THE SCHOOL OF PLATO.*

THE subject which Mr. Bussell proposes to himself is the

speculative philosophy of the Imperial Age of Rome, this age being limited, it would appear from his introduction, to the first three centuries of the Christian era, though the three centuries are later on (p. 211) extended to five. He regards this period as one distinguished by " wealth and variety of ideas,"—a characteristic due, he thinks, to the "careful and judicious government" of the Empire, which, at once freeing mankind from material cares and taking from them all political in- terests, gave them an ample and undisturbed leisure in which to attack the great problems of existence. We must pause for a moment to suggest a doubt which, though it does not affect Mr. Bussell's main argument, yet requires to be stated. There was a time in the period specified (1-300 A.D.) which may fairly be described as one of peace and plenty. Take its extreme limits, and it covers the reigns of the "good Emperors" (96-180 A.D.) But the expeditions of Trajan, very different from the unambitious defence of the frontiers which Mr. Bussell praises, must have made exhausting demands on the population and wealth of the Empire, and the reign of Marcus Aurelius was disturbed by the bloody war with the Mar- comanni, and by one of the most deadly of historic plagues. The Golden Age of the Empire is thus reduced to something less than half a century, the forty-four years of Hadrian and Antonints Pius (117-161 A.D.) Some historians would still further reduce it to the three-and-twenty years of Antoninus. But to pro- ceed. Mr. Hassell finds it necessary to give a general view of Greek philosophy, and devotes his First Book to a sum- mary of speculation from the Ionian school down to Aristotle. There is no need for the apology with which he introduces this preliminary discussion. There is no portion of the book that we have read with more interest, perhaps because there is none which we have read with so much ease, as Mr. Bussell's method presupposes an acquaintance with the writings of the philosophers whom he analyses and compares, and most readers will be more at home when the subject is Plato and Aristotle than when it is Plotinus or Porphyry. The chapter on Socrates is especially good. There was a sceptical element in his thought ; there was even something that we might call agnostic, for did he not maintain that if he had reached any degree of wisdom it was by recognising his own ignorance ? Yet he was eminently practical and constructive. He was the first philosopher to care for his fellow-men ; he was

the first to conceive of a God who cared for them:— "Socrates is actually the first to combine with inquiry, emotion, enthusiasm, love, unproven hope in immortality ; to introduce into Science an unfeigned trustfulness in Providence, a sense of a personal and immediate relation to the Divine, represented now as comprising the host of deities which his country worshipped, now by the central religious authority' of Greece, now by an All- father, a single Creator of great benevolence, wisdom, and (above all) personal interest in him. This conviction, coupled with a consequent sense of human importance and individual value (utterly at variance with the earlier physical or Atomic views, of * The School of Plato its Origin, Development, and Res vol under the Roman Empire. By F. W. Bused!, B.D. London Methuen and Co.

the nonentity of men), is his starting-point in his rile of instructor of youth. He believes every one has it, like himself ; he seeks to awaken and stimulate a dormant faculty for seeing things, useful and ordinary things, in a broad light, for comprehending exist- ence here as a whole, for recognising the essential feebleness of Reason or Reasoning to supply answers to the main questions, for finding the Divine Principle is closest communion with oneself."

This is the belief to which Christianity gives a definite form, while it suggests a method of realisation that masters the heart even when it does not convince the intellect.

Passing over the chapters on Plato and Aristotle, which the reader, however, will find fully remunerative of study, and the Second Book, dealing with the Academy, Old and New, the Peripatetics, the Pyrrhonists, and others, which is only less interesting because its subject cannot be connected with any commanding personality, we come to Book III., " Judaism." Here we may note a most valuable distinction and correction.

Mr. Bussell has heard, as most of us have heard, much idle talk about Hellenism and Hebraism, and enters a timely protest against it :—

" The superficial admirer of the `Classical' epochs will regret that the graceful harmony with Nature was dispelled among Christians by an Indo-Gnostic ' sense of alienation and estrange. ment ; that Hebrew influences entered to pervert, by grievous dogmas of man's sin and God's wrath, the pure sense of Divine Sonship; that Jewish asceticism and distrust of matter violently interrupted our communion with our Mother, and bade us fly from hence, forsaking the society of our kind and the duty and enterprise of practical life. This is, however, a mistaken notion ; it is Hellenic philosophy that is always unsocial and ascetic ; and it is the influence of the Hebrew Faith that has kept alive the ideal of development and of progress, the standard of domestic and national life ; for the deities of the Greeks are Natural Divinities, but the Jehovah of the Hebrews is the God of History. In this assurance of the moral government of the world lay the whole secret of this transforming and invigorating power, which Jewish and Christian teaching has without doubt exercised over rude or civilised society in the West."

" Judaism," Mr. Bussell has before remarked, " is not Orientalism." It is least Oriental in its attitude towards Nature, which the Eastern thinker regarded with terror, which to the Jew seemed nothing more than the divine handi- work. Our point of view is indeed different again. The doctrine of final causes, which the Jew accepted without actually formulating it, has almost receded out of view. To us "Nature is the mere indifferent sphere of our development and discipline, a quarry from which we may hew out our life

and triumph in obstacles overcome." We may here specially commend to the attention of our readers, to whom the name of Philo may not improbably occur as an example of a Hebrew thinker with Oriental tendencies, Mr. Bussell's very

able statement of this writer's position with regard both to Jewish and to Greek philosophy.

Our hasty review has now taken us over about three-fifths of his volume, and we at last reach in Book IV., " The Roman Imperial Age," his proper subject. We must frankly confess that the remaining portion of his book is less satisfactory. In his preface he has asked the reader's forgiveness for a " fault" which he describes as " the seeming superficiality of the treatment, —no details being admitted, and a stern banish- ment pronounced on all minor episodes in the narrative," and he asks to be believed when he says that an "accumulation of evidence does really lie behind" what may seem "specious paradoxes" or "obvious truisms." What we should like to have is some of this accumulated evidence, not because we doubt the accuracy of Mr. Bussell's conclusions, but because it would be much more easy to assimilate, not to say under- stand, them if we had it. Our complaint is that when we get to the actual subject of the book, as indicated by its title, the development or modification of Plato's theories by the thinkers of the early centuries of the Christian era, we are not brought sufficiently into contact with these thinkers. The most careful reader of Books IV. and V. would hardly be able, to put the matter quite simply, to distinguish one Neo- Platonist from another. The leading writers of the school are scarcely ever mentioned, though their thought, it is manifest, has been made the subject of most careful and com- plete analysis and comparison. We quite despair of giving

our readers any idea of Mr. Bussell's treatment of such themes as are indicated in the headings of his chapters, as, e.g., " The

Awakening of Subjectivity," " The Antithesis of the Two Worlds of Being and Becoming in Greek Philosophy," " The Inherent Dualism of Scientific Knowledge (Stoicism) Con- trasted with the Monism of Pious Emotion," "Emanation

and Continuity." The skill and subtlety with which he handles his subject can be most readily indicated by what are rather illustrations than main lines of argument. Take this instance :- " It will be noticed that there is a close resemblance between the national pride or narrowness of the Jews and of the still sur- viving dogmatic republicanism of Rome. Both believe in the ultimate value of a petty civic life, in purely national Gods, in an aristocratic constitution, in a policy of conquest or repression. Tacitus deplores the lack of military energy in Tiberius ; and Juvenal, the most vulgar of this type, regrets both the intrusion of Eastern worship and strange deities and the influence of the Greek culture and philosophy, its secret and insinuating power. Clearly this opposition. wherever it appeared, either as the religions fanaticism of the Hebrew race or the secular conservatism of Roman republicans, was doomed, as a belated survival of narrow prejudice."

One passage, however, we may quote as more easily detached than others from its context and giving a succinct statement of both the strength and the weakness of the later Platonism:— "It [the Platonic revival] is clearly an attempt to combine a lofty speculation with a tender piety, abstract thought (which cannot overleap dualism or reconcile itself to the World) with religious emotion, in which doubts or differences insensibly pass away. It finds, as we have noticed, a place for every divinity and for every worship ; and the theory of Emanation, as against crude Dualism or Creative Design, explains the inequalities of a World the administration of which cannot be termed wholly Providential. The highest or Absolute God is not the one who rules the world.

But a Deity who is the Dark Ground, or the abstract Reason, of the World, does not satisfy the demands of a wor- shipper. It is a conception too impersonal, and verges on sub- jective hallucination. The daimons monopolize a reverence which cannot be paid to a Notion ; and Platonism expires amid the steam of sacrifice, and the incantations or delusions of necromancy and wonder-working."

Surely it is a piece of far-fetched ingenuity when Mr. Bussell speaks of the "multitude of the early man-like animals described in the first chapter of Genesis" out of whom Adam was selected. He means, we suppose, that there must have been some creatures with pretensions to be Adam's helpmeet.