7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

     There (that is to say, at a particular point in a sort of
     Pythagorean mental pilgrimage through time and space) there,
     at last, its utmost travail and contest awaits the soul.
     For the immortal souls, so-called, when they were upon the
     highest point, passed out and stood (as you might stand upon
     the outside of a great hollow sphere) upon the back of the sky.
     And as they stand there, the revolution of the spheres carries
     them round; and they behold the things that are beyond the sky.
     That supercelestial place none of our poets on earth has ever
     yet sung of, nor will ever sing, worthily.  And thus it is:
     for I must make bold to state the truth, at any rate,
     especially as it is about truth, that I am speaking.  For the
     colourless, and formless, and impalpable Being, being in very
     truth of (that is, relative to) the soul, is visible by reason
     alone as one's guide.  Centered about that, the generation, or
     seed, genos,+--the people, of true knowledge inhabits this
     place.  As, then, the intelligence of God, which is nourished
     by pure or unmixed reason and knowledge (akêratô,+ unmixed
     with sense) so, the intelligence of every other soul also,
     which is about to receive that which properly belongs to it,
     beholding, after long interval, that which is, loves [166] it
     (that's the point!) and by the vision of truth is fed; and
     fares well; until, in cycle, the revolving movement brings
     it round again to the same place.  And in that journey round
     it looks upon justice itself; it looks upon Temperance, upon
     Knowledge; not that knowledge to which the process of becoming
     (the law of change, namely, of birth and death and decay)
     attaches; nor that which is, as it were, one in one thing,
     another in another, of those things which now we speak of as
     being; but the knowledge which is in that which in very deed is
     (tên en tô ho estin on ontos epistêmên ousan)+ and having beheld,
     after the same manner, all other things that really are, and
     feasted upon them, being passed back again to the interior of
     the sky, the soul returned home.  Phaedrus, 247.+

Only, as Plato thinks, that return was, in fact, an exile. There, in that attractive, but perhaps not wholly acceptable, sort of discourse, in some other passages like it, Plato has gone beyond his master Socrates, on two planes or levels, so to speak, of speculative ascent, which we may distinguish from each other, by way of making a little clearer what is in itself certainly so difficult.

For Plato, then, not by way of formal theory, we must remember, but by a turn of thought and speech (while he speaks of them, in fact) the Socratic "universals," the notions of Justice and the like, are become, first, things in themselves--the real things; and secondly, persons, to be known as persons must be; and to be loved, for the perfections, the visible perfections, we might say--intellectually visible--of [167] their being. "It looks upon Justice itself; it looks upon Temperance; upon Knowledge."

Hitherto, in the Socratic disputations, the ideas had been creations, serviceable creations, of men's thought, of our reason. With Plato, they are the creators of our reason--those treasures of experience, stacked and stored, which, to each one of us, come as by inheritance, or with no proportionate effort on our part, to direct, to enlarge and rationalise, from the first use of language by us, our manner of taking things. For Plato, they are no longer, as with Socrates, the instruments by which we tabulate and classify and record our experience--mere "marks" of the real things of experience, of what is essential in this or that, and common to every particular that goes by a certain common name; but are themselves rather the proper objects of all true knowledge, and a passage from all merely relative experience to the "absolute." In proportion as they lend themselves to the individual, in his effort to think, they create reason in him; they reproduce the eternal reason for him. For Socrates, as Aristotle understands him, they were still in service to, and valid only in and by, the experience they recorded, with no locus standi beyond. For Plato, for Platonists, they are become--Justice and Beauty, and the perfect State, or again Equality (that which we must bring with us, if we are to apprehend sensible [168] instances thereof, but which no two equal things here, two coins, ever really attain) nay, Couch, or Tree, every general thought, or name of a thing, whatever--separate (chôristos)+ separable from, as being essentially independent of, the individual mind which conceives them; as also of the particular temporary instances which come under them, come and go, while they remain for ever--those eternal "forms," of Tree, Equality, Justice, and so forth.

That, then, is the first stage, or plane, of Platonic transcendentalism. Our common ideas, without which, in fact, we none of us could think at all, are not the consequence, not the products, but the cause of our reason in us: we did not make them; but they make us what we are, as reasonable beings. The eternal Being, of Parmenides, one and indivisible, has been diffused, divided, resolved, refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple, numerous, stellar world, so to call it--abstract light into stars: Justice, Temperance as it is, Bravery as it is. Permanence, independency, indefectible identity with itself--all those qualities which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality--belong to every one of those ideas severally.

It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a return of the many gods of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love, [169] Fear, Confidence, and the like; and as such, the modern anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls "animism." Animism, that tendency to locate the movements of a soul like our own in every object, almost in every circumstance, which impresses one with a sense of power, is a condition of mind, of which the simplest illustration is primitive man adoring, as a divine being endowed with will, the meteoric stone that came rushing from the sky. That condition "survives" however, in the negro, who thinks the discharging gun a living creature; as it survives also, more subtly, in the culture of Wordsworth and Shelley, for whom clouds and peaks are kindred spirits; in the pantheism of Goethe; and in Schelling, who formulates that pantheism as a philosophic, a Platonic, theory. Such "animistic" instinct was, certainly, a natural element in Plato's mental constitution,--the instinctive effort to find anima, the conditions of personality, in whatever pre-occupied his mind, a mind, be it remembered, of which the various functions, as we reckon them, imagination, reason, intuition, were still by no means clearly analysed and differentiated from each other, but participated, all alike and all together, in every single act of mind.

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