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[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this "Small Print!" statement. If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at: hart@pobox.com *END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END* This etext was produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D. PLATO AND PLATONISM (1910) WALTER HORATIO PATERCONTENTS1. 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 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. NOTES6. +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 Natur 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! |
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