Chapter XVII

PLATO (concluded)

Search for universals--The thoughts of God--God cause and consummation--Dying to earth--The Platonic education

If we attempt now, by way of appendix to this very inadequate summary of the dialogues, to give in brief review some account of the main doctrines of Plato, as they may be gathered from a general view of them, we are at once met by difficulties many and serious. In the case of a genius such as Plato's, at once ironical, dramatic, and allegorical, we cannot be absolutely certain that in any given passage Plato is expressing, at all events adequately and completely, his own personal views, even at the particular stage of his own mental development then represented. And when we add to this that in a long life of unceasing intellectual development, Plato inevitably grew out of much that once satisfied him, and attained not infrequently to new points of view even of doctrines or conceptions which remained essentially unchanged, a Platonic dogma in the strict sense must clearly not be expected. One may, however, attempt in rough outline to summarise the main {163} tendencies of his thought, without professing to represent its settled and authenticated results.

We may begin by an important summary of Plato's philosophy given by Aristotle (Met. A. 6): "In immediate succession to the Pythagorean and Eleatic philosophies came the work of Plato. In many respects his views coincided with these; in some respects, however, he is independent of the Italians. For in early youth he became a student of Cratylus and of the school of Heraclitus, and accepted from them the view that the objects of sense are in eternal flux, and that of these, therefore, there can be no absolute knowledge. Then came Socrates, who busied himself only with questions of morals, and not at all with the world of physics. But in his ethical inquiries his search was ever for universals, and he was the first to set his mind to the discovery of definitions. Plato following him in this, came to the conclusion that these universals could not belong to the things of sense, which were ever changing, but to some other kind of existences. Thus he came to conceive of universals as forms or ideas of real existences, by reference to which, and in consequence of analogies to which, the things of sense in every case received their names, and became thinkable objects."

From this it followed to Plato that in so far as the senses took an illusive appearance of themselves giving {164} the knowledge which really was supplied by reason as the organ of ideas, in the same degree the body which is the instrument of sense can only be a source of illusion and a hindrance to knowledge. The wise man, therefore, will seek to free himself from the bonds of the body, and die while he lives by philosophic contemplation, free as far as possible from the disturbing influence of the senses. This process of rational realisation Plato called Dialectic. The objects contemplated by the reason, brought into consciousness on the occurrence of sensible perception, but never caused by these, were not mere notions in the mind of the individual thinker, nor were they mere properties of individual things; this would be to make an end of science on the one hand, of reality on the other. Nor had they existence in any mere place, not even beyond the heavens. Their home was Mind, not this mind or that, but Mind Universal, which is God.

In these 'thoughts of God' was the root or essence which gave reality to the things of sense; they were the Unity which realised itself in multiplicity. It is because things partake of the Idea that we give them a name. The thing as such is seen, not known; the idea as such is known, not seen.

The whole conception of Plato in this connection is based on the assumption that there is such a thing as knowledge. If all things are ever in change, then knowledge is impossible; but conversely, if there is {165} such a thing as knowledge, then there must be a continuing object of knowledge; and beauty, goodness, reality are then no dreams. The process of apprehension of these 'thoughts of God,' these eternal objects of knowledge, whether occasioned by sensation or not, is essentially a process of self-inquiry, or, as he in one stage called it, of Reminiscence. The process is the same in essence, whether going on in thought or expressed in speech; it is a process of naming. Not that names ever resemble realities fully; they are only approximations, limited by the conditions of human error and human convention. There is nevertheless an inter-communion between ideas and things. We must neither go entirely with those who affirm the one (the Eleatics), nor with those who affirm the many (the Heracliteans), but accept both. There is a union in all that exists both of That Which Is, and of that concerning which all we can say is that it is Other than what is. This 'Other,' through union with what is, attains to being of a kind; while on the other hand, What Is by union with the 'Other' attains to variety, and thus more fully realises itself.

That which Plato here calls 'What Is' he elsewhere calls 'The Limiting or Defining'; the 'Other' he calls 'The Unlimited or Undefined.' Each has a function in the divine process. The thoughts of God attain realisation in the world of things which change and pass, through the infusion {166} of themselves in, or the superimposing of themselves upon, that which is Nothing apart from them,--the mere negation of what is, and yet necessary as the 'Other' or correlative of what is. Thus we get, in fact, four forms of existence: there is the Idea or Limiting (apart); there is the Negative or Unlimited (apart), there is the Union of the two (represented in language by subject and predicate), which as a whole is this frame of things as we know it; and fourthly, there is the Cause of the Union, which is God. And God is cause not only as the beginning of all things, but also as the measure and law of their perfection, and the end towards which they go. He is the Good, and the cause of Good, and the consummation and realisation of Good.

This absolute Being, this perfect Good, we cannot see, blinded as we are, like men that have been dwelling in a cave, by excess of light. We must, therefore, look on Him indirectly, as on an image of Him, in our own souls and in the world, in so far as in either we discern, by reason, that which is rational and good.

Thus God is not only the cause and the end of all good, He is also the cause and the end of all knowledge. Even as the sun is not only the most glorious of all visible objects, but is also the cause of the life and beauty of all other things, and the provider of the light whereby we see them, so also {167} is it for the eye of the soul. God is its light, God is the most glorious object of its contemplation, God we behold imaged forth in all the objects which the soul by reason contemplates.

The ideas whereof the 'Other' (or, as he again calls it, the 'Great and Small' or 'More and Less,' meaning that which is unnamable, or wholly neutral in character, and which may therefore be represented equally by contradictory attributes) by participation becomes a resemblance, Plato compared to the 'Numbers' of the Pythagoreans (cf. above, p. 25). Hence, Aristotle remarks (Met. A. 6), Plato found in the ideas the originative or formative Cause of things, that which made them what they were or could be called,--their Essence; in the 'Great and Small' he found the opposite principle or Matter (Raw Material) of things.

In this way the antithesis of Mind and Matter, whether on the great scale in creation or on the small in rational perception, is not an antithesis of unrelated opposition. Each is correlative of the other, so to speak as the male and the female; the one is generative, formative, active, positive; the other is capable of being impregnated, receptive, passive, negative; but neither can realise itself apart from the other.

This relation of 'Being' with that which is 'Other than Being' is Creation, wherein we can {168} conceive of the world as coming to be, yet not in Time. And in the same way Plato speaks of a third form, besides the Idea and that which receives it, namely, 'Formless Space, the mother of all things.' As Kant might have formulated it, Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.

The 'Other' or Negative element, Plato more or less vaguely connected with the evil that is in the world. This evil we can never expect to perish utterly from the world; it must ever be here as the antithesis of the good. But with the gods it dwells not; here in this mortal nature, and in this region of mingling, it must of necessity still be found. The wise man will therefore seek to die to the evil, and while yet in this world of mortality, to think immortal things, and so as far as may be flee from the evil. Thereby shall he liken himself to the divine. For it is a likening to the divine to be just and holy and true.

This, then, is the summum bonum, the end of life. For as the excellence or end of any organ or instrument consists in that perfection of its parts, whereby each separately and the whole together work well towards the fulfilling of that which it is designed to accomplish, so the excellence of man must consist in a perfect ordering of all his parts to the perfect working of his whole organism as a {169} rational being. The faculties of man are three: the Desire of the body, the Passion of the heart, the Thought of the soul; the perfect working of all three, Temperance, Courage, Wisdom, and consequently the perfect working of the whole man, is Righteousness. From this springs that ordered tranquillity which is at once true happiness and perfect virtue.

Yet since individual men are not self-sufficient, but have separate capacities, and a need of union for mutual help and comfort, the perfect realisation of this virtue can only be in a perfect civic community. And corresponding with the three parts of the man there will be three orders in the community: the Workers and Traders, the Soldiers, and the Ruling or Guardian class. When all these perform their proper functions in perfect harmony, then is the perfection of the whole realised, in Civic Excellence or Justice.

To this end a careful civic education is necessary, first, because to know what is for the general good is difficult, for we have to learn not only in general but in detail that even the individual good can be secured only through the general; and second, because few, if any, are capable of seeking the general good, even if they know it, without the guidance of discipline and the restraints of law. Thus, with a view to its own perfection, and the good of all {170} its members, Education is the chief work of the State.

It will be remembered (see foregoing page) that in Plato's division of the soul of man there are three faculties, Desire, Passion, Reason; in the division of the soul's perfection three corresponding virtues, Temperance, Courage, Wisdom; and in the division of the state three corresponding orders, Traders, Soldiers, Guardians. So in Education there are three stages. First, Music (including all manner of artistic and refining influences), whose function it is so to attemper the desires of the heart that all animalism and sensualism may be eliminated, and only the love and longing for that which is lovely and of good report may remain. Second, Gymnastic, whose function it is through ordered labour and suffering so to subdue and rationalise the passionate part of the soul, that it may become the willing and obedient servant of that which is just and true. And third, Mathematics, by which the rational element of the soul may be trained to realise itself, being weaned, by the ordered apprehension of the 'diamond net' of laws which underlie all the phenomena of nature, away from the mere surface appearances of things, the accidental, individual, momentary,--to the deep-seated realities, which are necessary, universal, eternal.

And just as there was a perfectness of the soul {171} transcending all particular virtues, whether of Temperance or Courage or Wisdom, namely, that absolute Rightness or Righteousness which gathered them all into itself, so at the end of these three stages of education there is a higher mood of thought, wherein the soul, purified, chastened, enlightened, in communing with itself through Dialectic (the Socratic art of questioning transfigured) communes also with the Divine, and in thinking out its own deepest thoughts, thinks out the thoughts of the great Creator Himself, becomes one with Him, finds its final realisation through absorption into Him, and in His light sees light.