3: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

Well! that is true in a sense, as Socrates admits; not however in any sense which encourages idle acquiescence in what according to common language is our ignorance. There is a sense (it is exemplified in regard to sound and colour, perhaps in some far more important things) in which it is matter of experience that it is impossible to seek for, or be taught, what one does not know already. He who is in total ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them. Where could one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means incapacity for receiving knowledge. Yes, certainly; the Pythagoreans are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence- -: anamnêsis + famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don't know: how that happens. In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument most [63] fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno's slaves, a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry: introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on the table--particular objects, the mere sight of which will rouse him when subjected to the dialectical treatment, to universal truths concerning them. The problem required of him is to describe a square of a particular size: to find the line which must be the side of such a square; and he is to find it for himself. Meno, carefully on his guard, is to watch whether the boy is taught by Socrates in any of his answers; whether he answers anything at any point otherwise than by way of reminiscence and really out of his own mind, as the reasonable questions of Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or like sunlight on the photographer's negative.

"See him now!" he cries triumphantly, "How he remembers; in the logical order; as he ought to remember!" The reader, in truth, following closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space. It is [64] once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them: that as he remembers, in logical order (hôs dei)+ so he makes the mistakes also which he ought to make--the right sort of mistakes, such as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a kind of properly innate errors. Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai hai doxai autai.+--"Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him"; and he will perform, Socrates assures us, similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical problems, with any and every problem whatever.

"If then," observes Socrates in the Phaedo, wistfully pondering, for such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine:--

     If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathe-
     matical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already
     possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before
     and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the
     equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things
     of the kind?  For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is
     to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds
     not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute
     Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again, after the
     dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just
     and good, and about all things whatever, upon [65] which, in
     all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal--hois
     episphragizometha touto + --That, which really is.  Phaedo, 75.

But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno--from the prison-cell to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment upon the young boy with the square:-- Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erôtêsantos, epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên;+ "Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning, will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense (epistêmê)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?"--Yes! and that recovery is an act of reminiscence.

These opinions therefore, the boy's discoverable right notions about side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as consciously reasoned knowledge (erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai).+ That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us--the doctrine namely of metempsychôsis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then, would be immortal (athanatos an hê psychê eiê)+ prospectively as well as in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth "over the way, there," as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all events, it seemed plain that "the soul is eternal. It is right therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that is to say, one does not remember, just now." Those notions were in the boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half- obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again now, so kindly, so firmly!

Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the proper vocation of the philosophic teacher [67] to supervene with his encouraging questions. And there was another doctrine--a persuasion still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains-- "reminiscence." Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno, in the locus classicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain religious persons, priests and priestesses,

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