Now, as soon as the ideal dispositions of Plato are propounded to a modern hearer, they send an instantaneous shock to the remotest ends of his nature; and what I will ask you to do at present is to formulate this shock in terms of personality. Taking for example the Platonic provision with regard to marriage (how grotesquely, by the way, these provisions show alongside of what have gained great currency as "Platonic attachments"): perhaps the two thousand years since Plato, have taught us nothing so clearly as that one of the most mysterious and universal elements of personality, is that marvelous and absolutely inconsequential principle by which a given man finds himself determined to love a certain woman, or a given woman determined to love a certain man; and if we look back we find that the most continuous travail of the ages has been to secure perfect freedom for these determinations.
Does it not seem as if Time grinned at us in some horrible dream when we remind ourselves that here the divine Plato, as he has been called, and the unspeakable Zola (as some of us have learned to call him) have absolutely come cheek by jowl, and that the physiological marriage of Zola's is no more nor less than the ideal marriage of Plato?
Rejecting comment on the child-nursing arrangement of Plato it is instructive to pass on and regard from a different point of view, though still from the general direction of personality, the Platonic community of property. If men desire property says Plato, "one man's desire will contravene another's, and we shall have trouble. How shall we remedy it? Crush out the desire; and to that end abolish property."
But no, cries modern personality to Plato, cannot you imagine such an extension of personality as to make each man see that on the whole the shortest way to carry out his desires for property is to respect every other man's desire for property, and thus, in the regulations which will necessarily result from this mutual respect, to secure everything he acquires by spiritual considerations infinitely more effective than spears and bars?
We had occasion to observe the other day how complete has been the success of this doctrine here in the United States: we found that the real government now going on is individual, personal,—not at Washington and that we have every proper desire,—of love in marriage, of having one woman to wife, of cherishing our own children, of accumulating property,—secured by external law apparently, and really by respect for that law and the principles of personality it embodies.
It seems curious to me here to make two further points of contact, which taken with the Zola point just made, seem to tax the extremes of the heavens and the earth. Plato's organic principle appears to emerge from some such consideration as this:—A boy ten years old is found to possess a wondrous manual deftness: he can do anything with his fingers: word is brought to Plato: what shall the State do with this boy? Why, says Plato, if he be manually so adroit, likely he will turn pickpocket: the plain course is to chop off his hands,—or to expose him to die in one of those highly respectable places such as decency requires for generally unavailable children.
No, says the modern man: you are destroying his manifest gift, the very deepest outcome of his personality: he might be a pickpocket, true, but then he might be a great violinist, he might be a great worker in all manner of materials requiring deftness: instead of cutting off his hands, let us put him at an industrial school, let us set him to playing the violin, let us cherish him, let us develop his personality. So, Plato takes the gift of acquiring property—for it is a real gift and blessing to man, if properly developed—and he will chop it off, that is, he will crush out the desire of property by destroying the possibility of its exercise.
And what is this in its outcome but the Nirvana of the Buddhists? My passions keep me in fear and hope; therefore I will annihilate them: when I neither think nor desire, then I shall rest, then I shall enjoy Nirvana. Plato institutes a Nirvana for the ills of marriage, of offspring, of property: and he realizes it by the slow death through inanition of the desire for love, for children, for property.
And as we have found the Platonic Plato arguing himself into Zola, the dialectic Plato arguing himself into a dreaming Buddha, all for lack of the sense of personality, we now find the ideal Plato arguing himself, for the same lack, into a brawny Whitman. Think of Plato's community of property, and listen to Whitman's reverie, as he looks at some cattle. It is curious to notice how you cannot escape a certain sense of naïveté in this, and how you are taken by it,—until a moment's thought shows you that the naïveté is due to a cunning and bold contradiction of every fact in the case.