Part 8 (2/2)

Generalisation, whatever Platonists, or Plato himself at mistaken moments, may have to say about it, is a method, not of obliterating the concrete phenomenon, but of enriching it, with the joint perspective, the significance, the expressiveness, of all other things beside. What broad-cast light he enjoys!--that scholar, confronted with the sea- sh.e.l.l, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circ.u.mstances which may never precisely so occur again; in the contemplation of that single phenomenon, or object, or situation. He not only sees, but understands (thereby only seeing the more) and will, therefore, also remember. The significance of the particular object he will retain, by use of his intellectual apparatus of notion and general law, as, to use Plato's own figure, fluid matter may be retained in vessels, not indeed of unbaked clay, but of alabaster or bronze. So much by way of apology for general ideas--abstruse, or intangible, or dry and seedy and wooden, as we may sometimes think them.

”Two things,” says Aristotle, ”might rightly be attributed to Socrates: inductive reasoning, [160] and universal definitions.” Now when Aristotle says this of Socrates, he is recording the inst.i.tution of a method, which might be applied in the way just indicated, to natural objects, to such a substance as carbon, or to such natural processes as heat or motion; but which, by Socrates himself, as by Plato after him, was applied almost exclusively to moral phenomena, to the generalisation of aesthetic, political, ethical ideas, of the laws of operation (for the essence of every true conception, or definition, or idea, is a law of operation) of the feelings and the will. To get a notion, a definition, or idea, of motion, for example, which shall not exclude the subtler forms of it, heat for instance--to get a notion of carbon, which shall include not common charcoal only, but the diamond, a thing superficially so unlike it, and which shall also exclude, perhaps, some other substance, superficially almost indistinguishable from it: such is the business of physical science, in obedience to rules, outlined by Bacon in the first book of the Novum Organum, for securing those acts of ”inclusion” and ”exclusion,” inclusiones, exclusiones, naturae, debitae, as he says, ”which the nature of things requires,” if our thoughts are not to misrepresent them.

It was a parallel process, a process of inclusion, that one's resultant idea should be adequate, of rejection or exclusion, that this idea should be not redundant, which Socrates applied [161] to practice; exercising, as we see in the Platonic Dialogues, the two opposed functions of synagoge and diairesis,+ for the formation of just ideas of Temperance, Wisdom, Bravery, Justice itself--a cla.s.sification of the phenomena of the entire world of feeling and action. Ideas, if they fulfil their proper purpose, represent to the mind such phenomena, for its convenience, but may easily also misrepresent them. In the transition from the particulars to the general, and again in the transition from the general idea, the mental word, to the spoken or written word, to what we call the definition, a door lies open, both for the adulteration and the diminution of the proper content, of our conception, our definition. The first growth of the Platonic ”ideas,”

as we see it in Socrates, according to the report of Aristotle, provided against this twofold misrepresentation. Its aim is to secure, in the terms of our discourse with others and with ourselves, precise equivalence to what they denote. It was a ”mission” to go about Athens and challenge people to guard the inlets of error, in the pa.s.sage from facts to their thoughts about them, in the pa.s.sage from thoughts to words. It was an intellectual gymnastic, to test, more exactly than they were in the habit of doing, the equivalence of words they used so constantly as Just, Brave, Beautiful, to the thoughts they had; of those thoughts to the facts of experience, which it was the business of those [162] thoughts precisely to represent; to clear the mental air; to arrange the littered work-chamber of the mind.

In many of Plato's Dialogues we see no more than the ordered reflex of this process, informal as it was in the actual practice of Socrates.

Out of the accidents of a conversation, as from the confused currents of life and action, the typical forms of the vices and virtues emerge in definite outline. The first contention of The Republic, for instance, is to establish in regard to the nature of Justice, terms as exactly conterminous with thoughts, thoughts as exactly conterminous with moral facts, as the notion of carbon is for the naturalist, when it has come to include both charcoal and the diamond, on the basis of the essential law of their operation as experience reveals it. Show us, not merely accidental truths about it; but, by the doing of what (Ti poiousa)+ in the very soul of its possessor, itself by itself, Justice is a good, and Injustice a bad thing. That ill.u.s.trates exactly what is meant by ”an idea,” the force of ”knowledge through ideas,” in the particular instance of Justice. It will include perhaps, on the one hand, forms of Justice so remote from the Justice of our everyday experience as to seem inversions of it; it will clearly exclude, on the other hand, acts and thoughts, not it, yet, phenomenally, so like it, as to deceive the very G.o.ds; and its area will be expanded sufficiently to include, not the individual [163] only, but the state. And you, the philosophic student, were to do that, not for one virtue only, but for Piety, and Beauty, and the State itself, and Knowledge, and Opinion, and the Good. Nay, you might go on and do the same thing for the physical, when you came to the end of the moral, world, were life long enough, and if you had the humour for it:--for Motion, Number, Colour, Sound. That, then, was the first growth of the Platonic ideas, as derived immediately from Socrates, whose formal contribution to philosophy had been ”universal definitions,” developed ”inductively,”

by the twofold method of ”inclusion” and ”exclusion.”

Aristotle adds, however, that Socrates had stopped at the point here indicated: he had not gone on, like some others, to make those universal notions or definitions ”separable”--separable, that is to say, from the particular and concrete instances, from which he had gathered them. Separable: choristos + (famous word!) that is precisely what general notions become in what is specially called ”the Platonic Theory of Ideas.” The ”Ideas” of Plato are, in truth, neither more nor less than those universal definitions, those universal conceptions, as they look, as they could not but look, amid the peculiar lights and shadows, in the singularly const.i.tuted atmosphere, under the strange laws of refraction, and in the proper perspective, of Plato's house of thought. By its peculiarities, subsequent thought--philosophic, [164]

poetic, theological--has been greatly influenced; by the intense subjectivities, the accidents, so to speak, of Plato's genius, of Plato himself; the ways const.i.tutional with him, the magic or trick of his personality, in regarding the intellectual material he was occupied with--by Plato's psychology. And it is characteristic of him, again, that those peculiarities of his mental att.i.tude are evidenced informally; by a tendency, as we said, by the mere general tone in which he speaks of Beauty, for instance, ”as it really is,” of all that ”really is,” under its various forms; a manner of speaking, not explicit, but veiled, in various degrees, under figures, as at the end of the sixth book of The Republic, or under mythological fantasies, like those of the Phaedrus. He seems to have no inclination for the responsibilities of definite theory; for a system such as that of the Neo-Platonists for instance, his own later followers, who, in a kind of prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism, developed as definite philosophic dogma, hard enough in more senses than one, what in Plato is to the last rather poetry than metaphysical reasoning--the irrepressible because almost unconscious poetry, which never deserts him, even when treating of what is neither more nor less than a chapter in the rudiments of logic.

The peculiar development of the Socratic realism by Plato can then only be understood [165] by a consideration of the peculiarities of Plato's genius; how it reacted upon those abstractions; what they came to seem in its peculiar atmosphere. The Platonic doctrine of ”Ideas,” as was said, is not so much a doctrine, as a way of speaking or feeling about certain elements of the mind; and this temper, this peculiar way of feeling, of speaking, which for most of us will have many difficulties, is not uniformly noticeable in Plato's Dialogues, but is to be found more especially in the Phaedo, the Symposium, and in certain books of The Republic, above all in the Phaedrus. Here is a famous pa.s.sage from it:--

There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and s.p.a.ce) there, at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul.

For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the highest point, pa.s.sed out and stood (as you might stand upon the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky.

And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries them round; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky.

That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily. And thus it is: for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate, especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking. For the colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason alone as one's guide. Centered about that, the generation, or seed, genos,+--the people, of true knowledge inhabits this place. As, then, the intelligence of G.o.d, which is nourished by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akerato,+ unmixed with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also, which is about to receive that which properly belongs to it, beholding, after long interval, that which is, loves [166] it (that's the point!) and by the vision of truth is fed; and fares well; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings it round again to the same place. And in that journey round it looks upon justice itself; it looks upon Temperance, upon Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of becoming (the law of change, namely, of birth and death and decay) attaches; nor that which is, as it were, one in one thing, another in another, of those things which now we speak of as being; but the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is (ten en to ho estin on ontos epistemen ousan)+ and having beheld, after the same manner, all other things that really are, and feasted upon them, being pa.s.sed back again to the interior of the sky, the soul returned home. Phaedrus, 247.+

Only, as Plato thinks, that return was, in fact, an exile.

There, in that attractive, but perhaps not wholly acceptable, sort of discourse, in some other pa.s.sages like it, Plato has gone beyond his master Socrates, on two planes or levels, so to speak, of speculative ascent, which we may distinguish from each other, by way of making a little clearer what is in itself certainly so difficult.

For Plato, then, not by way of formal theory, we must remember, but by a turn of thought and speech (while he speaks of them, in fact) the Socratic ”universals,” the notions of Justice and the like, are become, first, things in themselves--the real things; and secondly, persons, to be known as persons must be; and to be loved, for the perfections, the visible perfections, we might say--intellectually visible--of [167]

their being. ”It looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon Temperance; upon Knowledge.”

Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations, serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason. With Plato, they are the creators of our reason--those treasures of experience, stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance, or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking things. For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the instruments by which we tabulate and cla.s.sify and record our experience--mere ”marks” of the real things of experience, of what is essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by a certain common name; but are themselves rather the proper objects of all true knowledge, and a pa.s.sage from all merely relative experience to the ”absolute.” In proportion as they lend themselves to the individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they reproduce the eternal reason for him. For Socrates, as Aristotle understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond. For Plato, for Platonists, they are become--Justice and Beauty, and the perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if we are to apprehend sensible [168] instances thereof, but which no two equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree, every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever--separate (choristos)+ separable from, as being essentially independent of, the individual mind which conceives them; as also of the particular temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they remain for ever--those eternal ”forms,” of Tree, Equality, Justice, and so forth.

That, then, is the first stage, or plane, of Platonic transcendentalism. Our common ideas, without which, in fact, we none of us could think at all, are not the consequence, not the products, but the cause of our reason in us: we did not make them; but they make us what we are, as reasonable beings. The eternal Being, of Parmenides, one and indivisible, has been diffused, divided, resolved, refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple, numerous, stellar world, so to call it--abstract light into stars: Justice, Temperance as it is, Bravery as it is. Permanence, independency, indefectible ident.i.ty with itself--all those qualities which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality--belong to every one of those ideas severally.

It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a return of the many G.o.ds of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love, [169] Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the modern anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls ”animism.” Animism, that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every object, almost in every circ.u.mstance, which impresses one with a sense of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest ill.u.s.tration is primitive man adoring, as a divine being endowed with will, the meteoric stone that came rus.h.i.+ng from the sky. That condition ”survives” however, in the negro, who thinks the discharging gun a living creature; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits; in the pantheism of Goethe; and in Sch.e.l.ling, who formulates that pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory. Such ”animistic”

instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato's mental const.i.tution,--the instinctive effort to find anima, the conditions of personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it remembered, of which the various functions, as we reckon them, imagination, reason, intuition, were still by no means clearly a.n.a.lysed and differentiated from each other, but partic.i.p.ated, all alike and all together, in every single act of mind.

And here is the second stage of the Platonic idealism, the second grade of Plato's departure [170] from the simpler realism of his master, as noted by Aristotle, towards that ”intelligible world,” opposed by him so constantly to the visible world, into which many find it so hard to follow him at all, and in which the ”ideas” become veritable persons.

To speak, to think, to feel, about abstract ideas as if they were living persons; that, is the second stage of Plato's speculative ascent. With the lover, who had graduated, was become a master, in the school of love, but had turned now to the love of intellectual and strictly invisible things, it was as if the faculty of physical vision, of the bodily eye, were still at work at the very centre of intellectual abstraction. Abstract ideas themselves became animated, living persons, almost corporeal, as if with hands and eyes. And it is, as a consequence, but partly also as a secondary reinforcing cause, of this mental condition, that the idea of Beauty becomes for Plato the central idea; the permanently typical instance of what an idea means; of its relation to particular things, and to the action of our thoughts upon them. It was to the lover dealing with physical beauty, a thing seen, yet unseen--seen by all, in some sense, and yet, truly, by one and not by another, as if through some capricious, personal self- discovery, by some law of affinity between the seer and what is seen, the knowing and the known--that the nature and function of an idea, as such, would come home most clearly. [170] And then, while visible beauty is the clearest, the most certain thing, in the world (lovers will always tell you so) real with the reality of something hot or cold in one's hand, it also comes nearest of all things, so Plato a.s.sures us, to its eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason, the eternal idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, ant.i.types, out of all proportion, in their truthfulness and adequacy, to any copy, left here with us, of Justice, for instance, or Equality, or the Perfect State. The typical instance of an abstract idea, yet pre- occupying the mind with all the colour and circ.u.mstance of the relations.h.i.+p of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of ideas, the a.s.sociations which belong properly to such relations.h.i.+ps only. A certain measure of caprice, of capricious preference or repulsion, would thus be naturally incidental to the commerce of men's minds with what really is, with the world in which things really are, only so far as they are truly known. ”Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is--impa.s.sioned lovers”: Tou ontos te kai aletheias erastas tous philosophous.+ They are the cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state--those impa.s.sioned lovers, erastas,+ of that which really is, and in comparison wherewith, office, wealth, honour, the love of which has rent Athens, the world, to pieces, will be of no more than secondary importance.

[172] He is in truth, in the power, in the hands, of another, of another will--this lover of the Ideas--attracted, corrected, guided, rewarded, satiated, in a long discipline, that ”ascent of the soul into the intelligible world,” of which the ways of earthly love (ta erotika)+ are a true parallel. His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by another, by which those ”animistic” old Greeks explained natural madness. That philosophic enthusiasm, that impa.s.sioned desire for true knowledge, is a kind of madness (mania)+ the madness to which some have declared great wit, all great gifts, to be always allied--the fourth species of mania, as Plato himself explains in the Phaedrus. To natural madness, to poetry and the other gifts allied to it, to prophecy like that of the Delphic pythoness, he has to add, fourthly, the ”enthusiasm of the ideas.”

The whole course of our theory hitherto (he there tells us) relates to that fourth form of madness; wherein, when any one, seeing the beauty that is here below, and having a reminiscence of the true, feels, or finds, his wings (pterotai)+ fluttering upwards, in his eagerness to soar above, but unable, like a bird looking towards the sky, heedless of things below, he is charged with unsoundness of mind. I have told how this is the most excellent of all forms of enthusiasm (or possession) both to its possessor and to him who partic.i.p.ates in it; how it comes of the n.o.blest causes; and that the lover who has a share of this madness is called a lover of the beautiful. For, as has been said, every soul of man, by its very nature, has seen the things that really are, otherwise it would not have come into this form of life (into a human body). But to rise from things here to the recollection of those, is not an easy matter [173]

for every soul; neither for those which then had but a brief view of things there; nor for such as were unlucky in their descent hither, so that, through the influence of certain a.s.sociations, turning themselves to what is not right, they have forgotten the sacred forms which then they saw. Few souls, in truth, remain, to which the gift of reminiscence adequately pertains. These, when they see some likeness of things there, are lost in amazement, and belong no longer to themselves; only, they understand not the true nature of their affection, because they lack discernment. Now, of Justice, and of Temperance, and of all those other qualities which are precious to souls, there is no clear light in their semblances here below; but, through obscure organs, with difficulty, very few, coming to their figures, behold the generation (genos,+ the people) of that which is figured. At that moment it was possible to behold Beauty in its clearness, when, with the choir of the blessed following on, ourselves with Zeus, some with one, some with another, of the G.o.ds, they looked upon a blissful vision and view, and were made partakers in what it is meet and right to call the most blessed of all mysteries; the which we celebrated, sound and whole then, and untouched by the evil things that awaited us in time to come, as being admitted to mystic sights, whole and sound and at unity with themselves, in pure light gazing on them, being ourselves pure, and unimpressed by this we carry about now and call our body, imprisoned like a fish in its sh.e.l.l.

Let memory be indulged thus far; for whose sake, in regret for what was then, I have now spoken somewhat at length.

As regards Beauty, as I said, it both shone out, in its true being, among those other eternal forms; and when we came down hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our bodily senses, gleaming with utmost brightness. For sight comes to us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom is not seen by it. Marvellous loves, in truth, would that (namely, Wisdom) have afforded, had it presented any manifest image of itself, such as that of Beauty, had it reached our bodily vision--that, and all those other amiable forms. But now Beauty alone has had this fortune; so that it is the clearest, the most certain, of all things; and the most lovable. Phaedrus, 249.+

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