Page:Philosophical Review Volume 27.djvu/550

538 theory of the thymoeides (which is a better term than thymos when reference is made to the faculty). But is there any such thing as will in Plato's terminology that is analogous to 'will' in the traditional faculty psychology? Both thymoeides and epithymetikon, the faculties respectively of the higher emotions and crass desires, have an activity value, a propulsive function, while to the reason is attributed attention, selection and an epitactic force in its practical conclusions, all of them functions of the so-called faculty of will. All of the Platonic faculties are thus endowed with will characteristics, but taken singly no one of them possesses all the marks which later philosophy and theology employed to describe the 'will.' Nevertheless when Plato describes the thymoeides as the executive ally of the reason, it is clear that he is thinking of this mental agency in a way to some extent analogous to our common use of will, but lacking the important element of discrimination and selection which attach to the reason. The faculties are arrayed by Plato as opposing forces in a dual alignment, with reason and the 'spirited element' on one side, and the concupiscent element on the other, corresponding roughly to ruler and subject, mind and body, good and evil. The reduction of these forces to complete harmony is justice, while the minor harmony of obedience of the concupiscent and subject element to its rulers is temperance. The freedom of the will falls outside the problems and terminology of the Greek philosophers of the classical period. The freedom of the individual is vested in the self-determining prerogative of reason, in which Plato puts the center of gravity of personality, and he explicitly states the doctrine of ethical responsibility. When one reads Plato's description of the several faculties (or as he calls them "parts" of the soul) and their disparate functions, their separate anatomical seats and the exclusion of the lower part from preëxistence, it is difficult to concur with the following: "In view of this persistent dualism [i.e., reason and passion, good and evil] it is clear that the three faculties of Plato's psychology are not independently cooperative powers, but merely different phases, sometimes sharply dissociated, sometimes merging into one another, of the activity of what we may call, using a terminology strange to Plato, the personal element of our being" (p. 123). Plato's view of the unity of personality does not appear to have been so clear as that. The least satisfactory and informing part of the volume is the chapter on the Doctrine of Ideas. The grounds for the distinction which the author draws between intellectual and ethical ideas are not very plain, nor, as I understand the Dialogues, is the distinction