owards the
life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed.

None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be
significant for him. He does not turn aside,--as some souls, intoxicated
with the Divine, have done,--from this world altogether.

Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this
world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he
says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out
of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there
what the universe really is (_Republic_, Book vi, _fin._; vii, _init._).
The very passage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end
of the _Republic_. Now the _Republic_ is a Utopia, and no one writes a
Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime
importance to man and helps him to advance.

Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of
history, as the modern faith in progress asserts. The life on earth, for
Plato, is like a school through which men pass and in which they may
learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not
that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope
for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better
and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at
one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and
then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it
gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and
from bad to worse, until at last God takes pity on it once more to save
it from utter destruction (_Polit._ 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of
cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this
feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply
rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and
there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have
sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it
they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his
sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of
spatial and temporal matter (_Theaet._ 176 A).

It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the individual soul
as learning through experience in its passage from one life to another,
Plato does not seem to have the idea of ma