The great chain of being pdf

The phrase omneigno- tum pro mirifico concisely explains a considerable part of the vogue of a number of philosophies, including some which have enjoyed great popular reputation in our own time.

The reader doesn't know exactly what they mean, but they have all the more on that account an air of sublimity; an agreeable feeling at once of awe and of exaltation comes over him as he con- templates thoughts of so immeasurable a profundity - their profundity being convincingly evidenced to him by the fact that he can see no bottom to them.

Akin to this is the pathos of the esoteric. How exciting and how welcome is the sense of initiation into hidden mysteries! There are expressions of certain disciples of M. Bergson which ad- mirably illustrate the place which the pathos of the esoteric has in this philosophy, or at least in the response to it. Rageot, for example, declares that unless one is in some sense born again one cannot acquire that intuitionphilosophiquewhich is the secret of the new teaching; and M.

Le Roy writes: "A veil interposed between the real and ourselves, which falls of a sudden as if an enchantment were dissipated, and leaves open before the mind depths of light hitherto unimagined, wherein is revealed before our very eyes, for the first time, reality itself: such is the feeling which is experienced at every page, with singular intensity, by the reader of M.

Some examples of metaphysical pathos in the stricter sense ought therefore to be given. A potent variety is the eternalistic pathos - the aesthetic pleas- ure which the bare abstract idea of immutability gives us. The greater philosophical poets know well how to evoke it. In English poetry it is illustrated by those familiar lines in Shel- ley's Adonais of which we have all at some time felt the magic: The One remains, the many' change and pass, Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly I t is not self-evident that remaining forever unchanged should be regarded as an excellence; yet through the associations and the half-formed images which the mere conception of change- lessness arouses - for one thing, the feeling of rest which its innereNachahmung induces in us in our tired moods - a phi- losophy which tells us that at the heart of things there is a reality wherein is no variableness nor shadow that is cast by turning, is sure to find its response in our emotional natures, at all events in certain phases of individual or group experience.

That it should afford so many people a pe- culiar satisfaction to say that All is One is, as William James once remarked, a rather puzzling thing. What is there more beautiful or more venerable about the numeral one than about any other number?

But psychologically the force of the monis- tic pathos is in some degree intelligible when one considers the nature of the implicit responses which talk about oneness pro- duces. It affords, for example, a welcome sense of freedom, arising from a triumph over, or an absolution from, the troublesome cleavages and disjunctions of things.

To recog- nize that things which we have hitherto kept apart in our minds are somehow the same thing - that, of itself, is nor- mally an agreeable experience for human beings. Blood's book called The AnaestheticRevelation. So, again, when a monistic philosophy declares, or suggests, that one is oneself a part of the universal Oneness, a whole complex of obscure emotional responses is released.

The deliquescence of the sense - the often so fatiguing sense - of separate per- sonality, for example, which comes in various ways as in the so-called mob-spirit , is also capable of excitation, and of really powerful excitation, too, by a mere metaphysical theorem. Santayana's sonnet beginning "I would I might forget that I am I" almost perfectly expresses the mood in which conscious individuality, as such, becomes a burden.

Just such escape for our imaginations from the sense of being a limited, particular self the monistic philosophies sometimes give us. Distinct from the monistic pathos is the voluntaristic - though Fichte and others have contrived to unite them. Here it is the response of our active and volitional nature, per- haps even, as the phrase goes, of our fighting blood, which is aroused by the character which is ascribed to the total uni- verse with which we feel ourselves consubstantial.

Now all this has nothing to do with philosophy as a science; but it has a great deal to do with philosophy as a factor in history, for the reason that it is not chiefly as a science that philosophy has been a factor in history. And the delicate task of discovering these varying susceptibilities and showing how they help to shape a system or to give an idea plausibility and currency is a part of the work of the historian of ideas.

It is largely because of their ambiguities that mere words are capable of this independent action as forces in his- tory. A term, a phrase, a formula, which gains currency or acceptance because one of its meanings, or of the thoughts which it -suggests, is congenial to the prevalent beliefs, the standards of value, the tastes of a certain age, may help to alter beliefs, standards of value, and tastes, because other meanings or suggested implications, not clearly distinguished by those who employ it, gradually become the dominant elements of its signification.

The word 'nature,' it need hardly be said, is the most extraordinary example of this, and the most pregnant subject for the investigations of philosophical semantics. It consists in a single specific proposi- tion or 'principle' expressly enunciated by the most influential of early European philosophers, together with some further propositions which are, or have been supposed to be, its corol- laries.

This proposition was, as we shall see, an attempted answer to a philosophical question which it was natural for man to ask - which reflective thought could hardly have failed to ask, sooner or later. The char- acter of this type of ideas, and of the processes which constitute their history, need not be further described in general terms, since all that follows will illustrate it. Second, any unit-idea which the historian thus isolates he next seeks to trace through more than one - ultimately, in- deed, through all - of the provinces of history in which it figures in any important degree, whether those provinces are called philosophy, science, literature, art, religion, or politics.

The postulate of such a study is that the working of a given con- ception, of an explicit or tacit presupposition, of a type of mental habit, or of a specific thesis or argument, needs, if its nature and its historic role are to be fully understood, to be traced connectedly through all the phases of men's reflective life in which those workings manifest themselves, or through as many of them as the historian's resources permit.

It is inspired by the belief that there is a great deal more that is common to more than one of these provinces than is usually recognized, that the same idea often appears, sometimes considerably dis- guised, in the most diverse regions of the intellectual world.

Landscape-gardening, for example, seems a topic fairly remote from philosophy; yet at one point, at least, the history of land- scape-gardening becomes a part of any truly philosophical history of modern thought. The vogue of the so-called "Eng- lish garden," which spread so rapidly in France and Germany after I , was, as M. Mornet and others have shown, the thin end of the wedge of Romanticism, or of one kind of Roman- ticism.

That vogue itself - partly, no doubt, the expression of a natural revulsion of taste from an over-dose of the formal gardening of the seventeenth century - was partly also an in- cident of the general craze for English fashions of all kinds, which Voltaire, Prevost, Diderot, and the Huguenot jour- nalistesin Holland had introduced. In one of its aspects that many- sided thing called Romanticism may not inaccurately be de- scribed as a conviction that the world is an englischerGartenon a grand scale.

The God of the seventeenth century, like its gardeners, always geometrized; the God of Romanticism was one in whose universe things grew wild and without trimming and in all the rich diversity of their natural shapes.

The prefer- ence for irregularity, the aversion from that which is wholly intellectualized, the yearning for echappeesinto misty distances - these, which were eventually to invade the intellectual life of Europe at all points, made their first modern appearance on a grand scale early in the eighteenth century in the form of the new fashion in pleasure-gardens; and it is not impossible to trace the successive phases of their growth and diffusion.

It is concerned only with a certain group of factors in history, and with these only in so far as they can be seen at work in what are commonly considered separate divisions of the intellectual world; and it is especially interested in the processes by which influences pass over from one province to another.

Even the partial realiza- tion of such a program would do much, I cannot but think, to give a needed unifying background to many now unconnected and, consequently, poorly understood facts.

It would help to put gates through the fences which, in the course of a praise- worthy effort after specialization and division of labor, have come to be set up in most of our universities between depart- ments whose work ought to be constantly correlated.

I have in mind especially the departments of philosophy and of the modern literatures. Most teachers of literature would perhaps readily enough admit that it is to be studied- I by no means say, can solely be enjoyed - chiefly for its thought-content, and that the interest of the history of literature is largely as a record of the movement of ideas - of the ideas which have affected men's imaginations and emotions and behavior. But, through a lack of adequate training in philosophy, students and even learned historians of literature often, I think, have not recog- nized such an idea when they met it - have not, at least, known its historic lineage, its logical import and implications, its other appearances in human thought.

Happily, this con- dition is fast altering for the better. On the other hand, those who investigate or teach the history of philosophy sometimes take very little interest in an idea when it does not wear philo- sophical full dress - or war-paint - and are prone to disre- gard its ulterior workings in the minds of the non-philosophic world. But the historian of ideas, while he oftenest will seek for the initial emergence of a conception or presupposition in some philosophic or religious system or scientific theory, will seek for its most significant manifestations in art, and above all in literature.

For, as Mr. Whitehead has said, "it is in litera- ture that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expres- sion. Accordingly, it is to literature that we must look, par- ticularly in its more concrete forms, if we hope to discover the inward thoughts of a generation.

Third: in common with what is called the study of compara- tive literature, the history of ideas expresses a protest against the consequences which have often resulted from the conven- tional division of literary and some other historical studies by nationalities or languages. And it is far from self-evident that in the study of the history of literature, not to speak of that of philosophy, in which this prac- tice has been generally abandoned, departmentalization by languages is the best way of recognizing the necessity for spe- cialization.

The existing scheme of division is partly a histori- cal accident, a survival of the time when most professors of foreign literatures were primarily language-masters. As soon as the Historical study of literature is conceived as a thorough investigation of any causal process - even the comparatively trivial one of the migration of stories - it must inevitably dis- regard national and linguistic boundary lines; for nothing is more certain than that a great proportion of the processes to be investigated disregard those lines.

And if the function of teachers or the training of advanced students is to be deter- mined by the affinity of certain minds for certain subjects, or certain types of thought, it is at least dubious whether, instead of professors of English or French or German literature, we ought not to have professors of the Renaissance, of the later Middle Ages, of the Enlightenment, of the Romantic Period, and the like.

For there was doubtless, on the whole, more in common, in fundamental ideas and tastes and moral temper, between a typical educated Englishman and a Frenchman or I talian of the later sixteenth century than between an English- man of that period and an Englishman of the 's or the 's or the 's - just as there is manifestly more in com- mon between an average New Englander and an Englishman of than between a New Englander of and his present posterity. If, then, a special capacity for sympathetic under- standing of that with which he deals is desirable in the histori- cal specialist, a division of these studies by periods, or groups within periods; would, it might plausibly be argued, be more appropriate than a division by countries, races, or languages.

I do not seriously urge such a reorganization of the humanistic departments of universities; there are obvious practical diffi- culties in the way. As Friedrich Schlegel long ago said: "Wenn die regionellen Theile der modernen Poesie, aus ihrem Zusammenhang gerissen, und als einzelne fur sich bestehende Ganze betrachtet werden, so sind sie uner- klarlich, Sie bekommen erst durch einander Haltung und Bedeutung.

Fourth: Another characteristic of the study of the history of ideas, as I should wish to define it, is that it is especially con- cerned with the manifestations of specific unit-ideas in the col- lective thought of large groups of persons, not merely in the doctrines or opinions of a small number of profound thinkers or eminent writers.

It seeks to investigate the effects of the sort of factors which it has - in the bacteriologist's sense - isolated, in the beliefs, prejudices, pieties, tastes, aspirations, current among the educated classes through, it may be, a whole gen- eration, or many generations.

It is, in short, most interested in ideas which attain a wide diffusion, which become a part of the stock of many minds. It is this characteristic of the study of the history of ideas in literature which often puzzles students - even advanced students - in the present-day literature departments in our universities.

Some of them, at least, my colleagues in those departments often tell me, are repelled when called upon to study some writer whose work, as litera- ture, is now dead - or at best, of extremely slight value, ac- cording to our present aesthetic and intellectual standards. Why not stick to the masterpieces, such students exclaim - or at least to these plus the minor classics - the things that can be still read with pleasure, or with a feeling of the significance for men of the present age of the ideas or the moods of feeling which they express?

This is a natural enough state of mind, if you don't regard the study of literary history as including within its province the study of the ideas and feelings which other men in past times have been moved by, and of the proc- esses by which what may be called literary and philosophical public opinion is formed.

Professor Palmer has said, with equal truth and felicity: "The tendencies of an age appear more distinctly in its writers of inferior rank than in those of commanding genius. These latter tell of past and future as well as of the age in which they live.

They are for all time. But on the sensitive responsive souls, of less creative power, current ideals record themselves with clearness. Finally, it is a part of the eventual task of the history of ideas to apply its own distinctive analytic method in the attempt to understand how new beliefs and intellectual fashions are in- troduced and diffused, to help to elucidate the psychological character of the processes by which changes in the vogue and influence of ideas have come about; to make clear, if possible, how conceptions dominant, or extensively prevalent, in one generation lose their hold upon men's minds and give place to others.

To this large and difficult and important branch of his- torical interpretation the method of study of which I am speak- ing can make only one contribution among many; but it is, I can't but think, a necessary contribution. For the process can hardly be made intelligible until the natures of the separate ideas which enter as factors in it are discriminated and sepa- rately observed in their general historic working. These lectures, then, are intended to exemplify in some small measure the sort of philosophical-historical inquiry of which I have been merely sketching the general aims and method.

The example will necessarily be inadequate, even as a treatment of the special topic chosen, being restricted not only by limitations of time but by the insufficiency of the lec- turer's knowledge. Nevertheless, so far as these limitations permit, we shall try to trace these ideas to their historic sources in the minds of certain philosophers; to observe their fusion; to note some of the most important of their widely ramifying influences in many periods and in diverse fields - meta- physics, religion, certain phases of the history of modern science, the theory of the purpose of art and the criteria of excellence therein, moral valuations, and even, though to a relatively slight extent, in political tendencies; to see how later generations derived from them conclusions undesired and un- dreamed-of by their originators; to mark some of their effects upon men's emotions and upon the poetic imagination; and in the end, perhaps, to draw a philosophic moral from the tale.

But I ought, I think, to close this preamble with three notes of warning. The first relates to the very program which I have outlined. The study of the history of ideas is full of dangers and pitfalls; it has its characteristic excess. Precisely because it aims at interpretation and unification and seeks to correlate things which often are not on the surface connected, it may easily degenerate into a species of merely imaginative historical generalization; and because the historian of an idea is com- pelled by the nature of his enterprise to gather material from several fields of knowledge, he is inevitably, in at least some parts of his synthesis, liable to the errors which lie in wait for the non-specialist.

I can only say that I am not unmindful of these dangers and have done what I could to avoid them; it would be too sanguine to suppose that I have in all cases suc- ceeded in doing so. In spite of the probability, or perhaps the certainty, of partial failure, the enterprise seems worth at- tempting. The other warnings are addressed to my hearers.

Our plan of procedure requires that we deal only with a part of the thought of anyone philosopher or anyone age. The part, therefore, must never be mistaken for the whole.

For their philosophical significance and historic operation can be understood only by contrast. The story to be told is in great part a story of con- flict, at first latent, eventually overt, between these ideas and a series of antagonistic conceptions, some of the antagonists being their own offspring. We must, then, observe them throughout in the light of their antitheses.

But nothing that is to be said is to be construed as a comprehensive exposition either of any system of doctrine or of the tendencies of any period. Finally, it is evident that, when one tries to relate in this fashion the biography of even one idea, a heavy demand is made upon the catholicity of the intellectual interests of one's auditors.

In tracing the influence of the conceptions which form the sub- ject of this course we shall be obliged, as has been intimated, to take account of episodes in the history of a number of disci- plines usually supposed to have little to do with one another, and usually studied in comparative isolation.

The history of ideas is therefore no subject for highly departmentalized minds; and it is pursued with some difficulty in an age of de- partmentalized minds. It presupposes, also, an interest in the workings of human thought in the past even when these are, or seem to many of our generation to be, misguided, confused, or even absurd.

The history of philosophy and of all phases of man's reflection is, in great part, a history of confusions of ideas; and the chapter of it with which we shall be occupied is no exception to this rule. To some of us it is not less interesting, and little less instructive, on that account. No doubt man's quest of intelligibility in nature and in himself, and of the kinds of emotional satis- faction which are conditioned by a sense of intelligibility, often, like the caged rat's quest of food, has found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

But though the history of ideas is a his- tory of trial-and-error, even the errors illuminate the peculiar nature, the cravings, the endowments, and the limitations of the creature that falls into them, as well as the logic of the prob- lems in reflection upon which they have arisen; and they may further serve to remind us that the ruling modes of thought of our own age, which some among us are prone to regard as clear and coherent and firmly grounded and final, are unlikely to appear in the eyes of posterity to have any of those attributes.

The adequate record of even the confusions of our forebears may help, not only to clarify those confusions, but to engender a salutary doubt whether we are wholly immune from different but equally great confusions. For though we have more em- pirical information at our disposal, we have not different or better minds; and it is, after all, the action of the mind upon facts that makes both philosophy and science - and, indeed, largely makes the 'facts.

On the other hand, I think it only fair to warn those who, for such reasons, are indifferent to the story here to be told, that without an acquaintance with it no under- standing of the movement of thought in the Occident, in most of its major provinces, is possible. THE most fundamental of the group of ideas of which we are to review the history appears first in Plato; and nearly all that follows might therefore serve as an illustration of a celebrated remark of Professor Whitehead's, that "the safest general char- acterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.

The cleavage to which I refer is that be- tween what I shall call otherworldliness and this-worldliness. By otherworldliness I do not mean a belief in and a preoccupa- tion of the mind with a future life.

To be concerned about what will happen to you after death, or to let your thought dwell much upon the joys which you hope will then await you, may obviously be the most extreme form of this-worldliness; and it is essentially such if that life is conceived, not as pro- foundly different in kind from this, but only as more of much the same sort of thing, a prolongation of the mode of being which we know in the world of change and sense and plurality and social fellowship, with merely the omission of the trivial or painful features of terrestrial existence, the heightening of its finer pleasures, the compensation of some of earth's frustra- tions.

The two most familiar expressions by Victorian poets of the desire for a continuance of personal existence perfectly illustrate this. In nothing was Robert Browning's breezy gusto for the life that now is more manifest than in his hope to "fight on, fare ever, there as here. Both writers were, indeed, giving utterance to a special form of this feeling which had been somewhat excep- tional before the Romantic period - though our present his- torical survey will show us its earlier emergence - and was highly characteristic of their own age - an identification of the chief value of existence with process and struggle in time, an antipathy to satisfaction and finality, a sense of the "glory of the imperfect," in Professor Palmer's phrase.

This is the complete negation of the otherworldliness of which I am speak- ing. For of that, even in its milder manifestations, a more or less sweeping contemptusmundi has been of the essence; it has had no necessary - though in most of its Occidental phases it has had an actual - connection with the craving for a sepa- rate personal immortality; and in its more thorough-going forms it has seen in that craving the last enemy to be overcome, the root of all the misery and, vanity of existence.

By 'otherworldliness,' then - in the sense in which the term, 1 suggest, is an indispensable one for distinguishing the primary antithesis in philosophical or religious tendencies - I mean the belief that both the genuinely 'real' and the truly good are radically antithetic in their essential characteristics to anything to be found in man's natural life, in the ordinary course of human experience, however normal, however in- telligent, and however fortunate.

The world we now and here know - various, mutable, a perpetual flux of states and rela- tions of things, or an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thoughts and sensations, each of them lapsing into nonentity in the very moment of its birth - seems to the otherworldly mind to have no substance in it; the objects of sense and even of empirical scientific knowledge are unstable, contingent, forever breaking down logically into mere relations to other things which when scrutinized prove equally relative and elusive.

Our judgments concerning them have seemed to many philosophers of many races and ages to lead us inevitably into mere quagmires of confusion and contradiction. And - the theme is of the tritest - the joys of the' natural life are evanescent and delu- sive, as age if not youth discovers. Not, however, in this world is either to be found, but only in a 'higher' realm of being differing in its essential nature, and not merely in de- gree and detail, from the lower.

That other realm, though to those enmeshed in matter, occupied with things of sense, busy with plans of action, or absorbed in personal affections, it ap- pears cold and tenuous and barren of interest and delight, is, to those who have been emancipated through reflection or emo- tional disillusionment, the final goal of the philosophic quest and the sole region in which either the intellect or the heart of man, ceasing, even in this present life, to pursue shadows, can find rest.

Such is the general creed of otherworldly philosophy; it is familiar enough, but we need to have it explicitly before us as the contrasting background for what is to follow. That this is a persistent type, and that it has, in one form or another, been the dominant official philosophy of the larger part of civilized mankind through most of its history, I need not remind you.

The greater number of the subtler speculative minds and of the great religious teachers have, in their several fashions and with differing degrees of rigor and thoroughness, been engaged in weaning man's thought or his affections, or both, from his mother Nature - many of them, indeed, in seeking to per- suade him that he must in very truth be born again, into a world whose goods are not Nature's goods and whose realities he cannot know through those processes of the mind by which he becomes acquainted with his natural environment and with the laws to which its ever-changing states conform.

The great metaphysicians might seek to demonstrate its truth, the saints might in some measure fashion their lives in accordance with it, the mystics might return from their ecstasies and stammeringly report a direct experience of that contact with the absolute reality and the sole satisfying good which it proclaimed; but Nature in the main has been too potent for it. While the plain man might admit the metaphysician's demonstration, might humble him- self before the saint, and might credit, without professing to understand, the mystic's report, he has manifestly continued to find something very solid and engrossing in the world in which his own constitution was so deeply rooted and with which it was so intimately interwoven; and even if experience defeated his hopes and in age the savor of life grew somewhat flat and insipid, he has sought comfort in some vision of a bet- ter ' this-world' to come, in which no desire should lack fulfil- ment and his own zest for things should be permanently revitalized.

These facts, it is incidentally to be observed, do not mean that the general character and tone of a society in which, at least nominally, an otherworldly philosophy is widely ac- cepted or officially dominant is little affected by that circum- stance.

The spectacle of medieval Europe, or of India before, and even since, its infection with the Western plague of nation- alism, is sufficient evidence to the contrary. Where some form of otherworldliness is generally professed, the socially preva- lent scale of values is largely shaped by it and the principal themes and objectives of intellectual effort receive their char- acter from it.

The' worldly' man in such a society commonly reveres - and is usually obliged to support - the minority who have more or less thoroughly and sincerely turned from the pursuit of temporal goods and detached themselves from the hurly-burly of the world in which he is not unpleasurably engrossed; and, by a familiar paradox, exemplified often in medieval Europe as it is in contemporary India, the chief power in the affairs of this world is not unlikely to fall, or to be forced, into the hands of those who have withdrawn from it.

There is perhaps nothing so favorable to success in this world's busi- ness as a high degree of emotional detachment from it.

But the social and political effects of otherworldliness, though a rich and interesting theme, do not here concern us, except as a reminder that otherworldliness has always been compelled in practice to make terms with this world and has often been instrumental to ends foreign to its principles.

It is of its own nature as a mode of human thought and feeling, and especially of the philosophic motives which provide its grounds or its 'rationalization,' that some further consideration is perti- nent to our topic.

There is a purely metaphysical otherworldliness which is sometimes to be found completely dissociated from any corresponding theory of the nature of the good, and therefore from any otherworldly moral and religious temper. Perhaps the oddest example of this is to be seen in those half-dozen irrelevant chapters about the Unknowable which Herbert Spencer, under the influence of Hamilton and Mansel, prefixed to the Synthetic Philosophy.

There are, moreover, as I have intimated, several distinct features or categories of the world of common thought and ex- perience which may give rise to the denial of either its 'reality' or its value. But when only one or only a few of them are operative, there does not result what may be called an integral otherworldliness in the metaphysical sense; some other characters of the world known to natural ex- perience remain exempt from the impeachment.

It is best exemplified in some of the Upanishads, in the system of the Vedanta, in the Vedantist and Buddhist strain - so ironically alien to the actual life and personal temper of Schopenhauer - in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung; primitive Buddhism, which is a kind of pragmatic otherworldliness, falls short of it only by its negativity, its in- sistence upon the insubstantiality and worthlessness of this world without any altogether unequivocal assertion of the positive reality and positive value of the alternative.

Some modern observers of otherworldliness will perhaps question whether Buddhism has not in this come nearer to disclosing the strange truth that many of the great philosophers and theo- logians have been occupied with teaching the worship of- nonentity; though of nonentity made to seem more' real' and emotionally more satisfying by an emphasis upon its freedom from the particular defects and limitations - the relativity, the internal logical conflicts, the lack of finality for thought and desire - which characterize all the concrete objects of which we can think at all.

It is not necessary for our purpose to at- tempt to answer this large question here. What is certain is that such philosophers have always believed themselves to be doing precisely the reverse of this.

But any otherworldliness, whether integral or limited, can, it would seem, make nothing of the fact that there is a 'this world' to be escaped from; least of all can it justify or explain the being of such a world, or that of any particular feature or aspect of empirical existence which it negates. Its natural recourse, therefore, is, as in the Vedanta, to the device of illusionism.

But to call the characters of actual experience 'illusion,' blank nonentity, though it is a kind of poetry which has a very potent metaphysical pathos, is, philosophically con- sidered, plainly the extremest kind of nonsense. And a self-contradiction does not cease to be meaningless by seeming sublime. Thus any otherworldly philosophy which does not resort to this desperate subterfuge of illusionism seems to have this world, whatever its ontological deficiencies, on its hands as an un- accountable mystery, a thing unsatisfying, unintelligible, and evil, which seemingly ought not to be, yet somehow undeniably is.

And this embarrassment is as evident in the partial forms of otherworldliness as in the integral variety. Even though it be only to the temporality, the successiveness and lapsingness, of the experiences we know, that you wish to deny the eulogis- tic epithet of 'real,' it remains the fact that all the experienced existence that we have is successive and lapsing, and that such existence is, by initial hypothesis, antithetic to that which is eternal and forever at the goal. I t is in the light of this primary antithesis of otherworldliness and this-worldliness that the dual role of Plato in Western thought can best be understood.

Unhappily, when one at- tempts to set forth the essentials of Plato's philosophy today one is confronted at the outset with radical differences of opinion among.

If nothing can be said to be 'known' upon which there is disagreement among specialists of high repute, we can hardly be said to know anything of the teaching of Plato himself about the profounder issues of philosophy. Plato's characteristics as a writer naturally make the Dialogues an even more fruitful field than the works of other philosophers for learned.

I wish, so far as possible, in these lec- tures to avoid entering upon controverted questions of exegesis, or of the intellectual biography of individual writers. But it would, no doubt, seem an evasion of a relevant issue if, in speak- ing of Platonism, no account were taken of these differences in the conclusions of scholars who have devoted much of their lives to the study of the Platonic writings.

The disputed ques- tion to which some brief reference must at this point be made is that concerning the attribution, not of the writings them- selves, but of the doctrines whatever they may be contained in them.

The long current view that, with the exception of some of the earlier dialogues in which the Theory of Ideas does not appear, Plato was propounding a metaphysical doc- trine of his own which went far beyond the teaching of Socra- tes, is still affirmed by the most eminent of German Plato- scholars, Constantin Ritter, who, indeed, in his most recent work, assures his readers that" no one doubts this. If Burnet's contentions are right, the entire Theory of Ideas must be ascribed to Socrates, of the substance of whose final philosophy Plato, a sort of greater Boswell, was, in the dialogues in which Socrates is the chief speaker, merely giving an objective and historically trustworthy report.

It is, according to Burnet, questionable whether Plato ever accepted that theory; it is certain that when he began to set forth his own distinctive and original opinions he had already rejected it, and that the Pla- tonic teaching, properly so called, was concerned, not with the Ideas, but mainly with" two things which hardly play any part in his earlier writings, or at least only in a mythical form, namely, God and the Soul," these being now treated" quite simply and without any touch of mythical imagery.

And while one great authority thus regards as probably non- Platonic the theory most conspicuous in the dialogues of Plato's middle period, in which Socrates still sustains the bur- den of the argument, another, Professor A. Taylor, deals in a similar manner with the most important of the later ones. A side-effect of the mals, men, angels and, finally, God. It was the classical chain. But there is nothing deposition is the oxygenation of the very detailed with, for example, a ranking about the world that compels us to think atmosphere by photosynthetic bacteria.

This view even predicted a both cooperation and conflict. Around a billion Fish natural summit, this view is with years ago, a great experiment us still. Sadly, the out- sive. Fish of eukaryotic cells, multicellular- Over the past million years ity, human societies and, finally, of the Bacteria, Archaea and micro- language. They explicitly point Although both representations are equally valid, we instinctively bial Eukarya have continued to out that evolution does not neces- position ourselves at the top of phylogenetic trees upper panel.

As sarily lead to progress, and even it happens, a few branches of refer to the great chain by its Latin name, about it in this way, suggesting, instead, Eukarya —plants and animals — grew scala naturae.

But it is impossible to over- that we have some deep psychological need freakishly huge bodies. Illustrating this, when we represent exploit, such as plant lignins, and new us. But animal gut. One of the huge species, Homo sapiens, plants, and, at the top, large animals.

Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. Arthur O.