Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/292

 286 Goebel islands of the blest on which they dwell in order to descend again to the prisoners and to share with them in toils and honors. This aloofness from the world which differs little from the claims of sanctity of certain religious sects has its ultimate basis in Plato's disdain of the senses. To rely on them for the knowledge of truth means to be deluded by them, for according to the Phaedo 24 "the eyes, and the ears and the other senses are full of deceit." Philosophy, therefore, urges the soul "to withdraw from them and to concentrate itself within itself, trusting nothing but itself and its own abstract thought of abstract existence. " We may interpret it as almost a rebuke of Plato's one-sided intellectualism when Goethe says in the "Spriiche in Prosa" (No. 557): "Die Sinne triigen nicht, aber das Urteil triigt," or when in the poem " Vermachtnis " he bequeaths to posterity the advice: Den Sinnen hast du dann zu trauen, Kein Falsches lassen sie dich schauen, Wenn dein Verstand dich wach erhalt. Believing with Schiller that the way to the deity lies open to man through his senses, how could the poet, whose thought revolved around the central idea of "Life, the highest gift of God and Nature, " have accepted a contemplation of the world which ultimately resulted in the stagnation and negation of life? Was it not Faust's painful experience of such inner stagnation which drove him to the outburst: Mir ekelt lange vor allem Wissen! What he seeks now in the presence of the eternal light is not philosophical knowledge in the sense of Plato's "ideas" but the vital flame of light on which he might kindle the torch of his own life. Thwarted in his design by the overpowering flame he resolutely turns his back to the sun, not to return to his previous state of capitivity, like Plato's cave dweller, but to view with growing rapture the most beautiful of sense-illusions, the changeful, yet continuous, many-colored bow, and to dis- cover that life is revealed only in the brilliant play of colors before him, the reflection of the one eternal light. In one of the "Spriiche in Prosa" (No. 1003) Goethe has attempted to give an explanation of the secret of life whose 2 < Phaedo 83, A.