7: THE DOCTRINE OF PLATO

II. DIALECTIC

[174] Three different forms of composition have, under the intellectual conditions of different ages, prevailed--three distinct literary methods, in the presentation of philosophic thought; the metrical form earliest, when philosophy was still a matter of intuition, imaginative, sanguine, often turbid or obscure, and became a Poem, Peri Physeôs,+ "Concerning Nature"; according to the manner of Pythagoras, "his golden verses," of Parmenides or Empedokles, after whom Lucretius in his turn modelled the finest extant illustration of that manner of writing, of thinking.

It was succeeded by precisely the opposite manner, when native intuition had shrunk into dogmatic system, the dry bones of which rattle in one's ears, with Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Spinoza, as a formal treatise; the perfected philosophic temper being situated midway between those opposites, in the third essential form of the literature of philosophy, namely the essay; that characteristic literary type of our own time, a time so rich and various in special apprehensions of truth, so tentative and dubious in its sense of their ensemble, and issues. Strictly appropriate form of our modern philosophic literature, the essay came into use at what was really the invention of the relative, [175] or "modern" spirit, in the Renaissance of the sixteenth century.*

The poem, the treatise, the essay: you see already that these three methods of writing are no mere literary accidents, dependent on the personal choice of this or that particular writer, but necessities of literary form, determined directly by matter, as corresponding to three essentially different ways in which the human mind relates itself to truth. If oracular verse, stimulant but enigmatic, is the proper vehicle of enthusiastic intuitions; if the treatise, with its ambitious array of premiss and conclusion, is the natural out-put of scholastic all-sufficiency; so, the form of the essay, as we have it towards the end of the sixteenth century, most significantly in Montaigne, representative essayist because the representative doubter, inventor of the name as, in essence, of the thing--of the essay, in its seemingly modest aim, its really large and adventurous possibilities--is indicative of Montaigne's peculiar function in regard to his age, as in truth the commencement of our own. It provided him with precisely the literary form necessary to a mind for which truth itself is but a possibility, realisable not as general conclusion, but rather as the elusive effect of a particular personal experience; to a mind which, noting [176] faithfully those random lights that meet it by the way, must needs content itself with suspension of judgment, at the end of the intellectual journey, to the very last asking: Que scais-je? Who knows?--in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined sense of one's ignorance.

And as Aristotle is the inventor of the treatise, so the Platonic Dialogue, in its conception, its peculiar opportunities, is essentially an essay--an essay, now and then passing into the earlier form of philosophic poetry, the prose-poem of Heraclitus. There have been effective writers of dialogue since, Bruno, for instance, Berkeley, Landor, with whom, however, that literary form has had no strictly constitutional propriety to the kind of matter it conveyed, as lending itself (that is to say) structurally to a many-sided but hesitant consciousness of the truth. Thus, with Berkeley, its purpose is but to give a popular turn to certain very dogmatic opinions, about which there is no diffidence, there are no half-lights, in the writer's own mind. With Plato, on the other hand, with Plato least of all is the dialogue--that peculiar modification of the essay--anything less than essential, necessary, organic: the very form belongs to, is of the organism of, the matter which it embodies. For Plato's Dialogues, in fact, reflect, they refine [177] upon while they fulfil, they idealise, the actual method, in which, by preference to anything like formal lecturing (the lecture being, so to speak, a treatise in embryo) Socrates conveyed his doctrine to others. We see him in those Dialogues of Plato, still loitering in the public places, the open houses, the suburban roads, of Athens, as if seeking truth from others; seeking it, doubtless, from himself, but along with, and by the help of, his supposed scholars, for whom, indeed, he can but bring their own native conceptions of truth to the birth; but always faithfully registering just so much light as is given, and, so to speak, never concluding.

The Platonic Dialogue is the literary transformation, in a word, of what was the intimately home-grown method of Socrates, not only of conveying truth to others, but of coming by it for himself. The essence of that method, of "dialectic" in all its forms, as its very name denotes, is dialogue, the habit of seeking truth by means of question and answer, primarily with one's self. Just there, lies the validity of the method--in a dialogue, an endless dialogue, with one's self; a dialogue concerning those first principles, or "universal definitions," or notions, those "ideas," which, according to Plato, are the proper objects of all real knowledge; concerning the adequacy of one's hold upon them; the relationship to them of other notions; the plausible conjectures in our own or other minds, [178] which come short of them; the elimination, by their mere presence in the mind, of positive ignorance or error. Justice, Beauty, Perfect Polity, and the like, in outlines of eternal and absolute certainty:--they were to be apprehended by "dialectic," literally, by a method (methodos)+ a circuitous journey, presented by the Platonic dialogues in its most accomplished literary form.

For the certainty, the absolute and eternal character, of such ideas involved, with much labour and scruple, repeated acts of qualification and correction; many readjustments to experience; expansion, by larger lights from it; those exclusions and inclusions, debitae naturae (to repeat Bacon's phrase) demanded, that is to say, by the veritable nature of the facts which those ideas are designed to represent. "Representation" was, in fact, twofold, and comprehended many successive steps under each of its divisions. The thought was to be adjusted, first, to the phenomena, to the facts, daintily, to the end that the said thought might just cover those facts, and no more. To the thought, secondly, to the conception, thus articulated, it was necessary to adjust the term; the term, or "definition," by which it might be conveyed into the mind of another. The dialogue--the freedom, the variety and elasticity, of dialogue, informal, easy, natural, alone afforded the room necessary for that long and complex process. If one, if Socrates, seemed to become [179] the teacher of another, it was but by thinking aloud for a few moments over his own lesson, or leaning upon that other as he went along that difficult way which each one must really prosecute for himself, however full such comradeship might be of happy occasions for the awakening of the latent knowledge, with which mind is by nature so richly stored. The Platonic Socrates, in fact, does not propose to teach anything: is but willing, "along with you," and if you concur, "to consider, to seek out, what the thing may be. Perchance using our eyes in common, rubbing away, we might cause Justice, for instance, to glint forth, as from fire-sticks."*

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