CHAPTER XI.

THE ATHENIAN PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS

 

I.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SOCRATES

 

IN the imaginary conversation of the Phaedo, Plato makes Socrates tell how he had lost all interest in the physical science of his time. The ‘nature of things’ had been sought, as it were, by taking the world to pieces and imagining it formed either by differentiation out of some primitive stuff or by the combination of several unchanging elements—a mechanical process, innocent of design. Anaxagoras, indeed, had spoken of Mind giving the first impulse of motion; but, to Socrates’ disappointment, this Mind was not employed to plan the universe, in all its parts, ‘for the best’. It was as if the reason why Socrates was then in prison should be found, not in his resolve to abide the sentence of the law, but in the movement of the limbs that brought him thither. Socrates did not himself attempt what Anaxagoras had left undone. He turned from the world of things to seek wisdom in the world of discourse.

The result of this re-orientation of philosophy was that the two great systems of the fourth century, the Platonic and the Aristotelian, looked for the nature of things no longer in a simpler material out of which they develop, but in some final perfection of form towards which they aspire by a natural or divine impulse, comparable to the conscious purposes of man. The mechanical interpretation of Nature yields to the teleological. Socrates himself, as Aristotle says (Metaphysics I, 6), had no system of Nature; but the revolution which set the concept of design above mechanical and material causes followed naturally upon his preoccupation with the intelligent guidance of man’s life towards his proper good.

The external facts of Socrates’ life have already been described. For our knowledge of his philosophy we depend upon three witnesses: Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle; for Socrates himself left no writings, and we learn nothing of his characteristic doctrine from the Clouds of Aristophanes (first performed, 423 BC). The Socrates of this comedy is a composite picture of at least three incompatible types: the head of a resident school of atheistical Ionian science; the wandering Sophist, lecturing on rhetoric, grammar, and other subjects to young men rich enough to pay his fees; and a ragged ascetic, neglecting his worldly interests to teach morals. The third figure only has something in common with the Socrates of Plato’s Apology and the ideal philosopher of the Cynic School. The Sophist may be dismissed entirely. Our other evidence, above all the Apology, denies that Socrates ever taught physical science, though he may well have sought wisdom in that quarter and failed to find it. Aristophanes recognized in Socrates and Euripides the two most subversive exponents of the modern spirit, and he heaped upon them every trait that he condemned, never dreaming that posterity would mistake his masks for historical portraits.

The bulk of Xenophon’s Memorabilia is not, even in intention, historical; it belongs, with his Qeconomicus and Symposium, to a type of apologetic literature known as ‘Socratic discourses.’ There were many such works. The writers were to some extent in competition, each correcting the others’ views of Socrates, who is a problematic figure to us because he was so even to his followers. Aristotle classes these writings with the prose mime as a form of fiction. They were imaginary conversations, designed to show what the dead master was like; and, while preserving a general fidelity to his character, the writers felt free to indulge in anachronism and to express their own opinions through his mouth. All Plato’s dialogues are subject to this convention. Aristotle must have known this literature, besides what he learnt from Plato in an intercourse of twenty years. His evidence provides the only means of fixing the point where Plato goes beyond his master; for Xenophon’s work is not independent of Plato’s, and of the other Socratic discourses only a few fragments survive.

No document takes us nearer to the real Socrates than Plato’s Apology, which is not an imaginary conversation in fictitious circumstances. Its aim is to give a true account of Socrates’ work. That the account is not only true, but substantially complete, may be inferred from the ‘high tone’ which Xenophon found in all reports of Socrates’ speech. Plainly Socrates had not tried to make an effective defence: he would not slur over anything in his past that would tell against him. The misrepresentation of his character and work by the comic poets is repudiated in terms that would have been futile, as well as disingenuous, if the picture in the Clouds had been even a caricature of the real man. He goes on to give his own account of his mission to Athenian society.

The Delphic oracle had declared that no one was wiser than Socrates. Unconscious of any wisdom, Socrates set out to refute the oracle by testing the recognized leaders of thought and action. The statesmen he found to be unaware that they knew nothing worth knowing. The poets, popularly esteemed as authorities on religion and morals, could give no rational account of their poems; they wrote, it seemed, ‘by some inspiration of genius.’ But among the craftsmen, (if only the cobbler would stick to his last and not fancy he could govern Athens), Socrates found what he called knowledge. We can infer what Socrates meant—or at least what Plato, at this stage, thought he meant—by the wisdom which he always said he did not possess and could not impart. The craftsman knows what he is trying to do, and why, and how to do it. He can give an explicit account of his knowledge; all his actions are intelligibly related to his purpose. Socrates’ ideal was to reduce conduct to an art of this type; hence he seldom discussed a moral question without re­ferring to the mason or the carpenter. Statesmen and poets had no such knowledge of the true aim of public and private life; they did not even feel the want of it.

For himself, Socrates asserts that he has nothing to teach. Attempts have been made to provide him with a Begriffsphilosophie. They were based upon statements in Xenophon, now seen to be derived from Plato’s dialogues, and upon a passage (Metaphysics, 1, 6) where Aristotle, describing Socrates’ influence on Plato, observes that he tried to define moral terms. Socrates’ essays in this kind had a practical motive. Clear notions, he thought, are needed for right action; no one can be consciously and consistently good unless he knows what goodness is. Aristotle gives no ground for ascribing to Socrates a speculative interest in concepts or universals, or any theory of their metaphysical status. In the Apology Socrates describes the positive side of his mission thus: ‘I have no other business but to go about persuading you all, both young and old, to care less for your bodies and your wealth than for the perfection of your souls, and telling you that goodness does not come from wealth, but it is goodness that makes wealth or anything else, in public or in private life, a good thing for men. If, by saying that, I am per­verting the young, so much the worse; but if anyone asserts that I say anything else, it is not true.’ The only positive doctrine professed by Socrates is that, of all the aims men pursue in life, only one has any value, namely, ‘to make one’s soul as good as possible.’ This had never before been said in Athens; it was a paradox, hard to understand. What is it, to be good? The question could not be answered in the Apology, but our witnesses agree in formulating certain principles which, at first sight, seem to be either platitudes or obviously false. These Socratic pro­positions are: (1) Goodness (virtue) is knowledge; (2) Goodness cannot be taught; (3) No one does wrong willingly; (4) Happiness is the result of goodness.

(1) The word arete (goodness) lacks some of the associations of ‘virtue.’ Linked with the notions of function and performance, it denotes the excellence of whatever is good for any work or end; in the plural it can mean ‘achievements.’ The ‘goodness’ taught by the Sophists was ability to manage affairs and to attain the aims of personal ambition. The Socratics do not depart from this usage; they differ only in their view of man’s function, which determines the content of his ‘goodness.’ The soul’s function, says Socrates in Plato’s Republic, is ‘to take thought and to govern’; more generally, it is ‘living’; man’s goodness is that which enables him to live well, and so to ‘do well’ in another sense—to be happy. The first Socratic proposition defines this goodness, on which right living and happiness depend, as knowledge. This hard saying means, as the Apology indicates, that there is, or should be, an art of living, whereby all our actions would be consciously directed to an aim clearly conceived—the good in which our function consists, the true end of life. If we are to be good, this end must be known.

(2) How is such knowledge gained ? It cannot, in the common sense, be taught. If the end of life were health or riches or social success, we could learn the means from the physician, the business man, the Sophist. Or, if ‘living well’ meant conforming to the rules of conduct approved by society, this again could be learnt as matter of ascertainable fact. But current beliefs about right and wrong cannot be knowledge: they are not consistent even within any one society; and no belief accepted on mere authority can be knowledge. I shall not know that what others call right and good is really so, unless I can see it for myself; and if I can see it, what others think becomes irrelevant. My action must be determined solely by my own conviction. The implied postulate is that every human soul has the power to discern, by direct intuition, what really is good. Once cleared of the mists of prejudice and false appearance, its judgment is infallible and beyond appeal. Socrates, accordingly, had no system of morals to teach. He spent his time inducing anyone who would undergo the test to examine his own beliefs, until their confusion and inconsistency led him to the conviction that he did not know the true end of life.

(3) Critics, ancient and modern, have raised the obvious objection: I may know what is good and yet fail to desire it; mere knowledge is not enough to determine the will. Socrates replied: No one does wrong willingly (or wittingly). The wrong-doer is misled; his sense of what is really good, and good for him, is obscured by a false appearance. The rival pleasure seems good, and he follows it. It is not true, then, that he knows, at the moment, what is good. If he knew this, in the full sense of ‘knowing,’ he could not desire anything else. In a conflict of motives the fault lies, not in desire, which is divided between the two objects, but in the failure to discern the true object from the false. Once we can do that, the whole current of desire must flow towards the true good. Celui qui n agit pas comme il pense, pense imparjaitement (Guyau).

The Charmides of Plato contains a discussion of self-control, starting from the Delphic precept, Know thyself. The upshot is that self-control, like every other virtue, means the knowledge of good and evil; and we may infer that this is tantamount to self-knowledge—the recognition of a true self, at the core of our being, which claims control over all the rest of what we call our ‘selves,’ and is, in the last resort, the ‘soul’ we must care for. Both Plato and Aristotle accepted the belief in this inmost self, and held it to be the divine element in man. Its peculiar form of desire, always directed to the true good it can perceive, they called by a special name, ‘Wish’ (boulesis). When we act wrongly, we do what we like, but not what we wish; the insight of the true self is for the moment obscured.

(4) Finally, happiness is the result of goodness. The sacrifice of pleasures that falsely seem good is not a sacrifice of happiness. There is no real conflict between duty and pleasure, because no pleasure is comparable to the satisfaction of the soul which follows the inward recognition of good. To live well is the same as to live happily. This doctrine could easily be misconstrued to mean that virtue is to be chosen for its reward in terms of worldly goods. Xenophon constantly ascribes this vulgar ‘utilitarianism’ to Socrates. It must be remembered that Socrates was not usually engaged in setting forth the moral principles above formulated,—we owe the formulation to Plato—but in drawing out and criticizing other men’s notions about conduct. No doubt he generally talked to them on their own level; he may often have recommended virtue as a means to health or social esteem. This would suffice to mislead a Xenophon; but the Socrates of Plato holds that worldly prosperity and honour are indifferent; what matters is ‘to care for one’s soul.’ The unresting pursuit of moral goodness is happiness, though poverty, suffering, and death be the cost. We do not will the good in order to be happy; we are happy in willing it.

This simple and profound doctrine of the right way of life is the philosophy of Socrates. Upon the question whether it had, in Socrates’ mind, a religious background or sanction Xenophon cannot be trusted; we depend entirely on the Apology and the earlier dialogues of Plato. One thing is clear: the moral doctrine is self-contained, requiring no support from theological beliefs. If the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is absolute, and can be known directly by the inward eye of every soul, no supernatural sanction for conduct is needed, though it might exist. In the Euthyphro Socrates discusses religion with a self-satisfied formalist, and, in the course of a subtle argument, makes him admit that right conduct cannot be defined as conduct pleasing to the gods. Their approval is, in logical terms, an accident; it does not make an action right. The action is approved because it is right, absolutely and without condition. Hence a theology professing to interpret the will of heaven as a guide to conduct is superfluous. Further, if happiness can be attained only by knowing and choosing what is good, it is attainable in this life, in proportion to our success in fulfilling the condition. No belief in rewards or punishments after death could influence conduct. The good man is happy now, the bad unhappy. If there is a future life, it will be the same then; if there is not, goodness is not to be renounced as unremunerative. This truth Socrates undertakes to prove in the Republic.

Whether, and in what sense, the historic Socrates believed in gods or in immortality is a doubtful question. Xenophon says that he sacrificed both publicly and in his own house; but conformity implied no acceptance of dogma. He prayed, we are told, though never for the satisfaction of particular wants. ‘His formula of prayer was simple: Give me that which is best for me; for, he said, the gods know best what things are good.’ The Platonic Apology speaks of ‘God’ or ‘the gods’ in conventional terms, open to any interpretation. The attitude to immortality is definitely agnostic. ‘To fear death is to think you are wise when you are not; it is to think you know what you do not know. No man knows whether death may not be the greatest good a man can have; yet men fear it, as if they knew it to be the worst of evils.... Were I to make any claim to be wiser than others, it would be because I do not think I have any sufficient knowledge of the other world, when in fact I have none’. Death may be either a .dreamless sleep or the migration of the soul to another place. In either case it is certain that ‘no evil can happen to a good man, and his concerns are not neglected by heaven’. If Socrates had professed any definite belief in immortality, no motive could have induced Plato to convey a false impression in the Apology. To Socrates this question, like every other, was a question of knowledge; and an essential trait of his mind is the clear sense where knowledge ends and ignorance, with its untested beliefs, begins. That no evil can befall the good man is a rational conviction, following from the definition of happiness. The only evil that can befall anyone is the loss of moral goodness. The statement that the good man’s concerns are ‘not neglected by heaven,’ expresses, in conventional terms, a conviction that the world is so arranged that goodness does bring happiness. No doubt Socrates believed this; but that ‘the gods’ had so arranged the world was not even a generally accepted belief; and we are not warranted in ascribing to Socrates either Plato’s theory of a designing Mind or Xenophon’s simple faith in a busy Providence. The master might have thought that both his disciples were in danger of thinking they knew what they did not know.

If conduct is subject to no external authority, social or super­natural, what stands between my will and the satisfaction of any desire whose end I can compass? Are not all things lawful by natural right? Why not define ‘goodness’ as the effective ability to do what I like? In the age of the Sophists and Socrates this ultimate problem rose up to confront the discoverers of the inner world of freedom. Science before Socrates had moved outwards into the physical world, expecting, with innocent confidence, to surprise the secret of its birth and nature, and unaware that it was discovering a pattern of its own contrivance. This speculation seemed at first to have no bearing on conduct, which was regulated by law, custom, and belief. But the unsettlement of tradition after the Persian Wars turned some minds to explore the inner world, governed, as it seemed, by other laws than those of the outer realm of necessity, or perhaps by no laws at all. In sleep, said Heracleitus, every man turns aside from the common world into a world of his own. When the speculative mind turns inward, Nature will become appearance, the scenery of a private dream: what more can be known of the alleged ‘nature of things,’ which does not appear? Each mind, at the centre of its own dream, will claim freedom and lordship of the inner realm. The restraints of religion and custom, imposed by society, will be denounced as unnatural conventions. The individual will identify his nature with the instincts, which disown artificial constraint. Give him Gyges’ ring of invisibility, let him either elude or overpower the watch-dogs of society, and he will do as he likes.

Protagoras, who denied the Parmenidean world of unapparent Being and started this train of thought, stopped far short of the conclusion (vol. v, p. 378). Plato was the first to see all that was implied in what he called Sophistry, and to find an explicit answer. Socrates’ answer was rather implicit in his life, a secret that made him a riddle even to his own disciples. In his character seemingly opposite tendencies were held in lightly balanced harmony. His rationalism found the key to goodness in clear thinking, and claimed for the individual an autonomy over-riding every recognized authority, divine or human. It was not clear to his contemporaries why this assertor of individual freedom should not be antinomian; why he should be indifferent to his own interests and pleasures; why he should not repudiate, or try to subvert, social institutions. Yet he challenged no conflict with received religion or with the demands of the State. He conformed to the established cult, and his accusers could find no more damaging charge than that he sometimes spoke of warnings received from a ‘divine sign.’ He did not, like the later Cynics, insult the decencies of common life, or exalt a state of nature above the civilization of Athens. Though he kept aloof from politics, he fulfilled the duties of a citizen, held office, married, and brought up children. He was not a champion of natural rights, but upheld positive law and accepted the duty of passive obedience. He was content to find in Athenian society freedom enough to go about his chosen business, avoiding any serious breach without the least compromise of principle. Regarding pleasure, and even comfort, with complete indifference, he had not that fear of pleasure which makes the ascetic. He could take pleasures when they came; when they did not come, he never missed them. True, the Socrates we know is the Socrates whom Plato and Xenophon knew, a man between sixty and seventy. His self-mastery may have been won after a long struggle with a passionate temperament; but, as we see it, the harmony is perfect. The followers who founded the minor Socratic schools could not divine its secret; Socrates had lived by a knowledge that he refused to call knowledge because he could give no account of it. The Cynics mistook him for an ascetic, and fell into anti-social ex­travagance. The Cyrenaics, following another clue, sought peace of mind in a haven of agreeable sensation1. Plato alone saw Socrates whole, and he set himself to give an account of the knowledge his master had disclaimed, but must certainly have possessed.

The inquiry was to carry him further than he could then foresee. Aristoxenus, the Peripatetic, had an anecdote of an Indian who met Socrates at Athens and asked him about his philosophy. When Socrates said that he sought to understand human life, the Indian replied that man cannot know himself without knowing God. The story may show that the successors of Plato and Aristotle were aware how far these two had travelled beyond their master’s explicit doctrine, when they saw that the recognition of goodness demanded by Socrates could not be separated from the recognition of Ultimate Being.

 

II.

PLATO: THE EARLY DIALOGUES

 

Plato was born (428—7 BC) of a family noble on both sides. In boyhood he must have listened to the conversation of Socrates, and felt the effect described by Alcibiades in the Symposium'. ‘No Corybant’s heart ever throbbed like mine when I hear him; his words make the tears pour from my eyes.’ As Plato grew to manhood, he came, deeply and irrevocably, under this influence. The story goes that he burnt a tragedy which was to have been staged at the Dionysia; Socrates had condemned the mere in­spiration of the poet’s genius, unable to give a rational account of its meaning. But Plato was not only a student of philosophy. His mind was poignantly distracted by another vocation, the life of active statesmanship, for which he was marked out by his gifts and social position. He never ceased to acknowledge this claim upon powers he could not contentedly suffer to fust in him unused.

After Socrates’ death, Plato, with others of his closest friends, withdrew to join Eucleides at Megara, resolved to continue the master’s work and defend his memory. The next twelve years Plato must have spent mainly at Athens. He is said to have served in the Corinthian War of 395—86 BC; and probably, at some time in this period, he visited Egypt and studied geometry under Theodorus at Cyrene. Meanwhile he composed the Apology and the imaginary conversations which form the earliest group of his writings. The order of the dialogues cannot be exactly determined. Plato may well have written more than one at a time. The Republic must have taken several years; others might have been composed in as many weeks. Happily, the methods of stylometry have laid some check upon the caprice of subjective criticism. There is now a general agreement to recognize three main groups, though the order within each group is still disputed. To the early group we shall here assign the direct defence of Socrates in the Apology and Crito; Laches, Lysis, Charmides, Euthyphro, illustrating the true character of Socrates’ work; the Shorter, and perhaps the Longer, Hippias, Protagoras, Gorgias, in which the leading Sophists appear; and the Ion. Probably all these were written, and the Republic begun, before Plato founded the Academy. The Apology has already been mentioned. The Crito explains why Socrates, to the surprise of the public and possibly to the dismay of his accusers, declined to escape from prison before his sentence was carried out. The history of Plato’s thought begins in what are sometimes called the Socratic dialogues.

The general purpose of the Laches, Lysis, Charmides, and Euthyphro is still apologetic: the first three show how far Socrates was from ‘perverting the young men’; the last indicates his true attitude to conventional religion—the other count in the in­dictment. But Plato is not merely echoing his master. These dialogues are by no means realistic specimens of Socrates’ conver­sation; they are closely knit works of art, grappling, sometimes obscurely, with fundamental thoughts. Plato was himself trying to grasp the Socratic philosophy of life and to make up his account with its implications. He was at this time in painful hesitation, whether or not to yield to the importunities of political friends, urging the claims of public life upon one in whom they must have seen the Alcibiades of his generation, with the same social advantages and far more brilliant intellectual powers. Alcibiades in the first of two dialogues named after him, stands on the threshold of political life, and Socrates convinces him that he will not be fit to advise his country until he has gained self-knowledge, or the knowledge of good and evil. Plato may have felt that the Socratic conception of the meaning and end of life had opened a gulf at his feet. The Socratic dialogues were, perhaps, written partly to clear his own mind before deciding whether he could hold true to this philosophy and also serve Athens as an active statesman.

The four dialogues are constructed on a uniform plan. The conversation arises out of a scene of ordinary life described at some length. The theme is the definition of a virtue: courage (Laches), self-control (Charmides), piety (Euthyphro), friendship (Lysis). A series of definitions are elicited, criticized by Socrates, and finally rejected. No conclusion is reached, and the reader is left wondering what inference he is to draw. This peculiar form avoids making Socrates lay down and defend any positive doc­trine; but the inconclusiveness is only apparent. At least one positive result is indicated—the central Socratic principle that virtue can be reduced to wisdom or knowledge, with its corollary that all virtues are one. The Laches, for example, disproves the common view that a man can be brave and at the same time unjust or intemperate. If virtue means a knowledge of what is good and bad, such insight will cover every field of conduct, and determine all desire and action.

The Charmides shows Plato’s mind at work upon the problem which then faced him in a practical form and never ceased to occupy his thoughts: the bearing of Socrates’ philosophy upon the government of society. The concept of self-knowledge leads to the question, how a man can know the limits of his own and other men’s knowledge and ignorance. What is this knowledge —Socrates had seemed to possess it—which judges all other knowledge? It is not an omniscience embracing all the special branches of science and art. If we could conceive the possessor of such omniscience in supreme control, every department of life would be scientifically directed; but it is not clear that true welfare and happiness would follow upon increased efficiency. Pursuing the same ends as before, men would be richer, healthier, stronger in war; but would they be better? The ruler should possess, not technical omniscience, but ‘a single kind of knowledge which has for its object good and evil’—a Sovereign Art, assessing the values of minor ends and their contribution to the well-being of the whole. The Charmides contains in germ the central doctrine of the Republic, that the ills of society can be healed only when political power is combined with knowledge of an absolute standard of value. The inference for Plato himself was that he could not become a statesman until he had become a philosopher.

Beside these studies of Socrates’ identification of goodness with knowledge, Plato has set some satirical exposures of the professed teachers of ‘goodness.’ In so far as the Sophists merely supplied an education in advanced subjects, they did not cross the path of Socrates, who sent them pupils; but their claim to teach the conduct of life to young men who were to guide the destiny of Athens challenged examination. Did they know themselves what was good or evil? Two dialogues devoted to Hippias amusingly exhibit the professor of omniscience as unable to follow the subtleties of a Socratic argument. In the Protagoras three of the four great Sophists, Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus, are present with their admirers in the house of a wealthy amateur; Gorgias is reserved for another occasion. Their methods—the allegorical discourse, exegesis of the poets—are parodied with the reserve of exquisite art. Socrates maintains the unity of all the virtues; but the argument is interrupted. Protagoras holds the centre of the stage, discoursing of education as a socializing influence. The vital question, on what philosophy of life sophistic education is based, is not raised till near the end. The argument is so cleverly turned that critics have been misled into imagining that Socrates here defends hedonism. The real purpose is to lead the Sophists to confess that their philosophy is the same as the ordinary man’s who believes that ‘good’ means ‘pleasant,’ or that pleasure is the only good. When he says that some pleasures are bad, he only means that they are outweighed by future pains: he has no standard of good save the amount of pleasure or pain. All errors of conduct must, then, be errors of judgment in the use of the hedonistic calculus. Socrates ingeniously claims this as a confirmation of his own doctrine: All wrong-doing is due to ignorance. This ignorance, he blandly suggests, the Sophists would cure, if only the public would send their sons to be taught. Charmed with this conclusion, all the Sophists accept the whole argument: ‘the pleasant is good, the painful evil’; right action can be defined as action that secures a pleasant and painless life. Thus the professional teachers of goodness are revealed as willing to fall in with popular hedonism. Their function is to teach men how to pursue efficiently the only end they recognize. If goodness can be taught at all, it is not taught by men to whom ‘the good’ means nothing but pleasure.4

If the Protagoras was too clever and gave the impression that Socrates could uphold hedonism, the Gorgias leaves no shade of ambiguity. Conceived in a wholly different vein of passionate earnestness, this dialogue throws into sharpest contrast two ideals of life. Rhetoric is treated as the weapon of political power in civic assemblies, and so as including statesmanship. It claims to be the Sovereign Art, but knows nothing of the true end of power; its aim is the autocracy of the politician in control of a democratic machine. To Socrates tyrannical power is at best unenviable. Better suffer wrong than do it; better be punished for wrong-doing than escape chastisement. Callicles, a rich young aspirant to political honours, protests that, if this be true, ‘the whole of human life is upside down.’ He maintains the natural right of the strong to the lion’s share and professes hedonism, which Socrates now openly refutes. The life of self-asserting ambition, exalted by Callicles above the life of the philosopher, ‘whispering with two or three striplings in a corner,’ is to Socrates the life of the enemy of society. Socrates claims to be the only true statesman; but if he should enter public life without stooping to flattery, he would be put to death.

The bitter passion of the Gorgias reveals Plato’s nature stirred to its depths by a conflict that had not yet been solved. His Seventh Letter tells how, before the revolution of 404 and later, he had been attracted to public life and again repelled by the deeds of the men in power, culminating in the execution of Socrates.

“The result was that I, who had at first been eager to take part in public life, when I saw all this happening and everything going to pieces, fell at last into bewilderment. I did not cease to think how all these things, and especially the general organization of the State, might be amended; but I was all the time waiting for the right moment for action. At last I perceived that the constitution of all existing States is bad and their institutions all but past remedy without a combination of radical measures and fortunate circumstance; and I was driven to affirm, in praise of true philosophy, that only from the standpoint of such philosophy was it possible to take a true view of public and private right, and that, accordingly, the human race would never see the end of trouble until genuine philosophers should come to hold political power, or those who held political power should, by some divine appointment, become philosophers.

It was in this mind that I first went to Italy and Sicily”.

 

III.

THE ACADEMY. DIALOGUES OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD

 

In the Gorgias Plato had resigned the hope of exercising the Sovereign Art in his own city. There remained the possibility of intervening in some State which could be reformed by a despot from above. This prospect opened before him on his first visit to Sicily (389—8). A second, and (as it proved) more effective, means was to found a school of philosophic statesmen. Plato’s own task would be to direct this school and to work out the Socratic philosophy on lines now taking shape in his mind, publishing his results in a form that would reach the educated public throughout the Greek world and attract students. The Academy was founded just after the first visit to Western Greece. At Syracuse Plato thought he had found in Dion, the brother-in-law of the reigning Dionysius, a young man who might become a philosopher-king; but to flatter a despot proved as impossible as to flatter a mob; and Dion, now deeply devoted to Plato, had to procure his escape by a ship which was conveying home the Spartan envoy, Pollis. According to Plutarch (Dion, Pollis, acting on Dionysius’ instructions, sold Plato into slavery at Aegina. Redeemed by a Cyrenian friend, Anniceris, he returned to Athens, probably in the summer of 388. Anniceris, it is said, refused repayment of the ransom, and the sum was used to buy a garden in the grove of the hero Academus. Here the school was founded on lines partly suggested by the Pythagorean societies Plato had seen in South Italy. He also found in Pythagoreanism the clue to the problem of knowledge. The discovery is unfolded in the dialogues of the middle group: Meno, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus. Some outlying works may be mentioned here. The Euthydemus dissociates the dialectic of Socrates from the barren disputation which was infecting the Megarian School. The founder of this School, Eucleides, was an Eleatic, who declared the Good to be one thing with many names—Wisdom, God, Mind. The Zenonian dialectic of his followers was called by their opponents ‘eristic’ or ‘anti-logic,’ and they have little to their credit beyond the formulation of puzzles which gave an impulse to logical theory. The Cratylus disposes of the notion that philosophic truth can be deduced from the structure of language. The Menexenus (385 BC) contains a satire on the Periclean ideal—a Parthian shot at Athenian democracy.

The possibility of knowledge had become a problem when Parmenides condemned as false the manifold world which ‘seems’ to the senses, and Protagoras had asserted, on the contrary side, that what seems to every man is real or true for him. Was there, or was there not, a world of true Being behind appearances and capable of supporting them? Protagoras’ fellow-countryman, Democritus of Abdera, whose long life must have nearly covered the century 450—350, gave the materialist answer. The atomism he adopted from Leucippus  is an ideally mechanistic system. True Being consists solely of atoms of uniform quality and of the void in which they move. Sensation is due to the impact of atoms from outside upon the atoms of the soul. All sensible differences of quality must be consequences of the only real differences between atoms—in shape, size, and position. These secondary qualities are ‘conventional,’ not part of the objective reality which is inaccessible to the ‘bastard knowledge’ of the senses. But the ‘genuine knowledge’ that reveals the real nature of the invisible atoms is explained by the same mechanism. The soul atoms, being diffused all over the body, can, by a direct contact independent of the sense-organs, perceive the atoms outside as they are. Democritus, of whom Aristotle remarked that he reduced all the senses to touch, might be said to reduce all thought to an exceptional kind of sensation. Such is the final outcome of Ionian science, seeking the real ‘nature of things’ in the ultimate components of material bodies.

To a follower of Socrates the problem of knowledge presents a different aspect; it is, in the first place, the problem of that knowledge which is goodness. Plato was, at this stage, no more interested than his master in the world of Nature. He held to the doctrine, learnt in his youth from the Heracleitean Cratylus, that sensible things are always changing and cannot be known. The primary aim of the Platonic theory of Forms or ‘Ideas’ is to provide for the inner world a law to save the individual will from the nightmare of unlimited freedom. The sovereign know­ledge of good and evil must have for its object standards that are universally and absolutely valid. Justice and the other moral conceptions that Socrates sought to define must be eternal objects, to be known by thought, though not by sense. They are not part of the furniture of anyone’s private world, but form a common world independent of what ‘seems’ to any individual or to all. Plato did not reach this conclusion solely by reflection upon the methods of Socrates and the formula, Goodness is knowledge. Platonism, as Aristotle saw1, is a form of Pythagoreanism, modified by Socratic influence. The Gorgias already points in this direction, where Socrates describes justice and temperance as a principle of order and law in the soul, and connects this principle with the harmonious order of the universe and the structure of mathematical truth.

The Meno announces a further discovery: how knowledge of eternal objects, moral or mathematical, is acquired. It cannot be derived by any process of ‘abstraction’ from the dream-world of appearance; it comes out of the soul itself by Reminiscence. Perhaps through contact with the mathematicians of Cyrene and South Italy, Plato came to recognize that the objects of the mathematical sciences—the only organized bodies of knowledge that could be called ‘science’—were not concrete things, and that the truths of mathematics neither hold good of sensible things nor can be proved by experience. To account for the a priori discovery of fresh mathematical truth, Plato postulates an im­personal memory, which, so far as it extends, is the same in all men, unlike the personal memory that registers the peculiar ex­perience acquired during this life. All mathematical truth is stored in this impersonal memory, and, since reality is a coherent system, the soul which recalls one truth can proceed to rediscover all the rest, without recourse to experience. Unlike historical information, such truths are recognized at first acquaintance; they carry their own warrant of immediate certainty, and they are linked in a necessary sequence. In the Meno Socrates establishes the fact of reminiscence by experiment, eliciting from a slave, ignorant of geometry, the solution of a rather difficult problem. The theory is supported by further arguments in the Phaedo. In both dialogues it is associated with the hypothesis of the soul’s pre-existence and the Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation.

Plato held, moreover, that knowledge of the meaning of moral terms, such as Socrates had tried to define, was reached in the same way. The meaning of ‘Justice’ is an object of knowledge, as absolute and immutable as the meaning of ‘Triangle.’ Further, the world of moral truth, like the mathematical, is an intelligible and necessary system, at the apex of which the Republic places the Form (Idea) of Goodness itself. To trace out its structure was to be the function of an ideal dialectic. This new conception of knowledge and its objects takes Plato beyond Socrates, who had seen the ideal type of knowledge, not in mathematics, but in the practical intelligence of the craftsman. It also points to aristocracy. Theoretically, all knowledge is latent in every human soul; but few will recover enough to justify their taking control of society. The rest must be guided by ‘true belief,’ imparted by a philosophic lawgiver. This lower form of goodness can be taught; the higher can be attained only by rational intuition, after a long and laborious training of the intellect.

In the Phaedo the light of this discovery transfigures the meaning of life and death. The life of the lover of wisdom is a meditation of death, and the death of Socrates becomes a symbol of the death of every man. The objects of rational knowledge, set in clear contrast with the experience that comes to the bodily senses, are the unchanging Ideas, incomposite and indestructible. The immortal soul is akin to the Ideas, and knows them when it withdraws from the body ‘to think by itself.’ This withdrawal is completed by the severance of soul from body in physical death; but, even then, only the philosopher’s soul is freed from all taint of the earthly.

Towards the end of the Phaedo, the theory of Ideas is formally stated for the first time. Reminiscence accounts for our knowledge of mathematical and moral Ideas; but here the theory has assumed a much wider application. It is announced as superseding all earlier explanations of the becoming and change of concrete things. At the same time it appears, at least to the modern reader, to be intended as a logical theory of propositions in general. This logical aspect is not distinguished from the metaphysical, and it must be remembered that no science of Logic existed. Since, however, the two aspects of the theory appear to lead to incompatible conclusions, of which Plato later became aware, it may be well to present them separately.

In Logic, the ‘Form’ or Idea (eidos) is a common character of any number of things called by the same name; for every common name there is a Form (which is, in one sense, the meaning of the name), and a corresponding class of things. The theory states (1) that there are Ideas such as Beautiful, Good, Large, etc. ‘just by themselves,’ and (2) that ‘if anything else (i.e. any individual thing) is beautiful, it is so for no other reason than that it partakes of that “Beautiful.”’ Logically construed, this amounts to an analysis of the proposition ‘This thing is beautiful' into (a) this thing (a particular subject), (b) Beautiful (a universal or predicate), and (c) is (the subject-predicate relation, ‘partaking,’ which every particular has to some universal). The proposition means the same as ‘This thing -partakes of (the) Beautiful (itself)’. Considered simply as an analysis of the type of proposition which has a particular subject and a universal predicate, this theory marks a brilliant discovery in Logic. Unfortunately it is extended to other types of proposition, such as ‘A is larger than B’, which do not in fact contain a predicate or the subject-predicate relation. It is probable also that a confusion of the proposition ‘This thing is beautiful’ with ‘This beautiful thing exist’s, partly accounts for the failure to distinguish the logical theory from a metaphysical explanation of the causes of existence, becoming, and change in time.

Under this other aspect, the theory is stated in the same context as follows: ‘What makes a thing beautiful is nothing but the presence of that “Beautiful” or its communication, however it may occur; for I do not insist on that, but only say that it is by the Beautiful that all beautiful things are beautiful’. This appears to mean that the fact corresponding to the proposition ‘This thing is beautiful’ is the presence in the thing, either of the Idea (eidos) ‘Beautiful’ itself, or of a character (idea, morphi) imparted by the Idea to the thing. When a beautiful thing begins to exist, or a thing becomes beautiful, what happens is that the Idea somehow either comes to be present in the thing or imparts its own nature to it. When the thing ceases to exist or to be beautiful, this presence or character is withdrawn, for neither the Idea itself nor the character can cease to exist or change. Thus the theory becomes a metaphysical account of ‘the causes of becoming and perishing,’ which is to supersede all mechanical and materialistic doctrines.

When we try to reconcile the two aspects of the theory, difficulties at once occur. In Logic common names, such as ‘red’ or ‘dirty,’ are on the same footing as ‘just’ or ‘triangular’; but can we suppose that redness and dirt are eternal Ideas, to be known a priori without reference to sensible experience? How, again, can an eternal and unchanging Idea impart its character to a thing at some moment of time and withdraw it at another? The metaphysical relation between the supersensible Idea and the perceptible thing, whether called ‘partaking’ or ‘presence’ or ‘communication,’ does not appear to us to be the same as the logical relation between subject and predicate, and it remains mysterious.

Elsewhere Ideas are often described as ‘models’ (paradeigmata) or types, which are copied or reflected in sensible things; and it is suggested that the imperfect things of sense are striving to realize in themselves the perfection of their models. On this view, the moving cause which makes the thing (imperfectly) like the Idea lies, not in the Idea, but in the thing which, as it were, desires to reproduce its character. This suggestion bears fruit in Aristotle’s doctrine of the Form as moving and final cause. An alternative suggestion is latent in the earlier passage where Socrates calls for a teleological explanation of existence, recognizing an Intelligence which designs the world, in all its parts, ‘for the best.’ What exists in time is not to be accounted for by mechanical antecedents or by an analysis of things into material elements. The ground of all existence must be sought in the real world of perfect Ideas. These may be conceived as the models, with reference to which the divine Artist fashions an imperfect world of appearance. A cosmology of this type, in which the moving cause is the divine Mind, was to be outlined later in the Timaeus.

Meanwhile Plato’s thought was still bent upon the reform of society. What were the least changes which would enable a Socrates to replace the Callicles of the Gorgias and to put in practice the sovereign art of philosophic statesmanship? The Republic studies the problem of harmonious organization in the analogous cases of the State and of the individual soul. Conflict and disharmony arise because the competing motives characteristic of groups of men in society and of ‘parts’ of the soul—love of knowledge and goodness, love of power, and love of pleasure—are not reconciled, and their relative values are not determined. A perfect society can exist only where the men who know what is really good are in complete control. In the perfect character the discord of motives must be so resolved that it cannot break out again, because all ends are seen in true proportion and no part of our nature is thwarted of its true satisfaction. The social and individual problems are intertwined throughout the Republic. Their solutions meet in the doctrine that political power must rest with the perfect character, the philosopher.

The commonwealth described is a reformed city-state, whose citizens are classed according to their natural dispositions and abilities. The lowest class minister to economic needs; next comes the executive and fighting class; and above them the philosophic rulers, who possess true wisdom and virtue. The cardinal virtues, which in the Socratic dialogues had all been reduced to wisdom, are now separately defined. Justice and Temperance are virtues of the citizen as such, and pervade the whole community. The principle of justice, that each should do the work he is naturally fit for, replaces the principle of ‘equality’ in existing democracies, where every man was held to be capable of all social functions. Temperance unites all classes in harmonious agreement on the question where power should lie. This principle of government by consent replaces the democratic ‘freedom’ of everyman to do as he likes. To understand the secret of this harmony we must turn to the economy of the individual soul.

The division of the soul into three ‘parts’—reflective, spirited, and appetitive—is not meant as an exhaustive classification of faculties. It is established by analysing states of mind containing a conflict of motives; and, as Aristotle observes, the element of desire is distributed among all three parts, each of which has its own desires and pleasures. The reflective part desires knowledge; the spirited, honour; the appetitive, money as a means to sensual enjoyment. There are three corresponding types of character, each preferring its own kind of pleasure. The pleasures of knowledge are the truest; but the lower parts, by following reason, find the truest pleasure they can have; they are not sacrificed. The three forms of desire are characterized by differences in their objects, as if desire were a single energy which can be diverted from one channel to another. This analysis corrects an impression left by the Phaedo, which was concerned with the significance of death and opposed the soul, as the thinking thing, to the body, as the seat of emotion and desire. From that standpoint, an ascetic type of morality treats the inward conflict as a struggle between passionless reason on the right side and naturally evil desire on the wrong. The Republic recognizes the element of desire as appearing in all three parts of the soul. Desire is not to be crushed as evil in itself; the moral problem is to be solved by bringing the competing desires into a stable agreement. Hence Temperance is defined as ‘a harmony and solidarity of all three parts of the soul, when they all consent to the rule of the reflective part, and there is no faction among them’.

This conception of desire (Eros) as the single moving energy of the soul is developed in the discourse which Socrates, in the Symposium, says that he heard from Diotima, a wise woman of Mantinea. The name Eros has been misappropriated to one species of desire; but the love of honour and the love of truth are manifestations of the same energy, which in itself is neither good nor evil, but takes its value from its object. ‘All are in love with the same thing always,’ namely with a happiness that consists in the possession of beauty and goodness, and the possession of them for ever. Thus Eros is a passion for immortality, reaching out beyond the individual life and its pleasures. Even in sexual desire the mortal creature seeks the immortality of the race. The love of honour aims at undying glory, for which the individual will sacrifice enjoyment and life itself. A third form is the passion to beget spiritual children, seen in the creative artist and in the educator, who plants his thoughts in living minds.

Such an educator was Socrates himself. Diotima here pauses to tell him that, though he might be initiated into these Lesser Mysteries of Eros, she doubts if he is capable of the perfect revelation. Plato may wish to imply that the vision of the eternal world, in the Greater Mysteries that follow, was denied to the historic Socrates, unless we should rather say, the Socrates of the earlier Platonic dialogues. Immortality in the three forms above mentioned is the immortality in time attainable by the mortal creature, who can only perpetuate his race, his fame, his creative work, his thoughts, in other mortal creatures. In the higher stages, next described, Eros is detached from the individual object and from physical beauty. It passes on to moral, and then to intellectual, beauty, becoming the philosophic passion for eternal truth. The final object, embracing all these forms, is an absolute and divine Beauty. The soul united with it in knowledge becomes divine and immortal. The energy which wings the soul to this highest flight is the same that appeared in the instinct to perpetuate the race and in the lower forms of ambition. It is the single moving force of the soul; and in the Phaedrus soul is defined, no longer as the thinking thing, opposed to the body with its emotions and desires, but as the self-moved source of all motion. If Eros is the energy of the self-moving soul, the division of the soul into ‘parts’ may be understood as the tem­porary diversion of some of this energy from its proper object to ends incidental to incarnation in a mortal body. The temperate harmony of the perfect character is to be reached, not by the suppression, but by the re-orientation, of desire.

The conversion of Eros from its lower forms to the passion for wisdom lifts the philosophic natures, whose training for the government of society is described in the Republic VI—VII, above the lovers of sensible beauty, immersed in the dream-world of appearance. The virtue they must possess consists in a knowledge whose object is Goodness itself, the principle of all truth and being, as the sun in the visible world is the source of all light and life. The discovery of the world of Ideas has immeasurably deepened Plato’s conception of the knowledge which is virtue. It means no longer a rational art of conduct, but a recognition of the final significance of the universe. The supreme object of knowledge, which ‘every soul seeks after, divining that it exists, but unable to say what it is,’ lies beyond even the intelligible world. The eye of the soul must be turned away from the idols of the Cave—a symbol of the world of appearance—and accus­tomed to the light of intelligible truth, until it can bear to look upon the Sun.

The faculty exercised is the Reason; and Plato here distinguishes two complementary phases of its activity: Intellect (dianoia) and Intuition (noesis). The procedure of Intellect is that deductive and discursive reasoning which operates in the mathematical sciences. Geometry, for example, assumes certain premisses, as if they were self-evident, and proceeds to deduce an indefinite series of necessary conclusions. But the Reason is also capable of a movement in the reverse direction, upwards from the consequence to the premiss that implies it. The assumptions of Geometry are not really ultimate. The branches of pure mathematics form a single chain of necessary truths, deducible from the ultimate premiss of the science of numbers (arithmetic), which we may perhaps formulate as ‘the existence of unit’y. Unity is one aspect of the Good. The upward movement is due to a power (as it were) of divination, which apprehends a prior truth by an immediate act of Intuition.

The Reason is first to be trained in the deductive arguments of mathematics. But mathematical concepts are not the only objects of knowledge, nor is unity the only aspect of the ultimate principle. There are the other Ideas, which culminate in the same principle under its aspect as the Good, though they also share with the mathematical structure the attributes of beauty and truth. From mathematics the philosophers will pass to Dialectic, the study of moral concepts, with a technique developed from the Socratic conversation aiming at the definition of moral terms. Here the deductive reasoning of Intellect has only a subordinate place, being employed in the criticism of ‘hypotheses’, the tentative definitions advanced by the respondent and tested by the consequences to which they lead. The ‘hypothesis’ is reached by an effort of Intuition to perceive the content of an Idea. If the consequences prove the suggestion to be one-sided, too narrow or too wide, it will be rejected, and the respondent will frame a new definition, which should more nearly coincide with the true meaning. The criticism of Intellect will again be applied, and so the process will be continued by Intuition and Intellect in alternating rhythm, until the Idea, which has all along been dimly in view, is fully apprehended. Even when an Idea is known, however, this knowledge is only a part of the whole system of truth. Intuition must mount higher still to the summit, from which the partial truth can be seen in relation to all the rest of truth—the knowledge of Goodness itself. If this unconditional principle can ever be reached, the Intellect may then proceed to a complete deduction of the structure of reality. The philosopher, could he ever achieve this quest, would see the world as God might see it, and become as God, knowing good from evil. If virtue is knowledge, nothing short of this is perfect knowledge; and the man who can reach it should be enthroned as absolute lawgiver. Then the perfect commonwealth might see the light of day.

In the Phaedo and the Republic the sensible and intelligible worlds are sharply distinguished, and the relation between them is obscure. If Dialectic is concerned wholly with Ideas ‘apart from all the senses,’ how does the power of thought gain its first foothold to ‘mount upon and spring from’? The theory of Reminiscence replies that the memory of an Idea seen before birth is awakened by the perception of its imperfect copies in the world of sense. The mythical encomium of Eros, delivered by Socrates in the Phaedrus, identifies this act of reminiscence with what we might call a process of ‘abstraction.’ Man, and man only, has Reason, enabling him to ‘understand by way of the Form (Idea), a unity gathered by reflection from many acts of perception; and this is recollection of the things formerly seen by the soul, when it travelled in the divine company, despising the things we now call real and looking upwards to true reality’. Further we are told that, of the three aspects of the divine—Beauty, Goodness, and Truth—Beauty alone is visible through the bodily eyes, as an ‘indwelling light’ in its likenesses on earth. The perception of Beauty in the individual causes the distraction of Love, a form of ‘divine madness’ compared to the inspiration of prophecy, religious enthusiasm, and poetry. This madness is exalted above rational sobriety; the influx of Beauty causes the wings which Psyche must receive from Eros to grow for the higher flights of philosophic intuition.

The theory of Reminiscence is here set in a new light. The Idea, a unity shared by a manifold, is intuitively discerned as beauty; as if the perfect type were revealed within, or through, the imperfect copy. The first apprehension is dim and confused. It is clarified by Dialectic, which, in the Phaedrus, is described as consisting of two complementary processes, Collection and Division, ending in the Definition. The Definition is a complete and explicit statement of the content of the ‘indivisible species’. For this procedure the Ideas are conceived as forming a hierarchy, in which a higher term is related to the lower as genus to sub­ordinate species. Collection is an act of Intuition, ‘surveying together’ the specific Form to be defined and a number of others that may be ‘widely scattered’, and divining the single generic Form under which they must all be gathered. Everything will depend upon the correctness of this intuition; but it is an act of insight, not a method for which rules can be given. The genus is then systematically divided ‘where the joints naturally come’, down through intermediate classes and sub-classes, each with its specific difference, to the indivisible species. This lowest term is a Form which cannot be further divided, because it has nothing below it but an indefinite number of individual things whose Form it is—the members of the species, unknowable in so far as they contain anything more than their common specific Form. This is the very Form that was dimly apprehended in the initial act of intuition. What is gained by the dialectical process is an explicit, statement of its content; and, moreover, the Form so defined is set in its proper relations to kindred Forms. The definition consists of the generic term and all the specific differ­ences of the intermediate classes. This method is later illustrated at length in the Sophist and Statesman. It exhibits the alternating rhythm of Intuition and Intellect, which in the mathematical sciences are employed to divine the premisses and to deduce the conclusions of demonstrative proof.

This description of Dialectic indicates that the intelligible world of Ideas includes a hierarchy of natural kinds, or ‘types fixed in Nature’. Such a structure points to a possible object for a science of Nature; and we learn from a fragment of Comedy that the method of Division was applied in the Academy to the classification of natural species. The belief in the existence of a limited number of eternally existing real kinds was perpetuated as a fundamental postulate in the philosophy of Aristotle.

Towards the end of the Phaedrus, the written word is disparaged as no better than the bastard brother of the living and breathing word that can be written with understanding in the learner’s mind. Plato speaks as if the dialogues we have reviewed were pastimes to amuse the leisure of the head of the Academy, whose serious work lay elsewhere, in living intercourse with his students. He may have laid aside his pen for some years. His time was also to be taken up by another essay in practical reform. On the accession of the younger Dionysius at Syracuse in 367 BC, Plato was led by a sense of duty and by the more sanguine hopes of Dion to attempt once more the conversion of a despot to philosophy. This unsuccessful journey may have interrupted the composition of the series: Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Statesman.

 

IV.

THE LATER DIALOGUES

 

The newly discovered world of Ideas had yet to be explored and conquered. Complete conquest would mean the deduction of a rational and coherent system of the universe from an absolute principle. If Plato had moments when the way seemed clear, he could not communicate a finished result. The Parmenides opens with a searching criticism of his own theory of Ideas, formulating difficulties ignored in the Phaedo and perhaps brought to light by discussion in the Academy. (1) Can an Idea, like a thing, be the subject of propositions and have many predicates without loss of unity? (2) The extent of the world of Ideas becomes a problem, if Logic is to recognize universals such as ‘mud’ or ‘dirt,’ which Metaphysics can hardly admit to be eternal forms of reality. (3) No intelligible account of the relation between an Idea and its group of synonymous things has yet been found. The problem cannot be evaded by regarding Ideas as mere thoughts in our minds, or by recognizing only the relation of likeness between Idea and thing. The gap between the Ideal world and the sensible threatens to remain unbridged. Modern critics dispute whether the exercises in abstract dialectic which fill the rest of the dialogue offer more than some hints towards an answer to these problems. But .the necessity of some answer is stated with emphasis: Ideas are indispensable to thought.

This conclusion is negatively reinforced in the Theaeletus, by a proof that knowledge is not to be found in sensation or sense­perception, or in ‘true belief,’ which can be produced or shaken by persuasion. Sensation is infallible, but does not apprehend reality, the immediate objects of the senses are qualities which only arise in a process taking place between the sense-organ and the physical thing. Nor can it yield truth; for this is a property of judgments, and every judgment must contain at least one term which is not a sense-object. The discussion of the claims of true belief shows that empiricist views of the mind as a mere passive receptacle of impressions from without cannot explain how we can ever make a false judgment. Incidentally Plato refutes the doctrines he ascribes to Protagoras: that what appears real to each man is real for him, and what he thinks true is true for him. He also rejects the extreme Heracleitean view which denies any stable Being, though he still holds that sensible objects are in perpetual change and cannot be known. The dialogue defends the old position that there can be no knowledge without the Ideas.

This criticism of the world of appearance and its champion, Protagoras, is followed by a dialogue defining the Sophist as a denizen of that world and himself a creator of illusions. The attempt involves a discussion of what is meant by an unreal appearance and by falsehood in speech and thought. The treatment of the former question does not solve the problem of the relation between an Idea and the things described as partly unreal copies of it. We find only a review of theories of the real, leading to a criticism both of the materialists, who believe only in tangible body, and of the ‘friends of Ideas’, who admit only the reality of ‘intelligible and bodiless Forms’. It is asserted that at least some perfectly real things must be capable of life and intelligence, and therefore of change. The friends of Ideas must not suppose that immutable Forms can be the whole of reality. Plato seems here to provide for the reality of the divine Mind, of that element in the human soul which knows truth, and, perhaps, of non-human intelligences, such as govern the movement of the stars.

The logical discussion which follows clears up some fallacies about negative propositions, and deals, for the first time, with propositions about Ideas, which are here treated as ‘kinds,’ arranged in a hierarchy. The dialectician, by means of Collection and Division, will make out their relations. All discourse depends on the combination of Ideas with one another. False speech and judgment are now explained. A judgment (doxa) is the conclusion of the process of thought, the silent dialogue which the mind holds with itself. Speech is the utterance of a judgment in a significant combination of words. It is false when it states about its subject something other than what is. ‘Appearance’ (phantasia), in the psychological sense, is defined as ‘a mixture of sensation and judgment,’ with the implication, apparently, that the element of falsity it may contain is due to the judgment. This demonstration of the possibility of false speech, judgment, and appearance justifies the definition of the Sophist as a species of image-maker, practising an art of deceit.

The Statesman continues the conversation begun in the Sophist. It defines the scope of the sovereign art of statesmanship, dismissing theocracy as not for this world. The ideal is still the philosopher king, ruling without laws; but, in his absence, laws such as he would approve must be framed. Plato undertook this task in the Laws, his last work. He there finds the practical solution in a mixture of constitutional monarchy and democracy.

The series of critical dialogues is inconclusive: problems are raised that are not solved. The Sophist and Statesman seem to promise a further dialogue, the Philosopher, in which Socrates would have taken the lead once more. If projected, it was never written. In its place we have another unfinished trilogy. The Timaeus opens with the creation of the world and of man; the Critias (a fragment) was to exhibit a commonwealth like that of the Republic, identified with pre-historic Athens, saving the Mediterranean world from an invasion of the inhabitants of Atlantis, and then swallowed up by flood and earthquake. The Hermocrates (never written) would, perhaps, have described the rise of existing society after the catastrophe, and the establishment of a second- best constitution. Plato may have abandoned his scheme as too vast, and recast his material in the Laws.

The cosmology of the Timaeus is a preface to the projected survey of human history and social institutions; it culminates in the description of the moral and physical nature of man. It is framed in conscious opposition to the mechanism of the Pre-Socratics and Democritus. Plato held that motion can be originated only by the principle of life, or ‘soul,’ and that the soul, or souls, which cause the motions of the universe must be governed by Reason, purposing ends that are good. The Laws declares that on these two discoveries rests the faith, indispensable to society, in gods whose providence is concerned with the good and evil of mankind. Thus metaphysical, religious, and moral considerations combine to dictate a type of cosmogony which is creational, rather than evolutionary, though nothing is created, in the later sense, out of nothing. The world is the work of a divine Artist, who, being good, desired that all things should be, so far as possible, like himself. An artist works upon existing material, and with reference to a model. The divine model is at first presented as the eternal world of Ideas, the existence of which is asserted throughout the Timaeus with all the old emphasis. The material is described as the visible principle of Becoming, whose orderless movement is reduced to order and harmony by the fashioning of a living universe with a reasonable soul and a body.

The World-soul itself is a compound of the two principles of Being and Becoming, or ‘the Same and the Other.’ It is ordered in the numerical ratios of a musical harmony; and its substance is divided into the two circles, equatorial and ecliptic, of the celestial sphere. The circle of the Other is subdivided into the planetary orbits. Here the allegorical or mythical form of exposition masks an inexplicable transition from the purely logical order to the physical, which is characteristic of this part of the Timaeus and recurs in the construction of the body of the universe. Visible and tangible body is reduced to atoms, with the forms of four of the regular geometrical solids; these forms themselves are decomposed into elementary triangles, and triangles can be expressed in relations of number. Matter appears sometimes as an indeterminate substance bounded by these forms, sometimes as mere Space. Elsewhere it seems to be ultimately reduced to a logical principle of ‘Otherness’ or multiplicity, as if the physical dispersion of objects in space were derived from the logical Form of Otherness, which (as the Sophist showed) separates the Ideas themselves, since each of them is not (is other than) all the rest. Thus the cosmogony, which cannot here be followed in detail, still leaves in obscurity the old problem, how to relate the eternal world of Ideas to the mutable things of time and space. The mechanism of the visible heavens and the living creatures of earth emerge from a mysterious background of logical entities, itself concealing the Power whose word becomes flesh.

That this scheme is, in some sense, ‘mythical’ has always been recognized; and it is commonly assumed that the mythical form is an allegorical disguise which can be stripped off, so as to unveil a coherent theory of the universe. Plato, it is believed, chose to wrap in misleading, and even contradictory, imagery, a rational doctrine which might have been set forth in literal and prosaic terms. But the interpreters who reverse this proceeding arrive at conflicting and arbitrary results. In Plato’s thought about God, the universe, and the soul there is an irreducible element of myth. This word has more than one sense. ‘Mythos’, meaning ‘account,’ ‘story,’ is used by Timaeus himself to describe the physical theories which fill a large part of the dialogue. These seem to embody the best results of contemporary speculation in astronomy and medicine. But for Plato ‘the actual physical world, just because it cannot be completely analysed into combinations of logical concepts, but involves a factor of irrational sensible fact, is incapable of being an object of science proper. Any conclusions we may form as to its structure and history must be put forward not as proved results of science, but as, at best, a “probable account”’ (mythos). Such an account might be in the plainest prose; the element of falsity lies, not in the mode of exposition, but in the object described, which is only a fleeting image of the real. This sense of mythos does not imply the use of poetical imagery. Plato also recognizes an allegorical type of myth. The Guardians of the Ideal State will fabricate myths to convey to the unphilosophic citizens religious truths beyond the reach of their intellects. Here the element of falsity resides in the allegorical form; but the truth it contains is assumed to be known and deliberately disguised. Now, the myths in Plato’s dialogues are partly allegorical; but those which deal with God and the soul cannot be completely transposed into rational and prosaic terms. They contain an element of that non-rational poetic thought, which the Phaedrus acknowledged as yielding intuitions of truth inaccessible to the sober intellect. When the imagery of Timaeus’ creation myth is dissolved by the allegorical method of interpretation, with it disappears the element which Plato in his old age valued more and more—the belief in ‘a Maker and Father of this universe,’ who not only designed the world but cares for the destinies of man.

The Philebus contains Plato’s last word upon the nature of human happiness, occasioned perhaps by an Academic contro­versy between Plato’s colleague Eudoxus, a hedonist, and others who denied that pleasure was a good at all and identified happiness with wisdom. Happiness is declared to consist in a mixed life combining all forms of knowledge with innocent and pure plea­sures. The mixture owes its goodness to the qualities of beauty, truth, and measure. Judged in respect of these qualities, pleasure is declared, on metaphysical grounds, to be inferior to Reason and knowledge.

From Aristotle we learn something of a latest phase, in which Plato developed the Pythagorean doctrine that all things represent numbers. He distinguished the numbers Two, Three, etc., which are Ideas, not only from collections of so many things, but also from an intermediate kind of numbers which occur in mathe­matical propositions, such as 2 + 2 = 4. An Ideal Number is unique, cannot be added to itself, and does not consist of units. Such Numbers are derived from a formal principle, the One, and a material, the ‘great and small’, or ‘Indeterminate Duality’, so called because ‘the indefinite is held to proceed to infinity both in the direction of increase and in that of diminution’. The principles are called, in the Philebus, by the Pythagorean names, Limit and Unlimited. In the physical world the Unlimited is exemplified by ‘hotter-and-colder,’ or ‘higher-and-lower’ in sound. The Limit is represented by ‘whatever has the ratio of one number or measure to another’. The union of the two principles produces ‘a mixed being which has become’, e.g. health, musical harmony, temperate seasons, etc. Plato seems to have held that Numbers themselves can be analysed into corresponding principles. Ideal spatial magnitudes form a class of more complex Ideas, in which Numbers serve as the formal principle, and the material is space. Below these again are the mathematical numbers and magnitudes, and finally physical atoms in actual space. It appears, further, that Plato regarded all Ideas as in some sense ‘Numbers,’ composed of corresponding principles. Here the formal principle may be identified with the One in its aspect of the Good. The material is the principle of multiplicity in the Ideal world. Ideas so formed serve as the principle of Limit to sensible things.

We hear also of an unpublished lecture on the Good; but if the notes preserved by Plato’s pupils had come down to us, it is not likely that we should understand them. Indeed, we have Plato’s own assurance that we should not. On his last visit to Syracuse (361 BC) he had told Dionysius something, but by no means all, of what was in his mind with regard to the ultimate questions of philosophy. Dionysius afterwards composed a treatise and gave it out as his own doctrine. Of this essay and others like it Plato writes that their authors could not understand anything of the matter. 

“There is not, nor shall there ever be, any writing of mine on this subject. It is altogether beyond such means of expression as exist in other fields of knowledge; rather, after long dwelling upon the thing itself, in a common life of philosophic converse, suddenly, as from a leaping spark, a light is kindled, which, when it has arisen in the soul, thenceforward feeds itself. Yet of this I am sure: that, if these things were to be written down or expressed in words, I could express them better than anyone; I know too that if they were set down in writing badly, I should be the person to suffer most. If I thought they could be adequately set forth to the world in speech or writing, in what nobler business could I have spent my life than in writing a work of great service to mankind and revealing Nature to all eyes under the light of day? But I do not think that a statement of what has been attempted in this field is a good thing for man, unless it be for the very few who can be enabled, by a slight indication, to make the discovery for them­selves. Of the rest, some would be puffed up with an entirely offensive spirit of false superiority; others, with a lofty and presumptuous conceit of understanding some great matter”.

From these words we may infer that there were moments when Plato seemed to himself to have gained a luminous vision of reality, in which the claims of logical intellect and poetic intuition were reconciled, and the world appeared both rational and harmonious. All that he could give to others was a ‘slight indication,’ such as might enable a few to discover for themselves the knowledge which, as Socrates had said, cannot be taught.

 

V.

ARISTOTLE

 

Aristotle joined the Academy in his eighteenth year (367 BC), about the time of Plato’s second visit to Sicily, and worked there till Plato died in 347. He was born at Stagirus in the Thracian peninsula, a Greek colony from Andros and Chalcis, the home of his mother’s family. His father, Nicomachus, was a physician, attached to the court of Amyntas II of Macedonia. The intellectual influences of Aristotle’s early years came from medical and physical science, untouched, in that quarter of the Greek world, by the philosophic revolution begun by Socrates at Athens. The natural bent of his mind was always towards the study of empirical facts; he collected them with enormous industry and sought to fit them into an encyclopaedic system of the universe. But during the twenty years he spent at the Academy, as the pupil and colleague of Plato, he became, once for all, a Platonist. His life-work was a gigantic effort to force the apparatus of Platonic thought to account for the natural world revealed by observation.

It is impossible as yet to trace closely the development of Aristotle’s thought. Of the dialogues he wrote at the Academy, only fragments survive. His collections of material have perished almost entirely. The extant works form a corpus of treatises, mainly intended for the School and little known outside it until they were published by Andronicus of Rhodes in the time of Cicero. Some parts consist of lectures written out in more or less summary form; others seem to be compilations of essays, of various dates, collected either by Aristotle himself or by his pupils after his death. When criticism has made out the stratification of these writings, it may go on to construct the history of Aristotle’s thought. A great advance has been made by W. Jager, whose Aristoteles supersedes earlier biographies. Other scholars are pursuing the same line; but some of the results are still in dispute, and a long controversy may be expected before agreement is reached.

The dialogues written at the Academy were, like Plato’s, intended for the educated public. Some, it would seem, were closely modelled, both in style and contents, upon the works of Plato’s middle period. In others the dramatic manner was dropped; and a new form, later used by Cicero, appears, in which a series of speeches are made upon some theme proposed by a chairman, who sums up at the end. The treatment of immortality in the Eudemus, dated by the death of the Platonist Eudemus of Cyprus in 354 BC, reproduced the conception of life and death expressed in the Phaedo. At this date Aristotle regarded the soul as a substance, not as a form inseparable from the matter of the body, and still held the theory of Ideas—a proof, incidentally, that the doctrines of the Phaedo had not been abandoned by their author. Another work of this period, the Protrepticus, reveals Aristotle’s sympathy with that impulse which tempted Plato throughout his life to withdraw from the tasks of practical reform into religious contemplation of truth. It was an exhortation, after the pattern perfected by Isocrates, recommending the philosophic life to a reigning prince, Themison of Cyprus.

After Plato’s death and the appointment of his nephew, Speusippus, to preside over the Academy, Aristotle may have felt that he could not continue his work under a man of inferior powers. With Xenocrates, who was later to succeed Speusippus, he withdrew to Assos in the Troad, where two Platonists, Erastus and Coriscus of Scepsis, were in friendly relations with the local despot, Hermeias of Atarneus, himself a former member of the Academy. Aristotle married Hermeias’ niece, Pythias. In this Platonic circle he stayed for three years, and then taught for a short time at Mitylene in Lesbos, the country of his collaborator and successor, Theophrastus. In 343 he was invited by Philip of Macedon, who may have known him as a boy, to undertake the education of Alexander, then thirteen years of age.

In this second period of his life, Aristotle still called himself a Platonist; but death had freed him from the duty to respect the feelings of a venerable master; and, as the leader of an independent school, he was bound to formulate his own doctrine. The native bent of his mind now asserted itself in clearer antagonism to the mystical metamathematics of Plato’s latest thought. The lost dialogue Concerning Philosophy, perhaps the programme of the School at Assos, attacked the Platonic Ideas, and, in particular, the theory of Ideal Numbers, distinct from the numbers of mathematics. It opened with a review of ancient wisdom, oriental as well as Greek, fragments of which Aristotle believed to have survived the catastrophes that, from time to time, had overwhelmed civilization. The cosmology set forth at the end had a theological character as marked as that of the Timaeus. The mythical Creator and his ideal model are, however, eliminated. The world is without beginning or end. The movement of the stars is the voluntary motion of their directing intelligences. God is already conceived as the Unmoved Mover, a pure unchang­ing Form, separate from the world. Some of the oldest parts of the extant treatises must date from this period.

 

VI.

FORM AND MATTER, THE ACTUAL AND THE POTENTIAL

 

With Aristotle’s rejection of the Platonic Ideas, the centre of reality is shifted back to the natural world of time and change. A science of Nature, such as Plato could not recognize, is possible, if the world given in experience contains objects that are real in the fullest sense. For Plato the world of immaterial Forms contained the true ‘nature of things’ and the objects of knowledge. In the hierarchy of Ideas, the method of Division led to the definition, by genus and differences, of the lowest object of knowledge—the indivisible essence of a natural kind. The problem was to find an intelligible relation to link the specific Form in the Ideal world to the individual members of the species. Aristotle tried to evade it by denying independent reality to the Idea. The specific Form, actually realized in each individual, is primarily real, and is the nature of the things possessing it. The real world, then, is no longer a world of universals, but of concrete things which we perceive. Although these things become and perish in time and suffer change, they contain a constant reality. Nature is, in the first place, a kingdom of specific Forms realized in matter; and every such Form is an invariable and limited set of characteristics, which can be defined and known. The main purpose of science is to define these essences and to demonstrate universal truths about them. The Aristotelian philosophy has its centre here. Its apparatus of concepts is designed to explain the nature of the individual substance, and how it can come into existence and undergo change.

The objects of physical science are things which have sensible matter and movement. These two characteristics distinguish them from the objects of the other theoretical sciences, mathe­matics and metaphysics, the objects of mathematics do not, indeed, exist apart from sensible matter; number and geometrical form exist only as determinations of physical things, though they are studied by mathematicians in abstraction from them. But, as thus abstracted, they are incapable of motion, and possess only ‘intelligible matter’, a principle of individuation distinguishing entities that are conceptually identical (e.g. two circles). This ‘intelligible matter’ is geometrical space, which is not imaginary, but an abstraction of the same kind as mathematical objects. The study of objects which are not only incapable of movement, but wholly immaterial, is the field of metaphysics, also called theology, because the chief among such objects is God. Since Aristotle’s theology is an appendix to his philosophy of Nature, we must seek the kernel of his thought in the analysis of the central objects of physical science.

In the Physics ‘natural objects’ are declared to be ‘animals and their parts, plants, and the simple bodies—earth, fire, water, and air’. Inorganic Nature consists of the simple bodies and lifeless compounds of them; organic Nature, of the living creatures, grouped in species. The individual living creature can be analysed, in the first place, into its specific Form, its other attributes, and its Matter.

The specific Form is an immaterial principle of structure, which cannot exist apart from the appropriate matter embodying it. Its content is conceptually identical in all the individuals, and is expressed in the definition by genus and differences. It is the true ‘nature’ or ‘essence’ of the thing, or ‘what it is to be’ a thing of that kind. It constitutes, as it were, the permanent and invariable core of the individual’s being. Round it are grouped the other attributes, divided into properties and accidents. A property is an attribute which belongs to all members of a given species and only to them, but is not part of the essence; thus the capacity for laughter is confined to men, but not essential. An accident is an attribute which may or may not belong to a thing, and may belong also to things of other species.

All these determinations, essential or not, are, in a wider sense, the Form of the individual substance at any given moment; but the substance is not simply the sum of them. It also contains an element determined by them, an unknown something which has the qualities and undergoes the changes that occur in the thing. This element is called ‘Matter.’ Matter and Form, however, are relative terms. In relation to the essential nature, the matter of a living creature is its body; but relatively to the organs of the living body, the tissues composing them are matter; relatively to the tissues, the simple bodies are matter; and these bodies themselves are logically analysable into the primary contrarieties (hot and cold, dry and fluid) and ultimate Matter. Ultimate or pure Matter is an abstraction of thought, not any kind of thing that can exist by itself. The lowest level on which Matter exists is the simple bodies. The name ‘Matter’ is applicable to anything indeterminate, but capable of determination. The history of this conception goes back through Plato’s In­determinate Duality, to the Pythagorean ‘Unlimited’—the void womb of becoming, informed by the principle of ‘Limit’.

It is, further, a given fact of experience that individual substances begin and cease to exist. Natural objects, as distinct from artificial things, are defined as having in themselves a source of movement or rest. A living creature is born, grows to its full development and then ceases to grow, produces another individual of the same kind, and at last decays and dies. These phenomena cannot be accounted for either by the unimaginable operation of a changeless Platonic Idea, or (as the Pre-Socratics had supposed) by mechanical interaction of the lowest forms of matter. Aristotle sees the moving cause in the goal of development—the specific ‘nature’ realized in each individual. In the highest types of living creatures—and the lower is to be explained by the higher—the Form is impressed by the male parent, in the act of generation, on matter supplied by the female. From its latent condition in the germ it develops to full perfection, this stage being marked by the capacity to reproduce the Form in another individual. Thus the cycle begins again, the perfection or ‘end’ of one individual acting as the ‘beginning’ of another. The ‘final cause’ and the ‘moving cause’ coincide with the ‘formal cause.’

The impulse of life, manifested in the growth of the living organism from the germ to perfection, is often spoken of as if it were an impulse of desire directed to the end, analogous to the artist’s desire to produce in his material the form he has before his mind. In the language of personification, ‘Nature’ is said to work to an end. But ‘Nature’ is not a soul, capable of desire or purpose, but merely a collective name for the natures of all natural things. The personification is only a literary device, expressing the given fact that the development of the living germ follows a definite course that seems to be predetermined: it can develop into the specific Form of its own kind and of no other. This fact is conveniently conceived by the analogy of conscious purpose, but not explained; for Aristotle’s system admits neither a designing Creator nor a World-soul which might be the seat of such purposes.

The same fact is also expressed by saying that the germ has the power to develop into its destined perfection, or is ‘potentially’ what it later comes to be actually. In connection with processes of becoming and change Actuality (energeia) and Potentiality (dynamis) correspond to Form and Matter, and are similarly relative terms: what is actually bronze is potentially a statue. The notion of potentiality is obscure. Dynamis is the substantive answering to the auxiliary verb ‘can,’ and covers several meanings: (1) the mere 'possibility of anything that may or may not be; (2) capacity to pass through a change of quality, quantity, or locomotion; (3) the potential existence of something that may develop into actual existence; (4) the power to effect a change, the faculty of producing something or of manifesting activity. Energeia has the corresponding senses: (1) reality, (2) actualization, (3) actuality, (4) activity. These ambiguities sometimes cover a confusion, and often render the thought obscure. What, for instance, is meant by saying that the seed is ‘potentially’ a tree? In relation to the full-grown tree the seed is matter, but not, of course, pure matter capable of any determination. It has the capacity of becoming a tree, if nothing hinders it; and this capacity must be due to the actual Form it already possesses—certain properties confining its development to the course that will end in the perfect Form of its own species. But this is not all; a lifeless piece of bronze has actual properties which fit it to be made into a statue, but it will never become a statue of itself. The seed, as a natural object, must contain ‘a source of movement within itself’—a force that will carry it to its fulfilment. But, though ‘power’ is one of the meanings of dynamis, this moving force resides, not in matter, but in the specific Form. Usually the ‘moving cause’ is said to be the specific Form as actually existing in the fully developed parent; but, in the act of generation, transmitting this Form to a new individual, the power or force must also be transmitted. Hence we must say that the specific Form, bearing this force, exists already in the seed; and since it does not exist in full actuality until the new tree is grown, it is said to exist ‘potentially’, and conceived as containing a latent power, whose energy will effect the development. Finally, when the actualization of the Form is complete, this ‘first entelechy’ is endowed with faculties, to be further expressed in the activities or functions of life, such as nutrition and reproduction.

In this analysis the word dynamis shifts through all its meanings. The whole is a description, rather than an explanation, of the mysterious force of life, whose operation we witness but cannot understand. Characteristic of Aristotle is the notion that this force resides in the specific Form, conveying it in unbroken succession from one perishable individual to another. His merit lies in the caution which keeps him from going further beyond the observed facts of life to seek an ‘explanation’ in unverifiable and insufficient hypotheses. On the other hand, the specific Forms, considered as everlasting and invariable constituents of the natural order, arc a metaphysical heritage from Plato, involving the dogma that the natural order itself is without beginning or end. A new species cannot be created or ‘evolved’ from another species; though, when a species becomes extinct, on Aristotle’s principles the natural order must be impaired—a consequence he never faces.

The concepts of Matter and Form, Potentiality and Actuality, above illustrated from their primary application to living creatures, are used as master-keys to explain all phenomena. A few examples must suffice. In order to make the Form the moving cause in artificial production, the Form of a statue is declared to pre-exist in the sculptor’s mind and to set in motion the desire leading to its realization. The material is moved by the tool, the tool by the craftsman’s hands; his hands are moved, in an appropriate way, ‘by his knowledge of his art and by his soul, in which is the Form’. In the analysis of changes other than the generation of substances—changes of quality, quantity, and place—the same concepts are used; and motion generally is defined as ‘the actualization of that which is potentially.’ In this context ‘matter’ figures as the subject which undergoes and per­sists through change. Aristotle tries to solve the old problem, How can what is come out of what is not? by remarking that Form (A) cannot come simply out of its privation (not A) but only from privation in a substrate (x) which has the new form potentially. Even in the case of locomotion, Aristotle speaks of ‘local matter,’ which is to be found, without the matter presupposed in other kinds of change, in the capacity for rotation of the heavenly spheres. Beyond this is ‘intelligible matter’ or spatial extension, and finally ‘ultimate matter.’ In the conceptual world, the genus is called ‘matter’ in relation to the species, which has a higher degree of determination. Aristotle can hardly be defended against the charge that concepts of such bewildering ambiguity are chiefly useful for making his system appear more complete and coherent than it is.

 

VII. 

THE OBJECTS AND METHODS OF SCIENCE

 

The belief, inherited from Plato, in the indivisible specific Form as the kernel of reality carried with it the old problem of the relation between the universal objects of knowledge and the particular things existing in time. Aristotle held to the doctrine that only the universal can be defined and known; but the most real things in his world are not universals, but individual substances, for the independent existence of the Platonic Ideas has been denied. When the specific Form is thus transferred from the intelligible world to actual existence in sensible matter, what it gains in substantial reality is offset by the danger that it may cease to be knowable. If the Platonic Idea is a universal, it can be known, but cannot exist; if it exists, it is an individual, and cannot be known. But the Aristotelian Form is open to the same dilemma. The world revealed to experience consists of individual existents. If these constitute the real, and the individual is indeed unknowable, the problem of finding real objects for knowledge, which the Theory of Ideas was to solve, seems to become in­oluble.

On the other hand, if the problem appeared in this light to Aristotle, to us the reality of the specific Form may seem more doubtful than its knowableness. These invariable Forms, which are to stiffen the unstable world of Heracleitean change with a structure of constant fixity, are metaphysical figments. The actual Form of an individual substance is declared to be the most real of entities; but this Form, numerically different from the Form of any other individual, perishes; it is not transmitted to descendants. The alleged specific Form which never begins or ceases to be, but only comes to be ‘actualized’ in fresh individuals, and exists ‘potentially’ in the germ, is not a thing that really persists and travels unchanged through the succession of individuals. Though Aristotle attacks Plato for giving independent existence to Ideas, he is in fact guilty of the same offence; the difference is that he makes the Idea exist within and throughout the flow of time and change. It is still the Platonic Idea, with a better claim to be knowable than to be real; for it retains the essential of an object of knowledge—a determinate, unvarying, definable content. Having persuaded himself that it exists everlastingly in the natural world, Aristotle is left with the problem, how to make this object of knowledge accessible to experience which must enter through the gate of the senses. The senses show us individual things, each with a numerically different Form of its own, involved with a mass of necessary or accidental attributes. It remains to give some account of the process by which the universal is disengaged from the particular.

Aristotle’s term Epagoge, though usually rendered by ‘Induction’, rather denoted a process of abstraction. Starting from the animal faculty of perception, ‘the first stage in the development from sense to knowledge is memory, the “remaining of the percept” when the moment of perception is over. The next stage is “experience,” or the framing, on the basis of repeated memories of the same kind of thing, of a conception, the fixation of a universal’. It appears, further, that by a similar process we ascend from particular judgments to universal judgments and to the first premisses (definitions, axioms etc.) of all science. Aristotle recognizes, throughout all the stages, the operation of Plato’s faculty of intuition (noesis). It is ultimately this highest human faculty that guides the entire procedure by its power of penetrating to the Idea and to ultimate truths. Induction is ‘the process whereby, after experience of a certain number of particular instances, the mind grasps a universal truth which then and afterwards is seen to be self-evident. Induction in this sense, is the activity of intuitive reason’. It is ‘a process not of reasoning but of direct insight, mediated psychologically by a review of particular instances’. In Plato intuition ‘collects’ the generic Idea from a review of the species; in Aristotle it also arrives at the specific Form from a review of individuals; Plato, indeed, had already made the sensuous intuition of beauty in the individual the starting-point of philosophy. On the lowest level of knowledge, in perception itself, there is an element of intuition, grasping the whole nature of the individual in a single immediate act.

Possessed by intuition and ‘induction’ of its universal objects and premisses, demonstrative science can proceed to its task of proving universal truths. Since the belief in the primary reality of the specific Form is as much the kernel of Aristotle’s logic as of his metaphysic, the typical purpose of science is to define such Forms and to show why they possess properties which are necessary but not parts of their essence. Definition, as in Plato, is by genus and specific differences; but Aristotle does not accept the Platonic method of Division. An indivisible species is to be defined by collecting attributes common to all individuals of the species, and separately, but not collectively, shared by other species of the same genus. Since we cannot examine every individual, we are once more thrown back upon intuition; and it is not clear how essential attributes can be distinguished from the properties which demonstration will prove to be necessarily derived from the essence. Aristotle’s whole discussion of this subject is obscured by two pre-suppositions. In the first place, he takes the existing structure of the mathematical sciences as the pattern of all science; and in geometry, for instance, ‘having angles equal to two right angles’ is taken to be a demonstrable property of the triangle, but not part of its definition. The other source of confusion is his belief that the syllogism—a discovery of which he was proud—is the structure common to all reasoning, and he tries to force the processes of scientific enquiry into this mould. The perfect syllogism, to which other ‘figures’ are to be reduced, is the figure with a universal affirmative conclusion. It is assumed that every proposition in a syllogism contains the subject-predicate relation, and the predicate in one premiss must be a term which can stand as subject in the other. An account of the process of reasoning which is subject to these limitations is necessarily incomplete and distorted.

Further, when the subject of inquiry is the cause of a class of events (such as eclipses of the moon), Aristotle tries to reduce this to an inquiry for the definition of an attribute. An eclipse is regarded as an attribute of the moon, and the ‘cause’ (the interposition of the earth) becomes the middle term of a syllogism: ‘Loses its light’ is always true of a body which has another body between it and its source of light; being such a body is true of the eclipsed moon; therefore ‘loses its light’ is true of the eclipsed moon. This can be recast into the definition: Eclipse of the moon is loss of light due to the earth’s interposition. Aristotle did not, however, imagine that the causes of events could be discovered by demonstration. The discovery of the ‘middle term’ stating the cause is made, after a number of experiences of the fact, by an ‘instantaneous guess’ of intuition. He admits that the syllogistic statement does not even prove that the cause we have guessed is the true cause. What lies behind these logical contortions is the conviction that the ‘cause’ of a thing or of an event is to be found in its essential nature or Form. Aristotle holds true to the tradition that the aim of science is, not to establish laws of succession among phenomena, but to discover the ‘nature of things.’ Hence the relation of cause and effect is replaced by the notions of Form and Matter, or actuality and potentiality. An effect is a potentiality actualized by its cause, or ‘Matter’ of a certain kind determined by a certain Form. The Matter individualizes the Form, which in itself is universal.

The method of definition by genus and specific difference implies the acceptance of Plato’s hierarchy of Forms, extending upwards from the indivisible species, through intermediate kinds, to highest genera, which must be simple and indefinable. The genus and intermediate kinds are less determinate than the lowest species, and so related to it as ‘Matter’; every difference adds an element of Form. Accordingly, as we move upward towards the highest genera, we are not, as Plato supposed, approaching the ultimate cause of all existence, but receding ever further from the primary reality of the concrete thing. The highest genera appear to be identical with the ‘categories’ which figure everywhere in Aristotle’s works, but are nowhere formally deduced. The authenticity of the treatise called Categories is disputed. It contains the famous list of ten; substance, quality, quantity, relation, place, date, position, state, action, passivity—apparently an inventory of the ultimate classes of things that are meant by words. They are the terms arrived at when we push the question, what a namable thing is, to the last point. But they stand at the farthest remove from the reality of the individual substance. To find anything that can rank as a higher kind of reality, we must look in another direction. There we find certain Forms which are declared to be without Matter, though they are all individuals. They are: the active Reason in man, which has no bodily organ, but is eternal and immortal or ‘divine,’ and enters the body ‘from without’; the Intelligences which move the spheres; and God, the Prime Mover. The divinity of the active Reason is a dogma inherited from Plato and earlier religious thought. The Intelli­gences and God are required to explain the motion of the universe. The First Heaven is moved directly by God; the other spheres, having different motions, are moved by subordinate immaterial Intelligences.

 

VIII. 

COSMOLOGY

 

Aristotle’s universe is a system of concentric spheres, with the earth at rest in the centre, and at the outside the ‘First Heaven’ of the fixed stars. The mathematical spheres, imagined by Eudoxus and Callippus to account for the apparent motions of the sun and moon and the five known planets, were converted by Aristotle into a mechanism of actual rotating spheres, each moving by contact the sphere next inside it. The number of spheres down to the moon was raised to 55. The heavenly bodies consist of a fifth element, incapable of any change except circular motion.

The existence of God is deduced from the eternity of the world and of motion. It is necessary, and sufficient, to suppose one eternal source of motion; but this cannot be itself moved. Already in the treatise Concerning Philosophy, Aristotle had declared God to be incapable of change; he is not a soul, or a creator, or even conscious of the world’s existence; the activity in which his life consists can be nothing but intuitive contemplation, without any element of desire or action. He is without parts or magnitude; and although in one place he is said to be outside the universe, he cannot really be in space. He can cause motion only as the final cause, or object of desire, which moves without itself being moved. The subject of this desire must presumably be the soul animating the body of the First Heaven; but the operation of the Intelligences is left in obscurity. Aristotle’s God thus holds a position like that of the Good in the Republic, and his efficacy is still illicitly imagined not merely as a source of mechanical motion propagated throughout the spheres, but also as an attraction to which life responds with its mysterious impulse to rise from the potentiality of Matter to the actuality of Form. The tendency to think in this way appears where personified Nature is repre­sented as striving towards perfection. But, as we have seen, the system admits no soul in Nature that might be the seat of such desire. Aristotle’s mind is still haunted by the Platonic doctrines of the Good and of Eros; but his God is the object of a desire for which he provides no subject.

A striking feature of the cosmology is the distinction between the celestial region and the sublunary, to which all becoming and all change, other than rotatory locomotion, are confined. Here are the four elements, which, as natural objects, ‘contain within themselves sources of motion,’ manifest in their tendency to move towards their natural places in four spheres—a notion which goes back to Anaximander. Each element contains two of the primary qualities (hot, dry, cold, fluid), whose interaction explains the transformation of the elements into one another and the production of intermediate natures by combination. The elements are the material cause of the generation of substances. The efficient cause, as we have seen, resides in the specific Forms; but the alternation of birth and growth, decay and death, in the life of individual creatures is due to the rhythmical approach and retreat of the sun in its annual course, causing transformation of the elements and the seasonal alternations of heat and cold, drought and rain. The Meteorologica contains a further study of the combinations and mutual influences of the four elements, and deals with the ‘meteoric’ phenomena of the sublunary region.

 

IX. 

BIOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

 

Biology is the department of science in which Aristotle’s characteristic concepts are most at home, and the treatises on natural history are still admired by those men of science who are aware that they exist. They contain a large collection of observations of the structure and habits of some five hundred animal species. The theory of classification is carried to a point beyond which, it is said, no advance was made before Linnaeus. The principle observed in explaining organic Nature is teleological, in the sense that the process by which an organism and its parts come into being is to be explained by the Form of the perfect creature—‘becoming is for the sake of being’—and the Form itself by its function or ‘activity.’ The phenomena cannot be accounted for by the casual play of mechanical causes, though these may suffice to produce some characters which are not essential. This teleology has, however, no firm metaphysical basis; it is an inverted mechanism, which cannot show how the end is to cause the beginning.

Natural history culminates in Psychology, for this science has for its object the specific Form, the vehicle of life. What has so far been studied morphologically as the structure characteristic of a species is now seen as the living essence embodied in the individual, informing its material parts. It is nothing else than the soul, which is related to an organic body of a certain constitution as Form to Matter. Thus soul and body are two inseparable aspects of one thing, and soul is defined as ‘the first entelechy (or actuality) of a natural organic body,’ the second, or further, actuality being the activities it displays in waking life. This interesting view of the relation of soul to body avoids the difficulties that arise when soul and body, or mind and matter, are conceived as entities of different orders, whose interaction has to be accounted for. All psychic phenomena which occur in plants and animals generally are not merely accompanied by physiological changes; they are the formal aspects of these material processes. Anger, for example, is on the physical side, a boiling of the blood; on the mental, a desire for retaliation. The mental aspect gives this phenomenon the Form of anger, which distinguishes the physical change from boiling that might be mechanically produced by the application of heat. Neither aspect can strictly be called, in the modern sense, the cause or the effect of the other; each is a ‘cause’ in the Aristotelian sense, the one formal, the other material. The psychologist, in defining anger, must mention both.

From this definition of soul it follows that no individual soul can exist apart from the body it informs from the moment of generation to the moment of death. On the other hand, the human soul contains an element, the active Reason, which is declared to be pure Form with no bodily organ, and to exist eternally. This is none other than that ‘true self’ which Socrates had believed in and Plato had held to be the rational part of the soul, whose impersonal memory contains all knowledge of reality. In Aristotle, as in Plato, it is immortal or ‘divine,’ and includes no element of personality, such as distinguishes one individual from another. More than once in the Ethics Aristotle explicitly calls it the ‘self.’

As life rises in the scale of Nature, one layer of soul is super­imposed on another. The lowest form of life, in the plant world, consists of the faculties of nutrition and reproduction. To this is added in animals the sentient life, including sensation and perception, feelings of pleasure and pain, desire and consequent movement, and at least some rudimentary emotions. On the physiological side sense-perception involves the assimilation of the organ to the objectively existing qualities perceived; this reception of the Form without the Matter’ has its mental aspect in the awareness of the quality. Imagination (phantasia) is the faculty which preserves images of former objects of perception, on which depends memory—the complex act of recognizing an image as the image of some past object. Imagination is also active in free imagery and in dreams.

In addition to these animal faculties, man has Reason, making him capable of thought and moral action. This faculty, though it can exist and exercise its activity of pure contemplation apart from the mortal soul, combines with the soul during life in such a way that its activity penetrates the lower functions. Even on the level of perception, while the senses receive only the Form of the sensible qualities, Reason, by its peculiar power of intuition, apprehends the essential nature of the individual. It thus receives the ‘intelligible Form’ of the indivisible species, in an immediate act occupying an undivided time. Again, we are told that the Reason ‘thinks the Forms in the images’ which, Aristotle holds, are present to the mind in all thinking. The Reason has thus the same function as in Plato: it is the power which apprehends the primary realities. Aristotle finally draws his distinction of Form and Matter, actual and potential, within the Reason itself: there is an active Reason and a passive. Some of his expressions suggest that, like Plato’s rational part with its impersonal memory, the active Reason is always in possession of all truth, which it recovers by an act of recognition. In the process of gaining knowledge, potential knowledge is raised to actuality. This seems like a translation into Aristotelian terms of Plato’s theory of reminiscence. Aristotle, however, is embarrassed by his conviction that the objects of knowledge exist in the physical world, so that the intelligible Forms must pass into the soul through the channel of sense-perception and imagination, and be received from that quarter by the ‘passive Reason.’ The obscurity of this part of his psychology is, perhaps, due to his having to combine this doctrine with a conception of Reason and knowledge that was more like Plato’s than he cared to admit.

 

X. 

ETHICS AND POLITICS

 

Aristotle’s theory of Ethics is dictated, no less than other parts of his philosophy, by his central doctrine of the specific Form. The first object of ethical inquiry is to discover the good or final cause of man’s existence. It is a foregone conclusion that this will be found among the activities of man’s specific Form or essential nature, which the Psychology has identified with his soul. The ‘good for man’ or happiness (as all agree to call it) must be some activity of soul, in which his peculiar nature finds its fullest realization. Every other species has a corresponding ‘good’; but man’s business is to realize his own nature. The moralist, however, cannot admit that all activities of life are good in themselves or ethical ends. Aristotle’s only discussion of the meaning of ‘good’  is confused and contradictory; but he recognizes that some things are good in themselves and such as ought to be desired, whether they are desired or not. He further holds, with Socrates and Plato, that the divine Reason or ‘ true self’ has the power to discern what is really good, and always ‘wishes’ for it; its judgment is the only guide and is infallible. Happiness, then, must consist in activities recognized by this faculty as good in themselves. Aristotle describes such activities as those which are ‘in accordance with virtue (goodness)’ adding (without justification) ‘or, if there be several virtues, in accordance with the best and most perfect.’ But since the goodness or ex­cellence of anything is that condition which enables it to perform its function well, virtue may equally well be defined in terms of good activities; it is a state of the soul from which good activities result, and analogous to bodily health.

Man’s nature is complicated by the presence in his soul of the divine Reason—the part which ‘possesses a rational principle (or rule)’, by virtue of its power of directly and infallibly perceiving what is good and ‘wishing’ it. In moral conduct, good or bad—an activity peculiar to man, since neither God nor the lower animals are capable of it—the operation of Reason is combined with the instinctive mechanism of action, namely the group of faculties we share with animals; sensation, perception, feelings of pleasure and pain, and the consequent desires and motions. The desires of this part, when left to itself, have for their object pleasure, or ‘what appears good’; having no rational principle, this part cannot tell good pleasures from bad. In man, however, the lower faculties are interpenetrated by Reason, and hence this part is amenable to Reason. In the perfect character the harmony is complete; but there are less perfect types, in whom a conflict of the higher and lower motives still occurs; according as the higher or the lower usually prevails, they are called ‘continent’ or ‘incontinent.’ In perfect vice, the battle has been finally won by the lower nature.

Moral Virtue is acquired by habituation. Children are still irrational, and conduct judged to be right by their rational elders is imposed upon them from without. As the habit of acting in certain ways is established and the Reason develops, the conduct becomes virtuous in the full sense: besides acting from a fully formed habit, the agent is then aware of the nature of good action and acts from his own deliberate choice. He is now governed by the rational principle within himself. The ends of action are intuitively determined by the Reason, and Aristotle speaks as if this process involved no deliberation about the relative values of alternative ends. Deliberation is only the process of thinking out the chain of means which will lead to an end, and the object of ‘choice’ is the first link in this chain—an act we can at once perform. Choice thus involves a decision reached by deliberation, affirmed by desire, and issuing in corresponding action. Upon the question of free will Aristotle makes no clear pronouncement.

The famous doctrine that Virtue is a mean state between two vices, of excess and defect, is derived from the medical analogy of health, as a balanced or ‘proportional’ mixture of contrary physical qualities, which may be upset by extremes of heat or cold, dryness or moisture, etc. This was itself an application of the Pythagorean view of ‘goodness’ as due to the imposition of Limit on an Unlimited. In moral Virtue the ‘unlimited’ factor is emotion, the affective phase of the instinctive mechanism. Emotion is held to vary in degrees of intensity; physiologically, it actually is a change in the amount of a quality in the direction of one or the other extreme. The habit which is Virtue or Vice is, from this standpoint, a certain range, somewhere in the scale, which determines the intensity of emotional reaction. If it is fixed too high or too low, the reaction will habitually be too intense or not intense enough. The mean state, which will be ‘relative to us’ (i.e. vary somewhat with differences of temperament), is Virtue. There are obvious objections to this theory; but the doctrine of the mean has attracted more attention than it deserves; and Aristotle himself recognizes that quantitative differences of emotion are only one factor in the determination of right conduct. We must feel and act ‘on the right grounds, at the right time, towards the right persons, for the right end.’ Under all these heads the Reason of the virtuous man is the sole and infallible judge of what the occasion demands.

After a long analysis of the particular moral virtues, Aristotle passes to the intellectual virtues of the rational part. They fall under two main heads: theoretical and practical wisdom. The first includes scientific knowledge of necessary truth, the intuition of first principles and demonstration. The highest form of activity is, not discursive reasoning or the discovery of truth, but the contemplation of truth already possessed—the only activity possible to God or to the disembodied Reason. The life of the philosopher has foretastes of this mode of consciousness, which possesses every attribute of felicity and answers to the definition of happiness as the activity of the soul in accordance with the best and most perfect of virtues. It is, however, a divine, rather than a human, activity, for the animal part of our nature has no share in it. Accordingly, the ‘good’ or happiness of man as a composite being lies in the other mode of activity peculiar to man, moral action. This involves the lower intellectual virtue of practical wisdom, exercised by Reason in its control over the in­stinctive nature. Though Aristotle quarrels with the statement of Socrates’ doctrine, ‘Virtue is knowledge (or wisdom),’ he accepts it in substance; for he declares that all the moral virtues are one, and that they cannot exist apart from practical wisdom, nor practical wisdom apart from them.

The Nicomachean Ethics opens with a picture of. human activity portioned out into the several ‘arts’, each with its end. Some of these ends are only means to the ends of higher arts; at the head of all is the art of Statesmanship (Politics), with its ultimate end, human happiness. Thus Aristotle inherits Plato’s view of Statesmanship as the sovereign art, controlling all the other branches of human activity by virtue of its knowledge of good and evil. Ethics, which defines the supreme end and indicates the way to attain it, is ‘in a sense’ this very science or art; and the treatise on Politics, or the study of man in society, follows immediately. It consists of a collection of writings which were never welded into a consecutive whole. The earliest stratum may be the theory of the Ideal State, since this is closer to Platonic tradition; the later parts are enriched by the industry of Aristotle and his School in compiling studies of 158 Greek constitutions. The Constitution of Athens alone survives. The political doctrine is discussed elsewhere.

The three books on Rhetoric and the fragment of the Poetics complete the Aristotelian corpus.

 

XI.

THE PERIPATETIC SCHOOL AT ATHENS

 

Soon after the accession of Alexander (336 BC), Aristotle, now fifty years old, returned to Athens. At the Academy Xenocrates had succeeded Speusippus in 339. Aristotle rented some buildings just outside the city in the grove of Apollo Lyceus and founded a rival school. The name ‘Peripatetic’ was derived from the walks (peripatoi), where the master discussed philosophy with his students. A large library was collected, with maps and a museum of objects to illustrate the lectures. Aristotle discoursed on the more abstruse subjects in the morning, and delivered popular courses to a wider public in the afternoon. He was also engaged in revising and adding to the writings of the previous period, and in organizing research. He ranks as the creator of a new kind of science of observation and description, amassing collections of facts of human and natural history, descriptions of animals, plants and minerals, materials for chronology in lists of the victors at the Pythian games and the Athenian Dionysia, the studies of 158 Constitutions, and innumerable smaller monographs. The first history of science was compiled by Theophrastus, Eudemus of Rhodes, and Meno, who respectively undertook physics and metaphysics, mathematics, and medicine.

A passage from the introduction to The Parts of Animals, shows that young men accustomed to the discussion of abstract ideas and formal rhetoric were not easily induced to study the anatomy of worms and insects.

“It remains to treat of the nature of living creatures, omitting nothing (so far as possible), whether of higher or of lower dignity. For even in the case of creatures, the contemplation of which is disagreeable to the sense, Nature, who fashioned them, nevertheless affords an extraordinary pleasure to anyone with a philosophic disposition, capable of understanding causes. We take delight in looking at representations of these things, because we observe at the same time the art of the painter or sculptor which created them; and it would be strange and unreasonable that the contemplation of the works of Nature themselves should not yield a still greater satisfaction, when we can make out their causes. Accordingly, the consideration of the lowlier forms of life ought not to excite a childish repugnance. In all natural things there is something to move wonder. There is a story that, when some strangers who wished to meet Heracleitus stopped short on finding him warming himself at the kitchen stove, he told them to come boldly in, for there also there were gods. In the same spirit we should approach the study of every form of life without disgust, knowing that in every one there is something of nature and of beauty. For it is in the works of Nature above all that design, in contrast with random chance, is manifest; and the perfect form which anything, born or made, is designed to realize holds the rank of beauty”.

This manifold activity was cut short by an outbreak of anti­Macedonian feeling at Athens upon the death of Alexander in 323 BC. The conqueror’s former tutor was assailed with the usual charge of impiety and withdrew to the home of his mother’s family at Chalcis, leaving the school to the charge of Theophrastus. Aristotle may have hoped to complete his life’s work by a final revision of his writings; but in the next year he died, at the age of 63. After the death of Theophrastus the intellectual supremacy passed from the Academy and the Lyceum to Alexandria.

Aristotle’s best work was done in the fields of Biology and Ethics, where teleology is more illuminating than mechanism. Our brief review of his system has shown how it revolves round the doctrine, inherited from Plato, of the specific Form of the natural kind. In this context his apparatus of concepts possesses its full meaning. The farther he moves from this central point, the less appropriate the concepts become. When he passes below the level of the living organism to penetrate the constitution of the inorganic, the notions of Form and Matter, the actual and the potential, are strained till they trail off into verbal distinctions, all but meaningless save for illicit associations with their proper use. His work is inferior to that of the Atomists, whose strength lay precisely here, while their weakness was that they levelled down the phenomena of life to the plane of the inanimate. Again, when he passes upward from the sublunary sphere of living Nature to the celestial region, the Intelligences, and the first source of motion, he becomes a doctrinaire, ready to prove a priori that there cannot be more than one world or five elements, or that the earth must be at rest in the centre of the universe. Several causes combined to hold him back from reaching the standpoint of modern science. For better or worse, he could never shake free from the commanding influence of Plato, though in later life his natural inclination towards the study of empirical fact carried him ever farther from the Academy. He had, moreover, an exaggerated respect for tradition, founded on the notion that fragments of ancient wisdom had survived the cataclysms which destroyed civilization from time to time, and were embedded in proverbial thought or in the sayings of the older sages. Finally, he inherited the Pythagorean and Academic tendency to see the pattern of all science in mathematics and to believe that the divine faculty of Reason can, with unerring intuition, ascertain the premisses of all knowledge and deduce the whole structure of reality. This faith in the infallibility of the soul, when she ‘withdraws to think by herself,’ was to cost the scientific world many centuries of illusion and disillusionment.

 

 

CHAPTER XII

ALEXANDER: THE CONQUEST OF PERSIA