Plato and Platonism

, must begin with an historic estimate of the conditions, antecedent and contemporary, wh

, in regard to literature and art no less than to philosophy, begins exactly where the estimate of general conditions, of the conditions common to all the products of this or that particular age-of the "environment"- leaves off, and we touch what is unique in the individual genius [125] which contrived after all, by force of will, to have its own masterful way with that environment. If in reading Plato, for instance, the philosophic student has to re-construct f

ts way-they have served science, science in vacuo, as if nothing beside, faith, imagination, love, the bodily sense, could detach them from it for an hour. It is not merely that we know little of their lives (there was so little to tell!) but that we know nothing at all of their temperaments; of which

or instance, which is not for the bodily eye. Yet the author of this philosophy of the unseen was,-Who can doubt it who has read but a page of him? this, in fact, is what has led and kept to his pages many who have little or no turn for the sort of questions Plato actually discusses:-The author of this philosophy of the unseen was one, for whom, as was said of a very different French writer, "the visible world really existed." Austere a

him thus reveals itself in trifles, it is manifest no less in the way in which he can tell a long story,-no one more effectively! and again, in his graphic presentment of whole scenes from actual life, like that with which The Republic opens. His Socrates, like other people, is curious to witness a new religious function: how they will do it. As in modern times, it would be a pleasant occasion also for meeting the acquaintance one likes best- Synesometha pollois [128] t?n ne?n autothi.+ "We shall meet a number of our youth there: we shall have a dialogue: there will be a torchlight procession in honour of the goddess, an equestrian procession: a novel feature!-What? Torches in their hands, passed on as they race? Aye, and an illumination, through the entire night. It will be worth seeing!"- that old midnight hour, as Carlyle says of another vivid scene, "shining yet on us, ruddy-bright through the centuries." Put alongside of that, and, for life-like charm, si

ke knowing a person. The Dialogue itself, being, as it is, the special creation of his literary art, becomes in his hands, and by his masterly conduct of it, like a single living person; so comprehensive a sense does he bring to bear upon it of the slowly- developing physiognomy of the thi

and colour it, as if with their personal influence, showing through what purports to be the wholly abstract analysis of some wholly abstract moral situation. Thus, the form of the dying Socrates himself is visible pathetically in the description of the suffering righteous man, actually put into his own mouth in the second book of The Republic; as the winning brilliancy of the lost spirit of Alcibiades infuses those pages of the sixth, which discuss the nature of one by birth and endowments an aristocrat, amid the dangers to which it is exposed in the Athens of that day-the qualities which must make him, if not the saviour, the destroyer, of a society which cannot remain unaffected by his showy presence. Corruptio

ess of manner and modesty of soul he records of it so affectionately. It is this he loves best to linger by; to feel himself in contact with a condition of life, which translates all it is, so immediately, into delightful colour, and movement, and sound. The eighth and ninth books of The Republic are a grave contribution, as you know, to abstract moral and political theory, a generalisation of weighty changes of character in men and states. But his observations on the concrete traits of individuals, young or old, w

French say. Once Thrasymachus had been actually seen to blush. It is with a very different sort of fineness Plato notes the blushes of the young; of Hippocrates, for instance, in the Protagoras. The great Sophist was said to be in Athens, at the house of Callicles, and the diligent young scholar is up betimes, eager to hear him. He rouses Socrates before daylight. As they linger in the court, the lad speaks of his own intellectual aspirations; blushes at his confidence. It was just then that the morning sun blus

ful reader lies in wait: the mutiny of the sailors in the ship-ship of the state, or of one's own soul: the echoes and beams and shadows of that half-illuminated cavern, the human mind: the caged birds in the Theatetus, which are like the flighty, half-contained notions of an imperfectly educated understanding. Real notions are to be ingrained by persistent thoroughness of the "dialectic" method, as

Plato; and, as love must of necessity deal above all with visible persons, this discipline involved an exquisite culture of the senses. It is "as lovers use," that he is ever on the watch for those dainty messages, those finer intimations, to eye and ear. If in the later development of his philosophy the highest sort of knowledge comes to seem like the knowledge of a person, the relation of the reason to truth like the commerce of one person with another, the peculiarities of personal relationship

emper, therefore, you must think in connexion with Plato's youth-of this, amid all the strength of the genius in which it is so large a constituent,-indulging, developing, refining, the sensuous capacities, the powers of eye and ear, of the fancy also which can re-fashion, of the speech which can best respond to and reproduce, their liveliest presentments. That is why when Plato speaks of visible things it is as if you saw them. He who in the Symposium describes so vividly the pathway, the ladder, of love, its joyful ascent t

, as a visible thing-seen in Charmides, say! in that subdued and grey-eyed loveliness, "clad in sober grey"; or in those youthful athletes which, in ancient marble, reproduce him and the like of him with sound, firm outlines, such as temperance secures. Still, that some more luxurious se

old puzzle of the existence of evil comes to him) that even to the truest eyesight, to the best trained faculty of soul, the beautiful would never come to seem strictly concentric with the good. That seems to have taxed his understanding as gravely as it had tried his will,-and he was glad when in the mere natural course of years he was become at all events less ardent a lover. 'Tis he is the authority for what Sophocles had said on the happy decay of the passions as age advanced: it was "lik

lumber well, and, by its pain or pleasure, cause no trouble to that part which is best in him, but may suffer it, alone by itself, in its pure essence, to behold and aspire towards some object, and apprehend what it knows not-some event, of the past, it may be, or something that now is, or will be hereafter; and in like manner has soothed hostile impulse, so th

capacity might have made him the poet of an Odyssey, a Sappho, or a Catullus, or, say! just such a poet as, just because he was so attractive, would have been disfranchised in the Perfect City; was become the creature of an immense seriousness, of a fully adult sense, unusual in Greek perhaps even more than in Roman writers, "of the weightiness of the matters concerning which he has to discourse, and of the frailty of man." He inherits, alien as they might be to certain powerful influences in his own temper, alike the sympathies and the antipathies of that strange, delightful teacher, who had given him (most precious of gi

and form, as if now at last the mind were veritably dealing with living people there, living people who play upon us through the affinities, the repulsion and attraction, of persons towards one another, all the magnetism, as we call it, of actual human friendship or love:-There, is the formula of Plato's genius, the essential condition of the specially Platonic temper, of Platonism. And his style, because it really is Plato's style, conforms to, and in its turn promotes in others, that mental situation. He breaks as it were visible colour into the v

power literally, moulding to term and phrase what might have seemed in its very nature too impalpable and abstruse to lend itself, in any case, to language? He gives names to the invisible acts, processes, creations, of abstract mind, as masterly, as efficiently, as Adam himself to the visible living creations of old. As Plato speaks of them, we might say, those abstractions too become visible living creatures. We read the speculative poetry of Wordsworth, or Tennyson; and we may observe that a great metaphysical force has come into language which is by no means purely technical or scholastic; what a help such language is to the understanding, to a real hold over the things, the thoughts, the [142] mental processes, those words denote; a vocabulary to which thought freely commits it

erse with Socrates or Plato does but promote. The very words of Plato, then, [143] challenge us straightway to larger and finer apprehension of the processes of our own minds; are themselves a discovery in the sphere of mind. It was he made us freemen of those solitary places, so trying yet so attractive: so remote and high, they seem, yet are naturally so close to us: he peopled them with intelligible forms. Nay more! By his peculiar gift of verbal articulation he divined the me

the temper, the intellectual alliances, of those who directly or indirectly have been sympathetic with him. Now it is noticeable that, at first sight somewhat incongruously, a certain number of Manicheans have always been of his company; people who held that matter was evil. Pointing significantly to an unmistakable vein of Manichean, or Puritan sentiment actually there in the Platonic Dialogues, these rude companions or successors of his, carry us back to his great predecessor, to Socrates, whose personal influence had so strongly enforced on Plato the severities, moral and intellectual, alike of Parmenides and of the Pythagoreans. The cold breath of a harsh

ome into a human body at all, had been the seed of d

mnastic "fused in music," became, from first to last, the aim of education as he conceived it. That the body is but "a hindrance to the attainment of philosophy, if one takes it along with one as a companion in one's search" (a notion which Christianity, at least in its later though wholly legitimate developments, will correct) can hardly have been the last thought of Plato himself on quitting it. He opens his door indeed to those austere monitors. They correct the sensuous richness of his genius, but could [146] not suppress it. The sensuous lover becomes a lover of the invisible, but still a lover, after his earlier pattern, carrying into the world of intellectual vision, of the?ria,+ all the associations of the actual world of sight. Some of its invisible realities he can all but see with th

f others, he acquires, by way of habit and rule, all that can be taught and learned; and what is thus derived from others by docility and discipline, what is rangé, comes to have in him, and in his work, an equivalent weight with what is unique, impulsive, underivable. Raphael-Raphael, as you see him in the Blenheim Madonna, is a supreme example of such scholarship in th

, his quarrels with those capricious tyrants show that he was disappointed. For the future he sought no more to pass beyond the charmed theoretic circle, "speaking wisdom," as was said of Pythagoras, only "among the perfect." He returns finally to Athens; and there, in the quiet precincts of the Acad?mus, which has left a somewhat dubious name to places where people come to be taught or to teach, founds, not a state, nor even a brotherhood, but only the first college, with something of a common life, of communism on that small scale, with Aristotle for one of its scholars, with its chapel, its gardens, its library with the authentic text of his Dialogues upon the shelves: we may just discern the sort of place through the scantiest notices. His reign was after all to be in his writings. Plato himself does nothing in them to retard the effacement which mere time brings

O

ne?n autothi. Pater's translation: "We shall meet

taphan? auton genesthai. E-text editor's translation: "And he blushed as he spoke, for

he discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phras

he discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phras

slation: "subject to the influence of fair persons;"

he discipline of sensuous love;" more literally, the phras

definition: "a looking at, viewing, beholding . .

definition: "a looking at, viewing, beholding . .