CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

I. THE THEORY OF IDEAS

[150] PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a

tendency, a group of tendencies--a tendency to think or feel, and to

speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's

dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of

himself and his own mental complexion. Those tendencies combine and

find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather

than Plato, have called the "theory of ideas," itself indeed not so

much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of

general terms, such as Useful or Just; of abstract notions, like

Equality; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City; of all those

terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the

particular presentations of our individual experience; or, to use

Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed [151] from his old Eleatic

teachers, which reduce "the Many to the One."

What the nature of such representative terms and notions, genus and

species, class-word, and abstract idea or ideal, may be; what their

relationship to the individual, the unit, the particulars which they

include; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic.

Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The

Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere

subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing

in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and

pass out of it, as also of the particular mind which entertains it:--

that is one of the fixed and formal answers to this question; and Plato

is the father of all realists. Realism, as such, in the sense just

indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or transcendental theory;

but rises, again and again, at least in a particular class of minds,

quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question. Taking our own

stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the

conceptualist:--See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a

permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with

which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those

common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here

(giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common

[152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through

common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's

individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their

full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and

notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between

general and particular, between our individual experience and the

common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to

assist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, "an

intellectual world," as Plato calls it, a true noêtos topos +. So much

for the modern view; for what common sense might now suggest as to the

nature of logical "universals."

Plato's realism however--what is called "The Theory of Ideas"--his way

of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say

about "the Many and the One," is often very difficult; though of

various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds.

From the simple and easily intelligible sort of realism attributed by

Aristotle to Socrates, seeking in "universal definitions," or ideas,

only a serviceable instrument for the distinguishing of what is

essential from what is unessential in the actual things about him,

Plato passes by successive stages, which we should try to keep distinct

as we read him, to what may be rightly called a "transcendental," what

to many minds has [153] seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of

thought, regarding those abstractions, which indeed seem to become for

him not merely substantial things-in-themselves, but little short of

living persons, to be known as persons are made known to each other, by

a system of affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, homoion homoiô +, like

to like--these persons constituting together that common, eternal,

intellectual world, a sort of divine family or hierarchy, with which

the mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable, or really

knows, is in communion or correspondence. And here certainly is a

theory, a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about which the

difficulties are many.

Yet as happens always with the metaphysical questions, or answers,

which from age to age preoccupy acuter minds, those difficulties about

the Many and the One actually had their attractiveness for some in the

days of Plato.--

Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is,

that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely,

embodied in one general term) which--hypo logôn +--under the

influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language,

become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to

everything of which existence is asserted from time to time.

This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun;

but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and

ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us. And

whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is

delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy;

he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in

motion-- kinei + --every definition [154] --logos+--every

conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and

firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other

and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particulari-

ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and

then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he

becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular,

till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first,

and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him,

older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither

father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely

even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would

hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter.

Philebus, 15.+

The Platonic doctrine of "the Many and the One"--the problem with which

we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as

well as of the metaphysical power of Plato--is not precisely the

question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely

to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a

railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the

questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or

protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings,

may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As

the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere

commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it

might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes

nothing less than the standard of what is uninteresting, as such, to

its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is

not so much [155] what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that

after all really tells. Plato and Platonism we shall never understand

unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about "the

Many and the One."

Plato's peculiar view of the matter, then, passes with him into a phase

of poetic thought; as indeed all that Plato's genius touched came in

contact with poetry. Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or

be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such; to

notions, we might think, carefully deprived of all the incident, the

colour and variety, which fits things--this or that--to the

constitution and natural habit of our minds, fits them for attachment

to what we really are. We cannot love or live upon genus and species,

accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an

orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses. Take a seed from the

garden. What interest it has for us all lies in our sense of potential

differentiation to come: the leaves, leaf upon leaf, the flowers, a

thousand new seeds in turn. It is so with animal seed; and with

humanity, individually, or as a whole, its expansion into a detailed,

ever-changing, parti-coloured history of particular facts and persons.

Abstraction, the introduction of general ideas, seems to close it up

again; to reduce flower and fruit, odour and savour, back again into

the dry and worthless seed. We might as well be colour-blind at once,

and there [156] is not a proper name left! We may contrast generally

the mental world we actually live in, where classification, the

reduction of all things to common types, has come so far, and where the

particular, to a great extent, is known only as the member of a class,

with that other world, on the other side of the generalising movement

to which Plato and his master so largely contributed--a world we might

describe as being under Homeric conditions, such as we picture to

ourselves with regret, for which experience was intuition, and life a

continuous surprise, and every object unique, where all knowledge was

still of the concrete and the particular, face to face delightfully.

To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce,

in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic,

logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to

seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal classes, under

general notions, and with--yes! with written labels fluttering on the

stalks, instead of blossoms--a botanic or "physic" garden, as they used

to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. And yet (it must be

confessed on the other hand) what we actually see, see and hear, is

more interesting than ever; the nineteenth century as compared with the

first, with Plato's days or Homer's; the faces, the persons behind

those masks which yet express so much, the flowers, or whatever it may

happen to be they carry or [157] touch. The concrete, and that even as

a visible thing, has gained immeasurably in richness and compass, in

fineness, and interest towards us, by the process, of which those acts

of generalisation, of reduction to class and generic type, have

certainly been a part. And holding still to the concrete, the

particular, to the visible or sensuous, if you will, last as first,

thinking of that as essentially the one vital and lively thing, really

worth our while in a short life, we may recognise sincerely what

generalisation and abstraction have done or may do, are defensible as

doing, just for that--for the particular gem or flower--what its proper

service is to a mind in search, precisely, of a concrete and intuitive

knowledge such as that.

Think, for a moment, of the difference, as regards mental attitude,

between the naturalist who deals with things through ideas, and the

layman (so to call him) in picking up a shell on the sea-shore; what it

is that the subsumption of the individual into the species, its

subsequent alliance to and co-ordination with other species, really

does for the furnishing of the mind of the former. The layman, though

we need not suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain impressions, is

in fact still but a child; and the shell, its colours and convolution,

no more than a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him. Let him

become a schoolboy about it, so to speak. The toy he puts aside; his

mind is [158] drilled perforce, to learn about it; and thereby is

exercised, he may think, with everything except just the thing itself,

as he cares for it; with other shells, with some general laws of life,

and for a while it might seem that, turning away his eyes from the

"vanity" of the particular, he has been made to sacrifice the concrete,

the real and living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract

product of the mind. But when he comes out of school, and on the sea-

shore again finds a fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it,

he may see what the service of that converse with the general has

really been towards the concrete, towards what he sees--in regard to

the particular thing he actually sees. By its juxtaposition and co-

ordination with what is ever more and more not it, by the contrast of

its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper and

perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been

enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent

world, concentrated upon, or as it were at focus in, it. By a kind of

short-hand now, and as if in a single moment of vision, all that, which

only a long experience, moving patiently from part to part, could

exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of nature, is

legible upon it, as it lies there in one's hand.

So it is with the shell, the gem, with a glance of the eye; so it may

be with the moral act, [159] with a condition of the mind, or a

feeling. You may draw, by use of this coinage (it is Hobbes's figure)

this coinage of representative words and thoughts, at your pleasure,

upon the accumulative capital of the whole experience of humanity.

Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken

moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating the

concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with the joint perspective,

the significance, the expressiveness, of all other things beside. What

broad-cast light he enjoys!--that scholar, confronted with the sea-

shell, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or

another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circumstances

which may never precisely so occur again; in the contemplation of that

single phenomenon, or object, or situation. He not only sees, but

understands (thereby only seeing the more) and will, therefore, also

remember. The significance of the particular object he will retain, by

use of his intellectual apparatus of notion and general law, as, to use

Plato's own figure, fluid matter may be retained in vessels, not indeed

of unbaked clay, but of alabaster or bronze. So much by way of apology

for general ideas--abstruse, or intangible, or dry and seedy and

wooden, as we may sometimes think them.

"Two things," says Aristotle, "might rightly be attributed to Socrates:

inductive reasoning, [160] and universal definitions." Now when

Aristotle says this of Socrates, he is recording the institution of a

method, which might be applied in the way just indicated, to natural

objects, to such a substance as carbon, or to such natural processes as

heat or motion; but which, by Socrates himself, as by Plato after him,

was applied almost exclusively to moral phenomena, to the

generalisation of aesthetic, political, ethical ideas, of the laws of

operation (for the essence of every true conception, or definition, or

idea, is a law of operation) of the feelings and the will. To get a

notion, a definition, or idea, of motion, for example, which shall not

exclude the subtler forms of it, heat for instance--to get a notion of

carbon, which shall include not common charcoal only, but the diamond,

a thing superficially so unlike it, and which shall also exclude,

perhaps, some other substance, superficially almost indistinguishable

from it: such is the business of physical science, in obedience to

rules, outlined by Bacon in the first book of the Novum Organum, for

securing those acts of "inclusion" and "exclusion," inclusiones,

exclusiones, naturae, debitae, as he says, "which the nature of things

requires," if our thoughts are not to misrepresent them.

It was a parallel process, a process of inclusion, that one's resultant

idea should be adequate, of rejection or exclusion, that this idea

should be not redundant, which Socrates applied [161] to practice;

exercising, as we see in the Platonic Dialogues, the two opposed

functions of synagôgê and diairesis,+ for the formation of just ideas of

Temperance, Wisdom, Bravery, Justice itself--a classification of the

phenomena of the entire world of feeling and action. Ideas, if they

fulfil their proper purpose, represent to the mind such phenomena, for

its convenience, but may easily also misrepresent them. In the

transition from the particulars to the general, and again in the

transition from the general idea, the mental word, to the spoken or

written word, to what we call the definition, a door lies open, both

for the adulteration and the diminution of the proper content, of our

conception, our definition. The first growth of the Platonic "ideas,"

as we see it in Socrates, according to the report of Aristotle,

provided against this twofold misrepresentation. Its aim is to secure,

in the terms of our discourse with others and with ourselves, precise

equivalence to what they denote. It was a "mission" to go about Athens

and challenge people to guard the inlets of error, in the passage from

facts to their thoughts about them, in the passage from thoughts to

words. It was an intellectual gymnastic, to test, more exactly than

they were in the habit of doing, the equivalence of words they used so

constantly as Just, Brave, Beautiful, to the thoughts they had; of

those thoughts to the facts of experience, which it was the business of

those [162] thoughts precisely to represent; to clear the mental air;

to arrange the littered work-chamber of the mind.

In many of Plato's Dialogues we see no more than the ordered reflex of

this process, informal as it was in the actual practice of Socrates.

Out of the accidents of a conversation, as from the confused currents

of life and action, the typical forms of the vices and virtues emerge

in definite outline. The first contention of The Republic, for

instance, is to establish in regard to the nature of Justice, terms as

exactly conterminous with thoughts, thoughts as exactly conterminous

with moral facts, as the notion of carbon is for the naturalist, when

it has come to include both charcoal and the diamond, on the basis of

the essential law of their operation as experience reveals it. Show

us, not merely accidental truths about it; but, by the doing of what

(Ti poiousa)+ in the very soul of its possessor, itself by itself,

Justice is a good, and Injustice a bad thing. That illustrates exactly

what is meant by "an idea," the force of "knowledge through ideas," in

the particular instance of Justice. It will include perhaps, on the

one hand, forms of Justice so remote from the Justice of our everyday

experience as to seem inversions of it; it will clearly exclude, on the

other hand, acts and thoughts, not it, yet, phenomenally, so like it,

as to deceive the very gods; and its area will be expanded sufficiently

to include, not the individual [163] only, but the state. And you, the

philosophic student, were to do that, not for one virtue only, but for

Piety, and Beauty, and the State itself, and Knowledge, and Opinion,

and the Good. Nay, you might go on and do the same thing for the

physical, when you came to the end of the moral, world, were life long

enough, and if you had the humour for it:--for Motion, Number, Colour,

Sound. That, then, was the first growth of the Platonic ideas, as

derived immediately from Socrates, whose formal contribution to

philosophy had been "universal definitions," developed "inductively,"

by the twofold method of "inclusion" and "exclusion."

Aristotle adds, however, that Socrates had stopped at the point here

indicated: he had not gone on, like some others, to make those

universal notions or definitions "separable"--separable, that is to

say, from the particular and concrete instances, from which he had

gathered them. Separable: chôristos + (famous word!) that is precisely

what general notions become in what is specially called "the Platonic

Theory of Ideas." The "Ideas" of Plato are, in truth, neither more nor

less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as

they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and

shadows, in the singularly constituted atmosphere, under the strange

laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of

thought. By its peculiarities, subsequent thought--philosophic, [164]

poetic, theological--has been greatly influenced; by the intense

subjectivities, the accidents, so to speak, of Plato's genius, of Plato

himself; the ways constitutional with him, the magic or trick of his

personality, in regarding the intellectual material he was occupied

with--by Plato's psychology. And it is characteristic of him, again,

that those peculiarities of his mental attitude are evidenced

informally; by a tendency, as we said, by the mere general tone in

which he speaks of Beauty, for instance, "as it really is," of all that

"really is," under its various forms; a manner of speaking, not

explicit, but veiled, in various degrees, under figures, as at the end

of the sixth book of The Republic, or under mythological fantasies,

like those of the Phaedrus. He seems to have no inclination for the

responsibilities of definite theory; for a system such as that of the

Neo-Platonists for instance, his own later followers, who, in a kind of

prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism, developed as definite

philosophic dogma, hard enough in more senses than one, what in Plato

is to the last rather poetry than metaphysical reasoning--the

irrepressible because almost unconscious poetry, which never deserts

him, even when treating of what is neither more nor less than a chapter

in the rudiments of logic.

The peculiar development of the Socratic realism by Plato can then only

be understood [165] by a consideration of the peculiarities of Plato's

genius; how it reacted upon those abstractions; what they came to seem

in its peculiar atmosphere. The Platonic doctrine of "Ideas," as was

said, is not so much a doctrine, as a way of speaking or feeling about

certain elements of the mind; and this temper, this peculiar way of

feeling, of speaking, which for most of us will have many difficulties,

is not uniformly noticeable in Plato's Dialogues, but is to be found

more especially in the Phaedo, the Symposium, and in certain books of

The Republic, above all in the Phaedrus. Here is a famous passage from

it:--

There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of

Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and space) there,

at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul.

For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the

highest point, passed out and stood (as you might stand upon

the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky.

And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries

them round; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky.

That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever

yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily. And thus it is:

for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate,

especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking. For the

colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very

truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason

alone as one's guide. Centered about that, the generation, or

seed, genos,+--the people, of true knowledge inhabits this

place. As, then, the intelligence of God, which is nourished

by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akêratô,+ unmixed

with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also,

which is about to receive that which properly belongs to it,

beholding, after long interval, that which is, loves [166] it

(that's the point!) and by the vision of truth is fed; and

fares well; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings

it round again to the same place. And in that journey round

it looks upon justice itself; it looks upon Temperance, upon

Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of becoming

(the law of change, namely, of birth and death and decay)

attaches; nor that which is, as it were, one in one thing,

another in another, of those things which now we speak of as

being; but the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is

(tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan)+ and having beheld,

after the same manner, all other things that really are, and

feasted upon them, being passed back again to the interior of

the sky, the soul returned home. Phaedrus, 247.+

Only, as Plato thinks, that return was, in fact, an exile.

There, in that attractive, but perhaps not wholly acceptable, sort of

discourse, in some other passages like it, Plato has gone beyond his

master Socrates, on two planes or levels, so to speak, of speculative

ascent, which we may distinguish from each other, by way of making a

little clearer what is in itself certainly so difficult.

For Plato, then, not by way of formal theory, we must remember, but by

a turn of thought and speech (while he speaks of them, in fact) the

Socratic "universals," the notions of Justice and the like, are become,

first, things in themselves--the real things; and secondly, persons, to

be known as persons must be; and to be loved, for the perfections, the

visible perfections, we might say--intellectually visible--of [167]

their being. "It looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon Temperance;

upon Knowledge."

Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations,

serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason. With Plato,

they are the creators of our reason--those treasures of experience,

stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance,

or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and

rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking

things. For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the

instruments by which we tabulate and classify and record our

experience--mere "marks" of the real things of experience, of what is

essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by

a certain common name; but are themselves rather the proper objects of

all true knowledge, and a passage from all merely relative experience

to the "absolute." In proportion as they lend themselves to the

individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they

reproduce the eternal reason for him. For Socrates, as Aristotle

understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and

by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond. For

Plato, for Platonists, they are become--Justice and Beauty, and the

perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if

we are to apprehend sensible [168] instances thereof, but which no two

equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree,

every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever--separate

(chôristos)+ separable from, as being essentially independent of, the

individual mind which conceives them; as also of the particular

temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they

remain for ever--those eternal "forms," of Tree, Equality, Justice, and

so forth.

That, then, is the first stage, or plane, of Platonic

transcendentalism. Our common ideas, without which, in fact, we none

of us could think at all, are not the consequence, not the products,

but the cause of our reason in us: we did not make them; but they make

us what we are, as reasonable beings. The eternal Being, of

Parmenides, one and indivisible, has been diffused, divided, resolved,

refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple,

numerous, stellar world, so to call it--abstract light into stars:

Justice, Temperance as it is, Bravery as it is. Permanence,

independency, indefectible identity with itself--all those qualities

which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality--belong to

every one of those ideas severally.

It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a

return of the many gods of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love,

[169] Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the modern

anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank

the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls "animism." Animism,

that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every

object, almost in every circumstance, which impresses one with a sense

of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest illustration is

primitive man adoring, as a divine being endowed with will, the

meteoric stone that came rushing from the sky. That condition

"survives" however, in the negro, who thinks the discharging gun a

living creature; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of

Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits;

in the pantheism of Goethe; and in Schelling, who formulates that

pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory. Such "animistic"

instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato's mental

constitution,--the instinctive effort to find anima, the conditions of

personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it

remembered, of which the various functions, as we reckon them,

imagination, reason, intuition, were still by no means clearly analysed

and differentiated from each other, but participated, all alike and all

together, in every single act of mind.

And here is the second stage of the Platonic idealism, the second grade

of Plato's departure [170] from the simpler realism of his master, as

noted by Aristotle, towards that "intelligible world," opposed by him

so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to

follow him at all, and in which the "ideas" become veritable persons.

To speak, to think, to feel, about abstract ideas as if they were

living persons; that, is the second stage of Plato's speculative

ascent. With the lover, who had graduated, was become a master, in the

school of love, but had turned now to the love of intellectual and

strictly invisible things, it was as if the faculty of physical vision,

of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre of

intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas themselves became animated,

living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes. And it

is, as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary reinforcing cause,

of this mental condition, that the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the

central idea; the permanently typical instance of what an idea means;

of its relation to particular things, and to the action of our thoughts

upon them. It was to the lover dealing with physical beauty, a thing

seen, yet unseen--seen by all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one

and not by another, as if through some capricious, personal self-

discovery, by some law of affinity between the seer and what is seen,

the knowing and the known--that the nature and function of an idea, as

such, would come home most clearly. [170] And then, while visible

beauty is the clearest, the most certain thing, in the world (lovers

will always tell you so) real with the reality of something hot or cold

in one's hand, it also comes nearest of all things, so Plato assures

us, to its eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason, the eternal

idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, antitypes,

out of all proportion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any copy,

left here with us, of Justice, for instance, or Equality, or the

Perfect State. The typical instance of an abstract idea, yet pre-

occupying the mind with all the colour and circumstance of the

relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the

entire theory of ideas, the associations which belong properly to such

relationships only. A certain measure of caprice, of capricious

preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the

commerce of men's minds with what really is, with the world in which

things really are, only so far as they are truly known. "Philosophers

are lovers of truth and of that which is--impassioned lovers": Tou

ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous philosophous.+ They are the

cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state--those

impassioned lovers, erastas,+ of that which really is, and in comparison

wherewith, office, wealth, honour, the love of which has rent Athens,

the world, to pieces, will be of no more than secondary importance.

[172] He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of

another will--this lover of the Ideas--attracted, corrected, guided,

rewarded, satiated, in a long discipline, that "ascent of the soul into

the intelligible world," of which the ways of earthly love (ta erôtika)+

are a true parallel. His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an

enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by

another, by which those "animistic" old Greeks explained natural

madness. That philosophic enthusiasm, that impassioned desire for true

knowledge, is a kind of madness (mania)+ the madness to which some have

declared great wit, all great gifts, to be always allied--the fourth

species of mania, as Plato himself explains in the Phaedrus. To

natural madness, to poetry and the other gifts allied to it, to

prophecy like that of the Delphic pythoness, he has to add, fourthly,

the "enthusiasm of the ideas."

The whole course of our theory hitherto (he there tells us)

relates to that fourth form of madness; wherein, when any one,

seeing the beauty that is here below, and having a reminiscence

of the true, feels, or finds, his wings (pterôtai)+ fluttering

upwards, in his eagerness to soar above, but unable, like a

bird looking towards the sky, heedless of things below, he is

charged with unsoundness of mind. I have told how this is the

most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession) both

to its possessor and to him who participates in it; how it comes

of the noblest causes; and that the lover who has a share of

this madness is called a lover of the beautiful. For, as has

been said, every soul of man, by its very nature, has seen the

things that really are, otherwise it would not have come into

this form of life (into a human body). But to rise from things

here to the recollection of those, is not an easy matter [173]

for every soul; neither for those which then had but a brief

view of things there; nor for such as were unlucky in their

descent hither, so that, through the influence of certain

associations, turning themselves to what is not right, they

have forgotten the sacred forms which then they saw. Few souls,

in truth, remain, to which the gift of reminiscence adequately

pertains. These, when they see some likeness of things there,

are lost in amazement, and belong no longer to themselves;

only, they understand not the true nature of their affection,

because they lack discernment. Now, of Justice, and of

Temperance, and of all those other qualities which are precious

to souls, there is no clear light in their semblances here below;

but, through obscure organs, with difficulty, very few, coming

to their figures, behold the generation (genos,+ the people)

of that which is figured. At that moment it was possible to

behold Beauty in its clearness, when, with the choir of the

blessed following on, ourselves with Zeus, some with one, some

with another, of the gods, they looked upon a blissful vision

and view, and were made partakers in what it is meet and right

to call the most blessed of all mysteries; the which we

celebrated, sound and whole then, and untouched by the evil

things that awaited us in time to come, as being admitted to

mystic sights, whole and sound and at unity with themselves,

in pure light gazing on them, being ourselves pure, and

unimpressed by this we carry about now and call our body,

imprisoned like a fish in its shell.

Let memory be indulged thus far; for whose sake, in regret

for what was then, I have now spoken somewhat at length.

As regards Beauty, as I said, it both shone out, in its true

being, among those other eternal forms; and when we came down

hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our bodily

senses, gleaming with utmost brightness. For sight comes to

us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom is not seen

by it. Marvellous loves, in truth, would that (namely, Wisdom)

have afforded, had it presented any manifest image of itself,

such as that of Beauty, had it reached our bodily vision--that,

and all those other amiable forms. But now Beauty alone has

had this fortune; so that it is the clearest, the most certain,

of all things; and the most lovable. Phaedrus, 249.+

NOTES

152. +Transliteration: noêtos topos. Pater's translation: "intellectual

world." Plato, Republic 508b and 517b.

153. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Pater's translation: "like to

like." Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato's dialogues; see,

for example, Parmenides 132d.

153. +Transliteration: hypo logôn. Pater's translation: "under the

influence of . . . thought and language." Plato, Philebus 15d.

153. +Transliteration: kinei. Pater's translation: "sets in motion."

Plato, Philebus 15e.

154. +Transliteration: logos. Pater's contextual translation:

"definition." Plato, Philebus 15e.

154. +The passage begins at Philebus 15d.

161. +Transliteration: synagôgê . . . diairesis. Liddell and Scott

definition / E-text editor's translation: "." For example, Phaedrus

266b.

162. +Transliteration: Ti poiousa. Pater's translation: "by the doing

of what."

163. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater's translation: "separable."

The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics. For example, see

Metaphysics 1090a.

165. +Transliteration: genos. Pater's translation: "seed, generation."

Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent." Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

165. +Transliteration: akêratô. Pater's translation: "unmixed with

sense." Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

166. +Transliteration: tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan.

Pater's translation: "the knowledge which is in that which in very deed

is." Plato, Phaedrus 247e.

166. See Plato, Phaedrus 247b ff.

168. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater's translation: "separable."

The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics. For example, see

Metaphysics 1090a.

171. +Transliteration: Tou ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous

philosophous. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor's

translation: "Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is

. . ." Plato, Republic 501d.

171. +Transliteration: erastas. See previous note.

172. +Transliteration: ta erôtika. Pater's translation: "the discipline

of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining

to love." For one instance, see Plato, Symposium 177d.

172. +Transliteration: mania. Liddell and Scott definition: "madness,

frenzy." See, for example, Plato, Phaedrus 249d.

172. +Transliteration: pterôtai. E-text editor's translation: "[he] is

furnished with wings." Plato, Phaedrus 249d.

173. +Transliteration: genos. Pater's translation: "seed, generation."

Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent." Plato, Phaedrus 247a.

173. +This passage begins at Phaedrus 249d.

CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

II. DIALECTIC

[174] Three different forms of composition have, under the intellectual

conditions of different ages, prevailed--three distinct literary

methods, in the presentation of philosophic thought; the metrical form

earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative,

sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physeôs,+

"Concerning Nature"; according to the manner of Pythagoras, "his golden

verses," of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn

modelled the finest extant illustration of that manner of writing, of

thinking.

It was succeeded by precisely the opposite manner, when native

intuition had shrunk into dogmatic system, the dry bones of which

rattle in one's ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, as a

formal treatise; the perfected philosophic temper being situated midway

between those opposites, in the third essential form of the literature

of philosophy, namely the essay; that characteristic literary type of

our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of

truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and

issues. Strictly appropriate form of our modern philosophic

literature, the essay came into use at what was really the invention of

the relative, [175] or "modern" spirit, in the Renaissance of the

sixteenth century.*

The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three

methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the

personal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of

literary form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three

essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to

truth. If oracular verse, stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper

vehicle of enthusiastic intuitions; if the treatise, with its ambitious

array of premiss and conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic

all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the

end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne,

representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of

the name as, in essence, of the thing--of the essay, in its seemingly

modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities--is

indicative of Montaigne's peculiar function in regard to his age, as in

truth the commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the

literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a

possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the

elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which,

noting [176] faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way,

must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of

the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? Who

knows?--in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all

true philosophy is but a refined sense of one's ignorance.

And as Aristotle is the inventor of the treatise, so the Platonic

Dialogue, in its conception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially

an essay--an essay, now and then passing into the earlier form of

philosophic poetry, the prose-poem of Heraclitus. There have been

effective writers of dialogue since, Bruno, for instance, Berkeley,

Landor, with whom, however, that literary form has had no strictly

constitutional propriety to the kind of matter it conveyed, as lending

itself (that is to say) structurally to a many-sided but hesitant

consciousness of the truth. Thus, with Berkeley, its purpose is but to

give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions, about which

there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer's own

mind. With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the

dialogue--that peculiar modification of the essay--anything less than

essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the

organism of, the matter which it embodies. For Plato's Dialogues, in

fact, reflect, they refine [177] upon while they fulfil, they idealise,

the actual method, in which, by preference to anything like formal

lecturing (the lecture being, so to speak, a treatise in embryo)

Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others. We see him in those

Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public places, the open

houses, the suburban roads, of Athens, as if seeking truth from others;

seeking it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and by the help

of, his supposed scholars, for whom, indeed, he can but bring their own

native conceptions of truth to the birth; but always faithfully

registering just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never

concluding.

The Platonic Dialogue is the literary transformation, in a word, of

what was the intimately home-grown method of Socrates, not only of

conveying truth to others, but of coming by it for himself. The

essence of that method, of "dialectic" in all its forms, as its very

name denotes, is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth by means of

question and answer, primarily with one's self. Just there, lies the

validity of the method--in a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one's

self; a dialogue concerning those first principles, or "universal

definitions," or notions, those "ideas," which, according to Plato, are

the proper objects of all real knowledge; concerning the adequacy of

one's hold upon them; the relationship to them of other notions; the

plausible conjectures in our own or other minds, [178] which come short

of them; the elimination, by their mere presence in the mind, of

positive ignorance or error. Justice, Beauty, Perfect Polity, and the

like, in outlines of eternal and absolute certainty:--they were to be

apprehended by "dialectic," literally, by a method (methodos)+ a

circuitous journey, presented by the Platonic dialogues in its most

accomplished literary form.

For the certainty, the absolute and eternal character, of such ideas

involved, with much labour and scruple, repeated acts of qualification

and correction; many readjustments to experience; expansion, by larger

lights from it; those exclusions and inclusions, debitae naturae (to

repeat Bacon's phrase) demanded, that is to say, by the veritable

nature of the facts which those ideas are designed to represent.

"Representation" was, in fact, twofold, and comprehended many

successive steps under each of its divisions. The thought was to be

adjusted, first, to the phenomena, to the facts, daintily, to the end

that the said thought might just cover those facts, and no more. To

the thought, secondly, to the conception, thus articulated, it was

necessary to adjust the term; the term, or "definition," by which it

might be conveyed into the mind of another. The dialogue--the freedom,

the variety and elasticity, of dialogue, informal, easy, natural, alone

afforded the room necessary for that long and complex process. If one,

if Socrates, seemed to become [179] the teacher of another, it was but

by thinking aloud for a few moments over his own lesson, or leaning

upon that other as he went along that difficult way which each one must

really prosecute for himself, however full such comradeship might be of

happy occasions for the awakening of the latent knowledge, with which

mind is by nature so richly stored. The Platonic Socrates, in fact,

does not propose to teach anything: is but willing, "along with you,"

and if you concur, "to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be.

Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we might cause

Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as from fire-sticks."*

"And," again, "is not the road to Athens made for conversation?" Yes!

It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that promoted

movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate parturition,

of the mind. A method such as this, a process (processus) a movement

of thought, which is the very converse of mathematical or demonstrative

reasoning, and incapable therefore of conventional or scholastic form,

of "exactness," in fact; which proceeded to truth, not by the analysis

and application of an axiom, but by a gradual suppression of error, of

error in the form of partial or exaggerated truths on the subject-

matter proposed, found its proper [180] literary vehicle in a dialogue,

the more flexible the better. It was like a journey indeed, that essay

towards Justice, for example, or the true Polity; a journey, not along

the simple road to Athens, but to a mountain's top. The proportions,

the outline, the relation of the thing to its neighbours,--how do the

inexperienced in such journeys mistake them, as they climb! What

repeated misconceptions, embodying, one by one, some mere particularity

of view, the perspective of this or that point of view, forthwith

abandoned, some apprehension of mountain form and structure, just a

little short, or, it may be, immeasurably short, of what Plato would

call the "synoptic" view of the mountain as a whole. From this or that

point, some insignificant peak presented itself as the mountain's

veritable crest: inexperience would have sworn to the truth of a wholly

illusive perspective, as the next turn in the journey assured one. It

is only upon the final step, with free view at last on every side,

uniting together and justifying all those various, successive, partial

apprehensions of the difficult way--only on the summit, comes the

intuitive comprehension of what the true form of the mountain really

is; with a mental, or rather an imaginative hold upon which, for the

future, we can find our way securely about it; observing perhaps that,

next to that final intuition, the first view, the first impression, had

been truest about it.

[181] Such, in its full scope, is the journey or pilgrimage, the method

(hodos, kinêsis, methodos)+ of the Socratic, of the perfected Platonic

dialectic, towards the truth, the true knowledge, of Bravery or

Friendship, for instance; of Space or Motion, again, as suggested in

the seventh book of The Republic; of the ideal City, of the immaculate

Beauty. You are going about Justice, for example--that great complex

elevation on the level surface of life, whose top, it may be, reaches

to heaven. You fancy you have grasped its outline. Alla metathômetha.+

You are forced on, perhaps by your companion, a step further, and the

view has already changed. "Persevere," Plato might say, "and a step

may be made, upon which, again, the whole world around may change, the

entire horizon and its relation to the point you stand on--a change

from the half-light of conjecture to the full light of indefectible

certitude." That, of course, can only happen by a summary act of

intuition upon the entire perspective, wherein all those partial

apprehensions, which one by one may have seemed inconsistent with each

other, find their due place, or (to return to the Platonic Dialogue

again, to the actual process of dialectic as there exposed) by that

final impression of a subject, a theorem, in which the mind attains a

hold, as if by a single imaginative act, through all the transitions of

a long conversation, upon all the seemingly opposite contentions of all

the various speakers at once. We see already why [182] Platonic

dialectic--the ladder, as Plato thinks, by which alone we can ascend

into the entirely reasonable world (noêtos topos)+ beginning with the

boyish difficulties and crudities of Meno, for instance, is a process

which may go on, at least with those gifted by nature and opportunity,

as in the Perfect City,--may go on to the close of life, and, as

Pythagorean theory suggests, perhaps does not end even then.

The process of dialectic, as represented in the Platonic Dialogues, may

seem, therefore, inconsistent with itself, if you isolate this or that

particular movement, in what is a very complex process, with many

phases of development. It is certainly difficult, and that not merely

on a first reading, to grasp the unity of the various statements Plato

has made about it. Now it may seem to differ from ordinary reasoning

by a certain plausibility only: it is logic, plus persuasion; helping,

gently enticing, a child out of his natural errors; carefully

explaining difficulties by the way, as one can best do, by question and

answer with him; above all, never falling into the mistake of the

obscurum per obscurius. At another time it may seem to aim at

plausibility of another sort; at mutual complaisance, as Thrasymachus

complains. It would be possible, of course, to present an insincere

dialogue, in which certain of the disputants shall be mere men of

straw. In the Philebus again, dialectic is only the name of the

process (described there [183] as exactly, almost as technically, as

Aristotle, or some modern master of applied logic, might describe it)

of the resolution of a genus into its species. Or it lapses into

"eristic"--into an argument for its own sake; or sinks into logomachy,

a mere dispute about words. Or yet again, an immense, a boundless

promise is made for it, as in the seventh book of The Republic. It is

a life, a systematised, but comprehensive and far-reaching,

intellectual life, in which the reason, nay, the whole nature of man,

realises all it was designed to be, by the beatific "vision of all time

and all existence."

Now all these varying senses of the word "dialectic" fall within

compass, if we remember that for Plato, as for every other really

philosophic thinker, method must be one; that it must cover, or be

understood to cover, the entire process, all the various processes, of

the mind, in pursuit of properly representative ideas, of a reasoned

reflex of experience; and that for Plato, this process is essentially a

long discourse or reasoning of the mind with itself. It is that

dynamic, or essential, dialogue of the mind with itself, which lends,

or imputes, its active principle to the written or spoken dialogue,

which, in return, lends its name to the method it figures--

"dialectic." Well! in that long and complex dialogue of the mind with

itself, many persons, so to speak, will necessarily take part; so many

persons as there are possible contrasts or shades [184] in the

apprehension of some complex subject. The advocatus diaboli will be

heard from time to time. The dog also, or, as the Greeks said, the

wolf, will out with his story against the man; and one of the

interlocutors will always be a child, turning round upon us innocently,

candidly, with our own admissions, or surprising us, perhaps at the

last moment, by what seems his invincible ignorance, when we thought it

rooted out of him. There will be a youth, inexperienced in the

capacities of language, who will compel us to allow much time to the

discussion of words and phrases, though not always unprofitably. And

to the last, let us hope, refreshing with his enthusiasm, the weary or

disheartened enquirer (who is always also of the company) the rightly

sanguine youth, ingenuous and docile, to whom, surely, those friendly

living ideas will be willing, longing, to come, after that Platonic law

of affinity, so effectual in these matters--homoion homoiô.+

With such a nature above all, bringing with it its felicities of

temperament, with the sort of natures (as we may think) which

intellectually can but thrive, a method like that, the dialectic

method, will also have its felicities, its singular good fortunes. A

voyage of discovery, prosecuted almost as if at random, the Socratic or

Platonic "dialogue of enquiry," seems at times to be in charge of a

kind of "Providence." Or again, it will be as when hunters or bird-

catchers "beat [185] the bush," as we say: Plato elaborates that figure

in The Republic. Only, if they be knowing in the process, a fair

percentage of birds will be found and taken. All the chances, or

graces, of such a method, as actually followed in a whole life of free

enquiry, The Republic, for a watchful reader, represents in little.

And when, using still another figure, Socrates says: "I do not yet

know, myself; but, we must just go where the argument carries us, as a

vessel runs before the wind," he breathes the very soul of the

"dialectic method":--hopê an ho logos, hôsper pneuma, pherê, tautê

iteon.+

This dialectic method, this continuous discourse with one's self,

being, for those who prosecute it with thoroughness, co-extensive with

life itself--a part of the continuous company we keep with ourselves

through life--will have its inequalities; its infelicities; above all,

its final insecurity. "We argue rashly and adventurously," writes

Plato, most truly, in the Timaeus--aye, we, the Platonists, as such,

sometimes--"by reason that, like ourselves, our discourses (our

Platonic discourses, as such) have much participation in the temerity

of chance." Of course, as in any other occasional conversation, with

its dependence on the hour and the scene, the persons we are with, the

humours of the moment, there will always be much of accident in this

essentially informal, this un-methodical, [186] method; and, therefore,

opportunities for misuse, sometimes consciously. The candid reader

notes instances of such, even in The Republic, not always on the part

of Thrasymachus:--in this "new game of chess," played, as Plato puts

it, not with counters, but with words, and not necessarily for the

prize of truth, but, it may be, for the mere enjoyment of move and

counter-move, of check-mating.

Since Zeno's paradoxes, in fact, the very air of Athens was become

sophisticated, infected with questionings, often vain enough; and the

Platonic method had been, in its measure, determined by (the unfriendly

might say, was in truth only a deposit from) that infected air.

"Socrates," as he admits, "is easily refuted. Say rather, dear

Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth." That is reassuring,

certainly! For you might think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic

Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or of himself perhaps en

caricature, in the Euthydemus, "Such is his skill in the war of words,

that he can refute any proposition whatever, whether true or false";

that, in short, there is a dangerous facility abroad for proving all

things whatever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his presumable

allotment of truth, has but the general allotment.

The friendly, on the other hand, might rejoin even then, that, as

Lessing suggests, the search for truth is a better thing for us than

its possession.

[187] Plato, who supposes any knowledge worth the name to be "absolute

and eternal"; whose constant contention it is, to separate longo

intervallo, by the longest possible interval, science (epistêmê)+ as the

possession of irresistible truth, from any and every sort of knowledge

which falls short of that; would hardly have accepted the suggestion of

Lessing. Yet, in spite of all that, in spite of the demand he makes

for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real

knowledge, he does think, or inclines his reader to think, that truth,

precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of

persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver; and must be,

in that degree, elusive, provisional, contingent, a matter of various

approximation, and of an "economy," as is said; that it is partly a

subjective attitude of mind:--that philosophic truth consists in the

philosophic temper. "Socrates in Plato," remarks Montaigne acutely,

"disputes, rather to the profit of the disputants, than of the dispute.

He takes hold of the first subject, like one who has a more profitable

end in view than to explain it; namely, to clear the understandings

that he takes upon him to instruct and exercise."

Just there, in fact, is the justification of Plato's peculiar

dialectical method, of its inexactness, its hesitancy, its scruples and

reserve, as if he feared to obtrude knowledge on an unworthy receiver.

The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma [188] --the Ethics of

Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza--begins with a truth, or with a clear

conviction of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does but

propose further to explain and apply.--The treatise, as the instrument

of a dogmatic philosophy begins with an axiom or definition: the essay

or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does

not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue

with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be co-extensive with

life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say,

or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair

chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps: it does but put one into a duly

receptive attitude towards such possible truth, discovery, or

revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet,--shed itself

on the purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system of

propositions, but forms a temper.

What Plato presents to his readers is then, again, a paradox, or a

reconciliation of opposed tendencies: on one side, the largest possible

demand for infallible certainty in knowledge (it was he fixed that

ideal of absolute truth, to which, vainly perhaps, the human mind, as

such, aspires) yet, on the other side, the utmost possible inexactness,

or contingency, in the method by which actually he proposes to attain

it. It has been said that the humour of Socrates, of which the [189]

famous Socratic irony--the pretence to have a bad memory, to dislike or

distrust long and formal discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a

mid-wife in relation to other people's thoughts--was an element, is

more than a mere personal trait; that it was welcome as affording a

means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching. It

belonged, in truth, to the tentative character of dialectic, of

question and answer as the method of discovery, of teaching and

learning, to the position, in a word, of the philosophic essayist.

That it was thus, might be illustrated abundantly from the Platonic

dialogues. The irony, the Socratic humour, so serviceable to a

diffident teacher, are, in fact, Plato's own. Kindyneuei,+ "it may

chance to be," is, we may notice, a favourite catchword of his. The

philosopher of Being, or, of the verb, "To be," is after all afraid of

saying, "It is."

For, again, person dealing with person--with possible caprice,

therefore, at least on one side--or intelligence with intelligence, is

what Plato supposes in the reception of truth:--that, and not an exact

mechanism, a precise machine, operating on, or with, an exactly

ponderable matter. He has fears for truth, however carefully

considered. To the very last falsehood will lurk, if not about truth

itself, about this or that assent to it. The receiver may add the

falsities of his own nature to the truth he receives. The proposition

which embodies it very [190] imperfectly, may not look to him, in those

dark chambers of his individuality, of himself, into which none but he

can ever get, to test the matter, what it looks to me, or to you. We

may not even be thinking of, not looking at, the same thing, when we

talk of Beauty, and the like; objects which, after all, to the

Platonist are matters of theôria,+ of immediate intuition, of immediate

vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal

experience; and which, as matter of such intuition, are incapable of

analysis, and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words. Place,

then, must be left to the last in any legitimate dialectic process for

possible after-thoughts; for the introduction, so to speak, of yet

another interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact, no necessary

conclusion, and leaves off only because time is up, or when, as he

says, one leaves off seeking through weariness (apokamnôn).+ "What

thought can think, another thought can mend." Another turn in the

endless road may change the whole character of the perspective. You

cannot, as the Sophist proposed to do (that was part of his

foolishness) take and put truth into the soul. If you could, it might

be established there, only as an "inward lie," as a mistake. "Must I

take the argument, and literally insert it into your mind?" asks

Thrasymachus. "Heaven forbid": answers Socrates. That is precisely

what he fears most, for himself, and for others; and from first to

last, demands, as the first condition of comradeship [191] in that long

journey in which he conceives teacher and learner to be but fellow-

travellers, pilgrims side by side, sincerity, above all sincerity with

one's self--that, and also freedom in reply. "Answer what you think,

megaloprepôs +--liberally." For it is impossible to make way otherwise,

in a method which consists essentially in the development of knowledge

by question and answer.

Misuse, again, is of course possible in a method which admits of no

objective sanction or standard; the success of which depends on a

loyalty to one's self, in the prosecution of it, of which no one else

can be cognisant. And if we can misuse it with ourselves, how much

more certainly can the expert abuse it with another. At every turn of

the conversation, a door lies open to sophistry. Sophistry, logomachy,

eristic: we may learn what these are, sometimes, from Plato's own

practice. That justice is only useful as applied to things useless;

that the just man is a kind of thief; and the like; is hardly so much

as sophistry. And this too was possible in a method, which, with all

its large outlook, has something of the irregularity, the accident, the

heats and confusion, of life itself--a method of reasoning which can

only in a certain measure be reasoned upon. How different the

exactness which Aristotle supposes, and does his best to secure, in

scientific procedure! For him, dialectic, Platonic dialectic, is, at

best, a part of "eristic" [192] --of the art, or trick, of merely

popular and approximate debate, in matters where science is out of the

question, and rhetoric has its office, not in providing for the

intelligence, but in moulding the sentiments and the will. Conversely

to that absoluteness and necessity which Plato himself supposes in all

real knowledge, as "the spectacle of all time and all existence," it

might seem that the only sort of truth attainable by his actual method,

must be the truth of a particular time and place, for one and not for

another. Dialogos peirastikos,+ "a Dialogue of search":--every one of

Plato's Dialogues is in essence such like that whole, life-long,

endless dialogue which dialectic, in its largest scope, does but

formulate, and in which truly the last, the infallible word, after all,

never gets spoken. Our pilgrimage is meant indeed to end in nothing

less than the vision of what we seek. But can we ever be quite sure

that we are really come to that? By what sign or test?

Now oppose all this, all these peculiarities of the Platonic method, as

we find it, to the exact and formal method of Aristotle, of Aquinas, of

Spinoza, or Hegel; and then suppose one trained exclusively on Plato's

dialogues. Is it the eternal certainty, after all, the immutable and

absolute character of truth, as Plato conceived it, that he would be

likely to apprehend? We have here another of those contrasts of

tendency, constitutional [193] in the genius of Plato, and which may

add to our interest in him. Plato is to be explained, as we say, or

interpreted, partly through his predecessors, and his contemporaries;

but in part also by his followers, by the light his later mental

kinsmen throw back on the conscious or unconscious drift of his

teaching. Now there are in the history of philosophy two opposite

Platonic traditions; two legitimate yet divergent streams of influence

from him. Two very different yet equally representative scholars we

may see in thought emerging from his school. The "theory of the

Ideas," the high ideal, the uncompromising demand for absolute

certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name; the immediate

or intuitive character of the highest acts of knowledge; that all true

theory is indeed "vision":--for the maintenance of that side of the

Platonic position we must look onward to Aristotle, and the Schoolmen

of all ages, to Spinoza, to Hegel; to those mystic aspirants to

"vision" also, the so-called Neo-Platonists of all ages, from Proclus

to Schelling. From the abstract, metaphysical systems of those, the

ecstasy and illuminism of these, we may mount up to the actual words of

Plato in the Symposium, the fifth book of The Republic, the Phaedrus.

But it is in quite different company we must look for the tradition,

the development, of Plato's actual method of learning and teaching.

The Academy of Plato, the established seat of his [194] philosophy,

gave name to a school, of which Lucian, in Greek, and in Latin, Cicero,

are the proper representatives,--Cicero, the perfect embodiment of what

is still sometimes understood to be the "academic spirit," surveying

all sides, arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, balancing,

tendencies, but ending in suspension of judgment. If Platonism from

age to age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of "being," or the

nearest attainable approach to or substitution for that; for others,

Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a

recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it

qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It

is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself

again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne--that typical

sceptic of the age of the Renaissance--conversations with himself, with

the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do

but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the

typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but

commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical

reassertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a

constant accumulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by

empirical science, has had assuredly, to check wholesomely the

pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts.--"Their name is

legion," says a modern writer. Reverent [195] and irreverent,

reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy,

guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable--they have been called,

indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intellectual security, but

cannot make up its mind. Q'ue scais-je? it cries, in the words of

Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom

such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service.

Sanguine about any form of absolute knowledge, of eternal, or

indefectible, or immutable truth, with our modern temperament as it is,

we shall hardly become, even under the direction of Plato, and by the

reading of the Platonic Dialogues. But if we are little likely to

realise in his school, the promise of "ontological" science, of a

"doctrine of Being," or any increase in our consciousness of

metaphysical security, are likely, rather, to acquire there that other

sort of Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking and suspended

judgment, if we are not likely to enjoy the vision of his "eternal and

immutable ideas," Plato may yet promote in us what we call "ideals"--

the aspiration towards a more perfect Justice, a more perfect Beauty,

physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs,

than any one has ever yet seen; that kosmos,+ in which things are only

as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is

constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide. There they

stand, the two [196] great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual

life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world of "ideas," "the great

perhaps," for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room

in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our

affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with

ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real:--and then,

over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in

nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem)

of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our

part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its

diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such

condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development

and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity,

of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a

question--the "philosophic temper," in short, for which a survival of

query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely

ascertained knowledge.

NOTES

174. +Transliteration: Peri Physeôs. Pater's translation: "Concerning

Nature."

174. ±Sic. This form, "situate," may be Pater's archaism for situated,

or it may simply be a typographic error in the original published

edition.

175. *Essay--"A loose sally of the mind," says Johnson's Dictionary.

Bailey's earlier Dictionary gives another suggestive use of the word

"among miners"--A little trench or hole, which they dig to search for

ore.

178. +Transliteration: methodos. Liddell and Scott definition:

"method." Plato, Republic 531c.

179. *Skepsasthai kai syzêtêsai hoti pote estin; kai, tach' an, par'

allêla skopountes, kai tribontes, hôsper ek pureiôn, eklampsai

poiêsaimen tên dikaiosynên. Pater's translation: "to consider, to seek

out, what the thing may be. Perchance using our eyes in common,

rubbing away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as

from fire-sticks." Plato, Meno 80d for the first line and, for the

remainder, Republic 435a.

181. +Transliteration: hodos, kinêsis, methodos. Liddell and Scott

definitions: "path, motion, method."

181. +Transliteration: Alla metathômetha. E-text editor's translation:

"But let us follow out [a different path of thought]," or "let's

examine this from a different perspective." For example, Plato,

Republic 334e.

182. +Transliteration: noêtos topos. Pater's translation: "reasonable

world." Plato, Republic 508b.

184. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Pater's translation: "like to

like." Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato's dialogues; see,

for example, Parmenides 132d.

185. +Transliteration: hopê an ho logos, hôsper pneuma, pherê, tautê

iteon. Pater's translation: "we must just go where the argument

carries us, as a vessel runs before the wind." Plato, Republic 394d.

187. +Transliteration: epistêmê. Liddell and Scott definition "1.

knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific

knowledge."

189. +Transliteration: Kindyneuei. Pater's translation: "it may chance

to be."

190. +Transliteration: theôria. Liddell and Scott definition: "a

looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection." Pater

defines it in Platonic terms as "immediate intuition." For example,

Plato, Republic 486a.

190. +Transliteration: apokamnôn. Liddell and Scott definition:

"grow[ing] quite weary." See, for example, Plato, Protagoras 333b.

191. +Transliteration: megaloprepôs. Liddell and Scott definition / E-

text editor's translation: "liberally." The exchange between

Thrasymachus and Socrates to which Pater refers begins at Republic

345b.

192. +Transliteration: Dialogos peirastikos. Pater's translation: "a

Dialogue of search."

195. +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."

CHAPTER 8: LACEDAEMON

[197] AMONG the Greeks, philosophy has flourished longest, and is still

most abundant, at Crete and Lacedaemon; and there there are more

teachers of philosophy than anywhere else in the world. But the

Lacedaemonians deny this, and pretend to be unlearned people, lest it

should become manifest that it is through philosophy they are supreme

in Greece; that they may be thought to owe their supremacy to their

fighting and manly spirit, for they think that if the means of their

superiority were made known all the Greeks would practise this. But

now, by keeping it a secret, they have succeeded in misleading the

Laconisers in the various cities of Greece; and in imitation of them

these people buffet themselves, and practise gymnastics, and put on

boxing-gloves, and wear short cloaks, as if it were by such things that

the Lacedaemonians excel all other Greeks. But the Lacedaemonians,

when they wish to have intercourse with their philosophers without

reserve, and are weary of going to them by stealth, make legal

proclamation that those Laconisers should depart, with any other aliens

who may be sojourning among them, and thereupon betake themselves to

their sophists unobserved by strangers. And you may know that what I

say is true, and that the Lacedaemonians are better instructed than all

other people in philosophy and the art of discussion in this way. If

any one will converse with even the most insignificant of the

Lacedaemonians, he may find him indeed in the greater part of what he

says seemingly but a poor creature; but then at some chance point in

the conversation he will throw in some brief compact saying, worthy of

remark, like a clever archer, so that his interlocutor shall seem no

better than a child. Of [198] this fact some both of those now living

and of the ancients have been aware, and that to Laconise consists in

the study of philosophy far rather than in the pursuit of gymnastic,

for they saw that to utter such sayings as those was only possible for

a perfectly educated man. Of these was Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of

Mytilene, Bias the Prienean, and our own Solon, Cleobulus the Lindian,

and Myson of Chen, and the seventh among them was called Chilon, a

Lacedaemonian. These were all zealous lovers and disciples of the

culture of the Lacedaemonians. And any one may understand that their

philosophy was something of this kind, short rememberable sayings

uttered by each of them. They met together and offered these in

common, as the first fruits of philosophy, to Apollo in his temple at

Delphi, and they wrote upon the walls these sayings known and read of

all men: Gnôthi sauton and Mêden agan. Protagoras, 343.+

Of course there is something in that of the romance to which the genius

of Plato readily inclined him; something also of the Platonic humour or

irony, which suggests, for example, to Meno, so anxious to be

instructed in the theory of virtue, that the philosophic temper must be

departed from Attica, its natural home, to Thessaly--to the rude

northern capital whence that ingenuous youth was freshly arrived.

Partly romantic, partly humorous, in his Laconism, Plato is however

quite serious in locating a certain spirit at Lacedaemon of which his

own ideal Republic would have been the completer development; while the

picture he draws of it presents many a detail taken straight from

Lacedaemon as it really was, as if by an admiring visitor, who had in

person paced the streets of the Dorian metropolis it was so difficult

for any [199] alien to enter. What was actually known of that stern

place, of the Lacedaemonians at home, at school, had charmed into

fancies about it other philosophic theorists; Xenophon for instance,

who had little or nothing of romantic tendency about them.

And there was another sort of romancing also, quite opposite to this of

Plato, concerning the hard ways among themselves of those

Lacedaemonians who were so invincible in the field. "The

Lacedaemonians," says Pausanias, "appear to have admired least of all

people poetry and the praise which it bestows." "At Lacedaemon there

is more philosophy than anywhere else in the world," is what Plato, or

the Platonic Socrates, had said. Yet, on the contrary, there were some

who alleged that true Lacedaemonians--Lacedaemonian nobles--for their

protection against the "effeminacies" of culture, were denied all

knowledge of reading and writing. But then we know that written books

are properly a mere assistant, sometimes, as Plato himself suggests, a

treacherous assistant, to memory; those conservative Lacedaemonians

being, so to speak, the people of memory pre-eminently, and very

appropriately, for, whether or not they were taught to read and write,

they were acknowledged adepts in the Pythagorean philosophy, a

philosophy which attributes to memory so preponderating a function in

the mental life. "Writing," says K. O. Müller in his laborious, [200]

yet, in spite of its air of coldness, passably romantic work on The

Dorians--an author whose quiet enthusiasm for his subject resulted

indeed in a patient scholarship which well befits it: "Writing," he

says, "was not essential in a nation where laws, hymns, and the praises

of illustrious men--that is, jurisprudence and history--were taught in

their schools of music." Music, which is or ought to be, as we know,

according to those Pythagorean doctrines, itself the essence of all

things, was everywhere in the Perfect City of Plato; and among the

Lacedaemonians also, who may be thought to have come within measurable

distance of that Perfect City, though with no conscious theories about

it, music (mousikê)+ in the larger sense of the word, was everywhere,

not to alleviate only but actually to promote and inform, to be the

very substance of their so strenuous and taxing habit of life. What

was this "music," this service or culture of the Muses, this harmony,

partly moral, doubtless, but also throughout a matter of elaborate

movement of the voice, of musical instruments, of all beside that could

in any way be associated to such things--this music, for the

maintenance, the perpetual sense of which those vigorous souls were

ready to sacrifice so many opportunities, privileges, enjoyments of a

different sort, so much of their ease, of themselves, of one another?

Platonism is a highly conscious reassertion [201] of one of the two

constituent elements in the Hellenic genius, of the spirit of the

highlands namely in which the early Dorian forefathers of the

Lacedaemonians had secreted their peculiar disposition, in contrast

with the mobile, the marine and fluid temper of the littoral Ionian

people. The Republic of Plato is an embodiment of that Platonic

reassertion or preference, of Platonism, as the principle of a society,

ideal enough indeed, yet in various degrees practicable. It is not

understood by Plato to be an erection de novo, and therefore only on

paper. Its foundations might be laid in certain practicable changes to

be enforced in the old schools, in a certain reformed music which must

be taught there, and would float thence into the existing homes of

Greece, under the shadow of its old temples, the sanction of its old

religion, its old memories, the old names of things. Given the central

idea, with its essentially renovating power, the well-worn elements of

society as it is would rebuild themselves, and a new colour come

gradually over all things as the proper expression of a certain new

mind in them.

And in fact such embodiments of the specially Hellenic element in

Hellenism, compacted in the natural course of political development,

there had been, though in a less ideal form, in those many Dorian

constitutions to which Aristotle refers. To Lacedaemon, in The

Republic itself, admiring allusions abound, covert, yet bold [202]

enough, if we remember the existing rivalry between Athens and her

neighbour; and it becomes therefore a help in the study of Plato's

political ideal to approach as near as we may to that earlier actual

embodiment of its principles, which is also very interesting in itself.

The Platonic City of the Perfect would not have been cut clean away

from the old roots of national life: would have had many links with the

beautiful and venerable Greek cities of past and present. The ideal,

poetic or romantic as it might seem, would but have begun where they

had left off, where Lacedaemon, in particular, had left off. Let us

then, by way of realising the better the physiognomy of Plato's

theoretic building, suppose some contemporary student of The Republic,

a pupil, say! in the Athenian Academy, determined to gaze on the actual

face of what has so strong a family likeness to it. Stimulated by his

master's unconcealed Laconism, his approval of contemporary Lacedaemon,

he is at the pains to journey thither, and make personal inspection of

a place, in Plato's general commendations of which he may suspect some

humour or irony, but which has unmistakably lent many a detail to his

ideal Republic, on paper, or in thought.

He would have found it, this youthful Anacharsis, hard to get there,

partly through the nature of the country, in part because the people of

Lacedaemon (it was a point of system with them, as we heard just now)

were suspicious of [203] foreigners. Romantic dealers in political

theory at Athens were safe in saying pretty much what they pleased

about its domestic doings. Still, not so far away, made, not in idea

and by the movements of an abstract argument, the mere strokes of a

philosophic pen, but solidified by constancy of character, fortified

anew on emergency by heroic deeds, for itself, for the whole of Greece,

though with such persistent hold throughout on an idea, or system of

ideas, that it might seem actually to have come ready-made from the

mind of some half-divine Lycurgus, or through him from Apollo himself,

creator of that music of which it was an example:--there, in the hidden

valley of the Eurotas, it was to be found, as a visible centre of

actual human life, the place which was alleged to have come, harsh

paradox as it might sound to Athenian ears, within measurable distance

of civic perfection, of the political and social ideal.

Our youthful academic adventurer then, making his way along those

difficult roads, between the ridges of the Eastern Acadian Mountains,

and emerging at last into "hollow" Laconia, would have found himself in

a country carefully made the most of by the labour of serfs; a land of

slavery, far more relentlessly organised according to law than anywhere

else in Greece, where, in truth, for the most part slavery was a kind

of accident. But whatever rigours these slaves of Laconia were

otherwise subjected to, they [204] enjoyed certainly that kind of well-

being which does come of organisation, from the order and regularity of

system, living under central military authority, and bound themselves

to military service; to furnish (as under later feudal institutions) so

many efficient men-at-arms on demand, and maintain themselves in

readiness for war as they laboured in those distantly-scattered farms,

seldom visited by their true masters from Lacedaemon, whither year by

year they sent in kind their heavy tribute of oil, barley and wine.

The very genius of conservatism here enthroned, secured, we may be

sure, to this old-fashioned country life something of the personal

dignity, of the enjoyments also, natural to it; somewhat livelier

religious feasts, for example, than their lords allowed themselves.

Stray echoes of their boisterous plebeian mirth on such occasions have

reached us in Greek literature.

But if the traveller had penetrated a little more closely he would have

been told certain startling stories, with at least a basis of truth in

them, even as regards the age of Plato. These slaves were Greeks: no

rude Scythians, nor crouching, decrepit Asiatics, like ordinary

prisoners of war, the sort of slaves you could buy, but genuine Greeks,

speaking their native tongue, if with less of muscular tension and

energy, yet probably with pleasanter voice and accent than their

essentially highland masters. Physically they throve, under something

of the same discipline which had made [205] those masters the masters

also of all Greece. They saw them now and then--their younger lords,

brought, under strict tutelage, on those long hunting expeditions, one

of their so rare enjoyments, prescribed for them, as was believed, by

the founder of their polity. But sometimes (here was the report which

made one shudder even in broad daylight, in those seemingly reposeful

places) sometimes those young nobles of Lacedaemon reached them on a

different kind of pursuit: came by night, secretly, though by no means

contrarily to the laws of a state crafty as it was determined, to

murder them at home, or a certain moiety of them; one here or there

perhaps who, with good Achaean blood in his veins, and under a

wholesome mode of life, was grown too tall, or too handsome, or too

fruitful a father, to feel quite like a slave. Under a sort of slavery

that makes him strong and beautiful, where personal beauty was so

greatly prized, his masters are in fact jealous of him.

But masters thus hard to others, these Lacedaemonians, as we know, were

the reverse of indulgent to themselves. While, as a matter of theory,

power and privilege belonged exclusively to the old, to the seniors

(hoi gerontes, hê gerousia)+ ruling by a council wherein no question

might be discussed, one might only deliver one's Aye! or No! Lacedaemon

was in truth before all things an organised place of discipline, an

organised [206] opportunity also, for youth, for the sort of youth that

knew how to command by serving--a constant exhibition of youthful

courage, youthful self-respect, yet above all of true youthful

docility; youth thus committing itself absolutely, soul and body, to a

corporate sentiment in its very sports. There was a third sort of

regulation visits the lads of Lacedaemon were driven to pay to those

country places, the vales, the uplands, when, to brace youthful

stomachs and develope resource, they came at stated intervals as a kind

of mendicants or thieves, feet and head uncovered through frost and

heat, to steal their sustenance, under penalties if detected--"a

survival," as anthropologists would doubtless prove, pointing out

collateral illustrations of the same, from a world of purely animal

courage and keenness. Whips and rods used in a kind of monitorial

system by themselves had a great part in the education of these young

aristocrats, and, as pain surely must do, pain not of bodily disease or

wretched accidents, but as it were by dignified rules of art, seem to

have refined them, to have made them observant of the minutest

direction in those musical exercises, wherein eye and ear and voice and

foot all alike combined. There could be nothing paraleipomenon,+ as

Plato says, no "oversights," here. No! every one, at every moment,

quite at his best; and, observe especially, with no superfluities;

seeing that when we have to do with music of any kind, with matters of

art, in stone, in words, [207] in the actions of life, all

superfluities are in very truth "superfluities of naughtiness," such as

annihilate music.

The country through which our young traveller from his laxer school of

Athens seeks his way to Lacedaemon, this land of a noble slavery, so

peacefully occupied but for those irregular nocturnal terrors, was

perhaps the loveliest in Greece, with that peculiarly blent loveliness,

in which, as at Florence, the expression of a luxurious lowland is duly

checked by the severity of its mountain barriers. It was a type of the

Dorian purpose in life--sternness, like sea-water infused into wine,

overtaking a matter naturally rich, at the moment when fulness may lose

its savour and expression. Amid the corn and oleanders--corn "so tall,

close, and luxuriant," as the modern traveller there still finds--it

was visible at last, Lacedaemon, koilê Spartê,+ "hollow Sparta," under

the sheltering walls of Taygetus, the broken and rugged forms of which

were attributed to earthquake, but without proper walls of its own. In

that natural fastness, or trap, or falcon's nest, it had no need of

them, the falcon of the land, with the hamlets (polichnia)+ a hundred

and more, dispersed over it, in jealously enforced seclusion from one

another.

From the first he notes "the antiquated appearance" of Lacedaemon, by

no means a "growing" place, always rebuilding, remodelling itself,

after the newest fashion, with shapeless suburbs [208] stretching

farther and farther on every side of it, grown too large perhaps, as

Plato threatens, to be a body, a corporate unity, at all: not that, but

still, and to the last, itself only a great village, a solemn, ancient,

mountain village. Even here of course there had been movement, some

sort of progress, if so it is to be called, linking limb to limb; but

long ago. Originally a union, after the manner of early Rome, of

perhaps three or four neighbouring villages which had never lost their

physiognomy, like Rome it occupied a group of irregular heights, the

outermost roots of Taygetus, on the bank of a river or mountain

torrent, impetuous enough in winter, a series of wide shallows and deep

pools in the blazing summer. It was every day however, all the year

round, that Lacedaemonian youth plunged itself in the Eurotas. Hence,

from this circumstance of the union there of originally disparate

parts, the picturesque and expressive irregularity, had they had time

to think it such, of the "city" properly so termed, the one open place

or street, High Street, or Corso--Aphetais by name, lined, irregularly

again, with various religious and other monuments. It radiated on all

sides into a mazy coil, an ambush, of narrow crooked lanes, up and

down, in which attack and defence would necessarily be a matter of

hand-to-hand fighting. In the outskirts lay the citizens' houses,

roomier far than those of Athens, with spacious, walled courts, almost

in the country. Here, in contrast [209] to the homes of Athens, the

legitimate wife had a real dignity, the unmarried woman a singular

freedom. There were no door-knockers: you shouted at the outer gate to

be let in. Between the high walls lanes passed into country roads,

sacred ways to ancient sacro-sanct localities, Therapnae, Amyclae, on

this side or that, under the shade of mighty plane-trees.

Plato, as you may remember, gives a hint that, like all other visible

things, the very trees--how they grow--exercise an aesthetic influence

on character. The diligent legislator therefore would have his

preferences, even in this matter of the trees under which the citizens

of the Perfect City might sit down to rest. What trees? you wonder.

The olive? the laurel, as if wrought in grandiose metal? the cypress?

that came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete: the oak? we think it

very expressive of strenuous national character. Well! certainly the

plane-tree for one, characteristic tree of Lacedaemon then and now; a

very tranquil and tranquillising object, spreading its level or gravely

curved masses on the air as regally as the tree of Lebanon itself. A

vast grove of such was the distinguishing mark of Lacedaemon in any

distant view of it; that, and, as at Athens, a colossal image, older

than the days of Phidias--the Demos of Lacedaemon, it would seem,

towering visibly above the people it protected. Below those mighty

trees, on an island in their national river, [210] were the "playing-

fields," where Lacedaemonian youth after sacrifice in the Ephebeum

delighted others rather than itself (no "shirking" was allowed) with a

sort of football, under rigorous self-imposed rules--tearing, biting--a

sport, rougher even than our own, et même très dangereux, as our Attic

neighbours, the French, say of the English game.

They were orderly enough perforce, the boys, the young men, within the

city--seen, but not heard, except under regulations, when they made the

best music in the world. Our visitor from Athens when he saw those

youthful soldiers, or military students, as Xenophon in his pretty

treatise on the polity of Lacedaemon describes, walking with downcast

eyes, their hands meekly hidden in their cloaks, might have thought

them young monks, had he known of such.

A little mountain town, however ambitious, however successful in its

ambition, would hardly be expected to compete with Athens, or Corinth,

itself a Dorian state, in art-production, yet had not only its

characteristic preferences in this matter, in plastic and literary art,

but had also many venerable and beautiful buildings to show. The

Athenian visitor, who is standing now in the central space of

Lacedaemon, notes here, as being a trait also of the "Perfect City" of

academic theory, that precisely because these people find themselves

very susceptible to the [211] influences of form and colour and sound,

to external aesthetic influence, but have withal a special purpose, a

certain strongly conceived disciplinary or ethic ideal, that therefore

a peculiar humour prevails among them, a self-denying humour, in regard

to these things. Those ancient Pelopid princes, from whom the

hereditary kings of historic Lacedaemon, come back from exile into

their old home, claim to be descended, had had their palaces, with a

certain Homeric, Asiatic splendour, of wrought metal and the like;

considerable relics of which still remained, but as public or sacred

property now. At the time when Plato's scholar stands before them, the

houses of these later historic kings--two kings, as you remember,

always reigning together, in some not quite clearly evolved

differentiation of the temporal and spiritual functions--were plain

enough; the royal doors, when beggar or courtier approached them, no

daintier than Lycurgus had prescribed for all true Lacedaemonian

citizens; rude, strange things to look at, fashioned only, like the

ceilings within, with axe and saw, of old mountain oak or pine from

those great Taygetan forests, whence came also the abundant iron, which

this stern people of iron and steel had super-induced on that earlier

dreamy age of silver and gold--steel, however, admirably tempered and

wrought in its application to military use, and much sought after

throughout Greece.

Layer upon layer, the relics of those earlier [212] generations, a

whole succession of remarkable races, lay beneath the strenuous

footsteps of the present occupants, as there was old poetic legend in

the depths of their seemingly so practical or prosaic souls. Nor

beneath their feet only: the relics of their worship, their

sanctuaries, their tombs, their very houses, were part of the scenery

of actual life. Our young Platonic visitor from Athens, climbing

through those narrow winding lanes, and standing at length on the open

platform of the Aphetais, finds himself surrounded by treasures, modest

treasures of ancient architecture, dotted irregularly here and there

about him, as if with conscious design upon picturesque effect, such

irregularities sometimes carrying in them the secret of expression, an

accent. Old Alcman for one had been alive to the poetic opportunities

of the place; boasts that he belongs to Lacedaemon, "abounding in

sacred tripods"; that it was here the Heliconian Muses had revealed

themselves to him. If the private abodes even of royalty were rude it

was only that the splendour of places dedicated to religion and the

state might the more abound. Most splendid of them all, the Stoa

Poekile, a cloister or portico with painted walls, to which the spoils

of the Persian war had been devoted, ranged its pillars of white marble

on one side of the central space: on the other, connecting those high

memories with the task of the living, lay the Choros, where, at the

Gymnopaedia, the Spartan youth danced in honour of Apollo.

[213] Scattered up and down among the monuments of victory in battle

were the heroa, tombs or chapels of the heroes who had purchased it

with their blood--Pausanias, Leonidas, brought home from Thermopylae

forty years after his death. "A pillar too," says Pausanias, "is

erected here, on which the paternal names are inscribed of those who at

Thermopylae sustained the attack of the Medes." Here in truth all

deities put on a martial habit--Aphrodite, the Muses, Eros himself,

Athene Chalcioecus, Athene of the Brazen House, an antique temple

towering above the rest, built from the spoils of some victory long

since forgotten. The name of the artist who made the image of the

tutelary goddess was remembered in the annals of early Greek art,

Gitiades, a native of Lacedaemon. He had composed a hymn also in her

praise. Could we have seen the place he had restored rather than

constructed, with its covering of mythological reliefs in brass or

bronze, perhaps Homer's descriptions of a seemingly impossible sort of

metallic architecture would have been less taxing to his reader's

imagination. Those who in other places had lost their taste amid the

facile splendours of a later day, might here go to school again.

Throughout Greece, in fact, it was the Doric style which came to

prevail as the religious or hieratic manner, never to be surpassed for

that purpose, as the Gothic style seems likely to do with us. Though

it is not exclusively the invention [214] of Dorian men, yet, says

Müller, "the Dorian character created the Doric architecture," and he

notes in it, especially, the severity of the perfectly straight,

smartly tapering line of its column; the bold projection of the

capital; the alternation of long unornamented plain surfaces with

narrower bands of decorated work; the profound shadows; the expression

of security, of harmony, infused throughout; the magnificent pediment

crowning the whole, like the cornice of mountain wall beyond, around,

and above it. Standing there in the Aphetais, amid these venerable

works of art, the visitor could not forget the natural architecture

about him. As the Dorian genius had differentiated itself from the

common Hellenic type in the heart of the mountains of Epirus, so here

at last, in its final and most characteristic home, it was still

surrounded by them:--ophrya te kai koilainetai.+

We know, some of us, what such mountain neighbourhood means. The

wholesome vigour, the clearness and purity they maintain in matters

such as air, light, water; how their presence multiplies the contrasts,

the element of light and shadow, in things; the untouched perfection of

the minuter ornament, flower or crystal, they permit one sparingly;

their reproachful aloofness, though so close to us, keeping sensitive

minds at least in a sort of moral alliance with their remoter

solitudes. "The whole life of the Lacedaemonian community," says

Müller, [215] "had a secluded, impenetrable, and secret character."

You couldn't really know it unless you were of it.

A system which conceived the whole of life as matter of attention,

patience, a fidelity to detail, like that of good soldiers and

musicians, could not but tell also on the merest handicrafts,

constituting them in the fullest sense of a craft. If the money of

Sparta was, or had recently been, of cumbrous iron, that was because

its trade had a sufficient variety of stock to be mainly by barter, and

we may suppose the market (into which, like our own academic youth at

Oxford, young Spartans were forbidden to go) full enough of business--

many a busy workshop in those winding lanes. The lower arts certainly

no true Spartan might practise; but even Helots, artisan Helots, would

have more than was usual elsewhere of that sharpened intelligence and

the disciplined hand in such labour which really dignify those who

follow it. In Athens itself certain Lacedaemonian commodities were

much in demand, things of military service or for every-day use, turned

out with flawless adaptation to their purpose.

The Helots, then, to whom this business exclusively belonged, a race of

slaves, distinguishable however from the slaves or serfs who tilled the

land, handing on their mastery in those matters in a kind of guild,

father to son, through old-established families of flute- [216]

players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary

lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lisés (to borrow an expression from French

feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper

functions of gentlemen--scholê,+ leisure, in the two senses of the word,

which in truth involve one another--their whole time free, to be told

out in austere schools. Long easeful nights, with more than enough to

eat and drink, the "illiberal" pleasures of appetite, as Aristotle and

Plato agree in thinking them, are of course the appropriate reward or

remedy of those who work painfully with their hands, and seem to have

been freely conceded to those Helots, who by concession of the State,

from first to last their legal owner, were in domestic service, and

sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded

to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon--youth of gold, or gilded steel.

The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with

the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other

stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of

submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant

qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor

must have become, in his measure, actually a sharer in them. Just

here, for once, we see that slavish êthos,+ the servile range of

sentiment, which ought to accompany the condition of slavery, if it be

indeed, as Aristotle supposes, one of the [217] natural relationships

between man and man, idealised, or aesthetically right, pleasant and

proper; the aretê,+ or "best possible condition," of the young servitor

as such, including a sort of bodily worship, and a willingness to share

the keen discipline which had developed the so attractive gallantry of

his youthful lords.

A great wave, successive waves, of invasion, sufficiently remote to

have lost already all historic truth of detail, had left them--these

Helots, and the Perioeci, in the country round about--thus to serve

among their own kinsmen, though so close to them in lineage, so much on

a level with their masters in essential physical qualities that to the

last they could never be entirely subdued in spirit. Patient modern

research, following the track of a deep-rooted national tradition

veiled in the mythological figments which centre in what is called "The

Return of the Heraclidae," reveals those northern immigrants or

invaders, at various points on their way, dominant all along it, from a

certain deep vale in the heart of the mountains of Epirus southwards,

gradually through zone after zone of more temperate lowland, to reach

their perfection, highlanders from first to last, in this mountain

"hollow" of Lacedaemon. They claim supremacy, not as Dorian invaders,

but as kinsmen of the old Achaean princes of the land; yet it was to

the fact of conquest, to the necessity of [218] maintaining a position

so strained, like that, as Aristotle expressly pointed out, of a

beleaguered encampment in an enemy's territory, that the singular

institutions of Lacedaemon, the half-military, half-monastic spirit,

which prevailed in this so gravely beautiful place, had been originally

due. But observe!--Its moral and political system, in which that

slavery was so significant a factor, its discipline, its aesthetic and

other scruples, its peculiar moral êthos,+ having long before our

Platonic student comes thither attained its original and proper ends,

survived,--there is the point! survived as an end in itself, as a

matter of sentiment, of public and perhaps still more of personal

pride, though of the finer, the very finest sort, in one word as an

ideal. Pericles, as you remember, in his famous vindication of the

Athenian system, makes his hearers understand that the ends of the

Lacedaemonian people might have been attained with less self-sacrifice

than theirs. But still, there it remained, hê diaita Dôrikê+--the

genuine Laconism of the Lacedaemonians themselves, their traditional

conception of life, with its earnestness, its precision and strength,

its loyalty to its own type, its impassioned completeness; a spectacle,

aesthetically, at least, very interesting, like some perfect instrument

shaping to what they visibly were, the most beautiful of all people, in

Greece, in the world.