No More Learning

In actual life, they are so rare, as to be incredible;
but, primarily, there is not only no presumption against them, but the
strongest presumption in favor of their appearance. But whether voices
were heard in the sky, or not; whether his mother or his father dreamed
that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo; whether a swarm of
bees settled on his lips, or not; a man who could see two sides of a
thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the
upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of
impossibilities, which reappears in every object; its real and its
ideal power,--was now, also, transferred entire to the consciousness
of a man.

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself
by propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute good,
which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental
distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations
from sources disdained by orators, and polite conversers; from mares
and puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and criers;
the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers, and fishmongers. He
cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two
poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His arguments and his
sentences are self-poised and spherical. The two poles appear; yes,
and become two hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is
transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands.
The seashore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of
two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and at
the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which
is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in
transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly
managed to present as much transitional surface as possible; this
command of two elements must explain the power and charm of Plato. Art
expresses the one, or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know
unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an
object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of
pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things added to things,
as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language
are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and
the reverse of the medal of Jove.

To take an example:--The physical philosophers have sketched each his
theory of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit;
theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of
mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as
second causes, to be no theories of the world, but bare inventories
and lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,--"Let
us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and
compose the universe. He was good; and he who is good has no kind of
envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be as much
as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit
this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world,
will be in the truth. " "All things are for the sake of the good, and
it is the cause of everything beautiful. " This dogma animates and
impersonates his philosophy. The synthesis which makes the character
of his mind appears in all his talents. Where there is great compass
of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the living
man, but in description appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not
to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by
an original mind in the exercise of its original power. In him the
freest abandonment is united with the precision of a geometer. His
daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the
birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician
polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it
stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of frame.
According to the old sentence, "If Jove should descend to the earth,
he would speak in the style of Plato. "

With this palatial air, there is, for the direct aim of several of his
works, and running through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness,
which mounts, in the Republic, and in the Phaedo, to piety. He has
been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the death of
Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the times attest
his manly interference before the people in his master's behalf, since
even the savage cry of the assembly to Plato is preserved; and the
indignation towards popular government, in many of his pieces, expresses
a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native reverence for
justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry,
prophecy, and the high insight, arc from a wisdom of which man is not
master; that the gods never philosophize; but, by a celestial mania,
these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he
sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw
the souls in pain; he hears the doom of the judge; he beholds the penal
metempsychosis; the Fates, with the rock and shears; and hears the
intoxicating hum of their spindle.

But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say, he had read
the inscription on the gates of Busyrane,--"Be bold;" and on the second
gate,--"Be bold, be bold and evermore be bold;" and then again he
paused well at the third gate,--"Be not too bold. " His strength is
like the momentum of a falling planet; and his discretion, the return
of its due and perfect curve,--so excellent is his Greek love of
boundary, and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms, one is
not more secure, than in following Plato in his flights. Nothing can
be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are
playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking, before he brings it
to the reader; and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master.
He has that opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon
he needs. As the rich man wears no more garments, drives no more horses,
sits in no more chambers, than the poor,--but has that one dress, or
equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so
Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There
is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess
and use,--epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire, and irony,
down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his
jests illustrations. Socrates' profession of obstetric art is good
philosophy; and his finding that word "cookery," and "adulatory art,"
for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No
orator can measure in effect with him who can give good nicknames.

What moderation, and understatement, and checking his thunder in mid
volley! He has good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with
all that can be said against the schools. "For philosophy is an elegant
thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but, if he is conversant
with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man. " He could well
afford to be generous,--he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach
of his vision, had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was
his speech: he plays with the doubt, and makes the most of it: he
paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that moves the sea
and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the
perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. "I,
therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how
I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy condition.
Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking
to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I
can and, when I die, to die so. And I invite all other men, to the
utmost of my power; and you, too, I in turn invite to this contest,
which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here. "

He is a great average man one who, to the best thinking, adds a
proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their
own dreams and glimpses made available, and made to pass for what they
are. A great common sense is his warrant and qualification to be the
world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic
class have: but he has, also, what they have not,--this strong solving
sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and
build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits
never this graduation, but slopes his thought, however picturesque the
precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never writes
in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic rapture.

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on
the earth, and cover his eyes, whilst he adorned that which cannot be
numbered, or gauged, or known, or named: that of which everything can
be affirmed and denied: that "which is entity and nonentity. " He called
it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to
demonstrate that it was so,--that this Being exceeded the limits of
intellect. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having
paid his homage, as for the human race, to the Illimitable, he then
stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, "And yet things are
knowable! "--that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily
honored,--the ocean of love and power, before form, before will, before
knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One; and now, refreshed and empowered
by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely, culture, returns; and
he cries, Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being
from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence
of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is
our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science
of quantities called mathematics; a science of qualities, called
chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it
Dialectic,--which is the intellect discriminating the false and the
true. It rests on the observation of identity and diversity; for, to
judge, is to unite to an object the notion which belongs to it. The
sciences, even the best,--mathematics, and astronomy, are like
sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to
make any use of them. Dialectic must teach the use of them. "This is
of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on any study for its
own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole
science which embraces all. "

"The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend the whole; or that
which in the diversity of sensations, can be comprised under a rational
unity. " "The soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass
into the human form. " I announce to men the intellect. I announce the
good of being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this
benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which it made and
maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as the law-giver is
before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men: that truth is
altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be
the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be balked of the
sight of essence, and to be stuffed with conjecture: but the supreme
good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all
felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing
else than knowledge: the fairest fortune that can befall man, is to
be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is
the essence of justice,--to attend every one his own; nay, the notion
of virtue is not to be arrived at, except through direct contemplation
of the divine essence. Courage, then, for "the persuasion that we must
search that which we do not know, will render us, beyond comparison,
better, braver, and more industrious, than if we thought it impossible
to discover what we do not know, and useless to search for it. " He
secures a position not to be commanded, by his passion for reality;
valuing philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing with real
being.

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, "Culture. " He saw the
institutions of Sparta, and recognized more genially, one would say,
than any since, the hope of education. He delighted in every
accomplishment, in every graceful and useful and truthful performance;
above all, in the splendors of genius and intellectual achievement.
"The whole of life, O Socrates," said Glauco, "is, with the wise the
measure of hearing such discourses as these. " What a price he sets on
the feats of talent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of
Parmenides! What price, above price on the talents themselves! He
called the several faculties, gods, in his beautiful personation. What
value he gives to the art of gymnastics in education; what to geometry;
what to music, what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal power
he celebrates! In the Timseus, he indicates the highest employment of
the eyes. "By us it is asserted, that God invented and bestowed sight
on us for this purpose,--that, on surveying the circles of intelligence
in the heavens, we might properly employ those of our own minds, which,
though disturbed when compared with the others that are uniform, are
still allied to their circulations; and that, having thus learned, and
being naturally possessed of a correct reasoning faculty, we might,
by imitating the uniform revolutions of divinity, set right our own
wanderings and blunders. " And in the Republic,--"By each of these
disciplines, a certain organ of the soul is both purified and
reanimated, which is blinded and buried by studies of another kind;
an organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, since truth is
perceived by this alone. "

He said, Culture; but he first admitted its basis, and gave immeasurably
the first place to advantages of nature. His patrician tastes laid
stress on the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the organic
character and disposition is the origin of caste. "Such as were fit
to govern, into their composition the informing Deity mingled gold:
into the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen and
artificers. " The East confirms itself, in all ages, in this faith. The
Koran is explicit on this point of caste. "Men have their metal, as
of gold and silver. Those of you who were the worthy ones in the state
of ignorance, will be the worthy ones in the state of faith, as soon
as you embrace it. " Plato was not less firm. "Of the five orders of
things, only four can be taught in the generality of men. " In the
Republic, he insists on the temperaments of the youth, as the first
of the first.

A happier example of the stress laid on nature, is in the dialogue
with the young Theages, who wishes to receive lessons from Socrates.
Socrates declares that, if some have grown wise by associating with
him, no thanks are due to him; but, simply, whilst they were with him,
they grew wise, not because of him; he pretends not to know the way
of it. "It is adverse to many, nor can those be benefited by associating
with me, whom the Daemons oppose, so that it is not possible for me
to live with these. With many, however, he does not prevent me from
conversing, who yet are not at all benefited by associating with me.
Such, O Theages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases the
God, you will make great and rapid proficiency: you will not, if he
does not please. Judge whether it is not safer to be instructed by
some one of those who have power over the benefit which they impart
to men, than by me, who benefit or not, just as it may happen. " As if
he had said, "I have no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You
will be what you must. If there is love between us, inconceivably
delicious and profitable will our intercourse be; if not, your time
is lost, and you will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, and
the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, beyond the will of you
or me, is this secret affinity or repulsion laid. All my good is
magnetic, and I educate, not by lessons, but by going about my
business. "

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he failed not to add, "There
is also the divine. " There is no thought in any mind, but it quickly
tends to convert itself into a power, and organizes a huge
instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, loved the illimitable,
saw the enlargement and nobility which come from truth itself, and
good itself, and attempted, as if on the part of the human intellect,
once for all, to do it adequate homage,--homage fit for the immense
soul to receive, and yet homage becoming the intellect to render. He
said, then, "Our faculties run out into infinity, and return to us
thence. We can define but a little way; but here is a fact which will
not be skipped, and which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things
are in a scale; and, begin where we will, ascend and ascend. All things
are symbolical; and what we call results are beginnings. "

A key to the method and completeness of Plato is his twice bisected
line. After he has illustrated the relation between the absolute good
and true, and the forms of the intelligible world, he says:--"Let there
be a line cut in two, unequal parts. Cut again each of these two
parts,--one representing the visible, the other the intelligible
world,--and these two new sections, representing the bright part and
the dark part of these worlds, you will have, for one of the sections
of the visible world,--images, that is, both shadows and reflections;
for the other section, the objects of these images,-that is, plants,
animals, and the works of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible
world in like manner; the one section will be of opinions and
hypotheses, and the other section, of truths. " To these four sections,
the four operations of the soul correspond,--conjecture, faith,
understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the image of the sun,
so every thought and thing restores us an image and creature of the
supreme Good. The universe is perforated by a million channels for his
activity. All things mount and mount.

All his thought has this ascension; in Phaedrus, teaching that "beauty
is the most lovely of all things, exciting hilarity, and shedding
desire and confidence through the universe, wherever it enters; and
it enters, in some degree, into all things; but that there is another,
which is as much more beautiful than beauty, as beauty is than chaos;
namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ of sight cannot reach unto,
but which, could it be seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality. "
He has the same regard to it as the source of excellence in works of
art. "When an artificer, in the fabrication of any work, looks to that
which always subsists according to the same; and, employing a model
of this kind, expresses its idea and power in his work; it must follow,
that his production should be beautiful. But when he beholds that which
is born and dies, it will be far from beautiful. "

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the same spirit, familiar now
to all the poetry, and to all the sermons of the world, that the love
of the sexes is initial; and symbolizes, at a distance, the passion
of the soul for that immense lake of beauty it exists to seek. This
faith in the Divinity is never out of mind, and constitutes the
limitation of all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom;--God only. In
the same mind, he constantly affirms that virtue cannot be taught;
that it is not a science, but an inspiration; that the greatest goods
are produced to us through mania, and are assigned to us by a divine
gift.

This leads me to that central figure, which he has established in his
Academy, as the organ through which every considered opinion shall be
announced, and whose biography he has likewise so labored, that the
historic facts are lost in the light of Plato's mind. Socrates and
Plato are the double star, which the most powerful instruments will
not entirely separate. Socrates, again, in his traits and genius, is
the best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's
extraordinary power. Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest enough;
of the commonest history; of a personal homeliness so remarkable, as
to be a cause of wit in others,--the rather that his broad good nature
and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, which was sure to
be paid. The players personated him on the stage; the potters copied
his ugly face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, adding to his
humor a perfect temper, and a knowledge of his man, be he who he might
whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat
in any debate,--and in debate he immoderately delighted. The young men
are prodigiously fond of him, and invite him to their feasts, whither
he goes for conversation. He can drink, too; has the strongest head
in Athens; and, after leaving the whole party under the table, goes
away, as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues with somebody
that is sober. In short, he was what our country-people call an old
one.

He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was monstrously fond of
Athens, hated trees, never willingly went beyond the walls, knew the
old characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought everything
in Athens a little better than anything in any other place. He was
plain as a Quaker in habit and speech, affected low phrases, and
illustrations from cocks and quails, soup-pans and sycamore-spoons,
grooms and farriers, and unnameable offices,--especially if he talked
with any superfine person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus, he
showed one who was afraid to go on foot to Olympia, that it was no
more than his daily walk within doors, if continuously extended, would
easily reach.

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears,--an immense talker,--the
rumor ran, that, on one or two occasions, in the war with Boeotia, he
had shown a determination which had covered the retreat of a troop;
and there was some story that, under cover of folly, he had, in the
city government, when one day he chanced to hold a seat there, evinced
a courage in opposing singly the popular voice, which had well-nigh
ruined him. He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, and
can live on a few olives; usually, in the strictest sense, on bread
and water, except when entertained by his friends. His necessary
expenses were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he did. He
wore no undergarment; his upper garment was the same for summer and
winter; and he went barefooted; and it is said that, to procure the
pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all day with the most
elegant and cultivated young men, he will now and then return to his
shop, and carve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that be, it
is certain that he had grown to delight in nothing else than this
conversation; and that, under his hypocritical pretense of knowing
nothing, he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, all the
fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives, or strangers from Asia
Minor and the islands. Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so
honest, and really curious to know; a man who was willingly confuted,
if he did not speak the truth, and who willingly confuted others,
asserting what was false; and not less pleased when confuted than when
confuting; for he thought not any evil happened to men, of such a
magnitude as false opinion respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless
disputant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of whose conquering
intelligence no man had ever reached; whose temper was imperturbable;
whose dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive; so careless
and ignorant as to disarm the weariest, and draw them, in the
pleasantest manner, into horrible doubts and confusion. But he always
knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. No escape; he drives
them to terrible choices by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and
Gorgiases, with their grand reputations, as a boy tosses his balls.
The tyrannous realist! -Meno has discoursed a thousand times, at length,
on virtue, before many companies, and very well, as it appeared to
him; but, at this moment, he cannot even tell what it is,--this
cramp-fish of a Socrates has so bewitched him.

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange conceits, drollery, and
_bon-hommie_, diverted the young patricians, whilst the rumor of
his sayings and quibbles gets abroad every day, turns out, in a sequel,
to have a probity as invincible as his logic and to be either insane,
or, at least, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion.
When accused before the judges of subverting the popular creed, he
affirms the immortality of the soul, the future reward and punishment;
and, refusing to recant, in a caprice of the popular government, was
condemned to die, and sent to the prison. Socrates entered the prison,
and took away all ignominy from the place, which could not be a prison,
whilst he was there. Crito bribed the jailor; but Socrates would not
go out by treachery. "Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is to be
preferred before justice. These things I hear like pipes and drums,
whose sound makes me deaf to everything you say. " The fame of this
prison, the fame of the discourses there, and the drinking of the
hemlock, are one of the most precious passages in the history of the
world.

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the droll and the martyr,
the keen street and market debater with the sweetest saint known to
any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, so
capacious of these contrasts; and the figure of Socrates, by a
necessity, placed itself in the foreground of the scene, as the fittest
dispenser of the intellectual treasurers he had to communicate. It was
a rare fortune, that this Aesod of the mob, and this robed scholar,
should meet, to make each other immortal in their mutual faculty. The
strange synthesis, in the character of Socrates, capped the synthesis
in the mind of Plato. Moreover, by this means, he was able, in the
direct way, and without envy, to avail himself of the wit and weight
of Socrates, to which unquestionably his own debt was great; and these
derived again their principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato.

It remains to say, that the defect of Plato in power is only that which
results inevitably from his quality. He is intellectual in his aim;
and, therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting into heaven, driving
into the pit, expounding the laws of the state, the passion of love,
the remorse of crime, the hope of the parting soul,--he is literary,
and never otherwise. It is almost the sole deduction from the merit
of Plato, that his writings have not,--what is, no doubt, incident
to this regnancy of intellect in his work,--the vital authority which
the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews
possess. There is an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary.

I know not what can be said in reply to this criticism, but that we
have come to a fact in the nature of things: an oak is not an orange.
The qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of salt, with salt.

In the second place, he has not a system. The dearest defenders and
disciples are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and his
theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks he means this,
and another, that: he has said one thing in one place, and the reverse
of it in another place. He is charged with having failed to make the
transition from ideas to matter. Here is the world, sound as a nut,
perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an
end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the
theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches.

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. Plato would willingly
have a Platonism, a known and accurate expression for the world, and
it should be accurate. It shall be the world passed through the mind
of Plato,--nothing less. Every atom shall have the Platonic tinge;
every atom, every relation or quality you knew before, you shall know
again and find here, but now ordered; not nature, but art. And you
shall feel that Alexander indeed overran, with men and horses, some
countries of the planet; but countries, and things of which countries
are made, elements, planet itself, laws of planet and of men, have
passed through this man as bread into his body, and become no longer
bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has become Plato.
He has
clapped copyright on the world. This is the ambition of individualism.
But the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor has good will to
eat it, but he is foiled. He falls abroad in the attempt; and biting,
gets strangled: the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own teeth.
There he perishes: unconquered nature lives on, and forgets him. So
it fares with all: so must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal
nature, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercitations. He argues
on this side, and on that. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple,
could never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be
quoted on both sides of every great question from him.

These things we are forced to say, if we must consider the effort of
Plato, or of any philosopher, to dispose of Nature,--which will not
be disposed of. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success
in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains. But there is an
injustice in assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not seem to treat
with flippancy his venerable name. Men, in proportion to their
intellect, have admitted his transcendent claims. The way to know him,
is to compare him, not with nature, but with other men. How many ages
have gone by, and he remains unapproached! A chief structure of human
wit, like Karnac, or the mediaeval cathedrals, or the Etrurian remains,
it requires all the breadth of human faculty to know it. I think it
is truliest seen, when seen with the most respect. His sense deepens,
his merits multiply, with study. When we say, here is a fine collection
of fables; or, when we praise the style; or the common sense; or
arithmetic; we speak as boys, and much of our impatient criticism of
the dialectic, I suspect, is no better. The criticism is like our
impatience of miles when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that
a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards. The great-eyed
Plato proportioned the lights and shades after the genius of our life.



PLATO: NEW READINGS


The publication, in Mr. Bohn's "Serial Library," of the excellent
translations of Plato, which we esteem one of the chief benefits the
cheap press has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a few
more notes of the elevation and bearings of this fixed star; or, to
add a bulletin, like the journals, of Plato at the latest dates.

Modern science, by the extent of its generalization, has learned to
indemnify the student of man for the defects of individuals, by tracing
growth and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient of lighting
up the vast background, generates a feeling of complacency and hope.
The human being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. His arts
and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, look glorious when
prospectively beheld from the distant brain of ox, crocodile, and fish.
It seems as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind her,
when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned out five or six men,
as Homer, Phidias, Menu, and Columbus, was nowise discontented with
the result. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. These were
a clear amelioration of trilobite and saurus, and a good basis for
further proceeding. With this artist time and space are cheap, and she
is insensible of what you say of tedious preparation. She waited
tranquilly the flowing periods of paleontology, for the hour to be
struck when man should arrive. Then periods must pass before the motion
of the earth can be suspected; then before the map of the instincts
and the cultivable powers can be drawn. But as of races, so the
succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the
fortune, in the history of mankind, to mark an epoch.

Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of
the Socratic, or on any thesis, as, for example, the immortality of
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school-man, or a geometer,
or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of
the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to
successive platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a germ of
expansion. These expansions are in the essence of thought. The
naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the extent
of the universe, but is as poor, when cataloguing the resolved nebula
of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic
of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require, and so to
anticipate, the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The
mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates
the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only
say, here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole
scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason. These
expansions, or extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight
where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and, by this second
sight, discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction.
Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, but runs continuously
round the universe. Therefore, every word becomes an exponent of nature.
Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses.
His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life,
and life out of death,--that law by which, in nature, decomposition
is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a
new creation; his discernment of the little in the large, and the large
in the small; studying the state in the citizen, and the citizen in
the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic
as an allegory on the education of the private soul; his beautiful
definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line,
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage,
justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues
themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer
and two horses; the golden, silver, brass, and iron temperaments;
Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates--fables which
have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the
zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine of
assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the
laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout
the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine,
"what comes from God to us, returns from us to God," and in Socrates'
belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.

More striking examples are his moral conclusions. Plato affirms the
coincidence of science and virtue; for vice can never know itself and
virtue; but virtue knows both itself and vice. The eye attested that
justice was best, as long as it was profitable; Plato affirms that it
is profitable throughout; that the profit is intrinsic, though the
just conceal his justice from gods and men; that it is better to suffer
injustice, than to do it; that the sinner ought to covet punishment;
that the lie was more hurtful than homicide; and that ignorance, or
the involuntary lie, was more calamitous than involuntary homicide;
that the soul is unwillingly deprived of true opinions; and that no
man sins willingly; that the order of proceeding of nature was from
the mind to the body; and, though a sound body cannot restore an unsound
mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render the body the best
possible. The intelligent have a right over the ignorant, namely, the
right of instructing them. The right punishment of one out of tune,
is to make him play in tune; the fine which the good, refusing to
govern, ought to pay, is, to be governed by a worse man; that his
guards shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be instructed that
there is gold and silver in their souls, which will make men willing
to give them everything which they need. This second sight explains
the stress laid on geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was not
more lawful and precise than was the supersensible; that a celestial
geometry was in place there, as a logic of lines and angles here below;
that the world was throughout mathematical; the proportions are constant
of oxygen, azote, and lime; there is just so much water, and slate,
and magnesia; not less are the proportions constant of moral elements.

This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and falsehood, delighted in revealing
the real at the base of the accidental; in discovering connection,
continuity, and representation, everywhere; hating insulation; and
appears like the god of wealth among the cabins of vagabonds, opening
power and capability in everything he touches. Ethical science was new
and vacant, when Plato could write thus:--"Of all whose arguments are
left to the men of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned
injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as respects the repute,
honors, and emoluments arising therefrom; while, as respects either
of them in itself, and subsisting by its own power in the soul of the
possessor, and concealed both from gods and men, no one has yet
sufficiently investigated, either in poetry or prose writings,--how,
namely, that the one is the greatest of all the evils that the soul
has within it, and justice the greatest good. "

His definition of ideas, as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and
self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the
understanding, marks an era in the world. He was born to behold the
self-evolving power of spirit, endless generator of new ends; a power
which is the key at once to the centrality and the evanescence of
things. Plato is so centered, that he can well spare all his dogmas.
Thus the fact of knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of
eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he offers as the most
probable particular explication. Call that fanciful,--it matters not;
the connection between our knowledge and the abyss of being is still
real, and the explication must be not less magnificent.

He has indicated every eminent point in speculation. He wrote on the
scale of the mind itself, so that all things have symmetry in his
tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, and descended into
detail with a courage like that he witnessed in nature. One would say,
that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm, or a district, or an
island, in intellectual geography, but that Plato first drew the sphere.
He domesticates the soul in nature; man is the microcosm. All the
circles of the visible heaven represent as many circles in the rational
soul. There is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual in the
action of the human mind. The names of things, too, are fatal, following
the nature of things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by their names,
significant of a profound sense. The gods are the ideas. Pan is speech,
or manifestation; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal soul; and
Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; Calliope, the soul of the world;
Aglaia, intellectual illustration.

These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had appeared often to pious and
to poetic souls; but this well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes
with command, gathers them all up into rank and gradation, the Euclid
of holiness, and marries the two parts of nature. Before all men, he
saw the intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He describes his
own ideal, when he paints in Timaeus a god leading things from disorder
into order. He kindled a fire so truly in the center, that we see the
sphere illuminated, and can distinguish poles, equator, and lines of
latitude, every arc and node; a theory so averaged, so modulated, that
you would say, the winds of ages had swept through this rhythmic
structure, and not that it was the brief extempore blotting of one
short-lived scribe. Hence it has happened that a very well-marked
class of souls, namely those who delight in giving a spiritual, that
is, an ethico-intellectual expression to every truth by exhibiting an
ulterior end which is yet legitimate to it, are said to Platonize.
Thus, Michel Angelo is a Platonist, in his sonnets. Shakspeare is a
Platonist, when he writes, "Nature is made better by no mean, but
nature makes that mean," or,

"He that can endure
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,
Does conquer him that did his master conquer,
And earns a place in the story. "

Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and 'tis the magnitude only of Shakspeare's
proper genius that hinders him from being classed as the most eminent
of this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose poem of "Conjugal
Love," is a Platonist.

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. The secret of his popular
success is the moral aim, which endeared him to mankind. "Intellect,"
he said, "is king of heaven and of earth;" but, in Plato, intellect
is always moral. His writings have also the sempiternal youth of poetry.
For their arguments, most of them, might have been couched in sonnets;
and poetry has never soared higher than in the Timaeus and the Phaedrus.
As the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras,
break himself with an institution. All his painting in the Republic
must be esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, sometimes in
violent colors, his thought. You cannot institute, without peril of
charlatan.

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege for the best (which, to
make emphatic, he expressed by community of women), as the premium
which he would set on grandeur. There shall be exempts of two kinds:
first, those who by demerit have put themselves below
protection,--outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of nature
and desert are out of the reach of your rewards; let such be free of
the city, and above the law. We confide them to themselves; let them
do with us as they will. Let none presume to measure the irregularities
of Michel Angelo and Socrates by village scales.

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a little mathematical
dust in our eyes. I am sorry to see him, after such noble superiorities,
permitting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence a little with
the baser sort, as people allow themselves with their dogs and cats.




III. SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC.

Among eminent persons, those who are most dear to men are not the class
which the economists call producers; they have nothing in their hands;
they have not cultivated corn, nor made bread; they have not led out
a colony, nor invented a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and
love of this city-building, market-going race of mankind, are the
poets, who, from the intellectual kingdom, feed the thought and
imagination with ideas and pictures which raise men out of the world
of corn and money, and console them for the shortcomings of the day,
and the meannesses of labor and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher
has his value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer, by engaging
him with subtleties which instruct him in new faculties. Others may
build cities; he is to understand them, and keep them in awe. But there
is a class who lead us into another region,--the world of morals, or
of will. What is singular about this region of thought, is, its claim.
Wherever the sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of
everything else. For other things, I make poetry of them; but the moral
sentiment makes poetry of me.

I have sometimes thought that he would render the greatest service to
modern criticism, who shall draw the line of relation that subsists
between Shakespeare and Swedenborg. The human mind stands ever in
perplexity, demanding intellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally
of each without the other. The reconciler has not yet appeared. If we
tire of the saints, Shakespeare is our city of refuge. Yet the instincts
presently teach, that the problem of essence must take precedence of
all others,--the questions of Whence? What? and Whither? and the
solution of these must be in a life, and not in a book. A drama or
poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, Menu, Jesus, work
directly on this problem. The atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region
of grandeur which reduces all material magnificence to toys, yet opens
to every wretch that has reason, the doors of the universe. Almost
with a fierce haste it lays its empire on the man. In the language of
the Koran, "God said, the heaven and the earth, and all that is between
them, think ye that we created them in jest, and that ye shall not
return to us? " It is the kingdom of the will, and by inspiring the
will, which is the seat of personality, seems to convert the universe
into a person:--

"The realms of being to no other bow,
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou. "

All men are commanded by the saint. The Koran makes a distinct class
of those who are by nature good, and whose goodness has an influence
on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim of creation: the
other classes are admitted to the feast of being, only as following
in the train of this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of this
kind:

"Go boldly forth, and feast on being's banquet;
Thou art the called,--the rest admitted with thee. "

The privilege of this caste is an access to the secrets and structure
of nature, by some higher method than by experience. In common parlance,
what one man is said to learn by experience, a man of extraordinary
sagacity is said, without experience, to divine. The Arabians say,
that Abul Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the Philosopher,
conferred together; and, on parting, the philosopher said, "All that
he sees, I know;" and the mystic said, "All that he knows, I see. " If
one should ask the reason of this intuition, the solution would lead
us into that property which Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which
is implied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigration. The soul
having been often born, or, as the Hindoos say, "traveling the path
of existence through thousands of births," having beheld the things
which are here, those which are in heaven, and those which are beneath,
there is nothing of which she has not gained the knowledge: no wonder
that she is able to recollect, in regard to any one thing, what formerly
she knew. "For, all things in nature being linked and related, and
the soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders but that any man
who has recalled to mind, or, according to the common phrase, has
learned one thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient
knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he have but courage,
and faint not in the midst of his researches. For inquiry and learning
is reminiscence all. " How much more, if he that inquires be a holy and
godlike soul! For, by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom,
and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does then easily
flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix: and he
is present and sympathetic with their structure and law.

This path is difficult, secret, and beset with terror. The ancients
called it ecstasy or absence,--a getting out of their bodies to think.
All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,--a
beatitude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad;
"the flight," Plotinus called it, "of the alone to the alone. " The
trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Behmen, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal,
Guion, Swedenborg, will readily come to mind. But what as readily comes
to mind, is the accompaniment of disease. This beatitude comes in
terror, and with shocks to the mind of the receiver. "It o'erinforms
the tenement of clay," and drives the man mad; or, gives a certain
violent bias, which taints his judgment. In the chief examples of
religious illumination, somewhat morbid, has mingled, in spite of the
unquestionable increase of mental power. Must the highest good drag
after it a quality which neutralizes and discredits it? --

"Indeed it takes
From our achievements, when performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute. "

Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses so much earth and
so much fire, by weight and metre, to make a man, and will not add a
pennyweight, though a nation is perishing for a leader? Therefore, the
men of God purchased their science by folly or pain. If you will have
pure carbon, carbuncle, or diamond, to make the brain transparent, the
trunk and organs shall be so much the grosser: instead of porcelain,
they are potter's earth, clay, or mud.

In modern times, no such remarkable example of this introverted mind
has occurred, as in Emanuel Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in 1688.
This man, who appeared to his contemporaries a visionary, and elixir
of moonbeams, no doubt led the most real life of any man then in the
world: and now, when the royal and ducal Frederics, Cristierns, and
Brunswicks, of that day, have slid into oblivion, he begins to spread
himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed,
by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a composition of several
persons,--like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens by the
union of four or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger scale,
and possesses the advantage of size. As it is easier to see the
reflection of the great sphere in large globes, though defaced by some
crack or blemish, than in drops of water, so men of large calibre,
though with some eccentricity or madness, like Pascal or Newton, help
us more than balanced mediocre minds.

His youth and training could not fail to be extraordinary. Such a boy
could not whistle or dance, but goes grubbing into mines and mountains,
prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, mathematics, and
astronomy, to find images fit for the measure of his versatile and
capacious brain. He was a scholar from a child, and was educated at
Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight, he was made Assessor of the Board
of Mines, by Charles XII. In 1716, he left home for four years, and
visited the universities of England, Holland, France, and Germany. He
performed a notable feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of
Fredericshall, by hauling two galleys, five boats, and a sloop, some
fourteen English miles overland, for the royal service. In 1721 he
journeyed over Europe, to examine mines and smelting works. He
published, in 1716, his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and, from this time, for
the next thirty years, was employed in the composition and publication
of his scientific works. With the like force, he threw himself into
theology. In 1743, when he was fifty-four years old, what is called
his illumination began. All his metallurgy, and transportation of ships
overland, was absorbed into this ecstasy. He ceased to publish any
more scientific books, withdrew from his practical labors, and devoted
himself to the writing and publication of his voluminous theological
works, which were printed at his own expense, or at that of the Duke
of Brunswick, or other prince, at Dresden, Liepsic, London, or
Amsterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor: the salary
attached to this office continued to be paid to him during his life.
His duties had brought him into intimate acquaintance with King Charles
XII. , by whom he was much consulted and honored. The like favor was
continued to him by his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hopken
says, the most solid memorials on finance were from his pen. In Sweden,
he appears to have attracted a marked regard. His rare science and
practical skill, and the added fame of second sight and extraordinary
religious knowledge and gifts, drew to him queens, nobles, clergy,
shipmasters, and people about the ports through which he was wont to
pass in his many voyages. The clergy interfered a little with the
importation and publication of his religious works; but he seems to
have kept the friendship of men in power. He was never married. He had
great modesty and gentleness of bearing. His habits were simple; he
lived on bread, milk, and vegetables; and he lived in a house situated
in a large garden; he went several times to England, where he does not
seem to have attracted any attention whatever from the learned or the
eminent; and died at London, March 29, 1772, of apoplexy, in his
eighty-fifth year. He is described, when in London, as a man of quiet,
clerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and kind to children.
He wore a sword when in full velvet dress, and, whenever he walked
out, carried a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait of him in
antique coat and wig, but the face has a wandering or vacant air.

The genius which was to penetrate the science of the age with a far
more subtle science; to pass the bounds of space and time; venture
into the dim spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new religion in
the world,--began its lessons in quarries and forges, in the
smelting-pot and crucible, in ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one
man is perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on so many
subjects. One is glad to learn that his books on mines and metals are
held in the highest esteem by those who understand these matters. It
seems that he anticipated much science of the nineteenth century;
anticipated, in astronomy, the discovery of the seventh planet,--but,
unhappily, not also of the eighth; anticipated the views of modern
astronomy in regard to the generation of earth by the sun; in magnetism,
some important experiments and conclusions of later students; in
chemistry, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries of
Schlichting, Monro, and Wilson; and first demonstrated the office of
the lungs. His excellent English editor magnanimously lays no stress
on his discoveries, since he was too great to care to be original; and
we are to judge, by what he can spare, of what remains.

A colossal soul, he lies vast abroad on his times, uncomprehended by
them, and requires a long local distance to be seen; suggest, as
Aristotle, Bacon, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of learning,
or _quasi_ omnipresence of the human soul in nature, is possible.
His superb speculations, as from a tower, over nature and arts, without
ever losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, almost realizes
his own picture, in the "Principia," of the original integrity of man.
Over and above the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capital
merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has the properties of the
sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well
as of a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero; and, in
Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted with modern books, will most
admire the merit of mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of
literature, he is not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary
scholars. His stalwart presence would flutter the gowns of an
university. Our books are false by being fragmentary; their sentences
are _bon mots_, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions
of surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to
their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,--being some
curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and
purposely framed to excite a surprise, as jugglers do by concealing
their means. But Swedenborg is systematic, and respective of the world
in every sentence; all the means are orderly given; his faculties work
with astronomic punctuality, and this admirable writing is pure from all
pertness or egotism.

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of great ideas. 'Tis hard to
say what was his own: yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures
of the universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with its breadth and
adequateness, shaming our sterile and linear logic by its genial
radiation, conversant with series and degree, with effects and ends,
skilful to discriminate power from form, essence from accident, and
opening by its terminology and definition, high roads into nature, had
trained a race of athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the
circulation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the earth was a magnet;
Descartes, taught by Gilbert's magnet, with its vortex, spiral, and
polarity, had filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical motion,
as the secret of nature. Newton, in the year in which Swedenborg was
born, published the "Principia," and established the universal gravity.
Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippocrates, Leucippus, and
Lucretius, had given emphasis to the dogma that nature works in
leasts,--"_tota in minimis existit natura_. " Unrivalled dissectors,
Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius,
Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in
human or comparative anatomy; Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming,
in his beautiful science, that "Nature is always like herself;" and,
lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application of principles,
had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology;
whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral argument.