A second fundamental Platonic thought is the postulate that the art of conduct, of individual and social life, ought to be as truly scientific as are the various arts and sciences that deal with material things. . To emphasize this thought, Plato makes use of the favorite Socratic com parison o• confusion of the virtues and the arts. As there is an art of carpentry or shoemaking known only to him who has mastered it. so 'vir tue.' the art of happiness, of conduct, the 'polit ical' or 'royal' art, must be conceived as a spe cific form of knowledge demanding a special training in its possessor. To the end or aim of the 'royal art' all partial and particular ends would be subordinated—it would be an 'idea of good' in which all particular goods, virtues, and utilities have their ground. Many of the minor dialogues illustrate the inability of the average disputant to apprehend any such larger end. or to define particular virtues and ends in relation to it. Others refute the pretensions of the soph ists, rhetoricians, and politicians who claim to teach o• practice the art of life and government, but in fact teach only the opinions of the multi tude—the humors of the many-headed beast, or the knack of persuasive speech, or the tricks by which the politician seizes the helm of the ship of state, though he has never learned to steer. Even the few virtuous and judicious statesmen of whom Athens boasts are guided not by knowl edge, hut by right opinion or happy instinct, which, in the corruption of the existing social order and the absence of all systematic and ef fective teaching of 'virtue.' mast be said to come to them by grace divine (Mow).
The Republic contains the positive and con structive application of these ideas. There Plato expounds his ideal of a city in which the end of government is not the domination of a faction, nor the multiplication of wealth, nor doing as one likes, but the virtue and consequently the true happiness of the individual citizen, and the order and harmony of the whole. The chief means to this end is justice—the division of labor gen eralized to mean the proper distribution of func tion among the three faculties of the soul, the appetites and desires, the emotions and passions, and the ruling reason, and answering to this the severe limitation to their proper work of the cor responding groups of the popnlation—the indus trial, the military, and the governing classes—de termined by birth only in so far as birth is found to involve mama] aptitude. The rulers, the em bodied reason of the State, are selected by severe tests from the warriors. Absolute disinterestedness is secured by forbidding them to hold private property and by the paradoxical community of wives and offspring. In order to master the 'po litical art.' they must supplement the ordinary education in music and gymnastics by a prolonged discipline in mathematics. astronomy, and dialec tic, which, as Plato expresses it in a poetical fig ure, the source of much later mysticism, will enable them to apprehend the 'idea of good,' the cause of light and truth and being in the intelli gible world, as the sun is in the world of matter. In the Republic, as everywhere, the logical skele ton of Plato's ethical and political theory is clothed with an eloquence nobly employed in the assertion of the ideal aims of life as against base, sensuous, and sordid views of happiness and suc cess. And many readers who care nothing for the abstract logic of Plato's ethical philosophy will be charmed or inspired by the preacher and prophet—his impassioned faith in the moral or der of the world, his denunciation of material istic, sensationist, and hedonistic philosophies, his affirmation in poetical myth and allegory of the hope of immortality and the inevitableness of the judgment of God.
Space fails to speak further of these things; of the vague but devout theism which, without breaking formally with the established polythe ism, Plato everywhere professes; of the sage and serious doctrine of Platonic love set forth in the Phredrus and Sy m posi um , whereby sensuous sion is made the prefigurement and symbol of spiritual exaltation and of all aspirations to ward the good, the true, and the beautiful; of the fantastic poetical physics of the Tima-us with its startling glimpses of the latest truths of science: of the puritanic banishment of Homer from the ideal State, in strange and pathetic con tradiction to the poetical fervor of Plato's own temperament and his theory of the divine in spiration of poesy; of countless other things that secure Plato his place not only in the litera tore of philosophy. but in that of religion, mysti
cism, poetry, and ;esthetic criticism.
But a word inust be said of the theory of ideas with which most expositors of Plato begin and which might be made the centre of the Platonic philosophy. Taken literally, it is the assertion of the astounding paradox that reality belongs nut to the individual thing. this book, this tree, this man, but to the general idea of hook, tree, or man. The individual things are but the fleeting, peri liable copies, of the Form or Idea which abides in changeless unity forever, and is the sole object of real knowledge. Primarily, this is merely a paradoxical logic of general terms, hich, employed with Plato's unflinching eoisist euev, serves as We I I as the reverse mode of speech that alone seems reasonable to us. ln the second place, it is a manifestation of the plasticity of the Greek imagination which in Plato, as in the mythology and on the stage of Aristophanes, re fuses to deal with ideas as algebraic counters, but since they are real forces in thought, life, and speech, treats them as veritable things and per sons. In the third place, it is a metaphysical doctrine with regard to the noumcnon or reality behind the veil of sense which all philosophies that acknowledge an absolute, whether in being or cognition, are compelled to assume. Only those who are willing to affirm that sense is all can consistently condemn as absurd Plato's asser tion that ultimate realities are more akin to our ideas than to our sensations and perceptions. Many passages show that Plato saw, as clearly as his modern critics see, the conflict of this doc trine with common sense. But metaphysics is not common sense. The ideas were the only al ternative, he thought, to the philosophy of Herac lit us that all things are in perpetual flux, which Plato interpreted to mean, in modern phrase, that reality is merely 'the permanent possibility of sensation.' It is because he would not accept this doctrine that Plato clung to the ideas; not, as we are so often told, because in the infancy of human thought he (lid not 'understand' the processes of generalization and abstraction.
Associated with the theory of ideas is the poetical doctrine of reminiscence or recollection. The soul has beheld the ideas in a previous stage of existence. "Our birth," as Wordsworth says, "is but a sleep and a forgetting." Learning, ex penenee, is the re-collection of the ideas through the suggestions and association of their imperfect copies in this world. We have never seen two things absolutely equal, but we recollect the idea and ideal of pure equality from the proximate equals of experience. Mathematical truths can be elicited from an uneducated man by skillful questioning (Meno). The idea of beauty alone has a not wholly inadequate embodiment on earth. Pence the peculiar ecstasy of the thrill which the aspect of beauty stirs in the lover. It awakens immortal memories of the soul's beatific vision of the idea.
Plato's writings exercised an inestimable influ ence on Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero, Plutarch, the Neo-Platonists, the Christian Fathers, the earlier scholastics, the philosophy and poetry of the Renaissance in Italy and England. and on the nineteenth-eentury revival of historical and phil osophical studies in Germany. His influence is rather increasing than diminishing in the higher literature and scholarship of our own time. Nor is it likely soon to wane. To borrow his own half mystical imagery, he purges the eye of the soul, that it may discern spiritual truth, and converts it from the' observation of the transient shadows of the fire-lit cave, to the contemplation stub specie irternitatis of the abiding forms of pure being illumined by the idea of good.