industrial products from the ends of the earth, and exhibit in every possible shape and variety the sublime of what is mechanical and material; but for supersensual ideas, and the τὸ ὄντως ὄν—the enduring and only real substratum of all that is-they will have none of them. Plato is a dreamer and a fantastical fellow to them; as they are Bavavoikoì and "a nation of shopkeepers to him. Between Plato and the English nation there is in fact a gulf which cannot be passed; any more than that greater gulf can be passed which lies. between the sphere of English notions and the world of German speculation. Individual Englishmen will no doubt make excursions to the Brocken, and find that it is not always altogether possessed by witches and devils; but your normal Englishman will hold to the belief that the man who travels in Germany has brought home a score of bottle-imps in his pocket, and that for this reason it is dangerous to have dealings with him. So individual Englishmen, as Butler (though strictly speaking he was an Irishman), will lecture on Plato, and exhibit some portion of that ideal enthusiasm with which his dialogues were written; in Cambridge, also, where, since the days of Smith and Cudworth, Plato has never been altogether forgotten, learned professors of Greek will wisely use the advantages of their position by endeavouring to inoculate the susceptible mind of some young Kingsley or Maurice, with the living germ of Platonic speculation; nay, even in cold and precise Oxford, where Aristotle has long been worshipped as the only "god of the philosophers,' a few heretical noses, with Puseyistic or Rationalising tendencies, may be found sniffling in this direction; but all these very praiseworthy exertions will never create a school of Platonists in England, such as that famous one which existed in Florence, illuminated by the first fair virgin flush of chaste thought that accompanied the revival of classical learning in the fifteenth century. Among the thousand and one publications in the domain of classical learning in England during the last century and a half, Butler's Lectures (so admirably annotated by Professor Thompson), with the exception of the translations of the eccentric Taylor, for a hearty

1 A well-known phrase used by Cicero in reference to Plato.

1

Grote-Sewell-Scotland.

recognition of the true Platonic attitude of philosophy, seem to stand almost alone.1 None of our great and most applauded English names in the world, whether of thought or of professed scholarship, were Platonic. Neither Bacon, nor Locke, nor Bentley, nor Porson, nor Whewell, nor Thirlwall, nor Grote, is a Platonist. The last-named writer, indeed, has come boldly out with one of the most characteristic features of "the nation of shopkeepers," when he represents Plato as the subtle theorist, and the sophists as the useful practical thinkers of the ancient world in the fifth century before Christ. This is the genuine English sentiment uttered by a learned London banker; while the strong denunciation of the sophists, and the hearty sympathy with Plato's Republic exhibited by one of the most talented of the English Puseyites, can only be regarded as one of those manifestations of combined academical and ecclesiastical feeling that so often react in a very salutary fashion against the merely practical tendencies of our age and nation. As for Scotland (since in a matter pertaining to philosophy it were wrong not to speak of our own country specially), it is, of all quarters of the world, that one where a person might wander longest without stumbling on a thinking person who had any living pulses beating in sympathy with the great founder of the Academy. Dr. Reid was, no doubt, a very strong

3

1 Badham's edition of the Philebus, recently published, must also be mentioned, as a work combining the most accurate philological learning with the soundest appreciation of the Platonic philosophy. It is understood that Professor Jowett of Cambridge is occupied with a new edition of the whole works of Plato. This is just what was to have been expected from that quarter.

2 Mr. Grote, whose merits as a political historian no wise critic will deny, is perhaps not the man, under any circumstances, to write in a worthy tone about Greek philosophy; but his whole chapter on Plato and the sophists, if there were no graver offence, is completely marred for historical purposes by the violent polemical attitude which this writer constantly assumes. His pages sound often like reports of an emphatic party-speech delivered in Parliament, rather than the grave verdict of a historian.

3 SEWELL, in his introduction to the Dialogues of Plato; a book glowing with great truths, but sparkling also with the brilliant exaggerations that belong to genius without sense.

4 Here, as in many other respects, the Scottish people have lagged wo fully behind the conception of their own great reformer John Knox,

headed man, with a great amount of "common sense," a virtue on which the Scottish nation generally, and not without reason, place a very high value; but he was no Platonist. The present writer once put the question to the late Sir William Hamilton, whether either Reid, or Stewart, or Brown, might be looked upon as men learned in the Greek philosophy; and the answer was decidedly not." "The whole Scottish school of philosophy," said he, " was essentially destitute of a learned foundation." And most certainly it does appear, that of all possible cognitive organs, "common sense," however useful in its place, is that which is the least adapted for laying hold of some of the most fundamental ideas in Plato. But even had the Scottish philosophy been based on a higher principle, it would have remained impossible for the Scottish people to have received Plato into their culture, so long as the universities were condemned to content themselves with dribbling out the beggarly elements of a nominal scholarship to satisfy the low demands of the country presbyteries of a church in which learning bears no premium. Of the two elements which go to a knowledge of Plato-an ideal tone of thought, and a familiarity with the Greek language-the Scotch had perhaps less of the former than the English, and of the latter they were altogether destitute. Hence Platonism never existed in Edinburgh; and Lord Jeffrey and the Reverend Archibald Alison were allowed with general applause to propound a theory of beauty, the characteristic feature of which consisted in denying that there exists any intellectual principle of beauty at all-the identical sceptical doctrine, in fact, tricked out with sentimental phrases, of the stout old Abderitan sophist Protagoras, that "every man is the measure of all things to himself, of true things that they are true, and of false things that they are false," and that beautiful objects are so only in virtue of an arbitrary and ever-shifting bond of association in the mind of the contemplator.

Hitherto, our readers will likely think we have been

who, in the Books of Discipline, lays it down expressly that the study of Plato and the New Testament shall go hand in hand in the universities. See First Book of Discipline, "of Readers, and of the Degrees and Times of Study."

Platonism and Christianity.

9

offering them very little encouragement to the study of Plato; having been eager, as it would seem, only to prove that both the English and the Scottish mind labour under a special incapacity of comprehending the works of the great apostle of idealism. Now, this certainly does seem ungracious; but it is so far necessary. It is not advisable that certain persons should wish to know anything about Plato, any more than about Coleridge, Carlyle, Shelley, or John Keats. Nothing is more beneficial to the mind than the cultivation of the habit of being content to be ignorant of certain subjects. Nevertheless there is one door through which the English mind has a more free and open access to the Platonic philosophy, viz., religion; and it is really astonishing, when we reflect seriously, how little this avenue has been made use of. Learned Germans have written valuable books on "the Christian element in Plato ;" and it is a well-known fact that many of the most authoritative of the Greek fathers spoke of the philosophy of the Academy, in the very same language that St. Paul used in reference to Judaism, as being a schoolmaster to bring the Greek world to Christ. Nor does it require a very profound glance to see how Platonic philosophy and Christian faith, in their grand outlines, characteristic tendencies, and indwelling spirit, are identical; identical, at least, in so far as a thing of Hebrew, and anything of Hellenic origin, can be considered as presenting varieties of a common type. The prominence given to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul in all Plato's works, as contrasted with the position of the same doctrine in the systems of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers-the atmosphere of a pure and unworldly emotion, that, like airs from Paradise, floats through the blooming bowers of the Academy; the single-hearted dedication of the soul to truth, beauty, and holiness, as things essentially divine, for their own sake, to the utter contempt of all the inferior springs of action that lie in the words expediency, policy, utility, and worldly wisdom; these, with other characteristic features that lie on the very surface of the Platonic books, are things essentially Christian, and are felt by every person

2

1 Ueber das Christliche in Plato, by Ackermann; a book worth reading.

2 Clemens Alexandrinus says this distinctly.

of well cultivated moral sensibility, to be much more closely allied to the Gospel of John than they are to Aristotle, or John Locke, or Doctor Paley. Why then, we ask again, has this door of entrance to the inner sanctuary of Platonic meditation been so little taken advantage of in these lands? Plainly, so far as we can see, from the strange peculiarities of the English mind already alluded to, which at once robbed our scholarship of all capacity to develope the best elements. which it contained, and our theology of all desire to form any alliance with the highest forms of scholarship. Our universities were, and still are, very closely connected with our churches; and yet Plato, the element in purely academical learning most essentially Christian, was neglected; just because the tyrannical force of the strong English character, with its obstinate idiosyncrasy, impressed a stamp both upon our theology and our scholarship which made it impressible in the least possible degree by anything in the shape of Platonism. Our universities, moreover, worked themselves, by the neglect of generations, into a course of narrow, pedantic routine, removed from the healthy breadth and large generosity of the English character almost as far as it certainly was from a truly stimulant and expansive academic teaching. It may be a harsh thing to say, but it is certainly true, that the combined action of these restrictive influences, produced, at an epoch now happily passing away, a temper of mind in the English universities, which was just as far from relishing or comprehending the Gospel of John as it was from relishing or comprehending Plato. The peculiarly Platonic element in Christianity was ignored by whole parties and whole generations of churchmen, just as much as the Christian element in Plato was unknown to scholars, or at all events little appreciated. Instead of giving lectures on Plato, an English scholar began at an early period to authenticate his claims for a future bishopric, by editing, with new Latin notes and a sprinkling of fresh various readings, some declamatory play of Euripides, for the hundredth time; and a Christian bishop, when once made, would find the occupation of his prelatical leisure much sooner in quarreling with Hermann about the metrical division of a choral line in Aeschylus, than in showing how the philosophers in the Academy bore