Plato and Platonism

a cynic. Another ancient philosopher, Pythagoras, set the frozen waves in motion again, brought back to Plato's recognition all that multiplicity in men's experience to w

way of antecedent. What he said, or was believed to have said, is almost everywhere in the very texture of Platonic philosophy, as vera vox, an autho

em of Parmenides. To realise unity in variety, to discover cosmos-an order that shall satisfy one's reasonable soul-below and within apparent chaos: is from first to last the continuous purpose of what we call philosophy. Well! Pythagoras seems to have found that unity of principle (arch?)+ in the dominion of number everywhere, the proportion, the harmony, the music, into which number as such expands. Truths of number: the essential laws of measure in time and space:-Yes, these are indeed everywhere in our experience: must, as Kant can explain to us, be an element in anything we are able so mu

rry wonders. In this spirit there had been much writing about him: that he was a son of Apollo, nay, Apollo himself-the twilight, attempered, Hyperborean Apollo, like the sun in Lapland: that his person gleamed at times with a supernatural brightness: that he had exposed to those who loved him a golden thigh: how Abaris, the minister of that god, [54] had come flying to him on a golden arrow: of his almost impossible journeys: how he was seen, had lectured indeed, in different places at the same time. As he walked on the banks of the Nessus the river had whispered his name: he had been, in the secondary sense, various persons in the course of ages; a courtesan once, for some ancient sin in him; and then a hero,

brilliant, perhaps a showy, personality there, infusing the [55] most abstract truths with what would tell on the fancy, seems more than probable, and, though he would appear really to have had from the first much of mystery or mysticism about him, the thaumaturge of Samos, "w

rabbed, as dull

l as is Ap

ds, the persons, of others, as if he had really

so Pythagoreanism became especially the philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian Greeks. If, as Plato was aware, or fancied, true Spartans knew more of philosophy than they let strangers suppose-turned them all out from time to tim

an ideal republic, or rather a religious brotherhood, under a rule outwardly expressive of that inward idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian soul, and, for it, as for him, e

like a musical harmony,-that was the chief thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done what they liked-temperance in a religious intention, with many singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like. For if, according to his philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, to use the phrase of Wordsworth reproducing the central Pythagorean doctrine, "from heaven," as he says, "trailing clouds of glory," so the arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither, of which means, surely, abstinence, the repression of one's carnal elements, must be one; in consideration also, in curious questions, as to the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul, before and after, for which he was so anxious to secure full use of all the opportunities of further perfecting which might yet await it, in the many revolutions of its existence. In t

hose discreet, unromantic pages, salutary therefore to listen to, concerning doctrines in themselves so fantastic.* In the Ethics, as you may know, in the Metaphysics, and elsewhere, Aristotle gives many not unsympathetic notices at least of the disciples, which, by way of sober contrast on a matter from the first profusely, perhaps cheaply, embroidered, is like quiet information from Pythagoras himself. Only, remember always in reading Plato-Plato, as a sincere learner in the school of Pythagoras-that the essence, the active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine, resides, not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor as with our modern selves too often, in the "infinite," those eternities, infinitudes, abysses, Carlyle invokes for us so often-in no cultus of the infinite (to apeir

we find them, especially in The Republic. Let us see, as much as possible in his own words, what Plato received from that older philosophy, of which the two leadi

of course, definite views on that most practical question, how virtue is to be attained by us; and Plato is certainly faithful to him in assigning the causation of virtue partly to discipline, forming habit (ask?sis)+ as enforced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy, as he is true to his own experience in assigning it partly also to a good natural disposition (physei)+ and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose some of us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also in part (theia moira)+ to the good pleasure of heaven, to un-merited

hat sort of thing, among the things you know not, will you propose as your [62] object of search? Or e

rsooth it is not possible for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for what he knows not; inasmuch as he would not seek what he knows, at least; because

es, certainly; the Pythagoreans are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence- -: anamn?sis + famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don't know: how that happens. In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument most [63] fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno's slaves, a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry: introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on t

with elementary space. It is [64] once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them: that as he remembers, in logical order (h?s dei)+ so he makes the mistakes

ng, for such consolation as there may be in it, in his last h

ter and the less, but about all other things of the kind? For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute Beauty (was he going now to see its very

re:- Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all' er?t?santos, epist?setai, analab?n, autos ex hautou, epist?m?n;+ "Through no one's teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning

mely of metempsych?sis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, [66] under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then, would be immortal (athanatos an h? psych? ei?)+ prospectively as well as in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth "over the way, ther

g questions. And there was another doctrine-a persuasion still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that great fact of our consciou

ent wrong-she gives back their soul again to the sun above in the ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, illustrious and swift in strength, and men greatest in wisdom; and for remaining time they are called holy heroes among us.' Inasmuch then as the soul is immortal, and has been born many times, and has seen both things here and things in Hades, and all things, there is nothing that it has not learned; so that it is by no means surprising that it should be able to remember both about virtue and about other matters what it knew at least even aforetime. For inasmuch as the whole of nature is akin to itself (homogeneous) and the soul has learned all things, nothing hinders

king sadness in himself, that he will survive-survive the effects of the poison, of the funeral fire; that somewhere, with some others, with Minos perhaps and other "righteous souls" o

the like. The doctrine of the transmigration, [69] the pilgrimage or mental journeys, of the soul linked itself readily with a fanciful, guess-work astronomy, which provided starry places, wide areas, hostelries, for that wanderer to move or rest in. A matter of very lively and presentable form and colour, as if making the invisible show through, this too pleased the extremely visual fancy of Plato; as we may see, in many places of the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Timaeus, and most conspicuously i

mere star-gazer may peep into as best he can, with its levers, its spindles and revolving [70] wheels, its spheres, he says,-"like those boxes which fit into one another," and the literal doors "opened in heaven," through which, at the due point of ascension, the revolving pilgrim soul will glide forth and have a chance of gazing into the wide spaces beyond, "as he stands outside on the back of the sky"-that hollow partly transparent

old; found echoes of here; might recover in its entirety, amid the influences of the melodious colour, sounds, manners, the enforced modulating discipline, which would make the whole life of a citizen of the Perfect City an education in music. We are now with Plato, you see! in his reproduction, so fully detailed for us in The [71] Republi

on (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 clot

imitive 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 f

those days,

nderstood

for my s

my soul to

e celestia

had not w

wo from my

ugh all this

ts of everl

long to t

gain that a

once more rea

I left my gl

soul with t

nd staggers

forward m

ward steps

is dust fal

tate I ca

eraclitus taught the doctrine of progress, and the Eleatics that of rest, so, in

O

inition: "I. beginning, first cause, origin. II. 1

homoion homoi?. Transl

-text editor's translation: "And do you suppose that truth is close kin to me

itor's translation: "To measure and propo

read since these pages went to press, with much admiration fo

experience of a thing . . . II. boundless, endless, countless / an end, extremity." As Pater indic

hiai t?n enanti?n. "Co-ordina

peras. See above, se

o apeiron. See above, s

is. Liddell and Scott defin

the nature, inborn quality, property or constitution of a person or thi

moira. Translation: "one's

Liddell and Scott definition: "

dei. E-text editor's trans

i doxai autai. Pater's translation: "Just now, as in a dream, t

to. E-text editor's translation: "these things u

ou, epist?m?n. E-text editor's translation: "No-one having taught him a thing, but rather through quest

tt definition "1. knowledge, understanding, ski

xt editor's translation: "Yet these notions were [already] im

t?mai gignontai. E-text editor's translation: "[He holds within himself true opinion

ch? ei?. Pater's translation: "The soul,

od behaviour, decency; 3. a set form or order: of states, government; 4. the mode or fashio

Liddell and Scott definition: "a

dell and Scott definition: "a dispos

n: peras. See above