Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/113

j. A. STEWART, The Myths of Plato. 99 from the severe strain of discussing true reality. Myth is the only legitimate form for such discourse, and that is why the Soul, the World, and God are the proper subjects of myth. It is not because, like the Ideas, they belong to ' timeless existence,' as Prof. Stewart thinks, it is because they belong wholly to the world of becoming. Natural science (except in so far as it can be mathematically ex- pressed in the light of the Idea of the Good) is necessarily mythical ; all accounts of the origin, history and destiny of the individual soul are necessarily mythical ; all discourse about the creation and pre- servation of the world is necessarily mythical. This is surely what Plato says, and yet it is just the opposite of what Prof. Stewart tells us. He, indeed, thinks (p. 347, n. 1) that it is "going too far" to say with Gouturat that the whole doctrine of tSc'cu is mythical ; but I do not see how he can escape that con- clusion, or why, on his view of myth, he should desire to do so. Gomperz actually imagines that he is throwing light on the subject by comparing some savage theory of ghostly 'doubles' of real ' things '. I can only repeat that the Ideas are never spoken of in mythical language, though the relation of the finite soul to them is (avdfjivrjo-is). They are always discussed in a simple, scientific manner, just as lines and planes are in Euclid. Myth, on the other hand, is the appropriate vehicle for all dis- course about the world of becoming. We can give no scientific account of it ; we can only tell the ' fairest tale ' we can. If it be asked why we should tell tales at all, the answer is twofold. In the first place, we are poets and cannot help it. We must make a picture, even if we cannot truly know. In the second place, Plato holds strongly that the 'protreptic' or educational value of myth is very great. If we are to be good men, it is above all things necessary that we should feel pleasure and pain at the right things. We must feel, if we cannot know, the goodness and beauty of human life and the world. The v<>6os A.oyio-/xds by which we infer space and the delights of mathematics will not produce this feeling in many minds. Nothing will awaken a proper sense of the good- ness of the world like a noble tale of Creation, nothing will arouse us to a feeling of the momentous issue of right and wrong in human life like a lofty vision of Death and Judgment. It is all TrcuSta, no doubt, just as the theory of the elements is ; but it will give us pleasure unattended by remorse, and it will stir up in us that Love of beauty, goodness and truth which, once awakened, can find no rest but in the knowledge and love of the good itself. And it is here that we come upon the element of truth in Prof. Stewart's theory. It is true that myth produces Transcendental Feeling, if we are to call it so, though not in the sense that it brings us into contact with reality. Such contact, Plato at least believed, is possible only to intellect at its highest. What myth does is to transfuse our ordinary consciousness of a sensible world in space and time a world of which the intellect knows nothing in such a way that we may feel it to be somehow an image of the eternal which alone is scientifically knowable.