THE ANTAGONISM OF HIGHER AND LOWER. I57 



the most enthusiastic monk. And yet they might 

 justly trace their intellectual descent from the most 

 Hellenic of Hellenic philosophers, and yet they are 

 connected by an unbroken chain of logical necessity 

 with the doctrine of Plato, And indeed we can 

 find in Plato both the source and the reason of 

 Neo-Platonic asceticism. For the Platonic system 

 is perhaps the most purely metaphysical the world 

 has ever seen. To Plato metaphysical " Ideas " 

 abstracted from phenomena were the only true 

 reality, while the phenomena of sense were real 

 only as partaking in them. The result is that the 

 connection of the Ideas with the Sensible becomes 

 entirely unintelligible (cf. iii. § 15, note) : the contrast 

 has become so sharp that union becomes inconceiv- 

 able, and Plato himself admits that he cannot explain 

 how sensible things partake of the Ideas. And, as 

 might have been expected, his metaphysical dualism 

 spreads from the theoretic to the practical sphere, 

 and in his latest and maturest work we find him 

 seriously propounding the theory of an evil World- 

 Soul, the action of which is to differentiate the 

 character of the imperfect world of Becoming from 

 the perfection of the world of Ideas.^ But from 



^ Laws X. 896D, 898c. It seems hopeless to deny this anti- 

 thesis of the phenomenal and the real on the a priori gxoMn^ that 

 Plato was too great a philosopher to be a dualist, and for this 

 reason to assume that a reconciliation of the Ideas and the Sensible 

 must be found somewhere in his system. For it is no derogation 

 to Plato's genius to say that he failed to achieve what no philo- 

 sopher has succeeded in achieving, viz., the impossible task of 

 reconciling the higher and the lower by abstract metaphysics. 

 And at all events Plato showed more discernment than his critics 

 in seeing where the real crux lay, and in perceiving that its solution 

 was, on his principles and by his method, impossible. And if a 

 way out of the difficulty was discovered by Plato, is it not astonish- 

 ing that all his successors should not only have failed to discover 



