ABSTRACT
§ 1 . In addition to his analysis of sense and intellect, Plato provides us with a psychology of education. He is not content with stating the nature of the ideal intellect, the mind of the man who views all things from the lofty standpoint of speculative insight; he indicates the way in which such an intellect may be formed. For Plato the true life of the soul is a continuation of that process by which at first order arose out of chaos; education is information, not the mere acquisition of knowledge, but the formation of mind, the process by which form is attained. Knowledge cannot be thrust into the soul from without nor attached to it as an ornament may be attached to the body; knowledge is activity, and the wise man is he who has acquired through training perfection in the exercise of his faculties. Education thus understood is a theory of life and sums up all the sciences that are concerned only with departments of life: it includes all that makes the soul more perfect and all that makes the body less a hindrance. For the discipline of the body athletic exercises are prescribed; for the discipline of mind intellectual pursuits are needed. Plato does not forget that the nature of man is tripartite, nor that life is more than the single purpose which a man may consciously keep before him. As there are in man reason, spirit, and desire, each of these must be affected by the training; for the whole is made of the parts and can only be reached through them. Hence the formation of the soul begins with the indirect influence of beauty in the surroundings: upon this beauty the soul feeds and becomes like to that which it thus assimilates. In a more advanced stage direct instruction begins, not with the unemotional detail of science, but in the concrete ideals of sage and hero; the memory for fact is still weak, but the young mind is impressionable and easily roused; the spirit (θνμός) glows and the zeal of emulation is awakened; it is enough that this ambition be for the attainment of the good, that the mind has received its bent. When at last the irrational self has reached its years of discretion and the right spirit has been evolved, the intellect can be trained so that, passing through the realm of mathematical truths, it comes at last to the speculative vision of the Ideas and grasps the Idea of the Good. As there are in the world three natures—(1) the Ideas, or Limit, (2) the composite natures (τά μικτά), (3) the unlimited or matter—and as the soul is itself intermediary between Pure Forms and the Formless, so the process of development through which it goes is threefold: for there is first the process of moulding the material, irrational nature; then the intermediary stage in which concrete embodiments of law are studied; and finally the highest stage in which the laws of nature are made the subject of thought and the mind thinks over the last great law of all things, the Good in which they live and move and have their being. Plato was doubtless perfectly conscious of the latent mysticism of his doctrine; he saw that the soul in turning round from darkness to light comes finally to itself; above the unity which it contemplates in the world of things, a unity which it looks upon face to face, is the still higher unity in which it is itself included; but from the mysticism of later schools Plato is saved by the fact that he does not regard the existent as wholly dependent on consciousness; the Idea of the Good is like the sun in the heavens: it reveals the world of intelligible things to the mind as the sun reveals to the eye its world of objects; but there is no suggestion in Plato that the object is ever other than external to the mind; consciousness of truth is never merely consciousness of self, and the mind does not contain the intelligible objects any more than the eye contains the world of things visible.
