THE OBJECTIVITY OF THE I. is interesting to note the insignificance of the Iposition occupied to day by so-called concepts or universals in most philosophic thought as compared with the place of paramount importance assigned to them under the name of eồŋ or Forms in Plato's philosophy. Since their first appearance in the philosophical arena, the elon have undergone a continuous watering-down process. In Plato the concepts are the only real existences. In modern psychology, and those systems which are most akin to it, they are but subjectively formed meanings. No concept has, however, suffered so undignified a downfall as the concept of beauty. The dos of Beauty shares in Plato with the dos of Good and the eidos of Truth the distinction of being the chief of all the Forms. In some unexplained, or unsatisfactorily explained way these three Forms are different from and superior to the rest. They stand at the summit of the hierarchy which tails away at its nether end into the obscure eïồn of hair and mud mentioned in the Parmenides, as to which Plato never appears properly to have made up his mind whether they deserved to be called forms or not. It is in the "Symposium " (§§ 210-212) and the "Phaedrus " (§§ 250 seq.) that most of our information with regard to the Form of Beauty is to be found. In the "Symposium "Plato describes the process which ends in the apprehension of The Form of Beauty. A man begins by appreciating the beauty of one beautiful object or shape. His capacity then advances to the stage in which he can appreciate several beautiful objects. The next stage is the apprehension of abstract beauty, that is, the beauty of laws and institutions. 44 But the knowledge of the form of beauty is not yet. Perseverance and aptitude in the study of the abstract beauty of stage three is required. We learn, moreover, in the seventh book of the 'Republic" that the method by which a man approaches nearer to the true vision of the eldos is by an arduous study in that branch of knowledge which is furthest removed from illusion, that is, in the exact sciences of measuring, weighing and counting, being the Theories of Numbers, Geometry, Stereometry, and Astronomy; and it is for the reason that he has had no training in these exact sciences that it is said of the artist in the tenth book that he will never attain to a perception of the ds itself. After study of this kind will come the sudden apprehension of the eloos. This is described in the "Symposium" in the language of a mystical vision. "And at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science which is the science of beauty everywhere. In the seventh epistle Plato says that the knowledge of the Forms cannot be put into words like other kinds of learning, but that suddenly, after much study and familiarity with the pursuit of them, light whereby they may be beheld springs up in the soul like flame from a fire. This final apprehension is a kind of intuition, a mystical flash entirely divorced from the purely logical and mathematical processes of study which necessarily precede it. The vision follows logically from and is conditioned by the leading-up process. But in itself it is distinct and unique, involving both immediacy and separation from self. Then will it be seen that all other beautiful things are beautiful only in so far as they participate in the true being of beauty. In the "Phaedrus," moreover, we are told that it is a characteristic of beauty that the Form of beauty alone of all the Forms appears in this world as she really is. A man cannot attain in this life to absolute wisdom or absolute justice; but he can apprehend absolute beauty. And then the soul which has already seen beauty in the οὐράνιος τόπος recognises it again when she sees it, and we have the doctrines of ȧváμvnois and metempsychosis dragged in by the heels to explain the logical difficulty of how anyone can be brought to know a fresh thing. In this doctrine, which is at any rate extreme in the whole-heartedness with which it asserts the objective independence and transcendence of beauty, subsequent commentators have with the greatest ingenuity succeeded in finding support for their own very diverse views. As Professor Adams aptly quotes: Hic liber est, in quo quaerit sua dogmata quisque : Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua. There has been Professor Jackson's theory of Plato's dual attitude towards the on, the attitude in which he thought of the relation between the particular and the eldos as being simply one of μíunois and the view in which he regarded the individual as definitely participating in and owing its being to the Form. How then, says Professor Jackson, on this second interpretation can the elos εἶδος be transcendent and independent? The tendency of practically all the commentators has been to water down that part of the doctrine which asserts the objective and transcendent nature of the είδος. Lutoslawski regards the eon as simply forms or thoughts of the divine or human mind. “A kind of notion of the human mind they are called." Lotze again argues for the eternal absolute validity of the on, but cannot swallow their eternal independent being. "The truth which Plato intended to teach is no other than that which we have just been expounding, that is to say, the validity of truths as such, apart from the question whether they can be established in relation to any other object in the external world, as its mode of being, or not.” Thus is Plato's doctrine of the objective reality of the Forms distorted to support the dogmas of modern Idealism, in spite of the crushing refutation of any such suggestion in the "Parmenides (§ 132), where we are asked whether it is possible to have a vonua of that which is not. Yet again there is the view which interprets the eon as processes or thoughts in the mind of God. As Professor Taylor has pointed out, this interpretation is thoroughly un-Platonic (vide Professor Taylor's "Plato," published by Constable, p. 44). When God is spoken of in the "Timaeus" as shaping the world on the model of the elồn, the latter are always spoken of as "known by Him and existing independently of Him, clear patterns of which the world is but a shadowy image." There is never any suggestion that the edn owe their existence to God's thought about them. One is, in fact, compelled to accept Professor Adam's definition of what Plato really meant by the elon, subversive as it may now appear. "Each idea is a singly independent, separate, self-existing, perfect and eternal essence, forming the objective correlate of our general notions." The esos therefore is an object of thought, not a creation by thought, and there can, I think, be no doubt that this was Plato's meaning. The watering-down of the full completeness of this doctrine, of which a few instances have been cited, has reached the extreme stage of dilution in the modern psychological view of concepts. The |