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THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY IN THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS.
PUBLISHED BY
JAMES MACLEHOSE AND SONS, GLASGOW, ^nblifihtce to the finibtrsite.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD., LONDON. Nevj York, • ■ The Macnttllan Co. London, - - - Simpkin, Hamilton and Co. Cambridge, ■ • M actntilan and Bowes. Edinburgh, • • Doug/as ami Fouiis.
The Evolution of Theology
in the
Greek Philosophers
The afford Lectures
delivered in the University of Glasgow in
Sessions 1 900-1 and 190 1-2
By Edward Caird
LL.D., D.C.L., D.Litt.
Fellow of the British Academy ; Corresponding Member of the French Academy
Master of Balliol College, Oxford ; Late Professor of Moral Philosophy
in the University of Glasgow
Vol. I.
Glasgow
James MacLehose and Sons
Publishers to the University 1904
All rights reserved
-^9 0 3
OLASOOW : PR.NTKD AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSK AND CO.
DEDICATED
TO THE MEMORY OF
WILLIAM WALLACE
LATE FELLOW AND TUTOR OF MERTON COLLEGE, AND
white's PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
Es sageiis aller Orten
Alle Herzen unter dem himmlischen Tage,
Jedes in seiner Sprache.
PREFACE
These volumes contain the Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow in Sessions 1900-1 and 1901-2. I have, however, rewritten most of them, and have added three lectures upon parts of the subject which I was not able to discuss with sufficient fullness.
I have attempted, so far as was possible within the limits of such a course of lectures, to give an accoimt of those ideas of Greek philosophy which have most powerfully affected the subsequent develop- ment of theological thought. In doing so, I have had to make a selection of topics which may require some explanation, both as to what it includes and as to what it excludes. On the one hand, I have thought it best to confine myself mainly to the most important writers, to Plato and Aristotle, to the chief representatives of the Stoic philosophy, and to Philo and Plotinus among the Neo-Platonists ; and I have made no attempt to deal with secondary
Tii
CONTENTS
LECTURE FIRST.
THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO THEOLOGY.
The Development of Religion — Its Relation to Theology, as the Reflective Form of the Religious Consciousness — Increasing Influence of Reflexion in the Highest Religions, especially in Judaism and Christianity — How a Religion grows into a Theology — How Theology and Religion, Reason and Faith, become opposed to each other — Importance of the Interests on both sides — The Danger of sacrificing either of them to the other — The Idea of Evolution as an Eirenicon — The unity of man's life in its diff"erent phases — Carlyle's view of the Alternation of Action and Reflexion — Objections to the Law of Evolution, (1) from those who separate Philosophy from Life, (2) from those who separate Iiife from Philosophy — In what sense Theology begins in Greece, .... 1-30
LECTURE SECOND.
STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY.
The Central Idea of Religion, and its Reflective Expression in Theology — The Opposition of the Secular and the Religious Consciousness — That the Idea of Religion is expressed only
mat»immm0''mtt^
xii CONTENTS
in the Highest Religion — Answer to an Objection to this View — Three Periods in the Development of Theology — Characteristics of the Theological Philosophy of Greece — Characteristics of the Theology of the Early Christian and Medieval Periods — Characteristics of Modern Theology or Philosophy of Religion, 31-57
LECTURE THIRD
THE PEECURSORS OF PLATO.
Plato as the Father of Theology — His Mysticism and his Idealism — The Eleatic and Ionic Schools — The One and the Many — Socrates — His Relation to Anaxagoras — His Limi- tation of Philosophy to Ethics — His Idea of the Moral Life as an Art — His View of the Place of Knowledge in Morality — Onesidedness of this View — The Conscious and the Unconscious in Moral Life — Individualistic Tendencies of Socrates and the Minor Socratics— -Plato's Philosophy as a Synthesis of Pre-Socratic with Socratic Ideas, . . 58-79
LECTURE FOURTH.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PLATONIC IDEALISM.
Plato as the Disciple of Socrates — His Dissatisfaction with the Socratic view of Ethics — The Dialogue Protagoras as the Turning-point — Socrates opposed as a scientific Hedonist to the Morality of Opinion — The Problem of the 3Ieno — The Myth of Reminiscence and its Meaning — The Development of Knowledge from Opinion to Science — Right Opinion as Inspiration — The New View of Ethics in the Oorgias — Doing What We Will, and Doing What Seems Best — Opposi- tion of a Science of Ethics which begins with the Idea of the Whole to Hedonism — Light thrown by this Distinction upon the Theory of Ideas, 80-108
CONTENTS xiii
LECTURE FIFTH.
THE NATURE OF IDEAS AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY.
Development of the Ideal Theory — Negative Relation of Ideas to Sense and Opinion exhibited in the Phaedo — Their Positive Relation exhibited in the Symposium — The Mystic and the Artist — Plato's Metaphysical Attempt to combine these two Relations — The Systematic Unity of Ideas — The Prin- ciple of Anaxagoras and his Application of it — Plato's Criticism of Anaxagoras — His method not different from that of the Physical Philosophers — Plato's Substitute for it — The Theory of Ideas and the Method of Dialectic — Regress to the Highest Idea — Plato's View of the Relation of Final to Efficient Causes.
Note on Plato's Relation to Anaxagoras — The Sei'/repos ttXoCj — Ideas as Causes — The Regressive Method and the Hierarchy of Ideas, 109-139
LECTURE SIXTH.
THE STATE AND THE IDEA OF GOOD.
The Republic as an Educational Treatise — The Organic Idea of the State — Plato's Opposition to Individualism — His Socialism — The Philosopher-King — That Virtue is Knowledge only for the Ruler — The Ideal too great for the City-State — Plato's Criticism of the Mythology of Greece and his Proposals for its Improvement — Mythology for the Many and Philosophy for the Few — Possibility of such a Division between Faith and Reason — Two Ways of Idealism — The Idea of Good — The Unworldliness of the Philosopher — Difficulty of connecting Contemplation with Practice — Three ways of Defining the Idea of Good : First, by Extension of the Individual Ideal of Socrates ; Secondly, by the Analogy of the Sun ; Thirdly, by the Synthesis of the Principles of the Sciences— Criticism of the Neo-Platonic Explanation of the Idea of Good —
xiv CONTENTS
Difficulty of Defining the Ultimate Principle of Unity — Mystic and Idealistic Solutions of it — The Eelation of the Idea of Good to God, 140-172
LECTUEE SEVENTH.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY OF IDEAS.
Necessity of Uniting Analysis and Synthesis in Dialectic — Plato's Conception of the Art of Rhetoric — His Method of Division — His Attempt to Combine the Eleatic with the Heraclitean Doctrines — His Criticism of Sensationalism and the Doc- trine of Flux in the Tlieaetetus — His Criticism of Abstract Idealism and the Eleatic Conception of the One in the Sophist — The Problem of the One and the Many in the Parmenides — Ideas not Abstractions or Separate Sub- stances, but Principles of Unity in Difference — Ideas neither purely Objective nor purely Subjective — The Unity of Thought and Reality — Absolute Reality of Mind — Are Minds the only Real Substances — Possibility of Degrees of Reality— Plato's Grades of Souls, .... 173-197
LECTURE EIGHTH.
THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL AND THE IDEA OF GOD.
The Argument of the Phaedo — Connection of the Doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul with the conception of Transmi- gration— Wordsworth and Plato — Inference from the Nature of the Objects of Intelligence as contrasted with Sensible Objects — The Ontological Argument for Immortality — Its Relation to the Ontological Argument for the Being of God — Objections to both — Restatement of them in a better form — Argument of the Republic — The Soul not destroyed by the Death of the Body — Argument of the Phaedrus — The Soul as Self-mover — The Relation of all Souls or Minds to the Divine Intelligence, 198-220
CONTENTS XV
LECTURE NINTH.
FINAL RESULTS OF THE IDEALISM OF PLATO.
The Relation of the Ideal to the Phenomenal "World— The Ideal World Organic in itself — Distinction of its Differences from the Differences of the Phenomenal World — The Question whether Plato misconceived the Abstraction of Science — The Limit and the Unlimited in the Philebus — Distinction of Being and Becoming, of Knowledge and Opinion, in the Timaeus — The Substratum of the Changing Qualities of the Phenomenal World — Its Identification with Space — The Phenomenal as an Image of the Ideal — Dilemma as to its Reality — How the Conditions of Time and Space cause Imperfection — The Distinction of the Conditions and the Causes of Things — The Goodness of God as the Cause of the Existence of the World — The Soul as a Mediating Principle between Mind and Body — Mathematical Principles as Intermediates between Ideas and Sensible Things — The Universe as the Only-Begotten Son of God — The Mystic and Idealistic Aspects of Plato's Philosophy — Is God for Plato Transcendent or Immanent ? , 221-259
LECTURE TENTH.
THE TRANSITION FROM PLATO TO ARISTOTLE.
Supposed Opposition between the Platonic and Aristotelian Types of Mind — Aristotle's Relation to Plato — Plato's Ten- dency to Unify and Aristotle's to Distinguish— Ambiguity of the two Doctrines, that the Individual is the Real, and that the Universal ia the Real — How they Differ and how they may be Reconciled — Common Source of Error in both Philo- sophies— Aristotle's Empiricism — His Conception of Organic Unity and Development — How far he carries these Ideas — Man as a Complex Being not One with Himself — That Dis- cursive Reason and the Feelings of Love and Hate belong to the Perishable Part of Man — Aristotle ultimately more Dualistic than Plato, 260-285
xvi CONTENTS
LECTURE ELEVENTH.
ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON IN ITS PRACTICAL USE.
The Definition of the Soul — The Life of Nutrition and Repro- duction in Plants — The Life of Sensation and Appetite in Animals — The Life of Reason and Will in Man — The Division of the Practical from the Contemplative Life — Beginnings of this Division in Plato and its Completion in Aristotle — Sense in which Ethics is a Science — Dependence of Moral Science upon Practice — How it can assist Practice — Man as a vvvOeTov — The Bliss of the Contemplative Life — How far Man can Partake in it — The Religious Aspect of Ethics and of the Contemplative Life, 286-314
LECTURE TWELFTH.
ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON IN ITS THEORETICAL USE.
Aristotle's View of the Relation of Reason and Passion — His Ambiguous Utterances as to the Will — Tendency to forget the Unreflective Activity of Reason — Difficulties in Relation to the Free Activity of Reason in Contemplation — Experience as the Beginning of all Knowledge — Conception of Science as Demonstration — Various Views of Scientific Method^Aris- totle's Actual Method higher than his Logical Theory — Connexion of his Method with his Individualism — Whether an Individual Substance can be regarded as part of a more Com- prehensive Individual Substance — Difficulties in the Definition of Substance — Account of Reason in the De Anima — Its two Aspects — Its Relation to Objects — Distinction of Actual and Potential Reason — The Relation of Reason to Sense — The Intuitive Reason and its Freedom from Error — Sensible and Intelligible Matter — How far Intuitive Reason frees itself from both — Difficulties as to the purely Affirmative Nature of Intuitive Reason — Whether the Object of Aristotle's Intuitive Reason is Abstract — Tendency to Mysticism as the Result of Aristotle's View, . 316-349
CONTENTS xvii
LECTURE THIRTEENTH.
DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG TO THEORETICAL OR TO
PRACTICAL REASON?
Aristotle's Exaltation of Theory contrasted with Kant's View of the Primacy of Practical Reason — Kant's View of Experi- ence and its Relation to the Ideas of Reason — The Ifleas of God, Freedom and Immortality — Knowledge and Belief — Belief founded on the Will to Believe — Likeness and Differ- ence of the Kantian and the Aristotelian views — InsuflBciency of Subjective Grounds of Belief — Kant's View of the Relation of Teleology and Mechanism — Teleological Conceptions in Modem Biology — How Kant supplies the Means of Tran- scending his own Conception of Knowledge — Relation of (Consciousness and Self-consciousness — The Identity beneath the Difference of Reason and Will — Relativity of the Opposi- tion of What Is to What Ought To Be— Aristotle's View of the Relation of Formal and Final to Efficient and Material Causes — The False Ideal of Exact Science — In what Sense the Highest Object is the Simplest — Why we find Contin- gency iu the Lives of Animals and Men — The Unity of the Ideal and the Real — The Unity of the Theoretical and the Practical Consciousness, .... . . 350-382
LECTURE FIRST.
THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO THEOLOGY.
A GREAT part of the scientific and philosophical work of this century has been the application of the idea of evolution to the organic world and to the various departments and interests of human life. And, as religion is the most comprehensive of all these interests — that which goes highest and lowest in man, and, as it were, sums up in itself all other interests — it was inevitable that the attempt should be made to throw new light on it by means of this idea. I need not dwell upon the importance and extent of the researches into the whole history of man's religious life which have been prompted and guided by this conception, nor upon the variety of interpretations which have been given to it. In a set of lectures delivered in another University,^ I endeavoured to deal with certain aspects of the subject. I there tried to show, in the first place,
' The Evolution of Religion (MacLeliose & Sons, Glasgow). VOL. I. A
2 THE RELATION OF
what is the principle that underlies and finds ex- pression in the religious life of man, or, in other words, what it is that makes him a religious being, a being who in all ages has been conscious of himself as standing in vital relation to a supreme object of reverence and worship whom he calls God. In the second place, I tried to show that, while this consciousness of God finds an adequate expression only in the highest forms of religious thought and experience, we can detect the beginnings of it, under very crude and elementary forms, even in the super- stitions of savages. And, though our knowledge does not yet enable us, if it ever will enable us, to solve many of the problems connected with the transmission and filiation of the religious movements of different times and nations, yet we can trace out a fairly distinct and continuous series of stages through which the religious life of man has passed.
There is, however, one aspect of this process of development which is worthy of special attention, and on which I could only touch incidentally in my former lectures. This is the great and growing importance of reflective thought — in other words, of the conscious reaction of mind upon the results of its own un- conscious or obscurely conscious movements — in the sphere of religion. The impulse which makes man religious, and which determines the character of the object worshipped as well as the manner of worship,
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 3
may be a rational one, but it is certainly not due in the first instance to the activity of conscious reason. As man thinks and argues, makes judgments and draws inferences, long before he begins to examine into the nature and laws of the logical process, as he builds up for himself some kind of social order and learns to observe moral rules and customs long before he thinks of asking for any ultimate principle of ethics, so he is a religious being long before he seeks to understand or to criticise, to maintain or to dispute the validity of the religious consciousness. Theology is not religion ; it is at best the philosophy of religion, the reflective reproduction and explana- tion of it ; and, as such, it is the product of a time that has outgrown simple faith and begun to feel the necessity of understanding wliat it believes. Early religion does not trouble itself about its own justifica- tion : it does not even seek to make itself intelligible. It manifests itself in a ritual rather than a creed. And even when, as in Greece, it becomes more articu- late and rises to some imaginative expression of itself in a mythology which can furnish a theme for art and poetry, yet, even then, it does not ask for any reason for its own existence, or attempt to gather up its general meaning and purport in a doctrine. It is intuitive rather than reflective, practical ratbcr than speculative, conscious rather tlian sclf-coiKscious. It has a vigorous life, whidi maintains itself ugainst all
4 THE RELATION OF
the other interests of man and strives to subdue and assimilate them to itself ; but it does not endeavour to formulate its own principle or estimate its relations to these other interests. We are a long way down the stream of religious history ere we meet with anything like a book-religion, i.e. a religion that has a sufficiently definite view of itself to fix its own image in a sacred literature. And from that there is still a long way to traverse ere we find any attempt made to liberate the religious idea from its imaginative dress, to define the character of the object of worship, or to discuss its relations to nature and to man.
Nevertheless man is from the first self-conscious, and he is continually on the way to become more clearly conscious of himself and of all the elements and phases of his being. Slow as may be the movement of his advance, the time must at last come when he turns back in thought upon him- self, to measure and criticise, to select and to reject, to reconsider and remould by reflexion, the immediate products of his own religious life. And though he can never metaphorically, any more than literally, ' stand upon his head ' ; though the day will never come when, in Goethe's sati- rical phrase, the world shall be held together liy philosophy and not by hunger and love ; though, in short, man cannot lay the foundations of his existence in conscious reason, or build it up from
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 5
beginning to end with deliberate plan and purpose ; yet in the long process of his history the part played by reflexion must become more and more important. Even if we allow that reflective thought cannot origmate any entirely new moral or religious movement, yet it is inevitable that it should become continually more powerful to disturb and to modify religious faith, and that, in consequence, man's hold of beliefs which he cannot justify to himself should become more and more relaxed. Nay, it is inevitable that the results of reflective criticism should enter more and more deeply into the very substance of religion itself, so that it be- comes scarcely possible for those who hold it to avoid theorising it.
Thus, to take an obvious instance, the later religion of the Jews was no longer that simple religious sentiment whicli held the race of Israel together by binding them all to tlie God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacol). It had become enriched with wider thoughts by the chequered experiences of its national history, by the captivity and exile — which, as it were, tore it away from its natural root and forced it to seek a new and spiritual principle of life — by the manifold relations of sym- ])athy and antagonism with other peoples into which the Hebrews were brought. Thus it was that the most narrowly national of all races gradually
6 THE RELATION OF
became the organ of a spirit of prophecy, which looked forward to the universal reign of a God of all men, whose worshippers should be distinguished not by race but only by the energy and purity of their moral life. For it may fairly be said that if the prophets still put forward a claim for the supremacy of Israel, it was rather as the leader of humanity in the path of spiritual progress than as a specially privileged and exclusive nationality. A religion that thus rose into the atmosphere of universality, freeing the spirits of its worshippers from the bonds of time and place, was no product of mere feeling or unconscious reason. It showed in its inmost texture the working of reflexion, and its life could be sus- tained only by continued reflexion. It was so far lifted above all that was local and particular in Judaism that it could encounter the speculative thought of Greece almost upon equal terms. It had become itself something like a philosophy, and could, therefore, in Alexandria and elsewhere, easily make terms with another philosophy, and blend or coalesce with it into a new product.
And what is true of the religion of Israel is still more true of Christianity. Springing out of a Judaism which was already deeply tinged with Greek ideas, and developing itself under the con- stant pressure of Greek influences, Christianity was from the first what we may call a reflective re-
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 7
ligion, a religion which gathered into itself many of the results of both Eastern and Western thought. Already in the New Testament, it is not only a religion, but it contains, especially in the writings of St. Paul, the germs of a theology. Hence, strictly speaking, it has never been, and can never be, a religion of simple faith ; or, if it ever relapses into such a faith, it immediately begins to lose its spiritual character, and to assimilate itself to re- ligions that are lower in the scale. It is not merely that, as Anselm and the Schoolmen generally contended, it is allowable for the Christian to advance from faith to reason, from veneratio to delectatio, but that, for him, not to do so is speedily to lose hold of that which is most valuable in his faith. And if he yields to a fear of the dangers of reflexion, with the doul^t and perplexity which attend it, and declines into the easier path of reliance on some kind of authority, he will inevit- ably turn his creed into a dead formula and his worship into a superstition. This does not, of course, mean that a true Christian must be a philosopher — philosophy is a special department of activity like any other — but it means that the Christian cannot in the long run maintain his faith unless he is continually turning it into living thought, using it as a key to the dilticulties of life, and endeavouring to realise what light it throws on
8 THE RELATION OF
his own nature and on his relations to his fellow- men and to God. And, if he does so, however small may be his speculative powers, his religion is on the way to become a theology.
Here, however, we meet with one of our greatest difficulties, a difficulty which, more than any other, has embarrassed the development of religion during the last two centuries. For it is an obvious fact that philosophy or reflective thought has often been regarded, and not seldom has regarded itself, not as the ally and interpreter, but as the enemy of the faith in which religion begins ; not as evolving and elucidating, but as disintegrating and destroying, the beliefs which are the immediate expression of the religious life. And sometimes also it has undertaken to provide a more or less efficient substitute for them. This was the claim put forward in behalf of the so-called Natural Eeligion by many represen- tatives of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and it has been supposed to be put forward by the adherents of some later systems of thought. On the other hand, there have been, and there arc, many who hold that the teaching of reason and philosophy upon religious subjects is mainly negative ; that its chief result is to show that all religious faith is what Matthew Arnold called extra-belief (Aberglaube), an illusion of the imagination and the feelings for which there is no rational evidence ; or at least
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 9
that, if it does substitute anything for the complex creeds of Christendom, it is something so vague and general that it cannot have any important influence upon the life of man. Thus the Supreme Being of Deism was so distant and abstract a conception that it could scarcely be said to do more than keep the place open for a possible God. And Mr. Herbert Spencer does not substantially alter the case, when he claims the whole sphere of attainable knowledge for science, and generously gives up to religion the infinite spaces of the Unknowable. For a worship of the Unknowable would at best only serve the purpose of the lictor who in the midst of a Koman triumph reminded the victorious Imperator that he too was mortal. Eeligion, on such a basis, would be nothing but a recognition of the impassable bounds of the Jlammantia moenia mundi, the inevitable limits of human knowledge and human destiny. It could not be — what Christianity and all the higher religions have claimed to be — the great power that consecrates and idealises tlie life of man by relating it to that which is eternal and divine.
Such a view of reason as the rival or enemy of faith is naturally met, on the other side, by a proclamation of faith as the enemy of reason. If natural religion be set up as the substitute for revealed religion, it is eagerly pointed out by some theologians that the substitute is inefficient ; that, as it rests upon abstract
10 THE RELATION OF
thought, it can at best meet the wants only of the few who live by thouglit, and that, even for them, it is a precarious and uncertain possession ; since it is devoid of that power of interesting the feelings and transform- ing the life which belongs to the beliefs that come to us in a more direct way, prior to and independent of the deliberate action of the intelligence. On the other hand, if it be argued that reason is entirely opposed to the claims of faith, that its attempts to deal with the problem of religion inevitably lead to a conviction that the problem is insoluble by any of the methods of human science, and that, therefore, the only rational creed is Agnosticism — this very argument is apt to be accepted by religious men as a confession of the incapacity of reason to deal with the highest interests of man's spiritual life. In this way many Eoman Catholic writers like De Maistre, and many Protestant writers like Mansel and, to a certain extent also, Mr. Balfour, have tried to maintain the cause of religion on the basis of philosophical scepticism. Tliey have contended that reason, except within the limits of empirical science, is a purely analytical and therefore disintegrating agency, which can create nothing and develop nothing, and which tears up by the roots the tree of life in the effort to see how it grows. They have sometimes endeavoured, on the basis of the Kantian criticism of knowledge, to show that, in face of the great problems of life —
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 11
of all the problems, in fact, with which religion is specially concerned — reason is placed between two alternatives, neither of which it is able to accept as true. And they have in various ways tried to exploit this incompetence of reason in the interests of faith, sometimes of faith in an external authority, at other times of a faith in some immediate or intuitive consciousness which is maintained to be prior to reason and above its criticism.
Now, whatever side we take in such a controversy, the result seems to be that there is a deep and apparently incurable schism in the spiritual life of man, a schism between his unconscious and his con- scious life ; or, as we may perhaps more accurately state it — since man is always in a sense both conscious and self-conscious — a schism between man's immediate experience and the retiexion in which he is involved whenever he attempts to understand himself. And instead of a fides quacrens intcllcctum, a faith which is simply the first direct grasp of the soul at truth, and which therefore leads on necessarily to the more adequate comprehension and appreciation of it, we have, on the one side, a faith that withdraws itself from criticism by raising a plea against the com- petence of the critic, and, on the other, a reason which treats faith as another name for illusion.
Now, it seems to me that we can to some extent sympathise with the motives of both sides in this
12 THE RELATION OF
old controversy. On the one hand, a faith which is not seeking intelligence is a faith which is stunted and perverted ; for, as we have seen, the very nature of religion, and especially of the Christian religion, involves and stimulates reflexion upon the great issues of life. Hence the attempt to defend Christianity by questioning the right of the intelli- gence to criticise it, is suicidal. The bulwark which it sets up for the defence of religion is also a barrier in the way of its natural development ; and a religion which does not develop must soon die. The faith that does not seek, but shuns and repels knowledge, is already losing its rational character. The exclusion of science from the sphere of religion — meaning, as it does, also the exclusion of religion from the sphere of science — necessarily leads to its withdrawal from other spheres of human life until, instead of being the key to all other interests, religion becomes a concern by itself, and, we might almost say, a private concern of the individual.
On the other hand, it seems difficult to admit the claim of science at all witliout making it so absolute as to leave no room for faith ; and that whether religion be conceived as irrational or as rational. For while, in the former case, religion is set aside and Agnosticism takes its place, in the lattier case it seems as if faith must equally disappear, because reason provides a complete substitute for it, a
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 13
religio philosophi which is based on a definite philosophical conception of the nature of God, and a definite proof of His existence. Thus, if it be admitted that a scientific interpretation of religion is possible, it might seem that this interpretation must take the place of religion itself ; that, if faith can be explained by reason, reason must become the nemesis of faith. Moreover, it is impossible that religion can be rationalised without being greatly modified ; and if such a transformation be justifiable, how can we regard the first form of religion as more than a temporary and provisional scafiblding which has to be removed when the build- ing is completed ? Thus, to treat the claims of knowledge as absolute seems fatal to faith ; but, on the other hand, it is futile to admit the right of intelligence to examine and criticise up to a certain point and no farther. All such compromises between reason and faith must break down, because we can find no third power beyond both to determine their respective limits ; while, if we allow either reason or faith to determine them, the power which does so is ijjso facto recognised as supreme. In particular, if reason be limited by anything but itself, it is enslaved ; it becomes, as the Scholastic theologians maintained it should be, the aiKilla fidei ; and the vcjice of a slave has no authority : it can add no weight to the word of tlie master.
14 THE RELATION OF
It is impossible that religion can receive any real aid or service from the activity of philoso- phical reflexion unless such reflexion is absolutely free. And if it be free, it seems as if it could recognise no right but its own, as if it must set aside as irrelevant all beliefs and doctrines which have arisen independently of its own action, and as if, in building up its scientific creed, it must clear the ground of all that occupied it before. Yet, if it does so, the fate of the eighteenth century Enlight- enment, and that of the Agnosticism of the present day, seem to show that religious belief is likely to evaporate in our hands, or to reduce itself to some- thing so vague and empty tliat it can hardly have any influence upon the life of man.
I have been trying to put as sharply as possible a dilemma which has greatly exercised the minds of men during the last two centuries, and which is still the source of perplexity to many. On the one hand, it seems as if religious faith must seek reason, as a condition of its own life ; and yet that, in seeking reason, it seeks its own destruction. It must seek reason: for it is impossible that any real faith can live without attempting to understand itself or develop its own intellectual content ; and when it has once entered upon this course, it cannot stop short of the end. If it appeals to reason, to reason it must go. And if at any point it becomes apprehensive, and
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 15
endeavours to put a stop to the process of reflexion and criticism, above all if it calls in the aid of scepticism to defend it against such criticism, it loses something of its sincerity, its wholeness of heart, and of the courage and freedom that goes only with such sincerity. Thus it is driven back upon itself and deprived of that firm hold upon thought and life which it formerly possessed. The result is that religion, whicli should be the great principle of unity in human life, becomes the source of the most un- happy of all its divisions. Or if, again, the other alternative be adopted, and it is recognised that, in an age of science, religion, like everything else, must submit to criticism on pain of losing its moral in- fluence, it seems as if, at the best, we were inviting such an idealistic re-interpretation of Christianity as has been attempted by Kant, by Schelling, and by Hegel : and then, it is alleged by many, we are substituting for a religion of the heart and will, a religion of the intellect that dissolves away all those personal relations of God and man which constitute the living power of Christianity. And if this be the best, what is the worst ? It is tliat all such attempts to explain or reconstitute religion upon a new basis should fail, or, like the Natural lieligion of the eighteenth century, should dissolve away in abstrac- tion, and leave us with nothing to correspond to religion except the fonscioiisness (bat. bf^yond all that
16 THE RELATION OF
we can feel and know there is an infinite unknown, and that, in short, we ourselves
" are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."
Now there cannot be any doubt that this is a real difficulty, which has produced and is now more than ever producing a division in our life, and ranging us in opposite ranks, and that not on the ground of any individual or class prejudice, but on the ground of what are really the highest interests of man's in- tellectual and moral life : setting on the one side those who feel that the powers of man's spiritual nature can be fully drawn out only by a religion that makes the strongest personal appeal to his will and affections, and who therefore cling to forms of belief which they refuse to criticise and try to exempt from criticism : and setting on the other side those to whom the most vital of all causes is the cause of truth and intellectual honesty, and who are there- fore prepared to accept the results of free enquiry, even if it should tear away from them everything they would wish to believe. Nay, this is a division which everyone who is open to the intellectual in- fluences of the time must feel in himself, as a conflict, or apparent conflict, between two claims, both of which rise out of his own nature. There are many writings of the last century which might be
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 17
adduced as evidence of the prevalence of such a state of mind. Thus in reading Mill's Essays on Religion — a book which attracted much attention when it was first published — we can see that the author is con- tinually asking himself how much he may still believe and hope, how much of Christianity he may retain consistently with his scientific integrity. And there are at the present day numerous writers, like Pro- fessor James, who maintain that there is a point at which we have a right, without any other evidence, to take what we think most desirable for our own spiritual life as by that very fact sufficiently evidenced to be true ; a point at which, in short, belief may be safely founded on the ' will to believe.' Yet from this there is only a step to the acceptance of the principles of Newman's Grammar of Assent, which asserts the right — in the general impossibility of find- ing sufficient evidence for any kind of religious truth — to treat insufficient evidence as if it were sufficient- On the other hand, there are many who regard all such expedients for the establishment or restoration of faith as more or less refined adaptations of Pascal's straightforward counsel : " II faut s'abetir " ; and who, therefore, think themselves obliged to accept the conclusion that our advancing knowledge is only making us more clearly realise the limits of our life and the impossibility of our discovering either whence it comes or whither it goes, or what is the unknown
VOL. I. B
18 THE RELATION OF
power that rules it ; and that the intense life of religions faith, in which so much that is great in the past life of man had its source and spring, was based upon an illusion, with which, for good or evil, we must learn henceforth to dispense.
Now, it cannot be denied that much remains to be done ere such difficulties as these can be solved or removed. But I think that there is already in our hands, in the idea of Evolution, a kind of Eirenicon or means of bringing the opposing sides nearer to an understanding with each other. In particular, that idea enables us to throw some new light upon the relations of the unconscious or unre- flective to the conscious or reflective life, as stages or factors in the development of man ; and thus, as it were, to break off the horns of the dilemma of which we have been speaking — a dilemma which really arises from their being sharply and abstractly opposed to each other. For, in the first place, in the very idea that they are two factors or stages of one life, it is involved that they are not governed by two absolutely antagonistic principles, but that there is an essential link of connexion between them. Their difference and opposition, however far it may reach, must ultimately be conceived as secondary and capable of being explained from their unity. Their conflict, in short, must be taken as analogous to the conflict of different members or
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 19
forms of vital activity in one organism, a competition which in the healthy organism is always subordinated to co-operation, or at least only ceases to be co-operation at a lower stage that it may become co-operation at a higher. It is thus that in organic evolution greater differentiation of function proves itself to be the means to deeper integration and more concentrated unity. And in this unity nothing that was valuable in the lower stage of life is ultimately sacrificed, however much the form may be changed.
Applying this to the case before us, we cannot admit tliat there is any fatal opposition between the unconscious or unreflective movement of man's mind and that which is conscious and reflective. It is the same reason that is at work in both, and all that reflexion can do is to bring to light the pro- cesses and categories which underlie the unreflective action of the intelligence, and, in doing so, to make the use of them more definite and adequate. We must, therefore, maintain that, though reason may accidentally become opposed to faith, its ultimate and healthy action nmst preserve for us, or restore to us, all that is valnalile in faith. Or, if it necessarily comes into collision with faith at a certain stage of development, at a further stage this antagonism must disappear, or l)e reduced within ever narrower limits. Nay, in the long run a living faith will absorl) int(j itself the elements of
20 THE RELATION OF
the criticism which is directed against it, and grow by their means into a higher form of religious life. We are too often disposed to say : Fiat justitia, ruat caelum, and to forget that justice sustains the universe, and cannot be the cause of its ruin. And so we are too apt to think the division of faith and reason to Ije incurable, and to suppose that we must choose the one and reject the other ; forgetting that a faith that really springs out of our rational or spiritual nature, or commends itself to it, cannot be fundamentally irrational or incap- able of being explained and defended ; and that a reason which is unable to find an intelligible meaning in some of the deepest experiences of human souls, must be one-sided and imperfectly developed. Hence, while we cannot deny the relative opposition of the two forms of spiritual life, and are indeed obliged to recognise it as one of the most potent factors in development, we cannot admit that it is an absolute opposition.
Nor, again, is it possible to be satisfied with a conception of progress that has often been advocated in the last century, by no one more forcibly than by Thomas Carlyle, the conception of an alternation of two different eras of human history — an era of intuition, faith, and unconsciousness, in which the minds of men are at one with themselves, and work joyfully and successfully in the service of some idea
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 21
which inspires them, but which they never seek to question or analyse, and an era of reflexion in which the " native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," in which faith grows weak, and the symbols which formerly satisfied the souls of men, and united them with each other, are dissected and torn to pieces by scepticism. Apparently Carlyle has little consolation for those who are born in such an unhappy age of transition, except to bid them wait for a new inspiration, a new imaginative synthesis, which shall set up another symbol in place of that which has disappeared. Least of all has he any trust in the reflective in- telligence, in the work of thought, as capable of bringing about such a synthesis or substantially contributing towards it. But a deeper consideration of the process in question may show, as I have already indicated, that the two great movements which constitute it, the movement of unconscious construction, faith and intuition, and the movement of reflective analysis and critical reconstruction, are not essentially opposed, but rather form the necessary complements of each other in the development of man's spiritual life : and that, as it is essential to faith that it should develop into reason, so the criticism of faith, as it is a criticism by reason of its own unconscious products, cannot be ultimately destructive or merely negative in its effect. Its
22 THE RELATION OF
searching fires may, indeed, burn up much of the wood, hay, stubble — the perisliable adjuncts that attach themselves to the edifice of human faith — but they cannot touch the stones of the building, still less the eternal foundation on which it is built. I will not conceal my conviction that its dissolving power must be fatal to many things which men have thought and still think to be bound up with their religious life, but I do not believe that it will destroy anything that is really necessary to it. Christianity is not, like some earlier religions, essentially connected with imagin- ative symbols, which must lose their hold upon man's mind so soon as he is able to distinguish poetry from prose. It had its origin, as we have seen, in an age which was, up to a certain point, an age of reflexion, and the first movement of its life was to break away from the local and national influences of the region in which it was born. It lived and moved from the beginning in an atmos- phere of universality, and in spite of the reactionary influences to which in its further history it was exposed and which gradually affected its life and doctrine, it never lost its essentially universal character. Hence, when its official representatives had turned it into a system of superstition and obstruction, its own influences have often inspired the reformers and revolutionists who attacked and
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 23
overthrew that system. It has thus, we might say, brought " not peace but a sword " into the life of men, because it would not let them rest in any partial or inadequate solution of their difficulties, or in anything short of the ideal of humanity which it set before them. Such a uni- versal religion, built upon the idea of the unity of man with God, and therefore on the conviction that the universe in which man lives is in its ultimate meaning and reality a spiritual world, cannot be justly regarded as a transitory phase of human development, or as a creation of feeling and imagination which science and philosophy are bound ultimately to displace. Whatever may be- come of the special doctrines in which it has found its first reflective expression, it contains a kernel which is essentially rational and which cannot but gain greater and greater importance the more man's spiritual life is developed. It has in it a seed of ideal truth which is one with man's mind — the anima naturaliter Christiana of which Tertullian speaks — and which therefore must grow with its growth and strengthen with its strength. And philosophy, in spite, or rather because, of its critical reaction upon all the products of Christian thought and life, must in the long run supply one of the most important of all the agencies by which that seed is brought to maturity. It must show itself
24 THE RELATION OF
neither as the enemy of religion, nor as a substitute for it, but as the purest form of its consciousness of itself, and therefore as the great means of its development.
The view of the evolution of religion and of its relation to theology which I have stated is one that has been gaining ground in modern philosophy ever since the time of Leibniz. It occupies an important place in the theories of all the German idealists from Kant to Hegel, and in those of many other writers who have followed in their footsteps during the last century. From what has been said above, it will be seen that the objections brought against it may be summed up under two heads : they are either the objections of those who would separate philosophy from life or the objections of those who would separate life from philosophy.
The former class of objections have not seldom been urged by recent critics, generally in the in- terest of religion. If philosophy can explain and criticise religion, still more if it can in any sense be said to give it a new and more rational form, must it not, they ask, set religion aside and take its place ? In other words, does not such a reflective interpretation of religion involve the sub- stitution of the philosophy of religion for religion itself, and therefore of a mere intellectual process for an experience which embraces the whole com-
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 25
plex nature of man, feeling, thought, and will ? If so, then the change of form, which philosophical reflexion brings with it, will involve such a trans- formation of the whole content of religion as well as of the attitude of the individual towards it, that all the vivid interest of immediate religious experi- ence must die out and leave in its place a mere caput tnortuum of abstraction or a dialectical movement of thought, which are as far removed from life as the conceptions of pure mathematics.
Such a view, however, involves an entire misconcep- tion of the work of philosophy and its relation to life. To say that a religion must develop into a theology does not mean that theology as a system of thought must take the place of religion. It was a fatal inversion of the true order of spiritual things, when doctrines as to the nature of God were treated by so-called Natural Eeligion as the basis of the religious life, instead of being regarded as the results of an effort to interpret it. Philosophy, if we separate it from life, can never be a substitute for life ; it is only life brought to self-consciousness ; and to say tliat it is higlier than the other forms of life is either untrue, or true only in a sense to which no reasonable objection can be taken. It is true only in the sense that a religion which understands itself, which has reflected on the principles on which it is l)ased, is an advance upon a religion that
26 THE RELATION OF
has not so reflected. But theology no more gives ns a new religion than the science of ethics gives us a new morality. Under limitations shortly to be stated, they cannot do so, and if they did, they would be worse than useless. They would be carrying us to another life and another experience, when what we want is to explain the life we are actually leading and the experiences we are having here and now. They would be liable to all the objections of those who say that the philosopher builds up a purely ideal world ' out of his own head.' If any philosopher ever did so, he might justly be left as its sole inhabitant. The only truth in the objection is that — while it is the business of philosophy simply to explain experience, and among other things to explain the religion and morality that exist and not any other — yet it is inevitable that our ethical and religious attitude should be greatly changed by our attaining to a reflective consciousness of the prin- ciples which we had before been using without reflexion. Ethics does not, and cannot produce a morality which is essentially different from the morality of immediate experience, the morality ex- isting in the intuitive vision of good men, who live up to the highest standard of their time, and in living up to it carry it a step higher. Yet it is true to say that reflexion contributes to moral pro- gress. If, for example, we reflect on the order of
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 27
the State and bring to light the principle that dominates its activities, the unity that pervades and connects its dispersed rules and institutions, the State becomes in a sense a new thing for us. The consciousness of the meaning of our life must react upon the life itself and conduce to its im- provement by liberating the political idea from the accidents of its temporary embodiment. And so it is with religion. As reflexion advances, it leads to a distinction which is continually growing clearer, between that which is accidental and of temporary value and that which is essential and fruitful for all time ; and this in turn must bring about a further development of the latter at the expense of the former. Tlius as man's progress, in one important aspect of it, is a progress to self-con- sciousness, lie is in some sense a new man when he has gained a new consciousness of himself. But it would be repeating the central mistake of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to separate speculation from life ami to make it a substitute for the experience from wliich it springs. The main practical use of philosopliy is to prune away the accretions of time, to counteract the tendency to stereotype or fossilise particular forms of life and thought, and so to give room for the further gj'owtli of the spirit of man. Philosophy is the criticism of life, and to separate it from life or substitute it for
28 THE RELATION OF
life, would be like attributing to the gardener what is due to the vital forces of the plant. The metaphor, indeed, fails to be adequate, but it fails in a way that tends further to emphasise the principle illus- trated by it. For the philosophy that criticises life is an element in the life it criticises, and the treat- ment of it as something independent, something that sets up claims for itself, must end in depriving it of its raison d'etre and making it barren and unfruitful. On the other hand, if it be an error to attempt to separate philosophy, as the criticism of life, from life itself, it is an equal error to attempt to separate life from philosophy. There is a literal truth in the saying of Socrates, that " a life without criticism is not worthy of being lived by men " ; and even that, strictly speaking, it cannot be lived by them. As I have already attempted to show, the critical reaction of the human mind upon experience begins almost as soon as the experience itself. Least of all is it possible to separate man's highest life, his religious experience, from such a critical reaction ; and in this sense theology begins to exist as soon as religion has taken any definite form. At the same time it is true that the criticism does not separate itself from the thing criticised till a comparatively late stage of human history. It works rather as a silent transforming influence, modifying and improving the beliefs of men or
RELIGION TO THEOLOGY 29
gradually making one belief obsolete and causing another to triumph over it.
Looking at it from this point of view, therefore, we may fairly say that the beginning of theology is to be found in Greek philosophy ; for it was in Greece that reflexion first became free, and at the same time systematic. It was in Greece that philosophy first organised itself as a relatively separate interest, over against the immediate practical interests of life. Philo- sophy, indeed, cannot detach itself from life ; in so far as it does so, it must be smitten with barrenness. Its office is to bring life to clear self-consciousness, and because Greek philosophy did this, it acquired and maintained a relative independence. And it is this that gives primary importance to its con- tribution to theology. There is, it is true, a theological philosophy of India, which is earlier in development than Greek philosophy ; but the thought of India, though often subtle and profound, is un- methodical ; and when it goes beyond the most alDstract ideas it mixes the forms of imagination with those of religion in a way that does not con- duce to distinct and adequate thinking. And, while it is not easy to ascertain what elements it has contributed to Western theology, it may safely be asserted that its influence was secondary and subordinate. Even in the Neoplatonic philosophy, which is most kindred in spirit with it, the likeness
30 RELIGION AND THEOLOGY
is mainly at least the result of the independent development of Greek speculation. It was the thought of Greece which, in this as in other de- partments, gave to the philosophical enquiries of Christendom a definite method and a definite aim. It was from Greece that the Fathers of the Church borrowed the forms of thought, the fundamental conceptions of nature and human life, in short, all the general presuppositions which they brought to the interpretation of the Christian faith. Hence it is hardly possible to trace with intelligence the evolution of doctrines either in the early or medieval Church, or in modern times, without a previous study of the development of theology in the Greek philosophers.
LECTURE SECOND.
STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY.
In the last lecture I said that Theology begins in Greece, or at least that it is not necessary to trace it farther back ; for it is there that we find philo- sophical reflexion, upon religion as upon other subjects, for the first time distinctly emancipating itself from sensuous images, and attempting to define its objects by their essential nature and relations to each other. Theology is religion brought to self-consciousness. It is the reflective analysis of the consciousness of God in its distinctive form, and in its connexion with all our other consciousness of reality. In this technical sense the word Theology first appears in Aristotle, as a name for what was afterwards called Metaphysic, the science which seeks to discover and exhibit the funda- mental principles of Being and Knowing, and which therefore finds its ultimate object in God. But, while the word is not found before Aristotle,^ tlie thing itself
'The word 'theologian' occurs in Plato, but only in tlic sense of a mythologist. ^^^^^ ^
32 STAGES IN THE
already exists in its full development in Plato, who, for good or evil, is deeply imbued with the theo- logical spirit, and might, indeed, justly be called the first systematic theologian. In other words, he is the first philosopher who grasped the idea that lies at the root of all religion, and made it the centre of his whole view of the universe.
Now, that which underlies all forms of religion, from the highest to the lowest, is the idea of God as an absolute power or principle. For, as I have attempted to show elsewhere,^ the religious conscious- ness, in its essential meaning, is the consciousness of a Being who embraces all our life and gives unity and direction to it, who lifts us above ourselves and binds our limited and transitory existence to the eternal. It is the consciousness that all our finite ex- perience presupposes and rests upon a principle which comprehends all its various contents and transcends all its differences. It is, finally, the consciousness that, beyond all the objects we perceive without us, and beyond all the states and activities of the self within us, there is a unity which manifests itself in both, and from which neither can be separated. Now, such a consciousness is not an arbitrary product of circumstances ; it is a necessary condition of the development of the mind of man, an experience which, in some form or other, man must make as he comes
^ The Evolution of Reliyion ; see especially I, Lect. 3.
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 33
to realise the meaning of his own life, an idea which is presupposed Trom the first in all science and all morality, and which must rise to the surface when their nature is understood. It is seldom, indeed, that we recognise fully and distinctly the unity of the whole in which our existence is contained. But when we analyse our experience, and search out its ultimate conditions, we are forced to realise that all that we know is known as a factor in one experience, the experience of one world, and that such a unity is the presupposition of all our consciousness, both of our- selves and of other objects. The idea of the continuity and self-consistency of the intelligible world, as a system which throughout all its differences is the manifestation of one principle, may seem at first to be a distant and difficult conception ; but it is in reality very near to us, and indeed may be shown to be the source of all our spiritual life. To think, to feel, to will — all the forms of our consciousness — are ulti- mately bound up with the idea of an all-comprehend- ing whole ; and to believe in a God is, in the last resort, simply to realise that there is a principle of unity in that whole, akin to that which gives unity to our own existence as self-conscious beings. Nor is the trutli of this statement affected by the fact that it is the result of a reflective analysis of belief, which goes much beyond the immediate consciousness
of the believer.
VOL. I, C
34 STAGES IN THE
Now, if this be the real or ultimate meaning of religion, as I have attempted elsewhere to show, we are obliged to draw a marked contrast between the religious and the profane or secular consciousness. The secular consciousness — i.e. our ordinary unre- flective consciousness of ourselves and the world — starts from the division and separation of things ; it takes them all, so to speak, as independent sub- stances which might exist by themselves, and whose relations to each other are external and accidental. It deals primarily with the finite, with the manifold forms of existence which limit, and are limited by each other in space and time ; or, if it rises to the eternal and infinite, it is only as to something beyond and far away — something that is not present in experience, but which the limitations and imperfections of ex- perience make us suspect or aspire to, a transcendent something, which we can neither name nor define except as the opposite of the finite. The religious consciousness is the direct antithesis of this way of thinking. It, so to speak, turns the tables upon the whole secular system of thought, beginning where it ends and ending where it begins, " burning what it adores and adoring what it burns," denying or treating as phenomenal and illusive what it regards as most real and certain, and regarding as the first principle of knowledge and reality what to it is the vaguest of abstractions. In other words, the first
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 35
concern of religion is not with the difference of things from each other, and from the subject that knows them, but with the unity that underlies all these differences. It demands that we should not regard the whole as the sum of the parts or particular existences presented to us one by one in our ordinary experience, but rather that we should regard the parts as having a dependent and derived life, which cannot for one moment be severed from the life of the whole, or from the principle of reality which reveals itself therein. If, therefore, it does not deny all reality or independence to the finite, yet it looks first and last to God as the unity from which all comes, to which all tends, and in which all is contained. In its conception of things it takes its stand not at the point of view of any one of them, but at the point of view of the universal principle, in relation to which they are and are known. The language of the natural man — if we may use that expression for the man whose thoughts and feelings are least influenced by religion — would be something like this : " I know most surely and certainly the things which I can see and handle, the outward objects I apprehend through my senses; I also know, in a way, the self within me — though about the soul or self there is something dark and mysterious whenever I try to realise its nature as other, and yet not other, than the body. But when I seek to rise above my. self and the objects
36 STAGES IN THE
I perceive, and to think of a Being who is neither the one nor the other, and yet somehow is the source and end of both, I seem to lose all solid basis either for knowledge or belief, and to be trying to give substance to a dream." On the other hand, the language of the man who looks at the world with the eyes of religion must rather be something like this : " I may be deceived, and am often deceived, as to the things without me, which at best are ever passing and changing. Of the self within me I have a more stable consciousness, as bound up with all that I know or feel, and as the source of a moral ideal which I cannot but regard as absolute ; but even the self seems to escape me when I think of the limits of my earthly existence and of the rapid alternations of my thoughts and feelings. Of one thing, however, I am sure, of the abiding presence and reality that holds together all the shifting phases of the outer and the inner life, of the all-embracing, all-sustaining unity in which I and all things ' live and move and have our being.' Though all else should fail me, I am certain of God." The religious consciousness, therefore, overturns all ordinary standards of value, and sets up a new standard in their place, a standard derived, not from any one finite existence or end, but from the relation of all finite existences and ends to the infinite. For, if the thought of God be admitted at all, it must claim
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 37
everything for itself, and can leave nothing for Caesar or for any other power. It cannot but demand that we should both understand and estimate everything else in relation to it, that all our knowledge of the universe should ultimately be brought to a focus in the knowledge of God, and that all the objects of our will should be valued only as means to the realisation of God in the world.
Now, it may be said, in objection to this view, that such a complete religious inversion of our ordinary consciousness of reality, such a * transvaluation of all values ' in the light of the infinite, goes very far beyond what we find in many religions, and that, indeed, it is a rare phenomenon even in the highest religion we know. In many religions God seems hardly to be regarded as an absolute being at all, but rather to be identified with some finite object or objects, or at least with some such object idealised, transfigured and lifted by imagination above the ordinary levels of finitude. And even when a more spiritual conception of divinity is attained, yet the relation of the individual to his (xod often takes a form which seems greatly to fall short of any such consciousness as I have described. It seems to be rather the relation of weak creatures to one who is far stronger than they, and from whom, therefore, they have much to liope and to fear — a relation which, even when it takes the form of
38 STAGES IN THE
admiration and love, is still analogous to the dependence of one finite being upon another, and not the unique consciousness in a finite creature of his union with the Infinite, in whom he loses, and in whom alone he can find himself.
Such objections can be met, in the first place, by showing that the religious consciousness, as the con- sciousness of the whole to which we belong, and of the supreme reality of the principle of unity in that whole, is involved in all our consciousness of the universe and of ourselves : and in the second place, that this prin- ciple, though involved in all our thought and activity, is for that very reason the last to be clearly appre- hended by us. Aristotle's assertion that that which is first in nature is last in time, has its highest exemplification here. In the history of man religion does not at first reveal itself in that which is its true or adequate form. It represents God purely as an object or purely as a subject, as manifesting Himself purely without, or again purely within us, before it rises to the consciousness of God as God, the one principle of all knowledge and reality. Yet, even from an early period the true idea is silently working under the imperfect forms of its expression, and giving indications of itself in many ways, especially in the language of worship ; for, under the sway of religious emotion, the individual is often carried beyond the limits of his ordinary
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 39
thought. And the whole history of the evohition of religion is a record of the process whereby it gradually reveals what was latent in it from the beginning and finds ever better ways of represent- ing its object, and whereby these again react in producing a truer relation of the individual to that object, as the principle of his own life and of the life of all things.
Such considerations — which I have dealt with more fully in another course of lectures ^ — may be sufficient to meet the difficulty of recognising in the various forms of religion what I have asserted to be the principle that imderlies them all, and is more or less distinctly expressed in every one of them. Here, however, we have to deal not with religion but with theology, the science or philosophy of religion. And theology, as we have seen, is just religion brought to self-consciousness, and endeavouring reflectively to criticise and interpret its own uncon- scious processes. Theology begins, therefore, as soon as the immediate process of religious life, the direct movement by which our minds rise to the conscious- ness of God, ceases to be sufficient for itself. In other words, it begins when the mind turns back upon itself to question the results of its own spontaneous activity. Here, as elsewhere, science arises in doubt, a doubt which makes the mind retrace in reflective
^ The Ecoiulion of Rdiyion, I, Lect. 7.
40 STAGES IN THE
thought the path in which it has been led by its first imaginative intuitions of truth, and ask whether it can justify in whole or in part the results at which it has arrived. And the question thus raised is one that brings with it more searching of heart than any other which arises in the transition from intuition to reflexion, from the ordinary consciousness to science. For religion does not affect merely one aspect of life or one department of things. A man's real religion, whatever he may profess, is the summed- up product of all his experience, the ultimate attitude of thought and feeling and will, into which he is thrown by his intercourse with the world. And though this attitude of mind is, in the main, due to the working of what we call unconscious reason, yet the whole nature of man as a rational being comes into play in producing it. Hence the awaking of conscious reason to sift and criticise religion, must bring with it a more serious disturb- ance of the existence of man than any other critical reaction of thought upon life. It must give rise to a movement of doubt and denial, and ultimately to a sifting process which, even if it restores the funda- mental principles of earlier faith, yet inevitably makes great changes in its form, and rejects so much that had formerly seemed essential, tliat some- times it is difficult to detect the identity which maintains itself through the change.
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 41
Now, this remark has a special application to the development of theology in Greece. The religion of Greece, indeed, especially in its later human- ised polytheism, marks a great advance in the spiritual history of man, a higher appreciation both of his own nature and of his relations to the world than can be discerned in earlier religions. Greek mythology, as it appears in Homer, in Pindar, and in the Tragedians, already shows the same freedom of spirit, the same large outlook upon the facts of human life and destiny, which at a later time manifested itself in the speculations of its philoso- phers. The Greek poets, indeed, wielded their imagin- ative symbols so freely, as a means of expressing all their thoughts and feelings, that the mythology they created or remoulded is like a collection of transparent allegories, through which spiritual truth is con- veyed ; and it was but a short step for the philo- sophers who came after them, to drop the symbols altogether and adopt the abstract language of thought. At the same time the imaginative form of Greek mythology exposed it in a peculiar way to the attacks of scepticism, so soon as the intellect of Greece had awakened to the distinction of poetry from prose. The delicate moonlit web of poetic fiction which the Greek imagination had woven around the crude naturalism of pre-historic religion, insensibly softening, colouring, and idealising it, could
42 STAGES IN THE
not maintain itself in the daylight of a critical age. Hence, at least in all the educated classes, there was a rapid collapse of faith ; and philosophy seemed to have had thrown upon it the task, not only of interpreting religion, but, as it were, of provid- ing a new religion out of itself. Bacon declares that with the ancients moral philosophy took the place of theology : he should rather have said that it tried to supply the want caused by the failure of popular religion. Indeed, the greatest of all the differences between the religious development of Greece and that of Christendom lies just in this, that, in the former philosophy at once breaks away from the tutelage of faith and asserts its independence, nay, claims to provide the only true basis on which the moral and spiritual life can be supported ; whereas, in the latter, there is a long period during which philosophy remains strictly the ancilla fidei ; and when it emancipates itself, it cannot be said, even with those who are most influenced by philoso- phical reflexion, to substitute itself for the religion of faith, but only to seek a rational basis for it, and to subject it to a sifting criticism.
A consideration of these facts enables us to make a preliminary division of the field which a complete history of theology would have to traverse, and to distinguish three ' main periods in that history, namely, the period of Greek and Eoman antiquity.
EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY 43
the Christian era down to the Eeformation, and the modern period. In these lectures I shall confine myself almost entirely to the first of those periods ; but it may do something to put our enquiries in their proper setting if we begin by sketching out, in however imperfect a way, the whole field of investigation.
In the first period, the period of Greek and Eoman antiquity, philosophy is almost absolutely free, hardly even troubled by any counter-claim of authority, in its attempts to discover the nature of things and of the Being in w^hom all reality centres. The poetic conceptions of early religion could not, as I have said, stand for a moment the shock of criticism. Sometimes, indeed, we find early philosophers treating mythology as an allegory of the higher truth which is expressed in their own doctrine, while at other times they attacked it as untrue, or set it aside as irrelevant. Seldom or never do we find them treating it as having any value in itself. And if Plato recognises that some other kind of teaching than that given by philosophy is neces- sary for men in the earlier stage of their intel- lectual and moral education — necessary for all in whom the power of philosophical reflexion has not been, or cannot be developed — yet he regards the actual mythology as altogether unfit for such a purpose, and looks for the creation of a
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purified body of myths which should convey a better ethical lesson. And, on the other side, closely as religion was bound up with the political life of Greece, we hear of very few attempts to interfere with the freedom of speculation to criticise and refute it. The attack made upon Anaxagoras for the impiety of his physical theories was really aimed at Pericles, whose friend he was. And Socrates is the only martyr of philosophy in the ancient world, the only man who can be said to have suffered for the freedom of thought. After his time philosophy became the natural refuge of all those whose spiritual needs could not be satis- fied by the decaying superstitions of the ancient world. The decline of that independent political life of cities, with which the religion of Greece had been so closely connected, deprived that religion of half its meaning ; and under the empire of Kome the educated classes in ever-increasing numbers found moral support and guidance in the teaching of one or other of the philosophical schools. It is true that to a certain extent the Stoics, and to a still greater extent the Neo-Platonists, endeavoured by an allegorising method to revive in some degree the life of mythology, and even to find some rational meaning in the ritual and ceremony of popular religion. And there were some in later times, among whom the most celebrated is the Emperor
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Julian, who took seriously this curious amalgam of philosophy and superstition. But, at the most, it could only be said that philosophy patronised the popular religion, and not that it formed a real alliance with it, still less paid to it any real deference.
It may then safely be said that ancient philo- sophy was, at once and almost without effort, free. If it owed much to the religion from which it emerged, it was hardly at all conscious of the debt. And perhaps its imperfection was partly due to the very ease with which it won its freedom. In spiri- tual things the greatness of the price we pay, has much to do with the value of the good we acquire. And one consequence of the facility with which criti- cism disposed of the primitive faiths of the ancient world was, that the purely intellectual life, the life of philosophical reflexion, tended too much to with- draw upon itself and to disconnect itself from the life of feeling and impulse, to break away, in short, from the unconscious basis out of which the life of consciousness arises. This exaltation of conscious as opposed to unconscious reason begins with Socrates, who in teaching that ' virtue is knowledge ' seemed to cast contempt on any virtue which is not the product of distinct reflexion upon the ends of hiinian existence, any virtue that depends upon i-ule and habit, or upon tlie influence of society in drawing
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out and disciplining the moral energies of man. And though, as we shall see, this defect was partly corrected by Plato and Aristotle, who laid increasing weight upon habit and social training, yet these great writers repeated the same error in a more dangerous form, when they exalted the intellectual above the practical life, and treated the former as that in which alone man could be said to rise into unity with the divine. Against this undue exaltation of the intellect there is a partial reaction in the later schools of the Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics, in which the guidance of practical life again becomes the great object of philosophy. But this change is less important than it seems. For in these schools ethics was almost entirely divorced from the wider social interests with which in earlier times it had been concerned, and confined to a con- sideration of the ways in which the inner inde- pendence and harmony of the indi^ddual soul might be maintained. The Roman Empire, while estab- lishing outward order and organisation of life among all the races submitted to its rule, had exercised a disintegrating influence upon all the social and political bonds that had hitherto held them together. And philosophy could only accept the result and endeavour to fortify the individual man in his isola- tion, and to bestow upon him that strength of heart and moral self-sufficiency of which he was in need.
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Hence, even more than Socrates, the Stoics and Epicureans tend to concentrate attention upon the inner life, as a sphere to be regulated by con- scious reason and deliberate purpose ; and they show even less respect than he did for the move- ments of natural feeling and immediate impulse. Their philosophical religion is a creation of abstract thought which hardly attempts to connect itself with experience, or to find any interpretation of it. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius live in an ideal world, which they hold, indeed, to be the only reality, but which they hardly attempt to bring into any rational connexion with the facts of their external lives. They are optimists, who yet take an almost pessimistic view of the actual con- ditions of existence in which they find themselves. Their philosophy is rather a refuge from the con- fusion and evil they see around them than a means of removing the appearance of confusion by throwing upon it the light of a liigher truth. They seek not to overcome the world but to make themselves indifferent to it. And with the Neo-Platonists, tiie last of the Greek schools of philosophy, this tendency to withdraw from life and all its problems becomes still more marked. The higher claims of contempla- tion, which had been asserted by Plato and Aristotle, are again put forward and in a still more exclusive sense ; for while Plato and Aristotle sought to bring
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all nature and all the interests of human life within the scope of philosophy, and had made theology only the culminating phase of science which brings all its varied results to a final unity, with the Neo- Platonists this unity becomes in itself the main and, we might almost say, the sole object of interest. Thus theology, absorbing the whole life of philo- sophy, is emptied of its contents, or rather has for its whole content the bare idea of religion. That idea, indeed, is expressed in Plotinus with a depth and comprehensiveness which has hardly anywhere else been equalled ; but we might perhaps say that with him the idea swallows up the reality. Man is left, as it were, alone with God, without any world to mediate between them, and in the ecstatic vision of the Absolute the light of reason is extin- guished.
It appears, then, that in ancient philosophy thought is free ; but, as it did not pay ' a great price ' for its freedom, as it gained that freedom without any hard struggle with faith and social authority, its emancipa- tion made it lose hold of reality. It tended in the end to an exclusive intellectualism, in which the form of thought was opposed to the matter, and the actual world was not idealised or spiritualised, but rather condemned as unideal and unspiritual. Nevertheless, the debt of philosophy and theology to Greek thought is incalculable. It first distinctly lifted man above
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vague wonder at a universe he could not comprehend, and gave him courage to define and to measure, to distinguish and to relate, all the forms of his inward and outward life. It first made him ask distinct questions of experience, and taught him the methods by which he could hope to answer them. It first attempted to name and to determine the categories or forms of thought under which we have to bring all things, if we would seek to understand their nature and to exhibit their relations to each other. Finally — what is most important in relation to our subject — it first sought to grasp and verify that idea of the ultimate unity of all things, which lies at the basis of all religion. It thus laid down the indispensable pre- suppositions of all later theological thought, and developed that flexible language of reflexion in which alone its ideal relations could be expressed. If the Eoman empire, by the peace which its organised rule secured, the pads Romanae majcstas, provided the external conditions under which Christianity could advance to the conquest of civilised mankind, the philosophy of Greece provided the inward conditions whereby its ideas could be interpreted and brought into that systematic form which was necessary to secure their permanent influence upon the human mind.
The second stage in the evolution of theology is that in which the conceptions and methods of Greek
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philosophy were used to formulate and interpret the new ideas as to the nature of God and man and their relations to each other, which were involved in, or suggested by, the facts of the life of Christ and the spiritual experiences of His followers. To a certain extent the two stages overlap one another ; for Chris- tianity had begun to be developed into a dogmatic system long before Neoplatonic thought had received its culminating expression in Plotinus. The charac- teristic attitude of theology during this whole period is directly the reverse of that which had prevailed during the first period ; for whereas in the first period philosophical reflexion was hardly conscious of limitation by any authority, and had not in any way to yield to the immediate claims of the religious con- sciousness, in the whole period of the evolution of Christian doctrine down to the Eeformation philosophy is in a strictly subordinate position. In the early Christian centuries its influence is very great, and, indeed, can hardly be exaggerated ; but it was not recognised. The Fathers did not seem to themselves to be actively developing a system of doctrine, but simply to be handing down the faith once delivered to the saints ; and, though in the Scholastic period philosophy was recognised to have a place of its own, it was strictly that of an instrument to analyse and explain doctrines which were accepted as true on the authority of the Churcli. While, therefore, there is
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a real evolution of doctrine, involving great activity of thought and many changes in the interpretation of the fundamental ideas of Christianity, the pre- vailing view of theologians was that they were simply maintaining an immovable truth ; and that, if they had made any alteration in its expression, it was merely of a formal kind, which had no eflect upon the substance of the faith. Only once, in the Alexandrian school of theologians, did philosophical reflexion gain a certain independence, and even claim to be a higher way of apprehending the truth; but this was a passing phase in the early history of the Church.
The result of this process was that each doctrine, as it established itself as one of the articles of faith, tended to become fixed and fossilised, and ceased to have the power of growth ; and the new life of thought seemed rather to transfer itself to fresh questions than to deepen and reinterpret the results already attained. Hence, though we can trace a rational process of development and a real movement of intelligence in the successive steps by which Christianity defined itself, yet this is disguised and to a great extent deprived of its value by the mode in which it took place. For, on the one hand, reason can never show its real power in servitude, or when its weapons are used by those who are not fully conscious of their nature. The conceptions of Plato and Aristotle, of the Stoics and Neo-Platonists, as
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employed by those in whom the genuine life of Greek thought was no longer present and who could not criticise the ideas they were using, were often com- bined in an external and mechanical way with the data supplied by Christian life and experience. And, on the other hand, it has to be remembered that these conceptions themselves contained elements that were essentially alien and even hostile to the matter to which they were applied. The consequence was that the movement of theological thought became more forced, unnatural, and fictitious the farther it ad- vanced, till it ended in the production of the great Scholastic systems — systems in which compromise and balance take the place of organic unity, and arguments for foregone conclusions are substituted for scientific or philosophical investigation. Scholastic theology really deserves the character which Mommsen has attributed to all theology : it is " the bastard child of faith and reason." It is the extreme manifestation at once of the slavery of reason and of the necessary recoil of reason against that which has enslaved it. The effort to confine the intelligence to the task of analysing data which it is not allowed to examine, and of arguing from premises which it may not ques- tion, could only end in making it rationalistic, scep- tical, and even destructive. And the Scholastic, while seeming to himself only to be analysing the doctrine of Christianity, really dissected it, and turned it from
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a living truth into a dead body of dogma. Finally, the Xominalism of the age before the Eeformation practi- cally showed that the Scholastic method was fatal to a Christian, and even to a religious view of life, and made it necessary in the interest of philosophy and theology itself that the long divorce of faith and reason should come to an end.
What we find, then, in this second period of the history of theology is an external combination of re- ligion with philosophy, and the production of a system of dogma in which the ideas and methods evolved by the free speculation of Greece were used to express and interpret the new principle of Christianity. But the results of such an artificial process, in which the form of thought was derived from one source and the matter from another, were necessarily very inade- quate, and could have only a provisional value. It was inevitable in the long run that the reflective power, called forth by this imperfect attempt to work out the consequences of the new view of life, should turn against its own products. It was in- evitable that modern philosophy, whicli had grown to maturity under the tutelage of the Church, should reassert the ancient freedom of Greek speculation, and again endeavour to interpret for itself the widening experience of humanity. And this movement of renewal and revival, or, as it is called, Benaissance, soon extended also to rehgious
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experience, when the Eeformers, setting aside the whole system of thought and hfe which the medieval Church had built upon the foundation of Christianity, tried to put themselves again in direct contact with the life and teaching of Christ.
The Eeformation, indeed, was far from being, in the first instance, an assertion of those claims of reason which Scholasticism had discredited ; but it contained the germ of a reconciliation between the two factors of man's life, which in the medieval Church had been opposed to each other ; for it demanded a faith which should not be the acceptance of the dictates of an outward authority, but the spiritual apprehension of Christianity by each man for himself. Such a faith was really, what a faith in authority could never become, a fides quaerens intellectum, a faith that had in itself the necessity of its own development into reason. And when Descartes put forward his maxim : De omnibus diLbitandum est, and sought to restore philosophy to its rights, as an investigation into truth without any presuppositions, he was really proclaiming that the era of compromise — of the blend- ing of incongruous elements derived from different sources, or of an external truce between opposite prin- ciples— was at an end ; and that the form and matter of thought must henceforth be derived from the same source, and brought into complete unity with each other. Hence modern philosophy, and the theology
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or view of ' the highest things,' in which it culminates, is, like Greek philosophy, free speculation. It deals with religion, as it deals with the other experiences of life, which it tries with perfect impartiality and disinterestedness to interpret. And when any attempt has been made to limit its freedom, it has reasserted itself in a sceptical and even a revolutionary spirit against all dogma whatsoever, and even against Christianity itself, so far as it was identified with dogma.
It could not, however, permanently retain such a merely negative attitude. Nor could it fall back upon that indifference to popular religion, which was the general characteristic of the Greek philosophers. It found itself in the presence of a religious experience, which had a far richer content than that of the Greeks, and it was forced to seek for some explanation of that experience. It had to deal with a religion which was not bound up with the peculiarities of any special age or nation, but which from the first has breathed the atmosphere of universality — a religion which found its immediate expression, not in a fanci- ful mythology, but in a life lived under human conditions and carried through suffering and death to a spiritual triumph. It could not escape into abstraction from the influence of tliis great fact, and of all the experiences to which in the history of humanity it has given rise. Nor could it hope
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to discover the ultimate reality of things by with- drawing into the inner life, or by losing all the manifold forms of existence, like Plotinus, in a mystic unity. It was committed to the hard task of idealising a world which in its first aspect seems to know nothing of the ideal ; of taking away the commonness of life by the power of a more compre- hensive vision, and finding the key to its discords in a harmony which realises itself through them. It had to seek the essential means for the realisation of its ideal in that very chance and contingency of life, which the greatest of ancient philosophers regarded as inexplicable, or as the result of that ex- ternal necessity which clings to all finite existence. In Christianity we might say that religion was for the first time brought face to face with the whole problem of the world in its vastness and universality, and at the same time in all its complexity of individual concrete detail. It had to idealise life and death, and in a certain sense even sin and evil, and to attain to a more real optimism through the lowest depths ever fathomed by pessimism. And philosophical reflexion upon such a religion was bound to follow in its foot- steps, to face the same difficulties, and find by its own methods a way to the same or to a better solution of them. Hence modern philosophy, though in its earlier stages — in the effort to assert its own free- dom and to establish the first basis of an intelligible
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view of the universe — it tended rather to withdraw from the whole sphere of religious thought, and even to regard it with hostility, has been obliged by the necessity of its own development more and more definitely to take cognisance of the Christian system of thought and life. It has been obliged to consider whether in its own way and by its own methods it can reinterpret and justify the thorough-going and fearless idealism and optimism of the founder of Christianity, while bringing it in relation to the whole results of modern life and science. This aspect of its work has gained greater prominence since the days of Kant, in the great speculative movement which he initiated at the end of the eighteenth century. And if it be true that during the course of last century there has been a partial reaction from the premature attempt then made to snatch at the fruits of philosophy before they were quite ripe, I think it may fairly be said that in its later years, after all the great development of science, especially of biological and historical science, there has been a return upon the methods and principles of idealism which, if it be characterised by greater caution, is perhaps on that account the more likely to bring about a peniuincut result.
LECTURE THIRD.
THE PEECUESOES OF PLATO.
In the last lecture I suggested that Plato is the first systematic theologian, the first philosopher who distinctly grasped the idea that lies at the root of all religion, and used it as the key to all the other problems of philosophy. Or, if this statement require some qualification, we may at least say that he is the philosopher to whom all our theology may be traced back, and to whom it owes most. Emerson once said that Plato's Dialogues were the Bible of educated men ; and if by this he meant that from them the reflective consciousness has drawn its greatest nutriment and support, it is not too much to say of the writings of one who is the fountain- head of idealistic, we might even say of ideal, views of life. Plato has done more than any other writer to fill both poetry and philosophy with the spirit of religion, to break the yoke of custom and tradition " heavy as frost and deep almost as life," which
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cramps the development of man's mind, to liberate him from the prejudices of the natural understanding, and to open up to him an ideal world in which he can find refuge from the narrowness and inadequacy of life. In the Terrestrial Paradise, on the summit of the Purgatorial mount, Dante is made to drink of the waters of Lethe to wash away from his memory all his earthly cares and sins, and then of the waters of Eunoe to refresh and strengthen his spirit for the vision of the heavens. Plato's writings may be said to be Lethe and Eunoe in one, at once the liberation of thought from that which is limited and temporary, and its initiation into a new ideal way of conceiving the world. To put it more directly, Plato is the sovirce of two great streams of theological thought which have flowed through all the subsequent literature of religion down to the present time. On the one hand, we may find in him the source, or at least one of the sources, of that spirit of mysticism which seeks to merge the particular in the universal, the temporal in the eternal, and ultimately to lose the intelligible world and tlie intelligence in an absolute divine unity ; a spirit which, through the Neo-Platonists, has exercised a very powerful influence upon the thought of Christendom, sometimes deepening and elevating it, though, on the whole, tending to give it a false direction. lUit Phito is also the main source of that
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idealism which is the best corrective of mysticism, the idealism which seeks not merely to get away from the temporal and the finite, but to make them intelligible ; not to escape from immediate experience into an ideal world in comparison with which it is a shadow and a dream, but to find the ideal in the world of experience itself, underlying it, and giving a new meaning to all its pheno- mena. These two tendencies conflict in Plato, as in subsequent philosophy and theology, and if we cannot say that in his writings their conflict comes to a definite issue, or results in the final victory of the more comprehensive view, yet the very statement of the alternative was of immense import- ance in the history of religious thought, and makes the study of Plato essential to any one who would understand its development.
There is always an element of illusion in the attempt to sum up the thought of a great writer in a few words of definition. But I may give a succinct view of Plato's work, and at the same time prepare the way for a more detailed statement, if I say that there are two principles or tendencies the union or coalescence of which gives its dis- tinctive character to the Platonic philosophy. In the first place, his thought is always moving from the particular to the universal, from the part to the whole ; he is constantly endeavouring to show the
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relative and illusive nature of the former as separated from the latter, and to reach a principle of unity deeper than all the differences of thought and things, a principle on which they depend and in relation to which alone they can be understood. And, in the second place, he is bent on establishing an ideal or spiritual conception of this principle of unity ; or, in other words, on proving that thought or mind is tlie ultimate ground, at once the first and the final cause, of all reality. Now, in the former of these points, Plato is following up a line of thought which had been marked out by the earlier Greek philosophers, while in the latter he was giving a deeper meaning and a wider scope to an idea which he had derived from his master, Socrates. It will therefore be necessary for the interpretation of Plato to go back for a little upon his predecessors.
The conception of an absolute principle of unity in the universe which is deeper than any of the special forms of existence, was the earliest thought of Greek philosophy ; but it was not clearly grasped before Xenophanes, who first set the permanent unity of all things in opposition to all their diver- sity and change. Xenophanes very naturally ex- pressed this thought in an attack upon the anthropomorphism of Greek mythology, which he regarded as an illegitimate attempt to raise one particular kind of being, one of the forms of
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the finite, into the place which could be given only to the Absolute. " There is one God, greatest of all gods and men, who is like to mortal creatures neither in form nor in mind." It is man's petty ambition and vanity that makes him think of God as such an one as himself, and, " if the oxen or the lions had hands and were able to paint pictures or carve out statues like men, they would have given their own forms to the gods." We have here a criticism of the humanised Poly- theism of Greece, a criticism which rests on the basis of an abstract Pantheism and repudiates the idea of giving any form whatsoever to the abso- lute Being, even the form of man himself. In other words, we have here the idea of God as the mere negation of the finite — an idea which could not be adequately represented in mythology ; though we may find a partial expression of it in the Homeric representation of fate as a power beyond the gods. In the apparently antagonistic philosophy of Heraclitus we have what is really another aspect of the same idea : for the endless flux of the particular forms of the finite, whose existence is nothing but the process whereby they pass away and merge in each other, is but the opposite counterpart of the changeless unity of the whole. " The One remains, the many change and pass." The Heraclitean philosophy exhibits what has been
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called the " dialectic of the finite," or, in other words, its self-contradiction when taken by itself : and this, as we have seen, is just the dialectic of the religious consciousness, by which it is lifted from the par- ticular to the universal, from the transitory to the eternal, from the finite to the infinite. Take any partial or limited existence, take even matter or mind in its abstraction, and we find that the idea of it ultimately breaks down and carries us beyond itself, and that to treat it as a self-determined whole, an absolutely independent substance, involves a contradiction ; in other words, we cannot think it at all except as transitory and changing. And what makes this movement of thought real for the com- mon consciousness, even where its logical necessity is not reflected upon, is that the very existence of a finite being is found to be the process of its dissolution. " The process of its life is the process of its death." This lesson is brought home to everyone by the experience of a life, which is lived under the shadow of death, and in which everything inward and outward seems to be perpetually slipping away from us. But the Greek mind was specially open to this pathos of finite existence, just because of its keen sensitiveness to its joys. The refrain of mortality is continually appearing even in the earliest song of Homer with all its fresh delight in the beauty of life : and as reiloxion deepened, it
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seemed to the Greeks only to disclose more dis- tinctly— beyond all the brightness of earthly existence and even beyond all the beautiful forms of the gods of Olympus — the harshness of an inexorable law of destiny.
Now, the first reading of this lesson of the vanity of all finite things tends to carry the mind to the idea of an Absolute in which all is lost and nothing is found again ; from mere change and multiplicity to mere permanence and unity, from the nothingness of the finite world to a God who is only its negation. Erom this point of view we may recognise the philosophies of Xenophanes and Heraclitus as half-thoughts, each of which finds its complement in the other, the whole thought which arises out of their recombination being just that conception of an absolute unity mediated by the negation of all difference and change, which we have already recognised as the basis of all theology.
This, then, is the first of the two characteristic elements in the philosophy of Plato. But so far we have only a pantheistic unity, a principle of unity which is negatively related to all things, and which therefore cannot be properly conceived as an ideal or spiritual, any more than it can properly be con- ceived as a material principle. The second element, the idealistic or spiritualistic element, in the Platonic thought is derived, mainly if not entirely, from
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Socrates. It is true tliat Anaxagoras first referred the order of the universe to a rational principle, when he said that " all things were in chaos till reason came to arrange them " ; but apparently all he meant was that the world is a system capable of being understood, because the connexion of its parts is determined by definite laws, and not that, as a whole, it is a manifestation of reason, or a system in which the highest good is realised. It was Socrates who first reached the conception of such a system. In a passage in the Memora- bilia'^ he is represented as declaring that, just as the substances that go to constitute man's body are derived from the material world, so his mind is a little ray of intelligence drawn from the great soul of the universe. Socrates then proceeds to give expression to a few of the ordinary arguments from design, based mainly on the adaptation of man's environment to his needs or of his physical organism to the purposes it has to subserve. It is clear, therefore, that if Socrates had attempted to con- struct any system of nature, he would have adopted a teleological view of things in which God would have been conceived as a designer working with conscious purpose to realise an end, and that end the happiness of his creatures and especially of man. In short, Socrates, in so far as he attempted
1 Mtm., I, 4, 8. VOL. I. li
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a theory of the universe at all, was disposed to think of it in the same way as he thought of the moral life of man. But he rather put aside all such ambitious designs and, except in this one place, he is represented as confining himself entirely to tlie sphere of ethics. And even ethics was for him not so much a science, as an art of life.
Socrates was thus, as it were, a philosopher by accident, one who took to philosophy to satisfy not a speculative but a practical want. Living in an age of enlightenment, an age when the old guides of life, religion and law and custom, were losing their hold upon the mind of man, he was com- pelled to find a substitute for them by reflexion upon the meaning and object of human existence. Hence he is the prophet of clear self-consciousness, who takes the Delphic epigram, ' Know thyself,' as his motto, and maintains that virtue must always be founded on such knowledge. For him the great source of error and evil is want of thought — that men go on living without considering the meaning and value of life, or asking themselves what good they expect to get out of their existence as a whole. Hence, though their wish is for the good — and, strictly speaking, no one can wish for anything else — they neither know what the good is, nor where to find it, and they blunder on from day to day, taking anything that attracts them for
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the good which they really desire. The aim of Socrates is to awake men to a realisation of what they are, and what therefore they must seek, if they would make the best of their existence and find satisfaction for themselves. Morality, he contends, is nothing but the art of living, and the conditions of success in it are like those of any other art. ISTow, every kind of art, whether mechanical or fine art, has to prescribe a definite course of conduct in which actions are regulated with reference to an end : and it therefore involves a clear consciousness of that end, and of the means whereby it is to be attained. But while no one would attempt to practise any common art without such knowledge, in the greater art of living men constantly act in this way, without asking themselves what they are living for, or whether the particular actions they do are fitted to secure it.
Is there then no end at all for human life, no good which it may be expected to secure for him who uses it aright ? To suppose that this is so, is to forget that in all our ethical judg- ments, in all our expressions of moral approval or disapproval, in all our characterisation of actions as good or bad, we presuppose that there is such an end ; and that it is the standard to wiiich we are bound to bring our lives, and by which we must estimate their worth. But tliis
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general acknowledgment is fruitless, because no attempt is made to realise what such language really means. It is supposed that everyone knows, and just for that reason no one enquires ; but so long as no one enquires, it is impossible that ignorance can be removed, or that any remedy can be applied to the ills which ignorance brings with it.
Hence the first demand of Socrates is for ethical reflexion and investigation, o ave^eraa-TO^ ^109 ov ^iiDTog avOpcoTTU} : ^ "a life without criticism, or re- flexion upon the meaning of life, is unworthy of a man " : it is rather the life of an irrational animal. For ' virtue is knowledge,' both in the negative sense that there can be no virtue without knowledge, and in the positive sense that, if knowledge is attained, virtue must follow. As to the former of these senses, Socrates maintains that he who is not conscious of the good, or does not know in what it consists, cannot possibly pursue it, or even consider the means whereby it is to be attained. If a virtuous life is a moral work of art in which every part is determined by the idea of the whole, it is impossible that it should be realised except by one who has that idea. It is possible that the particular actions done by an indi- vidual without any knowledge of the good may be similar to those which he would have had to do in
^ Apologia, 38 A.
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order to attain it ; but tliey will not really have the same character as if they were so done. Indeed, as not being done with a view to the good, they will have the character of vice. " He who is courageous with- out knowledge is courageous by a kind of cowardice : he who is temperate without knowledge is temperate by a kind of intemperance." On the other hand, if men are once awakened to a consciousness of their real good, how can they do otherwise than pursue it ? " We needs must love the highest when we see it." In all that we seek, what we really wish to find is the good ; and if it be once revealed to us, if we are enabled to see through the illusions which make us mistake something else for it, we must pursue it and it alone. It is just because men are blind, because "they know not what they do," that they are led away from the right path ; and if we can awake them to reflexion, we shall have laid the foundation for their moral regeneration.
The first step, therefore, is to make men conscious of their ignorance, i.e. not merely of ignorance in general, but of ignorance of that in which they con- tinually regard themselves as wise. For every moral judgment, every judgment with such predicates as just, unjust, teni])erate, intemperate, right, wrong, involves such a claim to ethical knowledge ; yet this claim is found to be invalid and baseless so soon as those who confidently use such general terms are
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called upon to define or explain them. The aim of the Socratic interrogation was, therefore, in the first place, to awake a consciousness that knowledge was wanting, and that without it men were like vessels without rudder or steersman ; and, secondly, to teach them the method of reflexion and investigation by which alone such ignorance could be removed. To find what is meant by the moral universals, the words of ethical import which we are continually using, above all to define ' the chief good,' to which all such words point as their ultimate basis, is the great object of all theory, as to realise it in our lives is the great object of all practice. Thus a virtuous life is for Socrates a life in which every thought and feeling, every impulse and action, is regulated in view of that good which man's nature fits him to realise and enjoy. And the first condition of such a life is that this good should be clearly defined, and that the means to it should be deliberately chosen. Whether the individual is a part of a wider teleological system or no, becomes thus for Socrates a secondary question ; and what he is mainly interested to maintain is that each man for himself should work out such a system in his own life. Socrates thinks, indeed, that each individual, in achieving his own mission, will also be serving the State and realising the divine will ; but his starting- point is individualistic and ethical, and the social and religious aspects of life fall into the background. He
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does not bid men rebel against authority, but he finds the source and sanction of all authority not without but within, in the reason and reflexion of the indi- vidual. Let each man be man and master of himself knowing what he seeks in life and steadfastly seeking what he knows. This is to Socrates the unum necessarium, the first principle of ethics, the one con- dition of moral existence to which everything else is to be subordinate.
Now, the obvious criticism upon this view of moral life is that it would exclude the greater part of what we commonly call morality. For the virtue of child- liood in all cases, and the virtue of most men throughout life, is not what Socrates demands, not the conscious pursuit of that which is recognised as the highest moral end ; it is only the habitual practice of certain kinds of action which are accepted as good, the habitual obedience to certain rules which are regarded as right, without any reflexion upon the reasons why they are so regarded. Men from their earliest years are moralised by the silent influences of tlicir social environment in the family and the State, aided by the sanctions of religion. But if, for a virtuous life, we demand a definite conception of the good of human existence and a definite regulation of all a man's ways by such a conception, we shall find very little virtue in the world, if indeed we can find any virtue at all. Cuuite said that the ideal uf
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a happy life was that the aspiration after some great object or achievement should be awakened in youth and gradually followed out to its completion in maturer years. But such a continuity of growing purpose is given to very few, and even to them it is not given in the definite form which Socrates seems to require. It is given rather as a dim anticipation which becomes clearer and clearer as the man ad- vances toward its fulfilment, and which rises into perfect distinctness only when it has been attained. Thus life, even to those who realise most fully what their aims are, is a strangely mingled web of con- sciousness and unconsciousness, and the star which they follow is a light shining in darkness. " A good man," said Goethe, " in his dark strivings is somehow conscious of the right way " ; while Oliver Cromwell, looking upon the opposite side of the shield, declared that " we never rise so high as when we do not know whither we are going." At least we may say that it is not given to any man to order his life from be- ginning to end with a clear knowledge of its meaning and purpose, and that action guided by conscious principle is rather the highest form to which morality rises than its normal type. Even Socrates himself may be quoted in the same sense ; for he did not profess in all cases to guide his own life by ethical science, but fell l)ack on what he called a divine voice that spoke within him, i.e. upon an unreasoned intui-
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tive perception of what ought to be done, which he regarded as a kind of oracle of the gods.
The truth is that in the moral life we cannot draw a sharp line of division between consciousness and unconsciousness, or rather we must say that there are many grades of relative consciousness or uncon- sciousness ; reaching down, on the one hand, to the mechanical observance of rules prescribed by an external authority ; and up, on the other hand, to the full realisation of a universal principle as furnish- ing a guide in all the details of action. The child is, in the main, externally guided or constrained to practise certain habits and to obey certain rules ; but these rules and habits have generally some rationale behind them, as being rules and habits which are needful to the maintenance of order in the society to which he belongs. And the intellijjrence of the child, while he is taught to observe them, does not remain entirely passive. What is commanded, so far as it has a rational meaning, commends itself to his reason and conscience, and helps to develop them. The rule from without is met by the 'greeting of the spirit' from within, and obedience is made easier l)y an awaking consciousness of its necessity. There is, no doubt, a long way from such dawning appreciation of the order to which bis life is subjected to the full and lt)yal acceptance of it as his own law, and therefore as a law of liberty ; and from
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that again to a reflective consciousness of the universal principle that underlies all the particular rules, at once giving them their authority and limiting their application. Nor is it possible at any point in this advance to draw a sharp line of distinction between conscious and unconscious morality. Eather we might say that there is no stage at which morality is either completely conscious or completely unconscious ; and that every stage may be called conscious in relation to the stage before it, and unconscious in relation to the stage after it. It is true, indeed, that the continuity of the moral life is sometimes interrupted by crises and even by revolutions, in which men seem to break away from their past and to make an entirely new beginning. There is such a thing as conversion. But such breaks are apt to be treated as more sharp and complete than they really are, and often — at least in cases where the individual has had any good social training — the main feature of the change is that he learns to realise the full meaning and spirit of the rules he has been taught to obey, and so vivifies the half -mechanical life of habit by the apprehension of the principle from which it derives its value. Thus revolution in individual as in national life is generally the cul- mination of a long process of preparation, like the lighting of the spark for which the explosive train has been laid ready, ur, to use a better illustration.
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like the first emergence of the plant from under- ground where its germinative forces have been slowly maturing.
We can see, however, that it was very natural for Socrates, as for other teachers in a similar position, to exaggerate the difference between con- scious morality and that which is relatively un- conscious. His whole purpose, his essential work and vocation, was to awaken men to reflexion, to arouse them to a clear consciousness of themselves, to call upon them to take life seriously and realise for themselves what they were to make of their lives. His attitude was like that of a modern religious teacher who is endeavouring to make men feel the necessity of acting from the highest principle ; and who, in view of this object, is not careful to make a distinction between one who is outwardly respectable and satisfies the demands of the ordin- arily accepted code of morals, and one who falls below that standard, or even one who is openly vicious. For what he seeks is not merely to make men act rightly, but to make them act upon the right motive ; and he may even be inclined to accept the dangerous maxim that " whatever is not of faith is sin," and to treat the outwardly good and the out- wardly ])ad as upon the same level, in so far as the former, no Iclss than the latter, want that deep religious principle froin which alunc, in his view.
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true moral life can spring. So it was with Socrates. No action seemed to him virtuous which was not based upon a knowledge of the ethical end, and he even asserted the paradox that it was better to do ill with knowledge than to do well without it. Nor does he seem to have allowed that there was any middle term between knowledge and ignorance, between the deliberate pursuit of the highest good and a life guided by casual impulses and mechanically accepted customs which are entirely without any moral value.
Such a view, however little Socrates might intend it, was essentially individualistic and unsocial in its effect. It set each man to think out the problem of life for himself ; and if it did not put him in opposition to society, at least it made him regard his relations to it as secondary, and not as the essential basis of his moral existence. And from the point of view of a religion like that of Greece, which was essentially national (and even municipal) in its spirit, consecrating the City-state as a kind of church or divine institution, this was a pro- foundly irreligious attitude. Thus, literally and absolutely, Socrates was guilty of the charges which were brought against him. He " corru])ted the youth and brought new gods into Athens," if it were cor- rupting the youth to teach them to set reason above authority, and if it were bringing new gods into
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Athens to appeal to inward conviction as the one authentic voice of God. Hence also it was a natural result that many of the immediate followers of Socrates, the Minor Socratic schools as they are called, should have adopted a thorough-going individualism, which withdrew them from the community, and repudiated all its claims, as well as all the re- ligious ideas that were connected therewith. Thus with them, as with some of the Sophists, the appeal to conscious reason took a distinctly revolu- tionary form, breaking the bonds of kindred and citizenship, and making the individual a law and an end to himself, independent at once of gods and men. This conception was developed in a hedonistic way by the Cyrenaics, who made pleasure, and even the pleasure of the moment, the end of all action : and it was developed by the Cynics in the direction of an asceticism which sought to secure the freedom of the individual by breaking all the ties which bind him to the things or beings that are without him. The Cynic philosophy, with its intolerance, its defiance of all law and autliority, its revolutionary effort to liberate man by stripping him of every covering of his nakedness which civilisation or the customs and institutions of social life have provided, was the extreme form, we might say the rechictio ad absurdtim, of the Socratic idea of independence. And tlie Cyrenaic philosophy
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seemed to reach the same result by showing that he who lives for himself must live for pleasure, and — since individual pleasures as such have no necessary unity or connexion — for the pleasure of the moment.
We have now considered the two main lines of speculation which contributed to the development of the Platonic philosophy. Plato, in fact, entered upon the whole inheritance of Greek thought, and his ideal- ism was the result of a synthesis of all the tendencies that show themselves in it. In particular, to adopt a phrase of Green's, he read the earlier philosophers with the eyes of Socrates, and Socrates with the eyes of the earlier philosophers, and thus was enabled to rid himself of the presuppositions of both, and to re- constitute philosophy on a new basis. It was his great work to combine that idea of a fundamental principle of unity in all things, which inspired the earlier schools, with the Socratic conception of reason, as the one power which is able to produce order out of chaos and to reduce all the manifold and conflict- ing elements of reality to one self-consistent whole. This conception which Socrates had set before him- self and his pupils as an ethical ideal, Plato treated as the master-key to the real nature not only of man, individual and social, but also of the whole universe. In doing so, he was led gradually to correct and supplement tlie errors and inadequacies
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of the philosophy of Socrates — his abrupt and im- mediated contrast of knowledge and ignorance, the indeterminateness of his conception of the good, his tendency to over-emphasise the subjective aspect of ethics and to withdraw the indivichial from the community, and man from the universe of which he is essentially a part. On the other hand, while thus freeing the ideas of Socrates from their onesided- ness, Plato drew the Eleatic conception of the unity of all things out of its abstraction, and found in the teleological ideas of Socrates the means of combining it with the Heraclitean conception of manifoldness and change. He thus laid the foundations of ideal- istic philosophy for all subsequent times.
It will be my endeavour in the following lectures to show how these views are developed in the successive dialogues of Plato.
LECTURE FOURTH.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE PLATONIC IDEALISM.
We have seen that the Platonic philosophy in its most general aspect may be described as an exten- sion to the universe of the principle which Socrates applied to the life of the individual man, and more- over that this extension was due mainly to the com- bination of Socratic ideas with ideas derived from the earlier philosophy of Greece. This general state- ment, however, true as it is, will not enable us to explain the distinctive character of Platonism, unless we follow out at least the main lines of development along which Plato's thought was carried as it absorbed these different elements. This mode of explanation has been made easier and more effective of late years since the order of the Platonic dialogues has been approximately determined by linguistic considerations irrespective even of the doctrines taught in them.
Following such indications we find that, as we might have expected, Plato is in the first instance
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simply the pupil of Socrates, and that his earliest works are mainly devoted to the illustration of the Socratic method and the Socratic ideas. They deal, on the one hand, with the method of interrogation by which Socrates awakened in his pupils a con- sciousness of ignorance and then led them on to the formation of more and more comprehensive and exact definitions of moral conceptions ; and, on the other hand, with the Socratic view of the moral life as a process determined by the idea of good as the end of action. In the course of these dialogues, how- ever, Plato shows a growing sense of certain diffi- culties which beset the strict Socratic doctrine, and, in particular, of two great but closely connected difficulties, the one arising from the sharpness of the Socratic distinction between knowledge and ignorance, of which I have already spoken, and the other from the ambiguity and imperfection of the Socratic definition of the good which is the final end of action. Socrates, indeed, seemed to fix the nature of that end by the term evSai/uLovla, commonly trans- lated 'happiness'; but the various senses in which his teaching was understood by his disciples show tliat he did not anticipate or decide any of the contro- versies about the nature of happiness which arose among them ; and, in particular, that he did not discuss the great question — whether happiness is to
be found in activity or in feeling, in the exercise of VOL. I. F
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the faculties of man, or in the pleasure or satisfac- tion that follows upon such exercise.
Now to Plato that question became one of the most important of all ethical issues, and there was ultimately no ambiguity in his rejection of the purely hedonistic alternative. But there was a time when Hedonism seemed to him to afford the most natural interpretation of the Socratic theory that ' virtue is knowledge.' In the Protagoras, which is probably the latest of the Socratic dialogues, Socrates is made to maintain the doctrine after- wards called psychological Hedonism, that pleasure is the only possible object of desire, and that, when we seem to pursue any object which is not the most pleasant at the moment, it is only as an indirect means to greater pleasure in the future. On this view, it would follow that the difference between virtue and vice lies, not in our acting or not acting with a view to pleasure, but in the character of the pleasures we seek. The vicious man is he who is led by his short-sightedness to sacrifice a greater but remoter good to one tliat is nearer but less valualjle ; the virtuous man is he who has learned to look before and after, and to calculate the ultimate effect of each action in producing pleasure and pain. Such an ethical calculus alone, it is held, can raise men above the illusive appearance of the moment, and enable them to regulate tlicir conduct in view of
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the greatest pleasure in life as a whole. On the other hand, if we can so regulate our actions, we inevitably must do so ; for, ex hypothesi, the only- thing we can desire or will is pleasure, and when we know what course will bring us most pleasure, we necessarily follow it. In this sense, therefore, virtue is knowledge and vice ignorance, and the whole task of ethics is to furnish a relative esti- mate of the degree and quantity of pleasure to be derived from different objects.
But Plato has no sooner drawn out this hedonistic scheme of life than he begins to throw doubt upon it, both in itself and as an interpretation of the Socratic doctrine ; and even in the very dialogue in which he sets it before us, he opposes to it another view, which he puts into the mouth of the Sophist Protagoras. Protagoras is made the representative of ordinary morality, which is based upon custom and opinion and not upon scientific reflexion; and in answer to the question of Socrates as to the way in which ethical truth is to be taught, he is made to maintain the thesis that it is not the subject of any special science but the product of a common instinct of humanity ; and that therefore there are no special experts from whom it must be learnt, but that, in a sense, everybody Uiaclies it to everybody. This idea is expressed in a sort of mythic apologue, in whicli the gods are described as making all mortal creatures
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out of the elements, and then handing them over to Prometheus and Epimetheus to endow them with the qualities necessary for their preservation. It is agreed that Epimetheus shall make the distribution, and that Prometheus shall inspect and criticise the result. Epimetheus, therefore, gifts the animals with various powers — some with swiftness, some with size, some with strength, and so on, till he has exhausted all that he has to bestow. But then it is found that man has been left unprovided, a helpless, unarmed creature, whose existence is narrow and precarious ; and Prometheus has to come to the rescue, and to steal from heaven fire and the arts that work by fire, as well as the art of weaving, to be the heritage of man. But even when so endowed, men are still left without the political art, the art of living together in peaceful co-operation ; consequently they are involved in a continual struggle for existence against each other, and are in danger of being dispersed and destroyed by the other animals. But " Zeus, fearing that the entire race should be exterminated, comes to their aid, bringing with him reverence and justice (atSwg and SUr]) to be the ordering principles of cities and the bonds of friendship and conciliation." These principles, however, are not given like special talents to particular individuals, but sliared among all ; for " cities cannot subsist if a few only share in the virtues, as a few only have capacity for any special
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art " : civil society, therefore, must be protected by the law that " he who has no part in justice or reverence shall be put to death as a plague to the State." ^ Hence it is that, when men consult together upon matters that full under the particular arts, they take experts into their counsel, and pay no attention to advice from those who are not experts ; whereas, wlien they discuss virtue and vice, good and evil, everybody is supposed to have a right to speak : for on this subject, though one man may know a little more than another, there are no professional teachers who are essentially distinguished from the rest of mankind, but all the citizens are teachers of all.
Protagoras then proceeds to give a sketch of the forms taken by this popular education in morals as it was actually in use in Greece. " Education and admonition commence in the first years of life and last to the very end of it. Mother and nurse, father and tutor, are vying with each other al)out the im- provement of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand what is said to him : he cannot say or do anythiug without their setting forth to iiim that ' this act is just ' aud ' that is unjust ' ; ' this is holy ' and ' that is unholy ' ; 'do this ' and ' abstain from that.' And if he obeys, well and good ; if not, ht; is straightened by tlncuts and Iddws like a piece of bent * I'lolaij., '6'2;1 v.
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or warped wood. At a later stage they send him to teachers, and enjoin them to see to his manners even more than to his reading and music ; and the teachers do as they are desired. And when the boy has learned his letters, and is beginning to understand what is written, as before he understood what was spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads sitting on a bench at school ; in these are contained many admonitions and many profitable tales, and encomiums of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them, and desire to become like them. Then again the teachers of the lyre take similar care that the young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief ; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the works of other excellent poets who have written lyrics ; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be gentle and harmonious and rhythmical, and so fitted for speech and action ; for the life of man in every part has need of harmony and rhythm. Then they send them to the masters of gymnastic, in order that their bodies may better minister to the virtuous mind, and that they may not be compelled through bodily weakness to play the coward in war or on any other occasion. . . . When they have done with masters, the State
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again compels them to learn the laws, and live after the pattern which they furnish, and not after their own fancies : and, just as, when the pupil is learning to write, the writing-master first draws lines with a style for the guidance of the young beginner, and gives him the tablet and makes him follow the lines, so the city draws the laws which were the invention of good lawgivers living in the olden times ; these are given to the young man to guide him in his conduct, whether he is commanding or obeying ; and he who transgresses them is to be corrected, or, in other words, called to account." ^
Nov/ it is, I think, obvious that we have here two views of education which are sharply coutrasted. On the one side, we have the uncompromising development of the Socratic doctrine that ' virtue is knowledge,' with all the contempt of Socrates for ordinary ojDinion — which lie regards as ignorance pretending to be knowledge — a contempt which reminds us of the atti- tude of Bentham towards those who appealed to moral sentiment in opposition to the results of his utilitarian theory. And what makes the parallel closer is that Socrates is here made to narrow his own doctrine by defining the good as the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain, and thus to reduce ethical science to a calculus of pleasures. On the other hand, the
^ Protag., 325c. seq. The similarity of this sketch of cilucatioii to that given in the earlier part of the Republic is evident.
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unsystematic and unscientific idea of morals is stated with equal one-sidedness by the Sophist Protagoras, who identifies morality with a natural sentiment which is developed by the action of many minds upon each other, by the ordinary social training of the family and the school, by the influences of poetic literature, and by the rewards and penalties which the State bestows and inflicts on its members, but not at all by that scientific process of reflexion and definition which Socrates regarded as all-important.
Now if it be asked, which of these views we are to attribute to Plato, we must answer. Neither and both. In other words, as is indicated at the end of the dialogue, Plato has set before us two views, each of them one-sided and imperfect, neither of which he could absolutely accept or reject. It was impossible that he should accept the narrow hedonistic view here attributed to Socrates ; yet neither could he surrender his confidence in the Socratic method or his convic- tion of the necessity of raising ethics into the form of science. He was obviously beginning to perceive that in ordinary opinion — in that common consciousness of ethical distinctions which is developed without any special scientific training by the experience of social life — there is a large element of truth, however mingled with error and illusion. The abrupt Socratic division of knowledge and ignorance was no longer tenable for him, nor could he any longer suppose that virtue was
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dependent for its primary development upon philo- sophical discussion. IJather — as was shown by the practice, howe^■er it might be excluded by the theory, of Socrates himself — ordinary opinion must be regarded as the first form of that consciousness of the good, which philosopliy has to analyse and develop. And if, as is the case, ethical science must be regarded as standing in a negative relation to opinion, as in a sense opposing and even subverting it, yet after all it must derive the means of correcting and transforming opinion from opinion itself. Opinion must furnish at least the starting-point of investigation ; and if there were no truth in it, truth in ethics could never be attained at all.
We may take it, then, that Plato in the Protagoras is at the parting of the ways. He is emancipating himself from Socrates, or, as he would probably himself have conceived it, he is advancing from a lower to a higher interpretation of Socratic principles, by the interposition of the middle term of opinion between the extremes of ignorance and knowledge which Socrates left in unmediated opposition. And in the Meno, a dialogue which on linguistic grounds must be placed in chjse connexion with the Protagoras, we find that Plato has taken this new step. In the beginning of the dialogue he states in the most direct way the difficulty which arises out of tiie Socratic position. Socrates has proposed to enter upon an enquir\- into the
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nature of virtue, of which he professes himself ignorant, and is met by Meno with the objection : " How will you enquire into that which you do not already know ? What will you put forth as the subject of the enquiry ? And, if you find what you want, how will you recognise that this is the thing which you did not know ? " "I see what you mean," answers Socrates, " but consider what a troublesome discussion you are raising. You argue that a man cannot enquire either into that which he knows or into that which he does not know : for, if he knows, he has no need to enquire, and, if not, he cannot enquire, for he does not know the very subject about which he has to enquire." ^
The difficulty here suggested is not a mere Scholastic subtility : it is really one of the most important prob- lems in the theory of knowledge. It is the question of the relation of science to the ordinary conscious- ness. If science were merely an analysis of ordinary experience, and did not yield anything more than we can find in such experience, it would be useless ; for it would not bring us a step farther than we were before. If, on the other hand, it does carry us beyond such experience, must it not be by a kind of leap in the dark ? If the premises anticipate the conclusion, what is the use of drawing it ? If they do not antici- pate the conclusion, how can it legitimately be drawn ? Plato was the first to face this diliiculty, and the 1 2Ieno, 80 D.
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answer he gives to it, or at least his first answer, takes the form of what seems to be a mere myth or poetic fiction ; though perhaps we may find that it conveys a serious meaning, a meaning which becomes more distinct in the farther development of his philo- sophy. In any case the answer is one which deserves our particular attention, as it is the first expression of that ideal theory which is the basis of Plato's philosophical theology.
Poets and other inspired men, we are here told, have declared " that the soul is immortal and at one time has an end which is termed dying, and at another time is born again, but is never destroyed. . . . The soul then, as being immortal, and as having been born again many times, and having seen all things that exist, whether in this world or in the world above, has knowledge of tliem all : and it is no wonder that she should be able to call to remembrance all that she knows about virtue : for, as all nature is akin and the soul has learned all things, there is no difficulty in eliciting, or as men say, learning, out of a single recollection all the rest, if a man is strenuous and does not faint : for all enquiry and all learning is recollec- tion." ^ On this view, then, the soul from the begin- ning has all truth in itself, but has it in a dim implicit way, as we might be said to know something which we have forgotten but of which tlie recollection may be ^ AJaio, 81 B.
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again awakened in us. This view Socrates seeks to illustrate by the aid of a young slave whom he ques- tions, and gradually, by mere questioning, leads to the discovery of the solution of a geometrical problem. In the first instance, the boy gives a wrong answer, but he is made by further questioning to correct himself and to attain to a true view of the sub- ject : and Socrates then draws what seems to be the necessary inference. " What do you say of this, Meno, were not these answers given out of his own head ? " " Yes, they were all his own." " And yet, as we were now saying, he did not know ? " " Yes." " But still he had in him these notions of his, had he not ? Then he who does not know, may still have true notions of that which he does not know." " Yes." " And at present these notions have just been stirred up in him as a dream, but if he were frequently asked the same questions in different forms, he would know as well as any one of us at last." ^ His knowledge, therefore, Socrates argues, is recollection, and if he did not acquire it before in this life, he must have acquired it in another life, or else he must have had it always. The possibility of learning is thus traced back to the fact that knowledge, all knowledge, is in the soul in a potential way, as a memory of some previous state of existence, which is not at first con- sciously present to us but may be recalled. * Menoy 85 B. aeg.
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Analogy is usually tlie first form in which new truth presents itself, and it was so above all with Plato, in whom the poet generally spoke before the philosopher. Yet there is always a danger that one who has grasped such an analogy, may treat it not merely as a guide to the truth — to the identity that underlies the likeness — but as itself constituting the whole truth to which it points : and it may be that this was the case with Plato. But we should not at once assume that it was so, still less should we assume that it remained so with him to the end. The metaphor of ' Reminiscence ' is a convenient way of bringing before us the idea that the acquisi- tion of knowledge is not a process of putting some- thing into the mind ab extra, but the evolution of something involved in its own nature. The same metaphor is implied in many common ways of speaking. When we say that we ' recognise ' the truth of an observation, it is not tliat we have known it before, but only that we had already before us the data from which it might be drawn. When we say " You are forgetting yourself," we do not mean that you have forgotten tlie indi- vidual being that you are, but that there is a rational principle, which is one witli your vcuy self, and whi(;h you are failing to realise. Self- recollection in this sense does nut iiicnn u<iiiig back- ward upon the |»ast but inward u])(ni a deeper \
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nature, which perhaps we have never been fully conscious of before. The same idea is illustrated by the claim which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates, that in interrogating he is practising his mother's art of midwifery upon the souls of those whom he subjects to his questions.^ Ob- viously the metaphor of reminiscence cannot be applied literally to the process whereby the mind rises from the particular to the universal : for, in so doing, it is not calling up the image of some object or event known in the past, but discovering the principle that underlies all similar objects and events. Nor could Plato possibly have thought that, in any world, universals could be the objects of sense-perception, like particular phenomena. Hence we should be disposed to say that he was merely using this image as a first expression of the truth which Aristotle puts more definitely when he says that mind is potentially all that it can know. And this, indeed, seems to be the meaning of the alternative to which Plato himself pointed when, in the passage already quoted, he suggested tliat perhaps the mind always had possession of these principles. While,
' This metaplior is commonly attributed to Socrates, but it appears for the first time in the Thea^teius, which is a compara- tively late dialogue, and it indicates an advance beyond the Platonic idea of Eeminiscence. It probably rather represents Plato's own reflexion on tlie method of Socrates.
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therefore, it may not be correct to say that to Plato the idea of reminiscence was merely a metaphor, it is at least obvious that it is not the only or the final form in which he presents his doctrine to us.
This becomes still more obvious when we con- sider another conception which Plato introduces in the passage quoted above : " As all nature is akin, and the soul has learned all things, there is no difficulty in thus eliciting, or as men say, learning, out of a single recollection all the rest, if one is strenuous and does not faint." The idea here expressed is that reality is not a collection of things, each of which might be known fully without the others, but a connected system in which each part implies the whole. Thus if we know anything, there is in what we know a link of connexion with everything else ; and if we follow it out, we shall gradually be brought into possession of the whole. What we know already contains a partial revelation of the general principle manifested in all that exists. Tluis it is as in an organism, where the life of tlie whole works in every member and organ, and there is no possibility of appreciat- ing the significance and value of any part without grasping in some measure the meaning of all the rest. Hence learning cannot ho a mere successive process of adding on uiicoiinccliMl jiorccptions or
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experiences to each other ; it must l^e a process of evokition, whereby a universal truth — which is at first confused with a particular case of its appli- cation— becomes separated from all particulars, and at the same time is recognised as the principle that determines their nature and their relations to each other.
Now, this conception of reality, as an objective system which is implied in the nature of the mind that apprehends it — so that the growth of knowledge of the world is at the same time the evolution of self-consciousness — enables us to understand the view of opinion which Plato takes, and by means of which he seeks to solve the difficulty of the Meno. Opinion is not to him, as it was to Socrates, another word for ignorance : it is a state of mind between knowledge and ignorance, in which we make judgments in particular cases, but are not able to give any reason for these judgments. We say, ' this is just,' and ' that is unjust,' without knowing what justice is. Eight opinion may, indeed, in many cases serve the pur- pose of knowledge. But it has two great draw- backs. In the first place it is unstable. It is " like the images of Daedalus," which are beautiful works of art but " are apt to run away, unless they are fastened by some tie." So right opinions are good but insecure, " unless they arc fixed dov/n
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 97
by a consideration of the cause " ^ i.e. of the reason or principle from which they flow. And, in the second place, as those who possess a faculty of making right judgments without any consciousness of the grounds on which they rest are incapable of explaining or vindicating them, they are unable to communicate their faculty to others. It is in them as a kind of inspiration or intuitive insight, which makes them act rightly without knowing what they do. Therefore " not by any wisdom nor because they were wise, did Themistocles, Pericles and other great statesmen succeed in guiding their states aright, but by a kind of divination; for diviners and prophets say many things truly, but they know not what they say." And so it is also with the poets, and in a sense with all good men, who therefore are often called divine. If, however, we could find anyone of these who should add to his intuitive perception of the right a consciousness of the reason of its rightness, his moral judg- ments would have a far higher value, and he would be among other living men what Tiresias was among the dead ; for, in the words of Homer " he alone had the breath of life and intelligence in him, while all the rest were but tUtting shades." ^
But important as this division between knowledge and opinion seems to be, we must not forget that,
^ Meno, 98 a. "^ Id., KM) a.
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for Plato, it is these very opinions which supply the means whereby we attain to knowledge. It is out of the unexplained judgments of the ordinary moral consciousness that we have to elicit the principles or reasons on which scientific morals must rest. We have to ascend from the particulars as given in opinion to the universal principle, by aid of which our views of these very particulars may be corrected. But how is this process to be carried out ? The Protagoras had suggested what seemed a very simple way of performing it. It had pointed out that there is one common element or circumstance accompanying, and forming a part in all the ends of our action, namely, that they secure pleasure or avert pain by their attainment ; and it had gone on to maintain that this common element in all our ends must be taken as the end, the summum bonnm, in reference to which they must all be estimated or valued. Hence, what is needed to correct ordinary opinion and to give a scientific basis to our particular judgments in morals, is simply a measuring art, which shall fix the value of all our actions by the amount of pleasure they produce. But while this was one way of achieving the Socratic aim of making morals scientific, another and a better way seemed to be suggested in the Meno. The great object of Socrates had been to define the moral universals, the words of approval or disapproval which ^re used in the^
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 99
ordinary moral judgments of men ; and his method of achieving it had consisted simply in bringing such judgments together, comparing them, showing their agreements and differences, and using one of them as a negative instance to correct the hasty hypo- thesis suggested by another ; for in this way he hoped to find a principle which would explain them all, showing the amount of trutli contained in each, and accounting for the error that was mingled with it. Thus, just as Newton from the many apparent motions of terrestrial and celestial bodies was enabled to elicit the principle of gravitation, which explained all the appearances, and showed in each case what the real motions were ; so Socrates, according to this view, sought by a synthesis of the varying judgments of men in particular moral difficulties, to discover a fundamental principle of morality which should justify these very judgments so far as they were right, and correct them so far as they were wrong. In so doing, in short, he was simply following the path which inductive science always has to follow when it seeks to penetrate beyond phenomena to the real laws and nature of things.
Now, the Mcno had suggested a new explanation of this process and its result. It hail suggested that the mind is possessed of a universal faculty, or, in other words, that it is guided in its
100 THE BEGINNINGS OF
apprehension of particular phenomena by universal principles, of which, however, it is not at first conscious, and which it can only imperfectly apply. Science, or knowledge in the stricter sense of the word, must, therefore, mean primarily the bringing of these principles to clear self-consciousness. Thus the true import of the doctrine that ' virtue is knowledge ' must be, not that a calculative art of life is to be substituted for the haphazard judgments of ignorance, but that the truth which underlies the judgments of the ordiuary moral consciousness, even when these judgments are erroneous, should be discovered ; that the reality, which is partly hid and partly revealed by the first appearances of things, should be brought to light by a comprehensive induction and a dialectical discussion of these very appearances. For the error of opinion, or, in other words, of the ordinary consciousness, lies in this, not that it altogether fails to apprehend truth or reality, but that it does not bring its different views of things into connexion, or correct one of them by another ; or, in other words, that it does not seek for the unity that underlies all the diff'erences and contradictions of the appearances. Opinion is always, so to speak, at some point of the circumference and never at the centre, and therefore it c^n never see things in their real value and relations. And truth is to be found only by concentration, by ' thinking
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 101
things together ' ; i.e. it is to be found only in some principle which explains all the diversities of ex- perience in consistency with each other.
The Gonjias is the dialogue in wliich the reconsti- tution of ethics upon the new basis begins. In it Plato insists, not, as in the purely Socratic dialogues, upon the opposition of ignorance and knowledge, but upon the opposition, and at the same time the relation, of opinion and knowledge, or, in other words, of the apparent and the real in morals. Polus, one of the antagonists of Socrates, speaks of the tyrant in a despotic State and of the skilful rhetorician in a free State as the persons who alone have it in their power to attain the highest happiness ; for, more than any other men, they can do what they please, can force all other men to bend to their will, and can exile or ruin all who oppose them. And Socrates is made to answer with the apparent paradox that such men can indeed do ' what seems to them best,' but that they, least of all men, can do ' what they will.' ^ For what men really will is not the means but the end, not the particular acts they do or the particular objects they strive after, but the good which they seek to secure through these acts and objects. The immediate objects of huiiiau desire — health, wealth, honour, etc. — are, after all, only means to happiness, and not
' GonjkiH, 4fi6 K, ovokv yap TTOLdv uiv ftouXoyrai, liis liroi eimlv iroulv nivTOi 6 ri Lv aiiToh 56^ij (ii\Tiajot> tlvai.
102 THE BEGINNINGS OF
happiness itself ; they are sought not for themselves but sub ratione honi, with a view to the supreme good of life. Thus what we really want is not to satisfy our desires but to satisfy ourselves, and we can satisfy ourselves only by the Summum Bonum ; but in our shortsightedness the ultimate good we seek is apt to become identified with the objects of special desires, and we pursue such objects as if they offered a complete satisfaction. And although, when we attain them, we find that we are still unsatisfied, this experience does not prevent us on the next occasion from falling under the same illusion. Hence the mere power to do what we please cannot help us, so long as we do not know what we will, do not know where the real satisfaction of the soul is to be found.
What, then, is this real good which Plato contrasts with the satisfaction of particular desires ? One point is clear to begin with, that it cannot be defined by aid of the measuring art of the Protagoras. For, according to the view there expressed, the supreme good was simply the sum of particular goods or pleasures. In other words, the Socrates of that dialogue assumed the particular desires and the plea- sures to which they point as his starting-point, and regarded the supreme good as simply the greatest pos- sible aggregate of such pleasures. He sought to define the whole by means of the parts, taken severally and then summed up together. But Plato now maintains
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 103
that we must begin with the unity of the whole and regard the parts only as elements in it or means to it. We are not to ask whether this object and that other object, each by itself, satisfies a particular desire and therefore gives a particular pleasure, and then add them all together, deducting any pains that follow on such pleasures and avoiding the objects which in the long run cause a preponderance of pain. We are to regard the good of life as one whole, and to estimate the particular objects only as contributing to this. For, as in any organism the whole is not the mere sum of the parts, nor could we describe a man as consisting of a head, plus arms, plits legs, and so on, but rather the whole is in every part, and each part can be estimated only as contributing to it : so we cannot say that the good of man consists of a number of separate goods — food, drink, wealth, honours, and so on — and that his complete satisfaction consists in the sum of the satisfactions to be got from all these. Bather we must regard the pleasure resulting from the attainment of each of these objects as illusory, in so far as it is not a means to, or an element in, the one complete good which we are always seeking. Nor does it alter the result, if we look at happiness in another way, as a good which has to be realised in time ; for we cannot regard life as a sum of particular actions or feelings, each of which has to be estimated separately, but rather we
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must regard each moment or period as a stage in the attainment of the one good of existence, the full realisation and satisfaction of the self.
This is not the exact form in which Plato pre- sents his idea to us, but it expresses his essential meaning. Thus he points out the analogy of virtue in the soul to health in the body. To regard it as the good of life to gratify every particular desire to the utmost is, he argues, as if we should sup- pose it to be the greatest good of the body to have the utmost possible satisfaction of all the appetites of sense without any consideration of health. Hence the politician who seeks merely to aggrandise the State, and to provide the citizens with ' harbours and ships and colonies ' and all the luxuries and conveniences of life, without attending to their moral and intellectual education, is like a cook setting up for a doctor, and supplying his patient with every kind of dainty that pleases the palate without heeding the diseased state of the body he may be producing. In the case of the body it is obvious that it would be ruinous thus to look to what is pleasant in particular and to regard the general good as secondary ; for when the order and due regulation of the parts is sacri- ficed, this in the long run brings about the ruin of the parts themselves. And the same is no less true in the case of the soul ; for what we really desire
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 105
is, as already said, not the particular object but the good which we think to tind in it, and the satis- faction derived from the former is transitory and illusory, if it comes into collision with the latter.
Plato, then, concludes tlie dialogue by putting the contrast between the two points of view in its most vivid and extreme form. Hence Callicles, the final opponent of Socrates, is made to maintain that the supreme bliss is to have as many, as diverse and as violent desires as possible, provided we have the opportunity of satisfying them. " How," he asks, " can a man be happy who is the servant of anything ? On the contrary I venture plainly to assert that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost and not to chastise them ; but when they have grown to the greatest, he should have the courage and intelligence to minister to them and satisfy all his longings. This 1 affirm to be natural justice and nobility. To this, however, many cannot attain ; and they blame the strong man liecause they are ashamed of their own weakness, which they desire to conceal ; and hence they say that intemperance is base." ^ " That," answers Socrates, " means that we are to be like a cask with holes, into which water is con- tinually being poured and from which it is as con- tinually running out." Hence it is the highest bliss
^ Gorjiat, 491 E.
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to be filled with a devouring craving which is ever receiving, but never has received, satisfaction. Our pleasure is bound up with the pain of a want that can never be filled ; and, as Shakespeare puts it, using the same metaphor,
"The cloyed will, That satiate but unsatisfied desire, that tub Both full and running, ravening first the lamb, Longs after for the garbage."^
As against this Plato puts the picture of the tem- perate man, the man whose inner life is ordered by one principle and therefore in harmony with itself, who " when his casks are once filled, has no need to feed them any more, and has no farther trouble or care about them." In other words, in him each desire and impulse has a definite limit, within which it is kept by regard to the others and to the whole of which it is a part. But if this is the type of humanity we are to aim at, then the true states- man, the true educator of men, is one w^ho will maintain the balance of the soul, and who, when it is in a diseased state, is ready to mortify and chas- tise any particular desire till it is again reduced to its proper proportions in relation to the rest. And from this point of view Plato is prepared to support the apparent paradox that it is better to suffer than to do injustice, and that if any one does injustice,
^Quoted by Thomson in his edition of the Gorgias,
THE PLATONIC IDEALISM 107
he ought to wish to be punished for it and not to escape, seeing that it is only by punishment he can be cured.
In all this Plato does not yet give us more than a formal description of the good, as an order or organisation of life which is determined by one principle. But what he distinctly maintains is that we must begin with the unity of the whole and not with the difference of the parts, with the uni- versal and not with the particulars, and that the former must determine the latter. And this is a very important point ; for it shows that for Plato the universal, or, to use his own word, the idea, is not merely a common element in the particulars, as pleasure is a common element in all the satis- factions of our desires. It has, moreover, a very distinct bearing upon the ordinary representation of Plato's theory of ideas, in which they are taken as just such common elements. In the Gonjias at least it is clear that the universal is conceived as the organising principle of a whole which determines the relations of all the parts. Further, this organising idea in etliics is not conceived as something wliich has to be brought to the parts or particulars from without, but something which is impHed in them, or in our conceptions of them, from the beginning. For, as Plato points out here, and as he shows more fully in the Lcpxiblic, the desire of the good
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underlies all our particular desires, and it is the good that we really seek in every end we set before us. " This is what every man pursues and makes his end, having a presentiment that there is such an end, and yet hesitating because neither knowing its nature nor having the same sure proof of it that we have of other things." ^ In other words, the good is the presupposition of all particular goods just as the truth is the presupposition of all our ordinary judg- ments, which, no doubt, are often erroneous, but nevertheless by synthesis and dialectic may be made to yield the knowledge of a principle which will enable us at once to explain and to correct them.
^Rep., 505 E.
LECTURE FIFTH.
THE NATURE OF IDEAS AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY.
In the last lecture I pointed ont that Plato goes beyond Socrates in two ways : in the first place, in so far as he puts opinion — which is his name for the ordinary consciousness before it has been changed by any process of reflexion — between ignorance and knowledge. In other words, he maintains that we are never in a state of pure ignorance from which science has to deliver us. If we ever were in such a state, learning would Ije impossible, for it would have nothing from which it could start. Opinion, however, is inchoate knowledge ; it is a knowledge of appearances, which must indeed be partly illusive, but which cannot be absolutely without relation to the truth. It, therefore, affords a starting-point from which investigati(m may l)egin, a material from which, by synthesis and dialectic, truth may be extracted.
110 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
In the second place, Plato transforms the view of morality which is attributed to Socrates in the Protagoras. He rejects the idea that the principle of morals is to be found in the pleasure which accom- panies, or forms an element in all attainment of our ends, and that the science of morals is therefore simply a calculus of pleasures. Such a view would involve that the whole good of life was merely the sum of the parts, whereas for Plato the particular goods of life must rather be estimated and determined by the nature of the whole. The fundamental idea of ethics must therefore be conceived as a principle of unity and order, which is implied in all our particular ethical judgments, but fully expressed in none of them, and which, when it is discovered, can be used to correct and complete the judgments from which it is derived.
So far Plato has been dealing mainly with the problem of philosophy as it is conceived by Socrates. He has Ijeen seeking to define the universals which underlie our ethical judgments and these only. But it was impossible for him to confine his speculations to this sphere. For in every judg- ment we make, we use imiversals or general ideas, and in every case the same maxim will apply, namely, that the universal must be taken neither as the sum of the particulars nor as the abstraction of a common element in them, but as a principle of unity
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 111
which is implied in them, and which, when discovered and defined, will make them intelligible. Thus it is not only snch predicates as ' good,' ' just,' ' temperate,' that require definition, but all the predicates we use even in our simplest judgments, such as ' one,' ' equal,' * great,' ' beautiful.' In all our immediate judgments we use general ideas such as these, to determine particular objects, without any previous definition of the general ideas themselves. In all equally we assume that we know that of which we are ignorant, and in all equally the Socratic process of investigation is necessary in order to define our universals, and to correct the uncertain and imperfect use of them which must prevail so long as they are undefined.
Nor could Plato be content with the definition of these general terms taken separately. Each of them is the name of a principle of unity witliin a certain limited sphere, but all special s])heres of existence are elements in the one great whole of reality. Hence, just as in the moral life all our definitions of par- ticular virtues had to be carried back to the definition of the good, as the principle of unity in human life, so all definitions of general ideas nnist be carried back to one principle of unity in, the universe. The problem of philosophy is, therefore, to rise from opinion to truth, not only in ethics, but in all spheres of reality ; and not only to find special principles of unity in all particular spheres of reality, but to bring
m
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them all together into one system by the discovery of one highest principle.
The dialogues which are most important in relation to this development of the ideal theory are the Symposium, the Phaedo, and the Repuhlic — dialogues which on the whole belong to tlie same stage of thought, and which were probably not far distant from each other in time of composition. The Sym- posmin and the Phaedo in particular seem to be counterparts and complements of each other, the former dwelling upon the positive relation of tlie particular and the universal, the latter upon their negative relation ; the former giving us a view of the education of man in which sense and opinion are treated as stepping-stones on which he may rise to truth, while the latter regards sense and opinion mainly as hindrances to his progress, and insists on the necessity of a complete emancipation from both. Yet it may easily be shown that there is no essential discord between the two views ; for Plato has already taught us to recognise the double nature of sen- sible experience, as the necessary starting-point or datum of science, and yet at the same time as in itself only an imperfect and illusive appre- hension of things, which it is the business of science to correct and transform. Thus the object of opinion at once is, and is not. It is a phenomenon or appearance ; and as the appearance both discloses
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and hides the reality, as it " half reveals and half conceals the soul within," it has an ambiguous character, and may be regarded either as that which prevents us from attaining to knowledge, or as that which is the necessary and only means of attaining to it. It becomes a hindrance, in so far as the appearance is taken for the reality; and in this point of view the great effort of science is to rise above opinion, to tear away the illusive veil which it casts over the truth, and to grasp the permanent unity which is disguised in its changing forms. Hence opinion is sometimes represented as a kind of dream in which shadows are taken for substances.^ " He who recognises the existence of beautiful objects but not of beauty itself, and is not capable of perceiving it even if it be pointed out to him, does he not seem to live in a perpetual dream rather than in waking reality ? " ^ For in no one of the particular objects to which he ascribes beauty is the principle of beauty adequately realised : and so it is with all the other principles of unity. " Of all the many beautiful things there is none which may not appear ugly, of the many just acts none that may not appear unjust, of the many equals none that in another relation may not appear unequal." ^ And the reason is that, while beauty, justice and equaUty have definite natures, and while oncli of tlicni is one self-
' SymjK, 19-J D. '■^ AV/)., 47(1 o. =* Id., 47!» A.
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identical thing, in their particular presentments, where they are confused with one another and with the subjects in which they appear, they take manifold and diverse fornis.^
When he is dwelling upon this point of view Plato sometimes seems almost, if not altogether, to fall back upon the unmediated opposition of knowledge and ignorance as it was conceived by Socrates. The ideal reality of things is represented as existing in eternal self-identity, as the one beyond the many, or as the permanent substance which is far removed from all the variableness of the phenomena. Thus, especially in some passages of the Phaedo, opinion is set in direct antithesis to science, and the negative relation of the latter to the former is insisted upon in language which approximates to the utterances of eastern mysticism. The idea in its pure nature, it is alleged, is not seen until we have purged away all the imperfections and irrelevancies which attach to its particular embodiments ; and this means also that the mind that would grasp it must altogether free itself from the dominion of the senses. It will be observed that these two, the objective and the subjective aspects of Plato's idealism, go together and imply each other. The ideal type is a de- finite form, a pure universal in which there is no variableness of aspect or compounding of different
^ Jxep., 470 A-
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elements, but a transparent and unchanging unity. But, as such, it is invisible, and cannot be presented to sense or imagination, but only grasped by the intelligence : and the intelligence which grasps it must itself be of kindred nature to it. Furthermore, even the intelligence can only grasp such a unity when it withdraws into itself from the confusions of sense which distract and disturb its pure activity. For " when in its perception of things it uses the body as its instrument, apprehending through sight or hearing or any other sense, then it is dragged down by the body into the region of things that never maintain their identity ; it wanders and is confused, and loses control of itself, and is as it were intoxicated, because it is dealing with things that have no stability in themselves. But when it returns into itself and reflects, it passes into another region, the region of that which is pure and ever- lasting, immortal and unchangeable ; and feeling its kindred thereto, it dwells there under its own control and has rest from its wandering, and is constant and one with itself, as are the objects with which it deals." ^ From this point of view the body is a kind of tomb of the soul from which it can rise only at death, and the whole life of the pliilosopher has to be conceived as a praftico fur ibat Ihial iiKuneiit in which it shall free itself from this " muddy vesture
' Phatdo, 79 c.
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of decay " that doth so " grossly close it in," and hinder it from the vision of the intelligible world. It is in such passages as these that we find the strongest support for the common conception of Plato's idealism as a kind of apotheosis of abstrac- tions, an attempt to find the truth of things in the most general and therefore empty predicates which we attach to them. Further, this conception of Plato's meaning is favoured by the circumstance that he has usually been read under the influence of the un- sympathetic criticism of Aristotle, or through t?ie interpretations of the Neo-Platonists, who could appreciate only the negative aspect of his philosophy. We have, however, to observe, in the first place, that Plato, even in the passages where he goes farthest in the direction of mysticism, constantly upholds the doctrine that opinion is not ignorance but imperfect knowledge, and that it is only through opinion, which is mediated by sense, that we can rise to a knowledge of the ideal reality of things. We know ideas at first only as predicates of particular objects, though really they are absolute types to which these objects are never adequate, which they recall, but of which they necessarily fall short. Thus when we give the predi- cate of equality to two material ol)jects, we are attributing to them something to which they may approximate but which they never exactly attain. The pure mathematical relation can never be
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 117
adequately realised in sensible experience, though it is constantly suggested by it. And the same is the case with such predicates as 'beautiful,' 'just,' ' holy,' and so on. No particular thing can realise the type, though every one suggests or recalls it ; and indeed it could not become an object of our con- sciousness unless it did so. And " must we not allow that when any one, looking at an object, observes that the thing which he sees aims at being some other thing, but falls short of, and cannot be that other — he who makes the observation must have had a previous knowledge of that to which the other, though similar, was inferior ? " ^
Setting aside the idea of Keminiscence, what Plato here puts before us is that we always know the particular through, and in relation to, a universal, which has a wider import. The universal is, tlicrefore, logically prior to the particular, in the sense that in apprehending the particular we presuppose it ; though it is also true that it is not till later that we direct attention to the universal for itself or altem})t to define it.
But, in llic second place, Plato's view of tlie par- ticular, as like the universal and Iheiefure capable of recalling it, is closely connected with his conception of art and also with his idealisation of love. Art is for him the great means of presenting the higiicr under
' Phuul., 74 u.
118 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
the form of the lower. Its business is to give to the particular object of sense a form in which it will more adequately represent its idea. In other words, art by a kind of ' noble untruth ' removes from the object all the imperfections of finitude and makes it serve as a substitute for the idea itself. Art and poetry bring down the idea into the region of ordinary experience, and make it a presence in the sensible world for those who cannot raise their minds above that world to the intelligible reality of which it is but a semblance. And the same may be said of natural beauty. For, as Plato says in the Phaedrus, the beautiful is the form in which the ideal comes nearest to the senses, and is presented most vividly to the ordinary consciousness ; ^ while the purely ethical and intellectual ideal has at first no form or comeliness that can commend it to the sense or imagination. And his explanation of the passion of love is that it arises just from that confusion or identification of the ideal with the sensible, of the universal with the particular, which beauty seems to authorise. Hence in the Symposiwrn Plato gives us the picture of a process of education or elevation of the soul, which begins in the wonder and desire pro- duced by the outward beauty of one finite individual ; and which rises by gradual stages from the body to the soul, from one to all beautiful forms, till it finds ^Phaedrus, 250c.
AND THEIR SYSTEMATIC UNITY 119
at last its perfect satisfaction in the contemplation of the ideal principle of beauty itself.^
In this way Plato seems to pass from a negative to a positive view of the relations of the particular to the universal, from the mystic longing to be freed from the bonds of sense to the recognition that the madness of the poet and the lover, who see the ideal in the sensible, has in it something of divine inspira- tion. But this is not all. Aristotle brings against Plato the charge that he sought the one beyond the many instead of seeking it in the many. But science, as Aristotle himself recognises,^ must necessarily do both. It must go beyond the phenomena with which it starts in order to explain them. If it seeks a principle of unity in the diversity of the things of experience, it must isolate the particular aspect or sphere of reality it is investigating from all that is irrelevant to it or not immediately connected with it. Thus the geometrician has to free his figures from every characteristic that does not flow from their definition as spatial forms or determinations of abstract space ; and the arithmetician has to isolate his numbers from every determitiatiou that does not belong to them as discrete units, sUmdiiig in external relations to each other. The existence of such sciences
^Symp., 210 a. se^.
'Cf. Anal, Post., II. 10. ^k 5' ifiwdpla^ i) (k trai'Tbi i)pffj.ri(ravToi rod Ka66\ov iv rj; 4'^XVi ''""^ ^"^^ irapa. to, TroXXd, 6 Ac if drraaiv Iv
1-10 THE NATURE OF IDEAS
depends on our being able to consider the relations with which they deal apart from every other relation — i.e. apart from everything that cannot be explained by the principle of unity that governs the special aspect or sphere of reality in question. And though such abstraction cannot be so fully and definitely attained in other cases, yet it remains true that in every science we have to deal with a special aspect or sphere of reality ; and that in order to deal with it successfully, we have to abstract as far as possible from all that is unconnected with its inmiediate object. In other words, we seek to free each science from irrelevancies, and to make it into a transparent body of truth, each part of which implies the whole. In many cases we may not be able perfectly to realise such a systematic unity, but it is the ideal we have always to strive after. For knowledge can hardly be regarded as worthy of the name of science till it ceases to be a collection of facts, and begins to take the form of an organic whole, all the elements of which are determined by the same principle of unity. Now, if I'lato's ' one beyond the many ' meant this — and we shall find reason to maintain that it did so — it is not liable to the objection that its unity is a mere abstraction. A science must abstract from what is irrelevant to its special point of view, in order that it may work out more fully and definitely what in that point of view is relevant.
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It nnist abstract from all that is not connected with its own specific aim, or included in the specific sphere of existence it has to investigate, in order that it may take as complete a view as possible of all that contributes to that aim, or falls within that sphere. And — subject to a qualification to be explained in the sequel — the Platonic ideas may be fairly inter- preted in this sense ; for by an idea Plato means something which can be defined, and from the dcKnition of which consequences can be drawn, i.e. he means not a bare unit but a unity of difierences, not a simple abstraction which excludes all distinction, but a content whose elements, though distinguishable, are yet in transparent unity with each other. When, therefore, he speaks of the exclusion of multiplicity and change from his ideas and from the science of them, what he means to express is that, when we reach the inmost nature of anything we find in it, not parts that are external to each other, or phases that merely succeed each other, but a whole, the elements of which are recognised as essentially con- nected with each other. In other words, what he is aiming at is not the negation of all difierence, but only of difl'erences that do not tlow from one principle or are not involved in it. This seems to be the real meaning of Plato, though we have to acknowledge that at this stage of his development he d\Nclls too exclusively upon the
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negative aspect of science, upon the permanent unity and simplicity of the idea as opposed to the multiplicity and variableness of the phenomena ; and that his language, especially in the Phaedo, might encourage the notion that all that is necessary to attain the ideal is to turn away from the world of sense and opinion. His mind, in fact, is occupied almost wholly with the movement upwards to appre- hend the principles of unity in things, and hardly at all with the movement downwards to reconstitute the phenomena by a new interpretation. And this over-emphasis, natural as it might be in the first effort to rise from opinion to science, inevitably led to the misunderstanding to which we have referred — a mis- understanding which seems to have arisen at an early period in the Platonic school itself, and which in his later dialogues Plato seeks to correct. Whether he ever completely corrected it so as to exclude the error of mysticism, or whether he was finally driven to admit an irreconcilable division between the world of sense and the world of intelligence, we shall have to consider hereafter.
In the meantime we must go on to deal with a second point, in which theology is vitally interested, namely, that for Plato, even in this earliest form of the ideal theory, all ideas form a whole, and point to one highest idea which includes or absorbs all the others into itself. For in Plato's pliilosophy, as
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already stated, the conceptions of Socrates are in such wise deepened, enlarged, and universalised, that the ideal principle which Socrates sought to introduce into morals is made the basis of a philosophy of the universe. In accordance with this view we find in the Phaedo a kind of transfigured rendering of the fact, vouched for by Xenophon, that Socrates at one period of his life had occupied himself with the physical theories of the earlier philosophers, but had finally turned away from them to investigate the ethical principle by which the conduct of man must be regulated. Plato accommodates this fact to his own case, and makes Socrates turn away from the theory of Anaxagoras — who, though he had spoken of reason as the ordering principle of all things, had nevertheless adhered to the methods of explanation which were employed hy the other physical philosophers — to the principles and methods of his own idealism. Thus the I'latonic Socrates tells us that tliero was a time when he was content to explain all phenomena by pliysical causes, treating e.g. the growth of animals as the result of some interaction of ho.it and cold, antl (,'vcn Uh^ jdMccpliou iind thought of man as duo to the action of the blood or the air on the matter of the brain. But he soon began to tind a difhculty in such ex})lana- tions ; for he found it im|)<issible to understand liow the luiity of lil'c and mind should 1)0 produced l)y
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the combination and reciprocal influence of the material parts of the body. He therefore began to doubt what before had seemed a " self-evident truth, that the growth of a man is simply the result of eating and drinking, and that, when by the digestion of food llesh is added to flesh and bone to bone, the lesser bulk becomes larger and the small man great." ^
Socrates could not see how such a process would explain the facts. Nay, he could not see how such an hypothesis would explain any ideal unity what- ever, not even that which is involved in the art of arithmetic. " I could not satisfy myself that when one is added to one, the one to which the addition is made becomes two, simply by reason of the addi- tion." ^ In other words, as Kant afterwards pointed out, there is a synthetic principle involved even in the operations of arithmetic, a principle of connexion which mediates in the addition of one element to another ; and we cannot say that the mere bringing of the terms together will explain this process, unless we can find some connective idea by means of which they are reduced to unity. Plato thus, as it appears, opens up the general question of the need of synthetic principles ; and that not only foj' the explanation of life and mind, but wherever, in thought or in things, we discover a real unification 1 Phaedo, 96 d. ^ phacdo, 96 K.
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of elements which seem in the first instance to be given as diverse.
Socrates then goes on to tell ns that, while troubled with this difficulty, he heard of a book by Anaxagoras which seemed to promise such an explanation of the universe as he wanted, a book in which it was maintained that reason is the disposer and cause of all things. " I was de- lighted at this notion and I said to myself : ' if mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all things for the best, and put each particular thing in the right place ' : and I argued that, if anyone discovered the cause of the generation or distribution or exist- ence of anything, he must find out what state of being, doing, or suffering, was best for it : and there- fore a man need only consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worst, since the same science comprehended both."^ In other words, Socrates expected to get from Anaxagoras a teleological system of the universe, which would solve the problem of ethics as a neces- sary element in its general explanation of reality. But when ho read the book, he found that Anaxa- goras had assigned for the causes and reasons of things only the particular elements and their actions and reactions upon each otlier ; and that lio liad not in any way attempted to explain the universe, or iiidciMl ' P/iaedo, 97 0.
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anything in it, as a whole, the elements of which were united by one teleological principle.
" I might compare Anaxagoras to a person who began by maintaining that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavoured to ex- plain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles ; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints that divide them, and the muscles are elastic and they cover the bones, which also have a covering or environ- ment of flesh and skin which contains them : and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the con- traction and relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my joints, and this is the reason why I am sitting here in a curved posture : — that is what he would say ; and he would have a similar ex- planation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound and ear and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true caase, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better to remain here and undergo my sentence : for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or iioeotia — by the dog they would, if they had been moved only liy their own idea of what
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is best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to endure any punishment which the State inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without muscles and bones and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my ])ur- poses. But to say that I do this because of them, and that this is the way the mind acts, and not from a choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mis- taking and misnaming." ^
Socrates expected from Anaxagoras a theory of the universe as an order based not merely upon law but upon design, not upon efficient, but upon final causes. He had expected that Anaxagoras would reduce the order of the universe to a system arranged in view of an absolute good : or, to put it otherwise, that he would explain the world as an intelligible world, the beginning and end of which were to be found in the intelligence. But he soon perceived that in liis exphmalions of paviicular things Anaxa- goras had really lulhjwed the same method as his predecessors, the method of physical causes ; that in other words, he hud dealt only with the imrlicular
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relations of things as they seemed to present them- selves to the senses, and had sought only to determine how thej acted and reacted upon each other. Now, this method, in Plato's opinion, was doomed to failure : for, as he puts it, when we gaze upon the world with the eyes of sense our minds are confused and dazzled as by the sun in eclipse. Hence it is not in this way that we can hope to rise to the principle of unity in the universe, or even to the principle of unity in any part of it. Being tlius disappointed in the high hopes which he had entertained of Anaxagoras, the Platonic Socrates is represented as turning, as a secondary resource, to the theory of ideas and the method of dialectic ; ^ that is, he is represented as turning to the Socratic method of induction and definition as it had been recast by Plato himself. That method, he thought, would ultimately bring him in another way to the result which he desired : for it would enable him, in the first place, to attain to the definition of the general predicates by which we characterise par- ticular classes of things, and so to the discovery of the principles which explain particular spheres of reality ; and then, in the second place, if doubt were thrown on any one of the principles so estab- lished, it would enable him to make a further regress upon some higher universal wliieh he would endea-
^See note at the end of this lecture.
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vour to define by the same method : and thus he would proceed step by step till he reached a highest principle by which he could explain all the others. An ideal principle reached in this way would not be a mere name — like the ordering mind in the system of Anaxagoras ; it would be seen to be the one prin- ciple of unity in which all the differences of things found their reconcilement and solution. This con- ception of a Jacob's ladder of science leading up to the highest idea, which is indicated in the Phaedo only by a few pregnant words, is worked out more fully in the Republic, where Plato gives his view of the special sciences as preparing the way for the final science of dialectic or philosophy. The sciences — Plato speaks particularly of the mathematical sciences which alone had been developed in his time — are there described as each finding its principle in some one idea which has to be separated from every- thing irrelevant, ami developed to all its conse- quences. Each of these sciences deals witli a whole or sphere of reality which is only a part in the gi'eater whole of the universe, and its principle is therefore a hypothesis which must rest upon something else than itself. Hence to reach an absolute principle we must take a synthetic view of the principles of all the sciences, and seek for the idea which is at the basis of them all ; ftir only one who can s(>.o things in thoii' unity is wurLby
VOL. I. I
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to be called a dialectician or philosopher. Thus the true method is to go back from particulars to uni- versals, and from these to still higher universals, till we reach the highest universal, the principle that binds them all together and has no principle beyond it — the Idea of Good which is the light of the intelligible, as the sun is the light of the sensible world.
Now, without entering at present upon the dis- cussion of Plato's Idea of Good as it is presented in the Bepuhlic, let us consider the general contrast of methods which he here sets before us. Plato rejects the view of Anaxagoras because, though reason was his nominal principle, he did not, on the basis of it, work out a conception of the world as an in- telKgble, or, what is the same thing for Plato, a teleo- logical system — an organic whole, in which the Good which is the essential aim of reason is realised. On the contrary, he fell back upon an explanation of phenomena by the special relations of the parts of the world, as acting and re .c ting upon each other according to physical laws which might be discovered by observation. Such a method could never, in Plato's opinion, lead to a final explanation of things ; nor, however far it was carried, could it verify the assertion of Anaxagoras that the world is the mani- festation of intelligence. But Plato thought that his own method of ideas, the method of dialectic and
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definition, if it were steadfastly pursued, would ulti- mately lead to the desired result, would carry the mind up from idea to idea till it reached the Idea of Good, as the most comprehensive of all principles from which all other principles might be deduced, and would thus enable us to conceive the world as a rational system.
Now, this scheme of Plato is apt to be regarded as only an attempt to substitute the barren pursuit of final causes for the fruitful ways of science. And, in a sense, we must admit the truth of the charge. Plato did not understand, and could not anticipate, how much science was to gain by the method he re- pudiates, the method which begins with isolated facts or elements of reality and aims only at finding out the laws of their action and reaction upon each other. Further, we have to admit that it was impossible for science to advance very far in the way which Plato preferred, by the direct attempt to discover formal or final causes. Not even in the case of the organic world, where final causes have their most natural application, could satisfactory results be reached by such a method. Even there we must begin with the use of lower categories, with the second causes or conditions on which Plato looks 80 slightingly. We must analyse the whole into its parts, and try to discover the ways in which these severed parts act and react on each other. To
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comprehend the living being as a whole or organism is the last, and not the first, thing in science. In this respect Plato's view is like that of Goethe, who objected to the analytic work of science that it ' murders in order to dissect,' and that in the end it leaves us with the parts in our hands, while the spiritual bond, that held them together and made them parts of one living being, has disappeared in the process. Yes, it may be answered, in the end we cannot explain life by the action of the parts of the dead body. But it is not less true that we must begin by dissecting, we must analyse the organism into its parts, else we shall never know much about it. If, indeed, after we have dissected and have the parts in our hands, we think that we have done all that is required, or that we can explain the animal fully by the mechanical and chemical relations of its parts — still more if we think we can explain mind on such a method — then we shall deserve Plato's censure ; but, on the other hand, he deserves ours, for his attempt at once to attain the ultimate secret, and for his contempt of the process of analysis which is the necessary pre- supposition of any conclusive synthesis. Plato does, indeed, introduce a saving clause ; for while, in the passage just quoted, he declares that the mechani- cal conditions of the actions of man or any other being, are not the real causes of these actit)ns,
And their systematic unity 133
he admits that they are conditions without which the real causes would not operate. But if this be true, these conditions also require investigation, and it will not do to pass them over, or treat them as something which may be taken for granted. Indeed, it is only after we have mastered the nature of the parts taken in isolation or as externally acting upon each otlier, that it is safe to go on to recognise that after all they are not isolated, nor is their relation merely external. It is just when analysis has done its work as completely as possible, that we become clearly conscious that no final account of such a being can be given, till we have discovered the one principle that manifests itself in all its differences, and binds them into one organic whole. So far I have spoken of organic beings in the narrower sense ; but Plato maintains that the same thing is true of all forms of existence, and of the universe itself. He maintains, in other words, tliat we can never get an ultimate explanation of anything by the method of the physical philosophers. For all things, so far as they are independent realities, are in a sense organic, i.e. they are systematic wholes, in which we have to explain the difference from the unity and not the unity from the difference, the parts from the wiiole, not the whole from the parts. Even in mathematics, we cannot explain the unity — say of a geometrical figure — by a synthesis of parts which
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are external to each other ; we must, on the con- trary, first define the unity, and then deduce the correlation of the parts from it. We cannot see e.g. what a triangle is, unless we are able to deduce all its distinctive characteristics from its definition. No ultimate explanation of anything can be given, if we accept the principles of Plato, except by the discovery of its formal or final cause.
But admitting all this, we must still maintain that no such reconstruction of the parts from the idea of the whole can be attained without a previous investiga- tion of the parts in their distinction and their external relations. Teleology may not under all circumstances be a barren study, but it must be barren to anyone who is not prepared to go through the patient labour of dissection and analysis. Plato's main defect is that he anticipates the end or ultimate result of philosophy, and that he does not realise the magni- tude and slowness of the mining process of science through which it is to be reached. And perhaps we may add that it is just because of his hasty antici- pation of the ultimate ideal view of reality which is the goal of science, that his idealism finally remained imperfect, and that both he and his great follower Aristotle were obliged to recognise the existence of something in the world which could not be ideally explained. A philosophy that would be thorough in its idealism, must stoop from the intuition of
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the whole to the detailed investigation of the parts ; it must wait for the complete realisation of its ideal principles till science has reduced the scattered phenomena into a system of necessarily, though it may be externally, related elements. The revolt of science against a premature teleology was a necessary step in the very history of the process by which in modern times philosophy has been advancing to a more complete teleological view of the universe.
NOTE ON PLATO'S RELATION TO ANAXAGORAS.
The point of Plato's argument in this part of the dialogue has, I think, been often misapprehended. The Platonic Socrates tells us that he went to the book of Anaxagoras with great expectations, because he had heard that Anaxagoras maintained that reason is the principle of all things. He found, however, on reading that book that Anaxagoras had in the main followed the method of the physical philosophers, and that in his explanations of phenomena he started with the particular elements or existences given in sense, and only sought to discover how they acted and reacted on each other. In short, Anaxagoras had at once, as by an immediate intuition, assumed a highest principle of the universe, but had then been unable to make any scientific use of that principle. Socrates, therefore, renounced such ambitious ways of philosophising, and fell back, as a Sevrepoi TrXoOs, on his own humbler ways of speculation ; as one whose eyes had been blinded by gazing directly at the sun during an eclipse, might turn to look at its image in water, or some similar medium. " This," says Socrates, " was what was in my mind : I was afraid lest my soul might be blinded altogether, if I continued to look at things with my eyes, or tried to apprehend them by lielp of my senses. I thought, therefore, that I ought to take refuge
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els Toiii \6yovs (i.e. in his own method of explaining things by ideal principles), and contemplate the truth of things in them." ^ " Yet, perhaps," he goes on, " my metaphor is not very exact, for I do not admit that he who contemplates things iv toTs \6yoi.s is looking at mere images, any more than he who looks at them iy rots ?pyois," i.e. who observes particulars and their relations as they are given in sense, without rising above them to the universal.
The meaning of this will become evident if we remember that Plato is giving a new vei'sion of the fact stated by Xeno- phon, namely, that Socrates turned away from the speculations of earlier philosophy, which had been based upon observation of the outward world, to practise his own method of seeking for the definition of universals in the sphere of ethics.^ Plato here makes two changes in the story in order to fit it to his own case. In the first place, he ignores the limitation of the Socratic philosophy to ethics ; and, in the second place, he conceives universals in the light of his own ideal theory, i.e. as principles at once of knowledge and of reality. Making these changes, Plato contrasts his own method of referring things to universal principles by aid of the intelligence, with that of Anaxagoras, who sought at a single stroke to reach the highest principle, and yet, after all, looked at the world only with the eyes of sense, which could apprehend nothing but particular things and their relations. It is a touch of Plato's humour that he speaks of his own method, which rises gradually from the definition of lower to the definition of higher universals, as a Sevrepoi ttXoOs ; and, again, that he describes himself as dazzled, as by the "sun in eclipse," when he looks at things with the eyes of sense, and as, therefore, turning for relief to the reflexion of things in thought. He has used nearly the same language in a passage a little earlier in the dialogue (79 b), where he declares that one who tries to apprehend reality by means of the senses " is disturbed and distracted and staggers like a drunken man," and couti'asts with this the puie and
^Phaedo, 99 k. "^ Mem., I. 1, 11 seq.
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tranquil action of the intelligence, when it contemplates the eternal ideas of things. Plato, we may be satisfied, would never have spoken in earnest of his own dialectic as an inferior method, though it was less ambitious than that of a philoso- pher who at once asserted the absolute supremacy of reason without working up to this highest universal through any subordinate principles of unity. And, indeed, Plato takes care to guard against such a mistake, when he declares that the metaphor of reflexion does not hold good, and that we do not see reality less directly iv rots \6yois than iv roh ipyoi^, i.e. through intelligence than through sense. In fact, he believes the reverse of this ; he believes that we apprehend the reality of things only as we rise above the particular phenomena of sense and their immediate relations to each other, to the universals or ideal principles of unity, which can only be apprehended by the intelligence. The meaning of the whole passage, then, is that in Plato's opinion we can by the per- ceptions of sense reach, at the most, only the physical causes or conditions of things, and that the final or formal causes, which alone he thinks worthy of the name of causes at all, can be grasped only by the intelligence. It will be observed that Plato does not here dispute the theory that we can apprehend particular things and their relations by sense alone, and there- fore does not distinguish between sensation and opinion. A different doctrine would result from the discussions of the Theaetetus, but these seem to belong to a later stage of the Platonic philosophy.
" Endeavouring to show the kind of cause I deal with," the Platonic Socrates goes on, " I fall back upon those ideal prin- ciples about which there has been so much talk, and I make them my starting-point. In other words, I assume that there is a beautiful in itself, a good in itself, and so on. And if you grant me this, I find in it a sufficient basis for my argument." Plato thus assumes that the ultimate cause or reason for any charac- teristic of a particular thing, is to be found in some universal or idea, and that "if there be anything beautiful but the beau- tiful itself, it must be for no other reason than that it partakes in the beautiful." ... "I know and can understand nothing
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of these other wise causes that are alleged, and if any one says to me that the bloom of colour in an object, or its shape, or any such quality of it is the source of its beauty, I leave all that, and singly and simply and perhaps foolishly I hold to the con- viction that nothing makes a thing beautiful, but the presence, or participation, or communication — whichever you like to call it — of the beautiful itself. For I am not prepared to speak definitely of the nature of the relation between the beautiful itself and the particular things we call beautiful, but only to assert that it is from the beautiful itself that all particular things derive their beauty." ^
The ideas, then, are to be taken as constitutive principles of reality within particular spheres of being, and their definition is the only key to the distinctive characteristics of those spheres. " Laying down, then, the principle," i.e. the definition of a univei'sal, "that seems to me to be surest, what agrees there- with I set down as true, and what does not agree therewith, I set down as untrue. ... And if anyone assails ^ the principle [virbdeais) itself, you will not mind him or answer him, till you have discovered as to all the consequences which followed from it, whether they agree with each other " ; in other words, you will try to work out a self-consistent view on the basis of a particular hypothesis, and will not reject it except on the ground that this cannot be done. But Plato does not stop here, he requires that the philosopher shall rise beyond principles that hold good within special spheres of being, to a highest
^Phaedo, 100 d.
2 There is an obvious difficulty in getting this meaning out of ?x<"'''0> but whatever the reading ought to be, the meaning seems assured by what is said immediately afterwards about the Eristic who confuses the discussion of a principle, taken by itself, with the discussion of its consequences. The discussion of a principle in itself must mean the enquiry whether it can be treated as an ultimate principle. Thus the principle of a special science is that idea which furnishes a basis for a self-consistent view of that sphere or aspect of reality. The idea of number e.g. may furnish a sufficient basis tor arithmetic, but we cannot take it as an dwirdderos dpxv '• when we examine it for itself, we are forced to carry it back to some more comprehensive idea.
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principle of unity. Hence he says : " When you are required to give an explanation of the principle itself, you will go on to set up a higher principle — the best you can discover among those next in the ascending scale — and so on to one that is higher still, till you reach one that is sufficient for itself. And you will take special care not, like the Eristics, to confuse the discussion of the principle itself, with that of the consequences which follow from it : so only you can hope to attain distinct results about that which really is." ^
This, as I understand it, points to a hierarchical distribution of ideas in which the highest idea is conceived as the ultimate ground of all the others. Thus the a.vvir6d€Tos dpxri is that to which we work back on the basis of what Aristotle calls the I5lai apxai, the latter being regarded as hypothetical in the sense that they find their ultimate ground or principle of explanation in the former. This, however, is not worked out in the Fhaedo, where Plato does not yet show that by his own method, he is able to reach the Idea of Good as the principle of all knowing and being. Here Plato confines himself to the lower ideas, insisting specially on the point that we must proceed by setting up definitions of special univei'sals, and working out the consequences of such definitions, to see how they cohere with each other. The truth, so far, is to be tested by the coherence or self-consistency of the view which our definition enables us to take of the special sphere, or, as we should rather say, the special aspect of reality included under a universal. In the last resort, however, we must recognise that such universals are not ultimate, and that every subordinate principle must be referred back to some higher principle, and that again to one that is still higher, till we reach that which is adequate, or, as we should rather say, self-sufficient.
1 Fhaedo, 101 D acq,
LECTURE SIXTH.
THE STATE AND THE IDEA OF GOOD.
We have now reached the point at which Plato's philosophy passes into theology, in so far as all the ideas are made to centre and culminate in one absolute ideal principle. This result is specially associated with the Repnhlic, that treatise of Plato's manhood in which he sums up all the conclusions he had then attained on morals and politics, on metaphysics and religion, and endeavours to weld them into a connected whole. It is impossible within any moderate compass to give a complete estimate of this great book, but for our purpose it is only necessary to refer to one or two leading features of it. Perhaps it might best be described as a treatise on Education, regarded as the one great business of life from the beginning to the end of it. But it lays emphasis on one aspect of this education which had been quite secondary with Socrates, and was altogether neglected by the Minor
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Socratics, namely, that it is the education of a social being, and therefore must be realised, in the first instance at least, through society. Plato, therefore, tries to imagine a perfect community after the highest type he knew, that of the Greek City-State. As an organised society the State, in his view, is founded neither on the force of the strong man, nor on the conspiracy of the weak ; it is not the crea- tion of arbitrary choice, even in the form of a social contract between its individual members ; it origi- nates not in the will of men at all, but in their nature, as beings who are essentially parts of a whole, each in himself fragmentary and incomplete, but find- ing his necessary complement in the rest. For such beings, to be isolated is to be weak and undeveloped, to be imited is to be strong and have their individual capacities drawn out in the service of each other. For such beings, therefore, the ideal of individualism, the ideal of self-seeking and self-aggrandisement, is suicidal and contradictory. It is only as they give themselves up to the general good that indi- viduals can possibly attain their own, and to seek happiness merely for themselves is the way to lose it. They must die to themselves that they may live in the general life. In short, it is only in the discliarge of their social duty that they can be in harmony with themselves ; and any attempt to make the general life of the connuuiiity subservient to
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their own, must lead to inner discord, disorganisa- tion and misery. Thus the ideal which Plato sets before us is that of a perfectly unified society, in which each individual, confining himself strictly to his own function, shall in that function be a pure organ and expression of the general will.
Plato has thus risen to the organic idea of the State, as a union of men which is based upon the division of labour according to capacity, and in which the citizen is united to the whole by the special office he discharges. But in working out this idea in the form of the Greek City-State, he lands himself in two great inconsistencies. On the one hand, sharing, as he does, in the Greek view that the higher life is only for the few — for those who are capable of intellectual culture, and in pro- portion as they are capable of it — he is unable to conceive the lower classes, those engaged in agricul- tural or industrial labour, as organic members of the State ; he is obliged to regard them as the instruments of a society in whose higher advantages they have no share. And, on the other hand, he is so solicitous to exclude all self-seeking, and directly to merge private in social good, that he deprives even the favoured citizens of personal rights, and destroys the family lest it should become the rival of the State. He thus seems to secure the unity of the State, not by subordinating the personal and
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private interests of its members, but rather by pre- venting any consciousness of such interests from arising; and the result is that he reduces it to a mechanical, instead of raising it to a spiritual or organic unity. In the reaction against the indi- vidualistic tendencies represented by the Sophists, he finds no way to maintain order except by the absolute suppression of individual freedom.
At the same time, this is not the whole truth, and it could not be the whole truth for one taught in the school of Socrates. Plato, indeed, made a great change in the views of his master, when he recognised that virtue cannot rest primarily upon scientific knowledge, but only upon what he calls right opinion, that is to say, upon a moral senti- ment which is in great part the result of social training. The virtue of the mass of men at all times, and of all men in the earlier part of their lives, must be the product, not of philosophic reflexion, but of the unconscious influences under which they grow up as members in a society, and of a teaching which has no scientific character. Yet Plato could not but hold that in its highest sense 'virtue is knowledge,' i.e. that it must rest upon conscious principle ; and that any other kind of virtue — any virtue that is based upon rules whose principle is not present to him who obeys them — is inchoate and imperfect. If not for the mass
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of mv5n, yet for the chosen few, there must be a complete liberation from the life of mere use and wont. Nor, indeed, can the life of use and wont produce its highest results, unless it is regulated by the providence of governors who have risen above it, and have attained to philosophic insight into the meaning and object of man's existence. The affairs of men will never be perfectly ordered " unless philo- sophers be kings or kings philosophers." What is wanted for the perfecting of the moral life is not, therefore, as Socrates taught, that all individuals should be able to guide themselves by a clear re- flective consciousness of the end of all human action and of the means whereby it may be attained ; it is only that there should be a few individuals in the State — even one might be enough — who have such a consciousness, and who are thereby fitted to become shepherds of men, and to guide and mould the lives of all the others. These wise governors, like Car- lyle's 'hero-kings,' will have the duty of selecting for each of the citizens the office which he individually is suited to discharge, and giving to him the mental and bodily training which he requires to discharge it aright. They will have to keep away from the lives of the citizens everything that is discordant and inharmonious, and to surround them with what is be- coming and beautiful, so that healthful and inspiring influences may reach them from every quarter. They
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will take the religion of the people under their care, and will provide that the poetry and mythology — the stories of gods and heroes through which truth is first presented to the immature minds of the young — shall be such as to suggest ideas of purity and goodness ; and they will banish from the State all profane and licentious tales such as pollute the pages of even the greatest of the Greek poets. For in the ideal city the philosophic legislator cannot permit the poet to follow his own sweet will, but must stand by his side and exercise a censorship over his works, so that nothing unseemly or unlaw- ful may reach the ears of the citizens.
Thus the demand of Socrates, that morality should be based on a clear reflective consciousness of the end of action, is not renounced, but it is limited to the few who stand at the head of the State. And no ques- tion is raised as to the general doctrine, that the life of society as a whole is to be guided by scientific knowledge ; though it is admitted that in a private station men may do with something less. In modern times even this modified form of the Socratic doctrine would be challenged. What we now expect from ethi- cal theory is that it should analyse and explain the moral consciousness of the past and the present, but not — except to a very limited extent — that it should furnish a guide for the future. "We recognise that
morality is progressive, and that in this progress. VOL. I. K
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the clear reflective consciousness of any form of life is rather the last product of its development than the beginning from which it starts. It is not given to nations any more than to individuals to scheme out the plan of their lives beforehand. What exists at first is at most some intuitive perception which grows clearer as it is brought into action, but which can be fully understood only when it is completely realised. And the attainment of definite knowledge — such knowledge e.g. as Plato and Aristotle had of the ethical basis of the Greek State — was an indication that the work of that kind of State was all but ended, and that men were advancing to other forms of social and political life.
But neither Plato nor Aristotle could look at the matter in this light. They were without the general idea of progress, and to them the Greek City-State was the irepag rrj^- avrupKeiag, the abso- lute form of man's ethical life, beyond which nothing could be acliieved. What seemed to them possible was only that the lessons drawn from the past experience of Greek politics might be used to perfect the type, and produce a city in which all the good points of Greek cities (especially of Athens and Sparta) might be united, and all their mistakes avoided. Plato perhaps faintly perceived that this ideal State — this Sparta without its rudeness, this Athens without its indiscipline — was a iroXireia ev
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ovpavw, a pattern laid up in heaven and in the soul of the philosopher. But neither he nor Aristotle discerned that they were pouring new wine into old bottles, and that, by the very fact that they were able to theorise Greek political life so perfectly, they were carried beyond it. They were putting more into the framework of the City-State than it could bear, and clothing a forecast of the future in the forms of the past.
One of the points in which Plato's overestimate of the practical power of theory, and his defective com- prehension of its real place in development, are shown most clearly, is in his scheme for remoulding Greek mythology and purifying it of all the elements which seemed to him to be immoral or irreligious. He sees no anachronism in placing the philosopher, who has meditated on all the problems of speculative theology, side by side with the poet, who gives imaginative form to the mythology of a nation, and sings the fresh songs that express its inchoate religious ideas. He fails to discern that the creation of a mythology could not be the work of an age of reflexion ; and that, even if per impossibile the poets could produce such a mythology, neither they nor any State authority could ever make it an object of belief. The conditions which call forth such deep and far-reaching speculations as those of Plato and Aristotle are altogether inconsistent with the creative
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spontaneity which gave rise to the legendary tales of gods and heroes, and equally inconsistent with the simple uncritical faith that accepted them as truth. It was natural, indeed, that a philosopher, who saw how much had been done by poetry to excite and educate the mind of Greece in the era when conscious reflexion was at its minimum, should express a pious wish that this great service could have been per- formed in a less ambiguous way, without the inter- mingling of so many weakening, and even immoral, elements : but to suppose that in any circumstances the miracle of the first great spontaneous outburst of Greek poetic production could be repeated, and repeated under the guidance of a fully developed philosophical criticism, was an obvious anachronism. A mythology cannot be produced of malice prepense^ or by those who do not believe in the gods whose actions they describe. The law of development will not permit us to have the flower along with the fruit, for the simple reason that the decay of the flower is the condition of the appearance of the fruit. And just because philosophy is the further product of a consciousness which has already expressed itself in a mythology, it is impossible that the two should flourish together ; still more that the former should preside over the genesis of the latter. There is, no doubt, a kind of poetry that belongs to an age of reflexion ; but it cannot be
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like the simple spontaneous song of an earlier time, nor can it create the kind of myths in which the popular imagination finds the first satisfaction of its spiritual needs.
Plato's discussion of the poetic mythology of Greece is one-sided and inadequate. He seems to condemn it in a body as immoral and misleading ; and he makes no distinction between the crude and almost savage stories which we find preserved in Hesiod, and the bright picture of humanised divinities which is set before us in Homer ; nor does he recognise the great advance both in an intellectual and in a moral aspect which is involved in the latter. He sees only that in both cases the gods are re- presented as doing deeds which, by the developed conscience of his own time, would be accounted discreditable; and he demands that divine beings should always be represented as perfectly good and also perfectly unchangeable — not noticing that at least the latter of these two demands is incon- sistent with the very existence of mythology. On the other hand, he regards it as the business of art and poetry to present the truths of ethics and religion in a form suitable to minds that are yet unripe and unfitted for the reilective processes of science. In particular, he thinks that it is the office of mythology to inculcate a simple faith in the onmipotence of goodness upon those who are not
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yet prepared to grapple with the problem of evil ; and in this poetic teaching he would have all the perplexing difficulties of life evaded, and all incon- venient facts suppressed. " If they can be got to believe us," says Plato, " we shall tell our citizens that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrelling among citizens." ^ Evil is to be kept out of sight, and, so far as may be, treated as an impossibility. Poetry is to tell its ' noble untruth,' and no scepticism or criticism is to be allowed to breathe a breath of suspicion upon it.
Now, it may be true, as Plato thinks, that faith in God — a faith that good is stronger than evil, and even that it is all-powerful — is the necessar}' basis of our higher life, and that without some such faith morality is apt to shrink into a hopeless striving after an unattainable ideal, and must, there- fore, cease to exercise its highest inspiring power. To hold that what we regard as best and highest is also the ultimate reality — the principle from which all comes and on which all depends — is the great religious spring of moral energy. Even from early times the social union finds its consecration in the idea that it is a union of men based on their common relation to a god, who is the guardian of the destinies of his people. On such a faith Plato 1 Rep., 378 c.
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would found his State. But his difficulty was that the first form of the religious faith of Greece was, in an ethical point of view, so imperfect, and that, such as it was, it was rapidly disappearing before the widening knowledge of men, and the loosening of social bonds that went therewith. The civic State, torn by faction, no longer rested securely on the belief in its protective deities ; and even if the State had remained what it was, the sympathies of men had begun to reach beyond it. For this condi- tion of things there seemed to be only two possible remedies : either that the old ideal life of citizenship — with all its wholesome narrowness of view, with all the religious beliefs on which it rested — should be restored, and that thus the thoughts and aims of men should again be confined within the limits of the microcosm of the city ; or, if this were impossible, then philosophy must face all the wider problems suggested by the knowledge and experience of the new time, all the difficulties that had arisen out of the hard facts of life, and especially out of the existence and prevalence of evil, and it must find some way of explaining them in consistency with the idea that good is the ultimate reality. Either the course of civilisation must be turned backward, so as to revive the 'good old times' of the fighters of Marathon, as was the dream of Aristophanes ; or else — as a pupil of Socrates might ratlier be expected
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to hold — philosophy must take account of the reasons upon which pessimistic views of life may be based, and must find its way to an optimism that has an answer for them all.
Now, Plato — and this is what constitutes the peculiar characteristic of the view which he presents in the Eepiiblic — does not adopt one of these alternatives to the exclusion of the other, but in a way accepts them botli : the former for the benefit of the citizens in general, the latter for the philosophic rulers. For the many, he would restore in a higher form the order of the Greek municipal State, in which the citizen, disciplined in civic virtue and patriotic self-devotion, inspired by a purified mythology, and surrounded by beautiful forms of art — aesthetic types of goodness and purity — should live a life of faith, sheltered from all doubt and intellectual difficulty. And, on the other hand, for the philosophic few who had outgrown the stage of culture in which the mind can be fed with imaginative pictures, he would endeavour to provide a higher kind of education, in which all the secrets of science and philosophy should be revealed. Further- more, the men thus educated were to take the place of kings or governors of the State, and to find in their contemplation of the intelligible universe the exemplar, after which, so far as possible, they should mould the life of the community over which they ruled.
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For, in Plato's view, he who has grasped the supreme principle of truth, which he calls the Idea of Good, is by it carried beyond all the contradictions of ordinary experience, and has become able to regard the confused and shadowy world of appearance from a higher point of view. He has become possessed of a divine pattern, by means of which he can bring order into the transitory life of men in this world.
Plato, then, makes a sharp division between an earlier stage of religious development of his citizens, in which they are to be kept out of sight of moral and religious difficulties, and taught simply that all things are ordered for the best by perfectly good gods, and a later stage of it, in which they are to face all the problems of existence, and to endea- vour to solve them by the aid of philosophical reflexion. At the same time, he is deeply conscious of the difficulties of the transition from the lirst to the second of these stages ; or, in other words, of the dangers of that period of doubt and criticism with which philosoi)hical enquiry must begin. In the seventh book of the Bepublic, ho illustrates these dangers by the image of a youth who is brought up to reverence certain persons as liis parents, and who is protected from temptation by his belief in their rightful authority over him, but who suddenly learns that they have no such natural claim to his obedience,
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and is tempted in consequence to disregard all the commands they have laid upon him. In like manner, as Plato would indicate, the young man who is prematurely initiated into the dialectical methods of philosophical criticism, will learn to detect the illusion of his first faith in those mythological divinities whom he has been taught to regard as the authors of the ethical rules under which he has hitherto lived ; and he will therefore be in danger of falling into a fatal scepticism, and losing his hold upon all ethical rules whatever. Hence Plato urges that this initiation, even in the case of those who are fitted for it, should be delayed till the character has been thoroughly confirmed in the love of what is good and the hate of what is evil; and that, in the case of the great body of the citizens, it should not take place at all.
Now, as we have already seen, there is a great dif- ficulty in admitting the conception of such a division between two classes of citizens in the same State — -a division in which the higher class possesses for itself the esoteric truth of philosophy, while the lower class is fed with mythological fables. There is, indeed, at all times, a certain difference between the ordinary consciousness which is content with half-pictorial modes of thought, and the reflective spirit of science which cannot be satisfied with anything but exact definition and clear logical connexion : but it is impos-
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sible to draw any definite line of separation between two classes of human beings, not living in different ages, but at the same time, and as members of the same society. Still more impossible — if there are grades in impossibility — would it be, in an age of reflexion, to push men back into an earlier stage of culture and save them from all the dangers of doubt. In such an age, the sphere of opinion cannot be sharply divided from that of science ; nor is it possible by any artificial barriers such as Plato proposes, to secure men from the disturbing power of a dialectic, which detects the ' noble untruths ' of poetry. The idea of a class of philosopher-kings who are to keep the keys of knowledge for themselves, and act as a kind of earthly providence to other men, sins, like Carlyle's conception of hero-worship, against the solidarity of humanity. A secret doctrine of philosophy is almost a contradiction in terms : for philosophy cannot live, and refuse to communicate itself to anyone who is capable of receiving its lessons. Something like it we may find in early stages of civilisation, as among the Egyptian priesthood, or in a modified form in the divided society of the middle ages. But such exceptions prove the rule : for in both cases philosophy was enslaved by tradition and smitten with barrenness. It was not the free evolu- tion of thought which alone Plato would have thought worthy of the name.
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In the case of the few who are admitted to the higher training in dialectic, Plato thinks that philo- sophy is able to replace the optimism of faith by a higher optimism, which is not, like the former, attained by a mere evasion of difficulties — by refus- ing to admit the reality of that which is ignoble or evil, or by taking refuge in the pure heaven of art — but which is to look all such problematical phenomena in the face, and to explain them in con- sistency with the absolute reality of the good. Now, it is manifest that philosophy can do this only in one of two ways : either by showing that what we call evil may itself from a higher point of view be resolved into a means to good, or into a phase in its development; or, at least, by showing that evil has only a secondary and transitory existence, which is incidental to the realisation of good in this phe- nomenal world. I here put these two alternatives in contrast ; for they point to two paths of idealistic philosophy of which we shall have much to say in the sequel, and which, therefore, it is well to have before us from the first. I say, then, that the difficulties and contradictions that seem to attach to the facts of our earthly existence, and especially the problem of evil, may be met by philosophy in two possible ways. On the one hand, philosophy may admit that there is some resistant element, or negative characteristic, in the phenomenal world, by reason of
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which the highest good cannot be realised in that world ; but, at the same time, it may maintain that this element becomes secondary and accidental in our eyes, when we turn to the permanent ideal being which gives even to the world of phenomena all the reality to which it can lay claim. Or, on the other hand, in the spirit of a more thorough- going idealism, philosophy may maintain that evil exists only in the part when we isolate it from the whole, or only in the particular phases of existence when we separate them from the complete process to which they contribute. Which of these solutions Plato adopted, we must presently consider. In the meantime we have to note that the relicjio philo- sophi, to which we advance in the second part of the BepuUic, centres in the Idea of Good, as a prin- ciple of unity on whicli ' all thinking things ' and ' all objects of all thouglit ' are dependent.
In the contemplation of this idea, the philosopher is carried beyond the State, and the morality of use and wont which is bound up witli its existence, to the contemplation of the whole system of tlie universe, in comparison with which the State is a very little tiling. For the philosopher, in Plato's ideal picture of him, is one whose thought, in the first instance at least, is directed away from all that is particular, finite and transitory to that which is universal and eternal. He is a '' spectator of all
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time and existence," and he cannot be chained down, either in thought or action, to any particular finite object or interest. He has freed himself from the narrow ambitions and desires of his transitory life as a mortal man, and is therefore perfectly generous and fearless : all mean cares and grudges have been taken out of his heart. The vision of absolute reality reconciles him to the universe, and to all things and beings in it, at the same time that it lifts him above the tendency to attribute too great importance to any of them, and above the passionate impulses which are the consequence of such over- estimate of the finite. " Such a-juiKpoXoyla," such a tendency to ascribe excessive value to the little things of time, says Plato, " must least of all be the characteristic of a soul that seeks to grasp the whole compass of reality human and divine."^ As it is expressed in the parallel words of Spinoza, " love towards that which is eternal alone feeds the soul with unmingled joy," so that no room is left for disturbance about finite and transitory things.
There is something that looks like a contradiction in the fact that Plato, who has hitherto been carefully building up the system of the State as a social and political ideal to be realised in the immediate life of man, now seems suddenly to soar away from all such practical considerations, and to regard all ^Bep., 486 a.
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earthly existence as " less than nothing and vanity." And an ingenious, though somewhat one- sided German writer, has even maintained that there is an absolute opposition between the two parts of the Republic — an opposition which, indeed, runs through all ideal views of life, and which cannot be in any way solved or bridged over. " Here," he declares, " we find a great rift in Platonism. It was as the moralising follower of Socrates that Plato drew the first sketch of the ideal State, but it is as the metaphysician — who looks beyond the changing appearance to the real being of things — that he completes it. These two ten- dencies meet in conflict, yet neither can free itself from the other. The reformer, who would heal the disease of his people, must believe in the usefulness of his own art ; but the speculative thinker must contemn the fleeting forms of life in ^^ew of the substantial reality that underlies them. This rift in Platonism is, however, the rift that rends the life of all noble spirits. They work in the present with their best energy, yet they know that the present is but a fleeting shadow." ^
^ Krohn (Dtr Platonische Staat, p. 103), quoted in edition of the Rtjmhlic by .Jowett and Campbell, Vol. II. p. 9. Compare the remarkable passage in the Laios (80.3 b), (ari. 5^ toIvw to. tQiv at'dpunrotv irpAffxara fj.€yd\r]^ ^^v anov5ii$ ovk d^ta, dvayKaidv ye fj.riv cirofddj^eiy. In the context it is said that "man was made to be the puppet or plaything of the gods, and that, truly considered, is the best of
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Krohn here seems to suppose that the last word of Plato, and indeed of philosophy, is that there is an absolute division in our spiritual life, and that morals and metaphysics are essentially contradictory. But there is, surely, no essential contradiction in reject- ing the claim of the particular objects and interests of our ordinary experience to be real in themselves and, as it were, in their own right, and yet asserting their relative reality, when they are regarded as the manifestation of the one principle which is absolutely real. Nor is there any inconsistency in condemning the actual state of the world as at discord with itself and unstable, in so far as it suggests an idea of which it falls short, and, at the same time, thinking of it as a step in the realisation of that idea. It is only in so far as Plato holds, not merely that there is " something in the world amiss " which " will be unriddled by and bye," but that there is something in it essentially unideal and irrational, that we can find in his philosophy such an ultimate contradiction as Krolm alleges. But with this point we are not yet prepared to deal.
him." Bruns (Plato's Gesetze) draws attention to the contrast of this with many other passages where the acquisition of virtue is spoken of as the most earnest work of life (e.g. 770 d). He argues on this and other grounds that the whole passage (803a-804b) is due to Philippus, the editor of the Laws. It is possible that there is a shade of pessimism in the passage which is not Platonic, but the general alternation of the two points of view is already found in the BepubliCf
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Meanwhile let us consider what it is that Plato finds in his Idea of Good. There are three ways in which he endeavours to answer this question. In the first place, as is indicated by the very name of the Good, it is the chief and final satisfaction for which our souls are always looking, which they anticipate from the first and for the sake of which they desire everything else ; yet it is the last thing they come clearly to understand. From this point of view the Repuhlic exhibits to us a series of stages in the process of defining it. In the first book, it is represented, as Socrates had represented it, as the goal of the individual life, which each man has to discover for himself by a consideration of his nature as a man and of the work for which it fits him. Then, at the next stage of Plato's argument, man is shown to be essentially social, essentially a member of a State, so that he can find his good, only as he dis- covers his proper place in the social organism, i.e. the place for v/hich his special tendencies and capacities fit him. But even here Plato cannot stop : for the social organism itself has to be regarded suh specie aeternitatis ; and, so viewed, it is found to be a microcosm, a little world in itself, but one which can only attain the perfection of which it is capable, when it is moulded after the similiUule of the macrocosm. Hence it is the philosopher — who lives in
the contemplation of the universe, and apprehends the VOL. I. L
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principle of order that is manifested in it — and he alone, who can give to the State its true or ideal constitution. He alone can make all things " after the patterns howed him in the Mount." Thus ethics and politics find their ultimate basis in a tlieology which contemplates the world as a teleo- logical system, and of this system the Idea of Good is the end and principle.
The next step is taken by means of an analogy : which is really more than an analogy, since the object used as an image is declared to be the ' offspring ' or product of that which it is taken to illustrate. In other words, the material world, from which the image is drawn, is not for Plato an arbitrary symbol of the ideal reality ; it is its manifestation or phenomenal expression ; and, therefore, the principle of unity in the one is essentially akin to the principle of unity in the other. Now, what is the principle of unity in the material world ? It is, Plato suggests, the sun ; for the sun, as the source of the heat which is essential to growth, may be re- garded as the cause of the existence of the objects we see ; while at the same time, as the source of light, it reveals the forms and colours of those objects, and enables us to see them. In like manner, Plato bids us regard the Idea of Good as at once the cause of existence to all things that exist, and of knowledge to all minds that know
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them. It is thus ' beyond existence ' and ' above knowledge'; as it is that in which they both originate, and by which they are united to each other as elements in one whole. By the aid of this analogy, therefore, Plato carries us beyond the conception of a principle of unity in the objective world, and suggests to us the thought that, if the Idea of Good is the ultimate cause or reason of the universe, it must be also the principle of unity in the con- sciousness of man, tlie principle that constitutes his intelligence and makes knowledge possible to him.
The third and last point in Plato's exposition of the Idea of Good is derived from its relation to the other ideas. In the Phacclo, as we saw in the last lecture, he had already spoken of a regressive method that goes back from one idea to another till it reaches a principle which is ultimate and self-sufficient. Here he speaks of a similar method by which the intelligence advances from the special sciences to philosophy. Each of the special sciences is shown to have some organising idea which gives order, self-consistency and systematic connexion to our view of a special sphere of reality, and thus lifts us aliove the empirical co-existences and sequencers of phenomena within that si)lune. But, as the world is one world, and all special spheres of reality are parts of one great all-inclusive sphere, it is impossible fur tlic intelligence to be saLislied
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with the results of the special sciences. The principles of these sciences are hypothetical, in the sense that they are not ultimate but find their basis in something deeper and more comprehensive than themselves. The true dialectician is ' one who sees things in their unity,' who is unable to rest in any fragmentary and incomplete view of things, but must feel insecure till he has found one all-embracing principle, which enables him to view the universe as a systematic or organic whole. Having found such a principle of principles he will be able to give their proper place to all tlie investigations of the special sciences.^ The Idea of Good, then, is the
' In spite of all that has been said by Mr. Adam in his edition of the Rejnihlic (Vol. II. p. 156 s&q.), I am not convinced that the doctrine attributed by Aristotle to Plato — that the objects of mathematical science constitute a separate kind of existence which stands midway between the ideal and the sensible — is to be found in the Bepublic. It is true that the mathematical sciences are spoken of as objects, not of voOi, but of 8idvoia, and that they are regarded as constituting the first stage in the ascent of the mind above sensible phenomena. It is true also that they are said to stand in the same relation to the objects of pure in- telligence, in which the objects of sense stand to them. Still, the special characteristic by which Aristotle distinguished to. /xadrjfxaTiKci from ideas is not mentioned, and Plato has as j'et no hesitation in speaking of ideas of quantity. And he can hardly have considered them disparate from the Idea of Good, since he reaches that Idea by viewing them in their unity, 6 yap (rvfOTTTLKbi dia\€KTLK6s {Rep., 537 c). This, I think, supports Jowett's rendering of the words : Kalroi vorirQiv 6vtwv fisr' dpxv^ '■ " when a first principle is added to them, they" — i.e. the sciences — "are cognisable by vovs," as distinguished from Sidfoia.
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teleological principle of Socrates, as applied not to the individual life but to the universe. It is the final end of all things, not as something external to them, but as immanent in them ; it is, therefore, beyond all the differences of the finite, and especially it transcends the distinction of knowing and being, the distinction between the intelligence and the reality which is its object. Lastly, it is the principle on which all other principles rest, and in which all science finds its unity.
If we gather together these different aspects of the Idea of Good, I think we can see what is Plato's true purpose and meaning, and at the same time we can guard against the misconceptions of many of his professed disciples. Thus, taking hold of those expressions in which he separates the Idea of Good from all others, and especially of his de- claration that it is ' beyond being ' and ' above know- ledge,' the Neo-Platonists identified the Good with a unity which we cannot deline or express, a unity which we can only experience in an ecstasy wherein all thought and even all consciousness is extinguished. They did not observe that I'lato reaches his con- ception of it, not by abstraction, but by synthesis, not ]jy turning away from all the special prin- ciples of knowledge, but by ' thinking them together,' that is, by finding the one principle which
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shall determine the place and relations of all the others. Nor did they attach sufficient weight to the passages in which the good is spoken of as a unity which is always presupposed, though never distinctly reflected upon, in our ordinary conscious- ness of the world. For Plato the Idea of Good is so far from being unintelligible that it is that which constitutes the intelligence.
There is, however, a real difficulty in the question which is not sufficiently met by such general statements. For how is it possible to characterise a principle of unity which is beyond all the differences of the finite, and, in particidar, beyond the difference of being and knowing ? If we seek to define the unity of the whole in terms of any of its parts, we seem to be committing an obvious paralogism. But it is not less illogical to define it by simply putting the different parts together, as if the infinite were a collection of finites. Hence we seem to be driven to the resource of defining it not positively, but negatively, that is, by denying of it everything that we assert of its parts. But we are brought in this way to the result of the Neo-Platonists, who argue that, because the Good is ' beyond being ' and ' above knowledge,' it cannot be characterised by any terms derived from either: which means that it cannot be characterised at all.
This difficulty is a real one, and it has often driven
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men into Agnosticism ; for it seems as if our minds were forced to make a demand which yet it is impossible for them to satisfy. On the one hand, it is a necessity of thought to regard the world as a self-consistent whole. We cannot conceive the possi- bility of there being two worlds, wliich are not parts of the same universe, because to do so would make all our thinking incoherent. In all our intel- lectual life we go upon the hypothesis that the universe is one ; and that everything in it has its definite place in relation to the whole, by ascertaining which we can define it. We go upon this hypothesis, indeed, for the most part without thinking of it at all ; but it is the essential business of philosophy to realise it, and to carry back all subordinate principles to it as the ultimate presupposition of ""the intelligence. Yet the moment we try to define this unity, we are met with the dilemma just mentioned, that either we must give up the attempt to characterise the whole at all, or else we must characterise it in terms of one or all of its parts. All definition seems to rest upon the distinc- tion of one object from another within the whole, and therefore the whole itself and its principle of unity seem to be beyond definition. Or if we define it in terms of one of its parts, we cany up into the whole the limitations of that part. Thus to say that the ultimate reality is matter as opposed to mind, or mind as opposed to matter, seems to involve a denial of the
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real existence of the alternative we reject, or to reduce it to an illusion. Is not the Idealist forced to de- clare, as Berkeley declared, that matter is a mere idea or subjective existence, and the Materialist to maintain that mind is really a quality or phase of matter, which by some illusion we treat as independent ? Or, on the other hand, if we say that the Absolute is a tertium quid, which is neither mind nor matter, though it is the source of both, how are we to define this tertium quid, or avoid reducing it to the Unknowable of Mr. Spencer ?
The key to this problem is to observe that the distinction of mind and matter, or of knowing and being, like all other distinctions we make, is a distinction within the intelligible world, a distinction in consciousness, which presupposes a unity beyond the difference. It is not, therefore, a distinction between two terms which stand on the same level, as if we had knowledge on the one side and reality on the other — each given altogether independently of the other — and had then to seek for something to mediate between them. To suppose such a dualism would be to assert the complete separation of two things, which are never presented in our experience except in relation to each other. It would be to deny thought its essential character as consciousness of an object, or reality its essential character as the object of thought. For we do not — as might seem from some psychological
THE IDEA OF GOOD 169
theories — first know ourselves, and then infer the existence of objects from the nature of certain of our thoughts; but it is only in distinguishing ourselves from, and relating ourselves to an objective world that we know the self within us at all. On the other hand, it is equally true — and it was a large part of the work of Kant to prove it — that objective reality is in essential relation to the conscious subject, and that it is impossible ultimately to think away this relation from it. Furthermore, so intimately associated in our experience are object and subject, that it might easily be shown that we cannot enlarge our inner life or deepen our self -consciousness, except by widening our experience and knowledge of the objective world ; and that we cannot widen our experience of the world, except by a process that draws out the capacities and enriches the inner life of the self. Hence to ask how we get from the subject to the object, or from the object to the subject, or from their difference to their unity, is to put the question in such a way that it cannot be answered ; for, if we could suppose them to be primarily unrelated, it would be impossil)le to pass from the one to the other, or, even if we had both, to discover their unity. ^
The problem, however, takes a very different aspect when we realise that in all our conscious life the unity of buth terms is the presupposition of their diU'ereuco..
170 THE STATE AND
aud tliat it is simply due to the self-ignorance of the ordinary consciousness— to its want of reflexion upon its own nature and conditions — that it fails to recognise the fact. Thus, in our natural dualism, we begin by taking tlie two terms, the mind and its object, as independent of each other. Then, as reflexion advances, we seek for some tcrtium quid which shall furnish a link of connexion between them. Lastly, as we become aware of the impossibility of finding any such tcrtium quid, we are apt to fall back on the paradox of Mysticism — that we know there is a unity of which we know nothing, and to which we approach only as we empty our minds of all positive contents. The truth is that, as the unity of the intelligence and the intelligible world is the first presupposition of all experience, it is not to Ije reached Ijy abstraction, but rather by correcting the abstraction of our ordinary consciousness ; by I'ealising that unity which is always with us — underlying all our thought, though not directly apprehended by it — and only needing to be brought to liglit by reflexion. As Plato says of the definition of justice, we have been seeking for it far away while it was lying close at our feet. But we need not to search in the heiglits above or in the depths beneath for ' that which is in our mouth and in our heart.' If it is 'beyond reality,' it is because it is the substance of which all reality is the manifestation ; if it is ' above knowledge,' it is only
THE IDEA OF GOOD 171
in the sense that we must go beyond experience to realise what experience is.
The question has often been asked, whether the idea of Good is eqidvalent to the idea of God. 1 think we must answer that the unity of being and knowing, if we take it positively, cannot be conceived except as an aljsolute self -consciousness, a creative mind, whose only o])ject is a universe which is the manifestation of itself. This aspect of the idea is not emphasised in the liqmblic, but it is obviously implied in it. I'lato seems, in the first instance, to have regarded his ' ideas ' mainly as olijective realities — the word ' idea ' itself at first suggesting a form or figure which we see, and then being transferred to the essence of the object as grasped by a thought wliich goes beyond its appearances. But here in the liipuUic Plato formulates a truth — which, no doubt, was very near him from the first, tliough not distinctly formulated — that the ol)ject is not com- plete apart from tlie thought wliich grasps it; and the term ' idea ' is henceforth used by him to express this unity. Plato does not, like most moderns, begin with the subjective consciousness, and ask for an object corresponding to it: he l)egins with the ol»j(H;t and goes on to realise that it is essentially an ' object thought,' an intelligible ol)ject. Put when this point is reached the impersonal ' idea ' begins to aj)proxinmte to a consciousness or mind, and
172 THE STATE AND THE IDEA OF GOOD
we pass beyond idealism to spiritualism. Thus ' the Idea of Good' is only a step removed from the idea of a supreme intelligence, the vou? 6eco9 of which Plato speaks in the Philebus} We may therefore fairly say that, with the sixth book of the liepuhlic, Plato has extended to the universe tlie Socratic conception of moral life, and has thereby become the founder of speculative theology.
^Fhil., 22 c, 28 D.
LECTURE SEVENTH.
FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE THEORY OF IDEAS.
In the Re2niblic Plato puts the coping-stone upon his ideal theory by asserting not merely the existence of a number of independent ideas, but the systematic unity of all ideas under one supreme principle, a principle at once of all reality and of all thought. But, with this conception of the ultimate unity of all things with each other and with the mind, Plato's philosophy seems to enter upon a second stage of development, which carries him still farther away from the abstract idealism commonly attributed to him. For hitherto he has looked upon the idea mainly as a unifying principle — a principle which we need not, indeed, take as a mere abstraction, but wliich is so far abstract as it leaves out many of the aspects of the manifold and changing phenomena, and has no diPferences or deter- minations but such as flow from its own nature. There is, however, a great danger of misunderstanding when
174 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
such almost exclusive emphasis is laid upon the unity of the idea, as if it had no distinction of elements within itself at all ; and this misunderstanding might go still farther in view of what Plato says as to the idea of good being 'l)eyond being' and 'beyond know- ledge/ if this were taken as excluding its immanence in both.
It is, therefore, noticeable that in the dialogues which follow the Repuhlic Plato begins to change his point of view, and to speak of it as the business of philosophy, not only to rise from difference to unity, but also to trace the way downwards from unity to difference and multiplicity. Already in the Mepuhlie, where the dialectician is primarily characterised as one who ' thinks things together,' it is indicated that, after he has reached the highest idea, he must seek to develop all the other ideas from it. But in the Fhacdrus the two processes of synthesis and analysis, a-yuaycoyy'i and Sialpecri^, are distinctly put on a level ; and only he who is able rightly to perform them both is thought worthy of the name of a dialectician. He must be able, Plato declares, " to take a comprehensive view of the multitude of scattered particulars and to bring them under one form or idea, for the purpose of defining the nature of the special subject which he wishes to discover." But he must also " be able to divide into species, carefully attending to the natural joints by which the parts are
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 175
severed and connected, and not breaking any part, like a bad carver." " Of these processes," says the Platonic Socrates, " I have always been a lover, seeking by their means to make myself able to speak and to think. And if I can find anyone who i.s thus able to see up to the one and down to the many, I am ready to follow in his footsteps as if he were a God.''^
Plato illustrates this view by a criticism of the teaching of rhetoric by some of the leading orators of the day, as resting upon a number of empirical rules about the use of words, about figures of speech, or about the commonplaces of argument, and not based upon any comprehensive view of the nature and object of oratory, and of ilie different elements and conditions that go to the making of an effective speech. In discussing the nature of anything, we must, he declares, first enquire whether it is simple or multiform ; and, if it is simple, we must ask what capacity it has of acting upon other things and being acted on by them ; while, if it has more forms tiian one, we nmst determine how many they are, and what capacity of acting or being acted on belongs to each of them. Without such a preliminary analysis, our procedure will be like the groping of a blind man. Now, as rhetoric has to act on the souls of men, we must begin in this case by asking what is the nature of the soul, and whether it is simple or multiform like J Phaedrus, 200 b,
176 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
the body. Then we must enquire how it, or any part of it, acts or is acted on, and by what agencies. And, lastly, we must classify the different kinds of argument, as well as the different kinds of soul and the affections of which they are susceptible ; and we must fit the several arguments to the several mental constitutions, and show how such and such souls are necessarily wrought upon by such and such discourses. If we proceed on this method, our rhetorical art will be not a collection of unconnected empirical rules, but a real scientific system ; and any speech we construct in accordance with its prescriptions will be not an aggregate of unconnected arguments and exhortations, but an organised whole. In Plato's own words : " This, I think, you will admit, that every speech ought to be composed like a living being, which has a complete body of its own, and is neither without head nor without feet ; in other words, it ought to have a beginning, middle, and end, all in harmony with each other and with the whole." ^
This conception of the equal importance of distinc- tion and relation, of analysis and synthesis, dominates all the later dialogues. Science is henceforth presented to us as an organised system of parts, which are clearly distinguished from each other, yet essentially bound together by the one idea or principle which is realised in them. In Plato's exposition of this view, howeverj
* Phaedrus, 264 c.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 177
we find something of the same ambiguity which lay in his first account of the ideal theory. And, as there it was sometimes doubtful whether the idea was to be regarded as merely the abstraction of some common element in the particulars, or as a principle which explained their differences ; so here, it is not quite clear whether Plato is merely referring to the division of a genus into subordinate species according to some arbitrarily chosen princijnum divisionis, or whether he means that the higher idea is to be taken as itself supplying the principle of its own division, and the subordinate ideas as having a necessary intercon- nexion, such that each implies and is implied in all the others. As, therefore, in the former case, we had to ask whether the idea is an abstract or a concrete universal, a common element or a principle which explains a certain compass of differences ; so in the latter case, we have to ask whether the relations of the parts that fall under the idea is tliat of co-ordinate species which do not stand in any essential relation to each other, or whether it is that of parts whicli cannot be conceived except as belonging to one whole. Is Plato, after all, only aiming at a mere classification of different existences from an arbitrarily chosen ])oiiit of view, or is he seeking to comprehend the intelligible world, and every distinct ])art of it. as a system of members which are in organic unity with each
other ?
VOL. I. ^
178 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
It is not easy to solve this problem ; indeed, it cannot be solved by a simple ' yes ' or ' no.' For, in the first place, before we deal with it at all, we have to separate two questions which Plato does not always clearly distinguish — the question as to the k6(jij.o<; vo}]t6^^ the system of ideas when viewed in themselves, and the question as to the objects of the phenomenal world, which are said to participate in these ideas. In regard to the latter, it is abundantly evident that, according to Plato, particular phenomenal existences are subsumed under ideas without being completely determined by them. Indeed, it is the primary characteristic of the world of sense and opinion that the ' many ' in it is not completely determined by the ' one ' ; or, in other words, that its differences and its changes are not the pure manifestation of ideal principles, V)ut in many ways fall short of them. Of this relation of the phenomenal to the ideal world, I shall have to speak in a later lecture ; for the present we have to consider the pure relation of ideas as elements in the intelligible world.
But, even from this point of view, the intention of Plato is not without some ambiguity, especially when we consider the way in wliich he employs the method of division in the Sophist and the Politicus. For in these dialogues he seeks to define an object simply by taking a large genus in which it is included, and dividing it into two species by any principle of
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 179
division tluit suggests itself ; then, subsuming the object under one of the species, he proceeds again to divide that species by another arbitrary prin- cipiiim lUvisionis ; and so on till he reaches an injima species which cannot he further divided. We can, however, hardly suppose that Plato means us to take this method quite seriously : indeed, the six examples of division by which the Eleatic stranger reaches the definition of the Sophist seem rather intended to exhibit tlie defects of such an arbitrary process, and to illustrate the fallacy which Aristotle points out when he says that division is a ' weak inference.' And we have to observe that in the latter part of the dialogue Plato directs all his efforts to illustrate a view of ideas and their relations, which is entirely opposed to this. Indeed, the aim of the whole remarkable group of dialogues which includes the Theaitetus, the Sophist and the Parmenides, seems to be just this — to develop the doctrine that universal s are not abstractions but concrete principles of unity in difference ; and that they have a com- munity with each otiier, which we can only express by saying that each contains or involves all tlie others.
This view of ideas seems to have arisen in Plato's mind in connexion with a careful study of the con- flicting views of the earlier Greek pliilosophers which, till this period, had uot receivetl nmcli atlt-ntinn from
180 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
him.^ The controversy between the two great schools, that of the Eleatics who insisted upon the unity and permanence of objects, and that of the Heracliteans who insisted exclusively upon their multiplicity and change- fulness — suggested to Plato the idea that neither of them could be regarded as adequate, and that the truth must lie in some tertium qind, which should at once transcend and combine them both. Hence he declares in the Theaetetus that it is above all necessary for as to examine carefully the two opposite theories of those who set everything in flux and of those who would make all reality immovable. And then he adds that " if we find that neither of these schools has anything reasonable to say, we shall be absurd enough to think that we, poor creatures, are able to suggest something to the purpose, while we reject the views of ancient and famous men." ^ If, therefore, the ideal theory were to vindicate its claims, it must show itself able to unite the 'one' and the 'many,' and to prove that they are not absolutely opposed but rather require each other. Accordingly in these dia-
1 Aristotle (Metaph., I. 6) says that the development of the ideal theory was due to a combination of the Socratic view of universals with a conception of sensation and its objects due to the philosophy of Heraclitus. But we do not find this connexion of Sensationalism with the Heraclitean philosophy referred to except in the Theaetetus, and the earlier development of the ideal theory in the Meno, Gorgias, Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic does not appear to be connecteil with any direct Heraclitean influence.
2 Theaetetus, 181b.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 181
logues Plato seeks to prove, on the one hand, that the views of these two schools are one-sided and self- contradictory, and, on the other hand, that the ideal theory is able to take up into itself the elements of truth that are in both. And it is important to notice that he directs his criticism both against the objective aspect of these philosophies, as theories of being, and against their subjective aspect, as theories of knowing ; and that from this point of view he identifies the Heraclitean philosophy with Sensation- alism, and the Eleatic philosophy with an abstract Idealism which might find some support in his own earlier statement of the ideal theory.
Thus, in the Thcaetettis Plato deals at once with the Protagorean doctrine that finds the measure of all things in the sensation of the individual, and with the doctrine of Heraclitus that all things are in flux ; and he attempts to show that, both severally and together, they lead to the result that nothing exists or can be known. For if the Heraclitean view be true, and everything is in continual process, ever becoming other than itself, no determination either of quality or quantity can remain even for a moment, and nothing can be said even to be. If there be nothing permanent, there is no reality in anything. And this, again, implies that no knowledge is pos- sible ; for, ex hypothesi, there is nothing left to char- acterise the object as one thing rather than its
182 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
opposite ; and that wliich is always changing in every aspect of it, can not be known even as changing. Again, looking at the question from the side of the subject " pure Sensationalism is speechless " ; for we can neither distinguish one sensation from, nor identify it with another, unless our thought goes beyond the sensation itself. " There is, therefore, no knowledge in the impressions of sense, but only in the discourse of reason in regard to them." ^
In the SojjJiist, again, the same results are shown to follow from the opposite doctrine, that is, from the abstract Eleatic assertion of the absolute unity and permanence of being ; for, if no difference be admitted in the aspects of the One, we cannot say anything about it. Even to affirm that ' the One is,' implies some distinction between being and unity. Every predication, in short, if it means anything, involves a relative difference between the subject and the predicate, and bare identity means nothing at all. Similar reasons make it impossible to give any meaning to a permanence which is with- out change, movement or activity. Neither absolute motion without rest nor absolute rest without motion can be conceived, but only the union of the two — that which combines motion and rest, or which
^ Theaet., 186 d. iv fih &pa rots iradr}fj.a(nv ovk 'ivi iiriaTi]fj.T], ev 5e tcJ) wepl e/cetVwc avWoyLcr/j-i^. Of course, syllogism has not yet its technical sense.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 183
rests in one point of view and moves in another.^ But if in this way pure unity and permanence, and pure diversity and change be proved to be each of them unintelligible, if they can neither be nor be known, what is the necessary inference ? It is obviously that the only thing that can either be, or be known, is the one-in-the-many, the permanent- i 11 -change. The Eleatic and the Heraclitean theories equally failed, because they attempted to divorce two elements which are inseparably united.
This result Plato immediately applies to the ideal theory. By its aid he sets aside the ordinary con- ception of ideas as self-referent abstractions, which are without any difference in themselves and without any relation to each other — a conception which had derived some support from the language of Plato himself in his earlier dialogues. Even in the Repuhlic, he had spoken as if any community or connexion between difi'erent ideas would be a source of confusion as to their real nature.^ But now he points out that, if ideas are to be conceived as principles of being and of knowledge, they can- not be taken as abstract identities without differ- ence, or as unmoved types unrelat-ed to each other and to the mind. As priiicipia csscndi, they must be unities of differences, and each of them must have a dehnitc place in the system of the whole, ^ Sophi.il, 249, 3. ^Jicji., <7(i a.
184 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
differentiated from the others and yet related to thera ; and as ^;?'mcz2?m cognoscendi, they must have community or relationship with the mind, and they must be conceived as forms of its activity as well as of the activity of the object.
In the Parmenides, this view is confirmed by an examination of the ideal theory with special refer- ence to the problem of the one and the many. Plato begins the discussion by casting contempt on the easy dialectical tricks of the sophists and rhetoricians, who proved that the one is also many, only by pointing out that the same individual in spite of his identity has many parts or attributes. But the true question of the one and the many relates to the difference and unity of these ideas in themselves, and not as they may be accidentally combined in one subject. " If, then, any one should attempt to show that the one and the many are the same, taking for his illustration the case of stones or trees and the like, we shall say that he shows, indeed, that something is at once one and many, but not that the one itself is many, or the many one. Thus he does not tell us anything worthy of wonder, but only what anyone can see for himself. But if, as I have just said, he were first to divide such pairs of ideas and set each idea by itself — say, the ideas of similarity and dissimilarity, of the one and the many, of rest and motion — and
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 185
should then show that these opposites are capable of being combined and separated, I should be greatly surprised." ^ Parmenides, however, proceeds to show that this result at which Socrates would wonder so much, can be actually realised : firstly, by a criticism of the theory of ideas, viewed as abstract universals ; and secondly, by following out the hypo- theses of the existence and of the non-existence of both of the one and of the many, in all the various senses in which these hypotheses can be taken.
In the first part of this investigation Plato shows the difficulties of the ideal theory, so long as ideas are taken as the common elements in various particulars, and yet at the same time as independent substances. For then, he asks, what can be meant by saying that many things participate in the same ideas ? If the idea be an independent substance, like a sail drawn over many objects,- it is impossible that it should be wholly in each of the things that participate in it : yet it would be absurd to suppose that it was divided among them ; for, in that case, it would cease to be one idea, and would thus lose all its meaning. Again, if the idea corresponds merely
^Parmenides, 129 d. It might be suggested tliat by putting this into the mouth of Socrates, Plato was acknowledging that tliere was a lime when it applied to himself.
"^Parni., 131 B.
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to the common element in many particular subjects which in other respects are different from each other, it will not be essentially related to these subjects, and cannot explain their existence. It will only be accidentally present in them along with their other qualities ; or if it be essentially bound up with them, it must be through some third idea.^ But, again, if that third idea be only a common element in the first idea and the particular subjects brought under it, it will only be accidentally related to both, and a fresh idea will be required to estal)lish connexion between them ; and so on ad infinitvAii. Nor will it alter the case if we suppose that the idea is an abstract type, and the subjects are merely like it ; for if likeness requires an idea to explain it, we again fall back into the same processus in infinitum. It appears, then, that we can explain nothing parti- cular by means of an abstract universal.
There is obviously no way out of these difficulties, so long as the idea is taken simply as a common element in a number of species and individuals, and not as a principle which manifests itself in their difference and binds them together into one systematic whole. Such an organic principle alone can be conceived as whole in all the parts brought under
^ Parm., 132 a. This is the rpiros fi^^pcDTros argument, which is so often mentioned by Aristotle, though he takes no notice of the iliscusbiou of it in the Parnwnidts.
THE l^HEORY OF IDEAS 187
it, and, therefore, as needing no tcrtiuvi quid to unite it with them. Now, looking to the way in which, both in the Theaeteiiis and the Sophist, Plato seeks to carry us beyond the abstract theories of the earlier schools, we cannot but suppose that his intent is to bring us to this conclusion, that is, to make us accept the doctrine that the true universal or idea is a concrete or organic prin- ci[)le, which is one with itself in all the diversity of its manifestations ; though, as is often the case, his dialectic is negative rather than positive, and he leaves us to draw the inference for ourselves.
Still more important is the application of the same method to the relation between ideas and the mind. If ideas be taken as objective principles, complete in themselves apart from any relation to our thought, Plato argues that they can be nothing for us ; and the objects of knowledge, though called Ity the same names as the ideas, will have no lelation to them. They will be completely transcendent and removed from our consciousness ; and, if there be any consciousness which grasps tliem, it will have no counuiniity or Luunexion with our minds. Yet, on the other hand, if we reject this hypothesis, and take ideas merely as our thoughts, which, as such, exist only in our minds, thoy will be reduced to subjective affections ; and it will be impossible to explain how through them we
188 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
can know anything objective. It is, however, absurd to regard thoughts in this way, as mere subjective states of an individual consciousness. " Why," asks Parmenides, " must not a thought be a thought of something ? And, if so, must it not be the thought of one definite object ? And must not this object be an ideal form, which remains the same in all cases in which it is realised ? " ^ In other words, Plato points out that the conceptualist hypothesis here suggested will not help us out of any of the difficulties involved in objective idealism ; and that^ indeed, it involves an ignoratio elencM. For ideas or universals cannot be taken as mere states of mind referring to nothing beyond themselves. But if not — if through universals we know anything — this implies that in some sense they are in the objects known through them, as well as in our minds ; and, indeed, that they are just the principles that give definiteness and unity to these objects, and make them capable of being known.
But if we can neither say that ideas are real principles without relation to mind, nor yet reduce them to states of mind, if, in other words, we can neither treat them as purely objective nor as purely subjective, what follows ? Obviously the only re- maining alternative is that the distinction between thought and reality, subjective and objective, must
1 Farm., lo2 c.
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 189
be regarded as a relative difference — a distinction between factors in a unity, which imply each other and which cannot be separated. On this view reality cannot be conceived except as the object of thought, nor thought except as the consciousness of reality. On the one hand, to take reality as com- plete in itself apart from thought, or as only accidentally related to thought, is essentially to misconceive its nature ; for every characteristic by which objects are determined as such, can be shown to involve their relation to a conscious subject; and the attempt to abstract from this relation would compel us to treat them as unknowable — as something external to the life of the subject, and which, therefore, the consciousness of the subject cannot reach. Indeed, it would be impossible on this hypothesis to explain how even the imagination of such objective reality should ever present itself to consciousness at all. On the other hand, it is equally irrational to take thouglits as mere states of the subject without reference to reality ; for it is in such objective reference that all their meaning lies. Indeed, apart from such reference, we could not apprehend them even as states of the sulg'eet.
We must, then, regard an idra, in the Platonic sense, as a principle which transcends the distinction of subject and object, of thought and reality, and which manifests itself in Imtli. We are not,
190 FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF
indeed, required to deny that there is an accidental, or merely subjective aspect of knowledge — as realised in a finite individual and under the special conditions of an individual life ; but we can never take the con- sciousness of an object as a mere state or quality of the individual subject, as determined by such conditions. We must regard such consciousness, however partial and inadequate it be, as the manifestation in an individual form of the one principle which is the source of all being and all thought. While, therefore, we uphold the relative distinction of thought and reality, we must be careful not to elevate it into an absolute difference ; for this would leave us with, on the one side, an idea which is merely a state of the subject, and, on the other side, a reality which is unknowable. We must repel the Berkeleian tendency to dissolve objects into ' mere ideas ' ; but at the same time we must rememlter that as objects they are relative to the subject ; for reality as intelligible implies the intelligence, and the intel- ligence, on its part, is nothing except as conscious of reality. We cannot understand either the process of being or the process of thought, unless we realise that they are only different aspects or stages of the same process ; and that, in their utmost divergence, they are held within the unity of one principle or, as Plato expresses it, of one idea.
But when we adopt this view of ideas, we are led
THE THEORY OF IDEAS 191
to a further result, which also is recognised by Plato. As we have seen, Plato requires us to conceive the idea as the unity of the opposite principles of the Eleatics and the Heracliteans, and, therefore, as com- bining in itself unity and difference, permanence and change. This, however, means that an idea must be conceived as a self-determining or active principle ; since only that which is self-determined can be said to transcend these oppositions, to maintain its unity in difference and its permanence in change. It alone can combine movement with rest, because its activity has its source and end in itself. But where are we to find such a self-determined principle ? It is obviously a conception which can find its realisa- tion, or at least its adequate realisation, only in a mind. Hence we do not wonder to find Plato declaring that " lieing in the full sense of the word (to 7raj/TeXft)9 op) cannot l)e conceived without motion and life, without soul and mind." ^ In other words, ideas, merely as such, are deposed from the highest place as principles of thought and reality and the place is taken by souls or minds. Accord- ingly, in lh(^ J'/i(ii(h-iis, in a passage to which wo sliall ha\(' to rcluni, the soul is s])o1<(Mi of as the one principle which is innn(jrl;il and unchangoablc, because it alone is self-moved or .scif-determiniMl and, therefore, the cause of all determination or
^SojJllst, L'lS K.
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charge in other things. ^ And it is obviously impossible to admit such a conception of soul or mind without depriving ideas, as such, of the posi- tion which they have hitherto occupied.
But with this a new difficulty arises : for, if " reality in the full sense of the word " be only found in souls or minds, what are we to make of other objects ? Are we to say that they are un- real appearances ? Then we shall have escaped the paradox of subjective idealism — that the only objects we know are our ideas as states of our subjectivity — only to fall into what we may call the paradox of objective idealism, that the only objects which we can recognise as such are minds. This difficulty does not escape Plato ; and accordingly we find him arguing in the Farmenides that, if things participate in ideas, and ideas are thoughts, we are reduced to the dilemma, either that ' all things think,' that is, that all things are minds : or, that " they are thoughts which exist without being in any mind that thinks them."^ But, if we reject the second alternative as absurd, we seem to be driven to the conclusion that nothing has real existence except minds and their
^ Phaedrufi, 245 c. It is to be noted that the dialogue in which Plato first speaks of the soul as self-moving and immortal is also the dialogue in which he first asserts that dialectic is a process both of analysis and synthesis, and that its object is to attain to a systematic view of things.
"^ Parm., 132 G. vorm-ara ovra avd-qTa flvai.
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states, and that all other existence is an illusory appearance. Can this conclusion be taken as in any sense reasonable ? And, if so, what is Plato's attitude towards it ?
Now, there is a sense in which every idealist must admit that the only object of mind is mind. Every- one who holds that the real is relative to mind, and, therefore, that the difference between mind and its object cannot be an absolute difference, must acknow- ledge that whatever is real, (and just so far as it is real,) has the nature of mind manifested in it. Eeality cannot be alien to the subject that knows it, nor can the intelligence comprehend any object except as it finds itself in it. In other words, objects can be recognised as real, only if, and so far as, they have that unity in difference, that per- manence in change, that intelligible individuality, which are the essential characteristics of mind.^ At least we can regard an object as an independent and substantial existence only in so far as it pos- sesses such characteristics.
It is not, however, necessary to infer from this that every object, which is in any sense real, ' thinks,' or is a conscious subject ; for we do not need to take reality as a simple predicate, which must be attached to everything in exactly the same sense. We may, and, indeed, we must admit that there are
' Rep. 477 A. t6 Tra/TtXaJs 6v TravreXcoi '^vwarbv, VOL. I. N
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what Mr. Bradley calls differences of degree, or what might perhaps even be regarded as differences of kind, in reality. In its highest sense the term ' real ' can be predicated only of a res completa, of that which is complete in itself, determined by itself, and, therefore, capable of being explained entirely from itself. But this does not involve the denial of reality even to the most transient of phenomena, if it be but as a phase of something more substantial than itself. There is a certain gradation in the being of things, according to the measure of their independence. From this point of view, every systematic whole must stand higher in the order of reality than an aggregate of unconnected, or exter- nally connected parts ; and a living being in its organic individuality would be regarded as more real than any inorganic thing. In the sphere of the organic, again, we may find many grades of being, from the simplest vegetable cell up to the highest and most complex of animals. But while all such beings are conceived as in a sense substantial, in so far as their existence is referred to a centre in themselves, it is only in man that we find that permanent self-identity, that unity with himself in all difference and change, which is needed fully to satisfy our conception of substantial reality. He only can be properly said to have a self, since he only is fully conscious of it. And it is only as self-conscious
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that he is able to refer all things to himself and so to generate a new world for himself ; or, if we prefer to put it so, to reconstitute the common world of all from a fresh individual centre. Even here, how- ever, we cannot stop ; for no finite spirit is complete in itself. As finite, he is part of a greater whole, the member of a society which itself is but one phase of humanity, conditioned by all the other phases of it, and, indeed, by all the other elements that enter into the constitution of the universe. We can, therefore, find that which is absolutely real or sub- stantial only in a creative mind, from whom all things and beings must be conceived as deriving whatever reality or substantiality they possess.
Now, if we adopt this point of view, it is possible to regard all objective reahty as kindred with the intelligence, without going on to assert that nothing exists except minds and their states. In other words, it is possible to maintain that every intelligible object is a partial form or expression of the same principle which is fully expressed in the intelligence, without denying the relative reality either of the inorganic or the organic world, and without, on the other hand, treating every mind as an absolutely self-determined being.
"We cannot, however, without much qualifica- tion, attribute any such conception to Plato. Plato, indeed, speaks of grades of being, but only in
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connexion with the theory of metempsychosis ; that is, he speaks only of the grades of elevation or degradation through which the individual soul may pass. All organised beings, or rather we should say all animals — for nothing is said of plants — are conceived by Plato as having in them a principle of self-determination to which he gives the name of a soul ; and all souls are treated as fundamentally identical in nature. But this nature is shown in its purity only in the Divine Being ; or, if in men, only in those men in whom the intelligence readies its highest development ; and, pre-eminently, in the philo- sopher who has grasped the central idea of good, and, therefore, beholds all things suh specie aeternitatis. And while the soul thus can rise to the highest, it can also sink to the lowest, becoming more and more immersed in the body, till the life of intelligence is lost in the obscure animal motions of sensation and appetite. So far, therefore, all real or substantial objects are conceived by Plato as souls or minds, in a more or less elevated or degraded condition. The doctrine of metempsychosis, in fact, enables him to hold that, in the strict sense of the word, reality is confined to souls or minds, without thereby denying that it belongs to every being that has life, or at least animal life, in it. On the other hand, when we descend further in the scale of being, this mode of explanation fails him, and Plato, it would seem, must
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be driven either to regard all inorganic objects as mere appearances, or else to imagine that they are some- how living and organic. And the latter alternative he would be obliged to reject ; for, as the body is con- ceived as obscuring and thwarting the life of the soul, it cannot be referred to the same principle with that life ; and its existence, even as an appearance, becomes a difficult problem. We are therefore compelled to recognise that at this point Plato's idealism passes into dualism ; and it becomes neces- sary for us to enquire into the exact form which his dualism finally took — a question which must be answered mainly from the Philehus and the Timaeus.
Before, however, we can deal with this subject, we have to consider more fully Plato's doctrine of the soul, and, particularly, his treatment of the question of immortality.
LECTURE EIGHTH.
THE IMMOETALITY OF THE SOUL AND THE IDEA OF GOD.
In the last lecture I endeavoured to show how Plato was led by a consideration of the opposing theories of the Eleatic and Heraclitean schools, to develop and correct his own theory of ideas. In his earlier account of that theory he had dwelt, with somewhat one-sided emphasis, on the contrast between the relative and shifting character of phenomena and the absolute unity and permanence of the ideal objects of knowledge. He had sometimes even spoken as if each of these objects was an independent and unchangeable unity, which was to be apprehended by itself, apart from all relation to the others. It is probable, however, that such statements were intended by Plato only to bring out clearly the difference between knowledge and opinion; and their inadequacy was partly corrected by tlie way in which all the ideas were referred back to the one central Idea of Good.
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Still the difficulty was not removed till, by the conflict of the earlier schools, Plato was led to realise the equal importance of analysis and synthesis, and to define the idea as the unity of identity and difference, of rest and motion. When this step was taken, the vague consciousness of the unity of all ideas with each other through the Idea of Good, which had been expressed in the Bepitblic, at once developed into the conception of a community or connexion of ideas, as distinct yet organically related elements of one intelligible whole.
At the same time, another process is going on in the mind of Plato. His early idealism had been essen- tially objective. The idea was primarily that which is absolutely real in the objective world as contrasted with the appearances of sense. It was the permanent essence of the thing which the name designated ; in Plato's own words, it was ' the good itself,' ' the beautiful itself,' ' the equal itself ' ; and the fact that it was recognised as such by the mind was secondary and derivative. But already in the Republic more attention is drawn to the subjective aspect of the intelligible reality, and the Idea of Good is regarded as at once and co-ordinately the principle of know- ing and the principle of being. And in the Pkaedrus and the Sophist this change is carried still farther, and soul or mind is treated as itself the principle of all thought and reality.
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Now, these stages in the development of Plato's thought are clearly reflected in his argument for the immortality of the soul, an argument which does not remain stationary, but is extended, modified, and developed through a succession of dialogues. In its earliest and most imperfect form, it is an attempt to prove the immortality of the soul through the special nature of its idea ; but this gradually passes into an endeavour to show that the soul is immortal in its own right. Thus souls or minds come to be regarded, not as beings whose substantial reality has to be proved by anything else, but as beings which contain in themselves the principle of all reality, and therefore of all proof. Finally, there is a still farther regress, by which all individual minds are referred back to one supreme intelligence, who is the ' first mover ' of all things, and who communicates life and intelligence to all other minds or souls. It is, therefore, essential to a comprehension of Plato's idealism, or rather, as we may call it, his spiritualism, that we should carefully follow out the different phases of this argument.
In the beginning of the Phaedo the immortality of the soul is conceived as involving, and involved in, its pre-existence ; and the proof of both is derived from the somewhat mythical conception of knowledge as reminiscence, a conception of which I have already spoken in an earlier lecture. As the knowledge of universals is drawn out of the soul, and not simply
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put into it by direct experience or by teaching, it is attributed to the memory of a former state of exist- ence, a memory which has become dulled and obscured by the descent of the spirit into the world of sense. This memory may be revived by reflexion and dialectic, though it cannot be completely restored till death liberates the soul from the body and its affections. The soul, therefore, is to be conceived as remaining unchanged in its essential nature through all the processes of birth and death; as being many times born into the sensible world and departing from it again, but ever maintaining the continuity of its life, and carrying with it, in a more or less explicit form, all the knowledge it ever possessed.
This suggestive poetic conception has been used by a modern poet for the same purpose. In his great " Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Eecollections of early Childhood," Wordsworth, like Plato, connects the idea of immortality with that of pre-existence, and finds the proof of both in those ' shadowy recollections ' of something better, which haunt us from our earliest years : in
"Those first affections, those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet the master-light of all our seeing, Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of an eternal silence."
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There are, however, two great changes in the Words- worthian reproduction of the Platonic myth. In the first place, Wordsworth seems to say that the child is nearest to its heavenly origin, and most clearly remembers it, and that, as we go on in life,
" the vision dies away, And fades into the light of common day."
Plato, on the other hand, has no sentiment about childhood, but holds that the soul at its first coming into the body is crushed and overwhelmed by its mortal nature, and loses all memory of the higher life in which it has partaken ; but that, as it grows to maturity, reminiscences of its past glories may be re-awakened in it. They may be re-awakened, in the first place, in a sensuous imaginative form, by beautiful objects which are " a shadow of good things, but not the perfect image of those things " : and then again in a more distinct and self-conscious way, they may be recalled by philosophical reflexion, which enables us to apprehend the truth in its own universal or ideal nature. And from this follows the second point of difference between Wordsworth and Plato, namely, that for Wordsworth the highest consciousness to which the soul can attain, is connected with certain vague imaginative suggestions or intuitions which cannot be defined or reduced to any distinct form :
"Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things,
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Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realised, High instincts, before which our mortal nature Doth tz-emble like a guilty thing surprised."
By Plato, on the other hand, all such symbolic and imaginative modes of consciousness are regarded as a mere foretaste and anticipation of knowledge, — a preparatory stage, in which the mind is satisfied with what is at best a ' noble untruth ' ; whereas the pure truth of things, as they really are, can only be apprehended by the reflexion of the philosopher, who grasps the universal and defines it, and who by it is enabled to gather all the different aspects of reality into a systematic unity.
With this half-mythical idea of reminiscence, how- ever, Plato immediately associates the more pregnant conception that, in rising to the universal, the mind is not so much going back into the past as going deeper into itself. The intelligence that grasps the universal must have something in itself tiiat is kindred thereto ; it must have something of that per- manent and substantial reality, that simplicity and unity with itself, which belongs to the ideal object it apprehends. It is, therefore, estranged from itself so long as its thought is turned only to that wliich is sensible and particular ; and, in awaking to tiuit which is spiritual and universal, it is, as it were, coming to itself again. Nor can it be touched by deatii : for
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death only breaks its connexion with the world of sense, and so delivers it from that " muddy vesture of decay," which obstructs its vision of the eternal, and prevents it from recognising its kinship there- with. Here, as elsewhere in the Phaedo, Plato seems to yield to the mystic tendency to exaggerate the opposition between the intelligible and the sensible, and to dwell upon that aspect of universals in which they appear as pure ideal unities freed from all the accidents of finite existence. And his argument is simply that the soul, in so far as it is capable of grasping such ideas, must be, like them, lifted above time and change. Plato, there- fore, is not yet prepared to maintain that the soul in its own right is immortal, still less to assert that it is the self-determining principle which determines all other things, the substantial being that underlies and gives origin to all other reality. He still treats it as a particular existence, which must be proved to be immortal through its special ^ relation to the ideal and eternal.
Nor does he go much beyond this point of view even in the curious argument which concludes the dialogue, and which he seems to regard as its most important result. The idea of the soul, he there contends, presupposes the idea of life ; and it cannot be separated from life, any more than the idea of evenness can be separated from the number two, or
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the idea of oddiiess from the number tliree. Hence, just because the idea of life is involved in the idea of the soul, the soul must live for ever.
We have here a close parallel to the ontological argument for the being of God — the argument that God necessarily exists, because existence is involved in the conception of Him as a perfect being. And both arguments seem open to the same objection. To the ontological argument it is objected that we cannot pass from thought to existence by means of another thought, but only by means of some tertium quid, if such can be found, which shall connect thought with existence. What is wanted is to prove that a being corresponding to the idea of perfection exists ; and it is an obvious evasion of tlie point to say that this requirement is satisfied because the idea of existence is included in the idea of perfection. And equally fallacious is it to attempt to bridge the gulf between the idea of the soul and its eternal existence by saying that life is essentially involved in that idea. Hence Teich- miiller contends with good reason that all that Plato has proved is that the idea of the soul — that ideal reality of which all souls partake, but with which none of them is identified — is immortal and eternal like all other ideas. In other words, he contends that Plato only gives us a relation of ideas ; and that, even if we grant to him that ideas
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are eternal principles, yet he has himself taught us that the same does not hold good of their particular embodiments. And it is a mere quibble to say that this case is an exception, because the idea in ques- tion is the idea of life ; for, ex hypothesi, an idea is distinguished from particular existences, just by the fact that it is eternal, while they are ever changing, ever becoming and passing away.
Now, there is a way of repelling the objection to the ontological argument for the being of God; though only, it must be confessed, by inverting it, or challenging the presuppositions on which it was originally based. That argument, as it is usually stated, starts with the assumption of an essential division between thought and being in general, and then seeks for some special means of transcending that division in the case of the idea of God. But, instead of assuming such a dualism to begin with, we may ask on what grounds it can be asserted. In other words, we may ask on what grounds existence is separated from thought, and thought from existence. When we look at the question in this way, as I tried to show in dealing with the Idea of Good, it becomes clear that the distinction of thought and reality is not an absolute one. It corresponds, indeed, to a real difference, but that difference presupposes an identity which is beyond it. There is an ultimate unity between thought
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and reality, which is postulated in the very act of opposing them, and without which that act itself would be meaningless ; for consciousness always presupposes a relation between the elements it dis- tinguishes, and therefore a unity which transcends the distinction. If the subject asserts his own existence in distinction from the existence of the objective world, he ipso facto presupposes the unity of the whole, in which both subjective and objective are factors. And the principle of that unity must be recognised by it as the principle at once of knowing and being ; that is, it must be recognised as the Divine Being. Thus, if we assert the existence of the mind that knows in opposition to the world that is known, we must also assert the existence of God. We must recognise the absolute Being who transcends the distinction of self and not-self, as a principle apart from which neither the one nor the other can have any reality or meaning. While, therefore, we cannot argue from the thought of God to His existence as an object, we can make a regress from the opposition of thought and reality to God as the unity implied in that opposition.
Is it possible to make a similar transformation of Plato's argument for the immortality of the soul ? And, if so, does Plato himself make it ? It is at once obvious that, in order to do so in the case of the soul, Plato must transcend that
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absolute opposition of the universal and the in- dividual, which Teichmuller and others have regarded as the essential characteristic of his philosophy. He must conceive the soul as possessed of what might be called a ' universal individuality,' i.e. an individuality which is one with its idea, and which, therefore, partakes of the eternity that be- longs to the idea. Now, the argument by which, in the Phaedo, Plato endeavoured to secure an ex- ceptional position for the soul, is certainly fallacious as he has there stated it ; but we find that, in later dialogues, he gave it another and less ambiguous form. Eor there we find him maintaining, not that the soul is immortal because it partakes in the idea of life, but that the ultimate principle of life, as of all substantial reality, is the soul. We may clearly trace the development of this thought in the Republic and the Fhaedrus.
In the Republic Plato lays down the principle that a thing can be destroyed only by its own evil, by that which specially mars and corrupts its own nature. Hence the soul cannot be injured by the diseases of the body or destroyed by its death, except in so far as these bring with them evils that directly affect the soul itself, namely, the evils of injustice and intemperance, folly and ignorance. But can the soul be destroyed even by these its own diseases ? On the contrary, we often find that its
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vitality, the intense activity of its life, shows itself just in and through its vices. " The injustice, which will murder others, keeps the murderer alive — aye, and well awake too ; so far removed is her dwelling-place from being a house of death." If, then, the soul cannot be destroyed even by its own peculiar and characteristic evils, it is absurd to think that it can receive any vital injury from the death of the body, which is not in itself con- nected with such evils. As no one can say that the decay of the body makes us more unjust, there is no reason to believe that the soul is affected by its death. Hence Plato contends that the soul is an absolutely permanent substance ; that, therefore, the number of souls must always remain the same, neither increased nor diminished; and that all that their connexion with mortal bodies can do is for a time to obscure and dim their brightness. But, he goes on, " in order to see the soul as she really is, not as we now behold her marred by communion with the body, we must contemplate her with the eye of reason in her original purity ; for, as she is now, she is like the sea-god Glaucon, whose original image can hardly be discerned, because his natural members are broken off and crushed and damaged by the waves, and incrustations have grown over them of seaweed and shells and stones, so that he
is more like a monster than his natural form." VOL. I. 9
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But " we must regard her higher nature as shown in her love of wisdom, and in her yearning for the divine to which she is akin." ^
Now, if we translate this into more modern terms, I think we can see that Plato means that the soul, in so far as it is capable of intellectual and moral life, has a universal principle, or perhaps we should say, the universal principle in it. Hence no influence can come to it from without which is capable of destroying it. No calamity which affects only its body or its mortal individuality can be fatal to its own life. For though, in one aspect of it, it is a particular finite being, subject to all the accidents and changes of mortality, there is that within it which lifts it above them all. We might add — though this perhaps would be going beyond what Plato says in this place and putting positively what he puts only negatively — that it can not only rise above tliem, but can also turn them into the means of its own development. Outward misfortune and even death, as Socrates had shown, it can treat with indifference, and even use them as an opportunity for the exercise and manifestation of its own spiritual energy. And as regards what Plato calls its own proper evils, though undoubtedly the soul may be divided against itself and weakened by vice and folly, yet even they cannot penetrate to 1 Rep., 611 D,
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 211
the deepest principle of its spiritual life ; they can- not destroy its self-conscious or rational nature, and therefore they cannot be incurable. Nay, the universal principle of spiritual life enables it to turn even its own failures and sins into ' stepping- stones ' upon which it may ' climb to higher things.* If this is going beyond Plato's exact words, it seems to be a natural inference from the principle he here lays down, that the soul cannot be destroyed by its own evil, much less by any other kind of evil.
The more positive expression of the same idea, however, is found in the Phaedrus. In that dialogue Plato gives us a myth in which the soul of man is described as a charioteer, driving a chariot with two horses — which of course represents the reason in its control over the higher and lower impulses, 01//XO9 and eTTiOujULia. The soul-chariot follows the pro- cession of the gods in their journey round the universe, and tries like them to rise above the apex of heaven to the vision of ideal reality, the vision of essential truth and goodness and beauty : but its wings often fail to carry it high enough. And when they fail, it sinks downward to the earth, and becomes the tenant of a mortal body. In connexion with this wonderful symbolic myth on which Plato lavishes all the treasures of his imagination, he suddenly turns from poetry to philosophy, and argues that the soul, as such, is immortal, because it is self-moved or
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self-determined : " Soul in every case is immortal," he contends, " for what is ever in motion is immortal, but that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move, ceases also to live. Only the self-moving, as it never abandons itself, never ceases to move, and is the fountain and begin- ning of motion to all that moves beside. Now, a beginning or principle cannot have come into being at any time, for that which comes into being must have a beginning or principle from which it comes, but the principle itself cannot come out of anything else : for if the principle came out of anything else, it would show itself not to be a principle. But, again, what never begins to be must also be indestructible : for, if the principle were destroyed, it could not rise into being out of anything else, nor anything else out of it, since all things must come from a principle. The begin- ning or principle of motion must, therefore, be found in that which moves itself, and it can itself have neither death nor birth ; otherwise the whole universe and the whole process of creation would collapse and be brought to a stand, and no path back into motion and existence would remain possible. If, however, we say that tliat is immortal which is moved by itself, we need have no scruple in asserting that this is the very essence and idea of the soul. For any body which has the principle of its motion
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 213
outside of itself is ' soiilless,' while that which has its principle of motion within and from itself, is ' possessed of a soul/ — implying that this is the very nature of soul. But if it be granted that that which moves itself is soul, then of necessity the soul is unbegotten and immortal." ^
This idea of the soul as the first mover is a very important one in the history of philosophy and theology, and we shall have to discuss it more fully hereafter in connexion with the views of Aristotle. Here I need only say what is necessary for the explanation of its place in the system of Plato. In this view, we have, in the first place, to remember that the term ' motion ' is used by Plato in a wider sense than we commonly attach to it, as meaning not only change of place, but activity in general. For in the former sense motion always implies the action of one thing upon another, and absolute self-move- ment is a contradiction in terms. What Plato means, therefore, is that the soul has in itself an original principle of activity, a principle of self-consciousness and self-determination. He thus carries the idea suggested in the Republic a step farther : for, while
^ Phaedrus, 245 c. The great ditrioulty in translating this passage is that in it Plato's language is in the very process of changing from figure to thought, or, as a CJernian would express it, from the VorMel- lung to the Beyriff. He is in the act of making philosophic terms out of words in common use. Thus dpx'7 is just passing from ' be- ginning' to 'principle,' -^iixaiz from 'birth' to 'becoming' ia general, ami Kivq<ns from ' motion ' to ' activity ' in general.
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in that dialogue we have the negative thought, that the soul cannot be destroyed by any evil derived from another than itself, in the Fhaedrus we have the positive counterpart of this, that it is determined, and can only be determined, by itself. It has a universal nature and, therefore, it transcends all limits or hindrances that can be put upon it by other things. They cannot affect it, or they can affect it only indirectly through its own action. Even its confinement in a mortal body is represented as the result of its own fall from its previous high estate ; and the nature of the body in which it is imprisoned, as well as its whole lot in this world, is said to be fixed by its own inner state. " The soul is form and doth the body make " : it creates its own environment, and in successive births it rises and falls in its outward estate, according to the goodness or badness of its actions: airia eXo/j-evov, Oeo^ avaiTio^} It is then Plato's doctrine in the Phaedrus that ' all soul ' — and here he makes no distinction between different grades of souls or even between the divine being and other souls — is self- moving or self-determined, and has a spring of eternal energy in itself; and that, though its spiritual life may be darkened and obstructed, it can never be destroyed. For soul is the principle of all reality both in itself and in all other tilings. " The soul '■ Rep., 417 E.
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in i ts totality," he declares/ " has the care of all inanimate or soulless being everywhere, and traverses the whole universe, appearing in divers forms. When it is perfect and its wings have fully grown, it soars upward and orders the whole world ; but when it loses its wings, it sinks downward, till it reaches the solid ground and takes up its abode in an earthly body, which seems to move of itself but is really moved by the soul. And this compound of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature : for immortal no such union can be believed to be, though our sensuous imagination, not having seen or known the nature of God, may picture him as an immortal creature having a body and a soul which are united through all time."
It appears, then, that in the Phaedrus the soul is taken as the principle of all things, to which all movement — all activity and actuality — must ultimately be referred. It is the one absolutely universal, and therefore absolutely individual existence, which deter- mines itself and is not determined by anything else, and which for that reason is immortal and eternal. Thus souls seem to attract to themselves the charac- teristics of ideas, or, at least, to take the place of ideas, as ultimate principles of being and know- ing. Further, Plato seems to attribute soul in this sense, not only to men, but to all living ' Phaedrus, 24G ij.
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creatures. At least he regards them all as alike in the fundamental principle of their being, how- ever the manifestation of it may be obstructed by the kind of body with which it has become associated. In short, as I have before explained, all life for Plato is the life of intelligence, more or less adequately realised. While, therefore, in all souls that are incarnated in bodies, there is ipso facto a finite and perishable nature which can- not survive the crisis of death, there is also in them a principle which is altogether independent of the accidents of their mortal part. Hence the individual who is capable of moral and intellectual activity — who, in spite of the narrow conditions of mortal life, can become a ' spectator of all time and exist- ence,' and who, in his practical efforts, is guided by a consciousness, or at least a foretaste and prophetic anticipation, of the universal good — such an indivi- dual is essentially self-determined. He has in him a universal principle of activity or life, and nothing can be imposed upon him from without which is not accepted from within. In this way Plato could maintain the originality and independence of every spiritual being, as such, even in his lowest degradation — even when, in his subjection to sense and appetite, he sinks below humanity : for in all its transmigrations the soul is conceived as remain- ing one with itself. There is, indeed, always a
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 217
certain mythic element in Plato's statement of this view ; and we are not able to say how far he means what he says of the pre-natal and the future states to be taken literally. But there cannot be any reasonable doubt that he attributes a self-determined and therefore immortal existence to the soul — or, perhaps we should rather say, to the reason or spirit ; for, in his later and more definite statements, the soul is taken as the prin- ciple that connects the pure reason with the mortal body ; and it is only to the spiritual part of man's being that the attribute of immortality is assigned.
It is obvious, however, that Plato could not stop at this point. As he could not rest in the thought of a multiplicity of ideas without referring them back to the one Idea of Good, so neither could he be content with the conception of a multitude of self-determined and immortal souls without referring back to one divine reason, as the source and end of their spiritual life. Hence in the Philebus wc find him speaking of a " divine intelligence," which is the ultimate cause of all order and organi- sation in the mixed and imperfect nature of man and of his world. And the same tliought is ex- pressed in the mythical language of the Tirnaeus, where Plato declares that the souls of tlie gods and the higher element in the souls of men are tlie direct work of the Creator : they are, therefore.
218 THE IMMORTALITY OF 1 HE SOUL
incapable of being destroyed except by him who has created them, and he cannot will to destroy what he has himself made.^ Thus, in place of a num- ber of independent spiritual beings, each immortal in his own right, we have the idea of a kingdom of spirits, who all, indeed, partake in the divine nature, and are therefore raised above time and change, but who, nevertheless, have a dependent and derived existence and are immortal only through their rela- tion to God. It is in accordance with this that in the Laws, where Plato repeats the argument of the Fhaedrus that the soul is immortal, because it is self-determined, he applies it only to the divine Being. God only is the first mover, the source of life and activity in all other beings. He is the sovereign will, who has ordered the world as an organic whole in which each individual has the exact part to play for which he is fitted.^ If man be immortal it is not in his own right as an individual, but because the divine life is communicated to him. In other words, we have to prove his immortality on the ground that the universal principle of reason, which is the presupposition of all being and of all knowledge, is the principle of his own life ; and that all beings, in whom this principle is realised, must have this nature manifested in them. We must prove it, in short, because in the language of 1 Tim., 41 A : cf. Leyes, 904 A. "^ Leges, 90.3 b.
AND THE IDEA OF GOD 219
the New Testament " God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." And perhaps this is the one argument for immortality, to which much weight can be attached.
It appears, then, that Plato's proof of the immortality of the soul ultimately resolves itself into the ontological argument for the being of God ; or rather, we should say, that it is what that argu- ment becomes when freed from its dualistic pre- suppositions. In other words, it is a regressive argument, which carries us back to an ultimate unity, prior to all difference, and especially to the difference of thought and being. Further, Plato maintains that this unity must be conceived as a supreme intelligence, which, as such, stands in a peculiar relation to all beings who have the principle of intelligence in them. These, and these alone, are regarded as partaking in the divine life, and, therefore, as lifted above change and death. All other things are, in comparison with them, only appearances, which are continually changing and pass- ing away to make room for others. But they — though for a time they become denizens of this world of birth and death, of growth and decay, and may pass through many transitory forms in the rise and fall of their spiritual life — do not essentially belong to it, and their real nature cannot manifest itself clearly until they are liberated from it.
220 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
Plato, then, though in his later dialogues he gets beyond the abstract antagonism between the ideal and the sensible worlds, ends by restating that antagonism in a new form. He has shown that ideas are not to be conceived as excluding all difference and relativity, but as elements in an intelligible world, each of which has its distinct character, while yet it is essentially bound up with all the rest. In the second place, he has turned this idealism into a spiritualism by treating soul or intelHgence as the only thing that can be regarded as active or self-determined, the only thing that can be taken as actual or real in the full sense of the word. Finally, he has suggested that all souls are to be viewed as derived from, or dependent on, one divine soul or spirit, who manifests himself in and to them, so that, in the words of Schiller,
" Aus dem Kelch des Seelen-reichs Schaumt ihm seine Unendlichkeit."
But this ideal or spiritual world, which is in per- fect unity with itself through all its difference, is still conceived as standing in sharp antithesis to the world of phenomenal appearance, in which differ- ence becomes conflict, and conflict produces endless mutation of birth and death. And the last problem of the Platonic philosophy or theology is to de- termine the relation of these two worlds to each other.
LECTURE NINTH.
THE FINAL EESULTS OF THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY.
In the last two lectures I attempted to show the nature of the transition by which Plato passes from the general doctrine that the idea or universal is the real, to the doctrine that the ultimate reality is to be found in mind. Absolute Being, ' that which is in the highest sense of the word/ must be a principle which transcends the opposition, maintained by the earlier schools, between being and becoming, between the one and the many; and which also transcends the new opposition, which was brought into view by Socrates, between the subject and the object. It cannot be conceived as rest without motion, as permanence without activity ; but as little can it be conceived as an objective ideal principle without consciousness or intelligence ; or, on the other hand, as a mere subjective thought or state of coiLSciousness without objective reality. If it is intelligence, it is not inLelligence as separated by
222 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
abstraction from the intelligible world, but as pre- supposing and including it. It is 'divine reason,' as the ultimate unity of all the ideas of things, and so as the principle at once of knowing and of being.
But this involves another transition. If mind be the principle of the universe, we cannot con- template all the parts of the universe as equally far from it and equally near to it. There are ideal principles in all things, but the principle of life and consciousness raises the beings that partake in it above other beings or things ; for all soul is divine and " has the care of all inanimate or soul- less being, and traverses the whole universe," ^ taking one form at one time and another at another. Every soul, as such, is a self-determining being, whose life cannot be overpowered or destroyed by anything external to itself. It is thus immortal, and above the power of death and time. And if, in any sense, it be made subject to them, it must be by its own act.
This at once brings us to a problem which greatly exercised the mind of Plato in the latest period of his life, as is shown by the Fhilebus and the Tiviaeus, the problem of the relation of the ideal to the phenomenal world. In one way this problem had now become much more complex and difficult for him ; for he could no longer be
' Phaedrus, 246 B,
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 223
content, if he ever were content, with the broad contrast between the permanent and the changing, the one and the many, seeing that he had recognised that the ideal world contains both these elements. The supreme principle could not now be conceived, if it ever were conceived, as an abstract unity resting in itself ; it is now definitely recognised as the keystone of a system, and as one with itself in all the ideas which it binds into a whole. It is a conscious and active principle, whose activity mani- fests itself in every element and part of the universe. It " lives through all life, extends through all extent, spreads undivided, operates unspent " ; but in a higher sense it reveals itself only in the individual souls who partake in its immortality.
But, though in this way the ideal world appears to take up into itself all the cliaracteristics by which the phenomenal world was at first dis- tinguished from it, Plato does not give up the fundamental contrast of tlie two. The multiplicity and movement that belong to the ideal world have still to be distinguished from the multiplicity and movement which are found in the world of genesis and change, the world of space and time. When we pass to the phenomenal, that transparent unity with itself througli all its difit'erences which be- longs to the pure intelligence, is ol)scured and disturbed, and its resting identity with itself in
224 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
all its activities is broken up and lost in opposition and contradiction. "The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not." Thus, in spite of the progress which Plato made towards a thorough-going idealism, in which the abstract antagonisms of earlier philosophy were overcome, he was never able to escape from the dualism implied in his original contrast of science and opinion.
We might perhaps regard this as due in part to a mistaken view of the abstraction which is necessary for science. Every science selects some aspect or sphere of reality, and isolates it from all other spheres or aspects of it, in order that it may thoroughly elucidate that which it has chosen as the object of its investigation. Every science thus rejects an immense variety of detail with which its peculiar object is surrounded, as being for it accidental and irrelevant. And, though what is irrelevant and accidental for one science may not be so for another, yet, however far we go in this direction, there seems to be much in objects and in their coexistences and successions, which can- not be explained by any science. Further, even if philosophy can grasp some Idea of Good — some principle which unites all the sciences, because it transcends their limited points of view — yet it must always be impossible for us to trace the operation of this principle in the endless detail of changing phenomena which make up our daily life. The utmost knowledge
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 225
we can attain still leaves the ordinary course of the world for us a mass of contingencies, of accidental juxtapositions and successions, of which we can only say that it is, and not why it is, still less that it is for the best.^ Hence our philosophy is too apt to become an effort to find our way to an ideal world in which we may take refuge from the confusions of the world of sense, even though we may acknowledge in words that it is this ideal world that gives to the world of sense all the order, significance, and reality which it possesses. Now, it is just here that Plato seems to take up his position, recognising what we may call the ideal kernel of existence, which gives to this world all the intelligible reality it possesses, but unable to see that in any sense or from any point of view it can be regarded as a pure manifestation of the ideal. Hence his optimism, in the strict sense of the word, is reserved for this ideal kernel, and in regard to every- thing else he is forced to lower his tone, and to declare that it is not the best but only as good as it can
'In the PhilthiiH (16 d) Plato urges that in the descent from the unity of the idea to tlie multiplicity of plienomena, we should endeavour to carry division by intelligible principles as far as possible, subdividing till " the unity with wliicli we began is seen not only to be one and many and inHiiite, but also a detinitenumbtT; the infinite must not be suffered to approach the many until the entire nund)er of the species intermediate between unity and infinity has been discovered — then, and not till then, we may rest from division, and without further troubling ourselves about the endless individuals, may allow tliem to drop into infinity." VOL. I. 1'
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possibly be in a phenomenal world ; since in that world the ideal is present only as reflected upon the sensible, as a " likeness of good things, but not the perfect image of those things." Hence also there is in Plato a strange fluctuation, both of thought and feeling, in regard to the phenomenal world. Sometimes it is almost exalted to the ideal from which it is derived, and sometimes it is contemned as a phantom world of shadows which hardly redeems itself from non- existence. The phenomenal world for Plato is so far real and divine, as it is a reflexion of the divine intelligence ; but it is undivine and unreal, because it is only a reflexion of it.
It is in the Philehus and the Timaeus that this view of the universe gets its fullest expression. In the former of these dialogues, Plato contrasts the divine intelligence which is one with itself in all its action, and so raised above all change and conflict, above all pleasure and pain, with the complex world of genesis and decay, of formation and dissolution, where a principle of order, which is derived from the divine intelligence, has to maintain itself in an element of chaos, and more or less successfully to reduce it to a cosmos. All finite existences, even finite spirits, are a kind of compromise between what Plato calls the limit and the unlimited, between a law which would regulate all things and confine them within definite bounds, and a vague indeterminate material or basis of phenomenal
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 227
existence, which has no law in itself, and therefore must receive its determination from without. And, as that which is determined from without can never be perfectly determined, so this material^ is ever ready to escape from the limitations to which it is subjected, and to return to the lawlessness from which it has been redeemed. If it could exist by itself, it would swing unchecked from excess to defect, from defect to excess, and the ' golden mean ' could only partially and for the time be established in it. It is like the marble of the sculptor, which always has some flaw or imperfection in it that makes it a less than perfect embodiment of his idea ; or like the forces of nature, which can be subjected to man's design, but have no direct athnity with the purpose they are made to serve and never exactly conform themselves to it. This disconformity shows itself in the continual passing away of everything finite, in the defects that attach to all natural existences, above all in the continual division and conflict of human life. In man this contrast of tlie material with tlie ideal wliich realises itself in it, appears as the opposition of mind and sense, of the intelligence that apprehends and seeks the gooil with the impulses which, left to themselves, tend to any object that promises pleasure without asking whether, or how far, the good is realised in it.
^I use this word as a convenient expression, though it suggests something more definite and substantial than Plato's dTretooc
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The ideal of man's life is that it should exhibit in itself " an immaterial principle of order maintaining a noble sovereignty over a living body " ; ^ and this involves not only the subordination of the natural to the spiritual, but also the most perfect order and gradation of all spiritual aims, and the restriction of enjoyment to pleasures that are simple and pure — pleasures that accompany the highest activities of the soul and do not disturb them. But such an ideal can never be completely realised in the 'mingled' and divided nature of man.
The same contrast is expressed in another way in the Timaeus, where Plato gets over some of its diffi- culties by adopting a mythic form of expression. " We must first," he declares, " make a distinction of the two great forms of being and ask : What is that which is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is ? The former, which is apprehended by reason and reflexion, is changeless and ever one with itself ; the latter, which is appre- hended by opinion through irrational sensation, is ever coming into being and perishing, but never really is. Now, everything that begins to be, must be brought into being by some cause ; for without a cause it is impossible for anything to be originated. But whatever things have been produced by the Creator, moulding the form and character of his work after the
1 Fhiklm-<, 64 B,
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 229
pattern of that which is ever the same, are of neces- sity beautiful ; while those things which he has produced after the pattern of that which has come to be — a pattern which is itself not original but created — cannot be beautiful. Now as to tlie whole sphere of heaven, the ordered universe, or whatever we please to call it, our first enquiry in this as in every other subject must be, whether it always existed and had no birth or origination from anything else than itself, or whether it came into being and had a begin- ning in something else. It did begin to be, I reply; for it is visible and tangible, and it has a material body ; and of all sucli sensible things, which are apprehended by opinion with the aid of sense, we must say that they are in process of becoming and are the results of such a process ; hence we must needs say that it had a cause."
" Now the Maker and Father of this universe is hard to find, and even if we had found him it would be impossible to reveal liim to all men. There is, however, an enquiry which we may make regarding him, to wit, whicli of the j)atterns he had in view when he fasliioned the universe, — the pattern of the unchangeable, or of tli;it which has come to be. If the World iiidet'd lie ln'autit'ul and its artificer good, it is manifest that he must have had in view the eternal as his nKulcl and pattern ; but if the reverse be true, which cannot be said witliout
230 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
blasphemy, then he had in view the pattern which has come to be. Now anyone can see that he looked to the eternal as his pattern ; for the world is the most beautiful of creatures, and he is the best of causes. Having, then, come into being in this way, we may say that it has been created in the image of that which is apprehended only by reason and intelligence, and which eternally is. The universe, then, it appears, is a copy and not an original."
" Now in every discussion it is most important to make a beginning which agrees with the nature of the subject of which we treat. Hence in speaking of a copy and its original, we must see that our words are kindred to the matter which they have to express. When they relate to the abiding and unchangeable reality which is apprehended by reason, they must Ije fixed and unchanging, and, in so far as it is possible for words to be so, they must be incapable of refutation or alteration. But when they relate to that which is an imarje, thoudi made in the likeness of the eternal, they need only have likelihood and make such an approach to exactness as the case admits ; for truth stands to belief as being to becoming. If, tlien, amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are not able in every respect to render all our ideas consistent with each other and precisely accurate, no one need be surprised. Enough, if we are able to give an account
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 231
which is no less likely than another ; for we must remember that I who speak, and you who judge of what I say, are mortal men, so that on these subjects we should be satisfied with a likely story, and demand nothing more." ^
In this passage Plato makes a broad division between the eternal reality of things and the world of becoming and change, and a corresponding division between the faculties of the soul by which they are severally apprehended, the former being the object of the pure intelligence and of knowledge, the latter of opinion, or, in other words, of a judg- ment directly based on sense. And it is to be noticed that by this he does not mean merely that opinion is a kind of knowledge which is imperfect by reason of the weakness of our minds. He means that this imperfection lies in the nature of the case ; for no changing finite existence can be the object of the pure intelligence, which always contemplates that which absolutely is. The phenomenal world can be pictured by the imagination but, strictly speaking, it can never be understood. It is seen under the form of time which is the moving image of eternity and breaks up the eternal ' now ' into past, present, and future. The ' is,' which is tlie only tense of science, loses its highest sense in the dubious region of phenomena which are continually
* J'imaeiut, '27 E sey.
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changing. It is true that there is something like the unity and permanence of absolute being in the recurrent movement of the heavenly bodies, which, passing through long cycles of change, are supposed ever to return again to their original order and to resume their courses. And in another way we have the same return of the time-process upon itself in the course of animal life, which, as Plato says, imitates eternity by the continual repro- duction of the species in new individuals, who go through the same cycle of change.^ In this world of generation and decay, however, we find no substantial existence, no permanent reality that ever remains one with itself : for, even if we go down to the four original elements, we find them also changing into one another. Nothing, therefore, that we know or experience in this world, seems to have a substantive reality of its own, or to be more tlian, so to speak, an adjective or passing phase of existence. And, if we ask v/hat is the substance of which such adjectives are predicated, we are obliged to say that it is a thing of which in itself and apart from these adjectives, we can say nothing.
" Suppose an artificer who has given all sorts of shapes to a piece of gold, to be incessantly remoulding it, substituting one shape for another ; and suppose somebody to be pointing to one of them, and to ask
^ Symposium, 207 D.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 233
what it is : the safest answer that could be made would be, that it was gold ; but as to the triangles and other shapes the gold had taken, it would be best not to speak of these shapes as if tliev really existed, seeing that they change even while we are making the assertion. . . . Now the same argument applies to the universal nature that receives all bodies. It must be always regarded as the same, as it never departs from its own nature. For, while receiving all indiscriminately, it never itself assumes a form like any of those things that enter into it. It, indeed, is the original recipient of all impressions, and is moved and transformed by them, and appears difierent from time to time by reason of them : but the things that go in and out, are but imitations of realities, modelled after their image in a way hard to explain, which we shall discuss hereafter." ^
Plato then goes on to say that this recepti\'e nature, being itself formless though it receives all forms, is hard to define, but tliat the admission of its reality is forced upon us by the necessity of providing a substratum in which the change to wliich all things are subjected may take place ; and tliat in spite of tlie fact tlial its clianges arc so com]>leto that they seem to leave nothing at all behind wliich can be regarded as constituting such a substiatum. And ' Tim., 50 a x,q.
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he sums up his whole doctriue as to the real, the phenomenal, and its basis or substratum in the following passage which contains in it the germs of much later speculation. " We must agree that there is one kind of being which is always the same, uncreated and indestructible, never receiving anything into itself from without, nor itself going out to any other, but invisible and imperceptible by sense, and of which the perception is granted to intelligence alone. And there is another kind of being which bears the same name with this and is similar to it, a created being which is always in motion, coming to be in a certain place and again perishing out of it, and which is apprehended by sense and opinion. And there is a third kind of being, namely, space, which is eternal and indestructible but provides a seat for all the changeful forms of existence, and which is apprehended without the aid of sense by a kind of spurious reason and is hard to believe in. Looking to this tertium quid as in a kind of dream, we say of all existence that it must be somewhere and occupy a space, and that that which has no place either in earth or in heaven, cannot be anything at all. And such is the power of this dream of ours that it makes us unable when we wake to realise the truth, to wit, that an image, or reflexion — seeing that by its essential nature and function, it has no basis in itself but is the flitting shadow of something
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 235
else — must have something else than itself, in which it is and by means of which it lays hold upon existence : otherwise it will be reduced to nothing at all. On the other hand, in order to vindicate the reality of the real we must call in the aid of the following accurate rule of reason, namely, that if there be anything which has two different con- stituents, it is impossible that one of these consti- tuents should inhere in the other in such a way that they shall form a self-identical unity in spite of their difference." ^
The train of thought here is a little difficult to follow. In the first place, Plato maintains that that which changes, as such, cannot be absolutely real, cannot have that permanent reality which science seeks to grasp. And as this change extends to all the qualities which we recognise in the phe- nomenal object, we are driven, in seeking for permanent reality, to look beneath the qualities for something which is equally receptive of them all. This common basis is then taken as the quasi-sub- stance of things sensible, while yet, as absolutely indeterminate, it is not a proper substance at all. To Plato a true substance must be a perfectly definite and determined object of knowledge, and, in
' 7'im., 52 A seq. Plato means that the plicnomenal, as a com- bination of an image witli that wliicli is its substratuni, lias not unity with itstlf, and therefore eannot be regarded as a substantial reality.
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this point of view, the qualitative states through which the substratum passes are more like substances than the supposed substratum itself; yet they cannot be taken as substances, because they change and pass away. Such, then, is the strange puzzle of pheno- menal existence. We know it under distinct pre- dicates which are definable, but which in it are continually changing ; and on the other hand, the substance, to which we seem obliged to refer these predicates, turns out to have no intelligible character. It is something which we are driven to assert as real by what Plato calls a " spurious and illegitimate reasoning," that is, by the argument that, as every par- ticular kind of existence has a material out of which it is formed, so all the forms of existence, as they change into each other, must have a substratum in which the change takes place. Of this substratum, however, we are able to give no account, except that it is the seat of everything else — that to which we refer when we say that everything must be some- where : in other words, it seems to be one with the condition of being in space, to wliich all sensible existence is subjected. Yet we are not able to con- ceive empty space as a substance, in wliich qualities inhere and changes take pluce. This riddle of phe- nomenal existence, however, is partially explained when we recognise that phenomenal existence is essentially an image or reilexion of something else
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 287
than itself, and that, therefore, we are obliged to think of it as a reflexion in something else than itself. Thus the image in one way looks to the ideal reality as its substance, and in another way to that in which it has, so to speak, its local habitation. It is characteristic of the phenomenal that it can be presented to us only through this curious combina- tion of metaphor and analogical inference, but no such ambiguous nature could possibly belong to that which is real in the full sense of the word.
But we cannot leave the matter at this point. If Plato be right in saying that we fall into an illegitimate way of thinking when we attribute in- dependent substance to the phenomenal, he cannot be right in saying that such a way of thinking is necessary. He is, in fact, attempting to find a way between the two horns of a dilemma. He is trying to conceive the ideal as manifesting itself in the phenomenal, and yet at the same time, as having an absolute reality which is complete in itself with- out any manifestation. Conversely, he would like to treat the phenomenal as if it were nothing at all, or at least a ' mere appearance ' which adds nothing to the ideal reality. Yet he cannot deny that even an appearance or image has a kind of reality of its own, and that it needs to be accounted for. Hence, wiien he aljandoned the simple method of Parmenides, wiio denied that phenomena have any reality at all, he
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was obliged to treat them as an illegitimate kind of substances — which yet are no true substances, be- cause they do not belong to the ideal or intelligible world. The only possible escape from this logical impasse, would have been to set aside altogether the abstract opposition of the ideal world and the world in space and time, and to substitute for it the conception that they are correlative factors in the one real world. If Plato had adopted this course, he would have done justice equally to the distinction and to the unity of these factors ; and he would have avoided the opposite dangers of an abstract monism and of an irreconcilable dualism. He would have conceived the intelligible reality, or the divine intelligence which is its central principle, not as resting in itself, but as essentially self -revealing ; and he would have treated the world in space and time as its necessary manifestation. Are there any traces of such a view in Plato ?
Before answering this question, let me first refer to the fact that Plato here identifies the substratum of phenomena with that which attaches spatial condi- tions to them, so that every one of them must be somewhere. We must remember, however, that this, whatever it is, has already been represented by Plato as also attaching temporal conditions to them ; so that every one of them must be in a ' now,' which is only a state of transition from what it was to what it will
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 239
be.^ Plato's thought, then, seems to be that the world in space and time is a sort of disrupted and distorted image of the intelligible world, in which the organic unity and eternal self- consistency of the ideal loses itself in dissonance and cliange. For, as reflected into space, the pure unity of ideas with each other through all their differences, is exchanged for the combination of parts which are external to each other and without unity in themselves ; and, as reflected into time, the ideal movement of tlie intelligence, which remains one with itself in all its activity because it grasps its whole system in every idea, is turned into the vicissitude of an external sequence in which one thing is continually passing away to make room for another. With this Plato combines the further conception, that that which is essentially self-external, as in space, and essentially in flux, as in time, must be
^ It would involve a long discussion to explain all that Plato says on this subject. We may agree with Baiiniker (ProUetnder Materie in der Oriech. Phil., p. 184 seq.) that Plato is led by Pythagorean influence to identify matter with space, and that, consequently, he gives a purely mathematical explanation of the four elements as figures formed by the combination of planes. But it is to be noted that Plato immediately proceeds to speak of it as the 'nurse of genesis,' and to trace the continual change of sensible things to the inequality of the determination of different parts of space by dill'or- ent figures, which are, therefore, continually conflicting and passing into each other. They are, as it were, shapes which appear for a moment and vanish to make room for others. Tiie idea of exter- nality is thus inmiedlately connected in Plato's mind with tiie ideas of conflict and of the consequent flux of becoming. And both seem to imply something analogous to the Aristotelian i/Xtj,
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externally determined in all its changes. Hence the phenomenal is contrasted with the intelligible world, or, what is the same thing, with the intelligence, as that which is moved by another with that which is mov^ed by itself ; or, in other words, as that which is under the sway of necessity with that which is self-determined or free.^ But though primarily and in itself the phenomenal world is the sphere of neces- sity, even in it Plato holds that actually necessity is subjected to a higher principle, which, however, never completely does away with it. " All these things, constituted as they are by the necessity of nature, the Creator of what is best in the world of becoming took to himself at the time when he was producing the self-sufficing and most perfect God ; ^ and while he used the necessary causes as his ministers in the accomplishment of his work, it was by his own art that he realised the good in all the creation. Wherefore we must distinguish two kinds of causes, the necessary and the divine ; and, so far as our nature admits, we must make the divine in
^It is to be observed that Plato views that which is moved by another as entirely passive, and that he has no idea of any reaction involved in the transmission of motion. The abstract contrast of that which is self-moved with that which is moved by anotiier, i.e. pure activity with pure passivity, is what makes the union of mind and body so accidental and external witli Plato.
^ Tim. , 68 E seq. The universe as an organic whole, as we shall see in the sequel, is conceived by Plato as a ' second God,' who is as like as possible tq the first.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 241
all cases our end and aim ; but we must seek the necessary causes for the sake of the divine, consider- ing that, without them and isolated from them, it is impossible for us to know or attain or in any way share in those highest things which are the objects we really desire."
Reason, in short, realises its designs in the world only so far as necessity will permit ; it rules, in Plato's metaphor, by ' persuading necessity ' ; and necessity can never be completely persuaded. Hence, in our enquiry into the nature of the world, as Plato had already pointed out in the Phacdo, we have to study both the causes of things, i.e. both the ends realised in them, and the conditions sine quihus non, imposed upon their realisation by the material in which they are realised. But we can never bring these two together, or conceive the necessity of nature as anything more than an external and partly recal- citrant means whereby the purposes of reason have to be realised.
We end, therefore, with a conception of the
phenomenal world as tlie resultant of two kinds of
causation, which cannot be brought to a unity ; for
we cannot in any way bridge over the gulf between
the actus puriis of reason and the mere passivity of
corporeal existence, which is supposed to be able to
receive and transmit motion or action, but not to
originate it. The only way, tlierefure, in which Lho VOL. i. g
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two can be united is by the external subjection of the one to the other; and this subjection, just because it is external, can never be complete ; for, where the means are not inherently related to the end, the end can never be perfectly achieved. It does not occur to Plato to ask whether either of the abstractions between which he has divided the world — the abstraction of pure activity or the abstraction of pure passivity — is intelligible by itself, or can be regarded as representing any reality. On the con- trary, he treats the former as that which alone is absolutely real and intelligible ; and his only problem is to explain how the latter can exist, or be thought at all. This problem he seeks to solve by the externality or spatial character of all corporeal existences ; for, as realised in space, the ideal forms are torn asunder from each other and even from them- selves, and their difference shows itself as disharmony and conflict. And, finally, when he has to meet the difficulty of conceiving extension or space as a substance, he finds his escape in the conception that the phenomenal world is a world of images which, as such, cannot be made intelligible and cannot therefore be regarded as absolutely real, yet which cannot be denied all reality. This battling ambiguity of nature withdraws it from the cognisance of science, and assigns it to the sphere of opinion. On the other hand, it is the nature of the ideal reality of things
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to be transparently one with itself in all its differ- ence ; as it is the nature of the pure intelligence to comprehend such reality, apart from all the confusions of the appearance. We are left, therefore, with a dualism which is at once subjective and objective; nor is it anywhere admitted that there is a principle which can dissolve the contradiction and reduce the two worlds to one.
Yet, while we say this, we must at the same time notice that Plato does supply us with a sug- gestion which might have removed this difficulty, if only he had fully developed its consequences. For, after all, Plato does not accept the doctrine that the relation of the real to the phenomenal is an altogether external or accidental relation. On the contrary, he not only refers the phenomenal to the ideal, as its cause, but he finds in the latter a kind of necessity for the former.
In the first place, let us look at what he says of the reason for the existence of the world. " Let me tell you why nature and this universe of things was framed by him who framed it. God is good ; and in a perfectly good being no envy or jealousy could ever exist in any case or at any time. Being thus far removed from any such feeling, he desired that all tilings should be as like himself as it was possible for them to be. This is the sovereign cause of the existence of the worM nf change, which we shall do
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well to believe on the testimony of wise men of old. God desired that everything should be good and nothing evil, so far as this was attainable. Wherefore, finding the visible world not in a state of rest but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he Ijrought order, thinking that in every way this was better than the other. Now it is impossible that the best of beings should ever produce any but the most beautiful of works. The Creator, therefore, took thought and discerned that out of the things that are by nature visible, no work, destitute of reason, could be made, which would be so fair as one that possessed reason, set- ting whole against whole. He saw also that reason could not dwell in anything that is devoid of soul. And because this was his thought, in framing the world he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the maker of the fairest and best of works. Hence, taking the account of things that has most likelihood, we ought to afltirni that the universe is a living creature endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God." ^
Even making some allowance for the mythic form of this statement, we can see that Plato finds in the goodness of God the reason for the creation of the world. The ideal reality, which in its ultimate conception is one with the dixine intelligence, is ^ Tim., 29 E seq.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 245
not conceived as indifferent to all that is outside of it, but as by the necessity of its natiu'e going beyond itself, and manifesting itself in the universe. Yet, on the other hand, this necessity is conceived as a conditional one, implying the previous existence of something else external to the divine being, some- thing which has no order in itself, and therefore must receive order, must be turned from chaos to cosmos, by the operation of the divine intelligence. And, just because of this, the universe, though the ' best of all possible worlds,' is not conceived as in itself essentially good. It is good so far as the nature of the case admits, or so far as the material to be used is capable of goodness. But this material is in itself formless, and even when it is brought under form, it never is completely subjected thereto. It, therefore, brings division, con- flict and change into the life of the created universe ; or, putting it in another way, it makes that universe phenomenal and unreal, or real only with the partial reality of an image, which has no substance in itself, but only in that which produces it. Thus, just because the divine intelligence is not conceived as essentially self-manifesting but as manifesting itself only in relation to something given from without, Plato's pregnant conception of the goodness of God loses its meaning, and the phenomenal and the real are again divorced from each other.
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We must, however, call attention to a second attempt of Plato to bridge the gulf between the eternal intelligence and the transitory world of sense, namely, by means of the idea of the soul as an intermediate or mediating existence. It is, in- deed, quite in the manner of Plato to introduce a middle term between extremes which he is unable directly to unite. Thus the soul itself is described as compounded of the elements of ' the same ' and ' the other,' i.e. of the self-identical unity of the idea and the unmediated difference of space, which are held together by an ovcrla, or essential being that contains both these elements.^ But such an expedient only raises the same diihculty in a new form. For, if the extremes be absolutely opposed to each other, the middle term that connects them will itself require another middle term to unite its discordant elements. Now, in the present case, the intelligence and the bodily nature are conceived as essentially disparate, and the soul, which partakes of both, cannot be regarded as transcending or reconciling their difference. Hence neither for the connexion of the divine intelligence with the world, nor for the connexion of the intelligence of man with his body, can we find a mediating principle in the soul. And in the soul itself the pure principle of thought breaks away from the powers 1 Timatus, 35 a.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 247
of sensation and appetite which are connected with the bodily existence ; nor is it possible to discover any link of connexion between them, either in the discursive reason, or in those higher desires which are summed up by Plato under the name of Ovfxo?.
And this leads to a further result in relation to the question of immortality. For that which is essen- tially connected with the body must share its fate. But if none of the powers of the soul are to survive the body, in what sense can it be said that man as an individual has any permanent being which is not touched by death ? That which abides can only be a pure universal intelligence, without memory or individual consciousness, which can hardly be dis- tinguished from the divine intelligence. Indeed, even the idea of God as an individual Being seems to disappear when he is conceived as a purely con- templative intelligence, who is complete in himself, apart from any manifestation in the world. These results of his dualistic view were not, indeed, realised by Plato, but they begin to show themselves in the metaphysic of Aristotle. Meanwhile they were held in check by other tendencies of Plato, and especially, as I have already indicated, b}' his conception of the goodness of God, as leading to the connuunica- tion of good to all his creatures.
Closely connected with the idea of the mediation of the soul, is another doctrine of which we lind
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considerable traces in the Philehus and the Timaeus, but which we know mainly through the Aristotelian criticism of it. Aristotle tells us that Plato in his later years laid great emphasis upon the con- ceptions of number and measure, and, indeed, that he represented the quantitative determinations of things with which mathematical science has to deal as a special kind of existences, which lie midway between the ideal and the sensible, differing from the latter by their generality, and from the former by their multiplicity ; for we can have many identical repetitions of the same numbers or figures, but there cannot be two identical ideas. We may suspect that in the statement of this theory Aristotle, with his usual tendency to insist on differences, has fixed and hardened the distinctions of Plato, and thereby given them a somewhat strange and unnatural ap- pearance : but what we actually find in the Platonic dialogues enables us partially to understand what is meant. In most of his works, indeed, Plato does not hesitate to speak of ideas of number and quantity; but in the later dialogues we can trace a growing tendency to regard such conceptions, not as ideas, but as conditions of the manifestation of the ideas in the sensible or phenomenal w^orld. Already in the Republic the mathematical sciences are referred to the discursive reason, as distinguished from dialectic which is referred to the pure or intuitive intelligence ;
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 249
though the main difference between them which is distinctly stated is that these sciences do not go back to first principles, but are based upon hypotheses which have only a relative generality.
In the Philcbus, however, the divine cause of all things, the ideal principle of all reality, is clearly distinguished from what is called ' the limit ' {to Trepan) ; that is, from the measure or quantitative determination, to which in the phenomenal world * the unlimited ' element (to aireipov) is subjected, in order to bring within bounds the endless possibility of increase and diminution which is characteristic of that element. The pure unity of the ideal or intelligible reality, in which the w^hole is present, in every part — or, what is the same thing in another aspect, the absolute self-identity of the divine intelligence, which is one with itself in all its activity and therefore combines in one the attributes of rest and motion — this pure unity and identity has to manifest itself in the sensible world as a law which determines the quantita- tive relations of the elements of each particular existence, and tlie order and extent of its changes. And the same mediating principle of measure can be observed also in the soul of man, in so far as there is an order and harmony of the inner life, which maintains itself in all the endless vicissitudes of states due to its association witli the
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body. Tlius the good of man consists in the due regulation of all the elements of his nature, or, as Plato expresses it, in the " rule of an immaterial order over a living body " ; and this is clearly distinguished from the absolute Good, which has in it no dis- tinction of parts, and in which, therefore, there is no need for one part to control another. Thus the pure organic unity of the ideal translates itself in the sensible world into the quantitative proportion of dift'erent elements, as determined by laws which maintain themselves, not absolutely but with rela- tive constancy, amid all the difference and change of nature and of the soul of man. This might be otherwise expressed by saying that the good in its manifestation becomes the beautiful ; for beauty is dependent on symmetry and proportion.^
The same fundamental conception is repeated in the Timaeus, where 'the unlimited' of the Philehus is iden- tified primarily with space and secondarily with time. In the Timaeus, therefore, it is represented that the ideal, as reflected into the dispersion of space and the flux of time, is partly infected by the character- istics of these forms ; but it recovers itself in so far as the externality of spatial existence is brought under the unity of definite geometrical figures, and its changes are determined to a definite order of succession. Further, this succession is conceived as
1 Philehus, 6-1 E.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 251
constantly repeating itself, so that, through a long cycle of movement, everything is brought back again and again to the same point. We are thus able to understand how it was that the mathematical rela- tions became for Plato the expression of the ideal in the sensible, and in what sense Aristotle could justly attribute to him the doctrine that they form a kind of ' intermediates ' (to. ixera^v) between the two. But it is manifest that this doctrine fails in the same way as the doctrine of the mediation of the soul ; for time and space are simply pre- supposed or assumed as existing external to the reality and the ideal ; nor is there anything in its nature, as Plato has described it, which can supply a rationale for its being reflected into space and time, so as to give rise to the phenomenal world. ]n both cases we see Plato endeavouring to escape from the difficulties of an absolute division by the introduction of a middle terra — an expedient which for reasons already given must necessarily fail. For no mediation between two extremes is possible, unless we can find a higher principle which transcends them both and reduces them to diflcrent forms or expres- sions of its own unity.
There is, however, still one other form of expres- sion, by which Plato seeks to escape the difficulties of dualism ; and it is one which deserves special attention, because of its influence upon Christian
252 THE FINAL RESULTS OF
theology. The phenomenal world — which, as we have seen, is conceived by Plato as a living being with a soul and a body — is represented in the Timaeus not only as the image or reflexion of the intelligible world, but also as a ' second god.' Thus, though it has only a derived existence, it is regarded as possessing a relative completeness and self-sufficiency, which entitle it to be called divine, in contrast with all other creatures which draw from it their being and well-being. Furthermore, this ' second god ' is called the ' son ' and even the ' only-begotten son ' of the first God. This idea is expressed in the concluding words of the Timaeus : " All our discourse about the nature of the universe hath here an end. Having received all living beings, mortal and immortal, into itself and being therewith replenished, this woild has come into existence in the manner explained above, as a living being which is itself visible and embraces all beings that are visible. It is, therefore, an image of its maker, a god manifested to sense, the greatest and best, the most beautiful and per- fect of all creatures, even the one and only-begotten universe." With this idea of the sonship of the phenomenal universe — which is conceived as a living and conscious individual embracing all other creatm^es in itself — Plato seems almost to cross the border that separates the dualistic philosophy of Greece from the peculiar doctrines of Christianity. But,
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 253
after all, it remains with him simply a strong metaphor, conveying indeed the idea of the near- ness of the derivative to its original, but still excluding the thought of any unity that really transcends the difference. All we can say is, that the ambiguous nature of the phenomenal world makes Plato at one time exalt it almost to the ideal, and at another time set it in almost absolute opposition thereto ; and that here, in his final utterances, we find him dwelling more on the positive than on the negative aspect of the relation.^
We seem, then, in the Timaeus, which may he regarded as the last word of Plato's theology, to 1:>e brought to a somewhat ambiguous conclusion, a sort of open verdict, which may be interpreted in two opposite ways according as we emphasise one or the other of the aspects of his thought. On the one hand, if we lay stress upon Plato's synthesis of
^I liave not said any tiling of the two souls, the good and the evil soul, of which Plato speaks in the Lau-a (896 e), as principles to which the origin of things is to be referred. The idea of an evil soul is directly excluded by the Polidcus (270 a), and it is difficult to see how Plato's principles could possibly admit of it. We may explain the admission of it by the popular character of the Laivs or by the tendency to pessimism which was characteristic of its editor. And we may observe that though the hypothesis of two souls is admitted for the moment, no use is made of the idea of the evil soul in the secjuel, in which Plato seems to refer the whole universe to a good principle, and that without suggest- ing the existence of any opposite principle, like the &irftpov of the PhUehus.
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opposites, upon his attempted reconciliation of Par- menides and Ileraclitus, upon his conception of mind as a self -moving principle whicli produces motion in all other things, and lastly, upon his conception of God as a goodness which communicates itself and therefore is the cause of being and well-being to all his creatures, we seem to be brought witliin sight of an absolute idealism, which transcends all distinc- tions, even the distinction of the material and the spiritual. On the other hand, if we lay stress upon the sharp contrast which he draws between intelli- gence and necessity, between that which is the self- moving and self-determined and that which is moved and determined by another, between the unity through all difference and the permanence through all activity which belong to the real or intelligible world, and the self-externality and endless flux which are characteristic of the phenomenal, we shall find in the Platonic writings a scheme of doctrine which is essentially dualistic, and even, as regards the world of sense, pessimistic. It is only if we keep all the threads together that we can understand the loftiness of his idealism, and the way in which he often seems to reject its consequences. Thus he holds that this is the ' best of all possible worlds,' the image of the invisible, the manifestation of the goodness of God, and even that it is a ' second god ' : yet at the same time he is able to declare.
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 255
that " evils can never pass away ; for there must needs exist something which stands opposed to tlie good. They have no seat among the gods, but of necessity they cling to the nature of mortal creatures, and haunt the region in which we dwell." ^ In like manner, Plato's absolute confidence in philosophy as the supreme gift of God to man, does not pre- clude an almost agnostic tone in many places of his writing, as when he declares that " the Father and Maker of this universe is hard to find out," and that even if we could find him, it would not be possible to communicate what we know to other men. We know God, Plato seems to say, through the world which is his reflexion ; hut it is a world of genesis and decay in which the divine can only be imperfectly adumbrated ; and we ourselves, though rational and so partakers of the divine nature, are in another aspect of our being only fragmentary and imperfect existences — parts of the partial world, who can never completely gather into their minds the meaning of the whole. " It is hard to exliibit except Ijy analogies, any of the tilings that are most important : for each of us seems to know everything as in a dream, and, again, in waking reality to know nothing at all."^ This strange alternation between the consciousness of al>solute knowledge as his iioitinn, niid the sense that whnt he
' ThKi't. ITfi A. ■-' Polilhiis, 211 D,
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knows is only a foretaste of something greater, is, however, not such a paradox as it seems. As the religious man says : " I lielieve, help thou mine un- belief," so the great idealistic philosopher feels it no contradiction to say : " I know," while yet he can hardly find expressions strong enough to char- acterise his ignorance. He knows, we might say, simply because he can, like Socrates, measure his ignorance. He has an idea of the whole, as an outline which he cannot iill up, though his whole life is a progress in filling it, and the goal he seeks is assured to him from the beginning. As man and as pliilosopher, Plato is conscious that he is born to be " a spectator of all time and existence," and he never thinks of the highest reality as inacces- sible to the intelligence. It is, as I have shown, an extreme misunderstanding of the words which he uses about the Idea of Good when the Neo-Platonists attribute to him the notion of an absolute unity, in which all distinction is lost, and which therefore cannot be apprehended except in an ecstasy in which thought and consciousness are annihilated. On the contrary, it is his fundamental thought that that which is most real is most knowable, and that whicli is most knowable is most real.^ It is not, therefore, in the silence and passivity of the spirit, but in its highest and most perfect activity, that it comes
^ Rvp., ill A,
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nearest to the divine ; and it is only because this activity is obstructed and weakened by our mortal nature, that we do not know God fully and as he is.
There has been much discussion among theologians about the immanency or transcendency of God, but it is not quite easy to determine what is meant by these words. If by the transcendency of God be meant that there is in the principle of the in- telligible world something not intelligible, we cannot speak of it without contradicting ourselves. The assertion of such transcendency is an attempt to reach a highest superlative, an attempt which over- leaps itself, and ends by saying nothing at all. God is a word that has no significance, unless by it we mean to express the idea of a Being who is the principle of unity presupposed in all the differences of things, and in all our divided consciousness of them. In this sense, then, we must think of God as essentially immanent in the world and accessible to our minds. But from another pomt of view, the principle of unity in the world must necessarily transcend the whole of which it is the principle ; and every attempt to explicate this principle into a system of the universe, made by those who are themselves parts of that system, must be in many ways inadequate. The microcosm can apprehend, but cannot fully comprehend, the macrocosm. In trying to realise the unity of the whole we seem only to advance from part to part,
VOL. I. R
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from finite to finite, so that " the margin fades for ever and for ever as we move." The articulation of knowledge always lacks something which the self- involved religious sentiment seems to possess ; though on the other hand, that sentiment, if it be not continually explicating itself, soon becomes abstract and empty. For a unity that does not go out into diversity, and cannot therefore return upon itself from it, is no real unity. Thus religion, in one aspect of it, is apt to become opposed to science and also to practical morality, as a contemplative consciousness that is beyond all the discourse of reason and all the deliberative action of the practical understanding. And even philosophy seems to be an enemy to religion, because, in spite of its striving after unity, it is obliged in the first instance to proceed by analysis, to work out every difference to its utmost conse- quences, and only to return to unity of principle through the reconciliation of opposites. Further, as this return is always being made, but never is made finally, conclusively and once for all ; so there always seems to be a gap between the effort to recognise and realise God in the world, and the religious intuition of piety which takes that recognition and realisation as complete. And that gap may be supposed to imply, on the one side, the transcendency of God, and, on the other, the failure of the intelligible universe to realise, and of our intelligence to under-
THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY 259
stand Him. Thus an imperfect consideration of the relation of different aspects of the truth may seem to drive us to the alternatives of mysticism or dualism. It is the great achievement of Plato that he makes us clearly see both horns of the dilemma, as it is his failure that he is not able to discover any quite satisfactory way of escape from it. Hence he could not attain to that end after which he was constantly striving, a complete reconciliation of the opposite lines of thought which meet in his philosophy. I think, however, that it will be evident even from the sketch of his philosophical theology I have given, that he did more than anyone before or since to open up all the questions with which the philosophy of religion has to deal.
LECTURE TENTH.
THE TEANSITION FROM PLATO TO ARISTOTLE.
The saying that " every one is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian " can be taken as true, if at all, only in a very general sense. It can only mean that men are roughly divided into two classes, those whose prevail- ing tendency is toward synthesis and those whose prevailing tendency is toward analysis; those who seek to discover unity among things that present them- selves as diverse and unconnected, and those who seek rather to detect differences in things that present themselves as similar or even identical. But it is obvious that these two characteristics can never be entirely isolated from each other. Distinction implies relation, and relation distinction ; and he who sees clearly the one cannot be altogether blind to the other. Least of all can we admit such blindness in the case of two great systematic writers, like Plato and Aristotle, who may be admitted to have a certain bias of mind, but who cannot be conceived
FROM PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 261
as one-sided dogmatists or men of one idea. Aris- totle's philosophy, indeed, is not the contradictory, but rather the opposite counterpart, of that of Plato ; and though the former may be disposed to dwell with greater emphasis on the points that separate him from his master than on those which they hold in common, yet it may safely be asserted that there are no two philosophers who are so closely akin in the general scheme of their thought. Thus — to name only the points that are of greatest import- ance— they are in thorough agreement in maintaining an idealistic or spiritualistic view of the ultimate principle of thought and reality ; and they agree also in holding that, in the world of our immediate ex- perience, this principle realises itself under conditions which are not in harmony with it, and which in some degree disguise and obstruct the manifestation of its true nature. But, while they thus coincide in the ultimate results of their philosophy, they start from opposite points of view, and their general agreement is apt to be hidden from us by continual collisions on almost every secondary question.
We may, then, describe Aristotle's general relation to Plato in the following way : He is tiie most faithful of Plato's disciples, a disciple who developed his master's doctrine to a more distinct and deiinite result, and who gave it a more systematic form ; and he is, at the same time, the severest of Plato's
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critics, one who saw into all the weak places of his teaching, and pressed home every objection against it with unsparing logic. Sometimes he is carried so far in his polemic that he becomes as one-sided as the philosopher he attacks, only in an opposite direction. At other times the antagonism between them is rather one of words than of essential meaning, and we seem to find the true interpretation of Plato rather in Aristotle's own view than in that which he attributes to his master. And not seldom he lays himself open to the same objections which he urges against Plato.
The precise nature of this agreement and difference may be made clearer by a few words of explanation. As I have shown in previous lectures, the general tendency of Plato is to generalise and to unify, to refer each sphere of phenomenal existence to some idea which he regards as the source of all its reality, and the principle through which alone it can be understood; and, ultimately, to carry back all these ideas to the Good or the divine reason, as the principle of all being .and of all thought. His fundamental doctrine is that ' the universal is the real ' ; and in his earlier dialogues he emphasises this aspect of things so strongly as to give colour to the idea that he seeks truth not in, but beyond, the many. Hence the Platonic idea has been supposed to be the abstract universal, i.e. a common element found in the particulars as these are given in ordinary experience, and not a principle which explains
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these particulars, and in doing so transforms our first conception of them. It has, however, been pointed out in the preceding lectures that there is much even in the earlier, and still more in the later dialogues of Plato, to prove that he is no mystic who loses the many in the one, and that, if he regards his ideal principles as transcending the particular phenomena of experience, yet this means — mainly and primarily — that he sets aside all that is irrelevant and accidental in the objects or aspects of objects investigated, in order that he may confine his view to their characteristic and inseparable properties. It has also been pointed out that philosophy, as Plato finally describes it, is as much concerned to resolve the unity of the idea into the multiplicity of its different elements or specific manifestations, as to bring back all its differences to unity. His ultimate aim, therefore is not simply to attain to unity, still less to do so by the omission of difference, but to produce a com- prehensive system of thought, in which all the elements are clearly distinguished, yet all are organi- cally connected with each other as members of one wliule.
On the otlier hand, it is olivious that Aristotle's primary tendency is to analyse and distinguish, to resolve his data into their separate elements, and to fix each element by clear definition in its opposition to all the others ; and, generally, to account for the whole,
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as far as possible, by the parts. He first drew sharp lines of division between the different sciences, insist- ing that each subject-matter should be dealt with according to its own principle and method. For him, ' the individual is the real,' and general ideas have value only as the explanation of particulars. He seeks the one not beyond, but in the many, not by abstracting from experience, but by the analysis of it. So far, therefore, his language seems to be in direct contradiction to that of Plato, and, indeed, he means us to understand that it is so. But when we look closer, we find that he too is obliged to find room for the Platonic point of view, and to confess that the one is not only in but also beyond the many ; ^ in other words, that there are irrelevances and inconsistencies in the immediate judgments of experience, from which we must abstract in order to reach the real nature of its objects ; and that science, therefore, cannot explain the many changing particulars without rejecting our first conceptions of them. For science, as Aristotle conceives it, has to become demonstrative ; it has to deduce the properties of things from their essential definitions ; and this implies that there is much that is irrelevant and accidental in particular substances, as immediately presented in experience, which must be set aside as incapable of being explained by the specific principles realised in them. ^Pod. An., 11, 19.
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Finally, if Aristotle seeks to explain things by resolving them into their elements, yet he knows that any real whole is more than the sum of its parts. And, though he seems at first to take the separate sciences and their objects as independent of each other, yet in the end he represents the universe as a teleological whole which finds its principle in the pure nature of mind or self-consciousness, a principle which is realising itself in every rational being and is eternally realised in God.
The truth is that both the principles, expressed in the propositions, ' the universal is the real ' and ' the individual is the real,' are ambiguous. Each of them may be taken in a higher and in a lower sense ; and while, in the lower sense, they are diametrically opposed to each other, in the higher sense they are only distinguished as complementary aspects of the same truth. That ' the universal is the real ' may, as we have seen, be taken to mean that any common quality, in the immediate conception of it, is an in- dependent reality, centred in itself and without relation to any other qualities or to any subject in wliich they inhere ; and this is what is conmionly under- stood by the term realism. Or, on the other hand, it may mean that anything that deserves to be called a substance, or independent reality, must have in it a principle of unity, which may at first be hidden from us, but which, when we discover it, can be seen
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to manifest itself in all the different aspects it presents to us. Thus each kind of existence has its specific form which makes it a relatively inde- pendent whole, and, again, all these specific forms are finally subordinated to one general form, which gives unity and individuality to the universe. In like manner, the principle that ' the individual is the real,' taken in its lowest sense, will mean that the real lies in the particular thing as the immediate object of sense perception, of which we can say only that it is unique, or that it is a ' this,' which here and now we see and handle, and to which universals must be attached as qualifying predicates. But, on the other hand, it may mean that reality is to be found only in that which has organic or, at least, systematic completeness, in that which is one with itself through all the difference of the elements that enter into its constitution, and which remains one with itself through all the phases of its history. In other words, it may mean that that alone is substantially real which has a self, or something analogous to a self, and which, therefore, in all its various modifi- cations may be said to be at least relatively self- determined.
Now, in the former of these two senses individuality and universality are direct opposites of each other, and to say that the real is both individual and uni- versal, both a ' this ' and an abstract quality, would
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be absurd — though dialectically it might be shown that abstract universality and abstract individuality easily pass into each other. But, in the latter sense, individuality and universality are different aspects of the same thing ; for a universal only means a general principle, viewed as expressing itself in different forms or phases, each of which implies all the others and the whole ; and an individual is just such a whole or totality, viewed as determined in all its forms or phases by one principle. To put it otherwise, we know any thing or being, only when we discern all the elements that are necessary to it in their dis- tinction and in their relation ; and we can recognise it as a real whole or individual substance, only in so far as these distinctions and relations are determined by one idea or principle. In short, it is just the determination of all its properties by one universal principle that makes us separate it from other things and beings as a true individual; and on the other hand, if, and so far as, its character be determined by external or accidental relations to other things, it is imperfectly individualised. This, of course, implies that ultimately there is no existence which is universal and none which is individual in the highest sense of these words, except the universe as a whole, or the divine Being who is its principle. But it also implies that no existence can have individuality even in a relative sense, except in so far as it has universality, that is,
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in so far as all its aspects are determined by one idea ; and that no existence can have universality, unless it is self-determined and individual.^
Now, just in so far as the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle can be taken in this latter sense, there is no real opposition between them ; while, if they can only be taken in the former sense, they must be regarded as wholly irreconcileable. The truth may perhaps best be expressed by saying that, to one who takes their first words in their most obvious sense, Plato and Aristotle seem respectively to begin with the abstract universal and the abstract individual, but that in their most developed doctrine they substitute for these what we may call the concrete universal and the concrete individual. This is partly hidden from us by the fact that Aristotle seems often to take Plato in his lowest sense, as many later writers have taken Aristotle in his lowest sense. In his criticisms upon the ideal theory Aristotle very distinctly points out the error of taking the abstract universal as com- plete in itself, and, therefore, as an independent or individual substance. He shows with convincing logic that the separate sciences of arithmetic, geometry, etc., in dealing with number, extension, quantity, motion, and the like, are concerned with aspects of things which
1 Aristotle's chief argument against the ideal theory is just that the ideas were at once universal and individual. Cf. e.g. Met., 1086, 10.
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may be isolated by abstraction, but which have no independent reality apart from each other, or from the concrete existence in which they are elements.^ In this he undoubtedly makes a valid criticism upon Plato, in so far as the latter, especially in his earlier v/orke, is apt to speak of particular ideas or universals, as if each of them were complete in itself apart from the rest, and even to take the special sciences built upon such principles as if they dealt with quite independent realities or provinces of reality. But Aristotle himself falls into the same error, though in a less obvious way, when he treats inorganic elements and organic beings — plants, animals and men — as, each and all of them, in- dividual substances in the same sense, without any admission of the partial character of their individuality, or of the fact that there are what Mr. Bradley calls " degrees of reality " among them. Each of them may be characterised as ' this particular thing ' ; and, therefore, as Aristotle seems to think, each of them may be taken as an independent substance which is only accidentally related to other sul)stances. It is true tliat he treats each of these substances as having a specific principle realised in it, but he draws a broad line of separation between the pro- perties wliich belong to it in virtue of this specific principle, and the accidents which come to it from ' See especially Afet., XIII, 3.
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the peculiar character of its matter or from its external relations to other things. Nor does he seem to admit that there is any point of view from which these accidents shall be conceived as them- selves the manifestation of a higher necessity. In other words, he does not realise that what, in view of the principle realised in a particular substance, might be regarded as accidental, may be necessary from the point of view of some larger whole, in which it is contained. Yet such isolation of the individual involves exactly the same error as the Platonic isolation of the universal.
And this leads me to point out what may be regarded as the common source of the errors of the Platonic and the Aristotelian philosophies. This is that both Plato and Aristotle start with presupposi- tions, which they are unable either to explain or to explain away : Plato, with the presupposition of a given multiplicity which he seeks to re- duce to unity ; Aristotle, with the presupposition of a confused unity or continuity ^ which he is never able distinctly to resolve into its elements or to show to be individually determined in all its parts. The result is that, in both cases, that which is re- garded as the ideal of knowledge, and, therefore, as the supreme reality, cannot be recognised as the truth or reality of the world of our immediate
^Phys., 184a, 21.
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experience. In that world, according to Plato, we fail to find the pure manifestation of the universal truth, which yet everything seems to suggest ; and when, in our practical endeavours, we seek to realise that universal Good, which is ultimately the object of all our desires, what we attain must always fall short of what we think. In like manner, according to Aristotle, what we require for our intellectual satisfaction is demonstrative system ; it is to resolve the world into a multitude of individual substances, each of wdiich is determined in all its properties by one principle ; but what we find is a multitude of imperfect specimens of each specific kind, none of which is free from accidental modifications. And, again, in the sphere of practical reason we are met by the same contradiction of the ideal and the actual ; for, while it is the chief end of man to realise himself as a rational being, to turn his life into a perfectly ordered whole in which every activity plays its proper part, he has to work out this ideal in the contingent matter of an individual human exist- ence, and under the influence of passions which can never be entirely subjected to reason. Yet on the other hand, that which in this world appears as the ideal which man must seek to find or to produce is, for both Plato and Aristotle, the supreme reality. For Plato, the Idea of Good is the unity of being and knowing, it is the idea which sums up all other
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ideas in itself, or it is the intelligence in wliich all other intelligences are embraced : but, as such, it is essentially separated from the finite world, and from the psychical as well as the corporeal existence of men. In like manner, the divine or absolute Being is for Aristotle a pure self-determined, self- contemplating reason, which can be grasped only by the pure intelligence of man, and can hardly be distinguished therefrom. As such, God is the first mover and the final end of the universe ; yet, as we shall see, Aristotle has great difficulty in connecting him with the finite at all, and only succeeds in doing so by a metaphysical tour de force. And, as his conception of matter, as the necessary basis of existence in this world of finitude and change, is more positive than Plato's, the ultimate result of his system is even more decidedly dualistic than that of his master.
This last point, however, is a subject of much controversy, and in order to deal with it fairly, it will be necessary to consider Aristotle's main lines of thought in two opposite aspects. I shall en- deavour, therefore, to show that Aristotle goes much beyond Plato in the fulness and definiteness with which he works out his idealistic system; and yet that, in doing so, he makes concessions to a dualistic mode of thinking which are greater than anything admitted by Plato.
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 273
The advance which Aristotle makes upon Plato lies mainly in two directions. In the first place, his individualistic tendency brings with it a greater respect for immediate experience : it saves him to a great extent from the dangers of a too rapid synthesis, and it keeps alive his curiosity for all the details of existence where no synthesis is yet pos- sible. Aristotle is no mere empiricist ; he is well aware that we must go lieyond immediate experience to know things as they really are ; but he has notli- ing of that impatience with particular phenomena, and that desire at once to get away from them to general principles, which was the main weakness of Plato. Plato had, indeed, to a certain extent, main- tained the rights of opinion, that is, of our immediate empirical consciousness, but Aristotle does much more. He is infinitely patient in exhibiting all the aspects of things as they present themselves to the ordinary consciousness, and all the judgments which they have suggested to the ' plain man,' as well as to the philo- sopher. His collections of empirical data, especially in biology, ethics, and politics, greatly widen tiie area of scientific enquiry ; and liis constant effort to mark out the different spheres of knowledge and to find the principles appropriate to each sphere, ex- hibits a great advance upon a method of philosophising which brought all things at once within the scope
of its grand generalisations. The dilHculty with VOL. I. S
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Aristotle is rather that each science or department of philosophy is treated so independently, and with so little reference to the others, that it is often hard to see how the various researches can be com- bined into one whole. But the dangers of excessive specialism were yet in the future ; and, in the mean- time, Aristotle's example gave a great encouragement to thoroughness and completeness of enquiry into different departments of knowledge — an encouragement which was much needed, but which was little appre- ciated till a later period.
To this formal improvement in the method of science, another of even more importance has to be added. Aristotle's deep interest in the phenomena of life — an interest which was probably awakened in him prior to his entrance into the Platonic school, and which in any case was quite independent of the Platonic philosophy — not only introduced science into a new field, but also suggested a new way of looking at things in general. The ideas of organism and de- velopment, indeed, were not quite alien to Plato: they were partly involved in his scheme of education based as it is on the idea of the latent rationality of opinion which it is the object of all philosophical teaching to bring to self- consciousness. He saw clearly that the highest ideal for man is to become what potentially he is, to develop the capacities which fire inherent in his nature. But Plato's almost ex-
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 275
elusive occupation with the theoretical and practical interests of men caused him to neglect the relations between humanity and the lower forms of life, or, so far as he paid regard to them, to interpret the animal as a degraded and degenerated form of man. His sharp distinction of soul, as that which is moved by itself, from body, as that which is moved by another — and which indeed he sometimes treats as if it were a corpse — tended to obscure the unity of the system of things, and the continuity of gradation by which one stage of existence is linked on to another. Hence all appearances of design in the pro- ducts of nature were apt to be attributed to conscious purpose rather than to the working of an immanent teleological principle. On the other hand, Aristotle recognises a purposive activity in all organised beings, an activity which is independent of consciousness, but which, in becoming conscious, does not essentially change its character. There is thus a correspondence or analogy running through all the steps of the scala naturae, connecting the unconscious life of plants with the relatively conscious life of animals, and the self-conscious life of num. For, in each case, tliere is an organising principle, which Aristotle calls the soul. The Aristotelian idea of the soul is, indeed, a new and original conception : for in Plato the soul is not generally distinguished from the intelligence ; and, though, in tlio Tinuieus, it aj)])oars as the pi'inciple
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that combines the intelligence with the body, this mediation is little more than a word, and shows only that Plato felt the need of some connecting link, which he was unable from the resources of his philosophy to supply. Aristotle, on the other hand, grasps the idea of organism, and declares the soul to be the form which realises, or brings into activity and actuality, the capacities of an organic body. Hence in his view the soul cannot exist without the body, nor the body without the soul. In short, on the first aspect of Aristotle's philosophy, and subject to a reservation in favour of the reason, soul and body seem to be taken by him as different but essentially correlated aspects of the life of one individual substance. Thus he rejects the Platonic idea that all souls are simply minds in various degrees of obscuration, owing to the nature of the bodies in which they are incorporated; and with it he repudiates the doctrine of transmigration, and, especially the transmigration of the soul of a man into the body of an animal. In place of this doctrine, he substitutes the conception of a hierarchical order of psychical existence, in which the higher soul includes the lower, and reduces it into the basis or material of its own new principle of life. But just because of this — because, in Aristotle's conception of it, the higher life presupposes the lower and makes it the means of its own realisation — Aristotle is able to
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 277
regard the whole process as one, to personify nature as a power that does nothing in vain, and even to look upon the whole ascending movement of organic being as an effort after the complete and self-deter- mined existence which is found only in God. Each of the finite creatures is thus regarded as seeking for the divine, but able to realise it only within the limits of its own form. Aiming at eternity, it is con- fined within the conditions of an individual existence which is finite and perishable, though it attains to a kind of image of eternity in the continuity of the species. It attains it, however, in a still higher way, in so far as its own limited life is made the basis of a higher life; till in the ascending scale we reach at last the rational life of man, who, at least in the pure activity of contemplation, can directly participate in the eternal and the divine.
So far the evolutionary conceptions of Aristotle seem to carry us beyond many of the difficulties of the Platonic theory, and to point towards a more complete idealism than Plato had ever imagined. For, if a philosopher l)e able to regard all nature as the realisation of an immanent design, which becomes more and more completely manifested the higher we rise in the scale of being ; if, further, he be able to view the imperfect life of the lower orders of creat- ures as subordinated to the fuller existence of those wliich stand higher in that scale, it is natural to
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expect that in the last resort he will be able to regard all being as the manifestation or realisation of the perfectly self-determined life of God. On this view accident could exist only from the point of view of the part, as separated from, and opposed to the whole ; it would be eliminated more and more as we advance to the point of view of existences which are relatively more complete, and it would disappear altogether from the point of view of the divine centre of the whole system. Matter, as opposed to form, would become a relative concep- tion, and the phenomenal world would simply be the real world imperfectly understood. The organic view of the universe would thus subordinate, and take up into itself the mechanical ; and in place of the Platonic conception that reason " persuades necessity to work out that which is best in most things," we should be able to substitute the doctrine that all things must, ultimately at least, be regarded as the manifestations of a divine reason.
Such a view, however, we cannot attribute to Aristotle. The organic idea, which he seems to accept, especially in his conception of life in all its forms, is continually traversed by another idea which is essentially alien to it — the idea that all finite existence is a combination of elements which are not essentially related. Aristotle, in fact, while accepting the Platonic opposition of form to matter,
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 279
gives to the latter a definite name, and a more dis- tinct position than Plato had assigned to it. For in the Republic Plato had spoken of it only as 'Not-Being,' and had referred the defects of finite existence to the fact that such existence stands midway between Not-Being and the substantial reality of the ideas. And in the Timaeus he seemed still farther to lower the character of phenomena by treating them as mere images or reflexions of true Being, explaining the appearance of substantial reality which they present by the spatial conditions which attach to such images. He seemed, therefore, to be endeavouring to escape the admission of a genuine dualism, to which nevertheless he was driven by what he calls a 'spurious reasoning.' Aristotle, on the other hand, looks for a substratum for all change in something which remains while its qualities are in process of being altered. The change of properties is, he argues, impos- sible, unless there be a substance which undergoes this change ; and the genesis and decay of substances is impossible, unless there is something which passes from the one fonn of existence to the other. Hence, as all forms of being are changeable, we are ulti- mately driven by a necessary argument from analogy, to conceive pure matter as the ultimate substratum of all that movement or transitionary process to which finite things as such are subjected. Matter is, there- fore, the possibility of all things and the actuality of
^80 THE TRANSITION PROM
nothing ; an idea which is made to seem less irra- tional by the doctrine that it never exists except under some elementary form. Perhaps we may better bring out the effect of Aristotle's view by saying — what Aristotle himself does not say — that matter is that in the nature of finite things and beings which causes their existence to be a continual process of change, that is, causes it to be not a pure activity which begins and ends in itself like that of God, the unmoved mover, but a continual movement from possibility to actuality, which comes to an end in one subject only to begin in another in end- less succession. Aristotle, indeed, avoids verbally the contradiction of making matter, which in itself is absolutely passive, the cause of the transitory cha- racter of the existence that is realised in it ; but he does so, as we shall see hereafter, only by taking for granted the transition from the eternal to the temporal, from the pure activity of the divine in- telligence to the movement and change of the phe- nomenal world. Yet this is the very thing which needs to be explained.
This general antagonism or imperfect union of matter and form sliows itself even in Aristotle's conception of the organic process. At times, as we have seen, he emphasises the unity of form and matter, and therefore of soul and body, so strongly as to make them essentially correlative with each other
PLATO TO ARISTOTLE 281
— opposite but complementary aspects of the same being, which are only separated by abstraction. Thus when he declares that the ultimate matter of a substance is one and the same with its form, though the one is to be taken as expressing the potentiality of which the other is the actuality/ he suggests the conception of a unity which is beyond the difference of the two elements, and in which, therefore, they entirely lose their independent character. So far as this is the case, it would be true to say, as Aris- totle does say in the immediate context, that no reason can be given for the unity of form and matter, except that they are reciprocally form and matter to each other. From such a point of view we could not speak of form acting upon matter, or matter reacting upon form, but only of the whole substance as manifesting itself in these two aspects. But Aristotle does not consistently think of it in this way. For the most part he seems rather to regard the form as giving to the matter a unity which does not belong to it, and to wliich it is never completely subordinated. Thus he declares that the soul neither grows nor decays, though all the activities usually ascribed to it are conditioned by the growth and decay of the body. The soul, in fact, is taken as an identity whicii aljidcs in unity with itself above all change ; and which, though it gives rise to manifold
^Met., U)45/y, 18.
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activities and changes in the individual subject, never itself enters into the process. While, there- fore, we can see that Aristotle is striving against the tendency to separate soul and body, yet his way of expressing the difference between them inevitably leads him back to the Platonic conception of a spiritual being which is dragged down into a lower region, and reduced to an imperfect kind of activity by the vehicle which it has to use. This tendency to fall from the conception of an organism to that of a arvvderov — a complex existence compounded of a mortal body and a spiritual principle which finds an inadequate expression therein — is shown even in his account of the animal life ; as when he tells us that the decay of age does not affect the soul, but only the organs through which it acts, and that, therefore, " if the old man had the young man's eyes, he would see as T^ell as the young man." Here the soul is manifestly taken as an abstract form which is not relative to the body ; not as a unity which maintains itself in change, but as one which is entirely lifted above change and unaffected by it.
The difficulty, however, takes a more definite form in relation to the reason of man, which, in Aristotle's own words, " seems to be born in us as an inde- pendent substance, which is beyond decay and death." ^ ^De An., 4085, 19.
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In this case the question is not merely of the presence or absence of a special bodily organ ; for reason, according to Aristotle, has no such organ. Yet its existence in the body and its connexion with the animal nature, subjects it to conditions which alter its pure activity, and bring it down from the intuitive contemplation of truth to the sphere of imagination and of discursive thought. Hence Aristotle says that " the discursive reason and the feelings of love and hate are not modes or affections of reason, but of the subject in which it is realised, though they are due to that realisation. Hence, when this subject is destroyed, reason ceases to remember and to love ; for such states belong not to- it, but to the being in whom soul and body are combined (rot; koivou), and this, of course, perishes. But reason in itself is something more divine and cannot be the subject of any such modes as these." ^
It would appear, then, that Aristotle holds that the individual mind, as such, i.e. the individual's con- ~-n1 sciousness of his own past and of all the particulars of his individual life, with all the desires and feelings which accompany such a consciousness, is changeable and mortal. In this region of the finite, reason sinks from intuition and contemplation into ' discourse of reason ' ; in other words, it no longer sees all things in their transparent unity, but, aided by sensuous
^ De An., 408/*, 25 seq.
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images, its thought moves from one object to another, distinguishing and connecting the different elements by definite acts of analysis and synthesis, of judg- ment and inference. Thus a deep line of division is drawn between the intuitive and the discursive intelligence, between the pure reason and the passions and interests of mortal life. And the organic idea, which is already strained to the utmost by Aristotle in his conception of the relations between the form and the matter, and, therefore, between the soul and body of plants and animals, is once for all set aside as regards the rational life of man.
The result, then, is that, though at first Aristotle seems to free himself from the dualism of Plato, and to rise to an organic point of view, he is unable in the long run to maintain this advantage. It was a distinct advance upon Plato to repudiate the mystic tendency shown in some parts of the Platonic writings, the tendency to regard the connexion of soul and body as accidental or external. It was a still farther advance to maintain that matter was not merely the ' Not-Being ' of the Re23tiblic, or the spatial conditions which, according to the Timaeus, distinguish images or appearances from reality, but the necessary correlate of foi'm. But Aristotle was not able to maintain himself at this point of view, or to work it out to all its consequences. Hence the very fact that he gave a distinctly positive
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character to matter as the substratum of motion and change, while yet he was unable to conceive it as simply the manifestation or necessary com- plement of the ideal principle, drives him in the end to a more definitely dualistic result tban had been reached by Plato. It also causes him to neglect or reject those speculations in which Plato comes nearest to a concrete, as opposed to an abstract idealism. Thus, in the end, as we shall see more fully hereafter, Aristotle comes to a view of reason, and of God as the unmoved mover, which carries us far in the direction of the mysticism of Plotinus.
LECTURE ELEVENTH.
ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON IN ITS PRACTICAL USE.
In the last lecture I gave a general view of Aristotle's way of thinking as contrasted with that of Plato. I pointed out that he makes a great advance upon Plato in so far as he frees himself from the tendency to oppose form to matter and soul to body, and thereby initiates a more organic view of the world, and, in particular, of the phenomena of life in all its forms — vegetable, animal and human. But just because he is not able to carry out this new way of thinking to its consequences, in the end he becomes the author of a more definite and pronounced form of dualism than that of Plato. For, though in his philosophy matter gets a more definite position, it is not after all made the true correlate of form. Hence it sinks into an external something which the form needs in order to realise itself, but in which it can only realise itself imperfectly. And even this necessity seems to be denied in the case of the
ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON 287
pure intelligence, which is conceived as so complete in itself, that its association with the body is not required for its realisation, but rather, through such association, it is drawn down into a lower kind of activity. It is this view of reason which is the source of the greatest difficulty in Aristotle's psycho- logy ; it manifests itself again in his conception of morality and of the relation of the practical to the contemplative life ; and, finally, it determines his idea of the nature of God and of his relations to the world.
This will become more completely understood if we follow the line of the ascent to man, which Aristotle traces out for us in the De Anima.
He begins by telling us that there is no proper definition of the soul, if a definition be understood to mean the determination of a generic form which remains identical with itself in all its specific manifestations.^ When we speak of organic beings as having souls, all we mean is that in each of them there is an immanent principle of unity. But this principle takes a different character in all the species that fall under it ; for these species are not co-ordinate. On the contrary, they form a series, in which each later member takes up the previous member into itself, but at the same time so transforms it that there is nothing which is
^ De Anima, 4146, "20 seq.
288 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
common to them all. It might, indeed, be said that what is possessed by the lowest kind of soul is common also to all the higher kinds : but this is not strictly true ; for in the higher soul, the lower ceases to be what it was, as it is made sub- ordinate to a different principle of unity, and its own characteristics are thereby completely changed. Thus the life of sensation which is characteristic of animals is not simply added to the nutritive life of plants ; it so absorbs and transfigures it, that, though all the elements of the latter are present in the former, none of them is just what it was in the former. And the same is the case when we pass from the sensitive life of animals to the rational life of men. In the transition to a higher stage of development, the elements of the lower stage are preserved, but they are, in the language of Aristotle, reduced to potentiality ; they are absorbed and taken up into a new form of being. The individuality of the more imperfect form of existence disappears, as it becomes the material or basis for a new princiinum mdividuationis. Hence the different species are con- nected only by a certain bond of analogy, in so far as the relations of form and matter are the same in all.
To begin at the beginning, the life of plants is a life of nutrition and reproduction, in which the individual assimilates material constituents from its
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 289
environment to subserve its own existence and thus goes through a course of growth and development, which in the end passes into decay and death. So long as this series of changes goes on, the individual unity of the plant maintains itself, and reproduction is only a farther extension of the same process whereby a specific form is realised in a new individual which must go through the same cycle of change. For, as Aristotle says, adopting the language of Plato, " it is the most natural of all functions for the living being to produce another like itself, the plant a plant, the animal an animal, in order that they may partake in the eternal, so far as is possible for them. This is what all beings seek for, and in view of this they do all that it is natural for them to do. We must, how- ever, distinguish between the objective end which they all seek and the realisation of it which is possible to the particular subject. Now, since living beings cannot partake in the divine and the eternal by continuing their individual 1 existence — it being impossible for a nature which is finite and perishable to maintain for ever its individuality and numerical identity — they partake in it as they can. In other words, they abide, not in themselves, but in what is like them ; not as numerically one, but in the unity of one species."^ What we have in the plant
^ De Aniina, 414a, 2(5. VOL. I. T
290 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
life is, therefore, not merely a continuation of the process of change, whereby the different inorganic elements are incessantly passing into each other ; for these elements and their process are subordinated to a higher principle of unity, first in the individual, and then, when the individual fails, in the race. Thus by the continuous cyclical movement of indi- vidual and racial life the transitory existence of finite beings is turned, in Platonic language, into a moving image of eternity.
Again, just as the nutritive life is not a mere repetition of the process of the elements, nor even that with the addition of another process, but in- volves the subjection of these elements to a higher principle of unity, so the sensitive and appetitive life of animals is not an external addition to the nutri- tive and reproductive process, but absorbs and, so to speak, transubstantiates its results. In one sense it might be said that the animal goes through the same round of existence as the plant, and that the ends realised in it are still the same, the maintenance of the individual and of his kind. But this is only superficially true : for these very ends become changed in character when they are mediated by conscious- ness, by sensation and desire. It is true, indeed, that these ends do not exist in their generality for the animal itself, any more than for the plant, and therefore the animal cannot be said to will them.
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 291
It is only of nature, as an unconscious principle, which realises itself in them througii their particular sensations and appetites, that Aristotle speaks as willing the good of the individual and of his kind. But the animal is capable of perceiving the particular objects that secure or hinder its well-being, and of feeling desire or aversion in relation to them. For the sensitive soul stands in an ideal relation to its objects, and can receive their sensible forms without the matter. Moreover, these sensible forms are not impressed on its organs from without, but the object without only calls into action what is potentially present in the sensitive faculty. Hence sense can- not perceive anything but its special object, and even that only within the limits of its sensibility. From this point of view its perceptions are merely a development of its own nature, and it might fairly be said to perceive nothing but itself.^ We have further to observe that all sensations, in order that they may be compared and distinguished from each other, must be lirought to a centre of sensibility in what we sliould call the feeling self.^ And the same must of course be true of the desiring self, though Aristotle does not call special attention to this.
In both these forms of life, as I have already observed, the idea of the organic correlation of body and soul conliicts with Aristotle's general conception
i/)e Anima, 417a, 21. ^ De An., 4'2(>6, 8.
202 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
of the relation of form to matter, which is deter- mined by form, yet not altogether subjected to it: for matter is always regarded as having a relative independence. Thus the material constituents of the body have a process of their own which is never completely subordinated to the process of plant life, and which in the decay and death of the plant ceases to be subordinated to it at all. And, in like manner, the nutritive life has a process of its own which is not unconditionally subordinated to the pro- cess of animal existence, or completely absorbed in it. But the discordance between these two aspects of the relation of form and matter becomes still more definitely and distinctly revealed in Aristotle's conception of the life of man. The form of man's life is reason ; and reason is not merely one form among others, it is the universal form, the form which embraces and prevails over all other forms. And reason has, as Aristotle puts it, no opposite, nothing from which it is distinguished or to which it is externally related ; if it is determined, it is only as it determines itself. If, therefore, reason be taken as the form of the life of any being, it would seem that that life must not only be a stage higher in development than the life of animals ; it must be qualitatively distinguished from it. For there can be no continuity between the relative and the absolute, between that which acts only as it is
IN ITS PRACTICAL USE 293
determined by something else and that which deter- mines itself. In fact, it seems something like a paradox that such a principle should manifest itself in the form of any particular existence. Yet this paradox, after all, is not one that arises out of the peculiar doctrines of Aristotle. It is the essential paradox or problem of the life of man, as a being who is, in one point of view, only a particular existence like an animal or a plant, Ijut who, never- theless, has the principle of universality, the principle of self- consciousness and self-determination within him. It is, therefore, by no subtilty of ancient dialectic, but by the nature of the case, that Aristotle is forced to recognise two contrasted aspects of the nature of man, as at once particular and universal, or, we might even say, finite and infinite. How does he endeavour to solve this problem ?
It must, I think, be confessed that Aristotle has no final solution for this difficulty, but rather that he evades it, as the Scholastics so often evaded their difficulties, by a distinction. In other words, he breaks the unity of man's life and divides it into two departments or spheres of existence, in either of which he may live and move. In both si)lieres, indeed, man manifests his rational nature ; for reason is the form of his being, and it is impossible to live the life of a man without, in some sense, living the life of reason. But tliere is an exercise of reason
2tU ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
ill whii'h it is deteniiiiieil by it.-^elf, ami deals only with purely intelligible ubjeets : and there is another exercise of reason in whieh it deals with a material which is alien to itself — a material which it can contiol and subordinate to its own ends, but which it can never cr>ni}ilelely assimilate. Thus in relation to the immediate world of experience reason may be regarded as both immanent and transcendent. But it is only as transcendent that it can fully realise itself and come to a clear consciousness of its own nature ; while, as immanent, it is obstrueted by the nature of the subject-matter with which it has to deal, and drawn down into a lower furm of activity iu which it can never adtHpiately manifest or satisfy itself. Speaking generally, tliese two spheres corre- spond to the theoretical ami the practical use of reason; for, iu its^ theoretical use, reason is concerned only to discover the uniNcrsal principles which underlie all existence, and to follow them out to their logical consequences : its work, therefore, is purely scientitic. and the results it reaches will be necessary and exact. In its practical use, on the other hand, it has to deal with the world of immediate experience, as well as with the nature of man, in all their complexity and particularity : it has to determine the ends which, as a rational being wlio is also an animal, he has to realise, aud to consider the means of realising them in the world.
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In this sphere, therefore, its objects are practical rather than scientific ; and if, by reflexion, it can attain to a kind of science, yet the results of such science must be only approximate and inexact — they can reach only generality and not universality. We have, then, a broad division Ijetween the two spheres of theory and practice ; and, in accordance with this division, we have to distinguish V^etween pure science, which has to do with intelligible reality, as such — with the ideal forms of things and their consequences — and that lower kind of science which seeks to throw light upon the particulars of experience that have to be dealt with in practice. In the sequel we may have t<) admit some modification of this contrast, and that, indeed, on both sides ; for Aristotle's actual methods of theoretical and practical science do not strictly correspond to the sharp distinction which he draws Ijetween them; but it will conduce to clearness to begin by taking the division in its most rigid form. "We have, therefore, first of all, to realise tliat Aristotle conceives the life of man as consisting in the exercise of reason, and as comprising two dis- tinct forms of that exercise, dtoypla and irpa^K;, the pure activity of contemplation, and the mixed and imperfect activity of the practical life. And we have further to realise that this division is not quite exclusive: for contemplation or science enters into prac- tice, though only as a means to an end beyond itself.
296 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
This broad division of the contemplative from the practical life is one of the points in which Aristotle separates himself decisively from Plato, though only by giving further play to tendencies which are already visible in the Platonic writings. For Plato's philosophy, like that of his master Socrates, was, in the first instance, practical, and it was only by gradual and almost unwilling steps that he came to make theory an end in itself apart from practice. And, even wlien he did so, he was never content to make theory his sole end, but to the last sought to bring the highest ideas of his speculation to bear upon the reformation of Greek political life. The Republic, however, shows the parting of the ways. It shows us how Plato, in the very effort to render his prac- tical proposals complete and to base them upon the highest philosophical principles, was gradually led to invert the relations of theory and pisactice, and to treat the latter as a secondary result of the former.
Thus in the first part of the Bepublic Plato starts from the actual life of a Greek State, and seems tacitly to assume, what Aristotle declared in so many words, that such a State is the iripag Ttjg avrapKelag — the precise form of social organisation in which the moral nature of man can find its best education and realisation. And if he seeks to improve upon the actual models of political life set before him in Athens or Sparta, it is not by introducing another
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political idea, but rather by working out more fully the principles that seemed to underlie these models. Thus his socialism and communism were only the further development of that tendency to lose the man in the citizen which had already been carried so far in the actual life of Greece.
But the very attempt to universalise the principle of Greek politics inevitably led Plato to aim at something more than it was possible to realise in a Greek municipal society. The philosopher, he main- tained, must rule ; and the philosopher was one who looked beyond the unity of the State to the unity of the whole universe, and who could not, therefore, treat the former as an absolute end. The Idea of Good, the principle of all being and of all knowing, must be made the basis and the object of his life ; and the State, with its bourgeoise ethics of use and wont and its mythological religion, could not be recognised by him as more than a subordinate sphere of reality. If, therefore, the philosopher has laid upon him the duty of governing and regulating the State, yet his true life is elsewhere. His function as ruler, indeed, is to make the civic community a copy of the ideal order of the intelligible world ; but his main interest lies in the original and not in the copy. Ethics and politics have fur him become secondary to philosophy or theology, and the practical has been subordinated to the coii(('iiii)lalivo life.
298 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
And soon the question must arise whether the con- nexion of the two can be maintained, and whether the municipal State can he brought in relation to the type set up for it, or reconstituted upon the model of the intelligible world. The last word of the Republic on this subject shows that Plato found it hard to pour the new wine into the old bottles. " I conclude, ' says Socrates, " that the man of understanding will direct all his energies throughout life to those studies which will impress upon the soul the characters of wisdom, temperance, and justice, and will neglect all others." ... " Then," answers Glaucon, " if that be his motive, he will not care to interfere with politics." " By the dog of Egypt, you are wrong," replies Socrates ; " for he certainly will do so, at least in his own city, though perhaps not in the city in which he happens to be born." " I understand," says Glaucon ; " you mean that he will be an active politician in the city which we have now organised, the city which as yet exists merely in idea ; for, I believe, it is not to be found anywhere on earth." "Well," answers Socrates again, " perhaps in heaven tliere is laid up a pattern for him who wishes to behold it, and, beholding, to organise his own life by its laws. But the question of its present or future existence upon earth is quite un- important ; for, in any case, the philosopher will live after the laws of that city only and not of any other." ^ ^Eep., 592 a.
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What we gather from tliis remarkable utterance is that Plato found it impossible to raise the Greek State, which still remained for him the highest type of political association, to the level of his philosophical principles. In fact, he makes no attempt to connect the reconstruction of the State with the Idea of Good, and the only place in which he gives a practical turn to his highest ideas is in the remarkaljle picture of the philosopher which he draws at the beginning of the Bcimhlic. There he endeavours to show that one who views all particular things in the light of the whole, as the philosopher must do, will necessarily acquire an absolute generosity and freedom of spirit, which will raise him far above the level of the ordinary civic virtues ; ^ but Plato does not enquii-e how, in that case, his philosophy can throw any light upon the organisation of the State. Eather, as Plato seems to indicate, his contemplation of ideal reality must bring with it a depreciatory estimate of all political interests, and even of the finite life in general. " Do you think," says Socrates, " that a spirit full of such lofty thoughts, and privileged to contemplate all time and existence, can possibly attach any great importance to this life of ours ? " ^ And, in another place, he anticipates Aristotle in drawing a broad line of
'Cf. /?e/).,491 B, where these virtues fire asserteil to be a hindrance to philosophy.
^ViVy)., 486 A.
300 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
division between the ethical virtues — which " are like qualities of the body, which, not being in us at first, are put into us by training and habit " ^ — and the wisdom of the philosophers, which is based on the pure faculty of intelligence and requires nothing for its development, except to be turned from sensible things to the contemplation of ideal reality. On this view, however, the relation of the philosopher to the State seems to drop away from him, or to become an external adjunct to his life, which can be easily disjoined from it altogether. He owes it as a duty to the city that has educated him that he should be willing to undertake its government, but his real vocation lies not in any practical endeavours, but in the contemplation of the ideal and the divine.
"When the link between theory and practice had become so weak, it was easily broken by Aristotle, who summarily rejects the idea of connecting ethics and politics with the highest principle of philosophy. Accordingly, in the Ethics he sets aside the Platonic Idea of Good — ostensibly, indeed, on the ground that it is an abstraction which has no definite meaning, or which at least is too vague and general to supply any practical guide to human life. ])Ut Aristotle's quarrel was not merely with the ideal theory of Plato, but with his whole attempt to connect ethics with meta- physics, and to base the regulation of conduct upon
'^ Rtp., 518 E.
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the conception of the ahsohite Good. While, therefore, Plato, in the effort to reach the deepest and most comprehensive view of ethics, had been drawn onward from the consideration of the unity of the State to that of the unity of the whole system of the universe, Aristotle entirely repudiates this line of thought as carrying us bevond the limits of the matter in hand, , -,
and demands that ethics and politics should be treated as a separate science, and saved from the irrelevant intrusion of metaphysics. And his ultimate reason for this was not that he denied the existence of an absolute Good, which it is possible for us to know; for, as we shall see, his own metaphysical investigations were directed to the discovery of such a Good. It lay rather in his conviction that our relation to that Good cannot be practical but only theoretical ; while the sphere of ethics, on the other hand, is not theory but practice. Theory, therefore, can be of use only so far as it is a means to practice; for "we study ethics not that we may know what virtue is, but that we may become good men ; otherwise there could be no ad- vantage in it whatsoever."^ It is true, indeed, that ethics starts with the conception of man as a rational subject who seeks to organise his life with a view to the end which, relatively to him, is the highest ; and no doubt also, what is highest relatively to man's nature is tlie exercise of his reason : but in the ethical spliere ^ A'th., lOO.S'., 27.
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this does not mean the exercise of pure reason upon its appropriate objects. It means, looking at the matter in a subjective point of view, the exercise of reason in governing the passions and giving unity and order to the inner life of man as a complex being, who is a compound of ' dust and deity ' : for he who speaks of man, as Aristotle says, irporrTiBwi kcu Otjpiov} that is, he must take into account the lower as well as the higher nature of man. And, looking at it in an objective point of view, it means the control of the conditions presented by the environment of the life of man. so as to gain opportunity for the exercise of his highest qualities. In both aspects, ethics has to guide man in dealing with the particular facts of his existence, and it has, therefore, to take account of external conditions and, therefore, of an element of contingency which cannot be brought within the sphere of pure reason.
And this also greatly affects the value of science in relation to morality ; for, while reason can rise above the particular experiences of the moral and social life to the general conception of the end to he sought, and of the means wherel)y it may be attained, it is hampered in its processes both of induction and deduction by conditions which do not apply to pure science. In the first place, ethical experience is not the product of reflexion, but of the unconscious action of reason in the development of social life ; and, we iPo/., 1287a, 30.
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may add, it must have been already acquired by the individual himself, who seeks to interpret it, or even to understand its interpretation when it is presented by others. For, only one who by par- ticipation in the common life of the State has had his moral nature developed, is capable of rising to the knowledge of ethical principles or even of making anything of them when they are set before him by others. The value of scientific ethics is, therefore, that it brings into clear consciousness the ideas which underlie the unreasoned ethics of the ordinary good man and good citizen ; and he who would recognise the truth of ethical science or gain any profit from it, must already possess in himself the data on which it is based. It is true that for such an one ethical science may have great value ; for the reflexion whicli discovers the universal principles involved in the special rules and customs of life will enable him to criticise and correct the very experience from which he starts. The statesman, above all — who has not merely to find his way amid the difficulties of private life, l)ut to meet tlio larger demands of legislation and administration, and even, it may be, to make modifications in the con- stitution of the conmiunity which he governs — must know the grounds upon wliich the State in general, and his particular form of State, are based. He must have analysed the moral naUire of man, and examined
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the particular excellences that need to be called forth, and the particular vices which need to be repressed, by a good education. But even in his case Aristotle insists on the necessity of that immediate sense or intuition of moral truth, which can only be developed by habit. Moral science, there- fore, must not only be based upon the immediate judgments of the individual who is imbued with the ethical spirit of a civic society, but it depends for the proper application of its general principles upon the peculiar tact and power of handling ethical interests which is due to that spirit.
Now no one can fail to recognise that, in his account of the development of the moral consciousness through habit and in his rejection of the Socratic doctrine that ' virtue is knowledge,' Aristotle is expressing an important aspect of the truth — if at least we limit knowledge to the reflective form of science. It is easy to show that the science of ethics presupposes the existence of morality, and cannot be the cause of that existence. If all the spiritual possessions of man, and, in particular, the institutions and customs of the society of which he is a member, be produced by the activity of the reason that is within him, yet they are certainly not due to a reason that is conscious of what it is doing, or aware of its own processes. So far, therefore, even the profoundest believer in the rational nature of man would admit
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that the unconscious comes before the conscious, or, what is the same thing, that the particular applica- tion of moral principles is prior to their distinct recognition as general principles. To say otherwise would be like saying that no one could trace effects to causes without having recognised and defined the idea of causality.
But, in the second place, Aristotle means more than this. He means that in the determination of particular objects by the ordinary consciousness there is a synthesis of reason with an irrational element — with an element of real contingency of which we can only say that it exists, and that we cannot explain it by any rational principle. Hence, strictly speak- ing, we cannot know the particular ; we can only grasp it in the immediate intuition of sense ; or, to put it in a more directly Aristotelian way, our knowledge of objects becomes actual, and not merely potential, only when the consciousness of the universal is brought into relation with the perceptions of sense.^ There is, therefore, an element in our consciousness which cannot be universalised, or made intelligible, in the way of science. This fact, however, does not embarrass us in the sphere of pure science ; for, in Aristotle's view of it, science has only to do with general principles and what can be deduced from them. In the practical life, however, it becomes
' Met., lU.'iGu, 5: cf. KWT". 17. VOL. I. U
806 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
highly important , for action has directly to do with the particular — with the particular act to be done and the particular end to be achieved. And this can be apprehended only in an immediate intuition, which might be called a moral sense, if that name did not do injustice to the rational element involved in it.^ This moral sense cannot be produced in us by teaching or by any purely intellectual process ; it is due only to that combination of the rational with the irrational factor, which belongs to our nature as thinking beings who are also animals ; and if it can be developed by training, and especially by the training of social life, yet the process of such training cannot be referred to reason alone. In other words, our appetites and passions have not reason immanent in them, and must have it superinduced upon them from without by exercise and habituation. They have in themselves no measure, they fluctuate between excess and defect, and only accidentally hit the golden mean. Hence, measure has to be imposed upon them by reason, and gradually to be wrought into their texture by discipline. It is as with the sculptor, who has to give form to a material which in itself is formless, or has only a form which is not relative to his purpose, and who, therefore, in shaping the parts of his statue, has so to guide his hand that each of them may be in just proportion to all the rest. '^Eth.. 1142a, 3.5.
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In the creation of such a work of art, the exact measure of each part has to be preserved, and the slightest exaggeration or diniinucion of any limb or feature may make all the difference lietween beauty and ugliness. So also it is with the moral artist, who has to take the rough block of humanity, with the animal nature which is its basis, and so to restrain or to encourage, to weaken or to strengthen, the different passions and tendencies, as to fashion out of them a noble character. Nor does it alter the case that each man, to a certain extent at least, is the moral artist of himself. Here, too, the material is given independently of the reason either of the individual himself or of those who regulate the life of the society in which he is a member ; and the manifold contingency to which that material is subjected, makes it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to attain a satisfactory result. All we can say is that goodness is shown in making the best of the circumstances. We can now see what it is that makes Aristotle dwell so persistentiy upon the inexactness of the science of ethics. It is not merely that the subject is so complex that it is impossible to disentangle all the threads tliat are interwoven in it. Nor is it, as has been suggested, that Aristotle mistakes the difficulties of the practice of science for the difficulties of tiie science of practice ; for, though the application of any science must involve many
808 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
«
considerations which are omitted in pure theory, that does not interfere with the exactness of the science itself. The real reason is that, in Aristotle's way of conceiving it, the science of practice has little or no value apart from practice, because of the essential nature of its subject-matter. It is that the actions of men involve a realisation of reason in an element which is not purely rational. Hence, from the pure idea of man as a rational being, we cannot develop an adequate conception of the methods in which reason is to be realised in human life. We are obliged to take the actual types of morality as they present themselves in experience, and from them to extract such general ideas as may give some help to the citizen and the statesman in mould- ing their own character and the character of others. And even in this case the teachings of science will be unavailing, unless such citizen or statesman is already deeply imbued with the spirit of the State. Thus (ppovrjaii can never become aocpia, practical wisdom can never be raised into the form of pure science. Accordingly, in his ethical and political philosophy, Aristotle clings very closely to the facts of Hellenic character and Hellenic institutions, and his ideal of the State is little more than a selection and combination of the features which present themselves in different Greek cities. It is an ideal Athens, with the mob of mechanics, and
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ail that are incapable of the highest civic functions, shut out from authority ; or it is an ideal Sparta with its admirable discipline directed to higher ends than war. But Aristotle never pretends, like Plato, directly to connect the ethical and political life with the highest exercise of the intelligence : indeed, he tells us explicitly that that life belongs to man as a (Tui'OeTov — a complex or compound being with a mortal as well as an immortal part. Hence he speaks contemptuously of the notion of ascribing moral virtues to the gods, who, as purely spiritual beings, cannot descend into the region of practice. " That perfect happiness is," he declares, " a purely contemplative activity, may be seen from this that we ascribe it most of all to the gods. But what kinds of moral action are we to attribute to them ? Are we to say that they do just actions ? As if it were not absurd to think of the gods as making bargains with each other and duly restoring what is entrusted to them, and the like. Or are we to say that they perform acts of bravery, enduring dangers and encountering risks because it is noble so to do ? Or, again, have they to show liberality in their dealings ? But to whom will they give any- thing, and what is the coin or currency that they use ? Or are they to be thought of as temperate ? Would it not bo a quaint praise of the gods to say that they have no bail iuqiul.ses tu check ? In
310 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
truth, when we go through all the moral virtues, we see clearly that such practical activities are meau and unworthy of the gods." ^
Whether the same objections will not lie against all the theoretic activities by which the intelligence of a finite being advances to the discovery of the truth, and, indeed, against every exercise of the intellect short of the beatific vision, Aristotle does not here enquire. But the consequence for ethical science is obvious. The ethical teacher must not attempt to pass beyond the boundaries of ethical experience, or to connect his science with metaphysical principles. He must be content to bring to light the principles that underlie Greek ethical practice, and to use them to improve that practice. In this lies at once the value of ethical studies, if confined within their proper range, and their valuelessness, if carried beyond it. Aristotle, therefore, frequently insists on the useless- ness of ethical theories that are not based upon an actually realised ethical life, and do not throw new light upon it. Morals, in his view of it, is essentially a science that springs from practice and returns to practice ; and for it to set up any other end than this, or to pretend to be science for science's sake, is to forfeit all its claims to the relative place which it liolds in human knowledge. It is only pure Oeoopia, pure contemplation, that can pass beyond these limi-
^Eth., 11786, 1 aeq.
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tations, can leave behind it the uncertain and troubled region of the contingent, in which lie the interests and cares of man's transitory life, and can attain to that kind of reality which is independent of time and change.
Nor is there any possibility of connecting the rela- tive truths of ethics with the absolute principles of pure metaphysic. There is, indeed, a kind of connexion between the practical and the theoretical life, in so far as the former is the precondition of the latter : but this is only an external and accidental connexion. The State is needed to protect and to educate man, to furnish the material basis for his existence and the sphere for the exercise of his moral energies. It is, so to speak, the ladder on which he has to climb up to the higher life. But with that which is highest of all, it has nothing directly to do. The contemplative life, and it alone, is self-sufficient and complete in itself ; or it would be so for us men were it not that, as mortal and changeable beings, we cannot continuously maintain the pure activity of thought, and must therefore fall back on tlie ethical virtues, which " enable us to play our parts as men." ^ In showing the elevation of the contem- plative life above all material and even moral interests, Aristotle's sober style for once gets a tinge of poetry. " Sucli a life," he declares, " is greater than
' TTpos t6 dfdpLjTreiKaOai. Elh., llTSt, 7.
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can be measured by a human standard, and man can live it not qxia man, but only as there is something divine within him. And the active development of this sometJiing is as much superior to the exercise of the other virtues as reason in its purity is superior to the mixed or composite nature of humanity in general. If then reason is divine in comparison with the man's whole nature, the life according to reason must be divine in comparison with human life. Nor ought we to pay regard to those who exhort us that, as we are men, we ought to think human things and to keep our eyes upon mortality : rather, as far as may be, we should endeavour to rise to that which is immortal and do everything to live in conformity with what is best in us ; for, if in bulk it is but small, yet in power and dignity it far exceeds everything else that we possess. Nay, it may even be regarded as consti- tuting our very individuality, since it is the supreme element, and that which is best in us. And if so, then it would be absurd for us to choose any life but that which is properly our own. And this agrees with what was said before " (in relation to the defini- tion of happiness) " that that which is characteristic of any nature is that which is best for it, and gives it most joy. Such, therefore, to man is the life according to reason, since it is this that makes him man." ^
^Efh., 11776, 27.
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In this passage we must not miss the verbal con- tradiction. The theoretic life is beyond the measure of humanity ; it is the life of God rather than of man. Yet, from another point of view, it is the life wherein that which constitutes the very nature and individuality of man, his characteristic power or faculty, alone finds its appropriate exercise. The sharp division which Aristotle makes between the two lives which man can live, makes it difficult for him to say where the central principle of man's being is to be placed, and what, strictly speaking, VL constitutes the self or ego to which everything else in him is to be referred. His words remind us of a saying of Emerson that the consciousness of man is a sliding-scale, which at one time seems to identify him with the divine spirit, and at another with the very flesh of his body. The rift that runs through the philosophy of Plato seems here to have widened till it rends human nature asunder. The result is a division of the contemplative from the practical life, which has had momentous results in the history of philosophy and theology. It is the source of wliat lias sometimes been called the ' intellectualism ' of Greek philosophy, which passed from it into tlie Christian church in the form of the exaltation of the monastic life above any life that can be lived in the world. And Thomas Aquinas was only following out the priuciplcy of Aristotle when he cxallod the
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contemplative above the moral virtues, and maintained that the latter related to the former dispositive sed non cssentialitcr} This transition of thought was already made easy by the religious turn of expression which Aristotle and his followers often use. It is specially marked in the Eudemian Ethics, where we are told that the highest life is to worship and contemplate God, Qepaireveiv tov Qeov Kai Oeoopeiv. Professor Burnet translates this by the familiar words : " to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever " : but we must remember that for Aristotle this enjoyment consists in a pure contemplative activity, in which thought rises above all discourse of reason into unity with its object, and rests in it as its final and complete satisfaction.
The farther development of this view and the dis- cussion of the error and truth which are mingled Id it, will be the subject of the next lecture.
^ Su/Ji)na, S.8. 9. 180, 2.
LECTURE TWELFTH.
AEISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON IN ITS THEORETICAL USE.
Ln' the last lecture I have shown that, although Aristotle regards leason as the form of man's life, he does not conceive of it as constituting a self or personality which equally manifests itself in all his feelings, thoughts and actions. In other words, he does not regard man as an organism, in which all the parts imply each other and the whole, because they are all the realisation of one principle. Rather he thinks of him as a combination of reason with an irrational element, which it cannot completely absorb or take up into itself.
But this view gives rise to a double difficulty : for, in the first place, it involves the severance of the theoretical from the practical life, of the life in which reason is purely self-determined and one with itself, from the life in which it determines a matter that is alien to itself : and, in the second place, it makes it impossible, even in the practical life, to
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arrive at any clear notion of the principle of activity. At times reason seems to be represented by Aristotle as constitutive of its own motives, and, therefore, as one with will ; as when he declares that " reason always chooses the best," and that " the good man is he who obeys reason."^ But elsewhere reason is conceived as the faculty of the universal and not of the particular, a purely theoretical faculty which "moves nothing," 2 and must be determined to action by the appetitive part of man's nature, by which alone an object or end can be prescribed as desirable. Yet Aristotle would certainly not accept the doctrine of Hume that " reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions" — because apart from them, it cannot choose or reject anything. The natural passions are for Aristotle immediate impulses, which are always in excess or defect, and never, except by accident, in the proper proportion in reference to the good of man's being as a whole. Having no measure in themselves, they need a measure to come to them from without ; and from what can it come save reason ? Aristotle seems to come near the solution of the difficulty, when he detects in man a ^ovXt](jig or will of the good, that is, a desire for the satisfaction of our whole being, which is quite different from the particular passions ; for this is clearly a desire, the contents of which could not be derived from ^Eth., lW3a, 17. ^^U., 1139a, 3(3.
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anything but reason. Nay, more, the presence of such a desire in us must be regarded as giving a new character to all the other impulses ; for, in virtue of it, all the particular ends of passion must be sought not for themselves but svb rationc boni, as means to the complete realisation and satisfac- tion of the one self to which they are all related. But Aristotle does not recognise this " will of the Good " as the essential impulse of a rational nature, which underlies all its other tendencies ; he seems simply to mention it as one of the elements of our being which is to be placed beside its other desires. And when he comes to ask himself what is the nature of that act of self-determination which is implied in all moral action, he does not connect it in any special way with the will of the good, but defines it simply as a ' deliberative desire,' meaning a desire accompanied by delibera- tion as to the means of its satisfaction — a definition which leaves desire and reason as two separate elements which are connected only externally. Nor is it by any accident or oversight that Aristotle is drawn into tliis circular process, in whicli intelligence and will presuppose each other ; it is the necessary result of his conception of human nature as a a-vi'OeTov, a combination of disparate elements. If desire be taken as separate from intelligence, intelli- gence can only be, what Hume makes it, an
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instrument by wMch the means of satisfying desire is determined. Nor is it possible that any desire should be in itself rational ; for, if reason be con- ceived as determining a motive, it seems to be leaving its own sphere and intruding into that of will, which ex hypothesi is closed to it. And Aristotle's final deliverance^ — that reason is the real man, but yet that the life of reason is one which he lives not qua man, but as having some- thing divine in him — only shows the perplexity to which he is reduced by the cross-currents of his thought.
Now the ultimate cause of Aristotle's defective view of the unity of the life of man lies in the fact, that he identifies reason primarily with its conscious or reflective activity, the activity which creates science and philosophy. He cannot, there- fore, attribute to it, or at least to it alone, that unconscious or unreflective activity which is implied in all our ordinary experience, both theoretical and practical. Hence he is obliged to explain that experience as a sort of blend between reason and sensation or desire, which has something in it essen- tially non-rational. It was, indeed, the general defect of Greek thought that, while it tended to exalt reason, what it comprehended under that name was rather the reflective power of the philosopher, the
^Elh., 11776, 26 seq.
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scientific man, and the statesman — who is like a scientific man in his mastery of the general principles of legislation and administration — rather than the self- consciousness and self-determination, which belongs equally to all men, and is, indeed, that which makes them men. Hence also Aristotle's view of the political and moral life was essentially aristocratic, though the aristocracy he recognised was not one of birth but of intelligence. Thus he regarded the Greek, with his quick perceptions and superior rational power, as a being almost of a different species from the barbarian ; and he even refused to recognise the Greek artizan, who practised a ' base mechanic trade,' as fitted to discharge the functions of a citizen. The same ' intellectualisra ' — which made him look upon science as something that can be attained only by one who has risen above the contingency of particular facts — shows itself in his separation of the higher and more general functions of the State from the occupations of the tradesman, whose vocation is to supply the means for a life in which he does not partake. Hence, instead of the organic unity of society, we have a hierarchy in whiih the slaves and mechanics furnish the basis for the life of those citiz(Mis who share in the administrative, judicial and legislative work of the State and enjoy its privileges; and these in turn supply the cnnditious for the still liigher functiiuis of the philosopher, who
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lives for contemplation alone. For contemplation is the only alsolutely free activity, which never is a means to anything but itself.^
"What, then, is the nature of this free activity, and how is it possible for Aristotle to speak of it in the terms he uses ? How is it possible for him to regard science and philosophy as the purely self-determined activity of reason, an activity which is free from all the conditions to which practice is subjected ? How does reason emancipate itself from the chains in which the will is bound ? And, when it has so emancipated itself, what is the subject-matter with which it deals ? Can the science, which abstracts from so much, still retain any real content for itself, and must it not necessarily lose itself in empty generalities ? These questions are not perhaps capable of being answered in an unambiguous way, or without considerable balancing between opposite ways of understanding the language of Aristotle. But the attempt to deal with them is necessary to any one who would estimate fairly the results of his thought and the influence he had upon sub- sequent times, and, above all, upon the history of theology.
We may begin by guarding against a possible misunderstanding. Aristotle is by no means an empiricist, yet no one can doubt that he makes iCf. Eth., X, 7.
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immediate experience the starting-point of his thought; and that, indeed, he conceives of all truth as being, if not based upon such experience, yet ultimately derived from it. No one could show greater interest in collecting facts, and in testing all the theories which they had suggested to previous writers or to the ordinary consciousness of men. Aristotle made many collections of data which were relevant to his special enquiries, nor was he impatient in chronicling such data, even when he could make no immediate scientific use of them. This is equally true in relation to the structure and processes of animal life, to the varieties of ethical sentiment, to the different kinds of political organisation and to the manifold forms of philosophical opinion. Aris- totle's aim is always to take as complete a view as is possible of all the phenomena relevant to the sub- ject he is investigating. Nor can he be said to have ever neglected — as Bacon supposes him and all the ancients to have neglected — to look for negative instances. On the contrary, his first effort is in- variably to seek out any appearance of disparity or contradiction between the different phenomena, or between the aspects in which they have presented themselves to different persons. His principle and his practice are at the very outset to bring to light as many such difficulties as he can discover; and ho even holds that we cannot be sure that we have
VOL. I. X
322 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
reached the truth of the subject under investigation, unless we are able, by means of it, to explain not only the phenomena or opinions if they have a real basis, but also to show the reason of the mistake when they have none.^ A principle of science is thus supposed to emerge, in the first instance at least, as the result of a synthesis of the phenomena to be explained, and as the key to all the difficulties con- nected therewith. And if Aristotle be not aware of the necessity of our modern methods of analysis and experiment, and sometimes is too ready to assume that he has all the necessary data without them, at any rate he cannot be accused of failing to make his inductions as complete as possible, or of theorising without an attempt to realise all the difficulties of his subject.
There is, however, another aspect of Aristotle's conception of science. All induction is with a view to deduction or demonstration, and these, for Aristotle, are two processes which are quite independent of each other. Hence, in order to deduction, we must first, by means of induction and dialectical discussion, attain to some general principle from which infer- ences may be drawn. Farther, all this process of discussion only gives occasion for the intuitive action
^ Eth., 1154a, 22. In the beginning of the 7th book of the Ethics, Aristotle explains this method of investigation, and examples of it may be found at the beginning of many of his works.
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of reason, which grasps the principle of the subject, and perceives its self-evidencing character. We might, therefore, say that Aristotle starts from the a posteriori to find the a priori ; in other words, that he begins with a view of truth as a mass of separate phenomena, which seem to be given to the mind from without, and that he regards the intellectual comprehension of these data as attained only when the mind finds itself in its objects, or grasps as their explanation a principle which needs no evidence but itself. The process is otherwise described by Aristotle as one in which we advance from what is first to us to that which is first in the nature of things. This regress from phenomena to their principles is, however, a preliminary process, and the proper movement of science begins with these principles and seeks to show by demonstration all that is involved in them.
Now we might at first be disposed to interpret this as meaning simply that the scientific man finds the starting-point of investigation in the immediate appearances of sense, that he soon discovers that these appearances, in the first view of tiiem, are inconsistent and even contradictory to each other, but that, by bringing them together and comparing them, he rises to an explanation, which enables him to remove their apparent inconsistency and bring them all into agree- ment with each other. But this is nut what Aristotle
324 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
says. He does not expect that science will ever be able to explain the particulars of sense from which it starts; for, in his view, science, as such, deals with the universal and the necessary, while the particulars of sense have in them an element of contingency which cannot be referred to any such principle. The world, indeed, is conceived by him as consisting in a multitude of individual things, in each of which some specific principle is manifested ; but this specific principle is not supposed to account for all that we find in the individual things, still less for all that happens to them. It cannot in this way explain any- thing that results from the particular material basis in which the form of the species is realised, or from the external relations into which the particular object is brought, but only the properties that are neces- sarily involved in the form and can be logically proved to be so involved. And, as logical proof for Aristotle means simple deduction, it would seem to follow that a science must be made up of universal judgments, which are analytically deducible from each other. It is probable that Aristotle was misled in some degree by the example of mathematics, and that he did not realise,^ what Kant afterwards showed, that there is a synthetical movement of thought in every step of the
J Professor Cook Wilson has pointed out to me that in one passage of the Metaphysic (1051a, 22 seq.) Aristotle seems to discern the synthetic character of mathematical proof ; but this is an isolated statement.
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process by which the science of mathematics is built up. It is true that he calls attention to the fact that mathematics has not to do with substances, but only with special aspects of them which are abstracted from their other aspects. And he also points out that there are many such aspects of substances, e.g. their motion, which may be made the subjects of special sciences. Still he seems to contemplate it as the ideal of a science, that it should be based upon the defini- tion of a substance — a definition which expresses the form realised in such a substance — and that its demonstrations should result in the exhibition of all the 'propria which are analytically deducible from that definition.^
' Objection might be taken to the above statements, if they were intended as a complete account of Aristotle's views upon logical method. They correspond to the ideal of science which is expressed in the Metaphysic, Book 7. In the Posterior Analytic we find two other views which are not easily reconcilable either with it or with each other. In the frst book nothing is said of substances, as such ; but the general conception of demonstration is still that it is deduction of projiria from a definition. And it is implied, I think, that this definition must express the formal cause of the subject — say, a triangle — of wliich the science treats. Aristotle seems mainly to be thinking of mathematics, though, as stated above, he does not apprehend the synthetic character of mathema- tical reasoning. In the second book, however, demonstration is taken as the proof of the existence of an attribute, or the occurrence of an event, through its own definition : and this definition may be given through the efficient, as well as the formal and final causes. Further, the cause in question is always tlie proximate cause, and nothing is said as to the mode in which this cause is to be con- nected with tlie definition of the sul)ject, wliich in the first book
326 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
Now it is hardly necessaiy to say that Aristotle's actual efforts at scientific construction do not conform to this type. He is not content, in practice, to seek for some abstract principle or definition of the object in question, and then to derive everything analytically from it. What he usually does is, first, to establish by induction and dialectical reasoning some very general view of the subject of investigation, and then to distinguish different elements within it, and to endeavour, by further inductions and inferences, to determine their relations as parts of a whole which is one with itself through all its differences. He thus proceeds not from the concrete to the abstract, but from the abstract to the concrete, not by analysis and
was spoken of as supplying the middle term in scientific demonstra- tion. Another view is suggested in the Metaphysic (Book 7, ch. 11 stq. ) by the fact that Aristotle has great difficulty in determining that the definition of a substance should express only its form and not its matter. There and more definite^ in his works upon the science of nature (especially Phys., II, 8, and the Part, An., I, 1) it is recognised that there are two lines of scientific enquiry ; one, which deals with the final cause (which is shown to be one with the formal cause) and the properties deducible therefrom ; and another, which deals with the necessary conditions of its realisa- tion, and, therefore, with material and efficient causes. Matter, of course, is here taken not as the indeterminate basis of all exist- ence of which he speaks in Mtt., 1029a, 24, but as equivalent to the material constituents (in our sense) of the plants or animals. This corresponds to the view of Plato spoken of above (pp. 130, 241). I shall have to say more of it in the next chapter. In reference to these diff"erences, I can only suggest that Aristotle forgets or modifies liis general statements, when he has to deal with particular branches of science.
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formal deduction, but by differentiation and integra- tion; or, in other words, by the evolution of differences and the reconciliation of them or the discovery of their relative character. In fact, there is no other way in which scientific investigation can possibly proceed if it would lead to any profitable result. For what in all cases investigation must seek after is to exchange the vaguely determined wholes of our immediate empirical consciousness for that clear articulation and necessary connexion of the different elements or aspects of a subject, or, in other words, for that systematic complete- ness and unity, which we call science. If we would determine the nature of any whole, says Aristotle himself on one occasion,^ we must divide it into its elementary parts and endeavour to define each of them separately : but, in practice at least, he is never content to conceive any real whole as tlie mere sum of the parts or as the resultant of their action and reaction upon each other, but seeks to discover how the relative independence of the parts is consistent with, and subordinated to, the unity of the whole. Thus in the Politics he regards the separate families as the elementary parts, or primitive cells, out of which the State is made up, but he is not content to treat the State as a multitude of families acting externally upon each other ; rather he maintains that ' the State is prior to the family,' or in other words, that it is the ^Pont. An., 966, 15.
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higher ethical unity of the State, which first enables us to comprehend fully the function of the family as a constituent part of it.
But, though the actual science of Aristotle does not agree with his logical ideal, it would be a mistake to suppose that this ideal is without influence upon his philosophy. On the contrary, his logical ideal is the counterpart of his conception of individuality as involving, so to speak, a nucleus of specific determination in each individual substance, which is embedded in a mass of accidents. In other words, Aristotle sharply divides the individual as an object of sense from the universal principle which is realised in it, and which enables us to make it an object of science. He separates the individual as having a specific character from the individual as this particular being in its particular environment. Nor does it carry us much farther that in one passage in the Metaphysics he speaks as if there were a definite form and a definite matter for every individual,^ so long as the form and the matter are not conceived as essentially and entirely relative to each other, that is, so long as the latter is conceived as in any sense accidental or as the source of accidents. For, so long as the separation of these two factors of reality is maintained, we are obliged to regard the true nature of the individual as consisting in that which he
^ Met., 1071a, -JS.
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is, or would be, apart from all relation to other individuals. Nor can we, on Aristotle's principles, consider this as a , mere distinction of the different points of view from which we regard the individual, as, on the one hand, a separate being, and as, on the other hand, a part of a more comprehensive in- dividuality. Aristotle, indeed, seems at times to encourage this conception, as when he tells us that an individual human being, when severed from society, is no more worthy of being called a man than a hand, when separated from the body, would be worthy of being called a hand. Are we then to say that there are different degre'es of substantiality or individuaUty, and that a civic society is a higher kind of substance than an individual man ? Could the Aristotelian philosophy allow of such a conception of substance or individuality ?
There are some passages in Aristotle in which this conception is at least suggested. Thus in the seventh book of the Metaphysics ^ he raises the question how a substance can be defined. To define it, he argues, we must resolve it into its elements ; but what can these elements be ? They cannot be substances, for sub- stances by their very nature as individuals are separated from each other, and different substances cannot be contained in one substantial unity. Yet they cannot be other than substances, for it is impossible to suppose ^ Mel., VII, 13.
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a substance made up of qualities or relations. It would appear, therefore, that a substance cannot be resolved into any elements at all, and, therefore, cannot be defined. Yet the substance is just that which we seek to define ; indeed, it is on the defini- tion of it that all demonstrative science is based. Aristotle ends with the promise of a further dis- cussion of the subject, a promise which is nowhere adequately fulfilled.^
Yet there are passages in this chapter which seem to suggest that what from one point of view may be regarded as an individual substance or self-determined whole — say, an individual man — may from another point of view be regarded as a res incompleta, an imperfect individuality, when we realise his essential relation to other individuals in society. 2 If, however, Aristotle had ever entered
' So far as I am aware, the only attempt which he makes in this direction is in a passage already quoted (Met., 10456, 16) in which he speaks of form and matter as essentially correlative. This, however, could not really solve the difficulty ; for, in the first place, this correlativity is not consistently maintained ; and, in the second place, even if it were maintained, it would not enable us to distinguish different elements in the form. For Aristotle does not seem here to be speaking of matter in the sense of the logical genus.
^ Met., 1039a, 2. This seems to be involved in what he says of the principle that i] ^vTeX^x"* X'^P'f"i ^^^ ^^^^ ^-S- i^ the number 2, the two units exist only potentially, while they exist actually only when the units are separated from each other. This would seem to point to the only possible solution of the diropla
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upon his course of explanation, he would have been carried on, like Plato, from the individual to the State and from the State to the world, and he woidd have been able to find absolute individuality only where Plato found absolute universality, in the universe as a whole or in God as its principle. In other words, he would have been obliged to regard all other individual substances but God or the universe as imperfectly individualised, and he would have been compelled at the same time to treat the conception of the contingent or accidental as existing only from the point of view of the part. But to have done this would have been to go quite beyond the general principles which he acknowledges in all his speculations. Aristotle, indeed, as we shall see, holds that there is in God a unity which transcends and comprehends all the forms of things, a unity of the intelligible world ; but he never imagined that any such unity is to be found in the world of experience.
To discover Aristotle's view of the highest kind of unity to which science can attain, we must turn
with which the chapter ends, whether a substance can be composed of substances or of elements that are not substances, both of which alternatives are impossible. It can, we may answer, be composed of substances, but these substances can exist in it only potentially or as elements of its higlier individuality. They can exist actually only wlien this higher substance is destroyed. This seems the necessary consequence of Aristotle's reasoning, but he nowhere accepts it. Nor, indeed, could he accept it without great modifi- cations in his theory of ovalod.
332 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASOxN
to the Be Anima, where he treats it mainly from the point of view of the subject of knowledge. In that treatise he discusses the position of intelli- gence in relation to the complex nature of man, and endeavours to explain its nature as a universal faculty which yet is subjected in its development to the conditions of man's finite life. Eor while, as I have stated above,^ it is the characteristic of reason to be determined by nothing but itself, yet it cannot act or develop itself in man without the aid of sensuous perception and imagination. It must, there- fore, be capable of receiving impressions, and, indeed, of receiving impressions from all the objects which can be known by it ; yet, on the other hand, these im- pressions must not alter its own nature or do anything except to give it occasion to determine itself. How is it possible to combine such opposite conditions ? To discover Aristotle's answer to this question, it is necessary to follow somewhat closely the pregnant and somewhat obscure utterances in which he sets before us his view of the rational life of man.
In the first place, he declares ^ that there is an analogy between reason and sense, in so far as both are capable of being affected, in some way, by objects, and so stimulated to apprehend them. Yet, as he contends such affection or stimulation only makes them realise what potentially they are. Hence in apprehending
1 Pp. 292 seq. : 331 seq. ^ De A)i., Ill, 4 seq.
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their objects, sense and reason may be said to be only apprehending themselves. But there is a two-fold difference between them. Eor, in the first place, each sense is confined to a definite object — the ear to sound, the eye to colour, etc. — and even that object it can apprehend only within certain limits of in- tensity. But reason has no limit to its capacity in either of these aspects : it is capable of apprehending all objects and under all conditions. Like pure matter, it is a potentiality for all the forms of things ; for it has no nature of its own which could come between it and other things or prevent it from seeing them as they are. Hence it is not going beyond itself in knowing anything else. Rather in all knowledge it is realising its own nature and so coming to a consciousness of itself. "We may. therefore, say that it is absolutely impassive, in so far as in no exercise of its knowing faculty is it drawn beyond itself or subjected to a foreign influence. Rather in apprehending objects it ' gains the mastery ' over them, and uses them to evolve its own powers. While, therefore, the data of sense may supply the first occasion for its action, the principle of its activity is always in itself, and we have to conceive all the process of its develop- ment as one of self-determination ; or, as Aristotle puts it, of the determination of the passive by the active reason. Aristotle's conception of reason,
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however, as at once a universal receptivity and a pure activity, has given occasion to so much controversy that it seems desirable to quote his own words.^
" Here," he declares, " we have to bring in a distinction of elements or factors, which prevails throughout all nature. For in every kind of reality we find, on the one hand, a matter as the potentiality out of which it is produced, and, on the other hand, a cause or active principle which realises itself therein : and this distinction necessarily extends to the soul. There is then a reason, the characteristic of which is that it becomes everything, and a reason the characteristic of which is that it produces everything. And the latter exists as a positive source of activity,^ like light which turns potential into actual colour. Now it is this form of reason which exists separately, unmingled and impassive, its very being consisting in its activity ; for that which is active is always superior to that which is passive, and the determining principle to the matter it determines. But science, in which active reason realises itself, is one with the reality which is its object ; while the potentiality of science, though prior to actual science in time in the individual, is posterior to it even in time, if we speak generally. Nor must we suppose that the active reason sometimes thinks and sometimes does
^De An., Ill, 5.
^ WJ ^is Tis. I think the opposition of i^is to (TT^prjcns is suggested.
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not think ; it thinks always, though it manifests this its essential nature only when it has been separated ; and it is of it alone that we can say that it is immortal and eternal. We however " (as the finite subjects in whom reason realises itself) " are liable to forgetfulness ; for though the rational power which is in us cannot be affected by anything else, there is also in us a passive reason, which is capable of decay and death, and except by means of this passive reason we do not think anything."
In this chapter we can see very clearly the diffi- culties under which Aristotle is placed in attempting to bring together the two aspects of man's intelli- gence, as a universal principle which yet must be conceived as developing itself in a finite individual subject. Season, from the former point of view, is impassive and active and it can be determined by nothing but itself. Yet at first it exists in man only as a potentiality ; and as a potentiality it would seem to be exposed to influences from without, while, as a universal potentiality, it would seem to be exposed to such influences from everything. How does Aristotle unite these two apparently contradictory characteristics of it ? He does so, as I have already pointed out, simply by showing that all that such influences can do is to become the occasion, not of imposing anything upon reason, or putting anything into it from without,
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but only of calling out its power of determining itself. Its universal potentiality or openness to everything — which at first sight looks like emptiness, and seems to involve its being subject to every im- pression— is really a capacity of overpowering every such impression, and finding itself in everything. " It must therefore, since it apprehends all things, be pure and unmingled, that it may overcome all objects, that is, that it may know them." ^
But this, again, raises the question, how objects are in the first instance given to reason ? Aristotle answers that they are given to it through the per- ceptions of sense, and the images which are derived therefrom. But we have to remember, in the first place, that even the perceptions of sense are not for Aristotle mere impressions ; for, as we have seen, objects act upon sense only to call out its own potentiality. Thus the activity of sense already strips objects of their ' sensible matter,' and appre- hends only their ' sensible forms.' These sensible forms, again, which are taken up into the imagin- ation, though they are free from the sensible matter of their objects, have still what Aristotle calls an ' intelligible matter ' ^ attaching to them, in so far as they are images of objects in space and time,
^De An., 429a, 19.
'^ Aristotle's conception of 'intelligible matter' has a close analogy to Kant's doctrine as to the forms of sense (of. lilet., 1036a, 10),
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and not, therefore, objects of pure thought. Thus they are not in the highest sense intelligible, though, as Aristotle maintains, we cannot think at all without them. They are the vehicles in which the forms of things are brought within the reach of our intelligence, the occasions for pure reason to exercise its faculty and to evolve its potentiality. It is in this sense, then, that Aris- totle says that the development of knowledge means the determination of reason as passive or potential by reason as active. But he is obliged to add that such determination is not possible, except so far as the passive reason is already supplied with the images of sense ; and that it is in these images or sensible forms, and not directly in itself, that the reason finds at first the objects or forms which are purely intelligible.^ In this way the self-determina- tion of the mind does not exclude its receiving its forms through the medium of sense and imagina- tion ; for, in doing so, it is not receiving into itself anything foreign, but only, as it were, recovering and recognising what is its own. All that reason has to do is to set aside or discount the intelligible matter in such images, in order to grasp its proper object, the object in which alone it can find itself.
^ iv roFj etdea-i rots aladrjToU ri porjrd f'crri {De An., 4.32a, 4). Our actualised knowledge for Aristotle is of the individual, which is pre- sented in sense or imagination (cf. Met., 1087a, 19), though we can distinguish the universal from the particular element in it. VOL. I. y
338 ARISTOTLE'S VIEV/ OF REASON
We see, then, how it is that Aristotle could make a distinction between the active and the passive reason, and yet regard them as one. The reason of man, in his view, is identical with the absolute reason, with this difference — that the absolute reason is com- plete in itself, and independent of all time-process, while in man reason, at first, appears as a potenti- ality which can be developed only by means of the data of sense. Yet these data are merely means or occasions of its own action, and what it finds in them, or rather, we might say, extracts from them, is the pure forms which are one with its own nature. In this sense, therefore, it is never determined by anything but itself. We are not, therefore, to think of the active reason as something external to the individual, but simply as the correlate of the universal potentiality which belongs to him as a finite subject, who cannot realise himself at once, but only by a process of development. Our know- ledge, as knowledge, is the manifestation of a universal principle, and yet, from another point of view, it is dependent on a sensible process, which must be stimulated from without by its appropriate objects. Thus it is limited in its evolution by the conditions of a sensitive life, from wliich, nevertheless, it emancipates itself in so far as it is realised. We know, indeed, as ' spectators of all time and exist- ence,' as conscious subjects who are only as they
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think and think as they are ; for intelligence is the same thing in all in whom it is developed, and in every one its nature is to emancipate itself from individual conditions, and to regard things not from the point of view of a particular organism, but from the point of view of a pure subject of knowledge. Hence, while, in one sense, reason is what is most our own, in another sense it may be said to be in- dependent of the individuality in which it is realised ; for, in so far as we know, it is not our individu- ality which is in question, but the reason that dwells in us ; and if this reason were completely realised, it would be an intelligence which no longer took any account of the particular self as a being with a determinate individual existence in space and time. It would not remember nor expect, and it would be free from all feelings of love and hate, which depend on the personal relations of this individual. Nay, we may go farther : for, as all finite individu- ality would drop out of view for a subject which contemplated only the forms of things in their pure ideal relations with each other, there would for it be no difference in things which would not be at once transparent, and therefore no process from one thing to another. Discourse of reason would cease in the pure intuition of truth in its unity.
This view of reason will l)ecome more intelligible, if we follow Aristotle a little farther in the contrast
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he draws between pure reason and the discursive faculty which, for want of a better name, we might call the understanding. Reason, as we have seen, apprehends its objects in their intelligible forms, freed from all the images of sense. It grasps the ideal unity which is hidden from us by the sensible or intelligible matter, that is, by the manifold sensuous or imaginative elements in connexion with which they are at first presented. For it, therefore, objects are simple and indivisible, as is the act of thought wherein they are known. And, as this intuitive act is completely one with itself and does not admit of division, it excludes the possibility of error. In this activity of reason, therefore, there are no degrees of knowledge ; we either know the truth altogether or we do not know it at all. In our ordinary consciousness of things, on the other hand, we have to admit the possibility of many intermediate stages between absolute ignorance and complete knowledge : for in ordinary experience we have to deal not with transparent unities in which no element can be separated from the rest, but with complex data including in themselves many disparate elements, which may be connected with each other but cannot be identified. And in forming such connexions, the discursive reason or under- standing has to proceed by judgment and inference. Thus it moves from one point or datum to another,
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without having, at least while the process lasts, any intuition of the unity of the whole. The highest result of this discursive process, however, is just to attain such an intuition ; and when the intuition comes, it will make the process of thought super- fluous ; for the mind, to which the whole object is an indivisible unity, has no longer any need to connect the parts together by any links of argument.
In the last paragraph, I am perhaps going a little beyond the words of Aristotle, but not, I think, beyond what is implied in them. Eor the simplicity and indivisibility of the objects of reason cannot be taken as absolutely excluding all ditterence, but only as meaning that no element can be separated from the rest. We may, therefore, illustrate what Aristotle means by comparing the kind of know- ledge of a science which is possessed by the learner or discoverer — for whom every new step is a surprise till it has been brought by reasoning into connexion with what is already known — with the kind of knowledge possessed by one who grasps the science as a unity in which every truth involves all the others. In this sense, the whole process of learning might be described as the process whereby discursive passes into intuitive reason ; for the ideal which in all investigation we are seeking, and in which alone the scientific impulse can be satisfied, is that of a unity of knowledge which is completely
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differentiated into all its parts and yet seen to be one with itself through all its differences. The great steps in the progress of thought are just those in which some new insight makes a scattered mass of observations and inferences suddenly coalesce into one indi^dsible body of truth.
While, however, we may fairly interpret in this way what Aristotle says of the indivisible objects of reason, we have to remember tliat for him these objects are not the phenomena of ordinary experience but the intelligible forms of things, and these alone. For it is only ' in things without matter ' that reason finds the objects, which it can identify with itself. Hence Aristotle goes on to contrast these objects not only with sensible objects but even with all objects which possess ' intelligible matter.' Anything that has quantity — anything that occupies a part of space and time — has in it an imagina- tive element which is inconsistent with the pure unity of thought. A quantitative whole, indeed, may be apprehended as a unity and by one iudivisilile act of mind ; for, though divisible, it may not be actually divided in our apprehension of it. In other words, we may take it as con- tinuous or as discrete just as we please ; and while, in the former case, the act of mind by which it is apprehended is one and indivisible, in the latter case the mental activity becomes divided
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into several acts Hke its object. But in the case of the pure form, there is no such alternative possibility. The intelligible form, as such, is simple, and it cannot be apprehended except in one indivisible act of thought ; for in the case of such a form, as we have already seen, we must either have absolute knowledge, or we must be completely ignorant.^
In the contrast thus drawn by Aristotle between an object quantitatively determined, and an object of pure thought, there is a measure of truth ; for a quantity, as such, is not an organic whole. We may take it either in its unity with itself or in its difference, either in its continuity or in its discretion, as we please ; but we cannot conceive it as an object which is one with itself in and through its difference, so long as we take it simply as a quantity. On the other hand, anyone who leaves out the quantitative aspect of things altogether, in order to reach their unity, will, so far, be making that unity empty and abstract. He will be securing unity not by synthesis, but by the omission of difference and multiplicity. And if he proceeds farther in this direction, the simplicity he attains will not be that of a whole which is indivisible — because no part of it can be conceived without the rest — but that of a bare identity,
' De An., 4306, 5-20. We must however always remember that in our knowledge the voCj jra^jjTtxos is always involved, and we cannot voilv avtv ipavTaa-fxaTOi, though we may discount the image.
344 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
which is one with itself because it has no content at all. The exclusion of the quantitative from the unity of the pure form thus suggests a suspicion that Aristotle is seeking for unity by the way of abstraction. And this suspicion is confirmed by what he says in the immediate context,^ in which he seems to be answering the objection that the pui-e forms cannot be simple because they have negatives or oppo- sites, which are apprehended by the same act of mind whereby we grasp the forms themselves ; for the knowledge of opposites is one. If this be the case, therefore, it seems impossible that the knowledge of such forms can be attained by a simple and in- divisible act of mind.
Now, the true answer to this difficulty would seem to be that, as correlated factors in one conception, the positive and the negative, the form and its opposite, are apprehended in one indivisible act of thought, and that, in this sense, they constitute a simple and indivisible unity. But the answer of Aristotle appears to be not this, but that the negatives or opposites of the pure forms exist only in the phenomenal world, in the region of matter and change. Hence also the mind only apprehends the negatives or opposites of the forms along with them, in so far as it has a material or sensible basis, and, therefore, itself belongs to the world of change. But for the absolute intelligence no ^De All., 430?', 20.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 345
opposition or negation can exist. It has no connexion with matter, and, therefore, no alternative potentiali- ties. In its pure intuitive energy it is simply positive or affirmative of itself, and has not to deal with the negative, even as a possibility.^
Now I will not say that such language is quite conclusive as to Aristotle's views. It is possible to take it as meaning simply that all oppositions and differences of thought are relative, and imply a unity which transcends them ; and that a perfect intelligence must contemplate all things in relation to this unity. If we adopted this view, we might say that Aristotle does not dismiss negation and opposition as unreal or as not entering into the objects of reason, but simply contends that they are never to be taken as absolute negation or opposition ; in other words, that they are only to be regarded as expressing the negative relation to each other of the indivisible factors of one whole. But when we consider Aristotle's general treatment of the idea of negation, and how he frequently attacks Plato for maintaining that opposites directly affect each other, it is difficult to attribute to him any such doctrine. In his whole discussion of the law of con- tradiction, again, he seems to lay all the emphasis upon the reciprocal exclusiveness of the affirmative and the negative ; nor does he ever seem to realise the truth tliat, if things have no positive relation, they
1 Dt An., 43M//, -24 : cf. Met., XOlbh, '24.
S46 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
cannot even exclude each other ; for, even in order to exclusion, they must be conceived as included in some larger unity. Finally, this view of Aristotle's meaning is confirmed by the comparison which he draws ^ between the intuition by which reason apprehends the pure forms of things and the apprehension by sense of the ' special sensibles,' which also he regards as simple and indivisible, independent of all judgment or infer- ence, and therefore exempt from the possibility of error. Aristotle fails to see that even the special sensibles cannot be apprehended without discrimination, nor, therefore, without mental process. On the other hand, even if we could conceive of something — say, a sensation of sound or colour — as given to the mind through sense, in an immediate intuition which implied no activity of thought, it would not supply any fit illustration of the intuitions of reason. For, though an intuition of reason may be called simple and indivisible, it is not in the sense of a bare unit which has no mediation, but in the sense of an organic unity, whose manifold elements are so perfectly mediated with each other that we can no longer think of any one of them except as involving, and involved in, the whole.
To sum up the result of this lecture. Our exami- nation of the Aristotelian conception of science has shown that his separation of the theoretical from the
iZ>e An., 430b, 29 seg.
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 847
practical activity of reason is based upon a principle which greatly narrows his view of the former. Practice is conceived as an imperfect manifestation of reason because it deals with the particular ; and, on the same grounds, practical science is regarded as less exact, and therefore of less scientific value than the other sciences. Eor science, in the highest sense of the word, has only to do with the definition of substances and the deduction of consequences from these definitions. It thus excludes from its considera- tion the accidental element which enters into the nature and the circumstances of every individual finite substance. It deals only with the universal, the pure forms of things and what is demonstrable from them. In the De Anima we are carried a step farther, in so far as the demonstrative process itself appears to be discounted or transcended in the idea of a pure intuition of reason. For the objects which reason grasps are, as we have seen, simple and in- divisible, and their whole nature must be apprehended in a simple and indivisible act. Now, if we take this simplicity in the highest sense, it will refer not to an abstract unit or identity, but to the organic or super-organic unity of a whole, in which no part can ever be separated from the rest without losing its essential character. Wliat, on this view, Aristotle means, is that we know a thing truly only when its diversity is completely taken up into its unity, so
348 ARISTOTLE'S VIEW OF REASON
that, if known at all, it must be known as in all its constituents the expression of one principle. In this sense it might without difficulty be acknowledged that the discourse of reason culminates in making way for an intuition, which completely transcends it, and renders it henceforth unnecessary. But Aris- totle fails to develop his view to its consequences, and that in two ways. In the first place, he forgets to trace the necessary connexion between the discur- sive operations of the mind and the intuition in which they result. At least we cannot find that he calls attention to the fact that the object of the intuition is a concrete unity, which contains in itself all the elements distinguished and related by the discursive faculty, though, of course, it casts upon them a new light which greatly alters our first thoughts of them. In the second place, Aristotle's initial error in making an essential division between form and matter, or in not carrying out fully the idea that they are correlative with each other, leads to a separa- tion of the world of experience, the world of change which is subjected to the conditions of space and time, from the world of intelligible forms which can be only apprehended by pure reason. Hence, as the unity of the intuitive reason is not reached by means of a synthesis which embraces all things in their concrete nature, but only by a synthesis of all things in their pure form without any matter,
IN ITS THEORETICAL USE 849
it is a unity which is reached by abstraction from many of the aspects of reality. And it is a dialectical necessity that he who omits any element of the whole, will be driven to omit other elements connected with them, and others again connected with these, till the whole is emptied of its contents and reduced to a barren identity. Thus Aristotle, the most scientific of minds, had placed his philosophy, as it were, upon a sliding-scale, which leads ultimately to the mystical negation of all science. At the same time, we can see that the organic idea, which he never consistently applied but which never ceases in some degree to influence him, leaves the result of his philosophy somewhat ambiguous, and even makes it possible for some interpreters to maintain that he rose ' above all dualism ' ^ to the conception of the world as a self-consistent system. i^ay, he even seems to assert the same thing himself.^ Before, however, we can venture to pronounce a final judg- ment upon this question, we must consider Aristotle's doctrine as to tlie nature of God and his relation to the world.
^ See especially A. BulHnger, Ariifoffe's Meta2>hi/^fc and his various other essays upon Aristotelian subjects. 2 Met., lOlGa, 4.
LECTURE THIRTEENTH.
DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG TO REASON OR TO WILL?
In the last two lectures we have considered Aristotle's views of the practical and of the theoretical life, and the grounds on which he regards the latter as a purer and higher expression of reason than the former. Practical reason has to realise itself in a subject-matter which is not purely rational but mixed with contingency, and in which the univer- sality of pure science is reduced to generality, and the absolute necessity of law to the hypothetical necessity of empirical fact. But the theoretical reason is free from all such limits. Its object is the universal and eternal, the forms of things apart from their matter, and as tliese forms are the counterpart of its own nature, it may even be said that its only object is itself. From this it follows that ethics cannot, as Plato supposed, be based upon metaphysics. Indeed, whatever connexion there is
REASON OR WILL 351
between them lies in the opposite direction ; for it is the virtues of the moral and political life that form the indispensable basis or precondition for the development and exercise of those higher qualities which are shown in the life of contemplation.
Aristotle's exaltation of theory above practice will become more intelligible if we compare it with the opposite view which is more prevalent in modern times, and which regards science as confined to the narrow sphere of a finite experience, while it finds a way to the infinite only through ideas connected with our practical life. On the whole, ancient philosophy tended towards what has been called ' intellectual ism ' and regarded the pure activity of reason as that in which man rises into iihe most intimate communion with the divine. But in modern times, especially since Kant, the trend of opinion has often been in the opposite direction, namely, to regard scientific knowledge as limited to the phenomenal world of experience, and to look to the impulses of the will or the demands of practical reason to free us from such limitations and supply us with grounds for belief in some higher reality. If we can discern the causes of this marked difference between the ancient point of view and that which has been most popular, at least in recent times, it will carry us some way toward the determination of their respective values ; in other words, it will
352 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
help us to decide whether the truth lies in either of these extremes or in some higher view in which the opposition between them is transcended.
Now, we have already seen how Aristotle was led to his view of the primacy of the contemplative life. The opposite view, which has been much favoured in recent speculations on the nature of religion, finds its foremost representative in Kant. It was the aim of the Critique of Pure Reason to show that the objective world — the only world of which we can have scientific knowledge — is a thorough-going system of necessity, a system of objects represented as existing in space and time, and reacting upon each other according to fixed laws which are altogether independent of our will. Of this objective system we, as natural beings, are parts, and in it we find the satisfaction of our immediate impulses ; but there is nothing in it or in ourselves as parts of it, which could suggest the existence of any principle either within or without or above us other than the necessity of nature, the necessity that connects all objects with each other. When, however, we reflect on the conditions of our knowledge of this world of externally related pheno- mena, we see that such knowledge is possible only through the unity of the self within us and by the thorough-going synthesis of phenomena according to the principles of the understanding. For, in order
TO REASON OR TO WILL ? 353
that objects may exist for us, it is necessary that the intelligence should combine the data, given in sense under the forms of time and space, by the aid of the principles of causality, reciprocity, and the other principles of the understanding, so as to produce a connected experience — an experience which can be referred to one self. But this, again, leads to a further step in the analysis of knowledge ; for, when we realise what is meant by this reference of experience to the unity of one self, we see that it involves certain ideas or ideals of reason, by which we are guided in applying the principles of the understanding. The conscious self in all its constructive activity — in its endeavour to construe its own life, in its endeavour to determine the connexion of outward phenomena, and finally in its effort to bring together in one both these forms of experience — is guided and stimulated by the ideas of the self, the world and God ; and of each of these it thinks as a systematic whole which is absolutely one with itself through all its differences. Of these ideas it cannot get rid, yet neither is it possible for it to realise or verify them in experience. The ultimate verdict of the Critique in relation to them is, therefore, an open one. To reason in its theoretical use, tliey must always remain proble- matical, tliat is, they must remain ideals which it
can and must aim at in the development of its vol.. I. z
354 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
knowledge, but which it can neither assert nor deny- to be real. They are, as it were, dark lanterns which illumine the object but not themselves, which throw light upon experience and enable us to detect its phenomenal character, yet without revealing anything as to the existence of real objects corre- sponding to themselves. If we have any right to believe in the existence of any such objects, it must be not upon theoretical grounds, but in virtue of some practical necessity to affirm their reality.
Now, such a practical necessity is found in the moral law which, as it issues unconditioned com- mands, compels us to believe in our own freedom. And the idea of an intelligible world is just the conception on which we must take our stand, in order to think of ourselves as self-determining beings,^ or to refer our own actions to ourselves as their origin and cause. Thus while the theoretical reason forced us to deny that the ego is under the law of necessity, which applies only to its objects, the practical reason reveals to us that we are under the law of freedom, or, in other words, that in all our action we are determined only by ourselves. But what is this law of freedom"? It is the counterpart of the ideas of reason ; for these are all reducible to different applications of the conception
^ Metaph. der Sitten, III, " Vou der aiissersten Grenze aller practischeu Pliilosophie. "
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 355
of self-consistent or systematic unity. To say that a rational being, as such, is under the law of freedom means, therefore, that iu all its actions it must be consistent with itself, and that this consistency must be its sole motive.
Now, if we free this idea from the ambiguity which attaches to Kant's dift'erent expressions of it — as bare logical consistency, as consistency with the self, and as consistency with the idea of a possible kingdom of ends ^ — what he seems to mean is that a moral life is one which in all its acts is in perfect organic unity with itself. Further, as the unity of the self is a principle to which all the intelligible world is relative, the moral law not only demands the systematic unity of the life of the individual, but postulates the idea of a system of the universe in which all the ideas of reason are realised, and all things are brought into unity with each other and with the intelligence. In other words, it postulates not only tlie freedom of the individual, but the conformity of all the conditions of his life to such freedom : or, as Kant puts it, it postulates both the immortality of the soul to work out its infinite task, and the existence of God as the ultimate principle of unity by which the order of the material world is conformed to the demands of self-
* The main defects of Kant's view arise, as I have triod to show elsewhere (Critical Phiioso/iky of Kant, II, p. 21S), from hia follow- ing out the first of these formulas to the exclusion of the other two.
356 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
determining reason, and happiness is bound up with goodness.
The general result of Kant's doctrine, then, is that, while there is nothing in the objective world, viewed simply in itself, to raise our thoughts above the necessity of nature, we find in our practical conscious- ness a sufficient warrant for the belief in our own freedom and in the existence of a spiritual Being like ourselves, who is the ultimate principle of all reality, and through whom, therefore, all reality is determined in conformity with the demands of our spirits. This Being we cannot, indeed, know, as we know the objects of ordinary experience, but the thought of him is bound up with the consciousness of self and with all the experience which the unity of the self makes possible; and the helicf in him is implied in our consciousness of the law that gives order and direction to our practical life. In this case, and in this case alone, can we vindicate our right to believe what we will to believe, but cannot know ; and the limitations which science cannot transcend are set aside by the imperative voice of duty, which compels us to think of the universe as ordered in conformity with itself.
Such, in outline, is the Kantian theory of the relation of our ordinary experience — our immediate consciousness of the world and ourselves — to that higher idea of both which is presupposed by morality
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 357
and religion. And we find the same theory repeated with modifications by many writers in the present day, who, without adhering closely to Kantian principles, adopt his general conception of the limits of know- ledge. To such writers science seems to be confined to the task of tracing out the lines of natural necessity by which one phenomenon, or phase of existence, is bound to another ; and the possibility of escape from this iron circle of causation is supposed to be opened up by the revolt of human hearts against it. Thus the feeling of inconsistency between the conditions of finite existence and the obligations laid upon us by our spiritual nature, the demand of the soul for a good more complete and enduring than any of the changing objects of sense, or the aspiration after an ideal beauty which is never adequately realised in the world — are regarded as a sufficient warrant for casting aside the ordinary tests of credibility and basing belief upon the ivill to believe. In many different ways the will, or the heart, or the imagination, is supposed to emanci- pate us from the limitations of sense and experience, and to put us in relation to ends and objects which cannot be brought within the scope of science.
Now it is easy to see that the two theories or classes of theories, represented by Aristotle and Kant, are diametrically opposed to each other, and it is instructive to draw out the points of contrast between them. With Kant science is confined to the discovery
358 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
of the laws which determine the co-existence and succession of ohjects and events in the finite world of experience, and it is only through tlie moral conscious- ness and the practical faith which that consciousness brings with it that we escape from the limits of this system of necessity, and rise to the idea of a spiritual God who rules over a free kingdom of spiritual beings. With Aristotle, on the other hand, moral practice is the hampered activity of reason, working with a matter which can never be perfectly subdued or determined by it, exercising itself in a medium which is exposed to the inroads of a necessity that comes not from within but from without, not from itself, but from nature and circumstance ; while it is science which emancipates reason from this foreign yoke, and raises it to a consciousness of all things in their ideal prin- ciples, which is also a consciousness of their unity with the mind that knows them : for, as Aristotle says, in the case of things without matter, the knower and the known are one. Thus it is only the mind which sees the essential forms of things — their final or formal causes — that can attain to the full consciousness and realisation of itself. Putting this contrast in a slightly different way, Kant holds that knowledge can grasp only the external conditions of things, while it is the faith that goes with the moral consciousness wdiich alone can give us insight into the final causes, the ultimate forms of reality, the s})iritual principles upon
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 359
which the universe is based. Aristotle, on the other hand, looks upon practice as a continual struggle with external necessity, wliile he thinks of Oecopta, philoso- phical contemplation, as the free converse of the mind with itself, the activity of unimpeded reason, which is at the same time the revelation of the nature of God and of the immanent purpose of the universe. In both cases, therefore, we have, on the one side, an immediate view of the world as a region of accidental co-existence and external necessity, and, on the other side, a deeper view of it as the manifestation of a spiritual principle, as an organic whole in which an ideal design is ever realising itself. But the difference is that the principles to which the two views are referred change places, and the higher religious and philosophical consciousness is in the one case associated with practice and in tlie other with theory.
Now this comparison is very instructive, whether we look at the points in which the two views agree or at those in which they differ. Looking first at the points of agreement, we see that they both start with the presupposition of a certain irrational or non-rational element in things which cannot be explained, though in the case of Aristotle this element is taken as objective, and in tlie case of Kant as subjective. Thus Aristotle presupposes that there is in the world a suV)stratum of matter, which makes it impossible that formal or final causes should
860 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
be perfectly realised, and which obliges us to explain many things by an external necessity, which is closely allied with contingency, or, at least, leaves much room for it. In like manner, mutatis mutandis Kant bases our experience upon data of sense, of which we can say nothing, except that so they are given. Our mind, indeed, by the aid of principles derived from itself can reduce these data into a fixed and necessary order, and so can construct out of them a world of experience. But it cannot make this world wholly intelligible ; it cannot bring it into agreement with the ideas of reason which are bound up with its consciousness of itself. Thus in both philo- sophies the immediate world of experience is conceived as one in which we continually encounter contingency or external necessity, and it is by abstraction from that world, or rather from the irrational element in it, that we are supposed to attain to the consciousness of an intelligible reality, which is determined only by idea or spiritual principles of connexion. These principles, however, are to Kant only objects of a practical faith which science cannot verify ; while, to Aristotle, they are the supreme objects of science, and, indeed, if we take the word science in its strictest sense, they are the only objects of science. Now there is a plausible explanation of this difference of view which many moderns would be ready to give. It is that Aristotle is still entangled
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 361
in the illusive search for formal or final causes which belongs to the metaphysical stage of thought. He has not yet discovered what later philosophers were to discover — that that search is hopeless, and that all we can do is to observe the qualities of things as they present themselves, to determine their quantitative relations, and to find out the laws that govern their co-existence and succession. To attempt anything more is to go beyond the possibility of science ; it is to substitute anthropomorphic fancies for the truths which we are able to ascertain by scientific methods. When we think we discover design in nature, what we see is not her real lineaments, but the reflexion of our own faces. If we can attain to more than this, the grounds of our belief must be not objective but subjective, not derived from scientific scrutiny of the world without, but by listening to some voice that speaks within us. If, therefore, we have any right to a faith that there is in nature a principle kindred in some way to our own spirits, and that this principle is the real cause or substance of the world without us, we must find its ground simply in this — that, as Kant showed, we cannot be true to ourselves or live in accordance with the law of our own rational being without presupposing or postulating such a principle. Hence modern philosophy must speak with a humbler voice than the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. It must not pretend to determine scientifically the
862 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
highest principles of reality. It must be content if it can find grounds for a rational faith tliat, behind the phenomenal veil which hides the truth of things from us, there is a divine reality which corresponds to the highest needs of our souls. For us, in this region of appearance, the true can never be coincident with the good ; but our souls refuse to believe in their ultimate discord, and this refusal is itsQlf a sufficient evidence that, if we could see the whole truth, we should find that they coincide.
It may, however, as I think, be shown that there is a better way out of the difficulty. The sharp antithesis between the phenomenal and the real or intelligible worlds which is common to Aristotle and Kant — whether it be conceived with the former as a contrast between the sphere of opinion and that of science, or with the latter as a contrast between the sphere of science and that of faith — is the result of a false abstraction. There is no phenomenal world, no world in which reality is veiled from us by a material or irrational element. The only distinction is between the world as im- perfectly conceived and the world as more adequately interpreted. Nor is it true in regard to any object that the utmost science can attain is to find out the external relations of co-existence or succession, in which it stands to other objects. It is, indeed, true that this kind of explanation is the primary
TO REASON OR lO WILL r 363
work of science, and that, as I have said in a previous lecture, neither Plato nor Aristotle had an adequate perception of tlic ditliculty and extent of this work. It is also true that tlie higher teleo- logical view of nature cannot be reached, except in so far as this hninbler work of science has been achieved. But it is unpossible to admit the abstract contrast between mechanism and teleology in the sense in which it has often been maintained. For, in the first place, recent times have seen a new attempt to use the conceptions of organism and organic evolution in the explanation of the pheno- mena of nature and, particularly, of the phenomena of the life of plants and animals. But any appli- cation of such categories to natural beings involves that the kingdom of nature is not cut ofl' by any sharp line of division from tlie kingdom of spirit ; but that there are in nature indications of the same upward movement towards an ideal end, which is continued in a higher form in the moral elTort of the human will to attain an absolute good. In this sense, modern thought has recognised the same fact which Aristotle half -poetically expresses when he speaks of a ' will of nature,' which reaches beyond the particular impulses of the animals and seeks for the preservation of the individual and the species. Even Kant himself acknowledges that it is necessary to use teleological ideas in dealing with living things;
364 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
though he treats this use as merely ' heuristic,' i.e. as supplying a necessary point of view from which we must carry on our scientific investigations, Ijut not as enabling us to attach any real predicates to such beings as objects. But the division between such a provisional hypothesis or postulate of science and its recognised truth is not easy to maintain — as is shown by the speculations of many of our modern biologists, whose general repudiation of teleological speculations does not prevent them from continually in detail making use of the idea of purpose, whenever it is necessary to explain any special modification of structure or function that seems to conduce to the preservation of the individual or the species.
We ought not, however, to make too much of such concessions. For it must be allowed that the main work of science has been to follow out the lines of external connexion between phenomena, and that, even in regard to the organic world, it generally pursues the same method to the same result. Even, therefore, if in this region it cannot altogether banish the idea of final causes, yet it keeps that thought as far as possible in the background; and it treats all the phenomena with which it deals as the necessary results of the action and reaction of elements which are not themselves subordinated to any per- vading unity. And the Darwinian theory, many as are the applications of the idea of purpose to which
TO REASON OR TO WILL ? 365
it has led, is itself an attempt to carry the idea of an external necessity, resulting from the rela- tions of the organism and the environment, into the explanation of those very phenomena which were once thought to be the clearest evidences of design.
But, in the second place, there is a better way of proving the limited and provisional character of the ordinary scientific view of nature, as a system of external necessity ; and Kant himself, though he maintained that view, and indeed, gave it a fuller and more distinctive philosophical expression than anyone before him, was also the first to supply the conclusive means of refuting it. For, while he treated the world of experience as a system of objects — which are external to each other in space, and pass through successive phases in time, according to necessary laws of coexistence and succession — he showed also that this world of necessity stands in essential relation to the unity of the self that knows it. Hence, any explanation of the world, or of any object in it, whicli does not take account of this relation, must be regarded as abstract and imperfect. Thus the external necessity which charac- terises the objective world when we regard it as complete in itself (as it is generally regarded by science), must receive a new interpretation when we recognise tliat it cannot be separated from the
366 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
unity of the intelligence. When we rise above the abstractions of the ordinary consciousness and of science, and take a complete or concrete view of the facts, we see that this external necessity never exists apart from an identity which manifests itself in it and controls it. This identity beyond difference, indeed, was recognised by Kant only in the form of an ideal of reason which cannot be realised in experi- ence, or, in his language, of a regulative idea, which cannot be treated as constitutive. But this view implies an imperfect conception of the unity of self- consciousness, and is quite inconsistent with Kant's own conception of the relativity of objects to that unity. For, if the object in its externality be an abstraction which requires an ideal principle of identity to complete it — if, in other words, the object always has a subjective unity underlying all its differences — we can no longer admit that Kant's categories of the understanding are the highest prin- ciples we can apply to the contents of our experience. If, therefore, the special sciences confine themselves to explaining the connexion of phenomena by the external relations of causality and reciprocity, this proves nothing in regard to the limits of knowledge. It proves only that such sciences are not able to speak the last word as to the nature of the objects with which they deal. For, in order to speak that last word, we must regard the world — and everything
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 3G7
in it to which we attribute any independent reality — not as an external combination of elements, acting and reacting on each other, but as a unity which is one with itself through all its differences. While, therefore, it may be legitimate for the purposes of science to bring all plienomena under the form of necessity, it is obvious that this is a provisional way of regarding them, and tliat it cannot furnish us with any ultimate conception of reality. " The truth of necessity is freedom or self-determination," in the sense that whatever claims to be real must be an individual, and that no object is individual except in so far as it is an organic whole which has its principle of unity in itself.
The result of this line of thought, then, is to break down the abstract opposition which Kant set up — between the object and the subject, between the world known and the self that knows it — by the dis- covery, in the object, of that unity which was sup- posed to characterise the subject. But with this we have also to break down the opposition between the theoretical and the practical life : for the relativity of subject and object, self and not-self, must be accepted in both its aspects ; and if the object cannot be severed from the unity of the self, neither can the unity of the self be severed from the nmltiplicity and externality of the object. Now Kant, as we liave seen, supposed that reason, in its practical
368 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
exercise, carries with it an ideal of freedom or self- determination, which sets it in abstract opposition to the objective world as a system of necessity. This also causes it to condemn that world as phenomenal, and to look beyond it to an intelligible world, in which all things are determined according to the law of liberty, and to a divine intelligence which orders all things according to that law. But one of the necessary presuppositions of this view has already disappeared when we have rejected the conception of the objective world as a world of necessity. And the other necessary presupposition must also dis- appear, when we recognise that the subjective unity of self-consciousness cannot be severed from the objec- tive consciousness of the world in space and time. The relativity of object and subject to each other implies that the unity of the intelligence must be found also in the object ; but it also implies that the intelligence or conscious self, in seeking to realise itself in the object, is only bringing to light what the true nature of the object is. Hence, we cannot suppose that the aspirations of the soul or the obligations of the will can carry us into a new region absolutely separated from that phenomenal world, which is the object of our knowledge. On the con- trary, the practical must be viewed as continuous with the theoretical life, and it must be recognised that, if the former goes farther than the latter,
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 369
it is still on the same road. The good cannot be opposed to the true ; for they are only different aspects of the relation of the same self to the same all-embracing whole, in which the self finds its objective counterpart. Thus the contrast of knowing and willing cannot be treated as an abso- lute one, so soon as we discern that in knowing we are coming to the consciousness of self as well as of the objective world, and that in action we are realis- ing an end which is involved in the nature of the world as well as in our own nature. It is true that in both cases, in knowledge as in action, the univer- sality of the principle that manifests itself in our lives is at first hidden from us by the conditions of its pro- gressive manifestation. What we know seems to be only the particular things with which our senses bring us into contact ; what we will seems to be only the particular objects which excite our desires. We do not reflect that all known objects already have taken their place in the one world to which all that is knowable by the one self must belong ; nor that all objects of desire must be sought sub ratione boni, as the satisfaction of a self which, as it is a unity to which all ends are related, cannot be satisfied with anything but the whole. Thus through all the stages of their development, the theoretical and the prac- tical consciousness are actuated by the same princi- ples, and have to contest with the same difficulties ; VOL. I. -2 A
370 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
nor is it possible to separate the one from the other without mutilating both.
We may put this point in a more palpable way, if we consider that the opposition of practical to theoretical reason, which Kant maintains, resolves itself into an opposition of that which ought to be to that which is. The good is an ' ought-to-be ' of reason, which never is realised in the phenomenal world. But, if the above criticisms have any value, this opposition must be broken down on both sides. For, on the one hand, the real, which is the object of knowledge, cannot be regarded as a dead reality which exists apart from any movement in itself or in the intelligence which apprehends it, but only as the expression of an absolute intelligence which reveals itself both in the object and in the mind. Nor, on the other hand, can the good be taken as mere ideal, an ' ought-to-be,' which is present to our minds but has no necessity of realisation ; for, as the good of a self, it has in itself a principle to which all knowable objects are related. Hence it is realised, or is realising itself, in all things, even in those which seem most to hinder its realisation. It is impossible to sever the absoluteness of the moral law, upon which Kant so strongly insists, from the idea that " morality is the nature of things " : in other words, that it is a principle which is realising itself in the objective world.
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 371
Thus also morality passes into religion, not as with Kant by the external postulate of a Deus ex machiiia who shall bind together goodness with happiness, or the spiritual with the natural world, but by the recognition that there is one principle underlying both. For the very essence of religion lies in the consciousness that what we have presented to us in the objective world is not a foreign necessity, which has no relation, or only an accidental relation to our will, but rather an environment which is the necessary condition of its exercise ; and, con- versely, that what we seek as the highest in our practical life, is not a mere subjective end, to which we try to subordinate all that is without us. Rather that it is one and the same end which is revealed both within and without, in the order of nature and history and in the wants and aspirations of our spirits. Our theoretical and our practical conscious- ness are thus in continuity with each other. We have not in the one the determination of the self by an objective world which is independent of us and our desires, succeeded in the other by the un- availing, or only partly successful, effort to subdue such objects to our will. We discern that, in knowledge, we are active as well as passive ; and that, in practice, we are passive as well as active. Or, more properly, we discern that the opposition of activity and passivity does not hold good, wlien
372 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
we are attempting to describe the relations of spiritual beings, who are members of the great organic whole of the universe, to that divine Spirit which is the principle of that whole. Eather we are obliged to say that these members are active, because, and just so far as, the principle of the whole is active in them.
It appears, then, that there is an essential fallacy in the Kantian attempt to confine science to the sphere of phenomenal objects which are connected to- gether only by an external necessity, and to refer all our higher consciousness of reality, whether re- ligious or philosophical, to the demands of practical reason. But the same criticism applies also to the opposite view of Aristotle, that it is the practical reason which is immersed in the phenomenal world — in the world of external necessity and contingency of which science in the strict sense of the term is impossible ; while it is the theoretical reason which alone is able to grasp things in their essential nature, and to follow out the inner necessity by which all their attributes are connected ; and, above all, it is the theoretical reason alone that can rise to the contem- plation of God as the principle of all reality, the first and the final cause of the universe. We must, I think, recognise tliat in this view also there is an unhappy divorce between the two sides of man's life ; and that his higher or religious consciousness can no
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 373
more be conceived as abstractly theoretical than it can be conceived as abstractly practical. The idea that science is concerned only with deducing the nature of things from their essential definitions — from the formal or final cause of their being — is as one-sided as the Kantian conception that it has to do only with measuring the phenomena as they are given, and determining the external conditions of their co-existence or succession. For neitlier of these is possible without the other. A teleology that takes no account of mechanism is as imperfect as a mechanical philosophy that takes no account of teleology. The latter, indeed, is less of an illusion ; for a science that deals with efficient, and not with formal or final causes, is a true science so far as it goes. It enables us to find order in the world, though it may be only an external order. It thus lays the true foundation for a systematic view of things, even though it may not be able to give to that view the highest kind of unity. It exhibits to us the anatomical structure and mecha- nical relations of the parts of the body, though it is not able to detect the secret of its life. On the othc- hand, as the work of the Scholastics often showed, the attempt to deal directly and immediately with formal and final causes, is apt to lead to a pliilosophy of foregone conclusions, which stereotypes our first notions of things, and attempts, by merely analysing these notions, to add to our knowledge of their objects.
374 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
So understood, the demousorative syllogism of Aristotle becomes a mere formal exercise of thought which can only bring out in the conclusion what has been assumed, and even explicitly assumed in the premises. "We cannot, indeed, attribute such a notion of science to Aristotle ; for as I have shown in an earlier lecture, his definitions were not mere reproductions of popular notions, but were reached by an inductive and dialectical process which is closely analogous to the methods of modern science. At the same time, we have to recognise that there were defects in Aristotle's logic which gave too much encouragement to the Scholastic interpretation of it. In the first place, he assumed that by a direct process of induction it is possible at once to rise to an explanation of nature by formal or final causes. Thus he thought it possible to solve the whole problem of science at one stroke, and did not recognise that we must use lower cate- gories before we proceed to higher categories ; in other words, that we must connect the phenomena with which we are dealing in an external way as causes and effects of each other, before we can safely attempt to grasp their essential individuality and the organic relations by which they are bound to each other and to the mind that knows them. It is true that besides the science that demonstrates the properties of sub- stances through their essential definition, Aristotle also refers to a kind of science which has to determine
YO REASON OR TO WILL? 375
the causes of particular events, such, for instance, as an eclipse. Like Plato, therefore, he recognises that the external or mechanical action of substances upon each other is worthy of investigation as well as the formal or teleological principles that are realised in them. And, especially in his biological works, he carries the investigation of the necessary conditions, without which the ends of nature cannot be achieved, to a point far beyond the imaginary physics of the Timaeus. But such enquiries into ' second causes ' do not, in his view of science, take the important place which has been given to them in modern times; still less does he suppose that they precede and condition the higher kind of knowledge which deals with the essential forms of things.^
^ In one sense we might say that for Aristotle the sole d^a7Karo;', the sole condition sine qua non, of the realisation of the ends of nature is matter. But, in bis special enquiries, matter is never taken in the sense of the ultimate indeterminate vXrj, but always as the specialised matter which is necessary for a particular purpose, e.g. in the life of an animal or a plant. Hence the investigation of material causes is really an enquiry into the special actions and reactions of the elements of such specialised matter upon each other or upon the environment — in other words, it is an enquiry into efficient caus<s. We have, however, to observe that etlicieut cause is taken by Aristotle in two quite diflerent senses. In the Metaphysic, the clficieut cause generally means a substance which exists prior in time to the efl'ect, and has the same forms realised in it as in the effect. (Cf. Met., 1032a, 2."), where Aristotle refers to his usual example: &v6pwiros yap AvOpuinov yeuif^.) In other cases the term efficient cause is used by Aristotle in the modern sense, as meaning the conditions of an effect, which, as Aristotle also observes, do 7iol precede it in time (An. Post., doa, 22).
376 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
In the second place, as I tried to show in the last lecture, Aristotle, almost in spite of himself, is forced by his doctrine as to matter to recognise an essential opposition between the universal and the particular. Hence no science seems to him exact except as it approximates to the type of mathematics. He saw, indeed, that the exactness of mathematical science rests upon abstraction, but he did not discern that the same defect of abstractness would attach to any attempt to determine individual substances apart from each other, and he even seemed to adopt the principle that the highest substance is that which is most simple. Hence, in what he supposed to be the absolutely regular movement of the heavens he saw a higher manifestation of intelligence than in the confused and complex motions of earthly things and beings. In this there is obviously manifested the influence of a false ideal of knowledge ; for, even if we conceived the stellar motions as he did, that is to say, as circular motions absolutely continuous and regular, or only irregular in so far as many spheres are concerned in the movement of one body, this absence of complexity would seem to us to involve that there is less, and not more, need for a spiritual principle to explain them. In both cases, however, in astronomy as in mathematics, we are really dealing with what is general and abstract — with asj^ects of the existence of material objects, the exactness of our knowledge
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 377
of which is depeiideut on the fact, that we consciously omit, or unconsciously neglect, their relations to other parts or elements of reality. In like manner, the comparative exactness of physical science in general is at least partly due to the fact that we regard its objects merely as material things, and omit altogether to take into account their relations to life and mind. Hence, though this kind of exactness seems to diminish as we rise in the scale of the sciences from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, from biology to psychology, this does not mean that we are passing from that which is more to that which is less in- telligible ; rather it means the reverse of this. It means that we are bringing our science nearer and nearer to the complex whole to which these abstracted elements belong, and, therefore, are leaving less and less to take its place with the accidental or inexplicable. It is true that, as we advance, just because we are leaving the region of the abstract, we are brought into contact with greater difhculties. The unexplained remainder, that is, the numerous objects and events which, after all that the special sciences can do, are still incompletely accounted for — all this apparently accidental element in life does not press itself upon our notice, while we are dealing with the abstractions of mathematics, or with what we may call the natural abstraction of the motions of the heavenly bodies. Even in physics and chemistry we are not mucli
378 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
troubled with the consciousness of it, because in these sciences we are satisfied with finding the causes or conditions of the particular phenomena, and are not embarrassed by the thought of any general purpose or teleological unity that binds all the particular phenomena together as elements in one whole. But biology brings with it the conceptions of organic unity and evolution ; it exhibits to us, in the plant and still more in the animal, a whole the parts of which are means and ends to each other. Here, therefore, we begin to be embarrassed by the fact that the purposes of the individual life and of the life of the species are so often thwarted and interfered with by what seem to be external accidents ; or, in other words, that the environment is so often at war with the life instead of subserving it. And when we come to the spiritual life of man, with its still higher purposes and its deeper teleological unity, we are still more disturbed by what seems the frequent defeat of rational order by external accidents — by tlie catastrophe of individual lives that seemed to contain so high promise in them, by the way in which the course of social progress is so often stopped or turned back, and by that mixture of success and failure in the attainment of good, which renders it so difficult to discover any general meaning in human history. Thus in the moral sciences we are continually dealing with the struggle of the will of man to remould nature, and, we may add, his own
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 379
natural life, in conformity with his spiritual needs ; and these two sides of our existence, by their co-existence and interference with each other, by their partial agreement and yet frequent collision, at once tend to awaken in our minds the idea of a rational plan and purpose, and at the same time to oppress us with a consciousness of its imperfect realisation. It is thus that the practical life of man appears to be the peculiar sphere of accident and caprice, just because it forces upon us the conception of a universal system ot" reason which would not admit any accident or caprice at all.
All this might make us inclined to accept the Aristotelian notion that ethics is the science in which least exactness is to be expected, and that it is excluded altogether from that sphere of demon- stration in which reason finds its highest exercise. In truth, however, such a view rests upon an illusion. The inorganic world taken by itself — in- cluding the heavenly bodies, which the Greeks deified, and even Aristotle and Plato treated as free from all imperfection and accident — is the sphere of an external necessity which, as Aristotle discciiied, is closely con- nected with contingency.^ It is in the organic world,
^In Met., VI, .3, Aiibtotle seems to come very near to the niodern idea that, in the endless series of efficient causes we must stop somewhere, and that the necessity of this arbitrary stop forces us to regard the whole series as contingent. But Aristotle does not definitely say tliis. Elsewhere he seems to take as contingent
380 DOES THE PRIMACY BELONG
and still more in man's moral life, and in the subjection of nature to the higher ends of that life, that purpose or design begins clearly to manifest itself. Here, therefore, we have the first lifting of the veil of contingency from nature ; and it is natural, as I have already suggested, that this partial revelation should awaken the desire for a more complete manifestation of spiritual law in the natural world. In ethics, there- fore, we are vexed with an antagonism of principles which, without going beyond the sphere of our science, we cannot finally solve. But it is the peculiar task of philosophy, following out the forecast of religion, to develop that idealistic view of the world which supplies the only possible key to such difficulties, and enables us to see that the principle of nature and the principle of man's higher life are one, and that it is an imperfect interpretation of the facts which regards them as coming into collision with each other. In other words, it is its business to raise the intuitive certitude of religion — its unreflecting faith in goodness and God — into the clear reflective consciousness that the world is an organic system, the principle of which is spiritual.
But it is impossible that philosophy should attain to such an interpretation of things, as it has too often tried to attain to it, by the way of abstraction, by
wh.itever cannot be traced to the operation of formal, final, or even efficient causes. Cf. Vol. I, p. 325 note.
TO REASON OR TO WILL? 381
turning away from the difficulties of the special sciences, and especially from the difficulties that beset us in the explanation of the practical life of man. On the contrary, it can solve them, or approximate in any measure to the solution of them, only by taking a more comprehensive and complete view of the facts than is possible in any of the special sciences. And, as it is an imperfect religion which withdraws itself from any of the concrete interests of life — from art or literature, from trade or politics — and seeks to escape from their manifold difficulties and dangers by occupying itself only with what are technically called ' religious interests,' and, as it were, hiding itself in the sanctuary : so it is an imperfect philosophy which finds the highest truth in a pure contemplation, which confines itself to the most general ideas, and throws no new light upon the results of natural or ethical science. Philosophy must, indeed, change our ordinary, and even our scientific views of reality ; it must give a new meaning to life : but it can do so only as it re-interprets our common experience, and shows us that the world we live in, here and now, is a spiritual world. The general result to which our argument brings us is that neither the theoretical nor the practical life can be viewed as the exclusive source of that higher consciousness which is manifested in religion and philosophy. Aristotle's exaltation of pure contempla- tion and Kant's exaltation of practical reason equally
382 REASON OR WILL
rest upon a false abstraction. To say, with the latter, that we can think and believe what we cannot know is arbitrarily to confine our knowledge of the objective world to lower categories than those which we apply to the inner life of the conscious self, and to forget that the consciousness of the self cannot be severed from the consciousness of the world. To say, with Aristotle, that we can know that which is universal and eternal, but that we cannot, in the full sense of the word, know that which is particular and temporal, is to suppose that we reach the highest reality by abstraction, and to forget that the ulti- mate truth must be that which is most complex and concrete, as it is that in which all other truth reaches its completion. We cannot find an ultimate principle of unity either in the subject as separated from the object or in the object as separated from the subject, since it is only in rising above this division that we have any apprehension of such a principle. Hence, also, any exclusive emphasis on the theoretical or the practical consciousness must tend to empty the consciousness of God of its peculiar meaning and content. If, therefore, there be any sense in which the religious consciousness may be regarded as contem- plative, it is not as excluding, but as at once including and transcending the practical consciousness. AVhether there is any trace of such a view in Aristotle, we shall have to consider in tlie next lecture.
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