Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/622

 602 PLATO speaking, therefore, dialectics covers tlie whole field of philosophy, while speaking in a looser way it appears as one single, though far the most important branch of it. Mathematics he does not regard as a science, but a help to sci- ence, lying midway between its absolute veri- ties and the uncertainties of opinion. Dialec- tics, as the science par eminence, deals only with the absolute and invariable. Its subject matter consists of those transcendental, spirit- ual essences which Plato calls forms, species (eZd//), improperly known as ideas. It is easy to say in a general way what these forms are. They are the eternal, immutable essences, re- moved from the sphere of sense, and cogni- zable only by the reason. They pervade the sensible world, being as it were the substance of which it is the shadow, giving to it what- ever of partial reality it possesses. They thus answer undoubtedly as near as may be to the intuitions and general concepts of modern metaphysics, and they are now more generally explained as mere abstractions, universals, the product exclusively of the rnind, and having no objective reality. Earlier scholars held them to be veritable, objective existences, subtle, half spiritual, and discerned directly by the eye of the soul, as sensible objects are by the eye of the body. Much as there is in Plato which gives plausibility to the more modern view, we yet incline decidedly to the realistic doctrine of former interpreters. The ideas or forms of Plato grew out of his strong convic- tion of the non- reality of matter. He adopted fully, in regard to the phenomenal world, the Heraclitan doctrine of the perpetual flow of all things. Thus, denying the reality of mat- ter, which never is, but is always becoming, he would have denied equally the possibility of forming a science by generalizations from matter. It could have been but the shadow of a shadow. The same thing is shown by the relation of Plato's doctrine to the Eleatics. The Eleatics were not idealists in the modern sense of the term. Their absolute One was not a mere abstraction, a creature of the mind, but the totality of the objective universe, as discerned by the soul or the reason, itself but a subtler species of matter. It is doubtful if there was any pure idealism in antiquity. Again, the way in which we become acquaint- ed with the " forms " proves their objective and real character. Were they mere intui- tions or generalizations, we could arrive at a knowledge of them by those processes of ab- straction and generalization to which the mind is abundantly competent. But such was not the case. The soul enshrined in the body could not, according to Plato, possibly arrive at this knowledge. It must have acquired it in a state anterior to the present, when, disembodied, it stood face to face with these essences kin- dred to itself, and communed with them as the bodily sense here holds converse with the elements of matter. Thus all learning is with Plato merely reminiscence, the knowledge which the soul had in its anterior state being called up by the action of the senses upon the phenomenal world, in whose pictured semblan- ces the soul learns to recall the features of the divine original. And that this doctrine of pre- existence and reminiscence is no mere poetic fiction or imaginative symbol is shown by the severity of the process which he employs in demonstrating it, and the high practical pur- pose to which he applies it. In order to estab- lish the doctrine of preexistence he employs one of the sharpest psychological processes in his entire works. He distinguishes between ideas drawn from the sense and those con- ceptions which sense never could furnish, but which exist in the mind from the very com- mencement of our earthly being, as standards to which our sensible perceptions are all re- ferred, and which consequently it must have brought with it from an anterior state. And in thus establishing the existence of the soul before coming into the body, he establishes its independence of the body, and by consequence its immortality. He reasons from the past to the future, and by showing that the soul is not dependent for its existence upon the body, he shows that it is not affected by the dissolution of the body. Preexistence, the ideas or forms, and immortality are thus all woven into one indissoluble web of argument, of which the ideas are, as everywhere in his system, the cen- tral point. We hold, therefore, to the middle- age realistic views of the Platonic forms or ideas, and the attempt to reduce them to the standard of the Scotch or French metaphysics of our own day is to ignore Plato's historical position, and lose sight of the peculiar prob- lems of Grecian speculation. Of course it is impossible but that Plato, in applying to these assumed realities his sharp dialectical methods, should be sometimes inconsistent with himself, and resolve the objective essences into the sub- jective conceptions for which they really stand. And as these transcendental forms are the es- sence of all reality, and the end of all true knowledge, it follows that the soul's residence in the body is an evil, that the phenomena of sense, interposed between the mind and these absolute existences, are constantly deceiving and alluring it from its proper element. The great business of the philosopher, therefore, is to emancipate himself as far as possible, not only from the dominion of the animal appe- tites, but also from the illusions of sense, and to retire into that interior world of reflection in which his mind can commune with its kin- dred eternal essences. The " ideas," however, are not themselves all of equal excellence ; but supreme above the others are the forms of the true, the beautiful, and the good, in which triad again the last takes the highest place, and be- comes, perhaps, identical with the Deity, who thus, under the Platonic conception, seems to fluctuate between a personal being and the highest and noblest of the ideas. And as the ideas are the only object of true science, anc