Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/356

ON PLATO'S PHAEDO. 355 to us by Wordsworth's Ode. But this, we may well say with J. S. Mill (though I know not whether in his sense), is " falsely called Platonic ". Wordsworth makes life a gradual decline : Plato makes it a progress. To Wordsworth it is a forgetting : to Plato a remembering. In Wordsworth the child is nearer heaven than the full-grown man : in Plato the full-grown man, if he has used his time well, has regained much of what he lost by birth. 1 Wordsworth's beautiful fancy owes more to the sentimentalism of Kousseau than to Plato's idealism. How far was Plato conscious that his doctrine of Recollec- tion was only a Vorstellung representing a Begriff, an expres- sion in terms of a history in time of what is really a logical development? The theory of Education in the Republic seems to supply an answer. It is sometimes said that in the Republic Plato applies the theory of ideas at which he was arriving in the Meno, but that he has given up the doctrine of Recollection at least as an essential part of his theory of knowledge (though it is alluded to in the ' myth ' at the end, 621 A). Now, I shall assume as a canon of interpretation in the case of Plato, as of any other philosopher, that we must start with the supposition that his thinking is coherent, and that we must begin by looking for agreement rather than for disagreement. On the other hand, we cannot put the canon in the form in which Prof. Teichmiiller and Mr. Archer-Hind put it "that any interpretation of Plato which attributes inconsistency to him stands self-condemned ", 2 Consistency is a very poor virtue to ascribe to Plato : it would imply that his system sprang ready-made from his head and that it admitted of no growth a view seriously maintained by Schleiermacher, who regards the order (i.e., the order which he conjecturally prefers) of the dialogues as representing an order adopted for purposes of exposition and not an order of development in the writer's mind. When, therefore, in the Republic, we find Education described as " the turning round of the eye of the soul to behold the truth," 3 it seems reason- 1 This has been pointed out by Mr. Archer-Hind in his edition of the Phaedo, p. 85. 2 Edition of the Phaedo, p. 24. Mr. Archer- Hind cannot mean this to be taken too literally, because he certainly admits a development in Platonic doctrine. 3 Rep. vii., 518 B, C. " Certain professors of education must be mis- taken in saying that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes Whereas our argument shows that the power (dtW/u?) is already in the soul ; and that as the eye may be imagined unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too, when the eye of the soul is turned round, the whole soul must be turned round from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn