CHAPTER IV.

PLATO: HIS TEACHERS AND HIS TIMES.

I.

In studying the growth of philosophy as an historical evolution,

repetitions and anticipations must necessarily be of frequent

occurrence. Ideas meet us at every step which can only be appreciated

when we trace out their later developments, or only understood when

we refer them back to earlier and half-forgotten modes of thought.

The speculative tissue is woven out of filaments so delicate and so

complicated that it is almost impossible to say where one begins and

the other ends. Even conceptions which seem to have been transmitted

without alteration are constantly acquiring a new value according

to the connexions into which they enter or the circumstances to

which they are applied. But if the method of evolution, with its two

great principles of continuity and relativity, substitutes a maze

of intricate lines, often returning on themselves, for the straight

path along which progress was once supposed to move, we are more

than compensated by the new sense of coherence and rationality where

illusion and extravagance once seemed to reign supreme. It teaches us

that the dreams of a great intellect may be better worth our attention

than the waking perceptions of ordinary men. Combining fragments of

the old order with rudimentary outlines of the new, they lay open the

secret laboratory of spiritual chemistry, and help to bridge over the

interval separating the most widely contrasted phases of life and

thought. Moreover, when we have once accustomed ourselves to break up

past systems of philosophy into their component elements, when we see

how heterogeneous and ill-cemented were the parts of this and that

proud edifice once offered as the only possible shelter against dangers

threatening the very existence of civilisation—we shall be prepared

for the application of a similar method to contemporary systems of

equally ambitious pretensions; distinguishing that which is vital,

fruitful, original, and progressive in their ideal synthesis from

that which is of merely provisional and temporary value, when it is

not the literary resuscitation of a dead past, visionary, retrograde,

and mischievously wrong. And we shall also be reminded that the most

precious ideas have only been shaped, preserved, and transmitted

through association with earthy and perishable ingredients. The

function of true criticism is, like Robert Browning’s Roman jeweller,

to turn on them ‘the proper fiery acid’ of purifying analysis which

dissolves away the inferior metal and leaves behind the gold ring

whereby thought and action are inseparably and fruitfully united.

Such, as it seems to us, is the proper spirit in which we should

approach the great thinker whose works are to occupy us in this and

the succeeding chapter. No philosopher has ever offered so extended

and vulnerable a front to hostile criticism. None has so habitually

provoked reprisals by his own incessant and searching attacks on

all existing professions, customs, and beliefs. It might even be

maintained that none has used the weapons of controversy with more

unscrupulous zeal. And it might be added that he who dwells so much on

the importance of consistency has occasionally denounced and ridiculed

the very principles which he elsewhere upholds as demonstrated truths.

It was an easy matter for others to complete the work of destruction

which he had begun. His system seems at first sight to be made up of

assertions, one more outrageous than another. The ascription of an

objective concrete separate reality to verbal abstractions is assuredly

the most astounding paradox ever maintained even by a metaphysician.

Yet this is the central article of Plato’s creed. That body is

essentially different from extension might, one would suppose, have

been sufficiently clear to a mathematician who had the advantage of

coming after Leucippus and Democritus. Their identity is implicitly

affirmed in the _Timaeus_. That the soul cannot be both created and

eternal; that the doctrine of metempsychosis is incompatible with the

hereditary transmission of mental qualities; that a future immortality

equivalent to, and proved by the same arguments as, our antenatal

existence, would be neither a terror to the guilty nor a consolation

to the righteous:—are propositions implicitly denied by Plato’s

psychology. Passing from theoretical to practical philosophy, it

might be observed that respect for human life, respect for individual

property, respect for marriage, and respect for truthfulness, are

generally numbered among the strongest moral obligations, and those

the observance of which most completely distinguishes civilised

from savage man; while infanticide, communism, promiscuity, and the

occasional employment of deliberate deceit, form part of Plato’s scheme

for the redemption of mankind. We need not do more than allude to

those Dialogues where the phases and symptoms of unnameable passion

are delineated with matchless eloquence, and apparently with at least

as much sympathy as censure. Finally, from the standpoint of modern

science, it might be urged that Plato used all his powerful influence

to throw back physical speculation into the theological stage; that he

deliberately discredited the doctrine of mechanical causation which,

for us, is the most important achievement of early Greek thought; that

he expatiated on the criminal folly of those who held the heavenly

bodies to be, what we now know them to be, masses of dead matter with

no special divinity about them; and that he proposed to punish this

and other heresies with a severity distinguishable from the fitful

fanaticism of his native city only by its more disciplined and rigorous

application.

A plain man might find it difficult to understand how such

extravagances could be deliberately propounded by the greatest

intellect that Athens ever produced, except on the principle, dear to

mediocrity, that genius is but little removed from madness, and that

philosophical genius resembles it more nearly than any other. And his

surprise would become much greater on learning that the best and wisest

men of all ages have looked up with reverence to Plato; that thinkers

of the most opposite schools have resorted to him for instruction and

stimulation; that his writings have never been more attentively studied

than in our own age—an age which has witnessed the destruction of so

many illusive reputations; and that the foremost of English educators

has used all his influence to promote the better understanding and

appreciation of Plato as a prime element in academic culture—an

influence now extended far beyond the limits of his own university

through that translation of the Platonic Dialogues which is too well

known to need any commendation on our part, but which we may mention as

one of the principal authorities used for the present study, together

with the work of a German scholar, his obligations to whom Prof. Jowett

has acknowledged with characteristic grace.[114]

As a set-off against the list of paradoxes cited from Plato, it would

be easy to quote a still longer list of brilliant contributions to

the cause of truth and right, to strike a balance between the two,

and to show that there was a preponderance on the positive side

sufficiently great to justify the favourable verdict of posterity.

We believe, however, that such a method would be as misleading as

it is superficial. Neither Plato nor any other thinker of the same

calibre—if any other there be—should be estimated by a simple

analysis of his opinions. We must go back to the underlying forces

of which individual opinions are the resultant and the revelation.

Every systematic synthesis represents certain profound intellectual

tendencies, derived partly from previous philosophies, partly from the

social environment, partly from the thinker’s own genius and character.

Each of such tendencies may be salutary and necessary, according to the

conditions under which it comes into play, and yet two or more of them

may form a highly unstable and explosive compound. Nevertheless, it is

in speculative combinations that they are preserved and developed with

the greatest distinctness, and it is there that we must seek for them

if we would understand the psychological history of our race. And this

is why we began by intimating that the lines of our investigation may

take us back over ground which has been already traversed, and forward

into regions which cannot at present be completely surveyed.

We have this great advantage in dealing with Plato—that his

philosophical writings have come down to us entire, while the thinkers

who preceded him are known only through fragments and second-hand

reports. Nor is the difference merely accidental. Plato was the creator

of speculative literature, properly so called: he was the first and

also the greatest artist that ever clothed abstract thought in language

of appropriate majesty and splendour; and it is probably to their

beauty of form that we owe the preservation of his writings. Rather

unfortunately, however, along with the genuine works of the master, a

certain number of pieces have been handed down to us under his name, of

which some are almost universally admitted to be spurious, while the

authenticity of others is a question on which the best scholars are

still divided. In the absence of any very cogent external evidence,

an immense amount of industry and learning has been expended on this

subject, and the arguments employed on both sides sometimes make

us doubt whether the reasoning powers of philologists are better

developed than, according to Plato, were those of mathematicians

in his time. The two extreme positions are occupied by Grote, who

accepts the whole Alexandrian canon, and Krohn, who admits nothing

but the _Republic_;[115] while much more serious critics, such as

Schaarschmidt, reject along with a mass of worthless compositions

several Dialogues almost equal in interest and importance to those

whose authenticity has never been doubted. The great historian

of Greece seems to have been rather undiscriminating both in his

scepticism and in his belief; and the exclusive importance which he

attributed to contemporary testimony, or to what passed for such

with him, may have unduly biassed his judgment in both directions.

As it happens, the authority of the canon is much weaker than Grote

imagined; but even granting his extreme contention, our view of

Plato’s philosophy would not be seriously affected by it, for the

pieces which are rejected by all other critics have no speculative

importance whatever. The case would be far different were we to

agree with those who impugn the genuineness of the _Parmenides_, the

_Sophist_, the _Statesman_, the _Philêbus_, and the _Laws_; for these

compositions mark a new departure in Platonism amounting to a complete

transformation of its fundamental principles, which indeed is one of

the reasons why their authenticity has been denied. Apart, however,

from the numerous evidences of Platonic authorship furnished by the

Dialogues themselves, as well as by the indirect references to them

in Aristotle’s writings, it seems utterly incredible that a thinker

scarcely, if at all, inferior to the master himself—as the supposed

imitator must assuredly have been—should have consented to let his

reasonings pass current under a false name, and that, too, the name of

one whose teaching he in some respects controverted; while there is a

further difficulty in assuming that his existence could pass unnoticed

at a period marked by intense literary and philosophical activity.

Readers who wish for fuller information on the subject will find in

Zeller’s pages a careful and lucid digest of the whole controversy

leading to a moderately conservative conclusion. Others will doubtless

be content to accept Prof. Jowett’s verdict, that ‘on the whole not

a sixteenth part of the writings which pass under the name of Plato,

if we exclude the works rejected by the ancients themselves, can be

fairly doubted by those who are willing to allow that a considerable

change and growth may have taken place in his philosophy.’[116] To

which we may add that the Platonic dialogues, whether the work of one

or more hands, and however widely differing among themselves, together

represent a single phase of thought, and are appropriately studied as a

connected series.

We have assumed in our last remark that it is possible to discover some

sort of chronological order in the Platonic Dialogues, and to trace a

certain progressive modification in the general tenor of their teaching

from first to last. But here also the positive evidence is very scanty,

and a variety of conflicting theories have been propounded by eminent

scholars. Where so much is left to conjecture, the best that can be

said for any hypothesis is that it explains the facts according to

known laws of thought. It will be for the reader to judge whether our

own attempt to trace the gradual evolution of Plato’s system satisfies

this condition. In making it we shall take as a basis the arrangement

adopted by Prof. Jowett, with some reservations hereafter to be

specified.

Before entering on our task, one more difficulty remains to be noticed.

Plato, although the greatest master of prose composition that ever

lived, and for his time a remarkably voluminous author, cherished a

strong dislike for books, and even affected to regret that the art of

writing had ever been invented. A man, he said, might amuse himself

by putting down his ideas on paper, and might even find written

memoranda useful for private reference, but the only instruction

worth speaking of was conveyed by oral communication, which made it

possible for objections unforeseen by the teacher to be freely urged

and answered.[117] Such had been the method of Socrates, and such was

doubtless the practice of Plato himself whenever it was possible for

him to set forth his philosophy by word of mouth. It has been supposed,

for this reason, that the great writer did not take his own books in

earnest, and wished them to be regarded as no more than the elegant

recreations of a leisure hour, while his deeper and more serious

thoughts were reserved for lectures and conversations, of which,

beyond a few allusions in Aristotle, every record has perished. That

such, however, was not the case, may be easily shown. In the first

place it is evident, from the extreme pains taken by Plato to throw

his philosophical expositions into conversational form, that he did

not despair of providing a literary substitute for spoken dialogue.

Secondly, it is a strong confirmation of this theory that Aristotle,

a personal friend and pupil of Plato during many years, should so

frequently refer to the Dialogues as authoritative evidences of his

master’s opinions on the most important topics. And, lastly, if it

can be shown that the documents in question do actually embody a

comprehensive and connected view of life and of the world, we shall

feel satisfied that the oral teaching of Plato, had it been preserved,

would not modify in any material degree the impression conveyed by his

written compositions.

II.

There is a story that Plato used to thank the gods, in what some might

consider a rather Pharisaic spirit, for having made him a human being

instead of a brute, a man instead of a woman, and a Greek instead

of a barbarian; but more than anything else for having permitted

him to be born in the time of Socrates. It will be observed that all

these blessings tended in one direction, the complete supremacy in

his character of reason over impulse and sense. To assert, extend,

and organise that supremacy was the object of his whole life. Such,

indeed, had been the object of all his predecessors, and such, stated

generally, has been always and everywhere the object of philosophy;

but none had pursued it so consciously before, and none has proclaimed

it so enthusiastically since then. Now, although Plato could not have

done this without a far wider range of knowledge and experience than

Socrates had possessed, it was only by virtue of the Socratic method

that his other gifts and acquisitions could be turned to complete

account; while, conversely, it was only when brought to bear upon

these new materials that the full power of the method itself could be

revealed. To be continually asking and answering questions; to elicit

information from everybody on every subject worth knowing; and to

elaborate the resulting mass of intellectual material into the most

convenient form for practical application or for further transmission,

was the secret of true wisdom with the sage of the market-place and

the workshop. But the process of dialectic investigation as an end in

itself, the intense personal interest of conversation with living men

and women of all classes, the impatience for immediate and visible

results, had gradually induced Socrates to restrict within far too

narrow limits the sources whence his ideas were derived and the

purposes to which they were applied. And the dialectic method itself

could not but be checked in its internal development by this want of

breadth and variety in the topics submitted to its grasp. Therefore the

death of Socrates, however lamentable in its occasion, was an unmixed

benefit to the cause for which he laboured, by arresting (as we must

suppose it to have arrested) the popular and indiscriminate employment

of his cross-examining method, liberating his ablest disciple from

the ascendency of a revered master, and inducing him to reconsider

the whole question of human knowledge and action from a remoter point

of view. For, be it observed that Plato did not begin where Socrates

had left off; he went back to the germinal point of the whole system,

and proceeded to reconstruct it on new lines of his own. The loss of

those whom we love habitually leads our thoughts back to the time of

our first acquaintance with them, or, if these are ascertainable, to

the circumstances of their early life. In this manner Plato seems to

have been at first occupied exclusively with the starting-point of

his friend’s philosophy, and we know, from the narrative given in the

_Apologia_, under what form he came to conceive it. We have attempted

to show that the account alluded to cannot be entirely historical.

Nevertheless it seems sufficiently clear that Socrates began with a

conviction of his own ignorance, and that his efforts to improve others

were prefaced by the extraction of a similar confession of ignorance on

their part. It is also certain that through life he regarded the causes

of physical phenomena as placed beyond the reach of human reason and

reserved by the gods for their own exclusive cognisance, pointing, by

way of proof, to the notorious differences of opinion prevalent among

those who had meddled with such matters. Thus, his scepticism worked

in two directions, but on the one side it was only provisional and

on the other it was only partial. Plato began by combining the two.

He maintained that human nescience is universal and necessary; that

the gods had reserved all knowledge for themselves; and that the only

wisdom left for men is a consciousness of their absolute ignorance. The

Socratic starting-point gave the centre of his agnostic circle; the

Socratic theology gave the distance at which it was described. Here we

have to note two things—first, the breadth of generalisation which

distinguishes the disciple from the master; and, secondly, the symptoms

of a strong religious reaction against Greek humanism. Even before the

end of the Peloponnesian War, evidence of this reaction had appeared,

and the _Bacchae_ of Euripides bears striking testimony to its gloomy

and fanatical character. The last agony of Athens, the collapse of

her power, and the subsequent period of oligarchic terrorism, must

have given a stimulus to superstition like that which quite recently

afflicted France with an epidemic of apparitions and pilgrimages almost

too childish for belief. Plato followed the general movement, although

on a much higher plane. While looking down with undisguised contempt

on the immoral idolatry of his countrymen, he was equally opposed

to the irreligion of the New Learning, and, had an opportunity been

given him, he would, like the Reformers of the sixteenth century, have

put down both with impartial severity. Nor was this the only analogy

between his position and that of a Luther or a Calvin. Like them, and

indeed like all great religious teachers, he exalted the Creator by

enlarging on the nothingness of the creature; just as Christianity

exhibits the holiness of God in contrast and correlation with the

sinfulness of unregenerate hearts; just as to Pindar man’s life seemed

but the fleeting shadow in a dream when compared with the beauty and

strength and immortality of the Olympian divinities; so also did Plato

deepen the gloom of human ignorance that he might bring out in dazzling

relief the fulness of that knowledge which he had been taught to prize

as a supreme ideal, but which, for that very reason, seemed proper to

the highest existences alone. And we shall presently see how Plato

also discovered a principle in man by virtue of which he could claim

kindred with the supernatural, and elaborated a scheme of intellectual

mediation by which the fallen spirit could be regenerated and made a

partaker in the kingdom of speculative truth.

Yet if Plato’s theology, from its predominantly rational character,

seemed to neglect some feelings which were better satisfied by the

earlier or the later faiths of mankind, we cannot say that it really

excluded them. The unfading strength of the old gods was comprehended

in the self-existence of absolute ideas, and moral goodness was

only a particular application of reason to the conduct of life. An

emotional or imaginative element was also contributed by the theory

that every faculty exercised without a reasoned consciousness of its

processes and aims was due to some saving grace and inspiration from

a superhuman power. It was thus, according to Plato, that poets and

artists were able to produce works of which they were not able to

render an intelligent account; and it was thus that society continued

to hold together with such an exceedingly small amount of wisdom and

virtue. Here, however, we have to observe a marked difference between

the religious teachers pure and simple, and the Greek philosopher

who was a dialectician even more than he was a divine. For Plato

held that providential government was merely provisional; that the

inspired prophet stood on a distinctly lower level than the critical,

self-conscious thinker; that ratiocination and not poetry was the

highest function of mind; and that action should be reorganised in

accordance with demonstrably certain principles.[118]

This search after a scientific basis for conduct was quite in the

spirit of Socrates, but Plato seems to have set very little value on

his master’s positive contributions to the systematisation of life.

We have seen that the _Apologia_ is purely sceptical in its tendency;

and we find a whole group of Dialogues, probably the earliest of

Plato’s compositions, marked by the same negative, inconclusive tone.

These are commonly spoken of as Socratic, and so no doubt they are in

reference to the subjects discussed; but they would be more accurately

described as an attempt to turn the Socratic method against its first

originator. We know from another source that temperance, fortitude,

and piety were the chief virtues inculcated and practised by Socrates;

while friendship, if not strictly speaking a virtue, was equally with

them one of his prime interests in life. It is clear that he considered

them the most appropriate and remunerative subjects of philosophical

discussion; that he could define their nature to his own satisfaction;

and that he had, in fact, defined them as so many varieties of wisdom.

Now, Plato has devoted a separate Dialogue to each of the conceptions

in question,[119] and in each instance he represents Socrates, who is

the principal spokesman, as professedly ignorant of the whole subject

under discussion, offering no definition of his own (or at least none

that he will stand by), but asking his interlocutors for theirs, and

pulling it to pieces when it is given. We do, indeed, find a tendency

to resolve the virtues into knowledge, and, so far, either to identify

them with one another, or to carry them up into the unity of a higher

idea. To this extent Plato follows in the footsteps of his master,

but a result which had completely satisfied Socrates became the

starting-point of a new investigation with his successor. If virtue is

knowledge, it must be knowledge of what we most desire—of the good.

Thus the original difficulty returns under another form, or rather

we have merely restated it in different terms. For, to ask what is

temperance or fortitude, is equivalent to asking what is its use. And

this was so obvious to Socrates, that, apparently, he never thought

of distinguishing between the two questions. But no sooner were they

distinguished than his reduction of all morality to a single principle

was shown to be illusive. For each specific virtue had been substituted

the knowledge of a specific utility, and that was all. Unless the

highest good were one, the means by which it was sought could not

converge to a single point; nor, according to the new ideas, could

their mastery come under the jurisdiction of a single art.

We may also suspect that Plato was dissatisfied not only with the

positive results obtained by Socrates, but also with the Socratic

method of constructing general definitions. To rise from the part to

the whole, from particular instances to general notions, was a popular

rather than a scientific process; and sometimes it only amounted

to taking the current explanations and modifying them to suit the

exigencies of ordinary experience. The resulting definitions could

never be more than tentative, and a skilful dialectician could always

upset them by producing an unlooked-for exception, or by discovering an

ambiguity in the terms by which they were conveyed.

Before ascertaining in what direction Plato sought for an outlet

from these accumulated difficulties, we have to glance at a Dialogue

belonging apparently to his earliest compositions, but in one respect

occupying a position apart from the rest. The _Crito_ tells us for

what reasons Socrates refused to escape from the fate which awaited

him in prison, as, with the assistance of generous friends, he might

easily have done. The aged philosopher considered that by adopting

such a course he would be setting the Athenian laws at defiance, and

doing what in him lay to destroy their validity. Now, we know that the

historical Socrates held justice to consist in obedience to the law

of the land; and here for once we find Plato agreeing with him on a

definite and positive issue. Such a sudden and singular abandonment

of the sceptical attitude merits our attention. It might, indeed, be

said that Plato’s inconsistencies defy all attempts at reconciliation,

and that in this instance the desire to set his maligned friend in a

favourable light triumphed over the claims of an impracticable logic.

We think, however, that a deeper and truer solution can be found. If

the _Crito_ inculcates obedience to the laws as a binding obligation,

it is not for the reasons which, according to Xenophon, were adduced

by the real Socrates in his dispute with the Sophist Hippias; general

utility and private interest were the sole grounds appealed to then.

Plato, on the other hand, ignores all such external considerations.

True to his usual method, he reduces the legal conscience to a purely

dialectical process. Just as in an argument the disputants are, or

ought to be, bound by their own admissions, so also the citizen

is bound by a tacit compact to fulfil the laws whose protection

he has enjoyed and of whose claims his protracted residence is an

acknowledgment. Here there is no need of a transcendent foundation for

morality, as none but logical considerations come into play. And it

also deserves to be noticed that, where this very idea of an obligation

based on acceptance of services had been employed by Socrates, it was

discarded by Plato. In the _Euthyphro_, a Dialogue devoted to the

discussion of piety, the theory that religion rests on an exchange of

good offices between gods and men is mentioned only to be scornfully

rejected. Equally remarkable, and equally in advance of the Socratic

standpoint, is a principle enunciated in the _Crito_, that retaliation

is wrong, and that evil should never be returned for evil.[120] And

both are distinct anticipations of the earliest Christian teaching,

though both are implicitly contradicted by the so-called religious

services celebrated in Christian churches and by the doctrine of

a divine retribution which is only not retaliatory because it is

infinitely in excess of the provocation received.

If the earliest of Plato’s enquiries, while they deal with the same

subjects and are conducted on the same method as those cultivated by

Socrates, evince a breadth of view surpassing anything recorded of him

by Xenophon, they also exhibit traces of an influence disconnected with

and inferior in value to his. On more than one occasion[121] Plato

reasons, or rather quibbles, in a style which he has elsewhere held up

to ridicule as characteristic of the Sophists, with such success that

the name of sophistry has clung to it ever since. Indeed, some of the

verbal fallacies employed are so transparent that we can hardly suppose

them to be unintentional, and we are forced to conclude that the young

despiser of human wisdom was resolved to maintain his thesis with any

weapons, good or bad, which came to hand. And it seems much more likely

that he learned the eristic art from Protagoras or from his disciples

than from Socrates. Plato spent a large part of his life in opposing

the Sophists—that is to say, the paid professors of wisdom and virtue;

but in spite of, or rather perhaps because of, this very opposition,

he was profoundly affected by their teaching and example. It is quite

conceivable, although we do not find it stated as a fact, that he

resorted to them for instruction when a young man, and before coming

under the influence of Socrates, an event which did not take place

until he was twenty years old; or he may have been directed to them by

Socrates himself. With all its originality, his style bears traces of

a rhetorical training in the more elaborate passages, and the Sophists

were the only teachers of rhetoric then to be found. His habit of

clothing philosophical lessons in the form of a myth seems also to have

been borrowed from them. It would, therefore, not be surprising that he

should cultivate their argumentative legerdemain side by side with the

more strict and severe discipline of Socratic dialectics.

Plato does, no doubt, make it a charge against the Sophists that

their doctrines are not only false and immoral, but that they are

put together without any regard for logical coherence. It would

seem, however, that this style of attack belongs rather to the later

and constructive than to the earlier and receptive period of his

intellectual development. The original cause of his antagonism to the

professional teachers seems to have been their general pretensions to

knowledge, which, from the standpoint of universal scepticism, were,

of course, utterly illusive; together with a feeling of aristocratic

contempt for a calling in which considerations of pecuniary interest

were involved, heightened in this instance by a conviction that the

buyer received nothing better than a sham article in exchange for

his money. Here, again, a parallel suggests itself with the first

preaching of the Gospel. The attitude of Christ towards the scribes and

Pharisees, as also that of St. Paul towards Simon Magus, will help us

to understand how Plato, in another order of spiritual teaching, must

have regarded the hypocrisy of wisdom, the intrusion of fraudulent

traders into the temple of Delphic inspiration, and the sale of a

priceless blessing whose unlimited diffusion should have been its own

and only reward.

Yet throughout the philosophy of Plato we meet with a tendency to

ambiguous shiftings and reversions of which, here also, due account

must be taken. That curious blending of love and hate which forms the

subject of a mystical lyric in Mr. Browning’s _Pippa Passes_, is not

without its counterpart in purely rationalistic discussion. If Plato

used the Socratic method to dissolve away much that was untrue, because

incomplete, in Socratism, he used it also to absorb much that was

deserving of development in Sophisticism. If, in one sense, the latter

was a direct reversal of his master’s teaching, in another it served

as a sort of intermediary between that teaching and the unenlightened

consciousness of mankind. The shadow should not be confounded with the

substance, but it might show by contiguity, by resemblance, and by

contrast where the solid reality lay, what were its outlines, and how

its characteristic lights might best be viewed.

Such is the mild and conciliatory mode of treatment at first adopted

by Plato in dealing with the principal representative of the

Sophists—Protagoras. In the Dialogue which bears his name the famous

humanist is presented to us as a professor of popular unsystematised

morality, proving by a variety of practical arguments and ingenious

illustrations that virtue can be taught, and that the preservation

of social order depends upon the possibility of teaching it; but

unwilling to go along with the reasonings by which Socrates shows the

applicability of rigorously scientific principles to conduct. Plato

has here taken up one side of the Socratic ethics, and developed it

into a complete and self-consistent theory. The doctrine inculcated is

that form of utilitarianism to which Mr. Sidgwick has given the name of

egoistic hedonism. We are brought to admit that virtue is one because

the various virtues reduce themselves in the last analysis to prudence.

It is assumed that happiness, in the sense of pleasure and the absence

of pain, is the sole end of life. Duty is identified with interest.

Morality is a calculus for computing quantities of pleasure and pain,

and all virtuous action is a means for securing a maximum of the one

together with a minimum of the other. Ethical science is constituted;

it can be taught like mathematics; and so far the Sophists are right,

but they have arrived at the truth by a purely empirical process;

while Socrates, who professes to know nothing, by simply following the

dialectic impulse strikes out a generalisation which at once confirms

and explains their position; yet from self-sufficiency or prejudice

they refuse to agree with him in taking their stand on its only logical

foundation.

That Plato put forward the ethical theory of the Protagoras in perfect

good faith cannot, we think, be doubted; although in other writings

he has repudiated hedonism with contemptuous aversion; and it seems

equally evident that this was his earliest contribution to positive

thought. Of all his theories it is the simplest and most Socratic;

for Socrates, in endeavouring to reclaim the foolish or vicious,

often spoke as if self-interest was the paramount principle of human

nature; although, had his assumption been formulated as an abstract

proposition, he too might have shrunk from it with something of the

uneasiness attributed to Protagoras. And from internal evidence of

another description we have reason to think that the Dialogue in

question is a comparatively juvenile production, remembering always

that the period of youth was much more protracted among the Greeks

than among ourselves. One almost seems to recognise the hand of a

boy just out of college, who delights in drawing caricatures of his

teachers; and who, while he looks down on classical scholarship in

comparison with more living and practical topics, is not sorry to show

that he can discuss a difficult passage from Simonides better than the

professors themselves.

III.

Our survey of Plato’s first period is now complete; and we have to

enter on the far more arduous task of tracing out the circumstances,

impulses, and ideas by which all the scattered materials of Greek

life, Greek art, and Greek thought were shaped into a new system and

stamped with the impress of an imperishable genius. At the threshold

of this second period the personality of Plato himself emerges into

greater distinctness, and we have to consider what part it played in

an evolution where universal tendencies and individual leanings were

inseparably combined.

Plato was born in the year 429, or according to some accounts 427,

and died 347 B.C. Few incidents in his biography can be fixed with

any certainty; but for our purpose the most general facts are also

the most interesting, and about these we have tolerably trustworthy

information. His family was one of the noblest in Athens, being

connected on the father’s side with Codrus, and on the mother’s with

Solon; while two of his kinsmen, Critias and Charmides, were among the

chiefs of the oligarchic party. It is uncertain whether he inherited

any considerable property, nor is the question one of much importance.

It seems clear that he enjoyed the best education Athens could afford,

and that through life he possessed a competence sufficient to relieve

him from the cares of material existence. Possibly the preference

which he expressed, when far advanced in life, for moderate health

and wealth arose from having experienced those advantages himself.

If the busts which bear his name are to be trusted, he was remarkably

beautiful, and, like some other philosophers, very careful of his

personal appearance. Perhaps some reminiscences of the admiration

bestowed on himself may be mingled with those pictures of youthful

loveliness and of its exciting effect on the imaginations of older

men which give such grace and animation to his earliest dialogues. We

know not whether as lover or beloved he passed unscathed through the

storms of passion which he has so powerfully described, nor whether his

apparently intimate acquaintance with them is due to divination or to

regretful experience. We may pass by in silence whatever is related on

this subject, with the certainty that, whether true or not, scandalous

stories could not fail to be circulated about him.

It was natural that one who united a great intellect to a glowing

temperament should turn his thoughts to poetry. Plato wrote a quantity

of verses—verse-making had become fashionable just then—but wisely

committed them to the flames on making the acquaintance of Socrates.

It may well be doubted whether the author of the _Phaedrus_ and the

_Symposium_ would ever have attained eminence in metrical composition,

even had he lived in an age far more favourable to poetic inspiration

than that which came after the flowering time of Attic art. It seems

as if Plato, with all his fervour, fancy, and dramatic skill, lacked

the most essential quality of a singer; his finest passages are on a

level with the highest poetry, and yet they are separated from it by a

chasm more easily felt than described. Aristotle, whom we think of as

hard and dry and cold, sometimes comes much nearer to the true lyric

cry. And, as if to mark out Plato’s style still more distinctly from

every other, it is also deficient in oratorical power. The philosopher

evidently thought that he could beat the rhetoricians on their own

ground; if the _Menexenus_ be genuine, he tried to do so and failed;

and even without its testimony we are entitled to say as much on

the strength of shorter attempts. We must even take leave to doubt

whether dialogue, properly so called, was Plato’s forte. Where one

speaker is placed at such a height above the others as Socrates, or

the Eleatic Stranger, or the Athenian in the _Laws_, there cannot be

any real conversation. The other interlocutors are good listeners,

and serve to break the monotony of a continuous exposition by their

expressions of assent or even by their occasional inability to follow

the argument, but give no real help or stimulus. And when allowed to

offer an opinion of their own, they, too, lapse into a monologue,

addressed, as our silent trains of thought habitually are, to an

imaginary auditor whose sympathy and support are necessary but are

also secure. Yet if Plato’s style is neither exactly poetical, nor

oratorical, nor conversational, it has affinities with each of these

three varieties; it represents the common root from which they spring,

and brings us, better than any other species of composition, into

immediate contact with the mind of the writer. The Platonic Socrates

has eyes like those of a portrait which follow us wherever we turn, and

through which we can read his inmost soul, which is no other than the

universal reason of humanity in the delighted surprise of its first

awakening to self-conscious activity. The poet thinks and feels for us;

the orator makes our thoughts and feelings his own, and then restores

them to us in a concentrated form, ‘receiving in vapour what he gives

back in a flood.’ Plato removes every obstacle to the free development

of our faculties; he teaches us by his own example how to think and

to feel for ourselves. If Socrates personified philosophy, Plato has

reproduced the personification in artistic form with such masterly

effect that its influence has been extended through all ages and over

the whole civilised world. This portrait stands as an intermediary

between its original and the far-reaching effects indirectly due to his

dialectic inspiration, like that universal soul which Plato himself has

placed between the supreme artificer and the material world, that it

might bring the fleeting contents of space and time into harmony with

uncreated and everlasting ideas.

To paint Socrates at his highest and his best, it was necessary to

break through the narrow limits of his historic individuality, and to

show how, had they been presented to him, he would have dealt with

problems outside the experience of a home-staying Athenian citizen.

The founder of idealism—that is to say, the realisation of reason,

the systematic application of thought to life—had succeeded in his

task because he had embodied the noblest elements of the Athenian

Dêmos, orderliness, patriotism, self-control, and publicity of debate,

together with a receptive intelligence for improvements effected in

other states. But, just as the impulse which enabled those qualities to

tell decisively on Greek history at a moment of inestimable importance

came from the Athenian aristocracy, with its Dorian sympathies, its

adventurous ambition, and its keen attention to foreign affairs, so

also did Plato, carrying the same spirit into philosophy, bring the

dialectic method into contact with older and broader currents of

speculation, and employ it to recognise the whole spiritual activity of

his race.

A strong desire for reform must always be preceded by a deep

dissatisfaction with things as they are; and if the reform is to be

very sweeping the discontent must be equally comprehensive. Hence the

great renovators of human life have been remarkable for the severity

with which they have denounced the failings of the world where they

were placed, whether as regards persons, habits, institutions, or

beliefs. Yet to speak of their attitude as pessimistic would either

be unfair, or would betray an unpardonable inability to discriminate

between two utterly different theories of existence. Nothing can well

be more unlike the systematised pusillanimity of those lost souls,

without courage and without hope, who find a consolation for their own

failure in the belief that everything is a failure, than the fiery

energy which is drawn into a perpetual tension by the contrast of what

is with the vision of what yet may be. But if pessimism paralyses

every generous effort and aspiration by teaching that misery is the

irremediable lot of animated beings, or even, in the last analysis,

of all being, the opposing theory of optimism exercises as deadly an

influence when it induces men to believe that their present condition

is, on the whole, a satisfactory one, or that at worst wrong will be

righted without any criticism or interference on their part. Even

those who believe progress to have been, so far, the most certain

fact in human history, cannot blind themselves to the existence of

enormous forces ever tending to draw society back into the barbarism

and brutality of its primitive condition; and they know also, that

whatever ground we have won is due to the efforts of a small minority,

who were never weary of urging forward their more sluggish companions,

without caring what angry susceptibilities they might arouse—risking

recrimination, insult, and outrage, so that only, under whatever form,

whether of divine mandate or of scientific demonstration, the message

of humanity to her children might be delivered in time. Nor is it only

with immobility that they have had to contend. Gains in one direction

are frequently balanced by losses in another; while at certain periods

there is a distinct retrogression along the whole line. And it is well

if, amid the general decline to a lower level, sinister voices are not

heard proclaiming that the multitude may safely trust to their own

promptings, and that self-indulgence or self-will should be the only

law of life. It is also on such occasions that the rallying cry is

most needed, and that the born leaders of civilisation must put forth

their most strenuous efforts to arrest the disheartened fugitives and

to denounce the treacherous guides. It was in this aspect that Plato

viewed his age; and he set himself to continue the task which Socrates

had attempted, but had been trampled down in endeavouring to achieve.

The illustrious Italian poet and essayist, Leopardi, has observed

that the idea of the world as a vast confederacy banded together for

the repression of everything good and great and true, originated with

Jesus Christ.[122] It is surprising that so accomplished a Hellenist

should not have attributed the priority to Plato. It is true that

he does not speak of the world itself in Leopardi’s sense, because

to him it meant something different—a divinely created order which

it would have been blasphemy to revile; but the thing is everywhere

present to his thoughts under other names, and he pursues it with

relentless hostility. He looks on the great majority of the human race,

individually and socially, in their beliefs and in their practices,

as utterly corrupt, and blinded to such an extent that they are ready

to turn and rend any one who attempts to lead them into a better

path. The many ‘know not wisdom and virtue, and are always busy with

gluttony and sensuality. Like cattle, with their eyes always looking

down and their heads stooping, not, indeed, to the earth, but to the

dining-table, they fatten and feed and breed, and in their excessive

love of these delights they kick and butt at one another with horns and

hoofs which are made of iron; and they kill one another by reason of

their insatiable lust.’[123] Their ideal is the man who nurses up his

desires to the utmost intensity, and procures the means for gratifying

them by fraud or violence. The assembled multitude resembles a strong

and fierce brute expressing its wishes by inarticulate grunts, which

the popular leaders make it their business to understand and to comply

with.[J] A statesman of the nobler kind who should attempt to benefit

the people by thwarting their foolish appetites will be denounced as

a public enemy by the demagogues, and will stand no more chance of

acquittal than a physician if he were brought before a jury of children

by the pastry-cook.

That an Athenian, or, indeed, any Greek gentleman, should regard

the common people with contempt and aversion was nothing strange.

A generation earlier such feelings would have led Plato to look on

the overthrow of democracy and the establishment of an aristocratic

government as the remedy for every evil. The upper classes, accustomed

to decorate themselves with complimentary titles, had actually come

to believe that all who belonged to them were paragons of wisdom and

goodness. With the rule of the Thirty came a terrible awakening. In

a few months more atrocities were perpetrated by the oligarchs than

the Dêmos had been guilty of in as many generations. It was shown

that accomplished gentlemen like Critias were only distinguished from

the common herd by their greater impatience of opposition and by the

more destructive fury of their appetites. With Plato, at least, all

allusions on this head came to an end. He now ‘smiled at the claims

of long descent,’ considering that ‘every man has had thousands and

thousands of progenitors, and among them have been rich and poor, kings

and slaves, Hellenes and barbarians, many times over;’ and even the

possession of a large landed property ceased to inspire him with any

respect when he compared it with the surface of the whole earth.[K]

There still remained one form of government to be tried, the despotic

rule of a single individual. In the course of his travels Plato came

into contact with an able and powerful specimen of the tyrant class,

the elder Dionysius. A number of stories relating to their intercourse

have been preserved; but the different versions disagree very widely,

and none of them can be entirely trusted. It seems certain, however,

that Plato gave great offence to the tyrant by his freedom of speech,

that he narrowly escaped death, and that he was sold into slavery,

from which condition he was redeemed by the generosity of Anniceris, a

Cyrenaean philosopher. It is supposed that the scathing description in

which Plato has held up to everlasting infamy the unworthy possessor

of absolute power—a description long afterwards applied by Tacitus to

the vilest of the Roman emperors—was suggested by the type which had

come under his own observation in Sicily.

Of all existing constitutions that of Sparta approached nearest to the

ideal of Plato, or, rather, he regarded it as the least degraded. He

liked the conservatism of the Spartans, their rigid discipline, their

haughty courage, the participation of their daughters in gymnastic

exercises, the austerity of their manners, and their respect for old

age; but he found much to censure both in their ancient customs and

in the characteristics which the possession of empire had recently

developed among them. He speaks with disapproval of their exclusively

military organisation, of their contempt for philosophy, and of

the open sanction which they gave to practices barely tolerated at

Athens. And he also comments on their covetousness, their harshness

to inferiors, and their haste to throw off the restraints of the law

whenever detection could be evaded.[124]

So far we have spoken as if Plato regarded the various false polities

existing around him as so many fixed and disconnected types. This,

however, was not the case. The present state of things was bad enough,

but it threatened to become worse wherever worse was possible. The

constitutions exhibiting a mixture of good and evil contained within

themselves the seeds of a further corruption, and tended to pass

into the form standing next in order on the downward slope. Spartan

timocracy must in time become an oligarchy, to oligarchy would succeed

democracy, and this would end in tyranny, beyond which no further fall

was possible.[125] The degraded condition of Syracuse seemed likely

to be the last outcome of Hellenic civilisation. We know not how far

the gloomy forebodings of Plato may have been justified by his own

experience, but he sketched with prophetic insight the future fortunes

of the Roman Republic. Every phase of the progressive degeneration is

exemplified in its later history, and the order of their succession is

most faithfully preserved. Even his portraits of individual timocrats,

oligarchs, demagogues, and despots are reproduced to the life in the

pages of Plutarch, of Cicero, and of Tacitus.

If our critic found so little to admire in Hellas, still less did he

seek for the realisation of his dreams in the outlying world. The

lessons of Protagoras had not been wasted on him, and, unlike the

nature-worshippers of the eighteenth century, he never fell into the

delusion that wisdom and virtue had their home in primaeval forests or

in corrupt Oriental despotisms. For him, Greek civilisation, with all

its faults, was the best thing that human nature had produced, the only

hearth of intellectual culture, the only soil where new experiments

in education and government could be tried. He could go down to the

roots of thought, of language, and of society; he could construct a new

style, a new system, and a new polity, from the foundation up; he could

grasp all the tendencies that came under his immediate observation, and

follow them out to their utmost possibilities of expansion; but his

vast powers of analysis and generalisation remained subject to this

restriction, that a Hellene he was and a Hellene he remained to the end.

A Hellene, and an aristocrat as well. Or, using the word in its most

comprehensive sense, we may say that he was an aristocrat all round,

a believer in inherent superiorities of race, sex, birth, breeding,

and age. Everywhere we find him restlessly searching after the wisest,

purest, best, until at last, passing beyond the limits of existence

itself, words fail him to describe the absolute ineffable only good,

not being and not knowledge, but creating and inspiring both. Thus it

came to pass that his hopes of effecting a thorough reform did not

lie in an appeal to the masses, but in the selection and seclusion

from evil influences of a few intelligent youths. Here we may detect

a remarkable divergence between him and his master. Socrates, himself

a man of the people, did not like to hear the Athenians abused. If

they went wrong, it was, he said, the fault of their leaders.[126] But

according to Plato, it was from the people themselves that corruption

originally proceeded, it was they who instilled false lessons into the

most intelligent minds, teaching them from their very infancy to prefer

show to substance, success to merit, and pleasure to virtue; making

the study of popular caprice the sure road to power, and poisoning

the very sources of morality by circulating blasphemous stories about

the gods—stories which represented them as weak, sensual, capricious

beings, setting an example of iniquity themselves, and quite willing to

pardon it in men on condition of going shares in the spoil. The poets

had a great deal to do with the manufacture of these discreditable

myths; and towards poets as a class Plato entertained feelings of

mingled admiration and contempt. As an artist, he was powerfully

attracted by the beauty of their works; as a theologian, he believed

them to be the channels of divine inspiration, and sometimes also the

guardians of a sacred tradition; but as a critic, he was shocked at

their incapacity to explain the meaning of their own works, especially

when it was coupled with ridiculous pretensions to omniscience; and he

regarded the imitative character of their productions as illustrating,

in a particularly flagrant manner, that substitution of appearance for

reality which, according to his philosophy, was the deepest source of

error and evil.

If private society exercised a demoralising influence on its most

gifted members, and in turn suffered a still further debasement by

listening to their opinions, the same fatal interchange of corruption

went on still more actively in public life, so far, at least, as

Athenian democracy was concerned. The people would tolerate no

statesman who did not pamper their appetites; and the statesmen, for

their own ambitious purposes, attended solely to the material wants

of the people, entirely neglecting their spiritual interests. In this

respect, Pericles, the most admired of all, had been the chief of

sinners; for ‘he was the first who gave the people pay and made them

idle and cowardly, and encouraged them in the love of talk and of

money.’ Accordingly, a righteous retribution overtook him, for ‘at the

very end of his life they convicted him of theft, and almost put him

to death.’ So it had been with the other boasted leaders, Miltiades,

Themistocles, and Cimon; all suffered from what is falsely called the

ingratitude of the people. Like injudicious keepers, they had made the

animal committed to their charge fiercer instead of gentler, until

its savage propensities were turned against themselves. Or, changing

the comparison, they were like purveyors of luxury, who fed the State

on a diet to which its present ‘ulcerated and swollen condition’

was due. They had ‘filled the city full of harbours, and docks, and

walls, and revenues and all that, and had left no room for justice

and temperance.’ One only among the elder statesmen, Aristeides, is

excepted from this sweeping condemnation, and, similarly, Socrates is

declared to have been the only true statesman of his time.[127]

On turning from the conduct of State affairs to the administration of

justice in the popular law courts, we find the same tale of iniquity

repeated, but this time with more telling satire, as Plato is speaking

from his own immediate experience. He considers that, under the

manipulation of dexterous pleaders, judicial decisions had come to be

framed with a total disregard of righteousness. That disputed claims

should be submitted to a popular tribunal and settled by counting

heads was, indeed, according to his view, a virtual admission that no

absolute standard of justice existed; that moral truth varied with

individual opinion. And this is how the character of the lawyer had

been moulded in consequence:—

He has become keen and shrewd; he has learned how to flatter his

master in word and indulge him in deed; but his soul is small and

unrighteous. His slavish condition has deprived him of growth and

uprightness and independence; dangers and fears which were too much

for his truth and honesty came upon him in early years, when the

tenderness of youth was unequal to them, and he has been driven

into crooked ways; from the first he has practised deception and

retaliation, and has become stunted and warped. And so he has passed

out of youth into manhood, having no soundness in him, and is now, as

he thinks, a master in wisdom.[128]

To make matters worse, the original of this unflattering portrait

was rapidly becoming the most powerful man in the State. Increasing

specialisation had completely separated the military and political

functions which had formerly been discharged by a single eminent

individual, and the business of legislation was also becoming a

distinct profession. No orator could obtain a hearing in the assembly

who had not a technical acquaintance with the subject of deliberation,

if it admitted of technical treatment, which was much more frequently

the case now than in the preceding generation. As a consequence of this

revolution, the ultimate power of supervision and control was passing

into the hands of the law courts, where general questions could be

discussed in a more popular style, and often from a wider or a more

sentimental point of view. They were, in fact, beginning to wield an

authority like that exercised until quite lately by the press in modern

Europe, only that its action was much more direct and formidable. A

vote of the Ecclêsia could only deprive a statesman of office: a vote

of the Dicastery might deprive him of civil rights, home, freedom,

property, or even life itself. Moreover, with the loss of empire and

the decline of public spirit, private interests had come to attract a

proportionately larger share of attention; and unobtrusive citizens

who had formerly escaped from the storms of party passion, now found

themselves marked out as a prey by every fluent and dexterous pleader

who could find an excuse for dragging them before the courts. Rhetoric

was hailed as the supreme art, enabling its possessor to dispense with

every other study, and promising young men were encouraged to look on

it as the most paying line they could take up. Even those whose civil

status or natural timidity precluded them from speaking in public could

gain an eminent and envied position by composing speeches for others to

deliver. Behind these, again, stood the professed masters of rhetoric,

claiming to direct the education and the whole public opinion of the

age by their lectures and pamphlets. Philosophy was not excluded from

their system of training, but it occupied a strictly subordinate place.

Studied in moderation, they looked on it as a bracing mental exercise

and a repertory of sounding commonplaces, if not as a solvent for

old-fashioned notions of honesty; but a close adherence to the laws of

logic or to the principles of morality seemed puerile pedantry to the

elegant stylists who made themselves the advocates of every crowned

filibuster abroad, while preaching a policy of peace at any price at

home.

It is evident that the fate of Socrates was constantly in Plato’s

thoughts, and greatly embittered his scorn for the multitude as

well as for those who made themselves its ministers and minions. It

so happened that his friend’s three accusers had been respectively

a poet, a statesman, and a rhetor; thus aptly typifying to the

philosopher’s lively imagination the triad of charlatans in whom

public opinion found its appropriate representatives and spokesmen.

Yet Plato ought consistently to have held that the condemnation of

Socrates was, equally with the persecution of Pericles, a satire

on the teaching which, after at least thirty years’ exercise, had

left its auditors more corrupt than it found them. In like manner

the ostracism of Aristeides might be set against similar sentences

passed on less puritanical statesmen. For the purpose of the argument

it would have been sufficient to show that in existing circumstances

the office of public adviser was both thankless and dangerous. We

must always remember that when Plato is speaking of past times he is

profoundly influenced by aristocratic traditions, and also that under a

retrospective disguise he is really attacking contemporary abuses. And

if, even then, his denunciations seem excessive, their justification

may be found in that continued decay of public virtue which, not

long afterwards, brought about the final catastrophe of Athenian

independence.

IV.

To illustrate the relation in which Plato stood towards his own times,

we have already had occasion to draw largely on the productions of

his maturer manhood. We have now to take up the broken thread of our

systematic exposition, and to trace the development of his philosophy

through that wonderful series of compositions which entitle him to

rank among the greatest writers, the most comprehensive thinkers, and

the purest religious teachers of all ages. In the presence of such

glory a mere divergence of opinion must not be permitted to influence

our judgment. High above all particular truths stands the principle

that truth itself exists, and it was for this that Plato fought. If

there were others more completely emancipated from superstition, none

so persistently appealed to the logic before which superstition must

ultimately vanish. If his schemes for the reconstruction of society

ignore many obvious facts, they assert with unrivalled force the

necessary supremacy of public welfare over private pleasure; and their

avowed utilitarianism offers a common ground to the rival reformers

who will have nothing to do with the mysticism of their metaphysical

foundation. Those, again, who hold, like the youthful Plato himself,

that the ultimate interpretation of existence belongs to a science

transcending human reason, will here find the doctrines of their

religion anticipated as in a dream. And even those who, standing aloof

both from theology and philosophy, live, as they imagine, for beauty

alone, will observe with interest how the spirit of Greek art survived

in the denunciation of its idolatry, and ‘the light that never was

on sea or land,’ after fading away from the lower levels of Athenian

fancy, came once more to suffuse the frozen steeps of dialectic with

its latest and divinest rays.

The glowing enthusiasm of Plato is, however, not entirely derived from

the poetic traditions of his native city; or perhaps we should rather

say that he and the great writers who preceded him drew from a common

fount of inspiration. Mr. Emerson, in one of the most penetrating

criticisms ever written on our philosopher,[129] has pointed out the

existence of two distinct elements in the Platonic Dialogues—one

dispersive, practical, prosaic; the other mystical, absorbing,

centripetal. The American scholar is, however, as we think, quite

mistaken when he attributes the second of these tendencies to Asiatic

influence. It is extremely doubtful whether Plato ever travelled

farther east than Egypt; it is probable that his stay in that country

was not of long duration; and it is certain that he did not acquire a

single metaphysical idea from its inhabitants. He liked their rigid

conservatism; he liked their institution of a dominant priesthood; he

liked their system of popular education, and the place which it gave

to mathematics made him look with shame on the ‘swinish ignorance’ of

his own countrymen in that respect;[130] but on the whole he classes

them among the races exclusively devoted to money-making, and in

aptitude for philosophy he places them far below the Greeks. Very

different were the impressions brought home from his visits to Sicily

and Southern Italy. There he became acquainted with modes of thought

in which the search after hidden resemblances and analogies was a

predominant passion; there the existence of a central unity underlying

all phenomena was maintained, as against sense and common opinion,

with the intensity of a religious creed; there alone speculation was

clothed in poetic language; there first had an attempt been made to

carry thought into life by associating it with a reform of manners and

beliefs. There, too, the arts of dance and song had assumed a more

orderly and solemn aspect; the chorus received its final constitution

from a Sicilian master; and the loftiest strains of Greek lyric poetry

were composed for recitation in the streets of Sicilian cities or at

the courts of Sicilian kings. Then, with the rise of rhetoric, Greek

prose was elaborated by Sicilian teachers into a sort of rhythmical

composition, combining rich imagery with studied harmonies and

contrasts of sense and sound. And as the hold of Asiatic civilisation

on eastern Hellas grew weaker, the attention of her foremost spirits

was more and more attracted to this new region of wonder and romance.

The stream of colonisation set thither in a steady flow; the scenes

of mythical adventure were rediscovered in Western waters; and it was

imagined that, by grasping the resources of Sicily, an empire extending

over the whole Mediterranean might be won. Perhaps, without being

too fanciful, we may trace a likeness between the daring schemes of

Alcibiades and the more remote but not more visionary kingdom suggested

by an analogous inspiration to the idealising soul of Plato. Each had

learned to practise, although for far different purposes, the royal art

of Socrates—the mastery over men’s minds acquired by a close study of

their interests, passions, and beliefs. But the ambition of the one

defeated his own aim, to the destruction of his country and of himself;

while the other drew into Athenian thought whatever of Western force

and fervour was needed for the accomplishment of its imperial task.

We may say of Plato what he has said of his own Theaetêtus, that ‘he

moves surely and smoothly and successfully in the path of knowledge

and inquiry; always making progress like the noiseless flow of a river

of oil’;[131] but everywhere beside or beneath that placid lubricating

flow we may trace the action of another current, where still sparkles,

fresh and clear as at first, the fiery Sicilian wine.

It will be remembered that in an earlier section of this chapter we

accompanied Plato to a period when he had provisionally adopted a

theory in which the Protagorean contention that virtue can be taught

was confirmed and explained by the Socratic contention that virtue is

knowledge; while this knowledge again was interpreted in the sense of

a hedonistic calculus, a prevision and comparison of the pleasures and

pains consequent on our actions. We have now to trace the lines of

thought by which he was guided to a different conception of ethical

science.

After resolving virtue into knowledge of pleasure, the next questions

which would present themselves to so keen a thinker were obviously,

What is knowledge? and What is pleasure? The _Theaetêtus_ is chiefly

occupied with a discussion of the various answers already given to

the first of these enquiries. It seems, therefore, to come naturally

next after the _Protagoras_; and our conjecture receives a further

confirmation when we find that here also a large place is given to

the opinions of the Sophist after whom that dialogue is named; the

chief difference being that the points selected for controversy are

of a speculative rather than of a practical character. There is,

however, a close connexion between the argument by which Protagoras

had endeavoured to prove that all mankind are teachers of virtue, and

his more general principle that man is the measure of all things. And

perhaps it was the more obvious difficulties attending the latter view

which led Plato, after some hesitation, to reject the former along

with it. In an earlier chapter we gave some reasons for believing

that Protagoras did not erect every individual into an arbiter of

truth in the sweeping sense afterwards put upon his words. He was

probably opposing a human to a theological or a naturalistic standard.

Nevertheless, it does not follow that Plato was fighting with a

shadow when he pressed the Protagorean dictum to its most literal

interpretation. There are plenty of people still who would maintain

it to that extent. Wherever and whenever the authority of ancient

traditions is broken down, the doctrine that one man’s opinion is as

good as another’s immediately takes its place; or rather the doctrine

in question is a survival of traditionalism in an extremely pulverised

form. And when we are told that the majority must be right—which is

a very different principle from holding that the majority should be

obeyed—we may take it as a sign that the loose particles are beginning

to coalesce again. The substitution of an individual for a universal

standard of truth is, according to Plato, a direct consequence of

the theory which identifies knowledge with sense-perception. It is,

at any rate, certain that the most vehement assertors of the former

doctrine are also those who are fondest of appealing to what they and

their friends have seen, heard, or felt; and the more educated among

them place enormous confidence in statistics. They are also fond of

repeating the adage that an ounce of fact is worth a ton of theory,

without considering that theory alone can furnish the balance in which

facts are weighed. Plato does not go very deep into the _rationale_ of

observation, nor in the infancy of exact science was it to be expected

that he should. He fully recognised the presence of two factors, an

objective and a subjective, in every sensation, but lost his hold on

the true method in attempting to trace a like dualism through the

whole of consciousness. Where we should distinguish between the mental

energies and the physical processes underlying them, or between the

elements respectively contributed to every cognition by immediate

experience and reflection, he conceived the inner and outer worlds as

two analogous series related to one another as an image to its original.

At this last point we touch on the final generalisation by which Plato

extended the dialectic method to all existence, and readmitted into

philosophy the earlier speculations provisionally excluded from it

by Socrates. The cross-examining elenchus, at first applied only to

individuals, had been turned with destructive effect on every class,

every institution, and every polity, until the whole of human life

was made to appear one mass of self-contradiction, instability, and

illusion. It had been held by some that the order of nature offered

a contrast and a correction to this bewildering chaos. Plato, on the

other hand, sought to show that the ignorance and evil prevalent among

men were only a part of the imperfection necessarily belonging to

derivative existence of every kind. For this purpose the philosophy

of Heracleitus proved a welcome auxiliary. The pupil of Socrates had

been taught in early youth by Cratylus, an adherent of the Ephesian

school, that movement, relativity, and the conjunction of opposites

are the very conditions under which Nature works. We may conjecture

that Plato did not at first detect any resemblance between the

Heracleitean flux and the mental bewilderment produced or brought to

light by the master of cross-examination. But his visit to Italy would

probably enable him to take a new view of the Ionian speculations,

by bringing him into contact with schools maintaining a directly

opposite doctrine. The Eleatics held that existence remained eternally

undivided, unmoved, and unchanged. The Pythagoreans arranged all

things according to a strained and rigid antithetical construction.

Then came the identifying flash.[132] Unchangeable reality, divine

order, mathematical truth—these were the objective counterpart of

the Socratic definitions, of the consistency which Socrates introduced

into conduct. The Heracleitean system applied to phenomena only; and

it faithfully reflected the incoherent beliefs and disorderly actions

of uneducated men. We are brought into relation with the fluctuating

sea of generated and perishing natures by sense and opinion, and these

reproduce, in their irreconcilable diversity, the shifting character of

the objects with which they are conversant. Whatever we see and feel

is a mixture of being and unreality; it is, and is not, at the same

time. Sensible magnitudes are equal or greater or less according as the

standard of comparison is chosen. Yet the very act of comparison shows

that there is something in ourselves deeper than mere sense; something

to which all individual sensations are referred as to a common centre,

and in which their images are stored up. Knowledge, then, can no

longer be identified with sensation, since the mental reproductions of

external objects are apprehended in the absence of their originals, and

since thought possesses the further faculty of framing abstract notions

not representing any sensible objects at all.

We need not follow Plato’s investigations into the meaning of knowledge

and the causes of illusion any further; especially as they do not lead,

in this instance, to any positive conclusion. The general tendency is

to seek for truth within rather than without; and to connect error

partly with the disturbing influence of sense-impressions on the higher

mental faculties, partly with the inherent confusion and instability

of the phenomena whence those impressions are derived. Our principal

concern here is to note the expansive power of generalisation which

was carrying philosophy back again from man to Nature—the deep-seated

contempt of Plato for public opinion—and the incipient differentiation

of demonstrated from empirical truth.

A somewhat similar vein of reflection is worked out in the _Cratylus_,

a Dialogue presenting some important points of contact with the

_Theaetêtus_, and probably belonging to the same period. There is the

same constant reference to Heracleitus, whose philosophy is here also

treated as in great measure, but not entirely, true; and the opposing

system of Parmenides is again mentioned, though much more briefly, as

a valuable set-off against its extravagances. The _Cratylus_ deals

exclusively with language, just as the _Theaetêtus_ had dealt with

sensation and mental imagery, but in such a playful and ironical tone

that its speculative importance is likely to be overlooked. Some of the

Greek philosophers seem to have thought that the study of things might

advantageously be replaced by the study of words, which were supposed

to have a natural and necessary connexion with their accepted meanings.

This view was particularly favoured by the Heracleiteans, who found,

or fancied that they found, a confirmation of their master’s teaching

in etymology. Plato professes to adopt the theory in question, and

supports it with a number of derivations which to us seem ludicrously

absurd, but which may possibly have been transcribed from the pages

of contemporary philologists. At last, however, he turns round and

shows that other verbal arguments, equally good, might be adduced on

behalf of Parmenides. But the most valuable part of the discussion is

a protest against the whole theory that things can be studied through

their names. Plato justly observes that an image, to be perfect,

should not reproduce its original, but only certain aspects of it;

that the framers of language were not infallible; and that we are just

as competent to discover the nature of things as they could be. One

can imagine the delight with which he would have welcomed the modern

discovery that sensations, too, are a language; and that the associated

groups into which they most readily gather are determined less by the

necessary connexions of things in themselves than by the exigencies of

self-preservation and reproduction in sentient beings.

Through all his criticisms on the popular sources of

information—sense, language and public opinion—Plato refers to an

ideal of perfect knowledge which he assumes without being able to

define it. It must satisfy the negative condition of being free from

self-contradiction, but further than this we cannot go. Yet, in the

hands of a metaphysician, no more than this was required to reconstruct

the world. The demand for consistency explains the practical philosophy

of Socrates. It also explains, under another form, the philosophy,

both practical and speculative, of his disciple. Identity and the

correlative of identity, difference, gradually came to cover with their

manifold combinations all knowledge, all life, and all existence.

It was from mathematical science that the light of certainty first

broke. Socrates had not encouraged the study of mathematics, either

pure or applied; nor, if we may judge from some disparaging allusions

to Hippias and his lectures in the _Protagoras_, did Plato at first

regard it with any particular favour. He may have acquired some notions

of arithmetic and geometry at school; but the intimate acquaintance

with, and deep interest in them, manifested throughout his later works,

probably dates from his visits to Italy, Sicily, Cyrênê, and Egypt.

In each of these places the exact sciences were cultivated with more

assiduity than at Athens; in southern Italy they had been brought into

close connexion with philosophy by a system of mystical interpretation.

The glory of discovering their true speculative significance was

reserved for Plato. Just as he had detected a profound analogy between

the Socratic scepticism and the Heracleitean flux, so also, by

another vivid intuition, he saw in the definitions and demonstrations

of geometry a type of true reasoning, a particular application of

the Socratic logic. Thus the two studies were brought into fruitful

reaction, the one gaining a wider applicability, and the other an

exacter method of proof. The mathematical spirit ultimately proved

too strong for Plato, and petrified his philosophy into a lifeless

formalism; but no extraneous influence helped so much to bring about

the complete maturity of his constructive powers, in no direction has

he more profoundly influenced the thought of later ages.

Both the _Theaetêtus_ and the _Cratylus_ contain allusions to

mathematical reasoning, but its full significance is first exhibited

in the _Meno_. Here the old question, whether virtue can be taught,

is again raised, to be discussed from an entirely new point of view,

and resolved into the more general question, Can anything be taught?

The answer is, Yes and No. You may stimulate the native activity of

the intellect, but you cannot create it. Take a totally uneducated

man, and, under proper guidance, he shall discover the truths of

geometry for himself, by virtue of their self-evident clearness. Being

independent of any traceable experience, the elementary principles of

this science, of all science, must have been acquired in some antenatal

period, or rather they were never acquired at all, they belong to the

very nature of the soul herself. The doctrine here unfolded had a

great future before it; and it has never, perhaps, been discussed with

so much eagerness as during the last half-century among ourselves.

The masters of English thought have placed the issue first raised by

Plato in the very front of philosophical controversy; and the general

public have been brought to feel that their dearest interests hang on

its decision. The subject has, however, lost much of its adventitious

interest to those who know that the _à priori_ position was turned, a

hundred years ago, by Kant. The philosopher of Königsberg showed that,

granting knowledge to be composed of two elements, mind adds nothing

to outward experience but its own forms, the system of connexions

according to which it groups phenomena. Deprive these forms of the

content given to them by feeling, and the soul will be left beating her

wings in a vacuum. The doctrine that knowledge is not a dead deposit

in consciousness or memory, but a living energy whereby phenomena

are, to use Kant’s words, gathered up into the synthetic unity of

apperception, has since found a physiological basis in the theory of

central innervation. And the experiential school of psychology have

simultaneously come to recognise the existence of fixed conditions

under which consciousness works and grows, and which, in the last

analysis, resolve themselves into the apprehension of resemblance,

difference, coexistence, and succession. The most complex cognition

involves no more than these four categories; and it is probable that

they all co-operate in the most elementary perception.

The truths here touched on seem to have been dimly present to the mind

of Plato. He never doubts that all knowledge must, in some way or

other, be derived from experience; and, accordingly, he assumes that

what cannot have been learned in this world was learned in another. But

he does not (in the _Meno_ at least) suppose that the process ever had

a beginning. It would seem that he is trying to express in figurative

language the distinction, lost almost as soon as found, between

intelligence and the facts on which intelligence is exercised, An

examination of the steps by which Meno’s slave is brought to perceive,

without being directly told, the truth of the Pythagorean theorem, will

show that his share in the demonstration is limited to the intuition

of certain numerical equalities and inequalities. Now, to Plato, the

perception of sameness and difference meant everything. He would have

denied that the sensible world presented examples of these relations in

their ideal absoluteness and purity. In tracing back their apprehension

to the self-reflection of the soul, the consciousness of personal

identity, he would not have transgressed the limits of a legitimate

enquiry. But self-consciousness involved a possible abstraction from

disturbing influences, which he interpreted as a real separation

between mind and matter; and, to make it more complete, an independent

pre-existence of the former. Nor was this all. Since knowledge is of

likeness in difference, then the central truth of things, the reality

underlying all appearance, must be an abiding identity recognised by

the soul through her previous communion with it in a purer world. The

inevitable tendency of two identities, one subjective and the other

objective, was to coalesce in an absolute unity where all distinctions

of time and space would have disappeared, carrying the whole mythical

machinery along with them; and Plato’s logic is always hovering on

the verge of such a consummation without being able fully to accept

it. Still, the mystical tendency, which it was reserved for Plotinus

to carry out in its entirety, is always present, though restrained by

other motives, working for the ascertainment of uniformity in theory

and for the enforcement of uniformity in practice.

We have accompanied Plato to a point where he begins to see his

way towards a radical reconstruction of all existing beliefs and

institutions. In the next chapter we shall attempt to show how

far he succeeded in this great purpose, how much, in his positive

contributions to thought is of permanent, and how much of merely

biographical or literary value.

FOOTNOTES:

[114] _The Dialogues of Plato translated into English._ By B. Jowett,

M. A. 2nd ed., 1875. Zeller, _Die Philosophie der Griechen_. Zweiter

Theil, erste Abtheilung. _Plato und die alte Academie_, 3rd ed., 1875.

[115] Krohn, _Der Platonische Staat_, Halle 1876. [I know this work

only through Chiapelli, _Della Interpretazione panteistica di Platone_,

Florence, 1881.]

[116] III., 418.

[117] _Phaedr._, p. 274 B ff.

[118] See Zeller’s note on the θεία μοῖρα, _op. cit._ p. 497.

[119] The _Charmides_, _Laches_, _Euthyphro_, and _Lysis_.

[120] P. 49, A ff. Zeller, 142.

[121] _Charmides_, 161 E; _Lysis_, 212 C.

[122] _Pensieri_, lxxxiv and lxxxv.

[123] _Repub._, 586, A. Jowett, III, p. 481.

[124] Zeller, _op. cit._, 777-8.

[125] _Repub._, VIII. and IX.

[126] Xenophon, _Mem._, III., v., 18.

[127] _Gorgias_, 515, C., ff. Jowett, II., 396-400.

[128] _Theaetêtus_, 173, A. Jowett, IV., 322.

[129] The lecture on Plato in _Representative Man_.

[130] _Legg._ 819, D. Jowett, V., 390.

[131] _Theaet._, 144. Jowett’s Transl.

[132] This expression is borrowed from Prof. Bain. See the chapter on

Association by Resemblance in _The Senses and the Intellect_.

[133] _Legg._ 716, C.