Sky and Earth, appear as ancestral and gigantic forms of creation emerging from primeval chaos.... "First Chaos was, and then broad-bosomed Earth.... The habitation of the blessed gods." This is the Hesiodic genesis, and the Orphic differs from it only in making Heaven and Earth a coequal and wedded pair, from whose union multitudinous nature was begotten. Euripides preserves it in the utterance of the seeress Melanippe: "It is not my word, but my mother's word, How Heaven and Earth were once one form; but stirred, And strove, and dwelt asunder far away: And then, re-wedding, bore unto the day And light of life all things that are, the trees, Flowers, birds and beasts and them that breathe the seas, And mortal man, each in his kind and law.”1 This dualism of the epic age passed over into the philosophic tradition with little more than a change of names. In place of Heaven and Earth, the antithesis is set between Chaos and Nous, Anarchy and Intelligence, or between Chaos and Cosmos, Void and Order,-though we must remember that the word ougavós persisted as a synonym of xóoμog even with Plato and Aristotle, and that xóoμos itself was at first used of the heavenly firmament, and only with advancing insight into the orderliness of the world beneath the spheres was it made to include terrene nature. The lesson of intelligence was in fact learned first of all from observation of the heavens. No phenomena so vividly impress the natural mind with a sense of their divinity as do the regular and brilliant courses of the heavenly bodies. Repetition is the gateway and light is the outer image of learning, and in the sun and moon and stars we have our permanent exemplars of repetition and light. "All mankind thou guidest as a single being; Expectantly, with raised head, they look up to thee!" 1 Gilbert Murray's translation. says a Babylonian hymn to the sun, for which the nineteenth psalm "The Heavens declare the glory of God, And the firmament sheweth his handywork❞— is only a later parallel. Plato, in describing the works of the Demiurge, tells how "of the heavenly and divine, he created the greater part out of fire, that they might be the brightest of all things and fairest to behold, and he fashioned them after the likeness of the universe in the figure of a circle, and made them follow the intelligent motion of the supreme, distributing them over the whole circumference of heaven, which was to be a true cosmos or glorious world spangled with them all over." And in another passage Plato derives from the image of the heavens, as does the psalmist, his conviction of the goodness of God: for if, he says, "we say that the whole path and movement of heaven, and of all that is therein, is by nature akin to the movement and revolution and calculation of mind, and proceeds by kindred laws, then, as is plain, we must say that the best soul takes care of the world and guides it along the good path." Perhaps the sublimest expression of this thought in Greek literature is Aristotle's characterization of Xenophanes: "He cast his eyes upon the expanse of Heaven, and saw that it was one, and that one God." Thus the heavens were at once the embodiment of reason and divinity, the symbol of divine rulership and the exemplar of divine perfection. But it was the reverse of obvious that either the mathematical regularity of the heavenly reason or the perfection of heavenly form extend to the world beneath the moon. What seems to have been really the first suggestion that such is the case was the Pythagorean discovery that musical intervals vary with the length of the sound-producing strings according to certain simple and regular numerical ratios. This discov 2 This and other citations from Plato are in Jowett's translation. ery burst upon men's minds as a sudden revelation of order where order had hitherto never been suspected, and in their first delirious application of it the Pythagoreans seemed to see number everywhere, in the world of change below as in the world of constancy above, in the conduct of men as in the conduct of gods and stars, and so they proclaimed the Whole to be a One, whose emanating numbers gave coherence and system to all things, and they named this systemic All a Cosmos. There remained one further step. Xenophanes had seen God in the heavens; Pythagoras had lifted Earth up into the Cosmos; but neither had as yet perceived that the world of sense and of physical numbers is only a symbol and an image of the true realm of law, that the cosmic citadel must be sought inwardly in thought and not outwardly in fact. This had been darkly intimated by the dark Heraclitus. "Better is the hidden harmony than the manifest," he had said; and again, "In one thing is wisdom, to know the reason by which all through all is guided." But it was Socrates who first clearly and explicitly emphasized the inner nature of the cosmic principle. "Socrates was the first," says Cicero, "to call philosophy down from the sky, and to settle it in the city and even introduce it within the house, and compel it to inquire concerning life and death and things good and ill." Probably, in saying this, Cicero, like Xenophon, merely saw Socrates turning from astronomy as from a vain speculation. The truth of Socrates' mission is perhaps better indicated by Aristotle's statement that it was Socrates who invented definition. We know what he strove to define-courage and temperance and justice and wisdom, the principles of conduct and the laws of an orderly life. Socrates was seeking cosmos, reason, not in the physical image, but in the spiritual reality. That Socrates was genuinely interested in physical science there is every reason to believe, but his final attitude is best expressed in the words which Plato puts into his mouth, "Those who elevate astronomy into philosophy appear to me to make us look downward and not upward." The predecessors of Plato had modelled two great conceptions. The physical and mathematical thinkers had evolved the grandiose notion of a Cosmos, an Order, written upon the face of Chaos. Heraclitus and, far more distinctly, Socrates had proclaimed this order of nature to be only the outward image and reflection of the inner order of reason. Pythagoras and Heraclitus and Socrates, more than all others, were the teachers of Plato, and it was from the inspirations of their insights that he drew his own magnificent vision of the world. II. The vivid impression one derives from a reading of Plato is of the intensity of his conviction of the unreality of sensible things. The world of sense, of sight and hearing and taste and touch, in which most men chiefly dwell is for him a shadow world. At its best it is but a symbol obscurely imitating the character of the reality which it veils; in its normal function it is a delusional mirage; and at its worst, when it conveys the deception of knowledge, it is the fount of corruption and the seed of damnation. The Greek argument against our commonsense conviction that what we see and touch is real is about as follows: All objects of sense suffer perpetual change; they never are this or that, but are always in a process of becoming or of ceasing to be this or that; hence, we cannot justly describe them as being anything, or indeed as having any true existence of any sort. Heraclitus remarked that one cannot bathe in the same river twice, and Cratylus, the sceptic, after remarking that we cannot in fact bathe in the same river even once, finally, as Aristotle tells us, ceased speech altogether on the ground that it was impossible to say any thing that is true; to inquisitors he would reply merely by a wagging of the finger, his mutely eloquent asseveration of his master's dogma that "All things flow." Plato accepted this doctrine, as he also accepted Socrates's conception that ignorance is essential vice, and combining the two, to the sceptical he added a moral condemnation of the world of sense: not only does it not give us truth, but because, as he says, "ignorance is the aberration of a mind bent on truth," through the intensity of its illusions it betrays the soul's integrity. The Cratylean denial of the possibility of discourse is thus, for Plato, the proclamation of moral ruin, and at such his sanity revolts. Nor is the way of salvation hard to find. If sense be false, ideas may yet be true, and in its own proper world discourse may be dealing with reality. "Knowledge"-these are Plato's words-"does not consist in impressions of sense, but in reasoning about them; in that only, and not in the mere impression, truth and being can be obtained." And again: "Things of which there is no rational account are not knowable....things which have a reason or explanation are knowable." Plato's "world of Ideas," as it is called, is in fact but the assertion that our speech is significant, and that this significance, not the courses of sense, is what we mean by reality. "The word expresses more than the fact" and "in the nature of things the actual must always fall short of the truth." Plato's idealism is thus simply a sane and unconquerable conviction that there is a realm of truth, and his whole philosophy is an effort to find out this truth. In the Phaedrus he speaks of truth as "the pilot of the soul"; in the Philebus he asserts that the soul has "a power or faculty of loving truth and of doing all things for the sake of it"; and in the Phaedo he makes Socrates, about to take the hemlock, preface his great argument for the soul's immor |