Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/377

 376 D. G. EITCHIE : ON PLATO'S PHAEDO. Personality, however, is something more than mere indi- vidual existence. The person in the ethical sense, the sub- ject of rights and duties, must be the member of an organised society. And it might be argued that it is only in so far as any one ceases to be a mere individual, that he becomes in the true sense a person, only in so far as he identifies himself with something wider and higher than self. In his theory of ethics, as expounded in the Republic, Plato sees this fully. It is not because he makes his citizens merge their lives in the life of the community that his ethics is inadequate, but because his conception of the community is too abstract and too much limited by the prepossessions of aristocratic Hel- lenism. In his visions of another world, so far from his neglecting the value of the individual, it might even be con- tended that he exaggerates the significance of the mere indi- vidual existence so much in his doctrine of metempsychosis as to neglect the greater ethical significance of the person, which, as just said, depends on a conception of society. He speaks indeed of the good man in the evil state as being the citizen of a heavenly city; but, in his accounts of the life free from the trammels of the body, there is no hint of per- fected community. His ideal in the Phaedo, and even in the Republic, is only an ideal for the philosophic few that escape from among the multitude who are " unworthy of educa- tion ". May we not say, though it may sound paradoxical, that Plato has no adequate conception of personality just because his conception of the soul is too individualistic ? And yet individualism is not a fair charge to bring against Plato's doctrine of the soul. As we have seen, the soul is not conceived of by him as a self-subsistent monad or atom. The soul is dependent for its life and its immortality on the eternal ideas, ultimately therefore on the Idea of the Good. So that, as Prof. Jowett has said (Plato, vol. i. 420), his ultimate argu- ment is equivalent to this : " If God exists, then the soul exists after death ". That is, Plato himself, like most of the older Christian theologians, 1 and unlike many who have sup- posed themselves Platoiiists, did not hold that the soul per se was immortal, but only because and in so far as it partakes in the divine nature and has the divine nature manifested in it. Immortality to him also was a hope (77 eu<> /j,eydij, Phaedo 114 C), not a dogma. 1 I have advisedly not complicated this statement by any reference to the dogma of tin- resurrection, which, from the point of view of philoso- phy, may be regarded a.s the assertion of the continued existence of human personality plus the assertion that such personality will be connected with an organism of some sort analogous to the present body according to popu- lar belief, altogether different from it according to St. Paul (I. Cor. xv. 35-50).