ABSTRACT
I have once more to confess at the end of this series of studies, as I confessed at the beginning, that it forms only the first half of a plan the complete execution of which has been, as I trust, only very temporarily interrupted. What I hope from the complete realisation of the whole, should its results find acceptance, is the dissipation of the clouds of mystery which, as recent historians, such as Max Wundt in Germany and G. Zuccante in Italy, who lack the courage to break fully with modern fashions and to return to the Academic tradition, openly confess, veils from us what is admittedly the most striking personality in the history of Greek thought. Our task, be our success in it what it may, is to restore Socrates to his rightful place as the first thoroughly intelligible figure in the great line of succession by which Greek Philosophy is indissolubly linked with Christianity on the one side and modern science on the other. It must be honestly said that even the fullest execution of such a plan only rolls the darkness a little farther back. Here, as in all our researches, omnia abeunt in mystcrium. Behind Socrates, if the main ideas of these studies contain substantial truth, we dimly discern the half-obliterated features of Pythagoras of Samos, and behind Pythagoras we can only just descry the mists which enclose whatever may be hidden under the name of Orpheus. And behind Orpheus, for us at least, there is only the impenetrable night. But it is a night in which, as we can hardly fail to recognise, the Church, the University, the organisation of science, all have their remote and unknown 269beginnings. They are all “houses” of the soul that, by what devious route soever, has come by the faith that she is a pilgrim to a country that does not appear, a creature made to seek not the things which are seen but the things which are eternal. And this is why I have chosen as a second motto for these pages the Scriptural command to lay fast hold on eternal life. Philosophy, as the history of her name shows, began as the quest for the road that leads to the city of God, and she has never numbered many true lovers among those who “forget the way.” It was precisely because it held out the prospect of the life everlasting to be won by converse with unseen tilings that Platonism, even apart from its baptism into Christ, had inherent strength to outlast all the other “philosophies,” and to grow up again into a new and profound metaphysic and ethics in the evil times of the third century of our ers. when the whole system of visible things seemed sinking into the “gulf of Non-being” before men’s eyes. For if the things which are seen are shaken, it is that the things which are not seen may remain. And, if I am not merely mistaken in my main contention, no small part of this inextinguishable vitality which has made the Platonic Philosophy, in the favourite image of Plotinus, a spring of the water of life in the deserts of “becoming,” is directly due to the teaching as much as to the life of the thinker whose last word was the message of immortal hope, καλὸν τὸ ὰθλον καὶ ἡ ἐλπὶς μϵγάλη.
