Initiation into Philosophy | Page 7

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 his more especially philosophical ideas. To Aristotle, as to Plato, but more precisely, man is composed of soul and body. The body is composed of organs, a well-made piece of mechanism; the soul is its final purpose; the body, so to speak, results in the soul, but, in turn, the soul acts on the body, and is in it not its end but its means of acting upon things, and the whole forms a full and continuous harmony. The faculties of the soul are its divers aspects, and its divers methods of acting; for the soul is one and indivisible. Reason is the soul considered as being able to conceive what is most general, and in consequence it forms within us an intermediary between ourselves and God. God is unique; He is eternal; from all eternity He has given motion to matter. He is purely spiritual, but all is material save Him, and He has not, as Plato would have it, _ideas_--immaterial living personifications--residing in His bosom. Here may be perceived, in a certain sense, progress, from Plato to Aristotle, towards monotheism; the Olympus of ideas in Plato was still a polytheism, a spiritual polytheism certainly,