He touches upon another question of great interest—the consciousness of evil—what in the Jewish Scriptures is called “eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” At the end of the narrative (272 B), the Eleatic asks his companion whether this life of innocence, or that which men live at present, is the better of the two. He wants to distinguish between the mere animal life of innocence, the “city of pigs,” as it is comically termed by Glaucon in the Republic, and the higher life of reason and philosophy. But as no one can determine the state of man in the world before the Fall, “the question must remain unanswered.” Similar questions have occupied the minds of theologians in later ages; but they can hardly be said to have found an answer. Professor Campbell well observes, that the general spirit of the myth may be summed up in the words of the Lysis (221): “If evil were to perish, should we hunger any more, or thirst any more, or have any similar sensations? Yet perhaps the question what will or will not be is a foolish one, for who can tell?” As in the “Theaetetus,” evil is supposed to continue—here, as the consequence of a former state of the world, a sort of mephitic vapour exhaling from some ancient chaos—there, as involved in the possibility of good, and incident to the mixed state of man.
Once more—and this is the point of connection with the rest of the dialogue—the myth is intended to bring out the difference between the ideal and the actual state of man. In all ages of the world men have dreamed of a state of perfection, which has been, and is to be, but never is, and seems to disappear under the necessary conditions of human society. The uselessness, the danger, the true value of such political ideals have often been discussed; youth is too ready to believe in them; age to disparage them. Plato’s prudens quaestio respecting the comparative happiness of men in this and in a former cycle of existence is intended to elicit this contrast between the golden age and “the life under Zeus” which is our own. To confuse the divine and human, or hastily apply one to the other, is a “tremendous error.” Of the ideal or divine government of the world we can form no true or adequate conception; and this our mixed state of life, in which we are partly left to ourselves, but not wholly deserted by the gods, may contain some higher elements of good and knowledge than could have existed in the days of innocence under the rule of Cronos. So we may venture slightly to enlarge a Platonic thought which admits of a further application to Christian theology. Here are suggested also the distinctions between God causing and permitting evil, and between his more and less immediate government of the world.
II. The dialectical interest of the “Statesman” seems to contend in Plato’s mind with the political; the dialogue might have been designated by two equally descriptive titles—either the “Statesman,” or “Concerning Method.” Dialectic, which in the earlier writings of Plato is a revival of the Socratic question and answer applied to definition, is now occupied with classification; there is nothing in which he takes greater delight than in processes of division (compare “Phaedrus” 266 B); he pursues them to a length out of proportion to his main subject, and appears to value them as a dialectical exercise, and for their own sake. A poetical vision of some order or hierarchy of ideas or sciences has already been floating before us in the “Symposium” and the Republic. And in the “Phaedrus” this aspect of dialectic is further sketched out, and the art of rhetoric is based on the division of the characters of mankind into their several
