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Cumming had chosen Plato’s Epistles or Anacreon’s Poems instead of the Anabasis or the Ars Poetica, he would have reduced the extent of the falsehood, and would have furnished a ready reply which would have been equally effective with his Sunday-school teachers and their disputants.
When several persons are said to have one and the same opinion, thought, or idea, many men, overlooking the true simple statement of the case, which is, that they are all thinking alike, look for something more abstruse and mystical, and imagine there must be some One Thing, in the primary sense, though not an individual which is present at once in the mind of each of these persons; and thence readily sprung Plato’s theory of Ideas, each of which was, according to him, one real, eternal object, existing entire and complete in each of the individual objects that are known by one name.”
In Plato’s Apology, Plato makes Socrates ask the accuser point-blank whether he is of the opinion that he, Socrates, does not believe in the gods at all and accordingly is a downright denier of the gods, or whether he merely means to say that he believes in other gods than those of the State. He makes the accuser answer that the assertion is that Socrates does not believe in any gods at all.
Hence there is nothing incredible in the assumption that Socrates attracted notice at Delphi as a defender of the old-fashioned religious views approved by the Oracle, precisely in virtue of his opposition to the ideas then in vogue. If we accept this explanation we are, however, excluded from taking literally Plato’s account of the answer of the Delphic Oracle and Socrates’s attitude towards it.
The attack, then, affords no information about Socrates’s personal point of view as regards belief in the gods, and the defence only very little. Both Xenophon and Plato give an account of Socrates’s daimonion, but this point has so little relation to the charge of atheism that it is not worth examination. For the rest Plato’s defence is indirect.
Even in Plato’s later works there is, in spite of their conservative attitude, a very peculiar reservation in regard to the anthropomorphic gods of popular belief. It shows itself in the Laws in the fact that where he sets out to prove the existence of the gods he contents himself with proving the divinity of the heavenly bodies and quite disregards the other gods.
It is observations of this kind that induced Zeller to believe that Plato altogether denied the gods of popular belief; he also contends that the gods have no place in Plato’s system. No doubt his doctrine of ideas led up to a kind of divinity, the idea of the good, as the crown of the system, but the direct inference from this conception would be pure monotheism and so exclude polytheism.
How to define a name, may not only be an inquiry of considerable difficulty and intricacy, but may involve considerations going deep into the nature of the things which are denoted by the name. Such, for instance, are the inquiries which form the subjects of the most important of Plato’s Dialogues; as, “What is rhetoric?” the topic of the Gorgias, or, “What is justice?” that of the Republic.
Ancient philosophy never got clear of this dilemma; hence Plato’s open recognition of the absurdity; hence Aristotle’s delight at being able to meet the popular faith half-way in his assumption of the divinity of the heavenly bodies; hence Xenocrates’s demons, the allegories of the Stoics, the ideal Epicureans of Epicurus, Euhemerus’s early benefactors of mankind.
They call forth in us an “anamnesis,” a “reminiscence” in Plato’s sense, awakening within us moods and intuitions in which something of the essence and meaning of being is directly experienced, although it remains in the form of feeling, and cannot easily, if at all, find expression in definable ideas or clear statements.
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