This type of personality reduces the world to two mutually exclusive elements, God and self; and permits no reconciliation or mediation between them. Fénelon puts this dualism in the form of a dilemma. "There is no middle course; we must refer everything either to God or to self; if to self, we have no other God than self; if to God, we are then without selfish interests, and we enter into self-abandonment." Undoubtedly for evangelistic purposes the sharp antithesis has great practical advantages. It is an easy way to reach heaven—this of scorning earth; an easy definition of the infinite to pronounce it the negation of the finite.
As Carlyle has represented for us the stronger side of Platonism, his friend Emerson shall serve to illustrate the weakness that lurks half hidden in all this way of thinking. It is so concealed that we shall hardly detect it unless we are sharply on the watch for this tendency to exalt the Infinite at the expense of the finite; the Universal at the expense of the particular; God at the expense of our neighbour.
"Higher far into the pure realm,
Over sun and star,
Over the flickering Dæmon film,
Thou must mount for love;
Into vision where all form
In one only form dissolves;
Where unlike things are like;
Where good and ill,
And joy and moan,
Melt into one."
"Thus we are put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality. We are made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness depend on a person or persons. But the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character, and blend with God, to attain their own perfection." "Before that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. Pressed on our attention, the saints and demigods whom history worships fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who on that condition gladly inhabits it." "The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, daring, which can love us and which we can love."
"I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods." "True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independency the surer."
Here you have Plato and Thomas à Kempis in the elegant garb of a heretical transcendentalist. But you get the same dualism of finite and infinite, perfect and imperfect; unworthy, crumbling earth-mask to be gotten rid of here on earth, and the stars to be sought out and gazed at up in heaven.
The combat of the higher against the lower is one in which we must all engage; and no doubt in order to win we must at times keep the lower solicitations at arm's-length. If, however, what appeals to us in the name of the highest counsels any relaxing of definite obligation, any alienation from the man or woman whom social institutions have placed closest by our side; any disloyalty to the plain companions and humble associates whom society or business places in our way; any breaking of social bonds which generations of self-sacrifice and self-control have laboriously woven, and centuries of experience have approved as beneficent; then it is time to abandon Plato, or rather those who have assumed to wear his mantle, and look for personal guidance to those greater masters who have transcended the antithesis of higher and lower, which it was Plato's great mission to make so sharp and clear. The principle of such a reconciliation we shall find in Aristotle; its complete accomplishment we shall find in Jesus.