MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 7 



tradition, and is still largely operative in our own day. 

 In thus allowing a legislative function to the good, Plato 

 produced a divorce between philosophy and science, 

 from which, in my opinion, both have suffered ever since 

 and are still suffering. The man of science, whatever his 

 hopes may be, must lay them aside while he studies 

 nature ; and the philosopher, if he is to achieve truth 

 must do the same. Ethical considerations can only 

 legitimately appear when the truth has been ascertained : 

 they can and should appear as determining our feeling 

 towards the truth, and our manner of ordering our lives 

 in view of the truth, but not as themselves dictating what 

 the truth is to be. 



There are passages in Plato among those which illus- 

 trate the scientific side of his mind where he seems 

 clearly aware of this. The most noteworthy is the one 

 in which Socrates, as a young man, is explaining the 

 theory of ideas to Parmenides. 



After Socrates has explained that there is an idea of 

 the good, but not of such things as hair and mud and 

 dirt, Parmenides advises him " not to despise even the 

 meanest things," and this advice shows the genuine 

 scientific temper. It is with this impartial temper that 

 the mystic's apparent insight into a higher reality and a 

 hidden good has to be combined if philosophy is to realise 

 its greatest possibilities. And it is failure in this respect 

 that has made so much of idealistic philosophy thin, 

 lifeless, and insubstantial. It is only in marriage with 

 the world that our ideals can bear fruit : divorced from 

 it, they remain barren. But marriage with the world is 

 not to be achieved by an ideal which shrinks from fact, 

 or demands in advance that the world shall conform to 

 its desires. 



Parmenides himself is the source of a peculiarly 



