Plato and Platonism | Page 5

is new; the new perspective,
the resultant complexion, the expressiveness which familiar thoughts
attain by novel juxtaposition. In other words, the form is new. But then,
in the creation of philosophical literature, as in all other products of art,
form, in the full signification of that word, is everything, and the mere
matter is nothing.
There are three different ways in which the criticism of philosophic, of
all speculative opinion whatever, may be conducted. The doctrines of
Plato's Republic, for instance, may be regarded as so much truth or
falsehood, to be accepted or rejected as such by the student of to-day.
That is the dogmatic method of criticism; judging every product of
human thought, however alien [9] or distant from one's self, by its
congruity with the assumptions of Bacon or Spinoza, of Mill or Hegel,
according to the mental preference of the particular critic. There is,
secondly, the more generous, eclectic or syncretic method, which aims
at a selection from contending schools of the various grains of truth
dispersed among them. It is the method which has prevailed in periods
of large reading but with little inceptive force of their own, like that of
the Alexandrian Neo-Platonism in the third century, or the Neo-
Platonism of Florence in the fifteenth. Its natural defect is in the
tendency to misrepresent the true character of the doctrine it professes
to explain, that it may harmonise thus the better with the other elements
of a pre-conceived system.
Dogmatic and eclectic criticism alike have in our own century, under
the influence of Hegel and his predominant theory of the ever-changing
"Time-spirit" or Zeit-geist, given way to a third method of criticism, the
historic method, which bids us replace the doctrine, or the system, we
are busy with, or such an ancient monument of philosophic thought as
The Republic, as far as possible in the group of conditions, intellectual,

social, material, amid which it was actually produced, if we would
really understand it. That ages have their genius as well as the
individual; that in every age there is a peculiar ensemble of conditions
which determines [10] a common character in every product of that age,
in business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion and manners,
in men's very faces; that nothing man has projected from himself is
really intelligible except at its own date, and from its proper point of
view in the never-resting "secular process"; the solidarity of philosophy,
of the intellectual life, with common or general history; that what it
behoves the student of philosophic systems to cultivate is the "historic
sense": by force of these convictions many a normal, or at first sight
abnormal, phase of speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us.
As the strangely twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on
an English lawn, is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the
contending forces of the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth,
to have been the creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts; so,
beliefs the most fantastic, the "communism" of Plato, for instance, have
their natural propriety when duly correlated with those facts, those
conditions round about them, of which they are in truth a part.
In the intellectual as in the organic world the given product, its normal
or abnormal characteristics, are determined, as people say, by the
"environment." The business of the young scholar therefore, in reading
Plato, is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or refute Plato's
opinions, to modify, or make apology for, [11] what may seem erratic
or impossible in him; still less, to furnish himself with arguments on
behalf of some theory or conviction of his own. His duty is rather to
follow intelligently, but with strict indifference, the mental process
there, as he might witness a game of skill; better still, as in reading
Hamlet or The Divine Comedy, so in reading The Republic, to watch,
for its dramatic interest, the spectacle of a powerful, of a sovereign
intellect, translating itself, amid a complex group of conditions which
can never in the nature of things occur again, at once pliant and
resistant to them, into a great literary monument. To put Plato into his
natural place, as a result from antecedent and contemporary movements
of Greek speculation, of Greek life generally: such is the proper aim of
the historic, that is to say, of the really critical study of him.
At the threshold, then, of The Republic of Plato, the historic spirit

impresses upon us the fact that some of its leading thoughts are partly
derivative from earlier thinkers, of whom we happen to possess
independent information. From that brilliant and busy, yet so
unconcerned press of early Greek life, one here another there stands
aside