3: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF NUMBER

The student of The Republic hardly needs to be reminded how all- pervasive in it that imagery is; how emphatic, in all its speculative theory, in all its practical provisions, is the desire for harmony; how the whole business of education (of gymnastic even, the seeming rival of music) is brought under it; how large a part of the claims of duty, of right conduct, for the perfectly initiated, comes with him to be this, that it sounds so well. Plêmmeleia,+ discordancy,--all faultiness resolves itself into that. "Canst play on this flute?" asks Hamlet:-- on human nature, with all its stops, of whose capricious tuneableness, or want of tune, he is himself the representative. Well! the perfect state, thinks Plato, can. For him, music is still everywhere in the world, and the whole business of philosophy only as it were the correct editing of it: as it will be the whole business of the state to repress, in the great concert, the jarring self-assertion (pleonexia)+ of those whose voices have large natural power in them. How, in detail, rhythm, the limit (peras)+ is enforced in Plato's Republic there is no time to [72] show. Call to mind only that the perfect visible equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-statues of the actual youth of Greece--legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than its fancied forms of deity--the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the apoxyomenus; and how the most beautiful type of such youth, by the universal admission of the Greeks themselves, had issued from the severe schools of Sparta, that highest civic embodiment of the Dorian temper, like some perfect musical instrument, perfectly responsive to the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of law.--Yet with a fresh setting of the old music in each succeeding generation. For in truth we come into the world, each one of us, "not in nakedness," but by the natural course of organic development clothed far more completely than even Pythagoras supposed in a vesture of the past, nay, fatally shrouded, it might seem, in those laws or tricks of heredity which we mistake for our volitions; in the language which is more than one half of our thoughts; in the moral and mental habits, the customs, the literature, the very houses, which we did not make for ourselves; in the vesture of a past, which is (so science would assure us) not ours, but of the race, the species: that Zeit-geist, or abstract secular process, in which, as we could have had no direct consciousness of it, so we can pretend to no future personal interest. It is humanity itself now--abstract humanity--that [73] figures as the transmigrating soul, accumulating into its "colossal manhood" the experience of ages; making use of, and casting aside in its march, the souls of countless individuals, as Pythagoras supposed the individual soul to cast aside again and again its outworn body.

So it may be. There was nothing of all that, however, in the mind of the great English poet at the beginning of this century whose famous Ode on The Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood, in which he made metempsychôsis his own, must still express for some minds something more than merely poetic truth. For Pythagoreanism too, like all the graver utterances of primitive Greek philosophy, is an instinct of the human mind itself, and therefore also a constant tradition in its history, which will recur; fortifying this or that soul here or there in a part at least of that old sanguine assurance about itself, which possessed Socrates so immovably, his masters, his disciples. Those who do not already know Wordsworth's Ode ought soon to read it for themselves. Listen instead to the lines which perhaps suggested Wordsworth's: The Retreat, by Henry Vaughan, one of the so- called Platonist poets of about two centuries ago, who was able to blend those Pythagorean doctrines with the Christian belief, amid which indeed, from the unsanctioned dreams of Origen onwards, those doctrines have shown themselves not otherwise than at home.

[74] Happy, those days, he declares,

     Before I understood this place,
     Appointed for my second race;
     Or taught my soul to fancy ought
     But a white celestial thought;
     When yet I had not walked above
     A mile or two from my first love;
     But felt through all this fleshly dress
     Bright shoots of everlastingness.
     O! how I long to travel back
     And tread again that ancient track!
     That I might once more reach that plain,
     Where first I left my glorious train.--
     But Ah! my soul with too much stay
     Is drunk; and staggers in the way.
     Some men a forward motion love,
     But I backward steps would move;
     And when this dust falls to the urn
     In that state I came return.

Summing up those three philosophies antecedent to Plato, we might say, that if Heraclitus taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics that of rest, so, in such quaint phrase as Vaughan's, Pythagoreanism is the philosophy of re-action.

NOTES

52. +Transliteration: archê. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1. supreme power, sovereignty, dominion; 2. office."

53. +Transliteration: homoion homoiô. Translation: "like by like."

56. +Transliteration: Alêtheian de ametria hêgei syngenê einai, ê emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth is close kin to measure and proportion, or to disproportion?" Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.

56. +Transliteration: Emmetria. E-text editor's translation: "To measure and proportion." Plato, The Republic, Book VI, 486d.

59. *Or to Mr. Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy; which I have read since these pages went to press, with much admiration for its learning and lucidity, and its unconventionality of view.

59. +Transliteration: to apeiron . . . to peras. Liddell and Scott definition: "I. without trial or experience of a thing . . . II. boundless, endless, countless / an end, extremity." As Pater indicates, in Plato the terms mean something like "infinite" and "finite," or "bounded" and "unbounded."

60. +Transliteration: systoichiai tôn enantiôn. "Co-ordinates consisting of opposites."

60. +Transliteration: peras. See above, second note for page 59.

60. +Transliteration: to apeiron. See above, second note for page 59.

61. +Transliteration: askêsis. Liddell and Scott definition: "excercise, training."

61. +Transliteration: physei. Liddell and Scott definition of physis: "the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or thing." Thus, the dative form cited by Pater means, "with regard to nature."

61. +Transliteration: theia moira. Translation: "one's lot by divine appointment."

62. +Transliteration: anamnêsis. Liddell and Scott definition: "a calling to mind, recollection."

64. +Transliteration: hôs dei. E-text editor's translation: "as is necessary."

64. +Transliteration: Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinêtai hai doxai autai. Pater's translation: "Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him." Plato, Meno, 85c.

65. +Transliteration: hois episphragizometha touto. E-text editor's translation: "these things upon which we set this seal." Plato, Phaedo, 75d.

65. +Transliteration: Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' erôtêsantos, epistêsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistêmên. E-text editor's translation: "No-one having taught him a thing, but rather through questioning alone, he will understand for certain, retrieving the knowledge out of himself?" Plato, Meno, 85d.

65. +Transliteration: epistêmê. Liddell and Scott definition "1. knowledge, understanding, skill, experience, wisdom; 2. scientific knowledge."

65. +Transliteration: enêsan de ge autô autai hai doxai. E-text editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] implanted in him, weren't they?" Plato, Meno 85c. Source, if any.

65. +Transliteration: [enesontai autôi alêtheis doxai,] erôtêsei epegertheisai, epistêmai gignontai. E-text editor's translation: "[He holds within himself true opinions,] which a questioning process may awaken into certain knowledge." Plato, Meno 86a.

66. +Transliteration: athanatos an hê psychê eiê. Pater's translation: "The soul, then, would be immortal." Plato, Meno 86b.

70. +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."

71. +Transliteration: Plêmmeleia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a false note . . . error, offense."

71. +Transliteration: pleonexia. Liddell and Scott definition: "a disposition to take more than one's share."

71. +Transliteration: peras. See above, note two, page 59.

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