Plato and Platonism | Page 9

and two make four.
Gradually we have come to think, or to feel, that primary certitude.
Political constitutions, again, as we now see so clearly, are "not made,"
cannot be made, but "grow." Races, laws, arts, have their origins and
end, are themselves ripples only on the great river of organic life; and
language is changing on our very lips.
In Plato's day, the Heraclitean flux, so deep down in nature itself-- the
flood, the fire--seemed to have laid hold on man, on the social and
moral world, dissolving or disintegrating opinion, first principles, faith,
establishing amorphism, so to call it, there also. All along indeed the
genius, the good gifts of Greece to the world had had much to do with

the mobility of its temperament. Only, when Plato came into potent
contact with his countrymen (Pericles, Phidias, Socrates being now
gone) in politics, in literature and art, in men's characters, the defect
naturally incident to that fine quality had come to have unchecked sway.
From the lifeless background of an unprogressive world--Egypt, Syria,
frozen Scythia--a world in which the unconscious social aggregate had
been everything, the conscious individual, his capacity and rights,
almost nothing, the Greek had stepped forth, like the young prince in
the fable, to set things going. To the philosophic eye however, [22]
about the time when the history of Thucydides leaves off, they might
seem to need a regulator, ere the very wheels wore themselves out.
Mobility! We do not think that a necessarily undesirable condition of
life, of mind, of the physical world about us. 'Tis the dead things, we
may remind ourselves, that after all are most entirely at rest, and might
reasonably hold that motion (vicious, fallacious, infectious motion, as
Plato inclines to think) covers all that is best worth being. And as for
philosophy--mobility, versatility, the habit of thought that can most
adequately follow the subtle movement of things, that, surely, were the
secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them. It means
susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short. It was the
spirit of God that moved, moves still, in every form of real power,
everywhere. Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality in
things, of falsity in our thoughts about them. It is just this principle of
mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that, with all his contriving
care for the future, he desires to withstand. Everywhere he displays
himself as an advocate of the immutable. The Republic is a proposal to
establish it indefectibly in a very precisely regulated, a very exclusive
community, which shall be a refuge for elect souls from an ill-made
world.
That four powerful influences made for the political unity of Greece
was pointed out by [23] Grote: common blood, common language, a
common religious centre, the great games in which all alike
communicated. He adds that they failed to make the Greeks one people.
Panhellenism was realised for the first time, and then but imperfectly,
by Alexander the Great. The centrifugal tendency had ever been too
much for the centripetal tendency in them, the progressive elements for
the element of order. Their boundless impatience, that passion for

novelty noted in them by Saint Paul, had been a matter of radical
character. Their varied natural gifts did but concentrate themselves now
and then to an effective centre, that they might be dissipated again,
towards every side, in daring adventure alike of action and of thought.
Variety and novelty of experience, further quickened by a
consciousness trained to an equally nimble power of movement,
individualism, the capacities, the claim, of the individual, forced into
their utmost play by a ready sense and dexterous appliance of
opportunity,--herein, certainly, lay at least one half of their vocation in
history. The material conformation of Greece, a land of islands and
peninsulas, with a range of sea-coast immense as compared with its
area, and broken up by repellent lines of mountain this way and that,
nursing jealously a little township of three or four thousand souls into
an independent type of its own, conspired to the same effect.
Independence, local and personal,--it was the Greek ideal!
[24] Yet of one side only of that ideal, as we may see, of the still
half-Asiatic rather than the full Hellenic ideal, of the Ionian ideal as
conceived by the Athenian people in particular, people of the coast who
have the roaming thoughts of sailors, ever ready to float away
anywhither amid their walls of wood. And for many of its admirers
certainly the whole Greek people has been a people of the sea-coast. In
Lacedaemon, however, as Plato and others thought, hostile,
inaccessible in its mountain hollow where it had no need of any walls
at all, there were resources for that discipline and order which
constitute