perfection. He makes his Socrates say that in asking about 'the causes of things, what it is that makes each thing come into being', it was not enough for him if he could only see that the thing was there because something had put it there: he also wanted to see that it was good for it to be there.

Socrates tells us that what he needed he thought he had found in a book by Anaxagoras, which announced 'that Mind was the disposer and cause of all' because, 'I said to myself, If this be so--if Mind is the orderer, it will have all in order, and put every single thing in the place that is best for it'.[8]

It is the same feeling as that which underlies the words of Genesis about the Creation, 'And G.o.d saw that it was good'. And there is no doubt that such a view of the world would be supremely satisfying if we could count it true. There may be considerable intellectual satisfaction, no doubt, in merely solving a puzzle as to how things come about, but it is as nothing compared to the joy there would be in contemplating their goodness.

5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the hideous imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis spoke of a Fall. Plato, in his own way, speaks of a Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in an Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow--he does not say exactly how--influencing the structure of things in this world. But he holds that on earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is the medium of s.p.a.ce and Time, and therefore the medium of history--and therefore history is always and inevitably a record of failure. 'While we are in the body,' Plato writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'[9] 'The body is a tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current phrase.

This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written:

'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the _Republic_, 'as he appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned, for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and strange things had grown round him, sh.e.l.ls and seaweed and stones, so that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to us now encompa.s.sed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real nature.' (_Republic_, 611.)

Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with no effect on the rest of the universe (_Sophist_, 248, 249); it is a living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as glorious as possible (_Tim._ 29 D). There is no envy, Plato says, in the Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is towards the life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed.