Part 11

From what we have been considering thus far, it is evident that Euripides’ spirit was primarily iconoclastic; there can be no question that he contributed to the decay of the ancient beliefs and that he helped drive the Olympians from their thrones in the minds of thinking men. For fifty years he openly uttered his criticisms in the theater at the high festival of Dionysus before the quick-witted Athenians. The effect must have been great, for no poet enjoyed more widespread popularity.

On the positive side Euripides offers no system of religion or of morals. Indeed, he seems never to have arrived at any complete unity in his thought. But he is stimulating now, and in his own day unquestionably goaded men to reflection, just because he raises so often fundamental questions—the questions which reflecting men were asking then and have been asking ever since—questions which are never wholly answered, but which always demand an answer. The stimulating character of his dramas makes him indeed one of the great religious poets of the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[154] _Thuc._ 2, 43-44.

[155] _Frgg._ 14-16.

[156] _Frg._ 11.

[157] _Frg._ 18.

[158] _Frgg._ 23-26.

[159] _Frgg._ 1, 2, 30, 31, 40-42; cf. 57, 67, 90.

[160] _Frgg._ 14, 15, 29, 32, 41, 128.

[161] _Frg._ 1.

[162] _Frg._ 4.

[163] _Frg._ 5.

[164] _Frg._ 25 = 1 Nauck^2, pp. 770 ff.

[165] _Apol._ 28 E.

[166] _Apol._ 30 A.

[167] _Frg._ 292, 7.

[168] _Frg._ 226, 4.

[169] _Hipp._ 451-459.

[170] _Hipp._ 473-476.

[171] _Hipp._ 1365-1369.

[172] _H. F._ 1307 ff.

[173] _H. F._ 1341 ff.

[174] _Frg._ 794.

[175] _Frg._ 946.

[176] _I.T._ 569.

[177] _I.T._ 570-575.

[178] _Phoen._ 954-958.

[179] _I.A._ 956 f.

[180] _Tro._ 884-888.

[181] _Frg._ 941.

[182] _Frg._ 593.

[183] _Frgg._ 151, 255, 506.

[184] _Hippol._ 1102 ff.

[185] _Frgg._ 757, 816.

[186] 592 ff.

[187] _Hel._ 1014 ff.

[188] 395.

[189] Adam, _Religious Teachers_, p. 316.

V

PLATO AND ARISTOTLE

Socrates became the father of many philosophic schools. His pupils naturally differed from one another in the emphasis which they gave to this or that side of their master’s teaching and in the ways in which they combined his doctrines with principles laid down by earlier thinkers, but all agreed in this, that they directed their attention to man as the center of thought and inquiry. From this time ethics and religion became the dominant themes of philosophy. Our subject bids us confine our attention to the greatest of these pupils, Plato.

Plato was born at Athens in the year 428/7 B.C. of an ancient family, which was related to the law-giver Solon. After being educated in the best Athenian fashion, he attached himself to Socrates in his twentieth year, when the latter was already about sixty years old, and he continued to associate with his master for ten years until the latter’s condemnation and death. Probably he was not one of the inner circle, but he tells us that he was present at his master’s trial and with other followers of Socrates was prepared to go bondsman, if a fine were inflicted. Sickness prevented him from sharing in the discussion of the last day, which is related to us in the Phaedo. After Socrates’ death, Plato was absent from Athens for about twelve years, residing first in the neighboring city of Megara, where his association with Euclides, one of Socrates’ oldest pupils, must have contributed to the development of his own philosophy. Later in southern Italy, if we accept the traditional account of his travels, he had an opportunity to study more closely in their home the Orphic-Pythagorean systems and doctrines, many of which no doubt he had often heard Socrates discuss. At Syracuse in Sicily he won over Dion, the young brother-in-law of the tyrant Dionysius. The latter, however, found his moral teachings offensive, seized him, and had him offered for sale as a prisoner of war in the slave market at Aegina. But a friend, Anniceris, bought him and set him free. When Plato’s other friends wished to repay to Anniceris the money he had spent, the latter refused, and the sum was used to purchase a grove sacred to the hero Academus, in which Plato opened a philosophic school. There, save for the interruptions caused by two journeys to Sicily, he continued to teach for about forty years, dying in 347 B.C. at the age of eighty.

To this school came pupils from almost every part of the Greek world. The chief subjects studied were the various branches of mathematics—including of course astronomy and harmonics,—and dialectics, by which is meant “the art of question and answer, the art of giving a rational account of things and of receiving such an account from others.” The distinctive methods employed were those of analysis and division which Plato seems to have developed so far that the invention of the former was actually, but erroneously, attributed to him. The purpose of analysis was to secure an explanation or proof of a proposition; that of division was to arrive at a proper classification or division of the object under consideration. Plato’s instruction was evidently given in considerable part by lectures, of which his hearers took notes; there was also scientific research on the part of the pupils who worked out the problems or difficulties set them by their master. Nor were these researches wholly mathematical and astronomical, for there is good reason to believe that studies in natural history were also pursued. Indeed, Aristotle, for twenty years a member of the Academy, must have had opportunities here to carry on those researches which interested him most in the early part of his life. But whatever the studies, the purpose was to lead the pupils to the discovery and contemplation of Reality, of Being, of the fundamental and permanent as against the individual and transitory phenomenon. Of Plato’s lectures we know virtually nothing; his Dialogues represent those parts of his doctrine which he wished to give to the outside world; it is probable that they in no sense adequately reproduce his teachings to his disciples.

How much of his philosophy Plato received from his master Socrates, how much he developed for himself cannot now be determined. Socrates left no writings; we know him only from the writings of others, and above all from the dialogues of Plato. There he is the chief spokesman, who leads his associates along various paths toward truth; and certainly no pupil ever built a nobler monument to his teacher than Plato did. Among modern scholars there are many views as to the extent of Plato’s debt to his master: one extreme wing, which has many adherents, would limit the Socratic elements in the Platonic doctrine to the ethical interest, the search for universals, and the dialectic method; the other wing, of which the eminent English Platonist Burnet is the chief representative, would attribute to Socrates practically everything found in the dialogues which Plato wrote before he began his teaching in the Academy. Indeed Burnet holds that Plato’s chief purpose in the earlier dialogues was to set forth the life and teaching of Socrates; he therefore claims that the “doctrine of ideas,” with all its consequences, and much besides, are purely Socratic, taken over by Plato in developed form. Few of us can accept either of these extreme views; it seems more probable that the truth lies between, that Plato learned much relating to “ideas” and their Pythagorean origins from his teacher, just as he derived from him his ethical interest and his method. But to reduce the brilliant pupil to a mere reporter of his master’s views with little philosophy of his own until he was past forty, is quite incredible, and such a procedure has no proper warrant. When speaking of Socrates in my previous lecture I avoided this question, for a discussion of it there would have been unprofitable and confusing; and even now for convenience I propose to treat that part of Plato’s philosophy which immediately concerns us as if it were wholly his own, begging you, however, to keep in mind always that undoubtedly much in germ or developed form was derived directly from Plato’s chief teacher. Furthermore I must ask you to remember that Plato had been given to poetry when a youth, and that although he renounced the practice of the art, he remained a poet in spirit to the end of his life; all his thoughts were touched with poetry, enlivened with humour, and fired with religious zeal. He was a consummate literary artist, and a man of many sides. It was natural therefore that he should nowhere set forth a crystallized system of philosophy such as a less imaginative and duller person might have done; he was apparently a man who grew through all his eighty years. The result is that in spite of the fact that we may properly speak of “the unity of Plato’s thought,” we find in his works variety, variation, and even contradiction. The requirements of our present situation, however, force us to consider our themes categorically, though that procedure is somewhat unfair to Plato.

Let us then first examine the central thought of Plato’s philosophy—the “doctrine of ideas.” Developing the doctrines of earlier philosophers, especially those of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, Plato held that the world is dual. In it is the phenomenal world visible to us, which includes all natural objects and those made by man, a transient and unreal world which we know only through our senses. But beside it, or rather behind it, is another world invisible but permanent and real, which can be grasped only by the reason. This is the world of ideas. Yet the two worlds are not separate, for the world of the senses owes its existence wholly to its dependence on the world of ideas. To understand Plato’s view we must consider in an elementary way what he meant by “ideas.” The words which he uses (εἶδος, ἰδέα) signify “form,” and in logic are used in the sense of “class,” “kind,” “species,” “the general principle for the classification of objects.” The translation “idea” is traditional, and there is no adequate reason for preferring “form” or any other English equivalent. Now Plato’s statement that the world of phenomena depends on the invisible world of ideas seems at first sight paradoxical, for by it he means that the individual tree, book, desk, chair, good man, or whatever you please, is not the real being at all, but that the ideas of tree, book, desk, chair, and goodness alone possess reality. It may be made plain by an illustration which shall be Plato’s own. At the beginning of the tenth book of the Republic Socrates and Glaucon are conversing together. The master wins Glaucon’s assent first to the proposition that although there are many beds and tables in the world, there are only two ideas, one of a bed, the other of a table. He then goes on to show that the workman makes a bed or table by shaping his material according to the idea of a bed or a table, but that he does not create the ideas themselves. That is done by God who is the real maker of the real bed, that is, of the idea of a bed. The carpenter makes only the particular bed which owes its temporary existence to the eternal idea—the real bed—which is in Nature, in the mind of God. Or if Plato should appear before us tonight, he might say, “Suppose we take a dozen books of different sizes and different shapes and appearance, how do we recognize that these diverse objects are all books?” Then when we hesitated to give an answer, as we probably should, he would reply, “It is because each one of these individual books partakes of the idea of book. The idea is present in the individual example and thereby gives the individual its existence; the individual depends therefore on the idea, not the idea on the individual. If this dozen, or indeed if all the books in the entire world were to be destroyed, the idea of book would still remain, and new books could be made by causing the materials, out of which books are constructed, to partake of the idea of book. That is, all individual books are transitory, impermanent, unreal; the idea of

## book is permanent, eternal, it alone has reality; and all individual

things, therefore, exist, so far as they have any real existence, only by partaking of the ideas. So all things come into being and owe their existence to sharing in the eternal ideas.”

We should be unjust to Plato if we thought that he regarded this doctrine as a perfect explanation of the relation between the visible and invisible worlds. Far from holding such a view he himself evidently held it to be a “guess at truth,” which served to show in its way that there is a permanent reality behind the phenomena of the visible world and a truth which is beyond sense. Indeed Plato is very conscious of troublesome questions which arise in connection with the doctrine, and in three dialogues—his Philebus, Parmenides, and Sophist—he endeavors to meet some of these questions, and there he offers admirable criticism of his own views.

With reference to the source of the doctrine, as I have said above, we cannot tell how much Plato derived from Socrates or how much he developed for himself. Socrates was evidently always searching for universals, trying to determine what goodness is in itself in contrast to the goodness embodied in a good man, what are virtue, courage, and such qualities. The teacher or the pupil may have extended the ideas, the universals, to include all things, even the humble articles of furniture which are the examples in the Republic. But in any case by this doctrine of “ideas,” “forms,” Plato secured a basis for reality, a means of attaining absolute knowledge in contrast to that relative knowledge, which according to the Sophists was the utmost which man could attain. Plato would have quite agreed with Protagoras that if the senses were our only avenues to knowledge, then indeed man would be the measure of all things and his knowledge would be limited to the transient phenomenal world; that is, he could have no knowledge of reality; but by apprehending through our reason the ideas—that is, the realities—on which the phenomenal world depends, we can gain genuine knowledge and free ourselves from subjection to mere opinion.

Plato also teaches that there are various grades of ideas, some being subordinate to others; the highest of all is that of the Good, identified by him with the Beautiful. This supreme idea is at once the cause of all existence and knowledge, and comprehends within itself all other ideas; as the sun in the visible world, so in the world of true knowledge the Good “is the universal author of all things right and beautiful, itself the source of truth and intelligence.” It is the Absolute, the universal Reason, God.[190]

We have seen that Plato sets the world of ideas apprehended by reason over against the world of phenomena, known to us through our senses. The latter world is material, the former immaterial. This concept of the immateriality of ideas was something new in philosophy. Anaxagoras had thought his formative principle (Νοῦς), as his predecessors had thought theirs, to be as material as the “seeds” out of which all things were made; but Plato developed an immaterial, an ideal world, wherein are found all cause and all reality.

Now the Platonic ideas are apprehended by the human intellect. What are the consequences of this fact? It must follow that man’s reason has a nature similar to that of the ideas; like them it must belong to the world which is above the senses; and with them it must partake of the Absolute. But Plato shows that the ideas are eternal and immortal, and draws therefrom the logical conclusion that man’s intellect, his reasoning soul, likewise knows no creation and is free from death.

However he is not content to let the matter rest on this argument alone, but he supports the doctrine of immortality by many proofs, as in the Phaedrus where Socrates explains: “The soul through all her being is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move, ceases also to live. Only the self-moving, as it never leaves itself, never ceases to move and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides.”[191] In the Phaedo[192] he represents Socrates as offering a number of different arguments to his questioning friends. One of these is that by which he first proves that souls exist before they are domiciled in our bodies, for recollection implies a previous existence, and since men can recall and recognize things which they have never seen or been taught in their present existence, it follows that they have been born with this knowledge, so that what we call learning is after all only a recollection of ideas gained in a previous existence. Socrates concludes his argument with the question: “Then may we not say, Simmias, that if, as we are always repeating, there is an absolute beauty, and goodness, and an absolute essence of all things; and if to this, which is now discovered to have existed in our former state, we refer all our sensations, and with this compare them, finding these ideas to be pre-existent and our inborn possession—then our souls must have had a prior existence, but if not, there would be no force in the argument?” To this his hearers give ready assent. In the Meno this same argument is very adroitly drawn from the realm of mathematics.[193] An untutored slave is made to “recollect” that the square of the hypothenuse of an isosceles right-angled triangle is equal to twice the square of one of its sides. This is the doctrine of recollection to which Wordsworth has given beautiful expression in his familiar lines:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.

But as Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo point out, this doctrine only shows that the soul existed before the body; it does not prove that the soul is immortal. Socrates therefore goes on to prove this further point, largely by showing the simple and unchanging nature of the soul which is like that of the ideas, and he therefore concludes that since it cannot admit of change, it must be free from death. Again he argues that since the soul can rule and use the body as it will, it must be anterior to the body and hence have an eternal and never ending existence.[194] The final and apparently most convincing proof to Plato’s mind, in spite of its dialectic character, is that the notion of life cannot be separated from the soul, for the soul is that which gives life; therefore since a dead soul is an impossibility, we must agree that the soul is immortal.[195] To follow out in detail the other arguments would occupy too much time now, interesting as it might prove. Indeed if we were to rehearse all of Plato’s proofs of the immortality of the soul, we should run through practically the entire gamut of the arguments which have ever been offered. His frequent return to the subject indicates the importance which he gave to the belief.

Before we approach Plato’s ethical and religious views we must glance for a moment at his psychology, for on that depends in no small measure his moral system. In the fourth book of the Republic when discussing the different forms of government, Socrates is made to show that the soul has three parts or elements: the first is the divine or rational part (τὸ θεῖον, τὸ λογιστικόν) whose seat is in the head, the second, the courageous or passionate element (τὸ θυμοειδές) residing in the heart, and the third is the appetite (τὸ ἐπιθυμητικόν) which belongs to the diaphragm or liver.[196] In the Phaedrus[197] this same division is set forth in a myth. Now when in an individual all three parts are in accord under the leadership of reason, whose orders are enforced by courage on appetite, the man is virtuous; but if appetite and courage unite against reason, discord results and the man is vicious. As the state is well ordered when harmony exists among its parts, so harmony of the soul, led by the reason, produces the virtuous human being. In the earlier dialogues the soul is evidently regarded as a unit, so that the parts are really forms or manifestations of the soul; all three are immortal. But in the Timaeus only the reason is immortal, the other parts being separable and bound to the body with which they die.[198] Now we have already seen that the soul, or at least its rational part, being divine and immortal, has an affinity for the eternal ideas and is endowed by a natural love for the true, the beautiful, and the good. It is therefore impelled toward the divine world of ideas by a natural passion, and this effort on the part of man’s reason is philosophy. The true philosopher then is the lover of truth and reality, who is absorbed in the pleasures of the soul so that he will hardly be conscious of bodily pleasure; indeed he will not think much of human life or even fear death.[199] The soul, however, in its effort to mount into the realm of the ideas, is held back by the body in which it is imprisoned and fettered in the world of the senses. Thus we find in Plato the Orphic belief that man has a dual nature, made up of a divine soul and a mortal hindering body. We shall presently see how he gave to the emotional belief of that sect a philosophic basis and so transformed it into a reasonable article of morality and religion.

Now we may consider Plato’s moral and religious views. The highest good for man, according to his teaching, is likeness to God—that is, the largest possible participation in the ideas of the Good which are in the Absolute. In direct proportion to the success of the rational soul in appropriating to itself these ideas, the man will practise justice and holiness, that is, be righteous; but inasmuch as the world of ideas cannot be apprehended by the senses, the rational soul of the philosopher must always try to escape from the world of the senses where evils dwell. As Socrates in the Theaetetus[200] assures Theodorus: “Evils, Theodorus, can never pass away; for there must always remain something which is antagonistic to the good. Having no place among the gods in heaven, of necessity they hover around the mortal nature and this earthly sphere. Wherefore we ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can; and to fly away is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like him is to become holy, just, and wise ... God is never in any way unrighteous—he is perfect righteousness; and he of us who is the most righteous is most like him.... To know this is true wisdom and virtue; and ignorance of this is manifest folly and vice.” The man, then, whose soul strives to become like God will inevitably be righteous. Plato’s philosophy thus results in practical morality.