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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Plato and Platonism, by Walter Pater
+#12 in our series by Walter Horatio Pater
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+Title: Plato and Platonism
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+Author: Walter Horatio Pater
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+
+PLATO AND PLATONISM (1910)
+WALTER HORATIO PATER
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+1. Plato and the Doctrine of Motion: 5-26
+2. Plato and the Doctrine of Rest: 27-50
+3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number: 51-74
+4. Plato and Socrates: 75-98
+5. Plato and the Sophists: 99-123
+6. The Genius of Plato: 124-149
+7. The Doctrine of Plato--
+I. The Theory of Ideas: 150-173
+II. Dialectic: 174-196
+8. Lacedaemon: 197-234
+9. The Republic: 235-266
+10. Plato's Aesthetics: 267-283, end
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 1: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
+
+[5] WITH the world of intellectual production, as with that of organic
+generation, nature makes no sudden starts.  Natura nihil facit per
+saltum; and in the history of philosophy there are no absolute
+beginnings.  Fix where we may the origin of this or that doctrine or
+idea, the doctrine of "reminiscence," for instance, or of "the
+perpetual flux," the theory of "induction," or the philosophic view of
+things generally, the specialist will still be able to find us some
+earlier anticipation of that doctrine, that mental tendency.  The most
+elementary act of mental analysis takes time to do; the most
+rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge, abstractions so simple that
+we can hardly conceive the human mind without them, must grow, and with
+difficulty.  Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation,
+its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it.  A powerful
+generalisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as [6] that of
+Heraclitus--"Panta rhei,"+ all things fleet away--may startle a
+particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all
+along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half-
+developed instincts of the human mind itself.
+
+Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of
+philosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or
+turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or the
+Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical
+literature.  His encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge is
+more than a mere step in a progress.  Nothing that went before it, for
+compass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it.  Plato's
+achievement may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of
+the mind's history.  Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was
+already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the
+oppositions of sects, the claims of rival schools.  Language and the
+processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he
+breathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.
+
+In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures less
+as the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of
+older ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory.
+And as we find there a [7] sort of storehouse of all physical theories,
+so in reading the Parmenides we might think that all metaphysical
+questions whatever had already passed through the mind of Plato.  Some
+of the results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone,
+are of the structure of his philosophy.  They are everywhere in it, not
+as the stray carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here or
+there amid the new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic
+life in the very stone he builds with.  The central and most intimate
+principles of his teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not
+merely to his own immediate, somewhat enigmatic master--to Socrates,
+who survives chiefly in his pages--but to various precedent schools of
+speculative thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these into
+that age of poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic
+apprehension had hardly understood themselves; beyond that unconscious
+philosophy, again, to certain constitutional tendencies, persuasions,
+forecasts of the intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would
+seem, to thoughts akin to Plato's in the older civilisations of India
+and of Egypt, as they still exercise their authority over ourselves.
+
+The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we find it so
+again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we pass from him
+to them) are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had
+their earlier [8] proprietors.  If at times we become aware in reading
+him of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite
+obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary
+world.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of
+his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely
+new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human
+genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of
+which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame
+itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times
+over.  Nothing but the life-giving principle of cohesion is new; the
+new perspective, the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which
+familiar thoughts attain by novel juxtaposition.  In other words, the
+form is new.  But then, in the creation of philosophical literature, as
+in all other products of art, form, in the full signification of that
+word, is everything, and the mere matter is nothing.
+
+There are three different ways in which the criticism of philosophic,
+of all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted.  The doctrines
+of Plato's Republic, for instance, may be regarded as so much truth or
+falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by the student of to-day.
+That is the dogmatic method of criticism; judging every product of
+human thought, however alien [9] or distant from one's self, by its
+congruity with the assumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel,
+according to the mental preference of the particular critic.  There is,
+secondly, the more generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims
+at a selection from contending schools of the various grains of truth
+dispersed among them.  It is the method which has prevailed in periods
+of large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like
+that of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the third century, or the Neo-
+Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth.  Its natural defect is in the
+tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it
+professes to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with the
+other elements of a pre-conceived system.
+
+Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own century, under
+the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-changing
+"Time-spirit" or Zeit-geist, given way to a third method of criticism,
+the historic method, which bids us replace the doctrine, or the system,
+we are busy with, or such an ancient monument of philosophic thought as
+The Republic, as far as possible in the group of conditions,
+intellectual, social, material, amid which it was actually produced, if
+we would really understand it.  That ages have their genius as well as
+the individual; that in every age there is a peculiar ensemble of
+conditions which determines [10] a common character in every product of
+that age, in business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion
+and manners, in men's very faces; that nothing man has projected from
+himself is really intelligible except at its own date, and from its
+proper point of view in the never-resting "secular process"; the
+solidarity of philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common or
+general history; that what it behoves the student of philosophic
+systems to cultivate is the "historic sense": by force of these
+convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of
+speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us.  As the strangely
+twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn,
+is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of
+the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to have been the
+creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts; so, beliefs the
+most fantastic, the "communism" of Plato, for instance, have their
+natural propriety when duly correlated with those facts, those
+conditions round about them, of which they are in truth a part.
+
+In the intellectual as in the organic world the given product, its
+normal or abnormal characteristics, are determined, as people say, by
+the "environment."  The business of the young scholar therefore, in
+reading Plato, is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or
+refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or make apology for, [11] what may
+seem erratic or impossible in him; still less, to furnish himself with
+arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction of his own.  His duty
+is rather to follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the
+mental process there, as he might witness a game of skill; better
+still, as in reading Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The
+Republic, to watch, for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a
+powerful, of a sovereign intellect, translating itself, amid a complex
+group of conditions which can never in the nature of things occur
+again, at once pliant and resistant to them, into a great literary
+monument.  To put Plato into his natural place, as a result from
+antecedent and contemporary movements of Greek speculation, of Greek
+life generally: such is the proper aim of the historic, that is to say,
+of the really critical study of him.
+
+At the threshold, then, of The Republic of Plato, the historic spirit
+impresses upon us the fact that some of its leading thoughts are partly
+derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom we happen to possess
+independent information.  From that brilliant and busy, yet so
+unconcerned press of early Greek life, one here another there stands
+aside to make the initial act of conscious philosophic reflexion.  It
+is done with something of the simplicity, the immediate and visible
+effectiveness, of the visible world in action all around.  Among
+Plato's many intellectual [12] predecessors, on whom in recent years
+much attention has been bestowed by a host of commentators after the
+mind of Hegel, three, whose ideas, whose words even, we really find in
+the very texture of Plato's work, emerge distinctly in close connexion
+with The Republic: Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the
+philosophy of number and music; Parmenides, "My father Parmenides," the
+centre of the school of Elea; Heraclitus, thirdly, author of the
+doctrine of "the Perpetual Flux": three teachers, it must be admitted
+after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost degree
+fragmentary and vague.  But then, one way of giving that knowledge
+greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual influence in
+Plato's writings.
+
+Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a philosophy which
+was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in style crabbed and
+obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten--he too might be
+thought, as a writer of prose, one of the "fathers" of Plato.  His
+influence, however, on Plato, though himself a Heraclitean in early
+life, was by way of antagonism or reaction; Plato's stand against any
+philosophy of motion becoming, as we say, something of a "fixed idea"
+with him.  Heraclitus of Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then
+is denoted by the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the
+Ionian League) died about forty years before [13] Plato was born.  Here
+then at Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of
+Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of
+ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all
+the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not
+to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as
+of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of
+intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had
+already been in and out of fashion.  Empires certainly had lived and
+died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the privileged class had gone
+to the wall.  In this era of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek
+youthfulness, one of the haughtiest of that class, as being also of
+nature's aristocracy, and a man of powerful intellectual gifts,
+Heraclitus, asserts the native liberty of thought at all events;
+becomes, we might truly say, sickly with "the pale cast" of his
+philosophical questioning.  Amid the irreflective actors in that
+rapidly moving show, so entirely immersed in it superficial as it is
+that they have no feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious.  He
+reflects; and his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth
+when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels
+already old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly
+colder.  Its very ingenuousness, its sincerity, will make the utterance
+of what comes [14] to mind just then somewhat shrill or overemphatic.
+
+Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar to think,
+so early in the impetuous spring-tide of Greek history, does but
+reflect after all the aspect of what actually surrounds him, when he
+cries out--his philosophy was no matter of formal treatise or system,
+but of harsh, protesting cries--Panta chôrei kai ouden menei.+  All
+things give way: nothing remaineth.  There had been enquirers before
+him of another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold,
+contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary
+elements the world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes,
+their own souls and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part
+of the bold enterprise of that romantic age; a series of intellectual
+adventures, of a piece with its adventures in unknown lands or upon the
+sea.  The resultant intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of
+gifted and sanguine but insubordinate youth (remember, that the word
+neotês,+ youth, came to mean rashness, insolence!) questioning,
+deciding, rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to
+discipline, unmethodical, irresponsible.  Those opinions too, coming
+and going, those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible world,
+were themselves but fluid elements on the changing surface of
+existence.
+
+[15] Surface, we say; but was there really anything beneath it?  That
+was what to the majority of his hearers, his readers, Heraclitus, with
+an eye perhaps on practice, seemed to deny.  Perpetual motion, alike in
+things and in men's thoughts about them,--the sad, self-conscious,
+philosophy of Heraclitus, like one, knowing beyond his years, in this
+barely adolescent world which he is so eager to instruct, makes no
+pretence to be able to restrain that.  Was not the very essence of
+thought itself also such perpetual motion? a baffling transition from
+the dead past, alive one moment since, to a present, itself deceased in
+turn ere we can say, It is here?  A keen analyst of the facts of nature
+and mind, a master presumably of all the knowledge that then there was,
+a vigorous definer of thoughts, he does but refer the superficial
+movement of all persons and things around him to deeper and still more
+masterful currents of universal change, stealthily withdrawing the
+apparently solid earth itself from beneath one's feet.  The principle
+of disintegration, the incoherency of fire or flood (for Heraclitus
+these are but very lively instances of movements, subtler yet more
+wasteful still) are inherent in the primary elements alike of matter
+and of the soul.  Legei pou Hêrakleitos, says Socrates in the Cratylus,
+hoti panta chôrei kai ouden menei.+  But the principle of lapse, of
+waste, was, in fact, in one's self.  "No one has ever passed [16] twice
+over the same stream."  Nay, the passenger himself is without identity.
+Upon the same stream at the same moment we do, and do not, embark: for
+we are, and are not: eimen te kai ouk eimen.+  And this rapid change, if
+it did not make all knowledge impossible, made it wholly relative, of a
+kind, that is to say, valueless in the judgment of Plato.  Man, the
+individual, at this particular vanishing-point of time and place,
+becomes "the measure of all things."
+
+     To know after what manner (says Socrates, after discussing the
+     question in what proportion names, fleeting names, contribute
+     to our knowledge of things) to know after what manner we must be
+     taught, or discover for ourselves, the things that really are
+     (ta onta)+ is perhaps beyond the measure of your powers and mine.
+     We must even content ourselves with the admission of this, that
+     not from their names, but much rather themselves from themselves,
+     they must be learned and looked for. . . . For consider, Cratylus,
+     a point I oft-times dream on--whether or no we may affirm that
+     what is beautiful and good in itself, and whatever is, respectively,
+     in itself, is something?
+
+     Cratylus.  To me at least, Socrates, it seems to be something.
+
+     Socrates.  Let us consider, then, that 'in-itself'; not whether
+     a face, or anything of that kind, is beautiful, and whether all
+     these things seem to flow like water.  But, what is beautiful in
+     itself--may we say?--has not this the qualities that define it,
+     always?
+
+     Cratylus.  It must be so.
+
+     Socrates.  Can we then, if it is ever passing out below, predicate
+     about it; first, that it is that; next, that it has this or that
+     quality; or must it not be that, even as we speak, it should
+     straightway become some other thing, and go out under on its way,
+     and be no longer as it is?  Now, how could that which is never in
+     the same state be a thing at all? . . .
+
+     [17] Socrates.  Nor, in truth, could it be an object of knowledge
+     to any one; for, even as he who shall know comes upon it, it would
+     become another thing with other qualities; so that it would be no
+     longer matter of knowledge what sort of a thing it is, or in what
+     condition.  Now, no form of knowing, methinks, has knowledge of
+     that which it knows to be no-how.
+
+     Cratylus.  It is as you say.
+
+     Socrates.  But if, Cratylus, all things change sides, and nothing
+     stays, it is not fitting to say that there is any knowing at
+     all. . . . And the consequence of this argument would be, that
+     there is neither any one to know, nor anything to be known.  If,
+     on the other hand, there be always that which knows, and that
+     which is known; and if the Beautiful is, and the Good is, and
+     each one of those things that really are, is, then, to my thinking,
+     those things in no way resemble that moving stream of which we are
+     now speaking.  Whether, then, these matters be thus, or in that
+     other way as the followers of Heraclitus affirm and many besides,
+     I fear may be no easy thing to search out.  But certainly it is
+     not like a sensible man, committing one's self, and one's own soul,
+     to the rule of names, to serve them, and, with faith in names and
+     those who imposed them, as if one knew something thereby, to
+     maintain (damaging thus the character of that which is, and our
+     own) that there is no sound ring in any one of them, but that all,
+     like earthen pots, let water.  Cratylus, 439.+
+
+Yet from certain fragments in which the Logos is already named we may
+understand that there had been another side to the doctrine of
+Heraclitus; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of
+chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the
+search for and the notation, if there be such, of an antiphonal rhythm,
+or logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in
+some intricate musical theme, might link together in one those
+contending, infinitely diverse [18] impulses.  It was an act of
+recognition, even on the part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive, the
+incoherent, the insane, of that Wisdom which, "reacheth from end to
+end, sweetly and strongly ordering all things."  But if the "weeping
+philosopher," the first of the pessimists, finds the ground of his
+melancholy in the sense of universal change, still more must he weep at
+the dulness of men's ears to that continuous strain of melody
+throughout it.  In truth, what was sympathetic with the hour and the
+scene in the Heraclitean doctrine, was the boldly aggressive, the
+paradoxical and negative tendency there, in natural collusion, as it
+was, with the destructiveness of undisciplined youth; that sense of
+rapid dissolution, which, according to one's temperament and one's luck
+in things, might extinguish, or kindle all the more eagerly, an
+interest in the mere phenomena of existence, of one's so hasty passage
+through the world.
+
+The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed an apprehension of which
+the full scope was only to be realised by a later age, in alliance with
+a larger knowledge of the natural world, a closer observation of the
+phenomena of mind, than was possible, even for Heraclitus, at that
+early day.  So, the seeds of almost all scientific ideas might seem to
+have been dimly enfolded in the mind of antiquity; but fecundated,
+admitted to their full working prerogative, one by one, in after ages,
+by good favour of the special [19] intellectual conditions belonging to
+a particular generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself preoccupied
+by a formula, not so much new, as renovated by new application.
+
+It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most
+modern empirical philosophies alike have illustrated emphatically,
+justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make bold to call it
+under the new light now thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of
+Ephesus.  The entire modern theory of "development," in all its various
+phases, proved or unprovable,--what is it but old Heracliteanism awake
+once more in a new world, and grown to full proportions?
+
+Panta chôrei, panta rhei+--It is the burden of Hegel on the one hand, to
+whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion
+too, each in its long historic series, are but so many conscious
+movements in the secular process of the eternal mind; and on the other
+hand of Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself properly is not
+but is only always becoming.  The bold paradox of Heraclitus is, in
+effect, repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just now of a
+cautiously reasoned experience, and, in illustration of the very law of
+change which it asserts, may itself presently be superseded as a
+commonplace.  Think of all that subtly disguised movement, latens
+processus, Bacon calls it (again as if by a kind of anticipation) which
+[20] modern research has detected, measured, hopes to reduce to minuter
+or ally to still larger currents, in what had seemed most substantial
+to the naked eye, the inattentive mind.  To the "observation and
+experiment" of the physical enquirer of to-day, the eye and the sun it
+lives by reveal themselves, after all, as Heraclitus had declared
+(scarcely serious, he seemed to those around him) as literally in
+constant extinction and renewal; the sun only going out more gradually
+than the human eye; the system meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in
+ceaseless movement nowhither.  Our terrestrial planet is in constant
+increase by meteoric dust, moving to it through endless time out of
+infinite space.  The Alps drift down the rivers into the plains, as
+still loftier mountains found their level there ages ago.  The granite
+kernel of the earth, it is said, is ever changing in its very
+substance, its molecular constitution, by the passage through it of
+electric currents.  And the Darwinian theory--that "species," the
+identifying forms of animal and vegetable life, immutable though they
+seem now, as of old in the Garden of Eden, are fashioned by slow
+development, while perhaps millions of years go by: well! every month
+is adding to its evidence.  Nay, the idea of development (that, too, a
+thing of growth, developed in the progress of reflexion) is at last
+invading one by one, as the secret of their explanation, all the
+products of mind, the very [21] mind itself, the abstract reason; our
+certainty, for instance, that two and two make four.  Gradually we have
+come to think, or to feel, that primary certitude.  Political
+constitutions, again, as we now see so clearly, are "not made," cannot
+be made, but "grow."  Races, laws, arts, have their origins and end,
+are themselves ripples only on the great river of organic life; and
+language is changing on our very lips.
+
+In Plato's day, the Heraclitean flux, so deep down in nature itself--
+the flood, the fire--seemed to have laid hold on man, on the social and
+moral world, dissolving or disintegrating opinion, first principles,
+faith, establishing amorphism, so to call it, there also.  All along
+indeed the genius, the good gifts of Greece to the world had had much
+to do with the mobility of its temperament.  Only, when Plato came into
+potent contact with his countrymen (Pericles, Phidias, Socrates being
+now gone) in politics, in literature and art, in men's characters, the
+defect naturally incident to that fine quality had come to have
+unchecked sway.  From the lifeless background of an unprogressive
+world--Egypt, Syria, frozen Scythia--a world in which the unconscious
+social aggregate had been everything, the conscious individual, his
+capacity and rights, almost nothing, the Greek had stepped forth, like
+the young prince in the fable, to set things going.  To the philosophic
+eye however, [22] about the time when the history of Thucydides leaves
+off, they might seem to need a regulator, ere the very wheels wore
+themselves out.
+
+Mobility!  We do not think that a necessarily undesirable condition of
+life, of mind, of the physical world about us.  'Tis the dead things,
+we may remind ourselves, that after all are most entirely at rest, and
+might reasonably hold that motion (vicious, fallacious, infectious
+motion, as Plato inclines to think) covers all that is best worth
+being.  And as for philosophy--mobility, versatility, the habit of
+thought that can most adequately follow the subtle movement of things,
+that, surely, were the secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them.
+It means susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short.
+It was the spirit of God that moved, moves still, in every form of real
+power, everywhere.  Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality
+in things, of falsity in our thoughts about them.  It is just this
+principle of mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that, with
+all his contriving care for the future, he desires to withstand.
+Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate of the immutable.  The
+Republic is a proposal to establish it indefectibly in a very precisely
+regulated, a very exclusive community, which shall be a refuge for
+elect souls from an ill-made world.
+
+That four powerful influences made for the political unity of Greece
+was pointed out by [23] Grote: common blood, common language, a common
+religious centre, the great games in which all alike communicated.  He
+adds that they failed to make the Greeks one people.  Panhellenism was
+realised for the first time, and then but imperfectly, by Alexander the
+Great.  The centrifugal tendency had ever been too much for the
+centripetal tendency in them, the progressive elements for the element
+of order.  Their boundless impatience, that passion for novelty noted
+in them by Saint Paul, had been a matter of radical character.  Their
+varied natural gifts did but concentrate themselves now and then to an
+effective centre, that they might be dissipated again, towards every
+side, in daring adventure alike of action and of thought.  Variety and
+novelty of experience, further quickened by a consciousness trained to
+an equally nimble power of movement, individualism, the capacities, the
+claim, of the individual, forced into their utmost play by a ready
+sense and dexterous appliance of opportunity,--herein, certainly, lay
+at least one half of their vocation in history.  The material
+conformation of Greece, a land of islands and peninsulas, with a range
+of sea-coast immense as compared with its area, and broken up by
+repellent lines of mountain this way and that, nursing jealously a
+little township of three or four thousand souls into an independent
+type of its own, conspired to the same effect.  Independence, local and
+personal,--it was the Greek ideal!
+
+[24] Yet of one side only of that ideal, as we may see, of the still
+half-Asiatic rather than the full Hellenic ideal, of the Ionian ideal
+as conceived by the Athenian people in particular, people of the coast
+who have the roaming thoughts of sailors, ever ready to float away
+anywhither amid their walls of wood.  And for many of its admirers
+certainly the whole Greek people has been a people of the sea-coast.
+In Lacedaemon, however, as Plato and others thought, hostile,
+inaccessible in its mountain hollow where it had no need of any walls
+at all, there were resources for that discipline and order which
+constitute the other ingredient in a true Hellenism, the saving Dorian
+soul in it.  Right away thither, to that solemn old mountain village,
+now mistress of Greece, he looks often, in depicting the Perfect City,
+the ideal state.  Perfection, in every case, as we may conceive, is
+attainable only through a certain combination of opposites, Attic
+aleipha with the Doric oxos;+ and in the Athens of Plato's day, as he
+saw with acute prevision, those centrifugal forces had come to be
+ruinously in excess of the centripetal.  Its rapid, empiric,
+constitutional changes, its restless development of political
+experiment, the subdivisions of party there, the dominance of faction,
+as we see it, steadily increasing, breeding on itself, in the pages of
+Thucydides, justify Plato's long-drawn paradox that it is easier to
+wrestle against many than against one.  The soul, [25] moreover, the
+inward polity of the individual, was the theatre of a similar
+dissolution; and truly stability of character had never been a
+prominent feature in Greek life.  Think of the end of Pausanias failing
+in his patriotism, of Themistocles, of Miltiades, the saviours of
+Greece, actually selling the country they had so dearly bought to its
+old enemies.
+
+It is something in this way that, for Plato, motion and the philosophy
+of motion identify themselves with the vicious tendency in things and
+thought.  Change is the irresistible law of our being, says the
+Philosophy of Motion.  Change, he protests, through the power of a true
+philosophy, shall not be the law of our being; and it is curious to
+note the way in which, consciously or unconsciously, that philosophic
+purpose shapes his treatment, even in minute detail, of education, of
+art, of daily life, his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or
+innocent words, as "manifold," "embroidered," "changeful," become the
+synonyms of what is evil.  He, first, notes something like a fixed
+cycle of political change; but conceives it (being change) as, from the
+very first, backward towards decadence.  The ideal city, again, will
+not be an art-less place: it is by irresistible influence of art, that
+he means to shape men anew; by a severely monotonous art however, such
+art as shall speak to youth, all day long, from year to year, almost
+exclusively, of the loins girded about.
+
+[26] Stimulus, or correction,--one hardly knows which to ask for first,
+as more salutary for our own slumbersome, yet so self-willed, northern
+temperaments.  Perhaps all genuine fire, even the Heraclitean fire, has
+a power for both.  "Athens," says Dante,
+
+     --Athens, aye and Sparta's state
+     That were in policy so great,
+        And framed the laws of old,
+        How small a place they hold,
+     How poor their art of noble living
+     Shews by thy delicate contriving,
+        Where what October spun
+        November sees outrun!
+     Think in the time thou canst recall,
+     Laws, coinage, customs, places all,
+        How thou hast rearranged,
+        How oft thy members changed!
+     Couldst thou but see thyself aright,
+     And turn thy vision to the light,
+        Thy likeness thou would'st find
+        In some sick man reclined;
+     On couch of down though he be pressed,
+     He seeks and finds not any rest,
+        But turns and turns again,
+        To ease him of his pain.
+     Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell's Translation.
+
+Now what Dante says to Florence, contrasting it with Athens and Sparta
+as he conceives them, Plato might have said to Athens, in contrast with
+Sparta, with Lacedaemon, at least as he conceived it.
+
+NOTES
+
+6. +Transliteration: Panta rhei.  Translation: "All things give way [or
+flow]."  Plato, Cratylus 402 A, cites Heraclitus' fragment more fully--
+Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chôrei kai ouden menei, or
+"Heracleitus says somewhere that all things give way, and nothing
+remains."  Pater cites the same fragment in The Renaissance,
+Conclusion.  The verb rheô means "flow," while the verb choreô means
+"give way."
+
+14. +Transliteration: Panta chôrei kai ouden menei.  Pater's
+translation: "All things give way: nothing remaineth."  Plato, Cratylus
+402A.
+
+14. +Transliteration: neotês.  Liddell and Scott definition: "youth:
+also ... youthful spirit, rashness."
+
+15. +Transliteration: Legei pou Hêrakleitos hoti panta chôrei kai ouden
+menei.  Pater's translation in The Renaissance, Conclusion:
+"[Herakleitos says somewhere that] All things give way; nothing
+remains."  Plato, Cratylus 402a.
+
+16. +Transliteration: eimen te kai ouk eimen.  E-text editor's
+translation: "We are and are not."  Heraclitus, Fragments.  Fragmenta
+Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 326.  Ed. F.W.A. Mullach.  Darmstadt:
+Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860 edition).  In
+the same fragment, Heraclitus is described as having said, Potamois
+tois autois embainomen te kai ouk embainomen, which translates as "we
+go into the same river, and [yet] we do not go into the same river."
+Plato cites that thought in the passage alluded to above, Cratylus
+402a.
+
+16. +Transliteration: ta onta.  Definition: "the things that are."
+
+17. +Rather than retain the original's very small print for such
+quotations, I have indented them throughout Plato and Platonism.  As
+Pater indicates, the source of his quotation is the Cratylus, 439.
+
+19.  +Transliteration: Panta chôrei, panta rhei.  See above, notes for
+pages 6, 14, 15, and 16.  The verb rheô means "flow," while the verb
+choreô means  "give way."
+
+24. +Transliteration: aleipha . . . oxos.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"unguent, oil . . . sour wine, vinegar."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST
+
+[27] OVER against that world of flux,
+
+     Where nothing is, but all things seem,
+
+it is the vocation of Plato to set up a standard of unchangeable
+reality, which in its highest theoretic development becomes the world
+of "eternal and immutable ideas," indefectible outlines of thought, yet
+also the veritable things of experience: the perfect Justice, for
+instance, which if even the gods mistake it for perfect Injustice is
+not moved out of its place; the Beauty which is the same, yesterday,
+to-day and for ever.  In such ideas or ideals, "eternal" as
+participating in the essential character of the facts they represent to
+us, we come in contact, as he supposes, with the insoluble, immovable
+granite beneath and amid the wasting torrent of mere phenomena.  And in
+thus ruling the deliberate aim of his philosophy to be a survey of
+things sub specie eternitatis, the reception of a kind of absolute and
+independent knowledge [28] (independent, that is, of time and position,
+the accidents and peculiar point of view of the receiver) Plato is
+consciously under the influence of another great master of the Pre-
+Socratic thought, Parmenides, the centre of the School of Elea.
+
+About half a century before the birth of Plato, Socrates being then in
+all the impressibility of early manhood, Parmenides, according to the
+witness of Plato himself--Parmenides at the age of sixty-five--had
+visited Athens at the great festival of the Panathenaea, in company
+with Zeno the Eleatic, a characteristic specimen of Greek cleverness,
+of the acute understanding, personally very attractive.  Though forty
+years old, the reputation this Zeno now enjoyed seems to have been very
+much the achievement of his youth, and came of a mastery of the sort of
+paradox youth always delights in.  It may be said that no one has ever
+really answered him; the difficulties with which he played so nicely
+being really connected with those "antinomies," or contradictions, or
+inconsistencies, of our thoughts, which more than two thousand years
+afterwards Kant noted as actually inherent in the mind itself--a
+certain constitutional weakness or limitation there, in dealing by way
+of cold-blooded reflexion with the direct presentations of its
+experience.  The  "Eleatic Palamedes," Plato calls him, "whose
+dialectic art causes one and the same thing to appear both like and
+[29] unlike, one and many, at rest and in motion."  Ah! you hear
+already the sort of words that seem sometimes so barren and
+unprofitable even in Plato.
+
+It is from extant fragments of a work of his, not a poem, but,
+appropriately, To Syngramma,+ The Prose, of Zeno, that such knowledge as
+we have of his doctrine, independently of the Parmenides of Plato, is
+derived.  The active principle of that doctrine then lies in the
+acuteness with which he unfolds the contradictions which make against
+the very conceivability of the fundamental phenomena of sense, in so
+far as those phenomena are supposed to be really existent independently
+of ourselves.  The truth of experience, of a sensible experience, he
+seems to protest:--Why! sensible experience as such is logically
+inconceivable.  He proved it, or thought, or professed to think, he
+proved it, in the phenomenon which covers all the most vivid, the
+seemingly irresistible facts, of such experience.  Motion was indeed,
+as the Heracliteans said, everywhere: was the most incisive of all
+facts in the realm of supposed sensible fact.  Think of the prow of the
+trireme cleaving the water.  For a moment Zeno himself might have
+seemed but a follower of Heraclitus.  He goes beyond him.  All is
+motion: he admits.--Yes: only, motion is (I can show it!) a nonsensical
+term.  Follow it, or rather stay by it, and it transforms itself,
+agreeably enough for the [30] curious observer, into rest.  Motion must
+be motion in space, of course; from point to point in it,--and again,
+more closely, from point to point within such interval; and so on,
+infinitely; 'tis rest there: perpetual motion is perpetual rest:--the
+hurricane, the falling tower, the deadly arrow from the bow at whose
+coming you shake there so wretchedly, Zeno's own rapid word-fence--all
+alike at rest, to the restful eye of the pure reason!  The tortoise,
+the creature that moves most slowly, cannot be overtaken by Achilles,
+the swiftest of us all; or at least you can give no rational
+explanation how it comes to be overtaken.  Zeno had an armoury of such
+enigmas.  Can a bushel of corn falling make a noise if a single grain
+makes none?  Again, that motion should cease, we find inconceivable:
+but can you conceive how it should so much as begin? at what point
+precisely, in the moving body?  Ubiquitous, tyrannous, irresistible, as
+it may seem, motion, with the whole so dazzling world it covers, is--
+nothing!
+
+Himself so striking an instance of mobile humour in his exposure of the
+unreality of all movement, Zeno might be taken so far only for a
+master, or a slave, of paradox; such paradox indeed as is from the very
+first inherent in every philosophy which (like that of Plato himself,
+accepting even Zeno as one of its institutors) opposes the seen to the
+unseen as [31] falsehood to truth.  It was the beginning of
+scholasticism; and the philosophic mind will perhaps never be quite in
+health, quite sane or natural, again.  The objective, unconscious,
+pleasantly sensuous mind of the Greek, becoming a man, as he thinks,
+and putting away childish thoughts, is come with Zeno one step towards
+Aristotle, towards Aquinas, or shall we say into the rude scholasticism
+of the pedantic Middle Age?  And we must have our regrets.  There is
+always something lost in growing up.
+
+The wholesome scepticism of Hume or Mill for instance, the scepticism
+of the modern world, beset now with insane speculative figments, has
+been an appeal from the preconceptions of the understanding to the
+authority of the senses.  With the Greeks, whose metaphysic business
+was then still all to do, the sceptical action of the mind lay rather
+in the direction of an appeal from the affirmations of sense to the
+authority of newly-awakened reason.  Just then all those real and
+verbal difficulties which haunt perversely the human mind always, all
+those unprofitable queries which hang about the notions of matter and
+time and space, their divisibility and the like, seemed to be stirring
+together, under the utterance of this brilliant, phenomenally clever,
+perhaps insolent, young man, his master's favourite.  To the work of
+that grave master, nevertheless--of Parmenides--a very different person
+certainly from his rattling disciple, Zeno's [32] seemingly so
+fantastic doctrine was sincerely in service.  By its destructive
+criticism, its dissipation of the very conceivability of the central
+and most incisive of sensible phenomena, it was a real support to
+Parmenides in his assertion of the nullity of all that is but
+phenomenal, leaving open and unoccupied space (emptiness, we might say)
+to that which really is.  That which is, so purely, or absolutely, that
+it is nothing at all to our mixed powers of apprehension:--Parmenides
+and the Eleatic School were much occupied with the determination of the
+thoughts, or of the mere phrases and words, that belong to that.
+
+Motion discredited, motion gone, all was gone that belonged to an
+outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive validity to
+the sort of knowledge, if knowledge it is to be called, which
+corresponds to the  "Pure Being," that after all is only definable as
+"Pure Nothing," that colourless, formless, impalpable existence (ousia
+achrômatos, aschêmatistos, anaphês)+ to use the words of Plato, for whom
+Parmenides became a sort of inspired voice.  Note at times, in reading
+him, in the closing pages of the fifth book of The Republic for
+instance, the strange accumulation of terms derivative from the
+abstract verb "To be."  As some more modern metaphysicians have done,
+even Plato seems to pack such terms together almost by rote.  Certainly
+something of paradox may always be felt even in his [33] exposition of
+"Being," or perhaps a kind of paralysis of speech--aphasia.+
+
+Parmenides himself had borrowed the thought from another, though he
+made it his own.  Plato, in The Republic, as a critic of Homer, by way
+of fitting Homer the better for the use of the schoolboys of the ideal
+city, is ready to sacrifice much of that graceful polytheism in which
+the Greeks anticipated the dulia of saints and angels in the catholic
+church.  He does this to the advantage of a very abstract, and as it
+may seem disinterested, certainly an uninteresting, notion of deity,
+which is in truth:--well! one of the dry sticks of mere "natural
+theology," as it is called.  In this he was but following the first,
+the original, founder of the Eleatic School, Xenophanes, who in a
+somewhat scornful spirit had urged on men's attention that, in their
+prayers and sacrifices to the gods, in all their various thoughts and
+statements, graceful or hideous, about them, they had only all along
+with much fallacy been making gods after their own likeness, as horse
+or dog too, if perchance it cast a glance towards heaven, would after
+the same manner project thither the likeness of horse or dog: that to
+think of deity you must think of it as neither here nor there, then nor
+now; you must away with all limitations of time and space and matter,
+nay, with the very conditions, the limitation, of thought itself;
+apparently not [34] observing that to think of it in this way was in
+reality not to think of it at all:--That in short Being so pure as this
+is pure Nothing.
+
+In opposition then to the anthropomorphic religious poetry of Homer,
+Xenophanes elaborates the notion, or rather the abstract or purely
+verbal definition, of that which really is (to on)+ as inconclusive of
+all time, and space, and mode; yet so that all which can be identified
+concretely with mode and space and time is but antithetic to it, as
+finite to infinite, seeming to being, contingent to necessary, the
+temporal, in a word, to the eternal.  Once for all, in harshest
+dualism, the only true yet so barren existence is opposed to the world
+of phenomena--of colour and form and sound and imagination and love, of
+empirical knowledge.  Objects, real objects, as we know, grow in
+reality towards us in proportion as we define their various qualities.
+And yet, from another point of view, definition, qualification, is a
+negative process: it is as if each added quality took from the object
+we are defining one or more potential qualities.  The more definite
+things become as objects of sensible or other empirical apprehension,
+the more, it might be said from the logician's point of view, have we
+denied about them.  It might seem that their increasing reality as
+objects of sense was in direct proportion to the increase of their
+distance from that perfect Being which is everywhere and at all times
+in every possible mode of being.  A [35] thing visibly white is found
+as one approaches it to be also smooth to the touch; and this added
+quality, says the formal logician, does but deprive it of all other
+possible modes of texture; Omnis determinatio est negatio.+  Vain
+puerilities! you may exclaim:--with justice.  Yet such are the
+considerations which await the mind that suffers itself to dwell awhile
+on the abstract formula to which the "rational theology" of Xenophanes
+leads him.  It involved the assertion of an absolute difference between
+the original and all that is or can be derived from it; that the former
+annuls, or is exclusive of, the latter, which has in truth no real or
+legitimate standing-ground as matter of knowledge; that, in opposite
+yet equally unanswerable senses, at both ends of experience there is--
+nothing!  Of the most concrete object, as of the most abstract, it
+might be said, that it more properly is not than is.
+
+From Xenophanes, as a critic of the polytheism of the Greek religious
+poets, that most abstract and arid of formulae, Pure Being, closed in
+indifferently on every side upon itself, and suspended in the midst of
+nothing, like a hard transparent crystal ball, as he says; "The
+Absolute"; "The One"; passed to his fellow-citizen Parmenides, seeking,
+doubtless in the true spirit of philosophy, for the centre of the
+universe, of his own experience of it, for some common measure of the
+experience of all men.  To enforce a reasonable unity and order, to
+impress some larger likeness of reason, [36] as one knows it in one's
+self, upon the chaotic infinitude of the impressions that reach us from
+every side, is what all philosophy as such proposes.  Kosmos;+ order;
+reasonable, delightful, order; is a word that became very dear, as we
+know, to the Greek soul, to what was perhaps most essentially Greek in
+it, to the Dorian element there.  Apollo, the Dorian god, was but its
+visible consecration.  It was what, under his blessing, art
+superinduced upon the rough stone, the yielding clay, the jarring
+metallic strings, the common speech of every day.  Philosophy, in its
+turn, with enlarging purpose, would project a similar light of
+intelligence upon the at first sight somewhat unmeaning world we find
+actually around us:--project it; or rather discover it, as being really
+pre-existent there, if one were happy enough to get one's self into the
+right point of view.  To certain fortunate minds the efficacious moment
+of insight would come, when, with delightful adaptation of means to
+ends, of the parts to the whole, the entire scene about one,
+bewildering, unsympathetic, unreasonable, on a superficial view, would
+put on, for them at least, kosmiotês,+ that so welcome expression of
+fitness, which it is the business of the fine arts to convey into
+material things, of the art of discipline to enforce upon the lives of
+men.  The primitive Ionian philosophers had found, or thought they
+found, such a principle (archê)+ in the force of some omnipresent
+physical element, [37] air, water, fire; or in some common law, motion,
+attraction, repulsion; as Plato would find it in an eternally appointed
+hierarchy of genus and species; as the science of our day embraces it
+(perhaps after all only in fancy) in the expansion of a large body of
+observed facts into some all-comprehensive hypothesis, such as
+"evolution."
+
+For Parmenides, at his early day, himself, as some remnants of his work
+in that direction bear witness, an acute and curious observer of the
+concrete and sensible phenomena of nature, that principle of reasonable
+unity seemed attainable only by a virtual negation, by the
+obliteration, of all such phenomena.  When we have learned as exactly
+as we can all the curious processes at work in our own bodies or souls,
+in the stars, in or under the earth, their very definiteness, their
+limitation, will but make them the more antagonistic to that which
+alone really is, because it is always and everywhere itself, identical
+exclusively with itself.  Phenomena!--by the force of such arguments as
+Zeno's, the instructed would make a clean sweep of them, for the
+establishment, in the resultant void, of the "One," with which it is
+impossible (para panta legomena)+ in spite of common language, and of
+what seems common sense, for the "Many"--the hills and cities of
+Greece, you and me, Parmenides himself, really to co-exist at all.
+"Parmenides," says one, "had stumbled upon [38] the modern thesis that
+thought and being are the same."
+
+Something like this--this impossibly abstract doctrine--is what Plato's
+"father in philosophy" had had to proclaim, in the midst of the busy,
+brilliant, already complicated life of the recently founded colonial
+town of Elea.  It was like the revelation to Israel in the midst of
+picturesque idolatries, "The Lord thy God is one Lord";+ only that here
+it made no claim to touch the affections, or even to warm the
+imagination.  Israel's Greek cousin was to undergo a harder, a more
+distant and repressive discipline in those matters, to which a
+peculiarly austere moral beauty, at once self-reliant and submissive,
+the aesthetic expression of which has a peculiar, an irresistible
+charm, would in due time correspond.
+
+It was in difficult hexameter verse, in a poem which from himself or
+from others had received the title--Peri physeôs+ (De Naturâ Rerum) that
+Parmenides set forth his ideas.  From the writings of Clement of
+Alexandria, and other later writers large in quotation, diligent modern
+scholarship has collected fragments of it, which afford sufficient
+independent evidence of his manner of thought, and supplement
+conveniently Plato's, of course highly subjective, presentment in his
+Parmenides of what had so deeply influenced him.-- [39] "Now come!"
+(this fragment of Parmenides is in Proclus, who happened to quote it in
+commenting on the Timaeus of Plato)  "Come! do you listen, and take
+home what I shall tell you: what are the two paths of search after
+right understanding.  The one,
+
+     hê men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mê einai?+
+
+"that what is, is; and that what is not, is not"; or, in the Latin of
+scholasticism, here inaugurated by Parmenides, esse ens: non esse non
+ens--
+
+     peithous esti keleuthos; alêtheiê gar opêdei?+
+
+"this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes along with it.  The
+other--that what is, is not; and by consequence that what is not, is:--
+I tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion:
+
+     tên dê toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon? oute gar an gnoiês
+     to ge mê eon ou gar ephikton?+
+
+That which is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at
+that; nor could you explain it to another; for Thought and Being are
+identical."--Famous utterance, yet of so dubious omen!--To gar auto
+voein estin te kai einai +---idem est enim cogitare et esse.  "It is one
+to me," he proceeds, "at what point I begin; for thither I shall come
+back over again: tothi gar palin hixomai authis."+
+
+Yes, truly! again and again, in an empty circle, we may say; and
+certainly, with those [40] dry and difficult words in our ears, may
+think for a moment that philosophic reflexion has already done that
+delightfully superficial Greek world an ill turn, troubling so early
+its ingenuous soul; that the European mind, as was said, will never be
+quite sane again.  It has been put on a quest (vain quest it may prove
+to be) after a kind of knowledge perhaps not properly attainable.
+Hereafter, in every age, some will be found to start afresh
+quixotically, through what wastes of words! in search of that true
+Substance, the One, the Absolute, which to the majority of acute people
+is after all but zero, and a mere algebraic symbol for nothingness.  In
+themselves, by the way, such search may bring out fine intellectual
+qualities; and thus, in turn, be of service to those who can profit by
+the spectacle of an enthusiasm not meant for them; must nevertheless be
+admitted to have had all along something of disease about it; as indeed
+to Plato himself the philosophic instinct as such is a form of "mania."
+
+An infectious mania, it might seem,--that strange passion for
+nonentity, to which the Greek was so oddly liable, to which the human
+mind generally might be thought to have been constitutionally
+predisposed; for the doctrine of  "The One" had come to the surface
+before in old Indian dreams of self-annihilation, which had been
+revived, in the second century after Christ, in the ecstasies
+(ecstasies of the pure [41] spirit, leaving the body behind it)
+recommended by the Neo-Platonists; and again, in the Middle Age, as a
+finer shade of Christian experience, in the mystic doctrines of Eckhart
+and Tauler concerning that union with God which can only be attained by
+the literal negation of self, by a kind of moral suicide; of which
+something also may be found, under the cowl of the monk, in the clear,
+cold, inaccessible, impossible heights of the book of the Imitation.
+It presents itself once more, now altogether beyond Christian
+influence, in the hard and ambitious intellectualism of Spinoza; a
+doctrine of pure repellent substance--substance "in vacuo," to be lost
+in which, however, would be the proper consummation of the transitory
+individual life.  Spinoza's own absolutely colourless existence was a
+practical comment upon it.  Descartes; Malebranche, under the monk's
+cowl again; Leibnitz; Berkeley with his theory of the "Vision of all
+things in God"; do but present variations on the same theme through the
+seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  By one and all it is assumed, in
+the words of Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable is the
+note of the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing
+steadily, as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite
+attainable) condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by
+the suppression of all the rule and outline of one's own actual
+experience and thought.
+
+[42] Something like that certainly there had been already in the
+doctrine of Parmenides, to whom Plato was so willing to go to school.
+And in the nineteenth century, as on the one hand the philosophy of
+motion, of the "perpetual flux," receives its share of verification
+from that theory of development with which in various forms all modern
+science is prepossessed; so, on the other hand, the philosophy of rest
+also, of the perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion of the
+exclusive reign of "The One," receives an unlooked-for testimony from
+the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals
+with--matter, organism, consciousness--began in a state of
+indeterminate, abstract indifference, with a single uneasy start in a
+sort of eternal sleep, a ripple on the dead, level surface.  Increasing
+indeed for a while in radius and depth, under the force of mechanic
+law, the world of motion and life is however destined, by force of its
+own friction, to be restored sooner or later to equilibrium; nay, is
+already gone back some noticeable degrees (how desirably!) to the
+primeval indifference, as may be understood by those who can reckon the
+time it will take for our worn-out planet, surviving all the fret of
+the humanity it housed for a while, to be drawn into the sun.
+
+But it is of Plato after all we should be thinking; of the
+comparatively temperate thoughts, the axiomata media, he was able to
+derive, by a [43] sort of compromise, from the impossible paradox of
+his ancient master.  What was it, among things inevitably manifest on
+his pages as we read him, that Plato borrowed and kept from the Eleatic
+School!
+
+Two essential judgments of his philosophy: The opposition of what is,
+to what appears; and the parallel opposition of knowledge to opinion;
+(heteron epistêmês doxa; eph' heterô ara heteron ti dynamenê hekatera
+autôn pephyke? ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston tauton einai?)+ and
+thirdly, to illustrate that opposition, the figurative use, so
+impressed on thought and speech by Plato that it has come to seem
+hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate philosophic language,
+of the opposition of light to darkness.--
+
+     Well, then (Socrates is made to say in the fifth book of The
+     Republic) if what is, is the object of knowledge, would not
+     something other than what is, be the object of opinion?
+
+     Yes! something else.
+
+     Does opinion then opine what is not; or is it impossible to have
+     even opinion concerning what is not?  Consider! does not he who
+     has opinion direct his opinion upon something? or is it
+     impossible, again, to have an opinion, yet an opinion about
+     nothing?
+
+     Impossible!
+
+     But he who has an opinion has opinion at least about something;
+     hasn't he?  Yet after all what is not, is not a thing; but would
+     most properly be denominated nothing.
+
+     Certainly.
+
+     Now to what is not, we assigned of necessity ignorance: to what
+     is, knowledge.
+
+     Rightly: he said.
+
+     [44] Neither what is, then, nor what is not, is the object of
+     opinion.
+
+     No!
+
+     Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance nor knowledge.
+
+     It seems not.
+
+     Is it, then, beyond these; going beyond knowledge in clearness,
+     beyond ignorance in obscurity?
+
+     Neither the one, nor the other.
+
+     But, I asked, opinion seems to you (doesn't it?) to be a darker
+     thing than knowledge, yet lighter than ignorance.
+
+     Very much so; he answered.
+
+     Does it lie within those two?
+
+     Yes.
+
+     Opinion, then, would be midway, between these two conditions?
+
+     Undoubtedly so.
+
+     Now didn't we say in what went before that if anything became
+     apparent such that it is, and is not, at the same time, a thing
+     of that kind would lie between that which is in unmixed clearness,
+     and that which wholly is not; and that there would be, in regard
+     to that, neither knowledge nor ignorance; but, again, a condition
+     revealing itself between ignorance and knowledge?
+
+     Rightly.
+
+     And now, between these two, what we call 'opinion' has in fact
+     revealed itself.
+
+     Clearly so.
+
+     It would remain for us therefore, as it seems, to find that which
+     partakes of both--both of Being and Not-being, and which could
+     rightly be called by neither term distinctly; in order that, if it
+     appear, we may in justice determine it to be the object of opinion;
+     assigning the extremes to the extremes, the intermediate to what
+     comes between them.
+
+     Or is it not thus?
+
+     Thus it is.
+
+     These points then being assumed, let him tell me! let him speak
+     and give his answer--that excellent person, who on the one hand
+     thinks there is no Beauty itself, nor any idea of Beauty itself,
+     ever in the same condition in regard to the same things (aei kata
+     tauta hôsautôs echousan)+ yet, on the other hand, holds [45] that
+     there are the many beautiful objects:--that lover of sight (ho
+     philotheamôn)+ who can by no means bear it if any one says that
+     the beautiful is one; the just also; and the rest, after the same
+     way.  For good Sir! we shall say, pray tell us, is there any one
+     of these many beautiful things which will not appear ugly (under
+     certain conditions) of the many just or pious actions which will
+     not seem unjust or impious?
+
+     No! he answered.  Rather it must be that they shall seem, in a
+     manner, both beautiful and ugly; and all the rest you ask of.
+
+     Well!  The many double things:--Do they seem to be at all less
+     half than double?
+
+     Not at all.
+
+     And great, in truth, and little, and light, and heavy--will they
+     at all more truly be called by these names which we may give them,
+     than by the opposite names?
+
+     No! he said; but each of them will always hold of both.
+
+     Every several instance of 'The Many,' then--is it, more truly
+     than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be?
+
+     It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper-
+     parties!) playing on words, and the children's riddle about the
+     eunuch and his fling round the bat--with what, and on what, the
+     riddle says he hit it; for these things also seem to set both
+     ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of
+     them either to be, or not to be; neither both, nor the one, nor
+     the other.
+
+     Have you anything then you can do with them; or anywhere you can
+     place them with fairer effect than in that position between being
+     and the being not?  For presumably they will not appear more
+     obscure than what is not, so as not to be, still more; nor more
+     luminous than what is, so as to be, even more than that.  We have
+     found then that the many customary notions of the many, about
+     Beauty and the rest are revolved somewhere between not-being and
+     being unmixedly.
+
+     So we have.
+
+     And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of this sort
+     presented itself, it must be declared matter not of knowledge, but
+     of opinion; to be apprehended by the intermediate faculty; as it
+     wanders unfixed, there, between.  Republic, 478.
+
+[46] Many a train of thought, many a turn of expression, only too
+familiar, some may think, to the reader of Plato, are summarised in
+that troublesome yet perhaps attractive passage.  The influence then of
+Parmenides on Plato had made him, incurably (shall we say?) a dualist.
+Only, practically, Plato's richly coloured genius will find a
+compromise between the One which alone really is, is yet so empty a
+thought for finite minds; and the Many, which most properly is not, yet
+presses so closely on eye and ear and heart and fancy and will, at
+every moment.  That which really is (to on)+ the One, if he is really to
+think about it at all, must admit within it a certain variety of
+members; and, in effect, for Plato the true Being, the Absolute, the
+One, does become delightfully multiple, as the world of ideas--
+appreciable, through years of loving study, more and more clearly, one
+by one, as the perfectly concrete, mutually adjusted, permanent forms
+of our veritable experience: the Bravery, for instance, that cannot be
+confused, not merely with Cowardice, but with Wisdom, or Humility.  One
+after another they emerge again from the dead level, the Parmenidean
+tabula rasa, with nothing less than the reality of persons face to face
+with us, of a personal identity.  It was as if the firm plastic
+outlines of the delightful old Greek polytheism had found their way
+back after all into a repellent monotheism.  Prefer as he may in theory
+that [47] blank white light of the One--its sterile, "formless,
+colourless, impalpable," eternal identity with itself--the world, and
+this chiefly is why the world has not forgotten him, will be for him,
+as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place.  He
+will suffer it to come to him, as his pages convey it in turn to us,
+with the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicuously visual
+emblem of it, the outline of which (essentially characteristic of
+himself as it seems) he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic
+teacher who had tried so hard to close the bodily eye that he might the
+better apprehend the world unseen.--
+
+     And now (he writes in the seventh book of The Republic) take
+     for a figure of human nature, as regards education and the lack
+     thereof, some such condition as this.  Think you see people as
+     it were in some abode below-ground, like a cave, having its
+     entrance spread out upwards towards the light, broad, across the
+     whole cavern.  Suppose them here from childhood; their legs and
+     necks chained; so that there they stay, and can see only what is
+     in front of them, being unable by reason of the chain to move
+     their heads round about: and the light of a fire upon them,
+     blazing from far above, behind their backs: between the fire and
+     the prisoners away up aloft: and see beside it a low wall built
+     along, as with the showmen, in front of the people lie the screens
+     above which they exhibit their wonders.
+
+     I see: he said.
+
+     See, then, along this low wall, men, bearing vessels of all sorts
+     wrought in stone and wood; and, naturally, some of the bearers
+     talking, other silent.
+
+     It is a strange figure you describe: said he: and strange
+     prisoners.--
+
+     They are like ourselves: I answered!  Republic, 514.
+
+[48] Metaphysical formulae have always their practical equivalents.
+The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the
+Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides, with Socrates, and the
+Cynics or the Stoics.  The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as
+truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of
+the One, as the Cyrenaic monochronos hêdonê+--the pleasure of the ideal
+now--is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion; and, as
+sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic for
+the understanding is found to be realisable enough as one of many
+phases of our so flexible human feeling.  The abstract philosophy of
+the One might seem indeed to have been translated into the terms of a
+human will in the rigid, disinterested, renunciant career of the
+emperor Marcus Aurelius, its mortal coldness.  Let me however conclude
+with a document of the Eleatic temper, nearer in its origin to the age
+of Plato: an ancient fragment of Cleanthes the Stoic, which has justly
+stirred the admiration of Stoical minds; though truly, so hard is it
+not to lapse from those austere heights, the One, the Absolute, has
+become in it after all, with much varied colour and detail in his
+relations to concrete things and persons, our father Zeus.
+
+An illustrious athlete; then a mendicant dealer in water-melons; chief
+pontiff lastly of the sect of the Stoics; Cleanthes, as we see him in
+anecdote [49] at least, is always a loyal, sometimes a very quaintly
+loyal, follower of the Parmenidean or Stoic doctrine of detachment from
+all material things.  It was at the most critical points perhaps of
+such detachment, that somewhere about the year three hundred before
+Christ, he put together the verses of his famous "Hymn."  By its
+practical indifference, its resignation, its passive submission to the
+One, the undivided Intelligence, which dia pantôn phoita+--goes to and
+fro through all things, the Stoic pontiff is true to the Parmenidean
+schooling of his flock; yet departs from it also in a measure by a
+certain expansion of phrase, inevitable, it may be, if one has to speak
+at all about that chilly abstraction, still more make a hymn to it.  He
+is far from the cold precept of Spinoza, that great re-assertor of the
+Parmenidean tradition: That whoso loves God truly must not expect to be
+loved by Him in return.  In truth, there are echoes here from many
+various sources.  Ek sou gar genos esmen+:--that is quoted, as you
+remember, by Saint Paul, so just after all to the pagan world, as its
+testimony to some deeper Gnôsis than its own.  Certainly Cleanthes has
+conceived his abstract monotheism a little more winningly, somewhat
+better, than dry, pedantic Xenophanes; perhaps because Socrates and
+Plato have lived meanwhile.  You might even fancy what he says an echo
+from Israel's devout response to the announcement: "The Lord thy God is
+one Lord."  The Greek [50] certainly is come very near to his unknown
+cousin at Sion in what follows:--
+
+     kydist', athanatôn, polyônyme, pankrates aiei
+     Zeu, physeos archêge, nomou meta panta kybernôn,
+     chaire· se gar pantessi themis thnêtoisi prosaudan, k.t.l.
+
+          Mullach, Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, I. p. 151.
+
+     Thou O Zeus art praised above all gods: many are Thy names and
+     Thine is all power for ever.
+
+     The beginning of the world was from Thee: and with law Thou
+     rulest over all things.
+
+     Unto Thee may all flesh speak: for we are Thy offspring.
+
+     Therefore will I raise a hymn unto Thee: and will ever sing of
+     Thy power.
+
+     The whole order of the heavens obeyeth Thy word: as it moveth
+     around the earth:
+
+     With little and great lights mixed together: how great art Thou,
+     King above all for ever!
+
+     Nor is anything done upon earth apart from Thee: nor in the
+     firmament, nor in the seas:
+
+     Save that which the wicked do: by their own folly.
+
+     But Thine is the skill to set even the crooked straight: what is
+     without fashion is fashioned and the alien akin before Thee.
+
+     Thus hast Thou fitted together all things in one: the good with
+     the evil:
+
+     That Thy word should be one in all things: abiding for ever.
+
+     Let folly be dispersed from our souls: that we may repay Thee
+     the honour, wherewith Thou hast honoured us:
+
+     Singing praise of Thy works for ever: as becometh the sons of
+     men.+
+
+NOTES
+
+29. +Transliteration: To Syngramma.  Translation: "The Prose."
+
+32. +Transliteration: ousia achrômatos, aschêmatistos, anaphês.  E-text
+editor's translation:  "the colorless, utterly formless, intangible
+essence."  Plato, Phaedrus 247c.  See also Appreciations, "Coleridge,"
+where Pater uses the same quotation.
+
+33. +Transliteration: aphasia.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"speechlessness."
+
+34. +Transliteration: to on.  Translation: "that which is."
+
+35. +The principle is that of Baruch Spinoza.
+
+36. +Transliteration: Kosmos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.
+order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order:
+of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an
+ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."
+
+36. +Transliteration: kosmiotês.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"propriety, decorum, orderly behaviour."
+
+36. +Transliteration: archê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "I.
+beginning, first cause, origin.  II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty,
+dominion; 2. office."
+
+37. +Transliteration: para panta legomena.  Pater's translation: "in
+spite of common language."
+
+38.  "The Lord thy God. . . ."  Deuteronomy 6:4.  "Hear, O Israel: The
+LORD our God is one LORD: . . ."  See also Mark 12:29: "And Jesus
+answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The
+Lord our God is one Lord: . . ."
+
+38. +Transliteration: Peri physeôs.  E-text editor's translation:
+"Regarding Nature--i.e. the title De Naturâ Rerum."
+
+39. +Transliteration: hê men hopôs estin te kai hôs ouk esti mê einai.
+Pater's translation: "that what is, is; and that what is not, is not."
+Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana [Fragmentary Song or Poem], line 35.
+Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 117.  Ed. F.W.A. Mullach.
+Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of the Paris, 1860
+edition).
+
+39. +Transliteration: peithous esti keleuthos; alêtheiê gar opêdei.
+Pater's translation: "this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes
+along with it."  Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana [Fragmentary Song or Poem],
+line 36.  Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.  Although I
+have left the quotation as Pater renders it, the semicolon should be a
+comma, as in the Mullach collection Pater used--otherwise the first
+half of the sentence would be a question, and that is not how Pater
+himself translates the verse.
+
+39. +Transliteration: tên dê toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon; oute
+gar an gnoiês to ge mê eon ou gar ephikton.  Pater's translation: "I
+tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion: That which
+is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at that."
+Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, lines 38-9.  Fragmenta Philosophorum
+Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
+
+39. +Transliteration: To gar auto voein estin te kai einai.  Pater's
+translation in Latin: "idem est enim cogitare et esse"; in English,
+that may be translated, "Thinking and being are identical."
+Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, line 40.  Fragmenta Philosophorum
+Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
+
+39. +Transliteration: tothi gar palin hixomai authis.  Pater's
+translation: "at what point I begin; for thither I shall come back over
+again."  Parmenides, Epeôn Leipsana, line 42.  Fragmenta Philosophorum
+Graecorum, Vol. 1, 118.
+
+43. +Transliteration: heteron epistêmês doxa; eph' heterô ara heteron ti
+dynamenê hekatera autôn pephyke; ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston
+tauton einai.  E-text editor's translation: "opinion differs from
+scientific knowledge...To each of them belongs a different power, so to
+each falls a different sphere...it is not possible for knowledge and
+opinion to be one and the same."  Plato, Republic, 478a-b.
+
+44. +Transliteration: aei kata tauta hôsautôs echousan.  Pater's
+translation: "ever in the same condition in regard to the same things."
+Plato, Republic 478.
+
+45. +Transliteration: ho philotheamôn.  Liddell and Scott definition
+"fond of seeing, fond of spectacles or shows."  This word is from the
+same passage just cited, note for page 44.
+
+46. +Transliteration: to on.  Translation: "that which is."
+
+48. Transliteration: monochronos hêdonê.  Pater's definition "the
+pleasure of the ideal now."  The adjective monochronos means,
+literally, "single or unitary time."  See also Marius the Epicurean,
+Vol. 1, Cyrenaicism, and Vol. 2, Second Thoughts, where Pater quotes
+the same key Cyrenaic language.
+
+49. +Transliteration: dia pantôn phoita.  E-text editor's translation:
+"which courses through all things."  Cleanthes (300-220 B.C.), Hymn to
+Zeus, lines 12-13.  Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
+Ed. F.W.A. Mullach.  Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1967 (reprint of
+the Paris, 1860 edition).  Pater has translated Cleanthes' phrase
+koinos logos as "undivided Intelligence."  The relevant verse reads,
+"su kateuthynês koinon logon, hos dia pantôn phoita,"  which may be
+translated, "You guide the Universal Thought that courses through all
+things."  But the word logos is multivalent and subject to
+philosophical nuance, so any translation of it is bound to be limited.
+
+49. +Transliteration: Ek sou gar genos esmen.  E-text editor's
+translation: "For we are born of you."  Cleanthes (300-220 B.C.), Hymn
+to Zeus, line 4.  Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
+Pater alludes also to Saint Paul's words in Acts 17:28: "For in him we
+live, and move, and have our being."
+
+50. +Here Pater provides a somewhat abbreviated translation of the Hymn
+to Zeus.  As above, the Greek is from Fragmenta Philosophorum
+Graecorum, Vol. 1, 151.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 3: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER
+
+[51] His devotion to the austere and abstract philosophy of Parmenides,
+its passivity or indifference, could not repress the opulent genius of
+Plato, or transform him into a cynic.  Another ancient philosopher,
+Pythagoras, set the frozen waves in motion again, brought back to
+Plato's recognition all that multiplicity in men's experience to which
+Heraclitus had borne such emphatic witness; but as rhythm or melody
+now--in movement truly, but moving as disciplined sound and with the
+reasonable soul of music in it.
+
+Pythagoras, or the founder of the Pythagorean philosophy, is the third
+of those earlier masters, who explain the intellectual confirmation of
+Plato by way of antecedent.  What he said, or was believed to have
+said, is almost everywhere in the very texture of Platonic philosophy,
+as vera vox, an authority with prescript claim on sympathetic or at
+least reverent consideration, to be developed generously in the natural
+growth of Plato's own thoughts.
+
+[52] Nothing remains of his writings: dark statements only, as occasion
+served, in later authors.  Plato himself attributes those doctrines of
+his not to Pythagoras but to the Pythagoreans.  But if no such name had
+come down to us we might have understood how, in the search for the
+philosophic unity of experience, a common measure of things, for a
+cosmical hypothesis, number and the truths of number would come to fill
+the place occupied by some omnipresent physical element, air, fire,
+water, in the philosophies of Ionia; by the abstract and exclusive idea
+of the unity of Being itself in the system of Parmenides.  To realise
+unity in variety, to discover cosmos--an order that shall satisfy one's
+reasonable soul--below and within apparent chaos: is from first to last
+the continuous purpose of what we call philosophy.  Well!  Pythagoras
+seems to have found that unity of principle (archê)+ in the dominion of
+number everywhere, the proportion, the harmony, the music, into which
+number as such expands.  Truths of number: the essential laws of
+measure in time and space:--Yes, these are indeed everywhere in our
+experience: must, as Kant can explain to us, be an element in anything
+we are able so much as to conceive at all.  And music, covering all it
+does, for Pythagoras, for Plato and Platonism--music, which though it
+is of course much besides, is certainly a formal development of purely
+numerical laws: that too surely is something, [53] independently of
+ourselves, in the real world without us, like a personal intelligible
+soul durably resident there for those who bring intelligence of it, of
+music, with them; to be known on the favourite Platonic principle of
+like by like (homoion homoiô)+ though the incapable or uninstructed ear,
+in various degrees of dulness, may fail to apprehend it.
+
+The Golden Verses of Pythagoras parted early into dust (that seems
+strange, if they were ever really written in a book) and antiquity
+itself knows little directly about his doctrine.  Yet Pythagoras is
+much more than a mere name, a term, for locating as well as may be a
+philosophical abstraction.  Pythagoras, his person, his memory,
+attracted from the first a kind of fairy-tale of mystic science.  The
+philosophy of number, of music and proportion, came, and has remained,
+in a cloud of legendary glory; the gradual accumulation of which
+Porphyry and Iamblichus, the fantastic masters of Neo-Platonism, or
+Neo-Pythagoreanism, have embodied in their so-called Lives of him, like
+some antique fable richly embossed with starry wonders.  In this spirit
+there had been much writing about him: that he was a son of Apollo,
+nay, Apollo himself--the twilight, attempered, Hyperborean Apollo, like
+the sun in Lapland: that his person gleamed at times with a
+supernatural brightness: that he had exposed to those who loved him a
+golden thigh: how Abaris, the minister of that god, [54] had come
+flying to him on a golden arrow: of his almost impossible journeys: how
+he was seen, had lectured indeed, in different places at the same time.
+As he walked on the banks of the Nessus the river had whispered his
+name: he had been, in the secondary sense, various persons in the
+course of ages; a courtesan once, for some ancient sin in him; and then
+a hero, Euphorbus, son of Panthus; could remember very distinctly so
+recent a matter as the Trojan war, and had recognised in a moment his
+own old armour, hanging on the wall, above one of his old dead bodies,
+in the temple of Athene at Argos; showing out all along only by hints
+and flashes the abysses of divine knowledge within him, sometimes by
+miracle.  For if the philosopher really is all that Pythagoras or the
+Pythagoreans suppose; if the material world is so perfect a musical
+instrument, and he knows its theory so well, he might surely give
+practical and sensible proof of that on occasion, by himself
+improvising music upon it in direct miracle.  And so there, in Porphyry
+and Iamblichus, the appropriate miracles are.
+
+If the mistaken affection of the disciples of dreamy Neo-Platonic
+Gnôsis at Alexandria, in the third or fourth century of our era, has
+thus made it impossible to separate later legend from original evidence
+as to what he was, and said, and how he said it, yet that there was a
+brilliant, perhaps a showy, personality there, infusing the [55] most
+abstract truths with what would tell on the fancy, seems more than
+probable, and, though he would appear really to have had from the first
+much of mystery or mysticism about him, the thaumaturge of Samos, "whom
+even the vulgar might follow as a conjuror," must have been very unlike
+the lonely "weeping" philosopher of Ephesus, or the almost disembodied
+philosopher of Elea.  In the very person and doings of this earliest
+master of the doctrine of harmony, people saw that philosophy is
+
+     Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
+     But musical as is Apollo's lute.
+
+And in turn he abounded in influence on the deeds, the persons, of
+others, as if he had really carried a magic lute in his hands to charm
+them.
+
+As his fellow-citizens had all but identified Pythagoras with him, so
+Apollo remained the peculiar patron of the Pythagoreans; and we may
+note, in connexion with their influence on Plato, that as Apollo was
+the chosen ancestral deity, so Pythagoreanism became especially the
+philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian Greeks.  If, as Plato was
+aware, or fancied, true Spartans knew more of philosophy than they let
+strangers suppose--turned them all out from time to time and feasted on
+it in secret, for the strengthening of their souls--it was [56]
+precisely the Pythagorean philosophy of music, of austere music,
+mastering, remoulding, men's very bodies, they would then have
+discussed with one another.
+
+A native of Ionia, it is in one of the Dorian cities of Magna Graecia,
+at Crotona, that Pythagoras finds the fitting scene of his mysterious
+influence.  He founds there something like an ideal republic, or rather
+a religious brotherhood, under a rule outwardly expressive of that
+inward idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian soul, and, for
+it, as for him, ever the peculiar pledge of the presence of philosophic
+truth.  Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê emmetria;+ asks one
+in The Republic; and Emmetria?+ of course, is the answer.
+
+Recalling the student of Plato to penetrate as far as he can into that
+mysterious community, there, long before, in the imagination of
+Pythagoras is the first dream of the Perfect City, with all those
+peculiar ethical sympathies which the Platonic Republic enforces
+already well defined--the perfect mystic body of the Dorian soul,
+built, as Plato requires, to the strains of music.  As a whole, and in
+its members severally, it would reproduce and visibly reflect to others
+that inward order and harmony of which each one was a part.  As such,
+the Pythagorean order (it was itself an "order") expanded and was long
+maintained in those cities of Magna Graecia which had been the scene of
+the practical [57] no less than of the speculative activity of its
+founder; and in one of which, Metapontum, so late as the days of Cicero
+what was believed to be the tomb of Pythagoras was still shown.  Order,
+harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will
+convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of
+the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony,--that was the chief
+thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though
+they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done
+what they liked--temperance in a religious intention, with many
+singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like.
+For if, according to his philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, to
+use the phrase of Wordsworth reproducing the central Pythagorean
+doctrine, "from heaven," as he says, "trailing clouds of glory," so the
+arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving
+one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither,
+of which means, surely, abstinence, the repression of one's carnal
+elements, must be one; in consideration also, in curious questions, as
+to the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul,
+before and after, for which he was so anxious to secure full use of all
+the opportunities of further perfecting which might yet await it, in
+the many revolutions of its existence.  In the midst of that
+aesthetically [58] so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if
+anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic
+Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascêsis, about
+him.  Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards,
+that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon
+his way.  The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the
+philosopher of music was,  perhaps not inconsistently, a lover, which
+enveloped the entire action of the Pythagoreans, and had indeed kept
+Pythagoras himself, as some have thought, from committing his thoughts
+to writing at all, was congruous with such monkish discipline.
+Mysticism--the condition of the initiated--is a word derived, as we
+know, from a Greek verb which may perhaps mean to close the eye that
+one may better perceive the invisible, but more probably means to close
+the lips while the soul is brooding over what cannot be uttered.  Later
+Christian admirers said of him, that he had hidden the words of God in
+his heart.
+
+The dust of his golden verses perhaps, but certainly the gold-dust of
+his thoughts, lies scattered all along Greek literature from Plato to
+the latest of the Greek Fathers of the Church.  You may find it
+serviceably worked out in the notes of Zeller's excellent work on Greek
+philosophy, and, with more sparing comment, in Mullach's Fragmenta
+Philosophorum Graecorum.  No one of those Pre-Socratic philosophers has
+[59] been the subject of a more enthusiastic erudition.  For his mind's
+health however, if in doing so he is not making a disproportionate use
+of his time, inconsistent certainly with the essential temper of the
+doctrine he seeks for, and such as a true Pythagorean would instantly
+condemn, the young scholar might be recommended to go straight to the
+pages of Aristotle--those discreet, unromantic pages, salutary
+therefore to listen to, concerning doctrines in themselves so
+fantastic.*  In the Ethics, as you may know, in the Metaphysics, and
+elsewhere, Aristotle gives many not unsympathetic notices at least of
+the disciples, which, by way of sober contrast on a matter from the
+first profusely, perhaps cheaply, embroidered, is like quiet
+information from Pythagoras himself.  Only, remember always in reading
+Plato--Plato, as a sincere learner in the school of Pythagoras--that
+the essence, the active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine, resides,
+not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor as with our modern selves too
+often, in the "infinite," those eternities, infinitudes, abysses,
+Carlyle invokes for us so often--in no cultus of the infinite (to
+apeiron) but in the finite (to peras).+  It is so indeed, with that
+exception of the Parmenidean sect, through all Greek philosophy,
+congruously with the proper vocation of the [60] people of art, of art
+as being itself the finite, ever controlling the infinite, the
+formless.  Those famous systoichiai tôn enantiôn,+ or parallel columns
+of contraries: the One and the Many: Odd and Even, and the like: Good
+and Evil: are indeed all reducible ultimately to terms of art, as the
+expressive and the inexpressive.  Now observe that Plato's "theory of
+ideas" is but an effort to enforce the Pythagorean peras,+ with all the
+unity-in-variety of concerted music,--eternal definition of the finite,
+upon to apeiron,+ the infinite, the indefinite, formless, brute matter,
+of our experience of the world.
+
+For it is of Plato again we should be thinking, and of Pythagoras or
+the Pythagoreans, only so far as they explain the actual conformation
+of Plato's thoughts as we find them, especially in The Republic.  Let
+us see, as much as possible in his own words, what Plato received from
+that older philosophy, of which the two leading persuasions were;
+first, the universality, the ultimate truth, of numerical, of musical
+law; and secondly, the pre-existence, the double eternity, of the soul.
+
+In spirit, then, we are certainly of the Pythagorean company in that
+most characteristic dialogue, the Meno, in which Plato discusses the
+nature, the true idea, of Virtue, or rather how one may attain thereto;
+compelled to this subordinate and accessory question by the
+intellectual [61] cowardice of his disciple, though after his manner he
+flashes irrepressible light on that other primary and really
+indispensable question by the way.  Pythagoras, who had founded his
+famous brotherhood by way of turning theory into practice, must have
+had, of course, definite views on that most practical question, how
+virtue is to be attained by us; and Plato is certainly faithful to him
+in assigning the causation of virtue partly to discipline, forming
+habit (askêsis)+ as enforced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy, as
+he is true to his own experience in assigning it partly also to a good
+natural disposition (physei)+ and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose
+some of us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also in part (theia
+moira)+ to the good pleasure of heaven, to un-merited grace.  Whatever
+else, however, may be held about it, it is certain (he admits) that
+virtue comes in great measure through learning.  But is there in very
+deed such a thing as learning? asks the eristic Meno, who is so
+youthfully fond of argument for its own sake, and must exercise by
+display his already well-trained intellectual muscle.  Is not that
+favourite, that characteristic, Greek paradox, that it is impossible to
+be taught, and therefore useless to seek, what one does not know
+already, after all the expression of an empirical truth?--
+
+     Meno.  After what manner Socrates will you seek for that which
+     you do not know at all--what it is?  For what sort of thing,
+     among the things you know not, will you propose as your [62]
+     object of search?  Or even if you should have lighted full upon
+     it, how will you know that it is this thing which you knew not?
+
+     Socrates.  Ah!  I understand the kind of thing you mean to say,
+     Meno.  Do you see what a contentious argument this is you are
+     bringing down on our heads?--that forsooth it is not possible
+     for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for what he knows
+     not; inasmuch as he would not seek what he knows, at least;
+     because he knows it, and to one in such case there is no need
+     of seeking.  Nor would he seek after what he knows not; for he
+     knows not what he shall seek for.  Meno, 80.
+
+Well! that is true in a sense, as Socrates admits; not however in any
+sense which encourages idle acquiescence in what according to common
+language is our ignorance.  There is a sense (it is exemplified in
+regard to sound and colour, perhaps in some far more important things)
+in which it is matter of experience that it is impossible to seek for,
+or be taught, what one does not know already.  He who is in total
+ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware
+of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them.  Where could
+one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means
+incapacity for receiving knowledge.  Yes, certainly; the Pythagoreans
+are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence-
+-: anamnêsis + famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise
+way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don't know: how
+that happens.  In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument
+most [63] fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning
+may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno's slaves,
+a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry:
+introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where
+diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on the
+table--particular objects, the mere sight of which will rouse him when
+subjected to the dialectical treatment, to universal truths concerning
+them.  The problem required of him is to describe a square of a
+particular size: to find the line which must be the side of such a
+square; and he is to find it for himself.  Meno, carefully on his
+guard, is to watch whether the boy is taught by Socrates in any of his
+answers; whether he answers anything at any point otherwise than by way
+of reminiscence and really out of his own mind, as the reasonable
+questions of Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or like
+sunlight on the photographer's negative.
+
+"See him now!" he cries triumphantly, "How he remembers; in the logical
+order; as he ought to remember!"  The reader, in truth, following
+closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that
+after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem
+for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the
+questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself
+illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space.  It is [64]
+once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the
+immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space.  So
+much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of
+the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a
+plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them:
+that as he remembers, in logical order (hôs dei)+ so he makes the
+mistakes also which he ought to make--the right sort of mistakes, such
+as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a
+kind of properly innate errors.  Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai
+hai doxai autai.+--"Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been
+stirred up within him"; and he will perform, Socrates assures us,
+similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical
+problems, with any and every problem whatever.
+
+"If then," observes Socrates in the Phaedo, wistfully pondering, for
+such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger
+outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine:--
+
+     If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathe-
+     matical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already
+     possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before
+     and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the
+     equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things
+     of the kind?  For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is
+     to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds
+     not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute
+     Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again, after the
+     dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just
+     and good, and about all things whatever, upon [65] which, in
+     all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal--hois
+     episphragizometha touto + --That, which really is.  Phaedo, 75.
+
+But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno--from the prison-cell
+to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment
+upon the young boy with the square:-- Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all'
+erôtêsantos, epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên;+
+"Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning,
+will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense
+(epistêmê)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?"--Yes! and
+that recovery is an act of reminiscence.
+
+These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about
+side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enêsan de ge autô
+autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right
+opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when
+stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as
+consciously reasoned knowledge (erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai
+gignontai).+  That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not
+quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as
+he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading
+psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us--the doctrine
+namely of metempsychôsis, of the transmigration of souls through
+various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral
+retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by
+Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the
+Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of
+Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so
+comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a
+personal hope in the immediate prospect of death.  The soul, then,
+would be immortal (athanatos an hê psychê eiê)+ prospectively as well as
+in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth
+"over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an
+encouragement to the search for truth, here.  Retrospectively, at all
+events, it seemed plain that "the soul is eternal.  It is right
+therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that
+is to say, one does not remember, just now."  Those notions were in the
+boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not
+come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens.  Ancient, half-
+obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds
+of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an
+earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again
+now, so kindly, so firmly!
+
+Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under
+the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the
+proper vocation of the philosophic teacher [67] to supervene with his
+encouraging questions.  And there was another doctrine--a persuasion
+still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong
+presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that
+great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains--
+"reminiscence."  Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno, in the
+locus classicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain
+religious persons, priests and priestesses,
+
+     --who had made it their business to be able to give an account
+     concerning their sacred functions.  Pindar too asserts this,
+     and many other of the poets, so many as were divinely inspired.
+     And what they say is as follows.  But do you observe, whether
+     they seem to you to speak the truth.  For they say that the soul
+     of man is immortal; and that at one time it comes to a pause,
+     which indeed they call dying, and then is born again; but that
+     it is never destroyed.  That on this account indeed it is our
+     duty to pass through life as religiously as possible (because
+     there's 'another world,' namely).  'For those,' says Pindar,
+     'from whom Persephone shall have received a recompense of ancient
+     wrong--she gives back their soul again to the sun above in the
+     ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, illustrious and swift in
+     strength, and men greatest in wisdom; and for remaining time they
+     are called holy heroes among us.'  Inasmuch then as the soul is
+     immortal, and has been born many times, and has seen both things
+     here and things in Hades, and all things, there is nothing that
+     it has not learned; so that it is by no means surprising that
+     it should be able to remember both about virtue and about other
+     matters what it knew at least even aforetime.  For inasmuch as
+     the whole of nature is akin to itself (homogeneous) and the soul
+     has learned all things, nothing hinders one, by remembering one
+     thing only, which indeed people call 'learning' (though it is
+     something else in fact, you see!) from finding out all other
+     things for himself, if he be brave and fail not through weariness
+     in his search.  For in truth to [68] seek and to learn is wholly
+     Recollection.  Therefore one must not be persuaded by that eristic
+     doctrine (namely that if ignorant in ignorance you must remain)
+     for that on the one hand would make us idle and is a pleasant
+     doctrine for the weak among mankind to hear; while this other
+     doctrine makes us industrious and apt to seek.  Trusting in
+     which that it is true, I am willing along with you to seek out
+     virtue:--what it is.  Meno, 81.
+
+These strange theories then are much with Socrates on his last sad day-
+-sad to his friends--as justifying more or less, on ancient religious
+authority, the instinctive confidence, checking sadness in himself,
+that he will survive--survive the effects of the poison, of the funeral
+fire; that somewhere, with some others, with Minos perhaps and other
+"righteous souls" of the national religion, he will be holding
+discourses, dialogues, quite similar to these, only a little better as
+must naturally happen with so diligent a scholar, this time to-morrow.
+
+And that wild thought of metempsychôsis was connected with a theory,
+yet more fantastic, of the visible heaven above us.  For Pythagoras,
+the Pythagoreans, had had their views also, as became the possessors of
+"a first principle"--of a philosophy therefore which need leave no
+problem untouched--on purely material things, above all on the
+structure of the planets, the mechanical contrivances by which their
+motion was effected (it came to just that!) on the relation of the
+earth to its atmosphere and the like.  The doctrine of the
+transmigration, [69] the pilgrimage or mental journeys, of the soul
+linked itself readily with a fanciful, guess-work astronomy, which
+provided starry places, wide areas, hostelries, for that wanderer to
+move or rest in.  A matter of very lively and presentable form and
+colour, as if making the invisible show through, this too pleased the
+extremely visual fancy of Plato; as we may see, in many places of the
+Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Timaeus, and most conspicuously in the tenth
+book of The Republic, where he relates the vision of Er--what he saw of
+the other world during a kind of temporary death.  Hell, Purgatory,
+Paradise, are briefly depicted in it; Paradise especially with a quite
+Dantesque sensibility to coloured light--physical light or spiritual,
+you can hardly tell which, so perfectly is the inward sense blent with
+its visible counter-part, reminding one forcibly of the Divine Comedy,
+of which those closing pages of The Republic suggest an early outline.
+
+That then is the third element in Plato derivative from his Pythagorean
+masters: an astronomy of infant minds, we might call it, in which the
+celestial world is the scene, not as yet of those abstract reasonable
+laws of number and motion and space, upon which, as Plato himself
+protests in the seventh book of The Republic, it is the business of a
+veritable science of the stars to exercise our minds, but rather of a
+machinery, which the mere star-gazer may peep into as best he can, with
+its levers, its spindles and revolving [70] wheels, its spheres, he
+says,--"like those boxes which fit into one another," and the literal
+doors "opened in heaven," through which, at the due point of ascension,
+the revolving pilgrim soul will glide forth and have a chance of gazing
+into the wide spaces beyond,  "as he stands outside on the back of the
+sky"--that hollow partly transparent sphere which surrounds and closes
+in our terrestrial atmosphere.  Most difficult to follow in detailed
+description, perhaps not to be taken quite seriously, one thing at
+least is clear about the planetary movements as Plato and his
+Pythagorean teachers conceive them.  They produce, naturally enough,
+sounds, that famous "music of the spheres," which the undisciplined ear
+fails to recognise, to delight in, only because it is never silent.
+
+That it really is impossible after all to learn, to be taught what you
+are entirely ignorant of, was and still is a fact of experience,
+manifest especially in regard to music.  Now that "music of the
+spheres" in its largest sense, its completest orchestration, the
+harmonious order of the whole universe (kosmos)+ was what souls had
+heard of old; found echoes of here; might recover in its entirety, amid
+the influences of the melodious colour, sounds, manners, the enforced
+modulating discipline, which would make the whole life of a citizen of
+the Perfect City an education in music.  We are now with Plato, you
+see! in his reproduction, so fully detailed for us in The [71]
+Republic, of the earlier and vaguer Pythagorean brotherhood.  Musical
+imagery, the notions of proportion and the like, have ever since Plato
+wrote played a large part in the theory of morals; have come to seem
+almost a natural part of language concerning them.  Only, wherever in
+Plato himself you find such imagery, you may note Pythagorean
+influence.
+
+The student of The Republic hardly needs to be reminded how all-
+pervasive in it that imagery is; how emphatic, in all its speculative
+theory, in all its practical provisions, is the desire for harmony; how
+the whole business of education (of gymnastic even, the seeming rival
+of music) is brought under it; how large a part of the claims of duty,
+of right conduct, for the perfectly initiated, comes with him to be
+this, that it sounds so well.  Plêmmeleia,+ discordancy,--all faultiness
+resolves itself into that.  "Canst play on this flute?" asks Hamlet:--
+on human nature, with all its stops, of whose capricious tuneableness,
+or want of tune, he is himself the representative.  Well! the perfect
+state, thinks Plato, can.  For him, music is still everywhere in the
+world, and the whole business of philosophy only as it were the correct
+editing of it: as it will be the whole business of the state to
+repress, in the great concert, the jarring self-assertion (pleonexia)+
+of those whose voices have large natural power in them.  How, in
+detail, rhythm, the limit (peras)+ is enforced in Plato's Republic there
+is no time to [72] show.  Call to mind only that the perfect visible
+equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-statues of the actual
+youth of Greece--legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than
+its fancied forms of deity--the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the
+apoxyomenus; and how the most beautiful type of such youth, by the
+universal admission of the Greeks themselves, had issued from the
+severe schools of Sparta, that highest civic embodiment of the Dorian
+temper, like some perfect musical instrument, perfectly responsive to
+the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of law.--Yet with a
+fresh setting of the old music in each succeeding generation.  For in
+truth we come into the world, each one of us, "not in nakedness," but
+by the natural course of organic development clothed far more
+completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay,
+fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity
+which we mistake for our volitions; in the language which is more than
+one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs,
+the literature, the very houses, which we did not make for ourselves;
+in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would assure us) not
+ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeit-geist, or abstract
+secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness
+of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest.  It is
+humanity itself now--abstract humanity--that [73] figures as the
+transmigrating soul, accumulating into its "colossal manhood" the
+experience of ages; making use of, and casting aside in its march, the
+souls of countless individuals, as Pythagoras supposed the individual
+soul to cast aside again and again its outworn body.
+
+So it may be.  There was nothing of all that, however, in the mind of
+the great English poet at the beginning of this century whose famous
+Ode on The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood,
+in which he made metempsychôsis his own, must still express for some
+minds something more than merely poetic truth.  For Pythagoreanism too,
+like all the graver utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an
+instinct of the human mind itself, and therefore also a constant
+tradition in its history, which will recur; fortifying this or that
+soul here or there in a part at least of that old sanguine assurance
+about itself, which possessed Socrates so immovably, his masters, his
+disciples.  Those who do not already know Wordsworth's Ode ought soon
+to read it for themselves.  Listen instead to the lines which perhaps
+suggested Wordsworth's: The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so-
+called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago, who was able to
+blend those Pythagorean doctrines with the Christian belief, amid which
+indeed, from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards, those doctrines
+have shown themselves not otherwise than at home.
+
+[74] Happy, those days, he declares,
+
+     Before I understood this place,
+     Appointed for my second race;
+     Or taught my soul to fancy ought
+     But a white celestial thought;
+     When yet I had not walked above
+     A mile or two from my first love;
+     But felt through all this fleshly dress
+     Bright shoots of everlastingness.
+     O! how I long to travel back
+     And tread again that ancient track!
+     That I might once more reach that plain,
+     Where first I left my glorious train.--
+     But Ah! my soul with too much stay
+     Is drunk; and staggers in the way.
+     Some men a forward motion love,
+     But I backward steps would move;
+     And when this dust falls to the urn
+     In that state I came return.
+
+Summing up those three philosophies antecedent to Plato, we might say,
+that if Heraclitus taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics
+that of rest, so, in such quaint phrase as Vaughan's, Pythagoreanism is
+the philosophy of re-action.
+
+NOTES
+
+52. +Transliteration: archê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "I.
+beginning, first cause, origin.  II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty,
+dominion; 2. office."
+
+53. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô.  Translation: "like by like."
+
+56. +Transliteration: Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê
+emmetria.  E-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth
+is close kin to measure and proportion, or to disproportion?"  Plato,
+The Republic, Book VI, 486d.
+
+56. +Transliteration: Emmetria.  E-text editor's translation: "To
+measure and proportion."  Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.
+
+59. *Or to Mr. Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy; which I have read since
+these pages went to press, with much admiration for its learning and
+lucidity, and its unconventionality of view.
+
+59. +Transliteration: to apeiron . . . to peras.  Liddell and Scott
+definition: "I. without trial or experience of a thing . . . II.
+boundless, endless, countless / an end, extremity."  As Pater
+indicates, in Plato the terms mean something like "infinite" and
+"finite," or "bounded" and "unbounded."
+
+60. +Transliteration: systoichiai tôn enantiôn.  "Co-ordinates
+consisting of opposites."
+
+60. +Transliteration: peras.  See above, second note for page 59.
+
+60. +Transliteration: to apeiron.  See above, second note for page 59.
+
+61. +Transliteration: askêsis.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"excercise, training."
+
+61. +Transliteration: physei.  Liddell and Scott definition of physis:
+"the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or
+thing."  Thus, the dative form cited by Pater means, "with regard to
+nature."
+
+61. +Transliteration: theia moira.  Translation: "one's lot by divine
+appointment."
+
+62. +Transliteration: anamnêsis.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+calling to mind, recollection."
+
+64. +Transliteration: hôs dei.  E-text editor's translation: "as is
+necessary."
+
+64. +Transliteration: Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai hai doxai
+autai.  Pater's translation: "Just now, as in a dream, these opinions
+have been stirred up within him."  Plato, Meno, 85c.
+
+65. +Transliteration: hois episphragizometha touto.  E-text editor's
+translation: "these things upon which we set this seal."  Plato,
+Phaedo, 75d.
+
+65. +Transliteration: Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erôtêsantos,
+epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên.  E-text editor's
+translation: "No-one having taught him a thing, but rather through
+questioning alone, he will understand for certain, retrieving the
+knowledge out of himself?"  Plato, Meno, 85d.
+
+65. +Transliteration: epistêmê.  Liddell and Scott definition "1.
+knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific
+knowledge."
+
+65. +Transliteration: enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai.  E-text
+editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] implanted in
+him, weren't they?"  Plato, Meno 85c.  Source, if any.
+
+65. +Transliteration: [enesontai autôi alêtheis doxai,] erôtêsei
+epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai.  E-text editor's translation: "[He
+holds within himself true opinions,] which a questioning process may
+awaken into certain knowledge."  Plato, Meno 86a.
+
+66. +Transliteration: athanatos an hê psychê eiê.  Pater's translation:
+"The soul, then, would be immortal."  Plato, Meno 86b.
+
+70. +Transliteration: kosmos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.
+order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order:
+of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an
+ornament...; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement."
+
+71. +Transliteration: Plêmmeleia.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+false note . . . error, offense."
+
+71. +Transliteration: pleonexia.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+disposition to take more than one's share."
+
+71. +Transliteration: peras.  See above, note two, page 59.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 4: PLATO AND SOCRATES
+
+[75] "PLATO," we say habitually when we talk of our teacher in The
+Republic, the Phaedrus, cutting a knot; for Plato speaks to us
+indirectly only, in his Dialogues, by the voice of the Platonic
+Socrates, a figure most ambiguously compacted of the real Socrates and
+Plato himself; a purely dramatic invention, it might perhaps have been
+fancied, or, so to speak, an idolon theatri--Plato's self, but
+presented, with the reserve appropriate to his fastidious genius, in a
+kind of stage disguise.  So we might fancy but for certain independent
+information we possess about Socrates, in Aristotle, and in the
+Memorabilia of Xenophon.
+
+The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the simplest figures in the world.
+From the personal memories of that singularly limpid writer the outline
+of the great teacher detaches itself, as an embodiment of all that was
+clearest in the now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek
+conscience.  All that Socrates is seen to be in [76] those unaffected
+pages may be explained by the single desire to be useful to ordinary
+young men, whose business in life would be mainly with practical
+things; and at first sight, as delineators of their common master,
+Plato and Xenophon might seem scarcely reconcilable.  But then, as
+Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium, Socrates had been ever in
+all respects a two-sided being; like some rude figure of Silenus, he
+suggests, by way of an outer case for the image of a god within.  By a
+mind, of the compass Plato himself supposes, two quite different
+impressions may well have been made on two typically different
+observers.  The speaker, to Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy,
+vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece of high and difficult
+and extraordinary thoughts.  In the absence, then, of a single written
+word from Socrates himself, the question is forced upon us: had the
+true Socrates been really Socrates according to Xenophon, and all
+besides only a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato's quite
+original and independent genius: or, had the master been indeed
+something larger and more many-sided than Xenophon could have
+thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler disciple only what was
+of simpler stamp in himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all
+that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with which the Platonic
+Dialogues credit him.  It is a problem about which probably no reader
+of [77] Plato ever quite satisfies himself:--how much precisely he must
+deduct from Socrates, as we find him in those Dialogues, by way of
+defining to himself the Socrates of fact.
+
+In Plato's own writing about Socrates there is, however, a difference.
+The Apology, marked as being the single writing from Plato's hand not
+in dialogue form, we may naturally take for a sincere version of the
+actual words of Socrates; closer to them, we may think, than the Greek
+record of spoken words however important, the speeches in Thucydides,
+for instance, by the admission of Thucydides himself, was wont to be.
+And this assumption is supported by internal evidence.  In that
+unadorned language, in those harsh grammatic (or rather quite
+ungrammatic) constructions we have surely the natural accent of one
+speaking under strong excitement.  We might think, again, that the
+Phaedo, purporting to record his subsequent discourse, is really no
+more than such a record, but for a lurking suspicion, which hangs by
+the fact that Plato, noted as an assistant at the trial, is expressly
+stated by one of the speakers in the Dialogue to have been absent from
+the dying scene of Socrates.  That speaker however was himself perhaps
+the veracious reporter of those last words and acts; for there are
+details in the Phaedo too pedestrian and common-place to be taken for
+things of mere literary invention: the rubbing of the legs, for
+instance, now released from the chain; the rather [78] uneasy
+determination to be indifferent; the somewhat harsh committal of the
+crudely lamenting wife and his child "to any one who will take the
+trouble"--details, as one cannot but observe in passing, which leave
+those famous hours, even for purely human, or say! pagan dignity and
+tenderness, wholly incomparable to one sacred scene to which they have
+sometimes been compared.
+
+We shall be justified then, in the effort to give reality or truth to
+our mental picture of Socrates, if we follow the lead of his own
+supposed retrospect of his career in the Apology, as completed, and
+explained to wholly sympathetic spirits, by the more intimate
+discourses of the Phaedo.
+
+He pleads to be excused if in making his defence he speaks after his
+accustomed manner: not merely in home-spun phrase, that is to say, very
+different from what is usually heard at least in those sophisticated
+law-courts of Athens, nor merely with certain lapsing into his familiar
+habit of dialogue, but with a tacit assumption, throughout his
+arguments, of that logical realism which suggested the first outline of
+Plato's doctrine of the "ideas."  Everywhere, with what is like a
+physical passion for what is, what is true--as one engaged in a sort of
+religious or priestly concentration of soul on what God really made and
+meant us to know--he is driving earnestly, yet with method, at those
+universal conceptions or definitions which serve to establish [79]
+firmly the distinction, attained by so much intellectual labour,
+between what is absolute and abiding, of veritable import therefore to
+our reason, to the divine reason really resident in each one of us,
+resident in, yet separable from, these our houses of clay--between
+that, and what is only phenomenal and transitory, as being essentially
+implicate with them.  He achieved this end, as we learn from Aristotle,
+this power, literally, of "a criticism of life," by induction (epagôgê)+
+by that careful process of enquiry into the facts of the matter
+concerned, one by one (facts most often of conscience, of moral action
+as conditioned by motive, and result, and the varying degrees of inward
+light upon it) for which the fitting method is informal though not
+unmethodical question and answer, face to face with average mankind, as
+in those famous Socratic conversations, which again are the first rough
+natural growth of Plato's so artistic written Dialogues.  The exclusive
+preoccupation of Socrates with practical matter therein, his anxious
+fixing of the sense of such familiar terms as just and good, for
+instance, was part of that humble bearing of himself by which he was to
+authenticate a claim to superior wisdom, forced upon him by nothing
+less than divine authority, while there was something also in it of a
+natural reaction against the intellectual ambition of his youth.  He
+had gone to school eagerly, as he tells his friends in the [80] Phaedo,
+in his last discourse, to a physical philosopher, then of great repute,
+but to his own great disappointment.--
+
+     In my youth he says I had a wonderful desire for the wisdom
+     which people call natural science--peri physeôs historian.+
+     It seemed to me a proud thing to know the causes of every matter:
+     how it comes to be; ceases to be; why it is.  I lost my sight in
+     this enquiry to the degree of un-learning what I had hitherto
+     seemed to myself and others to know clearly enough.  But having
+     heard one reading from a book written, as he said, by Anaxagoras,
+     which said that it is Reason that arranges and is the cause of
+     all things, I was delighted with this cause; and thought to
+     myself, if this be so, then it does with each what may be best
+     for it.  Thus considering, it was with joy I fancied I had found
+     me a teacher about the cause--Anaxagoras: that he would show me
+     for instance, first, whether the earth was round or flat; and
+     then that it was best for it to be so: and if he made these
+     points clear I was prepared to ask for no other sort of causes.
+     Phaedo, 96.
+
+Well!  Socrates proceeds to the great natural philosopher, and is
+immensely discouraged to find him after all making very little use of
+Reason in his explanation why natural things are thus and not
+otherwise; explaining everything, rather, by secondary and mechanical
+causes.  "It was as if," he concludes, "some one had undertaken to
+prove that Socrates does everything through Reason; and had gone on to
+show that it was because my body is constructed in a certain way, of
+certain bones and muscles, that Socrates is now sitting here in the
+prison, voluntarily awaiting death."
+
+The disappointment of Socrates with the [81] spirit in which Anaxagoras
+actually handled and applied that so welcome sapiential proposition
+that Reason panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin +--arranges and is
+the cause of all things--is but an example of what often happens when
+men seek an a posteriori justification of their instinctive
+prepossessions.  Once for all he turns from useless, perhaps impious,
+enquiries, into the material structure of the stars above him, or the
+earth beneath his feet, from all physical enquiry into material things,
+to the direct knowledge of man the cosmical order in man, as it may be
+found by any one who, in good faith with himself, and with devout
+attention, looks within.  In this precise sense it was that, according
+to the old saying, Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven to
+earth.  Montaigne, the great humanist, expands it.--"'Twas he who
+brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to
+restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies.
+He has done human nature a great service," he adds, "in showing it how
+much it can do of itself."  And a singular incident gave that piercing
+study, that relentless exposure, of himself, and of others, for the
+most part so unwelcome to them, a religious or mystic character.  He
+has a "vocation" thus to proceed, has been literally "called," as he
+understands, by the central religious authority of Greece.  His
+seemingly invidious testing of men's pretensions [82] to know, is a
+sacred service to the God of Delphi, which he dares not neglect.  And
+his fidelity herein had in turn the effect of reinforcing for him, and
+bringing to a focus, all the other rays of religious light cast at
+random in the world about him, or in himself.
+
+"You know Chaerephon," he says, "his eagerness about any matter he
+takes up.  Well! once upon a time he went to Delphi, and ventured to
+ask of the oracle whether any man living was wiser than I; and, amazing
+as it seems, the Pythia answered that there was no one wiser than I."
+Socrates must go in order, then, to every class of persons pre-eminent
+for knowledge; to every one who seems to know more than he.  He found
+them--the Athenian poets, for instance, the potters who made the vases
+we admire, undeniably in possession of much delightful knowledge
+unattained by him.  But one and all they were ignorant of the
+limitations of their knowledge; and at last he concludes that the
+oracle had but meant to say: "He indeed is the wisest of all men who
+like Socrates is aware that he is really worth little or nothing in
+respect of knowledge."  Such consciousness of ignorance was the proper
+wisdom of man.
+
+That can scarcely be a fiction.  His wholesome appeal then, everywhere,
+from what seems, to what really is, is a service to the Delphic god,
+the god of sanity.  To prove that the oracle had [83] been right after
+all, improbable as it seemed, in the signal honour it had put upon him,
+would be henceforward his proper business.  Committing him to a sort of
+ironical humility towards others, at times seemingly petty and prosaic,
+certainly very irritating, in regard to himself, in its source and
+motive, his business in life as he conceived it was nothing less than a
+divine possession.  He becomes therefore literally an enthusiast for
+knowledge, for the knowledge of man; such knowledge as by a right
+method of questioning, of self-questioning (the master's questioning
+being after all only a kind of mid-wife's assistance, according to his
+own homely figure) may be brought to birth in every human soul,
+concerning itself and its experience; what is real, and stable, in its
+apprehensions of Piety, Beauty, Justice, and the like, what is of
+dynamic quality in them, as conveying force into what one does or
+creates, building character, generating virtue.  Auto kath' hauto
+zêtein ti pot' estin aretê+--to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and
+by itself--there's the task.  And when we have found that, we shall
+know already, or easily get to know, everything else about and about
+it: "how we are to come by virtue," for instance.
+
+Well! largely by knowing, says naturally the enthusiast for knowledge.
+There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend--Mêden estin
+agathon ho ouk epistêmê periechei +--a strenuously [84] ascertained
+knowledge however, painfully adjusted to other forms of knowledge which
+may seem inconsistent with it, and impenetrably distinct from any kind
+of complaisant or only half-attentive conjecture.  "One and the same
+species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and
+through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic"*: it will
+be all this--the Virtue, for instance, which we must seek, as a hunter
+his sustenance, seek and find and never lose again, through a survey of
+all the many variable and merely relative virtues, which are but
+relative, that is to say, "to every several act, and to each period of
+life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us"--kath'
+hekastên tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hêlikiôn pros hekaston ergon, hekastô
+hêmôn --+ "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know
+what sort of a thing it is"--ho mê oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti
+eideiên;+ what its poiotêtes,+ its qualities, are?  "Do you suppose that
+one who does not know Meno, for example, at all, who he is, can know
+whether he is fair and rich and well-born, or the reverse of all that?"
+Yes! already for Socrates, we might say, to know what justice or Piety
+or Beauty really is, will be like the knowledge of a person; only that,
+as Aristotle carefully notes, his scrupulous habit of search for
+universal, or catholic, definitions (kath' holou)+ was after all but
+[85] an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts.  Strange! out of
+the practical cautions of Socrates for the securing of clear and
+correct and sufficient conceptions about one's actual experience, for
+the attainment of a sort of thoroughly educated common-sense, came the
+mystic intellectualism of Plato--Platonism, with all its hazardous
+flights of soul.
+
+A rich contributor to the philosophic consciousness of Plato, Socrates
+was perhaps of larger influence still on the religious soul in him.  As
+Plato accepted from the masters of Elea the theoretic principles of all
+natural religion--the principles of a reasonable monotheism, so from
+Socrates he derived its indispensable morality.  It was Socrates who
+first of pagans comprised in one clear consciousness the authentic
+rudiments of such natural religion, and gave them clear utterance.
+Through him, Parmenides had conveyed to Plato the notion of a  "Perfect
+Being," to brace and satisfy the abstracting intellect; but it was from
+Socrates himself Plato had learned those correspondent practical
+pieties, which tranquillise and re-assure the soul, together with the
+genial hopes which cheer the great teacher on the day of his death.
+
+Loyal to the ancient beliefs, the ancient usages, of the religion of
+many gods which he had found all around him, Socrates pierces through
+it to one unmistakable person, of perfect intelligence, power and
+goodness, who takes note [86] of him.  In the course of his seventy
+years he has adjusted that thought of the invisible to the general
+facts and to many of the subtler complexities of man's experience in
+the world of sight.  Sitivit anima mea, the Athenian philosopher might
+say, in Deum, in Deum vivum, as he was known at Sion.  He has at least
+measured devoutly the place, this way and that, which a religion of
+infallible authority must fill; has already by implication concurred in
+it; and in fact has his reward at this depressing hour, as the action
+of the poison mounts slowly to the centre of his material existence.
+He is more than ready to depart to what before one has really crossed
+their threshold must necessarily seem the cold and empty spaces of the
+world no bodily eye can ever look on.
+
+But, he is asked, if the prospect be indeed so cheerful, at all events
+for the just, why is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death
+must be by self-destruction?--Tois anthrôpois, mê hosion einai, autous
+heatous eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergetên.+  His consistent
+piety straightway suggests the solution of that paradox: we are the
+property, slaves, of the gods.  Now no slave has any sort of right to
+destroy himself; to take a life that does not really belong to him.
+Comfort himself and his friends, however, as he may, it does tax all
+his resources of moral and physical courage to do what is at last
+required of him: and it was something quite new, unseen [87] before in
+Greece, inspiring a new note in literature--this attitude of Socrates
+in the condemned cell, where, fulfilling his own prediction,
+multitudes, of a wisdom and piety, after all, so different from his,
+have ever since assisted so admiringly, this anticipation of the
+Christian way of dying for an opinion, when, as Plato says simply, he
+consumed the poison in the prison--to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtêriô.+
+It was amid larger consolations, we must admit, that Christian heroes
+did that kind of thing.  But bravery, you need hardly be reminded, was
+ever one of the specially characteristic virtues of the pagan world--
+loyalty even unto death.  It had been loyalty however hitherto to one's
+country, one's home in the world, one's visible companions; not to a
+wholly invisible claimant, in this way, upon one, upon one's self.
+
+Socrates, with all his singleness of purpose, had been, as Alcibiades
+suggested, by natural constitution a twofold power, an embodied
+paradox.  The infinitely significant Socrates of Plato, and the quite
+simple Socrates of Xenophon, may have been indeed the not incompatible
+oppositions of a nature, from the influence of which, as a matter of
+fact, there emerged on one hand the Cynic, on the other the Cyrenaic
+School, embodying respectively those opposed austerities and amenities
+of character, which, according to the temper of this or that disciple,
+had seemed to predominate in their common master.  And so the courage
+which declined to act as almost [88] any one else would have acted in
+that matter of the legal appeal which might have mitigated the penalty
+of death, bringing to its appropriate end a life whose main power had
+been an unrivalled independence, was contrasted in Socrates,
+paradoxically, with a genuine diffidence about his own convictions
+which explains some peculiarities in his manner of teaching.  The
+irony, the humour, for which he was famous--the unfailing humour which
+some have found in his very last words--were not merely spontaneous
+personal traits, or tricks of manner; but an essential part of the
+dialectical apparatus, as affording a means of escape from
+responsibility, convenient for one who has scruples about the fitness
+of his own thoughts for the reception of another, doubts as to the
+power of words to convey thoughts, such as he thinks cannot after all
+be properly conveyed to another, but only awakened, or brought to birth
+in him, out of himself,--who can tell with what distortions in that
+secret place?  For we judge truth not by the intellect exclusively, and
+on reasons that can be adequately embodied in propositions; but with
+the whole complex man.  Observant therefore of the capricious results
+of mere teaching, to the last he protests, dissemblingly, and with that
+irony which is really one phase of the Socratic humour, that in his
+peculiar function there have been in very deed neither teacher nor
+learners.
+
+[89] The voice, the sign from heaven, that "new deity" he was accused
+of fabricating (his singularly profound sense of a mental phenomenon
+which is probably not uncommon) held perhaps of the same characteristic
+habit of mind.  It was neither the playful pretence which some have
+supposed; nor yet an insoluble mystery; but only what happens naturally
+to a really diffident spirit in great and still more in small matters
+which at this or that taxing moment seem to usurp the determination of
+great issues.  Such a spirit may find itself beset by an inexplicable
+reluctance to do what would be most natural in the given circumstances.
+And for a religious nature, apt to trace the divine assistance
+everywhere, it was as if, in those perilous moments--well! as if one's
+guardian angel held one back.  A quite natural experience took the
+supernatural hue of religion; which, however, as being concerned now
+and then with some circumstance in itself trifling, might seem to lapse
+at times into superstition.
+
+And as he was thus essentially twofold in character, so Socrates had to
+contend against two classes of enemies.  "An offence" to the whole
+tribe of Sophists, he was hated also by those who hated them, by the
+good old men of Athens, whose conservatism finds its representative in
+Aristophanes, and who saw in the Socratic challenge of first
+principles, in that ceaseless testing of the origin and claims of what
+all [90] honest people might seem to take for granted, only a further
+development of the pernicious function of the Sophists themselves, by
+the most subtly influential of them all.  If in the Apology he proves
+that the fathers of sons had no proper locus standi against him, still,
+in the actual conduct of his defence, as often in Plato's Dialogues,
+there is (the candid reader cannot but admit it) something of
+sophistry, of the casuist.  Claiming to be but a simple argument, the
+Apology of Socrates moves sometimes circuitously, after the manner of
+one who really has to make the worse appear the better reason (ton
+hêttô logon kreittô poiein)+ and must needs use a certain kind of
+artificial, or ingenious, or ad captandum arguments, such as would best
+have been learned in the sophistic school.  Those young Athenians whom
+he was thought to have corrupted of set purpose, he had not only
+admired but really loved and understood; and as a consequence had
+longed to do them real good, chiefly by giving them that interest in
+themselves which is the first condition of any real power over others.
+To make Meno, Polus, Charmides, really interested in himself, to help
+him to the discovery of that wonderful new world here at home--in this
+effort, even more than in making them interested in other people and
+things, lay and still lies (it is no sophistical paradox!) the central
+business of education.  Only, the very thoroughness of the sort of
+self-knowledge he [91] promoted had in it something sacramental, so to
+speak; if it did not do them good, must do them considerable harm;
+could not leave them just as they were.  He had not been able in all
+cases to expand  "the better self," as people say, in those he
+influenced.  Some of them had really become very insolent questioners
+of others, as also of a wholly legitimate authority within themselves;
+and had but passed from bad to worse.  That fatal necessity had been
+involved of coming to years of discretion.  His claim to have been no
+teacher at all, to be irresponsible in regard to those who had in truth
+been his very willing disciples, was but humorous or ironical; and as a
+consequence there was after all a sort of historic justice in his
+death.
+
+     The fate of Socrates (says Hegel, in his peculiar manner) is
+     tragic in the essential sense, and not merely in that super-
+     ficial sense of the word according to which every misfortune
+     is called 'tragic.'  In the latter sense, one might say of
+     Socrates that because he was condemned to death unjustly his
+     fate was tragic.  But in truth innocent suffering of that sort
+     is merely pathetic, not tragic; inasmuch as it is not within
+     the sphere of reason.  Now suffering--misfortune--comes within
+     the sphere of reason, only if it is brought about by the free-
+     will of the subject, who must be entirely moral and justifiable;
+     as must be also the power against which that subject proceeds.
+     This power must be no merely natural one, nor the mere will of
+     a tyrant; because it is only in such case that the man is himself,
+     so to speak, guilty of his misfortune.  In genuine tragedy, then,
+     they must be powers both alike moral and justifiable, which, from
+     this side and from that, come into collision; and such was the
+     fate of Socrates.  His fate therefore is not merely personal, and
+     as it were part of the romance of an individual: [92] it is the
+     general fate, in all its tragedy--the tragedy of Athens, of
+     Greece, which is therein carried out.  Two opposed Rights come
+     forth: the one breaks itself to pieces against the other: in this
+     way, both alike suffer loss; while both alike are justified the
+     one towards the other: not as if this were right; that other
+     wrong.  On the one side is the religious claim, the unconscious
+     moral habit: the other principle, over against it, is the equally
+     religious claim--the claim of the consciousness, of the reason,
+     creating a world out of itself, the claim to eat of the tree of
+     the knowledge of good and evil.  The latter remains the common
+     principle of philosophy for all time to come.  And these are the
+     two principles which come forth over against each other, in the
+     life and in the philosophy of Socrates.  Geschichte der
+     Philosophie, vol. ii. p. 102.
+
+"I can easily conceive Socrates in the place of Alexander," says
+Montaigne, again, "but Alexander in the place of Socrates I cannot";
+and we may take that as typical of the immense credit of Socrates, even
+with a vast number of people who have not really known much about him.
+"For the sake of no long period of years," says Socrates himself, now
+condemned to death--the few years for which a man of seventy is likely
+to remain here--
+
+     You will have a name, Men of Athens! and liability to reproach
+     from those who desire to malign the city of Athens--that ye put
+     Socrates to death, a wise man.  For in very truth they will
+     declare me to have been wise--those who wish to discredit you--
+     even though I be not.  Now had you waited a little while this
+     thing would have happened for you in the course of nature.  For
+     ye see my estate: that it is now far onward on the road of life,
+     hard by death.  Apology, 38.
+
+Plato, though present at the trial, was absent when Socrates "consumed
+the poison in the [93] prison."  Prevented by sickness, as Cebes tells
+us in the Phaedo, Plato would however almost certainly have heard from
+him, or from some other of that band of disciples who assisted at the
+last utterances of their master, the sincerest possible account of all
+that was then said and done.  Socrates had used the brief space which
+elapsed before the officers removed him to the place, "whither he must
+go, to die" (hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai)+ to discourse with those who
+still lingered in the court precisely on what are called "The four last
+things."  Arrived at the prison a further delay awaited him, in
+consequence (it was so characteristic of the Athenian people!) of a
+religious scruple.  The ship of sacred annual embassy to Apollo at
+Delos was not yet returned to Athens; and the consequent interval of
+time might not be profaned by the death of a criminal.  Socrates
+himself certainly occupies it religiously enough by a continuation of
+his accustomed discourses, touched now with the deepening solemnity of
+the moment.
+
+The Phaedo of Plato has impressed most readers as a veritable record of
+those last discourses of Socrates; while in the details of what then
+happened, the somewhat prosaic account there given of the way in which
+the work of death was done, we find what there would have been no
+literary satisfaction in inventing; his indifferent treatment, for
+instance, of the wife, who had not been very dutiful but was now in
+violent [94] distress--treatment in marked contrast, it must be
+observed again, with the dignified tenderness of a later scene, as
+recorded in the Gospels.
+
+An inventor, with mere literary effect in view, at this and other
+points would have invented differently.  "The prison," says Cebes, the
+chief disciple in the Phaedo, "was not far from the court-house; and
+there we were used to wait every day till we might be admitted to our
+master.  One morning we were assembled earlier than usual; for on the
+evening before we heard that the ship was returned from Delos.  The
+porter coming out bade us tarry till he should call us.  For, he said,
+the Eleven are now freeing Socrates from his bonds, announcing to him
+that he must die to-day."
+
+They were very young men, we are told, who were with Socrates, and how
+sweetly, kindly, approvingly, he listened to their so youthfully
+sanguine discussion on the immortality of the soul.  For their sakes
+rather than his own he is ready to treat further, by way of a
+posteriori arguments, a belief which in himself is matter of invincible
+natural prepossession.  In the court he had pleaded at the most for
+suspended judgment on that question:--"If I claimed on any point to be
+wiser than any one else it would be in this, that having no adequate
+knowledge  of things in Hades so I do not fancy I know."  But, in the
+privacy of these last hours, he is confident in his utterance on the
+[95] subject which is so much in the minds of the youths around him;
+his arguments like theirs being in fact very much of the nature of the
+things poets write (poiêmata)+ or almost like those medicinable fictions
+(pseudê en pharmakou eidei)+ such as are of legitimate use by the
+expert.  That the soul (beautiful Pythagorean thought!) is a harmony;
+that there are reasons why this particular harmony should not cease,
+like that of the lyre or the harp, with the destruction of the
+instrument which produced it; why this sort of flame should not go out
+with the upsetting of the lamp:--such are the arguments, sometimes
+little better than verbal ones, which pass this way and that around the
+death-bed of Socrates, as they still occur to men's minds.  For
+himself, whichever way they tend, they come and go harmlessly, about an
+immovable personal conviction, which, as he says, "came to me apart
+from demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness":
+(Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos, kai euprepeias).+  The
+formula of probability could not have been more aptly put.  It is one
+of those convictions which await, it may be, stronger, better,
+arguments than are forthcoming; but will wait for them with unfailing
+patience.--"The soul therefore Cebes," since such provisional arguments
+must be allowed to pass, "is something sturdy and strong (ischuron ti
+estin)+ imperishable by accident or wear; and we shall really exist in
+Hades."  Indulging a little [96] further the "poetry turned logic" of
+those youthful assistants, Socrates too, even Socrates, who had always
+turned away so persistently from what he thought the vanity of the eye,
+just before the bodily eye finally closes, and his last moment being
+now at hand, ascends to, or declines upon, the fancy of a quite visible
+paradise awaiting him.--
+
+     It is said that the world, if one gaze down on it from above,
+     is to look on like those leathern balls of twelve pieces,
+     variegated in divers colours, of which the colours here--those
+     our painters use--are as it were samples.  There, the whole
+     world is formed of such, and far brighter and purer than they;
+     part sea-purple of a wonderful beauty; a part like gold; a part
+     whiter than alabaster or snow; aye, composed thus of other
+     colours also of like quality, of greater loveliness than ours--
+     colours we have never seen.  For even those hollows in it, being
+     filled with air and water, present a certain species of colour
+     gleaming amid the diversity of the others; so that it presents
+     one continuous aspect of varied hues.  Thus it is: and conform-
+     ably tree and flower and fruit are put forth and grow.  The
+     mountains again and the rocks, after the same manner, have a
+     smoothness and transparency and colours lovelier than here.  The
+     tiny precious stones we prize so greatly are but morsels of
+     them--sards and jasper and emerald and the rest.  No baser kind
+     of thing is to be found in that world, but finer rather.  The
+     cause of which is that the rocks there are pure, not gnawed away
+     and corrupted like ours by rot and brine, through the moistures
+     which drain together here, bringing disease and deformity to
+     rocks and earth as well as to living things.  There are many
+     living creatures in the land besides men and women, some abiding
+     inland, and some on the coasts of the air, as we by the sea,
+     others in the islands amidst its waves; for, in a word, what the
+     water of the sea is to us for our uses, that the air is to them.
+     The blending of the seasons there is such that they have no
+     sickness and come to years more numerous far than ours: while
+     [97] for sight and scent and hearing and the like they stand as
+     far from us, as air from water, in respect of purity, and the
+     aether from air.  There are thrones moreover and temples of the
+     gods among them, wherein in very deed the gods abide; voices
+     and oracles and sensible apprehensions of them; and occasions
+     of intercourse with their very selves.  The sun, the moon and
+     the stars they see as they really are; and are blessed in all
+     other matters agreeably thereto.  Phaedo, 110.
+
+The great assertor of the abstract, the impalpable, the unseen, at any
+cost, shows there a mastery of visual expression equal to that of his
+greatest disciple.--Ah, good master! was the eye so contemptible an
+organ of knowledge after all?
+
+Plato was then about twenty-eight years old; a rich young man, rich
+also in intellectual gifts; and what he saw and heard from and about
+Socrates afforded the correction his opulent genius needed, and made
+him the most serious of writers.  In many things he was as unlike as
+possible to the teacher--rude and rough as some failure of his own old
+sculptor's workshop--who might seem in his own person to have broken up
+the harmonious grace of the Greek type, and carried people one step
+into a world already in reaction against the easy Attic temper, a world
+in which it might be necessary to go far below the surface for the
+beauty of which those homely lips had discoursed so much.  Perhaps he
+acted all the more surely as a corrective force on Plato, henceforward
+an opponent of the [98] obviously successful mental habits of the day,
+with an unworldliness which, a personal trait in Plato himself there
+acquired, will ever be of the very essence of Platonism.--"Many are
+called, but few chosen": Narthêkophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te
+pauroi.+  He will have, as readers of The Republic know, a hundred
+precepts of self-repression for others--the self-repression of every
+really tuneable member of a chorus; and he begins by almost effacing
+himself.  All that is best and largest in his own matured genius he
+identifies with his master; and when we speak of Plato generally what
+we are really thinking of is the Platonic Socrates.
+
+NOTES
+
+79. +Transliteration: epagôgê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+bringing on, to, or in . . . argument from induction."
+
+80. +Transliteration: peri physeôs historian.  E-text editor's
+translation: "inquiry into nature."  Plato, Phaedo 96a.
+
+81. +Transliteration: panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin.  Pater's
+translation: "arranges and is the cause of all things."  Plato, Phaedo
+97c, offers a close paraphrase of Anaxagoras' saying.
+
+83. +Transliteration: Auto kath' hauto zêtein ti pot' estin aretê.
+Pater's translation: "to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by
+itself."  Plato, Meno 100b.
+
+83. +Transliteration: Mêden estin agathon ho ouk epistêmê periechei.
+Pater's translation: "There is no good thing which knowledge does not
+comprehend."  Plato, Meno 87d.
+
+84. *Tauton pantachou eidos--holon kai hygies--hen kata pantôn, dia
+pantôn, epi pasi-kath' holou. Pater's translation: "One and the same
+species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and
+through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic."  Perhaps
+Pater is combining phrases here; only the first phrase was locatable.
+Plato, Meno 72d.
+
+84. +Transliteration: kath' hekastên tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hêlikiôn pros
+hekaston ergon, hekastô hêmôn.  Pater's translation: "to every several
+act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do,
+in each one of us."  Plato, Meno 72a.
+
+84. +Transliteration: ho mê oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti eideiên.
+Pater's translation: "That, about which I don't know what it is, how
+should I know what sort of a thing it is."  Plato, Meno 71b.
+
+84. +Transliteration: poiotêtes.  Pater's translation: "qualities."
+
+84. +Transliteration: kath' holou.  Pater's translation: "universal, or
+catholic, definitions;" the phrase might be translated, "in accordance
+with the whole."
+
+86. +Transliteration: Tois anthrôpois, mê hosion einai, autous heatous
+eupoiein, all' allon dei menein euergetên.  Pater's translation: "why
+is it forbidden to seize such an advantage as death must be by self-
+destruction."  Plato, Phaedo 62a.
+
+87. +Transliteration: to pharmakon epien en tô desmôtêriô.  Pater's
+translation: "he consumed the poison in the prison."  Plato, Phaedo
+57a.
+
+90. +Transliteration: ton hêttô logon kreittô poiein.  Pater's
+translation: "to make the worse appear the better reason."  Plato,
+Apology 23d.
+
+93. +Transliteration: hoi elthonta me dei tethnanai.  Pater's
+translation: "whither he must go, to die."  The pronoun should be first
+person--"whither I must go."  Plato, Apology 39e.
+
+95. +Transliteration: poiêmata.  Liddell and Scott definition: "anything
+made or done . . . a poetical work."
+
+95. +Transliteration: pseudê en pharmakou eidei.  Pater's translation:
+"medicinable fictions."  Plato, Republic 389b contains a similar
+phrase.
+
+95. +Transliteration: Moi gegonen aneu apodeixeôs, meta eikotos tinos,
+kai euprepeias.  Pater's translation: "came to me apart from
+demonstration, with a sort of natural likelihood and fitness."  Plato,
+Phaedo 92c.
+
+95. +Transliteration: ischuron ti estin.  Pater's translation: "is
+something sturdy and strong."  Plato, Phaedo 95c.
+
+98. +Transliteration: Narthêkophoroi men polloi, bakchoi de te pauroi.
+Pater's translation: "Many are called, but few chosen."  Plato, Phaedo,
+69c.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 5: PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
+
+[99] "SOPHIST," professional enemy of Socrates:--it became, chiefly
+through the influence of Plato, inheriting, expanding, the preferences
+and antipathies of his master, a bad name.  Yet it had but indicated,
+by a quite natural verbal formation, the class of persons through whom,
+in the most effectual manner, supply met demand, the demand for
+education, asserted by that marvellously ready Greek people, when the
+youthful mind in them became suddenly aware of the coming of virile
+capacity, and they desired to be made by rules of art better speakers,
+better writers and accountants, than any merely natural, unassisted
+gifts, however fortunate, could make them.  While the peculiar
+religiousness of Socrates had induced in him the conviction that he was
+something less than a wise man, a philosopher only, a mere seeker after
+such wisdom as he might after all never attain, here were the
+sophistai,+ the experts--wise men, who proposed to make other people as
+wise as themselves, wise in that sort of wisdom [100] regarding which
+we can really test others, and let them test us, not with the merely
+approximate results of the Socratic method, but with the exactness we
+may apply to processes understood to be mechanical, or to the
+proficiency of quite young students (such as in fact the Sophists were
+dealing with) by those examinations which are so sufficient in their
+proper place.  It had been as delightful as learning a new game, that
+instruction, in which you could measure your daily progress by
+brilliant feats of skill.  Not only did the parents of those young
+students pay readily large sums for their instruction in what it was
+found so useful to know, above all in the art of public speaking, of
+self-defence, that is to say, in democratic Athens where one's personal
+status was become so insecure; but the young students themselves felt
+grateful for their institution in what told so immediately on their
+fellows; for help in the comprehension of the difficult sentences of
+another, or the improvement of one's own; for the accomplishments which
+enabled them in that busy competitive world to push their fortunes each
+one for himself a little further, and quite innocently.  Of course they
+listened.
+
+"Love not the world!"--that, on the other hand, was what Socrates had
+said, or seemed to say; though in truth he too meant only to teach them
+how by a more circuitous but surer way to [101] possess themselves of
+it.  And youth, naturally curious and for the most part generous,
+willing to undergo much for the mere promise of some good thing it can
+scarcely even imagine, had been ready to listen to him too; the sons of
+rich men most often, by no means to the dissatisfaction of Socrates
+himself, though he never touched their money; young men who had amplest
+leisure for the task of perfecting their souls, in a condition of
+religious luxury, as we should perhaps say.  As was evident in the
+court-house at the trial of the great teacher, to the eyes of older
+citizens who had not come under his personal influence, there had been
+little to distinguish between Socrates and his professional rivals.
+Socrates in truth was a Sophist; but more than a Sophist.  Both alike
+handled freely matters that to the fathers had seemed beyond question;
+encouraged what seemed impious questioning in the sons; had set "the
+hearts of the sons against the fathers"; and some instances there were
+in which the teaching of Socrates had been more conspicuously ruinous
+than theirs.  "If you ask people at Athens," says Socrates in the Meno,
+"how virtue is to be attained, they will laugh in your face and say
+they don't so much as know what virtue is."  And who was responsible
+for that?  Certainly that Dialogue, proposing to discover the essential
+nature of virtue, by no means re-establishes one's old prepossessions
+about it in the vein of [102] Simonides, or Pindar, or one's elders.
+Sophist, and philosopher; Protagoras, and Socrates; so far, their
+effect was the same:--to the horror of fathers, to put the minds of the
+sons in motion regarding matters it were surely best to take as settled
+once and for ever.  What then after all was the insuperable difference
+between Socrates and those rival teachers, with whom he had
+nevertheless so much in common, bent like him so effectively, so
+zealously, on that new study of man, of human nature and the moral
+world, to the exclusion of all useless "meteoric or subterranean
+enquiries" into things.  As attractive as himself to ingenuous youth,
+uncorrupt surely in its early intentions, why did the Sophists seem to
+Socrates to be so manifestly an instrument of its corruption?
+
+"The citizen of Athens," observed that great Athenian statesman of the
+preceding age, in whom, as a German philosopher might say, the mobile
+soul of Athens became conscious,--"The citizen of Athens seems to me to
+present himself in his single person to the greatest possible variety
+(pleista eidê)+ of thought and action, with the utmost degree of
+versatility."  As we saw, the example of that mobility, that daring
+mobility, of character has seemed to many the special contribution of
+the Greek people to advancing humanity.  It was not however of the
+Greek people in general that Pericles was speaking at the beginning of
+the Peloponnesian [103] war, but of Athens in particular; of Athens,
+that perfect flower of Ionian genius, in direct contrast to, and now in
+bitter rivalry with, Sparta, the perfect flower of the Dorian genius.
+All through Greek history, as we also saw, in connexion with Plato's
+opposition to the philosophy of motion, there may be traced, in every
+sphere of the activity of the Greek mind, the influence of those two
+opposing tendencies:--the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies,
+as we may perhaps not too fancifully call them.
+
+There is the centrifugal, the irresponsible, the Ionian or Asiatic,
+tendency; flying from the centre, working with little forethought
+straight before it in the development of every thought and fancy;
+throwing itself forth in endless play of undirected imagination;
+delighting in colour and brightness, moral or physical; in beautiful
+material, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in music, in
+architecture and its subordinate crafts, in philosophy itself.  In the
+social and political order it rejoices in the freest action of local
+and personal influences: its restless versatility drives it towards the
+assertion of the principles of individualism, of separatism--the
+separation of state from state, the maintenance of local religions, the
+development of the individual in that which is most peculiar and
+individual in him.  Shut off land-wards from the primitive sources of
+those many elements it was to compose anew, shut off from all the rest
+of the world, to [104] which it presented but one narrow entrance
+pierced through that rock of Tempe, so narrow that "in the opinion of
+the ancients it might be defended by a dozen men against all comers,"
+it did recompose or fuse those many diverse elements into one
+absolutely original type.  But what variety within!  Its very claim was
+in its grace of movement, its freedom and easy happiness, its lively
+interests, the variety of its gifts to civilisation; but its weakness
+is self-evident, and was what had made the political unity of Greece
+impossible.  The Greek spirit!--it might have become a hydra, to use
+Plato's own figure, a monster; the hand developing hideously into a
+hundred hands, or heads.
+
+This inorganic, this centrifugal, tendency, Plato was desirous to cure
+by maintaining over against it the Dorian influence of a severe
+simplification everywhere, in society, in culture, in the very physical
+nature of man.  An enemy everywhere, though through acquired principle
+indeed rather than by instinct, to variegation, to what is cunning, or
+"myriad-minded" (as we say of Shakespeare, as Plato thinks of Homer) he
+sets himself in mythology, in literature, in every kind of art, in the
+art of life, as if with conscious metaphysical opposition to the
+metaphysic of Heraclitus, to enforce the ideal of a sort of Parmenidean
+abstractness, and monotony or calm.
+
+This, perhaps exaggerated, ideal of Plato is [105] however only the
+exaggeration of that salutary, strictly European tendency, which,
+finding human mind, the human reason cool and sane, to be the most
+absolutely real and precious thing in the world, enforces everywhere
+the impress of its reasonable sanity; its candid reflexions upon things
+as they really are; its sense of logical proportion.  It is that
+centripetal tendency, again, which links the individual units together,
+states to states, one period of organic growth to another, under the
+reign of a strictly composed, self-conscious order, in the universal
+light of the understanding.
+
+Whether or not this temper, so clearly traceable as a distinct rival
+influence in the course of Greek development, was indeed the peculiar
+gift of the Dorian race, certainly that race, as made known to us
+especially in Lacedaemon, is the best illustration of it, in its love
+of order, of that severe composition everywhere, of which the Dorian
+style of architecture is as it were a material symbol, in its constant
+aspiration after what is dignified and earnest, as exemplified most
+evidently in the religion of its preference, the religion of Apollo.
+
+Now the key to Plato's view of the Sophists, Gorgias, Protagoras,
+Hippias, Prodicus, with their less brilliant followers--chosen
+educators of the public--is that they do but fan and add fuel to the
+fire in which Greece, as they wander [106] like ardent missionaries
+about it, is flaming itself away.  Teaching in their large,
+fashionable, expensive schools, so triumphantly well, the arts one
+needed most in so busy an age, they were really developing further and
+reinforcing the ruinous fluidity of the Greek, and especially of the
+Athenian people, by turning it very adroitly into a conscious method, a
+practical philosophy, an art of life itself, in which all those
+specific arts would be but subsidiary--an all-supplementing ars artium,
+a master-art, or, in depreciatory Platonic mood one might say, an
+artifice, or, cynically, a trick.  The great sophist was indeed the
+Athenian public itself, Athens, as the willing victim of its own gifts,
+its own flamboyancy, well-nigh worn out now by the mutual friction of
+its own parts, given over completely to hazardous political experiment
+with the irresponsibility which is ever the great vice of democracy,
+ever ready to float away anywhither, to misunderstand, or forget, or
+discredit, its own past.--
+
+     Or do you too hold like the many (asks Socrates in the sixth
+     book of The Republic) that a certain number are corrupted
+     by sophists in their youth; and that certain sophists,
+     irresponsible persons, corrupt them to any extent worth noting;
+     and not rather that those who say these things are the greatest
+     sophists; that they train to perfection, and turn out both old
+     and young, men and women, just as they choose them to be?--When,
+     pray?  He asked.--When seated together in their thousands at the
+     great assemblies, or in the law-courts, or the theatres, or the
+     camp, or any other common gathering of the public, with much
+     noise the majority praise this and blame [107] that in what is
+     said and done, both alike in excess, shouting and clapping; and
+     the very rocks too and the place in which they are, echoing
+     around, send back redoubled that clamour of praise and blame.
+     In such case, what heart as they say, what heart, think you,
+     can the young man keep? or what private education he may have
+     had hold out for him that it be not over-flooded by praise or
+     blame like that, and depart away, borne down the stream,
+     whithersoever that may carry it, and that he pronounce not
+     the same thing as they fair or foul; and follow the same ways
+     as they; and become like them?  Republic, 492.+
+
+The veritable sophist then, the dynamic sophist, was the Athenian
+public of the day; those ostensible or professional Sophists being not
+so much its intellectual directors as the pupils or followers of it.
+They did but make it, as the French say, abound the more in its own
+sense, like the keeper (it is Plato's own image) of some wild beast,
+which he knows how to command by a well-considered obedience to all its
+varying humours.  If the Sophists are partly the cause they are still
+more the effect of the social environment.  They had discovered, had
+ascertained with much acuteness, the actual momentum of the society
+which maintained them, and they meant only, by regulating, to maintain
+it.  Protagoras, the chief of Sophists, had avowedly applied to ethics
+the physics or metaphysics of Heraclitus.  And now it was as if the
+disintegrating Heraclitean fire had taken hold on actual life, on men's
+very thoughts, on the emotions and the will.
+
+That so faulty natural tendency, as Plato holds [108] it to be, in the
+world around them, they formulate carefully as its proper conscious
+theory: a theory how things must, nay, ought, to be.  "Just that," they
+seem to say--"Just that versatility, that mutable spirit, shall become
+by adoption the child of knowledge, shall be carefully nurtured,
+brought to great fortune.  We'll make you, and your thoughts, as fluid,
+as shifty, as things themselves: will bring you, like some perfectly
+accomplished implement, to this carrière ouverte, this open quarry, for
+the furtherance of your personal interests in the world."  And if old-
+fashioned principle or prejudice be found in the way, who better than
+they could instruct one, not how to minimise, or violate it--that was
+not needed, nor perhaps desirable, regarding what was so useful for the
+control of others--not that; but, to apply the intellectual solvent to
+it, in regard to one's self?  "It will break up,--this or that ethical
+deposit in your mind, Ah! very neatly, very prettily, and disappear,
+when exposed to the action of our perfected method.  Of credit with the
+vulgar as such, in the solitary chamber of the aristocratic mind such
+presuppositions, prejudices or principles, may be made very soon to
+know their place."
+
+Yes! says Plato (for a moment we may anticipate what is at least the
+spirit of his answer) but there are some presuppositions after all,
+which it will make us very vulgar to have dismissed from us.  "There
+are moreover," [109] those others proceed to say, "teachers of
+persuasion (peithous didaskaloi)+ who impart skill in popular and
+forensic oratory; and so by fair means or by unfair we shall gain our
+ends."  It is with the dêmos,+ with the vulgar, insubordinate, tag-rag
+of one's own nature--how to rule that, by obeying it--that these
+professors of rhetoric begin.  They are still notwithstanding the only
+teachers of morals ingenuous Greece is aware of; and wisdom, as seems
+likely, "must die with them!"--
+
+     Some very small number then (says the Platonic Socrates) is
+     left, of those who in worthy fashion hold converse with
+     philosophy: either, it may be, some soul of in-born worth and
+     well brought up, to which it has happened to be exiled in a
+     foreign land, holding to philosophy by a tie of nature, and
+     through lack of those who will corrupt it; or when it may
+     chance that a great soul comes to birth in an insignificant
+     state, to the politics of which it gives no heed, because it
+     thinks them despicable: perhaps a certain fraction also, of
+     good parts, may come to philosophy from some other craft,
+     through a just contempt of that.  The bridle too of our
+     companion Theages has a restraining power.  For in the case
+     of Theages also, all the other conditions were in readiness
+     to his falling away from philosophy; but the nursing of his
+     sickly body, excluding him from politics, keeps him back.  Our
+     own peculiarity is not worth speaking of--the sign from heaven!
+     for I suppose it has occurred to scarce anyone before.  And so,
+     those who have been of this number, and have tasted how sweet
+     and blessed the possession is; and again, having a full view
+     of the folly of the many, and that no one, I might say, effects
+     any sound result in what concerns the state, or is an ally in
+     whose company one might proceed safe and sound to the help of
+     the just, but that, like a man falling among wild beasts,
+     neither willing to share their evil deeds, nor sufficient by
+     himself to resist the whole fierce band, flung away before he
+     shall have done any service [110] to the city or to his own
+     friends, he would become useless both to himself and to others:
+     taking all this into consideration, keeping silence and doing
+     his own business, as one standing aside under a hedge in some
+     storm of dust and spray beneath a driven wind, seeing those
+     about him replete with lawlessness, he is content if by any
+     means, pure from injustice and unholy deeds, himself shall
+     live through his life here, and in turn make his escape with
+     good hope, in cheerful and kindly mood.  (What long sentences
+     Plato writes!)  Yet in truth, he said, he would make his escape
+     after not the least of achievements.--Nor yet the greatest, I
+     observed, because he did not light upon the polity fitted for
+     him: for, in that fitting polity, himself will grow to
+     completer stature, and, together with what belongs to him, he
+     will be the saviour also of the commonwealth.  Republic, 496.+
+
+Over against the Sophists, and the age which has sophisticated them, of
+which they are the natural product, Plato, being himself of a genius
+naturally rich, florid, complex, excitable, but adding to the utmost
+degree of Ionian sensibility an effectual desire towards the Dorian
+order and askêsis, asserts everywhere the principle of outline, in
+political and moral life; in the education which is to fit men for it;
+in the music which is one half of that education, in the philosophy
+which is its other half--the "philosophy of the ideas," of those
+eternally fixed outlines of our thought, which correspond to, nay, are
+actually identical with, the eternally fixed outlines of things
+themselves.  What the difference (difference in regard to continuity
+and clearness) really is between the conditions of mind, in which
+respectively the sophistic process, and the genuinely philosophical or
+dialectic process, as [111] conceived by Plato, leave us, is well
+illustrated by the peculiar treatment of Justice, its proper definition
+or idea, in The Republic.  Justice (or Righteousness, as we say, more
+largely) under the light of a comprehensive experience of it,
+carefully, diligently, adjusted to the nature of man on the one hand,
+of society on the other, becomes in the fourth book of The Republic, to
+ta hautou prattein+--to ta hautou prattein.+  There, then, is the eternal
+outline of Righteousness or Justice as it really is, equally clear and
+indefectible at every point; a definition of it which can by no
+supposition become a definition of anything else; impenetrable, not to
+be traversed, by any possible definition of Injustice; securing an
+essential value to its possessor, independently of all falsities of
+appearance; and leaving justice, as it really is in itself, unaffected
+even by phenomena so misrepresentative of it as to deceive the very
+gods, or many good men, as happened pre-eminently in the case of
+Socrates.
+
+[112] Here then is the reply of the Platonic Socrates to the challenge
+that he should prove himself master of a more certain philosophy than
+that of the people, as represented by the old gnomic poet Simonides,
+"whom it is hard to disbelieve," (sophos gar kai theios anêr)+ on the
+one hand; than that of the Sophists on the other, as represented by
+Thrasymachus.  "Show us not only that justice is a better thing than
+Injustice; but, by doing what (alla ti poiousa)+ to the soul of its
+possessor, each of them respectively, in and by itself (hautê di'
+hautên)+ even if men and gods alike mistake it for its contrary, is
+still the one a good thing, the other a bad one."
+
+But note for a few moments the precise treatment of the idea of Justice
+in the first book of The Republic.  Sophistry and common sense are
+trying their best to apprehend, to cover or occupy, a certain space, as
+the exact area of Justice.  And what happens with each proposed
+definition in turn is, that it becomes, under conceivable
+circumstances, a definition of Injustice: not that, in practice, a
+confusion between the two is therefore likely; but that the intellect
+remains unsatisfied of the theoretic validity of the distinction.
+
+Now that intellectual situation illustrates the sense in which
+sophistry is a reproduction of the Heraclitean flux.  The old
+Heraclitean physical theory presents itself as a natural basis for the
+moral, the social, dissolution, which the sophistical [113] movement
+promotes.  But what a contrast to it, in the treatment of Justice, of
+the question, What Justice is? in that introductory book of The
+Republic.  The first book forms in truth an eristic, a destructive or
+negative, Dialogue (such as we have other examples of) in which the
+whole business might have concluded, prematurely, with an exposure of
+the inadequacy, alike of common-sense as represented by Simonides, and
+of a sophisticated philosophy as represented by Thrasymachus, to define
+Justice.  Note, however, in what way, precisely.  That it is Just, for
+instance, to restore what one owes (to ta opheilomena apodidonai)+ might
+pass well enough for a general guide to right conduct; and the
+sophistical judgment that Justice is "The interest of the stronger" is
+not more untrue than the contrary paradox that "Justice is a plot of
+the weak against the strong."
+
+It is, then, in regard to the claims of Justice, not so much on
+practice, as on the intellect, in its demand for a clear theory of
+practice, that those definitions fail.  They are failures because they
+fail to distinguish absolutely, ideally, as towards the intellect, what
+is, from what is not.  To Plato, for whom, constitutionally, and ex
+hypothesi, what can be clearly thought is the precise measure of what
+really is, if such a thought about Justice--absolutely inclusive and
+exclusive--is, after all our efforts, not to be ascertained, this can
+only be, because Justice is not [114] a real thing, but only an empty
+or confused name.
+
+Now the Sophist and the popular moralist, in that preliminary attempt
+to define the nature of Justice--what is right, are both alike trying,
+first in this formula, then in that, to occupy, by a thought, and by a
+definition which may convey that thought into the mind of another--to
+occupy, or cover, a certain area of the phenomena of experience, as the
+Just.  And what happens thereupon is this, that by means of a certain
+kind of casuistry, by the allegation of certain possible cases of
+conduct, the whole of that supposed area of the Just is occupied by
+definitions of Injustice, from this centre or that.  Justice therefore-
+-its area, the space of experience which it covers, dissolves away,
+literally, as the eye is fixed upon it, like Heraclitean water: it is
+and is not.  And if this, and the like of this, is to the last all that
+can be known or said of it, Justice will be no current coin, at least
+to the acute philosophic mind.  But has some larger philosophy perhaps
+something more to say of it? and the power of defining an area, upon
+which no definition of Injustice, in any conceivable case of act or
+feeling, can infringe?  That is the question upon which the essential
+argument of The Republic starts--upon a voyage of discovery.  It is
+Plato's own figure.
+
+There, clearly enough, may be seen what the difference, the difference
+of aim, between Socrates [115] and the Sophists really was, amid much
+that they had in common, as being both alike distinguished from that
+older world of opinion of which Simonides is the mouthpiece.
+
+The quarrel of Socrates with the Sophists was in part one of those
+antagonisms which are involved necessarily in the very conditions of an
+age that has not yet made up its mind; was in part also a mere rivalry
+of individuals; and it might have remained in memory only as a matter
+of historical interest.  It has been otherwise.  That innocent word
+"Sophist" has survived in common language, to indicate some constantly
+recurring viciousness, in the treatment of one's own and of other
+minds, which is always at variance with such habits of thought as are
+really worth while.  There is an every-day "sophistry," of course,
+against which we have all of us to be on our guard--that insincerity of
+reasoning on behalf of sincere convictions, true or false in themselves
+as the case may be, to which, if we are unwise enough to argue at all
+with each other, we must all be tempted at times.  Such insincerity
+however is for the most part apt to expose itself.  But there is a more
+insidious sophistry of which Plato is aware; and against which he
+contends in the Protagoras, and again still more effectively in the
+Phaedrus; the closing pages of which discover the essential point of
+that famous quarrel between the Sophists and Socrates or Plato, in
+regard to a matter which is [116] of permanent interest in itself, and
+as being not directly connected with practical morals is unaffected by
+the peculiar prejudices of that age.  Art, the art of oratory, in
+particular, and of literary composition,--in this case, how one should
+write or speak really inflammatory discourses about love, write love-
+letters, so to speak, that shall really get at the heart they're meant
+for--that was a matter on which the Sophists had thought much
+professionally.  And the debate introduced in the Phaedrus regarding
+the secret of success in proposals of love or friendship turns properly
+on this: whether it is necessary, or even advantageous, for one who
+would be a good orator, or writer, a poet, a good artist generally, to
+know, and consciously to keep himself in contact with, the truth of his
+subject as he knows or feels it; or only with what other people,
+perhaps quite indolently, think, or suppose others to think, about it.
+And here the charge of Socrates against those professional teachers of
+the art of rhetoric comes to be, that, with much superficial aptitude
+in the conduct of the matter, they neither reach, nor put others in the
+way of reaching, that intellectual ground of things (of the
+consciousness of love for instance, when they are to open their lips,
+and presumably their souls, about that) in true contact with which
+alone can there be a real mastery in dealing with them.  That you
+yourself must have an inward, carefully ascertained, measured,
+instituted hold [117] over anything you are to convey with any real
+power to others, is the truth which the Platonic Socrates, in strongly
+convinced words, always reasonable about it, formulates, in opposition
+to the Sophists' impudently avowed theory and practice of the
+superficial, as such.  Well! we all always need to be set on our guard
+against theories which flatter the natural indolence of our minds.
+
+"We proposed then just now," says Socrates in the Phaedrus, "to
+consider the theory of the way in which one would or would not write or
+speak well."--"Certainly!"--"Well then, must there not be in those who
+are to speak meritoriously, an understanding well acquainted with the
+truth of the things they are to speak about?"--"Nay!" answers Phaedrus,
+in that age of sophistry, "It is in this way I have heard about it:--
+that it is not necessary for one who would be a master of rhetoric to
+learn what really is just, for instance; but rather what seems just to
+the multitude who are to give judgment: nor again what is good or
+beautiful; but only what seems so to them.  For persuasion comes of the
+latter; by no means of a hold upon the truth of things."
+
+Whether or not the Sophists were quite fairly chargeable with that sort
+of "inward lie," just this, at all events, was in the judgment of Plato
+the essence of sophistic vice.  With them [118] art began too
+precipitately, as mere form without matter; a thing of disconnected
+empiric rules, caught from the mere surface of other people's
+productions, in congruity with a general method which everywhere
+ruthlessly severed branch and flower from its natural root--art from
+one's own vivid sensation or belief.  The Lacedaemonian (ho Lakôn)+
+Plato's favourite scholar always, as having that infinite patience
+which is the note of a sincere, a really impassioned lover of anything,
+says, in his convinced Lacedaemonian way, that a genuine art of speech
+(tou legein etumos technê)+ unless one be in contact with truth, there
+neither is nor can be.  We are reminded of that difference between
+genuine memory, and mere haphazard recollection, noted by Plato in the
+story he tells so well of the invention of writing in ancient Egypt.--
+It might be doubted, he thinks, whether genuine memory was encouraged
+by that invention.  The note on the margin by the inattentive reader to
+"remind himself," is, as we know, often his final good-bye to what it
+should remind him of.  Now this is true of all art: Logôn ara technên,
+ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs, doxas te tethêreukôs, geloion tina kai
+atexnon parexetai.+ --It is but a kind of bastard art of mere words
+(texnê atexnos)+ that he will have who does not know the truth of
+things, but has tried to hunt out what other people think about it.
+"Conception," observed an intensely personal, deeply stirred, poet and
+artist of our own generation: [119] "Conception, fundamental brainwork,-
+-that is what makes the difference, in all art."
+
+Against all pretended, mechanically communicable rules of art then,
+against any rule of literary composition, for instance, unsanctioned by
+the facts, by a clear apprehension of the facts, of that experience,
+which to each one of us severally is the beginning, if it be not also
+the end, of all knowledge, against every merely formal dictate (their
+name is legion with practising Sophists of all ages) Peri brachylogias,
+kai eleeinologias, kai deinôseôs,+ concerning freedom or precision,
+figure, emphasis, proportion of parts and the like, exordium and
+conclusion:--against all such the Platonic Socrates still protests,
+"You know what must be known before harmony can be attained, but not
+yet the laws of harmony itself,"--ta pro tragôdias,+ Sophocles would
+object in like case, ta pro tragôdias, all' ou tragika.+  Given the
+dynamic Sophoclean intention or conviction, and the irresistible law of
+right utterance, (anankê logographikê)+ how one must write or speak,
+will make itself felt; will assuredly also renew many an old precept,
+as to how one shall write or speak, learned at school.  To speak pros
+doxan+ only, as towards mere unreasoned opinion, might do well enough in
+the law-courts with people, who (as is understood in that case) do not
+really care very much about justice itself, desire only that a friend
+should be acquitted, or an enemy convicted, irrespectively of it; but
+[120]
+
+For the essence of all artistic beauty is expression, which cannot be
+where there's really nothing to be expressed; the line, the colour, the
+word, following obediently, and with minute scruple, the conscious
+motions of a convinced intelligible soul.  To make men interested in
+themselves, as being the very ground of all reality for them, la vraie
+vérité, as the French say:--that was the essential function of the
+Socratic method: to flash light into the house within, its many
+chambers, its memories and associations, upon its inscribed and
+pictured walls.  Fully occupied there, as with his own essential
+business in his own home, the young man would become, of course,
+proportionately less interested, less meanly interested, in what was
+superficial, in the mere outsides, of other people and their
+occupations.  With the true artist indeed, with almost every expert,
+all knowledge, of almost every kind, tells, is attracted into, and duly
+charged with, the force of what [121] may be his leading apprehension.
+And as the special function of all speech as a fine art is the control
+of minds (psychagôgia)+ it is in general with knowledge of the soul of
+man--with a veritable psychology, with as much as possible as we can
+get of that--that the writer, the speaker, must be chiefly concerned,
+if he is to handle minds not by mere empiric routine, tribê monon, kai
+empeiria alla technê,+ but by the power of veritable fine art.  Now such
+art, such theory, is not "to be caught with the left hand," as the
+Greek phrase went; and again, chalepa ta kala.+  We have no time to hear
+in English Plato's clever specimens of the way in which people would
+write about love without success.  Let us rather hear himself on that
+subject, in his own characteristic mood of conviction.--
+
+     Try! she said (a certain Sibylline woman namely, from whose
+     lips Socrates in the Symposium is supposed to quote what follows)
+     Try to apply your mind as closely as possible to what I am going
+     to say.  For he who has been led thus far in the discipline of
+     love, beholding beautiful objects in the right order, coming now
+     towards the end of the doctrine of love, will on a sudden behold
+     a beauty wonderful in its nature:--that, Socrates! towards which
+     indeed the former exercises were all designed; being first of all
+     ever existent; having neither beginning nor end; neither growing
+     or fading away; and then, not beautiful in one way, unbeautiful
+     in another; beautiful now, but not then; beautiful in this
+     relation, unlovely in that; to some, but not to others.  Nor
+     again will that beauty appear to him to be beautiful as a face or
+     hands or anything else that belongs to the body; nor as any
+     kind of reasoning or science; nor as being resident in anything
+     else, as in a living creature or the earth or the sky or any
+     other [122] thing; but as being itself by itself, ever in a
+     single form with itself; all other beautiful things so
+     participating in it, that while they begin and cease to be, that
+     neither becomes more nor less nor suffers any other change.
+     Whenever, then, anyone, beginning from things here below, through
+     a right practice of love, ascending, begins to discern that other
+     beauty, he will almost have reached the end.  For this in truth
+     is the right method of proceeding towards the doctrine of love,
+     or of being conducted therein by another,--beginning from these
+     beautiful objects here below ever to be going up higher, with
+     that other beauty in view; using them as steps of a ladder;
+     mounting from the love of one fair person to the love of two;
+     and from the love of two to the love of all; and from the love
+     of beautiful persons to the love of beautiful employments--kala
+     epitêdeumata+ (that means being a soldier, or a priest, or a
+     scholar) and from the love of beautiful employments to the love
+     of beautiful kinds of knowledge; till he passes from degrees of
+     knowledge to that knowledge which is the knowledge of nothing
+     else save the absolute Beauty itself, and knows it at length as
+     in itself it really is.  At this moment of life, dear Socrates!
+     said the Mantinean Sibyl, if at any moment, man truly lives,
+     beholding the absolute beauty--the which, so you have once seen
+     it, will appear beyond the comparison of gold, or raiment, or
+     those beautiful young persons, seeing whom now, like many another,
+     you are so overcome that you are ready, beholding those beautiful
+     persons and associating ever with them, if it were possible,
+     neither to eat nor drink but only to look into their eyes and
+     sit beside them.  What then, she asked, suppose we? if it were
+     given to any one to behold the absolute beauty, in its clearness,
+     its pureness, its unmixed essence; not replete with flesh and
+     blood and colours and other manifold vanity of this mortal life;
+     but if he were able to behold that divine beauty (monoeides)+
+     simply as it is.  Do you think, she said, that life would be a
+     poor thing to one whose eyes were fixed on that; seeing that,
+     (hô dei)+ with the organ through which it must be seen, and
+     communing with that?  Do you not think rather, she asked, that
+     here alone it will be his, seeing the beautiful with that through
+     which it may be seen (namely with the imaginative reason, ho
+     nous+) to beget no mere phantasms of virtue, as it is no phantom
+     he [123] apprehends, but the true virtue, as he embraces what is
+     true?  And having begotten virtue (virtue is the child that will
+     be born of this mystic intellectual commerce, or connubium,
+     of the imaginative reason with ideal beauty) and reared it, he
+     will become dear to God, and if any man may be immortal he will
+     be.  Symposium, 210.+
+
+The essential vice of sophistry, as Plato conceived it, was that for it
+no real things existed.  Real things did exist for Plato, things that
+were "an end in themselves"; and the Platonic Socrates was right:--
+Plato has written so well there, because he was no scholar of the
+Sophists as he understood them, but is writing of what he really knows.
+
+NOTES
+
+99. +Transliteration: sophistai.  Liddell and Scott definition: "at
+Athens, one who professed to make men wise."
+
+102. +Transliteration: pleista eidê.  Pater's translation: "the greatest
+possible variety."  Pater refers to the Funeral Oration given by
+Pericles to commemorate the Athenians who, to date, had died in the
+Peloponnesian War.  Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.41.1.
+
+107. +Plato, Republic 492.
+
+109. +Transliteration: peithous didaskaloi.  Pater's translation:
+"teachers of persuasion."  Plato, Republic 365d.
+
+109. +Transliteration: dêmos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "the common
+people."
+
+110. +Plato, Republic 496.
+
+111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein.  Pater's translation: "The
+doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein."  The
+translation elaborates on the original, but captures its meaning
+accurately.  Plato, Republic 433a-b.
+
+111. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein.  Pater's translation: "The
+doing, by every part . . . of its own proper business therein."  Plato,
+Republic 433a-b.
+
+112. +Transliteration: sophos gar kai theios anêr.  E-text editor's
+translation: "for he was a wise and excellent man."  Plato, Republic
+331e.
+
+112. +Transliteration: alla ti poiousa.  Pater's translation: "but, by
+doing what. . ."  Plato, Republic 367b.
+
+112. +Transliteration: hautê di' hautên.  Pater's translation: "in and
+by itself."  Plato, Republic 367e.
+
+113. +Transliteration: to ta opheilomena apodidonai.  Pater's
+translation: "to restore what one owes."  Plato, Republic 331e and
+332a.
+
+118. +Transliteration: ho Lakôn.  Liddell and Scott definition: "The
+Lacedaemonian [i.e., Spartan]."
+
+118. +Transliteration: tou legein etumos technê.  Pater's translation:
+"a genuine art of speech."  Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
+
+118. +Transliteration: Logôn ara technên, ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs,
+doxas te tethêreukôs, geloion tina kai atexnon parexetai.  E-text
+editor's translation: "In the art of speaking, therefore, the person
+who does not know the truth, who has sought out only the opinions of
+others, will come by nothing better than a kind of unskilled jesting."
+Plato, Phaedrus 262c.
+
+118. +Transliteration: texnê atexnos.  Pater's translation: "[a]
+bastard art of mere words."  Plato, Phaedrus 260e.
+
+119. +Transliteration: Peri brachylogias, kai eleeinologias, kai
+deinôseôs.  E-text editor's translation: "Concerning brevity, and
+speech that moves to pity, and exaggeration. . ."  Plato, Phaedrus
+272a.
+
+119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias.  E-text editor's translation:
+"the things before tragedy."  Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
+
+119. +Transliteration: ta pro tragôdias, all' ou tragika.  E-text
+editor's translation: "the things before tragedy, but not tragedy
+itself."  Plato, Phaedrus 269a.
+
+119. +Transliteration: anankê logographikê.  E-text editor's
+translation: "[the manner] required [in] prose-writing or speech-
+making."  Plato, Phaedrus 264b contains similar language.
+
+119. +Transliteration: pros doxan.  E-text editor's translation: "in
+accordance with received opinion."  Plato, Republic 362a, among other
+passages.
+
+121. +Transliteration: psychagôgia.  Pater's translation: "the control
+of minds."  The verb agô means "lead or drive."  Plato, Phaedrus 261a
+and 271c.
+
+121. +Transliteration: tribê monon, kai empeiria alla technê.  Pater's
+translation: "[not] by mere empiric routine, but by the power of
+veritable fine art."  Plato, Phaedrus 270b.
+
+121. +Transliteration: chalepa ta kala.  E-text editor's translation:
+"fine things are hard [to obtain]."  Plato, Republic 435c.
+
+122. +Transliteration: kala epitêdeumata.  Pater's translation:
+"beautiful employments."  Plato, Symposium 211c.
+
+122. +Transliteration: monoeides.  E-text editor's translation: "of one
+kind, simple."  Plato, Symposium 211a and 211e.
+
+122. +Transliteration: hô dei.  E-text editor's translation: "with what
+is necessary."  Plato, Symposium 212a.
+
+122. +Transliteration: ho nous.  Pater's translation: "imaginative
+reason."  The word nous or noos generally means "mind."  Plato,
+Symposium 210-212.
+
+123. +The passage Pater cites--Diotima's speech about love--runs from
+210-212a of the Symposium.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 6: THE GENIUS OF PLATO
+
+[124] ALL true criticism of philosophic doctrine, as of every other
+product of human mind, must begin with an historic estimate of the
+conditions, antecedent and contemporary, which helped to make it
+precisely what it was.  But a complete criticism does not end there.
+In the evolution of abstract doctrine as we find it written in the
+history of philosophy, if there is always, on one side, the fatal,
+irresistible, mechanic play of circumstance--the circumstances of a
+particular age, which may be analysed and explained; there is always
+also, as if acting from the opposite side, the comparatively
+inexplicable force of a personality, resistant to, while it is moulded
+by, them.  It might even be said that the trial-task of criticism, in
+regard to literature and art no less than to philosophy, begins exactly
+where the estimate of general conditions, of the conditions common to
+all the products of this or that particular age--of the "environment"--
+leaves off, and we touch what is unique in the individual genius [125]
+which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful
+way with that environment.  If in reading Plato, for instance, the
+philosophic student has to re-construct for himself, as far as
+possible, the general character of an age, he must also, so far as he
+may, reproduce the portrait of a person.  The Sophists, the Sophistical
+world, around him; his master, Socrates; the Pre-Socratic philosophies;
+the mechanic influence, that is to say, of past and present:--of course
+we can know nothing at all of the Platonic doctrine except so far as we
+see it in well-ascertained contact with all that; but there is also
+Plato himself in it.
+
+--A personality, we may notice at the outset, of a certain
+complication.  The great masters of philosophy have been for the most
+part its noticeably single-minded servants.  As if in emulation of
+Aristotle's simplicity of character, his absorbing intellectualism--
+impressive certainly, heroic enough, in its way--they have served
+science, science in vacuo, as if nothing beside, faith, imagination,
+love, the bodily sense, could detach them from it for an hour.  It is
+not merely that we know little of their lives (there was so little to
+tell!) but that we know nothing at all of their temperaments; of which,
+that one leading abstract or scientific force in them was in fact
+strictly exclusive.  Little more than intellectual abstractions
+themselves, in them [126] philosophy was wholly faithful to its
+colours, or its colourlessness; rendering not grey only, as Hegel said
+of it, but all colours alike, in grey.
+
+With Plato it was otherwise.  In him, the passion for truth did but
+bend, or take the bent of, certain ineradicable predispositions of his
+nature, in themselves perhaps somewhat opposed to that.  It is however
+in the blending of diverse elements in the mental constitution of Plato
+that the peculiar Platonic quality resides.  Platonism is in one sense
+an emphatic witness to the unseen, the transcendental, the non-
+experienced, the beauty, for instance, which is not for the bodily eye.
+Yet the author of this philosophy of the unseen was,--Who can doubt it
+who has read but a page of him? this, in fact, is what has led and kept
+to his pages many who have little or no turn for the sort of questions
+Plato actually discusses:--The author of this philosophy of the unseen
+was one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, "the
+visible world really existed."  Austere as he seems, and on well-
+considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity,
+aesthetically so winning, is attained only by the chastisement, the
+control, of a variously interested, a richly sensuous nature.  Yes, the
+visible world, so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then,
+really existed for him: exists still--there's the point!--is active
+still everywhere, when he seems to have turned away from it to
+invisible things.
+
+[127] To the somewhat sad-coloured school of Socrates, and its
+discipline towards apathy or contempt in such matters, he had brought
+capacities of bodily sense with the making in them of an Odyssey; or
+(shall we say?) of a poet after the order of Sappho or Catullus; as
+indeed also a practical intelligence, a popular management of his own
+powers, a skill in philosophic yet mundane Greek prose, which might
+have constituted him the most successful of Sophists.  You cannot help
+seeing that his mind is a storehouse of all the liveliest imageries of
+men and things.  Nothing, if it really arrests eye or ear at all, is
+too trivial to note.  Passing through the crowd of human beings, he
+notes the sounds alike of their solemn hymns and of their pettiest
+handicraft.  A conventional philosopher might speak of  "dumb matter,"
+for instance; but Plato has lingered too long in braziers' workshops to
+lapse into so stupid an epithet.  And if the persistent hold of
+sensible things upon him thus reveals itself in trifles, it is manifest
+no less in the way in which he can tell a long story,--no one more
+effectively! and again, in his graphic presentment of whole scenes from
+actual life, like that with which The Republic opens.  His Socrates,
+like other people, is curious to witness a new religious function: how
+they will do it.  As in modern times, it would be a pleasant occasion
+also for meeting the acquaintance one likes best-- Synesometha pollois
+[128] tôn neôn autothi.+  "We shall meet a number of our youth there: we
+shall have a dialogue: there will be a torchlight procession in honour
+of the goddess, an equestrian procession: a novel feature!--What?
+Torches in their hands, passed on as they race?  Aye, and an
+illumination, through the entire night.  It will be worth seeing!"--
+that old midnight hour, as Carlyle says of another vivid scene,
+"shining yet on us, ruddy-bright through the centuries."  Put alongside
+of that, and, for life-like charm, side by side with Murillo's Beggar-
+boys (you catch them, if you look at his canvas on the sudden, actually
+moving their mouths, to laugh and speak and munch their crusts, all at
+once) the scene in the Lysis of the dice-players.  There the boys are!
+in full dress, to take part in a religious ceremony.  It is scarcely
+over; but they are already busy with the knuckle-bones, some just
+outside the door, others in a corner.  Though Plato never tells one
+without due motive, yet he loves a story for its own sake, can make one
+of fact or fancy at a moment's notice, or re-tell other people's
+better: how those dear skinny grasshoppers of Attica, for instance, had
+once been human creatures, who, when the Muses first came on earth,
+were so absorbed by their music that they forgot even to eat and drink,
+till they died of it.  And then the story of Gyges in The Republic, and
+the ring that can make its wearer invisible: [129] --it goes as easily,
+as the ring itself round the finger.
+
+Like all masters of literature, Plato has of course varied excellences;
+but perhaps none of them has won for him a larger number of friendly
+readers than this impress of visible reality.  For him, truly (as he
+supposed the highest sort of knowledge must of necessity be) all
+knowledge was like knowing a person.  The Dialogue itself, being, as it
+is, the special creation of his literary art, becomes in his hands, and
+by his masterly conduct of it, like a single living person; so
+comprehensive a sense does he bring to bear upon it of the slowly-
+developing physiognomy of the thing--its organic structure, its
+symmetry and expression--combining all the various, disparate subjects
+of The Republic, for example, into a manageable whole, so entirely
+that, looking back, one fancies this long dialogue of at least three
+hundred pages might have occupied, perhaps an afternoon.
+
+And those who take part in it!  If Plato did not create the "Socrates"
+of his Dialogues, he has created other characters hardly less life-
+like.  The young Charmides, the incarnation of natural, as the aged
+Cephalus of acquired, temperance; his Sophoclean amenity as he sits
+there pontifically at the altar, in the court of his peaceful house;
+the large company, of varied character and of every age, which moves in
+those Dialogues, though still oftenest the young [130] in all their
+youthful liveliness:--who that knows them at all can doubt Plato's hold
+on persons, that of persons on him?  Sometimes, even when they are not
+formally introduced into his work, characters that had interested,
+impressed, or touched him, inform and colour it, as if with their
+personal influence, showing through what purports to be the wholly
+abstract analysis of some wholly abstract moral situation.  Thus, the
+form of the dying Socrates himself is visible pathetically in the
+description of the suffering righteous man, actually put into his own
+mouth in the second book of The Republic; as the winning brilliancy of
+the lost spirit of Alcibiades infuses those pages of the sixth, which
+discuss the nature of one by birth and endowments an aristocrat, amid
+the dangers to which it is exposed in the Athens of that day--the
+qualities which must make him, if not the saviour, the destroyer, of a
+society which cannot remain unaffected by his showy presence.
+Corruptio optimi pessima!  Yet even here, when Plato is dealing with
+the inmost elements of personality, his eye is still on its object, on
+character as seen in characteristics, through those details, which make
+character a sensible fact, the changes of colour in the face as of tone
+in the voice, the gestures, the really physiognomic value, or the mere
+tricks, of gesture and glance and speech.  What is visibly expressive
+in, or upon, persons; those flashes of temper which check yet give
+[131] renewed interest to the course of a conversation; the delicate
+touches of intercourse, which convey to the very senses all the
+subtleties of the heart or of the intelligence:--it is always more than
+worth his while to make note of these.
+
+We see, for instance, the sharp little pygmy bit of a soul that catches
+sight of any little thing so keenly, and makes a very proper lawyer.
+We see, as well as hear, the "rhapsodist," whose sensitive performance
+of his part is nothing less than an "interpretation" of it, artist and
+critic at once: the personal vanities of the various speakers in his
+Dialogues, as though Plato had observed, or overheard them, alone; and
+the inevitable prominence of youth wherever it is present at all,
+notwithstanding the real sweetness of manner and modesty of soul he
+records of it so affectionately.  It is this he loves best to linger
+by; to feel himself in contact with a condition of life, which
+translates all it is, so immediately, into delightful colour, and
+movement, and sound.  The eighth and ninth books of The Republic are a
+grave contribution, as you know, to abstract moral and political
+theory, a generalisation of weighty changes of character in men and
+states.  But his observations on the concrete traits of individuals,
+young or old, which enliven us on the way; the difference in sameness
+of sons and fathers, for instance; the influence of servants on their
+masters; how the minute ambiguities of rank, as a family becomes [132]
+impoverished, tell on manners, on temper; all the play of moral colour
+in the reflex of mere circumstance on what men really are:--the
+characterisation of all this has with Plato a touch of the peculiar
+fineness of Thackeray, one might say.  Plato enjoys it for its own
+sake, and would have been an excellent writer of fiction.
+
+There is plenty of humour in him also of course, and something of
+irony--salt, to keep the exceeding richness and sweetness of his
+discourse from cloying the palate.  The affectations of sophists, or
+professors, their staginess or their inelegance, the harsh laugh, the
+swaggering ways, of Thrasymachus, whose determination to make the
+general company share in a private conversation, is significant of his
+whole character, he notes with a finely-pointed pencil, with something
+of the fineness of malice,--malin, as the French say.  Once
+Thrasymachus had been actually seen to blush.  It is with a very
+different sort of fineness Plato notes the blushes of the young; of
+Hippocrates, for instance, in the Protagoras.  The great Sophist was
+said to be in Athens, at the house of Callicles, and the diligent young
+scholar is up betimes, eager to hear him.  He rouses Socrates before
+daylight.  As they linger in the court, the lad speaks of his own
+intellectual aspirations; blushes at his confidence.  It was just then
+that the morning sun blushed with his first beam, as if to reveal the
+lad's [133] blushing face.--Kai hos eipen erythriasas, êdê gar
+hypephaine ti êmeras ôste kataphanê auton genesthai.+  He who noted that
+so precisely had, surely, the delicacy of the artist, a fastidious eye
+for the subtleties of colour as soul made visibly expressive.  "Poor
+creature as I am," says the Platonic Socrates, in the Lysis, concerning
+another youthful blush, "Poor creature as I am, I have one talent: I
+can recognise, at first sight, the lover and the beloved."
+
+So it is with the audible world also.  The exquisite monotony of the
+voice of the great sophist, for example, "once set in motion, goes
+ringing on like a brazen pot, which if you strike it continues to sound
+till some one lays his hand upon it."  And if the delicacy of eye and
+ear, so also the keenness and constancy of his observation, are
+manifest in those elaborately wrought images for which the careful
+reader lies in wait: the mutiny of the sailors in the ship--ship of the
+state, or of one's own soul: the echoes and beams and shadows of that
+half-illuminated cavern, the human mind: the caged birds in the
+Theatetus, which are like the flighty, half-contained notions of an
+imperfectly educated understanding.  Real notions are to be ingrained
+by persistent thoroughness of the "dialectic" method, as if by
+conscientious dyers.  He makes us stay to watch such dyers busy with
+their purple stuff, as he had done; adding as it were ethic colour to
+what he sees with the eye, and [134] painting while he goes, as if on
+the margin of his high philosophical discourse, himself scarcely aware;
+as the monkish scribe set bird or flower, with so much truth of earth,
+in the blank spaces of his heavenly meditation.
+
+Now Plato is one for whom the visible world thus "really exists"
+because he is by nature and before all things, from first to last,
+unalterably a lover.  In that, precisely, lies the secret of the
+susceptible and diligent eye, the so sensitive ear.  The central
+interest of his own youth--of his profoundly impressible youth--as
+happens always with natures of real capacity, gives law and pattern to
+all that succeeds it.  Ta erôtika,+ as he says, the experience, the
+discipline, of love, had been that for Plato; and, as love must of
+necessity deal above all with visible persons, this discipline involved
+an exquisite culture of the senses.  It is "as lovers use," that he is
+ever on the watch for those dainty messages, those finer intimations,
+to eye and ear.  If in the later development of his philosophy the
+highest sort of knowledge comes to seem like the knowledge of a person,
+the relation of the reason to truth like the commerce of one person
+with another, the peculiarities of personal relationship thus moulding
+his conception of the properly invisible world of ideas, this is partly
+because, for a lover, the entire visible world, its hues and outline,
+its attractiveness, its power and bloom, must have associated
+themselves pre-eminently [135] with the power and bloom of visible
+living persons.  With these, as they made themselves known by word and
+glance and touch, through the medium of the senses, lay the forces,
+which, in that inexplicable tyranny of one person over another, shaped
+the soul.
+
+Just there, then, is the secret of Plato's intimate concern with, his
+power over, the sensible world, the apprehensions of the sensuous
+faculty: he is a lover, a great lover, somewhat after the manner of
+Dante.  For him, as for Dante, in the impassioned glow of his
+conceptions, the material and the spiritual are blent and fused
+together.  While, in that fire and heat, what is spiritual attains the
+definite visibility of a crystal, what is material, on the other hand,
+will lose its earthiness and impurity.  It is of the amorous temper,
+therefore, you must think in connexion with Plato's youth--of this,
+amid all the strength of the genius in which it is so large a
+constituent,--indulging, developing, refining, the sensuous capacities,
+the powers of eye and ear, of the fancy also which can re-fashion, of
+the speech which can best respond to and reproduce, their liveliest
+presentments.  That is why when Plato speaks of visible things it is as
+if you saw them.  He who in the Symposium describes so vividly the
+pathway, the ladder, of love, its joyful ascent towards a more perfect
+beauty than we have ever yet actually seen, by way of a parallel to the
+gradual elevation of mind towards perfect [136] knowledge, knew all
+that, we may be sure--ta erôtika +--hêttôn tôn kalôn +--subject to the
+influence of fair persons.  A certain penitential colour amid that glow
+of fancy and expression, hints that the final harmony of his nature had
+been but gradually beaten out, and invests the temperance, actually so
+conspicuous in his own nature, with the charms of a patiently
+elaborated effect of art.
+
+For we must remind ourselves just here, that, quite naturally also,
+instinctively, and apart from the austere influences which claimed and
+kept his allegiance later, Plato, with a kind of unimpassioned passion,
+was a lover in particular of temperance; of temperance too, as it may
+be seen, as a visible thing--seen in Charmides, say! in that subdued
+and grey-eyed loveliness, "clad in sober grey"; or in those youthful
+athletes which, in ancient marble, reproduce him and the like of him
+with sound, firm outlines, such as temperance secures.  Still, that
+some more luxurious sense of physical beauty had at one time greatly
+disturbed him, divided him against himself, we may judge from his own
+words in a famous passage of the Phaedrus concerning the management,
+the so difficult management, of [137] those winged steeds of the body,
+which is the chariot of the soul.
+
+Puzzled, in some degree, Plato seems to remain, not merely in regard to
+the higher love and the lower, Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemus,
+as he distinguishes them in the Symposium; nor merely with the
+difficulty of arbitrating between some inward beauty, and that which is
+outward; with the odd mixture everywhere, save in its still
+unapprehended but eternal essence, of the beautiful with what is
+otherwise; but he is yet more harassed by the experience (it is in this
+shape that the world-old puzzle of the existence of evil comes to him)
+that even to the truest eyesight, to the best trained faculty of soul,
+the beautiful would never come to seem strictly concentric with the
+good.  That seems to have taxed his understanding as gravely as it had
+tried his will,--and he was glad when in the mere natural course of
+years he was become at all events less ardent a lover.  'Tis he is the
+authority for what Sophocles had said on the happy decay of the
+passions as age advanced: it was "like being set free from service to a
+band of madmen."  His own distinguishing note is tranquil afterthought
+upon this conflict, with a kind of envy of the almost disembodied old
+age of Cephalus, who quotes that saying of Sophocles amid his placid
+sacrificial doings.  Connect with this quiet scene, and contrast with
+the luxuriant power of the Phaedrus and the Symposium, what, [138] for
+a certain touch of later mysticism in it, we might call Plato's evening
+prayer, in the ninth book of The Republic.--
+
+     When any one, being healthfully and temperately disposed
+     towards himself, turns to sleep, having stirred the reasonable
+     part of him with a feast of fair thoughts and high problems,
+     being come to full consciousness, himself with himself; and
+     has, on the other hand, committed the element of desire neither
+     to appetite, nor to surfeiting, to the end that this may slumber
+     well, and, by its pain or pleasure, cause no trouble to that
+     part which is best in him, but may suffer it, alone by itself,
+     in its pure essence, to behold and aspire towards some object,
+     and apprehend what it knows not--some event, of the past, it may
+     be, or something that now is, or will be hereafter; and in like
+     manner has soothed hostile impulse, so that, falling to no angry
+     thoughts against any, he goes not to rest with a troubled spirit,
+     but with those two parts at peace within, and with that third
+     part, wherein reason is engendered, on the move:--you know, I
+     think, that in sleep of this sort he lays special hold on truth,
+     and then least of all is there lawlessness in the visions of his
+     dreams.  Republic, 571.
+
+For Plato, being then about twenty-eight years old, had listened to the
+"Apology" of Socrates; had heard from them all that others had heard or
+seen of his last hours; himself perhaps actually witnessed those last
+hours.  "Justice itself "--the "absolute" Justice--had then become
+almost a visible object, and had greatly solemnised him.  The rich
+young man, rich also in intellectual gifts, who might have become (we
+see this in the adroit management of his written work) the most
+brilliant and effective of Sophists; who might have developed dialogues
+into plays, tragedy, perhaps comedy, as he cared; [139] whose sensuous
+or graphic capacity might have made him the poet of an Odyssey, a
+Sappho, or a Catullus, or, say! just such a poet as, just because he
+was so attractive, would have been disfranchised in the Perfect City;
+was become the creature of an immense seriousness, of a fully adult
+sense, unusual in Greek perhaps even more than in Roman writers, "of
+the weightiness of the matters concerning which he has to discourse,
+and of the frailty of man."  He inherits, alien as they might be to
+certain powerful influences in his own temper, alike the sympathies and
+the antipathies of that strange, delightful teacher, who had given him
+(most precious of gifts!) an inexhaustible interest in himself.  It is
+in this way he inherits a preference for those trying severities of
+thought which are characteristic of the Eleatic school; an antagonism
+to the successful Sophists of the day, in whom the old sceptical
+"philosophy of motion" seemed to be renewed as a theory of morals; and
+henceforth, in short, this master of visible things, this so ardent
+lover, will be a lover of the invisible, with--Yes! there it is
+constantly, in the Platonic dialogues, not to be explained away--with a
+certain asceticism, amid all the varied opulence, of sense, of speech
+and fancy, natural to Plato's genius.
+
+The lover, who is become a lover of the invisible, but still a lover,
+and therefore, literally, a seer, of it, carrying an elaborate
+cultivation of the bodily senses, of eye and ear, their natural [140]
+force and acquired fineness--gifts akin properly to ta erôtika,+ as he
+says, to the discipline of sensuous love--into the world of
+intellectual abstractions; seeing and hearing there too, associating
+for ever all the imagery of things seen with the conditions of what
+primarily exists only for the mind, filling that "hollow land" with
+delightful colour and form, as if now at last the mind were veritably
+dealing with living people there, living people who play upon us
+through the affinities, the repulsion and attraction, of persons
+towards one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of actual human
+friendship or love:--There, is the formula of Plato's genius, the
+essential condition of the specially Platonic temper, of Platonism.
+And his style, because it really is Plato's style, conforms to, and in
+its turn promotes in others, that mental situation.  He breaks as it
+were visible colour into the very texture of his work: his vocabulary,
+the very stuff he manipulates, has its delightful aesthetic qualities;
+almost every word, one might say, its figurative value.  And yet no one
+perhaps has with equal power literally sounded the unseen depths of
+thought, and, with what may be truly called "substantial" word and
+phrase, given locality there to the mere adumbrations, the dim hints
+and surmise, of the speculative mind.  For him, all gifts of sense and
+intelligence converge in one supreme faculty of theoretic vision,
+theôria,+ the imaginative reason.
+
+[141] To trace that thread of physical colour, entwined throughout, and
+multiplied sometimes into large tapestried figures, is the business,
+the enjoyment, of the student of the Dialogues, as he reads them.  For
+this or that special literary quality indeed we may go safely by
+preference to this or that particular Dialogue; to the Gorgias, for
+instance, for the readiest Attic wit, and a manly practical sense in
+the handling of philosophy; to the Charmides, for something like the
+effect of sculpture in modelling a person; to the Timaeus, for certain
+brilliant chromatic effects.  Yet who that reads the Theaetetus, or the
+Phaedrus, or the seventh book of The Republic, can doubt Plato's gift
+in precisely the opposite direction; that gift of sounding by words the
+depths of thought, a plastic power literally, moulding to term and
+phrase what might have seemed in its very nature too impalpable and
+abstruse to lend itself, in any case, to language?  He gives names to
+the invisible acts, processes, creations, of abstract mind, as
+masterly, as efficiently, as Adam himself to the visible living
+creations of old.  As Plato speaks of them, we might say, those
+abstractions too become visible living creatures.  We read the
+speculative poetry of Wordsworth, or Tennyson; and we may observe that
+a great metaphysical force has come into language which is by no means
+purely technical or scholastic; what a help such language is to the
+understanding, to a real hold over the things, the thoughts, the [142]
+mental processes, those words denote; a vocabulary to which thought
+freely commits itself, trained, stimulated, raised, thereby, towards a
+high level of abstract conception, surely to the increase of our
+general intellectual powers.  That, of course, is largely due to
+Plato's successor, to Aristotle's life-long labour of analysis and
+definition, and to his successors the Schoolmen, with their systematic
+culture of a precise instrument for the registration, by the analytic
+intellect, of its own subtlest movements.  But then, Aristotle, himself
+the first of the Schoolmen, had succeeded Plato, and did but formulate,
+as a terminology "of art," as technical language, what for Plato is
+still vernacular, original, personal, the product in him of an
+instinctive imaginative power--a sort of visual power, but causing
+others also to see what is matter of original intuition for him.
+
+From first to last our faculty of thinking is limited by our command of
+speech.  Now it is straight from Plato's lips, as if in natural
+conversation, that the language came, in which the mind has ever since
+been discoursing with itself concerning itself, in that inward
+dialogue, which is the "active principle" of the dialectic method as an
+instrument for the attainment of truth.  For, the essential, or
+dynamic, dialogue, is ever that dialogue of the mind with itself, which
+any converse with Socrates or Plato does but promote.  The very words
+of Plato, then, [143] challenge us straightway to larger and finer
+apprehension of the processes of our own minds; are themselves a
+discovery in the sphere of mind.  It was he made us freemen of those
+solitary places, so trying yet so attractive: so remote and high, they
+seem, yet are naturally so close to us: he peopled them with
+intelligible forms.  Nay more!  By his peculiar gift of verbal
+articulation he divined the mere hollow spaces which a knowledge, then
+merely potential, and an experience still to come, would one day
+occupy.  And so, those who cannot admit his actual speculative results,
+precisely his report on the invisible theoretic world, have been to the
+point sometimes, in their objection, that by sheer effectiveness of
+abstract language, he gave an illusive air of reality or substance to
+the mere nonentities of metaphysic hypothesis--of a mind trying to feed
+itself on its own emptiness.
+
+Just there--in the situation of one, shaped, by combining nature and
+circumstance, into a seer who has a sort of sensuous love of the
+unseen--is the paradox of Plato's genius, and therefore, always, of
+Platonism, of the Platonic temper.  His aptitude for things visible,
+with the gift of words, empowers him to express, as if for the eyes,
+what except to the eye of the mind is strictly invisible, what an
+acquired asceticism induces him to rank above, and sometimes, in terms
+of harshest dualism, oppose to, the sensible world.  Plato is to be
+interpreted [144] not merely by his antecedents, by the influence upon
+him of those who preceded him, but by his successors, by the temper,
+the intellectual alliances, of those who directly or indirectly have
+been sympathetic with him.  Now it is noticeable that, at first sight
+somewhat incongruously, a certain number of Manicheans have always been
+of his company; people who held that matter was evil.  Pointing
+significantly to an unmistakable vein of Manichean, or Puritan
+sentiment actually there in the Platonic Dialogues, these rude
+companions or successors of his, carry us back to his great
+predecessor, to Socrates, whose personal influence had so strongly
+enforced on Plato the severities, moral and intellectual, alike of
+Parmenides and of the Pythagoreans.  The cold breath of a harshly
+abstract, a too incorporeal philosophy, had blown, like an east wind,
+on that last depressing day in the prison-cell of Socrates; and the
+venerable commonplaces then put forth, in which an overstrained pagan
+sensuality seems to be reacting, to be taking vengeance, on itself,
+turned now sick and suicidal, will lose none of their weight with
+Plato:--That "all who rightly touch philosophy, study nothing else than
+to die, and to be dead,"--that "the soul reasons best, when, as much as
+possible, it comes to be alone with itself, bidding good-bye to the
+body, and, to the utmost of its power, rejecting communion with it,
+with the very touch of it, aiming at what is."
+
+[145] It was, in short, as if for the soul to have come into a human
+body at all, had been the seed of disease in it, the beginning of its
+own proper death.
+
+As for any adornments or provision for this body, the master had
+declared that a true philosopher as such would make as little of them
+as possible.  To those young hearers, the words of Socrates may well
+have seemed to anticipate, not the visible world he had then delineated
+in glowing colour as if for the bodily eye, but only the chilling
+influence of the hemlock; and it was because Plato was only half
+convinced of the Manichean or Puritan element in his master's doctrine,
+or rather was in contact with it on one side only of his complex and
+genial nature, that Platonism became possible, as a temper for which,
+in strictness, the opposition of matter to spirit has no ultimate or
+real existence.  Not to be "pure" from the body, but to identify it, in
+its utmost fairness, with the fair soul, by a gymnastic "fused in
+music," became, from first to last, the aim of education as he
+conceived it.  That the body is but "a hindrance to the attainment of
+philosophy, if one takes it along with one as a companion in one's
+search" (a notion which Christianity, at least in its later though
+wholly legitimate developments, will correct) can hardly have been the
+last thought of Plato himself on quitting it.  He opens his door indeed
+to those austere monitors.  They correct the sensuous richness of his
+genius, but could [146] not suppress it.  The sensuous lover becomes a
+lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his earlier pattern,
+carrying into the world of intellectual vision, of theôria,+ all the
+associations of the actual world of sight.  Some of its invisible
+realities he can all but see with the bodily eye: the absolute
+Temperance, in the person of the youthful Charmides; the absolute
+Righteousness, in the person of the dying Socrates.  Yes, truly! all
+true knowledge will be like the knowledge of a person, of living
+persons, and truth, for Plato, in spite of his Socratic asceticism, to
+the last, something to look at.  The eyes which had noted physical
+things, so finely, vividly, continuously, would be still at work; and,
+Plato thus qualifying the Manichean or Puritan element in Socrates by
+his own capacity for the world of sense, Platonism has contributed
+largely, has been an immense encouragement towards, the redemption of
+matter, of the world of sense, by art, by all right education, by the
+creeds and worship of the Christian Church--towards the vindication of
+the dignity of the body.
+
+It was doubtless because Plato was an excellent scholar that he did not
+begin to teach others till he was more than forty years old--one of the
+great scholars of the world, with Virgil and Milton: by which is
+implied that, possessed of the inborn genius, of those natural powers,
+[147] which sometimes bring with them a certain defiance of rule, of
+the intellectual habits of others, he acquires, by way of habit and
+rule, all that can be taught and learned; and what is thus derived from
+others by docility and discipline, what is rangé, comes to have in him,
+and in his work, an equivalent weight with what is unique, impulsive,
+underivable.  Raphael--Raphael, as you see him in the Blenheim Madonna,
+is a supreme example of such scholarship in the sphere of art.  Born of
+a romantically ancient family, understood to be the descendant of Solon
+himself, Plato had been in early youth a writer of verse.  That he
+turned to a more vigorous, though pedestrian mode of writing, was
+perhaps an effect of his corrective intercourse with Socrates, through
+some of the most important years of his life,--from twenty to twenty-
+eight.
+
+He belonged to what was just then the discontented class, and might
+well have taken refuge from active political life in political ideals,
+or in a kind of self-imposed exile.  A traveller, adventurous for that
+age, he certainly became.  After the Lehr-jahre, the Wander-jahre!--all
+round the Mediterranean coasts as far west as Sicily.  Think of what
+all that must have meant just then, for eyes which could see.  If those
+journeys had begun in angry flight from home, it was for purposes of
+self-improvement they were continued: the delightful fruit of them is
+evident in what he writes; and finding him [148] in friendly
+intercourse with Dionysius the elder, with Dio, and Dionysius the
+younger, at the polished court of Syracuse, we may understand that they
+were a search also for "the philosophic king," perhaps for the
+opportune moment of realising "the ideal state."  In that case, his
+quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that he was disappointed.
+For the future he sought no more to pass beyond the charmed theoretic
+circle, "speaking wisdom," as was said of Pythagoras, only "among the
+perfect."  He returns finally to Athens; and there, in the quiet
+precincts of the Acadêmus, which has left a somewhat dubious name to
+places where people come to be taught or to teach, founds, not a state,
+nor even a brotherhood, but only the first college, with something of a
+common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one
+of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library with the
+authentic text of his Dialogues upon the shelves: we may just discern
+the sort of place through the scantiest notices.  His reign was after
+all to be in his writings.  Plato himself does nothing in them to
+retard the effacement which mere time brings to persons and their
+abodes; and there had been that, moreover, in his own temper, which
+promotes self-effacement.  Yet as he left it, the place remained for
+centuries, according to his will, to its original use.  What he taught
+through the remaining forty years of his life, the method of that
+teaching, whether it [149] was less or more esoteric than the teaching
+of the extant Dialogues, is but matter of surmise.  Writers, who in
+their day might still have said much we should have liked to hear, give
+us little but old, quasi-supernatural stories, told as if they had been
+new ones, about him.  The year of his birth fell, according to some, in
+the very year of the death of Pericles (a significant date!) but is not
+precisely ascertainable: nor is the year of his death, nor its manner.
+Scribens est mortuus, says Cicero:--after the manner of a true scholar,
+"he died pen in hand."
+
+NOTES
+
+127-28. +Transliteration: Synesometha pollois tôn neôn autothi.  Pater's
+translation: "We shall meet a number of our youth there."  Plato,
+Republic 328a.
+
+133. +Transliteration: Kai hos eipen erythriasas, êdê gar hypephaine ti
+êmeras ôste kataphanê auton genesthai.  E-text editor's translation:
+"And he blushed as he spoke, for presently the day began to break, so
+as to make him visible."  Plato, Protagoras 312a.
+
+134. +Transliteration: Ta erôtika.  Pater's translation: "the discipline
+of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining
+to love."  Plato, Symposium 177d.
+
+136. +Transliteration: ta erôtika.  Pater's translation: "the discipline
+of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining
+to love."  Plato, Symposium 177d.
+
+136. +Transliteration: hêttôn tôn kalôn.  Pater's translation: "subject
+to the influence of fair persons;" more literally, "yielding to
+beauty."  Plato, Meno 76c.
+
+140. +Transliteration: ta erôtika.  Pater's translation: "the discipline
+of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining
+to love."  Plato, Symposium 177d.
+
+140. +Transliteration: theôria.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection."
+Plato, Republic 486a.
+
+146. +Transliteration: theôria.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection."
+Plato, Republic 486a.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
+
+I. THE THEORY OF IDEAS
+
+[150] PLATONISM is not a formal theory or body of theories, but a
+tendency, a group of tendencies--a tendency to think or feel, and to
+speak, about certain things in a particular way, discernible in Plato's
+dialogues as reflecting the peculiarities, the marked peculiarities, of
+himself and his own mental complexion.  Those tendencies combine and
+find their complete expression in what Plato's commentators, rather
+than Plato, have called the "theory of ideas," itself indeed not so
+much a doctrine or theory, as a way of regarding and speaking of
+general terms, such as Useful or Just; of abstract notions, like
+Equality; of ideals, such as Beauty, or The Perfect City; of all those
+terms or notions, in short, which represent under general forms the
+particular presentations of our individual experience; or, to use
+Plato's own frequent expression, borrowed [151] from his old Eleatic
+teachers, which reduce "the Many to the One."
+
+What the nature of such representative terms and notions, genus and
+species, class-word, and abstract idea or ideal, may be; what their
+relationship to the individual, the unit, the particulars which they
+include; is, as we know, one of the constant problems of logic.
+Realism, which supposes the abstraction, Animal for instance, or The
+Just, to be not a mere name, nomen, as with the nominalists, nor a mere
+subjective thought as with the conceptualists, but to be res, a thing
+in itself, independent of the particular instances which come into and
+pass out of it, as also of the particular mind which entertains it:--
+that is one of the fixed and formal answers to this question; and Plato
+is the father of all realists.  Realism, as such, in the sense just
+indicated, is not in itself a very difficult or transcendental theory;
+but rises, again and again, at least in a particular class of minds,
+quite naturally, as the answer to a natural question.  Taking our own
+stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the
+conceptualist:--See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a
+permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with
+which we are, each one of us, in communication.  It is in that, those
+common or general ideas really reside.  And we might add just here
+(giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common
+[152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through
+common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one's
+individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their
+full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and
+notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between
+general and particular, between our individual experience and the
+common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to
+assist each other's thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, "an
+intellectual world," as Plato calls it, a true noêtos topos +.  So much
+for the modern view; for what common sense might now suggest as to the
+nature of logical "universals."
+
+Plato's realism however--what is called "The Theory of Ideas"--his way
+of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say
+about "the Many and the One," is often very difficult; though of
+various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds.
+From the simple and easily intelligible sort of realism attributed by
+Aristotle to Socrates, seeking in "universal definitions," or ideas,
+only a serviceable instrument for the distinguishing of what is
+essential from what is unessential in the actual things about him,
+Plato passes by successive stages, which we should try to keep distinct
+as we read him, to what may be rightly called a "transcendental," what
+to many minds has [153] seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of
+thought, regarding those abstractions, which indeed seem to become for
+him not merely substantial things-in-themselves, but little short of
+living persons, to be known as persons are made known to each other, by
+a system of affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, homoion homoiô +, like
+to like--these persons constituting together that common, eternal,
+intellectual world, a sort of divine family or hierarchy, with which
+the mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable, or really
+knows, is in communion or correspondence.  And here certainly is a
+theory, a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about which the
+difficulties are many.
+
+Yet as happens always with the metaphysical questions, or answers,
+which from age to age preoccupy acuter minds, those difficulties about
+the Many and the One actually had their attractiveness for some in the
+days of Plato.--
+
+     Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is,
+     that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely,
+     embodied in one general term) which--hypo logôn +--under the
+     influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language,
+     become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to
+     everything of which existence is asserted from time to time.
+     This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun;
+     but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and
+     ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us.  And
+     whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is
+     delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy;
+     he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in
+     motion-- kinei + --every definition [154] --logos+--every
+     conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and
+     firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other
+     and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particulari-
+     ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and
+     then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he
+     becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular,
+     till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first,
+     and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him,
+     older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither
+     father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely
+     even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would
+     hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter.
+     Philebus, 15.+
+
+The Platonic doctrine of "the Many and the One"--the problem with which
+we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as
+well as of the metaphysical power of Plato--is not precisely the
+question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely
+to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a
+railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the
+questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or
+protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings,
+may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable.  As
+the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere
+commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it
+might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes
+nothing less than the standard of what is uninteresting, as such, to
+its successor.  Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is
+not so much [155] what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that
+after all really tells.  Plato and Platonism we shall never understand
+unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about "the
+Many and the One."
+
+Plato's peculiar view of the matter, then, passes with him into a phase
+of poetic thought; as indeed all that Plato's genius touched came in
+contact with poetry.  Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or
+be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such; to
+notions, we might think, carefully deprived of all the incident, the
+colour and variety, which fits things--this or that--to the
+constitution and natural habit of our minds, fits them for attachment
+to what we really are.  We cannot love or live upon genus and species,
+accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an
+orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses.  Take a seed from the
+garden.  What interest it has for us all lies in our sense of potential
+differentiation to come: the leaves, leaf upon leaf, the flowers, a
+thousand new seeds in turn.  It is so with animal seed; and with
+humanity, individually, or as a whole, its expansion into a detailed,
+ever-changing, parti-coloured history of particular facts and persons.
+Abstraction, the introduction of general ideas, seems to close it up
+again; to reduce flower and fruit, odour and savour, back again into
+the dry and worthless seed.  We might as well be colour-blind at once,
+and there [156] is not a proper name left!  We may contrast generally
+the mental world we actually live in, where classification, the
+reduction of all things to common types, has come so far, and where the
+particular, to a great extent, is known only as the member of a class,
+with that other world, on the other side of the generalising movement
+to which Plato and his master so largely contributed--a world we might
+describe as being under Homeric conditions, such as we picture to
+ourselves with regret, for which experience was intuition, and life a
+continuous surprise, and every object unique, where all knowledge was
+still of the concrete and the particular, face to face delightfully.
+
+To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce,
+in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic,
+logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to
+seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal classes, under
+general notions, and with--yes! with written labels fluttering on the
+stalks, instead of blossoms--a botanic or "physic" garden, as they used
+to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard.  And yet (it must be
+confessed on the other hand) what we actually see, see and hear, is
+more interesting than ever; the nineteenth century as compared with the
+first, with Plato's days or Homer's; the faces, the persons behind
+those masks which yet express so much, the flowers, or whatever it may
+happen to be they carry or [157] touch.  The concrete, and that even as
+a visible thing, has gained immeasurably in richness and compass, in
+fineness, and interest towards us, by the process, of which those acts
+of generalisation, of reduction to class and generic type, have
+certainly been a part.  And holding still to the concrete, the
+particular, to the visible or sensuous, if you will, last as first,
+thinking of that as essentially the one vital and lively thing, really
+worth our while in a short life, we may recognise sincerely what
+generalisation and abstraction have done or may do, are defensible as
+doing, just for that--for the particular gem or flower--what its proper
+service is to a mind in search, precisely, of a concrete and intuitive
+knowledge such as that.
+
+Think, for a moment, of the difference, as regards mental attitude,
+between the naturalist who deals with things through ideas, and the
+layman (so to call him) in picking up a shell on the sea-shore; what it
+is that the subsumption of the individual into the species, its
+subsequent alliance to and co-ordination with other species, really
+does for the furnishing of the mind of the former.  The layman, though
+we need not suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain impressions, is
+in fact still but a child; and the shell, its colours and convolution,
+no more than a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him.  Let him
+become a schoolboy about it, so to speak.  The toy he puts aside; his
+mind is [158] drilled perforce, to learn about it; and thereby is
+exercised, he may think, with everything except just the thing itself,
+as he cares for it; with other shells, with some general laws of life,
+and for a while it might seem that, turning away his eyes from the
+"vanity" of the particular, he has been made to sacrifice the concrete,
+the real and living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract
+product of the mind.  But when he comes out of school, and on the sea-
+shore again finds a fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it,
+he may see what the service of that converse with the general has
+really been towards the concrete, towards what he sees--in regard to
+the particular thing he actually sees.  By its juxtaposition and co-
+ordination with what is ever more and more not it, by the contrast of
+its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper and
+perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been
+enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent
+world, concentrated upon, or as it were at focus in, it.  By a kind of
+short-hand now, and as if in a single moment of vision, all that, which
+only a long experience, moving patiently from part to part, could
+exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of nature, is
+legible upon it, as it lies there in one's hand.
+
+So it is with the shell, the gem, with a glance of the eye; so it may
+be with the moral act, [159] with a condition of the mind, or a
+feeling.  You may draw, by use of this coinage (it is Hobbes's figure)
+this coinage of representative words and thoughts, at your pleasure,
+upon the accumulative capital of the whole experience of humanity.
+Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken
+moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating the
+concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with the joint perspective,
+the significance, the expressiveness, of all other things beside.  What
+broad-cast light he enjoys!--that scholar, confronted with the sea-
+shell, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or
+another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circumstances
+which may never precisely so occur again; in the contemplation of that
+single phenomenon, or object, or situation.  He not only sees, but
+understands (thereby only seeing the more) and will, therefore, also
+remember.  The significance of the particular object he will retain, by
+use of his intellectual apparatus of notion and general law, as, to use
+Plato's own figure, fluid matter may be retained in vessels, not indeed
+of unbaked clay, but of alabaster or bronze.  So much by way of apology
+for general ideas--abstruse, or intangible, or dry and seedy and
+wooden, as we may sometimes think them.
+
+"Two things," says Aristotle, "might rightly be attributed to Socrates:
+inductive reasoning, [160] and universal definitions."  Now when
+Aristotle says this of Socrates, he is recording the institution of a
+method, which might be applied in the way just indicated, to natural
+objects, to such a substance as carbon, or to such natural processes as
+heat or motion; but which, by Socrates himself, as by Plato after him,
+was applied almost exclusively to moral phenomena, to the
+generalisation of aesthetic, political, ethical ideas, of the laws of
+operation (for the essence of every true conception, or definition, or
+idea, is a law of operation) of the feelings and the will.  To get a
+notion, a definition, or idea, of motion, for example, which shall not
+exclude the subtler forms of it, heat for instance--to get a notion of
+carbon, which shall include not common charcoal only, but the diamond,
+a thing superficially so unlike it, and which shall also exclude,
+perhaps, some other substance, superficially almost indistinguishable
+from it: such is the business of physical science, in obedience to
+rules, outlined by Bacon in the first book of the Novum Organum, for
+securing those acts of "inclusion" and "exclusion," inclusiones,
+exclusiones, naturae, debitae, as he says, "which the nature of things
+requires," if our thoughts are not to misrepresent them.
+
+It was a parallel process, a process of inclusion, that one's resultant
+idea should be adequate, of rejection or exclusion, that this idea
+should be not redundant, which Socrates applied [161] to practice;
+exercising, as we see in the Platonic Dialogues, the two opposed
+functions of synagôgê and diairesis,+ for the formation of just ideas of
+Temperance, Wisdom, Bravery, Justice itself--a classification of the
+phenomena of the entire world of feeling and action.  Ideas, if they
+fulfil their proper purpose, represent to the mind such phenomena, for
+its convenience, but may easily also misrepresent them.  In the
+transition from the particulars to the general, and again in the
+transition from the general idea, the mental word, to the spoken or
+written word, to what we call the definition, a door lies open, both
+for the adulteration and the diminution of the proper content, of our
+conception, our definition.  The first growth of the Platonic "ideas,"
+as we see it in Socrates, according to the report of Aristotle,
+provided against this twofold misrepresentation.  Its aim is to secure,
+in the terms of our discourse with others and with ourselves, precise
+equivalence to what they denote.  It was a "mission" to go about Athens
+and challenge people to guard the inlets of error, in the passage from
+facts to their thoughts about them, in the passage from thoughts to
+words.  It was an intellectual gymnastic, to test, more exactly than
+they were in the habit of doing, the equivalence of words they used so
+constantly as Just, Brave, Beautiful, to the thoughts they had; of
+those thoughts to the facts of experience, which it was the business of
+those [162] thoughts precisely to represent; to clear the mental air;
+to arrange the littered work-chamber of the mind.
+
+In many of Plato's Dialogues we see no more than the ordered reflex of
+this process, informal as it was in the actual practice of Socrates.
+Out of the accidents of a conversation, as from the confused currents
+of life and action, the typical forms of the vices and virtues emerge
+in definite outline.  The first contention of The Republic, for
+instance, is to establish in regard to the nature of Justice, terms as
+exactly conterminous with thoughts, thoughts as exactly conterminous
+with moral facts, as the notion of carbon is for the naturalist, when
+it has come to include both charcoal and the diamond, on the basis of
+the essential law of their operation as experience reveals it.  Show
+us, not merely accidental truths about it; but, by the doing of what
+(Ti poiousa)+ in the very soul of its possessor, itself by itself,
+Justice is a good, and Injustice a bad thing.  That illustrates exactly
+what is meant by "an idea," the force of "knowledge through ideas," in
+the particular instance of Justice.  It will include perhaps, on the
+one hand, forms of Justice so remote from the Justice of our everyday
+experience as to seem inversions of it; it will clearly exclude, on the
+other hand, acts and thoughts, not it, yet, phenomenally, so like it,
+as to deceive the very gods; and its area will be expanded sufficiently
+to include, not the individual [163] only, but the state.  And you, the
+philosophic student, were to do that, not for one virtue only, but for
+Piety, and Beauty, and the State itself, and Knowledge, and Opinion,
+and the Good.  Nay, you might go on and do the same thing for the
+physical, when you came to the end of the moral, world, were life long
+enough, and if you had the humour for it:--for Motion, Number, Colour,
+Sound.  That, then, was the first growth of the Platonic ideas, as
+derived immediately from Socrates, whose formal contribution to
+philosophy had been "universal definitions," developed "inductively,"
+by the twofold method of "inclusion" and "exclusion."
+
+Aristotle adds, however, that Socrates had stopped at the point here
+indicated: he had not gone on, like some others, to make those
+universal notions or definitions "separable"--separable, that is to
+say, from the particular and concrete instances, from which he had
+gathered them.  Separable: chôristos + (famous word!) that is precisely
+what general notions become in what is specially called "the Platonic
+Theory of Ideas."  The "Ideas" of Plato are, in truth, neither more nor
+less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as
+they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and
+shadows, in the singularly constituted atmosphere, under the strange
+laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of
+thought.  By its peculiarities, subsequent thought--philosophic, [164]
+poetic, theological--has been greatly influenced; by the intense
+subjectivities, the accidents, so to speak, of Plato's genius, of Plato
+himself; the ways constitutional with him, the magic or trick of his
+personality, in regarding the intellectual material he was occupied
+with--by Plato's psychology.  And it is characteristic of him, again,
+that those peculiarities of his mental attitude are evidenced
+informally; by a tendency, as we said, by the mere general tone in
+which he speaks of Beauty, for instance, "as it really is," of all that
+"really is," under its various forms; a manner of speaking, not
+explicit, but veiled, in various degrees, under figures, as at the end
+of the sixth book of The Republic, or under mythological fantasies,
+like those of the Phaedrus.  He seems to have no inclination for the
+responsibilities of definite theory; for a system such as that of the
+Neo-Platonists for instance, his own later followers, who, in a kind of
+prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism, developed as definite
+philosophic dogma, hard enough in more senses than one, what in Plato
+is to the last rather poetry than metaphysical reasoning--the
+irrepressible because almost unconscious poetry, which never deserts
+him, even when treating of what is neither more nor less than a chapter
+in the rudiments of logic.
+
+The peculiar development of the Socratic realism by Plato can then only
+be understood [165] by a consideration of the peculiarities of Plato's
+genius; how it reacted upon those abstractions; what they came to seem
+in its peculiar atmosphere.  The Platonic doctrine of "Ideas," as was
+said, is not so much a doctrine, as a way of speaking or feeling about
+certain elements of the mind; and this temper, this peculiar way of
+feeling, of speaking, which for most of us will have many difficulties,
+is not uniformly noticeable in Plato's Dialogues, but is to be found
+more especially in the Phaedo, the Symposium, and in certain books of
+The Republic, above all in the Phaedrus.  Here is a famous passage from
+it:--
+
+     There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of
+     Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and space) there,
+     at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul.
+     For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the
+     highest point, passed out and stood (as you might stand upon
+     the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky.
+     And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries
+     them round; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky.
+     That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever
+     yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily.  And thus it is:
+     for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate,
+     especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking.  For the
+     colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very
+     truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason
+     alone as one's guide.  Centered about that, the generation, or
+     seed, genos,+--the people, of true knowledge inhabits this
+     place.  As, then, the intelligence of God, which is nourished
+     by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akêratô,+ unmixed
+     with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also,
+     which is about to receive that which properly belongs to it,
+     beholding, after long interval, that which is, loves [166] it
+     (that's the point!) and by the vision of truth is fed; and
+     fares well; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings
+     it round again to the same place.  And in that journey round
+     it looks upon justice itself; it looks upon Temperance, upon
+     Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of becoming
+     (the law of change, namely, of birth and death and decay)
+     attaches; nor that which is, as it were, one in one thing,
+     another in another, of those things which now we speak of as
+     being; but the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is
+     (tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan)+ and having beheld,
+     after the same manner, all other things that really are, and
+     feasted upon them, being passed back again to the interior of
+     the sky, the soul returned home.  Phaedrus, 247.+
+
+Only, as Plato thinks, that return was, in fact, an exile.
+There, in that attractive, but perhaps not wholly acceptable, sort of
+discourse, in some other passages like it, Plato has gone beyond his
+master Socrates, on two planes or levels, so to speak, of speculative
+ascent, which we may distinguish from each other, by way of making a
+little clearer what is in itself certainly so difficult.
+
+For Plato, then, not by way of formal theory, we must remember, but by
+a turn of thought and speech (while he speaks of them, in fact) the
+Socratic "universals," the notions of Justice and the like, are become,
+first, things in themselves--the real things; and secondly, persons, to
+be known as persons must be; and to be loved, for the perfections, the
+visible perfections, we might say--intellectually visible--of [167]
+their being.  "It looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon Temperance;
+upon Knowledge."
+
+Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations,
+serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason.  With Plato,
+they are the creators of our reason--those treasures of experience,
+stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance,
+or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and
+rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking
+things.  For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the
+instruments by which we tabulate and classify and record our
+experience--mere "marks" of the real things of experience, of what is
+essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by
+a certain common name; but are themselves rather the proper objects of
+all true knowledge, and a passage from all merely relative experience
+to the "absolute."  In proportion as they lend themselves to the
+individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they
+reproduce the eternal reason for him.  For Socrates, as Aristotle
+understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and
+by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond.  For
+Plato, for Platonists, they are become--Justice and Beauty, and the
+perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if
+we are to apprehend sensible [168] instances thereof, but which no two
+equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree,
+every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever--separate
+(chôristos)+ separable from, as being essentially independent of, the
+individual mind which conceives them; as also of the particular
+temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they
+remain for ever--those eternal "forms," of Tree, Equality, Justice, and
+so forth.
+
+That, then, is the first stage, or plane, of Platonic
+transcendentalism.  Our common ideas, without which, in fact, we none
+of us could think at all, are not the consequence, not the products,
+but the cause of our reason in us: we did not make them; but they make
+us what we are, as reasonable beings.  The eternal Being, of
+Parmenides, one and indivisible, has been diffused, divided, resolved,
+refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple,
+numerous, stellar world, so to call it--abstract light into stars:
+Justice, Temperance as it is, Bravery as it is.  Permanence,
+independency, indefectible identity with itself--all those qualities
+which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality--belong to
+every one of those ideas severally.
+
+It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a
+return of the many gods of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love,
+[169] Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the modern
+anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank
+the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls "animism."  Animism,
+that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every
+object, almost in every circumstance, which impresses one with a sense
+of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest illustration is
+primitive man adoring, as a divine being endowed with will, the
+meteoric stone that came rushing from the sky.  That condition
+"survives" however, in the negro, who thinks the discharging gun a
+living creature; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of
+Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits;
+in the pantheism of Goethe; and in Schelling, who formulates that
+pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory.  Such "animistic"
+instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato's mental
+constitution,--the instinctive effort to find anima, the conditions of
+personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it
+remembered, of which the various functions, as we reckon them,
+imagination, reason, intuition, were still by no means clearly analysed
+and differentiated from each other, but participated, all alike and all
+together, in every single act of mind.
+
+And here is the second stage of the Platonic idealism, the second grade
+of Plato's departure [170] from the simpler realism of his master, as
+noted by Aristotle, towards that  "intelligible world," opposed by him
+so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to
+follow him at all, and in which the "ideas" become veritable persons.
+To speak, to think, to feel, about abstract ideas as if they were
+living persons; that, is the second stage of Plato's speculative
+ascent.  With the lover, who had graduated, was become a master, in the
+school of love, but had turned now to the love of intellectual and
+strictly invisible things, it was as if the faculty of physical vision,
+of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre of
+intellectual abstraction.  Abstract ideas themselves became animated,
+living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes.  And it
+is, as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary reinforcing cause,
+of this mental condition, that the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the
+central idea; the permanently typical instance of what an idea means;
+of its relation to particular things, and to the action of our thoughts
+upon them.  It was to the lover dealing with physical beauty, a thing
+seen, yet unseen--seen by all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one
+and not by another, as if through some capricious, personal self-
+discovery, by some law of affinity between the seer and what is seen,
+the knowing and the known--that the nature and function of an idea, as
+such, would come home most clearly. [170] And then, while visible
+beauty is the clearest, the most certain thing, in the world (lovers
+will always tell you so) real with the reality of something hot or cold
+in one's hand, it also comes nearest of all things, so Plato assures
+us, to its eternal pattern or prototype.  For some reason, the eternal
+idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, antitypes,
+out of all proportion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any copy,
+left here with us, of Justice, for instance, or Equality, or the
+Perfect State.  The typical instance of an abstract idea, yet pre-
+occupying the mind with all the colour and circumstance of the
+relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the
+entire theory of ideas, the associations which belong properly to such
+relationships only.  A certain measure of caprice, of capricious
+preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the
+commerce of men's minds with what really is, with the world in which
+things really are, only so far as they are truly known.  "Philosophers
+are lovers of truth and of that which is--impassioned lovers": Tou
+ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous philosophous.+  They are the
+cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state--those
+impassioned lovers, erastas,+ of that which really is, and in comparison
+wherewith, office, wealth, honour, the love of which has rent Athens,
+the world, to pieces, will be of no more than secondary importance.
+
+[172] He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of
+another will--this lover of the Ideas--attracted, corrected, guided,
+rewarded, satiated, in a long discipline, that "ascent of the soul into
+the intelligible world," of which the ways of earthly love (ta erôtika)+
+are a true parallel.  His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an
+enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by
+another, by which those "animistic" old Greeks explained natural
+madness.  That philosophic enthusiasm, that impassioned desire for true
+knowledge, is a kind of madness (mania)+ the madness to which some have
+declared great wit, all great gifts, to be always allied--the fourth
+species of mania, as Plato himself explains in the Phaedrus.  To
+natural madness, to poetry and the other gifts allied to it, to
+prophecy like that of the Delphic pythoness, he has to add, fourthly,
+the "enthusiasm of the ideas."
+
+     The whole course of our theory hitherto (he there tells us)
+     relates to that fourth form of madness; wherein, when any one,
+     seeing the beauty that is here below, and having a reminiscence
+     of the true, feels, or finds, his wings (pterôtai)+ fluttering
+     upwards, in his eagerness to soar above, but unable, like a
+     bird looking towards the sky, heedless of things below, he is
+     charged with unsoundness of mind.  I have told how this is the
+     most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession) both
+     to its possessor and to him who participates in it; how it comes
+     of the noblest causes; and that the lover who has a share of
+     this madness is called a lover of the beautiful.  For, as has
+     been said, every soul of man, by its very nature, has seen the
+     things that really are, otherwise it would not have come into
+     this form of life (into a human body).  But to rise from things
+     here to the recollection of those, is not an easy matter [173]
+     for every soul; neither for those which then had but a brief
+     view of things there; nor for such as were unlucky in their
+     descent hither, so that, through the influence of certain
+     associations, turning themselves to what is not right, they
+     have forgotten the sacred forms which then they saw.  Few souls,
+     in truth, remain, to which the gift of reminiscence adequately
+     pertains.  These, when they see some likeness of things there,
+     are lost in amazement, and belong no longer to themselves;
+     only, they understand not the true nature of their affection,
+     because they lack discernment.  Now, of Justice, and of
+     Temperance, and of all those other qualities which are precious
+     to souls, there is no clear light in their semblances here below;
+     but, through obscure organs, with difficulty, very few, coming
+     to their figures, behold the generation (genos,+ the people)
+     of that which is figured.  At that moment it was possible to
+     behold Beauty in its clearness, when, with the choir of the
+     blessed following on, ourselves with Zeus, some with one, some
+     with another, of the gods, they looked upon a blissful vision
+     and view, and were made partakers in what it is meet and right
+     to call the most blessed of all mysteries; the which we
+     celebrated, sound and whole then, and untouched by the evil
+     things that awaited us in time to come, as being admitted to
+     mystic sights, whole and sound and at unity with themselves,
+     in pure light gazing on them, being ourselves pure, and
+     unimpressed by this we carry about now and call our body,
+     imprisoned like a fish in its shell.
+
+     Let memory be indulged thus far; for whose sake, in regret
+     for what was then, I have now spoken somewhat at length.
+     As regards Beauty, as I said, it both shone out, in its true
+     being, among those other eternal forms; and when we came down
+     hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our bodily
+     senses, gleaming with utmost brightness.  For sight comes to
+     us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom is not seen
+     by it.  Marvellous loves, in truth, would that (namely, Wisdom)
+     have afforded, had it presented any manifest image of itself,
+     such as that of Beauty, had it reached our bodily vision--that,
+     and all those other amiable forms.  But now Beauty alone has
+     had this fortune; so that it is the clearest, the most certain,
+     of all things; and the most lovable.  Phaedrus, 249.+
+
+NOTES
+
+152. +Transliteration: noêtos topos.  Pater's translation: "intellectual
+world."  Plato, Republic 508b and 517b.
+
+153. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô.  Pater's translation: "like to
+like."  Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato's dialogues; see,
+for example, Parmenides 132d.
+
+153. +Transliteration: hypo logôn.  Pater's translation: "under the
+influence of  . . . thought and language."  Plato, Philebus 15d.
+
+153. +Transliteration: kinei.  Pater's translation: "sets in motion."
+Plato, Philebus 15e.
+
+154. +Transliteration: logos.  Pater's contextual translation:
+"definition."  Plato, Philebus 15e.
+
+154. +The passage begins at Philebus 15d.
+
+161. +Transliteration: synagôgê . . . diairesis.  Liddell and Scott
+definition / E-text editor's translation: "."  For example, Phaedrus
+266b.
+
+162. +Transliteration: Ti poiousa.  Pater's translation: "by the doing
+of what."
+
+163. +Transliteration: chôristos.  Pater's translation: "separable."
+The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics.  For example, see
+Metaphysics 1090a.
+
+165. +Transliteration: genos.  Pater's translation: "seed, generation."
+Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent."  Plato, Phaedrus 247a.
+165. +Transliteration: akêratô.  Pater's translation: "unmixed with
+sense."  Plato, Phaedrus 247a.
+
+166. +Transliteration: tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan.
+Pater's translation: "the knowledge which is in that which in very deed
+is."  Plato, Phaedrus 247e.
+
+166. See Plato, Phaedrus 247b ff.
+
+168. +Transliteration: chôristos.  Pater's translation: "separable."
+The term occurs often in Aristotle's Metaphysics.  For example, see
+Metaphysics 1090a.
+
+171. +Transliteration: Tou ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous
+philosophous.  Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor's
+translation: "Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is
+. . ."  Plato, Republic 501d.
+
+171. +Transliteration: erastas.  See previous note.
+
+172. +Transliteration: ta erôtika.  Pater's translation: "the discipline
+of sensuous love;" more literally, the phrase means "things pertaining
+to love."  For one instance, see Plato, Symposium 177d.
+
+172. +Transliteration: mania.  Liddell and Scott definition: "madness,
+frenzy."  See, for example, Plato, Phaedrus 249d.
+
+172. +Transliteration: pterôtai.  E-text editor's translation: "[he] is
+furnished with wings."  Plato, Phaedrus 249d.
+
+173. +Transliteration: genos.  Pater's translation: "seed, generation."
+Liddell and Scott definition: "race, descent."  Plato, Phaedrus 247a.
+
+173. +This passage begins at Phaedrus 249d.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
+
+II. DIALECTIC
+
+[174] Three different forms of composition have, under the intellectual
+conditions of different ages, prevailed--three distinct literary
+methods, in the presentation of philosophic thought; the metrical form
+earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative,
+sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physeôs,+
+"Concerning Nature"; according to the manner of Pythagoras, "his golden
+verses," of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn
+modelled the finest extant illustration of that manner of writing, of
+thinking.
+
+It was succeeded by precisely the opposite manner, when native
+intuition had shrunk into dogmatic system, the dry bones of which
+rattle in one's ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, as a
+formal treatise; the perfected philosophic temper being situated midway
+between those opposites, in the third essential form of the literature
+of philosophy, namely the essay; that characteristic literary type of
+our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of
+truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and
+issues.  Strictly appropriate form of our modern philosophic
+literature, the essay came into use at what was really the invention of
+the relative, [175] or "modern" spirit, in the Renaissance of the
+sixteenth century.*
+
+The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three
+methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the
+personal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of
+literary form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three
+essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to
+truth.  If oracular verse, stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper
+vehicle of enthusiastic intuitions; if the treatise, with its ambitious
+array of premiss and conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic
+all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the
+end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne,
+representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of
+the name as, in essence, of the thing--of the essay, in its seemingly
+modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities--is
+indicative of Montaigne's peculiar function in regard to his age, as in
+truth the commencement of our own.  It provided him with precisely the
+literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a
+possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the
+elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which,
+noting [176] faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way,
+must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of
+the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je?  Who
+knows?--in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all
+true philosophy is but a refined sense of one's ignorance.
+
+And as Aristotle is the inventor of the treatise, so the Platonic
+Dialogue, in its conception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially
+an essay--an essay, now and then passing into the earlier form of
+philosophic poetry, the prose-poem of Heraclitus.  There have been
+effective writers of dialogue since, Bruno, for instance, Berkeley,
+Landor, with whom, however, that literary form has had no strictly
+constitutional propriety to the kind of matter it conveyed, as lending
+itself (that is to say) structurally to a many-sided but hesitant
+consciousness of the truth.  Thus, with Berkeley, its purpose is but to
+give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions, about which
+there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer's own
+mind.  With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the
+dialogue--that peculiar modification of the essay--anything less than
+essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the
+organism of, the matter which it embodies.  For Plato's Dialogues, in
+fact, reflect, they refine [177] upon while they fulfil, they idealise,
+the actual method, in which, by preference to anything like formal
+lecturing (the lecture being, so to speak, a treatise in embryo)
+Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others.  We see him in those
+Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public places, the open
+houses, the suburban roads, of Athens, as if seeking truth from others;
+seeking it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and by the help
+of, his supposed scholars, for whom, indeed, he can but bring their own
+native conceptions of truth to the birth; but always faithfully
+registering just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never
+concluding.
+
+The Platonic Dialogue is the literary transformation, in a word, of
+what was the intimately home-grown method of Socrates, not only of
+conveying truth to others, but of coming by it for himself.  The
+essence of that method, of "dialectic" in all its forms, as its very
+name denotes, is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth by means of
+question and answer, primarily with one's self.  Just there, lies the
+validity of the method--in a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one's
+self; a dialogue concerning those first principles, or "universal
+definitions," or notions, those "ideas," which, according to Plato, are
+the proper objects of all real knowledge; concerning the adequacy of
+one's hold upon them; the relationship to them of other notions; the
+plausible conjectures in our own or other minds, [178] which come short
+of them; the elimination, by their mere presence in the mind, of
+positive ignorance or error.  Justice, Beauty, Perfect Polity, and the
+like, in outlines of eternal and absolute certainty:--they were to be
+apprehended by "dialectic," literally, by a method (methodos)+ a
+circuitous journey, presented by the Platonic dialogues in its most
+accomplished literary form.
+
+For the certainty, the absolute and eternal character, of such ideas
+involved, with much labour and scruple, repeated acts of qualification
+and correction; many readjustments to experience; expansion, by larger
+lights from it; those exclusions and inclusions, debitae naturae (to
+repeat Bacon's phrase) demanded, that is to say, by the veritable
+nature of the facts which those ideas are designed to represent.
+"Representation" was, in fact, twofold, and comprehended many
+successive steps under each of its divisions.  The thought was to be
+adjusted, first, to the phenomena, to the facts, daintily, to the end
+that the said thought might just cover those facts, and no more.  To
+the thought, secondly, to the conception, thus articulated, it was
+necessary to adjust the term; the term, or "definition," by which it
+might be conveyed into the mind of another.  The dialogue--the freedom,
+the variety and elasticity, of dialogue, informal, easy, natural, alone
+afforded the room necessary for that long and complex process.  If one,
+if Socrates, seemed to become [179] the teacher of another, it was but
+by thinking aloud for a few moments over his own lesson, or leaning
+upon that other as he went along that difficult way which each one must
+really prosecute for himself, however full such comradeship might be of
+happy occasions for the awakening of the latent knowledge, with which
+mind is by nature so richly stored.  The Platonic Socrates, in fact,
+does not propose to teach anything: is but willing, "along with you,"
+and if you concur, "to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be.
+Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we might cause
+Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as from fire-sticks."*
+
+"And," again, "is not the road to Athens made for conversation?"  Yes!
+It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that promoted
+movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate parturition,
+of the mind.  A method such as this, a process (processus) a movement
+of thought, which is the very converse of mathematical or demonstrative
+reasoning, and incapable therefore of conventional or scholastic form,
+of "exactness," in fact; which proceeded to truth, not by the analysis
+and application of an axiom, but by a gradual suppression of error, of
+error in the form of partial or exaggerated truths on the subject-
+matter proposed, found its proper [180] literary vehicle in a dialogue,
+the more flexible the better.  It was like a journey indeed, that essay
+towards Justice, for example, or the true Polity; a journey, not along
+the simple road to Athens, but to a mountain's top.  The proportions,
+the outline, the relation of the thing to its neighbours,--how do the
+inexperienced in such journeys mistake them, as they climb!  What
+repeated misconceptions, embodying, one by one, some mere particularity
+of view, the perspective of this or that point of view, forthwith
+abandoned, some apprehension of mountain form and structure, just a
+little short, or, it may be, immeasurably short, of what Plato would
+call the "synoptic" view of the mountain as a whole.  From this or that
+point, some insignificant peak presented itself as the mountain's
+veritable crest: inexperience would have sworn to the truth of a wholly
+illusive perspective, as the next turn in the journey assured one.  It
+is only upon the final step, with free view at last on every side,
+uniting together and justifying all those various, successive, partial
+apprehensions of the difficult way--only on the summit, comes the
+intuitive comprehension of what the true form of the mountain really
+is; with a mental, or rather an imaginative hold upon which, for the
+future, we can find our way securely about it; observing perhaps that,
+next to that final intuition, the first view, the first impression, had
+been truest about it.
+
+[181] Such, in its full scope, is the journey or pilgrimage, the method
+(hodos, kinêsis, methodos)+ of the Socratic, of the perfected Platonic
+dialectic, towards the truth, the true knowledge, of Bravery or
+Friendship, for instance; of Space or Motion, again, as suggested in
+the seventh book of The Republic; of the ideal City, of the immaculate
+Beauty.  You are going about Justice, for example--that great complex
+elevation on the level surface of life, whose top, it may be, reaches
+to heaven.  You fancy you have grasped its outline.  Alla metathômetha.+
+You are forced on, perhaps by your companion, a step further, and the
+view has already changed.  "Persevere," Plato might say, "and a step
+may be made, upon which, again, the whole world around may change, the
+entire horizon and its relation to the point you stand on--a change
+from the half-light of conjecture to the full light of indefectible
+certitude."  That, of course, can only happen by a summary act of
+intuition upon the entire perspective, wherein all those partial
+apprehensions, which one by one may have seemed inconsistent with each
+other, find their due place, or (to return to the Platonic Dialogue
+again, to the actual process of dialectic as there exposed) by that
+final impression of a subject, a theorem, in which the mind attains a
+hold, as if by a single imaginative act, through all the transitions of
+a long conversation, upon all the seemingly opposite contentions of all
+the various speakers at once.  We see already why [182] Platonic
+dialectic--the ladder, as Plato thinks, by which alone we can ascend
+into the entirely reasonable world (noêtos topos)+ beginning with the
+boyish difficulties and crudities of Meno, for instance, is a process
+which may go on, at least with those gifted by nature and opportunity,
+as in the Perfect City,--may go on to the close of life, and, as
+Pythagorean theory suggests, perhaps does not end even then.
+
+The process of dialectic, as represented in the Platonic Dialogues, may
+seem, therefore, inconsistent with itself, if you isolate this or that
+particular movement, in what is a very complex process, with many
+phases of development.  It is certainly difficult, and that not merely
+on a first reading, to grasp the unity of the various statements Plato
+has made about it.  Now it may seem to differ from ordinary reasoning
+by a certain plausibility only: it is logic, plus persuasion; helping,
+gently enticing, a child out of his natural errors; carefully
+explaining difficulties by the way, as one can best do, by question and
+answer with him; above all, never falling into the mistake of the
+obscurum per obscurius.  At another time it may seem to aim at
+plausibility of another sort; at mutual complaisance, as Thrasymachus
+complains.  It would be possible, of course, to present an insincere
+dialogue, in which certain of the disputants shall be mere men of
+straw.  In the Philebus again, dialectic is only the name of the
+process (described there [183] as exactly, almost as technically, as
+Aristotle, or some modern master of applied logic, might describe it)
+of the resolution of a genus into its species.  Or it lapses into
+"eristic"--into an argument for its own sake; or sinks into logomachy,
+a mere dispute about words.  Or yet again, an immense, a boundless
+promise is made for it, as in the seventh book of The Republic.  It is
+a life, a systematised, but comprehensive and far-reaching,
+intellectual life, in which the reason, nay, the whole nature of man,
+realises all it was designed to be, by the beatific "vision of all time
+and all existence."
+
+Now all these varying senses of the word "dialectic" fall within
+compass, if we remember that for Plato, as for every other really
+philosophic thinker, method must be one; that it must cover, or be
+understood to cover, the entire process, all the various processes, of
+the mind, in pursuit of properly representative ideas, of a reasoned
+reflex of experience; and that for Plato, this process is essentially a
+long discourse or reasoning of the mind with itself.  It is that
+dynamic, or essential, dialogue of the mind with itself, which lends,
+or imputes, its active principle to the written or spoken dialogue,
+which, in return, lends its name to the method it figures--
+"dialectic."  Well! in that long and complex dialogue of the mind with
+itself, many persons, so to speak, will necessarily take part; so many
+persons as there are possible contrasts or shades [184] in the
+apprehension of some complex subject.  The advocatus diaboli will be
+heard from time to time.  The dog also, or, as the Greeks said, the
+wolf, will out with his story against the man; and one of the
+interlocutors will always be a child, turning round upon us innocently,
+candidly, with our own admissions, or surprising us, perhaps at the
+last moment, by what seems his invincible ignorance, when we thought it
+rooted out of him.  There will be a youth, inexperienced in the
+capacities of language, who will compel us to allow much time to the
+discussion of words and phrases, though not always unprofitably.  And
+to the last, let us hope, refreshing with his enthusiasm, the weary or
+disheartened enquirer (who is always also of the company) the rightly
+sanguine youth, ingenuous and docile, to whom, surely, those friendly
+living ideas will be willing, longing, to come, after that Platonic law
+of affinity, so effectual in these matters--homoion homoiô.+
+
+With such a nature above all, bringing with it its felicities of
+temperament, with the sort of natures (as we may think) which
+intellectually can but thrive, a method like that, the dialectic
+method, will also have its felicities, its singular good fortunes.  A
+voyage of discovery, prosecuted almost as if at random, the Socratic or
+Platonic "dialogue of enquiry," seems at times to be in charge of a
+kind of "Providence."  Or again, it will be as when hunters or bird-
+catchers "beat [185] the bush," as we say: Plato elaborates that figure
+in The Republic.  Only, if they be knowing in the process, a fair
+percentage of birds will be found and taken.  All the chances, or
+graces, of such a method, as actually followed in a whole life of free
+enquiry, The Republic, for a watchful reader, represents in little.
+And when, using still another figure, Socrates says: "I do not yet
+know, myself; but, we must just go where the argument carries us, as a
+vessel runs before the wind," he breathes the very soul of the
+"dialectic method":--hopê an ho logos, hôsper pneuma, pherê, tautê
+iteon.+
+
+This dialectic method, this continuous discourse with one's self,
+being, for those who prosecute it with thoroughness, co-extensive with
+life itself--a part of the continuous company we keep with ourselves
+through life--will have its inequalities; its infelicities; above all,
+its final insecurity.  "We argue rashly and adventurously," writes
+Plato, most truly, in the Timaeus--aye, we, the Platonists, as such,
+sometimes--"by reason that, like ourselves, our discourses (our
+Platonic discourses, as such) have much participation in the temerity
+of chance."  Of course, as in any other occasional conversation, with
+its dependence on the hour and the scene, the persons we are with, the
+humours of the moment, there will always be much of accident in this
+essentially informal, this un-methodical, [186] method; and, therefore,
+opportunities for misuse, sometimes consciously.  The candid reader
+notes instances of such, even in The Republic, not always on the part
+of Thrasymachus:--in this "new game of chess," played, as Plato puts
+it, not with counters, but with words, and not necessarily for the
+prize of truth, but, it may be, for the mere enjoyment of move and
+counter-move, of check-mating.
+
+Since Zeno's paradoxes, in fact, the very air of Athens was become
+sophisticated, infected with questionings, often vain enough; and the
+Platonic method had been, in its measure, determined by (the unfriendly
+might say, was in truth only a deposit from) that infected air.
+"Socrates," as he admits, "is easily refuted.  Say rather, dear
+Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth."  That is reassuring,
+certainly!  For you might think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic
+Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or of himself perhaps en
+caricature, in the Euthydemus, "Such is his skill in the war of words,
+that he can refute any proposition whatever, whether true or false";
+that, in short, there is a dangerous facility abroad for proving all
+things whatever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his presumable
+allotment of truth, has but the general allotment.
+
+The friendly, on the other hand, might rejoin even then, that, as
+Lessing suggests, the search for truth is a better thing for us than
+its possession.
+
+[187] Plato, who supposes any knowledge worth the name to be "absolute
+and eternal"; whose constant contention it is, to separate longo
+intervallo, by the longest possible interval, science (epistêmê)+ as the
+possession of irresistible truth, from any and every sort  of knowledge
+which falls short of that; would hardly have accepted the suggestion of
+Lessing.  Yet, in spite of all that, in spite of the demand he makes
+for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real
+knowledge, he does think, or inclines his reader to think, that truth,
+precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of
+persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver; and must be,
+in that degree, elusive, provisional, contingent, a matter of various
+approximation, and of an "economy," as is said; that it is partly a
+subjective attitude of mind:--that philosophic truth consists in the
+philosophic temper.  "Socrates in Plato," remarks Montaigne acutely,
+"disputes, rather to the profit of the disputants, than of the dispute.
+He takes hold of the first subject, like one who has a more profitable
+end in view than to explain it; namely, to clear the understandings
+that he takes upon him to instruct and exercise."
+
+Just there, in fact, is the justification of Plato's peculiar
+dialectical method, of its inexactness, its hesitancy, its scruples and
+reserve, as if he feared to obtrude knowledge on an unworthy receiver.
+The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma [188] --the Ethics of
+Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza--begins with a truth, or with a clear
+conviction of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does but
+propose further to explain and apply.--The treatise, as the instrument
+of a dogmatic philosophy begins with an axiom or definition: the essay
+or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does
+not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue
+with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be co-extensive with
+life.  It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say,
+or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair
+chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps: it does but put one into a duly
+receptive attitude towards such possible truth, discovery, or
+revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet,--shed itself
+on the purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system of
+propositions, but forms a temper.
+
+What Plato presents to his readers is then, again, a paradox, or a
+reconciliation of opposed tendencies: on one side, the largest possible
+demand for infallible certainty in knowledge (it was he fixed that
+ideal of absolute truth, to which, vainly perhaps, the human mind, as
+such, aspires) yet, on the other side, the utmost possible inexactness,
+or contingency, in the method by which actually he proposes to attain
+it.  It has been said that the humour of Socrates, of which the [189]
+famous Socratic irony--the pretence to have a bad memory, to dislike or
+distrust long and formal discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a
+mid-wife in relation to other people's thoughts--was an element, is
+more than a mere personal trait; that it was welcome as affording a
+means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching.  It
+belonged, in truth, to the tentative character of dialectic, of
+question and answer as the method of discovery, of teaching and
+learning, to the position, in a word, of the philosophic essayist.
+That it was thus, might be illustrated abundantly from the Platonic
+dialogues.  The irony, the Socratic humour, so serviceable to a
+diffident teacher, are, in fact, Plato's own.  Kindyneuei,+ "it may
+chance to be," is, we may notice, a favourite catchword of his.  The
+philosopher of Being, or, of the verb, "To be," is after all afraid of
+saying, "It is."
+
+For, again, person dealing with person--with possible caprice,
+therefore, at least on one side--or intelligence with intelligence, is
+what Plato supposes in the reception of truth:--that, and not an exact
+mechanism, a precise machine, operating on, or with, an exactly
+ponderable matter.  He has fears for truth, however carefully
+considered.  To the very last falsehood will lurk, if not about truth
+itself, about this or that assent to it.  The receiver may add the
+falsities of his own nature to the truth he receives.  The proposition
+which embodies it very [190] imperfectly, may not look to him, in those
+dark chambers of his individuality, of himself, into which none but he
+can ever get, to test the matter, what it looks to me, or to you.  We
+may not even be thinking of, not looking at, the same thing, when we
+talk of Beauty, and the like; objects which, after all, to the
+Platonist are matters of theôria,+ of immediate intuition, of immediate
+vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal
+experience; and which, as matter of such intuition, are incapable of
+analysis, and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words.  Place,
+then, must be left to the last in any legitimate dialectic process for
+possible after-thoughts; for the introduction, so to speak, of yet
+another interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact, no necessary
+conclusion, and leaves off only because time is up, or when, as he
+says, one leaves off seeking through weariness (apokamnôn).+  "What
+thought can think, another thought can mend."  Another turn in the
+endless road may change the whole character of the perspective.  You
+cannot, as the Sophist proposed to do (that was part of his
+foolishness) take and put truth into the soul.  If you could, it might
+be established there, only as an "inward lie," as a mistake.  "Must I
+take the argument, and literally insert it into your mind?" asks
+Thrasymachus.  "Heaven forbid": answers Socrates.  That is precisely
+what he fears most, for himself, and for others; and from first to
+last, demands, as the first condition of comradeship [191] in that long
+journey in which he conceives teacher and learner to be but fellow-
+travellers, pilgrims side by side, sincerity, above all sincerity with
+one's self--that, and also freedom in reply.  "Answer what you think,
+megaloprepôs +--liberally."  For it is impossible to make way otherwise,
+in a method which consists essentially in the development of knowledge
+by question and answer.
+
+Misuse, again, is of course possible in a method which admits of no
+objective sanction or standard; the success of which depends on a
+loyalty to one's self, in the prosecution of it, of which no one else
+can be cognisant.  And if we can misuse it with ourselves, how much
+more certainly can the expert abuse it with another.  At every turn of
+the conversation, a door lies open to sophistry.  Sophistry, logomachy,
+eristic: we may learn what these are, sometimes, from Plato's own
+practice.  That justice is only useful as applied to things useless;
+that the just man is a kind of thief; and the like; is hardly so much
+as sophistry.  And this too was possible in a method, which, with all
+its large outlook, has something of the irregularity, the accident, the
+heats and confusion, of life itself--a method of reasoning which can
+only in a certain measure be reasoned upon.  How different the
+exactness which Aristotle supposes, and does his best to secure, in
+scientific procedure!  For him, dialectic, Platonic dialectic, is, at
+best, a part of  "eristic" [192] --of the art, or trick, of merely
+popular and approximate debate, in matters where science is out of the
+question, and rhetoric has its office, not in providing for the
+intelligence, but in moulding the sentiments and the will.  Conversely
+to that absoluteness and necessity which Plato himself supposes in all
+real knowledge, as "the spectacle of all time and all existence," it
+might seem that the only sort of truth attainable by his actual method,
+must be the truth of a particular time and place, for one and not for
+another.  Dialogos peirastikos,+ "a Dialogue of search":--every one of
+Plato's Dialogues is in essence such like that whole, life-long,
+endless dialogue which dialectic, in its largest scope, does but
+formulate, and in which truly the last, the infallible word, after all,
+never gets spoken.  Our pilgrimage is meant indeed to end in nothing
+less than the vision of what we seek.  But can we ever be quite sure
+that we are really come to that?  By what sign or test?
+
+Now oppose all this, all these peculiarities of the Platonic method, as
+we find it, to the exact and formal method of Aristotle, of Aquinas, of
+Spinoza, or Hegel; and then suppose one trained exclusively on Plato's
+dialogues.  Is it the eternal certainty, after all, the immutable and
+absolute character of truth, as Plato conceived it, that he would be
+likely to apprehend?  We have here another of those contrasts of
+tendency, constitutional [193] in the genius of Plato, and which may
+add to our interest in him.  Plato is to be explained, as we say, or
+interpreted, partly through his predecessors, and his contemporaries;
+but in part also by his followers, by the light his later mental
+kinsmen throw back on the conscious or unconscious drift of his
+teaching.  Now there are in the history of philosophy two opposite
+Platonic traditions; two legitimate yet divergent streams of influence
+from him.  Two very different yet equally representative scholars we
+may see in thought emerging from his school.  The  "theory of the
+Ideas," the high ideal, the uncompromising demand for absolute
+certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name; the immediate
+or intuitive character of the highest acts of knowledge; that all true
+theory is indeed "vision":--for the maintenance of that side of the
+Platonic position we must look onward to Aristotle, and the Schoolmen
+of all ages, to Spinoza, to Hegel; to those mystic aspirants to
+"vision" also, the so-called Neo-Platonists of all ages, from Proclus
+to Schelling.  From the abstract, metaphysical systems of those, the
+ecstasy and illuminism of these, we may mount up to the actual words of
+Plato in the Symposium, the fifth book of The Republic, the Phaedrus.
+
+But it is in quite different company we must look for the tradition,
+the development, of Plato's actual method of learning and teaching.
+The Academy of Plato, the established seat of his [194] philosophy,
+gave name to a school, of which Lucian, in Greek, and in Latin, Cicero,
+are the proper representatives,--Cicero, the perfect embodiment of what
+is still sometimes understood to be the "academic spirit," surveying
+all sides, arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, balancing,
+tendencies, but ending in suspension of judgment.  If Platonism from
+age to age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of "being," or the
+nearest attainable approach to or substitution for that; for others,
+Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a
+recognisable philosophic tradition.  Thus, in the Middle Age, it
+qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard.  It
+is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself
+again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne--that typical
+sceptic of the age of the Renaissance--conversations with himself, with
+the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do
+but reflect.  Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the
+typical essayist.  And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but
+commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical
+reassertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a
+constant accumulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by
+empirical science, has had assuredly, to check wholesomely the
+pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts.--"Their name is
+legion," says a modern writer.  Reverent [195] and irreverent,
+reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy,
+guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable--they have been called,
+indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intellectual security, but
+cannot make up its mind.  Q'ue scais-je? it cries, in the words of
+Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom
+such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service.
+
+Sanguine about any form of absolute knowledge, of eternal, or
+indefectible, or immutable truth, with our modern temperament as it is,
+we shall hardly become, even under the direction of Plato, and by the
+reading of the Platonic Dialogues.  But if we are little likely to
+realise in his school, the promise of  "ontological" science, of a
+"doctrine of Being," or any increase in our consciousness of
+metaphysical security, are likely, rather, to acquire there that other
+sort of Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking and suspended
+judgment, if we are not likely to enjoy the vision of his "eternal and
+immutable ideas," Plato may yet promote in us what we call "ideals"--
+the aspiration towards a more perfect Justice, a more perfect Beauty,
+physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs,
+than any one has ever yet seen; that kosmos,+ in which things are only
+as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is
+constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide.  There they
+stand, the two [196] great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual
+life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world of "ideas," "the great
+perhaps," for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room
+in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our
+affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with
+ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real:--and then,
+over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in
+nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem)
+of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our
+part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its
+diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts.  Such
+condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development
+and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity,
+of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a
+question--the "philosophic temper," in short, for which a survival of
+query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely
+ascertained knowledge.
+
+NOTES
+
+174. +Transliteration: Peri Physeôs.  Pater's translation: "Concerning
+Nature."
+
+174. ±Sic. This form, "situate," may be Pater's archaism for situated,
+or it may simply be a typographic error in the original published
+edition.
+
+175. *Essay--"A loose sally of the mind," says Johnson's Dictionary.
+Bailey's earlier Dictionary gives another suggestive use of the word
+"among miners"--A little trench or hole, which they dig to search for
+ore.
+
+178. +Transliteration: methodos.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"method."  Plato, Republic 531c.
+
+179. *Skepsasthai kai syzêtêsai hoti pote estin; kai, tach' an, par'
+allêla skopountes, kai tribontes, hôsper ek pureiôn, eklampsai
+poiêsaimen tên dikaiosynên.  Pater's translation: "to consider, to seek
+out, what the thing may be.  Perchance using our eyes in common,
+rubbing away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as
+from fire-sticks."  Plato, Meno 80d for the first line and, for the
+remainder, Republic 435a.
+
+181. +Transliteration: hodos, kinêsis, methodos.  Liddell and Scott
+definitions: "path, motion, method."
+
+181. +Transliteration: Alla metathômetha.  E-text editor's translation:
+"But let us follow out [a different path of thought]," or "let's
+examine this from a different perspective."  For example, Plato,
+Republic 334e.
+
+182. +Transliteration: noêtos topos.  Pater's translation: "reasonable
+world."  Plato, Republic 508b.
+
+184. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô.  Pater's translation: "like to
+like."  Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato's dialogues; see,
+for example, Parmenides 132d.
+
+185. +Transliteration: hopê an ho logos, hôsper pneuma, pherê, tautê
+iteon.  Pater's translation: "we must just go where the argument
+carries us, as a vessel runs before the wind."  Plato, Republic 394d.
+
+187. +Transliteration: epistêmê.  Liddell and Scott definition "1.
+knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific
+knowledge."
+
+189. +Transliteration: Kindyneuei.  Pater's translation: "it may chance
+to be."
+
+190. +Transliteration: theôria.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection."  Pater
+defines it in Platonic terms as "immediate intuition."  For example,
+Plato, Republic 486a.
+
+190. +Transliteration: apokamnôn.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"grow[ing] quite weary."  See, for example, Plato, Protagoras 333b.
+
+191. +Transliteration: megaloprepôs.  Liddell and Scott definition / E-
+text editor's translation: "liberally."  The exchange between
+Thrasymachus and Socrates to which Pater refers begins at Republic
+345b.
+
+192. +Transliteration: Dialogos peirastikos.  Pater's translation: "a
+Dialogue of search."
+
+195. +Transliteration: kosmos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "I. 1.
+order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order:
+of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an
+ornament. . .; III. the world or universe, from its perfect
+arrangement."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 8: LACEDAEMON
+
+[197] AMONG the Greeks, philosophy has flourished longest, and is still
+most abundant, at Crete and Lacedaemon; and there there are more
+teachers of philosophy than anywhere else in the world.  But the
+Lacedaemonians deny this, and pretend to be unlearned people, lest it
+should become manifest that it is through philosophy they are supreme
+in Greece; that they may be thought to owe their supremacy to their
+fighting and manly spirit, for they think that if the means of their
+superiority were made known all the Greeks would practise this.  But
+now, by keeping it a secret, they have succeeded in misleading the
+Laconisers in the various cities of Greece; and in imitation of them
+these people buffet themselves, and practise gymnastics, and put on
+boxing-gloves, and wear short cloaks, as if it were by such things that
+the Lacedaemonians excel all other Greeks.  But the Lacedaemonians,
+when they wish to have intercourse with their philosophers without
+reserve, and are weary of going to them by stealth, make legal
+proclamation that those Laconisers should depart, with any other aliens
+who may be sojourning among them, and thereupon betake themselves to
+their sophists unobserved by strangers.  And you may know that what I
+say is true, and that the Lacedaemonians are better instructed than all
+other people in philosophy and the art of discussion in this way.  If
+any one will converse with even the most insignificant of the
+Lacedaemonians, he may find him indeed in the greater part of what he
+says seemingly but a poor creature; but then at some chance point in
+the conversation he will throw in some brief compact saying, worthy of
+remark, like a clever archer, so that his interlocutor shall seem no
+better than a child.  Of [198] this fact some both of those now living
+and of the ancients have been aware, and that to Laconise consists in
+the study of philosophy far rather than in the pursuit of gymnastic,
+for they saw that to utter such sayings as those was only possible for
+a perfectly educated man.  Of these was Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of
+Mytilene, Bias the Prienean, and our own Solon, Cleobulus the Lindian,
+and Myson of Chen, and the seventh among them was called Chilon, a
+Lacedaemonian.  These were all zealous lovers and disciples of the
+culture of the Lacedaemonians.  And any one may understand that their
+philosophy was something of this kind, short rememberable sayings
+uttered by each of them.  They met together and offered these in
+common, as the first fruits of philosophy, to Apollo in his temple at
+Delphi, and they wrote upon the walls these sayings known and read of
+all men: Gnôthi sauton and Mêden agan.  Protagoras, 343.+
+
+Of course there is something in that of the romance to which the genius
+of Plato readily inclined him; something also of the Platonic humour or
+irony, which suggests, for example, to Meno, so anxious to be
+instructed in the theory of virtue, that the philosophic temper must be
+departed from Attica, its natural home, to Thessaly--to the rude
+northern capital whence that ingenuous youth was freshly arrived.
+Partly romantic, partly humorous, in his Laconism, Plato is however
+quite serious in locating a certain spirit at Lacedaemon of which his
+own ideal Republic would have been the completer development; while the
+picture he draws of it presents many a detail taken straight from
+Lacedaemon as it really was, as if by an admiring visitor, who had in
+person paced the streets of the Dorian metropolis it was so difficult
+for any [199] alien to enter.  What was actually known of that stern
+place, of the Lacedaemonians at home, at school, had charmed into
+fancies about it other philosophic theorists; Xenophon for instance,
+who had little or nothing of romantic tendency about them.
+
+And there was another sort of romancing also, quite opposite to this of
+Plato, concerning the hard ways among themselves of those
+Lacedaemonians who were so invincible in the field.  "The
+Lacedaemonians," says Pausanias, "appear to have admired least of all
+people poetry and the praise which it bestows."  "At Lacedaemon there
+is more philosophy than anywhere else in the world," is what Plato, or
+the Platonic Socrates, had said.  Yet, on the contrary, there were some
+who alleged that true Lacedaemonians--Lacedaemonian nobles--for their
+protection against the "effeminacies" of culture, were denied all
+knowledge of reading and writing.  But then we know that written books
+are properly a mere assistant, sometimes, as Plato himself suggests, a
+treacherous assistant, to memory; those conservative Lacedaemonians
+being, so to speak, the people of memory pre-eminently, and very
+appropriately, for, whether or not they were taught to read and write,
+they were acknowledged adepts in the Pythagorean philosophy, a
+philosophy which attributes to memory so preponderating a function in
+the mental life.  "Writing," says K. O. Müller in his laborious, [200]
+yet, in spite of its air of coldness, passably romantic work on The
+Dorians--an author whose quiet enthusiasm for his subject resulted
+indeed in a patient scholarship which well befits it: "Writing," he
+says, "was not essential in a nation where laws, hymns, and the praises
+of illustrious men--that is, jurisprudence and history--were taught in
+their schools of music."  Music, which is or ought to be, as we know,
+according to those Pythagorean doctrines, itself the essence of all
+things, was everywhere in the Perfect City of Plato; and among the
+Lacedaemonians also, who may be thought to have come within measurable
+distance of that Perfect City, though with no conscious theories about
+it, music (mousikê)+ in the larger sense of the word, was everywhere,
+not to alleviate only but actually to promote and inform, to be the
+very substance of their so strenuous and taxing habit of life.  What
+was this "music," this service or culture of the Muses, this harmony,
+partly moral, doubtless, but also throughout a matter of elaborate
+movement of the voice, of musical instruments, of all beside that could
+in any way be associated to such things--this music, for the
+maintenance, the perpetual sense of which those vigorous souls were
+ready to sacrifice so many opportunities, privileges, enjoyments of a
+different sort, so much of their ease, of themselves, of one another?
+
+Platonism is a highly conscious reassertion [201] of one of the two
+constituent elements in the Hellenic genius, of the spirit of the
+highlands namely in which the early Dorian forefathers of the
+Lacedaemonians had secreted their peculiar disposition, in contrast
+with the mobile, the marine and fluid temper of the littoral Ionian
+people.  The Republic of Plato is an embodiment of that Platonic
+reassertion or preference, of Platonism, as the principle of a society,
+ideal enough indeed, yet in various degrees practicable.  It is not
+understood by Plato to be an erection de novo, and therefore only on
+paper.  Its foundations might be laid in certain practicable changes to
+be enforced in the old schools, in a certain reformed music which must
+be taught there, and would float thence into the existing homes of
+Greece, under the shadow of its old temples, the sanction of its old
+religion, its old memories, the old names of things.  Given the central
+idea, with its essentially renovating power, the well-worn elements of
+society as it is would rebuild themselves, and a new colour come
+gradually over all things as the proper expression of a certain new
+mind in them.
+
+And in fact such embodiments of the specially Hellenic element in
+Hellenism, compacted in the natural course of political development,
+there had been, though in a less ideal form, in those many Dorian
+constitutions to which Aristotle refers.  To Lacedaemon, in The
+Republic itself, admiring allusions abound, covert, yet bold [202]
+enough, if we remember the existing rivalry between Athens and her
+neighbour; and it becomes therefore a help in the study of Plato's
+political ideal to approach as near as we may to that earlier actual
+embodiment of its principles, which is also very interesting in itself.
+The Platonic City of the Perfect would not have been cut clean away
+from the old roots of national life: would have had many links with the
+beautiful and venerable Greek cities of past and present.  The ideal,
+poetic or romantic as it might seem, would but have begun where they
+had left off, where Lacedaemon, in particular, had left off.  Let us
+then, by way of realising the better the physiognomy of Plato's
+theoretic building, suppose some contemporary student of The Republic,
+a pupil, say! in the Athenian Academy, determined to gaze on the actual
+face of what has so strong a family likeness to it.  Stimulated by his
+master's unconcealed Laconism, his approval of contemporary Lacedaemon,
+he is at the pains to journey thither, and make personal inspection of
+a place, in Plato's general commendations of which he may suspect some
+humour or irony, but which has unmistakably lent many a detail to his
+ideal Republic, on paper, or in thought.
+
+He would have found it, this youthful Anacharsis, hard to get there,
+partly through the nature of the country, in part because the people of
+Lacedaemon (it was a point of system with them, as we heard just now)
+were suspicious of [203] foreigners.  Romantic dealers in political
+theory at Athens were safe in saying pretty much what they pleased
+about its domestic doings.  Still, not so far away, made, not in idea
+and by the movements of an abstract argument, the mere strokes of a
+philosophic pen, but solidified by constancy of character, fortified
+anew on emergency by heroic deeds, for itself, for the whole of Greece,
+though with such persistent hold throughout on an idea, or system of
+ideas, that it might seem actually to have come ready-made from the
+mind of some half-divine Lycurgus, or through him from Apollo himself,
+creator of that music of which it was an example:--there, in the hidden
+valley of the Eurotas, it was to be found, as a visible centre of
+actual human life, the place which was alleged to have come, harsh
+paradox as it might sound to Athenian ears, within measurable distance
+of civic perfection, of the political and social ideal.
+
+Our youthful academic adventurer then, making his way along those
+difficult roads, between the ridges of the Eastern Acadian Mountains,
+and emerging at last into "hollow" Laconia, would have found himself in
+a country carefully made the most of by the labour of serfs; a land of
+slavery, far more relentlessly organised according to law than anywhere
+else in Greece, where, in truth, for the most part slavery was a kind
+of accident.  But whatever rigours these slaves of Laconia were
+otherwise subjected to, they [204] enjoyed certainly that kind of well-
+being which does come of organisation, from the order and regularity of
+system, living under central military authority, and bound themselves
+to military service; to furnish (as under later feudal institutions) so
+many efficient men-at-arms on demand, and maintain themselves in
+readiness for war as they laboured in those distantly-scattered farms,
+seldom visited by their true masters from Lacedaemon, whither year by
+year they sent in kind their heavy tribute of oil, barley and wine.
+The very genius of conservatism here enthroned, secured, we may be
+sure, to this old-fashioned country life something of the personal
+dignity, of the enjoyments also, natural to it; somewhat livelier
+religious feasts, for example, than their lords allowed themselves.
+Stray echoes of their boisterous plebeian mirth on such occasions have
+reached us in Greek literature.
+
+But if the traveller had penetrated a little more closely he would have
+been told certain startling stories, with at least a basis of truth in
+them, even as regards the age of Plato.  These slaves were Greeks: no
+rude Scythians, nor crouching, decrepit Asiatics, like ordinary
+prisoners of war, the sort of slaves you could buy, but genuine Greeks,
+speaking their native tongue, if with less of muscular tension and
+energy, yet probably with pleasanter voice and accent than their
+essentially highland masters.  Physically they throve, under something
+of the same discipline which had made [205] those masters the masters
+also of all Greece.  They saw them now and then--their younger lords,
+brought, under strict tutelage, on those long hunting expeditions, one
+of their so rare enjoyments, prescribed for them, as was believed, by
+the founder of their polity.  But sometimes (here was the report which
+made one shudder even in broad daylight, in those seemingly reposeful
+places) sometimes those young nobles of Lacedaemon reached them on a
+different kind of pursuit: came by night, secretly, though by no means
+contrarily to the laws of a state crafty as it was determined, to
+murder them at home, or a certain moiety of them; one here or there
+perhaps who, with good Achaean blood in his veins, and under a
+wholesome mode of life, was grown too tall, or too handsome, or too
+fruitful a father, to feel quite like a slave.  Under a sort of slavery
+that makes him strong and beautiful, where personal beauty was so
+greatly prized, his masters are in fact jealous of him.
+
+But masters thus hard to others, these Lacedaemonians, as we know, were
+the reverse of indulgent to themselves.  While, as a matter of theory,
+power and privilege belonged exclusively to the old, to the seniors
+(hoi gerontes, hê gerousia)+ ruling by a council wherein no question
+might be discussed, one might only deliver one's Aye! or No! Lacedaemon
+was in truth before all things an organised place of discipline, an
+organised [206] opportunity also, for youth, for the sort of youth that
+knew how to command by serving--a constant exhibition of youthful
+courage, youthful self-respect, yet above all of true youthful
+docility; youth thus committing itself absolutely, soul and body, to a
+corporate sentiment in its very sports.  There was a third sort of
+regulation visits the lads of Lacedaemon were driven to pay to those
+country places, the vales, the uplands, when, to brace youthful
+stomachs and develope resource, they came at stated intervals as a kind
+of mendicants or thieves, feet and head uncovered through frost and
+heat, to steal their sustenance, under penalties if detected--"a
+survival," as anthropologists would doubtless prove, pointing out
+collateral illustrations of the same, from a world of purely animal
+courage and keenness.  Whips and rods used in a kind of monitorial
+system by themselves had a great part in the education of these young
+aristocrats, and, as pain surely must do, pain not of bodily disease or
+wretched accidents, but as it were by dignified rules of art, seem to
+have refined them, to have made them observant of the minutest
+direction in those musical exercises, wherein eye and ear and voice and
+foot all alike combined.  There could be nothing paraleipomenon,+ as
+Plato says, no "oversights," here.  No! every one, at every moment,
+quite at his best; and, observe especially, with no superfluities;
+seeing that when we have to do with music of any kind, with matters of
+art, in stone, in words, [207] in the actions of life, all
+superfluities are in very truth "superfluities of naughtiness," such as
+annihilate music.
+
+The country through which our young traveller from his laxer school of
+Athens seeks his way to Lacedaemon, this land of a noble slavery, so
+peacefully occupied but for those irregular nocturnal terrors, was
+perhaps the loveliest in Greece, with that peculiarly blent loveliness,
+in which, as at Florence, the expression of a luxurious lowland is duly
+checked by the severity of its mountain barriers.  It was a type of the
+Dorian purpose in life--sternness, like sea-water infused into wine,
+overtaking a matter naturally rich, at the moment when fulness may lose
+its savour and expression.  Amid the corn and oleanders--corn "so tall,
+close, and luxuriant," as the modern traveller there still finds--it
+was visible at last, Lacedaemon, koilê Spartê,+ "hollow Sparta," under
+the sheltering walls of Taygetus, the broken and rugged forms of which
+were attributed to earthquake, but without proper walls of its own.  In
+that natural fastness, or trap, or falcon's nest, it had no need of
+them, the falcon of the land, with the hamlets (polichnia)+ a hundred
+and more, dispersed over it, in jealously enforced seclusion from one
+another.
+
+From the first he notes "the antiquated appearance" of Lacedaemon, by
+no means a "growing" place, always rebuilding, remodelling itself,
+after the newest fashion, with shapeless suburbs [208] stretching
+farther and farther on every side of it, grown too large perhaps, as
+Plato threatens, to be a body, a corporate unity, at all: not that, but
+still, and to the last, itself only a great village, a solemn, ancient,
+mountain village.  Even here of course there had been movement, some
+sort of progress, if so it is to be called, linking limb to limb; but
+long ago.  Originally a union, after the manner of early Rome, of
+perhaps three or four neighbouring villages which had never lost their
+physiognomy, like Rome it occupied a group of irregular heights, the
+outermost roots of Taygetus, on the bank of a river or mountain
+torrent, impetuous enough in winter, a series of wide shallows and deep
+pools in the blazing summer.  It was every day however, all the year
+round, that Lacedaemonian youth plunged itself in the Eurotas.  Hence,
+from this circumstance of the union there of originally disparate
+parts, the picturesque and expressive irregularity, had they had time
+to think it such, of the "city" properly so termed, the one open place
+or street, High Street, or Corso--Aphetais by name, lined, irregularly
+again, with various religious and other monuments.  It radiated on all
+sides into a mazy coil, an ambush, of narrow crooked lanes, up and
+down, in which attack and defence would necessarily be a matter of
+hand-to-hand fighting.  In the outskirts lay the citizens' houses,
+roomier far than those of Athens, with spacious, walled courts, almost
+in the country.  Here, in contrast [209] to the homes of Athens, the
+legitimate wife had a real dignity, the unmarried woman a singular
+freedom.  There were no door-knockers: you shouted at the outer gate to
+be let in.  Between the high walls lanes passed into country roads,
+sacred ways to ancient sacro-sanct localities, Therapnae, Amyclae, on
+this side or that, under the shade of mighty plane-trees.
+
+Plato, as you may remember, gives a hint that, like all other visible
+things, the very trees--how they grow--exercise an aesthetic influence
+on character.  The diligent legislator therefore would have his
+preferences, even in this matter of the trees under which the citizens
+of the Perfect City might sit down to rest.  What trees? you wonder.
+The olive? the laurel, as if wrought in grandiose metal? the cypress?
+that came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete: the oak? we think it
+very expressive of strenuous national character.  Well! certainly the
+plane-tree for one, characteristic tree of Lacedaemon then and now; a
+very tranquil and tranquillising object, spreading its level or gravely
+curved masses on the air as regally as the tree of Lebanon itself.  A
+vast grove of such was the distinguishing mark of Lacedaemon in any
+distant view of it; that, and, as at Athens, a colossal image, older
+than the days of Phidias--the Demos of Lacedaemon, it would seem,
+towering visibly above the people it protected.  Below those mighty
+trees, on an island in their national river, [210] were the "playing-
+fields," where Lacedaemonian youth after sacrifice in the Ephebeum
+delighted others rather than itself (no "shirking" was allowed) with a
+sort of football, under rigorous self-imposed rules--tearing, biting--a
+sport, rougher even than our own, et même très dangereux, as our Attic
+neighbours, the French, say of the English game.
+
+They were orderly enough perforce, the boys, the young men, within the
+city--seen, but not heard, except under regulations, when they made the
+best music in the world.  Our visitor from Athens when he saw those
+youthful soldiers, or military students, as Xenophon in his pretty
+treatise on the polity of Lacedaemon describes, walking with downcast
+eyes, their hands meekly hidden in their cloaks, might have thought
+them young monks, had he known of such.
+
+A little mountain town, however ambitious, however successful in its
+ambition, would hardly be expected to compete with Athens, or Corinth,
+itself a Dorian state, in art-production, yet had not only its
+characteristic preferences in this matter, in plastic and literary art,
+but had also many venerable and beautiful buildings to show.  The
+Athenian visitor, who is standing now in the central space of
+Lacedaemon, notes here, as being a trait also of the "Perfect City" of
+academic theory, that precisely because these people find themselves
+very susceptible to the [211] influences of form and colour and sound,
+to external aesthetic influence, but have withal a special purpose, a
+certain strongly conceived disciplinary or ethic ideal, that therefore
+a peculiar humour prevails among them, a self-denying humour, in regard
+to these things.  Those ancient Pelopid princes, from whom the
+hereditary kings of historic Lacedaemon, come back from exile into
+their old home, claim to be descended, had had their palaces, with a
+certain Homeric, Asiatic splendour, of wrought metal and the like;
+considerable relics of which still remained, but as public or sacred
+property now.  At the time when Plato's scholar stands before them, the
+houses of these later historic kings--two kings, as you remember,
+always reigning together, in some not quite clearly evolved
+differentiation of the temporal and spiritual functions--were plain
+enough; the royal doors, when beggar or courtier approached them, no
+daintier than Lycurgus had prescribed for all true Lacedaemonian
+citizens; rude, strange things to look at, fashioned only, like the
+ceilings within, with axe and saw, of old mountain oak or pine from
+those great Taygetan forests, whence came also the abundant iron, which
+this stern people of iron and steel had super-induced on that earlier
+dreamy age of silver and gold--steel, however, admirably tempered and
+wrought in its application to military use, and much sought after
+throughout Greece.
+
+Layer upon layer, the relics of those earlier [212] generations, a
+whole succession of remarkable races, lay beneath the strenuous
+footsteps of the present occupants, as there was old poetic legend in
+the depths of their seemingly so practical or prosaic souls.  Nor
+beneath their feet only: the relics of their worship, their
+sanctuaries, their tombs, their very houses, were part of the scenery
+of actual life.  Our young Platonic visitor from Athens, climbing
+through those narrow winding lanes, and standing at length on the open
+platform of the Aphetais, finds himself surrounded by treasures, modest
+treasures of ancient architecture, dotted irregularly here and there
+about him, as if with conscious design upon picturesque effect, such
+irregularities sometimes carrying in them the secret of expression, an
+accent.  Old Alcman for one had been alive to the poetic opportunities
+of the place; boasts that he belongs to Lacedaemon, "abounding in
+sacred tripods"; that it was here the Heliconian Muses had revealed
+themselves to him.  If the private abodes even of royalty were rude it
+was only that the splendour of places dedicated to religion and the
+state might the more abound.  Most splendid of them all, the Stoa
+Poekile, a cloister or portico with painted walls, to which the spoils
+of the Persian war had been devoted, ranged its pillars of white marble
+on one side of the central space: on the other, connecting those high
+memories with the task of the living, lay the Choros, where, at the
+Gymnopaedia, the Spartan youth danced in honour of Apollo.
+
+[213] Scattered up and down among the monuments of victory in battle
+were the heroa, tombs or chapels of the heroes who had purchased it
+with their blood--Pausanias, Leonidas, brought home from Thermopylae
+forty years after his death.  "A pillar too," says Pausanias, "is
+erected here, on which the paternal names are inscribed of those who at
+Thermopylae sustained the attack of the Medes."  Here in truth all
+deities put on a martial habit--Aphrodite, the Muses, Eros himself,
+Athene Chalcioecus, Athene of the Brazen House, an antique temple
+towering above the rest, built from the spoils of some victory long
+since forgotten.  The name of the artist who made the image of the
+tutelary goddess was remembered in the annals of early Greek art,
+Gitiades, a native of Lacedaemon.  He had composed a hymn also in her
+praise.  Could we have seen the place he had restored rather than
+constructed, with its covering of mythological reliefs in brass or
+bronze, perhaps Homer's descriptions of a seemingly impossible sort of
+metallic architecture would have been less taxing to his reader's
+imagination.  Those who in other places had lost their taste amid the
+facile splendours of a later day, might here go to school again.
+
+Throughout Greece, in fact, it was the Doric style which came to
+prevail as the religious or hieratic manner, never to be surpassed for
+that purpose, as the Gothic style seems likely to do with us.  Though
+it is not exclusively the invention [214] of Dorian men, yet, says
+Müller, "the Dorian character created the Doric architecture," and he
+notes in it, especially, the severity of the perfectly straight,
+smartly tapering line of its column; the bold projection of the
+capital; the alternation of long unornamented plain surfaces with
+narrower bands of decorated work; the profound shadows; the expression
+of security, of harmony, infused throughout; the magnificent pediment
+crowning the whole, like the cornice of mountain wall beyond, around,
+and above it.  Standing there in the Aphetais, amid these venerable
+works of art, the visitor could not forget the natural architecture
+about him.  As the Dorian genius had differentiated itself from the
+common Hellenic type in the heart of the mountains of Epirus, so here
+at last, in its final and most characteristic home, it was still
+surrounded by them:--ophrya te kai koilainetai.+
+
+We know, some of us, what such mountain neighbourhood means.  The
+wholesome vigour, the clearness and purity they maintain in matters
+such as air, light, water; how their presence multiplies the contrasts,
+the element of light and shadow, in things; the untouched perfection of
+the minuter ornament, flower or crystal, they permit one sparingly;
+their reproachful aloofness, though so close to us, keeping sensitive
+minds at least in a sort of moral alliance with their remoter
+solitudes.  "The whole life of the Lacedaemonian community," says
+Müller, [215] "had a secluded, impenetrable, and secret character."
+You couldn't really know it unless you were of it.
+
+A system which conceived the whole of life as matter of attention,
+patience, a fidelity to detail, like that of good soldiers and
+musicians, could not but tell also on the merest handicrafts,
+constituting them in the fullest sense of a craft.  If the money of
+Sparta was, or had recently been, of cumbrous iron, that was because
+its trade had a sufficient variety of stock to be mainly by barter, and
+we may suppose the market (into which, like our own academic youth at
+Oxford, young Spartans were forbidden to go) full enough of business--
+many a busy workshop in those winding lanes.  The lower arts certainly
+no true Spartan might practise; but even Helots, artisan Helots, would
+have more than was usual elsewhere of that sharpened intelligence and
+the disciplined hand in such labour which really dignify those who
+follow it.  In Athens itself certain Lacedaemonian commodities were
+much in demand, things of military service or for every-day use, turned
+out with flawless adaptation to their purpose.
+
+The Helots, then, to whom this business exclusively belonged, a race of
+slaves, distinguishable however from the slaves or serfs who tilled the
+land, handing on their mastery in those matters in a kind of guild,
+father to son, through old-established families of flute- [216]
+players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary
+lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lisés (to borrow an expression from French
+feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper
+functions of gentlemen--scholê,+ leisure, in the two senses of the word,
+which in truth involve one another--their whole time free, to be told
+out in austere schools.  Long easeful nights, with more than enough to
+eat and drink, the "illiberal" pleasures of appetite, as Aristotle and
+Plato agree in thinking them, are of course the appropriate reward or
+remedy of those who work painfully with their hands, and seem to have
+been freely conceded to those Helots, who by concession of the State,
+from first to last their legal owner, were in domestic service, and
+sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded
+to the "golden youth" of Lacedaemon--youth of gold, or gilded steel.
+The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with
+the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other
+stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of
+submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant
+qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor
+must have become, in his measure, actually a sharer in them.  Just
+here, for once, we see that slavish êthos,+ the servile range of
+sentiment, which ought to accompany the condition of slavery, if it be
+indeed, as Aristotle supposes, one of the [217] natural relationships
+between man and man, idealised, or aesthetically right, pleasant and
+proper; the aretê,+ or "best possible condition," of the young servitor
+as such, including a sort of bodily worship, and a willingness to share
+the keen discipline which had developed the so attractive gallantry of
+his youthful lords.
+
+A great wave, successive waves, of invasion, sufficiently remote to
+have lost already all historic truth of detail, had left them--these
+Helots, and the Perioeci, in the country round about--thus to serve
+among their own kinsmen, though so close to them in lineage, so much on
+a level with their masters in essential physical qualities that to the
+last they could never be entirely subdued in spirit.  Patient modern
+research, following the track of a deep-rooted national tradition
+veiled in the mythological figments which centre in what is called "The
+Return of the Heraclidae," reveals those northern immigrants or
+invaders, at various points on their way, dominant all along it, from a
+certain deep vale in the heart of the mountains of Epirus southwards,
+gradually through zone after zone of more temperate lowland, to reach
+their perfection, highlanders from first to last, in this mountain
+"hollow" of Lacedaemon.  They claim supremacy, not as Dorian invaders,
+but as kinsmen of the old Achaean princes of the land; yet it was to
+the fact of conquest, to the necessity of [218] maintaining a position
+so strained, like that, as Aristotle expressly pointed out, of a
+beleaguered encampment in an enemy's territory, that the singular
+institutions of Lacedaemon, the half-military, half-monastic spirit,
+which prevailed in this so gravely beautiful place, had been originally
+due.  But observe!--Its moral and political system, in which that
+slavery was so significant a factor, its discipline, its aesthetic and
+other scruples, its peculiar moral êthos,+ having long before our
+Platonic student comes thither attained its original and proper ends,
+survived,--there is the point! survived as an end in itself, as a
+matter of sentiment, of public and perhaps still more of personal
+pride, though of the finer, the very finest sort, in one word as an
+ideal.  Pericles, as you remember, in his famous vindication of the
+Athenian system, makes his hearers understand that the ends of the
+Lacedaemonian people might have been attained with less self-sacrifice
+than theirs.  But still, there it remained, hê diaita Dôrikê+--the
+genuine Laconism of the Lacedaemonians themselves, their traditional
+conception of life, with its earnestness, its precision and strength,
+its loyalty to its own type, its impassioned completeness; a spectacle,
+aesthetically, at least, very interesting, like some perfect instrument
+shaping to what they visibly were, the most beautiful of all people, in
+Greece, in the world.
+
+Gymnastic, "bodily exercise," of course, does [219] not always and
+necessarily effect the like of that.  A certain perfectly preserved old
+Roman mosaic pavement in the Lateran Museum, presents a terribly fresh
+picture of the results of another sort of "training," the monstrous
+development by a cruel art, by exercise, of this or that muscle,
+changing boy or man into a merely mechanic instrument with which his
+breeders might make money by amusing the Roman people.  Victor Hugo's
+odious dream of L'homme qui rit, must have had something of a prototype
+among those old Roman gladiators.  The Lacedaemonians, says Xenophon on
+the other hand, homoiôs apo te tôn skelôn kai apo cheirôn kai apo
+trachêlou gymnazontai.+  Here too, that is to say, they aimed at, they
+found, proportion, Pythagorean symmetry or music, and bold as they
+could be in their exercises (it was a Lacedaemonian who, at Olympia,
+for the first time threw aside the heavy girdle and ran naked to the
+goal) forbade all that was likely to disfigure the body.  Though we
+must not suppose all ties of nature rent asunder, nor all connexion
+between parents and children in those genial, retired houses at an end
+in very early life, it was yet a strictly public education which began
+with them betimes, and with a very clearly defined programme,
+conservative of ancient traditional and unwritten rules, an
+aristocratic education for the few, the liberales--"liberals," as we
+may say, in that the proper sense of the word.  It made them, in [220]
+very deed, the lords, the masters, of those they were meant by-and-by
+to rule; masters, of their very souls, of their imagination, enforcing
+on them an ideal, by a sort of spiritual authority, thus backing, or
+backed by, a very effective organisation of "the power of the sword."
+In speaking of Lacedaemon, you see, it comes naturally to speak out of
+proportion, it might seem, of its youth, and of the education of its
+youth.  But in fact if you enter into the spirit of Lacedaemonian
+youth, you may conceive Lacedaemonian manhood for yourselves.  You
+divine already what the boy, the youth, so late in obtaining his
+majority, in becoming a man, came to be in the action of life, and on
+the battle-field.  "In a Doric state," says Müller, "education was, on
+the whole, a matter of more importance than government."
+
+A young Lacedaemonian, then, of the privileged class left his home, his
+tender nurses in those large, quiet old suburban houses early, for a
+public school, a schooling all the stricter as years went on, to be
+followed, even so, by a peculiar kind of barrack-life, the temper of
+which, a sort of military monasticism (it must be repeated) would beset
+him to the end.  Though in the gymnasia of Lacedaemon no idle by-
+standers, no--well! Platonic loungers after truth or what not--were
+permitted, yet we are told, neither there nor in Sparta generally,
+neither there nor anywhere else, were the boys permitted [221] to be
+alone.  If a certain love of reserve, of seclusion, characterised the
+Spartan citizen as such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of that wrench
+from a soft home into the imperative, inevitable gaze of his fellows,
+broad, searching, minute, his regret for, his desire to regain, moral
+and mental even more than physical ease.  And his education continued
+late; he could seldom think of marriage till the age of thirty.
+Ethically it aimed at the reality, aesthetically at the expression, of
+reserved power, and from the first set its subject on the thought of
+his personal dignity, of self-command, in the artistic way of a good
+musician, a good soldier.  It is noted that "the general accent of the
+Doric dialect has itself the character not of question or entreaty, but
+of command or dictation."  The place of deference, of obedience, was
+large in the education of Lacedaemonian youth; and they never
+complained.  It involved however for the most part, as with ourselves,
+the government of youth by itself; an implicit subordination of the
+younger to the older, in many degrees.  Quite early in life, at school,
+they found that superiors and inferiors, homoioi and hypomeiones,+ there
+really were; and their education proceeded with systematic boldness on
+that fact.  Eirên, melleirên, sideunês,+ and the like--words, titles,
+which indicate an unflinching elaboration of the attitudes of youthful
+subordination and command with responsibility--remain as a part of what
+we might [222] call their "public-school slang."  They ate together "in
+their divisions" (agelai)+ on much the same fare every day at a sort of
+messes; not reclined, like Ionians or Asiatics, but like heroes, the
+princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on their wooden benches; were
+"inspected" frequently, and by free use of vivâ voce examination
+"became adepts in presence of mind," in mental readiness and vigour, in
+the brief mode of speech Plato commends, which took and has kept its
+name from them; with no warm baths allowed; a daily plunge in their
+river required.  Yes!  The beauty of these most beautiful of all people
+was a male beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness; had the
+expression of a certain ascêsis in it; was like un-sweetened wine.  In
+comparison with it, beauty of another type might seem to be wanting in
+edge or accent.
+
+And they could be silent.  Of the positive uses of the negation of
+speech, like genuine scholars of Pythagoras, the Lacedaemonians were
+well aware, gaining strength and intensity by repression.  Long spaces
+of enforced silence had doubtless something to do with that expressive
+brevity of utterance, which could be also, when they cared, so
+inexpressive of what their intentions really were--something to do with
+the habit of mind to which such speaking would come naturally.  In
+contrast with the ceaseless prattle of Athens, Lacedaemonian assemblies
+lasted as short a time as possible, all standing.  A [223]
+Lacedaemonian ambassador being asked in whose name he was come,
+replies: "In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my
+own."  What they lost in extension they gained in depth.
+
+Had our traveller been tempted to ask a young Lacedaemonian to return
+his visit at Athens, permission would have been refused him.  He
+belonged to a community bent above all things on keeping indelibly its
+own proper colour.  Its more strictly mental education centered, in
+fact, upon a faithful training of the memory, again in the spirit of
+Pythagoras, in regard to what seemed best worth remembering.  Hard and
+practical as Lacedaemonians might seem, they lived nevertheless very
+much by imagination; and to train the memory, to preoccupy their minds
+with the past, as in our own classic or historic culture of youth, was
+in reality to develope a vigorous imagination.  In music (mousikê)+ as
+they conceived it, there would be no strictly selfish reading, writing
+or listening; and if there was little a Lacedaemonian lad had to read
+or write at all, he had much to learn, like a true conservative, by
+heart: those unwritten laws of which the Council of Elders was the
+authorised depositary, and on which the whole public procedure of the
+state depended; the archaic forms of religious worship; the names of
+their kings, of victors in their games or in battle; the brief record
+of great events; the oracles they had received; the rhetrai, from [224]
+Lycurgus downwards, composed in metrical Lacedaemonian Greek; their
+history and law, in short, actually set to music, by Terpander and
+others, as was said.  What the Lacedaemonian learned by heart he was
+for the most part to sing, and we catch a glimpse, an echo, of their
+boys in school chanting; one of the things in old Greece one would have
+liked best to see and hear--youthful beauty and strength in perfect
+service--a manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism, though it
+may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of
+our own old English schools, nay, of the young Lacedaemonian's cousins
+at Sion, singing there the law and its praises.
+
+The Platonic student of the ways of the Lacedaemonians observes then,
+is interested in observing, that their education, which indeed makes no
+sharp distinction between mental and bodily exercise, results as it had
+begun in "music"--ends with body, mind, memory above all, at their
+finest, on great show-days, in the dance.  Austere, self-denying
+Lacedaemon had in fact one of the largest theatres in Greece, in part
+scooped out boldly on the hill-side, built partly of enormous blocks of
+stone, the foundations of which may still be seen.  We read what Plato
+says in The Republic of "imitations," of the imitative arts, imitation
+reaching of course its largest development on the stage, and are
+perhaps surprised at the importance he assigns, in every department of
+[225] human culture, to a matter of that kind.  But here as elsewhere
+to see was to understand.  We should have understood Plato's drift in
+his long criticism and defence of imitative art, his careful system of
+rules concerning it, could we have seen the famous dramatic
+Lacedaemonian dancing.  They danced a theme, a subject.  A complex and
+elaborate art this must necessarily have been, but, as we may gather,
+as concise, direct, economically expressive, in all its varied sound
+and motion, as those swift, lightly girt, impromptu Lacedaemonian
+sayings.  With no movement of voice or hand or foot, paraleipomenon,+
+unconsidered, as Plato forbids, it was the perfect flower of their
+correction, of that minute patience and care which ends in a perfect
+expressiveness; not a note, a glance, a touch, but told obediently in
+the promotion of a firmly grasped mental conception, as in that perfect
+poetry or sculpture or painting, in which "the finger of the master is
+on every part of his work."  We have nothing really like it, and to
+comprehend it must remember that, though it took place in part at least
+on the stage of a theatre--was in fact a ballet-dance, it had also the
+character both of a liturgical service and of a military inspection;
+and yet, in spite of its severity of rule, was a natural expression of
+the delight of all who took part in it.
+
+So perfect a spectacle the gods themselves might be thought pleased to
+witness; were in [226] consequence presented with it as an important
+element in the religious worship of the Lacedaemonians, in whose life
+religion had even a larger part than with the other Greeks,
+conspicuously religious, deisidaimones,+ involved in religion or
+superstition, as the Greeks generally were.  More closely even than
+their so scrupulous neighbours they associated the state, its acts and
+officers, with a religious sanction, religious usages, theories,
+traditions.  While the responsibilities of secular government lay upon
+the Ephors, those mysteriously dual, at first sight useless, and yet so
+sanctimoniously observed kings, "of the house of Heracles," with
+something of the splendour of the old Achaean or Homeric kings, in life
+as also in death, the splendid funerals, the passionate archaic laments
+which then followed them, were in fact of spiritual or priestly rank,
+the living and active centre of a poetic religious system, binding them
+"in a beneficent connexion" to the past, and in the present with
+special closeness to the oracle of Delphi.
+
+Of that catholic or general centre of Greek religion the Lacedaemonians
+were the hereditary and privileged guardians, as also the peculiar
+people of Apollo, the god of Delphi; but, observe! of Apollo in a
+peculiar development of his deity.  In the dramatic business of
+Lacedaemon, centering in these almost liturgical dances, there was
+little comic acting.  The fondness of the slaves for buffoonery and
+loud [227] laughter, was to their master, who had no taste for the
+like, a reassuring note of his superiority.  He therefore indulged them
+in it on occasion, and you might fancy that the religion of a people so
+strenuous, ever so full of their dignity, must have been a religion of
+gloom.  It was otherwise.  The Lacedaemonians, like those monastic
+persons of whom they so often remind one, as a matter of fact however
+surprising, were a very cheerful people; and the religion of which they
+had so much, deeply imbued everywhere with an optimism as of hopeful
+youth, encouraged that disposition, was above all a religion of sanity.
+The observant Platonic visitor might have taken note that something of
+that purgation of religious thought and sentiment, of its expression in
+literature, recommended in Plato's Republic, had been already quietly
+effected here, towards the establishment of a kind of cheerful daylight
+in men's tempers.
+
+In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity, of that harmony of
+functions, which is the Aristotelian definition of health, Apollo,
+sanest of the national gods, became also the tribal or home god of
+Lacedaemon.  That common Greek worship of Apollo they made especially
+their own, but (just here is the noticeable point) with a marked
+preference for the human element in him, for the mental powers of his
+being over those elemental or physical forces of production, which he
+also mystically represents, and which resulted [228] sometimes in an
+orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service.  He remains
+youthful and unmarried.  In congruity with this, it is observed that,
+in a quasi-Roman worship, abstract qualities and relationships, ideals,
+become subsidiary objects of religious consideration around him, such
+as sleep, death, fear, fortune, laughter even.  Nay, other gods also
+are, so to speak, Apollinised, adapted to the Apolline presence;
+Aphrodite armed, Enyalius in fetters, perhaps that he may never depart
+thence.  Amateurs everywhere of the virile element in life, the
+Lacedaemonians, in truth, impart to all things an intellectual
+character.  Adding a vigorous logic to seemingly animal instincts, for
+them courage itself becomes, as for the strictly philosophic mind at
+Athens, with Plato and Aristotle, an intellectual condition, a form of
+right knowledge.
+
+Such assertion of the consciously human interest in a religion based
+originally on a preoccupation with the unconscious forces of nature,
+was exemplified in the great religious festival of Lacedaemon.  As a
+spectator of the Hyacinthia, our Platonic student would have found
+himself one of a large body of strangers, gathered together from
+Lacedaemon and its dependent towns and villages, within the ancient
+precincts of Amyclae, at the season between spring and summer when
+under the first fierce heat of the year the abundant hyacinths fade
+from the fields.  Blue flowers, [229] you remember, are the rarest, to
+many eyes the loveliest; and the Lacedaemonians with their guests were
+met together to celebrate the death of the hapless lad who had lent his
+name to them, Hyacinthus, son of Apollo, or son of an ancient mortal
+king who had reigned in this very place; in either case, greatly
+beloved of the god, who had slain him by sad accident as they played at
+quoits together delightfully, to his immense sorrow.  That Boreas (the
+north-wind) had maliciously miscarried the discus, is a circumstance we
+hardly need to remind us that we have here, of course, only one of many
+transparent, unmistakable, parables or symbols of the great solar
+change, so sudden in the south, like the story of Proserpine, Adonis,
+and the like.  But here, more completely perhaps than in any other of
+those stories, the primary elemental sense had obscured itself behind
+its really tragic analogue in human life, behind the figure of the
+dying youth.  We know little of the details of the feast; incidentally,
+that Apollo was vested on the occasion in a purple robe, brought in
+ceremony from Lacedaemon, woven there, Pausanias tells us, in a certain
+house called from that circumstance Chiton.+  You may remember how
+sparing these Lacedaemonians were of such dyed raiment, of any but the
+natural and virgin colouring of the fleece; that purple or red,
+however, was the colour of their royal funerals, as indeed Amyclae
+itself was famous for purple stuffs--Amyclaeae vestes.  As [230] the
+general order of the feast, we discern clearly a single day of somewhat
+shrill gaiety, between two days of significant mourning after the
+manner of All Souls' Day, directed from mimic grief for a mythic
+object, to a really sorrowful commemoration by the whole Lacedaemonian
+people--each separate family for its own deceased members.
+
+It was so again with those other youthful demi-gods, the Dioscuri,
+themselves also, in old heroic time, resident in this venerable place:
+Amyclaei fratres, fraternal leaders of the Lacedaemonian people.  Their
+statues at this date were numerous in Laconia, or the docana, primitive
+symbols of them, those two upright beams of wood, carried to battle
+before the two kings, until it happened that through their secret
+enmity a certain battle was lost, after which one king only proceeded
+to the field, and one part only of that token of fraternity, the other
+remaining at Sparta.  Well! they were two stars, you know, at their
+original birth in men's minds, Gemini, virginal fresh stars of dawn,
+rising and setting alternately--those two half-earthly, half-celestial
+brothers, one of whom, Polydeuces, was immortal.  The other, Castor,
+the younger, subject to old age and death, had fallen in battle, was
+found breathing his last.  Polydeuces thereupon, at his own prayer, was
+permitted to die: with undying fraternal affection, had forgone one
+moiety of his privilege, and lay in the grave for a day in his [231]
+brother's stead, but shone out again on the morrow; the brothers thus
+ever coming and going, interchangeably, but both alike gifted now with
+immortal youth.
+
+In their origin, then, very obviously elemental deities, they were thus
+become almost wholly humanised, fraternised with the Lacedaemonian
+people, their closest friends of the whole celestial company, visitors,
+as fond legend told, at their very hearths, found warming themselves in
+the half-light at their rude fire-sides.  Themselves thus visible on
+occasion, at all times in devout art, they were the starry patrons of
+all that youth was proud of, delighted in, horsemanship, games, battle;
+and always with that profound fraternal sentiment.  Brothers, comrades,
+who could not live without each other, they were the most fitting
+patrons of a place in which friendship, comradeship, like theirs, came
+to so much.  Lovers of youth they remained, those enstarred types of
+it, arrested thus at that moment of miraculous good fortune as a
+consecration of the clean, youthful friendship, "passing even the love
+of woman," which, by system, and under the sanction of their founder's
+name, elaborated into a kind of art, became an elementary part of
+education.  A part of their duty and discipline, it was also their
+great solace and encouragement.  The beloved and the lover, side by
+side through their long days of eager labour, and above all on the
+battlefield, became respectively, aitês,+ the [232] hearer, and
+eispnêlas,+ the inspirer; the elder inspiring the younger with his own
+strength and noble taste in things.
+
+What, it has been asked, what was there to occupy persons of the
+privileged class in Lacedaemon from morning to night, thus cut off as
+they were from politics and business, and many of the common interests
+of men's lives?  Our Platonic visitor would have asked rather, Why this
+strenuous task-work, day after day; why this loyalty to a system, so
+costly to you individually, though it may be thought to have survived
+its original purpose; this laborious, endless, education, which does
+not propose to give you anything very useful or enjoyable in itself?
+An intelligent young Spartan might have replied: "To the end that I
+myself may be a perfect work of art, issuing thus into the eyes of all
+Greece."  He might have observed--we may safely observe for him--that
+the institutions of his country, whose he was, had a beauty in
+themselves, as we may observe also of some at least of our own
+institutions, educational or religious: that they bring out, for
+instance, the lights and shadows of human character, and relieve the
+present by maintaining in it an ideal sense of the past.  He might have
+added that he had his friendships to solace him; and to encourage him,
+the sense of honour.
+
+Honour, friendship, loyalty to the ideal of the [233] past, himself as
+a work of art!  There was much of course in his answer.  Yet still,
+after all, to understand, to be capable of, such motives, was itself
+but a result of that exacting discipline of character we are trying to
+account for; and the question still recurs, To what purpose?  Why, with
+no prospect of Israel's reward, are you as scrupulous, minute, self-
+taxing, as he?  A tincture of asceticism in the Lacedaemonian rule may
+remind us again of the monasticism of the Middle Ages.  But then,
+monastic severity was for the purging of a troubled conscience, or for
+the hope of an immense prize, neither of which conditions is to be
+supposed here.  In fact the surprise of Saint Paul, as a practical man,
+at the slightness of the reward for which a Greek spent himself,
+natural as it is about all pagan perfection, is especially applicable
+about these Lacedaemonians, who indeed had actually invented that so
+"corruptible" and essentially worthless parsley crown in place of the
+more tangible prizes of an earlier age.  Strange people!  Where,
+precisely, may be the spring of action in you, who are so severe to
+yourselves; you who, in the words of Plato's supposed objector that the
+rulers of the ideal state are not to be envied, have nothing you can
+really call your own, but are like hired servants in your own houses,--
+qui manducatis panem doloris?+
+
+Another day-dream, you may say, about those [234] obscure ancient
+people, it was ever so difficult really to know, who had hidden their
+actual life with so much success; but certainly a quite natural dream
+upon the paradoxical things we are told of them, on good authority.  It
+is because they make us ask that question; puzzle us by a paradoxical
+idealism in life; are thus distinguished from their neighbours; that,
+like some of our old English places of education, though we might not
+care to live always at school there, it is good to visit them on
+occasion; as some philosophic Athenians, as we have now seen, loved to
+do, at least in thought.
+
+NOTES
+
+198. +Transliteration: Gnôthi sauton . . . Mêden agan.  E-text editor's
+translation: "Know thyself . . . nothing too much."  Plato, Protagoras
+343b.
+
+200. +Transliteration: mousikê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "any art
+over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung
+to music...."
+
+205. +Transliteration: hoi gerontes, hê gerousia.  Liddell and Scott
+definitions: "the old . . . a Council of Elders, Senate, esp. at
+Sparta, where it consisted of 28."
+
+206. +Transliteration: paraleipomenon.  Pater's translation:
+"oversights."  The verb paraleipô means, "to leave on one side . . .
+leave unnoticed."
+
+207. +Transliteration: koilê Spartê.  Pater's translation: "hollow
+Sparta."
+
+207. +Transliteration: polichnia.  Pater's translation: "hamlets."
+
+214. +Transliteration: ophrya te kai koilainetai.  E-text editor's
+translation: "craggy and hollowed out."  Strabo cites this proverb
+about Corinth.  Strabo, Geography, Book 8, Chapter 6, Section 23.
+
+216. +Transliteration: scholê.  Pater's translation: "leisure."
+
+216. +Transliteration: êthos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "an
+accustomed place . . . custom, usage, habit."
+
+217. +Transliteration: aretê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "goodness,
+excellence, of any kind."
+
+218. +Transliteration: êthos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "an
+accustomed place . . . custom, usage, habit."
+
+218. +Transliteration: hê diaita Dôrikê.  E-text editor's translation:
+"the Dorian way of life."
+
+219. +Transliteration: homoiôs apo te tôn skelôn kai apo cheirôn kai apo
+trachêlou gymnazontai.  E-text editor's translation: "Their exercises
+train the legs, arms and neck with the same care."  Xenophon, Minor
+Works, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, Chapter 5, Section 9.
+
+221. +Transliteration: homoioi . . . hypomeiones.  Pater's translation:
+"superiors and inferiors."
+
+221. +Transliteration: Eirên, melleirên, sideunês.  Liddell and Scott
+definition of the first term: "a Lacedaemonian youth from his 18th.
+year, when he was entitled to speak in the assembly and to lead an
+army."  I have not come across the second or third terms, but the root
+meaning of the words suggests that they would mean, roughly,  "one who
+is of age, or nearly of age" and "a young man who is old enough to bear
+a sword."
+
+222. +Transliteration: agelai.  Pater's translation: "in their
+divisions."
+
+223. +Transliteration: mousikê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "any art
+over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung
+to music...."
+
+225. +Transliteration: paraleipomenon.  Pater's translation:
+"oversights."  The verb paraleipô means, "to leave on one side . . .
+leave unnoticed."
+
+226. +Transliteration: deisidaimones.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"fearing the gods," in both a good and bad sense--i.e. either pious or
+superstitious.
+
+229. +A Chitôn was "a woollen shirt worn next the body."  (Liddell and
+Scott.)
+
+231. +Transliteration: aitês.  Pater's translation: "the hearer."
+
+232. +Transliteration: eispnêlas.  Pater's translation: "the hearer."
+
+233. +Psalm 127, verse 2.  The King James Bible translation is "to eat
+the bread of sorrows."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 9: THE REPUBLIC
+
+[235] "THE Republic," as we may realise it mentally within the limited
+proportions of some quite imaginable Greek city, is the protest of
+Plato, in enduring stone, in law and custom more imperishable still,
+against the principle of flamboyancy or fluidity in things, and in
+men's thoughts about them.  Political "ideals" may provide not only
+types for new states, but also, in humbler function, a due corrective
+of the errors, thus renewing the life, of old ones.  But like other
+medicines the corrective or critical ideal may come too late, too near
+the natural end of things.  The theoretic attempt made by Plato to
+arrest the process of disintegration in the life of Athens, of Greece,
+by forcing it back upon a simpler and more strictly Hellenic type,
+ended, so far as they were concerned, in theory.
+
+It comes of Plato's literary skill, his really dramatic handling of a
+conversation, that one subject rises naturally out of another in the
+[236] course of it, that in the lengthy span of The Republic, though
+they are linked together after all with a true logical coherency, now
+justice, now the ideal state, now the analysis of the individual soul,
+or the nature of a true philosopher, or his right education, or the law
+of political change, may seem to emerge as the proper subject of the
+whole book.  It is thus incidentally, and by way of setting forth the
+definition of Justice or Rightness, as if in big letters, that the
+constitution of the typically Right State is introduced into what,
+according to one of its traditional titles-- Peri Dikaiosynês +--might
+actually have figured as a dialogue on the nature of Justice.  But tod'
+ên hôs eoike prooimion+--the discussion of the theory of the abstract
+and invisible rightness was but to introduce the practical architect,
+the creator of the right state.  Plato then assumes rather than
+demonstrates that so facile parallel between the individual
+consciousness and the social aggregate, passes lightly backwards and
+forwards from the rightness or wrongness, the normal or abnormal
+conditions, of the one to those of the other, from you and me to the
+"colossal man," whose good or bad qualities, being written up there on
+a larger scale, are easier to read, and if one may say so, "once in
+bricks and mortar," though but on paper, is lavish of a world as it
+should be.  A strange world in some ways!  Let us look from the small
+type of the individual to the monumental [237] inscription on those
+high walls, as he proposes; while his fancy wandering further and
+further, over tower and temple, its streets and the people in them, as
+if forgetful of his original purpose he tells us all he sees in thought
+of the City of the Perfect.
+
+To the view of Plato, as of all other Greek citizens, the state, in its
+local habitation here or there, had been in all cases the gift or
+ordinance of one or another real though half-divine founder, some Solon
+or Lycurgus, thereafter a proper object of piety, of filial piety, for
+ever, among those to whom he had bequeathed the blessings of civilised
+life.  Himself actually of Solon's lineage, Plato certainly is less
+aware than those who study these matters in the "historic spirit" of
+the modern world that for the most part, like other more purely
+physical things, states "are not made, but grow."  Yet his own work as
+a designer or architect of what shall be new is developed quite
+naturally out of the question how an already existing state, such as
+the actual Athens of the day, might secure its pre-eminence, or its
+very existence.  Close always, by the concrete turn of his genius, to
+the facts of the place and the hour, his first thought is to suggest a
+remedy for the peculiar evils of the Athenians at that moment; and in
+his delineation of the ideal state he does but elevate what Athens in
+particular, a ship so early going to pieces, might well be forced to
+become for her salvation, were [238] it still possible, into the
+eternal type of veritable statecraft, of a city as such, "a city at
+unity in itself," defiant of time.  He seems to be seeking in the first
+instance a remedy for the sick, a desperate political remedy; and
+thereupon, as happens with really philosophic enquirers, the view
+enlarges on all sides around him.
+
+Those evils of Athens then, which were found in very deed somewhat
+later to be the infirmity of Greece as a whole, when, though its
+versatile gifts of intellect might constitute it the teacher of its
+eventual masters, it was found too incoherent politically to hold its
+own against Rome:--those evils of Athens, of Greece, came from an
+exaggerated assertion of the fluxional, flamboyant, centrifugal Ionian
+element in the Hellenic character.  They could be cured only by a
+counter-assertion of the centripetal Dorian ideal, as actually seen
+best at Lacedaemon; by the way of simplification, of a rigorous
+limitation of all things, of art and life, of the souls, aye, and of
+the very bodies of men, as being the integral factors of all beside.
+It is in those simpler, corrected outlines of a reformed Athens that
+Plato finds the "eternal form" of the State, of a city as such, like a
+well-knit athlete, or one of those perfectly disciplined Spartan
+dancers.  His actual purpose therefore is at once reforming and
+conservative.  The drift of his charge is, in his own words, that no
+political constitution then existing is suitable to the philosophic,
+that is to [239] say, as he conceives it, to the aristocratic or kingly
+nature.  How much that means we shall see by and bye, when he maintains
+that in the City of the Perfect the kings will be philosophers.  It
+means that those called, like the gifted, lost Alcibiades, to be the
+saviours of the state, as a matter of fact become instead its
+destroyers.  The proper soil in which alone that precious exotic seed,
+the kingly or aristocratic seed, will attain its proper qualities, in
+which alone it will not yield wine inferior to its best, or rather,
+instead of bearing any wine at all, become a deadly poison, is still to
+be laid down according to rules of art, the ethic or political art; but
+once provided must be jealously kept from innovation.  Organic unity
+with one's self, body and soul, is the well-being, the rightness, or
+righteousness, or justice of the individual, of the microcosm; but is
+the ideal also, it supplies the true definition, of the well-being of
+the macrocosm, of the social organism, the state.  On this Plato has to
+insist, to the disadvantage of what we actually see in Greece, in
+Athens, with all its intricacies of disunion, faction against faction,
+as displayed in the later books of Thucydides.  Remember! the question
+Plato is asking throughout The Republic, with a touch perhaps of the
+narrowness, the fanaticism, or "fixed idea," of Machiavel himself, is,
+not how shall the state, the place we must live in, be gay or rich or
+populous, but strong--strong enough to remain [240] itself, to resist
+solvent influences within or from without, such as would deprive it not
+merely of the accidental notes of prosperity but of its own very being.
+
+Now what hinders this strengthening macrocosmic unity, the oneness of
+the political organism with itself, is that the unit, the individual,
+the microcosm, fancies itself, or would fain be, a rival macrocosm,
+independent, many-sided, all-sufficient.  To make him that, as you
+know, had been the conscious aim of the Athenian system in the
+education of its youth, as also in its later indirect education of the
+citizen by the way of political life.  It was the ideal of one side of
+the Greek character in general, of much that was brilliant in it and
+seductive to others.  In this sense, Pericles himself interprets the
+educational function of the city towards the citizen:--to take him as
+he is, and develope him to the utmost on all his various sides, with a
+variety in those parts however, as Plato thinks, by no means likely to
+promote the unity of the whole, of the state as such, which must move
+all together if it is to move at all, at least against its foes.  With
+this at first sight quite limited purpose then, paradoxical as it might
+seem to those whose very ideal lay precisely in such manifold
+development, to Plato himself perhaps, manifold as his own genius and
+culture conspicuously were--paradoxical [241] as it might seem, Plato's
+demand is for the limitation, the simplifying, of those constituent
+parts or units; that the unit should be indeed no more than a part, it
+might be a very small part, in a community, which needs, if it is still
+to subsist, the wholeness of an army in motion, of the stars in their
+courses, of well-concerted music, if you prefer that figure, or, as the
+modern reader might perhaps object, of a machine.  The design of Plato
+is to bring back the Athenian people, the Greeks, to thoughts of order,
+to disinterestedness in their functions, to that self-concentration of
+soul on one's own part, that loyal concession of their proper parts to
+others, on which such order depends, to a love of it, a sense of its
+extreme aesthetic beauty and fitness, according to that indefectible
+definition of Justice, of what is right, to hen prattein, to ta hautou
+prattein+, in opposition, as he thinks, to those so fascinating
+conditions of Injustice, poikilia, pleonexia, polypragmosynê,+ figuring
+away, as they do sometimes, so brilliantly.
+
+For Plato would have us understand that men are in truth after all
+naturally much simpler, much more limited in character and capacity,
+than they seem.  Such diversity of parts and function as is presupposed
+in his definition of Justice has been fixed by nature itself on human
+life.  The individual, as such, humble as his proper function may be,
+is unique in fitness for, in a consequent "call" to, that function.  We
+[242] know how much has been done to educate the world, under the
+supposition that man is a creature of very malleable substance,
+indifferent in himself, pretty much what influences may make of him.
+Plato, on the other hand, assures us that no one of us "is like another
+all in all."--Prôton men phyetai hekastos ou pany homoios hekastô, alla
+diapherôn tên physin, allos ep allou ergou praxin +.--But for this,
+social Justice, according to its eternal form or definition, would in
+fact be nowhere applicable.  Once for all he formulates clearly that
+important notion of the function, (ergon)+ of a thing, or of a person.
+It is that which he alone can do, or he better than any one else.
+
+That Plato should exaggerate this definiteness in men's natural
+vocations, thus to be read as it were in "plain figures" upon each, is
+one of the necessities of his position.  Effect of nature itself, such
+inequality between men, this differentiation of one from another, is to
+be further promoted by all the cunning of the political art.  The
+counter-assertion of the natural indifference of men, their pliability
+to circumstance, while it is certainly truer to our modern experience,
+is also in itself more hopeful, more congruous with all the processes
+of education.  But for Plato the natural inequality of men, if it is
+the natural ground of that versatility, (poikilia),+ of the wrongness or
+Injustice he must needs correct, will be the natural ground of Justice
+also, as essentially a unity or harmony enforced on disparate [243]
+elements, unity as of an army, or an order of monks, organic, mechanic,
+liturgical, whichever you please to call it; but a kind of music
+certainly, if the founder, the master, of the state, for his proper
+part, can but compose the scattered notes.
+
+Just here then is the original basis of society--gignetai toinyn hôs
+egômai polis epeidê tunchanei hêmôn hekastos ouk autarkês +--at first in
+its humblest form; simply because one can dig and another spin; yet
+already with anticipations of The Republic, of the City of the Perfect,
+as developed by Plato, as indeed also, beyond it, of some still more
+distant system "of the services of angels and men in a wonderful
+order"; for the somewhat visionary towers of Plato's Republic blend of
+course with those of the Civitas Dei of Augustine.  Only, though its
+top may one day "reach unto heaven," it by no means came down thence;
+but, as Plato conceives, arises out of the earth, out of the humblest
+natural wants.  Grote was right.--There is a very shrewd matter-of-fact
+utilitarian among the dramatis personae which together make up the
+complex genius of Plato.  Poiêsei hôs egômai tên polin hêmetera
+chreia+.--Society is produced by our physical necessities, our
+inequality in regard to them:--an inequality in three broad divisions
+of unalterable, incommunicable type, of natural species, among men,
+with corresponding differentiation of political and social functions:
+three firmly outlined orders [244] in the state, like three primitive
+castes, propagating, reinforcing, their peculiarities of condition, as
+Plato will propose, by exclusive intermarriage, each within itself.  As
+in the class of the artisans (hoi dêmiourgoi)+ some can make swords
+best, others pitchers, so, on the larger survey, there will be found
+those who can use those swords, or, again, think, teach, pray, or lead
+an army, a whole body of swordsmen, best, thus defining within
+impassable barriers three essential species of citizenship--the
+productive class, the military order, the governing class thirdly, or
+spiritual order.
+
+The social system is in fact like the constitution of a human being.
+There are those who have capacity, a vocation, to conceive thoughts,
+and rule their brethren by intellectual power.  Collectively of course
+they are the mind or brain, the mental element, in the social organism.
+There are those secondly, who have by nature executive force, who will
+naturally wear arms, the sword in the sheath perhaps, but who will also
+on occasion most certainly draw it.  Well, these are like the active
+passions and the ultimately decisive will in the bosom of man, most
+conspicuous as anger--anger, it may be, resentment, against known wrong
+in another or in one's self, the champion of conscience, flinging away
+the scabbard, setting the spear against the foe, like a soldier of
+spirit.  They are in a word the conscience, the armed conscience, of
+the state, [245] nobly bred, sensitive for others and for themselves,
+informed by the light of reason in their natural kings.  And then,
+thirdly, protected, controlled, by the thought, the will, above them,
+like those appetites in you and me, hunger, thirst, desire, which have
+been the motive, the actual creators, of the material order all around
+us, there will be the "productive" class, labouring perfectly in the
+cornfields, in the vineyards, or on the vessels which are to contain
+corn and wine, at a thousand handicrafts, every one still exquisitely
+differentiated, according to Plato's rule of right--eis hen kata physin
++; as within the military class also there will be those who command and
+those who can but obey, and within the true princely class again those
+who know all things and others who have still much to learn; those also
+who can learn and teach one sort of knowledge better than another.
+
+Plato however, in the first steps of the evolution of the State, had
+lighted quite naturally on what turns out to be a mistaken or
+inadequate ideal of it, in an idyll pretty enough, indeed, from "The
+Golden Age."--How sufficient it seems for a moment, that innocent
+world! is, nevertheless, actually but a false ideal of human society,
+allowing in fact no place at all for Justice; the very terms of which,
+precisely because they involve differentiation of life and its
+functions, are inapplicable to a society, if so it may be called, still
+essentially inorganic.  In [246] a condition, so rudimentary as to
+possess no opposed parts at all, of course there will be no place for
+disturbance of parts, for proportion or disproportion of faculty and
+function.  It is, in truth, to a city which has lost its first
+innocence (polis êdê tryphôsa)+ that we must look for the consciousness
+of Justice and Injustice; as some theologians or philosophers have held
+that it was by the "Fall" man first became a really moral being.
+
+Now in such a city, in the polis êdê tryphôsa,+ there will be an
+increase of population:-- kai hê chôra pou hê tote hikanê smikra ex
+hikanês estai.+  And in an age which perhaps had the military spirit in
+excess Plato's thoughts pass on immediately to wars of aggression:--
+oukoun tês tôn plêsion chôras hêmin apotmêteon?+  We must take something,
+if we can, from Megara or from Sparta; which doubtless in its turn
+would do the same by us.  As a measure of relief however that was not
+necessarily the next step.  The needs of an out-pushing population
+might have suggested to Plato what is perhaps the most brilliant and
+animating episode in the entire history of Greece, its early
+colonisation, with all the bright stories, full of the piety, the
+generosity of a youthful people, that had gathered about it.  No, the
+next step in social development was not necessarily going to war.  In
+either case however, aggressive action against our neighbours, or
+defence of our distant brethren beyond the seas [247] at Cyrene or
+Syracuse against rival adventurers, we shall require a new class of
+persons, men of the sword, to fight for us if need be.  Ah!  You hear
+the notes of the trumpet, and therewith already the stir of an
+enlarging human life, its passions, its manifold interests.  Phylakes
+or epikouroi,+ watchmen or auxiliaries, our new servants comprehend at
+first our masters to be, whom a further act of differentiation will
+distinguish as philosophers and kings from the strictly military order.
+Plato nevertheless in his search for the true idea of Justice, of
+rightness in things, may be said now to have seen land.  Organic
+relationship is come into the rude social elements and made of them a
+body, a society.  Rudimentary though it may still be, the definition of
+Justice, as also of Injustice, is now applicable to its processes.
+There is a music in the affairs of men, in which one may take one's due
+part, which one may spoil.
+
+Criticising mythology Plato speaks of certain fables, to be made by
+those who are apt at such things, under proper spiritual authority, so
+to term it, hôs en pharmakou eidei ta pseudê ta en deonti genomena,+
+medicinable lies or fictions, with a provisional or economised truth in
+them, set forth under such terms as simple souls could best receive.
+Just here, at the end of the third book of The Republic he introduces
+such a fable: phoinikikon pseudos,+ he calls it, a miner's story, about
+copper and silver and gold, such as may really [248] have been current
+among the primitive inhabitants of the island from which metal and the
+art of working it had been introduced into Greece.--
+
+     And I shall try first of all to persuade the rulers themselves
+     and our soldiers, and afterwards the rest of the community, as
+     to the matter of the rearing and the education we gave them,
+     that in fact it did but seem to happen with them, they seemed
+     to experience all that, only as in dreams.  They were then in
+     very truth nourished and fashioned beneath the earth within,
+     and the armour upon them and their equipment put together; and
+     when they were perfectly wrought out the earth even their mother
+     put them forth.  Now, therefore, it is their duty to think
+     concerning the land in which they are as of a mother, or
+     foster-mother, and to protect it if any foe come against it,
+     and to think of their fellow-citizens as being their brothers,
+     born of the earth as they.  All ye in the city, therefore, are
+     brothers, we shall say to them proceeding with our story; but
+     God, when he made you, mixed gold in the generation of those
+     among you fit to be our kings, for which cause they are the
+     most precious of all; and silver in those fit to be our guards;
+     and in the husbandmen and all other handicraftsmen iron and
+     brass.  Forasmuch then as ye are all of one kindred, for the
+     most part ye would beget offspring like to yourselves; but at
+     times a silver child will come of one golden, and from the
+     silver a child of gold, and so forth, interchangeably.  To
+     those who rule, then, first and above all God enjoins that of
+     nothing shall they be so careful guardians, nothing shall they
+     so earnestly regard, as the young children--what metal has
+     been mixed to their hands in the souls of these.  And if a
+     child of their own be born with an alloy of iron or brass, they
+     shall by no means have pity upon it, but, allotting unto it the
+     value which befits its nature, they shall thrust it into the
+     class of husbandmen or artisans.  And if, again, of these a
+     child be born with gold or silver in him, with due estimate
+     they shall promote such to wardenship or to arms, inasmuch as
+     an oracular saying declares that the city is perished already
+     when it has iron or brass to guard it.  Can you suggest a way
+     of getting them to believe this mythus?  Republic, 414.
+
+[249] Its application certainly is on the surface: the Lacedaemonian
+details also--the military turn taken, the disinterestedness of the
+powerful, their monastic renunciation of what the world prizes most,
+above all the doctrine of a natural aristocracy with its "privileges
+and also its duties."  Men are of simpler structure and capacities than
+you have fancied, Plato would assure us, and more decisively appointed
+to this rather than to that order of service.  Nay, with the boldness
+proper to an idealist, he does not hesitate to represent them (that is
+the force of the mythus) as actually made of different stuff; and
+society, assuming a certain aristocratic humour in the nature of
+things, has for its business to sanction, safeguard, further promote
+it, by law.
+
+The state therefore, if it is to be really a living creature, will
+have, like the individual soul, those sensuous appetites which call the
+productive powers into action, and its armed conscience, and its far-
+reaching intellectual light: its industrial class, that is to say, its
+soldiers, its kings--the last, a kind of military monks, as you might
+think, on a distant view, their minds full of a kind of heavenly
+effulgence, yet superintending the labours of a large body of work-
+people in the town and the fields about it.  Of the industrial or
+productive class, the artists and artisans, Plato speaks only in
+outline, but is significant in what he says; and enough remains of the
+actual fruits [250] of Greek industry to enable us to complete his
+outline for ourselves, as we may also, by aid of Greek art, together
+with the words of Homer and Pindar, equip and realise the full
+character of the true Platonic "war-man" or knight; and again, through
+some later approximate instances, discern something of those
+extraordinary, half-divine, philosophic kings.
+
+We must let industry then mean for Plato all it meant, would naturally
+mean, for a Greek, amid the busy spectacle of Athenian handicrafts.
+The "rule" of Plato, its precepts of temperance, proportion, economy,
+though designed primarily for its soldiers, and its kings or archons,
+for the military and spiritual orders, would probably have been
+incumbent also in relaxed degree upon those who work with their hands;
+and we have but to walk through the classical department of the Louvre
+or the British Museum to be reminded how those qualities of temperance
+and the like did but enhance, could not chill or impoverish, the
+artistic genius of Greek workmen.  In proportion to what we know of the
+minor handicrafts of Greece we shall find ourselves able to fill up, as
+the condition of everyday life in the streets of Plato's City of the
+Perfect, a picture of happy protected labour, "skilled" to the utmost
+degree in all its applications.  Those who prosecute it will be
+allowed, as we may gather, in larger proportion than those who "watch,"
+in silent thought or sword in hand, such animal [251] liberties as seem
+natural and right, and are not really "illiberal," for those who labour
+all day with their bodies, though they too will have on them in their
+service some measure of the compulsion which shapes the action of our
+kings and soldiers to such effective music.  With more or less of
+asceticism, of a "common life," among themselves, they will be the
+peculiar sphere of the virtue of temperance in the State, as being the
+entirely willing subjects of wholesome rule.  They represent, as we
+saw, in the social organism, the bodily appetites of the individual,
+its converse with matter, in a perfect correspondence, if all be right
+there, with the conscience and with the reasonable soul in it.
+Labouring by system at the production of perfect swords, perfect lamps,
+perfect poems too, and a perfect coinage, such as we know, to enable
+them the more readily to exchange their produce (nomisma tês allagês
+heneka)+ working perhaps in guilds and under rules to insure perfection
+in each specific craft, refining matter to the last degree, they would
+constitute the beautiful body of the State, in rightful service, like
+the copper and iron, the bronze and the steel, they manipulate so
+finely, to its beautiful soul--to its natural though hereditary
+aristocracy, its "golden" humanity, its kings, in whom Wisdom, the
+light, of a comprehensive Synopsis, indefectibly resides, and who, as
+being not merely its discursive or practical reason, but its faculty of
+contemplation likewise, will be also its priests, the [252] medium of
+its worship, of its intercourse with the gods.
+
+Between them, between that intellectual or spiritual order, those novel
+philosophic kings, and the productive class of the artists and
+artisans, moves the military order, as the sensitive armed conscience,
+the armed will, of the State, its executive power in the fullest sense
+of that term--a "standing army," as Plato supposes, recruited from a
+great hereditary caste born and bred to such functions, and certainly
+very different from the mere "militia" of actual Greek states, hastily
+summoned at need to military service from the fields and workshops.
+Remember that the veritable bravery also, as the philosopher sees it,
+is a form of that "knowledge," which in truth includes in itself all
+other virtues, all good things whatever; that it is a form of "right
+opinion," and has a kind of insight in it, a real apprehension of the
+occasion and its claims on one's courage, whether it is worth while to
+fight, and to what point.  Platonic knighthood then will have in it
+something of the philosophy which resides in plenitude in the class
+above it, by which indeed this armed conscience of the State, the
+military order, is continuously enlightened, as we know the conscience
+of each one of us severally needs to be.  And though Plato will not
+expect his fighting-men, like the Christian knight, like Saint Ranieri
+Gualberto, [253] to forgive their enemies, yet, moving one degree out
+of the narrower circle of Greek habits, he does require them, in
+conformity with a certain Pan-Hellenic, a now fully realised national
+sense, which fills himself, to love the whole Greek race, to spare the
+foe, if he be Greek, the last horrors of war, to think of the soil, of
+the dead, of the arms and armour taken from them, with certain scruples
+of a natural piety.
+
+As the knights share the dignity of the regal order, are in fact
+ultimately distinguished from it by degree rather than in kind, so they
+will be sharers also in its self-denying "rule."  In common with it,
+they will observe a singular precept which forbids them so much as to
+come under the same roof with vessels or other objects wrought of gold
+or silver--they "who are most worthy of it," precisely because while
+"many iniquities have come from the world's coinage, they have gold in
+them undefiled."  Yet again we are not to suppose in Platonic Greece--
+how could we indeed anywhere within the range of Greek conceptions?--
+anything rude, uncomely, or unadorned.  No one who reads carefully in
+this very book of The Republic those pages of criticism which concern
+art quite as much as poetry, a criticism which drives everywhere at a
+conscientious nicety of workmanship, will suppose that.  If kings and
+knights never drink from vessels of silver or gold, their earthen cups
+and platters, we may be sure, would be what we can [254] still see; and
+the iron armour on their bodies exquisitely fitted to them, to its
+purpose, with that peculiar beauty which such fitness secures.  See
+them, then, moving, in perfect "Justice" or "Rightness," to their
+Dorian music, their so expressive plain-song, under the guidance of
+their natural leaders, those who can see and fore-see--of those who
+know.
+
+That they may be one!--If, like an individual soul, the state has
+attained its normal differentiation of parts, as with that also its
+vitality and effectiveness will be proportionate to the unity of those
+parts in their various single operations.  The productive, the
+executive, the contemplative orders, respectively, like their
+psychological analogues, the senses, the will, and the intelligence,
+will be susceptible each of its own proper virtue or excellence,
+temperance, bravery, spiritual illumination.  Only, let each work
+aright in its own order, and a fourth virtue will supervene upon their
+united perfections, the virtue or perfection of the organic whole as
+such.  The Justice which Plato has been so long in search of will be
+manifest at last--that perfect oikeiopragia,+ which will be also perfect
+co-operation.  Oneness, unity, community, an absolute community of
+interests among fellow-citizens, philadelphia, over against the selfish
+ambition of those naturally ascendant, like Alcibiades or Crito, in
+that competition for office, for wealth and honours, which has rent
+Athens into factions ever breeding [255] on themselves, the centripetal
+force versus all centrifugal forces:--on this situation, Plato, in the
+central books of The Republic, dwells untired, in all its variety of
+synonym and epithet, the conditions, the hazard and difficulty of its
+realisation, its analogies in art, in music, in practical life, like
+three strings of a lyre, or like one colossal person, the painted dêmos+
+or civic genius on the walls of a Greek town-house, or, again, like the
+consummate athlete whose body, with no superfluities, is the precise,
+the perfectly finished, instrument of his will.  Hence, at once cause
+and effect of such "seamless" unity, his paradoxical new law of
+property in the City of the Perfect--mandatum novum, a "new
+commandment," we might fairly call it--ta tôn philôn koina.+  "And no
+one said that aught of the things he possessed was his own but they had
+all things common."  Ah, you see!  Put yourself in Plato's company, and
+inevitably, from time to time, he will seem to pass with you beyond the
+utmost horizon actually opened to him.
+
+Upon the aristocratic class therefore, in its two divisions, the army
+and the church or hierarchy, so to speak, the "rule" of Plato--poverty,
+obedience, contemplation, will be incumbent in its fullest rigour.
+"Like hired servants in their own house," they may not seem very
+enviable persons, on first thoughts.  But remember again that Plato's
+charge against things as they are is partly in a theoretic interest--
+the philosopher, [256] the philosophic soul, loves unity, but finds it
+nowhere, neither in the State nor in its individual members: it is
+partly also practical, and of the hour.  Divided Athens, divided
+Greece, like some big, lax, self-neglectful person would be an easy
+prey to any well-knit adversary really at unity in himself.  It is by
+way of introducing a constringent principal into a mass of amorphic
+particles, that Plato proclaims that these friends will have all things
+in common; and, challenged by the questions of his companions in the
+dialogue to say how far he will be ready to go in the application of so
+paradoxical a rule, he braces himself to a surprising degree of
+consistency.  How far then will Plato, a somewhat Machiavelian
+theorist, as you saw, and with something of "fixed" ideas about
+practical things, taking desperate means towards a somewhat exclusively
+conceived ideal of social well-being, be ready to go?
+
+Now we have seen that the genuine citizens of his Perfect City will
+have much of monasticism, of the character of military monks, about
+them already, with their poverty, their obedience, their contemplative
+habit.  And there is yet another indispensable condition of the
+monastic life.  The great Pope Hildebrand, by the rule of celibacy, by
+making "regulars" to that extent of the secular clergy, succeeded, as
+many have thought, in his design of making them in very deed, soul and
+body, but parts of the corporate order they [257] belonged to; and what
+Plato is going to add to his rule of life, for the archontes,+ who are
+to be philopolides,+ to love the corporate body they belong to better
+than themselves, is in its actual effects something very like a law of
+celibacy.  Difficult, paradoxical, as he admits it to be, he is pressed
+on by his hearers, and by the natural force of his argument,
+reluctantly to declare that the rule of communism will apply to a man's
+ownership of his wife and children.
+
+Observe!  Plato proposes this singular modification of married life as
+an elevation or expansion of the family, but, it may be rightly
+objected, is, in truth, only colouring with names exclusively
+appropriate to the family, arrangements which will be a suppression of
+all those sentiments that naturally pertain to it.  The wisdom of Plato
+would certainly deprive mothers of that privacy of affection, regarding
+which the wisdom of Solomon beamed forth, by sending all infants soon
+after birth to be reared in a common nursery, where the facts of their
+actual parentage would be carefully obliterated.  The result, as he
+supposes, will be a common and universal parentage, sonship,
+brotherhood; but surely with but a shadowy realisation of the
+affections, the claims, of these relationships.  It will involve a loss
+of differentiation in life, and be, as such, a movement backward, to a
+barbarous or merely animal grade of existence.
+
+[258] Ta tôn philôn koina.+--With this soft phrase, then, Plato would
+take away all those precious differences that come of our having a
+little space in things to do what one will or can with.  The Platonic
+state in fact, with its extraordinary common marriages, would be
+dealing precisely after the manner of those who breed birds or dogs.  A
+strange forbidding experiment, it seems, or should seem, to us, looking
+back on it in the light of laws now irrevocably fixed on these subjects
+by the judgment of the Christian church.  We must remember however, in
+fairness, that Plato in this matter of the relation of the sexes
+especially, found himself in a world very different from ours,
+regulated and refined, as it already is in some degree, by Christian
+ideas about women and children.  A loose law of marriage, beyond it
+concubinage in some degree sanctioned by religion, beyond that again
+morbid vice: such was the condition of the Greek world.  What Christian
+marriage, in harmonious action with man's true nature, has done to
+counteract this condition, that Plato tried to do by a somewhat forced
+legislation, which was altogether out of harmony with the facts of
+man's nature.  Neither the church nor the world has endorsed his
+theories about it.  Think, in contrast, of the place occupied in
+Christian art by the mother and her child.  What that represents in
+life Plato wishes to take from us, though, as he would have us think,
+in our own behalf.
+
+[259] And his views of the community of male and female education, and
+of the functions of men and women in the State, do but come of the
+relief of women in large measure from home-duties.  Such duties
+becoming a carefully economised department of the State, the women will
+have leisure to share the work of men; and will need a corresponding
+education.  The details of their common life in peace and war he
+certainly makes effective and bright.  But if we think of his proposal
+as a reinstatement of the Amazon we have in effect condemned it.  For
+the Amazon of mythology and art is but a survival from a half-animal
+world, which Theseus, the embodiment of adult reason, had long since
+overcome.
+
+Plato himself divides this confessedly so difficult question into two:
+Is the thing good? and in the second place, Is it possible?  Let us
+admit that at that particular crisis, or even generally, what he
+proposes is for the best.  Thereupon the question which suggested
+itself in regard to the community of goods recurs with double force:
+Where may lie the secret of the magnanimity (that is the term to hold
+by) which will make wealth and office, with all their opportunities for
+puissant wills, no motive in life at all?  Is it possible, and under
+what conditions--this disinterestedness on the part of those who might
+do what they will as with their own, this indifference, this surrender,
+not of one's goods and [260] time only, but of one's last resource,
+one's very home, for "the greatest happiness of the greatest number."--
+Those are almost the exact words of Plato.  How shall those who might
+be egotists on the scale of an Alcibiades or an Alexander be kept to
+this strange "new mandate" of altruism?  How shall a paradox so bold be
+brought within the range of possibilities?  Well! by the realisation of
+another paradox,--if we make philosophers our kings or our kings
+philosophers.  It is the last "wave of paradox," from the advancing
+crest of which Plato still shrinks back, oddly reluctant, as we may
+think, to utter his whole mind.  But, concede his position, and all
+beside, in the strange, paradoxical new world he is constructing, its
+extraordinary reaches of philadelphia, will be found practicable.
+
+Our kings must be philosophers.  But not, we must carefully note,
+because, as people are apt to fancy, philosophers as such necessarily
+despise or are unable to feel what is fascinating in the world of
+action, are un-formed or withered on one side, and, as regards the
+allurements of the world of sense, are but "corpses."  For Plato
+certainly they are no starvelings.  The philosophic, or aristocratic,
+or kingly, nature, as he conceives it, will be the perfect flower of
+the whole compass of natural endowments, promoted to the utmost by the
+artificial influences of society--kalokagathos +--capable therefore in
+the extreme degree of success in a purely "self-regarding" policy, of
+an [261] exploitation, in their own interests, of all that men in
+general value most, to the surfeiting, if they cared, of their
+ambition, their vanity, their love of liberty or license.
+
+Nor again must our kings be philosophers mainly because in such case
+the world will be very wisely, very knowingly, governed.  Of course it
+would be well that wise men should rule.  Even a Greek, still "a youth
+in the youth of the world," who indeed was not very far gone from an
+essentially youthful evaluation of things, was still apt to think with
+Croesus that the richest must of course be the happiest of men, and to
+have a head-ache when compelled to think, even he would have taken so
+much for granted.  That it would be well that wise men should govern,
+wise after the Platonic standard, bringing, that is to say, particular
+details under coherent general rules, able to foresee and influence the
+future by their knowledge of the past:--there is no paradox in that: it
+belongs rather, you might complain, to the range of platitudes.  But,
+remember! the hinge of Plato's whole political argument is, that the
+ruinous divisions of Athens, of Greece, of the entire social community,
+is the want of disinterestedness in its rulers; not that they are unfit
+to rule; rather, that they have often, it may be, a natural call to
+office--those exceptional high natures--but that they "abound" therein
+exclusively "in their own sense."  And the precise point of paradox in
+philosophic kingship, [262] as Plato takes it, is this, that if we have
+philosophers for our kings, our archons, we shall be under a sort of
+rulers who as such have made sacrifice of themselves, and in coming to
+office at all must have taken upon them "the form of a servant."--
+
+     For thus it is.--If you can find out a life better than being
+     a king, for those who shall be kings, a well-governed city
+     will become possible, and not otherwise.  For in that city
+     alone will those be kings who are in very deed rich.  But if
+     poor men, hungering after their private good, proceed to public
+     offices, it is not possible; for, the kingly office becoming an
+     object of contention, the sort of battle which results, being
+     at home and internal, destroys them, along with the common-
+     wealth.--Most truly, he replied.--Have you then, I asked, any
+     kind of life which can despise political offices, other than
+     the life of true philosophers?--Certainly not.--Yet still it
+     is necessary that those who come to office should not be lovers
+     of it; otherwise the rival lovers will fight.--That must be
+     so.--Whom then will you compel to proceed to the guardianship
+     of the city save those, who, being wisest of all in regard to
+     the conditions of her highest welfare, are themselves possessed
+     of privileges of another order, and a life better than the
+     politician's?  Republic, 520.
+
+More capable than others of an adroit application of all that power
+usually means in the way of personal advantage, your "legitimate," and
+really elect royalty or aristocracy must be secured from the love of
+it; you must insure their magnanimity in office by a counter-charm.
+But where is such a charm, or counter-charm, to be found?  Throughout,
+as usual in so provident a writer as Plato, the answer to that leading
+[263] question has had its prelude, even in the first book.--
+
+     Therefore it was, for my part, friend Thrasymachus, I was saying
+     just now that no one would be willing of his own motion to rule,
+     and take in hand the ills of other people to set them right, but
+     that he would ask a reward; because he who will do fairly by his
+     art, or prosper by his art, never does what is best for himself,
+     nor ordains that, in ordaining what is proper to his art, but
+     what is best for the subject of his rule.  By reason of which
+     indeed, as it seems, there must needs be a reward for those who
+     shall be willing to rule, either money, or honour, or a penalty
+     unless he will rule.--How do you mean this Socrates? said
+     Glaucon: for the two rewards I understand; but the penalty, of
+     which you speak, and have named as in the place of a reward, I
+     do not understand.--Then you do not understand, I said, the
+     reward of the best, for the sake of which the most virtuous
+     rule, when they are willing to rule.  Or do you not know that
+     the being fond of honours, fond of money, is said to be, and
+     is, a disgrace?--For my part, Yes! he said.--On this ground
+     then, neither for money are the good willing to rule, nor for
+     honour; for they choose neither, in openly exacting hire as
+     a return for their rule, to be called hirelings, nor, in taking
+     secretly therefrom, thieves.  Nor again is it for honour they
+     will rule; for they are not ambitious.  Therefore it is, that
+     necessity must be on them, and a penalty, if they are to be
+     willing to rule: whence perhaps it has come, that to proceed
+     with ready will to the office of ruler, and not to await
+     compulsion, is accounted indecent.  As for the penalty,--the
+     greatest penalty is to be ruled by one worse than oneself,
+     unless one will rule.  And it is through fear of that, the
+     good seem to me to rule, when they rule: and then they proceed
+     to the office of ruler, not as coming to some good thing, nor
+     as to profit therein, but as to something unavoidable, and
+     as having none better than themselves to whom to entrust it,
+     nor even as good.  Since it seems likely that if a city of good
+     men came to be, not to rule would be the matter of contention,
+     as nowadays to rule; and here it would become manifest that a
+     ruler in very deed, in the nature of things, considers not what
+     is profitable for himself, but for the subject of his rule.
+     So [264] that every intelligent person would choose rather to
+     be benefited by another, than by benefiting another to have
+     trouble himself.  Republic, 346.
+
+Now if philosophy really is where Plato consistently puts it, and is
+all he claims for it, then, for those capable of it, who are capable
+also in the region of practice, it will be precisely "that better thing
+than being a king for those who must be our kings, our archons."  You
+see that the various elements of Platonism are interdependent; that
+they really cohere.
+
+Just at this point then you must call to memory the greatness of the
+claim Plato makes for philosophy--a promise, you may perhaps think,
+larger than anything he has actually presented to his readers in the
+way of a philosophic revelation justifies.  He seems, in fact, to
+promise all, or almost all, that in a later age natures great and high
+have certainly found in the Christian religion.  If philosophy is only
+star-gazing, or only a condition of doubt, if what the sophist or the
+philistine says of it is all that can be said, it could hardly compete
+with the rewards which the vulgar world holds out to its servants.  But
+for Plato, on the other hand, if philosophy is anything at all, it is
+nothing less than an "escape from the evils of the world," and
+homoiôsis tô theô,+ a being made like to God.  It provides a
+satisfaction not for the intelligence only but for the whole nature of
+man, his imagination and faith, his affections, his capacity [265] for
+religious devotion, and for some still unimagined development of the
+capacities of sense.
+
+How could anything which belongs to the world of mere phenomenal change
+seem great to him who is "the spectator of all time and all existence"?
+"For the excellency" of such knowledge as that, we might say, he must
+"count all things but loss."  By fear of punishment in some roundabout
+way, he might indeed be compelled to descend into "the cave," "to take
+in hand the wrongs of other people to set them right"; but of course
+the part he will take in your sorry exhibition of passing shadows, and
+dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for himself.  You may think
+him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your
+master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"--you may
+think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly
+chimerical being.  Yet history records one instance in which such a
+figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain
+approach to the result Plato promises.  It was precisely because his
+whole being was filled with philosophic vision, that the Emperor Marcus
+Aurelius, that fond student of philosophy, of this very philosophy of
+Plato, served the Roman people so well in peace and war--with so much
+disinterestedness, because, in fact, so reluctantly.  Look onward, and
+what is strange and inexplicable in his realisation of the Platonic
+scheme--strange, if we consider how cold and [266] feeble after all
+were the rays of light on which he waited so devoutly--becomes clear in
+the person of Saint Louis, who, again, precisely because his whole
+being was full of heavenly vision, in self-banishment from it for a
+while, led and ruled the French people so magnanimously alike in peace
+and war.  The presence, then, the ascendancy amid actual things, of the
+royal or philosophic nature, as Plato thus conceives it--that, and
+nothing else, will be the generating force, the seed, of the City of
+the Perfect, as he conceives it: this place, in which the great things
+of existence, known or divined, really fill the soul.  Only, he for one
+would not be surprised if no eyes actually see it.  Like his master
+Socrates, as you know, he is something of a humorist; and if he
+sometimes surprises us with paradox or hazardous theory, will sometimes
+also give us to understand that he is after all not quite serious.  So
+about this vision of the City of the Perfect, The Republic, Kallipolis,+
+Uranopolis, Utopia, Civitas Dei, The Kingdom of Heaven--
+
+     Suffer me, he says, to entertain myself as men of listless
+     minds are wont to do when they journey alone.  Such persons,
+     I fancy, before they have found out in what way ought of what
+     they desire may come to be, pass that question by lest they
+     grow weary in considering whether the thing be possible or no;
+     and supposing what they wish already achieved, they proceed at
+     once to arrange all the rest, pleasing themselves in the
+     tracing out all they will do, when that shall have come to
+     pass--making a mind already idle idler still.  Republic, 144.
+
+NOTES
+
+236. +Transliteration: Peri Dikaiosynês.  Pater's translation: "on the
+nature of justice."
+
+236. +Transliteration: tod' ên hôs eoike prooimion.  E-text editor's
+translation: "this was only by way of introduction."  Plato, Republic
+357a.
+
+241. +Transliteration: to hen prattein, to ta hautou prattein.  E-text
+editor's translation: "to do one thing [only], to do only things proper
+to oneself."  Plato, Republic 369e.
+
+241. +Transliteration: poikilia, pleonexia, polypragmosynê.  Liddell and
+Scott definitions: "poikilia = metaph: cunning; pleonexia = a
+disposition to take more than one's share; polupragmosunê = meddling."
+
+242. +Transliteration: Prôton men phyetai hekastos ou pany homoios
+hekastô, alla diapherôn tên physin, allos ep allou ergou praxin.  E-
+text editor's translation: "To begin with, each person is of a nature
+not the same as  another's; rather, people differ in nature, and so one
+person will be best fitted for one task, and another for a different
+kind of work."  Plato, Republic 370a-b.
+
+242. +Transliteration: ergon.  Liddell and Scott definition: "work . . .
+employment."
+
+242. +Transliteration: poikilia.  Liddell and Scott definition: "metaph:
+cunning."
+
+243. +Transliteration: gignetai toinyn hôs egômai polis epeidê tunchanei
+hêmôn hekastos ouk autarkês.  E-text editor's translation: "As I see
+it, the city will come into existence because it so happens that as
+individuals we are not sufficient to provide for ourselves."  Plato,
+Republic 369b.
+
+243. +Transliteration: Poiêsei hôs egômai tên polin hêmetera chreia.  E-
+text editor's translation: "As I see it, it will be our needs that
+create the city."  Plato, Republic 369c.
+
+244. +Transliteration: hoi dêmiourgoi.  Liddell and Scott definition of
+dêmiourgos: "workman."
+
+245. +Transliteration: eis hen kata physin.  E-text editor's
+translation: "to one activity in accordance with [a given person's]
+nature."  Plato, Republic 372e..
+
+246. +Transliteration: polis êdê tryphôsa.  E-text editor's translation:
+"a city already [grown] luxurious."  The verb tryphaô means "to live
+softly or delicately, fare sumptuously, live in luxury."  (Liddell and
+Scott.)  Plato, Republic 372e.
+
+246. +Transliteration: polis êdê tryphôsa.  E-text editor's translation:
+"a city already [grown] luxurious."  The verb tryphaô means "to live
+softly or delicately, fare sumptuously, live in luxury."  (Liddell and
+Scott.)  Plato, Republic 372e.
+
+246. +Transliteration: kai hê chôra pou hê tote hikanê smikra ex hikanês
+estai.  E-text editor's translation: "And the land that used to be
+sufficient will be insufficient."  Plato, Republic 373d.
+
+246. +Transliteration: oukoun tês tôn plêsion chôras hêmin apotmêteon.
+E-text editor's translation: "And so we will appropriate for ourselves
+some of our neighbor's land."  Plato, Republic 373d.
+
+247. +Transliteration: Phylakes . . . epikouroi.  Pater's translation:
+"watchmen or auxiliaries."
+
+247. +Transliteration: hôs en pharmakou eidei ta pseudê ta en deonti
+genomena.  E-text editor's translation: "timely falsehoods that take
+the form of medicine."  Plato, Republic 389b and 414b contain parts of
+the quotation.
+
+247. +Transliteration: phoinikikon pseudos.  E-text editor's
+translation: "Phoenician story."  Plato, Republic 414c.
+
+251. +Transliteration: nomisma tês allagês heneka.  E-text editor's
+translation: "a common currency for exchange."  Plato, Republic 371b.
+
+254. +Transliteration: oikeiopragia.  E-text editor's translation:
+"functioning," from oikeios (proper to a thing, fitting) and pragos or,
+in everyday non-poetic speech, pragma(deed).  Plato, Republic 434c.
+
+255. +Transliteration: dêmos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "the
+commons, common people, plebeians; in Attica, townships or hundreds."
+
+255. +Transliteration: ta tôn philôn koina.  E-text editor's
+translation: "the possessions of friends are held in common."  Plato,
+Phaedrus 279c contains similar language.
+
+257. +Transliteration: archontes.  Liddell and Scott definition of
+archon: "ruler."
+
+257. +Transliteration: philopolides.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"[those] loving [their] city, state, or country."
+
+258. +Transliteration: Ta tôn philôn koina.  E-text editor's
+translation: "the possessions of friends are held in common."  Plato,
+Phaedrus 279c contains similar language.
+
+260. +Transliteration: kalokagathos.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"beautiful and good, noble and good."
+
+264. +Transliteration: homoiôsis tô theô.  Pater's translation: "a
+[process or act of] being made like to God."  Plato, Republic 454c.
+
+266. +Transliteration: Kallipolis.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"beautiful city."  Plato, Republic 527c.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 10: PLATO'S AESTHETICS
+
+[267] WHEN we remember Plato as the great lover, what the visible world
+was to him, what a large place the idea of Beauty, with its almost
+adequate realisation in that visible world, holds in his most abstract
+speculations as the clearest instance of the relation of the human mind
+to reality and truth, we might think that art also, the fine arts,
+would have been much for him; that the aesthetic element would be a
+significant one in his theory of morals and education.  Ta terpna en
+Helladi+ (to use Pindar's phrase) all the delightful things in Hellas:--
+Plato least of all could have been unaffected by their presence around
+him.  And so it is.  Think what perfection of handicraft, what a subtle
+enjoyment therein, is involved in that specially Platonic rule, to mind
+one's business (to ta hautou prattein)+ that he who, like Fra Damiano of
+Bergamo, has a gift for poikilia,+ intarsia or marqueterie, for example,
+should confine himself exclusively to that.  Before him, [268] you
+know, there had been no theorising about the beautiful, its place in
+life, and the like; and as a matter of fact he is the earliest critic
+of the fine arts.  He anticipates the modern notion that art as such
+has no end but its own perfection,--"art for art's sake."  Ar' oun kai
+hekastê tôn technôn esti ti sympheron allo ê hoti malista telean
+einai;+  We have seen again that not in theory only, by the large place
+he assigns to our experiences regarding visible beauty in the formation
+of his doctrine of ideas, but that in the practical sphere also, this
+great fact of experience, the reality of beauty, has its importance
+with him.  The loveliness of virtue as a harmony, the winning aspect of
+those "images" of the absolute and unseen Temperance, Bravery, Justice,
+shed around us in the visible world for eyes that can see, the claim of
+the virtues as a visible representation by human persons and their acts
+of the eternal qualities of  "the eternal," after all far out-weigh, as
+he thinks, the claim of their mere utility.  And accordingly, in
+education, all will begin and end "in music," in the promotion of
+qualities to which no truer name can be given than symmetry, aesthetic
+fitness, tone.  Philosophy itself indeed, as he conceives it, is but
+the sympathetic appreciation of a kind of music in the very nature of
+things.
+
+There have been Platonists without Plato, and a kind of traditional
+Platonism in the world, independent of, yet true in spirit to, the
+Platonism [269] of the Platonic Dialogues.  Now such a piece of
+traditional Platonism we find in the hypothesis of some close connexion
+between what may be called the aesthetic qualities of the world about
+us and the formation of moral character, between aesthetics and ethics.
+Wherever people have been inclined to lay stress on the colouring, for
+instance, cheerful or otherwise, of the walls of the room where
+children learn to read, as though that had something to do with the
+colouring of their minds; on the possible moral effect of the beautiful
+ancient buildings of some of our own schools and colleges; on the
+building of character, in any way, through the eye and ear; there the
+spirit of Plato has been understood to be, and rightly, even by those
+who have perhaps never read Plato's Republic, in which however we do
+find the connexion between moral character and matters of poetry and
+art strongly asserted.  This is to be observed especially in the third
+and tenth books of The Republic.  The main interest of those books lies
+in the fact, that in them we read what Plato actually said on a subject
+concerning which people have been so ready to put themselves under his
+authority.
+
+It is said with immediate reference to metre and its various forms in
+verse, as an element in the general treatment of style or manner
+(lexis)+ as opposed to the  matter (logoi)+ in the imaginative
+literature, with which as in time past the [270] education of the
+citizens of the Perfect City will begin.  It is however at his own
+express suggestion that we may apply what he says, in the first
+instance, about metre and verse, to all forms of art whatever, to music
+(mousikê)+ generally, to all those matters over which the Muses of Greek
+mythology preside, to all productions in which the form counts equally
+with, or for more than, the matter.  Assuming therefore that we have
+here, in outline and tendency at least, the mind of Plato in regard to
+the ethical influence of aesthetic qualities, let us try to distinguish
+clearly the central lines of that tendency, of Platonism in art, as it
+is really to be found in Plato.
+
+"You have perceived have you not," observes the Platonic Socrates,
+"that acts of imitation, if they begin in early life, and continue,
+establish themselves in one's nature and habits, alike as to the body,
+the tones of one's voice, the ways of one's mind."
+
+Yes, that might seem a matter of common observation; and what is
+strictly Platonic here and in what follows is but the emphasis of the
+statement.  Let us set it however, for the sake of decisive effect, in
+immediate connexion with certain other points of Plato's aesthetic
+doctrine.
+
+Imitation then, imitation through the eye and ear, is irresistible in
+its influence over human nature.  And secondly, we, the founders, the
+people, of the Republic, of the city that shall be [271] perfect, have
+for our peculiar purpose the simplification of human nature: a purpose
+somewhat costly, for it follows, thirdly, that the only kind of music,
+of art and poetry, we shall permit ourselves, our citizens, will be of
+a very austere character, under a sort of "self-denying ordinance."  We
+shall be a fervently aesthetic community, if you will; but therewith
+also very fervent "renunciants," or ascetics.
+
+In the first place, men's souls are, according to Plato's view, the
+creatures of what men see and hear.  What would probably be found in a
+limited number only of sensitive people, a constant susceptibility to
+the aspects and other sensible qualities of things and persons, to the
+element of expression or form in them and their movements, to phenomena
+as such--this susceptibility Plato supposes in men generally.  It is
+not so much the matter of a work of art, what is conveyed in and by
+colour and form and sound, that tells upon us educationally--the
+subject, for instance, developed by the words and scenery of a play--as
+the form, and its qualities, concision, simplicity, rhythm, or,
+contrariwise, abundance, variety, discord.  Such "aesthetic" qualities,
+by what we might call in logical phrase, metabasis eis allo genos,+ a
+derivation into another kind of matter, transform themselves, in the
+temper of the patient the hearer or spectator, into terms of ethics,
+into the sphere of the desires and the will, of the moral taste,
+engendering, nursing [272] there, strictly moral effects, such
+conditions of sentiment and the will as Plato requires in his City of
+the Perfect, or quite the opposite, but hardly in any case indifferent,
+conditions.
+
+Imitation:--it enters into the very fastnesses of character; and we,
+our souls, ourselves, are for ever imitating what we see and hear, the
+forms, the sounds which haunt our memories, our imagination.  We
+imitate not only if we play a part on the stage but when we sit as
+spectators, while our thoughts follow the acting of another, when we
+read Homer and put ourselves, lightly, fluently, into the place of
+those he describes: we imitate unconsciously the line and colour of the
+walls around us, the trees by the wayside, the animals we pet or make
+use of, the very dress we wear.  Only, Hina mê ek tês mimêseôs tou
+einai apolausôsin.+--Let us beware how men attain the very truth of what
+they imitate.
+
+That then is the first principle of Plato's aesthetics, his first
+consideration regarding the art of the City of the Perfect.  Men,
+children, are susceptible beings, in great measure conditioned by the
+mere look of their "medium."  Like those insects, we might fancy, of
+which naturalists tell us, taking colour from the plants they lodge on,
+they will come to match with much servility the aspects of the world
+about them.
+
+But the people of the Perfect City would not [273] be there at all
+except by way of a refuge, an experiment, or tour de force, in moral
+and social philosophy; and this circumstance determines the second
+constituent principle of Plato's aesthetic scheme.  We, then, the
+founders, the citizens, of the Republic have a peculiar purpose.  We
+are here to escape from, to resist, a certain vicious centrifugal
+tendency in life, in Greek and especially in Athenian life, which does
+but propagate a like vicious tendency in ourselves.  We are to become--
+like little pieces in a machine! you may complain.--No, like performers
+rather, individually, it may be, of more or less importance, but each
+with a necessary and inalienable part, in a perfect musical exercise
+which is well worth while, or in some sacred liturgy; or like soldiers
+in an invincible army, invincible because it moves as one man.  We are
+to find, or be put into, and keep, every one his natural place; to
+cultivate those qualities which will secure mastery over ourselves, the
+subordination of the parts to the whole, musical proportion.  To this
+end, as we saw, Plato, a remorseless idealist, is ready even to
+suppress the differences of male and female character, to merge, to
+lose the family in the social aggregate.
+
+Imitation then, we may resume, imitation through the eye and ear, is
+irresistible in its influence on human nature.  Secondly, the founders
+of the Republic are by its very purpose bound to the simplification of
+human nature: [274] and our practical conclusion follows in logical
+order.  We shall make, and sternly keep, a "self-denying" ordinance in
+this matter, in the matter of art, of poetry, of taste in all its
+varieties; a rule, of which Plato's own words, applied by him in the
+first instance to rhythm or metre, but like all he says on that subject
+fairly applicable to the whole range of musical or aesthetic effects,
+will be the brief summary: Alternations will be few and far between:--
+how differently from the methods of the poetry, the art, the choruses,
+we most of us love so much, not necessarily because our senses are
+inapt or untrained:--Smikrai hai metabolai.+  We shall allow no musical
+innovations, no Aristophanic cries, no imitations however clever of
+"the sounds of the flute or the lyre," no free imitation by the human
+voice of bestial or mechanical sounds, no such artists as are "like a
+mirror turning all about."  There were vulgarities of nature, you see,
+in the youth of ideal Athens even.  Time, of course, as such, is itself
+a kind of artist, trimming pleasantly for us what survives of the rude
+world of the past.  Now Plato's method would promote or anticipate the
+work of time in that matter of vulgarities of taste.  Yes, when you
+read his precautionary rules, you become fully aware that even in
+Athens there were young men who affected what was least fortunate in
+the habits, the pleasures, the sordid business of the class below them.
+[275] But they would not be allowed quite their own way in the streets
+or elsewhere in a reformed world, to whose chosen imperial youth
+(Basilikê phylê)+ it would not be permitted even to think of any of
+those things--oudeni prosechein ton voun.+  To them, what was illiberal,
+the illiberal crafts, would be (thanks to their well-trained power of
+intellectual abstraction!) as though it were not.  And if art, like
+law, be, as Plato thinks, "a creation of mind, in accordance with right
+reason," we shall not wish our boys to sing like mere birds.
+
+Yet what price would not the musical connoisseur pay to handle the
+instruments we may see in fancy passing out through the gates of the
+City of the Perfect, banished, not because there is no one within its
+walls who knows the use of, or would receive pleasure from, them (a
+delicate susceptibility in these matters Plato, as was said,
+presupposes) but precisely because they are so seductive, must be
+conveyed therefore to some other essentially less favoured
+neighbourhood, like poison, say! moral poison, for one's enemies'
+water-springs.  A whole class of painters, sculptors, skilled workmen
+of various kinds go into like banishment--they and their very tools;
+not, observe again carefully, because they are bad artists, but very
+good ones.--Alla mên, ô Adeimante, hêdys ge kai ho kekramenos.+  Art, as
+such, as Plato knows, has no purpose but itself, its own perfection.
+The proper art of the [276] Perfect City is in fact the art of
+discipline.  Music (mousikê)+ all the various forms of fine art, will be
+but the instruments of its one over-mastering social or political
+purpose, irresistibly conforming its so imitative subject units to
+type: they will be neither more nor less than so many variations, so to
+speak, of the trumpet-call.
+
+Or suppose again that a poet finds his way to us, "able by his genius,
+as he chooses, or as his audience chooses, to become all things, or all
+persons, in turn, and able to transform us too into all things and
+persons in turn, as we listen or read, with a fluidity, a versatility
+of humour almost equal to his own, a poet myriad-minded, as we say,
+almost in Plato's precise words, as our finest touch of praise, of
+Shakespeare for instance, or of Homer, of whom he was thinking:--Well!
+we shall have been set on our guard.  We have no room for him.  Divine,
+delightful, being, "if he came to our city with his works, his poems,
+wishing to make an exhibition of them, we should certainly do him
+reverence as an object, sacred, wonderful, delightful, but we should
+not let him stay.  We should tell him that there neither is, nor may
+be, any one like that among us, and so send him on his way to some
+other city, having anointed his head with myrrh and crowned him with a
+garland of wool, as something in himself half-divine, and for ourselves
+should make use of some more austere and less pleasing sort of poet,
+for his practical [277] uses."  Tô austêroterô kai aêdesterô poiêtê,
+ôphelias heneka.+  Not, as I said, that the Republic any more than
+Lacedaemon will be an artless place.  Plato's aesthetic scheme is
+actually based on a high degree of sensibility to such influences in
+the people he is dealing with.--
+
+     Right speech, then, and rightness of harmony and form and
+     rhythm minister to goodness of nature; not that good-nature
+     which we so call with a soft name, being really silliness,
+     but the frame of mind which in very truth is rightly and
+     fairly ordered in regard to the moral habit.--Most certainly
+     he said.--Must not these qualities, then, be everywhere
+     pursued by the young men if they are to do each his own
+     business?--Pursued, certainly.--Now painting, I suppose, is
+     full of them (those qualities which are partly ethical, partly
+     aesthetic) and all handicraft such as that; the weaver's art
+     is full of them, and the inlayer's art and the building of
+     houses, and the working of all the other apparatus of life;
+     moreover the nature of our own bodies, and of all other living
+     things.  For in all these, rightness or wrongness of form is
+     inherent.  And wrongness of form, and the lack of rhythm, the
+     lack of harmony, are fraternal to faultiness of mind and charac-
+     ter, and the opposite qualities to the opposite condition--the
+     temperate and good character:--fraternal, aye! and copies of
+     them.--Yes, entirely so: he said.--
+
+     Must our poets, then, alone be under control, and compelled to
+     work the image of the good into their poetic works, or not to
+     work among us at all; or must the other craftsmen too be
+     controlled, and restrained from working this faultiness and
+     intemperance and illiberality and formlessness of character
+     whether into the images of living creatures, or the houses
+     they build, or any other product of their craft whatever;
+     or must he who is unable so to do be forbidden to practise
+     his art among us, to the end that our guardians may not,
+     nurtured in images of vice as in a vicious pasture, cropping
+     and culling much every day little by little from many sources,
+     composing together some one great evil in their own souls, go
+     undetected?  Must we not rather seek for those craftsmen who
+     have the [278] power, by way of their own natural virtue, to
+     track out the nature of the beautiful and seemly, to the end
+     that, living as in some wholesome place, the young men may
+     receive good from every side, whencesoever, from fair works
+     of art, either upon sight or upon hearing anything may strike,
+     as it were a breeze bearing health from kindly places, and
+     from childhood straightway bring them unaware to likeness and
+     friendship and harmony with fair reason?--Yes: he answered: in
+     this way they would be by far best educated.--Well then, I said,
+     Glaucon, on these grounds is not education in music of the
+     greatest importance--because, more than anything else, rhythm
+     and harmony make their way down into the inmost part of the
+     soul, and take hold upon it with the utmost force, bringing
+     with them rightness of form, and rendering its form right, if
+     one be correctly trained; if not, the opposite? and again
+     because he who has been trained in that department duly, would
+     have the sharpest sense of oversights (tôn paraleipomenôn)+ and
+     of things not fairly turned out, whether by art or nature (mê
+     kalôs dêmiourgêthentôn ê mê kalôs phyntôn)+ and disliking them,
+     as he should, would commend things beautiful, and, by reason of
+     his delight in these, receiving them into his soul, be nurtured
+     of them, and become kalokagathos,+ while he blamed the base,
+     as he should, and hated it, while still young, before he was
+     able to apprehend a reason, and when reason comes would welcome
+     it, recognising it by its kinship to himself--most of all one
+     thus taught?--Yes: he answered: it seems to me that for reasons
+     such as these their education should be in music.  Republic, 400.
+
+Understand, then, the poetry and music, the arts and crafts, of the
+City of the Perfect--what is left of them there, and remember how the
+Greeks themselves were used to say that "the half is more than the
+whole."  Liken its music, if you will, to Gregorian music, and call to
+mind the kind of architecture, military or monastic again, that must be
+built to such music, and then the kind of colouring that will fill its
+[279] jealously allotted space upon the walls, the sort of carving that
+will venture to display itself on cornice or capital.  The walls, the
+pillars, the streets--you see them in thought! nay, the very trees and
+animals, the attire of those who move along the streets, their looks
+and voices, their style--the hieratic Dorian architecture, to speak
+precisely, the Dorian manner everywhere, in possession of the whole of
+life.  Compare it, for further vividness of effect, to Gothic building,
+to the Cistercian Gothic, if you will, when Saint Bernard had purged it
+of a still barbaric superfluity of ornament.  It seems a long way from
+the Parthenon to Saint Ouen "of the aisles and arches," or Notre-Dame
+de Bourges; yet they illustrate almost equally the direction of the
+Platonic aesthetics.  Those churches of the Middle Age have, as we all
+feel, their loveliness, yet of a stern sort, which fascinates while
+perhaps it repels us.  We may try hard to like as well or better
+architecture of a more or less different kind, but coming back to them
+again find that the secret of final success is theirs.  The rigid logic
+of their charm controls our taste, as logic proper binds the
+intelligence: we would have something of that quality, if we might, for
+ourselves, in what we do or make; feel, under its influence, very
+diffident of our own loose, or gaudy, or literally insignificant,
+decorations.  "Stay then," says the Platonist, too sanguine perhaps,--
+"Abide," he says to youth, "in these [280] places, and the like of
+them, and mechanically, irresistibly, the soul of them will impregnate
+yours.  With whatever beside is in congruity with them in the order of
+hearing and sight, they will tell (despite, it may be, of unkindly
+nature at your first making) upon your very countenance, your walk and
+gestures, in the course and concatenation of your inmost thoughts."
+
+And equation being duly made of what is merely personal and temporary
+in Plato's view of the arts, it may be salutary to return from time to
+time to the Platonic aesthetics, to find ourselves under the more
+exclusive influence of those qualities in the Hellenic genius he has
+thus emphasised.  What he would promote, then, is the art, the
+literature, of which among other things it may be said that it solicits
+a certain effort from the reader or spectator, who is promised a great
+expressiveness on the part of the writer, the artist, if he for his
+part will bring with him a great attentiveness.  And how satisfying,
+how reassuring, how flattering to himself after all, such work really
+is--the work which deals with one as a scholar, formed, mature and
+manly.  Bravery--andreia+ or manliness--manliness and temperance, as we
+know, were the two characteristic virtues of that old pagan world; and
+in art certainly they seem to be involved in one another.  Manliness in
+art, what can it be, as distinct from that which in opposition to it
+[281] must be called the feminine quality there,--what but a full
+consciousness of what one does, of art itself in the work of art,
+tenacity of intuition and of consequent purpose, the spirit of
+construction as opposed to what is literally incoherent or ready to
+fall to pieces, and, in opposition to what is hysteric or works at
+random, the maintenance of a standard.  Of such art êthos+ rather than
+pathos+ will be the predominant mood.  To use Plato's own expression
+there will be here no paraleipomena,+ no "negligences," no feminine
+forgetfulness of one's self, nothing in the work of art unconformed to
+the leading intention of the artist, who will but increase his power by
+reserve.  An artist of that kind will be apt, of course, to express
+more than he seems actually to say.  He economises.  He will not spoil
+good things by exaggeration.  The rough, promiscuous wealth of nature
+he reduces to grace and order: reduces, it may be, lax verse to staid
+and temperate prose.  With him, the rhythm, the music, the notes, will
+be felt to follow, or rather literally accompany as ministers, the
+sense,--akolouthein ton logon.+
+
+We may fairly prefer the broad daylight of Veronese to the contrasted
+light and shade of Rembrandt even; and a painter will tell you that the
+former is actually more difficult to attain.  Temperance, the
+temperance of the youthful Charmides, super-induced on a nature
+originally rich and impassioned,--Plato's own [282] native preference
+for that is only reinforced by the special needs of his time, and the
+very conditions of the ideal state.  The diamond, we are told, if it be
+a fine one, may gain in value by what is cut away.  It was after such
+fashion that the manly youth of Lacedaemon had been cut and carved.
+Lenten or monastic colours, brown and black, white and grey, give their
+utmost value for the eye (so much is obvious) to the scarlet flower,
+the lighted candle, the cloth of gold.  And Platonic aesthetics,
+remember! as such, are ever in close connexion with Plato's ethics.  It
+is life itself, action and character, he proposes to colour; to get
+something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of
+control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic
+or impassioned acts.
+
+Such Platonic quality you may trace of course not only in work of
+Doric, or, more largely, of Hellenic lineage, but at all times, as the
+very conscience of art, its saving salt, even in ages of decadence.
+You may analyse it, as a condition of literary style, in historic
+narrative, for instance; and then you have the stringent, shorthand art
+of Thucydides at his best, his masterly feeling for master-facts, and
+the half as so much more than the whole.  Pindar is in a certain sense
+his analogue in verse.  Think of the amount of attention he must have
+looked for, in those who were, not to read, but to sing him, or to
+listen while he was sung, and to understand. [283] With those fine,
+sharp-cut gems or chasings of his, so sparely set, how much he leaves
+for a well-drilled intelligence to supply in the way of connecting
+thought.
+
+And you may look for the correlative of that in Greek clay, in Greek
+marble, as you walk through the British Museum.  But observe it, above
+all, at work, checking yet reinforcing his naturally fluent and
+luxuriant genius, in Plato himself.  His prose is a practical
+illustration of the value of that capacity for correction, of the
+effort, the intellectual astringency, which he demands of the poet
+also, the musician, of all true citizens of the ideal Republic,
+enhancing the sense of power in one's self, and its effect upon others,
+by a certain crafty reserve in its exercise, after the manner of a true
+expert.  Chalepa ta kala+--he is faithful to the old Greek saying.
+Patience,--"infinite patience," may or may not be, as was said, of the
+very essence of genius; but is certainly, quite as much as fire, of the
+mood of all true lovers.  Isôs to legomenon alêthes, hoti chalepa ta
+kala.+  Heraclitus had preferred the "dry soul," or the "dry light" in
+it, as Bacon after him the siccum lumen.  And the dry beauty,--let
+Plato teach us, to love that also, duly.
+
+1891-1892.
+
+NOTES
+
+267. +Transliteration: Ta terpna en Helladi.  Pater's translation: "all
+the delightful things in Hellas."  Pindar, though I have not located
+the poem to which Pater refers.
+
+267. +Transliteration: to ta hautou prattein.  E-text editor's
+translation: "to do only things proper to oneself."  Plato, Republic
+369e.
+
+267. +Transliteration: poikilia.  Liddell and Scott definition: "metaph:
+cunning."
+
+268. +Transliteration: Ar' oun kai hekastê tôn technôn esti ti sympheron
+allo ê hoti malista telean einai.  E-text editor's translation: "Does
+there belong to each of the arts any advantage other than perfection?"
+Plato, Republic 341d.  Pater's reading is perhaps anachronistic in
+suggesting that Plato anticipated modern thinking about the autonomy of
+art.
+
+269. +Transliteration: lexis.  Liddell and Scott definition: "a
+speaking, speech . . . a way of speaking, diction, style."
+
+269. +Transliteration: logoi.  Pater's contextual translation: "matter."
+
+270. +Transliteration: mousikê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "any art
+over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung
+to music...."
+
+271. +Transliteration: metabasis eis allo genos.  Pater's translation:
+"a derivation into another kind of matter."
+
+272. +Transliteration: Hina mê ek tês mimêseôs tou einai apolausôsin.
+E-text editor's translation: "lest they draw the reality only from
+their imitation of it."  Plato, Republic 395c.
+
+274. +Transliteration: Smikrai hai metabolai.  E-text editor's
+translation: "our senses are inapt or untrained."  Plato, Republic
+397c.
+
+275. +Transliteration: Basilikê phylê.  E-text editor's translation:
+"royal tribe."
+
+275. +Transliteration: oudeni prosechein ton voun.  Pater's translation:
+"[they] would not be permitted even to think of any of those things."
+Plato, Republic 396b.
+
+275. +Transliteration: Alla mên, ô Adeimante, hêdys ge kai ho
+kekramenos.  E-text editor's translation: "But indeed, Adeimantus, the
+mixed kind of art also is pleasant."  Plato, Republic 397d.
+
+276. +Transliteration: mousikê.  Liddell and Scott definition: "any art
+over which the Muses presided, esp. music or lyric poetry set and sung
+to music...."
+
+277. +Transliteration: Tô austêroterô kai aêdesterô poiêtê, ôphelias
+heneka.  Pater's translation: "some more austere and less pleasing sort
+of poet, for his practical uses."  Plato, Republic 398a.
+
+278. +Transliteration: tôn paraleipomenôn.  Pater's translation:
+"oversights."  The verb paraleipô means, "to leave on one side . . .
+leave unnoticed."  Plato, Republic 401e.
+
+278. +Transliteration: mê kalôs dêmiourgêthentôn ê mê kalôs phyntôn.
+Pater's translation: "not fairly turned out, whether by art or nature."
+Plato, Republic 401e.
+
+278. +Transliteration: kalokagathos.  Liddell and Scott definition:
+"beautiful and good, noble and good."  Plato, Republic 401e.
+
+280. +Transliteration: andreia.  Pater's translation: "manliness."
+
+281. +Transliteration: êthos.  Liddell and Scott definition: "an
+accustomed place . . . custom, usage, habit."
+
+281. +Transliteration: pathos.  Liddell and Scott definition "1.
+anything that befalls one, a suffering, misfortune, calamity; 2. a
+passive condition: a passion, affection; 3. an incident."
+
+281. +Transliteration: paraleipomena.  Pater's translation:
+"oversights."
+
+281. +Transliteration: akolouthein ton logon.  Pater's translation:
+"follow the sense."  Plato, Republic 398d.
+
+283. +Transliteration: Chalepa ta kala.  E-text editor's translation:
+"fine things are hard [to obtain or understand]."  Plato, Republic
+435c.
+
+283. +Transliteration: Isôs to legomenon alêthes, hoti chalepa ta kala.
+E-text editor's translation: "Perhaps the saying is true--namely, that
+fine things are hard [to obtain or understand]."  Plato, Republic 435c.
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Plato and Platonism, by Walter Pater
+
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