Plato and Platonism : a series of lectures

rch
vs
'
ate
‘
:

bas

ΠῚ

ra
:

5 κι
ΟΝ r.>
ὁ ὦ ΠῚ
Pibyn ee S
ἐτοζεές
και .
<a

‘aoa via
ee enn γ᾽ is
wise
‘ νὐπιῖτεςε
Seria hast ies
‘ ἜΣ :
es, ds noe
hot bet er
4.» Ἢ
πές τὴ ΜΝ
re :

εὖ

ie .
ϑάδηνενα
τὸν
ἐν τὸς
“ταν
Sh νεὼν 4
τν κἢ

= oon
‘ 24

as in 2011 \ with funding from

Digitized by the Ἕ Archive

niversity of Toronto

PLATO AND PLATONISM

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON : BOMBAY - CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO
ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

ΙΡΡΙΑΤΟ
AND PLATON

A SERIES OF LECTURES ᾿

ΒΥ

WALTER /PATER/

‘Qs φιλοσοφιας μὲν οὔσης μεγιστης μουσικῆς

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
Ι910

\— LIBRARY

WOE er
RET Ua πο σ ΔΑΝ ΄'

First Edition 1893
Second Edition 1895; Reprinted 1896, 1897
Edition de Luxe 190t
Third Edition 1901 ; Reprinted 1902, 1905, 1907, 1909
Library Edition 1910

Tue Lectures of which this volume is com-
posed were written for delivery to some young
students of philosophy, and are now printed
with the hope of interesting a larger number
of them. By Platonism is meant not Neo-
Platonism of any kind, but the leading principles
of Plato’s doctrine, which I have tried to see in
close connexion with himself as he is presented

in his own writings.
Wea 8

P. VI I B

ἵ CONTENTS

CHAP,

1. PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
2. PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST

. PLATO AND SOCRATES

. PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

. THE GENIUS OF PLATO .

. THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO—

I, THE THEORY OF IDEAS

Y AWN | ὦ

II. DIALEcTIC
8. LACED/EMON
9. THE REPUBLIC
¥ το. PLATO'S AESTHETICS

. PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER .

ἽΝ

uf
Cea ie
th

Ἧ
Σ
᾽

eas, !

PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

Wiru the world of intellectual production, as
with that of organic generation, nature makes
no sudden starts. Natura nihil facit per saltum ;
and in the history of philosophy there are no
absolute beginnings. Fix where we may the
origin of this or that doctrine or idea, the
doctrine of “reminiscence,” for instance, or of
“the perpetual flux,” the theory of “induction,”
or the philosophic view of things generally,
the specialist will still be able to find us some
earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental
tendency. ‘The most elementary act of mental
analysis takes time to do; the most rudimentary
sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so
simple that we can hardly conceive the human
mind without them, must grow, and with
difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental and moral,
has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the
poetry that preceded it. A powerful general-
isation thrown into some salient phrase, such as
| 5

PLATO AND PLATONISM

that of Heraclitus—Tldvra ῥεῖ, all things fleet
away—may startle a particular age by its novelty,
but takes possession only because all along its
root was somewhere among the natural though
but half-developed instincts of the human mind
itself.

Plato has seemed to many to have been
scarcely less than the creator of philosophy ; and
it is an immense advance he makes, from the
crude or turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry
with the Ionians or the Eleatics, to that wide
range of perfectly finished philosophical litera-
ture. His encyclopedic view of the whole
domain of knowledge is more than a mere step
in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for
compass and power and charm, had been really
comparable to it. Plato’s achievement may
well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morn-
ing of the mind’s history. Yet in truth the
world Plato had entered into was already almost
weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by
the oppositions of sects, the claims of rival
schools. Language and the processes of thought
were already become sophisticated, the very air
he breathed sickly with off-cast speculative
atoms.

In the Tzmeus, dealing with the origin of the
universe he figures less as the author of a new
theory, than as already an eclectic critic of older
ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory
and counter-theory. And as we find there a

6

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

sort of storehouse of all physical theories, so
in reading the Parmenides we might think that
all metaphysical questions whatever had already
passed through the mind of Plato. Some of the
results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead
and gone, are of the structure of his philosophy.
They are everywhere in it, not as the stray
carved corner of some older edifice, to be found
here or there amid the new, but rather like
minute relics of earlier organic life in the very
stone he builds with. The central and most
intimate principles of his teaching challenge us
to go back beyond them, not merely to his
own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master—
to Socrates, who survives chiefly in his pages—
but to various precedent schools of speculative
thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy ; beyond
these into that age of poetry, in which the first
efforts of philosophic apprehension had hardly
understood themselves; beyond that uncon-
scious philosophy, again, to certain constitutional
tendencies, persuasions, forecasts of the intellect
itself, such as had given birth, it would seem,
to thoughts akin to Plato’s in the older civilisa-
tions of India and of Egypt, as they still exercise
their authority over ourselves.

The thoughts of Plato, like the language he
has to use (we find it so again, in turn, with
those predecessors of his, when we pass from
him to them) are covered with the traces of
previous labour and have had their earlier

7

PLATO AND PLATONISM

proprietors. If at times we become aware in
reading him of certain anticipations of modern
knowledge, we are also quite obviously among
the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary
world. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that
in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of
literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely
new: or rather, as in many other very original
products of human genius, the seemingly new 18
old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the
actual threads have served before, or like the
animal frame itself, every particle of which
has already lived and died many times over.
Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion
is new; the new perspective, the resultant
complexion, the expressiveness which familiar
thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition. In
other words, the form is new. But then, in the
creation of philosophical literature, as in all
other products of art, form, in the full significa-
tion of that word, is everything, and the mere
matter is nothing.

There are three different ways in which the
criticism of philosophic, of all speculative opinion
whatever, may be conducted. The doctrines of
Plato’s Repubsic, for instance, may be regarded as
so much truth or falsehood, to be accepted or
rejected as such by the student of to-day. That
is the dogmatic method of criticism ; judging
every product of human thought, however alien

8

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

or distant from one’s self, by its congruity with
the assumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or
Hegel, according to the mental preference of the
particular critic. There is, secondly, the more
generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which
aims at a selection from contending schools of
the various grains of truth dispersed among them.
It is the method which has prevailed in periods
of large reading but with little inceptive force
of their own, like that of the Alexandrian Neo-
Platonism in the third century, or the Neo-
Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its
natural defect is in the tendency to misrepresent
the true character of the doctrine it professes to
explain, that it may harmonise thus the better
with the other elements of a pre-conceived
system.

Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in
our own century, under the influence of Hegel
and his predominant theory of the ever-chang-
ing “ Time-spirit”” or Zezt-geist, given way to a
third method of criticism, the historic method,
which bids us replace the doctrine, or the
system, we are busy with, or such an ancient
monument of philosophic thought as The Re-
public, as far as possible in the group of con-
ditions, intellectual, social, material, amid which
it was actually produced, if we would really
understand it. ‘That ages have their genius as
well as the individual ; that in every age there
is a peculiar ensemble of conditions which deter-

PLATO AND PLATONISM

mines a common character in every product of
that age, in business and art, in fashion and
speculation, in religion and manners, in men’s
very faces ; that nothing man has projected from
himself is really intelligible except at its own
date, and from its proper point of view in the
never-resting “‘ secular process” ; the solidarity of
philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common
or general history; that what it behoves the
student of philosophic systems to cultivate is the
“historic sense”: by force of these convictions
many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase
of speculation has found a reasonable meaning
for us. As the strangely twisted pine-tree,
which would be a freak of nature on an English
lawn, is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid
the contending forces of the Alpine torrent that
actually shaped its growth, to have been the
creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts ;
so, beliefs the most fantastic, the ““ communism ”
of Plato, for instance, have their natural propriety
when duly correlated with those facts, those
conditions round about them; of which they are
in truth a part.

In the intellectual as in the organic world the
given product, its normal or abnormal charac-
teristics, are determined, as people say, by the
“environment.” The business of the young
scholar therefore, in reading Plato, is not to
take his side in a controversy, to adopt or refute
Plato’s opinions, to modify, or make apology for,

10

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

what may seem erratic or impossible in him ;
still less, to furnish himself with arguments on
behalf of some theory or conviction of his own.
His duty is rather to follow intelligently, but

with strict indifference, the mental process there,

as he might witness a game of skill ; better still,
as in reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in
reading The Republic, to watch, for its dramatic
interest, the spectacle of a powerful, of a sovereign
intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group
of conditions which can never in the nature of
things occur again, at once pliant and resistant
to them, into a great literary monument. To
put Plato into his natural place, as a result
from antecedent and contemporary movements
of Greek speculation, of Greek life generally :
such is the proper aim of the historic, that is
to say, of the really critical study of him.

At the threshold, then, of The Republic of
Plato, the historic spirit impresses upon us the
fact that some of its leading thoughts are
partly derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom
we happen to possess independent information.
From that brilliant and busy, yet so unconcerned
press of early Greek life, one here another there
stands aside to make the initial act of conscious
philosophic reflexion. It is done with some-
thing of the simplicity, the immediate and
visible effectiveness, of the visible world in action
all around. Among Plato’s many intellectual

11

PLATO AND PLATONISM

predecessors, on whom in recent years much
attention has been bestowed by ἃ host of
commentators after the mind of Hegel, three,
whose ideas, whose words even, we really find
in the very texture of Plato’s work, emerge
distinctly in close connexion with The Republic :
Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the
philosophy of number and music; Parmenides,
““My father Parmenides,” the centre of the
school of Elea; Heraclitus, thirdly, author of
the doctrine of “‘the Perpetual Flux”: three
teachers, it must be admitted after all, of whom
what knowledge we have is to the utmost degree
fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of
giving that knowledge greater definiteness is by
noting their direct and actual influence in Plato’s
writings.

Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose,
yet of a philosophy which was half poetic figure,
half generalised fact, in style crabbed and obscure,
but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten—he
too might be thought, as a writer of prose, one
of the “‘ fathers” of Plato. His influence, how-
ever, on Plato, though himself a Heraclitean in
early life, was by way of antagonism or reaction ;
Plato’s stand against any philosophy of motion
becoming, as we say, something of a “fixed
idea” with him. Heraclitus of Ephesus (what
Ephesus must have been just then is denoted by
the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of
the [onian League) died about forty years before

12

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

Plato was born. Here then at Ephesus, the
much frequented centre of the religious life of
Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its
tyrants, Heraclitus, of ancient hereditary rank,
an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the
bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy,
had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the
mutable character of political as well as of
physical existence ; perhaps, early as it was, on
the mutability of intellectual systems also, that
modes of thought and practice had already been
in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had
lived and died around; and in Ephesus as else-
where, the privileged class had gone to the wall.
In this era of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek
youthfulness, one of the haughtiest of that class,
as being also of nature’s aristocracy, and a man
of powerful intellectual gifts, Heraclitus, asserts
the native liberty of thought at all events ;
becomes, we might truly say, sickly with “the
pale cast” of his philosophical questioning.
Amid the irreflective actors in that rapidly
moving show, so entirely immersed in it
superficial as it is that they have no feeling of
themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He re-
flects; and his reflexion has the characteristic
melancholy of youth when it is forced suddenly
to bethink itself, and for a moment feels already
old, feels the temperature of the world about
it sensibly colder. Its very ingenuousnes, its
sincerity, will make the utterance of what comes
13

PLATO AND PLATONISM

to mind just then somewhat shrill or over-
emphatic.

Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside
from the vulgar to think, so early in the
impetuous spring-tide of Greek history, does
but reflect after all the aspect of what actually
surrounds him, when he cries out—his philo-
sophy was no matter of formal treatise or system,
but of harsh, protesting cries—TIlavra χωρεῖ καὶ
οὐδὲν μένε. All things give way: nothing
remaineth. There had been enquirers before
him of another sort, purely physical enquirers,
whose bold, contradictory, seemingly impious
guesses how and of what primary elements the
world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the
brutes, their own souls and bodies, had been
composed, were themselves a part of the bold
enterprise of that romantic age; a series of
intellectual adventures, of a piece with its
adventures in unknown lands or upon the sea.
The resultant intellectual chaos expressed the
very spirit of gifted and sanguine but insub-
ordinate youth (remember, that the word νεότης,
youth, came to mean rashness, insolence !)
questioning, deciding, rejecting, on mere rags
and tatters of evidence, unbent to discipline,
unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions
too, coming and going, those conjectures as to
what under-lay the sensible world, were them-
selves but fluid elements on the changing surface
of existence.

14

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

Surface, we say; but was there really any-
thing beneath it? That was what to the
majority of his hearers, his readers, Heraclitus,
with an eye perhaps on practice, seemed to
deny. Perpetual motion, alike in things and
in men’s thoughts about them,—the sad, self-
conscious, philosophy of Heraclitus, like one,
knowing beyond his years, in this barely
adolescent world which he is so eager to instruct,
makes no pretence to be able to restrain that.
Was not the very essence of thought itself also
such perpetual motion? a baffling transition from
the dead past, alive one moment since, to a
present, itself deceased in turn ere we can say,
It is here? A keen analyst of the facts of
nature and mind, a master presumably of all the
knowledge that then there was, a vigorous
definer of thoughts, he does but refer the
superficial movement of all persons and things
around him to deeper and still more masterful
currents of universal change, stealthily with-
drawing the apparently solid earth itself from
beneath one’s feet. The principle of disinte-
gration, the incoherency of fire or flood (for
Heraclitus these are but very lively instances
of movements, subtler yet more wasteful still)
are inherent in the primary elements alike of
matter and of the soul. Aéyeu που Ἡράκλειτος, Says
Socrates in the Cratylus, ὅτι πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν
μένε. But the principle of lapse, of waste, was,
in fact, in one’s self. ‘No one has ever passed

15

PLATO AND PLATONISM

twice over the same stream.”” Nay, the passenger
himself is without identity. Upon the same
stream at the same moment we do, and do not,
embark: for we are, and are not: εἶμέν τε καὶ
οὐκ εἶμεν. And this rapid change, if it did not
make all knowledge impossible, made it wholly
relative, of a kind, that is to say, valueless in the
judgment of Plato. Man, the individual, at this
particular vanishing-point of time and _ place,
becomes “ the measure of all things.”

To know after what manner (says Socrates, after discuss-
ing the question in what proportion names, fleeting names,
contribute to our knowledge of things) to know after what
manner we must be taught, or discover for ourselves, the
things that really are (τὰ ὄντα) is perhaps beyond the measure
of your powers and mine. We must even content ourselves
with the admission of this, that not from their names, but
much rather themselves from themselves, they must be learned
and looked for. . . . For consider, Cratylus, a point I oft-times
dream on—whether or no we may affirm that what is beautiful
and good in itself, and whatever is, respectively, in itself, zs
something καὶ

Cratylus. ‘To me at least, Socrates, it seems to be some-
thing.

Socrates. Let us consider, then, that ‘in-itself’; not
whether a face, or anything of that kind, is beautiful, and
whether all these things seem to flow like water. But, what
is beautiful in itself—may we say ?—has not this the qualities
that define it, always?

Cratylus. It must be so.

Socrates. Can we then, if it is ever passing out below,
predicate about it ; first, that it zs that; next, that it has this
or that guality; or must it not be that, even as we speak, it
should straightway become some other thing, and go out under
on its way, and be no longer as it is? . . . Now, how could
that which is never in the same state be a thing at all? ...

16

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

Nor, in truth, could it be an object of knowledge to any one ;
for, even as he who shall know comes upon it, it would become
another thing with other qualities; so that it would be no
longer matter of knowledge what sort of a thing it is, or in
what condition. Now, no form of knowing, methinks, has
knowledge of that which it knows to be no-how.

Cratylus. It is as you say.

Socrates. But if, Cratylus, all things change sides, and
nothing stays, it is not fitting to say that there is any
knowing at all. . . . And the consequence of this argument
would be, that there is neither any one to know, nor anything
to be known. If, on the other hand, there be always that
which knows, and that which is known; and if the Beautiful
is, and the Good zs, and each one of those things that really
are, 7s, then, to my thinking, those things in no way resemble
that moving stream of which we are now speaking. Whether,
then, these matters be thus, or in that other way as the followers
of Heraclitus affirm and many besides, I fear may be no easy
thing to search out. But certainly it is not like a sensible
man, committing one’s self, and one’s own soul, to the rule of
names, to serve them, and, with faith in names and those who
imposed them, as if one knew something thereby, to maintain
(damaging thus the character of that which is, and our own)
that there is no sound ring in any one of them, but that all,
like earthen pots, let water. Cratylus, 439.

Yet from certain fragments in which the
Logos is already named we may understand that
there had been another side to the doctrine of
Heraclitus ; an attempt on his part, after all, to
reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos,
to the unity of a reasonable order, by the search
for and the notation, if there be such, of an.
antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceed-
ing uniformly from movement to movement,
as 1n some intricate musical theme, might link to-
gether in one those contending, infinitely diverse

P. VI 17 c

PLATO AND PLATONISM

impulses. It was an act of recognition, even on
the part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive,
the incoherent, the insane, of that Wisdom
which, “reacheth from end to end, sweetly
and strongly ordering all things.” But if the
“weeping philosopher,” the first of the pessi-
mists, finds the ground of his melancholy in the
sense of universal change, still more must he
weep at the dulness of men’s ears to that
continuous strain of melody throughout it. In
truth, what was sympathetic with the hour and
the scene in the Heraclitean doctrine, was the
boldly aggressive, the paradoxical and negative
tendency there, in natural collusion, as it was,
with the destructiveness of undisciplined youth ;
that sense of rapid dissolution, which, according
to one’s temperament and one’s luck in things,
might extinguish, or kindle all the more eagerly,
an interest in the mere phenomena of existence,
of one’s so hasty passage through the world.
The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed
an apprehension of which the full scope was
only to be realised by a later age, in alliance
with a larger knowledge of the natural world, a
closer observation of the phenomena of mind,
than was possible, even for Heraclitus, at that
early day. So, the seeds of almost all scientific
ideas might seem to have been dimly enfolded in
the mind of antiquity ; but fecundated, admitted
to their full working prerogative, one by one,
in after ages, by good favour of the special
18

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

intellectual conditions belonging to a particular
generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself pre-
occupied by a formula, not so much new, as
renovated by new application.

It is in this way that the most modern
metaphysical, and the most modern empirical
philosophies alike have illustrated emphatically,
justified, expanded, the divination (so we may
make bold to call it under the new light now
thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of
Ephesus. The entire modern theory of “de-
velopment,” in all its various phases, proved or
unprovable,—what is it but old Heracliteanism
awake once more in a new world, and grown to
full proportions ?

Πάντα χωρεῖ, πάντα pet.—It is the burden of
Hegel on the one hand, to whom nature, and
art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion
too, each in its long historic series, are but so
many conscious movements in the secular process
of the eternal mind; and on the other hand of
Darwin and Darwinism, for which “ type” itself
properly zs not but is only always Jdecoming.
‘The bold paradox of Heraclitus is, in effect,
repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just
now of a cautiously reasoned experience, and, in
illustration of the very law of change which it
asserts, may itself presently be superseded as a
commonplace. Think of all that subtly dis-
guised movement, /afens processus, Bacon calls
it (again as if by a kind of anticipation) which
19

PLATO AND PLATONISM

modern research has detected, measured, hopes
to reduce to minuter or ally to still larger
currents, in what had seemed most substantial to
the naked eye, the inattentive mind. To the
“observation and experiment” of the physical
enquirer of to-day, the eye and the sun it lives
by reveal themselves, after all, as Heraclitus had
declared (scarcely serious, he seemed to those
around him) as literally in constant extinction
and renewal; the sun only going out more
gradually than the human eye; the system
meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in ceaseless
movement nowhither. Our terrestrial planet is
in constant increase by meteoric dust, moving to
it through endless time out of infinite space.
The Alps drift down the rivers into the plains,
as still loftier mountains found their level there
ages ago. The granite kernel of the earth, it
is said, is ever changing in its very substance,
its molecular constitution, by the passage through
it of electric currents. And the Darwinian
theory—that “species,” the identifying forms
of animal and vegetable life, immutable though
they seem now, as of old in the Garden of
Eden, are fashioned by slow development, while
perhaps millions of years go by: well! every
month is adding to its evidence. Nay, the idea
of development (that, too, a thing of growth,
developed in the progress of reflexion) is at last
invading one by one, as the secret of their ex-
planation, all the products of mind, the very
20

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

mind itself, the abstract reason; our certainty,
for instance, that two and two make four.
Gradually we have come to think, or to feel,
that primary certitude. Political constitutions,
again, as we now see so Clearly, are “‘ not made,”
cannot be made, but “‘ grow.” Races, laws, arts,
have their origins and end, are themselves
ripples only on the great river of organic life ;
and language is changing on our very lips.

In Plato’s day, the Heraclitean flux, so deep
down in nature itself—the flood, the fire—
seemed to have laid hold on man, on the social
and moral world, dissolving or disintegrating
opinion, first principles, faith, establishing amor-
phism, so to call it, there also. All along indeed
the genius, the good gifts of Greece to the
world had had much to do with the mobility
of its temperament. Only, when Plato came
into potent contact with his countrymen (Pericles,
Phidias, Socrates being now gone) in politics,
in literature and art, in men’s characters, the
defect naturally incident to that fine quality
_ had come to have unchecked sway. From the
lifeless background of an unprogressive world—
Egypt, Syria, frozen Scythia—a world in which
_ the unconscious social aggregate had been every-
| thing, the conscious individual, his capacity and
rights, almost nothing, the Greek had stepped
_ forth, like the young prince in the fable, to set
_ things going. To the philosophic eye however,

21

PLATO AND PLATONISM

about the time when the history of Thucydides
leaves off, they might seem to need a regulator,
ere the very wheels wore themselves out.
Mobility ! We do not think that a neces-
sarily undesirable condition of life, of mind, of the
physical world about us. *Tis the dead things,
we may remind ourselves, that after all are most
entirely at rest, and might reasonably hold that
motion (vicious, fallacious, infectious motion, as
Plato inclines to think) covers all that is best
worth being. And as for philosophy—mobility,
versatility, the habit of thought that can most
adequately follow the subtle movement of things,
that, surely, were the secret of wisdom, of the
true knowledge of them. It means susceptibility,
sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short. It
was the spirit of God that moved, moves still, in
every form of real power, everywhere. Yet to
Plato motion becomes the token of unreality in
things, of falsity in our thoughts about them.
It is just this principle of mobility, in itself so
welcome to all of us, that, with all his contriv-
ing care for the future, he desires to withstand.
Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate
of the immutable. The Republic is a proposal to
establish it indefectibly in a very precisely regu-
lated, a very exclusive community, which shall
be a refuge for elect souls from an ill-made world.

That four powerful influences made for the
political unity of Greece was pointed out by
22

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

Grote : common blood, common language, a com-
mon religious centre, the great games in which
all alike communicated. He adds that they
failed to make the Greeks one people. Pan-
hellenism was realised for the first time, and then
but imperfectly, by Alexander the Great. The
centrifugal tendency had ever been too much for
the centripetal tendency in them, the progres-
sive elements for the element of order. Their
boundless impatience, that passion for novelty
noted in them by Saint Paul, had been a matter
of radical character. Their varied natural gifts
did but concentrate themselves now and then to
an effective centre, that they might be dissipated
again, towards every side, in daring adventure
alike of action and of thought. Variety and
novelty of experience, further quickened by a
consciousness trained to an equally nimble power
of movement, individualism, the capacities, the
claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost
play by a ready sense and dexterous appliance of
opportunity,—herein, certainly, lay at least one-
half of their vocation in history. The material
conformation of Greece, a land of islands and
peninsulas, with a range of sea-coast immense
as compared with its area, and broken up by
repellent lines of mountain this way and that,
nursing jealously a little township of three or four
thousand souls into an independent type of its
own, conspired to the same effect. Independ-
ence, local and personal,—it was the Greek ideal |
23

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Yet of one side only of that ideal, as we may
see, of the still half-Asiatic rather than the full
Hellenic ideal, of the Ionian ideal as conceived
by the Athenian people in particular, people of
the coast who have the roaming thoughts of
sailors, ever ready to float away anywhither amid
their walls of wood. And for many of its
admirers certainly the whole Greek people has
been a people of the sea-coast. In Lacedemon,
however, as Plato and others thought, hostile,
inaccessible in its mountain hollow where it had
no need of any walls at all, there were resources
for that discipline and order which constitute
the other ingredient in a true Hellenism, the
saving Dorian soul in it. Right away thither,
to that solemn old mountain village, now mistress
of Greece, he looks often, in depicting the
Perfect City, the ideal state. Perfection, in
every case, as we may conceive, is attainable
only through a certain combination of opposites,
Attic dea with the Doric ὄξος ; and in the
Athens of Plato’s day, as he saw with acute
prevision, those centrifugal forces had come to
be ruinously in excess of the centripetal. Its
rapid, empiric, constitutional changes, its restless
development of political experiment, the sub-
divisions of party there, the dominance of faction,
as we see it, steadily increasing, breeding on
itself, in the pages of Thucydides, justify Plato’s
long-drawn paradox that it is easier to wrestle
against many than against one. ‘The soul,

24

THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION

moreover, the inward polity of the individual,
was the theatre of a similar dissolution; and
truly stability of character had never been a
prominent feature in Greek life. Think of
the end of Pausanias failing in his patriotism,
of Themistocles, of Miltiades, the saviours of
Greece, actually selling the country they had so
dearly bought to its old enemies.

It is something in this way that, for Plato,
motion and the philosophy of motion identify
themselves with the vicious tendency in things
and thought. Change is the irresistible law of
our being, says the Philosophy of Motion.
Change, he protests, through the power of a
true philosophy, shall not be the law of our
being; and it is curious to note the way in
which, consciously or unconsciously, that philo-
sophic purpose shapes his treatment, even in
minute detail, of education, of art, of daily life,
his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or
innocent words, as ““ manifold,” ‘‘ embroidered,”
“ changeful,” become the synonyms of what is
evil. He, first, notes something like a fixed cycle
of political change; but conceives it (being
change) as, from the very first, backward towards
decadence. The ideal city, again, will not be
an art-less place: it is by irresistible influence of
art, that he means to shape men anew; by a
severely monotonous art however, such art as
shall speak to youth, all day long, from year to
year, almost exclusively, of the loins girded about.

25

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Stimulus, or correction,— one hardly knows
which to ask for first, as more salutary for our
own slumbersome, yet so self- willed, northern
temperaments. Perhaps all genuine fire, even
the Heraclitean fire, has a power for both.

« Athens,” says Dante,

—Athens, aye and Sparta’s state
That were in policy so great,
And framed the laws of old,
How small a place they hold,
How poor their art of noble living
Shews by thy delicate contriving,
Where what October spun
November sees outrun !
Think in the time thou canst recall,
Laws, coinage, customs, places all,
How thou hast rearranged,
How oft thy members changed !
Couldst thou but see thyself aright,
And turn thy vision to the light, ᾿
Thy likeness thou would’st find
In some sick man reclined ;
On couch of down though he be pressed,
He seeks and finds not any rest,
But turns and turns again,
To ease him of his pain.

Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell’s Translation.

Now what Dante says to Florence, contrasting
τ with Athens and Sparta as he conceives them,
Plato might have said to Athens, in contrast
with Sparta, with Lacedemon, at least as he

conceived it.

26

Π

PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST

Over against that world of flux,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,

it is the vocation of Plato to set up a standard
of unchangeable reality, which in its highest
theoretic development becomes the world of
“eternal and immutable ideas,” indefectible out-
lines of thought, yet also the veritable things
of experience: the perfect Justice, for instance,
which if even the gods mistake it for perfect
Injustice is not moved out of its place; the
Beauty which is the same, yesterday, to-day and
for ever. In such ideas or ideals, ‘‘ eternal” as
participating in the essential character of the
facts they represent to us, we come in contact,
as he supposes, with the insoluble, immovable
granite beneath and amid the wasting torrent
of mere phenomena. And in thus ruling the
deliberate aim of his philosophy to be a survey
of things sub specie eternitatis, the reception of a
kind of absolute and independent knowledge
27

PLATO AND PLATONISM

(independent, that is, of time and position, the
accidents and peculiar point of view of the
receiver) Plato is consciously under the influ-
ence of another great master of the Pre-Socratic
thought, Parmenides, the centre of the School of
Elea.

About half a century before the birth of
Plato, Socrates being then in all the impressi-
bility of early manhood, Parmenides, according
to the witness of Plato himself—Parmenides at
the age of sixty-five—had visited Athens at the
great festival of the Panathenea, in company
with Zeno the Eleatic, a characteristic specimen
of Greek cleverness, of the acute understanding,
personally very attractive. Though forty years
old, the reputation this Zeno now enjoyed seems
to have been very much the achievement of his
youth, and came of a mastery of the sort of
paradox youth always delights in. It may be
said that no one has ever really answered him ;
the difficulties with which he played so nicely
being really connected with those ‘‘ antinomies,”
or contradictions, or inconsistencies, of our
thoughts, which more than two thousand years
afterwards Kant noted as actually inherent in the
mind itself—a certain constitutional weakness or
limitation there, in dealing by way of cold-
blooded reflexion with the direct presentations
of its experience. The “Eleatic Palamedes,”
Plato calls him, ‘“‘ whose dialectic art causes one
and the same thing to appear both like and

28

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

unlike, one and many, at rest and in motion,” —
Ah! you hear already the sort of words that
seem sometimes so barren and unprofitable even
in Plato.

It is from extant fragments of a work of his,
not a poem, but, appropriately, To Σύγγραμμα---
The Prose, of Zeno, that such knowledge as we
have of his doctrine, independently of the Par-
menides of Plato, is derived. The active prin-
ciple of that doctrine then lies in the acuteness
with which he unfolds the contradictions which
make against the very conceivability of the funda-
mental phenomena of sense, in so far as those
phenomena are supposed to be really existent
independently of ourselves. The truth of ex-
perience, of a sensible experience, he seems to
protest:— Why! sensible experience as such
is logically inconceivable. He proved it, or
thought, or professed to think, he proved it, in
the phenomenon which covers all the most
vivid, the seemingly irresistible facts, of such
experience. Motion was indeed, as the Hera-
cliteans said, everywhere: was the most incisive
of all facts in the realm of supposed sensible fact.
Think of the prow of the trireme cleaving the
water. Fora moment Zeno himself might have
seemed but a follower of Heraclitus. He goes
beyond him. All is motion: he admits.—Yes :
only, motion is (I can show it!) a nonsensical
term. Follow it, or rather stay by it, and it
transforms itself, agreeably enough for the

29

PLATO AND PLATONISM

curious observer, into rest. Motion must be
motion in space, of course ; from point to point
in it,—and again, more closely, from point to
point within such interval ; and so on, infinitely ;
tis rest there: perpetual motion is perpetual
rest:—the hurricane, the falling tower, the
deadly arrow from the bow at whose coming
you shake there so wretchedly, Zeno’s own rapid
word-fence—all alike at rest, to the restful eye
of the pure reason! ‘The tortoise, the creature
that moves most slowly, cannot be overtaken by
Achilles, the swiftest of us all; or at least you
can give no rational explanation how it comes to
be overtaken. Zeno had an armoury of such
enigmas. Can a bushel of corn falling make a
noise if a single grain makes none? Again,
that motion should cease, we find inconceivable :
but can you conceive how it should so much as
begin? at what point precisely, in the moving
body? Ubiquitous, tyrannous, irresistible, as it
may seem, motion, with the whole so dazzling
world it covers, is—nothing !

Himself so striking an instance of mobile
humour in his exposure of the unreality of
all movement, Zeno might be taken so far only
for a master, or a slave, of paradox; such
paradox indeed as is from the very first inherent
in every philosophy which (like that of Plato
himself, accepting even Zeno as one of its
institutors) opposes the seen to the unseen as

30

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

falsehood to truth. It was the beginning of
scholasticism ; and the philosophic mind will
perhaps never be quite in health, quite sane
or natural, again. The objective, unconscious,
pleasantly sensuous mind of the Greek, becom-
ing a man, as he thinks, and putting away childish
thoughts, is come with Zeno one step towards
Aristotle, towards Aquinas, or shall we say into
the rude scholasticism of the pedantic Middle
Age? And we must have our regrets. There
is always something lost in growing up.

The wholesome scepticism of Hume or Mill
for instance, the scepticism of the modern world,
beset now with insane speculative figments, has
been an appeal from the preconceptions of the
understanding to the authority of the senses.
With the Greeks, whose metaphysic business
was then still all to do, the sceptical action of
the mind lay rather in the direction of an appeal
from the affirmations of sense to the authority of
newly-awakened reason. Just then all those real
and verbal difficulties which haunt perversely
the human mind always, all those unprofitable
queries which hang about the notions of matter
and time and space, their divisibility and the
like, seemed to be stirring together, under the
utterance of this brilliant, phenomenally clever,
perhaps insolent, young man, his master’s
favourite. ‘To the work of that grave master,
nevertheless—of Parmenides—a very different
person certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno’s

31

PLATO AND PLATONISM

seemingly so fantastic doctrine was sincerely in
service. By its destructive criticism, its dissipa-
tion of the very conceivability of the central and
most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a
real support to Parmenides in his assertion of the
nullity of all that is but phenomenal, leaving
open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might
say) to that which really is. That which 2s, so
purely, or absolutely, that it is nothing at all
to our mixed powers of apprehension :— Par-
menides and the Eleatic School were much
occupied with the determination of the thoughts,
or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to
that.

Motion discredited, motion gone, all was
gone that belonged to an outward and concrete
experience, thus securing exclusive validity to the
sort of knowledge, if knowledge it is to be called,
which corresponds to the “Pure Being,” that
after all is only definable as “* Pure Nothing,” that.
colourless, formless, impalpable existence (οὐσία
ἀχρώματος, ἀσχημάτιστος, ἀναφής) to use the words of
Plato, for whom Parmenides became a sort of
inspired voice. Note at times, in reading him,
in the closing pages of the fifth book of The
Republic for instance, the strange accumulation
of terms derivative from the abstract verb “Τὸ
be.” As some more modern metaphysicians
have done, even Plato seems to pack such terms
together almost by rote. Certainly something
of paradox may always be felt even in his

32

#

“4; ΝῊ > ie
6 ee

ay δ" fy

exposition of ““ Being,” or perhaps a kind of
paralysis of speech—é¢acia.

Parmenides himself had borrowed the thought
from another, though he made it his own.
Plato, in The Republic, as a critic of Homer, by
way of fitting Homer the better for the use of
the schoolboys of the ideal city, is ready to
sacrifice much of that graceful polytheism in
which the Greeks anticipated the du/ia of saints
and angels in the catholic church. He does
this to the advantage of a very abstract, and as it
may seem disinterested, certainly an uninteresting,
notion of deity, which is in truth :—well ! one of
the dry sticks of mere “ natural theology,” as it is
called. In this he was but following the first,
the original, founder of the Eleatic School, Xeno-
phanes, who in a somewhat scornful spirit had
urged on men’s attention that, in their prayers
and sacrifices to the gods, in all their various
thoughts and statements, graceful or hideous,
about them, they had only all along with much
_ fallacy been making gods after their own like-
ness, as horse or dog too, if perchance it cast a
glance towards heaven, would after the same
_ manner project thither the likeness of horse or
_ dog: that to think of deity you must think of it
as neither here nor there, then nor now ; you
must away with all limitations of time and space
_and matter, nay, with the very conditions, the
limitation, of thought itself; apparently not

P. VI 33 D

PLATO AND PLATONISM

observing that to think of it in this way was in
reality not to think of it at all :—That in short
Being so pure as this is pure Nothing.

In opposition then to the anthropomorphic
religious poetry of Homer, Xenophanes elaborates
the notion, or rather the abstract or purely verbal
definition, of that which really is (τὸ ὄν) as in-
clusive of all time, and space, and mode; yet so
that all which can be identified concretely with
mode and space and time is but antithetic to it,
as finite to infinite, seeming to being, contingent
to necessary, the temporal, in a word, to the
eternal. Once for all, in harshest dualism, the
only true yet so barren existence is opposed to
the world of phenomena—of colour and form and
sound and imagination and love, of empirical
knowledge. Objects, real objects, as we know,
grow in reality towards us in proportion as we
define their various qualities. And yet, from
another point of view, definition, qualification,
is a negative process: it is as if each added
quality took from the object we are defining one
or more potential qualities. The more definite
things become as objects of sensible or other
empirical apprehension, the more, it might be
said from the logician’s point of view, have we
denied about them. It might seem that their
increasing reality as objects of sense was in direct
proportion to the increase of their distance from
that perfect Being which is everywhere and at
all times in every possible mode of being. A

34

Ἵ
ἡ

|
Ul

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

thing visibly white is found as one approaches it
to be also smooth to the touch ; and this added
quality, says the formal logician, dses but deprive
it of all other possible modes of texture ; Omnis
determinatio est negatio. Vain puerilities ! you may
exclaim :—with justice. Yet such are the con-
siderations which await the mind that suffers itself
to dwell awhile on the abstract formula to which
the “rational theology” of Xenophanes leads
him. It involved the assertion of an absolute
difference between the original and all that is or
can be derived from it; that the former annuls,
or is exclusive of, the latter, which has in truth
no real or legitimate standing-ground as matter
of knowledge; that, in opposite yet equally
unanswerable senses, at both ends of experience
there is—nothing ! Of the most concrete object,
as of the most abstract, it might be said, that it
more properly is not than is.

From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism
of the Greek religious poets, that most abstract
and arid of formule, Pure Being, closed in indiffer-
ently on every side upon itself, and suspended in
the midst of nothing, like a hardtransparent crystal
ball, as he says ; “The Absolute”; “The One”;
passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking,
doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the
centre of the universe, of his own experience of
it, for some common measure of the experience
ofall men. To enforce a reasonable unity and
order, to impress some larger likeness of reason,

35

PLATO AND PLATONISM

as one knows it in one’s self, upon the chaotic
infinitude of the impressions that reach us from
every side, is what all philosophy as such pro-
poses. Κόσμος: order; reasonable, delightful,
order ; 184 word that became very dear, as we
know, to the Greek soul, to what was perhaps
most essentially Greek in it, to the Dorian
element there. Apollo, the Dorian god, was but
its visible consecration. It was what, under his
blessing, art superinduced upon the rough stone,
the yielding clay, the jarring metallic strings,
the common speech of every day. Philosophy,
in its turn, with enlarging purpose, would project
a similar light of intelligence upon the at first
sight somewhat unmeaning world we find actually
around us :—project it; or rather discover it, as
being really pre-existent there, if one were happy
enough to get one’s self into the right point of
view. To certain fortunate minds the efficacious
moment of insight would come, when, with
delightful adaptation of means to ends, of the
parts to the whole, the entire scene about
one, bewildering, unsympathetic, unreasonable,
on a superficial view, would put on, for them at
least, κοσμιότης, that so welcome expression of
fitness, which it is the business of the fine arts
to convey into material things, of the art of
discipline to enforce upon the lives of men.
The primitive Ionian philosophers had found,
or thought they found, such a principle (ἀρχή) in
the force of some omnipresent physical element,
36

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

air, water, fire ; or insome common law, motion,
attraction, repulsion ; as Plato would find it in
an eternally appointed hierarchy of genus and
species ; as.the science of our day embraces it
(perhaps after all only in fancy) in the ex-
pansion of a large body of observed facts into
some all-comprehensive hypothesis, such as
«ἐ evolution.”

For Parmenides, at his early day, himself, as
some remnants of his work in that direction bear
witness, an acute and curious observer of the
concrete and sensible phenomena of nature, that
principle of reasonable unity seemed attainable
only by a virtual negation, by the obliteration,
of all such phenomena. When we have learned
as exactly as we can all the curious processes at
work in our own bodies or souls, in the stars, in or
under the earth, their very definiteness, their
limitation, will but make them the more antago-
nistic to that which alone really is, because it is
always and everywhere itself, identical exclu-
sively with itself. Phenomena !—by the force
of such arguments as Zeno’s, the instructed
would make a clean sweep of them, for the
establishment, in the resultant void, of the
““QOne,” with which it is impossible (παρὰ πάντα
λεγόμενα) in spite of common language, and of
what seems common sense, for the “ Many ’—
the hills and cities of Greece, you and me,
Parmenides himself, really to co-exist at all.
“ Parmenides,” says one, “had stumbled upon

37

PLATO AND PLATONISM

the modern thesis that thought and being are
the same.”

Something like this—this impossibly abstract
doctrine—is what Plato’s “ father in philosophy ”
had had to proclaim, in the midst of the busy,
brilliant, already complicated life of the recently
founded colonial town of Elea. It was like the
revelation to Israel in the midst of picturesque
idolatries, “‘ The Lord thy God is one Lord” ;
only that here it made no claim to touch the
affections, or even to warm the imagination.
Israel’s Greek cousin was to undergo a harder,
a more distant and repressive discipline in
those matters, to which a peculiarly austere
moral beauty, at once self-reliant and submis-
sive, the zsthetic expression of which has a
peculiar, an irresistible charm, would in due
time correspond.

It was in difficult hexameter verse, in a poem
which from himself or from others had received
the title—Tlepi φύσεως (De Naturd Rerum) that
Parmenides set forth his ideas. From _ the
writings of Clement of Alexandria, and other
later writers large in quotation, diligent modern
scholarship has collected fragments of it, which
afford sufficient independent evidence of his
manner of thought, and supplement conveniently
Plato’s, of course highly subjective, presentment
in his Parmenides of what had so deeply influ-
enced him.—

38

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

“Now come!” (this fragment of Parmenides
is in Proclus, who happened to quote it in
commenting on the Timeus of Plato) “Come !
do you listen, and take home what I shall tell
you: what are the two paths of search after
right understanding. The one,

"vl, Vice " ᾿ wy ee top 8
Ἢ μεν OTWS ἐστιν TE καὶ WS οὐκ EOTL μὴ εἰναι

“that what is, is; and that what is not, is ποῖ ἢ;
or, in the Latin of scholasticism, here inaugurated
by Parmenides, esse ens : non esse non ens—

πειθοῦς ἐστι κέλευθος ; ἀληθείη yap ὀπηδεῖ

“this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes
along with it. The other—that what is, is not ;
and by consequence that what is not, is :—I tell
you that is the way which goes counter to
persuasion :

τὴν δή τοι φράζω παναπειθέα ἔμμεν ἀταρπόν"

οὔτε γὰρ ἂν γνοίης τό γε μὴ ἐὸν οὐ γὰρ ἐφικτόν" —
That which is not, never could you know:
there is no way of getting at that ; nor could you
explain it to another; for Thought and Being
are identical."—Famous utterance, yet of so
dubious omen !—T6 γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι
—idem est enim cogitare etesse. ‘‘It is one to me,”
he proceeds, ‘‘ at what point I begin ; for thither
I shall come back over again: τόθι γὰρ πάλιν
ἵξομαι avis.”

Yes, truly! again and again, in an empty
circle, we may say; and certainly, with those
39

PLATO AND PLATONISM

dry and difficult words in our ears, may think
for a moment that philosophic reflexion has
already done that delightfully superficial Greek
world an ill turn, troubling so early its ingenuous
soul ; that the European mind, as was said, will
never be quite sane again. It has been put on
a quest (vain quest it may prove to be) after a
kind of knowledge perhaps not properly attain-
able. Hereafter, in every age, some will be
found to start afresh quixotically, through what
wastes of words ! in search of that true Substance,
the One, the Absolute, which to the majority of
acute people is after all but zero, and a mere
algebraic symbol for nothingness. In themselves,
by the way, such search may bring out fine
intellectual qualities; and thus, in turn, be of
service to those who can profit by the spec-
tacle of an enthusiasm not meant for them ;
must nevertheless be admitted to have had all
along something of disease about it; as indeed
to Plato himself the philosophic instinct as such
is a form of “ mania.”

An infectious mania, it might seem,—that
strange passion for nonentity, to which the Greek
was so oddly liable, to which the human mind
generally might be thought to have been con-
stitutionally predisposed ; for the doctrine of
‘The One” had come to the surface before in
old Indian dreams of self-annihilation, which
had been revived, in the second century after
Christ, in the ecstasies (ecstasies of the pure

40

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

spirit, leaving the body behind it) recommended
by the Neo-Platonists; and again, in the Middle
Age, as a finer shade of Christian experience, in
the mystic doctrines of Eckhart and Tauler
concerning that union with God which can only
be attained by the literal negation of self, by a
kind of moral suicide; of which something also
may be found, under the cowl of the monk, in
the clear, cold, inaccessible, impossible heights
of the book of the Imitation. It presents itself
once more, now altogether beyond Christian
influence, in the hard and ambitious intellect-
ualism of Spinoza; a doctrine of pure repellent
substance—substance “in vacuo,” to be lost
in which, however, would be the proper con-
summation of the transitory individual life.
Spinoza’s own absolutely colourless existence
was a practical comment upon it. Descartes ;
Malebranche, under the monk’s cowl again ;
Leibnitz; Berkeley with his theory of the
*‘ Vision of all things in God”; do but present
variations on the same theme through the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. By one and all
it is assumed, in the words of Plato, that to be
colourless, formless, impalpable is the note of
the superior grade of knowledge and existence,
evanescing steadily, as one ascends towards that
perfect (perhaps not quite attainable) condition
of either, which in truth can only be attained by
the suppression of all the rule and outline of one’s
own actual experience and thought.

> ae
, : Ἢ:
41 = ae
δὲ, ὁ aap. ὶ
«ε s

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Something like that certainly there had been
already in the doctrine of Parmenides, to whom
Plato was so willing to go to school. And in
the nineteenth century, as on the one hand the
philosophy of motion, of the “ perpetual flux,”
receives its share of verification from that theory
of development with which in various forms
all modern science is prepossessed ; so, on the
other hand, the philosophy of rest also, of the
perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion
of the exclusive reign of “The One,” receives
an unlooked-for testimony from the modern
physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena
he deals with—matter, organism, consciousness—
began in a state of indeterminate, abstract in-
difference, with a single uneasy start in a sort of
eternal sleep, a ripple on the dead, level surface.
Increasing indeed for a while in radius and
depth, under the force of mechanic law, the
world of motion and life is however destined, by
force of its own friction, to be restored sooner or
later to equilibrium ; nay, is already gone back
some noticeable degrees (how desirably !) to the
primeval indifference, as may be understood by
those who can reckon the time it will take for
our worn-out planet, surviving all the fret of the
humanity it housed for a while, to be drawn
into the sun.

But it is of Plato after all we should be think-
ing ; of the comparatively temperate thoughts,
the axiomata media, he was able to derive, by a

42

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

sort of compromise, from the impossible paradox
of his ancient master. What was it, among
things inevitably manifest on his pages as we
read him, that Plato borrowed and kept from
the Eleatic School !

Two essential judgments of his philosophy :
The opposition of what zs, to what appears ; and
the parallel opposition of knowledge to opinion ;
(ἕτερον ἐπιστήμης δόξα" ἐφ᾽ ἑτέρῳ ἄρα ἕτερόν τι δυναμένη
ἑκατέρα αὐτῶν πέφυκε" οὐκ ἐγχωρεῖ γνωστὸν καὶ δοξαστὸν
ταὐτὸν εἶναι") and thirdly, to illustrate that opposi-
tion, the figurative use, so impressed on thought
and speech by Plato that it has come to seem
hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate
philosophic language, of the opposition of light
to darkness.—

Well, then (Socrates is made to say in the fifth book of The
Republic) if what is, is the object of knowledge, would not
something other than what is, be the object of opinion ?

Yes ! something else.

Does opinion then opine what is not ; or is it impossible to
have even opinion concerning what is not? Consider! does
not he who has opinion direct his opinion upon something? or
is it impossible, again, to have an opinion, yet an opinion about
nothing ?

Impossible !

But he who has an opinion has opinion at least about some-
thing ; hasn’t he? Yet after all what is not, is not a thing ;
but would most properly be denominated nothing.

Certainly.

Now to what is not, we assigned of necessity ignorance: te
what is, knowledge.

Rightly : he said.

43

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Neither what is, then, nor what is not, is the object of
opinion.

No!

Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance nor knowledge.

It seems not.

Is it, then, beyond these ; going beyond knowledge in clear-
ness, beyond ignorance in obscurity καὶ |

Neither the one, nor the other.

But, I asked, opinion seems to you (doesn’t it?) to be a
darker thing than knowledge, yet lighter than ignorance.

Very much so; he answered.

Does it lie within those two?

Yes.

Opinion, then, would be midway, between these two con-
ditions ?

Undoubtedly so.

Now didn’t we say in what went before that if anything
became apparent such that it is, and is not, at the same time, a
thing of that kind would lie between that which ἐς in unmixed
clearness, and that which wholly is mot; and that there would
be, in regard to that, neither knowledge nor ignorance ; but,
again, a condition revealing itself between ignorance and
knowledge?

Rightly.

And now, between these two, what we call ‘opinion’ has
in fact revealed itself.

Clearly so.

It would remain for us therefore, as it seems, to find that
which partakes of both—both of Being and Not-being, and
which could rightly be called by neither term distinctly ; in
order that, if it appear, we may in justice determine it to be
the object of opinion ; assigning the extremes to the extremes,
the intermediate to what comes between them. Or is it not
thus ὃ

Thus it is.

These points then being assumed, let him tell me! let him
speak and give his answer—that excellent person, who on the
one hand thinks there is no Beauty itself, nor any idea of Beauty
itself, ever in the same condition in regard to the same things
(ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχουσαν) yet, on the other hand, holds

44

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

that there are the many beautiful objects :—that lover of sight
(ὁ φιλοθεάμων) who can by no means bear it if any one says that
the beautiful is one; the just also; and the rest, after the same
way. For good Sir! we shall say, pray tell us, is there any one
of these many beautiful things which will not appear ugly
(under certain conditions) of the many just or pious actions
which will not seem unjust or impious ?

No! he answered. Rather it must be that they shall seem,
in a manner, both beautiful and ugly ; and all the rest you
ask of.

Well! The many double things :—Do they seem to be at
all less half than double?

Not at all.

And great, in truth, and little, and light, and heavy—will
they at all more truly be called by these names which we may
give them, than by the opposite names ?

No! he said ; but each of them will always hold of both.

Every several instance of ‘The Many,’ then—is it, more
truly than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be?

It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper-
parties !) playing on words, and the children’s riddle about the
eunuch and his fling round the bat—with what, and on what,
the riddle says he hit it ; for these things also seem to set both
ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of them
either to be, or not to be; neither both, nor the one, nor the
other.

Have you anything then you can do with them; or any-
where you can place them with fairer effect than in that posi-
tion between being and the being not? For presumably they
will not appear more obscure than what is not, so as not to be,
still more ; nor more luminous than what is, so as to de, even
more than that. We have found then that the many customary
notions of the many, about Beauty and the rest are revolved
somewhere between not-being and being unmixedly.

So we have.

And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of
this sort presented itself, it must be declared matter not of
knowledge, but of opinion ; to be apprehended by the inter-
mediate faculty ; as it wanders unfixed, there, between.

Republic, 478.

45

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Many a train of thought, many a turn of
expression, only too familiar, some may think,
to the reader of Plato, are summarised in that
troublesome yet perhaps attractive passage. The
influence then of Parmenides on Plato had made
him, incurably (shall we say ἢ) a dualist. Only,
practically, Plato’s richly coloured genius will
find a compromise between the One which
alone really is, is yet so empty a thought
for finite minds; and the Many, which most
properly is not, yet presses so closely on eye
and ear and heart and fancy and will, at every
moment. That which really is (τὸ ὄν) the One,
if he is really to think about it at all, must admit
within it a certain variety of members ; and, in
effect, for Plato the true Being, the Absolute,
the One, does become delightfully multiple, as
the world of ideas—appreciable, through years
of loving study, more and more clearly, one by
one, as the perfectly concrete, mutually adjusted,
permanent forms of our veritable experience: the
Bravery, for instance, that cannot be confused,
not merely with Cowardice, but with Wisdom,
or Humility. One after another they emerge
again from the dead level, the Parmenidean
tabula rasa, with nothing less than the reality
of persons face to face with us, of a personal
identity. It was as if the firm plastic outlines
of the delightful old Greek polytheism had
found their way back after all into a repellent
monotheism. Prefer as he may in theory that

46

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

blank white light of the One—its sterile, “form-
less, colourless, impalpable,” eternal identity with
itself—the world, and this chiefly is why the
world has not forgotten him, will be for him,
as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means
a colourless place. He will suffer it to come to
him, as his pages convey it in turn to us, with
the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicu-
ously visual emblem of it, the outline of which
(essentially characteristic of himself as it seems)
he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic
teacher who had tried so hard to close the
bodily eye that he might the better apprehend

the world unseen.—

And now (he writes in the seventh book of The Republic)
take for a figure of human nature, as regards education and the
lack thereof, some such condition as this. ‘Think you see
people as it were in some abode below-ground, like a cave,
having its entrance spread out upwards towards the light,
broad, across the whole cavern. Suppose them here from
childhood ; their legs and necks chained ; so that there they
stay, and can see only what is in front of them, being unable
by reason of the chain to move their heads round about: and
the light of a fire upon them, blazing from far above, behind
their backs: between the fire and the prisoners away up aloft :
and see beside it a low wall built along, as with the showmen,
in front of the people lie the screens above which they exhibit
their wonders.

I see: he said.

See, then, along this low wall, men, bearing vessels of all
sorts wrought in stone and wood ; and, naturally, some of the
bearers talking, other silent.

It is a strange figure you describe: said he: and strange
prisoners.—

They are like ourselves: I answered! Republic, 514.

47

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Metaphysical formule have always their
practical equivalents. The ethical alliance of
Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the
Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Par-
menides, with Socrates, and the Cynics or the
Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm
is as truly the moral or practical equivalent of
the Parmenidean doctrine of the One, as the
Cyrenaic μονόχρονος ἡδονή ----(ἣξ pleasure of the
ideal now—is the practical equivalent of the
doctrine of motion ; and, as sometimes happens,
what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic
for the understanding is found to be realisable
enough as one of many phases of our so flexible
human feeling. The abstract philosophy of the
One might seem indeed to have been translated
into the terms of a human will in the rigid,
disinterested, renunciant career of the emperor
Marcus Aurelius, its mortal coldness. Let me
however conclude with a document of the Eleatic
temper, nearer in its origin to the age of Plato:
an ancient fragment of Cleanthes the Stoic,
which has justly stirred the admiration of Stoical
minds ; though truly, so hard is it not to lapse
from those austere heights, the One, the Abso-
lute, has become in it after all, with much varied
colour and detail in his relations to concrete
things and persons, our father Zeus.

An illustrious athlete ; then a mendicant dealer
in water-melons ; chief pontiff lastly of the sect
of the Stoics; Cleanthes, as we see him in anec-

48

THE DOCTRINE OF REST

dote at least, is always a loyal, sometimes a very
quaintly loyal, follower of the Parmenidean or
Stoic doctrine of detachment from all material
things. It was at the most critical points perhaps
of such detachment, that somewhere about the
year three hundred before Christ, he put to-
gether the verses of his famous “‘ Hymn.” By
its practical indifference, its resignation, its passive
submission to the One, the undivided Intelli-
gence, which διὰ πάντων gorra— goes to and fro
through all things, the Stoic pontiff is true to
the Parmenidean schooling of his flock; yet
departs from it also in a measure by a certain
expansion of phrase, inevitable, it may be, if one
has to speak at all about that chilly abstraction,
still more make a hymn to it. He is far from
the cold precept of Spinoza, that great re-assertor
of the Parmenidean tradition : That whoso loves
God truly must not expect to be loved by Him
in return. In truth, there are echoes here from
many various sources. "Ex cod γὰρ γένος ἐσμεν :-—
that is quoted, as you remember, by Saint
Paul, so just after all to the pagan world, as its
testimony to some deeper ὕσμόσις than its own.
_ Certainly Cleanthes has conceived his abstract
monotheism a little more winningly, somewhat
_ better, than dry, pedantic Xenophanes ; perhaps
because Socrates and Plato have lived meanwhile.
_ You might even fancy what he says an echo from
_Israel’s devout response to the announcement :
“Τῆς Lord thy God is one Lord.” The Greek

P. VI 49 E

PLATO AND PLATONISM

certainly is come very near to his unknown
cousin at Sion in what follows :—

΄ὔ Ἡ pe ,ὔ , Ν 2
κύδιστ᾽, ἀθανάτων, πολυώνυμε, παγκρατὲς αἰεὶ
Ζεῦ, φύσεως ἀρχηγέ, νόμου μέτα πάντα κυβερνῶν,
χαῖρε" σὲ γὰρ πάντεσσι θέμις θνητοῖσι προσαυδᾷν. κ.τ.λ.

Mullach, Fragmenta Philosophorum Grecorum, I. p. 151.
Thou O Zeus art praised above all gods: many are Thy

names and Thine is all power for ever.

The beginning of the world was from Thee: and with law
Thou rulest over all things.

Unto Thee may all flesh speak: for we are Thy offspring.

Therefore will I raise a hymn unto Thee: and will ever
sing of Thy power.

The whole order of the heavens obeyeth Thy word: as it
moveth around the earth :

With little and great lights mixed together : how great art
Thou, King above all for ever !

Nor is anything done upon earth apart from Thee: nor in
the firmament, nor in the seas :

Save that which the wicked do: by their own folly.

But Thine is the skill to set even the crooked straight :
what is without fashion is fashioned and the alien akin before
Thee.

Thus hast Thou fitted together all things in one: the
good with the evil :

That Thy word should be one in all things: abiding for
ever.

Let folly be dispersed from our souls: that we may repay
Thee the honour, wherewith Thou hast honoured us :

Singing praise of Thy works for ever: as becometh the
sons of men.

50

ΠῚ
PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

His devotion to the austere and abstract philo-
sophy of Parmenides, its passivity or indifference,
could not repress the opulent genius of Plato, or
transform him into a cynic. Another ancient
philosopher, Pythagoras, set the frozen waves in
motion again, brought back to Plato’s recogni-
tion all that multiplicity in men’s experience
to which Heraclitus had borne such emphatic
witness; but as rhythm or melody now—in
movement truly, but moving as disciplined sound
and with the reasonable soul of music in it.
Pythagoras, or the founder of the Pythagorean
philosophy, is the third of those earlier masters,
who explain the intellectual confirmation of
Plato by way of antecedent. What he said, or
was believed to have said, is almost everywhere
in the very texture of Platonic philosophy, as
vera vox, an authority with prescript claim on
sympathetic or at least reverent consideration,
to be developed generously in the natural growth
of Plato’s own thoughts.
| ΕΙ

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Nothing remains of his writings: dark state-
ments only, as occasion served, in later authors.
Plato himself attributes those doctrines of his
not to Pythagoras but to the Pythagoreans.
But if no such name had come down to us we
might have understood how, in the search for
the philosophic unity of experience, a common
measure of things, for a cosmical hypothesis,
number and the truths of number would come
to fill the place occupied by some omnipresent
physical element, air, fire, water, in the philo-
sophies of Ionia; by the abstract and exclusive
idea of the unity of Being itself in the system
of Parmenides. To realise unity in variety, to
discover cosmos—an order that shall satisfy one’s
reasonable soul—below and within apparent
chaos: is from first to last the continuous pur-
pose of what we call philosophy. Well! Pytha-
goras seems to have found that unity of principle
(ἀρχή) in the dominion of number everywhere,
the proportion, the harmony, the music, into
which number as such expands. Truths of
number: the essential laws of measure in time
and space :—Yes, these are indeed everywhere in
our experience: must, as Kant can explain to us,
be an element in anything we are able so much
as to conceive at all. And music, covering all it
does, for Pythagoras, for Plato and Platonism
—music, which though it is of course much
besides, is certainly a formal development of
purely numerical laws: that too surely zs some-

52

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

thing, independently of ourselves, in the real
world without us, like a personal intelligible
soul durably resident there for those who bring
intelligence of it, of music, with them; to be
known on the favourite Platonic principle of
like by like (ὅμοιον ὁμοίῳ) though the incapable
or uninstructed ear, in various degrees of dulness,
may fail to apprehend it.

The Golden Verses of Pythagoras parted early
into dust (that seems strange, if they were ever
really written in a book) and antiquity itself
knows little directly about his doctrine. Yet
Pythagoras is much more than a mere name, a
term, for locating as well as may be a philosophical
abstraction. Pythagoras, his person, his memory,
attracted from the first a kind of fairy-tale of
mystic science. The philosophy of number, of
music and proportion, came, and has remained,
in a cloud of legendary glory; the gradual
accumulation of which Porphyry and Iamb-
lichus, the fantastic masters of Neo-Platonism,
or Neo-Pythagoreanism, have embodied in their
so-called Lives of him, like some antique fable
richly embossed with starry wonders. In this
spirit there had been much writing about him :
that he was a son of Apollo, nay, Apollo himself
—the twilight, attempered, Hyperborean Apollo,
like the sun in Lapland : that his person gleamed
at times with a supernatural brightness: that he
had exposed to those who loved him a golden
thigh: how Abaris, the minister of that god,

53

PLATO AND PLATONISM

had come flying to him on a golden arrow: of
his almost impossible journeys: how he was
seen, had lectured indeed, in different places at
the same time. As he walked on the banks of
the Nessus the river had whispered his name:
he had been, in the secondary sense, various
persons in the course of ages ; a courtesan once,
for some ancient sin in him; and then a hero,
Euphorbus, son of Panthus; could remember
very distinctly so recent a matter as the Trojan
war, and had recognised in a moment his own
old armour, hanging on the wall, above one of
his old dead bodies, in the temple of Athene at
Argos ; showing out all along only by hints and
flashes the abysses of divine knowledge within
him, sometimes by miracle. For if the philo-
sopher really is all that Pythagoras or the
Pythagoreans suppose ; if the material world is
so perfect a musical instrument, and he knows
its theory so well, he might surely give practical
and sensible proof of that on occasion, by himself
improvising music upon it in direct miracle.
And so there, in Porphyry and Iamblichus, the
appropriate miracles are.

If the mistaken affection of the disciples of
dreamy Neo-Platonic Gudészs at Alexandria, in
the third or fourth century of our era, has thus
made it impossible to separate later legend from
original evidence as to what he was, and said,
and how he said it, yet that there was a brilliant,
perhaps a showy, personality there, infusing the

54

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

most abstract truths with what would tell on
the fancy, seems more than probable, and,
though he would appear really to have had
from the first much of mystery or mysticism
about him, the thaumaturge of Samos, “ whom
even the vulgar might follow as a conjuror,”
must have been very unlike the lonely “weep-
ing” philosopher of Ephesus, or the almost
disembodied philosopher of Elea. In the very
person and doings of this earliest master of the
doctrine of harmony, people saw that philo-
sophy is

Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo’s lute.

And in turn he abounded in influence on the
deeds, the persons, of others, as if he had really
carried a magic lute in his hands to charm them.

As his fellow-citizens had all but identified
Pythagoras with him, so Apollo remained the
peculiar patron of the Pythagoreans; and we
may note, in connexion with their influence
on Plato, that as Apollo was the chosen ancestral
deity, so Pythagoreanism became especially the
philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian
Greeks. If, as Plato was aware, or fancied,
true Spartans knew more of philosophy than
they let strangers suppose—turned them all out
from time to time and feasted on it in secret,
for the strengthening of their souls—it was

55

PLATO AND PLATONISM
precisely the Pythagorean philosophy of music,

of austere music, mastering, remoulding, men’s
very bodies, they would then have discussed
with one another.

A native of Ionia, it is in one of the Dorian
cities of Magna Grecia, at Crotona, that Pytha-
goras finds the fitting scene of his mysterious
influence. He founds there something like an
ideal republic, or rather a religious brotherhood,
under a rule outwardly expressive of that inward
idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian
soul, and, for it, as for him, ever the peculiar
pledge of the presence of philosophic truth.
᾿Αλήθειαν δὲ ἀμετρίᾳ ἡγεῖ συγγενῆ εἶναι, ἢ ἐμμετρίᾳ ; asks
one in the The Republic ; and ’Eyperpia’ of course.
is the answer.

Recalling the student of Plato to penetrate
as far as he can into that mysterious community,
there, long before, in the imagination of Pytha-
goras is the first dream of the Perfect City,
with all those peculiar ethical sympathies which
the Platonic Republic enforces already well
defined—the perfect mystic body of the Dorian
soul, built, as Plato requires, to the strains of
music. Asa whole, and in its members severally,
it would reproduce and visibly reflect to others
that inward order and harmony of which each
one was a part. As such, the Pythagorean
order (it was itself an “ order”) expanded and
was long maintained in those cities of Magna
Grecia which had been the scene of the prac-

56

4

!

!

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

tical no less than of the speculative activity of
its founder ; and in one of which, Metapontum,
so late as the days of Cicero what was believed
to be the tomb of Pythagoras was still shown.
Order, harmony, the temperance, which, as
Plato will explain to us, will convince us by the
visible presentment of it in the faultless person
of the youthful Charmides, is like a musical
harmony,—that was the chief thing Pythagoras
exacted from his followers, at least at first,
though they were mainly of the noble and
wealthy class who could have done what they
liked—temperance in a religious intention, with
many singular scruples concerning bodily puri-
fication, diet, and the like. For if, according
to his philosophy, the soul had come from
heaven, to use the phrase of Wordsworth re-
producing the central Pythagorean doctrine,
“‘from heaven,” as he says, “trailing clouds of
glory,’ so the arguments of Pythagoras were
always more or less explicitly involving one in
consideration of the means by which one might
get back thither, of which means, surely, absti-
nence, the repression of one’s carnal elements,
must be one; in consideration also, in curious
questions, as to the relationship of those carnal
elements in us to the pilgrim soul, before and
after, for which he was so anxious to secure full
use of all the opportunities of further perfecting
which might yet await it, in the many revolutions
of its existence. In the midst of that zsthetic-
57

PLATO AND PLATONISM

ally so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if
anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic
kings of the Platonic Republic, already something
of the monk, of monastic ascésis, about him. Its
purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature
towards, that closer vision of truth to which
perchance he may be even now upon his way.
The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of
which the philosopher of music was, perhaps
not inconsistently, a lover, which enveloped the
entire action of the Pythagoreans, and had
indeed kept Pythagoras himself, as some have
thought, from committing his thoughts to writ-
ing at all, was congruous with such monkish
discipline. Mysticism—the condition of the
initiated—is a word derived, as we know, from a
Greek verb which may perhaps mean to close the
eye that one may better perceive the invisible,
but more probably means to close the lips while
the soul is brooding over what cannot be uttered.
Later Christian admirers said of him, that he
had hidden the words of God in his heart.

The dust of his golden verses perhaps, but
certainly the gold-dust of his thoughts, lies
scattered all along Greek literature from Plato to
the latest of the Greek Fathers of the Church.
You may find it serviceably worked out in the
notes of Zeller’s excellent work on Greek philo-
sophy, and, with more sparing comment, in
Mullach’s Fragmenta Philosophorum Grecorum.
No one of those Pre-Socratic philosophers has

58

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

been the subject of a more enthusiastic erudition.
For his mind’s health however, if in doing so he
is not making a disproportionate use of his time,
inconsistent certainly with the essential temper
of the doctrine he seeks for, and such asa true
Pythagorean would instantly condemn, the young
scholar might be recommended to go straight
to the pages of Aristotle—those discreet, un-
romantic pages, salutary therefore to listen to,
concerning doctrines in themselves so fantastic.’
In the Ethics, as you may know, in the Meta-
physics, and elsewhere, Aristotle gives many
not unsympathetic notices at least of the dis-
ciples, which, by way of sober contrast on a
matter from the first profusely, perhaps cheaply,
embroidered, is like quiet information from
Pythagoras himself. Only, remember always
in reading Plato—Plato, as a sincere learner in
the school of Pythagoras—that the essence, the
active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine,
resides, not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor
as with our modern selves too often, in the
‘“‘infinite,” those eternities, infinitudes, abysses,
Carlyle invokes for us so often—in no cultus of
the infinite (τὸ ἄπειρον) but in the finite (τὸ πέρας).
It is so indeed, with that exception of the
Parmenidean sect, through all Greek philosophy,
congruously with the proper vocation of the

1 Or to Mr. Burnet’s Early Greek Philosophy ; which I have read
since these pages went to press, with much admiration for its
learning and lucidity, and its unconventionality of view.

59

PLATO AND PLATONISM

people of art, of art as being itself the finite,
ever controlling the infinite, the formless. ‘Those
famous συστοιχίαι τῶν ἐναντιῶν, OT parallel columns
of contraries : the One and the Many : Odd and
Even, and the like: Good and Evil: are indeed
all reducible ultimately to terms of ar, as the
expressive and the inexpressive. Now observe
that Plato’s “theory of ideas” is but an effort to
enforce the Pythagorean πέρας, with all the unity-
in-variety of concerted music,—eternal definition
of the finite, upon τὸ ἄπειρον, the infinite, the
indefinite, formless, brute matter, of our experi-
ence of the world.

For it is of Plato again we should be thinking,
and of Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans, only so
far as they explain the actual conformation of
Plato’s thoughts as we find them, especially in
The Repubhc. Let us see, as much as possible
in his own words, what Plato received from
that older philosophy, of which the two leading
persuasions were ; first, the universality, the ulti-
mate truth, of numerical, of musical law ; and
secondly, the pre-existence, the double eternity,
of the soul.

In spirit, then, we are certainly of the
Pythagorean company in that most characteristic
dialogue, the Meno, in which Plato discusses the
nature, the true idea, of Virtue, or rather how
one may attain thereto ; compelled to this sub-
ordinate and accessory question by the intel-

60

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

lectual cowardice of his disciple, though after his
manner he flashes irrepressible light on that
other primary and really indispensable question
by the way. Pythagoras, who had founded his
famous brotherhood by way of turning theory
into practice, must have had, of course, definite
views on that most practical question, how virtue
is to be attained by us; and Plato is certainly
faithful to him in assigning the causation of virtue
partly to discipline, forming habit (ἄσκησις) as en-
forced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy,
as he is true to his own experience in assigning
it partly also to a good natural disposition (φύσει)
and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose some of
us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also
in part (θείᾳ μοίρᾳ) to the good pleasure of heaven,
to un-merited grace. Whatever else, however,
may be held about it, it is certain (he admits)
that virtue comes in great measure through
learning. But is there in very deed such a thing
as learning? asks the eristic Meno, who is so
youthfully fond of argument for its own sake,
and must exercise by display his already well-
trained intellectual muscle. Is not that favourite,
that characteristic, Greek paradox, that it is
impossible to be taught, and therefore useless
to seek, what one does not know already, after
all the expression of an empirical truth ?—

Meno. After what manner Socrates will you seek for that
which you do not know at all—what it is? For what sort of
thing, among the things you know not, will you propose as your

61

PLATO AND PLATONISM

object of search? Or even if you should have lighted full
upon it, how will you know that it is this thing which you
knew not?

Socrates. Ah! I understand the kind of thing you mean
to say, Meno. Do you see what a contentious argument this
is you are bringing down on our heads '—that forsooth it is
not possible for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for
what he knows not; inasmuch as he would not seek what he
knows, at least ; because he knows it, and to one in such case
there is no need of seeking. Nor would he seek after what he
knows not; for he knows not what he shall seek for.

Meno, 80.

Well! that is true in a sense, as Socrates
admits; not however in any sense which en-
courages idle acquiescence in what according to
common language is our ignorance. There is a
sense (it is exemplified in regard to sound and
colour, perhaps in some far more important
things) in which it is matter of experience that
it is impossible to seek for, or be taught, what
one does not know already. He who is in total
ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will
certainly be unaware of them when they light
on him, or he lights upon them. Where could
one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not
to know at all means incapacity for receiving
knowledge. Yes, certainly ; the Pythagoreans
are right in saying that what we call learning is
in fact reminiscence—dvdéyryors: famous word !
and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise
way it is impossible or possible to find out what
you don’t know: how that happens. In full
use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument most

: 62

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

fit for him of whatever what we call teaching
and learning may really be, Plato, dramatic
always, brings in one of Meno’s slaves, a boy
who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of
geometry : introduces him, we may fancy, into
a mathematical lecture-room where diagrams are
to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying
on the table—particular objects, the mere sight
of which will rouse him when subjected to the
dialectical treatment, to universal truths con-
cerning them. The problem required of him
is to describe a square of a particular size: to
find the line which must be the side of such a
square ; and he is to find it for himself. Meno,
carefully on his guard, is to watch whether the
boy is taught by Socrates in any of his answers ;
whether he answers anything at any point other-
wise than by way of reminiscence and really out
of his own mind, as the reasonable questions of
Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or
like sunlight on the photographer’s negative.
“See him now!” he cries triumphantly,
‘‘ How he remembers ; in the logical order ; as
he ought to remember!” The reader, in truth,
following closely, scrupulously, this pretty process,
cannot help seeing that after all the boy does not
discover the essential point of the problem for
himself, that he is more than just guided on his
way by the questioning of Socrates, that Plato
has chosen an instance in itself illusively clear as
being concerned with elementary space. It is
63

PLATO AND PLATONISM

once for all, however, that he recognises, under
such questioning, the immovable, indefectible
certainty of this or that truth of space. So
much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly
to the advantage of the Pythagorean theory :
that even his false guesses have a plausibility, a
kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about
them: that as he remembers, in logical order
(ὡς Se@) so he makes the mistakes also which he
ought to make—the right sort of mistakes, such
as are natural and ought to occur in order to the
awakening mind, a kind of properly innate errors.
Νῦν αὐτῷ ὥσπερ ὄναρ ἄρτι ἀνακεκίνηνται ai δόξαι αὗται.
--“ Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have
been stirred up within him”; and he will
perform, Socrates assures us, similar acts of re-
miniscence on demand, with other geometrical
problems, with any and every problem whatever.
“If then,” observes Socrates in the Phedo,
wistfully pondering, for such consolation as
there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger
outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine :—
If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain
mathematical principle, that is) before birth, we were born
already possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both
before and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely
about the equal and the greater and the less, but about all other
things of the kind? For our theory (of an innate knowledge,
that is to say, independent of our experience here) our theory
holds not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the
absolute Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again,

after the dim intermediate life here?) and about what is
absolutely just and good, and about all things whatever, upon

64

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

which, in all our past questioning and answering, we set this
seal—ois ἐπισφραγιζόμεθα rovro— That, which really is. Pheda,
75:

But to return to the cheerful pages of the
Meno—from the prison-cell to the old mathe-
matical lecture-room and that psychological ex-
periment upon the young boy with the square :—
Οὔκουν οὐδένος διδάξαντος, ἀλλ᾽ ἐρωτήσαντος, ἐπιστήσεται,
ἀναλαβών, αὐτὸς ἐξ αὑτοῦ, ἐπιστήμην ᾽ ““ Through no
one’s teaching, then, but by a process of mere
questioning, will he attain a true science,
knowledge in the fullest sense (ἐπιστήμη) by the
recovery of such science out of himself ?”—Yes !
and that recovery is an act of reminiscence.

These opinions therefore, the boy’s discover-
able right notions about side and square and
diagonal, were innate in him (ἐνῆσαν δέ ye αὐτῷ
αὗται ai δόξαι) and surely, as Socrates was observing
later, right opinions also concerning other things
more important, which too, when stirred up by
a process of questioning, will be established in
him as consciously reasoned knowledge (ἐρωτήσει
ἐπεγερθεῖσαι, ἐπιστῆμαι γίγνονται). That at least is
what Plato is quite certain about: not quite so
confident, however, regarding another doctrine,
fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford
an explanation of this leading psychological fact of
an antecedent knowledge within us—the doctrine
namely of metempsychésts, of the transmigration
of souls through various forms of the bodily life,

P. VI 65 F

PLATO AND PLATONISM

under a law of moral retribution, somewhat
oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by
Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal con-
sciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last
inseparably connected with the authority of
Socrates, who in the Phedo discourses at great
length on that so comfortable theory, venturing
to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal
hope in the immediate prospect of death. The
soul, then, would be immortal (ἀθάνατος ἂν ἡ
ψυχὴ εἴη) prospectively as well as in retrospect,
and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of
truth “over the way, there,” as, in the Meno,
Socrates drew from it an encouragement to the
search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all
events, it seemed plain that ‘‘the soul is eternal.
It is right therefore to make an effort to find out
things one may not know, that is to say, one
does not remember, just now.” Those notions
were im the boy, they and the like of them, in
all boys and men; and he did not come by them
in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient,
half-obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls,
the mental tablet, seeds of knowledge to come,
shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an
earlier period of time they had been laid up in
him, to blossom again now, so kindly, so firmly!

Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that
seed swells within it under the spring-tide
influences of this untried atmosphere, it would
be the proper vocation of the philosophic teacher

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

to supervene with his encouraging questions.
And there was another doctrine—a persuasion
still more poetical or visionary, it might seem,
yet with a strong presumption of literal truth
about it, when seen in connexion with that great
fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently
explains—‘“‘ reminiscence.” Socrates had heard
it, he tells us in the Meno, in the /ocus classicus
on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain
religious persons, priests and priestesses,

—who had made it their business to be able to give an account
concerning their sacred functions. Pindar too asserts this, and
many other of the poets, so many as were divinely inspired.
And what they say is as follows.—But do you observe, whether
they seem to you to speak the truth. For they say that the
soul of man is immortal ; and that at one time it comes toa
pause, which indeed they call dying, and then is born again ;
but that it is never destroyed. [hat on this account indeed it
is our duty to pass through life as religiously as possible (because
there’s ‘another world,’ namely). ‘For those,’ says Pindar,
‘from whom Persephone shall have received a recompense of
ancient wrong—she gives back their soul again to the sun
above in the ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, illustrious
and swift in strength, and men greatest in wisdom ; and for
remaining time they are called holy heroes among us.’ Inas-
much then as the soul is immortal, and has been born many
times, and has seen both things here and things in Hades, and
all things, there is nothing that it has not learned ; so that it is
_ by no means surprising that it should be able to remember both
_ about virtue and about other matters what it knew at least even
_ aforetime. For inasmuch as the whole of nature is akin to
__ itself (homogeneous) and the soul has learned all things, nothing
hinders one, by remembering one thing only, which indeed
_ people call ‘learning’ (though it is something else in fact, you
_ see!) from finding out all other things for himself, if he be brave
and fail not through weariness in his search. For in truth to

67

PLATO AND PLATONISM

seek and to learn is wholly Recollection. ‘Therefore one must not
be persuaded by that eristic doctrine (namely that if ignorant
in ignorance you must remain) for that on the one hand would
make us idle and is a pleasant doctrine for the weak among man-
kind to hear ; while this other doctrine makes us industrious
and apt to seek. ‘Trusting in which that it is true, I am willing
along with you to seek out virtue :—what it is. Adena, 81.

These strange theories then are much with
Socrates on his last sad day—sad to his friends—
as justifying more or less, on ancient religious
authority, the instinctive confidence, checking
sadness in himself, that he will survive—survive
the effects of the poison, of the funeral fire ;
that somewhere, with some others, with Minos
perhaps and other “righteous souls” of the
national religion, he will be holding discourses,
dialogues, quite similar to these, only a little
better as must naturally happen with so diligent
a scholar, this time to-morrow.

And that wild thought of metempsychésis was
connected with a theory, yet more fantastic, of
the visible heaven above us. For Pythagoras,
the Pythagoreans, had had their views also, as
became the possessors of “a first principle ”»—
of a philosophy therefore which need leave no
problem untouched—on purely material things,
above all on the structure of the planets, the
mechanical contrivances by which their motion
was effected (it came to just that!) on the
relation of the earth to its atmosphere and
the like. The doctrine of the transmigration, ©

68 |

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

the pilgrimage or mental journeys, of the soul
linked itself readily with a fanciful, guess-work
astronomy, which provided starry places, wide
areas, hostelries, for that wanderer to move or rest
in. A matter of very lively and presentable form
and colour, as if making the invisible show
through, this too pleased the extremely visual
fancy of Plato; as we may see, in many places
of the Phedo, the Phadrus, the Timeus, and
most conspicuously in the tenth book of The
Republic, where he relates the vision of Er—
what he saw of the other world during a kind of
temporary death. Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, are
briefly depicted in it ; Paradise especially with a
quite Dantesque sensibility to coloured light—
_ physical light or spiritual, you can hardly tell
which, so perfectly is the inward sense blent with
its visible counter-part, reminding one forcibly
of the Divine Comedy, of which those closing
_ pages of The Republic suggest an early outline.
That then is the third element in Plato
_ derivative from his Pythagorean masters: an
astronomy of infant minds, we might call it, in
_ which the celestial world is the scene, not as yet
_ of those abstract reasonable laws of number and
_ motion and space, upon which, as Plato himself
protests in the seventh book of The Republic, it 15

_ the business of a veritable science of the stars to

exercise our minds, but rather of a machinery,

which the mere star-gazer may peep into as best

he can, with its levers, its spindles and revolving
69

PLATO AND PLATONISM

wheels, its spheres, he says, ‘‘like those boxes
which fit into one another,” and the literal doors
‘“‘ opened in heaven,” through which, at the due
point of ascension, the revolving pilgrim soul
will glide forth and have a chance of gazing into
the wide spaces beyond, ‘‘as he stands outside
on the back of the sky”’—that hollow partly
transparent sphere which surrounds and closes
in our terrestrial atmosphere. Most difficult to
follow in detailed description, perhaps not to be
taken quite seriously, one thing at least is clear
about the planetary movements as Plato and
his Pythagorean teachers conceive them. They
produce, naturally enough, sounds, that famous
“music of the spheres,” which the undisciplined
ear fails to recognise, to delight in, only because
it is never silent.

That it really is impossible after all to learn,
to be taught what you are entirely ignorant of,
was and still is a fact of experience, manifest
especially in regard tomusic. Now that ‘ music
of the spheres” in its largest sense, its completest
orchestration, the harmonious order of the whole
universe (κόσμος) was what souls had heard of old;
found echoes of here; might recover in its
entirety, amid the influences of the melodious
colour, sounds, manners, the enforced modulating
discipline, which would make the whole life of
a citizen of the Perfect City an education in
music. We are now with Plato, you see! in
his reproduction, so fully detailed for us in The

70

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

Republic, of the earlier and vaguer Pythagorean
brotherhood. Musical imagery, the notions of
proportion and the like, have ever since Plato
wrote played a large part in the theory of morals ;
have come to seem almost a natural part of
language concerning them. Only, wherever in
Plato himself you find such imagery, you may
note Pythagorean influence.

The student of The Republic hardly needs to
be reminded how all-pervasive in it that imagery
is; how emphatic, in all its speculative theory,
in all its practical provisions, is the desire for
harmony ; how the whole business of education
(of gymnastic even, the seeming rival of music) is
brought under it ; how large a part of the claims
of duty, of right conduct, for the perfectly initi-
ated, comes with him to be this, that it sounds
so well. TAnupérea, discordancy,—all faultiness
resolves itself into that. ‘Canst play on this
flute?’ asks Hamlet:—on human nature, with
all its stops, of whose capricious tuneableness, or
want of tune, he is himself the representative.
Well! the perfect state, thinks Plato, can. For
him, music is still everywhere in the world, and
the whole business of philosophy only as it were
the correct editing of it : as it will be the whole
business of the state to repress, in the great
concert, the jarring self-assertion (πλεονεξία) of
those whose voices have large natural power in
them. How, in detail, rhythm, the limit (πέρας)
is enforced in Plato’s Repudb/ic there is no time to

γι

PLATO AND PLATONISM

show. Call to mind only that the perfect visible
equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-
statues of the actual youth of Greece—legacy of
Greek sculpture more precious by far than its
fancied forms of deity—the quoit-player, the
diadumenus, the apoxyomenus ; and how the most
beautiful type of such youth, by the universal
admission of the Greeks themselves, had issued
from the severe schools of Sparta, that highest
civic embodiment of the Dorian temper, like
some perfect musical instrument, perfectly re-
sponsive to the intention, to the lightest touch,
of the finger of law.—Yet with a fresh setting of
the old music in each succeeding generation.
For in truth we come into the world, each one
of us, “not in nakedness,” but by the natural
course of organic development clothed far more
completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a
vesture of the past, nay, fatally shrouded, it
might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity
which we mistake for our volitions; in the
language which is more than one half of our
thoughts ; in the moral and mental habits, the
customs, the literature, the very houses, which
we did not make for ourselves ; in the vesture of
a past, which is (so science would assure us) not
ours, but of the race, the species : that Zest-geist,
or abstract secular process, in which, as we
could have had no direct consciousness of it, so
we can pretend to no future personal interest. It
is humanity itself now—abstract humanity—that
72

THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

figures as the transmigrating soul, accumulating
into its “colossal manhood” the experience of
ages ; making use of, and casting aside in its
march, the souls of countless individuals, as
Pythagoras supposed the individual soul to cast
aside again and again its outworn body.

So it may be. There was nothing of all
that, however, in the mind of the great English
poet at the beginning of this century whose
famous Ode on The Intimations of Immortality from
Recollections of Childhood, in which he made metem-
psychosis his own, must still express for some
minds something more than merely poetic truth.
For Pythagoreanism too, like all the graver
utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an
instinct of the human mind itself, and therefore
also a constant tradition in its history, which wz//
recur ; fortifying this or that soul here or there
in a part at least of that old sanguine assurance
about itself, which possessed Socrates so immov-
ably, his masters, his disciples. Those who do
not already know Wordsworth’s Ode ought soon
to read it for themselves. Listen instead to the
lines which perhaps suggested Wordsworth’s :—
The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so-
called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago,
who was able to blend those Pythagorean doctrines
with the Christian belief, amid which indeed,
from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards,
those doctrines have shown themselves not other-
wise than at home.

73

PLATO AND PLATONISM
Happy, those days, he declares,

Before I understood this place,
Appointed for my second race ;

Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white celestial thought ;

When yet I had not walked above

A mile or two from my first love ;
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

O! how I long to travel back

And tread again that ancient track !
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train.—
But Ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk ; and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,

But I backward steps would move ;
And when this dust falls to the urn

In that state I came return.

Summing up those three philosophies ante-
cedent to Plato, we might say, that if Heraclitus
taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics
that of rest, so, in such quaint phrase as
Vaughan’s, Pythagoreanism is the philosophy of

re-action.

74

IV
PLATO AND SOCRATES

“PLaTo,” we say habitually when we talk of
our teacher in The Republic, the Phedrus, cut-
ting a knot; for Plato speaks to us indirectly
only, in his Dialogues, by the voice of the
Platonic Socrates, a figure most ambiguously
compacted of the real Socrates and Plato himself ;
a purely dramatic invention, it might perhaps
have been fancied, or, so to speak, an zdolon theatri
—Plato’s self, but presented, with the reserve
appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a kind
of stage disguise. So we might fancy but for
certain independent information we possess about
Socrates, in Aristotle, and in the Memorabilia of
Xenophon.

The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the
simplest figures in the world. From the personal
memories of that singularly-limpid writer the
outline of the great teacher detaches itself, as
an embodiment of all that was clearest in the
now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek
conscience. All that Socrates is seen to be in

75

PLATO AND PLATONISM

those unaffected pages may be explained by the
single desire to be useful to ordinary young men,
whose business in life would be mainly with
practical things ; and at first sight, as delineators
of their common master, Plato and Xenophon
might seem scarcely reconcilable. But then, as
Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium,
Socrates had been ever in all respects a two-
sided being ; like some rude figure of Silenus, he
suggests, by way of an outer case for the image
of a god within. By a mind, of the compass
Plato himself supposes, two quite different
impressions may well have been made on two
typically different observers. The speaker, to
Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy,
vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece
of high and difficult and extraordinary thoughts.
In the absence, then, of a single written word
from Socrates himself, the question is forced
upon us: had the true Socrates been really
Socrates according to Xenophon, and all besides only
a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato’s
quite original and independent genius: or, had
the master been indeed something larger and
more many-sided than Xenophon could have
thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler
disciple only what was of simpler stamp in
himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all
that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with
which the Platonic Dialogues credit him. It
is a problem about which probably no reader of
76

PLATO AND SOCRATES

Plato ever quite satisfies himself :—-how much
precisely he must deduct from Socrates, as we
find him in those Dialogues, by way of defining
to himself the Socrates of fact.

In Plato’s own writing about Socrates there
is, however, a difference. The fo/ogy, marked
as being the single writing from Plato’s hand
not in dialogue form, we may naturally take for
a sincere version of the actual words of Socrates ;
closer to them, we may think, than the Greek
record of spoken words however important, the
speeches in Thucydides, for instance, by the
admission of Thucydides himself, was wont to
be. And this assumption is supported by internal
evidence. In that unadorned language, in those
harsh grammatic (or rather quite ungrammatic)
constructions we have surely the natural accent
of one speaking under strong excitement. We
might think, again, that the Phedo, purporting
to record his subsequent discourse, is really no
more than such a record, but for a lurking
suspicion, which hangs by the fact that Plato,
noted as an assistant at the trial, is expressly
stated by one of the speakers in the Dialogue to
have been absent from the dying scene of Socrates.
That speaker however was himself perhaps the
veracious reporter of those last words and acts ;
for there are details in the Phedo too pedestrian
and common-place to be taken for things of mere
literary invention : the rubbing of the legs, for in-
stance, now released from the chain; the rather

77

PLATO AND PLATONISM

uneasy determination to be indifferent ; the some-
what harsh committal of the crudely lamenting
wife and his child ‘‘ to any one who will take the
trouble ’’— details, as one cannot but observe in
passing, which leave those famous hours, even for
purely human, or say ! pagan dignity and tender-
ness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to
which they have sometimes been compared.

We shall be justified then, in the effort to
give reality or truth to our mental picture of
Socrates, if we follow the lead of his own supposed
retrospect of his career in the Apology, as com-
pleted, and explained to wholly sympathetic
spirits, by the more intimate discourses of the
Phedo.

He pleads to be excused if in making his
defence he speaks after his accustomed manner :
not merely in home-spun phrase, that is to say,
very different from what is usually heard at least
in those sophisticated law-courts of Athens, nor
merely with certain lapsing into his familiar
habit of dialogue, but with a tacit assumption,
throughout his arguments, of that logical
realism which suggested the first outline of
Plato’s doctrine of the “ideas.” Everywhere,
with what is like a physical passion for what zs,
what is ¢rue—as one engaged in a sort of religious
or priestly concentration of soul on what God
really made and meant us to know—he is driv-
ing earnestly, yet with method, at those universal
conceptions or definitions which serve to establish

78

PLATO AND SOCRATES

firmly the distinction, attained by so much
intellectual labour, between what is absolute and
abiding, of veritable import therefore to our
reason, to the divine reason really resident in
each one of us, resident in, yet separable from,
these our houses of clay — between that, and
what is only phenomenal and transitory, as
being essentially implicate with them. He
achieved this end, as we learn from Aristotle,
this power, literally, of “‘a criticism of life,” by
induction (ἐπαγωγή) by that careful process of
enquiry into the facts of the matter concerned,
one by one (facts most often of conscience, of
moral action as conditioned by motive, and
result, and the varying degrees of inward light
upon it) for which the fitting method is informal
though not unmethodical question and answer,
face to face with average mankind, as in those
famous Socratic conversations, which again are
the first rough natural erowth of Plato’s so
artistic written Dialogues. The exclusive pre-
occupation of Socrates with practical matter
therein, his anxious fixing of the sense of such
familiar terms as just and good, for instance, was
part of that humble bearing of himself by which
he was to authenticate a claim to superior
wisdom, forced upon him by nothing less than
divine authority, while there was something
also in it of a natural reaction against the intel-
lectual ambition of his youth. He had gone
to school eagerly, as he tells his friends in the
79

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Phedo, in his last discourse, to a physical philo-
sopher, then of great repute, but to his own great
disappointment.—

In my youth he says I had a wonderful desire for the
wisdom which people call natural sclence—repi φύσεως ἱστορίαν.
It seemed to me a proud thing to know the causes of every
matter: how it comes to be ; ceases to be; why itis. I lost
my sight in this enquiry to the degree of un-learning what
I had hitherto seemed to myself and others to know clearly
enough. But having heard one reading from a book written,
as he said, by Anaxagoras, which said that it is Reason that
arranges and is the cause of all things, I was delighted with
this cause; and thought to myself, if this be so, then it does
with each what may be best for it. Thus considering, it was
with joy I fancied I had found me a teacher about the cause—
Anaxagoras: that he would show me for instance, first,
whether the earth was round or flat ; and then that it was best
for it to be so: and if he made these points clear I was pre-
pared to ask for no other sort of causes. Phedo, 96.

Well! Socrates proceeds to the great natural
philosopher, and is immensely discouraged to
find him after all making very little use of
Reason in his explanation why natural things
are thus and not otherwise ; explaining every-
thing, rather, by secondary and mechanical
causes. ‘It was as if,” he concludes, “ some one
had undertaken to prove that Socrates does
everything through Reason; and had gone on
to show that it was because my body is con-
structed in a certain way, of certain bones and
muscles, that Socrates is now sitting here in the
prison, voluntarily awaiting death.”

The disappointment of Socrates with the

80

PLATO AND SOCRATES

spirit in which Anaxagoras actually handled and
applied that so welcome sapiential proposition
that Reason πάντα διακόσμει, καὶ πάντων αἴτιός ἐστιν
—arranges and is the cause of all things—is
but an example of what often happens when
men seek an @ posteriori justification of their in-
stinctive prepossessions. Once for all he turns
from useless, perhaps impious, enquiries, into the
material structure of the stars above him, or the
earth beneath his feet, from all physical enquiry
into material things, to the direct knowledge of
man, the cosmical order in man, as it may be
found by any one who, in good faith with
himself, and with devout attention, looks within.
In this precise sense it was that, according to
the old saying, Socrates brought philosophy
down from heaven to earth. Montaigne, the
great humanist, expands it.—‘‘’ITwas he who
brought again from heaven, where she lost her
time, human wisdom, to restore her to man
with whom her most just and greatest business
lies. He has done human nature a great
service,” he adds, “in showing it how much it
can do of itself.” And a singular incident gave
that piercing study, that relentless exposure, of
himself, and of others, for the most part so un-
welcome to them, a religious or mystic char-
acter. He has a “vocation” thus to proceed,
has been literally ‘‘ called,” as he understands, by
the central religious authority of Greece. His
seemingly invidious testing of men’s pretensions
P. VI 81 G

PLATO AND PLATONISM

to know, is a sacred service to the God of Delphi,
which he dares not neglect. And his fidelity
herein had in turn the effect of reinforcing for
him, and bringing to a focus, all the other rays
of religious light cast at random in the world
about him, or in himself.

“You know Cherephon,” he says, “his
eagerness about any matter he takes up. Well!
once upon a time he went to Delphi, and
ventured to ask of the oracle whether any man
living was wiser than I; and, amazing as it
seems, the Pythia answered that there was no one
wiser than I.” Socrates must go in order, then,
to every class of persons pre-eminent for know-
ledge ; to every one who seems to know more
than he. He found them—-the Athenian poets,
for instance, the potters who made the vases we
admire, undeniably in possession of much de-
lightful knowledge unattained by him. But one
and all they were ignorant of the limitations of
their knowledge ; and at last he concludes that
the oracle had but meant to say: “ He indeed is
the wisest of all men who like Socrates is aware
that he is really worth little or nothing in
respect of knowledge.” Such consciousness of
ignorance was the proper wisdom of man.

That can scarcely be a fiction. His whole-
some appeal then, everywhere, from what seems, _
to what really is, is a service to the Delphic god,
the god of sanity. To prove that the oracle had —

82 |

PLATO AND SOCRATES

been right after all, improbable as it seemed, in
the signal honour it had put upon him, would
be henceforward his proper business. Com-
mitting him to a sort of ironical humility
towards others, at times seemingly petty and
prosaic, certainly very irritating, in regard to
himself, in its source and motive, his business in
life as he conceived it was nothing less than
a divine possession. He becomes therefore
literally an enthusiast for knowledge, for the
knowledge of man; such knowledge as by a
right method of questioning, of self-questioning
(the master’s questioning being after all only a
kind of mid-wife’s assistance, according to his
own homely figure) may be brought to birth in
every human soul, concerning itself and its
experience; what is real, and stable, in its
apprehensions of Piety, Beauty, Justice, and the
like, what is of dynamic quality in them, as
conveying force into what one does or creates,
building character, generating virtue. Αὐτὸ καθ᾽
αὑτὸ ζητεῖν τί ποτ᾽ ἔστιν ἀρετή----ἰο seek out what
virtue is, itself, in and by itself—there’s the task.
And when we have found that, we shall know
already, or easily get to know, everything else
about and about it: “how we are to come by
virtue,” for instance.

| Well! largely by knowing, says naturally the
enthusiast for knowledge. There is no good
thing which knowledge does not comprehend—
Μηδέν ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν ὃ οὐκ ἐπιστήμη περιέχει---ἃ Strenu-
83

PLATO AND PLATONISM

ously ascertained knowledge however, painfully
adjusted to other forms of knowledge which may
seem inconsistent with it, and impenetrably
distinct from any kind of complaisant or only
half-attentive conjecture. ‘“‘One and the same
species in every place: whole and sound: one,
in regard to, and through, and upon, all par-
ticular instances of it: catholic” !: it will be all
this—the Virtue, for instance, which we must
seek, as a hunter his sustenance, seek and find
and never lose again, through a survey of all the
many variable and merely relative virtues, which
are but relative, that is to say, “to every several
act, and to each period of life, in regard to each
thing we have to do, in each one of us”—«aé’
ἑκάστην τῶν πράξεων, Kal τῶν ἡλικιῶν πρὸς ἕκαστον ἔργον,
ἑκάστῳ ἡμῶν. “That, about which I don’t know
what it is, how should I know what sort of a
thing it is "—6 μὴ οἶδα τί ἐστι, πῶς ἂν ὁποῖόν γέ τι
εἰδείην; What its ποιότητες, its qualities, are? ‘‘Do

you suppose that one who does not know Meno, i

for example, at all, who he is, can know whether
he is fair and rich and well-born, or the reverse
of all that?” Yes! already for Socrates, we
might say, to know what Justice or Piety or
Beauty really is, will be like the knowledge of a
person; only that, as Aristotle carefully notes,
his scrupulous habit of search for universal, or
catholic, definitions (καθ᾽ ὅλου) was after all but

1 Ῥαὐτὸν πανταχοῦ εἶδος---ὅλον καὶ ὑγιές---ἔν κατὰ πάντων, διὰ
πάντων, ἐπὶ πᾶσι---καθ᾽ ὅλου.

84

PLATO AND SOCRATES

an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts.
Strange ! out of the practical cautions of Socrates
for the securing of clear and correct and sufh-
cient conceptions about one’s actual experience,
for the attainment of a sort of thoroughly
educated common-sense, came the mystic intel-
lectualism of Plato—Platonism, with all its
hazardous flights of soul.

A rich contributor to the philosophic con-
sciousness of Plato, Socrates was perhaps of larger
influence still on the religious soul in him.
As Plato accepted from the masters of Elea the
theoretic principles of all natural religion—the
principles of a reasonable monotheism, so from
Socrates he derived its indispensable morality.
It was Socrates who first of pagans comprised in
one clear consciousness the authentic rudiments
of such natural religion, and gave them clear
utterance. Through him, Parmenides had
conveyed to Plato the notion of a “ Perfect
Being,” to brace and satisfy the abstracting
intellect ; but it was from Socrates himself Plato
had learned those correspondent practical pieties,
which tranquillise and re-assure the soul, to-
gether with the genial hopes which cheer the
great teacher on the day of his death.

Loyal to the ancient beliefs, the ancient
usages, of the religion of many gods which he
had found all around him, Socrates pierces
through it to one unmistakable person, of perfect
intelligence, power and goodness, who takes note

85

PLATO AND PLATONISM

of him. In the course of his seventy years he
has adjusted that thought of the invisible to the
general facts and to many of the subtler com-
plexities of man’s experience in the world of
sight. ΠΟΙ anima mea, the Athenian philo-
sopher might say, zz Deum, in Deum vrvum, as he
was known at Sion. He has at least measured
devoutly the place, this way and that, which a
religion of infallible authority must fill; has
already by implication concurred in it; and in
fact has his reward at this depressing hour, as
the action of the poison mounts slowly to the
centre of his material existence. He is more
than ready to depart to what before one has
really crossed their threshold must necessarily
seem the cold and empty spaces of the world no
bodily eye can ever look on.

But, he is asked, if the prospect be indeed so
cheerful, at all events for the just, why is it
forbidden to seize such an advantage as death
must be by self-destruction ?—Tois ἀνθρώποις, μὴ
ὅσιον εἶναι, αὐτοὺς ἑαυτοὺς εὐποιεῖν, GAN Adrov δεῖ μένειν
εὐεργέτην. His consistent piety straightway sug-
gests the solution of that paradox: we are the
property, slaves, of the gods. Now no slave
has any sort of right to destroy himself; to take
a life that does not really belong to him.
Comfort himself and his friends, however, as he
may, it does tax all his resources of moral and
physical courage to do what is at last required
of him : and it was something quite new, unseen

86

a

PLATO AND SOCRATES

before in Greece, inspiring a new note in litera-
ture—this attitude of Socrates in the condemned
cell, where, fulfilling his own prediction, multi-
tudes, of a wisdom and piety, after all, so different
from his, have ever since assisted so admiringly,
this anticipation of the Christian way of dying
for an opinion, when, as Plato says simply, he
consumed the poison in the prison—vré φάρμακον
ἔπιεν ἐν τῷ δεσμωτηρίῳ. It was amid larger consola-
tions, we must admit, that Christian heroes
did that kind of thing. But bravery, you need
hardly be reminded, was ever one of the specially
characteristic virtues of the pagan world—loyalty
even unto death. It had been loyalty however
hitherto to one’s country, one’s home in the world,
one’s visible companions ; not to a wholly invisible
claimant, in this way, upon one, upon one’s self.

Socrates, with all his singleness of purpose,
had been, as Alcibiades suggested, by natural con-
stitution a twofold power, an embodied paradox.
The infinitely significant Socrates of Plato, and
the quite simple Socrates of Xenophon, may
have been indeed the not incompatible opposi-
tions of a nature, from the influence of which,
as a matter of fact, there emerged on one hand
the Cynic, on the other the Cyrenaic School,
embodying respectively those opposed austerities
and amenities of character, which, according to
the temper of this or that disciple, had seemed
to predominate in their common master. And
so the courage which declined to act as almost

87

PLATO AND PLATONISM

any one else would have acted in that matter
of the legal appeal which might have miti-
gated the penalty of death, bringing to its appro-
priate end a life whose main power had been
an unrivalled independence, was contrasted in
Socrates, paradoxically, with a genuine diff-
dence about his own convictions which explains
some peculiarities in his manner of teaching.
The irony, the humour, for which he was
famous—the unfailing humour which some
have found in his very last words—were not
merely spontaneous personal traits, or tricks of
manner ; but an essential part of the dialectical
apparatus, as affording a means of escape from
responsibility, convenient for one who _ has
scruples about the fitness of his own thoughts
for the reception of another, doubts as to the
power of words to convey thoughts, such as he
thinks cannot after all be properly conveyed to
another, but only awakened, or brought to birth
in him, out of himself,—who can tell with what
distortions in that secret place? For we judge
truth not by the intellect exclusively, and on
reasons that can be adequately embodied in
propositions ; but with the whole complex man.
Observant therefore of the capricious results of
mere teaching, to the last he protests, dis-
semblingly, and with that irony which is really
one phase of the Socratic humour, that in his
peculiar function there have been in very deed
neither teacher nor learners.
88

PLATO AND SOCRATES

The voice, the sign from heaven, that “ new
deity” he was accused of fabricating (his
singularly profound sense of a mental phe-
nomenon which is probably not uncommon)
held perhaps of the same characteristic habit of
mind. It was neither the playful pretence
which some have supposed ; nor yet an insoluble
mystery ; but only what happens naturally to a
really diffident spirit in great and still more in
small matters which at this or that taxing
moment seem to usurp the determination of
great issues. Such a spirit may find itself beset
by an inexplicable reluctance to do what would
be most natural in the given circumstances.
And for a religious nature, apt to trace the
divine assistance everywhere, it was as if, in
those perilous moments— well! as if one’s
guardian angel held one back. A quite natural
experience took the supernatural hue of religion ;
which, however, as being concerned now and
then with some circumstance in itself trifling,
might seem to lapse at times into superstition.

And as he was thus essentially twofold in
character, so Socrates had to contend against
two classes of enemies. “Ἀπ offence” to the
whole tribe of Sophists, he was hated also by
those who hated them, by the good old men of
Athens, whose conservatism finds its representa-
tive in Aristophanes, and who saw in the Socratic
challenge of first principles, in that ceaseless
testing of the origin and claims of what all

89

PLATO AND PLATONISM

honest people might seem to take for granted,
only a further development of the pernicious
function of the Sophists themselves, by the most
subtly influential of them all. If in the Apology
he proves that the fathers of sons had no proper
locus standt against him, still, in the actual
conduct of his defence, as often in Plato’s
Dialogues, there is (the candid reader cannot
but admit it) something of sophistry, of the
casuist. Claiming to be but a simple argument,
the Apology of Socrates moves sometimes
circuitously, after the manner of one who really
has to make the worse appear the better reason
(τὸν ἥττω λόγον κρείττω ποιεῖν) aNd must needs use a
certain kind of artificial, or ingenious, or ad
captandum arguments, such as would best have
been learned in the sophistic school. Those
young Athenians whom he was thought to have
corrupted of set purpose, he had not only
admired but really loved and understood ; and as
a consequence had longed to do them real good,
chiefly by giving them that interest in themselves
which is the first condition of any real power
over others. ‘To make Meno, Polus, Charmides,
really interested in himself, to help him to the
discovery of that wonderful new world here at
home—in this effort, even more than in making
them interested in other people and things, lay
and still lies (it is no sophistical paradox !) the
central business of education. Only, the very
thoroughness of the sort of self-knowledge he
go

PLATO AND SOCRATES

promoted had in it something sacramental, so
to speak ; if it did not do them good, must do
them considerable harm ; could not leave them
just as they were. He had not been able in all
cases to expand “ the better self,” as people say,
in those he influenced. Some of them had really
become very insolent questioners of others, as
also of a wholly legitimate authority within
themselves; and had but passed from bad to
worse. That fatal necessity had been involved
of coming to years of discretion. His claim to
have been no teacher at all, to be irresponsible
in regard to those who had in truth been his
very willing disciples, was but humorous or
ironical; and as a consequence there was after
all a sort of historic justice in his death.

The fate of Socrates (says Hegel, in his peculiar manner) is
tragic in the essential sense, and not merely in that superficial
sense of the word according to which every misfortune is called
“tragic.” In the latter sense, one might say of Socrates that
because he was condemned to death unjustly his fate was
tragic. But in truth innocent suffering of that sort is merely
pathetic, not tragic ; inasmuch as it is not within the sphere of
reason. Now suffering—misfortune—comes within the sphere
of reason, only if it is brought about by the free-will of the
subject, who must be entirely moral and justifiable ; as must
be also the power against which that subject proceeds. ‘This
power must be no merely natural one, nor the mere will of a
tyrant ; because it is only in such case that the man is himself,
so to speak, guilty of his misfortune. In genuine tragedy,
then, they must be powers both alike moral and ‘ustifiable,
which, from this side and from that, come into collision ; and
such was the fate of Socrates. His fate therefore is not merely
personal, and as it were part of the romance of an individual :

ΟΙ

PLATO AND PLATONISM

it is the general fate, in all its tragedy—the tragedy of Athens,
of Greece, which is therein carried out. “Two opposed Rights
come forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other :
in this way, both alike suffer loss ; while both alike are justified
the one towards the other: not as if this were right; that
other wrong. On the one side is the religious claim, the
unconscious moral habit: the other principle, over against it,
is the equally religious claim—the claim of the consciousness,
of the reason, creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The latter
remains the common principle of philosophy for all time to
come. And these are the two principles which come forth
over against each other, in the life and in the philosophy of
Socrates. Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 102.

“1 can easily conceive Socrates in the place
of Alexander,” says Montaigne, again, ‘“‘ but
Alexander in the place of Socrates I cannot” ;
and we may take that as typical of the immense
credit of Socrates, even with a vast number of
people who have not really known much about
him. “For the sake of no long period of years,”
says Socrates himself, now condemned to death
—the few years for which a man of seventy is
likely to remain here—

You will have a name, Men of Athens! and liability to
reproach from those who desire to malign the city of Athens—
that ye put Socrates to death, a wise man. For in very truth
they will declare me to have been wise—those who wish to
discredit you—even though I be not. Now had you waited
a little while this thing would have happened for you in the

course of nature. For ye see my estate: that it is now far
onward on the road of life, hard by death. Apology, 38.

Plato, though present at the trial, was absent
when Socrates “consumed the poison in the
92

PLATO AND SOCRATES

prison.” Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells
us in the Phedo, Plato would however almost
certainly have heard from him, or from some
other of that band of disciples who assisted at
the last utterances of their master, the sincerest
possible account of all that was then said and
done. Socrates had used the brief space which
elapsed before the officers removed him to the
place, “ whither he must go, to die” (οἱ ἐλθόντα pe
δεῖ τεθνάναι) to discourse with those who still
lingered in the court precisely on what are
called “The four last things.” Arrived at the
prison a further delay awaited him, in consequence
(it was so characteristic of the Athenian people !)
of a religious scruple. The ship of sacred annual
embassy to Apollo at Delos was not yet returned
to Athens ; and the consequent interval of time
might not be profaned by the death of a criminal.
Socrates himself certainly occupies it religiously
enough by a continuation of his accustomed
discourses, touched now with the deepening
solemnity of the moment.

The Phado of Plato has impressed most
readers as a veritable record of those last discourses
of Socrates; while in the details of what then
happened, the somewhat prosaic account there
given of the way in which the work of death
was done, we find what there would have been
no literary satisfaction in inventing ; his indiffer-
ent treatment, for instance, of the wife, who had
not been very dutiful but was now in violent

93

PLATO AND PLATONISM

distress—treatment in marked contrast, it must
be observed again, with the dignified tenderness
of a later scene, as recorded in the Gospels.

An inventor, with mere literary effect in view,
at this and other points would have invented
differently. ‘“‘The prison,” says Cebes, the
chief disciple in the Phedo, “was not far from
the court-house; and there we were used to
wait every day till we might be admitted to
our master. One morning we were assembled
earlier than usual ; for on the evening before we
heard that the ship was returned from Delos.
The porter coming out bade us tarry till he
should call us. For, he said, the Eleven are
now freeing Socrates from his bonds, announcing
to him that he must die to-day.”

They were very young men, we are told,
who were with Socrates, and how sweetly,
kindly, approvingly, he listened to their so
youthfully sanguine discussion on the immor-
tality of the soul. For their sakes rather than
his own he is ready to treat further, by way of
a posteriori arguments, a belief which in himself
is matter of invincible natural prepossession. In
the court he had pleaded at the most for sus-
pended judgment on that question:—“If I
claimed on any point to be wiser than any one
else it would be in this, that having no adequate
knowledge of things in Hades so I do not fancy
I know.” But, in the privacy of these last
hours, he is confident in his utterance on the

94

.
|
:

PLATO AND SOCRATES

subject which is so much in the minds of the
youths around him; his arguments like theirs
being in fact very much of the nature of the
things poets write (ποιήματα) or almost like those
medicinable fictions (ψευδῆ ἐν φαρμάκου εἴδει) such
as are of legitimate use by the expert. That the
soul (beautiful Pythagorean thought !) is a har-
mony ; that there are reasons why this particular
harmony should not cease, like that of the lyre or
the harp, with the destruction of the instrument
which produced it ; why this sort of flame should
not go out with the upsetting of the lamp :—
such are the arguments, sometimes little better
than verbal ones, which pass this way and that
around the death-bed of Socrates, as they still
occur to men’s minds. For himself, whichever
way they tend, they come and go harmlessly,
about an immovable personal conviction, which, as
he says, “came to me apart from demonstration,
with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness” :
(Mot γέγονεν ἄνευ ἀποδείξεως, μετὰ εἰκότος τινός, καὶ
εὐπρεπείας). ‘The formula of probability could
not have been more aptly put. It is one of
those convictions which await, it may be,
stronger, better, arguments than are forthcom-
ing; but will wait for them with unfailing
patience. —“ The soul therefore Cebes,’”’ since
such provisional arguments must be allowed to
pass, “18 something sturdy and strong (ἰσχυρόν τι
ἔστιν) imperishable by accident or wear; and we
shall really exist in Hades.” Indulging a little
95

PLATO AND PLATONISM

further the “poetry turned logic” of those
youthful assistants, Socrates too, even Socrates,
who had always turned away so _ persistently
from what he thought the vanity of the eye,
just before the bodily eye finally closes, and his
last moment being now at hand, ascends to,
or declines upon, the fancy of a quite visible
paradise awaiting him.—

It is said that the world, if one gaze down on it from
above, is to look on like those leathern balls of twelve pieces,
variegated in divers colours, of which the colours here—those
our painters use—are as it were samples. ‘There, the whole
world is formed of such, and far brighter and purer than they ;
part sea-purple of a wonderful beauty ; a part like gold; a part
whiter than alabaster or snow; aye, composed thus of other
colours also of like quality, of greater loveliness than ours—
colours we have never seen. For even those hollows in it,
being filled with air and water, present a certain species of
colour gleaming amid the diversity of the others ; so that it
presents one continuous aspect of varied hues. ‘Thus it is:
and conformably tree and flower and fruit are put forth and
grow. ‘The mountains again and the rocks, after the same
manner, have a smoothness and transparency and colours
lovelier than here. The tiny precious stones we prize so
greatly are but morsels of them—sards and jasper and emerald
and the rest. No baser kind of thing is to be found in that
world, but finer rather. The cause of which is that the
rocks there are pure, not gnawed away and corrupted like
ours by rot and brine, through the moistures which drain
together here, bringing disease and deformity to rocks and
earth as well as to living things. “Ichere are many living
creatures in the land besides men and women, some abiding
inland, and some on the coasts of the air, as we by the sea,
others in the islands amidst its waves ; for, in a word, what the
water of the sea is to us for our uses, that the air is to them.
The blending of the seasons there is such that they have no
sickness and come to years more numerous far than ours: while

96

PLATO AND SOCRATES

for sight and scent and hearing and the like they stand as far
from us, as air from water, in respect of purity, and the ether
from air. There are thrones moreover and temples of the
gods among them, wherein in very deed the gods abide ; voices
and oracles and sensible apprehensions of them ; and occasions
of intercourse with their very selves. ‘The sun, the moon and
the stars they see as they really are; and are blessed in all
other matters agreeably thereto. Phedo, 110.

The great assertor of the abstract, the im-

palpable, the unseen, at any cost, shows there
a mastery of visual expression equal to that of
his greatest disciple.—Ah, good master! was

the eye so contemptible an organ of knowledge
after all?

Plato was then about twenty-eight years old ;
a rich young man, rich also in intellectual gifts ;
and what he saw and heard from and about
Socrates afforded the correction his opulent
genius needed, and made him the most serious
of writers. In many things he was as unlike

as possible to the’ teacher—rude and rough as
some failure of his own old sculptor’s workshop
-—who might seem in his own person to have
broken up the harmonious grace of the Greek

type, and carried people one step into a world

already in reaction against the easy Attic temper,
ἃ world in which it might be necessary to go far
_below the surface for the beauty of which those

homely lips had discoursed so much. Perhaps

he acted all the more surely as a corrective force
on Plato, henceforward an opponent of the

P. VI 97 H

PLATO AND PLATONISM

obviously successful mental habits of the day,
with an unworldliness which, a personal trait
in Plato himself there acquired, will ever be of
the very essence of Platonism.—‘‘ Many are
called, but few chosen” : Ναρθηκοφόροι μὲν πολλοί,
βάκχοι δέ τε παῦρο. He will have, as readers of
The Republic know, a hundred precepts of self-
repression for others—the self-repression of every
really tuneable member of a chorus; and he
begins by almost effacing himself. All that is
best and largest in his own matured genius he
identifies with his master ; and when we speak
of Plato generally what we are really thinking
of is the Platonic Socrates.

98

ν

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

“SopHIsT,” professional enemy of Socrates :—it
became, chiefly through the influence of Plato,
inheriting, expanding, the preferences and anti-
_ pathies of his master, a bad name. Yet it had
_ but indicated, by a quite natural verbal formation,
the class of persons through whom, in the most
_ effectual manner, supply met demand, the demand
for education, asserted by that marvellously ready
_ Greek people, when the youthful mind in them
became suddenly aware of the coming of virile
capacity, and they desired to be made by rules
_of art better speakers, better writers and account-
ants, than any merely natural, unassisted gifts,
however fortunate, could make them. While
the peculiar religiousness of Socrates had induced
in him the conviction that he was something
less than a wise man, a philosopher only, a mere
seeker after such wisdom as he might after all
never attain, here were the σοφισταί, the experts
_—wise men, who proposed to make other people
88 wise as themselves, wise in that sort of wisdom
99

PLATO AND PLATONISM

regarding which we can really test others, and
let them test us, not with the merely approximate
results of the Socratic method, but with the
exactness we may apply to processes understood
to be mechanical, or to the proficiency of quite
young students (such as in fact the Sophists
were dealing with) by those examinations which
are so sufficient in their proper place. It had
been as delightful as learning a new game,—
that instruction, in which you could measure
your daily progress by brilliant feats of skill.
Not only did the parents of those young students
pay readily large sums for their instruction in
what it was found so useful to know, above all
in the art of public speaking, of self-defence,
that is to say, in democratic Athens where one’s
personal status was become so insecure; but the
young students themselves felt grateful for their
institution in what told so immediately on their
fellows; for help in the comprehension of the
difficult sentences of another, or the improvement
of one’s own; for the accomplishments which
enabled them in that busy competitive world
to push their fortunes each one for himself a
little further, and quite innocently. Of course |
they listened.

“Love not the world !”—that, on the other
hand, was what Socrates had said, or seemed to
say ; though in truth he too meant only to teach —
them how by a more circuitous but surer way to

100 |

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

possess themselves of it. And youth, naturally
curious and for the most part generous, willing
to undergo much for the mere promise of some
good thing it can scarcely even imagine, had
been ready to listen to him too ; the sons of rich
men most often, by no means to the dissatisfac-
tion of Socrates himself, though he never touched
their money; young men who had amplest
leisure for the task of perfecting their souls, in
a condition of religious luxury, as we should
perhaps say. As was evident in the court-house
at the trial of the great teacher, to the eyes of
older citizens who had not come under his
personal influence, there had been little to
distinguish between Socrates and his professional
rivals. Socrates in truth was a Sophist; but
more than a Sophist. Both alike handled freely
matters that to the fathers had seemed beyond
question; encouraged what seemed impious
questioning in the sons; had set “the hearts
of the sons against the fathers”; and some
instances there were in which the teaching of
Socrates had been more conspicuously ruinous
than theirs. “1 you ask people at Athens,”
says Socrates in the Meno, “‘ how virtue is to be
attained, they will laugh in your face and say
they don’t so much as know what virtue is.”
_ And who was responsible for that? Certainly
that Dialogue, proposing to discover the essen-
tial nature of virtue, by no means re-establishes
one’s old prepossessions about it in the vein of
Io!

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Simonides, or Pindar, or one’s elders. Sophist,
and philosopher; Protagoras, and Socrates; so
far, their effect was the same :—to the horror
of fathers, to put the minds of the sons in motion
regarding matters it were surely best to take as
settled once and for ever. What then after all
was the insuperable difference between Socrates
and those rival teachers, with whom he had
nevertheless so much in common, bent like him
so effectively, so zealously, on that new study of
man, of human nature and the moral world, to
the exclusion of all useless ‘“‘ meteoric or subter-
ranean enquiries” into things. As attractive as
himself to ingenuous youth, uncorrupt surely in
its early intentions, why did the Sophists seem
to Socrates to be so manifestly an instrument of
its corruption ?

“The citizen of Athens,” observed that great
Athenian statesman of the preceding age, in
whom, as a German philosopher might say, the
spabile soul of Athens became conscious,—‘* The
citizen of Athens seems to me to present himself
in his single person to the greatest possible
variety (πλεῖστα εἴδη) of thought and action, with
the utmost degree of versatility.” As we saw,
the example of that mobility, that daring
mobility, of character has seemed to many the
special contribution of the Greek people to
advancing humanity. It was not however of
the Greek people in general that Pericles was
speaking at the beginning of the Peloponnesian

102

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

war, but of Athens in particular; of Athens,
that perfect flower of Ionian genius, in direct
contrast to, and now in bitter rivalry with,
Sparta, the perfect flower of the Dorian genius.
All through Greek history, as we also saw, in
connexion with Plato’s opposition to the philo-
sophy of motion, there may be traced, in every
sphere of the activity of the Greek mind, the
influence of those two opposing tendencies :—
the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies, as
we may perhaps not too fancifully call them.
There is the centrifugal, the irresponsible, the
Ionian or Asiatic, tendency; flying from the
centre, working with little forethought straight
before it in the development of every thought
and fancy; throwing itself forth in endless play
of undirected imagination ; delighting in colour
and brightness, moral or physical; in beautiful
material, in changeful form everywhere, in
poetry, in music, in architecture and its subor-
dinate crafts, in philosophy itself. In the social
and political order it rejoices in the freest action
of local and personal influences: its restless
versatility drives it towards the assertion of the
principles of individualism, of separatism—the
separation of state from state, the maintenance of
local religions, the development of the individual
in that which is most peculiar and individual in
him. Shut off land-wards from the primitive
sources of those many elements it was to compose
anew, shut off from all the rest of the world, to
103

PLATO AND PLATONISM

which it presented but one narrow entrance
pierced through that rock of Tempe, so narrow
that “in the opinion of the ancients it might be
defended by a dozen men against all comers,”
it did recompose or fuse those many diverse
elements into one absolutely original type. But
what variety within! Its very claim was in its
grace of movement, its freedom and easy happiness,
its lively interests, the variety of its gifts to
civilisation ; but its weakness is self-evident, and
was what had made the political unity of Greece
impossible. The Greek spirit !—it might have
become a hydra, to use Plato’s own figure, a
monster ; the hand developing hideously into a
hundred hands, or heads.

This inorganic, this centrifugal, tendency,
Plato was desirous to cure by maintaining over
against it the Dorian influence of a severe
simplification everywhere, in society, in culture,
in the very physical nature of man. An enemy
everywhere, though through acquired principle
indeed rather than by instinct, to variegation, to
what is cunning, or “‘myriad-minded” (as we
say of Shakespere, as Plato thinks of Homer) he
sets himself in mythology, in literature, in every
kind of art, in the art of life, as if with con-
scious metaphysical opposition to the metaphysic
of Heraclitus, to enforce the ideal of a sort
of Parmenidean abstractness, and monotony or
calm.

This, perhaps exaggerated, ideal of Plato is

104

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

however only the exaggeration of that salutary,
strictly European tendency, which, finding human
mind, the human reason cool and sane, to be
the most absolutely real and precious thing in
the world, enforces everywhere the impress of
its reasonable sanity ; its candid reflexions upon
things as they really are ; its sense of logical pro-
portion. It is that centripetal tendency, again,
which links the individual units together, states
to states, one period of organic growth to another,
under the reign of a strictly composed, self-
conscious order, in the universal light of the
understanding.

Whether or not this temper, so clearly trace-
able as a distinct rival influence in the course of
Greek development, was indeed the peculiar gift
of the Dorian race, certainly that race, as made
known to us especially in Lacedemon, is the
best illustration of it, in its love of order, of that
severe composition everywhere, of which the
Dorian style of architecture is as it were a
material symbol, in its constant aspiration after
what is dignified and earnest, as exemplified
most evidently in the religion of its preference,
the religion of Apollo.

Now the key to Plato’s view of the Sophists,
Gorgias, Protagoras, Hippias, Prodicus, with
their less brilliant followers—chosen educators
of the public—is that they do but fan and add
fuel to the fire in which Greece, as they wander
‘eee 105

PLATO AND PLATONISM

like ardent missionaries about it, is flaming itself
away. Teaching in their large, fashionable,
expensive schools, so triumphantly well, the arts
one needed most in so busy an age, they were
really developing further and reinforcing the
ruinous fluidity of the Greek, and especially of
the Athenian people, by turning it very adroitly
into a conscious method, a practical philosophy,
an art of life itself, in which all those specific
arts would be but subsidiary—an all-supplement-
ing ars artium, a master-art, or, in depreciatory
Platonic mood one might say, an artifice, or,
cynically, a trick. The great sophist was indeed
the Athenian public itself, Athens, as the willing
victim of its own gifts, its own flamboyancy,
well-nigh worn out now by the mutual friction
of its own parts, given over completely to
hazardous political experiment with the irre-
sponsibility which is ever the great vice of
democracy, ever ready to float away anywhither,
to misunderstand, or forget, or discredit, its own
past.—

Or do you too hold like the many (asks Socrates in the
sixth book of The Republic) that a certain number are corrupted
by sophists in their youth ; and that certain sophists, irrespons-
ible persons, corrupt them to any extent worth noting ; and
not rather that those who say these things are the greatest
sophists ; that they train to perfection, and turn out both old
and young, men and women, just as they choose them to be?
—When, pray? He asked.—-When seated together in their
thousands at the great assemblies, or in the law-courts, or
the theatres, or the camp, or any other common gathering of
the public, with much noise the majority praise this and blame

106

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

that in what is said and done, both alike in excess, shouting
and clapping ; and the very rocks too and the place in which
they are, echoing around, send back redoubled that clamour or
praise and blame. In such case, what heart as they say, what
heart, think you, can the young man keep? or what private
education he may have had hold out for him that it be not
over-flooded by praise or blame like that, and depart away,
borne down the stream, whithersoever that may carry it, and
that he pronounce not the same thing as they fair or foul ;
and follow the same ways as they; and become like them?

Republic, 492.

The veritable sophist then, the dynamic
sophist, was the Athenian public of the day;
those ostensible or professional Sophists being
not so much its intellectual directors as the
pupils or followers of it. They did but make it,
as the French say, abound the more in its own
sense, like the keeper (it is Plato’s own image)
of some wild beast, which he knows how to
command by a well-considered obedience to all
its varying humours. If the Sophists are partly
the cause they are still more the effect of the
social environment. They had discovered, had
ascertained with much acuteness, the actual
momentum of the society which maintained
them, and they meant only, by regulating, to
maintain it. Protagoras, the chief of Sophists,
had avowedly applied to ethics the physics or
metaphysics of Heraclitus. And now it was as
if the disintegrating Heraclitean fire had taken
hold on actual life, on men’s very thoughts, on
the emotions and the will.

That so faulty natural tendency, as Plato holds

107

PLATO AND PLATONISM

it to be, in the world around them, they formu-
late carefully as its proper conscious theory: a
theory how things must, nay, ought, to be.
“Just that,” they seem to say— “Just that
versatility, that mutable spirit, shall become by
adoption the child of knowledge, shall be care-
fully nurtured, brought to great fortune. We'll
make you, and your thoughts, as fluid, as shifty,
as things themselves: will bring you, like some
perfectly accomplished implement, to this carriere
ouverte, this open quarry, for the furtherance of
your personal interests in the world.” And if
old-fashioned principle or prejudice be found in
the way, who better than they could instruct
one, not how to minimise, or violate it—that
was not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding
what was so useful for the control of others—not
that ; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to it,
in regard to one’s self? “It will break up,—
this or that ethical deposit in your mind, Ah !
very neatly, very prettily, and disappear, when
exposed to the action of our perfected method.
Of credit with the vulgar as such, in the solitary
chamber of the aristocratic mind such _pre-
suppositions, prejudicies or principles, may be
made very soon to know their place.”

Yes! says Plato (for a moment we may
anticipate what is at least the spirit of his answer)
but there are some presuppositions after all,
which it will make us very vulgar to have
dismissed from us. ‘There are moreover,”

108

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

those others proceed to say, “teachers of per-
suasion (πειθοῦς διδάσκαλοι) Who impart skill in
popular and forensic oratory; and so by fair
means or by unfair we shall gain our ends.” It
is with the δῆμος, with the vulgar, insubordinate,
tag-rag of one’s. own nature—how to rule that,
by obeying it—that these professors of rhetoric
begin. They are still notwithstanding the only
teachers of morals ingenuous Greece is aware
of ; and wisdom, as seems likely, “ must die with
them !”—

Some very small number then (says the Platonic Socrates)
is left, of those who in worthy fashion hold converse with
philosophy : either, it may be, some soul of in-born worth and
well brought up, to which it has happened to be exiled in a
foreign land, holding to philosophy by a tie of nature, and
through lack of those who will corrupt it; or when it may
chance that a great soul comes to birth in an insignificant state,
to the politics of which it gives no heed, because it thinks them
despicable: perhaps a certain fraction also, of good parts, may
come to philosophy from some other craft, through a just
contempt of that. The bridle too of our companion Theages
has a restraining power. For in the case of Theages also, all
the other conditions were in readiness to his falling away from
philosophy ; but the nursing of his sickly body, excluding him
from politics, keeps him back. Our own peculiarity is not
worth speaking of—the sign from heaven! for I suppose it has
occurred to scarce anyone before. And so, those who have
been of this number, and have tasted how sweet and blessed the
possession is ; and again, having a full view of the folly of the
many, and that no one, I might say, effects any sound result
in what concerns the state, or is an ally in whose company one
might proceed safe and sound to the help of the just, but that,
like a man falling among wild beasts, neither willing to share
their evil deeds, nor sufficient by himself to resist the whole
fierce band, flung away before he shall have done any service

109

PLATO AND PLATONISM

to the city or to his own friends, he would become useless both
to himself and to others: taking all this into consideration,
keeping silence and doing his own business, as one standing
aside under a hedge in some storm of dust and spray beneath
a driven wind, seeing those about him replete with lawlessness,
he is content if by any means, pure from injustice and unholy
deeds, himself shall live through his life here, and in turn make
his escape with good hope, in cheerful and kindly mood.
(What long sentences Plato writes!) Yet in truth, he said,
he would make his escape after not the least of achievements.—
Nor yet the greatest, I observed, because he did not light upon
the polity fitted for him: for, in that fitting polity, himself
will grow to completer stature, and, together with what belongs
to him, he will be the saviour also of the commonwealth.

Republic, 496.

Over against the Sophists, and the age which
has sophisticated them, of which they are the
natural product, Plato, being himself of a genius
naturally rich, florid, complex, excitable, but
adding to the utmost degree of Ionian sensibility
an effectual desire towards the Dorian order and
ascésis, asserts everywhere the principle of outline,
in political and moral life; in the education
which is to fit men for it; in the music which
is one half of that education, in the philosophy
which is its other half—the “ philosophy of the
ideas,” of those eternally fixed outlines of our
thought, which correspond to, nay, are actu-
ally identical with, the eternally fixed outlines
of things themselves. What the difference
(difference in regard to continuity and clearness)
really is between the conditions of mind, in
which respectively the sophistic process, and the
genuinely philosophical or dialectic process, as

110

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

conceived by Plato, leave us, is well illustrated
by the peculiar treatment of Justice, its proper
definition or idea, in The Republic. Justice (or
Righteousness, as we say, more largely) under
the light of a comprehensive experience of it,
carefully, diligently, adjusted to the nature of
man on the one hand, of society on the other,
becomes in the fourth book of The Republic, Τὸ τὰ
αὑτοῦ mpdrrev— The doing, by every part, in
what is essentially a whole consisting of parts,
of its own proper business therein. That, is a
notion of Righteousness made familiar to us b
Saint Paul, and in Plato holds somewhat of his
Pythagorean predecessors. It is the execution,
neither more nor less, by every performer, of his
own part in a musical exercise ; or, in a physical
organism, the execution by every faculty of its
own function, neither more nor less: it is harmony :
it is health,—To τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν. There, then, is
the eternal outline of Righteousness or Justice
as it really is, equally clear and indefectible at
every point; a definition of it which can by no
supposition become a definition of anything else ;
impenetrable, not to be traversed, by any pos-
sible definition of Injustice ; securing an essential
value to its possessor, independently of all falsities
of appearance; and leaving Justice, as it really is
in itself, unaffected even by phenomena so mis-
representative of it as to deceive the very gods,
or many good men, as happened pre-eminently
in the case of Socrates.
III

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Here then is the reply of the Platonic Socrates
to the challenge that he should prove himself
master of a more certain philosophy than that
of the people, as represented by the old gnomic
poet Simonides, “‘whom it is hard to disbelieve,”
(σόφος yap καὶ θεῖος ἀνήρ,) ON the one hand; than
that of the Sophists on the other, as represented by
Thrasymachus. ‘Show us not only that Justice
is a better thing than Injustice ; but, by doing
what (ἀλλὰ τί ποιοῦσα) to the soul of its possessor,
each of them respectively, in and by itself (airy
δι’ αὑτήν) Εν if men and gods alike mistake it
for its contrary, is still the one a good thing, the
other a bad one.”

But note for a few moments the precise
treatment of the idea of Justice in the first book
of The Republic. Sophistry and common sense
are trying their best to apprehend, to cover or
occupy, a certain space, as the exact area of
Justice. And what happens with each proposed
definition in turn is, that it becomes, under
conceivable circumstances, a definition of In-
justice: not that, in practice, a confusion between
the two is therefore likely ; but that the zte//ect
remains unsatisfied of the theoretic validity of
the distinction.

Now that intellectual situation illustrates the
sense in which sophistry is a reproduction of the
Heraclitean flux. The old Heraclitean physical
theory presents itself as a natural basis for the
moral, the social, dissolution, which the sophis-

112

— ee

|

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

tical movement promotes. But what a contrast
to it, in the treatment of Justice, of the question,
What Justice zs? in that introductory book of
The Republic. ‘The first book forms in truth
an eristic, a destructive or negative, Dialogue
(such as we have other examples of) in which
the whole business might have concluded, prema-

_turely, with an exposure of the inadequacy, alike

of common-sense as represented by Simonides,

_and of a sophisticated philosophy as represented
by Thrasymachus, to define Justice. Note,
however, in what way, precisely. That it is

_ Just, for instance, to restore what one owes (τὸ τὰ
ὀφειλόμενα ἀποδιδόναι) might pass well enough for a
general guide to right conduct ; and the sophis-
tical judgment that Justice is ‘‘ The interest of

the stronger”’ is not more untrue than the con-

trary paradox that “Justice is a plot of the weak
against the strong.”

It is, then, in regard to the claims of Justice,

-notso much on practice, as on the intellect, in its

demand for a clear theory of practice, that those

definitions fail. They are failures because they
fail to distinguish absolutely, ideally, as towards
the intellect, what is, from what is not. To
Plato, for whom, constitutionally, and ex hypothes?,

what can be clearly thought is the precise
‘measure of what really is, if such a thought
about Justice—absolutely inclusive and ex-
clusive—is, after all our efforts, not to be ascer-

tained, this can only be, because Justice is not

ΠΡ. VI 113 I

PLATO AND PLATONISM

a real thing, but only an empty or confused
name.

Now the Sophist and the popular moralist, in
that preliminary attempt to define the nature of
Justice—what is right, are both alike trying, ©
first in this formula, then in that, to occupy, ©
by a thought, and by a definition which may |
convey that thought into the mind of another ©
—to occupy, or cover, a certain area of the —
phenomena of experience, as the Just. And
what happens thereupon is this, that by means
of acertain kind of casuistry, by the allegation —
of certain possible cases of conduct, the whole —
of that supposed area of the Just is occupied by —
definitions of Injustice, from this centre or that. —
Justice therefore—its area, the space of ex-
perience which it covers, dissolves away, literally,
as the eye is fixed upon it, like Heraclitean
water: it is and is not. And if this, and the
like of this, is to the last all that can be known
or said of it, Justice will be no current coin, at
least to the acute philosophic mind. But has
some larger philosophy perhaps something more |
to say of it? and the power of defining an area,
upon which no definition of Injustice, in any
conceivable case of act or feeling, can infringe?
That is the question upon which the essential
argument of The Republic starts—upon a voyage
of discovery. It is Plato’s own figure. |

There, clearly enough, may be seen what the
difference, the difference of aim, between Socrates

114 |

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

and the Sophists really was, amid much that
they had in common, as being both alike dis-
tinguished from that older world of opinion of
which Simonides is the mouthpiece.

The quarrel of Socrates with the Sophists
was in part one of those antagonisms which are
involved necessarily in the very conditions of an
age that has not yet made up its mind; was in
part also a mere rivalry of individuals; and it
might have remained in memory only as a
matter of historical interest. It has been other-
wise. That innocent word “Sophist” has sur-
vived in common language, to indicate some
constantly recurring viciousness, in the treatment
of one’s own and of other minds, which is always
at variance with such habits of thought as are
really worth while. There is an every-day
“‘sophistry”’ of course, against which we have
all of us to be on our guard—that insincerity of
reasoning on behalf of sincere convictions, true
or false in themselves as the case may be, to
_which, if we are unwise enough to argue at all
_ with each other, we must all be tempted at times.
Such insincerity however is for the most part apt
_to expose itself. But there is a more insidious
sophistry of which Plato is aware; and against
which he contends in the Protagoras, and again
still more effectively in the Phedrus ; the closing
pages of which discover the essential point of
that famous quarrel between the Sophists and
Socrates or Plato, in regard to a matter which is
| 115

PLATO AND PLATONISM

of permanent interest in itself, and as being not
directly connected with practical morals is un-
affected by the peculiar prejudices of that age.
Art, the art of oratory, in particular, and of
literary composition,—in this case, how one
should write or speak really inflammatory dis-
courses about love, write love-letters, so to speak,
that shall really get at the heart they’re meant
for —that was a matter on which the Sophists
had thought much professionally. And the ©
debate introduced in the Phedrus regarding the
secret of success in proposals of love or friend-
ship turns properly on this: whether it is
necessary, or even advantageous, for one who —
would be a good orator, or writer, a poet,a good
artist generally, to know, and consciously to keep
himself in contact with, the truth of his subject
as he knows or feels it ; or only with what other +,
people, perhaps quite indolently, think, or suppose
others to think, about it. And here the charge ] |
of Socrates against those professional teachers οὗ Ι |
the art of rhetoric comes to be, that, with ΠΛΌΟΝ |
superficial aptitude in the conduct of the matter,
they neither reach, nor put others in the way oth Υ: |
reaching, that intellectual ground of things (of —
the consciousness of love for instance, when they —
are to open their lips, and presumably their souls, —
about that) in true contact with which alone
can there be a real mastery in dealing with |
them. That you yourself must have an inward, |
carefully ascertained, measured, instituted hold |
116 Bi

i
‘
;

ὩΣ -ἀἰὀὸ
--- Ὡς lia φΦΨΦΨἌΕἘΝ

τ 5 Ee a δ δὸ
at ee a ee eee

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

over anything you are to convey with any real
power to others, is the truth which the Platonic
Socrates, in strongly convinced words, always
reasonable about it, formulates, in opposition to
the Sophists’ impudently avowed theory and
practice of the superficial, as such. Well! we
all always need to be set on our guard against
theories which flatter the natural indolence of
our minds.
“We proposed then just now,” says Socrates
in the Phedrus, “to consider the theory of the
way in which one would or would not write
or speak well.” —“ Certainly !”—‘“‘ Well then,
must there not be in those who are to speak
meritoriously, an understanding well acquainted
with the truth of the things they are to speak
about?” —‘‘ Nay!” answers Phedrus, in that
age of sophistry, ‘‘ It is in this way I have heard
about it :—that it is not necessary for one who
would be a master of rhetoric to learn what
really is just, for instance; but rather what
seems just to the multitude who are to give
judgment: nor again what is good or beautiful ;
but only what seems sotothem. For persuasion
comes of the latter ; by no means of a hold upon
the truth of things.”

!
|
[
|

b

:

Whether or not the Sophists were quite
fairly chargeable with that sort of ‘inward lie,”
just this, at all events, was in the judgment of
Plato the essence of sophistic vice. With them

117

PLATO AND PLATONISM

art began too precipitately, as mere form without
matter; a thing of disconnected empiric rules,
caught from the mere surface of other people’s

productions, in congruity with a general method _

which everywhere ruthlessly severed branch and
flower from its natural root—art from one’s own
vivid sensation or belief. The Lacedemonian
(ὁ Λάκων) Plato’s favourite scholar always, as
having that infinite patience which is the note

of a sincere, a really impassioned lover of

anything, says, in his convinced Lacedemonian
way, that a genuine art of speech (τοῦ λέγειν ἔτυμος
τέχνη) unless one be in contact with truth, there
neither is nor can be. We are reminded of
that difference between genuine memory, and
mere haphazard recollection, noted by Plato in

the story he tells so well of the invention οὗ

writing in ancient Egypt.—It might be doubted,
he thinks, whether genuine memory was en-
couraged by that invention. The note on the
margin by the inattentive reader to “remind

himself,” is, as we know, often his final good-bye -

to what it should remind him of. Now this
is true of all art: Λόγων ἀρὰ τέχνην, ὁ τὴν ἀλήθειαν
μὴ εἰδώς, δόξας τε τεθηρεύκως, γέλοιον τινα καὶ ἄτεχνον
παρέξεται.---ἰ is but a kind of bastard art of mere
words (τέχνη ἄτεχνος) that he will have who does
not know the fruth of things, but has tried to
hunt out what other people “amk about it.
“Conception,” observed an intensely personal,
deeply stirred, poet and artist of our own genera-

118

set ἄς ee et ae
ae ee ase see ἃ πὶ,

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

tion: ‘Conception, fundamental brainwork,—
that is what makes the difference, in all art.”
Against all pretended, mechanically com-
municable rules of art then, against any rule
of literary composition, for instance, unsanctioned
by the facts, by a clear apprehension of the facts,
of that experience, which to each one of us
severally is the beginning, if it be not also the
end, of all knowledge, against every merely
formal dictate (their name is legion with practis-
ing Sophists of all ages) Περὶ βραχυλογίας, καὶ
ἐλεεινολογίας, καὶ δεινώσεως, concerning freedom or
precision, figure, emphasis, proportion of parts
and the like, exordium and conclusion :—against
all such the Platonic Socrates still protests, “‘ You
know what must be known before harmony can
be attained, but not yet the laws of harmony
itself,” —ra πρὸ τραγῳδίας, Sophocles would object
in like Case, τὰ πρὸ τραγῳδίας, GAN οὐ τραγικά.
Given the dynamic Sophoclean intention or con-
viction, and the irresistible law of right utter-
ance, (ἀνάγκη Aoyoypadixy) how one must write or
speak, will make itself felt; will assuredly also
renew many an old precept, as to how one shall
write or speak, learned at school. To speak πρὸς
δόξαν only, as towards mere unreasoned opinion,
might do well enough in the law-courts with
people, who (as is understood in that case) do
not really care very much about justice itself,
desire only that a friend should be acquitted,
or an enemy convicted, irrespectively of it ; but
[19

PLATO AND PLATONISM

it is not the principle on which Abelard and
Heloise wrote their famous love-letters ; or Plato
his kindled and enkindling words on love and
friendship in the Symposium, and in that very
Dialogue of the Phaedrus. It is not the way in
which, as Dante records, a certain book discoursed
of love to Paolo and Francesca, till they found
themselves—well! in the Inferno; so potent
it was.

For the essence of all artistic beauty is expres-
sion, which cannot be where there's really
nothing to be expressed; the line, the colour,
the word, following obediently, and with minute
scruple, the conscious motions of a convinced
intelligible soul. ‘To make men interested in
themselves, as being the very ground of all
reality for them, /2 vrai vérité, as the French
say :—that was the essential function of the
Socratic method: to flash light into the house
within, its many chambers, its memories and

associations, upon its inscribed and pictured —

walls. Fully occupied there, as with his own
essential business in his own home, the young
man would become, of course, proportionately

less interested, less meanly interested, in what

was superficial, in the mere outsides, of other

people and their occupations. With the true

artist indeed, with almost every expert, all know-

ledge, of almost every kind, tells, is attracted

into, and duly charged with, the force of what
120

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

may be his leading apprehension. And as the
special function of all speech as a fine art is
the control of minds (ψυχαγωγία) it is in general
with knowledge of the soul of man—with a

veritable psychology, with as much as possible

as we can get of that—that the writer, the
speaker, must be chiefly concerned, if he is to
handle minds not by mere empiric routine, τριβῇ

᾿ μόνον, καὶ ἐμπειρίᾳ ἀλλά τέχνῃ, but by the power of

veritable fine art. Now such art, such theory,

is not ““ἴο be caught with the left hand,” as the
Greek phrase went; and again, χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά.
We have no time to hear in English Plato’s
clever specimens of the way in which people
would write about love without success. Let
us rather hear himself on that subject, in his
own characteristic mood of conviction.—

Try! she said (a certain Sibylline woman namely, from

whose lips Socrates in the Symposium is supposed to quote what
_ follows) Try to apply your mind as closely as possible to what
_I am going to say. For he who has been led thus far in the
| discipline of love, beholding beautiful objects in the right
| order, coming now towards the end of the doctrine of love, will
_ on a sudden behold a beauty wonderful in its nature :—that,
| Socrates! towards which indeed the former exercises were all
| designed; being first of all ever existent; having neither
_ beginning nor end; neither growing or fading away; and then,
_ not beautiful in one way, unbeautiful in another; beautiful

now, but not then; beautiful in this relation, unlovely in

_ that; to some, but not to others. Nor again will that
| beauty appear to him to be beautiful as a face or hands or
_ anything else that belongs to the body; nor as any kind of

reasoning or science ; nor as being resident in anything else,

as in a living creature or the earth or the sky or any other

I2I

PLATO AND PLATONISM

thing ; but as being itself by itself, ever in a single form with
itself ; all other beautiful things so participating in it, that
while they begin and cease to be, that neither becomes more
nor less nor suffers any other change. Whenever, then,
anyone, beginning from things here below, through a right
practice of love, ascending, begins to discern that other beauty,
he will almost have reached the end. For this in truth is the
right method of proceeding towards the doctrine of love, or of
being conducted therein by another,—beginning from these
beautiful objects here below ever to be going up higher, with
that other beauty in view ; using them as steps of a ladder ;
mounting from the love of one fair person to the love of two ;
and from the love of two to the love of all; and from the love
of beautiful persons to the love of beautiful employments—xada
ἐπιτηδεύματα (that means being a soldier, or a priest, or a scholar)
and from the love of beautiful employments to the love of

beautiful kinds of knowledge; till he passes from degrees of τ
knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of
nothing else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at

length as in itself it really is. At this moment of life, dear
Socrates ! said the Mantinean Sibyl, if at any moment, man
truly lives, beholding the absolute beauty—the which, so you
have once seen it, will appear beyond the comparison of gold, —

or raiment, or those beautiful young persons, seeing whom
now, like many another, you are so overcome that you are ~
ready, beholding those beautiful persons and associating ever

with them, if it were possible, neither to eat nor drink but only — |

to look into their eyes and sit beside them. What then, she

asked, suppose we? if it were given to any one to behold the ~

absolute beauty, in its clearness, its pureness, its unmixed
essence ; not repiete with flesh and blood and colours and —
other manifold vanity of this mortal life; but if he were able
to behold that divine beauty (μονοειδὲς) simply as it is. Do
you think, she said, that life would be a poor thing to one
whose eyes were fixed on that; seeing that, (ᾧ δεῖ) with the
organ through which it must be seen, and communing with
that? Do you not think rather, she asked, that here alone it
will be his, seeing the beautiful with that through which it

ε

may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, 6 νοῦς) to

beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom he
122

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

apprehends, but the true virtue, as he embraces what is true?
And having begotten virtue (virtue is the child that will be
born of this mystic intellectual commerce, or connubium, of
the imaginative reason with ideal beauty) and reared it, he
will become dear to God, and if any man may be immortal
he will be. Symposium, 210.

The essential vice of sophistry, as Plato con-
ceived it, was that for it no real things existed.
Real things did exist for Plato, things that were
“an end in themselves”; and the Platonic
Socrates was right :—Plato has written so well
there, because he was no scholar of the Sophists
as he understood them, but is writing of what
he really knows.

123

VI
THE GENIUS OF PLATO

ALL true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of
every other product of human mind, must begin
with an historic estimate of the conditions, ante-
cedent and contemporary, which helped to make
it precisely what it was. But a complete criti-
cism does not end there. In the evolution of
abstract doctrine as we find it written in the
history of philosophy, if there is always, on one
side, the fatal, irresistible, mechanic play of
circumstance—the circumstances of a particular
age, which may be analysed and explained ; there
is always also, as if acting from the opposite side,
the comparatively inexplicable force of a person-
ality, resistant to, while it is moulded by, them.
It might even be said that the trial-task of criti-
cism, in regard to literature and art no less than
to philosophy, begins exactly where the estimate
of general conditions, of the conditions common
to all the products of this or that particular age
—of the ‘environment ””—leaves off, and we
touch what is unique in the individual genius
124

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

which contrived after all, by force of will, to
have its own masterful way with that environ-
ment. If in reading Plato, for instance, the
philosophic student has to re-construct for
himself, as far as possible, the general character
of an age, he must also, so far as he may, re-
produce the portrait of a person. The Sophists,
the Sophistical world, around him ; his master,
Socrates; the Pre-Socratic philosophies; the
mechanic influence, that is to say, of past and
present :—of course we can know nothing at all
of the Platonic doctrine except so far as we see
it in well-ascertained contact with all that; but
there is also Plato himself in it.

—A personality, we may notice at the outset,
of a certain complication. The great masters
of philosophy have been for the most part its
noticeably single-minded servants. As if in
emulation of Aristotle’s simplicity of character,
his absorbing intellectualism—impressive cer-
tainly, heroic enough, in its way—they have
served science, science 7 vacuo, as if nothing
beside, faith, imagination, love, the bodily sense,
could detach them from it for an hour. It is
not merely that we know little of their lives
(there was so little to tell!) but that we know
nothing at all of their temperaments ; of which,
that one leading abstract or scientific force in
_ them was in fact strictly exclusive. Little more
_ than intellectual abstractions themselves, in them
| 125

PLATO AND PLATONISM

philosophy was wholly faithful to its colours, or
its colourlessness ; rendering not grey only, as
Hegel said of it, but all colours alike, in grey.

With Plato it was otherwise. In him, the
passion for truth did but bend, or take the bent
of, certain ineradicable predispositions of his
nature, in themselves perhaps somewhat opposed
tothat. It is however in the blending of diverse
elements in the mental constitution of Plato that
the peculiar Platonic quality resides. Platonism
is In one sense an emphatic witness to the un-
seen, the transcendental, the non-experienced, the
beauty, for instance, which is not for the bodily
eye. Yet the author of this philosophy of the
unseen was,—Who can doubt it who has read
but a page of him? this, in fact, is what has led
and kept to his pages many who have little or
no turn for the sort of questions Plato actually
discusses :—The author of this philosophy of the
unseen was one, for whom, as was said of a very
different French writer, “‘ the vzszb/e world really
existed.” Austere as he seems, and on well-
considered principle really is, his temperance or
austerity, esthetically so winning, is attained
only by the chastisement, the control, of a
variously interested, a richly sensuous nature.
Yes, the visible world, so pre-eminently worth
eye-sight at Athens just then, really existed for
him: exists still—there’s the point !—is active
still everywhere, when he seems to have turned
away from it to invisible things.

126

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

To the somewhat sad-coloured school of
Socrates, and its discipline towards apathy or
contempt in such matters, he had brought
capacities of bodily sense with the making in
them of an Odyssey; or (shall we say?) of a
poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus ; as
_ indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular
| management of his own powers, a skill in philo-
_ sophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might
_ have constituted him the most successful of
Sophists. You cannot help seeing that his mind
is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of
men and things. Nothing, if it really arrests
eye or ear at all, is too trivial to note. Passing
through the crowd of human beings, he notes
the sounds alike of their solemn hymns and of
their pettiest handicraft. A conventional philo-
sopher might speak of ‘dumb matter,” for
instance; but Plato has lingered too long in
braziers’ workshops to lapse into so stupid an
epithet. And if the persistent hold of sensible
things upon him thus reveals itself in trifles, it
is manifest no less in the way in which he can
_ tell a long story,—no one more effectively! and
again, in his graphic presentment of whole scenes
_ from actual life, like that with which The Re-
_ public opens. His Socrates, like other people,
1s curious to witness a new religious function :
_ how they will do it. As in modern times, it
_ would be a pleasant occasion also for meeting
_ the acquaintance one likes best—Huveodue0a πολλοῖς
127

PLATO AND PLATONISM

τῶν νέων αὐτόθ. ‘ We shall meet a number of @

our youth there: we shall have a dialogue:
there will be a torchlight procession in honour
of the goddess, an equestrian procession : a novel
feature !—What? Torches in their hands, passed
on as they race? Aye, and an illumination,
through the entire night. It will be worth
seeing |” —that old midnight hour, as Carlyle
says of another vivid scene, “shining yet on us,
ruddy-bright through the centuries.” Put along-
side of that, and, for life-like charm, side by side
with Murillo’s Beggar-boys (you catch them,
if you look at his canvas on the sudden, actually
moving their mouths, to laugh and speak and
munch their crusts, all at once) the scene in
the Lysis of the dice-players. There the boys
are! in full dress, to take part in a religious
ceremony. It is scarcely over; but they are
already busy with the knuckle-bones, some just
outside the door, others in a corner. Though
Plato never tells one without due motive,
yet he loves a story for its own sake, can
make one of fact or fancy at a moment’s notice,
or re-tell other people’s better: how those dear
skinny grasshoppers of Attica, for instance,
had once been human creatures, who, when
the Muses first came on earth, were so ab-
sorbed by their music that they forgot even
to eat and drink, till they died of it. And
then the story of Gyges in The Republic, and
the ring that can make its wearer invisible:
128

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

—it goes as easily, as the ring itself round the
finger.

Like all masters of literature, Plato has of

course varied excellences; but perhaps none
of them has won for him a larger number of
friendly readers than this impress of visible reality.
For him, truly (as he supposed the highest sort
οὗ knowledge must of necessity be) all knowledge
_was like knowing a person. The Dialogue itself,
being, as it is, the special creation of his literary
art, becomes in his hands, and by his masterly
conduct of it, like a single living person; so
comprehensive a sense does he bring to bear
upon it of the slowly-developing physiognomy
of the thing—its organic structure, its symmetry
and expression—combining all the various, dis-
parate subjects of The Republic, for example,
into a manageable whole, so entirely that, look-
ing back, one fancies this long dialogue of at
least three hundred pages might have occupied,
perhaps an afternoon.
_ And those who take part in it! If Plato
did not create the “Socrates” of his Dialogues,
he has created other characters hardly less life-
like. The young Charmides, the incarnation
of natural, as the aged Cephalus of acquired,
temperance ; his Sophoclean amenity as he sits
there pontifically at the altar, in the court of his
peaceful house; the large company, of varied
character and of every age, which moves in
those Dialogues, though still oftenest the young
aa. VI 129 K

PLATO AND PLATONISM

in all their youthful liveliness :—-who that knows :
them at all can doubt Plato’s hold on persons, ~
that of persons on him? Sometimes, even when — ὕ
they are not formally introduced into his work, ;
characters that had interested, impressed, or ἱ
touched. him, inform and eulidtir it, as if with Ὁ
their personal influence, showing through what
purports to be the wholly abstract analysis of
some wholly abstract moral situation. Thus, ᾿
the form of the dying Socrates himself is visible
I
{|

pathetically in the description of the suffering”
righteous man, actually put into his own mouth”
in the second book of The Republic ; as the |
winning brilliancy of the lost spirit of Alcibiades —
infuses those pages of the sixth, which discuss
the nature of one by birth and cide an |
aristocrat, amid the dangers to which it is ex-
posed in the Athens of that day—the qualities |
which must make him, if not the saviour, the —
destroyer, of a society which cannot remain if
unaffected by his showy presence. ἐόν
optim pessima! Yet even here, when Plato is
dealing with the inmost clements of personality, -
his eye is still on its object, on character as seen
in characteristics, through those details, which
make character a sensible fact, the changes of
colour in the face as of tone in the voice, the
gestures, the really physiognomic value, or the |
mere tricks, of gesture and glance and speech, —
‘What is visibly expressive in, or upon, persons ;
those flashes of temper which check yet sive |

130 |

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

renewed interest to the course of a conversation ;
the delicate touches of intercourse, which convey
to the very senses all the subtleties of the heart
or of the intelligence :—it is always more than
worth his while to make note of these.

We see, for instance, the sharp little pygmy

bit of a soul that catches sight of any little

thing so keenly, and makes a very proper lawyer.
We see, as well as hear, the “‘ rhapsodist,” whose

sensitive performance of his part is nothing less

than an “interpretation” of it, artist and critic
at once: the personal vanities of the various

speakers in his Dialogues, as though Plato had
observed, or overheard them, alone; and the
inevitable prominence of youth wherever it is

present at all, nothwithstanding the real sweet-

'ness of manner and modesty of soul he records
οὗ it so affectionately. It is this he loves best

to linger by; to feel himself in contact with a
condition of life, which translates all it is, so
immediately, into delightful colour, and move-
ment, and sound. The eighth and ninth books
of The Republic are a grave contribution, as you

_know, to abstract moral and political theory, a

generalisation of weighty changes of character
in men and states. But his observations on the
concrete traits of individuals, young or old, which
enliven us on the way; the difference in same-
ness of sons and fathers, for instance; the in-

fluence of servants on their masters; how the
minute ambiguities of rank, as a family becomes

[31

PLATO AND PLATONISM

impoverished, tell on manners, on temper ; all
the play of moral colour in the reflex of mere
circumstance on what men really are :—the
characterisation of all this has with Plato a
touch of the peculiar fineness of Thackeray, one
might say. Plato enjoys it for its own sake,
and would have been an excellent writer of
fiction.

There is plenty of humour in him also of
course, and something of irony—salt, to keep
the exceeding richness and sweetness of his dis-
course from cloying the palate. The affectations

of sophists, or professors, their staginess or their —
inelegance, the harsh laugh, the swaggering ©
ways, of Thrasymachus, whose determination to —
make the general company share in a private ©
conversation, is significant of his whole char-
acter, he notes with a finely-pointed pencil, with ©
something of the fineness of malice,—malin, as —
the French say. Once Thrasymachus had been ~
actually seen to blush. It is with a very differ- —
ent sort of fineness Plato notes the blushes of the —
young ; of Hippocrates, for instance, in the Prota- _
goras. The great Sophist was said to be in ~
Athens, at the house of Callicles, and the diligent —
young scholar is up betimes, eager to hear him. |
He rouses Socrates before daylight. As they —

linger in the court, the lad speaks of his own

intellectual aspirations ; blushes at his confidence, —
It was just then that the morning sun blushed —
with his first beam, as if to reveal the lad’s

132

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

blushing face.—Ka) ὃς εἶπεν ἐρυθριάσας, ἤδη γὰρ
ὑπέφαινέ τι ἡμέρας ὥστε καταφανῆ αὐτὸν γενέσθα. He
who noted that so precisely had, surely, the
delicacy of the artist, a fastidious eye for the

subtleties of colour as soul made visibly ex-

pressive. ‘‘ Poor creature as I am,” says the
Platonic Socrates, in the Lysis, concerning an-

| other youthful blush, “ Poor creature as I am, I
_ have one talent : I can recognise, at first sight, the

lover and the beloved.”
So it is with the audible world also. The

| exquisite monotony of the voice of the great
_ sophist, for example, “once set in motion, goes
_ ringing on like a brazen pot, which if you strike
_ it continues to sound till some one lays his hand

upon it.” And if the delicacy of eye and ear, so

also the keenness and constancy of his observa-
tion, are manifest in those elaborately wrought
images for which the careful reader lies in wait :
the mutiny of the sailors in the ship—ship of

the state, or of one’s own soul: the echoes and

_beams and shadows of that half-illuminated
_ cavern, the human mind: the caged birds in the
_ Theetetus, which are like the flighty, half-
contained notions of an imperfectly educated
understanding. Rea/ notions are to be ingrained
_ by persistent thoroughness of the “dialectic”
_ method, as if by conscientious dyers. He makes
us stay to watch such dyers busy with their
_ purple stuff, as he had done; adding as it were
ethic colour to what he sees with the eye, and

133

PLATO AND PLATONISM

painting while he goes, as if on the margin of
his high philosophical discourse, himself scarcely
aware ; as the monkish scribe set bird or flower,
with so much truth of earth, in the blank spaces
of his heavenly meditation.

Now Plato is one for whom the visible world
thus “‘ really exists”’ because he is by nature and
before all things, from first to last, unalterably a
lover. In that, precisely, lies the secret of the

susceptible and diligent eye, the so sensitive ear. ᾿
The central interest of his own youth—of his ©
profoundly impressible youth—as happens always ~

with natures of real capacity, gives law and
pattern to all that succeeds it. Ta ἐρωτικά, as he

says, the experience, the discipline, of love,

had been that for Plato; and, as love must of |

necessity deal above all with visible persons, this

discipline involved an exquisite culture of the
senses. It is “‘as lovers use,” that he is ever on
the watch for those dainty messages, those finer —
intimations, to eye and ear. If in the later

development of his philosophy the highest sort —

of knowledge comes to seem like the knowledge
of a person, the relation of the reason to truth
like the commerce of one person with another,
the peculiarities of personal relationship thus
moulding his conception of the properly in-
visible world of ideas, this is partly because, for
a lover, the entire visible world, its hues and
outline, its attractiveness, its power and bloom,
must have associated themselves pre-eminently
134

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

with the power and bloom of visible living
persons. With these, as they made themselves
known by word and glance and touch, through
the medium of the senses, lay the forces, which,
in that inexplicable tyranny of one person over
| another, shaped the soul.
Just there, then, is the secret of Plato’s inti-
mate concern with, his power over, the sensible
_ world, the apprehensions of the sensuous faculty :
he is a lover, a great lover, somewhat after the -
| manner of Dante. For him, as for Dante, in the
_ impassioned glow of his conceptions, the material
and the spiritual are blent and fused together.
_ While, in that fire and heat, what is spiritual
attains the definite visibility of a crystal, what is
| material, on the other hand, will lose its earthi-
ness and impurity. It is of the amorous temper,
| therefore, you must think in connexion with
_ Plato’s youth—of this, amid all the strength of
_ the genius in which it is so large a constituent,
_ —indulging, developing, refining, the sensuous
capacities, the powers of eye and ear, of the fancy
_ also which can re-fashion, of the speech which
_ can best respond to and reproduce, their liveliest
| presentments. That is why when Plato speaks
of visible things it is as if you saw them. He
who in the Sympostum describes so vividly the
pathway, the ladder, of love, its joyful ascent
towards a more perfect beauty than we have
ever yet actually seen, by way of a parallel to
_ the gradual elevation of mind towards perfect
135

PLATO AND PLATONISM

knowledge, knew all that, we may be sure—
τὰ épwtixd—all the ways of lovers, in the literal
sense. He speaks of them retrospectively indeed,
but knows well what he is talking about. Plato
himself had not been always a mere Platonic
lover ; was rather, naturally, as he makes Socrates
say of himself, ἥττων τῶν xarav—subject to the
influence of fair persons. A certain penitential
colour amid that glow of fancy and expression,
hints that the final harmony of his nature had
been but gradually beaten out, and invests the
temperance, actually so conspicuous in his own
nature, with the charms of a patiently elaborated
effect of art.

For we must remind ourselves just here, that,
quite naturally also, instinctively, and apart from
the austere influences which claimed and kept
his allegiance later, Plato, with a kind of unim-

passioned passion, was a lover in particular of

temperance ; of temperance too, as it may be seen,
as a visible thing—seen in Charmides, say! in
that subdued and grey-eyed loveliness, “clad in
sober grey”; or in those youthful athletes
which, in ancient marble, reproduce him and
the like of him with sound, firm outlines, such
as temperance secures. Still, that some more
luxurious sense of physical beauty had at one
time greatly disturbed him, divided him against
himself, we may judge from his own words in a
famous passage of the Phedrus concerning the
management, the so difficult management, of
36

Se

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

those winged steeds of the body, which is the
chariot of the soul.

Puzzled, in some degree, Plato seems to
remain, not merely in regard to the higher love

and the lower, Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite

_Pandemus, as he distinguishes them in the

Symposium; nor merely with the difficulty of

_arbitrating between some inward beauty, and
_ that which is outward; with the odd mixture
_ everywhere, save in its still unapprehended but
_ eternal essence, of the beautiful with what is
_ otherwise ; but he is yet more harassed by the
_ experience (it is in this shape that the world-old
| puzzle of the existence of evil comes to him)
_ that even to the truest eyesight, to the best trained
faculty of soul, the beautiful would never come
_ to seem strictly concentric with the good. That

seems to have taxed his understanding as gravely

as it had tried his will, and he was glad when in
_the mere natural course of years he was become
_ at all events less ardent a lover. ’*Tis he isthe
_authority for what Sophocles had said on the
happy decay of the passions as age advanced :
_ it was “like being set free from service to a band
of madmen.” His own distinguishing note is

tranquil afterthought upon this conflict, with a

_kind of envy of the almost disembodied old age

of Cephalus, who quotes that saying of Sophocles
amid his placid sacrificial doings. Connect with

this quiet scene, and contrast with the luxuriant
power of the Phedrus and the Symposium, what,

137

PLATO AND PLATONISM

for a certain touch of later mysticism in it, we
might call Plato’s evening prayer, in the ninth
book of The Republic.—

When any one, being healthfully and temperately disposed
towards himself, turns to sleep, having stirred the reasonable
part of him with a feast of fair thoughts and high problems,
being come to full consciousness, himself with himself; and
has, on the other hand, committed the element of desire
neither to appetite, nor to surfeiting, to the end that this may
slumber well, and, by its pain or pleasure, cause no trouble to

that part which is best in him, but may suffer it, alone by © |

itself, in its pure essence, to behold and aspire towards some
object, and apprehend what it knows not—some event, of the
past, it may be, or something that now is, or will be hereafter ;
and in like manner has soothed hostile impulse, so that, falling
to no angry thoughts against any, he goes not to rest with a
troubled spirit, but with those two parts at peace within, and
with that third part, wherein reason is engendered, on the move:

—you know, I think, that in sleep of this sort he lays special — |

hold on truth, and then least of all is there lawlessness in the
visions of his dreams. Republic, 571.

For Plato, being then about twenty-eight

years old, had listened to the “ Apology” of |

Socrates; had heard from them all that others

had heard or seen of his last hours; himself
perhaps actually witnessed those last hours.

“Justice itself "—the “absolute” Justice —had

then become almost a visible object, and had
greatly solemnised him. The rich young man,

rich also in intellectual gifts, who might have

become (we see this in the adroit management of —
his written work) the most brilliant and effective —
of Sophists ; who might have developed dialogues —

into plays, tragedy, perhaps comedy, as he cared ;
138

\
|

|
Ϊ

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

whose sensuous or graphic capacity might have
made him the poet of an Odyssey, a Sappho, or a
Catullus, or, say! just such a poet as, just because
he was so attractive, would have been disfran-
chised in the Perfect City; was become the
creature of an immense seriousness, of a fully
adult sense, unusual in Greek perhaps even more
than in Roman writers, “of the weightiness of
the matters concerning which he has to discourse,
and of the frailty of man.” He inherits, alien
as they might be to certain powerful influences
in his own temper, alike the sympathies and the
antipathies of that strange, delightful teacher,
who had given him (most precious of gifts !) an
inexhaustible interest in himself. It is in this
way he inherits a preference for those trying
_ severities of thought which are characteristic of
the Eleatic school; an antagonism to the suc-
cessful Sophists of the day, in whom the old
_ sceptical “‘ philosophy of motion” seemed to be
renewed as a theory of morals ; and henceforth,
in short, this master of visible things, this so
_ ardent lover, will be a lover of the invisible, with
_— Yes! there it is constantly, in the Platonic dia-
_logues, not to be explained away—with a certain
asceticism, amid all the varied opulence, of sense,
of speech and fancy, natural to Plato’s genius.
| The lover, who is become a lover of the
invisible, but still a lover, and therefore, literally,
_aseer, of it, carrying an elaborate cultivation of
the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural
139

PLATO AND PLATONISM

force and acquired fineness—gifts akin properly to
τὰ ἐρωτικά, aS he says, to the discipline of sensuous
love—into the world of intellectual abstractions ;
seeing and hearing there too, associating for
ever all the imagery of things seen with the
conditions of what primarily exists only for the
mind, filling that “‘ hollow land” with delightful
colour and form, as if now at last the mind were
veritably dealing with living people there, living _
people who play upon us through the affinities,
the repulsion and attraction, of persons towards _
one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of
actual human friendship or love :—There, is the
formula of Plato’s genius, the essential condition
of the specially Platonic temper, of Platonism.
And his style, because it really is Plato’s style, —
conforms to, and in its turn promotes in others, |
that mental situation. He breaks as it were
visible colour into the very texture of his work :
his vocabulary, the very stuff he manipulates,
has its delightful esthetic qualities ; almost every
word, one might say, its figurative value. And
yet no one perhaps has with equal power literally —
sounded the unseen depths of thought, and, —
with what may be truly called “substantial” |
word and phrase, given locality there to the ©
mere adumbrations, the dim hints and surmise, ©
of the speculative mind. For him, all gifts of
sense and intelligence converge in one supreme
faculty of theoretic vision, θεωρία, the imaginative
reason.
140

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

To trace that thread of physical colour, en-
twined throughout, and multiplied sometimes
into large tapestried figures, is the business, the
| enjoyment, of the student of the Dialogues, as he
reads them. For this or that special literary
_ quality indeed we may go safely by preference to
this or that particular Dialogue ; to the Gorgias,
_ for instance, for the readiest Attic wit, and a
manly practical sense in the handling of philo-
_ sophy ; to the Charmides, for something like the
_ effect of sculpture in modelling a person ; to the
_ Timezus, for certain brilliant chromatic effects.
| Yet who that reads the Theetetus, or the Phedrus,
or the seventh book of The Republic, can doubt
_ Plato’s gift in precisely the opposite direction ;
that gift of sounding by words the depths of
_ thought, a plastic power literally, moulding to
_ term and phrase what might have seemed in its
very nature too impalpable and abstruse to lend
itself, in any case, to language? He gives names
to the invisible acts, processes, creations, of
_ abstract mind, as masterly, as efficiently, as Adam
_ himself to the visible living creations of old. As
Plato speaks of them, we might say, those
abstractions too become visible living creatures.
_ We read the speculative poetry of Wordsworth,
or Tennyson ; and we may observe that a great
_ metaphysical force has come into language which
is by no means purely technical or scholastic ;
what a help such language is to the understanding,
toa real hold over the things, the thoughts, the
[41

PLATO AND PLATONISM

mental processes, those words denote ; a vocabu-
lary to which thought freely commits itself,
trained, stimulated, raised, thereby, towards a
high level of abstract conception, surely to the
increase of our general intellectual powers. ‘That,
of course, is largely due to Plato’s successor, to
Aristotle’s life-long labour of analysis and defini-
tion, and to his successors the Schoolmen, with
their systematic culture of a precise instrument

for the registration, by the analytic intellect, οὐ
its own subtlest movements. But then, Aristotle, —

himself the first of the Schoolmen, had succeeded
Plato, and did but formulate, as a terminology
“‘of art,” as technical language, what for Plato
is still vernacular, original, personal, the product
in him of an instinctive imaginative power—a
sort of visual power, but causing others also to
see what is matter of original intuition for him.

From first to last our faculty of thinking is
limited by our command of speech. Now it is
straight from Plato’s lips, as if in natural con-

versation, that the language came, in which

the mind has ever since been discoursing with
itself concerning itself, in that inward dialogue,
which is the ‘active principle” of the dialectic
method as an instrument for the attainment of
truth. For, the essential, or dynamic, dialogue,

is ever that dialogue of the mind with itself, —

which any converse with Socrates or Plato does
but promote. The very words of Plato, then,
142

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

challenge us straightway to larger and finer appre-
hension of the processess of our own minds; are
themselves a discovery in the sphere of mind.
It was he made us freemen of those solitary
places, so trying yet so attractive : so remote and
high, they seem, yet are naturally so close to us:
he peopled them with intelligible forms. Nay
more! By his peculiar gift of verbal articulation
he divined the mere hollow spaces which a
knowledge, then merely potential, and an ex-
perience still to come, would one day occupy.
And so, those who cannot admit his actual
speculative results, precisely Azs report on the
invisible theoretic world, have been to the point
sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer
effectiveness of abstract language, he gave an
illusive air of reality or substance to the mere
nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis—of a mind
trying to feed itself on its own emptiness.

Just there—in the situation of one, shaped,
_ by combining nature and cian metasien! into a
seer who has a sort of sensuous love of the un-
seen—is the paradox of Plato’s genius, and
therefore, always, of Platonism, of the Platonic
temper. His aptitude for things visible, with
the gift of words, empowers him to express, as
if for the eyes, what except to the eye of the
mind is strictly invisible, what an acquired
asceticism induces him to rank above, and some-
times, in terms of harshest dualism, oppose to,
the sensible world. Plato is to be interpreted
143

PLATO AND PLATONISM

not merely by his antecedents, by the influence
upon him of those who preceded him, but by
his successors, by the temper, the intellectual
alliances, of those who directly or indirectly
have been sympathetic with him. Now it is
noticeable that, at first sight somewhat incon-
gruously, a certain number of Manicheans have
always been of his company; people who held
that matter was evil. Pointing significantly to
an unmistakable vein of Manichean, or Puritan
sentiment actually there in the Platonic Dia-
logues, these rude companions or successors of
his, carry us back to his great predecessor, to
Socrates, whose personal influence had so strongly
enforced on Plato the severities, moral and in-
tellectual, alike of Parmenides and of the Pytha-
goreans. ‘The cold breath of a harshly abstract,
a too incorporeal philosophy, had blown, like
an east wind, on that last depressing day in
the prison-cell of Socrates; and the venerable
commonplaces then put forth, in which an over-
strained pagan sensuality seems to be reacting,
to be taking vengeance, on itself, turned now
sick and suicidal, will lose none of their weight |
with Plato:—That “all who rightly touch |
philosophy, study nothing else than to die, and ©
to be dead,”—that “the soul reasons best, when,
as much as possible, it comes to be alone with
itself, bidding good-bye to the body, and, to the |
utmost of its power, rejecting communion with |
it, with the very touch of it, aiming at what zs.”
144

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

It was, in short, as if for the soul to have come into
a human body at all, had been the seed of disease
in it, the beginning of its own proper death.

As for any adornments or provision for this
body, the master had declared that a true philo-
sopher as such would make as little of them
as possible. To those young hearers, the words
of Socrates may well have seemed to anticipate,

not the visible world he had then delineated in

glowing colour as if for the bodily eye, but only

the chilling influence of the hemlock ; and it
_ was because Plato was only half convinced of the
_Manichean or Puritan element in his master’s

doctrine, or rather was in contact with it on one
side only of his complex and genial nature, that
Platonism became possible, as a temper for
which, in strictness, the opposition of matter to
spirit has no ultimate or real existence. Not to

be “pure” from the body, but to identify it, in

its utmost fairness, with the fair soul, by a

gymnastic “ fused in music.”’ became, from first
3 3

to last, the aim of education as he conceived it.

That the body is but “a hindrance to the attain-

ment of philosophy, if one takes it along with
one as a companion in one’s search” (a notion
which Christianity, at least in its later though
wholly legitimate developments, will correct)

can hardly have been the last thought of Plato
himself on quitting it. He opens his door
indeed to those austere monitors. They correct
the sensuous richness of his genius, but could

Ρ. VI 145 L

PLATO AND PLATONISM ᾿

not suppress it. The sensuous lover becomes ἃ
lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his —
earlier pattern, carrying into the world of intel- _
lectual vision, of θεωρία, all the associations of the ©
actual world of sight. Some of its invisible ©
realities he can all but see with the bodily eye: the _
absolute Temperance, in the person of the youth- —
ful Charmides ; the absolute Righteousness, in ©
the person of the dying Socrates. Yes, truly! —
all true knowledge will be like the know- 4
ledge of a person, of living persons, and —
truth, for Plato, in spite of his Socratic asceti- Ϊ
cism, to the last, something to /ook at. The ©
eyes which had noted physical things, so —
finely, vividly, continuously, would be still δὲ
work ; and, Plato thus qualifying the Manichean ~
or Puritan element in Socrates by his own
capacity for the world of sense, Platonism has —
contributed largely, has been an immense en- —
couragement towards, the redemption of matter, |
of the world of sense, by art, by all nigh
education, by the creeds and worship of the
Christian Church—towards the vindication off ἢ
the dignity of the body.

It was doubtless because Plato was an excellent
scholar that he did not begin to teach others till ©
he was more than forty years old—one of the |
great scholars of the world, with Virgil and ©
Milton : by which is implied that, possessed of |

the inborn genius, of those natural powers, !
146 |

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

which sometimes bring with them a certain
defiance of rule, of the intellectual habits of
others, he acquires, by way of habit and rule,
all that can be taught and learned ; and what
is thus derived from others by docility and
discipline, what is rangé, comes to have in him,
and in his work, an equivalent weight with
what is unique, impulsive, underivable. Raphael
—Raphael, as you see him in the Blenheim
Madonna, is a supreme example of such scholar-
ship in the sphere of art. Born of a romantically
ancient family, understood to be the descendant
of Solon himself, Plato had been in early youth
‘a writer of verse. That he turned to a more
vigorous, though pedestrian mode of writing, was
perhaps an effect of his corrective intercourse with
Socrates, through some of the most important
years of his life.—from twenty to twenty-eight.
He belonged to what was just then the
discontented class, and might well have taken
tefuge from active political life in political ideals,
or in a kind of self-imposed exile. A traveller,
adventurous for that age, he certainly became.
‘After the Lehr-jahre, the Wander-jahre !—all
round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as
Sicily. Think of what all that must have meant
just then, for eyes which could see. If those
journeys had begun in angry flight from home,
it was for purposes of self-improvement they
were continued: the delightful fruit of them
is evident in what he writes; and finding him
147

PLATO AND PLATONISM

in friendly intercourse with Dionysius the elder, _
with Dio, and Dionysius the younger, at the
polished court of Syracuse, we may understand —
that they were a search also for “ the philosophic |
king,” perhaps for the opportune moment οὗ
realising “‘the ideal state.” In that case, his —
quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that
he was disappointed. For the future he sought no
more to pass beyond the charmed theoretic circle, _
“‘speaking wisdom,” as was said of Pythagoras,
only ‘“‘ among the perfect.” Hereturns finally to
Athens ; and there, in the quiet precincts of the -
Académus, which has left a somewhat dubious —
name to places where people come to be taught |
or to teach, founds, not a state, nor even a.
brotherhood, but only the first college, with
something of a common life, of communism on >
that small scale, with Aristotle for one of its —
scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library
with the authentic text of his Dia/ogues upon the —
shelves: we may just discern the sort of place
through the scantiest notices. His reign was
after all to be in his writings. Plato himself does —
nothing in them to retard the effacement which ©
mere time brings to persons and their abodes ;
and there had been that, moreover, in his own
temper, which promotes self-effacement. Yet as -
he left it, the place remained for centuries, —
according to his will, to its original use. What
he taught through the remaining forty years of |
his life, the method of that teaching, whether it

148 |

THE GENIUS OF PLATO

was less or more esoteric than the teaching of

the extant Dia/ogues, is but matter of surmise.
Writers, who in their day might still have said
much we should have liked to hear, give us
little but old, quasi-supernatural stories, told as
if they had been new ones, about him. The
year of his birth fell, according to some, in the
very year of the death of Pericles (a significant
date !) but is not precisely ascertainable: nor is
the year of his death, nor its manner. Scribens
est mortuus, says Cicero :—after the manner of a
true scholar, “he died pen in hand.”

149

Vil

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

I. The Theory of Ideas

PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of —
theories, but a tendency, a group of tendencies—
a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, abou |
certain things in a particular way, discernible ir

Plato’s dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, :
the marked peculiarities, of himself and his
own mental complexion. Those tendencies |
combine and find their complete expression 1
what Plato’s commentators, rather than Plato,
have called the “theory of ideas,” itself indesa '
not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of
regarding and speaking of general terms, such as
Useful or Fust ; of abstract notions, like Ἐμοί ἢ
of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City;
of all those terms or notions, in short, whic
represent under general forms the particular pre-
sentations of our individual experience ; or, to.
use Plato’s own frequent expression, borrowec

150

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

from his old Eleatic teachers, which reduce “ the
Many to the One.”

What the nature of such representative terms
and notions, genus and species, class-word, and
abstract idea or ideal, may be; what their rela-
tionship to the individual, the unit, the par-
ticulars which they include ; is, as we know, one
of the constant problems of logic. Realism,
which supposes the abstraction, Amal for
instance, or The “fust, to be not a mere name,
nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere
subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but
to be ves, a thing in itself, independent of the
particular instances which come into and pass out
of it, as also of the particular mind which enter-
tains it :—that is one of the fixed and formal
answers to this question ; and Plato is the father
of all realists. Realism, as such, in the sense just
indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or tran-
scendental theory ; but rises, again and again, at
least in a particular class of minds, quite naturally,
as the answer to a natural question. ‘Taking our
own stand as to this matter somewhere between
the realist and the conceptualist :—See! we
might say, there is a general consciousness, a
permanent common sense, independent indeed of
each one of us, but with which we are, each one
of us, in communication. It is in that, those
common or general ideas really reside. And we
might add just here (giving his due to the
nominalist also) that those abstract or common

IS!

PLATO AND PLATONISM

notions come to the individual mind through
language, through common or general names,
Animal, “fustice, Equality, into which one’s in-
dividual experience, little by little, drop by drop,
conveys their full meaning or content ; and, by the
instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus
locating the particular in the general, mediating
between general and particular, between our in-
dividual experience and the common experience of
our kind, we come to understand each other, and
to assist each other’s thoughts, as in a common
mental atmosphere, an “intellectual world,” as
Plato calls it, a true νοητὸς τόπος. So much for the
modern view ; for what common sense might now
suggest as to the nature of logical “ universals.”

Plato’s realism however—what is called
“The Theory of Ideas” —his way of regarding
abstract term and general notion, what Plato has
to say about “the Many and the One,” is often
very difficult; though of various degrees of
difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds.
From the simple and easily intelligible sort
of realism attributed by Aristotle to Socrates,
seeking in “universal definitions,’ or ideas, only
a serviceable instrument for the distinguishing of
what is essential from what is unessential in the
actual things about him, Plato passes by successive
stages, which we should try to keep distinct as
we read him, to what may be rightly called
a ‘transcendental,’ what to many minds has

152

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of
thought, regarding those abstractions, which
indeed seem to become for him not merely
substantial things-in-themselves, but little short
of living persons, to be known as persons are
made known to each other, by a system of
affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, ὅμοιον ὁμοίῳ, like
to like—these persons constituting together that
common, eternal, intellectual world, a sort of
divine family or hierarchy, with which _ the
mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable,
or really knows, is in communion or corre-
spondence. And here certainly is a theory, a
tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about
which the difficulties are many.

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

Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is,
_ that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely,
_ embodied in one general term) which—timd Adéywv—under the
_ influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language,
_ become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to every-
| thing of which existence is asserted from time to time. ‘This
| law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun ; but
| something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and ineradicable
| affection of our reason itself in us. And whenever a young
man gets his first taste of this he is delighted as having found
_ the priceless pearl of philosophy ; he becomes an enthusiast in
| his delight ; and eagerly sets in motion—xivei—every definition

153

PLATO AND PLATONISM

—éyos—every conception or mental definition (it looked so
fixed and firm till then!) at one time winding things round
each other and welding them into one (that is, he drops all
particularities out of view, and thinks only of the one common
form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into
parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the
particular, till the one common term seems _ inapplicable)
puzzling first, and most of all, himself ; and then any one who
comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may
be ; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who
will listen ; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of
men ; for he would hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find
an interpreter. Philebus, 15.

The Platonic doctrine of “the Many and the

One ”—the problem with which we are brought
face to face in this choice specimen of the humour
as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato—
is not precisely the question with which the
speculative young man of our own day is likely
to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his
neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or

even of a Chinese ; though the questions we are ©

apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment,
or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zezt-
geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to
seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the
theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes
the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters
of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the

all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes

nothing less than the standard of what is un-
interesting, as such, to its successor. Still in the ~
discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much —

154

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

what he thinks as the person who is thinking,
that after all really tells. Plato and Platonism
we shall never understand unless we are patient
with him in what he has to tell us about “the
Many and the One.”

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

155

PLATO AND PLATONISM

is not a proper name left! We may contrast
generally the mental world we actually live in,
where classification, the reduction of all things
to common types, has come so far, and where the
particular, to a great extent, is known only as the
member of a class, with that other world, on the
other side of the generalising movement to which
Plato and his master so largely contributed—a
world we might describe as being under Homeric
conditions, such as we picture to ourselves with
regret, for which experience was intuition, and
life a continuous surprise, and every object unique,
where all knowledge was still of the concrete and
the particular, face to face delightfully.

To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after
all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time,
as we may think at first sight, the systematic,
logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and
straightway all ran to seed; to genus and species
and differentia, into formal classes, under general
notions, and with—yes! with written labels
fluttering on the stalks, instead of blossoms—a
botanic or “‘ physic” garden, as they used to say,
instead of our flower-garden and orchard. And
yet (it must be confessed on the other hand)
what we actually see, see and hear, 1s more
interesting than ever; the nineteenth century as
compared with the first, with Plato’s days or
Homer’s; the faces, the persons behind those
masks which yet express so much, the flowers, or
whatever it may happen to be they carry or

156

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

touch. The concrete, and that even as a visible
thing, has gained immeasurably in richness and
compass, in fineness, and interest towards us, by
the process, of which those acts of generalisation,
of reduction to class and generic type, have
certainly been a part. And holding still to the
concrete, the particular, to the visible or sensuous,
if you will, last as first, thinking of that as
essentially the one vital and lively thing, really
worth our while in a short life, we may recognise
sincerely what generalisation and abstraction have
done or may do, are defensible as doing, just for
that—for the particular gem or flower—what its
proper service is to a mind in search, precisely,
of a concrete and intuitive knowledge such as
that.

Think, for a moment, of the difference, as
regards mental attitude, between the naturalist
who deals with things through ideas, and the
layman (so to call him) in picking up a shell on
the sea-shore ; what it is that the subsumption
of the individual into the species, its subsequent
alliance to and co-ordination with other species,
really does for the furnishing of the mind of
the former. The layman, though we need not
suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain im-
pressions, is in fact still but a child; and the
shell, its colours and convolution, no more than
a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him.
Let him become a schoolboy about it, so to
speak, The toy he puts aside; his mind is

157

PLATO AND PLATONISM

drilled perforce, to learn about it ; and thereby is
exercised, he may think, with everything except
just the thing itself, as he cares for it; with
other shells, with some general laws of life, and
for a while it might seem that, turning away his
eyes from the “ vanity ” of the particular, he has
been made to sacrifice the concrete, the real and
living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract
product of the mind. But when he comes out
of school, and on the sea-shore again finds a
fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it,
he may see what the service of that converse
with the general has really been towards the
concrete, towards what he sees—in regard to the
particular thing he actually sees. By its juxta-
position and co-ordination with what is ever
more and more not 7, by the contrast of its very
imperfection, at this point or that, with its
own proper and perfect type, this concrete and
particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by
the whole colour and expression of the whole
circumjacent world, concentrated upon, or as it
were at focus in, it. By a kind of short-hand
now, and as if in a single moment of vision, all
that, which only a long experience, moving
atiently from part to part, could exhaust, its
manifold alliance with the entire world of
nature, is legible upon it, as it lies there in one’s
hand.
So it is with the shell, the gem, with a glance
of the eye; so it may be with the moral act, ©
158

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

with a condition of the mind, or a feeling. You

_may draw, by use of this coinage (it is Hobbes’s
figure) this coinage of representative words and

thoughts, at your pleasure, upon the accumula-

_ tive capital of the whole experience of humanity.
_ Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato him-

self at mistaken moments, may have to say

about it, is a method, not of obliterating the
concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with
the joint perspective, the significance, the ex-

_pressiveness, of all other things beside. What
_broad-cast light he enjoys !—that scholar, con-
fronted with the sea-shell, for instance, or with
some enigma of heredity in himself or another,

with some condition of a particular soul, in

circumstances which may never precisely so

occur again ; in the contemplation of that single
phenomenon, or object, or situation. He not
only sees, but understands (thereby only seeing

the more) and will, therefore, also remember.

The significance of the particular object he will

retain, by use of his intellectual apparatus of
notion and general law, as, to use Plato’s own

figure, fluid matter may be retained in vessels,
not indeed of unbaked clay, but of alabaster or
bronze. So much by way of apology for
general ideas—abstruse, or intangible, or dry and
seedy and wooden, as we may sometimes think
them.

“Two things,” says Aristotle, “ might rightly
be attributed to Socrates: inductive reasoning,

159

PLATO AND PLATONISM

and universal definitions.” Now when Aristotle ©
says this of Socrates, he is recording the institu-—
tion of a method, which might be applied in the —
way just indicated, to natural objects, to such ἃ
substance as carbon, or to such natural processes ©
as heat or motion ; but which, by Socrates him- ©
self, as by Plato after him, was applied almost —
exclusively to moral phenomena, to the general- ©
isation of esthetic, political, ethical ideas, of ©
the laws of operation (for the essence of every ©
true conception, or definition, or idea, is a law of ©
operation) of the feelings and the will. To get —
a notion, a definition, or idea, of motion, for |
example, which shall not exclude the subtler —
forms of it, heat for instance—to get a notion of ©
i
;
.

carbon, which shall include not common charcoal

only, but the diamond, a thing superficially so
unlike it, and which shall also exclude, perhaps, —
some other substance, superficially almost indis- —
tinguishable from it: such is the business of |
ΓΝ science, in obedience to rules, outlined ,

by Bacon in the first book of the Novum
Organum, for securing those acts of “inclusion”
and “exclusion,” ic/usiones, exclusiones, natura,
debite, as he says, “ which Hie nature of things
requires,” if our thoughts are not to misrepresent
them.

It was a parallel process, a process of in-

clusion, that one’s resultant idea should be

adequate, of rejection or exclusion, that this idea

should be not redundant, which Socrates applied —
160

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

to practice ; exercising, as we see in the Platonic
Dialogues, the two opposed functions of συναγωγή
and διαίρεσις, for the formation of just ideas of
Temperance, Wisdom, Bravery, Justice itself—a
classification of the phenomena of the entire
world of feeling and action. Ideas, if they fulfil
their proper purpose, represent to the mind such
phenomena, for its convenience, but may easily
also misrepresent them. In the transition from
the particulars to the general, and again in the
transition from the general idea, the mental
word, to the spoken or written word, to what
we call the definition, a door lies open, both for
the adulteration and the diminution of the
proper content, of our conception, our definition.
The first growth of the Platonic “ideas,” as we
see it in Socrates, according to the report of
Aristotle, provided against this twofold mis-
representation. Its aim is to secure, in the
terms of our discourse with others and with
ourselves, precise equivalence to what the
denote. It was a“ mission” to go about Athens
and challenge people to guard the inlets of error,
in the passage from facts to their thoughts about
them, in the passage from thoughts to words.
It was an intellectual gymnastic, to test, more
exactly than they were in the habit of doing,
the equivalence of words they.used so constantly
as ‘fust, Brave, Beautiful, to the thoughts they
had; of those thoughts to the facts of ex-
perience, which it was the business of those
P. VI 161 M

PLATO AND PLATONISM

thoughts precisely to represent; to clear the
mental air; to arrange the littered work-
chamber of the mind.

In many of Plato’s Dialogues we see no more
than the ordered reflex of this process, informal —
as it was in the actual practice of Socrates. Out —
of the accidents of a conversation, as from the ©
confused currents of life and action, the typical
forms of the vices and virtues emerge in definite —
outline. The first contention of The Republic,
for instance, is to establish in regard to the
nature of Justice, terms as exactly conterminous —
with thoughts, thoughts as exactly conterminous _
with moral facts, as the notion of carbon is for
the naturalist, when it has come to include both —
charcoal and the diamond, on the basis of the
essential law of their operation as experience
reveals it. Show us, not merely accidental
truths about it; but, by the doing of what (Τί
ποιοῦσα) In the very soul of its possessor, itself by
itself, Justice is a good, and Injustice a bad thing,
That illustrates exactly what is meant by “an
idea,” the force of “knowledge through ideas,”
in the particular instance of Justice. It will
include perhaps, on the one hand, forms of
Justice so remote from the Justice of our every-
day experience as to seem inversions of it; it
will clearly exclude, on the other hand, acts and’
thoughts, not it, yet, phenomenally, so like it, as)
to deceive the very gods; and its area will be
expanded sufficiently to include, not the indi-

162 |

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

vidual only, but the state. And you, the philo-
sophic student, were to do that, not for one
virtue only, but for Piety, and Beauty, and the
State itself, and Knowledge, and Opinion, and
the Good. Nay, you might go on and do the
same thing for the physical, when you came to
the end of the moral, world, were life long
enough, and if you had the humour for it :—for
Motion, Number, Colour, Sound. That, then,
was the first growth of the Platonic ideas, as
derived immediately from Socrates, whose formal
contribution to philosophy had been “ universal
definitions,” developed “inductively,” by the
twofold method of “ inclusion ” and “ exclusion.”
_ Aristotle adds, however, that Socrates had
stopped at the point here indicated: he had not
gone on, like some others, to make those universal
notions or definitions ‘separable ”—separable,
that is to say, from the particular and concrete
instances, from which he had gathered them.
Separable : χωριστός (famous word !) that is pre-
tisely what general notions become in what is
specially called “the Platonic Theory of Ideas.”
The “Ideas” of Plato are, in truth, neither more
ior less than those universal icGhitions: those
iniversal conceptions, as they look, as they could
10t but look, amid the peculiar lights and
hadows, in the singularly constituted atmosphere,
inder the strange laws of refraction, and in the
roper perspective, of Plato’s house of thought.
y its peculiarities, subsequent thought—philo-
163

PLATO AND PLATONISM

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

The peculiar development of the Socratic
realism by Plato can then only be understoot
164

ἑ
| THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

.

by a consideration of the peculiarities of Plato’s
genius ; how it reacted upon those abstractions ;
what they came to seem in its peculiar atmo-
sphere. The Platonic doctrine of “Ideas,” as
was said, is not so much a doctrine, as a way of
speaking or feeling about certain elements of the
mind; and this temper, this peculiar way of
feeling, of speaking, which for most of us will
have many difficulties, is not uniformly notice-
ible in Plato’s Dialogues, but is to be found
more especially in the Phado, the Symposium,
> in certain books of The Republic, above all
nthe Phedrus. Here is a famous passage from
| :--

There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of
ythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and _ space)
here, at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the
oul. For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were
1pon the highest point, passed out and stood (as you might
itand upon the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back
ἢ the sky. And as they stand there, the revolution of the
pheres carries them round; and they behold the things that
ire beyond the sky. ‘That supercelestial place none of our
yoets on earth has ever yet sung of, nor will ever sing,
worthily. And thus it is: for 1 must make bold to state the
ruth, at any rate, especially as it is about truth, that I am
jpeaking. For the colourless, and formless, and impalpable
3eing, being in very truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is
nsible by reason alone as one’s guide. Centered about that,
he generation, or seed, yévos—the people, of true knowledge
nhabits this place. As, then, the intelligence of God, which
8 nourished by pure or unmixed reason and knowlege (dxn-
νάτῳ, unmixed with sense) so, the intelligence of every other
joul also, which is about to receive that which properly be-
‘ongs to it, beholding, after long interval, that which is, ves
| 165

~

PLATO AND PLATONISM

it (that’s the point!) and by the vision of truth is fed; and
fares well; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings it
round again to the same place. And in that journey round it
looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon ‘Temperance, upon
Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of
becoming (the law of change, namely, of birth and death and
decay) attaches; nor that which is, as it were, one in one
thing, another in another, of those things which now we
speak of as being; but the knowledge which is in that
which in very deed is (τὴν ἐν ty 6 ἐστιν ὃν ὄντως ἐπιστήμην
οὖσαν) and having beheld, after the same manner, all other
things that really are, and feasted upon them, being passed
back again to the interior of the sky, the soul returned home,
Phedrus, 247.

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

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

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

166 |

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

their being. “It looks upon Justice itself; it
looks upon Temperance ; upon Knowledge.”
Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the
ideas had been creations, serviceable creations,
' of men’s thought, of our reason. With Plato,
they are the creators of our reason—those
_ treasures of experience, stacked and _ stored,
_which, to each one of us, come as by inherit-
_ ance, or with no proportionate effort on our part,
to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the
first use of language by us, our manner of tak-
ing things. For Plato, they are no longer, as
with Socrates, the instruments by which we
_ tabulate and classify and record our experience
—mere “marks” of the real things of experi-
ence, of what is essential in this or that, and
common to every particular that goes by a
_ certain common name; but are themselves
rather the proper objects of all true know-
ledge, and a passage from all merely relative
experience to the “absolute.” In proportion
as they lend themselves to the individual, in
his effort to think, they create reason in him ;
they reproduce the eternal reason for him. For
Socrates, as Aristotle understands him, they were
still in service to, and valid only in and by, the
experience they recorded, with no /ocus standi
beyond. For Plato, for Platonists, they are
_become—Justice and Beauty, and the perfect
State, or again Equality (that which we must
bring with us, if we are to apprehend sensible
167

PLATO AND PLATONISM

instances thereof, but which no two equal
things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay,
Couch, or Tree, every general thought, or
name of a thing, whatever—separate (χωριστός)
separable from, as being essentially independent
of, the individual mind which conceives them ;
as also of the particular temporary instances
which come under them, come and go, while
they remain for ever—those eternal “forms,” of
Tree, Equality, Justice, and so forth.

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

It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in
that abstract world; a return of the many gods
of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love,

168

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such,
the modern anthropologist, our student of the
natural history of man, would rank the Platonic
theory as but a form of what he calls “animism.”
Animism, that tendency to locate the movements
of a soul like our own in every object, almost in
every circumstance, which impresses one with a
sense of power, is a condition of mind, of which
the simplest illustration is primitive man ador-
ing, as a divine being endowed with will, the
meteoric stone that came rushing from the sky.
That condition “survives” however, in the
negro, who thinks the discharging gun a liv-
ing creature; as it survives also, more subtly,
in the cnlare of Wordsworth and Shelley, aie
whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits ; in
the pantheism of Goethe; and in Schelling,
who formulates that pantheism as a philosophic,
a Platonic, theory. Such “animistic” instinct
was, certainly, a natural element in Plato’s
mental constitution,—the instinctive effort to
find anima, the conditions of personality, in
whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it
remembered, of which the various functions, as
we reckon them, imagination, reason, intuition,
were still by no means clearly analysed and
differentiated from each other, but participated,
all alike and all together, in every single act of
mind.

_ And here is the second stage of the Platonic
idealism, the second grade of Plato’s departure
| 169

PLATO AND PLATONISM

from the simpler realism of his master, as noted |
by Aristotle, towards that “intelligible world,” —
opposed by him so constantly to the visible ©
world, into which many find it so hard to follow
him at all, and in which the ‘‘ideas” become |
veritable persons. ΤῸ speak, to think, to feel, —
about abstract ideas as if they were living |
persons; that, is the second stage of Plato’s —
speculative ascent. With the lover, who had |
graduated, was become a master, in the school |
of love, but had turned now to the love οὗ
intellectual and strictly invisible things, it was —
as if the faculty of physical vision, of the bodily
eye, were still at work at the very centre of —
intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas them- —
selves became animated, living persons, almost
corporeal, as if with hands and eyes. And it is, ©
as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary
reinforcing cause, of this mental condition, that —
the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the central —
idea ; the permanently typical instance of what —
an idea means; of its relation to particular —
things, and to the action of our thoughts upon —
them. It was to the lover dealing with physi- —
cal beauty, a thing seen, yet unseen—seen by _
all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one and |
not by another, as if through some capricious, _
personal self-discovery, by some law of affinity —
between the seer and what is seen, the knowing |
and the known—that the nature and function οὐ
an idea, as such, would come home most clearly.
170

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

And then, while visible beauty is the clearest,
the most certain thing, in the world (lovers will
always tell you so) real with the reality of some-
thing hot or cold in one’s hand, it also comes
nearest of all things, so Plato assures us, to its
eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason,
the eternal idea of beauty had left visible copies
of itself, shadows, antitypes, out of all propor-
tion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any
copy, left here with us, of Justice, for instance,
or Equality, or the Perfect State. The typical
instance of an abstract idea, yet pre-occupying
the mind with all the colour and circumstance
of the relationship of person to person, the idea
of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of
ideas, the associations which belong properly to
such relationships only. A certain measure of
caprice, of capricious preference or repulsion,
would thus be naturally incidental to the
commerce of men’s minds with what really
is, with the world in which things really are,
only so far as they are truly known. “ Philo-
sophers are /overs of truth and of that which zs
—impassioned lovers”: Tod ὄντος τε καὶ ἀληθείας
ἐραστὰς, τοὺς φιλοσόφου. They are the corner-
stone, as readers of The Republic know, of the
ideal state—those impassioned lovers, ἐραστάς, of
that which really is, and in comparison where-
with, office, wealth, honour, the love of which
has rent Athens, the world, to pieces, will be of
no more than secondary importance.
171

PLATO AND PLATONISM

He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of
another, of another will—this lover of the Ideas
—attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated,
in a long discipline, that “ascent of the soul into
the intelligible world,” of which the ways of
earthly love (τὰ ἐρωτικά) are a true parallel. His
enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an enthust-
asm: has about it that character of possession of
one person by another, by which those “ani-
mistic” old Greeks explained natural madness.
That philosophic enthusiasm, that impassioned
desire for true knowledge, is a kind of madness
(μανία) the madness to which some have declared
great wit, all great gifts, to be always allied—
the fourth species of mania, as Plato himself
explains in the Phedrus. ΤῸ natural madness, to
poetry and the other gifts allied to it, to prophecy
like that of the Delphic pythoness, he has to
add, fourthly, the “‘ enthusiasm of the ideas.”

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

172

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

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

Let memory be indulged thus far ; for whose sake, in regret
for what was then, I have now spoken somewhat at length.
As regards Beauty, as 1 said, it both shone out, in its true
being, among those other eternal forms ; and when we came
down hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our
bodily senses, gleaming with utmost brightness. For sight
comes to us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom
is not seen by it. Marvellous loves, in truth, would that
(namely, Wisdom) have afforded, had it presented any mani-
fest image of itself, such as that of Beauty, had it reached our
bodily vision—that, and all those other amiable forms. But
now Beauty alone has had this fortune; so that it is the
clearest, the most certain, of all things ; and the most lovable.
Phedrus, 2.49.

173

PLATO AND PLATONISM

II. Dialectic

Three different forms of composition have,
under the intellectual conditions of different
ages, prevailed—three distinct literary methods,
in the presentation of philosophic thought ; the
metrical form earliest, when philosophy was
still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine,
often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem,
Περὶ Φύσεως, “Concerning Nature”; according to
the manner of Pythagoras, “‘his golden verses,”
of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom
Lucretius in his turn modelled the finest extant
illustration of that manner of writing, of
thinking.

It was succeeded by precisely the opposite
manner, when native intuition had shrunk into
dogmatic system, the dry bones of which rattle
in one’s ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or
Spinoza, as a formal treatise; the perfected
philosophic temper being situate midway be-
tween those opposites, in the third essential
form of the literature of philosophy, namely
the essay; that characteristic literary type of
our own time, a time so rich and various in
special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and
dubious in its sense of their ensemb/e, and issues.
Strictly appropriate form of our modern phil-
osophic literature, the essay came into use at
what was really the invention of the relative,

174

|
|

}

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

or “modern” spirit, in the Renaissance of the
sixteenth century.’

The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see
already that these three methods of writing are

no mere literary accidents, dependent on the
personal choice of this or that particular writer,
but necessities of literary form, determined
directly by matter, as corresponding to three
essentially different ways in which the human

mind relates itself to truth. If oracular verse,

stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper vehicle
_of enthusiastic intuitions ; if the treatise, with its

ambitious array of premiss and conclusion, is the
natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency ; so,
the form of the essay, as we have it towards the
end of the sixteenth century, most significantly
in Montaigne, representative essayist because the
representative doubter, inventor of the name as,
in essence, of the thing—of the essay, in its
seemingly modest aim, its really large and adven-
turous possibilities—is indicative of Montaigne’s
peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth
the commencement of our own. It provided
him with precisely the literary form necessary
to a mind for which truth itself is but a possi-
bility, realisable not as general conclusion, but
rather as the elusive effect of a particular
personal experience; to a mind which, noting

1 Essay— A loose sally of the mind,” says Johnson’s Diction-
ary. Bailey’s earlier Dictionary gives another suggestive use of
the word “among miners ”—4 Jittle trench or hole, which they dig to
search for ore.

175

PLATO AND PLATONISM

faithfully those random lights that meet it by ©
the way, must needs content itself with suspen- |
sion of judgment, at the end of the intellectual |
journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? |

Who knows ?—in the very spirit of that old

Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is |

but a refined sense of one’s ignorance.

And as Aristotle is the inventor of the ‘|

treatise, so the Platonic Dialogue, in its con-

ception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially |
an essay—an essay, now and then passing into —
the earlier form of philosophic poetry, the |
prose-poem of Heraclitus. ‘There have been ~
effective writers of dialogue since, Bruno, for |
instance, Berkeley, Landor, with whom, how-
ever, that literary form has had no strictly —
constitutional propriety to the kind of matter ἡ
it conveyed, as lending itself (that is to say) ©
structurally to a many-sided but hesitant con- |
sciousness of the truth. Thus, with Berkeley, ©
its purpose is but to give a popular turn to |
certain very dogmatic opinions, about which ©
there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, —
in the writer’s own mind. With Plato, on the
other hand, with Plato least of all is the
dialogue—that peculiar modification of the
essay—anything less than essential, necessary, —
organic: the very form belongs to, is of the
organism of, the matter which it embodies.
For Plato’s Dialogues, in fact, reflect, they refine |

176

3 Se >=
Te Er i

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual
ethod, in which, by preference to anything
ike formal lecturing (the lecture being, so to
peak, a treatise in embryo) Socrates conveyed
is doctrine to others. We see him in those
Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public
places, the open L citiaeg the suburban roads, of
Athens, as if seeking πα from others ; seeking
it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and
y the help of, his supposed scholars, for whom,
ndeed, he can but bring their own native con-
eptions of truth to the birth ; but always faith-
ully registering just so much light as is given,
d, so to speak, never concluding.

The Platonic Dialogue is the literary trans-
ormation, in a word, of what was the inti-
ately home-grown method of Socrates, not only
f conveying truth to others, but of coming by
for himself. The essence of that method, of
dialectic” in all its forms, as its very name
enotes, is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth
y means of question and answer, primarily with
ne’s self. Just there, lies the validity of the
ethod—in a dialogue, an endless dialogue,
ith one’s self; a dialogue concerning those first
rinciples, or “universal definitions,” or notions,
ose “ideas,” which, according to Plato, are
€ proper objects of all real knowledge ; con-
ting the adequacy of one’s hold upon them;
e relationship to them of other notions; the
lausible conjectures in our own or other minds,
P. VI 177 N

=~ δὴ

PLATO AND PLATONISM

which come short of them; the elimination, by
their mere presence in the mind, of positive
ignorance or error. Justice, Beauty, Perfect
Polity, and the like, in outlines of eternal and
absolute certainty: —they were to be appre-
hended by “dialectic,” literally, by a method
(μέθοδος) a Circuitous journey, presented by the
Platonic dialogues in its most accomplished
literary form.

For the certainty, the absolute and eternal
character, of such ideas involved, with much
labour and scruple, repeated acts of qualification
and correction; many readjustments to experi-
ence ; expansion, by larger lights from it ; those
exclusions and inclusions, debite nature (to repeat
Bacon’s phrase) demanded, that is to say, by the
_ veritable nature of the facts which those ideas are |
designed to represent. ‘‘ Representation ”’ was, in
fact, twofold, and comprehended many successive
steps under each of its divisions. The thought
was to be adjusted, first, to the phenomena, to
the facts, daintily, to she end that the said
thought might just cover those facts, and no more, |
To the thought, secondly, to the conception, thus
articulated, it was necessary to adjust the term;
the term, or “ definition,” by which it might be
conveyed into the mind of another. The
dialogue—the freedom, the variety and elasticity,
of dialogue, informal, easy, natural, alone afforded
the room necessary for that long and complex:
process. If one, if Socrates, seemed to become

178

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

the teacher of another, it was but by thinking
aloud for a few moments over his own lesson, or
leaning upon that other as he went along that
difficult way which each one must really prose-
cute for himself, however full such comradeship
might be of happy occasions for the awakening of
the latent knowledge, with which mind is by
nature so richly stored. The Platonic Socrates,
in fact, does not propose to teach anything : is
but willing, “along with you,” and if you concur,
“to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be.
Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing
away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to
glint forth, as from fire-sticks.” ἢ

*< And, » again, “is not the road to Athens
‘made for conversation?” Yes! It might seem
that movement, after all, and any habit that pro-
moted movement, promoted the power, the
successes, the fortunate parturition, of the mind.
A method such as this, a process (processus) a
movement of thought, which is the very converse
of mathematical or demonstrative reasoning, and
incapable therefore of conventional or scholastic
form, of ‘‘ exactness,” in fact; which proceeded
to truth, not by the analysis and application of an
axiom, but by a gradual suppression of error, of
error in the form of partial or exaggerated truths
on the subject-matter proposed, found its proper

1 Σκέψασθαι. καὶ συζητῆσαι ὅτι πότε ἔστιν" καί, (Tax ἄν, Tap
ἄλληλα σκοποῦντες, καὶ τρίβοντες, ὥσπερ ἐκ πυρείων, ἐκλάμψαι
ποιήσαιμεν τὴν δικαιοσύνην.

179

PLATO AND PLATONISM

literary vehicle in a dialogue, the more flexible

the better. It was like a journey indeed, that
essay towards Justice, for example, or the true
Polity ; a journey, not along the simple road to

Athens, but to a mountain’s top. The propor-_
tions, the outline, the relation of the thing to.
its neighbours,—how do the inexperienced in such —
journeys mistake them, as they climb! What >

repeated misconceptions, embodying, one by one, —
some mere particularity of view, the perspective

of this or that point of view, forthwith abandoned, _

some apprehension of mountain form and structure,

just a little short, or, it may be, immeasurably

short, of what Plato would call the “synoptic "
view of the mountain as a whole. From this or

that point, some insignificant peak presented itself

as the mountain’s veritable crest: inexperience

would have sworn to the truth of a wholly illusive -

perspective, as the next turn in the journey
assured one. It is only upon the final step, with
free view at last on every side, uniting together
and justifying all those various, successive, partial
apprehensions of the difficult way—only on the

summit, comes the intuitive comprehension of

what the true form of the mountain really is ;

with a mental, or rather an imaginative hold upon

which, for the future, we can find our way
securely about it; observing perhaps that, next

to that final intuition, the first view, the first
impression, had been truest about it.

180

δι Σ.»-

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

Such, in its full scope, is the journey or
pilgrimage, the method (ὁδός, κίνησις, μέθοδος) Of
the Socratic, of the perfected Platonic dialectic,
towards the truth, the true knowledge, of Bravery
or Friendship, for instance ; of Space or Motion,
again, as suggested in the seventh book of The
Republic ; of the ideal City, of the immaculate
Beauty. You are going about Justice, for ex-
ample—that great complex elevation on the level
surface of life, whose top, it may be, reaches to
heaven. You fancy you have grasped its outline.
᾿Αλλὰ μεταθώμεθα. You are forced on, perhaps by
your companion, a step further, and the view has
already changed. ‘“‘ Persevere,”’ Plato might say,
“and a step may be made, upon which, again,
a whole world around may change, the entire
horizon and its relation to the point you stand
on—a change from the half-light of conjecture
to the full light of indefectible certitude. That,
of course, can only happen by a summary act of
intuition upon the entire perspective, wherein
all those partial apprehensions, which one by
one may have seemed inconsistent with each
other, find their due place, or (to return to the
Platonic Dialogue again, to the actual process of
dialectic as there exposed) by that final impression
of a subject, a theorem, in which the mind attains
a hold, as if by a single imaginative act, through
all the transitions of a long conversation, upon
all the seemingly opposite contentions of all the
various speakers at once. We see already why
181

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Platonic dialectic—the ladder, as Plato thinks, |

by which alone we can ascend into the entirely
reasonable world (νοητὸς τόπος) beginning with
the boyish difficulties and crudities of Meno,
for instance, is a process which may go on, at

least with those gifted by nature and opportunity, —

as in the Perfect City,—may go on to the close
of life, and, as Pythagorean theory suggests,
perhaps does not end even then.

The process of dialectic, as represented in the
Platonic Dialogues, may seem, therefore, incon-_
sistent with itself, if you isolate this or that

particular movement, in what is a very complex

process, with many phases of development. It

is certainly difficult, and that not merely on a
first reading, to grasp the unity of the various
statements Plato has made about it. Now it

may seem to differ from ordinary reasoning by

a certain plausibility only : it is logic, p/us per-
suasion ; helping, gently enticing, a child out οὗ,
his natural errors ; ; carefully explaining difficulties
by the way, as one can best do, by question and
answer with him; above all, never falling into

the mistake of the obscurum per obscurius. At
another time it may seem to aim at plausibility
of another sort; at mutual complaisance, as
Thrasymachus complains. It would be possible,

of course, to present an insincere dialogue, in
which certain of the disputants shall be mere
men of straw. In the PAz/ebus again, dialectic

is only the name of the process (described there
182

one

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

as exactly, almost as technically, as Aristotle, or
-‘'some modern master of applied logic, might
describe it) of the resolution of a genus into
its species. Or it lapses into “eristic’’—into
an argument for its own sake; or sinks into
logomachy,a mere dispute about words. Or yet
again, an immense, a boundless promise is made
for it, as in the seventh book of The Republi.
It is a life, a systematised, but comprehensive
and far-reaching, intellectual life, in which the
reason, nay, the whole nature of man, realises all
it was designed to be, by the beatific “ vision of
all time and all existence.”

Now all these varying senses of the word
“ dialectic” fall within compass, if we remember
that for Plato, as for every other really philo-
sophic thinker, method must be ome; that it
must cover, or be understood to cover, the entire
process, all the various processes, of the mind,
in pursuit of properly representative ideas, of a
reasoned reflex of experience ; and that for Plato,
this process is essentially a long discourse or
reasoning of the mind with itself. It is that
dynamic, or essential, dialogue of the mind with
itself, which lends, or imputes, its active principle
to the written or spoken dialogue, which, in
return, lends its name to the method it figures—
“dialectic.” Well! in that long and complex
dialogue of the mind with itself, many persons,
so to speak, will necessarily take part ; so many
persons as there are possible contrasts or shades

183

PLATO AND PLATONISM

in the apprehension of some complex subject. —

The advocatus diaboli will be heard from time
to time. The dog also, or, as the Greeks said,
the wolf, will out with his story against the

man; and one of the interlocutors will always —
be a child, turning round upon us innocently, —
candidly, with our own admissions, or surprising |

us, perhaps at the last moment, by what seems

his invincible ignorance, when we thought it ©
rooted out of him. There will be a youth, in- ©
experienced in the capacities of language, who ©
will compel us to allow much time to the dis- |

cussion of words and phrases, though not always
unprofitably. And to the last, let us hope, re-
freshing with his enthusiasm, the weary or dis-
heartened enquirer (who is always also of the
company) the rightly sanguine youth, ingenuous
and docile, to whom, surely, those friendly living
ideas will be willing, longing, to come, after that
Platonic law of affinity, so effectual in these
matters—opoioy ὁμοίῳ.

With such a nature above all, bringing with
it its felicities of temperament, with the sort of

natures (as we may think) which intellectually —

can but thrive, a method like that, the dialectic

method, will also have its felicities, its singular —

good fortunes. A voyage of discovery, prosecuted
almost as if at random, the Socratic or Platonic
‘dialogue of enquiry,” seems at times to be in

charge of a kind of “ Providence.” Or again, —
it will be as when hunters or bird-catchers “* beat —

184

|

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

the bush,” as we say: Plato elaborates that figure
in The Republic. Only, if they be knowing in
the process, a fair percentage of birds will be
found and taken. All the chances, or graces, of
such a method, as actually followed in a whole
life of free enquiry, The Republic, for a watchful
reader, represents in little. And when, using
still another figure, Socrates says: “I do not
yet know, myself; but, we must just go where
the argument carries us, as a vessel runs before
the wind,” he breathes the very soul of the
(ἐς dialectic method” :—Omn ἂν ὁ λόγος, ὥσπερ πνεῦμα,

] / im | ΑΨ.
φέρῃ, ταύτῃ LTEOV.

This dialectic method, this continuous dis-
course with one’s self, being, for those who
prosecute it with thoroughness, co-extensive
with life itself—a part of the continuous com-
pany we keep with ourselves through life—will
have its inequalities ; its infelicities ; above all,
its final insecurity. ‘‘ We argue rashly and ad-
-venturously,” writes Plato, most truly, in the
Timeus—aye, we, the Platonists, as such, some-
times—‘“ by reason that, like ourselves, our dis-
courses (our Platonic discourses, as such) have
much participation in the temerity of chance.”
Of course, as in any other occasional conversation,
with its dependence on the hour and the scene,
the persons we are with, the humours of the
moment, there will always be much of accident
in this essentially informal, this un-methodical,

185

PLATO AND PLATONISM

method; and, therefore, opportunities for misuse,
sometimes consciously. ‘The candid reader notes
instances of such, even in The Republic, not
always on the part of Thrasymachus :—in this
“new game of chess,” played, as Plato puts it,
not with counters, but with words, and not
necessarily for the prize of truth, but, it may
be, for the mere enjoyment of move and counter-
move, of check-mating.

Since Zeno’s paradoxes, in fact, the very air
of Athens was become sophisticated, infected with
questionings, often vain enough; and the Platonic

method had been, in its measure, determined :
by (the unfriendly might say, was in truth only —

a deposit from) that infected air. ‘‘ Socrates,” as

he admits, “is easily refuted. Say rather, dear —
Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth.” —

That is reassuring, certainly! For you might
think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic

ἡ

i

Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or οὔ.

himself perhaps ez caricature, in the Euthydemus, —

“Such is his skill in the war of words, that he '

can refute any proposition whatever, whether
true or false” ; that, in short, there is a danger-
ous facility abroad for proving all things what-
ever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his
presumable allotment of truth, has but the general
allotment.

The friendly, on the other hand, might rejoin

even then, that, as Lessing suggests, the search
for truth is a better thing for us than its possessiony
186

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

Plato, who supposes any knowledge worth the
name to be “absolute and eternal”; whose
constant contention it is, to separate /ongo inter-
vallo, by the longest possible interval, science
(ἐπιστήμη) as the possession of irresistible truth,
from any and every sort of knowledge which
falls short of that; would hardly have accepted
the suggestion of Lessing. Yet, in spite of all
that, in spite of the demand he makes for certainty
and exactness and what is absolute, in all real
knowledge, he does think, or inclines his reader
to think, that truth, precisely because it resembles
some high kind of relationship of persons to
persons, depends a good deal on the receiver;
and must be, in that degree, elusive, provisional,
contingent, a matter of various approximation,
and of an “economy,” as is said; that it is
partly a subjective attitude of mind :—that philo-
sophic truth consists in the philosophic temper.
*‘ Socrates in Plato,” remarks Montaigne acutely,
“disputes, rather to the profit of the disputants,
than of the dispute. He takes hold of the first
subject, like one who has a more profitable end
in view than to explain it; namely, to clear the
understandings that he takes upon him to instruct
and exercise.”

Just there, in fact, is the justification of Plato’s
peculiar dialectical method, of its inexactness, its
hesitancy, its scruples and reserve, as if he feared
to obtrude knowledge on an unworthy receiver.
The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma

187

PLATO AND PLATONISM

—the Ethics of Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza
—begins with a truth, or with a clear conviction
of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does
but propose further to explain and apply.—The
treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philo-
sophy 4egis with an axiom or definition: the
essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the
instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so
much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue
with oneself, that dialectic process, which may
be co-extensive with life. It does in truth
little more than clear the ground, as we say,
or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one
may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing,
perhaps: it does but put one into a duly receptive
attitude towards such possible truth, discovery,
or revelation, as may one day occupy the ground,
the tablet,—shed itself on the purified air; it
does not provide a proposition, nor a system of
propositions, but forms a temper.

What Plato presents to his readers is then,
again, a paradox, or a reconciliation of opposed
tendencies: on one side, the largest possible
demand for infallible certainty in knowledge (it

was he fixed that ideal of absolute truth, to which, ~ |

vainly perhaps, the human mind, as such, aspires)

yet, on the other side, the utmost possible inex-

actness, or contingency, in the method by which

actually he proposes to attain it. It has been

said that the humour of Socrates, of which the
188

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

famous Socratic irony—the pretence to have a
bad memory, to dislike or distrust long and formal
discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a
mid-wife in relation to other people’s thoughts—
was an element, is more than a mere personal
trait; that it was welcome as affording a means
of escape from the full responsibilities of his
teaching. It belonged, in truth, to the tentative
character of dialectic, of question and answer as
the method of discovery, of teaching and learning,
_to the position, in a word, of the philosophic
essayist. That it was thus, might be illustrated
abundantly from the Platonic dialogues. The
irony, the Socratic humour, so serviceable to a
diffident teacher, are, in fact, Plato’s own. Kuw-
᾿ δυνεύει, “it may chance to be,” is, we may notice,
a favourite catchword of his. The philosopher
of Being, or, of the verb “To be,” is after all
afraid of saying, “It is.”
For, again, person dealing with person—with
_ possible caprice, therefore, at least on one side—
or intelligence with intelligence, is what Plato
supposes in the reception of truth :—that, and
mot an exact mechanism, a precise machine,
operating on, or with, an exactly ponderable
matter. He has fears for truth, however care-
fully considered. To the very last falsehood
will lurk, if not about truth itself, about this or
that assent to it. The receiver may add the
falsities of his own nature to the truth he re-
ceives. ‘The proposition which embodies it very
| 189

PLATO AND PLATONISM

imperfectly, may not look to him, in those dark
chambers of his individuality, of himself, into
which none but he can ever get, to test the
matter, what it looks to me, or to you. We
may not even be thinking of, not looking at,
the same thing, when we talk of Beauty, and
the like; objects which, after all, to the Platonist
are matters of θεωρία, of immediate intuition, of
immediate vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied,
of an earlier personal experience; and which, as
matter of such intuition, are incapable of analysis,
and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words.
Place, then, must be left to the last in any legiti-
mate dialectic process for possible after-thoughts ;
for the introduction, so to speak, of yet another
interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact,
no necessary conclusion, and leaves off only because
time is up, or when, as he says, one leaves off
seeking through weariness (dsoxduvov). ‘S What
thought can think, another thought can mend.”
Another turn in the endless road may change the
whole character of the perspective. You cannot,
as the Sophist proposed to do (that was part of
his foolishness) take and put truth into the soul.
If you could, it might be established there, only
as an “inward lie,” as a mistake. ‘ Must I take
the argument, and literally insert it into your
mind?” asks Thrasymachus. ‘ Heaven forbid”:
answers Socrates. ‘That is precisely what he fears
most, for himself, and for others; and from first
to last, demands, as the first condition of comrade-
190

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

ship in that long journey in which he conceives
teacher and learner to be but fellow-travellers,
pilgrims side by side, sincerity, above all sincerity
with one’s self—that, and also freedom in reply.
“ Answer what you think, peyadorperds—liber-
ally.”” For it is impossible to make way other-
wise, in a method which consists essentially in
the development of knowledge by question and
answer.

Misuse, again, is of course possible in a method
which admits of no objective sanction or standard ;
the success of which depends on a loyalty to one’s
self, in the prosecution of it, of which no one
else can be cognisant. And if we can misuse it
with ourselves, how much more certainly can
the expert abuse it with another. At every turn
of the conversation, a door lies open to sophistry.
Sophistry, logomachy, eristic: we may learn
what these are, sometimes, from Plato’s own
practice. That justice is only useful as applied
to things useless; that the just man is a kind
of thief; and the like; is hardly so much as
sophistry. And this too was possible in a
method, which, with all its large outlook, has
something of the irregularity, the accident, the
heats and confusion, of life itself—a method of
reasoning which can only in a certain measure
be reasoned upon. How different the exactness
which Aristotle supposes, and does his best to
secure, in scientific procedure! For him, dialectic,
Platonic dialectic, is, at best, a part of “ eristic”

19!

PLATO AND PLATONISM

—of the art, or trick, of merely popular and
approximate debate, in matters where science is
out of the question, and rhetoric has its office,
not in providing for the intelligence, but in
moulding the sentiments and the will. Con-
versely to that absoluteness and necessity which
Plato himself supposes in all real knowledge, as
“the spectacle of all time and all existence,” it
might seem that the only sort of truth attain-
able by his actual method, must be the truth
of a particular time and place, for one and not
for another. δΔιάλογος πειραστικός, “a Dialogue of
search” :—every one of Plato’s Dialogues is in
essence such like that whole, life-long, endless
dialogue which dialectic, in its largest scope,
does but formulate, and in which truly the last,
the infallible word, after all, never gets spoken.
Our pilgrimage is meant indeed to end in nothing
less than the vision of what we seek. But can
we ever be quite sure that we are really come
to that? By what sign or test ?

Now oppose all this, all these peculiarities of
the Platonic method, as we find it, to the exact
and formal method of Aristotle, of Aquinas, of
Spinoza, or Hegel; and then suppose one trained
exclusively on Plato’s dialogues. Is it the eternal
certainty, after all, the immutable and absolute
character of truth, as Plato conceived it, that he
would be likely to apprehend? We have here
another of those contrasts of tendency, consti-

192

THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

tutional in the genius of Plato, and which may
add to our interest in him. Plato is to be ex-
_ plained, as we say, or interpreted, partly through
his predecessors, and his contemporaries; but in
part also by his followers, by the light his later
mental kinsmen throw back on the conscious or
unconscious drift of his teaching. Now there
are in the history of philosophy two opposite
_ Platonic traditions; two legitimate yet divergent
streams of influence from him. Two very differ-
ent yet equally representative scholars we may
see in thought emerging from his school. The
“theory of the Ideas,” the high ideal, the un-
compromising demand for absolute certainty, in
any truth or knowledge worthy of the name ;
the immediate or intuitive character of the
highest acts of knowledge; that all true theory
15 indeed “ vision” :—for the maintenance of that
side of the Platonic position we must look onward
to Aristotle, and the Schoolmen of all ages, to
Spinoza, to Hegel; to those mystic aspirants to
“vision” also, the so-called Neo-Platonists of
all ages, from Proclus to Schelling. From the
abstract, metaphysical systems of those, the ecstasy
and illuminism of these, we may mount up to
the actual words of Plato in the Symposium, the
fifth book of The Republic, the Phedrus.

But it is in quite different company we must
look for the tradition, the development, of Plato’s
actual method of learning and teaching. The
Academy of Plato, the established seat of his

P. VI 193 ο

PLATO AND PLATONISM

philosophy, gave name to a school, of which
Lucian, in Greek, and in Latin, Cicero, are the
proper representatives,—Cicero, the perfect em-
bodiment of what is still sometimes understood
to be the “academic spirit,” surveying all sides,
arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, bal-
ancing, tendencies, but ending in suspension of
judgment. If Platonism from age to age has
meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of “ being,”
or the nearest attainable approach to or substi-
tution for that; for others, Platonism has been
in fact only another name for scepticism, in a
recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the
Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the
confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like
the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates -
himself again, in those endless conversations of :
Montaigne—that typical sceptic of the age of
the Renaissance—coversations with himself, with
the living, with the dead through their writings, |
which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist :
or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. -
And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does
but commence the modern world, which, side
by side with its metaphysical reassertions, from
Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a.
constant accumulation of the sort of certainty
which is afforded by empirical science, has had
assuredly, to check wholesomely the pretensions —
of one and of the other alike, its doubts.—“ Their +
name is legion,” says a modern writer. Reverent |
194 |

“ἀπ

—— — i

| THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

and irreverent, reasonable and unreasonable, manly
and unmanly, morbid and healthy, guilty and
honest, wilful, inevitable—they have been called,
indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intel-
lectual security, but cannot make up its mind.
Que scais-je ? it cries, in the words of Montaigne ;
but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates,
with whom such dubitation had been nothing
less than a religious duty or service.

Sanguine about any form of absolute know-
ledge, of eternal, or indefectible, or immutable
truth, with our modern temperament as it is, we
shall hardly become, even under the direction
of Plato, and by the reading of the Platonic
Dialogues. But if we are little likely to realise
in his school, the promise of “ontological ”
science, of a “doctrine of Being,” or any increase
in our consciousness of metaphysical security, are
likely, rather, to acquire there that other sort of
Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking
nd suspended judgment, if we are not likely to
enjoy the vision of his “eternal and immutable
ideas,” Plato may yet promote in us what we
call “ideals”—the aspiration towards a more
perfect Justice, a more perfect Beauty, physical
and intellectual, a more perfect condition of
Shuman affairs, than any one has ever yet seen ;
that κόσμος, in which things are only as they are
Vthought by a perfect mind, to which experience
is constantly approximating us, but which it
‘does not provide. There they stand, the two
195

PLATO AND PLATONISM

great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual
life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world
of ‘‘ideas,” “the great perhaps,” for which it is
his merit so effectively to have opened room in
the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all,
through our affinities of nature with it, which,
however, in our dealings with ourselves and others
we may assume to be objective or real :—and
then, over against our imperfect realisation of
that ideal, in ourselves, in nature and history,
amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem)
of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate.
attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which
to the last will have its diffidence and reserve,
its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition
of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial
development and under felicitous culture, is but
the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful
scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still
a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short,
for which a survival of query will be still the
salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascer-
tained knowledge.

196

Vill

LACED/EMON

| Amonc the Greeks, philosophy has flourished longest, and is
_ still most abundant, at Crete and Lacedemon ; and there there
_ are more teachers of philosophy than anywhere else in the world.
_ But the Lacedemonians deny this, and pretend to be unlearned
| people, lest it should become manifest that it is through philo-
_ sophy they are supreme in Greece ; that they may be thought
| to owe their supremacy to their fighting and manly spirit, for
\ they think that if the means of their superiority were made
known all the Greeks would practise this. But now, by keep-
| ing it a secret, they have succeeded in misleading the Laconisers
‘in the various cities of Greece ; and in imitation of them these
| people buffet themselves, and practise gymnastics, and put on
_ boxing-gloves, and wear short cloaks, as if it were by such
\things that the Lacedzmonians excel all other Greeks. But
‘the Lacedzemonians, when they wish to have intercourse with
) their philosophers without reserve, and are weary of going to
_ them by stealth, make legal proclamation that those Laconisers
should depart, with any other aliens who may be sojourning
_ among them, and thereupon betake themselves to their sophists
unobserved by strangers. And you may know that what I say
is true, and that the Lacedemonians are better instructed than
_all other people in philosophy and the art of discussion in this
way. If any one will converse with even the most insignificant
of the Lacedemonians, he may find him indeed in the greater
| part of what he says seemingly but a poor creature ; but then
at some chance point in the conversation he will throw in some
brief compact saying, worthy of remark, like a clever archer,
80 that his interlocutor shall seem no better than a child Of

197

PLATO AND PLATONISM

this fact some both of those now living and of the ancients —
have been aware, and that to Laconise consists in the study of |

philosophy far rather than in the pursuit of gymnastic, for they
saw that to utter such sayings as those was only possible for
a perfectly educated man. Of these was Thales of Miletus,
Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias the Prienean, and our own Solon,
Cleobulus the Lindian, and Myson of Chen, and the seventh

among them was called Chilon, a Lacedemonian. ‘These were

all zealous lovers and disciples of the culture of the Lacedz-
monians. And any one may understand that their philosophy
was something of this kind, short rememberable sayings uttered
by each of them. ‘They met together and offered these in

|

common, as the first fruits of philosophy, to Apollo in his —
temple at Delphi, and they wrote upon the walls these sayings ©
known and read of all men: Γνῶθι σαυτόν and Μηδὲν ἄγαν.

Protagoras, 343.

Of course there is something in that of the
romance to which the genius of Plato readily
inclined him; something also of the Platonic —

humour or irony, which suggests, for example,
to Meno, so anxious to be instructed in the
theory of virtue, that the philosophic temper
must be departed from Attica, its natural home,
to Thessaly—to the rude northern capital whence
that ingenuous youth was freshly arrived. Partly
romantic, partly humorous, in his Laconism,
Plato is however quite serious in locating a
certain spirit at Lacedemon of which his own
ideal Republic would have been the completer
development ; while the picture he draws of
it presents many a detail taken straight from
Lacedemon as it really was, as if by an admiring
visitor, who had in person paced the streets of
the Dorian metropolis it was so difficult for any
198

LACEDA MON

| alien to enter. What was actually known of
) that stern place, of the Lacedemonians at home,
at school, had charmed into fancies about it

) other philosophic theorists; Xenophon for in-

} stance, who had little or nothing of romantic
) tendency about them.

| And there was another sort of romancing also,
quite opposite to this of Plato, concerning the
hard ways among themselves of those Lacede-
_monians who were so invincible in the field.
_ “The Lacedemonians,” says Pausanias, “ appear
to have admired least of all people poetry and
| the praise which it bestows.” “Αἱ Lacedemon
there is more philosophy than anywhere else
in the world,” is what Plato, or the Platonic
Socrates, had said. Yet, on the contrary, there
were some who alleged that true Lacedemonians
—Lacedemonian nobles—for their protection
against the “effeminacies”’ of culture, were denied
all knowledge of reading and writing. But
then we know that written books are properly a
mere assistant, sometimes, as Plato himself sug-
gests, a treacherous assistant, to memory; those
conservative Lacedemonians being, so to speak,
the people of memory pre-eminently, and very
appropriately, for, whether or not they were
taught to read and write, they were acknow-
ledged adepts in the Pythagorean philosophy,
a philosophy which attributes to memory so
preponderating a function in the mental life.
“Writing,” says K. O. Miiller in his laborious,

199

PLATO AND PLATONISM

yet, in spite of its air of coldness, passably romantic
work on The Dorians—an author whose quiet
enthusiasm for his subject resulted indeed in a
patient scholarship which well befits it : “ Writ-
ing,” he says, “was not essential in a nation
where laws, hymns, and the praises of illustrious
men—that is, jurisprudence and history—were
taught in their schools of music.” Music, which
is or ought to be, as we know, according to those
Pythagorean doctrines, itself the essence of all
things, was everywhere in the Perfect City of
Plato ; and among the Lacedemonians also, who
may be thought to have come within measurable
distance of that Perfect City, though with no
conscious theories about it, music (μουσική) in the
larger sense of the word, was everywhere, not
to alleviate only but actually to promote and
inform, to be the very substance of their so
strenuous and taxing habit of life. What was
this “‘music,” this service or culture of the
Muses, this harmony, partly moral, doubtless,
but also throughout a matter of elaborate move-
ment of the voice, of musical instruments, of all
beside that could in any way be associated to
such things—this music, for the maintenance,
the perpetual sense of which those vigorous
souls were ready to sacrifice so many opportunities,
privileges, enjoyments of a different sort, so much
of their ease, of themselves, of one another ?

Platonism is a highly conscious reassertion
200

5. Ἃ Φ'

‘of one of the two constituent elements in’ the
Hellenic genius, of the spirit of the highlands
namely in which the early Dorian forefathers of
the Lacedemonians had secreted their peculiar
disposition, in contrast with the mobile, the
marine and fluid temper of the littoral Ionian
people. The Republic of Plato is an embodiment
of that Platonic reassertion or preference, of
Platonism, as the principle of a society, ideal
enough indeed, yet in various degrees practicable.
It is not understood by Plato to be an erection
_de novo, and therefore only on paper. Its founda-
tions might be laid in certain practicable changes
to be enforced in the old schools, in a certain
reformed music which must be taught there, and
would float thence into the existing homes of
Greece, under the shadow of its old temples, the
sanction of its old religion, its old memories, the
old names of things. Given the central idea,
with its essentially renovating power, the well-
worn elements of society as it is would rebuild
‘themselves, and a new colour come gradually
over all things as the proper expression of a
certain new mind in them.

And in fact such embodiments of the specially
Hellenic element in Hellenism, compacted in
the natural course of political development, there
had been, though in a less ideal form, in those
many Dorian constitutions to which Aristotle
tefers. To Lacedemon, in The Republic itself,
admiring allusions abound, covert, yet bold
201

LACEDEMON ΘΑ

%
τ

PLATO AND PLATONISM

enough, if we remember the existing rivalry |
between Athens and her neighbour; and it
becomes therefore a help in the study of Plato’s —
political ideal to approach as near as we may to |
that earlier actual embodiment of its principles, —
which is also very interesting in itself. The
Platonic City of the Perfect would not have >
been cut clean away from the old roots of
national life: would have had many links with ©
the beautiful and venerable Greek cities of past
and present. ‘The ideal, poetic or romantic as it
might seem, would but have begun where they |
had left off, where Lacedemon, in particular, had |
left off. Let us then, by way of realising the —
better the physiognomy of Plato’s theoretic build- _
ing, suppose some contemporary student of The
Republic, a pupil, say! in the Athenian Academy, —
determined to gaze on the actual face of what has _
so strong a family likeness to it. Stimulated by |
his master’s unconcealed Laconism, his approval —
of contemporary Lacedemon, he is at the pains
to journey thither, and make personal inspection
of a place, in Plato’s general commendations of
which he may suspect some humour or irony,
but which has unmistakably lent many a detail
to his ideal Republic, on paper, or in thought.

He would have found it, this youthful
Anacharsis, hard to get there, partly through the
nature of the country, in part because the people
of Lacedemon (it was a point of system with
them, as we heard just now) were suspicious of

202

LACEDA MON

foreigners. Romantic dealers in political theory
at Athens were safe in saying pretty much what
they pleased about its domestic doings. Still,
not so far away, made, not in idea and by
the movements of an abstract argument, the
mere strokes of a philosophic pen, but solidified
by constancy of character, fortified anew on
emergency by heroic deeds, for itself, for the
whole of Greece, though with such persistent
hold throughout on an idea, or system of ideas,
that it might seem actually to have come
ready-made from the mind of some half-divine
_Lycurgus, or through him from Apollo himself,
creator of that music of which it was an example:
—there, in the hidden valley of the Eurotas, it
was to be found, as a visible centre of actual
human life, the place which was alleged to have
come, harsh paradox as it might sound to Athenian
ears, within measurable distance of civic per-
fection, of the political and social ideal.

Our youthful academic adventurer then, mak-
ing his way along those difficult roads, between
the ridges of the Eastern Acadian Mountains,
and emerging at last into “hollow” Laconia,
would have found himself in a country carefully
made the most of by the labour of serfs; a land
of slavery, far more relentlessly organised accord-
ing to law than anywhere else in Greece, where,
in truth, for the most part slavery was a kind
of accident. But whatever rigours these slaves
of Laconia were otherwise subjected to, they
| 203

PLATO AND PLATONISM

enjoyed certainly that kind of well-being which
does come of organisation, from the order and
regularity of system, living under central military
authority, and bound themselves to military
service ; to furnish (as under later feudal institu-
tions) so many efficient men-at-arms on demand,
and maintain themselves in readiness for war as
they laboured in those distantly-scattered farms,
seldom visited by their true masters from Lace-
demon, whither year by year they sent in kind
their heavy tribute of oil, barley and wine. The ©
very genius of conservatism here enthroned, —
secured, we may be sure, to this old-fashioned
country life something of the personal dignity,
of the enjoyments also, natural to it ; somewhat
livelier religious feasts, for example, than their
lords allowed themselves. Stray echoes of their
boisterous plebeian mirth on such occasions have
reached us in Greek literature.

But if the traveller had penetrated a little
more closely he would have been told certain
startling stories, with at least a basis of truth in
them, even as regards the age of Plato. These
slaves were Greeks : no rude Scythians, nor crouch-
ing, decrepit Asiatics, like ordinary prisoners of
war, the sort of slaves you could buy, but genuine
Greeks, speaking their native tongue, if with less
of muscular tension and energy, yet probably with
pleasanter voice and accent than their essentially
highland masters. Physically they throve, under
something of the same discipline which had made

204

LACEDAMON

those masters the masters also of all Greece.
_ They saw them now and then—their younger
lords, brought, under strict tutelage, on those
long hunting expeditions, one of their so rare
enjoyments, prescribed for them, as was believed,
_ by the founder of their polity. But sometimes
_ (here was the report which made one shudder
even in broad daylight, in those seemingly
_reposeful places) sometimes those young nobles
_ of Lacedemon reached them on a different kind
of pursuit: came by night, secretly, though by
no means contrarily to the laws of a state crafty
as it was determined, to murder them at home,
or a certain moiety of them; one here or there
_ perhaps who, with good Achzan blood in his
| veins, and under a wholesome mode of life, was
_ grown too tall, or too handsome, or too fruitful
a father, to feel quite like a slave. Under a sort
of slavery that makes him strong and beautiful,
where personal beauty was so greatly prized, his
_ masters are in fact jealous of him.

But masters thus hard to others, these Lace-
demonians, as we know, were the reverse of
indulgent to themselves. While, as a matter of
_ theory, power and privilege belonged exclusively
to the old, to the seniors (οἱ γέροντες, ἡ γερουσία)
ruling by a council wherein no question might be
_ discussed, one might only deliver one’s Aye! or
No! Lacedemon was in truth before all things
an organised place of discipline, an organised
205

PLATO AND PLATONISM

opportunity also, for youth, for the sort of youth
that knew how to command by serving—a con-
stant exhibition of youthful courage, youthful
self-respect, yet above all of true youthful docility;
youth thus committing itself absolutely, soul and
body, to a corporate sentiment in its very sports.
There was a third sort of regulation visits the
lads of Lacedemon were driven to pay to those
country places, the vales, the uplands, when, to
brace youthful stomachs and develope resource,
they came at stated intervals as a kind of mendi-
cants or thieves, feet and head uncovered through
frost and heat, to steal their sustenance, under

penalties if detected—“a survival,” as anthro- —

pologists would doubtless prove, pointing out
collateral illustrations of the same, from a world
of purely animal courage and keenness. Whips
and rods used in a kind of monitorial system by
themselves had a great part in the education of
these young aristocrats, and, as pain surely must
do, pain not of bodily disease or wretched accidents,
but as it were by dignified rules of art, seem to
have refined them, to have made them observant
of the minutest direction in those musical exer-
cises, wherein eye and ear and voice and foot
all alike combined. There could be nothing
παραλειπόμενον, aS Plato says, no “oversights,” here.
No! every one, at every moment, quite at his
best ; and, observe especially, with no superfluities ;
seeing that when we have to do with music of
any kind, with matters of art, in stone, in words,
206

Beet δώ τῳ:

LACEDAMON

‘in the actions of life, all superfluities are in
very truth “ superfluities of naughtiness,” such as
annihilate music.

_ The country through which our young
traveller from his laxer school of Athens seeks
his way to Lacedemon, this land of a noble
slavery, so peacefully occupied but for those
irregular nocturnal terrors, was perhaps the
loveliest in Greece, with that peculiarly blent
loveliness, in which, as at Florence, the expression
of a luxurious lowland is duly checked by the
severity of its mountain barriers. It was a type
of the Dorian purpose in life—sternness, like sea-
water infused into wine, overtaking a matter
naturally rich, at the moment when fulness may
lose its savour and expression. Amid the corn
and oleanders—corn “‘so tall, close, and luxuriant,”
as the modern traveller there still finds—it was
visible at last, Lacedemon, κοίλη Σπάρτη, “ hollow
Sparta,” under the sheltering walls of Taygetus,
'the broken and rugged forms of which were
attributed to earthquake, but without proper
walls of itsown. In that natural fastness, or trap,
or falcon’s nest, it had no need of them, the falcon
| of the land, with the hamlets (πολίχνια) a hundred
_and more, dispersed over it, in jealously enforced
~ seclusion from one another.

From the first he notes “the antiquated ap-
pearance” of Lacedemon, by no means a “ grow-
ing” place, always rebuilding, remodelling itself,
after the newest fashion, with shapeless suburbs
207

PLATO AND PLATONISM

;
stretching farther and farther on every side of it, :

grown too large perhaps, as Plato threatens, to

be a body, a corporate unity, at all: not that, but
still, and to the last, itself only a great village, aq

solemn, ancient, mountain village. Even here

of course there had been movement, some sort οὗ

progress, if so it is to be called, linking limb to
limb; but long ago. Originally a union, after
the manner of early Rome, of perhaps three or four

neighbouring villages which had never lost their —
physiognomy, like Rome it occupied a group οὗ

irregular heights, the outermost roots of Taygetus,
on the bank of a river or mountain torrent,

impetuous enough in winter, a series of wide —
shallows and deep pools in the blazing summer. ©

It was every day however, all the year round,

that Lacedemonian youth plunged itself in the —
Eurotas. Hence, from this circumstance of the —
union there of originally disparate parts, the —
picturesque and expressive irregularity, had they —
had time to think it such, of the “city” properly —
so termed, the one open place or street, High —
Street, or Corso—Aphetais by name, lined, irregu- —
larly again, with various religious and other

monuments. It radiated on all sides into a maz

coil, an ambush, of narrow crooked lanes, up
and down, in which attack and defence would
necessarily be a matter of hand-to-hand fighting.
In the outskirts lay the citizens’ houses, roomier —

far than those of Athens, with spacious, walled
courts, almost in the country. Here, in contrast
208

ee ee

BS Pe ae OP eee, PS

4

LACEDAMON

to the homes of Athens, the legitimate wife had
ἃ real dignity, the unmarried woman a singular
freedom. There were no door-knockers: you
shouted at the outer gate to be let in. Between
the high walls lanes passed into country roads,
‘sacred ways to ancient sacro-sanct localities,
Therapne, Amycle, on this side or that, under
the shade of mighty plane-trees.

Plato, as you may remember, gives a hint
that, like all other visible things, the very trees
—how they grow—exercise an esthetic influence
on character. The diligent legislator therefore
would have his preferences, even in this matter
‘of the trees under which the citizens of the
‘Perfect City might sit down to rest. What
‘trees? you wonder. The olive? the laurel, as if
wrought in grandiose metal? the cypress? that
‘came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete:
‘the oak? we think it very expressive of strenuous
‘national character. Well! certainly the plane-
‘tree for one, characteristic tree of Lacedemon
‘then and now; a very tranquil and tranquillising
jobject, spreading its level or gravely curved
masses on the air as regally as the tree of Lebanon
itself. A vast grove of such was the distinguish-
ling mark of Lacedemon in any distant view of
it; that, and, as at Athens, a colossal image,
older than the days of Phidias—the Demos of
Lacedemon, it would seem, towering visibly
Lbove the people it protected. Below those
}mighty trees, on an island in their national river,
P. VI 209 P

PLATO AND PLATONISM

were the “ playing-fields,” where Lacedemonian
youth after sacrifice in the Ephebeum delighted
others rather than itself (no “shirking” was
allowed) with a sort of football, under rigorous
self-imposed rules——tearing, biting —a_ sport,
rougher even than our own, ef méme tres dangereux,
as our Attic neighbours, the French, say of the
English game.

They were orderly enough perforce, the boys,
the young men, within the city—-seen, but not
heard, except under regulations, when they made
the best music in the world. Our visitor from
Athens when he saw those youthful soldiers, or
military students, as Xenophon in his pretty
treatise on the polity of Lacedemon describes,
walking with downcast eyes, their hands meekly
hidden in their cloaks, might have thought them
young monks, had he known of such.

A little mountain town, however ambitious,

|

however successful in its ambition, would hardly |

be expected to compete with Athens, or Corinth,
itself a Dorian state, in art-production, yet had
not only its characteristic preferences in this
matter, in plastic and literary art, but had also
many venerable and beautiful buildings to show.
The Athenian visitor, who is standing now in
the central space of Lacedemon, notes here, as
being a trait also of the “Perfect City” of

academic theory, that precisely because these —
people find themselves very susceptible to the —

210

LACEDA MON

influences of form and colour and sound, to
external esthetic influence, but have withal a
special purpose, a certain strongly conceived dis-
ciplinary or ethic ideal, that therefore a peculiar
humour prevails among them, a self-denying
humour, in regard to these things. Those ancient
Pelopid princes, from whom the hereditary kings
of historic Lacedemon, come back from exile into
their old home, claim to be descended, had had
their palaces, with a certain Homeric, Asiatic
splendour, of wrought metal and the like; con-
siderable relics of which still remained, but as
public or sacred property now. At the time
when Plato’s scholar stands before them, the
houses of these later historic kings—two kings,
as you remember, always reigning together, in
some not quite clearly evolved differentiation of
_ the temporal and spiritual functions—were plain
_ enough ; the royal doors, when beggar or courtier
_ approached them, no daintier than Lycurgus had
prescribed for all true Lacedemonian citizens ;
' rude, strange things to look at, fashioned only,
like the ceilings within, with axe and saw, of old
mountain oak or pine from those great Taygetan
forests, whence came also the abundant iron,
which this stern people of iron and steel had
_ super-induced on that earlier dreamy age of silver
and gold—steel, however, admirably tempered
and wrought in its application to military use,
_and much sought after throughout Greece.
Layer upon layer, the relics of those earlier

21ῚΙι

PLATO AND PLATONISM

generations, a whole succession of remarkable
races, lay beneath the strenuous footsteps of the
present occupants, as there was old poetic legend
in the depths of their seemingly so practical or
prosaic souls. Nor beneath their feet only : the
relics of their worship, their sanctuaries, their
tombs, their very houses, were part of the scenery
of actual life. Our young Platonic visitor from
Athens, climbing through those narrow winding
lanes, and standing at length on the open platform
of the Aphetais, finds himself surrounded by
treasures, modest treasures of ancient architecture, —
dotted irregularly here and there about him, as
if with conscious design upon picturesque effect,
such irregularities sometimes carrying in them the
secret of expression, an accent. Old Alcman for
one had been alive to the poetic opportunities of
the place; boasts that he belongs to Lacedemon,
“‘abounding in sacred tripods” ; that it was here
the Heliconian Muses had revealed themselves
to him. If the private abodes even of royalty
were rude it was only that the splendour of places
dedicated to religion and the state might the more
abound. Most splendid of them all, the Stoa
Pehile, a cloister or portico with painted walls,
to which the spoils of the Persian war had been ~
devoted, ranged its pillars of white marble on one
side of the central space: on the other, connecting
those high memories with the task of the living,
lay the Choros, where, at the Gymnopedia, the
Spartan youth danced in honour of Apollo.
212

LACEDAMON

Scattered up and down among the monuments
of victory in battle were the 4eroa, tombs or
_ chapels of the heroes who had purchased it with
their blood—Pausanias, Leonidas, brought home
_ from Thermopyle forty years after his death.
“A pillar too,” says Pausanias, “‘is erected here,
| on which the paternal names are inscribed of
_ those who at Thermopyle sustained the attack of
_the Medes.” Here in truth all deities put on a
| martial habit—Aphrodite, the Muses, Eros him-
self, Athene Chalcicecus, Athene of the Brazen
_ House, an antique temple towering above the
rest, built from the spoils of some victory long
since forgotten. The name of the artist who
made the image of the tutelary goddess was
remembered in the annals of early Greek art,
| Gitiades, a native of Lacedemon. He had com-
_ posed a hymn also in her praise. Could we have
seen the place he had restored rather than con-
| structed, with its covering of mythological reliefs
in brass or bronze, perhaps Homer’s descriptions
_ of a seemingly impossible sort of metallic archi-
_ tecture would have been less taxing to his reader’s
imagination. Those who in other places had
lost their taste amid the facile splendours of a
_ later day, might here go to school again.

| Throughout Greece, in fact, it was the Doric
_ style which came to prevail as the religious or
_hieratic manner, never to be surpassed for that
| purpose, as the Gothic style seems likely to do
with us. Though it is not exclusively the in-
213

PLATO AND PLATONISM

vention of Dorian men, yet, says Miller, “the
Dorian character created the Doric architecture,”
and he notes in it, especially, the severity of the
perfectly straight, smartly tapering line of its
column ; the bold projection of the capital; the
alternation of long unornamented plain surfaces
with narrower bands of decorated work; the
profound shadows ; the expression of security, of
harmony, infused throughout; the magnificent
pediment crowning the whole, like the cornice
of mountain wall beyond, around, and above it.
Standing there in the Aphetais, amid these vener-
able works of art, the visitor could not forget the
natural architecture about him. As the Dorian
genius had differentiated itself from the common
Hellenic type in the heart of the mountains of
Epirus, so here at last, in its final and most
characteristic home, it was still surrounded by
them ἱ---ὐὀφρυᾷ τε καὶ κοιλαίνεται.

We know, some of us, what such mountain
neighbourhood means. ‘The wholesome vigour,
the clearness and purity they maintain in matters
such as air, light, water; how their presence
multiplies the contrasts, the element of light and
shadow, in things; the untouched perfection of
the minuter ornament, flower or crystal, they
permit one sparingly ; their reproachful aloof-
ness, though so close to us, keeping sensitive
minds at least in a sort of moral alliance with
their remoter solitudes. ‘The whole life of
the Lacedemonian community,” says Miller,

214

LACEDAMON

_ “had a secluded, impenetrable, and secret char-
acter.” You couldn’t really know it unless you
were of it.
| A system which conceived the whole of life
as matter of attention, patience, a fidelity to
᾿ς detail, like that of good soldiers and musicians,
_ could not but tell also on the merest handicrafts,
_ constituting them in the fullest sense of a cra/Z.
If the money of Sparta was, or had recently
been, of cumbrous iron, that was because its
trade had a sufficient variety of stock to be
mainly by barter, and we may suppose the
market (into which, like our own academic
| youth at Oxford, young Spartans were forbidden
to go) full enough of business—many a busy
workshop in those winding lanes. The lower
arts certainly no true Spartan might practise ;
but even Helots, artisan Helots, would have
_ more than was usual elsewhere of that sharpened
| intelligence and the disciplined hand in such
- labour which really dignify those who follow it.
In Athens itself certain Lacedemonian com-
_ modities were much in demand, things of military
service or for every-day use, turned out with
| flawless adaptation to their purpose.
| The Helots, then, to whom this business
exclusively belonged, a race of slaves, dis-
) tinguishable however from the slaves or serfs
' who tilled the land, handing on their mastery

) in those matters in a kind of guild, father to

son, through old-established families of flute-
| 215

PLATO AND PLATONISM

players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus

left their hereditary lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lses
(to borrow an expression from French feudalism)
in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for
the proper functions of gentlemen—cyors, leisure,
in the two senses of the word, which in truth
involve one another—their whole time free, to
be told out in austere schools. Long easeful
nights, with more than enough to eat and drink,
the “‘illiberal” pleasures of appetite, as Aristotle
and Plato agree in thinking them, are of course
the appropriate reward or remedy of those who
work painfully with their hands, and seem to
have been freely conceded to those Helots, who
by concession of the State, from first to last their
legal owner, were in domestic service, and some-
times much petted in the house, though by no
means freely conceded to the “ golden youth” of
Lacedemon—youth of gold, or gilded steel.
The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust
his young master with the coarseness of vice, is
probably a fable; and there are other stories
full of a touching spirit of natural service, of
submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admira-
tion for the brilliant qualities of one trained
perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor

must have become, in his measure, actually a :

sharer in them. Just here, for once, we see that

slavish ἦθος, the servile range of sentiment, which

ought to accompany the condition of slavery, if

it be indeed, as Aristotle supposes, one of the
216

LACEDAMON

natural relationships between man and man,
idealised, or esthetically right, pleasant and
proper; the ἀρετή, or “best possible condition,”
οὗ the young servitor as such, including a sort of
bodily worship, and a willingness to share the
keen discipline which had developed the so
attractive gallantry of his youthful lords.

A great wave, successive waves, of invasion,
sufficiently remote to have lost already all
historic truth of detail, had left them—these
_Helots, and the Pericci, in the country round
_about—thus to serve among their own kinsmen,
though so close to them in lineage, so much on
a level with their masters in essential physical
qualities that to the last they could never be
entirely subdued in spirit. Patient modern
research, following the track of a deep-rooted
national tradition veiled in the mythological
figments which centre in what is called “ The
Return of the Heraclidz,” reveals those northern
immigrants or invaders, at various points on
their way, dominant all along it, from a certain
deep vale in the heart of the mountains of
Epirus southwards, gradually through zone after
zone of more temperate lowland, to reach their
perfection, highlanders from first to last, in this
mountain “ hollow ” of Lacedemon. They claim
supremacy, not as Dorian invaders, but as kins-
men of the old Achzan princes of the land; yet
it was to the fact of conquest, to the necessity of
217

PLATO AND PLATONISM

maintaining a position so strained, like that, as
Aristotle expressly pointed out, of a beleaguered
encampment in an enemy’s territory, that the
singular institutions of Lacedemon, the half-
military, half-monastic spirit, which prevailed
in this so gravely beautiful place, had been
originally due. But observe !—Its moral and
political system, in which that slavery was so
significant a factor, its discipline, its esthetic and
other scruples, its peculiar moral ἦθος, having
long before our Platonic student comes thither
attained its original and proper ends, survived,—
there is the point! survived as an end in itself,
as a matter of sentiment, of public and perhaps
still more of personal pride, though of the finer,
the very finest sort, in one word as an ddeal.
Pericles, as you remember, in his famous vindi-
cation of the Athenian system, makes his hearers
understand that the ends of the Lacedemonian
people might have been attained with less self-
sacrifice than theirs. But still, there it remained,
ἡ δίαιτα Awpixj—the genuine Laconism of the
Lacedzmonians themselves, their traditional con-
ception of life, with its earnestness, its precision
and strength, its loyalty to its own type, its
impassioned completeness ; a spectacle, zesthetic-
ally, at least, very interesting, like some perfect
instrument shaping to what they visibly were,
the most beautiful of all people, in Greece, in
the world.

Gymnastic, “ bodily exercise,” of course, does

218

LACEDAMON

not always and necessarily effect the like of that.
A certain perfectly preserved old Roman mosaic
pavement in the Lateran Museum, presents a
terribly fresh picture of the results of another
sort of “training,” the monstrous development
_by a cruel art, by exercise, of this or that muscle,
changing boy or man into a merely mechanic
instrument with which his breeders might make
money by amusing the Roman people. Victor
-Hugo’s odius dream of L’ homme qui rit, must have
had something of a prototype among those old
Roman gladiators. The Lacedemonians, says
Xenophon on the other hand, ὁμοίως ἀπό τε τῶν
σκελῶν Kal ἀπὸ χειρῶν Kal ἀπὸ τραχήλου γυμνάζονται.
Here too, that is to say, they aimed at, they
found, proportion, Pythagorean symmetry or
‘music, and bold as they could be in their
exercises (it was a Lacedemonian who, at
Olympia, for the first time threw aside the
heavy girdle and ran naked to the goal) forbade
all that was likely to disfigure the body.
Though we must not suppose all ties of nature
rent asunder, nor all connexion between parents
and children in those genial, retired houses at an
end in very early life, it was yet a strictly public
education which began with them betimes, and
with a very clearly defined programme, con-
servative of ancient traditional and unwritten
rules, an aristocratic education for the few, the
liberales—* liberals,” as we may say, in that the
‘proper sense of the word. It made them, in
| 219

PLATO AND PLATONISM

very deed, the lords, the masters, of those they
were meant by-and-by to rule ; masters, of their
very souls, of their imagination, enforcing on
them an ideal, by a sort of spiritual authority,
thus backing, or backed by, a very effective
organisation of “the power of the sword.” In
speaking of Lacedemon, you see, it comes
naturally to speak out of proportion, it might
seem, of its youth, and of the education of its
outh. But in fact if you enter into the spirit
of Lacedemonian youth, you may conceive
Lacedemonian manhood for yourselves. You —
divine already what the boy, the youth, so late —
in obtaining his majority, in becoming a man,
came to be in the action of life, and on the
battle-field. “In a Doric state,” says Muller, ©
“ education was, on the whole, a matter of more —
importance than government.”
A young Lacedemonian, then, of the privi-
leged class left his home, his tender nurses in
those large, quiet old suburban houses early, for —
a public school, a schooling all the stricter as
years went on, to be followed, even so, by a
peculiar kind of barrack-life, the temper of which, ~
a sort of military monasticism (it must be re- —
peated) would beset him to the end. Though —
in the gymnasia of Lacedemon no idle by-
standers, no—well! Platonic loungers after truth —
or what not—were permitted, yet we are told,
neither there nor in Sparta generally, neither
there nor anywhere else, were the boys permitted —
220

LACEDAMON

to be alone. If a certain love of reserve, of
seclusion, characterised the Spartan citizen as
such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of that wrench
from a soft home into the imperative, inevitable
_gaze of his fellows, broad, searching, minute, his
regret for, his desire to regain, moral and mental
even more than physical ease. And his educa-
tion continued late; he could seldom think of
| marriage till the age of thirty. Ethically it
aimed at the reality, esthetically at the expres-
sion, of reserved power, and from the first set its
subject on the thought of his personal dignity,
οὗ self-command, in the artistic way of a good
musician, a good soldier. It is noted that “the
general accent of the Doric dialect has itself the
character not of question or entreaty, but of
command or dictation.” The place of deference,
of obedience, was large in the education of
_Lacedeamonian youth; and they never com-
plained. It involved however for the most part,
/as with ourselves, the government of youth by
itself; an implicit subordination of the younger
} to the older, in many degrees. Quite early in
life, at school, they found that superiors and
} inferiors, ὅμοιοι and ὑπομείονες, there really were ;
and their education proceeded with systematic
boldness on that fact. Eipny, μελλείρην, σιδεύνης,
and the like—words, titles, which indicate an
unflinching elaboration of the attitudes of youth-
ful subordination and command with respon-
-sibility—-remain as a part of what we might
221

PLATO AND PLATONISM

call their “public-school slang.” They ate
together “‘in their divisions” (ἀγέλαι) on much |
the same fare every day at a sort of messes; not
reclined, like Ionians or Asiatics, but like heroes,
the princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on |
their wooden benches; were “inspected” fre-
quently, and by free use of wud voce examination
“became adepts in presence of mind,” in mental
readiness and vigour, in the brief mode of speech |
Plato commends, which took and has kept its —
name from them; with no warm baths allowed; ©
a daily plunge in their river required. Yes!
The beauty of these most beautiful of all people
was a male beauty, far remote from feminine
tenderness; had the expression of a certain
ascésis in it; was like un-sweetened wine. In
comparison with it, beauty of another type
might seem to be wanting in edge or accent.
And they could be silent. Of the positive
uses of the negation of speech, like genuine
scholars of Pythagoras, the Lacedemonians
were well aware, gaining strength and intensity
by repression. Long spaces of enforced silence
had doubtless something to do with that expres-
sive brevity of utterance, which could be also,
when they cared, so inexpressive of what their
intentions really were—something to do with
the habit of mind to which such speaking would ~
come naturally. In contrast with the ceaseless —
prattle of Athens, Lacedemonian assemblies lasted
as short a time as possible, all standing. A
222

LACEDAMON

_Lacedemonian ambassador being asked in whose
name he was come, replies: “In the name of
the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own.”
What they lost in extension they gained in
_ depth.

Had our traveller been tempted to ask a
young Lacedemonian to return his visit at Athens, _

permission would have been refused him. He
belonged to a community bent above all things

on keeping indelibly its own proper colour. Its

more strictly mental education centered, in fact,
upon a faithful training of the memory, again in

the spirit of Pythagoras, in regard to what seemed
best worth remembering. Hard and practical as
Lacedemonians might seem, they lived neverthe-
less very much by imagination ; and to train the
memory, to preoccupy their minds with the past,
as in our own classic or historic culture of youth,

_ was in reality to develope a vigorous imagination.

In music (μουσική) as they conceived it, there

would be no strictly selfish reading, writing or

listening ; and if there was little a Lacedemonian
lad had to read or write at all, he had much to
learn, like a true conservative, by heart: those
unwritten laws of which the Council of Elders
was the authorised depositary, and on which the
whole public procedure of the state depended ;
the archaic forms of religious worship; the
names of their kings, of victors in their games or
in battle ; the brief record of great events ; the
oracles they had received; the rhetrai, from
223

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Lycurgus downwards, composed in metrical Lace-
demonian Greek ; their history and law, in short,
actually set to music, by Terpander and others, as
was said. What the Lacedemonian learned by
heart he was for the most part to sing, and we
catch a glimpse, an echo, of their boys in school
chanting ; one of the things in old Greece one
would have liked best to see and hear—youth-
ful beauty and strength in perfect service —a
manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism,
though it may make one think of the novices
at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own
old English schools, nay, of the young Lace-
dzmonian’s cousins at Sion, singing there the law
and its praises.

The Platonic student of the ways of the Lace-
dzemonians observes then, is interested in observ-
ing, that their education, which indeed makes no
sharp distinction between mental and _ bodily
exercise, results as it had begun in “ music ”—
ends with body, mind, memory above all, at their
finest, on great show-days, in the dance. Austere,
self-denying Lacedemon had in fact one of the
largest theatres in Greece, in part scooped out
boldly on the hill-side, built partly of enormous
blocks of stone, the foundations of which may
still be seen. We read what Plato says in The
Republic of “imitations,” of the imitative arts,
imitation reaching of course its largest develop-
ment on the stage, and are perhaps surprised at
the importance he assigns, in every department of

224

LACEDAMON

human culture, to a matter of that kind. But
here as elsewhere to see was to understand. We
| should have understood Plato’s drift in his long
criticism and defence of imitative art, his careful
“system of rules concerning it, caiitd we have
seen the famous dramatic Lacedemonian dancing.
They danced a theme, a subject. A complex and
elaborate art this must necessarily have been, but,
as we may gather, as concise, direct, economically
expressive, in all its varied sound and motion, as
those swift, lightly girt, zmpromptu Lacedemonian
‘sayings. With no movement of voice or hand or
foot, παραλειπόμενον, unconsidered, as Plato forbids,
it was the perfect flower of their correction, of
that minute patience and care which ends in a
perfect expressiveness; not a note, a glance, a
touch, but told obediently in the promotion of a
firmly grasped mental conception, as in that
perfect poetry or sculpture or painting, in which
“the finger of the master is on every part of his
work.” We have nothing really like it, and to
comprehend it must remember that, though it
took place in part at least on the stage of a theatre
—was in fact a ballet-dance, it had also the
character both of a liturgical service and of a
military inspection; and yet, in spite of its
severity of rule, was a natural expression of the

delight of all who took part in it.

So perfect a spectacle the gods themselves
might be thought pleased to witness; were in
im P. VI 225 Q

PLATO AND PLATONISM

consequence presented with it as an important
element in the religious worship of the Lace-
demonians, in whose life religion had even a
larger part than with the other Greeks, con-
spicuously religious, δεισιδαίμονες, involved in reli--
gion or superstition, as the Greeks generally were,
More closely even than their so scrupulous
neighbours they associated the state, its acts and
officers, with a religious sanction, religious usages,
apa ES traditions. While the responsibilities of
secular government lay upon the Ephors, those.
mysteriously dual, at first sight useless, and yet 80.
sanctimoniously observed kings, “οἵ the house of
Heracles,” with something of the splendour of the
old Achzan or Homeric kings, in life as also in
death, the splendid funerals, the passionate archaic
laments which then followed them, were in fact
of spiritual or priestly rank, the living and active
centre of a poetic religious system, binding them:
‘“‘in a beneficent connexion” to the past, and in
the present with special closeness to the oracle of
Delphi.

Of that catholic or general centre of Greell
religion the Lacedemonians were the hereditary
and privileged guardians, as also the peculiar
people of Apollo, the god of Delphi; but,
observe ! of Apollo in a peculiar development of
his deity. In the dramatic business of Lace-
demon, centering in these almost liturgical
dances, there was little comic acting. The
fondness of the slaves for buffoonery and loud

226

LACEDAMON

laughter, was to their master, who had no taste
for the like, a reassuring note of his superiority.
He therefore indulged them in it on occasion,
and you might fancy that the religion of a people
‘so strenuous, ever so full of their dignity, must
) have been a religion of gloom. It was otherwise.
‘The Lacedemonians, like those monastic persons
of whom they so often remind one, as a matter
᾿ of fact however surprising, were a very cheerful
Hpeople; and the religion of which they had
}so much, deeply imbued everywhere with an
Foptimism as of hopeful youth, encouraged that
disposition, was above all a religion of sanity.
} The observant Platonic visitor might have taken
note that something of that purgation of religious
Hthought and sentiment, of its expression in
literature, recommended in Plato’s Repub/ic, had
been already quietly effected here, towards the
establishment of a kind of cheerful daylight in
‘men’s tempers.

_ In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity,
of that harmony of functions, which is the
§ Aristotelian definition of health, Apollo, sanest of
ithe national gods, became also the tribal or home
Mgod of Lacedemon. That common Greek
worship of Apollo they made especially their own,
Pbut (just here is the noticeable point) with a
marked preference for the human element in him,
for the mental powers of his being over those
elemental or physical forces of production, which
she also mystically represents, and which resulted
227

PLATO AND PLATONISM

sometimes in an orgiastic, an unintellectual, or |
even an immoral service. He remains youthful
and unmarried. In congruitv with this, it is
observed that, in a quasi-Roman worship, abstract
qualities and relationships, ideals, become sub-
sidiary objects of religious consideration around
him, such as sleep, death, fear, fortune, laughter
even. Nay, other gods also are, so to speak,
Apollinised, adapted to the Apolline presence ;
Aphrodite armed, Enyalius in fetters, perhaps
that he may never depart thence. Amateurs
everywhere of the virile element in life, the
Lacedemonians, in truth, impart to all things an
intellectual character. Adding a vigorous logic
to seemingly animal instincts, for them courage
itself becomes, as for the strictly philosophic mind
at Athens, with Plato and Aristotle, an intel-
lectual condition, a form of right knowledge.

Such assertion of the consciously human
interest in a religion based originally on a pre-
occupation with the unconscious forces of nature,
was exemplified in the great religious festival of
Lacedemon. Asa spectator of the Hyacithia, our
Platonic student would have found himself one of
a large body of strangers, gathered together from
Lacedemon and its dependent towns and villages,
within the ancient precincts of Amycle, at the
season between spring and summer when under
the first fierce heat of the year the abundant
hyacinths fade from the fields. Blue flowers,

228

LACEDHAMON

you remember, are the rarest, to many eyes the
loveliest; and the Lacedemonians with their guests
‘were met together to celebrate the death of the
hapless lad who had lent his name to them,
Hyacinthus, son of Apollo, or son of an ancient
mortal king who had reigned in this very place ;
in either case, greatly beloved of the god, who
had slain him by sad accident as they played at
quoits together delightfully, to his immense
sorrow. That Boreas (the north-wind) had
maliciously miscarried the discus, is a circum-
‘stance we hardly need to remind us that we have
here, of course, only one of many transparent,
unmistakable, parables or symbols of the great
solar change, so sudden in the south, like the
story of Proserpine, Adonis, and the like. But
here, more completely perhaps than in any other
of those stories, the primary elemental sense had
obscured itself behind its really tragic analogue in
human life, behind the figure of the dying youth.
We know little of the details of the feast;
incidentally, that Apollo was vested on the
occasion in a purple robe, brought in ceremony
from Lacedemon, woven there, Pausanias tells us,
in a certain house called from that circumstance
Chiton. You may remember how sparing these
Lacedemonians were of such dyed raiment, of any
but the natural and virgin colouring of the fleece ;
that purple or red, however, was the colour of
their royal funerals, as indeed Amycle itself was
famous for purple stuffs—<Amyclee vesies. As
229

PLATO AND PLATONISM

the general order of the feast, we discern clearly
a single day of somewhat shrill gaiety, between
two days of significant mourning after the manner
of All Souls’ Day, directed from mimic grief for
a mythic object, to a really sorrowful com-
memoration by the whole Lacedemonian people
—each separate family for its own deceased
members.

It was so again with those other youthful
demi-gods, the Dioscuri, themselves also, in old
heroic time, resident in this venerable place:
Amycle@i fratres, fraternal leaders of the Lace-
demonian people. Their statues at this date were
numerous in Laconia, or the docana, primitive
symbols of them, those two upright beams of
wood, carried to battle before the two kings,
until it happened that through their secret enmity
a certain battle was lost, after which one king
only proceeded to the field, and one part only of
that token of fraternity, the other remaining at
Sparta. Well! they were two stars, you know,
at their original birth in men’s minds, Gemum,
virginal fresh stars of dawn, rising and setting
alternately—those two half-earthly, half-celestial
brothers, one of whom, Polydeuces, was immortal.
The other, Castor, the younger, subject to old
age and death, had fallen in battle, was found
breathing his last. Polydeuces thereupon, at his
own prayer, was permitted to die: with undying
fraternal affection, had forgone one moiety of his
privilege, and lay in the grave for a day in his

230

LACEDAMON

brother’s stead, but shone out again on the
morrow; the brothers thus ever coming and
_ going, interchangeably, but both alike gifted now
_ with immortal youth.

In their origin, then, very obviously elemental
deities, they were thus become almost wholly
humanised, fraternised with the Lacedemonian
_ people, their closest friends of the whole celestial
company, visitors, as fond legend told, at their
_very hearths, found warming themselves in the
half-light at their rude fire-sides. ‘Themselves
_ thus visible on occasion, at all times in devout art,
_ they were the starry patrons of all that youth was
proud of, delighted in, horsemanship, games,
battle ; and always with that profound fraternal
sentiment. Brothers, comrades, who could not
live without each other, they were the most
fitting patrons of a place in which friendship,
comradeship, like theirs, came to so much.
Lovers of youth they remained, those enstarred
types of it, arrested thus at that moment of
_ miraculous good fortune as a consecration of the
clean, youthful friendship, “‘ passing even the love
of woman,” which, by system, and under the
sanction of their founder’s name, elaborated into
a kind of art, became an elementary part of
education. A part of their duty and discipline,
it was also their great solace and encouragement.
_ The beloved and the lover, side by side through
their long days of eager labour, and above all on
_ the battlefield, became respectively, dirns, the

231

PLATO AND PLATONISM

hearer, and εἰσπνήλας, the inspirer; the elder

inspiring the younger with his own strength and
noble taste in things.

What, it has been asked, what was there to —
occupy persons of the privileged class in Lace-_
demon from morning to night, thus cut off as __
they were from politics and business, and many —
of the common interests of men’s lives? Our |
Platonic visitor would have asked rather, Why ©
this strenuous task-work, day after day ; why this —
loyalty to a system, so costly to you individually, —

though it may be thought to have survived its
original purpose; this laborious, endless, educa-
tion, which does not propose to give you anything

very useful or enjoyable in itself? An intelligent —

young Spartan might have replied: “Τὸ the end
that I myself may be a perfect work of art, issu-
ing thus into the eyes of all Greece.” He might
have observed—we may safely observe for him—
that the institutions of his country, whose he was,
had a beauty in themselves, as we may observe
also of some at least of our own institutions,
educational or religious: that they bring out,

for instance, the lights and shadows of human —

character, and relieve the present by maintaining
in it an ideal sense of the past. He might have
added that he had his friendships to solace him ;
and to encourage him, the sense of honour.

Honour, friendship, loyalty to the ideal of the

232

LACEDAMON

past, himself as a work of art! There was
much of course in his answer. Yet still, after
all, to understand, to be capable of, such motives,
was itself but a result of that exacting discipline
of character we are trying to account for; and
the question still recurs, To what purpose ?
Why, with no prospect of Israel’s reward, are
_ you as scrupulous, minute, self-taxing, as he?
_A tincture of asceticism in the Lacedemonian
rule may remind us again of the monasticism of
the Middle Ages. But then, monastic severity
_ was for the purging of a troubled conscience, or
for the hope of an immense prize, neither of
which conditions is to be supposed here. In
fact the surprise of Saint Paul, as a practical
man, at the slightness of the reward for which
a Greek spent himself, natural as it is about all
pagan perfection, is especially applicable about
_ these Lacedemonians, who indeed had actually
invented that so “corruptible” and essentially
_ worthless parsley crown in place of the more
tangible prizes of an earlier age. Strange
people! Where, precisely, may be the spring
of action in you, who are so severe to yourselves ;
you who, in the words of Plato’s supposed
objector that the rulers of the ideal state are not
to be envied, have nothing you can really call
your own, but are like hired servants in your
own houses,—gui manducatis panem doloris ὃ

Another day-dream, you may say, about those
233

PLATO AND PLATONISM

obscure ancient people, it was ever so difficult —
really to know, who had hidden their actual life
with so much success; but certainly a quite
natural dream upon the paradoxical things we ©
are told of them, on good authority. It is —
because they make us ask that question ; puzzle —
us by a paradoxical idealism in life; are thus —
distinguished from their neighbours ; that, like —
some of our old English places of education, —
though we might not care to live always αἴ
school there, it is good to visit them on occasion ; _
as some philosophic Athenians, as we have now —
seen, loved to do, at least in thought.

234

IX

THE REPUBLIC

“THE Republic,” as we may realise it mentally
within the limited proportions of some quite
imaginable Greek city, is the protest of Plato, in
enduring stone, in law and custom more im-
perishable still, against the principle of flam-
boyancy or fluidity in things, and in men’s
thoughts about them. Political “ideals” may
provide not only types for new states, but also,
in humbler function, a due corrective of the
errors, thus renewing the life, of old ones. But
like other medicines the corrective or critical
ideal may come too late, too near the natural
end of things. The theoretic attempt made by
Plato to arrest the process of disintegration in
the life of Athens, of Greece, by forcing it back
upon a simpler and more strictly Hellenic type,
ended, so far as they were concerned, in theory.

It comes of Plato’s literary skill, his really
dramatic handling of a conversation, that one
subject rises naturally out of another in the

235

PLATO AND PLATONISM

course of it, that in the lengthy span of The q
Republic, though they are linked together after —
all with a true logical coherency, now justice,
now the ideal state, now the analysis of the
individual soul, or the nature of a true philo-

sopher, or his right education, or the law of i |
political change, may seem to emerge as the _

proper subject of the whole book. It is thus
incidentally, and by way of setting forth the
definition of Justice or Rightness, as if in big ©
letters, that the constitution of the typically
Right State is introduced into what, according —

to one of its traditional titles—tIep) Δικαιοσύνης--- ὦ

might actually have figured as a dialogue on the ©

nature of Justice. But τόδ᾽ ἣν ὡς ἔοικε προοίμιον----

the discussion of the theory of the abstract and 1
invisible rightness was but to introduce the —
practical architect, the creator of the right state.

\ Plato then assumes rather than demonstrates that Ι β
‘so facile parallel between the individual con- —
' sciousness and the social aggregate, passes lightly

| backwards and forwards from the rightness or —
_wrongness, the normal or abnormal conditions, —
of the one to those of the other, from you and ᾿
_me to the “colossal man,’ > whose good or bad —
| qualities, being written up there on a larger ©
Beas, are easier to read, and if one may Say 80,
“once in bricks and mortar,” though but on —
‘paper, is lavish of a world as it should be. A
strange world in some ways! Let us look from ~
the small type of the individual to the monu-
236

THE REPUBLIC

mental inscription on those high walls, as he
proposes; while his fancy wandering further
and further, over tower and temple, its streets
and the people in them, as if forgetful of his
original purpose he tells us all he sees in thought
of the City of the Perfect.

᾿ To the view of Plato, as of all other Greek
_ citizens, the state, in its local habitation here or
there, had been in all cases the gift or ordinance
_ of one or another real though half-divine founder,
some Solon or Lycurgus, thereafter a proper
object of piety, of filial piety, for ever, among
_ those to whom he had bequeathed the blessings
of civilised life. Himself actually of Solon’s
lineage, Plato certainly is less aware than those
_ who study these matters in the “ historic spirit ”
_ of the modern world that for the most part, like ,
other more purely physical things, states “are
/ not made, but grow.” Yet his own work as δ᾽
designer or architect of what shall be new is
| developed quite naturally out of the question
_ how an already existing state, such as the actual
_ Athens of the day, might secure its pre-eminence,
or its very existence. Close always, by the
| concrete turn of his genius, to the facts of the
_ place and the hour, his first thought is to suggest
| a remedy for the peculiar evils of the Athenians
αἵ that moment; and in his delineation of the
_ ideal state he does but elevate what Athens in
| particular, a ship so early going to pieces, might
_ well be forced to become for her salvation, were
237

DO oe)

PLATO AND PLATONISM

it still possible, into the eternal type of veritable

statecraft, of a city as such, “a city at unity in ©
itself,” defiant of time. He seems to be seeking
in the first instance a remedy for the sick, a

desperate political remedy; and thereupon, as —
happens with really philosophic enquirers, the
view enlarges on all sides around him.

Those evils of Athens then, which were —

found in very deed somewhat later to be the ~

infirmity of Greece as a whole, when, though its —
versatile gifts of intellect might constitute it the ©
teacher of its eventual masters, it was found too ©
incoherent politically to hold its own against —
Rome :—those evils of Athens, of Greece, came —
from an exaggerated assertion of the fluxional, —
flamboyant, centrifugal Ionian element in the —
Hellenic character. They could be cured only
by a counter-assertion of the centripetal Dorian —
ideal, as actually seen best at Lacedemon; by
the way of simplification, of a rigorous imitation
of all things, of art and life, of the souls, aye, —
and of the very bodies of men, as being the
integral factors of all beside. It is in those ~

‘simpler, corrected outlines of a reformed Athens —

that Plato finds the “eternal form” of the State, —

toe

_ of a city as such, like a well-knit athlete, or one —
_of those perfectly disciplined Spartan dancers.
᾿ His actual purpose therefore is at once reforming

and conservative. The drift of his charge is, in
his own words, that no political constitution then
existing is suitable to the philosophic, that is to

238 |

THE REPUBLIC

say, as he conceives it, to the aristocratic or
_ kingly nature. How much that means we shall
866 by and bye, when he maintains that in the
City of the Perfect the kings will be philo-
-sophers. It means that those called, like the
gifted, lost Alcibiades, to be the saviours of the
state, as a matter of fact become instead its
destroyers. The proper soil in which alone that
| precious exotic seed, the kingly or aristocratic
seed, will attain its proper qualities, in which
alone it will not yield wine inferior to its best,
or rather, instead of bearing any wine at all,
_ become a deadly poison, is still to be laid down
according to rules of art, the ethic or political
art; but once provided must be jealously kept
from innovation. Organic unity with one’s self,
body and soul, is the well-being, the rightness,
or righteousness, or justice of the individual, of
the microcosm ; but is the ideal also, it supplies
the true definition, of the well-being of the
macrocosm, of the social organism, the state.
On this Plato has to insist, to the disadvantage
of what we actually see in Greece, in Athens,
with all its intricacies of disunion, faction against
faction, as displayed in the later books of Thucy-
dides. Remember ! the question Plato is asking
throughout The Republic, with a touch perhaps
of the narrowness, the fanaticism, or “ fixed idea,”
of Machiavel himself, is, not how shall the state,
the place we must live in, be gay or rich or
populous, but strong—strong enough to remain
239

PLATO AND PLATONISM

itself, to resist solvent influences within or from
without, such as would deprive it not merely of
the accidental notes of prosperity but of its own
very being.

Now what hinders this strengthening macro-
cosmic unity, the oneness of the political
organism with itself, is that the unit, the indi-
vidual, the microcosm, fancies itself, or would
fain be, a rival macrocosm, independent, many-
sided, all-sufficient. To make him that, as
you know, had been the conscious aim of the
Athenian system in the education of its youth,
as also in its later indirect education of the
citizen by the way of political life. It was the
ideal of one side of the Greek character in
general, of much that was brilliant in it and
seductive to others. In this sense, Pericles
himself interprets the educational function of the
city towards the citizen :—to take him as he is,
and develope him to the utmost on all his
various sides, with a variety in those parts how-
ever, as Plato thinks, by no means likely to
promote the unity of the whole, of the state as
such, which must move all together if it is to
move at all, at least against its foes. With this
at first sight quite limited purpose then, para-
doxical as it might seem to those whose very
ideal lay precisely in such manifold development,
to Plato himself perhaps, manifold as his own
genius and culture conspicuously were—para-

240

THE REPUBLIC

doxical as it might seem, Plato’s demand is for the
limitation, the simplifying, of those constituent
parts or units; that the unit should be indeed
no more than a part, it might be a very small
part, in a community, which needs, if it is still
to subsist, the wholeness of an army in motion,
of the stars in their courses, of well-concerted
music, if you prefer that figure, or, as the
modern reader might perhaps object, of a
machine. The design of Plato is to bring back
{δε Athenian people, the Greeks, to thoughts of
order, to disinterestedness in their functions, to
_ that self-concentration of soul on one’s own part,
that loyal concession of their proper parts to
others, on which such order depends, to a love
of it, a sense of its extreme esthetic beauty and
fitness, according to that indefectible definition
of Justice, of what is right, TO ἕν πράττειν, TO τὰ
αὑτοῦ πράττειν, in Opposition, as he thinks, to those
so fascinating conditions of Injustice, ποικιλία,
πλεονεξία, πολυπραγμοσύνη, figuring away, as they
do sometimes, so brilliantly. .

For Plato would have us understand that men
are in truth after all naturally much simpler, |
much more limited in character and capacity, —
than they seem. Such diversity of parts and Ὁ
function as is presupposed in his definition of ©
Justice has been fixed by nature itself on human —
life. The individual, as such, humble as his
_ proper function may be, is unique in fitness for,
in a consequent “call” to, that function. We
P. VI 241 R

PLATO AND PLATONISM

know how much has been done to educate the
world, under the supposition that man is a
creature of very malleable substance, indifferent
in himself, pretty much what influences may
make of him. Plato, on the other hand, assures
us that no one of us “is like another all in all.” —
Πρῶτον μὲν φύεται ἕκαστος ob πάνυ ὅμοιος ἑκάστῳ, ἀλλὰ
διαφέρων τὴν φύσιν, ἄλλος ἐπ ἄλλου ἔργου πρᾶξιν.---Βαῖ
for this, social Justice, according to its eternal
form or definition, would in fact be nowhere
applicable. Once for all he formulates clearly
that important notion of the function, (ἔργον) of a
thing, or of a person. It is that which he alone
can do, or he better than any one else.

That Plato should exaggerate this definiteness
in men’s natural vocations, thus to be read as it
were in “ plain figures” upon each, is one of the

necessities of his position. Effect of nature itself, —

such inequality between men, this differentiation
of one from another, is to be further promoted

by all the cunning of the political art. The —

counter-assertion of the natural indifference of —

men, their pliability to circumstance, while it is
certainly truer to our modern experience, is also
in itself more hopeful, more congruous with all

the processes of education. But for Plato the

natural inequality of men, if it is the natural

ground of that versatility, (ποικιλία), of the wrong- —
ness or Injustice he must needs correct, will be
the natural ground of Justice also, as essentially —

a unity or harmony enforced on disparate
242

THE REPUBLIC

elements, unity as of an army, or an order of
-monks, organic, mechanic, liturgical, whichever
you please to call it; but a kind of music
certainly, if the founder, the master, of the state,
for his proper part, can but compose the scattered
notes.

Just here then is the original basis of society—
᾿ γίγνεται τοίνυν ὡς ἐγῴμαι πόλις ἐπειδὴ τυγχάνει ἡμῶν
ἕκαστος οὐκ αὐτάρκης---αἴ first in its humblest form ;
simply because one can dig and another spin ;
yet already with anticipations of The Republic,
_ of the City of the Perfect, as developed by Plato,
as indeed also, beyond it, of some still more
distant system “of the services of angels and
men in a wonderful order”; for the somewhat
visionary towers of Plato’s Republic blend of
course with those of the Cruitas Dez of Augustine.
Only, though its top may one day “reach
unto heaven,” it by no means came down
thence ; but, as Plato conceives, arises out of the
earth, out of the humblest natural wants. Grote
was right.—There is a very shrewd matter-of-
fact utilitarian among the dramatis persone which
together make up the complex genius of Plato.
Ποιήσει ὡς ἐγῴώμαι τὴν πόλιν ἡμετέρα xpela.—Society 15
produced by our physical necessities, our in-
equality in regard to them :—an inequality in
three broad divisions of unalterable, incom-
municable type, of natural species, among men,
with corresponding differentiation of political
and social functions: three firmly outlined orders

243

PLATO AND PLATONISM

in the state, like three primitive castes, propagat-
ing, reinforcing, their peculiarities of condition,
as Plato will propose, by exclusive intermarriage,
each within itself. As in the class of the artisans
(of δημιουργοί) Some can make swords best, others
pitchers, so, on the larger survey, there will be
found those who can use those swords, or, again,
think, teach, pray, or lead an army, a whole
body of swordsmen, best, thus defining within
impassable barriers three essential species of
citizenship—the productive class, the military
order, the governing class thirdly, or spiritual
order.

The social system is in fact like the constitu-
tion of a human being. There are those who
have capacity, a vocation, to conceive thoughts,
and rule their brethren by intellectual power.
Collectively of course they are the mind or
brain, the mental element, in the social organism.
There are those secondly, who have by nature
executive force, who will naturally wear arms,
the sword in the sheath perhaps, but who will
also on occasion most certainly draw it. Well,
these are like the active passions and the ulti-
mately decisive will in the bosom of man, most
conspicuous as anger—anger, it may be, resent-
ment, against known wrong in another or in one’s
self, the champion of conscience, flinging away
the scabbard, setting the spear against the foe,

like a soldier of spirit. They are in a word the ©
conscience, the armed conscience, of the state, ©

244

THE REPUBLIC

| nobly bred, sensitive for others and for them-
selves, informed by the light of reason in their
natural kings. And then, thirdly, protected,
controlled, by the thought, the will, above them,
} like those appetites in you and me, hunger,
_ thirst, desire, which have been the motive, the
actual creators, of the material order all around
us, there will be the “ productive” class, labour-
ing perfectly in the cornfields, in the vineyards,
or on the vessels which are to contain corn and
_ wine, at a thousand handicrafts, every one still
exquisitely differentiated, according to Plato’s
rule of right—eis ἕν κατὰ φύσιν; aS within the
military class also there will be those who com-
mand and those who can but obey, and within
the true princely class again those who know all
things and others who have still much to learn ;
those also who can learn and teach one sort of
knowledge better than another.

Plato however, in the first steps of the evolu-
tion of the State, had lighted quite naturally on
what turns out to be a mistaken or inadequate
ideal of it, in an idyll pretty enough, indeed,
from “The Golden Age.”—How sufficient it
seems for a moment, that innocent world ! is,
nevertheless, actually but a false ideal of human
society, allowing in fact no place at all for
Justice; the very terms of which, precisely
because they involve differentiation of life and
its functions, are inapplicable to a society, if so
it may be called, still essentially inorganic. In

, 245

PLATO AND PLATONISM

a condition, so rudimentary as to possess no
opposed parts at all, of course there will be no
place for disturbance of parts, for proportion or
disproportion of faculty and function. It is, in
truth, to a city which has lost its first innocence
(πόλις ἤδη τρυφῶσα) that we must look for the
consciousness of Justice and Injustice ; as some
theologians or philosophers have held that it
was by the “Fall” man first became a really
moral being.

Now in such a city, in the πόλις ἤδη τρυφῶσα,
there will be an increase of population :--καὶ ἡ

χώρα που ἡ τότε ἱκανὴ σμικρὰ ἐξ ἱκανῆς ἔστα. And in ©

an age which perhaps had the military spirit in
excess Plato’s thoughts pass on immediately to
wars of aggression :—otxow τῆς τῶν πλησίον χώρας
ἡμῖν ἀποτμητέννδὺ We must take something, if
we can, from Megara or from Sparta; which
doubtless in its turn would do the same by us.
As a measure of relief however that was not
necessarily the next step. The needs of an out-
pushing population might have suggested to
Plato what is perhaps the most brilliant and
animating episode in the entire history of Greece,
its early colonisation, with all the bright stories,
full of the piety, the generosity of a youthful
people, that had gathered about it. No, the
next step in social development was not neces-
sarily going to war. In either case however,
aggressive action against our neighbours, or
defence of our distant brethren beyond the seas
246

Mii δε σον δες

THE REPUBLIC

at Cyrene or Syracuse against rival adventurers,
we shall require a new class of persons, men
of the sword, to fight for us if need be. Ah!
You hear the notes of the trumpet, and there-
with already the stir of an enlarging human
life, its passions, its manifold interests. Φύλακες
Or ἐπίκουροι, Watchmen or auxiliaries, our new
servants comprehend at first our masters to be,
whom a further act of differentiation will dis-
tinguish as philosophers and kings from the
strictly military order. Plato nevertheless in
his search for the true idea of Justice, of right-
ness in things, may be said now to have seen
land. Organic relationship is come into the
rude social elements and made of them a body,
a society. Rudimentary though it may still be,
the definition of Justice, as also of Injustice, is
now applicable to its processes. There is a
music in the affairs of men, in which one may
take one’s due part, which one may spoil.
Criticising mythology Plato speaks of certain
fables, to be made by those who are apt at such
things, under proper spiritual authority, so to
term it, ὡς ἐν φαρμάκου εἴδει τὰ ψευδῆ τὰ ἐν δέοντι
γενόμενα, Medicinable lies or fictions, with ἃ pro-
visional or economised truth in them, set forth
under such terms as simple souls could best
receive. Just here, at the end of the third book
of The Republic he introduces such a fable:
φοινικικὸν ψεῦδος, he calls it, a miner’s story, about
copper and silver and gold, such as may really
247

PLATO AND PLATONISM

have been current among the primitive inhabit-
ants of the island from which metal and the
art of working it had been introduced into
Greece.—

And I shall try first of all to persuade the rulers themselves
and our soldiers, and afterwards the rest of the community, as
to the matter of the rearing and the education we gave them,
that in fact it did but seem to happen with them, they seemed
to experience all that, only as in dreams. ‘They were then in
very truth nourished and fashioned beneath the earth within,
and the armour upon them and their equipment put together ;
and when they were perfectly wrought out the earth even their
mother put them forth. Now, therefore, it is their duty to
think concerning the land-in-which they are as of a mother, or
foster-mother, and to protect it if any foe come against it, and
to think of their fellow-citizens as being their brothers, born
of the earth as they. All ye in the city, therefore, are brothers,
we shall say to them proceeding with our story 5 but God,
when he made you, mixed gold in the generation of those
among you fit to be our kings, for which cause they are the
most precious of all; and silver in those fit to be our guards ;
and in the husbandmen and all other handicraftsmen iron and
brass. Forasmuch then as ye are all of one kindred, for the
most part ye would beget offspring like to yourselves ; but at
times a silver child will come of one golden, and from the silver
a child of gold, and so forth, interchangeably. ‘To those who
rule, then, first and above all God enjoins that of nothing shall
they be so careful guardians, nothing shall they so earnestly
regard, as the young children—what metal has been mixed to
their hands in the souls of these. And if a child of their own
be born with an alloy of iron or brass, they shall by no means
have pity upon it, but, allotting unto it the value which befits
its nature, they shall thrust it into the class of husbandmen or
artisans. And if, again, of these a child be born with gold or
silver in him, with due estimate they shall promote such to
wardenship or to arms, inasmuch as an oracular saying declares
that the city is perished already when it has iron or brass to
guard it. Can you suggest a way of getting them to believe
this mythus? Republic, 414.

248

Se ee ae Ὁ

THE REPUBLIC

Its application certainly is on the surface:
the Lacedemonian details also—the military turn
_ taken, the disinterestedness of the powerful, their
monastic renunciation of what the world prizes
_ most, above all the doctrine of a natural aristocracy
with its “ privileges and also its duties.””’ Men
_are of simpler structure and capacities than you
have fancied, Plato would assure us, and more
decisively appointed to this rather than to that
order of service. Nay, with the boldness proper
to an idealist, he does not hesitate to represent
them (that is the force of the mythus) as actually
made of different stuff; and society, assuming a
certain aristocratic humour in the nature of
things, has for its business to sanction, safeguard,
further promote it, by law.

The state therefore, if it is to be really a living
creature, will have, like the individual soul, those
sensuous appetites which call the productive
powers into action, and its armed conscience, and
its far-reaching intellectual light: its industrial
class, that is to say, its soldiers, its kings—the
last, a kind of military monks, as you might
think, on a distant view, their minds full of a
‘kind of heavenly effulgence, yet superintending
the labours of a large body of work-people in the
town and the fields about it. Of the industrial
or productive class, the artists and artisans, Plato
speaks only in outline, but is significant in what
he says; and enough remains of the actual fruits

249

PLATO AND PLATONISM

of Greek industry to enable us to complete his —
outline for ourselves, as we may also, by aid of
Greek art, together with the words of Homer ~
and Pindar, equip and realise the full character of
the true Platonic “‘war-man” or knight; and Ἶ
again, through some later approximate instances, —
discern something of those extraordinary, half-_
divine, philosophic kings.

We must let industry then mean for Plato all
it meant, would naturally mean, for a Greek, ©
amid the busy spectacle of Athenian handicrafts. —
The “rule” of Plato, its precepts of temperance, —
proportion, economy, though designed primarily —
for its soldiers, and its kings or archons, for the ©
military and spiritual orders, would probably ᾿
have been incumbent also in relaxed degree upon ~
those who work with their hands ; and we have ©
but to walk through the classical department ~
of the Louvre or the British Museum to be —
reminded how those qualities of temperance and ~
the like did but enhance, could not chill or im-_
poverish, the artistic genius of Greek workmen. —
In proportion to what we know of the minor ~
handicrafts of Greece we shall find ourselves able —
to fill up, as the condition of everyday life in the
streets of Plato’s City of the Perfect, a picture of —
happy protected labour, “skilled” to the utmost —
degree in all its applications. ‘Those who pro-—
secute it will be allowed, as we may gather, in ©
larger proportion than those who “watch,” in ~
silent thought or sword in hand, such animal —

250 ᾿

--

THE REPUBLIC

liberties as seem natural and right, and are not
really “‘illiberal,” for those who labour all day
with their bodies, though they too will have on
them in their service some measure of the com-
pulsion which shapes the action of our kings and
soldiers to such effective music. With more or
less of asceticism, of a “common life,” among
themselves, they will be the peculiar sphere of
the virtue of temperance in the State, as being
the entirely willing subjects of wholesome rule.

hey represent, as we saw, in the social organism,
the bodily appetites of the individual, its converse
with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be
right there, with the conscience and with the

\reasonable soul in it. Labouring by system at

the production of perfect swords, perfect lamps,
perfect poems too, and a perfect coinage, such as
we know, to enable them the more readily to
exchange their produce (νόμισμα τῆς ἀλλαγῆς ἕνεκα)
working perhaps~in guilds and under rules to
insure perfection in-each. specific..craft, refining
matter to the last degree, they would.constitute
the beautiful body of the State, in rightful service,
like the copper and iron, the bronze and the steel,
they manipulate so finely, to its beautiful soul—
to its natural though hereditary aristocracy, its
*‘ golden” humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom,
the light, of a comprehensive Synopsis, indefectibly
resides, and who, as being not merely its dis-
cursive or practical reason, but its faculty of con-
templation likewise, will be also its priests, the
251

PLATO AND PLATONISM

medium of its worship, of its intercourse with

the gods.

Between them, between that intellectual or
spiritual order, those novel philosophic kings,
and the productive class of the artists and artisans,
moves the military order, as the sensitive armed
conscience, the -armed—will,..of.the—State, its
executive power in the fullest.sense of that term

“standing army,” as Plato supposes, recruited
sa a great hereditary caste born and -bred.t

such functions, and certainly very different from i
the mere “militia” of actual Greek states, @

hastily summoned at need to military service
from the fields and workshops. Remember that
the veritable bravery also, as the philosopher
sees it, is a form of that “ knowledge,” which in

truth includes in itself all other virtues, all good i

things whatever ; that it is a form of “ right _
opinion,” and has a kind of insight in it, a real
apprehension of the occasion and its claims
on one’s courage, whether it is worth while to
fight, and to what point. Platonic knighthood
then will have in it something of the philosophy
which resides in plenitude in the class above it,

by which indeed this armed conscience of the

State, the military order, is continuously en-

lightened, as we know the conscience of each one

of us severally needs to be. And though Plato

will not expect his fighting-men, like the

Christian knight, like Saint Ranieri Gualberto,
252

THE REPUBLIC

_ to forgive their enemies, yet, moving one degree
out of the narrower circle of Greek habits, he
_ does require them, in conformity with a certain
_ Pan-Hellenic, a now fully realised national sense,
_ which fills himself, to love the whole Greek race,
_ to spare the foe, if he be Greek, the last horrors
οὗ war, to think of the soil, of the dead, of the
arms and armour taken from them, with certain
_ scruples of a natural piety.

_ Asthe knights share the dignity of the regal
_ order, are in fact ultimately distinguished from
it by degree rather than in kind, so they will
be sharers also in its self-denying‘‘rule.” In
common with it, they will observe a singular
precept which forbids them so much as to come
under the same roof with vessels-or-other-objects
wrought of_gold—or-silver—they “who are most
worthy of it,” precisely because while “many
iniquities have come from the world’s coinage,
they have gold in them undefiled.” Yet again
we are not to suppose in Platonic Greece—how
could we indeed anywhere within the range of
Greek conceptions '—anything rude, uncomely,
or unadorned. No one who reads carefully in
this very book of The Republic those pages of
criticism which concern art quite as much as
poetry, a criticism which drives everywhere at a
conscientious nicety of workmanship, will suppose
that. If kings and knights never drink from
vessels of silver or gold, their earthen cups and
platters, we may be sure, would be what we can

253

PLATO AND PLATONISM

still see; and the iron armour on their bodies
exquisitely fitted to them, to its purpose, with
that peculiar beauty which such fitness secures.
See them, then, moving, in perfect “‘ Justice” or
“Rightness,” to their Dorian music, their so
expressive plain-song, under the guidance of their
natural leaders, those who can see and fore-see—
of those who know.

That they may be one !—TIf, like an individual
soul, the state has attained its normal differentia-

tion of parts, as with that also its vitality and —
_ effectiveness will be proportionate to the unity οὗ

those parts in their various single operations.
~The productive, the executive, the contemplative
orders, respectively, like their psychological
analogues, the senses, the will, and the intelli-
gence, will be susceptible each of its own proper
virtue or excellence, temperance, bravery, spiritual
illumination. Only, let each work aright in its
own order, and a fourth virtue will supervene
upon their united perfections, the virtue or
perfection of the organic whole as such. The
Justice which Plato has been so long in search of
will be manifest at last—that perfect οἰκειοπραγία,

which will be also perfect co-operation. One-

ness, unity, community, an absolute communit
of interests among fellow-citizens, phi/ade/phia,
over against the selfish ambition of those natur-
ally ascendant, like Alcibiades or Crito, in that

competition for office, for wealth and honours, —

which has rent Athens into factions ever breeding
254

THE REPUBLIC

on themselves, the centripetal force versus all
centrifugal forces :—on this situation, Plato, in
the central books of The Republic, dwells untired,
in all its variety of synonym and epithet, the
_ conditions, the hazard and difficulty of its realisa-
tion, its analogies in art, in music; in practical
life, like three strings ‘of a lyre, or like one
colossal person, the painted δῆμος or civic genius
on the walls of a Greek town-house, or, again,
like the consummate athlete whose body, with
no superfluities, is the precise, the perfectly
finished, instrument of his will. Hence, at once
cause and effect of such “seamless” unity, his
paradoxical new law of property in the City of
the Perfect—mandatum novum, a“ new command-
ment,” we might fairly call it—7ra τῶν φίλων κοινά.
“ And no one said that aught of the things he
possessed was his own but they had all things
common.” Ah, you see! Put yourself in
Plato’s company, and inevitably, from time to
time, he will seem to pass with you beyond the
utmost horizon actually opened to him.

Upon the aristocratic class therefore, in its two
divisions, the army and the church or hierarchy,
so to speak, the “rule” of Plato— poverty,
obedience, contemplation, will be incumbent in
its fullest rigour. ‘‘ Like hired servants in their
own house,” they may not seem very enviable
persons, on first thoughts. But remember again
that Plato’s charge against things as they are is
partly in a theoretic interest—the philosopher,

255

PLATO AND PLATONISM

the philosophic soul, loves unity, but finds it

nowhere, neither in the State nor in its individual
members: it is partly also practical, and of the

hour. Divided Athens, divided Greece, like

some big, lax, self-neglectful person would be an

easy prey to any well-knit adversary really at —
unity in himself. It is by way of introducing a —
constringent principal into a mass of amorphic ©
particles, that Plato proclaims that these friends —
will have-all things in common ; and, challenged —

P his companions in the dialogue
to say how far he will be ready to go in the _
application of so paradoxical a rule, he braces |
himself to a surprising degree of consistency. ©
How far then will Plato, a somewhat Machia- ©
velian theorist, as you saw, and with something
of “fixed” ideas about practical things, taking —
desperate means towards a somewhat exclusively ©
conceived ideal of social well-being, be ready —

by the questions o

to go?

256

Now we have seen that the genuine citizens of —
his Perfect City will have much of monasticism, —
of the character of military monks, about them ~
already, with their poverty, their obedience, their —
contemplative habit. And there is yet another —
indispensable condition of the monastic life. The —
great Pope Hildebrand, by the rule of celibacy, ~
by making “regulars” to that extent of the —
secular clergy, succeeded, as many have thought, —
in his design of making them in very deed, soul —
and body, but parts of the corporate order they

ἃ 2 a oe ϑς 2S ὧν δον

ona

petite te IS

ee π᾿
ee δος,

eee Pa

THE REPUBLIC

belonged to; and what Plato is going to add to
his rule of life, for the ἄρχοντες, who are to be
φιλοπόλιδες, to love the corporate body they
belong to better than themselves, is in its actual
Jeffects something very like a law of celibacy.
Difficult, paradoxical, as he admits it to be, he is
pressed on by his hearers, and by the natural
force of his argument, reluctantly to declare that
the rule of communism~-will-apply~to~a man’s
ownership of his wife and children.

Observe ! Plato proposes this singular modifica-
tion of married life as an elevatron-or_expansion
of the family, but, it may be rightly objected, is,
in truth, only colouring with names exclusively
appropriate to the family, arrangements which
will be a suppression of all those sentiments that
naturally pertain to it. The wisdom of Plato
would certainly deprive mothers of that privacy
of affection, regarding which the wisdom of
Solomon beamed forth, by sending all infants
soon after birth to be reared-in..a common
nursery, where the facts of their actual parentage
would be carefully obliterated. The result, as he
supposes, will be a common and universal parent-
age, sonship, brotherhood ; but surely with but
ΓΑ shadowy realisation of the affections, the claims,
of these relationships. It will involve a loss of
) differentiation in life, and be, as such, a movement
backward, to a barbarous or merely animal grade
of existence.

P. VI 257 5

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Ta τῶν φίλων xowd.—With this soft phrase,
then, Plato would take away all those precious
differences that come of our having a little space —
in things to do what one will or can with. The —
Platonic state in fact, with its extraordinary
common marriages, would be dealing precisely —
after the manner of those who breed birds or —
dogs. A strange forbidding experiment, it seems, —
or should seem, to us, looking back on it in the —
light of laws now irrevocably fixed on these
subjects by the judgment of the Christian
church. We must remember however, in fair- "
ness, that Plato in this matter of the relation of —
the sexes especially, found himself in a world
very different from ours, regulated and refined, as Ἶ
it already is in some degree, by Christian ideas i
about women and children. A loose law of
marriage, beyond it concubinage in some degree
sanctioned by religion, beyond that again morbid —
vice : such was the condition of the Greek world. ©
What Christian marriage, in harmonious action
with man’s true nature, has done to counteract —
this condition, that Plato tried to do by a some- —
what forced legislation, which was altogether out
of harmony with the facts of man’s πατοῦν
Neither the church nor the world has endorsed
his theories about it. Think, in contrast, of the ]

᾿
|
.
‘

te ge στ ξὺν» τὸ

place occupied in Christian art by the mother
and her child. What that represents in life Plato
wishes to take from us, though, as he would have
us think, in our own behalf,

258

THE REPUBLIC

And his views of the community of male and
female education, and of the functions of men
and women in the State, do but come of the
relief of women in large measure from home-
duties. Such duties becoming a carefully
economised department of the State, the women
will have leisure to share the-werk-of-men ; and
will need a corresponding education. ‘The details
of their commen-tifé in peace and war he
certainly makes effective and bright. But if we
think of his proposal as a reinstatement of the
Amazon we have in effect condemned it. For
the Amazon of mythology and art is but a
survival from a _ half-animal world, which
Theseus, the embodiment of adult reason, had
long since overcome.

Plato himself divides this confessedly so
difficult question into two: Is the thing good?
and in the second place, Is it possible? Let us
admit that at that particular crisis, or even
generally, what he proposes is for the best.
Thereupon the question which suggested itself
in regard to the community of goods recurs with
double force: Where may lie the secret of the
magnanimity (that is the term to hold by) which
will make wealth and office, with all their
opportunities for puissant wills, no motive in life
at all? Is it possible, and under what conditions
—this disinterestedness on the part of those who
might do what they will as with their own, this
indifference, this surrender, not of one’s goods and

259

|
|

PLATO AND PLATONISM |

time only, but of one’s last resource, one’s very —
home, for “the greatest happiness of the greatest —
number.”—Those are almost the exact words of
Plato. How shall those who might be egotists
on the scale of an Alcibiades or an Alexander be
kept to this strange “new mandate” of altruism ?
How shall a paradox so bold be brought within the ©
range of possibilities? Well! by the realisation -
of another paradox,—if we make philosophers our _
kings or our kings philosophers. It is the last
“wave of paradox,” from the advancing crest of
which Plato still shrinks back, oddly reluctant, —
as we may think, to utter his whole mind. But,
concede his position, and all beside, in the
strange, paradoxical new world he is constructing,
its extraordinary reaches of philadelphia, will be
found practicable.

Our kings must be philosophers. But not, we
must carefully note, because, as people are apt to
fancy, philosophers as such necessarily despise or
are unable to feel what is fascinating in the world
of action, are un-formed or withered on one side,
and, as regards the allurements of the world of
sense, are but “corpses.” For Plato certainly
they are no starvelings. The philosophic, or
aristocratic, or kingly, nature, as he conceives it,
will be the perfect flower of the whole compass
of natural endowments, promoted to the utmost
by the artificial influences of society-—xaroxayabds
—capable therefore in the extreme degree of
success in a purely “self-regarding ” policy, of an

260

THE REPUBLIC

exploitation, in their own interests, of all that
‘men in general value most, to the surfeiting, if
they cared, of their ambition, their vanity, their
love of liberty or license.

Nor again must our kings be philosophers

| mainly because in such case the world will be
_very wisely, very knowingly, governed. Of

course it would be well that wise men should
rule. Even a Greek, still “a youth in the youth
of the world,” who indeed was not very far gone

_ from an essentially youthful evaluation of things,
_ was still apt to think with Croesus that the richest
_ must of course be the happiest of men, and to
have a head-ache when compelled to think, even

he would have taken so much for granted. That
it would be well that wise men should govern,
wise after the Platonic standard, bringing, that is
to say, particular details under coherent general

rules, able to foresee and influence the future by

their knowledge of the past :—there is no paradox

in that: it belongs rather, you might complain,

to the range of platitudes. But, remember ! the
hinge of Plato’s whole political argument is, that

the ruinous divisions of Athens, of Greece, of the

entire social community, is the want of dis-
interestedness in its rulers; not that they are
unfit to rule; rather, that they have often, it
may be, a natural call to office—those exceptional

high natures—but that they “abound” therein

exclusively “in their own sense.” And the
precise point of paradox in philosophic kingship,
261

PLATO AND PLATONISM

as Plato takes it, is this, that if we have
philosophers for our kings, our archons, we shall
be under a sort of rulers who as such have made
sacrifice of themselves, and in coming to office at
all must have taken upon them “the form of a
servant.” —

For thus it is—If you can find out a life better than being

a king, for those who shall be kings, a well-governed city will
become possible, and not otherwise. For in that city alone
will those be kings who are in very deed rich. But if poor
men, hungering after their private good, proceed to public
offices, it is not possible ; for, the kingly office becoming an —
object of contention, the sort of battle which results, being at
home and internal, destroys them, along with the common-
wealth.—Most truly, he replied—Have you then, I asked, any
kind of life which can despise political offices, other than the
life of true philosophers ?—Certainly not.—Yet still it is
necessary that those who come to office should not be lovers of
it ; otherwise the rival lovers will fight.—That must be so.—
Whom then will you compel to proceed to the guardianship of
the city save those, who, being wisest of all in regard to the
conditions of her highest welfare, are themselves possessed of
privileges of another order, and a life better than the politician’s?
Republic, 520.

More capable than others of an adroit applica-
tion of all that power usually means in the way
of personal advantage, your “legitimate,” and
really elect royalty or aristocracy must be secured
from the love of it; you must insure their
magnanimity in office by a counter-charm. But
where is such a charm, or counter-charm, to be
found? Throughout, as usual in so provident a
writer as Plato, the answer to that leading

262

THE REPUBLIC

question has had its prelude, even in the first
book.—

Therefore it was, for my part, friend Thrasymachus, I was
saying just now that no one would be willing of his own motion
to rule, and take in hand the ills of other people to set them
right, but that he would ask a reward; because he who will
do fairly by his art, or prosper by his art, never does what is
best for himself, nor ordains that, in ordaining what is proper
to his art, but what is best for the subject of his rule. By
reason of which indeed, as it seems, there must needs be a
reward for those who shall be willing to rule, either money, or
honour, or a penalty unless he will rule—How do you mean
this Socrates? said Glaucon: for the two rewards I understand ;
but the penalty, of which you speak, and have named as
in the place of a reward, I do not understand.—Then you do
not understand, I said, the reward of the best, for the sake of
which the most virtuous rule, when they are willing to rule.
Or do you not know that the being fond of honours, fond of
money, is said to be, and is, a disgrace ?—-For my part, Yes !
he said.—On this ground then, neither for money are the good
willing to rule, nor for honour; for they choose neither, in
openly exacting hire as a return for their rule, to be called hire-
lings, nor, in taking secretly therefrom, thieves. Nor again is
it for honour they will rule; for they are not ambitious.
Therefore it is, that necessity must be on them, and a penalty,
if they are to be willing to rule: whence perhaps it has come,
that to proceed with ready will to the office of ruler, and not
to await compulsion, is accounted indecent. As for the penalty,
—the greatest penalty is to be ruled by one worse than oneself,
unless one will rule. And it is through fear of that, the good
seem to me to rule, when they rule: and then they proceed
to the office of ruler, not as coming to some good thing, nor
as to profit therein, but as to something unavoidable, and as
having none better than themselves to whom to entrust it, nor
even as good. Since it seems likely that if a city of good men
came to be, not to rule would be the matter of contention, as
nowadays to rule; and here it would become manifest that a
ruler in very deed, in the nature of things, considers not what
is profitable for himself, but for the subject of his rule. So

263

PLATO AND PLATONISM

that every intelligent person would choose rather to be benefited
by another, than by benefiting another to have trouble himself.
Republic, 346.

Now if philosophy really is where Plato con-
sistently puts it, and is all he claims for it, then,
for those capable of it, who are capable also in
the region of practice, it will be precisely “that
better thing than being a king for those who
must be our kings, our archons.” You see that
the various elements of Platonism are inter-
dependent ; that they really cohere.

Just at this point then you must call to
memory the greatness of the claim Plato makes
for philosophy—a promise, you may perhaps
think, larger than anything he has actually
presented to his readers in the way of a
philosophic revelation justifies. He seems, in
fact, to promise all, or almost all, that in a later
age natures great and high have certainly found
in the Christian religion. If philosophy is only
star-gazing, or only a condition of doubt, if what
the sophist or the philistine says of it is all that
can be said, it could hardly compete with the
rewards which the vulgar world holds out to its
servants. But for Plato, on the other hand, if
philosophy is anything at all, it is nothing less.
than an “escape from the evils of the world,”
and ὁμοίωσις τῷ θεῷ, a being made like to God. It:
provides a satisfaction not for the intelligence
only but for the whole nature of man, his
imagination and faith, his affections, his capacity

264

|

THE REPUBLIC

for religious devotion, and for some still un-
imagined development of the capacities of sense.

How could anything which belongs to the
world of mere phenomenal change seem great
to him who is “the spectator of all time and
all existence”? ‘For the excellency” of such
knowledge as that, we might say, he must “count
all things but loss.” By fear of punishment in
some roundabout way, he might indeed be com-
pelled to descend into “the cave,” “to take in
hand the wrongs of other people to set them
right”; but of course the part he will take in
your sorry exhibition of passing shadows, and
dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for
himself. You may think him, that philosophic
archon or king, who in consenting to be your
master has really taken upon himself “the form
of a servant”—you may think him, in our late
age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical
being. Yet history records one instance in which
such a figure actually found his way to an imperial
throne, and with a certain approach to the result
Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole
being was filled with philosophic vision, that the
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, that fond student of
philosophy, of this very philosophy of Plato, served
the Roman people so well in peace and war—with
so much disinterestedness, because, in fact, so
reluctantly. Look onward, and what is strange
and inexplicable in his realisation of the Platonic
scheme—strange, if we consider how cold and

265

PLATO AND PLATONISM

feeble after all were the rays of light on which he
waited so devoutly—becomes clear in the person
of Saint Louis, who, again, precisely because his
whole being was full of heavenly vision, in self-
banishment from it for a while, led and ruled the
French people so magnanimously alike in peace
and war. The presence, then, the ascendancy amid
actual things, of the royal or philosophic nature,
as Plato thus conceives it—that, and nothing else,
will be the generating force, the seed, of the City
of the Perfect, as he conceives it: this place, in
which the great things of existence, known or
divined, really fill the soul. Only, he for one
would not be surprised if no eyes actually see it.
Like his master Socrates, as you know, he is
something of a humorist ; and if he sometimes
surprises us with paradox or hazardous theory,
will sometimes also give us to understand that
he is after all not quite serious. So about this
vision of the City of the Perfect, The Republic,
Καλλίπολις, Uranopolis, Utopia, Civitas Dei, The
Kingdom of Heaven—

Suffer me, he says, to entertain myself as men of listless
minds are wont to do when they journey alone. Such persons,
I fancy, before they have found out in what way ought of what
they desire may come to be, pass that question by lest they
grow weary in considering whether the thing be possible or no;
and supposing what they wish already achieved, they proceed at
once to arrange all the rest, pleasing themselves in the tracing
out all they will do, when that shall have come to pass—:
making a mind already idle idler still. Republic, 144.

266

᾿
£
d
ἤ
Ἷ
A
ἶ

““.“4 »ἱἶἷἱἽ. ee τ αν

ρος. >
~~ wr

pet = eS et

να
PLATO'S AESTHETICS

WHEN we remember Plato as the great lover,
what the visible world was to him, what a large
place the idea of Beauty, with its almost adequate
realisation in that visible world, holds in his most
abstract speculations as the clearest instance of
the relation of the human mind to reality and
truth, we might think that art also, the fine arts,
would have been much for him ; that the esthetic
element would be a significant one in his theory
of morals and education. Ta τερπνὰ ἐν “Ελλάδι (to
use Pindar’s phrase) all the delightful things in
Hellas :—Plato least of all could have been un-
affected by their presence around him. And
so it is. Think what perfection of handicraft,
what a subtle enjoyment therein, is involved in
that specially Platonic rule, to mind one’s busi-
Ness (τὸ τὰ αὑτοῦ πράττειν) that he who, like Fra
Damiano of Bergamo, has a gift for ποικιλία,
intarsia or marqueterie, for example, should con-
fine himself exclusively to that. Before him,
267

PLATO AND PLATONISM

you know, there had been no theorising about
the beautiful, its place in life, and the like; and
as a matter of fact he is the earliest critic of the
fine arts. He anticipates the modern notion
that art as such has no end but its own perfec-
tion,—‘“‘art for art’s sake.” ‘Ap’ οὖν καὶ ἑκάστῃ
TOV τεχνῶν ἔστι TL συμφέρον ἄλλο ἢ ὅτε μάλιστα τελέαν
εἶναι; We have seen again that not in theory
only, by the large place he assigns to our
experiences regarding visible beauty in the
formation of his doctrine of ideas, but that in
the practical sphere also, this great fact of
experience, the reality of beauty, has its im-
portance with him. The loveliness of virtue as
a harmony, the winning aspect of those “‘images”
of the absolute and unseen Temperance, Bravery,
Justice, shed around us in the visible world for
eyes that can see, the claim of the virtues as a
visible representation by human persons and
their acts of the eternal qualities of ‘the
eternal,” after all far out-weigh, as he thinks,
the claitn of their mere utility. And accordingly,
‘\in education, all will begin and end in “ music,’
fin the promotion of qualities to which no truer
-name can be given than symmetry, zsthetic fit-
‘ness, tone. Philosophy itself indeed, as he con-
ceives it, is but the sympathetic appreciation of
a kind of music in the very nature of things.
There have been Platonists without Plato,
and a kind of traditional Platonism in the world,
independent of, yet true in spirit to, the Platonism
268

PLATO’S ASTHETICS

of the Platonic Dialogues. Now such a piece of
traditional Platonism we find in the hypothesis
of some close connexion between what may be
called the esthetic qualities of the world about
us and the formation of moral character, between
esthetics and ethics. Wherever people have
been inclined to lay stress on the colouring, for
instance, cheerful or otherwise, of the walls of
the room where children learn to read, as though
that had something to do with the colouring of
their minds ; on the possible moral effect of the
beautiful ancient buildings of some of our own
schools and colleges ; on the building of character,
in any way, through the eye and ear; there the
spirit of Plato has been understood to be, and
rightly, even by those who have perhaps never
read Plato’s Republic, in which however we do
find the connexion between moral character and
matters of poetry and art strongly asserted.
This is to be observed especially in the third
and tenth books of The Republic. The main
interest of those books lies in the fact, that in
them we read what Plato actually said on a
subject concerning which people have been so
ready to put themselves under his authority.

It is said with immediate reference to metre
and its various forms in verse, as an element in
the general treatment of style or manner (λέξις)
as opposed to the matter (λόγοι) in the imaginative
literature, with which as in time past the

269

PLATO AND PLATONISM

education of the citizens of the Perfect City
will begin. It is however at his own express
suggestion that we may apply what he says, in
the first instance, about metre and verse, to all
forms of art whatever, to music (μουσική) generally,
to all those matters over which the Muses of
Greek mythology preside, to all productions in
which the form counts equally with, or for more
than, the matter. Assuming therefore that we
have here, in outline and tendency at least, the
mind of Plato in regard to the ethical influence
of esthetic qualities, let us try to distinguish
clearly the central lines of that tendency, of
Platonism in art, as it is really to be found in
Plato.

“You have perceived have you not,” observes
_the Platonic Socrates, ‘that acts of imitation, if
they begin in early life, and continue, establish
themselves in one’s nature and habits, alike as to
the body, the tones of one’s voice, the ways of
one’s mind.”

Yes, that might seem a matter of common
observation ; and what is strictly Platonic here
and in what follows is but the emphasis of the
statement. Let us set it however, for the sake
of decisive effect, in immediate connexion with
certain other points of Plato’s esthetic doctrine.
Imitation then, imitation through the eye and
ear, is irresistible in its influence over human
nature. And secondly, we, the founders, the
people, of the Republic, of the city that shall be

270

ΒΡ τ ανοναν..

erage

PLATO’S ASTHETICS

perfect, have for our peculiar purpose the simpli-
fication of human nature: a purpose somewhat
costly, for it follows, thirdly, that the only kind
of music, of art and poetry, we shall permit
ourselves, our citizens, will be of a very austere
character, under a sort of “self-denying ordin-
ance.” We shall be a fervently esthetic com-
munity, if you will; but therewith also very
fervent ‘‘ renunciants,” or ascetics.

In the first place, men’s souls are, according
to Plato’s view, the creatures of what men see
and hear. What would probably be found in a
limited number only of sensitive people,- a
constant susceptibility to the aspects and other
sensible qualities of things and persons, to the
element of expression or form in them and their
movements, to phenomena as such—this suscepti-
bility Plato supposes in men generally. It is
not so much the matter of a work of art, what is
conveyed in and by colour and form and sound,
that tells upon us educationally—the subject, for
instance, developed by the words and scenery of
a play—as the form, and its qualities, concision,
simplicity, rhythm, or, contrariwise, abundance,
variety, discord. Such “esthetic” qualities, by
what we might call in logical phrase, μετάβασις εἰς
ἄλλο γένος, a derivation into another kind of
matter, transform themselves, in the temper of
the patient the hearer or spectator, into terms
of ethics, into the sphere of the desires and the
will, of the mora/ taste, engendering, nursing

271

Ν

PLATO AND PLATONISM

there, strictly moral effects, such conditions of
sentiment and the will as Plato requires in his ~
City of the Perfect, or quite the opposite, but
hardly in any case indifferent, conditions.

Imitation :—it enters into the very fastnesses
of character; and we, our souls, ourselves, are
for ever imitating what we see and hear, the
forms, the sounds which haunt our memories,
our imagination. We imitate not only if we
play a part on the stage but when we sit as
spectators, while our thoughts follow the acting
of another, when we read Homer and put our-
selves, lightly, fluently, into the place of those
he describes : we imitate unconsciously the line
and colour of the walls around us, the trees by
the wayside, the animals we pet or make use of,
the very dress we wear. Only, Ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς
μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι amodkatcwow.—Let us beware
how men attain the very truth of what they
imitate.

That then is the first principle of Plato’s
esthetics, his first consideration regarding the
art of the City of the Perfect. Men, children,
are susceptible beings, in great measure condi-
tioned by the mere look of their ‘“‘ medium.”
Like those insects, we might fancy, of which
naturalists tell us, taking colour from the plants
they lodge on, they will come to match with
much servility the aspects of the world about
them.

But the people of the Perfect City would not

272

PLATO’S ASTHETICS

be there at all except by way of a refuge, an
experiment, or our de force, in moral and social
philosophy ; and this circumstance determines
the second constituent principle of Plato’s
esthetic scheme. We, then, the founders, the
᾿ς citizens, of the Republic have a peculiar purpose.
We are here to escape from, to resist, a certain
vicious centrifugal tendency in life, in Greek
and especially in Athenian life, which does but
propagate a like vicious tendency in ourselves.
We are to become—like little pieces in a
machine ! you may complain.—No, like per-
formers rather, individually, it may be, of more
or less importance, but each with a necessary
and inalienable part, in a perfect musical exercise
which is well worth while, or in some sacred
liturgy ; or like soldiers in an invincible army,
invincible because it moves as one man. We
are to find, or be put into, and keep, every one
his natural place; to cultivate those qualities
which will secure mastery over ourselves, the
subordination of the parts to the whole, musical
proportion. To this end, as we saw, Plato, a
remorseless idealist, is ready even to suppress the
differences of male and female character, to
merge, to lose the family in the social aggregate.

Imitation then, we may resume, imitation
through the eye and ear, is irresistible in its
influence on human nature. Secondly, the
founders of the Republic are by its very purpose
bound to the simplification of human nature:

P. VI 273 T

av

PLATO AND PLATONISM

and our practical conclusion follows in logical
order. We shall make, and sternly keep, a
‘self-denying ” ordinance in this matter, in the
matter of art, of poetry, of taste in all its
varieties ; a rule, of which Plato’s own words,
applied by him in the first instance to rhythm
or metre, but like all he says on that subject
fairly applicable to the whole range of musical
or esthetic effects, will be the brief summary :
Alternations will be few and far between :—-how
differently from the methods of the poetry,
the art, the choruses, we most of us love so
much, not necessarily because our senses are
inapt or untrained : — Σμικραὶ ai μεταβολαί. We
shall allow no musical innovations, no Aristo-
phanic cries, no imitations however clever of
“the sounds of the flute or the lyre,” no free
imitation by the human voice of bestial or
mechanical sounds, no such artists as are
“like a mirror turning all about.” ‘There were
vulgarities of nature, you see, in the youth of
ideal Athens even. ‘Time, of course, as such,
is itself a kind of artist, trimming pleasantly for
us what survives of the rude world of the past.
Now Plato’s method would promote or anticipate
the work of time in that matter of vulgarities of
taste. Yes, when you read his precautionary
rules, you become fully aware that even in
Athens there were young men who affected what
was least fortunate in the habits, the pleasures,
the sordid business of the class below them.
274

le amie Rial lhe I ER RIE Se -.5 5

PLATO’S ASTHETICS

But they would not be allowed quite their own
way in the streets or elsewhere in a reformed
world, to whose chosen imperial youth (βασιλικὴ
φυλή) it would not be permitted even to think of
any of those things—otSeri προσέχειν τὸν νοῦν. ΤῸ
them, what was illiberal, the illiberal crafts,
would be (thanks to their well-trained power of
intellectual abstraction !) as though it were not.
And if art, like law, be, as Plato thinks, “a
creation of mind, in accordance with right
reason,” we shall not wish our boys to sing like
mere birds.

Yet what price would not the musical
connoisseur pay to handle the instruments we
may see in fancy passing out through the gates
of the City of the Perfect, banished, not because
there is no one within its walls who knows the
use of, or would receive pleasure from, them (a
delicate susceptibility in these matters Plato, as
was said, presupposes) but precisely because they
are so seductive, must be conveyed therefore to
some other essentially less favoured neighbour-
hood, like poison, say! moral poison, for one’s
enemies’ water-springs. A whole class of
painters, sculptors, skilled workmen of various
kinds go into like banishment—they and their
very tools ; not, observe again carefully, because
they are bad artists, but very good ones.—’Anra
μήν, ὦ ᾿Αδείμαντε, ἡδύς ye καὶ ὁ Kexpayévos. Art, as
such, as Plato knows, has no purpose but itself,
its own perfection. The proper art of the

P. VI 275 T2

PLATO AND PLATONISM

Perfect City is in fact the art of discipline.
Music (μουσική) all the various forms of fine art,
will be but the instruments of its one over-
mastering social or political purpose, irresistibly
conforming its so imitative subject units to type :
they will be neither more nor less than so many
variations, so to speak, of the trumpet-call.

Or suppose again that a poet finds his way to
us, “Sable by his genius, as he chooses, or as his
audience chooses, to become all things, or all
persons, in turn, and able to transform us too
into all things and persons in turn, as we listen
or read, with a fluidity, a versatility of humour
almost equal to his own, a poet myriad-minded,
as we say, almost in Plato’s precise words, as
our finest touch of praise, of Shakespeare for
instance, or of Homer, of whom he was thinking :
—Well! we shall have been set on our guard.
We have no room for him. Divine, delightful,
being, “if he came to our city with his works,
his poems, wishing to make an exhibition of
them, we should certainly do him reverence as
an object, sacred, wonderful, delightful, but we
should not let him stay. We should tell him
that there neither is, nor may be, any one like
that among us, and so send him on his way to
some other city, having anointed his head with
myrrh and crowned him with a garland of wool,
as something in himself half-divine, and for our-
selves should make use of some more austere
and less pleasing sort of poet, for his practical

276

age ἐῶν

PLATO’S ASTHETICS

uses.” —T@ αὐστηροτέρῳ καὶ ἀηδεστέρῳ ποιητῇ, ὠφελίας
ἕνεκα. Not, as I said, that the Republic any
more than Lacedezmon will be an artless place.
Plato’s esthetic scheme is actually based on a
high degree of sensibility to such influences in
the people he is dealing with.—

Right speech, then, and rightness of harmony and form
and rhythm minister to goodness of nature; not that good-
nature which we so call with a soft name, being really silli-
ness, but the frame of mind which in very truth is rightly and
fairly ordered in regard to the moral habit.—Most certainly he
said.— Must not these qualities, then, be everywhere pursued
by the young men if they are to do each his own business ?—
Pursued, certainly.—Now painting, 1 suppose, is full of them
(those qualities which are partly ethical, partly esthetic) and
all handicraft such as that ; the weaver’s art is full of them, and
the inlayer’s art and the building of houses, and the working
of all the other apparatus of life; moreover the nature of our
own bodies, and of all other living things. For in all these,
rightness or wrongness of form is inherent. And wrongness
of form, and the lack of rhythm, the lack of harmony, are
fraternal to faultiness of mind and character, and the opposite
qualities to the opposite condition—the temperate and good
character :—fraternal, aye! and copies of them.—Yes, entirely
so: he said.—

Must our poets, then, alone be under control, and compelled
to work the image of the good into their poetic works, or not
to work among us at all; or must the other craftsmen too be
controlled, and restrained from working this faultiness and
intemperance and illiberality and formlessness of character
whether into the images of living creatures, or the houses they
build, or any other product of their craft whatever ; or must
he who is unable so to do be forbidden to practise his art
among us, to the end that our guardians may not, nurtured in
images of vice as in a vicious pasture, cropping and culling
much every day little by little from many sources, composing
together some one great evil in their own souls, go undetected ?
Must we not rather seek for those craftsmen who have the

277

PLATO AND PLATONISM

power, by way of their own natural virtue, to track out the
nature of the beautiful and seemly, to the end that, living as in
some wholesome place, the young men may receive good from
every side, whencesoever, from fair works of art, either upon
sight or upon hearing anything may strike, as it were a
breeze bearing health from kindly places, and from childhood
straightway bring them unaware to likeness and friendship and
harmony with fair reason '—Yes: he answered: in this way
they would be by far best educated.—Well then, I said,
Glaucon, on these grounds is not education in music of the
greatest importance—because, more than anything else, rhythm
and harmony make their way down into the inmost part of
the soul, and take hold upon it with the utmost force, bringing
with them rightness of form, and rendering its form right, if
one be correctly trained; if not, the opposite? and again
because he who has been trained in that department duly,
would have the sharpest sense of oversights (τῶν παραλειπομένων)
and of things not fairly turned out, whether by art or nature
(μὴ καλῶς δημιουργηθέντων ἢ μὴ καλῶς φύντων) and disliking
them, as he should, would commend things beautiful, and, by
reason of his delight in these, receiving them into his soul, be
nurtured of them, and become καλοκαγαθός, while he blamed
the base, as he should, and hated it, while still young, before
he was able to apprehend a reason, and when reason comes
would welcome it, recognising it by its kinship to himself—
most of all one thus taught '—Yes: he answered: it seems
to me that for reasons such as these their education should be
in music. Republic, 400.

Understand, then, the poetry and music, the
arts and crafts, of the City of the Perfect—what
is left of them there, and remember how the
Greeks themselves were used to say that “the
half is more than the whole.” Liken its music,
if you will, to Gregorian music, and call to mind
the kind of architecture, military or monastic
again, that must be built to such music, and
then the kind of colouring that will fill its

278

PLATO’S ASTHETICS

_ jealously allotted space upon the walls, the sort of
carving that will venture to display itself on
cornice or capital. The walls, the pillars, the
streets—you see them in thought ! nay, the very
trees and animals, the attire of those who move
along the streets, their looks and voices, their
style—the hieratic Dorian architecture, to speak
precisely, the Dorian manner everywhere, in
possession of the whole of life. Compare it, for
further vividness of effect, to Gothic building,
to the Cistercian Gothic, if you will, when
Saint Bernard had purged it of a still barbaric
superfluity of ornament. It seems a long way
from the Parthenon to Saint Ouen ‘of the
aisles and arches,” or Notre-Dame de Bourges ; yet
they illustrate almost equally the direction of
the Platonic esthetics. ‘Those churches of the
Middle Age have, as we all feel, their loveliness,
yet of astern sort, which fascinates while perhaps
it repels us. We may try hard to like as well
or better architecture of a more or less different
kind, but coming back to them again find that
the secret of final success is theirs. The rigid
logic of their charm controls our taste, as logic
proper binds the intelligence: we would have
something of that quality, if we might, for our-
selves, in what we do or make; feel, under its
influence, very difident of our own loose, or
gaudy, or literally insignificant, decorations.
“Stay then,” says the Platonist, too sanguine
perhaps,—“ Abide,” he says to youth, “in these
279

)

Ι γί
:

y ca
lf

PLATO AND PLATONISM

places, and the like of them, and mechanically,
irresistibly, the soul of them will impregnate
yours. With whatever beside is in congruity
with them in the order of hearing and sight,
they will tell (despite, it may be, of unkindly
nature at your first making) upon your very coun-
tenance, your walk and gestures, in the course
and concatenation of your inmost thoughts.”

And equation being duly made of what is
merely personal and temporary in Plato’s view
of the arts, it may be salutary to return from
time to time to the Platonic esthetics, to find
ourselves under the more exclusive influence of
those qualities in the Hellenic genius he has
thus emphasised. What he would promote,
then, is the art, the literature, of which among
other things it may be said that it solicits a
certain effort from the reader or spectator, who
is promised a great expressiveness on the part of
the writer, the artist, if he for his part will bring
with him a great attentiveness) And how
satisfying, how reassuring, how flattering to
himself after all, such work really is—the work
which deals with one as a scholar, formed,
mature and manly. Bravery—dvdpe‘a or manliness
—manliness and temperance, as we know, were
the two characteristic virtues of that old pagan
world; and inart certainly they seem to be involved
inoneanother. Manliness in art, what can it be,
as distinct from that which in opposition to it

280

τ ee se eS τα

PLATO’S ASTHETICS

must be called the feminine quality there,—
what but a full conciousness of what one does, of
art itself in the work of art, tenacity of intuition
and of consequent purpose, the spirit of con-
struction as opposed to what is literally incoherent
or ready to fall to pieces, and, in opposition to
what is hysteric or works at random, the main-
tenance of a standard. Of such art ἦθος rather
than πάθος will be the predominant mood. To
use Plato’s own expression there will be here
NO παραλευπόμενα, NO “ negligences,” no feminine
forgetfulness of one’s self, nothing in the work
of art unconformed to the leading intention of
the artist, who will but increase his power by
reserve. An artist of that kind will be apt, of
course, to express more than he seems actually
to say. He economises. He will not spoil
good things by exaggeration. The rough, pro-
miscuous wealth of nature he reduces to grace
and order: reduces, it may be, lax verse to
staid and temperate prose. With him, the
rhythm, the music, the notes, will be felt to
follow, or rather literally accompany as ministers,
the sense,—dxorovbeiv τὸν λόγον.

We may fairly prefer the broad daylight of
Veronese to the contrasted light and shade of
Rembrandt even; and a painter will tell you
that the former is actually more difficult to
attain. Temperance, the temperance of the
youthful Charmides, super-induced on a nature
originally rich and impassioned,—Plato’s own

281

PLATO AND PLATONISM

native preference for that is only reinforced by
the special needs of his time, and the very
conditions of the ideal state. ‘The diamond, we
are told, if it be a fine one, may gain in value
by what is cut away. It was after such fashion
that the manly youth of Lacedemon had been
cut and carved. Lenten or monastic colours,
brown and black, white and grey, give their
utmost value for the eye (so much is obvious) to
the scarlet flower, the lighted candle, the cloth
of gold. And Platonic esthetics, remember ! as
such, are ever in close connexion with Plato’s
ethics. It is life itself, action and character, he
proposes to colour; to get something of that
irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of
control, into the general course of life, above all
into its energetic or impassioned acts.

Such Platonic quality you may trace of course
not only in work of Doric, or, more largely, of
Hellenic lineage, but at all times, as the very
conscience of art, its saving salt, even in ages of
decadence. You may analyse it, as a condition
of literary style, in historic narrative, for in-
stance ; and then you have the stringent, short-
hand art of Thucydides at his best, his masterly
feeling for master-facts, and the half as so much
more than the whole. Pindar is in a certain
sense his analogue in verse. Think of the
amount of attention he must have looked for,
in those who were, not to read, but to sing him,
or to listen while he was sung, and to under-

282

PLATO’S ASSTHETICS

stand. With those fine, sharp-cut gems or
chasings of his, so sparely set, how much he
leaves for a well-drilled intelligence to supply in
the way of connecting thought.

And you may look for the correlative of that
in Greek clay, in Greek marble, as you walk
through the British Museum. But observe it,
above all, at work, checking yet reinforcing his
naturally fluent and luxuriant genius, in Plato
himself. His prose is a practical illustration
of the value of that capacity for correction, of
the effort, the intellectual astringency, which he
demands of the poet also, the musician, of all
true citizens of the ideal Republic, enhancing
the sense of power in one’s self, and its effect
upon others, by a certain crafty reserve in its
exercise, after the manner of a true expert.
Χαλεπὰ τὰ xata—he is faithful to the old Greek
saying. Patience, “infinite patience,” may or
may not be, as was said, of the very essence of
genius ; but is certainly, quite ‘as much as fire,
of the mood of all true lovers. Ἴσως τὸ λεγόμενον
ἀληθές, ὅτε χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά. Heraclitus had pre-
ferred the “dry soul,” or the “dry light” in it,
as Bacon after him the siccum lumen. And the
dry beauty,—let Plato teach us, to love that
also, duly.

1891-1892.

Printed by Ἐ. & R. Ciark, Limirep, Edinburgh.

are 0}
Δ A Le ,

geen ih 5

wet
—
7 }

ry

i ἌΡ ᾿
a βρνς οὐ ψο] τα νιν ὟΝ ti Mt tate a a Ἂν

NEW LIBRARY EDITION OF
ΔΗ

OF

WALIER FAITE

In Ten Volumes. With decorated backs. ὅνο.

I,

Il.

ΙΧ,
Χ,

7s. 6d. net each. ᾿

THE RENAISSANCE: STUDIES IN ART
AND POETRY.

AND III. MARIUS THE EPICUREAN. In
Two Vols.

. IMAGINARY PORTRAITS.
. APPRECIATIONS. With an Essay on “ Style.”
. PLATO AND PLATONISM. A Series of

Lectures.

. GREEK STUDIES. A Series of Essays.

MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES. A Series of
Essays.

GASTON DELATOUR. An unfinished Romance.
ESSAYS FROM “THE GUARDIAN.”

MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltp., LONDON.

Νᾳ

Ph re " ω
ΝΠ Τὴ

"Δι σὺ

Wi Coe ey yi i oe |

ἔν

,᾿
i
4
᾿
4
‘
’ fa ¥
i ]
4
; ee
i
ΔΑ

-
7
~ ral
y
;
aos
i
ἢ ΕἾ
ny
f Wes
“ie ‘ 7,
Ϊ é
‘
+4 “Fe
a -* .f
ite
‘
᾿
ΩΣ
ou
at? a rh δὰ
. Ὺ Ἠν
ht ae |
i = | hue 6

x - -Ὄ

ἐς ὁ ΝΣ ve

9,

,
= ed
Ὡς ἃ τ
ς . ζ
6 ΞΕ.
ae
ν .
if
.
͵
᾿
-
‘ wa
> 7
᾿ at
»--
Ἀν To
:
’
Never
“ ᾿ >
ἘΣ

JAN 2 1984

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

ut
wom
᾿
i

"