"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 [64] 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 (hos dei)+ 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. Nyn auto hosper onar arti anakekinetai hai doxai autai.+—"Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him"; and he will perform, Socrates assures us, similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical problems, with any and every problem whatever.

"If then," observes Socrates in the Phaedo, 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 mathe- matical 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 [65] which, in all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal—hois episphragizometha touto + —That, which really is. Phaedo, 75.

But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno—from the prison-cell to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment upon the young boy with the square:— Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erotesantos, epistesetai, analabon, autos ex hautou, epistemen;+ "Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning, will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense (episteme)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?"—Yes! and that recovery is an act of reminiscence.

These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enesan de ge auto autai hai doxai)+ 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 (erotesei epegertheisai, epistemai gignontai).+ 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 metempsychosis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phaedo 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 (athanatos an he psyche eie)+ 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 in 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 [67] 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 locus 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 to a pause, which indeed they call dying, and then is born again; but that it is never destroyed. That 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.' Inasmuch 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 [68] 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 mankind 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. Meno, 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 metempsychosis 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, [69] 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 Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Timaeus, 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 is 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 [70] 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 to music. Now that "music of the spheres" in its largest sense, its completest orchestration, the harmonious order of the whole universe (kosmos)+ 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 [71] 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 initiated, comes with him to be this, that it sounds so well. Plemmeleia,+ 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 (pleonexia)+ of those whose voices have large natural power in them. How, in detail, rhythm, the limit (peras)+ is enforced in Plato's Republic there is no time to [72] 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 responsive 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 Zeit-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 [73] 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 metempsychosis 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 will 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 immovably, 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 otherwise than at home.

[74] 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 antecedent 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.

NOTES

52. +Transliteration: arche. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty, dominion; 2. office."

53. +Transliteration: homoion homoio. Translation: "like by like."

56. +Transliteration: Aletheian de ametria hegei syngene einai, e emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth is close kin to measure and proportion, or to disproportion?" Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.

56. +Transliteration: Emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "To measure and proportion." Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.

59. *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. +Transliteration: to apeiron . . . to peras. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. without trial or experience of a thing . . . II. boundless, endless, countless / an end, extremity." As Pater indicates, in Plato the terms mean something like "infinite" and "finite," or "bounded" and "unbounded."

60. +Transliteration: systoichiai ton enantion. "Co-ordinates consisting of opposites."

60. +Transliteration: peras. See above, second note for page 59.

60. +Transliteration: to apeiron. See above, second note for page 59.

61. +Transliteration: askesis. Liddell and Scott definition: "excercise, training."

61. +Transliteration: physei. Liddell and Scott definition of physis: "the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or thing." Thus, the dative form cited by Pater means, "with regard to nature."

61. +Transliteration: theia moira. Translation: "one's lot by divine appointment."

62. +Transliteration: anamnesis. Liddell and Scott definition: "a calling to mind, recollection."

64. +Transliteration: hos dei. E-text editor's translation: "as is necessary."

64. +Transliteration: Nyn auto hosper onar arti anakekinetai hai doxai autai. Pater's translation: "Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him." Plato, Meno, 85c.

65. +Transliteration: hois episphragizometha touto. E-text editor's translation: "these things upon which we set this seal." Plato, Phaedo, 75d.

65. +Transliteration: Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erotesantos, epistesetai, analabon, autos ex hautou, epistemen. E-text editor's translation: "No-one having taught him a thing, but rather through questioning alone, he will understand for certain, retrieving the knowledge out of himself?" Plato, Meno, 85d.

65. +Transliteration: episteme. Liddell and Scott definition "1. knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific knowledge."

65. +Transliteration: enesan de ge auto autai hai doxai. E-text editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] implanted in him, weren't they?" Plato, Meno 85c. Source, if any.

65. +Transliteration: [enesontai autoi aletheis doxai,] erotesei epegertheisai, epistemai gignontai. E-text editor's translation: "[He holds within himself true opinions,] which a questioning process may awaken into certain knowledge." Plato, Meno 86a.

66. +Transliteration: athanatos an he psyche eie. Pater's translation: "The soul, then, would be immortal." Plato, Meno 86b.

70. +Transliteration: kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1. order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order: of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."

71. +Transliteration: Plemmeleia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a false note . . . error, offense."

71. +Transliteration: pleonexia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a disposition to take more than one's share."

71. +Transliteration: peras. See above, note two, page 59.



CHAPTER 4: PLATO AND SOCRATES

[75] "PLATO," we say habitually when we talk of our teacher in The Republic, the Phaedrus, cutting 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 idolon 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 [76] 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 [77] 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 Apology, 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 Phaedo, 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 Phaedo too pedestrian and common-place to be taken for things of mere literary invention: the rubbing of the legs, for instance, now released from the chain; the rather [78] uneasy determination to be indifferent; the somewhat 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 tenderness, 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 completed, and explained to wholly sympathetic spirits, by the more intimate discourses of the Phaedo.

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 is, what is true—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 driving earnestly, yet with method, at those universal conceptions or definitions which serve to establish [79] 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 (epagoge)+ 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 growth of Plato's so artistic written Dialogues. The exclusive preoccupation 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 intellectual ambition of his youth. He had gone to school eagerly, as he tells his friends in the [80] Phaedo, in his last discourse, to a physical philosopher, 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 science—peri physeos historian.+ It seemed to me a proud thing to know the causes of every matter: how it comes to be; ceases to be; why it is. 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 prepared to ask for no other sort of causes. Phaedo, 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 everything, 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 constructed 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 [81] spirit in which Anaxagoras actually handled and applied that so welcome sapiential proposition that Reason panta diakosmei, kai panton aitios estin +—arranges and is the cause of all things—is but an example of what often happens when men seek an a posteriori justification of their instinctive 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.—"'Twas 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 unwelcome to them, a religious or mystic character. 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 [82] 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 Chaerephon," 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 knowledge; 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 delightful 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 wholesome 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 [83] been right after all, improbable as it seemed, in the signal honour it had put upon him, would be henceforward his proper business. Committing 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. Auto kath' hauto zetein ti pot' estin arete+—to 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—Meden estin agathon ho ouk episteme periechei +—a strenuously [84] 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 particular 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"—kath' hekasten ton praxeon, kai ton helikion pros hekaston ergon, hekasto hemon —+ "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know what sort of a thing it is"—ho me oida ti esti, pos an hopoion ge ti eideien;+ what its poiotetes,+ its qualities, are? "Do you suppose that one who does not know Meno, 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 (kath' holou)+ was after all but [85] an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts. Strange! out of the practical cautions of Socrates for the securing of clear and correct and sufficient conceptions about one's actual experience, for the attainment of a sort of thoroughly educated common-sense, came the mystic intellectualism of Plato—Platonism, with all its hazardous flights of soul.

A rich contributor to the philosophic consciousness 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, together 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 [86] 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 complexities of man's experience in the world of sight. Sitivit anima mea, the Athenian philosopher might say, in Deum, in Deum vivum, 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 anthropois, me hosion einai, autous heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergeten.+ His consistent piety straightway suggests 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 [87] before in Greece, inspiring a new note in literature—this attitude of Socrates in the condemned cell, where, fulfilling his own prediction, multitudes, 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—to pharmakon epien en to desmoterio.+ It was amid larger consolations, 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 constitution 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 oppositions 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 [88] any one else would have acted in that matter of the legal appeal which might have mitigated the penalty of death, bringing to its appropriate end a life whose main power had been an unrivalled independence, was contrasted in Socrates, paradoxically, with a genuine diffidence 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, dissemblingly, 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.

[89] The voice, the sign from heaven, that "new deity" he was accused of fabricating (his singularly profound sense of a mental phenomenon 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. "An 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 representative in Aristophanes, and who saw in the Socratic challenge of first principles, in that ceaseless testing of the origin and claims of what all [90] 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 standi 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 (ton hetto logon kreitto poiein)+ 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 [91] 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 super- ficial 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 justifiable, 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: [92] 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.

"I 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 [93] prison." Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells us in the Phaedo, 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" (hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai)+ 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 Phaedo 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 indifferent treatment, for instance, of the wife, who had not been very dutiful but was now in violent [94] 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 Phaedo, "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 immortality 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 suspended 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 [95] 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 (poiemata)+ or almost like those medicinable fictions (pseude en pharmakou eidei)+ such as are of legitimate use by the expert. That the soul (beautiful Pythagorean thought!) is a harmony; 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": (Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeos, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias).+ 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 forthcoming; but will wait for them with unfailing patience.—"The soul therefore Cebes," since such provisional arguments must be allowed to pass, "is something sturdy and strong (ischuron ti estin)+ imperishable by accident or wear; and we shall really exist in Hades." Indulging a little [96] 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 conform- ably 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. There 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 [97] 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 aether 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. Phaedo, 110.

The great assertor of the abstract, the impalpable, 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, a 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 [98] 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": Narthekophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi.+ 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.

NOTES

79. +Transliteration: epagoge. Liddell and Scott definition: "a bringing on, to, or in . . . argument from induction."

80. +Transliteration: peri physeos historian. E-text editor's translation: "inquiry into nature." Plato, Phaedo 96a.

81. +Transliteration: panta diakosmei, kai panton aitios estin. Pater's translation: "arranges and is the cause of all things." Plato, Phaedo 97c, offers a close paraphrase of Anaxagoras' saying.

83. +Transliteration: Auto kath' hauto zetein ti pot' estin arete. Pater's translation: "to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by itself." Plato, Meno 100b.

83. +Transliteration: Meden estin agathon ho ouk episteme periechei. Pater's translation: "There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend." Plato, Meno 87d.

84. *Tauton pantachou eidos—holon kai hygies—hen kata panton, dia panton, epi pasi-kath' holou. Pater's translation: "One and the same species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic." Perhaps Pater is combining phrases here; only the first phrase was locatable. Plato, Meno 72d.

84. +Transliteration: kath' hekasten ton praxeon, kai ton helikion pros hekaston ergon, hekasto hemon. Pater's translation: "to every several act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us." Plato, Meno 72a.

84. +Transliteration: ho me oida ti esti, pos an hopoion ge ti eideien. Pater's translation: "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know what sort of a thing it is." Plato, Meno 71b.

84. +Transliteration: poiotetes. Pater's translation: "qualities."

84. +Transliteration: kath' holou. Pater's translation: "universal, or catholic, definitions;" the phrase might be translated, "in accordance with the whole."

86. +Transliteration: Tois anthropois, me hosion einai, autous heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergeten. Pater's translation: "why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self- destruction." Plato, Phaedo 62a.

87. +Transliteration: to pharmakon epien en to desmoterio. Pater's translation: "he consumed the poison in the prison." Plato, Phaedo 57a.

90. +Transliteration: ton hetto logon kreitto poiein. Pater's translation: "to make the worse appear the better reason." Plato, Apology 23d.

93. +Transliteration: hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai. Pater's translation: "whither he must go, to die." The pronoun should be first person—"whither I must go." Plato, Apology 39e.

95. +Transliteration: poiemata. Liddell and Scott definition: "anything made or done . . . a poetical work."

95. +Transliteration: pseude en pharmakou eidei. Pater's translation: "medicinable fictions." Plato, Republic 389b contains a similar phrase.

95. +Transliteration: Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeos, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias. Pater's translation: "came to me apart from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness." Plato, Phaedo 92c.

95. +Transliteration: ischuron ti estin. Pater's translation: "is something sturdy and strong." Plato, Phaedo 95c.

98. +Transliteration: Narthekophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi. Pater's translation: "Many are called, but few chosen." Plato, Phaedo, 69c.



CHAPTER 5: PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS

[99] "SOPHIST," professional enemy of Socrates:—it became, chiefly through the influence of Plato, inheriting, expanding, the preferences and antipathies 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 accountants, 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 sophistai,+ the experts—wise men, who proposed to make other people as wise as themselves, wise in that sort of wisdom [100] 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 [101] 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 dissatisfaction 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. "If 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 essential nature of virtue, by no means re-establishes one's old prepossessions about it in the vein of [102] 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 subterranean 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 mobile soul of Athens became conscious,—"The citizen of Athens seems to me to present himself in his single person to the greatest possible variety (pleista eide)+ 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 [103] 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 philosophy 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 subordinate 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 [104] 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 Shakespeare, 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 conscious 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 [105] 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 proportion. 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 traceable 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 Lacedaemon, 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 [106] 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-supplementing 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 irresponsibility 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, irresponsible 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 [107] 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 of 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 [108] it to be, in the world around them, they formulate 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 carefully 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 presuppositions, prejudices 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," [109] those others proceed to say, "teachers of persuasion (peithous didaskaloi)+ 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 demos,+ 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 [110] 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 askesis, 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 actually 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 [111] 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, to ta hautou prattein+—to ta hautou prattein.+ 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 possible 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 misrepresentative of it as to deceive the very gods, or many good men, as happened pre-eminently in the case of Socrates.

[112] 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," (sophos gar kai theios aner)+ 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 (alla ti poiousa)+ to the soul of its possessor, each of them respectively, in and by itself (haute di' hauten)+ even 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 Injustice: not that, in practice, a confusion between the two is therefore likely; but that the intellect 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 sophistical [113] movement promotes. But what a contrast to it, in the treatment of Justice, of the question, What Justice is? 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, prematurely, 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 (to ta opheilomena apodidonai)+ might pass well enough for a general guide to right conduct; and the sophistical judgment that Justice is "The interest of the stronger" is not more untrue than the contrary paradox that "Justice is a plot of the weak against the strong."

It is, then, in regard to the claims of Justice, not so 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 hypothesi, what can be clearly thought is the precise measure of what really is, if such a thought about Justice—absolutely inclusive and exclusive—is, after all our efforts, not to be ascertained, this can only be, because Justice is not [114] 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 a certain 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 experience 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 [115] and the Sophists really was, amid much that they had in common, as being both alike distinguished 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 otherwise. That innocent word "Sophist" has survived 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 Phaedrus; 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 [116] of permanent interest in itself, and as being not directly connected with practical morals is unaffected 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 discourses 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 Phaedrus regarding the secret of success in proposals of love or friendship 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 of the art of rhetoric comes to be, that, with much superficial aptitude in the conduct of the matter, they neither reach, nor put others in the way of 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 [117] 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 Phaedrus, "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 Phaedrus, 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 so to them. For persuasion comes of the latter; by no means of a hold upon the truth of things."

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 [118] 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 Lacedaemonian (ho Lakon)+ 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 Lacedaemonian way, that a genuine art of speech (tou legein etumos techne)+ 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 of writing in ancient Egypt.— It might be doubted, he thinks, whether genuine memory was encouraged 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: Logon ara technen, ho ten aletheian me eidos, doxas te tethereukos, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai.+ —It is but a kind of bastard art of mere words (texne atexnos)+ that he will have who does not know the truth of things, but has tried to hunt out what other people think about it. "Conception," observed an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and artist of our own generation: [119] "Conception, fundamental brainwork,- -that is what makes the difference, in all art."