and the same time as an orthodox member of the Orphic com- 

 munity filled with pious faith, and as an eager champion of scien- 

 tific natural research, as the heir of venerable mystics and priests, 

 and as the immediate precursor of the atomic physicists". 1 



But if the influence of religious ideas and mystical concep- 

 tions may be seen upon these early thinkers, much more is it to 

 be traced in the philosophy of Plato. So much so is this the case 

 that Wundt has been able to say, "Religious and ethical problems 

 are not for him intellectual problems but on the contrary almost 

 every single question of knowledge becomes for him an ethical 

 and religious problem". 2 Throughout the Platonic dialogues 

 the influence of mysticism is exhibited. It seems almost to be 

 the warp and the woof of his philosophy. He was a religious 

 poet, who, like his predecessors, faced the problems of the universe 

 and tried to solve them, but the ethical and religious interests 

 dominated all his thinking. It is only necessary to recall, as an 

 example of his mystic tendencies, the familiar doctrine of Reminis- 

 cence, which occupies a prominent place in at least three of the 

 dialogues the Phaedrus, Meno and Phaedo. For Plato, all 

 education was a process of purification, a gradual recovery of what 

 at birth man had lost, an ever more perfect reminiscence of the 

 upper world. From this point of view, therefore, this mundane 

 existence and the human body are the soul's sad prison-house, 

 and it is the hope of the soul to escape from its bondage and return 

 again to its own abode. 



The mystical religious tendency, which plays such a role in 

 certain aspects of Plato's thought, was one of the characteristics 

 of subsequent speculation, and has never, indeed, been without 

 an advocate wherever speculation has operated relative to the 

 religious aspects of human life. Here it is necessary to leave this 

 mystical tendency, as Cornford has called it, in order to follow 

 the scientific tendency, which also was developing among the 

 Greeks. But it must not be supposed that with Plato the influence 

 of religious mysticism upon philosophy ceased. Rather, its effect 

 may be traced in, if not a more sublime and beautiful form, possibly 

 in an even more pronounced way upon many a succeeding thinker. 

 So marked has th's attitude been throughout the centuries that 



1 Greek Thinkers, Vol. I, P. 252. 



2 System der Philosophic, P. 5. 



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