PLATO AS A REFORMER.
I.
In the last chapter we considered the philosophy of Plato chiefly
under its critical and negative aspects. We saw how it was exclusively
from that side that he at first apprehended and enlarged the dialectic
of Socrates, how deeply his scepticism was coloured by the religious
reaction of the age, and how he attempted, out of his master’s mouth,
to overturn the positive teaching of the master himself. We saw how,
in the _Protagoras_, he sketched a theory of ethics, which was no
sooner completed than it became the starting-point of a still more
extended and arduous enquiry. We followed the widening horizon of his
speculations until they embraced the whole contemporary life of Hellas,
and involved it in a common condemnation as either hopelessly corrupt,
or containing within itself the seeds of corruption. We then saw how,
by a farther generalisation, he was led to look for the sources of
error in the laws of man’s sensuous nature and of the phenomenal world
with which it holds communion; how, moreover, under the guidance of
suggestions coming both from within and from without, he reverted to
the earlier schools of Greek thought, and brought their results into
parallelism with the main lines of Socratic dialectic. And finally,
we watched him planting a firm foothold on the basis of mathematical
demonstration; seeking in the very constitution of the soul itself for
a derivation of the truths which sensuous experience could not impart,
and winning back from a more profoundly reasoned religion the hope,
the self-confidence, the assurance of perfect knowledge, which had been
formerly surrendered in deference to the demands of a merely external
and traditional faith. That God alone is wise, and by consequence alone
good, might still remain a fixed principle with Plato; but it ceased
to operate as a restraint on human aspiration when he had come to
recognise an essential unity among all forms of conscious life, which,
though it might be clouded and forgotten, could never be entirely
effaced. And when Plato tells us, at the close of his career, that God,
far more than any individual man, is the measure of all things,[133]
who can doubt that he had already learned to identify the human and
divine essences in the common notion of a universal soul?
The germ of this new dogmatism was present in Plato’s mind from
the very beginning, and was partly an inheritance from older forms
of thought. The _Apologia_ had reproduced one important feature in
the positive teaching of Socrates—the distinction between soul
and body, and the necessity of attending to the former rather than
to the latter: and this had now acquired such significance as to
leave no standing-room for the agnosticism with which it had been
incompatible from the first. The same irresistible force of expansion
which had brought the human soul into communion with absolute truth,
was to be equally verified in a different direction. Plato was too
much interested in practical questions to be diverted from them long
by any theoretical philosophy; or, perhaps, we should rather say
that this interest had accompanied and inspired him throughout. It
is from the essential relativity of mind, the profound craving for
intellectual sympathy with other minds, that all mystical imaginations
and super-subtle abstractions take rise; so that, when the strain of
transcendent absorption and ecstasy is relaxed under the chilling
but beneficent contact of earthly experience, they become condensed
into ideas for the reconstitution of life and society on a basis of
reciprocity, of self-restraint, and of self-devotion to a commonwealth
greater and more enduring than any individual, while, at the same
time, presenting to each in objective form the principle by virtue of
which only, instead of being divided, he can become reconciled with
himself. Here we have the creed of all philosophy, whether theological,
metaphysical, or positive, that there is, or that there should be, this
threefold unity of feeling, of action, and of thought, of the soul,
of society, and of universal existence, to win which is everlasting
life, while to be without it is everlasting death. This creed must be
re-stated and re-interpreted at every revolution of thought. We have to
see how it was, for the first time, stated and interpreted by Plato.
The principal object of Plato’s negative criticism had been to
emphasise the distinction between reality and appearance in the world
without, between sense, or imagination, and reason in the human soul.
True to the mediatorial spirit of Greek thought, his object now was to
bridge over the seemingly impassable gulf. We must not be understood to
say that these two distinct, and to some extent contrasted, tendencies
correspond to two definitely divided periods of his life. It is evident
that the tasks of dissection and reconstruction were often carried on
conjointly, and represented two aspects of an indivisible process.
But on the whole there is good reason to believe that Plato, like
other men, was more inclined to pull to pieces in his youth and to
build up in his later days. We are, therefore, disposed to agree with
those critics who assign both the _Phaedrus_ and the _Symposium_ to a
comparatively advanced stage of Platonic speculation. It is less easy
to decide which of the two was composed first, for there seems to be a
greater maturity of thought in the one and of style in the other. For
our purposes it will be most convenient to consider them together.
We have seen how Plato came to look on mathematics as an introduction
to absolute knowledge. He now discovered a parallel method of approach
towards perfect wisdom in an order of experience which to most persons
might seem as far as possible removed from exact science—in those
passionate feelings which were excited in the Greek imagination by the
spectacle of youthful beauty, without distinction of sex. There was,
at least among the Athenians, a strong intellectual element in the
attachments arising out of such feelings; and the strange anomaly might
often be seen of a man devoting himself to the education of a youth
whom he was, in other respects, doing his utmost to corrupt. Again, the
beauty by which a Greek felt most fascinated came nearer to a visible
embodiment of mind than any that has ever been known, and as such could
be associated with the purest philosophical aspirations. And, finally,
the passion of love in its normal manifestations is an essentially
generic instinct, being that which carries an individual most entirely
out of himself, making him instrumental to the preservation of the race
in forms of ever-increasing comeliness and vigour; so that, given a
wise training and a wide experience, the maintenance of a noble breed
may safely be entrusted to its infallible selection.[134] All these
points of view have been developed by Plato with such copiousness
of illustration and splendour of language that his name is still
associated in popular fancy with an ideal of exalted and purified
desire.
So far, however, we only stand on the threshold of Platonic love. The
earthly passion, being itself a kind of generalisation, is our first
step in the ascent to that highest stage of existence where wisdom
and virtue and happiness are one—the good to which all other goods
are related as means to an end. But love is not only an introduction
to philosophy, it is a type of philosophy itself. Both are conditions
intermediate between vacuity and fulfilment; desire being by its very
nature dissatisfied, and vanishing at the instant that its object
is attained. The philosopher is a lover of wisdom, and therefore not
wise; and yet not wholly ignorant, for he knows that he knows nothing.
Thus we seem to be thrown back on the standpoint of Plato’s earliest
agnosticism. Nevertheless, if the _Symposium_ agrees nominally with
the _Apologia_, in reality it marks a much more advanced point of
speculation. The idea of what knowledge is has begun to assume a much
clearer expression. We gather from various hints and suggestions
that it is the perception of likeness; the very process of ascending
generalisation typified by intellectual love.
It is worthy of remark that in the Platonic Erôs we have the germ—or
something more than the germ—of Aristotle’s whole metaphysical
system.[135] According to the usual law of speculative evolution, what
was subjective in the one becomes objective in the other. With Plato
the passion for knowledge had been merely the guiding principle of a
few chosen spirits. With Aristotle it is the living soul of Nature,
the secret spring of movement, from the revolution of the outermost
starry sphere to the decomposition and recomposition of our mutable
terrestrial elements; and from these again through the whole scale of
organic life, up to the moral culture of man and the search for an
ideally-constituted state. What enables all these myriad movements
to continue through eternity, returning ever in an unbroken circle
on themselves, is the yearning of unformed matter—that is to say,
of unrealised power—towards the absolute unchanging actuality,
the self-thinking thought, unmoved, but moving every other form of
existence by the desire to participate in its ineffable perfection.
Born of the Hellenic enthusiasm for beauty, this wonderful conception
subsequently became incorporated with the official teaching of Catholic
theology. What had once been a theme for ribald merriment or for
rhetorical ostentation among the golden youth of Athens, furnished
the motive for his most transcendent meditations to the Angel of the
Schools; but the fire which lurked under the dusty abstractions of
Aquinas needed the touch of a poet and a lover before it could be
rekindled into flame. The eyes of Beatrice completed what the dialectic
of Plato had begun; and the hundred cantos of her adorer found their
fitting close in the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
We must, however, observe that, underlying all these poetical
imaginations, there is a deeper and wider law of human nature to which
they unconsciously bear witness—the intimate connexion of religious
mysticism with the passion of love. By this we do not mean the constant
interference of the one with the other, whether for the purpose of
stimulation, as with the naturalistic religions, or for the purpose
of restraint, as with the ethical religions; but we mean that they
seem to divide between them a common fund of nervous energy, so that
sometimes their manifestations are inextricably confounded, as in
certain debased forms of modern Christianity; sometimes they utterly
exclude one another; and sometimes, which is the most frequent case of
any, the one is transformed into the other, their substantial identity
and continuity being indicated very frankly by their use of the same
language, the same ritual, and the same aesthetic decoration. And this
will show how the decay of religious belief may be accompanied by
an outbreak of moral licence, without our being obliged to draw the
inference that passion can only be held in check by irrational beliefs,
or by organisations whose supremacy is fatal to industrial, political,
and intellectual progress. For, if our view of the case be correct,
the passion was not really restrained, but only turned in a different
direction, and frequently nourished into hysterical excess; so that,
with the inevitable decay of theology, it returns to its old haunts,
bringing with it seven devils worse than the first. After the Crusades
came the Courts of Love; after the Dominican and Franciscan movements,
the Renaissance; after Puritanism, the Restoration; after Jesuitism,
the Regency. Nor is this all. The passion of which we are speaking,
when abnormally developed and unbalanced by severe intellectual
exercise, is habitually accompanied by delirious jealousy, by cruelty,
and by deceit. On taking the form of religion, the influence of its
evil associates immediately becomes manifest in the suppression of
alien creeds, in the tortures inflicted on their adherents, and in the
maxim that no faith need be kept with a heretic. Persecution has been
excused on the ground that any means were justifiable for the purpose
of saving souls from eternal torment. But how came it to be believed
that such a consequence was involved in a mere error of judgment? The
faith did not create the intolerance, but the intolerance created
the faith, and so gave an idealised expression to the jealous fury
accompanying a passion which no spiritual alchemy can purify from
its original affinities. It is not by turning this most terrible
instinct towards a supernatural object that we should combat it, but by
developing the active and masculine in preference to the emotional and
feminine side of our nervous organisation.[136]
In addition to its other great lessons, the _Symposium_ has afforded
Plato an opportunity for contrasting his own method of philosophising
with pre-Socratic modes of thought. For it consists of a series of
discourses in praise of love, so arranged as to typify the manner in
which Greek speculation, after beginning with mythology, subsequently
advanced to physical theories of phenomena, then passed from the
historical to the contemporary method, asking, not whence did things
come, but what are they in themselves; and finally arrived at the
logical standpoint of analysis, classification, and induction.
The nature of dialectic is still further elucidated in the _Phaedrus_,
where it is also contrasted with the method, or rather the no-method,
of popular rhetoric. Here, again, discussions about love are chosen
as an illustration. A discourse on the subject by no less a writer
than Lysias is quoted and shown to be deficient in the most elementary
requisites of logical exposition. The different arguments are strung
together without any principle of arrangement, and ambiguous terms
are used without being defined. In insisting on the necessity of
definition, Plato followed Socrates; but he defines according to a
totally different method. Socrates had arrived at his general notions
partly by a comparison of particular instances with a view to eliciting
the points where they agreed, partly by amending the conceptions
already in circulation. We have seen that the earliest Dialogues
attributed to Plato are one long exposure of the difficulties attending
such a procedure; and his subsequent investigations all went to prove
that nothing solid could be built on such shifting foundations as
sense and opinion. Meanwhile increasing familiarity with the great
ontological systems had taught him to begin with the most general
notions, and to work down from them to the most particular. The
consequence was that dialectic came to mean nothing but classification
or logical division. Definition was absorbed into this process, and
reasoning by syllogism was not yet differentiated from it. To tell
what a thing was, meant to fix its place in the universal order of
existence, and its individual existence was sufficiently accounted for
by the same determination. If we imagine first a series of concentric
circles, then a series of contrasts symmetrically disposed on either
side of a central dividing line, and finally a series of transitions
descending from the most absolute unity to the most irregular
diversity—we shall, by combining the three schemes, arrive at some
understanding of the Platonic dialectic. To assign anything its place
in these various sequences was at once to define it and to demonstrate
the necessity of its existence. The arrangement is also equivalent to
a theory of final causes; for everything has a function to perform,
marked out by its position, and bringing it into relation with the
universal order. Such a system would inevitably lead to the denial of
evil, were not evil itself interpreted as the necessary correlative
of good, or as a necessary link in the descending manifestations of
reality. Moreover, by virtue of his identifying principle, Plato saw
in the lowest forms a shadow or reflection of the highest. Hence the
many surprises, concessions, and returns to abandoned positions which
we find in his later writings. The three moments of Greek thought,
circumscription, antithesis, and mediation, work in such close union,
or with such bewildering rapidity of alternation, through all his
dialectic, that we are never sure whither he is leading us, and not
always sure that he knows it himself.
In the opening chapter of this work we endeavoured to explain how the
Pythagorean philosophy arose out of the intoxicated delight inspired by
a first acquaintance with the manifold properties of number and figure.
If we would enter into the spirit of Platonism, we must similarly
throw ourselves back into the time when the idea of a universal
classification first dawned on men’s minds. We must remember how it
gratified the Greek love of order combined with individuality; what
unbounded opportunities for asking and answering questions it supplied;
and what promises of practical regeneration it held out. Not without
a shade of sadness for so many baffled efforts and so many blighted
hopes, yet also with a grateful recollection of all that reason
has accomplished, and with something of his own high intellectual
enthusiasm, shall we listen to Plato’s prophetic words—words of deeper
import than their own author knew—‘If I find any man who is able to
see a One and Many in Nature, him I follow and walk in his steps as if
he were a god.’[137]
It is interesting to see how the most comprehensive systems of the
present century, even when most opposed to the metaphysical spirit,
are still constructed on the plan long ago sketched by Plato. Alike
in his classification of the sciences, in his historical deductions,
and in his plans for the reorganisation of society, Auguste Comte
adopts a scheme of ascending or descending generality. The conception
of differentiation and integration employed both by Hegel and by
Mr. Herbert Spencer is also of Platonic origin; only, what with the
ancient thinker was a statical law of order has become with his modern
successors a dynamic law of progress; while, again, there is this
distinction between the German and the English philosopher, that the
former construes as successive moments of the Idea what the latter
regards as simultaneous and interdependent processes of evolution.
II.
The study of psychology with Plato stands in a fourfold relation to
his general theory of the world. The dialectic method, without which
Nature would remain unintelligible, is a function of the soul, and
constitutes its most essential activity; then soul, as distinguished
from body, represents the higher, supersensual element of existence;
thirdly, the objective dualism of reality and appearance is reproduced
in the subjective dualism of reason and sense; and lastly, soul, as
the original spring of movement, mediates between the eternal entities
which are unmoved and the material phenomena which are subject to
a continual flux. It is very characteristic of Plato that he first
strains an antithesis to the utmost and then endeavours to reconcile
its extremes by the interposition of one or more intermediate links.
So, while assigning this office to soul as a part of the universe, he
classifies the psychic functions themselves according to a similar
principle. On the intellectual side he places true opinion, or what
we should now call empirical knowledge, midway between demonstration
and sense-perception. Such at least seems to be the result reached in
the _Theaetêtus_ and the _Meno_. In the _Republic_ a further analysis
leads to a somewhat different arrangement. Opinion is placed between
knowledge and ignorance; while the possible objects to which it
corresponds form a transition from being to not-being. Subsequently
mathematical reasoning is distinguished from the higher science which
takes cognisance of first principles, and thus serves to connect it
with simple opinion; while this again, dealing as it does with material
objects, is related to the knowledge of their shadows as the most
perfect science is related to mathematics.[138]
Turning from dialectic to ethics, Plato in like manner feels the need
of interposing a mediator between reason and appetite. The quality
chosen for this purpose he calls θυμός, a term which does not, as has
been erroneously supposed, correspond to our word Will, but rather
to pride, or the feeling of personal honour. It is both the seat of
military courage and the natural auxiliary of reason, with which it
co-operates in restraining the animal desires. It is a characteristic
difference between Socrates and Plato that the former should have
habitually reinforced his arguments for virtue by appeals to
self-interest; while the latter, with his aristocratic way of looking
at things, prefers to enlist the aid of a haughtier feeling on their
behalf. Aristotle followed in the same track when he taught that to be
overcome by anger is less discreditable than to be overcome by desire.
In reality none of the instincts tending to self-preservation is more
praiseworthy than another, or more amenable to the control of reason.
Plato’s tripartite division of mind cannot be made to fit into the
classifications of modern psychology, which are adapted not only to a
more advanced state of knowledge but also to more complex conditions
of life. But the characters of women, by their greater simplicity and
uniformity, show to some extent what those of men may once have been;
and it will, perhaps, confirm the analysis of the _Phaedrus_ to recall
the fact that personal pride is still associated with moral principle
in the guardianship of female virtue.
If the soul served to connect the eternal realities with the fleeting
appearances by which they were at once darkened, relieved, and shadowed
forth, it was also a bond of union between the speculative and the
practical philosophy of Plato; and in discussing his psychology we have
already passed from the one to the other. The transition will become
still easier if we remember that the question, ‘What is knowledge?’
was, according to our view, originally suggested by a theory reducing
ethical science to a hedonistic calculus, and that along with it would
arise another question, ‘What is pleasure?’ This latter enquiry,
though incidentally touched on elsewhere, is not fully dealt with in
any Dialogue except the _Philêbus_, which we agree with Prof. Jowett
in referring to a very late period of Platonic authorship. But the
line of argument which it pursues had probably been long familiar
to our philosopher. At any rate, the _Phaedo_, the _Republic_, and
perhaps the _Gorgias_, assume, as already proved, that pleasure is
not the highest good. The question is one on which thinkers are still
divided. It seems, indeed, to lie outside the range of reason, and
the disputants are accordingly obliged to invoke the authority either
of individual consciousness or of common consent on behalf of their
respective opinions. We have, however, got so far beyond the ancients
that the doctrine of egoistic hedonism has been abandoned by almost
everybody. The substitution of another’s pleasure for our own as the
object of pursuit was not a conception which presented itself to
any Greek moralist, although the principle of self-sacrifice was
maintained by some of them, and especially by Plato, to its fullest
extent. Pleasure-seeking being inseparably associated with selfishness,
the latter was best attacked through the former, and if Plato’s logic
does not commend itself to our understanding, we must admit that it was
employed in defence of a noble cause.
The style of polemics adopted on this occasion, whatever else may
be its value, will serve excellently to illustrate the general
dialectic method of attack. When Plato particularly disliked a class
of persons, or an institution, or an art, or a theory, or a state of
consciousness, he tried to prove that it was confused, unstable, and
self-contradictory; besides taking full advantage of any discredit
popularly attached to it. All these objections are brought to bear
with full force against pleasure. Some pleasures are delusive, since
the reality of them falls far short of the anticipation; all pleasure
is essentially transitory, a perpetual becoming, never a fixed state,
and therefore not an end of action; pleasures which ensue on the
satisfaction of desires are necessarily accompanied by pains and
disappear simultaneously with them; the most intense, and for that
reason the most typical, pleasures, are associated with feelings of
shame, and their enjoyment is carefully hidden out of sight.
Such arguments have almost the air of an afterthought, and Plato was
perhaps more powerfully swayed by other considerations, which we
shall now proceed to analyse. When pleasure was assumed to be the
highest good, knowledge was agreed to be the indispensable means
for its attainment; and, as so often happens, the means gradually
substituted itself for the end. Nor was this all; for knowledge (or
reason) being not only the means but the supreme arbiter, when called
on to adjudicate between conflicting claims, would naturally pronounce
in its own favour. Naturally, also, a moralist who made science the
chief interest of his own life would come to believe that it was the
proper object of all life, whether attended or not by any pleasurable
emotion. And so, in direct opposition to the utilitarian theory,
Plato declares at last that to brave a lesser pain in order to escape
from a greater, or to renounce a lesser pleasure in order to secure a
greater, is cowardice and intemperance in disguise; and that wisdom,
which he had formerly regarded as a means to other ends, is the one
end for which everything else should be exchanged.[139] Perhaps it may
have strengthened him in this attitude to observe that the many, whose
opinion he so thoroughly despised, made pleasure their aim in life,
while the fastidious few preferred knowledge. Yet, after a time, even
the latter alternative failed to satisfy his restless spirit. For the
conception of knowledge resolved itself into the deeper conceptions of
a knowing subject and a known object, the soul and the universe, each
of which became in turn the supreme ideal. What interpretation should
be given to virtue depended on the choice between them. According to
the one view it was a purification of the higher principle within us
from material wants and passions. Sensual gratifications should be
avoided, because they tend to degrade and pollute the soul. Death
should be fearlessly encountered, because it will release her from the
restrictions of bodily existence. But Plato had too strong a grasp
on the realities of life to remain satisfied with a purely ascetic
morality. Knowledge, on the objective side, brought him into relation
with an organised universe where each individual existed, not for his
own sake but for the sake of the whole, to fulfil a definite function
in the system of which he formed a part. And if from one point of
view the soul herself was an absolutely simple indivisible substance,
from another point of view she reflected the external order, and only
fulfilled the law of her being when each separate faculty was exercised
within its appropriate sphere.
There still remained one last problem to solve, one point where the
converging streams of ethical and metaphysical speculation met and
mixed. Granted that knowledge is the soul’s highest energy, what is the
object of this beatific vision? Granted that all particular energies
co-operate for a common purpose, what is the end to which they are
subordinated? Granted that dialectic leads us up through ascending
gradations to one all-comprehensive idea, how is that idea to be
defined? Plato only attempts to answer this last question by re-stating
it under the form of an illustration. As the sun at once gives life to
all Nature, and light to the eye by which Nature is perceived, so also
the idea of Good is the cause of existence and of knowledge alike, but
transcends them both as an absolute unity, of which we cannot even say
that it is, for the distinction of subject and predicate would bring
back relativity and plurality again. Here we seem to have the Socratic
paradox reversed. Socrates identified virtue with knowledge, but, at
the same time, entirely emptied the latter of its speculative content.
Plato, inheriting the idea of knowledge in its artificially restricted
significance, was irresistibly drawn back to the older philosophy
whence it had been originally borrowed; then, just as his master had
given an ethical application to science, so did he, travelling over the
same ground in an opposite direction, extend the theory of ethics far
beyond its legitimate range, until a principle which seemed to have no
meaning, except in reference to human conduct, became the abstract bond
of union between all reality and all thought.
Whether Plato ever succeeded in making the idea of Good quite clear to
others, or even to himself, is more than we can tell. In the _Republic_
he declines giving further explanations on the ground that his pupils
have not passed through the necessary mathematical initiation. Whether
quantitative reasoning was to furnish the form or the matter of
transcendent dialectic is left undetermined. We are told that on one
occasion a large audience assembled to hear Plato lecture on the Good,
but that, much to their disappointment, the discourse was entirely
filled with geometrical and astronomical investigations. Bearing in
mind, however, that mathematical science deals chiefly with equations,
and that astronomy, according to Plato, had for its object to prove
the absolute uniformity of the celestial motions, we may perhaps
conclude that the idea of Good meant no more than the abstract notion
of identity or indistinguishable likeness. The more complex idea of law
as a uniformity of relations, whether coexistent or successive, had not
then dawned, but it has since been similarly employed to bring physics
into harmony with ethics and logic.
III.
So far we have followed the evolution of Plato’s philosophy as it may
have been effected under the impulse of purely theoretical motives.
We have now to consider what form was imposed on it by the more
imperious exigencies of practical experience. Here, again, we find
Plato taking up and continuing the work of Socrates, but on a vastly
greater scale. There was, indeed, a kind of pre-established harmony
between the expression of thought on the one hand and the increasing
need for its application to life on the other. For the spread of
public corruption had gone on _pari passu_ with the development of
philosophy. The teaching of Socrates was addressed to individuals,
and dealt chiefly with private morality. On other points he was
content to accept the law of the land and the established political
constitution as sufficiently safe guides. He was not accustomed to see
them defied or perverted into instruments of selfish aggrandisement;
nor, apparently, had the possibility of such a contingency occurred
to him. Still less did he imagine that all social institutions then
existing were radically wrong. Hence the personal virtues held a more
important place in his system than the social virtues. His attacks
were directed against slothfulness and self-indulgence, against the
ignorant temerity which hurried some young men into politics before
their education was finished, and the timidity or fastidiousness which
prevented others from discharging the highest duties of citizenship.
Nor, in accepting the popular religion of his time, had he any
suspicion that its sanctions might be invoked on behalf of successful
violence and fraud. We have already shown how differently Plato felt
towards his age, and how much deeper as well as more shameless was
the demoralisation with which he set himself to contend. It must also
be remembered how judicial proceedings had come to overshadow every
other public interest; and how the highest culture of the time had, at
least in his eyes, become identified with the systematic perversion
of truth and right. These considerations will explain why Greek
philosophy, while moving on a higher plane, passed through the same
orbit which had been previously described by Greek poetry. Precisely
as the lessons of moderation in Homer had been followed by the lessons
of justice in Aeschylus, precisely as the religion which was a selfish
traffic between gods and men, and had little to tell of a life beyond
the grave, was replaced by the nobler faith in a divine guardianship
of morality and a retributive judgment after death—so also did the
Socratic ethics and the Socratic theology lead to a system which
made justice the essence of morality and religion its everlasting
consecration.
Temperance and justice are very clearly distinguished in our minds.
The one is mainly a self-regarding, the other mainly a social virtue.
But it would be a mistake to suppose that the distinction was equally
clear to Plato. He had learned from Socrates that all virtue is one.
He found himself confronted by men who pointedly opposed interest to
honour and expediency to fair-dealing, without making any secret of
their preference for the former. Here, as elsewhere, he laboured to
dissolve away the vulgar antithesis and to substitute for it a deeper
one—the antithesis between real and apparent goods. He was quite
ready to imagine the case of a man who might have to incur all sorts
of suffering in the practice of justice even to the extent of infamy,
torture, and death; but without denying that these were evils, he held
that to practise injustice with the accompaniment of worldly prosperity
was a greater evil still. And this conviction is quite unconnected
with his belief in a future life. He would not have agreed with St.
Paul that virtue is a bad calculation without the hope of a reward for
it hereafter. His morality is absolutely independent of any extrinsic
considerations. Nevertheless, he holds that in our own interest we
should do what is right; and it never seems to have entered his
thoughts that there could be any other motive for doing it. We have to
explain how such a paradox was possible.
Plato seems to have felt very strongly that all virtuous action tends
towards a good exceeding in value any temporary sacrifice which it may
involve; and the accepted connotation of ethical terms went entirely
along with this belief. But he could not see that a particular action
might be good for the community at large and bad for the individual who
performed it, not in a different sense but in the very same sense, as
involving a diminution of his happiness. For from Plato’s abstract and
generalising point of view all good was homogeneous, and the welfare of
the individual was absolutely identified with the welfare of the whole
to which he belonged. As against those who made right dependent on
might and erected self-indulgence into the law of life Plato occupied
an impregnable position. He showed that such principles made society
impossible, and that without honour even a gang of thieves cannot
hold together.[140] He also saw that it is reason which brings each
individual into relation with the whole and enables him to understand
his obligations towards it; but at the same time he gave this reason a
personal character which does not properly belong to it; or, what comes
to the same thing, he treated human beings as pure _entia rationis_,
thus unwittingly removing the necessity for having any morality at all.
On his assumption it would be absurd to break the law; but neither
would there be any temptation to break it, nor would any unpleasant
consequences follow on its violation. Plato speaks of injustice as an
injury to the soul’s health, and therefore as the greatest evil that
can befall a human being, without observing that the inference involves
a confusion of terms. For his argument requires that soul should mean
both the whole of conscious life and the system of abstract notions
through which we communicate and co-operate with our fellow-creatures.
All crime is a serious disturbance to the latter, for it cannot without
absurdity be made the foundation of a general rule; but, apart from
penal consequences, it does not impair, and may benefit the former.
While Plato identified the individual with the community by slurring
over the possible divergence of their interests, he still further
contributed to their logical confusion by resolving the ego into a
multitude of conflicting faculties and impulses supposed to represent
the different classes of which a State is made up. His opponents
held that justice and law emanate from the ruling power in the body
politic; and they were brought to admit that supreme power is properly
vested in the wisest and best citizens. Transferring these principles
to the inner forum, he maintained that a psychological aristocracy
could only be established by giving reason a similar control over the
animal passions.[141] At first sight, this seemed to imply no more
than a return to the standpoint of Socrates, or of Plato himself in
the _Protagoras_. The man who indulges his desires within the limits
prescribed by a regard for their safe satisfaction through his whole
life, may be called temperate and reasonable, but he is not necessarily
just. If, however, we identify the paramount authority within with
the paramount authority without, we shall have to admit that there
is a faculty of justice in the individual soul corresponding to the
objective justice of political law; and since the supreme virtue is
agreed on all hands to be reason, we must go a step further and admit
that justice is reason, or that it is reasonable to be just; and
that by consequence the height of injustice is the height of folly.
Moreover, this fallacious substitution of justice for temperance was
facilitated by the circumstance that although the former virtue is not
involved in the latter, the latter is to a very great extent involved
in the former. Self-control by no means carries with it a respect for
the rights of others; but where such respect exists it necessitates a
considerable amount of self-control.
We trust that the steps of a difficult argument have been made clear by
the foregoing analysis; and that the whole process has been shown to
hinge on the ambiguous use of such notions as the individual and the
community, of which the one is paradoxically construed as a plurality
and the other as a unity; justice, which is alternately taken in the
sense of control exercised by the worthiest, control of passion in the
general interest, control of our passions in the interest of others,
and control of the same passions in our own interest; and wisdom or
reason, which sometimes means any kind of excellence, sometimes the
excellence of a harmonious society, and sometimes the excellence of a
well-balanced mind. Thus, out of self-regarding virtue social virtue
is elicited, the whole process being ultimately conditioned by that
identifying power which was at once the strength and the weakness of
Plato’s genius.
Plato knew perfectly well that although rhetoricians and men of
the world might be silenced, they could not be converted nor even
convinced by such arguments as these. So far from thinking it possible
to reason men into virtue, he has observed of those who are slaves
to their senses that you must improve them before you can teach them
the truth.[L] And he felt that if the complete assimilation of the
individual and the community was to become more than a mere logical
formula, it must be effected by a radical reform in the training of
the one and in the institutions of the other. Accordingly, he set
himself to elaborate a scheme for the purpose, our knowledge of which
is chiefly derived from his greatest work, the _Republic_. We have
already made large use of the negative criticism scattered through that
Dialogue; we have now to examine the positive teaching by which it was
supplemented.
IV.
Plato, like Socrates, makes religious instruction the basis of
education. But where the master had been content to set old beliefs on
a new basis of demonstration, the disciple aimed at nothing less than
their complete purification from irrational and immoral ingredients.
He lays down two great principles, that God is good, and that He is
true.[142] Every story which is inconsistent with such a character must
be rejected; so also must everything in the poets which redounds to the
discredit of the national heroes, together with everything tending in
the remotest degree to make vice attractive or virtue repellent. It is
evident that Plato, like Xenophanes, repudiated not only the scandalous
details of popular mythology, but also the anthropomorphic conceptions
which lay at its foundation; although he did not think it advisable to
state his unbelief with equal frankness. His own theology was a sort
of star-worship, and he proved the divinity of the heavenly bodies by
an appeal to the uniformity of their movements.[143] He further taught
that the world was created by an absolutely good Being; but we cannot
be sure that this was more than a popular version of the theory which
placed the abstract idea of Good at the summit of the dialectic series.
The truth is that there are two distinct types of religion, the one
chiefly interested in the existence and attributes of God, the other
chiefly interested in the destiny of the human soul. The former is best
represented by Judaism, the latter by Buddhism. Plato belongs to the
psychic rather than to the theistic type. The doctrine of immortality
appears again and again in his Dialogues, and one of the most beautiful
among them is entirely devoted to proving it. He seems throughout to be
conscious that he is arguing in favour of a paradox. Here, at least,
there are no appeals to popular prejudice such as figure so largely in
similar discussions among ourselves. The belief in immortality had long
been stirring; but it had not taken deep root among the Ionian Greeks.
We cannot even be sure that it was embraced as a consoling hope by any
but the highest minds anywhere in Hellas, or by them for more than a
brief period. It would be easy to maintain that this arose from some
natural incongeniality to the Greek imagination in thoughts which drew
it away from the world of sense and the delights of earthly life. But
the explanation breaks down immediately when we attempt to verify it
by a wider experience. No modern nation enjoys life so keenly as the
French. Yet, quite apart from traditional dogmas, there is no nation
that counts so many earnest supporters of the belief in a spiritual
existence beyond the grave. And, to take an individual example, it is
just the keen relish which Mr. Browning’s Cleon has for every sort of
enjoyment which makes him shrink back with horror from the thought of
annihilation, and grasp at any promise of a happiness to be prolonged
through eternity. A closer examination is needed to show us by what
causes the current of Greek thought was swayed.
The great religious movement of the sixth and fifth centuries—chiefly
represented for us by the names of Pythagoras, Aeschylus, and
Pindar—would in all probability have entirely won over the educated
classes, and given definiteness to the half-articulate utterances
of popular tradition, had it not been arrested prematurely by
the development of physical speculation. We showed in the first
chapter that Greek philosophy in its earliest stages was entirely
materialistic. It differed, indeed, from modern materialism in holding
that the soul, or seat of conscious life, is an entity distinct from
the body; but the distinction was one between a grosser and a finer
matter, or else between a simpler and a more complex arrangement of
the same matter, not between an extended and an indivisible substance.
Whatever theories, then, were entertained with respect to the one
would inevitably come to be entertained also with respect to the
other. Now, with the exception of the Eleates, who denied the reality
of change and separation altogether, every school agreed in teaching
that all particular bodies are formed either by differentiation or by
decomposition and recomposition out of the same primordial elements.
From this it followed, as a natural consequence, that, although
the whole mass of matter was eternal, each particular aggregate of
matter must perish in order to release the elements required for the
formation of new aggregates. It is obvious that, assuming the soul to
be material, its immortality was irreconcilable with such a doctrine as
this. A combination of four elements and two conflicting forces, such
as Empedocles supposed the human mind to be, could not possibly outlast
the organism in which it was enclosed; and if Empedocles himself, by
an inconsistency not uncommon with men of genius, refused to draw the
only legitimate conclusion from his own principles, the discrepancy
could not fail to force itself on his successors. Still more fatal to
the belief in a continuance of personal identity after death was the
theory put forward by Diogenes of Apollonia, that there is really no
personal identity even in life—that consciousness is only maintained
by a perpetual inhalation of the vital air in which all reason resides.
The soul very literally left the body with the last breath, and had a
poor chance of holding together afterwards, especially, as the wits
observed, if a high wind happened to be blowing at the time.
It would appear that even in the Pythagorean school there had been a
reaction against a doctrine which its founder had been the first to
popularise in Hellas. The Pythagoreans had always attributed great
importance to the conceptions of harmony and numerical proportion; and
they soon came to think of the soul as a ratio which the different
elements of the animal body bore to one another; or as a musical
concord resulting from the joint action of its various members, which
might be compared to the strings of a lute. But
‘When the lute is broken
Sweet tones are remembered not.’
And so, with the dissolution of our bodily organism, the music of
consciousness would pass away for ever. Perhaps no form of psychology
taught in the Greek schools has approached nearer to modern thought
than this. It was professed at Thebes by two Pythagoreans, Cebes and
Simmias, in the time of Plato. He rightly regarded them as formidable
opponents, for they were ready to grant whatever he claimed for
the soul in the way of immateriality and superiority to the body,
while denying the possibility of its separate existence. We may
so far anticipate the course of our exposition as to mention that
the direct argument by which he met them was a reference to the
moving power of mind, and to the constraint exercised by reason over
passionate impulse; characteristics which the analogy with a musical
harmony failed to explain. But his chief reliance was on an order of
considerations, the historical genesis of which we shall now proceed to
trace.
It was by that somewhat slow and circuitous process, the negation of
a negation, that spiritualism was finally established. The shadows
of doubt gathered still more thickly around futurity before another
attempt could be made to remove them. For the scepticism of the
Humanists and the ethical dialectic of Socrates, if they tended to
weaken the dogmatic materialism of physical philosophy, were at first
not more favourable to the new faith which that philosophy had suddenly
eclipsed. For the one rejected every kind of supernaturalism; and the
other did not attempt to go behind what had been directly revealed by
the gods, or was discoverable from an examination of their handiwork.
Nevertheless, the new enquiries, with their exclusively subjective
direction, paved the way for a return to the religious development
previously in progress. By leading men to think of mind as, above all,
a principle of knowledge and deliberate action, they altogether freed
it from those material associations which brought it under the laws of
external Nature, where every finite existence was destined, sooner or
later, to be reabsorbed and to disappear. The position was completely
reversed when Nature was, as it were, brought up before the bar of
Mind to have her constitution determined or her very existence denied
by that supreme tribunal. If the subjective idealism of Protagoras and
Gorgias made for spiritualism, so also did the teleological religion
of Socrates. It was impossible to assert the priority and superiority
of mind to matter more strongly than by teaching that a designing
intelligence had created the whole visible universe for the exclusive
enjoyment of man. The infinite without was in its turn absorbed by the
infinite within. Finally, the logical method of Socrates contained
in itself the germs of a still subtler spiritualism which Plato now
proceeded to work out.
The dialectic theory, considered in its relation to physics, tended
to substitute the study of uniformity for the study of mechanical
causation. But the general conceptions established by science were
a kind of soul in Nature; they were immaterial, they could not be
perceived by sense, and yet, remaining as they did unchanged in a world
of change, they were far truer, far more real, than the phenomena to
which they gave unity and definition. Now these self-existent ideas,
being subjective in their origin, readily reacted on mind, and
communicated to it those attributes of fixedness and eternal duration
which had in truth been borrowed by them from Nature, not by Nature
from them. Plato argued that the soul was in possession of ideas too
pure to have been derived from the suggestions of sense, and therefore
traceable to the reminiscences of an ante-natal experience. But we can
see that the reminiscence was all on the side of the ideas; it was they
that betrayed their human origin by the birthmark of abstraction and
finality—betokening the limitation of man’s faculties and the interest
of his desires—which still clung to them when from a temporary law of
thought they were erected into an everlasting law of things. As Comte
would say, Plato was taking out of his conceptions what he had first
put into them himself. And, if this consideration applies to all his
reasonings on the subject of immortality, it applies especially to what
he regards as the most convincing demonstration of any. There is one
idea, he tells us, with which the soul is inseparably and essentially
associated—namely, the idea of life. Without this, soul can no more
be conceived than snow without cold or fire without heat; nor can
death approach it without involving a logical contradiction. To assume
that the soul is separable from the body, and that life is inseparable
from the soul, was certainly an expeditious method of proof. To a
modern, it would have the further disadvantage of proving too much.
For, by parity of reasoning, every living thing must have an immortal
soul, and every soul must have existed from all eternity. Plato
frankly accepted both conclusions, and even incorporated them with his
ethical system. He looked on the lower animals as so many stages in a
progressive degradation to which human beings had descended through
their own violence or sensuality, but from which it was possible for
them to return after a certain period of penitence and probation.
At other times he describes a hell, a purgatory, and a heaven, not
unlike what we read of in Dante, without apparently being conscious
of any inconsistency between the two representations. It was, indeed,
an inconsistency such as we find in the highest order of intellects,
the inconsistency of one who mediated between two worlds, between
naturalistic metempsychosis on the one side, and ethical individualism
on the other.
It was not merely the immortality, it was the eternity of the soul that
Plato taught. For him the expectation of a life beyond the grave was
identified with the memory of an ante-natal existence, and the two must
stand or fall together. When Shelley’s shipwrecked mother exclaims to
her child:—
‘Alas! what is life, what is death, what are we,
That when the ship sinks we no longer may be!
What! to see thee no more, and to feel thee no more,
To be after life what we have been before!’
Her despair is but the inverted image of Plato’s hope, the return to
a purer state of being where knowledge will no longer be obscured
by passing through the perturbing medium of sight and touch. Again,
modern apologists for the injustice and misery of the present
system[144] argue that its inequalities will be redressed in a future
state. Plato conversely regarded the sufferings of good men as a
retribution for former sin, or as the result of a forgotten choice.
The authority of Pindar and of ancient tradition generally may have
influenced his belief, but it had a deeper ground in the logic of a
spiritualistic philosophy. The dualism of soul and body is only one
form of his fundamental antithesis between the changeless essence
and the transitory manifestations of existence. A pantheism like
Spinoza’s was the natural outcome of such a system; but his practical
genius or his ardent imagination kept Plato from carrying it so far.
Nor in the interests of progress was the result to be regretted; for
theology had to pass through one more phase before the term of its
beneficent activity could be reached. Ethical conceptions gained a new
significance in the blended light of mythology and metaphysics; those
who made it their trade to pervert justice at its fountain-head might
still tremble before the terrors of a supernatural tribunal; or if
Plato could not regenerate the life of his own people he could foretell
what was to be the common faith of Europe in another thousand years;
and memory, if not hope, is the richer for those magnificent visions
where he has projected the eternal conflict between good and evil into
the silence and darkness by which our lives are shut in on every side.
V.
Plato had begun by condemning poetry only in so far as it was
inconsistent with true religion and morality. At last, with his usual
propensity to generalise, he condemned it and, by implication, every
imitative art _quâ_ art, as a delusion and a sham, twice removed
from the truth of things, because a copy of the phenomena which
are themselves unreal representations of an archetypal idea. His
iconoclasm may remind us of other ethical theologians both before and
after, whether Hebrew, Moslem, or Puritan. If he does not share their
fanatical hatred for plastic and pictorial representations, it is only
because works of that class, besides being of a chaster character,
exercised far less power over the Greek imagination than epic and
dramatic poetry. Moreover, the tales of the poets were, according
to Plato, the worst lies of any, since they were believed to be
true; whereas statues and pictures differed too obviously from their
originals for any such illusion to be produced in their case. Like the
Puritans, again, Plato sanctioned the use of religious hymns, with the
accompaniment of music in its simplest and most elevated forms. Like
them, also, he would have approved of literary fiction when it was
employed for edifying purposes. Works like the _Faery Queen_, _Paradise
Lost_, and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, would have been his favourites in
English literature; and he might have extended the same indulgence to
fictions of the Edgeworthian type, where the virtuous characters always
come off best in the end.
The reformed system of education was to be not only moral and religious
but also severely scientific. The place given to mathematics as the
foundation of a right intellectual training is most remarkable, and
shows how truly Plato apprehended the conditions under which knowledge
is acquired and enlarged. Here, as in other respects, he is, more
even than Aristotle, the precursor of Auguste Comte. He arranges the
mathematical sciences, so far as they then existed, in their logical
order; and his remarks on the most general ideas suggested by astronomy
read like a divination of rational mechanics. That a recommendation of
such studies should be put into the mouth of Socrates is a striking
incongruity. The older Plato grew the farther he seems to have advanced
from the humanist to the naturalistic point of view; and, had he been
willing to confess it, Hippias and Prodicus were the teachers with whom
he finally found himself most in sympathy.
Macaulay has spoken as if the Platonic philosophy was totally unrelated
to the material wants of men. This, however, is a mistake. It is true
that, in the _Republic_, science is not regarded as an instrument for
heaping up fresh luxuries, or for curing the diseases which luxury
breeds; but only because its purpose is held to be the discovery of
those conditions under which a healthy, happy, and virtuous race can
best be reared. The art of the true statesman is to weave the web of
life with perfect skill, to bring together those couples from whose
union the noblest progeny shall issue; and it is only by mastering the
laws of the physical universe that this art can be acquired. Plato knew
no natural laws but those of mathematics and astronomy; consequently,
he set far too much store on the times and seasons at which bride and
bridegroom were to meet, and on the numerical ratios by which they
were supposed to be determined. He even tells us about a mysterious
formula for discovering the nuptial number, by which the ingenuity of
commentators has been considerably exercised. The true laws by which
marriage should be regulated among a civilised people have remained
wrapped in still more impenetrable darkness. Whatever may be the best
solution, it can hardly fail to differ in many respects from our
present customs. It cannot be right that the most important act in
the life of a human being should be determined by social ambition, by
avarice, by vanity, by pique, or by accident—in a word, by the most
contemptible impulses of which human nature is susceptible; nor is
it to be expected that sexual selection will always necessitate the
employment of insincerity, adulation, and bribery by one of the parties
concerned, while fostering in the other credulity, egoism, jealousy,
capriciousness, and petty tyranny—the very qualities which a wise
training would have for its object to root out.[145]
It seems difficult to reconcile views about marriage involving
a recognition of the fact that mental and moral qualities are
hereditarily transmitted, with the belief in metempsychosis elsewhere
professed by Plato. But perhaps his adhesion to the latter doctrine
is not to be taken very seriously. In imitation of the objective
world, whose essential truth is half hidden and half disclosed by
its phenomenal manifestations, he loves to present his speculative
teaching under a mythical disguise; and so he may have chosen the
old doctrine of transmigration as an apt expression for the unity
and continuity of life. And, at worst, he would not be guilty of any
greater inconsistency than is chargeable to those modern philosophers
who, while they admit that mental qualities are inherited, hold each
individual soul to be a separate and independent creation.