The Life of Reason | Page 8

his
mind, now found in Socrates its precise definition; and it was naturally
where the Life of Reason had been long cultivated that it came finally
to be conceived.
[Sidenote: Plato gave the ideal its full expression.]
Socrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and his
utilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what gives
utility to life. His condemnation for atheism--if we choose to take it
symbolically--was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece were not
honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared
there in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, because
you knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul might
harbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a
problem that seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to
Plato to bring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to
elicit from the depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals
which had inspired its legislators and been embodied in its sacred civic
traditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk of
evening; and it was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtues
that brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in so
sad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made him censure
the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to see beauty
flourish in the real world. It was love of freedom that made him harsh
to his ideal citizens, that they might be strong enough to preserve the
liberal life. And when he broke away from political preoccupations and
turned to the inner life, his interpretations proved the absolute
sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothing pertinent unsaid
on ideal love and ideal immortality.
[Sidenote: Aristotle supplied its natural basis.]
Beyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever been
carried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision to

many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and more
enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and adequacy,
with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race. Plato, by
virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certain prophetic zeal,
outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and the rational; he saw
human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by physical dangers that he
wished to give it mythical sanctions, and his fondness for
transmigration and nether punishments was somewhat more than
playful. If as a work of imagination his philosophy holds the first place,
Aristotle's has the decisive advantage of being the unalloyed expression
of reason. In Aristotle the conception of human nature is perfectly
sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an
ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and weighed,
especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato's more
discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. The Life of
Reason finds there its classic explication.
[Sidenote: Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.]
As it is improbable that there will soon be another people so free from
preoccupations, so gifted, and so fortunate as the Greeks, or capable in
consequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbable
that a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle's scope, judgment, or
authority, one knowing so well how to be both reasonable and exalted.
It might seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been done
before with unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferior
things at great length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler to
read and to propagate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal justness
and masterly brevity. But times change; and though the principles of
reason remain the same the facts of human life and of human
conscience alter. A new background, a new basis of application,
appears for logic, and it may be useful to restate old truths in new
words, the better to prove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his
morals, Greek, concise, and elementary. As a Greek, he mixes with the
ideal argument illustrations, appreciations, and conceptions which are
not inseparable from its essence. In themselves, no doubt, these
accessories are better than what in modern times would be substituted
for them, being less sophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to our eyes
they disguise what is profound and universal in natural morality by

embodying it in images which do not belong to our life. Our direst
struggles and the last sanctions of our morality do not appear in them.
The pagan world, because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness,
seems childish to us. We do not find there our sins and holiness,