1. The dream of Socrates. Once upon a time, the biographer of the Greek philosophers reports,1 Socrates dreamed a dream. He found an unfledged cygnet upon his knee. In a few moments it became winged and flew away, uttering a very sweet sound. The next day a young man came to him, who was said to reckon Solon among his nearer ancestors, and looked back through him to Codrus and to the god Poseidon. The name of this young man was Plato.
2. Plato’s early life. Before he came to Socrates, this youth had been a writer of dithyrambics, and songs, and tragedies. He had studied under Ariston, the Argive, a celebrated wrestler. Some say that he won his name from the breadth of his chest, and that he gained a prize for wrestling at the Isthmian games. But, whatever his earlier studies may have been, the day in which he settled on the knees of Socrates was the one which determined the course of his after-life. Nothing that he had learnt before that time was assuredly wasted, but the discourses of Socrates gave his studies a meaning and a direction. From him Plato learnt to understand himself, and thence to understand his predecessors and contemporaries. From him he learnt what it behoved a Greek to seek for, what it behoved a man to seek for, what perils and temptations beset the one and the other if he enters upon the search.
3. The paucity of facts concerning his life. So completely has Plato identified himself with his master, that it is difficult to discover with any certainty the events and circumstances of his own life. Less is recorded of him than of many of the most insignificant of Greek sophists. What is recorded rests upon very unsatisfactory evidence. The epistles which are called by his name have long been rejected as spurious, though some fragments of information respecting him may be derived from them. The most interesting of these concern his expeditions into Sicily, his connection with the elder tyrant Dionysius, his experiments for the reformation of the younger, his hope of realising some ideal polity through the influence of a dissolute and worthless tyrant, his direct influence upon the character and fortunes of the stern aristocrat, the conspirator, the despot Dion. Though it may not be possible to arrange the parts of this history, we may perhaps admit that Plato had an intense longing to prove that he was no mere dreamer; that what he believed was capable of realisation. We have not enough facts to point a moral respecting the infirmity of a noble mind in yielding to the hope of great results through such instruments. He may never have entertained any flattering expectations, but may simply, and perhaps reluctantly, have fulfilled a task that was imposed upon him. How far it was necessary that his polity should be tried in Syracuse, or anywhere else, in order that the truth of its principles might be tested, we may understand better when we have considered what that polity was. The question which immediately concerns us is, whether Plato, when he became fledged, flew away into the air, and left his master upon the earth, as some have fancied, and as the old tradition seems to intimate, or whether he was the truest and most faithful expounder of his master’s doctrines, the true Socratic, because he was not the founder of a Socratic system, but a living and original investigator.
4. Relation between the Socratic schools and Plato. Plato conversed with both Aristippus and Antisthenes. With Euclides he enjoyed a closer intimacy than with either of them, for to Megara he and other disciples fled after the death of Socrates, when it seemed less safe to dwell in Athens. It would be rash to say that the direction of his own thoughts was determined by his observation of these three men, for it is a notion apparently well supported by internal evidence, that his Phædrus and his Laches were written in the lifetime of his master. Yet it seems impossible to doubt that he had very early noticed the tendency in his different fellow-disciples to adopt certain sentences which fell from their teacher’s lips, and from these to form systems and schools, and that he had considered very deeply whether there was no course by which he might escape from the like temptation. If Socrates had compounded his creed out of the different systems then prevalent in Greece, it could surprise no one that the elements thus artificially put together should reassert their independence, and in some new shape, perhaps, be claimed as the property of the minds to which they were severally most adapted. Everything that he had seen of his master made this supposition impossible. Whether he had studied the doctrines of other schools or no, it is evident that every thought which he uttered came fresh and living from himself, or, rather, was the united fruit of his own reflections and of those of the persons with whom he conversed. It was evident that he had been able to minister to other minds, because he knew so well what was passing in his own, and had sought out every principle as the solution of an actual difficulty. But it is fair to suppose that every philosopher is in some sort an inquirer into the workings of his own mind—nay, that his philosophy, so far as it is sincere, is an exhibition of his own mind. How then was Socrates, who was so remarkably himself, preserved from that narrowness and exclusiveness into which Aristippus and Antisthenes, both sincere men in their way, had obviously fallen?
5. How Socrates escaped narrowness and the temptation to theorise. Plato could only answer the question by supposing that it was the healthy habit of always connecting his own thoughts with outward circumstances, and with the puzzles of the age in which he was living, which prevented the Socratic doctrines, in their owner’s hands, from ever stagnating into a mere theory. The obvious resource for making a philosophy complete and general, and suited to all times, was to strip it of those accidental features which had adapted it so happily to a particular crisis. Plato was convinced, by reflection and experience, that precisely the opposite course was the safe one. The poetry of Homer could be read and enjoyed in the age of Pericles, not because it stood aloof from all temporary and local accidents, but because it was enveloped in them. It was exactly when men were presented to them as they were in an entirely different state of manners, that they were able to realise them as their brethren and their countrymen. Reasons will no doubt occur in multitudes to the reader why the analogy of poetry is inapplicable to philosophy: it is sufficient for our purpose that they did not weigh with Plato. No one knew so well as he—no one felt so strongly—the essential difference between poetry and philosophy; he even was betrayed into exaggerations in his attempt practically to assert it. But he was convinced that it did not consist in this, that the poet obtains immortality for thoughts which he utters by adapting himself to the feelings of the age in which he lives, and the philosopher by divesting himself of them all. He thought he could see that the abandonment of all living and practical sympathies, the attempt to divorce himself from human interests, gives to the philosopher that narrow and bounded character from which he hopes by these means to deliver himself. If, then, Grecian wisdom was not to retrograde from the point to which Socrates had brought it, or if it was ever to become useful in other countries and periods, Plato concluded that it must not resolve itself into speculations or declamations about this or that scheme of life, this or that principle of action or pursuit, but must be content to exhibit itself in the conversations of actual men, not of some imaginary day, but of that day, talking about the matters of which they did talk when they met in the streets or at their feasts. He would not take the least pains to forget the people among whom he was living, or the transactions that were occupying them, or adopt any more universal mode of thought and speech than that which was common among them.
6. Why Plato wrote Dialogues. The Dialogue of Plato is not then, as some have represented it, an artistical invention, in which the philosopher sacrificed his severe judgment to his imagination, or to a desire of reputation for dramatic skill with his contemporaries or with posterity, or to the ambition of presenting truths in an agreeable form. It is evident that he regarded it as a necessary mean for the elucidation of the truths with which he believed himself to be possessed; and that he is not at all more anxious to impress any one principle upon his readers than this, that in the Dialogue, rightly used, we have the induction to all principles. It is strange, indeed, that Plato should be accused of sacrificing the interest of his disciples to a selfish desire of fame, by that method which has the effect of leading them onwards step by step in self-inquiry; or that he should be supposed to have used this as a way of conciliating their favour, when, in fact, it has caused more conscious vexation and irritation to every superficial talker of that day, than any which his genius could have devised. A mere artist endeavours to carry us at once into noble contemplations, which make us conscious of our own greatness and dignity. It is Plato’s desire that we should feel our own way into these contemplations, ascending into them through rugged and thorny paths, discovering how many frivolous difficulties suggest themselves to us, which must be cleared away before we can see anything as it is. Character of his Dialogues. His Dialogues are literally an education, explaining to us how we are to deal with our own minds, how far we are to humour them, how far we are to resist them; how they are to entertain the glimpses of light which sometimes fall upon them; how they are to make their way through the complications and darkness in which they so often feel themselves lost. Nowhere but in the sacred oracles do we find an author so cognisant of his own perplexities, so little anxious to hide them from us; nay, so anxious to awaken us to the consciousness of them, in order that we may be delivered from them. Herein lies the art of Plato. Most consummate art it is, we admit; superior in the depth of insight which must have led to it, and in the influence which it exerts, to that which is displayed in almost any human composition. Still it is not art, in the sense commonly given to that word; it has no independent purpose of pleasing. It does not work underground, leaving the ordinary man to feel its effects simply, and the thoughtful man to judge of its character by its effects. On the contrary, it anxiously draws your attention to its own methods and contrivances; that you should enter into them, and understand all the springs and valves that are at work, is as much the writer’s ambition, as that you should accept any one of the final results. Indeed, he does not acknowledge the results as yours, till in the region of your own inner being you have gone through the processes which lead to them.
7. A chain gradually unwinding itself. Plato above all men must be studied in Plato. A hearty and sympathising acquaintance with one Dialogue will do more to initiate a student into what is blunderingly called his system, than the reports of all philosophical critics and historians. There you find no digests of doctrine, no collections of ready-manufactured notions, to be adopted and carried away. Every one is alive and at work. The actors too are not, as in our best Dialogues—in those of Berkeley, for instance—personages with significant names; they are real Phedruses, Gorgiases, and Protagorases, discoursing, in a place which is ascertained to us by an accurate and vivid description, about some passing question in the folds of which are found to be contained the deepest and highest principles of our being. These are drawn forth, not violently by any predetermination that such and such facts shall give forth such and such a moral, but by the ordinary accidents of conversation, amidst explanations and contradictions, the confusion of disciples, the anger of doctors, clumsy attempts at reconciliation by good-natured bystanders. The dialogue is often a Siris. Like Berkeley’s admirable treatise, it may be bound here on earth to no worthier a stake than the properties and virtues of tar-water. Oftentimes the starting-point may be one far less worthy than this, the lying speech of some rhetorician in support of some mischievous and vulgar paradox. Yet the chain is unwound with a skill of which our modest countryman would have cheerfully confessed that his was but a feeble copy, till its highest link is felt to be about the throne of Him whose name it was the privilege of Berkeley to utter, the honesty of Plato to declare unutterable.
8. His supposed Eclecticism. Thus far we have described Plato as reasserting the entire principle of Socrates against those who had dismembered it. But a notion has gone forth, and has received support from an able and eloquent French commentator of our day, that Plato was an Eclectic; in other words, that his object on every occasion was to set in opposition two imperfect principles, and either, by merely showing their inadequacy, to suggest the hint, or, by clear exposition, to develope the form, of a third idea which should include them both. This is the most plausible shape which the theory has taken. Another and common way in which it is stated is, that Plato framed to himself the notion of a philosophy which, taking its start from the doctrine of Socrates, should adopt into itself all the other Greek philosophies, whether metaphysical or moral, and that accordingly we do find in him not only an attempt to harmonise the doctrines of the schools which took their name from Socrates, but also of those which preceded him. In both these statements there is, as it seems to us, much truth: yet truth put into a form which is exceedingly likely to mislead a reader, and utterly to pervert his notions respecting the real object of the Greek teacher. We suspect that, in considering these theories, we may both arrive at a clearer apprehension of Plato’s meaning, and gain some light which will profit us in all our future inquiries.
9. Moral distinction the primary purpose of Plato. One main object of Plato in using the dialogue was, that he might discover the latent meaning of words, and might lead the inquirer to recognise this meaning as that which had been implied in them from their origin, and had been floating in the minds of those who had given them quite a different signification. Hereby he was carrying out the method which Socrates, as we have seen, had been throughout his life maturing, and to which we have traced the success of all his experiments in moral science. For this practice was grounded upon a faith which is ripened day by day into certainty, that there is in every man that which apprehends and recognises truth; that the truth is continually near him; and again, that his view of it is continually interrupted and distorted by the phantoms which are presented to his senses. In drawing forth this truth out of the mind of the student, and teaching him to realise it as his own, consisted, as Plato believed, the great duty of the Socratic teacher; to this all his labours were to be bent; so far as he did this work faithfully, he might hope to be rewarded with greater illumination. Never, however, was it to be forgotten that the discipline was a moral as well as an intellectual one, nay, that it was primarily and essentially moral; that he must resist the attractions and bribery of sense in order to escape her impositions. Now the process we have described leads to a result which often looks like the result of Eclecticism. An opinion seems to be rejected as false, an opinion that is set in opposition to it is shown also to be unsatisfactory, and then at last a truth is seen, or suspected to be hidden somewhere, which both alike had been aiming ineffectually to reach. The reader of Plato’s Dialogues will be encountered again and again with instances of this sort. But let him beware of hurrying to the conclusion, that the reconcilement of these opinions, or the construction of another opinion which shall be more comprehensive than both, was the aim of the teacher. If he will quietly accompany him along the road, he will find that in such conversations as these, distinction is much more his object than accommodation. To distinguish between those images which the mind shapes for itself out of the objects of sense when it is sense-ridden and sense-possessed, and that sound meaning and reality which it is capable of perceiving when it has sought to purge itself of its natural and habitual delusions—to teach it the art of rejecting as well as choosing, and to put it in the posture for either one act or the other; this is the intention of Plato. It may be that he has done more to introduce harmony and unity into moral speculations than any philosopher who ever lived; we fully believe that he has. But he begins with cultivating in us the habit of moral distinction. He begins with leading us to feel that truth and falsehood are radical ultimate contradictions which cannot be accounted for or resolved into any others. To see that which is, as it verily is, this is the highest privilege of the best and wisest man; to see things as they are not, confused, sensualised, corrupted, this is the misery and curse of the thoughtless, slavish victim of inclination. To open that inward eye by which the reality of things is discerned in other men, is the vocation and privilege of him who has himself served an apprenticeship to truth, and feels that he is her servant.
10. Purely Socratic Dialogues. Such, we conceive, is the object of one large class of the Platonic Dialogues, which are the induction or vestibule to the rest. In these Plato is distinctly and emphatically Socratic. They must, indeed, differ in an important respect from the actual conversations of Socrates, in that the end must always have been more present to the mind of the writer, than it could have been to that of the speaker. In Socrates the strongest feeling seems to have been, “I am certain there is something which is not appearance or phantasy, which man did not shape out for himself, but which will remain when all phantasies have disappeared, which is, and which 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 upon this conclusion, Plato came to feel that if there is an unseen reality in all things, a truth, a substance in things, of which the eye sees only the shape and colour, there must be a truth and substance which has none of those sensible adjuncts, which is in itself, and the beholding of which is the function and highest attainment of the purified spirit. Now the outward shell of this opinion so closely resembles the doctrine of Euclides that we cannot wonder that some critics, in their desire to reduce the philosophy of Plato into fragments, should have pronounced several of the earlier Dialogues to be not in fact his, but productions of the Megarian school. All in which they found this substance, this τὸ ὄν, put forward as the end of human investigations, they naturally connected with a system which had the assertion that Good and Being are identical for its prominent characteristic. Those who agree with us in the view we have taken will at once see the plausibility of the critic’s notion, and its utter untenableness. These Dialogues not Megarian. In no part of Plato’s works is the distinction between him and the Megarians so conspicuous as in this where he is asserting their own principle. For by adhering closely to the method of Socrates, by making his Dialogues—not the declaration of a truth, but a mental exercise to arrive at it, he has not only divested the doctrine of all its dryness and prickliness, but he has shown how it is connected with those other more obvious notions to which the Megarian set it in rude opposition. 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, there is a reality in it as well as a falsehood in it. Whatever man has found an expression for in language, whatever man has pursued as an object in life, there is in that a truth, a substance, which may be distinguished from the lying phantom that surrounds and counterfeits it. Opinions reconciled. And so far as a man does this, so far does he put himself into the right condition of mind for arriving ultimately at the perception of that Truth, that Being which is encompassed with no accidents. But then, in order to attain or to cultivate this state of mind, there must be a discipline, a curbing, and contradiction of the lower nature, and therefore this too is a good.
11. Second class of Dialogues Without, then, any purpose of combining opinions, nay, while resolutely maintaining boundaries, and using a most subtle test for the discrimination of the true from the apparent, Plato had actually reduced the three doctrines which assumed the name of Socratic into a certain relation and harmony. It now became him to consider how far this same doctrine and method might be applied to the earlier philosophers of Greece; how far his master had been anticipated by Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, or Pythagoras; how far he had thrown back a light upon them which might make their speculations more intelligible and consistent with each other. Here commences, in our judgment, the second class of the Platonic Dialogues, that in which the link between Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, between the doctrine of Being which Socrates had asserted, and the question respecting Unity, which had been so great an occupation of the Greek mind, is illustrated and developed.
12. Our readers will not have forgotten that the leader of the Eleatic school, Xenophanes, was in one respect distinguished from his successors. His language at first sight seems remarkably to accord with that of Socrates. That which he supposed to be the true object of man’s contemplation was God, or “The Being.” Yet, while doing justice to the course of thought by which he arrived at this conclusion, we were obliged to admit that he was essentially a destructive thinker; that he reduced his Being to a mere negation of human qualities and attributes; and that Parmenides found a happier expression for the results of his inquiries when he said that they simply led to the affirmation of Oneness. Difference between Xenophanes and Socrates How, then, did the doctrine of Socrates differ from that of Xenophanes? It was separated from it by a whole heaven. The Being of Xenophanes was altogether exclusive; the Being of Socrates was altogether inclusive. If the language of men contained such words as “just,” “merciful,” “good,” if it attributed these names to certain acts, then, whether these words had been understood or no, whether they had been rightly applied or no, there was a reality corresponding to them, there was a “justice,” a “mercy,” a “goodness,” and all these centred and united themselves in the Being. No Sophist could embarrass him with the question, “Seeing man also uses the words ‘unjust,’ ‘unmerciful,’ ‘bad,’ why should not these also have their appropriate archetypes? and why may not these, as much as the others, dwell in that permanent and all-containing substance?” For it was assumed in the very hypothesis that all these are departures from that which is, that they are intrinsically falsehoods. Ideas. Now, it was by reflection upon this difference, so delicate yet so vital, so strikingly marking the man who was fighting against all popular opinions and faith from the man who was finding out substance and life in all, that Plato seems to have gained his first insight into that doctrine of Ideas which constitutes the most native and peculiar portion of his philosophy, that which may not wrongly be called its purely Platonic portion. We are perfectly willing to admit the assertion which the other disciples of Socrates seem to have made with no little vehemence, and which Aristotle has adopted from them, that no such principle as this was enunciated by Socrates in any of his discourses. Yet we believe as undoubtedly, that by his steady adoption of the Socratic method, Plato arrived at this principle, and that they failed in apprehending it only because they neglected that method. In endeavouring to make this remark clear, we shall also perhaps be able to give our readers such insight as a treatise like this may hope to give into the subject itself.
13. Practical difficulty in the Socratic doctrine. The Greek word for appearance and for opinion is the same. An opinion is that which seems to each man. Now the whole of the education and discipline of Socrates had been to lead his disciples away from appearances to realities. Opinion and knowledge. And just so far as he did this he felt that he was leading them from Opinions to Knowledge. His experiments upon others convinced him, his own heart told him, that there is in us a thirst after knowledge, that with less than knowledge we cannot be satisfied. These at least are Socratic assertions; no one pretends that they were palmed upon him by Plato. But how could this be? The essence, the being of a thing, or of a person, seems shut up in that thing or person. I may acknowledge that it is there, but how can it ever come within the region of my perceptions? Must it not be, after all, some shape, or image, or phantom of this thing which I take account of, and not the very thing itself? Supposing this were admitted, the Socratic philosophy falls to the ground. And what falls with it? Not a scheme or a system, but the faith that truth is anyhow cognisable by man, the faith that he is not the necessary dupe of shadows and impostures; the fact that he is a moral being. It was not a doubtful question whether these results would follow from such a determination as this; they had followed; the practice and education of Socrates had been nothing less or more than 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 may be known, which had discomfited them, and made a mock of their subtleties. Yet unless this great practical puzzle could in some manner be resolved, the conclusions of Socrates, however ascertained to be sound by the reason and moral feeling of every one who fairly worked them out, would be liable to continual assaults on the side of the understanding. On this point, too, Plato was not left to his own conjectures. The Sophists had stolen their armour from the real, the honest philosophers of Greece. They had not dared to grapple with this difficulty, and the proofs which they had left of its existence in their speculations had been eagerly laid hold of by those who knew so well how to suck the poison out of every flower.
14. Heracleitans and Eleatics. We have intimated that a faithful and affectionate study of the strange, earnest thoughts which occupied Heraclitus might be profitable to any man. But his sayings concerning the endless vicissitude of things, and the falsehood of all human conjectures, made far more impression upon the Greek mind than his deeper thoughts respecting the universal light in man, and the power he possesses of conversing with that which is universal. These latter sentiments had only connected themselves with the vague pantheistic notions which were now gaining ascendancy (notions probably very far indeed from the mind of Heraclitus himself, who thought it the ultimate wisdom to know the name of Jupiter); the former, in the hands of Protagoras, had become a system which excluded all feeling of constancy and permanence or order. One man has one notion of the things which he beholds or meditates upon; another man another. Any one of these notions may be as right as another; and that we cannot have more than such notions, that we cannot arrive any more nearly to the truth of things, is a proposition not so much to be proved as to be taken for granted. Meantime the Eleatic “fixedness,” which was the formal opposite of the Heracleitan “flux,” served the purpose of the deceiver equally well. To be able to deny the fact of plurality, and so embarrass the minds of men respecting the objects of their worship, was just as convenient a line of policy as to upset their faith in their own convictions. Such observation might have led another man to despair of all inquiries; they only gave Plato a stronger moral interest in prosecuting those upon which he had entered.
15. All the notions, you say, which the mind forms respecting that which the bodily eye sees, or that which 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, guiding-posts to that which is not false, or confused, or contradictory. This notion of the flower and of justice proves that there is a very flower—a very justice. Again, the mind is capable of beholding the Being, the One. Notions and ideas. But of this Being, of this One, all the notions, imaginations, premonitions of the sensual understanding offer most miserable and counterfeit resemblances. True, Xenophanes and Parmenides; yet there is that in this Being, this One, which does and must answer to these notions; that which they are trying, however vainly, however awkwardly, to express. If, then, we connect the results of these inquiries, which start from such opposite points, what follows? There are forms permanent and unchangeable in which that which is, manifests itself as it is; in which we behold it as it is. Are these forms, then, in the beholder, or in that which he beholds? We answer, the region of pure Being, that in which the inner mind dwells, may be (one might expect that it would be) under some corresponding law to that of sensible phenomena. At all events there could be no à priori presumption against the doctrine that as a sound cannot, by the very nature of language and of things, be referred only to that whence it proceeds, but likewise involves the supposition of an ear which receives it, so there may be such a presentation of that which actually is, of the substance or essence of each thing, as can neither be understood merely in reference to that thing, nor merely in reference to that whereunto it is made, but must by its nature appertain one and the same moment to both. But then this presentation cannot by its very nature be fluctuating or variable; it must be permanent and substantial, or it cannot make known that which is permanent and substantial; it must be the very opposite to that which is its parallel in the world of sense. Ideas substantial. Are we to say of such ideas or forms that they are eternal as well as substantial? To answer “Yes,” would perhaps startle no one, if these ideas or forms had merely reference to Justice, Goodness, or even Beauty. But when we speak of the actual flower and tree that we behold as having a primary form or idea, is there not something dangerous in a doctrine which would represent such forms as eternal? The reply is, that this statement would do but very partial justice to Plato. For if in the minutest thing he believes that there is a reality, and therefore in some sense an archetypal form or idea, yet he believes also, just as firmly, that every idea has its ground and termination in one higher than itself, and that there is a supreme idea, the foundation and consummation of all these, even the idea of the absolute and perfect Being, in whose mind they all dwelt, and in whose eternity alone they can be thought or dreamed of as eternal.
16. This remark may also relieve the doctrine of another objection. These ideas, being by their very nature substantial, must be substantially in him who perceives them. Ideas–how in us. It is only seeking to remove the difficulty a step further from us, and falling into a contradiction and absurdity in the attempt, to suppose that there are indeed forms or ideas of things, but that we have only notions or conceptions of these ideas. The idea itself must be considered as with us and in us; the notion which we form about that whereof it is the idea, when we begin to use our senses, to compare and to reflect, must not be identified with the idea, but is a witness and proof of its presence, and that we are feeling after it; to realise or to possess the idea is to have the science or the knowledge of the thing. But then this assertion, that these ideas are substantially with us, must be taken in connection with what has been said before, and it will be seen at once that, instead of affirming the ground and root of our knowledge to be in ourselves, this is the very falsehood which Plato was seeking to overturn. These ideas are the witnesses in our inmost being that there is something beyond us and above us; when we enter into the idea of anything we abdicate our own pretensions to be authors or creators, we become mere acknowledgers of that which is. And to enter into that deepest and ultimate idea, which is the ground of our being, must be in the deepest sense an abdication of our own notions and imaginations, an act of submission to, and reception of, the Truth.
17. Plato no theorist. Here, then, we find Plato most consistently carrying out the principle which it had been the vocation of his master from first to last to assert. Here we see how perfectly harmonious the Socratic doctrine, that knowledge is the end of life, is with that humility and confession of ignorance which are at the root of all the Socratic discipline and culture. Here we see the harmony between knowledge and being; how necessarily a certain state of character and affections is presupposed in every act of knowledge. Here, lastly, we see how truly Plato reconciled those two forms of philosophy, one of which had dealt with the objects of our knowledge, one with our acts of perception—how truly he discovered a truth, one side of which each had dimly perceived, yet how little this was the result of any project for harmonising opposite theories,—how much rather it was the effect of resolutely pursuing a principle which supersedes theories altogether, and so far as it is faithfully acted upon, delivers us from our bondage to them. Not to frame a comprehensive system which shall include nature and society, man and God, as its different elements, or in its different compartments, and which therefore necessarily leads the system-builder to consider himself above them all, but to demonstrate the utter impossibility of such a system, to cut up the notion and dream of it by the roots, this is the work and the glory of Plato. He who is attempting the construction of such a Babel must understand not merely that he will not find the model of it in Plato, but that before he advances one step he must undo everything that Plato has done, must disprove all his conclusions, and prove the falsehood of the process by which he has arrived at them. Those commentators who can find in Plato nothing but the most exquisite ridicule of all the system-makers in his own and in past days have, it is true, understood him imperfectly. That ridicule would not be so delightful and satisfying as it is, so thoroughly genial and consolatory to every earnest student, if he did not feel that it was the handmaid of the most severe demonstration, that it was only another aspect of the most generous and noble sympathy with everything that is honest and humble, practical and true. The kind and experienced teacher smiles at our useless waste of time in attempting to build, but it is that he may urge us to the more profitable occupation of seeking after the foundation of that which is built. The first is the employment of those who desire to be gods, the second of those who believe that the highest blessing of which man is capable is to know God.
18. His supposed classification. But if it be true that Plato is almost free from that propensity for theories which has beset most philosophers, nay, that this principle, consistently followed out, is positively incompatible with them, how is it that he is so commonly supposed to have mapped out the domain of human knowledge into the three provinces of Dialectics, Ethics, and Physics? In considering this question we shall perhaps discover the purpose of a third class of his Dialogues, and be able, moreover, to contemplate his so-called Eclecticism under yet another aspect.
19. The critics who have discovered this classification in Plato evidently cannot mean that there is one portion of the Dialogues which does, and one portion which does not, treat of dialectics. They must be aware that every dialogue exhibits the dialectic method of Plato, that every one is making with more or less success some new trial or application of it. Neither, we think, can they pretend, without doing violence to the purpose and language of their author, that these dialectical dialogues are not also ethical. His dialectics and ethics inseparable Not only is a moral purpose conspicuous throughout them, but, as we have said before, the development of the method by which the truth is perceived and ascertained is inseparably interwoven with a moral culture. The disengagement of the mind from sensible impressions and sensible fascinations is the joint effect of restraint upon inclination and of the art by which the apparent is distinguished from the real. Without the feeling of this connection and intertwining of the ethical with the intellectual discipline, the most beautiful Dialogues are unintelligible; nay, the desire to separate that which Plato has believed inseparable, is perhaps the main cause of the narrow and partial views which have prevailed as to the object and construction of his works.
20. The Phædrus. Look, for instance, at the Phædrus. Lysias had proposed a certain thesis respecting Love, and had defended it with abundance of ingenuity in studiously-balanced sentences, the aptest clothing for a rhetorical purpose and a rhetorical method. Socrates shows, first, how easy it is to meet his arguments with a counter series as ingenious and as artificially expressed. Then he discovers the radical defect of both sets of arguments, that they were dealing with a word the meaning of which had not been ascertained. In the attempt to find what this word signifies, to separate the true from the apparent meanings of it, he unveils the principles of his dialectics. But there is combined with this exposition the most distinct declaration and warning, (assuming a form which, however unfit for us, was appropriate to the evil condition of Greek society, and proves the purity of the writer who, in the midst of such society, could maintain so elevated a standard,) that only by restraining the grosser appetites can we be in a state for apprehending the true nature of Love. In the conclusion of the Dialogue, the two principles are harmonised in a splendid mythus, wherein the disciple is taught that only he who governs himself, who has his lower nature in subjection, can be fit for the highest exercise of his faculties, for the contemplation of that which verily and indeed is. We cannot reduce this Dialogue under any of the partial names and descriptions that have been given of it. We cannot consider it a mere attack upon the rhetoricians, or a mere development of the Socratic method for testing the meaning of words. Neither does it seem to us a treatise on pure love, or on the idea of beauty. All these subjects may be hinted at, and even most valuably illustrated. But the reader of the Phædrus must be contented to feel how they sustain each other, and to let them form themselves into a whole in his mind, without being eager to give the absolute supremacy to any one of them. He will then find, we believe, that this Dialogue is one of the most conspicuous, we might say the type dialogue, of that class which teaches us how to make substance or being the end of our inquiries and meditations; but he certainly will not be able to discover whether it is more ethical or dialectical.
21. The Gorgias. The Gorgias is another almost equally striking instance of the same kind. Formal critics have determined that this too shall be merely an attack upon rhetoric, or else that it shall have the merely moral object of explaining the nature and purpose of punishment. It must strike a person, who only hears of this discussion, that a work which could suggest such opposite interpretations must be most incoherent and rhapsodical. The more he reads it the more he will be struck with the sequency of its thoughts, with the natural and easy manner in which one grows out of another. And he will find, we believe, upon reflection, that as the intellectual purpose of the Sophist was inseparably combined with the moral, as the pursuit of political power for an end was inseparably united to the cultivation of a treacherous art as the means, so it was impossible to introduce a sounder intellectual discipline among the youth of Athens, without leading them at the same time to perceive that the true purpose of their lives was not the acquisition of dominion, or the escape from suffering and punishment, but the attainment, even through suffering, punishment, and disgrace, of a deliverance from the moral evil which obstructed their search after truth, and made power a curse to them. Here, again, he distinguishes the true from the apparent, not by the help of ethics without dialectics, or of dialectics without ethics, but of both conjointly.
22. How the case stands in reference to physics we shall have to explain shortly. But thus much we may affirm now, that whensoever his opponents have engaged in physical speculations, Plato is not unwilling in those Dialogues, which have most distinctly a moral purpose, to cope with them, and that he never in such wise divides these two provinces as to suggest the thought that the principles by which either is governed may not most usefully or injuriously affect the other. The Theætetus. Of this fact we could easily convince our readers, if we could afford space for an analysis of the Theætetus. But we must do no more than commend that exquisite specimen of Platonic wisdom to their careful study, and proceed to show how the notion that Plato established a formal division in the subjects of human thought may have originated, and may be reconciled with our belief in his hatred of theories and consistency of purpose.
23. Third class of dialogues. We have often observed that the founders of the different schools in Greece had been led by the circumstances of their position, or by the peculiar tendencies of their own minds, to choose for themselves a distinct sphere of observation. It was no forethought or wish to be a natural philosopher that drew Thales into his course of speculation. Search after unity. It was merely that the outward facts submitted to his senses were those which struck him as the most likely to contain the solution of the problem which he found within. In like manner, Pythagoras was led by a series of scarcely known or acknowledged influences gradually to desert the maxims of his native soil, and to make Society, or the State, the subject of his inquiries. To these we know he added a scheme of nature which he tried to reduce under the same law as the facts which related to the order and government of men. Parmenides and Zeno again entered into their purely metaphysical region, not from any resolution of choosing one province of thought more than another, but merely by reflecting upon the two preceding systems, and finding that they were inadequate. They too sought to make their own system universal, and to make the scheme of the political world and of nature in some sense dependent on the laws which concern the region of pure mind. Plato then found the fact already established for him, that there actually are these three lines in which the thoughts of men, when they are strongly exercised, naturally run. He had not to create any artificial distinctions; the natural distinctions had been discovered by the experience of his predecessors. What remained for him? Unity in nature, in society, in knowledge. To follow them into each of these regions, to inquire how far any of them had discovered the unity of which he was in search, to consider whether what they had looked for in nature, in society, in the mind of man, may not be implied indeed in each of these, yet have its foundations beneath them all. This, we believe, was the final and consummate effort of the Platonic philosophy. As there is a set of Dialogues which seem to us designed merely to unfold the Socratic doctrine of Being, another expressly intended to develope the principle of Ideas, as necessary to the support of the former, and as solving a problem which the Heracleitans and Eleatics had shown to exist, so we believe there is a third in which Plato reflects upon his master’s discoveries and his own, and exhibits them in direct application to the three subjects of nature, of society, and of knowledge. Every one will recognise in the Timæus an attempt to discover a unity for the external universe; in the Republic, an attempt to discover the meaning of political unity. And, therefore, without contradicting our previous assertion that, in all his Dialogues, Plato is evolving a dialectical method, we may also admit that there are some in which he proposes to himself the direct and formal aim of showing how this method is a guide to the true unity in knowledge. Why Plato reverses this order. Nor must it be forgotten that Plato was enabled by his position as a reviewer of past systems, was obliged by his position as an expounder of Socrates, to reverse the order which we have followed in tracing the rise of these schools historically. He not only might begin with those principles which the Eleatics had expounded, and descend to the natural speculations of the Ionians, but he could not follow any other course if he was to make the Socratic doctrine of Being, and the Socratic method of distinguishing the real from the fantastic, his guiding stars through the whole journey. Here, then, we must begin our notice of his experiments in search of unity. We are eager to introduce our readers to that which we consider the crowning labour of his life, the end at which he was obscurely aiming through the whole of it—his polity; but we must first refer to his discussions respecting the conditions and meaning of SCIENCE. A few words will then be sufficient for the less important, though by no means uninteresting, question—how far his views respecting the physical world were in conformity or disagreement with his other principles.
24. Unity in science. 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 they had a real subject for their inquiries, let those inquiries be as idle as they might. But the Eleatic had to produce both the dream and the interpretation; to maintain that there was a region of pure mind, as well as to show what was transacted there. Plato, therefore, had also two tasks. He had to show that their assumption was sound, before he ventured to inquire how far it was able to carry them. For this purpose he adopted a method which has greatly puzzled many of his readers. The Parmenides. In the Dialogue entitled Parmenides he introduces Socrates, full of youthful vivacity, broaching the doctrine of ideas in opposition to the antiplurality doctrine of Parmenides and Zeno. The aged philosopher treats his antagonist with most graceful courtesy, allows him to put forth one explanation after another of his scheme, shows him that all are untenable, then encourages him to hope that, after a more severe philosophical training, he will understand himself better, and finally proceeds to establish his own doctrine of the One in a series of annihilating propositions, wherein he shows that it must exist, and that it cannot exist under any conditions or limitations with which the understanding is acquainted. Probably no one but Plato ever ventured upon such an experiment as this—the experiment, we mean, of showing that his own principle was untenable except so far as it is connected with and grounded upon the principle of another philosopher who did not recognise it. But the Dialogue of the Parmenides does not merely serve the purpose of establishing the truth that the mind witnesses of something which is not under sensible laws, but it also prepares us to feel the want which the Eleatic doctrine could not satisfy. A conviction of the purely negative character of the method grows upon us as we read, and while we assent to its conclusions we feel an increasing moral interest in seeking for some higher point of view from which we may contemplate it, and that imperfect substitute which the young Socrates had proposed for it. The Sophist. In the Sophist this wish is to a great degree realised. There we have an Eleatic stranger discussing with the young Theætetus the meaning of the word Sophist, and the qualities of the animal which it denoted, how far it belongs to the same genus with the Philosopher, or how they are distinguished. In the course of this dialogue we arrive at the conclusion that the great object of the Sophist is to set up a universal science. By universal science he means merely a capacity of talking upon all manner of subjects, of framing a set of images of that which is, and passing these off for substances and realities. But here a difficulty arises: Parmenides, whose opinions the Eleatic stranger might be supposed to favour, has told us that we are not to inquire respecting that which is not; that the conception is in fact an impossible one. The Sophist and Philosopher. How then will our definition of the Sophist practically avail us? How shall we be able ever to pursue him on to that ground whereunto we have had the clearest evidence that he has betaken himself? The Eleatic stranger finds himself obliged then, much as he fears the guilt of parricide, to inquire into the soundness of this doctrine of his honoured countryman and teacher. By degrees the fallacy unveils itself. We find that in refusing to recognise the notion of not-being, he was in fact shutting his eyes to something which is. The contradiction may appear startling, but we do not escape it by refusing to look it in the face. We have actually stumbled upon an instance in which that which is adverse to reality must be treated to all intents and purposes as real. And when we look a little further into the use of language, we see more and more the impossibility of giving that definite rigid exclusiveness to the word or notion of Being which it must bear in the system of Parmenides. We find that we cannot by any means identify our notion of sameness or of difference with our notion of Being. And yet the notion of Being enters into both of these; there is a sameness and a difference between things. Whither does all this lead? The dialectical science. It leads to the conclusion which, as is so constantly the case in Plato, is carried more directly home to our understanding than it is expressed in words, that Parmenides is after all dwelling in a region of words. For all that he seems to have sounded the very inmost depth of thought, and though he has actually discovered that there are depths which words do not reach, yet he himself is at last only setting up one notion against another notion. It is not Being, but the notion of Being which he has been investigating, and which he has necessarily investigated most imperfectly. And now, then, the vision of a new kind of science wholly unlike that of the Sophist, yet in one sense as universal as his, wholly different from that exclusive dogmatic national philosophy of Parmenides, yet, like his, having unity for its condition and ultimate ground, opens upon us. This is the science of dialectics, the science expressly appertaining to the philosopher. It is that which rejects no form of thought or language as unfit for its investigation, but searches out the idea of each, and ascertains what notions and phantasms are inconsistent with it, and attach themselves to it, and have sought to make themselves part of it. Being it looks upon as the object of its search, but Being connected with life, connected with 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 because it includes all existing sciences, but because it discovers in all forms of thought an ultimate ground of unity beneath them all, because it assigns to each science its specific object, and its relation to every other.
25. Dialectical science the science: what it must do. Every science is seeking after a foundation. It rests upon the faith that there is a law for the facts which it inquires into; what that law is, is the subject of its inquiry. The science should explain to us how the mind proceeds in the search after these laws through whatever set of facts we may be looking for them. But its own specific object is the deep ground of all laws, the Being from whom they derive their life and potency. This dialectics then is the search after premises. Parmenides and Zeno had gone no higher than to the notion of a Logic which, taking the premises of the mind for granted, should affirm what conclusions will legitimately and necessarily flow from them. This was in fact their universal science, as Rhetoric was that of the Sophist. The first overthrew all facts, setting up a law in the mind in opposition to them. The second confounded law and fact, using certain laws of the mind to overturn admitted facts, or the contradictions of facts to disprove the existence of law. The principle of seeking for laws in and through facts is the principle by which Socrates upheld the faith and morality of men against the invasions of Rhetoric, and by which Plato upheld the possibility of science against the invasions of Logic. Here is that inductive science which two thousand years after had to maintain the same battle against the same enemies, when it for the first time clearly and efficiently asserted itself as the only guide to a knowledge of the physical world. The Socratic doctrine of Being makes us feel that it is necessary. The Platonic doctrine of Ideas makes us understand that it is possible. The demand in the mind for a Unity which shall be not negative, but positive, not the amalgamation of parts, but that which precedes all distinction into parts, and remains unaffected by it; this makes us confident that it is real.
26. Dialectics and politics connected: how? The connection between the Platonic dialectics and the Platonic politics is indicated by several passages in the Dialogues, which are intended to unfold the character of each. Thus in the Sophist the Eleatic stranger proposes to examine the meaning of three words, Sophist, Philosopher, Politician. The last is reserved for a separate discussion, and actually forms the subject of one dialogue. But it is obvious that Plato intended us to feel how strong was the relation between the three persons denoted by the words, and how impossible it would be to investigate the last without a previous knowledge of the other two. The young Athenian, under the teaching of the Sophist, began more and more to feel that the rhetorician and the statesman were convertible terms, that the efficient and practical ruler of men was the efficient master of words. On the other hand, it is obvious that the logic of Parmenides and Zeno must have made politics a mere set of abstract propositions, to which an earnest and enthusiastic man might impart a practical meaning and life, but which would lose all the qualities that had endeared them to him as a logician, in proportion as they received this impregnation. Zeno himself was probably a specimen of this class, but we have no reason to suppose that he left any successors; his disciples must either have devoted themselves merely to inquiries respecting entity and unity, or have become politicians of the rhetorical kind. Now, it is obvious that the dialectics of Plato, by their very nature and definition, could not pretend to be themselves Politics. They necessarily assumed facts, not indeed as premises to start from, but as the raw materials, in the heart of which premises lay hid. The laws and conditions of society were to be investigated by this dialectic, could not be investigated without it: but they were presumed to exist, and they were perfectly distinct from the faculty and science by which they were discovered. Plato then was in a condition to do justice to Pythagoras as he had done justice to Parmenides. He could believe that there might be much in the discoveries of the one respecting the order of society, as there had been much in the discoveries of the other respecting the conditions and requirements of the pure mind, and he prepared himself to use the philosophy which he had ascertained to be true in one region for an investigation of the observations which had been made and the doctrines which had been broached respecting the other.
27. The Republic: the notion that it is merely an ethical or dialectical treatise. But this is not all. The reader of Plato’s Republic will discover, not perhaps without some surprise, that questions respecting the nature and objects of dialectics occupy a considerable place in this political treatise. Hence it has been inferred that the title of the work is altogether misleading; that it is not the purpose of Plato to teach us the conditions and the relations of a State, but merely to raise a platform upon which to carry forward with more interest, and probably with greater success, the philosophical inquiries which he has commenced in his other Dialogues. The Republic, according to these commentators, is a kind of laboratory which he has built for the purpose of pursuing his experiments into the nature of the individual man. On many accounts this hypothesis will be likely to find acceptance in this day, even if it had not been supported by talents and erudition of the first order. We are not anxious to refute it, but we are anxious that our readers should study the Republic with a free spirit, and that they should not be hindered by a theory from perceiving how it illustrates a subject which has occupied us so much already, and must occupy us at every step of our future progress; we mean the relations between the mind of man and the constitution of society. To Plato we believe was committed the task of expressing the deepest wants and necessities of our being, and of discovering or prophesying the kind of satisfaction that must be provided for them. We make no apology for dwelling so long upon his name in this rapid sketch of moral and metaphysical inquiries, because we are satisfied that if we put our readers in a right course for studying his works and those of Aristotle, and the Jewish Scriptures, they will be able to trace with little assistance from us the progress of these inquiries in modern Europe, whether in the age of the fathers, of the schoolmen, or in the period since the Reformation; whereas the most able and elaborate discourses upon the ethics and metaphysics of later times without this preparation can, we think, avail them little. It must, therefore, be a great point with us to ascertain whether Plato is silent upon those wants which belong to our social being and position; whether he thought them of a purely secondary and accidental character; or whether he found them so imbedded in the constitution of man that he could not investigate the law of each man’s internal life without also investigating that by which he is related to his fellows. The supporters of the former opinion (as the readers of Schleiermacher’s Introduction to the Republic will perceive) have felt that they needed and have not failed to exercise the most admirable ingenuity in working out their conclusion. Those who adopt the latter may content themselves with beseeching attention to the express language of Plato, and with briefly recapitulating the heads of his dialogue.
28. The Republic, first book. Opening. We find ourselves at the beginning of the Republic in a circle of Athenians met to witness a religious ceremony lately introduced from Thrace. The most prominent and interesting person in the group is old Cephalus, a cheerful and benignant octogenarian, with whom Socrates begins a discourse on the comforts of old age, and the advantage or disadvantage of riches. A remark of Cephalus leads to the inquiry, whether the definition of justice given by Simonides, that it consists in speaking the truth, and giving to each man that which is his due, is satisfactory or no? Cephalus being called away to perform a sacrifice, his part in the dialogue devolves upon Polemarchus. Justice. But we have not advanced further in the discussion than to a general consent of the parties that the mere external acts indicated in the words of Simonides cannot satisfy the idea of justice; and again, that its obligations cannot be affected by our position to each other as friends or enemies; when the sophist Thrasymachus breaks in with a vehement assertion that the whole notion of justice is a fraud practised by the strong man upon the weaker. The consequence, that the life of an unjust man would be in itself desirable, is one from which he does not shrink, and to the examination of this doctrine the greater part of the first book is devoted.
29. Second book In the beginning of the second, we find young Glaucon and Adeimantus professing themselves dissatisfied with the manner in which Thrasymachus has defended his cause, and with his haste in abandoning it. They have no sympathy with his views, they are convinced in their feelings that Justice is intrinsically good, but the arguments by which it is proved to be so seem to them inconclusive. Is it not true that society has put honour on a certain course of conduct which ministers to its own security and advantage? Has it not succeeded in helping out the weakness of its own sanctions by religious feelings and terrors? Are we not brought into the world under this twofold set of impressions in favour of what is called justice, and against injustice? Can justice be shown not to be the creature of society? Can we suppose a man retaining the idea and practice of Justice in opposition to laws and his fellow-men, and without the imagination of some divine sanction or patronage? The question Socrates allows to be difficult; perhaps it cannot be at once answered. But might we not arrive at some solution of it if we examined it upon a larger scale? The question presumes an existing state of society; it supposes this notion of justice, be it a fiction or reality, to be necessary to the support of a State. Shall we inquire then how it becomes necessary to a State; what justice in a State is? Then possibly we may know better what justice in an individual is, and whether it can or cannot be maintained under the disadvantages imagined by Glaucon.
30. Now we would remark in passing, that those who consider the political part of the Republic merely accidental and subordinate, look upon this Preface as the great staff of their theory. They maintain that it is altogether so much easier and more consistent to believe that the subject started in the outset is really the main and central one of the book, and that all subjects which may occur by the way are merely intended for the illustration of it, that no student of Plato who really understands that teacher’s method will tolerate any other supposition. The Republic is an inquiry respecting justice. We admit at once that this is the object of Plato; that the Republic is an inquiry into the nature and meaning of Justice; that if this end be lost sight of, it would be quite impossible to understand the connection of its different parts. But then we say that the most natural and obvious construction of Plato’s words leads to the belief that the idea of political justice was in his mind inseparable from that of individual justice; that this was precisely the quality which he perceived to be the meeting point between the spheres of ethics and politics; say, rather, which proved that these are two concentric spheres. The clear establishment of this relation is, we conceive, the great purpose of these two first books. They are a lesson to all future reasoners with sophistical men, that they can only maintain the moral ground safely when they are content to follow their opponents to their own political ground; when, instead of contending that there is an order which the individual is obliged to follow, supposing society to have no existence, they will be at the pains to prove that there are eternal principles involved in the constitution of society itself, to which its individual members conform themselves, not because they are content to sacrifice their own distinct personality, but because they have no other way of asserting it. Whether modern writers on ethics would have fared worse or better if they had attended to the admonition of the most experienced and subtle of all the antagonists of sophistry, we may have occasion to inquire hereafter. At all events, those who believe that the main purpose of the Platonic Dialogues is to discover and develope a method of thought, must, we think, be strangely hampered by a theory which compels them to suppose that on this occasion the result arrived at is the only important consideration; and that the processes for attaining it are altogether artificial, and yet, withal, most clumsy and cumbrous.
31. Third book. But to return: Starting with the hope that the proposed scheme for seeking after justice in a State will lead to a solution of our difficulties, Plato proceeds at once to the formation of a society. Now any one who looks in the arrangements which he here sets forth for the outlines of some imaginary perfect commonwealth, will unquestionably be much disappointed. Its freedom from mysticism. So far from there being anything mystical or Utopian in his primary conception of the society, everything is as terrestrial and commonplace as the merest materialist could desire. Men meet together, and find that each is not sufficient to provide for his own animal wants. Different necessities arise, different capacities discover themselves among the persons associated, adapted to these necessities; hence division of labour, distinct occupations and professions. By and by comes the desire for an excess of the good things which earth produces; hence tumults and external wars. The guardians. Now we feel the necessity for a set of guardians or watch-dogs of the state. What manner of persons must these guardians be? Clearly they are in danger of becoming wolves instead of watch-dogs. How is this to be prevented? How are we to produce in them those internal qualities which are so obviously necessary for the welfare of the whole community? We say that these arrangements are very unlike what might be expected from the builder of an imaginary commonwealth. No assumption of any advantageous position; no previous theory about the wants and feelings of the persons composing the society; above all, no hope, by outward contrivances and dispositions, to avert the occurrence of crime. How can this be accounted for? The Republic not imaginary at all. Does not such apparent carelessness about external contrivances rather favour the notion that the society is only a scaffolding? We answer, if it were so we should be utterly unable to account for the scaffolding not being more elaborately constructed. If Plato had the liberty of forming his own plan and choosing his own materials; if it were a matter of utter indifference to him how far these are consistent with the nature of things, provided they did but help him to a discovery which would afterwards be good and entire on its own ground, whatever steps had led us to it, any attempt to conform to dry ordinary facts as they meet us in the world would be idle, and, as an offence against art, censurable. If, on the contrary, his object were not to frame a society after an ideal in his own mind, but, as we have supposed all along, to investigate the conditions of political unity — the idea involved in the very existence of society, by departing from which it has become confused and incoherent — if this be the view of the treatise, which is most consistent with the rest of Plato’s philosophy, and which most clearly exhibits its relation to the other Dialogues, then it can be no matter of wonder to us that Plato should carefully abstain from any exercises of imagination while he is setting before us the bare and naked elements of which society is composed; that he should take pains to convince us that he is not a creator but a searcher; not one of those poets to whom he can assign no place in his commonwealth, but one of those investigators of the truth as it actually is whom he would put at the head of it.
32. Is the Republic a treatise on education? The Republic of Plato then assumes selfish desires to exist, and the evil results of them to have occurred. And it is an examination of this question,—Under what conditions can we suppose it permanently to cohere, in spite of the tendencies to decomposition which manifestly discover themselves within it? When, however, we direct our attention to the means of preserving any body from decay, we may either consider what positive precautions are necessary in order to resist the progress of its corruption; or, on the other hand, by what means it is possible to call forth and invigorate those principles of life which it must have within it in order that it may be at all, though their presence may only make itself manifest through the power which opposes them. Plato again and again gives us to understand that it is with the development of these principles of life, and not with the outward regulations for the repression of evil, that he concerns himself in this dialogue. It is on this account that the Republic has assumed to many persons the appearance simply of a treatise on education, nay, of little more than a censure upon the existing Greek education. Reasons for the opinion. These critics remind us that he has scarcely given the first rude hint of his society before he tells us that the minds of the guardians of the State must not be corrupted by those false ideas of the gods which occur in the poems of Homer. That a great part of the third book is occupied with the consideration of two particular branches of education, gymnastics and music, and even with a minute and elaborate inquiry respecting the kinds of music which serve or frustrate the ends of education. That the subject is renewed in the sixth and seventh books, where the use of all the sciences in forming the mind of a statesman is carefully investigated. All this is true, yet we are persuaded that the value of this portion of the work will be far more appreciated by those who consider it subordinate to the great object of discovering the principle which lies at the foundation of society, which connects it with the processes of the individual mind, and which gives consistency and harmony to both of them, than by those who determine that it shall be the sole and independent purpose of the dialogue. Character of the gods. Nothing is more entirely consistent with the purpose which we have attributed to Plato than his placing a right view of the character of the gods at the threshold of his education; for the idea of the Good, and of this as connected with Order, is that which underlies his whole scheme. To make men feel that this is, that this exists, to teach them how to distinguish between the anomalies of society and its principles, is his great endeavour. Above all things, therefore, we must see that our models are not defaced with our own corruptions.
33. Music. For precisely the same reason the subject of music becomes invested with so much importance. To develope the sense of order and harmony in the minds of the members of the commonwealth, is the secret for making it really that which it pretends to be. It is a part of this order that the feeling of it should be first communicated to the guiding, guarding minds of the society, that from them it should diffuse itself through the whole. By this means a new and most important element of our Republic is brought to light. Among the guardians will be some of a higher order than the rest. They will be those on whom the education has produced its complete mellowing effect; distinguished from the others in this, that whereas they have chiefly derived a more braced and masculine tone of character from the union of gymnastic exercises with the higher forms of music, these have imbibed the very essence of the music, have acquired that perfectly harmonised temper, that sense of wholeness, which makes them the true ideals and representatives of the entire community. The qualities of the magistrates. These are obviously our magistrates. But how shall we persuade our people that these different qualities exist, and that they constitute a fitness for the different offices in the state? We must tell them a story, says Plato, in order that we may bring home this conviction to their minds. We must inform them that they were all made originally out of the earth, which, on that account, they are to love as their common mother, reckoning themselves brethren in consequence of their relation to her. That however it pleased the gods to introduce different materials into their composition, making some of gold, some of silver, some of inferior metals; that it is important that these should not be confounded, but should be kept distinct and applied to distinct uses, in order that the society may receive benefit from each of them. Such is the parable by which our author teaches us that he looks upon himself not as the contriver of some imaginary scheme, but only as following out the intentions of Providence in the institution of society.
34. Relation of the state to the individual. All this time we seem to have been forgetting our original question respecting Justice. Fourth book. But we find in the fourth book that the arrangements of the State, and even our long discussion upon music, have been preparing the way for a more clear development of this idea. We have discovered three classes in society, and we have seen that each of these classes embodies a certain characteristic quality, which through it becomes the quality of the whole fellowship. The class of magistrates expresses to us the very idea of Wisdom, superintending, distinguishing, arranging; the class of guardians, the very idea of Fortitude, sustaining, amalgamating, preserving; the inferior classes, while they keep their position, the very idea of Temperance, self-restraining, and submitting. Without any of these it is obvious that a society could not exist, and the permanence of its existence depends upon the degree in which the qualities of each class interpenetrate the rest. Music and justice. But then do not these imply the existence of still another quality—of some principle or power which fuses together all the classes and all these qualities—which belongs not primarily or particularly to one class, but must by its very nature be predicated of the whole? This is evidently that musical principle which we have been seeking by all our education to instil. But what shall be the name of it? Is not this that Justice which we have been trying to understand the meaning of? Do we not translate the rude outward notion of Simonides into a practical, satisfactory idea, when instead of making justice consist in giving every man his due and in speaking the truth, we describe it as that which 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 still a little deeper? Our first object was to discover the nature and effect of justice, not in society, but in the individual. At every step of our progress we seem to have found proof that these two considerations are inseparable; that the law of society must be the law of the individual. Now, perhaps, we are in a condition to explain this fact more particularly. Our inquiry has brought to light three classes as the necessary constituents of the State; a class of magistrates, a class of guardians, a class occupied in supplying the animal wants of the whole body. Whence the necessity for this distribution of society? Is it not that there is a similar distribution of parts in the man himself? Is there not in him Reason, Energy, or Will, Cupidity, or an animal nature? And if these are not to exist in perpetual discord, the man in perpetual misery, must there not be that in him which preserves each of these parts in its proper relation to the rest, giving the supremacy to Reason, preserving the strength and purity of Will, subjecting Cupidity? Is not Justice then necessary to each of us?
35. The great problem of society. This point being ascertained, Socrates is willing to finish the dialogue. But Glaucon and Adeimantus remind him that justice being, according to him, the principle of harmony or unity in the commonwealth, he is bound to explain the other conditions of this unity. For if any inevitable circumstances make this union impracticable, justice itself is impracticable; and if for the commonwealth, then, according to the whole tenour of the argument, for the individual also; so that we should be obliged at last to acquiesce in a conclusion not very unlike that sophistical one which we have been labouring to confute. The four next books, then, from the beginning of the fifth to the end of the ninth, are occupied with these questions: first, in what sense are family relationships compatible with the unity of a commonwealth? secondly, how far can it consist with individual selfishness and ambition? thirdly, how can it consist with that law of decay and degeneracy to which all societies seem to have been subject?
36. What Plato’s statements are upon the first of these subjects we have no need to inform any reader. Those who know scarcely anything else of him have heard that he has somewhere spoken of the two sexes as intended to perform exactly the same duties and exercises, and that he has connected with this doctrine another (which indeed in a logical mind will generally be inseparable from it), of a community in wives and children. Plato’s communism. They have heard also that these notions actually enter into the composition of his perfect commonwealth, and that he wishes to supersede all the existing relations of father and child, wife and husband, which lie, as we suppose, at the foundation of all moral apprehensions and all political order. The question, then, naturally suggests itself, not whether we are prepared to offer any justification for this part of his speculations, but how, while such a huge and hideous blot exists in them, we can venture to speak of them as important; above all, can devote so much time to the examination of them? Many readers and admirers of Plato have dwelt with much satisfaction on the fact, that in the Laws (a later work, undoubtedly, than the Republic) he appears to have changed his views, and to recognise the sanctity of human relationships as they exist. We confess that we do not regard the passages referred to as a recantation. Even if Plato considered them so himself (of which there is no proof), we feel convinced that he would have relapsed into his former opinion, if he had again devoted himself to the task of studying the idea of a commonwealth. The doctrine of the Laws: how and why different from that of the Republic The Laws, it seems to us, are intended to explain the conditions under which any particular nation exists; whence proceeds the coercive power by which the evils of its members are restrained; how it is to be preserved as a distinct community. For this end Plato perceived the importance of distinct relationships; he could not help seeing that they lie at the very foundation of national life; that with the loss of them it would perish. The Republic, on the other hand, is not an inquiry respecting the conditions of a particular state. Phrases may occur in it again and again which seem to define this as its object; but others, far more pregnant in their meaning, and oftentimes uttered unconsciously, show that another and grander aim was present to the mind of the writer, and was haunting him when he could not realise it. He felt that there should be some body which expresses, 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 as this is implied in the existence of every national community, but yet transcends it, and is not subject to its limitations. We could easily produce proofs of this feeling from every book of the Republic, but we know none in which it comes forth more strikingly than in that fifth book of which we are now speaking. The idea of a universal Greek society is there formally put forth, yet it is evident that this does not satisfy the mind of Plato; he has the dream of something still more comprehensive: a feeble sophist would have tried to express the dream in big words; he is content to suggest the nearest practical approximation to an expression of it that his circumstances made possible. But with this universal society Plato does not see how distinct relationships are compatible. Perfect community seems the very law of its being; whatsoever interferes with this seems to frustrate its intention.
37. Advantages of Plato’s error to us. Here, then, we see at once the ignorance and knowledge of Plato. How such a universal society as this could grow out of a national community, out of a family, and could preserve uninjured, in harmony with itself, both those holy institutions which had been its cradle, this he did not know; this wisdom was reserved for the shepherds of Palestine. To them it was only communicated by degrees, and their chief duty consisted in keeping that which had been divinely given them in the sure confidence that more would be added. But this was permitted to the sage of Greece—he was allowed to feel the necessity of a universal community to the life of man; he was permitted to feel that it was a great living truth implied in the existence of society, though yet undeveloped. To such insight and honesty of purpose, rejecting no light that has been vouchsafed, it is granted, that even the crudities and ignorances into which he fell in the search after truth shall be for the benefit of future generations, nay for the practical correction and exposure of these very crudities when they are reproduced by men of a different spirit. The fifth book of the Republic is a curious anticipation of every scheme of universal society which has been propounded by religious fanatics or political theorists from the propagation of Christianity to the present day. It remains a standing practical testimony from the wisest man in the ancient world, that this is the only consistent law, and must be the ultimate law of every such society, whensoever it attempts to exist alone, as a merely spiritual or cosmical family. Rejecting, then, with indignation the errare mehercule malo of the Roman academician, and loving Plato only as far as he loved truth, we may yet find a worth even in this unfortunate passage of his writings.
38. How a perfect commonwealth is compatible with selfishness. The portion of the Republic comprehended in the sixth and seventh books is second to no part of it in interest. The difficulty to be solved in it is the compatibility of such a State as we have described with the selfish notions of men. Plato does not blink the question. Sixth book. He at once declares his conviction that such a State could only be administered by philosophers; and he then goes on to explain what he means by a philosopher; why it is that the persons generally bearing that name are unfit to be practical politicians; what their real relation to the rest of their countrymen is. Here then we have the full exposition and development of that doctrine which we found lying at the root of Socratic teaching; that the selfish, self-seeking principle, leading men to animal gratifications, is the source of disorder and confusion in the life of man, not really the moving spring of it; that there is in man something higher, which is not satisfied with itself, but which seeks after converse with the Good. The philosopher is the man who is holding this converse; whose mind is fixed on the true end and meaning of things, upon the substance, the reality of them. The rest are following images and shadows, but still in the pursuit of these are confessing their want of a Good, and are blindly feeling after it. The philosopher, if he descends to the pursuit of their shadows, becomes worthy of their contempt, for there is a perpetual contradiction between the higher aims of which he is conscious and the grovelling course he has actually taken. If, on the other hand, he steadily keeps his own idea in sight, he is necessarily unintelligible to them, and on that account they despise him. The philosopher’s duty to the multitude. But suppose, having worked his own way out of the mine in which they are dwelling, and no longer receiving light through the little crannies which transmit it broken and confused, and lead men utterly astray as to the fountain from which it has flowed, he has come out into the open sunlight, and by it seen all objects as they are, he neither glorifies himself by living apart from them, nor yet submits to confuse his light with their darkness, but goes down amongst them that he may lead them by the same track which he has himself trodden into the clear day—would he not then be fulfilling his function as a philosopher, and yet be most truly a politician? If the question occurs to you, what is this upward road? Seventh book. Plato is ready to consider it with you. There is a certain education recognised among men; they teach arithmetic, geometry, as well as the gymnastics and music we spoke of before, and they evidently attach a high value to these studies. Are they wrong? surely not. They are wrong only in this, that throughout their whole lives they are seeking shadows instead of substances, and that they have made all these sciences helpful to their low ambition. Arithmetic and geometry have been resorted to merely for secular commercial ends; they might be made the means of purifying the mind to a perception of the truth of things. What is the appropriate function of each of these sciences, with a view to this object, he carefully inquires: and this inquiry brings out the necessity of that grand, deeper science of Dialectics, which directly leads to the contemplation of truth as truth, of good as good, in its pure essence. Now a nation thus guided and educated comes into the condition of such a republic as we have described. Its wisest, deepest-minded men will be its magistrates; the community will have one end; that principle of justice, which assigns to each his proper place, imparts a sense of proportion and harmony to all, will be diffused through it and actuate it. Thus, then, the existence of ambition and selfishness does not upset the idea of our Republic, does not prove that it is not implied in the nature of society, does not show that it may not be at some time or somewhere realised.
39. Law of decay in societies. Eighth and ninth books. We come next to that law of decay in societies which most speculators have recognised, and which the Pythagorean philosophers fancied they could express in certain numerical ratios. Plato has given a very valuable turn to the inquiry by connecting it with the cardinal doctrine of the Republic, that the life of men and the life of States explain each other. In conformity with this doctrine, he maintains that there is a democratical, an oligarchical, and a tyrannical form of character answering to those respective forms of government. This form of character is obviously a departure from some true and original model. The same may be shown of the governments; and it is possible in each case to trace the process of degeneration, and to show how that which takes place in society, and that which takes place in the individual, react upon each other. In this part of the dialogue, Plato proves that his faculty of close, lively, practical observation had not been impaired but strengthened by his converse with transcendent realities. It would be hard to find a passage in any ancient work on which a modern statesman might more profitably meditate, or in which he would be more sure to find hints explaining to him the facts of his daily experience, than the eighth and ninth books of the Republic. The result of the investigation is the same as in the former case. This law of degeneracy exists in the commonwealths of the earth, just because they have not understood and steadfastly contemplated that original model, that perfect idea of a commonwealth, which is also the original model and perfect idea of a human character. It is a contradiction and absurdity then to allege the fact of this degeneracy as a proof that no such model is to be found. But after all these inquiries does the thought still linger about the mind, where is it to be found? Plato answers (book ix. p. fin.), Ἀλλ’ ἐν οὐρανῷ ἴσως παράδειγμα ἀνάκειται τῷ βουλομένῳ ὁρᾶν καὶ ὁρῶντι ἑαυτὸν κατοικίζειν. Is it wonderful that such words should have suggested to some of the Christian fathers the recollection of those words in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which describe the hopes of the head of the covenanted people, Ἐξεδέχετο γὰρ τὴν τοὺς θεμελίους ἔχουσαν πόλιν ἧς τεχνίτης καὶ δημιουργὸς ὁ Θεός; or those which describe this hope as accomplished, Ἡμῶν τὸ πολίτευμα ἐν οὐρανοῖς ὑπάρχει?
40. Tenth book. Art and poetry. There is still one subject upon which it is needful to say a few words, especially as Plato has devoted his last book to the full exposition of it: we mean his opinion respecting the imitative arts generally, and especially respecting poetry, so far as it is included among those arts. It is evident that our author attached great importance to these opinions, and yet that he was never wholly satisfied with them. He touches upon the question almost as soon as he has sketched the first outline of his society; he recurs to it again when his task seems completed, partly as if he felt there was no security for the reception of his idea while any doubt overhung this point, partly as if there was something in it which he had not fully penetrated. Again, in the introduction to the Timæus, he offers a kind of apology to the poets for his severity, and appears to think that they may have an important vocation, though he does not clearly understand what it is. It is observable that the grounds upon which he places his arguments in the third and in the tenth books, are not precisely the same. In both, indeed, he dwells much upon the fact that the poet must adapt himself to the opinions of mankind respecting actions and character, otherwise they will not acknowledge the verisimilitude of his picture; hence he must need pervert the truth of things, and can never exalt those minds to which he accommodates himself. But in the last he appears to see a peculiar mischief in poetry from its tendency to destroy the harmony of character, to weaken self-control, and thus to undermine the justice and order of the commonwealth by the honour which it bestows upon all excited and passionate feelings. How far he was influenced by the circumstances of his own time. The latter argument might lead one to suspect that Plato was at least in part determined to these views by the circumstances of his own age. The exaltation of passion, the want of balance and harmony in characters, the preference of weak, earthly creatures to calm and stately ideals, were the great characteristics of the Euripidean, as distinguished from the Sophoclean drama. Add to this the influence of a poetical age (an influence felt most when that age had departed) in fostering the worship of mere creative power, and the notion of the mind of man being the origin of all that is, which lay, as we have seen, at the root of Greek sophistry, and which it had been the great aim of Socrates throughout his life to combat. Still Plato’s attack upon Homer, and his eagerness to disprove the common opinion that the Greeks were indebted to him for much of their organisation and cultivation, are proofs that he was not merely affected by these temporary considerations. We leave it then as a hint for our reader’s reflection, whether this reluctant condemnation of poetry by one who had been himself a poet in the formal sense of the word, and in the best sense continued a poet always, may not be explained in the same way as we explained just now his theory respecting relationship. Poetry expressly national. Poetry seems to belong primarily and almost exclusively to national life. The sense of national union gives the first impulse to it; when that sense is weakened it withers, with its revival it starts to life again; without it men would never become conscious of their own powers, their own affections, their own wants; and in the consciousness of these consist the joy and freedom of their life as the citizens of a state. By calling this forth in the Greeks, Homer may be said to have made them a nation, a nation full of life, full of turbulence. But is there nothing better than this mere consciousness of power? Is there no higher condition of society than this of being citizens of a state? The Republic is an answer to the question. It teaches that far beyond this consciousness of power lies the contemplation of truth and goodness, and the assimilation of the soul to these. It shows that far beyond the mere feeling of energy to dare, to act, to 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, of which this fellowship is the result and the realisation. With this community, says Plato, poetry hath little to do. Praise of the gods, eulogies of great men, these are the only fields for its exercise. Strictly speaking, we think he is right; that is to say, if it were possible for us, as it was necessary for him, to separate (how important it is to distinguish we hope we have explained) the national life from the universal life, the national society from the universal, poetry, which is the soul of the first, would, except in the cases named by him, be excluded from the other. If we would connect all the vital energies of which poetry is the expression, with those deeper insights, that perfect moral state and moral life which belong to the higher region, we must also understand, and by understanding realise, for ourselves at least, and, so far as is permitted us, for mankind, the law by which the universal and the national societies sustain each other.
41. Immortality The Republic ends nobly with a discussion on immortality, which has been less popular than that in the Phædo, because the scenery of it is less solemn and affecting, but which for its own merits seems entitled to even more attention. We are far, indeed, from thinking so lightly as some have done of those arguments from reminiscence, and from the law of interchange between light and darkness, death and life, which occur in the dying conversation of Socrates. On the contrary, they seem to us pregnant with the deepest meaning. But we cannot help thinking that when Plato had once realised in his own mind the connection between the life of the individual and the life of society, he felt he had a stronger ground to fix his hope of immortality upon—that he had found the point where the witness in the heart meets the demands of the reason. The sense of belonging to a community, stretching behind and before, outlasting the deaths of generations of men, is an evidence to each man of his individual immortality, which you may be quite unable to translate into syllogisms, but which happily supersedes the necessity of them. Plato only went to the roots of this feeling, when, having shown that the existence of the individual and of society are alike based upon the idea of justice, and are alike sustained by the contemplation of that which is true and permanent, and alike die a moral death when they contradict the principles of their being, he affirmed that the accident of physical death can as little change the condition of one as of the other, and that as they have lived here must be their life hereafter.2
42. Plato, how far a Pythagorean. We have dwelt so long, for reasons which we have explained already, upon this great summary of the ethical, metaphysical, and political philosophy of Greece, that we can afford time but for one remark, which is necessary to show how the doctrine of Plato is connected with that of the great predecessor whose labours, we suppose, it was his intention to review. That there is a Pythagorean character in the Republic, the book on music, the passages on geometry and arithmetic, and certain mystical sentences respecting the law of decay in a State—which have defied the skill of commentators—prove abundantly. But if we look well at the work, we shall find that the whole of it may in one sense be called Pythagorean. For the discovery of the musical law which gives internal wholeness to a State, as distinguished from that external law by which its parts are prevented from falling asunder, is in fact the object of the treatise. Wherein then does he differ from Pythagoras? Precisely in this—that while he gives music and arithmetic their due honour as instruments for cultivating in man the feeling of his own position and relations, he does not deduce that position and those relations from any combinations of notes or series of numbers. He makes Justice—a moral principle—the music of his commonwealth. And this is the more remarkable and the more honourable, because it is evident that he felt the temptation to be a cabbalist, and never divested himself of the belief (perhaps no deep thinker was ever able quite to divest himself of it) that there is something profoundly and mysteriously interwoven with the life of man in the relations of lines, of numbers, and of sounds. It was a great merit thus to keep the practical ground so steadily, and never to forget that this is really the highest ground. By doing so he was enabled to perform the same service in one sphere which he had already performed in another, to discover the political principle which Pythagoras had been seeking for amidst the laws that connect us with nature, as he had discerned the scientific principle which Parmenides had been groping after amidst the forms of our own minds.
43. Physics of Plato. It is a great satisfaction to us that our duty, as historians of moral and metaphysical inquiries, does not call upon us, or even permit us, to say many words on the subject of Plato’s Physics. The Timæus Still the Timæus is so curiously connected with the Republic by the exquisite introduction to it, in which Critias tells the story of the submerged State, so like in all respects to that which Socrates had described the day before, (here we have the doctrine of reminiscence obviously brought into play, and a new evidence that our philosopher considered the Republic as no work of imagination, but the discovery of a truth implied and forgotten in the constitution of all societies,) and so much importance has been attached, both in early and later times, to this dialogue, as if it contained the very heart of Platonism, that we cannot venture entirely to pass it over. With respect to the link between the Politics and the Physics of Plato, we would not speak confidently. Peculiarities of it. He may have perceived a closer relation between the moral κόσμος, which he had been investigating in the Republic, and the material universe which Timæus creates, than we are able to trace. But this we think is evident, that he did enter upon his new task with a kind of consciousness that it behoved him to fill up a gap in his speculations, and to complete his review of the ancient philosophy, and at the same time with a secret apprehension that the light which had hitherto guided him might forsake him in this region. It is strange at all events that, while undertaking to develope a subject so important in Greek eyes as the creation and organisation of nature, he should make Socrates merely a listener. To a faithful student of Plato it must seem still more strange that he should on this occasion utterly desert his customary method, that the dialogue form should be merely used to throw a graceful dramatical veil over the introduction, and that in the expository part it should be exchanged for the haranguing style to which Plato was in general so averse.
44. Use that has been made of it. And yet it is to this cause more than any other that the Timæus owes its reputation among those who undertake to furnish summaries and synopses of Platonical doctrine. Elsewhere they found him balancing opinions, often refusing to pronounce a verdict upon their respective merits—most unnecessarily tedious (as they think) in tracing the road to a conclusion, most unaccountably and ill-naturedly forgetful of the duty of clothing it in precise, available, transferable formulas. Here, on the contrary, though his language may be more obscure than it is in other places; though there may be more allusions to ill-understood portions of Greek speculation than in all the rest; though, lastly, his teachings refer to a question upon which we all believe that he could have only very partial illumination; still the manifest convenience of catching so Protean a philosopher for one moment in a rigid definite state, has overweighed all these considerations, and has made the Platonic cosmogony the grand storehouse from which diligent redacteurs have been wont to collect their notions of the mind and the works of Plato. Nay, it has even been a plausible and popular theory, ingeniously accounting for the uncertainty of the other Dialogues, that they were only intended as a vestibule to the inner oracle of the Timæus. Having sufficiently explained our views respecting these so-called uncertainties, and having endeavoured to show how much the method of Plato is part and parcel of Plato himself, we must needs regard this particular work with very different feelings. Not pretending to behold with indifference the splendid theory which it developes, aware how closely that theory is connected with some of those which exercised the strongest influence upon the minds of men, especially in the first ages of the Christian Church, and being very willing to accept for Plato the compliments which natural philosophers have paid him for his intuition of truths hereafter to be established, we must yet confess that the Timæus seems to us chiefly valuable because it illustrates the worth of the principle from which it is so signal a departure. In every other dialogue, Plato is teaching us how to discover a universal law in any particular fact which falls under our notice; here we have huge hypotheses to begin with, and all facts fitted and disposed according to them.
45. His confusion of theology with physics For whatever there is of truth in these hypotheses he is indebted to his previous studies in another direction. Having arrived by his own sure course of upward investigation at the doctrine of ideas, he was able to see that the world must be created according to an idea. But having attained this point, his light forsook him; he was not able to apply his dialectic to the elimination of this idea, from the names or facts in which it was imbedded. He had simply to trust to his imagination to construct a theory. Whereas in other cases he is a philosopher seeking for light, and when he could not perceive the tract of it, showing where it ought to be, and from what unrisen sun it must flow; here he is a presumptuous theologian, assuming himself capable of declaring that which must be revealed, and thereby losing the right way to that which may be discovered. Plato and Bacon. Bacon does him no injustice in respect to his Physics when he says that he confused and corrupted them with theology; when he implicitly includes him among the giants who piled hill on hill in hopes of reaching heaven. Would that our countryman, for the honour of his own character, for the sake of the ages which were to follow him, had been as willing to recognise the truth of Plato, as he was acute in detecting his falsehood; as honest in acknowledging him for a guide, as he was right in pointing him out for a beacon. He would then have seen that the Timæus was in contradiction to the principle of induction, because it was inconsistent with the principle of Plato. 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 the desire of fame deserves to be called the last infirmity of noble minds) into the examination of 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 but the extension of that method to a new class of subjects. He would have taught his disciples that the course of investigation which promised them such new discoveries in the world of sense—which was grounded upon the great principle that man is but a seeker, which is prosperous in proportion as he endeavours simply to behold that which is, and not to darken it by the mists of his own conceptions—had been ages before marked out as the only one by which they might safely hope to become acquainted with the truths of their own being. He would solemnly have conjured them to remember that a heathen, uninstructed by that revelation which deals directly with these transcendent truths and lays them open to every peasant, had yet perceived that they must be the most precious which a man can know, and that only in knowing them he is truly a man. He would have told them, that if ever that study, in which the heathen sage forgot his usual wisdom, should become the only one in which Christians care to be proficients, if ever ex reseratione viarum sensûs et accensione majore luminis naturae aliquid incredulitatis et noctis animis nostris erga divina mysteria oboriatur—or there should grow up a feeling towards these mysteries which is worse than unbelief, if it be not another form of unbelief, a stupid acquiescence in them without the acknowledgment that they answer to any cravings in the heart, any necessities of the reason, any predictions of the imagination, then, for the sake of the age and country upon which such a disease had fallen, for the sake of all that should follow it, for the sake of physical knowledge itself, which can never long flourish apart from moral light, it would be most desirable that men should resume the study of the Athenian philosopher, should realise the wants of their minds by observing those which he experienced in his, should consider in what way we can find an adequate provision for both.
Notes
Diog Laert. lib. iii. cap. i. s. 7.↩︎
As the Republic, like so many other of the Platonic Dialogues, closes with a mythus, and as the passage in the third book on Lying brings the whole subject of the use which Plato thought it lawful to make of fables and legends directly before us, it may be as well to make one remark on this subject. Throughout this dialogue, even more than in his other writings, it is evident that, dearly as he loved truth for its own sake, and firmly as he believed it could be contemplated in its pure essence, he yet felt that there was no criterion of truth so sure as that it governed practice and was the law of life. To substitute a pure idealism for the faith of his country was never his object or his dream. He hated such attempts, not more for their hardness and cruelty than for their utter inconsistency with his whole doctrine. He left them to men who did not believe that ideas were substantial, who thought they were mere creations of the mind and had nothing to do with living acts. While then he was very jealous of all those stories which evidently hindered men from acknowledging goodness and truth as the ultimate ends of their existence, he was equally certain that, somehow or other, all great principles must have an investiture of facts, and cannot be fully or satisfactorily presented to man except in facts. And if no such series of facts embodying and revealing truths were within his reach, rather than leave it to be fancied that his truths were bare naked conceptions of his mind, he would invent a clothing for them: it was the least evil of the two. But it was an evil; it exposed him to fearful contradictions; it often put his love for truth in the greatest jeopardy. Then what pretence have those to the name of Platonists who wish to believe that there is no series of facts containing a revelation of supersensual and transcendent truths, who think it an à priori probability that the deep want of such facts which Plato experienced has not been satisfied; who 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?↩︎