4: PLATO AND SOCRATES

    In my youth he says I had a wonderful desire for the wisdom
     which people call natural science--peri physeôs historian.+
     It seemed to me a proud thing to know the causes of every matter:
     how it comes to be; ceases to be; why it is.  I lost my sight in
     this enquiry to the degree of un-learning what I had hitherto
     seemed to myself and others to know clearly enough.  But having
     heard one reading from a book written, as he said, by Anaxagoras,
     which said that it is Reason that arranges and is the cause of
     all things, I was delighted with this cause; and thought to
     myself, if this be so, then it does with each what may be best
     for it.  Thus considering, it was with joy I fancied I had found
     me a teacher about the cause--Anaxagoras: that he would show me
     for instance, first, whether the earth was round or flat; and
     then that it was best for it to be so: and if he made these
     points clear I was prepared to ask for no other sort of causes.
     Phaedo, 96.

Well! Socrates proceeds to the great natural philosopher, and is immensely discouraged to find him after all making very little use of Reason in his explanation why natural things are thus and not otherwise; explaining everything, rather, by secondary and mechanical causes. "It was as if," he concludes, "some one had undertaken to prove that Socrates does everything through Reason; and had gone on to show that it was because my body is constructed in a certain way, of certain bones and muscles, that Socrates is now sitting here in the prison, voluntarily awaiting death."

The disappointment of Socrates with the [81] spirit in which Anaxagoras actually handled and applied that so welcome sapiential proposition that Reason panta diakosmei, kai pantôn aitios estin +--arranges and is the cause of all things--is but an example of what often happens when men seek an a posteriori justification of their instinctive prepossessions. Once for all he turns from useless, perhaps impious, enquiries, into the material structure of the stars above him, or the earth beneath his feet, from all physical enquiry into material things, to the direct knowledge of man the cosmical order in man, as it may be found by any one who, in good faith with himself, and with devout attention, looks within. In this precise sense it was that, according to the old saying, Socrates brought philosophy down from heaven to earth. Montaigne, the great humanist, expands it.--"'Twas he who brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies. He has done human nature a great service," he adds, "in showing it how much it can do of itself." And a singular incident gave that piercing study, that relentless exposure, of himself, and of others, for the most part so unwelcome to them, a religious or mystic character. He has a "vocation" thus to proceed, has been literally "called," as he understands, by the central religious authority of Greece. His seemingly invidious testing of men's pretensions [82] to know, is a sacred service to the God of Delphi, which he dares not neglect. And his fidelity herein had in turn the effect of reinforcing for him, and bringing to a focus, all the other rays of religious light cast at random in the world about him, or in himself.

"You know Chaerephon," he says, "his eagerness about any matter he takes up. Well! once upon a time he went to Delphi, and ventured to ask of the oracle whether any man living was wiser than I; and, amazing as it seems, the Pythia answered that there was no one wiser than I." Socrates must go in order, then, to every class of persons pre-eminent for knowledge; to every one who seems to know more than he. He found them--the Athenian poets, for instance, the potters who made the vases we admire, undeniably in possession of much delightful knowledge unattained by him. But one and all they were ignorant of the limitations of their knowledge; and at last he concludes that the oracle had but meant to say: "He indeed is the wisest of all men who like Socrates is aware that he is really worth little or nothing in respect of knowledge." Such consciousness of ignorance was the proper wisdom of man.

That can scarcely be a fiction. His wholesome appeal then, everywhere, from what seems, to what really is, is a service to the Delphic god, the god of sanity. To prove that the oracle had [83] been right after all, improbable as it seemed, in the signal honour it had put upon him, would be henceforward his proper business. Committing him to a sort of ironical humility towards others, at times seemingly petty and prosaic, certainly very irritating, in regard to himself, in its source and motive, his business in life as he conceived it was nothing less than a divine possession. He becomes therefore literally an enthusiast for knowledge, for the knowledge of man; such knowledge as by a right method of questioning, of self-questioning (the master's questioning being after all only a kind of mid-wife's assistance, according to his own homely figure) may be brought to birth in every human soul, concerning itself and its experience; what is real, and stable, in its apprehensions of Piety, Beauty, Justice, and the like, what is of dynamic quality in them, as conveying force into what one does or creates, building character, generating virtue. Auto kath' hauto zêtein ti pot' estin aretê+--to seek out what virtue is, itself, in and by itself--there's the task. And when we have found that, we shall know already, or easily get to know, everything else about and about it: "how we are to come by virtue," for instance.

Well! largely by knowing, says naturally the enthusiast for knowledge. There is no good thing which knowledge does not comprehend--Mêden estin agathon ho ouk epistêmê periechei +--a strenuously [84] ascertained knowledge however, painfully adjusted to other forms of knowledge which may seem inconsistent with it, and impenetrably distinct from any kind of complaisant or only half-attentive conjecture. "One and the same species in every place: whole and sound: one, in regard to, and through, and upon, all particular instances of it: catholic"*: it will be all this--the Virtue, for instance, which we must seek, as a hunter his sustenance, seek and find and never lose again, through a survey of all the many variable and merely relative virtues, which are but relative, that is to say, "to every several act, and to each period of life, in regard to each thing we have to do, in each one of us"--kath' hekastên tôn praxeôn, kai tôn hêlikiôn pros hekaston ergon, hekastô hêmôn --+ "That, about which I don't know what it is, how should I know what sort of a thing it is"--ho mê oida ti esti, pôs an hopoion ge ti eideiên;+ what its poiotêtes,+ its qualities, are? "Do you suppose that one who does not know Meno, for example, at all, who he is, can know whether he is fair and rich and well-born, or the reverse of all that?" Yes! already for Socrates, we might say, to know what justice or Piety or Beauty really is, will be like the knowledge of a person; only that, as Aristotle carefully notes, his scrupulous habit of search for universal, or catholic, definitions (kath' holou)+ was after all but [85] an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts. Strange! out of the practical cautions of Socrates for the securing of clear and correct and sufficient conceptions about one's actual experience, for the attainment of a sort of thoroughly educated common-sense, came the mystic intellectualism of Plato--Platonism, with all its hazardous flights of soul.

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