Initiation into Philosophy | Page 7

the soul and as to rewards and penalties beyond
the grave. He is neither in opposition nor formally favourable. We feel
that he wishes to believe in it rather than that he is sure about it. He
says that "it is a fine wager to make"; which means that even should we
lose, it is better to believe in this possible gain than to disbelieve.
Further, it is legitimate to conclude--both from certain passages in the
Laws and from the beautiful theory of Plato on the punishment which is
an expiation, and on the expiation which is medicinal to the soul and
consequently highly desirable--that Plato often inclined strongly
towards the doctrine of posthumous penalties and rewards, which
presupposes the immortality of the soul.

PLATONIC LOVE.--Platonic love, about which there has been so
much talk and on which, consequently, we must say a word, at least to
define it, is one of the applications of his moral system. As in the case
of all other things, the idea of love is in God. There it exists in absolute
purity, without any mixture of the idea of pleasure, since pleasure is
essentially ephemeral and perishable. Love in God consists simply in
the impassioned contemplation of beauty (physical and moral); we
shall resemble God if we love beauty precisely in this way, without
excitement or agitation of the senses.
POLITICS.--One of the originalities in Plato is that he busies himself
with politics--that is, that he makes politics a part of philosophy, which
had barely been thought of before him (I say barely, because
Pythagoras was a legislator), but which has ever since been taken into
consideration. Plato is aristocratic, no doubt because his thought is
generally such, independently of circumstances, also, perhaps, because
he attributed the great misfortunes of his country which he witnessed to
the Athenian democracy; then yet again, perhaps, because that
Athenian democracy had been violently hostile and sometimes cruel to
philosophers, and more especially to his own master. According to
Plato, just as man has three souls, or if it be preferred, three centres of
activity, which govern him--intelligence in the head, courage in the
heart, and appetite in the bowels--even so the city is composed of three
classes: wise and learned men at the top, the warriors below, and the
artisans and slaves lower still. The wise men will govern: accordingly
the nations will never be happy save when philosophers are kings, or
when kings are philosophers. The warriors will fight to defend the city,
never as aggressors. They will form a caste--poor, stern to itself, and
redoubtable. They will have no individual possessions; everything will
be in common, houses, furniture, weapons, wives even, and children.
The people, finally, living in strict equality, either by equal partition of
land, or on land cultivated in common, will be strictly maintained in
probity, honesty, austerity, morality, sobriety, and submissiveness. All
arts, except military music and war dances, will be eliminated from the
city. She needs neither poets nor painters not yet musicians, who
corrupt morals by softening them, and by making all feel the secret
pang of voluptuousness. All theories, whether aristocratic or tending

more or less to communism, are derived from the politics of Plato
either by being evolved from them or by harking back to them.
THE MASTER OF THE IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.--Plato is for all
thinkers, even for his opponents, the greatest name in human
philosophy. He is the supreme authority of the idealistic
philosophy--that is, of all philosophy which believes that ideas govern
the world, and that the world is progressing towards a perfection which
is somewhere and which directs and attracts it. For those even who are
not of his school, Plato is the most prodigious of all the thinkers who
have united psychological wisdom, dialectical strength, the power of
abstraction and creative imagination, which last in him attains to the
marvellous.


CHAPTER V
ARISTOTLE
A Man of Encyclopedic Learning; as Philosopher, more especially
Moralist and Logician.
ARISTOTLE, PUPIL OF PLATO.--Aristotle of Stagira was a pupil of
Plato, and he remembered it, as the best pupils do as a rule, in order to
oppose him. For some years he was tutor to Alexander, son of Philip,
the future Alexander the Great. He taught long at Athens. After the
death of Alexander, being the target in his turn of the eternal accusation
of impiety, he was forced to retire to Chalcis, where he died. Aristotle
is, before all else, a learned man. He desired to embrace the whole of
the knowledge of his time, which was then possible by dint of
prodigious effort, and he succeeded. His works, countless in number,
are the record of his knowledge. They are the summa of all the sciences
of his epoch. Here we have only to occupy ourselves with