Part 1 (2/2)
It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most modern empirical philosophies alike have ill.u.s.trated 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 Herac.l.i.teanism awake once more in a new world, and grown to full proportions?
Panta ch.o.r.ei, 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 Herac.l.i.tus is, in effect, repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just now of a cautiously reasoned experience, and, in ill.u.s.tration of the very law of change which it a.s.serts, may itself presently be superseded as a commonplace.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 antic.i.p.ation) 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 Herac.l.i.tus 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 const.i.tution, by the pa.s.sage 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 fas.h.i.+oned 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 cert.i.tude. Political const.i.tutions, 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 Herac.l.i.tean 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, establis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d 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. Panh.e.l.lenism 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 pa.s.sion 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 towns.h.i.+p 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 h.e.l.lenic 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 const.i.tute the other ingredient in a true h.e.l.lenism, 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, const.i.tutional 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 Herac.l.i.tean fire, has a power for both. ”Athens,” says Dante,
--Athens, aye and Sparta's state That were in policy so great, And framed the laws of old, How small a place they hold, How poor their art of n.o.ble living Shews by thy delicate contriving, Where what October spun November sees outrun!
Think in the time thou canst recall, Laws, coinage, customs, places all, How thou hast rearranged, How oft thy members changed!
Couldst thou but see thyself aright, And turn thy vision to the light, Thy likeness thou would'st find In some sick man reclined; On couch of down though he be pressed, He seeks and finds not any rest, But turns and turns again, To ease him of his pain.
Purgatory: Canto VI: Shadwell's Translation.
Now what Dante says to Florence, contrasting it with Athens and Sparta as he conceives them, Plato might have said to Athens, in contrast with Sparta, with Lacedaemon, at least as he conceived it.
NOTES
6. +Transliteration: Panta rhei. Translation: ”All things give way [or flow].” Plato, Cratylus 402 A, cites Herac.l.i.tus' fragment more fully-- Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta ch.o.r.ei 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 rheo means ”flow,” while the verb ch.o.r.eo means ”give way.”
14. +Transliteration: Panta ch.o.r.ei kai ouden menei. Pater's translation: ”All things give way: nothing remaineth.” Plato, Cratylus 402A.
14. +Transliteration: neotes. Liddell and Scott definition: ”youth: also ... youthful spirit, rashness.”
15. +Transliteration: Legei pou Herakleitos hoti panta ch.o.r.ei 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.” Herac.l.i.tus, 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, Herac.l.i.tus 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 pa.s.sage 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 ch.o.r.ei, panta rhei. See above, notes for pages 6, 14, 15, and 16. The verb rheo means ”flow,” while the verb ch.o.r.eo means ”give way.”
<script>