The works of Plato · Plato
ON THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY GENERALLY.
The dialectic of Plato, however great its defects may be estimated, presents, nevertheless, a worthy image of the pure philosophical feeling. This Plato assumed to be grounded in love and in a longing after the eternal ideas, by the contemplation of which the mortal soul sustains itself, and by perpetual renovation becomes participant in immortality. Stimulated by such a desire, the philosophical mind or soul strives to attain, as far as possible, to a perfect remembrance of ideas which are the eternal essence of things, the memory of them being awakened by sensible phenomena, which are resemblances of the ideas and real entity, and thereby serve as means by which the cognition of real being becomes attainable. But while the sensible, by bringing to mind this resemblance to real entity, is subservient to the efforts of the reasonable soul, it also impedes and limits it in its pursuits of the true, since the sensuous representations contain as much of irresemblance as of resemblance. But the greatest impediment to philosophical investigation arises from the constant flux of sensation which allows it no stability. Flowing on in a continual series of production and decay, sensible things are constantly changing their state and never exhibit the full perfection of the subsistent.
They comprise at once entity and non-entity, and it is not the true standard and the all-sufficient which they represent, but only the relative, which constantly varies by greater or less from the measure of the true and substantive entity. It was to this that Plato looked when he thought he had discovered in the ideas of the other and the relatively great and little, the grounds of the sensible matter of mutability. But contingent being is only for the absolute, a mean merely by which the resemblance to ideas is manifested in sensible things; and, viewed in this light, ideas must appear as the ends of sensible existence, and as the standard by which the true therein is to be measured. A multiplicity of ends having been admitted, it followed that there must also be a last end,—an ultimatum in the realm of ideas,—therefore a _supreme idea_.
This result follows from the consideration of the mutual relation of ideas, for one idea must be explained by another, and thus we proceed through a series of subordinate ideas up to higher and higher, in order to reduce them by a legitimate synthesis into unity, until at last we arrive at the highest idea, and then again, by a converse method, to descend by analysis from the supreme unity to the multiplicity of subordinate ideas. In this higher and lower ordination, each subordinate idea requires merely as a supposition until it is shown by the latter to be legitimate. But from such hypotheses or suppositions the mind must at last arrive at that which implies nothing else, and is in itself sufficient; of this kind is the nature of good, which, exhausting all true entity, is itself in want of nothing, but is desired by all. This idea of good, or God, is consequently the key-stone of all rational investigation. It embraces whatever subsists without difference, in time or space,—all truth and science, all substances and all reason, being neither reason nor essence, but being superior to, unites both within itself.
It is the source of motion to all, for all has a desire towards it, and consequently it is the mistress of all generation, in which nought is true beyond its resemblance of the good. However, from some impelling necessity, evil, the opposite of good, is in generation mixed up with it. Man, therefore, as living in this scene of production and decay, cannot attain to a complete knowledge of the unity of good; for to him truth, and the science of truth, appear in opposition to each other, and it is not permitted to mortal nature to contemplate the eternal, in its absolute essence, but merely as shadowed forth in the temporal. God, then, is the good itself, of which this sensible world is only an image. But in the present world it ought to be man’s endeavour to enlarge and cultivate his science, in order that, by attaining to as pure a knowledge as possible of the multiplicity of ideas, he may be able to discern therein, however imperfectly, the unity of truth and science which subsists in the good.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.