stand as to this matter somewhere between the realist and the conceptualist:–See! we might say, there is a general consciousness, a permanent common sense, independent indeed of each one of us, but with which we are, each one of us, in communication. It is in that, those common or general ideas really reside. And we might add just here (giving his due to the nominalist also) that those abstract or common [152] notions come to the individual mind through language, through common or general names, Animal, Justice, Equality, into which one’s individual experience, little by little, drop by drop, conveys their full meaning or content; and, by the instrumentality of such terms and notions, thus locating the particular in the general, mediating between general and particular, between our individual experience and the common experience of our kind, we come to understand each other, and to assist each other’s thoughts, as in a common mental atmosphere, “an intellectual world,” as Plato calls it, a true noêtos topos +. So much for the modern view; for what common sense might now suggest as to the nature of logical “universals.”
Plato’s realism however–what is called “The Theory of Ideas”–his way of regarding abstract term and general notion, what Plato has to say about “the Many and the One,” is often very difficult; though of various degrees of difficulty, it must be observed, to various minds. From the simple and easily intelligible sort of realism attributed by Aristotle to Socrates, seeking in “universal definitions,” or ideas, only a serviceable instrument for the distinguishing of what is essential from what is unessential in the actual things about him, Plato passes by successive stages, which we should try to keep distinct as we read him, to what may be rightly called a “transcendental,” what to many minds has [153] seemed a fantastic and unintelligible habit of thought, regarding those abstractions, which indeed seem to become for him not merely substantial things-in-themselves, but little short of living persons, to be known as persons are made known to each other, by a system of affinities, on the old Eleatic rule, homoion homoiô +, like to like–these persons constituting together that common, eternal, intellectual world, a sort of divine family or hierarchy, with which the mind of the individual, so far as it is reasonable, or really knows, is in communion or correspondence. And here certainly is a theory, a tendency to think or feel, and to speak, about which the difficulties are many.
Yet as happens always with the metaphysical questions, or answers, which from age to age preoccupy acuter minds, those difficulties about the Many and the One actually had their attractiveness for some in the days of Plato.–
Our doctrine (says the Platonic Socrates in the Philebus) is, that one and the same thing (the one common notion, namely, embodied in one general term) which–hypo logôn +–under the influence of our thoughts and words, of thought and language, become one and many, circulates everywhere, in regard to everything of which existence is asserted from time to time. This law neither will cease to be, nor has it just now begun; but something of the kind is, I think, an eternal and ineradicable affection of our reason itself in us. And whenever a young man gets his first taste of this he is delighted as having found the priceless pearl of philosophy; he becomes an enthusiast in his delight; and eagerly sets in motion– kinei + –every definition [154] –logos+–every conception or mental definition (it looked so fixed and firm till then!) at one time winding things round each other and welding them into one (that is, he drops all particulari- ties out of view, and thinks only of the one common form) and then again unwinding them, and dividing them into parts (he becomes intent now upon the particularities of the particular, till the one common term seems inapplicable) puzzling first, and most of all, himself; and then any one who comes nigh him, older or younger, or of whatever age he may be; sparing neither father nor mother, nor any one else who will listen; scarcely even the dumb creatures, to say nothing of men; for he would hardly spare a barbarian, could he but find an interpreter. Philebus, 15.+
The Platonic doctrine of “the Many and the One”–the problem with which we are brought face to face in this choice specimen of the humour as well as of the metaphysical power of Plato–is not precisely the question with which the speculative young man of our own day is likely to puzzle himself, or exercise the patience of his neighbour in a railway carriage, of his dog, or even of a Chinese; though the questions we are apt to tear to pieces, organism and environment, or protoplasm perhaps, or evolution, or the Zeit-geist and its doings, may, in their turn, come to seem quite as lifeless and unendurable. As the theological heresy of one age sometimes becomes the mere commonplace of the next, so, in matters of philosophic enquiry, it might appear that the all-absorbing novelty of one generation becomes nothing less than the standard of what is uninteresting, as such, to its successor. Still in the discussion even of abstract truths it is not so much [155] what he thinks as the person who is thinking, that after all really tells. Plato and Platonism we shall never understand unless we are patient with him in what he has to tell us about “the Many and the One.”
Plato’s peculiar view of the matter, then, passes with him into a phase of poetic thought; as indeed all that Plato’s genius touched came in contact with poetry. Of course we are not naturally formed to love, or be interested in, or attracted towards, the abstract as such; to notions, we might think, carefully deprived of all the incident, the colour and variety, which fits things–this or that–to the constitution and natural habit of our minds, fits them for attachment to what we really are. We cannot love or live upon genus and species, accident or substance, but for our minds, as for our bodies, need an orchard or a garden, with fruit and roses. Take a seed from the garden. What interest it has for us all lies in our sense of potential differentiation to come: the leaves, leaf upon leaf, the flowers, a thousand new seeds in turn. It is so with animal seed; and with humanity, individually, or as a whole, its expansion into a detailed, ever-changing, parti-coloured history of particular facts and persons. Abstraction, the introduction of general ideas, seems to close it up again; to reduce flower and fruit, odour and savour, back again into the dry and worthless seed. We might as well be colour-blind at once, and there [156] is not a proper name left! We may contrast generally the mental world we actually live in, where classification, the reduction of all things to common types, has come so far, and where the particular, to a great extent, is known only as the member of a class, with that other world, on the other side of the generalising movement to which Plato and his master so largely contributed–a world we might describe as being under Homeric conditions, such as we picture to ourselves with regret, for which experience was intuition, and life a continuous surprise, and every object unique, where all knowledge was still of the concrete and the particular, face to face delightfully.
To that gaudy tangle of what gardens, after all, are meant to produce, in the decay of time, as we may think at first sight, the systematic, logical gardener put his meddlesome hand, and straightway all ran to seed; to genus and species and differentia, into formal classes, under general notions, and with–yes! with written labels fluttering on the stalks, instead of blossoms–a botanic or “physic” garden, as they used to say, instead of our flower-garden and orchard. And yet (it must be confessed on the other hand) what we actually see, see and hear, is more interesting than ever; the nineteenth century as compared with the first, with Plato’s days or Homer’s; the faces, the persons behind those masks which yet express so much, the flowers, or whatever it may happen to be they carry or [157] touch. The concrete, and that even as a visible thing, has gained immeasurably in richness and compass, in fineness, and interest towards us, by the process, of which those acts of generalisation, of reduction to class and generic type, have certainly been a part. And holding still to the concrete, the particular, to the visible or sensuous, if you will, last as first, thinking of that as essentially the one vital and lively thing, really worth our while in a short life, we may recognise sincerely what generalisation and abstraction have done or may do, are defensible as doing, just for that–for the particular gem or flower–what its proper service is to a mind in search, precisely, of a concrete and intuitive knowledge such as that.
Think, for a moment, of the difference, as regards mental attitude, between the naturalist who deals with things through ideas, and the layman (so to call him) in picking up a shell on the sea-shore; what it is that the subsumption of the individual into the species, its subsequent alliance to and co-ordination with other species, really does for the furnishing of the mind of the former. The layman, though we need not suppose him inattentive, or unapt to retain impressions, is in fact still but a child; and the shell, its colours and convolution, no more than a dainty, very easily destructible toy to him. Let him become a schoolboy about it, so to speak. The toy he puts aside; his mind is [158] drilled perforce, to learn about it; and thereby is exercised, he may think, with everything except just the thing itself, as he cares for it; with other shells, with some general laws of life, and for a while it might seem that, turning away his eyes from the “vanity” of the particular, he has been made to sacrifice the concrete, the real and living product of nature, to a mere dry and abstract product of the mind. But when he comes out of school, and on the sea- shore again finds a fellow to his toy, perhaps a finer specimen of it, he may see what the service of that converse with the general has really been towards the concrete, towards what he sees–in regard to the particular thing he actually sees. By its juxtaposition and co- ordination with what is ever more and more not it, by the contrast of its very imperfection, at this point or that, with its own proper and perfect type, this concrete and particular thing has, in fact, been enriched by the whole colour and expression of the whole circumjacent world, concentrated upon, or as it were at focus in, it. By a kind of short-hand now, and as if in a single moment of vision, all that, which only a long experience, moving patiently from part to part, could exhaust, its manifold alliance with the entire world of nature, is legible upon it, as it lies there in one’s hand.
So it is with the shell, the gem, with a glance of the eye; so it may be with the moral act, [159] with a condition of the mind, or a feeling. You may draw, by use of this coinage (it is Hobbes’s figure) this coinage of representative words and thoughts, at your pleasure, upon the accumulative capital of the whole experience of humanity. 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- shell, for instance, or with some enigma of heredity in himself or another, with some condition of a particular soul, in circumstances 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 institution 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 synagôgê and diairesis,+ for the formation of just ideas of Temperance, Wisdom, Bravery, Justice itself–a classification 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 passage from facts to their thoughts about them, in the passage 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 illustrates 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 gods; 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: chôristos + (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 constituted 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 constitutional 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 attitude 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 passage from it:–
There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and space) there, at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul. For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the highest point, passed 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 God, which is nourished by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akêratô,+ 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 (tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan)+ and having beheld, after the same manner, all other things that really are, and feasted upon them, being passed 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 passages 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 classify 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 passage 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 (chôristos)+ 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 identity 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 gods 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 circumstance, which impresses one with a sense of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest illustration is primitive man adoring, as a divine being endowed with will, the meteoric stone that came rushing 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 Shelley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits; in the pantheism of Goethe; and in Schelling, who formulates that pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory. Such “animistic” instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato’s mental constitution,–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 analysed and differentiated from each other, but participated, 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 assures us, to its eternal pattern or prototype. For some reason, the eternal idea of beauty had left visible copies of itself, shadows, antitypes, 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 circumstance of the relationship of person to person, the idea of Beauty, conveyed into the entire theory of ideas, the associations which belong properly to such relationships 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–impassioned lovers”: Tou ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous philosophous.+ They are the cornerstone, as readers of The Republic know, of the ideal state–those impassioned 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 erôtika)+ 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 impassioned 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 (pterôtai)+ 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 participates in it; how it comes of the noblest 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 associations, 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 gods, 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 shell.
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.+
NOTES
152. +Transliteration: noêtos topos. Pater’s translation: “intellectual world.” Plato, Republic 508b and 517b.
153. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Pater’s translation: “like to like.” Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato’s dialogues; see, for example, Parmenides 132d.
153. +Transliteration: hypo logôn. Pater’s translation: “under the influence of . . . thought and language.” Plato, Philebus 15d.
153. +Transliteration: kinei. Pater’s translation: “sets in motion.” Plato, Philebus 15e.
154. +Transliteration: logos. Pater’s contextual translation: “definition.” Plato, Philebus 15e.
154. +The passage begins at Philebus 15d.
161. +Transliteration: synagôgê . . . diairesis. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor’s translation: “.” For example, Phaedrus 266b.
162. +Transliteration: Ti poiousa. Pater’s translation: “by the doing of what.”
163. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater’s translation: “separable.” The term occurs often in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.
165. +Transliteration: genos. Pater’s translation: “seed, generation.” Liddell and Scott definition: “race, descent.” Plato, Phaedrus 247a. 165. +Transliteration: akêratô. Pater’s translation: “unmixed with sense.” Plato, Phaedrus 247a.
166. +Transliteration: tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan. Pater’s translation: “the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is.” Plato, Phaedrus 247e.
166. See Plato, Phaedrus 247b ff.
168. +Transliteration: chôristos. Pater’s translation: “separable.” The term occurs often in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. For example, see Metaphysics 1090a.
171. +Transliteration: Tou ontos te kai alêtheias erastas tous philosophous. Liddell and Scott definition / E-text editor’s translation: “Philosophers are lovers of truth and of that which is . . .” Plato, Republic 501d.
171. +Transliteration: erastas. See previous note.
172. +Transliteration: ta erôtika. Pater’s translation: “the discipline of sensuous love;” more literally, the phrase means “things pertaining to love.” For one instance, see Plato, Symposium 177d.
172. +Transliteration: mania. Liddell and Scott definition: “madness, frenzy.” See, for example, Plato, Phaedrus 249d.
172. +Transliteration: pterôtai. E-text editor’s translation: “[he] is furnished with wings.” Plato, Phaedrus 249d.
173. +Transliteration: genos. Pater’s translation: “seed, generation.” Liddell and Scott definition: “race, descent.” Plato, Phaedrus 247a.
173. +This passage begins at Phaedrus 249d.
CHAPTER 7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO
II. DIALECTIC
[174] Three different forms of composition have, under the intellectual conditions of different ages, prevailed–three distinct literary methods, in the presentation of philosophic thought; the metrical form earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physeôs,+ “Concerning Nature”; according to the manner of Pythagoras, “his golden verses,” of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn modelled the finest extant illustration of that manner of writing, of thinking.
It was succeeded by precisely the opposite manner, when native intuition had shrunk into dogmatic system, the dry bones of which rattle in one’s ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, as a formal treatise; the perfected philosophic temper being situated midway between those opposites, in the third essential form of the literature of philosophy, namely the essay; that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and issues. Strictly appropriate form of our modern philosophic literature, the essay came into use at what was really the invention of the relative, [175] or “modern” spirit, in the Renaissance of the sixteenth century.*
The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the personal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of literary form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth. If oracular verse, stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper vehicle of enthusiastic intuitions; if the treatise, with its ambitious array of premiss and conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing–of the essay, in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities–is indicative of Montaigne’s peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting [176] faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? Who knows?–in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined sense of one’s ignorance.
And as Aristotle is the inventor of the treatise, so the Platonic Dialogue, in its conception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially an essay–an essay, now and then passing into the earlier form of philosophic poetry, the prose-poem of Heraclitus. There have been effective writers of dialogue since, Bruno, for instance, Berkeley, Landor, with whom, however, that literary form has had no strictly constitutional propriety to the kind of matter it conveyed, as lending itself (that is to say) structurally to a many-sided but hesitant consciousness of the truth. Thus, with Berkeley, its purpose is but to give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions, about which there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer’s own mind. With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the dialogue–that peculiar modification of the essay–anything less than essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the organism of, the matter which it embodies. For Plato’s Dialogues, in fact, reflect, they refine [177] upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual method, in which, by preference to anything like formal lecturing (the lecture being, so to speak, a treatise in embryo) Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others. We see him in those Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public places, the open houses, the suburban roads, of Athens, as if seeking truth from others; seeking it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and by the help of, his supposed scholars, for whom, indeed, he can but bring their own native conceptions of truth to the birth; but always faithfully registering just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never concluding.
The Platonic Dialogue is the literary transformation, in a word, of what was the intimately home-grown method of Socrates, not only of conveying truth to others, but of coming by it for himself. The essence of that method, of “dialectic” in all its forms, as its very name denotes, is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth by means of question and answer, primarily with one’s self. Just there, lies the validity of the method–in a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one’s self; a dialogue concerning those first principles, or “universal definitions,” or notions, those “ideas,” which, according to Plato, are the proper objects of all real knowledge; concerning the adequacy of one’s hold upon them; the relationship to them of other notions; the plausible conjectures in our own or other minds, [178] which come short of them; the elimination, by their mere presence in the mind, of positive ignorance or error. Justice, Beauty, Perfect Polity, and the like, in outlines of eternal and absolute certainty:–they were to be apprehended by “dialectic,” literally, by a method (methodos)+ a circuitous journey, presented by the Platonic dialogues in its most accomplished literary form.
For the certainty, the absolute and eternal character, of such ideas involved, with much labour and scruple, repeated acts of qualification and correction; many readjustments to experience; expansion, by larger lights from it; those exclusions and inclusions, debitae naturae (to repeat Bacon’s phrase) demanded, that is to say, by the veritable nature of the facts which those ideas are designed to represent. “Representation” was, in fact, twofold, and comprehended many successive steps under each of its divisions. The thought was to be adjusted, first, to the phenomena, to the facts, daintily, to the end that the said thought might just cover those facts, and no more. To the thought, secondly, to the conception, thus articulated, it was necessary to adjust the term; the term, or “definition,” by which it might be conveyed into the mind of another. The dialogue–the freedom, the variety and elasticity, of dialogue, informal, easy, natural, alone afforded the room necessary for that long and complex process. If one, if Socrates, seemed to become [179] the teacher of another, it was but by thinking aloud for a few moments over his own lesson, or leaning upon that other as he went along that difficult way which each one must really prosecute for himself, however full such comradeship might be of happy occasions for the awakening of the latent knowledge, with which mind is by nature so richly stored. The Platonic Socrates, in fact, does not propose to teach anything: is but willing, “along with you,” and if you concur, “to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be. Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as from fire-sticks.”*
“And,” again, “is not the road to Athens made for conversation?” Yes! It might seem that movement, after all, and any habit that promoted movement, promoted the power, the successes, the fortunate parturition, of the mind. A method such as this, a process (processus) a movement of thought, which is the very converse of mathematical or demonstrative reasoning, and incapable therefore of conventional or scholastic form, of “exactness,” in fact; which proceeded to truth, not by the analysis and application of an axiom, but by a gradual suppression of error, of error in the form of partial or exaggerated truths on the subject- matter proposed, found its proper [180] literary vehicle in a dialogue, the more flexible the better. It was like a journey indeed, that essay towards Justice, for example, or the true Polity; a journey, not along the simple road to Athens, but to a mountain’s top. The proportions, the outline, the relation of the thing to its neighbours,–how do the inexperienced in such journeys mistake them, as they climb! What repeated misconceptions, embodying, one by one, some mere particularity of view, the perspective of this or that point of view, forthwith abandoned, some apprehension of mountain form and structure, just a little short, or, it may be, immeasurably short, of what Plato would call the “synoptic” view of the mountain as a whole. From this or that point, some insignificant peak presented itself as the mountain’s veritable crest: inexperience would have sworn to the truth of a wholly illusive perspective, as the next turn in the journey assured one. It is only upon the final step, with free view at last on every side, uniting together and justifying all those various, successive, partial apprehensions of the difficult way–only on the summit, comes the intuitive comprehension of what the true form of the mountain really is; with a mental, or rather an imaginative hold upon which, for the future, we can find our way securely about it; observing perhaps that, next to that final intuition, the first view, the first impression, had been truest about it.
[181] Such, in its full scope, is the journey or pilgrimage, the method (hodos, kinêsis, methodos)+ of the Socratic, of the perfected Platonic dialectic, towards the truth, the true knowledge, of Bravery or Friendship, for instance; of Space or Motion, again, as suggested in the seventh book of The Republic; of the ideal City, of the immaculate Beauty. You are going about Justice, for example–that great complex elevation on the level surface of life, whose top, it may be, reaches to heaven. You fancy you have grasped its outline. Alla metathômetha.+ You are forced on, perhaps by your companion, a step further, and the view has already changed. “Persevere,” Plato might say, “and a step may be made, upon which, again, the whole world around may change, the entire horizon and its relation to the point you stand on–a change from the half-light of conjecture to the full light of indefectible certitude.” That, of course, can only happen by a summary act of intuition upon the entire perspective, wherein all those partial apprehensions, which one by one may have seemed inconsistent with each other, find their due place, or (to return to the Platonic Dialogue again, to the actual process of dialectic as there exposed) by that final impression of a subject, a theorem, in which the mind attains a hold, as if by a single imaginative act, through all the transitions of a long conversation, upon all the seemingly opposite contentions of all the various speakers at once. We see already why [182] Platonic dialectic–the ladder, as Plato thinks, by which alone we can ascend into the entirely reasonable world (noêtos topos)+ beginning with the boyish difficulties and crudities of Meno, for instance, is a process which may go on, at least with those gifted by nature and opportunity, as in the Perfect City,–may go on to the close of life, and, as Pythagorean theory suggests, perhaps does not end even then.
The process of dialectic, as represented in the Platonic Dialogues, may seem, therefore, inconsistent with itself, if you isolate this or that particular movement, in what is a very complex process, with many phases of development. It is certainly difficult, and that not merely on a first reading, to grasp the unity of the various statements Plato has made about it. Now it may seem to differ from ordinary reasoning by a certain plausibility only: it is logic, plus persuasion; helping, gently enticing, a child out of his natural errors; carefully explaining difficulties by the way, as one can best do, by question and answer with him; above all, never falling into the mistake of the obscurum per obscurius. At another time it may seem to aim at plausibility of another sort; at mutual complaisance, as Thrasymachus complains. It would be possible, of course, to present an insincere dialogue, in which certain of the disputants shall be mere men of straw. In the Philebus again, dialectic is only the name of the process (described there [183] as exactly, almost as technically, as Aristotle, or some modern master of applied logic, might describe it) of the resolution of a genus into its species. Or it lapses into “eristic”–into an argument for its own sake; or sinks into logomachy, a mere dispute about words. Or yet again, an immense, a boundless promise is made for it, as in the seventh book of The Republic. It is a life, a systematised, but comprehensive and far-reaching, intellectual life, in which the reason, nay, the whole nature of man, realises all it was designed to be, by the beatific “vision of all time and all existence.”
Now all these varying senses of the word “dialectic” fall within compass, if we remember that for Plato, as for every other really philosophic thinker, method must be one; that it must cover, or be understood to cover, the entire process, all the various processes, of the mind, in pursuit of properly representative ideas, of a reasoned reflex of experience; and that for Plato, this process is essentially a long discourse or reasoning of the mind with itself. It is that dynamic, or essential, dialogue of the mind with itself, which lends, or imputes, its active principle to the written or spoken dialogue, which, in return, lends its name to the method it figures– “dialectic.” Well! in that long and complex dialogue of the mind with itself, many persons, so to speak, will necessarily take part; so many persons as there are possible contrasts or shades [184] in the apprehension of some complex subject. The advocatus diaboli will be heard from time to time. The dog also, or, as the Greeks said, the wolf, will out with his story against the man; and one of the interlocutors will always be a child, turning round upon us innocently, candidly, with our own admissions, or surprising us, perhaps at the last moment, by what seems his invincible ignorance, when we thought it rooted out of him. There will be a youth, inexperienced in the capacities of language, who will compel us to allow much time to the discussion of words and phrases, though not always unprofitably. And to the last, let us hope, refreshing with his enthusiasm, the weary or disheartened enquirer (who is always also of the company) the rightly sanguine youth, ingenuous and docile, to whom, surely, those friendly living ideas will be willing, longing, to come, after that Platonic law of affinity, so effectual in these matters–homoion homoiô.+
With such a nature above all, bringing with it its felicities of temperament, with the sort of natures (as we may think) which intellectually can but thrive, a method like that, the dialectic method, will also have its felicities, its singular good fortunes. A voyage of discovery, prosecuted almost as if at random, the Socratic or Platonic “dialogue of enquiry,” seems at times to be in charge of a kind of “Providence.” Or again, it will be as when hunters or bird- catchers “beat [185] the bush,” as we say: Plato elaborates that figure in The Republic. Only, if they be knowing in the process, a fair percentage of birds will be found and taken. All the chances, or graces, of such a method, as actually followed in a whole life of free enquiry, The Republic, for a watchful reader, represents in little. And when, using still another figure, Socrates says: “I do not yet know, myself; but, we must just go where the argument carries us, as a vessel runs before the wind,” he breathes the very soul of the “dialectic method”:–hopê an ho logos, hôsper pneuma, pherê, tautê iteon.+
This dialectic method, this continuous discourse with one’s self, being, for those who prosecute it with thoroughness, co-extensive with life itself–a part of the continuous company we keep with ourselves through life–will have its inequalities; its infelicities; above all, its final insecurity. “We argue rashly and adventurously,” writes Plato, most truly, in the Timaeus–aye, we, the Platonists, as such, sometimes–“by reason that, like ourselves, our discourses (our Platonic discourses, as such) have much participation in the temerity of chance.” Of course, as in any other occasional conversation, with its dependence on the hour and the scene, the persons we are with, the humours of the moment, there will always be much of accident in this essentially informal, this un-methodical, [186] method; and, therefore, opportunities for misuse, sometimes consciously. The candid reader notes instances of such, even in The Republic, not always on the part of Thrasymachus:–in this “new game of chess,” played, as Plato puts it, not with counters, but with words, and not necessarily for the prize of truth, but, it may be, for the mere enjoyment of move and counter-move, of check-mating.
Since Zeno’s paradoxes, in fact, the very air of Athens was become sophisticated, infected with questionings, often vain enough; and the Platonic method had been, in its measure, determined by (the unfriendly might say, was in truth only a deposit from) that infected air. “Socrates,” as he admits, “is easily refuted. Say rather, dear Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth.” That is reassuring, certainly! For you might think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist, or of himself perhaps en caricature, in the Euthydemus, “Such is his skill in the war of words, that he can refute any proposition whatever, whether true or false”; that, in short, there is a dangerous facility abroad for proving all things whatever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his presumable allotment of truth, has but the general allotment.
The friendly, on the other hand, might rejoin even then, that, as Lessing suggests, the search for truth is a better thing for us than its possession.
[187] Plato, who supposes any knowledge worth the name to be “absolute and eternal”; whose constant contention it is, to separate longo intervallo, by the longest possible interval, science (epistêmê)+ as the possession of irresistible truth, from any and every sort of knowledge which falls short of that; would hardly have accepted the suggestion of Lessing. Yet, in spite of all that, in spite of the demand he makes for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real knowledge, he does think, or inclines his reader to think, that truth, precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver; and must be, in that degree, elusive, provisional, contingent, a matter of various approximation, and of an “economy,” as is said; that it is partly a subjective attitude of mind:–that philosophic truth consists in the philosophic temper. “Socrates in Plato,” remarks Montaigne acutely, “disputes, rather to the profit of the disputants, than of the dispute. He takes hold of the first subject, like one who has a more profitable end in view than to explain it; namely, to clear the understandings that he takes upon him to instruct and exercise.”
Just there, in fact, is the justification of Plato’s peculiar dialectical method, of its inexactness, its hesitancy, its scruples and reserve, as if he feared to obtrude knowledge on an unworthy receiver. The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma [188] –the Ethics of Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza–begins with a truth, or with a clear conviction of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does but propose further to explain and apply.–The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philosophy begins with an axiom or definition: the essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue with oneself, that dialectic process, which may be co-extensive with life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps: it does but put one into a duly receptive attitude towards such possible truth, discovery, or revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet,–shed itself on the purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system of propositions, but forms a temper.
What Plato presents to his readers is then, again, a paradox, or a reconciliation of opposed tendencies: on one side, the largest possible demand for infallible certainty in knowledge (it was he fixed that ideal of absolute truth, to which, vainly perhaps, the human mind, as such, aspires) yet, on the other side, the utmost possible inexactness, or contingency, in the method by which actually he proposes to attain it. It has been said that the humour of Socrates, of which the [189] famous Socratic irony–the pretence to have a bad memory, to dislike or distrust long and formal discourse, to have taught nothing, to be but a mid-wife in relation to other people’s thoughts–was an element, is more than a mere personal trait; that it was welcome as affording a means of escape from the full responsibilities of his teaching. It belonged, in truth, to the tentative character of dialectic, of question and answer as the method of discovery, of teaching and learning, to the position, in a word, of the philosophic essayist. That it was thus, might be illustrated abundantly from the Platonic dialogues. The irony, the Socratic humour, so serviceable to a diffident teacher, are, in fact, Plato’s own. Kindyneuei,+ “it may chance to be,” is, we may notice, a favourite catchword of his. The philosopher of Being, or, of the verb, “To be,” is after all afraid of saying, “It is.”
For, again, person dealing with person–with possible caprice, therefore, at least on one side–or intelligence with intelligence, is what Plato supposes in the reception of truth:–that, and not an exact mechanism, a precise machine, operating on, or with, an exactly ponderable matter. He has fears for truth, however carefully considered. To the very last falsehood will lurk, if not about truth itself, about this or that assent to it. The receiver may add the falsities of his own nature to the truth he receives. The proposition which embodies it very [190] imperfectly, may not look to him, in those dark chambers of his individuality, of himself, into which none but he can ever get, to test the matter, what it looks to me, or to you. We may not even be thinking of, not looking at, the same thing, when we talk of Beauty, and the like; objects which, after all, to the Platonist are matters of theôria,+ of immediate intuition, of immediate vision, or, as Plato sometimes fancied, of an earlier personal experience; and which, as matter of such intuition, are incapable of analysis, and therefore, properly, incommunicable by words. Place, then, must be left to the last in any legitimate dialectic process for possible after-thoughts; for the introduction, so to speak, of yet another interlocutor in the dialogue, which has, in fact, no necessary conclusion, and leaves off only because time is up, or when, as he says, one leaves off seeking through weariness (apokamnôn).+ “What thought can think, another thought can mend.” Another turn in the endless road may change the whole character of the perspective. You cannot, as the Sophist proposed to do (that was part of his foolishness) take and put truth into the soul. If you could, it might be established there, only as an “inward lie,” as a mistake. “Must I take the argument, and literally insert it into your mind?” asks Thrasymachus. “Heaven forbid”: answers Socrates. That is precisely what he fears most, for himself, and for others; and from first to last, demands, as the first condition of comradeship [191] in that long journey in which he conceives teacher and learner to be but fellow- travellers, pilgrims side by side, sincerity, above all sincerity with one’s self–that, and also freedom in reply. “Answer what you think, megaloprepôs +–liberally.” For it is impossible to make way otherwise, in a method which consists essentially in the development of knowledge by question and answer.
Misuse, again, is of course possible in a method which admits of no objective sanction or standard; the success of which depends on a loyalty to one’s self, in the prosecution of it, of which no one else can be cognisant. And if we can misuse it with ourselves, how much more certainly can the expert abuse it with another. At every turn of the conversation, a door lies open to sophistry. Sophistry, logomachy, eristic: we may learn what these are, sometimes, from Plato’s own practice. That justice is only useful as applied to things useless; that the just man is a kind of thief; and the like; is hardly so much as sophistry. And this too was possible in a method, which, with all its large outlook, has something of the irregularity, the accident, the heats and confusion, of life itself–a method of reasoning which can only in a certain measure be reasoned upon. How different the exactness which Aristotle supposes, and does his best to secure, in scientific procedure! For him, dialectic, Platonic dialectic, is, at best, a part of “eristic” [192] –of the art, or trick, of merely popular and approximate debate, in matters where science is out of the question, and rhetoric has its office, not in providing for the intelligence, but in moulding the sentiments and the will. Conversely to that absoluteness and necessity which Plato himself supposes in all real knowledge, as “the spectacle of all time and all existence,” it might seem that the only sort of truth attainable by his actual method, must be the truth of a particular time and place, for one and not for another. Dialogos peirastikos,+ “a Dialogue of search”:–every one of Plato’s Dialogues is in essence such like that whole, life-long, endless dialogue which dialectic, in its largest scope, does but formulate, and in which truly the last, the infallible word, after all, never gets spoken. Our pilgrimage is meant indeed to end in nothing less than the vision of what we seek. But can we ever be quite sure that we are really come to that? By what sign or test?
Now oppose all this, all these peculiarities of the Platonic method, as we find it, to the exact and formal method of Aristotle, of Aquinas, of Spinoza, or Hegel; and then suppose one trained exclusively on Plato’s dialogues. Is it the eternal certainty, after all, the immutable and absolute character of truth, as Plato conceived it, that he would be likely to apprehend? We have here another of those contrasts of tendency, constitutional [193] in the genius of Plato, and which may add to our interest in him. Plato is to be explained, as we say, or interpreted, partly through his predecessors, and his contemporaries; but in part also by his followers, by the light his later mental kinsmen throw back on the conscious or unconscious drift of his teaching. Now there are in the history of philosophy two opposite Platonic traditions; two legitimate yet divergent streams of influence from him. Two very different yet equally representative scholars we may see in thought emerging from his school. The “theory of the Ideas,” the high ideal, the uncompromising demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name; the immediate or intuitive character of the highest acts of knowledge; that all true theory is indeed “vision”:–for the maintenance of that side of the Platonic position we must look onward to Aristotle, and the Schoolmen of all ages, to Spinoza, to Hegel; to those mystic aspirants to “vision” also, the so-called Neo-Platonists of all ages, from Proclus to Schelling. From the abstract, metaphysical systems of those, the ecstasy and illuminism of these, we may mount up to the actual words of Plato in the Symposium, the fifth book of The Republic, the Phaedrus.
But it is in quite different company we must look for the tradition, the development, of Plato’s actual method of learning and teaching. The Academy of Plato, the established seat of his [194] philosophy, gave name to a school, of which Lucian, in Greek, and in Latin, Cicero, are the proper representatives,–Cicero, the perfect embodiment of what is still sometimes understood to be the “academic spirit,” surveying all sides, arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, balancing, tendencies, but ending in suspension of judgment. If Platonism from age to age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of “being,” or the nearest attainable approach to or substitution for that; for others, Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne–that typical sceptic of the age of the Renaissance–conversations with himself, with the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical reassertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a constant accumulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by empirical science, has had assuredly, to check wholesomely the pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts.–“Their name is legion,” says a modern writer. Reverent [195] and irreverent, reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy, guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable–they have been called, indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intellectual security, but cannot make up its mind. Q’ue scais-je? it cries, in the words of Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service.
Sanguine about any form of absolute knowledge, of eternal, or indefectible, or immutable truth, with our modern temperament as it is, we shall hardly become, even under the direction of Plato, and by the reading of the Platonic Dialogues. But if we are little likely to realise in his school, the promise of “ontological” science, of a “doctrine of Being,” or any increase in our consciousness of metaphysical security, are likely, rather, to acquire there that other sort of Platonism, a habit, namely, of tentative thinking and suspended judgment, if we are not likely to enjoy the vision of his “eternal and immutable ideas,” Plato may yet promote in us what we call “ideals”– the aspiration towards a more perfect Justice, a more perfect Beauty, physical and intellectual, a more perfect condition of human affairs, than any one has ever yet seen; that kosmos,+ in which things are only as they are thought by a perfect mind, to which experience is constantly approximating us, but which it does not provide. There they stand, the two [196] great landmarks of the intellectual or spiritual life as Plato conceived it: the ideal, the world of “ideas,” “the great perhaps,” for which it is his merit so effectively to have opened room in the mental scheme, to be known by us, if at all, through our affinities of nature with it, which, however, in our dealings with ourselves and others we may assume to be objective or real:–and then, over against our imperfect realisation of that ideal, in ourselves, in nature and history, amid the personal caprices (it might almost seem) of its discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question–the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.
NOTES
174. +Transliteration: Peri Physeôs. Pater’s translation: “Concerning Nature.”
174. ±Sic. This form, “situate,” may be Pater’s archaism for situated, or it may simply be a typographic error in the original published edition.
175. *Essay–“A loose sally of the mind,” says Johnson’s Dictionary. Bailey’s earlier Dictionary gives another suggestive use of the word “among miners”–A little trench or hole, which they dig to search for ore.
178. +Transliteration: methodos. Liddell and Scott definition: “method.” Plato, Republic 531c.
179. *Skepsasthai kai syzêtêsai hoti pote estin; kai, tach’ an, par’ allêla skopountes, kai tribontes, hôsper ek pureiôn, eklampsai poiêsaimen tên dikaiosynên. Pater’s translation: “to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be. Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as from fire-sticks.” Plato, Meno 80d for the first line and, for the remainder, Republic 435a.
181. +Transliteration: hodos, kinêsis, methodos. Liddell and Scott definitions: “path, motion, method.”
181. +Transliteration: Alla metathômetha. E-text editor’s translation: “But let us follow out [a different path of thought],” or “let’s examine this from a different perspective.” For example, Plato, Republic 334e.
182. +Transliteration: noêtos topos. Pater’s translation: “reasonable world.” Plato, Republic 508b.
184. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Pater’s translation: “like to like.” Variants of the phrase occur in many of Plato’s dialogues; see, for example, Parmenides 132d.
185. +Transliteration: hopê an ho logos, hôsper pneuma, pherê, tautê iteon. Pater’s translation: “we must just go where the argument carries us, as a vessel runs before the wind.” Plato, Republic 394d.
187. +Transliteration: epistêmê. Liddell and Scott definition “1. knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific knowledge.”
189. +Transliteration: Kindyneuei. Pater’s translation: “it may chance to be.”
190. +Transliteration: theôria. Liddell and Scott definition: “a looking at, viewing, beholding . . . contemplation, reflection.” Pater defines it in Platonic terms as “immediate intuition.” For example, Plato, Republic 486a.
190. +Transliteration: apokamnôn. Liddell and Scott definition: “grow[ing] quite weary.” See, for example, Plato, Protagoras 333b.
191. +Transliteration: megaloprepôs. Liddell and Scott definition / E- text editor’s translation: “liberally.” The exchange between Thrasymachus and Socrates to which Pater refers begins at Republic 345b.
192. +Transliteration: Dialogos peirastikos. Pater’s translation: “a Dialogue of search.”
195. +Transliteration: kosmos. Liddell and Scott definition: “I. 1. order; 2. good order, good behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order: of states, government; 4. the mode or fashion of a thing; II. an ornament. . .; III. the world or universe, from its perfect arrangement.”
CHAPTER 8: LACEDAEMON
[197] AMONG the Greeks, philosophy has flourished longest, and is still most abundant, at Crete and Lacedaemon; and there there are more teachers of philosophy than anywhere else in the world. But the Lacedaemonians deny this, and pretend to be unlearned people, lest it should become manifest that it is through philosophy they are supreme in Greece; that they may be thought to owe their supremacy to their fighting and manly spirit, for they think that if the means of their superiority were made known all the Greeks would practise this. But now, by keeping it a secret, they have succeeded in misleading the Laconisers in the various cities of Greece; and in imitation of them these people buffet themselves, and practise gymnastics, and put on boxing-gloves, and wear short cloaks, as if it were by such things that the Lacedaemonians excel all other Greeks. But the Lacedaemonians, when they wish to have intercourse with their philosophers without reserve, and are weary of going to them by stealth, make legal proclamation that those Laconisers should depart, with any other aliens who may be sojourning among them, and thereupon betake themselves to their sophists unobserved by strangers. And you may know that what I say is true, and that the Lacedaemonians are better instructed than all other people in philosophy and the art of discussion in this way. If any one will converse with even the most insignificant of the Lacedaemonians, he may find him indeed in the greater part of what he says seemingly but a poor creature; but then at some chance point in the conversation he will throw in some brief compact saying, worthy of remark, like a clever archer, so that his interlocutor shall seem no better than a child. Of [198] this fact some both of those now living and of the ancients have been aware, and that to Laconise consists in the study of philosophy far rather than in the pursuit of gymnastic, for they saw that to utter such sayings as those was only possible for a perfectly educated man. Of these was Thales of Miletus, Pittacus of Mytilene, Bias the Prienean, and our own Solon, Cleobulus the Lindian, and Myson of Chen, and the seventh among them was called Chilon, a Lacedaemonian. These were all zealous lovers and disciples of the culture of the Lacedaemonians. And any one may understand that their philosophy was something of this kind, short rememberable sayings uttered by each of them. They met together and offered these in common, as the first fruits of philosophy, to Apollo in his temple at Delphi, and they wrote upon the walls these sayings known and read of all men: Gnôthi sauton and Mêden agan. Protagoras, 343.+
Of course there is something in that of the romance to which the genius of Plato readily inclined him; something also of the Platonic humour or irony, which suggests, for example, to Meno, so anxious to be instructed in the theory of virtue, that the philosophic temper must be departed from Attica, its natural home, to Thessaly–to the rude northern capital whence that ingenuous youth was freshly arrived. Partly romantic, partly humorous, in his Laconism, Plato is however quite serious in locating a certain spirit at Lacedaemon of which his own ideal Republic would have been the completer development; while the picture he draws of it presents many a detail taken straight from Lacedaemon as it really was, as if by an admiring visitor, who had in person paced the streets of the Dorian metropolis it was so difficult for any [199] alien to enter. What was actually known of that stern place, of the Lacedaemonians at home, at school, had charmed into fancies about it other philosophic theorists; Xenophon for instance, who had little or nothing of romantic tendency about them.
And there was another sort of romancing also, quite opposite to this of Plato, concerning the hard ways among themselves of those Lacedaemonians who were so invincible in the field. “The Lacedaemonians,” says Pausanias, “appear to have admired least of all people poetry and the praise which it bestows.” “At Lacedaemon there is more philosophy than anywhere else in the world,” is what Plato, or the Platonic Socrates, had said. Yet, on the contrary, there were some who alleged that true Lacedaemonians–Lacedaemonian nobles–for their protection against the “effeminacies” of culture, were denied all knowledge of reading and writing. But then we know that written books are properly a mere assistant, sometimes, as Plato himself suggests, a treacherous assistant, to memory; those conservative Lacedaemonians being, so to speak, the people of memory pre-eminently, and very appropriately, for, whether or not they were taught to read and write, they were acknowledged adepts in the Pythagorean philosophy, a philosophy which attributes to memory so preponderating a function in the mental life. “Writing,” says K. O. Müller in his laborious, [200] yet, in spite of its air of coldness, passably romantic work on The Dorians–an author whose quiet enthusiasm for his subject resulted indeed in a patient scholarship which well befits it: “Writing,” he says, “was not essential in a nation where laws, hymns, and the praises of illustrious men–that is, jurisprudence and history–were taught in their schools of music.” Music, which is or ought to be, as we know, according to those Pythagorean doctrines, itself the essence of all things, was everywhere in the Perfect City of Plato; and among the Lacedaemonians also, who may be thought to have come within measurable distance of that Perfect City, though with no conscious theories about it, music (mousikê)+ in the larger sense of the word, was everywhere, not to alleviate only but actually to promote and inform, to be the very substance of their so strenuous and taxing habit of life. What was this “music,” this service or culture of the Muses, this harmony, partly moral, doubtless, but also throughout a matter of elaborate movement of the voice, of musical instruments, of all beside that could in any way be associated to such things–this music, for the maintenance, the perpetual sense of which those vigorous souls were ready to sacrifice so many opportunities, privileges, enjoyments of a different sort, so much of their ease, of themselves, of one another?
Platonism is a highly conscious reassertion [201] of one of the two constituent elements in the Hellenic genius, of the spirit of the highlands namely in which the early Dorian forefathers of the Lacedaemonians had secreted their peculiar disposition, in contrast with the mobile, the marine and fluid temper of the littoral Ionian people. The Republic of Plato is an embodiment of that Platonic reassertion or preference, of Platonism, as the principle of a society, ideal enough indeed, yet in various degrees practicable. It is not understood by Plato to be an erection de novo, and therefore only on paper. Its foundations might be laid in certain practicable changes to be enforced in the old schools, in a certain reformed music which must be taught there, and would float thence into the existing homes of Greece, under the shadow of its old temples, the sanction of its old religion, its old memories, the old names of things. Given the central idea, with its essentially renovating power, the well-worn elements of society as it is would rebuild themselves, and a new colour come gradually over all things as the proper expression of a certain new mind in them.
And in fact such embodiments of the specially Hellenic element in Hellenism, compacted in the natural course of political development, there had been, though in a less ideal form, in those many Dorian constitutions to which Aristotle refers. To Lacedaemon, in The Republic itself, admiring allusions abound, covert, yet bold [202] enough, if we remember the existing rivalry between Athens and her neighbour; and it becomes therefore a help in the study of Plato’s political ideal to approach as near as we may to that earlier actual embodiment of its principles, which is also very interesting in itself. The Platonic City of the Perfect would not have been cut clean away from the old roots of national life: would have had many links with the beautiful and venerable Greek cities of past and present. The ideal, poetic or romantic as it might seem, would but have begun where they had left off, where Lacedaemon, in particular, had left off. Let us then, by way of realising the better the physiognomy of Plato’s theoretic building, suppose some contemporary student of The Republic, a pupil, say! in the Athenian Academy, determined to gaze on the actual face of what has so strong a family likeness to it. Stimulated by his master’s unconcealed Laconism, his approval of contemporary Lacedaemon, he is at the pains to journey thither, and make personal inspection of a place, in Plato’s general commendations of which he may suspect some humour or irony, but which has unmistakably lent many a detail to his ideal Republic, on paper, or in thought.
He would have found it, this youthful Anacharsis, hard to get there, partly through the nature of the country, in part because the people of Lacedaemon (it was a point of system with them, as we heard just now) were suspicious of [203] foreigners. Romantic dealers in political theory at Athens were safe in saying pretty much what they pleased about its domestic doings. Still, not so far away, made, not in idea and by the movements of an abstract argument, the mere strokes of a philosophic pen, but solidified by constancy of character, fortified anew on emergency by heroic deeds, for itself, for the whole of Greece, though with such persistent hold throughout on an idea, or system of ideas, that it might seem actually to have come ready-made from the mind of some half-divine Lycurgus, or through him from Apollo himself, creator of that music of which it was an example:–there, in the hidden valley of the Eurotas, it was to be found, as a visible centre of actual human life, the place which was alleged to have come, harsh paradox as it might sound to Athenian ears, within measurable distance of civic perfection, of the political and social ideal.
Our youthful academic adventurer then, making his way along those difficult roads, between the ridges of the Eastern Acadian Mountains, and emerging at last into “hollow” Laconia, would have found himself in a country carefully made the most of by the labour of serfs; a land of slavery, far more relentlessly organised according to law than anywhere else in Greece, where, in truth, for the most part slavery was a kind of accident. But whatever rigours these slaves of Laconia were otherwise subjected to, they [204] enjoyed certainly that kind of well- being which does come of organisation, from the order and regularity of system, living under central military authority, and bound themselves to military service; to furnish (as under later feudal institutions) so many efficient men-at-arms on demand, and maintain themselves in readiness for war as they laboured in those distantly-scattered farms, seldom visited by their true masters from Lacedaemon, whither year by year they sent in kind their heavy tribute of oil, barley and wine. The very genius of conservatism here enthroned, secured, we may be sure, to this old-fashioned country life something of the personal dignity, of the enjoyments also, natural to it; somewhat livelier religious feasts, for example, than their lords allowed themselves. Stray echoes of their boisterous plebeian mirth on such occasions have reached us in Greek literature.
But if the traveller had penetrated a little more closely he would have been told certain startling stories, with at least a basis of truth in them, even as regards the age of Plato. These slaves were Greeks: no rude Scythians, nor crouching, decrepit Asiatics, like ordinary prisoners of war, the sort of slaves you could buy, but genuine Greeks, speaking their native tongue, if with less of muscular tension and energy, yet probably with pleasanter voice and accent than their essentially highland masters. Physically they throve, under something of the same discipline which had made [205] those masters the masters also of all Greece. They saw them now and then–their younger lords, brought, under strict tutelage, on those long hunting expeditions, one of their so rare enjoyments, prescribed for them, as was believed, by the founder of their polity. But sometimes (here was the report which made one shudder even in broad daylight, in those seemingly reposeful places) sometimes those young nobles of Lacedaemon reached them on a different kind of pursuit: came by night, secretly, though by no means contrarily to the laws of a state crafty as it was determined, to murder them at home, or a certain moiety of them; one here or there perhaps who, with good Achaean blood in his veins, and under a wholesome mode of life, was grown too tall, or too handsome, or too fruitful a father, to feel quite like a slave. Under a sort of slavery that makes him strong and beautiful, where personal beauty was so greatly prized, his masters are in fact jealous of him.
But masters thus hard to others, these Lacedaemonians, as we know, were the reverse of indulgent to themselves. While, as a matter of theory, power and privilege belonged exclusively to the old, to the seniors (hoi gerontes, hê gerousia)+ ruling by a council wherein no question might be discussed, one might only deliver one’s Aye! or No! Lacedaemon was in truth before all things an organised place of discipline, an organised [206] opportunity also, for youth, for the sort of youth that knew how to command by serving–a constant exhibition of youthful courage, youthful self-respect, yet above all of true youthful docility; youth thus committing itself absolutely, soul and body, to a corporate sentiment in its very sports. There was a third sort of regulation visits the lads of Lacedaemon were driven to pay to those country places, the vales, the uplands, when, to brace youthful stomachs and develope resource, they came at stated intervals as a kind of mendicants or thieves, feet and head uncovered through frost and heat, to steal their sustenance, under penalties if detected–“a survival,” as anthropologists would doubtless prove, pointing out collateral illustrations of the same, from a world of purely animal courage and keenness. Whips and rods used in a kind of monitorial system by themselves had a great part in the education of these young aristocrats, and, as pain surely must do, pain not of bodily disease or wretched accidents, but as it were by dignified rules of art, seem to have refined them, to have made them observant of the minutest direction in those musical exercises, wherein eye and ear and voice and foot all alike combined. There could be nothing paraleipomenon,+ as Plato says, no “oversights,” here. No! every one, at every moment, quite at his best; and, observe especially, with no superfluities; seeing that when we have to do with music of any kind, with matters of art, in stone, in words, [207] in the actions of life, all superfluities are in very truth “superfluities of naughtiness,” such as annihilate music.
The country through which our young traveller from his laxer school of Athens seeks his way to Lacedaemon, this land of a noble slavery, so peacefully occupied but for those irregular nocturnal terrors, was perhaps the loveliest in Greece, with that peculiarly blent loveliness, in which, as at Florence, the expression of a luxurious lowland is duly checked by the severity of its mountain barriers. It was a type of the Dorian purpose in life–sternness, like sea-water infused into wine, overtaking a matter naturally rich, at the moment when fulness may lose its savour and expression. Amid the corn and oleanders–corn “so tall, close, and luxuriant,” as the modern traveller there still finds–it was visible at last, Lacedaemon, koilê Spartê,+ “hollow Sparta,” under the sheltering walls of Taygetus, the broken and rugged forms of which were attributed to earthquake, but without proper walls of its own. In that natural fastness, or trap, or falcon’s nest, it had no need of them, the falcon of the land, with the hamlets (polichnia)+ a hundred and more, dispersed over it, in jealously enforced seclusion from one another.
From the first he notes “the antiquated appearance” of Lacedaemon, by no means a “growing” place, always rebuilding, remodelling itself, after the newest fashion, with shapeless suburbs [208] stretching farther and farther on every side of it, grown too large perhaps, as Plato threatens, to be a body, a corporate unity, at all: not that, but still, and to the last, itself only a great village, a solemn, ancient, mountain village. Even here of course there had been movement, some sort of progress, if so it is to be called, linking limb to limb; but long ago. Originally a union, after the manner of early Rome, of perhaps three or four neighbouring villages which had never lost their physiognomy, like Rome it occupied a group of irregular heights, the outermost roots of Taygetus, on the bank of a river or mountain torrent, impetuous enough in winter, a series of wide shallows and deep pools in the blazing summer. It was every day however, all the year round, that Lacedaemonian youth plunged itself in the Eurotas. Hence, from this circumstance of the union there of originally disparate parts, the picturesque and expressive irregularity, had they had time to think it such, of the “city” properly so termed, the one open place or street, High Street, or Corso–Aphetais by name, lined, irregularly again, with various religious and other monuments. It radiated on all sides into a mazy coil, an ambush, of narrow crooked lanes, up and down, in which attack and defence would necessarily be a matter of hand-to-hand fighting. In the outskirts lay the citizens’ houses, roomier far than those of Athens, with spacious, walled courts, almost in the country. Here, in contrast [209] to the homes of Athens, the legitimate wife had a real dignity, the unmarried woman a singular freedom. There were no door-knockers: you shouted at the outer gate to be let in. Between the high walls lanes passed into country roads, sacred ways to ancient sacro-sanct localities, Therapnae, Amyclae, on this side or that, under the shade of mighty plane-trees.
Plato, as you may remember, gives a hint that, like all other visible things, the very trees–how they grow–exercise an aesthetic influence on character. The diligent legislator therefore would have his preferences, even in this matter of the trees under which the citizens of the Perfect City might sit down to rest. What trees? you wonder. The olive? the laurel, as if wrought in grandiose metal? the cypress? that came to a wonderful height in Dorian Crete: the oak? we think it very expressive of strenuous national character. Well! certainly the plane-tree for one, characteristic tree of Lacedaemon then and now; a very tranquil and tranquillising object, spreading its level or gravely curved masses on the air as regally as the tree of Lebanon itself. A vast grove of such was the distinguishing mark of Lacedaemon in any distant view of it; that, and, as at Athens, a colossal image, older than the days of Phidias–the Demos of Lacedaemon, it would seem, towering visibly above the people it protected. Below those mighty trees, on an island in their national river, [210] were the “playing- fields,” where Lacedaemonian youth after sacrifice in the Ephebeum delighted others rather than itself (no “shirking” was allowed) with a sort of football, under rigorous self-imposed rules–tearing, biting–a sport, rougher even than our own, et même très dangereux, as our Attic neighbours, the French, say of the English game.
They were orderly enough perforce, the boys, the young men, within the city–seen, but not heard, except under regulations, when they made the best music in the world. Our visitor from Athens when he saw those youthful soldiers, or military students, as Xenophon in his pretty treatise on the polity of Lacedaemon describes, walking with downcast eyes, their hands meekly hidden in their cloaks, might have thought them young monks, had he known of such.
A little mountain town, however ambitious, however successful in its ambition, would hardly be expected to compete with Athens, or Corinth, itself a Dorian state, in art-production, yet had not only its characteristic preferences in this matter, in plastic and literary art, but had also many venerable and beautiful buildings to show. The Athenian visitor, who is standing now in the central space of Lacedaemon, notes here, as being a trait also of the “Perfect City” of academic theory, that precisely because these people find themselves very susceptible to the [211] influences of form and colour and sound, to external aesthetic influence, but have withal a special purpose, a certain strongly conceived disciplinary or ethic ideal, that therefore a peculiar humour prevails among them, a self-denying humour, in regard to these things. Those ancient Pelopid princes, from whom the hereditary kings of historic Lacedaemon, come back from exile into their old home, claim to be descended, had had their palaces, with a certain Homeric, Asiatic splendour, of wrought metal and the like; considerable relics of which still remained, but as public or sacred property now. At the time when Plato’s scholar stands before them, the houses of these later historic kings–two kings, as you remember, always reigning together, in some not quite clearly evolved differentiation of the temporal and spiritual functions–were plain enough; the royal doors, when beggar or courtier approached them, no daintier than Lycurgus had prescribed for all true Lacedaemonian citizens; rude, strange things to look at, fashioned only, like the ceilings within, with axe and saw, of old mountain oak or pine from those great Taygetan forests, whence came also the abundant iron, which this stern people of iron and steel had super-induced on that earlier dreamy age of silver and gold–steel, however, admirably tempered and wrought in its application to military use, and much sought after throughout Greece.
Layer upon layer, the relics of those earlier [212] generations, a whole succession of remarkable races, lay beneath the strenuous footsteps of the present occupants, as there was old poetic legend in the depths of their seemingly so practical or prosaic souls. Nor beneath their feet only: the relics of their worship, their sanctuaries, their tombs, their very houses, were part of the scenery of actual life. Our young Platonic visitor from Athens, climbing through those narrow winding lanes, and standing at length on the open platform of the Aphetais, finds himself surrounded by treasures, modest treasures of ancient architecture, dotted irregularly here and there about him, as if with conscious design upon picturesque effect, such irregularities sometimes carrying in them the secret of expression, an accent. Old Alcman for one had been alive to the poetic opportunities of the place; boasts that he belongs to Lacedaemon, “abounding in sacred tripods”; that it was here the Heliconian Muses had revealed themselves to him. If the private abodes even of royalty were rude it was only that the splendour of places dedicated to religion and the state might the more abound. Most splendid of them all, the Stoa Poekile, a cloister or portico with painted walls, to which the spoils of the Persian war had been devoted, ranged its pillars of white marble on one side of the central space: on the other, connecting those high memories with the task of the living, lay the Choros, where, at the Gymnopaedia, the Spartan youth danced in honour of Apollo.
[213] Scattered up and down among the monuments of victory in battle were the heroa, tombs or chapels of the heroes who had purchased it with their blood–Pausanias, Leonidas, brought home from Thermopylae forty years after his death. “A pillar too,” says Pausanias, “is erected here, on which the paternal names are inscribed of those who at Thermopylae sustained the attack of the Medes.” Here in truth all deities put on a martial habit–Aphrodite, the Muses, Eros himself, Athene Chalcioecus, Athene of the Brazen House, an antique temple towering above the rest, built from the spoils of some victory long since forgotten. The name of the artist who made the image of the tutelary goddess was remembered in the annals of early Greek art, Gitiades, a native of Lacedaemon. He had composed a hymn also in her praise. Could we have seen the place he had restored rather than constructed, with its covering of mythological reliefs in brass or bronze, perhaps Homer’s descriptions of a seemingly impossible sort of metallic architecture would have been less taxing to his reader’s imagination. Those who in other places had lost their taste amid the facile splendours of a later day, might here go to school again.
Throughout Greece, in fact, it was the Doric style which came to prevail as the religious or hieratic manner, never to be surpassed for that purpose, as the Gothic style seems likely to do with us. Though it is not exclusively the invention [214] of Dorian men, yet, says Müller, “the Dorian character created the Doric architecture,” and he notes in it, especially, the severity of the perfectly straight, smartly tapering line of its column; the bold projection of the capital; the alternation of long unornamented plain surfaces with narrower bands of decorated work; the profound shadows; the expression of security, of harmony, infused throughout; the magnificent pediment crowning the whole, like the cornice of mountain wall beyond, around, and above it. Standing there in the Aphetais, amid these venerable works of art, the visitor could not forget the natural architecture about him. As the Dorian genius had differentiated itself from the common Hellenic type in the heart of the mountains of Epirus, so here at last, in its final and most characteristic home, it was still surrounded by them:–ophrya te kai koilainetai.+
We know, some of us, what such mountain neighbourhood means. The wholesome vigour, the clearness and purity they maintain in matters such as air, light, water; how their presence multiplies the contrasts, the element of light and shadow, in things; the untouched perfection of the minuter ornament, flower or crystal, they permit one sparingly; their reproachful aloofness, though so close to us, keeping sensitive minds at least in a sort of moral alliance with their remoter solitudes. “The whole life of the Lacedaemonian community,” says Müller, [215] “had a secluded, impenetrable, and secret character.” You couldn’t really know it unless you were of it.
A system which conceived the whole of life as matter of attention, patience, a fidelity to detail, like that of good soldiers and musicians, could not but tell also on the merest handicrafts, constituting them in the fullest sense of a craft. If the money of Sparta was, or had recently been, of cumbrous iron, that was because its trade had a sufficient variety of stock to be mainly by barter, and we may suppose the market (into which, like our own academic youth at Oxford, young Spartans were forbidden to go) full enough of business– many a busy workshop in those winding lanes. The lower arts certainly no true Spartan might practise; but even Helots, artisan Helots, would have more than was usual elsewhere of that sharpened intelligence and the disciplined hand in such labour which really dignify those who follow it. In Athens itself certain Lacedaemonian commodities were much in demand, things of military service or for every-day use, turned out with flawless adaptation to their purpose.
The Helots, then, to whom this business exclusively belonged, a race of slaves, distinguishable however from the slaves or serfs who tilled the land, handing on their mastery in those matters in a kind of guild, father to son, through old-established families of flute- [216] players, wine-mixers, bakers, and the like, thus left their hereditary lords, Les Gens Fleur-de-lisés (to borrow an expression from French feudalism) in unbroken leisure, to perfect themselves for the proper functions of gentlemen–scholê,+ leisure, in the two senses of the word, which in truth involve one another–their whole time free, to be told out in austere schools. Long easeful nights, with more than enough to eat and drink, the “illiberal” pleasures of appetite, as Aristotle and Plato agree in thinking them, are of course the appropriate reward or remedy of those who work painfully with their hands, and seem to have been freely conceded to those Helots, who by concession of the State, from first to last their legal owner, were in domestic service, and sometimes much petted in the house, though by no means freely conceded to the “golden youth” of Lacedaemon–youth of gold, or gilded steel. The traditional Helot, drunk perforce to disgust his young master with the coarseness of vice, is probably a fable; and there are other stories full of a touching spirit of natural service, of submissiveness, of an instinctively loyal admiration for the brilliant qualities of one trained perhaps to despise him, by which the servitor must have become, in his measure, actually a sharer in them. Just here, for once, we see that slavish êthos,+ the servile range of sentiment, which ought to accompany the condition of slavery, if it be indeed, as Aristotle supposes, one of the [217] natural relationships between man and man, idealised, or aesthetically right, pleasant and proper; the aretê,+ or “best possible condition,” of the young servitor as such, including a sort of bodily worship, and a willingness to share the keen discipline which had developed the so attractive gallantry of his youthful lords.
A great wave, successive waves, of invasion, sufficiently remote to have lost already all historic truth of detail, had left them–these Helots, and the Perioeci, in the country round about–thus to serve among their own kinsmen, though so close to them in lineage, so much on a level with their masters in essential physical qualities that to the last they could never be entirely subdued in spirit. Patient modern research, following the track of a deep-rooted national tradition veiled in the mythological figments which centre in what is called “The Return of the Heraclidae,” reveals those northern immigrants or invaders, at various points on their way, dominant all along it, from a certain deep vale in the heart of the mountains of Epirus southwards, gradually through zone after zone of more temperate lowland, to reach their perfection, highlanders from first to last, in this mountain “hollow” of Lacedaemon. They claim supremacy, not as Dorian invaders, but as kinsmen of the old Achaean princes of the land; yet it was to the fact of conquest, to the necessity of [218] maintaining a position so strained, like that, as Aristotle expressly pointed out, of a beleaguered encampment in an enemy’s territory, that the singular institutions of Lacedaemon, the half-military, half-monastic spirit, which prevailed in this so gravely beautiful place, had been originally due. But observe!–Its moral and political system, in which that slavery was so significant a factor, its discipline, its aesthetic and other scruples, its peculiar moral êthos,+ having long before our Platonic student comes thither attained its original and proper ends, survived,–there is the point! survived as an end in itself, as a matter of sentiment, of public and perhaps still more of personal pride, though of the finer, the very finest sort, in one word as an ideal. Pericles, as you remember, in his famous vindication of the Athenian system, makes his hearers understand that the ends of the Lacedaemonian people might have been attained with less self-sacrifice than theirs. But still, there it remained, hê diaita Dôrikê+–the genuine Laconism of the Lacedaemonians themselves, their traditional conception of life, with its earnestness, its precision and strength, its loyalty to its own type, its impassioned completeness; a spectacle, aesthetically, at least, very interesting, like some perfect instrument shaping to what they visibly were, the most beautiful of all people, in Greece, in the world.
Gymnastic, “bodily exercise,” of course, does [219] not always and necessarily effect the like of that. A certain perfectly preserved old Roman mosaic pavement in the Lateran Museum, presents a terribly fresh picture of the results of another sort of “training,” the monstrous development by a cruel art, by exercise, of this or that muscle, changing boy or man into a merely mechanic instrument with which his breeders might make money by amusing the Roman people. Victor Hugo’s odious dream of L’homme qui rit, must have had something of a prototype among those old Roman gladiators. The Lacedaemonians, says Xenophon on the other hand, homoiôs apo te tôn skelôn kai apo cheirôn kai apo trachêlou gymnazontai.+ Here too, that is to say, they aimed at, they found, proportion, Pythagorean symmetry or music, and bold as they could be in their exercises (it was a Lacedaemonian who, at Olympia, for the first time threw aside the heavy girdle and ran naked to the goal) forbade all that was likely to disfigure the body. Though we must not suppose all ties of nature rent asunder, nor all connexion between parents and children in those genial, retired houses at an end in very early life, it was yet a strictly public education which began with them betimes, and with a very clearly defined programme, conservative of ancient traditional and unwritten rules, an aristocratic education for the few, the liberales–“liberals,” as we may say, in that the proper sense of the word. It made them, in [220] very deed, the lords, the masters, of those they were meant by-and-by to rule; masters, of their very souls, of their imagination, enforcing on them an ideal, by a sort of spiritual authority, thus backing, or backed by, a very effective organisation of “the power of the sword.” In speaking of Lacedaemon, you see, it comes naturally to speak out of proportion, it might seem, of its youth, and of the education of its youth. But in fact if you enter into the spirit of Lacedaemonian youth, you may conceive Lacedaemonian manhood for yourselves. You divine already what the boy, the youth, so late in obtaining his majority, in becoming a man, came to be in the action of life, and on the battle-field. “In a Doric state,” says Müller, “education was, on the whole, a matter of more importance than government.”
A young Lacedaemonian, then, of the privileged class left his home, his tender nurses in those large, quiet old suburban houses early, for a public school, a schooling all the stricter as years went on, to be followed, even so, by a peculiar kind of barrack-life, the temper of which, a sort of military monasticism (it must be repeated) would beset him to the end. Though in the gymnasia of Lacedaemon no idle by- standers, no–well! Platonic loungers after truth or what not–were permitted, yet we are told, neither there nor in Sparta generally, neither there nor anywhere else, were the boys permitted [221] to be alone. If a certain love of reserve, of seclusion, characterised the Spartan citizen as such, it was perhaps the cicatrice of that wrench from a soft home into the imperative, inevitable gaze of his fellows, broad, searching, minute, his regret for, his desire to regain, moral and mental even more than physical ease. And his education continued late; he could seldom think of marriage till the age of thirty. Ethically it aimed at the reality, aesthetically at the expression, of reserved power, and from the first set its subject on the thought of his personal dignity, of self-command, in the artistic way of a good musician, a good soldier. It is noted that “the general accent of the Doric dialect has itself the character not of question or entreaty, but of command or dictation.” The place of deference, of obedience, was large in the education of Lacedaemonian youth; and they never complained. It involved however for the most part, as with ourselves, the government of youth by itself; an implicit subordination of the younger to the older, in many degrees. Quite early in life, at school, they found that superiors and inferiors, homoioi and hypomeiones,+ there really were; and their education proceeded with systematic boldness on that fact. Eirên, melleirên, sideunês,+ and the like–words, titles, which indicate an unflinching elaboration of the attitudes of youthful subordination and command with responsibility–remain as a part of what we might [222] call their “public-school slang.” They ate together “in their divisions” (agelai)+ on much the same fare every day at a sort of messes; not reclined, like Ionians or Asiatics, but like heroes, the princely males, in Homer, sitting upright on their wooden benches; were “inspected” frequently, and by free use of vivâ voce examination “became adepts in presence of mind,” in mental readiness and vigour, in the brief mode of speech Plato commends, which took and has kept its name from them; with no warm baths allowed; a daily plunge in their river required. Yes! The beauty of these most beautiful of all people was a male beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness; had the expression of a certain ascêsis in it; was like un-sweetened wine. In comparison with it, beauty of another type might seem to be wanting in edge or accent.
And they could be silent. Of the positive uses of the negation of speech, like genuine scholars of Pythagoras, the Lacedaemonians were well aware, gaining strength and intensity by repression. Long spaces of enforced silence had doubtless something to do with that expressive brevity of utterance, which could be also, when they cared, so inexpressive of what their intentions really were–something to do with the habit of mind to which such speaking would come naturally. In contrast with the ceaseless prattle of Athens, Lacedaemonian assemblies lasted as short a time as possible, all standing. A [223] Lacedaemonian ambassador being asked in whose name he was come, replies: “In the name of the State, if I succeed; if I fail, in my own.” What they lost in extension they gained in depth.
Had our traveller been tempted to ask a young Lacedaemonian to return his visit at Athens, permission would have been refused him. He belonged to a community bent above all things on keeping indelibly its own proper colour. Its more strictly mental education centered, in fact, upon a faithful training of the memory, again in the spirit of Pythagoras, in regard to what seemed best worth remembering. Hard and practical as Lacedaemonians might seem, they lived nevertheless very much by imagination; and to train the memory, to preoccupy their minds with the past, as in our own classic or historic culture of youth, was in reality to develope a vigorous imagination. In music (mousikê)+ as they conceived it, there would be no strictly selfish reading, writing or listening; and if there was little a Lacedaemonian lad had to read or write at all, he had much to learn, like a true conservative, by heart: those unwritten laws of which the Council of Elders was the authorised depositary, and on which the whole public procedure of the state depended; the archaic forms of religious worship; the names of their kings, of victors in their games or in battle; the brief record of great events; the oracles they had received; the rhetrai, from [224] Lycurgus downwards, composed in metrical Lacedaemonian Greek; their history and law, in short, actually set to music, by Terpander and others, as was said. What the Lacedaemonian learned by heart he was for the most part to sing, and we catch a glimpse, an echo, of their boys in school chanting; one of the things in old Greece one would have liked best to see and hear–youthful beauty and strength in perfect service–a manifestation of the true and genuine Hellenism, though it may make one think of the novices at school in some Gothic cloister, of our own old English schools, nay, of the young Lacedaemonian’s cousins at Sion, singing there the law and its praises.
The Platonic student of the ways of the Lacedaemonians observes then, is interested in observing, that their education, which indeed makes no sharp distinction between mental and bodily exercise, results as it had begun in “music”–ends with body, mind, memory above all, at their finest, on great show-days, in the dance. Austere, self-denying Lacedaemon had in fact one of the largest theatres in Greece, in part scooped out boldly on the hill-side, built partly of enormous blocks of stone, the foundations of which may still be seen. We read what Plato says in The Republic of “imitations,” of the imitative arts, imitation reaching of course its largest development on the stage, and are perhaps surprised at the importance he assigns, in every department of [225] human culture, to a matter of that kind. But here as elsewhere to see was to understand. We should have understood Plato’s drift in his long criticism and defence of imitative art, his careful system of rules concerning it, could we have seen the famous dramatic Lacedaemonian dancing. They danced a theme, a subject. A complex and elaborate art this must necessarily have been, but, as we may gather, as concise, direct, economically expressive, in all its varied sound and motion, as those swift, lightly girt, impromptu Lacedaemonian sayings. With no movement of voice or hand or foot, paraleipomenon,+ unconsidered, as Plato forbids, it was the perfect flower of their correction, of that minute patience and care which ends in a perfect expressiveness; not a note, a glance, a touch, but told obediently in the promotion of a firmly grasped mental conception, as in that perfect poetry or sculpture or painting, in which “the finger of the master is on every part of his work.” We have nothing really like it, and to comprehend it must remember that, though it took place in part at least on the stage of a theatre–was in fact a ballet-dance, it had also the character both of a liturgical service and of a military inspection; and yet, in spite of its severity of rule, was a natural expression of the delight of all who took part in it.
So perfect a spectacle the gods themselves might be thought pleased to witness; were in [226] consequence presented with it as an important element in the religious worship of the Lacedaemonians, in whose life religion had even a larger part than with the other Greeks, conspicuously religious, deisidaimones,+ involved in religion or superstition, as the Greeks generally were. More closely even than their so scrupulous neighbours they associated the state, its acts and officers, with a religious sanction, religious usages, theories, traditions. While the responsibilities of secular government lay upon the Ephors, those mysteriously dual, at first sight useless, and yet so sanctimoniously observed kings, “of the house of Heracles,” with something of the splendour of the old Achaean or Homeric kings, in life as also in death, the splendid funerals, the passionate archaic laments which then followed them, were in fact of spiritual or priestly rank, the living and active centre of a poetic religious system, binding them “in a beneficent connexion” to the past, and in the present with special closeness to the oracle of Delphi.
Of that catholic or general centre of Greek religion the Lacedaemonians were the hereditary and privileged guardians, as also the peculiar people of Apollo, the god of Delphi; but, observe! of Apollo in a peculiar development of his deity. In the dramatic business of Lacedaemon, centering in these almost liturgical dances, there was little comic acting. The fondness of the slaves for buffoonery and loud [227] laughter, was to their master, who had no taste for the like, a reassuring note of his superiority. He therefore indulged them in it on occasion, and you might fancy that the religion of a people so strenuous, ever so full of their dignity, must have been a religion of gloom. It was otherwise. The Lacedaemonians, like those monastic persons of whom they so often remind one, as a matter of fact however surprising, were a very cheerful people; and the religion of which they had so much, deeply imbued everywhere with an optimism as of hopeful youth, encouraged that disposition, was above all a religion of sanity. The observant Platonic visitor might have taken note that something of that purgation of religious thought and sentiment, of its expression in literature, recommended in Plato’s Republic, had been already quietly effected here, towards the establishment of a kind of cheerful daylight in men’s tempers.
In furtherance then of such a religion of sanity, of that harmony of functions, which is the Aristotelian definition of health, Apollo, sanest of the national gods, became also the tribal or home god of Lacedaemon. That common Greek worship of Apollo they made especially their own, but (just here is the noticeable point) with a marked preference for the human element in him, for the mental powers of his being over those elemental or physical forces of production, which he also mystically represents, and which resulted [228] sometimes in an orgiastic, an unintellectual, or even an immoral service. He remains youthful and unmarried. In congruity with this, it is observed that, in a quasi-Roman worship, abstract qualities and relationships, ideals, become subsidiary objects of religious consideration around him, such as sleep, death, fear, fortune, laughter even. Nay, other gods also are, so to speak, Apollinised, adapted to the Apolline presence; Aphrodite armed, Enyalius in fetters, perhaps that he may never depart thence. Amateurs everywhere of the virile element in life, the Lacedaemonians, in truth, impart to all things an intellectual character. Adding a vigorous logic to seemingly animal instincts, for them courage itself becomes, as for the strictly philosophic mind at Athens, with Plato and Aristotle, an intellectual condition, a form of right knowledge.
Such assertion of the consciously human interest in a religion based originally on a preoccupation with the unconscious forces of nature, was exemplified in the great religious festival of Lacedaemon. As a spectator of the Hyacinthia, our Platonic student would have found himself one of a large body of strangers, gathered together from Lacedaemon and its dependent towns and villages, within the ancient precincts of Amyclae, at the season between spring and summer when under the first fierce heat of the year the abundant hyacinths fade from the fields. Blue flowers, [229] you remember, are the rarest, to many eyes the loveliest; and the Lacedaemonians with their guests were met together to celebrate the death of the hapless lad who had lent his name to them, Hyacinthus, son of Apollo, or son of an ancient mortal king who had reigned in this very place; in either case, greatly beloved of the god, who had slain him by sad accident as they played at quoits together delightfully, to his immense sorrow. That Boreas (the north-wind) had maliciously miscarried the discus, is a circumstance we hardly need to remind us that we have here, of course, only one of many transparent, unmistakable, parables or symbols of the great solar change, so sudden in the south, like the story of Proserpine, Adonis, and the like. But here, more completely perhaps than in any other of those stories, the primary elemental sense had obscured itself behind its really tragic analogue in human life, behind the figure of the dying youth. We know little of the details of the feast; incidentally, that Apollo was vested on the occasion in a purple robe, brought in ceremony from Lacedaemon, woven there, Pausanias tells us, in a certain house called from that circumstance Chiton.+ You may remember how sparing these Lacedaemonians were of such dyed raiment, of any but the natural and virgin colouring of the fleece; that purple or red, however, was the colour of their royal funerals, as indeed Amyclae itself was famous for purple stuffs–Amyclaeae vestes. As [230] the general order of the feast, we discern clearly a single day of somewhat shrill gaiety, between two days of significant mourning after the manner of All Souls’ Day, directed from mimic grief for a mythic object, to a really sorrowful commemoration by the whole Lacedaemonian people–each separate family for its own deceased members.
It was so again with those other youthful demi-gods, the Dioscuri, themselves also, in old heroic time, resident in this venerable place: Amyclaei fratres, fraternal leaders of the Lacedaemonian people. Their statues at this date were numerous in Laconia, or the docana, primitive symbols of them, those two upright beams of wood, carried to battle before the two kings, until it happened that through their secret enmity a certain battle was lost, after which one king only proceeded to the field, and one part only of that token of fraternity, the other remaining at Sparta. Well! they were two stars, you know, at their original birth in men’s minds, Gemini, virginal fresh stars of dawn, rising and setting alternately–those two half-earthly, half-celestial brothers, one of whom, Polydeuces, was immortal. The other, Castor, the younger, subject to old age and death, had fallen in battle, was found breathing his last. Polydeuces thereupon, at his own prayer, was permitted to die: with undying fraternal affection, had forgone one moiety of his privilege, and lay in the grave for a day in his [231] brother’s stead, but shone out again on the morrow; the brothers thus ever coming and going, interchangeably, but both alike gifted now with immortal youth.
In their origin, then, very obviously elemental deities, they were thus become almost wholly humanised, fraternised with the Lacedaemonian people, their closest friends of the whole celestial company, visitors, as fond legend told, at their very hearths, found warming themselves in the half-light at their rude fire-sides. Themselves thus visible on occasion, at all times in devout art, they were the starry patrons of all that youth was proud of, delighted in, horsemanship, games, battle; and always with that profound fraternal sentiment. Brothers, comrades, who could not live without each other, they were the most fitting patrons of a place in which friendship, comradeship, like theirs, came to so much. Lovers of youth they remained, those enstarred types of it, arrested thus at that moment of miraculous good fortune as a consecration of the clean, youthful friendship, “passing even the love of woman,” which, by system, and under the sanction of their founder’s name, elaborated into a kind of art, became an elementary part of education. A part of their duty and discipline, it was also their great solace and encouragement. The beloved and the lover, side by