W. T. Stace

“ Before we can show that reason explains, that is, rationalizes the world, we must surely first show that reason itself is rational, or rather, to be more accurate, that our conception of reason is rational. There must not be any mere inexplicable facts, any mysteries, any dark places, in our notion of reason. It must be penetrated through and through by the light of reason. It must be absolutely transparent, crystalline. How can we hope to explain the world, if our very first principle itself contains irrationalities? ”

“ If virtue is the sole end of life, what precisely is virtue? Socrates had given no clear answer to this question. The only definition he had given was that virtue is knowledge, but upon examination it turns out that this is not a definition at all. Virtue is knowledge, but knowledge of what? It is not knowledge of astronomy, of mathematics, or of physics. It is ethical knowledge, that is to say, knowledge of virtue. To define virtue as the knowledge of virtue is to think in a circle, and gets us no further in the enquiry what virtue is. ”

“ It was the greatness and glory of Plato to have seen this, and thereby to have become the founder of all true philosophy. For to say that the Absolute is concepts is the same as saying it is reason. It might seem, then, that Plato has satisfied the second canon of criticism. He takes as first principle a self-explanatory reality. But we cannot quite so quickly jump to this conclusion. After all, the mere word reason is not a key which will unlock to us the doors of the universe. Something more is necessary than the mere word. We must, in fact, be told what reason is. ”

“ Heracleitus had taught that all permanence is illusion. Everything is a perpetual becoming; all things flow. What is at this moment, at the next moment is not. Even at one and the same moment, Heracleitus believed, a thing is and is not. If it is true to say that it is, it is equally true that it is not. And this is, in effect, the teaching of Protagoras.
The Protagorean philosophy thus amounts to a declaration that knowledge is impossible. If there is no objective truth, there cannot be any knowledge of it. The impossibility of knowledge is also the standpoint of Gorgias. ”

“ The objective truth is that there is nothing but sand. The objective truth is something which has an existence of its own, independent of me. It does not matter what I think, or what you think, what I want, or what you want; the truth is what it is. We must conform ourselves to the truth. Truth will not conform itself to our personal inclinations, wishes, or impressions. ”

“ The wise man is perfect, has all happiness, freedom, riches, beauty. He alone is the perfect king, statesman, poet, prophet, orator, critic, physician. The fool has all vice, all misery, all ugliness, all poverty. And every man is one or the other. Asked where such a wise man was to be found, the Stoics pointed doubtfully at Socrates and Diogenes the Cynic. The number of the wise, they thought, is small, and is continually growing smaller. The world, which they painted in the blackest colours as a sea of vice and misery, grows steadily worse. ”

“ It would be absurd to suppose that our thoughts can be the cause of the universe. Our concepts are indeed copies of the Ideas, but to confuse them with the Ideas themselves is, for Plato, as absurd as to confuse our idea of a mountain with the mountain itself. ”

“ Coming now to Aristotle's special treatment of the art of poetry, we may note that he concentrates his attention almost exclusively upon the drama. It does not matter whether the plot of a drama is historical or fictitious. For the object of art, the exhibition of the universal, is just as well attained in an imaginary as in a real series of events. Its aim is not correctness, but truth, not facts, but the Idea. Drama is of two kinds, tragedy and comedy. Tragedy exhibits the nobler specimens of humanity, comedy the worse. ”

“ Everything is seen, but seen in a haze, in which all things appear one, in which shapes flow into another, in which nothing has an outline, in which even vital distinctions are obliterated. Hence it is that, though oriental thought contains, in one way or another, practically all philosophical ideas, it grips none, and can hold nothing fast. It seizes its object, but its flabby grasp relaxes and slips off. Hinduism, like modern science, has its doctrine of evolution. But it has no philosophy of evolution. ”

“ If the aims of art were merely to imitate, a photograph would be the best picture, since it is the most accurate copy of its object. What Plato failed to see was that the artist does not copy his object, but idealizes it. And this means that he does not see the object simply as an object, but as the revelation of an Idea. He does not see the phenomenon with the eyes of other men, but penetrates the sensuous envelope and exhibits the Idea shining through the veils of sense.
The second point is Plato's estimate of artistic genius. The artist does not work by reason, but by inspiration. ”

“ But simple faith, once destroyed by thought, never returns either to the individual, or to the race. This can no more happen than a man can again become a child. There is only one remedy for the ills of thought, and that is, more thought. If thought, in its first inroads, leads, as it always does, to scepticism and denial, the only course is, not to suppress thought, but to found faith upon it. This was the method of Socrates, and it is the method, too, of all great spirits. They are not frightened of shadows. They have faith in reason. ”

“ Memory is the string upon which isolated experiences are strung together, and which makes them into that unity I call myself, my personality. If memory perishes, there can be no personal life. And it must be remembered that Aristotle does not mean merely that, in that future life--if we persist in calling it such--the memory of this life is obliterated. He means that in the future life itself reason has no memory of itself from moment to moment. We cannot be dogmatic about what Aristotle himself thought. ”

“ Side by side with this metaphysic, Heracleitus lays down a theory of physics. All things are composed of fire. "This world," he says, "neither one of the gods nor of the human race has made; but it is, it was, and ever shall be, an eternally living fire." All comes from fire, and to fire all returns. "All things are exchanged for fire and fire for all, as wares for gold and gold for wares." Thus there is only one ultimate kind of matter, fire, and all other forms of matter are merely modifications and variations of fire. It is clear for what reason Heracleitus enunciated this principle. ”

“ Science, as such, has no answer. If pressed in this way, science may of course turn round and say: "there is in the reality of things no higher and no lower; what I mean by higher and lower is simply more and less organized; higher and lower are mere metaphors; they are the human way of looking at things; we naturally call higher what is nearest ourselves; but from the absolute point of view there is no higher and lower." But this is to reduce the universe to a madhouse. It means that there is no purpose, no reason, in anything that happens. The universe, in this case, is irrational. ”

“ The essential mark of the decay of Greek thought was the intense subjectivism which is a feature of all the post-Aristotelian schools. Not one of them is interested in the solution of the world-problem for its own sake. The pure scientific spirit, the desire for knowledge for its own sake, is gone. That curiosity, that wonder, of which Aristotle speaks as the inspiring spirit of philosophy, is dead. The motive power of philosophy is no longer the disinterested pursuit of truth, but only the desire of the individual to escape from the ills of life. ”

“ Now this view of art finds no place at all in Plato's thought. Art is, for him, absolutely subservient both to morals and to philosophy. That it subserves morality we see from the "Republic," where only that poetry is allowed which inculcates virtue, and only because it inculcates virtue. It is no sufficient justification of a poem to plead that it is beautiful. Beautiful or not, if it does not subserve the ends of morality, it is forbidden. Hence too the preposterous notion that its exercise is to be controlled, even in details, by the State. ”

“ Philosophy is futile, and not only philosophy, but morality and everything else. If there is really no higher and lower, there is no better and no worse. It is just as good to be a murderer as to be a saint. ”

“ Why should one ever struggle towards higher things, when in reality all are equally high? Why avoid evil, when evil is as much a manifestation of God as good? Mere pantheism must necessarily end in this calamitous view. And these deplorable effects explain the fact that Hinduism, with all its high thinking, finds room for the worship of cows and snakes, and, with all its undoubted moral elevation, yet allows into its fold the grossest abominations. ”

“ To found it upon sense-impressions and feelings is to found it upon shifting quicksands. My feelings and sensations are binding upon no man but myself, and therefore a universally valid law cannot be founded upon them. Yet the Sophists identified morality with the feelings of the individual. Whatever I think right is right for me. Whatever you think right is right for you. Whatever each man, in his irrational self-will, chooses to do, that is, for him, legitimate. ”

“ For philosophy is founded upon reason. It is the effort to comprehend, to understand, to grasp the reality of things intellectually. Therefore it cannot admit anything higher than reason. To exalt intuition, ecstasy, or rapture, above thought--this is death to philosophy. Philosophy in making such an admission, lets out its own life-blood, which is thought. In Neo-Platonism, therefore, ancient philosophy commits suicide. This is the end. The place of philosophy is taken henceforth by religion. Christianity triumphs, and sweeps away all independent thought from its path. ”

“ What Aristotle means is that the artist copies, not the sensuous object, but what Plato would call the Idea. Art is thus not, in Plato's contemptuous phrase, a copy of a copy. It is a copy of the original. Its object is not this or that particular thing, but the universal which manifests itself in the particular. Art idealizes nature, that is, sees the Idea in it. It regards the individual thing, not as an individual, but in its universal aspects, as the fleeting embodiment of an eternal thought. ”

“ It is a mere fact, which dogmatically forces itself upon our consciousness without giving any reason for itself. Our principle must be such that we cannot ask a further reason of it. It must be its own reason, and so in itself satisfy the demand for a final explanation. Now there is only one such principle in the world, namely, reason itself. You can ask the reason of everything else in the world. You can ask the reason of the sun, the moon, stars, the soul, God, or the devil. But you cannot ask the reason of reason, because reason is its own reason. Let us put the same thought in another way. ”

“ If the Ideas produce things out of themselves, the Ideas must in the process undergo change. But Plato has declared them to be absolutely unchangeable, and to be thus immutable is to be sterile. Hence the Ideas have within themselves no principle for the production of things, and the scientific explanation of things by this means becomes impossible. Hence there is nothing for it but to have recourse to myth. Plato can only imagine that things are produced by a world-former, or designer, who, like a human artist, fashions the plastic matter into images of the Ideas. ”

“ If everything is grounded in the one ultimate reality, the Ideas, then the entire universe must be clasped together in a system, all parts of which flow out of the Ideas. If there exists in the universe anything which stands aloof from this system, remains isolated, and cannot be reduced to a manifestation of the Ideas, then the philosophy has failed to explain the world, and we have before us a confessed dualism. Now not only has Plato to drag in God for the explanation of things, he has also to drag in matter. God takes matter and forms it into copies of the Ideas. ”

“ As neither the principle of form in general was shown to be necessary, nor were the particular forms deduced from each other, we have to conclude that Aristotle like Plato, named a self-explanatory principle, reason or form, as ultimate principle of things, but failed to show in detail that it is self-explanatory. Yet, in spite these defects, the philosophy of Aristotle is one of the greatest philosophies that the world has ever seen, or is ever likely to see. If it does not solve all problems, it does render the world more intelligible to us than it was before. ”

“ Only that man is happy whose soul is in the state it ought to be in, only in fact the just, the good, and the moral man. Happiness has nothing to do with pleasure. If you could conceive an absolutely just and upright man, who was yet weighed down with every possible misery and disaster, in whose life pleasure had no part, such a man would still be absolutely happy. Happiness is, therefore, in Plato, merely another name for the summum bonum. In saying that the summum bonum is happiness, Plato is not telling us anything about it. ”

“ But if the definition of a triangle differed from day to day, it would be useless, since we could never say whether any particular figure were a triangle or not, just as the standard yard in the Tower of London would be useless if it changed in length, and were twice as long to-day as it was yesterday. A definition is thus something absolutely permanent, and a definition is only the expression in words of the nature of an Idea. Consequently the Ideas cannot change. The many beautiful objects arise and pass away, but the one Beauty neither begins nor ends. ”

“ And it might be asked, what is the use of exhorting a man to obey the laws of the universe, when, as part of the great mechanism of the world, he cannot by any possibility do anything else? It is not to be supposed that a genuine solution of this difficulty is to be found in Stoic philosophy. They urged, however, that, though man will in any case do as the necessity of the world compels him, it is given to him alone, not merely to obey the law, but to assent to his own obedience, to follow the law consciously and deliberately, as only a rational being can. ”

“ Instead of deducing the world from their first principle, they simply denied the reality of the world altogether. They attempted to solve the problem by denying the existence of the problem. The world, they said, is simply not-being. It is an illusion. Now certainly it is a great thing to know which is the true world, and which the false, but after all this is not an explanation. To call the world an illusion is not to explain it. If the world is reality, then the problem of philosophy is, how does that reality arise? If the world is illusion, then the problem is, how does that illusion arise? ”