The Five Great Philosophies of Life Part 6

We now have three of the cardinal virtues: temperance, the subjection of appet.i.te to reason; fort.i.tude, the control of the spirit by reason; and wisdom, won through education, the a.s.sertion of the dictates of reason over the clamour of both appet.i.te and spirit. But where, amid all this, Plato asks, is righteousness? In reply he remarks, "that when we first began our inquiry, ages ago, there lay righteousness rolling at our feet, and we, fools that we were, failed to see her, like people who go about looking for what they have in their hands. Righteousness is the comprehensive aspect of the three virtues already considered in detail.

It is the ultimate cause and condition of the existence of all of them.

Righteousness in a state consists in each citizen doing the thing to which his nature is most perfectly adapted: in minding one's own business, in other words, with a view to the good of the whole.

Righteousness in an individual, then, consists in having each part of one's nature devoted to its specific function: in having the appet.i.tes obey, in having the spirit steadfast in difficulty and danger, and in having the reason rule supreme. Thus righteousness, that subordination and coordination of all the parts of the soul in the service of the soul as a whole, includes each of the other three virtues and comprehends them all in the unity of the soul's organic life.

"For the righteous man does not permit the several elements within him to meddle with one another, but he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master, and at peace with himself; when he has bound together the three principles within him, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he will begin to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affairs of politics or of private business; in all which cases he will think and call just and good action, that which preserves and cooperates with this condition, and the knowledge which presides over this wisdom."

Unrighteousness, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of this. "Then a.s.suming the threefold division of the soul, must not unrighteousness be a kind of quarrel between these three--a meddlesomeness and interference, a rising up of a part of the soul against the whole soul, an a.s.sertion of unlawful authority, which is made by a rebellious subject against a true prince, of whom he is the natural va.s.sal--this is the sort of thing; the confusion and error of these parts or elements in unrighteousness and intemperance, cowardice, and ignorance, and in general all vice." In other words, righteousness and unrighteousness "are like disease and health; being in the soul just what disease and health are in the body." "Then virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, vice is the disease and weakness and deformity of the soul." From this point of view our old question of the comparative advantage of righteousness and unrighteousness answers itself. Indeed, the question whether it is more profitable to be righteous and do righteously and practice virtue, whether seen or unseen of G.o.ds and men, or to be unrighteous and act unrighteously if only unpunished, becomes, Plato says, ridiculous. "If when the bodily const.i.tution is gone, life is no longer endurable, though pampered with every sort of meats and drinks, and having all wealth and all power, shall we be told that life is worth having when the very essence of the vital principle is undermined and corrupted, even though a man be allowed to do whatever he pleases, if at the same time he is forbidden to escape from vice and unrighteousness, or attain righteousness and virtue, seeing that we now know the true nature of each?"

Righteousness, according to Plato, is the condition of the soul's health and life. To part with righteousness for any external advantage is to commit the supreme folly of selling our own souls. Righteousness is the organising principle of the soul; unrighteousness is the disorganising principle. Health and life rest on organisation. Disorganisation and vice are synonymous with disease and death. Therefore, all seeming gains that one may win in the paths of unrighteousness really involve the greatest possible loss.

We have now seen what righteousness is, whether in a state or in an individual. It is the health, harmony, beauty, excellence of the whole state or the whole man, secured by having each member attend strictly to its own distinctive work, with a view to the good of the whole state or the whole man. Thus defined it is something so obviously desirable and essential, that nothing else is worthy to be compared with it. Whoever parts with it even in exchange for the greatest outward honours, emoluments, comforts, or pleasures, is bound to get the worst of the bargain. Yet men do part with it; states do part with it. And the eighth and ninth books of the Republic are devoted to a description of the four stages of degeneration through which states and individuals pa.s.s on the downward road from righteousness and virtue to unrighteousness and vice.

The breaking up of a thing often reveals its nature as effectually as the putting it together; and as we have traced the four virtues by which either the state or the soul is constructed, it will throw added light upon the problem to trace in conclusion the four stages through which men and states go down to destruction.

VI

THE STAGES OF DEGENERATION

The first step down is where, instead of the good, men seek personal honour and distinction. At first the deterioration, whether in state or individual, is hardly noticeable. An ambitious statesman, on the whole, will advocate, if he is shrewd and far-sighted, much the same measures as the statesman who is intent on the welfare of the state. For he knows that by promoting the public welfare he will most effectively gain the reputation and distinction he desires. Yet there is a marked difference in the att.i.tude of mind, and in the long run that difference will express itself in action. When it comes to a close and hard decision, where the real interest of the state lies in one direction, and the waves of popular enthusiasm are running in an opposite direction, the man who cares for the real welfare of the state will stand fast, while the man who cares supremely for honour and distinction will be more likely to give way. Besides, contention and strife will arise, since the ambitious man is more anxious to do something himself than he is to have the best thing done by some one else. Hence the state where the statesmen love power, office, and honour will be less well off than the state where they are disinterestedly devoted to the public good.

Just so the man who is supremely covetous of power and honour will be weaker than the man who loves the good and follows the guidance of reason as supreme, in both these respects. He will be p.r.o.ne to follow the clamour of the mult.i.tude when he knows it is not the voice of reason; and he will try to have his own way, even when he knows that the way of another man is better than his. As Plato says, "He gives up the kingdom that is within him to the middle principle of contentiousness and pa.s.sion, and becomes proud and ambitious." Here, then, are the two tests by which each man may judge for himself whether he is a degenerate of the first grade or not. First: Will you do what reason shows you to be right every time, at all costs, no matter if all the honours and emoluments are attached to doing something a shade or two off from this absolutely right and reasonable course? Second: Would you rather have what is best done by somebody else, and let him have the credit of it, rather than get all the credit yourself by doing something not quite so good? The man of pride and ambition can never be quite disinterested in his service of the good, although incidentally most of the things he does will be good things. As Plato puts it, "He is not single-minded toward virtue, having lost his best guardian." He has neglected "the one thing that can preserve a man's goodness through his life--reason blended with music."

It is a short and easy step, in state and individual, from the love of honour down to the love of money as the guiding principle of life. The appet.i.tive side of life is always present, even in the most upright of men. It may be asleep, but it is never dead. And when there is nothing more deep and vital than the love of honour to hold it in restraint, it is sure to wake up and prowl about. Rivalry for honour soon reveals the fact that directly or indirectly honour and office can be bought. Then comes the state of things where only rich men can get office, or can afford to hold it if it comes to them. That in the state is what Plato calls an oligarchy. The deterioration of a state under this condition is very rapid, for, as he says, "When riches and virtue are placed together in the scales of the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.

And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become lovers of trade and of money, and they honour and reverence the rich man and make a ruler of him, and dishonour the poor man." The evils of this oligarchical rule, he says, are ill.u.s.trated by considering the nature of the qualification for office and influence. "Just think what would happen if the pilots were to be chosen according to their property, and a poor man refused permission to steer, even though he were the better pilot?" The other defect is "the inevitable division; such a state is not one but two states, the one of poor men, the other of rich men, who are living on the same spot and ever conspiring against one another."

The avaricious man is like the state which is governed by rich men. "Is not this man likely to seat the concupiscent and covetous elements on the vacant throne? And when he has made the reasoning and pa.s.sionate faculties sit on the ground obediently on either side, and taught them to know their place, he compels the one to think only of the method by which lesser sums may be converted into larger ones, and schools the other into the worship and admiration of riches and rich men. Of all conversions there is none so speedy or so sure as when the ambitious youth changes into the avaricious one."

Nowhere is Plato more keen or more fair than in his judgment of the money-maker. He says that he will generally do the right thing; he will be eminently respectable; he will not sink to very low or disreputable courses. All his goodness, however, will be of a forced, constrained, artificial, and at bottom unreal character. He will be good because he has to, in order to maintain that standing in the community on which his wealth depends. In Plato's own words: "He coerces his bad pa.s.sions by an effort of virtue; not that he convinces them of evil, or exerts over them the gentle influence of reason, but he acts upon them by necessity and fear, and because he trembles for his possessions. This sort of man will be at war with himself: he will be two men, not one; but, in general, his better desires will be found to prevail over his inferior ones. For these reasons such an one will be more decent than many are; yet the true virtue of a unanimous and harmonious soul will be far out of his reach."

The next step down for the state is what Plato calls democracy. Of the democracy of intelligence and self-control diffused throughout the body of self-respecting citizens Plato had formed and could form no conception. By democracy he meant the state of things where each man does that which is right in his own eyes. "In the first place the citizens are free. The city is full of freedom and frankness--there a man may do as he likes. They have a complete a.s.sortment of const.i.tutions; and if a man has a mind to establish a state, he must go to a democracy as he would go to a bazaar, where they sell them, and pick out one that suits him. Democracy is a most accommodating and charming form of government, full of variety and diversity, and (this, perhaps, is the keenest of all Plato's keen thrusts) _dispensing equality to equals and unequals alike_."

The man corresponding to democracy in the state, is the man whose life is given over to the undiscriminating enjoyment of all sorts of pleasures. "In this way the young man pa.s.ses out of his original nature which was trained in the school of necessity, into the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures, putting the government of himself into the hands of the one of his pleasures that offers and wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another, and is very impartial in his encouragement of them all.

Neither does he receive or admit into the fortress any true word of advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and n.o.ble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honour some and curtail and reduce others--whenever this is repeated to him he shakes his head and says that they are all alike, and that one is as honourable as another. He lives through the day, indulging the appet.i.te of the hour; and sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he is for total abstinence, and tries to get thin; then again, he is at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything, then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he is at politics, and starts to his feet and says and does anything that may turn up; and, if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither order nor law; and this is the way of him,--this he terms joy and freedom and happiness. There is liberty, equality, and fraternity enough in him."

The life of chance desire, unregulated by any subordinating principle, then, is the third stage of the descent and degradation of the soul.

In the state democracy speedily and inevitably pa.s.ses over into tyranny.

All appet.i.te is insatiable. In a state where each citizen does what he pleases "all things are just ready to burst with liberty; excess of liberty, whether in states or individuals, seems only to pa.s.s into excess of slavery. Then tyranny naturally arises out of democracy." He then proceeds, with prophetic pen, to trace the evolution of the modern political boss. First there develops a cla.s.s of drones who get their living as professional politicians. Second, "there is the richest cla.s.s, which, in a nation of traders, is generally the most orderly; they are the most squeezable persons and yield the largest amount of honey to the drones; this is called the wealthy cla.s.s, and the drones feed upon them.

There is also a third cla.s.s, consisting of working-men who are not politicians and have little to live upon; these, when a.s.sembled, are the largest and most powerful cla.s.s in a democracy; but then, the mult.i.tude is seldom willing to meet unless they get a little honey. Their leaders take the estates of the rich and give to the people as much of them as they can consistently with keeping the greater part themselves. The people have always some one as a champion whom they raise into greatness. This is the very root from which a tyrant (that is, as we should say, a boss) comes. When he first appears above ground, he is a protector. At first, in the early days of his power, he smiles upon every one and salutes every one; he, to be called a tyrant who is making promises in public and also in private, and wanting to be kind and good to every one! Thus liberty, getting out of all order and reason, pa.s.ses into the harshest and bitterest form of slavery." The worst form of government, according to Plato, is that which we know too well to-day in our great cities: the government of the professional politician who maintains himself by buying the votes of the poor with the money he has squeezed out of the rich. All pretence of administering the government in the interest of the community is frankly abandoned. The boss, or tyrant, as Plato calls him, frankly and unblushingly avows that he is in politics for what he can get out of it.

The true statesman, the philosopher king, in Plato's phrase, sees and serves the public good. Such a government Plato calls an aristocracy, or the government of the best for the good of all. First below that comes timocracy, or the government of those who are ambitious for power and place. Next comes oligarchy, the government of the rich for the protection of the interests of the moneyed cla.s.s. Next below that, and as a logical consequence, comes populism, which is our word for what Plato calls democracy; a government which aims to satisfy the immediate wants of everybody, regardless of moral, legal, or const.i.tutional restraints. Last, and lowest of all, comes the rule of the professional politician who has thrown all pretence of regard for the public good, all consideration of honour, all loyalty to the rich and genuine sympathy for the poor to the winds, and is simply manipulating the forms of government, getting and distributing offices, collecting a.s.sessments and distributing bribes, all in the interests of his own private pocket.

Between disinterested service of the public good and such unblushing pursuit of private gain, Plato says that there is no stopping place.

Logically Plato is right; historically, too, he was right at the time when he was writing. Modern democracy, however, is a very different thing from the populistic democracy with which Plato was familiar and which our large cities know too well. A democracy, resting on intelligence and public spirit, diffused through rich and poor alike, was beyond Plato's profoundest dreams. That great experiment the American people, with their public-school system, and their principle of the equality of all before the law, are now trying on a gigantic scale.

Corresponding to the tyrannical state comes the tyrannical man. "The wild beast in our nature gets the upper hand and the man becomes drunken, l.u.s.tful, pa.s.sionate, the best elements in him are enslaved; and there is a small ruling part which is also the worst and the maddest. He has the soul of the slave, and the tyrannical soul must always be poor and insatiable. He is by far the most miserable of all men." "He who is the real tyrant, whatever men may think, is the real servant and is obliged to practice the greatest adulation and servility and be the flatterer of mankind; he has desires which he is truly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor if you know how to inspect the soul of him. All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions. Even as the state which he resembles, he grows worse from having power; he becomes of necessity more jealous, more faithless, more unjust, more impious; he entertains and nurtures every evil sentiment, and the consequence is that he is supremely miserable and thus he makes everybody else equally miserable."

VII

THE INTRINSIC SUPERIORITY OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

Plato first constructs the ideal character and shows that it consists in the righteous rule of the intelligent principle in man over the spirit and the appet.i.tes. A soul thus in harmony with itself, under the rule of reason, is at once healthy, happy, beautiful, and good. Later, reversing the process, he shows how the good, beautiful, true, healthy condition of the soul may be destroyed through the successive steps of pride, avarice, lawless liberty, ending at last in the tyrannous rule of some single appet.i.te or pa.s.sion which has dethroned reason and set itself up as supreme. The consequence of it all is that "the most righteous man is also the happiest, and this is he who is the most royal master of himself; the worst and most unrighteous man is also the most miserable; this is he who is also the greatest tyrant of himself and the most complete slave."

The reason why the life of a righteous man is happier than the life of an unrighteous man is that it has "a greater share in pure existence as a more real being." "If there be a pleasure in being filled with that which agrees with nature; that which is more really filled with more real being will have more real and true joy and pleasure; whereas, that which partic.i.p.ates in less real being will be less truly and surely satisfied and will partic.i.p.ate in a less true and real pleasure. Those, then, who know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with gluttony and sensuality, never pa.s.s into the true upper world; neither are they truly filled with true being, nor do they taste of true and abiding pleasure. Like brute animals, with their eyes down and bodies bent to the earth, or leaning on the dining table, they fatten and feed and breed, and, in their excessive love of these delights, they kick and b.u.t.t at one another with horns and hoofs which are made of iron; they kill one another by reason of their insatiable l.u.s.t; for they fill themselves with that which is not substantial, and the part of themselves which they fill is also unsubstantial and incontinent." "Thus when the whole soul follows the philosophical principle, and there is no division, the several parts, each of them, do their own business and are righteous, and each of them enjoy their own best and truest pleasures.

But when either of the other principles prevails, it fails in attaining its own pleasure and compels the others to pursue after a shadow of pleasure which is not theirs."

Having reached this point Plato introduces a figure, which carries the whole point of his argument. "Do you now model the form of a mult.i.tudinous, polycephalous beast, having a head of all manner of beasts, tame and wild, making a second form as of a lion, and a third of a man; the second smaller than the first, and the third smaller than the second; then join them and let the three grow into one. Now fashion the outside into a single image as of a man, so that he who is not able to look within may believe the beast to be a single human creature. Now unrighteousness consists in feasting the monster and strengthening the lion in one in such wise as to weaken and starve the man; while righteousness consists in so strengthening the man within him that he may govern the many-headed monster." "Righteousness subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the G.o.d in man, and unrighteousness is that which subjects the man to the beast."

Finally Plato sums up the discussion by antic.i.p.ating the question which Jesus asked four centuries later. "How would a man profit if he receive gold and silver on the condition that he was to enslave the n.o.blest part of him to the worst? Who can imagine that a man who sold his son or daughter into slavery for money, especially if he sold them into the hands of fierce and evil men, would be the gainer, however much might be the sum which he received? And will any one say that he is not a miserable caitiff who sells his own divine being to that which is most G.o.dless and detestable and has no pity? Eriphyle took the necklace as the price of her husband's life, but he is taking a bribe in order to compa.s.s a worse ruin." He even pushes the question a step further and asks, "What shall a man be profited by unrighteousness even if his unrighteousness be undetected? For he who is undetected only gets worse; whereas he who is detected and punished has the brutal part of his nature silenced and humanised; the gentler element in him is liberated and his whole soul is perfected and enn.o.bled by the acquirement of righteousness and temperance and wisdom. The man of understanding will concentrate himself on this as the work of life. In the first place he will honour studies which impress these qualities on his soul and will disregard others. In the next place he will keep under his body and will be far from yielding to brutal and irrational pleasures, and he will be always desirous of preserving the harmony of the body for the sake of the concord of the soul. He will not allow himself to be dazzled by the opinion of the world and heap up riches to his own infinite harm. He will look at the city which is within him, and he will duly regulate his acquisition and expense, in so far as he is able, and for the same reason he will accept such honours as he deems likely to make him a better man. He will look at the nature of the soul, and, from the consideration of this, he will determine which is the better and which is the worst life and make his choice, giving the name of evil to the life which will make his soul more unrighteous, and good to the life which will make his soul more righteous; for this is the best choice,--best for this life and after death. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast to the heavenly way and follow after righteousness and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil; then shall we live dear to one another and the G.o.ds, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward."

With this magnificent tribute to the intrinsic superiority of righteousness over unrighteousness Plato concludes his greatest work.

The question why a man should do right, even if he wore the ring of Gyges which would exempt him from all external consequences of his misdeeds, has been answered by a thoroughgoing a.n.a.lysis of the nature of the soul, and the demonstration that righteousness is that organisation of the elements of the soul into an active and harmonious unity, wherein its health and beauty and life and happiness consist. In conclusion let us borrow from another of Plato's dialogues the prayer which he ascribes to Socrates,--a brief and simple prayer, yet one which, in the light of our study of the Republic, I trust we shall recognise as summing up the spirit of his teaching as a whole. "Beloved Pan, and all ye G.o.ds who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy; and may I have such a quant.i.ty of gold as none but the temperate can carry.

Anything more? That prayer, I think, is enough for me."

VIII

TRUTH AND ERROR IN PLATONISM

Obviously this Platonic principle is vastly deeper and truer than anything we have had before. The personality at which both Stoic and Epicurean aimed was highly abstract,--something to be gained by getting away from the tangle and complexity of life rather than by conquering and transforming the conditions of existence into expressions of ourselves. Epicurus makes a few sallies from his cosey comfortable camp, to forage for provender. The Stoic draws into the citadel of his own self-sufficiency; and from this fortified position defies attack. Plato comes out into the open field, and squarely gives battle to the hosts of appet.i.te, pa.s.sion, temptation, and corruption, of which the world outside, and our hearts inside are full. In this he is true to the moral experience of the race: and his trumpet-call to the higher departments of our nature to enter the "great combat of righteousness"; his demand of instantaneous and absolute surrender which he presents to everything low and sensual within us, are clear, strong notes which it is good for every one of us to hear and heed. To him as to Carlyle, "Life is not a May-game, but a battle and a march, a warfare with princ.i.p.alities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery s.p.a.ces waited on by the choral muses and the rosy hours; it is a stern pilgrimage through the rough, burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men, loves men with inexpressible soft pity, as they _cannot_ love him; but his soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of creation. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars, keen glancing, from the immensities, send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the eternities. Deep calls for him unto deep.

"Thou, O World, how wilt thou secure thyself against this man? None of thy promotions is necessary for him. His place is with the stars of Heaven; to thee it may be momentous, to thee it may be life or death; to him it is indifferent, whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth. He wants none of thy rewards; behold also he fears none of thy penalties. Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas; nor by thy gibbets and law-penalties restrain him. Thou canst not forward him; thou canst not hinder him. Thy penalties, thy poverties, neglects, contumelies,--behold all these are good for him. To this man death is not a bugbear; to this man life is already as earnest and awful, and beautiful and terrible as death."

This is a note which appeals forcibly to every n.o.ble youth. It has been struck by the Hebrew Prophets and the Christian Apostles: by Savonarola and Fichte, and a host of heroic souls; but by no one more clearly and constrainingly than by Plato. It is the note of earnest and aggressive righteousness; without which no personality can be either sound or strong. The man who has never heard this summons to go forth and conquer the evils of the world without and of his own heart within him, in the name of a righteousness high above both his own attainment and the attainment of the world about him as the heavens are higher than the earth, is still in the nursery stage of personal development.

On the other hand, there is danger in the very sharpness of the ant.i.thesis which Platonism makes between the higher and the lower. For the most part this danger is latent in Plato himself; though even in him it came out in his tendency to regard family life and private property as detrimental rather than serviceable to that development of character on which the larger devotion to the state, and the ideal order, must ultimately rest.

In Neoplatonism, in the many forms of mysticism, in certain aspects of Christian asceticism, and notably in the numerous phases of what calls itself "New Thought" to-day, what was for the most part latent in Plato, becomes frankly explicit. In general it is a loosening of the ties that hold us to drudgery and homely duty; a weakening of the bonds that bind us to the men and women by our side, in order to gaze more serenely on the ineffable beyond the clouds. This developed Platonism admits that we must live after a fashion in this very imperfect world; but says our real conversation all the time must be in heaven. Individual people are but faulty, imperfect copies of the pattern of the perfect good laid up on high. We must buy and sell, work and play, laugh and cry, love and hate down here among the shadows; but we must all the time feed our souls on the good, the true, the beautiful, which these distorted human shadows only serve to hide. These Platonic lovers of something better than their husbands or wives, or a.s.sociates or friends, go through the world with a serene smile, and an air of other-worldliness which, if we do not inquire too closely into their domestic life and business efficiency, we cannot but admire. They undoubtedly exert a tranquillising influence in their way, especially on those who are so fortunate as to behold them from a little distance. But they are not the most comfortable people to live with, as husband or wife, colleague or business partner. Louisa Alcott had this Platonic type in mind when she defined a philosopher as a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends having hold of the ropes, trying to pull him down to earth.

A good deal that pa.s.ses for religion is this Neoplatonism masquerading in Christian dress. All such hymns as "The Sweet By and By," "Oh, Paradise, Oh, Paradise," and the like, which set heaven and eternity in sharp ant.i.thesis against earth and time, are simply Neoplatonism baptized into Christian phraseology; and the baptism is by sprinkling rather than immersion.

Thomas a Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," and indeed all the mystical books of devotion--Tauler, Fenelon, "The Theologia Germanica"--are saturated with this Platonic or Neoplatonic spirit. "Thou shalt lamentably fall away, if thou set a value upon any worldly thing." "Let therefore nothing which thou doest seem to thee great; let nothing be grand, nothing of value or beauty, nothing worthy of honour save what is eternal." "Man approacheth so much the nearer unto G.o.d, the farther he departeth from all earthly comfort." These words from the "Imitation of Christ" sound orthodox enough in our ears. But we ought to understand once for all that it is Neoplatonic mysticism, not essential Christianity, that breathes through them.

This type of personality reduces the world to two mutually exclusive elements, G.o.d and self; and permits no reconciliation or mediation between them. Fenelon puts this dualism in the form of a dilemma. "There is no middle course; we must refer everything either to G.o.d or to self; if to self, we have no other G.o.d than self; if to G.o.d, we are then without selfish interests, and we enter into self-abandonment."

Undoubtedly for evangelistic purposes the sharp ant.i.thesis has great practical advantages. It is an easy way to reach heaven--this of scorning earth; an easy definition of the infinite to p.r.o.nounce it the negation of the finite.

As Carlyle has represented for us the stronger side of Platonism, his friend Emerson shall serve to ill.u.s.trate the weakness that lurks half hidden in all this way of thinking. It is so concealed that we shall hardly detect it unless we are sharply on the watch for this tendency to exalt the Infinite at the expense of the finite; the Universal at the expense of the particular; G.o.d at the expense of our neighbour.

"Higher far into the pure realm, Over sun and star, Over the flickering Daemon film, Thou must mount for love; Into vision where all form In one only form dissolves; Where unlike things are like; Where good and ill, And joy and moan, Melt into one."

"Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not s.e.x, nor person, nor partiality. We are made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness depend on a person or persons. But the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character, and blend with G.o.d, to attain their own perfection." "Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. Pressed on our attention, the saints and demiG.o.ds whom history worships fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who on that condition gladly inhabits it." "The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, daring, which can love us and which we can love."

"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty G.o.ds." "True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer."

Here you have Plato and Thomas a Kempis in the elegant garb of a heretical transcendentalist. But you get the same dualism of finite and infinite, perfect and imperfect; unworthy, crumbling earth-mask to be gotten rid of here on earth, and the stars to be sought out and gazed at up in heaven.

The combat of the higher against the lower is one in which we must all engage; and no doubt in order to win we must at times keep the lower solicitations at arm's-length. If, however, what appeals to us in the name of the highest counsels any relaxing of definite obligation, any alienation from the man or woman whom social inst.i.tutions have placed closest by our side; any disloyalty to the plain companions and humble a.s.sociates whom society or business places in our way; any breaking of social bonds which generations of self-sacrifice and self-control have laboriously woven, and centuries of experience have approved as beneficent; then it is time to abandon Plato, or rather those who have a.s.sumed to wear his mantle, and look for personal guidance to those greater masters who have transcended the ant.i.thesis of higher and lower, which it was Plato's great mission to make so sharp and clear. The principle of such a reconciliation we shall find in Aristotle; its complete accomplishment we shall find in Jesus.