PLATO

A thinking man is one of the most recent productions evolved from

Nature's laboratory. The first man of brains to express himself about

the world in an honest, simple and natural way, just as if nothing had

been said about it before, was Socrates.

Twenty-four centuries have passed since Socrates was put to death on the

charge of speaking disrespectfully of the gods and polluting the minds

of the youths of Athens. During ten of these centuries that have passed

since then, the race lost the capacity to think, through the successful

combination of the priest and the soldier. These men blocked human

evolution. The penalty for making slaves is that you become one.

To suppress humanity is to suppress yourself.

The race is one. So the priests and the soldiers who in the Third

Century had a modicum of worth themselves, sank and were submerged in

the general slough of superstition and ignorance. It was a panic that

continued for a thousand years, all through the endeavor of faulty men

to make people good by force. At all times, up to within our own decade,

frank expression on religious, economic and social topics has been

fraught with great peril. Even yet any man who hopes for popularity as

a writer, orator, merchant or politician, would do well to conceal

studiously his inmost beliefs. On such simple themes as the taxation of

real estate, regardless of the business of the owner, and a payment

of a like wage for a like service without consideration of sex, the

statesman who has the temerity to speak out will be quickly relegated

to private life. Successful merchants depending on a local constituency

find it expedient to cater to popular superstitions by heading

subscription-lists for the support of things in which they do not

believe. No avowed independent thinker would be tolerated as chief ruler

of any of the so-called civilized countries.

The fact, however, that the penalty for frank expression is limited now

to social and commercial ostracism is very hopeful--a few years ago it

meant the scaffold.

We have been heirs to a leaden legacy of fear that has well-nigh

banished joy and made of life a long nightmare.

In very truth, the race has been insane.

Hallucinations, fallacies, fears, have gnawed at our hearts, and men

have fought men with deadly frenzy. The people who interfered, trying to

save us, we have killed. Truly did we say, "There is no health in us,"

which repetition did not tend to mend the malady.

We are now getting convalescent. We are hobbling out into the sunshine

on crutches. We have discharged most of our old advisers, heaved the

dulling and deadly bottles out of the windows, and are intent on

studying and understanding our own case. Our motto is twenty-four

centuries old--it is simply this: KNOW THYSELF.

* * * * *

Socrates was a street preacher, with a beautiful indifference as to

whether people liked him or not. To most Athenians he was the town fool.

Athens was a little city (only about one hundred fifty thousand), and

everybody knew Socrates. The popular plays caricatured him; the topical

songs misquoted him; the funny artists on the street-corners who modeled

things in clay, while you waited, made figures of him.

Everybody knew Socrates--I guess so!

Plato, the handsome youth of nineteen, wearing a purple robe, which

marked him as one of the nobility, paused to listen to this uncouth man

who gave everything and wanted nothing.

Ye gods! But it is no wonder they caricatured him--he was a temptation

too great to resist.

Plato smiled--he never laughed, being too well-bred for that. Then he

sighed, and moved a little nearer in.

"Individuals are nothing. The State is all. To offend the State is to

die. The State is an organization and we are members of it. The State is

only as rich as its poorest citizen. We are all given a little sample of

divinity to study, model and marvel at. To understand the State you must

KNOW THYSELF."

Plato lingered until the little crowd had dispersed, and when the old

man with the goggle-eyes and full-moon face went shuffling slowly down

the street, he approached and asked him a question.

This man Socrates was no fool--the populace was wrong--he was a man so

natural and free from cant that he appeared to the triflers and

pretenders like a pretender, and they asked, "Is he sincere?"

What Plato was by birth, breeding and inheritance, Socrates was by

nature--a noble man.

Up to this time the ambition of Plato had been for place and power--to

make the right impression on the people in order to gain political

preferment. He had been educated in the school of the Sophists, and his

principal studies were poetry, rhetoric and deportment.

And now straightway he destroyed the manuscript of his poems, for in

their writing he had suddenly discovered that he had not written what he

inwardly believed was true, but simply that which he thought was proper

and nice to say. In other words, his literature had been a form of

pretense.

Daily thereafter, where went Socrates there went Plato. Side by side

they sat on the curb--Socrates talking, questioning the bystanders,

accosting the passers-by; Plato talking little, but listening much.

Socrates was short, stout and miles around. Plato was tall, athletic and

broad-shouldered. In fact, the word, "plato," or "platon," means broad,

and it was given him as a nickname by his comrades. His correct name was

Aristocles, but "Plato" suited him better, since it symbols that he was

not only broad of shoulder, but likewise in mind. He was not only noble

by birth, but noble in appearance.

Emerson calls him the universal man. He absorbed all the science, all

the art, all the philosophy of his day. He was handsome, kindly,

graceful, gracious, generous, and lived and died a bachelor. He never

collided with either poverty or matrimony.

* * * * *

Plato was twenty-eight years old when Socrates died. For eight years

they had been together daily. After the death of Socrates, Plato lived

for forty-six years, just to keep alive the name and fame of the great

philosopher.

Socrates comes to us through Plato. Various other contemporaries mention

Socrates and quote him, some to his disadvantage, but it was left for

Plato to give us the heart of his philosophy, and limn his character for

all time in unforgetable outline.

Plato is called the "Pride of Greece." His contribution to the wealth of

the world consists in the fact that he taught the joys of the

intellect--the supreme satisfaction that comes through thinking. This is

the pure Platonic philosophy: to find our gratifications in exalted

thought and not in bodily indulgence. Plato's theory that five years

should be given in early manhood to abstract thought, abstaining from

all practical affairs, so as to acquire a love for learning, has been

grafted upon a theological stalk and comes down to our present time. It

has, however, now been discarded by the world's best thinkers as a

fallacy. The unit of man's life is the day, not the month or year, much

less a period of five years. Each day we must exercise the mind, just as

each day we must exercise the body. We can not store up health and draw

upon it at will over long-deferred periods. The account must be kept

active. To keep physical energy we must expend physical energy every

day. The opinion of Herbert Spencer that thought is a physical

function--a vibration set up in a certain area of brain-cells--is an

idea never preached by Plato. The brain, being an organ, must be used,

not merely in one part for five years to the exclusion of all other

parts, but all parts should be used daily. To this end the practical

things of life should daily engage our attention, no less than the

contemplation of beauty as manifest in music, poetry, art or dialectics.

The thought that every day we should look upon a beautiful picture, read

a beautiful poem, or listen for a little while to beautiful music, is

highly scientific, for this contemplation and appreciation of harmony is

a physical exercise as well as a spiritual one, and through it we grow,

develop, evolve.

That we could not devote five years of our time to purely esthetic

exercises, to the exclusion of practical things, without very great

risk, is now well known. And when I refer to practical affairs, I mean

the effort which Nature demands we should put forth to get a living.

Every man should live like a poor man, regardless of the fact that he

may have money. Nature knows nothing of bank-balances. In order to have

an appetite for dinner, you must first earn your dinner. If you would

sleep at night, you must first pay for sweet sleep by physical labor.

* * * * *

Plato was born on the Island of Ægina, where his father owned an estate.

His mother was a direct descendant of Solon, and his father, not to be

outdone, traced to Codrus.

The father of Socrates was a stonecutter and his mother a midwife, so

very naturally the son had a beautiful contempt for pedigree. Socrates

once said to Plato, "Anybody can trace to Codrus--by paying enough to

the man who makes the family-tree." This seems to show that genealogy

was a matter of business then as now, and that nothing is new under the

sun. Yet with all his contempt for heredity, we find Socrates often

expressing pride in the fact that he was a "native son," whereas Plato,

Aspasia, the mother of Themistocles, and various other fairly good

people, were Athenian importations.

Socrates belonged to the leisure class and had plenty of time for

extended conversazione, so just how much seriousness we should mix in

his dialogues is still a problem. Each palate has to season to suit.

Also, we can never know how much is Socrates and how much essence of

Plato. Socrates wrote nothing, and Plato ascribes all of his wisdom to

his master. Whether this was simple prudence or magnanimity is still a

question.

The death of Socrates must have been a severe blow to Plato. He at once

left Athens. It was his first intention never to return. He traveled

through the cities of Greece, Southern Italy and down to Egypt, and

everywhere was treated with royal courtesies.

After many solicitations from Dionysius, Tyrant of Syracuse, he went to

visit that worthy, who had a case of philosophic and literary scabies.

Dionysius prided himself on being a Beneficent Autocrat, with a literary

and artistic attachment. He ruled his people, educated them, cared for

them, disciplined them.

Some people call this slavery; others term it applied socialism.

Dionysius wanted Syracuse to be the philosophic center of the world, and

to this end Plato was importuned to make Syracuse his home and dispense

his specialty--truth.

This he consented to do.

It was all very much like the arrangement between Mæcenas and Horace, or

Voltaire and Frederick the Great. The patron is a man who patronizes--he

wants something, and the particular thing that Dionysius wanted was to

have Plato hold a colored light upon the performances of His Altruistic,

Beneficent, Royal Jackanapes. But Plato was a simple, honest and direct

man: he had caught the habit from Socrates.

Charles Ferguson says that the simple life does not consist in living in

the woods and wearing overalls and sandals, but in getting the cant out

of one's cosmos and eliminating the hypocrisy from one's soul.

Plato lived the simple life. When he spoke he stated what he thought. He

discussed exploitation, war, taxation, and the Divine Right of Kings.

Kings are very unfortunate--they are shut off and shielded from truth

on every side. They get their facts at second hand and are lied to all

day long. Consequently they become in time incapable of digesting truth.

A court, being an artificial fabric, requires constant bracing. Next to

capital, nothing is so timid as a king. Heine says that kings have to

draw their nightcaps on over their crowns when they go to bed, in order

to keep them from being stolen, and that they are subject to insomnia.

Walt Whitman, with nothing to lose--not even a reputation or a hat--was

much more kingly walking bareheaded past the White House than Nicholas

of Russia or Alfonso of Spain can ever possibly be.

Dionysius thought that he wanted a philosophic court, but all he wanted

was to make folks think he had a philosophic court. Plato supplied him

the genuine article, and very naturally Plato was soon invited to

vacate.

After he had gone, Dionysius, fearful that Plato would give him a bad

reputation in Athens--somewhat after the manner and habit of the

"escaped nun"--sent a fast-rowing galley after him. Plato was arrested

and sold into slavery on his own isle of Ægina.

This all sounds very tragic, but the real fact is it was a sort of

comedy of errors--as a king's doings are when viewed from a safe and

convenient distance. De Wolf Hopper's kings are the real thing.

Dionysius claimed that Plato owed him money, and so he got out a

body-attachment, and sold the philosopher to the highest bidder.

This was a perfectly legal proceeding, being simply peonage, a thing

which exists in some parts of the United States today. I state the fact

without prejudice, merely to show how hard custom dies.

Plato was too big a man conveniently either to secrete or kill. Certain

people in Athens plagiarized Doctor Johnson who, on hearing that

Goldsmith had debts of several thousand pounds, in admiration exclaimed,

"Was ever poet so trusted before!" Other good friends ascertained the

amount of the claim and paid it, just as Colonel H. H. Rogers graciously

cleared up the liabilities of Mark Twain, after the author of

"Huckleberry Finn" had landed his business craft on a sandbar.

And so Plato went free, arriving back in Athens, aged forty, a wiser and

a better man than when he left.

* * * * *

Nothing absolves a reputation like silence and absence, or what the

village editors call "the grim reaper." To live is always more or less

of an offense, especially if you have thoughts and express them. Athens

exists, in degree, because she killed Socrates, just as Jerusalem is

unforgetable for a similar reason. The South did not realize that

Lincoln was her best friend until the assassin's bullet had found his

brain. Many good men in Chicago did not cease to revile their chiefest

citizen, until the ears of Altgeld were stopped and his hands stiffened

by death. The lips of the dead are eloquent.

Plato's ten years of absence had given him prestige. He was honored

because he had been the near and dear friend of Socrates, a great and

good man who was killed through mistake.

Most murders and killings of men, judicial and otherwise, are matters of

misunderstandings.

Plato had been driven out of Syracuse for the very reasons that Socrates

had been killed at Athens. And now behold, when Dionysius saw how Athens

was honoring Plato, he discovered that it was all a mistake of his

bookkeeper, so he wrote to Plato to come back and all would be

forgiven.

* * * * *

Those who set out to live the Ideal Life have a hard trail to travel.

The road to Jericho is a rocky one--especially if we are a little in

doubt as to whether it really is the road to Jericho or not. Perhaps if

we ever find the man who lives the Ideal Life he will be quite unaware

of it, so occupied will he be in his work--so forgetful of self.

Time had taught Plato diplomacy. He now saw that to teach people who did

not want to be taught was an error in judgment for which one might

forfeit his head.

Socrates was the first Democrat: he stood for the demos--the people.

Plato would have done the same, but he saw that the business was extra

hazardous, to use the phrase of our insurance friends. He who works for

the people will be destroyed by the people. Hemlock is such a rare and

precious commodity that few can afford it; the cross is a privilege so

costly that few care to pay the price.

The genius is a man who first states truths; and all truths are

unpleasant on their first presentation. That which is uncommon is

offensive. "Who ever heard anything like that before?" ask the literary

and philosophic hill tribes in fierce indignation. Says James Russell

Lowell, "I blab unpleasant truths, you see, that none may need to state

them after me."

Plato was a teacher by nature: this was his business, his pastime, and

the only thing in life that gave him joy. But he dropped back to the

good old ways of making truth esoteric as did the priests of Egypt,

instead of exoteric as did Socrates. He founded his college in the grove

of his old friend Academus, a mile out of Athens on the road to Eleusis.

In honor of Academus the school was called "The Academy." It was

secluded, safe, beautiful for situation. In time Plato bought a tract of

land adjoining that of Academus, and this was set apart as the permanent

school. All the teaching was done out of doors, master and pupils seated

on the marble benches, by the fountain-side, or strolling through the

grounds, rich with shrubs and flowers and enlivened by the song of

birds. The climate of Athens was about like that of Southern California,

where the sun shines three hundred days in the year.

Plato emphasized the value of the spoken word over the written, a thing

he could well afford to do, since he was a remarkably good writer. This

for the same reason that the only man who can afford to go ragged is the

man with a goodly bank-balance. The shibboleth of the modern schools of

oratory is, "We grow through expression." And Plato was the man who

first said it. Plato's teaching was all in the form of the "quiz,"

because he believed that truth was not a thing to be acquired from

another--it is self-discovery.

Indeed, we can imagine it was very delightful--this walking, strolling,

lying on the grass, or seated in semicircles, indulging in endless talk,

easy banter, with now and then a formal essay read to start the

vibrations.

Here it was that Aristotle came from his wild home in the mountains of

Macedonia, to remain for twenty years and to evolve into a rival of the

master.

We can well imagine how Aristotle, the mountain-climber and horseman, at

times grew heartily tired of the faultily faultless garden with its high

wall and graveled walks and delicate shrubbery, and shouted aloud in

protest, "The whole world of mountain, valley and plain should be our

Academy, not this pent-up Utica that contracts our powers."

Then followed an argument as to the relative value of talking about

things or doing them, or Poetry versus Science.

Poetry, philosophy and religion are very old themes, and they were old

even in Plato's day; but natural science came in with Aristotle. And

science is only the classification of the common knowledge of the common

people. It was Aristotle who named things, not Adam. He contended that

the classification and naming of plants, rocks and animals was quite as

important as to classify ideas about human happiness and make guesses at

the state of the soul after death.

Of course he got himself beautifully misunderstood, because he was

advocating something which had never been advocated before. In this lay

his virtue, that he outran human sympathy, even the sympathy of the

great Plato.

Yet for a while the unfolding genius of this young barbarian was a

great joy to Plato, as the earnest, eager intellect of an ambitious

pupil always is to his teacher. Plato was great in speculation;

Aristotle was great in observation. Well has it been said that it was

Aristotle who discovered the world. And Aristotle in his old age said,

"My attempts to classify the objects of Nature all came through Plato's

teaching me first how to classify ideas." And forty years before this

Plato had said, "It was Socrates who taught me this game of the

correlation and classification of thoughts."

* * * * *

The writings of Plato consist of thirty-five dialogues, and one essay

which is not cast in the dramatic form--"The Apology." These dialogues

vary in length from twenty pages, of, say, four hundred words each, to

three hundred pages. In addition to these books are many quotations from

Plato and references to him by contemporary writers. Plato's work is as

impersonal as that of Shakespeare. All human ideas, shades of belief,

emotions and desires pass through the colander of his mind. He allows

everybody to have his say.

What Plato himself thought can only be inferred, and this each reader

does for himself. We construct our man Plato in our own image. A

critic's highest conception of Plato's philosophy is the highest

conception of the critic's own. We, however, are reasonably safe in

assuming that Plato's own ideas were put into the mouth of Socrates, for

the one intent of Plato's life was to redeem Socrates from the charges

that had been made against him. The characters Shakespeare loved are the

ones that represent the master, not the hated and handmade rogues.

Plato's position in life was that of a spectator rather than that of an

actor. He stood and saw the procession pass by, and as it passed,

commented on it. He charged his pupils no tuition and accepted no fees,

claiming that to sell one's influence or ideas was immoral.

It will be remembered that Byron held a similar position at the

beginning of his literary career, and declared i' faith, he "would not

prostitute his genius for hire." He gave his poems to the world. Later,

when his income was pinched, he began to make bargains with Barabbas and

became an artist in per centum, collecting close, refusing to rhyme

without collateral.

Byron's humanity is not seriously disputed. Plato also was human. He had

a fixed income and so knew the worthlessness of riches. He issued no

tariff, but the goodly honorarium left mysteriously on a marble bench by

a rich pupil he accepted, and for it gave thanks to the gods. He said

many great things, but he never said this: "I would have every man poor

that he might know the value of money."

"The Republic" is the best known and best read of any of Plato's

dialogues. It outlines an ideal form of government where everybody would

be healthy, happy and prosperous. It has served as inspiration to Sir

Thomas More, Erasmus, Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Morris, Edward

Bellamy, Brigham Young, John Humphrey Noyes and Eugene Debs. The

sub-division of labor, by setting apart certain persons to do certain

things--for instance, to care for the children--has made its appeal to

Upton Sinclair, who jumped from his Utopian woodshed into a rubber-plant

and bounced off into oblivion.

Plato's plan was intended to relieve marriage from the danger of

becoming a form of slavery. The rulers, teachers and artists especially

were to be free, and the State was to assume all responsibilities. The

reason is plain: he wanted them to reproduce themselves. But whether

genius is an acquirement or a natural endowment he touches on but

lightly. Also, he seemingly did not realize "that no hovel is safe from

it."

If all marriage-laws were done away with, Plato thought that the men and

women who were mated would still be true to each other, and that the

less the police interfered in love-relations, the better.

In one respect at least, Plato was certainly right: he advocated the

equality of the sexes, and declared that no woman should be owned by a

man nor forced into a mode of life, either by economic exigency or

marriage, that was repulsive to her. Also, that her right to bear

children or not should be strictly her own affair, and to dictate to a

mother as to who should father her children tended to the production of

a slavish race.

The eugenics of "The Republic" were tried for thirty years by the Oneida

Community with really good results, but one generation of communal

marriages was proved to be the limit, a thing Plato now knows from his

heights in Elysium, but which he in his bachelor dreams on earth did not

realize.

In his division of labor each was to do the thing he was best fitted to

do, and which he liked to do. It was assumed that each person had a

gift, and that to use this gift all that was necessary was to give him

an opportunity. That very modern cry of "equality of opportunity" harks

back to Plato.

The monastic impulse was a very old thing, even in the time of Plato.

The monastic impulse is simply cutting for sanctuary when the pressure

of society gets intense--a getting rid of the world by running away from

it. This usually occurs when the novitiate has exhausted his capacity

for sin, and so tries saintship in the hope of getting a new thrill.

Plato had been much impressed by the experiments of Pythagoras, who had

actually done the thing of which Plato only talked. Plato now picked the

weak points in the Pythagorean philosophy and sought, in imagination, to

construct a fabric that would stand the test of time.

However, all Utopias, like all monasteries and penitentiaries, are made

up of picked people. The Oneida Community was not composed of average

individuals, but of people who were selected with great care, and only

admitted after severe tests. And great as was Plato, he could not

outline an ideal plan of life except for an ideal people.

To remain in the world of work and share the burdens of all--to ask for

nothing which other people can not have on like terms--not to consider

yourself peculiar, unique and therefore immune and exempt--is now the

ideal of the best minds. We have small faith in monasticism or

monotheism, but we do have great faith in monism. We believe in the

Solidarity of the Race. We must all progress together. Whether

Pythagoras, John Humphrey Noyes and Brigham Young were ahead of the

world or behind it is really not to the point--the many would not

tolerate them. So their idealism was diluted with danger until it became

as somber, sober and slaty-gray as the average existence, and fades as

well as shrinks in the wash.

A private good is no more possible for a community than it is for an

individual. We help ourselves only as we advance the race--we are happy

only as we minister to the whole. The race is one, and this is monism.

And here Socrates and Plato seemingly separate, for Socrates in his life

wanted nothing, not even joy, and Plato's desire was for peace and

happiness. Yet the ideal of justice in Plato's philosophy is very

exalted.

No writer in that flowering time of beauty and reason which we call "The

Age of Pericles" exerted so profound an influence as Plato. All the

philosophers that follow him were largely inspired by him. Those who

berated him most were, very naturally, the ones he had most benefited.

Teach a boy to write, and the probabilities are that his first essay,

when he has cut loose from his teacher's apron-strings and starts a

brownie bibliomag, will be in denunciation of the man who taught him to

push the pen and wield the Faber.

Xenophon was more indebted, intellectually, to Plato than to any other

living man, yet he speaks scathingly of his master. Plutarch, Cicero,

Iamblichus, Pliny, Horace and all the other Roman writers read Plato

religiously. The Christian Fathers kept his work alive, and passed it on

to Dante, Petrarch and the early writers of the Renaissance, so all of

their thought is well flavored with essence of Plato. Well does Addison

put into the mouth of Cato those well-known words:

It must be so--Plato, thou reasonest well!--

Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,

This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,

Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul

Back on herself, and startles at destruction?

'T is the divinity that stirs within us;

'T is heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,

And intimates eternity to man.

All of that English group of writers in Addison's day knew their Plato,

exactly as did Cato and the other great Romans of near two thousand

years before. From Plato you can prove that there is a life after this

for each individual soul, as Francis of Assisi proved, or you can take

your Plato, as did Hume, and show that man lives only in his influence,

his individual life returning to the mass and becoming a part of all the

great pulsing existence that ebbs and flows through plant and tree and

flower and flying bird. And today we turn to Plato and find the

corroboration of our thought that to live now and here, up to our

highest and best, is the acme of wisdom. We prepare to live by living.

If there is another world we better be getting ready for it. If heaven

is an Ideal Republic it is founded on unselfishness, truth, reciprocity,

equanimity and co-operation, and only those will be at home there who

have practised these virtues here. Man was made for mutual service. This

way lies Elysium.

Plato was a teacher of teachers, and like every other great teacher who

has ever lived, his soul goes marching on, for to teach is to influence,

and influence never dies. Hail, Plato!

[Illustration: KING ALFRED]