Against all pretended, mechanically communicable 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 practising Sophists of all ages) Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai deinoseos,+ 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,"—ta pro tragodias,+ Sophocles would object in like case, ta pro tragodias, all' ou tragika.+ Given the dynamic Sophoclean intention or conviction, and the irresistible law of right utterance, (ananke logographike)+ 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 pros doxan+ 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 [120]

For the essence of all artistic beauty is expression, 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, la vraie verite, 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 knowledge, of almost every kind, tells, is attracted into, and duly charged with, the force of what [121] may be his leading apprehension. And as the special function of all speech as a fine art is the control of minds (psychagogia)+ 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, tribe monon, kai empeiria alla techne,+ but by the power of veritable fine art. Now such art, such theory, is not "to be caught with the left hand," as the Greek phrase went; and again, chalepa ta kala.+ 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 [122] 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—kala epitedeumata+ (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 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 replete with flesh and blood and colours and other manifold vanity of this mortal life; but if he were able to behold that divine beauty (monoeides)+ 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, (ho dei)+ 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 may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, ho nous+) to beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom he [123] 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 conceived 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.

NOTES

99. +Transliteration: sophistai. Liddell and Scott definition: "at Athens, one who professed to make men wise."

102. +Transliteration: pleista eide. Pater's translation: "the greatest possible variety." Pater refers to the Funeral Oration given by Pericles to commemorate the Athenians who, to date, had died in the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.41.1.

107. +Plato, Republic 492.

109. +Transliteration: peithous didaskaloi. Pater's translation: "teachers of persuasion." Plato, Republic 365d.

109. +Transliteration: demos. Liddell and Scott definition: "the common people."

110. +Plato, Republic 496.

111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." The translation elaborates on the original, but captures its meaning accurately. Plato, Republic 433a-b.

111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein. Pater's translation: "The doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein." Plato, Republic 433a-b.

112. +Transliteration: sophos gar kai theios aner. E-text editor's translation: "for he was a wise and excellent man." Plato, Republic 331e.

112. +Transliteration: alla ti poiousa. Pater's translation: "but, by doing what. . ." Plato, Republic 367b.

112. +Transliteration: haute di' hauten. Pater's translation: "in and by itself." Plato, Republic 367e.

113. +Transliteration: to ta opheilomena apodidonai. Pater's translation: "to restore what one owes." Plato, Republic 331e and 332a.

118. +Transliteration: ho Lakon. Liddell and Scott definition: "The Lacedaemonian [i.e., Spartan]."

118. +Transliteration: tou legein etumos techne. Pater's translation: "a genuine art of speech." Plato, Phaedrus 260e.

118. +Transliteration: Logon ara technen, ho ten aletheian me eidos, doxas te tethereukos, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai. E-text editor's translation: "In the art of speaking, therefore, the person who does not know the truth, who has sought out only the opinions of others, will come by nothing better than a kind of unskilled jesting." Plato, Phaedrus 262c.

118. +Transliteration: texne atexnos. Pater's translation: "[a] bastard art of mere words." Plato, Phaedrus 260e.

119. +Transliteration: Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai deinoseos. E-text editor's translation: "Concerning brevity, and speech that moves to pity, and exaggeration. . ." Plato, Phaedrus 272a.

119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragodias. E-text editor's translation: "the things before tragedy." Plato, Phaedrus 269a.

119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragodias, all' ou tragika. E-text editor's translation: "the things before tragedy, but not tragedy itself." Plato, Phaedrus 269a.

119. +Transliteration: ananke logographike. E-text editor's translation: "[the manner] required [in] prose-writing or speech- making." Plato, Phaedrus 264b contains similar language.

119. +Transliteration: pros doxan. E-text editor's translation: "in accordance with received opinion." Plato, Republic 362a, among other passages.

121. +Transliteration: psychagogia. Pater's translation: "the control of minds." The verb ago means "lead or drive." Plato, Phaedrus 261a and 271c.

121. +Transliteration: tribe monon, kai empeiria alla techne. Pater's translation: "[not] by mere empiric routine, but by the power of veritable fine art." Plato, Phaedrus 270b.

121. +Transliteration: chalepa ta kala. E-text editor's translation: "fine things are hard [to obtain]." Plato, Republic 435c.

122. +Transliteration: kala epitedeumata. Pater's translation: "beautiful employments." Plato, Symposium 211c.

122. +Transliteration: monoeides. E-text editor's translation: "of one kind, simple." Plato, Symposium 211a and 211e.

122. +Transliteration: ho dei. E-text editor's translation: "with what is necessary." Plato, Symposium 212a.

122. +Transliteration: ho nous. Pater's translation: "imaginative reason." The word nous or noos generally means "mind." Plato, Symposium 210-212.

123. +The passage Pater cites—Diotima's speech about love—runs from 210-212a of the Symposium.



CHAPTER 6: THE GENIUS OF PLATO

[124] ALL true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of every other product of human mind, must begin with an historic estimate of the conditions, antecedent and contemporary, which helped to make it precisely what it was. But a complete criticism 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 personality, resistant to, while it is moulded by, them. It might even be said that the trial-task of criticism, 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 [125] which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful way with that environment. 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, reproduce 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 certainly, heroic enough, in its way—they have served science, science in 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 [126] 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 to that. 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 unseen, 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 visible world really existed." Austere as he seems, and on well- considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity, aesthetically 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.

[127] 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 philosophic 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 philosopher 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 Republic opens. His Socrates, like other people, is 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— Synesometha pollois [128] ton neon autothi.+ "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 alongside 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 absorbed 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: [129] —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 of 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, disparate subjects of The Republic, for example, into a manageable whole, so entirely that, looking 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 [130] 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 they are not formally introduced into his work, characters that had interested, impressed, or touched him, inform and colour it, as if with 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 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 endowments an aristocrat, amid the dangers to which it is exposed in the Athens of that day—the qualities which must make him, if not the saviour, the destroyer, of a society which cannot remain unaffected by his showy presence. Corruptio optimi pessima! Yet even here, when Plato is dealing with the inmost elements 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 give [131] 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, notwithstanding the real sweetness of manner and modesty of soul he records of 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 movement, 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 sameness of sons and fathers, for instance; the influence of servants on their masters; how the minute ambiguities of rank, as a family becomes [132] 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 discourse 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 character, 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 different sort of fineness Plato notes the blushes of the young; of Hippocrates, for instance, in the Protagoras. 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 [133] blushing face.—Kai hos eipen erythriasas, ede gar hypephaine ti emeras oste kataphane auton genesthai.+ 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 expressive. "Poor creature as I am," says the Platonic Socrates, in the Lysis, concerning another 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 observation, 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 Theatetus, which are like the flighty, half-contained notions of an imperfectly educated understanding. Real 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 [134] 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 erotika,+ 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 invisible 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 [135] 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 intimate 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 earthiness 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 Symposium 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 [136] knowledge, knew all that, we may be sure—ta erotika +—hetton ton kalon +—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 unimpassioned 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 Phaedrus concerning the management, the so difficult management, of [137] 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 is the 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 Phaedrus and the Symposium, what, [138] 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; [139] 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 disfranchised 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 successful 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 dialogues, 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, a seer, of it, carrying an elaborate cultivation of the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural [140] force and acquired fineness—gifts akin properly to ta erotika,+ 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 aesthetic 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, theoria,+ the imaginative reason.

[141] To trace that thread of physical colour, entwined 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 philosophy; to the Charmides, for something like the effect of sculpture in modelling a person; to the Timaeus, for certain brilliant chromatic effects. Yet who that reads the Theaetetus, or the Phaedrus, 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, to a real hold over the things, the thoughts, the [142] mental processes, those words denote; a vocabulary 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 definition, and to his successors the Schoolmen, with their systematic culture of a precise instrument for the registration, by the analytic intellect, of 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 conversation, 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, [143] challenge us straightway to larger and finer apprehension of the processes 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 experience still to come, would one day occupy. And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results, precisely his 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 circumstance, into a seer who has a sort of sensuous love of the unseen—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 sometimes, in terms of harshest dualism, oppose to, the sensible world. Plato is to be interpreted [144] 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 incongruously, 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 Dialogues, 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 intellectual, alike of Parmenides and of the Pythagoreans. 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 overstrained 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 is."

[145] 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 philosopher 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 to last, the aim of education as he conceived it. That the body is but "a hindrance to the attainment 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 [146] not suppress it. The sensuous lover becomes a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his earlier pattern, carrying into the world of intellectual vision, of theoria,+ 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 youthful Charmides; the absolute Righteousness, in the person of the dying Socrates. Yes, truly! all true knowledge will be like the knowledge of a person, of living persons, and truth, for Plato, in spite of his Socratic asceticism, to the last, something to look at. The eyes which had noted physical things, so finely, vividly, continuously, would be still at 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 encouragement towards, the redemption of matter, of the world of sense, by art, by all right education, by the creeds and worship of the Christian Church—towards the vindication of 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, [147] 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 range, 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 scholarship 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 refuge 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 [148] 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 of 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." He returns finally to Athens; and there, in the quiet precincts of the Academus, 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 Dialogues 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 [149] was less or more esoteric than the teaching of the extant Dialogues, 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."

NOTES

127-28. +Transliteration: Synesometha pollois ton neon autothi. Pater's translation: "We shall meet a number of our youth there." Plato, Republic 328a.

133. +Transliteration: Kai hos eipen erythriasas, ede gar hypephaine ti emeras oste kataphane auton genesthai. E-text editor's translation: "And he blushed as he spoke, for presently the day began to break, so as to make him visible." Plato, Protagoras 312a.

134. +Transliteration: Ta erotika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.

136. +Transliteration: ta erotika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.

136. +Transliteration: hetton ton kalon. Pater's translation: "subject to the influence of fair persons;" more literally, "yielding to beauty." Plato, Meno 76c.

140. +Transliteration: ta erotika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." Plato, Symposium 177d.

140. +Transliteration: theoria. Liddell and Scott definition: "a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection." Plato, Republic 486a.

146. +Transliteration: theoria. Liddell and Scott definition: "a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection." Plato, Republic 486a.



CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

I. THE THEORY OF IDEAS

[150] 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, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in 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 in what Plato's commentators, rather than Plato, have called the "theory of ideas," itself indeed not so much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of general terms, such as Useful or Just; of abstract notions, like Equality; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City; of all those terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the particular presentations of our individual experience; or, to use Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed [151] 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 relationship to the individual, the unit, the particulars which they include; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic. Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and pass out of it, as also of the particular mind which entertains 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 transcendental 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 [152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's individual 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 individual 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 noetos topos +. 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 [153] 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, homoion homoio +, 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 correspondence. 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 preoccupy acuter minds, those difficulties about the Many and the One actually had their attractiveness 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—hypo logon +—under the influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language, become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to everything 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— kinei + —every definition [154] —logos+—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 particulari- ties 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 Zeit-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 uninteresting, as such, to its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much [155] 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 [156] 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, is 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 [157] 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 impressions, 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 [158] 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 juxtaposition and co- ordination with what is ever more and more not it, 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 patiently 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, [159] 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 accumulative capital of the whole experience of humanity. Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato himself 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 expressiveness, of all other things beside. What broad-cast light he enjoys!—that scholar, confronted 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, [160] and universal definitions." Now when Aristotle says this of Socrates, he is recording the institution of a method, which might be applied in the way just indicated, to natural objects, to such a substance as carbon, or to such natural processes as heat or motion; but which, by Socrates himself, as by Plato after him, was applied almost exclusively to moral phenomena, to the generalisation of aesthetic, 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 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 indistinguishable from it: such is the business of physical science, in obedience to rules, outlined by Bacon in the first book of the Novum Organum, for securing those acts of "inclusion" and "exclusion," inclusiones, exclusiones, naturae, debitae, as he says, "which the nature of things requires," if our thoughts are not to misrepresent them.

It was a parallel process, a process of inclusion, that one's resultant idea should be adequate, of rejection or exclusion, that this idea should be not redundant, which Socrates applied [161] to practice; exercising, as we see in the Platonic Dialogues, the two opposed functions of synagoge and diairesis,+ 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 misrepresentation. Its aim is to secure, in the terms of our discourse with others and with ourselves, precise equivalence to what they 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 Just, Brave, Beautiful, to the thoughts they had; of those thoughts to the facts of experience, which it was the business of those [162] 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 (Ti poiousa)+ 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 everyday 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 individual [163] only, but the state. And you, the philosophic 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: choristos + (famous word!) that is precisely what general notions become in what is specially called "the Platonic Theory of Ideas." The "Ideas" of Plato are, in truth, neither more nor less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and shadows, in the singularly constituted atmosphere, under the strange laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of thought. By its peculiarities, subsequent thought—philosophic, [164] 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 attitude 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 Phaedrus. He seems to have no inclination for the responsibilities of definite theory; for a 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 Plato is to the last rather poetry than metaphysical reasoning—the irrepressible because almost unconscious poetry, which never deserts him, even when treating of what is neither more nor less than a chapter in the rudiments of logic.

The peculiar development of the Socratic realism by Plato can then only be understood [165] by a consideration of the peculiarities of Plato's genius; how it reacted upon those abstractions; what they came to seem in its peculiar atmosphere. 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 noticeable in Plato's Dialogues, but is to be found more especially in the Phaedo, the Symposium, and in certain books of The Republic, above all in the Phaedrus. Here is a famous passage from it:—

There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and space) there, at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul. For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the highest point, passed out and stood (as you might stand upon the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky. And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries them round; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky. That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily. And thus it is: for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate, especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking. For the colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason alone as one's guide. Centered about that, the generation, or seed, genos,—the people, of true knowledge inhabits this place. As, then, the intelligence of God, which is nourished by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akerato, unmixed with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also, which is about to receive that which properly belongs to it, beholding, after long interval, that which is, loves [166] 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 (ten en to ho estin on ontos epistemen ousan)+ 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. Phaedrus, 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 themselves—the real things; and secondly, persons, to be known as persons must be; and to be loved, for the perfections, the visible perfections, we might say—intellectually visible—of [167] 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 inheritance, 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 taking 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 experience, 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 knowledge, 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 locus 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 [168] 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 (choristos)+ 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 diffused, 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, [169] 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 adoring, 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 living creature; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of Wordsworth and Shelley, for 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 [170] 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. To 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 of 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 themselves 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 physical 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 of an idea, as such, would come home most clearly. [170] 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 something 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 proportion, 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. "Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is—impassioned lovers": Tou ontos te kai aletheias erastas tous philosophous.+ They are the cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state—those impassioned lovers, erastas,+ of that which really is, and in comparison wherewith, office, wealth, honour, the love of which has rent Athens, the world, to pieces, will be of no more than secondary importance.

[172] 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 (ta erotika)+ are a true parallel. His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by another, by which those "animistic" old Greeks explained natural madness. That philosophic enthusiasm, that impassioned desire for true knowledge, is a kind of madness (mania)+ 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 Phaedrus. To 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 reminiscence of the true, feels, or finds, his wings (pterotai)+ fluttering 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 [173] 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 associations, turning themselves to what is not right, they have forgotten 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, because they lack discernment. Now, of Justice, and of Temperance, 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 (genos,+ 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 I 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 manifest 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. Phaedrus, 249.+

NOTES

152. +Transliteration: noetos topos. Pater's translation: "intellectual world." Plato, Republic 508b and 517b.

153. +Transliteration: homoion homoio. Pater's translation: "like to like." Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato's dialogues; see, for example, Parmenides 132d.

153. +Transliteration: hypo logon. Pater's translation: "under the influence of . . . thought and language." Plato, Philebus 15d.

153. +Transliteration: kinei. Pater's translation: "sets in motion." Plato, Philebus 15e.

154. +Transliteration: logos. Pater's contextual translation: "definition." Plato, Philebus 15e.

154. +The passage begins at Philebus 15d.

161. +Transliteration: synagoge . . . diairesis. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor's translation: "." For example, Phaedrus 266b.

162. +Transliteration: Ti poiousa. Pater's translation: "by the doing of what."

163. +Transliteration: choristos. Pater's translation: "separable." The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.

165. +Transliteration: genos. Pater's translation: "seed, generation." Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent." Plato, Phaedrus 247a. 165. +Transliteration: akerato. Pater's translation: "unmixed with sense." Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

166. +Transliteration: ten en to ho estin on ontos epistemen ousan. Pater's translation: "the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is." Plato, Phaedrus 247e.

166. See Plato, Phaedrus 247b ff.

168. +Transliteration: choristos. Pater's translation: "separable." The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.

171. +Transliteration: Tou ontos te kai aletheias erastas tous philosophous. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor's translation: "Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is . . ." Plato, Republic 501d.

171. +Transliteration: erastas. See previous note.

172. +Transliteration: ta erotika. Pater's translation: "the discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining to love." For one instance, see Plato, Symposium 177d.

172. +Transliteration: mania. Liddell and Scott definition: "madness, frenzy." See, for example, Plato, Phaedrus 249d.

172. +Transliteration: pterotai. E-text editor's translation: "[he] is furnished with wings." Plato, Phaedrus 249d.

173. +Transliteration: genos. Pater's translation: "seed, generation." Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent." Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

173. +This passage begins at Phaedrus 249d.



CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

II. DIALECTIC

[174] 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, Peri Physeos,+ "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 situated midway between 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 ensemble, and issues. Strictly appropriate form of our modern philosophic literature, the essay came into use at what was really the invention of the relative, [175] 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 adventurous 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 possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting [176] faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension 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 conception, 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, however, that literary form has had no strictly constitutional propriety to the kind of matter it conveyed, as lending itself (that is to say) structurally to a many-sided but hesitant consciousness 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 [177] upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual method, in which, by preference to anything like formal lecturing (the lecture being, so to speak, a treatise in embryo) Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others. We see him in those Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public places, the open houses, the suburban roads, of Athens, as if seeking truth from others; seeking it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and by the help of, his supposed scholars, for whom, indeed, he can but bring their own native conceptions of truth to the birth; but always faithfully registering just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never concluding.