On his eighty-second birthday, while he was pursuing his accustomed occupation, the stylus suddenly fell from Plato’s hand, and he expired. Under the trees so long associated with his kindly instruction, he found a final resting-place; an admiring country preserved his memory by altars and statues; and the verdict of succeeding generations has been that Plato was the greatest philosopher of antiquity.
Plato’s Philosophical System.—Plato was an enthusiast in the pursuit of truth. He believed in a personal God, rational, immutable, eternal. He realized that man could never attain absolute wisdom, possible to God alone; and looked upon philosophy as “a longing after heavenly wisdom.” He sought to correct abuses, to elevate humanity; and made man’s highest duty consist in searching out God and imitating the perfection of the Almighty as his rule of conduct. The four cardinal virtues were wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice; but none could be virtuous without aid from on high. (Read Bulkley’s “Plato’s Best Thoughts.”)
The soul, an emanation from the Supreme Mind, was immortal. It existed before its union with the body, and all earthly knowledge is but the recollection of what it possessed in some former state. When, disembodied, it stood face to face with kindred immaterial essences, it acquired those ideas, or forms, which figure so prominently in the Platonic system—interpreted by some to mean veritable objective existences too subtile to be discerned by the eye of flesh, and by others explained as mere intuitions or generalizations having no objective reality.
Plato regarded men as free agents, to be rewarded or punished in a future life for their deeds in this. His poetical fancy fixed on some distant star as the abode of the blessed. The earth he supposed to occupy the centre of the universe. It was not eternal, but was made by an intelligent God, who breathed into it a soul; so it was a living creature, self-active, and gifted with the beautiful form of the sphere.
Nor did the philosopher forget to train the reasoning powers, by the study of mathematics. The importance he attached to this science may be inferred from the sign on his school: “Let no one enter here who is a stranger to geometry.” Plato has the honor of having been the inventor of geometrical analysis.
Plato’s Works, which have descended to us unimpaired, are in the form of dialogues—a delightful method of conveying philosophical instruction, when, as in Plato’s case, the personages introduced as speakers are salient characters, and their idiosyncrasies are maintained throughout with discrimination. The dull lessons of dialectics are thus enlivened by graphic portraitures and happy strokes of humor. Plato’s language is the perfection of Attic prose, beautified by a poetical tinge. “If Jupiter should speak Greek,” said ancient critics, “it would be Plato’s.” What Socrates dreamed on the night before the young Plato entered his school—that a cygnet came from the grove of Academus, and, after nestling on his breast for a time, took its flight heavenward, singing sweetly as it rose—is recorded as presaging his pupil’s sweet mastery of words.
The Platonic Dialogues, thirty-five in number, discuss various subjects. One of the finest is “Phædo,” written to prove the immortal nature of the soul. It derives its name from the beloved disciple of Socrates, who is here made by Plato, prevented from being present himself, to describe their master’s death-scene and repeat his last discourse. Full of sublime and poetical conceptions, the “Phædo” aims at lifting the mind above the sensual to the spiritual and eternal; at foreshadowing the joys of the heavenly state, and painting death as a thing to be desired rather than feared, since it is the portal of bliss. The philosopher Cleom’brotus, on reading this Dialogue, is said to have thrown himself into the sea to exchange this life for the better one pictured by Plato.
EXTRACT FROM PHÆDO.
(Socrates, having proved the immortality of the soul to the satisfaction of all present in the prison, addresses them as follows.)
“Then, Cebes, beyond question, the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will truly exist in another world!”