A Short History of Greek Philosophy

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The cosmopolitan temper of these men led them to hold of small account
the forms and prejudices of ordinary society: they despised the rites
of marriage; they thought no flesh unclean. They believed in no
multifarious theology; there was but one divinity--the power that ruled
all nature, the one absolutely self-centred independent being, whose
manner of [221] existence they sought to imitate. Nor had they any
sympathy with the subtleties of verbal distinction cultivated by some
of the Socratics, as by other philosophers or Sophists of their time.
Definitions and abstractions and classifications led to no good. A man
was a man; what was good was good; to say that a man was good did not
establish the existence of some abstract class of goods. As
Antisthenes once said to Plato, "A horse I see, but 'horseness' I do
not see." What the exact point of this criticism was we may reserve
for the present.

[222]

III. EUCLIDES THE MEGARIC.--Euclides, a native of Megara on the
Corinthian isthmus, was a devoted hearer of Socrates, making his way to
hear him, sometimes even at the 'risk of his life, in defiance of a
decree of his native city forbidding intercourse with Athens. When
Plato and other Athenian followers of Socrates thought well to quit
Athens for {133} a time after Socrates' execution, they were kindly
entertained by Euclides at Megara.

The exact character of the development which the Socratic teaching
received from Euclides and his school is a matter of considerable
doubt. The allusions to the tenets of the school in Plato and [223]
others are only fragmentary. We gather, however, from them that
Euclides was wholly antithetical to the personal turn given to
philosophy, both by the Cyrenaics and the Cynics. He revived and
developed with much dialectical subtlety the metaphysical system of
Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute
existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this [224]
are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good,
and the good for man could only be found in such an absorption of
himself in this one absolute good through reason and contemplation, as
would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with it. Such
absorption raised a man above the troubles and pains of life, and thus,
in insensibility to these through reason, man attained his highest good.

The school is perhaps interesting only in so far as it marks the
continued survival of the abstract dialectic method of earlier
philosophy. As such it had a very definite influence, sometimes
through agreement, sometimes by controversy, on the systems of Plato
and Aristotle now to be dealt with.

{134}

CHAPTER XIV

PLATO

_Student and wanderer--The Dialogues--Immortal longings--Art is
love--Knowledge through remembrance--Platonic love_

[239]

This great master, the Shakespeare of Greek philosophy, as one may call
him, for his fertility, his variety, his humour, his imagination, his
poetic grace, was born at Athens in the year 429 B.C. He was of noble
family, numbering among his ancestors no less a man than the great
lawgiver Solon, and tracing back his descent even further to the [240]
legendary Codrus, last king of Athens. At a very early age he seems to
have begun to study the philosophers, Heraclitus more particularly, and
before he was twenty he had written a tragedy. About that time,
however, he met Socrates; and at once giving up all thought of poetic
fame he burnt his poem, and devoted himself to the hearing of Socrates.
For ten years he was his constant companion. When Socrates met his
death in 399, Plato and other followers of the master fled at first to
Megara, as already mentioned (above, p. 132); he then entered on a
period of extended travel, first to Cyrene and {135} Egypt, thence to
Italy and Sicily. In Italy he devoted himself specially to a study of
the doctrine of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he offended
the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his freedom of speech, and was
delivered up to the Spartans, who were then at war with Athens. [241]
Ultimately he was ransomed, and found his way back to Athens, but he is
said to have paid a second visit to Sicily when the younger Dionysius
became tyrant. He seems to have entertained the hope that he might so
influence this young man as to be able to realise through him the dream
of his life, a government in accordance with the dictates of [242]
philosophy. His dream, however, was disappointed of fruition, and he
returned to Athens, there in the 'groves of Academus' a mythic hero of
Athens, to spend the rest of his days in converse with his followers,
and there at the ripe age of eighty-one he died. From the scene of his
labours his philosophy has ever since been known as the Academic [243]
philosophy. Unlike Socrates, he was not content to leave only a memory
of himself and his conversations. He was unwearied in the redaction
and correction of his written dialogues, altering them here and there
both in expression and in structure. It is impossible, therefore, to
be absolutely certain as to the historical order of composition or
publication among his numerous {136} dialogues, but a certain
approximate order may be fixed.

We may take first a certain number of comparatively short dialogues,
which are strongly Socratic in the following respects: _first_, they
each seek a definition of some particular virtue or quality; _second_,
each suggests some relation between it and knowledge; _third_, each
leaves the answer somewhat open, treating the matter suggestively
rather than dogmatically. These dialogues are _Charmides_, which
treats of Temperance (_mens sana in corpore sano_); _Lysis_, which
treats of Friendship; _Laches_, Of Courage; _Ion_, Of Poetic
Inspiration; _Meno_, Of the teachableness of Virtue; _Euthyphro_, Of
Piety.

The last of these may be regarded as marking a transition to a second
series, which are concerned with the trial and death of Socrates. The
_Euthyphro_ opens with an allusion by Socrates to his approaching
trial, and in the _Apology_ we have a Platonic version of Socrates'
speech in his own defence; in _Crito_ we have the story of his noble
self-abnegation and civic obedience after his condemnation; in _Phaedo_
we have his last conversation with his friends on the subject of
Immortality, and the story of his death.

Another series of the dialogues may be formed of those, more or less
satirical, in which the ideas and methods of the Sophists are
criticised: _Protagoras_, {137} in which Socrates suggests that all
virtues are essentially one; _Euthydemus_, in which the assumption and
'airs' of some of the Sophists are made fun of; _Cratylus_, Of the
sophistic use of words; _Gorgias_, Of the True and the False, the truly
Good and the truly Evil; _Hippias_, Of Voluntary and Involuntary Sin;
_Alcibiades_, Of Self-Knowledge; _Menexenus_, a (possibly ironical) set
oration after the manner of the Sophists, in praise of Athens.

The whole of this third series are characterised by humour, dramatic
interest, variety of personal type among the speakers, keenness rather
than depth of philosophic insight. There are many suggestions of
profounder thoughts, afterwards worked out more fully; but on the whole
these dialogues rather stimulate thought than satisfy it; the great
poet-thinker is still playing with his tools.

A higher stage is reached in the _Symposium_, which deals at once
humorously and profoundly with the subject of Love, human and divine,
and its relations to Art and Philosophy, the whole consummated in a
speech related by Socrates as having been spoken to him by Diotima, a
wise woman of Mantineia. From this speech an extract as translated by
Professor Jowett may be quoted here. It marks the transition point
from the merely playful and critical to the relatively serious and
dogmatic stage in the mind of Plato:--

{138} "Marvel not," she said, "if you believe that love is of the
immortal, as we have already several times acknowledged; for here
again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as
far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to
be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a
new existence in the place of the old. Nay even in the life of the
same individual there is succession and not absolute unity: a man is
called the same, and yet in the short interval which elapses between
youth and age, and in which every animal is said to have life and
identity, he is undergoing a perpetual process of loss and
reparation--hair, flesh, bones, blood, and the whole body are always
changing. Which is true not only of the body, but also of the soul,
whose habits, tempers, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears,
never remain the same in any one of us, but are always coming and
going; and equally true of knowledge, which is still more
surprising--for not only do the sciences in general come and go, so
that in respect of them we are never the same; but each of them
individually experiences a like change. For what is implied in the
word 'recollection,' but the departure of knowledge, which is ever
being forgotten and is renewed and preserved by recollection, and
appears to be the same although in reality new, according to that law
of succession by which all mortal things are preserved, not absolutely
the same, but by substitution, the old worn-out mortality leaving
another new and similar existence behind--unlike the divine, which is
always the same and not another? And in this way, Socrates, the mortal
body, or mortal anything, partakes of immortality; but the immortal in
another way. Marvel not then at the love which all men have of their
offspring; for that universal love and interest is for the sake of
immortality."

I was astonished at her words, and said: "Is this really true, O thou
wise Diotima?" And she answered with all the authority of a sophist:
"Of that, Socrates, you may be assured;--think only of the ambition of
men, and you will wonder at the senselessness of their ways, unless you
consider how they are stirred by the love of an immortality of fame.
They are ready to run risks greater far than they would have run for
their children, and to spend money and undergo any sort of {139} toil,
and even to die for the sake of leaving behind them a name which shall
be eternal. Do you imagine that Alcestis would have died to save
Admetus, or Achilles to avenge Patroclus, or your own Codrus in order
to preserve the kingdom for his sons, if they had not imagined that the
memory of their virtues, which is still retained among us, would be
immortal? Nay," she said, "I am persuaded that all men do all things,
and the better they are the more they do them, in hope of the glorious
fame of immortal virtue; for they desire the immortal.

"They whose bodies only are creative, betake themselves to women and
beget children--this is the character of their love; their offspring,
as they hope, will preserve their memory and give them the blessedness
and immortality which they desire in the future. But creative
souls--for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls
than in their bodies--conceive that which is proper for the soul to
conceive or retain. And what are these conceptions?--wisdom and virtue
in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are
deserving of the name inventor. But the greatest and fairest sort of
wisdom by far is that which is concerned with the ordering of states
and families, and which is called temperance and justice. And he who
in youth has the seed of these implanted in him and is himself
inspired, when he comes to maturity desires to beget and generate. He
wanders about seeking beauty that he may beget offspring--for in
deformity he will beget nothing--and naturally embraces the beautiful
rather than the deformed body; above all when he finds a fair and noble
and well-nurtured soul, he embraces the two in one person, and to such
an one he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of
a good man; and he tries to educate him; and at the touch of the
beautiful which is ever present to his memory, even when absent, he
brings forth that which he had conceived long before, and in company
with him tends that which he brings forth; and they are married by a
far nearer tie and have a closer friendship than those who beget mortal
children, for the children who are their common offspring are fairer
and more immortal. Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other
great poets, {140} would not rather have their children than ordinary
human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children
such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them
everlasting glory? Or who would not have such children as Lycurgus
left behind him to be the saviours, not only of Lacedaemon, but of
Hellas, as one may say? There is Solon, too, who is the revered father
of Athenian laws; and many others there are in many other places, both
among Hellenes and barbarians. All of them have given to the world
many noble works, and have been the parents of virtue of every kind,
and many temples have been raised in their honour for the sake of their
children; which were never raised in honour of any one, for the sake of
his mortal children.

"These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates,
may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of
these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will
lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain. But I will do my
utmost to inform you, and do you follow if you can. For he who would
proceed aright in this matter should begin in youth to visit beautiful
forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one
such form only--out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he
will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the
beauty of another; and then if beauty of form in general is his
pursuit, how foolish would he be not to recognise that the beauty in
every form is one and the same! And when he perceives this he will
abate his violent love of the one, which he will despise and deem a
small thing, and will become a lover of all beautiful forms; in the
next stage he will consider that the beauty of the mind is more
honourable than the beauty of the outward form. So that if a virtuous
soul have but a little comeliness, he will be content to love and tend
him, and will search out and bring to the birth thoughts which may
improve the young, until he is compelled to contemplate and see the
beauty of institutions and laws, and to understand that the beauty of
them all is of one family, and that personal beauty is a trifle; and
after laws and institutions he will go on to the sciences, that he may
see their beauty, being not like a servant in love with the beauty of
one youth or man or {141} institution, himself a slave mean and
narrow-minded, but drawing towards and contemplating the vast sea of
beauty, he will create many fair and noble thoughts and notions in
boundless love of wisdom; until on that shore he grows and waxes
strong, and at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science,
which is the science of beauty everywhere. To this I will proceed;
please to give me your very best attention.

"He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has
learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes
toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and
this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)--a nature
which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or
waxing and waning, in the next place not fair in one point of view and
foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place
fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul,
as if fair to some and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or
hands or any other part of the bodily frame, or in any form of speech
or knowledge, or existing in any other being; as for example, in an
animal, or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place, but beauty
only, absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without
diminution and without increase, or any change, is imparted to the
ever-growing and perishing beauties of all other things. He who under
the influence of true love rising upward from these begins to see that
beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of going or being
led by another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth
as steps along which he mounts upwards for the sake of that other
beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from
fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions,
until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty,
and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. This, my dear
Socrates," said the stranger of Mantineia, "is that life above all
others which a man should live, in the contemplation of beauty
absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be
after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths,
whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be
content to live seeing only and conversing with them without meat or
drink, {142} if that were possible--you only want to be with them and
to look at them. But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty--the
divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with
the pollutions of mortality, and all the colours and vanities of human
life--thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty divine
and simple? Do you not see that in that communion only, beholding
beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not
images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of
a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the
friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an
ignoble life?" (Jowett, _Plato_, vol. ii. p. 58).

Closely connected in subject with the _Symposium_ is the _Phaedrus_.
As Professor Jowett observes: "The two dialogues together contain the
whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love, which in _The
Republic_ and in the later writings of Plato is only introduced
playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the _Phaedrus_ and
_Symposium_ love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the
other. The spiritual and emotional is elevated into the ideal, to
which in the _Symposium_ mankind are described as looking forward, and
which in the _Phaedrus_, as well as in the _Phaedo_, they are seeking
to recover from a former state of existence."

We are here introduced to one of the most famous conceptions of Plato,
that of _Reminiscence_, or Recollection, based upon a theory of the
prior existence of the soul. In the _Meno_, already alluded to,
Socrates is representing as eliciting from one of Meno's slaves {143}
correct answers to questions involving a knowledge or apprehension of
certain axioms of the science of mathematics, which, as Socrates
learns, the slave had never been taught. Socrates argues that since he
was never taught these axioms, and yet actually knows them, he must
have known them before his birth, and concludes from this to the
immortality of the soul. In the _Phaedo_ this same argument is worked
out more fully. As we grow up we discover in the exercise of our
senses that things are equal in certain respects, unequal in many
others; or again, we appropriate to things or acts the qualities, for
example, of beauty, goodness, justice, holiness. At the same time we
recognise that these are _ideals_, to which in actual experience we
never find more than an approximation, for we never discover in any
really existing thing or act _absolute_ equality, or justice, or
goodness. In other words, any act of judgment on our part of actual
experiences consists in a measuring of these experiences by standards
which we give or apply to them, and which no number of experiences can
give to us because they do not possess or exemplify them. We did not
consciously possess these notions, or ideals, or _ideas_, as he prefers
to call them, at birth; they come into consciousness in connection with
or in consequence of the action of the senses; but since the senses
could not give these ideas, the process of {144} knowledge must be a
process of _Recollection_. Socrates carries the argument a step
further. "Then may we not say," he continues, "that if, as we are
always repeating, there is an absolute beauty and goodness and other
similar ideas or essences, and to this standard, which is now
discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our
sensations, and with this compare them--assuming these ideas to have a
prior existence, then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if
not, not? There is the same proof that these ideas must have existed
before we were born, as that our souls existed before we were born; and
if not the ideas, then not the souls."

In the _Phaedrus_ this conception of a former existence is embodied in
one of the _Myths_ in which Plato's imaginative powers are seen at
their highest. In it the soul is compared to a charioteer driving two
winged steeds, one mortal, the other immortal; the one ever tending
towards the earth, the other seeking ever to soar into the sky, where
it may behold those blessed visions of loveliness and wisdom and
goodness, which are the true nurture of the soul. When the chariots of
the gods go forth in mighty and glorious procession, the soul would
fain ride forth in their train; but alas! the mortal steed is ever
hampering the immortal, and dragging it down.

If the soul yields to this influence and descends to earth, there she
takes human form, but in higher {145} or lower degree, according to the
measure of her vision of the truth. She may become a philosopher, a
king, a trader, an athlete, a prophet, a poet, a husbandman, a sophist,
a tyrant. But whatever her lot, according to her manner of life in it,
may she rise, or sink still further, even to a beast or plant.

Only those souls take the form of humanity that have had _some_ vision
of eternal truth. And this vision they retain in a measure, even when
clogged in mortal clay. And so the soul of man is ever striving and
fluttering after something beyond; and specially is she stirred to
aspiration by the sight of bodily loveliness. Then above all comes the
test of good and evil in the soul. The nature that has been corrupted
would fain rush to brutal joys; but the purer nature looks with
reverence and wonder at this beauty, for it is an adumbration of the
celestial joys which he still remembers vaguely from the heavenly
vision. And thus pure and holy love becomes an opening back to heaven;
it is a source of happiness unalloyed on earth; it guides the lovers on
upward wings back to the heaven whence they came.

{146}

CHAPTER XV

PLATO (_continued_)

_The Republic--Denizens of the cave--The Timaeus--A dream of creation_

And now we pass to the central and crowning work of Plato, _The
Republic_, or _Of Justice_--the longest with one exception, and
certainly the greatest of all his works. It combines the humour and
irony, the vivid characterisation and lively dialogue of his earlier
works, with the larger and more serious view, the more constructive and
statesmanlike aims of his later life. The dialogue opens very
beautifully. There has been a festal procession at the Piraeus, the
harbour of Athens, and Socrates with a companion is wending his way
homeward, when he is recalled by other companions, who induce him to
visit the house of an aged friend of his, Cephalus, whom he does not
visit too often. Him he finds seated in his court, crowned, as the
custom was, for the celebration of a family sacrifice, and beholds
beaming on his face the peace of a life well spent and reconciled.
They talk of the happiness that comes in old age to those who have done
good and not evil, and who are not too severely {147} tried in the
matter of worldly cares. Life to this good old man seems a very simple
matter; duty to God, duty to one's neighbours, each according to what
is prescribed and orderly; this is all, and this is sufficient.

Then comes in the questioning Socrates, with his doubts and
difficulties as to what is one's duty in special circumstances; and the
discussion is taken up, not by the good old man, "who goes away to the
sacrifice," but by his son, who can quote the authorities; and by
Thrasymachus, the Sophist, who will have nothing to do with authority,
but maintains that _interest_ is the only real meaning of justice, and
that Might is Right. Socrates, by analogy of the arts, shows that
Might absolutely without tincture of justice is mere weakness, and that
there is honour even among thieves. Yet the exhibition of the 'law
working in the members' seems to have its weak side so long as we look
to individual men, in whom there are many conflicting influences, and
many personal chances and difficulties, which obscure the relation
between just action and happiness.

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