The matter to which I here advert, illustrates a material distinction between some writings of Plato as compared with others, and between different points of view which his mind took on at different times. In the Platonic Apology, we find Sokrates confessing his own ignorance, and proclaiming himself to be isolated among an uncongenial public falsely persuaded of their own knowledge. In several other dialogues, he is the same: he cannot teach anything, but can only cross-examine, test, and apply the spur to respondents. But the Republic presents him in a new character. He is no longer a dissenter amidst a community of fixed, inherited, convictions.[190] He is himself on the throne of King Nomos: the infallible authority, temporal as well as spiritual, from whom all public sentiment emanates, and by whom orthodoxy is determined. Hence we now find him passing to the opposite pole; taking up the orthodox, conservative, point of view, the same as Melêtus and Anytus maintained in their accusation against Sokrates at Athens. He now expects every individual to fall into the place, and contract the opinions, prescribed by authority: including among those opinions deliberate ethical and political fictions, such as that about the gold and silver earthborn men. Free-thinking minds, who take views of their own, and enquire into the evidence of these beliefs, become inconvenient and dangerous. Neither the Sokrates of the Platonic Apology, nor his negative Dialectic, could be allowed to exist in the Platonic Republic.
[190] Plato, Repub. vii. p. 541.
Idea of Good — The Chiefs alone know what it is — If they did not they would be unfit for their functions.
One word more must be said respecting a subject which figures conspicuously in the Republic — the Idea or Form of Good. The chiefs alone (we read) at the end of their long term of study, having ascended gradually from the phenomena of sense to intellectual contemplation and familiarity with the unchangeable Ideas — will come to discern and embrace the highest of all Ideas — the Form of Good:[191] by the help of which alone, Justice, Temperance, and the other virtues, become useful and profitable.[192] If the Archons do not know how and why just and honourable things are good, they will not be fit for their duty.[193] In regard to Good (Plato tells us) no man is satisfied with mere appearance. Here every man desires and postulates that which is really good: while as to the just and the honourable, many are satisfied with the appearance, without caring for the reality.[194]
[191] Plato, Republic, vii. pp. 533-534.
[192] Plato, Republic, vi. p. 505 A.
[193] Plato, Republic, vi. p. 506 A.
[194] Plato, Republic, vi. p. 505 D.
What is the Good? Plato does not know; but he requires the Chiefs to know it. Without this the Republic would be a failure.
Plato proclaims this Real Good, as distinguished from Apparent Good, to be the paramount and indispensable object of knowledge, without which all other knowledge is useless. It is that which every man divines to exist, yearns for, and does everything with a view to obtain: but which he misses, from not knowing where to seek; missing also along with it that which gives value to other acquisitions.[195] What then is this Real Good — the Noumenon, Idea, or form of Good?