Socrates became the father of many philosophic schools. His pupils
naturally differed from one another in the emphasis which they gave
to this or that side of their master’s teaching and in the ways in
which they combined his doctrines with principles laid down by earlier
thinkers, but all agreed in this, that they directed their attention
to man as the center of thought and inquiry. From this time ethics and
religion became the dominant themes of philosophy. Our subject bids us
confine our attention to the greatest of these pupils, Plato.
Plato was born at Athens in the year 428/7 B.C. of an ancient
family, which was related to the law-giver Solon. After being educated
in the best Athenian fashion, he attached himself to Socrates in his
twentieth year, when the latter was already about sixty years old,
and he continued to associate with his master for ten years until the
latter’s condemnation and death. Probably he was not one of the inner
circle, but he tells us that he was present at his master’s trial and
with other followers of Socrates was prepared to go bondsman, if a fine
were inflicted. Sickness prevented him from sharing in the discussion
of the last day, which is related to us in the Phaedo. After Socrates’
death, Plato was absent from Athens for about twelve years, residing
first in the neighboring city of Megara, where his association with
Euclides, one of Socrates’ oldest pupils, must have contributed to
the development of his own philosophy. Later in southern Italy, if we
accept the traditional account of his travels, he had an opportunity
to study more closely in their home the Orphic-Pythagorean systems and
doctrines, many of which no doubt he had often heard Socrates discuss.
At Syracuse in Sicily he won over Dion, the young brother-in-law of
the tyrant Dionysius. The latter, however, found his moral teachings
offensive, seized him, and had him offered for sale as a prisoner of
war in the slave market at Aegina. But a friend, Anniceris, bought
him and set him free. When Plato’s other friends wished to repay to
Anniceris the money he had spent, the latter refused, and the sum was
used to purchase a grove sacred to the hero Academus, in which Plato
opened a philosophic school. There, save for the interruptions caused
by two journeys to Sicily, he continued to teach for about forty years,
dying in 347 B.C. at the age of eighty.
To this school came pupils from almost every part of the Greek
world. The chief subjects studied were the various branches of
mathematics—including of course astronomy and harmonics,—and
dialectics, by which is meant “the art of question and answer, the art
of giving a rational account of things and of receiving such an account
from others.” The distinctive methods employed were those of analysis
and division which Plato seems to have developed so far that the
invention of the former was actually, but erroneously, attributed to
him. The purpose of analysis was to secure an explanation or proof of a
proposition; that of division was to arrive at a proper classification
or division of the object under consideration. Plato’s instruction was
evidently given in considerable part by lectures, of which his hearers
took notes; there was also scientific research on the part of the
pupils who worked out the problems or difficulties set them by their
master. Nor were these researches wholly mathematical and astronomical,
for there is good reason to believe that studies in natural history
were also pursued. Indeed, Aristotle, for twenty years a member of the
Academy, must have had opportunities here to carry on those researches
which interested him most in the early part of his life. But whatever
the studies, the purpose was to lead the pupils to the discovery and
contemplation of Reality, of Being, of the fundamental and permanent as
against the individual and transitory phenomenon. Of Plato’s lectures
we know virtually nothing; his Dialogues represent those parts of his
doctrine which he wished to give to the outside world; it is probable
that they in no sense adequately reproduce his teachings to his
disciples.
How much of his philosophy Plato received from his master Socrates,
how much he developed for himself cannot now be determined. Socrates
left no writings; we know him only from the writings of others, and
above all from the dialogues of Plato. There he is the chief spokesman,
who leads his associates along various paths toward truth; and
certainly no pupil ever built a nobler monument to his teacher than
Plato did. Among modern scholars there are many views as to the extent
of Plato’s debt to his master: one extreme wing, which has many
adherents, would limit the Socratic elements in the Platonic doctrine
to the ethical interest, the search for universals, and the dialectic
method; the other wing, of which the eminent English Platonist Burnet
is the chief representative, would attribute to Socrates practically
everything found in the dialogues which Plato wrote before he began
his teaching in the Academy. Indeed Burnet holds that Plato’s chief
purpose in the earlier dialogues was to set forth the life and teaching
of Socrates; he therefore claims that the “doctrine of ideas,” with all
its consequences, and much besides, are purely Socratic, taken over by
Plato in developed form. Few of us can accept either of these extreme
views; it seems more probable that the truth lies between, that Plato
learned much relating to “ideas” and their Pythagorean origins from
his teacher, just as he derived from him his ethical interest and his
method. But to reduce the brilliant pupil to a mere reporter of his
master’s views with little philosophy of his own until he was past
forty, is quite incredible, and such a procedure has no proper warrant.
When speaking of Socrates in my previous lecture I avoided this
question, for a discussion of it there would have been unprofitable and
confusing; and even now for convenience I propose to treat that part of
Plato’s philosophy which immediately concerns us as if it were wholly
his own, begging you, however, to keep in mind always that undoubtedly
much in germ or developed form was derived directly from Plato’s
chief teacher. Furthermore I must ask you to remember that Plato had
been given to poetry when a youth, and that although he renounced the
practice of the art, he remained a poet in spirit to the end of his
life; all his thoughts were touched with poetry, enlivened with humour,
and fired with religious zeal. He was a consummate literary artist,
and a man of many sides. It was natural therefore that he should
nowhere set forth a crystallized system of philosophy such as a less
imaginative and duller person might have done; he was apparently a man
who grew through all his eighty years. The result is that in spite of
the fact that we may properly speak of “the unity of Plato’s thought,”
we find in his works variety, variation, and even contradiction. The
requirements of our present situation, however, force us to consider
our themes categorically, though that procedure is somewhat unfair to
Plato.
Let us then first examine the central thought of Plato’s
philosophy—the “doctrine of ideas.” Developing the doctrines of
earlier philosophers, especially those of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras,
Plato held that the world is dual. In it is the phenomenal world
visible to us, which includes all natural objects and those made by
man, a transient and unreal world which we know only through our
senses. But beside it, or rather behind it, is another world invisible
but permanent and real, which can be grasped only by the reason. This
is the world of ideas. Yet the two worlds are not separate, for the
world of the senses owes its existence wholly to its dependence on
the world of ideas. To understand Plato’s view we must consider
in an elementary way what he meant by “ideas.” The words which he
uses (εἶδος, ἰδέα) signify “form,” and in logic are used in the
sense of “class,” “kind,” “species,” “the general principle for the
classification of objects.” The translation “idea” is traditional, and
there is no adequate reason for preferring “form” or any other English
equivalent. Now Plato’s statement that the world of phenomena depends
on the invisible world of ideas seems at first sight paradoxical, for
by it he means that the individual tree, book, desk, chair, good man,
or whatever you please, is not the real being at all, but that the
ideas of tree, book, desk, chair, and goodness alone possess reality.
It may be made plain by an illustration which shall be Plato’s own. At
the beginning of the tenth book of the Republic Socrates and Glaucon
are conversing together. The master wins Glaucon’s assent first to the
proposition that although there are many beds and tables in the world,
there are only two ideas, one of a bed, the other of a table. He then
goes on to show that the workman makes a bed or table by shaping his
material according to the idea of a bed or a table, but that he does
not create the ideas themselves. That is done by God who is the real
maker of the real bed, that is, of the idea of a bed. The carpenter
makes only the particular bed which owes its temporary existence to the
eternal idea—the real bed—which is in Nature, in the mind of God. Or
if Plato should appear before us tonight, he might say, “Suppose
we take a dozen books of different sizes and different shapes and
appearance, how do we recognize that these diverse objects are all
books?” Then when we hesitated to give an answer, as we probably
should, he would reply, “It is because each one of these individual
books partakes of the idea of book. The idea is present in the
individual example and thereby gives the individual its existence;
the individual depends therefore on the idea, not the idea on the
individual. If this dozen, or indeed if all the books in the entire
world were to be destroyed, the idea of book would still remain,
and new books could be made by causing the materials, out of which
books are constructed, to partake of the idea of book. That is, all
individual books are transitory, impermanent, unreal; the idea of
book is permanent, eternal, it alone has reality; and all individual
things, therefore, exist, so far as they have any real existence, only
by partaking of the ideas. So all things come into being and owe their
existence to sharing in the eternal ideas.”
We should be unjust to Plato if we thought that he regarded this
doctrine as a perfect explanation of the relation between the visible
and invisible worlds. Far from holding such a view he himself evidently
held it to be a “guess at truth,” which served to show in its way that
there is a permanent reality behind the phenomena of the visible world
and a truth which is beyond sense. Indeed Plato is very conscious of
troublesome questions which arise in connection with the doctrine, and
in three dialogues—his Philebus, Parmenides, and Sophist—he endeavors
to meet some of these questions, and there he offers admirable
criticism of his own views.
With reference to the source of the doctrine, as I have said above,
we cannot tell how much Plato derived from Socrates or how much he
developed for himself. Socrates was evidently always searching for
universals, trying to determine what goodness is in itself in contrast
to the goodness embodied in a good man, what are virtue, courage, and
such qualities. The teacher or the pupil may have extended the ideas,
the universals, to include all things, even the humble articles of
furniture which are the examples in the Republic. But in any case by
this doctrine of “ideas,” “forms,” Plato secured a basis for reality,
a means of attaining absolute knowledge in contrast to that relative
knowledge, which according to the Sophists was the utmost which man
could attain. Plato would have quite agreed with Protagoras that if
the senses were our only avenues to knowledge, then indeed man would
be the measure of all things and his knowledge would be limited to the
transient phenomenal world; that is, he could have no knowledge of
reality; but by apprehending through our reason the ideas—that is, the
realities—on which the phenomenal world depends, we can gain genuine
knowledge and free ourselves from subjection to mere opinion.
Plato also teaches that there are various grades of ideas, some
being subordinate to others; the highest of all is that of the Good,
identified by him with the Beautiful. This supreme idea is at once the
cause of all existence and knowledge, and comprehends within itself all
other ideas; as the sun in the visible world, so in the world of true
knowledge the Good “is the universal author of all things right and
beautiful, itself the source of truth and intelligence.” It is the
Absolute, the universal Reason, God.[190]
We have seen that Plato sets the world of ideas apprehended by reason
over against the world of phenomena, known to us through our senses.
The latter world is material, the former immaterial. This concept of
the immateriality of ideas was something new in philosophy. Anaxagoras
had thought his formative principle (Νοῦς), as his predecessors had
thought theirs, to be as material as the “seeds” out of which all
things were made; but Plato developed an immaterial, an ideal world,
wherein are found all cause and all reality.
Now the Platonic ideas are apprehended by the human intellect. What
are the consequences of this fact? It must follow that man’s reason
has a nature similar to that of the ideas; like them it must belong to
the world which is above the senses; and with them it must partake of
the Absolute. But Plato shows that the ideas are eternal and immortal,
and draws therefrom the logical conclusion that man’s intellect, his
reasoning soul, likewise knows no creation and is free from death.
However he is not content to let the matter rest on this argument
alone, but he supports the doctrine of immortality by many proofs, as
in the Phaedrus where Socrates explains: “The soul through all her
being is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal; but
that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move,
ceases also to live. Only the self-moving, as it never leaves itself,
never ceases to move and is the fountain and beginning of motion to
all that moves besides.”[191] In the Phaedo[192] he represents Socrates
as offering a number of different arguments to his questioning friends.
One of these is that by which he first proves that souls exist before
they are domiciled in our bodies, for recollection implies a previous
existence, and since men can recall and recognize things which they
have never seen or been taught in their present existence, it follows
that they have been born with this knowledge, so that what we call
learning is after all only a recollection of ideas gained in a previous
existence. Socrates concludes his argument with the question: “Then
may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there
is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all
things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our
former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them,
finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession—then
our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be
no force in the argument?” To this his hearers give ready assent. In
the Meno this same argument is very adroitly drawn from the realm of
mathematics.[193] An untutored slave is made to “recollect” that the
square of the hypothenuse of an isosceles right-angled triangle is
equal to twice the square of one of its sides. This is the doctrine of
recollection to which Wordsworth has given beautiful expression in his
familiar lines:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
But as Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo point out, this doctrine only
shows that the soul existed before the body; it does not prove that
the soul is immortal. Socrates therefore goes on to prove this further
point, largely by showing the simple and unchanging nature of the
soul which is like that of the ideas, and he therefore concludes that
since it cannot admit of change, it must be free from death. Again
he argues that since the soul can rule and use the body as it will,
it must be anterior to the body and hence have an eternal and never
ending existence.[194] The final and apparently most convincing proof to
Plato’s mind, in spite of its dialectic character, is that the notion
of life cannot be separated from the soul, for the soul is that which
gives life; therefore since a dead soul is an impossibility, we must
agree that the soul is immortal.[195] To follow out in detail the other
arguments would occupy too much time now, interesting as it might
prove. Indeed if we were to rehearse all of Plato’s proofs of the
immortality of the soul, we should run through practically the entire
gamut of the arguments which have ever been offered. His frequent
return to the subject indicates the importance which he gave to the
belief.
Before we approach Plato’s ethical and religious views we must glance
for a moment at his psychology, for on that depends in no small measure
his moral system. In the fourth book of the Republic when discussing
the different forms of government, Socrates is made to show that the
soul has three parts or elements: the first is the divine or rational
part (τὸ θεῖον, τὸ λογιστικόν) whose seat is in the head, the second,
the courageous or passionate element (τὸ θυμοειδές) residing in the
heart, and the third is the appetite (τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν) which belongs to
the diaphragm or liver.[196] In the Phaedrus[197] this same division
is set forth in a myth. Now when in an individual all three parts are
in accord under the leadership of reason, whose orders are enforced
by courage on appetite, the man is virtuous; but if appetite and
courage unite against reason, discord results and the man is vicious.
As the state is well ordered when harmony exists among its parts, so
harmony of the soul, led by the reason, produces the virtuous human
being. In the earlier dialogues the soul is evidently regarded as a
unit, so that the parts are really forms or manifestations of the
soul; all three are immortal. But in the Timaeus only the reason is
immortal, the other parts being separable and bound to the body with
which they die.[198] Now we have already seen that the soul, or at
least its rational part, being divine and immortal, has an affinity
for the eternal ideas and is endowed by a natural love for the true,
the beautiful, and the good. It is therefore impelled toward the
divine world of ideas by a natural passion, and this effort on the
part of man’s reason is philosophy. The true philosopher then is the
lover of truth and reality, who is absorbed in the pleasures of the
soul so that he will hardly be conscious of bodily pleasure; indeed he
will not think much of human life or even fear death.[199] The soul,
however, in its effort to mount into the realm of the ideas, is held
back by the body in which it is imprisoned and fettered in the world
of the senses. Thus we find in Plato the Orphic belief that man has a
dual nature, made up of a divine soul and a mortal hindering body. We
shall presently see how he gave to the emotional belief of that sect a
philosophic basis and so transformed it into a reasonable article of
morality and religion.
Now we may consider Plato’s moral and religious views. The highest good
for man, according to his teaching, is likeness to God—that is, the
largest possible participation in the ideas of the Good which are in
the Absolute. In direct proportion to the success of the rational soul
in appropriating to itself these ideas, the man will practise justice
and holiness, that is, be righteous; but inasmuch as the world of
ideas cannot be apprehended by the senses, the rational soul of the
philosopher must always try to escape from the world of the senses
where evils dwell. As Socrates in the Theaetetus[200] assures Theodorus:
“Evils, Theodorus, can never pass away; for there must always remain
something which is antagonistic to the good. Having no place among
the gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the mortal nature
and this earthly sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to
heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God,
so far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy,
just, and wise ... God is never in any way unrighteous—he is perfect
righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most like
him.... To know this is true wisdom and virtue; and ignorance of this
is manifest folly and vice.” The man, then, whose soul strives to
become like God will inevitably be righteous. Plato’s philosophy thus
results in practical morality.
Furthermore we are assured in the Republic that a seeker after
righteousness will not be neglected by the gods, for Socrates there
says:[201] “Then this must be our notion of the just man, that even when
he is in poverty or sickness or any other seeming misfortune, all
things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death:
for the gods have a care of any one whose desire is to become just
and be like God, so far as man can attain the divine likeness, by the
pursuit of virtue.”
The path by which man is to attain to likeness of God, and so to
freedom from his lower nature, is that of a noble asceticism which
Socrates described to Simmias and Cebes the night before his own
death:[202] “No one who has not studied philosophy and who is not
entirely pure at the time of his departure is allowed to enter the
company of the gods, but the lover of knowledge only. And this is the
reason, Simmias and Cebes, why the true votaries of philosophy abstain
from all fleshly lusts, and hold out against them and refuse to give
themselves up to them, not because they fear poverty or the ruin of
their families, like the lovers of money and the world in general; nor
like the lovers of power and honour, because they dread the dishonour
or the disgrace of evil deeds.”
“No, Socrates, that would not become them,” said Cebes.
“No indeed,” he replied, “and therefore they who have any care of their
own souls, and do not merely live moulding and fashioning the body, say
farewell to all this; they will not walk in the ways of the blind: and
when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they
feel that they ought not to resist her influence, and whither she leads
they turn and follow.”
“What do you mean, Socrates?”
“I will tell you,” he said. “The lovers of knowledge are conscious that
the soul was simply fastened and glued to the body—until philosophy
freed her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a
prison, not in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of
every sort of ignorance, and by reason of lust had become the principal
accomplice in her own captivity.” And a little later Socrates says:
“The soul of the true philosopher thinks that she ought not to resist
this deliverance (which philosophy offers), and therefore abstains from
pleasures and desires and pains and fears, so far as she is able.”
Somewhat earlier in the dialogue Socrates had stated in still more
emphatic terms the necessity of putting the body aside if man’s soul
would attain real knowledge:[203] “For if while in company with the body
the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows—either
knowledge is not to be attained at all, or if at all, after death.
For then, and not till then, the soul will be parted from the body
and exist in herself alone. In this present life, I reckon that we
make the nearest approach to knowledge when we have the least possible
intercourse or communion with the body, and are not surfeited with the
bodily nature, but keep ourselves pure until the hour when God himself
is pleased to release us. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of
the body we shall be pure and shall hold converse with the pure, and
know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than
the light of truth.” As the phrase, “until the hour when God himself
is pleased to release us,” shows, man might not hasten the time of his
release by his own act. And in other places, in familiar ways, Plato
teaches that man may not desert the station where god has set him on
guard until the command is given.
Finally in the Cratylus,[204] where Socrates in discussing the origin
and nature of language indulges in some serious fooling in connection
with the name of the soul (ψυχή), he says that he imagines that
those who first gave the soul its name “psyche,” (ψυχή), wished to
express the truth that the soul when in the body is the source of
life, and gives the body the ability to breathe and revive, and that
when this power fails the body, then it perishes and dies. As for
body, he reminds his interlocutor that that word (σῶμα) is variously
interpreted, some saying that it is the grave (σῆμα) of the soul, which
may be regarded as in a tomb during this present life; and he adds that
the Orphic poets were probably the ones who invented the name, for
they had the notion that the embodied soul is suffering punishment for
sin, and that the body is a prison in which the soul is incarcerated
until the penalty of sin is paid. Likewise in the Gorgias[205] Socrates
refers to the same Orphic idea and quotes a verse from Euripides: “Who
knows whether life be not death and death life?” That is, this death
in life is due to the body which tends to strangle the soul. Only
when the reasoning soul has escaped from this tomb of the flesh can
it really live. This is the reason why the true philosopher is always
pursuing death in the sense that he is trying to free his soul, so far
as may be, from the concerns of the body that it may enjoy life at its
best.[206]
I have used Plato’s own words thus extensively for they set forth
more eloquently than any words of mine the essential features of his
doctrine. It requires no argument to show how great his debt to the
Orphics and Pythagoreans was. But we cannot fail to see that he went
far beyond his predecessors, for to their emotional belief in the
immortality of the soul he gave an intellectual basis, by showing that
the rational soul is of the same nature and substance as the Absolute,
and therefore immortal and ever striving to apprehend the Absolute to
which it belongs. In place of the external purifications and simple
taboos which made up the Orphic course of life, Plato substitutes a
noble discipline, reminding us of St. Paul—a discipline which has for
its aim nothing less than the likening of man’s soul to God. When Plato
teaches that man must begin his immortality here “by the practice of
death,” we now see that he really means the practice of life; for life
can only begin when the soul is released from its bodily tomb.
From the Orphics and Pythagoreans Plato adopted also the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls. According to his view a thousand
years—ten times the longest span of human life—elapsed between
death and rebirth, during which the wicked received their ten-fold
punishment and the righteous their like reward. When the time to return
on earth came around, the souls were allowed to choose their new life
as they pleased, only the wicked souls, “which had never seen the
truth,” could not pass into the bodies of men. The choice made and their
next destiny determined, the souls passed to the plain of Forgetfulness
where each must drink of the river of Lethe; in the darkness of
midnight there was an earthquake and thunderstorm, and the souls were
driven, like shooting stars, to their birth. Ten thousand years were
required to complete the round of rebirths and to allow the soul to
return to its heavenly home. But the soul of a philosopher, “guileless
and true,” might secure release after three rebirths if each time he
had chosen the higher life. Some incurable sinners were not allowed
to return to earth, but when their souls approached the mouth of the
cavern which led to the upper world, the mouth gave a mighty roar and
drove them back, while fiends tortured them with all the sufferings
which a fertile imagination could devise. The path of salvation
therefore lay in following righteousness and justice, in choosing
the good, that is, in true philosophy. At the close of the Republic
Socrates relates the vision of Er the Pamphylian whose soul returned
with a report of the other world, and so concludes: “And thus, Glaucon,
the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we
are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the
river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled. Wherefore my
counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way and follow after
justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and
able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall
we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here
and when, like conquerors in the games who go round to gather gifts, we
receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life
and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been
describing.”[207]
With regard to the ultimate fate of the soul Plato is not wholly
clear; but apparently he held that with the exception of those who had
done unpardonable wrongs the souls of men, when their wanderings and
rebirths were over and they had attained to purity, returned to God, to
the universal reason; probably, however, he thought of their return as
being without loss of individuality, for Plato lays so much stress on
the individual soul that we cannot believe that he would have allowed
it to lose its personality in the Absolute.
This account, I trust, for all its imperfections, is sufficient
to indicate what a great advance Plato made in his concept of the
spiritual life. Man’s reason is now made the means and agent of his
spiritual ascent; the reasoning soul, by its own nature, strives to
seek its own, and so finds its goal by virtue of its reason. The human
will is not neglected in the Platonic system, but it is by no means
made prominent. Man’s salvation is attained when the soul through the
exercise of its reason has risen superior to its bodily prison, freed
itself of the imperfections and evils which are necessarily associated
with the body, and purified has attained to God’s likeness.
In the preceding discussion I have used the word God freely, but it may
fairly be asked how far such use is justified, and furthermore whether
Plato was a pantheist or a polytheist. It is indeed somewhat difficult
to answer these questions, for in many passages he speaks of the gods
in the plural after the common manner, and in the Timaeus he especially
provides for a multitude of gods secondary to the Absolute; in many
other places he speaks of the Divine (τὸ θεῖον) or simply God (θεός).
Sometimes he seems to conceive of God as a living personality; again
God is apparently only the impersonal idea of the Good. Yet in spite
of the fact that his expressions range from polytheism almost to
monotheism, considering the sum total of his thought, we are justified
in speaking of his idea of God. At the same time we must always
understand that his thought admitted many gods, subordinate to the
Absolute and included in it.
But whatever the form of expression which he uses, Plato conceives
of God as the giver of good alone. For him there is no deception or
deceit in the divine; the chastening of man by God is always for the
purpose of making man better, never to satisfy any punitive desire. The
notion of “the envy of the gods,” which is so prominent in Aeschylus,
Herodotus, and other writers of the fifth century, to Plato is
abhorrent and inconceivable. Furthermore he makes the Divine, the idea
of the Good, the measure of truth, not man, as Protagoras would have
had him. His world therefore has a divine warrant of its validity; it
is ordered by the mind of the good and just God, and not by the will
of a debased divinity or by mere chance. Previous thinkers had made
Justice the highest attribute of divinity; to this Plato added Goodness
as the chief characteristic of God.
But in this discussion of Plato’s religious philosophy we have left
one important subject untouched—the problem of evil. This was a
question which a mind so acute and inquisitive as Plato’s could not
finally avoid. Of the presence of evil in the world he was fully
aware, and indeed he maintained that evils must always exist, for
there must remain something antagonistic to the good; and since evils
cannot exist in heaven the earth is their abode, from which man must
try to escape.[208] On the source of evil, however, he touches only in
the Statesman and the Timaeus;[209] in both the question is intimately
connected with his theories of creation, which he sets forth in myth.
But leaving aside the Platonic imagery, I will simply remind you that
earlier in this lecture we saw that Plato conceived the world we
know as dual—the phenomenal world known through the senses and the
world of ideas apprehended by reason. Now the ideas alone have Being;
but the phenomenal world is always in a state of Becoming, that is,
of coming into being and of ceasing to be; it is both temporal and
imperfect. Obviously there must be some principle, parallel in a way
to the perfect and eternal ideas, such that it can receive them, and
by its participation in them bring the imperfect sensible world into
transitory existence. This principle is to Plato the material element.
Now since he ascribes to the ideas alone real existence, that is,
Being, the material principle must be Not-being. It is the negative
substratum of all sensible phenomena, itself invisible, without form or
characteristic, or in Plato’s words “the receptacle, and in a manner,
the nurse of all generation” for, although itself formless, it is
capable of taking on all the forms which the ideas may impose upon it.
Plato himself could not avoid the difficulties which such a material
substratum raises, and at times he is forced to speak as if it were
something real in itself, having an existence beside the ideas. But
his true notion seems to be that matter is mere negation, like the
Aristotelian στέρησις, something which cannot be grasped by
the intellect, as can the ideas, or perceived by the senses, as can
the phenomenal world; it is identical with space. Of course when Plato
talks about this negative principle, he inevitably speaks as if we
could know something about it.[210]
The Absolute in Plato’s thought had not only life and intelligence
but also creative activities; and the acts of creation consisted
in imposing on the formless material principle the ideas which the
Absolute comprehends in itself, or, as perhaps he would have preferred
to say, in making the material principle partake of the appropriate
idea. In the Cratylus he illustrates the relation of matter to the idea
by the way in which the artisan makes a shuttle out of wood, always
forming his material with reference to the true or ideal shuttle.[211]
We may illustrate further by examples modelled on Plato’s own. Think
for a moment of the potter and his clay. The clay is formless matter
which the potter takes and places on the wheel, and there imposes
upon the clay the idea of the pot which is in his own mind; so the
pot acquires a real existence in so far as it partakes of or embodies
the idea which exists in the potter’s mind. Or we may think of the
sculptor and the shapeless block of marble. By imposing his idea upon
the marble, by making the shapeless block embody his idea, the sculptor
brings the statue into being. These illustrations, both Plato’s and
my own, are of course misleading, for the wood, clay, and marble from
which the several objects are made are far from being the negative
substance which Plato would have us believe his material principle to
be. But they may serve to suggest the way in which he conceived the
varied world about us to come into its temporary existence.
Now to Plato’s mind the Absolute and the ideas are perfect; yet we
know that the phenomenal world is imperfect, and imperfection is evil;
therefore, he says, evil must be found in the negative substratum,
since as we have already seen, this was regarded by Plato as in every
way the opposite of the perfect ideas. This imperfection, inherent
in the material principle, is the “necessity” of which he speaks in
the Theaetetus as causing evils—the opposite of the good.[212] Evil,
therefore, is eternal, but, as we have earlier learned, the individual
may escape, if he will take the deliverance which philosophy offers him.
As I have said, the course of creation is explained through myth in
the Timaeus and the Statesman.[213] In the former God is represented
as creating first the gods of heaven which are the fixed stars and
planets, from whom sprang the gods of popular mythology. The Creator
had already conceived of creatures of the air, sea, and land; but these
he did not himself create, for then they would have been on equality
with the gods; he rather commissioned the gods to create man and the
lower animals, while he furnished the divine part, the soul. Man’s soul
therefore is of the same nature as the universal soul, but his body is
material, made of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water,
and it is imperfect, being subject to the passions. In the Statesman
Plato sets forth his theory of the development of man from an earlier
stage to the present: the significant thing for us at the moment is his
explanation of man’s falling away from virtue as due to the admixture
of matter in him, that this fall was “inherent in the primal nature
which was full of disorder.”
This, then, will at least suggest Plato’s view as to the origin of
evil in the world. His language is that of myth, and it seems evident
that he did not formulate his explanation perfectly even in his own
mind. We shall best regard it as one of his guesses at truth. It is, of
course, easy to find weaknesses in his thought on this question and to
show that the explanation which he suggests is not satisfactory. But
we shall do better to remember the difficulty of the problem and to
recognize the value of his attempt to reach its solution.
The greatest service, however, which Plato did was to establish
by means of his doctrine of ideas a rational relation between the
invisible world of reason and the visible world of the senses; and
by pointing out that the rational part of man’s soul is of the same
substance as the ideas and therefore of the same substance as the
Absolute, to give an intellectual basis to the doctrine of a natural
striving on the part of man after the supreme Good. Hardly second to
this was his service in the field of ethics, where he showed that man’s
spiritual advance depends upon the constant curbing of the passions
and the body. The greatness of his genius is shown by the fact that
throughout antiquity the highest religious thought of paganism had
its source in his work and was only a development of it. Before we
have finished these lectures we shall gain some hints of his profound
influence on Christianity.
* * * * *
Platonic philosophy by attributing to the ideas an existence apart
from things, and conversely by denying all existence to anything but
the ideas, had removed all reality to the supernatural world. It was
inevitable that this view should be promptly attacked. The challenge
came from Plato’s greatest pupil, Aristotle.
Aristotle, born at Stagira in Thrace about 384 B.C., by
inheritance and early training had a strong bent toward natural
science, since he was descended from a line of physicians who,
according to Galen, taught anatomy by dissection. For twenty years he
was the pupil and assistant of Plato in the Academy. After the death
of his master he went to the court of Hermias, a prince of Mysia, and
in 343 he was appointed tutor to the son of King Philip of Macedon,
Alexander, then thirteen years of age. About 335 he opened a school
in the Lyceum at Athens, where he taught for some thirteen years.
Then, being accused of impiety after Alexander’s death, he withdrew
to Chalcis in Euboea, as he said, that the Athenians might not sin a
second time against philosophy; there he died about 322.
Into Aristotle’s encyclopedic knowledge and enormous scientific
activities we may not now go; and indeed we need not dwell at very
great length upon him, for his influence in religion was less potent
than Plato’s through antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages. The chief
cause of the elder philosopher’s greater influence is to be found in
the fact that Plato’s thought centered on man, his morality, and his
relation to God, while Aristotle was concerned primarily with the
universe of which man was to him only a part; to Plato virtue was
inseparably connected with religion, and was therefore something to be
sought with fervent spirit as well as with cool reason; to Aristotle
virtue was rather an intellectual matter, an even balance of the soul,
that natural perfection of the whole organism on which the well-being
and happiness of man depended—a state which was to be attained by
right calculation, choice, and habit. So it came to pass that although
Aristotle’s works on logic were continuously studied in one form or
another, his great sway in many realms of human thought, including
theology, began in the thirteenth century, when, learning first from
Arabic scholars, later aided and stimulated by the Latin conquest of
Constantinople in 1204, the western intellectual world eagerly studied
his works anew. Then Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Roger
Bacon raised him to the supreme position in philosophy and theology, so
that he became for that age indeed “the master of those who know.”
Let us now consider some parts of his philosophy. He criticized
Plato’s doctrine that ideas have an existence apart from things, and
not unjustly charged that Plato had taken the universals, which we
arrive at by abstraction, and had elevated these general concepts
into eternal and immortal elements, claiming for them that they were
anterior to the things of sense and alone had real existence. In his
own philosophy he took a position fundamentally opposed to that of
Plato, for he insisted that “ideas,” “forms” and the phenomenal world
could not exist apart, for if they did, then we should be obliged to
postulate a third world beyond them; that is to say, that if the idea
of man, for example, had a substantial existence apart from individual
men, then there would have to be an idea antecedent to both the idea of
man and the individual men, the model of both, and this idea would be a
“third man.” He further pointed out that men know the ideas only in the
concrete objects, never apart from those objects of which they are the
ideas, that the essence can never be separated from that of which it is
the essence, since then both thing and essence would cease to exist. So
he charged Plato with using meaningless poetic metaphors when he said
that ideas, forms, existed apart from things. Reality to Aristotle was
always in the individual object, itself an indissoluble union of matter
and form. Of course he recognized that the human mind could abstract
these two elements each from the other and could think of the
matter and the form as separate, but he would not allow that these
abstractions had substantial reality in the sense that they could ever
exist by themselves.[214]
Since then to him the Platonic ideas were nothing apart from the
individual objects, Aristotle could find no principle of movement or
change in them; so he claimed that the doctrine of ideas was sterile
and came to naught. In his own system he enumerated four principles
or causes, which he insisted, however, are only known to us from
individual things: the material cause (τὸ ἐξ oὗ γίνεταί τι, ἡ ὓλη), the
formal cause (τὸ εἶδος, ἡ μορφή), the efficient cause (τὸ ὅθεν ἡ ἀρχή),
and the final cause (τὸ oὗ ἕνεκα, τὸ τέλος). To make his meaning clear
let us use in part his own illustrations: the material cause of the
statue is the bronze of which it is made, just as in the example of the
pot which we used a little while ago, the clay was its material cause;
the formal cause is the idea of the statue, or of the pot, or of the
octave in music, which the artist has in mind; the artist himself is
the efficient cause; and the object of the action, the completed pot,
statue, or whatever it may be, is the final cause.[215] That is to say
the statue exists potentially in the bronze, the pot potentially in the
clay, the octave potentially in the musical sounds, but these things
can be called in actual existence only by the operation of the other
three causes; and the same thing holds true in animate nature. It
is possible therefore to state the matter generally and to say that
in every case the individual is produced by the operation of the
formal, efficient, and final causes on the material cause, bringing
to actuality the potentiality in matter. Of course we may regard
the formal, efficient, and final causes as different aspects of the
same formal cause—a thing which Aristotle himself does in more than
one passage,[216] so that in the last analysis he regards matter and
form as the two causes or principles of things. These two are to him
correlatives, each completing the other, although he gives greater
importance to the formal than to the material cause. These two causes,
he says, attract each other; and their union brings about movement,
which is always the evolution of something from something else.
From these considerations I trust that it is evident that Aristotle
regarded every object of nature, whether animate or inanimate, as
the product of causation; behind each individual he found another
individual, and he saw that each object was the result of conscious
causal activity. So, looking on the world with scientific eyes, he
found therein continuous movement dependent on a chain of causes, and
he pointed out that such a chain requires a first cause which must be
the source of all activity. This first cause was to him Mind, pure
Thought, God, conscious, eternal, and good. But his First Cause was at
the same time the Final Cause, for the supreme Mind conceives the end
toward which all creative activity is tending, that is, it acts with
intelligence so that the world is the creation of intelligence and is
directed toward wise ends.[217] The order of the universe bears witness
to the Mind which set it in order, and which keeps it in motion, all
for intelligent ends; for to use Aristotle’s own expression, “God and
Nature do nothing without a purpose.”[218] Thus Aristotle introduced
into theology cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence
of God.
But when Aristotle defines God as pure Thought, the supreme Idea
or Form, with no admixture of matter, it might seem that he had
contradicted himself. It will be remembered, however, that in his
system matter and form do not stand quite on an equality—matter is
somewhat subordinate to form. He regarded matter as the point of
departure for something higher—the clay being antecedent and lower
than the pot, the bronze than the statue—for the higher product always
results from the operation of the formal cause on the material. Of
course in our illustrations the bronze and the clay are not absolute
matter, but only matter with reference to the higher products evolved
from them—the pot and the statue. Indeed Aristotle did not suppose
that there was such a thing as absolute matter existing by itself, but
he rather thought of his material cause as matter not yet formed, the
germ from which the actual object was to be developed by the operation
of the formal cause. Now he saw in the universe an ascending scale of
existence, just as today we recognize such a scale in the animal world,
each stage being more perfect than that below it; he pointed out that
with reference to the lower, each higher stage was ideal, but material
with reference to that which was still higher. So in every stage the
idea, the form, preceded and conditioned the material element, and in
a sense we may correctly say that Aristotle gradually refined away
his material element in the ascending scale. At the summit Aristotle
placed the perfect and supreme Idea, God, the eternal antecedent
of all activity, the prime mover of the universe. So in the end he
identified God and Form. Strictly speaking in his system God could
not be a resultant of form and matter, for then God would not be the
ultimate being, but some cause would lie behind him; and he would not
be perfection, since some potentiality, the characteristic of matter,
would still reside in him. As a matter of fact Aristotle in a number of
passages identifies his ultimate material and form (ἡ ἐσχάτη ὔλη καὶ
ἡ μορφὴ ταὐτό);[219] not that he would have granted that there was a
material element in the Supreme Being; but in the light of what we have
just said we can understand how he might have held that the ultimate
material and God were identical.[220]
It readily follows from Aristotle’s concept of God as the prime
mover, the source of all activity in the world, that God can be but
one. Monotheism is the logical result of the Aristotelian reasoning.
Moreover it was inevitable that Aristotle should make God transcendent,
that is, that he should place him above all objects of the natural
world, since if the First Cause is pure thought unmixed with matter, he
cannot be immanent in material things. The immateriality which Plato
gave to his ideas, his pupil transferred to God.
Midway between the natural and the supernatural worlds Aristotle placed
man, whom he regarded as bound to the world of nature by his body and
the lower elements of his mind, but connected with God through his
reason, for he held that the human mind possessed attributes of the
divine intelligence. Aristotle’s psychology was based on his belief
that there was a purpose in all nature, and on his view that in the
individual were always united form and material. With reference to
animate beings he showed that they had their formative principle
within them, which brought to actuality the material which had the
potentiality of life, and which determined the purpose for which the
individual creature existed. This formative principle was then for
him the soul of the animate being, whether plant, lower animal, or
man; it was the internal principle which determined the processes of
nutrition, growth, and decay common to all animate creatures, and
no less the functions peculiar to the lower and the higher animals
throughout the scale of life. The soul of a plant, then, he defined as
the assimilative principle (τὸ θρεπτικόν) But creatures of the next,
higher stage, the so-called lower animals, he saw had senses, desires,
and self-movement; to their souls therefore he assigned the additional
elements of sensation (τὸ αἰσθητικόν), appetite (tὸ ὀrektikόn), and
motion (τὸ κινητικόν). Finally, he said, the human soul had mind (νοῦς)
in addition to the elements possessed by the lower animals and plants,
for man has the power of thought and reflection. Therefore man is the
highest creature, the most perfect organism in the natural order.
But the human mind, as Aristotle pointed out, has two activities:
it concerns itself with knowing and with reasoning; it is passive,
receptive, in that it receives ideas from without, and creative in that
it can reflect on its own ideas and so create new ideas which are in no
sense dependent on material objects—are, as we say, abstract ideas. To
this creative part of man’s soul, to his reason alone, did Aristotle
grant eternal existence and immortality. All other activities of the
soul—knowing, moving, seeking, feeling, and assimilating—he held to
be bound to the body and hence to perish with it; but the reasoning
element he maintained was in no way dependent on the material world,
was always active, and therefore it alone was immortal and eternal.[221]
Yet after establishing the immortality of the reasoning element
Aristotle failed to define the fate of the immortal human reason after
death; of joys or pains beyond the grave he gave no description.
In ethics Aristotle taught that the highest human good was that
happiness which results when man’s mind under the direction of reason
is active toward virtuous ends; that moral virtue is a habit which
is acquired by cultivation, a condition which is attained when the
appetites are controlled by the will and guided by the reason. Now in
the Aristotelian system man alone was regarded as capable of moral
action. The animals are guided by appetite and lack intelligence to
direct them; God is pure reason and therefore we cannot attribute to
him any moral qualities; but man possesses the characteristics of
the lower creatures and has at the same time the divine element, the
reason, which connects him with God. Therefore since man is endowed
with reason which can either prompt the will to check the appetite
or bid the will let appetite go its way, he is capable of choice and
so of morality. By thus emphasizing the controlling function of the
will Aristotle prepared the way for the Stoics, as we shall see in our
next lecture. Virtue in the active life of society was to him always
the mean between two extremes, both of which were themselves vices.
Courage, for example, lies midway between cowardice and rashness;
temperance between indulgence and abstinence; and so on through the
whole range of the ethical virtues. Above these virtues of the active
life, Aristotle placed a higher rank—the intellectual virtues of
wisdom, knowledge, good-sense, practical insight, etc., which result
from a harmony of the active and the receptive parts of the intellect.
Highest of all he put the speculative activities of the intellect,
which he regarded as its proper and most constant function. This
“theoretical” or “contemplative” life (θεωρητικὸς βίος) he said brought
man his highest happiness just because it was his highest activity.
Yet Aristotle could not hold out the hope that men could attain this
joy fully or in great numbers; he saw that the greater part of human
life was concerned with practical virtues, with good character; and he
believed that only when man was good in everyday life could he hope to
rise to the contemplative life, but that in that life, at moments, he
might catch glimpses of the happiness which belonged continuously to
God.[222]
Unquestionably Aristotle did a large service in putting ethics on a
more scientific basis than his predecessors had done, but his chief
contributions to the subject with which we are now concerned were in
the field of theology. There, as we have already noted, he established
the cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God;
and he also introduced a clearly defined transcendentalism, thus making
explicit what had been implied in parts of Plato’s teachings. Yet he
failed to provide that satisfaction for religious hopes and fears which
men desired, and so, as I have said, the cold scientific reasoning of
the Stagirite had far less influence in religion than the enthusiastic
thought of his teacher until after many centuries had passed.
* * * * *
Although we may readily recognize that the influence of philosophy on
the religious belief of the most enlightened in this time was great,
we may still question whether it had any considerable influence on the
religious customs of the people. Practice is always more conservative
than thought, and we find that the thinkers who did most to destroy
traditional theology frequently conformed to the traditional worship of
the common man. So Socrates sacrificed in the usual way to the gods,
although he held advanced ideas with regard to prayers and oaths. No
doubt Plato and Aristotle passed for pious so far as their religious
practices were concerned, in spite of the fact that they put new
content into ancient forms. The former frequently made the speakers in
his dialogues refer to the gods in quite the traditional way, and in
his Timaeus he set forth a kind of systematic theology; in his Laws,
written in his old age as a supplement to his Republic, he planned
for his ideal state a religious organization, involving a plurality
of gods, not dissimilar to that of the actual Athenian state; he
represented his chief spokesman as proving the existence of the gods,
giving warrant for the familiar practices of religion, and justifying
the ways of gods to men; moreover he proposed to have statutes against
impiety and the introduction of religious rites not recognized by
law.[223] Aristotle clearly had slight respect for the common notions
as to the gods, but for all that he regarded the worship of many gods
as natural, and he thought that worship was indispensable for the
existence of a state; therefore in his Politics he made a place for a
polytheistic religion, defined the duties of priests and other sacred
officials, and provided that all the expenses of public worship should
be borne by the state.[224] The charge, prompted by political passion,
brought against Aristotle for impiety in deifying Hermias, the prince
of Mysia, shows that he was not regarded as atheistic.
As a matter of fact with all the changes in religious thought which
the centuries brought in Greece, sacred customs and practices remained
but little altered down to the end of antiquity. Theology has small
interest for the common man. He must depend for his assurance on the
performance of those acts which immemorial custom has sanctioned as
the proper means of securing the favor of the gods, rather than on
the speculations of some theologian or on his own poor reflections.
Sacrifice and prayer before the sacred statue or symbol, community
worship at the great festivals, private devotion at the shrine
within the home, rites of riddance and appeasing, the promise and
payment of vows, remained the practices of the mass of men for many
centuries after the prophet of Nazareth delivered his message—indeed
Christianity took over many of these things and has kept them to the
present day. Then too we must remember that the civic character of
the common Greek religion had a higher side, for it strengthened the
bond of family and of city-state; and through the great festivals at
Olympia, Delphi, and Nemea it helped to form a dim concept of a Greek
nation. Thus it elevated men’s notions of responsibility to the social
units, both small and great. Furthermore, apart from the civic and
national sides of Greek religion, the general religious thought of the
mass was gradually ennobled with the passage of the centuries; in spite
of the survival into later antiquity of certain rude and primitive
elements, religion became more moral and more spiritual, as we have
already seen was the case with the Eleusinian Mysteries. Plato and
Aristotle in the very nature of the case could have little influence
on the many in their day; but when their thoughts had been transmuted
into terms which the common man could comprehend and express in living,
philosophy became for the many a guide of life.