1. The biographer of the Greek philosophers reports that Socrates once dreamed he had an unfledged cygnet on his knee. In a few moments it grew wings and flew away, singing very sweetly. The next day a young man came to him who was said to count Solon among his nearer ancestors, and through Solon to look back to Codrus and the god Poseidon. His name was Plato.
2. Before coming to Socrates, this youth had written dithyrambs, songs and tragedies. He had studied under Ariston of Argos, a celebrated wrestler. Some say he got his name from the breadth of his chest, and that he won a wrestling prize at the Isthmian games. Whatever his earlier studies, the day he settled at the knees of Socrates decided the course of his life. Nothing he had learnt before was wasted, but the discourses of Socrates gave it meaning and direction. From Socrates he learnt to understand himself, and so to understand his predecessors and contemporaries. He learnt what a Greek, and what a man, ought to seek, and what perils and temptations beset either who starts the search.
3. Plato has so identified himself with his master that it is hard to establish the events of his own life. Less is recorded of him than of many insignificant Greek sophists, and what is recorded rests on poor evidence. The epistles that bear his name have long been rejected as spurious, though some scraps of information may be drawn from them. The most interesting concern his journeys to Sicily: his connection with the elder tyrant Dionysius, his attempts to reform the younger, his hope of realising an ideal polity through a dissolute and worthless tyrant, and his influence on Dion, the stern aristocrat, conspirator and despot. We cannot arrange this history, but we may grant that Plato had an intense longing to prove he was no mere dreamer, and that what he believed could be realised. We have too few facts to draw a moral about a noble mind yielding to hopes of great results from such instruments. He may never have had flattering expectations, but only, perhaps reluctantly, carried out a task laid on him. How far it was necessary that his polity be tried in Syracuse or anywhere to test its principles, we can judge better once we have considered what it was. The question that concerns us now is whether Plato, once fledged, flew off into the air and left his master on the earth, as some have fancied and the old tradition seems to hint; or whether he was the truest expounder of his master — the true Socratic precisely because he was not the founder of a Socratic system but a living and original investigator.
4. Plato conversed with both Aristippus and Antisthenes. With Euclides he was closer, for after the death of Socrates, when Athens seemed unsafe, he and other disciples fled to Megara. It would be rash to say that his own thought was shaped by watching these three, since internal evidence apparently supports the view that his Phædrus and Laches were written in his master’s lifetime. Yet he must have noticed very early how his fellow-disciples seized on particular sayings of their teacher and built systems and schools out of them, and he must have thought deeply about how to escape the same temptation. If Socrates had made up his creed from the systems then current in Greece, it would be no surprise that the elements, artificially put together, reasserted their independence and were claimed by the minds they suited. Everything Plato had seen of his master made that supposition impossible. Whether or not Socrates had studied other schools, every thought he uttered came fresh and living from himself — or rather was the joint fruit of his own reflection and that of the people he talked with. He could minister to other minds because he knew so well what passed in his own, and sought out each principle as the answer to a real difficulty. But every philosopher is in some sort an inquirer into the workings of his own mind, and his philosophy, if sincere, shows that mind. How then was Socrates, so remarkably himself, kept from the narrowness and exclusiveness into which Aristippus and Antisthenes, both sincere in their way, had plainly fallen?
5. Plato could answer only that it was the healthy habit of always tying his thoughts to outward circumstances and to the puzzles of his own age that kept the Socratic doctrines, in their owner’s hands, from stagnating into mere theory. The obvious way to make a philosophy complete and fit for all times is to strip off the accidental features that suited it to one crisis. Plato was convinced by reflection and experience that the opposite course was the safe one. Homer could be read and enjoyed in the age of Pericles not because he stood aloof from the local and temporary, but because he was wrapped in it; men were presented as they were in a quite different state of manners, and that was exactly what let readers see them as brothers and countrymen. The reader will think of many reasons why the analogy of poetry does not hold for philosophy; it is enough that they did not weigh with Plato. No one knew or felt more strongly the essential difference between poetry and philosophy — he was even betrayed into exaggerations in asserting it. But he was convinced it did not lie in this, that the poet wins immortality by adapting himself to the feelings of his age and the philosopher by divesting himself of them all. He thought he saw that giving up living and practical sympathies, divorcing oneself from human interests, produces the very narrowness the philosopher hopes to escape. So if Greek wisdom was not to fall back from where Socrates had brought it, or ever to serve other countries and periods, Plato concluded it must not dissolve into speculations or declamations about this scheme of life or that principle of action. It must show itself in the conversations of actual men — not of some imaginary day, but of that day — talking about what they really talked of when they met in the streets or at their feasts. He took no pains to forget the people he lived among or what occupied them, or to adopt any more universal way of thinking and speaking than theirs.
6. The Dialogue of Plato is therefore not, as some have said, an artistic invention in which the philosopher sacrificed severe judgment to imagination, to a reputation for dramatic skill, or to the wish to present truths agreeably. He plainly regarded it as a necessary means of making clear the truths he believed he possessed, and he is anxious above all to impress this, that in the Dialogue rightly used we have the induction to all principles. It is strange that he should be accused of sacrificing his disciples to a selfish desire for fame by a method that leads them step by step in self-inquiry, or of using it to win their favour, when it caused more vexation to every superficial talker of the day than anything else his genius could have devised. A mere artist tries to carry us at once into noble contemplations that make us conscious of our own greatness. Plato wants us to feel our own way into them, climbing rugged and thorny paths and finding how many frivolous difficulties must be cleared away before we see anything as it is. His Dialogues are literally an education: they teach how to deal with our own minds, how far to humour them and how far to resist, how to receive the glimpses of light that sometimes fall on them, and how to find a way through the darkness in which they so often feel lost. Only in the sacred oracles do we find an author so aware of his own perplexities, so unwilling to hide them, and so anxious to awaken us to them so that we may be delivered. Here lies Plato’s art. It is most consummate — deeper in insight and influence than almost any human composition — yet it is not art in the common sense, for it has no independent purpose of pleasing. It does not work underground, leaving the ordinary man to feel its effects and the thoughtful man to judge it by them. It draws your attention anxiously to its own methods, and the writer is as ambitious that you understand all the springs and valves at work as that you accept any one result. Indeed he does not acknowledge the results as yours until you have gone, in your own inner being, through the processes that lead to them.
7. Plato above all men must be studied in Plato. Hearty, sympathetic acquaintance with one Dialogue will do more to introduce a student to what is blunderingly called his system than the reports of all critics and historians. There are no digests of doctrine, no ready-made notions to carry away; everything is alive and at work. Nor are the speakers, as in our best Dialogues — Berkeley’s, for instance — personages with significant names; they are real Phædruses, Gorgiases and Protagorases, talking in a place we are given an accurate, vivid description of, about some passing question that proves to contain the deepest and highest principles of our being. These are drawn out not by force, as if the facts were predetermined to yield a moral, but by the ordinary accidents of conversation: explanations and contradictions, the confusion of disciples, the anger of doctors, the clumsy reconciliations of good-natured bystanders. The dialogue is often a Siris. Like Berkeley’s admirable treatise, it may be moored on earth to no worthier a stake than the virtues of tar-water; often the starting-point is less worthy still, the lying speech of some rhetorician defending a mischievous, vulgar paradox. Yet the chain is unwound with a skill of which our modest countryman would cheerfully have confessed his own was a feeble copy, until its highest link is felt to be about the throne of Him whose name Berkeley had the privilege to utter, and Plato the honesty to declare unutterable.
8. So far I have described Plato as reasserting the whole principle of Socrates against those who had dismembered it. But a notion has gone out, supported by an able and eloquent French commentator of our day, that Plato was an Eclectic. In its most plausible form this says that on every occasion he set two imperfect principles against each other, and either by showing their inadequacy hinted at, or by clear exposition developed, a third idea including both. Another common version is that Plato conceived a philosophy which, starting from Socrates, would absorb all the other Greek philosophies, metaphysical and moral, so that we find in him an attempt to harmonise not only the schools that took their name from Socrates but those before him. There seems to me much truth in both statements, but truth in a form likely to mislead and to pervert the reader’s notion of the Greek teacher’s real object. I suspect that by considering these theories we may understand Plato’s meaning better and gain light for all our future inquiries.
9. One main object of Plato in using the dialogue was to discover the latent meaning of words, and to lead the inquirer to recognise it as what had been implied in them from their origin, though floating in the minds of those who gave them quite another meaning. This carried out the method Socrates had been maturing all his life, to which we traced the success of his moral experiments. It rested on a faith ripening daily into certainty: that there is in every man that which apprehends and recognises truth; that truth is always near him; and that his view of it is always interrupted and distorted by the phantoms presented to his senses. Plato believed the great duty of the Socratic teacher was to draw this truth out of the student’s mind and teach him to realise it as his own; to this all labour was to be bent, and in doing it faithfully the teacher might hope for greater illumination. But we must never forget that the discipline was moral as well as intellectual — primarily and essentially moral: he must resist the attractions and bribery of sense to escape her impositions. Now this process leads to a result that often looks like Eclecticism. One opinion is rejected as false, the opposite opinion is shown to be unsatisfactory too, and then a truth is seen, or suspected to lie hidden, which both were aiming ineffectually to reach. The reader of the Dialogues will meet such instances again and again. But let him not hurry to conclude that the teacher’s aim was to reconcile these opinions or to build a more comprehensive one. If he quietly accompanies Plato he will find that in such conversations distinction is much more the object than accommodation. The intention is to distinguish between the images the mind shapes from objects of sense when it is sense-ridden, and the sound meaning and reality it can perceive when it has sought to purge itself of its habitual delusions; to teach it the art of rejecting as well as choosing, and to put it in the posture for either. He may well have done more than any philosopher who ever lived to bring harmony and unity into moral speculation — I fully believe he has. But he begins by cultivating in us the habit of moral distinction, and by making us feel that truth and falsehood are radical, ultimate contradictions that cannot be explained or resolved into anything else. To see what is, as it truly is, is the highest privilege of the best and wisest man; to see things as they are not, confused, sensualised, corrupted, is the misery and curse of the thoughtless, slavish victim of inclination. To open in other men the inward eye that discerns the reality of things is the vocation of him who has served his own apprenticeship to truth and feels himself her servant.
10. Such, I conceive, is the object of one large class of the Platonic Dialogues, the induction or vestibule to the rest. In these Plato is distinctly and emphatically Socratic. They must differ from the actual conversations of Socrates in one respect: the end must always have been more present to the writer than to the speaker. In Socrates the strongest feeling seems to have been: “I am certain there is something that is not appearance or phantasy, that man did not shape for himself, that will remain when all phantasies have vanished, that is, and that I must recognise if I would be anything but a phantom or shadow myself.” This was the conclusion of a practical, working mind. By earnest meditation on it, Plato came to feel that if every thing has an unseen reality, a truth and substance of which the eye sees only shape and colour, there must be a truth and substance without any of these sensible adjuncts, which is in itself, and the beholding of which is the function and highest attainment of the purified spirit. The outward shell of this opinion so resembles the doctrine of Euclides that we cannot wonder some critics, wanting to break Plato’s philosophy into fragments, pronounced several early Dialogues to be productions of the Megarian school. Wherever they found this substance, this τὸ ὄν, set forward as the end of human inquiry, they connected it with a system whose prominent mark was that Good and Being are identical. Those who agree with my view will see both the plausibility of the notion and its utter untenableness. Nowhere is the distinction between Plato and the Megarians clearer than here, where he asserts their own principle. By keeping to the method of Socrates, and making his Dialogues not the declaration of a truth but a mental exercise to arrive at it, he has removed all the dryness and prickliness of the doctrine and shown how it connects with the more obvious notions the Megarian roughly opposed to it. Pleasure is not the good, they said; self-denial is not the good; Being is the good. Yes, said Plato, but there is a Being in pleasure, a reality as well as a falsehood. Whatever man has found words for, whatever he has pursued in life, contains a truth, a substance, that can be distinguished from the lying phantom that surrounds and counterfeits it. So far as a man does this, he puts himself in the right state of mind to perceive in the end that Truth, that Being, which has no accidents about it. But to reach and cultivate this state of mind there must be a discipline, a curbing and contradiction of the lower nature, and so this too is a good.
11. Without any purpose of combining opinions — indeed while resolutely maintaining boundaries and using a most subtle test for telling the true from the apparent — Plato had brought the three doctrines that called themselves Socratic into a certain relation and harmony. Next he had to consider how far the same doctrine and method might apply to the earlier philosophers of Greece: how far his master had been anticipated by Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides or Pythagoras, and how far he had thrown back a light that made their speculations more intelligible and consistent with each other. Here, in my judgment, begins the second class of Dialogues, in which the link is illustrated and developed between Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy — between the doctrine of Being that Socrates asserted and the question of Unity that had so long occupied the Greek mind.
12. Readers will remember that the Eleatic leader Xenophanes differed in one respect from his successors: his language at first seems to agree remarkably with that of Socrates. What he took to be the true object of contemplation was God, or “The Being.” Yet while doing justice to his course of thought, we had to admit he was essentially a destructive thinker, who reduced his Being to a bare negation of human qualities, and that Parmenides expressed the result better in simply affirming Oneness. How then did Socrates’ doctrine differ from Xenophanes’? By a whole heaven. The Being of Xenophanes was altogether exclusive; the Being of Socrates altogether inclusive. If language has words like “just,” “merciful,” “good,” and applies them to certain acts, then whether or not the words were understood or rightly applied, there is a reality corresponding to them — a “justice,” a “mercy,” a “goodness” — and all centre and unite in the Being. No Sophist could embarrass him by asking: “Man also uses ‘unjust,’ ‘unmerciful,’ ‘bad’; why should these not have archetypes too, and dwell in that permanent, all-containing substance?” For it was assumed in the very hypothesis that these are departures from what is, and so intrinsically falsehoods. By reflecting on this delicate yet vital difference — which marks the man fighting all popular opinion and faith from the man finding substance and life in everything — Plato seems to have gained his first insight into the doctrine of Ideas, the most native part of his philosophy, which may fairly be called purely Platonic. I readily admit what the other disciples of Socrates vehemently asserted, and Aristotle took from them: that Socrates never enunciated this principle in any discourse. Yet I believe just as firmly that Plato reached it by steadily adopting the Socratic method, and that they missed it only because they neglected that method. In making this clear I may also give such insight into the subject itself as a treatise like this can.
13. The Greek word for appearance and for opinion is the same: an opinion is what seems to each man. The whole education Socrates gave was to lead his disciples from appearances to realities, and in so doing he felt he was leading them from Opinions to Knowledge. His experiments on others convinced him, and his own heart told him, that we thirst for knowledge and cannot be satisfied with less. These at least are Socratic assertions; no one pretends Plato palmed them on him. But how could this be? The essence, the being of a thing or person seems shut up inside it. I may acknowledge it is there, but how can it come within my perceptions? Must it not be some shape, image or phantom of the thing I take account of, and not the thing itself? Grant this, and the Socratic philosophy falls. And what falls with it? Not a scheme or system, but the faith that truth is anyhow knowable by man, that he is not the necessary dupe of shadows and impostures — the fact that he is a moral being. There was no doubt that these results would follow; they had followed, and the practice and education of Socrates had been nothing but a deliverance from them. The Sophists had turned the world into a shadow world in which they could safely practise their juggleries. It was the great assertion that something is, and that only what is can be known, that had discomfited them and mocked their subtleties. Yet unless this great practical puzzle could somehow be resolved, the conclusions of Socrates, however sound by the reason and moral feeling of everyone who worked them out, would remain open to continual assault from the understanding. Here too Plato was not left to conjecture. The Sophists had stolen their armour from the real, honest philosophers of Greece. Those philosophers had not dared to grapple with the difficulty, and the proofs they left of its presence in their speculations had been eagerly seized by men who knew so well how to suck poison from every flower.
14. I have suggested that a faithful, affectionate study of the strange, earnest thoughts of Heraclitus might profit any man. But his sayings on the endless vicissitude of things and the falsehood of all human conjectures impressed the Greek mind far more than his deeper thoughts on the universal light in man and his power of conversing with the universal. These latter connected themselves only with the vague pantheistic notions then gaining ground — notions probably very far from Heraclitus himself, who thought it ultimate wisdom to know the name of Jupiter. The former, in the hands of Protagoras, became a system excluding all constancy, permanence or order. One man has one notion of what he beholds or meditates on, another man another; any may be as right as any other; and that we cannot have more than such notions, nor come nearer the truth of things, is to be taken for granted rather than proved. Meanwhile the Eleatic “fixedness,” the formal opposite of the Heraclitean “flux,” served the deceiver equally well. Denying plurality, and so embarrassing men’s minds about the objects of their worship, was as convenient a policy as upsetting their faith in their own convictions. Such observations might have led another man to despair of all inquiry; they only gave Plato a stronger moral interest in pursuing the inquiries he had begun.
15. All the notions, you say, that the mind forms about what the bodily eye sees, or its own inward eye sees, are confused, fluctuating, contradictory. My notion of the flower is not the very flower; my notion of what is just is not the very just. Most true, Heraclitus; most true, Protagoras. But these notions are indexes, guideposts to what is not false, confused or contradictory. The notion of the flower and of justice proves there is a very flower — a very justice. Again, the mind can behold the Being, the One; but all the notions, imaginations and premonitions of the sensual understanding offer only miserable, counterfeit resemblances of it. True, Xenophanes and Parmenides; yet there is that in this Being, this One, which does and must answer to these notions, which they are trying, however vainly or awkwardly, to express. Now connect the results of inquiries that start from such opposite points. What follows? There are permanent, unchangeable forms in which what is manifests itself as it is, and in which we behold it as it is. Are these forms in the beholder or in what he beholds? We answer that the region of pure Being, where the inner mind dwells, may be (one might expect it to be) under some law corresponding to that of sensible phenomena. At least there could be no à priori presumption against this doctrine: a sound cannot, by the nature of language and things, be referred only to what it comes from, but supposes an ear that receives it; so there may be such a presentation of what actually is — of the substance or essence of each thing — as cannot be understood merely in reference to the thing, nor merely in reference to the one it is made to, but belongs at one and the same moment to both. This presentation cannot by its nature be fluctuating; it must be permanent and substantial, or it could not make known what is permanent and substantial. It must be the very opposite of its parallel in the world of sense. Are we to say such ideas or forms are eternal as well as substantial? To say “Yes” would startle no one if they concerned only Justice, Goodness, or even Beauty. But when we speak of the actual flower and tree as having a primary form or idea, is there not something dangerous in a doctrine that makes such forms eternal? The reply is that this would do very partial justice to Plato. For if he believes there is a reality, and so in some sense an archetypal form or idea, in the minutest thing, he believes just as firmly that every idea has its ground and termination in one higher than itself, and that there is a supreme idea, foundation and consummation of all the rest — the idea of the absolute and perfect Being, in whose mind they all dwelt, and in whose eternity alone they can be thought of as eternal.
16. This remark also relieves the doctrine of another objection. These ideas, being substantial by nature, must be substantially in him who perceives them. To suppose there are indeed forms or ideas of things but that we have only notions of those ideas is merely to push the difficulty a step further off, and to fall into contradiction and absurdity in the attempt. The idea itself must be considered as with us and in us. The notion we form of the thing, when we begin to use our senses, compare and reflect, must not be identified with the idea; it is a witness and proof that the idea is present and that we are feeling after it. To realise or possess the idea is to have the science, the knowledge, of the thing. But this assertion that the ideas are substantially with us must be taken together with what was said before, and then it is plain that it does not affirm the ground and root of knowledge to be in ourselves — the very falsehood Plato sought to overturn. The ideas are the witnesses in our inmost being that there is something beyond and above us; when we enter into the idea of anything we give up our pretensions to be authors or creators and become mere acknowledgers of what is. To enter into that deepest, ultimate idea which is the ground of our being must be, in the deepest sense, a surrender of our own notions and imaginations — an act of submission to, and reception of, the Truth.
17. Here, then, Plato most consistently carries out the principle his master asserted from first to last. We see how perfectly the Socratic doctrine that knowledge is the end of life agrees with the humility and confession of ignorance at the root of all the Socratic discipline. We see the harmony between knowledge and being, and how every act of knowledge presupposes a certain state of character and affections. And we see how truly Plato reconciled two forms of philosophy, one dealing with the objects of our knowledge and one with our acts of perception — how truly he found a truth of which each had dimly seen one side, yet how little this came from any project of harmonising opposite theories, and how much from resolutely pursuing a principle that supersedes theories altogether and, so far as it is faithfully acted on, frees us from bondage to them. The work and glory of Plato is not to frame a comprehensive system including nature and society, man and God, as its elements or compartments — which necessarily leads the builder to think himself above them all — but to show the utter impossibility of such a system and cut up the very dream of it by the roots. Whoever attempts to build such a Babel must understand that he will not find its model in Plato, and that before he advances a step he must undo everything Plato has done, disprove all his conclusions, and prove false the process by which he reached them. Those commentators who find in Plato nothing but exquisite ridicule of all system-makers, his own day’s and earlier, have understood him imperfectly. That ridicule would not be so delightful, so genial and consoling to every earnest student, if he did not feel it to be the handmaid of the most severe demonstration, and only another aspect of the most generous sympathy with everything honest, humble, practical and true. The kind, experienced teacher smiles at our useless waste of time in building, but only to urge us to the more profitable work of seeking the foundation of what is built. The first is the employment of those who desire to be gods; the second, of those who believe the highest blessing man is capable of is to know God.
18. But if Plato is almost free from the propensity to theories that has beset most philosophers — if his principle, consistently followed, is positively incompatible with them — how is he so commonly supposed to have mapped human knowledge into three provinces: Dialectics, Ethics and Physics? In considering this we may perhaps discover the purpose of a third class of his Dialogues, and see his so-called Eclecticism under yet another aspect.
19. The critics who find this classification in Plato cannot mean that one part of the Dialogues treats of dialectics and another does not. They must know that every dialogue shows his dialectic method and makes some new trial or application of it. Nor, I think, can they pretend, without doing violence to the author’s purpose and language, that the dialectical dialogues are not also ethical. A moral purpose is conspicuous throughout, and, as I have said, developing the method by which truth is perceived is inseparably interwoven with moral culture. Freeing the mind from sensible impressions and fascinations is the joint effect of restraining inclination and of the art that distinguishes the apparent from the real. Without a sense of this intertwining of ethical and intellectual discipline, the most beautiful Dialogues are unintelligible. Indeed the desire to separate what Plato believed inseparable is perhaps the main cause of the narrow and partial views held of his works.
20. Look at the Phædrus. Lysias had proposed a thesis about Love and defended it ingeniously in studiously balanced sentences, the aptest dress for a rhetorical purpose. Socrates first shows how easy it is to meet his arguments with a counter-series as ingenious and artificial. Then he finds the radical defect of both: they were dealing with a word whose meaning had not been ascertained. In trying to find what it signifies, and to separate its true from its apparent meanings, he unveils the principles of his dialectics. Combined with this is the most distinct declaration and warning — in a form unfit for us, but suited to the evil state of Greek society, and proving the purity of the writer who could keep so high a standard in the midst of it — that only by restraining the grosser appetites can we be in a state to apprehend the true nature of Love. At the close the two principles are harmonised in a splendid myth in which the disciple learns that only he who governs himself, with his lower nature in subjection, is fit for the highest exercise of his faculties, the contemplation of that which truly is. We cannot reduce this Dialogue to any of the partial descriptions given of it. It is not a mere attack on rhetoricians, nor a mere development of the Socratic method for testing words; nor does it seem a treatise on pure love or on the idea of beauty. All these may be hinted at and even valuably illustrated, but the reader must be content to feel how they sustain each other and let them form a whole in his mind, without eagerly giving supremacy to any one. He will then find, I believe, that this is the type dialogue of the class that teaches us to make substance or being the end of our inquiries; but he will certainly not be able to discover whether it is more ethical or dialectical.
21. The Gorgias is another nearly as striking instance. Formal critics have decided that it must be merely an attack on rhetoric, or else have the merely moral object of explaining the nature and purpose of punishment. A person who only hears of this discussion would suppose that a work open to such opposite interpretations must be incoherent and rhapsodical. The more he reads it, the more he will be struck by the sequence of its thoughts and the easy way one grows out of another. On reflection he will find that, as the Sophist’s intellectual purpose was inseparably joined to the moral, and the pursuit of political power as an end to the cultivation of a treacherous art as the means, so it was impossible to bring a sounder intellectual discipline to the youth of Athens without leading them to see that the true purpose of life was not gaining dominion or escaping suffering and punishment, but gaining — even through suffering, punishment and disgrace — deliverance from the moral evil that obstructed their search after truth and made power a curse to them. Here again he distinguishes the true from the apparent, not by ethics without dialectics, or dialectics without ethics, but by both together.
22. How the case stands with physics I shall explain shortly. But I can say now that whenever his opponents engaged in physical speculation, Plato is willing, in those Dialogues with the most distinctly moral purpose, to take them on, and that he never divides the two provinces so as to suggest that the principles governing one may not usefully or injuriously affect the other. I could easily convince readers of this if I had space to analyse the Theætetus; but I can only commend that exquisite specimen of Platonic wisdom to their careful study, and go on to show how the notion that Plato formally divided the subjects of human thought may have arisen, and may be reconciled with my belief in his hatred of theories and consistency of purpose.
23. I have often observed that the founders of the Greek schools were led, by their circumstances or the tendencies of their own minds, to choose a distinct sphere of observation. No forethought or wish to be a natural philosopher drew Thales into his course; the outward facts presented to his senses simply struck him as most likely to solve the problem he found within. Likewise Pythagoras was led, by scarcely known or acknowledged influences, gradually to desert the maxims of his native soil and make Society, or the State, the subject of his inquiries; to this he added a scheme of nature he tried to bring under the same law as the facts of the order and government of men. Parmenides and Zeno entered their purely metaphysical region not by resolving to choose one province over another, but by reflecting on the two preceding systems and finding them inadequate. They too sought to make their system universal, and to make the political world and nature in some sense dependent on the laws of pure mind. Plato then found it already established that there are these three lines along which men’s thoughts naturally run when strongly exercised. He had no artificial distinctions to create; his predecessors’ experience had discovered the natural ones. What remained for him? To follow them into each region, to ask how far any had found the unity he sought, and to consider whether what they looked for in nature, in society, in the mind of man may be implied in each yet have its foundations beneath them all. This, I believe, was the final, consummate effort of the Platonic philosophy. As one set of Dialogues seems designed merely to unfold the Socratic doctrine of Being, and another expressly to develop the principle of Ideas as necessary to support the former and to solve a problem the Heracliteans and Eleatics had shown to exist, so I believe there is a third in which Plato reflects on his master’s discoveries and his own, and applies them directly to the three subjects of nature, society and knowledge. Everyone will recognise in the Timæus an attempt to find a unity for the external universe, and in the Republic an attempt to find the meaning of political unity. So, without contradicting my assertion that in all the Dialogues he is evolving a dialectical method, we may admit that some propose the direct, formal aim of showing how this method guides us to the true unity in knowledge. We must also remember that Plato, as reviewer of past systems and as expounder of Socrates, was obliged to reverse the order in which we traced the schools historically. He might begin with the principles the Eleatics expounded and descend to the natural speculations of the Ionians, and he could take no other course if the Socratic doctrine of Being, and the Socratic method of distinguishing the real from the fantastic, were to be his guiding stars all the way. Here, then, I must begin my notice of his search for unity. I am eager to introduce readers to what I consider the crowning labour of his life, the end he aimed at obscurely throughout — his polity; but first I must refer to his discussions of the conditions and meaning of SCIENCE. A few words will then suffice for the less important, though interesting, question of how far his views on the physical world agreed or disagreed with his other principles.
24. There was one great and obvious difference between the position of the Parmenideans and that of the Pythagoreans or Ionians. No one could doubt that the latter had a real subject for inquiry, however idle the inquiries. But the Eleatic had to produce both the dream and the interpretation: to maintain that there was a region of pure mind, and to show what went on there. So Plato had two tasks: to show their assumption was sound before inquiring how far it could carry them. For this he adopted a method that has greatly puzzled many readers. In the Parmenides he introduces Socrates, full of youthful vivacity, broaching the doctrine of ideas against the antiplurality doctrine of Parmenides and Zeno. The aged philosopher treats him with graceful courtesy, lets him offer one explanation after another, shows that all are untenable, encourages him to hope that after more severe training he will understand himself better, and finally establishes his own doctrine of the One in a series of annihilating propositions showing that it must exist and that it cannot exist under any conditions or limitations the understanding knows. Probably no one but Plato ever tried such an experiment — showing that his own principle is untenable except as connected with and grounded on the principle of another philosopher who did not recognise it. But the Dialogue does more than establish that the mind witnesses of something not under sensible laws. It prepares us to feel the want the Eleatic doctrine could not satisfy. As we read, a conviction of the purely negative character of the method grows, and while we assent to its conclusions we feel an increasing moral interest in finding a higher point of view from which to contemplate both it and the imperfect substitute the young Socrates proposed. In the Sophist this wish is largely realised. An Eleatic stranger discusses with the young Theætetus the meaning of the word Sophist and the qualities of the animal it denotes, how far it belongs to the same genus as the Philosopher and how they differ. We conclude that the Sophist’s great object is to set up a universal science — meaning merely a capacity of talking on all subjects, of framing images of what is and passing them off as substances and realities. But a difficulty arises: Parmenides, whose opinions the Eleatic stranger might be expected to favour, has told us not to inquire about what is not, since the conception is impossible. How then will our definition of the Sophist avail us? How shall we ever pursue him onto the ground where we have clear evidence he has gone? The stranger finds himself obliged, much as he fears the guilt of parricide, to examine the soundness of this doctrine of his honoured countryman and teacher. By degrees the fallacy unveils itself: in refusing to recognise not-being, Parmenides was shutting his eyes to something which is. The contradiction may seem startling, but we do not escape it by refusing to look at it. We have stumbled on an instance where what is adverse to reality must be treated to all intents as real. And looking further into the use of language, we see more and more the impossibility of giving the word Being the rigid exclusiveness it must have in Parmenides’ system. We cannot identify our notion of sameness or difference with our notion of Being, yet Being enters into both; there is a sameness and a difference between things. Where does this lead? To the conclusion — carried home more directly than it is put in words, as constantly in Plato — that Parmenides is after all dwelling in a region of words. Though he seems to have sounded the inmost depth of thought, and has actually found that there are depths words do not reach, he is at last only setting one notion against another. It is not Being but the notion of Being he has been investigating, and necessarily most imperfectly. Now the vision opens of a new kind of science, wholly unlike the Sophist’s, yet in one sense as universal; wholly different from the exclusive, dogmatic, national philosophy of Parmenides, yet like his having unity for its condition and ultimate ground. This is the science of dialectics, the science proper to the philosopher. It rejects no form of thought or language as unfit for investigation, but searches out the idea of each, and finds which notions and phantasms are inconsistent with it, which cling to it, and which have tried to become part of it. It looks on Being as the object of its search, but Being connected with life and power, not a dry abstract notion, the mere negation of other notions. This must be the science of sciences: not because it reduces all forms of thought to one or includes all existing sciences, but because it discovers beneath all forms of thought an ultimate ground of unity, and assigns to each science its specific object and its relation to every other.
25. Every science is looking for a foundation. It rests on the faith that there is a law for the facts it investigates, and what that law is, is what it inquires into. The science should explain how the mind goes about searching for such laws, whatever the facts. But its own specific object is the deep ground of all laws, the Being from whom they get their life and power. So dialectics is the search after premises. Parmenides and Zeno went no higher than a Logic that takes the mind’s premises for granted and says what conclusions follow from them. That was their universal science, as Rhetoric was the Sophist’s. The first overthrew all facts by setting up a law in the mind against them. The second confounded law and fact, using certain laws of the mind to overturn admitted facts, or the contradictions of facts to disprove law. The principle of seeking laws in and through facts is the one by which Socrates defended men’s faith and morality against Rhetoric, and Plato defended the possibility of science against Logic. This is the inductive science which, two thousand years later, had to fight the same battle against the same enemies when it first asserted itself clearly as the only guide to knowledge of the physical world. The Socratic doctrine of Being makes us feel that this science is necessary. The Platonic doctrine of Ideas makes us understand that it is possible. The mind’s demand for a Unity that is positive and not negative, not an amalgam of parts but what precedes all division into parts and is unaffected by it, makes us confident that it is real.
26. Several passages in the Dialogues indicate the connection between Plato’s dialectics and his politics. In the Sophist, for example, the Eleatic stranger proposes to examine three words: Sophist, Philosopher, Politician. The last is reserved for its own dialogue, but Plato plainly wants us to feel how close the three persons are, and that the last cannot be investigated without knowing the other two. Under the Sophist’s teaching, the young Athenian came more and more to feel that rhetorician and statesman were interchangeable, and that the effective ruler of men was the effective master of words. On the other hand, the logic of Parmenides and Zeno must have made politics a set of abstract propositions. An earnest man might give them practical life, but they would lose, in proportion, everything that endeared them to him as a logician. Zeno himself was probably an example, but we have no reason to think he left successors; his disciples must either have confined themselves to inquiries about entity and unity or become rhetorical politicians. Plato’s dialectics, by their nature, could not claim to be Politics. They assumed facts, not as premises to start from but as raw material in which premises lie hidden. The laws and conditions of society were to be investigated by this dialectic and could not be investigated without it, but they were presumed to exist and were quite distinct from the faculty and science that discovers them. So Plato was in a position to do justice to Pythagoras as he had to Parmenides. He could believe there was much in the one’s discoveries about the order of society, as there had been in the other’s about the needs of the pure mind. He prepared to use the philosophy he had found true in one region to examine the observations and doctrines of the other.
27. But there is more. The reader of the Republic will find, perhaps with surprise, that questions about the nature and objects of dialectics take up a good deal of this political treatise. Some have inferred that the title misleads: Plato’s purpose is not to teach the conditions and relations of a State but to build a platform for carrying forward the philosophical inquiries of his other Dialogues with more interest and success. On this view the Republic is a laboratory built for experiments on the nature of the individual man. This hypothesis is likely to find acceptance today, even apart from the first-rate talent and learning behind it. I am not anxious to refute it, but I want readers to study the Republic with a free spirit, not hindered by a theory from seeing how it illustrates a subject that has occupied us already and must at every step ahead: the relation between the mind of man and the constitution of society. I believe Plato was charged with expressing the deepest wants of our being and with discovering or prophesying the kind of satisfaction that must be provided for them. I make no apology for dwelling on his name in this rapid sketch, because if readers are set on the right course for studying Plato, Aristotle and the Jewish Scriptures, they can trace for themselves, with little help from me, the progress of these inquiries in modern Europe, whether in the age of the fathers, the schoolmen, or since the Reformation. Without that preparation, the ablest discourses on later ethics and metaphysics will avail them little. So it matters greatly to ascertain whether Plato is silent on the wants of our social being; whether he thought them purely secondary and accidental; or whether he found them so embedded in man’s constitution that he could not investigate the law of each man’s inner life without also investigating the law that relates him to his fellows. The supporters of the former opinion (as readers of Schleiermacher’s Introduction to the Republic will see) have shown admirable ingenuity in working out their conclusion. Those who hold the latter may be content to beg attention to Plato’s express words and briefly recap the heads of his dialogue.
28. At the beginning of the Republic we are in a circle of Athenians gathered to witness a religious ceremony lately brought in from Thrace. The most prominent and interesting person is old Cephalus, a cheerful, benign octogenarian, with whom Socrates begins to discuss the comforts of old age and the advantages or disadvantages of riches. A remark of Cephalus leads to the question whether Simonides’ definition of justice, that it consists in speaking the truth and giving each man his due, is satisfactory. Cephalus is called away to perform a sacrifice, and Polemarchus takes his part. The discussion has got no further than a general agreement that the mere outward acts in Simonides’ words cannot satisfy the idea of justice, and that its obligations are not affected by whether we stand as friends or enemies. Then the sophist Thrasymachus breaks in, vehemently asserting that the whole notion of justice is a fraud practised by the strong on the weak. He does not shrink from the consequence that the life of an unjust man would be desirable in itself, and most of the first book is devoted to examining this doctrine.
29. At the start of the second book, young Glaucon and Adeimantus say they are dissatisfied with how Thrasymachus defended his cause and with his haste in giving it up. They do not share his views, and feel convinced that Justice is intrinsically good, but the arguments proving it seem to them inconclusive. Is it not true that society has put honour on a certain course of conduct because it serves its own security and advantage? Has it not helped out the weakness of its sanctions with religious feelings and terrors? Are we not born under this twofold set of impressions for what is called justice and against injustice? Can we suppose a man keeping the idea and practice of Justice against the laws and his fellow-men, without imagining some divine sanction or patronage? Socrates admits the question is difficult and perhaps cannot be answered at once. But might we reach some solution by examining it on a larger scale? The question presumes an existing society and supposes this notion of justice, fiction or reality, to be necessary to a State’s support. Shall we then inquire how it becomes necessary to a State, and what justice in a State is? Then perhaps we may know better what justice in an individual is, and whether it can be maintained under the disadvantages Glaucon imagines.
30. I remark in passing that those who regard the political part of the Republic as merely accidental and subordinate treat this Preface as the main support of their theory. They say it is so much easier and more consistent to believe that the subject started at the outset is the main and central one, and that everything else is merely illustration, that no student who understands Plato’s method will tolerate any other supposition. I admit at once that this is Plato’s object, that the Republic is an inquiry into the nature and meaning of Justice, and that if this is lost sight of, the connection of its parts cannot be understood. But I say the most natural reading of Plato’s words is that political justice was inseparable in his mind from individual justice. This was the very quality he saw as the meeting point of ethics and politics; or rather, as proof that they are two concentric spheres. Establishing this relation is, I think, the great purpose of the first two books. They teach all later reasoners with sophistical men that the moral ground can be held safely only by following opponents onto their own political ground. Instead of contending that there is an order the individual must follow even if society did not exist, they should take pains to prove that eternal principles are involved in the very constitution of society. Its individual members conform to these principles, not because they are willing to sacrifice their distinct personality, but because they have no other way of asserting it. Whether modern writers on ethics would have fared better by heeding this admonition from the most experienced and subtle opponent of sophistry, I may inquire later. At all events, those who think the main purpose of the Dialogues is to discover and develop a method of thought must be strangely hampered by a theory that makes them suppose that here the result is the only thing that matters, and the processes for reaching it are artificial and yet clumsy and cumbrous.
31. To return: hoping that seeking justice in a State will solve our difficulties, Plato proceeds at once to form a society. Anyone looking here for an imaginary perfect commonwealth will be disappointed. Nothing in his primary conception is mystical or Utopian; everything is as earthly and commonplace as the merest materialist could wish. Men meet and find that each cannot provide for his own animal wants. Different needs arise, and different capacities among the group suit them, hence division of labour and distinct occupations. Then comes the desire for an excess of earth’s good things, hence tumults and external wars. Now we need guardians, or watch-dogs, of the state. What sort of persons must they be? They are clearly in danger of becoming wolves instead of watch-dogs. How is that prevented? How do we produce in them the inner qualities so obviously necessary to the community’s welfare? These arrangements are very unlike what we would expect from the builder of an imaginary commonwealth: no assumption of an advantageous position, no prior theory about the wants and feelings of the members, and above all no hope of averting crime by outward contrivances. Does this apparent carelessness about external contrivances favour the notion that the society is only a scaffolding? If it were, I could not account for the scaffolding not being built more elaborately. If Plato were free to choose his plan and materials, and indifferent whether they fit the nature of things so long as they helped him to a discovery that would stand on its own ground whatever steps led to it, then any effort to conform to dry ordinary facts would be idle and, as an offence against art, censurable. But suppose his object was not to frame a society after an ideal in his own mind but, as I have supposed throughout, to investigate the conditions of political unity: the idea involved in society’s very existence, from which it has departed and become confused and incoherent. If that is the view of the treatise most consistent with the rest of Plato’s philosophy and with its relation to the other Dialogues, then it is no wonder he carefully avoids imagination while setting out the bare elements of which society is composed. He takes pains to convince us he is a searcher, not a creator. He is not one of the poets he can find no place for in his commonwealth, but one of the investigators of truth as it actually is, whom he would put at its head.
32. The Republic then assumes that selfish desires exist and that their evil results have occurred. It examines this question: under what conditions can we suppose society to hold together permanently, despite the tendencies to decomposition plainly appearing within it? In preserving any body from decay we may consider either what positive precautions resist its corruption, or how to call forth and strengthen the principles of life it must have within it in order to be at all, though their presence may show itself only through the power that opposes them. Plato repeatedly gives us to understand that in this dialogue he is concerned with developing those principles of life and not with outward regulations for repressing evil. That is why the Republic has seemed to many simply a treatise on education, or little more than a censure of existing Greek education. These critics remind us that he has hardly sketched his society before he says the guardians’ minds must not be corrupted by the false ideas of the gods in Homer’s poems; that much of the third book concerns gymnastics and music, with a minute inquiry into which kinds of music serve or frustrate the ends of education; and that the subject returns in the sixth and seventh books, where the use of all the sciences in forming a statesman’s mind is investigated. All this is true. But I am persuaded this portion will be better appreciated by those who treat it as subordinate to the great object of discovering the principle at the foundation of society, which connects it with the processes of the individual mind and gives consistency and harmony to both, than by those who make it the dialogue’s sole and independent purpose. Nothing fits my view of Plato’s purpose better than his putting a right view of the gods’ character at the threshold of education, for the idea of the Good, connected with Order, underlies his whole scheme. His great endeavour is to make men feel that this is, that it exists, and to teach them to distinguish between society’s anomalies and its principles. Above all, therefore, we must see that our models are not defaced with our own corruptions.
33. For the same reason music becomes so important. Developing the sense of order and harmony in the commonwealth’s members is the secret of making it really what it claims to be. It is part of this order that the feeling of it should first be given to the guiding, guarding minds of the society and spread from them through the whole. This brings to light a new and important element. Among the guardians some will be of a higher order. These are the ones on whom education has had its complete mellowing effect. The others have mainly gained a braced, masculine tone from combining gymnastics with the higher forms of music; these have absorbed the very essence of the music, acquiring a perfectly harmonised temper and a sense of wholeness that makes them the true ideals and representatives of the whole community. These are obviously our magistrates. But how shall we persuade our people that these different qualities exist and fit people for different offices? We must tell them a story, says Plato. We must tell them they were all originally made out of the earth, which they are therefore to love as their common mother, counting themselves brothers through her. Yet the gods put different materials into them, making some of gold, some of silver, some of baser metals. These must not be confounded but kept distinct and put to distinct uses, so that society benefits from each. In this parable Plato shows that he regards himself not as the contriver of an imaginary scheme but only as following out Providence’s intentions in instituting society.
34. All this time we seem to have forgotten our original question about Justice. But in the fourth book we find that the State’s arrangements, and even the long discussion of music, have been preparing a clearer development of the idea. We have found three classes in society, and each embodies a characteristic quality that through it becomes the quality of the whole fellowship. The magistrates express the very idea of Wisdom: superintending, distinguishing, arranging. The guardians express Fortitude: sustaining, amalgamating, preserving. The inferior classes, while they keep their place, express Temperance: self-restraining and submitting. Without any of these a society could not exist, and its permanence depends on how far each class’s qualities interpenetrate the rest. But do these not imply still another quality, a principle or power that fuses all the classes and qualities, belonging not to one class in particular but by its nature to the whole? This is evidently the musical principle we have been trying to instil through education. What shall we name it? Is it not the Justice we have been trying to understand? Do we not turn Simonides’ crude outward notion into a practical, satisfactory idea when, instead of making justice consist in giving every man his due and speaking the truth, we describe it as what determines the true relation of all things and persons to each other, the very law and harmony of the world? Yet may we not go a little deeper? Our first object was to find justice’s nature and effect not in society but in the individual. At every step we seem to find proof that the two are inseparable, that the law of society must be the law of the individual. Perhaps now we can explain this more particularly. Our inquiry has shown three necessary classes in the State: magistrates, guardians, and a class supplying the body’s animal wants. Why this distribution? Is it not that there is a similar distribution of parts in the man himself: Reason, Energy or Will, and Cupidity or animal nature? If these are not to live in perpetual discord and the man in perpetual misery, must there not be something in him that keeps each in its proper relation to the others, giving supremacy to Reason, preserving the strength and purity of Will, and subjecting Cupidity? Is Justice then not necessary to each of us?
35. With this point settled, Socrates is willing to end the dialogue. But Glaucon and Adeimantus remind him that if justice is, as he says, the principle of harmony or unity in the commonwealth, he is bound to explain the other conditions of that unity. If inevitable circumstances make the union impracticable, then justice itself is impracticable. If so for the commonwealth, then by the whole tenor of the argument also for the individual, and we would end by acquiescing in a conclusion not unlike the sophistical one we have laboured to refute. So the four books from the beginning of the fifth to the end of the ninth take up three questions. First, in what sense are family relationships compatible with the unity of a commonwealth? Second, how far can that unity consist with individual selfishness and ambition? Third, how can it consist with the law of decay and degeneracy to which all societies seem subject?
36. I need not tell any reader what Plato says on the first. Even those who know almost nothing else of him have heard that he spoke of the two sexes as meant to perform exactly the same duties and exercises, and joined to this another doctrine (which in a logical mind is generally inseparable from it) of a community of wives and children. They have heard that these notions enter into his perfect commonwealth, and that he wishes to supersede the existing relations of father and child, wife and husband, which we suppose lie at the foundation of all moral apprehension and political order. The question naturally arises, not whether I can justify this part of his speculations, but how, with such a huge and hideous blot in them, I can venture to call them important, and above all spend so much time examining them. Many readers and admirers of Plato take satisfaction in the fact that in the Laws, undoubtedly a later work, he seems to have changed his views and to recognise the sanctity of human relationships as they exist. I do not regard the passages referred to as a recantation. Even if Plato thought them one himself (there is no proof of it), I am convinced he would have relapsed into his former opinion had he again devoted himself to studying the idea of a commonwealth. The Laws, it seems to me, explain the conditions under which any particular nation exists, where the coercive power restraining its members’ evils comes from, and how it is preserved as a distinct community. For this Plato saw the importance of distinct relationships; he could not help seeing they lie at the foundation of national life and that with their loss it would perish. The Republic, on the other hand, is not an inquiry into the conditions of a particular state. Phrases in it again and again seem to define this as its object, but others, far more pregnant and often uttered unconsciously, show a different and grander aim present in the writer’s mind, haunting him when he could not realise it. He felt there should be some body expressing not the law of a confined, definite national life but the law of society itself, the principle of its unity. He felt that such a body is implied in the existence of every national community, yet transcends it and is not subject to its limitations. I could produce proofs of this from every book of the Republic, but none more striking than the fifth. The idea of a universal Greek society is formally put forward there, yet it is evident this does not satisfy Plato; he has the dream of something more comprehensive. A feeble sophist would have tried to express the dream in big words; he is content to suggest the nearest practical approximation his circumstances allowed. But with this universal society Plato does not see how distinct relationships are compatible. Perfect community seems the very law of its being, and anything that interferes with it seems to frustrate its intention.
37. Here we see at once Plato’s ignorance and his knowledge. How such a universal society could grow out of a national community and a family, and keep both those holy institutions, which had been its cradle, unharmed and in harmony with itself, he did not know. That wisdom was reserved for the shepherds of Palestine. It was given to them only by degrees, and their chief duty was to keep what had been divinely given in sure confidence that more would be added. But this was permitted to the sage of Greece: to feel that a universal community is necessary to man’s life, and that it is a great living truth implied in the existence of society, though still undeveloped. To such insight and honesty of purpose, rejecting no light vouchsafed, it is granted that even the crudities and ignorances he fell into in seeking truth shall benefit future generations. They even serve to correct and expose those same crudities when men of a different spirit reproduce them. The fifth book of the Republic curiously anticipates every scheme of universal society put forward by religious fanatics or political theorists from the spread of Christianity to the present day. It stands as practical testimony from the wisest man of the ancient world that this is the only consistent law, and must be the ultimate law, of every such society whenever it tries to exist alone as a merely spiritual or cosmic family. So I reject with indignation the Roman academician’s “I would rather be wrong, by Hercules,” and love Plato only as far as he loved truth. Yet I may find worth even in this unfortunate passage.
38. The part of the Republic in the sixth and seventh books is second to none in interest. The difficulty it must solve is whether such a State as we have described is compatible with men’s selfish notions. Plato does not dodge the question. He declares at once his conviction that such a State could only be administered by philosophers. He then explains what he means by a philosopher, why the people generally called by that name are unfit to be practical politicians, and what their real relation is to their countrymen. Here we have the full development of the doctrine we found at the root of Socrates’ teaching: the selfish, self-seeking principle that leads men to animal gratifications is the source of disorder and confusion in human life, not its real moving spring. There is in man something higher, not satisfied with itself, that seeks converse with the Good. The philosopher is the man holding this converse, whose mind is fixed on the true end and meaning of things, their substance and reality. The rest follow images and shadows, yet in pursuing them they confess their want of a Good and feel blindly after it. If the philosopher descends to the pursuit of their shadows, he becomes worthy of their contempt, since there is a perpetual contradiction between the higher aims he is conscious of and the grovelling course he has taken. If instead he steadily keeps his own idea in view, he is necessarily unintelligible to them and they despise him for that. But suppose he has worked his way out of the mine where they dwell, no longer getting light through little crannies that transmit it broken and confused and mislead men about its source, and has come out into open sunlight and seen all things as they are. He neither glorifies himself by living apart nor confuses his light with their darkness, but goes down among them to lead them by the track he has trodden into clear day. Would he not then be fulfilling his function as a philosopher and yet be most truly a politician? If you ask what this upward road is, Plato is ready to consider it with you. Men recognise a certain education: they teach arithmetic and geometry, as well as the gymnastics and music we spoke of, and plainly value these studies highly. Are they wrong? Surely not. They are wrong only in seeking shadows instead of substances throughout their lives and in making all these sciences serve their low ambition. Arithmetic and geometry have been used merely for secular commercial ends; they might purify the mind to perceive the truth of things. Plato carefully inquires what is the proper function of each science for this end, and the inquiry shows the need of the grander, deeper science of Dialectics, which leads directly to contemplating truth as truth and good as good, in its pure essence. A nation guided and educated this way comes into the condition of the republic we have described. Its wisest, deepest-minded men will be its magistrates; the community will have one end; and the principle of justice, which assigns each his place and gives all a sense of proportion and harmony, will pervade and actuate it. So the existence of ambition and selfishness does not upset the idea of our Republic, does not prove it is not implied in the nature of society, and does not show that it may not be realised at some time or somewhere.
39. Next comes the law of decay in societies, which most speculators have recognised and which the Pythagorean philosophers fancied they could express in numerical ratios. Plato gives the inquiry a valuable turn by connecting it with the cardinal doctrine of the Republic, that the life of men and the life of States explain each other. Accordingly he maintains that there is a democratic, an oligarchic and a tyrannical form of character answering to those forms of government. Each form of character is obviously a departure from some true original model, as the governments are too. In each case the process of degeneration can be traced, and one can show how what happens in society and what happens in the individual react on each other. In this part Plato proves that his faculty of close, lively, practical observation was strengthened, not impaired, by his converse with transcendent realities. It would be hard to find an ancient passage on which a modern statesman could meditate more profitably, or one more sure to explain the facts of his daily experience, than the eighth and ninth books. The result is the same as before. This law of degeneracy exists in earthly commonwealths just because they have not understood and steadfastly contemplated that original model, the perfect idea of a commonwealth, which is also the original model and perfect idea of a human character. It is a contradiction and absurdity to allege this degeneracy as proof that no such model exists. But after all this, does the thought still linger: where is it to be found? Plato answers at the end of book nine: “But perhaps in heaven there is a pattern laid up for the one who wishes to see it, and seeing it, to found a city within himself.” Is it wonderful that such words suggested to some of the Christian fathers the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews about the hope of the head of the covenanted people: “he looked for the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God”; or those describing the hope as fulfilled: “our citizenship is in heaven”?
40. One more subject needs a few words, especially since Plato devotes his last book to it: his opinion of the imitative arts generally, and of poetry as one of them. He plainly attached great importance to these opinions and yet was never wholly satisfied with them. He touches on the question almost as soon as he has sketched his society’s first outline, and returns to it when his task seems complete, partly as if there were no security for his idea’s reception while doubt hung over this point, partly as if something in it remained unpenetrated. In the introduction to the Timæus he offers a kind of apology to the poets for his severity and seems to think they may have an important vocation, though he does not clearly understand it. The grounds of his arguments in the third and tenth books are not quite the same. In both he stresses that the poet must adapt himself to men’s opinions about actions and character, or they will not acknowledge the likeness of his picture; so he must pervert the truth of things and can never exalt the minds he accommodates himself to. But in the last he sees a particular mischief in poetry: it tends to destroy harmony of character and weaken self-control, and so undermines the commonwealth’s justice and order by honouring every excited and passionate feeling. The latter argument might lead one to suspect that Plato was partly determined by the circumstances of his own age. The exaltation of passion, the want of balance and harmony in characters, the preference for weak, earthly creatures over calm and stately ideals were the marks of the Euripidean as against the Sophoclean drama. Add the influence of a poetical age (felt most after it had passed) in fostering the worship of mere creative power and the notion that man’s mind is the origin of all that is. That notion, as we have seen, lay at the root of Greek sophistry and was what Socrates fought all his life. Still, Plato’s attack on Homer, and his eagerness to disprove the common opinion that the Greeks owed Homer much of their organisation and cultivation, show he was not merely affected by passing considerations. So I leave it as a hint for the reader’s reflection whether this reluctant condemnation of poetry, by one who had been a poet in the formal sense and in the best sense remained one always, may be explained as we explained his theory about relationship. Poetry seems to belong primarily and almost exclusively to national life. The sense of national union gives it its first impulse; when that sense weakens, poetry withers, and with its revival it starts to life again. Without it men would never become conscious of their own powers, affections and wants, and in that consciousness consists the joy and freedom of their life as citizens of a state. By calling this forth in the Greeks, Homer may be said to have made them a nation, full of life and full of turbulence. But is there nothing better than mere consciousness of power? Is there no higher condition of society than being citizens of a state? The Republic answers. It teaches that far beyond this consciousness of power lies the contemplation of truth and goodness and the soul’s assimilation to them. Far beyond the mere feeling of energy to dare, act and revenge lies the perception of order and harmony, an intimate fellowship with a Being above us and the beings around us. It teaches that there is a universal society, of which this contemplation and assimilation are the ground, this perception of order and harmony the life, and this fellowship the result and realisation. With this community, says Plato, poetry has little to do: praise of the gods and eulogies of great men are its only fields. Strictly speaking, I think he is right. That is, if we could separate, as he had to, the national life from the universal life (I hope I have explained how important it is to distinguish them), poetry, the soul of the first, would be excluded from the other except in the cases he names. If we would connect all the vital energies poetry expresses with the deeper insights and perfect moral life of the higher region, we must understand, and by understanding realise, for ourselves at least and as far as is permitted for mankind, the law by which the universal and national societies sustain each other.
41. The Republic ends nobly with a discussion of immortality. It has been less popular than that in the Phædo, because its scenery is less solemn and affecting, but on its merits it deserves even more attention. I am far from thinking as lightly as some do of the arguments from reminiscence and from the interchange of light and darkness, death and life, in Socrates’ dying conversation; they seem to me pregnant with the deepest meaning. But I cannot help thinking that once Plato had realised the connection between the individual’s life and society’s life, he felt he had a stronger ground for his hope of immortality. He had found the point where the witness in the heart meets the demands of reason. The sense of belonging to a community stretching behind and before, outlasting the deaths of generations, is for each man evidence of his own immortality. You may be quite unable to put it into syllogisms, but happily it makes them unnecessary. Plato only went to the roots of this feeling when he showed that the individual and society alike rest on the idea of justice, alike are sustained by contemplating what is true and permanent, and alike die a moral death when they contradict the principles of their being. He then affirmed that the accident of physical death can no more change the condition of one than of the other, and that as they have lived here must be their life hereafter.
[Note.] The Republic, like many Dialogues, closes with a myth, and the passage on Lying in the third book puts before us what use Plato thought it lawful to make of fables and legends, so one remark is in order. Dearly as he loved truth for its own sake, and firmly as he believed it could be contemplated in pure essence, he felt that no criterion of truth was so sure as that it governed practice and was the law of life. He never meant to replace his country’s faith with a pure idealism. He hated such attempts, not more for their hardness and cruelty than for their inconsistency with his whole doctrine. He left them to men who did not believe ideas were substantial, who thought them mere creations of the mind with nothing to do with living acts. While he was jealous of stories that hindered men from acknowledging goodness and truth as life’s ultimate ends, he was equally certain that all great principles must somehow have an investiture of facts and cannot be fully presented to man except in facts. If no series of facts embodying and revealing truths was within his reach, then rather than let his truths be taken for bare conceptions of his mind, he would invent a clothing for them, as the lesser evil. But it was an evil: it exposed him to fearful contradictions and often put his love of truth in great jeopardy. What claim then to the name of Platonists have those who wish to believe there is no series of facts containing a revelation of supersensual, transcendent truths? They think it an à priori probability that the deep want of such facts which Plato felt has not been satisfied, and are determined, even by the most violent treatment of historical evidence, to prove that whenever a supposed fact manifests a principle it must be a fable.
42. For reasons already explained I have dwelt long on this great summary of Greek ethical, metaphysical and political philosophy, so I have time for only one remark, showing how Plato’s doctrine connects with that of the great predecessor whose labours I suppose he meant to review. The book on music, the passages on geometry and arithmetic, and certain mystical sentences about the law of decay in a State, which have defied commentators, amply prove a Pythagorean character in the Republic. But looking closely, the whole work may in one sense be called Pythagorean. Its object is to discover the musical law that gives a State internal wholeness, as distinct from the external law that keeps its parts from falling apart. Where then does he differ from Pythagoras? In this: while he gives music and arithmetic their due honour as instruments for cultivating in man the feeling of his position and relations, he does not deduce that position and those relations from combinations of notes or series of numbers. He makes Justice, a moral principle, the music of his commonwealth. This is the more remarkable and honourable because he evidently felt the temptation to be a cabbalist, and never shed the belief (perhaps no deep thinker ever quite did) that something profound and mysterious is interwoven with human life in the relations of lines, numbers and sounds. It was a great merit to keep so steadily to the practical ground and never forget that it is really the highest. By doing so he did in one sphere what he had already done in another: he discovered the political principle Pythagoras had sought among the laws that connect us with nature, as he had found the scientific principle Parmenides had groped after among the forms of our own minds.
43. I am glad that my duty as historian of moral and metaphysical inquiries does not call upon me, or even permit me, to say much on Plato’s Physics. Still, the Timæus is so curiously connected with the Republic by its exquisite introduction, in which Critias tells the story of the submerged State, so like the one Socrates described the day before, that I cannot pass it over. (Here the doctrine of reminiscence is plainly brought into play, and it is new evidence that Plato considered the Republic no work of imagination but the discovery of a truth implied and forgotten in the constitution of all societies.) Moreover, so much importance has been attached to this dialogue, early and late, as if it held the very heart of Platonism. About the link between Plato’s Politics and Physics I would not speak confidently. He may have seen a closer relation between the moral κόσμος he investigated in the Republic and the material universe Timæus creates than I can trace. But this seems evident: he entered his new task conscious that he must fill a gap in his speculations and complete his review of ancient philosophy, and at the same time secretly apprehensive that the light that had guided him might forsake him here. It is strange at any rate that, undertaking a subject so important in Greek eyes as the creation and organisation of nature, he makes Socrates merely a listener. To a faithful student of Plato it must seem stranger still that he wholly abandons his usual method: the dialogue form is used merely as a graceful dramatic veil over the introduction, and in the expository part it gives way to the harangue, a style Plato generally disliked.
44. Yet it is to this above all that the Timæus owes its reputation among those who produce summaries and synopses of Platonic doctrine. Elsewhere they found him balancing opinions, often refusing to give a verdict on their merits, tedious (they think) in tracing the road to a conclusion, and ill-naturedly forgetful of the duty to clothe it in precise, available, transferable formulas. Here, though his language may be more obscure, there may be more allusions to ill-understood parts of Greek speculation than in all the rest, and his teaching concerns a question on which we all believe he could have only partial illumination, still the convenience of catching so Protean a philosopher for one moment in a rigid, definite state has outweighed all this. The Platonic cosmogony has become the storehouse from which diligent compilers gather their notions of Plato’s mind and works. It has even been a plausible and popular theory, ingeniously accounting for the uncertainty of the other Dialogues, that they were only a vestibule to the inner oracle of the Timæus. Having explained my views on these so-called uncertainties, and tried to show how much Plato’s method is part and parcel of Plato himself, I must regard this work with very different feelings. I do not pretend to look with indifference on the splendid theory it develops. I know how closely it is tied to theories that strongly influenced men’s minds, especially in the first ages of the Church, and I am willing to accept for Plato the compliments natural philosophers have paid him for intuiting truths to be established later. Yet the Timæus seems to me chiefly valuable because it shows the worth of the principle from which it is so signal a departure. In every other dialogue Plato teaches us to discover a universal law in any particular fact that comes to our notice; here we have huge hypotheses to begin with, and all facts fitted and arranged according to them.
45. Whatever truth these hypotheses hold he owes to his earlier studies in another direction. Having reached the doctrine of ideas by his own sure upward investigation, he could see that the world must be created according to an idea. But at that point his light forsook him; he could not apply his dialectic to drawing this idea out from the names or facts in which it lay embedded. He had to trust his imagination to construct a theory. In other cases he is a philosopher seeking light, and when he could not see its track, showing where it ought to be and from what unrisen sun it must flow. Here he is a presumptuous theologian, assuming he can declare what must be revealed, and so losing the right way to what may be discovered. Bacon does him no injustice in respect to his Physics when he says Plato confused and corrupted them with theology, and when he implicitly counts him among the giants who piled hill on hill hoping to reach heaven. I wish our countryman, for his own honour and for the ages that followed, had been as willing to recognise Plato’s truth as he was acute in detecting his falsehood, as honest in acknowledging him a guide as he was right in pointing him out as a beacon. He would then have seen that the Timæus contradicts the principle of induction because it is inconsistent with Plato’s own principle. He would have seen that in one solitary instance the Greek sage was betrayed, by that ambition of completeness and circularity (which far more than desire of fame deserves to be called the last infirmity of noble minds), into a subject on which he could only dogmatise, and could dogmatise only by forsaking his own method. He would have confessed that the Novum Organum was only the extension of that method to a new class of subjects. He would have taught his disciples that the course of investigation promising such new discoveries in the world of sense, founded on the principle that man is only a seeker and prospers in proportion as he tries simply to behold what is and not darken it with the mists of his own conceptions, had been marked out ages before as the only way to become acquainted safely with the truths of their own being. He would have solemnly urged them to remember that a heathen, untaught by the revelation that deals directly with these transcendent truths and lays them open to every peasant, had yet perceived that they must be the most precious a man can know, and that only in knowing them is he truly a man. He would have told them that if ever the study in which the heathen sage forgot his usual wisdom should become the only one in which Christians care to excel, and if ever, “from the opening of the ways of the senses and the kindling of a greater light of nature, some unbelief and night should arise in our minds toward the divine mysteries,” then a feeling would grow up toward those mysteries worse than unbelief, if it is not another form of it: a stupid acquiescence in them, without acknowledging that they answer any craving of the heart, any necessity of reason, any prediction of the imagination. In that case, for the sake of the age and country so diseased, of all who should follow, and of physical knowledge itself, which can never long flourish apart from moral light, it would be most desirable that men resume the study of the Athenian philosopher. They should realise the wants of their own minds by observing those he felt in his, and consider how an adequate provision for both can be found.