by Walter Pater
But musical as is Apollo’s lute.
And in turn he abounded in influence on the deeds, the persons, of others, as if he had really carried a magic lute in his hands to charm them.
As his fellow-citizens had all but identified Pythagoras with him, so Apollo remained the peculiar patron of the Pythagoreans; and we may note, in connexion with their influence on Plato, that as Apollo was the chosen ancestral deity, so Pythagoreanism became especially the philosophy, of the severely musical Dorian Greeks. If, as Plato was aware, or fancied, true Spartans knew more of philosophy than they let strangers suppose — turned them all out from time to time and feasted on it in secret, for the strengthening of their souls — it was precisely the Pythagorean philosophy of music, of austere music, mastering, remoulding, men’s very bodies, they would then have discussed with one another.
A native of Ionia, it is in one of the Dorian cities of Magna Graecia, at Crotona, that Pythagoras finds the fitting scene of his mysterious influence. He founds there something like an ideal republic, or rather a religious brotherhood, under a rule outwardly expressive of that inward idea of order or harmony, so dear to the Dorian soul, and, for it, as for him, ever the peculiar pledge of the presence of philosophic truth. Alętheian de ametria hęgei syngenę einai, ę emmetria;+ asks one in The Republic; and Emmetria?+ of course, is the answer.
Recalling the student of Plato to penetrate as far as he can into that mysterious community, there, long before, in the imagination of Pythagoras is the first dream of the Perfect City, with all those peculiar ethical sympathies which the Platonic Republic enforces already well defined — the perfect mystic body of the Dorian soul, built, as Plato requires, to the strains of music. As a whole, and in its members severally, it would reproduce and visibly reflect to others that inward order and harmony of which each one was a part. As such, the Pythagorean order (it was itself an “order”) expanded and was long maintained in those cities of Magna Graecia which had been the scene of the practical no less than of the speculative activity of its founder; and in one of which, Metapontum, so late as the days of Cicero what was believed to be the tomb of Pythagoras was still shown. Order, harmony, the temperance, which, as Plato will explain to us, will convince us by the visible presentment of it in the faultless person of the youthful Charmides, is like a musical harmony, — that was the chief thing Pythagoras exacted from his followers, at least at first, though they were mainly of the noble and wealthy class who could have done what they liked — temperance in a religious intention, with many singular scruples concerning bodily purification, diet, and the like. For if, according to his philosophy, the soul had come from heaven, to use the phrase of Wordsworth reproducing the central Pythagorean doctrine, “from heaven,” as he says, “trailing clouds of glory,” so the arguments of Pythagoras were always more or less explicitly involving one in consideration of the means by which one might get back thither, of which means, surely, abstinence, the repression of one’s carnal elements, must be one; in consideration also, in curious questions, as to the relationship of those carnal elements in us to the pilgrim soul, before and after, for which he was so anxious to secure full use of all the opportunities of further perfecting which might yet await it, in the many revolutions of its existence. In the midst of that aesthetically so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascęsis, about him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards, that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence of which the philosopher of music was, perhaps not inconsistently, a lover, which enveloped the entire action of the Pythagoreans, and had indeed kept Pythagoras himself, as some have thought, from committing his thoughts to writing at all, was congruous with such monkish discipline. Mysticism — the condition of the initiated — is a word derived, as we know, from a Greek verb which may perhaps mean to close the eye that one may better perceive the invisible, but more probably means to close the lips while the soul is brooding over what cannot be uttered. Later Christian admirers said of him, that he had hidden the words of God in his heart.
The dust of his golden verses perhaps, but certainly the gold-dust of his thoughts, lies scattered all along Greek literature from Plato to the latest of the Greek Fathers of the Church. You may find it serviceably worked out in the notes of Zeller’s excellent work on Greek philosophy, and, with more sparing comment, in Mullach’s Fragmenta Philosophorum Graecorum. No one of those Pre-Socratic philosophers has been the subject of a more enthusiastic erudition. For his mind’s health however, if in doing so he is not making a disproportionate use of his time, inconsistent certainly with the essential temper of the doctrine he seeks for, and such as a true Pythagorean would instantly condemn, the young scholar might be recommended to go straight to the pages of Aristotle — those discreet, unromantic pages, salutary therefore to listen to, concerning doctrines in themselves so fantastic.* In the Ethics, as you may know, in the Metaphysics, and elsewhere, Aristotle gives many not unsympathetic notices at least of the disciples, which, by way of sober contrast on a matter from the first profusely, perhaps cheaply, embroidered, is like quiet information from Pythagoras himself. Only, remember always in reading Plato — Plato, as a sincere learner in the school of Pythagoras — that the essence, the active principle of the Pythagorean doctrine, resides, not as with the ancient Eleatics, nor as with our modern selves too often, in the “infinite,” those eternities, infinitudes, abysses, Carlyle invokes for us so often — in no cultus of the infinite (to apeiron) but in the finite (to peras).+ It is so indeed, with that exception of the Parmenidean sect, through all Greek philosophy, congruously with the proper vocation of the people of art, of art as being itself the finite, ever controlling the infinite, the formless. Those famous systoichiai tôn enantiôn,+ or parallel columns of contraries: the One and the Many: Odd and Even, and the like: Good and Evil: are indeed all reducible ultimately to terms of art, as the expressive and the inexpressive. Now observe that Plato’s “theory of ideas” is but an effort to enforce the Pythagorean peras,+ with all the unity-in-variety of concerted music, — eternal definition of the finite, upon to apeiron,+ the infinite, the indefinite, formless, brute matter, of our experience of the world.
For it is of Plato again we should be thinking, and of Pythagoras or the Pythagoreans, only so far as they explain the actual conformation of Plato’s thoughts as we find them, especially in The Republic. Let us see, as much as possible in his own words, what Plato received from that older philosophy, of which the two leading persuasions were; first, the universality, the ultimate truth, of numerical, of musical law; and secondly, the pre-existence, the double eternity, of the soul.
In spirit, then, we are certainly of the Pythagorean company in that most characteristic dialogue, the Meno, in which Plato discusses the nature, the true idea, of Virtue, or rather how one may attain thereto; compelled to this subordinate and accessory question by the intellectual cowardice of his disciple, though after his manner he flashes irrepressible light on that other primary and really indispensable question by the way. Pythagoras, who had founded his famous brotherhood by way of turning theory into practice, must have had, of course, definite views on that most practical question, how virtue is to be attained by us; and Plato is certainly faithful to him in assigning the causation of virtue partly to discipline, forming habit (askęsis)+ as enforced on the monk, the soldier, the schoolboy, as he is true to his own experience in assigning it partly also to a good natural disposition (physei)+ and he suggests afterwards, as I suppose some of us would be ready to do, that virtue is due also in part (theia moira)+ to the good pleasure of heaven, to un-merited grace. Whatever else, however, may be held about it, it is certain (he admits) that virtue comes in great measure through learning. But is there in very deed such a thing as learning? asks the eristic Meno, who is so youthfully fond of argument f
or its own sake, and must exercise by display his already well-trained intellectual muscle. Is not that favourite, that characteristic, Greek paradox, that it is impossible to be taught, and therefore useless to seek, what one does not know already, after all the expression of an empirical truth? —
Meno. After what manner Socrates will you seek for that which you do not know at all — what it is? For what sort of thing, among the things you know not, will you propose as your object of search? Or even if you should have lighted full upon it, how will you know that it is this thing which you knew not?
Socrates. Ah! I understand the kind of thing you mean to say, Meno. Do you see what a contentious argument this is you are bringing down on our heads? — that forsooth it is not possible for a man to seek either for what he knows, or for what he knows not; inasmuch as he would not seek what he knows, at least; because he knows it, and to one in such case there is no need of seeking. Nor would he seek after what he knows not; for he knows not what he shall seek for. Meno, 80.
Well! that is true in a sense, as Socrates admits; not however in any sense which encourages idle acquiescence in what according to common language is our ignorance. There is a sense (it is exemplified in regard to sound and colour, perhaps in some far more important things) in which it is matter of experience that it is impossible to seek for, or be taught, what one does not know already. He who is in total ignorance of musical notes, who has no ear, will certainly be unaware of them when they light on him, or he lights upon them. Where could one begin? we ask, in certain cases where not to know at all means incapacity for receiving knowledge. Yes, certainly; the Pythagoreans are right in saying that what we call learning is in fact reminiscence- -: anamnęsis + famous word! and Socrates proceeds to show in what precise way it is impossible or possible to find out what you don’t know: how that happens. In full use of the dialogue, as itself the instrument most fit for him of whatever what we call teaching and learning may really be, Plato, dramatic always, brings in one of Meno’s slaves, a boy who speaks Greek nicely, but knows nothing of geometry: introduces him, we may fancy, into a mathematical lecture-room where diagrams are to be seen on the walls, cubes and the like lying on the table — particular objects, the mere sight of which will rouse him when subjected to the dialectical treatment, to universal truths concerning them. The problem required of him is to describe a square of a particular size: to find the line which must be the side of such a square; and he is to find it for himself. Meno, carefully on his guard, is to watch whether the boy is taught by Socrates in any of his answers; whether he answers anything at any point otherwise than by way of reminiscence and really out of his own mind, as the reasonable questions of Socrates fall like water on the seed-ground, or like sunlight on the photographer’s negative.
“See him now!” he cries triumphantly, “How he remembers; in the logical order; as he ought to remember!” The reader, in truth, following closely, scrupulously, this pretty process, cannot help seeing that after all the boy does not discover the essential point of the problem for himself, that he is more than just guided on his way by the questioning of Socrates, that Plato has chosen an instance in itself illusively clear as being concerned with elementary space. It is once for all, however, that he recognises, under such questioning, the immovable, indefectible certainty of this or that truth of space. So much, the candid reader must concede, is clearly to the advantage of the Pythagorean theory: that even his false guesses have a plausibility, a kinship to, a kind of claim upon, truth, about them: that as he remembers, in logical order (hôs dei)+ so he makes the mistakes also which he ought to make — the right sort of mistakes, such as are natural and ought to occur in order to the awakening mind, a kind of properly innate errors. Nyn autô hôsper onar arti anakekinętai hai doxai autai.+— “Just now, as in a dream, these opinions have been stirred up within him”; and he will perform, Socrates assures us, similar acts of reminiscence on demand, with other geometrical problems, with any and every problem whatever.
“If then,” observes Socrates in the Phaedo, wistfully pondering, for such consolation as there may be in it, in his last hours, the larger outlook suggested by this hopeful doctrine: —
If, having apprehended it (having apprehended a certain mathe- matical principle, that is) before birth, we were born already possessed of this principle, had we not knowledge, both before and immediately upon our begetting here, not merely about the equal and the greater and the less, but about all other things of the kind? For our theory (of an innate knowledge, that is to say, independent of our experience here) our theory holds not a bit more about two equal lines, than about the absolute Beauty (was he going now to see its very face again, after the dim intermediate life here?) and about what is absolutely just and good, and about all things whatever, upon which, in all our past questioning and answering, we set this seal — hois episphragizometha touto + — That, which really is. Phaedo, 75.
But to return to the cheerful pages of the Meno — from the prison-cell to the old mathematical lecture-room and that psychological experiment upon the young boy with the square: — Oukoun oudenos didaxantos, all’ erôtęsantos, epistęsetai, analabôn, autos ex hautou, epistęmęn;+ “Through no one’s teaching, then, but by a process of mere questioning, will he attain a true science, knowledge in the fullest sense (epistęmę)+ by the recovery of such science out of himself?” — Yes! and that recovery is an act of reminiscence.
These opinions therefore, the boy’s discoverable right notions about side and square and diagonal, were innate in him (enęsan de ge autô autai hai doxai)+ and surely, as Socrates was observing later, right opinions also concerning other things more important, which too, when stirred up by a process of questioning, will be established in him as consciously reasoned knowledge (erôtęsei epegertheisai, epistęmai gignontai).+ That at least is what Plato is quite certain about: not quite so confident, however, regarding another doctrine, fascinating as he finds it, which seemed to afford an explanation of this leading psychological fact of an antecedent knowledge within us — the doctrine namely of metempsychôsis, of the transmigration of souls through various forms of the bodily life, under a law of moral retribution, somewhat oracularly suggested in the ancient poets, by Hesiod and Pindar, but a matter of formal consciousness with the Pythagoreans, and at last inseparably connected with the authority of Socrates, who in the Phaedo discourses at great length on that so comfortable theory, venturing to draw from it, as we saw just now, a personal hope in the immediate prospect of death. The soul, then, would be immortal (athanatos an hę psychę eię)+ prospectively as well as in retrospect, and is not unlikely to attain to clearer levels of truth “over the way, there,” as, in the Meno, Socrates drew from it an encouragement to the search for truth, here. Retrospectively, at all events, it seemed plain that “the soul is eternal. It is right therefore to make an effort to find out things one may not know, that is to say, one does not remember, just now.” Those notions were in the boy, they and the like of them, in all boys and men; and he did not come by them in this life, a young slave in Athens. Ancient, half- obliterated inscriptions on the mental walls, the mental tablet, seeds of knowledge to come, shed by some flower of it long ago, it was in an earlier period of time they had been laid up in him, to blossom again now, so kindly, so firmly!
Upon a soul thus provided, puzzled as that seed swells within it under the spring-tide influences of this untried atmosphere, it would be the proper vocation of the philosophic teacher to supervene with his encouraging questions. And there was another doctrine — a persuasion still more poetical or visionary, it might seem, yet with a strong presumption of literal truth about it, when seen in connexion with that great fact of our consciousness which it so conveniently explains— “reminiscence.” Socrates had heard it, he tells us in the Meno, in the locus classicus on this matter, from the venerable lips of certain religious persons, priests and priestesses,
— who had made it their business to be able to give an account concerning their s
acred functions. Pindar too asserts this, and many other of the poets, so many as were divinely inspired. And what they say is as follows. But do you observe, whether they seem to you to speak the truth. For they say that the soul of man is immortal; and that at one time it comes to a pause, which indeed they call dying, and then is born again; but that it is never destroyed. That on this account indeed it is our duty to pass through life as religiously as possible (because there’s ‘another world,’ namely). ‘For those,’ says Pindar, ‘from whom Persephone shall have received a recompense of ancient wrong — she gives back their soul again to the sun above in the ninth year, of whom are begotten kings, illustrious and swift in strength, and men greatest in wisdom; and for remaining time they are called holy heroes among us.’ Inasmuch then as the soul is immortal, and has been born many times, and has seen both things here and things in Hades, and all things, there is nothing that it has not learned; so that it is by no means surprising that it should be able to remember both about virtue and about other matters what it knew at least even aforetime. For inasmuch as the whole of nature is akin to itself (homogeneous) and the soul has learned all things, nothing hinders one, by remembering one thing only, which indeed people call ‘learning’ (though it is something else in fact, you see!) from finding out all other things for himself, if he be brave and fail not through weariness in his search. For in truth to seek and to learn is wholly Recollection. Therefore one must not be persuaded by that eristic doctrine (namely that if ignorant in ignorance you must remain) for that on the one hand would make us idle and is a pleasant doctrine for the weak among mankind to hear; while this other doctrine makes us industrious and apt to seek. Trusting in which that it is true, I am willing along with you to seek out virtue: — what it is. Meno, 81.
These strange theories then are much with Socrates on his last sad day- -sad to his friends — as justifying more or less, on ancient religious authority, the instinctive confidence, checking sadness in himself, that he will survive — survive the effects of the poison, of the funeral fire; that somewhere, with some others, with Minos perhaps and other “righteous souls” of the national religion, he will be holding discourses, dialogues, quite similar to these, only a little better as must naturally happen with so diligent a scholar, this time to-morrow.