THE SCEPTICAL APPROACH TO RELIGION

CONTENTS

RATIONALISM AND FAITH

By the sceptical point of view, then, I mean something quite definite. Very briefly, scepticism comes down to this, that it draws a sharp distinction, and persistently maintains a sharp distinction, between knowledge and theory. Knowledge is limited to what we have, not by inference from something else, but directly and without the intervention of inferential reason; in the ancient terminology of the sect, knowledge is what we possess in the form of immediate affections. To take a familiar illustration: I have certain sensations, when looking at or feeling an object, which I express by calling the object red and hard and round. And these sensations I know that I have, whatever you or another may have. Again I have certain feelings of pleasure and pain, hope and fear, elation and depression, self-approval and disapproval, and all the rest. And these, too, no matter how we try to explain them, are simply there, immediate affections of the mind, indisputable facts. Thus much I know, and I know further that these sensations and feelings come to me in certain patterns and sequences, so that I can classify them and order my doings accordingly. The complete sceptic is perfectly justified in addicting himself to scientific pursuits, if by science we mean no more than experimentation among, and classification of, phenomena; and he is equally justified in adapting his life to a chosen scheme of ethics. But the sceptic stops there, and stops sharply. Any attempt to go behind the immediate data of experience, any theory which reason may fabricate of the nature of the objects causing those sensations in his mind, or of himself as the recipient feeling subject; still more, any inference as to the ultimate nature of the world of which all phenomena and he himself are constituent parts, may be true or may be false, but whether true or false he, as sceptic, will not presume to say. Such is the sceptical position which I accept, the self-denying ordinance at which, as it seems to me, the rigorous use of reason must arrive; and I am seeking for an approach to religion from this point of view.

And first of all a word about the method which was advocated by Baron von Huegel, and which, under the cover of his great name, has attracted a good deal of attention in these days. At bottom the Baron's argument amounts to something like this. The child has from birth a vague confused perception of an outer physical environment, and from this is led by the slow lessons of contact to differentiate the various objects that flit before him and to acquire a practical sense of the ordered world in which he lives. But in addition to the faculty of physical perception man is born with an inner and immediate sense of a spiritual object which by attention may gradually develop into knowledge of what he will call God. Belief in God is thus attained not so much by inference or rational demonstration as by clarifying and strengthening an immediate affection just as is our belief in an outer world of phenomena.

Let me say that I personally am not prepared to deny the validity of this approach to theism and religion; but from the critical point of view it is open to serious objection. The difficulty is obvious. However imperative the immediate intuition of God may be for those who trust in it, there is no means by which its acceptance can be forced upon those - and they today at least would be the majority - who assert that they are unaware of any such experience. The doubters of course may be wrong. It may be true that all men are born with an immediate sense of the being of God, and that, if the vision is lost, it is because it has been choked by cares of the world or prevented from growing by other interests, but the fact remains that in many minds such an immediate sense of the being of God has been lost or remains so vague as of itself to have little force of persuasion. If in our apology for religion we are to meet the intellectual unbeliever on his own grounds, we must fall back for our starting point upon some element of consciousness which is universal to all men and cannot be honestly disputed.

And that element can be found, if anywhere, in the sense of self-approval or disapproval which makes itself felt in the mind as a man acts in one way or another. I begin with myself. I simply know by an intuitive affection, however that intuition may come to me, that some acts are for myself right and others wrong. With that intuition I have a concomitant feeling of self-approval when I do what seems to me right, and of disapproval when I do what seems to me wrong. I am thus somehow holding myself responsible for my acts, which is the same thing as saying that to myself I appear to be free to choose between what I regard as right and what I regard as wrong. Further, the feeling of disapproval, when it arises, can be described as repentance or remorse. That is to say, with self-dissatisfaction there is bound up a regret, and regret is inseparable from some purpose to act differently in the future. There is thus inherent in my very nature as man a purpose, a stirring of the will, however faint and intermittent, to shape my life and character after a pattern which is associated with a telos, or "end," of self-approval. All of which may be summed up in the statement that the moral sense, or conscience, is an integral part of my constitution as a human being, and that, in so far as it embraces not only a present feeling but an intention for the future, it is teleological. Now it is to be noted that this moral sense comes to me not at all by inference or reasoning. In the language of Aristotle, who first analysed the action of conscience, it is an aisthesis, a direct perception, or, in the sceptic's terminology, an immediate affection; and as the perception of an inner state it may be called intuition, an ultimate fact of our conscious experience. As such, and so far, it is a matter of incontrovertible knowledge. And, secondly, this intuition in the forum conscientiae appears to be, so far as we can learn, not peculiar to one's self but universal. You may find a man who theoretically denies the distinction of right and wrong as having any objective authority; but if you press him you will discover that always there is a point in conduct at which he will admit feeling the distinction for himself, and will resent the suggestion of acting in a certain way as base and distasteful. A man's moral sense may be very low and shifty, but no man, whether in a state of savagery or of advanced civilization, escapes remorse if he commits an act flagrantly at variance with his code of right and wrong; and no man, though his resolution may be extremely feeble, lacks at least a velleity, or slightest stirring of the will, to act in the future as to avoid remorse. I do not believe you will discover anywhere, or at any time, a human being who does not feel ill at ease if he is conscious of having betrayed a friend, and who does not, under the sting of shame, form some sort of resolve for the future. In other words, so far as we can judge from what men say of themselves, the teleology of conscience is universal.

So much I know of myself; so much the most complete sceptic will admit that he knows of himself. But as knowledge it stops just there; and this is a condition of our argument we must not forget. Because at any moment I have a feeling of self-approval or disapproval, it does not follow that this judgement must correspond with what I should feel with larger experience of life or with clearer scrutiny of myself. In fact such feelings, if allowed to influence us unchecked and unexamined, may prove in the test to be very fallible guides to action. Nevertheless they are there, unfailingly with us; and they do involve the constant sense of responsibility and freedom and purpose. Furthermore, any attempt to get behind the bare working of conscience as a law of man's inner being, with whatever may be implied by the word law, any attempt to determine how or why it is there, or to prove from it the existence of a lawgiver who governs the world in which man's life is staged,- any such endeavour carries us forthwith out of the range of knowledge into the probabilities of inference and theory.

Not only is this so, but we have to take account of that other kind of aistheis, called more properly observation than intuition, since it involves rather the looking out at things set over against us than the looking in at ourselves. And the troublesome business for our thinking is that through observation we seem to be in contact with a set of facts not only different from, but contrary to, the facts of intuition. All that I immediately observe of the natural world and of man as a part of nature appears as mechanically shifting patterns or as a series of mechanical actions and reactions. There are no visible signs of voluntary choice controlling what we see happening about us, no direct indications to the eye of purpose.

[I am aware that my distinctions and terminology are too simple to satisfy the professional epistemologist, but I am not trying to write a treatise of epistemology - absit. The distinction between "observation" and "intuition" means no more than this, that we do recognize two domains of experience, viz. our knowledge of external phenomena and the consciousness of ourselves, our needs, responsibilities, and so on. And for this dichotomy of experience I can think of no better terms than observation and intuition, though these words, especially the latter, are not without ambiguity, owing to their various uses. So of the other distinction. It may be that there is no such thing as pure perception, aisthesis. Some process of mind may be involved in the judgement that this particular group of sensations is a stone, or that the feelings of responsibility and freedom and purpose are included in the sense of self-approval or disapproval. But whatever these mental processes may be, they are radically distinct from the inferential procedure that arrives at a theory of the ultimate nature of things as corresponding with either or both of the two domains of observation and intuition.]

Now there are, you will find, three different ways in which the mind may react when brought to bay by this paradox, and as a result men fall into three main groups, more or less sharply divided as they are more or less acutely aware of the urgency of the problem. To the first group would belong those who, simply admitting the facts of experience, reject the claims of reason to evade the antithesis between observation and intuition. By this I do not mean the state of one whose immediate affections, however received, are so dull and whose brain is so sluggish that the conflict never occurs to him or occurs so feebly as to awaken no disquiet. We may leave such an one out of our consideration, as Dante turned from the souls of the unfortunate who had never really lived. I am thinking rather of those who are very much alive, to whom the contrast between observation and intuition comes so keenly and seems so final, that they deliberately refuse to let their minds play upon the paradox at all and, as they say, hold their judgement in suspense. These are the true sceptics whom I place in the first group. But I would have you notice that those who resolutely stop here and refuse to draw any inference from the facts of experience, are extremely rare. Whatever he may profess, the thinking man is drawn almost irresistibly by the needs of life and the tyranny of temperament to yield to the temptation of theorizing about what he sees and feels. And particularly I would have you notice that this is true of those who believe themselves to be sceptics and call themselves agnostics. Watch their acts and examine their words, and you will find that, like Huxley who invented the name, they are so interested in the visible phenomena of the world as in their theories to ignore or, when pressed by argument, to deny any genuine validity to the voice of conscience. Quite generally they pass from the first to the second of our three groups of thinkers, and may be classified with those who, accepting the data of observation as true, by explicit or covert inference reject the contrary data of intuition as illusory. Ordinarily today such men, these dogmatists who often masquerade as agnostics, reach their point of view from a direct interest in physical science or through the more obscure influence of others so interested. And it is easy to see how this happens. By observation we are immediately aware of certain motions and activities among the phenomena all about us. On the one hand we perceive inanimate objects behaving after the manner of billiard balls played one upon the other, or of a machine in operation. There appears to be what might be called a static system of interlocked motions; the individual objects are changing their position, but the system remains unchanged; there are constantly varying patterns, but no real growth and nothing essentially new. At the same time we observe a whole group of animate objects in the process of growth: the acorn developing into an oak and the child developing into a man. And then, carried along by an urgent impulse to simplify, we merge these two fields of observation together. From what we observe of the animate half of nature we think of the whole world as undergoing a sort of growth or development, while at the same time, from what we observe of the inanimate half of nature, we conceive this growth as a process of purely mechanical evolution. There is, even the scientist must admit, something of inference, or as he would say hypothesis, in this interfusion of the two fields of observation, but it is an inference that has forced itself upon the minds of many thinking men from the days of Heracleitus to the present. And now, with the advent of palaeontology into the realm of science, we can say that the role of inference has become less and less dominant, and that we are enabled to observe, if not the actual process of evolution, at least the clear signs left over from that process. We have some right to say that the bare fact of evolution has been removed from the sphere of inferential philosophy to the sphere of observational science. And always the theory of evolution, so long as it remains scientific, is observational to this extent, that it entirely eschews any implication with what comes to us by intuition. As the scientist studies the growing acorn, as he traces the palaeontological signs of cosmic development, he may indeed observe a system of mutual adjustments which impart to nature the appearance of design or plan, but behind this system he perceives no visible indications of a conscious purpose at work; and if he speaks of natural law, he is only giving a name to some indefinable power of chance or fatality threading the sequence of observed phenomena. Science, as Spinoza argued convincingly, is resolutely non-teleological, and must be non-teleological.

Inference, of a more dubious sort, creeps in when the scientist, not content with deliberately and legitimately leaving intuition out of his working theory of the world, presumes to deny the validity of intuition as an independent fact in its own sphere. And the temptation to do this is readily understandable. From observing other men I turn to myself, and immediately I am aware that observation gives the same result here as elsewhere: I see, looking at myself from the outside, so to speak, how inheritance and environment are at work in shaping my own destiny exactly as they are with other men. The paradox of observing myself as part of a mechanical process of evolution, and at the same moment intuiting myself as a free and responsible agent, the difficulty of admitting that I am at once separate from the world as a purposive being and part of a world evolving under some unconscious law of necessity becomes more distressing the more I reflect, until to escape the dilemma I reason away the disturbing factor of conscious teleology as a product of illusion. Hence the second group of those whom I rank as open or covert dogmatists of observation.

In direct contrast with these would be the third group, viz. those who, accepting the content of intuition as valid, reject, if not the data of observation, at least the dogmatic inferences therefrom, as illusory. It will be seen that the opposition here displayed can be traced back to a primary divergence of interest or emphasis. In both cases the mind has been caught by the dilemma of outer determination and inner freedom, and its resolution of this contradiction follows one or the other of two lines as it responds more vigorously to the solicitations of what is outwardly observed or of what is inwardly felt; and as its interest and attention are thus centred upon one or the other order of experience, so that order gains in emphasis, while the other loses in emphasis until it can be disregarded as an illusion. The faculty of our mind by which the isolated data of observation are combined into a theory of mechanically operated changes is reason, and the extension of this inference so as to cover, or exclude, the field of intuition is properly called rationalism. The contrary force, which fixes our attention upon the content of intuition as more significant and real than the data of observation, is in its origin so obscure as scarcely to have a name. But to its manifestation as a more or less conscious opposition to the inference of rationalism we give the name of faith, and the life directed and controlled by faith we call religion. Faith may then be defined as the faculty that urges us on to carry over the immediate sense of personal freedom and responsibility and purpose into our interpretation of the world at large, in defiance, if need be, of that more self-assertive display of reason which we call rationalism. To faith the whole world thus becomes teleological just as the individual is conscious of being teleological; and religion is an attempt to live in harmony with a world so conceived.

For the rest my object in this lecture is to consider briefly some of the inevitable corollaries of faith as so defined, and to examine its warrant for acceptance.

First of all we must keep clearly before us the fact that the faith of religion, as we are considering it, is not knowledge but inference, and we should make no attempt to escape the implications of such an admission. But if faith stands thus on the same basis with rationalism, as one alternative of two possible attitudes towards the paradox of experience, yet its procedure is not quite the same as that of the other alternative. In a sense the religious man's inference from intuition rejects the result of observation as an illusion, just as the rationalist's inference from observation rejects the result of intuition as an illusion. But the parallel is not exact. The inference of rationalism is by its nature all-embracing and fanatically dogmatic; it simply sweeps away the possibility of freedom and responsibility anywhere and everywhere; it tells me categorically that my intuition is a pure illusion having no correspondence with the facts of existence, and that if I think of myself as free and responsible I am merely a victim of self-deception. Theoretically, if I accept the contention of rationalism, I may seem to have reached a logical solution of the dilemma of experience, and I may thus bring a certain ease to my mind; but the simple truth must not be shuffled out of sight that I have accomplished this by means of pure inference, and that the consciousness of myself as a responsible being capable of purpose remains uneliminated and unaltered. I may by inference remove the immediate affection of freedom from my theory of life; I shall continue to live nevertheless precisely as if I had no such theory.

In contrast with this procedure the inference of faith is more modest and consistent; it is thus, in the proper use of the word, more reasonable than rationalism, as it is far less subject to the corrosive acid of scepticism. It does not, at least it need not, so much reject as transcend the immediate data of observation. It may, without betraying its own demands, admit that the acorn, so far as we can see, develops into an oak by a law which leaves to the acorn itself no freedom of action and no responsibility for its growth; it may with perfect consistency admit, indeed in loyalty to itself is rather bound to believe, that the cosmic evolution has left no visible material records of a conscious purposive mind at work in the cosmos itself. In other words, faith normally does not transfer our consciousness of freedom and responsibility and purpose to, or into, the observed phenomena of the objective universe, but rather infers the existence of a free and responsible agent, whose purpose is operative in the world while He Himself is transcendent to the world. The content of faith is thus theistic rather than pantheistic or deistic. To sum up the argument in more technical language; the inference from observation is in the direction of a materialistic or pseudo-spiritual monism, whereas the proper inference from intuition leads to a dualism of spirit and matter. This is the true meaning of cosmic teleology as different from immanent law, and it was against precisely this dualistic conception of teleology that the rationalizing philosophers of the seventeenth century thundered in the index.

[In drawing this contrast between the uses of observation and of intuition I have omitted the emotional reaction of the poet, or of the poetic faculty within all of us, which brings a sense of something human and divine interfused through nature. This, I take it, is not a result of pure observation but is definable as the pathetic fallacy (though the word fallacy rather begs the question). It is a kind of halfway house between the scientific outlook and the fully teleological inference of faith. I have in mind to deal with this subject in an essay on Wordsworth.]

[* I say nothing here of Buddhism which, in its early form, was neither theistic nor, in the full sense of the word, teleological. This subject I have dealt with elsewhere, in The Catholic Faith.]

Now if cosmic teleology is an inference from the teleological knowledge of myself, if faith is a transference of this triple form of consciousness to a Being who transcends the world, then we are bound by our faith to a corresponding conception of the nature and operation of such a Being. As a matter of fact, if we deal with the subject honestly, we shall see that the whole history of religion from the superstition of the most ignorant savage to the creed of the most enlightened man of today does actually follow this law of correspondence. We shall discover the same inference of purpose and freedom and responsibility in the mysterious object of primitive worship as in the God of the most advanced theism. For what is the daemonic presence, too vague perhaps even to possess a name, which excites at once the awe and the devotion of the earliest known man, and which he thinks he can in some degree control by means of magical formulae and rites? It is a something instinctively rather than consciously conjectured behind the world of his observation which is purposing to bring good or evil to the individual man or his people; something free and transcendent in so far as it is separated in his thought from the little mechanical world of his restricted observation; yet at the same time hampered somehow by that which it transcends and through which it works; something responsive in the sense that it may respond to the worshipper's prayers and threats, but responsible also to the worshipper's moral code in a manner which justifies him in showing on occasion indignation against the invisible power for what he regards as wrong-doing as well as gratitude for right-doing. The object of primitive faith is thus utterly anthropomorphic; but it scarcely can be called personal, just as primitive man has the vaguest notion of his own personality. And this is the point where progress enters. One may say that the change from superstition to religion and the gradual development of religion to the most refined theism can be measured by an ever clearer understanding of personality as involved in the intuition of purpose and freedom and responsibility, by an ever clearer conception of faith as a conscious inference of such a personality behind the mechanism of observed phenomena.

Growth in religion is thus in the direction of a deeper and broader anthropomorphism; but not away from anthropomorphism. And this is a corollary of faith that must not be forgotten. So long as God remains a purposeful Being - and to faith He can be only that - He must be imagined as working out a design, just as man is conscious of doing, through some sort of obstacle or hindrance and by the lingering processes of time. There can in fact be no conception of purpose without such limitation, though with deepening self-consciousness the inference of limitation may change in character. Similarly He must be held, like man, responsible to the moral law, though again the nature of the moral law will purify itself and deepen as human experience grows larger. And so God's freedom will correspond to man's liberty of choice, developed to that self-determination to choose only good which man sees as the far-off goal of his own endeavour. If ever theologians, whether Christian or non-Christian, growing restive under the restraints of anthropomorphism, have framed what seemed to them a higher definition of the Supreme Being, if ever they have declared His freedom to be absolute power to do as He would, if they have altered responsibility into absolute authority over good and evil as though moral distinctions were no more than the decrees of His unconditioned will, if they have transmuted purpose into absolute creativeness,- then they have done so, not by pursuing the humble inferences of faith from intuition, but by transferring to God the monistic inferences of absolute causality drawn from observation of the mechanical sequences of nature. That was the way of Calvin, for instance, in reaching his rationalized theology of determinism. Yet it is a notable fact that, whenever religion has not been utterly stifled by misapplied metaphysics, the true inferences of faith will, in the theologian's unguarded moments, break through the whole panoply of absolutism. It was Jonathan Edwards, most intrepid of Calvinists, who, after reducing man's consciousness of free will to an illusion in order to leave the will of God absolute, gave this noble expression to the theism of faith:

We must conceive of Him as influenced in the highest degree by that which, above all others, is properly a moral inducement, viz. the moral good which He sees in such and such things: and therefore He is, in the most proper sense, a moral Agent, the source of all moral ability and agency, the fountain and rule of all virtue and moral good; though by reason of his being supreme over all, it is not possible He should be under the influence of law or command, promises or threatenings, rewards or punishments, counsels or warnings. The essential qualities of a moral Agent are in God, in the greatest possible perfection; such as understanding, to perceive the difference between moral good and evil:... and also a capacity of choice, and choice guided by understanding, and a power of acting according to his choice or pleasure, and being capable of doing those things which are in the highest sense praiseworthy.

Why, then, if faith is what I have described it to be, do we make such an inference, what warrant have we for its validity, and what compulsion lies upon us for taking religion seriously as a matter of any consequence to our intellectual and practical life?

Now the reply to these queries given by a large number of thinking men, of whom Professor John Dewey may be named as an eminent example, is at once simple and specious. The inference of faith they declare, is merely a "wishful belief," a "defence attitude." We are here in a world which affords no knowledge of any life beyond the span of our mortal years, and no knowledge of a supernatural Being who is governing it in accordance with our individual sense of freedom and responsibility to an end corresponding to our sense of purpose. We crave the existence of such a Being, and so we infer that He does exist. We are dismayed by the thought of our life as confined to the limits of birth and death, terrified by the great gulf of nothingness which yawns before us at the end of our course, tormented by our loneliness in a world where there is no personality responding to our human need of companionship. And so, losing heart, unwilling to face the hard facts, we create for ourselves a religion as a pure attitude of defence against the truth. We believe simply because we wish to believe, because we are afraid not to believe.

The issue is clear cut. The infidel has thrown down the gauntlet; for myself I am ready to accept the defi and to meet the challenger on his own ground. Whatever others may have said of mystical visions, whatever tales there may be of violent irruptions from the supernatural world, I can only report that for myself I can see no sure warrant for the beginning of religion except in faith, and no warrant for rejecting the infidel's identification of faith with desire. I say for myself; yet I think that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was with me when he defined faith as "the substance of things hoped for." What is the meaning of these words except that faith is a deliberate act of confidence in our hopes, and what is the meaning of this but an acceptance of the challenge that we believe because we wish to believe? And I submit that the Church today holds the same position. At least I can put no other interpretation upon the words of a learned Jesuit which, though they were intentionally directed against myself, sound to me like a confirmation of what I would maintain. "You may," he says, "tell yourself, intelligo ut credam: but . . . the intimate understanding of Catholicity, which is the real understanding of it, comes only after your act of Catholic faith, after your adherence, after your credo ut intelligam." For what is this credo ut intelligam but an admission that the initial act of faith is, again, to believe because we wish to believe, hoping that possibly confirmation in experience may come later?

All this, you will observe, is no more than a corollary of the sceptic's statement that knowledge, demonstrable knowledge at least, is limited to our immediate affections, and that faith is therefore not knowledge but undemonstrable inference. Nor has reason any power to demonstrate that the inferred existence of a God is necessarily true. At least I can say that of all the rational attempts to demonstrate the existence of God - and I have read many from Plato's time to those of the present day - not one is logically coercive, not one of them bridges the gap between a demonstration of what would be in the world if anything there corresponded to what we know of ourselves by intuition, and demonstration of the fact that something does actually there exist corresponding to our intuition. Against that final doubt reason is perfectly powerless. It is, to illustrate my point, because of the inadequacy of A. E. Taylor's attempt to solve this problem rationally in his initial chapter on Actuality and Value, while he seems to imply that the validity of religion depends upon such a solution, that we go through the rest of this really noble work on The Faith of a Moralist with the unquieted sense of having been trapped by some concealed fallacy.

Again, admit the challenger's assertion that we believe because we wish to believe, because we are afraid not to believe. What then?

Well, first of all I would ask the challenger to play fair. I would say to him: You tell me that my faith is a mere refuge from the known facts. Very good. But you cannot make such an accusation and at the same time cloak yourself about in the pretended indifference of the self-styled "agnostic"; having taken this positive attitude, you cannot avoid the issue you have raised by asserting that we know nothing of the truth or falsehood of any proposition whatsoever and must therefore hold our judgement in absolute equilibrium. This is not a matter of idle curiosity, as if one were debating whether he should open his egg at the sharp or the flat end. Faith means belief in God and in the responsibility of my human soul to God, and religion, if it is anything more than a flatus vocis, means a life fashioned in accordance with that belief. Indifference to faith, equally with dogmatic denial of faith, is pragmatically a rejection of the demands of religion. You, the challenger, cannot hold me to the consequences of my position, while you slip easily from the infidel's stand of open contradiction to the self-styled agnostic's indifference of suspended judgement. There are not three parties to our dispute, but only two: to the honourable mind it must be either acceptance or non-acceptance of the inference of faith, with loyalty to the consequences of one or the other choice.

And in another matter I would ask the challenger to play fair. Again I would say to him: You cannot belittle my faith as a product of fear and as a defence attitude, and then laugh at me for fleeing from a bogey of my own fancy. It is you who are fond of asserting that faith springs from a refusal to face facts. Or, if you would creep out of the implication of such an assertion by adding that it is not really facts from which I am fleeing but my own falsely pessimistic colouring of the facts; if, that is, you present the truth of life as simply this, that my conscious existence is measured by the quick transit from birth to death, that I am only a sudden and momentary emergence into a world which pursues its ruthless course with grand indifference to what my desires may be, and with nothing at its heart which corresponds to my sense of personal freedom and responsibility, that my life is like a bubble tossed up from a sea of waves clashing endlessly and purposelessly beneath an empty sky, and of tides sweeping restlessly hither and thither in obedience to no directing hand - if this is the fact you would beg me to face, yet would insist that there is nothing to disquiet or discomfort me, nothing to fear, nothing to justify me in running off to some imaginary refuge, then I would retort with the charge that your optimism is less logical than my faith; I would say that this optimism of yours, granting it to be genuine, either is dependent on the dullness of an atrophied imagination or is itself a kind of stubborn and joyless and very vulnerable defence attitude. And in this the judgement of mankind is with me, and it is you that stand in arbitrary isolation. Not here and now only, but always and everywhere, when men begin to reflect, their reaction towards a world seen without God and without purpose is dark with despair and bitter with resentment. Plutarch, heritor of all the wisdom of Greece, has filled a long essay with quotations from the poets of his land which come to a head in the pungent line of Euripides:

We name it life, in fact 'tis only travail.

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

And so I take up the challenge. I must either believe or disbelieve that there is within the world, or, rather, beyond the world, that which corresponds to my intuition of freedom and responsibility; I must either regard the universe as teleological, with all which this implies, or I must regard it as without purpose. There is for the honest and serious mind, for the practical rule of life, no middle ground. And faced with the compulsion of choosing between such alternatives I say to you, the champion of what you call facts, that your view is simply incredible. You ask me to believe that nature has planted in me, and not in me alone but in all men, desires which I must eradicate as pure deceptions, that I am the victim of a cosmic jest, only the more cruel if unintended, that the ultimate fact of existence is a malignant mockery. The genial Autocrat of the Breakfast Table once said that no decent man could logically hold the doctrines of Calvin without going mad. His gibe upon that parody of faith was not without point, but it might be applied with even greater aptitude to the challenger of the very principle of faith. Again I say: de te fabula.

I am not retracting the admission that faith, initially at least, is inference and not knowledge, or that a man believes because he wishes to believe; I am only saying that, all things considered, the so-called disbelief of the infidel is an inference which, if honestly examined, demands an act of almost impossible credulity.

But the issue does not end here. Faith, to become religion, must be something more than lip-assent to a greater probability. Religion requires a decision of the will to live in accordance with faith, an unremitting determination to transmute a probability of belief into a truth of experience. It is thus, as Pascal declared, a pari, a wager, a great venture, in which a man stakes his all upon the realization of a hope. And here it must be admitted that infidelity is much easier, less exacting, than faith. The life of infidelity demands no such effort of the will and no such renunciations as does the life of religion; it is rather by comparison a letting of oneself go, a facile surrender to the streaming impressions that crowd upon us from the outer world and to the tides of sensation that ebb and flow within us. So it is that in moments of depression and apparent failure, we hear the voice of doubt, like a whisper in the ear, saying: After all faith at best is only a matter of probability which we are under no obligation to accept; why then take the harder course? Against such doubts the best remedy would seem to be Plato's prescription of a handy sentence in the form of an epode, or charm, to be repeated over and over again:

Khalepon to pistenein amekhanon to apistein.

Difficilius discredere quam credere.

It is hard to believe, harder not to believe.

The alternative to faith, if honestly faced, is an act of impossible credulity.

You may remember the close of Socrates' argument in gaol with the challenger of his faith:

"These, my dear friend Crito, are the words that I seem to hear, as the mystic worshippers seem to hear the piping of flutes; and the sound of this voice so murmurs in my ears that I can hear no other. I know that anything more which you may say will be vain. Yet speak, if you have anything to say.

"I have nothing to say, Socrates."

"Leave me then, Crito, to fulfil the will of God, and to follow whither he leads."

THE SOCRATIC REVOLUTION

In one brief sentence the old Dictator of Fleet Street - and I can see him shake his head as he uttered it - summed up for practical purposes all that I tried to expand in my former lecture; and I think there is a sounder basis of philosophy in his words than you will find anywhere in Locke or Berkeley or Hume. He meant, as the rest of the conversation shows clearly enough, that by inference from the facts of observation (that is by "theory") we are led to a conception of the whole range of cosmic events, including human conduct, as just happening in a fatal order of sequence, whereas to "experience" (that is to intuition as I use the word) man feels himself to be a free and responsible agent. Otherwise expressed, the moment we begin to reflect on the nature of things we are faced by the paradoxical contradiction of determinism and freedom, out of which reason may try to extricate us as best she can. Practically the ordinary man lives, as it might be said, from hand to mouth, ill hours of reflection wavering from one horn of the theoretical dilemma to the other, but more generally not reflecting at all.

But philosophy, whether for man's blessing or undoing, cannot rest in such a compromise. Unless in humility it is willing to abide in the rarest of all states, genuine scepticism, it must reason out some reconciliation of the paradox of experience (experience, that is, not in the Johnsonian, but in the larger sense including both observation and intuition), and the strange fact, the utterly amazing fact, if one stops to consider, is that philosophy by an almost irresistible impulse lays hold of the data of observation, and from that proceeds by a series of inferences, properly called rationalism, to build up a conception of the world in which no possible place is left for the human sense of freedom and responsibility and purpose. "All theory," as Johnson said, "is against the freedom of the Will." In other words philosophy, when divorced from the faith of religion, has an almost fatal tendency to become non-teleological; and this, I repeat, is a strange, amazing fact. For, after all, to quote Dr. Johnson in: "You are surer that you can lift up your finger not as you please than you are of any conclusion from a deduction of reasoning."

I would not be too absolute in my statement. There as in the nature of the case would be expected, of cosmic teleology in various philosophies of the Orient and the Occident. But if you examine you will find, I believe, that always, with a exception, one or another of the three factors of intuition - whether it be freedom or responsibility or purpose - is lacking to the completed system; and without all three of these factors teleology is a name nothing more. For an independent development of the full circle of intuition into an articulate theory of the world overriding, or supplementing, the inference from observation,- for that, so far as my knowledge goes, we must look to Greece, and, more narrowly, to a particular city of that land, Athens, and in that city to the only two philosophers of note contributed by it to the course of Hellenic thought. Again have the astonishing fact that Socrates and Plato appear suddenly and inexplicably as a contradiction the prevalent trend of their age and people. It may true that their ideas correspond with the ethical basis of tragedy, and are thus intrinsically Athenian; but among the professed philosophers of Greece all who preceded Socrates are non-teleological in their outlook, as are all those who followed Plato. They stand in this respect utterly alone, shining like a gleam of light in the vast encompassing darkness, a kind of illusory dawn which, for Greece at least, brought no day.

[The incomplete teleology of Aristotle I leave for treatment elsewhere.]

But there is a further distinction to note, since evolution may be understood in two quite different ways. By the first of these the end is indeed contained in the beginning, or principium, but unconsciously, as an immanent tendency to develop in a certain manner and towards a certain goal. And this process is clearly enough what we understand by scientific evolution in the Darwinian use of the word. It implies a thorough determinism, and is a desperate endeavour to cling to the facts of observation and to avoid the contaminating ideas of intuition. All which seems rational enough, until you venture to ask why. Just what is this immanent principle at work in the nature of things? What is the cause behind all this mechanical evolution? The point is that causality is an utterly human conception, and has no meaning outside of what we know intuitively of human activity. The only causal relation of which we have any comprehension is that between the proposal in my mind to do something and the doing of it, as the outcome of purpose; whereas all we get from observation, as Hume demonstrated finally, is a succession of unconnected events. Hence scientific evolution, having eschewed the intuitive sense of cause, has no resource but to fall back on an assumption of changes, or variations, that happen by pure chance. But a succession of haphazard changes leaves the orderly progress of the world quite unexplained; and recent attempts to circumvent the difficulties of Darwinism by the substitution of sudden emergence for gradual variation do not really bring any relief. And so, to account for observed orderliness of succession, the scientific evolutionist can only double chance with the mysterious fatalism of probability. The determinism that masquerades in the name of reason is thus a bare hypothesis of immanent law compounded of chance and probability, which are the very contrary of cause. I doubt whether the brain of man has ever devised a darker, more incomprehensible, more obscurant, and in the end more meaningless explanation of what we see happening in the world than the theory that things progress to some predetermined goal by some blind impulse within themselves which usurps the name of absolute causality. In the name of reason, what is this immanent law of which we have no knowledge either by observation or by intuition?

The serious question raised by the conception of evolution is thus, not whether the changes we observe are a gradual or sudden occurrence, but whether they are self-determined or designed, whether they are the result of immanent law or of external direction, whether, in any comprehensible sense of the word, they are uncaused or caused. Hence we are brought to another definition of evolution according to which the telos would not be present in the beginning but at the beginning in the form of a conscious plan. This definition implies an agent who, so to speak, has the end before his eye, or mind's eye, as a model or pattern to be imitated. The classical illustration of evolution so interpreted would be the architect who conceives the plan of a building, and thereupon proceeds to bring it into being by arrangement of the material at his disposal. Thus taken telos is a prothesis, a something proposed to be done, a purpose; purposive teleology is thoroughly anthropomorphic. And here this important corollary should be noted. A teleological view of evolution in this higher sense does not imply an automatic sort of progress in which each successive step must be regarded as an advance on the preceding, but, by the very fact of a dualism of forces, seen in the proposing agent and the material at his disposal, leaves the question of progress, of better and worse, to be decided by the nature of the change at any moment.

To sum up the argument, we may say that from various meanings of telos it might be etymologically correct to use the term teleology of any one of these three conceptions of the cosmos: (1) as simply coming to an end and ceasing to be, or (2) as evolutionary in the sense of developing by the immanent law to an end potentially present in the beginning, or (3) as guided to a foreseen consummation by some transcendent agent. Clearly the third proposition is the only one that embraces causality and purpose; it is the only one reached by inference from intuition; and it is this definition that have in mind in my use of the word.

Now, as I have said, the whole movement of pre-Socratic philosophy was for a mechanical evolution that falls under the second of these definitions. The beginning of that movement came at the close of the sixth century B.C., when Thales of Miletus discarded popular mythological stories of the origin of the world (which might have developed, but in fact never develop, into a true teleology), and for them substituted a rationalized theory of determinism. It is probable that Thales wrote no philosophical treatises, and certainly, if he did, they were lost at an early date; but from the report of Aristotle we can see pretty clearly the motive and direction of his thought. He was, to employ the expressive term coined I believe by Cudworth, the first of the hylozoists, that is to say, of those who held that life is an inseparable property of matter, not as a conscious will, nor even as a vitalistic energy peculiar to animal bodies, but as an energy indistinguishable from brute mass, such that matter of itself, by the immanent law of its own being, unfolds automatically from a primitive simplicity to the actual complex of phenomena as we know them.

Thales, for reasons into which we need not enter, thought of matter in its aboriginal form as water. He was followed by the line of so-called Ionian philosophers, who like him were hylozoists, and differed from him chiefly in regarding some other element than water - whether air or fire or just nameless unqualified matter - as the primitive stuff, and in giving various explanations, such as separation out, or thickening and thinning, or everlasting recurrence, to the manner of change. It sounds naive no doubt in our ears to be told that water or air or fire is the primitive stuff out of which the manifold world evolves; but the choice of this or that element was rather accidental to their system, and the principle at which they were guessing - guessing in ignorance, if you will - was nevertheless the first recorded attempt in the West to arrive at an exclusively scientific philosophy, and was was the father of such modern theories as Kant's primordial mist[*] and Huxley's chemistry of the brain and Haeckel's monism.

[* Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels: "Bei einem auf solche Weise efuellten Raum dauert die allgemeine Ruhe nur einen Augenblick. Die Elemente haben wesentliche Kraefte, einander in Bewegung zu setzen, und sind sich eine Quelle des Lebens." The only real difference that I can see between Thales and Kant is that the naivete, of the former is childlike and that of the latter childish.]

There is a passage in the Phaedo in which Socrates, interrupting rather arbitrarily the long argument for the immortality of the soul on that last day of his life, tells his friends of his own intellectual conversion; and if any words put into the mouth of his master by Plato are genuine, these, I believe, are so.

In his youth the Platonic Socrates tells us, he had a keen desire to gain a knowledge of natural philosophy. (The reader of Aristophanes will recall the parody of the young scientist investigating by sound laboratory method "how many feet of its own a flea could jump.") But the result of these researches was so far from encouraging that it only served to show his own ignorance. Then in the midst of his perplexities he heard one reading from a treatise of Anaxagoras, in which that philosopher declared that reason (nous) is the directing cause of all things. This greatly pleased Socrates, who expected to find that all things were thus arranged in the best possible way, so that if any one wished to discover the cause of the origin, existence, or decay of anything, he would only have to find how it was best for the thing to arise, be, or decay. He expected, moreover, to learn not only the particular good which was the cause of each particular thing, but the common good which was the cause of all. But when he read the book for himself his hopes were bitterly disappointed. He found that really Anaxagoras referred the order of the world not to reason at all as a cause, but to the physical properties of air, aether, water, etc. All this, says Socrates, is just as if a man, after saying that Socrates does everything by virtue of his reason, were to attempt to assign the causes of each particular act of Socrates by referring them, not to reason, but to the physical elements of which Socrates' body is composed. Thus, e.g., he would say that the cause of Socrates' sitting there in prison was that his body was composed of bones and sinews, and that when the bones move in their sockets, the sinews by their contraction and relaxation make the body bend. Whereas "the real cause," Socrates declares, "of my sitting and conversing here is that it seemed best to the Athenians to condemn me, and that, therefore, it seemed to me better to sit here and submit to the sentence. The physical things (bones, sinews, air, etc.)," he continues, "are not causes, they are necessary conditions without which the real cause - my choice of what I deem best - could not take effect, and it is very unphilosophical to confuse the cause with the condition." All these physical philosophers then, with their vortices, air, etc., are just groping in the dark, overlooking the true cause which binds all things together - the Good.

[This summary is taken almost verbatim, with some omissions, from Frazer's Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory, an essay written in 1879 but not published until 1930.]

To this point there can be little doubt of the authenticity of the sentiment put into the mouth of Socrates. Everything we know of him points to the fact that he did, so far as conduct is concerned, reject the deterministic implications of the philosophy of his day for an ethical teleology based on the innate recognition of the good as the end of life. And it is in this way we should understand the familiar saying that he brought philosophy down from heaven (meaning the physical phenomena of the skies) to earth. But the answer is not so easy when we ask how far he went in carrying over the immediate datum of intuition into a theory of the cosmos itself. Here we cannot be sure that Plato did not read his own speculations into the teaching of his master. Plato, as we shall see, reached a completely teleological philosophy by developing on parallel lines the doctrine of Ideas and the belief in God as the two cooperative causes of order in the phenomenal world of our observation; and the problem is to know how much of this development was original with him and how much of it was taken over directly from Socrates. Here we can only conjecture. But I believe it safe to say that both a rudimentary doctrine of Ideas and a conception of the Divine pointing towards theism, out of which Plato was to construct his cosmic theory, were Socratic.

However that may be, it would appear that Plato himself was aware of the rather devious course by which he attained his goal, and that he has deliberately left guideposts in his writings for the instruction of any attentive reader. I do not see why otherwise the four dialogues which mark the steps of his progress are so linked together that they stand out almost as a separate treatise within the larger bulk of his works. First we have the Gorgias, which indicates reasons for clinging to the doctrine of Ideas, though the doctrine itself is scarcely mentioned. This is followed by the Republic, which in the first book virtually duplicates the main discussion of the Gorgias and then proceeds to elevate the doctrine of Ideas to the highest point of independence. With the Republic the Timaeus is linked in somewhat similar manner, only here the introduction is a professed summary of the political argument of the earlier dialogue, while the role of Ideas is not so much expanded as contracted by subordinating them to God as the efficient cause of creation. And lastly the Laws, in the tenth book, quite explicitly repeats the three theses of the hypothesis upon which the Ideal doctrine of the Republic was based, and categorically rejects them for another hypothesis by which Ideas are so subordinated to the divine Agent of justice as almost to disappear from view. Our business is to discover how the elements necessary for a full-fledged teleology gradually emerge as Plato passes from one phase of thought to another in this epitome of his philosophical development.

The Gorgias is a dialogue to which I return always with enhanced admiration of its superlative beauty and significance. In it Plato gathers up all that he had learned from his teacher, and from it proceeds on lines of his own speculation. The dramatic setting of the piece you will remember. Socrates is carried to the hall where Gorgias, the famed sophist out of Sicily, has been giving a public display of his skill in speaking, and the newcomer, after his cool fashion, requires what this rhetoric may be for which the young men of the cities are flocking about its professor, and paying huge sums for instruction. It is an art, replies Polus, a sort of henchman of Gorgias, the art of persuasion, and as such enables its votaries to exert influence over individuals and assemblies. But, says Socrates, these matters of debate in which the rhetorician exercises his influence can ordinarily be reduced to a question of justice and injustice, right and wrong. Must then the pupil of rhetoric know what justice or right is in itself, or is it sufficient that he be instructed simply in the method of making any opinion prevail? Only that, replies Polus. Then, says Socrates, rhetoric is no art at all but just a low sort of cunning in flattery.

Polus merely reaffirms his statement. Your argument is very subtle and very nice, he rejoins to Socrates, but here is the fact: rhetoric as the art of persuasion does enable a man to control others, and so to accomplish whatever he may desire. You may sneer at the means, but wherever you go you will find that the pupils of rhetoric are actually the men of power and so the possessors of happiness. I deny the fact, is Socrates' answer. Power is the ability to achieve what a man really and ultimately wants, and to do this he must know what he wants. Through the cunning of rhetoric a man may make himself tyrant of a city, and so able to exile whomsoever he desires and to slay whomsoever he desires. But in doing this he may in fact be working against his own interest. He has no real power until he knows what is finally good for him, no real happiness until his will is set upon that good.

The difference between Polus and Socrates might summed up in two phrases signifying respectively: (1) what seems to a man good, what a man at any moment may desire, and (2) the good which man, from the bottom of his heart, finally wants. Mere skill and cunning may help him to acquire the pleasures momentarily desired; to attain the happiness he really craves he must know himself and those principles of justice and injustice which are the laws of his being. And such knowledge is the province of philosophy, not of rhetoric.

Polus, by arguments which, it must be acknowledged, are sometimes superficially fallacious, is reduced to self-contradiction and from that to sullen acquiescence. Whereupon Callicles, who has been listening to the debate with increasing restlessness, suddenly breaks in with the complaint that Gorgias and Polus have been brought to contradict themselves because they were too much of gentlemen to stick to their thesis that justice and injustice, as Socrates defines them, are empty words and have nothing to do with happiness. He, Callicles, will make no concession to popular prejudice, but will maintain the naked truth. And the truth is simply this, that nomos (convention, tradition, law) and physis (nature) are two quite different things, so different as to be at variance one with the other. Justice as defined by the one is exactly the injustice of the other, and so of injustice; and you, Socrates, he declares, have thrown Gorgias and Polus into confusion because they did not detect your trickery in slipping from one to the other use of these ambiguous terms. In nature, justice is the right of the stronger man to get what he can. In truth a man is nothing else but a bundle of desires, each of which is directed to the attainment of a particular pleasure, and happiness is the reward of the man who is able to satisfy the greatest number of his desires and to the fullest extent. Most men, however, are not strong, but weak, and so we see this curious result. The many weak, who really hold precisely the same opinion as the strong, but who know that by the rule of unchecked nature they should come off very ill indeed, get together and establish certain laws of conventional justice, whereby it is declared wrong to use any means at one's disposal for the fulfilment of each and every desire. I, the law decrees, must limit my ambition by the rule of equality; I must forgo those natural pleasures the enjoyment of which will encroach on the pleasures of my neighbour, and in he must forgo some of his natural pleasures. And thus is nature ousted by what may be called a pact of the many. But the simple truth remains unaffected, that by the very constitution of his being man grasps at every good thing which he has strength and wisdom to compass. All which, Socrates, you really know in your heart as well as I but you have been led to support the popular fallacy by your inveterate love of philosophizing. Now philosophy is an excellent part of education, and there no disgrace to a young man in pursuing such a study; in fact I regard one who neglects philosophy in his youth as an inferior sort of mind, who will never aspire to anything great or noble. But if I see him continuing the study in later life, I should like beat him, for, however good his natural part may be, he grows effeminate, and so through the belief in justice loses the power of fulfilling his simplest desires or even of taking any care of himself. And thus I fear it is with you, Socrates. suppose some one were to carry you off to and charge you with crimes of which you are innocent, what would you do? There you would stand giddy and gaping, with not a word to say for yourself, because of your false and silly notion of justice. And if your accuser, however poor a creature he might should claim the penalty of death against you, die you would for all your philosophy. Then what is the value of "An art which converts a man of sense to fool"?

The thesis of Callicles, it will be noted, is to this extent like that of Socrates, that it seems to be based on pure intuition. Equally with Socrates, he sees that man's conduct is not, as might be inferred from the observation of external phenomena, determined by mechanical laws, but that, to use the sceptic's terminology, man by an immediate affection knows himself to be a creature of purpose with freedom to act accordingly. It is the strong and clever man whom Callicles holds up as a model, the man who understands what his nature is and feels within himself the capacity to satisfy the impulses of nature. The difference is this: Callicles recognizes two factors of intuition, viz. purpose and freedom, but overlooks the third factor, responsibility, whereas Socrates admits all three of these elements into his conception of nature, and perceives, as Aristotle was to argue later, that the immediate sense of responsibility involved in our intuitive distinction of right and wrong, and shown in our self-approbation and self-depreciation, cannot be eliminated from consciousness, that it is indeed the ultimate fact, without which purpose and freedom cease to have any sure direction and leave man a prey to his superficial and ever fluctuating desires. Socrates' method of demonstrating this truth is to drive his antagonist from point to point, from desire to ever lower desire, until he reaches a pleasure which Callicles repudiates as in itself undesirable - undesirable not because its attainment would conflict with the satisfaction of other desires or would diminish the total sum of pleasures, but because it is repugnant in itself. In other words, Socrates simply forces Callicles to admit that at a certain point his freedom and purpose are controlled by a judgement which depends solely on the distinction between right and wrong and has nothing to do with a merely quantitative measurement of pleasures.

The argument is back to the point at which Polus left it, only now we see more clearly why happiness does not come automatically with the power to fulfil whatever desires may spring up in a man at this or that moment, and why it is not equivalent to the sum of pleasures, but depends on the knowledge of the good as the true end of man and on the will to pursue that end. Because, Socrates says to Callicles,

"Because, if you remember, Polus and I have agreed that all our actions are to be done for the sake of the good ;--and will you agree with us in saying that the good is the end of all our actions, that all our actions are to be done for the sake of the good, and not the good for the sake of them?"

"I consider that nothing worth speaking of will have been effected by me unless I make you the one witness of my words; nor by you, unless you make me the one witness of yours; no matter about the rest of the world For, indeed, we are at issue about matters which to know is honourable and not to know disgraceful; to know or not to know happiness and misery."

And so by a long circuit we are brought back to the question of rhetoric with which the discussion opened. By the sophists rhetoric was acclaimed as the art of persuasion which enabled the practitioner to sway the minds of men at his pleasure and so to win mastery over society. To Socrates, unless it was directed to the instruction of others in the truth of justice and injustice (a truth which the sophist either denied or disregarded), it was no art at all but a trick of flattery, base and generally futile when employed to delude others in the court or the assembly, utterly ugly and ruinous when used by a man to deceive himself into thinking that there is no evil rooted in his nature and that to be happy he need only let himself go.

Now it used to be supposed that the ethical amoralism put into the mouth of Polus and Callicles was a malicious invention of Plato; but the recent discovery of a papyrus shows that one sophist at least, a certain Antiphon, had written a treatise advocating precisely such a theory.* And without waiting for such a discovery we might have known from the debate between the Athenian envoys and the magistrates of Melos, as reported by Thucydides in his fifth book, how far the political thinking of the age was governed by the same notions. And from that day to ours the sophistical theory of ethics has not lacked advocates. It was from Plato's Callicles, and from Thucydides' history which he translated, that Hobbes derived his distinction between man in the state of nature and man under the convention of the social contract. In the natural state man is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish"; the master motive of all his actions is defined in the famous phrase of the Leviathan as "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death." The justice of nature as opposed in the Calliclean sense to the justice of convention could not be placed in the saddle more emphatically as the rule of life. And then, in the Elements of Law, we see Hobbes endeavouring to show how out of the clash of motives so determined the principles of social justice come into being by a sort of mechanical cancelling out. In other words Hobbes first assumes the position of Callicles, and then undertakes to prove that in practice it will coincide with the position of Socrates - than which a prettier case of eating one's cake and having it could not be devised.

[* See Ernest Barker, Greek Political Theory, 66.]

In one sense the conclusion of Callicles is thus inverted by Hobbes, while his premiss is inverted by Rousseau; but the essential point of the sophistical theory nevertheless remains unaltered. Both Hobbes and Rousseau dismiss the Socratic dualism within the man himself for the Calliclean dualism between a man and society. Both, so far as the individual is concerned, admit the intuition of freedom and purpose, while equally they reject the law of personal responsibility depending on the intuition of right and wrong. Theoretically they may seem to arrive at opposite poles, in so far as to Hobbes man is conscious of evil as the primitive impulse of his nature, whereas to Rousseau he is conscious rather of good; practically they are at one with each other and with their forerunner in so far as their ethical monism eliminates the need of any inner voluntary control, and they are alike in this that each flatters the individual by making social morality the outcome of allowing each man to pursue his natural desires. And in one form or the other the ethics of Callicles passing through these channels is still dominant in our sociological theories.

Over against this stream of influence we have the ethics of Socrates as it was developed by Plato, and handed down to the world.

III

PLATONIC IDEALISM

That fairly lame and impotent conclusion on the heels of so bold an assertion might be put down to the Socratic irony, yet I take it to be not so much a pretended ignorance as a genuine humility. I think we may be pretty sure that the premisses and conclusions of the Gorgias, though the dramatic presentation of the debate is no doubt Plato's invention, came straight from the living Socrates. The outcome clearly is to leave us with the conviction that any attempt to explain the conduct of men without taking into account their sense of responsibility to the intuitive discriminations of right and wrong must inevitably break down against the facts of human experience. But is this all? Can the philosopher do no more than defend himself against the attacks of sophistry? When asked in turn for a positive demonstration of his ethical creed, shall he only say: I am ignorant how these things are? Is there no way in which he can confirm the insistent voice of conscience by glimpses of a similar power at work in the universe at large? It may be that the problem must be left where Socrates leaves it; but at least the main endeavour of Plato in his later dialogues will be to give a more satisfactory answer to these questions.

And the first step in the Platonic development would seem to follow immediately upon the conclusion of the Gorgias. The desires which Callicles presents as belonging to the natural man are very urgent and are directed to very palpable objects of the phenomenal world; and the pleasures of attainment are very sweet. There needs no argument to tell us, no exhortation to persuade us, that in the pursuit of these desires and the gustation of these pleasures we are moving in a realm of insistent reality. Yet in face of the certainty of these physical sensations Socrates declares that they fade into insignificance beside the deeper reality of a quite different sphere of experience. These cravings of the body, he asserts, are pallid and ephemeral moods in comparison with the steady ineradicable want of the soul, this instinctive ambition to dominate others but a shadowy reflection of the need for self-mastery, these pleasures of satisfied desire are bought at a ruinous price if they interfere with the soul's happiness of self-approval. And Socrates is almost diabolically clever in breaking down the cynical position of his opponents. But is his own noetic philosophy any less vulnerable? Does it offer anything tenable in place of the naturalism he has undermined, or does it leave us with the gloomy foreboding that nothing matters and nothing is worthwhile? Can he show that this deeper want of the soul to which he appeals has any external justification, or is it merely a longing for something unattainable because non-existent? Is this vaunted happiness a mere illusion of possession where there is nothing to possess? Are justice and righteousness anything more than phantoms evoked by the soul to people its own emptiness? You call them Ideas, the antagonists of Socrates might have said, but are they true things in any such sense as the body and the material objects of the natural world are true things? Can we see them, or taste them or handle them, or in any way derive enjoyment out of them? And to all these implied questions Socrates could only reply: "I myself am ignorant how these things are."

And so we have a series of dialogues, the Meno, Phaedrus, Symposium, and Phaedo, in which Plato laid out all his superb powers as a poet to clothe Ideas in such splendour of the imagination that, though we might not prove their existence by the compelling method of logic, we should nevertheless feel their reality as objects of desire which could be set over against the palpable world of the senses. In the first of these dialogues, the Meno, the effort is to impart to Ideas the cogency of things seen by referring our knowledge of them to actual vision in a former life, and at the same time to account for their dim fragility, so to speak, by the fact that in this present life we possess only a memory of that vision.

The Phaedrus, taking up this notion of reminiscence, pictures our ante-natal experience in the form of a myth of the soul driving her chariot in a procession of the gods up to the summit of the heavenly arch, and there, while in that company it is swept onward by the revolution of the spheres, having sight of the things beyond - justice and beauty and temperance and all the choir of virtues, not as we in this life have glimpses of them clogged and clouded by earthly conditions, but in their utter purity and reality, as Ideas unsheathed of matter. And then by some ill-hap the soul sinks beneath the double load of forgetfulness and ignoble passions, and so, losing her wings and falling to this nether sphere, is encased in a mortal body like an oyster in his shell. Nevertheless the vision is not altogether lost, but remains to the soul as the flashing and vanishing recollection of things seen long ago. And thus it is. He who has been the spectator of many glories in the other world is amazed when he meets here with a godlike face or form, and is drawn to union with such a person as if he had stumbled upon a precious embodiment of the divine beauty. At first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him, and if he were not afraid of being thought a downright madman he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a god. But as he continues to gaze there is a sort of reaction, and by the influence of beauty through the eyes he feels a new growth and moisture in those wings of the soul which had shrivelled in his downward fall, and a great longing seizes him to mount once more through the heavens, up and on to that vision of the Ideal beauty which he had almost forgotten and of which he is now so miraculously reminded.

And again, in the Symposium, giving now a new turn to the myth of recollection and speaking through the mouth of an inspired prophetess, Plato describes the love of beautiful bodies as an initiation into the mysteries whereby the soul is led on step by step up the celestial ladder until she is able to contemplate true beauty, the divine Idea pure and clear and unalloyed, as it lies before the eye of deity, and so becomes a begetter of immortal realities, even as she is immortal, if any soul of man may be. It is in this hope that the Phaedo rises to a chant of victory over death. "Many a man," says Socrates, the notorious lover of all beauty,- "many a man has been willing to go to the world below animated by the hope of seeing there an earthly love, or wife, or son, and conversing with them. And will he who is a true lover of wisdom, and is strongly persuaded in like manner that only in the world below he can worthily enjoy her, still repine at death? Will he not depart with joy? Surely he will, O my friend, if he be a true philosopher. For he will have a firm conviction that there, and there only, he can find wisdom in her purity." (Jowett's translation.)

But it is an ill business to paraphrase or abridge the writing of a great poet. My only aim in attempting so thankless a task is to show how in these dialogues of Plato's middle period the Ideas which before had been taken for granted are forced into the forefront of his thought, and how the poet, taking up the argument of the Gorgias where the dialectician had left it, turns to the imagination for evidence that the Ideal world can awaken a love deeper and stronger and more awarding than any passionate longing for the powers or pleasures afforded by the world. And it may be that here, rather than in the dialectician, we have the Plato who has brought courage to so many frightened minds. It may be that now, as in his day and always, our failure is not so much of the intellect as of the imagination. Not because of ignorance do we drag out our lives in the pursuit of material pleasures that satiate while they do not satisfy; rather it would seem to be because the faculty of realization is dull and slack and has so intermittent a grasp upon the things which we know to make for happiness and peace. Certainly today at least our disease is chiefly of the imagination; we are poisoned by our poets. Yet the reason too has its claims, and still the query of the Gorgias is left unanswered: I know that these things are, but how they are I know not. In the Republic Plato will become the dialectician again and endeavour to give a rational explanation of the how.

This connection between the Gorgias and the Republic is not fanciful. In the first book of the Republic, written we may suppose a number of years after the Gorgias, the discussion between Socrates and Callicles is substantially repeated, and with the same conclusion. We see Socrates, by somewhat different arguments of course, turning into ridicule the same naturalistic thesis now put into the mouth of a professional sophist, Thrasymachus, and ending himself with the same admission of ignorance. "The result of the whole discussion," he says, "has been that I know nothing at all; for while I do not know what justice itself is, I am not likely to know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, nor can I tell whether he who has it is happy or not."

The indication is clear enough that in the Republic Plato was proposing to write a sequel to the earlier dialogue. And to that end Socrates now is not allowed to escape into his ivory tower of ignorance. At the beginning of the next book we find two of his young friends, actual brothers of Plato in fact, laying hold of the wily old sceptic and putting him to the question. I wish, says one of them, you would listen to me, for I think that Thrasymachus threw away his case too soon, succumbing like a snake under the eye of a charmer. This is what I want to hear: your own definition of justice and its powers, and whether of itself, quite apart from any pleasures and pains that may be picked up by the way, it is sufficient always and automatically, to render its possessor happy. And so the brothers lay down the terms of the new argument in the form of a startling hypothesis: You, Socrates, are to imagine two men, one perfectly just but reputed unjust, and made to endure the utmost tortures inflicted upon the worst sort of criminal, the other perfectly unjust but reputed just, and so rewarded with all the pleasures and blessings this world can afford. You are to take these two men as they are; there is to be no reversal of their conditions in this life or another, and no hope of reversal. You are to suppose that no gods are, or that if they are they pay no heed to the affairs of mankind, or that if they pay heed they can be placated with a few cheap prayers and sacrifices. You are always talking about justice and happiness, Socrates tell us now which of these two men is happy, and why.

The ultimate problem of ethics could not be expressed more sharply, and Socrates accepts it - or, rather, Plato accepts it as the form in which it had been bequeathed to him by Socrates, and which he will endeavour to solve in the person of Socrates. What follows, then, is substantially a continuation of the Gorgias; it will undertake to define the nature of justice, which was taken for granted in the earlier dialogue, and will then show how the possession of this quality produces happiness. Briefly then, Plato deals first with the nature of justice psychologically and politically as shown in the individual and in the State. For the former, as is well known, he arrives at his definition by analysing the soul of the individual into three faculties and determining the proper (that is the "just") relation of these, one to the other, in the total action of the soul. On the one side he discovers in man the faculty of reason, over against which he sets the two other faculties of concupiscence and of what we designate as the personal emotions of honour, pride, indignation (to thymoeides). Now the healthy state of a man depends, he says, on the dominance of the reasoning, judicial faculty over the upsurging, or insurging, desires of concupiscence, which of themselves are limited by no principle of restraint and hence of themselves have no power of producing an harmonious balance. In the resultant conflict between these desires and the selecting restraining power of reason the middle faculty of personal emotions has an ambiguous position; generally indeed it is on the side of reason, but on occasion may range itself with the physical desires. Thus we arrived in the fourth book at the famous psychological definition of justice as that balance of the faculties in which each plays its own part without encroaching on the field of the others:

But in reality justice was such as we were describing, being concerned, however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of the others,- he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him . . . and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and cooperates with this harmonious condition, just and good action, and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action, and the opinion which presides over it ignorance. (Jowett's translation.)

This new position, as it is set forth in the marvellous close of the fifth book, involves a double dichotomy, objective and subjective. On one side of the dividing line stands the Idea, let us say of justice (Plato in fact uses the Idea of beauty for his illustration, but the method is the same),- the fixed, unchanging law, or principle, or fact, by participation in which this or that act is just and is so recognized by us. On the other side are ranged those acts which are more or less just as their participation in the Idea is more or less complete. That is the objective division; and with it corresponds the subjective dichotomy. There is the man who recognizes the existence of justice in itself and does not confuse the Idea with the acts which participate in the Idea, neither putting the acts in the place of the Idea, nor the Idea in the place of the acts. Such an one, we should say, is truly awake, and in possession of true knowledge. Over against him is the man who, though he may call this or that act just, has no sense of justice in itself, or who, if another lead him towards a knowledge of that idea, is unable to follow. He, Plato would say, is not awake but in a kind of dream state; for the dreamer, whether actually asleep or not, is one who confuses dissimilar things and takes the copy for the reality. Instead of knowing he opines, and instead of knowledge has only opinions.

It will be seen that these ethical distinctions are drawn from the field of intuition, and that they pretend to be a verifiable extension of the knowledge involved in the facts of intuitive experience. The foundation goes down to that immediate sense of right and wrong which is instinctive in all men, and to that corresponding sense of freedom and responsibility which manifests itself in self-approval or disapproval as we act in one way or another. Intuition to this extent, that we have such a feeling, and so limited, is a part of universal consciousness, a matter of knowledge, not of inference or conjecture, against which any arguments from the other half of our experience are powerless. And the doctrine of Ideas, at the last analysis, is no more than an assertion that with the inner sense of responsibility we are bound, if we reflect honestly, to believe in the existence of something to which we are responsible, something external to ourselves in so far as we neither make nor unmake it, neither alter nor escape, that there are fixed standards of right and wrong under which we are held to account in our choice of conduct, whether we comprehend them or not, exactly as we are subject to the laws of the physical world whether we comprehend them or not. The doctrine of Ideas is thus not an immediate and integral part of consciousness which cannot be denied, nor is it like theism a more or less voluntary inference from conscience, but rather a logical, reasonable, and - to the Platonist - certain corollary of conscience, however it may be disputed. Philosophy is the acceptance of this corollary as true, the determination to hold fast to it despite all the decoys of false reasoning, and the pursuit of its ramifications into the wide fields of thought and fancy.

So defined, the Ideas essential to what we mean by Platonism are really simple enough, whatever demands they may make upon our credence. But we have yet to reckon with the fact that to Plato there are Ideas derived straight from observation as well as these ethical and aesthetic Ideas which belong to what we know by intuition. Here is a matter, then, that must be cleared up before we go further, and this can best be done by analysing the process by which the two kinds of Ideas are formed in the mind. We perceive particular concrete objects, men for instance, Socrates and Coriscus, Peter and Paul. These are data of immediate observation, things seen. But these men have each certain qualities which carry us from the field of observation to that of intuition. We say that this particular act of Peter is just, in which case we are not merely reporting what we observe (we see Peter acting, not the quality of his act), but are valuing what we observe. We have an intuitive appreciation of our own acts as brave, or just, or what not, and such qualities by a process of transference we attach to another person's acts. These are specifically ethical judgements, to which correspond our aesthetic judgements, though the latter are rather more intimately bound up with actual observation. We perceive that Peter has a particular colour, but the appreciation of that colour as beautiful or ugly is a judgement that wells out of the field of intuition just as do our ethical judgements. There are then two fields of experience, the observation of particular things and the intuitive valuation of particular qualities; and in each of these fields there are corresponding Ideas. Thus, for example, Plato talks of the Idea man, not these individual men Peter and Paul, but generic man; again not manhood as an attribute peculiar severally to Peter and Paul, but an objective entity by the possession of which, or the presence of which, Peter and Paul are both men. And, in the other field, Plato talks of Ideas corresponding to particular ethical and aesthetic qualities, the Idea justice by participation in which, or by the presence of which, this particular act or man is declared to be just; and so of the Idea beauty and the beautiful act or object.

Now the notable and, it must be admitted, somewhat confusing fact is that, though Plato himself nowhere distinguishes formally between these two kinds of Ideas, yet the distinction cuts to the very root of his philosophy, and to neglect it is to miss the heart of what we call Platonism. The importance of the point I would make can be indicated by a single word: one set of Ideas have opposites, whereas the other set have not. Thus the Idea man is different indeed from the Idea horse, just as the particular man is different from the particular horse; yet in neither case can we properly speak of opposition. On the other side the ethical Idea goodness has an opposite in badness, just as a good act is opposite to a bad act; and the aesthetic Idea beauty has its opposite in ugliness just as a beautiful thing is opposite to an ugly thing. And it will be seen at once that the existence or non-existence of these oppositions makes all the difference in the world in our practical relation to the two kinds of Ideas. The Ideas of visible things may concern the intellect, but, for the very reason that they have no opposites, they leave our other faculties untouched. And it was in the main over these observational Ideas, if we may so call them, that the mediaeval schoolmen waged their fruitless debate to determine whether they were universalia ante rem or universalia post rem. The logical faculty may have been sharpened to a razor edge, but if any other human faculty, or indeed any human interest, got involved in that windy logomachy, it was incidentally and through the dragging in of Ideas of another sort.

On the other side it will be seen at once that ethical and aesthetic Ideas, owing to the fact that their negatives have the character of opposites, and that their negation leaves you a prey to these opposites, bring into play not only the intellectual faculty but the emotions and the will. You are going to feel and act about the same whether you believe in the Idea of some group of visible things as a universal ante rem or regard it as an abstract generalization post rem; you are going to feel and act very differently if you do or do not believe in the Idea of such a quality, or value, as justice. To illustrate. You are going to ride in the same way whether you believe that the Idea horse is a mere concept abstracted from observing particular horses, or that somehow it preexisted before ever a particular horse was seen. A horse will be the same thing to you and your horsemanship will be unaffected whether or no you believe in what a contemporary of Plato ridiculed as "horseness." But you are going to ride that horse into battle with a different feeling and to a different purpose if you believe that there is such a thing as veritable justice and that the course in which you engaged is, within the limits of human error, on the side of justice, or if you disbelieve in any fixed canon of right and wrong. In the latter case, if you deny the reality of such a standard and think of justice and injustice as constantly shifting opinions - this and nothing more - what heart and vigour shall you have in the moral conflicts of life? Must it not happen, if you cling persistently to your belief - rather to your unbelief - that you will take your conduct rather lightly, and that in the end, when belief works itself out in act, as in the end belief and unbelief have a way of doing, conscience will degenerate into a shifty sort of opportunism and so in practice, under the sway of the thronging passions, will become the champion of what is the opposite of justice? And in like manner that synthesis of feeling and emotion and judgement which we call taste will be affected by your belief or disbelief in the Idea of beauty.

[The distinction between Ideas of things and Ideas of qualities, though it is fundamental to any sound and practical understanding of Plato, has been strangely neglected by most of the commentators. I did myself call attention to it in my early volumes on Platonism and The Christ of the New Testament, but I might have dealt with the subject more thoroughly had I known Sir James Frazer's little treatise on The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory, then still in manuscript.--For a fuller exposition of the line and the place of Ideas see Appendix A.]

And so we come to that unforgettable and thrilling allegory at the close of the sixth book, where beauty and justice, with the whole choir of aesthetic and ethical Ideas, are carried up to the supreme Idea of the Good, into which they converge and from which they have their measure of glory, as in the physical realm the light and life of our earth and of her sister planets fall from the shining orb of the sun. Strange tales were current after Plato's death about his attempt to define this mystical entity of Goodness, and one of these tells how in a lecture on the subject he advanced into ever subtler and more abstract arguments, while his audience slipped away until only Aristotle was left. But I think these were the inventions of an age much given to humorous satire. Certainly in the Republic, as we have it, Plato is quite clear in his statement that, though we can say what the Good is not - not pleasure, for instance, as most people affirm it to be - yet we cannot define it positively. It is the name we give to that something deeper than the passing desires for what may seem to a man good at the moment, that something which in his heart of hearts a man knows that he wants, which ever retreats before him on the pathway of justice and beauty, and of which he gets a far-off glimpse in moments of satisfied conscience. It is the assurance that this want of the soul is not an illusion but the feeling after a reality which lies at the heart of the world as it lies in the heart of man. This climax of Plato's doctrine of Ideas quite clearly is no more than a magnificent explication into cosmic philosophy of the autobiographical confession of Socrates reported in the Phaedo, where he turns from materialistic studies to seek goodness as the true motive of human acts.

And without a clear sense of this ultimate motive of all our actions there can be no order in our life; otherwise expressed, without the possession of this cosmic Idea of Goodness in the soul, though we may not be able to define that Idea positively, there can be no happiness. That might be taken as self-evident. But Plato, not content with this philosophical assumption, goes back, in the eighth book of the Republic, to the practical demonstration, interrupted by books v, vi, vii, and proceeds to confirm the truth of his thesis by a portrayal of the five different types of mankind. At one extreme stands the "aristocrat," he who in all his actions is governed by "the best," the just man as he was described earlier in the dialogue, now raised to the philosopher, in whom justice is not a mere arbitrary balance of the faculties but that inner poise and power of a soul which waits ever obediently upon the Idea of the Good. At the other extreme comes the man in whom the greed of dominion and the lust of pleasure have contended for the throne until the very thought of justice and measure has been driven out and his soul is left the prey of some hideous ravening passion, like a city under the sway of a merciless tyrant. If the aristocrat is in the truer sense a man awake, then the state of the tyrannized soul is like a drunken and debauched dream in which the mis-shapen monsters of the imagination are unchained and stalk forth to work unspeakable horrors.

Can anyone ask which of these is the happy man and which the miserable man, or doubt the cause of happiness and misery? And so, at the conclusion of these pictures of life, which have followed one another like little dramas contesting on the stage for a prize, Socrates turns to one of his young hearers as to the appointed judge with the query:

"Need we hire a herald, or shall I announce the decision of Glauco that the aristocrat as the best and justest is also the happiest, and that this is he who is the most royal man and king over himself; and that the worst and most unjust man is also the most miserable, and that this is he who, being the greatest tyrant of himself, is also the greatest tyrant of his State?"

Of the intended connection between the Republic and its sequel the Timaeus there can be no doubt. The prologue to the Timaeus announces categorically that the dialogue is to be a continuation of the Republic, and this announcement is followed by a summary of the Ideal State of the Republic, just as the Republic opened with a repetition of the main argument of the Gorgias. And then, as if aware that the pursuit of philosophy had led him in the Republic to an untenable extravagance, Plato proceeds to expound a view of the doctrine of Ideas in the form of a strange - to the irreligious reader a forever baffling - myth of creation.

I need not spend much time on the allegory of the Timaeus, which in its general outline is simple enough. The gist of the matter is set forth at the beginning of the story, and can be conveyed in a brief paraphrase. We are told that nothing can change its status and so come into new being without a cause. Creation is thus a sort of fashioning, like the craft of a sculptor or a painter; and the nature of the fashioned thing will depend on the skill of the fashioner and on the kind of image before his mind's eye which he proposes to embody. Thus it is that from the excellence of this world we believe that it was fashioned by a benevolent artist in imitation of a fair and wonderful pattern. It was God who fashioned it, and the model before him was the immutably perfect world of Ideas laid up in eternity. God is good, we say, and in the good there can be no residue of envy. And so, being good, and desiring that the product of his will should be good and that, so far as possible, there should be nothing evil, God, the Creator, took all that was available to his hands, took it as it came to him lying not in a state of easily malleable quiescence but in a state of turbulent motion without sense or measure, and out of this disorder moulded it into an ordered likeness of the everlasting harmonies, thinking that order is altogether better than disorder.

Surely we are justified in holding that in this myth of creation there is an intentional modification of the conclusions reached by the author in his enthusiasm for pure philosophy. Instead of the Idea of the Good which in the sixth book of the Republic was elevated, or so it appeared, to the honour of being the supreme and solitary and sufficient cause of all, we have now three causes. Adopting the language of Aristotle, we may say that in the Timaeus Ideas retain their function as final and formal cause, as the end to be attained and the model to be imitated, but that beside them, as the efficient cause and agent of good in the world, is set the divine artificer, the Demiurge, the God that inhabiteth eternity and whose name is holy. For the third, material cause we have that which lay at the Creator's disposal, the obscure stuff of "unordered motion," the passively receptive yet blindly obstructive matrix of things to be.

One step further Plato was to take in his recantation. It will be remembered that at the beginning of the great philosophical ascent of the Republic, which was to end in the glorification of the Idea of Goodness as alone and of itself sufficient for the good and happy life, we were asked for the sake of the argument to suppose one of three things: that no gods are, or if they are they pay no heed to the doings of mankind, or if they pay heed they may be placated with a few cheap prayers and sacrifices. Plato himself apparently would never have admitted the actual truth of such a supposition, but it is evident that for a while he regarded the existence of the gods as a matter of so little importance in comparison with the doctrine of Ideas as to be negligible. Now in the tenth book of the Laws, written we know just before his death, he repeats these three terms of the atheistical hypothesis and repudiates the very suggestion of them as impious and immoral. In the Timaeus he was concerned with restoring God to His place beside Ideas as the Agent of creation; in the theological treatise of the Laws he is occupied rather with the role of Providence in the life of man. God is now not so much the divine Artificer with His eye set upon the eternal forms of the Ideal world, as Executive of the immutable laws of righteousness and holiness, the inexorable Judge under whose sentence the awards of virtue and the penalties of vice are meted out, and under whose chastening guidance all men, if they will obey, may rise to ever better and higher spheres of existence. If the Timaeus reads like a correction of the earlier extravagance of philosophy, it is scarcely too strong to regard the tenth book of the Laws as an avowed retractation.

IV

THE PLATONIC TELEOLOGY