Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/114

 100 CRITICAL NOTICES : As I have said, this is the exact opposite of Prof. Stewart's view, and yet, when we come to the interpretation of the actual myths, it makes comparatively little difference to the result. It remains the fact that these myths give us imaginative representations of the Soul, God, and the World, things which cannot be scientifically apprehended. According to Prof. Stewart, that is because they are timeless ; according to what I understand Plato to say, it is because they belong wholly to time, the " moving image of eternity ". They give us a sense of " That which is, and was, and shall be," as Prof. Stewart says, but that is not ' timeless existence,' and Plato tells us more than once that the words rjv and Icrrai are quite in- applicable to the eternal. The proper sphere of myth is the temporal and not the eternal, the part and not the whole, becoming and not being; what is true in Prof. Stewart's view is simply that myth deals with things which the Intellect cannot conceive, though for quite a different reason than he assigns. Prof. Stewart has an interesting passage (p. 355) in which he points out that Aristotle's theology in Met. A is as truly mythical as anything in the Phcedrus, and it is certain that the unmoved God who " moves the Heavens as one Beloved moves a Lover " (ver is <pwficvoi') belongs to mythology and not to science. There is, however, one great difference between Plato and Aristotle in this respect which has not been sufficiently noticed. It is only when he reaches the upper end of the scale that Aristotle becomes mythical, and that is just where Plato ceases to be so. In the description of the ' supercelestial region ' (uTrepoupui'ios TOTTO?) in the Phadrus (247, C-E), the mythical (and allegorical) element is at its minimum. Its place is taken by a scientific and technical voca- bulary (d(rx^"aTt(TTOs ova-La, ev TO> o Itrnv ov, OVTIOS and the like) ; while the description of the region of yeWo-is is wholly mythical. That is just because Plato does not start, like Aristotle, from the world of becoming. It is all a question of the starting-point. Plato, starting from above, turned natural science into myth ; Aristotle, starting from below, can find none but a mythical ex- pression for the highest realities. That is why he identifies ' First Philosophy ' with Theology, an identification which Plato would have repudiated, and that is why ecclesiastical orthodoxy could accommodate itself to Aristotle, while most heresies come from Plato. Prof. Stewart's theory of myth is, in fact, far more applicable to Aristotle than to Plato, and it is quite in harmony with this that Aristotle thinks more nobly of the 'Vegetative Soul' than Plato does, and allows far more weight to the dim inspirations of unconscious and irrational nature. In a very real sense, Aristotle is the first Neoplatonist. To see Prof. Stewart at his best, we must study such discussions as that of the Fall and Ascension of human Souls (pp. 350 sqq.). This is a real contribution to a difficult subject, and the latest re- searches, especially those of Dieterich, have been fully utilised. We are shown how Plato treated his Orphic and Pythagorean