2: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF REST

     Clearly so.

     It would remain for us therefore, as it seems, to find that which
     partakes of both--both of Being and Not-being, and which could
     rightly be called by neither term distinctly; in order that, if it
     appear, we may in justice determine it to be the object of opinion;
     assigning the extremes to the extremes, the intermediate to what
     comes between them.
 

     Or is it not thus?

     Thus it is.

     These points then being assumed, let him tell me! let him speak
     and give his answer--that excellent person, who on the one hand
     thinks there is no Beauty itself, nor any idea of Beauty itself,
     ever in the same condition in regard to the same things (aei kata
     tauta hôsautôs echousan)+ yet, on the other hand, holds [45] that
     there are the many beautiful objects:--that lover of sight (ho
     philotheamôn)+ who can by no means bear it if any one says that
     the beautiful is one; the just also; and the rest, after the same
     way.  For good Sir! we shall say, pray tell us, is there any one
     of these many beautiful things which will not appear ugly (under
     certain conditions) of the many just or pious actions which will
     not seem unjust or impious?

     No! he answered.  Rather it must be that they shall seem, in a
     manner, both beautiful and ugly; and all the rest you ask of.

     Well!  The many double things:--Do they seem to be at all less
     half than double?

     Not at all.

     And great, in truth, and little, and light, and heavy--will they
     at all more truly be called by these names which we may give them,
     than by the opposite names?

     No! he said; but each of them will always hold of both.

     Every several instance of 'The Many,' then--is it, more truly
     than it is not, that which one may affirm it to be?

     It is like people at supper-parties he said (very Attic supper-
     parties!) playing on words, and the children's riddle about the
     eunuch and his fling round the bat--with what, and on what, the
     riddle says he hit it; for these things also seem to set both
     ways, and it is not possible, fixedly, to conceive any one of
     them either to be, or not to be; neither both, nor the one, nor
     the other.

     Have you anything then you can do with them; or anywhere you can
     place them with fairer effect than in that position between being
     and the being not?  For presumably they will not appear more
     obscure than what is not, so as not to be, still more; nor more
     luminous than what is, so as to be, even more than that.  We have
     found then that the many customary notions of the many, about
     Beauty and the rest are revolved somewhere between not-being and
     being unmixedly.

     So we have.

     And agreed, at least, at the outset, that if anything of this sort
     presented itself, it must be declared matter not of knowledge, but
     of opinion; to be apprehended by the intermediate faculty; as it
     wanders unfixed, there, between.  Republic, 478.

[46] Many a train of thought, many a turn of expression, only too familiar, some may think, to the reader of Plato, are summarised in that troublesome yet perhaps attractive passage. The influence then of Parmenides on Plato had made him, incurably (shall we say?) a dualist. Only, practically, Plato's richly coloured genius will find a compromise between the One which alone really is, is yet so empty a thought for finite minds; and the Many, which most properly is not, yet presses so closely on eye and ear and heart and fancy and will, at every moment. That which really is (to on)+ the One, if he is really to think about it at all, must admit within it a certain variety of members; and, in effect, for Plato the true Being, the Absolute, the One, does become delightfully multiple, as the world of ideas-- appreciable, through years of loving study, more and more clearly, one by one, as the perfectly concrete, mutually adjusted, permanent forms of our veritable experience: the Bravery, for instance, that cannot be confused, not merely with Cowardice, but with Wisdom, or Humility. One after another they emerge again from the dead level, the Parmenidean tabula rasa, with nothing less than the reality of persons face to face with us, of a personal identity. It was as if the firm plastic outlines of the delightful old Greek polytheism had found their way back after all into a repellent monotheism. Prefer as he may in theory that [47] blank white light of the One--its sterile, "formless, colourless, impalpable," eternal identity with itself--the world, and this chiefly is why the world has not forgotten him, will be for him, as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place. He will suffer it to come to him, as his pages convey it in turn to us, with the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicuously visual emblem of it, the outline of which (essentially characteristic of himself as it seems) he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic teacher who had tried so hard to close the bodily eye that he might the better apprehend the world unseen.--

     And now (he writes in the seventh book of The Republic) take
     for a figure of human nature, as regards education and the lack
     thereof, some such condition as this.  Think you see people as
     it were in some abode below-ground, like a cave, having its
     entrance spread out upwards towards the light, broad, across the
     whole cavern.  Suppose them here from childhood; their legs and
     necks chained; so that there they stay, and can see only what is
     in front of them, being unable by reason of the chain to move
     their heads round about: and the light of a fire upon them,
     blazing from far above, behind their backs: between the fire and
     the prisoners away up aloft: and see beside it a low wall built
     along, as with the showmen, in front of the people lie the screens
     above which they exhibit their wonders.

     I see: he said.

     See, then, along this low wall, men, bearing vessels of all sorts
     wrought in stone and wood; and, naturally, some of the bearers
     talking, other silent.

     It is a strange figure you describe: said he: and strange
     prisoners.--

     They are like ourselves: I answered!  Republic, 514.

[48] Metaphysical formulae have always their practical equivalents. The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides, with Socrates, and the Cynics or the Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of the One, as the Cyrenaic monochronos hêdonê+--the pleasure of the ideal now--is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion; and, as sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic for the understanding is found to be realisable enough as one of many phases of our so flexible human feeling. The abstract philosophy of the One might seem indeed to have been translated into the terms of a human will in the rigid, disinterested, renunciant career of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, its mortal coldness. Let me however conclude with a document of the Eleatic temper, nearer in its origin to the age of Plato: an ancient fragment of Cleanthes the Stoic, which has justly stirred the admiration of Stoical minds; though truly, so hard is it not to lapse from those austere heights, the One, the Absolute, has become in it after all, with much varied colour and detail in his relations to concrete things and persons, our father Zeus.

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