Page:The Dialogues of Plato v. 1.djvu/578

 

 

Mantinea was restored in the year 369, the composition of the Dialogue will probably fall between 384 and 369. Whether the recollection of the event is more likely to have been renewed at the destruction or restoration of the city, rather than at some intermediate period, is a consideration not worth raising. The Symposium is connected with the Phaedrus both in style and subject ; they are the only Dialogues of Plato in which the theme of love is discussed at length. In both of them philosophy is regarded as a sort of enthusiasm or madness ; Socrates is himself 'a prophet new inspired' with Bacchanalian revelry, which, like his philosophy, he characteristically pretends to have derived not from himself but from others. The Phaedo also presents some points of comparison with the Symposium. For there, too, philosophy might be described as ' dying for love;' and there are not wanting many touches of humour and fancy, which remind us of the Symposium (64 B, 85 B, 99 A). But while the Phaedo and Phaedrus look backwards and forwards to past and future states of existence, in the Symposium there is no break between this world and another ; and we rise from one to the other by a regular series of steps or stages, proceeding from the particulars of sense to the universal of reason, and from one universal to many, which are finally reunited in a single science (cp. Rep. vi. 511 B). At first immortality means only the succession of existences ; even knowledge comes and goes. Then follows, in the language of the mysteries, a higher and a higher degree of initiation ; at last we arrive at the perfect vision of beauty, not relative or changing, but eternal and absolute ; not bounded by this world, or in or out of this world, but an aspect of the divine, extending over all things, and having no limit of space or time : this is the highest knowledge of which the human mind is capable. Plato does not go on to ask whether the in- dividual is absorbed in the sea of light and beauty or retains his personality. Enough for him to have attained the true beauty or good, without enquiring precisely into the relation in which human beings stood to it. That the soul has such a reach of thought, and is capable of partaking of the eternal nature, seems to imply that she too is eternal (cp. Phaedrus, 245 foil.). But Plato docs not distinguish the eternal in man from the eternal in the world or in God. He is willing to rest in the contemplation