No More Learning

On the surface,
and accepted literally, it seemed to deny the possibility of knowledge;
it threatened to destroy humanity and {99} civilisation. But its
strength lay latent in an implied denial only of what was merely
traditional; it denied the finality of purely Greek preconceptions; it
was laying the foundations of a broader humanity. It represented the
claim of a new generation to have no dogma or assumption thrust on it
by mere force, physical or moral. "_I_ too am a man," it said; "_I_
have rights; _my_ reason must be convinced. " This is the fundamental
thought at the root of most revolutions and reformations and revivals,
and the thought is therefore a necessary and a just one.

Unfortunately it seems to be an inevitable condition of human affairs
that nothing new, however necessary or good can come into being out of
the old, without much sorrow and many a birth-pang. The extravagant,
the impetuous, the narrow-minded on both sides seize on their points of
difference, raise them into battle-cries, and make what might be a
peaceful regeneration a horrid battlefield of contending hates. The
Christ when He comes brings not peace into the world, but a sword. And
men of evil passions and selfish ambitions are quick on both sides to
make the struggle of old and new ideals a handle for their own
indulgence or their own advancement; the Pharisees and the Judases
between them make the Advent in some of its aspects a sorry spectacle.

A reconciler was wanted who should wed what {100} was true in the new
doctrine of individualism with what was valuable in the old doctrine of
universal and necessary truth; who should be able to say, "Yes, I
acknowledge that your individual view of things must be reckoned with,
and mine, and everybody else's; and for that very reason do I argue for
a universal and necessary truth, because the very truth for you as an
individual is just this universal. " The union and identification of
the Individual and Universal,--this paradox of philosophy is the
doctrine of Socrates.




{101}

CHAPTER XI

SOCRATES

_The crisis of philosophy--Philosophic midwifery--The wisest of
men--The gadfly of Athens--Justice, beauty, utility--Virtue is
knowledge_


The sophistic teaching having forced philosophy to descend into the
practical interests and personal affairs of men, it followed that any
further step in philosophy, any reaction against the Sophists, could
only begin from the moral point of view. Philosophy, as an analysis of
the data of perception or of nature, had issued in a social and moral
chaos. Only by brooding on the moral chaos could the spirit of truth
evoke a new order; only out of the moral darkness could a new
intellectual light be made to shine. The social and personal anarchy
seemed to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the philosophy of nature; if
ever the philosophy of nature was to be recovered it must be through a
revision of the theory of morals. If it could be proved that the
doctrine of individualism, of isolation, which the analysis of a
Protagoras or a Gorgias had reached, was not only _unlivable_ but
unthinkable,--carried the seeds of its own destruction, theoretical as
well as practical, within {102} itself,--then the analysis of
_perception_, from which this moral individualism issued, might itself
be called to submit to revision, and a stable point of support in the
moral world might thus become a centre of stability for the
intellectual and the physical also.

By a perfectly logical process, therefore, the crisis of philosophy
produced in Greece through the moral and social chaos of the sophistic
teaching had two issues, or perhaps we may call it one issue, carried
out on the one side with a less, on the other side with a greater
completeness. The less complete reaction from sophistic teaching
attempted only such reconstruction of the moral point of view as should
recover a law or principle of general and universally cogent character,
whereon might be built anew a _moral_ order without attempting to
extend the inquiry as to a universal principle into the regions of
abstract truth or into physics. The more complete and logical
reaction, starting, indeed, from a universal principle in morals,
undertook a logical reconstruction on the recovered universal basis all
along the line of what was knowable.

To Socrates it was given to recover the lost point of stability in the
world of morals, and by a system of attack, invented by himself, to
deal in such a manner with the anarchists about him as to prepare the
way for his successors, when the time was ripe for a more extended
exposition of the new point of {103} view. Those who in succession to
him worked out a more limited theory of law, mainly or exclusively in
the world of morals, only were called the _Incomplete Socratics_.
Those who undertook to work it out through the whole field of the
knowable, the _Complete Socratics_, were the two giants of philosophy,
Plato and Aristotle.

Greek philosophy then marks with the life of Socrates a parting of the
ways in two senses: _first_, inasmuch as with him came the reaction
from a physical or theoretical philosophy, having its issue in a moral
chaos; and _second_, inasmuch as from him the two great streams of
later philosophy issued--the one a philosophy of law or universals in
_action_, the other a philosophy of law or universals in _thought_ and
_nature_ as well.

Socrates, son of Sophroniscus a sculptor and Phaenarete a midwife, was
born at Athens in or about the year 469 B. C. His parents were probably
poor, for Socrates is represented as having been too poor to pay the
fees required for instruction by the Sophists of his time. But in
whatever way acquired or assimilated, it is certain that there was
little of the prevalent culture in cultivated Athens with which
Socrates had not ultimately a working acquaintance.

Among a people distinguished generally for their handsome features and
noble proportions, Socrates was a notable exception. His face was
squat and {104} round, his eyes protruding, his lips thick; he was
clumsy and uncouth in appearance, careless of dress, a thorough
'Bohemian,' as we should call him. He was, however, gifted with an
uncommon bodily vigour, was indifferent to heat and cold, by
temperament moderate in food and drink, yet capable on occasion of
drinking most people 'under the table. ' He was of an imperturbable
humour, not to be excited either by danger or by ridicule. His vein of
sarcasm was keen and trenchant, his natural shrewdness astonishing, all
the more astonishing because crossed with a strange vein of mysticism
and a curious self-forgetfulness. As he grew up he felt the visitation
of a mysterious internal voice, to which or to his own internal
communings he would sometimes be observed to listen in abstracted
stillness for hours. The voice within him was felt as a restraining
force, limiting his action in various ways, but leaving him free to
wander about among his fellows, to watch their doings and interpret
their thoughts, to question unweariedly his fellows of every class,
high and low, rich and poor, concerning righteousness and justice and
goodness and purity and truth. He did not enter on his philosophic
work with some grand general principle ready-made, to which he was
prepared to fit the facts by hook or by crook. Rather he compared
himself to his mother, the midwife; he sought to help others to {105}
express themselves; he had nothing to tell them, he wanted them to tell
him. This was the irony of Socrates, the eternal _questioning_, which
in time came to mean in people's minds what the word does now. For it
was hard, and grew every year harder, to convince people that so subtle
a questioner was as ignorant as he professed to be; or that the man who
could touch so keenly the weak point of all other men's answers, had no
answer to the problems of life himself.

In striking contrast, then, to the method of all previous philosophies,
Socrates busied himself to begin with, not with some general
intellectual _principle_, but with a multitude of different _people_,
with their notions especially on moral ideas, with the meaning or
no-meaning which they attached to particular words,--in short, with the
individual, the particular, the concrete, the every-day. He did not at
all deny that he had a purpose in all this. On the contrary, he openly
professed that he was in search of the lost universal, the lost _law_
of men's thoughts and actions. He was convinced that life was not the
chaos that the Sophists made out; that nobody really believed it to be
a chaos; that, on the contrary, everybody had a meaning and purport in
his every word and act, which could be made intelligible to himself and
others, if you could only get people to think out clearly what they
really meant. Philosophy {106} had met her destruction in the busy
haunts of men; there where had been the bane, Socrates' firm faith
sought ever and everywhere the antidote.

This simple enough yet profound and far-reaching practice of Socrates
was theorised in later times as a logical method, known to us as
_Induction_, or the discovery of universal laws or principles out [195]
of an accumulation of particular facts. And thus Aristotle, with his
technical and systematising intellect, attributes two main innovations
in philosophy to Socrates; the _Inductive_ process of reasoning, and
the establishing of _General Ideas_ or Definitions upon or through this
process. This, true enough as indicating what was latent in the
Socratic method, and what was subsequently actually developed out of it
by Aristotle himself, is nevertheless probably an anachronism if one
seeks to represent it as consciously present in Socrates' mind.
Socrates adopted the method unconsciously, just because he wanted to
get at the people about him, and through them at what they thought. He
was the pioneer of Induction rather than its inventor; he created, so
to speak, the raw material for a theory of induction and definition; he
knew and cared nothing about such theories himself.

A story which may or may not be true in fact is put in Socrates' mouth
by Plato, as to the cause which first started him on his "search for
definitions. " {107} One of his friends, he tells us, named Chaerephon,
went to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and asked whether there was
anybody wiser than Socrates. The answer was given that there was none
wiser. This answer was reported to Socrates, who was much astonished,
his own impression being that he had no wisdom or knowledge at all. So
with a view to prove the oracle wrong he went in succession to various
people of eminence and reputation in the various walks of
life,--statesmen and poets and handicraftsmen and others,--in the
expectation that they would show, on being questioned, such a knowledge
of the principles on which their work was based as would prove their
superior wisdom. But to his astonishment he found one after another of
these men wanting in any apprehension of principles at all. They
seemed to work by a kind of haphazard or 'rule of thumb,' and indeed
felt annoyed that anything more should be expected of them. From which
at the last Socrates came to the conclusion that perhaps the oracle was
right in this sense at least, that, if he himself knew nothing more
than his fellows, he was at least conscious of his own ignorance,
whereas they were not.

Whether this tale may not itself be a specimen of Socrates' irony we
cannot tell, but at all events it illustrates from another point of
view the real meaning of Socrates' life. He, at least, was not content
{108} to rest in haphazard and rule of thumb; he was determined to go
on till he found out what was the law or principle of men's acts and
words. The ignorance of others as to any such law or principle in
their own case did not convince him that there was no such law or
principle; only it was there (he thought) working unconsciously, and
therefore in a way defencelessly. And so he compares himself at times
to a gadfly, whose function it is to sting and irritate people out of
their easy indifference, and force them to ask themselves what they
were really driving at. Or again, he compares himself to the
torpedo-fish, because he tried to give people a shock whenever they
attempted to satisfy him with shallow and unreal explanations of their
thoughts and actions.

The disinterested self-sacrificing nobility of Socrates' life, thus
devoted to awakening them that sleep out of their moral torpor; the
enmities that his keen and trenchant questionings of quacks and
pretenders of every kind induced; the devotion of some of his friends,
the unhappy falling away of others; the calumnies of interested
enemies, the satires of poets; and lastly, the story of the final
attack by an ungrateful people on their one great teacher, of his
unjust condemnation and heroic death--all this we must pass over here.
The story is in outline, at least, a familiar one, and it is one of the
noblest in history. What is more to {109} the purpose for us is to
ascertain how far his search for definitions was successful; how far he
was able to

Take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them;

how far, in short, he was able to evolve a law, a universal principle,
out of the confused babel of common life and thought and speech, strong
enough and wide enough on which to build a new order for this world, a
new hope for the world beyond.

We have said that Socrates made the individual and the concrete the
field of his search. And not only did he look to individuals for
light, he looked to each individual specifically in that aspect of his
character and faculty which was most particular to himself. That is to
say, if he met a carpenter, it was on his carpentering that he
questioned him; if a sculptor, on his practice as a sculptor; if a
statesman, on his statesmanship. In short, he did not want general
vague theories on subjects of which his interlocutors could not be
supposed to have any special experience or knowledge; he interrogated
each on the subject which he knew best.

And what struck him, in contrast to the confusion and uncertainty and
isolation of the sophistic teaching 'in the air,' was that when you get
a man to talk on his own trade, which he _knows_, as is proved by the
actual work he produces, you find invariably two {110} things--_first_,
that the skill is the man's _individual_ possession no doubt, the
result of inborn capacity and continuous training and practice; but
_second_, that just in proportion to that individual skill is the man's
conviction that his skill has reference to a _law_ higher than himself,
outside himself. If the man whom Socrates interviewed was a skilful
statesman, he would tell you he sought to produce obedience to _law_ or
right among the citizens; if he was a skilful sculptor, he produced
_beautiful_ things; if he was a skilful handicraftsman, he produced
_useful_ things. Justice, beauty, utility; these three words in
different ways illustrated the existence of something always realising
itself no doubt in individuals and their works, but nevertheless
exercising a governing influence upon these to such a degree that this
ideal something might be conceived as _prior_ to the individual or his
work; or secondly, as _inherent_ in them and giving value to them; or
thirdly, as coming in at the end as the _perfection_ or completion of
them. This law or ideal then had a threefold aspect in its own nature,
being conceivable as Justice, as Beauty, as Utility; it had a threefold
aspect in relation to the works produced in accordance with it, as the
cause _producing_, the cause _inhering_, the cause completing or
_perfecting_.

We may therefore conceive Socrates as arguing thus: "You clever
Sophists, when we let you take {111} us into the region of abstract
talk, have a knack of so playing with words that in the end we don't
seem to know anything for certain, especially on such subjects as we
have hitherto thought the most important, such as God and right and
truth and justice and purity. We seem to be perfectly defenceless
against you; and what is more, any smart youth, whose opinion on any
practical matter no one would think of taking, can very soon pick up
the trick from you, and bewilder plain people really far wiser than
himself by his clever argumentation; all going to prove that there is
nothing certain, nothing real, nothing binding; nothing but opinions
and conventions and conscious or unconscious humbug in the universe.

"But when I go and have a quiet talk with any man who really is a known
master of some craft or skill, about that craft or skill, I find no
doubt whatever existing in his mind about there being a law, a
something absolutely real and beautiful and true in connection with it.
He, on the contrary, lives with no other purpose or hope or desire but
as far as he can to realise in what he works at something of this real
and beautiful and true, which was before him, will be after him, is the
only valuable thing in him, but yet which honours him with the function
of, in his day and generation, expressing it before the eyes of men. "

{112} "Have we not here a key to the great secret? If each man, in
respect of that which he knows best because he lives by it and for it,
knows with intimate knowledge and certainty that there at least there
is a Law working, not himself, but higher and greater than he,--have we
not here a hint of the truth for the universe as a whole; that there
also and in all its operations, great as well as small, there must be a
Law, a great Idea or Ideal working, which was before all things, works
in and gives value to all things, will be the consummation of all
things? Is not this what we mean by the Divine? "

Thus Socrates, despising not the meaner things of life, but bending
from the airy speculations of the proud to the realities which true
labour showed him, laid his ear, so to speak, close to the breast of
nature, and caught there the sound of her very heart-beats.

"Virtue is knowledge," thus he formulated his new vision of things.
Knowledge, yes; but _real_ knowledge; not mere head-knowledge or
lip-knowledge, but the knowledge of the skilled man, the man who by
obedience and teachableness and self-restraint has come to a knowledge
evidencing itself in _works_ expressive of the law that is in him, as
he is in it. _Virtue is knowledge_; on the one hand, therefore, not
something in the air, unreal, intangible; but something in me, in you,
in each man, something which you cannot handle except as individual and
{113} in individuals; on the other hand, something more than individual
or capricious or uncertain,--something which is absolute, over-ruling,
eternal.

_Virtue is knowledge_. And so if a man is virtuous, he is realising
what is best and truest in himself, he is fulfilling also what is best
and truest without himself. He is free, for only the truth makes free;
he is obedient to law, but it is at once a law eternally valid, and a
law which he dictates to himself. And therefore virtue is teachable,
inasmuch as the law in the teacher, perfected in him, is also the law
in the taught, latent in him, by both individually possessed, but
possessed by both in virtue of its being greater than both, of its
being something more than individual.

_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore the law of virtuous growth is
expressed in the maxim engraved on the Delphic temple, 'Know thyself. '
Know thyself, that is, realise thyself; by obedience and self-control
come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility;
satisfy yourself, in the only way in which true self-satisfaction is
possible, by realising in yourself the law which constitutes your real
being.

_Virtue is knowledge_. And therefore all the manifold relations of
life,--the home, the market, the city, the state; all the multiform
activities of life,--labour and speech and art and literature and {114}
law; all the sentiments of life,--friendship and love and reverence and
courage and hope,--all these are parts of a knowable whole; they are
expressions of law; they are Reason realising itself through
individuals, and in the same process realising them.




{115}

CHAPTER XII

SOCRATES (_concluded_)

_The dialectic method--Instruction through humiliation--Justice and
utility--Righteousness transcending rule_


It must not be imagined that anywhere in the recorded conversations of
Socrates can we find thus in so many words expounded his fundamental
doctrine. Socrates was not an expositor but a questioner; he
disclaimed the position of a teacher, he refused to admit that any were
his pupils or disciples. But his questioning had two sides, each in
its way leading people on to an apprehension of the ideal in existence.
The first side may be called the negative or destructive, the second,
the positive or constructive. In the first, whose object was to break
down all formalism, all mere regard for rules or traditions or
unreasoned maxims, his method had considerable resemblance to that of
the Sophists; like them he descended not infrequently to what looked
very like quibbling and word-play. As Aristotle observes, the
dialectic method differed from that of the Sophists not so much in its
form, as in the purpose for which it was employed. The end of the
{116} Sophists was to confuse, the end of Socrates was through
confusion to reach a more real, because a more reasoned certainty; the
Sophists sought to leave the impression that there was no such thing as
truth; he wished to lead people to the conviction that there was a far
deeper truth than they were as yet possessed of.

A specimen of his manner of conversation preserved for us by Xenophon
(_Memor_. IV. ii. ) will make the difference clearer. Euthydemus was a
young man who had shown great industry in forming a collection of wise
sayings from poets and others, and who prided himself on his superior
wisdom because of his knowledge of these. Socrates skilfully manages
to get the ear of this young man by commending him for his collection,
and asks him what he expects his learning to help him to become? A
physician? No, Euthydemus answers. An architect? No. And so in like
manner with other practical skills,--the geometrician's, astronomer's,
professional reciter's. None of these he discovers is what Euthydemus
aims at. He hopes to become a great politician and statesman. Then of
course he hopes to be a just man himself? Euthydemus flatters himself
he is that already. "But," says Socrates, "there must be certain acts
which are the proper products of justice, as of other functions or
skills? "--"No doubt. "--"Then of course you can tell us what {117} those
acts or products are? "--"Of course I can, and the products of injustice
as well. "--"Very good; then suppose we write down in two opposite
columns what acts are products of justice and what of injustice. "--"I
agree," says Euthydemus. --"Well now, what of falsehood? In which
column shall we put it? "--"Why, of course in the unjust column. "--"And
cheating? "--"In the same column. "--"And stealing? "--"In it too. "--"And
enslaving? "--"Yes. "--"Not one of these can go to the just
column? "--"Why, that would be an unheard-of thing. "

"Well but," says Socrates, "suppose a general has to deal with some
enemy of his country that has done it great wrong; if he conquer and
enslave this enemy, is that wrong? "--"Certainly not. "--"If he carries
off the enemy's goods or cheats him in his strategy, what about these
acts? "--"Oh, of course they are quite right. But I thought you were
talking about deceiving or ill-treating friends. "--"Then in some cases
we shall have to put these very same acts in both columns? "--"I suppose
so. "

"Well, now, suppose we confine ourselves to friends. Imagine a general
with an army under him discouraged and disorganised. Suppose he tells
them that reserves are coming up, and by cheating them into this belief
he saves them from their discouragement, and enables them to win a
victory. What about this cheating of one's friends? "--"Why, I {118}
suppose we shall have to put this too on the just side. "--"Or suppose a
lad needs medicine, but refuses to take it, and his father cheats him
into the belief that it is something nice, and getting him to take it,
saves his life; what about that cheat? "--"That will have to go to the
just side too. "--"Or suppose you find a friend in a desperate frenzy,
and steal his sword from him, for fear he should kill himself; what do
you say to that theft? "--"That will have to go there too. "--"But I
thought you said there must be no cheating of friends? "--"Well, I must
take it all back, if you please. "--"Very good. But now there is
another point I should like to ask you. Whether do you think the man
more unjust who is a voluntary violator of justice, or he who is an
involuntary violator of it? "--"Upon my word, Socrates, I no longer have
any confidence in my answers. For the whole thing has turned out to be
exactly the contrary of what I previously imagined. However, suppose I
say that the voluntary deceiver is the more unjust. "--"Do you consider
that justice is a matter of knowledge just as much (say) as
writing? "--"Yes, I do. "--"Well now, which do you consider the better
skilled as a writer, the man who makes a mistake in writing or in
reading what is written, because he chooses to do so, or the man who
does so because he can't help it? "--"Oh, the first; because he can put
it right whenever he likes. "--"Very {119} well, if a man in the same
way breaks the rule of right, knowing what he is doing, while another
breaks the same rule because he can't help it, which by analogy must be
the better versed in justice? "--"The first, I suppose. "--"And the man
who is better versed in justice must be the juster man? "--"Apparently
so; but really, Socrates, I don't know where I am. I have been
flattering myself that I was in possession of a philosophy which could
make a good and able man of me. But how great, think you, must now be
my disappointment, when I find myself unable to answer the simplest
question on the subject? "

Many other questions are put to him, tending to probe his
self-knowledge, and in the end he is brought to the conclusion that
perhaps he had better hold his tongue, for it seems he knows nothing at
all. And so he went away deeply despondent, despising himself as an
absolute dolt. "Now many," adds Xenophon, "when brought into this
condition by Socrates, never came near him again. But Euthydemus
concluded that his only hope of ever being worth anything was in seeing
as much of Socrates as he could, and so he never quitted his side as
long as he had a chance, but tried to follow his mode of living. And
Socrates, when he perceived this to be his temper, no longer tormented
him, but sought with all simplicity and clearness to {120} show him
what he deemed it best for him to do and think. "

Was this cross-examination mere 'tormenting' with a purpose, or can we
discover underlying it any hint of what Socrates deemed to be the truth
about justice?

Let us note that throughout he is in search of a _definition_, but that
as soon as any attempt is made to define or classify any particular
type of action as just or unjust, _special circumstances_ are suggested
which overturn the classification. Let us note further that while the
immediate result is apparently only to confuse, the remoter but more
permanent result is to raise a suspicion of any hard and fast
definitions, and to suggest that there is something deeper in life than
language is adequate to express, a 'law in the members,' a living
principle for good, which transcends forms and maxims, and which alone
gives real value to acts. Note further the suggestion that this living
principle has a character analogous to the knowledge or skill of an
accomplished artificer; it has relation on the one hand to law, as a
principle binding on the individual, it has relation on the other hand
to _utility_, as expressing itself, not in words, but in acts
beneficial to those concerned. Hence the Socratic formula, Justice is
equivalent to the _Lawful_ on the one hand, to the _Useful_ on the
other.

{121}

Socrates had thus solved by anticipation the apparently never-ending
controversy about morality. Is it a matter imposed by God upon the
heart and conscience of each individual? Is it dictated by the general
sense of the community? Is it the product of Utility? The Socratic
answer would be that it is all three, and that all three mean
ultimately the same thing. What God prescribes is what man when he is
truly man desires; and what God prescribes and man desires is that
which is good and useful for man. It is not a matter for verbal
definition but for vital realisation; the true morality is that which
_works_; the ideally desirable, is ultimately the only possible, course
of action, for all violations of it are ultimately suicidal.

Note finally the suggestion that the man who _knows_ (in Socrates'
sense of knowledge) what is right, shows only more fully his
righteousness when he voluntarily sins; it is the 'unwilling sinner'
who is the wrongdoer. When we consider this strange doctrine in
relation to the instances given,--the general with his army, the father
with his son, the prudent friend with his friend in desperate
straits,--we see that what is meant is that 'sin' in the real sense is
not to be measured or defined by conformity or otherwise to some formal
standard, at least in the case of those who _know_, that is, in the
case of men who have realised goodness in its true nature in {122}
their characters and lives. As St. Paul expressed it (Rom. xiii. 10),
"Love is the fulfilling of the law. " Or again (Gal. v. 23), after
enumerating the 'fruits of the spirit'--love, joy, peace,
longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance--he
adds, "Against such there is no law. "

In the domain of life, not less than in that of the arts, the highest
activity does not always or necessarily take the form of conformity to
rule. There are critical moments when rules fail, when, in fact,
obedience to rule would mean disobedience to that higher law, of which
rules and formulae are at best only an adumbration. The originality of
the great musician or painter consists in just such transcendence of
accepted formulae; this is why he invariably encounters opposition and
obloquy from the learned conventional pedants of his time. And in the
domain of morals the martyrs, reformers, prophets are in like manner
'willing sinners. ' They are denounced, persecuted, crucified; for are
they not disturbers of society; do they not unsettle young men; do they
not come, as Christ came, not to bring peace into the world, but a
sword? And thus it is that the willing sinners of one generation are
the martyrs and heroes of the next. Through their life and death a
richer meaning has been given to the law of beauty or of rectitude,
only, alas! in its turn to be translated into new conventions, new
{123} formulae, which shall in due time require new martyrs to
transcend them. And thus, on the other hand, the perfectly honest
sticklers for the old and common-place, unwilling sinners all
unconscious of their sin, are fated to bear in history the brand of men
who have persecuted the righteous without cause.
To each, according to
the strange sad law of life, time brings its revenges.




{124}

CHAPTER XIII

THE INCOMPLETE SOCRATICS

_A philosopher at ease--The sensual sty--Citizens of the world--The tub
of Diogenes--A philosophy of abstracts_


[204]

I. ARISTIPPUS AND THE CYRENAICS. --Aristippus was a native of Cyrene, a
Greek colony on the north coast of Africa. He is said to have come to
Athens because of his desire to hear Socrates; but from the notices of
him which we find in Xenophon's memoirs he appears to have been from
the first a somewhat intractable follower, dissenting especially from
the poverty and self-denial of the master's mode of life. [205] He in
course of time founded a school of his own, called the Cyrenaic from
his own place of birth, and from the fact that many subsequent leaders
of the school also belonged to Cyrene. Among his notable disciples
were his daughter Arete, her son named Aristippus after his
grandfather, Ptolemaeus the Aethiopian, Antipater of Cyrene, and a long
succession of others.

Aristippus was a man of considerable subtlety of mind, a ready speaker,
clever in adapting himself to persons and circumstances. On one
occasion, being {125} asked what benefit he considered philosophy had
conferred upon him, he answered, "The capacity of associating with
every one without embarrassment. " Philosophy, in fact, was to
Aristippus a method of social culture, a means of making the best of
life as he found it. As Horace observes of him (_Epp_. i. 17. 23)--

Omnis Aristippum decuit color et status et res
Tentantem majora, fere praesentibus aequum.

"Every aspect and manner of life and fortune fitted Aristippus; he
aimed at what was greater, yet kept an even, mind whatever his present
condition. "

[206]

As we have already said, this school was _incompletely_ Socratic,
inasmuch as philosophy was not an end in itself, knowledge whether of
oneself or of other matters had no intrinsic interest for them;
philosophy was only a means towards pleasurable living, enabling them
so to analyse and classify the several experiences of life as to render
a theory of satisfactory [207] existence possible. With them first
came into prominence a phrase which held a large place in all
subsequent Greek philosophy, the _End_ of existence, by which was meant
that which summed up the good in existence, that which made life worth
living, that which was good and desirable in and for itself, and not
merely as a means to something else. What then according to the
Cyrenaics was the End of life? {126} Their answer was that life had at
each moment its own End, in the pleasure of that moment. The past was
gone, the future not yet with us; remembrance of the one, fear or hope
of the other, might contribute to affect the purity of the present
pleasure, but such as it was the present pleasure was a thing apart,
complete in and for itself. Nor was its perfection qualified by any
question of the means by which it was procured; the moment's pleasure
was pleasurable, whatever men might say as to the manner of its [208]
procuring. This pleasure was a tranquil activity of the being, like
the gently heaving sea, midway between violent motion which was pain,
and absolute calm which was insensibility. As a state of activity it
was something positive, not a mere release from [209] pain, not a
simple filling up of a vacuum. Nothing was in its essential nature
either just or noble or base; custom and convention pronounced them one
or other. The wise man made the best he could of his conditions;
valuing mental activity and friendship and wealth and bodily exercise,
and avoiding envy and excessive indulgence of passion and superstition,
not because the first were in themselves good or the second evil, but
because they were respectively helpers or hinderers of pleasure. He is
the master and possessor of pleasure not who abstains from it, but who
uses it and keeps his self-command in the using. Moderate
indulgence--this is wisdom.

{127}

[210]

The one criterion, whether of good or of truth, is the feeling of the
moment for the man who feels it; all question of causes of feelings is
delusive. We can say with truth and certainty, I have the sensation of
white or the sensation of sweet. But that there is a white or a sweet
thing which is the cause of the sensation, that we cannot say for
certain. A man may very well have the sensation white or sweet from
something which has no such quality, as men in delusion or madness have
impressions that are true and real inasmuch as they have them, although
other people do not admit their reality. There is, therefore, no
criterion of truth as between man and man; we may employ the same
words, but each has his own impressions and his own individual
experiences.

One can easily understand this as the doctrine of such a man as
Aristippus, the easy-going man of the world, the courtier and the wit,
the favourite of the tyrant Dionysius; it fits in well enough with a
life of genial self-indulgence; it always reappears whenever a man has
reconciled himself 'to roll with pleasure in a sensual sty. ' But life
is not always, nor for most persons at any time, a thing of ease and
soft enchantments, and the Cyrenaic philosophy must remain for the
general work-a-day world a stale exotic. 'Every man for himself and
the devil take the hindmost,' is a maxim which comes as a rule {128}
only to the lips of the worldly successful, while they think themselves
strong enough to stand alone. But this solitude of selfishness neither
works nor lasts; every man at some time becomes 'the hindmost,' if not
before, at least in the hour of death for him or his; at that hour he
is hardly disposed, for himself or those he loves, to repeat his maxim.

II. ANTISTHENES AND THE CYNICS. --Aristippus, in his praises of pleasure
as the one good for man (see above, p. 126), remarks that there were
some who [209] refused pleasure "from perversity of mind," taking
pleasure, so to speak, in the denial of pleasure. The school of the
Cynics made this perverse mood, as Aristippus deemed it, the maxim of
their philosophy. As the Cyrenaic school was the school of the rich,
the courtly, the self-indulgent, so the Cynic was the school of the
poor, the exiles, the ascetics. Each was an extreme expression of a
phase of Greek life and thought, though there was this point of union
[215] between them, that _liberty_ of a kind was sought by both. The
Cyrenaics claimed liberty to please themselves in the choice of their
enjoyments; the Cynics sought liberty through denial of enjoyments.
[219] Both, moreover, were cosmopolitan; they mark the decay of the
Greek patriotism, which was essentially civic, and the rise of the
wider but less intense conception of humanity. Aristippus, in a
conversation with Socrates (Xenoph. _Memor_. II. i. ) on the {129}
qualifications of those who are fitted to be magistrates, disclaims all
desire to hold such a position himself. "There is," he says, "to my
thinking, a middle way, neither of rule nor of slavery, but of freedom,
which leads most surely to true happiness. So to avoid all the evils
of partisanship and faction I nowhere take upon me the position of a
citizen, but in every city remain a sojourner and a stranger. " And in
like manner Antisthenes the Cynic, being asked how a man should
approach politics, answered, "He will approach it as he will fire, not
too near, lest he be burnt; not too far away, lest he starve of cold. "
And Diogenes, being asked of what city he was, answered, "I am a
citizen of the world. " The Cynic ideal, in fact, was summed up in
these four words--wisdom, independence, free speech, liberty.

[214]

Antisthenes, founder of the school, was a native of Athens, but being
of mixed blood (his mother was a Thracian) he was not recognised as an
Athenian citizen. He was a student first under Gorgias, and acquired
from him a considerable elegance of literary style; subsequently he
became a devoted hearer of Socrates, and became prominent among his
followers for an asceticism surpassing his master's. One day, we are
told, he showed a great rent in the thread-bare cloak which was his
only garment, whereupon Socrates slily remarked, "I can see through
your cloak your love of glory. " He carried a leathern {130} scrip and
a staff, and the 'scrip and staff' became distinctive marks of his
school. The name Cynic, derived from the Greek word for a dog, is
variously accounted for, some attributing it to the 'doglike' habits of
the school, others to their love of 'barking' criticism, others to the
fact that a certain gymnasium in the outskirts of Athens, called
Cynosarges, sacred to Hercules the patron-divinity of men in the
political position of Antisthenes, was a favourite resort of his. He
was a voluminous, some thought a too voluminous, [216] expounder of his
tenets. Like the other Incomplete Socratics, his teaching was mainly
on ethical questions.

[215]

His chief pupil and successor was the famous Diogenes, a native of
Sinope, a Greek colony on the Euxine Sea. He even bettered the
instructions of his master in the matter of extreme frugality of
living, claiming that he was a true follower of Hercules in preferring
independence to every other good. The tale of his living in a cask or
tub is well known. His theory was that the peculiar privilege of the
gods consisted in their need of nothing; men approached nearest the
life of the gods in needing as little as possible.

[217]

Many other sayings of one or other teacher are quoted, all tending to
the same conclusion. For example, "I had rather be mad than enjoying
myself! " "Follow the pleasures that come after pains, not those which
bring pains in their train. " "There {131} are pains that are useless,
there are pains that are natural: the wise choose the latter, and thus
find happiness even through pain. For the very contempt of pleasure
comes with practice to be the highest pleasure. " "When I wish a
treat," says Antisthenes, "I do not go and buy it at great cost in the
marketplace; I find my storehouse of pleasures in the soul. "

[218]

The life of the wise man, therefore, was a training of mind and body to
despise pleasure and attain independence. In this way virtue was
teachable, and could be so acquired as to become an inseparable
possession. The man who had thus attained to wisdom, not of words, but
of deeds, was, as it were, in an impregnable fortress that could
neither crumble into ruin nor be lost by treachery. And so
Antisthenes, being asked what was the most essential point of learning,
answered, "To unlearn what is evil. " That is to say, to the Cynic
conception, men were born with a root of evil in them in the love of
pleasure; the path of wisdom was a weaning of soul and body by practice
from the allurements of pleasure, until both were so perfectly
accustomed to its denial as to find an unalloyed pleasure in the very
act of [219] refusing it. In this way virtue became absolutely
sufficient for happiness, and so far was it from being necessary to
have wealth or the admiration of men in addition, that the true kingly
life was "to do well, {132} and be ill spoken of. " All else but virtue
was a matter of indifference.

The cosmopolitan temper of these men led them to hold of small account
the forms and prejudices of ordinary society: they despised the rites
of marriage; they thought no flesh unclean. They believed in no
multifarious theology; there was but one divinity--the power that ruled
all nature, the one absolutely self-centred independent being, whose
manner of [221] existence they sought to imitate. Nor had they any
sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some
of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time.
Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man
was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not
establish the existence of some abstract class of goods. As
Antisthenes once said to Plato, "A horse I see, but 'horseness' I do
not see. " What the exact point of this criticism was we may reserve
for the present.

[222]

III. EUCLIDES THE MEGARIC. --Euclides, a native of Megara on the
Corinthian isthmus, was a devoted hearer of Socrates, making his way to
hear him, sometimes even at the 'risk of his life, in defiance of a
decree of his native city forbidding intercourse with Athens. When
Plato and other Athenian followers of Socrates thought well to quit
Athens for {133} a time after Socrates' execution, they were kindly
entertained by Euclides at Megara.

The exact character of the development which the Socratic teaching
received from Euclides and his school is a matter of considerable
doubt. The allusions to the tenets of the school in Plato and [223]
others are only fragmentary. We gather, however, from them that
Euclides was wholly antithetical to the personal turn given to
philosophy, both by the Cyrenaics and the Cynics. He revived and
developed with much dialectical subtlety the metaphysical system of
Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute
existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this [224]
are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good,
and the good for man could only be found in such an absorption of
himself in this one absolute good through reason and contemplation, as
would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with it. Such
absorption raised a man above the troubles and pains of life, and thus,
in insensibility to these through reason, man attained his highest good.

The school is perhaps interesting only in so far as it marks the
continued survival of the abstract dialectic method of earlier
philosophy. As such it had a very definite influence, sometimes
through agreement, sometimes by controversy, on the systems of Plato
and Aristotle now to be dealt with.




{134}

CHAPTER XIV

PLATO

_Student and wanderer--The Dialogues--Immortal longings--Art is
love--Knowledge through remembrance--Platonic love_


[239]

This great master, the Shakespeare of Greek philosophy, as one may call
him, for his fertility, his variety, his humour, his imagination, his
poetic grace, was born at Athens in the year 429 B. C. He was of noble
family, numbering among his ancestors no less a man than the great
lawgiver Solon, and tracing back his descent even further to the [240]
legendary Codrus, last king of Athens. At a very early age he seems to
have begun to study the philosophers, Heraclitus more particularly, and
before he was twenty he had written a tragedy. About that time,
however, he met Socrates; and at once giving up all thought of poetic
fame he burnt his poem, and devoted himself to the hearing of Socrates.
For ten years he was his constant companion. When Socrates met his
death in 399, Plato and other followers of the master fled at first to
Megara, as already mentioned (above, p. 132); he then entered on a
period of extended travel, first to Cyrene and {135} Egypt, thence to
Italy and Sicily. In Italy he devoted himself specially to a study of
the doctrine of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he offended
the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his freedom of speech, and was
delivered up to the Spartans, who were then at war with Athens. [241]
Ultimately he was ransomed, and found his way back to Athens, but he is
said to have paid a second visit to Sicily when the younger Dionysius
became tyrant. He seems to have entertained the hope that he might so
influence this young man as to be able to realise through him the dream
of his life, a government in accordance with the dictates of [242]
philosophy. His dream, however, was disappointed of fruition, and he
returned to Athens, there in the 'groves of Academus' a mythic hero of
Athens, to spend the rest of his days in converse with his followers,
and there at the ripe age of eighty-one he died. From the scene of his
labours his philosophy has ever since been known as the Academic [243]
philosophy. Unlike Socrates, he was not content to leave only a memory
of himself and his conversations. He was unwearied in the redaction
and correction of his written dialogues, altering them here and there
both in expression and in structure. It is impossible, therefore, to
be absolutely certain as to the historical order of composition or
publication among his numerous {136} dialogues, but a certain
approximate order may be fixed.

We may take first a certain number of comparatively short dialogues,
which are strongly Socratic in the following respects: _first_, they
each seek a definition of some particular virtue or quality; _second_,
each suggests some relation between it and knowledge; _third_, each
leaves the answer somewhat open, treating the matter suggestively
rather than dogmatically. These dialogues are _Charmides_, which
treats of Temperance (_mens sana in corpore sano_); _Lysis_, which
treats of Friendship; _Laches_, Of Courage; _Ion_, Of Poetic
Inspiration; _Meno_, Of the teachableness of Virtue; _Euthyphro_, Of
Piety.

The last of these may be regarded as marking a transition to a second
series, which are concerned with the trial and death of Socrates. The
_Euthyphro_ opens with an allusion by Socrates to his approaching
trial, and in the _Apology_ we have a Platonic version of Socrates'
speech in his own defence; in _Crito_ we have the story of his noble
self-abnegation and civic obedience after his condemnation; in _Phaedo_
we have his last conversation with his friends on the subject of
Immortality, and the story of his death.

Another series of the dialogues may be formed of those, more or less
satirical, in which the ideas and methods of the Sophists are
criticised: _Protagoras_, {137} in which Socrates suggests that all
virtues are essentially one; _Euthydemus_, in which the assumption and
'airs' of some of the Sophists are made fun of; _Cratylus_, Of the
sophistic use of words; _Gorgias_, Of the True and the False, the truly
Good and the truly Evil; _Hippias_, Of Voluntary and Involuntary Sin;
_Alcibiades_, Of Self-Knowledge; _Menexenus_, a (possibly ironical) set
oration after the manner of the Sophists, in praise of Athens.

The whole of this third series are characterised by humour, dramatic
interest, variety of personal type among the speakers, keenness rather
than depth of philosophic insight. There are many suggestions of
profounder thoughts, afterwards worked out more fully; but on the whole
these dialogues rather stimulate thought than satisfy it; the great
poet-thinker is still playing with his tools.

A higher stage is reached in the _Symposium_, which deals at once
humorously and profoundly with the subject of Love, human and divine,
and its relations to Art and Philosophy, the whole consummated in a
speech related by Socrates as having been spoken to him by Diotima, a
wise woman of Mantineia. From this speech an extract as translated by
Professor Jowett may be quoted here. It marks the transition point
from the merely playful and critical to the relatively serious and
dogmatic stage in the mind of Plato:--

{138} "Marvel not," she said, "if you believe that love is of the
immortal, as we have already several times acknowledged; for here
again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as
far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to
be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a
new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the
same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is
called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between
youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and
identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and
reparation--hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always
changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul,
whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears,
never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and
going; and equally true of knowledge, which is still more
surprising--for not only do the sciences in general come and go, so
that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them
individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the
word 'recollection,' but the departure of knowledge, which is ever
being forgotten and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and
appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law
of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely
the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving
another new and similar existence behind--unlike the divine, which is
always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal
body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in
another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their
offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of
immortality. "

I was astonished at her words, and said: "Is this really true, O thou
wise Diotima? " And she answered with all the authority of a sophist:
"Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;--think only of the ambition of
men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you
consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame.
They are ready to run risks greater far than they would have run for
their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of {139} toil,
and even to die for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall
be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save
Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order
to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the
memory of their virtues, which is still retained among us, would be
immortal? Nay," she said, "I am persuaded that all men do all things,
and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious
fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.

"They whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to women and
beget children--this is the character of their love; their offspring,
as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the blessedness
and immortality which they desire in the future. But creative
souls--for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls
than in their bodies--conceive that which is proper for the soul to
conceive or retain. And what are these conceptions? --wisdom and virtue
in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are
deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of
wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states
and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who
in youth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself
inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He
wanders about seeking beauty that he may beget offspring--for in
deformity he will beget nothing--and naturally embraces the beautiful
rather than the deformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble
and well-nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such
an one he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of
a good man; and he tries to educate him; and at the touch of the
beautiful which is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he
brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in company
with him tends that which he brings forth; and they are married by a
far nearer tie and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal
children, for the children who are their common offspring are fairer
and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other
great poets, {140} would not rather have their children than ordinary
human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children
such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them
everlasting glory? Or who would not have such children as Lycurgus
left behind him to be the saviours, not only of Lacedaemon, but of
Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is the revered father
of Athenian laws; and many others there are in many other places, both
among Hellenes and barbarians. All of them have given to the world
many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every kind,
and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake of their
children; which were never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of
his mortal children.

"These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates,
may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of
these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will
lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my
utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would
proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful
forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one
such form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he
will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the
beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his
pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognise that the beauty in
every form is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will
abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a
small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the
next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more
honourable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous
soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend
him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may
improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the
beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of
them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and
after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may
see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of
one youth or man or {141} institution, himself a slave mean and
narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of
beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in
boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes
strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science,
which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed;
please to give me your very best attention.

"He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has
learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes
toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and
this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature
which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or
waxing and waning, in the next place not fair in one point of view and
foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place
fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul,
as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or
hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech
or knowledge, or existing in any other being; as for example, in an
animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place, but beauty
only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without
diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the
ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who under
the influence of true love rising upward from these begins to see that
beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going or being
led by another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth
as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other
beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from
fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions,
until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty,
and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear
Socrates," said the stranger of Mantineia, "is that life above all
others which a man should live, in the contemplation of beauty
absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be
after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths,
whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be
content to live seeing only and conversing with them without meat or
drink, {142} if that were possible--you only want to be with them and
to look at them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the
divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with
the pollutions of mortality, and all the colours and vanities of human
life--thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty divine
and simple? Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding
beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not
images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of
a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the
friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an
ignoble life? " (Jowett, _Plato_, vol. ii. p. 58).


Closely connected in subject with the _Symposium_ is the _Phaedrus_.
As Professor Jowett observes: "The two dialogues together contain the
whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love, which in _The
Republic_ and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced
playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the _Phaedrus_ and
_Symposium_ love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the
other. The spiritual and emotional is elevated into the ideal, to
which in the _Symposium_ mankind are described as looking forward, and
which in the _Phaedrus_, as well as in the _Phaedo_, they are seeking
to recover from a former state of existence. "

We are here introduced to one of the most famous conceptions of Plato,
that of _Reminiscence_, or Recollection, based upon a theory of the
prior existence of the soul. In the _Meno_, already alluded to,
Socrates is representing as eliciting from one of Meno's slaves {143}
correct answers to questions involving a knowledge or apprehension of
certain axioms of the science of mathematics, which, as Socrates
learns, the slave had never been taught. Socrates argues that since he
was never taught these axioms, and yet actually knows them, he must
have known them before his birth, and concludes from this to the
immortality of the soul. In the _Phaedo_ this same argument is worked
out more fully. As we grow up we discover in the exercise of our
senses that things are equal in certain respects, unequal in many
others; or again, we appropriate to things or acts the qualities, for
example, of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness. At the same time we
recognise that these are _ideals_, to which in actual experience we
never find more than an approximation, for we never discover in any
really existing thing or act _absolute_ equality, or justice, or
goodness. In other words, any act of judgment on our part of actual
experiences consists in a measuring of these experiences by standards
which we give or apply to them, and which no number of experiences can
give to us because they do not possess or exemplify them. We did not
consciously possess these notions, or ideals, or _ideas_, as he prefers
to call them, at birth; they come into consciousness in connection with
or in consequence of the action of the senses; but since the senses
could not give these ideas, the process of {144} knowledge must be a
process of _Recollection_. Socrates carries the argument a step
further. "Then may we not say," he continues, "that if, as we are
always repeating, there is an absolute beauty and goodness and other
similar ideas or essences, and to this standard, which is now
discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our
sensations, and with this compare them--assuming these ideas to have a
prior existence, then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if
not, not? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed
before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and
if not the ideas, then not the souls. "

In the _Phaedrus_ this conception of a former existence is embodied in
one of the _Myths_ in which Plato's imaginative powers are seen at
their highest. In it the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two
winged steeds, one mortal, the other immortal; the one ever tending
towards the earth, the other seeking ever to soar into the sky, where
it may behold those blessed visions of loveliness and wisdom and
goodness, which are the true nurture of the soul. When the chariots of
the gods go forth in mighty and glorious procession, the soul would
fain ride forth in their train; but alas! the mortal steed is ever
hampering the immortal, and dragging it down.

If the soul yields to this influence and descends to earth, there she
takes human form, but in higher {145} or lower degree, according to the
measure of her vision of the truth. She may become a philosopher, a
king, a trader, an athlete, a prophet, a poet, a husbandman, a sophist,
a tyrant. But whatever her lot, according to her manner of life in it,
may she rise, or sink still further, even to a beast or plant.

Only those souls take the form of humanity that have had _some_ vision
of eternal truth. And this vision they retain in a measure, even when
clogged in mortal clay. And so the soul of man is ever striving and
fluttering after something beyond; and specially is she stirred to
aspiration by the sight of bodily loveliness. Then above all comes the
test of good and evil in the soul. The nature that has been corrupted
would fain rush to brutal joys; but the purer nature looks with
reverence and wonder at this beauty, for it is an adumbration of the
celestial joys which he still remembers vaguely from the heavenly
vision. And thus pure and holy love becomes an opening back to heaven;
it is a source of happiness unalloyed on earth; it guides the lovers on
upward wings back to the heaven whence they came.




{146}

CHAPTER XV

PLATO (_continued_)

_The Republic--Denizens of the cave--The Timaeus--A dream of creation_


And now we pass to the central and crowning work of Plato, _The
Republic_, or _Of Justice_--the longest with one exception, and
certainly the greatest of all his works. It combines the humour and
irony, the vivid characterisation and lively dialogue of his earlier
works, with the larger and more serious view, the more constructive and
statesmanlike aims of his later life. The dialogue opens very
beautifully. There has been a festal procession at the Piraeus, the
harbour of Athens, and Socrates with a companion is wending his way
homeward, when he is recalled by other companions, who induce him to
visit the house of an aged friend of his, Cephalus, whom he does not
visit too often. Him he finds seated in his court, crowned, as the
custom was, for the celebration of a family sacrifice, and beholds
beaming on his face the peace of a life well spent and reconciled.
They talk of the happiness that comes in old age to those who have done
good and not evil, and who are not too severely {147} tried in the
matter of worldly cares. Life to this good old man seems a very simple
matter; duty to God, duty to one's neighbours, each according to what
is prescribed and orderly; this is all, and this is sufficient.

Then comes in the questioning Socrates, with his doubts and
difficulties as to what is one's duty in special circumstances; and the
discussion is taken up, not by the good old man, "who goes away to the
sacrifice," but by his son, who can quote the authorities; and by
Thrasymachus, the Sophist, who will have nothing to do with authority,
but maintains that _interest_ is the only real meaning of justice, and
that Might is Right.