are not intended for the whole community, but only for the ruling
minority. It was by the corruption of the higher classes that Plato was
most distressed, and the salvation of the State depended, according
to him, on their reformation. This leads us on to his scheme for
the reconstitution of society. It is intimately connected with his
method of logical definition and classification. He shows with great
force that the collective action of human beings is conditioned by
the division of labour; and argues from this that every individual
ought, in the interest of the whole, to be restricted to a single
occupation. Therefore, the industrial classes, who form the bulk of
the population, are to be excluded both from military service and
from political power. The Peloponnesian War had led to a general
substitution of professional soldiers for the old levies of untrained
citizens in Greek warfare. Plato was deeply impressed by the dangers,
as well as by the advantages, of this revolution. That each profession
should be exercised only by persons trained for it, suited his notions
alike as a logician, a teacher, and a practical reformer. But he saw
that mercenary fighters might use their power to oppress and plunder
the defenceless citizens, or to establish a military despotism. And,
holding that government should, like strategy, be exercised only by
functionaries naturally fitted and expressly trained for the work, he
saw equally that a privileged class would be tempted to abuse their
position in order to fill their pockets and to gratify their passions.
He proposed to provide against these dangers, first by the new system
of education already described, and secondly by pushing the division
of labour to its logical conclusion. That they might the better attend
to their specific duties, the defenders and the rulers of the State
were not to practise the art of money-making; in other words, they were
not to possess any property of their own, but were to be supported
by the labour of the industrial classes. Furthermore, that they need
not quarrel among themselves, he proposed that every private interest
should be eliminated from their lives, and that they should, as a
class, be united by the closest bonds of family affection. This purpose
was to be effected by the abolition of marriage and of domesticity.
The couples chosen for breeding were to be separated when the object
of their union had been attained; children were to be taken from their
mothers immediately after birth and brought up at the expense and under
the supervision of the State. Sickly and deformed infants were to be
destroyed. Those who fell short of the aristocratic standard were to
be degraded, and their places filled up by the exceptionally gifted
offspring of low-class parents. Members of the military and governing
caste were to address each other according to the kinship which might
possibly exist between them. In the absence of home-employments, women
were to be, so far as possible, assimilated to men; to pass through the
same bodily and mental training; to be enrolled in the army; and, if
they showed the necessary capacity, to discharge the highest political
functions. In this practical dialectic the identifying no less than
the differentiating power of logic is displayed, and displayed also in
defiance of common ideas, as in the modern classifications of zoology
and botany. Plato introduces distinctions where they did not before
exist, and annuls those which were already recognised. The sexes were
to be assimilated, political life was to be identified with family
life, and the whole community was to present an exact parallel with the
individual soul. The ruling committee corresponded to reason, the army
to passionate spirit, and the industrial classes to the animal desires;
and each, in its perfect constitution, represented one of the cardinal
virtues as reinterpreted by Plato. Wisdom belonged to the ruling
part, courage to the intermediate executive power, and temperance or
obedience to the organs of material existence; while justice meant the
general harmony resulting from the fulfilment of their appropriate
functions by all. We may add that the whole State reproduced the Greek
family in a much deeper sense than Plato himself was aware of. For his
aristocracy represents the man, whose virtue, in the words of Gorgias,
was to ‘administer the State;’ and his industrial class takes the place
of the woman, whose duty was ‘to order her house, and keep what is
indoors, and obey her husband.’[146]
Such was the celebrated scheme by which Plato proposed to regenerate
mankind. We have already taken occasion to show how it was connected
with his ethical and dialectical philosophy. We have now to consider
in what relation it stands to the political experience of his own
and other times, as well as to the revolutionary proposals of other
speculative reformers.
VI.
According to Hegel,[147] the Platonic polity, so far from being an
impracticable dream, had already found its realisation in Greek life,
and did but give a purer expression to the constitutive principle
of every ancient commonwealth. There are, he tells us, three stages
in the moral development of mankind. The first is purely objective.
It represents a régime where rules of conduct are entirely imposed
from without; they are, as it were, embodied in the framework of
society; they rest, not on reason and conscience, but on authority
and tradition; they will not suffer themselves to be questioned,
for, being unproved, a doubt would be fatal to their very existence.
Here the individual is completely sacrificed to the State; but in
the second or subjective stage he breaks loose, asserting the right
of his private judgment and will as against the established order
of things. This revolution was, still according to Hegel, begun by
the Sophists and Socrates. It proved altogether incompatible with
the spirit of Greek civilisation, which it ended by shattering to
pieces. The subjective principle found an appropriate expression in
Christianity, which attributes an infinite importance to the individual
soul; and it appears also in the political philosophy of Rousseau.
We may observe that it corresponds very nearly to what Auguste Comte
meant by the metaphysical period. The modern State reconciles both
principles, allowing the individual his full development, and at the
same time incorporating him with a larger whole, where, for the first
time, he finds his own reason fully realised. Now, Hegel looks on the
Platonic republic as a reaction against the subjective individualism,
the right of private judgment, the self-seeking impulse, or whatever
else it is to be called, which was fast eating into the heart of Greek
civilisation. To counteract this fatal tendency, Plato goes back to
the constitutive principle of Greek society—that is to say, the
omnipotence, or, in Benthamite parlance, omnicompetence, of the State;
exhibiting it, in ideal perfection, as the suppression of individual
liberty under every form, more especially the fundamental forms of
property, marriage, and domestic life.
It seems to us that Hegel, in his anxiety to crush every historical
process into the narrow symmetry of a favourite metaphysical formula,
has confounded several entirely distinct conceptions under the common
name of subjectivity. First, there is the right of private judgment,
the claim of each individual to have a voice in the affairs of the
State, and to have the free management of his own personal concerns.
But this, so far from being modern, is one of the oldest customs
of the Aryan race; and perhaps, could we look back to the oldest
history of other races now despotically governed, we should find it
prevailing among them also. It was no new nor unheard-of privilege that
Rousseau vindicated for the peoples of his own time, but their ancient
birthright, taken from them by the growth of a centralised military
system, just as it had been formerly taken from the city communities of
the Graeco-Roman world. In this respect, Plato goes against the whole
spirit of his country, and no period of its development, not even the
age of Homer, would have satisfied him.
We have next the disposition of individuals, no longer to interfere in
making the law, but to override it, or to bend it into an instrument
for their own purposes. Doubtless there existed such a tendency in
Plato’s time, and his polity was very largely designed to hold it
in check. But such unprincipled ambition was nothing new in Greece,
however the mode of its manifestations might vary. What had formerly
been seized by armed violence was now sought after with the more subtle
weapons of rhetorical skill; just as at the present moment, among these
same Greeks, it is the prize of parliamentary intrigue. The Cretan and
Spartan institutions may very possibly have been designed with a view
to checking this spirit of selfish lawlessness, by reducing private
interests to a minimum; and Plato most certainly had them in his mind
when he pushed the same method still further; but those institutions
were not types of Hellenism as a whole, they only represented one, and
that a very abnormal, side of it. Plato borrowed some elements from
this quarter, but, as we shall presently show, he incorporated them
with others of a widely different character. Sparta was, indeed, on
any high theory of government, not a State at all, but a robber-clan
established among a plundered population whom they never tried or cared
to conciliate. How little weight her rulers attributed to the interests
of the State as such, was well exhibited during the Peloponnesian War,
when political advantages of the utmost importance were surrendered
in deference to the noble families whose kinsmen had been captured at
Sphactêria, and whose sole object was to rescue them from the fate with
which they were threatened by the Athenians as a means of extorting
concessions;—conduct with which the refusal of Rome to ransom the
soldiers who had surrendered at Cannae may be instructively contrasted.
We have, thirdly, to consider a form of individualism directly opposed
in character to those already specified. It is the complete withdrawal
from public affairs for the sake of attending exclusively to one’s
private duties or pleasures. Such individualism is the characteristic
weakness of conservatives, who are, by their very nature, the party
of timidity and quiescence. To them was addressed the exhortation
of Cato, _capessenda est respublica_. The two other forms of which
we have spoken are, on the contrary, diseases of liberalism. We see
them exemplified when the leaders of a party are harassed by the
perpetual criticism of their professed supporters; or, again, when
an election is lost because the votes of the Liberal electors are
divided among several candidates. But when a party—generally the
Conservative party—loses an election because its voters will not
go to the poll, that is owing to the lazy individualism which shuns
political contests altogether. It was of this disease that the public
life of Athens really perished; and, so far, Hegel is on the right
track; but although its action was more obviously and immediately fatal
in antiquity, we are by no means safe from a repetition of the same
experience in modern society. Nor can it be said that Plato reacted
against an evil which, in his eyes, was an evil only when it deprived
a very few properly-qualified persons of political supremacy. With
regard to all others he proposed to sanction and systematise what was
already becoming a common custom—namely, entire withdrawal from the
administration of affairs in peace and war. Hegel seems to forget
that it is only a single class, and that the smallest, in Plato’s
republic which is not allowed to have any private interests; while the
industrial classes, necessarily forming a large majority of the whole
population, are not only suffered to retain their property and their
families, but are altogether thrown back for mental occupation on the
interests arising out of these. The resulting state of things would
have found its best parallel, not in old Greek city life, but in modern
Europe, as it was between the Reformation and the French Revolution.
The three forms of individualism already enumerated do not exhaust
the general conception of subjectivity. According to Hegel, if we
understand him aright, the most important aspect of the principle in
question would be the philosophical side, the return of thought on
itself, already latent in physical speculation, proclaimed by the
Sophists as an all-dissolving scepticism, and worked up into a theory
of life by Socrates. That there was such a movement is, of course,
certain; but that it contributed perceptibly to the decay of old
Greek morality, or that it was essentially opposed to the old Greek
spirit, cannot, we think, be truly asserted. What has been already
observed of political liberty and of political unscrupulousness may be
repeated of intellectual inquisitiveness, rationalism, scepticism, or
by whatever name the tendency in question is to be called—it always
was, and still is, essentially characteristic of the Greek race. It
may very possibly have been a source of political disintegration at
all times, but that it became so to a greater extent after assuming
the form of systematic speculation has never been proved. If the study
of science, or the passion for intellectual gymnastics, drew men away
from the duties of public life, it was simply as one more private
interest among many, just like feasting, or lovemaking, or travelling,
or poetry, or any other of the occupations in which a wealthy Greek
delighted; not from any intrinsic incompatibility with the duties of a
statesman or a soldier. So far, indeed, was this from being true, that
liberal studies, even of the abstrusest order, were pursued with every
advantage to their patriotic energy by such citizens as Zeno, Melissus,
Empedocles, and, above all, by Pericles and Epameinondas. If Socrates
stood aloof from public business it was that he might have more leisure
to train others for its proper performance; and he himself, when called
upon to serve the State, proved fully equal to the emergency. As for
the Sophists, it is well known that their profession was to give young
men the sort of education which would enable them to fill the highest
political offices with honour and advantage. It is true that such a
special preparation would end by throwing increased difficulties in
the way of a career which it was originally intended to facilitate, by
raising the standard of technical proficiency in statesmanship; and
that many possible aspirants would, in consequence, be driven back
on less arduous pursuits. But Plato was so far from opposing this
specialisation that he wished to carry it much farther, and to make
government the exclusive business of a small class who were to be
physiologically selected and to receive an education far more elaborate
than any that the Sophists could give. If, however, we consider Plato
not as the constructor of a new constitution but in relation to the
politics of his own time, we must admit that his whole influence was
used to set public affairs in a hateful and contemptible light. So far,
therefore, as philosophy was represented by him, it must count for a
disintegrating force. But in just the same degree we are precluded from
assimilating his idea of a State to the old Hellenic model. We must
rather say, what he himself would have said, that it never was realised
anywhere; although, as we shall presently see, a certain approach to it
was made in the Middle Ages.
Once more, looking at the whole current of Greek philosophy, and
especially the philosophy of mind, are we entitled to say that it
encouraged, if it did not create, those other forms of individualism
already defined as mutinous criticism on the part of the people, and
selfish ambition on the part of its chiefs? Some historians have
maintained that there was such a connexion, operating, if not directly,
at least through a chain of intermediate causes. Free thought destroyed
religion, with religion fell morality, and with morality whatever
restraints had hitherto kept anarchic tendencies of every description
within bounds. These are interesting reflections; but they do not
concern us here, for the issue raised by Hegel is entirely different.
It matters nothing to him that Socrates was a staunch defender of
supernaturalism and of the received morality. The essential antithesis
is between the Socratic introspection and the Socratic dialectics on
the one side, and the unquestioned authority of ancient institutions
on the other. If this be what Hegel means, we must once more record
our dissent. We cannot admit that the philosophy of subjectivity, so
interpreted, was a decomposing ferment; nor that the spirit of Plato’s
republic was, in any case, a protest against it. The Delphic precept,
‘Know thyself,’ meant in the mouth of Socrates: Let every man find out
what work he is best fitted for, and stick to that, without meddling in
matters for which he is not qualified. The Socratic dialectic meant:
Let the whole field of knowledge be similarly studied; let our ideas
on all subjects be so systematised that we shall be able to discover
at a moment’s notice the bearing of any one of them on any of the
others, or on any new question brought up for decision. Surely nothing
could well be less individualistic, in a bad sense, less anti-social,
less anarchic than this. Nor does Plato oppose, he generalises his
master’s principles; he works out the psychology and dialectic of
the whole state; and if the members of his governing class are not
permitted to have any separate interests in their individual capacity,
each individual soul is exalted to the highest dignity by having
the community reorganised on the model of its own internal economy.
There are no violent peripeteias in this great drama of thought, but
everywhere harmony, continuity, and gradual development.
We have entered at some length into Hegel’s theory of the _Republic_,
because it seems to embody a misleading conception not only of Greek
politics but also of the most important attempt at a social reformation
ever made by one man in the history of philosophy. Thought would be
much less worth studying if it only reproduced the abstract form of
a very limited experience, instead of analysing and recombining the
elements of which that experience is composed. And our faith in the
power of conscious efforts towards improvement will very much depend on
which side of the alternative we accept.
Zeller, while taking a much wider view than Hegel, still assumes that
Plato’s reforms, so far as they were suggested by experience, were
simply an adaptation of Dorian practices.[148] He certainly succeeds
in showing that private property, marriage, education, individual
liberty, and personal morality were subjected, at least in Sparta, to
many restrictions resembling those imposed in the Platonic state. And
Plato himself, by treating the Spartan system as the first form of
degeneration from his own ideal, seems to indicate that this of all
existing polities made the nearest approach to it. The declarations of
the _Timaeus_[149] are, however, much more distinct; and according to
them it was in the caste-divisions of Egypt that he found the nearest
parallel to his own scheme of social reorganisation. There, too, the
priests, or wise men came first, and after them the warriors, while
the different branches of industry were separated from one another by
rigid demarcations. He may also have been struck by that free admission
of women to employments elsewhere filled exclusively by men, which so
surprised Herodotus, from his inability to discern its real cause—the
more advanced differentiation of Egyptian as compared with Greek
society.[150]
VII.
But a profounder analysis of experience is necessary before we can come
to the real roots of Plato’s scheme. It must be remembered that our
philosopher was a revolutionist of the most thorough-going description,
that he objected not to this or that constitution of his time, but to
all existing constitutions whatever. Now, every great revolutionary
movement, if in some respects an advance and an evolution, is in other
respects a retrogression and a dissolution. When the most complex forms
of political association are broken up, the older or subordinate forms
suddenly acquire new life and meaning. What is true of practice is
true also of speculation. Having broken away from the most advanced
civilisation, Plato was thrown back on the spontaneous organisation of
industry, on the army, the school, the family, the savage tribe, and
even the herd of cattle, for types of social union. It was by taking
some hints from each of these minor aggregates that he succeeded in
building up his ideal polity, which, notwithstanding its supposed
simplicity and consistency, is one of the most heterogeneous ever
framed. The principles on which it rests are not really carried out
to their logical consequences; they interfere with and supplement
one another. The restriction of political power to a single class is
avowedly based on the necessity for a division of labour. One man, we
are told, can only do one thing well. But Plato should have seen that
the producer is not for that reason to be made a monopolist; and that,
to borrow his own favourite example, shoes are properly manufactured
because the shoemaker is kept in order by the competition of his rivals
and by the freedom of the consumer to purchase wherever he pleases.
Athenian democracy, so far from contradicting the lessons of political
economy, was, in truth, their logical application to government. The
people did not really govern themselves, nor do they in any modern
democracy, but they listened to different proposals, just as they might
choose among different articles in a shop or different tenders for
building a house, accepted the most suitable, and then left it to be
carried out by their trusted agents.
Again, Plato is false to his own rule when he selects his philosophic
governors out of the military caste. If the same individual can be a
warrior in his youth and an administrator in his riper years, one
man can do two things well, though not at the same time. If the same
person can be born with the qualifications both of a soldier and of
a politician, and can be fitted by education for each calling in
succession, surely a much greater number can combine the functions of
a manual labourer with those of an elector. What prevented Plato from
perceiving this obvious parallel was the tradition of the paterfamilias
who had always been a warrior in his youth; and a commendable
anxiety to keep the army closely connected with the civil power. The
analogies of domestic life have also a great deal to do with his
proposed community of women and children. Instead of undervaluing the
family affections, he immensely overvalued them; as is shown by his
supposition that the bonds of consanguinity would prevent dissensions
from arising among his warriors. He should have known that many a home
is the scene of constant wrangling, and that quarrels between kinsfolk
are the bitterest of any. Then, looking on the State as a great school,
Plato imagined that the obedience, docility, and credulity of young
scholars could be kept up through a lifetime; that full-grown citizens
would swallow the absurdest inventions; and that middle-aged officers
could be sent into retirement for several years to study dialectic. To
suppose that statesmen must necessarily be formed by the discipline
in question is another scholastic trait. The professional teacher
attributes far more practical importance to his abstruser lessons
than they really possess. He is not content to wait for the indirect
influence which they may exert at some remote period and in combination
with forces of perhaps a widely different character. He looks for
immediate and telling results. He imagines that the highest truth
must have a mysterious power of transforming all things into its own
likeness, or at least of making its learners more capable than other
men of doing the world’s work. Here also Plato, instead of being too
logical, was not logical enough. By following out the laws of economy,
as applied to mental labour, he might have arrived at the separation
of the spiritual and temporal powers, and thus anticipated the best
established social doctrine of our time.
With regard to the propagation of the race, Plato’s methods
are avowedly borrowed from those practised by bird-fanciers,
horse-trainers, and cattle-breeders. It had long been a Greek custom to
compare the people to a flock of sheep and their ruler to a shepherd,
phrases which still survive in ecclesiastical parlance. Socrates
habitually employed the same simile in his political discussions;
and the rhetoricians used it as a justification of the governors
who enriched themselves at the expense of those committed to their
charge. Plato twisted the argument out of their hands and showed that
the shepherd, as such, studies nothing but the good of his sheep.
He failed to perceive that the parallel could not be carried out in
every detail, and that, quite apart from more elevated considerations,
the system which secures a healthy progeny in the one case cannot be
transferred to creatures possessing a vastly more complex and delicate
organisation. The destruction of sickly and deformed children could
only be justified on the hypothesis that none but physical qualities
were of any value to the community. Our philosopher forgets his own
distinction between soul and body just when he most needed to remember
it.
The position assigned to women by Plato may perhaps have seemed to
his contemporaries the most paradoxical of all his projects, and it
has been observed that here he is in advance even of our own age. But
a true conclusion may be deduced from false premises; and Plato’s
conclusion is not even identical with that reached on other grounds by
the modern advocates of women’s rights, or rather of their equitable
claims. The author of the _Republic_ detested democracy; and the
enfranchisement of women is now demanded as a part of the general
democratic programme. It is an axiom, at least with liberals, that
no class will have its interests properly attended to which is left
without a voice in the election of parliamentary representatives;
and the interests of the sexes are not more obviously identical than
those of producers and consumers, or of capitalists and labourers.
Another democratic principle is that individuals are, as a rule, the
best judges of what occupation they are fit for; and as a consequence
of this it is further demanded that women should be admitted to every
employment on equal terms with men; leaving competition to decide in
each instance whether they are suited for it or not. Their continued
exclusion from the military profession would be an exception more
apparent than real; because, like the majority of the male sex, they
are physically disqualified for it. Now, the profession of arms is
the very one for which Plato proposes to destine the daughters of his
aristocratic caste, without the least intention of consulting their
wishes on the subject. He is perfectly aware that his own principle of
differentiation will be quoted against him, but he turns the difficulty
in a very dexterous manner. He contends that the difference of the
sexes, so far as strength and intelligence are concerned, is one not
of kind but of degree; for women are not distinguished from men by
the possession of any special aptitude, none of them being able to do
anything that some men cannot do better. Granting the truth of this
rather unflattering assumption, the inference drawn from it will still
remain economically unsound. The division of labour requires that each
task should be performed, not by those who are absolutely, but by
those who are relatively, best fitted for it. In many cases we must be
content with work falling short of the highest attainable standard,
that the time and abilities of the best workmen may be exclusively
devoted to functions for which they alone are competent. Even if women
could be trained to fight, it does not follow that their energies
might not be more advantageously expended in another direction. Here,
again, Plato improperly reasons from low to high forms of association.
He appeals to the doubtful example of nomadic tribes, whose women took
part in the defence of the camps, and to the fighting power possessed
by the females of predatory animals. In truth, the elimination of home
life left his women without any employment peculiar to themselves;
and so, not to leave them completely idle, they were drafted into the
army, more with the hope of imposing on the enemy by an increase of
its apparent strength than for the sake of any real service which they
were expected to perform.[151] When Plato proposes that women of proved
ability should be admitted to the highest political offices, he is far
more in sympathy with modern reformers; and his freedom from prejudice
is all the more remarkable when we consider that no Greek lady (except,
perhaps, Artemisia) is known to have ever displayed a talent for
government, although feminine interference in politics was common
enough at Sparta; and that personally his feeling towards women was
unsympathetic if not contemptuous.[152] Still we must not exaggerate
the importance of his concession. The Platonic polity was, after all,
a family rather than a true State; and that women should be allowed a
share in the regulation of marriage and in the nurture of children,
was only giving them back with one hand what had been taken away with
the other. Already, among ourselves, women have a voice in educational
matters; and were marriage brought under State control, few would doubt
the propriety of making them eligible to the new Boards which would be
charged with its supervision.
The foregoing analysis will enable us to appreciate the true
significance of the resemblance pointed out by Zeller[153] between
the Platonic republic and the organisation of mediaeval society. The
importance given to religious and moral training; the predominance
of the priesthood; the sharp distinction drawn between the military
caste and the industrial population; the exclusion of the latter from
political power; the partial abolition of marriage and property;
and, it might be added, the high position enjoyed by women as
regents, châtelaines, abbesses, and sometimes even as warriors or
professors,—are all innovations more in the spirit of Plato than
in the spirit of Pericles. Three converging influences united to
bring about this extraordinary verification of a philosophical deal.
The profound spiritual revolution effected by Greek thought was
taken up and continued by Catholicism, and unconsciously guided to
the same practical conclusions the teaching which it had in great
part originally inspired. Social differentiation went on at the
same time, and led to the political consequences logically deduced
from it by Plato. And the barbarian conquest of Rome brought in its
train some of those more primitive habits on which his breach with
civilisation had equally thrown him back. Thus the coincidence between
Plato’s _Republic_ and mediaeval polity is due in one direction to
causal agency, in another to speculative insight, and in a third to
parallelism of effects, independent of each other but arising out of
analogous conditions.
If, now, we proceed to compare the _Republic_ with more recent schemes
having also for their object the identification of public with private
interests, nothing, at first sight, seems to resemble it so closely
as the theories of modern Communism; especially those which advocate
the abolition not only of private property but also of marriage. The
similarity, however, is merely superficial, and covers a radical
divergence, For, to begin with, the Platonic polity is not a system of
Communism at all, in our sense of the word. It is not that the members
of the ruling caste are to throw their property into a common fund;
neither as individuals nor as a class do they possess any property
whatever. Their wants are provided for by the industrial classes, who
apparently continue to live under the old system of particularism.
What Plato had in view was not to increase the sum of individual
enjoyments by enforcing an equal division of their material means, but
to eliminate individualism altogether, and thus give human feeling the
absolute generality which he so much admired in abstract ideas. On the
other hand, unless we are mistaken, modern Communism has no objection
to private property as such, could it remain divided either with
absolute equality or in strict proportion to the wants of its holders;
but only as the inevitable cause of inequalities which advancing
civilisation seems to aggravate rather than to redress. So also with
marriage; the modern assailants of that institution object to it as a
restraint on the freedom of individual passion, which, according to
them, would secure the maximum of pleasure by perpetually varying its
objects. Plato would have looked on such reasonings as a parody and
perversion of his own doctrine; as in very truth, what some of them
have professed to be, pleas for the rehabilitation of the flesh in its
original supremacy over the spirit, and therefore the direct opposite
of a system which sought to spiritualise by generalising the interests
of life. And so, when in the _Laws_ he gives his Communistic principles
their complete logical development by extending them to the whole
population, he is careful to preserve their philosophical character as
the absorption of individual in social existence.[154]
The parentage of the two ideas will further elucidate their
essentially heterogeneous character. For modern Communism is an
outgrowth of the democratic tendencies which Plato detested; and
as such had its counterpart in ancient Athens, if we may trust the
_Ecclêsiazusae_ of Aristophanes, where also it is associated with
unbridled licentiousness.[155] Plato, on the contrary, seems to have
received the first suggestion of his Communism from the Pythagorean and
aristocratic confraternities of Southern Italy, where the principle
that friends have all things in common was an accepted maxim.
If Plato stands at the very antipodes of Fourier and St. Simon, he is
connected by a real relationship with those thinkers who, like Auguste
Comte and Mr. Herbert Spencer, have based their social systems on a
wide survey of physical science and human history. It is even probable
that his ideas have exercised a decided though not a direct influence
on the two writers whom we have named. For Comte avowedly took many of
his proposed reforms from the organisation of mediaeval Catholicism,
which was a translation of philosophy into dogma and discipline, just
as Positivism is a re-translation of theology into the human thought
from which it sprang. And Mr. Spencer’s system, while it seems to be
the direct antithesis of Plato’s, might claim kindred with it through
the principle of differentiation and integration, which, after passing
from Greek thought into political economy and physiology, has been
restored by our illustrious countryman to something more than its
original generality. It has also to be observed that the application of
very abstract truths to political science needs to be most jealously
guarded, since their elasticity increases in direct proportion to
their width. When one thinker argues from the law of increasing
specialisation to a vast extension of governmental interference with
personal liberty, and another thinker to its restriction within the
narrowest possible limits, it seems time to consider whether experience
and expediency are not, after all, the safest guides to trust.
VIII.
The social studies through which we have accompanied Plato seem to have
reacted on his more abstract speculations, and to have largely modified
the extreme opposition in which these had formerly stood to current
notions, whether of a popular or a philosophical character. The change
first becomes perceptible in his theory of Ideas. This is a subject on
which, for the sake of greater clearness, we have hitherto refrained
from entering; and that we should have succeeded in avoiding it so long
would seem to prove that the doctrine in question forms a much less
important part of his philosophy than is commonly imagined. Perhaps,
as some think, it was not an original invention of his own, but was
borrowed from the Megarian school; and the mythical connexion in which
it frequently figures makes us doubtful how far he ever thoroughly
accepted it. The theory is, that to every abstract name or conception
of the mind there corresponds an objective entity possessing a separate
existence quite distinct from that of the scattered particulars by
which it is exemplified to our senses or to our imagination. Just as
the Heracleitean flux represented the confusion of which Socrates
convicted his interlocutors, so also did these Ideas represent the
definitions by which he sought to bring method and certainty into
their opinions. It may be that, as Grote suggests, Plato adopted this
hypothesis in order to escape from the difficulty of defining common
notions in a satisfactory manner. It is certain that his earliest
Dialogues seem to place true definitions beyond the reach of human
knowledge. And at the beginning of Plato’s constructive period we
find the recognition of abstract conceptions, whether mathematical or
moral, traced to the remembrance of an ante-natal state, where the soul
held direct converse with the transcendent realities to which those
conceptions correspond. Justice, temperance, beauty, and goodness, are
especially mentioned as examples of Ideas revealed in this manner.
Subsequent investigations must, however, have led Plato to believe
that the highest truths are to be found by analysing not the loose
contents but the fixed forms of consciousness; and that, if each virtue
expressed a particular relation between the various parts of the soul,
no external experience was needed to make her acquainted with its
meaning; still less could conceptions arising out of her connexion with
the material world be explained by reference to a sphere of purely
spiritual existence. At the same time, innate ideas would no longer be
required to prove her incorporeality, when the authority of reason over
sense furnished so much more satisfactory a ground for believing the
two to be of different origin. To all who have studied the evolution
of modern thought, the substitution of Kantian forms for Cartesian
ideas will at once elucidate and confirm our hypothesis of a similar
reformation in Plato’s metaphysics.
Again, the new position occupied by Mind as an intermediary between
the world of reality and the world of appearance, tended more and more
to obliterate or confuse the demarcations by which they had hitherto
been separated. The most general headings under which it was usual to
contrast them were, the One and the Many, Being and Nothing, the Same
and the Different, Rest and Motion. Parmenides employed the one set of
terms to describe his Absolute, and the other to describe the objects
of vulgar belief. They also served respectively to designate the wise
and the ignorant, the dialectician and the sophist, the knowledge
of gods and the opinions of men; besides offering points of contact
with the antithetical couples of Pythagoreanism. But Plato gradually
found that the nature of Mind could not be understood without taking
both points of view into account. Unity and plurality, sameness and
difference, equally entered into its composition; although undoubtedly
belonging to the sphere of reality, it was self-moved and the cause
of all motion in other things. The dialectic or classificatory method,
with its progressive series of differentiations and assimilations, also
involved a continual use of categories which were held to be mutually
exclusive. And on proceeding to an examination of the summa genera, the
highest and most abstract ideas which it had been sought to distinguish
by their absolute purity and simplicity from the shifting chaos of
sensible phenomena, Plato discovered that even these were reduced
to a maze of confusion and contradiction by a sincere application
of the cross-examining elenchus. For example, to predicate being of
the One was to mix it up with a heterogeneous idea and let in the
very plurality which it denied. To distinguish them was to predicate
difference of both, and thus open the door to fresh embarrassments.
Finally, while the attempt to attain extreme accuracy of definition was
leading to the destruction of all thought and all reality within the
Socratic school, the dialectic method had been taken up and parodied
in a very coarse style by a class of persons called Eristics. These
men had, to some extent, usurped the place of the elder Sophists
as paid instructors of youth; but their only accomplishment was to
upset every possible assertion by a series of verbal juggles. One of
their favourite paradoxes was to deny the reality of falsehood on the
Parmenidean principle that ‘nothing cannot exist.’ Plato satirises
their method in the _Euthydêmus_, and makes a much more serious
attempt to meet it in the _Sophist_; two Dialogues which seem to have
been composed not far from one another.[156] The _Sophist_ effects a
considerable simplification in the ideal theory by resolving negation
into difference, and altogether omitting the notions of unity and
plurality,—perhaps as a result of the investigations contained in the
_Parmenides_, another dialogue belonging to the same group, where the
couple referred to are analysed with great minuteness, and are shown to
be infected with numerous self-contradictions. The remaining five ideas
of Existence, Sameness, Difference, Rest, and Motion, are allowed to
stand; but the fact of their inseparable connexion is brought out with
great force and clearness. The enquiry is one of considerable interest,
including, as it does, the earliest known analysis of predication,
and forming an indispensable link in the transition from Platonic to
Aristotelian logic—that is to say, from the theory of definition and
classification to the theory of syllogism.
Once the Ideas had been brought into mutual relation and shown to be
compounded with one another, the task of connecting them with the
external world became considerably easier; and the same intermediary
which before had linked them to it as a participant in the nature of
both, was now raised to a higher position and became the efficient
cause of their intimate union. Such is the standpoint of the
_Philêbus_, where all existence is divided into four classes, the
limit, the unlimited, the union of both, and the cause of their union.
Mind belongs to the last and matter to the second class. There can
hardly be a doubt that the first class is either identical with the
Ideas or fills the place once occupied by them. The third class is the
world of experience, the Cosmos of early Greek thought, which Plato
had now come to look on as a worthy object of study. In the _Timaeus_,
also a very late Dialogue, he goes further, and gives us a complete
cosmogony, the general conception of which is clear enough, although
the details are avowedly conjectural and figurative; nor do they seem
to have exercised any influence or subsequent speculation until the
time of Descartes. We are told that the world was created by God,
who is absolutely good, and, being without jealousy, wished that all
things should be like himself. He makes it to consist of a soul and
a body, the former constructed in imitation of the eternal archetypal
ideas which now seem to be reduced to three—Existence, Sameness, and
Difference.[157] The soul of the world is formed by mixing these three
elements together, and the body is an image of the soul. Sameness is
represented by the starry sphere rotating on its own axis; Difference
by the inclination of the ecliptic to the equator; Existence, perhaps,
by the everlasting duration of the heavens. The same analogy extends
to the human figure, of which the head is the most essential part, all
the rest of the body being merely designed for its support. Plato seems
to regard the material world as a sort of machinery designed to meet
the necessities of sight and touch, by which the human soul arrives
at a knowledge of the eternal order without;—a direct reversal of
his earlier theories, according to which matter and sense were mere
encumbrances impeding the soul in her efforts after truth.
What remains of the visible world after deducting its ideal elements is
pure space. This, which to some seems the clearest of all conceptions,
was to Plato one of the obscurest. He can only describe it as the
formless substance out of which the four elements, fire, air, water,
and earth, are differentiated. It closes the scale of existence and
even lies half outside it, just as the Idea of Good in the _Republic_
transcends the same scale at the other end. We may conjecture that
the two principles are opposed as absolute self-identity and absolute
self-separation; the whole intermediate series of forms serving
to bridge over the interval between them. It will then be easy to
understand how, as Aristotle tells us, Plato finally came to adopt the
Pythagorean nomenclature and designated his two generating principles
as the monad and the indefinite dyad. Number was formed by their
combination, and all other things were made out of number. Aristotle
complains that the Platonists had turned philosophy into mathematics;
and perhaps in the interests of science it was fortunate that the
transformation occurred. To suppose that matter could be built up out
of geometrical triangles, as Plato teaches in the _Timaeus_, was,
no doubt, a highly reprehensible confusion; but that the systematic
study of science should be based on mathematics was an equally new and
important aperçu. The impulse given to knowledge followed unforeseen
directions; and at a later period Plato’s true spirit was better
represented by Archimedes and Hipparchus than by Arcesilaus and
Carneades.
It is remarkable that the spontaneous development of Greek thought
should have led to a form of Theism not unlike that which some persons
still imagine was supernaturally revealed to the Hebrew race; for the
absence of any connexion between the two is now almost universally
admitted. Modern science has taken up the attitude of Laplace towards
the hypothesis in question; and those critics who, like Lange, are most
imbued with the scientific spirit, feel inclined to regard its adoption
by Plato as a retrograde movement. We may to a certain extent agree
with them, without admitting that philosophy, as a whole, was injured
by departing from the principles of Democritus. An intellectual like
an animal organism may sometimes have to choose between retrograde
metamorphosis and total extinction. The course of events drove
speculation to Athens, where it could only exist on the condition of
assuming a theological form. Moreover, action and reaction were equal
and contrary. Mythology gained as much as philosophy lost. It was
purified from immoral ingredients, and raised to the highest level
which supernaturalism is capable of attaining. If the _Republic_ was
the forerunner of the Catholic Church, the _Timaeus_ was the forerunner
of the Catholic faith.
IX.
The old age of Plato seems to have been marked by restless activity
in more directions than one. He began various works which were never
finished, and projected others which were never begun. He became
possessed by a devouring zeal for social reform. It seemed to him that
nothing was wanting but an enlightened despot to make his ideal State
a reality. According to one story, he fancied that such an instrument
might be found in the younger Dionysius. If so, his expectations were
speedily disappointed. As Hegel acutely observes, only a man of half
measures will allow himself to be guided by another; and such a man
would lack the energy needed to carry out Plato’s scheme.[158] However
this may be, the philosopher does not seem to have given up his idea
that absolute monarchy was, after all, the government from which most
good might be expected. A process of substitution which runs through
his whole intellectual evolution was here exemplified for the last
time. Just as in his ethical system knowledge, after having been
regarded solely as the means for procuring an ulterior end, pleasure,
subsequently became an end in itself; just as the interest in knowledge
was superseded by a more absorbing interest in the dialectical
machinery which was to facilitate its acquisition, and this again by
the social re-organisation which was to make education a department of
the State; so also the beneficent despotism originally invoked for the
purpose of establishing an aristocracy on the new model, came at last
to be regarded by Plato as itself the best form of government. Such,
at least, seems to be the drift of a remarkable Dialogue called the
_Statesman_, which we agree with Prof. Jowett in placing immediately
before the _Laws_. Some have denied its authenticity, and others have
placed it very early in the entire series of Platonic compositions.
But it contains passages of such blended wit and eloquence that no
other man could have written them; and passages so destitute of life
that they could only have been written when his system had stiffened
into mathematical pedantry and scholastic routine. Moreover, it seems
distinctly to anticipate the scheme of detailed legislation which Plato
spent his last years in elaborating. After covering with ridicule the
notion that a truly competent ruler should ever be hampered by written
enactments, the principal spokesman acknowledges that, in the absence
of such a ruler, a definite and unalterable code offers the best
guarantees for political stability.
This code Plato set himself to construct in his last and longest work,
the _Laws_. Less than half of that Dialogue, however, is occupied
with the details of legislation. The remaining portions deal with the
familiar topics of morality, religion, science, and education. The
first book propounds a very curious theory of asceticism, which has
not, we believe, been taken up by any subsequent moralist. On the
principle of _in vino veritas_ Plato proposes that drunkenness should
be systematically employed for the purpose of testing self-control.
True temperance is not abstinence, but the power of resisting
temptation; and we can best discover to what extent any man possesses
that power by surprising him when off his guard. If he should be
proof against seductive influences even when in his cups, we shall
be doubly sure of his constancy at other times. Prof. Jowett rather
maliciously suggests that a personal proclivity may have suggested
this extraordinary apology for hard drinking. Were it so, we should be
reminded of the successive revelations by which indulgences of another
kind were permitted to Mohammed, and of the one case in which divorce
was sanctioned by Auguste Comte. We should also remember that the
Christian Puritanism to which Plato approached so near has always been
singularly lenient to this disgraceful vice. But perhaps a somewhat
higher order of considerations will help us to a better understanding
of the paradox. Plato was averse from rejecting any tendency of his
age that could possibly be turned to account in his philosophy.
Hence, as we have seen, the use which he makes of love, even under
its most unlawful forms, in the _Symposium_ and the _Phaedrus_. Now,
it would appear, from our scanty sources of information, that social
festivities, always very popular at Athens, had become the chief
interest in life about the time when Plato was composing his _Laws_.
According to one graceful legend, the philosopher himself breathed his
last at a marriage-feast. It may, therefore, have occurred to him that
the prevalent tendency could, like the amorous passions of a former
generation, be utilised for moral training and made subservient to the
very cause with which, at first sight, it seemed to conflict.
The concessions to common sense and to contemporary schools of thought,
already pointed out in those Dialogues which we suppose to have been
written after the _Republic_, are still more conspicuous in the _Laws_.
We do not mean merely the project of a political constitution avowedly
offered as the best possible in existing circumstances, though not
the best absolutely; but we mean that there is throughout a desire to
present philosophy from its most intelligible, practical, and popular
side. The extremely rigorous standard of sexual morality (p. 838)
seems, indeed, more akin to modern than to ancient notions, but it was
in all probability borrowed from the naturalistic school of ethics,
the forerunner of Stoicism; for not only is there a direct appeal to
Nature’s teaching in that connexion; but throughout the entire work
the terms ‘nature’ and ‘naturally’ occur with greater frequency, we
believe, than in all the rest of Plato’s writings put together. When,
on the other hand, it is asserted that men can be governed by no other
motive than pleasure (p. 663, B), we seem to see in this declaration
a concession to the Cyrenaic school, as well as a return to the
forsaken standpoint of the _Protagoras_. The increasing influence of
Pythagoreanism is shown by the exaggerated importance attributed to
exact numerical determinations. The theory of ideas is, as Prof. Jowett
observes, entirely absent, its place being taken by the distinction
between mind and matter.[159]
The political constitution and code of laws recommended by Plato to
his new city are adapted to a great extent from the older legislation
of Athens. As such they have supplied the historians of ancient
jurisprudence with some valuable indications. But from a philosophic
point of view the general impression produced is wearisome and even
offensive. A universal system of espionage is established, and the
odious trade of informer receives ample encouragement. Worst of all,
it is proposed, in the true spirit of Athenian intolerance, to uphold
religious orthodoxy by persecuting laws. Plato had actually come to
think that disagreement with the vulgar theology was a folly and a
crime. One passage may be quoted as a warning to those who would set
early associations to do the work of reason; and who would overbear new
truths by a method which at one time might have been used with fatal
effect against their own opinions:—
Who can be calm when he is called upon to prove the existence of the
gods? Who can avoid hating and abhorring the men who are and have been
the cause of this argument? I speak of those who will not believe the
words which they have heard as babes and sucklings from their mothers
and nurses, repeated by them both in jest and earnest like charms;
who have also heard and seen their parents offering up sacrifices and
prayers—sights and sounds delightful to children—sacrificing, I say,
in the most earnest manner on behalf of them and of themselves, and
with eager interest talking to the gods and beseeching them as though
they were firmly convinced of their existence; who likewise see and
hear the genuflexions and prostrations which are made by Hellenes and
barbarians to the rising and setting sun and moon, in all the various
turns of good and evil fortune, not as if they thought that there
were no gods, but as if there could be no doubt of their existence,
and no suspicion of their non-existence; when men, knowing all these
things, despise them on no real grounds, as would be admitted by all
who have any particle of intelligence, and when they force us to say
what we are now saying, how can any one in gentle terms remonstrate
with the like of them, when he has to begin by proving to them the
very existence of the gods?[160]
Let it be remembered that the gods of whom Plato is speaking are the
sun, moon, and stars; that the atheists whom he denounces only taught
what we have long known to be true, which is that those luminaries
are no more divine, no more animated, no more capable of accepting
our sacrifices or responding to our cries than is the earth on which
we tread; and that he attempts to prove the contrary by arguments
which, even if they were not inconsistent with all that we know about
mechanics, would still be utterly inadequate to the purpose for which
they are employed.
Turning back once more from the melancholy decline of a great genius
to the splendour of its meridian prime, we will endeavour briefly
to recapitulate the achievements which entitle Plato to rank among
the five or six greatest Greeks, and among the four or five greatest
thinkers of all time. He extended the philosophy of mind until it
embraced not only ethics and dialectics but also the study of politics,
of religion, of social science, of fine art, of economy, of language,
and of education. In other words, he showed how ideas could be applied
to life on the most comprehensive scale. Further, he saw that the study
of Mind, to be complete, necessitates a knowledge of physical phenomena
and of the realities which underlie them; accordingly, he made a return
on the objective speculations which had been temporarily abandoned,
thus mediating between Socrates and early Greek thought; while on
the other hand by his theory of classification he mediated between
Socrates and Aristotle. He based physical science on mathematics, thus
establishing a method of research and of education which has continued
in operation ever since. He sketched the outlines of a new religion in
which morality was to be substituted for ritualism, and intelligent
imitation of God for blind obedience to his will; a religion of
monotheism, of humanity, of purity, and of immortal life. And he
embodied all these lessons in a series of compositions distinguished
by such beauty of form that their literary excellence alone would
entitle them to rank among the greatest masterpieces that the world
has ever seen. He took the recently-created instrument of prose style
and at once raised it to the highest pitch of excellence that it has
ever attained. Finding the new art already distorted by false taste and
overlaid with meretricious ornament, he cleansed and regenerated it in
that primal fount of intellectual life, that richest, deepest, purest
source of joy, the conversation of enquiring spirits with one another,
when they have awakened to the desire for truth and have not learned to
despair of its attainment. Thus it was that the philosopher’s mastery
of expression gave added emphasis to his protest against those who made
style a substitute for knowledge, or, by a worse corruption, perverted
it into an instrument of profitable wrong. They moved along the surface
in a confused world of words, of sensations, and of animal desires;
he penetrated through all those dumb images and blind instincts,
to the central verity and supreme end which alone can inform them
with meaning, consistency, permanence, and value. To conclude: Plato
belonged to that nobly practical school of idealists who master all the
details of reality before attempting its reformation, and accomplish
their great designs by enlisting and reorganising whatever spontaneous
forces are already working in the same direction; but the fertility of
whose own suggestions it needs more than one millennium to exhaust.
There is nothing in heaven or earth that was not dreamt of in his
philosophy: some of his dreams have already come true; others still
await their fulfilment; and even those which are irreconcilable with
the demands of experience will continue to be studied with the interest
attaching to every generous and daring adventure, in the spiritual no
less than in the secular order of existence.
FOOTNOTES:
[134] See the chapter on the Metaphysics of Sexual Love in
Schopenhauer’s _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_.
[135] Cf. for the whole following passage Havet, _Le Christianisme et
ses Origines_, I., 286-8. It was, however, written before the author
had become acquainted with M. Havet’s work.
[136] In order to avoid misconception it may be as well to mention
that the above remarks apply only to mystical passion assuming the
form of religion; they have nothing to do with intellectual and moral
convictions.
[137] _Phaedr._, 266, B. Jowett, II., 144. According to Teichmüller
(_Literarische Fehden im vierten Jahrhundert vor Chr._, p. 135)—the
god here spoken of is no other than Plato himself. Even granting the
pantheistic interpretation of Platonism to be true, this seems a
somewhat strained application of it.
[138] Adapting Plato’s formula to modern ideas we might say: A literary
education: knowledge of the world: mathematics: physical science.
[139] _Phaedo_, 69, A. Jowett, I., 442.
[140] _Repub._, I., 348, B ff.; Zeller, _op. cit._, 507-8.
[141] See especially the argument with Callicles in the _Gorgias_.
[142] _Repub._, II., 379, A; 380, D.
[143] Zeller, 678-8.
[144] ‘Un monde qui est l’injustice même.’—Ernest Renan, _L’Église
Chrétienne_, p. 139.
[145] Cf. _Lysis_, 210, E. Jowett, I., 54.
[146] _Meno_, 71, E. Jowett, I., 270.
[147] _Gesch. d. Ph._, II., 272.
[148] _Op. cit._, p. 777.
[149] _Timaeus_, 24, A. Jowett, III., 608.
[150] Cf. the excellent remarks of Teichmüller, _Lit. Fehden_, p. 107.
[151] _Repub._, V., 471, D.
[152] He mentions as one of the worst effects of a democracy that it
made them assume airs of equality with men. _Repub._, 563, B.; cf. 569,
E. _Timaeus_, 90, E. It is to be feared that Plato regarded woman as
the missing link.
[153] In his _Vorträge und Abhandlungen_, first series, p. 68.
[154] _Legg._, 739, B. Jowett, V., 311.
[155] [Since the above was first published, Teichmüller has brought
forward new arguments to prove that it was Plato’s scheme of Communism
which Aristophanes intended to satirise (_Lit. Fehden_, pp. 14, ff.);
but I do not think that even the first half of the _Republic_ could
possibly have been composed at such an early date as that assigned to
it by this learned and ingenious critic.]
[156] [Here, also, the recent arguments of Teichmüller (_Lit. Fehden_,
p. 51) deserve attention, but they have failed to convince me that an
earlier date should be assigned to the _Euthydêmus_.]
[157] We may even say that they are reduced to two; for Existence is a
product of Sameness and Difference.
[158] _Gesch. d. Ph._, II., 175.
[159] In the work already referred to, Teichmüller advances the
startling theory that Aristotle’s _Nicomachean Ethics_ was published
before the completion of the _Laws_, and that Plato took the
opportunity thus offered him for replying to the criticisms of his
former pupil. (_Lit. Fehden_, pp. 194-226).
[160] _Legg._, 887-8. Jowett, V., 456.