Volume I Part 13 (2/2)
[Sidenote: His education and teaching.]
To the knowledge acquired by Plato during the eight or ten years he had spent with Socrates, he added all that could be obtained from the philosophers of Egypt, Cyrene, Persia, and Tarentum. With every advantage arising from wealth and an ill.u.s.trious parentage, if even it was only of an earthly kind, for he numbered Solon among his ancestors, he availed himself of the teaching of the chief philosophers of the age, and at length, returning to his native country, founded a school in the grove of Hecademus. Thrice during his career as a teacher he visited Sicily on each occasion returning to the retirement of his academy. He attained the advanced age of eighty-three years. It has been given to few men to exercise so profound an influence on the opinions of posterity, and yet it is said that during his lifetime Plato had no friends. He quarrelled with most of those who had been his fellow-disciples of Socrates; and, as might be antic.i.p.ated from the venerable age to which he attained, and the uncertain foundation upon which his doctrines reposed, his opinions were very often contradictory, and his philosophy exhibited many variations. To his doctrines we must now attend.
[Sidenote: The doctrines of Plato. The three primary principles.]
It was the belief of Plato that matter is coeternal with G.o.d, and that, indeed, there are three primary principles--G.o.d, Matter, Ideas; all animate and inanimate things being fas.h.i.+oned by G.o.d from matter, which, being capable of receiving any impress, may be designated with propriety the Mother of Forms. He held that intellect existed before such forms were produced, but not antecedently to matter. To matter he imputed a refractory or resisting quality, the origin of the disorders and disturbances occurring in the world; he also regarded it us the cause of evil, accounting thereby for the preponderance of evil, which must exceed the good in proportion as matter exceeds ideas. It is not without reason, therefore, that Plato has been accused of Magianism. These doctrines are of an Oriental cast.
[Sidenote: He a.s.serts the existence of a personal G.o.d.]
[Sidenote: Nature of the soul.]
The existence of G.o.d, an independent and personal maker of the world, he inferred from proofs of intelligence and design presented by natural objects. ”All in the world is for the sake of the rest, and the places of the single parts are so ordered as to subserve to the preservation and excellency of the whole; hence all things are derived from the operation of a Divine intellectual cause.” From the marks of unity in that design he deduced the unity of G.o.d, the Supreme Intelligence, incorporeal, without beginning, end, or change. His G.o.d is the fas.h.i.+oner and father of the universe, in contradistinction to impersonal Nature.
In one sense, he taught that the soul is immortal and imperishable; in another, he denied that each individual soul either has had or will continue to have an everlasting duration. From what has been said on a former page, it will be understood that this psychological doctrine is essentially Indian. His views of the ancient condition of and former relations of the soul enabled Plato to introduce the celebrated doctrine of Reminiscence, and to account for what have otherwise been termed innate ideas. They are the recollections of things with which the soul was once familiar.
[Sidenote: Plato's Ideal theory.]
[Sidenote: Exemplars or types.]
The reason of G.o.d contemplates and comprehends the exemplars or original models of all natural forms, whatever they may be; for visible things are only fleeting shadows, quickly pa.s.sing away; ideas or exemplars are everlasting. With so much power did he set forth this theory of ideas, and, it must be added, with so much obscurity, that some have a.s.serted his belief in an extramundane s.p.a.ce in which exist incorporeal beings, the ideas or original exemplars of all organic and inorganic forms. An ill.u.s.tration may remove some of the obscurity of these views. Thus all men, though they may present different appearances when compared with each other, are obviously fas.h.i.+oned upon the same model, to which they all more or less perfectly conform. All trees of the same kind, though they may differ from one another, are, in like manner, fas.h.i.+oned upon a common model, to which they more or less perfectly conform. To such models, exemplars, or types, Plato gave the designation of Ideas. Our knowledge thereof is clearly not obtained from the senses, but from reflection. Now Plato a.s.serted that these ideas are not only conceptions of the mind, but actually perceptions or ent.i.ties having a real existence; nay, more, that they are the only real existences. Objects are thus only material embodiments of ideas, and in representation are not exact; for correspondence between an object and its model is only so far as circ.u.mstances will permit. Hence we can never determine all the properties or functions of the idea from an examination of its imperfect material representation, any more than we can discover the character or qualities of a man from pictures of him, no matter how excellent those pictures may be.
[Sidenote: Doctrine of Reminiscence.]
[Sidenote: Recollections during transmigration.]
The Ideal theory of Plato, therefore, teaches that, beyond this world of delusive appearances, this world of material objects, there is another world, invisible, eternal, and essentially true; that, though we cannot trust our senses for the correctness of the indications they yield, there are other impressions upon which we may fall back to aid us in coming to the truth, the reminiscences or recollections still abiding in the soul of the things it formerly knew, either in the realm of pure ideas, or in the states of former life through which it has pa.s.sed. For Plato says that there are souls which, in periods of many thousand years, have successively transmigrated through bodies of various kinds.
Of these various conditions they retain a recollection, more faintly or vividly, as the case may be. Ideas seeming to be implanted in the human mind, but certainly never communicated to us by the senses, are derived from those former states. If this recollection of ancient events and conditions were absolutely precise and correct, then man would have an innate means for determining the truth. But such reminiscences being, in their nature, imperfect and uncertain, we never can attain to absolute truth. With Plato, the Beautiful is the perfect image of the true. Love is the desire of the soul for Beauty, the attraction of like for like, the longing of the divinity within us for the divinity beyond us; and the Good, which is beauty, truth, justice, is G.o.d--G.o.d in his abstract state.
[Sidenote: G.o.d is the sum of ideas.]
[Sidenote: The nature of the world and of the G.o.ds.]
[Sidenote: Triple const.i.tution of the soul.]
[Sidenote: Transmigration and future rewards and punishments.]
[Sidenote: The physiology of Plato.]
From the Platonic system it therefore followed that science is impossible to man, and possible only to G.o.d; that, however, recollecting our origin, we ought not to despair, but elevate our intellectual aim as high as we may; that all knowledge is not attributable to our present senses; for, if that were the case, all men would be equally wise, their senses being equal in acuteness; but a very large portion, and by far the surest portion, is derived from reminiscence of our former states; that each individual soul is an idea; and that, of ideas generally, the lower are held together by the higher, and hence, finally by one which is supreme; that G.o.d is the sum of ideas, and is therefore eternal and unchangeable, the sensuous conditions of time and s.p.a.ce having no relation to him, and being inapplicable in any conception of his attributes; that he is the measure of all things, and not man, as Protagoras supposed; that the universe is a type of him; that matter itself is an absolute negation, and is the same as s.p.a.ce; that the forms presented by our senses are unsubstantial shadows, and no reality; that, so far from there being an infinity of worlds, there is but one, which, as the work of G.o.d, is neither subject to age nor decay, and that it consists of a body and a soul; in another respect it may be said to be composed of fire and earth, which can only be made to cohere through the intermedium of air and water, and hence the necessity of the existence of the four elements; that of geometrical forms, the pyramid corresponds to fire, the cube to earth, the octahedron to air, these forms being produced from triangles connected by certain numerical ratios; that the entire sum of vitality is divided by G.o.d into seven parts, answering to the divisions of the musical octave, or to the seven planets; that the world is an animal having within it a soul; for man is warm, and so is the world; man is made of various elements, and so is the world; and, as the body of man has a soul, so too must the world have one; that there is a race of created, generated, and visible G.o.ds, who must be distinguished from the eternal, their bodies being composed for the most part of fire, their shape spherical; that the earth is the oldest and first of the starry bodies, its place being in the centre of the universe, or in the axis thereof, where it remains, balanced by its own equilibrium; that perhaps it is an ensouled being and a generated G.o.d; that the mortal races are three, answering to Earth, Air, and Water; that the male man was the first made of mortals, and that from him the female, and beasts, and birds, and fishes issued forth; that the superiority of man depends upon his being a religious animal; that each mortal consists of two portions, a soul and a body--their separation const.i.tutes death; that of the soul there are two primitive component parts, a mortal and an immortal, the one being made by the created G.o.ds, and the other by the Supreme; that, for the purpose of uniting these parts together, it is necessary that there should be an intermedium, and that this is the daemonic portion or spirit; that our mental struggles arise from this triple const.i.tution of Appet.i.te, Spirit, and Reason; that Reason alone is immortal, and the others die; that the number of souls in the universe is invariable or constant; that the sentiment of pre-existence proves the soul to have existed before the body; that, since the soul is the cause of motion, it can neither be produced nor decay, else all motion must eventually cease; that, as to the condition of departed souls, they hover as shades around the graves, pining for restoration to their lifeless bodies, or migrating through various human or brute shapes, but that an unembodied life in G.o.d is reserved for the virtuous philosopher; that valour is nothing but knowledge, and virtue a knowledge of good; that the soul, on entering the body, is irrational or in a trance, and that the G.o.d, the star who formed its created part, influences its career, and hence its fortunes may be predicted by astrological computations; that there are future rewards and punishments, a residence being appointed for the righteous in his kindred star; for those whose lives have been less pure there is a second birth under the form of a woman, and, if evil courses are still persisted in, successive transmigrations through various brutes are in reserve--the frivolous pa.s.sing into birds, the unphilosophical into beasts, the ignorant into fishes; that the world undergoes periodical revolutions by fire and water, its destructions and reproductions depending upon the coincidences of the stars. Of Plato's views of human physiology I can offer no better statement than the following from Ritter: ”All in the human body is formed for the sake of the Reason, after certain determinate ends. Accordingly, first of all, a seat must be provided for the G.o.d-like portion of the soul, the head, viz., which is round, and similar to the perfect shape of the whole, furnished with the organs of cognition, slightly covered with flesh, which impedes the senses. To the head is given the direction of the whole frame, hence its position at the top; and, since the animal creation possesses all the six irregular motions, and the head ought not to roll upon the ground, the human form is long, with legs for walking and arms for serving the body, and the anterior part is fas.h.i.+oned differently from the posterior.
Now, the reason being seated in the head, the spirit or irascible soul has its seat in the breast, under the head, in order that it may be within call and command of the Reason, but yet separated from the head by the neck, that it might not mix with it. The concupiscible has likewise its particular seat in the lower part of the trunk, the abdomen, separated by the diaphragm from that of the irascible, since it is destined, being separate from both, to be governed and held in order both by the spirit and the Reason. For this end G.o.d has given it a watch, the liver, which is dense, smooth, and s.h.i.+ning, and, containing in combination both bitter and sweet, is fitted to receive and reflect, as a mirror, the images of thoughts. Whenever the Reason disapproves, it checks inordinate desires by its bitterness, and, on the other hand, when it approves, all is soothed into gentle repose by its sweetness; moreover, in sleep, in sickness, or in inspiration it becomes prophetic, so that even the vilest portion of the body is in a certain degree partic.i.p.ant of truth. In other respects the lower portion of the trunk is fas.h.i.+oned with equal adaptation for the ends it has to serve. The spleen is placed on the left side of the liver, in order to secrete and carry off the impurities which the diseases of the body might produce and acc.u.mulate. The intestines are coiled many times, in order that the food may not pa.s.s too quickly through the body, and so occasion again an immoderate desire for more; for such a constant appet.i.te would render the pursuit of philosophy impossible, and make man disobedient to the commands of the divinity within him.”
[Sidenote: His ethical ideas.]
The reader will gather from the preceding paragraph how much of wisdom and of folly, of knowledge and of ignorance, the doctrines of Plato present. I may be permitted to continue this a.n.a.lysis of his writings a little farther, with the intention of exhibiting the manner in which he carried his views into practice; for Plato a.s.serted that, though the supreme good is unattainable by our reason, we must try to resemble G.o.d as far as it is possible for the changeable to copy the eternal; remembering that pleasure is not the end of man, and, though the sensual part of the soul dwells on eating and drinking, riches and pleasure, and the spiritual on worldly honours and distinctions, the reason is devoted to knowledge. Pleasure, therefore, cannot be attributed to the G.o.ds, though knowledge may; pleasure, which is not a good in itself, but only a means thereto. Each of the three parts of the soul has its own appropriate virtue, that of reason being wisdom; that of the spirit, courage; that of the appet.i.te, temperance; and for the sake of perfection, justice is added for the mutual regulation of the other three.
[Sidenote: His proposed political inst.i.tutions.]
[Sidenote: The Republic of Plato.]
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