Iptintttnn Mmurrfiitg 
 
 THE LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 
 LECTURES FOR 1917-1918 
 
was established in 1912 with a bequest of $25,000 
 under the will of Louis Clark Vanuxem, of the 
 Class of 1879. By direction of the executors of 
 Mr. Vanuxem's estate, the income of the foun- 
 dation is to be used for a series of public lectures 
 delivered in Princeton annually, at least one half 
 of which shall be on subjects of current scientific 
 interest. The lectures are to be published and 
 distributed among schools and libraries generally. 
 
 The following lectures have already been pub- 
 lished or are in press: 
 
 1912-13 The Theory of Permutable Functions, by 
 Vito Volterra 
 
 1913-14 Lectures delivered in connection with the 
 dedication of the Graduate College of 
 Princeton University by Emile Boutroux, 
 Alois Riehl, A. D. Godley, and Arthur 
 Shipley 
 
 1914-15 Romance, by Sir Walter Raleigh 
 
 1915-16 A Critique of the Theory of Evolution, 
 by Thomas Hunt Morgan 
 
 1916-17 The Mineral Resources of Civilization, 
 by Charles R. Van Hise 
 
 1917-18 Platonism, by Paul Elmer More 
 
LOUIS CLARK VANUXEM FOUNDATION 
 
 PLATONISM 
 
 BY 
 
 PAUL ELMER MORE 
 
 AUTHOR OF THE "SHBLBTIBNE ESSATS" 
 
 LECTURES DELIVERED AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 
 OCTOBER 29, 30, 31, NOVEMBER 6, 7, 1917 
 
 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 PRINCETON 
 
 LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 1917 
 
^i 
 
 s 
 
 Copyright, 1917, by 
 Princeton University Press 
 
 Published November, 1917 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 !£C -6 1917 
 
 ^0,4477869 
 
1 
 
 Alo St) ^^17 Sv acrta? €1817 hiDpit^ecrO ai, to fikv 
 dvayKoiov, to Se Oelov, koX to ^ev Oelov iv aTracriv 
 ^TjTeiif KTujcreco^; iveKa evSaCfiovo^ ^lov, Ka6* ocrov 
 rjfJLOJT/ Tj <^vcn<; ivhe^^erai, to he avayKoiov iKeCpcop 
 ^dpiv^ \oyit^6p.evov a)s dvev tovtcov ov SvvaTa airrd 
 iKCLPa i(l>^ of? (TTTOvSoi^ofJiej/ fxova KaTavoelv ovS' av 
 \a^elv ovS' aXX&>9 ttw? joterao-xeiz'. — Timaeus, 68e. 
 
 'Ef &v iTTopiadfieOa (^iKocroi^ia*; yepo'?, ov [jLei^ov 
 dyaOov ovr rfXOev ovre rj^ei ttotc tco 6v7]T(o yevei 
 ScoprjOev iK 6ewv. — Timaeus, 47a. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Though this book goes out under the rather 
 presumptuous title of Platonism, no one can be 
 more aware than the author of the incomplete- 
 ness of its argument. Almost nothing, for in- 
 stance, is said of education and art and govern- 
 ment, to name a few of the subsidiary subjects 
 that occupy a large and important place in the 
 Dialogues. These alluring topics have been 
 passed by, somewhat reluctantly, in order that 
 attention might be concentrated on the ethical 
 theme that runs through all Plato's discussions 
 and is certainly the mainspring of his philosophy. 
 At another time and in another volume I may 
 undertake to fill out the omissions here acknow- 
 ledged; but, whether that is done or not, my pur- 
 pose in the work now pubUshed has been to lay 
 the foundation for a series of studies on the ori- 
 gins and early environment of Christianity and 
 on such more modem movements as the Enghsh 
 revival of philosophic religion in the seventeenth 
 century and the rise of romanticism in the eigh- 
 teenth. My conviction is that behind all these 
 movements the strongest single influence has 
 been the perilous spirit of liberation brought into 
 the world by the disciple of Socrates, and that our 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 mental and moral atmosphere, so to speak, is 
 still permeated with inveterate perversions of 
 Plato's doctrine. 
 
 It will be seen that my aim, in the present vol- 
 mne and in its projected sequels, is not so much 
 to produce a work of history — ^though, of course, 
 historical accuracy must be the first requisite — as 
 to write what a Greek Platonist would have called 
 a ProtrepticuSj an invitation, that is, to the prac- 
 tice of philosophy. In saying this I am under 
 no delusion as to what such a work is likely to 
 accomplish. Readers of settled convictions who 
 happen to take up this presentation of philosophy 
 will accept or reject it in accordance with the 
 bent of their minds ; and I know that the current 
 of thought today runs against me and not with 
 me. It is a fact to be reckoned with now, as it 
 was when Socrates talked on these matters in the 
 gaol of Athens, that for those who differ on fun- 
 damental principles there is no common counsel 
 but only contempt for each other ; as St. Augus- 
 tine says, si non sit intus qui doceat inanis fit 
 strepitus noster. My hope would be with those 
 who are still searching — particularly if I might 
 touch the minds of a few of our generous college 
 youth who, finding the intellectual life deprived 
 of centre or significance, drift through the sup- 
 posedly utiUtarian courses of economics and bio- 
 logy, and so enter the world with no better 
 preparation against its distractions than a vague 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 and soon-spent yearning for social service and a 
 benumbing trust in mechanical progress. I can 
 foresee no restoration of humane studies to their 
 lost position of leadership until they are felt once 
 more to radiate from some central spiritual truth. 
 I do not believe that the aesthetic charms of Uter- 
 ature can supply this want, nor is it clear to me 
 that a purely scientific analysis of the facts of 
 moral experience can furnish the needed motive ; 
 the former is too apt to rim into dilettantism, and 
 the latter appeals too little to the imagination 
 and the springs of enthusiasm. Only through 
 the centrahzing force of rehgious faith or through 
 its equivalent in philosophy can the intellectual 
 life regain its meaning and authority for earnest 
 men. Yet, for the present at least, the dogmas 
 of religion have lost their hold, while the current 
 philosophy of the schools has become in large 
 measure a quibbling of speciahsts on technical 
 points of minor importance, or, where serious, 
 too commonly has surrendered to that flattery of 
 the instinctive elements of human nature which 
 is the very negation of mental and moral disci- 
 pline. 
 
 It is in such a belief and such a hope, whether 
 right or wrong, that I have turned back to the 
 truth, still potent and fresh and salutary, which 
 Plato expounded in the troubled and doubting 
 days of Greece — the truth which is in religion but 
 is not boimded by religious dogma, and which 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 needs no confirmation by miracle or inspired tra- 
 dition. The first task before me was to see this 
 philosophy in its naked outlines, stripped of its 
 confusing accessories, and cleared of the misun- 
 derstandings which, starting among the barba- 
 rians of Alexandria, have made of Platonism too 
 often a support instead of a corrective of the 
 disintegrating forces of society. This I have at- 
 tempted to do, with imperfect success no doubt, 
 in the present volume. If, when the series is 
 completed, I may have succeeded in directing a 
 few seeking minds to the inexhaustible source of 
 strength and comfort in the Platonic Dialogues, 
 I shall account my labour amply rewarded. Of 
 strength and comfort we have need enough in 
 these trying times, and shall have no less need in 
 the days of peace, when they come. 
 
 To one criticism I should be sensitive. Those 
 who have read the eighth volume of my Shelburne 
 Essays will recognize that the present work is 
 virtually an expansion of the views there summed 
 up in the Definitions of Dualism, and they may 
 think that I have tried to impose my own theories 
 on Plato, to measure him in my pint cup. In a 
 way every interpreter of a great author must be 
 open to such a charge; he has no other measure 
 than his own capacity. But at least I am not 
 guilty of attempting to force Plato into confor- 
 mity with a preconceived system ; the Definitions 
 of Dualism were themselves the result of my 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 study of the Dialogues, and avowedly rejected 
 any pretensions to originality. 
 
 In making the translations from Plato scat- 
 tered through the following pages I have often 
 had other versions before me, and have not scru- 
 pled to draw on them quite freely for words and 
 phrases. Where these passages are included in 
 inverted commas, I have adhered to the original 
 as closely as possible while conforming to Eng- 
 lish idiom. The passages not so indicated, but 
 noted by marginal references, are rather allu- 
 sions than quotations. 
 
 Finally, I have to thank the trustees of the 
 Vanuxem fund for permitting me to print in this 
 volimie a large amount of material which it 
 was impossible to include in the coxirse of five 
 lectures. 
 
 P. E. M. 
 
 Princeton, N. J., 
 
 May 1, 1917. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preface v 
 
 I The Three Socratie Theses 1 
 
 II The Socratie Quest 28 
 
 III The Platonic Quest 54 
 
 IV The Socratie Paradox: the DuaUsm 
 
 of Plato 79 
 
 V Psychology 118 
 
 VI The Doctrine of Ideas 162 
 
 VII Science and Cosmogony 204 
 
 VIII Metaphysics 232 
 
 IX Conclusion 270 
 
 Appendix 299 
 
 XL 
 
PLATONISM 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE THREE SOCRATIC THESES 
 No person of antiquity, scarcely any of the 
 modem world, has been portrayed so vividly as 
 the master whom Plato made the responsible 
 mouthpiece of his speculations. We seem to de- 
 scry the man Socrates in the very flesh ; we can al- 
 most hear his voice, as he talked with friends and 
 strangers in the agora and other meeting-places 
 of Athens. But when we come to consider him as 
 a philosopher in his own right, and to determine 
 precisely what he taught, the way is not so plain. 
 Of the two main witnesses on whom we must rely 
 for our knowledge of his teaching, the one, our 
 gossiping Xenophon, imderstood him too little, 
 whereas the other understood him, in a manner, 
 too well, developing his instruction into so rich 
 and voluminous a body of thought that Socrates 
 might have exclaimed with some apparent reason, 
 as indeed he is said actually to have done on 
 hearing one of the simpler of Plato's Dialogues: 
 "By Heracles, what lies the young man has told 
 about me!" Our conception of the Socratic phil- 
 
Parmenides 
 130a 
 
 2 PLATONISM 
 
 osophy is thus, like the Eros of the wonderful 
 ymposium ^^^^^^ q£ Mautiuea, the child of Penury and 
 Abundance — an Abundance, we might add, 
 "drunken with the drink of the gods." 
 
 Yet withal the leading theses of Socrates are 
 in themselves, and taken separately, clear enough 
 — or ought to be so to any one who approaches 
 the subject with open mind — and the real diffi- 
 culty begins only when we undertake to combine 
 them into a coherent system, and to weigh their 
 remoter consequences. These leading doctrines, 
 if we may give such a name to the impulses that 
 carried him towards philosophy, were three: an 
 intellectual scepticism, a spiritual affirmation, 
 and a tenacious belief in the identity of virtue and 
 knowledge. 
 
 Of the sceptical, questioning disposition of So- 
 crates we have ample testimony. This was the 
 trait, particularly as it touched the common tra- 
 dition in matters of government and morals, that 
 most impressed those of his contemporaries who 
 did not belong to the inner circle of disciples. 
 And probably the irony of Socrates, his real or 
 feigned ignorance used as a dissolvent of the as- 
 simied knowledge of others, is the characteristic 
 first suggested today by the mention of his name. 
 He himself, when obliged to defend his life be- 
 fore the tribunal of his fellow citizens, manfully 
 admitted this scepticism, and even claimed for it 
 Apology 2iA a divine sanction. One of his friends, so he de- 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 3 
 
 clared, had gone to Delphi to inquire of the oracle 
 whether there was any one wiser than Socrates, 
 and had been told that there was none wiser. 
 Whereupon Socrates, amazed and incredulous, 
 had put himself to the task of testing this strange 
 saying. His method of inquiry (which we may 
 suppose he had employed from the beginning of 
 his pubhc career, though with less deliberate pur- 
 pose before the intervention of the oracle) was to 
 select a man eminent for wisdom, and to cross- 
 question him about his knowledge; and this he 
 did repeatedly, and always with the same result. 
 "It would soon become apparent," he says, "that 
 to many people, and most of all to himself, the 
 man seemed to be wise, whereas in truth he was 
 not so at all. Thereupon I would try to show 
 him how he was wise in opinion only and not in 
 reality; but I merely made myself a nuisance to 
 him and to many of those about him. So I used 
 to go away reflecting that at least I was wiser 
 than this man. Neither of us, I would say to 
 myself, knows anything much worth while, but 
 he in his ignorance thinks he knows, whereas I 
 neither know nor think I know."^ 
 
 ^ I hold for many reasons that the biographical parts of 
 the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo present a faithful picture 
 of the man Socrates, and in the main give a true account 
 of his last days, however the glamour of Plato's rhetoric 
 may lie over the whole. It is easier to believe in the power 
 of Nature to create such a character than in the ability of 
 an author to imagine it. Furthermore, though Xenophon 
 
4 PLATONISM 
 
 But if the existence, even the predominance, 
 of the doubting mood in Socrates cannot be over- 
 looked, the quahty of this scepticism needs none 
 the less to be sharply distinguished from what 
 commonly passes imder the name. The matter 
 stands thus. Absolute suspension of judgment, 
 however a man may profess it in words or strive 
 to attain it in practice, is an impossibility. You 
 may deny the power of human reason to explain 
 the cause and ultimate nature of things; but the 
 moment you do this, you will find yourself, if you 
 examine your mind honestly, putting credence in 
 some faculty either above the reason or below 
 the reason. Some relation to appearances you 
 must assume, some motive of action you are 
 bound to obey, some affirmation you are forced 
 to make ; ^ the only choice is to which of the alter- 
 native sohcitations you will say yes, and to which 
 you will say no. Thus, when a man calls himself 
 a sceptic, it commonly means that he subscribes 
 to some form of materialistic dogma, and practi- 
 
 probably had little intercourse with Socrates and certainly 
 was lio philosopher, yet he gives the same report of So- 
 crates* ordinary ways of life, and one can find in the Me- 
 morabilia clear traces of the three Socratic theses. 
 
 ^ This fact is virtually acknowledged by the clever ex- 
 ponent of ancient scepticism, Sextus Empiricus. See his 
 Hypotyposes i, 17, et passim. As for modern agnostics, 
 so-called, they too reserve their scepticism for the "unknow- 
 able" things of the spirit, and are thorough-going dogma- 
 tists in their theories of conduct based on the ikcmi irddrj. 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 5 
 
 cally believes that pleasures and pains of the 
 body, however he may refine and intelleetualize 
 their quality, are the one certain fact of experi- Phaedo ssb 
 ence. As the followers of Aristippus used to 
 say : "Only our sensations are comprehensible." 
 This creed may be adopted from mere indolence 
 of mind, or in the combative manner of the 
 schools — but with results curiously ahke. Ac- 
 cording to his first disciple, Pyrrho, the father of 
 professional scepticism, reduced the problems of 
 philosophy to these three: "What is the nature 
 of things? How should we be disposed towards 
 them? What is the consequence to us of this de- 
 termination?" The answer was that we know 
 nothing of the great forces playing about us, and 
 that he is wise who, freeing his soul of trouble- 
 some fears or questions, does not look beyond the 
 pleasure within his reach.^ There is a pretty 
 parable that tells how Pyrrho enforced this doc- 
 trine. Being once at sea and caught in a storm, 
 he rebuked the terror of the passengers by point- 
 ing to a little pig that kept on feeding through 
 all the conmiotion — such, he said, ought to be the 
 tranquillity of the wise man. There is an affir- 
 mation in this — deck and disguise it as you will — 
 the affirmation of the sty: pinguem et nitidum 
 vises Epicuri de grege porcum. Such a man may 
 call himself a philosophical sceptic by reason of 
 his anti-rationalism, but his philosophy comes 
 
 ^ See Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica xiv, 18, 2. 
 
6 PLATONISM 
 
 from a plane below the reason, and is hard to dis- 
 tinguish from the indolent self-assurance that is 
 content to do without thinking at all. 
 
 If we take the word "sceptic" in its truer sense, 
 as describing one who takes nothing on trust but 
 examines the facts of experience to their last con- 
 clusion, the Epicurean or Pyrrhonist has no right 
 to the name, since he still labours under the de- 
 lusion of supposing he knows what he does not 
 know, and has yet to learn that pleasure and pain 
 have no final value in themselves, but must be es- 
 timated by their relation to values of quite an- 
 other order. Manifestly, at least, the scepticism 
 of Socrates was no Pyrrhonic drifting with the 
 current of opinion; it meant to him rather an 
 unwearied questioning of the solicitations of both 
 the reason and the senses, and a continuous ex- 
 ercise of the will, being of all states of mind the 
 rarest and the most difficult for a man in this 
 world to maintain. Doubt was thus to Socrates 
 the beginning both of philosophy and of morality 
 — ^of philosophy, since only those are prompted 
 Lysis 218a to philosophizc truly who are ignorant and, at the 
 same time, aware of their ignorance ; of morality, 
 since only those will feel the compelling of a 
 higher impulse who have seen through the illu- 
 sory curtain of the senses. When Socrates came 
 to explain to the court why he had not hesitated 
 in a course of action which was sure to bring him 
 into peril of losing what most men prize, includ- 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 7 
 
 ing life itself, he replied boldly that he had fol- 
 lowed the behest of the God for the reason that 
 of those so-called perils we have no real know- 
 ledge — ^not even of the greatest of them. "For 
 the fear of death," he said, "is just another form Apology 29a 
 of appearing wise when we are foolish, and of 
 seeming to know what we know not. No mortal '^/ 
 knoweth of death whether it be not the greatest 
 of all good things to man, yet do men fear it as 
 if they knew it to be the greatest of evils. And is 
 not this that most culpable ignorance which pre- 
 tends to know what it knows not?" This sounds 
 like the parable of Pyrrho and his pig; but note 
 the difference in the consequences drawn. So- 
 crates was not contradicting himself, but was 
 basing his conduct on a prof ounder form of scep- 
 ticism than Pyrrho's, when, in one and the same 
 discourse, he avowed that his only wisdom was 
 to know his own ignorance, yet declared himself 
 ready to face death with this downright affirma- 
 tion: "To do wrong and to disobey our superior, 
 whether human or divine, this I do know to be an 
 evil and shameful thing." He had an invincible 
 assurance of this spiritual fact for the very reason 
 that his scepticism went deep enough to include 
 those current judgments and those immediate 
 values of sensation which to a Pyrrho were the 
 only certain guides through the perplexities of 
 hfe. 
 
 There is, then, no inconsistency in the imion of 
 
8 PLATONISM 
 
 intellectual scepticism and spiritual afBrmation; 
 rather, scepticism is the negative aspect of the 
 same intuitive truth of which spiritual affirmation 
 is the positive aspect. It would even be a grave 
 error — the gravest of all errors in its possible 
 consequences — to reckon the sceptical attitude, 
 because it is purely negative, as less essential to 
 the Socratic life than its positive coimterpart. 
 It is, if anything, more essential ; for its authority 
 extends in a way beyond reason and the senses to 
 the highest citadel of the soul. Our one safe- 
 guard against a host of ruinous deceptions that 
 speak in the name of the spirit is the obstinate 
 interrogation of every affirmation of every sort, 
 and the holding of each presumptive truth to give 
 proof of itself in experience. In later years these 
 two aspects of Socratic doctrine were developed 
 independently into separate schools, the sceptic, 
 of which we have spoken, and the Neoplatonic. 
 If Socrates had been ahve, and had been forced 
 to choose between the books of a Sextus Empiri- 
 cus, let us say, who in the name of scepticism re- 
 jected all authority of reason and the higher in- 
 tuition, and the books of a Proclus, who accepted 
 almost without discrimination any words uttered 
 in the name of the spirit, he would have ranged 
 himself, I am sure, with Sextus, and would have 
 expended his powers of irony upon the religious 
 jargon of the self-styled Platonist. He would 
 have preferred the half-truth of the one to the 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 9 
 
 sham-truth of the other; and Plato would have 
 made the same choice. 
 
 But if it is easy to see how true scepticism and 
 spiritual intuition may go hand in hand, the case 
 is different when to these two theses we add the 
 third. It was one of Socrates' favorite maxims 
 that no man errs, or sins, willingly, but only 
 through ignorance — a saying hard to reconcile 
 with the actual conduct of the world, hard to re- 
 concile with the other aspects of the Socratic doc- 
 trine. On its face this maxim implies an equation 
 of virtue and knowledge, and by knowledge the 
 evidence obliges us to believe that Socrates meant, 
 not indeed a Pyrrhonic acquiescence in the solici- 
 tations of the present, but that larger calculation 
 of life in the terms of pleasure and pain which 
 from his day to this has been the mark of the 
 rationahzing utihtarian. As we know better, he 
 would say, the near and remote consequences of 
 our acts in those terms, we are enabled to conduct 
 ourselves more prudently; and this prudence is 
 virtue. How, one asks in some bewilderment, 
 can a teacher maintain such a thesis as this, yet 
 as a sceptic reject the authority of the senses, and 
 as a mystic avow that his morality depends on a 
 superrational intuition? How can the same man 
 be a rationalizing utihtarian and a sceptical 
 mystic? 
 
 However perplexing such a union of contra- 
 ries may appear to us, we have nothing to do but 
 
10 PLATONISM 
 
 to accept the paradox as it stands. Above all we 
 must not emphasize the rationalistic thesis so as 
 to suppress the other two. In that way we should 
 fall into the totally inadequate conception of So- 
 crates made current to-day by the Greek Think- 
 ers of Theodor Gomperz. According to that bril- 
 liant and much-quoted history, the Platonic So- 
 crates, with his religious and fundamentally scep- 
 tical traits, is to be rejected for a mere questioner 
 of popular tradition and promoter of the ration- 
 ahstic "Enlightenment." The story in the 
 Apology of his self-dedication to the service of 
 the God is pure moonshine; Socrates had one 
 simple aim, to set forth the unity of virtue and 
 knowledge, and to that end there was no need of 
 exhortation or animating appeal, no room for any 
 positive ethical teaching based on an authority 
 higher than reason. Now the Socrates of this 
 school of interpreters is an impossibility — a crea- 
 ture manufactured in a Teutonic phrontisterion, 
 and not the hving man of Athens from whom the 
 deepest inspiration of philosophy has flowed even 
 to this day. Gomperz himself offers a corrective 
 to his portrait by quoting as the motto for his 
 volume this sentence from Clement of Alexan- 
 dria: "Wherefore also Cleanthes in his second 
 book Concerning Pleasure says that Socrates al- 
 ways identified the just man and the happy man, 
 and cursed him who first distinguished between 
 the just and the profitable as one who had done 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 11 
 
 an impious thing J" There is decidedly something 
 of the exhorter and preacher of virtue in the 
 words itahcized, though we need not, for all 
 that, picture Socrates quite as a Lutheran par- 
 son. If Clement is right, and Plato was not a 
 mere mystificator, and if human nature has any 
 place in the study of philosophy, then Gomperz 
 is wrong. We may be certain that beneath the 
 irony of Socrates, deeper than his questioning of 
 popular phrases and his search for precision of 
 definition, lay a power of very positive teaching 
 and a direct appeal to the conscience, in his own 
 way and at his own time, which smote the heart 
 even of such a worldling as Alcibiades to the 
 quick, and shall never cease to vibrate in the 
 hearts of Uving men. Plutarch was in the right 
 tradition when, remembering the confession of 
 Alcibiades, he said that "outwardly Socrates to 
 those who met him appeared rude and imcouth 
 and overbearing, but within was full of earnest- 
 ness and of matters that moved his hearers to 
 tears and wrung their hearts."^ 
 
 On the other hand we must be on our guard 
 against the contrary extreme of those scholars, 
 such as Burnet and Taylor of St. Andrews, who, 
 in their laudable desire to reinstate Socrates as a 
 religious teacher and seer, go so far as to make a 
 mechanical division between the rationalistic and 
 the mystical elements in the Platonic Dialogues, 
 
 * Cato vii. 
 
12 PLATONISM 
 
 and then relegate all the former to Plato himself 
 and derive all the latter from Socrates. Profes- 
 sor Bmnet^ would even have us believe that in 
 the earher Dialogues, down to and including The 
 Republic, Plato was merely reproducing as a 
 dramatic artist the mystic and idealistic Pytha- 
 goreanism of his master, whereas in the later Dia- 
 logues he breaks away from this and gives ex- 
 pression to his own scientific and anti-Socratic 
 rationahsm. Now, with all due deference to the 
 great learning of Professor Burnet, one must say 
 that such a theory has no warrant in history or in 
 common sense. To assert that a man could write 
 The Republic without a definite philosophy of his 
 own is to run pretty close to a pedantic absurd- 
 ity; and it is not much better to maintain that 
 there was no rationahsm in the teaching of So- 
 crates than that there was no mysticism in the 
 teaching of Plato. 
 
 The efforts of various scholars to escape the 
 Socratic Paradox by representing him on the one 
 hand as a pure rationalist or on the other hand 
 as a pure mystic are equally untenable. So far 
 as we can judge from the records, Socrates never 
 attempted to find an interpretation of the word 
 "knowledge" which should reconcile his third 
 thesis with the other two, nor did he even, we may 
 suppose, see quite so logical a synthesis of his 
 intellectual scepticism and higher intuition as we 
 
 ^ Greek Philosophy, Part I, pp. 178, 179 £f. 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 13 
 
 have felt justified in deriving from the language 
 of the Apology. For the most part he was con- / 
 tent, it should appear, to enunciate his three 
 principles as independent truths, and to enforce 
 now one and now another of them as occasion 
 prompted, leaving to his disciples, the creators 
 of the so-called Socratic schools, the labour of 
 constructing from them what properly may be 
 regarded as a philosophic system. Endless in- 
 consistencies and controversies were to arise 
 among his successors from the varying emphasis 
 placed by them on the different aspects of his 
 creed. To Plato alone it was given to combine 
 the three theses without sacrificing one for the 
 other, and so to develop a philosophy that tran- 
 scended the master's actual teaching while in no 
 fundamental matter betraying it. So success- 
 fully did he accomphsh this great task that to 
 the world at large Socrates has come to stand 
 for httle more than a mouthpiece of the Pla- 
 tonic speculations. Nevertheless we shall be do- 
 ing a grave injustice if, caught by the spell of 
 Plato's richer and subtler genius, we forget that 
 the imposing enimciation of his three doctrines 
 by Plato's teacher was the determining event in 
 the moral and religious life of the Western 
 world; for the supreme need of a man's soul is 
 not that he should acquire a splendid system of 
 philosophy, but that he should hold as an inex- 
 pugnable possession that spirit of scepticism and 
 
14 PLATONISM 
 
 insight and that assurance of the identity of vir- 
 tue and knowledge for which Socrates hved and 
 died.^ 
 
 Yet however important, even revolutionary, 
 the work of Socrates may appear, we must re- 
 member that he was only one teacher among 
 many; nor can we rightly understand the Pla- 
 tonic philosophy without taking into account the 
 strong currents of thought, sympathetic and 
 antipathetic, amid which it took its origin. The 
 age of Socrates was notable for an intellectual 
 curiosity and a moral fermentation for which 
 there is perhaps only one parallel in history, and 
 that parallel takes us out of Europe to Asia. 
 There, in the country of the Ganges, at a some- 
 what earher date, the old formahties of religion 
 had ceased to satisfy the devout Hindu wor- 
 shipper, and he could no longer accept the tradi- 
 tional precepts of morality until he had justified 
 them at the bar of his own conscience. Every- 
 where men were asking themselves and one an- 
 other about the underlying truth of things, and 
 a rumour went abroad that certain lonely ex- 
 plorers had discovered a treasure of knowledge 
 which they held as a secret possession. And so 
 the books of the period are filled with stories, 
 
 ^ The Christian philosophy of Pascal is founded on three 
 similar principles: "II faut avoir ces trois qualites, pyr- 
 rhonien, geometre, Chretien soumis; et elles s'accordent, et 
 se temperent, en doutant ou il faut, en assurant ou il faut, 
 et en se soumettant oii il faut." — Pensee 268, Brunschvicg. 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 15 
 
 some of them quaint and obscure, others very 
 beautiful, of eager inquirers who went out into 
 the wilderness, where the sages had their solitary 
 abodes, to question and hsten, and to learn, if 
 they were deemed worthy, the new meaning of 
 the old words of rehgion and morahty. 
 
 Something hke that, though the methods of 
 teaching and the final results were different, was 
 going on in Greece during the lifetime of Socra- 
 tes. The supposed possessors of the secret were 
 not eremites hiding in the forest depths, but 
 teachers who called themselves sophists and went 
 about from city to city imparting instruction for 
 a price; and the inquirers who flocked to their 
 lectures were not, for the most part, rehgious 
 enthusiasts, but young men of family who were 
 looking for the readiest path to honour and power 
 in civic hfe. Yet, withal, the mental and moral 
 ferments were much the same as in India, and in 
 both lands the deepest problems of law and faith 
 did not pass through the ordeal untouched. 
 
 Not the least extraordinary of Plato's literary 
 gifts is his skill in reproducing in a colder age 
 the ardour which surrounded his childhood and 
 youth. In the opening of such a Dialogue as the 
 Protagoras, for instance, there is a note of excite- 
 ment, of expectation, which carries the reader 
 back to a society stirred by a veritable renaissance 
 of wonder. Even the more conservative citizens 
 were moved, some to hostility, some to friendly 
 
16 PLATONISM 
 
 curiosity. So, in the Theages, we have a charm- 
 ingly realistic picture of an elderly man, of posi- 
 tion and property, coming into Athens from the 
 country to consult Socrates about the education 
 of his son ; for the boy has heard rumours of the 
 marvellous cunning of these professors who are 
 flocking to the city from the ends of the world, 
 and is determined to place himself as a pupil 
 under one of them. The father, as befits a solid 
 man of the soil, is bewildered and anxious; he 
 doesn't mind spending the necessary money, but 
 he has his suspicion of these innovations and he 
 fears they are as likely to corrupt as to inform. 
 Whereupon Socrates turns to the young man, 
 and quizzes him to bring out just what he thinks 
 this new wisdom is and what it will do for him. 
 
 Now to many scholars of our age Socrates was 
 not much different from any other of these vota- 
 ries of new-fangled ideas ; and, superficially, there 
 is some basis for this fatal confusion. But the 
 moment we apply to these wandering teachers 
 the test of the three Socratic theses we see that in 
 their attitude towards the central truth of philo- 
 sophy they stood at the opposite pole from So- 
 crates; we see, too, how deeply the intellectual 
 and moral destiny of Greece was involved in this 
 difference. 
 
 Some of the sophists may have been inclined 
 to dogmatic rationalism, and could therefore 
 scarcely be called sceptics in any sense of the 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 17 
 
 word. But for the most part they were question- 
 ers and innovators by profession, in harmony with 
 the eonmion imrest of the times. Their general 
 position is fairly expressed in the famous maxim '^""^^^^^ 
 of Protagoras, that "Man is the measure of all 
 things." Such a principle might seem on its face Theaetetus 
 — as it has seemed to certain modern critics — ^to It^^passim 
 be in accord with Socrates' habit of putting the 
 received laws of conduct to the test of human ex- 
 perience ; and this indeed would be the case, were 
 it not for the utterly diverse meanings that may 
 be attached to the word "man." Now Protagoras 
 had in mind to say that right and wrong are mat- 
 ters of human opinion, being actually to each 
 man as his good pleasure thinks them to be. 
 More than that, they not only vary in their na- 
 ture with the opinions of different men, but de- 
 pend on the changing moods of each individual 
 man, so that what is right and just for me at this 
 moment may be at another moment the very re- 
 verse of right and just. In other words, by 
 "man" Protagoras meant the impression of the 
 senses and the dictates of temperament, and vir- 
 tually denied the existence of that unchanging 
 law on which Socrates based his conduct when he 
 declared himself ignorant of all things save of 
 this one fact, that it is better for a man to be 
 just than to be unjust, and better, if needs be, to 
 suffer wrong than to do wrong. 
 
 The issue between the two ways of life is 
 
Theaetetus 
 162d 
 
 18 PLATONISM 
 
 brought out more sharply by adding to the 
 Protagorean maxim already quoted his other fa- 
 mous saying, that of the gods we have no know- 
 ledge whether they are or are not, and by con- 
 trasting with these statements the terse epigram 
 of Plato, that, if we cared for our happiness. 
 Laws 716c "Not auy man, as some say, but God would be the 
 measure of all things." Plato, when he wrote 
 these words in his old age, was thinking not so 
 much of a deity set apart in a remote region of 
 the heavens, or even of a deity immanent in the 
 human breast, as of that element of the soul it- 
 self which is capable of rendering a man like to a 
 god. He, too, in his Way, was making man the 
 measure of all things; but by man he had learnt 
 from his master to think first, not of the opinions 
 that separate one man from another, and a man 
 today from himself of yesterday, but of the divine 
 principle that is the same in all men and forms 
 therefore the only true bond of friendship and so- 
 ciety. It was just this principle of the innate 
 divine that Protagoras denied — certainly at least 
 Plato so understood him — when he made man the 
 measure of truth and avowed that of the gods 
 there was no way of knowing whether they were 
 or were not. And, whatever apparent exceptions 
 there may have been here and there, Protagoras 
 was in this representative of the whole body of 
 the sophists. By omitting the Socratic affirma- 
 tion from their scheme they turned their philo- 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 19 
 
 sophy, so far as they had any, in the direction of 
 that Pyrrhonic scepticism which is the very con- 
 trary of the Socratic. 
 
 The same essential difference between So- 
 crates and the sophists comes out when we pass 
 from scepticism and spiritual affirmation to the 
 third thesis. So far as it is possible to group to- 
 gether men who formed no cohesive party, but 
 professed each after his own desire, the sophists 
 were at least in agreement among themselves in 
 the behef that virtue and knowledge are some- 
 how identical ; in fact it was their avowed mission 
 to impart the knowledge requisite for virtue, as 
 the thing virtue was commonly understood. And 
 they had a useful function to perform. Their 
 instruction was partly of a purely objective sort, 
 and as such valuable in itself. As for their rhet- 
 oric, Socrates did not hesitate to admit that he 
 had acquired some of his perfectly legitimate 
 skill in the use of words from Prodicus and other 
 such teachers. And so, in the absence of schools 
 beyond the most elementary sort, the sophists 
 must enjoy the credit of sharing in the advance- 
 ment of practical education. Even here, indeed, 
 we begin to see the divergence between their 
 method and that of Socrates, for Socrates was too 
 genuinely sceptical, of himself as well as of oth- 
 ers, to go about like an ambulatory imiversity 
 lecturing for a fee on any province of science or 
 art then known to mankind. But that is a minor 
 
20 PLATONISM 
 
 matter. The serious divergence was in their pur- 
 pose. If there is any truth in Plato's account of 
 the debates between Socrates and such masters 
 of the craft as Gorgias and Protagoras, it is clear 
 that the sophists directed their instruction chiefly 
 to the acquisition of skill in manipulating indi- 
 vidual men and popular assemblies. I do not 
 mean to say, following an ancient accusation, 
 that the sophists set out deliberately to instruct 
 men in the art of making the better cause appear 
 the worse, in the sense that they had any vicious 
 or anti-social end in view; but rather that they 
 had in view no end at all, except the end of suc- 
 cess. Their concern was very much with practi- 
 cal cleverness and very little with moral conse- 
 quences, very much with current opinion and very 
 httle with truth for its own sake; hence the su- 
 preme place of rhetoric in their curriculum, as 
 the art of persuasion. They would have accepted 
 as readily as Socrates the identification of vir- 
 tue and knowledge; but they identified the two 
 by making them both a means, without stopping 
 to ask themselves or others the means to what. 
 In the quest of that what Socrates was to pass 
 his life ; and if he was still searching and had not 
 reached the goal of the great quest when death 
 put an end to all his asking, it was because he had 
 not discovered the relation of the knowledge that 
 determines virtue to the knowledge that belongs 
 to scepticism and spiritual aflSrmation. 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 21 
 
 Such is the contrast between Socrates and the 
 sophists the moment we apply to them the test 
 of the three theses. To ignore this radical differ- 
 ence in favor of the surface resemblances, as has 
 been somewhat the practice since Grote's power- 
 ful rehabilitation of the sophists, is to overlook 
 the whole significance of the Socratic teaching, 
 and it is to miss terribly the tragic lesson of his- 
 tory. This was no paltry feud over scholastic 
 terms, but the battle of one man who saw the 
 truth and knew the consequences of error against 
 a host of men who looked upon the truth with the 
 eyes of a Pontius Pilate ; rather, it was the battle 
 of one man for the deeper common sense of man- 
 kind against the sophistries of a people that had 
 lost its anchorage and was drifting it knew not 
 whither. 
 
 The Greeks are distinguished from other great 
 peoples by their lack of any really sacred books 
 or of a definite revelation ; and to this freedom of 
 their imagination we owe a religion which of all 
 religions is the most purely human and the most 
 nearly universal, almost as full of meaning to- 
 day, for those who understand it, as it was to the 
 contemporaries of Socrates. But this freedom 
 was a peril also, as all liberty is perilous. In an 
 age of doubt and egoistic revolt from tradition 
 such a religion, imless its deeper meaning meets 
 with some authentication in the individual con- 
 sciousness, is peculiarly liable to lose its moral 
 
22 PLATONISM 
 
 hold and to become a plaything for the fancy of 
 its votaries. This is the easy way; it was the di- 
 rection in which the educated classes of Greece 
 were naturally turning, and the Protagorean 
 scepticism, with its flattering plausibility, was 
 ready at hand to cloak moral indolence in the 
 garb of philosophy. 
 
 The Greeks, again, as we see them typified 
 from the beginning in Odysseus, were inclined to 
 cleverness and versatility more than to plain 
 truth, and apt to lay weight on the value of 
 worldly wisdom somewhat at the expense of in- 
 stinctive rectitude. They were always a little too 
 quick to applaud knowledge for its own sake and 
 to measure virtue by the standard of success. 
 And this disposition was fostered by the sophists 
 at a critical moment of history. Plato laid his 
 finger on one of the spots where the decay of na- 
 tional character first discovered itself, when he 
 phaednis 272d dcclarcd that for the rhetorician, trained to plead 
 before the courts, there was no need to bother 
 over the exact nature of justice and goodness, 
 since no juror would take heed of such subtleties, 
 but would be guided in his vote by the force of 
 persuasion based on probability. Any one con- 
 versant with the literature of the Greek people 
 knows how large a place the word "probable" 
 occupies in their whole manner of thinking, and 
 how cunningly the sophistical game played with 
 the national foible. 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 23 
 
 What came in the end of this itching cleverness 
 and this adroit flattery can be read in the Roman 
 estimate of Greece in her degeneracy : 
 
 "Augur schoenobates medicus magus, 
 
 omnia novit 
 Graeculus esuriens; in caelum miseris, 
 
 ibit."^ 
 Or, if it seems unfair to accept the petulant sat- 
 ire of Juvenal as historical evidence, some credit 
 at least must be allowed to Cicero's comparison 
 of Greek and Roman witnesses under oath. "He 
 had," he says, in his oration Pro Flacco, "always 
 been particularly addicted to that nation and 
 their studies, and knew many modest and worthy 
 men among them. But as to the sanctity of an 
 oath, they had no notion of it; all their concern 
 in giving evidence was, not how to prove, but 
 how to express what they said. Whereas a 
 Roman, in giving his testimony, was always 
 jealous of himself, lest he should go too far; 
 weighed all his words, and was afraid to let any- 
 thing drop from him too hastily and passion- 
 ately."^ Or still, if we hesitate to take the 
 
 "^ Juvenal iii, 77. It is amusing to see how Dr. Johnson 
 adapted the lines to what was a corresponding prejudice, 
 in his day not entirely unwarranted, against the French: 
 
 "They sing, they dance, clean shoes, or cure a clap; 
 All sciences a fasting Monsieur knows, 
 And, bid him go to heU, to heU he goes." 
 
 ^ Abridged from Middleton's paraphrase, Life of Cicero 
 I, 300, ed. 1741. 
 
24 PLATONISM 
 
 Roman estimate of a conquered and subject 
 people, there is the direct statement of Polybius,^ 
 himself a Greek, as to the slipperiness of the 
 Greek character resulting from their rejection of 
 the restraints of religion. 
 
 All this was involved in the difference between 
 Socrates and the sophists; and unless we see 
 clearly how the destiny of the Athenian people, 
 and one might say of the world, was at stake, we 
 shall make nonsense of the solemnity with which 
 Apology 30d Socrates proclaimed his mission: "Therefore,© 
 men of Athens, I am not concerned to plead for 
 myself, as one might expect of me, but am rather 
 pleading for you, lest by condenming me in your 
 ignorance you throw away God's gift to you. . . . 
 That I am really such an one given to the city by 
 God, you may understand from my life ; for it is 
 not from merely human motives that I neglect 
 my own affairs and see them going to waste these 
 many years, while I look imweariedly to your 
 interests, and come to you all individually, as if 
 I were a father or an elder brother, with my 
 message and persuasion of virtue." Such was 
 the last pubhc profession of Socrates, and it was 
 not heard. This is not to say that the general de- 
 cline of Greek civilization should be attributed to 
 any special class of men as the deliberate source 
 of corruption. The serious corrupters of youth, 
 
 ® History vi, 54, 55. See also the use made of this pas- 
 sage by Warburton in his Divine Legation 1, 408. 
 
THE SOCRATIC THESES 25 
 
 to use the phrase of the indictment against So- 
 crates, were not the sophists, as Plato himself 
 admits, but the mass of the people, who were ^^4^2''.!''' 
 jealous of any distinction that ran counter to 
 their own ideas, and made resistance to the course 
 they were pursuing extremely difficult, even dan- 
 gerous. The pity of it was that at this moment 
 of intellectual curiosity and moral restlessness, 
 when many generous minds here and there had 
 caught glimpses of a higher law than tradition 
 and needed to be encouraged in their quest of 
 truth, the accredited teachers of the land should 
 have disappointed the searchers and left them 
 without any power of united resistance. The 
 condemnation of the sophists, as a body, is not 
 that they turned the current of thought in a new 
 direction, but that they were themselves so deeply 
 imtmersed in the popular tide, and lent their 
 weight to its onward sweep. 
 
 Unless this is true there is no meaning at all in 
 those earher Dialogues of Plato in which he at- 
 tacks the rhetoric of the sophists as being no 
 genuine art, but only one of the many branches 
 of popular flattery, like cooking and the rest. 
 When he wrote these Dialogues, the particular 
 men with whom Socrates had contended were no 
 longer living, but the evil they had fostered was 
 very much alive, was even growing daily more 
 manifest to any one who looked beneath the sur- 
 face of things. Hence the note of bitterness and 
 
 Gorgias 
 passim 
 
26 PLATONISM 
 
 occasionally of despondence in the writings of 
 the one man who saw to the heart of the contrast 
 between Socrates and the sophists, and, knowing 
 he had failed to convert his own generation to 
 the Socratic doctrine, did not know that he was 
 establishing this doctrine for future ages as the 
 Tiraaeus 47b iudcf cctiblc sourcc of philosophy, "than which no 
 greater good has come or ever will come to mortal 
 men." 
 
 Out of the depths of his inner life Socrates had 
 arrived at the conviction of three truths, two of 
 which, scepticism and spiritual affirmation, were, 
 as we have seen, intimately associated, while the 
 third, the rationalistic identification of virtue and 
 knowledge, stood in apparently unrelated isola- 
 tion. It was the task of his successor to expound 
 these theses in a way that should force their ac- 
 ceptance upon any man who looked honestly into 
 his own breast, and to carry them up to a point 
 at which they should all three meet in a single 
 harmonious system of philosophy. I do not 
 mean that Plato saw the task lying before him 
 in this limited and systematic form: his mind 
 was too elastic, and his outlook on life too 
 crowded with images of men and their destinies, 
 to be confined in any formula however large. I 
 mean rather that these theses were his funda- 
 mental conviction, as they were of Socrates — the 
 skeleton, so to speak, which, more or less con- 
 cealed, gave shape and strength and coherence to 
 
THE SOCRATOC THESES 27 
 
 all his thought. And we on our part, if we may 
 borrow Plato's license in shifting a metaphor, 
 we, who would "swim through such and so great ^^^^^j^'^^^ 
 a sea of words" as stretches before us in the Di- 
 alogues, can find no safer light to guide us than 
 these three motives to philosophy which he him- 
 self took from his master. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE SOCRATIC QUEST 
 
 The fidelity with which Plato brings out the 
 threefold impulse of Socrates to philosophy is 
 evidence in itself that the same motives were at 
 work in his own mind. But they are equally 
 manifest in passages from which the biographical 
 element is entirely absent. The theoretical basis 
 of his scepticism may be left until we take up the 
 discussion of his attitude towards metaphysics; 
 here it will be sufficient to call attention to the 
 note of profound disillusion running all through 
 his works, and growing stronger with his age. 
 ^^048^°^° "The doings of men," he declares at the end of his 
 life, "are not worthy of great seriousness, yet it is 
 \ necessary to be serious; and this is our misfort- 
 une. . . . Men are for the most part puppets, 
 and little is their share of truth." Socrates, I 
 think, would never have spoken in just that tone 
 of bitterness, born of a longer and sadder know- 
 ledge; but Plato's words, nevertheless, spring 
 ^^6e'''"" from the same vein of sceptical irony as that 
 which he had so often seen his master display in 
 common intercourse. So deeply ingrained is this 
 note of doubt or hesitation in the Dialogues that 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 29 
 
 the leaders of the Academy after Plato's death 
 passed by an easy transition into a form of scept- 
 icism barely distinguishable from that of the fol- 
 lowers of Pyrrho. These men, if we may accept 
 the verdict^ of a late critic, justified their posi- 
 tion, in part, by Plato's own fondness for such 
 terms as "the probable" {to eikos), thereby forc- 
 ing his philosophy into accord with the teaching 
 of the sophists — an irony of Fate comparable to 
 that which brought about the condemnation of 
 Socrates as a sophist. 
 
 As for spiritual affirmation, Plato's language 
 is fairly exultant with the faith in righteousness 
 as the one thing which a man may safely assert, 
 against all appearances, to be always desirable. 
 Even above his magnificent art of exposition and 
 dialectic, his real power of persuasion, for those 
 who have ears to hear, lies in the earnestness of 
 this direct and unwavering affirmation. When 
 Socrates, in gaol and awaiting the hour of execu- 
 tion, was urged by his dear friend Crito to bribe 
 his way to hberty, he closed his memorable state- 
 ment of the self-imposed obligations of duty with 
 a simile borrowed from the experience of relig- 
 ious devotees. "These things," he said, "I seem crito s4d 
 to hear as the Corybantes think they hear the 
 sound of flutes, and the echo of these words keeps 
 
 ^ Prolegomena § 10. This treatise, whether by Olympi- 
 odorus or another, is by no means negligible for the 
 modern student. 
 
30 PLATONISM 
 
 up such a humming in my ears as quite to drown 
 out any contrary arguments." So it is today 
 with the understanding reader of the Platonic 
 Dialogues; he is like one who has hearkened to 
 the same incantation of magic flutes, the very 
 memory of which is able to overpower all the dis- 
 tracting voices of the world. But Plato was not 
 writing only for the anima naturaliter Platonica, 
 As a teacher needing withal to maintain his doc- 
 trine logically against the attack of adversaries, 
 he could not rest in a bare affirmation; he was 
 bound to discover some authority for his faith, 
 some definition of this higher knowledge, to which 
 reason, if honest with itself, would at least will- 
 ingly assent. 
 
 Furthermore, the tendency to a positive ration- 
 alism was as strong in Plato as it was in Socrates. 
 His belief in the simple identification of virtue 
 and knowledge is constantly coming to the sur- 
 860D s face in his writings, and even in the Laws he is 
 still reasoning on the f amihar Socratic thesis that 
 no man errs, or sins, willingly, but only through 
 ignorance. Now, as I have said, such a maxim 
 seems on its face to run counter to the known 
 motives of human conduct, since any man, if 
 questioned on his conduct, will admit that he 
 often does wrong against the knowledge of what 
 he knows to be best for him. Here, then, is an 
 issue between philosophy and apparent fact; and 
 if you solve this difficulty by explaining the equa- 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 31 
 
 tion of virtue and knowledge after the manner of 
 the utiHtarians, as Socrates and Plato did, you 
 forthwith lay yourself open to the charge of 
 throwing away your spiritual affirmation. 
 
 At the outset of his philosophical career Plato 
 was thus beset with the double problem, first of 
 justifying separately his rationalism and his 
 higher intuition, and then of harmonizing these 
 two seemingly contradictory positions. So far as 
 we can conjecture from the records, Socrates 
 himself had faced and solved the problem of 
 rationalism raised by his identification of virtue 
 and knowledge, and to this extent Plato, in writ- 
 ing his Dialogues, had only to repeat and clarify 
 the steps of what may be called the Socratic 
 Quest. But at this point Socrates ceased to be 
 an expositor of his own philosophy: for the justi- 
 fication of spiritual insight before the bar of rea- 
 son, which may be called the Platonic Quest, and 
 for the relation of insight and rationahsm, which 
 had been left as the Socratic Paradox, Plato had 
 to rely on his own resources of argument. Our 
 study of Platonism, therefore, will follow this 
 order: taking up first the Socratic Quest, we shall 
 pass then to the Platonic Quest, and from these 
 proceed to the Socratic Paradox. Or, expressed 
 in the language of the three theses, our task is, 
 first, to deal with the rationaHstic identification 
 of virtue and knowledge, secondly to see how 
 scepticism leads from this thesis to spiritual af- 
 
32 PLATONISM 
 
 firmation, and, thirdly, to discover how this ra- 
 tionalism and affirmation can be held together. 
 
 Now, there is a group of Dialogues, almost 
 certainly the earliest written, in which Plato is 
 engaged in pursuing the Socratic Quest, as if 
 lured on by a goal already clearly enough seen 
 and within easy reach, yet at the same time with 
 glimpses of another goal beyond, still wrapped in 
 the haze of distance. None of these Dialogues is 
 conclusive, and at the end of each the reader is 
 left in a mood like that of the ancient Persian, 
 who complained that he had heard great argu- 
 ment 
 
 "About it and about, but evermore 
 Came out by the same door where in he went." 
 
 Meanwhile, however, these Dialogues wind in 
 and out of their theme with such delightful ease, 
 and gather by the way so many charming pictures 
 of Athenian manners, that they might well be 
 named the idylls of philosophy. Indeed, if I may 
 confess my private taste, I almost at times hold 
 them more precious than those greater Dialogues 
 in which Plato no longer speaks as an inquirer 
 but as a perfect master. For Truth, it may be, 
 is to be worshipped at a distance, a creature so 
 high and divine that no man, not even a Plato, 
 can lay hands on her without a little soiling her 
 robes. And these early Dialogues, as I assume 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 33 
 
 / them to be, have the peculiar fascination of sug- 
 gesting the truth to us as something certain yet 
 unapproached. 
 
 Each of them sets out to define a particular 
 virtue — Charmides temperance, Laches bravery, 
 Euthyphro holiness, Lysis friendship — and ends 
 by rejecting as inadequate or inconsistent the 
 various proposed definitions. But through all 
 their inconclusiveness, these two thoughts are 
 continually before the mind: that in some way 
 which the debaters cannot understand the differ- 
 ent virtues are distinct from one another, yet at 
 the same time merely aspects of one all-embracing 
 virtue; and, secondly, that in some way, equally 
 obscure to the debaters, this one inclusive virtue 
 is dependent on knowledge. 
 
 A glance at one of these early Dialogues will 
 indicate the character of all. In the Charmides 
 we find a boy of this name presented by his elder 
 cousin and guardian, Critias, to Socrates as a 
 perfect specimen of that comeliness and grace 
 and modesty, imited with strength and self- 
 mastery, which gave to the youth of that age and 
 land their peculiarly androgynous charm. He is 
 the embodiment of the much-lauded and much- 
 desired virtue of sophrosyne, which, for lack of a 
 better equivalent, we translate "temperance." 
 And Socrates, having introduced the topic by one 
 of his dramatic ruses, proceeds to question the 
 lad about this virtue, insinuating that he ought to 
 
34 PLATONISM 
 
 be able to define it if it is really in his possession. 
 Temperance, replies the boy, after some hesita- 
 tion, is a way of doing things sedately, a kind of 
 quietness or slowness in action. And so the dis- 
 cussion begins ; for, in his usual manner, Socrates 
 finds difficulties in this definition. Certainly, he 
 says, and Charmides admits, temperance is one 
 of the fair and excellent things {ton halon) ; yet 
 we should not bestow such epithets upon a person 
 who learned his lesson or ran a race slowly, but 
 upon one who was swift and agile. The lad, thus 
 driven from his first definition, tries another: it 
 is, he thinks, a kind of true shame or modesty. 
 But again, objects Socrates, surely temperance 
 is a good thing, as well as a fair thing, and, as 
 Homer has declared, modesty is not always good 
 for a man who is in need. And so once more the 
 boy and his examiner seem to have reached an 
 impasse. 
 
 Now, a plain unimaginative man like Grote 
 will see little profit in this sort of word-play be- 
 yond its tendency to shake the ignorant out of 
 their confidence ; and there is that in this first part 
 of the Dialogue — and something more. It is an 
 admirable example of the superficial sophistry to 
 which Plato sometimes descends, whether wit- 
 tingly or unwittingly, while the conclusion he has 
 in view is perfectly sound. The fallacy lies in 
 the ambiguous use of such words as "fair" and 
 "good," which retain their practical popular 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 35 
 
 meaning as applied to the specific acts of men, 
 while they include also hints and admonitions of 
 a deeper sense as touching the purpose underly- 
 ing any specific act. All temperance is good? 
 Yes. Then it follows, if goodness is such a thing, 
 simple and invisible, as it is becoming in Plato's 
 rational system, that all good is temperance, and 
 all good is bravery, and so with the other specific 
 virtues. In a word there is only one morahty, 
 into which all the virtues are merged indistin- 
 guishably, and any attempt to define or apply a 
 specific virtue will result in confusions and con- 
 tradictions. But then virtue that cannot be de- 
 fined or applied is rather an aerial commodity for 
 this workaday world; and so, where are we? Of 
 course Charmides might have retorted that he 
 was employing the word "good" in one sense and 
 his interlocutor in another; but this would have 
 demanded a power of analysis quite beyond his 
 years — a power, in fact, which his literary creator 
 had not yet attained, or which he most artfully 
 concealed. 
 
 At this point the argument of the Charmides 
 takes another turn. At the secret suggestion of 
 his cousin the lad asks Socrates what he has to 
 say of this definition: "Temperance is doing 
 one's own business"? That sounds well; but it 
 does not take Socrates long to bring out its in- 
 adequacy, for how can doing one's own business 
 be temperance until a man first decides whether 
 
36 PLATONISM 
 
 what he is doing is beneficial or the contrary? He 
 might be doing himself an injury while thinking 
 a certain act was his business, and, manifestly, it 
 cannot be acting temperately to do oneself an 
 injury. Before a man can be temperate, there- 
 fore, he must know himself and his business. 
 Here Critias takes up the challenge, and avers 
 that temperance is just the sort of knowledge im- 
 plied in Socrates' queries: it is self-knowledge. 
 Moreover, he has a divine sanction for this defi- 
 nition, and from a source that must appeal 
 strongly to Socrates ; for the God of Delphi who 
 meets the worshipper at the threshold of the 
 temple with the inscription "Know thyself" is 
 not issuing a command, but pronouncing a salu- 
 tation after the manner of our "Hail," "Be well," 
 and to be well is the same as to be temperate. By 
 his manner of salutation, therefore, the God is 
 instructing us that to know oneself and to be 
 well and to be temperate are all one and the same 
 virtue. Thus, by an easy transition, we have the 
 argument slipping from the question whether the 
 virtues are all one to the question whether virtue, 
 this particular virtue of temperance at least, is 
 not identical with knowledge. Critias, in asso- 
 ciating virtue with self-knowledge, might seem to 
 have reached the goal of the quest, but he is soon 
 thrown by Socrates into embarrassment because 
 he is unable to analyse the ambiguity lurking in 
 the word "knowledge" similar to that which en- 
 tangled Charmides in the use of the "good." 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 37 
 
 Under the cross-questioning of Socrates this 
 knowledge which Critias identifies with temper- 
 ance proves to be, not the knowledge of anything 
 definite, such as that which we obtain from sight 
 or sound, but just a knowledge of knowledge and 
 of ignorance. Eut where is the profit in this in- 
 substantial sort of knowledge? How, for in- 
 stance, shall the possessor of this knowledge be 
 able to distinguish the pretender in medicine from 
 the true physician? To do this he will have to 
 know some of the marks of the physician's art, 
 something about health and disease, and this is a 
 very different sort of thing from the knowledge 
 of knowledge, whatever that may mean. And so 
 it is with temperance; if we define this virtue as 
 knowledge, it must be knowledge of some specific 
 way of profiting ourselves, and not that mere 
 empty knowing that we know or do not know. 
 
 The argument is all a tangle, in which we have 
 become involved by the treacherous words "good- 
 ness" and "knowledge." Yet we are left with a 
 hint of the way of escape, given in the last beauti- 
 ful address of Socrates to the youth whose virtue 
 was the occasion of all this seeking and doubting : 
 "I would advise you to regard me as a babbling 
 fellow unable to reason anything out, and of 
 yourself to believe that, as you are more temper- 
 ate, so you are happier." 
 
 Simple as this last sentence may soimd, it is 
 pregnant with meaning. After the fruitless 
 
38 PLATONISM 
 
 arguing forwards and backwards, it awakens in 
 us the sensation of one who has been long wan- 
 dering in a blind labyrinth, and suddenly comes 
 upon an opening in the wall through which he 
 descries lying before him a clear and spacious 
 garden. So strong is this impression that we 
 should be tempted to believe Plato had written 
 the Dialogue deliberately as a puzzle, having in 
 his hand all the while the clues not only of the 
 Socratic Quest in which he is engaged, but of the 
 larger Quest that is to follow, were it not for the 
 two great arguments of the Protagoras and the 
 Gorgias, which seem to come after the Charmides 
 and its group in time and to represent the author 
 as still searching. 
 
 Much of the Protagoras is like the debate of 
 the earliest Dialogues, only wider in dramatic 
 scope. The sophist who gives his name to the 
 piece maintains that the virtues are separate. Be- 
 ing separate, they cannot be embraced under any 
 single category such as knowledge, yet they can, 
 he thinks, be imparted by instruction. Socrates 
 holds that they are all a form of knowledge, and 
 so not many but one; and as they are identical 
 with knowledge, he would like to believe that 
 they are teachable, but is troubled because he can 
 find no teachers from whom you can learn them 
 as you can acquire the various arts from prac- 
 titioners. The two disputants are thus complete- 
 ly at cross purposes, and the reader is likely to 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST S9 
 
 be vexed at their apparent stupidity in missing 
 the occasions of coming to agreement. For ex- 
 ample, Protagoras has been forced to admit that 
 three of the virtues — justice, hohness, temper- 
 ance — are at least pretty closely akin, being all 
 reducible to wisdom, or knowledge; but he still 
 clings to his theory that the fourth virtue, 
 bravery, is quite apart from the others. Where- 
 upon Socrates proceeds to show that bravery 
 too can be reduced to knowledge; since, as a 
 virtue, it should not be confused with the 
 headlong impulse of the unthinking animal, 
 and can be nothing more than wisdom regard- 
 ing what is dangerous and what is not. At 
 this point Protagoras takes refuge in silence, and 
 the discussion comes to an end. Yet how easy, 
 the reader is likely to say to himself with some 
 impatience, it would have been for Protagoras to 
 retort: Very good, my dear teaser; no doubt 
 bravery is dependent on knowledge, just as tem- 
 perance and holiness are, but just observe your 
 own addition — "regarding what is dangerous and 
 what is not" ; it is this very regarding that makes 
 the virtues different applications of knowledge, 
 and so not one but separate. The retort is easy ; 
 yet beware. Unless you have got clearly defined 
 in your understanding this slippery thing called 
 knowledge, your questioner will attack you from 
 another side, and you will fall a victim to his cun- 
 ning, as Protagoras had already fallen in trying 
 
40 PLATONISM 
 
 to explain how the knowledge of virtue is im- 
 parted in instruction. 
 
 So far, then, we seem not to have escaped from 
 the labyrinth of the group of Dialogues in which 
 the Charmides is included. But there is one im- 
 portant addition to be noted. This you may 
 know, said Socrates at the close of the Charmides, 
 that you will be happier as you are more temper- 
 ate. Now, in the Protagoras for the first time, 
 Plato takes up this further identification of virtue 
 and knowledge with the sum of pleasures which, 
 in ordinary language, is named happiness. We 
 cannot get away from this one fact, Socrates 
 argues, that the feeling of pleasure is in itself 
 good and that pain is in itself bad; hence we seem 
 to have here a sure criterion of the rightness or 
 wrongness of our acts, in the result — ^not, of 
 course, the immediate consequence but the final 
 result — as shown by the balance of pleasure and 
 pain. Virtue is reduced to a pure hedonism 
 (from hedone, pleasure), dependent on a man's 
 ability to calculate and weigh his sensations pres- 
 ent and future. If, therefore, men are to be per- 
 suaded to follow justice and holiness and tem- 
 perance, they must be taught that such a course of 
 life in its totality imparts more pleasure than the 
 contrary course. The conclusion may be given 
 in the excellent language of Bishop Berkeley's 
 use of this argument to undermine the logic of 
 those who make hedonism an excuse for vice: 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 41 
 
 "But Socrates, who was no country parson, sus- 
 pected your men of pleasure were such through 
 ignorance of the art of reckoning. It was his 
 opinion (Plato in Protagoras) that rakes cannot 
 reckon. And that for want of this skill they 
 make wrong judgments about pleasure, on the 
 right choice of which their happiness depends. 
 To make a right computation, should you not 
 consider all the faculties and all the kinds of 
 pleasure, taking into your account the future as 
 well as the present, and rating them all accord- 
 ing to their true value? And all these points 
 duly considered, will not Socrates seem to have 
 had reason on his side, when he thought ignor- 
 ance made rakes, and particularly their being 
 ignorant of what he calls the science of more and 
 less, greater and smaller, equaUty and compari- 
 son, that is to say of the art of computing?"^ 
 
 Manifestly, the argument has reached here a 
 certain conclusion, the Socratic Quest has 
 touched the goal. Virtue is an act which will re- 
 sult in the greater sum of pleasure, and he will be 
 the virtuous man who has the knowledge that 
 enables him to calculate the consequences of his 
 conduct, and strike a balance in the terms of 
 sensation. Knowledge has been defined by the 
 content of pleasure and pain, and by such a defi- 
 nition we can say that no man errs, or sins, will- 
 ingly, but only through ignorance. This, ap- 
 
 ^ Alciphron II, xviii, abridged. 
 
42 PLATONISM 
 
 parently, is the form in which Socrates held his 
 thesis, and it has maintained its position in the 
 world to this day; since Bentham formulated the 
 utilitarianism of the eighteenth century it may 
 even be regarded as the dominant theory of 
 ethics, however it may have disguised itself by 
 various additions and verbal modifications. And, 
 in a way, when combined, as it was in the teach- 
 ing of Socrates, with another truth of an utterly 
 different order, it contains a kernel of truth. But 
 taken alone as complete in itself, as it is professed 
 by the utilitarian and as it was expressed in the 
 Protagoras, it certainly is inadequate, if not false. 
 What assurance is there that any man, by his 
 own judgment or even by the collective exper- 
 ience of society, shall be able at any critical mo- 
 ment to foresee the long series of consequences 
 that may follow a particular act, or shall be wise 
 enough to determine coldly, amid the warm solici- 
 tations of present desire, where the remote bal- 
 ance of pleasure and pain will lie? Such a calcu- 
 lation is but a fumbling guide at best; unless 
 fortified by a higher truth it is likely to bring us, 
 indeed in the end it has invariably brought men, 
 to the Pyrrhonic form of scepticism, which 
 thrusts aside the uncertainties of the far future, 
 and seeks for tranquilhty in accepting with a 
 kind of stoic Epicureanism the pleasure in sight 
 as the only reality — 
 
 "Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go." 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 43 
 
 But that is not the scepticism of Socrates, nor is 
 this the goal to which Plato's mind is moving 
 with the steady sweep of tidal waters drawn on- 
 ward by a celestial force. What is this thing 
 called pleasm^e which we have so lightly accepted 
 as the sole arbiter of life? That is the question 
 agitated in the GorgiaSj and never afterwards 
 forgotten by Plato. 
 
 By a roundabout way the discussion of the 
 Gorgias is brought at last to a sharp dispute be- 
 tween Calhcles, on the one part, portrayed as a 
 typical demagogue of the day, a man interested 
 superficially in philosophical questions, but at 
 heart an agnostic and egotist seeking for a Uf e of 
 pleasure through power, and, on the other part, 
 Socrates, represented here as the customary iron- 
 ist, but with new resources of sarcasm for those 
 who try to humiliate him and of stirring appeal 
 for those who will heed. The brief for pleasure, 
 which in the Protagoras was held by Socrates, is 
 now put into the mouth of Calhcles, in order to 
 demonstrate its insufficiency when carried to the 
 logical end, while Socrates, as usual, is made the 
 vehicle of Plato's expanding thought — von Aen- 
 derungen zu hoheren Aenderungen. 
 
 This talk about temperance and righteousness, 
 says Callicles, with a cynicism that reminds us of 
 certain latter-day prophets, is all humbug : 
 
 "The nobility and justice of nature, as I now 491E s 
 tell you boldly, is really this, that a man who 
 
44 PLATONISM 
 
 would live rightly should permit his desires to 
 grow to the uttermost and not temper them by 
 discipline; and when they have thus grown he 
 should be able to serve them by reason of his cour- 
 age and wisdom, and satisfy any longing that 
 may arise. But this is impossible for the mob. 
 Hence, for shame, they conceal their own im- 
 potence by blaming such men, and say that in- 
 temperance is a dishonourable thing, as I declared 
 before, thus reducing the better natures to 
 slavery. And, being incapable of satisfying their 
 longing for pleasure, they praise temperance and 
 justice, for their own lack of manhood. Suppose 
 a man were bom the son of a king, or were cap- 
 able by his own nature of making himself a king 
 or tyrant or ruler, what, in the name of truth, 
 would be worse or more dishonourable than tem- 
 perance or justice for such a man — for a man, I 
 say, who, when he might enjoy the good things of 
 life and there was no one to hinder, should bring 
 in the conmion opinion and reason and censure 
 of the mob as a master over himself? And would 
 he not be a wretched creature if he were so sub- 
 dued by the specious honour of justice and tem- 
 perance as not to grant advantages to his friends 
 over his enemies, in the city where he himself was 
 ruling? No, Socrates, the truth is — and you pro- 
 fess yourself a votary of the truth — that luxury 
 and intemperance and liberty, these, if they are 
 supported, are virtue and happiness; the rest is 
 fopperies, the unnatural conventions of society, 
 idle chatter." 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 45 
 
 Very good, replies Socrates, we have got down 
 to the real point at issue; and he proceeds to 
 draw inferences from this definition of virtue in 
 a way that causes his antagonist to squirm with 
 indignation. If pleasure is all, and there is no 
 criterion beyond it, what should hinder a man 
 from indulging himself in practices which can 
 scarcely be named, which, in fact, we do not name 
 today? Nor was there anything unfair in so 
 pressing the argument. We need only look at 
 the actual life in Athens, or in the Italian cities 
 of the Renaissance, to learn that it is perfectly 
 possible for a man to gratify his lowest and vilest 
 desires without losing that sense of pleasure 
 which the hedonist makes his norm of conduct. 
 These grosser pursuits cannot be rejected on the 
 ground that a true calculation, so long as it con- 
 fines itself to a purely quantitative estimation of 
 pleasure and pain, finds them in the end on the 
 wrong side of the ledger. Such a reckoning may 
 save a man from excess ; it will not teach him to 
 renounce any pleasure in itself. Callicles is 
 decent enough to admit that some pleasures are 
 in themselves better than others, and having thus 
 granted the existence of the good, or the honour- 
 able, as a standard outside of pleasures by which 
 we may grade them, he has virtually given up his 
 case. 
 
 It is at this point that Socrates utters his ironi- 
 cally exultant cry, "Joy! joy!" — as it were a 499b 
 
46 PLATONISM 
 
 prophetic note of triumph over the hosts of 
 sophistry. That is one of the great moments of 
 philosophy, the moment when we pass from the 
 Soeratic Quest to the Platonic Quest; and I 
 never read the exclamation put into the mouth of 
 Socrates, but I think of the shout of Achilles, 
 when he came from his tent and stood by the 
 trench, with the divine splendour radiating about 
 him. The real battle was yet to come, but there 
 was terror in the walls of Troy. 
 
 "Seeing, then," says Socrates, taking up the 
 argument formally, "that we have agreed to- 
 gether, you and I, that there is such a thing as 
 the good and such a thing as the pleasant, and 
 that the pleasant is not the same as the good, and 
 that each is acquired by a certain attention and 
 mode of action, according as we set out after the 
 pleasant or the good — but before I proceed, tell 
 me whether you say yes or no to all this." And 
 Callicles, like a man brought to bay, says yes. 
 Whereupon Socrates returns to the points on 
 which they had differed, and now, fortified by this 
 concession of Callicles, pronoimces the verdict 
 and throws back the slurs of his antagonist, in a 
 way that has never failed to hearten good men 
 against the slanders and insults of unscrupulous 
 power: 
 
 507b "And so, Callicles, we come to this necessary 
 conclusion, that the temperate man, being, as we 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 47 
 
 have described him, just and brave and holy, is 
 entirely good; and the good man must do well 
 and honourably whatever he does, and he who is 
 doing well must be blessed and happy ^ and the 
 bad man who is doing ill must be miserable. . . . 
 Well, then, either this argument of ours must be 
 refuted, that men are made happy by the posses- 
 sion of temperance and justice, and miserable by 
 the possession of evil, or, if the argimient is true, 
 we must regard the consequences. . . . We must 
 consider whether you were right or wrong in your 
 abusive taunts, to the effect that I am unable to 
 defend myself or any of my friends or family, or 
 to save them from the extremity of danger, be- 
 ing, Hke an outlaw, at the mercy of any one who 
 chooses to buffet me on the ear, if I may repeat 
 your insulting words, or to deprive me of my 
 property, or banish from the city, or, worst of 
 all, kill me. Such a state, you declare, is the most 
 shameful a man can be in. But I say, as I have 
 often said, and there is no reason why I should 
 not say it again — I say, O Callicles, the most 
 shameful thing is not to be buffeted on the ear 
 unjustly, nor to have my face or purse cut; but 
 it is a worse thing and more shameful to buffet 
 me and slash me and mine unjustly, and to rob / 
 and abuse my body or my house. In a word, to 
 do any injustice to me and mine is a worse thing 
 and more shameful for the one who does the in- 
 justice than for me the sufferer. This is the 
 truth as it appeared to us in our former discus- 
 sion, and is now made fast and bound, if I may 
 use a bold metaphor, in proofs of iron and ada- 
 
 '/ 
 
48 PLATONISM 
 
 mant. So at least it should seem; unless you, or 
 some one more audacious than you, should suc- 
 ceed in arguing fairly against what I am now 
 saying. For as for me, my word is always the 
 same: that I do not know how these things are, 
 but that of all the men I have ever met, as now, 
 no one has been able to say otherwise without 
 making himself ridiculous." 
 
 Thus, after taking a fall out of one adversary 
 and then another, Socrates is at liberty to profess 
 his tremendous affirmation of the moral life, in 
 a tone very different from that of the calculating 
 argument employed with Protagoras. But ob- 
 serve the door by which he has finally slipped into 
 this new region. Weigh the sentence italicized 
 above, by which the passage has been made, for 
 it is the keynote of Platonism, the despair of the 
 petty logician, the joy of the initiated: "He who 
 is doing well must be blessed and happy, and the 
 bad man who is doing ill must be miserable."^ 
 Now on its face this is no argument at all, but a 
 bit of outrageous sophistry turning on the am- 
 biguity of a phrase. To do well in Greek means 
 both to prosper, he fortunate, and to act right- 
 eously, justly } Callicles would have been ready 
 from the first to grant that to do well in the sense 
 
 ^"Oo-TC TToA-X^ dvayKr) . . . rbv 8' cv irpaTTOvra fjuaKapiov T€ 
 KoX €vBaifiova etvai, tov Se Trovrjpov kol KaKws irpaTTOvra ddkiov. 
 
 * In the preceding debate with Polus the argument 
 (474c £f) had taken a similar turn by means of the 
 ambiguity of the word kukov. 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 49 
 
 of being fortunate is to he happy — naturally ; but 
 if he now makes no objection to the other mean- 
 ing, that to do well in the sense of acting justly 
 is to he happy, it is because he has been brow- 
 beaten by Socrates into a state of submissiveness. 
 To understand the full scope of this silent admis- 
 sion we must briefly recapitulate the argument. 
 
 Callicles had begun by drawing a distinction 
 between nature (physis) and tradition (nomos) . 
 Nature is what we know by our inmiediate indi- 
 vidual sense, that is by natural feeling; tradition 
 is what we have not learned from our indi- 
 vidual experience, but accept as the opinion, 
 or common sense, of mankind. Nature, he con- 
 tends, tells us that happiness depends upon the 
 amount of pleasure we can wring out of life, and 
 not upon the means by which we obtain this 
 pleasure; therefore, in nature, it is better to be 
 unjust than to be just. Against this precept of 
 nature the law of tradition, or conmaon sense, that 
 it is better to be just than to be unjust, has no 
 weight for any one who is cognizant of the facts, 
 since it is merely an opinion which we try to make 
 prevail with others, for our own advantage and 
 not at all for theirs. The problem of philosophy, 
 therefore, unless it should be content with a 
 brutal form of hedonism, was to confirm the 
 authority of the popular verdict, and to prove 
 that it is true also in nature.^ 
 
 ^ For this contrast of nature and common sense, or com- 
 mon opinion, see Laws 659d, 889e, et passim. 
 
50 PLATONISM 
 
 Socrates, as we have seen, takes hold of the 
 distinction thus drawn, and so entangles Callicles 
 in his logic that at last he is obliged to accede to 
 a qualitative difference in pleasures and to a cri- 
 terion of life apart from them and above them. 
 So far the discussion is perfectly fair, and to this 
 extent Callicles has been forced by sound reason- 
 ing to admit that the popular conmion-sense 
 opinion is also true by the test of his own feelings. 
 We do know for a fact that one pleasure is bet- 
 ter, in the sense that we naturally call it more 
 just, than another. But the next step, that our 
 happiness depends on this new qualitative cri- 
 terion, rather than the quantity of pleasure, is not 
 argued at all; it is merely slipped through by a 
 verbal ambiguity, owing to the bewilderment into 
 which Callicles has been thrown. The phrase 
 doing well merges together the two standards of 
 nature and common sense — to be happy by pros- 
 pering is a thesis of nature, whereas to be happy 
 by acting justly is a thesis of common sense — 
 and, however it was with Callicles, Plato should 
 not have let this confusion pass without com- 
 ment. But neither here nor anywhere else in the 
 Dialogue does the author show himself aware of 
 the fallacy. Instead of bringing evidence to 
 prove that the common-sense view is also true by 
 the experience of each individual man, he allows 
 Socrates to maintain his position by the mere arm 
 of an invincible scepticism : "So at least it should 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 51 
 
 seem; unless you, or some one more audacious 
 than you, should succeed in arguing fairly 
 against what I am now saying. For as for me, 
 my word is always the same, that I do not know 
 how these things are, but that of all the men I 
 have ever met, as now, no one has been able to say 
 otherwise without making himself ridiculous." 
 
 It is something — a great thing, no doubt — ^to 
 have raised the common opinion of mankind to 
 the solemn utterance of a spiritual affirmation, 
 supported by the powers of scepticism; but this 
 is still not philosophy, however it may be the basis 
 of philosophy. Common sense may be right, but 
 so long as it cannot tell "how these things are," 
 cannot, that is, give an account of itself dialectic- 
 ally, it is open to attack and discomfiture. Now, 
 so far from being able to give an account of itself, 
 conmion sense is painfully aware of its unaided 
 inabiUty to square its verdict with the visible facts 
 of life, and is continually taking refuge in the ex- 
 pected reversals of an invisible world hereafter. 
 It declares that the just man must prosper and 
 be happy, and in this declaration it never wavers ; 
 yet it beholds everywhere the prizes of the race 
 going to the strong and unscrupulous, and in its 
 distress it prays to God for vengeance on the 
 wicked and for help to the righteous. So it was 
 not only in Greece but the world over; and so it 
 is today. How marvellously, for example, the 
 trust and despair of religion were combined in 
 
52 PLATONISM 
 
 the Jewish Psahns, and how legitimately our 
 worship has adapted those outcries to its sense of 
 present defeat and future victory, any one may 
 understand by reading the great sermon of New- 
 man on the Condition of the Members of the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 And this is precisely the position of Plato in 
 the Gorgias. Beside the magnificent profession 
 of Socrates that the just man is happy, he sets 
 Callicles' picture of the just man as he may be 
 actually seen on this earth, buffeted and scorned, 
 unable to protect himself against the machina- 
 tions of evil ; and, beyond the quibble of a phrase, 
 Plato has no positive logic to prove that Socrates, 
 in this point, is right. Whether conscious or not 
 of this defect in the argument, he turns for his 
 vindication from philosophy to mythology, flee- 
 ing, like the Christian Church, to faith in the 
 power of another world to make good the dis- 
 harmony of this. The Dialogue concludes with 
 an account of the pagan day of judgment, when 
 the naked soul stands, with all its secrets revealed, 
 before the tribunal of Aeacus and Radamanthys 
 and Minos, and, as these pronounce, is sentenced 
 to reward or punishment. "For this," Socrates 
 says, "was the law [nomos, the divine ratification 
 of nomos as common sense] concerning men un- 
 der Cronus, and is now and always among the 
 gods, that he who has passed through this life in 
 justice and hoHness goes after death to the Isl- 
 
THE SOCRATIC QUEST 53 
 
 ands of the Blessed, there to dwell in perfect hap- 
 piness beyond the range of evil, whereas he who 
 has lived wickedly and atheistically departs to 
 the prison-house of vengeance and judgment." 
 
 So far Plato has come in the Quest: he has 
 shown that the popular view of morality has the 
 sanction of religion, and that, if only the myth 
 of future retribution be true, then certainly it is 
 better, measured by the ordinary standard of hap- 
 piness, to be just than to be unjust. But what if 
 the myth be rejected? The effort to confirm this 
 verdict philosophically, by an argument based on 
 the immediate knowledge of men, here and now, 
 will be the task of The Republic, If Plato suc- 
 ceeds in reaching this goal, then the ambiguity of 
 the phrase by which Callicles in the Gorgias was 
 tricked into acquiescence will prove to contain no 
 fallacy, but the truth of philosophy as it is ex- 
 pressed by the instinctive common sense of man- 
 kind. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PLATONIC QUEST 
 
 The Republic is the richest book of philosophy 
 ever yet composed. In its wide scope there is 
 scarcely an important question of human life 
 that is not touched on ; ethics, psychology, meta- 
 physics, science, education, art, religion — every- 
 thing is here. Impressed by this diversity of in- 
 terests, the pedant has undertaken to analyse the 
 work into separate treatises written at different 
 times ; and the casual reader, in his bewilderment, 
 is likely to ask himself whether the whole thing is 
 not the random outpouring of a powerful but il- 
 logical brain, the creation, perhaps, of a poet who 
 has taken up the ungrateful task of philosophiz- 
 ing. Yet, with all its variety, the better we know 
 the Dialogue the more strongly we feel its or- 
 ganic unity ; and, indeed, the thesis that never for 
 a moment is lost from sight through all the diva- 
 gations of reason and fancy, ought to be clear 
 enough to any attentive student. It is pro- 
 claimed by the author categorically more than 
 once, notably in the beginning of the eighth book, 
 at one of the cardinal points of the argument, 
 where he says his design was to set forth the 
 
 54. 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 65 
 
 various forms of government, with the corre- 
 sponding characters of individual men, "in order s44a 
 that, having seen all these, and having come to an 
 agreement about the best man and the worst, we 
 might learn whether or not the best man is the 
 most happy and the worst man the most miser- 
 able." 
 
 Words could not state more plainly than these 
 that the object of the Dialogue is to come to an 
 understanding about that affirmation of Socrates 
 in the Gorgias concerning happiness and virtue, 
 which was there upheld by the force of sarcasm 
 and ridicule, but is now to be confirmed by argu- 
 ment and by illustration of a positive sort. 
 
 Here the problem arises as to the relation of 
 the Platonic Dialogues to one another. The so- 
 lution depends primarily on the time of composi- 
 tion. If these works which we have considered as 
 forming a propaedeutic to The Republic are com- 
 paratively late in order, following at least the 
 Phaedrus, which an ancient tradition held to be 
 the earliest of all the Dialogues, then Plato, of 
 course, was merely playing a part in them. If, 
 however, they are, as virtually all scholars hold 
 today, the unriper products of his genius, then 
 we have still to answer the question whether they 
 display the candid gropings of a mind attempt- 
 ing to pass beyond the Socratic Quest, or were 
 written purposely as a preparation, with the con- 
 clusions of The Republic already in view. The 
 
56 PLATONISM 
 
 decision can rest only on subtle inference and on 
 comparison with the procedure of other writers. 
 My own opinion is that the Charmides (with its 
 companion pieces) and the Protagoras, Gorgias, 
 and Republic certainly follow one another in this 
 chronological order. But I cannot believe that 
 they were all planned together deliberately as 
 one complete design; for that would be to grant 
 to their author a comprehensiveness of intellect 
 and a power of artistic restraint almost more 
 than human. Nor can I admit that they are to 
 be taken as purely occasional treatises with no 
 continuous argument ; for that is simply to write 
 oneself down as incapable of reading philosophy. 
 The only other explanation is to see in them the 
 inevitable development of Plato's thought, and 
 to suppose that in each case the larger theme of 
 the Dialogue to succeed was floating vaguely be- 
 fore him, but was not yet worked out in logical 
 form. And this, too, is the most interesting 
 theory ; for I doubt if literature affords any other 
 example of a mind circling outwards from a 
 single central impulse with quite such fateful 
 regularity of pattern — and when we have fol- 
 lowed these broadening rings to the utmost reach 
 of our vision, it is as if they still moved onwards 
 and outwards to some far-off invisible shore. 
 
 The first book of The Republic is frankly an 
 introduction, in which Plato recapitulates the 
 Quest so far as this had carried him hitherto. 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 57 
 
 After a dramatic exposition of the mise en scene 
 he leads Socrates and Polemarchus into a genial 
 debate on the nature of justice, very much as 
 temperance was discussed in the Charmides, and 
 bravery and holiness and friendship in the other 
 early Dialogues ; and with the same inconclusive 
 result. No tenable definition of justice is 
 reached, but the inference is subtly suggested 
 that in some way justice is merely one form of 
 an all-embracing virtue, and that this master vir- 
 tue is somehow dependent on knowledge. 
 
 At this point the amicable conversation is 
 broken by the sophist Thrasymachus, as the 
 gambolling of lambs might be interrupted by the 
 advent of a wolf. As CalUcles, in the Gorgias, 
 was a rougher duplicate of Gritias, in the Charmi- 
 deSj so the present antagonist is still more turbu- 
 lent — a veritable devil's advocate ; and to the end 
 of this book we have what is substantially a sum- 
 mary of the main dispute of the Gorgias. You 
 two, exclaims Thrasymachus, are talking silly 
 nonsense and indulging in a game of mutual flat- 
 tery. When urged by Socrates to give his own 
 definition of the virtue, he asserts insolently that 
 justice is the interest of the stronger, and nothing 
 more ; and then, shifting the words to their popu- 
 lar sense and calling that injustice which in his 
 view of life is really justice, he repeats the cyn- 
 ical theory of the day, which we have already 
 heard from Calhcles, and now in this latter age 
 
68 PLATONISM 
 
 are hearing proclaimed as a novel doctrine by 
 teachers of the Nietzschean type. My meaning, 
 says Thrasymachus, will be clear if we take the 
 extreme case of so-called injustice, and see how 
 happy it renders a man in contrast with the mis- 
 erable creatures who are subject to him and obey 
 the slave-morality — ^the injustice of the tyrant 
 who brings a whole city imder his will and is able 
 to provide for himself and his friends whatever 
 good he desires. The truth of what I say, adds 
 Thrasymachus, is proved by the fact that in their 
 heart of hearts men envy and eulogize such a 
 character; for in reality people give hard names 
 to injustice not because they condemn the thing 
 itself but because they are afraid of suffering un- 
 der it. To this unreserved glorification of power 
 Socrates has no difficulty in replying. The man 
 who holds it right to make his own supremacy the 
 law of conduct must first understand what his 
 interest is, even in this crude form, so that mere 
 strength is not sufficient but must be united with 
 some sort of wisdom ; and as soon as this element 
 of wisdom is admitted, all kinds of considerations 
 of man's higher nature force themselves upon us 
 and make the identification of happiness with 
 sheer power unthinkable. 
 
 The conclusion of the dispute is like that to 
 which Socrates and Callicles came in the Gorgias, 
 only with this important difference: in the pres- 
 ent case Socrates admits that nothing has been 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 59 
 
 finally decided. "The discussion," he says, at the 
 end of the book, "has brought me no real know- 
 ledge; for while I do not know what justice in 
 itself is, we shall scarcely know whether it hap- 
 pens to be a virtue or not, and whether he who 
 possesses it is happy or not happy." And now, 
 instead of cloaking this ignorance in the myth of 
 a judgment to come, he will settle down with his 
 friends to lay bare, if possible, the inmost nature 
 of this thing they call justice, and to discover the 
 source of their, or rather his, assurance that it is 
 better to be just than unjust, better even, if needs 
 be, to suffer the extremity of injustice than to do 
 injustice. To this end they will strip justice of 
 all the honours and rewards by which a man is 
 lured to act contrary to his natural desires, and 
 will contrast with this the purest injustice, with- 
 out any of the penalties imposed upon it from 
 without. They will picture to themselves a man 
 who pursues through hfe an undeviating course 
 of justice, yet who shall appear to others to be 
 acting unjustly; and by his side they will set up 
 the man who, hke the owner of the ring of in- 
 visibihty, is able to satisfy all his evil propensi- 
 ties without detection. Furthermore, for the sake 
 of argument, they will suppose that the juggling 
 pardon-sellers actually have the power to buy off 
 the vengeance of the gods, so that by the sacrifice 
 of a little of his ill-gotten gains the unjust man 
 can be assured of as fair a prospect after death 
 
60 PLATONISM 
 
 as the just man. Then they may see whether, 
 imder such conditions as these, the just man is 
 still happy and the imjust man unhappy. If this 
 proves to be the case, it must be because justice 
 in itself brings happiness and injustice misery. 
 The novelty of such a procedure they fully rec- 
 ognize, for, as one of them observes, from the be- 
 ginning of the world, so far as the records go, 
 there never has been an attempt to denounce in- 
 justice and praise justice as they are in the soul, 
 themselves the greatest possible evil and the 
 greatest possible good, even if they are hidden 
 from the eyes of men and gods. 
 
 How shall this mystery be laid bare, and who 
 shall read the writing on the secret scroll of the 
 human heart? For a while the little band of 
 searchers is daimted by the task; and then So- 
 crates thinks of a device. After all, the State is 
 but man writ large ; if, then, we are balked in dis- 
 covering what we seek in the isolated soul, per- 
 haps its operation will be traced more easily in 
 the conduct of society. And so, for the rest of the 
 Dialogue, the working of justice and injustice is 
 regarded alternately as displayed in the individ- 
 ual and in the Repubhc. 
 
 To begin with the larger writing, Socrates 
 suggests that the easiest way to track down the 
 virtues of a city or State (the words were about 
 synonymous to a Greek) will be to follow its 
 progress genetically from its feeblest beginnings 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 61 
 
 to its consummation as seen in a highly developed 
 civiHzation. A Mttle examination shows that this 
 advance is by what we should call today the in- 
 creasing division of labour, or by what was sug- 
 gested in the Charmides as the source of the vir- 
 tue named temperance, that is by the practice of 
 each man doing his own business. Such a law 
 must not be limited to the individual, holding the 
 shoemaker to his last and the farmer to his 
 plough, but must permeate the organization of 
 society; it will divide the people as a whole into 
 separate classes, each with its special function in 
 the conmion life. Three great tasks the State 
 has : to govern itself, to defend itself, and to nour- 
 ish itself; and to these vital functions will cor- 
 respond the main division of the people into rul- 
 ers and soldiers and producers. Then, if our 
 principle of organization is sound, the State will 
 possess the various virtues according as each of 
 these classes carries out its proper activity : it will 
 be wise when the rulers perform their duty com- 
 petently, brave when the soldiers defend their 
 fellow citizens under the guidance of the rulers, 
 temperate when the labourers, obeying the rulers 
 and protected by the soldiers, are industrious and 
 productive.^ But we have not yet found the 
 
 ^ There is some confusion in Plato's conception of tem- 
 perance as given in The Republic. Thus, at 4S2A, it is re- 
 garded, not as the special virtue of the productive class, but 
 as extended through all three classes. On the other hand, 
 
62 PLATONISM 
 
 fourth of the cardinal virtues, the most important 
 of all, justice. As there is no separate class left 
 this virtue must somehow be spread through the 
 whole of society. What else can it be but that 
 very law itself of doing one's own business, which 
 is the efficient cause of organization and the force 
 behind the specific virtues? 
 
 Now if the virtues of the single man are analo- 
 gous to those of the State, it must be because the 
 soul itself has faculties corresponding in their 
 functions with the three classes of society. Two 
 such faculties, or modes of the soul's activity, are 
 manifest at a glance; reason, answering to the 
 ruling class, and desire, answering to the pro- 
 ductive, acquisitive class. And the specific vir- 
 tues of these faculties name themselves : a man is 
 wise when reason governs his actions, temperate 
 when his appetites are imder subjection to rea- 
 son. A third analogy Socrates finds in the fac- 
 ulty by which we feel anger, indignation, resent- 
 ment, pride, superiority — the thymos^ as it is 
 called in Greek by an untranslatable term. This, 
 
 such passages as 434c and 435b would seem to be mean- 
 ingless unless temperance is limited to the productive class. 
 Only by this restriction of temperance to the lowest ele- 
 ment of the State and of the soul can it be separated from 
 justice. So, certainly, Aristotle, with apparent reference to 
 Plato, understood the matter (e.g., Topica v, 6, 10). The 
 confusion in Plato is owing to his occasional failure to dis- 
 tinguish between the division of the State into classes and 
 of the soul into faculties. 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 63 
 
 it should be observed, was not what we mean or 
 think we understand by the "will"; for the will, 
 if Plato had had any word of precisely this sig- 
 nification, would not have been accepted by him 
 as a separate faculty or mode of activity. He 
 would have agreed wdth Hobbes in regarding it 
 as "the last appetite in dehberating," and would 
 have admitted the conclusive statement of Jona- 
 than Edwards, to the effect that "a man never, 
 in any instance, wills anything contrary to his 
 desires, or desires anything contrary to his will, 
 . . . the will is always determined by the strong- 
 est motive." The thymos, then, is the seat of the 
 personal emotions as distinguished from physical 
 desires. It is at once, as an appetitive faculty, 
 akin to the desires, and by its mental character- 
 istics close to the reason ; it Ues between the two, 
 hke the soldier class between the governors and 
 the producers, and its virtue like theirs is bravery, 
 or courage.^ 
 
 ^ The psychology of Plato for its purpose is sound and 
 effective, and he was within his rights as a moralist when 
 he threw it into relief by the great metaphor of the State. 
 But the reader of The Republic should be warned that 
 Plato's mental procedure was the reverse of his rhetorical 
 method, and that his psychology really preceded his so- 
 ciology. The division of the State into classes was made 
 not so much for itself as for an illustration of the activities 
 of the soul. As such it was an excellent device of rhetoric, 
 even of logic ; but Plato, it must be acknowledged, sometimes 
 overstepped the proper limits of analogy. He did not 
 always remember that the State is a collection of funda- 
 
64 PLATONISM 
 
 And so, as Socrates says, our dream is com- 
 pleted, and by a fable, for which we may thank 
 the gods, we have been guided to the discovery of 
 justice in the soul. For evidently that principle 
 of attending to one's business which was the or- 
 ganizing force of society and the efficient cause 
 of the civic virtues is a shadowy image of what 
 443c we are seeking. In very truth the justice of a 
 man is like that of the State, save for this im- 
 portant difference, that it is not concerned with 
 the division of labour in outer things, but with the 
 conduct and being of the soul itself. It is the 
 power that holds the several elements of the soul 
 each to the performance of its peculiar duty, 
 and forbids meddling. By it a man first brings 
 order into his own nature, becoming one with 
 himself, and having his members tempered and 
 harmonized like the chords of a lute that make 
 one music of many notes. And then, when the 
 
 mental units, and not, like the soul, a unit with various 
 forms of activity. There are in the State rulers and pro- 
 ducers, and the distinguishing virtue of the former is wis- 
 dom, as temperance is of the latter; but these classes are 
 composed of individuals each of whom possesses all the 
 faculties. The neglect of this simple fact has led our "di- 
 vine" philosopher now and then, as it has led modern socio- 
 logists, into strange and devious imaginings. His most ar- 
 dent admirers will confess that, whereas he generally shows 
 a profound intimacy with the intricacies of the individual 
 soul, some of his theories of the State have a remote rela- 
 tion to the realities of human nature. But this is one of the 
 subjects which must be left for another time and another 
 book. 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 65 ] 
 
 peace of his inner life is established and he is | 
 
 master of himself, he will proceed to act, as he ] 
 
 has occasion to act, whether in a matter of private -i 
 
 business or pubhc interest, in accordance with the ; 
 
 law of justice within him, calling any act just 
 which preserves the balance of his soul and co- ^ 
 
 operates with it, and declining as unjust anything i 
 
 that would contravene and mar his self-control. : 
 
 Justice, in a word, might by its very definition 
 be taken to denote the happier condition of the 
 soul in precisely the same way as health of body is ] 
 
 more desirable than disease. But a definition 
 does not necessarily force conviction, and all that ^ 
 
 logic can do — though its importance in this re- \ 
 
 spect must not be underestimated — is to clear 
 away from before our eyes the obstacles thrown 
 up by false reasoning, and then to bid us look at 
 the truth as it stands naked and revealed. In the \ 
 
 end the success of any moral appeal depends on 
 the consent of the soul itself; for of what avail, 
 as Socrates asked, are argument and definition oorgias 472b 
 unless the hearer in his very heart bears testimony ; 
 
 to them? And there's the rub. Our life is woven \ 
 
 of endlessly changing emotions, and few of us ' 
 
 are capable of distinguishing the permanent from 
 the transient effects of our acts, and of disentan- 
 ghng the threads of experience so as to say that \ 
 
 we feel thus now because we then did so. To ; 
 
 draw proper conclusions we need the help of one j 
 
 who is able to throw such a light into the soul and 
 
66 PLATONISM 
 
 character of a man as shall make us see clearly 
 into those dark places. The philosopher, there- 
 fore, who is concerned with something besides 
 verbal triumphs has no other recourse than to 
 turn to the power of the imagination; and so 
 Plato will devote the eighth and ninth books of 
 his Dialogue to unfolding such a "counterfeit 
 presentment" of the various forms of government 
 and of the corresponding characters as shall 
 compel the most reluctant reader to say: This is 
 the very truth of things as I myself have seen 
 it— 
 
 "O Hamlet, speak no more; 
 Thou tum'st mine eyes into my very soul." 
 
 The method of portraiture will be a union of 
 history and psychology. It will undertake to ex- 
 hibit the cities of Greece actually passing from 
 one form of government to another — from aris- 
 tocracy to timocracy, and from that to oligarchy 
 and democracy, and last to that tyranny which 
 was the perpetual menace of these small and fac- 
 tious States, and which was to close with the 
 despotism of Alexander and the more enduring 
 domination of Rome. And at the same time it 
 will set forth the traits of human nature which 
 lie behind these political changes as their cause 
 Republic 544D aud material ; "for States are not things of stock 
 or stone, but depend on the character of the men 
 in them, which drags all else with it whatever 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 67 
 
 way it inclines." Plato, writing when the forces 
 of his people were at ebb, gave only the descend- 
 ing scale of governments, so that his picture to 
 be complete would need to be balanced by a cor- 
 responding study of the ascending scale. It may 
 be objected also that events in this world are not 
 so regular in their progress as he has made them 
 appear; yet it is none the less true that his gen- 
 eralizations from the short and confused annals 
 of Greece are in the main quite amazingly con- 
 firmed by the larger sweep of history, and it is 
 still more sadly true that a reflecting man can 
 scarcely turn from Plato's account of the weak- 
 nesses inherent in the nature of democracy with- 
 out a shudder of apprehension. To take from 
 Plato's broadly composed narrative a few sen- 
 tences indicating the cardinal points of what 
 might be entitled the Tyrant's Progress must 
 necessarily deprive the picture of its symmetrj^ 
 and its power of persuasion, but that is one of 
 the disabilities we have to face in our attempt to 
 dissect what is a living body of thought and no 
 dead logic. The Dialogue itself remains un- 
 touched for those who will read it. Now the just 
 man in Plato's scheme is the aristocrat, he who 
 has his centre of action in the reason, which is the 
 best part of the soul. Such a man may find him- 
 self in a society governed by quite other ideals 
 than his own, a city where contention is rife and 
 the ambition to prevail over others is stronger 
 
68 PLATONISM 
 
 than the determination to rule over oneself. He 
 will indeed live at peace with his own soul, content 
 to serve the State as best he can for the unseen 
 rewards of justice. But the son, unless by some 
 divine chance he inherit his father's strength of 
 character, will probably be moved by different 
 considerations. The mother, perhaps, will feel 
 herself humiliated because her husband is not dis- 
 tinguished among the magistrates of the city, but 
 lives in quiet contempt of the brawling courts 
 and contentious assemblies, with, it may be, the 
 appearance of indifference to her own feuds and 
 vanities. She will inveigh against this philo- 
 sophical life to her son, and the friends and very 
 servants of the house will join in the complaints, 
 and will urge the boy to go down into the battle 
 and contend with the world's weapons for the 
 prizes that his talents merit. To these exhorta- 
 tions will be added the force of many examples 
 and the voices of the market place, all telling him 
 that those who mind their own business and fol- 
 low too fine a sense of honour, after the manner 
 of his father, are no better than simpletons — 
 
 "Honour! tut, a breath: 
 There's no such thing in nature ; a mere term 
 Invented to awe fools." 
 
 Thus the education of the world lays hold of him, 
 and he loses his best guardian, that divine gift of 
 philosophy tempered with the love of pure beauty 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 69 
 
 which alone dweUing in the soul is able to pre- 
 serve it to the uttermost. He becomes a timocrat 
 instead of an aristocrat, a man in whom the glory 
 of success and the name of authority override the 
 simple law of justice and of intrinsic honour. He 
 is no longer ruled by reason, but by undue pre- 
 dominance of the sort of pride that belongs to the 
 thymos, or spirited faculty. 
 
 To understand the next step it is first neces- 
 sary to note that by oligarchy Plato meant what 
 we are more likely to name plutocracy, that is to 
 say, "a government resting on the valuation of ssoc 
 property, in which all real power is in the hands 
 of the rich." The individual character corre- 
 sponding to this kind of State will arise when the 
 son of a timocrat sees his father suddenly mis- 
 carry in some magnanimous project, striking 
 against the prejudices of the city as a ship foun- 
 ders on a sunken reef, and losing both reputation 
 and authority, perhaps even life. Then the son, 
 observing the insecurity of such a pubUc career, 
 will turn his attention to the more tangible ad- 
 vantages of money, and will devote his energies 
 to the amassing of wealth. He will eject reason 
 and pride from their high places, and on the va- 
 cant throne of his soul will seat the concupiscent 
 and covetous element, to which he will pay hom- 
 age as if it were the Great King himself. In the 
 ordinary transactions of business he will play the 
 game so as, perhaps, to acquire the reputation of 
 
70 PLATONISM 
 
 honest dealing — that, indeed, is within the scope 
 of his ambition — but observe him when he has got 
 hold of some trust for which he thinks he shall 
 not be made to account, and you will see the 
 rapacity of his nature. He may appear in the 
 eyes of the world a very respectable sort of per- 
 son, but there is no real health in him, nothing of 
 the power and peace of a soul at one with itself. 
 At the best his is but a sordid life, absorbed in the 
 calculation of profit and loss, in which there is lit- 
 tle room for the education of taste or for the 
 pursuit of pleasure in its higher forms. The 
 very absence of finer interests will permit the 
 grovelling and sensual desires to gather strength 
 within him, and these will be kept down only by 
 the one masterful desire of increasing riches. He 
 will be at war with himself, although the prudent 
 element in him will still be in the ascendant. 
 
 From such a state the transition to the lower 
 stage of democracy is clear and rapid. Suppose 
 the son of one of these money-getters comes into 
 the early possession of wealth without the disci- 
 pline of acquisition: almost certainly he will be 
 imsettled by vain conceits and puflfed up by the 
 flatteries of those who wish to prey upon him. 
 He will be taught to regard modesty as merely 
 simple; to ridicule temperance as unmanly; to 
 despise moderation and thrift as vulgar and il- 
 liberal. Such old-fashioned traits will be thrust 
 rudely out of doors, and into their place will 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 71 
 
 troop all those passions which his father had sup- 
 pressed — insolence and anarchy and waste and 
 shamelessness — rushing in now like revellers 
 flushed with drink and crowned with garlands. 
 All pleasures and desires are the same to him 
 without distinction. He lives from day to day 
 as his appetites impel him, indulging now in wine 
 and lewd luxuries, then drinking water only and 
 dieting; going in now for physical training, then 
 throwing up everything for a spell of listless 
 loafing; making a pretence even of the philo- 
 sophical Ufe, or throwing himself into some po- 
 litical excitement, or trying his luck in some 
 business venture — living always without law or 
 plan or purpose, taking license for liberty and 
 ceaseless distraction for the pursuit of happiness. 
 He is not one man, but many, the fit double of 
 the democratic city.^ 
 
 Last of all comes the tyrannical man, by an 
 easy change. In the soul of each of us there 
 dwell desires that are innocent and desires that 
 are harmful; even in the good man the evil pro- 
 pensities are not extirpated, but only held in 
 leash. This we can see in ourselves when, after 
 some undue indulgence of appetite, we fall asleep 
 and, in this relaxation of reason and habit, be- 
 
 ^ It is only fair to add that by democracy Plato meant the 
 license of equalitarianism ; his aristocratic State was really 
 a democracy governing itself by respect for what is best in 
 human nature. 
 
72 PLATONISM 
 
 come the sport of fantastic and lawless visions. 
 Then sometimes, in om* dreams, the wild beast 
 within us goes forth boldly to slake its lust, and 
 there is no crime, no shameful act of incest or 
 violence or unnatural passion, which it may not 
 commit. Exactly like this is the condition of the 
 tyrannical man. He has been brought up in a 
 democratical family to a perfectly unrestrained 
 life, which the flatterers about him dignify by 
 the name of liberty. His father and true friends 
 still retain some moderation and balance among 
 the desires that draw the heart this way and that, 
 but the baser sort who hang upon him discover 
 the natural bent of his nature, and by humouring 
 this raise it to be imdisputed lord of the household 
 within him, as it were a huge and winged drone 
 in the hive, maddening him with a kind of frenzy 
 to which every lesser impulse is made subordinate. 
 Then indeed License is crowned king, and sits as 
 the disposer of his soul. What he desires, whe- 
 ther his master-passion be for money or women 
 or power, he will have, though it involve the sac- 
 rifice of every other emotion or necessitate any 
 crime against those nearest and dearest to him. 
 He is not a himian being, but a ravenous beast, 
 or resembles a true man only as a man may seem 
 to act in those hours of turbid dreaming when 
 the soul is swept along by visions of abominable 
 lust. 
 
 Such is the Tyrant's Progress as it is drawn in 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 73 
 
 the eighth and ninth books of The RepubliCj 
 frightful enough in this brief outline, almost over- 
 whelming when read with all the realistic details 
 painted in by the relentless hand of the artist. 
 Question may arise as to the propriety of apply- 
 ing the names "aristocracy," "democracy," and 
 the rest to the different stages of the degenerating 
 State, and indeed the whole subject of Plato's 
 sociology, in the sense of those terms, must, as I 
 have said, be considered by itself. But of the 
 reality of these various conditions in the hfe of 
 society or of the individual, by whatever political 
 names we designate them, there can be no doubt 
 at all. To take the two limits, with which we are 
 the most concerned, as was Plato, we recognize 
 immediately the man whose faculties are each, so 
 to speak, attending to its own business — the man 
 who is wise by the due exercise of reason, temper- 
 ate by the proper control of his appetites, brave 
 and self-respecting by the measured activity of 
 the thymos; and who deals with the world as he 
 deals with himself. And we know equally well 
 the flimsy creature who is tossed about from one 
 unstable passion to another, until he sinks to the 
 still lower stage, when out of the conflict of un- 
 guarded desires one master-passion arises, like 
 the criminal tyrant in a lawless State, to enslave 
 the man's soul and drive him furiously across the 
 rights of others. 
 
 Well, Plato may now ask, have I not made out 
 
74 PLATONISM 
 
 the case for Socrates? No one can look at these 
 contrasted portraits of the aristocrat and the ty- 
 rant without granting their veracity, or without 
 saying to himself: "Yes, if this be justice, then 
 the just man is in his own nature happy, and, if 
 this be injustice, then the unjust man is in his 
 own nature miserable. These equations corre- 
 spond with what I have suspected in the lives of 
 other men, and with what is the certain experi- 
 ence of my own life. It is no more possible to 
 escape these conclusions than to deny that phy- 
 sical health means a state of pleasurable existence 
 and disease means pain." This is the last and 
 supreme argumentum ad hominem: It is better 
 to do justice simply and solely because you are 
 happier so doing than otherwise.* 
 
 Do we seem to have gone a long way round to 
 reach at the last what was all the while near at 
 hand? The conclusion is a commonplace, or to 
 use a fitter term, it is the common sense of man- 
 kind, defended by the weapons of a terrible irony, 
 confirmed by the insight of the man who perhaps 
 saw more clearly than any one before him or af- 
 ter him into the obscure depths of the human 
 heart, and made persuasive by the art of a mas- 
 terly rhetorician. But there is this remarkable 
 fact to observe about a true commonplace in the 
 
 * Compare the last proposition of Spinoza's Ethics: Beati- 
 tudo non est virtutis praemium, sed ipsa virtus; nee eadem 
 gaudemus, quia libidines coercemus, sed contra quia eadem 
 gaudemus^ ideo libidines coercere possumus. 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 75 
 
 moral order : it passes current in the mouths of all 
 unsophisticated men, yet if you question them 
 about it you are hkely to discover that they can- 
 not explain its meaning, and if you press them 
 closely you may even bring them to deny that it 
 has any meaning. As for the commonplace 
 which forms the goal of the Platonic Quest, it 
 not only has these features of other conmion- 
 places of morality, but it stands at the bifurca- 
 tion of the road where religion and philosophy 
 part company. Religion, though hke philosophy 
 it is really based on the Socratic affirmation, is 
 yet too fearful to rest on this truth alone, and 
 will seek another foundation for its faith in some 
 miraculous event of history or in some revelation 
 from above. So St. Paul argued to the Corinth- 
 ians: 
 
 "Now if Christ be preached that He rose from 
 the dead, how say some among you that there is 
 no resurrection of the dead?" 
 
 "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preach- 
 ing vain, and your faith is also vain." 
 
 "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we 
 are of all men most miserable." ^ 
 
 We are of all men most miserable — is not this 
 the very reverse of what Plato thought philo- 
 sophy was to teach when he set forth on his great 
 
 ^ I Cor, XV, 12, 14, 19. 
 
76 PLATONISM 
 
 search in The Republic?^ I have not in mind to 
 speak shghtingly of the Christian faith, or of any- 
 genuine faith; I know the sources of reUgious 
 conviction; but when I see the perplexity into 
 which even St. Paul could be thrown by the 
 fear of losing his belief in a particular miraculous 
 event, I appreciate the force of Plato's boast that 
 he alone, with his master, had the courage to rest 
 his faith on the simple common sense of mankind. 
 This is philosophy. Having expounded the 
 meaning of the commonplace that it is better to 
 be just than to be unjust, and having thus given 
 authority to the affirmation of the spirit, philo- 
 sophy does not seek for extraneous proofs of this 
 truth, but proceeds to use it as a principle for 
 investigating the manifold life and activities of 
 the soul. 
 
 In the Protagoras we reached the goal of the 
 Socratic Quest, when it was shown that the 
 knowledge identified with virtue was the know- 
 ledge needed for the calculation of the conse- 
 
 ^ With St. Paul's religious fear of scepticism one may 
 compare the great passage of the Apology (40c-41d) in 
 which Socrates states his philosophic faith as confirmed by 
 the daemonic guide and undaunted by doubt: "To die must 
 be one of two things : either the dead are as nothing and have 
 no perception or feeling whatsoever, or else, as many be- 
 lieve, there is a change and migration of the soul from this 
 world to another. . . . And ye too, my judges, ought to be 
 of good hope towards death, being persuaded of this one 
 truth at least, that no evil can befall a good man either in 
 life or in death." 
 
THE PLATONIC QUEST 77 
 
 quences of any act in the terms of pleasure and 
 pain. It now appears that the Platonic Quest 
 has also brought us to knowledge, but to know- 
 ledge of a different order. To go back to our 
 starting-point in the Charmides, it will be re- 
 membered that Critias suggested a definition of 
 temperance, there the typical virtue, as the do- 
 ing of one's business. To this suggestion Socrates 
 replied that the endeavour to do one's own busi- 
 ness would profit a man little unless he first had 
 some knowledge of what business was really his 
 own. And Critias, accepting the challenge, de- 
 clared that temperance, or any other virtue, did 
 presuppose knowledge, and was, indeed, such 
 knowledge as the God of Delphi impHed in the 
 words "Know thyself," with which he greeted his 
 worshippers in place of the ordinary salutation 
 among men, "Rejoice." One feels, while reading 
 the Charmides, that in Plato's eyes Critias had 
 enounced a great truth, and that his subsequent 
 entanglement by Socrates was owing to his in- 
 abihty to defend dialectically a sound position in- 
 to which he had, so to speak, stumbled blindly. 
 And now, in the appeal of The Republic to the 
 inner experience of the hearer, we learn at last 
 what was meant by connecting morahty with the 
 Delphic salutation. The knowledge commanded 
 by the God is no empty "knowledge of know- 
 ledge," as it became to Critias under the fire of 
 Socrates' questions, but receives a very definite 
 
78 PLATONISM 
 
 content. To know myself is to be effectively con- 
 scious of this certain fact, that I am happy when 
 I act morally, and, conversely, that I am acting 
 morally so long as I am happy. 
 
 This knowledge of happiness is not of things 
 future, nor is it, like the knowledge of pleasure, 
 dependent for its authority on a fallible science 
 of calculation; it is immediate and independent. 
 Here, evidently, are two different orders of know- 
 ledge, on both of which our conduct is based, and 
 Plato's philosophy has yet to explain the para- 
 doxical bond between the knowledge which So- 
 crates identified with virtue and the knowledge by 
 which we confirm our spiritual affirmation. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE SOCRATIC PARADOX: THE DUALISM OF 
 
 PLATO 
 
 The conclusions of The Republic, it will be 
 seen at a glance, are reached by a thoroughgoing 
 dualism. In particular the criterion of happi- 
 ness, whereon, as I think, the whole ethical sys- 
 tem of Plato finally rests, will have no clear 
 meaning for us unless we see how it came to be 
 used by him as something essentially different in 
 kind from pleasure. 
 
 In the Protagoras we heard Socrates arguing 
 that, whatever else may be open to doubt, all 
 pleasure in itself is certainly good and all pain 
 evil. If on any occasion a man seems to reject 
 a pleasure as evil, this is only because, if admitted, 
 it would deprive him of a greater pleasure or re- 
 sult in an overbalance of pain. Therefore virtue 
 is a science of mensuration applied to pleasure 
 and pain ; when we err in our conduct it is through 
 lack of this kind of knowledge, and the common 
 reproach that a man is overcome by pleasure is 
 no condemnation of pleasure itself, but of the 
 man who is in a state of ignorance regarding the 
 most important matter of life. 
 
 This is the so-called philosophy of hedonism, 
 
 79 
 
80 PLATONISM 
 
 or, if the phrase is not self-contradictory, indi- 
 vidualistic utilitarianism. It probably, to judge 
 from the way it was carried out in the Cyrenaic 
 and Epicm^ean schools, represents a genuine as- 
 pect of the Socratic attempt to identify virtue 
 and knowledge. But Plato, as we have seen, 
 soon passed beyond that position, if indeed he 
 was ever really satisfied with it. In the Gorgias 
 he introduces Socrates as forcing his opponents 
 to admit a seemingly quahtative difference in 
 pleasures, and in so doing he virtually takes the 
 foundation from under hedonism as a self-suffi- 
 cient scheme of ethics. For the moment you 
 grant a choice among pleasures not determined 
 by the scientific mensuration of more and less, 
 but based upon a qualitative criterion of good 
 and bad, you are far along on the path towards 
 admitting a criterion which is outside of and 
 above pleasures and depends upon a generic dis- 
 tinction between all pleasure properly so-called 
 and a feeling of another order. 
 
 The ruthlessness with which Plato at first ap- 
 plies this criterion would rather indicate that it 
 was a new discovery with him and had not been 
 in his mind when he wrote the Protagoras, Hav- 
 ing perceived that pleasure, so far from affording 
 the final measure of good, might even be contrary 
 to the good, he seems for a while to have taken 
 pleasure in denigrating pleasure. So, in the Gor- 
 gias, he outruns the requirements of his argu- 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 81 
 
 ment in forcing attention upon the disgusting 
 possibilities of a hedonistic standard. Again, in 
 the PhaedOj he recurs more definitely to the 64d ff. 
 theme of the Protagoras, and repudiates its con- 
 clusions in the most vehement language. What are 
 we to think, he asks, of those who, as the popular 
 opinion holds, are brave because they are afraid 
 to be cowards, casting out fear by fear, or of 
 those who are temperate through calculation of 
 future pains, masters of certain pleasures be- 
 cause they are the slaves of other pleasures? No, 
 this is not the real business of morality, to barter 
 pleasures for pleasures and pains against pains, 
 the greater and the less, as if they were pieces 
 of money. But that is the only right currency 
 when we exchange all these things for wisdom 
 and courage and justice, all these pleasures and 
 pains for true virtue. Do you believe for a 
 moment that the philosopher has any serious 
 concern for these baubles that we call pleas- 
 ures? They are but the poor affections of the 
 body, whereas all the study of the philosopher 
 is to escape, so far as mortal man can escape, 
 from the body and its obscure interests into 
 the world of Ideas which are the veritable hfe 
 of the soul. The very intensity of a pleasure 
 may be a hindrance to the soul in her labour of 
 purgation and her search for the truth, since 
 those things that cause us to feel most strongly 
 are apt to seem clearest to us and truest, and so 
 
82 PLATONISM 
 
 the keenest emotions may be those that bind us 
 most closely to this earth. Every pleasure and 
 every pain is, as it were, a nail that clamps the 
 soul to the body and makes her corporeal, creat- 
 ing the opinion that those things are true which 
 the body affirms, and preventing the soul from 
 passing to the other world in her own purity and 
 power. This is the tone, too, of the MenOy though 
 less poetically coloured, and of parts of The Re- 
 public, and appears to represent Plato's middle 
 period of lyrical revolt. At times he almost ap- 
 proaches the paradoxical enthusiasm of the first 
 CjTiic, who used to avow that he would rather go 
 mad than feel pleasure. 
 
 But this unmitigated asceticism is a passing 
 phase of Plato's philosophy and does not repre- 
 sent his final judgment of human life. In his 
 later years he was to settle back into a saner at- 
 titude towards the common-sense view, and to 
 recognize that pleasure was not in itself necessar- 
 ily an evil, but mixed with good and bad, and, 
 properly considered, one of the decisive guides 
 of conduct. Much of the Philebus is given up to 
 a dispassionate analysis of pleasure and an en- 
 deavour to determine its relation to knowledge as 
 the highest form of mortal activity. Still later, 
 in the Laws, almost as if in a spirit of recantation 
 for his earlier severity, he descends from his high 
 philosophical scorn to discuss the quotidian uses 
 of pleasure and pain as constituting the practical 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 83 
 
 problem of education. These first books of the 
 Laws are so frequently disregarded by writers on 
 Platonism that it will be worth while to dwell at 
 some length on their expression of his ripest and 
 mellowest views. 
 
 In The Republic Plato had entered upon a dis- 
 cussion of the sort of education suitable for a 
 citizen of the world, but had been turned away 
 from this topic by the allurements of pure philo- 
 sophy. After writing this Dialogue he went 
 through what may be called a metaphysical 
 period, and then, in his closing years, as life be- 
 gan to look less solemn to him, he seems to have 
 felt doubts of the availability of his high morality 
 for the common needs of mankind. And so the 
 talk of the three friends, which forms the matter 
 of his last work, will be "the temperate play of Laws 685a 
 old men amusing themselves in regard to the 
 laws." Instead of a debate on the uncompromis- 
 ing ideals of the philosopher, this Dialogue will 
 deal with the education of the ordinary citizen 
 and the formation of a practical government. 
 
 The heart of the whole argument is in this no- 
 table passage of the first book: "We should con- 644d 
 sider that each of us as a living creature is but a 
 divine puppet, whether created as a plaything of 
 the gods or in some more serious mood. Of this 
 we are not certain, but we know that the feelings 
 [of pleasure and pain] are the sinews, or cords, 
 that pull us in various directions." Hence the 
 
84 PLATONISM 
 
 lawgiver who has to study the well-being of so- 
 ciety cannot afford to neglect these motives of 
 action; rather, his first object will be to get them 
 into his own hands so as to be able to form and 
 control the character of his citizens : 
 
 653a *'I say, therefore, that pleasure and pain are the 
 original perception of children, and these are the 
 things in which virtue and vice first come to the 
 soul. As for wisdom and settled convictions of 
 truth, fortunate is he to whom they come even in 
 his old age, and he is the perfect man who pos- 
 sesses them with all their blessings. Now the 
 virtue first appearing in children I call their edu- 
 cation. If pleasure and hking, pain and hatred, 
 are rightly implanted in the souls of those who 
 have not yet learned to know them by reason, and 
 if, when reason is added, their souls are in accord 
 with it as to the fact that they have been rightly 
 trained by suitable habits, this harmony is virtue 
 in its completeness ; but the part of virtue that has 
 to do with the right training in pleasures and 
 pains, teaching us to hate what we ought to hate 
 from the beginning of life to the end, and to love 
 what we ought to love, — if we separate this part 
 in our discourse and call it education, we shall in 
 my opinion be using the right name." ^ 
 
 The point to remember, then, is that to Plato's 
 sober thought pleasure was not in itself a thing 
 
 ^ I am not at all sure that my translation of this difficult 
 passage is correct in every detail, but the general sense of 
 the Greek is plain enough. 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 85 
 
 undesirable, nor yet in any way negligible (such 
 a belief would have been simply inhuman), but 
 was rather the most important matter to be con- 
 sidered in education from the earhest years of 
 childhood. The health of the soul was involved, 
 he thought, in the acquisition of right habits of 
 feeling. At the same time it is clear that this 
 healthy but unreasoning state of virtue ulti- 
 mately was dependent upon something besides 
 the mere difference between pleasure and pain; 
 and, in fact, all through the first books of the 
 Laws the education of youth is placed in the 
 hands of men who have attained "wisdom and 
 settled convictions of truth," and who are able to 
 mould the habits of their pupils by the authority 
 of "virtue in its completeness." The wisdom of 
 these guides is the knowledge, as expressed in the 
 conclusion of The Republic, that as we act mo- 
 rally we are happy; their authority is in the fact 
 that this feeling of happiness is of itself and al- 
 ways good, whereas pleasure is a subordinate 
 feeling, to be controlled finally by a power out- 
 side of itself. In other words, Plato in the Laws 
 has reverted from his temporary rejection of 
 pleasure as intrinsically a snare of evil, but still 
 adheres to his belief in the radical difference be- 
 tween pleasure and happiness, pain and misery.^ 
 
 ^ I am fully aware of the ambiguity of "happiness" as a 
 translation of Plato's evSaifiovta, but no better term seems to 
 be available. "Eudaemony" is not English. The words 
 
86 PLATONISM 
 
 This most fundamental distinction of Plato's 
 dualism is alluded to many times in the Dia- 
 470b logues, notably, and apparently first, in the Gorg- 
 iaSj where Socrates, to the amazement of his 
 hearers, will not admit that the Great King, to 
 whom every possible pleasure is open in the high- 
 est degree, is happy unless he is also just and 
 righteous. In The Republic the same theme is 
 taken up and elaborated in the strongest conceiv- 
 able terms. For the sake of avoiding any mis- 
 understanding two extreme types are isolated 
 and contrasted one with the other. The unjust 
 man is to possess all the pleasures and so-called 
 good things of the world, with unrestricted power 
 to carry out his desires and with no prospect of 
 coming pain to mar his enjoyment. Even be- 
 yond that, he is to have also the reputation of 
 justice, so that the finer pleasures of honour shall 
 fall to him as well as the grosser material plea- 
 sures. With his wealth he can even, as people 
 suppose, make himself acceptable to the gods by 
 the magnificence of his sacrifices. On the other 
 side is set the just man, in his noble simplicity, 
 
 "felicity" and "blessedness" suggest themselves, but are 
 barred out by their association with a future life. I must 
 beg the reader to divest the word "happiness" of the sense 
 customarily given it in philosophy as meaning no more than 
 a sum of pleasures, and to accept my use of it as signifying 
 a feeling different in kind from pleasure. As a matter of 
 fact this deeper meaning is often unconsciously, or half- 
 consciously, conveyed by the word in ordinary speech. 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 87 
 
 the man who, as Aeschylus says, wishes to be and 
 not to seem good. He is to possess his justice 
 alone, without even the reputation of it, but, be- 
 ing the best of men, is to be reputed the worst. 
 Let him be scourged and abused and cruelly tor- 
 tured ; let him know all the pains of existence and 
 none of the pleasures, with no hope of compensa- 
 tion hereafter. Would Socrates dare to affirm 
 that under such conditions the just man is still 
 the happier and the imjust man the more miser- 
 able? And Socrates does not waver. 
 
 Nor does Plato waver. In the matter of lan- 
 guage he may now and then fall into apparent 
 ambiguities; for it must be remembered always 
 that he had no technical terminology at his com- 
 mand, and employed words pretty much as they 
 came to him. We should not therefore be sur- 
 prised if at times, when the philosophical distinc- 
 tion is not the matter uppermost in his mind, he 
 fails to discriminate sharply between the words 
 pleasure (Jiedone) and happiness (eudaimonia) , 
 or even seems to take the latter consciously, in 
 what was then, as now, its popular use, to mean 
 merely pleasure in its larger and more stable as- 
 pect. There is, for instance, a curious passage of 
 the Laws in which he begins by making the dis- 660e a. 
 tinction clearly, as he had done in the Gorgias 
 and The Republic, and then draws back from his 
 position as if alarmed by its possible conse- 
 quences. If, he says, the just life is not repre- 
 
88 PLATONISM 
 
 sented as offering also the greater sum of plea- 
 sure, and we force upon men the uncompromis- 
 ing question whether he is the happier who lives 
 the justest life or he who lives the most pleasur- 
 able, why, they will retort upon us by asking 
 what is the profit to your just man from his ex- 
 istence devoid of pleasure. Somehow, therefore, 
 the lawgiver must refrain from separating the 
 pleasurable and the just. He will say that we 
 see these things but dimly, and so they appear 
 differently to different men, just things appear- 
 ing pleasant to the just man and unjust things 
 unpleasant, but contrariwise to the unjust man. 
 Now the judgment of the just man we must sup- 
 pose to be more valid than that of the unjust man, 
 and our task will be to make his judgment pre- 
 vail as a criterion of pleasures. Such a conclu- 
 sion might seem to carry us back to the aban- 
 doned position of the Protagoras; yet even here 
 a phrase slips in which shows that Plato was 
 merely arguing on a lower plane for practical 
 purposes. This belief that the balance of plea- 
 sure belongs to righteousness is perhaps only a 
 663d salutary illusion, he says, which the cunning law- 
 giver can implant in the minds of the young, sim- 
 ilar to the myths of the gods with which religion 
 is bound up in the popular creed. Plato, in other 
 words, was here writing for practical men and 
 making his appeal to the ordinary intelligence. 
 He saw that for such minds it would be useless, 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 89 
 
 if not actually prejudicial, to present his thesis 
 in the absolute terms of philosophy; just as the 
 preacher today who is engaged in the cure of souls 
 would probably succeed only in rendering relig- 
 ion fantastic or repugnant to sober people of the 
 world by describing the agonies of a martyr at 
 the stake and trying to make his audience reaHze 
 that it is possible amid such torture to die in an 
 ecstasy of happiness. Such a preacher would be 
 proclaiming a psychological fact, but it is doubt- 
 ful whether his words would be for edification. 
 
 So, I take it, there is a certain philosophical 
 "economy" here and there in the language of the 
 Laws; possibly, too, Plato's own naked convic- 
 tion seemed to him in his later years, not less true, 
 but less urgent for the common need of mankind. 
 However that be, one thing is indubitable: he 
 who has not grasped this distinction in kind be- 
 tween happiness and pleasure will wander in the 
 labyrinth of Plato's Dialogues with no clue to 
 guide him. He may admire their various beauties 
 and their infinite riches, but they will be to him 
 a maze without ultimate plan or exit. 
 
 This dualism of feeling, as I have said before 
 and must say again, is the great discovery of 
 Plato; its vital importance is proved by the 
 course of philosophy among writers of the mod- 
 em world who have forgotten it or tried in one 
 way and another to avoid it. Certainly the his- 
 tory of ethical theory ought to estabHsh one fact 
 
90 PLATONISM 
 
 incontestably : no doctrine can speak with the per- 
 emptory voice of truth which eschews all forms 
 of reward and penalty. No statement of a cate- 
 gorical imperative, no trust in an innate sense of 
 duty, no exhortation to the love of God or of 
 man, will avail against the temptations of the 
 world unless the admonition bears with it the 
 promise of satisfying what all men instinctively 
 crave. The heart of man naturally demands 
 pleasure or happiness, and will not forgo its de- 
 mand.^ 
 
 On the other hand those who have understood 
 this trait of human nature, without admitting, 
 tacitly it may be, the radical dualism of pleasure 
 and happiness, have fallen invariably into one of 
 two difficulties: either they have sunk into a de- 
 grading form of Epicureanism, or, shunning this 
 error, they have lost themselves in the pursuit of 
 elusive shadows. These difficulties are abund- 
 antly evident in the development of English 
 utilitarianism. The strength of Bentham's sys- 
 tem — and it had undoubted strength — lay in his 
 steady perception of the relation between the 
 practice and the reward of virtue. But his purely 
 quantitative standard of pleasures left out of the 
 account too large a part of human nature to sat- 
 isfy the finer minds even among his followers. 
 
 ^ Those who think that happiness is omitted from the 
 Buddhist scheme of salvation have strangely misread the 
 books or, more probably, have not read them at all. 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 91 
 
 So we see John Stuart Mill endeavouring to 
 abide by the half-truth of utilitarianism while 
 giving to it a colour and a tone which should raise 
 it out of the sty. "When thus attacked," he says, 
 "the Epicureans have always answered, that it 
 is not they, but their accusers, who represent 
 human nature in a degrading light ; since the ac- 
 cusation supposes human beings to be capable of 
 no pleasures except those of which swine are 
 capable. ... It must be admitted, however, that 
 utilitarian writers in general have placed the su- 
 periority of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly 
 in the greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, 
 &c., of the former — that is, in their circumstantial 
 advantages rather than in their intrinsic nature. 
 And on all these points utilitarians have fully 
 proved their case ; but they might have taken the 
 other, and, as it may be called, higher ground, 
 with entire consistency. It is quite compatible 
 with the principle of utility to recognize the fact, 
 that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable 
 and more valuable than others. It would be ab- 
 surd that while, in estimating all other things, 
 quality is considered as well as quantity, the esti- 
 mation of pleasures should be supposed to depend 
 on quantity alone." ^ 
 
 Bentham had recognized no difference at all 
 between pleasure and happiness. Mill, by his 
 addition of a qualitative standard, was really 
 
 * Utilitarianism, Chap. ii. 
 
92 PLATONISM 
 
 feeling his way towards a standard of morality 
 above pleasure, while still verbally denying the 
 existence of such a standard.^ He is the example 
 
 ^ Surely there is no consistency, but inconsistency, in the 
 two members of Mill's sentence : "On all these points utili- 
 tarians have fully proved their case; but they might have 
 taken the other, and, as it might be called, higher ground, 
 with entire consistency." If the utilitarians are right in 
 making "permanency, safety," etc. the standard of value 
 and desirability among pleasures, what is the need or mean- 
 ing of another, qualitative standard.^ — I admit freely that 
 this question of a qualitative and quantitative standard of 
 pleasures is extremely subtle, and for its complete answer, 
 in accordance with the Platonic philosophy, should be de- 
 ferred until after the consideration of Plato's psychology 
 and cosmology. A qualitative standard would seem to rest 
 on the difference between the sensation of pleasure in the 
 fulfilment of physical desires (the IttiOvixyitlkov') and the 
 emotion of pleasure in the satisfaction of personal desires 
 (the 6v/i6<;)f between, that is, such a sensation as that which 
 accompanies the quenching of thirst and such an emotion 
 as that which accompanies the satisfaction of pride or 
 vanity. But the consistent utilitarian would maintain that 
 the difference here is still really quantitative, and so com- 
 mensurable, being measured by permanency, etc., as well as 
 by intensity ; and he would argue that the personal emotions 
 are more considerable than the physical sensations by a true 
 quantitative standard. I am inclined to think that the utili- 
 tarian has proved, or could prove, his case. If this double 
 quantitative standard of intensity and of permanency is re- 
 ferred to the cosmological dualism of the one and the many, 
 the immutable and the flux, it will be seen that pleasure, 
 as a momentarily shifting sensation, tends to commingle 
 itself with pain, and, as an unchecked distraction moving 
 in the direction of the flux, must be so far adjudged evil. It 
 becomes good on the contrary only in so far as it subserves 
 the more stable part of our personal self. Meanwhile there 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 93 
 
 par excellence of a philosopher who combines the 
 most lucid powers of exposition with an incapa- 
 city of clear thinking. The entanglement of Mill 
 and the later utihtarians was patent to T. H. 
 Green, who sought a way of escape by saving de- 
 sire as a motive of action while changing the ob- 
 ject of desire. To this end he sets up a distinc- 
 tion between pleasure and what he calls "self- 
 satisfaction," and argues that the object of our 
 desire is not pleasure or even the pleasure of self- 
 satisfaction, but is this self-satisfaction for its own 
 sake, while pleasure, if it comes, is a mere contin- 
 gent effect. By this analysis of the object of de- 
 sire he thinks he has pointed to the source of Mill's 
 confusion and has estabhshed a criterion of val- 
 ues superior to pleasure. Now many of Green's 
 pages devoted to the elucidation and expansion 
 of his idea of self-satisfaction are rich with the 
 burden of history, and there is a hearty kernel of 
 truth in his argument. But there are two fatal 
 weaknesses. In the first place Green's notion that 
 5^Z/-satisf action may consist in the sacrifice of the 
 individual's well-being for the well-being of so- 
 ciety is only Bentham's old fallacy, decked out 
 in new terms, of supposing that we can appeal to 
 pleasure as the motive of conduct and then avoid 
 
 can be no harm, I think, in speaking of the admission of 
 a seemingly qualitative difference in pleasures as a step 
 towards recognizing the fundamental distinction between 
 pleasure and happiness. 
 
94 PLATONISM 
 
 the egotistic consequences of such a creed by 
 merging pleasure in the greatest happiness (as 
 the utihtarians use the word) of the greatest 
 number. And, secondly, Green is blind to the 
 fact that, by rejecting pleasure as his motive yet 
 failing to find the criterion of self-satisfaction in 
 happiness as a feeling distinct in kind from 
 pleasure, he leaves his standard of self-satisfac- 
 tion — so long as he writes consistently — without 
 verifiable meaning or content. Take one of his 
 typical sections: 
 
 . . . "To the question. What is the well-being 
 which in a calm hour we desire but a succession 
 of pleasures? we reply as follows. The ground 
 of this desire is a demand for an abiding satisfac- 
 tion of an abiding self. In a succession of plea- 
 sures there can be no such satisfaction, nor in the 
 longest prolongation of the succession any nearer 
 approach to it than in the first pleasure enjoyed. 
 If a man, therefore, under the influence of the 
 spiritual demand described, were to seek any suc- 
 cession of pleasures as that which would satisfy 
 the demand, he would be under a delusion. Such 
 a delusion may be possible, but we are not to sup- 
 pose that it takes place because many persons, 
 through a mistaken analysis of their inner ex- 
 perience, affirm that they have no idea of well- 
 being but as a succession of pleasures."^ 
 
 How often, while reading such passages as 
 
 ® Prolegomena § 234. 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 95 
 
 these, we feel that Green is on the verge of mak- 
 ing the great discovery made by Plato so long 
 ago, but is held back by the age-old fallacy of 
 regarding happiness, or whatever you choose to 
 call it, as nothing more than a succession or con- 
 summation of pleasures! What vain circumlo- 
 cutions his noble spirit would have been spared, 
 and what hair-sphtting subtleties of argument, 
 if he had been able to say in simple, straightfor- 
 ward language, "This self-satisfaction or well- 
 being which I am trying so hard to offer as a 
 substitute for the unsatisfaction of pleasure is 
 just the happiness that every man has felt and 
 may understand"!^ 
 
 No, mankind craves happiness; it can be 
 weaned from the seduction of false pleasures only 
 by this possession which is so like pleasure yet 
 greater and essentially other than pleasure, and 
 it will be diverted by no empty promises or 
 threats. The whole religious hterature of the 
 world, truer in its candid reliance on the intui- 
 tive knowledge of the soul than are the rebeUious 
 searchings of the schools, is replete with appeals 
 to our consciousness of the difference between 
 pleasure and the rapture, or peace, or happiness 
 — the word is nought but the fact is everything — 
 
 ^ The distinction between pleasure and happiness is im- 
 plicit in such passages of the Prolegomena as §§ 228^ 238; 
 but it is never defined or brought out into the light^ and for 
 the most part Green accepts happiness in the utilitarian 
 sense as the sum of pleasures. 
 
96 PLATONISM 
 
 of obedience to a higher law than our personal 
 or physical desires. I could cover many pages 
 with passages to this effect; a single quotation 
 from one of the older of our English divines, the 
 length of which may be excused by the impor- 
 tance of the topic, will suffice : 
 
 "That joy should be enjoined, that sadness 
 should be prohibited, may it not be a plausible 
 exception against such a precept, that it is super- 
 fluous and needless, seeing all the endeavours of 
 men do aim at nothing else but to procure joy 
 and eschew sorrow; seeing all men do conspire in 
 opinion with Solomon, that a man hath nothing 
 better under the sun than — to he merry, 
 
 "It is true that men, after a confused manner, 
 are very eager in the quest, and earnest in the 
 pursuit of joy; they rove through all the forests 
 of creatures, and beat every bush of nature for 
 it, hoping to catch it either in natural endow- 
 ments and improvements of soul, or in the gifts 
 of fortune, or in the acquists of industry ; in tem- 
 poral possessions, in sensual enjoyments, in ludi- 
 crous divertisements and amusements of fancy; 
 so each in his way doth incessantly prog for joy; 
 but all much in vain, or without any considerable 
 success ; finding at most, instead of it, some faint 
 shadows, or transitory flashes of pleasure, the 
 which, depending on causes very contingent and 
 mutable, residing in a frail temper of fluid hu- 
 mours of the body, consisting in slight touches 
 upon the organs of sense, in frisks of the corpor- 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 97 
 
 eai spirits or in fumes and vapours twitching the 
 imagination, do soon flag and expire. 
 
 "Wherefore there is ground more than enough, 
 that we should be put to seek for a true, substan- 
 tial, and consistent joy. It is a scandalous mis- 
 prision, vulgarly admitted, concerning religion, 
 that it is altogether sullen and sour. Such, in- 
 deed, is the transcendent goodness of our God, 
 that he maketh our delight to be our duty, and 
 our sorrow to be our sin, adapting his holy will 
 to our principal instinct; that he would have us 
 to resemble himself, as in all other perfections, 
 so in a constant state of happiness. Indeed, to 
 exercise piety and to rejoice are the same things, 
 or things so interwoven that nothing can disjoin 
 them."« 
 
 It is the honour of Plato that he held fast to 
 this fundamental truth of religion, while basing 
 it on the immediate intuition of the mind, with- 
 out necessary recourse to the problematical re- 
 wards and penalties of another state of existence. 
 
 This is the beginning of Plato's dualism, but 
 not the end. If happiness and pleasure are dis- 
 tinct feelings, it will follow that the activities they 
 accompany, or the motives of our activity, are 
 likewise distinguished in kind. We are brought 
 back to that troublesome and recurring question 
 of the early Dialogues as to the identity or sep- 
 arateness of the virtues. Somehow it appeared 
 
 ^ From the forty-third sermon of Isaac Barrow^ with 
 omissions. 
 
98 PLATONISM 
 
 there, as we took up bravery and temperance and 
 holiness in turn, that they all had a tendency to 
 run together into one supreme virtue; yet, as 
 soon as we reached this point, invariably the par- 
 ticular virtue under discussion lost its concrete 
 value, and we were left with an empty word on 
 our hands which had no significance for solving 
 the specific problems of life. Now, if we return 
 to these unanswered puzzles after considering 
 Plato's later Dialogues, we shall see that the dif- 
 ficulty lay in the ambiguity of the word "virtue" 
 {arete), which is used for two quite different 
 things. For our own convenience, therefore, we 
 will henceforth make a distinction in language 
 which Plato himself never made, by using differ- 
 ent translations for the same word to denote a 
 distinction in fact which he did make. So far as 
 possible we will reserve the word "virtue" for 
 the art of living, for right conduct, that is, as 
 manifested in specific spheres of activity, and 
 will adopt the word "morality" for the higher 
 unity in which the particular virtues seemed to 
 have a way of losing themselves. 
 
 It is not easy to decide how fully Plato him- 
 self in his earlier Dialogues was aware of this dis- 
 tinction which later becomes so important to his 
 ethical system. In the Protagoras it is latent. 
 We can see it growing clearer in the Phaedo and 
 the Meno, though it is there still only implicit. 
 In The Republic the distinction is something 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 99 ' 
 
 more than implied by the separate treatment of I 
 
 the group of virtues — wisdom, bravery, temper- ! 
 ance — on the one hand and of justice on the other. 
 Wisdom is the right action of our reason, brav- 
 ery of the thymos, and temperance of the desires. 
 
 These are the specific virtues. Justice is the com- ■ 
 
 pelling and governing force behind all these ■ 
 
 forms of activity, the healthy balance of the soul j 
 
 as a whole and its right energy as a unit. This \ 
 
 distinction between morality as the central gov- j 
 
 erning force and the virtues as specific forms of \ 
 
 activity is brought out even more clearly in the j 
 Politicus, where it is shown that the specific 306a s. j 
 virtues, or perhaps we should say the tendencies 
 that create them, may come, if left to them- 
 selves, into actual conflict one with another. 
 
 Thus, for example, bravery and temperance \ 
 
 are not only different one from the other, but ; 
 
 may take hostile sides in the soul of a man \ 
 or in a State. Bravery, in so far as it is the 
 
 quality of a temperament quick and virile by j 
 
 nature, is apt, if unrestrained, to run into im- j 
 
 petuosity and insolence; whereas temperance, as j 
 
 it is found in a disposition inclined to slowness | 
 
 and quiet, may very easily sink into sloth and i 
 
 cowardliness. These temperaments and virtues \ 
 
 manifest themselves in two classes of men who | 
 
 may divide a city into factious parties (Plato j 
 
 would say today into radicals and conserva- ! 
 tives), and whom it is the art of the true states- 
 
100 PLATONISM 
 
 man to reconcile in friendly co-operation for the 
 common good. Though Plato does not here draw 
 the parallel out in so many words, it is every- 
 where implied that this royal art {basilike 
 techne) of the governing statesman is but an- 
 other name for justice, equivalent to the moral 
 principle that in the individual soul resides above 
 the various activities, and governs and harmo- 
 nizes the specific virtues. 
 
 But for the final exposition of this, as of so 
 many other doctrines, we must turn to the book 
 Laws 963a ff of Plato's old agc. All our laws, he says at the 
 conclusion of that long treatise, must be con- 
 trolled by some one purpose. As the physician 
 has a definite end in view, the preservation of 
 health, to which all his activities are directed, and 
 as the pilot has a definite task, so it must be with 
 the statesman, or lawgiver. The aim of the 
 statesman is the creation and preservation of vir- 
 tue in the State ; and as his aim is thus not many, 
 but one, so the virtues which have appeared to 
 us all along as fourfold must also in some way be 
 one virtue, or subordinate to some one moral pur- 
 pose. It was easy to see what was meant by the 
 special virtue of bravery ; it is a manner of facing 
 things fearful. The nature of wisdom, too, is 
 clear; it is a kind of prudence in the choice and 
 use of means. And in the same way we imder- 
 stand temperance and justice. But what is the 
 character of the moral force in subservience to 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 101 
 
 which these various virtues are united? It is a 
 kind of wisdom — ^not prudence, but the mind, or 
 intelligence — ^working in him who is able not only 
 to discern the many different activities of life but 
 to look beyond them ; the divine vision of him who, 
 whatever may be the field of observation, is able 
 to behold the changeless law above all change. It 
 is the knowledge, rehgiously speaking, of the 
 gods, that they are and that they govern the 
 world by a beneficent design. There are two 
 ways by which we may approach this supreme 
 knowledge: one by the soul's perception of her 
 own nature, that she is the oldest and most divine 
 of existing things, lord of the body by right of 
 age and dignity; the other by the perception of 
 the ordered motion of the stars and of all created 
 objects that display the governance of an omnis- 
 cient intelUgence; and these two ways are virtu- 
 ally one. He will be a true worshipper of the 
 gods who has attained to this knowledge of the 
 soul's hegemony and of the indwelUng reason of 
 the imiverse. He alone possesses that saving 
 moraUty {arete soterias) which fits him to be the 969c 
 ruler of himself and of the State.^ 
 
 ^ Philo Judaeus, in his Legum Allegoria (1, 63 ff.) has 
 a quaint comparison of the dperr] yeviK-ri, as he calls the 
 super-virtue, and the four dperal Kara fxipos with the river 
 that went out of Eden to water the garden, and from 
 thence was parted, and became into four heads. The doc- 
 trine is Stoic as well as Platonic. See, for instance, Sto- 
 baeus, Ethica VI, i. 
 
102 PLATONISM 
 
 Such, freely and succinctly rendered, but I 
 think not misinterpreted, is the ethical position of 
 Plato in the conclusion of the Laws and at the 
 end of his life. Substantially it is the same as 
 the doctrine of The Republic, though the termin- 
 ology is different. In both Dialogues there are 
 four virtues, one of which is taken — with some 
 confusion of thought, it must be admitted — now 
 as parallel with the others, and now as distinct 
 from them by reason of its quality of leadership 
 and comprehensiveness. The Republic gave the 
 double function to justice; in the Laws justice 
 tends to be limited to the political virtue of right 
 distribution, whereas the moral leadership is 
 transferred to the reason, in such a way that wis- 
 dom is treated both as one of the four cardinal 
 virtues and as the queen over them all. Evi- 
 dently this ambiguous position of wisdom is ex- 
 plained by the fact that we are dealing with two 
 kinds of knowledge, and points to a further dual- 
 ism of Plato's philosophy. 
 
 Along with the question of the unity and di- 
 versity of the virtues there ran through all the 
 early Dialogues another problem, which was left 
 in an equally unsettled state. The morality, or 
 super-virtue, into which the specific virtues had a 
 fashion of merging and so escaping our search, 
 was always some kind of wisdom or knowledge. 
 Bravery, so soon as it became a desirable quality 
 and no mere impetuosity of temper, involved a 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 103 
 
 knowledge of what things are properly to be 
 feared and what are not. Temperance was 
 meaningless until we acquired an understanding 
 of ourselves and of what was good for us. It 
 would follow that, if all these forms of virtue rest 
 on a body of knowledge, they ought to be teach- 
 able, like medicine or any other art ; yet in prac- 
 tice there seem to be no teachers to whom a man 
 can go to learn morality as he can go to a physi- 
 cian to learn medicine. This paradox reached its 
 climax in the Protagoras, where Socrates argued 
 that theoretically all the virtues are knowledge 
 yet practically are not teachable, while his an- 
 tagonist held that the virtues have each their indi- 
 vidual character apart from knowledge yet can 
 be taught. 
 
 It now appears that this paradox lay in the 
 ambiguity of a word ; and in the later Dialogues, 
 whatever may be said of the other aspects of 
 Plato's philosophy, the double character of the 
 relation of the mind to facts is brought out with 
 a precision and dwelt on with a persistence which 
 leave no doubt of his fundamental dualism. In 
 The Republic the distinction is represented pic- 
 torially by the bifurcated Mne, separating know- 
 ledge proper from what is properly called opin- 
 ion ; and thereafter these two terms are employed 
 regularly for the two processes that caused the 
 earlier ambiguity. The full bearing of this ter- 
 minology on Plato's system must be left for an- 
 
104 PLATONISM 
 
 other chapter. Here the point to observe is that 
 the primary motive for making the distinction is 
 rather ethical than metaphysical, as may be seen 
 from the trend of the argument in the Theaetetus. 
 
 163A The avowed purpose of this Dialogue is to de- 
 termine whether knowledge and perception 
 {episteme and aisthesis) are the same thing or 
 different things; to discover, that is, whether we 
 have any fixed and certain form of knowledge. 
 But this thesis soon becomes involved with the 
 subsidiary questions whether all things are in a 
 state of flux and whether man is the measure of 
 
 l^^^ all things. Twice at least these three problems 
 are brought together quite definitely, but for the 
 most part the discussion passes from one to an- 
 other of them after the rather disconcerting man- 
 ner sometimes adopted by Plato. The best clue 
 to guide the reader through this labyrinth is a 
 sense of what was the dominating interest in the 
 author's mind; nor is this interest hard to dis- 
 cover. Here, as almost everywhere in Plato, the 
 bias is ethical ; the real animus of the Dialogue is 
 
 i57d the desire to demolish the belief, shared by the 
 sophists with their audiences, that there is no 
 certain reality behind our sense of the good and 
 the beautiful. And so, in a way, the process of 
 proving is inverted ; if this stronghold of popular 
 unreason is undermined, then the answers to the 
 three troublesome questions will follow of them- 
 selves. If you grant the existence of a principle 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 105 
 
 of goodness, fixed and immutable, then there is 
 a standard of values fixed, there is something be- 
 sides the flux, there is a knowledge superior to 
 that depending on outer perception (which Plato 
 will grant to the flux), and man, in the Prota- 
 gorean sense, is not the measure of all things. 
 
 To this end the arch-sophist Protagoras is 
 brought to the bar, and under the cross-question- 
 ing of Socrates is forced to admit the inclusion of 
 a standard of "better" and "worse" in our judg- 
 ments. But, while making this admission, he 
 still clings to his dogma that man (that is, al- 
 ways, man as a creature totally immersed in the 
 flux) is the measure of all things; he still main- 
 tains that as things seem just and beautiful to i67c 
 each State, such they are as long as the State so 
 judges them. Socrates retorts with the argu- 
 ment that, if there is no objective and fixed re- 
 ality in the moral world, no standard by which 
 the degrees of better and worse can be deter- 
 mined, then the use of such words as "just" and 
 "beautiful" is perfectly meaningless — a conclu- 
 sion against which our coromon sense revolts im- 
 placably. Furthermore, though a man may as- 
 sert that the just is whatever a State regards as 
 better for itself in the sense of being more profit- 
 able, yet no one will say, unless he is merely 
 amusing himself with words, that whatever a 
 State regards as profitable, and so establishes as i77d 
 the law of justice, will necessarily turn out to 
 
106 PLATONISM 
 
 be profitable in the event. This introduces the 
 question of the future, and shows that at least the 
 profitable is not measured by the present opin- 
 ions of men (in other words, that to this extent 
 man is not the measure), and that probably the 
 justice which the sophists are so fond of connect- 
 ing with profit may also be something uncon- 
 trolled by opinion — something about which it 
 very much behoves a man to get not opinion but 
 knowledge. 
 
 But is there any such thing as knowledge? 
 How shall we take it as a guide unless we know 
 what it is ? Plato has no answer to this question 
 put as a problem of epistemology. We cannot, 
 
 209E he declares, get at a knowledge of what know- 
 ledge is by analysing the process of knowing, for 
 the reason that this analysis implies knowledge 
 of the parts, and so on ad infinitum. And again 
 
 196D he asks, as might be asked of any one, ancient or 
 modern, who thinks the tantalizing problem of 
 epistemology has been solved, whether perhaps 
 it was not a bit impudent ever to have supposed 
 they were going to define the process of knowing 
 when they did not know what knowledge is.^^ It 
 is characteristic of Plato, however, that he does 
 not deny the possibility of defining knowledge in 
 the terms of the intellect, but only confesses the 
 
 ^^ For Plato's scepticism in regard to epistemology see 
 also Charmides 169a. 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 107 
 
 failure on this occasion to reach such a definition. 
 He will not step beyond the bounds of Socratic 
 scepticism: so far, he says, using Socrates as his 210c 
 mouthpiece, and no further my art prevails, to 
 clarify the mind of the docile listener and make 
 him more agreeable to his friends. 
 
 But with this sceptical outcome as regards the 
 avowed epistemological issue, the Dialogue con- 
 tains two statements, one dropped casually by 
 the way, the other uttered with all the impressive- 
 ness at Plato's command, which permit us to see 
 what positive answer Plato had in reserve. The 
 former occurs in connection with a rather whim- 202B 
 sical account of the aboriginal irrational elements 
 underlying phenomena, which can be named but 
 of which nothing can be predicated, and suggests 
 that there may be similar elements of sensation 
 in the soul, in regard to which the soul may be in 
 a state of truth, although it cannot be said to 
 know them, since knowledge comes only with 
 rational discourse. ^^ The other, and more ex- 
 plicit, statement is made in the digression on the i76b 
 
 ^^ This passage of the Theaetetus is, I admits obscure. 
 My interpretation of it would be confirmed by a sentence 
 of the Philebus (66c), as read by Ficino: HifiTrrat tolvvv, 
 as ^ySovas Wefxev dXvTrov? opKra/xevoi, Kadapa.<: «7rovo/w-acrai/TCs t^S 
 ^v)(rj<; avTrj<; €Tn(rTrj/jLasy rats Be ala-Oya-ea-LV €7rofX€vas — puras 
 nominantes animae ipsius scientias, sensus autem sequentes. 
 But however this passage of the Theaetetus be taken, there 
 is no possibility of misunderstanding the words in which 
 Plato affirms the reality of the superrational intuition. 
 
108 PLATONISM 
 
 philosophic Hfe, which, to one not familiar with 
 Plato's indirect methods, might appear to be 
 strangely out of place in the heart of this Dia- 
 logue. Our only refuge from the evils of this 
 world, says Socrates, is to render ourselves like 
 unto God. In him there is no injustice, no shadow 
 of wrong, but, as we conceive things, purest jus- 
 tice; and there is nothing that more resembles 
 God than he among us who becomes as just as 
 it is possible for man to be. The knowledge 
 (gnosis J superrational intuition) of this truth is 
 wisdom and morality, and the ignorance of this 
 truth is folly and manifest evil; and all other 
 seeming wisdom is comparatively a vulgar and 
 mean thing. 
 
 The Theaetetus, so analysed, bears throughout 
 on the question now imder consideration. Leav- 
 ing aside as doubtful and, for the present pur- 
 pose, relatively unimportant the suggestion of an 
 infrarational intuition of immediate sensation, 
 we have these two conclusions: an admission of 
 the practical impossibility of discovering any defi- 
 nition of knowledge regarded as the relation of 
 human reason to objective facts, and an affirma- 
 tion of the higher intuition, which is above reason 
 and is true knowledge. The gist of the argument 
 is the opposition between the Platonic dualism of 
 knowledge and opinion and the Protagorean 
 (and, in general, the sophistic) monism. Plato 
 does not deny that men move about in a world of 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 109 
 
 shifting impressions, and are constrained to base 
 their conduct on judgments drawn from observa- 
 tion of facts which never can be complete ; in our 
 practical life, so far as it is concerned with phe- 
 nomena, we have only the guidance of opinion. 
 To this extent he agrees with Protagoras, though 
 even here he draws ethical conclusions very dif- 
 ferent from those of the sophist ; but he does deny 
 flatly the Protagorean dogma that this shadowy 
 form of opinion is all we have. Were Protago- 
 ras right he might have referred to a tadpole or a uu 
 pig as Well as to a man for his measure. No, 
 Plato asserts, besides opinion, whether true or 
 false, man has also knowledge. The operation 
 of this faculty we may not be able to analyse, but 
 it is there, within our souls, giving us certain in- 
 formation of the everlasting reality of righteous- 
 ness and loveliness in themselves, as things apart 
 from the flux, and bidding us look to the God of 
 these realities for the measure of our nature. 
 
 Now, in this duahsm of knowledge and opinion 
 is found the answer to the paradoxical question 
 as to the teachableness of virtue. Morality, as 
 the force behind the specific virtues, is a matter 
 of knowledge, whereas the specific virtues are de- 
 pendent on what is commonly called knowledge 
 but is really opinion ; and opinion can be formed 
 by instruction, whereas knowledge cannot be. 
 Thus, the virtue of temperance may be described 
 as a golden mean in our action, a result of obe- 
 
110 PLATONISM 
 
 dience to the precept "Nothing too much," which 
 announces to each urgent desire: So far shalt 
 thou go and no further. If, for example, we eat 
 a certain amount and kind of food (and no chance 
 intervene), we shall be healthy and enjoy the 
 pleasure of health; if we transgress through ig- 
 norance or wilfulness, we shall surely injure our 
 health and suffer the pains of disease. And so it 
 is with all the other activities of life, under which- 
 ever of the specific virtues they may fall. Our 
 judgment of the point at which any activity 
 ceases to be a virtue and becomes a vice is deter- 
 mined by a calculation of consequences in plea- 
 sure and pain, and the rightness or wrongness of 
 our calculation will depend on our own exper- 
 ience and on the similar experience of others. 
 The experience of others is imparted to us by in- 
 struction, and so it is that the specific virtues are 
 teachable; we can go to a man of experience to 
 learn the nature of temperance and bravery and 
 wisdom and justice, as we can go to a physician 
 to learn the precepts of his art. 
 
 Hence the weight which Plato lays on the edu- 
 cation of youth in the choice and control of 
 pleasures and pains. In the average and in the 
 long run the man so trained, having the tradi- 
 tion of society to correct his own narrower ex- 
 perience, will act instinctively on a proper calcu- 
 lation. But it is to be noted that this trained in- 
 stinct, though the only guide we have in our 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 111 
 
 specific acts, casts no more than a flickering light. 
 Thus, bravery, when it rises to the dignity of a 
 virtue, is determined by a man's opinion of what 
 should be feared and what should not, and of the 
 extent to which he should give rein to his im- 
 pulses of hostility and self-defence. It is a reck- 
 oning of the balance of pleasure consequent upon 
 his own safety and upon the rewards of public 
 esteem. But our judgment can never be infalli- 
 ble in such matters : any man, by an error of cal- 
 culation, may attack where true bravery would 
 have counselled retreat, or may retreat where 
 true bravery would have counselled attack. The 
 outcome, moreover, is subject to hazards beyond 
 the scope of his consideration. In an attack 
 which from the point of view of his company is 
 prudent, he may be the one who falls into the 
 hands of the enemy: and he may suffer torture 
 and death in such a way that his act of true cour- 
 age may end, so far as he personally is concerned, 
 in pain, and no pleasure at all. At the best, 
 though we have an immediate intuition of plea- 
 sure and pain as present realities, as soon as we 
 begin to calculate consequences in order to act, 
 our judgment can be verified only eoc post facto, 
 and the virtues cannot be raised out of the region 
 of uncertain opinion. 
 
 This treachery of calculation is what tends to 
 drag the hedonist down to the sty, bidding him 
 distrust the more elusive rewards of virtue and 
 
112 PLATONISM 
 
 lay hold of any pleasure near at hand whose pun- 
 ishment is not swift and visible. If there be any 
 steady law of conduct it must be referred to a 
 principle freed from the chances of fortune and 
 so fortified against the immediate cravings of 
 appetite. For this principle, as we have seen, 
 Plato turned to the moral impulsion behind the 
 specific virtues. In the Laws he identified it with 
 wisdom, but with a wisdom drawn from the soul's 
 knowledge of herself as divine and akin to God, 
 a wisdom quite different from the virtue identi- 
 cal with a calculating prudence. In The Repub- 
 lic the same moral impulsion was called justice; 
 but there again justice was so defined as to be 
 synonymous with a form of knowledge; it was 
 the intuition commanded in the Delphic saluta- 
 tion "Know thyself," as the virtues are taught in 
 the other Delphic precept, "Nothing too much." 
 And this higher knowledge, as we have also seen, 
 is not vague or empty of content, but rich with 
 fruition. It, too, is concerned with a state of 
 feeling — ^not those pleasures, in which the opin- 
 ions of virtue have their range, but the happiness 
 present in the soul with the purpose to act virtu- 
 ously and dependent on the purpose alone. No 
 man can impart this knowledge to us, though he 
 may exhort us to look more intently into the na- 
 ture of our being ; the knowledge of the happiness 
 of morality is not teachable, but comes to each of 
 us secretly, by what Plato, speaking mythologic- 
 ally, caUs a "divine chance." 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 113 
 
 I would not for a moment maintain that no 
 difficulties adhere to this dualism, partly implicit 
 and partly exphcit in the philosophy of Plato, 
 which sets pleasure, virtue, and opinion in one 
 group, and over against them happiness, moral- 
 ity, and knowledge. We are here, let us admit 
 frankly, in the region of paradox. Indeed dual- 
 ism is but another name for that Socratic Para- 
 dox which results from accepting simultaneously 
 both the spiritual affirmation of Socrates and his 
 identification of virtue with knowledge (that is, 
 with opinion, as something distinct from the 
 knowledge of the spirit). It is of the nature of 
 the dualistic intuition that it cannot be ultimately 
 explained by reason, but we can perhaps make its 
 operation clearer by an illustration. 
 
 When Socrates lay in prison, awaiting the day 
 of execution, he was visited by one of his power- 
 ful friends, Crito, who pressed money upon him 
 to bribe his way out and so to escape an unfair 
 doom. Socrates' reply is given in the Dialogue 
 that goes by the name of his friend. The conver- 
 sation turns on two main theses. First Socrates 
 asks Crito whether he still abides by their old de- 
 cision of former days, that it is better, no matter 
 what the circumstances may be, to do justice than 
 to do injustice, better to suffer injustice patient- 
 ly, if needs be, than to do wrong in return? To 
 this thesis Crito is committed, and he will not now 
 draw back. And note that there is no real dis- 
 
114 PLATONISM 
 
 cussion here, but a direct appeal to the moral in- 
 tuition; for, as Socrates declares, between one 
 who assents to this affirmation of the spirit and 
 one who dissents there is no common ground of 
 debate, but each necessarily will look with con- 
 tempt on the views of the other. Then fol- 
 lows the question: What is the right course of 
 conduct for me, Socrates, under the particular 
 circumstances in which I am now placed? How 
 shall I do justice? This is not a matter of intui- 
 tion, to be settled by an affirmation, but a point 
 to be argued out and decided on its merits, like 
 any other specific case of virtue. And what is 
 the argument? In the first place Socrates re- 
 peats the statement of the Apology, that we have 
 no certain knowledge of death whether it be a 
 good thing for man or an evil thing. So far the 
 principle of scepticism rules. But men have 
 learned by experience that it is a good thing for 
 a city to be governed by laws ; since then only is 
 order possible, and that like-mindedness of citi- 
 zens on which hang all the strength and blessings 
 of civilization. By our very birth and education 
 and volimtary residence in a city we have entered 
 into a kind of contract with it, and we ought 
 either to submit to the laws as they are or to bring 
 about the passage of other laws. That is what 
 men mean by justice, that we should obey the 
 behests of the city or persuade it to think other- 
 wise ; and, in view of our ignorance of death and 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 115 
 
 money and so many other things of the sort that 
 seem to people to affect their personal welfare, 
 the pursuit of justice is probably the best calcu- 
 lation of pleasures a man can make. Moreover, 
 by obedience to the laws of men we shall put our- 
 selves into harmony with the spirit of law in gen- 
 eral, and with the peaceful and orderly move- 
 ment of the universe. Therefore, Socrates rea- 
 sons, it is better for me to stay here where I am, 
 and to abide by the voice of the laws of Athens. 
 Now, in this discussion of law and duty So- 
 crates says not a word which would not have been 
 accepted by John Stuart Mill. Wherein, then, 
 is the difference between Socrates' position and 
 that of a high-minded utihtarian? A¥hen it 
 comes to the decision of a particular case, they 
 argue and decide alike ; both reach the same defi- 
 nition of what is just, and both say that this deci- 
 sion must be followed at the risk of losing money 
 and comfort and even hfe itself. So far they 
 agree, but at this point they part company, and 
 their ways are in opposite directions. To Mill 
 there was nothing beyond the decision, nothing 
 (in his philosophy taken literally, that is, for in 
 his character he was inconsistent) to give vahdity 
 to the decision of virtue when it might be weak- 
 ened by doubts. For, after all, any such calcula- 
 tion as this made by Socrates, and as would be 
 made by Mill, is in the region of guessing ; unless 
 it can be reinforced by some surer intuition, it 
 
116 PLATONISM 
 
 will yield to men in general only a treacherous 
 foundation for conduct, and this enforcing power 
 of intuition is precisely what Socrates had and 
 what utilitarianism lacks. Suppose there was an 
 error in the reasoning of Socrates when he re- 
 fused the opportunity, as Crito says, not only to 
 carry on a life of virtue but to provide for the 
 proper training of his children — suppose Crito 
 was right and Socrates was wrong (as the case 
 might well be) , what recompense was there for a 
 man who sacrificed himself for an empty name? 
 And without the assurance of some criterion 
 other than the very fallible calculations of reason 
 and the conflicting precepts of tradition, from 
 what source was a man in Socrates' position to 
 draw the strength of character that should with- 
 stand the temptations of the nearer pleasure? 
 There is no such resource in the philosophy of 
 hedonism. But Socrates did not waver. He 
 knew that it was better to do justice than to do 
 injustice, not because justice would probably 
 bring to him the larger pleasure as a man living 
 in a city and universe of law (though this too he 
 guessed) , but because the very intention of doing 
 justice certainly brought its sufficient reward. 
 The feeling of happiness associated with moral 
 purpose was so much more real to him than were 
 the stings of pleasure and pain that, under its 
 compulsion, he could afford to laugh at the 
 doubts which might weaken his loyalty to ap- 
 
DUALISM OF PLATO 117 
 
 parent virtue by contrasting the security of im- 
 mediate pleasure with the insecurity of a long 
 calculation, and by pitting the intensity of per- 
 sonal desires against the duller sense of partici- 
 pating in the public good. 
 
 Fortunately for the world the conmion sense 
 of mankind is more in conformity with a hedon- 
 ism complemented, as it was in Socrates, by in- 
 tuition and scepticism, than with a hedonism that 
 thinks it unnecessary to look for any guide be- 
 yond the hght of its own tremulous lamp. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 Plato's ethical philosophy is connected, as any 
 system of ethics must be connected, with a par- 
 ticular way of regarding the soul. Its end is in 
 psychology, and we are thus brought face to face 
 with a problem of consistency : the soul under his 
 analysis fell into three faculties (if we may use 
 this word without its modern psychological impli- 
 cations), yet his ethics is essentially dualistic. 
 How are these two positions to be reconciled? 
 
 The apparent discrepancy of Plato's philo- 
 sophy in this matter has troubled more than one 
 of the commentators on The Republic, In a 
 602c note on a critical passage of the tenth book James 
 Adam has these significant words : 
 
 "The reasoning from here to 607a has been 
 supposed to rest on a psychological theory irre- 
 concilable with that of Book iv, to which the dis- 
 cussion expressly alludes (in 602e). See for ex- 
 ample Krohn PI, St, p. 255 and Pfleiderer Zur 
 Losung etc. p. 38. It is true that Plato is here 
 content, in view of his immediate purpose, with 
 a twofold division of the soul into (1) a 
 rational and (2) an irrational, alogiston (604d, 
 605b), or lower element. But the resemblance 
 between the two theories is greater than the dif- 
 
 118 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 119 
 
 ference, for (a) the logistikon is common to both, 
 and (b) on its moral side the irrational element 
 appears sometimes as the e pithy metikon (606d), 
 sometimes as a degenerate form of the thymo- 
 eides (604e, 606a)." 
 
 The point is well taken, and is enforced chiefly 
 by the characterization of the good man under 
 the stress of adversity. "There is," says Plato, 604a 
 "a principle of reason and law in him which com- 
 mands him to resist, and there is hkewise the 
 sense of his misfortmie which is forcing him to 
 indulge his sorrow. But when a man is drawn in 
 contrary directions at once in regard to the same 
 object, we say that there must be two elements 
 in him. The law affirms that to be patient under 
 suffering is best, and that we should not give way 
 to impatience, since in fact it is not clear whether 
 our state is good or evil, and anyhow nothing is 
 gained by resentment ; none of the events of hu- 
 man Uf e is of serious importance, and grief stands 
 in the way of that state which we need to attain as 
 speedily as possible. Then there is the other 
 principle, which inclines us to recollection of our 
 troubles and to lamentations, and can never have 
 enough of them; this we may call irrational, fu- 
 tile, and cowardly." Such a description admits 
 of no ambiguity. On one side it sets the govern- 
 ing, controlling, inhibiting energy of the soul, 
 working to the end of law and reason; on the 
 other side, all that part of the soul which suffers 
 
120 PLATONISM 
 
 and desires and which is repugnant to self-mas- 
 tery. Mr. Adam was correct in arguing that this 
 analysis is only superficially inconsistent with the 
 psychology of the fourth book, but he errs, I 
 think, in holding that the dualism here imposed 
 on the threefold division of the faculties is for 
 immediate purposes alone, rather than funda- 
 mental to Plato's philosophy. He might have 
 been warned of this error by a consideration of 
 the series of portraits of the eighth and ninth 
 books, from which was drawn the account of the 
 Tyrant's Progress, and which is avowedly a re- 
 turn to the interrupted argument of the fourth 
 book. 
 
 What is the cause of that degeneration from 
 the highest type of liberty down to the basest 
 condition of slavery? The just and good man is 
 called the aristocrat for the reason that he is 
 governed by the moral force which is the better 
 of the two halves of his nature. When the worse 
 half breaks from this control and begins to act 
 for itself, the balance of the soul is disturbed ; but 
 the rebellious desires are still at first of a specious 
 kind, the ambitions of elevated rank and au- 
 thority which have very much the look of pure 
 virtues. The next step is taken when the weight 
 of desire passes to a lower form of ambition, and 
 the man begins to crave money as the material 
 reality beneath everything the world reverences. 
 For a while the spendthrift passions are held in 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 121 
 
 subjection by a kind of mild compulsion. But 
 this balance is precarious; the desire for money, 
 following the nature of any desire, grows more 
 and more excessive, imtil the very excess leads to 
 a revolt of the other desires. Then we see the 
 emergence of the distracted soul, across which all 
 desires move with equal authority and to which 
 all passions are in turn equally alluring. Again 
 the change comes from the tendency to unbridled 
 expansion which is in the very nature of desire. 
 Soon there is a contention among all the loosened 
 passions, until some one evil and devouring lust 
 gathers strength above its rivals, and snatches a 
 despotism, the last and most miserable state of a 
 man's soul. 
 
 Certainly if anything is evident throughout 
 the whole course of this decline, it is that the soul 
 is regarded as composed of two warring elements, 
 and that the descending steps are measured by 
 the degree to which one of these elements throws ^ 
 off obedience to the other. The sum of the mat- 
 ter is in the words of the Laws: "To have won 85oc 
 the victory over pleasures, this is to live happily, 
 the life of felicity, but to fail before them is the 
 very opposite." This does not mean, as the pre- 
 ceding discussion of the Laws abundantly proves, 
 that pleasure is in itself a thing to be scorned, or 
 is in its nature necessarily destructive of happi- 
 ness; but it does mean that pleasure may on oc- 
 casion draw us away from our true goal, and that 
 
122 PLATONISM 
 
 happiness is dependent on the dominance of one 
 member of the soul over the other. 
 
 The duahsm of Plato's psychology is less en- 
 tangled in other Dialogues where the classifica- 
 tion of the virtues does not come so prominent- 
 ly into view as in The Republic, Thus, in the 
 PhaedOj, it falls into rather a harsh opposition be- 
 tween the soul and the body {soma = sema) , and 
 in this form, unfortunately, it was to be taken up 
 by the Christian Platonists and developed into an 
 asceticism which, with Plato, had been only a 
 passing phase of philosophic bitterness. It is to 
 be remembered, also, that even in the Phaedo the 
 "body" is really not so much the material flesh as 
 a symbol for all that part of the soul which is 
 swayed by the baser desires. For, as it is argued 
 i29e ff. in the first Alcihiades, a man is a different thing 
 from the body which he uses, neither is he both 
 body and soul, but soul ; and in the tenth book of 
 The Republic, where Plato is arguing for im- 
 mortality, he traces the source of evil to the soul 
 itself, as distinct from the body, with no uncer- 
 tain note. So strong is this thought of the inner 
 dualism that in his later years he would even 
 speak as if we were not one soul but two. In this 
 way his dualism colors the mythology of the 
 Timaeus: 
 
 69c "He himself [God] was creator of the divine, 
 but the creation of the mortal he laid upon his 
 offspring to accomplish. And they, in imitation 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 128 ' 
 
 of his act, took from him the immortal element of i 
 
 soul, and then fashioned about her a mortal body, j 
 
 and gave her all the body as a vehicle; and in it ,j 
 
 they framed also another kind of soul, which is ' 
 
 mortal, having in itself dreadful and compelling j 
 
 passions — pleasure first, the greatest incitement j 
 
 to evil, then pains that frighten away good, and 
 besides these confidence and fear, witless counsel- i 
 
 lors both, and wrath hard to appease, and allur- | 
 
 ing hope. Having mingled these with irrational 
 sensation and with love that stops at nothing, \ 
 
 they composed as they could the mortal soul of i 
 
 man." 
 
 In the LawSj by a change of allegory, the soul 896c fif. 
 is regarded as herself the creator, instead of the 
 created, and as such the source of all good and 
 evil in the world, of what is beautiful and what is 
 ugly, just and imjust. From her proceed the 
 passions and powers of man, and from her pro- 
 ceed the motions that rule the heavens and every 
 moving creature — yet not from one soul but from 
 two souls, the beneficent and the worker of all 
 that is contrary. 
 
 In view of this persistent dualism it is clear 
 that the three faculties of Plato's psychology 
 are not independently co-operative powers, but 
 merely different phases, sometimes sharply dis- 
 sociated, sometimes merging into one another, of 
 the activity of what we may call, using a termin- 
 ology strange to Plato, the personal element of 
 our being. The faculties might have been four 
 
124 PLATONISM 
 
 or five or any other number, instead of three, if 
 the analysis of the virtues had been carried fur- 
 ther — if, for instance, bravery had been subdi- 
 vided into endurance and aggressiveness. The 
 only obscurity in this scheme is chargeable to 
 Plato's careless treatment of the word "reason'' 
 when he passes from epistemology to ethics. By 
 employing the same term now for the higher of 
 the two elements of the soul, and now for the 
 prudential faculty of the lower element, he intro- 
 duced, or at least encouraged, an ambiguity which 
 has never to this day been purged from the body 
 of philosophy, as any one may know who will 
 trace the meaning of "reason" and "rational" 
 through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
 down into modern literature. In one place you 
 will find Plato drawing the reason close to the 
 
 411c «F. desires, as in the passage of The Republic which 
 deals with education imder the two heads of 
 "music" (including hterature, etc.) and gymnas- 
 tic. Here reason and the concupiscent faculty, 
 taken together as opposed to the thymos, have 
 their discipline in music, whereas the thymos is 
 
 4391 s. fortified by gymnastic. Yet in another part of 
 the same Dialogue the thymos is regarded as the 
 spirit of indignation and self-respect which is 
 normally on the side of judgment against the 
 desires. In either case the assimilation of the 
 reason whether to the desires or to the thymos 
 shows that we have to do here with a prudential 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 1«5 
 
 faculty different in kind from reason regarded 
 as an element of the soul set over against all the 
 practical activities. 
 
 A hint of this double nature of reason may be 
 found in the most picturesque presentation of 
 Plato's psychology — the famous metaphor of the 
 chariot in the Phaedrus, Superficially, the divi- 246a £f. 
 sion is tripartite, as made by the driver, repre- 
 senting reason, and his two horses, the one docile, 
 the other self-willed; but, more carefully consid- 
 ered, the image shows the usual dualism under a 
 novel guise. When the soul comes into sight of 
 a fair and beloved object, the wild horse rushes 
 forward to satisfy his base lust, dragging along 
 with him his mate (the thymos, as instinctive self- 
 respect) and the driver. At first the driver and 
 the better horse resist ineffectually ; but of a sud- 
 den there comes to the di'iver a remembrance of 
 the pure eternal beauty he has beheld in a pre- 
 vious existence with the gods, and, as it were, 
 smitten by that vision, he himself is thrown back- 
 wards and pulls both the horses to their haunches. 
 By this check the driver and the docile horse gain 
 control of the concupiscent beast, and the soul is 
 turned from its evil deed. The power of resis- 
 tance came at last, not from the driver as a de- 
 liberative agent, but from the knowledge that 
 belongs to a diviner reason, and strikes into him 
 after the manner of the Christian's grace of God. 
 
 But Plato's symbolism is interpreted more 
 
126 PLATONISM 
 
 Republic 439E clcaply by the story of a certain lieontius, who, 
 coming up to the city one day by the north wall, 
 was troubled by the sight of some dead bodies 
 lying in the place of execution. For a while he 
 was divided between his curiosity and a feeling of 
 repulsion, and stood with closed eyes, debating 
 with himself. But at last his desire got the mas- 
 tery, and, forcing open his eyes, he ran up to the 
 place, crying, "Look, ye wretches, take your fill 
 of the lovely spectacle!" The moral of the tale, 
 Plato adds, is the distinction between the thymos 
 and the desires, as proved by their enmity. But 
 it suggests something more than that. The de- 
 liberative pause of Leontius, while reason and 
 self-respect are contending with desire, points to 
 the function of that element of the soul, whether 
 it be called reason or by another name, which is 
 above them all, and upon whose exercise rests 
 the possibility of forming judgments and deter- 
 mining our actions.^ The problem of Platonic 
 
 ^ Schleiermacher, in his note to Republic 572a, gives a 
 clear statement of this separate governing element of the 
 soul: "Ich will aber hier, wenn auch nur im Vorbeigehen, 
 aufmerksam darauf machen, wie ausser den dreien, dem be- 
 gehrlichen, dem eifrigen und dem verniinftigen, noch ein 
 vierter, namlich der von jenen dreien bald dieses bald jenes 
 beschwichtigende oder aufregende sich einschleicht ; so dass 
 nun dieser hier der Fuhrmann wird, und wir ein Dreige- 
 spann haben nebst einem Fuhrmann, wie es scheint, indem 
 was im Phaidros der Fuhrmann war, hier als Ross erseheint, 
 und zwar nicht in einer in gleichem Grade bildlichen Dar- 
 stellung." — This is good Platonism, except that Schleier- 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 127 
 
 psychology is to define, or at least to understand 
 as clearly as may be possible, the operation of 
 this dualism. In a general way the substratum 
 of the lower element of the soul is easily found in 
 the desires and emotions (the thymos is, succinct- 
 ly, the desires as these assume the guise of per- 
 sonal emotions) ; the difficulty is in coming to 
 terms with the higher element. 
 
 It is tempting to associate this governing prin- 
 ciple with the free will, or liberum arhitrium, 
 which has been a theme of metaphysical debate 
 ever since it was brought into prominence by the 
 contest of the orthodox Church with the Pelag- 
 ians ; and there is, perhaps, no better way to ob- 
 tain a clear notion of the intention of Plato's psy- 
 chology than by turning aside for a moment to 
 the last great discussion of this question in mod- 
 ern times. For the support of the Calvinistic 
 doctrine of predestination against the Pelagian 
 error of the Arminians, Jonathan Edwards had, 
 in his Treatise Concerning Human Affections, 
 denied the existence of any such faculty as the 
 will in the ordinary sense of the word. The will, 
 or the heart as he calls it, is merely the inclination 
 of the soul towards the good as this is present to 
 us at the moment of action. This thesis was later 
 taken up and developed in his inquiry into the 
 
 macher's aufregende, though a literal translation of Plato's 
 KLvr)<Ta<i, shows^ as I hope to prove^ a mistaken notion of the 
 action of the governing faculty. 
 
128 PLATONISM 
 
 Freedom of the Will. Here, to clinch his argu- 
 ment for the identity of will and inclination, he 
 uses the illustration of a drunkard who has liquor 
 before him and must choose whether to drink or 
 not; and he proves that the so-called volition of 
 the drunkard will certainly be in accord with 
 "what, in the present view of his mind, taken in 
 the whole of it, is most agreeable to him." That 
 is well; and so far Plato would assent, for there 
 is no place in his psychology, any more than in 
 the theology of Calvin, for a positive faculty of 
 the will as a force independent of our inclination. 
 But Edwards failed to discriminate sufficiently 
 between two classes of motives impelling a man 
 to action : the immediate physical craving and the 
 memory of pains and pleasures stored up in the 
 mind by experience. Now, these latter are more 
 sluggish in operation than the former; they are 
 at a disadvantage, so to speak, unless the phys- 
 ical desire is held in check until they acquire a 
 kind of cumulative weight. The liberty of the 
 soul might thus appear to reside, not in the de- 
 termination of a positive will — which must in- 
 deed obey the strongest motive at the moment of 
 action — but in the power of holding all motives 
 in suspense until a due balance has been struck. 
 
 In fact the theory did come to Edwards in just 
 this form, and in two sections of his Inquiry he 
 makes a diversion from his main argument to 
 consider it. The actual treatise against which he 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 1«9 
 
 directs his contentions, though he does not name 
 it, was undoubtedly Isaac Watts's Essay on the 
 Freedom of Will in God and the Creature; but 
 the theory itself has stronger authorities behind 
 it than this mild Arminian, and needs to be con- 
 sidered historically. Its lineage goes back to 
 Descartes. 
 
 The Cartesian philosophy made no generic dis- 
 tinction between the will and the understanding ; 
 it regarded the will as the act of selection among 
 the various data of the senses, by which act we 
 form the ideas in the understanding. The sen- 
 sations themselves are not deceptive, and if we 
 fall into error, it is because the will draws infer- 
 ences and makes inadequate judgments. Truth 
 is measured by the clearness of our ideas, and 
 right action is dependent on the truth of the ideas 
 behind it. 
 
 Malebranche also taught that we act in ac- 
 cordance with our inclinations and that our incli- 
 nations are the result of our judgments; but he 
 goes beyond Descartes in his ethical deductions. 
 Error, he thinks, is due to the inherent restless- 
 ness of the human will, which is drawn to the 
 multiplicity and vanity of sensible objects, and 
 so fails to make true judgments of the value of 
 things. Hence the process of attaining a true 
 judgment is by an act of attention on the part of 
 the mind;^ and hence, also, the general law of 
 
 ^ Recherche de la Verite, Preface. 
 
130 PLATONISM 
 
 truth and conduct: "We should never give our 
 entire assent except to propositions which appear 
 so evidently true that we cannot reject them with- 
 out feeling an inner pain and the secret reproach 
 of reason ; that is to say, without knowing clearly 
 that our unwillingness to assent would be an 
 abuse of our liberty."^ 
 
 The idealism of Malebranche, variously mod- 
 ified in the transit, was brought into England by 
 John Norris, who, though himself an Oxonian, 
 forms an interesting link between the Cambridge 
 Platonists of the seventeenth century and the 
 deistic writers of the eighteenth. He takes, for 
 our purpose, an important step forwards by as- 
 sociating Malebranche' s "act of attention" ex- 
 plicitly with the problem of the freedom of the 
 will.* The place of Norris in English philosophy 
 has received such scant consideration that it may 
 be worth while to quote from him at some length 
 on this point : 
 
 "In the first place 'tis agreed betwixt us that 
 there must be a to eph' hemin, some principle of 
 
 ^ Ibid. I, ii, 4 ; repeated^ VI, i. 
 
 * The connection between attention and liberty is, no 
 doubt, implicit in Malebranche. Thus he says (I, i, 2) that 
 liberty consists in the ''ability to suspend one's judgment 
 and one's love," and "to make our natural inclinations ter- 
 minate in some particular object." But I do not remember 
 that he has brought this notion of attention and liberty to 
 bear clearly on the problem of the freedom of the will, and 
 passages of the sixth book place the act of attention itself in 
 a secondary, or at least an ambiguous, position. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 131 
 
 free agency in man. All that does or can fall un- 
 der debate is what is the primary and immediate 
 subject of this free agency. Now this, being a ra- 
 tional perfection, must be primarily subjected 
 either in the imderstanding or in the will, or, to 
 speak more accurately, either in the soul as in- 
 telligent or in the soul as volent. That the latter 
 cannot be the root of liberty will be sufficiently 
 clear if this one proposition be fully made out, 
 viz., that the will necessarily follows the dictate 
 of the understanding, or that the soul necessarily 
 wills as she understands. 
 
 "Now for the demonstration of this, I shall de- 
 sire but this one postulatum, which I think all the 
 schools of learning will allow me, viz., that the 
 object of the soul as volent is apparent good, or 
 that the soul cannot will evil as evil. Now good 
 apparent, or evil apparent, is the same in other 
 terms with that which is apprehended or judged 
 to be good or evil respectively. ... If, there- 
 fore, good apparent be the object of the will, 
 good apprehended will be so too, and consequent- 
 ly the soul necessarily wills as she understands; 
 otherwise she will choose evil as evil, which is 
 against the supposition. . . . 
 
 "The soul, therefore, as volent cannot be the 
 immediate subject of liberty. If, therefore, there 
 be any such thing as free agency, the seat of it 
 must be in the soul as intelligent. But, does not 
 the soul necessarily understand as the object ap- 
 pears, as well as she necessarily wills as she un- 
 derstands? She does so, and therefore I do not 
 
132 PLATONISM 
 
 place the seat of liberty in the soul as judging, 
 or forming a judgment, for that I confess to be 
 determined by the appearance of things. But, 
 though it be necessary that the soul judge as 
 things appear, yet 'tis not necessary ( except only 
 in self-evident propositions) that things should 
 appear thus or thus, but that will wholly depend 
 upon the degrees of advertency, or attention; 
 such a degree being requisite to make the object 
 appear thus, and such a degree to appear other- 
 wise. And this advertency is that wherein I 
 place the seat of free agency. Lower than this I 
 discern not the least glimpse of it, and higher I 
 cannot go. Here, therefore, I conceive I have 
 good reason to fix, and to affirm that the only 
 autexousion of the soul consists in her having an 
 immediate power to attend or not attend, or to 
 attend more or less. I say an immediate power; 
 for if you will have an express act of the will 
 interposed, that act of the will must have a prac- 
 tical judgment, that judgment an objective ap- 
 pearance, that appearance another attention, that 
 attention another will, and so on ad infinitum, I 
 think it therefore reasonable to stop at the first." 
 
 These passages occur in Norris's reply (un- 
 dated) to a letter of Henry More's dated Janu- 
 ary 16, 1685/6, but the correspondence was not 
 printed until 1688, when it formed a supplement 
 to Norris's Theory and Regulation of Love,'^ 
 Locke's Essay appeared two years after the pub- 
 
 ^ I quote from the second edition, 1694. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 133 
 
 lication of this correspondence, and it is a nice 
 question to guess whether he had felt the injflu- 
 ence of Norris's theory. The writer of the letter 
 he afterwards characterized as "an obscure en- 
 thusiastic gentleman," nor was he at all of the 
 school of Malebranche ; yet one of the most strik- 
 ing chapters of the Essay (I, xxi) is substantially 
 a development of the Norrisian conception of 
 free will and attention. 
 
 Locke starts with a thoroughly hedonistic con- 
 ception of life. That which is properly good or 
 bad, he says, is nothing but barely pleasure or 
 pain, the distinction, of course, being carried into 
 the distant consequences of our acts. Happiness 
 is not different in kind from pleasure, but is 
 merely the utmost pleasure we are capable of, 
 and misery the utmost pain. All men naturally 
 desire happiness, and would always act with this 
 end in view, were will and desire the same thing. 
 But the will is perfectly distinguished from de- 
 sire ; it is determined not by what we desire, that 
 is happiness, but by the most important and 
 urgent uneasiness we at any time feel. And this 
 follows from the nature of our happiness and 
 misery. All present pain, whatever it be, makes 
 a part of our present misery ; but all absent good 
 does not at any time make a necessary part of our 
 present happiness, nor does the absence of it 
 make a part of our misery. On the other hand 
 change itself is attended with some uneasiness; 
 
134 PLATONISM 
 
 so that, unless the absence of good in some way is 
 made present to us by a feeling of uneasiness, it 
 does not move us to change our conduct. Thus, 
 all men desire happiness, but when they are rid 
 of pain they are apt to take up with the pleasure 
 at hand. 
 
 Wherein then does liberty consist? It is not 
 in desire, for it is a necessity of our nature to 
 desire happiness. Nor is it, properly speaking, 
 in the will; for freedom of the will is merely an 
 external consideration, being the absence of any 
 restraint preventing us from acting in accordance 
 with the impulsion of present uneasiness. The 
 place of liberty is in the mind, or, following 
 Locke's own terminology, it is and it is not in the 
 will. As a matter of fact the Essay here admits 
 into the discussion a confusion of terms of which 
 Edwards was not slow to take advantage. In 
 one place Locke says that the "power which the 
 mind has thus to order the consideration of any 
 idea, or the forbearing to consider it, . . . is that 
 which we call the will"; but elsewhere he takes 
 the position, more consistent with his general sys- 
 tem, that a man is "determined in willing by his 
 own thought and judgment what is best for him 
 to do." The will is evidently taken in two ways, 
 first as a power of directing our thought, which is 
 a matter of internal liberty; and secondly as a 
 power of acting in accordance with our thought, 
 which is an internal necessity and a matter of 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 135 
 
 external liberty conditioned by circumstances. 
 The power of directing our thought should in 
 fact not have been called the will at all (unless, 
 at least, it was distinguished, by some such phrase 
 as the will to refrain, from the positive will as 
 ordinarily conceived) ; nor is it rightly identified 
 with the mind, but is above the mind and purely 
 negative in character. 
 
 Now it may sound strange to use the attribute 
 "negative of that higher power in which our lib- 
 erty resides." It is so termed because, as Locke 
 himself says, it is the power within the mind to 
 suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of 
 its desires, and the consequent liberty to consider 
 the objects of all the desires and weigh them one 
 against the other. "In this," he continues, "lies 
 the liberty man has ; and from the not using of it 
 right comes all that variety of mistakes, errors, 
 and faults which we run into in the conduct of 
 our lives, and our endeavours after happiness; 
 whilst we precipitate the determination of our 
 wills, and engage too soon before due examina- 
 tion. To prevent this, we have a power to sus- 
 pend the prosecution of this or that desire, as 
 every one daily may experiment in himself. This 
 seems to me the source of all liberty ; in this seems 
 to consist that which is (as I think improperly) 
 called free-will. For during this suspension of 
 any desire, before the will be determined to ac- 
 tion, and the action (which follows that determi- 
 
136 PLATONISM 
 
 nation) done, we have opportunity to examine, 
 view and judge of the good or evil of what we 
 are going to do; and when, upon due examina- 
 tion, we have judged, we have done our duty, all 
 that we can or ought to do in pursuit of our hap- 
 piness; and it is not a fault, but a perfection of 
 our nature, to desire, will, and act according to 
 the last result of a fair examination." 
 
 Locke's view of liberty, then, is essentially the 
 same as Norris's: liberty is the power of atten- 
 tion, by which we may bring the ideas of absent 
 good and future pleasure and of evil and pain 
 into the mind in such a way that they may com- 
 pete with the pressure of inmiediate pleasure or 
 uneasiness. It is, to go back to Descartes, the 
 power to form clear and adequate judgments. 
 But by regarding this power negatively, as a 
 mere act of suspension, he has given it a pro- 
 founder and truer psychological standing as an 
 element of the soul apart from that other element 
 which reasons and remembers and desires. He 
 makes it the inhibiting check by virtue of which 
 reason and memory and desire are enabled to ar- 
 rive at a proper balance and to result in right con- 
 duct. Locke, however, did not perceive, or per- 
 ceiving shirked, the radical conclusions that ought 
 to follow his theory. Otherwise he would not 
 have clung to the hedonism which regards happi- 
 ness as nothing more than the sum of pleasure, 
 but would have distinguished generically between 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 137 
 
 happiness and pleasure, attributing happiness to 
 that element of our being which gives us the 
 power of suspension, and leaving pleasure to the 
 consequences of our particular course of action. 
 Some inkling of this distinction he seems to have 
 had when to the ordinary balance of calculable 
 pleasures and pains he added the hope and fear 
 of eternal happiness or misery in another life. 
 "But when," he says, "infinite happiness is put 
 into one scale, against infinite misery in the other, 
 if the worst that comes to the pious man, if he 
 mistakes, be the best that the wicked man can 
 attain to if he be in the right, who can without 
 madness run into the venture?" Heaven and 
 hell, as the reward attached to the moral state of 
 the soul rather than to the particular virtue or 
 vice of our conduct, are, in fact, the mythological 
 equivalent for Plato's philosophical distinction 
 between happiness and pleasure, misery and pain. 
 But from the attainment of this deeper insight 
 Locke was prevented by the whole weight of his 
 sensational system. 
 
 Locke's presentation of the problem of freedom 
 came to Edwards apparently, as I have said, 
 through the mediation of Watts. With the con- 
 tentions of the ordinary Arminians, who insisted 
 on a separation between will and inclination and 
 sought for the source of evil in a voluntary 
 choice of action contrary to known good and hap- 
 piness, the Puritan divine had an easy task; and 
 
138 PLATONISM 
 
 from this point of view his argument against free- 
 will ("improperly" so-called, as Locke declared) 
 has never been answered. But with the theory 
 as developed by Descartes, Malebranche, Norris, 
 and Locke his path was not so smooth. Twice, 
 as I have said, he undertook to reply to Watts, 
 without naming him, and once he struck at the 
 heart of the question, declaring that "this suspen- 
 sion of volition, if there be properly any such 
 thing, is itself an act of volition" — with the ob- 
 vious conclusions. To this objection Norris had 
 already replied; but our Arminian might have 
 argued further that the act of suspension, or will 
 to refrain, really implies an essentially different 
 order of choice from that of the positive will, or 
 inclination. Two desires are not set before it to 
 choose between, but the purpose to be self-de- 
 termined or not, the intention to be in a state to 
 choose wisely or not; the actual choice of one 
 course of action or another must come after the 
 suspension is made, and is the work of the imag- 
 ination and the discursive reason balanced against 
 a present desire. Returning again to the ques- 
 tion whether our freedom depends on an act of 
 suspension apart from the positive will, Edwards 
 endeavours to evade it by pointing to its moral 
 implication. "If," he says, "determining thus to 
 suspend and consider be that act of the will 
 wherein alone liberty is exercised, then in this 
 all virtue and vice must consist. . . . According 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 139 
 
 to such a supposition the most horrid crimes, 
 adultery, murder, sodomy, blasphemy, &c., do not 
 at all consist in the horrid nature of the things 
 themselves, but only in the neglect of thorough 
 consideration before they were perpetrated, 
 which brings their viciousness to a small matter 
 and makes all crimes equal." To which the 
 Arminian might have retorted by distinguishing 
 between the moral state of the agent, which de- 
 pends on the degree of his self-control, and the 
 virtue or vice of any particular act, which de- 
 pends on the pleasure or pain ultimately result- 
 ing from the act. 
 
 Now, however Plato's psychological termin- 
 ology may vary from Dialogue to Dialogue, or 
 from page to page, there is always in the back- 
 ground of his ethics this notion of the governing 
 element of the soul as an absolute inhibition, or 
 power of suspension. And despite the differ- 
 ences of time and circumstance, his path to this 
 position was very much like that traversed by the 
 French and English philosophers. We can see 
 this in his recourse to the same illustration as that 
 afterwards employed by Locke and Edwards. 
 In The Republic he analyses the state of a man 473b ff 
 who feels a desire to drink but is restrained by 
 thought of the remoter consequences. At first 
 reading, the reason, as the restraining faculty, 
 might seem to be merely one impulse {to koluon) 
 opposing another {to heleuon) ; but look more 
 
140 PLATONISM 
 
 attentively and you will detect here, in the usual 
 double twist of the word "reason" when applied 
 by Plato to ethical matters, precisely the Lockian 
 point of view against which the Edwardsian 
 argument for predestination finally broke. Rea- 
 son, on the one hand, is a realizing sense of the 
 future as contrasted with the present craving, but 
 it is also something above both these contending 
 inclinations, a something which forbids one of 
 them from encroaching on the province of the 
 other, and by holding them in leash makes possi- 
 ble a proper balance and control. This concep- 
 tion of the higher reason is, it must be admitted, 
 rather latent than explicit in these passages of 
 The Republic, but no room is left for doubting 
 Plato's meaning if we take into account his de- 
 velopment of the Socratic self-knowledge on its 
 sceptical, inhibitive side. "To seem to know," says 
 
 229c Plato in the Sophist, "when we do not know, is the 
 source of those errors in judgment to which we 
 are all prone"; and further, in the first Alcibia- 
 
 1170 des:^ "Through this same ignorance, which leads 
 us to think we know when we do not know, come 
 our errors of practice." That is Plato's way of 
 expressing Malebranche's first law of judgment 
 and conduct and Locke's theory of suspension. 
 
 ® Whether genuine or not, I have not scrupled to use this 
 and other passages of the first Alcibiades as thoroughly Pla- 
 tonic in conception. They could be abundantly confirmed 
 from the Dialogues of unquestioned authenticity. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 141 
 
 And Plato owes his supremacy in the world of 
 thought to the consistency of his insight where his 
 great successors drew back in a kind of meta- 
 physical alarm. The Lockian position presup- 
 poses a radical dualism, and has no real validity 
 against predestinarianism, or any other form of 
 determinism, unless this foundation is accepted, 
 with all its consequences. It was because Locke, 
 led astray by his sensational philosophy, failed to 
 develop this truth that his theory of freedom 
 misses logical finality and has been forgotten 
 or rejected by most modern psychologists. In 
 like manner Malebranche, though he took the 
 opposite direction from Locke's, lost his splen- 
 did opportunity because, in his effort to escape 
 the mechanical dualism of Descartes, he fell 
 into the abyss of pantheism. It was just here 
 that Plato showed the depth and courage of 
 his conviction, by the thoroughgoing dualism 
 of his philosophy. He was, mainly, I think, 
 kept in the strait and narrow path by fidelity 
 to his master; and to imderstand- the nature 
 of that element of the soul in which he placed 
 human freedom and morality, we have yet to see 
 how it is related to the most singular, and to some 
 persons the most puzzling, aspect of Socrates' 
 reUgious conviction. 
 
 There is a beautiful passage in the fourth book 
 of the Memorabilia which rises in tone above the 
 usual wont of Xenophon, as if he were here writ- 
 
142 PLATONISM 
 
 ing of things he but half comprehended. So- 
 crates has been expounding the many gracious 
 bounties bestowed by the gods upon mankind, 
 and concludes with the supreme gift of reason 
 and discourse by which men are distinguished 
 from animals. "And more," he adds, "when we 
 are unable to foresee what is advantageous for us 
 in the future, the gods are still with us, telling us, 
 if we consult them, of things to come by the voice 
 of prophecy, and teaching us what is best." "But 
 with you, Socrates," his interlocutor replies, "they 
 seem to deal more kindly than with other men, 
 since even without your asking they forewarn 
 you of what should be done and what not." And 
 Socrates acknowledges the truth of this favour, 
 but declares that another man may attain to the 
 same harmony with the divine, "if he will not 
 wait to see the gods in their actual forms, but will 
 be content, discerning their works, to honour and 
 worship them." "For consider but the soul of 
 man," he continues, "which, if it can be said of 
 anything human, partakes of the divine; mani- 
 festly it rules in us as a king, yet is not seen at 
 all. Whence we should learn not to despise 
 things invisible, but from their acts should infer 
 their power, and so do honour to the divine imma- 
 nence [to daimonioTi]'' 
 
 This reverential regard for the daemonic guid- 
 ance was, in fact, the religion of Socrates. One 
 of the clauses of the indictment against him, it 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 143 
 
 will be remembered, was that he denied the gods 
 of the city, and introduced strange daemonic 
 powers of his own. To this charge Xenophon 
 replied by a flat contradiction, avowing that So- 
 crates not only himself observed carefully the offi- 
 cial worship but taught others to look for the will 
 of the gods in what we should now term the State 
 religion. Plato took a double course with the ac- 
 cusation. First he leads the plaintiff in the trial 
 to widen the charge so as to embrace pure athe- 
 ism, and then pounces on the absurdity of indict- 
 ing the same man for denying the existence of 
 gods and for introducing new gods. Secondly, 
 he brings into view the innocence and genuine 
 piety of the Socratic faith. Now the truth of the 
 matter would seem to be this: though there is 
 every reason to believe that Socrates, like Plato 
 after him, conformed in the main to the common 
 religious practices of the day, being too sincerely 
 sceptical to set up the dictates of private doubt 
 against the intuition that might lie half-concealed 
 in the popular myths, yet he was in the deepest 
 sense of the word an innovator. However clum- 
 sily his accusers may have formulated their in- 
 dictment, and whatever political aim they may 
 have had in view, they were right in seeing this. 
 The daemonic voice, or divine immanence, to 
 which Socrates yielded perfect obedience, may 
 not have been a strange god added to the pan- 
 theon, as his enemies asserted, but it did bring a 
 
144 PLATONISM 
 
 new and strange faith into Athens and the world, 
 
 Republic 496c the faith of philosophy. 
 
 Many men since that day have asked them- 
 selves what this portent might be; some have 
 wondered reverentially, and some have scoffed at 
 Socrates as an ordinary dupe of fanaticism if not 
 the victim of an epileptic delusion. Plato, ap- 
 parently having no direct cue from his master, 
 interpreted the phenomenon in various ways. At 
 one time he speaks of the daemon, or, more 
 vaguely, the daemonic, as if it were merely the 
 spark of divine intelligence implanted by God in 
 every soul. Again it might be an exclusive gift 
 to Socrates and, possibly, to some few others. 
 Besides its looser kinship with the divine, it might 
 ( appear as Socrates' "guardian, a very god," or, 
 
 more bravely, as "God." At other times the my- 
 thological symbolism, if we may so call it, falls 
 away, and leaves the naked spirit of the man, as 
 it were the higher self speaking to the lower. So 
 
 Hippias Major ^^eu Socratcs contrasts his own hesitating ways 
 
 304b 298b 
 
 with the magnificent assurance of one of the 
 sophists, he ascribes the cause of his embarrass- 
 ment to some daemonic chance, or fortune, that 
 has taken possession of him. If he heeds the bid- 
 ding of this power and refrains from everything 
 but the search for truth, then the mighty men of 
 the tongue deride his incompetence; and if he 
 hearkens to them and regards truth as a minor 
 matter in comparison with success, then he must 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 145 
 
 listen to all sorts of reproaches from a man who 
 is always standing by to expose him. This fel- 
 low, he says, is closely related to him and lives 
 in the same house with him; and when he goes 
 home, scolds him in private. And who is this 
 troublesome spy whom nothing can escape ? Why, 
 it is just Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus ! 
 
 All this is very tantalizing for those scholars 
 who must put a ticket and a name on everything. 
 But one fact is certain: whether it be a god, or 
 very God, or the man's self, or some less defin- 
 able intimation of the divine will, the daemonic 
 guide invariably takes the form of an inhibition, 
 and never of a positive command. On this one 
 point Plato, whom we may trust in such a matter 
 above Xenophon, leaves us in no doubt whatever : 
 "From childhood it has been with me," Plato 
 makes Socrates say in the Apology, "as it were a 3id 
 voice speaking at intervals, always warning me 
 against something I had in mind to do, never 
 urging me to act." It was this inhibitive aspect 
 of the Socratic religion which Plato never forgot, 
 and which justifies us in connecting the daemonic 
 admonition symbollically with the principle of 
 liberty and morality in the Platonic psychology. 
 There is a phrase in the first Dialogue with Al- iosa 
 cibiades, whether Plato's or some good Platon- 
 ist's, which I have always cherished as a pecu- 
 liarly happy attempt to name the unnamable. 
 Socrates is explaining to the petulant youth why 
 
146 PLATONISM 
 
 for so many years, while other admirers were pay- 
 ing assiduous court, he alone has refrained until 
 now. "The cause," he declares, "was nothing 
 human, but some daemonic check (daimonion 
 enanti6ma)y The incident is trivial; but in 
 these words I seem to see the Socratic religion 
 and the Platonic philosophy bound together by 
 an indissoluble bond. We may not know what 
 this daemonic or, as I have elsewhere translated 
 it, this inner check is ; we may not know why and 
 how it acts, or why it does not act, but we do 
 know that the clarity of our spiritual perception 
 and the assurance of our freedom depend on 
 keeping this will to refrain distinct from any 
 conception of the will as a positive force. 
 
 We touch here on the mystery of the spiritual 
 life. Men are loath to accept this purely nega- 
 tive view of what is highest in their being; every 
 instinct of the concupiscent soul cries out against 
 this complete severance between the law of the 
 spirit and the law of nature, and the human heart 
 revolts from it with all the energy and the tenac- 
 ity of its craving for flattery. Men argue in their 
 calmer moods that such a philosophy leads no- 
 where save to utter abnegation of life and to a 
 quietism that promises only the peace of death. 
 In their moments of exaltation they appeal to the 
 stronger emotions and, as they think, deeper con- 
 solations of a religion that clings to faith in a per- 
 sonal God who has manifested himself in human 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 147 
 
 form with passions like unto man's. All these 
 arguments and repudiations I know; but, withal, 
 I read Plato, and then read in my own soul, and 
 the book and the voice of consciousness are one in 
 replying that the truth of our being can be found 
 only in the hard fact of dualism, and that the 
 spirit, if we would define it, can be expressed only 
 in terms of negation. Nor has this truth ever 
 been forgotten by the world. If you turn to those 
 Christian theologians who have most wrestled 
 with language to give a name to their God, you 
 will find that the attributes allowed to him are 
 all merely negatives of things we know by our 
 senses."^ And so it is in the higher schools of phi- 
 losophy. The Oxford idealism of T. H. Green 
 is by no means purely Platonic, and its reduction 
 of dualism to a relation between consciousness 
 and nature tends to obscure the dualism within 
 consciousness itself which is the more important 
 aspect of the problem; yet Green's principle of 
 consciousness is at least Platonic in this, that it 
 can be stated only in terms of negation. "As to 
 
 ^ "In our attempts to express what we conceive the Best 
 of Beings and the Greatest of Felicities to be, we describe 
 by the exact Contraries of all that we experience here — the 
 one as infinite, /^comprehensible, /mmutable, etc., the other 
 as mcorruptible, undefiled, and that passeth not away. At 
 all events, this Coincidence, say rather Identity, of Attri- 
 butes is sufficient to apprize us that to be inheritors of bliss 
 we must become the children of God." — Bishop Leighton, 
 quoted by Coleridge in his Aids to Reflection. 
 
148 PLATONISM 
 
 what that consciousness in itself or in its com- 
 pleteness is," he says, "we can only make nega- 
 tive statements. That there is such a conscious- 
 ness is implied in the existence of the world; but 
 what it is we only know through its so far acting 
 in us as to enable us, etc."^ It is still our fate 
 that the command of morality is "Thou shalt 
 not," and they who would worship God "in spirit 
 and in truth" must worship Him as the spirit 
 that denies, and they who would be philosophers, 
 lovers of truth, must look to a wisdom that warns 
 us only to abstain. He is the wise and good man 
 who need not say, as Bolingbroke was obliged to 
 say in an hour of remorse: "My genius, unlike 
 the demon of Socrates, whispered so softly that 
 very often I heard him not, in the hurry of those 
 passions by which I was transported." 
 
 Yet it is equally true that the effects of the 
 admonition are of the most positive sort, as can 
 be seen in the power and influence of the whole 
 life of SoQrates. No doubt the inhibition kept 
 him from political activity — Jesus, too, it will be 
 remembered, refrained from politics — but it 
 guided him also to the noblest form of patriotism, 
 withholding him from illegal acts at the bidding 
 of tyrants who held life and death in their hands, 
 and restraining him- voluntarily in gaol when 
 bribery would have opened the gates in a mo- 
 ment. It bade him subordinate his own wel- 
 
 ^ Prolegomena § 51. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 149 
 
 fare to those laws of the State to which he felt 
 himself bound by a kind of tacit contract, and 
 thus enabled him, as he thought, to bring himself 
 into harmony with the unwritten laws of the uni- 
 verse of which the enacted laws of society are, as 
 it were, the sisters. Being subject to law, he 
 should be in unison also with the gods whose 
 word the law is. Hence his fearlessness of death 
 and his terrifying calmness on the field of bat- 
 tle. Hence the vigour of his morality, and the 
 preservation of his chastity against such attacks 
 of lust as are described with appalling freedom 
 in the last scenes of the Symposium, Hence his 
 resolute disregard of the conflicting opinions of 
 men, and his loyalty to the testimony of his own 
 soul when it prohibited the retahation of evil for 
 evil, though at any price of suffering and oblo- 
 quy. The same warning voice guided him in the ^292^5 
 rejection of undesirable disciples, and it was 
 noted that those who came to him most clearly 
 under the divine permission were speediest and 
 surest in their spiritual growth. Through one of 
 these disciples it made him the teacher of Greece, 
 and the apostle to the world. The philosophy of 
 Plato is that same voice speaking with all the 
 splendid powers of persuasion. 
 
 The question of the freedom of the will was 
 forced into the domain of theology by the desire 
 to vindicate God from the imputation of evil and 
 to hold man accountable for his actions. And 
 
150 PLATONISM 
 
 the problem of philosophic dualism goes back to 
 the same instinctive belief in human responsibil- 
 ity. If a man is responsible for his acts, then he 
 must have been free to choose between conflict- 
 ing impulses ; and, as we have seen, this freedom 
 can exist only by virtue of an inhibitive power of 
 the soul, the so-called will to refrain, entirely 
 distinct from the positive will which is determined 
 by the final predominance of one impulse over 
 another. The admission of responsibility thus 
 throws us back upon a radical psychological dual- 
 ism and upon a cosmic dualism of good and evil 
 as its counterpart. But the sense of responsibil- 
 ity itself springs from our immediate feelings of 
 happiness and misery. It is of the essence of 
 those feelings, as distinguished from pleasure 
 and pain, that we are conscious of them as de- 
 pendent upon ourselves and not upon circum- 
 stances; we are happy with the knowledge that 
 we have chosen to act after due exercise of the 
 inhibiting power, we are miserable with the know- 
 ledge that we have not so chosen. Thus, the 
 consciousness of happiness and misery brings 
 with it a sense of responsibility; the sense of re- 
 sponsibility leads us to a belief in the freedom of 
 the will; the freedom of the will forces us to ac- 
 cept a radical dualism, psychological and cosmic. 
 The whole argument is merely a logical evolu- 
 tion, so to speak, of what is implicit in the primi- 
 tive fact of consciousness, since by the very con- 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 151 
 
 sciousness of happiness and misery we are equally 
 and immediately conscious of a radical dualism. 
 
 Now the consciousness of happiness and mis- 
 ery is certainly the fountain-head of Plato's 
 ethical philosophy, and the consequent dualism 
 of the soul is constantly present, sometimes im- 
 plicit, sometimes clearly explicit, in his psycho- 
 logy. But it cannot be said that he followed a 
 perfectly consistent course in regard to the other 
 two links in the chain, the dualism of good and 
 evil, and the sense of responsibility. It remains, 
 therefore, to examine his attitude on these two 
 points, since the argument is so intimately con- 
 catenated that no one link can be dropped with- 
 out imperilling the whole. 
 
 Plato's difficulties over the cosmic dualism of 
 good and evil were precisely those that were later 
 to trouble the theologians of Christianity: how 
 shall we reconcile the presence of intrinsic evil in 
 the world with faith in an omnipotent deity? 
 And to escape this unanswerable contradiction it 
 must be admitted that Plato more than once fell 
 into the fallacy so dear to Stoics and deists: God 
 must be the cause of all things, yet God cannot be 
 the cause of evil; hence the maladjustment and 
 wrong we see in individual things and persons are 
 not essentially evil, but are the mere necessity of 
 imperfection in a world of infinite parts and 
 pieces. The evil of the part is the good of the 
 
 e.g. Laws 
 903b 
 
152 PLATONISM 
 
 whole.^ Elsewhere Plato takes refuge in that in- 
 secure form of optimism which might be called a 
 half-way house between radical dualism and 
 
 Timaeus gtoico-dcistic monism. God is good and must be 
 the author of good, and the world is the best of 
 possible worlds. If there is evil in it, this will be 
 
 Ibid. 56c due to the refractoriness of the material in which 
 God had to work — rather, not he himself, for 
 he would not be held responsible for things as 
 
 Ibid. 4iA they are, but the lesser gods, his offspring, to 
 whom he entrusts the actual work of creation. 
 
 And as Plato was led at times by the paradox 
 that confronts all theologians to remove evil 
 somehow from the first cause, or causes, of things, 
 and to speak of it as if it were a mere shadow or 
 negation of reality, so he was tempted by the 
 Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge 
 
 ® I have called this theodicy, which virtually denies the 
 reality of evil, Stoic (cf. Marcus Aurelius ii, 3, et passim) 
 and deistic (cf. Shaftesbury, The Moralists i, 3, et passim), 
 but it is a fallacy that lies in ambush for all theology. 
 Thomas Aquinas even introduced it into the orthodox canon 
 of Catholicism; thus, Summa 1, xlvii, 2; "Sicut ergo divina 
 sapientia causa est distinctionis rerum propter perfectionem 
 universi, ita et inaequalitatis ; non enim esset perfectum uni- 
 versum, si tantum unus gradus bonitatis inveniretur in re- 
 bus" ; and I, xlix, 3 : "Puta, si quis dicat naturam ignis esse 
 malam, quia combussit domum alicujus pauperis. Judicium 
 autem de bonitate alicujus rei non est accipiendum secundum 
 ordinem ad aliquid particulare, sed secundum seipsum, et 
 secundum ordinem ad totum universum." — The same denial 
 of the reality of evil in human sinfulness is involved in the 
 Thomist argument in regard to primary and secondary 
 causes. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 153 
 
 to explain away the fact of human responsibil- 
 ity. There is no avoiding this twist in Plato's ^ ^^ 
 teaching; he raises the point of irresponsibility pubuc 
 again and again, and in one of the later books "^^^^ 
 of the Laws, where, apparently he is replying 860d s. 
 to certain criticisms of Aristotle,^^ he develops 
 the thesis at great length and in such a way 
 as to leave no room for misunderstanding. 
 And, indeed, if we believe that all men do right 
 so far as they know what the right is, and if we 
 limit knowledge to what is learned by perception 
 and experience, how shall we escape a kind of in- 
 tellectual determinism? Instead of holding men 
 responsible for their wilfulness, the Platonist in 
 this sense should be one to say with Christ on the 
 Cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do." As a matter of fact, Plato's ^ , _ 
 
 •^ , ' Protagoras 
 
 common theory of punishment as purely reme- 323c s. 
 dial in function, rather than retributive, is quite ^^^ ^^"^^ 
 in accordance with this view of human errancy; 
 though it is to be noted that when he comes to 
 deal with the practical details of criminal pro- 
 cedure, he virtually allows a difference between Laws sesA 
 voluntary and involimtary deeds of violence. 
 These inconsistencies of Plato with his own 
 
 ^° Teichmiiller's Literarische Fehden is replete with wild ] 
 
 conjectures, but he has, I am inclined to believe, made good i 
 his contention that this excursus of the Laws is an answer 
 
 to the strictures in the third book of the Nicomachean ] 
 
 Ethics on the Socratico-Platonic thesis that no man errs, or ] 
 
 sins, willingly, | 
 
154 PLATONISM 
 
 philosophy of free will and dualism cannot be 
 shirked ; nor should we forget that they have been 
 the source, or encouragement, of a vast amount 
 of twisted thinking on the capital question of evil 
 and responsibility in Pagan and Christian writ- 
 ers. But, withal, it is still more important to 
 remember that the burden of Plato's ethical feel- 
 ing is prevailingly in harmony with his philo- 
 sophy. No one was more conscious than he of 
 the reality of evil, when his writing is free of en- 
 tanglement in a rationalizing theodicy. The evil 
 379c" of life, he declares categorically, outweighs the 
 good ; and in general his tendency to err is rather 
 on the side of an asceticism that exaggerates the 
 conflict of principles in the soul. Even in the 
 Timaeus, where his deistic optimism is most 
 clearly expressed, the outcome of his cosmogony, 
 as we shall see in a later chapter, is an absolute 
 dualism of good and evil. 
 
 And as with the reality of evil, so it is with the 
 question of responsibility. No one can have fol- 
 lowed the argument of The Republic without 
 perceiving that the whole discussion of justice 
 and injustice, happiness and misery, is based on 
 a deep and unshakable consciousness of human 
 responsibility. Nor are passages lacking that 
 offer another explanation than intellectual de- 
 terminism for the Socratic' identification of vir- 
 tue and knowledge. The principle of dualism is 
 too firmly rooted in Plato's mind to permit him 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 155 
 
 to dwell long in any rational evasion of reality. 
 If you wish to look into his true heart, turn, for 
 instance, to the opening of the fifth book of the 
 Laws, where he proclaims roundly that to every 
 man his whole being is double, and that all the 
 honour and dishonour of the soul hang on the 
 right recognition of this fact of consciousness: 
 "For when a man holds not himself but others 727b 
 responsible for his various faults and for the 
 many and great evils that befall him, and is al- 
 ways exempting himself as innocent, he is not 
 really honouring his soul, as he thinks, but the 
 very contrary." Ignorance and weakness may 
 be regarded as the cause of evil, and are indeed 
 the cause, if rightly considered, but behind them 
 lies the original and mysterious power of self- 
 love (philautia) : 
 
 "The greatest evil to men, generally, is one Laws 731D 
 which is innate in their souls, and which a man is 
 always excusing in himself and so has no way of 
 escaping. I mean what is expressed in the say- 
 ing that every man is and ought to be dear to 
 himself. Whereas the truth is that this absorb- 
 ing self-love is continually and in all men the 
 cause of all their faults; for the lover is blinded 
 in regard to the object of his passion, so that he 
 is a bad judge of the just and the good and the 
 beautiful, always fancying that he ought to hon- 
 our what belongs to him above the truth. Yet, 
 really, he who would be a great man ought not 
 
156 PLATONISM 
 
 to cherish himself or his possessions, but the 
 things that are just, whether they pertain to 
 himself or to the conduct of another. From this 
 same fault arises the common habit of regarding 
 our own ignorance as wisdom, and of thinking 
 we know all things when, so to speak, we really 
 know nothing." 
 
 These are words that should never be forgot- 
 ten by the Platonist when Plato, for the mo- 
 ment, seems to sway from his own deepest con- 
 victions. They were, in fact, remembered and 
 much quoted by the Platonizers of ancient 
 Greece, especially by Plutarch. They may not, 
 perhaps no words can, clear away the metaphysi- 
 cal difficulties that beset any one who, rashly or 
 sullenly, undertakes to reason out the problem 
 of evil, but they contain, I suspect, the only prac- 
 tical answer philosophy can give to that vexed 
 question. It makes little difference whether we 
 say that self-love is the source of ignorance and 
 the evils that flow therefrom, or that ignorance 
 is the source of self-love. Rather, the right way 
 of proceeding is to grasp the distinction between 
 the higher knowledge of intuition and the lower 
 knowledge of things, which Plato so often makes, 
 and, having firmly assured ourselves of this dis- 
 tinction, to see that self-love, as the spring of 
 evil, is merely another name for the absence of 
 the higher knowledge. Whether we call such a 
 condition self-love or self -ignorance depends on 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 167 
 
 whether we regard it from one or the other of the 
 two contrary poles of the "self"; it is self-love if 
 regarded from the lower element of our being, 
 self -ignorance if regarded from the higher ele- 
 ment. It is essentially, in the one case or the 
 other, a failure to submit to the law of our double 
 being, a kind of indolence, or want of attention, 
 at the very centre of consciousness; for self- 
 knowledge is the supreme activity of a soul at- 
 tending to its own business. 
 
 Responsibihty, then, is the word we use for 
 that self-knowledge which tells us that the exer- 
 cise or inertia of the inner check and the happi- 
 ness or misery attendant thereupon are matters 
 entirely within our own jurisdiction. But we 
 also know that our pleasures and pains are con- 
 tingent upon forces outside of our complete con- 
 trol; and here we are boimd to hold ourselves 
 creatures of fate and chance, and not responsi- 
 ble. In so far as the Socratic thesis may be taken 
 to identify the higher knowledge and morality, 
 it implies freedom and responsibility; in so far 
 as it identifies practical knowledge and virtue it 
 implies determinism and irresponsibihty. To 
 revert to the illustration employed by Plato and 
 by Locke and Edwards, let us suppose the case 
 of a man before whom Hquor is set. On the one 
 side he is drawn by a natural physical craving to 
 drink ; on the other side are the considerations of 
 expediency and inexpediency which come to him 
 
158 PLATONISM 
 
 in a more or less laggard manner from the mem- 
 ory of experience and from the precepts of tra- 
 dition. If he exercises duly the will to refrain, so 
 as to place himself in a position to form a clear 
 image and judgment of the desirability or un- 
 desirability of drinking, he will be acting morally 
 and will be happy; his judgment may be, prob- 
 ably will be, wise as well as clear, and the act of 
 drinking or not drinking will probably result in 
 pleasure ; though there is also the possibility that 
 his judgment may be based on insufficient know- 
 ledge, with the result of painful consequences. 
 On the other hand, if he acts without due sus- 
 pense of judgment, allowing himself to be hur- 
 ried on by the physical craving or the contrary 
 considerations without a proper balance of mo- 
 tives, and if his judgment is then erroneous, as it 
 probably will be, he will not only suffer pain as 
 a consequence of his action, but will feel that he 
 has acted from self-love, or self -ignorance, and 
 will be miserable accordingly. Whatever his 
 course, he will be conscious that he was entirely 
 free to exercise the will to refrain, or the inner 
 check, and will hold himself responsible for his 
 happiness or misery. But he will know also that, 
 at the moment of action, his positive will was 
 bound to follow the predominant inclination, and 
 that, as the physical craving and the weight of 
 experience were determined by causes not en- 
 tirely within his jurisdiction, he is not fully re- 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 159 
 
 sponsible for the contingencies of pleasure and 
 pain. 
 
 There is thus an element of responsibility in 
 our conduct, and there is also an element of ir- 
 responsibility, and it was probably this complex- 
 ity of our ethical nature that led Plato to waver 
 in his attitude towards the question. And for 
 the very reason that any philosophical statement 
 of the problem must close with this admission of 
 an irreconcilable paradox, Plato has, after his 
 manner, given his final answer in the form of a 
 myth, enjoying in this realm of symbols a release 
 from the restricting law of scepticism. In the 
 great epilogue to The Republic which describes 
 the experience of men in the other world, it is 
 said that the souls of the dead, after undergoing 
 for a time the penalties and rewards of their for- 
 mer deeds, are brought together into the pres- 
 ence of the three Fates. Thereupon a prophet 
 takes from the knees of Lachesis the various 
 samples of lives and the lots, and from a lofty 
 pulpit makes this proclamation: "The words of 
 Lachesis, daughter of Necessity. Ye souls of a 
 day, now is the beginning of another cycle of 
 mortal life and death. Your daemon will not be 
 allotted to you, but you shall choose your dae- 
 mon. Let him who draws the first lot have the 
 first choice, and the life he chooses shall be his 
 destiny. But virtue is free, and as a man hon- 
 ours or dishonours her he will have more or less 
 
160 PLATONISM 
 
 of her. The responsibihty hes with the chooser; 
 God is justified. Even for the last comer, if he 
 selects wisely and will live diligently, there is 
 ready a life, not evil, with which he may be con- 
 tent. Let not the first to choose be heedless, nor 
 the last be dejected." So the lives are thrown 
 down before the waiting souls, and the comedy 
 of choosing proceeds. The moral of the allegory 
 for us lies in the mixture of freedom and com- 
 pulsion in the law. There is an element of haz- 
 ard in the order and range of choice, yet Odys- 
 seus, the wise, to whom falls the last lot, seeks 
 and finds the one life he desires, finds it lying ne- 
 glected by all his predecessors.^^ The selection 
 when it comes is the man's own, yet there is a 
 bias in the soul which leads it to make a choice in 
 accordance with its previous career. Only the 
 few learn from past experience, and they so very 
 little. The myth of transmigration was to Plato 
 a half -serious parable of the same truth that was 
 conveyed to the Hindu mind by the word harma, 
 which meant at once a man's voluntary deeds 
 and their inevitable consequences, his freedom 
 amid the coils of fate which he himself was weav- 
 ing and could alone unravel: 
 
 ^^ The combination of freedom and determinism, respon- 
 sibility and irresponsibility, in Plato's myth became a sub- 
 ject of debate among the commentators. See Stobaeus, 
 Ethica vii, 39. 
 
PSYCHOLOGY 161 
 
 We harvest as the seed was sown, 
 And he that scattered reaps alone; — 
 So from each deed there falls a germ 
 That shall in coming hves its source affirm. 
 
 Unseen they call it, for it lurks 
 The hidden spring of present works ; 
 Unkxown-befgee, even as the fruit 
 Was undiscovered in the vital root. 
 
 And he that now impure hath been 
 Impure shall be, the clean be clean ; 
 We wrestle in our present state 
 With bonds ourselves we forged — and call it 
 Fate. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 
 
 The setting of the problem we have now to 
 consider is admirably given in the introduction 
 to the so-called Moralia Magna of the Aristotel- 
 ian school. The first to approach the question of 
 ethics, says the author of this treatise, was Py- 
 thagoras, who, however, erred in looking for vir- 
 tues in numbers. After him came Socrates, who 
 discoursed better and more copiously on these 
 matters, but still faultily. For he placed the 
 virtues entirely in the rational part of the soul, 
 quite overlooking the irrational part and taking 
 no account of the passions and the natural dis- 
 positions of men. The error is patent. In the 
 sciences, when we know what a thing is we have 
 the science. Thus, if a man knows what physic 
 is, he is thereby a physician. But with the vir- 
 tues it is not so; for it does not follow that, if a 
 man knows what justice is, he is himself forthwith 
 just. Afterwards Plato rightly divided the soul 
 into two parts, the rational and the irrational, 
 and distributed the virtues accordingly. So far 
 well. But Plato also erred when he mixed up his 
 discussion of virtue with his discussion of the 
 Good as absolute truth and being; for there is 
 
 162 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 163 
 
 nothing in common between these two questions. 
 No doubt the good is the end and purpose of 
 virtue, but this is the good as it is to us in our 
 civil Hfe, and not the Good conceived abstractly 
 as an Idea separated from the actual things 
 which we call good. 
 
 That is a fair summary of the ground on which 
 Aristotle and later Peripatetics rested their op- 
 position to the Platonic philosophy. It will be 
 clear, I think, that their analysis of Plato's psy- 
 chology was correct so far as it went, but was 
 seriously inadequate. The more difficult pro- 
 blem remains, whether they were right in reject- 
 ing the doctrine of Ideas as an illogical sequence 
 of psychological dualism. What were these 
 Ideas, which have made such a stir in the world, 
 and what is their exact place in the Platonic 
 philosophy? 
 
 Now, it may be true that, looking into our 
 souls, we are obliged to state the facts of con- 
 sciousness in the terms of a paradoxical dualism, 
 and such a statement may have great practical 
 value, but it still leaves the facts, in one sense, 
 quite unexplained. What is the bond between 
 the inner check, or spirit, and the concupiscent 
 element of the soul? How and why does the one 
 act upon the other? How even can two essenti- 
 ally contrary powers exist together in one con- 
 sciousness? These are the questions that reason 
 thrusts upon a dualistic philosopher, and that 
 
164 PLATONISM 
 
 have no rational answer. The recourse to either 
 form of monism he merely refuses as contradic- 
 tory to the facts of consciousness, denouncing the 
 acceptance of spiritual reality alone as a false 
 idealism, and the acceptance of the concupiscent 
 or sensational reality alone as a false scepticism. 
 The attempt to bring the two terms closer to- 
 gether by lowering the spirit to a process of rea- 
 soning he repudiates as rationalism, and the ef- 
 fort to find some intellectual reconciliation of the 
 irreconcilable he deals with as a futile presump- 
 tion of metaphysics. Nevertheless, some sort of 
 reconciliation the heart of man craves and will 
 not, perhaps cannot, forgo; and the Platonic 
 Ideas, as the dualist understands them, are pri- 
 marily just the labour of the imagination to effect 
 practically what could not be effected intellect- 
 ually. We shall be in a better position to com- 
 prehend this act of the imagination when we 
 have analysed Plato's treatment of a very com- 
 plex subject. 
 
 The first and chief difficulty in the way of the 
 interpreter is the obvious fact that Plato ap- 
 proaches the doctrine of Ideas from many dif- 
 ferent angles, and nowhere gives a final exposi- 
 tion of his meaning. That was his lordly privi- 
 lege; so much so that one is sometimes tempted 
 to believe, with Schleiermacher, that he deliber- 
 ately left these obstacles in the path of his dis- 
 ciples in order that they might not be satisfied 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 165 
 
 with the empty husks of word-knowledge, but 
 should be kept aware of their ignorance until 
 what they learned was illuminated by the light 
 of their own inner experience. At any rate we 
 should not fall into the error of smoothing away 
 these obstacles by assuming a radical break in 
 Plato's doctrine. That his attitude towards 
 Ideas altered somewhat in the course of a long 
 life may be granted; he would scarcely have 
 been human if he had not suffered the changes of 
 time. But to hold, as it has become rather the 
 fashion nowadays, that at a certain moment in 
 his career he repudiated one theory of Ideas and 
 adopted a contrary theory, or even that the 
 change in his views was anything more than the 
 natural shifting of interest from one aspect of 
 the question to another, is, I say flatly, to mis- 
 conceive totally his philosophic history. The 
 evidence for such a break is of the flimsiest sort 
 and is contradicted by passages which can be ex- 
 plained away only by doing violence to the text. 
 If Plato appears inconsistent in his attitude 
 towards Ideas it is because here, as in other 
 cardinal points of his philosophy, he allows him- 
 self a puzzling license in the matter of termino- 
 logy.^ Sometimes the word "idea," or eidos^ is 
 used quite as it might be heard in the market- 
 place, meaning simply the "form" of an object, or 
 
 ^ It was a saying of the philosopher Didymus, as quoted 
 by Stobaeus, that to 7ro\v<f><iivov tov nXarcDvos ov 7ro\vBo$ov. 
 
166 PLATONISM 
 
 the "class" of objects grouped together more or 
 less loosely by similarity of form; at other times 
 it has a highly technical meaning as used in the 
 schools; and it passes from one use to the other 
 in such a way that on occasion we may have diffi- 
 culty in determining its particular degree of 
 technicality. But the most troublesome ambi- 
 guity — an ambiguity which has caused the spill- 
 ing of oceans of ink and of some blood — ^meets 
 us when we are most sure that the usage is 
 strictly technical. It is hard for the classifying 
 philologue or the systematizing metaphysician to 
 acquiesce in the fact that the Platonic Ideas fall 
 under two quite different categories, correspond- 
 ing to two different processes of the mind; and 
 the maddening part of the truth is that Plato, 
 though his whole philosophy hinges in a way on 
 this distinction, will, when he pleases, write as if 
 he were unaware of any such distinction. This 
 sovereign indifference to our ease, I say, mad- 
 dens the systematizer and may blind the modest 
 inquirer; yet the faithful Platonist would scarce- 
 ly wish it otherwise, since he is thus forced al- 
 ways to remember the winged freedom of the 
 spirit and the peril of scholastic pigeon-holes. 
 What he might censure as ignorance or confusion 
 in a lesser mind, he may tolerate as a not ignoble 
 ^^184^"' liberty in the proved seer. "A certain freedom 
 in the use of words and phrases, with the avoid- 
 ance of minute precision," Plato himself says, "is 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 167 
 
 commonly allowed in a man who would not be 
 pedantic; one even might call the contrary pro- 
 cedure illiberal." 
 
 The Ideas of Plato, then, fall under two main 
 categories, which may be designated as the ra- 
 tional and the ethical. The former category is 
 itself not simple, but must be taken to embrace 
 both mathematical forms (the discussion of which 
 we shall leave to the following chapter on 
 Science) and those intellectual generalizations 
 from particular objects to the group which are 
 commonly, but erroneously, thought of first in 
 connection with the Platonic doctrine. This sec- 
 ond division, embracing intellectual generaliza- 
 tions, again falls into two subdivisions exempli- 
 fied, respectively, by the Idea man which em- 
 braces within itself the many individual men we 
 see, and the Idea table which we have in our 
 minds in connection with seeing and using many 
 individual tables. In the one case the Idea is of 
 a class of things in nature, and corresponds to 
 the genus or species of modern science; in the 
 other case it is of a class of manufactured ob- 
 jects. In either case the term, without question, 
 has a certain practical utility and answers to a 
 certain process of experience: that is to say, in 
 common parlance we have no difficulty in distin- 
 guishing men as a group from any other group 
 of animals, and tables from any other kind of 
 furniture. The distinction is at least a prag- 
 
168 PLATONISM 
 
 matical reality. Our miiids are not harassed by 
 the fact that creatures may be found or imagined 
 which shade by imperceptible degrees upwards 
 into men and downwards into apes, or by the 
 fact that articles may be made which could with 
 equal propriety be called tables or desks or 
 shelves ; for the ordinary concerns of life the dis- 
 tinctions are plain and the terms sufficiently 
 precise. 
 
 But difficulties grow thick as soon as we begin 
 to speculate. What is the nature of this Idea 
 man or this Idea table which we have in our 
 minds? Is it an entity apart from the individual 
 objects, of which it is the pre-existent cause? 
 And if so, how and where does it exist? Was it 
 as an image in the mind of the Creator, or as a 
 latent potentiality of impersonal energy, or as a 
 pattern to which the Creator looked or which 
 somehow controlled the impersonal energy? And 
 how could there be a single stable image or po- 
 tentiality or pattern of a group of individuals 
 varying indefinitely in traits and merging in- 
 sensibly into other groups? If there was a pre- 
 existent Idea of men or tables, then why, by the 
 same right, was there not an Idea of a certain 
 class of men or tables, and then an Idea of a 
 smaller group, and so on? Aristotle and other 
 critics of Plato were not slow to bring out these 
 difficulties. Of course we might say that it is 
 just as easy to conceive the existence of an infi- 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 169 
 
 nite number of Ideas as the existence of an in- 
 finite number of material objects, but we balk at 
 the infinitude of Ideas as a needless duplicating 
 of our troubles. On the other hand, if we reject 
 Ideas as previously existent entities, and hold 
 them to be no more than words corresponding to 
 generalizations of the human mind, are we not 
 bound by such a theory to reject also any prin- 
 ciple of purpose or teleology in the world? The 
 notion of purpose or design, whether we regard 
 the world as created or self-evolved, can scarcely 
 be maintained unless an Idea of what is to be 
 unfolded already in some manner exists. Either 
 course leaves us with insoluble difficulties, and 
 hence the long and imended debate between the 
 metaphysicians of the realistic and the nominal- 
 istic schools, between those who, in the mediaeval 
 jargon, contended for universalia ante rem and 
 those who contended for universalia post rem. 
 
 In a general way it may be said that, with 
 natural classes, such as men and animals, the dif- 
 ficulties of the nominalistic view are seemingly 
 the more insuperable, and that, in the slow re- 
 turn of science and philosophy to a dependence 
 on some sort of teleology in the process of evo- 
 lution, we are forcing ourselves back into a be- 
 lief in Ideas in something like the Platonic sense. 
 But with a manufactured article, such as tables, 
 the obstacles in the way of accepting the Idea 
 still seem mountainous ; they loom up before the 
 
170 PLATONISM 
 
 mind in the case of such an object because we 
 see its conception and follow its construction as 
 we do not in the case of natural groups. Some 
 commentators, perceiving this difference in the 
 difficulties, have urged that Plato held to Ideas 
 of natural classes, but never, or only at an early 
 stage of his mental development, believed in 
 Ideas of manufactured articles. That is an old 
 way with commentators, to strain at a gnat and 
 swallow the camel. In reality the difference is 
 apparent only and superficial, and it is just as 
 easy to hypostatize one kind of generalization as 
 the other. It ought to be perfectly clear from 
 the tenth book of The Republic, if from no other 
 passage, that Plato in his maturity held equally 
 to both kinds of Ideas. It ought to be clear also 
 that he spoke of Ideas as of entities anterior to 
 individual objects and having an existence out- 
 side of the generalizing mind of man. To doubt 
 this is to deny the plain sense of innumerable 
 passages in his works and is to flout the common 
 sense of many generations of readers. 
 
 So far the way of the interpreter is fairly clear 
 and straightforward. He has simply to admit 
 that Plato taught the reality of generalizations 
 as pre-existent entities without attempting to 
 explain the nature of their existence. In very 
 sooth, there would appear to be no answer to 
 such a question, and Plato was wise and honest 
 enough not to stultify himself by trying to forge 
 one. 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 171 
 
 He was saved from this intellectual stultifica- 
 tion partly by his loyalty to the Socratic scepti- 
 cism, and partly also, it may be, by the fact that 
 his main interest lay not in these Ideas that cor- 
 respond to generalizations from the similarity of 
 objects of perception (nor even in those other 
 rational Ideas, corresponding to mathematical 
 forms, which are yet to be considered), but in 
 Ideas (he employed the same word for both 
 kinds) of a totally different origin. It is hard to 
 see how any one can read the Dialogues without 
 being impressed by the fact that Plato was 
 brought to his doctrine of Ideas by ethical rather 
 than logical considerations, and that to the end, 
 despite what may be called his period of meta- 
 physical stress, his chief interest lay in this di- 
 rection. The clue to his motives is given in the 
 closing paragraphs of the fifth book of The Re- 
 public, where he is introducing his great argu- 
 ment on the place of Ideas in the philosophical 
 and political life. What shall be our reply, he 
 says, to the good fellow who is quite ready to ad- 
 mit the existence of beautiful things, but who 
 laughs at us when we speak of the absolute un- 
 changeable Idea of beauty as really and eternal- 
 ly existent apart from these particular things? 
 Shall we not ask him to name any particular 
 beautiful thing which on occasion may not ap- 
 pear ugly, or any just or holy act, so-called, 
 which may not under other circumstances appear 
 
172 PLATONISM 
 
 unjust and unholy? And so with other things 
 we regard as great or small, heavy or light, and 
 the like. No, the simple truth is that the popular 
 ascription of beauty and the like is concerned 
 with things that are tossing about in some mid- 
 region between pure being and not-being; beauty 
 and justice so taken furnish no hold on know- 
 ledge, neither can they be utterly ignored, but 
 are matters of opinion only, a state of mind as 
 shifting and uncertain as themselves. And as 
 men use these words so will their hearts be. If 
 a man admits the reahty of beauty and justice as 
 eternal Ideas he will love beauty and justice and 
 embrace them as things he can know and depend 
 upon; he will be a lover of such knowledge, a 
 philosopher. But if he sees only a mutable world 
 of things now fair and just, now ugly and un- 
 just, he will perforce be content with this sort of 
 uncertainty and will not endure to hear of fixed 
 laws of beauty and justice. There is nothing for 
 him really to know, no knowledge for him to 
 love ; he will not be a philosopher, but a lover of 
 opinion, a philodoccer. 
 
 Now pretty much all of Plato's theory is in 
 this passage, which I have given in somewhat 
 condensed form, and it will repay minute study. 
 In the first place it will be observed that the 
 Ideas of great and small, corresponding to gen- 
 eralizations derived from the similarity of ob- 
 jects of perception, are thrown in among the 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 173 
 
 Ideas of beauty and justice, as if all Ideas were 
 of the same order. But their inclusion, it will 
 also be observed, is merely casual, and they drop 
 out of consideration when the value of Ideas is 
 discussed and the necessity of their existence is 
 maintained. This is in accordance with the com- 
 mon habit of Plato, to name together groups of 
 intellectual and of ethical Ideas as if the argu- 
 ment was concerned with them indiscriminately, 
 and then quietly to drop one or the other group. 
 It is not the only case where he is content to draw 
 tacitly, perhaps unconsciously, a distinction of 
 prime importance to his philosophy. 
 
 It will be further observed that all through 
 this argument, and indeed repeatedly in other 
 Dialogues, Plato couples beauty with justice, or 
 with goodness, as if they belonged to the same 
 category ; and in this case he does not name them 
 together, merely to drop one of the classes, as he 
 does when he includes intellectual generalizations 
 with them, but maintains the union intimately to 
 the end. There is here, then, a real refusal, or 
 failure, to discriminate between aesthetics and 
 ethics in the Ideal sphere. This, however, does 
 not mean that he identified beauty and goodness 
 through all their course, for there were many 
 manifestations of beauty which he condemned as 
 inimical to goodness; and it decidedly does not 
 mean, as the Paterians would have us believe, 
 that his primary interest was in the beautiful. 
 
174 PLATONISM 
 
 Laws 727d foF of such aesthctcs he can on occasion speak 
 with utter scorn. The explanation is, rather, 
 that he made a distinction between Ideal beauty 
 and the actual manifestations of beauty. 
 
 Only once, in the Hippias Major, did Plato 
 undertake to deal with the beautiful from a 
 purely aesthetic point of view, and here the near- 
 est approach to a definition, after many trials, is 
 299b that beauty might be called "pleasure through 
 sight and hearing." This definition, indeed, he 
 finally rejects, because it does no more than de- 
 scribe the effect upon us of beautiful objects, 
 whereas the beautiful itself, for which he is look- 
 ing, would be the cause that brings together into 
 a common category all the objects that so affect 
 us. Yet it may stand as Plato's working defini- 
 tion of the beautiful, and fits in with his constant 
 association of practical aesthetics and hedonism, 
 the desire of beauty with the desire of pleasure. 
 Beautiful objects as such are merely one division 
 of things that give us pleasure, and are to be em- 
 braced or renounced, like all such things, not by a 
 standard of immediate intensity but by a wider 
 calculation of the kind of pleasure given. Other 
 things being equal, the more beautiful object is 
 preferable to the less beautiful, just as generally 
 the intenser pleasure of the moment is prefer- 
 able to the less intense. But "other things" are 
 by no means always equal; the larger consider- 
 ation of life may command us to condemn a par- 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 175 
 
 ticular manifestation of beauty, as it may bid us 
 reject any other appeal to the senses, and above 
 this falHble principle of hedonism is the moral 
 law, with its power of inhibition upon the impulse 
 of all desires. Hence it follows that art cannot 
 be left to work under the canons of beauty alone, 
 independently of outside control, but is to be 
 judged by a standard embracing interests of a 
 far wider order ; art must be subservient to ethics. 
 In The Republic Plato, himself the master art- 
 ist, shuts out of his ideal city poets and artists of 
 high renown, men of whom he may elsewhere 
 speak in the language of reverence, because the 
 pleasure derived from their craft seems to his 
 austere judgment contrary to the goal of happi- 
 ness towards which he is straining. It is even 
 true that he is wont to look with a touch of sus- 
 picion on art in itself, just as sometimes he is 
 hurried by zeal, against his better judgment, to 
 denounce pleasure in itself. He seems at these 
 moments to feel that the tendency of art is al- 
 most inevitably to strengthen the immediate sen- 
 sations against the inner check, and that there is 
 an ancient irreconcilable feud between philo- ibid. 607b 
 sophy and poetry. This, however, is Plato 
 troubled in spirit by too pressing a vision of the 
 perils and misfortunes of life; in his calmer 
 moods he recognizes the great function of art and 
 poetry in education, and throughout the Laws 
 there are passages on this topic replete with 
 sound and subtle observation. 
 
 Republic 604d 
 606a,d 
 
176 PLATONISM 
 
 But it is not my intention in this volume of 
 introductory studies to enter into the compHcated 
 task of imraveUing Plato's aesthetics, further 
 than to show how and why that question is in- 
 volved in the question of his ethics. In brief, the 
 practice of art, as he saw it, is parallel with the 
 practice of the virtues, but distinguished by the 
 kind of pleasure evoked. When, however, we 
 pass to the Idea behind the manifestations of 
 beauty we are in the region of happiness, just as 
 when we pass from considering the virtues to the 
 moral force above them. And as happiness ad- 
 mits no distinction in kind, so the Idea of beauty 
 merges into that of goodness. Hence there is no 
 confusion, granted Plato's general point of view, 
 as every true Platonist is ready to grant, in his 
 method of dealing simultaneously with aesthetic 
 and ethical Ideas. 
 
 But there is still another distinction to be 
 made. (I trust the reader's patience is not ex- 
 hausted; I sometimes fancy that the best defini- 
 tion of a Platonist would be "a lover of distinc- 
 tions.") In the passage of the fifth book of The 
 Republic to which we are referring, just before 
 476a the paragraphs actually quoted, Plato speaks of 
 the Ideas of justice and injustice, good and evil, 
 each of which is one by itself, but by participa- 
 tion in acts and bodies and by communion one 
 with another, has the appearance of being many. 
 Now the point with which we are concerned is 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 177 
 
 the inclusion of these Ideas of evil and ugliness 
 (the latter, Ideas of ugliness, are not mentioned 
 here, but they are so included in other passages 
 of similar import) with those of goodness and 
 beauty. Is the philosopher, then, as a lover of 
 Ideas, one who loves ugliness and injustice by 
 the same token that he loves beauty and jus- 
 tice? The answer to this question is implicit in 
 the fact that here, as elsewhere, when Plato 
 comes to draw his conclusions and apply his 
 moral, he silently drops these so-to-speak reverse 
 Ideas of ugliness and injustice out of considera- 
 tion and argues as if he had named only beauty 
 and justice. The Ideas of ugliness and injustice 
 are not properly ethical — precisely as it is not 
 ethical to be ugly or unjust — but are of the na- 
 ture of intellectual generalizations ; they are, like 
 other intellectual Ideas, listed with the ethical, 
 and then, in like manner, tacitly ignored when 
 the moral application is made. 
 
 It is clear, then, that in discussing Plato's doc- 
 trine of Ideas we have to deal with a very com- 
 plex question. First of all we must set apart 
 notions derived from the similarity perceived in 
 a group of objects or from quantitative relations. 
 With these must be placed also those aesthetic 
 and ethical notions which are equally derived by 
 generalizing from observation, and which include 
 ugliness as well as beauty, unrighteousness as 
 well as righteousness. All these are Ideas in a 
 
178 PLATONISM 
 
 way and have their own reahty ; but they are in- 
 tellectual in their origin and pertain to the scien- 
 tific rather than to the philosophic life. The dif- 
 ference lies in this, that in the procedure of 
 science we are interested in acquiring a know- 
 ledge of the Ideas, whereas in the procedure of 
 philosophy we are interested in possessing the 
 Ideas themselves. Ideas, as Plato was supremely 
 concerned in them, and as they constitute the 
 essence of what the world has rightly known as 
 Platonism, are not derived intellectually, but are 
 an emphatic assertion of the unchanging reality 
 behind moral forces, a natural development of 
 the Socratic affirmation of spiritual truth. 
 
 We can now understand why Plato saw in the 
 rejection or acceptance of Ideas the line dividing 
 men into two hostile camps. He had in mind one 
 of the commonplace distinctions with which we 
 are perfectly familiar today as were the people 
 of Athens in his day, and which is fraught with 
 far-reaching consequences. We are all acquaint- 
 ed with the man who, having a current know- 
 ledge of history and the world, insists fluently 
 that there is no fixed standard of beauty or jus- 
 tice, and who overwhelms us with illustrations 
 to prove that everything regarded as beautiful or 
 just by one people and at one age is to another 
 people or at another age the very reverse of 
 beautiful or just. Plato would admit that such 
 men, if the debate is kept within the bounds they 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 179 
 
 prescribe, are entirely right ; there is nothing ab- 
 solutely fixed in particulars, and no knowledge 
 of what is not fixed. But he would add that this 
 is only the lower side of the truth. The fact that 
 all peoples and all ages have some word, more or 
 less precise, for the beautiful and the just, and 
 have the same motions in their souls towards that 
 which they call by these words, shows that some 
 constant force is at work through all the variety 
 of its manifestations. The objects and acts that 
 appeal to an Australian head-hunter as beauti- 
 ful and right may in some respects be quite the 
 contrary of what would receive the approbation 
 of a Christian bishop; but beauty and justice, or 
 rightness, have the same place and function in 
 the soul of the one as of the other. These, Plato 
 would say, are the absolute Ideas which both 
 head-hunter and bishop know, whereas in the ap- 
 plication of these Ideas to particular objects and 
 acts they fall into the region of opinion. Such, 
 he would contend, is the fact, no matter whether 
 you acknowledge it or not ; but he would add that 
 it matters a great deal to you personally whether 
 you acknowledge it. If you admit the reality of 
 the Idea of justice, you will love the Idea, and 
 your love will be established upon something 
 fixed; you will not only be confirmed in your 
 readiness to act in accordance with the principles 
 of justice as these are formulated by your own 
 experience and by that of the society in which 
 
180 PLATONISM 
 
 you live (whence all the practical virtues), but 
 you will be led to search deeply into your con- 
 sciousness for principles that approach more 
 nearly to the absolute standard and authority of 
 an Idea. You will be a promoter of your own 
 welfare and of society's, a guide and governor 
 among men who are groping towards wisdom, a 
 philosopher. On the other hand, if you reject the 
 Idea of justice and say there is nothing fixed and 
 unalterable behind the changing fashions of law 
 and custom, nothing at once the cause and goal 
 of these fashions, if you say that justice is merely 
 a name for acts which may have nothing in com- 
 mon, you are taking away all that gives to justice 
 a firm hold upon the human heart. You will 
 scarcely retain any deep love for what is only a 
 name; you may conform to the popular rules of 
 justice from habit or for prudential reasons, but, 
 really, one may well be slow in trusting you very 
 far out of sight, or in placing much reliance on 
 your character — indeed, one may ask whether, 
 properly speaking, you have such a thing as a 
 character. If what is just to-day was unjust 
 yesterday and may be unjust to-morrow, and 
 there is nothing behind these changes, one can't 
 see why you shouldn't change, at your own con- 
 venience, without waiting for the slower-moving 
 opinions of society. And certainly, supposing 
 you are a lover of anything besides yourself, one 
 cannot think of you as a philosopher, but, if you 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 181 
 
 will pardon a rather ugly-sounding word, as a 
 philodoxer. 
 
 These Ideas, then, which play so important a 
 role in Plato's philosophy and have for these 
 thousands of years haunted the world as impal- 
 pable embodiments of truth, are primarily ethi- 
 cal in their nature ; and we have this pragmatic 
 proof of their existence, that without them we 
 can discover no sound basis of morality. They 
 are, in fact, the very reahties of our spiritual Hf e, 
 in comparison with which all the sohd-seeming 
 phenomena of earth are things evanescent and 
 unreal. But in what does their reahty subsist? 
 What are they in themselves? To answer this 
 question we must go back to the psychological 
 analysis of morality. 
 
 The central truth of dualism is a recognition of 
 the absolute distinction between the two elements 
 of our conscious being and an admission of the 
 impossibility of finding any rationally positive 
 explanation of the mutual interaction of these 
 two elements. We know that our concupiscent 
 soul is, or ought to be, under the jurisdiction of 
 the spirit, yet our analytic reason can express 
 this jurisdiction only in terms of suspension and 
 an inner check. But the human mind cannot rest 
 comfortably in this state of mere negation; it is 
 impelled by its very nature to seek some positive 
 expression for these superrational facts of con- 
 sciousness, and it is just here that another fac- 
 
182 PLATONISM 
 
 ulty, the imagination, steps in to perform what 
 was impossible to the reason. In its lower ac- 
 tivity the imagination is the power by which the 
 sensations derived through the organs of sight 
 and the rest are projected outside of the mind as 
 objects of perception. The imagination can also 
 go beyond this function and, after recombining 
 at pleasure the data of perception, can project 
 these new combinations into the void as things 
 having to the mind a certain degree of in- 
 dependent existence. Thus, the landscape con- 
 ceived by the artist or the character conceived 
 by the poet is thrown out into the world of ob- 
 jective existences. And so, by a still higher ac- 
 tivity, the imagination essays to deal with the 
 immediate data of consciousness, as it deals with 
 those of sensation. Justice, which to the reason 
 was only a negation of our positive impulses, is, 
 like the creation of the artist, projected outside 
 of the soul so as to become a positive entity with 
 a life and habitation of its own, and the soul un- 
 der control of moral force seems itself to be reach- 
 ing out to touch and take into its possession that 
 which is, in a way, its own creation. 
 
 These imaginative projections of the facts of 
 moral consciousness are the true Platonic ideas. 
 Hence their peculiarity: though the most inti- 
 mate realities of experience, things of which our 
 knowledge is so firm and sure that of other things 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 183 
 
 we seem in comparison to have only opinion, yet 
 the moment we apply our discursive reason to 
 them, the moment we imdertake to describe them 
 in intellectual terms, they melt away into noth- 
 ingness, like the dew in the clear dry breath of 
 the morning. Hence, too, the varying terms 
 which Plato gives to their operation. They are 
 always, as products of the imagination, objective 
 entities, separate (chdrista) from the world of 
 phenomena and from the soul itself, but at one 
 time he may speak of them as patterns {para- 
 deigmata), laid up in heaven or in some unde- 
 fined region, to which we look as models to mould 
 our conduct by, or, at another time, he may speak 
 of them as visitants to the soul, neither exactly 
 corporeal nor yet incorporeal, by whose presence sophist 247a 
 (parousia) we possess the qualities of which they 
 are the substance, or, more vaguely still, as mere 
 forces (dynameis) that play upon us and make md. 247e 
 us what we are. The looseness of Plato's termin- 
 ology would indicate that, to him at least, it is 
 of relatively slight importance how we take them 
 to be, so long as we accept their being and bow 
 to their authority. The point of supreme im- 
 portance for the Platonizer today is, not that he 
 should be able to define the operation of Ideas, 
 but that he should avoid the two contrary errors 
 of the rationalist and the romanticist. 
 
 On the one hand the literature of philosophy 
 is replete with the ghastly failures of the ration- 
 
184 PLATONISM 
 
 alist, who, perceiving the illogical nature of these 
 forms, has either rejected them and their author 
 altogether in the name of reason, or, by attempt- 
 ing some intellectual "reconciliation," has re- 
 duced them to mere nominalistic categories of the 
 reason and so emptied them of all vital signifi- 
 cance. This denial of the office of the imagina- 
 tion is particularly the error of metaphysics, of 
 which we shall have more to say in our discussion 
 of the Parmenides. 
 
 But the other error is equally wide-spread and 
 even more lethal in its consequences. I mean the 
 error of the romanticist who sees clearly enough 
 that Ideas are the creation of the image-making 
 faculty, but treats them as if they were somehow 
 created by a purely spontaneous power eoo nihilo, 
 and so deprives them of eternal and authorita- 
 tive validity. This is peculiarly the fault of the 
 self-styled Platonists of modern times, but it may 
 be traced back to the beginnings of romanticism, 
 if not to the ancient school of Neoplatonists. 
 Hegel laid his finger on one of its manifestations 
 in his criticism of romantic irony: "It was 
 Friedrich von Schlegel who first brought forward 
 this idea, and Ast repeated it, saying, 'The most 
 ardent love of all beauty in the Idea, as in life, 
 inspires Socrates' words with inward, unfathom- 
 able life.' This life is now said to be irony! But 
 this irony issues from the Fichtean philosophy, 
 and is an essential point in the comprehension of 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 185 
 
 the conceptions of most recent times. It is when 
 subjective consciousness maintains its independ- 
 ence of everything, that it says, *It is I who 
 through my educated thoughts can annul all de- 
 terminations of right, morality, good, &c., be- 
 cause I am clearly master of them, and I know 
 that if anything seems good to me I can easily 
 subvert it, because things are only true to me in 
 so far as they please me now.' This irony is thus 
 only a trifling with everything, and it can trans- 
 form all things into show: to this subjectivity 
 nothing is any longer serious."^ But the evil has 
 persisted in romantic writers who are serious 
 enough in their way. It is not the misuse of So- 
 cratic irony, but a more subtle perversion of Pla- 
 tonic truth, which one will find, for instance, in 
 such a writer as Professor Santayana, when he 
 maintains that "religion and poetry are identical 
 in essence, and differ merely in the way in which 
 they are attached to practical affairs." By this 
 he would argue, if I understand his drift, that 
 the ideal world is a purely spontaneous evoca- 
 tion, and as in poetry every man is free to create 
 what images he will, so it is in religion. "The 
 impassioned soul," he says, "must pass beyond 
 the understanding, or else go unsatisfied ; and un- 
 less it be as disciplined as it is impassioned it will 
 not tolerate dissatisfaction. From what quarter, 
 
 ^ History of Philosophy, translated by E. S. Haldane^ I, 
 400. 
 
186 PLATONISM 
 
 then, will it draw the wider views, the deeper har- 
 monies, which it craves? Only from the imagi- 
 nation. There is no other faculty left to invoke. 
 The imagination, therefore, must furnish to re- 
 ligion and to metaphysics those large ideas tinc- 
 tured with passion, those supersensible forms 
 shrouded in awe, in which alone a mind of great 
 sweep and vitality can find its congenial objects." 
 But these Ideas are of the nature of things that 
 cannot be verified. "Faith and the higher reason 
 of the metaphysician are therefore forms of 
 imagination believed to be avenues to truth, as 
 dreams or oracles may sometimes be truthful, not 
 because their necessary correspondence to truth 
 can be demonstrated, for then they would be por- 
 tions of science [that is, of what is known, in 
 contrast with Ideas which would be matters of 
 opinion], but because a man dwelling on those 
 intuitions is conscious of a certain moral trans- 
 formation, of a certain warmth and energy of 
 life."^ Now there is much in all this that seems 
 to have the ring of true Platonism, but on closer 
 investigation it will prove to indicate an attitude 
 towards things of the spirit which Plato would 
 have met with scorn and denial. Plato would 
 not say precisely with S ant ay ana (we take him 
 as typical of romantic Platonism) that the 
 imagination furnishes to religion those large 
 Ideas in which alone a great mind feels itself at 
 
 ^ Poetry and Religion, pp. v, 6, 8. 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 187 
 
 home, but rather that the imagination gives vi- 
 tality to the moral facts which are furnished it 
 by religion. And Plato would have utterly de- 
 nied that the correspondence of Ideas with truth 
 cannot be demonstrated; on the contrary he 
 would have asserted that the work of the imagi- 
 nation, unless it answers in the fullest measure 
 to known truth, is not an Idea at all. Ideas are 
 the product of the imagination, but of the imagi- 
 nation working upon material given to it by the 
 immutable law of moraUty; the truth is present 
 to our consciousness before this act of transfor- 
 mation, and has no more authority, though it 
 may be clothed with more persuasion, after it 
 has been evoked for the inner eye as a form than 
 it had previously to that evocation. 
 
 I may seem to have dwelt overlong on this 
 perversion, but the right use of the imagination 
 is of the very essence of Ideahsm. It is true that 
 the power of the Platonic philosophy over the 
 minds and hearts of men is attributable in large 
 measure to its insistence on the immediate vision 
 of moral forces as Ideal entities ; but it behooves 
 the Platonist to remember also that the imagina- 
 tion is the most treacherous and headstrong of 
 all oiu* faculties if once it is permitted to slip the 
 leash of moral control. The romantic spontan- 
 eity, which lures the imagination with a promise 
 of irresponsibiUty in creating its moral and re- 
 ligious Ideas, is a meretricious parody of Platon- 
 
188 
 
 PLATONISM 
 
 Republic 49 7d 
 
 Republic 507e 
 
 Symposium 
 219a 
 
 ism; its end is a bitter disillusion in the reality of 
 misery. Alas that, surveying the many flatteries 
 addressed to the soul under the guise of idealism, 
 we must say in words that were so often in the 
 mouth of Plato himself: How difficult are all 
 things fair! how treacherous the desire of them! 
 Such is the function, such are the limitations, 
 of that activity of the soul which produces the 
 Platonic Ideas. The name "imagination," I 
 need scarcely add, does not itself occur in Plato, 
 as indeed there is no word in classical Greek quite 
 corresponding to its connotation; but I have not 
 scrupled to apply our modern term to the process 
 by which the ethical facts of consciousness are not 
 only projected outside of the soul as independ- 
 ent entities, but are represented as images in 
 some way visible. Vision, Plato observes, is the 
 noblest of our perceptions, the sense that seems 
 to bring us into closest intimacy with the objects 
 of the phenomenal world ; hence it is natural that, 
 in the groping language of symbolism, our know- 
 ledge of Ideas should come to the soul by a spirit- 
 ual organ similar in its operation to that of the 
 physical eye. We see Ideas, Plato says, by the 
 inner eye, "the vision of the understanding" — 
 which is his nearest approach to a technical term 
 for the faculty of the imagination regarded as a 
 passive instrument. In the sixth book of The 
 Republic (following the conclusion of the fifth 
 book to which we have already referred) he 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 189 
 
 elaborates the metaphor in detail, comparing the 
 ethical Ideas in the soul with the models which 
 an artist studies in the work of imitation. He is 
 even so deeply convinced of the value of this 
 similitude as to carry it beyond the mere usage 
 of rhetoric into the region of mythology, as is his 
 wont in matters that transcend the reach of ra- 
 tional definition. For is it, he would seem to ask, 
 after all only metaphor? Does our imagination, 
 as we think in our cooler moods, really create 
 these Ideas as phantoms of its own evocation, or 
 may it be that they are in fact bodied forms that 
 show themselves to us in our moments of exalta- 
 tion, creatures like to the gods who have their 
 home on Olympus, yet at their own choice may 
 be revealed to us in dreams or the more blessed 
 hours of waking, recognized, for the dulness of 
 our senses, only as they fade away into the air : 
 
 "By his pace in leaving us I knew. 
 Without all question, 'twas a God; the Gods are 
 easily known." ^ 
 
 And so we have the entrancing fable of the 
 Phaedrus, wherein the Ideas are no longer de- 
 scribed vaguely as images floating before the 
 soul, but as shining realities, existing for ever in 
 their own light beyond the confines of the high- 
 est heaven. Thither the soul, when purified of 
 her mortal passions, drives in her winged car 
 
 ^ Iliad xii, 70, Chapman's translation. 
 
190 PLATONISM 
 
 with the lordly procession of the gods, and, reach- 
 ing the apex of the skies, for the time of a celes- 
 tial revolution looks out into those unearthly- 
 spaces, and beholds there the divine spectacle of 
 justice itself and temperance itself, even know- 
 ledge itself, not as these things are guessed at in 
 the shifting and uncertain phenomena descried 
 by the purblind eyes of the body, but in their 
 everlasting veracity and glory. That is the great 
 and joyous feast of the soul — the eucharist of the 
 philosopher, whereat he partakes of the eternal 
 substance, and is made aware of his spiritual 
 kinship with the gods. Is the fable a delusion, 
 a mere hunger of the brain, the consolation of an 
 innocent make-believe? How far, in other 
 words, was Plato consciously turning his psy- 
 chology into allegory, and how far did he regard 
 his mythical account of Ideas as the shadow of 
 an immortal revelation? I for one would not 
 care to say, holding that it is of the very essence 
 of Platonism to leave these high matters in their 
 own evasive liberty; but I know that Emerson 
 wrote from the same true experience of the soul 
 in his chapter on Illusions: 
 
 "There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the 
 universe. All is system and gradation. Every god 
 is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal 
 enters the hall of the firmament ; there is he alone 
 with them alone, they pouring on him benedic- 
 tions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 191 
 
 thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall 
 snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in 
 a vast crowd which sways this way and that, and 
 whose movement and doings he must obey: he 
 fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. 
 The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now 
 furiously commanding this thing to be done, now 
 that. What is he that he should resist their will, 
 and think or act for himself? Every moment, 
 new changes, and new showers of deceptions, to 
 baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, 
 for an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts 
 a little, there are the gods still sitting around him 
 on their thrones — they alone with him alone." 
 
 And as the Platonic vision unrolls in a mythi- 
 cal space that is not the expansion of this world, 
 so it falls in a time that is not measured by the 
 interval between a man's birth and dying. The 
 same magic of the imagination which placed the 
 adventure of the soul in a region beyond the ut- 
 termost sphere of the heavens carries the event 
 back to a remote age, to a Hf e before the begin- 
 ning of these terrestrial days. Our knowledge of 
 Ideas, which now is of things at once visible and 
 invisible, becomes by this act as it were a dim 
 and transient memory of what the soul did verit- 
 ably behold, face to face, in some prenatal exist- 
 ence. This is the meaning of metempsychosis 
 and "reminiscence" as they are taught in the 
 Meno and elsewhere, the setting in a mythical 
 
192 PLATONISM 
 
 time and space of an experience which, philo- 
 sophically considered, belongs to neither; for the 
 Ideas, though known in time, are eternal, and 
 though seen by the eye of the spirit, are not to be 
 found among the phenomena that fill the bound- 
 aries of physical space. They are as the gods 
 sitting on their unshakable thrones, seen through 
 the drifting snow-storms of illusions. 
 
 He in whom the memory of this great adven- 
 ture stirs is filled with longing to join the gods 
 once again in their upward procession within the 
 vault of the sky. So haunting is the recollection 
 of his joy that in comparison with it all other 
 satisfactions dwindle to worthless make-believe. 
 Hence the theory of an Uranian love that carries 
 the desires of the soul upwards to the participa- 
 tion in Ideas, like, yet very unlike, the common, 
 or Pandemic, love that craves the pleasure of 
 earthly possessions. In the greatest of the myth- 
 ological Dialogues, the Symposium, Socrates 
 tells a pretty tale which he pretends to have heard 
 from the lips of an inspired woman of Mantinea. 
 Love, he says, is not a god, neither is he a mortal, 
 but a mighty daemon, begotten of the divine 
 Poros, or Abundance, and conceived of the mor- 
 tal Penia, or Penury, whose office it is to act as 
 a mediator between gods and men. He it is that 
 creates in us "the thirst that from the soul doth 
 rise," the insatiable longings for wisdom, which 
 is the most beautiful of all things. Such a desire 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 193 
 
 is not known to the gods, for beauty and goodness 
 in perfection are already theirs, and desire is only 
 of that which is not possessed. Neither is it felt 
 by the ignorant among men, for this is the very 
 evil of ignorance that he who has no part in 
 beauty or goodness or wisdom should yet be con- 
 tent with his lot; feeling no want, he has no de- 
 sire. Love, the Uranian love, is philosophy ; and 
 the true philosopher is he who, having in memory 
 the vision of the celestial images, possessing 
 them yet not possessing them, feels the whole 
 current of his being turned to the one supernatu- 
 ral desire to snatch them out of the shadowy past 
 and make them the present palpable realities of 
 his life. Every act, every wish, every thought, 
 should be the perfect imitation, rather the com- 
 plete embodiment, of an Idea. Imagination is 
 not an empty dream, not a vacant and wander- 
 ing liberty, but the master of things as they are 
 and the moulder of his will. 
 
 It is this emotional element that distinguishes 
 the Platonic philosophy from the other schools, 
 and has made it an undying force in the practical 
 world; and this emotional element must be re- 
 garded, I think, as the indispensable servant of 
 truth, if philosophy is to be a life and not an idle 
 disputation. But I dare not say that it has 
 passed into wide acceptance without bringing 
 grave perils in its train. Plato himself may have 
 taken great pains to discriminate theoretically 
 
194 PLATONISM 
 
 between the love of ideal beauty, which is akin to 
 the love of endurance and temperance and wis- 
 dom and all the chorus of the virtues, and the 
 other love which is not ideal at all, but a license 
 of the imagination or a lust of the flesh; but it 
 needs a strong man to maintain such a distinc- 
 tion, when all the powers of the world, together 
 with the subtler power of self-love, make for con- 
 fusion. It is thus not without reason that Pla- 
 tonic love has often passed into a jest, and some- 
 times into a reproach. Nor can Plato for this be 
 held entirely guiltless. There are passages of 
 the Symposium, and more particularly of the 
 Phaedrus, in which the passionate colour of his 
 language so envelops the allurement of particu- 
 lar objects that some effort of the mind is re- 
 quired to remember the ideal beauty of which 
 they are supposed to be the manifestations. The 
 danger is heightened when he speaks with curious 
 lack of indignation of pleasures which the world 
 has agreed to hold unnatural and to reject with 
 instinctive abomination. Yet in these few iso- 
 lated passages where the attraction of sensuous 
 beauty seems for the moment to have veiled his 
 purer ethical vision, we do him a great wrong if 
 we fail to remember that it is a passing cloud 
 before the sun of the soul, not an eclipse. We 
 need then to turn to the strange confession of 
 Alcibiades at the close of the Symposium, and to 
 learn again how rigidly beauty and all the seduc- 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 195 
 
 tions of pleasure were held in subjection to the 
 refraining will. The Socrates of Plato may have 
 portrayed himself playfully as a slave to any Theages usb 
 beautiful body and as wise only in erotic lore; Ti6d "™ 
 when it came to the test of action he could master 
 the lawless impulses of the flesh unflinchingly 
 and, as it seems, without a pang of regret. 
 Those who dwelt with him and understood his 
 manner of speech knew well enough that all his 
 babble about the pursuit of beautiful bodies was 
 but a veil of irony thrown before the hunger of 
 his soul for fulfilment of its unearthly love. 
 
 The ideal world, created or, it may be, ob- 
 scurely grasped by the imagination, is thus at 
 once an illusion and a reality, with this differ- 
 ence, that when we deal with philosophy as a 
 mere dead corpus of speculation these Ideas fade 
 away into an illusory make-believe, whereas such 
 is the constitution of our spiritual nature that the 
 more we take philosophy as a principle of life 
 the more vivid and real do they become. That is 
 a truth which can be demonstrated only by liv- 
 ing, not by argument. But of the facts of ethi- 
 cal experience underlying the Ideas there is no 
 such halting tale, no question at all of make- 
 believe. Here we have not to do with the meta- 
 phorical "eye of the understanding," but with 
 that form of progressive knowledge, rather with 
 the only immediate and veritable knowledge, 
 which Plato designated as dialectic — ^that is, the 
 
196 PLATONISM 
 
 philosophy of the soul discoursing with herself of 
 the pure intuitions of consciousness, and so pass- 
 ing ever upwards to larger and more comprehen- 
 sive truth. The parallel processes of that ascent, 
 dialectical and ideal, may be described somewhat 
 as follows. Let us suppose that a certain plea- 
 sure is presented to a man. His natural desire 
 is forthwith to reach out for this pleasure ; but he 
 is made to pause. This power of suspension, 
 which to Locke was the substitute for the free 
 will, and which I have termed the inner check 
 or, more precisely in the language of Plato, the 
 daemonic opposition, intervenes between desire 
 and the reaching out for fulfilment. The man 
 has time to calculate from experience or precept, 
 half unwittingly it may be, whether it will be bet- 
 ter to grant himself this pleasure or to forgo it. 
 The result of this act of suspension, whether it 
 end in permission or negation, and whether the 
 judgment of ultimate pleasure and pain be right 
 or wrong, is the virtue of temperance, and with 
 it comes the feeling of happiness. That is the 
 dialectical certainty, what we know by immedi- 
 ate and incontrovertible evidence. But with 
 this certainty there rises before the man's imagi- 
 nation, if he reflects on his state, the Idea of 
 temperance as a visible power or presence, so al- 
 luring in itself that beside it the object of his 
 physical desire appears mean and ephemeral. If 
 his judgment was led to veto that desire, it will 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 197 
 
 seem to him that his act of restraint was merely 
 the choice in its place of this more desirable 
 image; the love of the Idea has driven out the 
 baser love of the flesh. If his judgment granted 
 the desire as good, then it will seem to him as if 
 this desired object were indeed beautiful, but 
 beautiful only as a shadow or receptacle of the 
 overflowing loveliness of the Idea. 
 
 Now suppose this event of the soul, if I may 
 so call it, is followed, as in life it will be, by other 
 events in which various desires more or less simi- 
 lar in nature are involved. Out of the grouping 
 of these events will arise a larger experience of 
 the happiness invariably attendant on the inhibit- 
 ing power and a clearer consciousness of this 
 power itself as the determining element of the 
 soul's true welfare. We grow thereby in dialec- 
 tical knowledge. And with this growth there fol- 
 lows a like enlargement of the ethical imagina- 
 tion. The Idea of temperance comes to embrace 
 more details and fuller reality, and to show on its 
 face a more radiant charm ; and as our love of the 
 Idea is enhanced, the desire of any particular 
 pleasure dwindles in comparison. With larger 
 dialectical knowledge the Idea of temperance is 
 taken up into a more comprehensive form, into 
 the Idea of fortitude, it may be, as the soul's vir- 
 tue of resistance to all temptations, whether of 
 desire or of aversion, hope or fear; and this Idea 
 again may be carried up into the still larger Idea 
 
198 PLATONISM 
 
 of wisdom, and ever onward to the supreme Idea 
 of the Good. 
 Symposium And SO, as it were by the steps of an ascending 
 stairway, we have reached the summit of Plato's 
 dialectic and of human experience, to that Idea 
 of the Good which to the practical mind of the 
 writer of the Moralia Magna seemed a fantastic 
 unreality, but to the inward-looking eye of the 
 soul is the one supreme reality. It is not to be 
 wondered at that certain of Plato's contempo- 
 raries were made dizzy by the attempt to gaze 
 directly at this luminary of truth, as the eye of 
 the body is blinded by meeting the unveiled radi- 
 ance of the sun, or that tradition should have soon 
 gathered strange tales about the lectures in which 
 he unfolded his theories.^ Plato himself virtu- 
 Repubiic 506d ally admitted that no definition of the Good was 
 possible, since there is nothing beyond it from 
 which further light could be obtained, and there 
 is no way of explaining why we desire that which 
 is the end of all desiring. The only device for 
 turning the eye of the soul thitherward is not by 
 endeavouring to define the undefinable, but by 
 pointing out the direction to be taken by those 
 who would approach it; as Plato has done sym- 
 ^BrJIr bolically in the wonderful allegory of the cave, 
 and, more analytically, in the discussion, follow- 
 ing this allegory, of the propaedeutic training in 
 
 ^ For example, the often-quoted story of Aristoxenus, 
 Elements of Harmony ii, 30. 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 199 
 
 abstract thought.^ It is possible that in the lec- 
 tures devoted to this preliminary training Plato 
 may have been careless in his use of terms, but 
 two things are certain: the alleged confusion of 
 his mathematical with his ethical Ideas, on which 
 Aristotle laid so much stress, is, as we shall see 
 in our study of Plato's science, a disastrous mis- 
 imderstanding of his method; and the tradition 
 of an esoteric doctrine, as distinct from the sup- 
 posedly popular exposition of his philosophy in 
 the Dialogues, has not the slightest foundation 
 in fact. The Dialogues, as we have them, carry 
 the mind as far as it can go, further than most 
 minds are willing to follow, and the notion of a 
 secret truth still beyond is merely the hugger- 
 muggery of an age which was losing its power to 
 discriminate between thinking and wishing to 
 think. What, in the name of intelligence, should 
 that mystical doctrine be? If there were no other 
 damning evidence, the silly allusions to this enig- 
 matic teaching and the statement that Plato 
 never had written and never would write down 
 his true principles are sufficient to prove the so- 
 called Platonic Epistles a forgery."^ 
 
 ^ The scholium to Gorgias 506c puts the case well: 
 "For the Good, as the end, is in itself undefinable. Where- 
 fore it is here set forth by means of negation of what it 
 seems to be, as for instance that it is not pleasure." And so 
 on of its treatment in other Dialogues. 
 
 '^ Ch. Huit, La Vie et Voeuvre de Platon, 1, chap, v, §§ 7 
 and 8 (the two sections by an oversight are both numbered 
 
200 PLATONISM 
 
 But if we cannot define the supreme Idea — 
 since it is the ethical fact which must be used to 
 give meaning to all our ethical definitions — at 
 least we can look at it, as Plato did, from differ- 
 ent points of view. What it is not we can say 
 ^^^505bc with assurance. It is not pleasure, since pleas- 
 ures may be relatively either good or bad. 
 Neither is it knowledge, in the ordinary sense of 
 the word, since those finer wits who would so de- 
 fine it are obliged in the end to say "knowledge 
 of the Good." How, then, shall we approach it 
 positively? 
 
 When we see the supreme Idea, or seem to see 
 it, as a power at work in other things than our- 
 selves, in the material world first of all, and then 
 in the characters of men as a part of that visible 
 world, we call it Beauty. And so we have the 
 211c ff marvellous account, in the Symposium^ of the up- 
 ward progression of the soul when, drawn by the 
 charm of a fair form, she passes on to consider 
 this form with other fair forms, and from these 
 to fair actions, and from these to fair notions, 
 and out of these to that one notion of absolute 
 beauty, and catches glimpses of Beauty at last 
 as it is in itself. This, be it observed, is not the 
 surrender of the soul to the allurements of gold 
 and rich vestments and the physical bloom of 
 youth, which might lead us in a direction the 
 
 7), has dealt magisterially with the subject of these lec- 
 tures and of an esoteric doctrine. 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS 201 
 
 very opposite of the Good, but is, as it were, a 
 rejection of these attractions while in the act of 
 appreciating them. It is not, as in the case of 
 the mere aesthete, a submersion of the soul in 
 the flux of the world as the flux appears to us 
 stayed and informed by a force equivalent to the 
 inner check, but an invigorating sense of this 
 force as so manifesting itself in the world and as 
 drawing us by the world, and from the world, to 
 itself. And he who thus rests his eyes upon the 
 divine indwelling force of beauty, rather than 
 upon its scattered and inert manifestations, will 
 feel awakened within himself a kindred impulse, 
 not of passive pleasure, but of moral energy, 
 spurring him to engender true deeds of virtue, as 
 an immortal being raised into the companionship 
 of God. 
 
 With that last word we see how easily the su- 
 preme Idea passes into the field of religion. The 
 apex of our aesthetic experience which was at- 
 tained by the ascending steps of generalization is 
 now conversely regarded as a creative energy 
 reaching down into the world and imposing upon 
 its fleeting substance the forms and order of sta- 
 bihty. And this Cause of being, as contrasted 
 with the not-being of chaos, will become to Plato, 
 particularly in his later years, when in the 
 Timaeus and the Laws he turns from the vexa- 
 tions of metaphysical inquiry back to the less in- 
 quisitive faith of youth, simply God; not the 
 
202 PLATONISM 
 
 gods of the popular pantheon, whose story is 
 filled with the evils and atrocities of human law- 
 lessness, but the God, who is as it were the re- 
 flection in the mirror of the universe — it may 
 rather be the original and no reflection at all — 
 of that daemonic check in the soul which is the 
 cause of truth and beauty. 
 
 But withal, however large a part we may sup- 
 pose the supreme Idea to play in our aesthetic 
 and religious life, it was still more important, in 
 Plato's philosophy, to study it there in the soul 
 itself. For thus alone we shall not infer it by 
 metaphor or allegory, but know it, know it im- 
 mediately in its pure essence, as that for which 
 all other things are desired and which is the end 
 of all desire — the Good. And how do we know 
 that which surpasses knowing? The answer was 
 given by Plato in the argimient of The Republic; 
 it may be found summarily stated in an early 
 Christian theologian who was often a better 
 Academician than were the Pagans who usurped 
 the name: "Plato himself says that happiness 
 (eudaimonia) is the well-being of the daemon, 
 and that by the daemon is meant the governing 
 element of our soul, and that the most perfect 
 and fullest Good is this happiness."^ ^^ 
 
 ® Clemens Alexandrinus, Stromata, II, xxii, 131: *Avto? 
 8e 6 IIAaTwv T7]v evSaifioviav to ev tov BaLfiova €X^'*'' ^t'yuova Sc 
 XeyeaOaL to t^s if/v)(rjs ^fxCiv -qyefxovLKOv, tyjv Sc €v6aLfxovLav to 
 T€A.«OTaTOv dya^ov koI TrX-qpitrrarov Aeyci. 
 
DOCTRINE OF IDEAS WS 
 
 In this consummation of Plato's dialectic we 
 see how at last the three theses that wind in and 
 out of his Dialogues are brought together and 
 indissolubly united. The Good is the spiritual 
 affirmation of Socrates, spoken now in the tested 
 language of philosophy. It is the scepticism of 
 Socrates, since it states a fact that cannot be de- Republic 508e 
 fined in the terms of the understanding, and bids 
 the reason submit to this fact as to a master. In 
 its double aspect it is the solution of the Socratic 
 paradox, since with the soul's own feeling of hap- 
 piness it makes moral intuition the one certain 
 thing above peradventure, thus identifying mo- 
 rality and knowledge, while as the source of what 
 light we have to guide us in the practical decis- 
 ions of this world, it imparts a measure of truth 
 to our judgments and the power of judging to 
 the mind, thus identifying virtue and right opin- 
 ion. It is the limit of self-consciousness, given 
 by the soul to the imagination, and rendered by 
 the imagination back to the soul as an Idea, 
 :^ "more beautiful than truth or knowledge." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 
 
 With his habitual flexibility Plato, as we have 
 seen, used the term "Idea" both for the rational- 
 ized forms of things in time and space and for 
 the immediate intuitions of the soul. The latter 
 are the field of ethical dialectic, or true philo- 
 sophy, the former of intellectual dialectic, or 
 science; and the failure to discriminate resolute- 
 ly between these two fields has been a fruitful 
 source of error among self-styled Platonists 
 from the beginning down to the present day. 
 The confusion is in some measure attributable to 
 the fact that Plato had at command no specific 
 word corresponding to our conception of "sci- 
 ence," but, as in Latin, so in Greek, the same 
 general expression {scientia, episteme) had to do 
 duty for all kinds of knowledge. The chief task 
 of the conmientator, therefore, may sometimes 
 seem to be nothing more than the imposition of 
 a rigid terminology on the freer method of the 
 Master. The process, one admits, is not without 
 its dangers, similar to those that attend the 
 hardening of religious faith into formulated 
 creeds; but the risk is necessary, in the one case 
 
 204 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 205 
 
 as in the other, if we would guard oiu'selves 
 against the heresies that seek authority under the 
 cover of a great name. 
 
 In the introductory books of The Republic 
 Plato showed that a State is rightly governed 
 when there is a proper division of the citizens and 
 each class performs its own duties, one class 
 guiding, another defending, another producing. 
 In like manner an individual man is in a healthy 
 condition when his various faculties function nor- 
 mally. Both the State and the man, when so 
 functioning, possess the several virtues of wis- 
 dom, courage, and temperance, belonging re- 
 spectively to the separate classes and faculties. 
 In both, justice is regarded as the active prin- 
 ciple which, by its power of temporary or per- 
 manent veto, holds each class or faculty to the 
 performance of its particular duty; it is the dy- 
 namic centre of morality manifesting itself at 
 the periphery in the specific virtues. Now this 
 healthy condition can be assured only by that 
 complete self-knowledge which will place philo- 
 sophy in command of the soul and the philo- 
 sopher at the head of the State. What, then, is 
 the procedure by which we shall attain to this 
 knowledge? Manifestly it is by means of a 
 course of education directed not so much to the Republic sisc 
 acquisition of crude information ( Plato accepted 
 the old Greek saying that "much-learning does 
 not educate the mind") as to the end of turning 
 
W6 PLATONISM 
 
 the whole soul from the pursuit of shadows to the 
 contemplation of the one light of truth. 
 so9d ff It is at this point, before entering upon the 
 intellectual discipline necessary for the philo- 
 sopher, that Plato introduces the famous image 
 of the divided line, the nature of which can be 
 best displayed in a diagram, thus: 
 
 Opinion Knowledge 
 
 Conjecture I Belief I Understanding I Pure reason, 
 
 I I I Knowledge 
 
 Images, I Objects, I Mathematical 1 Ethical 
 
 Reflections, etc. | Animals,etc.| forms | experiences 
 
 At a first glance the main bifurcation here is 
 that between the two great fields covered the one 
 by opinion, with its two grades of conjecture and 
 belief, and the other by knowledge, with its two 
 corresponding grades; and this, indeed, is a 
 dichotomy that runs all through Plato's works — 
 on the one side the uncertain mutability of the 
 phenomenal world and of our relation to it, on the 
 other side the certain stability of the intelligible 
 world. Yet, as we follow the application of his 
 line to the actual system of education, we discover 
 that the emphasis of division undergoes signifi- 
 cant changes. To begin with, the first of the four 
 members, that of images and conjecture, is quiet- 
 ly dropped out of consideration, though, for other 
 purposes, it is taken up again in the last book of 
 Tlfie Republic. This leaves us with a threefold 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 207 
 
 division of material objects, mathematical forms, 
 and ethical experiences, which, it will be seen at 
 a glance, correspond to the three classes of Plato's 
 Ideas. Now, as Plato is dealing here with edu- 
 cation as a discipline in the knowledge of Ideas, 
 we should expect this triple classification to re- 
 divide so as to indicate two main groups, embrac- 
 ing on one side those generalizations from par- 
 ticulars and those mathematical forms which to- 
 gether are the subject matter of science, and on 
 the other side those intuitions which belong to 
 the true dialectic. And such is the case; Plato's 
 line does ultimately conform to this fundamental 
 dualism of his philosophy, although the fact is 
 obscured somewhat by the peculiar bent of his 
 mind. 
 
 In his conception of science, contrariwise in 
 this to his ethical procedure, Plato shows every- 
 where a strong bias towards the deductive meth- 
 od; and as a result his comparative contempt for 
 pure observation and for generalization by in- 
 duction led him to neglect the experimental and 
 biological bases which Aristotle did so much to 
 establish. Even the mania, as it might almost be 
 called, for classification which infests some of his 
 later Dialogues — notably the Sophist and the 
 Politicus — does not work itself out by an induc- 
 tive ascent from the less inclusive to the more in- 
 clusive, but proceeds downward by a series of 
 rather mechanical dichotomies. It follows that 
 
208 PLATONISM 
 
 the parts of science admitted into his educational 
 curriculum are preponderantly the deductive 
 branches of mathematics, beginning with arith- 
 metic and passing on through plane and solid 
 geometry to astronomy and musical harmony. 
 Though the Ideas corresponding to natural gen- 
 era, which are treated in the inductive sciences, 
 may not be excluded absolutely from such a 
 scheme, they will sink to a very subordinate 
 position. 
 
 In determining the place of astronomy and 
 music — more particularly the former — in such a 
 curriculum, Plato raises the question whether the 
 method of study then in vogue should not be 
 changed for one better suited to the purpose of 
 RepuMic S29c, philosophical training, and to this end he em- 
 phasizes the difference between the mere observa- 
 tion of phenomena and the pursuit of scientific, 
 or mathematical, law. All these devious lights 
 which we behold moving in the sky are indeed the 
 fairest and most orderly of visible objects, yet 
 are far from those true motions and those exact 
 forms apprehensible by the understanding alone 
 and not by the eyes. They are to be used as 
 rough diagrams written out for us in the heavens 
 and serviceable to the reason, but the geometer, 
 though acknowledging their excellence as works 
 of handicraft, would deem it absurd to study 
 them seriously as if in them could be found the 
 absolute laws of proportion. Now, some part of 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 209 
 
 this contempt for the slower procedure of obser- 
 vational science must be laid, as we have said, to 
 Plato's ineradicable distrust for things as they 
 are and to the deductive bias of his mind; but in 
 a measure also it can be ascribed to the imperfec- 
 tion of the available means of observation. The 
 astronomer of that day possessed no mechanical 
 instrument by which the motions of the celestial 
 bodies could be accurately observed and so made 
 the basis of mathematical formulae. Hence the 
 scientific astronomer (in Plato's sense of the 
 word) would be obliged to work upon an intel- 
 lectualized sphere, so to speak, of which the visi- 
 ble scroll of the heavens is a clumsy and ever- 
 changing imitation. In this notion of a mathe- 
 matical system which could be guessed at from 
 what was actually observed, Plato was looking 
 beyond his age to the time when the real science 
 of astronomy was possible; but we may suppose 
 also that, if he were Uving today, he would still 
 hold it a form of illusion to believe that the rela- 
 tions of material phenomena of any sort are such 
 as can be contained in a complete equation. He 
 would maintain that there is no perfect corre- 
 spondence but only an approximation between 
 the facts of observation and the generalized laws 
 which belong rather to the apparatus of our own 
 intelligence ; and in this, I take it, he would be in 
 accord with the most recent trend of scientific 
 theory. 
 
no PLATONISM 
 
 Observational astronomy Plato, therefore, 
 relegated to a place among the arts, and rejected 
 its pretensions to the name of science. The 
 higher education of the philosopher was not con- 
 cerned with those Ideas which correspond to gen- 
 eralizations from particular objects such as men 
 or tables, or from the visible motions of phenom- 
 ena, even the majestic phenomena of the heavens, 
 but with those Ideas of form and quantity and 
 time which belong to the pure understanding ; not 
 with the stars and their measured orbits, but with 
 the absolute circles and ellipses of an immaterial 
 world. Yet this ideal science, all science indeed, 
 is only a part of the propaedeutic to the veritable 
 interest of the philosopher; we reach at last the 
 essential division in Plato's scheme. To compre- 
 hend this bifurcation we must recur again to the 
 fourfold line in which the progress of education 
 was figured, and must take note of a curious am- 
 biguity in its terminology. 
 
 Under the higher division of "knowledge," as 
 distinguished from "opinion," are embraced two 
 fields: one of mathematical forms and the cor- 
 responding faculty, or understanding; the other 
 of ethical experiences and the faculty corre- 
 sponding to these, which, among its various ap- 
 pellations, is called by precisely the same term, 
 "knowledge," as that under which both of these 
 spheres are subsumed. That is to say, we are 
 brought once more face to face with the trouble- 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 211 
 
 some fact that Plato recognized two kinds of 
 knowledge (entirely apart from the realm of 
 opinion), and that in some passages he treats 
 these as if identical, while in other passages the 
 central thesis of his philosophy seems to depend 
 on maintaining a distinction between them. 
 
 Certainly this distinction is made with formal 
 precision, and the relative places of science and 
 dialectic are settled without ambiguity, in the 
 closing paragraphs of the sixth book. Students ^^"J'J'ff 
 of arithmetic and geometry, it is there said, as- 
 sume the odd and even forms, the three kinds of 
 triangles, and the like as universally admitted 
 hypotheses which need no proof, and from these 
 proceed to demonstrate whatever problem they 
 have in view. They use, indeed, visible figures in 
 these demonstrations, but in reality their concern 
 is with the absolute square, for instance, or the 
 absolute diagonal, which exist in the understand- 
 ing alone and of which the diagrams drawn by 
 them are only symbols. This procedure belongs 
 to the intelligible sphere of knowledge, although 
 in it the soul cannot rise to first principles but is 
 obliged to cling to hypotheses, employing for this 
 purpose the intellectualized figures of those ma- 
 terial objects of which the shadowy reflections (in 
 the lowest of the four divisions) are the field of 
 conjecture. Such is the sphere of geometry and 
 the other mathematical sciences. In contrast 
 with this is the higher sphere of the intelligible 
 
212 PLATONISM 
 
 (the highest of the four divisions) . Here, reason 
 starts indeed with hypotheses, as it does in sci- 
 ence, but uses them merely as a point of de- 
 parture for its ascent into a world that is above 
 hypothesis, and so mounting climbs to the first 
 principle of all (the Good). This is the world 
 of knowledge and true being contemplated by 
 dialectic (that is, ethical dialectic, as shown in 
 Plato's practical illustrations, though he does not 
 here so qualify it), a clearer and purer world 
 than that of the sciences so-called. The activity 
 of the mind concerned with geometry and its 
 cognates is properly termed understanding and 
 not reason (the higher reason, or intuition), as 
 falling between opinion and reason.^ 
 
 I do not see how it could be averred in plainer 
 language that the essential division of the line 
 marks off dialectic alone on the one side, and on 
 the other side the three fields of which mathe- 
 matics and its abstractions are the highest. And 
 the value of science, as of the departments below 
 it, is not in itself, but in its use as a gymnasium, 
 or training place, for the mind that is preparing 
 for the philosophic life. Each study, beginning 
 with the common arts, is an illustration, so to 
 speak, of that above it; practice of the lower 
 faculty is a discipline for the exercise of the 
 
 ■^ Republic 51 Id: Aiavotav 8e KaXeiv ftoi SokcTs t^v t<ov yeoy- 
 fierpLKOiv T€ Koi rrjv twv tolovtwv l^tv aW* ov vovv, w? fierai-u ri 
 Sd^ijs Tc Kui VOX) T^v 8tavoiav ovtrav. 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 213 
 
 higher, while the potential presence of the higher 
 demonstrates itself in the activity of the lower. 
 There is nothing of the "ivory tower" in this sys- 
 tem, no place for the dreamer in wisdom or for 
 the antinomian hypocrite; and Plato is as thor- 
 oughly convinced as St. James that faith and ^^an^l'^'et fol^ 
 works cannot be disjoined. How otherwise could 
 it be in a doctrine wherein the assurance of truth 
 takes the form of happiness attending an active 
 and unremitting self-government? And so, how- 
 ever sharply Plato's philosophy in its logical as- 
 pect falls into an absolute dualism, in practice it 
 is always presented as a slow ascent of the soul 
 by the steps of physical and mental and moral 
 discipline. 
 
 If, in the course of education just described, 
 the mathematical sciences seem to have usurped 
 an undue prominence, our judgment of the fact 
 must take various considerations into accoimt. 
 In the first place it must be remembered that the 
 training of the body and the ordinary instruction 
 in the arts had already been discussed by Plato 
 at great length in earlier books of The Republic, 
 And, secondly, mathematical studies were the 
 only ones sufficiently advanced in Greece to offer 
 the sort of discipline obtained in our graduate 
 schools today in many fields of history and lin- 
 guistic beyond the preparatory and general 
 education of the college. But even if this were 
 not the case, it is probable that Plato would have 
 
214 PLATONISM 
 
 regarded studies of which geometry is the type 
 as pecuharly adapted to the immediate prepara- 
 tion for the hfe in philosophy towards which all 
 serious education was directed. For mathe- 
 matics, like dialectic, deals with unchanging real- 
 ities, though in a different sphere of the ideal 
 world; and by our experience with the fixed 
 hypothetical abstractions of mathematics he 
 would hold that we are helped to rise above a du- 
 bious recognition of the shifting standards of 
 custom and tradition into loyalty to the eternal 
 veracity of ethical Ideas. 
 
 Furthermore, and this, perhaps, is the real key 
 to Plato's exaggerated interest in the science of 
 s25d number, mathematics rests finally on the basis 
 of the one and the many, abstracting from the 
 perception of the divisible one and the unifiable 
 many the conception of an absolute One and an 
 absolute Many. And this distinction between 
 unity and multiplicity, the uniform and the va- 
 rious, the unchanging and the changing, the self- 
 complete and the progressive, at once abstract 
 and corresponding to actual experience, is the 
 only resource at our command to express in lan- 
 guage of the understanding the ultimate dualism 
 (as we thus call it) of consciousness upon which 
 morality is founded. With this instrument at his 
 disposal, the dialectical philosopher is able to 
 give an account of himself, and to ward off de- 
 lusive notions and the attacks of false logic. He 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 215 
 
 not only possesses the faith of intuition, but is 
 armed with the full panoply of discursive reason. 
 In Socrates Plato saw the perfect model of such 
 a dialectical gladiator. 
 
 The Dialogue in which Plato develops his sci- 
 entific theories in connection with a vision of the 
 universe as a whole is the Timaeus, I suspect 
 that most students who approach this strange 
 piece of writing will undergo an experience some- 
 what as follows. A first reading is likely to leave 
 them merely confused and mystified. A second 
 reading will lead them to feel that part of the 
 Dialogue, the religious speculation, contains a 
 sublime allegory, while another part, the scientific 
 speculation, still repels them as futile and weari- 
 some. A third reading may bring the conviction 
 that even this scientific speculation, though in de- 
 tail often resting on hasty assumptions and miss- 
 ing the inductive method of experiment, is yet as 
 a whole one of the very great achievements of the 
 human brain. Certainly the attempt to reduce 
 the material universe to a purely geometrical and 
 mechanical system has allured thinking men from 
 that day to this, with, it must be added, utterly 
 different results according as they have been true 
 or not to the spirit in which Plato himself con- 
 ceived the function of science. 
 
 Whatever may be doubtful in the interpreta- 
 tion of the Timaeus, one thing ought to be be- 
 yond question: the whole argument is founded 
 
216 PLATONISM 
 
 on a radical dualism. To say, with the English 
 editor, that here we find "Platonism as a com- 
 plete and coherent scheme of monistic idealism,"^ 
 is to suffer the error, only too common at the 
 present day, of forcing into Plato's words a meta- 
 physic which is quite contrary to their plain 
 meaning. The true thesis is stated imequivocally 
 
 27d in the opening sentences of the argument: "In 
 the first place, then, in my opinion, we must dis- 
 tinguish these two things: What is that which 
 always is and has no becoming, and what is that 
 which, always becoming, never is? The one, be- 
 ing always the same, we comprehend by thought 
 with reason; the other, becoming and perishing, 
 never really being, we guess at by opinion with 
 unreasoning perception." And this distinction 
 is repeated at the opening of the second main di- 
 
 47k vision of the argument: "What we have said 
 hitherto, with slight exceptions, was concerned 
 with exhibiting the things created through mind, 
 or reason ; but we must now add to our exposition 
 
 5iD the things that become out of necessity. ... If 
 reason and true opinion are two things different 
 in kind, then do the unchangeable Ideas surely 
 exist as objects of reason alone, not perceptible 
 by our senses; but if, as some hold, true opinion 
 differs in nothing from reason, then all that we 
 perceive by our bodily organs must be regarded 
 as having the most real existence." 
 
 ^ Archer-Hind, Introduction, p. 2. 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 217 
 
 That is to say, in both the grand divisions of 
 the argument the starting-point is the immediate 
 consciousness of that duahsm within the soul it- 
 self which, intellectually, appears as knowledge 
 and opinion; and from this the assumption is 
 made that the world of which we are members 
 must conform in some way to this double opera- 
 tion of consciousness. If we have reason, a cer- 
 tainty of knowledge, there must exist in the imi- 
 verse at large a sphere of changeless, eternal ob- 
 jects which can thus be known, the Ideas, and 
 these must be absolutely different in kind from 
 the objects of physical perception which have the 
 changing, ephemeral nature of opinion. The cos- 
 mogony of the Timaeus will be a marvellously 
 unrolling picture of the relation and interaction 
 between these two elements, a supreme effort of 
 the imagination working out the story of crea- 
 tion, not in capricious license, but imder the con- 
 trol at each step of the law of our own inner be- 
 ing — at least such ought to be the procedure, 
 and such the procedure is when Plato remains 
 true to his own law of scepticism. 
 
 At the centre of this story lies the great pas- 
 sage, already quoted as one of the mottoes of this 
 book, which, more clearly perhaps than any other 
 words in Plato, states the purpose and character 
 of his philosophical investigation: "Wherefore ess 
 we must discriminate between two kinds of cause, 
 the one of necessity, the other divine: and the 
 
218 PLATONISM 
 
 divine cause we must seek in all things, to the 
 end that we may possess a happy life so far as 
 our nature permits; and the necessary cause for 
 the sake of the divine, reflecting that otherwise 
 we cannot apprehend by themselves those truths 
 which are the object of our serious study, nor 
 grasp them or in any other way partake of them." 
 Such is the double aspect of the world, a divine 
 element and a substratum of brute necessity, as 
 reflected in the dualism of our own souls ; and the 
 tale of creation is divided accordingly into two 
 sections, as the work is considered to proceed 
 from above downwards or from below upwards. 
 In the first account, taken in briefest outline, 
 we are told how God creates the actual world as 
 a living animal in likeness of the ideal world. As 
 to the manner in which Plato conceives this ideal 
 model of which our imiverse is the imperfect, but 
 the best possible, imitation, there is no clear state- 
 ment ; the conception is left in the same mythical 
 penumbra that always surrounds his theory of 
 Ideas. Are these Ideas, we ask, the thoughts of 
 God, or are they eternal laws, or substantial enti- 
 ties of some sort existing outside of himself ; and 
 there is no definite reply. The like insoluble 
 question, whether holiness and righteousness are 
 determined by God's will or themselves determine 
 iod it, was raised in the Euthyphro, as it has been 
 raised since by Christian theologians and left un- 
 answered. In a general way we may say this: 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 219 
 
 that the conception of Ideas runs parallel in 
 Plato's mind with the mythology of a vaguely 
 personal deity; when the mere immanence of the 
 divine in the phenomenal world, or the similarity 
 of the phenomenal to the divine, is dominant in 
 his thought, then the divine floats before his vis- 
 ion as the Ideal, and he speaks as a philosopher ; 
 but when the divine is considered rather as an 
 energy or cause working upon brute material and 
 moulding it as a man shapes an image to his will, 
 then he is wont to speak in theological language 
 of God, the creator and upholder and judge. 
 
 Having created this world-soul and its vehicle, 
 God then mixes what remains of the soul-stuff, 
 distributes it to the stars (not as planetary souls, 
 but as material for further use), and implants 
 in it knowledge of its destiny and duty. There- 
 upon he rests, and calls upon the lesser gods to 
 fashion the various creatures in their kinds, leav- 
 ing this task to his lieutenants lest any one 
 should impute to the hand of the supreme Demi- 
 urge the imperfections that must inhere in indi- 
 vidual things. First his delegates compose the 
 soul of man, of three parts: reason, which is 
 placed in the brain and so separated from the 
 other two faculties and from the influence of the 
 grosser body; the thymos (the seat of the per- 
 sonal emotions), which goes to the breast, and is 
 generally an assistant of reason in governing the 
 third faculty; and this third faculty, the concu- 
 
220 PLATONISM 
 
 piscent element, situated in the abdomen. As in 
 The Republic, the significant division is between 
 reason, which is divine and immortal, and the 
 emotional and concupiscent members of the soul, 
 which are mortal and often indistinguishable 
 from the body. 
 
 The second part of the Dialogue takes up the 
 story of creation from the material side. The 
 substratum of the world, upon which the Demi- 
 urge and his delegates work, is described as the 
 expansion of space, or the irregular and unrest- 
 ing flux, which is brought into comparative order 
 by the imposition of limits and geometric forms. 
 We have thus the fundamental dualism falling 
 into a counterpart of the fourfold scheme of the 
 Philebus: at the one extreme is the "cause," or 
 God, at the other extreme the "infinite*' (apei- 
 ron, more properly the limitlessness of chaos than 
 our notion of infinity) ; and between them the ir- 
 rational relation of these two extremes, expressed 
 as the "limit," or mathematical form, and the 
 "limited," or formal world. But for the infinite 
 of the Philebus Plato substitutes in the Timaeus 
 a term of wider and deeper significance. This 
 substratum of the limitless flux is now called by 
 the name "necessity" (ananke), which points at 
 once to the double aspect of creation that was al- 
 ways more or less clearly present to Plato's mind. 
 So important, in fact, is the implication of this 
 word, that on its interpretation may depend one's 
 right to be classed as a true Platonist. 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY SSI 
 
 As in the philosophical mythology Goodness is 
 placed at the apex of the Ideas, whence its in- 
 fluence reached down the ladder of life, so in the 
 theological view of creation Goodness is the mo- 
 tive of God's action and the end of being. "He 
 was good," says Timaeus at the beginning of his ^^e 
 tale, "and in the good there never can be envy of 
 aught. And being free from this quality, he de- 
 sired all things to be as like to himself as possi- 
 ble. This is that sovereign principle of creatioij 
 and of the imiverse which we most certainly shall 
 be right in accepting from wise men. For God, 
 in his desire that all things should be good and 
 that, so far as possible, there should be nothing 
 evil, took the visible material as it came to him, 
 lying not in a state of rest but moving without 
 harmony or measure; and out of disorder he 
 brought it into order, thinking such a state alto- 
 gether better than the other." And so, when the 
 act of creation is completed, the world is a place 
 of forms and motions ordered to the end of good- 
 ness, in so far as is permitted by natural neces- 
 sity consenting and yielding to the persuasion of 
 reason. 
 
 In the use of this word "necessity" we see how 
 the ethical basis of Plato's philosophy becomes 
 in his cosmogony teleological. Here, as always, 
 his point of departure is the consciousness of our 
 moral being, and if there may seem to be some 
 taint of the pathetic fallacy in such a reading of 
 
222 PLATONISM 
 
 human motive into nature, it is fair to remember 
 that any comprehensible theory of the cause of 
 things must incur the same condemnation. The 
 modern conception of natural law, though ex- 
 pressed in the most strictly scientific terms, will 
 in the end be found to depend on an implicit 
 trust in the submission of nature to reason and 
 rightness. The chief difference is that the mod- 
 ern man of science, in formulating his general 
 hypotheses, is likely to be less aware of his men- 
 tal processes and more subject to naive illusions 
 than was Plato. 
 
 But if necessity has this teleological aspect, it 
 has also another aspect in which formal reason 
 rather than purpose is pre-eminent. Looked at 
 in one way (which is the essentially Platonic 
 way) the theory of a divine cause and necessity 
 exhibits even the material world as the field of 
 ethical Ideas ; from another point of view it seems 
 for the moment to leave these in obscurity, and 
 shows only the rational Ideas of form and num- 
 ber. Then it may be that the immortal soul it- 
 self, whether animating the universe as a whole 
 or the individual creatures within the universe, 
 is described, in the language of a geometrician, as 
 possessing the faculty of reason and self-govern- 
 ment because its secret motions follow the laws 
 of mathematical proportion, and, a fortiori, the 
 material world is conceived as a rational system 
 because of the imposition of these same laws upon 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 223 
 
 the chaos of necessity. We are in the reahn of 
 physical science. 
 
 In accordance with the popular notions of the 
 day Plato divided matter into the four elements ; 
 but these were rather variations of one aborigi- 
 nal substance in its fiery, gaseous, liquid, and 
 solidified states than separate and permanent 
 substances. I shall not attempt to follow his 
 elaborate account of the production of these ele- 
 ments and of their combinations and mutations. 
 In brief, Plato traces geometric forms back to 
 their origin, and finds that the simplest figures 
 are the scalene and the isosceles triangle. By 
 combinations of the former he constructs the 
 equilateral triangle, and from this the three regu- 
 lar solids — the pyramid, the octohedron, and the 
 icosahedron. Out of the isosceles triangle he 
 constructs the square, and from this the cube. 
 By the imposition of these four tridimensional 
 figures on the formless substratum he creates re- 
 spectively his four elements — fire, air, water, 
 earth. The actual phenomena perceived by us, 
 as well as the organs of perception, result from 
 the adhesions, transmutations, and interactions of 
 these elements caused by the unresting impulse 
 which they bring with them out of the aboriginal 
 flux of necessity. 
 
 Many of the details of Plato's system display 
 the faults of a mind too easily satisfied with a 
 priori reasoning, yet in its main outlines it is one 
 
2M PLATONISM 
 
 of the most grandiose and fruitful of human in- 
 ventions. The substance of the world as he saw 
 it was intrinsically that to which the chemist and 
 physicist of today are looking — a field of energy 
 the differentiations of which are expressed in nu- 
 merical formulae, or, in other words, a combina- 
 tion of motion and form. The whole reach of 
 manifest existence, from the obscure actions of 
 the atom to the uttermost sweep of the revolving 
 spheres of the heavens, falls into a vast mathe- 
 matical equation. Much of the inspiration of 
 this theory came to Plato, no doubt, from Pytha- 
 gorean and other sources, but what to his prede- 
 cessors had been a vague dream he saw as a co- 
 ordinate and rational system. So far as the 
 mathematical interpretation of the material uni- 
 verse can be attributed to the invention of one 
 human brain, the honour of the achievement be- 
 longs to Plato. 
 
 It is not strange that the Timaeus should have 
 been one of the most influential of Plato's works. 
 Through the Middle Ages the role of the Demi- 
 urge harmonized sufficiently with the Hebrew 
 Jehovah to shape the Christian conceptions of 
 creation, while the Ideas as models of the visible 
 world could be accepted as the eternal thoughts 
 of God, thus bringing philosophy and theology 
 into a peaceful union. With the RenaissaiJce 
 other aspects of the Dialogue came more to the 
 front, and played no inconsiderable part in that 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 225 
 
 mathematical revival which, side by side with the 
 biological and inductive principles of develop- 
 ment, marked the great awakening of science. 
 But it must be admitted, however reluctantly, 
 that, so far as the influence of Plato has been felt 
 in this direction, it has tended to foster rather an 
 improper subordination of philosophy to science 
 than a furtherance of legitimate scientific dis- 
 covery. And for this degradation of philosophy, 
 though it is in essence the very contrary of 
 Platonism, we cannot entirely exonerate Plato 
 himself. It may not be fair to blame him for the 
 common failure to comprehend what has been 
 called his economy of method, his habit, that is, 
 of taking for granted that the main theses of his 
 philosophy will be kept in memory by his reader 
 and need not be constantly repeated when some 
 outlying question is imder consideration. Nor is 
 it to his discredit that he was always the searcher 
 after truth, winding his arguments sinuously 
 back and forth in such a way that one not natu- 
 rally akin to him in spirit may easily miss the 
 steady tidal setting of his thought. But it is a 
 different matter when at times he allows himself 
 to be so far carried away by subordinate inter- 
 ests as to approach something like treachery to 
 his own deeper intuition. In particular there is 
 abundant evidence in the Dialogues and else- 
 where that in his old age he wandered into a 
 mathematical mysticism for which enigmatic is 
 
226 PLATONISM 
 
 a mild word. The numerical proportion on 
 which the soul of the world is constructed in the 
 35a 5 Timaeus, the calculation of the great year of ex- 
 546b €f istence in The Republic, to take the examples 
 that have maddened innumerable commentators, 
 are fantastic and, at bottom, meaningless. It 
 may be also that in his lectures on the Good he 
 permitted this lust of science to usurp a place in 
 the realm of ethical dialectic which he himself 
 had denied to it. We can in a way understand 
 his purpose and justify his procedure. These 
 mathematical entities to which he reduced moral 
 values were, we may suppose, not actual num- 
 bers, but the principles of number — if such a 
 phrase means anything. The quantitative Ideas 
 of unity and division might be taken as symbols 
 of the qualitative Ideas of dialectic; and for this 
 substitution there is a certain intellectual justi- 
 fication, as I have pointed out, so long as the 
 character of the substitution is not forgotten. 
 But such a procedure is at least perilous in itself, 
 and was certainly disastrous in its consequences. 
 It was almost inevitable that his followers, lack- 
 ing his own sure intuition, should seize on this 
 mathematical symbolism and apply it in the 
 crudest fashion to the expression of dialectical 
 truths — how crude the fashion we may see in the 
 spurious continuation of the Laws entitled Epi- 
 nomis. This recrudescence of Pythagorean spec- 
 ulations must have begun very soon after Plato's 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 227 
 
 death. At least we know that Xenocrates, who 
 succeeded Speusippus, Plato's nephew, as head 
 of the Academy, defined the world-soul and indi- 
 vidual souls as self -moving number. Naturally 
 the critics of Platonism laid hold of this mad- 
 ness and exaggerated its importance. Aristotle^ 
 did not hesitate to ridicule the theory of Xeno- 
 crates in particular as the most absurd ever 
 broached by man. 
 
 This is the phase of Platonism that, despite its 
 early critics, has been cropping up in modern 
 times ever since the Renaissance. It would not 
 be easy to say how far these unexpected results 
 may be traced to a renewed interest in Plato 
 along with the revival of science, and how far 
 they are attributable to the natural inclination of 
 the human mind to magnify the scope of its own 
 achievements.* But certainly the analogy of the 
 geometrical scheme of the Timaeus with the 
 mechanistic hypotheses of Descartes is sufficient- 
 ly close to suggest at least an imconscious causal 
 relation between the two. And from Descartes 
 the mischievous confusion comes to a cHmax in 
 Spinoza, who undertakes to interpret the world 
 by an argument proceeding from axioms to 
 theorems and corollaries after the rigorous man- 
 ner of EucHd's geometry. From such a system 
 
 ^ De Anima, 1, iv, 16. 
 
 * For the influence of Platonism and Neoplatonism in this 
 respect, see Kurd Lasswitz, Geschichte der Atomistik I, 
 pp. 264-269. 
 
228 PLATONISM 
 
 teleological design and liberty of the spirit are 
 absolutely excluded. If the universe is to be ex- 
 plained entirely on mathematical principles, it 
 must be purely mechanical in its structure, with 
 no place for spontaneity or deliberate purpose. 
 The Darwinian law of evolution by natural se- 
 lection, in which biology joined hands with a 
 mathematical law of probability, gave new sanc- 
 tion to the inclusion of the human spirit in the 
 grinding cogs of a huge machine. The "block 
 universe" of Huxley, though he violently repudi- 
 ated Platonism, is in reality a late stage of the 
 scientific philosophy that, apparently, was im- 
 ported into the Academy by Xenocrates. And 
 in our own days we have the much-applauded ef- 
 forts of Mr. Bertrand Russell and certain of the 
 so-called New Realists to reduce the Platonic 
 Ideas to mathematical entities. 
 
 It is easy, as I have said, to see how this sub- 
 jection of philosophy to mathematics may be as- 
 sociated with certain unguarded statements of 
 Plato in the Timaeus and elsewhere, but it rests, 
 nevertheless, on a total misconception of his real 
 position. The relation of dialectic to science is, 
 in fact, precisely the same in the Timaeus as in 
 The Republic, The two realms of Ideas at their 
 beginning lie close together, and the knowledge 
 of the one may almost coalesce with the know- 
 ledge of the other. At least in the degree of cer- 
 tainty attending them the moral generalizations 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 229 
 
 from our conduct may seem at their start to dif- 
 fer little from the mathematical and geometric 
 abstractions of the intellect; but the progress 
 from the two classes of generalizations is in dia- 
 metrically opposite directions. In the case of 
 dialectic we proceed from hypothesis to the un- 
 hypothetical facts of ethical experience, and so, 
 by the gradual elimination of what is contingent, 
 rise to the immediate consciousness of that ele- 
 ment of the soul which is the basis of our moral 
 nature, and to the imaginative conception of God, 
 or the Good, as the primal cause of order and 
 beauty and joy in the world; whereas in the case 
 of science we proceed by continually immersing 
 the Ideas deeper and deeper into the lawless un- 
 knowable flux of necessity. As we pass from the 
 pure science of mathematics to the more mixed 
 and comphcated fields of physics and chemistry 
 and biology, our laws become continually less 
 rigorous, our formulae more subject to exception 
 and reversal, our generalization more dependent 
 on the accumulation of detailed observation. It 
 is for this reason that all through the Timaeus 
 we find Plato, as soon as he leaves the abstrac- 
 tions of number and form, employing the words 
 "probable" (eikos) , "probably" (eikotos) ; and 
 the measure of the gap between scientific conjec- 
 ture and dialectical assurance may be taken by 
 comparing the constant and unabashed use of 
 such phrases in the Timaeus with Plato's scorn 
 
230 PLATONISM 
 
 and contempt in the Phaedrus and elsewhere for 
 the sophistical substitution of probability and 
 flattery for the unyielding truth in questions of 
 civic and personal morality. To ascribe know- 
 ledge and certainty to physical science and to 
 deny man's inner freedom by imprisoning the 
 spirit in a huge mechanism of fixed and calculable 
 natural law is to invert the whole order of the 
 Platonic philosophy. 
 
 The result of such an inversion is shown strik- 
 ingly in the different connotations of the word 
 "necessity" in Plato and Marcus Aurelius. To 
 the former necessity meant the resistance of the 
 meaningless and incomprehensible flux of things, 
 whether in nature or the human soul, to the gov- 
 ernment of order and happiness ; it was the exact 
 contrary of the spirit, which is shrined in liberty. 
 To the imperial Stoic necessity was the binding 
 force of the whole world, leaving to the spirit this 
 poor relic of freedom alone, that it might form its 
 own opinion as to the moral character of the uni- 
 versal flux of which it was itself also a part, and 
 so might persist in praising that as good which it 
 felt to be evil. The stoicism of a Marcus Aure- 
 lius was not without its forcible consolations, but 
 for all its protestations it was intrinsically a doc- 
 trine of sadness and of spiritual sterility ; and the 
 modern stoicism of science is gray with the same 
 disease. More than that, there is no stable foun- 
 dation of conduct in this physical necessity taken 
 
SCIENCE AND COSMOGONY 231 
 
 as a substitute for spiritual law. In the end men 
 will clamour for release from such joyless servi- 
 tude ; if they cannot discover the way of freedom 
 in the law of the spirit, they will throw open the 
 gate of the soul to the throng of invading de- 
 sires, and the stoical necessity of science, save 
 for the few exceptional minds, will remain as a 
 theory, while in practice the mass of mankind 
 will follow a rebellious and epicurean individ- 
 ualism. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 METAPHYSICS 
 
 By metaphysics I should say that, here and 
 elsewhere, I mean something different from phil- 
 osophy. The latter is the sincere and humble en- 
 deavour to make clear and precise to ourselves 
 the fundamental facts of our conscious life, and 
 47a than philosophy, as Plato says in the Timaeus, 
 no greater good has come nor ever will come to 
 mortal men as a gift from the gods. Its method 
 and its truth are summed up in the three Socratic 
 theses — scepticism, spiritual affirmation, and the 
 paradoxical identification of virtue and know- 
 ledge. Metaphysics differs from philosophy in 
 this, that it essays to give a consistent explana- 
 tion of the rerum natura, including our conscious- 
 ness, in the terms of pure reason, thereby playing 
 false to the law of scepticism and affecting a 
 rational reconciliation of the Socratic dualism. 
 266b "' Reason in itself is the faculty of combining and 
 dividing. Thus, in what may be broadly called 
 the world of science, reason is properly employed 
 in combinations ending in mathematical unity 
 and in divisions proceeding to the infinitesimal. 
 It fulfils also a most important function in philo- 
 sophy, so long as it follows the perception of 
 
METAPHYSICS 233 
 
 actual similarities and differences in what may be 
 called the quantitative field of our moral exper- 
 ience; the whole sphere of practical virtue is to 
 this extent dependent upon it. But reason be- 
 comes metaphysical — or eristic, as Plato would 
 have said — the moment it presumptuously disre- 
 gards the dualism of consciousness and attempts 
 by its own naked force to build up a theoretic 
 world of abstract unity excluding multiplicity or 
 of abstract multiplicity excluding unity. Mor- 
 ally expressed, it is equally the error of metaphys- 
 ics to explain away the reality of evil in favour of 
 some conception of infinite goodness and to deny 
 the existence of the absolute Good in favour of 
 some conception of infinite relativity.^ 
 
 The former error, that of false idealism, crept 
 into the Academy at an early date. From the 
 conmientary of Proclus on. the passage in the 
 Timaeus concerning the goodness of God and 
 God's treatment of the flux of necessity in crea- 
 tion,^ it appears that these words were the battle- 
 ground of two great schools of interpretation, 
 echoes of whose wrangling still disturb the air of 
 quiet study. The leaders of one of these sects 
 were Plutarch and, more particularly, Atticus 
 (not, of course, the friend of Cicero, but a writer 
 of the second half of the second century a.d.), 
 
 ^ For this distinction between dialectic and eristic (or 
 metaphysic) see Philebus 17a. 
 
 ^ See the preceding chapter, p. 221. 
 
234 PLATONISM 
 
 who saw in Plato first of all the ethical philoso- 
 pher. To them the distinction between good and 
 evil was primordial and eternal. The substratum 
 of the flux existed always, and received its im- 
 pulse to chaotic motion from an eternal soul of 
 evil. Here they would have been wiser had they 
 been satisfied with Plato's deliberate choice of the 
 ambiguous word "necessity" for the nature of 
 this substratimi, instead of laying undue empha- 
 sis on a phrase in the Laws and erecting our con- 
 896e sciousness of good and evil into an unverifiable 
 hypothesis of two world-souls. A more serious 
 error lay in introducing the order of time into the 
 moral order, and in insisting on a temporal pri- 
 ority of the flux and the soul of evil to the event 
 of creation. To this degree they changed the 
 allegory of the Timaeus to a rationalized transac- 
 tion, and laid themselves open to charges of in- 
 consistency which their opponents were not slow 
 to drive home. 
 
 The other school, represented by Porphyry, 
 lamblichus, and the later Neoplatonists general- 
 ly, including Proclus himself, sought for the car- 
 dinal doctrine of Plato in intellectual Ideas (de- 
 spite the fact that Plato had subordinated these 
 immistakably to the ethical order of which alone 
 we have pure knowledge), and so virtually de- 
 nied the antinomy of good and evil in favour of a 
 rationally imified conception of the imiverse. 
 Starting with the assumption of a superessential 
 
METAPHYSICS ^B5 
 
 monism, they rebuked the views of their dualistic 
 opponents as impiously abrogating either the 
 goodness or the omnipotence of God. If God, 
 they said, is both absolutely good and creatively 
 omnipotent, then his work of creation must be 
 eternal and entirely good. Brought face to face 
 with the question of existing evil, they explained 
 it away by a vast hocus-pocus of metaphysical 
 emanations and subsumptions. The Whole is 
 absolutely one and absolutely good, but by its 
 very attribute of being it must be productive 
 of other being, and creation becomes a process 
 of endless self -division of the One which some- 
 how leaves the One undivided. The members 
 so produced are good, as related to the whole; 
 they may appear evil, as related to one another. 
 Evil is merely a Contingent of subordinate ex- 
 istence^ — all of which, to the mind hungering 
 after the truth, is nothing but "words, words, 
 words." 
 
 Now, whatever may have been the mistakes of 
 Atticus otherwise, in his insistence on the prime 
 importance of both good and evil as facts not to 
 be juggled out of sight he was faithful to his 
 master in the matter which really counted philo- 
 sophically; and, in general, the little we know of 
 him from Proclus and Eusebius leads us to es- 
 teem him as one of the few genuine Platonists, 
 
 ^ Hav TO KaKov Kara Trapviroa-raa-LV eo-rt. — Proclus, In 
 Timaeum 116a. 
 
236 PLATONISM 
 
 and to regret the loss of his works as a calamity. 
 It is, perhaps, the most deplorable event in the 
 history of philosophy that the true tradition of 
 Platonism was swallowed up in Neoplatonism 
 and never to this day has escaped from the verbal 
 metaphysic of a Proclus/ 
 
 Plato's own attitude towards the claims of 
 metaphysics is best seen in the Dialogue, called 
 by the name of his great monistic predecessor, in 
 which he comes to close grips with the rational 
 contradictions inherent in the doctrine of Ideas; 
 
 * There is an interesting passage in the introduction to 
 Thomas Taylor's translation of the Select Works of Ploti- 
 nus, which shows how the leaders of the romantic revival, 
 by a natural affinity, turned for their Platonism to the 
 Alexandrian interpreters. "For though Grantor, Atticus, 
 Albinus, Galen, and Plutarch," he says, "were men of great 
 genius, and made no common proficiency in philosophic at- 
 tainments, yet they appear not to have developed the pro- 
 fundity of Plato's conceptions; they withdrew not the veil 
 which covers his secret meaning, like the curtains which 
 guarded the adytum of temples from the profane eye; and 
 they saw not that all behind the veil is luminous, and that 
 there divine spectacles everywhere present themselves to 
 the view. This task was reserved for men who were born 
 indeed in a baser age, but who being allotted a nature simi- 
 lar to their master were the true interpreters of his sublime 
 and mystic speculations. Of these Plotinus was the leader, 
 and to him this philosophy is indebted for its genuine restor- 
 ation, and for that succession of philosophic heroes 
 [Porphyry, lamblichus, Proclus, et al.], who were lumi- 
 nous links of the golden chain of deity." — And still today 
 the English editor of the Timaeus, Mr. Archer-Hind, in his 
 note to the passage under consideration (30a), expressly 
 ranges himself with the Neoplatonists. 
 
METAPHYSICS 237 
 
 and our view of his philosophy is likely in the 
 end to be coloured by our interpretation of this 
 extraordinary piece of writing. Now it may be 
 admitted at once that, if ever there was a prob- 
 lem that verified the proverb quot homines tot 
 sententiae, it is the meaning of the Parmenides, 
 The literature on the subject is enormous, and is 
 based on views not only divergent in various de- 
 grees but often mutually destructive. I take it 
 that the Platonist or the student of philosophy 
 generally will at least be grateful for a classified 
 survey of these interpretations, however he may 
 feel disposed towards the new interpretation 
 which I have the temerity to add to the list al- 
 ready portentously long. 
 
 To begin with the extremists. There are those 
 who see in the Dialogue a frank and imreserved 
 attack on the doctrine of Ideas, and who, accord- 
 ingly, reject the work as spurious, on the ground, 
 mainly, that Plato himself could not possibly 
 have treated the central thesis of his philosophy 
 in this manner. The first to support this view was 
 Socher.^ The other extreme is represented by 
 Fouillee, who takes the Dialogue throughout as 
 a positive argument for Ideas.^ His position is 
 briefly this: in the first part of the Dialogue 
 Parmenides shows that the union of contraries in 
 the sensible world implies a similar union of con- 
 
 ^ Ueber Platon's Schriften, published in 1820. 
 ^ La Philosophie de Platon I, 203, 204. 
 
288 PLATONISM 
 
 traries in the Ideas, and that the difficulties which 
 concern the participation of sensible things in 
 Ideas will be solved when we see how one Idea 
 participates in another. Hence the second part 
 of the Dialogue takes up this point, and demon- 
 strates that whatever hypothesis you start with, 
 it always involves the primitive union of contra- 
 ries, the radical union of the one and the many. 
 Thus, whatever pair of Ideas you may consider, 
 positive and negative, you will always find a 
 mediating term in some third Idea, so that all 
 Ideas, even those mutually contradictory, enter 
 into one another and are reconciled in the su- 
 preme Unity. In other words, for Plato read 
 Hegel. 
 
 To these two extremes should be added Grote's 
 cavalier denial of any consistent meaning at all in 
 Plato. He regards the theory of Ideas sup- 
 ported by Socrates in this Dialogue as genuinely 
 Platonic, and at the same time regards Parme- 
 nides' attack on the theory as "most powerful" 
 in itself and as beyond the reach of Plato's an- 
 swer. The whole Dialogue has no other purpose 
 than to clear the mind of false and hasty assump- 
 tions : "It is certainly well calculated to produce 
 the effect intended — of hampering, perplexing, 
 and putting to shame, the affirmative rashness of 
 a novice in philosophy."'^ 
 
 Now these interpretations cannot all be right, 
 
 "^ Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates II, 295. 
 
METAPHYSICS 239 
 
 and I think it would be easy to demonstrate that 
 they are all wrong. As for Socher, it is suffi- 
 cient to say that the Dialogue bears on every 
 page indubitable signs of the master's hand, and 
 to ask who else could have written it. This in- 
 trinsic evidence is so convincing that almost all 
 scholars now accept the work as authentic. 
 Moreover, the objections lose their point as soon 
 as we have found (as I think we shall find) an 
 interpretation which gives the Dialogue an im- 
 portant and integral place in the whole meta- 
 physical discussion of Plato's later years. On 
 the other hand, Fouillee quite overshoots the 
 mark. Virtually to ignore, as he does, the val- 
 idity of the arguments against Ideas is simply to 
 read the book with closed mind. As for the sec- 
 ond part, even Zeller, from whom he borrowed 
 his Hegelianizing method, recognized that the 
 nature of the antinomies here employed indicates 
 an absolute gulf between true Being and the em- 
 pirical world of time and space.^ 
 
 Grote maintains his position with his usual 
 cleverness and honesty, but I doubt if he has any 
 followers today. To hold that Plato never at- 
 tained a philosophical position of his own, and 
 that the great bulk of his works contains no posi- 
 tive plan or conviction, is to fly in the face of 
 common sense. 
 
 Those who take a middle ground between the 
 
 ® Die Philosophie der Griechen^ II, i, 565. 
 
240 PLATONISM 
 
 extremes of Socher and Fouillee are so numerous 
 that it would be intolerably tedious to deal with 
 them individually. We can get the same result 
 more conmiodiously by a rough classification of 
 the points which, with negligible shades of differ- 
 ence, are variously combined in their theories. 
 On one point they pretty well agree : they nearly 
 all acknowledge the strength of the Parmenidean 
 attack on the position held by Socrates in this 
 Dialogue ; they differ in their methods of avoid- 
 ing the disagreeable consequences of this admis- 
 sion. They all make Parmenides the mouthpiece 
 of Plato in this first part of the Dialogue, but 
 to some of them the "young" Socrates is vainly 
 attempting to support an embryonic theory of 
 Ideas which Plato had now outgrown, whereas 
 to others Socrates is arguing for a theory of 
 Ideas (as entities separate from the world of 
 phenomena) which was advanced by enemies of 
 Plato, whether frankly as their own or in Plato's 
 name, or was erroneously supposed to be Plato's 
 by inconsiderate pupils of the Academy. By 
 exploding this false doctrine Plato, either directly 
 or inferentially, is enforcing the genuine doctrine 
 of Ideas as pure conceptions of the mind, or as 
 "the basis of potentiality," or "scientific laws," or 
 "the methodic foundation of experience." In 
 other words, they differ in naming the source and 
 degree of the error supported by Socrates, but 
 they all agree in holding that, in one way or an- 
 
METAPHYSICS Ml 
 
 other, the Dialogue looks to a rationalizing recon- 
 ciliation of the difficulties inherent in the doctrine 
 of Ideas ; they all, in various ways, belong to the 
 metaphysical school represented of old by Pro- 
 clus and in modern times by Hegel. 
 
 Now the first difficulty in these explanations 
 is the supposition that in a question vital to 
 his whole philosophy Plato would have chosen 
 Socrates as the mouthpiece of the doctrine he 
 wished to combat. The difficulty is not quite so 
 overwhelming, I admit, if we assume that the 
 "young" Socrates is arguing for a genuine Pla- 
 tonism now outgrown rather than for a pseudo- 
 Platonism. But such an assumption throws 
 us into another insurmountable difficulty. 'No 
 doubt in the course of his growth Plato changed 
 somewhat in his attitude towards Ideas ; it could 
 hardly be otherwise. But there is nothing in his 
 writings to indicate such a complete break as 
 must be assimaed by this explanation of the Par- 
 menides, whereas, on the contrary, there are pas- 
 sages in his latest works which speak strongly for lIw^ 'iesc^'' 
 the essential continuity of his philosophy in this 
 respect. 
 
 Against those who would see in Socrates the 
 champion of pseudo-Platonism, there are two 
 further objections. On the one hand the concep- 
 tualist doctrine of Ideas which they regard as 
 genuinely Platonic is clearly embraced among ^^]^2b^^^^ 
 the various explanations set up by Socrates and 
 
242 PLATONISM 
 
 knocked down by Parmenides. On the other 
 Ibid. 134D hand, in this very Dialogue it is shown that the 
 rejection of Ideas as existing apart in a sphere 
 above our own involves the rejection also of the 
 divine government and knowledge of the world — 
 a conclusion so abhorrent to Plato that he could 
 not have accepted the premise. And I hold it 
 demonstrable (though to prove the point would 
 require a separate essay) that the whole recent 
 movement to deprive Platonic Ideas of some 
 sort of independent reality for the imagination 
 is, on the bare face of it, a perversion of the 
 simple facts, for the conscious or unconscious 
 purpose of confirming the tendency of present- 
 day thought by the authority of a revered name 
 of the past. 
 
 When they come to the second part of the 
 Dialogue these mediators take different and con- 
 tradictory groimds. Some of them hold that 
 Parmenides remains the spokesman for Plato 
 throughout, and that, having exploded the false 
 doctrine of Ideas, he now demonstrates the true 
 doctrine. To these the same reply must be made 
 as was made to Fouillee : this second part of the 
 Dialogue, unless violently distorted, is, like the 
 first, negative from beginning to end, and to dis- 
 cover in it a positive exposition of any doctrine 
 is a wanton reading of what is not written. Oth- 
 ers hold that Plato first uses Parmenides as his 
 own mouthpiece to destroy the pseudo-doctrine 
 
METAPHYSICS 243 
 
 foisted upon him by the Eleaties, and then, in a 
 super-refined spirit of revenge, turns the table 
 by making Parmenides exhibit the fallacies of 
 his own Eleatic philosophy of the one. This ex- 
 planation contains, as we shall see, a half truth, 
 but it overreaches itself in taking Parmenides 
 now as the exponent of Platonic truth and then 
 as the exponent of Eleatic untruth. Plato was 
 subtle enough, in all conscience, but he was not 
 quite so disconcertingly double-faced as that. 
 And, further, though a minor result of the sec- 
 ond discussion may be to expose the untenability 
 of the Eleatic unity in its absolute, exclusive 
 form, the primary intention and achievement of 
 Parmenides will turn out to be of an entirely dif- 
 ferent nature. 
 
 So much for the interpretations which run 
 counter to common sense or to plain statements 
 in the Dialogue itself or to the whole tenor of 
 Plato's philosophy. A few scholars have partly 
 or wholly avoided these errors, and have left ex- 
 planations which are rather inadequate than 
 false. Among these is the author of the Greek 
 Thinkers, with whom, considering his general at- 
 titude towards Greek philosophy, I find myself 
 rather unwillingly yoked. Gomperz holds that 
 the Parmenides was written at a time when 
 Plato's mind was in a state of fermentation. At- 
 tacks from the Megarians, or new Eleaties, had 
 imited with his own deepened reflection to dis- 
 
244 PLATONISM 
 
 turb him with difficulties in regard to the very 
 basis of his metaphysical theory of Ideas. He 
 could not at this time answer these difficulties, 
 neither could he surrender his whole philosophy. 
 In his zeal for the truth, therefore, he brings to- 
 gether all the arguments against Ideas, making 
 no discrimination between those that are answer- 
 able and those that are not. In this way he de- 
 livers himself, so to speak, and is free to pass on. 
 He piles up all sorts of arguments against the 
 metaphysical school from which had proceeded 
 the sharpest attacks on the theory of Ideas. Af- 
 ter the date of the Parmenides we see two things 
 happening : Plato's searching analysis of hostile 
 doctrines brings out by way of indirect proof the 
 inevitability of the doctrine of Ideas, and the trial 
 through which he has passed leads him to modify 
 his own principles.^ 
 
 One thing is thus seen by Gomperz which 
 ought to be clear to any one who reads the Dia- 
 logue with open mind: the logic against Ideas is 
 conducted with relentless rigour, and is not di- 
 rected against a particular form of the doctrine 
 but against all its forms, including conceptual- 
 ism.'^ 
 
 ® Griechische Denker II, 437-440. 
 
 ^° 132b: ''Perhaps/' says Socrates, "each of these Ideas 
 is only an act of cognition, and is nowhere present except in 
 the mind." Only in one place does Parmenides leave the 
 position of Socrates unassailed. Socrates proposes a simile 
 by which he thinks that possibly the indivisible integrity of 
 
METAPHYSICS 245 
 
 But another thing is clear. Plato did not for 
 a moment admit that this logic, however rigor- 
 ously conducted, rendered the doctrine of Ideas 
 in itself untenable. As we have seen, he con- 
 tinued to adhere to the doctrine in his later works, 
 and, more than that, this very Dialogue contains 
 direct statements of his adherence. The strong- 
 est of these is in the words of Parmenides him- 
 self, where, at the close of the discussion which 
 has driven Socrates point by point to a complete 
 silence, he asks what is to be done about philo- issb 
 sophy if we surrender our belief in Ideas, or 
 whither we shall turn our minds, or, indeed, how 
 we shall be able to converse at all. 
 
 Such a passage ought to be suflScient in itself 
 
 the Idea may be reconciled with its presence in the multi- 
 plicity of objects which partake of its nature: "Just as day, 
 being one and the same, is simultaneously present in many 
 places yet is not separate from itself [that is, does not lose 
 its integrity by being among the events of time], so each 
 Idea might be in all things yet remain one and the same" 
 (131b). Instead of replying to this argument, Parmenides 
 shifts the comparison to a tent spread over a number of 
 men; in which case not the whole tent but only a portion 
 of it should properly be said to be over each man. Did 
 Plato himself fail to see that by shifting the simile from 
 time to place he was leaving the real point untouched, or 
 did he perceive the difficulty of determining the nature of 
 time itself, whether it has any objective reality, and so 
 shrink from a discussion which would have been out of all 
 proportion to the scope of the Dialogue? All the difficul- 
 ties raised by Parmenides involve the conception of Ideas 
 as in space. Can a metaphysical psychology avoid this 
 fallacy ? 
 
M6 PLATONISM 
 
 to refute those who find in the Parmenides any 
 surrender of the distinctly Platonic doctrine of 
 Ideas, but its force and emphasis are doubled 
 when we remember that it does not stand alone, 
 but is a repetition of — rather a brief reference to 
 — Plato's constant argument against the anti- 
 idealists of the Heraclitean and Protagorean 
 school. This point is important enough in itself 
 and in its bearing on the place of the Parmenides 
 in the whole drift of Plato's metaphysical period 
 to warrant us in pausing a moment to consider 
 such a passage as the close of the Cratylus, The 
 bulk of this Dialogue is given up to a series of 
 linguistic puzzles which have been one of the 
 bugbears of Platonic students. Many of the 
 derivations suggested by Plato are so absurdly 
 extravagant as to force the conclusion that he 
 was ridiculing the pretensions of certain etymo- 
 logists of the age; yet others, again, seem to be 
 advanced quite soberly by him, and the reader is 
 left with no criterion to distinguish between 
 satire and serious exposition. This bewildering 
 medley of fun and earnestness is not absent in 
 other Dialogues; is indeed one of the marks of 
 the Platonic method. But whatever Plato's atti- 
 tude may have been towards the legitimacy or 
 illegitimacy of the current etymological science 
 of the day, he seems to have felt that the Hera- 
 clitean notion of the flux was natural to the un- 
 reflecting mass of men and was deeply imbedded 
 
METAPHYSICS Ml 
 
 in the elementary substance of language. Any 
 seeker for the truth, therefore, must free his mind 
 from the implications of common speech and 
 train himself to look at things as they are. The 
 fact is, says Socrates at the close of his discus- 439c s 
 sion with the "young" Cratylus, that those who 
 gave this colour to language did so, not because 
 our world is a huge perpetual flux, but because 
 their own minds were revolving dizzily in a sort 
 of whirl, into which they had fallen and are 
 dragging us after them. The only escape for us 
 is not to consider individual objects which may 
 be good or beautiful, and the like, and which ap- 
 pear to us to be continually changing, but to fix 
 our minds on Ideas, such as the good itself, the 
 beautiful itself. For how can we even give a 
 name to a thing which is now this and now that, 
 always altering, and slipping away from us at 
 the very moment we are speaking of it? There 
 is no knowledge of such a thing; for just when 
 you are going to know it, off it goes into some- 
 thing else, so that you have no chance to learn 
 what it is or what quahties it has. There isn't 
 any knowledge — ^nothing to be known and no 
 one to know, if all things are in this state of un- 
 ceasing flux. Granted the faculty of knowledge 
 in us, then there must be something for it to 
 know; then there must be those Ideas of good- 
 ness itself and beauty itself, and the hke, which 
 do not belong to the cosmic stream and whirl. 
 
248 PLATONISM 
 
 It may be hard to decide between the truth of 
 these Ideas and what the Heraehteans and 
 Protagoreans and all the rest of them believe, 
 but certainly he is a pretty poor creature who 
 will permit the life of his soul to be determined 
 by the mere implications of common speech, and 
 will ignorantly assert that there is nothing sound 
 in the universe but that the whole thing is a sort 
 of leaky vessel continually at drip. How would 
 he differ from a man who was suffering from a 
 rheum, and was convinced accordingly that the 
 whole world was in a state of rheumy fluction? 
 You at least, Cratylus, are still young, and 
 ought not to accept these current theories out of 
 hand, but should investigate them bravely and 
 honestly. 
 
 Now there can be no doubt that the brief ex- 
 hortation to the "young" Socrates was written 
 in the same tone and to the same general end as 
 that to the "young" Cratylus. The interpreta- 
 tion of the Parmenides thus depends on the solu- 
 tion of this crux: we have the whole doctrine of 
 Ideas subjected to a process of destructive logic 
 to which Plato makes no direct answer either 
 here or anywhere else in his writings, and by the 
 side of this we have an unwavering statement of 
 the reahty and vital importance of Ideas. Given 
 this dilemma the only way of escape would seem 
 to be through holding that Ideas do not come to 
 us by a process of metaphysical logic, but by 
 
METAPHYSICS 249 
 
 means of some direct experience independent of 
 such logic, and that the method of reasoning em- 
 ployed against them by Parmenides, while per- 
 fectly soimd in itself, is all in vacuo, so to speak, 
 and has no bearing upon their existence or non- 
 existence. No other interpretation would ap- 
 pear to be tenable, and as a matter of fact the 
 second, and larger, part of the Dialogue is di- 
 rected to exhibiting the limitations, and the use- 
 fulness within these limitations, of what I have 
 called the process of metaphysical logic. To un- 
 derstand this point we must look a little more 
 closely into the antecedents and structure of the 
 Dialogue. 
 
 Parmenides, the principal speaker of the Dia- 
 logue which bears his name, was the pre-Socratic 
 philosopher from whom more than from any 
 other, unless it be Pythagoras, Plato's thoughts 
 received their colour. His name sounded to 
 Plato out of antiquity with peculiar awfulness, 
 and even when disagreeing with him the yoimger ^^t3E^*''^ 
 man could not forget his veneration. Against 
 all the other philosophers, from Homer down, 
 who had seen in the world only the play of flux 
 and perpetual mutation, Parmenides stood forth 
 in lonely grandeur, a man, in the Homeric 
 phrase, "reverend and dreadful," a sage able to 
 impress Socrates with "the noble depth of his 
 mind." In Elea of Magna Graecia he had set 
 up a school in direct opposition — so it seemed at 
 
250 PLATONISM 
 
 least to Plato and the later men — ^to that of 
 Heraclitus. In his cosmic poem he represents 
 himself as carried by the Smi-maidens up to the 
 Gate of Night and Day, which is opened to him 
 by the goddess Dike (Right, Justice), and there 
 in the realm of heavenly light he is instructed in 
 the difference between truth and deceptive opin- 
 ion. The whole vision was to be taken over by 
 Plato in The Republic when searching for the 
 nature of justice, and worked up into his sublime 
 comparison of the supreme good in the moral 
 sphere with the light-giving sun in the physical 
 sky. And the truth as Parmenides saw it was 
 one aspect, incomplete and therefore partly false, 
 of what Plato was to hold. Our opinion of the 
 world of change and appearance is a mere decep- 
 tion; rather, such a world is not, for the reality 
 of being is the reality of thought, or knowledge, 
 one and indivisible, without beginning or end, 
 without growth or decay, finite in itself and with 
 nothing beyond it, with no colour or motion or 
 quality of perception. The universe of Parme- 
 nides was the pantheism of his predecessor Xeno- 
 phanes, but as it would be expressed by an intui- 
 tive philosopher instead of a religious dreamer. 
 
 Now it was inevitable that this one-sided per- 
 ception, or intuition, of the unity underlying all 
 things should have been met with ridicule on the 
 part of those who could see nothing but the world 
 of flux, and it became necessary for the Eleatic 
 
METAPHYSICS 251 
 
 pupils of Parmenides to support their master by 
 means of whatever logical instrimaent they could 
 lay hands on. The shrewdest of these defenders 
 was Zeno, who sought to discomfit the enemy by 
 bringing confusion into their own camp. The 
 HeracHteans had undertaken to dispose of the 
 Eleatic unity by showing the absurdity of a 
 theory which, by its maintenance of indivisibility, 
 involved the denial of our common perceptions 
 of motion and change, and by its insistence on 
 absolute uniformity, involved the denial of all 
 qualities to things, thus reducing the mind to a 
 state of complete negation. Zeno did not, in- 
 deed could not, answer these criticisms directly, 
 but he did undertake to strengthen the Parmeni- 
 dean position by setting forth the equal absurdi- 
 ties that followed if we rejected imity and made 
 multiplicity the essence of all things. One of his 
 argimaents was the famous riddle of Achilles and 
 the tortoise. Suppose Achilles, who runs ten 
 times faster than the tortoise, tries to catch a 
 tortoise that has a start of ten feet. By the time 
 he has traversed these ten feet, the tortoise will 
 be one foot in advance. When he has traversed 
 this foot, the tortoise will be a tenth of a foot in 
 advance ; and so on ad infinitum. That is to say, 
 on the assumption that time and space are di- 
 visible this division will proceed without end, and 
 Achilles never can overtake the tortoise; which 
 is absurd on the face of it. Another argument 
 
252, PLATONISM 
 
 of Zeno's turned on the contradictions that must 
 arise from the ascription of quahties to things. 
 For instance, if you say that A is like B, this will 
 imply that A is unlike something else, so that 
 you are driven to the paradox of holding that A 
 is at the same time like and unlike ; which, again, 
 is absurd. 
 
 All this, of course, might be waved aside as 
 an amusing play of logomachy, but in fact it in- 
 troduced a real evil into the life of a people who 
 were already prone by nature to lose themselves 
 in linguistic subtleties and to prize sheer clever- 
 ness above simple veracity. Instead of throw- 
 ing up the whole game the Heracliteans answered 
 Zeno in kind, while on the other hand the Megar- 
 ian school of Euclides took up the cudgels for 
 the Eleatics and carried their logic to the ex- 
 treme of fatuity. Hence arose that art of eristic 
 which threatened for a while to reduce the whole 
 of Greek philosophy to a vain babble of conten- 
 tious words. The very essence of eristic, it will 
 be seen, lies in the metaphysical use of reason, or 
 logic, without regard for, or in flat contradic- 
 tion to, the facts of experience and intuition. By 
 the time of Plato's maturity these successors of 
 the sophists were expending their strength in 
 ever vainer and more perplexing enigmas, while 
 of the sincere aspiration after the truth it might 
 be said, 
 
 "Naked and poor thou goest, Philosophy!" 
 
METAPHYSICS 253 
 
 The wrangle had spread until it embraced Plato's 
 own doctrine of Ideas, which hitherto he had held 
 rather as a matter of intuition and as an unques- 
 tioned necessity of the imagination than as a 
 reasoned conviction, and was forcing him in self- 
 defence into what may be called his metaphysical 
 period. 
 
 One of his aims at this time, perhaps his chief 
 aim, was to expose the vanity of the new form of 
 sophistry — for it was at bottom precisely the 
 same spirit as that which he had opposed in his 
 earher Dialogues, but disguised now in the sober 
 garb of metaphysics — and in its place to estab- 
 lish the true dialectic, that is to say the general- 
 izing ascent of the reason without losing from 
 sight, indeed by using as its firm stepping-stones, 
 those innate perceptions of moral and aesthetic 
 consequences which he had hypostatized as Ideas. 
 Already, in The Republic, he had expressed his 4S4a 
 scorn of those who, by reason of their inabihty to 
 distinguish Ideas, gave themselves up to the pur- 
 suit of verbal oppositions, thinking they were 
 practising dialectic, or the true philosophical dis- 
 course, when in fact they were indulging in mere 
 eristic. In his systematic exposition of this evil, 
 the first task would be to bring into the hght the 
 Ivu'king absurdities of the Herachtean meta- 
 physic of the flux ; this he had done in the Craty- 
 lus, Euthydemus, and Theaetetus with a drastic 
 power in comparison with which the campaign 
 
254 PLATONISM 
 
 of Zeno and the other Eleatics was mere child's 
 play. Now, in the Parmenides, he would employ 
 the same weapon, only with greater respect for 
 the persons concerned, against the Eleatics and 
 Megarians, and at the same time would investi- 
 gate the vahdity and scope of the whole meta- 
 physical, eristic method. 
 
 For this purpose he took advantage of the oc- 
 casion when the aged Parmenides had visited 
 Athens with his pupil Zeno, and had there met 
 and talked with Socrates, then a "very young 
 man." There are, I know, difficulties in the way 
 of accepting this meeting as historical, but Plato 
 mentions it so often, and in such a manner, that 
 we are almost bound to regard it not only as a 
 fact but as one to which Socrates was fond of 
 alluding. That, however, is unessential. Whe- 
 ther as a fact or fiction, we are told in the Par- 
 menides that Zeno has been reading those treat- 
 ises of his in which, as I have said, he undertook 
 to support the Parmenidean unity by showing 
 that the multiplicity assumed in its place by the 
 Heracliteans led to even greater paradoxes. So- 
 crates listens attentively, grasps the point of the 
 argimient, but has a modest question to ask. I 
 see, he says, that material phenomena are at the 
 same time both one and many ; for instance I, as 
 I stand here, am one if I am taken as a separate 
 integral member of this group of men, but I am 
 many if you consider me as composed of parts, 
 
METAPHYSICS 255 
 
 right and left, upper and lower. I can under- 
 stand how your logic by laying hold of these 
 contraries will reduce our reason to a paradoxi- 
 cal impasse. That seems easy enough if you 
 start with material phenomena. But I should 
 like to hear how you would apply this process to 
 Ideas. What, exclaims Parmenides, with con- 
 cealed pleasure, wishing to bring out his clever 
 young questioner, do you believe in these Ideas 
 as real things having an existence apart from 
 phenomena? Whereupon follows the famous 
 attack on the doctrine, which turns on the diifi- 
 culty of comprehending how an Idea can be im- 
 manent in the many particular phenomena which 
 bear its name without losing its integral unity, or 
 how phenomena can participate in the Idea with- 
 out forgoing their character of changing multi- 
 plicity. Socrates is completely blocked in all his 
 efforts to explain away this difficulty — indeed 
 neither Plato nor any one else has ever found a 
 positive solution of the paradox — and is ready 
 to throw up his position as untenable ; when Par- 
 menides checks him. No, says the old warrior, 
 you cannot do that, for without Ideas you are 
 confronted by a still more disastrous paradox; 
 unless these generalizations of the mind corre- 
 spond to things in some way really existent there 
 can be no philosophy, no knowledge, no meaning 
 at all in conversation. You yourself have de- 
 clared that the logic of Zeno did not touch the 
 
ft56 PLATONISM 
 
 simple fact of experience which presents phe- 
 nomena to us as at the same time both one and 
 many, and you need only carry the method out to 
 its legitimate end to discover that it will leave 
 you in possession also of your intuitive belief in 
 the parallel existence of Ideas and phenomena. 
 Then, after some hesitation, Parmenides is per- 
 suaded to give an illustration of this self-denying 
 use of eristic. Now it should be observed here 
 that this interpretation of the first part of the 
 Dialogue — in itself the only one which does not 
 do violence to the plain sense of the text — avoids 
 the absurdity of supposing that Plato would have 
 selected Socrates for the spokesman of a theory 
 he meant to denounce. To represent Socrates, 
 when "very young," as not yet competent to 
 maintain his position with the full mastery of 
 dialectic is quite another matter, and is in perfect 
 conformity with Plato's own transition, not from 
 one philosophy to another, but from what may be 
 called his purely intuitional period to the years 
 of metaphysical examination into his creed. 
 
 As for Parmenides' eristical exhibition, which 
 forms the second part of the Dialogue, it is just 
 one of the terrible things of philosophy; heaven 
 ^^J^;^"^*^^' forbid that I should ask my reader "to swim 
 through such and so great a sea of words." But 
 without a glance at the main points of the dis- 
 cussion we cannot assure ourselves of the general 
 purport of this Dialogue or understand the drift 
 of the Dialogues that follow. 
 
METAPHYSICS 257 
 
 Parmenides, then, condescends to submit his 
 own doctrine of the One as a corpus vile to be 
 tried out by this eristical method. He will first 
 take the statement that the One is and trace the 
 consequences, and will afterwards deal in the 
 same way with the contrary statement that the 
 One is not. The argument thus drags its awful 
 length through these eight hypotheses (I alter 
 their order as noted) : 
 
 A (This stands first in the Dialogue) : The 
 One is posited as absolute and indivisible. It fol- 
 lows from this hypothesis that the One is devoid 
 of all qualities, incapable of being known or in 
 any way considered or named or uttered. 
 
 B ( Second in the Dialogue) : But by the very 
 hypothesis that the One is we attribute being to 
 it. Thus the One is presented as a duality of 
 unity and being; this duality is subject to further 
 division, and the One becomes endlessly divisible 
 and possessed of infinite qualities. But to say 
 that it possesses every possible pair of contrary 
 qualities is the same as to say that it has no quali- 
 ties ; and we are reduced to a similar absurdity. 
 
 Now let us consider the consequences of this 
 hypothesis for the Many {ta alia, that is, the Oth- 
 ers, all things conceivable besides the One) : 
 
 C (Fourth in the Dialogue) : If the Many 
 are taken as having no participation in the One, 
 i.e., as absolute multiplicity, it follows that, like 
 the One of A, they will have no qualities at all, 
 and are utterly inconceivable. 
 
258 PLATONISM 
 
 D (Third in the Dialogue) : If the Many 
 participate in the One, then, like the One of B, 
 they will have all contrary qualities, which is 
 equally repugnant to reason. 
 
 So far we have been arguing on the supposi- 
 tion that the One is ; now let us take the contrary 
 supposition that the One is not: 
 
 E ( Sixth in the Dialogue) : If the One is not, 
 regarded absolutely, we get the same total nega- 
 tion as in A. 
 
 F (Fifth in the Dialogue) : But by the very 
 hypothesis that the One is not we associate being 
 with it. To say that the One is not is a different 
 thing from saying that the Not- One is not, and 
 in this way altereity, the property of difference, 
 is brought into the Not-One, and the Not-One 
 (like the One in hypothesis B) becomes possessed 
 of all different qualities. (This hypothesis, it 
 should be noted, is in metaphysical form the old 
 thesis which Plato had wrestled with in earlier 
 Dialogues and was to discuss at length in the 
 Sophist, that there is no such thing as a false 
 statement, for the reason that it is impossible to 
 speak what is not.) 
 
 G (Eighth in the Dialogue) : If we take the 
 One as not being absolutely, it follows that the 
 Many will have no qualities at all and there is 
 nothing. 
 
 H (Seventh in the Dialogue) : If the One is 
 not but the Many are, it follows that, by seeming 
 to be composed of units, the Many will have all 
 contrary qualities. 
 
METAPHYSICS 259 
 
 Now, there are two ways of looking at these 
 hypotheses. According to most of the interpre- 
 ters one set (A, C, E, G) is meant to show the 
 impossibiHty of positing an absolute One apart 
 from the Many, whereas another set (B, D, F, 
 H) demonstrates the reconciliation of the One 
 and the Many. Thus hypothesis A leads to a 
 total negation, whereas hypothesis B, by recon- 
 ciling the One and the Many, leads to the possi- 
 bility of predication and corresponds with actual 
 experience. The whole argument, in a word, is 
 a continuation of the assault on the doctrine of 
 Ideas as entities of real existence apart from 
 phenomena (chdrista) , and a proof that, by some 
 theory of conceptualism or the like, they are in 
 and of the Many. 
 
 The other way of interpreting the argument 
 is to accept all the hypotheses as resulting equally 
 in an impasse, since it is just as absurd to say that 
 a thesis leads to the simultaneous possession of 
 all contrary qualities as to say that it leads to the 
 total negation of qualities. And this in my judg- 
 ment, as my wording of the summaries above will 
 have made evident, is the only interpretation the 
 language of Plato will bear. Of course, if you 
 care to do violence to the text, you may get any 
 meaning out of it you choose; and that capable 
 scholars are not above using violence can be 
 shown from a shining example. After deducing 
 from the second hypothesis the possibility of at- 
 
260 PLATONISM 
 
 tributing all qualities to the One, Plato adds a 
 corollary in which, by a subtle analysis of the time 
 element, he shows how this is the same as saying 
 that the One would have no qualities. Very 
 good. But how does Professor Burnet in his 
 summary of the hypotheses deal with this double- 
 edged argument? He states the conclusion of 
 the hypothesis proper thus : 
 
 "Therefore One partakes of past, present, and 
 future; it was, it is, it will be; it has become, is 
 becoming, and will become. It can be the object 
 of knowledge, judgment, and sensation; it can 
 be named and spoken of."^^ 
 
 That is as close to the Greek as need be; but 
 turn now to his statement of the conclusion of 
 the corollary: 
 
 "It is the instantaneous which makes all 
 changes from one opposite to another possible, 
 and it is in the instant of change that what 
 changes has neither the one nor the other of its 
 opposite qualities. "^^ 
 
 Compare this with the Greek which is literally 
 as follows: 
 
 "By the same token it [the One], passing from 
 one to many and from many to one, is neither 
 one nor many, is neither divided nor combined. 
 And, passing from like to unlike and from un- 
 like to like, it is neither like nor unlike, neither 
 made like nor made unlike; and, passing from 
 
 ^^ Greek Philosophy, Part I, p. 268. 
 12 Ibid. 
 
METAPHYSICS 261 
 
 small to large and to equal and to the opposites, 
 it would be neither small nor large nor equal, 
 neither increased nor diminished nor made 
 equal." 
 
 Is it too much to say that, by transposing this 
 statement from its negative to a positive form, 
 Burnet has come pretty close to betraying his 
 author? The case is still worse with a critic like 
 Natorp, who out of an argument ending thus in 
 complete negation draws a positive meaning such 
 as this: 
 
 "By the instrumentality of continuity, as we 
 may now put it briefly, the way is prepared for 
 a reconciliation between the absolute position 
 (the thesis) and the relative (the antithesis). 
 The possibility is opened for the passage of the 
 absolute position into relativity, that is to say, 
 for the passage of the Idea, first conceived as 
 pure thought, the a priori, into experience, which 
 means the realm of relativity. The first founda- 
 tion is laid for the possibility of experience as 
 methodically assured knowledge."^^ 
 
 There is not a hint of all this in Plato; it is 
 Kant or Hegel or Natorp. The conclusions of 
 the second hypothesis and of its corollary ought 
 to be enough in themselves to show that no such 
 inference can be drawn. But to clinch the fact, 
 
 ^* Plato's Ideenlehre, p. 256. — How describe this typical 
 product of modern Platonic scholarship? If I dared express 
 my real feeling, I should say that, beneath its imposing 
 armour of technical jargon, the book was a nightmare of 
 niaiseries. 
 
262 PLATONISM 
 
 the whole Dialogue ends sharply with this 
 formidable summary: "Thus, it seems, whether 
 One is or is not, both it and the Many, regarded 
 both in themselves and in relation to each other, 
 all in every way both are and are not, both have 
 appearance and have not." How a scholar can 
 have this consummation before his eyes and yet 
 fail to see that all the eight hypotheses must be 
 taken without distinction as reductions to the 
 absurd, is beyond my comprehension. 
 
 Certain owlish persons who are aware of this 
 consequence have worried themselves over the 
 method by which it was obtained. It is full of 
 fallacies and false reasoning, exclaims Apelt,^"^ 
 and will waive the whole thing as a piece of 
 youthful indiscretion. Fallacies, quotha! It is 
 indeed an arsenal of fallacies; rather, it is the 
 fundamental fallacy of metaphysics from the be- 
 ginning until now, stripped of its garb of irrele- 
 vant truths and laid bare to the gaze of any who 
 will see. For I take it that any metaphysic 
 which attempts to give an account of the ulti- 
 mate nature of things, the rerum natura, by the 
 process of pure reason will impale itself on one 
 or the other horn of this dilemma: either it will 
 cling honestly to the absolute One or the absolute 
 Many, and so move about in the void, with no 
 content of meaning; or it will surreptitiously 
 
 ^* "Wahres Arsenal von Erschleichungen und Sophismen," 
 Beitrdge, p. 32. 
 
METAPHYSICS 263 
 
 merge the absolute One in the concrete one or 
 the absolute Many in the concrete many, and so 
 fall into a dishonest mixture, or "reconciliation," 
 of contraries. This is not the place to support 
 such a charge by detailed illustrations, but I think 
 it would not be hard to show how perfectly the 
 error of Spinoza's system is exposed by Plato's 
 second hypothesis (B). Compare with the 
 working out of that hypothesis Spinoza's effort 
 to deduce all the contrary qualities of phenome- 
 nal existence from the absolute One: "Transeo 
 iam ad ea explicanda, quae ex Dei sive entis 
 aeterni et infiniti essentia necessario debuerunt 
 sequi: non quidem omnia (infinita enim infinitis 
 modis ex ipsa debere sequi) .^^ In like manner 
 the scientific conception of a "block universe," 
 as an absolute closed system, falls under the third 
 hypothesis (D), or, in the Spencerian form of 
 the Unknowable and the Knowable, under the 
 fourth hypothesis (C). On the other side, the 
 various forms of Pragmatism, all the systems 
 that accept only the absolute flux, including the 
 much-bruited metaphysic of M. Bergson, will 
 come within the scope of one or another of the 
 four hypotheses that assume the One as not 
 being. 
 
 I would not insist on this modern application ; 
 but at least I do not see how the second part 
 of the Dialogue can be understood otherwise than 
 
 15 Ethics II, Praef. 
 
ft64i PLATONISM 
 
 as an endeavour to deal in such a manner with 
 the metaphysic, or eristic, which had sprung up 
 by the side of true philosophy in Plato's own 
 day. And the results obtained are of a double 
 nature. The first four of the hypotheses discover 
 the embarrassment into which those of the Meg- 
 arian school were driven who, in fanatical oppo- 
 sition to Platonic Ideas and the Heraclitean flux, 
 ran to an uncompromising idealism of the One, 
 as the exclusive reality. I do not believe that 
 Plato meant to direct his argument against the 
 Parmenidean unity itself (cf. 128a) ; that unity, 
 as the Idea of the Good, was so deeply imbedded 
 in his own teleological philosophy that it is im- 
 possible to think of him as trying to eradicate it. 
 Rather, his aim must have been to tear away 
 from this unity the scaffolding which had been 
 raised about it by the later Eleatics and Meg- 
 arians, and so to leave it in the form of an ob- 
 scure intuition, such as it appeared to Parme- 
 nides himself, untouched by the rationaUsm 
 which would petrify it into a logical negation of 
 experience. Even so, it is notable that Plato 
 treats this error with a certain respect; at least 
 his exposition is conducted without any admix- 
 ture of that contemptuous buffoonery which he 
 had employed in the Euthydemus, when "dust- 
 ing the jackets" of the two shameless Protago- 
 reans. He was himself a spiritual child of the 
 ancient sage, and thought it almost an act of 
 
METAPHYSICS ^65 
 
 parricide to lay hands on "father Parmenides." ^JSiJf* 
 In this way we can understand the propriety of 
 making Parmenides the instrument of attack on 
 his Megarian successors. 
 
 But this freeing of the Parmenidean imity 
 from its eristical supergrowth was by the way, 
 so to speak; the main intention was to bring re- 
 lief to Plato's own doctrine of Ideas. At the 
 conclusion of the first part of the Dialogue we 
 found ourselves confronted by this dilemma: one 
 by one the arguments set up to explain the rela- 
 tion between Ideas and phenomena had been 
 knocked down, yet it was declared impossible to 
 surrender Ideas. The situation was very much 
 hke that taken by Dr. Johnson (the great So- 
 cratic of the modern world) in regard to a ques- 
 tion of equal ethical importance: "All theory is 
 against the freedom of the will, all experience 
 for it." By demonstrating that the eristical 
 method led to the same absurdity (and so de- 
 stroyed itself) whether we posited the One as 
 existing or as not existing, Parmenides would 
 intimate to his young friend that to guard him- 
 self against a rationahsm which brought out the 
 contradictions involved in positing the existence 
 of Ideas he should have retorted by forcing his 
 antagonist to admit the contradictions involved 
 in positing the non-existence of Ideas. Thus he 
 would have made himself free to accept the re- 
 ality of Ideas as a necessity of inner experience, 
 
^66 PLATONISM 
 
 just as he had seen that the eristic of Zeno and 
 the Herachteans left him free to accept the re- 
 ahty of phenomena as known to perception. 
 
 This interpretation of the Parmenides, I sub- 
 mit, avoids the violences to the text to which other 
 interpretations are bound to have recourse. It 
 justifies the choice of speakers, and does away 
 with the arbitrary assumption of a radical break 
 in Plato's philosophy. It has also the advantage 
 of finding a single purpose running through the 
 two parts of the discussion, and of establishing 
 an integral relation between this Dialogue and 
 the others in which Plato turned his attention 
 from the sophistry of rhetoric to the sophistry of 
 metaphysic. 
 
 If an}^ further confirmation of this thesis is 
 needed, it may be found in the natural interpre- 
 tation of a much-disputed passage of the Dia- 
 logue which is commonly, and rightly, I think, 
 regarded as supplementary to the Parmenides. 
 In the central part of the Sophist Plato considers 
 242c ff in turn three classes of philosophers. First, by 
 an argument essentially the same as that em- 
 ployed in the Parmenides, he reduces the Eleat- 
 ics and Megarians to confusion. He next deals 
 with the opposite school, not the mere Heracli- 
 teans in this case, but the gross materialists who 
 cling to brute sensations and wage war upon the 
 246a idealists of all colours, a veritable gigantomachia. 
 These, or their kindred at least, he had already 
 
METAPHYSICS 267 
 
 made the subject of biting ridicule; now he is 
 content with what is really little more than a 
 reference to the proofs he has elsewhere given at 
 length. He argues briefly that there is a soul, 
 or life-giving principle in us; that there is a dif- 247b 
 ference between the just and the unjust soul; that 
 this difference is due to the possession and pres- 
 ence of justice or its contrary in the soul, and 
 that, therefore, justice itself exists as an invisible, 
 impalpable entity — ^that is to say as an Idea. 
 After dismissing these two opposed sects, he 
 turns to the "friends of Ideas" ; and here the in- 248a 
 terpreters run amuck. Campbell, in his note, 
 thus states the various positions held : 
 
 "Four possible suppositions remain, if we be- 
 heve the dialogues to be the work of Plato. The 
 *friends of forms' are either (1) Megarians 
 (since Schleiermacher this has been the most 
 general impression) ; or (2) Plato himself at an 
 earlier stage; or (3) Platonists who have im- 
 perfectly understood Plato. The fourth hy- 
 pothesis combines (2) and (3)." 
 
 Now, in the name of conscience, why should 
 not an imsophisticated reader take these friends 
 of forms, or Ideas, to be just Plato and his true 
 followers, without any beating about the bush?^^ 
 
 ^® Some colour may be lent to Campbell's third supposi- 
 tion by the words of 248c (Trpos Srj ravra k, t. A.). They 
 may, in fact, point to the overzealousness of Platonists (or 
 of Plato himself in his unguarded moments) who held the 
 definition of Ideas too rigidly; but the statement of 248a 
 
teS PLATONISM 
 
 In the first place, as we have seen above, Plato, 
 in his contention against the materialists, assumes 
 the existence of Ideas in precisely the manner" 
 of his early Dialogues. The Sophist^ therefore, 
 can scarcely contain a rejection of Ideas, or any 
 radical change in the way of regarding them. 
 What follows? Plato subjects these ideahsts to 
 the antinomies of reason, thus (I borrow Camp- 
 belFs own summary) : 
 
 "Perfect Being [the realm of Ideas] cannot be 
 in a state of mere negative repose, a sacred form 
 without thought, or life, or soul, or motion. . . . 
 But on the other hand, thought is equally impos- 
 sible without a principle of permanence and rest. 
 Hence the philosopher, with whom thought is the 
 highest being, can listen wholly neither to the ad- 
 vocates of rest nor of motion, but must say with 
 the children, that *both are best,' when he is 
 defining the nature of Being." 
 
 We have, then, in this section of the Sophist 
 an exact repetition in brief of the method em- 
 ployed in the second part of the Parmenides, ap- 
 plied now directly to the doctrine of Ideas. And 
 observe that the conclusion is in no sense of the 
 word a "reconciliation" of rest and motion, the 
 One and the Many, nor is it in any sense a de- 
 
 (koi o-w/iart k. t. A.) is so perfectly in accord with Plato's 
 position in the Timaeus and elsewhere as to leave room for 
 no doubts of the nature of these "friends of Ideas." It is 
 to be noted that the exposition of the theory comes from 
 the mouth of an Eleatic. 
 ^^ *'Ej€t Kal TTopovaiq., 
 
METAPHYSICS 269 
 
 termination of the relationship of Ideas to phe- 
 nomena, but a categorical statement that Ideas 
 are and that in some unknown way they show the 
 effects of their power in the realm of multipUcity 
 and change.^^ The destruction of eristic and 
 metaphysical assumption by means of an imwav- 
 ering affirmation of the reaUty of moral Ideas, 
 united with an unwavering scepticism, is Plato's 
 philosophical justification of his master's life and 
 faith. 
 
 But candour forbids us to stop here. Though 
 this is the significant outcome of Plato's later 
 thought, it is clear that, for a while at least, he 
 was haimted by the hope of attaining to some 
 discursive proof of those Ideas the existence of 
 which could only not be disproved by the false 
 methods of eristic, and to some rational explana- 
 tion of the inherence of these Ideas in phe- 
 nomena. There are tentative efforts to create 
 this positive metaphysic in the Sophist and the 
 Philehus, but it should appear that the full work- 
 ing out of the plan was left for the projected 
 Dialogue on the Philosopher, The absence of sopust 2S3c 
 that work from the Platonic canon means, I con- 
 jecture, simply this, that Plato became aware of 
 his inabiUty to achieve what, indeed, no philo- 
 sopher has ever achieved; since it Hes beyond the 
 scope of human reason. 
 
 ^® The key note to the Sophist is struck in the word 
 8Lr)7roprjfi€vov (250e), "we have seen the difficulties through 
 to the end/* 
 
Republic 486a 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Granted that Platonism has been expounded 
 correctly in the foregoing chapters, the question 
 remains — a very grave question — whether its in- 
 fluence has been on the whole for good or for evil. 
 The extent of this influence no one, I think, will 
 deny. As a dominant factor in the formation of 
 the Christian religion it has helped to mould the 
 civilization of the western world, and as a philo- 
 sophy in its own right it has been the inspiration 
 of innumerable poets and prophets who have 
 called upon men to rise above ephemeral interests 
 to the contemplation of all time and all being. 
 In a manner not given to any other writer Plato 
 must be regarded as the liberator of the spirit, 
 who has set wings to the human soul and sent it 
 voyaging through the empyrean. But in that 
 flight how many have mounted too near the sun, 
 and fallen to earth in ruinous combustion ! How 
 many others have forever lost their way in those 
 thin heights ! Alas, for the weakness of mankind, 
 and their "blind hopes" ! It is a fact, sad and in- 
 disputable, that no one is more hkely to call him- 
 self, or to be called by his admirers, a Platonist 
 
 2T0 
 
CONCLUSION ni 
 
 than the reformer with a futile scheme for the 
 regeneration of the world, or the dreamer who 
 has spurned the realities of human nature for 
 some illusion of easy perfection, or the romantic 
 visionary who has set the spontaneity of fancy 
 above the rational imagination, or the "fair soul" 
 who has withdrawn from the conflict of life into 
 the indulgence of a morbid introspection, or the 
 votary of faith as a law abrogating the sterner 
 law of works and retribution. Half the enthusi- 
 asts and inspired maniacs of society have shielded 
 themselves under the aegis of the great Athenian. 
 Not to mention the detected mountebanks, the 
 list is replete with the names of accepted sages 
 whose wisdom, if brought to the test, would prove 
 to be only a finer form of spiritual flattery. 
 
 If these are the only products of Platonism, 
 then it is a pity the works of Plato were not lost 
 altogether, with the books of so many other an- 
 cient philosophers, and we who busy ourselves 
 with interpreting the Dialogues are merely add- 
 ing to the sum of the world's folly. But it is 
 not so. It is with Platonism as with Christianity 
 and every other strong excitement of the human 
 heart. Liberty is the noblest and at the same 
 time the most perilous possession that can be 
 given to mankind; and, unless we are prepared 
 to silence the higher call of religion and philo- 
 sophy altogether for the safer demands of a pure- 
 ly practical wisdom, we must expect, while we try 
 
272 PLATONISM 
 
 to expose, these vagaries of minds made drmik 
 with excess of enthusiasm. No, we dare not re- 
 pudiate Platonism for the dangers that surround 
 it; but it is well that we should be put on our 
 guard against Platonists, remembering the ad- 
 monition of St. John to the disciples of Christ: 
 "Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits 
 whether they are of God, because many false 
 prophets are gone out into the world." 
 
 We have already had occasion to distinguish 
 between the true and the false Platonist in the 
 realms of art and science; but there is need of a 
 single general criterion which can be applied to 
 every pretender to the name, and such a criterion, 
 happily, is not far to seek. Both the true and 
 the false Platonist appear with the promise of 
 regeneration in their hands, stimulating the im- 
 agination to roam in unbounded and unfamiliar 
 fields, loosing the soul from the prison-house of 
 convention, pointing to a prize beyond the re- 
 wards of commonplace prudence. But there is 
 this certain difference between them. To the 
 true Platonist the divine spirit, though it may be 
 called, and is, the hidden source of beauty and 
 order and joy, yet always, when it speaks di- 
 rectly in the human breast, makes itself heard as 
 an inhibition; like the guide of Socrates, it never 
 in its own proper voice commands to do, but only 
 to refrain. Whereas to the pseudo-Platonist it 
 appears as a positive inspiration, saying yes to 
 
CONCLUSION «73 
 
 s desires and emotions. Goethe unwittingly 
 was giving expression to the everlasting formula 
 of pseudo-Platonism when he put into the mouth 
 of Mephistopheles the fateful words: "I am the 
 spirit that ever denies." It is God that denies, 
 not Satan. The moment these terms are re- 
 versed, what is reverenced as the spirit becomes a 
 snare instead of a monitor: hberty is turned into 
 license, a glamour of sanctity is thrown over the 
 desires of the heart, the humility of doubt goes 
 out of the mind, the will to follow this or that im- 
 pulsion is invested with divine authority, there is 
 an utter confusion of the higher and the lower 
 elements of our nature. 
 
 This longing for the assiu'ance of faith without 
 the humbling bondage of scepticism extends, of 
 course, far beyond the sphere of pseudo-Platon- 
 ism, and has been the ever-present temptation of 
 those strong men, of whatever professed creed, 
 who have laid violent hands on rehgion and philo- 
 sophy. Here is the origin of those enthusiasms 
 and extravagances of inner freedom which are 
 constantly rising to trouble the world by making 
 an unholy divorce between supposed inspiration 
 and common sense, sometimes between supposed 
 inspiration and common morality. The mani- 
 festations of fanaticism may be various, in ac- 
 cordance with the disposition of the man or 
 group of men upon whom the temptation falls, 
 but the ultimate cause is always the same: it is 
 
274 PLATONISM 
 
 the lust of the heart to identify our personal in- 
 clinations with the voice of God or with some di- 
 vine authority. In religion this spirit is seen at 
 work in the pride of the ascetic — "the hair shirt, 
 the watchings, the midnight prayers, the obmut- 
 escence, the gloom and mortification of religious 
 orders, and of those who aspired to religious per- 
 fection," as Paley says/ For the ascetic is 
 simply the man who translates the inhibitions of 
 the spirit into a positive law of physical discom- 
 fort. From the same source came the lust of 
 persecution into the Catholic church, leading a 
 man like Torquemada to believe that his passion 
 for dominance was the divine will ; and the equal 
 intolerance and inhumanity of the Puritans, who, 
 as was charged by the writer of a tract in 1676, 
 held that "the Holy Spirit directs and persuades 
 men what to believe and do [note the affirmation] 
 by his immediate working." It was not without 
 reason that South could say they fetched "a war- 
 rant for all their villainies from ecstasy and in- 
 spiration." There was needed the whole revul- 
 sion of the eighteenth century to "cast enthusiasm 
 out of divinity," to use Bishop Sprat's strong 
 phrase — the pity being that so much of the true 
 inspiration had to be ejected with the false. 
 Turn again to Paley, the apostle of common 
 sense in religion, if not of common sense at the 
 expense of religion, and hear his measured rebuke 
 
 ^ Evidences II, ii. 2. 
 
CONCLUSION 276 
 
 of the wild language of the sectarian who cher- 
 ishes the emotions attendant upon so-called "con- 
 version" and "rebirth" as evidences of sanctifica- 
 tion: "Our Saviour uttered no impassioned de- 
 votion. There was no heat in his piety, or in the 
 language in which he expressed it; no vehement 
 or rapturous ejaculations, no violent urgency, in 
 his prayers. ... I feel a respect for Methodists, 
 because I believe that there is to be found 
 amongst them much sincere piety, and availing, 
 though not always well-informed, Christianity: 
 yet I never attended a meeting of theirs, but I 
 came away with the reflection, how different what 
 I heard was from what I read! I do not mean in 
 doctrine, with which at present I have no con- 
 cern, but in manner ; how different from the calm- 
 ness, the sobriety, the good sense, and I may add, 
 the strength and authority, of our Lord's dis- 
 courses!"^ 
 
 Nor has the evil been less marked in philo- 
 sophy than in religion, as he who writes in this 
 time of imiversal war can testify with sad con- 
 viction. There is a saying of Kant's which is 
 much quoted: "Act on a maxim which thou 
 canst will to be law imiversal" ; it is the formula 
 of his so-called categorical imperative. Well, no 
 one would hold Kant directly responsible for the 
 calamity to civilization wrought by the European 
 War; the causes are manifold and complicated. 
 
 2 Ibid. II, ii, 3, 
 
276 PLATONISM 
 
 Yet, after all, what is the ambition of Kant's 
 people but this maxim in actual operation? For 
 the moment you identify the moral sense with 
 the human willj as Kant did, and bestow upon 
 this will a certainty and authority above the ne- 
 gations of pure reason, you are in imminent 
 danger, however you may hedge yourself about 
 with precautions, of confounding your law uni- 
 versal with the libido dominandi and of seeing in 
 the categorical imperative an excuse for forcing 
 your own sense of right upon reluctant mankind. 
 One cannot follow the course of German thought 
 from Luther through Kant and Fichte and 
 Hegel, through Mommsen and Treitschke and 
 others who have justified the aggression of their 
 national statecraft, without a growing conviction 
 that the boasted idealism of the Teutonic mind, 
 if not of the Northern mind generally, has been 
 vitiated from the first by an inability to hold the 
 will to refrain (if we may so name the daemonic 
 check without ourselves suffering the ambiguous 
 consequences of the word "will") distinct from 
 the will to power.* 
 
 ' Paulsen, in his famous commentary, is continually allud- 
 ing to the "Platonism" of Kant, yet unwittingly, in passage 
 after passage, shows how far Kant's rationalistic (and ut- 
 terly inconsistent) dualism is from the ethical dualism of 
 Plato, and how easily it slips into a dogmatism of the will. 
 "With immediate certainty," he says, "we aflSrm moral good 
 as the real purpose of life. We do this, not by means of 
 the understanding or scientific thinking, but through the 
 will, or, as Kant says, the practical reason. In the fact 
 
CONCLUSION 277 
 
 These are examples of the evil that fastens 
 upon the better part of the soul whenever men 
 are tempted to identify spirituality with their 
 positive will. The danger of the seduction, 
 whether for religion or philosophy, was pointed 
 out by Hooker clearly enough in his contention 
 with the Puritanic temper of his day. "For my 
 purpose herein is to show," he said, "that, when 
 the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded 
 that it is the will of God to have those things 
 done which they fancy, their opinions are as 
 thorns in their sides, never suffering them to take 
 rest till they have brought their speculations into 
 practice. The lets and impediments of which 
 practice their restless desire and study to remove 
 leadeth them every day forth by the hand into 
 other more dangerous opinions, sometimes quite 
 and clean contrary to their first pretended mean- 
 that the will, which alone judges things as 'good* or *bad/ 
 determines morality as that which has absolute worth, we 
 have the point of departure for the interpretation of life." 
 The result of this he states elsewhere: "Perhaps we may- 
 say that there is an inner relationship between Kant's 
 ethics and the Prussian nature. The conception of life as 
 service, a disposition to order everything according to rule, 
 a certain disbelief in human nature, and a kind of lack of 
 the natural fulness of life, are traits common to both. It is a 
 highly estimable type of human character which here meets 
 us, but not a lovable one. It has something cold and severe 
 about it that might well degenerate into external perform- 
 ance of duty, and hard doctrinaire morality." {Immanuel 
 Kant, by Friedrich Paulsen, translated by J. E. Creighton 
 and Albert Lefevre, pp. 5 and 54.) 
 
278 PLATONISM 
 
 ings: so as what will grow out of such errors as 
 go masked under the cloak of divine authority, 
 impossible it is that ever the wit of man should 
 imagine, till time have brought forth the fruits of 
 them : for which cause it behoveth wisdom to fear 
 the sequels thereof, even beyond all apparent 
 cause of fear."* But long before Hooker's day 
 the matter was set right by Plato, once for all, in 
 the conversation between Socrates and Euthy- 
 phro, the prof oundest and most beautiful, I some- 
 times think, as well as the most perfectly Socratic 
 of the Dialogues. There the fanaticism of a 
 young man who has no hesitation in holding his 
 own extravagant notion of holy procedure as 
 identical with the absolute law of holiness is con- 
 trasted with the ironical modesty of Socrates, 
 now an old man full of experience, who, never 
 doubting the reality of the Idea of holiness as an 
 eternal peremptory fact, yet knows that the 
 transference of the Idea into the region of spe- 
 cific action can be only tentative and subject to 
 correction. Those who have understood the 
 Euthyphro need read no further to learn the true 
 relation between the spiritual affirmation of So- 
 crates and Plato and their scepticism. 
 
 Fanaticism, as I have said, is rather contrary 
 to Platonism than pseudo-Platonic, and is by no 
 means confined to those who pretend to be fol- 
 lowers of the Academy. The perversion of those 
 
 ^Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface, viii, 2. 
 
CONCLUSION ^79 
 
 who falsely assume Plato's name more eomjnonly 
 takes the guise of an ideahsm in which the softer 
 emotions of the soul masquerade as the spirit. In 
 this form pseudo-Platonism is almost synony- 
 mous with the romantic movement which has 
 carried and still carries with it so many of the 
 finer minds of the age. For us romanticism seems 
 to have begun with the revolt from the narrow re- 
 strictions of neo-classical authority in the eight- 
 eenth century, but its roots really go back to the 
 theosophic speculations of Alexandria. There 
 its chief exponent was Plotinus, who took up the 
 ancient metaphysical error of Parmenides, and 
 sought to re-establish the doctrine of an all- 
 embracing unity in place of the irrational dualism 
 of the master in whose name he pretended to 
 teach. From this unity — to summarize the per- 
 plexed inconsistencies of Neoplatonism in the 
 briefest terms — the creation of the world was 
 supposed to proceed by a series of emanations, 
 through intelligence and soul, down to body, or 
 material "necessity," which, as the last and re- 
 motest offshoot of the divine, was converted 
 somehow, in a manner never cleared by Plotinus 
 of the obscurity inherent in any monistic system, 
 into the cause of evil. This "necessity" of the 
 Plotinian metaphysic may seem to have some re- 
 semblance to Plato's substratum of the same 
 name, but the difference is really fundamental. 
 With Plotinus the final "necessity" is not so 
 
«80 PLATONISM 
 
 much an independent inexplicable force, of which 
 the divine government is a negation, as it is a 
 vaguely conceived distance from the divine, a 
 "deprivation" (steresis) , so to sj^eak. Though at 
 times Plotinus falls into the common language of 
 the Stoics and sees a shadowy sort of evil in the 
 existence of individual souls as a breaking up of 
 the supreme unity, at other times he admits a view 
 of the world which virtually juggles evil out of it 
 altogether. "God made me," he says, speaking 
 for the universe, "and I am come from him, per- 
 fectly fashioned out of all living beings, sufficing 
 and sufficient unto myself, in want of nothing." 
 In such a scheme the individual acts in accord- 
 ance with the necessity of his nature; "each man 
 also does what comes natural to him, and differ- 
 ent men do different things." Plotinus was not 
 unaware of the deductions that would be drawn 
 from such a doctrine: "By saying that there is 
 no evil at all in the universe, we perforce do 
 away with the good as well, and deny that there 
 is any desirable end to be attained." In such a 
 conclusion of nihilism Plotinus was unwilling to 
 rest, and he twists and struggles to escape the 
 net of his own logic ; but if he escapes at all, it is 
 only into a kind of etheriahzed naturalism. Let 
 us grant that the great Neoplatonist was filled 
 with cravings for truth; his doctrine of emana- 
 tion and necessity and steresis, none the less, by 
 weakening the sense of evil as a positive force, 
 
CONCLUSION «81 
 
 and by identifying salvation with a surrender of 
 the soul to vague yearnings for completion, is 
 one of the sources of the endless stream of 
 pseudo-Platonism.^ 
 
 First in the list of the modern pseudo-proph- 
 ets, the father of all the brood, is Rousseau, who, 
 in the words of his latest expositor, "with modi- 
 fications due to the influence of Montesquieu," 
 remained "essentially a Platonist to the end."^ 
 Now, to discover the essential creed of Rousseau 
 one need not look far. It is stated explicitly in 
 a famous passage of the Nouvelle Helo'ise : "Only 
 the souls of fire know how to combat and con- 
 quer; all the great achievements, all the sublime 
 actions, are their work ; cold reason never has ac- 
 complished anything illustrious, and we triumph 
 over our passions only by opposing one to an- 
 other. When the passion of virtue arises in the 
 soul, it dominates alone and holds all in equilib- 
 rium." There is, no doubt, a half-truth in such 
 words, as there is in all pseudo-Platonism. 
 Without the heart, without deep feeling and 
 strong desires, it is true that no great work is 
 achieved whether for good or for evil; that is the 
 
 ^ The quotations here used are taken from The Problem 
 of Evil in Plotinus, by B. A. G. Fuller. To that study I 
 would refer those who desire to look more thoroughly into a 
 subject of great moment which I have been obliged to treat 
 in the most summary fashion. 
 
 ® C. E. Vaughan, The Political Writings of Jean Jacques 
 Rousseau I, 236. 
 
282 PLATONISM 
 
 49iA ff express doctrine of The Republic, But to look 
 for balance in the mere opposition of passion to 
 passion, to make morality only one passion 
 among many, is to preach a ruinous perversion 
 of Platonism. "As for Julie," Rousseau says, 
 "who had no rule but her heart, and knew no 
 other more sure, she abandoned herself to it 
 without scruple, and to do well needed only to 
 do what it demanded of her." The philosophy 
 of abandonment is not Plato's. It may be that 
 of Goethe, the romantic, who, having made 
 Mephistopheles the spirit of denial, could put no 
 better word for God into the mouth of Faust than 
 feeling (Gefiihl), and could discover no better 
 use for that feeling than the seduction of an in- 
 nocent girl. 
 
 In England we shall find another leader of 
 romanticism who is revered by many today as a 
 Platonist and as an emancipator of the human 
 spirit. The message of Blake is elusively ut- 
 tered, but simple enough in itself. It is fairly 
 well summed up in his two mythical personifica- 
 tions of good and evil, "Emanation" and the 
 "Spectre," who play their parts in Milton and 
 other of his Prophetic Books. What little Blake 
 knew of the Alexandrian philosophers came to 
 him at second hand from Jacob Boehme, but his 
 principle of goodness is clearly nothing more 
 than a personification of that instinct of self-ex- 
 pansion in the superessential One which Plotinus 
 
CONCLUSION 283 
 
 made the cause of the unfolding universe. The 
 Emanations, according to Blake, come forth "like 
 Females of sweet beauty" ; they are the power of 
 the imagination, the perfect spontaneity of de- 
 sire, the innocence of imquestioning impulse. 
 Against them in each man is set his evil Spectre, 
 which is nothing else but the man's own shadow 
 regarded as the questioning, limiting, restrain- 
 ing reason: 
 
 "They take the Two Contraries which 
 are called QuaHties, with which 
 
 Every substance is clothed; they name 
 them Good and Evil. 
 
 From them they make an Abstract, 
 which is a Negation 
 
 Not only of the Substance from which 
 it is derived, 
 
 A murderer of its own Body, but also a 
 murderer 
 
 Of every Divine Member. It is the 
 Reasoning Power, 
 
 An Abstract objecting power, that neg- 
 atives everything. 
 
 This is the Spectre of Man, the Holy 
 Reasoning Power, 
 
 And in its Holiness is closed the Abomi- 
 nation of Desolation!""^ 
 
 There could not be a more extraordinary 
 amalgamation of abstract reason as a process of 
 cold logic, such as it had become in the school of 
 
 ''Jerusalem f. 10, 11. 8-16. 
 
284 PLATONISM 
 
 the rationalists and pseudo-classicists, with 
 reason as the spiritual inhibition which Socrates 
 worshipped in the daemonic check; and both 
 forms of reason Blake rejects as the spectral 
 abomination. "Jesus," he declares, "was all vir- 
 tue, and acted from impulse not from rules." 
 
 Those who care to see the mythology of Blake 
 developed in splendid imagery and chains of 
 long-drawn sophistry may take up the works of 
 Shelley, the purest of the English romantics — a 
 Platonist also, as most of his admirers will have 
 him. "Under forms of thought derived from the 
 atheist and materialist Godwin," we read in one 
 of the best informed of living British critics, 
 "Shelley has given, in Prometheus Unbound j 
 magnificent expression to the faith of Plato and 
 of Christ."'— The faith of Plato and of Christ! 
 Shall I confess that to meet with such words in 
 such a place is to be overborne with the futility 
 of writing at all. What shall a Platonist say? 
 what shall he not say? The most casual student 
 ought to perceive that the ethos of Shelley's 
 drama, through its superficial paraphernalia of 
 classic and Platonic borrowings, is antipodal to 
 true classicism and Platonism. If words mean 
 anything the poem breathes the spirit of rebellion 
 against the idea of the divine as a restricting, in- 
 hibiting power, and is animated by the dream of 
 
 ® C. H. Herford, Cambridge History of English Litera- 
 ture XII, 74. 
 
CONCLUSION 285 
 
 deifying the emancipated emotions in its place. 
 Here, if anywhere, the voice that denies is evil : 
 
 "Music is in the sea and air, 
 Winged clouds soar here and there, 
 Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of: 
 'T is love, all love!" 
 
 (Love, the unconvinced reader must add, which 
 does not exclude hatred and bitter intolerance 
 of those who have worshipped a different God.) 
 
 These pseudo-Platonists you shall know, then, 
 by a single test : they all grasp at the imaginative 
 and emotional elements of Platonism, but forget 
 that the spiritual affirmation speaks from a dark 
 recess of the soul (dark, Plato would say, from 
 excess of Hght), in which no image of mortal 
 likeness is seen, and into which no positive motive 
 can enter. And so you shall find them substi- 
 tuting untrammelled spontaneity for centralized 
 control, endless expansiveness for obedience to 
 the inner check, and an exaggerated sense of 
 personal importance for the impersonahty of the 
 spirit. They are the sons of Plotinus and citizens 
 of Alexandria. 
 
 But if the last word of Platonism viewed from 
 the personal side of reason and concupiscence, as 
 the last word of all genuine spirituality, is a 
 negation, we are not, therefore, to suppose that 
 it signifies or commands an impoverishment of 
 our human existence. The very contrary of that 
 is true. I would not deny that the dualism of 
 
286 PLATONISM 
 
 body and soul, which Plato apparently took over 
 from the old Orphic mysteries, led him at times 
 to magnify a pure asceticism, and it is easy to 
 see why this aspect of his teaching exercised a 
 disproportionate influence in those after ages 
 when the world seemed to be breaking up before 
 men's eyes and lapsing into its original chaos. 
 Indeed, remembering the catalogue of ills, such 
 as "to behold desert a beggar bom," which drove 
 Shakespeare, the least ascetic of poets, to cry out 
 for restful death, and reckoning up the inevitable 
 treacheries of hope and the feeble results of en- 
 deavour, the sullen antipathies or the light-heart- 
 ed indifference of mankind to all that summons 
 them out of their ephemeral concerns — reflecting 
 on these things, I should not dare to deny that one 
 of the just and permanent offices of philosophy 
 is to create for the anxious soul a refuge from 
 the world. There are times in our day, as there 
 were in Plato's, when no other safety or comfort 
 seems open to us than the way of flight. I would 
 not repudiate the great passage of The Republic 
 in which Plato sums up the obstacles confronting 
 any one who, living the philosophic hfe, would 
 aim to be both in the world and of the world : 
 
 496a "Then, Adeimantus, I said, the worthy disci- 
 ples of philosophy will be but a small remnant: 
 perchance some noble and well-educated person, 
 detained by exile in her service, who in the ab- 
 sence of corrupting influences remains devoted to 
 
CONCLUSION 287 
 
 her; or some lofty soul bom in a mean city, the 
 politics of which he contenms and neglects; and 
 there may be a gifted few who leave the arts, 
 which they justly despise, and come to her; — or 
 peradventure there are some who are restrained 
 by our friend Theages' bridle; for everything in 
 the life of Theages conspired to divert him from 
 philosophy; but ill-health kept him away from 
 pohtics. My own case of the internal sign is 
 hardly worth mentioning, for rarely, if ever, has 
 such a monitor been given to any other man. 
 Those who belong to this small class have tasted 
 how sweet and blessed a possession philosophy is, 
 and have also seen enough of the madness of the 
 multitude; and they know that no politician is 
 honest, nor is there any champion of justice at 
 whose side they may fight and be saved. Such 
 a one may be compared to a man who has fallen 
 among wild beasts — he will not join in the 
 wickedness of his fellows, but neither is he able 
 singly to resist all their fierce natures, and there- 
 fore seeing that he would be of no use to the 
 State or to his friends, and reflecting that he 
 would have to throw away his hf e without doing 
 any good either to himself or others, he holds his 
 peace, and goes his own way. He is like one 
 who, in the storm of dust and sleet which the 
 driving wind hurries along, retires under the 
 shelter of a wall ; and seeing the rest of mankind 
 full of wickedness, he is content, if only he can 
 live his own life and be pure from evil or un- 
 righteousness, and depart in peace and good- 
 will, with bright hopes." (Jowett's translation.) 
 
«88 PLATONISM 
 
 These are the moments when, looking out on 
 the futihty of all things human, we say that the 
 Poiiticus 272E great pilot himself, having dropped the helm 
 from his hands, has retired apart into his watch- 
 tower and left the world to be rolled backward in 
 its course by its own fated and innate desire. 
 Such moments of dejection will come to every 
 thinking man, and for these too philosophy has 
 its healing mission. And when the hour of part- 
 ing is at hand and the work of life is accom- 
 plished, as on that day in the Athenian gaol when 
 Socrates was talking for the last time with his 
 friends and disciples, then, also, philosophy will 
 appear as a study of death and a long prepara- 
 tion for surrender of the concerns of this earth. 
 
 But that is not the characteristic note of Plato, 
 nor the aspect of philosophy on which it is well to 
 gaze overmuch. Rather, we should dwell on the 
 fulness of existence that belongs by right to him 
 who has overcome himself. No one, I think, can 
 read the Dialogues without being impressed 
 above all by the broad sanity of the life they in- 
 culcate and display. It would require a whole 
 book to exhibit this truth in detail, but some no- 
 tion of its scope can be obtained by taking a few 
 sentences from a Dialogue in which, from the 
 nature of the subject, one would least expect to 
 meet with these practical uses of philosophy. If, 
 caught by the occasional note of asceticism, any 
 one beUeves that Plato's teaching is contrary to 
 
CONCLUSION 289 
 
 the maxim of a somid mind in a somid body, he 
 need not study the book of The Republic which 
 deals at length with physical training as a prepa- 
 ration for the higher education, but may find the 
 doctrine stated with sufiicient explicitness in a 
 few passing words of the Timaeus, "All that is 87c 
 good is fair," it is there said, "and the fair can- 
 not be lacking in proportion." Hence the sound 
 man will not suffer his intelligence to grow at 
 the expense of his physical strength — "the soul 
 must not be exercised to the neglect of the body, 
 nor the body to the neglect of the soul, in order 
 that, being a match for each other, they may at- 
 tain balance and health." That is the founda- 
 tion, but beyond this the whole tenor of the Dia- 
 logue is a witness to Plato's interest in the play 
 of the intellect for its own sake. Particularly in 
 the large observations of natural law he sees a 
 field of endless and elevated activity; "for," he 59c 
 says, "if we pursue these as a source of recrea- 
 tion, not forgetting the principle of eternal being 
 but gaining from the plausible theories of phe- 
 nomena a pleasure free of remorse, we may create 
 for ourselves a sober and intelligent entertain- 
 ment for life." 
 
 Nor does the concern of the philosopher end 
 with the exercise of the body and the understand- 
 ing ; the arts, too, will be included in his purview, 
 and his will be the genuine love of beauty. 
 Whether his interest is in mathematics, or in any ssc 
 
290 PLATONISM 
 
 other intellectual pursuit, he will, if he is rightly 
 to be called a cultivated man, apply himself to 
 80b the arts — not, indeed, as do the common run of 
 the thoughtless, who seek for pleasure only in 
 lovely forms or in the concourse of sweet sounds, 
 but after the manner of those wiser men who find 
 happiness from the imitation of the divine har- 
 mony in mortal motions. Thus, as Plato says 
 Republic 549b elscwherc, philosophy is reason tempered by 
 music, the best guardian and saviour of the soul, 
 which alone, if it is born in man, is able to pre- 
 serve him in virtue to the end. 
 
 Yet there is also in these studies a higher aim 
 than the immediate gratification and safety they 
 offer. Does any one suppose that he shall reach 
 up forthright to the assurance of spiritual intui- 
 tion, without the discipline which comes from ex- 
 erting the brain in the lower sphere of know- 
 ledge, or that his eyes shall see God before they 
 have learned to look with sympathetic interest 
 upon the ordered expanse of creation, or that he 
 shall taste the mystery of eternity when he has 
 never cared to acquire the long lessons of time? 
 Possibly for some men this brief and unlaborious 
 path to the summit may lie open; but they will 
 not find it indicated in Plato. 
 
 Philosophy, as Plato expoimded it in the 
 groves of the Academy, was thus the fulness of 
 life, moving ever to higher and richer planes of 
 knowledge and feeling. Yet it was a life, also, 
 
CONCLUSION 291 
 
 conditioned by the moral law, consciously present 
 as an inner check setting limits to the grasp of 
 reason, staying the flow of desires, governing the 
 imagination, bringing not stagnation and death, 
 as some foolishly suppose, but offering the true 
 Hberty wherein alone is the fruition of our na- 
 ture, and opposing that license whose end is the 
 faction and disease of the soul. The operation 
 of this check, the manner in which the Spirit of 
 God moves upon the face of the waters, we can- 
 not explain; it is of the very essence of dualism 
 that the relation between the elements of our be- 
 ing cannot be stated in positive terms. The be- 
 ginning and end of philosophy are contained in 
 the spiritual affirmation that it is better to be 
 just than unjust, better to suffer all things for 
 righteousness' sake than to do unrighteousness; 
 but in the daily practice of Ufe no absolute law 
 of just dealing has been vouchsafed to man, and 
 he is left to the stern necessity of approaching 
 wisdom humbly by the slow accumulations of ex- 
 perience, and of learning by suffering. It should 
 appear that Plato, in the proposed Dialogue on 
 the Philosopher J had in mind to answer the per- 
 plexities of the dualistic paradox once for all, 
 and to set forth the law of the spirit in the lan- 
 guage of positive metaphysics. That dialogue he 
 never wrote, in honesty to himself could not 
 write ; and who shall presume to supply what the 
 master's hand left undone? 
 
292 PLATONISM 
 
 "The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower 
 Unfinished must remain." 
 
 But Plato has done for us better than his 
 promise. If the picture of the philosopher as an 
 abstract ideal was not drawn, he has left us in the 
 character and lineaments of Socrates an immor- 
 tal portrait of philosophy incarnate in a living 
 historic man. I shall not attempt to retell a 
 story the beauty of which lies open for any one 
 to read in its perfection. It is sufficient to point 
 to the lesson of that life as a practical reconcilia- 
 tion of the paradox that baffles reason and drives 
 so many troubled minds to the positive extreme 
 of religious asceticism or to the negative extreme 
 of hedonism. Socrates was no ascetic; I doubt 
 if any citizen of Athens more keenly enjoyed the 
 common pleasures of the day, or was more heart- 
 ily welcome amongst men of all shades of belief 
 and all modes of Uving — except among the shams 
 and pretenders. Yet, withal, he walked always 
 with his ear inclined to the voice of the divine in- 
 hibition; and when the voice spoke, it was as if 
 an invisible wall was thrown about him, shutting 
 him off from the solicitations of the world. It is 
 not only that he could mingle innocent indul- 
 gence with unflinching self-restraint and combine 
 acceptance of the chances of fortune with the 
 clearest self-direction, but there was about him a 
 reserve, a mark of power, a sign of emancipation, 
 which proved that he had bargained with life on 
 
CONCLUSION 293 
 
 his own terms. Those who came close to him 
 knew that what all the world desired, yet threw 
 away, he had. 
 
 For, however we may calculate the sum of 
 pleasures and pains in such an existence as that 
 of Socrates, the records, if words have any mean- 
 ing, leave us in no uncertainty as to his happi- 
 ness. At the end of the account of his last day in 
 gaol the reporter of the scene declares that to his Piaedo ns 
 friends he seemed in death the best and wisest 
 and most just of all men they had known. To 
 these epithets the reporter might well have add- 
 ed "the happiest." That, indeed, is the strong- 
 est and most enduring impression we get of the 
 man, his pecuhar testimony to the reaHty of the 
 spirit and to the value of philosophy — ^his happi- 
 ness. Other saints and sages have pointed the 
 way to a life in faith, have charmed us by the 
 sweetness of their resignation, incited us by the 
 fires of their charity, heartened us by their great 
 courage, humiUated us by their superiority to 
 temptation, allured us by the vision of heaven 
 upon their faces, taught us, in a measure, the 
 difference between the peace and the pleasure of 
 the soul: but were it not for Socrates, the world, 
 our western world at least, would have no assur- 
 ance of the supreme victory of the truth in happi- 
 ness. Herein he was greater than his greatest 
 pupil. With all Plato's sweep of imagination 
 and depth of insight, despite the fact that only 
 
294 PLATONISM 
 
 through his sympathy and subtle understanding 
 are the master's Hneaments really known to us, 
 there are signs here and there in his works that 
 he himself never altogether conquered the world 
 or rose quite above the mists of spiritual pride. 
 I do not mean, in these closing words, to belit- 
 tle the achievement of one whose writings are the 
 purest source of philosophy yet given to man- 
 kind; but it is true, nevertheless, that, though 
 Plato could perceive and depict the serenity of 
 Socrates, he could not completely possess it. And 
 when, in his searching of many questions, he 
 went astray into doubtful paths, as now and then 
 he did, leaving the door open to the strange mis- 
 conceptions and confusions of a pseudo-Platon- 
 ism, it was because for the moment he allowed 
 himself to become unfaithful to the humility of 
 spirit which was as much the strength of So- 
 crates as was his certainty of spiritual conviction. 
 There is a quaint story in Diogenes Laertius 
 which tells how Socrates once met Xenophon in 
 a narrow lane, and, putting his staff across it so 
 as to prevent the young man's passage, asked him 
 where the various necessities of Hfe were for sale. 
 And when Xenophon had answered, he asked 
 again where men might be made good and virtu- 
 ous. And, receiving no reply, he said, "Follow 
 me, then, and learn." So, as we read the Dia- 
 logues of Plato, the figure of Socrates seems to 
 rise before us, challenging us with his queries, and 
 
CONCLUSION 296 
 
 bidding us follow him in the pursuit of truth and 
 goodness. He would not say, if he were to meet 
 us now, that we should make his hfe in ancient 
 Athens the exact model of our conduct, for that 
 was determined by the ephemeral circumstances 
 of the hour; he would rather command us to deal 
 honestly with ourselves and others, as he had 
 done, and to look for our reward in that happi- 
 ness which is the crown of philosophy. 
 
 THE END 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 For the beginner in Platonism the order of reading 
 the Dialogues is of the first importance. The effect 
 of plunging through Plato's works as they are ar- 
 ranged in any of the existing editions or translations 
 known to me is likely to be a state of bewilderment as 
 to what all the talk is about. The traditional arrange- 
 ment by tetralogies (groups of four) is arbitrary; un- 
 related Dialogues are there forced together by some 
 purely accidental resemblance, while others, closely re- 
 lated in subject, may be widely separated. On the 
 other hand none of the modem rearrangements is, in 
 my judgment, satisfactory. Now, two principles of 
 sequence are open to us, the chronological and the logi- 
 cal; but neither of them is without difficulties. The 
 chronological order in itself no doubt would be the most 
 natural, if only we had some infallible criterion as to 
 the relative time of composition. It is true that certain 
 large outlines of sequence by this canon have been 
 pretty generally agreed on, but the details are still 
 disputed and are not likely ever to be settled. We are 
 thus thrown upon the logical order of ideas; but here 
 again there are serious difficulties. Plato did not al- 
 ways finish one subject and then pass on to another; 
 on the contrary his themes often cross one another in 
 such a way that in a pair of Dialogues one theme may 
 be more developed in what thus seems to be the later of 
 the two in logical order, while the treatment of another 
 
 9m 
 
298 PLATONISM 
 
 theme would indicate that this Dialogue was the earlier. 
 Our only recourse, therefore, is a compromise, and in 
 the arrangement that follows I have proceeded frankly 
 on that principle. In the main the groups there formed 
 would appear to follow one another in the time of com- 
 position, as they do, largely considered, in the logical 
 order of ideas; but it is probable that in some cases a 
 Dialogue included in a later group, for instance the 
 biographical, was written before some one of an earlier, 
 let us say, the Socratic, group. Within the groups the 
 arrangement is logical and probably also, for the most 
 part, chronological, though here again it was necessary 
 to compromise. I can only say that the scheme is the 
 one that seems to me, after reading Plato through many 
 times, to give the clearest general notion of the de- 
 velopment of his philosophy. The analyses which fol- 
 low the diagram are, patently, of the most meagre sort. 
 They make no pretension even to indicate the large sub- 
 sidiary questions, often in themselves profoundly in- 
 teresting, which branch out from the main ethical thread 
 of Plato's thought. 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 SUGGESTED ORDER OP READING 
 
 I. So- 
 cratic 
 
 r Char- 
 mid es 
 Protag- 
 oras 
 
 . Gorgias 
 
 II. Bio- 
 graphic 
 
 Euthy- 
 
 phro 
 Apology 
 Crito 
 Phaedo 
 
 III. Ideal ^ 
 
 299 
 
 Meno 
 Phaedrus 
 Sympos- 
 ium 
 
 IV. The Republic 
 
 (Gratylus 
 Euthydemus 
 Theaetetus 
 Parmenides 
 Sophist 
 
 VL Cosmologicalj^j;?!^^^'^ 
 
 VII. Laws 
 
 Minor 
 
 r Laches 
 
 Th cages 
 
 Lysis 
 
 I and II Alcibiades 
 
 Rivals 
 
 Hipparchus 
 
 Major and Minor Hippias 
 
 lo 
 
 Menexenus 
 
 Clitopho 
 
 Critias 
 
 Minos 
 . Epinomis 
 
SOO PLATONISM 
 
 The Socratic Group 
 
 In general these Dialogues are aporistic, that is, they 
 set forth the difficulties and bearing of a question with- 
 out coming to a definite conclusion. 
 
 The Charmides deals with the nature of temperance. 
 No satisfactory definition is discovered, but we are left 
 with the suggestion that somehow the virtues run to- 
 gether into one and are connected with some form of 
 knowledge. 
 
 The Protagoras asks whether virtue can be taught 
 like the arts. Thus again the question is raised whether 
 the virtues are all identical with some form of know- 
 ledge. In what seems to be a digression, but is really 
 the main point of progress from the Charmides^ So- 
 crates suggests that virtue may depend on a science of 
 measurement, by which we calculate the sum of pleasure 
 and pain resulting from any act. According to this 
 theory of hedonism the virtuous man would be he who 
 can foresee most clearly the future, and the criterion of 
 virtue would be pleasure. 
 
 The Gorgias proves that pleasure and pain do not 
 furnish a sufficient law of morality, and takes refuge 
 in the intuition that justice (which now appears as the 
 moral sense, or sum of the virtues) is better for a man 
 than injustice. It hints at a distinction between pleas- 
 ure and happiness, but appeals to the judgment after 
 death to set right the apparent injustice of this life. 
 
 The Biographic Group 
 
 These four Dialogues are connected with the trial 
 and death of Socrates. Together they give a portrait 
 of him at the consummation of his life as the philo- 
 
APPENDIX 301 
 
 sopher par excellence, and are thus a concrete practi- 
 cal presentation of the intuition reached in the earlier 
 group. 
 
 The Euthyphro presents Socrates, at the eve of his 
 trial, talking with a young friend on the nature of 
 holiness. Euthyphro has no doubt of his perfect know- 
 ledge of this virtue as a practical conformity with the 
 will of the gods. Socrates, who is about to defend him- 
 self against the charge of impiety, does not question 
 the reality of holiness as an eternal Idea to be sought 
 for and obeyed, but brings out the difficulty of de- 
 termining what in any case is the will of the gods. To 
 know this we must first know what holiness is. 
 
 The Apology sets forth the divine mission of So- 
 crates as one called to lead his people to consider the 
 needs of the soul before those of the body. The spirit- 
 ual affirmation is connected with scepticism, and the 
 probability of an adjustment of the wrongs of life in a 
 future world is still maintained. 
 
 The Crito shows Socrates in gaol, unjustly condemned 
 to death, yet unwilling to evade human laws by brib- 
 ing his way to liberty. The belief is expressed that 
 obedience to these decrees of the State will prepare a 
 man to face the judgment of the Divine Laws. 
 
 The Phaedo shows Socrates dying for his conviction, 
 in happiness. He is happy because his real life here 
 and now is in the eternal immutable world of Ideas, and 
 to this life there is neither beginning nor end. 
 
 The Ideal Group 
 
 What is this world of Ideas in which the philo- 
 sopher lives.'' 
 
 The Meno resumes the old question whether virtue is 
 
302 PLATONISM 
 
 a form of knowledge which can be imparted by instruc- 
 tion. It connects Ideas with the things of eternity by 
 the argument of reminiscence. Our knowledge of them, 
 and our impulse to virtue, is a memory of our vision of 
 absolute justice and goodness in some former existence. 
 
 The Phaedrus places Ideas in a mythical superceles- 
 tial sphere, as the Meno regarded them in a mythical 
 time. The argument looks forward also to the meta- 
 physical problem of truth and falsehood. 
 
 The Symposium brings Ideas into life as an ethical 
 force by exhibiting the love and desire they excite in 
 the soul by the attraction of their beauty. 
 
 The Republic 
 
 Here the arguments of the earlier groups are de- 
 veloped and woven together into a single strand. Jus- 
 tice is the moral sense, and the other virtues are the 
 specific applications of it. The just man, as he is just, 
 is happy, now and here, and there is no need to appeal 
 to future rewards and punishments. Justice and hap- 
 piness are the effect of the Idea of the Good as the 
 supreme cause. The philosopher is he whose life is 
 governed by this cause. The knowledge of ourselves as 
 happy in justice is an immediate certain intuition (the 
 spiritual affirmation), above the practical knowledge, 
 or opinion, which, working in the sphere of the specific 
 virtues, is always subject to confirmation by the 
 future. The constitution of the ideal State is expound- 
 ed as a counterpart of the perfect philosopher. 
 
 The Metaphysical Group 
 
 As The Republic was the focus of the earlier dis- 
 cussions, so from it radiate the later questions. The 
 
APPENDIX 303 
 
 earlier contention had been with the rhetorical sophists 
 who, as a class, ignored the authority of the moral law 
 as having any stabihty apart from the universal flux. 
 Now the ground shifts to the question of knowledge 
 itself; passing from the naive to the metaphysical 
 doubts of sophistry. The TheaetetuSf Sophist, and 
 Politicus are internally connected, and almost certainly 
 follow in this order. The Cratylus and Euthydemus 
 are probably earlier, possibly a good deal earlier. The 
 Parmenides, logically considered, seems to me to fall 
 best between the Theaetetus and the Sophist; but there 
 are undeniable objections to this arrangement. 
 
 The Cratylus plays with the absurdities involved in 
 the popular notion of the universal flux as betrayed by 
 the etymologies of language, and proves the inadequacy 
 of such a criterion for any one earnestly in search of the 
 truth. 
 
 The Euthydemus makes sport of the thesis that there 
 is no distinction between knowledge and opinion, truth 
 and falsehood. It eliminates this thesis by a reduction 
 to the absurd. 
 
 The Theatetus debates the question, What is know- 
 ledge.'* Protagoras had argued that knowledge is ob- 
 tained only by perception, that there is therefore no 
 distinction between kinds of knowledge, and that the 
 sensations of the individual are the only measure of 
 truth. Socrates rebuts these theses, but comes to no 
 satisfactory conclusion as to the nature of knowledge, 
 that is of knowledge as a relation between subject and 
 object. But he also strongly reaffirms the spiritual fact 
 that we know it is best for a man to live in the world 
 of Ideas, and to imitate in his conduct, so far as this 
 is possible, the justice of the divine nature. 
 
304 PLATONISM 
 
 The Parmenides first acknowledges the diflSculties in- 
 herent in any rational explanation of the doctrine of 
 Ideas (and of the moral certainty dependent on this 
 doctrine). Secondly, it affirms the necessity of main- 
 taining this doctrine, and exhibits the inadequacy of the 
 metaphysical use of reason to prove or disprove what 
 we possess by the higher intuition. 
 
 The Sophist now shows the proper use of the reason, 
 controlled by the content of experience, when dealing 
 with the questions raised by the metaphysical logician. 
 First it arrives at a physical definition of the sophist; 
 then passes to his character; then discusses the nature 
 of being and not-being (the relative), and sets down 
 the sophist as one who deals with the realm of not- 
 being. Meanwhile the second argument of the Parmen- 
 ideSj the necessity of maintaining the doctrine of Ideas 
 as an intuition superior to metaphysics, has been re- 
 stated in summarized form. 
 
 The Politicus undertakes to discuss the character of 
 the statesman on the same level as the discussion of the 
 sophist. Its most interesting part is the long mythical 
 digression on the forward and backward revolutions of 
 the world as it is now guided by the divine will and 
 now left to move by its own innate impulsion. 
 
 The Cosmological Group 
 
 The exact chronological place of these two Dialogues 
 is problematic. I^ogically they may be taken as a sequel 
 and development of the mythical digression of the 
 Politicus. 
 
 The Timaeus turns from metaphysics to cosmogony. 
 The dualism of knowledge and opinion has been forti- 
 fied against the attacks of sophist and eristic ; the uni- 
 
APPENDIX 805 
 
 verse is now shown to present itself to us in a corre- 
 sponding dualism of the Divine and Necessity. To the 
 former belong ethical Ideas ; science ranges in a region 
 between the two. The essential parts of the first ac- 
 count of creation will be found in sections 27d to 31b, 
 34a to 35b, 36d to 38c, 39e and 40a, 41a to 43c ; of the 
 second account in sections 47e to 52d, 69a to 70b, 70de. 
 The Philebus returns to the old question of pleasure 
 and pain, but with the results of the metaphysical in- 
 quiry as a background. Which is the higher, pleasure 
 or knowledge, and what is their relative position in the 
 universal scheme? In answering this question the na- 
 ture of things is divided into the cause, the limit, the 
 limited, and the limitless ; the cause being equivalent to 
 the Divine and the limitless to the Necessity of the 
 Timaeus, while the limit and the limited are the effect 
 of the interworking of the two extremes. Pleasure be- 
 longs to the limitless, knowledge (of the sort embraced 
 by science) to the limit. This return to the question of 
 pleasure, now treated without the ascetic bias of the 
 middle Dialogues, prepares us for the main ethical theme 
 of the Lams, 
 
 The Laws 
 
 The life of man is discussed in relation to education, 
 art, and religion, not measured by the ideal criterion of 
 happiness as in The Republic, but by practical con- 
 siderations of pleasure. On this same basis a system of 
 laws is devised, not for an ideal State, but for the best 
 feasible State in which the individual may freely de- 
 velop. This Dialogue is known to be the work of Plato's 
 last days, and it is in many respects a summing up and 
 revision of all his previous writings. 
 
806 PLATONISM 
 
 The Minor Dialogues 
 
 These I have separated from the main groups, in 
 some cases because they are trivial and probably spur- 
 ious, and in other cases because, in essential matters, 
 they do not advance upon one of the included Dialogues. 
 In either case, it is well for the reader who approaches 
 Plato for the first time to leave all of them, except per- 
 haps the Laches and Theages, to the end. The Men- 
 exenuSy in particular, raises the question of authenticity. 
 Judging this Dialogue by intrinsic evidence alone, I 
 should have been inclined to reject it as spurious, as 
 some critics do not hesitate actually to do. Yet Aris- 
 totle apparently accepted it as Platonic, and we know 
 from Cicero that in his day it was so much admired as 
 to be recited annually at Athens. Such testimony ought 
 to instil modesty into the modem scholar. Some of 
 the Dialogues, for example the First and Second Alci- 
 biades, read as if they were composed by an accredited 
 pupil of the Academy while Plato was still alive, and 
 as such might be called semi-authentic. But this ex- 
 planation, of course, I oflFer as pure conjecture. 
 
 The Laches, Theages, and Lysis, dealing respectively 
 with courage, wisdom, and friendship, might form a 
 class by themselves with the Charmides. 
 
 The First and Second Alcibiades have many points in 
 common with the Euthyphro, The Rivals asks who the 
 philosopher is, and answers that it is he who knows 
 himself, and hence knows how to govern and give judg- 
 ment. The Hipparchus debates the meaning of the 
 profitable. 
 
 The Hippias Major is on the nature of beauty. The 
 Hippias Minor discusses ignorance as the real source of 
 
APPENDIX 307 
 
 evil. The lo deals with poetry and the poet, and the 
 Menexenus with oratory. 
 
 The Clitopho shows Socrates taken to task because 
 he has never given a positive definition of justice. It 
 properly forms an introduction to The Republic. The 
 Critias, an unfinished sequel to The Republic, was de- 
 signed to narrate the heroic war of Athens with the 
 mythical kingdom of Atlantis. 
 
 The Minos, on the nature of law, may be taken as 
 introductory to the Laws, The Epinomis, which pur- 
 ports to be a continuation of the Laws, is in my judg- 
 ment spurious. 
 
 To the body of the Dialogues is appended a collec- 
 tion of thirteen Letters, which I have never been able to 
 accept as genuine, despite their early admission into 
 the canon by critics of antiquity. Whether genuine or 
 not, they are an important source for the facts of 
 Plato's life. 
 
 The brief Definitions of philosophic terms can scarce- 
 ly be Plato's, but probably were composed for use in 
 the Academy. 
 
 Finally, in some editions there are six Dialogues ap- 
 pended, aU trivial, which are certainly spurious, and 
 were so regarded in antiquity. They need not be con- 
 sidered. 
 
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