Plato and Platonism | Page 4

of Motion: 5-26 2. Plato and the Doctrine of
Rest: 27-50 3. Plato and the Doctrine of Number: 51-74 4. Plato and
Socrates: 75-98 5. Plato and the Sophists: 99-123 6. The Genius of
Plato: 124-149 7. The Doctrine of Plato-- I. The Theory of Ideas:
150-173 II. Dialectic: 174-196 8. Lacedaemon: 197-234 9. The
Republic: 235-266 10. Plato's Aesthetics: 267-283, end


CHAPTER 1
: PLATO AND THE DOCTRINE OF MOTION
[5] WITH the world of intellectual production, as with that of organic
generation, nature makes no sudden starts. Natura nihil facit per saltum;
and in the history of philosophy there are no absolute beginnings. Fix
where we may the origin of this or that doctrine or idea, the doctrine of
"reminiscence," for instance, or of "the perpetual flux," the theory of
"induction," or the philosophic view of things generally, the specialist
will still be able to find us some earlier anticipation of that doctrine,
that mental tendency. The most elementary act of mental analysis takes
time to do; the most rudimentary sort of speculative knowledge,
abstractions so simple that we can hardly conceive the human mind
without them, must grow, and with difficulty. Philosophy itself, mental
and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the poetry that
preceded it. A powerful generalisation thrown into some salient phrase,
such as [6] that of Heraclitus--"Panta rhei,"+ all things fleet away--may
startle a particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because
all along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half-
developed instincts of the human mind itself.
Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of

philosophy; and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or
turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or the Eleatics,
to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical literature. His
encyclopaedic view of the whole domain of knowledge is more than a
mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for compass and
power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's achievement
may well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morning of the mind's
history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was already
almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of
sects, the claims of rival schools. Language and the processes of
thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed
sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.
In the Timaeus, dealing with the origin of the universe he figures less
as the author of a new theory, than as already an eclectic critic of older
ones, himself somewhat perplexed by theory and counter-theory. And
as we find there a [7] sort of storehouse of all physical theories, so in
reading the Parmenides we might think that all metaphysical questions
whatever had already passed through the mind of Plato. Some of the
results of patient earlier thinkers, even then dead and gone, are of the
structure of his philosophy. They are everywhere in it, not as the stray
carved corner of some older edifice, to be found here or there amid the
new, but rather like minute relics of earlier organic life in the very
stone he builds with. The central and most intimate principles of his
teaching challenge us to go back beyond them, not merely to his own
immediate, somewhat enigmatic master--to Socrates, who survives
chiefly in his pages--but to various precedent schools of speculative
thought, in Greece, in Ionia, in Italy; beyond these into that age of
poetry, in which the first efforts of philosophic apprehension had
hardly understood themselves; beyond that unconscious philosophy,
again, to certain constitutional tendencies, persuasions, forecasts of the
intellect itself, such as had given birth, it would seem, to thoughts akin
to Plato's in the older civilisations of India and of Egypt, as they still
exercise their authority over ourselves.
The thoughts of Plato, like the language he has to use (we find it so
again, in turn, with those predecessors of his, when we pass from him
to them) are covered with the traces of previous labour and have had
their earlier [8] proprietors. If at times we become aware in reading him

of certain anticipations of modern knowledge, we are also quite
obviously among the relics of an older, a poetic or half-visionary world.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his
wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new:
or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the
seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual
threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every
particle of which has already lived and died many times over. Nothing
but the life-giving principle of cohesion