2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST

"this is the path to persuasion, for truth goes along with it. The other--that what is, is not; and by consequence that what is not, is:-- I tell you that is the way which goes counter to persuasion:

     tên dê toi phrazô panapeithea emmen atarpon? oute gar an gnoiês
     to ge mê eon ou gar ephikton?+

That which is not, never could you know: there is no way of getting at that; nor could you explain it to another; for Thought and Being are identical."--Famous utterance, yet of so dubious omen!--To gar auto voein estin te kai einai +---idem est enim cogitare et esse. "It is one to me," he proceeds, "at what point I begin; for thither I shall come back over again: tothi gar palin hixomai authis."+

Yes, truly! again and again, in an empty circle, we may say; and certainly, with those [40] dry and difficult words in our ears, may think for a moment that philosophic reflexion has already done that delightfully superficial Greek world an ill turn, troubling so early its ingenuous soul; that the European mind, as was said, will never be quite sane again. It has been put on a quest (vain quest it may prove to be) after a kind of knowledge perhaps not properly attainable. Hereafter, in every age, some will be found to start afresh quixotically, through what wastes of words! in search of that true Substance, the One, the Absolute, which to the majority of acute people is after all but zero, and a mere algebraic symbol for nothingness. In themselves, by the way, such search may bring out fine intellectual qualities; and thus, in turn, be of service to those who can profit by the spectacle of an enthusiasm not meant for them; must nevertheless be admitted to have had all along something of disease about it; as indeed to Plato himself the philosophic instinct as such is a form of "mania."

An infectious mania, it might seem,--that strange passion for nonentity, to which the Greek was so oddly liable, to which the human mind generally might be thought to have been constitutionally predisposed; for the doctrine of "The One" had come to the surface before in old Indian dreams of self-annihilation, which had been revived, in the second century after Christ, in the ecstasies (ecstasies of the pure [41] spirit, leaving the body behind it) recommended by the Neo-Platonists; and again, in the Middle Age, as a finer shade of Christian experience, in the mystic doctrines of Eckhart and Tauler concerning that union with God which can only be attained by the literal negation of self, by a kind of moral suicide; of which something also may be found, under the cowl of the monk, in the clear, cold, inaccessible, impossible heights of the book of the Imitation. It presents itself once more, now altogether beyond Christian influence, in the hard and ambitious intellectualism of Spinoza; a doctrine of pure repellent substance--substance "in vacuo," to be lost in which, however, would be the proper consummation of the transitory individual life. Spinoza's own absolutely colourless existence was a practical comment upon it. Descartes; Malebranche, under the monk's cowl again; Leibnitz; Berkeley with his theory of the "Vision of all things in God"; do but present variations on the same theme through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By one and all it is assumed, in the words of Plato, that to be colourless, formless, impalpable is the note of the superior grade of knowledge and existence, evanescing steadily, as one ascends towards that perfect (perhaps not quite attainable) condition of either, which in truth can only be attained by the suppression of all the rule and outline of one's own actual experience and thought.

[42] Something like that certainly there had been already in the doctrine of Parmenides, to whom Plato was so willing to go to school. And in the nineteenth century, as on the one hand the philosophy of motion, of the "perpetual flux," receives its share of verification from that theory of development with which in various forms all modern science is prepossessed; so, on the other hand, the philosophy of rest also, of the perpetual lethargy, the Parmenidean assertion of the exclusive reign of "The One," receives an unlooked-for testimony from the modern physical philosopher, hinting that the phenomena he deals with--matter, organism, consciousness--began in a state of indeterminate, abstract indifference, with a single uneasy start in a sort of eternal sleep, a ripple on the dead, level surface. Increasing indeed for a while in radius and depth, under the force of mechanic law, the world of motion and life is however destined, by force of its own friction, to be restored sooner or later to equilibrium; nay, is already gone back some noticeable degrees (how desirably!) to the primeval indifference, as may be understood by those who can reckon the time it will take for our worn-out planet, surviving all the fret of the humanity it housed for a while, to be drawn into the sun.

But it is of Plato after all we should be thinking; of the comparatively temperate thoughts, the axiomata media, he was able to derive, by a [43] sort of compromise, from the impossible paradox of his ancient master. What was it, among things inevitably manifest on his pages as we read him, that Plato borrowed and kept from the Eleatic School!

Two essential judgments of his philosophy: The opposition of what is, to what appears; and the parallel opposition of knowledge to opinion; (heteron epistêmês doxa; eph' heterô ara heteron ti dynamenê hekatera autôn pephyke? ouk enchôrei gnôston kai doxaston tauton einai?)+ and thirdly, to illustrate that opposition, the figurative use, so impressed on thought and speech by Plato that it has come to seem hardly a figure of speech at all but appropriate philosophic language, of the opposition of light to darkness.--

     Well, then (Socrates is made to say in the fifth book of The
     Republic) if what is, is the object of knowledge, would not
     something other than what is, be the object of opinion?

     Yes! something else.

     Does opinion then opine what is not; or is it impossible to have
     even opinion concerning what is not?  Consider! does not he who
     has opinion direct his opinion upon something? or is it
     impossible, again, to have an opinion, yet an opinion about
     nothing?

     Impossible!

     But he who has an opinion has opinion at least about something;
     hasn't he?  Yet after all what is not, is not a thing; but would
     most properly be denominated nothing.

     Certainly.

     Now to what is not, we assigned of necessity ignorance: to what
     is, knowledge.

     Rightly: he said.

     [44] Neither what is, then, nor what is not, is the object of
     opinion.

     No!

     Opinion therefore would be neither ignorance nor knowledge.

     It seems not.

     Is it, then, beyond these; going beyond knowledge in clearness,
     beyond ignorance in obscurity?

     Neither the one, nor the other.

     But, I asked, opinion seems to you (doesn't it?) to be a darker
     thing than knowledge, yet lighter than ignorance.

     Very much so; he answered.

     Does it lie within those two?

     Yes.

     Opinion, then, would be midway, between these two conditions?

     Undoubtedly so.

     Now didn't we say in what went before that if anything became
     apparent such that it is, and is not, at the same time, a thing
     of that kind would lie between that which is in unmixed clearness,
     and that which wholly is not; and that there would be, in regard
     to that, neither knowledge nor ignorance; but, again, a condition
     revealing itself between ignorance and knowledge?

     Rightly.

     And now, between these two, what we call 'opinion' has in fact
     revealed itself.

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