Part 3
The student is asked to take a view from the height to which he has already attained, and catch a glimpse here and there of the world, of history, and of the meaning of human life. The fuller significance of what appears in the fair field of learning will come with maturer years. It is not enough for the student to enjoy selfishly his knowledge and power; he should be a mediator between his capabilities and his opportunities. It is one thing to have power, another to use it. The mighty engine may have within it the potency of great work, but it may stand idle forever unless the proper means are employed to utilize it. Let the student convert his power into active energy, and study the best ways of making it tell for the highest usefulness. Education but prepares to enter the great school of life, and that school should be a means of continuous development towards greater power and higher character, and knowledge and usefulness. Progress is the condition of life; to stand still is to decay. One with a progressive spirit gains a little day by day and year by year, and in the sum of years there will be a large aggregate. Employ well the differentials of time, then integrate, and what is the result?
An old and honored college instructor was accustomed to say, “Education is valuable, but good character is indispensable,” and the force of this truth grows upon me with every year of experience. I well remember a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher upon the theme “Upbuilding,” in which he spent two hours in an earnest and eloquent appeal, especially to the young, to thrust down the lower nature and cultivate the nobler instincts, and thus evolve to higher planes.
Happy is he who can keep the buoyancy and freshness and hope of early years. The “vision splendid,” which appears to the eye of youth, too often may “fade into the light of common day.” Too often Wordsworth’s lines become a prophecy, but let them be a warning:
“Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.”
Age should be the time of rich fruition. Not long since the Rev. William R. Alger, on his visit to Denver, after an absence of a dozen years, addressed a congregation of his old friends, and among other things he spoke of his impressions when he first approached these grand mountains. It was at set of sun, and, as he looked away over the plains, he beheld on an elevation a thousand cattle, and in the glory of the departing day they seemed to him like “golden cattle pasturing in the azure and feeding on the blue.” Upon his last visit he again approached these scenes at the close of day, and his impressions were as vivid as in earlier years; his enjoyment in life was deeper, his faith was stronger, and his hope brighter. There is no need to grow old in spirit; it is only the dead soul that wholly loses the hope and the joy of youth.
There are three grand categories, not always understood by those who carelessly name them—the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. May the thoughts and deeds which give character to life be such as to fall within this trinity of perfect ideals.
PLATO’S PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION AND LIFE.
It is the calm judgment of history that, in artistic, literary, and philosophical development, the world shows, relatively, nothing comparable to the Golden Age of Greece. Attica was the Shakespeare of the Ancient World. As the Bard of Avon gathered the material of legend, romance, and history, and crowned the intellectual activity of the Elizabethan Age with results of enduring value, so the leading city of Greece centred in herself many influences of the Orient, and, in a period of great intellectual awakening under favorable conditions, became the genius that produced results of surpassing power and beauty. The Greeks created when European civilization was young, and as yet there was little of the ideal that, in the Attic Period, blossomed into the conceptions of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
In any other period never has so great a master as Socrates found so great a pupil as Plato; never has so great a master as Plato encountered so great a pupil as Aristotle. Each pupil grasped and enlarged upon the mighty work of his instructor.
The world still wonders how any age could become so suddenly and highly creative. Like the century plant, the Greek race seemed to have been accumulating, through a long period, power for a quick and startling development. The thoughtful historian enumerates many favoring conditions. The Greeks as a race were active, eager for knowledge, and had a capacity for healthy ideal conceptions. The beneficent climate brought them in contact with nature, and the peculiar charm of their sky, air, mountains, and sea filled them with a sense of wonder and a sense of beauty. We may also mention the stimulus of their intercourse with their own colonies and with other peoples; their religion, which contained the germs of ethical and philosophical thought, and was favorable to freedom of view; the respect for law that sought for the rules of the state and for individual conduct a foundation in permanent principles.
Socrates is a more favorite theme than Plato, partly because he is the first of the three heroic figures that mark the beginning of philosophy. Then his name is surrounded with a halo that was constituted by the events of Athens’ greatest period of fame. He lived just after the glory of victory over the Persian invaders had stimulated the Greek pride and every activity that is born of pride and hope. He lived in the period of Athenian supremacy and was contemporary with Phidias, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Pericles.
Plato, on the contrary, beheld the beginning of the misfortunes of Attica and of the decay of Greece. It was the period of the Peloponnesian Wars, of the Spartan and the Theban Supremacy. It was the time of the Thirty Tyrants and of the restored Democracy. But while the time of Plato was not that of the greatest national glory, it permitted the free development of philosophical thought which later culminated in Aristotle.
Socrates, with earnestness of soul, with contempt for the extreme democratic spirit of his time and the growing disregard of divine and human law, with contempt for the Sophists, whose teachings were no higher than prudential preparation for practical life and cultivation of the morals and manners of a Lord Chesterfield, devoted himself to exposing the ignorance and false reasoning of the day and to the search for truth, setting up for his ideal the Supreme Good which included the True and the Beautiful. He, however, was practical in that he taught that all good was good for something; whatever was ideal was to be applied in real life, and he was a notable example of closely following ideals with practical action. “Know thyself” was his maxim, and, in knowing thyself, know the good and follow it.
Socrates is the practical man, Plato the idealist and literary man, Aristotle the scientific man. Socrates left us no writings, and, while Plato in his works uses Socrates as his chief interlocutor, the dialogues are to be regarded as expressing Socrates’ philosophy as changed and enlarged by the views of Plato. Xenophon’s “Memorabilia” is the source of more nearly accurate views of the life and teachings of Socrates.
Plato uses Socrates’ method of induction and exact definition to reach the truth aimed at. Many of the scenes are like plays, some of which would take on a stage setting, with characters that are very much alive and very human. Although in pursuit of the most serious subjects, a dramatic tone runs through the discussions. In the first book of the “Republic,” Thrasymachus in argument gets angry, grows red in the face, and fairly roars his views at Socrates, who pretends to be panic-stricken at his looks. Later Thrasymachus asks, “I want to know, Socrates, whether you have a nurse.” To Socrates’ look of astonished inquiry he more than intimates that the philosopher is too childish to go about unattended. Many of the dialogues are in part historical facts. The characters are the neighbors and friends or intellectual antagonists of the philosopher. The doctrines he combats are doctrines of the day, the scenes are real and in or about Athens. The tyranny he hates and the extreme democracy he satirizes are forms of government whose evils he has observed, and from which he has suffered. You read the dialogues, follow their thought, get into their spirit, and you are brought in touch with the great, throbbing life of the Athenian commonwealth. A few dialogues, carefully read, are worth a hundred volumes of the commentators.
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It is related that at a certain time Socrates dreamed he saw a young swan perched on his knee. Soon it gained strength of wing and flew away, singing a sweet song. The next day Plato appeared and became the intimate pupil of Socrates. This is one of many myths, later invented to enlarge the halo of a great name. It was said that Plato was the son of Apollo and that the bees of Hymettus fed him with honey, giving him the power of sweet speech. Myths aside, the chance that made Plato the intimate friend and disciple of Socrates became of vast significance to the future history of philosophy. Plato was of aristocratic parentage; he showed in his youth a poetic temperament, which was later displayed in the dramatic art of his writings. After the death of Socrates in 399 B. C., he travelled and resided at various courts. At the age of forty he returned to Athens and opened his school in the Gymnasium of the Academy, where with one or two intervals he taught for a period of forty years. Aristotle was for twenty years his pupil, and there are many interesting accounts of the relation between pupil and master.
Plato had in him somewhat of the Puritan, while Aristotle was more a man of the world, and we may suppose that he often maintained his opinions with his customary sarcastic smile. He offended the more austere tastes of his master by nicety of dress, care of his shoes, display of finger rings, and a dudish cut of his hair. Contemporaries speak of Plato with admiration for his intellect and reverence for the beauty of his character, which was “elevated in Olympian cheerfulness above the world of change and decay.”
In our purpose to touch upon some points of Plato’s doctrines, we are treating of a transcendent genius whose work has profoundly affected the thought of the world. Platonism reappears as Neo-Platonism in the second and third centuries of our era; is largely adopted in its new form a century later by St. Augustine, the great expounder of Christianity and teacher of the Middle Ages; arises again in the seventeenth century proclaiming that moral law is written in fixed characters in every rational mind; culminates in the grand idealism of Schelling and Hegel; is transmitted to-day in the magnificent idealistic ethics of such men as Caird, Green, and Bradley; gives the cardinal virtues to Christianity; furnishes a broad and inspiring ethical code for the present; speaks with an inspiration that largely meets the approval of the Christian world; inspired the Utopia and the New Atlantis and all ideal schemes of government and society; was, following Socrates, the father of the inductive method; became the starting point for the scientific study of nature and psychology in the eleventh century; was a large element in the humanistic movement, which at the close of the middle ages created modern natural science; created conceptions which, developing down through the centuries in two diverging lines, indirectly found highest expression in the idealism of Hegel and the evolution of Spencer, and is likely to furnish in broad outlines, especially as presented by Aristotle, ground for the reconciliation of the opposite poles of philosophy in a spiritual evolution.
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What was Plato’s central idea? It was the existence of fixed principles in the universe, principles realized in the consciousness of man, through pursuit of knowledge. Socrates aimed at a permanent ground for ethical wisdom in a time when the old foundations of conduct and of divine and human law were shaken. He was the progenitor of the inductive method, in that he sought in numerous instances and opinions the essential common ground or principle, and aimed at exact definition. The class concept, general notion, universal truth, was the object of his search. And we find him, for instance, in Plato, tracing through the ten books of the “Republic” the essential character of justice. Plato, following Socrates, sought a foundation for ethical conceptions in a metaphysical theory, the Doctrine of Ideas, a magnificent illustration of the truth that speculative philosophy grows out of man’s earnest desire to know why he is here, and what is the meaning of his moral nature.
It will help much any view in the field of philosophy to keep uppermost the thought of distinct classes, types, or kinds of things in nature; the thought of the corresponding class concepts, general notions or universals in the human mind; and the thought of original ideas in the mind of God, as constituting principles or laws or modes of action in nature. This is not a world of chaotic chance, it is a world of rational and progressive order, and we are compelled to seek for the architecture an architect and a plan embodying rational ideas. Plato’s ideas are eternal entities existing neither in nature nor in the mind of God, but nevertheless the archetypes, forms, or patterns after which every kind of things to which may be applied a common name was fashioned. Plato here held in an imperfect way the mighty truth of all philosophy, and the “Ideas” have reappeared in many guises,—as the forms or essences of Aristotle, existing only as realized in nature, as ideas in the mind of God, as the self-evolving categories of Hegel, as the perfecting principle and the fashioning laws in the doctrine of evolution.
Man in his preëxistent state dwelt in the region of immaterial ideas and gazed on the fulness of their truth. At his human birth he was made oblivious of his past existence, and growth in wisdom was a gradual realization in the consciousness of the eternal verities formerly known. As in Wordsworth, man’s birth was but a “sleep and a forgetting;” growth in knowledge was a remembering. “Trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home.” The truth in this metaphor of philosophy, we may believe, is that man is of divine origin, and hence may know the divine revelations in his own being and in the material world. Here was foreshadowed in rough outlines the spiritual idealism which in its fresh form appears to be gaining new ground to-day. God writes the book of nature; man is the son of God and reads and vaguely understands the meaning of the mighty volume.
Sensations are not knowledge, but the signs of knowledge, as words are the signs of thought, and the mind is innately active and rational, else there could be no interpretation of those signs. This appears to be the true explanation of the fact that we are educated by contact with nature. Without the signs, no communication of knowledge; without the native power of the reader, no reception of knowledge.
Plato held that the ideas were manifest in nature and were also innate in the mind; hence by self-examination and comparison with the copies of the ideas in nature, man arrived at essential truth which was the work of philosophy.
Plato identified the Idea of Ideas with Cause, Mind, the Good or God. God was a personality and supreme above the gods. He was named by his chief attribute, the Good, and of this the True and the Beautiful were qualities. Cousin says, “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are only revelations of the same Being; that which reveals them to us is reason.” “If all perfection belongs to the perfect being, God will possess beauty in its plenitude. The father of the world, of its laws, of its ravishing harmonies, the author of forms, colors, and sounds, he is the principle of beauty in nature. It is he whom we adore without knowing it, under the name of the ideal, when our imagination, borne on from beauties to beauties, calls for a final beauty in which it may find repose.” This passage is thoroughly Platonic in spirit and throws much light on the meaning of these absolute ideas of Plato. With change of terms the same passage would apply to Truth and Goodness. We trace them as they appear in the conscious reason and disposition, as they are manifested in the relations of society or are suggested by the reality and beneficence of the world, and we are led to the conception of the perfect ideals whose truth exists in God.
Plato has four principles whose interrelation and process of the active elements determine the world, as the laws of modern evolution are conceived to work out the results discovered by science: (1) unlimited, unformed, or chaotic nature; (2) law, imposing limits and forms upon nature; (3) the resulting, definite types and ideas of a rational world; (4) the Cause which effects these results.
The Good is that which imparts truth to the object and knowledge to the perceiving subject, and is the cause of science and truth; hence, to know the Good is the ethical aim, for to know the Good is to act in harmony with it, and knowledge is virtue.
Plato was fully aware that the philosopher, then as to-day, was regarded by the many as a useless star-gazer, and in the celebrated Allegory of the Cave he shows the relation of true insight to the common view of life and the world. He imagines dwellers in a cave so placed that they see only the shadows of passing objects and hear only the echoes of sounds from the outer world. If released and brought to the full light of the sun they are dazzled and pained, and think they are in a world of false appearance, and believe the realities are the familiar shadows in the cave. After a while they become accustomed to the day and the real objects, and see their truth and beauty. And if they return to the cave, they are half blind and appear ridiculous to the dwellers there. He concludes, “Whether I am right or not, God only knows; but, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and lord of light in this world, and the source of truth and reason in the other: this is the first great cause which he, who would act rationally either in public or private life, must behold.”
To the Sophist, who follows the opinion of the many instead of regarding fixed principles of truth, he pays his respects with the searching satire of a Carlyle.
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His theology, which is a part of his philosophy, has many striking features that have commanded the astonishment of the Christian world. “God the Creator changes not; He deceives not.” It is wrong to do good to friends and injure enemies, for the injury of another can be in no case just. If you have a quarrel with any one, become reconciled before you sleep. In heaven is the pattern of the perfect city. All things will work together for good to the just. He advocates the severest abstract piety that, as in the conduct of the sternest Roman or the severest Puritan, swerves not from duty. The myth of Er, the Armenian, reminds us in many points of the judgment day; and his exhortation to pursue the heavenly way that it may be well with us here and hereafter, may be our salvation if we are obedient, is one of the most striking in the history of religious belief.
In the fifth book of the “Laws” is an exhortation to right living that partakes of the spirit of the Christian philosophy. Every man is to honor his own soul with an honor that regards divine good, to value principle higher than life, to place virtue above all gold, to glory in following the better course, to count reverence in children a greater heritage than riches, to regard a contract as a holy thing, to avoid excess of self-love and to adhere to the truth as the beginning of every good. We need no further illustration of the fact that Platonism was naturally welcomed by the early Christian Church.
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The ethical ideals of Plato are the most valuable phase of his writings. In the First Book of the “Republic,” Thrasymachus, in a dialogue with Socrates, defines justice to be _Sublime Simplicity_, and argues that the unjust are discreet and wise, as some may argue to-day that shrewd dishonesty is commendable. The ethics of Plato is the opposite pole of this philosophy, and as such stands for the rational and moral order of the world. His system is not hedonistic, but ideal. It aims at a good, but the good is attained by a life of virtue.
In a famous passage of the “Republic,” the transcendently just man is described. He is to be clothed in justice only. Being the best of men, he is to be esteemed the worst, and so continue to the hour of his death. He is to be bound, scourged, and suffer every kind of evil, and even be crucified; still he is to be just for righteousness’ sake. No wonder some Christian fathers believed this referred to Him who was to come, as described in the celebrated chapter of Isaiah. The best man is also the happiest, whether seen or unseen by gods and men. In the “Crito” Socrates will not escape from prison if it is not right, though he suffer death or any other calamity. “Virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice is the disease and weakness and deformity of the soul.” He is a fool who laughs at aught but folly and vice. The possession of the whole world is of no value without the good. No pleasure except that of the wise is quite true and pure. “Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the god in man?” “How would a man profit if he received gold and silver on the condition that he was to enslave the noblest part of him to the worst?” “The Holy is loved of God because it is Holy.” Not pleasure, but wisdom and knowledge and right opinions and true reasonings are better, both now and forever. The good ruler considers not his own interest, but that of the state. The governing class are to be told that gold and silver they have from God; the divine metal is in them.
Any one who finds in these views a doctrine of pleasure must seek with a prejudiced eye. Plato, as usual, anticipates later ethical discussions, and points to the fact that there is a quality in pleasure; and quality in conduct is the very contention of absolute moralists. He speaks of the soul whose dye of good quality is washed out by pleasure. The attainment of genuine well-being, the development of divine qualities within men, was the aim, and the consciousness of this priceless possession of rational manhood was the incidental reward. His doctrine places before men abstract ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, which invite the better nature by their supreme excellence.