Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/290

 284 Goebel prisoners honour and set in authority? Would he not rather feel what Homer describes, and wish extremely 'To live on earth a swain, Or serve a swain for hire, ' or suffer anything rather than be so the victim of seeming and live in their way? " "Yes," he said, "I certainly think that he would endure anything rather than that." "Then consider this point," I said. "If this man were to descend again and take his seat in his old place, would not his eyes be full of darkness because he had just come out of the sunlight?" "Most certainly," he said. "And suppose that he had again to take part with the prisoners there in the old contest of distinguishing between the shadows, while his sight was confused and before his eyes had got steady (and it might take them quite a considerable time to get used to the darkness), would not men laugh at him, and say that having gone up above he had come back with his sight ruined, so that it was not worth while even to try to go up? And do you not think that they would kill him who tried to release them and bear them up, if they could lay hands on him, and slay him? " "Certainly," he said. "Now this simile, my dear Glaucon, must be applied in all its parts to what we said before; the sphere revealed to sight being likened to the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire therein to the power of the sun. If you will set the upward ascent and the seeing of things in the upper world with the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible sphere, you will have my surmise; and that is what you are anxious to have. Whether it be actually true, God knows. But this is how it appears to me. In the world of knowledge the Form of the good is perceived last and with difficulty, but when it is seen it must be inferred that it is the cause of all that is right and beautiful in all things, pro- ducing in the visible world light and the lord of light, and being itself lord in the intelligible world and the giver of truth and reason, and this Form of the good must be seen by whosoever would act wisely in public or in private." Similarities as well as dissimilarities between this parable and the Faust scene under discussion are obvious. Considering the resemblances first, it does not seem improb- able that the very thought of having Faust ascend the solitary alpine heights in search of regeneration, culminating in the vision of the eternal light, may have been suggested by the picture which Socrates, interrupting his profound disquisition upon the nature of the Good, draws of the man dragged up a steep, rugged ascent there to behold the light of the sun. Again in the sublime Platonic conception of the sun as a simile of the idea of the Good, the ultimate cause of the visible world and of our knowledge, Goethe may well have recognized the verifica-