The Republic — Plato

the heavens when there arc no stars appearing. Men cannot live by thought alone; the world of sense is always breaking in upon them. They are for the most part confined to a corner of earth, and see but a little way beyond their own home or place of abode ; they " do not lift up their eyes to the hills " ; they are not awake when the dawn appears. But in Plato we have reached a height from which a man may look into the distance (" Rep." iv.

445 C) and behold the future of the world and of philosophy. The ideal of the State and of the life of the philosopher; the ideal of an education continuing through life and extending equally to both sexes ; the ideal of the unity and correlation of knowledge ; the faith in good and immortality — arc the vacant forms of light on which Plato is seeking to fix the eye of mankind. VIII.

Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in Greek philosophy, float before the minds of men in our own day : one seen more clearly than formerly, as though each year and each generation brought us nearer to some great change ; the other almost in the same degree retiring from view behind the laws of nature, as if oppressed by them, but still remaining a silent hope of we know not what hidden in the heart of man.

The first ideal is the future of the human race in this world ; the second the future of the individual in another. The first is the more perfect realization of our own present life ; the second, the abnegation of it: the one, limited by experience, the other, transcending it. Both of them have been and are powerful motives of action j there are a few in whom they have taken the place of all earthly interests.

The hope of a future for the human race at first sight seems to be the more disinterested, the hope of individual existence the more egotistical, of the two motives.

But when men have learned to resolve their hope of a future either for themselves or for the world into the will of God — " not my will, but thine," the difference between them falls away ; and they may be allowed to make either of them the basis of their lives, according to their own individual character or temperament. There is as much faith in the willingness to work for an unseen future in this world as in another. Neither is it inconceivable that some rare nature may feel his duty to another generation, or to another century, al2most as strongly as to his own, or that, hving always in the presence of God, he may realize another world as vividly as he does this. The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by us under similitudes derived from human qualities ; although sometimes, like the Jewish prophets, we may dash away these figures of speech and describe the nature of God only in negatives. These again by degrees acquire a positive meaning.

It would be well if, when meditating on the higher truths either of philosophy or religion, we sometimes substituted one form of expression for another, lest through the necessities of language we should become the slaves of mere words.

There is a third ideal, not the same, but akin to these, which has a place in the home and heart of every believer in the religion of Christ, and in which men seem to find a nearer and more familiar truth, the Divine man, the Son of Man, the Saviour of mankind, who is the first-born and head of the whole family in heaven and earth, in whom the divine and human, that which is without and that which is within the range of our earthly faculties, are indissolubly united.

Neither is this divine form of goodness wholly separable from the ideal of the Christian Church, which is said in the New Testament to be " his body," or at variance with those other images of good which Plato sets before us. We see him in a figure only, and of figures of speech we select but a few, and those the simplest, to be the expression of him. We behold him in a picture, but he is not there.

We gather up the fragments of his discourses, but neither do they represent him as he truly was. His dwelling is neither in heaven nor earth, but in the heart of man. This is that image which Plato saw dimly in the distance, which, when existing among men, he called, in the language of Plomer, " the likeness of God " (" Rep." vi.

501 B), the likeness of a nature which in all ages men have felt to be greater and better than themselves, and which in endless forms, whether derived from Scripture or nature, from the witness of history or from the human heart, regarded as a person or not as a person, with or without parts or passions, existing in space or not in space, is and will always continue to be to mankind the Idea of Good. R. J.