INTRODUCTION

1. THE PLATONIC DRAMA

THE Platonic Dialogue may be broadly described as a Drama in which speech is the action,1 and Socrates and his companions are the actors. The speech in which the action consists is mainly that of argumentative conversation in which, although Socrates or another may take a leading part, yet everybody has his say. The conversation or argument is always about matters which can be profitably discussed—that is, matters on which men form workaday opinions which discussion may show to be right or wrong, wholly or in part.

But it is only mainly that the Platonic Drama consists in argumentative conversation. It contains another element, the " Myth, which, though not ostensibly present in some Dialogues, is so striking in others, some of them the greatest, that we are compelled to regard it, equally with the argumentative conversation, as essential to Plato's philosophical style.

The Myth is a fanciful tale, sometimes traditional, sometimes newly invented, with which Socrates or some other interlocutor interrupts or concludes the argumentative conversation in which the movement of the Drama mainly consists.

The object of this work is to examine the examples of the Platonic Myth in order to discover its function in the organism of the Platonic Drama. That Myth is an organic part of the Platonic Drama, not an added ornament, is a point about which the experienced reader of Plato can have no doubt. The Sophists probably ornamented their discourses and made

1 Cf. Cratylus, 387 Β, τὸ λέγειν μία τίς ἐστι τῶν πράξεων.

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them more interesting by the insertion of illustrative fables or allegories like the Choice of Hercules; but the Platonic Myth is not illustrative-it is not Allegory rendering pictorially results already obtained by argument. Of this the experienced reader of Plato is well aware. He feels when the brisk debate is silenced for a while, and Socrates or another great interlocutor opens his mouth in Myth, that the movement of the Philosophic Drama is not arrested, but is being sustained, at a crisis, on another plane. The Myth bursts in upon the Dialogue with a revelation of something new and strange; the narrow, matterof-fact, workaday experience, which the argumentative conversation puts in evidence, is suddenly flooded, as it were, and transfused by the inrush of a vast experience, as from another world" Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground."

It is in the mouth of the dramatic Socrates that Plato puts those Myths best fitted to fill us with wondering surmise and make us think-the so-called Eschatological Myths. It may be that here Plato represents a trait of the real Socrates. Socrates' method of argumentative conversation, it is fully recognised, determined the dialogue-form of the Platonic writings. It may be that also the introduction of Myths, at least of the Eschatological Myths-Myths distinguished by great impressiveness of matter and style-was suggested to Plato by something in the real Socrates. The personal influence of Socrates worked as a vital principle in Plato's mind, and bodied itself forth in Socratic dramas-plays in which, as I have said, Socrates and his companions are the actors, and philosophical discourse is the action. Any element, then, in the Platonic writings which the experienced reader finds of great dramatic moment-and the Myth is such-is likely to represent some striking trait in the person and influence of the real Socrates. In the Myths put into his mouth Socrates prophesies-sets forth, by the aid of imaginative language, the fundamental conditions of conduct and knowledge. He "prophesies," and his hearers listen spellbound. That Socrates possessed what is now called mesmeric influence is very likely. The comparison of his influence (in ordinary debate) with that

1 See Grote's Plato, ii. 38, note e.

of the electric fish, ἡ θαλαττία νάρκη, may be thought to imply as much; while his familiar spirit, or daiμóviov, must be taken as evidence of "abnormality." I venture to offer the suggestion, for what it may be worth, that the Platonic Myths, in manner if not always in matter, represent (directly as spoken by "Socrates" himself, indirectly as spoken by "Timaeus," Critias," "Protagoras," "the Eleatic Stranger") certain impressive passages in the conversation of the real Socrates, when he held his hearers spellbound by the magnetism of his face and speech. Be this as it may, Myth distinguished once for all by weight and ring from Allegory3 is an essential element of Plato's philosophical style; and his philosophy cannot be understood apart from it.*

The main plan of this work is to append to the English translation of each of the Platonic Myths observations and notes relating specially to that Myth itself. Each Myth is a unique work of art, and must be dealt with individually in its own context. But I hope that the general effect of these special observations will be to leave the reader, at the end, with an adequate impression of the significance of Myth, first in Plato's philosophy, and then in present-day thought.

Before beginning, however, to carry out the main plan of

1 Meno, 80 A.

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2 Hegel (Gesch. d. Philos. ii. 94-101) regards the daubvior as a "magnetic " phenomenon, physiologically explicable. C. R. Volquardsen (Das Dämonium des Socrates und seine Interpreten, Kiel, 1862) holds (pp. 58 and 71) that it cannot be explained by any law of anthropology or physiology, but is a singular phenomenon. Zeller (Socrates and the Socratic Schools, pp. 72-79, Eng. Transl.) concludes that it is "a vague apprehension of some good or ill result following on certain actions.'

F. W. H. Myers (Human Personality, ii. 95 ff.) cites the daubriov of Socrates as an example of wise automatism; of the possibility that the messages which are conveyed to the supraliminal mind from subliminal strata of the personality -whether as sounds, as sights, or as movements-may sometimes come from far beneath the realm of dream and confusion,-from some self whose monitions convey to us a wisdom profounder than we know" (p. 100). Against L. F. Lélut (Du Démon de Socrate, 1856), who argues from the records of the dauóvior in Xenophon and Plato that Socrates was insane, Myers contends (p. 95) that "it is now possible to give a truer explanation; to place these old records in juxtaposition with more instructive parallels; and to show that the messages which Socrates received were only advanced examples of a process which, if supernormal, is not abnormal, and which characterises that form of intelligence which we describe as genius." Dr. H. Jackson's article on "the dauóvior onμelor of Socrates" in the Journal of Philology (vol. x. pp. 232 ff.) may also be referred to, and Kühner's Prolegomena (v. de Socratis dapoviy) to his edition of Xen. Mem. 3 See infra, p. 15 and pp. 230 ff.

4 Zeller's Plato, pp. 159-163 (Eng. Transl.), may be read in connection with this and preceding paragraphs.

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this work, I will offer some preliminary remarks on μvloλoyía, or story-telling in general, in the course of which I hope to indicate what I conceive to be the ground of Plato's methodical employment of it in philosophy.

2. GENERAL REMARKS ON μvoλoyía, OR STORY-TELLING. MYTH DISTINGUISHED FROM ALLEGORY

It is a profound remark that Imagination rather than Reason makes the primary difference between man and brute.1 The brute lives mainly among the immediate impressions of

sense.

The after-images of these impressions are evidently of little account in his life, being feeble and evanescent.2

But man lives a double life-not only, with the brute, in the narrow world of present sensations, but also in a wide world of his own, where his mind is continually visited and re-visited by crowds of vivid, though often grotesque and grotesquely combined, images of past sense-impressions. It is in this wide i wonder-world of waking dream, which encompasses the narrow familiar world of his present sense-impressions, that man begins his human career. It is here that the savage and the child begin to acquire what the brute has no such opportunity of beginning to acquire, and never does acquire, a sense of vast environment and of the long course of time. This waking dream, which constitutes so great a part of man's childish experience, probably owes much of its content to the dreams of sleep. Some of the lower animals, as well as man, seem to have dreams in sleep. But man, we may suppose, differs from

"In the lower stages of civilisation Imagination, more than Reason, distinguishes men from the animals; and to banish art would be to banish thought, to banish language, to banish the expression of all truth."-Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, Introduction to the Republic, p. clxiv.

2 "At the proper season these birds (swallows) seem all day long to be impressed with the desire to migrate; their habits change; they become restless, are noisy, and congregate in flocks. Whilst the mother-bird is feeding, or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct is probably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is the more persistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her young ones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct has ceased to act, what an agony of remorse the bird would feel if, from being endowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image constantly passing through her mind of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from cold and hunger" (Darwin, The Descent of Man, part i. chap. iv. p. 173, ed. 1901).

And he can

the lower animals 'in remembering his dreams. tell them, and improve upon them in the telling, whether they be dreams of sleep or waking dreams—indeed, he must tell them. They are so vivid that they will out; he cannot keep them to himself; and, besides, the telling of them gives what may be called secondary expression and relief to certain emotions and feelings, which in the case of the brute find only primary expression in acts within the world of sense-impressions. In the case of man, fear, confidence, anger, love, hate, curiosity, wonder, find not only primary expression in acts within the world of sense-experience, but also secondary and, as it were, dramatic expression in the adventures and doings of the dream-world, all circumstantially told. It is impossible to over-estimate the early debt which man owes to his love of story-telling thus inspired and supplied with material. In telling and listening to stories about the dream-world, man, in short, learns to think. The dream-world of the primitive story-teller and his audience is a large, easy world, in which they can move about freely as they like-in which they are rid of the hard facts of the world of sense-experience, and can practise their powers without hindrance on tractable material, calling up images and combining them at will, as the story goes on, and thus educating, in play, the capacity which, afterwards applied to the explanation of the world of sense-experience, appears as the faculty of constructive thought. The first essays of this faculty are the so-called Aetiological Myths, which attempt to construct a connection between the world of sense-experience and the dream-world-which take the dreamworld as the context which explains the world of senseexperience. Judged by the standard of positive science the matter of the context supplied from the dream-world by the mythopoeic fancy is in itself, of course, worthless; but the mind is enlarged by the mere contemplation of it; the habit of looking for a context in which to read the sense-given is acquired, and matter satisfactory to science is easily received when it afterwards presents itself. The conceptual context of science thus gradually comes to occupy the place once filled by the fantastical context of the dream-world. But this is not the only respect in which the mythopoeic fancy serves the evelopment of man. If it prepares the way for the exercise