others, became dominated by love of power, which led them to appalling cruelties and
persecutions, nominally for the sake of religion. In our own day, Hitler belongs to this type; by all
accounts, the pleasures of sense are of very little importance to him. Liberation from the tyranny
of the body contributes to greatness, but just as much to greatness in sin as to greatness in virtue.
This, however, is a digression, from which we must return to Socrates.
We come now to the intellectual aspect of the religion which Plato (rightly or wrongly) attributes
to Socrates. We are told that the body is a hindrance in the acquisition of knowledge, and that
sight and hearing are inaccurate witnesses: true existence, if revealed to the soul at all, is revealed
in thought, not in sense. Let us consider, for a moment, the implications of this doctrine. It
involves a complete rejection of empirical knowledge, including all history and geography. We
cannot know that there was such a place as Athens, or such a man as Socrates; his death, and his
courage in dying, belong to the world of appearance. It is only through sight and hearing that we
know anything about all this, and the true philosopher ignores sight and hearing. What, then, is
left to him? First, logic and mathematics; but these are hypothetical, and do not justify any
categorical assertion about the real world. The next step--and this is the crucial one --depends
upon the idea of the good. Having arrived at this idea, the philosopher is supposed to know that
the good is the real, and thus to be able to infer that the world of ideas is the real world. Later
philosophers had arguments to prove the identity of the real and the good, but Plato seems to have
assumed it as self-evident. If we wish to understand him, we must, hypothetically, suppose this
assumption justified.
Thought is best, Socrates says, when the mind is gathered into itself, and is not troubled by sounds
or sights or pain or pleasure, but takes leave of the body and aspires after true being; "and in this
the philosopher dishonours the body." From this point, Socratesr goes on to the ideas or forms or
essences. There is absolute justice, absolute beauty, and absolute good, but they are not visible to
the eye. "And I speak not of these alone, but of absolute greatness, and health, and strength, and of
the essence or true nature of everything." All these are only to be seen by intellectual vision.
Therefore while we are in