It is the calm judgment of history that, in artistic, literary, and
philosophical development, the world shows, relatively, nothing
comparable to the Golden Age of Greece. Attica was the Shakespeare of
the Ancient World. As the Bard of Avon gathered the material of legend,
romance, and history, and crowned the intellectual activity of the
Elizabethan Age with results of enduring value, so the leading city
of Greece centred in herself many influences of the Orient, and, in
a period of great intellectual awakening under favorable conditions,
became the genius that produced results of surpassing power and beauty.
The Greeks created when European civilization was young, and as yet
there was little of the ideal that, in the Attic Period, blossomed into
the conceptions of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
In any other period never has so great a master as Socrates found
so great a pupil as Plato; never has so great a master as Plato
encountered so great a pupil as Aristotle. Each pupil grasped and
enlarged upon the mighty work of his instructor.
The world still wonders how any age could become so suddenly and highly
creative. Like the century plant, the Greek race seemed to have been
accumulating, through a long period, power for a quick and startling
development. The thoughtful historian enumerates many favoring
conditions. The Greeks as a race were active, eager for knowledge, and
had a capacity for healthy ideal conceptions. The beneficent climate
brought them in contact with nature, and the peculiar charm of their
sky, air, mountains, and sea filled them with a sense of wonder and a
sense of beauty. We may also mention the stimulus of their intercourse
with their own colonies and with other peoples; their religion, which
contained the germs of ethical and philosophical thought, and was
favorable to freedom of view; the respect for law that sought for the
rules of the state and for individual conduct a foundation in permanent
principles.
Socrates is a more favorite theme than Plato, partly because he
is the first of the three heroic figures that mark the beginning
of philosophy. Then his name is surrounded with a halo that was
constituted by the events of Athens’ greatest period of fame. He
lived just after the glory of victory over the Persian invaders had
stimulated the Greek pride and every activity that is born of pride and
hope. He lived in the period of Athenian supremacy and was contemporary
with Phidias, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Pericles.
Plato, on the contrary, beheld the beginning of the misfortunes
of Attica and of the decay of Greece. It was the period of the
Peloponnesian Wars, of the Spartan and the Theban Supremacy. It was the
time of the Thirty Tyrants and of the restored Democracy. But while the
time of Plato was not that of the greatest national glory, it permitted
the free development of philosophical thought which later culminated in
Aristotle.
Socrates, with earnestness of soul, with contempt for the extreme
democratic spirit of his time and the growing disregard of divine and
human law, with contempt for the Sophists, whose teachings were no
higher than prudential preparation for practical life and cultivation
of the morals and manners of a Lord Chesterfield, devoted himself to
exposing the ignorance and false reasoning of the day and to the search
for truth, setting up for his ideal the Supreme Good which included the
True and the Beautiful. He, however, was practical in that he taught
that all good was good for something; whatever was ideal was to be
applied in real life, and he was a notable example of closely following
ideals with practical action. “Know thyself” was his maxim, and, in
knowing thyself, know the good and follow it.
Socrates is the practical man, Plato the idealist and literary man,
Aristotle the scientific man. Socrates left us no writings, and,
while Plato in his works uses Socrates as his chief interlocutor, the
dialogues are to be regarded as expressing Socrates’ philosophy as
changed and enlarged by the views of Plato. Xenophon’s “Memorabilia” is
the source of more nearly accurate views of the life and teachings of
Socrates.
Plato uses Socrates’ method of induction and exact definition to reach
the truth aimed at. Many of the scenes are like plays, some of which
would take on a stage setting, with characters that are very much alive
and very human. Although in pursuit of the most serious subjects,
a dramatic tone runs through the discussions. In the first book of
the “Republic,” Thrasymachus in argument gets angry, grows red in
the face, and fairly roars his views at Socrates, who pretends to be
panic-stricken at his looks. Later Thrasymachus asks, “I want to know,
Socrates, whether you have a nurse.” To Socrates’ look of astonished
inquiry he more than intimates that the philosopher is too childish
to go about unattended. Many of the dialogues are in part historical
facts. The characters are the neighbors and friends or intellectual
antagonists of the philosopher. The doctrines he combats are doctrines
of the day, the scenes are real and in or about Athens. The tyranny he
hates and the extreme democracy he satirizes are forms of government
whose evils he has observed, and from which he has suffered. You read
the dialogues, follow their thought, get into their spirit, and you
are brought in touch with the great, throbbing life of the Athenian
commonwealth. A few dialogues, carefully read, are worth a hundred
volumes of the commentators.
* * * * *
It is related that at a certain time Socrates dreamed he saw a young
swan perched on his knee. Soon it gained strength of wing and flew
away, singing a sweet song. The next day Plato appeared and became the
intimate pupil of Socrates. This is one of many myths, later invented
to enlarge the halo of a great name. It was said that Plato was the son
of Apollo and that the bees of Hymettus fed him with honey, giving him
the power of sweet speech. Myths aside, the chance that made Plato the
intimate friend and disciple of Socrates became of vast significance to
the future history of philosophy. Plato was of aristocratic parentage;
he showed in his youth a poetic temperament, which was later displayed
in the dramatic art of his writings. After the death of Socrates in
399 B. C., he travelled and resided at various courts. At the age of
forty he returned to Athens and opened his school in the Gymnasium of
the Academy, where with one or two intervals he taught for a period of
forty years. Aristotle was for twenty years his pupil, and there are
many interesting accounts of the relation between pupil and master.
Plato had in him somewhat of the Puritan, while Aristotle was more
a man of the world, and we may suppose that he often maintained his
opinions with his customary sarcastic smile. He offended the more
austere tastes of his master by nicety of dress, care of his shoes,
display of finger rings, and a dudish cut of his hair. Contemporaries
speak of Plato with admiration for his intellect and reverence for the
beauty of his character, which was “elevated in Olympian cheerfulness
above the world of change and decay.”
In our purpose to touch upon some points of Plato’s doctrines, we are
treating of a transcendent genius whose work has profoundly affected
the thought of the world. Platonism reappears as Neo-Platonism in
the second and third centuries of our era; is largely adopted in
its new form a century later by St. Augustine, the great expounder
of Christianity and teacher of the Middle Ages; arises again in the
seventeenth century proclaiming that moral law is written in fixed
characters in every rational mind; culminates in the grand idealism
of Schelling and Hegel; is transmitted to-day in the magnificent
idealistic ethics of such men as Caird, Green, and Bradley; gives the
cardinal virtues to Christianity; furnishes a broad and inspiring
ethical code for the present; speaks with an inspiration that largely
meets the approval of the Christian world; inspired the Utopia and the
New Atlantis and all ideal schemes of government and society; was,
following Socrates, the father of the inductive method; became the
starting point for the scientific study of nature and psychology in
the eleventh century; was a large element in the humanistic movement,
which at the close of the middle ages created modern natural science;
created conceptions which, developing down through the centuries in two
diverging lines, indirectly found highest expression in the idealism
of Hegel and the evolution of Spencer, and is likely to furnish in
broad outlines, especially as presented by Aristotle, ground for the
reconciliation of the opposite poles of philosophy in a spiritual
evolution.
* * * * *
What was Plato’s central idea? It was the existence of fixed principles
in the universe, principles realized in the consciousness of man,
through pursuit of knowledge. Socrates aimed at a permanent ground
for ethical wisdom in a time when the old foundations of conduct
and of divine and human law were shaken. He was the progenitor of
the inductive method, in that he sought in numerous instances and
opinions the essential common ground or principle, and aimed at exact
definition. The class concept, general notion, universal truth, was the
object of his search. And we find him, for instance, in Plato, tracing
through the ten books of the “Republic” the essential character of
justice. Plato, following Socrates, sought a foundation for ethical
conceptions in a metaphysical theory, the Doctrine of Ideas, a
magnificent illustration of the truth that speculative philosophy grows
out of man’s earnest desire to know why he is here, and what is the
meaning of his moral nature.
It will help much any view in the field of philosophy to keep
uppermost the thought of distinct classes, types, or kinds of things
in nature; the thought of the corresponding class concepts, general
notions or universals in the human mind; and the thought of original
ideas in the mind of God, as constituting principles or laws or modes
of action in nature. This is not a world of chaotic chance, it is a
world of rational and progressive order, and we are compelled to seek
for the architecture an architect and a plan embodying rational ideas.
Plato’s ideas are eternal entities existing neither in nature nor in
the mind of God, but nevertheless the archetypes, forms, or patterns
after which every kind of things to which may be applied a common name
was fashioned. Plato here held in an imperfect way the mighty truth of
all philosophy, and the “Ideas” have reappeared in many guises,—as the
forms or essences of Aristotle, existing only as realized in nature,
as ideas in the mind of God, as the self-evolving categories of Hegel,
as the perfecting principle and the fashioning laws in the doctrine of
evolution.
Man in his preëxistent state dwelt in the region of immaterial ideas
and gazed on the fulness of their truth. At his human birth he was
made oblivious of his past existence, and growth in wisdom was a
gradual realization in the consciousness of the eternal verities
formerly known. As in Wordsworth, man’s birth was but a “sleep and a
forgetting;” growth in knowledge was a remembering. “Trailing clouds of
glory do we come from God, who is our home.” The truth in this metaphor
of philosophy, we may believe, is that man is of divine origin, and
hence may know the divine revelations in his own being and in the
material world. Here was foreshadowed in rough outlines the spiritual
idealism which in its fresh form appears to be gaining new ground
to-day. God writes the book of nature; man is the son of God and reads
and vaguely understands the meaning of the mighty volume.
Sensations are not knowledge, but the signs of knowledge, as words are
the signs of thought, and the mind is innately active and rational,
else there could be no interpretation of those signs. This appears to
be the true explanation of the fact that we are educated by contact
with nature. Without the signs, no communication of knowledge; without
the native power of the reader, no reception of knowledge.
Plato held that the ideas were manifest in nature and were also innate
in the mind; hence by self-examination and comparison with the copies
of the ideas in nature, man arrived at essential truth which was the
work of philosophy.
Plato identified the Idea of Ideas with Cause, Mind, the Good or God.
God was a personality and supreme above the gods. He was named by his
chief attribute, the Good, and of this the True and the Beautiful were
qualities. Cousin says, “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are
only revelations of the same Being; that which reveals them to us is
reason.” “If all perfection belongs to the perfect being, God will
possess beauty in its plenitude. The father of the world, of its laws,
of its ravishing harmonies, the author of forms, colors, and sounds, he
is the principle of beauty in nature. It is he whom we adore without
knowing it, under the name of the ideal, when our imagination, borne
on from beauties to beauties, calls for a final beauty in which it
may find repose.” This passage is thoroughly Platonic in spirit and
throws much light on the meaning of these absolute ideas of Plato. With
change of terms the same passage would apply to Truth and Goodness. We
trace them as they appear in the conscious reason and disposition, as
they are manifested in the relations of society or are suggested by the
reality and beneficence of the world, and we are led to the conception
of the perfect ideals whose truth exists in God.
Plato has four principles whose interrelation and process of the active
elements determine the world, as the laws of modern evolution are
conceived to work out the results discovered by science: (1) unlimited,
unformed, or chaotic nature; (2) law, imposing limits and forms upon
nature; (3) the resulting, definite types and ideas of a rational
world; (4) the Cause which effects these results.
The Good is that which imparts truth to the object and knowledge to
the perceiving subject, and is the cause of science and truth; hence,
to know the Good is the ethical aim, for to know the Good is to act in
harmony with it, and knowledge is virtue.
Plato was fully aware that the philosopher, then as to-day, was
regarded by the many as a useless star-gazer, and in the celebrated
Allegory of the Cave he shows the relation of true insight to the
common view of life and the world. He imagines dwellers in a cave so
placed that they see only the shadows of passing objects and hear only
the echoes of sounds from the outer world. If released and brought to
the full light of the sun they are dazzled and pained, and think they
are in a world of false appearance, and believe the realities are the
familiar shadows in the cave. After a while they become accustomed to
the day and the real objects, and see their truth and beauty. And if
they return to the cave, they are half blind and appear ridiculous to
the dwellers there. He concludes, “Whether I am right or not, God only
knows; but, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of
knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with
an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author
of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and lord of light
in this world, and the source of truth and reason in the other: this
is the first great cause which he, who would act rationally either in
public or private life, must behold.”
To the Sophist, who follows the opinion of the many instead of
regarding fixed principles of truth, he pays his respects with the
searching satire of a Carlyle.
* * * * *
His theology, which is a part of his philosophy, has many striking
features that have commanded the astonishment of the Christian world.
“God the Creator changes not; He deceives not.” It is wrong to do good
to friends and injure enemies, for the injury of another can be in no
case just. If you have a quarrel with any one, become reconciled before
you sleep. In heaven is the pattern of the perfect city. All things
will work together for good to the just. He advocates the severest
abstract piety that, as in the conduct of the sternest Roman or the
severest Puritan, swerves not from duty. The myth of Er, the Armenian,
reminds us in many points of the judgment day; and his exhortation to
pursue the heavenly way that it may be well with us here and hereafter,
may be our salvation if we are obedient, is one of the most striking
in the history of religious belief.
In the fifth book of the “Laws” is an exhortation to right living that
partakes of the spirit of the Christian philosophy. Every man is to
honor his own soul with an honor that regards divine good, to value
principle higher than life, to place virtue above all gold, to glory in
following the better course, to count reverence in children a greater
heritage than riches, to regard a contract as a holy thing, to avoid
excess of self-love and to adhere to the truth as the beginning of
every good. We need no further illustration of the fact that Platonism
was naturally welcomed by the early Christian Church.
* * * * *
The ethical ideals of Plato are the most valuable phase of his
writings. In the First Book of the “Republic,” Thrasymachus, in a
dialogue with Socrates, defines justice to be _Sublime Simplicity_, and
argues that the unjust are discreet and wise, as some may argue to-day
that shrewd dishonesty is commendable. The ethics of Plato is the
opposite pole of this philosophy, and as such stands for the rational
and moral order of the world. His system is not hedonistic, but ideal.
It aims at a good, but the good is attained by a life of virtue.
In a famous passage of the “Republic,” the transcendently just man is
described. He is to be clothed in justice only. Being the best of men,
he is to be esteemed the worst, and so continue to the hour of his
death. He is to be bound, scourged, and suffer every kind of evil, and
even be crucified; still he is to be just for righteousness’ sake. No
wonder some Christian fathers believed this referred to Him who was
to come, as described in the celebrated chapter of Isaiah. The best
man is also the happiest, whether seen or unseen by gods and men. In
the “Crito” Socrates will not escape from prison if it is not right,
though he suffer death or any other calamity. “Virtue is the health and
beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice is the disease and weakness
and deformity of the soul.” He is a fool who laughs at aught but folly
and vice. The possession of the whole world is of no value without the
good. No pleasure except that of the wise is quite true and pure. “Is
not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or rather to
the god in man?” “How would a man profit if he received gold and silver
on the condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the
worst?” “The Holy is loved of God because it is Holy.” Not pleasure,
but wisdom and knowledge and right opinions and true reasonings are
better, both now and forever. The good ruler considers not his own
interest, but that of the state. The governing class are to be told
that gold and silver they have from God; the divine metal is in them.
Any one who finds in these views a doctrine of pleasure must seek
with a prejudiced eye. Plato, as usual, anticipates later ethical
discussions, and points to the fact that there is a quality in
pleasure; and quality in conduct is the very contention of absolute
moralists. He speaks of the soul whose dye of good quality is washed
out by pleasure. The attainment of genuine well-being, the development
of divine qualities within men, was the aim, and the consciousness
of this priceless possession of rational manhood was the incidental
reward. His doctrine places before men abstract ideals of Truth,
Beauty, and Goodness, which invite the better nature by their supreme
excellence.
Plato enumerates four virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Temperance, Justice.
Professor Green interprets them in modern form, and maintains their
fixed standard of excellence and universal application. Any modern
analysis of the principles of conduct which contribute to health
of soul and are favorable to success in life, would confirm the
enumeration of the Greek virtues. Professor Green says: The Good Will
is the will (1) to know what is true and to make what is beautiful; (2)
to endure pain and fear; (3) to resist the allurements of pleasure; (4)
to take for one’s self and to give to others, not what one is inclined
to, but what is due. Not only does he enjoin the spirit of justice,
but the cultivation of moral courage, and, as contrasted with lazy
ignorance, the growth in wisdom which is realization of virtue.
Wisdom played a peculiar and important part in the Greek ethics.
Vice was ignorance, because the wise man could but live according
to his best knowledge. And the Greeks, properly interpreted, were
right. Did we see virtue in all its truth and beauty, and vice in all
its deformity, we could but choose the best. Growth in wisdom was a
gradual realization in the soul of the heavenly ideas that were the
true heritage of man, and in this development the soul was gradually
perfected. This beautiful and satisfying philosophy reappears to-day in
some of the most ennobling systems of ethics the world has produced. It
makes individual and race progress an increase in consciousness of the
knowledge of truth and virtue, a revelation of the divine within us.
The Jewish and the Christian conception of divine law as binding
man to the performance of his moral obligations was not strongly
characteristic of the Greek mind. But responsibility, without which
conduct can have no ethical significance, was by no means foreign
to Plato’s system. In the myth of Er the soul has its choice of the
lot of life, and its condition at the end of the earthly career is a
requital for the deeds done in the body. Throughout Plato’s writings
the implications of personal merit or guilt are prominent.
It is a doctrine of virtue rather than of duty. He who sees the right
and does not do it is a fool, but that is his matter. He is not bound
by any moral law to be wise. If he is virtuous it is well; if not, so
much the worse for him. Love of God is the essential of the Christian
ethics; knowledge of the Good, of the Greek. To pursue the Good was
virtue, and virtue he sets forth in world-wide contrast with vice.
Plato’s conception of justice, or right, was so exalted that some
have thought he attained in later years an insight into the nature of
conscience, or the Moral Faculty.
The Greek idea of beauty must be touched in passing. The wise life was
a beautiful life. The Beautiful was an attribute of the Deity. They had
the love of Beauty which Goethe possessed when he had become fascinated
with the study of Greek art, and exclaimed, “The Beautiful is greater
than the Good, for it includes the Good, and adds something to it.”
Plato calls the Beautiful the splendor of the True. The youth should
learn to love beautiful forms, first a single form, then all beautiful
forms and beauty wherever found; then he will turn to beauty of mind,
of institutions and laws, and sciences, and he will gradually draw
toward the great sea of beauty, and create and contemplate many fair
thoughts, and he will become conscious of absolute beauty, and come
near to God, who is transcendent beauty and goodness.
* * * * *
Plato’s philosophy makes education a process of developing the power
and knowledge latent in the mind, rather than a process of teaching.
The Socratic method of _drawing out_ is one of time-honored use among
pedagogues. Plato defines a good education as “That which gives to the
body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which
they are capable.” The ideal aim is the harmonious or symmetrical
development of the physical, mental, and moral powers. Physical
training is for the health of the soul, as well as for the strength and
grace of the body. The training of the reason is of first importance.
The æsthetic emotions are to be cultivated as a means of moral and
religious education. Memory is little emphasized.
The artisans and laborers were simply to learn a trade; the warrior
class were to be trained in gymnastics and music. The complete
education of the highest class, or the magistrates, was to include
music and literature, gymnastics, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy,
and finally philosophy. All this was to be supplemented by practical
acquaintance with the details of civil and military functions.
Education is the foundation of the state, and in the “Laws” he would
make it compulsory. The women are to receive the same training as the
men. Children are to be taught to honor their parents and respect
their elders. The direction in which education starts a man will
determine his future life. In early childhood education is to be made
attractive, although to unduly honor the likings of children is to
spoil them. The tales which children are permitted to hear must be
models of virtuous thought. Harmful tales concerning the gods and
heroes are prohibited, but noble traits and deeds of endurance are to
be emphasized. Youth should imitate no baseness, but what is temperate,
holy, free, and courageous; for “imitations, beginning in early youth,
at last sink into the constitution and become a second nature.”
Children must not be frightened with ghost stories and reference to the
infernal world.
Excessive athletics makes men stupid and subject to disease. The
kinds of music employed in education must inspire courage, reverence,
freedom, and temperance. Art should present true beauty and grace, to
draw the soul of childhood into harmony with the beauty of reason.
“Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul,
making the soul graceful of him who is rightly educated.” Good language
and music and grace and rhythm depend on simplicity.
Arithmetic cultivates quickness, and teaches abstract number and
necessary truth. Geometry deals with axiomatic knowledge and will draw
the soul toward truth. Astronomy compels the mind to look upward. It
is to be studied not so much for practical use, as in navigation, but
because the mind is purified and illumined thereby. In this connection
Plato maintains his position against those who carp at the so-called
useless studies.
Plato’s ideal state offends the thought of conservative men more
than all else in his writings, but it was conceived in view of the
highest ideas of virtue and justice. It was simply bad psychology. He
enumerates and describes five kinds of states and the corresponding
five types of individual character. Indeed he studies justice first in
the ideal state, and then in the individual. The three impulses of the
soul are compared with the three classes of citizens in the state, and
to each he ascribes its excellence, thus forming his list of virtues.
But we cannot dwell upon this phase of Plato’s teachings. We may,
however, refer to his caricature of extreme democracy; it has a useful
modern application.
In this state the father descends to his son and fears him, and the
son is on a level with his father and does not fear him. The alien is
equal to the citizen, and the slave to the master. The master fears
and flatters his scholars, and the scholars despise their masters.
The young man is on a level with the old, and old men, for fear of
seeming morose and authoritative, condescend to the young and are full
of pleasantry and gayety. Even the animals in the democracy show the
spirit of equality, and the horses and asses march along the streets
with all the rights and dignities of freemen, and will run at you if
you do not get out of their way, and everything is just ready to burst
with liberty. The citizens become sensitive and chafe at authority, and
cease to care for the laws. Surely the statesman can turn to Plato for
wisdom, for out of this condition grows tyranny.
And, correspondingly, the democratical young man, a kind of _fin de
siècle_ type, is described. Insolence he terms breeding, and anarchy
liberty, and waste magnificence, and impudence courage.
No wonder Plato saw that his ideal state would not be realized _until
kings became philosophers_, that is to say—never. Modern dreamers might
profit by his wise predictions.
* * * * *
Plato’s doctrine is one of ideas and idealism as contrasted with
sensations and sensationalism. It is spiritualism as contrasted with
materialism. The higher produces the lower, instead of the lower the
higher. It is the doctrine that recognizes the rational order of the
world, the transcendent nature of conscious man, and his ethical aim.
It places ideals before man, in the attaining of which he comes to
realization of his true being. It is a doctrine of rational explanation
of man’s existence. As such it has always strongly invited the
adherence of philosophers and Christians. The founders of the church
regarded Plato as directly inspired or as having derived inspiration
from the Hebrew scriptures.
The doctrine of Universals may be taken with allowance, but we may
believe that it represents the right side of philosophical thought. It
matters not much whether we hold to the view of Plato’s ideas or native
truths of the mind developed by experience or the creative activity of
the mind in knowing the outer world or the doctrine of participation
in the divine nature and divine thought or the power to generalize
from the facts of subjective and objective nature, a power above, and
not of, material nature—all these views imply man’s spiritual and
ideal character. Behind man and behind nature is the same reality. In
some sense (not the pantheistic, as commonly understood) both are
manifestations of that reality. Hence the power of man to know the
world, because it is a rational world, and manifestation answers to
manifestation, thought to thought. He who claims that all knowledge is
founded in sensation is partly right; for to know the outer realm is to
realize the inner and to know, in part, the truth of the Universe.
Subjective ideas, in some form, must be retained in philosophy. Our
world, as a world of evolution, is orderly and has a progressive plan;
hence, according to all human conception, is the product of ideas
worked out through what are called the laws of nature.
Men have always asked what is the use of philosophy, and to-day they
repeat the question with emphasis. We appreciate the state of mind
that rejoices in consciousness of standing on the solid earth, the
courageous patience that works out with guarded induction scientific
truth, the honesty that will not substitute hasty conjecture for
fact, and the faith that works toward results to be fully realized
only in the distant future. But many scientific men are coming to
regard biological and psychological sciences as great laboratories for
philosophy. We may believe the coming problems will be solved by the
coöperation of philosophy and science. Science studies the objective
side and philosophy the subjective side of the same reality.
Philosophy has a use as an attempt to satisfy the imperative need
of men to ask the meaning of their being. It has a use as forming a
rational hypothesis concerning a First Cause, and a Final Aim. It is
a ground of belief in ideals. All speculative philosophy has been
inspired more or less by Platonism, and has given the world the
noblest, most hopeful, useful, and influential systems of ethics.
Philosophical training gives the power to view comprehensively,
connectedly, and logically any group of facts. It contains the
presuppositions of science and of our very existence. The investigator
in the forest learns many valuable details; if he ascends the
mountains, he views the landscape as a whole, and, as it were, finds
himself. Finally philosophy represents the supreme, the spiritual,
interests of man and aims at essential truth.
Will it be relegated to the shelves of archæology? The signs of to-day
appear to answer no. In the whole history of philosophy, the mind
has never been able to rest permanently in any extreme or one-sided
position or in any position that is inadequate to explain essential
facts of existence. Hence it cannot rest permanently in materialism. A
recent writer speaks of the history of philosophy as “preëminently a
record of remarkable returns of the human intellect to ancient follies
and dreams, long since outgrown and supposed to have been consigned to
oblivion.” Well! It is strange indeed if nature has evolved a product
whose needs, instincts, and native beliefs are a lie, a product without
aim or rational ground for existence. If it is so, then pessimism is
our philosophy and annihilation our best solution of the problem of
conscious life. Most men are too respectful believers in evolution to
ascribe to nature any such satanic irony.
At any rate one likes to take an excursion in this field; he feels
benefited by the trip. Men still like to seek the great fountain head
of philosophy, and take a dip in the Castalian spring—a mental bath of
this sort is a good and useful thing. They like to sit in the shady
groves of the Academy and listen to Plato or walk with Aristotle in the
environs of the Gymnasium. The mighty minds of the past have marked out
the broad outlines of truth; it is our work to fill in, to correct. The
ethical conceptions were furnished by the ancients. The modern world
has merely made them richer in content and broader in application. The
deeper meaning of any philosophy or science is learned by the historic
method, which gives us the trend of events.
* * * * *
The closing words of the “Republic” are an appropriate ending to the
discussion of Plato: “And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and
has not perished, and may be our salvation, if we are obedient to the
spoken word; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness
and our soul will not be defiled. Wherefore my counsel is that we hold
fast to the heavenly way and follow after justice and virtue always,
considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of
good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live, dear to one another
and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors
in the games who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And
it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a
thousand years which we have been reciting.”
“Plato, thou reasonest well!—
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
* * * * *
’Tis the divinity that stirs within us;
’Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.”