PLATO (_continued_)
_The Republic--Denizens of the cave--The Timaeus--A dream of creation_
And now we pass to the central and crowning work of Plato, _The
Republic_, or _Of Justice_--the longest with one exception, and
certainly the greatest of all his works. It combines the humour and
irony, the vivid characterisation and lively dialogue of his earlier
works, with the larger and more serious view, the more constructive and
statesmanlike aims of his later life. The dialogue opens very
beautifully. There has been a festal procession at the Piraeus, the
harbour of Athens, and Socrates with a companion is wending his way
homeward, when he is recalled by other companions, who induce him to
visit the house of an aged friend of his, Cephalus, whom he does not
visit too often. Him he finds seated in his court, crowned, as the
custom was, for the celebration of a family sacrifice, and beholds
beaming on his face the peace of a life well spent and reconciled.
They talk of the happiness that comes in old age to those who have done
good and not evil, and who are not too severely {147} tried in the
matter of worldly cares. Life to this good old man seems a very simple
matter; duty to God, duty to one's neighbours, each according to what
is prescribed and orderly; this is all, and this is sufficient.
Then comes in the questioning Socrates, with his doubts and
difficulties as to what is one's duty in special circumstances; and the
discussion is taken up, not by the good old man, "who goes away to the
sacrifice," but by his son, who can quote the authorities; and by
Thrasymachus, the Sophist, who will have nothing to do with authority,
but maintains that _interest_ is the only real meaning of justice, and
that Might is Right. Socrates, by analogy of the arts, shows that
Might absolutely without tincture of justice is mere weakness, and that
there is honour even among thieves. Yet the exhibition of the 'law
working in the members' seems to have its weak side so long as we look
to individual men, in whom there are many conflicting influences, and
many personal chances and difficulties, which obscure the relation
between just action and happiness.
Socrates therefore will have justice 'writ large' in the community as a
whole, first pictured in its simpler, and then in its more complex and
luxurious forms. The relation of the individual to the community is
represented chiefly as one of education and training; and many strange
theories--as of the equal {148} training of men and women, and the
community of wives, ideas partially drawn from Sparta--are woven into
the ideal structure. Then the dialogue rises to a larger view of
education, as a preparation of the soul of man, not for a community on
earth, but for that heavenly life which was suggested above (p. 144) in
the myth of the steeds.
The purely earthly unideal life is represented as a life of men tied
neck and heels from birth in a cave, having their backs to the light,
and their eyes fixed only on the shadows which are cast upon the wall.
These they take for the only realities, and they may acquire much skill
in interpreting the shadows. Turn these men suddenly to the true
light, and they will be dazzled and blinded. They will feel as though
they had lost the realities, and been plunged into dreams. And in pain
and sorrow they will be tempted to grope back again to the familiar
darkness.
Yet if they hold on in patience, and struggle up the steep till the sun
himself breaks on their vision, what pain and dazzling once more, yet
at the last what glorious revelation! True, if they revisit their old
dwelling-place, they will not see as well as their fellows who are
still living contentedly there, knowing nothing other than the shadows.
They may even seem to these as dreamers who have lost their senses; and
should they try to enlighten these denizens of the cave, they may be
persecuted or {149} even put to death. Such are the men who have had a
sight of the heavenly verities, when compared with the children of
earth and darkness.
Yet the world will never be right till those who have had this vision
come back to the things of earth and order them according to the
eternal verities; the philosopher must be king if ever the perfect life
is to be lived on earth, either by individual or community. As it
would be expressed in Scriptural language, "The kingdoms of this world
must become the kingdoms of the Lord and of His Christ."
For the training of these ideal rulers an ideal education is required,
which Plato calls dialectic; something of its nature is described later
on (p. 170), and we need not linger over it here.
The argument then seems to fall to a lower level. There are various
approximations in actual experience to the ideal community, each more
or less perfect according to the degree in which the good of the
individual is also made the good of all, and the interests of governors
and governed are alike. Parallel with each lower form of state is a
lower individual nature, the worst of all being that of the tyrant,
whose will is his only law, and his own self-indulgence his only
motive. In him indeed Might is Right; but his life is the very
antithesis of happiness. Nay, pleasure of any kind can give no law to
reason; reason can judge of pleasure, but not _vice versâ_. There is
no profit to a {150} man though he gain the whole world, if _himself_
be lost; if he become worse; if the better part of him be silenced and
grow weaker. And after this 'fitful fever' is over, may there not be a
greater bliss beyond? There have been stories told us, visions of
another world, where each man is rewarded according to his works. And
the book closes with a magnificent Vision of Judgment. It is the story
of Er, son of Armenius, who being wounded in battle, after twelve days'
trance comes back to life, and tells of the judgment seat, of heavenly
bliss and hellish punishments, and of the renewal of life and the new
choice given to souls not yet purified wholly of sin. "God is
blameless; Man's Soul is immortal; Justice and Truth are the only
things eternally good." Such is the final revelation.
The _Timaeus_ is an attempt by Plato, under the guise of a Pythagorean
philosopher, to image forth as in a vision or dream the actual framing
of the universe, conceived as a realisation of the Eternal Thought or
Idea. It will be remembered that in the analysis already given (p.
143) of the process of knowledge in individual men, Plato found that
prior to the suggestions of the senses, though not coming into
consciousness except in connection with sensation, men had _ideas_ that
gave them a power of rendering their sensations intelligible. In the
_Timaeus_ Plato attempts a vision of the universe as though he saw
{151} it working itself into actuality on the lines of those ideas.
The vision is briefly as follows: There is the Eternal Creator, who
desired to make the world because He was good and free from jealousy,
and therefore willed that all things should be like Himself; that is,
that the formless, chaotic, unrealised void might receive form and
order, and become, in short, real as He was. Thus creation is the
process by which the Eternal Creator works out His own image, His own
ideas, in and through that which is formless, that which has no name,
which is nothing but possibility,--dead earth, namely, or _Matter_.
And first the world-soul, image of the divine, is formed, on which as
on a "diamond network" the manifold structure of things is
fashioned--the stars, the seven planets with their sphere-music, the
four elements, and all the various creatures, aetherial or fiery,
aerial, aqueous, and earthy, with the consummation of them all in
microcosm, in the animal world, and specially in man.
One can easily see that this is an attempt by Plato to carry out the
reverse process in thought to that which first comes to thinking man.
Man has sensations, that is, he comes first upon that which is
conceivably last in creation, on the immediate and temporary things or
momentary occurrences of earth. In these sensations, as they
accumulate into a kind of habitual or unreasoned knowledge or opinion,
he discovers elements which have been active to {152} correlate the
sensations, which have from the first exercised a governing influence
upon the sensations, without which, indeed, no two sensations could be
brought together to form anything one could name. These regulative,
underlying, permanent elements are Ideas, _i.e._ General Forms or
Notions, which, although they may come second as regards time into
consciousness, are by reason known to have been there before, because
through them alone can the sensations become intelligibly possible, or
thinkable, or namable. Thus Plato is led to the conception of an order
the reverse of our individual experience, the order of creation, the
order of God's thought, which is equivalent to the order of God's
working; for God's thought and God's working are inseparable.
Of course Plato, in working out his dream of creation absolutely
without any scientific knowledge, the further he travels the more
obviously falls into confusion and absurdity; where he touches on some
ideas having a certain resemblance to modern scientific discoveries, as
the law of gravitation, the circulation of the blood, the quantitative
basis of differences of quality, etc., these happy guesses are apt to
lead more frequently wrong than right, because they are not kept in
check by any experimental tests. But taken as a 'myth,' which is
perhaps all that Plato intended, the work offers much that is
profoundly interesting.
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With the _Timaeus_ is associated another dialogue called the _Critias_,
which remains only as a fragment. In it is contained a description of
the celebrated visionary kingdom of Atlantis, lying far beyond the
pillars of Hercules, a land of splendour and luxury and power, a land
also of gentle manners and wise orderliness. "The fiction has
exercised a great influence over the imagination of later ages. As
many attempts have been made to find the great island as to discover
the country of the lost tribes. Without regard to the description of
Plato, and without a suspicion that the whole narrative is a
fabrication, interpreters have looked for the spot in every part of the
globe--America, Palestine, Arabia Felix, Ceylon, Sardinia, Sweden. The
story had also an effect on the early navigators of the sixteenth
century" (Jowett, _Plato_, vol. iii. p. 679).
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