p to folly unawares, and then,
although they do not attain to the highest bliss, yet if they have once
conquered they may be happy enough.

The language of the Meno and the Phaedo as well as of the Phaedrus
seems to show that at one time of his life Plato was quite serious in
maintaining a former state of existence. His mission was to realize the
abstract; in that, all good and truth, all the hopes of this and another
life seemed to centre. To him abstractions, as we call them, were
another kind of knowledge--an inner and unseen world, which seemed
to exist far more truly than the fleeting objects of sense which were
without him. When we are once able to imagine the intense power which
abstract ideas exercised over the mind of Plato, we see that there was
no more difficulty to him in realizing the eternal existence of them
and of the human minds which were associated with them, in the past and
future than in the present. The difficulty was not how they could exist,
but how they could fail to exist. In the attempt to regain this 'saving'
knowledge of the ideas, the sense was found to be as great an enemy as
the desires; and hence two things which to us seem quite distinct are
inextricably blended in the representation of Plato.

Thus far we may believe that Plato was serious in his conception of the
soul as a motive power, in his reminiscence of a former state of being,
in his elevation of the reason over sense and passion, and perhaps in
his doctrine of transmigration. Was he equally serious in the rest? For
example, are we to attribute his tripartite division of the soul to the
gods? Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men?
The latter is the more probable; for the horses of the gods are both
white, i.e. their every impulse is in harmony with reason; their
dualism, on the other hand, only carries out the figure of the chariot.
Is he serious, again, in regarding love as 'a madness'? That seems to
arise out of the antithesis to the former conception of love. At the
same time he appears to intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno,
and elsewhere, that there is a faculty in man, whether to be termed in
modern language genius, or inspiration, or imagination, or idealism,
or communion with God, which cannot be reduced to rule and measure.
Perhaps, too, he is ironically repeating the common language of mankind
about philosophy, and is turning their jest into a sort of earnest.
(Compare Phaedo, Symp