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Contrast of Actual and Ideal.—The two stages of Greek thought which we have sketched did more than to readjust Greek life to deeper views of the State and the individual; of the good and of nature. The very challenge and process brought into explicit consciousness a new feature of the moral life, which is fundamental to true moral consciousness, viz., the factor of contrast between the actual and the ideal. We have seen that the clash of one-sided interests and political institutions and, in the case of Plato, the tragic execution of Socrates, obliged Plato and Aristotle to admit that the actual State did not subserve the real purpose which they were forced to seek in social organization. Both Plato and Aristotle, therefore, draw the picture of a State that should serve the complete purposes of human development. And again, in the individual life, both the conception of the development of man's highest possibilities and the conception of a measure or standard for the conflicting desires and purposes lead on to a conception which shall embody not merely the existing status but the goal of yet unrealized purpose.

The Ideal as the True Reality.—Various qualities and aspirations are embodied by Plato in this conception, and with characteristic Greek genius he has given to this conception of the ideal almost as concrete and definite a form as the Greek sculptor of Apollo gave to his ideal of light and clarity, or the sculptor of Aphrodite to the conception of grace. As contrasted with the flux of transient emotions, or the uncertain play of half-comprehended or futile goods, this ideal good is conceived as eternal, unchanging, ever the same. It is superhuman and divine. As contrasted with various particular and partial goods on which the sons of men fix their affections, it is the one universal good which is valid for all men everywhere and forever. In his effort to find suitable imagery for this conception, Plato was aided by the religious conceptions of the Orphic and Pythagorean societies, which had emphasized the pre-existence and future existence of the soul, and its distinction from the body. In its previous life, said Plato, the soul has had visions of a beauty, a truth, and a goodness of which this life affords no adequate examples. And with this memory within it of what it has looked upon before, it judges the imperfect and finite goods of this present world and longs to fly away again and be with God. This thought of contrast between ideal and actual, to which Plato in some of his writings gave the turn of a contrast between soul and body, passed on with increased emphasis into Stoic and later Platonist schools, and furnished a philosophic basis for the dualism and asceticism which is found in Hellenistic and mediæval morality.

Ethical Significance.—While the true ethical contrast between the actual and the ideal was thus shifted over into a metaphysical contrast between soul and body, or between what is fixed and what is changing, the fundamental thought is highly significant, for it merely symbolizes in objective form the characteristic of every moral judgment, viz., the testing and valuing of an act by some standard, and what is even more important, the forming of a standard by which to do the testing. Even Aristotle, who is frequently regarded as the mere describer of what is, rather than the idealistic portrayer of what ought to be, is no less insistent upon the significance of the ideal. In fact, his isolation of reflection or theoria from the civic virtues was used by the mediæval church in its idealization of the "contemplative life." Like Plato, he conceives the ideal as a divine element in human nature:

"Nevertheless, instead of listening to those who advise us as men and mortals not to lift our thoughts above what is human and mortal, we ought rather, as far as possible, to put off our mortality and make every effort to live in the exercise of the highest of our faculties; for though it be but a small part of us, yet in power and value it far surpasses all the rest."[81]