[51] His devotion to the austere and abstract philosophy of Parmenides,
its passivity or indifference, could not repress the opulent genius of
Plato, or transform him into a cynic. Another ancient philosopher,
Pythagoras, set the frozen waves in motion again, brought back to
Plato's recognition all that multiplicity in men's experience to which
Heraclitus had borne such emphatic witness; but as rhythm or melody
now--in movement truly, but moving as disciplined sound and with the
reasonable soul of music in it.
Pythagoras, or the founder of the Pythagorean philosophy, is the third
of those earlier masters, who explain the intellectual confirmation of
Plato by way of antecedent. What he said, or was believed to have
said, is almost everywhere in the very texture of Platonic philosophy,
as vera vox, an authority with prescript claim on sympathetic or at
least reverent consideration, to be developed generously in the natural
growth of Plato's own thoughts.
[52] Nothing remains of his writings: dark statements only, as occasion
served, in later authors. Plato himself attributes those doctrines of
his not to Pythagoras but to the Pythagoreans. But if no such name had
come down to us we might have understood how, in the search for the
philosophic unity of experience, a common measure of things, for a
cosmical hypothesis, number and the truths of number would come to fill
the place occupied by some omnipresent physical element, air, fire,
water, in the philosophies of Ionia; by the abstract and exclusive idea
of the unity of Being itself in the system of Parmenides. To realise
unity in variety, to discover cosmos--an order that shall satisfy one's
reasonable soul--below and within apparent chaos: is from first to last
the continuous purpose of what we call philosophy. Well! Pythagoras
seems to have found that unity of principle (archê)+ in the dominion of
number everywhere, the proportion, the harmony, the music, into which
number as such expands. Truths of number: the essential laws of
measure in time and space:--Yes, these are indeed everywhere in our
experience: must, as Kant can explain to us, be an element in anything
we are able so much as to conceive at all. And music, covering all it
does, for Pythagoras, for Plato and Platonism--music, which though it
is of course much besides, is certainly a formal development of purely
numerical laws: that too surely is something, [53] independently of
ourselves, in the real world without us, like a personal intelligible
soul durably resident there for those who bring intelligence of it, of
music, with them; to be known on the favourite Platonic principle of
like by like (homoion homoiô)+ though the incapable or uninstructed ear,
in various degrees of dulness, may fail to apprehend it.
The Golden Verses of Pythagoras parted early into dust (that seems
strange, if they were ever really written in a book) and antiquity
itself knows little directly about his doctrine. Yet Pythagoras is
much more than a mere name, a term, for locating as well as may be a
philosophical abstraction. Pythagoras, his person, his memory,
attracted from the first a kind of fairy-tale of mystic science. The
philosophy of number, of music and proportion, came, and has remained,
in a cloud of legendary glory; the gradual accumulation of which
Porphyry and Iamblichus, the fantastic masters of Neo-Platonism, or
Neo-Pythagoreanism, have embodied in their so-called Lives of him, like
some antique fable richly embossed with starry wonders. In this spirit
there had been much writing about him: that he was a son of Apollo,
nay, Apollo himself--the twilight, attempered, Hyperborean Apollo, like
the sun in Lapland: that his person gleamed at times with a
supernatural brightness: that he had exposed to those who loved him a
golden thigh: how Abaris, the minister of that god, [54] had come
flying to him on a golden arrow: of his almost impossible journeys: how
he was seen, had lectured indeed, in different places at the same time.
As he walked on the banks of the Nessus the river had whispered his
name: he had been, in the secondary sense, various persons in the
course of ages; a courtesan once, for some ancient sin in him; and then
a hero, Euphorbus, son of Panthus; could remember very distinctly so
recent a matter as the Trojan war, and had recognised in a moment his
own old armour, hanging on the wall, above one of his old dead bodies,
in the temple of Athene at Argos; showing out all along only by hints
and flashes the abysses of divine knowledge within him, sometimes by
miracle. For if the philosopher really is all that Pythagoras or the
Pythagoreans suppose; if the material world is so perfect a musical
instrument, and he knows its theory so well, he might surely give
practical and sensible proof of that on occasion, by himself
improvising music upon it in direct miracle. And so there, in Porphyry
and Iamblichus, the appropriate miracles are.
If the mistaken affection of the disciples of dreamy Neo-Platonic
Gnôsis at Alexandria, in the third or fourth century of our era, has
thus made it impossible to separate later legend from original evidence
as to what he was, and said, and how he said it, yet that there was a
brilliant, perhaps a showy, personality there, infusing the [55] most
abstract truths with what would tell on the fancy, seems more than
probable, and, though he would appear really to have had from the first
much of mystery or mysticism about him, the thaumaturge of Samos, "whom
even the vulgar might follow as a conjuror," must have been very unlike
the lonely "weeping" philosopher of Ephesus, or the almost disembodied
philosopher of Elea. In the very person and doings of this earliest
master of the doctrine of harmony, people saw that philosophy is
Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute.
And in turn he abounded in influence on the deeds, the persons, of
others, as if he had really carried a magic lute in his hands to charm
them.
As his fellow-citizens had all but identified Pythagoras with him, so
Apollo remained the peculiar patron of the Pythagoreans; and we may
note, in connexion with their influence on Plato, that as Apollo was
the chosen ancestral deity, so Pythagoreanism became especially the
philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian Greeks. If, as Plato was
aware, or fancied, true Spartans knew more of philosophy than they let
strangers suppose--turned them all out from time to time and feasted on
it in secret, for the strengthening of their souls--it was [56]
precisely the Pythagorean philosophy of music, of austere music,
mastering, remoulding, men's very bodies, they would then have
discussed with one another.
A native of Ionia, it is in one of the Dorian cities of Magna Graecia,
at Crotona, that Pythagoras finds the fitting scene of his mysterious
influence. He founds there something like an ideal republic, or rather
a religious brotherhood, under a rule outwardly expressive of that
inward idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian soul, and, for
it, as for him, ever the peculiar pledge of the presence of philosophic
truth. Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê emmetria;+ asks one
in The Republic; and Emmetria?+ of course, is the answer.
Recalling the student of Plato to penetrate as far as he can into that
mysterious community, there, long before, in the imagination of
Pythagoras is the first dream of the Perfect City, with all those
peculiar ethical sympathies which the Platonic Republic enforces
already well defined--the perfect mystic body of the Dorian soul,
built, as Plato requires, to the strains of music. As a whole, and in
its members severally, it would reproduce and visibly reflect to others
that inward order and harmony of which each one was a part. As such,
the Pythagorean order (it was itself an "order") expanded and was long
maintained in those cities of Magna Graecia which had been the scene of
the practical [57] no less than of the speculative activity of its
founder; and in one of which, Metapontum, so late as the days of Cicero
what was believed to be the tomb of Pythagoras was still shown. Order,
harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will
convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of
the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony,--that was the chief
thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though
they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done
what they liked--temperance in a religious intention, with many
singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like.
For if, according to his philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, to
use the phrase of Wordsworth reproducing the central Pythagorean
doctrine, "from heaven," as he says, "trailing clouds of glory," so the
arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving
one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither,
of which means, surely, abstinence, the repression of one's carnal
elements, must be one; in consideration also, in curious questions, as
to the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul,
before and after, for which he was so anxious to secure full use of all
the opportunities of further perfecting which might yet await it, in
the many revolutions of its existence. In the midst of that
aesthetically [58] so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if
anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic
Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascêsis, about
him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards,
that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon
his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the
philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover, which
enveloped the entire action of the Pythagoreans, and had indeed kept
Pythagoras himself, as some have thought, from committing his thoughts
to writing at all, was congruous with such monkish discipline.
Mysticism--the condition of the initiated--is a word derived, as we
know, from a Greek verb which may perhaps mean to close the eye that
one may better perceive the invisible, but more probably means to close
the lips while the soul is brooding over what cannot be uttered. Later
Christian admirers said of him, that he had hidden the words of God in
his heart.
The dust of his golden verses perhaps, but certainly the gold-dust of
his thoughts, lies scattered all along Greek literature from Plato to
the latest of the Greek Fathers of the Church. You may find it
serviceably worked out in the notes of Zeller's excellent work on Greek
philosophy, and, with more sparing comment, in Mullach's Fragmenta
Philosophorum Graecorum. No one of those Pre-Socratic philosophers has
[59] been the subject of a more enthusiastic erudition. For his mind's
health however, if in doing so he is not making a disproportionate use
of his time, inconsistent certainly with the essential temper of the
doctrine he seeks for, and such as a true Pythagorean would instantly
condemn, the young scholar might be recommended to go straight to the
pages of Aristotle--those discreet, unromantic pages, salutary
therefore to listen to, concerning doctrines in themselves so
fantastic.* In the Ethics, as you may know, in the Metaphysics, and
elsewhere, Aristotle gives many not unsympathetic notices at least of
the disciples, which, by way of sober contrast on a matter from the
first profusely, perhaps cheaply, embroidered, is like quiet
information from Pythagoras himself. Only, remember always in reading
Plato--Plato, as a sincere learner in the school of Pythagoras--that
the essence, the active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine, resides,
not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor as with our modern selves too
often, in the "infinite," those eternities, infinitudes, abysses,
Carlyle invokes for us so often--in no cultus of the infinite (to
apeiron) but in the finite (to peras).+ It is so indeed, with that
exception of the Parmenidean sect, through all Greek philosophy,
congruously with the proper vocation of the [60] people of art, of art
as being itself the finite, ever controlling the infinite, the
formless. Those famous systoichiai tôn enantiôn,+ or parallel columns
of contraries: the One and the Many: Odd and Even, and the like: Good
and Evil: are indeed all reducible ultimately to terms of art, as the
expressive and the inexpressive. Now observe that Plato's "theory of
ideas" is but an effort to enforce the Pythagorean peras,+ with all the
unity-in-variety of concerted music,--eternal definition of the finite,
upon to apeiron,+ the infinite, the indefinite, formless, brute matter,
of our experience of the world.
For it is of Plato again we should be thinking, and of Pythagoras or
the Pythagoreans, only so far as they explain the actual conformation
of Plato's thoughts as we find them, especially in The Republic. Let
us see, as much as possible in his own words, what Plato received from
that older philosophy, of which the two leading persuasions were;
first, the universality, the ultimate truth, of numerical, of musical
law; and secondly, the pre-existence, the double eternity, of the soul.
In spirit, then, we are certainly of the Pythagorean company in that
most characteristic dialogue, the Meno, in which Plato discusses the
nature, the true idea, of Virtue, or rather how one may attain thereto;
compelled to this subordinate and accessory question by the
intellectual [61] cowardice of his disciple, though after his manner he
flashes irrepressible light on that other primary and really
indispensable question by the way. Pythagoras, who had founded his
famous brotherhood by way of turning theory into practice, must have
had, of course, definite views on that most practical question, how
virtue is to be attained by us; and Plato is certainly faithful to him
in assigning the causation of virtue partly to discipline, forming
habit (askêsis)+ as enforced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy, as
he is true to his own experience in assigning it partly also to a good
natural disposition (physei)+ and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose
some of us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also in part (theia
moira)+ to the good pleasure of heaven, to un-merited grace. Whatever
else, however, may be held about it, it is certain (he admits) that
virtue comes in great measure through learning. But is there in very
deed such a thing as learning? asks the eristic Meno, who is so
youthfully fond of argument for its own sake, and must exercise by
display his already well-trained intellectual muscle. Is not that
favourite, that characteristic, Greek paradox, that it is impossible to
be taught, and therefore useless to seek, what one does not know
already, after all the expression of an empirical truth?--
Meno. After what manner Socrates will you seek for that which
you do not know at all--what it is? For what sort of thing,
among the things you know not, will you propose as your [62]
object of search? Or even if you should have lighted full upon
it, how will you know that it is this thing which you knew not?
Socrates. Ah! I understand the kind of thing you mean to say,
Meno. Do you see what a contentious argument this is you are
bringing down on our heads?--that forsooth it is not possible
for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for what he knows
not; inasmuch as he would not seek what he knows, at least;
because he knows it, and to one in such case there is no need
of seeking. Nor would he seek after what he knows not; for he
knows not what he shall seek for. Meno, 80.
Well! that is true in a sense, as Socrates admits; not however in any
sense which encourages idle acquiescence in what according to common
language is our ignorance. There is a sense (it is exemplified in
regard to sound and colour, perhaps in some far more important things)
in which it is matter of experience that it is impossible to seek for,
or be taught, what one does not know already. He who is in total
ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware
of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them. Where could
one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means
incapacity for receiving knowledge. Yes, certainly; the Pythagoreans
are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence-
-: anamnêsis + famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise
way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don't know: how
that happens. In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument
most [63] fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning
may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno's slaves,
a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry:
introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where
diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on the
table--particular objects, the mere sight of which will rouse him when
subjected to the dialectical treatment, to universal truths concerning
them. The problem required of him is to describe a square of a
particular size: to find the line which must be the side of such a
square; and he is to find it for himself. Meno, carefully on his
guard, is to watch whether the boy is taught by Socrates in any of his
answers; whether he answers anything at any point otherwise than by way
of reminiscence and really out of his own mind, as the reasonable
questions of Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or like
sunlight on the photographer's negative.
"See him now!" he cries triumphantly, "How he remembers; in the logical
order; as he ought to remember!" The reader, in truth, following
closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that
after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem
for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the
questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself
illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space. It is [64]
once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the
immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So
much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of
the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a
plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them:
that as he remembers, in logical order (hôs dei)+ so he makes the
mistakes also which he ought to make--the right sort of mistakes, such
as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a
kind of properly innate errors. Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai
hai doxai autai.+--"Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been
stirred up within him"; and he will perform, Socrates assures us,
similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical
problems, with any and every problem whatever.
"If then," observes Socrates in the Phaedo, wistfully pondering, for
such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger
outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine:--
If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathe-
matical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already
possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before
and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the
equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things
of the kind? For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is
to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds
not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute
Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again, after the
dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just
and good, and about all things whatever, upon [65] which, in
all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal--hois
episphragizometha touto + --That, which really is. Phaedo, 75.
But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno--from the prison-cell
to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment
upon the young boy with the square:-- Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all'
erôtêsantos, epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên;+
"Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning,
will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense
(epistêmê)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?"--Yes! and
that recovery is an act of reminiscence.
These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about
side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enêsan de ge autô
autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right
opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when
stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as
consciously reasoned knowledge (erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai
gignontai).+ That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not
quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as
he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading
psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us--the doctrine
namely of metempsychôsis, of the transmigration of souls through
various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral
retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by
Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the
Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of
Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so
comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a
personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then,
would be immortal (athanatos an hê psychê eiê)+ prospectively as well as
in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth
"over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an
encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all
events, it seemed plain that "the soul is eternal. It is right
therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that
is to say, one does not remember, just now." Those notions were in the
boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not
come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half-
obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds
of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an
earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again
now, so kindly, so firmly!
Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under
the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the
proper vocation of the philosophic teacher [67] to supervene with his
encouraging questions. And there was another doctrine--a persuasion
still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong
presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that
great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains--
"reminiscence." Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno, in the
locus classicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain
religious persons, priests and priestesses,
--who had made it their business to be able to give an account
concerning their sacred functions. Pindar too asserts this,
and many other of the poets, so many as were divinely inspired.
And what they say is as follows. But do you observe, whether
they seem to you to speak the truth. For they say that the soul
of man is immortal; and that at one time it comes to a pause,
which indeed they call dying, and then is born again; but that
it is never destroyed. That on this account indeed it is our
duty to pass through life as religiously as possible (because
there's 'another world,' namely). 'For those,' says Pindar,
'from whom Persephone shall have received a recompense of ancient
wrong--she gives back their soul again to the sun above in the
ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, illustrious and swift in
strength, and men greatest in wisdom; and for remaining time they
are called holy heroes among us.' Inasmuch then as the soul is
immortal, and has been born many times, and has seen both things
here and things in Hades, and all things, there is nothing that
it has not learned; so that it is by no means surprising that
it should be able to remember both about virtue and about other
matters what it knew at least even aforetime. For inasmuch as
the whole of nature is akin to itself (homogeneous) and the soul
has learned all things, nothing hinders one, by remembering one
thing only, which indeed people call 'learning' (though it is
something else in fact, you see!) from finding out all other
things for himself, if he be brave and fail not through weariness
in his search. For in truth to [68] seek and to learn is wholly
Recollection. Therefore one must not be persuaded by that eristic
doctrine (namely that if ignorant in ignorance you must remain)
for that on the one hand would make us idle and is a pleasant
doctrine for the weak among mankind to hear; while this other
doctrine makes us industrious and apt to seek. Trusting in
which that it is true, I am willing along with you to seek out
virtue:--what it is. Meno, 81.
These strange theories then are much with Socrates on his last sad day-
-sad to his friends--as justifying more or less, on ancient religious
authority, the instinctive confidence, checking sadness in himself,
that he will survive--survive the effects of the poison, of the funeral
fire; that somewhere, with some others, with Minos perhaps and other
"righteous souls" of the national religion, he will be holding
discourses, dialogues, quite similar to these, only a little better as
must naturally happen with so diligent a scholar, this time to-morrow.
And that wild thought of metempsychôsis was connected with a theory,
yet more fantastic, of the visible heaven above us. For Pythagoras,
the Pythagoreans, had had their views also, as became the possessors of
"a first principle"--of a philosophy therefore which need leave no
problem untouched--on purely material things, above all on the
structure of the planets, the mechanical contrivances by which their
motion was effected (it came to just that!) on the relation of the
earth to its atmosphere and the like. The doctrine of the
transmigration, [69] the pilgrimage or mental journeys, of the soul
linked itself readily with a fanciful, guess-work astronomy, which
provided starry places, wide areas, hostelries, for that wanderer to
move or rest in. A matter of very lively and presentable form and
colour, as if making the invisible show through, this too pleased the
extremely visual fancy of Plato; as we may see, in many places of the
Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Timaeus, and most conspicuously in the tenth
book of The Republic, where he relates the vision of Er--what he saw of
the other world during a kind of temporary death. Hell, Purgatory,
Paradise, are briefly depicted in it; Paradise especially with a quite
Dantesque sensibility to coloured light--physical light or spiritual,
you can hardly tell which, so perfectly is the inward sense blent with
its visible counter-part, reminding one forcibly of the Divine Comedy,
of which those closing pages of The Republic suggest an early outline.
That then is the third element in Plato derivative from his Pythagorean
masters: an astronomy of infant minds, we might call it, in which the
celestial world is the scene, not as yet of those abstract reasonable
laws of number and motion and space, upon which, as Plato himself
protests in the seventh book of The Republic, it is the business of a
veritable science of the stars to exercise our minds, but rather of a
machinery, which the mere star-gazer may peep into as best he can, with
its levers, its spindles and revolving [70] wheels, its spheres, he
says,--"like those boxes which fit into one another," and the literal
doors "opened in heaven," through which, at the due point of ascension,
the revolving pilgrim soul will glide forth and have a chance of gazing
into the wide spaces beyond, "as he stands outside on the back of the
sky"--that hollow partly transparent sphere which surrounds and closes
in our terrestrial atmosphere. Most difficult to follow in detailed
description, perhaps not to be taken quite seriously, one thing at
least is clear about the planetary movements as Plato and his
Pythagorean teachers conceive them. They produce, naturally enough,
sounds, that famous "music of the spheres," which the undisciplined ear
fails to recognise, to delight in, only because it is never silent.
That it really is impossible after all to learn, to be taught what you
are entirely ignorant of, was and still is a fact of experience,
manifest especially in regard to music. Now that "music of the
spheres" in its largest sense, its completest orchestration, the
harmonious order of the whole universe (kosmos)+ was what souls had
heard of old; found echoes of here; might recover in its entirety, amid
the influences of the melodious colour, sounds, manners, the enforced
modulating discipline, which would make the whole life of a citizen of
the Perfect City an education in music. We are now with Plato, you
see! in his reproduction, so fully detailed for us in The [71]
Republic, of the earlier and vaguer Pythagorean brotherhood. Musical
imagery, the notions of proportion and the like, have ever since Plato
wrote played a large part in the theory of morals; have come to seem
almost a natural part of language concerning them. Only, wherever in
Plato himself you find such imagery, you may note Pythagorean
influence.
The student of The Republic hardly needs to be reminded how all-
pervasive in it that imagery is; how emphatic, in all its speculative
theory, in all its practical provisions, is the desire for harmony; how
the whole business of education (of gymnastic even, the seeming rival
of music) is brought under it; how large a part of the claims of duty,
of right conduct, for the perfectly initiated, comes with him to be
this, that it sounds so well. Plêmmeleia,+ discordancy,--all faultiness
resolves itself into that. "Canst play on this flute?" asks Hamlet:--
on human nature, with all its stops, of whose capricious tuneableness,
or want of tune, he is himself the representative. Well! the perfect
state, thinks Plato, can. For him, music is still everywhere in the
world, and the whole business of philosophy only as it were the correct
editing of it: as it will be the whole business of the state to
repress, in the great concert, the jarring self-assertion (pleonexia)+
of those whose voices have large natural power in them. How, in
detail, rhythm, the limit (peras)+ is enforced in Plato's Republic there
is no time to [72] show. Call to mind only that the perfect visible
equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-statues of the actual
youth of Greece--legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than
its fancied forms of deity--the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the
apoxyomenus; and how the most beautiful type of such youth, by the
universal admission of the Greeks themselves, had issued from the
severe schools of Sparta, that highest civic embodiment of the Dorian
temper, like some perfect musical instrument, perfectly responsive to
the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of law.--Yet with a
fresh setting of the old music in each succeeding generation. For in
truth we come into the world, each one of us, "not in nakedness," but
by the natural course of organic development clothed far more
completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay,
fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity
which we mistake for our volitions; in the language which is more than
one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs,
the literature, the very houses, which we did not make for ourselves;
in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would assure us) not
ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeit-geist, or abstract
secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness
of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest. It is
humanity itself now--abstract humanity--that [73] figures as the
transmigrating soul, accumulating into its "colossal manhood" the
experience of ages; making use of, and casting aside in its march, the
souls of countless individuals, as Pythagoras supposed the individual
soul to cast aside again and again its outworn body.
So it may be. There was nothing of all that, however, in the mind of
the great English poet at the beginning of this century whose famous
Ode on The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood,
in which he made metempsychôsis his own, must still express for some
minds something more than merely poetic truth. For Pythagoreanism too,
like all the graver utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an
instinct of the human mind itself, and therefore also a constant
tradition in its history, which will recur; fortifying this or that
soul here or there in a part at least of that old sanguine assurance
about itself, which possessed Socrates so immovably, his masters, his
disciples. Those who do not already know Wordsworth's Ode ought soon
to read it for themselves. Listen instead to the lines which perhaps
suggested Wordsworth's: The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so-
called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago, who was able to
blend those Pythagorean doctrines with the Christian belief, amid which
indeed, from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards, those doctrines
have shown themselves not otherwise than at home.
[74] Happy, those days, he declares,
Before I understood this place,
Appointed for my second race;
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love;
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
O! how I long to travel back
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain,
Where first I left my glorious train.--
But Ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk; and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn
In that state I came return.
Summing up those three philosophies antecedent to Plato, we might say,
that if Heraclitus taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics
that of rest, so, in such quaint phrase as Vaughan's, Pythagoreanism is
the philosophy of re-action.
NOTES
52. +Transliteration: archê. Liddell and Scott definition: "I.
beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty,
dominion; 2. office."
53. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Translation: "like by like."
56. +Transliteration: Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê
emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth
is close kin to measure and proportion, or to disproportion?" Plato,
The Republic, Book VI, 486d.
56. +Transliteration: Emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "To
measure and proportion." Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.
59. *Or to Mr. Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy; which I have read since
these pages went to press, with much admiration for its learning and
lucidity, and its unconventionality of view.
59. +Transliteration: to apeiron . . . to peras. Liddell and Scott
definition: "I. without trial or experience of a thing . . . II.
boundless, endless, countless / an end, extremity." As Pater
indicates, in Plato the terms mean something like "infinite" and
"finite," or "bounded" and "unbounded."
60. +Transliteration: systoichiai tôn enantiôn. "Co-ordinates
consisting of opposites."
60. +Transliteration: peras. See above, second note for page 59.
60. +Transliteration: to apeiron. See above, second note for page 59.
61. +Transliteration: askêsis. Liddell and Scott definition:
"excercise, training."
61. +Transliteration: physei. Liddell and Scott definition of physis:
"the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or
thing." Thus, the dative form cited by Pater means, "with regard to
nature."
61. +Transliteration: theia moira. Translation: "one's lot by divine
appointment."
62. +Transliteration: anamnêsis. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
calling to mind, recollection."
64. +Transliteration: hôs dei. E-text editor's translation: "as is
necessary."
64. +Transliteration: Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai hai doxai
autai. Pater's translation: "Just now, as in a dream, these opinions
have been stirred up within him." Plato, Meno, 85c.
65. +Transliteration: hois episphragizometha touto. E-text editor's
translation: "these things upon which we set this seal." Plato,
Phaedo, 75d.
65. +Transliteration: Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erôtêsantos,
epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên. E-text editor's
translation: "No-one having taught him a thing, but rather through
questioning alone, he will understand for certain, retrieving the
knowledge out of himself?" Plato, Meno, 85d.
65. +Transliteration: epistêmê. Liddell and Scott definition "1.
knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific
knowledge."
65. +Transliteration: enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai. E-text
editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] implanted in
him, weren't they?" Plato, Meno 85c. Source, if any.
65. +Transliteration: [enesontai autôi alêtheis doxai,] erôtêsei
epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai. E-text editor's translation: "[He
holds within himself true opinions,] which a questioning process may
awaken into certain knowledge." Plato, Meno 86a.
66. +Transliteration: athanatos an hê psychê eiê. Pater's translation:
"The soul, then, would be immortal." Plato, Meno 86b.
70. +Transliteration: kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.
order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order:
of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an
ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."
71. +Transliteration: Plêmmeleia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
false note . . . error, offense."
71. +Transliteration: pleonexia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
disposition to take more than one's share."
71. +Transliteration: peras. See above, note two, page 59.