ce he
has found by the analysis of the soul that they are concerned with the
inferior faculties. He means to say that the higher faculties have to do
with universals, the lower with particulars of sense. The poets are on
a level with their own age, but not on a level with Socrates and Plato;
and he was well aware that Homer and Hesiod could not be made a rule of
life by any process of legitimate interpretation; his ironical use of
them is in fact a denial of their authority; he saw, too, that the
poets were not critics--as he says in the Apology, 'Any one was a better
interpreter of their writings than they were themselves. He himself
ceased to be a poet when he became a disciple of Socrates; though, as he
tells us of Solon, 'he might have been one of the greatest of them, if
he had not been deterred by other pursuits' (Tim.) Thus from many points
of view there is an antagonism between Plato and the poets, which was
foreshadowed to him in the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry.
The poets, as he says in the Protagoras, were the Sophists of their day;
and his dislike of the one class is reflected on the other. He regards
them both as the enemies of reasoning and abstraction, though in the
case of Euripides more with reference to his immoral sentiments about
tyrants and the like. For Plato is the prophet who 'came into the world
to convince men'--first of the fallibility of sense and opinion, and
secondly of the reality of abstract ideas. Whatever strangeness there
may be in modern times in opposing philosophy to poetry, which to us
seem to have so many elements in common, the strangeness will disappear
if we conceive of poetry as allied to sense, and of philosophy as
equivalent to thought and abstraction. Unfortunately the very word
'idea,' which to Plato is expressive of the most real of all things, is
associated in our minds with an element of subjectiveness and unreality.
We may note also how he differs from Aristotle who declares poetry to
be truer than history, for the opposite reason, because it is concerned
with universals, not like history, with particulars (Poet).

The things which are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things which
are unseen--they are equally opposed in Plato to universals and ideas.
To him all particulars appear to be floating about in a world of sense;
they have a taint of error or even of evil. There is no difficulty in
seeing that this is an illusion; for there is no more error or v