Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/97

] offspring of the democracy of Athens and of the regnant ideas of individualism, ideas with which the political atmosphere of Athens in the fifth century was rife. "The great sophist," he says, "was indeed the Athenian public itself, Athens, as the willing victim of its own gifts, its own flamboyancy, well-nigh worn out now by the mutual friction of its own parts, given over completely to hazardous political experiment with the irresponsibility which is ever the great vice of democracy, ever ready to float away anywhither, to misunder- stand, or forget, or discredit, its own past." The real Sophist, then, was the public of Athens, which had for its disciples the professional teachers of individual success, the iconoclasts of the old faith, the founders of scepticism, the followers of the powers that be. And these children of the time had a reflex influence on it,—two facts not ordinarily made prominent enough.

As might be expected from the nature of Pater's genius, he has much to say on the Æsthetics of Plato,—in fact it is this side of Plato, as above remarked, that offers most attraction to the author. In Plato he finds the first philosopher who speculated at all about the beautiful. "Before him [Plato], you know, there had been no theorising about the beautiful, its place in life, and the like; and as a matter of fact he is the earliest critic of the fine arts. He anticipates the modern notion that art as such has no end but its own perfection—'art for art's sake.'" The ethical influence of the aesthetic is made prominent in Plato's construction of the Perfect City, and he understands fully how great is the moral worth of poetry and the fine arts. "It is life itself, action and character, he proposes to color; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts." The poetry, the architecture, the music, the art, with which Plato means to grace his ideal Republic, and thereby serve the ethical education of its people, are severely Dorian, on large plain lines. The daily study and observaation [sic] of this severe, monastic art tend to inspire in the beholders corresponding ethical notions,—order, rigid discipline, self-control.

The work consists of an introduction on philosophic method and ten chapters of "geneses"—the geneses respectively of matter,