BOOKS.
PLATO AND PLATONISM.* Mn. PATER has written a very fine and delicate study of Plato and Platonism, the study of a scholar and an artist even more than the study of a metaphysician. The motto he takes from Plato describes the leading idea of his book, asserting, as it does, that philosophy is essentially the prin- ciple of harmony in human life. As a matter of fact, the thinkers whose names have been the leading names in philosophy, have hardly ever, except in Plato's own case, illustrated the full force of this assumption. Plato himself was a "mighty harmonist ;" so, perhaps, if we may accept the tradition about him, was Pythagoras ; nor have there been wanting some more modern names in philosophy with which we associate, in some degree, the conceptions which Plato regarded as interpreting the higher order and beauty of the universe,—Bacon, for instance, Descartes, Male- branche, Berkeley, Coleridge. But, for the most part, we must go to the poets, and not to the philosophers, to find representatives of the sort of teaching which Plato understood under the worcl 1.eovatitti,—the teaching that chiefly fascinates Mr. Pater in Plato's writings. The most notable names in philosophy, from Parmenides onwards, in- cluding, for instance, Aristotle and his Arabic commentators, Occam, Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, even Butler, Leibnitz, Wolff, Helvetius, Hume, Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Mill, Herbert Spencer, suggest to us nothing so little as the Platonic conception of philosophy as the highest kind of harmony ; nor would Mr. Pater, we suspect, have undertaken to give a course of lectures on any philosopher of the ordinary type. His love for Plato is due greatly to what he justly terms Plato's "sensuous love of the un-seen." Nevertheless, what he says of Parmenides as one of the most potent influences moulding Plato's thought, is well and admirably said. Mr. Pater de- lineates truly and skilfully Plato's recoil from the doctrine of perpetual change and flux,—the doctrine of Heraclitus,— which undermined the whole principle of constancy and fidelity in human life, and which made of the mind of man a mere moral and spiritual chameleon. It was recoil from this philosophy for ephemeral rather than immortal beings, valich led to that aspiration after fixity and constancy which fascinated Plato with the petrified immutability of the One Absolute Being as Parmenides taught it. This it was that appealed to Plato's thirst for lofty and inflexible prin- ciples of conduct. He saw that the doctrine of perpetual flux was really a doctrine which made life a mere phantom,- * Plato awl Platonism. A. Series of LootTires by Walter Pater, Fellow of Brumes, College. London: Macmillan and co. a rapid succession of transitory sensations, without any per- manent meaning or end. If perpetual change is the only law of our being, we are mere dancing atoms,—nay, not so much as atoms, flickerings of capricious change, which can have no more responsibility for what we are, or are not, than the shadows which fly and shrink and lengthen as the sun moves over the leaves of a forest. It was the passionate eagerness for something fixed, for something of permanent significance in human life, which made Plato drink-in the teaching of Parmenides as a grateful refuge from the mockery of a philo- sophy of perpetual flax, and therefore of perpetual illusion.
And in his chapter on Plato's doctrine of ideas, Mr. Pater shows with great skill how the one eternal, indivisible, and immutable Being of Parmenides, has for Plato "been diffused, divided, resolved, refracted, differentiated, into the eternal Ideas, a multiple, numerous, stellar world, so to call it,— abstract light into stars : Justice, Temperance as it is, Bravery as it is. Permanence, independency, indefectible identity with itself,—all those qualities which Parmenides supposed in the one and indivisible reality,—belong to every one of those ideas, severally. It was like a recrudescence of polytheism in that abstract world; a return of the many gods of Homer, veiled now as abstract notions, Love, Fear, Confidence, and the like ; and as such, the modern anthropologist, our student of the natural history of man, would rank the Platonic theory as but a form of what he calls 'animism." (pp. 152-53.) We hesi- tate at the words " animism " and "polytheism." Mr. Pater goes on to explain what he calls this "animism," this spiritual "polytheism," as if only the existence of intrinsic life, of a kind of personality in the Platonic ideas, could account for the reverent passion which they inspire in Plato,—the enthusiasm with which, when really beheld by the soul, they are sup- posed to fill it,—so that even a temporary vision of them is sufficient to renew the fountains of moral strength and religious hope. But is this a correct reading of Plato's drift P Did he not really mean that there are intellectual and moral conditions of life which are, in some sense, prior to life of any kind, divine or human, independent of it, and by the observance, or non-observance, of which conditions, the moral and intellectual character of all life, divine or human, is really determined P To modern thinkers, no doubt, it seems as if there were a contradiction in terms in talking of an idea as existing outside a living mind ; but it looks to us very much as if Plato's ideas of Justice, Temperance, Beauty, and the like, were conceived by him as independent of any mind, though the great purpose and object of them is to ani- mate, subdue, and control minds. As far as we can judge, Plato craved an ideal standard which was independent even of the divine personality itself, and one therefore which could not be identified, as Berkeley subsequently identified it, with that personality. He wanted the ideas of Justice, Beauty, Tem- perance, and the rest, to be as independent of God as of man. He foresaw, we imagine, the danger of a theology which places the will of God above these great moral and spiritual ideas, and places character therefore at the mercy of an omnipotent caprice. And surely the history both of Mahommedanism and of Calvinism has shown us that in shrinking from any philosophy which makes the moral attributes of God de- pendent on his absolute will, he had some reason on his side.
The only point, then, on which we venture to differ from Mr. Pater, is in the inference he supposes Plato to have drawn from the passionate love with which these eternal ideas possess minds worthy to gaze upon them in their purity, that they were in any sense living persons,—that his view was a kind of abstract Polytheism. On the contrary, we believe that he looked upon these ideas as in some way much more than livjng persons, though not living persons, as partaking in some respects of that Greek conception of Destiny which re- garded Destiny as beyond the control of the gods. Those ideas determined all that was really worthy of enthusiastic love in living beings, God or man, but they were not themselves conceived as personal. The very passage which Mr. Pater quotes from the " Phtedrus " to show why it is that men have a clearer idea of Beauty than they have of Justice, and the rest of the eternal ideas,—namely, that Beauty alone of these eternal ideas has left in this lower world any adequate copies of itself, copies "out of all proportion in their truthfulness and adequacy to any copy left here with us, of Justice, for In- stance," seems to us to prove this. "As regards Beauty, as I said, it both shone out, in its true being, among those other
eternal forms ; and when we came down hither we apprehended it through the clearest of all our bodily senses, gleaming with utmost brightness. For sight comes to us keenest of all our bodily senses, though Wisdom is not seen by it. Marvellous hves, in truth, would that [namely, Wisdom] have afforded, had it presented any manifest image of itself, such as that of Beauty, had it reached our bodily vision,—that, and all those other amiable forms. But now Beauty alone has had this fortune ; so that it is the clearest, the most certain, of all things, and the most lovable." In other words, Beauty is clearest to us and most lovable because it can be discerned by the bodily sense as well: by the spiritual sense, while the other divine qualities are discerned by the spiritual sense alone, Yet there is nothing so personal in Beauty as there is in Wisdom and Courage and Temperance. We discern beauty in a sunset, in a landscape, in a flower, whereas we cannot discern wisdom or courage or temperance without some personality real, or at all events imagined, in whom wisdom and couragerand temperance shall be illustrated. Yet Plato chooses Beauty—least personal of all of these ideas—as the one divine idea of which we possess the clearest vision on earth. We:cannot but think that he regarded these eternal ideas, not as living, but as above life, as presenting superpersonal standards by which persons, whether divine or human, if they are to be worthy to gaze upon them, shall guide themselves. He had the greatest fear of subordinating the eternal standards of conduct to the will even of divine omnipotence, and his device was to represent that there are eternal conditions, or, as we should say, "laws," of personal life which can only be apprehended by persons, but which are independent of, and raised above, the persons who apprehend them. His doctrine of men's partial reminis- cence of a prenatal vision, and of the eternal verities of which in a former existence men have had a fleeting glimpse, is
Plato's equivalent for Kant's doctrine of a priori truths and conceptions and we doubt if to Plato these dominating moral conditions affecting the higher personalities were a bit more of the nature of distinct personalities than a priori categories were to Kant.
Mr. Pater does full justice to the asceticism which Plato so constantly inculcates in spite of his "sensuous love of the un-seen." But we wonder that he does not lay more stress than he does on the doctrine approaching very nearly to the Christi= doctrine of retributive as distinguished from merely corrective punishment, which is so vividly represented in the " Gorgias," where, in our opinion, Plato comes very near to a doctrine, not merely of retribution, but of penance. If Mr. Pater does injustice of any kind to Plato,—and we would not say that be does,—it is in rather underrating the depth and intensity of his moral convictions. On the other hand, we do not think that he insists sufficiently on the very low estimate Plato must have formed of the claims of the domestic affections upon human nature, before be could have given us his ideal of the domestic life of his model republic. His whole con- ception of human life was too artificial. As Mr. Pater puts it, he wished every man to make himself "a work of art," and, of course, to a certain extent he was quite right; but there is always a great danger that, in making yourself "a work of art," you may make yourself stiff, artificial, unnatural, perhaps even distorted ; and such, no doubt, would have been the vice of the citizens of his model republic. There is the greatest possible charm in the whole book, though we think that Mr. Pater sympath ices a little more with Plato as an unsatisfied searcher after truth than he does with Plato as a spiritual moralist of the highest rank. Here is one of the finest passages, in which he sums up Plato's services as a thinker :—
" Since Zono's paradoxes, in fact, the very air of Athens was become sophisticated, infected with questionings, often vain enough ; and the Platonic method had been, in its measure, deter- mined by (the unfriendly might say, was in truth only a deposit from) that infected Socrates,' as he admits, is easily re- futed. Say rather, dear Agathon, that you cannot refute the truth., That is reassUring, certainly ! For you might think sometimes, uneasily, of the Platonic Socrates, that, as he says of the Sophist or of himself perhaps en caricature in the Buthydsmus. Such is his skill in the war of words that he can refute any pro- position whatever, whether true or false' ; that, in short, there is a dangerous facility abroad for proving all things whatever, equally well, of which Socrates, and his presumable allotment of truth, has but the general advantage. The friendly, on the other hand, might rejoin oven then, that as Leasing suggests, the search for truth is a better thing for us than its possession. Plato, who supposes any knowledge worth the name to be absolute and eternal'; whose constant contention it is, to separate longo in- terval°, by the longest possible interval, science (irterviVq) as the possession of irresistible truth, from any and ovary sort of knowledge which falls short of that ; would hardly have accepted the suggestion of Leasing. Yet, in spite of all that, in spite of the demand be makes for certainty and exactness and what is absolute, in all real knowledge, he does think, or inclines his readers to think, that truth, precisely because it resembles some high kind of relationship of persons to persons, depends a good deal on the receiver ; and must be, in that degree, elusive, pro- visional, contingent, a matter of various approximation, and of an economy,' as is said ; that it is partly a subjective attitude of mind :—that philosophic truth consists in the philosophic temper. Socrates in Plato,' remarks Montaigne acutely, disputes. rather to the profit of the disputants, than of the dispute. lie takes hold of the first subject, like one who has a more profitable end in view than to explain it ; namely, to clear the understand- ings that he takes upon him to instruct and exercise.' Just there, in fact, is the justification of Plato's peculiar dialectical method, of its inexactness, its hesitancy, its scruples and reserve, as if he feared to obtrude knowledge on an unworthy receiver. The treatise, as the proper instrument of dogma—the Ethics of Aristotle, the Ethics of Spinoza—begins with a truth, or with a clear conviction of truth, in the axiom or definition, which it does but propose further to explain and apply.—The treatise, as the instrument of a dogmatic philosophy, begins with an axiom or definition : the essay or dialogue, on the other hand, as the instrument of dialectic, does not necessarily so much as conclude in one; like that long dialogue with oneself, that dialectic pro- cess, which may be co-extensive with life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps : it does but put one into a duly receptive atti- tude towards such possible truth, discovery, or revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet,—shed itself on the purified air ; it does not provide a proposition, nor a. system of propositions, but forms a temper."
And, he observes very happily a little further on " KlIAVVE141, it may chance to be,' is, we may notice, a favourite catch- word of his. The philosopher of Being, or, of the verb to be,'
is, after all, afraid of saying It is.'" But this applies much more to questions of metaphysics than to questions of ethics, in which last Plato's judgments are as explicit and affirma- tive as any human judgments could be.
One of the best characteristics of Mr. Pater's book is that he translates, as we may say, Plato's theory, with the greatest freedom and vivacity, into its true modern equivalents. We have seldom read, for instance, a more telling passage than that in which he explains (pp. 142-46) how much fresh light and meaning the abstract and generalised " idea " throws on the individual and concrete example, how the scientifie know- ledge of species and genus adds even to the imaginative, as well as to the intellectual, apprehension of every individual specimen of a class. Plato's "sensuous love of the un-seen " helped him greatly in the sensuous realisation even of the seen.
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