nothing compared to the joy there would be in
contemplating their goodness.

5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the hideous
imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis spoke of a Fall. Plato, in
his own way, speaks of a Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in
an Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow--he does not
say exactly how--influencing the structure of things in this world. But
he holds that on earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium
which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is the medium of
Space and Time, and therefore the medium of history--and therefore
history is always and inevitably a record of failure. 'While we are in
the body,' Plato writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its
evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'[9] 'The body is a
tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current phrase.

This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man
might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written:

'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the _Republic_, 'as he
appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been
cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned,
for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and
strange things had grown round him, shells and seaweed and stones, so
that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to
us now encompassed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we
ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We
should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what
company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and
Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed
after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of
the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real
nature.' (_Republic_, 611.)

Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The
Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with
no effect on the rest of the universe (_Sophist_, 248, 249); it is a
living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as
glorious as possible (_Tim._ 29 D). There is no envy, Plato says, in the
Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only
it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is t