The Life of Reason | Page 9

our
love, charity, and honour.
The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most,
things to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant
self-sacrifice--piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he might add
that his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours are
extravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged his
greater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and
become like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality
and little sense of humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do
not wish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we
can adopt from Greek morals is only the abstract principle of their
development; their foundation in all the extant forces of human nature
and their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them.
These forces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their
relative power. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and
wrongs to fight against, and less of goods to attain. The movement of
conscience has veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the
character.
Another circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics is the
impressive illustration of their principle which subsequent history has
afforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of
which Aristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify
even his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments and
clarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic with
physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is the
aggravated extension. Socrates' pupils could not abandon his ideal
principles, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;
they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which
theology was afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates
and being no naturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal
experiment beyond the mythical stage. He accordingly remained the
purer moralist, much as Aristotle's judgment may be preferred in many
particulars. Their relative position may be roughly indicated by saying

that Plato had no physics and that Aristotle's physics was false; so that
ideal science in the one suffered from want of environment and control,
while in the other it suffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no
application.
[Sidenote: Plato's myths in lieu of physics.]
What had happened was briefly this: Plato, having studied many sorts
of philosophy and being a bold and universal genius, was not satisfied
to leave all physical questions pending, as his master had done. He
adopted, accordingly, Heraclitus's doctrine of the immediate, which he
now called the realm of phenomena; for what exists at any instant, if
you arrest and name it, turns out to have been an embodiment of some
logical essence, such as discourse might define; in every fact some idea
makes its appearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is a
phenomenon. Moreover, another philosophy had made a deep
impression on Plato's mind and had helped to develop Socratic
definitions: Parmenides had called the concept of pure Being the only
reality; and to satisfy the strong dialectic by which this doctrine was
supported and at the same time to bridge the infinite chasm between
one formless substance and many appearances irrelevant to it, Plato
substituted the many Socratic ideas, all of which were relevant to
appearance, for the one concept of Parmenides. The ideas thus acquired
what is called metaphysical subsistence; for they stood in the place of
the Eleatic Absolute, and at the same time were the realities that
phenomena manifested.
The technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat
is technical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to
say on any concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful
in misunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were
now conceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it
and caused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and
definitions could thus be placed behind phenomena to constitute a
substantial physical world. Such a dream could not be taken seriously,
until good sense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be
imagined peopling the infinite and yet carrying on the business of earth.
Aristotle rejected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thought
they might still be essences operative in nature, if only they were
identified with the life or form of particular things. The dream thus lost

its frank wildness, but none of its inherent incongruity: for the sense in
which characters and values make a thing what it is, is purely
dialectical. They give it its status in the ideal world; but the appearance
of these characters and values here and