No More Learning

A
physician? No, Euthydemus answers. An architect? No. And so in like
manner with other practical skills,--the geometrician's, astronomer's,
professional reciter's. None of these he discovers is what Euthydemus
aims at. He hopes to become a great politician and statesman. Then of
course he hopes to be a just man himself? Euthydemus flatters himself
he is that already. "But," says Socrates, "there must be certain acts
which are the proper products of justice, as of other functions or
skills? "--"No doubt. "--"Then of course you can tell us what {117} those
acts or products are? "--"Of course I can, and the products of injustice
as well. "--"Very good; then suppose we write down in two opposite
columns what acts are products of justice and what of injustice. "--"I
agree," says Euthydemus. --"Well now, what of falsehood? In which
column shall we put it? "--"Why, of course in the unjust column. "--"And
cheating? "--"In the same column. "--"And stealing? "--"In it too. "--"And
enslaving? "--"Yes. "--"Not one of these can go to the just
column? "--"Why, that would be an unheard-of thing. "

"Well but," says Socrates, "suppose a general has to deal with some
enemy of his country that has done it great wrong; if he conquer and
enslave this enemy, is that wrong? "--"Certainly not. "--"If he carries
off the enemy's goods or cheats him in his strategy, what about these
acts? "--"Oh, of course they are quite right. But I thought you were
talking about deceiving or ill-treating friends. "--"Then in some cases
we shall have to put these very same acts in both columns? "--"I suppose
so. "

"Well, now, suppose we confine ourselves to friends. Imagine a general
with an army under him discouraged and disorganised. Suppose he tells
them that reserves are coming up, and by cheating them into this belief
he saves them from their discouragement, and enables them to win a
victory. What about this cheating of one's friends? "--"Why, I {118}
suppose we shall have to put this too on the just side. "--"Or suppose a
lad needs medicine, but refuses to take it, and his father cheats him
into the belief that it is something nice, and getting him to take it,
saves his life; what about that cheat? "--"That will have to go to the
just side too. "--"Or suppose you find a friend in a desperate frenzy,
and steal his sword from him, for fear he should kill himself; what do
you say to that theft? "--"That will have to go there too. "--"But I
thought you said there must be no cheating of friends? "--"Well, I must
take it all back, if you please. "--"Very good. But now there is
another point I should like to ask you. Whether do you think the man
more unjust who is a voluntary violator of justice, or he who is an
involuntary violator of it? "--"Upon my word, Socrates, I no longer have
any confidence in my answers. For the whole thing has turned out to be
exactly the contrary of what I previously imagined. However, suppose I
say that the voluntary deceiver is the more unjust. "--"Do you consider
that justice is a matter of knowledge just as much (say) as
writing? "--"Yes, I do. "--"Well now, which do you consider the better
skilled as a writer, the man who makes a mistake in writing or in
reading what is written, because he chooses to do so, or the man who
does so because he can't help it? "--"Oh, the first; because he can put
it right whenever he likes. "--"Very {119} well, if a man in the same
way breaks the rule of right, knowing what he is doing, while another
breaks the same rule because he can't help it, which by analogy must be
the better versed in justice? "--"The first, I suppose. "--"And the man
who is better versed in justice must be the juster man? "--"Apparently
so; but really, Socrates, I don't know where I am. I have been
flattering myself that I was in possession of a philosophy which could
make a good and able man of me. But how great, think you, must now be
my disappointment, when I find myself unable to answer the simplest
question on the subject? "

Many other questions are put to him, tending to probe his
self-knowledge, and in the end he is brought to the conclusion that
perhaps he had better hold his tongue, for it seems he knows nothing at
all. And so he went away deeply despondent, despising himself as an
absolute dolt. "Now many," adds Xenophon, "when brought into this
condition by Socrates, never came near him again. But Euthydemus
concluded that his only hope of ever being worth anything was in seeing
as much of Socrates as he could, and so he never quitted his side as
long as he had a chance, but tried to follow his mode of living. And
Socrates, when he perceived this to be his temper, no longer tormented
him, but sought with all simplicity and clearness to {120} show him
what he deemed it best for him to do and think. "

Was this cross-examination mere 'tormenting' with a purpose, or can we
discover underlying it any hint of what Socrates deemed to be the truth
about justice?

Let us note that throughout he is in search of a _definition_, but that
as soon as any attempt is made to define or classify any particular
type of action as just or unjust, _special circumstances_ are suggested
which overturn the classification. Let us note further that while the
immediate result is apparently only to confuse, the remoter but more
permanent result is to raise a suspicion of any hard and fast
definitions, and to suggest that there is something deeper in life than
language is adequate to express, a 'law in the members,' a living
principle for good, which transcends forms and maxims, and which alone
gives real value to acts. Note further the suggestion that this living
principle has a character analogous to the knowledge or skill of an
accomplished artificer; it has relation on the one hand to law, as a
principle binding on the individual, it has relation on the other hand
to _utility_, as expressing itself, not in words, but in acts
beneficial to those concerned. Hence the Socratic formula, Justice is
equivalent to the _Lawful_ on the one hand, to the _Useful_ on the
other.

{121}

Socrates had thus solved by anticipation the apparently never-ending
controversy about morality. Is it a matter imposed by God upon the
heart and conscience of each individual? Is it dictated by the general
sense of the community? Is it the product of Utility? The Socratic
answer would be that it is all three, and that all three mean
ultimately the same thing. What God prescribes is what man when he is
truly man desires; and what God prescribes and man desires is that
which is good and useful for man. It is not a matter for verbal
definition but for vital realisation; the true morality is that which
_works_; the ideally desirable, is ultimately the only possible, course
of action, for all violations of it are ultimately suicidal.

Note finally the suggestion that the man who _knows_ (in Socrates'
sense of knowledge) what is right, shows only more fully his
righteousness when he voluntarily sins; it is the 'unwilling sinner'
who is the wrongdoer. When we consider this strange doctrine in
relation to the instances given,--the general with his army, the father
with his son, the prudent friend with his friend in desperate
straits,--we see that what is meant is that 'sin' in the real sense is
not to be measured or defined by conformity or otherwise to some formal
standard, at least in the case of those who _know_, that is, in the
case of men who have realised goodness in its true nature in {122}
their characters and lives. As St. Paul expressed it (Rom. xiii. 10),
"Love is the fulfilling of the law. " Or again (Gal. v. 23), after
enumerating the 'fruits of the spirit'--love, joy, peace,
longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance--he
adds, "Against such there is no law. "

In the domain of life, not less than in that of the arts, the highest
activity does not always or necessarily take the form of conformity to
rule. There are critical moments when rules fail, when, in fact,
obedience to rule would mean disobedience to that higher law, of which
rules and formulae are at best only an adumbration. The originality of
the great musician or painter consists in just such transcendence of
accepted formulae; this is why he invariably encounters opposition and
obloquy from the learned conventional pedants of his time. And in the
domain of morals the martyrs, reformers, prophets are in like manner
'willing sinners. ' They are denounced, persecuted, crucified; for are
they not disturbers of society; do they not unsettle young men; do they
not come, as Christ came, not to bring peace into the world, but a
sword? And thus it is that the willing sinners of one generation are
the martyrs and heroes of the next. Through their life and death a
richer meaning has been given to the law of beauty or of rectitude,
only, alas! in its turn to be translated into new conventions, new
{123} formulae, which shall in due time require new martyrs to
transcend them. And thus, on the other hand, the perfectly honest
sticklers for the old and common-place, unwilling sinners all
unconscious of their sin, are fated to bear in history the brand of men
who have persecuted the righteous without cause. To each, according to
the strange sad law of life, time brings its revenges.




{124}

CHAPTER XIII

THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS

_A philosopher at ease--The sensual sty--Citizens of the world--The tub
of Diogenes--A philosophy of abstracts_


[204]

I. ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAICS. --Aristippus was a native of Cyrene, a
Greek colony on the north coast of Africa. He is said to have come to
Athens because of his desire to hear Socrates; but from the notices of
him which we find in Xenophon's memoirs he appears to have been from
the first a somewhat intractable follower, dissenting especially from
the poverty and self-denial of the master's mode of life. [205] He in
course of time founded a school of his own, called the Cyrenaic from
his own place of birth, and from the fact that many subsequent leaders
of the school also belonged to Cyrene. Among his notable disciples
were his daughter Arete, her son named Aristippus after his
grandfather, Ptolemaeus the Aethiopian, Antipater of Cyrene, and a long
succession of others.

Aristippus was a man of considerable subtlety of mind, a ready speaker,
clever in adapting himself to persons and circumstances. On one
occasion, being {125} asked what benefit he considered philosophy had
conferred upon him, he answered, "The capacity of associating with
every one without embarrassment. " Philosophy, in fact, was to
Aristippus a method of social culture, a means of making the best of
life as he found it. As Horace observes of him (_Epp_. i. 17. 23)--

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res
Tentantem majora, fere praesentibus aequum.

"Every aspect and manner of life and fortune fitted Aristippus; he
aimed at what was greater, yet kept an even, mind whatever his present
condition. "

[206]

As we have already said, this school was _incompletely_ Socratic,
inasmuch as philosophy was not an end in itself, knowledge whether of
oneself or of other matters had no intrinsic interest for them;
philosophy was only a means towards pleasurable living, enabling them
so to analyse and classify the several experiences of life as to render
a theory of satisfactory [207] existence possible. With them first
came into prominence a phrase which held a large place in all
subsequent Greek philosophy, the _End_ of existence, by which was meant
that which summed up the good in existence, that which made life worth
living, that which was good and desirable in and for itself, and not
merely as a means to something else. What then according to the
Cyrenaics was the End of life? {126} Their answer was that life had at
each moment its own End, in the pleasure of that moment. The past was
gone, the future not yet with us; remembrance of the one, fear or hope
of the other, might contribute to affect the purity of the present
pleasure, but such as it was the present pleasure was a thing apart,
complete in and for itself. Nor was its perfection qualified by any
question of the means by which it was procured; the moment's pleasure
was pleasurable, whatever men might say as to the manner of its [208]
procuring. This pleasure was a tranquil activity of the being, like
the gently heaving sea, midway between violent motion which was pain,
and absolute calm which was insensibility. As a state of activity it
was something positive, not a mere release from [209] pain, not a
simple filling up of a vacuum. Nothing was in its essential nature
either just or noble or base; custom and convention pronounced them one
or other. The wise man made the best he could of his conditions;
valuing mental activity and friendship and wealth and bodily exercise,
and avoiding envy and excessive indulgence of passion and superstition,
not because the first were in themselves good or the second evil, but
because they were respectively helpers or hinderers of pleasure. He is
the master and possessor of pleasure not who abstains from it, but who
uses it and keeps his self-command in the using. Moderate
indulgence--this is wisdom.

{127}

[210]

The one criterion, whether of good or of truth, is the feeling of the
moment for the man who feels it; all question of causes of feelings is
delusive. We can say with truth and certainty, I have the sensation of
white or the sensation of sweet. But that there is a white or a sweet
thing which is the cause of the sensation, that we cannot say for
certain. A man may very well have the sensation white or sweet from
something which has no such quality, as men in delusion or madness have
impressions that are true and real inasmuch as they have them, although
other people do not admit their reality. There is, therefore, no
criterion of truth as between man and man; we may employ the same
words, but each has his own impressions and his own individual
experiences.

One can easily understand this as the doctrine of such a man as
Aristippus, the easy-going man of the world, the courtier and the wit,
the favourite of the tyrant Dionysius; it fits in well enough with a
life of genial self-indulgence; it always reappears whenever a man has
reconciled himself 'to roll with pleasure in a sensual sty. ' But life
is not always, nor for most persons at any time, a thing of ease and
soft enchantments, and the Cyrenaic philosophy must remain for the
general work-a-day world a stale exotic. 'Every man for himself and
the devil take the hindmost,' is a maxim which comes as a rule {128}
only to the lips of the worldly successful, while they think themselves
strong enough to stand alone. But this solitude of selfishness neither
works nor lasts; every man at some time becomes 'the hindmost,' if not
before, at least in the hour of death for him or his; at that hour he
is hardly disposed, for himself or those he loves, to repeat his maxim.

II. ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNICS. --Aristippus, in his praises of pleasure
as the one good for man (see above, p. 126), remarks that there were
some who [209] refused pleasure "from perversity of mind," taking
pleasure, so to speak, in the denial of pleasure. The school of the
Cynics made this perverse mood, as Aristippus deemed it, the maxim of
their philosophy. As the Cyrenaic school was the school of the rich,
the courtly, the self-indulgent, so the Cynic was the school of the
poor, the exiles, the ascetics. Each was an extreme expression of a
phase of Greek life and thought, though there was this point of union
[215] between them, that _liberty_ of a kind was sought by both. The
Cyrenaics claimed liberty to please themselves in the choice of their
enjoyments; the Cynics sought liberty through denial of enjoyments.
[219] Both, moreover, were cosmopolitan; they mark the decay of the
Greek patriotism, which was essentially civic, and the rise of the
wider but less intense conception of humanity. Aristippus, in a
conversation with Socrates (Xenoph. _Memor_. II. i. ) on the {129}
qualifications of those who are fitted to be magistrates, disclaims all
desire to hold such a position himself. "There is," he says, "to my
thinking, a middle way, neither of rule nor of slavery, but of freedom,
which leads most surely to true happiness. So to avoid all the evils
of partisanship and faction I nowhere take upon me the position of a
citizen, but in every city remain a sojourner and a stranger. " And in
like manner Antisthenes the Cynic, being asked how a man should
approach politics, answered, "He will approach it as he will fire, not
too near, lest he be burnt; not too far away, lest he starve of cold. "
And Diogenes, being asked of what city he was, answered, "I am a
citizen of the world. " The Cynic ideal, in fact, was summed up in
these four words--wisdom, independence, free speech, liberty.

[214]

Antisthenes, founder of the school, was a native of Athens, but being
of mixed blood (his mother was a Thracian) he was not recognised as an
Athenian citizen. He was a student first under Gorgias, and acquired
from him a considerable elegance of literary style; subsequently he
became a devoted hearer of Socrates, and became prominent among his
followers for an asceticism surpassing his master's. One day, we are
told, he showed a great rent in the thread-bare cloak which was his
only garment, whereupon Socrates slily remarked, "I can see through
your cloak your love of glory. " He carried a leathern {130} scrip and
a staff, and the 'scrip and staff' became distinctive marks of his
school. The name Cynic, derived from the Greek word for a dog, is
variously accounted for, some attributing it to the 'doglike' habits of
the school, others to their love of 'barking' criticism, others to the
fact that a certain gymnasium in the outskirts of Athens, called
Cynosarges, sacred to Hercules the patron-divinity of men in the
political position of Antisthenes, was a favourite resort of his. He
was a voluminous, some thought a too voluminous, [216] expounder of his
tenets. Like the other Incomplete Socratics, his teaching was mainly
on ethical questions.

[215]

His chief pupil and successor was the famous Diogenes, a native of
Sinope, a Greek colony on the Euxine Sea. He even bettered the
instructions of his master in the matter of extreme frugality of
living, claiming that he was a true follower of Hercules in preferring
independence to every other good. The tale of his living in a cask or
tub is well known. His theory was that the peculiar privilege of the
gods consisted in their need of nothing; men approached nearest the
life of the gods in needing as little as possible.

[217]

Many other sayings of one or other teacher are quoted, all tending to
the same conclusion. For example, "I had rather be mad than enjoying
myself! " "Follow the pleasures that come after pains, not those which
bring pains in their train. " "There {131} are pains that are useless,
there are pains that are natural: the wise choose the latter, and thus
find happiness even through pain. For the very contempt of pleasure
comes with practice to be the highest pleasure. " "When I wish a
treat," says Antisthenes, "I do not go and buy it at great cost in the
marketplace; I find my storehouse of pleasures in the soul. "

[218]

The life of the wise man, therefore, was a training of mind and body to
despise pleasure and attain independence. In this way virtue was
teachable, and could be so acquired as to become an inseparable
possession. The man who had thus attained to wisdom, not of words, but
of deeds, was, as it were, in an impregnable fortress that could
neither crumble into ruin nor be lost by treachery. And so
Antisthenes, being asked what was the most essential point of learning,
answered, "To unlearn what is evil. " That is to say, to the Cynic
conception, men were born with a root of evil in them in the love of
pleasure; the path of wisdom was a weaning of soul and body by practice
from the allurements of pleasure, until both were so perfectly
accustomed to its denial as to find an unalloyed pleasure in the very
act of [219] refusing it. In this way virtue became absolutely
sufficient for happiness, and so far was it from being necessary to
have wealth or the admiration of men in addition, that the true kingly
life was "to do well, {132} and be ill spoken of. " All else but virtue
was a matter of indifference.

The cosmopolitan temper of these men led them to hold of small account
the forms and prejudices of ordinary society: they despised the rites
of marriage; they thought no flesh unclean. They believed in no
multifarious theology; there was but one divinity--the power that ruled
all nature, the one absolutely self-centred independent being, whose
manner of [221] existence they sought to imitate. Nor had they any
sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some
of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time.
Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man
was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not
establish the existence of some abstract class of goods. As
Antisthenes once said to Plato, "A horse I see, but 'horseness' I do
not see. " What the exact point of this criticism was we may reserve
for the present.

[222]

III. EUCLIDES THE MEGARIC. --Euclides, a native of Megara on the
Corinthian isthmus, was a devoted hearer of Socrates, making his way to
hear him, sometimes even at the 'risk of his life, in defiance of a
decree of his native city forbidding intercourse with Athens. When
Plato and other Athenian followers of Socrates thought well to quit
Athens for {133} a time after Socrates' execution, they were kindly
entertained by Euclides at Megara.

The exact character of the development which the Socratic teaching
received from Euclides and his school is a matter of considerable
doubt. The allusions to the tenets of the school in Plato and [223]
others are only fragmentary. We gather, however, from them that
Euclides was wholly antithetical to the personal turn given to
philosophy, both by the Cyrenaics and the Cynics. He revived and
developed with much dialectical subtlety the metaphysical system of
Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute
existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this [224]
are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good,
and the good for man could only be found in such an absorption of
himself in this one absolute good through reason and contemplation, as
would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with it. Such
absorption raised a man above the troubles and pains of life, and thus,
in insensibility to these through reason, man attained his highest good.

The school is perhaps interesting only in so far as it marks the
continued survival of the abstract dialectic method of earlier
philosophy. As such it had a very definite influence, sometimes
through agreement, sometimes by controversy, on the systems of Plato
and Aristotle now to be dealt with.




{134}

CHAPTER XIV

PLATO

_Student and wanderer--The Dialogues--Immortal longings--Art is
love--Knowledge through remembrance--Platonic love_


[239]

This great master, the Shakespeare of Greek philosophy, as one may call
him, for his fertility, his variety, his humour, his imagination, his
poetic grace, was born at Athens in the year 429 B. C. He was of noble
family, numbering among his ancestors no less a man than the great
lawgiver Solon, and tracing back his descent even further to the [240]
legendary Codrus, last king of Athens. At a very early age he seems to
have begun to study the philosophers, Heraclitus more particularly, and
before he was twenty he had written a tragedy. About that time,
however, he met Socrates; and at once giving up all thought of poetic
fame he burnt his poem, and devoted himself to the hearing of Socrates.
For ten years he was his constant companion. When Socrates met his
death in 399, Plato and other followers of the master fled at first to
Megara, as already mentioned (above, p.
132); he then entered on a
period of extended travel, first to Cyrene and {135} Egypt, thence to
Italy and Sicily. In Italy he devoted himself specially to a study of
the doctrine of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he offended
the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his freedom of speech, and was
delivered up to the Spartans, who were then at war with Athens. [241]
Ultimately he was ransomed, and found his way back to Athens, but he is
said to have paid a second visit to Sicily when the younger Dionysius
became tyrant. He seems to have entertained the hope that he might so
influence this young man as to be able to realise through him the dream
of his life, a government in accordance with the dictates of [242]
philosophy. His dream, however, was disappointed of fruition, and he
returned to Athens, there in the 'groves of Academus' a mythic hero of
Athens, to spend the rest of his days in converse with his followers,
and there at the ripe age of eighty-one he died. From the scene of his
labours his philosophy has ever since been known as the Academic [243]
philosophy. Unlike Socrates, he was not content to leave only a memory
of himself and his conversations. He was unwearied in the redaction
and correction of his written dialogues, altering them here and there
both in expression and in structure. It is impossible, therefore, to
be absolutely certain as to the historical order of composition or
publication among his numerous {136} dialogues, but a certain
approximate order may be fixed.

We may take first a certain number of comparatively short dialogues,
which are strongly Socratic in the following respects: _first_, they
each seek a definition of some particular virtue or quality; _second_,
each suggests some relation between it and knowledge; _third_, each
leaves the answer somewhat open, treating the matter suggestively
rather than dogmatically. These dialogues are _Charmides_, which
treats of Temperance (_mens sana in corpore sano_); _Lysis_, which
treats of Friendship; _Laches_, Of Courage; _Ion_, Of Poetic
Inspiration; _Meno_, Of the teachableness of Virtue; _Euthyphro_, Of
Piety.

The last of these may be regarded as marking a transition to a second
series, which are concerned with the trial and death of Socrates. The
_Euthyphro_ opens with an allusion by Socrates to his approaching
trial, and in the _Apology_ we have a Platonic version of Socrates'
speech in his own defence; in _Crito_ we have the story of his noble
self-abnegation and civic obedience after his condemnation; in _Phaedo_
we have his last conversation with his friends on the subject of
Immortality, and the story of his death.

Another series of the dialogues may be formed of those, more or less
satirical, in which the ideas and methods of the Sophists are
criticised: _Protagoras_, {137} in which Socrates suggests that all
virtues are essentially one; _Euthydemus_, in which the assumption and
'airs' of some of the Sophists are made fun of; _Cratylus_, Of the
sophistic use of words; _Gorgias_, Of the True and the False, the truly
Good and the truly Evil; _Hippias_, Of Voluntary and Involuntary Sin;
_Alcibiades_, Of Self-Knowledge; _Menexenus_, a (possibly ironical) set
oration after the manner of the Sophists, in praise of Athens.

The whole of this third series are characterised by humour, dramatic
interest, variety of personal type among the speakers, keenness rather
than depth of philosophic insight. There are many suggestions of
profounder thoughts, afterwards worked out more fully; but on the whole
these dialogues rather stimulate thought than satisfy it; the great
poet-thinker is still playing with his tools.

A higher stage is reached in the _Symposium_, which deals at once
humorously and profoundly with the subject of Love, human and divine,
and its relations to Art and Philosophy, the whole consummated in a
speech related by Socrates as having been spoken to him by Diotima, a
wise woman of Mantineia. From this speech an extract as translated by
Professor Jowett may be quoted here. It marks the transition point
from the merely playful and critical to the relatively serious and
dogmatic stage in the mind of Plato:--

{138} "Marvel not," she said, "if you believe that love is of the
immortal, as we have already several times acknowledged; for here
again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as
far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to
be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a
new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the
same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is
called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between
youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and
identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and
reparation--hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always
changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul,
whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears,
never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and
going; and equally true of knowledge, which is still more
surprising--for not only do the sciences in general come and go, so
that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them
individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the
word 'recollection,' but the departure of knowledge, which is ever
being forgotten and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and
appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law
of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely
the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving
another new and similar existence behind--unlike the divine, which is
always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal
body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in
another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their
offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of
immortality. "

I was astonished at her words, and said: "Is this really true, O thou
wise Diotima? " And she answered with all the authority of a sophist:
"Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;--think only of the ambition of
men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you
consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame.
They are ready to run risks greater far than they would have run for
their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of {139} toil,
and even to die for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall
be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save
Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order
to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the
memory of their virtues, which is still retained among us, would be
immortal? Nay," she said, "I am persuaded that all men do all things,
and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious
fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.

"They whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to women and
beget children--this is the character of their love; their offspring,
as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the blessedness
and immortality which they desire in the future. But creative
souls--for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls
than in their bodies--conceive that which is proper for the soul to
conceive or retain. And what are these conceptions? --wisdom and virtue
in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are
deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of
wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states
and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who
in youth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself
inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He
wanders about seeking beauty that he may beget offspring--for in
deformity he will beget nothing--and naturally embraces the beautiful
rather than the deformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble
and well-nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such
an one he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of
a good man; and he tries to educate him; and at the touch of the
beautiful which is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he
brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in company
with him tends that which he brings forth; and they are married by a
far nearer tie and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal
children, for the children who are their common offspring are fairer
and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other
great poets, {140} would not rather have their children than ordinary
human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children
such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them
everlasting glory? Or who would not have such children as Lycurgus
left behind him to be the saviours, not only of Lacedaemon, but of
Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is the revered father
of Athenian laws; and many others there are in many other places, both
among Hellenes and barbarians. All of them have given to the world
many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every kind,
and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake of their
children; which were never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of
his mortal children.

"These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates,
may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of
these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will
lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my
utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would
proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful
forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one
such form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he
will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the
beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his
pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognise that the beauty in
every form is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will
abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a
small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the
next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more
honourable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous
soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend
him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may
improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the
beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of
them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and
after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may
see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of
one youth or man or {141} institution, himself a slave mean and
narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of
beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in
boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes
strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science,
which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed;
please to give me your very best attention.

"He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has
learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes
toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and
this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature
which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or
waxing and waning, in the next place not fair in one point of view and
foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place
fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul,
as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or
hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech
or knowledge, or existing in any other being; as for example, in an
animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place, but beauty
only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without
diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the
ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who under
the influence of true love rising upward from these begins to see that
beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going or being
led by another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth
as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other
beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from
fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions,
until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty,
and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear
Socrates," said the stranger of Mantineia, "is that life above all
others which a man should live, in the contemplation of beauty
absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be
after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths,
whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be
content to live seeing only and conversing with them without meat or
drink, {142} if that were possible--you only want to be with them and
to look at them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the
divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with
the pollutions of mortality, and all the colours and vanities of human
life--thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty divine
and simple? Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding
beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not
images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of
a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the
friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an
ignoble life? " (Jowett, _Plato_, vol. ii. p. 58).


Closely connected in subject with the _Symposium_ is the _Phaedrus_.
As Professor Jowett observes: "The two dialogues together contain the
whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love, which in _The
Republic_ and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced
playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the _Phaedrus_ and
_Symposium_ love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the
other. The spiritual and emotional is elevated into the ideal, to
which in the _Symposium_ mankind are described as looking forward, and
which in the _Phaedrus_, as well as in the _Phaedo_, they are seeking
to recover from a former state of existence. "

We are here introduced to one of the most famous conceptions of Plato,
that of _Reminiscence_, or Recollection, based upon a theory of the
prior existence of the soul. In the _Meno_, already alluded to,
Socrates is representing as eliciting from one of Meno's slaves {143}
correct answers to questions involving a knowledge or apprehension of
certain axioms of the science of mathematics, which, as Socrates
learns, the slave had never been taught. Socrates argues that since he
was never taught these axioms, and yet actually knows them, he must
have known them before his birth, and concludes from this to the
immortality of the soul. In the _Phaedo_ this same argument is worked
out more fully. As we grow up we discover in the exercise of our
senses that things are equal in certain respects, unequal in many
others; or again, we appropriate to things or acts the qualities, for
example, of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness. At the same time we
recognise that these are _ideals_, to which in actual experience we
never find more than an approximation, for we never discover in any
really existing thing or act _absolute_ equality, or justice, or
goodness. In other words, any act of judgment on our part of actual
experiences consists in a measuring of these experiences by standards
which we give or apply to them, and which no number of experiences can
give to us because they do not possess or exemplify them. We did not
consciously possess these notions, or ideals, or _ideas_, as he prefers
to call them, at birth; they come into consciousness in connection with
or in consequence of the action of the senses; but since the senses
could not give these ideas, the process of {144} knowledge must be a
process of _Recollection_. Socrates carries the argument a step
further. "Then may we not say," he continues, "that if, as we are
always repeating, there is an absolute beauty and goodness and other
similar ideas or essences, and to this standard, which is now
discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our
sensations, and with this compare them--assuming these ideas to have a
prior existence, then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if
not, not? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed
before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and
if not the ideas, then not the souls. "

In the _Phaedrus_ this conception of a former existence is embodied in
one of the _Myths_ in which Plato's imaginative powers are seen at
their highest. In it the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two
winged steeds, one mortal, the other immortal; the one ever tending
towards the earth, the other seeking ever to soar into the sky, where
it may behold those blessed visions of loveliness and wisdom and
goodness, which are the true nurture of the soul. When the chariots of
the gods go forth in mighty and glorious procession, the soul would
fain ride forth in their train; but alas! the mortal steed is ever
hampering the immortal, and dragging it down.

If the soul yields to this influence and descends to earth, there she
takes human form, but in higher {145} or lower degree, according to the
measure of her vision of the truth. She may become a philosopher, a
king, a trader, an athlete, a prophet, a poet, a husbandman, a sophist,
a tyrant. But whatever her lot, according to her manner of life in it,
may she rise, or sink still further, even to a beast or plant.

Only those souls take the form of humanity that have had _some_ vision
of eternal truth. And this vision they retain in a measure, even when
clogged in mortal clay. And so the soul of man is ever striving and
fluttering after something beyond; and specially is she stirred to
aspiration by the sight of bodily loveliness. Then above all comes the
test of good and evil in the soul. The nature that has been corrupted
would fain rush to brutal joys; but the purer nature looks with
reverence and wonder at this beauty, for it is an adumbration of the
celestial joys which he still remembers vaguely from the heavenly
vision. And thus pure and holy love becomes an opening back to heaven;
it is a source of happiness unalloyed on earth; it guides the lovers on
upward wings back to the heaven whence they came.




{146}

CHAPTER XV

PLATO (_continued_)

_The Republic--Denizens of the cave--The Timaeus--A dream of creation_


And now we pass to the central and crowning work of Plato, _The
Republic_, or _Of Justice_--the longest with one exception, and
certainly the greatest of all his works. It combines the humour and
irony, the vivid characterisation and lively dialogue of his earlier
works, with the larger and more serious view, the more constructive and
statesmanlike aims of his later life. The dialogue opens very
beautifully. There has been a festal procession at the Piraeus, the
harbour of Athens, and Socrates with a companion is wending his way
homeward, when he is recalled by other companions, who induce him to
visit the house of an aged friend of his, Cephalus, whom he does not
visit too often. Him he finds seated in his court, crowned, as the
custom was, for the celebration of a family sacrifice, and beholds
beaming on his face the peace of a life well spent and reconciled.
They talk of the happiness that comes in old age to those who have done
good and not evil, and who are not too severely {147} tried in the
matter of worldly cares. Life to this good old man seems a very simple
matter; duty to God, duty to one's neighbours, each according to what
is prescribed and orderly; this is all, and this is sufficient.

Then comes in the questioning Socrates, with his doubts and
difficulties as to what is one's duty in special circumstances; and the
discussion is taken up, not by the good old man, "who goes away to the
sacrifice," but by his son, who can quote the authorities; and by
Thrasymachus, the Sophist, who will have nothing to do with authority,
but maintains that _interest_ is the only real meaning of justice, and
that Might is Right. Socrates, by analogy of the arts, shows that
Might absolutely without tincture of justice is mere weakness, and that
there is honour even among thieves. Yet the exhibition of the 'law
working in the members' seems to have its weak side so long as we look
to individual men, in whom there are many conflicting influences, and
many personal chances and difficulties, which obscure the relation
between just action and happiness.

Socrates therefore will have justice 'writ large' in the community as a
whole, first pictured in its simpler, and then in its more complex and
luxurious forms. The relation of the individual to the community is
represented chiefly as one of education and training; and many strange
theories--as of the equal {148} training of men and women, and the
community of wives, ideas partially drawn from Sparta--are woven into
the ideal structure. Then the dialogue rises to a larger view of
education, as a preparation of the soul of man, not for a community on
earth, but for that heavenly life which was suggested above (p. 144) in
the myth of the steeds.

The purely earthly unideal life is represented as a life of men tied
neck and heels from birth in a cave, having their backs to the light,
and their eyes fixed only on the shadows which are cast upon the wall.
These they take for the only realities, and they may acquire much skill
in interpreting the shadows. Turn these men suddenly to the true
light, and they will be dazzled and blinded. They will feel as though
they had lost the realities, and been plunged into dreams. And in pain
and sorrow they will be tempted to grope back again to the familiar
darkness.

Yet if they hold on in patience, and struggle up the steep till the sun
himself breaks on their vision, what pain and dazzling once more, yet
at the last what glorious revelation! True, if they revisit their old
dwelling-place, they will not see as well as their fellows who are
still living contentedly there, knowing nothing other than the shadows.
They may even seem to these as dreamers who have lost their senses; and
should they try to enlighten these denizens of the cave, they may be
persecuted or {149} even put to death. Such are the men who have had a
sight of the heavenly verities, when compared with the children of
earth and darkness.

Yet the world will never be right till those who have had this vision
come back to the things of earth and order them according to the
eternal verities; the philosopher must be king if ever the perfect life
is to be lived on earth, either by individual or community. As it
would be expressed in Scriptural language, "The kingdoms of this world
must become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ. "

For the training of these ideal rulers an ideal education is required,
which Plato calls dialectic; something of its nature is described later
on (p. 170), and we need not linger over it here.

The argument then seems to fall to a lower level. There are various
approximations in actual experience to the ideal community, each more
or less perfect according to the degree in which the good of the
individual is also made the good of all, and the interests of governors
and governed are alike. Parallel with each lower form of state is a
lower individual nature, the worst of all being that of the tyrant,
whose will is his only law, and his own self-indulgence his only
motive. In him indeed Might is Right; but his life is the very
antithesis of happiness. Nay, pleasure of any kind can give no law to
reason; reason can judge of pleasure, but not _vice versa_. There is
no profit to a {150} man though he gain the whole world, if _himself_
be lost; if he become worse; if the better part of him be silenced and
grow weaker. And after this 'fitful fever' is over, may there not be a
greater bliss beyond? There have been stories told us, visions of
another world, where each man is rewarded according to his works. And
the book closes with a magnificent Vision of Judgment. It is the story
of Er, son of Armenius, who being wounded in battle, after twelve days'
trance comes back to life, and tells of the judgment seat, of heavenly
bliss and hellish punishments, and of the renewal of life and the new
choice given to souls not yet purified wholly of sin. "God is
blameless; Man's Soul is immortal; Justice and Truth are the only
things eternally good. " Such is the final revelation.

The _Timaeus_ is an attempt by Plato, under the guise of a Pythagorean
philosopher, to image forth as in a vision or dream the actual framing
of the universe, conceived as a realisation of the Eternal Thought or
Idea. It will be remembered that in the analysis already given (p.
143) of the process of knowledge in individual men, Plato found that
prior to the suggestions of the senses, though not coming into
consciousness except in connection with sensation, men had _ideas_ that
gave them a power of rendering their sensations intelligible. In the
_Timaeus_ Plato attempts a vision of the universe as though he saw
{151} it working itself into actuality on the lines of those ideas.
The vision is briefly as follows: There is the Eternal Creator, who
desired to make the world because He was good and free from jealousy,
and therefore willed that all things should be like Himself; that is,
that the formless, chaotic, unrealised void might receive form and
order, and become, in short, real as He was. Thus creation is the
process by which the Eternal Creator works out His own image, His own
ideas, in and through that which is formless, that which has no name,
which is nothing but possibility,--dead earth, namely, or _Matter_.
And first the world-soul, image of the divine, is formed, on which as
on a "diamond network" the manifold structure of things is
fashioned--the stars, the seven planets with their sphere-music, the
four elements, and all the various creatures, aetherial or fiery,
aerial, aqueous, and earthy, with the consummation of them all in
microcosm, in the animal world, and specially in man.

One can easily see that this is an attempt by Plato to carry out the
reverse process in thought to that which first comes to thinking man.
Man has sensations, that is, he comes first upon that which is
conceivably last in creation, on the immediate and temporary things or
momentary occurrences of earth. In these sensations, as they
accumulate into a kind of habitual or unreasoned knowledge or opinion,
he discovers elements which have been active to {152} correlate the
sensations, which have from the first exercised a governing influence
upon the sensations, without which, indeed, no two sensations could be
brought together to form anything one could name. These regulative,
underlying, permanent elements are Ideas, _i. e. _ General Forms or
Notions, which, although they may come second as regards time into
consciousness, are by reason known to have been there before, because
through them alone can the sensations become intelligibly possible, or
thinkable, or namable. Thus Plato is led to the conception of an order
the reverse of our individual experience, the order of creation, the
order of God's thought, which is equivalent to the order of God's
working; for God's thought and God's working are inseparable.

Of course Plato, in working out his dream of creation absolutely
without any scientific knowledge, the further he travels the more
obviously falls into confusion and absurdity; where he touches on some
ideas having a certain resemblance to modern scientific discoveries, as
the law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the quantitative
basis of differences of quality, etc. , these happy guesses are apt to
lead more frequently wrong than right, because they are not kept in
check by any experimental tests. But taken as a 'myth,' which is
perhaps all that Plato intended, the work offers much that is
profoundly interesting.

{153}

With the _Timaeus_ is associated another dialogue called the _Critias_,
which remains only as a fragment. In it is contained a description of
the celebrated visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the
pillars of Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury and power, a land
also of gentle manners and wise orderliness. "The fiction has
exercised a great influence over the imagination of later ages. As
many attempts have been made to find the great island as to discover
the country of the lost tribes. Without regard to the description of
Plato, and without a suspicion that the whole narrative is a
fabrication, interpreters have looked for the spot in every part of the
globe--America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Sardinia, Sweden. The
story had also an effect on the early navigators of the sixteenth
century" (Jowett, _Plato_, vol. iii. p. 679).




{154}

CHAPTER XVI

PLATO (_continued_)

_Metaphysics and psychology--Reason and pleasure--Criticism of the
ideas--Last ideals_


We now come to a series of highly important dialogues, marked as a
whole by a certain diminution in the purely artistic attraction, having
less of vivid characterisation, less humour, less dramatic interest,
less perfect construction in every way, but, on the other hand,
peculiarly interesting as presenting a kind of after-criticism of his
own philosophy. In them Plato brings his philosophic conceptions into
striking relation with earlier or rival theories such as the Eleatic,
the Megarian, the Cyrenaic, and the Cynic, and touches in these
connections on many problems of deep and permanent import.

The most remarkable feature in these later dialogues is the
disappearance, or even in some cases the apparently hostile criticism,
of the doctrine of Ideas, and consequently of Reminiscence as the
source of knowledge, and even, apparently, of Personal {155}
Immortality, so far as the doctrine of Reminiscence was imagined to
guarantee it. This, however, is perhaps to push the change of view too
far. We may say that Plato in these dialogues is rather the
psychologist than the metaphysician; he is attempting a revised
analysis of mental processes. From this point of view it was quite
intelligible that he should discover difficulties in his former theory
of our mental relation to the external reality, without therefore
seeing reason to doubt the existence of that reality. The position is
somewhat similar to that of a modern philosopher who attempts to think
out the psychological problem of Human Will in relation to Almighty and
Over-ruling Providence. One may very clearly see the psychological
difficulties, without ceasing to believe either in the one or the other
as facts.

Throughout Plato's philosophy, amidst every variation of expression, we
may take these three as practically fixed points of belief or of faith,
or at least of hope; _first_, that Mind is eternally master of the
universe; _second_, that Man in realising what is most truly himself is
working in harmony with the Eternal Mind, and is in this way a master
of nature, reason governing experience and not being a product of
experience; and _thirdly_ (as Socrates said before his judges), that at
death we go to powers who are wise and good, and to men departed who in
their day shared in the divine wisdom and goodness,--that, in short,
there is something remaining for the dead, and better for those that
have done good than for those that have done evil.

The first of the 'psychological dialogues,' as we have called them, is
the _Philebus_. The question here is of the _summum bonum_ or chief
good. What is it? Is it pleasure? Is it wisdom? Or is it both? In
the process of answering these questions Plato lays down rules for true
definition, and establishes classifications which had an immense
influence on his successor Aristotle, but which need not be further
referred to here.

The general gist of the argument is as follows. Pleasure could not be
regarded as a sufficient or perfect good if it was entirely emptied of
the purely intellectual elements of anticipation and consciousness and
memory. This would be no better than the pleasure of an oyster. On
the other hand, a purely intellectual existence can hardly be regarded
as perfect and sufficient either. The perfect life must be a union of
both.

But this union must be an orderly and rational union; in other words,
it must be one in which Mind is master and Pleasure servant; the
finite, the regular, the universal must govern the indefinite,
variable, particular. Thus in the perfect life there are four
elements; in the body, earth, water, air, fire; in the soul, the
finite, the indefinite, the union of the {157} two, and the cause of
that union. If this be so, he argues, may we not by analogy argue for
a like four-fold order in the universe? There also we find regulative
elements, and indefinite elements, and the union of the two. Must
there not also be the Great Cause, even Divine Wisdom, ordering and
governing all things?

The second of the psychological series is the _Parmenides_, in which
the great Eleatic philosopher, in company with his disciple Zeno, is
imagined instructing the youthful Socrates when the two were on a visit
to Athens, which may or may not be historical (see above, p. 34). The
most striking portion of this dialogue is the criticism already alluded
to of Plato's own theory of Ideas, put into the mouth of Parmenides.
Parmenides ascertains from Socrates that he is quite clear about there
being Ideas of Justice, Beauty, Goodness, eternally existing, but how
about Ideas of such common things as hair, mud, filth, etc. ? Socrates
is not so sure; to which Parmenides rejoins that as he grows older
philosophy will take a surer hold of him, and that he will recognise
the same law in small things and in great.

But now as to the nature of these Ideas. What, Parmenides asks, is the
relation of these, as eternally existing in the mind of God, to the
same ideas as possessed by individual men? Does each individual
actually _partake_ in the thought of God through {158} the ideas, or
are his ideas only _resemblances_ of the eternal? If he partakes, then
the eternal ideas are not one but many, as many as the persons who
possess them. If his ideas only resemble, then there must be some
basis of reference by which the resemblance is established, a _tertium
quid_ or third existence resembling both, and so _ad infinitum_.
Socrates is puzzled by this, and suggests that perhaps the Ideas are
only notions in our minds. But to this it is replied that there is an
end in that case of any reality in our ideas. Unless in some way they
have a true and causal relation with something beyond our minds, there
is an end of mind altogether, and with mind gone everything goes.

This, as Professor Jowett remarks, "remains a difficulty for us as well
as for the Greeks of the fourth century before Christ, and is the
stumbling-block of Kant's _Critic_, and of the Hamiltonian adaptation
of Kant as well as of the Platonic ideas. It has been said that 'you
cannot criticise Revelation. ' 'Then how do you know what is
Revelation, or that there is one at all? ' is the immediate rejoinder.
'You know nothing of things in themselves. '--'Then how do you know that
there are things in themselves? ' In some respects the difficulty
pressed harder upon the Greek than upon ourselves. For conceiving of
God more under the attribute of knowledge than we do, he was more under
the necessity of {159} separating the divine from the human, as two
spheres which had no communication with one another.