scepticism in science-will bring to naught all those who have not believed, in their childhood, that God is a Person, good and true. In their childhood: May they, will they, give up afterwards the belief in his Personality when it has done its work? Most of them, continuing to live in "sense and imagination,”—albeit, under good guidance, useful lives,-will have no difficulty in retaining the belief of their childhood; but a few will become so "logical" that they will hardly be able to retain it. It is in relation to the needs of these latter that we ought to consider the Myths setting forth the idea of a Personal God and the correlate idea of Personal Immortality of the Soul, which Plato has put into his Dialogues. In these Myths they have representations of what they once believed as fact without questioning. They see the world of childhood -that dream-world which was once so real-put on the stage for them by a great Maker of Mysteries and Miracles. But why represent it? That the continuity of their lives may be brought home to them-that they may be led to sympathise with what they were, and, sympathising, to realise that what they now are-is due to what they were. It is because the continuity of life is lost sight of, that religious conviction and scientific thought are brought into opposition. The scientific thinker, looking back over his life, is apt to divide it sharply into the time during which he believed what is not true, and the time during which he has known the truth. Thus to fail in sympathy with his own childhood, and with the happy condition of the majority of men and women, and with the feelings which may yet return to comfort him when the hour of his death draws near, betokens, Plato would say, a serious flaw in a man's " philosophy of life." The man abstracts "the present time" from its setting in his whole life. He plucks from its stem the "knowledge of truth," and thinks that it still lives. The "knowledge of truth," Plato would tell ùs, does not come except to the man whose character has been formed and understanding guided, in childhood and youth, by unquestioning faith in the goodness and truthfulness of a Personal God. And this faith he must reverence all his life through, looking back to his childhood and forward to his death. To speak of this faith as false, and a thing of the past, is what no Thinker will care to do. The Thinker-" the spectator of all time and all existence "-does not cut up the organic unity of his life into the abstractions of Past, and Present, and Future-Past which is non-existent, Present which is a mere imaginary point, Future which is nonexistent. His life is all one Present, concrete, continuous, indivisible1 The man who cuts up life into Past, Present, and Future, does so with the intent of appropriating something for his own private use. The Thinker, who sees Life clearly and sees it whole, will regard religious belief and scientific knowledge as both means for the sake of conduct, or corporate action. He will show his devotion to this end by setting his face steadily against individualism in the pursuit of knowledge and the holding of belief-against the scientific specialist's ideal of the indefinite accumulation of knowledge-against the priest's doctrine of the opus operatum, effectual in securing the only true good, as it is thought, the private profit of the individual-hardest of all, against the refined form of individualism by which he is himself tempted, the individualism of the schoolman, or doctrinaire, who withdraws himself within his logical faculty, and pleases himself there with the construction of “a System”ῥήματα ἐξεπίτηδες ἀλλήλοις ὁμοιωμένα. In the Allegory2 of the Cave, Plato shows, us the victory of the Thinker over individualism. The Thinker has come out at last into the daylight, and, when he might stay in it always and enjoy it, he will not stay, but returns into the Cave to pay his τpopeia-the debt which he owes for the education which he has received-by carrying on, in the training of a new generation, the régime to which he owes it that he has seen the light. "We shall compel him to return," Plato says, and he adds, "We do him no injustice." The compulsion is moral, not external.3 It is the obligation which the perfectly 1 He realises in an eminent degree what seems to be the experience of us all; for our present' is always an extended time," not an indivisible point: see Bosanquet's Logic, i. 351. 2 and Myth; see infra, p. 252. 3 Rep. 520. educated man feels laid upon him by his consciousness of his inherence in the continuous life of his city-the obligation of seeing to it that his own generation shall have worthy successors. How important, then, to keep alive in the elders sympathy with the faith in which it is necessary they should bring up the young generation! Consciousness of what they owe as тpopeîa, and earnest desire to pass the State on to worthy successors, will do most to keep alive this sympathy; but, on the other hand, the logical understanding will always be reminding them that "in truth" (though perhaps not "in practice") the doctrines of science and the convictions of the religious consciousness are "incompatible"; and it is here, I take it, with regard to this ȧopía started by abstract thought, that Plato hopes for good from Myth, as from some great Ritual at which thinkers may assist and feel that there are mysteries which the scientific understanding cannot fathom. That the scientific understanding, then, working within its own region, must reject the idea of a Personal God, was, I take it, as clear to Plato as it was to Aristotle. Would Plato, then, say that the proposition "There is a Personal God" is not true? He would say that what children are to be taught to believe" that once upon a time God or the Gods did this thing or that" is not true as historical fact. Where historical or scientific fact is concerned, the scientific understanding is within its own region, and is competent to say "it is true" or "it is not true." But the scientific understanding cannot be allowed to criticise its own foundation-that which all the faculties of the living man, the scientific understanding itself included, take for granted-" that it is good to go on living the human life into which I have been born; and that it is worth while employing my faculties carefully in the conduct of my life, for they do not deceive me." This fundamental assumption of Life," It is good to live, and my faculties are trustworthy," Plato throws into the proposition, "There is a Personal God, good and true, who keeps me in all my ways." He wishes children to take this proposition literally. He knows that abstract thinkers will say that "it is not true"; but he is satisfied if the men, whose parts and training have made them influential in their generation, read as it to mean-things happen as if they were ordered by a Personal God, good and true. To this as if this recognition of "Personal God" as "Regulative Principle "-they are helped so I take Plato to think-by two agencies, of which Myth, breaking in upon the logic of the Dialogue with the representation of the religious experience of childhood, and of venerable old age like that of Cephalus, is one. The other agency is Ritual. This is recognised by Plato as very important; and Myth may be taken to be its literary counterpart. One of the most significant things in the Republic is the deference paid to Delphi. Philosophy-that is, the Constitution of the Platonic State-indeed lays down" canons of orthodoxy," the τύποι περὶ θεολογίας determines the religious dogma ; but the ritual is to be determined from without, by Delphi.3 Religion is to be at once rational and traditional-at once reformed, and conservative of catholic use. Plato was not in a position to realise the difficulty involved in this arrangement. It is a modern discovery, that ritual reacts on dogma, and in some cases even creates it. Plato seems to take for granted that the pure religious dogma of his State will not in time be affected by the priestly ritual. At any rate, he assumes that his State, as the civil head of a united Hellas, and Delphi, as the ecclesiastical head, will, like Empire and Church in Dante's De Monarchia, be in sympathy with each other. It is plain, then, from the place-if I have rightly indicated the place—which Plato assigns to Ritual in daily life, and to 1 "A rite is an assemblage of symbols, grouped round a religious idea or a religious act, intended to enhance its solemn character or develop its meaningjust as a myth is the grouping of mythic elements associated under a dramatic form. Thus we have the rite of baptism, funeral rites, sacrificial rites.' Réville, Prolegomènes de l'Histoire des Religions (Eng. Transl. by Squire), p. 110. 2 Rep. 379 A. * Rep. 427 Β, Τί οὖν, ἔφη, ἔτι ἂν ἡμῖν λοιπὸν τῆς νομοθεσίας εἴη; καὶ ἐγὼ εἶπον ὅτι Ἡμῖν μὲν οὐδέν, τῷ μέντοι ̓Απόλλωνι τῷ ἐν Δελφοῖς τά τε μέγιστα καὶ κάλλιστα καὶ πρῶτα τῶν νομοθετημάτων. Τὰ ποῖα ; ἢ δ' ὅς. Ἱερῶν τε ἱδρύσεις καὶ θυσίαι καὶ ἄλλαι θεῶν τε καὶ δαιμόνων καὶ ἡρώων θεραπείαι, τελευτησάντων τε αὖ θῆκαι καὶ ὅσα τοῖς ἐκεῖ δεῖ ὑπηρετοῦντας ἵλεως αὐτοὺς ἔχειν. τὰ γὰρ δὴ τοιαῦτα οὔτ ̓ ἐπιστάμεθα ἡμεῖς οἰκίζοντές τε πόλιν οὐδενὶ ἄλλῳ πεισόμεθα, ἐὰν νοῦν ἔχωμεν, οὐδὲ χρησόμεθα ἐξηγητῇ, ἀλλ ̓ ἢ τῷ πατρίῳ· οὗτος γὰρ δήπου ὁ θεὸς περὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις πάτριος ἐξηγητὴς ἐν μέσῳ τῆς γῆς ἐπὶ τοῦ ὀμφαλοῦ καθήμενος ἐξηγεῖται. See infra, pp. 454-5, where it is argued that Plato's KaλTOMs is misunderstood (as in part by Aristotle) if its constitution is taken to be drawn for an isolated municipality, and not for an Empire-city (like the antediluvian Athens of the Atlantis Myth), under which, as civil head (Delphi being the ecclesiastical head), Hellas should be united against barbarians for the propagation of liberty and culture in the world. Myth in philosophical literature,' what place he assigns to the scientific understanding. The scientific understanding, which is only a small part, and a late developed part, of the whole man, as related to his whole environment, is apt, chiefly because it has the gift of speech and can explain itself, while our deeper laid faculties are dumb, to flatter itself with the conceit that it is the measure of all things-that what is to it inconceivable is impossible. It cannot conceive the Part ruling the Whole: therefore it says that the proposition "the World is ruled by a Personal God" is not true. Plato has, so far as I can gather, two answers to this pronouncement of the scientific understanding. The first is, "Life would come to naught if we acted as if the scientific understanding were right in denying the existence of a Personal God"; and he trusts to Ritual and Myth (among other agencies) to help men to feel this. His attitude here is very like Spinoza's : Deum nullam aliam sui cognitionem ab hominibus per prophetas petere, quam cognitionem divinae suae justitiae et caritatis, hoc est, talia Dei attributa, quae homines certa vivendi ratione imitari possunt; quod quidem Jeremias expressissimis verbis docet (22. 15, 16). . . . Evangelica doctrina nihil praeter simplicem fidem continet; nempe Deo credere eumque revereri, sive, quod idem est, Deo obedire. . . . Sequitur denique fidem non tam requirere vera, quam pia dogmata, hoc est, talia, quae animum ad obedientiam movent. . . . Fidem non tam veritatem, quam pietatem exigere." Plato's other answer goes deeper. It consists in showing that the "Whole," or all-embracing Good, cannot be grasped scientifically, but must be seen imperfectly in a similitude.3 The logical understanding, as represented by Glaucon, not satisfied with knowing what the all-embracing Good is like, wishes to know what it is-as if it were an object presented to knowledge. But the Good is not an object presented to knowledge. It is the condition of knowledge. It is likel 1 Or rather, in philosophical conversation; for the Platonic Dialogues, after all, with their written discussions and myths, are only offered as models to be followed in actual conversation-actual conversation being essential to the continued life of Philosophy. 3 Rep. 506. 2 Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-politicus, chapters 13 and 14. |