The Press. SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1906. MYTH, POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 12478, 14 April 1906, Page 8

The Press. SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1906. MYTH, POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY

All these elements are combined in. a ■very remarkable book recently published by Professor J. A. Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in tho TJnirersity oi Oxford, on tfee Myths of Plato. It is a book which vitalises and exhibits in new relations en extremely important phase of ancient Greek thought, the full significance of which has not been, generally grasped. For sudh a task the spirit of the poet was needed as well as the soirit of the philosopher, and both required to bo supplemented by the spirit of patient research. Professor Stewart has fulfilled these requirements. He has wound his way into tihe heart of this strange region of speculation, and interpreted ita true spirit and meaning in the light of the thought, knowledge, and imaginative tendencies botti of ancient and modern times.

What are the Myths of Plato? All classical and many general readers are aware that the great mass of Plato's teaching is conveyed in the form of dramatic dialectic*;. A group of persons mcc% together, generally in a quite casuaJ and accidental manner. A conversation, is started on some topic of ordinary everyday interest. Presently an expression is used, or a string is touched, which gives forth an ambiguous or a misleading sound. Then Socrates (who is almost invariably the chief speaker), ever on the watoh for confusion of thought or half-formed opinions, oaiches up the expression used, and puts some searching questions. The other speaker becomes confused, sometimes irritable; and in his attempts to defend bis position flounders more and more. Gradually and imperceptibly the whole batteries of the SocraAic dialeotio are brought to bear on him, and amy others that come to his assistance. We look on and wonder, as the popular language and conceptions of the day are riddled to shreds. The ordinary relations of life are shown, under this relentless fire, to be bristling with unsuspected ethical problems. What we thought we knew we find we did not know at ell; and we end by discovering that we really do not know what we thought. The whole process ds carried out with a playful irony, sometimes subdued into sadness and disappointment; but the attitude is almost always ono of kindliness and sympathy. Whole dia-

logues of Plato ere in this vein, and the reading of them is in the highest degree stimulating to tho intellect and satisfying to the litttaiy taste. But. like all great thinkers, and perhaps more deeply than any of them, Plato know that there are worlds which the mind of man yearns to explore, but which the ordinary logical or scientific understanding cannot enter. The writ of scientific conceptions does not run there, and the attempt to apply them has always ended in failure and confusion. Tho German philosopher, Kant, after constructing his elaborate edifioe of the human mind and its possibilities, reserves three great Ideas from tbo system—God, the Soul, and Immortality. The attempt to prove or disprove these, he says, only leads to contradictions and " anti-nomios." "We oannot here stay to expound the relation in which he places them to his system. Plato, with perhaps a wider range of philosophic imagination than Kant's, reserves a much larger range of subjects from ordinary logical argumentation. There is on the one hand the great group of Ideas just named, with the addition of cognate questions, such as tihe origin of this universe and its organisation, tho lifo history and destiny of tho soul; and on the other, the whole warfld of ultimate realities, of which the so-called realities which our faculties apprehend aro but pale and distorted reflections. What is knowledge? What is beauty? What is love? What is truth? These and similar questions defy analysis; "tihey are not in the same piano as our faculties; their archetypes belong to a world where space and time and human senses find no place. They may be adumbrated, but not categorically answered; and it is in his method of adumbrating tJheni that Plato takes up a position unique among philosophers. For these most sublime of all his speculations he calls to his aid the form adopted by primitive people to envisage to themselves tihe operations of Nature, tihe form of Myth. Tlie quaint incongruity of tibia device strikes his own sense of philosophio humour; for, after piling up some awe-inspiring cosmic theory in the form of a faWe, and in language of sombre eloquence, he sometomes banters himself by making the speaker remark—"AH this may be oldwires' fables," or "Of oourse I cannot expeofc you to believe this," or "AH tfliia may be true or false, for aught I know." But in other cases the tale is introduced wdth a sense of t!he terrible seriousness of the position, and tho discussion wfoidh follows it ss sdemnased and exalted. Some of these Myttihs were borrowed from earlier sources, but only in skeleton. The splendour of the imagery, and the lofty, daring sweep of tbe.speoulatdon, these aire Plato's own. Professor Stewart's exposition of this side of the Platonic teaching is worked out with great poetic and philosophio insight. The Myth is a product of tlie dream-consciousness, a state. analogous to that sort of under-world transcendental feeling, into which we pass in reading great poetry or in moments of spiritual exaltation. Illustrations of teaching by Myth- may be found in many languages; but in sublimity, splendour, and scope Plato far surpasses them all. His influence on later ages was derived mainly from this higher logic of the philosophio imagination. The Neo-Platonists of Alexandria carried it to extravagant issues in their strivings towards mystic absorption in God (of which an example will be found in Kingsley's "Hypatia"). The formation of early Christian doctrine was largely coloured by it. The mixture of astronomy and spiritual blessedness in Dante's "ParadLeo" is a lineal descendant of the same great original. The Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth oentury, Cudworth, Norm, Smith, and Henry More, worked out their theology on the same lines. And even now those strange, unearthly mysteries, which Plato has woven into the form of fable, create a thrilling impression, which all tihe logio and science of "modern thought" cannot produce. If ever a pagan approached inspiration, Plato has approached it hero. Consummate artist as he was, ho blended by imperceptible traaisitions the logical and the transcendental, and adapted to each its appropriate stjle of sentiment and language. It is by this many-sidedness and universality that ho has attuned to his unapproachable eminence in th© development of human thought, from which the oracular warning against half-1 truths and one-sided systems sounds down the ages. I