THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

26 THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and
at all who
refuting, . . . like puppy-dogs who delight to tear and pull
come near them" (539). This dear delight, philosophy, means two things
chiefly: to think clearly, which is metaphysics; and to rule wisely, which
is politics. First then, our young Elite must learn to think clearly. For
that purpose they shall study the doctrine of Ideas.
But this famous doctrine of Ideas, embellished and obscured by the
fancy and poetry of Plato, is a discouraging maze to the modern student,
and must have offered another severe test to the survivors of many siftings.
The Idea of a thing might be the "general idea" of the .class to which
it belongs (the Idea of John, or Dick, or Harry, is Man) ; or it might be
the law or laws according to which the thing operates (the Idea of John
would be the reduction of all his behavior to "natural laws 5
'); or it
might be the perfect purpose and ideal towards which the thing and its
class may develop (the Idea of John is the John of Utopia) . Very prob-
ably the Idea is all of these idea, law and ideal. Behind the surface
phenomena and particulars which greet our senses, are generalizations,
regularities, and directions of development, unperceived by sensation
but conceived by reason and thought. These ideas, laws and ideals are
more permanent and therefore more "real" than the sense-perceived
particular things through which we conceive and deduce them : Man is
more permanent than Tom, or Dick, or Harry; this circle is born with
the movement of my pencil and dies under the attrition of my eraser, but
the conception Circle goes on forever. This tree stands, and that tree
falls; but the laws which determine what bodies shall fall, and when, and
how, were without beginning, are now, and ever shall be, without end.
There is, as the gentle Spinoza would say, a world of things perceived by
sense, and a world of laws inferred by thought; we do not see the law of
inverse squares but it is there, and everywhere; it was before anything
began, and will survive when all the world of things is a finished tale.
Here is a bridge: the sense perceives concrete and iron to a hundred
million tons; but the mathematician sees, with the mind's eye, the daring
and delicate adjustment of all this mass of material to the laws of mechanics
and mathematics and engineering, those laws according to which
all good bridges that are made must be made; if the mathematician be also
a poet, he will see these laws upholding the bridge; if the laws were vio-
lated the bridge would collapse into the stream beneath; the laws are the
God that holds up the bridge in the hollow of his hand. Aristotle hints
something of this when he says that by Ideas Plato meant what Pythagoras
meant by "number" when he taught that this is a world of numbers
(meaning presumably that the world is ruled by mathematical constancies
and regularities) . Plutarch tells us that according to Plato "God always
geometrizes"; or, as Spinoza puts the same thought, God and the uni-