CHAPTER VI.
THE MYTHS OF PLATO.
The consecration, and the poet's dream."
―Wordsworth.
"As Being is to Becoming," says Plato, "so Truth is to Faith." Where a man cannot prove, he must be content to believe; and the myths which the philosopher introduces here and there are guesses after this Truth which he believes and feels, but cannot precisely define. He is conscious that there are more things in heaven and earth than are "dreamed of in his philosophy," and that there are some unseen realities transcending all mortal experience; and so he builds up his doctrine of ideas, embodies them in circumstances, gives them "a local habitation and a name," and describes in detail the mysteries of the unknown future and the unrecorded past. These descriptions are not intended, he says, to be exactly true. "No man of sense ought to affirm that." All that he claims for them is verisimilitude. "We may venture to think without impropriety that something of the kind is true." Nor, again, is it desirable that
