iLllLP-Ji|i:'J^, .il^JlLl THE VITALITY OF PLATONISM AND OTHER ESSAYS CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS ILontron: FETTER LANE, E.G. C. F. CLAY, Manager (StsinhutQl) : loo, PRINXES STREET Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO. ILeipjig: F. A. BROCKHAUS i^jto gorfe: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Bombag anU (JTalrutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. A// rights reserved THE VITALITY OF PLATONISM AND OTHER ESSAYS BY JAMES ADAM LATE FELLOW AND SENIOR TUTOR OF EMMANUEL COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE EDITED BY HIS WIFE ADELA MARION ADAM Cambridge : at the University Press 191 1 A3 Cambrilrge PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS TOIC (J)|ATAT0IC cmoi CYNecTi'oic re kai cyNTpAnezoic, OYK ACHMOY noAeooc noAiTAic 'EMMANOYHA, ToAe TO BiBAiAApiON eyMeNec n^pA eYMeNoyc KexApicGoa. ei MEN 0lAOCO(|)HTeON, (|)lAOC04)HTeON, KAI €1 MH (|)lAOCO(J)H- TeON, <|)lAOCO(t)HT€ON" HANTOaC ApA 4)lAOCO(|)HTeON. (Aristotle.) 247023 CONTENTS I. The Vitality of Platonism .... II. The Divine Origin of the Soul . III. The Doctrine of the Logos in Heraclitus . IV. The Hymn of Cleanthes .... V. Ancient Greek Views of Suffering and Evil VI. The Moral and Intellectual Value of Classical Education PAGE I 35 77 104 190 213 PREFACE THESE essays were read by my husband as papers or lectures on various occasions. The Divine Origin of the Soul was published in Cam- bridge Praelectiofis, 1906, and The Moral and Intellectual Value of Classical Education in the Emmanuel College Magazine, Vol. vil. I have to thank the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press and the editor of the magazine respectively for their kind permission to reprint them. The Vitality of Platonism was read to the Classical Society at Aberdeen University in 1902, and to a similar society In Edinburgh in the following year. The Doctrine of the Logos in Heraclitus is a paper read before the Oxford University Philological Society in 1906. The essay entitled The Hymn of Cleanthes contains the substance of three lectures delivered in 1906 at Westminster College, Cam- bridge, before a Summer School of Theology. The remaining essay on Ancient Greek Views of Suffering and Evil was the author's last public lecture, which viii Preface was given to the Vacation Biblical Students at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1907, one month before his death. In preparing this volume for the press it has not seemed possible altogether to eliminate overlapping between the essays among themselves or with James Adam's book on The Religious Teachers of Greece. When ideas and illustrations recur, it is usually in a different setting, and they fulfil a special purpose in the separate essays. Dr Giles has been kind enough to read the proofs, and Mr Leonard Whibley to give advice concerning the MS and its arrangement. I have prefixed to the book the dedication and motto originally set before the last essay. It is fitting that the expression of my husband's love for the college where he worked should introduce these echoes of his teaching. A. M. A. May^ 191 1. » > THE VITALITY OF PLATONISM A distinguished philosopher, speaking of the educational value of Plato and Aristotle, remarked on one occasion that he had grave doubts whether it was expedient to make men study "dead philo- sophies, imperfectly understood." It might fairly be said in reply that no philosophic system which is worth studying at all has ever been perfectly understood, except, perhaps, by its inventor ; and some have actually doubted whether Hegel was always intelligible even to himself. But it is a much more disputable assertion to say that Platonism is dead, and if one were to join issue with so bold an antagonist on his own ground and fight him with his own weapons, we should be tempted to maintain on the other hand that Platonism, so far from having joined the majority, is not even sickly or moribund, but rather the only philosophy which is really alive. Like Teiresias in the realm of shades, Plato, we might say, oTo^ TriirvvraL, to\ 8e (tkloI dicrcrovcri. But I am far from making any such reflection upon other philosophic systems, and will content myself ^, with trying to show that the announcement of the death of Platonism is a little premature. A. E. I 2 The Vitality of Platonism It is at all events a curious and significant sign of Plato's continued vitality that we often find modern philosophers displaying an almost pathetic anxiety to father their doctrines upon him. Take for example Lotze, who after explaining his own metaphysical principles, proceeds to identify them with the Platonic Ideas, which he interprets, as philosophers are apt to do, in the light of his own theory. The truth which Plato intended to teach, says Lotze, is no other than that which we have just been expounding, that is to say, the validity of truths as such, apart from the question whether they can be established in relation to any object in the external world, as its mode of being or not\ I have elsewhere^ tried to show that Lotze's application of his own metaphysical doctrines to those of Plato involves an entirely erroneous view of Plato's theory of Ideas : but it is a striking proof of the vitality of Plato's authority and name that successive generations of idealists are so apt to shelter themselves beneath his wing. And if the influence of Plato's teaching is still alive in modern philosophy, and affects, as in point of fact it does affect, nearly every revival of idealism, it is hardly less dominant in theology and religion. Some of the early apologists for Christianity, such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, show that they recognised and acknowledged the connec- tion between Platonism and the Christian faith when * Logic, E. T.= p. 2 10. ' Adam, Republic of Plato, vol. ii. 169 f. Influence of Plato 3 they speak of Greek philosophy as a preparation for Christianity, and assert, as Clement does, that Plato wrote by the inspiration of God — iirnrvoia ©eou^ Few writers have had more influence in shaping the course of theological thought in England than the Cambridge Platonists of the 1 7th century, Cudworth, John Smith, Nathanael Culverwel, and others ; and the fundamental principles of this school or band of thinkers were derived from a study of Platonism, which was uncritical indeed, and often mistaken, but always apprehended with the firmest grasp the central doctrine of Plato's religious teaching, the essential divinity of the human soul. In a later generation Ackerman and Baur, in their treatises on the Christian elements in Plato, and on Socrates and Christianity, discussed the relationship between Platonism and Christianity with a keener insight and a surer criticism, and pointed out many striking coincidences between the two systems. And to take a still more recent example, Bishop Westcott, nearly all of whose theological writings are coloured by Platonism, has declared that the myths of Plato answered in the first place to Revelation, as an endeavour to enrich the store of human knowledge, and in the second place '*to the Gospel, as an endeavour to present, under the form of facts, the manifestation of Divine Wisdom.". . ." Plato," he says, "points us to St John'." The stimulus exerted by Platonism on poets and 1 Coh. ad Gent. 180 a, Migne. - Contetnporary Review^ 11. p. 480 f. I — 2 4 The Vitality of Platonism - artists has been hardly less remarkable. In spite of the severe and almost puritanical regulations by which Plato in the Republic tries to clip the wings of Poetry and Art, the artistic temperament has in all ages been powerfully attracted by his writings, and it is highly significant of the intellectual affinity between Plato and Ruskin that in drawing up a list of books worth reading Ruskin took his pen and wrote ''Plato, every word^ The Platonic conception of an eternal self-existent principle of Beauty, stand- ing serene and changeless above all the fluctuations of fashion and taste, has proved an inexhaustible fountain of inspiration to some of the greatest painters and sculptors in the most flourishing and creative period of Italian art. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of the influence of Plato's ideal- ism on the artistic imagination is that of Michael Angelo, who was a member of the Platonic Academy at Florence, and gives expression to the idea which vitalises all his greatest work in language which might have come from Plato himself. One of his sonnets, translated by Wordsworth, contains these truly Platonic lines : — Heaven-born, the Soul a heaven-ward course must hold'; Beyond the visible world she soars to seek (For what delights the sense is false and weak) Ideal Form^, the universal mould. The wise m.an, I affirm, can find no rest Cf. Man is a (^uto»' qvk ^yyaov, dWa ovpdviov. Plato, Twi. 90 A. ^ Cf. Platonic Ideas. Hostility to Greek ideas 5 In that which perishes : nor will he lend His heart to aught which doth on time depend ^ The fact is that Platonism, if we understand the word in a broad and Hteral, and not in a narrow or pedantic sense, is not yet dead, and cannot die, because its roots are struck deep in universal human nature. / It is true that in the popular language of his time Plato speaks of the barbarian as the natural enemy of Greece ; it is true that he calls his own ideal republic emphatically a Greek city ; but the animating spirit of his teaching, as we shall see, is the enthusiasm of humanity, and leaves no room for the artificial distinctions of barbarian and Greek, bond and free. To the most characteristic principles of Greek life and thought he is constantly opposed. The old and all but universal rule of pagan morality, 'Mo good to your friends, and evil to your foes" is attacked by him in the Republic and elsewhere^ with arguments based on a loftier view of man's nature and work than anything which we meet with in Greek literature before his time, and the practical conclusions which he draws '* that the good man never does evil to any," *' that it is better to suffer than to do wrong," have justly been held to fore- shadow the Sermon on the Mount. " Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good ^ Cf. ycVccri? as opposed to ovo-ta, and time as opposed to eternity. See Plato, Rep. 509 b et passim. "^ Rep. 335 A ff., Crito 49 c, Gorg. 472 d ff. 6 The Vitality of Platonism to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you." Plato does not go , so far as this, but he is following the same road. /On questions like the training and work of women, the true functions of statesmanship, the theory and practice of education, and many others which might be named, Plato is equally hostile to prevalent Greek ideas. But in nothing does he display so marked an antagonism to contemporary thought and feeling as in his attitude to Greek theology and religion. Starting from the funda- mental principles that the divine nature is good, immutable, and cannot lie, he attempts to show, with more refinement perhaps, but hardly less vigour, than Tertullian, that the Olympian theology violates these canons at every point. His diatribes against the religion and theology of Homer and Hesiod, who were regarded by the Greeks as the founders of their theogony, were perhaps the severest blow which paganism suffered before the Christian era, and may fairly be considered as preparing and paving the way {irpoo^oTToieiv) for a higher form of religious belief. In the words of Clement of Alexan- ) dria, TrpoTrapacrKevd^eL — t) (f)L\o(TO(f)La, TTpoohorroiovcra Tov €19 y^picTTov TeXeLovixevov^. These considerations make it clear that the genius of Plato is by no means exclusively Greek, and that in many points his teaching is directly opposed to some of the most cherished beliefs of his own age. Even his political sympathies are ^ Sir. I. 717 D, Migne. Appeal to universal aspirations *j Panhellenic rather than Athenian, and his philo- sophy, though reared on the soil of Attica, appeals, as I have already hinted, to certain universal ele- ments in human nature, and not to Hellenic human nature only. For this reason he is careful to place his ideal city under the protection, not of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, or any other divinity peculiarly associated with one particular branch of the Hellenic race : he commits it to Apollo, the god of Delphi, the symbol of Greek unity, aye, and something more, the God of the whole human race, so far as antiquity recognised such a God of all, the co7nmune humani generis oraculmUy the ancestral in- terpreter, who seated on the holy stone in the centre of the earth expounds the Father's will to all man- kind {Traa-iv dvOpcoTTOLs, Rep. 427 c). And what are these universal human instinct^ and aspirations to which Platonism makes appeal ? It is said that when Anaxagoras was asked for what purpose he was born, he replied *' In order that I may look upon the heavens and the sun," and some of Plato's contemporaries were fond of deriving the word dvOp(DTTo^ from 6 ra dvo) dOpoiv, the creature whose eyes are directed on the heavenly places, in distinc- tion from the lower animals, whose eyes are bent downwards on the earth \ In a deeper sense it is perhaps true that Nature has implanted in all man- kind an unquenchable longing for the things that are above : ra dvta (f)poveLT€, /xt) tol iirl yrj<;. So Plato at least believes, in common with an innumerable ^ Cf. Lactantius, Dw. Insiit. \\. c. i. 8 The Vitality of Platonism company of the greatest and noblest in every age, and it is to this inborn passion for perfection that he appeals — this innate though often unconscious yearn- ing after the ideally true and beautiful and good, which finds its highest embodiment in lives devoted to the service of Knowledge, Art, Humanity, and God. The philosophy of Plato furnishes the most poetical and perhaps the truest answer to "those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things" which are the heritage of human nature : it is the most inspiring philosophical expression of "those first affections, Those shado\^7 recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal Silence : truths that ffltake. To perish never; Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy. Can utterly abolish or destroy ! " It is because Plato has attempted, and attempted with more success than others, to satisfy these per- manent aspirations of humanity that his philosophy still lives, and is likely to live "While water flows and tall trees bloom in spring" tor av vS(o/3 re pcT^ koX 8cV8p€a fxaKpa TeOrjXr]. Plato s view of Nature 9 The ancients were in the habit of saying that if the Muses spoke in Greek, they must have spoken with the tongue of Plato. But it is not only in his " style and language that Plato is poetical : his philo- sophy itself is steeped in poetry, and we shall altogether fail to understand his significance in the history of human thought unless we realise this in- disputable fact. On this account I shall have frequent recourse to modern poetry in seeking to explain and illustrate the vitality of Platonism, and in particular to the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, whose writings are often tinged by philo- sophic thought. The method which I propose to follow is to give an outline of Plato's teaching, first on Nature and secondly on human nature, adding parallels and illustrations, chiefly from Tennyson and Wordsworth, as opportunity occurs. It is impossible within the time at my disposal to touch on all the leading doctrines of a writer who ranges with almost equal authority over the entire domain of human life and thought, but if I succeed in showing you that Plato's philosophy of Nature and especially of human nature is not yet dead, my discourse may prove at least a finger post to point the way — an lyvQ% Tco ravTov /xerioj^rt, which is Plato's ideal of what a lecture ought to be. Perhaps the best way to approach the subject of Plato's conception of Nature will be to start from the Timaeus. The central idea of that great dia- logue Is the analogy between the Macrocosm and the microcosm, the Universe and man. Let us J^ lo The Vitality of Platonis7n consider the Universe first. The world in which we live, says Plato \ is the product of two causes, Necessity and Perfect Reason>^ Necessity performs the function of the passive or material cause, and is in fact nothing but the personification of the original, inchoate, indeterminate material substratum, like the TTpoiTq vXrj of Aristotle. Ideal Reason, in the person of the Sr)fjiLovpy6<; or Creator, plays the part of the efficient or creative cause, and evolves order out of the chaos of blind necessity, stamping formless matter with mathematical forms, "which are them- selves copies of the Eternal Essences or Ideas, moulded from them in a mysterious and wonderful way-." It is thus that the body of the Universe is framed. But as in man there is soul as well as body, so also in the Universe. The Soul of the World is first compounded by God himself out of the changeless and the changeful, and then '* in the midst of the Universe," as Plato tells us, ''he set Soul, and drew it through the whole framework, yea and wrapped the whole body of the Universe with a covering of Soul, and made it a sphere for revolving in a circle, one only Universe in lonely splendour, but able by reason of its excellence to be its own companion, and needing no other, being sufficient to itself for acquaintance and friend. In this way he begat that happy God, the Universe^" Now I will ask you to believe that this half- poetical, half-religious idea of a World-Soul, which ^ Tim. 47 E ff. * /did. 50 c. 5 /did. 34 b. The So2cl of the World 1 1 according to Plato is as it were the incarnation of the Divine Reason, less perfect indeed than God himself but still wholly rational and far from anger or desire — I will ask you to believe that this World-Soul or World-Reason is in reality Plato's conception of Nature. I think a careful study of the Timaeiis will convince you that the identification is sound. And if the Soul of the World which God creates in the Tiviaeus is in reality Nature, see what follows. It follows that Nature, as Dante somewhere says, is the child of God. that she is a spiritual and not a material creature, good and not evil ; for God, ac- cording to Plato, is the author only of good, and evil Cometh not from him. In Plato's way of thinking God and Nature are not two mutually opposing forces, but an omnipotent Father and a loyal son, working harmoniously together toward "that far-off divine event To which the whole Creation moves," when Necessity shall bow the knee, and Good prevail. The fact is that it is Plato, and not Aristode, who founded the theological view of the Universe, and Aristotle is only Platonising when he says that God and Nature do nothing in vain. We may add that from another point of view Nature is in Plato at once the revelation of God to man and God's vice-gerent, ever indwelling in the world of space and time. So much at present for Plato's idea of Nature. Other important points will come to light of them- 12 The Vitality of Platonzsnt selves, when I describe his view of human nature, which I now proceed to do. Plato was profoundly attracted by Nature, but he felt an even deeper interest in man. In this respect he is the true successor of his master Socrates. The essential nature and history of humanity, with all its hopes and enthusiasms, with all its infinite possibilities for good and evil, is the dominant theme of nearly all his greatest dialogues. It would seem that his conception of the Universe itself is in reality suggested and conditioned by his view of man. The Universe is a ''magnus homo," and has a Soul, purer indeed and grander than the soul of man, but essentially the same in kind ; and just as the truest nature of man is to be sought in his soul and not in his body, so also, as we have seen, it is the Soul, and not the Body of the Universe which constitutes the Nature of the Whole. What then, according to Plato, is the nature of mian ? As he appears in this life, man "is a com- pound of the mortal and the immortal, standing midway between corruptibility and incorruptibility : in the words of Philo, Bvqrrjf; koI aOavdrov (f)vo-eo)<; fie96pLOp\" The mortal part is the body, and its affections and lusts, which Plato in the Timaeus calls the ''mortal kind of soul " (Ov-qrov eT8o9 ^v^i)\ the immortal part is Reason, the eye of soul, the lamp of human life, the representative of God in man, the candle of the Lord. The mythical creation of the rational part of our souls by God is thus 1 De Mund. Opif. 46. See Adam, Republic of Plato, 588 b. Plato's view of man 13 described by Plato. After the Creator had com- pounded the Universal Soul "again into the same cup, in which he blended and mingled the Soul of the Universe, he poured that which was left of the former elements, mingling them in somewhat the same way, yet no longer so pure as before, but one or two degrees less pure\" In other words the rational or immortal part of soul, for it is that alone which comes immediately from God himself, is made of the same elements as the Soul of the Universe. Now we have already seen that Plato thinks of the World-Soul as Nature, and I would have you ob- serve what follows as to the relationship existing between Nature and man. Every vestige of hos- tility and antagonism disappears ; and Nature, instead of being **red in tooth and claw with ravine," is man s elder brother co-operating with him and the universal Father in one great Trinity of beneficence and love against the stubborn and malignant forces of Necessity and Chaos. It has been said that it is a good thing to have a devil in the world, so long as you keep your foot on his neck. War is the never-ending lot of man — 7roXe/xos irdpTcov na-n/jp — and in the struggle against evil we have the gods for our allies. The general conception of a natural affinity or kinship between God and man, and man and Nature was not invented by Plato. It was a familiar Greek idea that men are but " mortal gods," and gods "immortal men^" and Pindar was only ^ Tim. 41 D. ^ These words are put into Heraclitus' mouth by Lucian, Vif. Auct. 14. 14 The Vitality of Platonism expressing a common belief when he sang *'one is the race of men and gods : and from one mother we both inherit the breath of Hfe\" There is also reason to believe that the same inspiring conception had already even before the time of Plato assumed a deeper and more religious significance in Orphic and Pythagorean teaching. The unity between man and nature, again, was an underlying hypothesis of Greek life ; and the life in harmony with Nature, that is, with the Nature of the Whole, is an ideal which expresses much of the best Greek thought even before the days of Stoicism. But Plato is the first of the Greeks to make the kinship of the divine and human natures the basis of a philosophy of man, and he expounds the doctrine with more emphasis than any pre-Christian thinkers except the Stoics, and with a far greater wealth of philosophic meaning than any other writer in any age. At this stage I will invite you to pause for a moment and consider the affinity between this view of Nature and that with which we meet in the poems of Wordsworth. The subject of Words- worth's Platonism has already been briefly touched upon by the author of John Inglesant, in a paper read to the Wordsworth society in 1881 : and I observe that a critic in the Ti?nes of to-day (March 20, 1903) pronounces Wordsworth ''the profoundest, the most daring Platonist in English literature." Mr Shorthouse lays stress upon a remarkable passage from the Exctcrsion and finds in it ''the key not ^ Nem. 6. i. Plato and Wordsworth 15 only to Wordsworth's Platonism, but to that peculiar conception of his that an entrance into the world of abstract thought may be won by the help of material objects\" The lines of Wordsworth are : — " While yet a child and long before his time Had he perceived the presence and the power Of greatness : and deep feelings had impressed Great objects on his mind, with portraiture And colour so distinct, that on his mind They lay like substances, and almost seem'd To haunt the bodily sense-." ''•The presence and the power of greatness,'" says Shorthouse — ''this is that 'principle of excel- lence' in which Plato believed." The poet seems to affirm that by the help of the vast objects of nature, perceived in silence and in solitude, we are enabled to understand and to conceive the great realities of abstract thought, and to "breathe in worlds To which the Heaven of Heavens is but a veil." These remarks are suggestive and true ; but in what I have to say of Wordsworth's Platonism I will pursue a somewhat different, and for some of you perhaps an easier line of thought, confining myself to Wordsworth's view of Nature and her relation to man. It seems to me that the philo- ■ sophical idea which underlies nearly all the finest poetry of Wordsworth is no other than that which we have already found in Plato, although the English poet develops it in a somewhat different ' p. 12. ^ Book I. 1 6 The Vitality of Platonism way from the Greek philosopher. To Wordsworth as to Plato, Nature is a Soul or Spirit, and divine : "O Soul of Nature! that by laws divine Sustained and governed, still dost overflow With an impassioned life^ ! " And just as in Plato Nature imitates God, and is created by Perfect Wisdom, so in Wordsworth Nature is "a Power That is the visible quality and shape And image of Right Reason : that matures Her processes by stedfast laws; gives birth To no impatient or fallacious hopes, No vain conceits : provokes to no quick turns Of self-applauding intellect ; but trains To meekness, and exalts by humble faith ^" In more than one passage Wordsworth appears to conceive of Nature as an indwelling soul, like Plato's Soul of the Universe : "To every form of Being is assigned An active Principle : ... it subsists In all things, in all natures ; in the stars Of azure heaven, the unenduring clouds, In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks, The moving waters, and the invisible air. Spirit that knows no insulated spot, No chasm, no solitude; from link to link It circulates, the Soul of all the Worlds I" ^ Prelude, Book xii. = y^^^^ ^qqY xiii. ' Excursion^ Book ix. ad init. Plato and Wordsworth 1 7 It is In this spirit that Wordsworth finds the true and essential unity of Nature, "Even as one essence of pervading light Shines in the brightest of ten thousand stars And the mute moon that feeds the lonely lamp Couched in the de\^7 grass \" With this may be compared the passage from- the Lines coinposed a few miles above Tint em Abbey beginning "I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts'." And it is the same idea to which the poet gives magnificent expression in his description of the scenery of Switzerland : — "The immeasurable height Of woods decaying, never to be decayed, The stationary blasts of waterfalls, And in the narrow rent at every turn Winds thwarting mnds, bewildered and forlorn, The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky, The rocks that muttered close upon our ears. Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside As if a voice were in them, the sick sight And giddy prospect of the raving streams. The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens, Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light — Were all the workings of one mind, the features Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree; Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end^" ' Prelude, Book xiv. - Quoted i7ifra. The Divifie 0?'igi?i of the Sou/, p. 48. ^ Prelude, Book vi. A. E. 2 1 8 The Vitality of Platonism And in her relations with man, how kind, and beneficent is Nature ! What lessons of moderation and calm she teaches us ! What strength and con- solation we derive from communion with the " kin- dred spectacles and sounds" of nature, "the noise of wood and water," the starry heavens, the sea, the " everlasting hills " ! Of these and similar ideas the poetry of Wordsworth is full, and quotations would be superfluous. I will only add that Wordsworth, like Plato, is never forgetful of man when he writes of Nature. As Shorthouse says, if ''Nature elevates man," ''man consecrates Nature" — ''man and Nature act and re-act\" And thus it is that no one who is not a friend of man can hope to understand the voice of Nature. "But this we from the mountains learn And this the valleys show, That never will they deign to hold Communion where the heart is cold To human weal and woe^." It is ''the still sad music of humanity" that Nature sings, "Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdued" These quotations, which might be greatly multiplied, may seem perhaps to show you that there is a strong vein of Platonism in Wordsworth. ^ p. 6 of paper quoted above. ^ Lines composed at Cora Lin?t. ^ Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, Celestial origin of man 19 Mr Shorthouse is unwilling to assert that Words- worth '' consciously Platonized ; on the contrary, it is not likely that he ever read the Dialogues." I do not feel sure of this, but all that I wish at present to maintain is that Wordsworth's interpretation of Nature has its philosophical basis whether con- sciously or unconsciously in Platonism. Let us now return to Plato himself. The famous words in which Plato proclaims that man is " a celestial and not a terrestrial plant'" — ovpdvLov (J)vt6v, ovk eyyeuov — sum up a whole school of theological and religious thought. You remember the passage in which St Paul addresses the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers on the Areopagus at Athens : " God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation : that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from any one of us : for in him we live, and move, and have our being : as certain also of your own poets have said. For we are also his offspring " — tov yap /cat yeVo9 icjxiv (Acts xvii. 26-28). These sentences are full of Stoic moral and religious teaching, and the sentiment with which they conclude, though it may have been derived by Paul from the Phaenoynena of Aratus, who uses the same quotation in the second century before Christ — or possibly from Aristobulus of Alexandria — this profound conviction of the universal brotherhood of ' Tim. 90 A. 20 The Vitality of Platonism men and their relationship to God the Father reaches back through the hymn of Cleanthes the Stoic to the great Platonic doctrine which I have named. It is the same behef in the celestial origin of man that inspires the teaching of some of the early fathers of the Church, such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, nor has it lost its power to move the minds and sway the hearts of men to-day. Perhaps it is not too much to say that the Ik crov yap yivo<; ecr/ieV of Cleanthes is the highest expres- sion of the religious sentiment in the whole range of Greek literature and not unworthy to rank with the Christian equivalent : '' Our Father which art in Heaven." In the presence of this spiritual affinity the distinction between Pagan and Christian seems to fade away, and we have a momentary vision of an ideal faith, a Trapdhuyixa iv ovpavco, whereof all earthly religions are but shadows pointing to the perfect day. Plato's position on this subject is that he believes it to be just the presence of this divine element in man which renders his nature most distinctively and most specifically humane The ^'colour and likeness of true manhood," says Plato in the Re- public'^, is its likeness to the God-head : dv^peUeKov is nothing but OeoeUeKov. Man is most manlike when he most resembles God, and (as Tennyson says) "then most godlike being most a man." The lower appetites which clog and thwart the soul are no part of man at all : they are of the earth, earthy, ^ See Adam, notes on Rep. 501 b, 589 d. ^ 501 b. Essential divinity of man 21 whereas man is a child of Heaven. It is the higher which is the human nature, and according to this higher nature man must be defined and placed. The noble lines of George Herbert, which I have else- where quoted to illustrate this subject, express the teaching of Plato better than anything that I can say, and may at the same time serve to show you that whether Platonism is a dead philosophy or not, it may sometimes be a living faith. " To this life things of sense Make their pretence : In th' other Angels have a right by birth : Man tries them both alone, And makes them one With th' one hand touching heav'n^ with th' other earthy In soul he mounts and flies, In flesh he dies, He wears a stuffe whose thread is coarse and round, But trimm'd with curious lace; And should take place After the trimming, not the stuffe and ground \'' Of this doctrine of the essential divinity of man I have said in another place that "the sure and abiding conviction of the presence of a divine ele- ment within us, rendering our nature essentially and truly human, makes itself felt in nearly all the dialogues of Plato. It is the ultimate source of all his idealism, religious and metaphysical, no less than moral and political, and may well be considered the most precious and enduring inheritance which he has bequeathed to posterity'." To me this doctrine 1 Ma?i's Medley. ' Note en J^ep, 501 b. 22 The Vitality of Platonism appears to be more fundamental than anything else in Plato, except perhaps the theory of Ideas, with which it stands in close relationship ; and it is assuredly the most living, aye and life-giving of all Platonic doctrines. Let us endeavour for a moment to understand how it is connected with other parts of Plato's teaching — such as his theory of knowledge, the pre-existence and immortality of the soul, and the aim and scope of education. /' The only true objects of knowledge, according to Plato, are the transcendent, self-existing Ideas, ^^*^ which are poetically described in the myth of the Phaedrtis. These Ideas, which are themselves the only true realities, on the model of which the visible Universe and all its parts are fashioned, depend in turn upon the one supreme or sovereign Idea, that is the Good, so that the whole Universe of thought and things is, if we may adopt a phrase of Aristotle, attached to — dvrjpTr)TaL ck — the Idea of Good or God. Or to change the figure, v/e may say that the totality of existences is one long altar-stair, ascending step by step from the lowest to the highest, " Through the mighty commonwealth of things, Up from the creeping plant to sovereign manV' and higher still through all the infinite gradations of the spiritual world, whose lamp or sun is God himself. Both conceptions are Platonic, and both are also Tennysonian : "For so the whole round earth is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God^" * Wordsworth, Exnirsio?i, Book iv. ^ Morte d' Arthur. Human soul akin to the Ideas 23 And again : "the great world's altar-stairs That slope through darkness up to God\" To these transcendent Ideas, and especially to the Idea of Good, the human soul, in virtue of its Inherent divinity, is akin, and by reason of its kin- ship with the Ideally true and beautiful, It is able to apprehend perfection. As the Cambridge Platonists In the seventeenth century loved to say, Man's Reason Is the candle of the Lord, lighted by God himself, to guide the soul on high. In the words of Xathanael Culverwel, perhaps the most truly eloquent of that illustrious band of writers and thinkers : " The Candle of the Lord it came from him, and 'twould falne return to him,... the face of the soul naturally looks up to God, coelurnque tueri Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vulttis, 'tis as true of the soul as of the body. All light loves to dwell at home with the Father of Lights. Heaven 'tis P atria hwtinum, God has there fixt a tabernacle for the Sun, for 'tis good to be there, 'tis a condescension In a Sunne-beam that 'twill stoop as low as earth, and that 'twill guild this inferiour part of the world ; 'tis the humility of light that 'twill incarnate and incorporate It self unto sublunary bodies ; yet even there 'tis not forgetful of Its noble birth and original, but 'twill still look upwards to the Father of Lights^" ^ I71 Memoriam, 55. ^ A discourse of the Light of Nature^ ist Ed., p. 199. 24 The Vitality of Platonism It is in this way that the doctrine of the divinity of the human soul is connected with the Platonic theory of knowledge. How is it related to the teaching of Plato on pre-existence and immortality ? Throughout the whole of Greek literature, from Homer downwards, immortality is universally held to be an attribute of that which is divine, and it is a wide-spread principle of Greek philosophy that the a(l)6ap7ov is also dyevrjTov — the immortal is also the uncreated. Each of these principles is fully accepted by Plato, and although in the Timaetts he speaks of the creation of the human soul by God, that is in all probability only an allegorical way of saying that the soul of man is an efflux or fragment — aTTocTTracr/xa, as the Stoics said — of the divine Soul. It certainly does not imply that Soul as such had a beginning in time. In this way the divinity of Soul implies at once its pre-existence and its immortality. To tell the story of the Soul as Plato tells it, mingling poetic fancy with moral and religious truth, and '* overlaying all with the Muses' charm" — nitisaeo contingens cuncta lepore — would require the genius of another Plato. Each p articular soul ^^ has _aji-,^ndless history behind it, and an Infinite ! prospect before. Incarnation is only an episode in a life that stretches throug^h both eternities, a hak«agzplace^or^hall we say a quiet haven '^. Nay rather a troubled and storm-tossed sea, a prison- house in which the soul is chained till Death, the great deliverer, sets her free, a tomb in which soul lies dead, until death's resurrection morn shall bid Pre-existence and hnmortality 25 the shadows flee away. We are again reminded of St Paul : '' O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death ? " (Rom. vll. 24). " For we that are In this tabernacle do groan, being burdened : not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life" (2 Cor. V. 4). Or in the words of St Peter, both of whose epistles furnish many analogies to the doctrine of Plato, OavaTOjOeU /-xei^ crapKi, l^cjoTroL-qOeU Se TTveviiaTi — the death of the body makes the spirit alive. Before the round of Incarnation began, says Plato in the Timaeus\ God ''set each soul as it were in a chariot and showed her the nature of the whole," in harmony with which it Is her duty to live ; and in the interval betw^een each successive incarnation, the soul that has strenuously followed truth and righteousness on earth, renews her faded fires and plum.es her wings afresh by gazing on the perfect forms of Beauty and Truth in the realms of the Ideas. And when she returns to earth again, if she have drunk not too deeply of that ''daughter of Lethe," that awaits "the slipping through from state to state " it may often happen that a stray sunbeam from the heavenly kingdom enters the window of the prison-house and reminds her of the " imperial palace whence she came," making her to rejoice and sing like " Memnon smitten with the morning sun." This is the Platonic form of that doctrine^ of Reminiscence or Recollection with which we so 1 41 E, 42 B. 26 The Vitality of Platonism often meet in English poetry. It is this which inspires the lines of Tennyson : — " Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like gUmpses of forgotten dreams — Of something felt, like something here ; Of something done, I know not where; Such as no language may declare*." The same thought is expressed by Boethius^ "Who for a good he knows not sighs? Who can an unknown end pursue? How find? How e'en when haply found Hail that strange form he never knew? Or is it that man^s inmost soul Once knew each part and knew the whole 7 " Now, though by fleshly vapours dimmed, Not all forgot her visions past; For while the several parts are lost, To the one whole she cleaveth fast; Whence he who yearns the truth to find Is neither sound of sight nor blind. " For neither does he know in full, Nor is he reft of knowledge quite, But, holding still to what is left, He gropes in the uncertain light, And by the past that still survives To win back all he bravely strives." And it is essentially the same idea which was in the mind of Wordsworth when he wrote the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. ^ The Two Voices. '^ Consolation of Philosophy, v. 3, tr. James. Doctrine of Reminiscence 27 " Hence in a season of calm weather Though inland far we be Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither, Can in a moment travel thither, And see the Children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." In the prefatory note with which he introduces this poem, Wordsworth is careful to indicate that he is not committed to the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul : he merely regards the notion " as having sufficient foundation In humanity " to justify him In using It for poetical purposes. The doctrine almost disappears from Greek philosophy, properly so-called, between the time of Plato and the Neopla- tonlsts ; but Its Influence Is traceable In the apocryphal literature of the Old Testament, and especially In the book of the Wisdom of Solomon. '' I was a child of goodly parts," says the author of that work, '' and received a good soul ; or rather, being good, I came Into a body undefiled " — dyaOo^ a)P tjXOov eU crw/xa diJLLavTov^. It has not been accepted by the Christian Church, and now survives In Western literature chiefly as a poetic fancy. In the East, on the other hand, it is still what It was to Plato and to Orlgen, and in later times to Henry Moore — an Integral and essential part of the belief in the eternity of Soul. The other half of Plato's doctrine has fared better ; but there is no philosophical system at the present day which can be compared 28 The Vitality of Platonism with Platonism In the extent to which It Is moulded and inspired by the ever-present consciousness of immortality. It remains for us to see In what way Plato's doctrine of the divinity of the human soul affects his conception of the scope and method of education. In our essential nature, the soul is divine ; but when Incarnate in a mortal body, she is clogged and en- cumbered by the evils inseparable from her tenement of flesh. In these circumstances, what Is the duty of the teacher ? Is It, as some of Plato's contem- poraries held — nor is the opinion even now extinct — is it to endeavour "to put sight as it were Into blind eyes " — In other words to fill the soul with moribund facts and dogma, imperfectly understood, or rather, as Plato would say, not understood at all ? Against this view of education Plato urges unrelent- ing warfare, for it is the entire and absolute negation of his whole theory and practice. According to him Reason, which is the eye of the soul, present In many men and women, Is never blind ; although its gaze is only too often directed on the false and fleeting, the hollow and impure. The ''leaden weights " of tradition, prejudice, passion and desire, drag the soul's eye downwards to that which is of the earth earthy. Who then, according to Plato, is the true and heaven-born teacher ? He Is one who makes It his aim, not to multiply, but to remove those leaden weights, that the soul may thus obey her native impulse and soar upwards. Or to change the figure, and avail myself of what I have ventured Tra7tsformation of the soul by education 29 to write elsewhere, *' Michael Angelo used to say that every block of marble contained a statue, and that the sculptor brings it to light by cutting away the encumbrances by which the 'human face divine' is concealed. In like manner, according to Plato, it is the business of the teacher to prune the soul of his pupil of those unnatural excrescences and incrus- tations which hide its true nature, until the human soul divine stands out in all its pristine grace and purity^" Or yet again, the teacher is a kind of revolutionist, seeking to turn round the soul of his pupil from darkness into light. In this process of revolution or circumversion — TrepLaycjyij is the Greek word — the moral as well as the intellectual part of our nature shares. Plato is most careful to point this out', and he would have refused to admit that it is possible for the intellect to be transformed without a corresponding transformation of the moral nature. But the transformation is effected, according to Plato, through the Reason, which is the element of God within us, rather than through the will, and it is the development of the reason and the reasoning faculties which his curriculum of studies in the Republic is primarily intended to produce. What is that curriculum.^ Theory of Number, Plane Geometry, Stereometry, Astronomy, Har- monics and Dialectic. We need not suppose that Plato was irrevocably committed to these particular studies : he did what every great educational reformer must always do, adopted the leading scientific studies ^ Note on Rep. 518 c. "■ Ibid, 30 The Vitality of Platonism of his day, and infused new life and meaning into them. But I feel sure that Plato would never have surrendered the one great principle that the avenue to the knowledge of the Ideas leads through Mathe- matics to Dialectic : for inasmuch as Nature is constructed by God according to mathematical laws ^609 ael yeojfjLeTpeL — he who would apprehend the truths of Nature must travel through Mathematics to his goaP. I have elsewhere drawn attention to an interesting and, as I think, important fact in con- nexion with the influence of Plato's curriculum on the course of medieval academic study. You are aware that the curriculum of our Universities used to con- sist of a quadrivium and a trivium, the quadrivium being Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. These four studies you will observe correspond to Plato's five preliminary studies, Theory of Number, Plane Geometry, Stereometry, Astronomy and Harmonics: for Stereometry, as conceived by Plato, is only a branch of Geometry. Now the Platonic Academy had a continuous history till Justinian closed the philosophic schools, and we can hardly be wrong in supposing that the adoption of these studies into the medieval curriculum was due directly or indirectly to the value attached to them by the Platonic school. But there is a still more striking link cementing our Universities with the Academy of Plato and even with the fourth century B.C. In the medieval Universities those who were ^ See Adam, Religious TeacJiers of Greece^ p. 419 f.; Republic of Plato, vol. ii., p. 168. Educational currimlmn 31 duly qualified in the quadrivium and trivitim received the title of bachelors or masters of Arts, because Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music, to- gether with the studies of the trivium, were techni- cally called Arts, Now the interesting point to notice is that this use of the word Arts in what I may call the academic sense, actually occurs in Plato, who speaks of Number or Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and Music as the so-called Arts. When the mystic cap is placed upon your heads, making you magistros or 7nagistras artium as the case may be, I ask you to remember that you are indebted to Plato, or the age in which he lived, for part at least of this high sounding and doubtless well- deserved title. So far, I have spoken of Plato's educational theory as if it affected our present life on earth and nothing more. But inasmuch as the faculty of reason, which the teacher tries to cherish and foster, is immortal and divine, the horizon of the teacher is not limited by this transitory life. The soul, says Plato, takes nothing with it into the unseen world except its education\ Plato therefore "believes that the teacher can influence the pupil for hereafter as well as for life here, and that the soul which is once smitten with the love of truth may still advance from knowledge to more knowledge throughout un- numbered lives and phases of existence " still to come". If the seed appears for the moment to fall ' Fhaed. 107 D. ^ Adam, Rep. of Plato, vol. ii., p. 168. 32 The Vitality of Platonism on barren soil, the teacher may still be comforted : perchance it may yet '^ bloom to profit, otherwhere." *' We will not," says the Platonic Socrates, "relinquish our endeavour, until we either persuade Thrasy- machus and the others, or make some progress in view of the life which is to come, when in another existence we may chance on topics such as these\" KaXoi^ TO a9\ov kol rj iXnU fieydXr) — I think you will agree with me that such a theory of education upholds to us a larger prospect than the usual application of the term either in ancient or in modern times. According to the familiar saying, some of us are born Platonists, and the rest Aristotelians ; and the Aristotelian will probably think that here, as elsewhere, Plato soars too high. In reply to this objection, Plato would probably say, and say with truth, that even if the goal appears to some impossible to reach, the stimulus of a great though unattainable ideal may enable them to reach the limits of that to which they ca7i attain. Think of the heavenly pastures through which the soul is led in looking for that untravelled land. And even if we refuse to follow Plato into these loftier regions of thought and speculation, his remarks on educational theory and method furnish many lessons for the guidance of teacher and pupil even within a narrower sphere. Among these I will only mention two or three. How does Plato conceive of the relationship between the teacher and the taught ? They are intellectual partners or comrades in the search for knowledge. The teacher 1 J^eJ^. 498 D. The goal and means of education 33 is himself a learner, and the pupil a teacher ; for it is from the contact of the two minds that truth or knowledge springs to light. Another lesson is that education is at once an intellectual and a moral revelation, the Trepiayojyrj of the whole nature of the pupil €K cr/coTovs eh (f)m — out of darkness into light. The ultimate goal of intellectual education, according to Plato, is the knowledge of God, and moral training culminates in assimilation to His glorious image — o/xotcjcrts 6eq) Kara to hvpaTou dvOp(o7T(ij\ This is Plato's version of man's chief end. Hardly less valuable and significant is Plato's view of education as the free and unconstrained development of the individual soul, and his concep- tion of the means whereby this end can be attained — stimulus, the shock of surprise and contradiction, the pleasure of discovery, generalisations prematurely formed and Q^ladlv discarded in favour of new and Jater generalisations, destined themselves to suffer the same fate as the intellectual horizon widens and expands. These and many other kindred principles of educational theory are frequently heralded as new discoveries of the present day, as for example by Professor Armstrong, who is never weary of extol- ling what he calls the "heuristic" method. In point of fact, they are all of them found in Plato, and their employment in the art and practice of education is abundandy illustrated throughout his dialogues. But we shall miss the most distinctive and essential element in Plato's theory of education if we seek to ^ Theaet. i-j^b. A. E. z 34 The Vitality of Platonism narrow its range or isolate it from the rest of his philosophy. Plato never loses sight of the whole when treating of the part, and education in his view is but a part of life ; as life itself is of eternity. The genius of Plato is always reaching forth after tot) okov KoX 7ravTo<; deiov re koL av6 poiirivov^ — his gaze is fixed upon " all time and all existence " — iravTo^ jxkv y^povov, irda-Y)^ 8e oucriag*. In the words of Goethe, " every utterance of Plato points to the eternal — to an eternal Unity or Whole " — ein ewig Ganzes — ''an eternal principle of Goodness, Truth and Beauty which he strives to quicken and promote in every bosom-." In Plato's description of that momentous scene in the prison-house of Athens — a scene to which there is no parallel, save only one, in human history — occur the touching and memorable words : aXX' olfiai eyojye, d) %(jJKpaTe<;, €Tl rjkiov elvai iirl toi<; opecri kol ovTTOi SeSu/ceWil '' Nay, Socrates, I think the sun is still upon the mountains, and has not yet set." In the considerations which I have put before you, I have hardly touched the fringe of a great and noble subject, but I hope that some of you may have at least begun to realise that Plato's sun still shines upon the everlasting hills. ^ Rep. 486 A. ^ Farbenlehre^ iii. p. 141, Weimar, 1893. ^ Fhaed. 116 e. II. THE DOCTRINE OF THE CELESTIAL ORIGIN OF THE SOUL FROM PINDAR TO PLATO Kttt (TWfxa fxlv rrdvToiV eVtTai Oavdro) 7repnT0€V€i, ^ioov S' en ActVcTat aiwvo? ctSwXov to yap iarn fiovov €K 0€(j)V ivSu Bk Trpaa-crovTiov /xcXcW, drap cvSoVrco-crtv iv TToXXoU ovcipois StiKVVdt T€p7rvo)V iep7roL(rav ;>(a\€7r(oi/ re Kpiatv. F iND AR, /ragnient 131 Bergk. Tke body of all men is subject to all-powerful deaths but alive there yet remains an image of the living man ; for that alone is from the gods. It sleeps when the limbs are active, but to them that sleep in many a dream it revealeth an award of joy or sorrow draiving near. I propose in the present lecture to invite your attention to part of a remarkable fragment of Pindar's dirges, preserved by Plutarch in his Con- solatio ad Apolloniu7n}. It has long been recognised that the Pindaric dirges introduce us to a circle of ideas to which Greek poetry is hitherto a stranger, although parallels are to be found in Orphic eschato- logy and to a certain extent also in the fragments ' c. 35. 3—2 36 The Divine Origin of the Soul of Heraclitus. From whatever source Pindar may have derived his conception of the future world, and he certainly did not evolve it out of his inner consciousness and nothing else, the power of poetry to refine and purify religious sentiment has never been better illustrated than by the poet who throughout his whole career believed himself the chosen servant of Apollo, the god of religious and prophetical as well as of poetical inspiration. My object, however, is not to discuss the origin of these beliefs : it is rather to trace from Pindar to Plato the gradual development and progressive intellectualisa- tion of one of the beliefs contained in the particular fragment which I have put into your hands, and incidentally, perhaps, to remark upon its significance in connexion with later developments in Poetry, Philosophy, and Religion. A word or two is necessary with reference to the translation. oXoiv, which I have taken as '* the living man," means simply "life." Pindar is using the abstract for the concrete. In my opinion W. Christ is grievously wrong when he explains the word by aevi sernpiterni, " eternity " : alo^v is never so used by Pindar. In the last line Kpiaiv means *' adjudica- tion," as Kpiv(ji in a passage of the Pythians means "adjudge^": TOl% OVT€ V'dcTTOS O/V.WS iTTtt/Wvos €v HvOlolSl KpiOiy. "To them, at the Pythian festival, no such glad return to home was adjudged " : ' 8. Zz. Homeric notion of sonl 37 but the specific reference in our fragment, as Boeckh and other editors have pointed out, Is doubtless to the adjudication of joy and sorrow at the judgment of the dead. Pindar recognises such a judgment in the second Olympian', and implicitly also In other fragments of his OprjvoL- describing the bliss that awaits the pious, and the torments in store for the wicked. Anyone who reads the fragments of the OprjvoL side by side will agree, I think, that Kpicriv is to be understood in this way. Let us now turn our attention to the Ideas which Pindar's w^ords embody. We note to begin with the survival of the old Homeric notion of the soul as the shadow of the living self. The soul of Patroclus, you remember, appeared to Achilles in a vision of the night, ''In all things like to the man himself, in stature and fair eyes and voice, and the raiment on his body was the same^" So far, there- fore, we are entirely on Homeric ground. But the rest of the passage belongs to a stratum of Ideas which is unlike anything to be found In the Iliad or Odyssey. In the first place, the soul Is said to be of divine descent ; secondly, this kinship with the gods is cited as a ground for believing In immortality — TO yap icTTi ixovov Ik decov, the first indication, I believe, in Greek literature of a definite argument for this belief, such as Plato afterwards developed in the Phaedo ; and thirdly, the fundamental Idea in the last two lines, the Idea of which the premonitory vision of the day of judgment is one particular ' 2. 59. •' 130, 132, 133 Bergk. ' 11 23. 66. 38 The Divine Origin of the Soul application, is that during life, so long as we are awake and conscious, the soul is asleep, but when the body is laid to rest, the soul awakes and reveals to us in visions of the night that which in our waking moments we cannot see. It is the first of these conceptions, that of the celestial origin of the soul, with whose development in Greek literature down to Plato I wish at present to deal ; but we shall find that the other two ideas are closely bound up with it, and sometimes make their appearance in writers by whom the soul's divinity is affirmed. In Pindar, as in Heraclitus, a thinker with whom the poet has other points in common besides obscurity, the celestial origin of the soul is still, what it primarily was, a predominantly religious belief; but the germs of a philosophical inter- pretation are already discernible when the poet deliberately founds his faith in immortality upon this doctrine, and also when by means of it he explains the possibility of divination during sleep. The particular idea involved in the latter part of the passage before us, reappears not only in the Republic of Plato ^ but also in an Aristotelian fragment, where we are told that " whenever the soul is alone and by itself in sleep, it recovers its proper nature," that is, of course, its celestial nature, '' and divines and prophesies the future- " ; and the same idea lies at the root of the Stoic philosophy of divination. Nor is it, indeed, unknown in modern psychological thought. Pindar's description of the soul in this ^ IX. 572 A. ^ Fr. 12. Pindar and modern psychology 39 passage bears an obvious and striking resemblance to Mr Myers' theory of the subconscious or sub- liminal self, which, according to the hypothesis of Professor James, is the medium of communication between the soul and that higher or transcendental region which he calls God : nor did the analogy escape Mr Myers, for he chooses the Pindaric fragment as the heading of his chapter on Sleep\ In his Ingersoll lecture, again, Professor James makes the existence of this subliminal self the basis of an argument for immortality, precisely as Pindar says: ''for this alone is from the gods." The possibility of a philosophical development of the Pindaric notion is also, I think, involved in another passage of Pindar. You will observe that here it is simply y\ivyr\ — soul in the old Homeric sense, or not much more — that comes from the gods. In the sixth Nemean, however, after emphatically pro- claiming the original unity of men and gods — tv dvSpcjT/, h 6eo)v yevos' — Pindar suggests that perhaps the point in which we resemble the im- mortals is in mind or reason {[xeyaf v6ov)\ And it is on the divinity of vov<;, rather than of xjjvxv^ that Greek philosophy, as we shall presently see, chiefly insists. This, and not simply the soul or xpvxyj, is the philosophical version of that StocrSoro? apxoi, that god-given seed or germ of life which Pindar ' Hitman Personality^ vol. i. p. 121. '^ 6. I. I agree with Professor Bury in his explanation of these words. 2 Ibid. 5. 40 The Divine Origin of the Soul mentions in yet another fragment \ It would be absurd, of course, to attribute to a poet any rigid psychological nomenclature ; but no one denies that vov% in Pindar is predominantly, though not ex- clusively, an intellectual faculty' ; and in Greek philosophy itself, even, I believe, in Stoicism, vov^ is never the merely siccum lumen, the clear, cold light, which ive are sometimes in the habit of calling reason. The dry soul, says Heraclitus, is the wisest : awi] ^r)pr) i/^fx^? croc^wrarT^ : but, we must remember, it was made of fire. In classical Greek lyric poetry, other than Pindar, there is no certain trace of the ideas we are now considering. The younger Melanippides, who died perhaps about 413 B.C., has left a striking fragment of a prayer, addressed presumably to Dionysus^: kXvOl fxoLj u) iranp, Savjxa fipoTijJV, tS? act^wov " Hear me, O Father, honoured of mortal men, thou that art lord of the ever-living soul." If the whole of this poem had survived, it is possible that some further light would be thrown on the subject of this lecture. Aeschylus has one or two definite suggestions of the divine affinity of the soul, notably in the passage where he speaks of the ' 137 Bergk. ^ Aios Toi v6opr]v 6/Xfxacnv \afXTrpvv€Tai, iv yp-epa Se /xotp' aVpo'cTKOTro? fSpoTwvK The notion underlying this passage, and I think also a passage in the Agamemiion-, is the same as we have already found in the fragments of Pindar and Aristotle. In sleep the soul is to a certain extent released from the shackles of the body, and foresees the future by virtue of her natural affinity with the gods. In harmony with this conception, Aeschylus attaches great weight to revelation by means of dreams ; and even when the body is awake, in moments of ecstatic elevation, such as he portrays in the person of Cassandra, and in those dim forebodings of futurity that so often haunt the mind of the Chorus in the Oresteia, the soul appears to give proof of her connexion with the divine. Nowhere in Aeschylus, however, is this doctrine brought into relationship with the belief in immortality, as it is by Pindar ; nor. indeed, except in recognising a judgment and punishments — never, I believe, rewards — hereafter, and in one or two further details, do the eschatological pictures of Aeschylus differ very much from those in Homer, except that the all-pervading gloom is deeper and more intense. W^ith regard to Sophocles, I will only say that although Dronke has rightly called * Eum. 104 f. ^ 189 ff. a-rd^iL h" Iv d' lyrvoi kt\. See Headlam in C/. Rei\ for 1903, p. 241. 42 The Divine Origin of the Soul attention to certain exquisite touches of religious mysticism in his plays, for example avrX iivpLOJv fxiav \jjvxiJT^\ the particular subject we are now discussing cannot be illustrated from him. With Euripides the case is different, and we shall find that the form In which he expresses the Idea of the soul's divinity is of the highest interest and importance in con- nexion with later philosophical thought in Greece. But before we speak of Euripides himself, it Is necessary to say something about the sources of that distinctive type of theology with which in his plays and fragments the notion of man's relationship to God is associated. In the age of Euripides, the concept of a creative or world-forming Nous or Reason had been made familiar to Greek thought by Anaxagoras' epoch- making declaration, Travra xpyjixara tjv ofxov' etra vov(; lkdo}v avTOL Ste/coV/i-Tycre": "when all things were together, Reason came and set them in order." Whether the creative vovs of Anaxagoras was a purely incorporeal or as we should say spiritual substance or not, is a question still debated ; but this much at least Is clear, that if it was corporeal, the material of which It was composed differed so much from every other kind of matter that it did not deserve to be called matter at all. To call it by the question-begging epithet of ''thought-matter" or "thought-stuff," as Windelband does, throws no light upon Its nature, besides being in my judgment a forced and unnatural translation of the Greek ^ O. C. 498. ^ ap. Diog. Laert. 11. 6. TJie Nous of Anaxagoras 43 word 1/0O9. Gomperz talks vaguely of ''a kind of fluid or aether," a ''curious reasoning fluid," ''of an extremely refined and mobile materiality'." Every such suggestion appears to me incompatible with the well-known criticism in the Phaedo, where Plato characteristically blames Anaxagoras, because after announcing that Mind is the cause of everything, he made little or no use of this great principle in explaining the constitution of the Universe, but had recourse to "airs and aethers and waters and many other such absurdities'." The opposition in this passage between N'ous on the one hand, and the "airs and aethers" on the other, tells strongly against the identification of Nous with any substance of the kind ; and, indeed, according to Anaxagoras himself, air and aether are among the substances which ASCIIS originally separated off from the primeval mixture or chaos'. It is impossible fully to discuss the matter here : I will only say that I agree with Heinze' and Arleth' in holding that Anaxagoras probably intended us to understand by A"o2is an incorporeal essence, although in the absence of an accepted philosophical terminology he failed to make the new idea absolutely clear. There are still two points in connexion with Anaxagoras' theory of which my subject requires me to remind ' Greek T/ii n ke r s (E.T.), 1216, 1217. - Phaedo 98 c. =* Fr. 2 Diels {Fragmente der Vorsokratiker). * Ueber d. Nov? d. Afiaxagoras (Leipzig, 1890). ' Archivf. Gesch. d. Philos. viii. 461 if. 44 ^/^^ Divine Origin of the Soul you. The world-ordering Reason which he describes is transcendent rather than immanent, although its immanence In certain things is not denied : ecrrti^ ofo-t 8e Acal vov'^ evL\ And finally, although this N'ous possesses many of the attributes and dis- charges many of the functions which later philo- sophy ascribed to the Deity, Anaxagoras in his extant fragments nowhere calls it God. Turn now for a little to the fragments of Diogenes of Apollonia, who lived in Athens during the latter part of the fifth century B.C., and whose philosophy is in effect little more than a revision of the physical theory of Anaximenes In the light of Anaxagoras' theory of Mind. The primary substance, says Diogenes, of which all other things are only particular forms or differentiations, is ''great and strong and eternal and immortal and possessed of much knowledge " {noWa etSos ea-nY, being able " to preserve the measures of all things, winter and summer, night and day, rains and winds and sunny weather^" " By means of Air," he says in another fragment, "all are steered and over all Air has power. For this very thing seems to me God" {avTo yap jxoi rovro deos So/cel ^IvaiY, "and I believe that it reaches to everything and disposes everything and^is present in everything. ...There are many forms of living creatures many in number, resembling one another neither In appearance nor in way of life nor in intelligence owing to the ^ Fr. II Diels. - J^r. 8 Diels. ^ Fr. 3 Diels. * ^€0? is Usener's certain emendation for iOo^. Diogenes of Apollonia 45 multitude of differentiations ; but yet they all live and see and hear by virtue of the same element, and all of them too derive their intelligence from the same source^" The Air within us, that is, our reason, Diogenes called a '* little part of God " (ixLKpoi^ fjLopLou Tov Oeov)''. From these extracts you will see in the first place that Diogenes materializes the pov<; of Anaxagoras in the element of Air : secondly, that he expressly identifies this noetic Air with God — avTO yap jxoi tovto 9eo<; So/cet eTvai : and thirdly, that this divine noetic Air is not transcendent, but only immanent — an all-pervading cosmic Deity, like the \6yos of the Stoics. I have treated thus briefly of Anaxagoras and Diooenes not so much on their own account, as because of the light which they throw on certain highly characteristic passages of Euripides. The ancients were fond of calling Euripides the "philo- sopher upon the stage." Browning, I think, shews truer insight when he makes him say, •'I incline to poetize philosophy"; and it is with this poetical interpretation of the doctrine of Diogenes that I now proceed to deal. In discussing poetry, more especially dramatic poetry, we must of course be mindful of Browning's indignant protest, " Which of you did I enable Once to slip inside my breast, There to catalogue and label What I like least, what love best?' 1 Fr. 5. ' Dials- p. 331. 3. 46 The Divine Origin of the Soul No ancient poet has suffered so much as Euripides both in his own Hfetime and afterwards from the vulgar species of gallery criticism that hisses the stage-villain. I may nevertheless be allowed to express my personal belief that the passages about to be discussed reflect a tone of feeling peculiarly congenial to the great poet of humanity, for a reason which will afterwards appear. Let us now consider some of the passages in question. We have seen that Diogenes identifies the all-pervading Air with God. To this theory Euripides has an allusion in the famous prayer of Hecabe in the Troades^ : ocTTis 7T0T et avj SvcTTOTraaTO's eiScvai, Zcvs, fiT uvayKYj (^vcreog, cire vovs jSpoTwv, 7rpoar]V^dfxy]v cr^' iravra yap Sl d\p6fj>ov [iaivdiv KeXevOov Kara Slkyjv to. OvrjT ay€ts : " O Earth's upholder, throned upon the Earth," etc. : for Anaximenes, the philosophical master of Dio- genes, taught that the earth "rides upon the air" (eVoxetTat Ta> dept), and also that ''just as our Soul, which is Air, holds us together, so also breath and Air encompass the whole Universe^" You will remember that Plato, too, in speaking of this theory, compares the i\ir to a ^dOpov or pedestal supporting the earth I For the most part, however, when Euripides writes in this vein, it is Aether and not Air which he calls Zeus. In a poet, of course, ^ 884 ff. -^ Diels p. 22 ^ 6, 25 § 2. ■' Phaedo 99 b. The Aether in Etiritides 47 we ought not to expect a clear distinction between these two concepts, although Anaxagoras had already differentiated them. Euripides, no doubt, prefers the word ''Aether" partly as having a greater wealth of poetical and religious associations than '\\ir." Thus in one fragment' we read yata /xeyto-T?; koX Aio? AlOijp " Mightiest Earth and Aether of Zeus " ; that is, I believe, not Aether "home of Zeus," though Euripides sometimes describes the element in that way, but just '' Zeus's Aether," the Aether in which Zeus consists, the Aether of which Zeus is made, in no respect different from Zeus himself. The remainder of the fragment clearly shews that Zeus is here identified with Aether. '^^ether," continues the poet, '' is the father of men and gods ; and Earth receives into her womb the falling rain of dewy drops, and bears mortal men, aye, and food, and the tribes of wild beasts." But the most characteristic example in Euripides of this identifica- tion is contained in the well-known lines : opas Tov v\j/ov revs' aTretpov alO^pa Kal yrjv Trept^ i)(pv&' vypal% Iv ayKciAais ; TovTOV vo/xt^€ Zyjva, rovS rjyov Oiov^ : thus translated by ^Ir Way : "Seest thou the boundless ether there on high That folds the earth around with dewy arms? This deem thou Zeus, this reckon one with God." 1 839 Nauck^. - Fr. 941. Cf. 877 aA/V alBrjp tiktu ae, KOpa, Zcvs os aV^pOJTTOtS 6l'0{J.d^€TaL, 48 The Divine Origin of the Soul There is more than a touch of what W. K. CHfford called ''cosmic emotion" in these verses. Nowhere, however, does ancient literature furnish a more perfect expression of cosmic feeling or a finer example of the poetical treatment of a philosophical conception than we meet with in a less known fragment of Euripides descriptive of the aetherial creative reason indwelling in the world : ere Tov avTOcfiVu, tov iv alOiptio pvfx^ia TToivToiv <^v(TLV € fXTrXi ^av $', bv TTcpt fX€v (j}'5f iripi 8' op^vaia vv^ alo\6xp(J^S, aKpiTos t aarpoiv o;)(Xos O'SeXc^^ws dfxcf>i)(op€V€L^. "Thee, self-begotten, who in ether rolled Ceaselessly round, by mystic links dost bind The nature of all things, whom veils enfold Of light, of dark night flecked with gleams of gold, Of star-hosts dancing round thee without end." Mr Way, to whom this translation is due, justly compares the familiar lines of Wordsworth : "I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. And the round ocean, and the living air. And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things." We may say, I think, that in this all-pervading spirit, ''the soul of all the worlds," as he sometimes ' 593 Nauck-. Euripides and Wordsworth 49 calls it, Wordsworth finds the true and essential unity of Nature — it embraces, as Euripides would have said, the "nature of all things," "Even as one essence of pervading light Shines in the brightest of ten thousand stars And the meek worm that feeds her lonely lamp Couched in the dewy grass." The parallel between Euripides and Wordsworth is here complete ; and in Virgil, too, we have exactly the same conception : deum namque ire per omnes terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum'. Some may be disposed to call this philosophy, others will call it poetry, and others, perhaps, religion ; but in truth it is only one particular way of trying to express that omnipresent unity which poetry and religion make us feel, which science also presupposes, and which it is perhaps the ultimate goal of a philosophy of the sciences — Plato, at least, believed it was — to demonstrate and apprehend. But to return. I think it is deserving of particular notice that in each of the three poets I have named, this kind of poetical pantheism, or Nature- mysticism, as it may more appropriately be called, is accompanied not only by a deeper sense of the unity between man and nature, but also by a profounder sympathy with '* human weal and woe" than we readily find elsewhere. It was a true instinct that prompted Tennyson to put together in ' Georgics 4. 221 f. : also in Ae/ieid 6. 724 ff. A. E. 4 50 The Divine Origin of the Soul a single stanza these two characteristics of Virgil's poetry : "Thou that seest Universal Nature moved by Universal Mind; Thou majestic in thy sadness At the doubtful doom of human kind." The power inherent in Nature dwells also ''in the mind of man," so that the link which binds us to the one unites us also to the other. You will remember that the later Stoics expressly founded their doctrine of human brotherhood on the presence in all men of the koivo% \6yos, or universal reason that " moves through all things, mingling with the great and lesser lights\" Marcus Aurelius, for example, reminds us that man's brotherhood with all mankind depends not on blood, or the generative seed, but on community in mind (vov kolvcji/lo) : each man's mind, he says, is God and an efflux from God" ; and God is ef? Sta iravToiv /cat ovcria fjiia, "one God, one essence stretching through all things"'," present in Nature as well as in man. The humanism of Euripides is not an intellectual dogma, but the language of the heart ; yet it is more than a mere accident — I would rather say it is the operation of a law of nature — that the most profoundly human of tragedians should have been the author of the greatest nature-drama of antiquity, I mean, of course, the Bacchae. So far, I have spoken only of the peculiar kind ^ Hymn of Cleanthes 1 2 f. " XII. 26. 3 yjj ^ N attire-mysticism, of Euripides 51 of poetical theology which is sometimes found in Euripides. That which Pindar calls " the gods" — TO yap ian jiovov eV Sewv — has become, under the influence, perhaps, of Diogenes, an immanent, all- embracing aetherial substance designated by the name of Zeus. Let us now turn from the divine to the human, and consider one or two of those passages in which the poet has in view the doctrine of man's affinity to God. The fragment most commonly cited by the ancients in this connexion is the line 6 vovs ya/j qfx<2v iariv iv cKatrro) ^€os^. "The reason in each one of us is God."' Our first impression is that we have here the same sentiment as that of Dante, *' Mind is that culmi- nating and most precious part of the soul, which is Deity-." If we look closer, however, we shall see that the emphasis is on vov<; and not on Oe6<; : Euripides means there is no God but reason ; and so the line was explained by Nemesius. This is not mysticism, but rationalism, in the sense in which the word is used in '' Euripides the rationalist." In the prayer of Hecabe it is difficult to say whether the words Zev?, €lt avdyKr) (f)vcr€o<;, etre z^'ous /SpoTwv — ''Zeus, whether thou art Nature's law or mind of man" — are meant to be understood in the rationalistic or in the mystical sense. Per- haps the latter interpretation is the more probable, seeing that Hecabe has already spoken of ^ Fr. 10 1 8. ■' Convito Hi. c. ii, tr. K. Hillard. 4—2 52 The Divine Origin of the Soul Zeus in language suggested by the theory of Diogenes, according to which the mind of man is a form of that universally diffused aerial substance which Diogenes holds to be God. I do not think the two alternatives avdyK-q (jyucreos and t/ov<; /SpoTOJv are intended to be rigidly construed ; if Zeus, as Hecabe implies, is omnipresent Air or Aether, he is at once the law of Nature — an allusion, I think, to Democritus and the Atomists — and the m.ind of man. The real emphasis is on the last line — Kara hiK-qv Ta OvTjT dyeis : *' whatever Zeus may be, the sceptre of his kingdom," Hecabe means, ''is justice." But interpret this passage as we may, the doctrine of the kinship between the mind of man and the cosmic mind or aether is clearly involved in two lines of the Helena. The speaker is Theonoe, to whose character, as Mr Pearson says, '*an element of mysticism is appropriate." 6 vov% T(3v KttT^aVOVTOl/ t^ fxlv OV, yUOJfXqV 8' €)^€L dddvarov, ds dOdvarov alOep i/jLTreawv^. "Albeit the mind Of the dead live not, deathless consciousness Still hath it, when in deathless aether merged ^" Here, of course, we have nothing but a highly philosophised interpretation of the idea underlying the well-known fifth -century epitaph on the Athenians who fell at Potidaea : " Aether received their souls, and earth their bodies : by the gates of Potidaea ' Hel I0I4 ff. ^ Way's translation (substituting " mind " for '' soul "). Phenomena of life mid death 53 they were slain'/' In the background there is the theory, derived, no doubt, from Anaxagoras, that absokite creation and absolute destruction have no place in the economy of nature ; the phenomena we call life and death are only the temporary union and subsequent dissolution of pre-existing and imperishable elements. The bearing of this theory on anthropology is thus expressed by Euripides in a fragment to which I have already referred : *' All things go back whence they came : that which was born of Earth to Earth, and that which sprang from the seed of Aether returns to the firmament of Heaven \" You will further notice that in Euripides it is not, as in the epitaph, ^v)(f\, but vov%, that returns to the aetherial element. Elsewhere, in agreement with Epicharmus (if the fragments are really by Epicharmus^), he calls the divine element in man — the element that rejoins the aether — by the name of nvevixa, TTvevfxa fxiv Trpo? alOipa TO -. 638, 833. • Afem. I. 4. 17. 56 The Divine Origin of the Soul Socrates himself developed the notion on practical rather than theoretical lines, using it as a motive to encourage piety, by dwelling on the unwearied zeal with which this cosmic intelligence consults the interests of man — for his teleology is almost pain- fully anthropocentric ; but there is none the less a real analogy between the Socratic conception and the philosophical theory we have been discussing. And in at least one passage of the Memorabilia Socrates definitely suggests that the human mind is itself only a portion of the world-informing Reason, which, according to Xenophon, he occasionally identified with God. Xenophon is relating a con- versation between Socrates and Aristodemus, and has reached the point at which the young man, though originally disposed to ridicule the belief in gods, is constrained to allow that there is some little force in the argument from design. "Well now," says Socrates, "do you suppose that you have a little wisdom yourself, and yet that there is no wisdom to be found elsewhere ? And that, too, when you know that you have in your body only a small fragment of the mighty earth, and a little portion of the great waters, and of the other ele- ments, extending far and wide, you received, I suppose, a little bit of each towards the framing of your body? Mind alone, forsooth" — vovv 8e apa ixovov — adds Socrates, sarcastically, "which is no- where to be found, you seem by some lucky chance or other to have snatched up from nowhere \" In ^ Mem, I. 4. 8. Socrates and the divinity of the soul 57 its full significance, the implication contained in this concluding sentence is that the soul or rather the mind {yov<;) of man is, as the Stoics said, a fragment or oLTTOcnraa-fJLa of the universal mind or God ; but the doctrine is not elsewhere touched upon by the Socrates of the Memoradi/ia, at least in this particular form, although there is one other passage where he pronounces the soul to be divined The speech of the dying Cyrus in the Cyropaedia of Xenophon supplies some additional examples of the type of thought which I am trying to illustrate, and in particular makes the doctrine of the divinity of soul into an argument for immortality and divina- tion. In words that irresistibly recall the Phaedo of Plato, Cyrus expresses a disposition to believe that the soul, or rather the vov% or reason, survives the moment of death, and being then pure and uncontaminated by communion with the body — \ aKpaTo<; kol KaOapos — attains a measure of intelli- gence far beyond what it has hitherto enjoyed. ^ When the body dissolves, its component factors, Cyrus says, return to the elements with which they are akin ; and what of the soul ? We cannot see it as it passes, but neither do we see it while it .animates the body. Presumably therefore — this we ;are left to infer — the soul likewise, in virtue of its : divinity, returns to the divine. Yet another reason is given by Cyrus for supposing that our intelligence is heightened after death. In sleep, which is the image and counterpart of death, the soul most ^ See Mem. iv. 3. 14. 58 The Divine Origin of the Soul fully realises its kinship with the Godhead, and penetrates the veil that usually hides from us the future ; and the explanation is that during sleep more than at any other time the soul is freed from the dominion of the body\ For the origin of these and similar views, which only make explicit what is already implicit in the fragment of Pindar, we must doubtless look to the Pythagorean doctrine of the body as the sepulchre of the soul ; but what I wish to suggest is that it is perfectly possible — for my own part I think it highly probable — that the historical Socrates sometimes conversed in this way. The Cyropaedia is permeated, of course, by Socratic ideas ; and in this instance the parallel between Xenophon and Plato is in favour, so far as it goes, of the presence in their common master of a similar strain or tendency of thought. Nor are such ideas otherwise than in harmony with the temperament of Socrates. Although no one ever served the cause of Reason better, he was not, in any narrow acceptation of the word, a "rationalist" pure and simple. His susceptibility to the influence of dreams, attested both by Xenophon and Plato ; his faith in oracles; those frequent "pauses of immobility," during which he would stand for hours together, as Gellius says, '' inconnivens, immobilis, eisdem in vestigiis, tanquam quodani secessn mentis atgne animi facto a corp07'e^''\ and, above all, the divine sign or " voice," the pledge and symbol of his intimate relationship to God — for these and ^ CyroJ>. VIII. 7. 19 f. ' Nodes Ait, 11. i. Religious rationalism of Socrates 59 other features we must seek analogies in the history, not of rationaHsm, but of reHgion. It is impossible, I think, to understand the historical Socrates without taking account of the religious as well as of the rationalistic elements in his character ; but the link that unites the two is contained in the doctrine that Reason is itself divine : to yap iart fxovov e/c deojv. From Socrates we now pass to Plato. It would require a treatise to give any adequate idea of the extent to which this doctrine penetrates nearly the whole of Plato's teaching from beginning to end of his long career, and I can hardly even attempt to shew you how, beyond all other Platonic doctrines, it has made Platonism live throughout the ages, not only in poetry, philosophy, and theology, but also, perhaps, in human lives. The most that I can do is to mention one or two different ways in which Plato expresses his belief in man's affinity with the divine, and to indicate a few of the principal implications of the theory in Platonisip, with some remarks on its connexion with later religious and philosophical thought. The nearest analogy in Plato to the kind of cosmic deity of earlier and later Greek philosophy is of course the soul of the world in the Philelms' and Timaeus'' : but in Plato, I need hardly say, the world-soul differs from the immanent Godhead of Diogenes and the Stoics, inasmuch as it is a purely immaterial or spiritual essence. In the Philebus Plato derives the human soul from the soul of the ' 28 c ff. • 34 c ff. 6o The Divine Origin of the Soul world ; and the train of reasoning by which he supports this derivation is only a more developed and expanded form of the argument employed by Socrates in his conversation with Aristodemus\ But the conception of a cosmic soul, at least in this particular shape, is absent from the earlier dialogues of Plato ; and even in the Timaeiis the human soul, I or rather the rational and noetic part of it, is not, as in the Philebus, dependent for its origin upon the soul of the world, but, like the world-soul itself, comes directly from the supreme God or Demiurgus. '^As concerning the sovereign part of soul within us," says Plato, " that which we say, and say truly, dwells at the top of the body and raises us from earth towards our heavenly kindred, forasmuch as we are a heavenly and not an earthly plant — ^vtov ovK iyyecov, dW ovpaviov — we ought to believe that God has given it to each of us as a dae7non-y' that is, a genius or guardian angel to direct our lives, in the beautiful phrase of Menander, as it were our lkV(nojyoiyo% tov ^lov^. It is in this passage, I believe, that we should seek the origin of the view so much insisted upon by the later Stoics, that the faculty of reason, to quote the words of Marcus Aurelius, is just the Saifxajv, ov iKdcTco TrpocrTdT-qv KoX rjyefJLOva 6 Zev? iScoKev, aTTOcnracrixa iavTov, "the genius, which Zeus has bestowed on every man, to 1 29 A ff. ^ T/m. 90 A. ^ uTTavTL SatfxoiV dvSpi (rvfiirapia-raraL €vBv'5 yevojjievoi, /xvcrraytoyos toO (3lov. Meiiieke iv. p. 238, Fusion of religion and metaphysics in Plato 6i be a ruler and guide, even a fragment of himself." In other Platonic dialogues the form of expression is metaphysical rather than theological, though here, too, owing to the characteristically Platonic fusion of theology and metaphysics, there is still a certain colouring of theology, or perhaps I had better say, religion. In the Republic the soul in its essential, that is, its rational nature, is said to be '' akin to the divine and immortal and ever-existent'," that is to the changeless and eternal essence which Plato calls the Ideas ; and in the Phaedo we read that when- ever the soul — and by the soul in this dialogue he means z^ous — whenever the soul makes use of the body and its senses in any investigation, "she is dragged by the body into the region of the change- able, and like the objects she is fain to grasp, this way and that she wanders, confused and dizzy like a drunkard. But when she investigates a subject by herself, away she soars into the realm beyond, to join the pure and eternal and immortal and unchangeable, and, because she is of their kindred, with them she ever dwells as often as it is permitted her to be alone; and then she no longer wanders, but changes not, because she is in contact with the changeless'." You will see from this passage that although the doctrine of the soul's celestial origin has now been intellectualised, its religious meaning is not yet lost. For the nearest parallel to such passages of Plato, and they are very numerous, we must look to the Paradiso of Dante. " Thou ' V. 27. - 611 E. ^ 79 C ff. 62 The Divine Origin of the Son I shouldest know," says Beatrice, "that all have their delight in proportion as their sight sinks deep into that Truth wherein every intellect finds rest\" I say no more at present about the manifold ways in which the infinite variety of Plato's genius gives expression to the old Pindaric sentiment, to yap icTTL jxovov eK Oeojv. Before, however, touching on the applications of the doctrine in Platonism, let me call your attention to a new and historically fruitful idea with which Plato enriches this ancient belief. The question as to the essential meaning of the word man — what it is in virtue of which we are said to be human — had hardly as yet been raised by Greek philosophy. In the view of Plato, it is just the presence of this divine element that makes us specifically human. Man is most truly man whenj he most resembles God. This suggestion is clearly^ intended in two passages of the Republic. The first is where Plato is describing how the true legislative artist will endeavour to model the character and lives of men after the image of the divine. Looking now at natural, that is, ideal — observe how the natural in Plato is always the ideal — Beauty and Justice and Temperance, and now at the actual picture he is painting, he will, says Plato, blend and minofle institutions, like so manv colours, until he has obtained to apSpeiKeXov, the colour and com- plexion of true manhood ; and he will found his idea of the avSpeLKekov on that which, when it eippears among men, Homer himself called ^eoetSe? re Kal ' Canto 28. 106 ff. Manlike equivalent to Godlike 63 0€oeLK€\op\ The Manlike, in short, is the Godlike. The second passage occurs in the elaborate com- parison of human nature as it now is to a kind of chimaera or triple-headed creature, wearing the vesture of humanity, and comprising within its folds a many-headed monster, symbolical of desire, a lion, symbolical of spirit, and withal what Plato, in language made familiar to us by St Paul, declares to be the " inward man " (6 ii>To human just in proportion as he is divine was after- \ wards taken up by Aristotle and the Stoics^ ; and no one can fail to see its hitherto unexhausted, perhaps for ever inexhaustible, significance in religion. "It would seem," says Aristotle, " that ^ this " — meaning the divine or rational part of man \ — "is actually the self" (Sofete §* av Kal cTvau eKao-To^ TovToY, " inasmuch as it is the supreme and better part of man." The implication in the ^ ^vinxiyvvvn'i re kol KepavvvvT€. 527 d. 72 The Divine Origin of the Soul to light unless the whole nature of the man is turned along with it ; and one of the incidental results of the higher curriculum is to strengthen the moral discipline of youth by disclosing the bed-rock of reason on which it was founded. In the truly philosophic nature, according to Plato, it is the auwr intellectualis, the passion for truth, not this or that portion of truth, but all truth, everywhere and always, that is the source of all the moral virtues too — courage and high-mindedness, temperance, justice, kindness and the rest'. In the last analysis, morality, in Plato, is the love of Truth. By the ladder of the mathematical sciences, or as Plato is already beginning to call them, "arts" — in this originating, as I have elsewhere tried to shew, our modern academic usage of the word — the mind slowly and laboriously climbs upward into the kingdom of realities ; for we must get behind and above mathematics, behind every other single science, if we are really to attain to knowledge, as the word is understood by Plato. To this elevation we rise by what he calls Dialectic, in the view of Plato the science of sciences, above and beyond all other sciences, even as its final object, the Idea of the Good, determines all the other Ideas. If we may try to interpret Plato's dream in something like the language of to-day, and it is a dream which is a little nearer to fulfilment now than in his time, we may say, perhaps, that the ultimate goal of knowledge is not even then attained when each 1 Rep. 485 A ff. Plato s dialectic 73 particular science has at last combined and correlated its several classes of phenomena under adequate generalisations and these again under one supreme generalisation which will constitute the o.px^ or first principle of the science. Something more than this is needed, something like the ideal which a recent writer had in view when he suggested that "in another age. all the branches of knowledge, whether relating to God or man or nature, will become the knowledge of ^ the revelation of a single science,' and all thino-s, like the stars in heaven, will shed their light upon one another \" The first principles of the several sciences must in their turn be corre- lated with one another and themselves subsumed under the first principle of all, which in Plato Is the Good. It is only then that the philosopher becomes "a spectator of all time and all existence," only then that he recognises the essential unity of knowledge and understands in the fullest sense — observe how poetry again comes to the aid of science — understands how "The whole round world is every way Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." And the weapon to be employed throughout the whole of this enquiry is not the intuitive, but the analytic and discursive intellect, whose province it is by patient and laborious investigation to demonstrate that Unity, in which the intuitive Intellect, by reason of its affinity thereto, has always and everywhere found rest. ^ Jowett, Plato II. p. 25. 74 The Divine Origin of the Sou/ The dialectic of Plato, like his conception of Good, is an ideal, and as such unattainable, perhaps, ov TrpaKTov ovSe ktyjtov avOpcnTTco, Aristotle might have said. Well, it is Plato's way to make us "breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil." And if we consider his dialectic simply as an ideal, it is, I venture to think, the kind of ideal for which, apart from idiosyncrasies of thought and language, philosophy is looking still, towards the realisation of which, if we believe in the unity of knowledge, every investigator does his part, in however humble a sphere, whether he studies man or nature, and whether he succeeds or fails, if only he is actuated by the love of truth. It is false to say that such an ideal is useless because it lies beyond our present powers. Some men are so constituted that they need the stimulus of the unattainable to make them reach the utmost limits of that to which they can attain. And in point of fact, an Ideal, as Plato well knew — I believe it to be the meaning of the one great paradox of the Ideal theory — an Ideal is from its very nature immanent as well as transcendent, always being realised in the progress we make towards it. Already we "know in part": e/c fiepov^ yLvo)a-KOfxev\ | The higher we climb the hill of knowledge in' this life, the nearer we come to that transcendent Unity — call it by what name you will, the Absolute, or God, or Nature ; for all our names ^ I Cor. xiii. 9. Plato s hope of ultimate perfection 75 are but a shadow of the Truth — wherein ''are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden." But to Plato this life is not all : it is only a single stage upon our journey. The Platonic doctrine of immortality holds out the hope of a continuous advance throughout a series of lives until at last knowledge is made perfect. With perfect know- ledge, too, comes perfect goodness or "assimilation to God " ; for knowledge in Plato transforms the moral as well as the intellectual nature, and the Form of Good, which is the source of knowledge, is also the fountain of virtue. And in Plato as in Pindar, the ultimate proof of immortality — the proof that lies deeper than all his arguments and yet is heard throughout them all— is the kinship of the human soul with the divine : to yap ia-n fxovov eV 6ea)v. , _ In the speech delivered by St Paul before the council of the Areopagus, the doctrine which the apostle declares to be the common meeting-ground of Greek and Christian thought is just the doctrine which I have tried to explain and illustrate through- out this lecture. "In him we live and move and have our being ; as certain even of your own poets have said, For we are also his offspring " : tov yap Kal yivo<; eV/xeV. I have endeavoured to shew you that St Paul might with equal truth have added *'and as certain of your own philosophers have said": and I have tried to put before you what I believe the doctrine really means alike in Poetry and in Philosophy. The all-embracing and yet yS The Divine Origin of the Soul all-transcending unity, In which ** we live and move and have our being" Is just that ultimate reality which Religion, Philosophy and Poetry, each in its own language — remember, ocrrts ttot' el av, Sv(rT67racrTo<; elSevau — are trying now and always to interpret to the human Intellect or heart ; and the doctrine of man's relationship to that great unity — Tov yap KOL y€vo<; ia/xev — is not the fading echo of a "dead philosophy": it Is still, what Plato made it, the ever-living watchword of idealism. In conclusion, I would ask you to link the present with the past by adding to the passages I have discussed the not less noble verses of our greatest living poet, himself a scholar In the highest or creative meaning of the word : "Mother of man's time-travelling generations, Breath of his nostrils, heart-blood of his heart, God above all gods worshipped by all nations, Light above light, law beyond law thou art. Thy face is as a sword smiting in sunder Shadows and chains and dreams and iron things : The sea is dumb before thy face, the thunder Silent, the skies are narrower than thy wings. ****** All old gray histories hiding thy clear features, O secret spirit and sovereign, all men's tales, Creeds woven of men thy children and thy creatures They have woven for vestures of thee and for veils. Thine hands, without election or exemption, Feed all men fainting from false peace or strife, O thou the resurrection and redemption, The godhead and the manhood and the life\" ^ Swinburne, Mafer triumphalis. III. THE DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS IN HERACLITUS^ There are few questions appertaining to the history of ancient philosophy which have been more widely and warmly debated than the meaning of the word Xoyos in Heraclitus. By the ancients it was understood to mean reason — cosmic reason — universally diffused, present both in nature and in man, not of course one incorporeal entity, but identical with the ever-living, ever-thinking fire — TTvp (f)p6vLiJiov deit^ojov — which constitutes the change- less because ever-changing reality of things : and this KOLvos \6yo^ or universal reason was held to be synonymous with God. In other words, if the ancients are to be trusted, the Heraclitean concept of Logos does not really differ from the Stoic, ex- cept that on its material side, Logos is in Heraclitus fire, whereas, according to the strictest Stoic defi- nition, it is aether. The ancient interpretation has ' [The references to Professor Burnet's £ar/}' Greek Philosophy are given according to the pages of the second edition except where otherwise stated ; but his translations are quoted from the first edition, which alone was published in the lifetime of James Adam, and the variations in the second edition are noted.] 78 The Logos in Herachtus been followed by many exponents of Heracllteanism In modern times, such as Bernays, Patin, Teichmliller, and, with certain reservations, Zeller ; but others have taken a different view. Thus, for example, Heinze denies that the attribute of intelligence or thought belongs to the Heraclitean Logos : it is merely what he calls " objective reason," or law, the universal reason manifested in the development of the world, a principle destitute of anything analo- gous to consciousness or personality : and Professor Burnet goes so far as to maintain, if I understand him rightly, that the Logos-doctrine is entirely Stoic, the word Logos, in the relevant passages of Heraclitus, meaning only ''argument" or ''dis- course." It is unnecessary to say more by way of shewing that this is one of those subjects on which doctors disagree ; and I have selected it as the theme of my discourse, not so much with the hope of convincing others, as with the desire of being fortified in my own opinion — or the reverse — by the discussion which I trust my paper will provoke. It will conduce to clearness if I say at the outset that, as at present advised, I believe the ancients were right in regarding the Heraclitean Logos as virtually identical with the Stoic, although the Stoic theory was of course far more fully developed and elaborated in detail. The question "What does Logos mean in Heraclitus?" can be settled only by an exami- nation of the fragments. Other evidence is ad- Meaning of Heraclitean Logos 79 missible, but only by way of supplementing and confirming the results to which the fragments point; and I will therefore confine myself, in the first in- stance, to Heraclitus' own words. The word \6yQ% occurs in six of the fragments. In at least one of these it is used in the ordinary untechnical sense : /8A.af avOpojiros inl Travrl Xoyco iTTTOTjcrdai c^tXeet : "a foolish person is wont to be excited at every discoursed" In another much- disputed fragment it is difficult to say whether the word is technical or not : ddkacrcra Sta^eerat koL (jieTpeeTai €? top avTov \6yov okoIos Trpoad^v fjv rj yeviadai tyrjt'^ "the sea is poured out and mea- sured €9 Tov avrov Xoyov oKolos tjv before it became earth," or if (with Eusebius) we omit yi], "before it came into existence." Leaving this fragment on one side, let us consider the remaining four, in three of which at least Logos appears to have a special meaning. The first is the fragment placed first by i\Ir Bywater : in all probability it was the opening sentence of the book^: ovk ifiev dWa tov Xoyov aKovcrapTas oixoXoyieiv cro(f)6p icTTL, ev rrdvTa dvai\ "having hearkened not to me, but to the Logos, it is wise to confess that all things are one." It is true that Hippolytus writes Soy/xaro? ^ 117 Bywater. 2 23. K summary of some of the different views entertained on this passage will be found in Patrick's Heraclitus^ p. 116. For Burnet's view see Early Greek Philosophy', p. 148. ^^ There is nothing in Arist. Rhet. 111. 1407^ 14 to contradict this supposition : for the words ei' tyj apxV o.vtov tov crvyypafxixaTO^ need not mean " in the first sentence." 8o The Logos in Heraclitus instead of Xoyov : but Bernays' emendation has been accepted by all subsequent commentators, and the word Soy/xa does not occur till at least a century after Heraclitus. On this fragment I will at present only add that Professor Burnet's trans- lation, "It is wise to hearken not to me but my argument\" involves an antithesis which, though intelligible enough, is only partial, and scarcely adequate, I think, to the prophetic fervour of the sentence, particularly if these words began the book. '' Hearken not unto me, but to the Logos" : that is, it is not I, Heraclitus, who speak, nor any- thing that has to do with me, such as my argument, but the Logos that speaks through me : I am the mouthpiece of the Logos, and that is why I call on you to hear, not me, but it. Here, as elsewhere, Heraclitus speaks as if he believed himself to be inspired. " The Sibyl," you remember, '' with fren- zied mouth, uttering words unsmiling, unadorned, and unanointed, reaches with her voice throughout a thousand years by reason of the god"." The second fragment seems to have followed immediately on the first, tov Se \6yQv rouS' eoV- 709 atel d^vveroL ylvovrai dvOpoiTTOi Kal Trpocrdev rj OLKOvcraL Kat aKovcroLvre^; to Trpcorov. yivoixivctiv yap TTavTOiv Kara tov \6yov Tovhe dneLpoLCTL ioLKacn TreLpajfjiepoL koL ineajv koI epyojp TOLOVTeoJV okolcop iyoj hLTjyevfiai, hiaipicov eKacTOv /caret (jyvaiv /cat (j)pdl^ojv oKios ^X^^' '^ovs Be dkXovs dvOpdjrrov^ \av- 6dp€L oKoaa eyep64vTe<; ttoUovctl, OKOxjnep o/coVa ^ [In ed. 2 ''to my Word. "J - 12. Fragments relating to the Logos 8i ^vhovT(.% iTTiKavQavovTCki. '' This Logos is always existent, but men fail to understand it both before they have heard it, and when they have heard it for the first time. For, although all things happen according to (or rather by way of) this Logos, men seem as if they had no acquaintance with it when they make acquaintance with such works and words as I expound, dividing each thing according to its nature, and explaining how it really is. The rest of mankind " — that is to say, presumably, all except Heraclitus, who professes to have read the riddle of the Universe — "are unconscious of what they do when they are awake, just as they forget what they do when asleep^" The first sentence — tov Se \6yov rouS' i6vTo% atei d^vv€TOL ylvovrai avOpcoiroL kol Trpocrdev rj olkov- crai KOI aKovcravTe^ to npajTov — is thus translated by Burnet. " Though this discourse- is true ever- more, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before the)' have heard it at all." No doubt iovros can mean *'is true'^": but I submit that the expression "is true evermore," if " evermore " means anything, would suggest that it is possible for truth to be some- times true and sometimes false. In point of fact, according to Professor Burnet's view, the adverb adds nothing to iovTo^ : if a discourse is true, it is ipso facto always true. It is not like Heraclitus ^ 2. - [In ed. 2 ''Word.^'] •^ [Burnet /. f.' p. 146, says that in Ionic ewv means "true when coupled with words like A.oyos.] A. E. 6 82 The Logos in Hcraclitus to waste his words. The interpretation which I advocate gives its full and proper meaning to old. The Being or Entity which Heraclitus calls \oyos — the Logos that speaks through him — is ever-exis- tent, uncreated and imperishable : that is what the philosopher means ; and we may compare not only what he says himself about the irvp deit^coov, the " ever-living " Fire that '' was and is and shall be always\" but also the manifest echo of iovTos aid in the hymn of Cleanthes : ciV^' eVa yiyvecrdaL irdv- roiv \6yov alkv iovra^ "so that all things form one Logos ever-existent.'' Consider next what is involved in the words d^vveToi yivovrai dvOpconoL Kal TTpoaOev y) a/coucrat Ka\ aKovcrai/Tes to TTpcoTov. Professor Burnet translates: *'men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all " : but the two members of the clause koI TTpocrdev rj aKovcraL and koL aKovcravTes to TrpciiTov are equally important in the Greek, and there is no indication that the first should be subordinated to the second : the natural translation is '* men fail to understand the Logos both before they have heard it, and when they have heard it for the first time." It is clear that Heraclitus is blaming his fellow-men for not understanding the Logos before as well as after he expounds it : and the censure is virtually repeated in the next line: *'men seem as if they had no experience of the Logos — dTrdpoidi ioiKacn — when they make acquaintance with my account of it." ^ 20. ^ line 21. Discussion of frag^nents 83 And such a censure is unjustified and meaningless unless Heraclitus believed it possible for his readers to apprehend the Logos otherwise than through the ear. The lesson, Heraclitus seems to say, is one that he who runs may read ; it is present in our daily life and conversation ; but men are altogether sunk in spiritual and intellectual slumber: ''they know as little of what they are doing when awake as they remember what they do in sleep." As he complains elsewhere, they speak and act ''as if they were asleep^": they "do not understand the things with which they meet, nor when they are taught do they have knowledge of them, although they think they have'." They are at variance with that with which they live in most continual intercourse', being unable, in short, to interpret their own experience, for "eyes and ears are bad witnesses to those who have barbarian souls*." Now what is that "with which men live in most continual intercourse" (w /xaXto-ra SiT^i^e/cew? 6/>LtXeouo-i)'? This fragment is preserved by Marcus Aurelius', whose words are as follows : w ixaXiaTa hi'qveKm^ o^iikovcri Xoyco toj TOL 6\a hiOLKovPTL TovTco hia(\>ipovTai. Bywater at- tributes to Marcus the whole expression Xoyoj rw ra oka Blolkovptl. Diels, on the other hand, while rightly holding Marcus responsible for rw ra oXa hiOLKovpTL, believes that Xoyw is due to Heraclitus : ' Cf. 94, 95 (sleepers turr I aside into a world 0/ tkeir OWH, €tS iStov sc. . KOV/XOV). ^5. 3 93- ' 4. ' 93- 6 IV. 46. 6- —2 84 The Logos in Heraclitus (p ^akiorra hi'qv€Ki(xi<; ofXiXeovcrL \oya>, tovto) Stat^e- povTaiK For my own part, I am disposed to agree with Diels ; but, in any case, that HeracHtus was thinking of the Logos may be in part inferred from what has been already said, and will appear more clearly in the sequel. It w^ould seem then that the Logos, whose prophet Heraclitus claims to be, is something of which we already have experience, even before we read its message in the book. It is, moreover, universal in its operation: "everything happens according to this Logos " — ycvoixevcov yap iravTcov Kara rov \6yov rovhe. Are we to suppose then that the Logos is only as it were the universal law pre- vailing throughout the realm of nature and humanity, what Heinze calls objective reason, devoid of active rationality or thought ? Nothing has yet been said to exclude such a view ; and /caret rov \6yov Tovhe. "in accordance with this Logos" might seem at first to favour it. The phrase /car epiv, however, occur- ring in other fragments of Heraclitus — iravra /car cpiv yiveaOai^ — shews that /cara, in Heraclitus, may very well mean '' by way of," " through," without implying the negation of activity in the noun it governs : for Strife, in Heraclitus, is admittedly something active. And when we consider one of the other fragments in which the Logos is named, we shall find reason for believing that the Heraclitean Logos is possessed of intelligence. The fragment I refer to runs thus : rov \6yov S' iovro'^ ^vvov, t^ojovai ol iroWol o) 92. ■ /.c.^ p. 140. [In ed. 2, p. 153 Burnet begins the fragment with Sio Set €Tre(r6aL to) ^j/w from Sex. Adv. Math. vii. 133 and attributes toC Xoyov Se ovros ^vvov (which he now reads) to the Stoic interpreter whom Sextus is following.] 86 The Logos in Heraclitus rest," as Burnet takes it*: still less is Dr Patrick right: "whose word was worth more than that of others-": nor yet should we translate (with Diels fr. 59) "von dem mehr die Rede ist als von den anderen." Heraclitus means simply that Bias had more of the Logos — the universal and eternal Logos — in him than the other teachers^ of the Greeks, Pythagoras, for instance, who iTToirjcre iojvTov aro(l)i7]P, 7To\vixa6ir}v, KaKorexy'^W ''made a wisdom of his own, a heap of learning and a heap of mischieP." It is natural enough that one who looked upon himself as the vehicle of the Logos — '' listen not to me, but to the Logos " — should attribute an exceptional measure of the same inspiration to the man v/ho forestalled him in the characteristically Heraclitean sentiment : ot Let us now consider some of the other fragments which appear to throw light upon the nature of the Logos, without, however, mentioning it by name. "There is but one wisdom," says Heraclitus, '*to know the knowledge by which all things are steered through all": tv to o'0(j}6vf eTrtcrracr^ai yv(x)ixr)v, y Kv/BepvaTai iravTa 8ta rrdvTOiv^. The words tv to orocpov, as I understand them, are directed against the multiplicity of private and particular ''wisdoms," put forward by Heraclitus' predecessors, such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus, ' p. 154. 2 /^ p J JO, 2 Patin, Heraklifs Einheitskhre^ p. 56, comes near to this suggestion, without exactly making it. ■* 17. ^ Ciwn, TToWol KUKoii oXtyoL Bk dyaOoL ^ 19. Fragments illustrating the Logos 87 whom he vituperates In fragment 16; but it is with the second part of the sentence that we are chiefly concerned. What is the yvoi^Li) ''by which all things are steered through all" ? Remembering that ''all things come to pass by way of the Logos " — yivo\kiv(Mv yap TTavTOiv Kara rov \6yov roVSe — we can hardly be wrong in identifying with the Logos the yvo)iL'iq by which all things are steered : from which, of course, it follows that the Logos yiyvaxTKeL "knows." The omniscience of the Logos would also seem to be implied in the impressive sentence "Who can escape from that which never sets?" to fxrj hvvop Trore TTO)? dv TL? XolOol'; for it can hardly be doubted that Heraclitus is here thinking of the never-dying {aeiCoJov) Logos. We have seen moreover, that the Logos in Heraclitus is common or universal — ^vv6<;' Tov \6yov 8' i6pTo<; ^vvov, etc. Now in another well-known fragment thought is expressly said to be common to all things : ^vov Ictti iradi ro (j)povi€Lv\ In strict logic, of course, this would not establish the identity of the two conceptions : but Heraclitus is not a logician, and if we remember that fui/oV is one of his favourite catch-words we may believe that (i)povieiv and Xoyo?, to each of which he assigns the property of ^worr}^, were in point of fact inseparably connected in his mind. I will now invite you to consider one or two of the fragments in which the philosopher speaks of the world-forming fire. If fire in Heraclitus is only as it were the material embodiment of Logos, we 1 27. ' 91- 88 The Logos i7i Heraclitus shall expect to find — supposing we are right so far — that he attributes rationality also to this element. The fragments which may fairly be held to justify us in identifying the Logos with fire are two in number. In fragment 20 we read of the "ever- living fire," that "was and Is and shall be always/' Identical with the world-order or cosmos. Presum- ably this is the same as the \6yo% which always Is : Tov Se \6yov rovS' kovro^ aleiK The second frag- ment speaks of the thunderbolt as steering all things : TOL Se TTOLVja olaKL^ei K€pavv6<;". The thunderbolt, of course, is only an oracular name for fire ; and we have an exact parallel to this fragment In the sentence already quoted : ev to cro(f)6v, iTricrTacrOai yvoiynqv y Kv/BepvoLTaL TTavra Sta TrdvToiv "there is but one wis- dom, to know the knowledge by which all things are steered through all." Now we have seen that this yvoy^jLiq Is the Logos, so that the fire which steers all things is itself the Logos. And the metaphor in olaKL^eL clearly presupposes the rationality of that which steers the world. The connexion of intelli- gence with the warm dry element of fire appears moreover in the psychological fragments of Hera- clitus. "The dry parched soul Is wisest and best" — avT7 iyprj xjjvxrj crocfyajraTr] koL dpLCTTrj' : "It is a joy to souls to become wet' " — with the Implication of course that it is better to be dry : " when a man is drunk, he is led by a beardless boy, stumbling, not knowing the way he goes, because his soul is wet'." 2- ' 28. -^ 74, 75. 72. ' 73- Rationality of the Logos 89 On these grounds, then, I believe that the frag- ments of Heraclltus are in themselves sufficient to establish the rationality of the fwo? \6yo% about which he speaks. By way of confirmation, I w^ill remind you of the well-known passage In which Sextus Emplrlcus, or rather Aenesldemus — for it is Aenesldemus he is following here — seems to be paraphrasing the account of the Logos contained in Heraclltus' own book. "It Is the opinion of the philosopher," says Sextus, " that what encompasses us Is rational" (XoytKroV)' and possessed of Intelli- gence ((^/)€i^i9/3e9)....This divine reason [d^iov \6yov), according to Heraclltus, we draw^ In by means of respiration, and so we become actively intelligent {yo^poX yLyvofxeda). In sleep we are sunk In forget- fulness, but our intelligence returns when we awake. For during sleep, when the sensory avenues are closed, the mind within us Is separated from its connexion with the encompassing element, except that the union by means of respiration Is preserved as a sort of root; and the mind when It has thus been separated loses the power of memory which it pre- viously had. But when we are awake, the mind peeps out again through the avenues of sense, as if through windows, and, coming Into contact with the ^ Sextus thinks of air, but the element of air does not appear to be recognised by Heraditus. If Heraclitus used to -rr^pUxov at all, he can only have meant by it fire, for the atmosphere which we breathe, according to Heraclitus, is nothing but fire in one of its manifold transmutations. This passage helps to bring vividly before our minds the general character of Heraclitus' conception, with its curious intermixture of spirituality and materialism. 90 The Logos in Heraclitus encompassing element, puts on the power of reason (koyLKTjv ivSverai SvvafjLLp). Accordingly, just as embers, when they are placed near the fire, change and become red-hot, so in like manner the portion of the encompassing element which is quartered in our body becomes all but irrational when it is separated, while on the other hand it is rendered homogeneous with the whole by being connected therewith through the majority of avenues\" It is true, no doubt, that the phraseology of this extract, and some of the ideas which it contains, are post- Heraclitean: in particular, as Professor Burnet has pointed out, "the distinction between mind and body is far too sharply drawn " for Heraclitus. But in the words of the same authority, "we can hardly doubt that the striking simile of the embers which glow when they are brought near the fire is genuine^" ; and I may add that the pervading idea of the whole passage, which is that our intellectual life is nourished and sustained by physical communion with the element that surrounds us on every side, is only the material- ised form of the doctrine which is the foundation of Heraclitean ethics Set eirecrOai tw fww "follow the universal," i.e. the Logos'. And if we admit that the simile is Heraclitean, we must equally admit that it is meaningless and absurd, unless the surrounding ^ Adv. Math. vn. 127 ff. - I.e. p. 170 f. ^ Fr, 2 Diels. I agree with Patin, Gomperz and others in attributing these words to Heraclitus. Bywater takes a different view : see//-. 92. The Logos as divine law 91 element Is rational. The fire we breathe must be permanently maintained at a level of actual thought which enables it to kindle our smouldering reason into a flame. As Heraclitus himself says, ^vvov iart TTaaL TO (bpovieiv "thought is common to all things": ^vv vGco Xiyovra^ icr^upt^ccr^at ^p>) toj ^vvco Trdvicov, oKcocnrep I'Ofxo) 770X19 kol ttoXv IcryypoTepco^ : *' they who speak with the reason should strongly cleave to that which is common to all things, as a city cleaves to law, and much more strongly": TpecjjovTaL yap Trct^re? ol avOpcoTreiOL vojxol v7ro ivo<; tov uetov ' Kpariei yap roarovrov okocfov iOiXei /cat i^apKcei TTOLcn Kal TTepiyiv^Tai "for all human laws are nur- tured by the one divine lav; : for it prevails as much as it will and suffices for all and has something over\" This divine law is manifestly just the ^etos Xoyos in which, according to the testimony of the ancients, Heraclitus believed. It would accordingly seem that the Logos of Heraclitus is a unity, omnipresent, rational, and divine, the guiding and controlling cause of every- thing that comes to pass whether by the agency of man or of nature. " From the visible light," says Clement, *' we may perchance hide, but it is impos- sible to hide from the intellectual, or in the words of Heraclitus : Miow shall a man hide from that which never sets ?'" {to [xtj Sui^ov ttotc ttw? du rt? XdOoL;)' Ao-ainst the view which I am now defending it is sometimes urged that *' the word \6yos did not mean s 27. Clem. Faedag. 516 c, Migne. 92 The Logos in He^'aclihis Reason at all in early days\" In my opinion this is hardly a correct statement of the point at Issue : the question is not whether \6yo^ in Heraclltus Is exactly synonymous with Reason : it is whether his Logos possesses the attribute of Reason, and this can be determined only by such a comparative study of the fragments as I have attempted above. It is a mere petitio principii X.O assert that Logos in early Greek has nothing to do with reason if what Heraclltus says of Logos cannot be otherwise correctly under- stood. Heraclltus may quite well have been the first to use the word with such an implication. But in point of fact, as Teichmiiller has shown^ the word Logos and its congeners — ScaXeyecr^at, for instance, in Homer's aX.\a 7117 {xoi raura (J)l\os SteXefaro ^vjuo9 ; — even before the time of Heraclltus, fre- quently imply reflection or thought ; and soon after Heraclltus we meet with Xoyo? in Parmenides with the micaning of reason or ratiocination, as opposed to sense-perception : Kplvai 8e Xoyw TToXvBrjpLp eXeyypv i^ ijjidOev py]6'evTa^. To Heraclltus, however, I do not think that Xoyoq meant simply reason. I think he conceives of it rather as the rational prin- ciple, power, or being which speaks to man both from without and from v/ithin — the universal Word, which for those who have ears to hear is audible ^ Burnet, /.f.' p. 133 n.^^ [In ed. 2, p. 146 n.^ this statement is modified as follows : " The Stoic interpretation given by Marc. Aur. iv. 46 (J^. P. 32 b) must be rejected altogether. The word Aoyo5 was never used like that till post-Aristotelian times."] 2 Neuc Studi€?i, I. 167 ff. ^ Farm. i. 36 f. Diels. Fragments of Epicharnius 93 both in Nature and in their own hearts. Such an interpretation seems to suit all the fragments in which he speaks of the Logos, more especially the first, "having hearkened not unto me, but to the Logos, it is wise to confess that all things are one." In his somewhat hurried review of the different connotations of Xoyo'i in Greek literature, Teich- miiller says nothing about Epicharmus ; and as the fragments which bear the name of this philosopher- poet furnish some confirmation of the view which I have ventured to put before you. it may be worth while to examine what they have to say upon the subject. The principal fragments ascribed to Epicharmus, you may remember, belong to one or other of three classes. First come the dramatic remains, the authenticity of which is now acknowledged, I believe, by all. Secondly, we have about fifteen fragments of the Carmen Physicum, Whether these are genuine or not is a question still debated. Rohde and Diels attribute them to Epicharmus, while von Wilamowitz-Mollendorff and Kaibel consider them spurious, the latter however maintaining on sufficient grounds that they date from the fifth century before Christ, and were known to Euripides^ The third set of fragments are supposed by Kaibel to be taken from the Politeia of Chrysogonus. the flute-player, who wrote in the end of the fifth century B.C. i\ristoxenus, as we learn from Athenaeus, assigned some of the xbevheTny^dpixeta to this source. ^ See Kaibelj Comicorum Graecorum fragmenta^ i. p. i i^i ff- 94 The Logos in Heraclitiis Now In the first and third of these three collec- tions we have several traces of Heracliteanism. Let us take the admittedly genuine fragments first. In fragment 170 (Kaibel) the poet takes the Heraclitean doctrine of universal flux, and applies it for the first time in Greek literature to the question of the per- manence of human personality. If you increase or diminish a number, it is no longer the same as before. Similarly with human beings : (SSe vvv opT), Koi Tos di^^^ojTTOus • 6 fJikv yap av^iO\ 6 Se ya /xav cfiOivei, €1- p.iTaWaya Se 7ravT€S ivrl Travra tov xP^^'^^ • from which the inference Is drawn that you and I are different persons to-day from what we were yesterday, and from what we shall be again to-morrow. This interesting fragment has been admirably discussed by Bernays', who shews that it originated the problem known among the Stoics as the av^avofxevo^; \6yos : but it does not bear directly on our subject, and I mention it here only to illustrate the way in which Epicharmus gives a particular application to one of the fundamental principles of Heraclitus. The same tendency to work out Heracliteanism in detail reveals itself in fragment 172, which deals with the univer- sality of thought and is little more than an elaboration of the saying of Heraclitus ^vpov icm Tracri to (jypoueeLv. The first two lines are as follows : Ev/xaic, TO croc^oV ccrrtv ov KaO' €v fxovov^ a\K oaa-arrep ^rj, Travra Kal yviofxav e^et. ^ Epicha7'7mis und der Aviavo/xci'os Xoyos. Ges. Abh, i. 109- 117. Fragments of the Carmen Physicum 95 Everything that has Hfe, has also ypcofxa. In Heraclitus however it would seem that the Logos is not confined to living objects, any more than in Stoicism. The rest of the fragment of pseudo- Epicharmus seems to mean that although eggs have no yvwfia when they are laid, yet the hen by sitting on them makes them live, and then they have ypcjfjLa. The two last verses are : TO Se aoffibv a <^t'cris t66* olSiv wp6vricnv cx^^^' '^"^ vw/xaros ai(rai', ^ See fr. 239, 240 Kaibel. ' Diels, i.e. p. 98 {/r. 57. 2, 3). 96 The Logos in Heraclitus The derivation of the human soul from the gods had already been affirmed by Pindar and others ; in Euripides and Plato we meet with the doctrine that the human z^oGs is in its origin and nature divine ; but so far as I am aware, this is the only passage in Greek literature, until we come to the Stoics, which ap- pears to be definitely and immediately inspired by the Heraclitean doctrine of Logos. It seems to me clear that the author of these lines written, as I have said, in the end of the fifth century before Christ, not only had Heraclitus in his mind, but interpreted the Logos as I have done. Up to this point we have considered the Logos merely as immanent — immanent in nature and in man. But the Stoics regarded it in yet another aspect : it was also the concors discordia rertoji — the harmony in which all mutually antagonistic tendencies or forces, both in the moral and in the physical world, are recon- ciled. I need only remind you of the lines of Cleanthes: aA/\a cjv KOL TO. Treptcraa CTrtVracrat, apna Ouvat, Kol KO(T/i€LV TaKocrfxa Kttt ov (fjlXa aoL cf)t\a Icttlv. toSc yap €is %v iravra crvvrjpixoKas iaOXa KaKolcnv, wcr6*' eva ytyvecr^at Travrwv \6yov auv coi'to,^. ''Nay, but thou knowest to make crooked straight: Chaos to thee is order ; in thine eyes The unloved is lovely, who didst harmonise Things evil with things good, that there should be One Word through all things everlastingly-." 1 18-21. ^ For other illustrations of this characteristically Stoic doctrine see the passages in von Arnim Stoicoruin fragmenta veterum 11. i ii68ff. Harmony of oppo sites 97 There can be no doubt that the general concep- tion of a supreme and ultimate unity or harmony of opposites goes back to Heraclitus. As Professor Burnet has remarked, "opposites," in Heraclitus, ''are but the two faces of the fire which is the thought that rules the world \" "Opposition," Heraclitus says, '* is co-operation — to avrl^ovv (jv[k<^ip^i — and the fairest harmony results from differences'-": "were there no higher and lower notes in music, there could be no harmony at alP." "As with the bow and the lyre, so with the world ; it is the tension of opposing forces that makes the structure one " : TToXivTovo^ apfJiOPLr) Kocrfiov OKojcnrep to^ov kol \vpaq\ The sum of the whole matter is contained in the fragment : "Join together that which is whole and that which is not whole, that which agrees and that which disagrees, the concordant and the dis- cordant : from all comes one and from one comes alP'' : cfc iravTOiv iv /cat e^ ivo<; iravra. But the particular question which concerns the student of the Logos doctrine is whether Heraclitus, like the Stoics, con- sidered this ultimate unity to be the Logos. I think there is every reason to suppose he did. For in the first place he complains, as we have seen, that the multitude are ignorant of the Logos : " they are at variance with that with which they live in most continual intercourse": "they seem as if they had no experience of the Logos both before they hear it and when they have heard it for the first time " : ' l.c} p. 144 f. '' 46. ' 43- ' 56. ' 59. A. E. 7 98 The Logos in Heraclitus ''although the Logos is universal, they live as if they had a private intelligence of their own." And in like manner he complains that the multitude do not understand that "hidden harmony" which is ''better than the visible^": "they do not understand," he says, " how that which is discordant is concordant with itself-." It is a fair inference that this hidden harmony is the Logos. In the second place, it is the Logos of which Heraclitus at the very outset of his book proclaims himself to be the prophet. " Listen not to me but to the Logos." And the doctrine in which his preaching actually culminates — the last word of Heraclitus, so to speak — is not the universal flux or warfare, but the underlying harmony of all the opposing forces that make up the universal life. This was well understood in antiquity, and is now generally recognised by modern writers on Heraclitus, among others by Professor Burnet. In a passage of Philo, to which Patin^ was the first to assign its due importance in the history of Heraclitean criticism, we read as follows : " That which is made up of both the opposites is one, and when this one is dissected, the opposites are brought to light. Is not this what the Greeks say their great and celebrated Heraclitus put in the forefront of his philosophy as its sum and substance, and boasted of as a new discovery .-^ " We are consequently bound to suppose that in the Logos whose prophet Heraclitus declared him- ' 47. ' 45- ^ I.e. p. 60. Philo, Quis rer, div. haer. 43. Logos as reconciler of opposite s 99 self to be, all opposites are reconciled. The Logos reveals itself through him, and what it reveals, that is, the Logos itself, is unity. " Having listened not to me, but to the Logos, it is wise to confess that all things are one.'" Thirdly, we may arrive, I think, at the same conclusion by yet another way. It is tolerably clear that \GyQ% in Heraclitus is to be identified with ^eos. Various indications point in this direction. The epithet " divine " is applied by him to the el? v6\i.o% which we have already interpreted as the Logos, the z^o/xo§ which " prevails as much as it will and suffices for all and has something over\" We are told by Clement of Alexandria that " Hera- clitus the Ephesian believed fire to be God"," and the identification is generally admitted, although I\L Bovet sees nothing in it beyond a metaphor'. Metaphor or no metaphor, it does not matter much : for in Heraclitus metaphor is truth: no one can read his fragments without realising this fact, xlnd if fire in Heraclitus is God. the Logos must be God ; for we have seen that the Xoyo9 on its material side is fire. There is also at least one fragment of the philosopher himself which appears to deify the Logos. '' There is but one Wisdom : it wills not and yet wills to be called by the name of Zeus'." The "one Wisdom" is manifestly the Logos, or '• thought by which all things are steered through all'": it is willing to be called Zeus, because it is 1 91. - Coh. ad Gent. p. 165 a, Migne. " Le Dull de Plakm, p. 102. * 65. * 19. 7—2 loo The Logos in Heraclitus the true objective reality which men ignorantly worship under that name^: on the other hand, it re- jects the appellation for the reasons which prompted Heraclitus to declare that Homer and Archilochus should be scourged and cast out of the arena. The Logos has none of the anthropomorphic or other degrading attributes and passions belonging to the Homeric Zeus. And if Logos in Heraclitus is equivalent to 0e6% the Logos must certainly be that ultimate reality in which all opposites are reconciled : for Heraclitus expressly says that " God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger": 6 ^eo? y]\i.ipy\ ev(j)p6vrj, •^eufjicoi' 6ipo^y TToXeiJLo^; elpijvrj, Kopos Xt/xo?-; and in another fragment we have the idea that to God all things are beautiful and good and right, but men think some things wrong and others right". In short, when Cudworth speaks of God as ^' reconciling all the variety and contrariety of things in the universe into one most lovely and admirable harmony*," he exactly expresses one of the principal ideas which I think Heraclitus connected with his doctrine of the Logos. If the view which I have put before you is correct, we must suppose that Heraclitus was first and foremost a prophet and a theologian rather than a man of science ; and it is as a theologian that he is regarded by many scholars, notably by Tannery in ^ Cf. Zeller, F/u7. der G.\ i. 2. p. 670, n. 3. ' 36. ' 61. ^ Intellectual System of the Universe^ p. 207. Divinity of the Logos loi his Science Hellene. The hierophantic and oracular nature of Heraclltus' style points to the same con- clusion ; he himself says that "the lord, whose oracle is at Delphi, neither utters plainly nor yet conceals his meaning, but speaks by signs" (aXXa o-T^/xatVet)', and he seems to have deliberately modelled his style upon Apollo's. I may add also that the fragment e8LCr]o-dfir)v efxecovTov-, which is sometimes understood as equivalent merely to avroStSa/cros et/xi, ''I am self-taught," "I enquired of myself," ought, I think, when interpreted by the light of the fragments already discussed, to be understood in the deeper and more mystical sense " I investigated myself," i.e. it was by self-study, by looking within and not without that I djscovered the secret of the Universe: for the fwo? Xoyos is present in us as well as without. " The beauty thou dost worship dwells in thee : Within thy soul divine it harboureth: This also bids my spirit soar, and saith Words that unsphere for me Heaven's harmony^" This is of course a favourite idea in every age with thinkers of the school to which Heraclitus seems to have belonged. " /;^ te ipsum 7'edi : in ijiteriore homine habitat Veritas^' as Augustine says. I have endeavoured to shew that the Heraclitean Logos is at once the Divine Reason immanent both in Nature and in man, and also the unity in which all ^ II. ' 80. ^ Campanella, So?mefs, tr. Symonds. I02 The Logos in Heraclitus opposites are reconciled. The first of these two conceptions — I mean the doctrine of the divine immanence — appears again and again in Greek philosophy between the time of Heraclitus and the rise of Stoicism ; but the second — the notion of a world-unity or harmony of differences — is com- paratively rare, I think, in Greek literature until Cleanthes. Some have thought that this is the leading idea in the drama of Sophocles. " Un- deserved suffering," says Professor Butcher, " while it is exhibited in Sophocles under various lights, always appears as part of the permitted evil which is a condition of a just and harmoniously ordered universe'." Nestle has endeavoured to show, not, I think, successfully, that Euripides held the same belief, and borrowed it from Heraclitus. According to Euripides, he says, ^' the whole world, material as well as moral, depends on the reciprocal play of opposites, which however have no absolute value. And thus the entire Cosmos reveals itself as a work of unalterable law, which Heraclitus, and after him Euripides, call Dike, so that in the view of both this Dike is not simply a moral but a cosmic force"." There are traces of the belief in Plato, particularly in the Laws, 903 b ff. rw tov iravTo^; iTTifxeXovfJiivco npos ttjv aojTrjpLav kol dperrjv tov oXov ttolvt IcttX crvvTerayfjiipa .../cat TO aov fxopiov eU to ttolj/ ^vvTeivei j^Xiirov act, KaiTTep TTavcTfJiLKpov ov . , . fiepos iiTjv ev€Ka okov kol ov^ ^ Some Aspects of the Gr. Genius^ p. 127. ^ Euripides^ p. 151. Heraclit7is founder of Logos doctrine 103 okov fjLepov<; iveKa aTrepya^erat. In Stoicism the two essential characteristics of the Logos are that it is omnipresent and that it reconciles the seeming contrariety of things into a perfect harmony; and since each of these characteristics belongs to the Heraclitean \6yo^, we are justified in holding that Heraclitus, and not the Stoics, was the founder of the doctrine, which has played so great a part in later religious and philosophical thought. IV. KAEANBOYS YMN02 KvSlctt ddavoLTOiv, ttoXvojvvixc, TTayKparks alet, Zev, (j)i)(Teo)<; dp)(r)y€, vofJLOV /xera iravra Kvfiepvoiv, ^ai/^e* ere yap noivTeo'cn 6ip.i^ Ornqrolcn TrpocravSdv. Ik (tov yap yevofiecrOa, Oeov fxiix-qixa \a^6vT€^ jxovvoL, ocra ^a)eL re Kal epirei OvrjT eiri yalav. 5 Tw o"€ KaOvfxvTJaoj Kal crov KpdTO<; alkv deicrco. croi 87) TTcts oSe K6crfJio<;, ikLcrcrofJLevof; nepl yalav, Tret^erat, 17 Kep dyrjs, Kal kKcov vtto crelo Kpar^lrai' Tolov e\ei . ^ (TV KaTev6vveL<; koivov Xoyov, os Sta 7rdvT0)v (fiOLTa, ixLyvvfievo^ fJieydkoLS ixLKpol<; re (j)d€crcrLP. &)9 Toacro^ yeyact)<; vnaros /^acrtXeu? Sta Traz/rd?- ovBe TL yiyveTai epyov inl -yOovl crov Si^a, BalfJLOP, 15 ovTe Kar alOipiov Oelov ttoXov ovt ivl ttovtco, TrXrjv oTTocra pit^ovcri KaKol cr(f)eT€pr)crLi' dvoiai^;. 4. yevofxecrOa, Oeov for the corrupt ycVos iafj.€v, rjxov. Cf. Musonius, p. 90 Hense avOpw-n-O'^ /xifx-qixa fxkv Oiov fJLOvov Toiv eVt- yciW €(TTLv. The conjecture yivo/xio-Oa is due to Meineke. II. TcXetrat. Supplied by von Arnim. 14. cos Toa-aoq yeyaw?. Von Arnim reads w av rocroq yc- yaws ktA. : others suppose a lacuna after (fidforcn, but the error seems incurable. THE HYMN OF CLEANTHES O God most glorious, called by many a name, Nature's great King, through endless years the same ; Omnipotence, who by thy just decree Controllest all, hail, Zeus, for unto thee Behoves thy creatures in all lands to call. 5 We are thy children, we alone, of all On earth's broad ways that wander to and fro, Bearing thine image wheresoe'er we go. Wherefore with songs of praise thy power I will forth shew. Lo! yonder Heaven, that round the earth is wheeled, i° Follows thy guidance, still to thee doth yield Glad homage ; thine unconquerable hand Such flaming minister, the levin-brand, Wieldeth, a sword two-edged, whose deathless might Pulsates through all that Nature brings to light; 15 Vehicle of the universal Word, that flows Through all, and in the light celestial glows Of stars both great and small. O King of Kings Through ceaseless ages, God, whose purpose brings To birth, whateer on land or in the sea 20 Is wrought, or in high heaven's immensity; Save what the sinner works infatuate. io6 The Hymn of Cleanthes o}CKcl (TV Kol TOi Treptaord kiricTTacraL apna Oeivai, Kai KOCTfieLV TaKOCTfJLa, KOL ov (fiika crol (ftika ecTLV. (oSe yap eh tv Trdvra crvvy]pixoKa<; ecrOXd KaKolcriVy 20 (xxtS* €ua yiyvecrdaL TrdvTOiV \6yov alev iovra. ov (f)eijyovT€<; ioicriv octol Ovtjtojp /ca/cot elcn, OTJCTfJiopoL, oIt* dya6(tiv fxev del KTrjcriv 7ToOeovTe<; ovT io-opoxTL Oeov KOLvov vofJLOv ovre KkvovcriVy a> Kev TTeiOoixevoi crvv vco /Blov ecrOXop e^oiev. 25 avToi o avB^ opjxcocrLV dvoL KaKov aX\o9 eir aWo, ol fxev VTTep S6^r)<; cnrovSri/ hvcrepicTTOv eypvTe<;, ol S' ein KepSocrijvas rerpaixixevoi ovhevl /coct/jloj, dWoL 8' et9 dveciv kol (TcofxaTOS rjSea epya. in dXkoTe 8' aXXa (j)epovTaL, 30 cr7rev8oPTe<; fxdXa Trdynrav evavTia TcovSe yevecrdai. dWd Zev TrdvSojpe, Ke\aLve(j)e<;, dpyiKepavvey dv6p(t}TTov% < [xev > pvov dneipocrTJvrj^ dno XvyprjipovraL (for €povT€'i of the MS) is due to Meineke. The Hymn of C leant he s 107 Nay, but thou knowest to make crooked straight: Chaos to thee is order : in thine eyes The unloved is lovely, who didst harmonize 25 Things evil with things good, that there should be One Word through all things everlastingly. One Word — whose voice alas! the wicked spurn; Insatiate for the good their spirits yearn : Yet seeing see not, neither hearing hear 30 God's universal law, which those revere, By reason guided, happiness who win. The rest, unreasoning, diverse shapes of sin Self-prompted follow : for an idle name Vainly they wrestle in the lists of fame : 35 Others inordinately riches woo, Or dissolute, the joys of flesh pursue. Now here, now there they wander, fruitless still, For ever seeking good and finding ill. Zeus the all-bountiful, whom darkness shrouds, 40 Whose lightning lightens in the thunder-clouds ; Thy children save from error's deadly sway : Turn thou the darkness from their souls away : Vouchsafe that unto knowledge they attain ; For thou by knowledge art made strong to reign 45 O'er all, and all things rulest righteously. So by thee honoured, we will honour thee, Praising thy works continually with songs, As mortals should ; nor higher meed belongs E'en to the gods, than justly to adore 5© The universal law for evermore. THE HYMN OF CLEANTHES Athenagoras, Leg. pro Christ ianis, 7. 904 b, Migne Troo^roX fxlv yap Koi (f>L\6(T0(f)0L — irri^aXov crro;^ao'TiKW9, Kivr/^eVrcs fJilv Kara (TV ixTT 6.0 (.lav T79 Trapa tov Btov Trvorj^; vtto tt]^ avTO<; avTov i/'v;^t;<; 6Kao"TOS IrjTrja-aL €t Swarb^; evpeiv T€ kol vorjcrai tqv dXyOcLav, Clement, Sf?vm. i. 7. 732 d, Migne ^wtos S', oT/xat, dvaToXy TrdvTa (fi(jnL^€Tai. My object in these lectures is to expound and illustrate the religious significance of Stoicism, in connexion more especially with the hymn of Cleanthes. But before we can profitably enter on the subject before us, it is necessary to say a word or two about the development of religious thought in Greece before Stoicism began. Leaving out of account everything of merely secondary importance, we can distinguish in Greek literature — and it is with literature alone that we are now concerned- two main lines of religious development, the one represented by the poets from Homer to Sophocles, and the other by the philosophers from Thales down to the Stoics. The poets for the most part accepted the leading features of the old Homeric theodicy, with its polytheism and anthropomorphism ; but a tolerably continuous progress can be traced in the growing emphasis which was laid upon the higher Religious thought in poets 109 and more idealistic elements in Homer's theology, to the suppression or comparative neglect of the grosser anthropomorphic features, and more par- ticularly in the gradual spiritualisation of Zeus. The father of Gods and men in Aeschylus and Sophocles is a Being infinitely more capable of inspiring religious devotion and faith than the Homeric Zeus, who combines in a single personality the two opposing principles of Naturalism and Idealism, and is always violating the law of righteousness, to which he never- theless requires, on pain of severest penalties, his human subjects to conform. It would be impossible, for instance, to find a true Homeric parallel to the beautiful hymn to Zeus that occurs in the Suppliant Maidens of Aeschylus — I quote it according to Mr Morshead's admirable rendering — " Though the deep will of Zeus be hard to track Yet doth it flame and glance A beacon in the dark, 'mid clouds of chance That wrap mankind. Yea, though the counsel fall, undone it shall not lie, Whatever be shaped and fixed within Zeus' ruling mind. Dark as a solemn grove, with sombre leafage shaded, His paths of purpose mnd, A marvel to man's eye. Smitten by him from towering hopes degraded Mortals lie low and still: Tireless and effortless works forth its will The arm divine ! God from his holy seat, in calm of unarmed power, Brings forth the deed at the appointed hour^ ! " 1 ZZ^, iio The Hymn of Cleanthes And there Is little or nothing in Homer to corre- spond to the sentiment of entire dependence on the justice of the Supreme God to which the Chorus in Sophocles' Electra give expression when they thus console the maiden : Odp(T€L fJLOLy 6dp(T€L TCKVOV * €Tt /XCytt? Ot'paVU) Zcvs, OS € crc KadvpLvrjcroi koX abv KpaTOS alkv aucrw. " O God most glorious, called by many a name. Nature's great King, through endless years the same; Omnipotence, who by thy just decree ControUest all, hail, Zeus, for unto thee Behoves thy creatures in all lands to call. We are thy children, we alone, of all On earth's broad ways that wander to and fro. Bearing thine image wheresoe'er we go. Wherefore with songs of praise thy power I will forth shew." Let us begin by considering the epithet iroXvcovviie *' called by many a name." Cleanthes, like the Stoics in general, was a believer, of course, in one God, whom he identified, as will afterwards be seen, with the soul of the world, or rather with Reason imma- nent in the universe ; and iroXvMwiJLe signifies that all the different gods of polytheism are only so many 120 The Hy7nn of Cleanthes different names, or perhaps embodiments of the uni- versal Spirit, according to the different spheres in which that Spirit works, or — which amounts to the same thing — the different aspects in which he is resrarded^ We meet with the same idea in an im- pressive fragment of HeracHtus-': ''God is day and night, summer and winter, war and peace, satiety and hunger ; but he is changed, just as, when incense is mingled with incense, it is named accord- ing to the flavour of each." It is highly probable, I think, that this fragment actually suggested to the Stoics the method by which they contrived to recon- cile their philosophic pantheism with the religious polytheism of the Greeks ; but the important point for us to notice is that the epithet noXvdjpviJLe implies far more than a mere '* accommodation " on the part of a philosopher to the popular religion. It ought not to be limited in its application to the gods of the ^ Cf. Max Miiller's Hibbcrt Lectures, p. 311. One poet in the Veda, for instance, says " They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni ; that which is and is one, the wise name in diverse manners." Cf. also the Monotheistic tendency among the Babylonians. In one inscription, dating perhaps from 2000 B.C. or so, we have a list of identifications of the different gods with special aspects of the supreme god Merodach. Bel is Merodach of lordship and domination, Nebo „ ,, trading, etc.. Sin ,, ,, the illumination of the night, and so forth. See Pinches, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 118. This tendency to a reconciliation with poly- theism is of course characteristic of pantheism in every age. ' iv-. 36 (following By water's text). Universality of God 121 Greek pantheon : rather it implies that all mankind, in every age and country, worship one and the same God, by whatever name they call him. Ntimina sicut nomina, according to the Latin saying. In other words, the epithet TToXvcopvfjie strikes at the very outset of the hymn a note of universalism ; the God whom Cleanthes invokes is not the god of the Greek alone, or of the barbarian : he is the God of the whole human race. The old exclusiveness of fifth century Hellenism has disappeared; and in its place we have the wider and more comprehensive ideal of a religion coextensive with humanity itself. It is true that Cleanthes calls his God by the dis- tinctively Hellenic name of Zeus ; but, owing in large measure to the teaching of Greek drama, the concept of Zeus had already been universalised, more especially by Sophocles^ in his doctrine of a divine law whereof Zeus and Zeus alone is guardian, a law engraved by him in the hearts and consciences of all men, without distinction of race or creed, and of prior obligation to the ordinances made by man ; and the Zeus of Cleanthes is free from every vestige of exclusiveness or particularism. The same conception, that God is god of all mankind, and not merely of one particular race or people, is again emphasized in the third line : ae yap TravrecTcri OefXL^; OptjtoIctl npocravSav : " for it is ^ Cf. Socrates' advice to worship God ro/xo) TrdAcw?, Xen. Mem. i. 3. I, and Plato, I^e/>. 427 c, where Apollo, as the Trarpioq l^-qy-qTYj^ of Zeus, is said to expound at Delphi the will of Zeus, the universal father, iracriv a.v6pis>ivoL in IVa ttjv vloO^a-Lav d7ro/\a/3a)/x€v, Gal. iv. 5, and dTroKaraAXacrcrco, Col. i. 21, 22, Eph. ii. 16 et al. Kinshii) between man and God 123 delivered before the council of the Areopagus at Athens we find hardly a single idea, except the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, which cannot be abundantly illustrated from Greek sources ; but the sentiment on which the great prophet of Christianity as the divinely-appointed universal religion rightly lays most stress, is just this Stoic doctrine of the kinship between man and God. " God — hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation: that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from any one of us : for in him we live, and move, and have our being " — a Stoic would rather have said, perhaps, '*God lives in us." "As certain also of your own poets have said. For we are also his offspring — tov yap koI yivo<; ecrfxivK The poet whom St Paul has in his mind is not indeed Cleanthes, but Aratus ; and in all probability, as Norden in his Antike Kunstprosa- has pointed out, the quotation is taken not directly from Aratus, but from Aristo- bulus, a hellenizing Jew who flourished about 1 50 B.C. , and was the first to maintain what afterwards became a favourite patristic theory, that Plato derived all his wisdom from Moses, being in fact only Mwi;o'i7S OLTTLKL^CDV *' Moses Speaking in Attic Greek." We know from Eusebius" that Aristobulus cited in support of his audacious theory that part of Aratus ^ Acts xvii. 26-28. -^ p. 475. ' Praep. Ev. xiii. 12. 6. 124 ^^^^ Hymn of C leant hes poem in which St Paul's quotation occurs, and there is evidence to shew that the apostle was not unac- quainted with the literature of Jewish Hellenism, whether he had read any pure Greek literature or not\ But although it is Aratus who is responsible for the particular words in which St Paul here gives expression to the idea, the conception itself — that of the affinity between God and man — is, as I have said, characteristic not only of Stoicism, but of earlier Greek religious thought, indeed there is perhaps no idea which is more deeply rooted in Greek thought than this ; and in order that we may understand its precise significance in the hymn of Cleanthes, as well as on account of the intrinsic importance of the doctrine itself, I will now call your attention to some of the principal stages in the development of this idea before the days of the Stoics. The first point to notice is that the doctrine in question was by no means alien to the ordinary religious consciousness of Greece, as reflected, for example, in the Homeric poems. Not only in Homer is Zeus the '' father of Gods and men," but it is involved in the very nature of anthropomorphic theology that since God resembles man, man in his turn resembles God. From the religious point of view, this is the great merit of anthropomorphism — that it assumes an essential unity between God and man. Anthropomorphism, in a word, involves theo- morphism ; and in point of fact, as has frequently been remarked, there is no really essential or ultimate ^ See Hastings, I.e. s.v, Paul, Mortal Gods and immortal men 125 difference between the Homeric god and the Homeric man, except the attribute of immortality : whereas the blessed gods live for ever — /^a/cape? d^oi oXkv l6vT^% — we are but children of a day. Hence it is not otherwise than in harmony with the spirit of what we may call orthodox Greek theology when Lucian^ makes Heraclitus say: rt Sat ot ai'6 pcoiroL ; Oeol uvr]ToL tl Sal ol Oeoi ; avOpojiroi aSdvaToi : " What are men ? Mortal Gods. What are Gods } Immortal men." But in Homer the preponderating stress is laid upon the human attribute of the Gods rather than upon the divine affinities of man ; and the same may be said of Hesiod, in spite of occasional hints of the original unity of the divine and human, as for example when he declares that " Gods and mortal men are sprung of the same stockV' and again in a fragment preserved by Origen, which tells of the ''common feasts and common assemblies" of gods and men in the days of primeval innocence and bliss'. Another point to be observed is that in Homer, Hesiod, and the bulk of Greek lyric poetrv down to Pindar there is little or no suggestion of a spiritual affinity between man and God : man re- sembles God, and God is conceived in the imaee of man, but the resemblance and affinity extend to the outward bodily form as well as to the soul — or rather perhaps, much more than to the soul : for it was only by degrees that the notion of the soul as constituting the true and essential nature of the man came to the 1 Vit. And. 14. ' O.D. 108. ^ Fr. 187, Goettling. 126 The Hymn of C leant hes front in Greek thought. Here, as everywhere, the principle holds good : '' first the natural, and after- wards the spiritual." In Pindar's view, as shewn above', it is only the spiritual nature of man, the >^vyf\ or soul, which is declared to be of divine descent. The history of Christian religious thought is enough to prove that Poetry is a most powerful agent in refining and purifying the religious sentiment : I need only refer you by way of illustration to Palgrave's Treasury of Sacred Song. And the same is true of ancient Greece ; nor indeed has this inherent power of Poetry ever been better exemplified than by the poet, who throughout his whole career believed himself the chosen servant of Apollo, the most distinctively spiritual of the Greek gods, the god of religious and prophetical, as well as of poetical inspiration. Although Pindar has not yet shaken himself free from the old Homeric conception of the "^vyfi as nothing but the shadow of the living self, yet all the emphasis is upon the soul : it is only the spirit or soul of man, says Pindar, that comes from the Gods: TO yap ecTTL fxovov Ik Oecov. Furthermore, according to what the poet here says, in our waking moments the soul is unconscious or asleep; but when the body is laid to rest, the soul awakes and apprehends the future by virtue of its divine affinity, revealing to us the judgment which awaits us after death. What is the theory underlying this conception ? Clearly it is ^ Divine Origin of the Soul, Soul and body 127 nothing but the idea familiar to most of us from the Phaedo of Plato, that the body is as it were the prison-house or tomb of the soul — crw/xa BecrfJLcoTTJpLoi/, crcofxa crrjjJLa^ — from which we are set free by the deliverer Death, although sleep, Death's image and twin-sister, sometimes effects a partial resuscitation, a kind of temporary reunion of the soul with the fountain of her being. In somewhat the same way it is said by Plato in the Republic that when we retire to rest after having feasted the rational part of our nature with lofty thoughts, we may, perhaps, in visions of the night apprehend truths greater than we know-, the natural divinity of the soul reasserting itself, when temporarily freed from the tyranny of the flesh and its desires. In the literature of the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, there are not a few traces of this profoundly religious view of the relationship between the soul and the body. We meet with it in the Pythagorean school, in Heraclitus, and in Empedocles, and Euripides gives expression to the same thought in the well-known lines Ti9 otScv €t TO ^rjv fxev Ictti KarOavetv, TO Ko^rOavciv 8e t,rjv kolto) voixt^iraL; "Who knows if in the world beneath the ground, Life is accounted death, death life? who knows ?"^ The general theory of human life and destiny involved in this conception, which is closely allied to ' Cf. St Pauls doctrine of viKp^ats. "Who shall deliver me out of the body of this death ? " Rom. vii. 24. ' 57^ i^- ^ ^r- 638, Nauck-. 128 The Hymn of Cleanthes Buddhism, appears to have been elaborated during the great religious revival, usually known as the Orphic revival, that spread over a large part of Greece during the sixth century B.C. The notion was that life in the body is a penance which the soul, itself originally a God or a portion of the divine essence, has to pay in consequence of ante-natal sin : so that the end of our endeavours is, by the practice of abstinence, by religious ceremonies, and by the cultivation of righteousness and holiness, to keep the soul as far as may be pure from the contamination of the flesh, in order that in due time she may be qualified to rejoin the celestial circle from which she has been exiled\ But the point which chiefly concerns us now is that alike In the fragment of Pindar, discussed in the Divine Origin of the Soitl, and in the Orphic religious discipline by which that fragment Is almost certainly Inspired, a clear distinction is drawn between man's bodily nature, which is of the earth, earthy and perishable, and his spiritual nature or soul, which alone is divine, '' I am a child of earth and starry heaven " — yr\^ ttols elixt koi ovpavov dorrepoevTos, says the soul in one of the Orphic tablets found In S. Italy': that Is, my body is of the earth, my soul from heaven. The religious potentialities of this conception may be seen from the beautiful lines of the Christian poet George Herbert ; quoted in the ^ See G. Murray in Miss Harrison's Proleg. to Gk. Religion, 660-674. - ^Nliss Harrison, Lc. p. 660. Hu7nan mind a little part of God 129 essay on the Vitality of Platonisniy p. 21. In this passage the words " In soul he mounts and flies, In flesh he dies," correspond to the doctrine of crcjfjLa crrJ/Aa, the body- is the tomb ; yet flesh is not quite the same as crw/xa : it is o-w/xa tainted by sin. In Pindar, therefore, the doctrine of mans essential divinity is to a certain extent spirituaHsed by being restricted to what he calls the soul or xjjvxq ' but he seems still to conceive of the soul in the old Homeric way, and he does not, at least in this fragment, give an intellectual interpretation to the doctrine : it is \lfV)(TJ, and not yet vov<;, which he declares to be descended from the gods. There is, however, a remarkable passage in the sixth N'emean^ where after an emphatic assertion of the original unity of men and gods — %.v dvSpcjp, ev deoiv yevo^ — the poet suggests that perhaps the point in which we resemble the immortals is in reality the more intellectual or spiritual part of our nature — mind or reason, ^xiyav poop, Pindar says. And it was in this direction that the doctrine of man's celestial origin was developed after the time of Pindar. Thus for example Diogenes of Apollonia, a philosopher who lived at Athens during the latter part of the fifth century before Christ, declared that the povs or reason within us is a little part of God {fiiKpop fiopLov Tov Beov)'- ; and Euripides, influenced no doubt by ^ See supra, Divine Origi?i of the Soul, p. 39. - Diels, Frag. d. Vorsokratiker-, i. p. 331, 28. A. E. 9 130 The Hymn of Cleanthes this philosopher, speaks of the i/ov? or iTvevfxa — the human mind or spirit — as akin to the aetherial element which in more than one passage he identifies with Zeus, and as destined at last to be reunited with or reabsorbed into the divine or universal mind from which it came\ But the thinker who more than any other of the Greeks intellectualised the doctrine of man's divine descent was Plato. In Plato it is always vovs or reason which is divine : only we must beware of supposing that he conceived of povs merely as the kind of siccum lumen, the clear cold light, the unim- passioned analytic and discursive intellect which we are sometimes in the habit of calling reason : it is a religious or spiritual as well as an intellectual faculty in Plato, the link that binds us to the godhead, apprehending the truth not only by means of ratioci- nation, but also intuitively, in virtue of its affinity with Him who is the truth. Mr Nettleship's observa- tions on Greek philosophy in general are specially applicable to Plato. "We say that Greek moral philosophy, as compared with modern, lays great stress on knowledge, and gives importance to the intellect. That impression arises mainly from the fact that we are struck by the constant recurrence of intellectual terminology, and omit to notice that reason or intellect is always conceived of as having to do with the good. Reason is to Greek thinkers the very condition of man's having a moral being ^ Eur. Fr. 941, Hel. 1014 ff. quoted supra ^ Divine Origin of tJie Soul, pp. 47, 52. Reason and spirit in man 131 Their words for reason and rational cover to a great extent the ground which is covered by words Hke 'spirit,' 'spiritual,' and 'ideal' in our philosophy. They would have said that a man is a rational being, where we should say that he is a spiritual being \" Understood in this way, the doctrine of man's relationship to the divine is perhaps the most funda- mental of Plato's doctrines. As I have elsewhere ventured to say, it *' is the ultimate source of all his idealism, religious and metaphysical, no less than moral and political, and may well be considered the most precious and enduring inheritance which he has bequeathed to posterity I" It would lead us too far from our immediate subject to justify this state- ment in detail ; but before returning to my exposition of Cleanthes, I will quote to you one or two passages in which the founder of idealism in the western world gives expression to the doctrine which has been the watchword of idealism ever since he lived, and I will also point out to you one characteristic and historically fruitful addition which he made to this great doctrine. You will remember that Plato has two ways of representing that which he calls divine. Sometimes he speaks of the divine in a half-impersonal way, as the Idea or Form, transcendent at once and im- manent, eternal, changeless and invisible, the para- digm or type to which the world of generation and ^ Lectures and Remains^ ii. p. 221. ' Republic of Plato ^ ii. p. 42. 132 The Hyynn of Cleanthes decay Imperfectly conforms'. The totality of Ideas or Forms constitutes a perfectly graduated hierarchy, comparable to the spiritual or angelic hierarchies of patristic and medieval theology- ; and supreme over all stands the one great unity, which Plato calls the Idea of Good. i\t other times, again, he uses more obviously religious language, representing the divine as what we should call a personal being, and desig- nating it by the name of God. From Plato's point of view there is not, I believe, any essential or fundamental difference between these two modes of presentation : in other words, the Idea of Good in Plato is God, and God is the Idea of Good : for to Plato philosophy and religion are one and the same thing, and could not be otherwise, inasmuch as God is the supreme truth, and we apprehend him through the divine faculty of reason. Similarly in Dante — God is at once the good, the object of universal desire, the final goal of all particular and immediate striving, and yet at the same time a- personal being, the creative cause of all that is. Now whichever of ^ Cf. dvTCTVTra tv(T€0}. OLTa, fJLLyvvfX€vo€T€pr) eTrto-rao-at aprta ^ctvai, Kttt KocrfxcLV TdKoa-fxa, kol ov L\a ra, The Doctrine of the Logos in Heraclitus, pp. yQff. 154 ^'^^ Hymn of Cleantkes went the usual process of spiritualisation — ** first the natural and afterwards the spiritual " — through the influence of poetry and philosophy^ — until we meet with it in an altogether dematerialised or spiritual form in the Platonic theory of the cosmic or world soul. It should also be remarked that whereas in Heraclitus God is conceived of only as immanent and not as transcendent, in conformity with the usual trend of pantheistic theology, Plato on the other hand represents the world-soul as distinct from the Creator or supreme God, as It were his vice- gerent in the world of space and time, an emanation, as it would seem, from his own transcendence ; and thus the Platonic form of the doctrine satisfies the two essential conditions of theism, according to which the Godhead is at once transcendent and immanent. The Stoics, as w^e have seen, reverted to Heraclitus in both particulars, affirming only the immanence of God in their doctrine of the omni- present Logos, and denying the duality of matter and spirit through their identification of the Logos with TTt'ev/xa lvQ^p\.Kov, ''warm breath" or ''aether." Let me endeavour to show you in a little more detail how this conception of the divine immanence and omnipresence was worked out by Stoicism, ^ See especially the fragments of Epicharmus, ed. Kaibel. In Euripides, too, we have a kindred conception : see Adam, Religious Teachers of Greece, pp. 299 ff. : and something of the same kind meets us in Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia (in whom, however, the materialism reappears), and in Socrates: ibid. pp. 261 ff., 266 f., 348 f. All-pervading Godhead 155 before I proceed to remark upon its religious mean- ing and value. The all-pervading Deity or world-soul or Logos — for these different designations, together with many others, such as Justice, Providence and Fate, are practically synonymous, or at most express but different ways in which the human mind conceives of the divine unity — this all-pervading Godhead was regarded by the Stoics as a spirit or Trvevfxa — a kind of ''atmospheric current" present in every form of matter, whether organic or inorganic : but the degree of tension or strain persisting in the wvevfjLa — the TTvevfjiaTLKos t6i^o<; — as it was called, is by no means the same throughout. Where the tension is least, as in inorganic objects, stones, for example, minerals, pieces of earth, wood and so forth, the Trvevfjia appears as a kind of current {irvevfjiaTLKOP tl) stream- ing from the centre to the extremities of the object and back again to the centre, with power to hold the thing together, but with no powder to make it move. This, which is the lowest grade of Trvev^ia, though still, of course, a revelation of the Godhead, the Stoics called i^is or "cohesion," because it possesses (TvveKTiK-q ZvvajXL^, by means of which it prevents the object from falling to pieces. We must not call it soul, but it is the substitute for soul in inorganic things. Next higher in the scale comes <^vo-t9 or " Nature," which is so to speak the soul of plants, the word " Nature " being used in a highly technical or scientific sense, with a play of course on ^vrov "plant." Here the tension of the npevfjia is greater, 156 The Hymn of Cleanthes involving the power of movement, upward and downward movement at least, together with such other attributes or qualities as belong to the life of plants. It is not until we reach the third stage in the ascent that we meet with >\}vyj\ or soul, which is the form in which the Trveviia reveals itself in the lower animals. Finally, when man is reached, we have rational soul or ^01^9, the form of Trvevfia in which the tension is highest, for, as we have already seen, man's vqvs is in a peculiar and distinctive sense a portion of God. Now in this ascending scale of existences I would have you particularly observe that each higher grade includes and embraces all the lower : minerals have eft9, plants eft? and (^vcrcs : the lower animals eft?, (f)vcrLs and i/zv^'^ : and man efts, (f>v(TLs, ^^rj and vov