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wretchedness. It had been a favorite doctrine with him that Antisthenes. friendship and patriotism are altogether worthless; and in his last agony, Diogenes asking him whether he needed a friend, "Will a friend release me from this pain?" he inquired. Diogenes handed him a dagger, saying, "This will." "I want to be free from pain, but not from life." Into such degradation had philosophy fallen, as represented by the Cynical school, that it may be doubted whether it is right to include a man like Antisthenes among those who derive their title from their love of wisdom—a man who condemned the knowledge of reading and writing, who depreciated the institution of marriage, and professed that he saw no other advantage from philosophy than that it enabled him to keep company with himself.

Diogenes of

Sinope.

The wretched doctrines of Cynicism were carried to their utmost application by Diogenes of Sinope. In early life he had been accustomed to luxury and ease; but his father, who was a wealthy banker, having been convicted of debasing the coinage, Diogenes, who in some manner shared in the disgrace, was in a very fit state of mind to embrace doctrines implying a contempt for the goods of the world and for the opinions of men. He may be considered as the prototype of the hermits of a later period in his attempts at the subjugation of the natural appetites by means of starvation. Looking upon the body as a mere clog to the soul, he mortified it in every possible manner, feeding it on raw meat and leaves, and making it dwell in a tub. He professed that the nearer a man approached to suicide the nearer he approached to virtue. He wore no other dress than a scanty cloak; a wallet, a stick, and a drinking-cup completed his equipment: the cup he threw away as useless on seeing a boy take water in the hollow of his hand. It was his delight to offend every idea of social decency by performing all the acts of life publicly, asserting that whatever is not improper in itself ought to be done openly. It is said that his death, which occurred in his ninetieth year, was in consequence of devouring a neat's foot raw. From his carrying the Socratic notions to an extreme, he merits the designation applied to him, "the mad Socrates." His contempt for the opinions of others, and his religious disbelief, are illustrated by an incident related of him, that, having in a moment of weakness made a promise to some friends that he would offer a sacrifice to Diana, he repaired the next day to her temple, and, taking His irreverence. a louse from his head, cracked it upon her altar.

What a melancholy illustration of the tendency of the human mind do these facts offer. What a quick, yet inevitable descent from Decline of the morality of Socrates. Selfishness is enthroned; friendship morality. and patriotism are looked upon as the affairs of a fool: happy is the man who stands in no need of a friend; still happier he who has not No action is intrinsically bad; even robbery, adultery, sacrilege,

one.

are only crimes by public agreement. The sage will take care how he indulges in the weakness of gratitude or benevolence, or any other such sickly sentiment. If he can find pleasure, let him enjoy it; if pain is inflicted on him, let him bear it; but, above all, let him remember that death is just as desirable as life.

If the physical speculations of Greece had ended in sophistry and atheism, ethical investigations, it thus appears, had borne no better fruit. Both systems, when carried to their consequences, had been found to be not only useless to society, but actually prejudicial to its best interests. As far as could be seen, in the times of which we are speaking, the prospects for civilization were dark and discouraging; nor did it appear possible that any successful attempts could be made to extract from philosophy any thing completely suitable to the wants of man. Yet, in the midst of these discreditable delusions, one of the friends and disciples of Socrates—indeed, it may be said, his chief disciple, Plato, was laying the foundation of another system, which, though it contained much that was false and more that was vain, contained also some things vigorous enough to descend to our times.

Plato was born about B.C. 426. Antiquity has often delighted to cast Birth of Plato. a halo of mythical glory around its illustrious names. The immortal works of its great philosopher seemed to entitle him to more than mortal honors. A legend, into the authenticity of which we will abstain from inquiring, asserted that his mother Perictione, a pure virgin, suffered an immaculate conception through the influences of Apollo. The god declared to Ariston, to whom she was about to be married, the parentage of the child. The wisdom of this great writer may justify such a noble descent, and, in some degree, excuse the credulity of his admiring and affectionate disciples, who gave a ready ear to the stupendous and idle story.

To the knowledge acquired by Plato during the eight or ten years he had spent with Socrates, he added all that could be obtained from the philosophers of Egypt, Cyrene, Persia, and Tarentum. With every advantage arising from wealth and an illustrious parentage, if even it was only of an earthly kind, for he numbered Solon among his ancestors, he His education availed himself of the teaching of the chief philosophers of the and teaching. age, and at length, returning to his native country, founded a school in the grove of Hecademus. Thrice during his career as a teacher he visited Sicily, on each occasion returning to the retirement of his academy. He attained the advanced age of eighty-three years. It has been given to few men to exercise so profound an influence on the opinions of posterity, and yet it is said that during his lifetime Plato had no friends. He quarreled with most of those who had been his fellow-disciples of Socrates; and, as might be anticipated from the venerable age to which he attained, and the uncertain foundation upon which his doc

PLATO'S DOCTRINES, THE PRIMAL PRINCIPLES, GOD, THE SOUL. 113

trines reposed, his opinions were very often contradictory, and his phi losophy exhibited many variations. To his doctrines we must now attend.

primary princi

It was the belief of Plato that matter is coeternal with God, and that, indeed, there are three primary principles-God, Matter, The doctrines of Ideas; all animate and inanimate things being fashioned by Plato. The three God from matter, which, being capable of receiving any im- ples. press, may be designated with propriety the Mother of Forms. He held that intellect existed before such forms were produced, but not antecedently to matter. To matter he imputed a refractory or resisting quality, the origin of the disorders and disturbances occurring in the world; he also regarded it as the cause of evil, accounting thereby for the preponderance of evil, which must exceed the good in proportion as matter exceeds ideas. It is not without reason, therefore, that Plato has been accused of Magianism. These doctrines are of an Oriental cast.

existence of a

The existence of God, an independent and personal maker of the world, he inferred from proofs of intelligence and design pre- He asserts the sented by natural objects. "All in the world is for the sake personal God. of the rest, and the places of the single parts are so ordered as to subserve to the preservation and excellency of the whole; hence all things are derived from the operation of a Divine intellectual cause." From the marks of unity in that design he deduced the unity of God, whom he regarded as the Supreme Intelligence, incorporeal, without beginning, end, or change. His god is the fashioner and father of the universe, in contradistinction to impersonal Nature. In one sense, he taught that the soul is immortal and imperishable; in another, he denied that each individual soul either has had or will continue to have an everlasting duration. From what has been said on a former page, it will be understood that this psychological doctrine is essentially Indian. His views of the ancient condition and former relations of the soul en- Nature of the abled Plato to introduce the celebrated doctrine of Reminis- soul. cence, and to account for what have otherwise been termed innate ideas. They are the recollections of things with which the soul was once familiar.

Plato's Ideal

The reason of God contemplates and comprehends the exemplars or original models of all natural forms, whatever they may be; for visible things are only fleeting shadows, quickly passing away; ideas or exemplars are everlasting. With so much power did he set forth this theory of ideas, and, it must be added, with so much ob- theory. scurity, that some have asserted an extramundane space in which exist. incorporeal beings, the ideas or original exemplars of all organic and inorganic forms. An illustration may remove some of the obscurity of these views. Thus all men, though they may present different appearances when compared with each other, are obviously fashioned upon the

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Exemplars or

THE IDEAL THEORY.

same model, to which they all more or less perfectly conform. All trees of the same kind, though they may differ from one another, are, in like manner, fashioned upon a common model, to which they more or less perfectly conform. To such models, exemplars or types. types, Plato gave the designation of Ideas. Our knowledge thereof is clearly not obtained from the senses, but from reflection. Now Plato asserted that these ideas are not only conceptions of the mind, but actually perceptions or entities having a real existence; nay, more, that they are the only real existences. Objects are thus only material embodiments of ideas, and in representation are not exact; for correspondence between an object and its model is only so far as circumstances will permit. Hence we can never determine all the properties or functions of the idea from an examination of its imperfect material representation, any more than we could discover the character or qualities of a man from pictures of him, no matter how excellent those pictures might be.

Doctrine of Rem·iniscence.

during trans

The Ideal theory of Plato, therefore, teaches that, beyond this world of delusive appearances, this world of material objects, there is another world, invisible, eternal, and essentially true; that, though we can not trust our senses for the correctness of the indications they yield, there are other impressions upon which we may fall back to aid us in coming to the truth, the reminiscences or recollections still abiding in the soul of the things it formerly knew, either in the realm of pure ideas, or in the states of former life through which it has passed. For Plato says that there are souls which, in periods of many thousand years, have successively transmigrated through bodies of vaRecollections rious kinds. Of these various conditions they retain a recolmigration. lection, more faintly or vividly, as the case may be. Ideas seeming to be implanted in the human mind, but certainly never communicated to us by the senses, are derived from those former states. If this recollection of ancient events and conditions were absolutely precise and correct, then man would have an innate means for determining the truth. But such reminiscences being, in their nature, imperfect and uncertain, we never can attain to absolute truth. With Plato, the Beautiful is the perfect image of the true. Love is the longing of the soul for beauty, the attraction of like for like, the longing of the divinity within us for the divinity beyond us; and the Good, which is beauty, truth, justice, is God-God in his abstract state.

From the Platonic system it therefore followed that science is impossible to man, and possible only to God; that, however, recollecting our origin, we ought not to despair, but elevate our intellectual aim as far as we may; that all knowledge is not attributable to our present senses; for, if that were the case, all men would be equally wise, their senses being equal in acuteness; but a very large portion, and by far the surest

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115

the world and

portion, is derived from reminiscence of our former states; that each individual soul is an idea; and that, of ideas generally, the low- God is the sum er are held together by the higher, and hence, finally, by one of ideas. which is supreme; that God is the sum of ideas, and is therefore eternal and unchangeable, the sensuous conditions of time and space having no relation to him, and inapplicable in any conception of his attributes; that he is the measure of all things, and not man, as Protagoras supposed; that the universe is a type of him; that matter itself is an absolute negation, and is the same as space; that the forms presented by our senses are unsubstantial shadows, and no reality; that, so far from there being an infinity of worlds, there is but one, which, as the The nature of work of God, is neither subject to age nor decay, and that it of the gods. consists of a body and a soul; in another respect it may be said to be composed of fire and earth, which can only be made to cohere through the intermedium of air and water, and hence the necessity of the exist ence of the four elements; that, of geometrical forms, the pyramid corresponds to fire, the cube to earth, the octahedron to air, these forms being produced from triangles connected by certain numerical ratios; that the entire sum of vitality is divided by God into seven parts, answering to the divisions of the musical octave, or to the seven planets; that the world is an animal having within it a soul; for man is warm, and so is the world; man is made of various elements, and so is the world; and, as the body of man has a soul, so too must the world have one; that there is a race of created, generated, and visible gods, who must be distinguished from the eternal, their bodies being composed for the most part of fire, and in shape spherical; that the earth is the oldest and first of the starry bodies, its place being in the centre of the universe, or in the axis thereof, where it remains, balanced by its own equilibrium; perhaps it is an ensouled being and a generated god; that the mortal races are three, answering to Earth, Air, and Water; that the male man was the first made of mortals, and that from him the female, and beasts, and birds, and fishes issued forth; that the superiority of man depends upon his being a religious animal; that each mortal consists of two portions, a soul and a body-their separation constitutes death; that of the soul there are two primitive component parts, a mortal and an immortal, the one being made by the cre- Triple constituated gods, and the other by the Supreme; that for the pur- tion of the soul, pose of uniting these parts together it is necessary that there should be an intermedium, and that this is the dæmonic portion or spirit; that our mental struggles arise from this triple constitution of Appetite, Spirit, and Reason; that Reason alone is immortal, and the others die; that the number of souls in the universe is invariable or constant; that the sentiment of pre-existence proves the soul to have existed before the body; that, since the soul is the cause of motion, it can neither be pro