TWO:IV.There is a story that Plato used to thank the gods, in what some might consider a rather Pharisaic spirit, for having made him a human being instead of a brute, a man instead of a woman, and a Greek instead of a barbarian; but more than179 anything else for having permitted him to be born in the time of Socrates. It will be observed that all these blessings tended in one direction, the complete supremacy in his character of reason over impulse and sense. To assert, extend, and organise that supremacy was the object of his whole life. Such, indeed, had been the object of all his predecessors, and such, stated generally, has been always and everywhere the object of philosophy; but none had pursued it so consciously before, and none has proclaimed it so enthusiastically since then. Now, although Plato could not have done this without a far wider range of knowledge and experience than Socrates had possessed, it was only by virtue of the Socratic method that his other gifts and acquisitions could be turned to complete account; while, conversely, it was only when brought to bear upon these new materials that the full power of the method itself could be revealed. To be continually asking and answering questions; to elicit information from everybody on every subject worth knowing; and to elaborate the resulting mass of intellectual material into the most convenient form for practical application or for further transmission, was the secret of true wisdom with the sage of the market-place and the workshop. But the process of dialectic investigation as an end in itself, the intense personal interest of conversation with living men and women of all classes, the impatience for immediate and visible results, had gradually induced Socrates to restrict within far too narrow limits the sources whence his ideas were derived and the purposes to which they were applied. And the dialectic method itself could not but be checked in its internal development by this want of breadth and variety in the topics submitted to its grasp. Therefore the death of Socrates, however lamentable in its occasion, was an unmixed benefit to the cause for which he laboured, by arresting (as we must suppose it to have arrested) the popular and indiscriminate employment of his cross-examining method,180 liberating his ablest disciple from the ascendency of a revered master, and inducing him to reconsider the whole question of human knowledge and action from a remoter point of view. For, be it observed that Plato did not begin where Socrates had left off; he went back to the germinal point of the whole system, and proceeded to reconstruct it on new lines of his own. The loss of those whom we love habitually leads our thoughts back to the time of our first acquaintance with them, or, if these are ascertainable, to the circumstances of their early life. In this manner Plato seems to have been at first occupied exclusively with the starting-point of his friends philosophy, and we know, from the narrative given in the Apologia, under what form he came to conceive it. We have attempted to show that the account alluded to cannot be entirely historical. Nevertheless it seems sufficiently clear that Socrates began with a conviction of his own ignorance, and that his efforts to improve others were prefaced by the extraction of a similar confession of ignorance on their part. It is also certain that through life he regarded the causes of physical phenomena as placed beyond the reach of human reason and reserved by the gods for their own exclusive cognisance, pointing, by way of proof, to the notorious differences of opinion prevalent among those who had meddled with such matters. Thus, his scepticism worked in two directions, but on the one side it was only provisional and on the other it was only partial. Plato began by combining the two. He maintained that human nescience is universal and necessary; that the gods had reserved all knowledge for themselves; and that the only wisdom left for men is a consciousness of their absolute ignorance. The Socratic starting-point gave the centre of his agnostic circle; the Socratic theology gave the distance at which it was described. Here we have to note two thingsfirst, the breadth of generalisation which distinguishes the disciple from the master; and, secondly, the symptoms of a strong181 religious reaction against Greek humanism. Even before the end of the Peloponnesian War, evidence of this reaction had appeared, and the Bacchae of Euripides bears striking testimony to its gloomy and fanatical character. The last agony of Athens, the collapse of her power, and the subsequent period of oligarchic terrorism, must have given a stimulus to superstition like that which quite recently afflicted France with an epidemic of apparitions and pilgrimages almost too childish for belief. Plato followed the general movement, although on a much higher plane. While looking down with undisguised contempt on the immoral idolatry of his countrymen, he was equally opposed to the irreligion of the New Learning, and, had an opportunity been given him, he would, like the Reformers of the sixteenth century, have put down both with impartial severity. Nor was this the only analogy between his position and that of a Luther or a Calvin. Like them, and indeed like all great religious teachers, he exalted the Creator by enlarging on the nothingness of the creature; just as Christianity exhibits the holiness of God in contrast and correlation with the sinfulness of unregenerate hearts; just as to Pindar mans life seemed but the fleeting shadow in a dream when compared with the beauty and strength and immortality of the Olympian divinities; so also did Plato deepen the gloom of human ignorance that he might bring out in dazzling relief the fulness of that knowledge which he had been taught to prize as a supreme ideal, but which, for that very reason, seemed proper to the highest existences alone. And we shall presently see how Plato also discovered a principle in man by virtue of which he could claim kindred with the supernatural, and elaborated a scheme of intellectual mediation by which the fallen spirit could be regenerated and made a partaker in the kingdom of speculative truth.
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