Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/623

 PLATO 603 preparation to commune with them, and espe- cially with the good, the noblest of them all, is the great end of philosophical striving, so in the last analysis science and virtue coincide, and the ideas furnish the basis not only of all science, but of piety and morality. Physics Plato expounds in a great measure from a Pythagorean standpoint, and his cosmogony in most of its details scarcely rose, probably, even in his own view, above the level of plausible conjecture. The world is originated and not eternal. It is framed by the Creator out of a chaotic and formless mass, after the model of an immovable and perfect archetypal world. The two are brought into union through the medium of a world-soul, placed in the world according to the relation of numbers, and con- stituting a harmonizing link between the Deity and the archetypal world on the one hand, and blind and formless matter on the other. As the work of a good being, the world must be as perfect as the untractable and essentially evil nature of matter admits. Hence the uni- verse is a unity, and has the most perfect of all forms and motions, the spherical and the circular. The stars are heavenly and imperish- able essences, and the earth lies, round, self- poised, and immovable, in the centre of the world. The soul, according to Plato's concep- tion of its nature, would come into the depart- ment of physics. It consists, in his view, of two portions, the soul proper, the intellect or reason, divine and immortal, and a sensuous or appetitive principle, material and perish- able; while intermediate between them, but ap- proaching nearer to the reason, is a third ele- ment which he calls passion, and which thus mediates between the divine and the earthly, the intellectual and the sensuous, as the soul of the world mediates between Deity and matter. The immortality of the soul Plato maintains at length and with great earnestness. He ar- gues it from the general principle that con- traries spring from contraries, death from life, and consequently life from death, from the soul's preexistence and consequent indepen- dence of the body, from its simplicity which renders it incapable of dissolution, from its su- periority to the body, from its bearing within it the principle of life, &c. The soul's own proper evil, viz., sin, does not annihilate it; much less then can an alien and merely inciden- tal evil, like the dissolution of the body, have any such power. He believes in future retri- bution, exonerates God from responsibility for sin and suffering, and sets forth in elaborate myths the blessedness of the virtuous and the punishments of the vicious, blending, however, with his teaching the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis. In ethics Plato holds to the Socratic doctrine that virtue is a science and consequently matter of instruction. Virtue is ially one, the good, but has various forms of development. He retains the fourfold di- vision of the virtues into wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. The first three ally themselves to the three divisions of the soul respectively, wisdom being the proper virtue of the intellect, courage of the passionate por- tion,, and temperance of the animal or sensu- ous. Justice is the principle that pervades and regulates the whole. In discussing the nature of the chief good, which the ancients made the starting point of their ethical system, Pla- to avoids the opposite extremes of cynicism and hedonism, that on the one hand which ex- cludes pleasure, and that on the other which makes it identical with pleasure. True virtue always carries with it its own enjoyment, and the virtuous man, another name for the philoso- pher, finds his highest happiness in communion with and assimilation to the good and the di- vine. Politics with Plato, as with the Greeks generally, are closely allied to ethics. The state is but the individual on a larger scale; the individual but a miniature state. Hence for purposes of moral analysis Plato turns from the individual to the state, as in deciphering an inscription he would turn from smaller and more obscure to larger and more legible char- acters. His analysis of a state is but an en- largement of his psychological analysis. Its division is threefold. The governing class represent the intellect, the essence of the soul, the laborers and handicraftsmen its sensuous and appetitive portions, and the soldiers or guards the intermediate passionate element. The virtue of the first class is wisdom, of the second temperance, and of the third courage ; while in the state, as in the individual, justice is the principle that runs through, regulates, and harmonizes the whole. According to the ordinary Greek conception, Plato makes the state supreme, and merges in it all the inter- ests of individual and domestic life. House- hold relations and ties are to be unsparingly sacrificed on the altar of the state. A com- munity of wives and of goods is to take the place of domestic life and of private property. The education and the employments of the citizens are all to be regulated by the state. Plato draws out at length his system of educa- tion. He would banish all dramatic poetry as involving the personating of fictitious charac- ters, and thus virtually sanctioning falsehood, all music except the simpler and more manly kinds, all those fables which exhibit degra- ding pictures of the gods, and everything that can foster timidity and the fear of death. The governing class in the state should consist of philosophers of those who, having risen to the contemplation of the real and the true, can esti- mate at their worth the shadowy pursuits and pleasures of the multitude. A monarchy is to be preferred on account of the difficulty of find- ing many men qualified to rule. In the " Laws," however, Plato abandons the monarchical the- ory for that of a mixed government. His views are decidedly aristocratic, and he would devolve all the privileges of the government on the two higher classes, while the multitude are merely to be kept under wholesome restraint.