Representative Men: Seven Lectures
were heard in the sky, or not; whether his mother or his father dreamed
that the infant man-child was the son of Apollo; whether a swarm of
bees settled on his lips, or not; a man who could see two sides of a
thing was born. The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature; the
upper and the under side of the medal of Jove; the union of
impossibilities, which reappears in every object; its real and its
ideal power,--was now, also, transferred entire to the consciousness
of a man.
The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract truth, he saved himself
by propounding the most popular of all principles, the absolute good,
which rules rulers, and judges the judge. If he made transcendental
distinctions, he fortified himself by drawing all his illustrations
from sources disdained by orators, and polite conversers; from mares
and puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles; from cooks and criers;
the shops of potters, horse-doctors, butchers, and fishmongers. He
cannot forgive in himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two
poles of thought shall appear in his statement. His arguments and his
sentences are self-poised and spherical. The two poles appear; yes,
and become two hands, to grasp and appropriate their own.
Every great artist has been such by synthesis. Our strength is
transitional, alternating; or, shall I say, a thread of two strands.
The seashore, sea seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of
two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at the approach and at
the departure of a friend; the experience of poetic creativeness, which
is not found in staying at home, nor yet in traveling, but in
transitions from one to the other, which must therefore be adroitly
managed to present as much transitional surface as possible; this
command of two elements must explain the power and charm of Plato. Art
expresses the one, or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know
unity in unity; poetry to show it by variety; that is, always by an
object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of
pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both. Things added to things,
as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language
are inexhaustibly attractive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and
the reverse of the medal of Jove.
To take an example:--The physical philosophers have sketched each his
theory of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit;
theories mechanical and chemical in their genius. Plato, a master of
mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as
second causes, to be no theories of the world, but bare inventories
and lists. To the study of nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,--"Let
us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and
compose the universe. He was good; and he who is good has no kind of
envy. Exempt from envy, he wished that all things should be as much
as possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise men, shall admit
this as the prime cause of the origin and foundation of the world,
will be in the truth." "All things are for the sake of the good, and
it is the cause of everything beautiful." This dogma animates and
impersonates his philosophy. The synthesis which makes the character
of his mind appears in all his talents. Where there is great compass
of wit, we usually find excellencies that combine easily in the living
man, but in description appear incompatible. The mind of Plato is not
to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but is to be apprehended by
an original mind in the exercise of its original power. In him the
freest abandonment is united with the precision of a geometer. His
daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the
birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician
polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony so subtle that it
stings and paralyzes, adorn the soundest health and strength of frame.
According to the old sentence, "If Jove should descend to the earth,
he would speak in the style of Plato."
With this palatial air, there is, for the direct aim of several of his
works, and running through the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness,
which mounts, in the Republic, and in the Phaedo, to piety. He has
been charged with feigning sickness at the time of the death of
Socrates. But the anecdotes that have come down from the times attest
his manly interference before the people in his master's behalf, since
even the savage cry of the assembly to Plato is preserved; and the
indignation towards popular government, in many of his pieces, expresses
a personal exasperation. He has a probity, a native reverence for
justice and honor, and a humanity which makes him tender for the
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he believes that poetry,
prophecy, and the high insight, arc from a wisdom of which man is not
master; that the gods never philosophize; but, by a celestial mania,
these miracles are accomplished. Horsed on these winged steeds, he
sweeps the dim regions, visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw
the souls in pain; he hears the doom of the judge; he beholds the penal
metempsychosis; the Fates, with the rock and shears; and hears the
intoxicating hum of their spindle.
But his circumspection never forsook him. One would say, he had read
the inscription on the gates of Busyrane,--"Be bold;" and on the second
gate,--"Be bold, be bold and evermore be bold;" and then again he
paused well at the third gate,--"Be not too bold." His strength is
like the momentum of a falling planet; and his discretion, the return
of its due and perfect curve,--so excellent is his Greek love of
boundary, and his skill in definition. In reading logarithms, one is
not more secure, than in following Plato in his flights. Nothing can
be colder than his head, when the lightnings of his imagination are
playing in the sky. He has finished his thinking, before he brings it
to the reader; and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master.
He has that opulence which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon
he needs. As the rich man wears no more garments, drives no more horses,
sits in no more chambers, than the poor,--but has that one dress, or
equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so
Plato, in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word. There
is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess
and use,--epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire, and irony,
down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his
jests illustrations. Socrates' profession of obstetric art is good
philosophy; and his finding that word "cookery," and "adulatory art,"
for rhetoric, in the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. No
orator can measure in effect with him who can give good nicknames.
What moderation, and understatement, and checking his thunder in mid
volley! He has good-naturedly furnished the courtier and citizen with
all that can be said against the schools. "For philosophy is an elegant
thing, if any one modestly meddles with it; but, if he is conversant
with it more than is becoming, it corrupts the man." He could well
afford to be generous,--he, who from the sunlike centrality and reach
of his vision, had a faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was
his speech: he plays with the doubt, and makes the most of it: he
paints and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that moves the sea
and land. The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, in the
perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in bursts of light. "I,
therefore, Callicles, am persuaded by these accounts, and consider how
I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy condition.
Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value, and looking
to the truth, I shall endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I
can and, when I die, to die so. And I invite all other men, to the
utmost of my power; and you, too, I in turn invite to this contest,
which, I affirm, surpasses all contests here."
He is a great average man one who, to the best thinking, adds a
proportion and equality in his faculties, so that men see in him their
own dreams and glimpses made available, and made to pass for what they
are. A great common sense is his warrant and qualification to be the
world's interpreter. He has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic
class have: but he has, also, what they have not,--this strong solving
sense to reconcile his poetry with the appearances of the world, and
build a bridge from the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits
never this graduation, but slopes his thought, however picturesque the
precipice on one side, to an access from the plain. He never writes
in ecstasy, or catches us up into poetic rapture.
Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could prostrate himself on
the earth, and cover his eyes, whilst he adorned that which cannot be
numbered, or gauged, or known, or named: that of which everything can
be affirmed and denied: that "which is entity and nonentity." He called
it super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the Parmenides, to
demonstrate that it was so,--that this Being exceeded the limits of
intellect. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. Having
paid his homage, as for the human race, to the Illimitable, he then
stood erect, and for the human race affirmed, "And yet things are
knowable!"--that is, the Asia in his mind was first heartily
honored,--the ocean of love and power, before form, before will, before
knowledge, the Same, the Good, the One; and now, refreshed and empowered
by this worship, the instinct of Europe, namely, culture, returns; and
he cries, Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being
from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence
of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is
our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; a science
of quantities called mathematics; a science of qualities, called
chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,--I call it
Dialectic,--which is the intellect discriminating the false and the
true. It rests on the observation of identity and diversity; for, to
judge, is to unite to an object the notion which belongs to it. The
sciences, even the best,--mathematics, and astronomy, are like
sportsmen, who seize whatever prey offers, even without being able to
make any use of them. Dialectic must teach the use of them. "This is
of that rank that no intellectual man will enter on any study for its
own sake, but only with a view to advance himself in that one sole
science which embraces all."
"The essence or peculiarity of man is to comprehend the whole; or that
which in the diversity of sensations, can be comprised under a rational
unity." "The soul which has never perceived the truth, cannot pass
into the human form." I announce to men the intellect. I announce the
good of being interpenetrated by the mind that made nature: this
benefit, namely, that it can understand nature, which it made and
maketh. Nature is good, but intellect is better: as the law-giver is
before the law-receiver. I give you joy, O sons of men: that truth is
altogether wholesome; that we have hope to search out what might be
the very self of everything. The misery of man is to be balked of the
sight of essence, and to be stuffed with conjecture: but the supreme
good is reality; the supreme beauty is reality; and all virtue and all
felicity depend on this science of the real: for courage is nothing
else than knowledge: the fairest fortune that can befall man, is to
be guided by his daemon to that which is truly his own. This also is
the essence of justice,--to attend every one his own; nay, the notion