The process of experience has been by Plato called Anamnesis or Recollection. But Recollection is not always an easy, and never a merely passive, process; and sometimes the forgetfulness seems so deep that no extraneous stimulus can at all move it. We have seen already one of these stimuli which rouse the sleeping sense—the mystery of numbers: and there are many others. But, we have also learned, that in the psychical sphere items of memory are not, as reckless fancy puts it, stored up in compartments, sorted and arranged, ready to be pulled out. The process of recollection is a complicated affair: an affair of give and take, of comparison and selection and rejection, of construction and reconstruction. You cannot haul up ready-made memories from the mine. And this perhaps was sometimes forgotten by Plato; it certainly has been by more than one of his commentators. You may, no doubt, call up ideas from the vasty deep: but they come by laws and principles of their own. Even when they come, which they sometimes do unexpectedly, they come as an echo of the calling mind. Recollection involves intellectual process: as Kant said, the synthesis of imagination reposes upon the synthesis in the concept. Yet—and this is the point which Plato's title of Anamnesis accentuates—unless 'the soul had been such as to be affected in this way' (the words are those of Aristotle), unless the soul had been implicitly intellectual in tone and faculty, it would not have grasped the presented universe under the categories which it uses. There is, says Aristotle, in the barest act of sensation a congenital power of judgment; there is, says Plato, an eye of the soul—a natural virtue of intelligence, which can never be put into it, and must always be presupposed in any theory of its processes.
There are, therefore, no innate ideas, says Cudworth in explanation of Plato, if these ideas mean formed and completed products of knowledge. All ideas in this sense begin and grow within the range of experience, and the history of their growth or development in literature and art can be at least approximately traced. We can trace, that is, the successions and connexions of the various types of beauty, or goodness: can show how the idea at one time dwelt in one of its aspects, at another in a different one. We can observe the variation, and it may be the progress, in men's conception of God. But it is another matter when we seek to explain these ideas themselves out of other elements, heterogeneous to them. When that question is asked, then with Plato we seem, in the absence of any theory of origins, obliged to own that it is by the Beautiful that beautiful things come to be beautiful. The μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένοs—the crossing of essential boundaries—which Aristotle forbids to science, still raises its eternal barrier in the logical, if it cease to hold good (as has been suggested) in the physical sphere. In the totality which we call the world and experience of reality there are, so to say, ultimate and irreducible provinces. The utmost that philosophy, i. e. science, can do with these is to co-ordinate them,—to show their mutual filiations, adaptations, and harmonies,—to note their inadequacies and discrepancies. They are not all of equal rank, perhaps; they have to yield to each other, it may be in turn: but none of them can be arbitrarily expunged from the totality, and none of them shown to be a mere phase of others. To do that is to strip the universe of its variety and—it may be added—of its beauty and its interest. If it be a false philosophy that does it, there is a good deal of false philosophy abroad. There is a lust of explanation which is never content till it has found an equation for everything, till it has expressed everything in terms of the common-place, till it has emptied everything of all that made it individual and real, and turned it into an abstract, identical (as only abstracts can be) with some other abstract. Such abstractions are of course useful, and therefore need no excuse, when restricted to a special sphere. So long, that is, as we remember that it is an abstraction we are making, and that we are arbitrarily simplifying the real natural problem, no harm is done by these artificial constructions; and they are important steps in a larger process. But what is correct and useful within a range whose limits we can define, becomes dangerous when carried beyond all bounds. Its approximate truth then becomes misleading error.
It is these irreducible elements—these great provinces in human experience, in reality, in the system of reason—that correspond to the more important of what are known as Platonic ideas. As ultimate constituents of the actual world they are in the narrower sense inexplicable. One does not amount to an exact sum of some others, nor is one got from another by the simple process of subtraction. But if they cannot be explained, by being reduced to multiples of some one basis, they can be comprehended in the respective implication and explication they exhibit with their co-realities. They can be correlated, reduced, and unified: we may even say, they can be identified; but if we use such a term, we must mean that there is some totality beyond and above them in which they all find a place and all are harmonious; in which all when brought to their Truth are really one and the same. This birthright of human nature in all ages and countries—this central essence of man's spirit—is the realm of Platonic ideas. They are the great elements, or constituent members, of humanity and of reality: the framework of his mind and of the world. How in each case they may be wrought out in detail, to what degree they may here be evolved, and there stunted, is a matter of historical research. And, in a sense, even it is not wrong to try to trace them one to another: to explain them, as the phrase is, one by another. For they are essentially connected: they are members of one system: they are unified and harmonised in a way for which even the word 'organism' is wholly insufficient. They are the poles and lines on which the tent of human life, of intelligent life, is stretched: but they are also the invisible ties which bind together the earth and heavens, and all that is therein.
These ideas therefore are immanent in man: for they are the basis of human nature. But to name, to disentangle them, to measure out their bounds and describe their connexions—that is no easy work. And that is the work of Platonic recollection. That is the process of historical experience. But it is a small thing for Plato to say that these ideas are innate in man. What he is more concerned to make clear is that in the possession or vision of these eternal forms, the human soul is a partner of the gods, a citizen of the heavens. In less mythical language, man, as an intelligent, artistic, moral, and religious being, is not a mere accidental on-looker on the surface of things, but near their central and abiding truth. The forms of his mind, to speak after the manner of Kant, are the objective essences of the real world of experience. Degrees there may be in the reality which they possess—less or larger measures of truth to full experience—but true and real they are: never mere falsity or emptiness. To estimate the amounts of that reality is a problem Plato often tried. At one time it seems as if the Good were in his estimate the form of forms, the real of reals: but when we look closely, we see that it is a goodness which is synonymous with real reality or perfect being. At another time truth, i. e. reality, seems to be lord of all: at another, beauty: and again he seems to confess his inability to lay down the order of precedence in this hierarchy. Of one thing only he is perfectly clear: and that is the unreality, the non-entity of the sense-world as merely perceived, and the true being of the world of reason. But he has no doubts as to the central truth that in the good, the true, and the beautiful, there is a higher reality—a more far-reaching and deep-piercing influence than in all the mere variety of sensation, the mere multitude of sensible fact.
What Plato has sometimes called the act of reminiscence, what he has sometimes called the instinct of Love, is also known to him as the process of Dialectic. For reminiscence has to watch and wrestle with the inertia of oblivion, has to set the imagined beside the real, and to correct percepts by concepts, concepts by percepts, has to brace up its energies, and to advance not by mere pressing onward, but by tacking and zigzagging through contrary difficulties finally realise itself. And love too is a battle, where the craving for union has to measure its force with the instinct of independence, where selfishness and self-surrender seek a reconciliation, and where in the close, if the close be love, each is self-retained only as self-abandoned, and each rises to a higher union in which lower selfhoods are absorbed. Even so in the course of Dialectic. It is the art which divides and conjoins, which unifies and distinguishes: the art of asking and answering. To Plato it appears in the main as an action of the intelligent subject: but an action which, as he hints, is almost a natural instinct, which through discipline has become an art. In the hands of its typical artist, it proceeds, or seems to proceed, as if unconscious of its principle and end. Socrates has, as he professes, no overt conception of the result: he has no knowledge of the positive conclusion to be reached. It is the Logos—the logic of reality—which sustains the movement. Abandoning any subjective humour of carrying the argument to a preconceived end, one is swept on by the current of real logic—the reason in things. The dogma we have set up and seemed to see before us, will, if we are dispassionate, carry us on beyond itself, and suggest aspects calling for recognition and acceptance. If only we refrain from arresting the movement of criticism,—a course to which prudence, ease, custom, and every form of the ignava ratio counsel us,—truth will reveal itself in us, and by us. It is because other aims, personal and particular, are so ever-present with us, that speculative free inquiry seems so hard. It is we who insist on closing up the door, not the truth that is reluctant to show itself.
Truth, then, is self-revelation or development. Not a result which is to be accepted, bowed to, and reverenced: but the result issuing (and only valuable as issuing) from a process in which we and objectivity are fellow-workers. The truth may no doubt be presented—as Spinoza does present it—in definitions, stating the net result as fundamental fact. Fundamental fact it is; but as so stated, as Substance, it comes as a stranger, almost as an enemy: the great vision, suddenly offered to untrained eyes, overwhelms and alarms the living sense of self, of personality. Hegel wishes to show it as a friend, as our very own,—as Subject (but not merely subject). It is for this that philosophy runs through its cycle and returns into itself. Man points to nature and nature to man: universal to individual: thought to things: the self to God, and God to the human soul.
[1] Hegel, Werke, ii. 14.
[2] Spinoza, Eth. Def. 3.
[3] Spin. De inteil. Em. i. 10.