Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 16.djvu/131

* PLATO. 103 PLATO. blame, and discourse eloquently of virtue and the education that fitted men for life. But they could not define the terms they used, or defend the coherency and consistenc}' of their opinions against objectors. They were unable to make the preliminary distinctions and classifications requi- site for the intelligent discussion of such ques- tions as 'Can virtue be taught ?'(J/e)io) or 'Is pleasure or knowledge the good?' (Philehus). They had o])inions, but no knowledge. Dialectic was said to have been "invented' by Zeno, the au- thor of the famous fallacies disproving motion; and the Athenians of the fifth century were subtle and skillful disputants. But the rules of the game (the principles of elementary logic) had never been formulated, and Socrates was the first to play it with system and conscious mastery. He demanded definitions of general terms and confirmed or refuted them by apt induction and generalization from simple pertinent instances. So great was his skill that, as Xenophon aftirms and Plato illustrates, he could deal with an oppo- nent as he pleased. None could escape the net- work of argument which he wove. Plato inherited from Socrates his intense conviction of the dif- ference between imtested opinion and reasoncii knowledge, and, starting from the Socratic logic of the definition and simple induction, he worked out in concrete examples the details of the logic of consistency so that all that remained for Aristotle was" to codify them and add the formu- las of tlie syllogism. In the prosecution of this task Plato "was' confronted by certain quibbles about being and not being, the one and the many, the whole and the part, rest and motion, the real- ity or unrealit- of abstract ideas, which from one point of view are mere verbal fallacies, from another are problems of psychology and meta- physics. To interpret aright the more metaphys- ical and abstract dialogues, we must remember that, whether Plato succeeded or failed in solving metaphysical problems which are still debated, he never lost sight of his main object, the removal of the verbal fallacies from the pathway of prac- tical logic. Familiarity with the Aristotelian logic makes this seem a trifle to us. But to ac- complish it for the first time was one of the greatest achievements of human genius. A second fundamental Platonic thought is the postulate that the art of conduct, of individual and social life, ought to be as truly scientific as are the various arts and sciences that deal with material things. ^ To emphasize this thought, Plato makes use of the favorite Socratic com- parison or confusion of the virtues and the arts. As there is an art of carpentry or shoemaking known only to him who has mastered it, so 'vir- tue.' the art of happiness, of conduct, the 'polit- ical' or 'royal' art, must be conceived as a spe- cific form of knowledge demanding a special training in its possessor. To the end or aim of the 'royal art' all partial and particular ends would i)e subordinated — it would be an 'idea of good' in which all particular goods, virtues, and utilities have their ground. Hany of the minor dialogues illustrate the inability of the average disputant to apprehend any such larger end. or to define particular virtues and ends in relation to it. Others refute the pretensions of the soph- ists, rhetoricians, and politicians who claim to teach or practice the art of life and government, but in fact teach only the opinions of the multi- tude — the humors of the many-headed beast, or the knack of persuasive speech, or the tricks by which the politician seizes the helm of the ship of state, though he has never learned to steer. Even the few virtuous and judicious statesmen of whom Athens boasts are guided not by knowl- edge, but by right opinion or happy instinct, which, in the corruption of the existing social order and the absence of all systematic and ef- fective teaching of 'virtue,' must be said to come to them by grace divine (ileno). The Repuhlic contains the positive and con- structive application of these ideas. There Plato expounds his ideal of a city in which the end of government is not the domination of a faction, nor the multiplication of wealth, nor doing as one likes, but the virtue and consequently the true happiness of the individual citizen, and the order and harmony of the whole. The chief means to this end is justice — the division of labor gen- eralized to mean the proper distribution of func- tion among the three faculties of the soul, the appetites and desires, the emotions and passions, and the ruling reason, and answering to this the severe limitation to their proper work of the cor- responding groups of the population — the indus- trial, the militaiy, and the governing classes — de- termined by birth only in so far as birth is found to involve natural aptitude. The rulers, the em- bodied reason of the State, are selected by severe tests from the warriors. Absolute disinterestedness is secured by forbidding them to hold private property and by the paradoxical community of wives and ofl'spring. In order to master the 'po- litical art.' they must supplement the ordinary education in music and gj'mnastics b_v a prolonged discipline in mathematics, astronomy, and dialec- tic, which, as Plato expresses it in a poetical fig- ure, the source of much later mysticism, will enable them to apprehend the 'idea' of good,' the cause of light and truth and being in the intelli- gible world, as the sun is in the world of matter. In the Republic, as everywhere, the logical skele- ton of Plato's ethical and political theory is clothed with an eloquence nobly employed in the assertion of the ideal aims of life as against base, sensuous, and sordid views of happiness and suc- cess. And many readers who care nothing for the abstract logic of PJato's ethical philosophy will be charmed or inspired by the preacher and prophet — his impassioned faith in the moral or- der of the world, his denunciation of material- istic, sensationist, and hedonistic philosophies, his affirmation in poetical myth and allegory of the hope of immortalitv and the inevitableness of the judgment of God. Space fails to speak further of these things; of the vague but devout theism which, without breaking formally with the established polythe- ism, Plato everywhere professes ; of the sage and serious doctrine of Platonic love set forth in the Ph<edriis and fiijmposium, whereby sensuous pas- sion is made the prefigurement and symbol of spiritual exaltation and of all aspirations to- ward the good, the true, and the beautiful; of the fantastic poetical physics of the Timwus with its startling glimpses of the latest truths of science ; of the puritanic banishment of Homer from the ideal State, in strange and pathetic con- tradiction to the poetical fervor of Plato's own temperament and his theory of the divine in- spiration of poesy; of countless other things that secure Plato his place not only in the litera-