CHAPTER XIII. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY. PART I.

_Socrates._ It is, then, necessary to wait until we learn how we ought to be disposed towards gods and men.

_Alcibiades._ But when, Socrates, will that time arrive? and who shall teach us it? For it seems to me that I should with the greatest pleasure see that man.

_Socrates._ It is he who cares for thee.(320)

_Second Alcib._ § 22.

In the three preceding chapters we have witnessed a great spectacle, a spectacle in all history unique and without a rival, the encounter, that is, with the forces of the great world-empire of a voluntary society which bears in its bosom and propagates a body of truth, and this encounter carried on without respite during ten generations of men. The elements of this conflict are, on the one side, power, throned in civilisation, and defended by that sword before which nothing hitherto had stood; on the other, a belief testified by suffering and patience, but which moreover appears only as the possession of a society which is itself dropped as a seed into the earth’s bosom and silently fills its expanse. Attention must now be called to another aspect of the same encounter. Rome, as we have said, preëminently wielded power; not the power of her legions only, immense as that was, but the power of her laws, and the power of that many-sided and as it seemed triumphant all-embracing civilisation, of which she was the golden head. The mind however, the thought of the world which she ruled, belonged to the great Hellenic race: and it remains to consider what contest this mind waged with the truth which the Christian Church sustained and suffered for. The sword hews away limbs; the fire destroys bodies; and the martyrs offered freely their limbs and their bodies to sword and flame. But the martyrs were inspired with a mind; they carried Christ in them; and a mind too was opposed to theirs; the mind which animated that ancient civilisation; the mind which had erected such shrines as Diana of Ephesus and the Parthenon at Athens; the mind which dictated the laws of Solon and Lycurgus; the mind which taught in the Academus, the Lyceum, the Portico, and the Garden; the mind which built Alexandria for the world’s emporium and university, and raised Antioch to be the gorgeous throne of eastern magnificence. We have to consider how this heathen mind encountered the Christian; in short, how, “after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased Him through the folly of Christian preaching to save those that believed.”(321) Let us trace the encounter of heathen wisdom—that is, Philosophy—with Christian wisdom, that is, the truth of a God incarnate and crucified, with all its consequences, as upborne by the Christian Church and planted among men.

Now the system of polytheistic worship which was then in possession of the Græco-Roman world had been subjected for many ages to all the analytic power of human reason as exercised by the most gifted of races which have hitherto embodied their genius in a corresponding civilisation. The philosophy of Greece is in fact such an analysis, and the rise of this philosophy is carried back by the ablest inquirers to the time of Thales and Pythagoras in the sixth century before Christ, In the beautiful climate of Ionia and Southern Italy there arose at this time men who attempted by the efforts of their own reason to form a physical and a moral theory of the world which surrounded them. Philosophy is not merely thought, but methodical thinking, thinking consciously directed upon the knowledge of things in their connection with each other. Nor is it content merely with the collecting of observations and the knowledge so derived, but proceeds to gather the individual instances into a whole, to draw to a centre what was scattered, and to form a view of the world resting upon clear conceptions and at unity with itself.(322) This was the nature of that work which Thales and Pythagoras commenced. Let us give a glance at the race which bore them, and of which they were representative men.

This race had dwelt for some ages in Greece, and from thence occupied by emigration the shores of Asia Minor, Sicily, and Southern Italy, with a part of Africa. Pythagoras, the father of Italian philosophy, had migrated from Samos to Crotona, having visited Egypt, examined and gathered from all the stores of its knowledge. A century later Herodotus, the father of Greek history, migrated likewise from his country Halicarnassus, and after spending many years in extensive travels through Egypt and Western Asia settled at Thurii. In the succeeding century Plato travelled in like manner with similar purposes. He was familiar with Sicily as with his own Attica, not to speak of Egypt or Phœnicia. These three great men, Pythagoras, Herodotus, and Plato, are specimens herein of the cultured Greek, the gentleman, as we should call him. Thus though Greece proper was a very small country, the whole region from middle Italy, including Sicily, and the rich coast-land of Northern Africa from Carthage to Egypt, with again Phœnicia and Syria, and the continent to the depth of perhaps a hundred miles round the three sides of Asia Minor watered by the sea, were in a larger sense the Greek’s country, a field of Grecian thought, and enterprise, and observation, a sphere in which his mind was enlarged, and his judgment of men and things matured.(323) Generally speaking these regions were singularly favoured as to richness of soil and convenience of situation. Herodotus himself has marked the climate of Ionia as the most beautiful and best-tempered of the earth; and with a far wider knowledge of its regions we should not venture to dispute the justness of his remark. Some modern writers are wont to dwell on the effect which climate exercises upon man’s mind. However this may be, it is certain that the race whose energies were diffused over this region was most highly gifted with natural endowments. When out of the world which Christianity has mainly formed, and from the bosom of nations which have grown through the struggle of a thousand years, and with perpetual competition among each other, into a rich civilisation, we look back on that ancient and simpler world, we find in Hellenism the most perfect expression of the natural man, as a plastic, artistic, poetical, philosophical, and generally intellectual race, wherein matter was most completely permeated by mind. The language which they used even yet presents a very perfect image of such a race, as not being formed from the corruption of other idioms, but a mother tongue, the most brilliant of the Aryan sisters. In its union of strength with beauty, of pleasing sound with accurate sense, in its power to convey the most subtle distinctions of philosophic thought, or the most radiant images of sensuous loveliness, the gravest enunciations of law, or the tenderest dreams of romance, it was well calculated to be the organ of a people wherein bodily form and immaterial intellect alike culminated. The language which we use ourselves is full of nerve and vigor, with a certain northern force and a habit of appropriating the material stores of other languages by incorporating their words, which suits well the descendants of sea-kings, who have provinces all over the world; but it is without inflexions, deprived of cases and genders, defective in marking time, whereas the Greek in all these is most rich and flexible: the one resembles the torso of a Hercules without its limbs, the other an Apollo as he touches the earth in his perfect symmetry. Then compare its sound with that of the old Hellenic tongue, and we seem to hear the poet’s “stridor ferri tractæque catenæ,” beside the voice of a lute; while as to texture, it is like the train of a railway matched with the golden network, fine as the spider’s web, indissoluble as adamant, which the poet feigns to have been wrought by Vulcan: the English imprisons thought in a rude and cumbrous iron, while the Greek exhibits it in a rich and ductile gold. As was the language, so was the people. Fond of society and intercourse, skilful, crafty, commercial, enterprising, with a most human and genial intellect, with a keen and critical judgment, and a vivid imagination. When such a race turned itself to a scientific consideration of the world, it might well produce what we are now to pass in review, the Greek philosophy.

And here it is well to lay down first the standing-point of the Greek mind. The Hellenic religion was a natural religion, inasmuch as according to it man had no need to raise himself above the surrounding world and his own nature in order to connect himself with the Deity. As he was originally constituted, he felt himself related to it: no inward change in his mode of thought, no struggle with his natural impulses and inclinations, was required of him for this purpose. All that to him was humanly natural seemed to him to have its justification in regard to the Deity likewise; and so the most godlike man was he who worked out most completely his powers as man, and the essence of religious duty consisted in that man should do for the honour of the Deity what is in accordance with his own nature.(324)

But this natural religion of the Greeks differed from that of others in that neither outward nature as such, nor the sensuous being of man as such, but human nature in its beauty, as illumined by mind, is its point of excellence. The Greek did not, like the Eastern, lose his independence before the powers of nature, nor revel like the northern savage in boundless liberty, but in the full consciousness of his freedom saw its highest fulfilment in obedience to the general order as the law of his own nature. And as the purely Grecian deities are the ideals of human activity, he thus stands to them in a calm and free relation, such as no other nation of antiquity felt, because they are the mirror of his own being, but his being exalted, so that he is drawn to them without purchasing this at the cost of the pain and toil of an inward struggle.(325)

How the features of his own land served to image out to his fancy the Greek’s religious attitude a poet has told us in exquisite verses, worthy of the beauty which they describe; the apotheosis of nature.

“Where are the Islands of the Blest? They stud the Ægean sea; And where the deep Elysian rest? It haunts the vale where Peneus strong Pours his incessant stream along, While craggy ridge and mountain bare Cut keenly through the liquid air, And in their own pure tints arrayed, Scorn earth’s green robes which change and fade, And stand in beauty undecayed, Guards of the bold and free.”(326)

It seems to me essential to bear in mind throughout our whole inquiry this standing-point of the Greek mind, because through all the succession of schools and the fluctuation of doctrines, it remains, so to say, the ground-work on which they are embroidered. It is the very texture of Hellenic thought upon which first Pythagoras, then Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno, Cleanthes, Panætius, and even Plotinus and Porphyrius spin their web. They vary the decoration, but the substance remains unaltered. This standing-point rules the conception of virtue, and therefore of the whole moral world. It reaches also to the final end of man, and determines it.

Moreover as the intellectual power of man seems to have culminated in the Hellenic race, so it would seem that a state of things existed among that people which left the human reason practically more to its own unaided resources than we find to have been the case elsewhere. No doubt the Greek mind had lived and brooded for ages upon the remains of original revelation, nor can any learning now completely unravel the interwoven threads of tradition and reason so as to distinguish their separate work. However, it is certain that in the sixth century before Christ the Greeks were without a hierarchy, and without a definite theology: not indeed without individual priesthoods, traditionary rites, and an existing worship, as well as certain mysteries which professed to communicate a higher and more recondite doctrine than that exposed to the vulgar gaze. But in the absence of any hierarchy holding this priesthood together, and teaching anything like a specific doctrine about divine and human things, a very large range indeed was given to the mind, acting upon this shadowy religious belief, and reacted upon by it, to form their philosophy. The Greeks did not, any more than antiquity in general, use the acts of religious service for instruction by religious discourse.(327) In other words, there was no such thing as preaching among them. A domain therefore was open to the philosopher on which he might stand without directly impeaching the ancestral worship, while he examined its grounds, and perhaps sapped its foundations. He was therein taking up a position which their priests, the civil functionaries of religious rites scarcely any longer retaining a spiritual meaning or a moral cogency, had not occupied.

Thus it was that in the midst of a people who worshipped traditionally a multitude of gods and goddesses, such as we have them exhibited in the Homeric and Hesiodic poems, the chief, perhaps the only, and the yet unwritten literature of that day, beings with a personal character and will, who were supposed to divide the government of the world between them, with a more or less recognised sovereignty of one chief, arose men who set themselves by the light of reason to think steadily and continuously how that world in which they were living had become what it was. Such a movement of mind indicated in itself dissatisfaction with the existing religion, wherein the gods were considered the causes of things, and their wills the rulers of them, though in the background even here loomed the idea of fate, the representative, as it were, of brute matter, from which the Greek mind could never disengage itself. Yet we do not find that these philosophers set themselves openly to attack the existing religion; rather leaving it in possession, and themselves usually complying with its forms, they pursued their own train of thought, as it were by its side, not choosing to look whither it would lead them.

Such very much appears the position of inquirers in the first period of Greek philosophy, which is generally made to extend from its rise under Thales to the time of the Sophists and Socrates. Their thoughts were mainly occupied with the appearances of the physical world: they speculated how it could have arisen. Thus Thales, we are told, imagined its first principle to be water; Anaximander, boundless matter; Anaximenes, air; the Pythagoreans said, all is number; the Eleatic school, all is the one unchangeable being.(328) On the contrary Heracleitus conceived the one Being as ever in motion, involved in perpetual change: in accordance with which he nowhere finds true knowledge, and thinks the mass of men have no understanding for eternal truth.(329) Empedocles of Agrigentum sets forth the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, as the material principles or roots of things, attaching to these two ideal principles as moving forces, Love as the unitive, and Hatred as the severing.(330) Anaxagoras, over and above mechanical causes, to which he limited himself in the explanation of everything in particular, recognises a divine spirit, which as the finest of all things is simple, unmixed, passionless reason, which came upon chaos, forming and ordering the world out of it.(331) Democritus of Abdera takes for his principles the Full and the Empty, identifying these with Being and Non-being, or Something and Nothing. His Full consists of indivisible atoms.(332)

The remarkable thing about all these systems, if we may so call them, is, that while the existing popular religion teemed over, so to say, with the idea of a number of personal agents directing human things, these philosophers nearly all concurred in the attempt to find some one agent, and that material, from which all should spring. As yet even the radical distinction of matter and spirit was not clear to their minds:(333) the soul of the individual man was to them merely a particle of the vital power which disclosed itself through the universe, the purest portion, but a portion still, of primal matter. In their conception of the constituent cause while they advanced towards unity they receded from personality. Even the world-forming Intelligence of Anaxagoras, who first distinctly declares that spirit is not mixed with matter, works only as a power of nature, and is portrayed to us in a semi-sensuous form, as a finer matter.(334)

After Greek philosophy had run out during about a hundred and fifty years in this sort of vague and imaginative speculation upon the physical world, it underwent a great change, which marks the transition to its second period. These successive opinions of philosophers led a class of men who arose at Athens about the middle age of Socrates to the conclusion, that it would be more profitable to turn the course of human thought from such cosmological reveries to the question of the perception itself of truth by man. He who accomplished this was Socrates, who turned his reflexion by preference upon man himself as the subject who thinks and wills.(335) And herein his character had an influence over Greek philosophy which is strikingly marked through the whole of its second period. This period embraces the Sophists, Socrates himself, Plato and Aristotle, and the Stoics and Epicureans; finally those Sceptic and Eclectic schools which rose naturally from the criticism detecting what is untenable in preceding systems. During the six hundred years which elapse from the teaching career of Socrates to the death of Marcus Antoninus we may say that one great line of inquiry occupied among philosophers the human mind; it was man himself, as the subject of logical thought and moral will.(336) The chief endeavour was to form a science of ethics, and a science of reasoning, to which physical and mathematical studies, though at times warmly pursued and never wholly neglected, were yet subordinate.(337)

Who is this man of singular ugliness, with a face like a Silenus, with a body enduring hunger and impervious to heat and cold, who for thirty years frequents from morning to night the agora, the streets, the porticoes of Athens; who can drain the wine-cup through the night, and with reason unimpaired discuss philosophy through the following day; never alone, ready to converse with all in whom he discerned the germ of inquiry; who neither courts the high nor despises the low, but beside whom may be found the reckless beauty of Alcibiades and the staid gravity of Nicias, the admiring gaze of Plato even in youth majestic, and the sober homage of plainer Xenophon? Who is this, the man most social of men where the whole population is a club, the club of Athenian citizenship; whose tongue arrests the most volatile and inconstant of peoples; whose reason attracts and by turns draws out or silences the most opposite of characters; whose whole life is publicity; of spirit at once homely and subtle, simple and critical, parent both of philosophic certitude and philosophic scepticism? This is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus, to whom Greek philosophy will look back as on one that had given its bent and directed its course during a thousand years, until the last of its defenders(338) will fight a hopeless battle with triumphant Christianity, as the gods of Greece vanish, never more to return, and the lurid star of a false prophet teaching a false monotheism appears above the horizon, and takes the place, which they have left vacant, to be chief foe of the Christian name.

The special principle of Socrates is thus described to us by an historian of Greek philosophy.(339) “It is not merely an already existing mode of thought which was further developed by Socrates, but an essentially new principle and proceeding which were introduced into philosophy. Whilst all preceding philosophy had been directed immediately on the object, so that the question of the essence and grounds of natural appearances is in it the radical question, on which all others depend, Socrates was the first to give utterance to the conviction that nothing can be known respecting anything which meets our thought, before its general essence, its conception, be determined: that accordingly the trial of our own representations by the standard of the conception is philosophical self-cognition, the beginning and the condition of all true knowing: whilst those who preceded him had arrived through the consideration of things only to distinguishing between the representation of things and the knowing of them, he, reversing this, makes all cognition of things dependent on the right view of the nature of knowledge.”

Another(340) says: “It is stated in Aristotle’s _Metaphysics_(341) that Socrates introduced the method of Induction and Definition, which proceeds from the individual to the determination of the conception. Aristotle marks(342) the domain of ethics as that on which Socrates applied this method. According to him the fundamental view of Socrates was the indivisible unity of theoretical prudence and practical ability on ethical ground. Socrates conceived all the virtues to be prudences, inasmuch as they are sciences.(343) These statements are fully borne out by the portraits of Xenophon and Plato: Aristotle has only given point to their expression. Thus Xenophon says,(344) ‘he was ever conversing about human things, inquiring what was piety and what impiety; what honour and what turpitude; what just and what unjust; what sobermindedness and what madness; what courage and what cowardice; what policy and what politician; what the government of men and who capable of it; and suchlike things; and those who knew these he esteemed men of honour and goodness, those who knew them not to be justly called of servile mind.’ ‘Never did he cease inquiring with those who frequented him about what everything was.’(345) ‘And he did not distinguish between wisdom and temperance, but he asserted that justice and every other virtue was wisdom.’(346) With this view hang together the convictions that virtue can be taught, that all virtue in truth is only one, and that no one is willingly wicked, but only through ignorance.(347) The good is identical with the beautiful and the expedient. Right dealing, grounded upon prudence and practice, is better than good fortune. Self-knowledge, the fulfilment of the Delphic Apollo’s injunction, ‘Know thyself,’ is the condition of practical ability. External goods do not advance. To need nothing is godlike; to need the least possible comes nearest to the divine perfection.(348) Cicero’s well-known expression is substantially correct,(349) that Socrates called down philosophy from heaven to earth, introduced it into cities and houses, and required it to study life, morals, goods and evils, which constituted a progress from the natural philosophy pursued by his predecessors to ethics whose province is man. But Socrates possessed no complete system of ethical doctrines, but only the mainspring of inquiry; and so it was natural that he could only reach definite ethical statements in conversation with others. Thus his art was Mental Midwifery,(350) as Plato designates it. His confessed non-knowledge, resting on the firm consciousness of the essence of true knowledge, stood higher than the imagined knowledge of those who conversed with him; and to it was attached the Socratic Irony; that apparent recognition which is paid to the superior wisdom and prudence of another until this is dissolved into its nothingness by the dialectic examination which measures what is maintained as a generalisation by the fixed point of the particular case. Thus it was that Socrates exercised the charge of examining men,(351) which he was convinced had been imposed upon him by the Delphic god in the oracle elicited by Chærepho, that he was the wisest of men.”

The opinion, practice, and teaching of Socrates concerning the gods and the godhead are set forth most graphically by his disciple Xenophon in two chapters of his _Memorabilia_. Scarcely could a Christian moralist exhibit more lucidly the argument from design in proof of a divine Providence which has formed and which rules the world; more than this, which has produced the seasons of the year, the plants, the animals, for the good of man. In the eyes of Socrates the human body itself is a never-failing proof of the divine love of man. He details the wisdom with which it is put together, and forces the opponent, who is introduced as not sacrificing, nor praying to the gods, nor believing in divination, to confess: “When I consider this, assuredly these things seem the device of some wise world-maker, the lover of living things.”(352) Another he compels by a long enumeration of divine benefits to man to come to a similar conclusion.(353) “Certainly, Socrates, the gods seem to have a great care for men. Besides, he replies, when we cannot foresee in the future what is good for us, they help us by revealing through divination what is to come, and instructing us as to the best course. Nay, Socrates, rejoins the other, they seem to treat you even more kindly than other men; for without being asked by you they signify before to you what you should do and what leave undone. That I say true, answers Socrates, even you, O Euthydemus, will acknowledge, if you do not wait until you see the forms of the gods, but are contented, when you behold their works, to worship and honour them. And consider that the gods themselves point this out to you: for not only do the rest of them, when they give us good things, not exhibit themselves to our senses in so doing, but he(354) who coördinates and holds together the whole universe, in whom are all beautiful and good things, and who provides them for the perpetual use of men free from waste, disease, and old age, so that they help us unfailingly, quicker than thought, is discerned in the greatness of his operations, but while he administers these to us, is himself invisible. And take thought that the sun, who seems to be manifest to all, allows not men to examine him closely, but should anyone attempt to look at him shamelessly, takes away his sight. And the ministers of the gods too you will find evading our senses; the lightning shoots from on high, and is master wherever it alights, but is seen neither in its approach, nor in its stroke, nor in its departure. The winds themselves are invisible, but their works are manifest, and we feel them as they come. Nay and man’s soul too, or if there be anything else in man participating the divine, manifestly rules in us as a king, but is not seen. Bearing in thought these things we must not despise the invisible, but learning their power by their results, honour that which is divine.(355) Indeed, Socrates, says Euthydemus, for my part I am quite resolved not the least to neglect what is divine; but my trouble is, that it seems to me that no single man can ever be duly thankful for the kindnesses of the gods. Do not let this trouble you, Euthydemus, for you see the god at Delphi, when anyone asks him how to be grateful to the gods, answers, By your country’s law. Now it is surely law everywhere to please the gods by sacrifices, as best you can. How then can anyone honour the gods better or more piously than by doing what themselves bid? Only we must not be behind our power: for anyone who is so behind surely is manifest therein as not honouring the gods. Our duty is to honour them to the utmost of our power, and then to take heart and hope from them, the greatest goods: for a man cannot show a sound mind in hoping from others greater goods than from those who have the power to give the greatest aid; nor from those in any other way than by pleasing them. And how can one better please them than by the most unfailing obedience to them? Now by saying such things, and himself doing them, he was ever bringing those who were in intercourse with him to piety and a sound mind.”

The last words of this man to his judges were: “And now it is time that we depart, I to death, and you to life; but which of us are going unto the better thing is not clear to anyone save to God.”(356) And when the hemlock was reaching his heart,(357) he uncovered his head, and said with his last utterance, “O Crito, we owe a cock to Æsculapius: pay it, and do not neglect it.”

I have cited at length these passages because I think that they exhibit clearly the opinions and convictions of Socrates on the most important of all subjects. We behold here a man of a very religious mind, holding with the utmost tenacity the idea of a Providence, the Benefactor of men and their Judge, since it discriminates between them by reward and punishment: nor is it an impersonal Providence, an abstract Reason, but “a wise world-maker,” who loves man and does him good, and whose operations in this very purpose of doing him good indicate unity of design and perfection of execution: and yet in his conception of the godhead itself he halts between unity and plurality, and beside a statement such as we might read in a Pauline epistle of the one God who orders in harmony the universe and holds it together, we find him passing to the recognition and worship of many gods: beside words to his judges most sublime and most pathetic, concerning the issue of life and of death, we find him with his last breath directing his friend to discharge the sacrifice of a cock which he had promised to Æsculapius. He does not attempt to solve either the rational or the moral antagonism between many gods and one; but practically he throws himself into the worship of his country, referring to the law of each place as that which should determine for ever man the question how the gods are to be honoured. And in this I believe that he is typical of the whole race of philosophers at whose head he stands. Like him they spoke of one God, and they offered the cock to Æsculapius. If we seek the highest expressions concerning the divine unity, wisdom, and power which are to be found in their writings, they approach S. Paul: if we consider other expressions, and above all, their practice, it is in the main that other word of Socrates, Worship according to the law of your country. In the doctrine attributed to him both by Xenophon and Aristotle, that he identified virtue and prudence, and believed that no man is willingly wicked, but only out of ignorance, we have a proof which can scarcely be exceeded in force how entirely the standing-point of Socrates was that above attributed to the Greek mind in general, that of a religion according to nature. It ignores in the most emphatic because in the most unconscious way the inclination to evil in man. The relation between God and man is simply that of greater and less. There is a physical affinity and a numerical proportion between that mighty nature which is ruled through all its length and breadth by a pervading reason, and the portion of it contained in man’s body and soul.(358)

It is curious to imagine what would have been the effect of the life and the death of Socrates had he lived and died just as he did with one sole exception, that Plato and Xenophon had not been his disciples. Socrates wrote nothing: oral discourse was his sole instrument of teaching. When its last memories had faded away, we might have known as little of him as we really know of Pythagoras. He would still indeed have been the greatest of heathen names because he died for his moral convictions. This might have been all, and it would have been very much. This, however, was not to be. In Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_ we have an accurate life-portrait of the man, while in the great genius of Plato we have the application of what may be termed Socratic principles to the formation of an ethical, logical, and physical system. The Megaric(359) school of Euclides, and Phædo’s school of Elis, took indeed one side of his doctrine, the dialectic, for their special subject of inquiry; the Cynic school of Antisthenes and the Cyrenian school of Aristippus another side, the ethical: but it was Plato who embraced in one comprehensive scheme the whole grasp of his master’s thought, as well as the collective approved elements of former systems.

The principle of Socrates concerning the union of knowledge and virtue invited his followers to work out a system of dialectics and ethics.(360) And further the dialectic process of induction and definition, which Aristotle tells us that Socrates introduced, was made by Plato the foundation of his philosophy.(361) Its central point is the doctrine of Ideas. Now the Platonic Idea is the object of the conception. As a single object becomes known by its representation, so the Idea becomes known by its conception. It is not the essence as such which dwells in many similar individual objects, but that essence as represented perfectly in its kind, unalterably, in unity, independence, and self-existence. The Idea points to the general, but is represented by Plato as an original image of the individual projected as it were outside of time and space. Conceive individuals which have a similar being, or belong to the same class, delivered from the limits of time and space, of materiality and individual imperfections, and so reduced to that unity which is the groundwork of their existence, and such unity is the Platonic Idea. The highest Idea is the Idea of the good,(362) which is as it were the sun in the realm of Ideas, viewed as the first cause of being and of knowledge. Plato seems to identify it with the highest godhead. Thus the method to attain the knowledge of Ideas is dialectics, which comprehend the double path of rising to the general and returning from the general to the particular.

As to the generation(363) of the doctrine of Ideas, Aristotle states it as the common product of the doctrine of Heracleitus that everything which meets the senses is subject to change and flux, and of the Socratic view of the conception. From Socrates Plato learnt that when once this is rightly formed, it can be held fast unchangeably: he would not then apply it to anything which meets the senses, but inferred that there must be other beings which are the objects of the knowledge acquired by the conception, and these objects he named Ideas. The filiation,(364) then, between Socrates and Plato is this: Socrates was the first to require that all knowledge and all moral dealing should proceed from the knowing of the conception, and endeavoured to execute this by his inductive process, while with Plato the same conviction formed the starting-point of a philosophical system: so that what with Socrates was simply a rule of scientific procedure was carried out by Plato to an objective intuition, and when Socrates said, Only the knowing of the conception is true knowledge, Plato added, Only the being of the conception is true being.

Thus in Plato we have a man of great original mind attempting with this instrument of induction and definition to form a scheme of the universe, which divides under his hand into a triple aspect of ethics, physics, and dialectics.(365) No doubt his main intention was to offer to the cultured and reflective few,—that inner circle to which his teaching and his writings were directed,—a philosophy which should serve them as a religion,(366) which should fill up the gaps and remove the anomalies of the existing worship, purifying and restoring it, while it preserved amity with it notwithstanding. Such being his intention, the manner in which he treats the doctrine of the Divine Being is the more remarkable. Instead of basing his philosophy upon it, and showing its relation as a part of his system of physics, ethics, and dialectics, he speaks of it frequently indeed, but always incidentally.(367) It is not so with other doctrines which he has at heart. Three of his finest dialogues are dedicated to setting forth as many aspects of his doctrine as to the soul’s immortality; the Phædrus treats of its preëxistence; the Banquet of the influence of immortality on the relations of the present life; the Phædo of death as the means of a happy futurity.(368) But no one collects together and lucidly exhibits his view of the divine nature. This has to be picked out of his writings, a bit here, and another there, and put together by the student. No doubt he felt, as he has said,(369) “with regard to the Maker and the Father of this universe it is hard to find him out, and when you have found him impossible to describe him to all men.” He was intimately convinced that the great mass of mankind was quite unsuited to receive the conception of the Divine Being which he had formed. But I believe there to have been another reason of greater force with him for his not having presented as a whole his conclusions on this central doctrine of all. It was not merely that the fate of his master Socrates was ever before him,(370) but the singular position which he held with regard to the established worship. He wished to correct, not to destroy it; he wished to reduce it to monotheism, and yet to preserve polytheism. The two are bound together in his mind. If then his writings be carefully analysed, and every reference to the Supreme Being put together into a sort of mosaic,(371) we should find the following picture. The everlasting essence of things, with which Philosophy deals, is the highest object. Ideas are those everlasting gods after the pattern of which the world and all things which are in it are formed, and the Godhead, taken absolutely, is not distinct from the highest Idea. Plato sets forth the causality of Ideas and the sway of reason in the world together with the impossibility to explain what is generated save by an Ingenerate, motion save by a soul, and the ordered disposition of the world, working out a purpose, save by reason; and in all which he declares respecting the Godhead, the Idea of Good, of the highest metaphysical and ethical perfection, is his guiding-point. As this highest Idea stands at the head of all Ideas as the cause of all being and knowledge, so the one everlasting invisible God, the Former and Father of all things, stands at the head of all the gods, alike difficult to find and to describe. Just as the above Idea is distinguished by the conception of the Good, so Plato selects goodness as God’s most essential attribute. It is on this ground that he maintains the Godhead to be absolutely good and upright, and its operation to be merely good and upright; against the old notion which imputed envy to it, and derived evil from it. Again, in opposition to the fabulous appearances of the gods, it is from the goodness of the Godhead that he deduces its unchangeableness, inasmuch as what is perfect can neither be changed by anything else, nor change itself, and so become worse. He adds, the Godhead will never show itself to men other than it is, since all falsehood is foreign to it; inasmuch as to falsehood in the properest sense, that is, ignorance and self-deception, it is not exposed, and has no need to deceive others. He extols the divine perfection, to which no beauty and no excellence is wanting; the divine power, which embraces everything and can do everything which is possible, that is, which does not involve a moral or a metaphysical contradiction: for instance, it is impossible for God to wish to change Himself, for evil to cease, and from the doctrine respecting the forming of the world and matter it is clear that the divine activity in producing is limited by the nature of the finite.(372) He extols the divine wisdom which disposes all things to its purpose; its omniscience, which nothing escapes; its justice, which leaves no transgression unpunished and no virtue unrewarded; its goodness, which makes the best provision for all. He rejects, as notions taken from man, not merely the Godhead’s having a body, but likewise all those tales which impute passions, quarrels, crimes of every kind to the gods. He declares them to be exalted above pleasure and displeasure, to be untouched by any evil; and is full of moral indignation at the thought that they allow themselves to be won over, or rather corrupted, by prayers and offerings. Moreover he shows that everything is ordered and ruled by Divine Providence, which extends over the least as well as the greatest, and as regards men is especially convinced that they are a carefully-tended possession of the Godhead, and that all things must issue in good to those who through virtue gain its goodwill. If the unequal and unjust distribution of men’s lot is objected, his reply is, that virtue carries its reward and wickedness its punishment immediately in itself; further, that both are sure of a complete retribution in the after-world, while already in this life as a rule in the end the upright goes not without recognition and thanks, nor the transgressor without universal hate and detestation. As to the general fact that there is evil in the world, it seemed to him so inevitable that it was not requisite expressly to defend the Godhead on that score. All these statements carry us back at last to one and the same point. It is the Idea of the Good by applying which Plato produces so exalted a doctrine of God. In the like spirit he will consider only the moral intention in acts of worship. He alone can please the Godhead who is like it, and he alone is like it who is pious, wise, and just. The gods cannot receive the gifts of the wicked; the virtuous alone have a right to invoke them. God is goodness; and he who bears not the image of that goodness in himself stands in no communion with him.

The doctrine here set forth is the highest ever reached by purely heathen Greek speculation; but we must remember that it is not thus collected into a head by Plato himself, still less is it put into such a relation to his physical, his logical, and his moral system as such a doctrine ought to bear. A man who had reached so lofty a conviction of the divine unity and moral perfection as this must, if he would make it effectual, give to it in his system the place which it really holds in the world. If there be indeed a Maker and Father of the universe by whom all things consist, all that Plato taught should have been subordinated to this its first principle, and the sum of his teaching to men should have been to set him forth. So far is this from the position which Plato really took, that in his ideal Republic no other religion but the traditional Greek religion was to subsist; he changes nothing in the very forms of the polytheistic worship; he refers the decision on many points to the Delphic Apollo.(373) And when in his last book on the Laws(374) he sets forth the notion of a second best state, one which can be realised under actual circumstances, wherein he gives a mass of practical directions for the needs of the lower classes, religion in its purely polytheistic dress is the soul of his teaching, the groundwork of his structure. Men are to worship first of all the Olympian gods, and the gods who are the patrons of the city; then the gods of the earth; then demons and heroes; and all these in the traditional way by offerings, prayers, and vows. All good in public life is their gift; everything is to be consecrated to them; to violate their shrines is the greatest of crimes. In fact, after all, but few of mankind are capable of understanding or receiving the philosophic God. However imperfect(375) the popular belief in the gods may be, and however unsatisfactory to him the allegorical interpretations of it then so much in vogue, yet is it in Plato’s conviction indispensable to all those who have not had a scientific education. Men must first be taught with lies, and then with the truth: the popular fables and the worship grounded on them is therefore for all the _first_, and for most the _only_ form of religion.(376) The philosopher, it is true, sees deeper and despises them in his heart. Thus the monotheist in speculation is a polytheist in practice: as Socrates, the model and exemplar of Greek philosophy, with his dying breath, so Plato, its most inspired teacher with all the voice of his authority, sacrificed the cock to Æsculapius.

But moreover, this supreme God, who has to be disinterred from the recesses of the Platonic teaching, and conciliated with the worship practically paid to a host of subordinate gods, is in Plato’s conception neither absolutely personal nor free, and he is not the Creator but only the Former of the world. In Plato’s theory there is coeternal with him a first matter, without form or quality, which exists independently of him; which moreover is inhabited and swayed to and fro in disorderly heavings by a sort of soul, the token of that dark Necessity(377) which rises behind the figures of gods and men in Greek poetry. It is indeed the work of the divine reason to come down upon this shapeless mass and its inborn mover, and out of them to construct the world-soul, with which and with his own reason he forms and maintains and vivifies the ordered universe. As he is by this operation the Father of the universe, so this First Matter is “the Mother of all generation,” the condition of the existence of corporeal things. But in this original matter lies the origin of evil, which, perpetuated in the corporeal structure of man, can indeed be tamed and schooled, and in a certain degree subdued, but never can be exterminated by the divine reason. The power, the wisdom, and the providence of Plato’s God are encountered by this check, which stands eternally over against the Demiurgos in his world-forming activity, which limits his freedom, and impairs his personality, while it excludes the whole idea of creation. Students of this philosophy(378) attempt to associate together his highest Idea, that of the Good, with the supreme God, of whom he speaks with personal attributes, as the just, the wise, the true, the good, but admit that Plato has not attempted to solve the problem how the Idea, which by his hypothesis as it is the highest is also the most general, is at the same time the most individual, the one personal God. In fact, it is admitted that he fails—together with all the ancient Greek writers—in the strict conception of personality.(379) As according to him individual beings are what they are only by participation of something higher, it is no wonder that in describing that one Reason, the Idea of the Good, the highest and most general of all, which forms and governs the world, his language oscillates between the personal and the impersonal. But if his philosophical reasons tend one way, it must be allowed that the heart and affections of the man, and the whole moral sense of the teacher, decide another.

The ethical system of Plato appears to be a strict deduction from his physical. As man in his view is a compound of matter, vivified by a portion of the world-soul, which the divine reason takes and unites with a portion of itself, so his virtues correspond to this threefold composition.(380) For man has an immortal portion in his soul, the reason, the godlike, in him, but the divine reason, in joining a portion of the world-soul with matter, invests it with two mortal parts, one the courageous, or manly, the other, sensuous desire, or the female element, having their seat in the body’s activity. To these answer respectively the virtues of prudence, of courage, and of temperance, while justice comes in afterwards as a right ordering of the three, or as prudence applied to practice. The seat of all irregular desires, of all evil, in fact, is to Plato in this union of the soul with matter. As this matter is primordial, evil in its origin does not indeed spring from God, but it is beyond his power: it springs from that state of things which existed before the action of God on chaos:(381) it must stand over against the good: and of necessity encompasses this mortal nature and the place of its habitation: and to man it lies not in the perverted use of free-will, but in his original composition, wherein his body is its seat. But in this triple composition of man Plato does not seem to have clearly apprehended a human personality at all: he has not even attempted to explain(382) in what the unity of the soul consists besides these its three portions, two of which, being tied to the body, drop off at death.

It is in the practice of Plato as a teacher that we can most fitly consider the conception which the Greek philosophers in general had concerning the method of studying and imparting philosophy altogether. It was about the fortieth year of his life, and twelve years after the death of his master Socrates, that Plato, having already travelled widely, settled at Athens.(383) Here he purchased a fixed residence at the Academia, which became from that time a philosophical school for study, conversation, oral lectures, and friendly meetings. Here he drew around him an inner circle of scholars to whom he addressed his unwritten doctrines,(384) especially his doctrine of Ideas, the key to his whole system, according as they were able, after preparation, to receive them: and here besides he gave lectures which might be attended not only by that inner circle of choice disciples but by studious persons in general. This residence of Plato served for three hundred years, from 387 before Christ until the siege of Athens by Sylla in 87, as the centre of Plato’s philosophy viewed as a teaching power. Now in this Plato had before him the great example of Pythagoras, in the first age of Greek philosophy. Concerning the doctrines of that philosopher we know little with certainty,(385) but all are agreed as to his manner of teaching them. His attempt was to establish a community which should carry in its bosom, propagate, and perpetuate a doctrine in morals, politics, religion, and philosophy. His whole procedure was by oral teaching, for he left not a word written. It was in fact a religious order of life which he first practised in his own person, and then endeavoured to communicate to others. Into this order trial for everyone preceded reception.(386) His scholars were for a long period required to practise silent obedience and unconditional submission to the authority of the doctrine delivered to them. Severe daily examination was imposed upon all. The publishing of his doctrine, especially his speculation as to the nature of God, was strictly forbidden. The upright life, the learning which then could only be attained by personal inquiry, the persuasiveness of Pythagoras, were together so effective that he succeeded in establishing such a community both in Crotona and in other cities of Southern Italy. It was persecuted and suffered continual disasters, but still this Pythagorean community, bearing on its founder’s doctrines and manner of life, existed for several generations after his death, during which many of the most distinguished Greeks belonged to it. Such was the poet Æschylus, whose mind was formed on Pythagorean principles. In Plato’s time the Pythagorean Archytas was at the head of the state of Tarentum: and Plato himself was largely imbued with Pythagorean tenets.(387)

Now Plato, it is true, did not imitate the political part of the Pythagorean scheme. It was only upon paper that he set forth his ideal republic. But the same conception as to the manner of communicating a doctrine lay in his mind as in that of Pythagoras. He did not look to writing as a primary instrument of communicating thought. He places it himself in a relation of dependence upon oral dialectic instruction. It is only to serve as a reminder of what had been otherwise taught: and, moreover, it is quite subordinate to his first postulate, the earnestness of a life devoted to inquiry and education.(388) These principles are set forth with great lucidity in his dialogue Phædrus, where he introduces by the mouth of Socrates the Egyptian god Thoth, the inventor of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, drafts and dice, and also of letters. With these inventions in his hand the god approached the then king of Egypt Thamous, recommending him to make them known to his subjects. But Thamous was by no means inclined to receive these inventions unconditionally: he praises or blames them, as he judges of them, and at last he comes to the letters.(389) “This discovery,” says Thoth, “O king, will make the Egyptians wiser, and improve their memory. It is of sovereign effect in both things.” “Most ingenious Thoth,” replies the king, “one man is made to give birth to art, and another to judge what good or what harm it will do to those who use it. And now you, being the father of letters, out of natural affection assert of them that which is just the contrary to their real office. For they will breed forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn them, who will slight the faculty of memory, inasmuch as relying on what is written externally in the types of others they do not exercise remembrance by an inward act of their own. The spell you have found is good not for fixing in the mind, but for reminding. And as to wisdom, you offer to those who learn them not its reality but its appearance. For they will indeed hear much, but as this will be without teaching, they will seem to have many minds but generally no judgment, and be hard to comprehend, having become wiseacres instead of wise men. O Socrates, says Phædrus, you are one who can easily tell stories from Egypt or any other country. My dear Phædrus, it was in the temple of Dodonean Jupiter that they made the first oracular words to proceed from an oak. The men of that day, not being wise as you young men, were satisfied in their simplicity to listen to an oak or a rock, if they only spoke the truth. Perhaps it makes a difference to you who the speaker is, and from what country; for you do not look merely whether it is true or not. Your rebuke, says Phædrus, is just, and what the Theban says about letters seems to me to be right. Well then, says Socrates, the man who thinks to leave an art in writing, and he also who receives it as being, when written, something clear and certain, must be very simple, and be really ignorant of Ammon’s oracle, when he thinks that written words are something more than a reminder to one who knows the subject of the matters about which they are written. Exactly so, Socrates. For surely, Phædrus, writing shares this troublesome characteristic with painting. The productions of painting stand there as if they were alive, but if you ask them a question, preserve a solemn silence. Just so it is with writing. You may think that they speak with some meaning, but if you ask what that meaning is, there they stand with just the same word in their mouth. When once a thing is written, it is tossed over and over by all who take it in, whether it concerns them or not, and is unable to speak, or to be silent with the proper persons. And if it is maltreated or slandered, it wants its father always to help it, for it can neither defend nor help itself. What you say now is also very true indeed. But, says Socrates, can we not find another word, this one’s lawful brother, and see the process by which it arises, and how much better and abler than the former it is? What word is this, and how does it arise? The word which is written on the disciple’s soul together with true knowledge, which is able to defend itself, and knows how to speak and to be silent with the proper persons. You mean the living and animated word of one who has knowledge, whereof the written word may justly be called the shadow.(390) I mean that indeed. Tell me now; an intelligent gardener, who had seeds that he cared for, and wished to bear fruit, would he hurry with them in summer to the gardens of Adonis, plant them, and rejoice to see them springing up with a fair show in a week? or would he do this for amusement, and in festival-time, if he did it at all, but when he took pains would use his gardener’s art, sow them at the fitting time, and be too glad if, seven months afterwards, he saw them coming to perfection? Certainly, Socrates, that would be the difference between his sport and his earnest. Shall we, then, say that he who possesses the science of justice, honour, and goodness, has less intelligence than the gardener for his own seeds? Surely not. He will not, then, hurry to write them with a pen in ink with words, which cannot on the one hand help themselves with speech, and on the other hand are incapable to teach the truth sufficiently. I should think he would not. He will not; but as for these written flower-borders, he will sow and write them, when he does write them, for amusement, storing up reminders for himself, should he come to a forgetful old age, and for every one who pursues the same footsteps, and he will take pleasure in seeing them springing up tenderly: so when other men fall to other amusements, lubricating themselves at the banquet, or other such things, he will take his amusement here. In this, Socrates, you would substitute a very seemly amusement for a bad one, when the man who can play with words sports upon the subject of justice and suchlike. So it is, my dear Phædrus, but it is, I take it, earnest in a far higher sense, when one, using the art of dialectics, takes hold of a fitting soul, and plants and sows with true knowledge words able to help both themselves and their planter, not fruitless, but having seed, whence growing up in a succession of minds they will from age to age produce an immortal line,(391) and will make their possessor happy as far as man can be.”

In these words, put in his master’s mouth, Plato, if I mistake not, has given us the whole purpose of his life, and the manner in which he hoped to accomplish it. It was in the Academia that he sought to establish that immortal line of living words, who should speak as the possessors of real knowledge upon justice, truth, and goodness. He is describing a living culture by living teachers, of whom he aspired to be himself the first; and the written dialogues which he has left are in his intention, and so far as they enter at all upon the higher points of his doctrine,(392) reminders of that which he had set forth to chosen auditors by word of mouth, the word which was able, as he says, to explain and defend itself, and to answer a question put to it.

This, then, was the relation existing in the mind of the prince of Greek philosophers between the written and the spoken word as instruments in imparting true knowledge, or science. The written word he regarded as subsidiary, as presupposing instruction by question and answer, and still more the moral discipline of a life earnestly given up to the study of the subjects in question. Without this a writing by itself was like a figure in a picture, which makes an impression on the beholder, but when asked if it is the true impression keeps, as he says, a solemn face, and makes no reply; which is the same to all, the earnest and the indifferent, and cannot treat them according to their merits. He laughs at the notion of such a writing being by itself any more than sport. And let us remember that he who said this has enshrined his own philosophy in the most finished specimens of dramatic dialogues which the Greek mind produced. These are the statements of the man who wrote Greek in his countrymen’s opinion as Jupiter would have spoken it. There are, then, in Plato’s mind three constituents of teaching: first, the choice of fitting subjects for it, and what is therein implied, the imposition of a moral discipline upon them regulating their life to the end in view; secondly, the master’s oral instruction conveying gradually and with authority to minds so prepared the doctrine to be received; and thirdly, the committing such doctrine to writing, which shall serve to _remind_ the disciple of what he has been taught. And this was what he carried into effect.(393) He fixed himself at the Academia, over which he presided for forty years: he was succeeded therein by his nephew Speusippus, who held his chair for eight years; Xenocrates followed in the same post during twenty-five years; and the line was continued afterwards by Polemon, Crantor, Crates, Arcesilaus, and others in uninterrupted series. Plato thus established the method of Greek philosophy, and his example herein was followed by Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus.

His great disciple Aristotle came to him at the age of seventeen, and studied under him during twenty years. At a later age, when, after completing the education of Alexander, he fixed himself in middle life at Athens, he set up there a second philosophical school at the Lyceum on its eastern side, and on the model of that of Plato. Attached to this museum were a portico, a hall with seats, one seat especially for the lecturing professor, a garden, and a walk, together with a residence, all permanently appropriated to the teacher and the process of instruction.(394) When Aristotle died in the year 322 B.C., his friend Theophrastus presided over his school during five and thirty years, and the line continued on. We learn that there were periodical meetings, convivial and conversational, among the members both of the Academic and Peripatetic schools, and laws for their regulation established by Xenocrates and Aristotle. It was in the shady walks of his garden that this great philosopher taught by word of mouth the choicer circle of his disciples: for the more general hearers he gave lectures sitting.(395) His instructions were divided into two classes, those which he gave on rhetoric, the art of discussion, knowledge of civil matters, and suchlike, which were exoteric, and those which touched the finer and more subtle points of philosophy, which were termed acroatic, as addressed to the ears.(396) Again, his dialogues he called “public” or “issued” discourses, things made over to the general public, in distinction from what was not so disclosed, but reserved for the philosopher’s own meditation, to be subsequently communicated either by oral lecture or by writing to the private circle of scholars who gave themselves up entirely to his philosophy. These Aristotle called “philosophical” or “teaching” discourses, proceeding, that is, from the principles proper to each branch of learning, and not from the opinions of the lecturer. These latter were termed “tentative,” as belonging to the exoteric. Simplicius, one of the latest writers on Greek philosophy, defines exoteric as “the common, and what concludes by arguments which are matter of opinion;” and Philoponus, as discourses “not of strict proof, and not directed to lawfully-begotten hearers,” that is, trained and prepared, “but to the public, and springing from probabilities.”(397) Thus in Aristotle, the largest in grasp of mind, the most observant of facts, the most accurate in definition among Greek writers, the philosopher in fact and “master of those who know,”(398) for all future ages, we find the same three constituents of teaching as in Plato, and in the same order of importance: first, hearers selected for their natural aptitude, and then submitted to a moral discipline and a common life; secondly, the instruction of such hearers by word of mouth, question and answer, discussion and cross-examination; and lastly, the committing of doctrines to writing. With him too his written philosophical discourses were _reminders_ of his oral teaching, which they presupposed and required as a key to their full meaning, and especially for the comprehension of their harmony as a system.

The order of teaching which I have thus sketched as being followed in practice by the two most eminent Greek philosophers belonged to them all. They had no other conception respecting the method of communicating a doctrine efficiently to men. None of them considered philosophy merely or chiefly as a literature: none of them attributed to a book the power of teaching it. Their conception was, a master and his scholars, and the living together, the moral subordination and discipline which this involved. This school of education or training in knowledge(399) was their primary thought: the committing of their doctrine to writing was both subsequent and secondary. Their writings were intended, as Plato says, to be recollections(400) of their teaching, and failed to convey the real knowledge to those who had not the stamp of this teaching impressed on their minds.

As Plato made a local habitation for himself and his doctrine in the Academia, and Aristotle in the Lyceum, so Zeno, the founder of the third great philosophic school, took up his abode in the Portico at Athens, a court surrounded with pillars, and adorned with the paintings of Polygnotus. Here he began to teach about 308 B.C., and here he continued teaching as some say for fifty-eight years. It is said that the character of Socrates, as drawn by Xenophon and by Plato in his _Apology_, filled him with astonishment and admiration:(401) and the Stoics afterwards drew their doctrine of the wise man, which they endeavoured to image out and realise, from that living example of it,(402) an instance of the connection of doctrine with person which is full of interest and suggestion. Zeno was succeeded in his office of teaching by Cleanthes, and Cleanthes by Chrysippus and a long line of teachers, who for several hundred years continued, with variations, the same general doctrine of ethics.

Just in the same way and at the same time Zeno’s great rival Epicurus fixed the seat of his school in the Garden at Athens, which thenceforth became for thirty-six years the central point of the teacher’s activity. About him gathered a circle of friends whom similarity of principles and the enjoyment of cultivated intercourse bound together with unusual intimacy. It speaks for the special character of his philosophy that from the beginning women and even hetæræ formed a part of this society. But he succeeded during this long period of teaching in impressing upon his school so strong a character that it is recognised without essential change during hundreds of years.(403)

We should do injustice to the character and the work of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus, the founders of the four great schools of Greek philosophy, if we did not take into account what was in their day no doubt of greater influence than their writings, that is, their function as teachers, their oral teaching itself, and those fundamental principles of philosophic education which lay at the bottom of it. Plato has left us very little of doctrine put out in his own name. He is not a speaker in his dialogues. He puts what he would say in the mouth of others, especially of Socrates. He tells us that he has purposely done this in order that men might not say, here is Plato’s philosophy:(404) and the reason of this was that he utterly distrusted his own or any man’s power to disclose to others such a system in a set form of words. It is, then, the more remarkable that he has said in his own person what were his most settled convictions as to intercourse by word of mouth, and continuous written discourse, viewed as instruments for attaining and communicating truth. He expresses his absolute disbelief that men can reach true conceptions by their being set forth in the immutable form of writing. It is a far other and more difficult work which has to be accomplished. In a word, not even aptness for learning and memory will give the power to see the truth as to virtue and vice to one who is not kin to the subject; nor, again, this kinship without such aptitude and memory: but when both are joined, then out of living together, after much time,(405) by the continual friction of name, definition, acts of sight and perception, by thought and meditation, the hearing and answering the objections of others, the process of mutual cross-examination discharged without envy or jealousy, and with sincere love of the truth, a sudden flash of fire kindles in the mind, and nourishes itself, disclosing the knowledge required. Thus it is that prudence and intelligence on each subject, shining out in this beam of light, go forward as far as man may reach. The view here propounded, if reflected upon, will convey to us what the living work first of Pythagoras, and then of Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and their successors, was. Both the conception indeed and the realisation seem to have been most complete in Pythagoras. The philosophic living together was its basis. Instruction was oral. Learning was effected by the collision of mind with mind, by objection and answer. It was the Socratic principle inherited from these schools that nothing passed muster for knowledge which did not stand the test of cross-examination:(406) but an unchangeable text was utterly unsuited, according to Plato, to debate the question under treatment in such fashion, while on the other hand the mind of the reader was passive in receiving the impression which it conveyed. On neither side therefore did the conditions of knowledge exist, but this was reached under the circumstances of personal intercourse above mentioned, and might be recalled in the written form to the minds of those who had thus first attained it.

Down to the end of Greek philosophy the same conception as to the method of teaching prevailed. Ammonius Sakkas, the founder of Neoplatonism, delivered his doctrine only by word of mouth, which his chief disciples, Erennius, Origines, and Plotinus, engaged not to make public.(407) It was when one of them, Erennius, had broken this promise, that another, Plotinus, after delivering lectures at Rome, wrote down his philosophy; but his scheme was to carry it out by collecting his disciples together in one city, and thus realising Plato’s republic.