THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

PLATO 27
versal laws of structure and operation are one and the same reality. To
Plato, as to Bertrand Russell, mathematics is therefore the indispensable
prelude to philosophy, and its highest form; over the doors of his Academy
Plato placed, Dantesquely, these words, "Let no man ignorant of geometry
enter here." 16
Without these Ideas these generalizations, regularities and ideals
the world would be to us as it must seem to the first-opened eyes of the
child, a mass of unclassified and unmeaning particulars of sensation; for
meaning can be given to things only by classifying and generalizing them,
by finding the laws of their beings, and the purposes and goals of their
activity. Or the world without Ideas would be a heap of book-titles fallen
haphazard out of the catalogue, as compared to the same titles arranged
in order according to their classes, their sequences and their purposes;
it would be the shadows in a cave as compared with the sunlit realities
without, which cast those fantastic and deceptive shadows within (514).
Therefore the essence of a higher education is the search for Ideas: for
generalizations, laws of sequence, and ideals of development; behind
things we must discover their relation and meaning, their mode and law
of operation, the function and ideal they serve or adumbrate; we must
classify and coordinate our sense experience in terms of law and purpose;
only for lack of this does the mind of the imbecile differ from the mind
of Caesar.
Well, after five years of training in this recondite doctrine of Ideas,
this art of perceiving significant forms and causal sequences and ideal
potentialities amid the welter and hazard of sensation; after five years of
training in the application of this principle to the behavior of men and
the conduct of states; after this long preparation from childhood through
youth and into the maturity of thirty-five; surely now these perfect products
are ready to assume the royal purple and the highest functions of
public life? surely they are at last the philosopher-kings who are to rule
and to free the human race?
Alas! not yet. Their education is still unfinished. For after all it has
been, in the main, a theoretical education: something else is needed. Let
these Ph.D.'s pass down now from the heights of philosophy into the
"cave" of the world of men and things; generalizations and abstractions
are worthless except they be tested by this concrete world; let our students
enter that world with no favor shown them; they shall compete with men
of business, with hard-headed grasping individualists, with men of brawn
and men of cunning; in this mart of strife they shall learn from the book
of life itself; they shall hurt their fingers and scratch their philosophic
"The details of the argument for the interpretation here given of the doctrine of
Ideas may be followed in D. G. Ritchie's Plato, Edinburgh, 1902, especially pp. 49
and 85.