Chapter X

THE PHILOSOPHERS OF ATHENS (continued).

THE SOCRATIC SCHOOL (continued).

PLATO.

This new movement we have designated in general terms as the Socratic School. Not that we are to suppose that, in any technical sense, Socrates founded a school. The Academy, the Lyceum, the Stoa, and the Garden, were each the chosen resort of distinct philosophic sects, the locality of separate schools; but Athens itself, the whole city, was the scene of the studies, the conversations, and the labors of Socrates. He wandered through the streets absorbed in thought. Sometimes he stood still for hours lost in profoundest meditation; at other times he might be seen in the market-place, surrounded by a crowd of Athenians, eagerly discussing the great questions of the day.

Socrates, then, was not, in the usual sense of the word, a teacher. He is not to be found in the Stoa or the Grove, with official aspect, expounding a system of doctrine. He is "the garrulous oddity" of the streets, putting the most searching and perplexing questions to every bystander, and making every man conscious of his ignorance. He delivered no lectures; he simply talked. He wrote no books; he only argued: and what is usually styled his school must be understood as embracing those who attended him in public as listeners and admirers, and who caught his spirit, adopted his philosophic method, and, in after life, elaborated and systematized the ideas they had gathered from him.

Plato (B.C. 430-347) was pre-eminently the pupil of Socrates. He came to Socrates when he was but twenty years of age, and remained with him to the day of his death.

Some have supposed that this old tradition intimates that Plato departed from the method of his master--he became fledged and flew away into the air. But we know that Plato did not desert his master whilst he was living, and there is no evidence that he abandoned his method after he was dead. He was the best expounder and the most rigid observer of the Socratic "organon." The influence of Socrates upon the philosophy of Plato is everywhere discernible. Plato had been taught by Socrates, that beyond the world of sense there is a world of eternal truth, seen by the eye of reason alone. He had also learned from him that the eye of reason is purified and strengthened by reflection, and that to reflect is to observe, and analyze, and define, and classify the facts of consciousness. Self-reflection, then, he had been taught to regard as the key of real knowledge. By a completer induction, a more careful and exact analysis, and a more accurate definition, he carried this philosophic method forward towards maturity. He sought to solve the problem of being by the principles revealed in his own consciousness, and in the ultimate ideas of the reason to find the foundation of all real knowledge, of all truth, and of all certitude.

The question as to the nature, the sources, and the validity of human knowledge had attracted general attention previous to the time of Socrates and Plato. As the results of this protracted controversy, the opinions of philosophers had finally crystallized in two well-defined and opposite theories of knowledge.

2. The second theory is that which denies the existence (except as phantasms, images, or mere illusions of the mind) of the whole of sensible phenomena, and refers all knowledge to the rational apperception of unity (τὸ ἔν) or the One.

This was the doctrine of the later Eleatics. The world of sense was, to Parmenides and Zeno, a blank negation, the non ens. The identity of thought and existence was the fundamental principle of their philosophy.

"Thought is the same thing as the cause of thought;

For without the thing in which it is announced,

You can not find the thought; for there is nothing, nor shall be,

This theory, therefore, denied to man any valid knowledge of the external world.

At the outset of his philosophic studies, Plato had derived from Socrates an important principle, which became the guide of all his subsequent inquiries. He had learned from him that the criterion of truth must be no longer sought amid the ever-changing phenomena of the "sensible world." This had been attempted by the philosophers of the Ionian school, and ended in failure and defeat. It must therefore be sought in the metaphenomenal--the "intelligible world;" that is, it must be sought in the apperceptions of the reason, and not in opinions founded on sensation. In other words, he must look within. Here, by reflection, he could recognize, dimly and imperfectly at first, but increasing gradually in clearness and distinctness, two classes of cognitions, having essentially distinct and opposite characteristics. He found one class that was complex (σνγκεγυµένον), changeable (θάτερον), contingent and relative (τὰ προς τι σχέσιν ἔχοντα); the other, simple (κεχωρισµένον), unchangeable (ἀκίνητον), constant (ταὐτόν), permanent (τὸ ὂν ἀει), and absolute (ἀνυπόθετον = ἁπλοῦν). One class that may be questioned, the other admitting of no question, because self-evident and necessary, and therefore compelling belief. One class grounded on sense-perception, the other conceived by reason alone. But whilst the reason recognizes, it does not create them. They are not particular and individual, but universal. They belong not to the man, but to the race.

In attempting to present to the reader an adequate representation of the Platonic Ideas, we shall be under the necessity of anticipating some of the results of his Dialectical method before we have expounded that method. And, further, in order that it may be properly appreciated by the modern student, we shall avail ourselves of the lights which modern psychology, faithful to the method of Plato, has thrown upon the subject. Whilst, however, we admit that modern psychology has succeeded in giving more definiteness and precision to the "doctrine of Ideas," we shall find that all that is fundamentally valuable and true was present to the mind of Plato. Whatever superiority the "Spiritual" philosophy of to-day may have over the philosophy of past ages, it has attained that superiority by its adherence to the principles and method of Plato.

This investigation is resumed in the "Republic." This greatest work of Plato's was designed not only to exhibit a scheme of Polity, and present a system of Ethics, but also, at least in its digressions, to propound a system of Metaphysics more complete and solid than had yet appeared. The discussion as to the powers or faculties by which we obtain knowledge, the method or process by which real knowledge is attained, and the ultimate objects or ontological grounds of all real knowledge, commences at § 18, book v., and extends to the end of book vii.

That we may reach a comprehensive view of this "sublimest of sciences," we shall find it necessary to consider--

1st. What are the powers or faculties by which we obtain knowledge, and what are the limits and degrees of human knowledge?

2d. What is the method in which, or the processes and laws according to which, the mind operates in obtaining knowledge?

3d. What are the ultimate results attained by this method? what are the objective and ontological grounds of all real knowledge?

The answer to the first question will give the PLATONIC PSYCHOLOGY; the answer to the second will exhibit the PLATONIC DIALECTIC; the answer to the last will reveal the PLATONIC ONTOLOGY.

I. PLATONIC PSYCHOLOGY.

Now we have to divide the segment which represents intelligible things in this way: The one part represents the knowledge which the mind gets by using things as images--the other; that which it has by dealing with the ideas themselves; the one part that which it gets by reasoning downward from principles--the other, the principles themselves; the one part, truth which depends on hypotheses--the other, unhypothetical or absolute truth.

Thus, to explain a problem in geometry, the geometers make certain hypotheses (namely, definitions and postulates) about numbers and angles, and the like, and reason from them--giving no reason for their assumptions, but taking them as evident to all; and, reasoning from them, they prove the propositions which they have in view. And in such reasonings, they use visible figures or diagrams--to reason about a square, for instance, with its diagonals; but these reasonings are not really about these visible figures, but about the mental figures, and which they conceive in thought.

The diagrams which they draw, being visible, are the images of thoughts which the geometer has in his mind, and these images he uses in his reasoning. There may be images of these images--shadows and reflections in water, as of other visible things; but still these diagrams are only images of conceptions.

This, then, is one kind of intelligible things: conceptions--for instance, geometrical conceptions of figures. But in dealing with these the mind depends upon assumptions, and does not ascend to first principles. It does not ascend above these assumptions, but uses images borrowed from a lower region (the visible world), these images being chosen so as to be as distinct as may be.

Now the other kind of intelligible things is this: that which the Reason includes, in virtue of its power of reasoning, when it regards the assumptions of the sciences as (what they are) assumptions only, and uses them as occasions and starting-points, that from these it may ascend to the Absolute, which does not depend upon assumption, the origin of scientific truth.

The reason takes hold of this first principle of truth, and availing itself of all the connections and relations of this principle, it proceeds to the conclusion--using no sensible image in doing this, but contemplates the idea alone; and with these ideas the process begins, goes on, and terminates.

"I apprehend," said Glaucon, "but not very clearly, for the matter is somewhat abstruse. You wish to prove that the knowledge which by the reason, in an intuitive manner, we may acquire of real existence and intelligible things is of a higher degree of certainty than the knowledge which belongs to what are commonly called the Sciences. Such sciences, you say, have certain assumptions for their basis; and these assumptions are by the student of such sciences apprehended not by sense, but by a mental operation--by conception.

"But inasmuch as such students ascend no higher than assumptions, and do not go to the first principles of truth, they do not seem to have true knowledge, intellectual insight, intuitive reason, on the subjects of their reasonings, though the subjects are intelligible things. And you call this habit and practice of the geometers and others by the name of JUDGMENT (διάνοια), not reason, or insight, or intuition--taking judgment to be something between opinion, on the one side, and intuitive reason, on the other.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Has had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar,

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory, do we come

Exiled from the true home of the spirit, imprisoned in the body, disordered by passion, and beclouded by sense, the soul has yet longings after that state of perfect knowledge, and purity, and bliss, in which it was first created. Its affinities are still on high. It yearns for a higher and nobler form of life. It essays to rise, but its eye is darkened by sense, its wings are besmeared by passion and lust; it is "borne downward, until at length it falls upon and attaches itself to that which is material and sensual," and it flounders and grovels still amid the objects of sense.

And now, with all that seriousness and earnestness of spirit which is peculiarly Christian, Plato asks how the soul may be delivered from the illusions of sense, the distempering influence of the body, and the disturbances of passion, which becloud its vision of the real, the good, and the true?