THE ETHICS OF PLATO.

RISTOTLE was the first to grasp the great truth that in

Philosophy and Science, as in Statecraft, our motto must be "divide et impera;" he mapped out the field of knowledge into what are still recognized as its main departments, and Philosophy has not been slow to recognize his merits. The thought of Plato, on the other hand, is permeated with the idea of the essential unity of all truth, an idea which in these days of specialisation is perhaps even more valuable. The Aristotelian method, when carried to excess, leads to the turning of more or less arbitrary lines of division into impassable gulfs, across which Metaphysics and Ethics, Science and Theology, stretch wistful hands in vain; while the Platonic has often caused men to ignore fundamental differences, and to hide great gaps in their systems by the use of vague generalisations, leaping to first principles from a few isolated instances, forgetting that Plato himself has insisted as strongly as Bacon on the importance of the media axiomata (e.g. Philebus 17 A).

No part of the philosophy of Aristotle has been more fully accepted as the embodiment of the Greek ideal in its fullest and most complete form than his Ethics; but this work, in spite of extraordinary flashes of insight, in the main represents rather the limitations of the Hellenic spirit than those permanent and universal features which give the Greek ideal its value. In his grasp of the problems involved, and in his conception of the ethical ideal he falls far short of Plato, though it is sometimes a little difficult to separate the ethical speculations of the latter from the æsthetic and metaphysical ideas in which they are enwrapped. This entanglement, far from being a defect in Plato's art, is a necessary consequence of his unique manner of presenting his thought, and of his strong conviction of the essential unity of all truth; we must be careful lest in considering his ethics by themselves we act, in his own words, like unskilful carvers, and instead of following the natural joints, tear and mangle the helpless bird; yet, if in thus separating them from the body of his work, we are careful not to forget the fundamental unity of his thought, it may not be without interest to

inquire what were the conclusions of the greatest of Greek thinkers on subjects which are still of vital importance.

It is the great glory of Christian Ethics to have grasped firmly the kindred ideas that one of the main functions of the science is to investigate the nature of evil, and that the investigation of this problem concerns not only the sage, but also the ordinary man, the slave and the publican as well as the saint and the philosopher. In both these points it was anticipated by Plato. No other philosopher has ever touched life at points so many and so various. Tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, of noble descent, gifted with perfect health, a dashing cavalry leader, the friend of statesmen and of kings, in his youth the writer of delicate amoretti, some of them of very doubtful morality, he had mixed with the best society of the Hellenic world, had seen its apparent beauty, its dalliance and its wit, had known to the full its real grossness, and its inability to satisfy the cravings of man's deeper nature. Yet as the friend and companion of Socrates he had been present while that great teacher conversed with the traders and the carpenters, yes, and with the harlots, in the market place, and had doubtless shared in the reproach so often directed against his master that he consorted with low and vulgar persons, and was quite regardless of that sense of his own dignity which characterized the well-bred Athenian gentlemen; in this intercourse he had seen that the lower classes were as debased as the upper, their ideals as low and as sensual, and without any touch of that aesthetic refinement which the rich threw over their immorality, under the influence of which "vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." Gradually out of this varied intercourse there dawned on Plato the conviction, a conviction which widened until it took possession of his whole nature as completely as ever it did of that of Hebrew Prophet or mediæval Saint, that at the root of this misery, this sordid "striving and striving and ending in nothing" lay a single cause, which took many forms, but which was always of the same essential nature, and which we can only describe in a word which would have been meaningless to the ordinary Greek, as sin. The bright joyous nature of the typical Athenian gentleman never attained to the thought that the carnal mind is enmity against God, that the natural man must be crushed and broken and transformed

ere the new man, at harmony with himself and with his God, can be made manifest. To this conception Plato rose, and the great difference between his Ethics and that of Aristotle is that while the latter looks upon a good life as a scientific, or rather as an artistic achievement of which the artist has some reason to be proud, Plato considers the best we can do as fading to nothingness in the light of heaven; the good man, though for a moment he may feel a pardonable pride as he gazes down upon the vulgar throng," tearing each other in their slime " below, must yet, as he thinks of the perfect pattern laid up eternal in the heavens, count himself after all but an unprofitable servant.

When man has attained to the consciousness of imperfection, both in himself and in the world, he is apt to take council of despair. "I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there, and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there." "The just man perisheth in his righteousness, and the wicked man prolongeth his life in his wickedness." "I looked for righteousness and behold oppression, for judgment and behold a cry." "For the wickedness that is on earth exceeds far the good that is in it." (Plato, Repub. 379 C.) Looking into his own heart, he sees sin and evil desires, "the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," and a faint flickering desire to do better which knows not how to realize itself. Whence comes this evil in the life of man, this baneful power which throttles his best endeavours? The answer of Plato is in effect one which has been given by many men in many ages, by the early Christian and by the modern Hindoo, and which will continue to be given so long as there exist tender hearted, sensitive mystics who, revolting against the tyranny of the flesh, try to free the pure spirit from its thraldom, and to take the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. The evil lies in

matter.

"For I know that in my flesh dwelleth no good thing," says St. Paul. The mind of man, the spectator of all time and of all existence (Repub. 486 A) is enclosed in this body of sin and death, and in the latter all things evil and base have their origin. "But if, my dear Glaucon, we desire to see the soul as it is in very truth, we must not look upon it maimed by its association with the body and by other evils, as now we see it, but as it is

when purified and as we can behold it with the eye of reason. -For now when we look upon it, we are like those who caught sight of the sea-god Glaucus, whose original nature could with difficulty be discerned, since of the old members of his body some had been broken off and others crushed, and he was all battered by the waves, while new accretions had adhered to him, shells and seaweed and stones, so that he looked more like some evil beast than as he was in reality. So the soul, as now we see it, is disfigured by countless ills. We should fix our attention upon its love of reason, upon its strivings and upon the companionships for which its kinship to the divine and immortal and eternal impels it to seek; we should look on it as it would be if it strove with its whole being after such fellowship, and by the impulse thence derived brought itself up out of the sea in which it now is, and disencumbered itself of the stones and shells which now adhere to it, and of that uncouth multitude of earthy and rocky substances with which it is now overgrown, because of those earthy banquetings which are deemed so felicitous (Repub. x. 611 C. sq). To say that the many ills to which man is heir, the sins which so easily beset him, are due to the association of his soul with the body which mars and stains all its beauty, is a conclusion against which many of our natural instincts revolt. Matter, even if the source of ill, is also the source of much good; through it the indwelling spirit can manifest itself, can mould it into shapes of beauty and of grace which are visible emanations of the God-head, God manifest to sense. This body of death can be so beautiful and pure that we seem forced to agree with Swinburne when he cries passionately over the body of his dead mistress :

"Her mouth an alms-giving,

The glory of her garments charity,

The beauty of her bosom a good deed.

And all her body was more virtuous

Than souls of women fashioned otherwise."

And yet even beauty, radiant with the light from heaven, can lead astray; sin lieth ever at the door :

"medio de fonte leporum

surgit amari aliquid, atque ipsis in floribus angat."

History affords us all too many examples of the nameless orgies in which the worship of physical beauty culminates :"Nowhere in any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervour of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions and receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the world has known this was the flower-time of the Eolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a by-word for corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed into the gorgeousness of art, burning their envelope of words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no expression of the divine in human life could be extracted."* The Greek of the decadence has fully revealed himself in the Anthology, and the spectacle is not a pleasant one. The Italian of the Renascence, as portrayed in the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, however fascinating to the unregenerate mind, cannot be considered as embodying a satisfactory ideal. In our revolt from the sensuality to which this worship of the physical leads, we fly to the other extreme and condemn even innocent beauty as sinful, and matter as the root of all evil. Thence arise austerities from which in the end there is a recoil, the austerities of St. Simeon Stylites, of St. Jerome and the monks of the Thebaid, or of the modern Indian fakir. Sometimes the same view leads to very different results. We cannot get away from our bodies; the taint of the physical is over our most spiritual actions; but if our bodies are inherently evil, then so long as we live our actions must also be so, whether we be rakes or anchorites. Now sensuality is undoubtedly pleasant, and by invincible logic no more sinful than any other line of action. Thus, as the history of the Albigenses shows, the doctrine of the sinfulness of matter ends logically not in self-denial, but in the grossest forms of excess. From this conclusion our better nature revolts; there is a recoil to saner ideals, and the weary cycle begins anew, until, like Plato in the Meno, we despair of human aid, and wait with impatience or with resignation for "the spark from heaven to fall."

*J. A. SYMONDS: Lyric Poets of Greece.