Plato and Platonism | Page 6

to make the initial act of conscious philosophic reflexion. It is
done with something of the simplicity, the immediate and visible
effectiveness, of the visible world in action all around. Among Plato's
many intellectual [12] predecessors, on whom in recent years much
attention has been bestowed by a host of commentators after the mind
of Hegel, three, whose ideas, whose words even, we really find in the
very texture of Plato's work, emerge distinctly in close connexion with
The Republic: Pythagoras, the dim, half-legendary founder of the
philosophy of number and music; Parmenides, "My father
Parmenides," the centre of the school of Elea; Heraclitus, thirdly,
author of the doctrine of "the Perpetual Flux": three teachers, it must be
admitted after all, of whom what knowledge we have is to the utmost
degree fragmentary and vague. But then, one way of giving that
knowledge greater definiteness is by noting their direct and actual
influence in Plato's writings.
Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a philosophy which
was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in style crabbed and
obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten--he too might be
thought, as a writer of prose, one of the "fathers" of Plato. His influence,
however, on Plato, though himself a Heraclitean in early life, was by
way of antagonism or reaction; Plato's stand against any philosophy of
motion becoming, as we say, something of a "fixed idea" with him.
Heraclitus of Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then is
denoted by the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian
League) died about forty years before [13] Plato was born. Here then at
Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of Ionia, itself
so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of ancient hereditary
rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still
undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind,
on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence;
perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also,
that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of
fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus

as elsewhere, the privileged class had gone to the wall. In this era of
unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek youthfulness, one of the haughtiest
of that class, as being also of nature's aristocracy, and a man of
powerful intellectual gifts, Heraclitus, asserts the native liberty of
thought at all events; becomes, we might truly say, sickly with "the pale
cast" of his philosophical questioning. Amid the irreflective actors in
that rapidly moving show, so entirely immersed in it superficial as it is
that they have no feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He
reflects; and his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth
when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels
already old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly colder.
Its very ingenuousness, its sincerity, will make the utterance of what
comes [14] to mind just then somewhat shrill or overemphatic.
Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar to think, so
early in the impetuous spring-tide of Greek history, does but reflect
after all the aspect of what actually surrounds him, when he cries
out--his philosophy was no matter of formal treatise or system, but of
harsh, protesting cries--Panta chôrei kai ouden menei.+ All things give
way: nothing remaineth. There had been enquirers before him of
another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold, contradictory,
seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary elements the
world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes, their own souls
and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part of the bold
enterprise of that romantic age; a series of intellectual adventures, of a
piece with its adventures in unknown lands or upon the sea. The
resultant intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of gifted and
sanguine but insubordinate youth (remember, that the word neotês,+
youth, came to mean rashness, insolence!) questioning, deciding,
rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to discipline,
unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions too, coming and going,
those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible world, were
themselves but fluid elements on the changing surface of existence.
[15] Surface, we say; but was there really anything beneath it? That
was what to the majority of his hearers, his readers, Heraclitus, with an
eye perhaps on practice, seemed to deny. Perpetual motion, alike in
things and in men's thoughts about them,--the sad, self-conscious,
philosophy of Heraclitus, like one, knowing beyond his years, in this

barely adolescent world which he is so eager to instruct, makes no
pretence to be able to restrain that. Was not the very essence of thought