Let us not think that this is "mysticism "-" the scholasticism of the heart"-such as we find afterwards in the NeoPlatonic teaching. On the contrary, it is to be regarded as evidence of the non-scholastic, concrete view which Plato takes of Philosophy. Philosophy to Plato is not copía-a mere system of ascertained truth-but strictly pλo oopía ἔρως, child of πόρος and ἀπορία, as the parentage is set forth in Diotima's Myth in the Symposium: Philosophy is not what finally satisfies-or surfeits-the intellect it is the organic play of all the human powers and functions--it is Human Life, equipped for its continual struggle, eager and hopeful, and successful in proportion to its hope-its hope being naturally visualised in dreams of a future state. These dreams the human race will never outgrow, so the Platonist holds, will never ultimately cast aside as untrue; for the young will believe in them in every generation, and the weary and bereaved will cherish them, and men of geniuspoets, philosophers, saints—will always rise up to represent them anew. The Philosophy of an epoch must be largely judged by the way in which it “ represents" them. How much virtue Plato finds in "representation "-philosophical and poetical-may be gathered from the fact that, while he attaches the highest value to the Orphic doctrine which he himself borrows for philosophical use, he ascribes the worst moral influence to the actual teaching of the Orphic priests.2

I said that it is reasonable to suppose that Plato was affected by the agnosticism which prevailed in Athens, and felt, notwithstanding some "proofs" which he ventured to offer, serious doubt as to whether even the bare fact of conscious immortality is matter of scientific knowledge. It may

1 "Der Mysticismus ist die Scholastik des Herzens, die Dialektik des Gefühls," Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa: Maximen und Reflexionen: dritte Abtheilung.

2 Republic, 364 E. In Aristoph. Ranae, 159, and Demosth. de Corona, 259 ff., the practices of the agyrtae, or itinerant celebrants of initiatory rites, are held up to ridicule.

3 But see Zeller's Plato, p. 408 (Eng. Transl.). Zeller holds that the fact of immortality and future retribution was regarded by Plato as established beyond doubt; only details were uncertain. Couturat (de Pl. Myth. p. 112) thinks that the whole doctrine of immortality in Plato is "mythic." Jowett (Introduction to Phaedo) remarks that in proportion as Plato succeeds in substituting a philosophical for a mythological treatment of the immortality of the Soul, the contemplation of ideas under the form of eternity' takes the place of past and

now be added, however, that his sympathy with the personal religion, in which many took refuge from agnosticism, was profound, and moved him to deal, in Myth openly borrowed from the religious teachers, with subjects which Aristotle left alone. Official (as distinct from personal) religion offers no safe refuge from agnosticism. Recognising this, Plato took the matter of his strictly Eschatological Myths almost entirely from the Orphic teaching, which presented religion as a way of salvation which all, without distinction of sex or civil status, simply as human beings, of their own free choice, can enter upon and pursue.1

future states of existence." Mr. Adam (Rep. vol. ii. p. 456) says, "that soul is immortal, Plato is firmly convinced: transmigration he regards as probable, to say the least."

See Gardner and Jevons' Manual of Greek Antiquities, Book iii. ch. iv. "Orgiastic Cults," and Jevons' Introduction to the History of Religion, pp. 327374. "The leading characteristic," says Dr. Jevons (o.c. p. 339), "of the revival in the sixth century B.C., both in the Semitic area, and as transplanted into Greece, is a reaction against the gift theory of sacrifice, and a reversion to the older sacramental conception of the offering and the sacrificial meal as affording actual communion with the God whose flesh and blood were consumed by his worshippers. . . . The unifying efficacy (p. 331) of the sacrificial meal made it possible to form a circle of worshippers. We have the principle of voluntary religious associations which were open to all. Membership did not depend on birth, but was constituted by partaking in the divine life and blood of the sacred animal." These voluntary associations formed for religious purposes-thiasi or erani-"differed (p. 335) from the cult of the national gods in that all-women, foreigners, slaves-were admitted, not merely members of the State." In short, initiatio (μinois) took the place of civitas as the title of admission to religious privileges.

Prof. Gardner closes the chapter on 'Orgiastic Cults," referred to above, with the following words :-"In several respects the thiasi were precursors of Christianity, and opened the door by which it entered. If they belonged to a lower intellectual level than the best religion of Greece, and were full of vulgarity and imposture, they yet had in them certain elements of progress, and had something in common with the future as well as the past history of mankind. All properly Hellenic religion was a tribal thing, belonged to the state and the race, did not proselytise, nor even admit foreign converts; and so when the barriers which divided cities were pulled down it sank and decayed. The cultus of Sabazius or of Cybele was, at least, not tribal: it sought converts among all ranks, and having found them, placed them on a level before the God. Slaves and women were admitted to membership and to office. The idea of a common humanity, scarcely admitted by Greek philosophers before the age of the Stoics, found a hold among these despised sectaries, who learned to believe that men of low birth and foreign extraction might be in divine matters superior to the wealthy and the educated. In return for this great lesson we may pardon them much folly and much superstition." Prof. Gardner pursues this subject further in his Exploratio Evangelica, pp. 325 ff., chapter on "Christianity and the thiasi"; see also Grote's History of Greece, part i. ch. i. (vol. i. 19, 20, ed. 1862).

8. SUMMARY OF INTRODUCTORY OBSERVATIONS IN THE FORM OF A DEFENCE OF PLATO AGAINST A CHARGE BROUGHT AGAINST HIM BY KANT.

Let me close this Introduction with a summing up of its meaning, in the form of a defence of Plato against a charge brought by Kant in a well-known passage.1

The light dove, in free flight cleaving the air and feeling its resistance, might imagine that in airless space she would fare better. Even so Plato left the world of sense, because it sets so narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured beyond, on the wings of the Ideas, into the empty space of the pure understanding. He did not see that, with all his effort, he made no way.

Here Kant brings against Plato the charge of "transcendental use, or rather, misuse, of the Categories of the Understanding "of supposing super-sensible objects, Soul, Cosmos, God, answering to "Ideas" which have no adequate objects in a possible experience, and then determining these supposed objects by means of conceptions-the Categoriesthe application of which ought to be restricted to sensible objects.

In bringing this charge, Kant seems to me to ignore the function which Myth performs in the Platonic philosophy. I submit that the objects which Plato supposes for the "Transcendental Ideas " are imaginatively constructed by him, not presented as objects capable of determination by scientific categories-that Plato, by means of the plainly nonscientific language of Myth, guards against the illusions which Kant guards against by means of "criticism"; or, to put it otherwise, that Plato's employment of Myth, when he deals with the ideals of Soul, Cosmos, and God-Kant's three Ideas of Reason-shows that his attitude is "critical," not dogmatic. The part which the Myth of Er plays in the philosophic action of the Republic may be taken as a specimen of the evidence for this view of Plato's attitude. There is nothing in the Republic, to my mind, so significant as the

1 Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Einleitung, § 3.

2 See Krit. d. rein. Vern.: die transc. Dialectik, Einleitung, 1.
Ideas" in Kant's sense, not the Platonic idéal.

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deep sympathy of its ending with the mood of its beginning. It begins with the Hope of the aged Cephalus—“ The sweet hope which guides the wayward thought of mortal man;" it ends with the great Myth in which this Hope is visualised. As his Hope is sufficient for Cephalus, who retires to his devotions from the company of the debaters, so is the Representation of it-the Vision of Er-given as sufficient, in the end, for the debaters themselves. To attempt to rationalise here to give speculative reasons for such a Hope, or against it, would be to forget that it is the foundation of all our special faculties, including the faculty of scientific explanation; and that science can neither explain away, nor corroborate, its own foundation. The attempt which is made in the latter half of the Tenth Book of the Republic to place the natural expression of this Hope-man's belief in the immortality of the Soul-on a "scientific basis,"to determine " Soul" by means of "Categories of the Understanding," I regard as intended by the great philosopher-artist to lead up to the Myth of Er, and heighten its effect by contrast to give the reader of the Republic a vivid sense of the futility of rationalism in a region where Hope confirms itself by "vision splendid." 1

Of course, I do not deny that passages may be found in which the Ideas of Soul, Cosmos, and God are treated by Plato, without Mythology, as having objects to be determined under the scientific categories of Cause and Substance-e.g. in Phaedrus, 245 E, and Phaedo, 105 c, we seem to have

1 "The argument about immortality (Rep. 608 c to 612A)," says R. L. Nettleship (Philosophical Lectures and Remains, ii. 355), "does not seem to be in any organic connection either with what actually precedes or with what actually follows it. It would seem that Plato had two plans in his mind as to how to finish the Republic." I cannot think that Plato had two plaus in his mind. The argument for the immortality of the Soul in Rep. 608 c-612A is formally so inconclusive that it is impossible to suppose Plato to be serious with it. The equivocal use of the term Death (Bávaros) in the argument could not have escaped a logician so acute as Plato. The argument is, that, as Injustice (adikla), the proper vice (kakia) of the Soul, does not cause "Death" (@ávaros), in the sense of the separation of Soul from body, nothing else can ever cause "Death (Bávaros), now, however, to be understood in the sense of the annihilation of the disembodied Soul itself.

2 Grote (Plato, ii. 190) has an interesting note on Phaedo, 105 c,-"Nemesius, the Christian bishop of Emesa, declares that the proofs given by Plato of the immortality of the Soul are knotty and difficult to understand, such as even adepts in philosophical study can hardly follow. His own belief in it rests upon the inspiration of the Christian Scriptures (Nemesius, de Nat. Homin. c. 2, p. 55, ed. 1565)."

serious scientific argument for the immortality of the Soulindeed, it would be astonishing if there were no such passages, for the distinction between Category and Idea, as understood by Kant, is not explicit in Plato's mind; but I submit that such passages fade into insignificance by the side of the great Myths. We are safe in saying at least that, if sometimes Plato lapses into a logical treatment of these ideals, or "Ideas of Reason," he is well aware that there is another way of treating them,—in Myth,-and that he shows a marked preference for this latter way.

The Platonic Myth, then, effects its purpose-the regulation of Transcendental Feeling for the service of conduct and science-in two ways which we may profitably distinguish, while admitting that the distinction between them was not explicit in Plato's mind: (1) by representing ideals, and (2) by tracing faculties back to their origins. In following either of these two ways the Platonic Myth carries us away to "Places" and "Times" which are, indeed, beyond the ken of sense or science, but yet are felt to be involved in the concrete "Here" and "Now" of ordinary experience.

The order in which I propose to take the Myths scarcely amounts to an arrangement of them in two classes according as the object is, either to represent ideals, or trace faculties to their origins, for most of them do both. I shall begin, however, with the Myths which are mainly concerned with_ideals, and shall end with those which are mainly concerned with origins. The former, it may be remarked, answer roughly to the so-called Eschatological Myths-but only roughly, for some of them are more properly described as Aetiological; the latter answer to the Aetiological Myths.

I shall take first the Myths in the Phaedo and Gorgias, and the Myth of Er in the Republic, strictly "Eschatological" Myths, which present the Soul as immortal, free within limits set by ȧváyкn, and responsible, under God's government, throughout all its transmigrations.

Next I shall take the Myths-mainly "Aetiological "—in the Politicus, Fourth Book of the Laws, and Protagoras, where God's creative agency, and government of the Cosmos and Man, are broadly treated, and presented as consistent with the existence of evil.