Part 2 — CHAPTER XIII PLATO

The belief in human immortality, construed in a theological or philosophical sense, had at this time hardly penetrated to circles of ordinary lay folk. Socrates himself, when it came to such inquiries into the unknowable, never claimed to provide an answer that differed from that which would be given by the majority of his fellow citizens out of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors. Where in the pages of Plato he is allowed to give undisguised expression to his natural and homely vigour—in the Apology—he shows little anticipation of an immortal life of the soul. Death, he thinks, either brings complete unconsciousness to men, like a dreamless sleep, or else it means the transition of the soul to another life in the realm of the Souls—a realm which, to judge by his allusions, has much more resemblance to the Homeric Hades than to any of the visionary countries imagined by theologians or theologically minded poets.1 Both possibilities he accepts with complete equanimity, trusting in the righteousness of the controlling gods,2 and he looks no further. How should he know with certainty where everyone was ignorant?3

With a like absence of concern it is possible that the majority of the cultured (who were just beginning to separate themselves from the rest of the community) left unsettled the problem of the Unknown.4 Plato assures us that it was in his time a widespread belief of the populace that the outgoing soul-breath of the dying was caught up by the winds—especially if its exit took place in stormy weather—and was dispersed, blown away, into nothing.5 In other ways, too, we may suppose that the orthodox Greek, when death approached, allowed his fancy to picture what might await his soul on the other side of death’s threshold.6 But it is certain that the belief in an unending life of the soul—a life with no end because it had no beginning—was not among these thoughts. Plato himself lets us see how strange such a conception was even to those who were capable of following and understanding a philosophical discussion. Towards the end of the long dialogue upon the best kind of State his Sokrates asks Glaukon with apparent irrelevance “are you not aware that our soul is immortal and never perishes?” Whereupon, we are told, Glaukon looked at him in astonishment and said, “No, in truth, of that I was not aware: can you then assert any such thing?”7

The idea that the soul of man may be everlasting and imperishable seemed thus a paradoxical freak to one who was no adept in the theological doctrine of the soul. If in later times the case was altered, no one contributed more effectually or more permanently to bring that change about than the great thinker and poet who established the theological conception of personal immortality in the very heart of philosophy and then gave back the idea strengthened and made more profound to its parent theology, while he himself extended the influence of that idea far beyond the bounds of school or sect by the far-reaching power of his own unaging writings which belong, not to the schoolroom, but to the greatest achievements of literature whether of Greece or of mankind. It is beyond calculation what power has been wielded since their first appearance by the Platonic dialogues in the confirmation, dissemination, and precise definition of the belief in immortality—a power that with all its alteration in the passage of the centuries has maintained itself unbroken into our own times.

§ 2

Plato had not always given his assent to the belief in immortality. At any rate, it must have remained very much in the background of his thoughts and his belief in the days when he still regarded the world from the point of view of a slightly more developed Socraticism. Not only at that period (in the Apology) does he make his Sokrates go to his death without the most distant approach to a belief in the undying vitality of his soul, but also in the first sketch of his Ideal State—a sketch made while the influence of the Socratic view of life still prevailed with him—the belief in immortality is omitted and even excluded.8 It seems as if Plato did not reach the higher conception of the nature and value of the soul, its origin and destiny reaching out beyond all temporal limitation, until the great change which came over his philosophy had been completed. The world of ever-changing Appearance manifesting itself to the senses in perpetual flux and efflux—this in its inessential, unseizable unreality he abandoned to the criticisms of Herakleitos. But above it, in accordance with his own deepest longings and, as it seemed, implied as its real object by the Socratic search itself after conceptual knowledge, stood a world of unchangeable Being without beginning or end, to which all the appearances of this lower world owed such reality as they possessed. “Being” itself, the totality of the Ideas, remained uncontaminated with “Becoming” and passing away; remained the highest goal and supreme aim standing high above all that aspired to it, or felt a longing for its complete and unlimited fullness.9 This everlasting reality holds itself aloof from the stream of appearance and is not to be grasped within that stream; it is not manifested in the deceitful ever-changing perception of the senses, nor yet in the Opinion that is based upon them; it can only be apprehended, without any assistance from the senses, by the pure intuition of the Reason.10 This world of everlasting self-identical Being exists outside the thought and knowledge of man, but it first reveals itself to man in the activity of his own thinking;11 and at the same time there is revealed to him a higher power than the mere capacity to abstract the unsubstantial general conceptions from the multiplicity of experience—a power that is the highest capacity of the soul, enabling it to voyage out beyond all experience and with infallible knowledge12 to soar of its own independent power upwards to a transcendental world of permanent and essential reality. The highest capacity that belongs to man, the soul of his soul, is not enclosed within this world that surrounds his senses in its restless flood. Like the objects that are the last goal of its study the soul itself is raised to where it can for the first time find a form of activity worthy of its natural powers. It achieves a new distinction, a priestlike dignity, as an intermediary between the two worlds to both of which it belongs.

The soul is a pure spiritual essence; it contains nothing within it that is material, nothing of the “place” where Becoming is shaped into a distant resemblance to Being.13 It is incorporeal and belongs to the realm of the “invisible”, which in this immaterialist doctrine counts as the most real of all, more real than the most solid matter.14 It is not one of the Ideas; on the contrary it seems to partake in one of the Ideas—that of Life—only as other appearances share in their Ideas.15 But it stands nearer to the whole world of the everlasting Ideas than anything else that is not itself an Idea; of all the things in the world it is “most like” to the Idea.16

But it has also a share in Becoming. It cannot simply remain with the Ideas in unaltered other-world transcendence. It has its origin indeed in that other world beyond Appearance. It was from the beginning, uncreated17 like the Ideas and like the Soul of the World to which it is akin.18 It is “older than the body”19 to which it must link itself; it does not come into being at the same time as the body, but is only drawn down from its spiritual state of being into the realm of matter and becoming. In the Phaedrus this “fall into birth” appears as the necessary result of an intellectual “fall” which takes place within the soul itself.20 In the Timaeus, however, with its study of the general life of the whole world-organism, the animation of the living creature has now to be explained as arising out of the plan—not from a failure of the plan—of the Creator.21 The soul thus seems to be destined from the beginning to give life to a body. It is not only the knowing and thinking element in a world of inanimate things, it is also the source of all movement. Itself in motion from the beginning it bestows the power of movement upon the body with which it is associated; without it, there would be no movement in the world, and no life either.22

But though enclosed within the body it remains a stranger to the body. On its side it has no need of the body and is not conditioned by it. It remains independently associated with it as its mistress and leader.23 Even in their united existence there is a great gulf fixed between the soul and all that is not soul;24 body and soul never fuse into one, however closely they may be bound up with each other. And yet the body and its impulses have the power to influence profoundly the immortal being that dwells within it. By its union with the body the soul can be made unclean; “diseases” such as folly and unrestrained passion come to it from the body.25 It is not beyond the reach of change like the Ideas, to which it is akin without being of their nature; on the contrary, it can degenerate entirely. The evil influences of the body penetrate to its inmost being; even in its everlasting, immaterial, spiritual nature it can derive something “corporeal”26 from such a sinister partnership.

It is bound to the body by influences of a lower kind which attach themselves to the pure power of knowledge that alone is proper to it. At the outset of his speculations Plato, like other thinkers before him,27 had thought of the different capacities of the soul, alternately in conflict or alliance with each other, as “parts” of unequal rank and value, bound up together within the soul of man.28 Even in the previous life of the soul, in the other world, the reasoning power of the soul is, according to the Phaedrus, already coupled with “Temper” and “Desire”; it is these in fact which drag down the soul into the realm of the material; and the three parts still remain indissolubly united in the everlasting life which awaits the soul after its release from the body.

But in proportion as the philosopher extends and elevates his conception of the soul, and as he becomes more convinced of its eternal destiny and vocation to a life of unending blessedness in a realm of unchangeable being, the more impossible does it seem to him that this candidate for immortality in the realm of the everlasting Forms can be a composite amalgam of elements capable of being resolved again by division and analysis29—that the reasoning faculty can be for ever united with Effort and Desire, which perpetually threaten to drag it downwards into materiality. The soul in its true and original nature is now for him simple and indivisible.30 Only with its enclosure in the body does the everlasting, thinking soul, whose tendency is towards the eternal, acquire impulses and desires31 that have their origin in the body and belong to the body,32 that only adhere to the soul during the period of its earthly life, that with their separation from their immortal associate will pass away, since they are themselves mortal and such as perish with the body.

The soul, to which sense-perception,33 feeling, emotion, and desire are only added from outside, is in its own imperishable nature nothing but pure capacity of thought and knowledge—with which indeed the power to will that which is conceived in thought, seems to be directly associated. It is destined for the “other” world, for the intuition and undistorted reflection in its consciousness of the immaterial essences. Banished to this earth amid the restless change and alteration of all being, and not uninfluenced by the forces of bodily life, it must endure a brief exile here.34 Not unscathed does it leave behind it, in death, its ill-assorted companion, the body.35 Then it goes into an intermediate region of bodiless existence in which it must do penance for the misdeeds of its life on earth, and free itself from their effects.36 After that it is driven away once more into a body and transported to a fresh life upon earth, the character of which it chooses for itself in accordance with the special nature that it had evolved in its earlier incarnation upon earth.37 Though no organic connexion exists between them, yet there is a certain “symmetry”38 between the individual soul and the body that is lent to it.

Thus, the soul lives through a series of earthly lives39 of the most varied character; it may even sink so low as the animals in the course of its incarnations.40 Its own merits, the success or failure of its conflict with the passions and desires of the body, decide whether or not its lives shall lead it upwards to a nobler type of existence. Its task is plain: it must free itself from its impure companions, sensual Lust and the darkening of the powers of Reason. If it can succeed in this it will find once more the “way upwards”41 which at last leads it into complete immunity from renewed incarnation and brings it home again into the kingdom of everlasting untroubled Being.

§ 3

It is evident that in what he thus, clothing philosophy in the language of poetry, says of the origin, destiny, and character of the soul, which though beyond time is yet placed within time, and though beyond space is yet the cause of all movement within space—that in all this Plato is following in the track of the theologians of earlier times. Only in the poetry and speculative thought of theologi, not in any physiologists’ doctrine, did he find the conception, imaginatively expressed and pointing in the direction which he also followed, of a multiplicity of independent souls whose existence had been from all time and was not first begun in the material world with the creation of a living organism; of souls enclosed in the corporeal as though in a foreign, hostile element, which survive their association with the body, passing through many such bodies and yet preserving themselves intact after the destruction of each of those bodies, immortal, endless (for they are without beginning),42 and alive from the very beginning of Time. The souls, moreover, have life as distinct, complete, and indivisible personalities, not as mere dependent emanations of a simple common Source of all life.

The theory of the eternity and indestructibility of the individual souls, of the personal immortality of the souls, is difficult to reconcile with more specifically Platonic doctrine—with the doctrine of the Ideas.43 And yet it is undeniable that from the moment that he first adopted this theory—and adopted it, too, precisely in connexion with the philosophy of the Ideas—he adhered to it steadfastly and without deviating from its essential meaning. The process by which he arrived at it is not to be found in the “proofs” by which he attempts in the Phaedo to establish the truth of the soul’s immortality in which he himself already believed. Those proofs in reality do not prove what they are intended to prove (and what considered as a fact of experience is unproved and as an axiom necessary to thought is beyond proof); they cannot therefore be the reasons that led the philosopher to hold his conviction. He has in fact borrowed this article of his faith from the creeds which already contained it. He himself scarcely conceals the fact. As authority for the main outlines of the soul’s history as given by himself he refers us almost apologetically, and as though excusing himself for not providing a philosophical proof, to the theologi and priests of the mysteries.44 And he himself becomes the philosophical poet, completely and without concealment, when in imitation of the poetry of edification he, too, gives a picture of the soul’s sojourn in an intermediate station of its pilgrimage or describes the stages of its earthly existence45 that lead the soul down even to the animal.

For such mythological expressions of the inexpressible the philosopher himself claims no more than symbolical truth.46 He is fully in earnest, however, with the fundamental conception of the soul as an independent substance that enters from beyond space and time into the material and perceptible world, and into external conjunction with the body, not into organic union with it; that maintains itself as a being of spiritual essence in the midst of the flux and decay of the material world, though at the same time its pure brightness is overshadowed through this conjunction and must purify itself from the effects; that can disentangle itself,47 even to the extent of complete severance from the embrace of the material and the perceptible. All that is essential in this conception he derives from the theologians, but he brings it into close relationship with his own philosophy which depends upon a conviction of the absolute opposition between Being and Becoming, and upon the dualistic division of the world into matter and mind—a dualism that applies also to the relations of soul and body and throughout the whole realm of Appearance. The soul which stands half-way between the unity and unchangeability of Being and the ever-varying multiplicity of matter has in this realm of fragmentary and subordinate validity, into which it is temporarily exiled, the power to reflect the Ideas and represent them in its own consciousness clear and unfalsified. The soul in its complete independence of sense-perception and of concepts derived from the senses is alone able to pursue the “Quest of Reality”.48 In this pursuit the body with which it is associated is nothing but a hindrance and a serious one. The soul has a hard struggle against the tendencies of the body in spite of its independence and aloofness. Just as, in the creation of the universe, matter, though not a cause is at least a subordinate cause which by its influence and exigencies gives various hindrances49 to the “Mind” that shapes and orders the world, so, too, the soul finds in this ephemeral and inconstant Matter, with its stirring and tumultuous unrest, a serious obstacle to its own proper activity. This is the evil, or the cause of evil,50 which must be overthrown in order that the mind may win its way to freedom and final rest and security in the realm of pure Being. Plato often speaks of the katharsis, the purification, after which man must strive.51 He takes both the word and the idea from the theologians, but he gives it a higher meaning while yet preserving unmistakably the analogy with the katharsis of the theologi and mystery-priests. It is not the pollution which comes from contact with sinister daimones and from all that belongs to them, that is to be avoided, but rather the dulling of the power of knowledge and of willing what is known (regarded as a simultaneously created power) due to the world of the senses and its fierce impulses.52 Man’s effort must be directed not so much to ritual purity, as to the preservation of his knowledge of the eternal from eclipse through the deceptive illusions of the senses; towards the concentration and gathering together of the soul within itself;53 its withdrawal from contact with the ephemeral as the source of pollution and debasement.

Thus, even in this philosophic reinterpretation of ritual abstinence in terms of a spiritual release and emancipation, the effort after “purity” retains its religious sense. The world of the Ideas, the world of pure Being, to which only the pure soul can attain,54 is a world of divinity. The “Good” as the highest of the Ideas, the loftiest pattern, the supreme aim to which all Being and Becoming tend, which is at the same time more than all the Ideas—the first cause of all Being and all knowledge—is also God.55 The soul for which, in its desire and longing for the full being of the Idea, the knowledge of the “Good” is the “supreme science”,56 enters hereby into the closest communion with God. The “turning away” of the soul from the many-coloured image to the sun of the highest Idea, is itself57 a turning towards the divine, towards the luminous source of all Being and Knowing.

Thus exalted, philosophic inquiry turns to enthousiasmos.58 The way which leads upwards from the lower levels of Becoming to Being, is discovered by means of dialectic, which in its “comprehensive view”59 is able to unite the distracted ever-moving flood of multifarious Appearance into the ever-enduring unity of the Idea which is reflected in Appearance. Dialectic travels through the whole range of the Ideas, graduated one above the other, till it reaches the last and most universal of the Ideas. In its upward course it passes by an effort of sheer logic through the whole edifice of the highest concepts.60 Plato is the most subtle of dialecticians; he almost carries subtlety to excess in his eager pursuit of every intricacy of logic—and of paralogism. But he combined to a remarkable degree the cold exactitude of the logician with the enthusiastic intensity of the seer; and his dialectic, after its patient upward march step by step from concept to concept, at last soars to its final goal in a single tremendous flight, in which the longed-for realm of the Ideas reveals itself in a moment of immediate vision. So the Bacchant in his ecstasy saw divinity suddenly plain, and so too in the nights consecrated by the mysteries the epoptês beheld the vision of the Goddesses in the torch-lit glare of Eleusis.61

To this loftiest height whence a view is obtained of “colourless, formless Being, beyond the reach of every contact”, inaccessible to sense-perception, it is dialectic that shows the way; and dialectic now becomes a way of salvation in which the soul finds once more its own divine nature and its divine home. The soul is closely akin to godhead and like it62—it is itself something divine. The reason in the soul is divine,63 and comprehends everlasting Being immediately by its power of thought. “If the eye were not sunlike, it could never see the sun”;64 if the mind were not akin by nature to the good,65 the highest of the Ideas, it could never comprehend the Good, the Beautiful, and all that is perfect and eternal. In its power of recognizing the eternal the soul bears within itself the surest proof that it is itself eternal.66

The “purification” by means of which the soul gets rid of67 the defacement that has overtaken it during its earthly life reveals again the divine in man. Even on earth the philosopher is thus rendered immortal and godlike.68 As long as he can continue in a state of pure intellectual knowledge and comprehension of the everlasting, for so long is he living, already in this life, “in the Islands of the Blest.”69 By expelling all traces of the corruptible and the mortal in and about himself, he is more and more to “become like God”;70 so that when it is at last set free from this earthly existence, his soul may enter into the divine, the invisible, the pure, the eternally self-identical, and as a disembodied mind remain for ever with that which is its kin.70a At this point, language that can only make use of physical imagery becomes totally inadequate.71 A goal is set before the soul that lies outside all physical nature, beyond time and space, without past or future, an ever-present now.72

The soul can escape out of time and space and find its home in eternity, without at the same time losing its own self in the General and Universal that stands above time and space. We must not inquire what sort of personality and individual distinctness can yet remain with the soul when it has cast off all effort, desire, sense-perception, and everything related to the world of change and multiplicity, to become once more a pure mirror of the eternal. Nor must we ask how it is possible to think of a spirit removed above space and time and all the multiplicity of matter and yet personal and separate in its personality.73 For Plato the Souls live on as they had been in the beginning—individual beings conscious of themselves in a time that has no end and is beyond all time. He teaches a personal immortality.

§ 4

There is an “other-worldly” tone in this philosophy, and its doctrine of the soul. Far beyond the world in which life has placed man lies the realm of pure Being, the good, the perfect, and the unspoilt. To reach that realm at last, to free the mind from the unrest and illusion of the senses, to be rid of the desires and emotions that would “nail”74 it down here below, to sever its connexion75 with the body and bodily things—that is the soul’s highest duty. The only reason why it is banished into this world is that it may all the more completely separate itself from the world. To die—to be dead inwardly to all that is visible, material, physical—that is the goal and the fruit of philosophy.76 “To be ready and fit to die” is the hall-mark of the complete philosopher. For such, philosophy is the deliverer that frees him for all time from the body77—from its desires, its restlessness, its wild passions78—and gives him back again to the eternal and its silence.

To be pure, to be free from evil, to die already in this temporal world—these are the oft-repeated exhortations which the philosopher addresses to the immortal soul. Ascetic morality here again demands from man what is essentially a quite negative proceeding. But this denial of the world is only a step leading on to the most supremely positive behaviour. Katharsis is only the gateway to philosophy; and it is philosophy which teaches man how to reach what alone is positive, the only true and unconditional Being; instructs him how to reach the clear and perfect understanding of the only permanent good and how to merge himself utterly in that good.79 The soul of the thinker yearns after Reality;80 death is for it not merely the annihilation of the chains of the body that impede it, but a very positive “acquisition of intellectual knowledge”81 to which it is urged on by its proper nature—which is therefore also a fulfilment of its proper task. So the turning aside from the physical and the ephemeral is at the same time and without transition a turning towards the eternal and the divine. The flight from the things of this world is in itself an entry into that other world, and a becoming like to the divine.82

But the true realities are not to be found in this world. To grasp them plainly in its thought—to recover the untroubled vision of its spiritual eye—the soul must divest itself entirely of all the stress and distraction of the earthly. For this mundane world, the mirage that encompasses the senses, the philosopher has nothing but denial. Because it gives no foothold for true knowledge the whole world of Becoming has no independent value for his science. The apprehension of that which is never more than relative, which simultaneously manifests contrary qualities in itself, can only serve as stimulus and invitation to the search for what is absolute.83 In this realm of doubtful shadows the soul finds nothing but obscure reminders of that which it had once beheld plainly. The beauty of the physical world which is apprehended by the noblest of the senses, the eye, serves indeed to recall to the soul’s memory the Beautiful-in-itself, of which that other is but a pale copy, and to disclose to the soul what is really its own property, what it had brought with it ready made from an earlier existence beyond the bounds of all matter.84 But the observation of beauty here below must lead beyond itself at once and conduct the mind out of the world of mere appearance to the pure forms of the Ideal world. The process of Becoming tells us nothing about the nature of Being; the thinker learns nothing from this source—in fact he learns no new knowledge or wisdom of any kind in this world; he only recovers what he had before and always possessed in latent form.85 The treasure, however, lies beyond the limits of this world. He must turn away his gaze from the shadow-figures upon the wall of the cave of this world, and direct it towards the sun of eternity.86 He is placed in this world of perpetual change; to it his senses and his understanding are directly referred; and yet he must disdain and rise superior to, and flee from, all that this world offers, giving himself up immediately and entirely to the unseen, and taking flight from this world to that where he will become like God, and be purified and justified by the power and might of his knowledge.87

Earthly life as it actually is will remain strange to him, and he a stranger in earthly life,88 despised as a fool for his inaptitude in earthly affairs by the great majority of those who are so versed in such things.89 He has something higher to think about—the salvation of his own soul. He will not live for the community, but for himself, and his real task.90 Human interests seem to him hardly worth troubling about,91 the state itself hopelessly corrupt, founded as it is upon deception and passion and injustice. At the same time, he himself of course would be the real statesman,92 the leader who could guide his fellow citizens to their true salvation—acting not as the servant of their lusts, but as a doctor who gives help to the sick.93 It is “not ships and harbours and walls and taxes and such trivialities”94 that he would give the city, but justice and health and everything else which after this life can stand before the stern judgment of the other world.95 This would be the best mode of life,96 and he could show them the way to it; no worldly power or greatness can do as much—none of the great statesmen of the past, Themistokles, Kimon, and Perikles, understood anything of all this; all their efforts were nothing but blind error and wandering.97

At the climax of his life and of his philosophical development Plato completed an ideal picture of the State, drawn in accordance with the principles and the requirements of his own philosophy. It rests upon a broad foundation—the multitude of its inhabitants divided strictly into classes that in themselves and their manner of life are to display, like a beacon that can be seen afar, the virtue of Justice. At one period this had seemed to include all that was necessary for the completion of the ideal State; but now, far above that level, pointing upwards into the lofty aether above the earth, a final consummation reveals itself to him, to which all mere mundane things serve but as support and furtherance. A small minority of the citizens, the philosophers, form this last pinnacle of the building. Here on earth and in this state that is organized in conformity with justice, they will serve the state, as in duty bound and not for their own satisfaction, and take part in government.98 As soon as duty is fulfilled they will return to the supramundane contemplation which is the aim and content of their whole life’s activity. To provide a place where these contemplatives may live, where they may be educated for their vocation, the highest there is; to allow dialectic as a form of living to take its place in the activity of worldly civilization as an object of men’s effort99—to bring about all this the Ideal State is built up step by step. The bourgeois social virtues and their firm establishment and interconnexion, which had once seemed the real and sufficient reason for the erection of the whole edifice of the state—seen from this elevation, these no longer retain their independent importance. “The so-called virtues” all pale before the highest capacity of the soul, which is the mystic beholding of the eternal.100 The chief mission of the perfect wise man is no longer to fulfil his obligations to the others that stand without. To make his own inner life fit and ready for self-emancipation is now his real and immediate task. Mysticism aims at a personal salvation such as the individual can only obtain for himself. Good works are no longer necessary when the mind has no further connexion with earthly life and conduct. When it comes to dealing with practical earthly affairs he who possesses the highest virtue will have all these others added unto him.101 Virtue belongs to him; it is his real condition of being; but the particular virtues he will rarely need to use.

This lofty pinnacle is accessible to but a few. God alone and a small102 company of mortals are able to approach in pure thought to the everlasting Reality, the sole object of certain, plain and unchanging Knowledge. The majority of men can never become philosophers.103 And yet, according to this philosophy, the crown of all life belongs to the philosopher. This is no religion for the poor in spirit. Science—the supreme knowledge of the highest Being—is a pre-condition of salvation. To know God is to become like God.104 It is easy to see why such a message of salvation could not attract a wider community of believers. It could not have done so without being false to its own nature. To a few lofty spirits among mankind, it offers a reward that beckons from eternity. Freedom from life in the corruptible body is the prize it offers; that and a never-ending union with true Reality—a return to what is everlasting and divine. A symbol of what the philosopher has achieved after his death will be provided by the community by whom the departed will be honoured as a Daimon.105

Such then is the ideal vision of a civilization in which the belief in the soul’s immortality and its vocation to an everlasting life in the kingdom of the gods was held with profound and serious conviction. The belief in immortality here becomes the corner-stone of a building, the architect of which regards all earthly things as only valid for the moment, and therefore of profound unimportance. For him only the Heaven of the spiritual world with its everlasting laws and patterns seriously matters. He discards without a regret the whole of Greek culture as it had expressed itself in state and society, custom and art—an art that will last as long as humanity itself. He demands an aristocracy, and an aristocracy measured by a standard of what is the “best” that was quite beyond the reach of any possible human society even though it were as deeply impregnated with aristocratic ideas as Greek society always was. And the final aim and ideal sought by this organization of life on earth was to be the superseding of all earthly life . . .

The mind of Plato, equally ready to receive as to give, was not likely to become immobilized for ever in a mystic rapture of vision. Even when he had finished the Republic he did not cease to reshape his system at many points and in many directions, while some special problems were taken up again for further and repeated study. Even a second sketch of a political system was left behind by him in which he sought to lay down rules for the guidance of life among the multitude who are still regarded as completely shut out from the realm of the everlasting Forms. To this end the highest aims of human endeavour are almost left out of sight and practical rules for reaching the attainable “better” are supplied for the benefit of the majority. He had learnt resignation at many points. Nevertheless, the profound conviction of all his thoughts remained unchanged; the claims that he put before the world and mankind remained essentially the same. For this reason after generations have not been mistaken in seeing in him the priestly man of wisdom, who with warning finger points the immortal spirit of man on its way from this feeble world upwards to the everlasting life.