"INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS. ">

INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.

The Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the
exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There
are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in
the Sophist; the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and
institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws;
as works of art, the Symposium and the Protagoras are of higher
excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato has the same largeness
of view and the same perfection of style; no other shows an equal
knowledge of the world, or contains more of those thoughts which
are new as well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere
in Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater wealth of humour or
imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of his writings
is the attempt made to interweave life and speculation, or to
connect politics with philosophy. The Republic is the centre around
which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here philosophy reaches
the highest point (cp, especially in Books V, VI, VII) to which
ancient thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon
among the moderns, was the first who conceived a method of
knowledge, although neither of them always distinguished the bare
outline or form from the substance of truth; and both of them had
to be content with an abstraction of science which was not yet
realized. He was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world
has seen; and in him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the
germs of future knowledge are contained. The sciences of logic and
psychology, which have supplied so many instruments of thought to
after-ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato. The
principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of
arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and
accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between
causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the
rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and
desires into necessary and unnecessary—these and other great
forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and
were probably first invented by Plato. The greatest of all logical
truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to
lose sight, the difference between words and things, has been most
strenuously insisted on by him (cp. Rep.; Polit.; Cratyl), although
he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own writings
(e.g. Rep.). But he does not bind up truth in logical
formulae,— logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and the
science which he imagines to ‘contemplate all truth and all
existence’ is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism which
Aristotle claims to have discovered (Soph. Elenchi).

Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part
of a still larger design which was to have included an ideal
history of Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy.
The fragment of the Critias has given birth to a world-famous
fiction, second only in importance to the tale of Troy and the
legend of Arthur; and is said as a fact to have inspired some of
the early navigators of the sixteenth century. This mythical tale,
of which the subject was a history of the wars of the Athenians
against the Island of Atlantis, is supposed to be founded upon an
unfinished poem of Solon, to which it would have stood in the same
relation as the writings of the logographers to the poems of Homer.
It would have told of a struggle for Liberty (cp. Tim.), intended
to represent the conflict of Persia and Hellas. We may judge from
the noble commencement of the Timaeus, from the fragment of the
Critias itself, and from the third book of the Laws, in what manner
Plato would have treated this high argument. We can only guess why
the great design was abandoned; perhaps because Plato became
sensible of some incongruity in a fictitious history, or because he
had lost his interest in it, or because advancing years forbade the
completion of it; and we may please ourselves with the fancy that
had this imaginary narrative ever been finished, we should have
found Plato himself sympathising with the struggle for Hellenic
independence (cp. Laws), singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon
and Salamis, perhaps making the reflection of Herodotus where he
contemplates the growth of the Athenian empire—‘How
brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so
far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness!’ or,
more probably, attributing the victory to the ancient good order of
Athens and to the favor of Apollo and Athene (cp. Introd. to
Critias).

Again, Plato may be regarded as the ‘captain’
(‘arhchegoz’) or leader of a goodly band of followers;
for in the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero’s
De Republica, of St. Augustine’s City of God, of the Utopia
of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary States
which are framed upon the same model. The extent to which Aristotle
or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the Politics has
been little recognised, and the recognition is the more necessary
because it is not made by Aristotle himself. The two philosophers
had more in common than they were conscious of; and probably some
elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle. In English
philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only in the
works of the Cambridge Platonists, but in great original writers
like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas. That there is a
truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears witness to
herself, is a conviction which in our own generation has been
enthusiastically asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground. Of the
Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the
world Plato has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato
is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of
Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the
legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation
of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly impressed with the
unity of knowledge; in the early Church he exercised a real
influence on theology, and at the Revival of Literature on
politics. Even the fragments of his words when ‘repeated at
second-hand’ (Symp.) have in all ages ravished the hearts of
men, who have seen reflected in them their own higher nature. He is
the father of idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature.
And many of the latest conceptions of modern thinkers and
statesmen, such as the unity of knowledge, the reign of law, and
the equality of the sexes, have been anticipated in a dream by
him.

The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the
nature of which is first hinted at by Cephalus, the just and
blameless old man—then discussed on the basis of proverbial
morality by Socrates and Polemarchus— then caricatured by
Thrasymachus and partially explained by Socrates— reduced to
an abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus, and having become
invisible in the individual reappears at length in the ideal State
which is constructed by Socrates. The first care of the rulers is
to be education, of which an outline is drawn after the old
Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and
morality, and more simplicity in music and gymnastic, a manlier
strain of poetry, and greater harmony of the individual and the
State. We are thus led on to the conception of a higher State, in
which ‘no man calls anything his own,’ and in which
there is neither ‘marrying nor giving in marriage,’ and
‘kings are philosophers’ and ‘philosophers are
kings;’ and there is another and higher education,
intellectual as well as moral and religious, of science as well as
of art, and not of youth only but of the whole of life. Such a
State is hardly to be realized in this world and quickly
degenerates. To the perfect ideal succeeds the government of the
soldier and the lover of honour, this again declining into
democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but regular
order having not much resemblance to the actual facts. When
‘the wheel has come full circle’ we do not begin again
with a new period of human life; but we have passed from the best
to the worst, and there we end. The subject is then changed and the
old quarrel of poetry and philosophy which had been more lightly
treated in the earlier books of the Republic is now resumed and
fought out to a conclusion. Poetry is discovered to be an imitation
thrice removed from the truth, and Homer, as well as the dramatic
poets, having been condemned as an imitator, is sent into
banishment along with them. And the idea of the State is
supplemented by the revelation of a future life.

The division into books, like all similar divisions (Cp. Sir
G.C. Lewis in the Classical Museum.), is probably later than the
age of Plato. The natural divisions are five in number;—(1)
Book I and the first half of Book II down to the paragraph
beginning, ‘I had always admired the genius of Glaucon and
Adeimantus,’ which is introductory; the first book containing
a refutation of the popular and sophistical notions of justice, and
concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues, without arriving at
any definite result. To this is appended a restatement of the
nature of justice according to common opinion, and an answer is
demanded to the question—What is justice, stripped of
appearances? The second division (2) includes the remainder of the
second and the whole of the third and fourth books, which are
mainly occupied with the construction of the first State and the
first education. The third division (3) consists of the fifth,
sixth, and seventh books, in which philosophy rather than justice
is the subject of enquiry, and the second State is constructed on
principles of communism and ruled by philosophers, and the
contemplation of the idea of good takes the place of the social and
political virtues. In the eighth and ninth books (4) the
perversions of States and of the individuals who correspond to them
are reviewed in succession; and the nature of pleasure and the
principle of tyranny are further analysed in the individual man.
The tenth book (5) is the conclusion of the whole, in which the
relations of philosophy to poetry are finally determined, and the
happiness of the citizens in this life, which has now been assured,
is crowned by the vision of another.

Or a more general division into two parts may be adopted; the
first (Books I — IV) containing the description of a State
framed generally in accordance with Hellenic notions of religion
and morality, while in the second (Books V — X) the Hellenic
State is transformed into an ideal kingdom of philosophy, of which
all other governments are the perversions. These two points of view
are really opposed, and the opposition is only veiled by the genius
of Plato. The Republic, like the Phaedrus (see Introduction to
Phaedrus), is an imperfect whole; the higher light of philosophy
breaks through the regularity of the Hellenic temple, which at last
fades away into the heavens. Whether this imperfection of structure
arises from an enlargement of the plan; or from the imperfect
reconcilement in the writer’s own mind of the struggling
elements of thought which are now first brought together by him;
or, perhaps, from the composition of the work at different
times—are questions, like the similar question about the
Iliad and the Odyssey, which are worth asking, but which cannot
have a distinct answer. In the age of Plato there was no regular
mode of publication, and an author would have the less scruple in
altering or adding to a work which was known only to a few of his
friends. There is no absurdity in supposing that he may have laid
his labours aside for a time, or turned from one work to another;
and such interruptions would be more likely to occur in the case of
a long than of a short writing. In all attempts to determine the
chronological order of the Platonic writings on internal evidence,
this uncertainty about any single Dialogue being composed at one
time is a disturbing element, which must be admitted to affect
longer works, such as the Republic and the Laws, more than shorter
ones. But, on the other hand, the seeming discrepancies of the
Republic may only arise out of the discordant elements which the
philosopher has attempted to unite in a single whole, perhaps
without being himself able to recognise the inconsistency which is
obvious to us. For there is a judgment of after ages which few
great writers have ever been able to anticipate for themselves.
They do not perceive the want of connexion in their own writings,
or the gaps in their systems which are visible enough to those who
come after them. In the beginnings of literature and philosophy,
amid the first efforts of thought and language, more
inconsistencies occur than now, when the paths of speculation are
well worn and the meaning of words precisely defined. For
consistency, too, is the growth of time; and some of the greatest
creations of the human mind have been wanting in unity. Tried by
this test, several of the Platonic Dialogues, according to our
modern ideas, appear to be defective, but the deficiency is no
proof that they were composed at different times or by different
hands. And the supposition that the Republic was written
uninterruptedly and by a continuous effort is in some degree
confirmed by the numerous references from one part of the work to
another.

The second title, ‘Concerning Justice,’ is not the
one by which the Republic is quoted, either by Aristotle or
generally in antiquity, and, like the other second titles of the
Platonic Dialogues, may therefore be assumed to be of later date.
Morgenstern and others have asked whether the definition of
justice, which is the professed aim, or the construction of the
State is the principal argument of the work. The answer is, that
the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same truth; for
justice is the order of the State, and the State is the visible
embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society. The
one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal of
the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair body. In
Hegelian phraseology the state is the reality of which justice is
the idea. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of God
is within, and yet developes into a Church or external kingdom;
‘the house not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens,’ is reduced to the proportions of an earthly
building. Or, to use a Platonic image, justice and the State are
the warp and the woof which run through the whole texture. And when
the constitution of the State is completed, the conception of
justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the same or different
names throughout the work, both as the inner law of the individual
soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and punishments in
another life. The virtues are based on justice, of which common
honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice is based
on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is
reflected both in the institutions of states and in motions of the
heavenly bodies (cp. Tim.). The Timaeus, which takes up the
political rather than the ethical side of the Republic, and is
chiefly occupied with hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet
contains many indications that the same law is supposed to reign
over the State, over nature, and over man.

Too much, however, has been made of this question both in
ancient and modern times. There is a stage of criticism in which
all works, whether of nature or of art, are referred to design. Now
in ancient writings, and indeed in literature generally, there
remains often a large element which was not comprehended in the
original design. For the plan grows under the author’s hand;
new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked
out the argument to the end before he begins. The reader who seeks
to find some one idea under which the whole may be conceived, must
necessarily seize on the vaguest and most general. Thus Stallbaum,
who is dissatisfied with the ordinary explanations of the argument
of the Republic, imagines himself to have found the true argument
‘in the representation of human life in a State perfected by
justice, and governed according to the idea of good.’ There
may be some use in such general descriptions, but they can hardly
be said to express the design of the writer. The truth is, that we
may as well speak of many designs as of one; nor need anything be
excluded from the plan of a great work to which the mind is
naturally led by the association of ideas, and which does not
interfere with the general purpose. What kind or degree of unity is
to be sought after in a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry,
in prose, is a problem which has to be determined relatively to the
subject-matter. To Plato himself, the enquiry ‘what was the
intention of the writer,’ or ‘what was the principal
argument of the Republic’ would have been hardly
intelligible, and therefore had better be at once dismissed (cp.
the Introduction to the Phaedrus).

Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths
which, to Plato’s own mind, are most naturally represented in
the form of the State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of
Messiah, or ‘the day of the Lord,’ or the suffering
Servant or people of God, or the ‘Sun of righteousness with
healing in his wings’ only convey, to us at least, their
great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals to
us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of
good—like the sun in the visible world;—about human
perfection, which is justice—about education beginning in
youth and continuing in later years—about poets and sophists
and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind
—about ‘the world’ which is the embodiment of
them—about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is
laid up in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life. No such
inspired creation is at unity with itself, any more than the clouds
of heaven when the sun pierces through them. Every shade of light
and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is
allowable in a work of philosophical imagination. It is not all on
the same plane; it easily passes from ideas to myths and fancies,
from facts to figures of speech. It is not prose but poetry, at
least a great part of it, and ought not to be judged by the rules
of logic or the probabilities of history. The writer is not
fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole; they take possession
of him and are too much for him. We have no need therefore to
discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable
or not, or whether the outward form or the inward life came first
into the mind of the writer. For the practicability of his ideas
has nothing to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to
which he attains may be truly said to bear the greatest
‘marks of design’— justice more than the external
frame-work of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The
great science of dialectic or the organisation of ideas has no real
content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the
higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and
all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that
Plato reaches the ‘summit of speculation,’ and these,
although they fail to satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker,
may therefore be regarded as the most important, as they are also
the most original, portions of the work.

It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which
has been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which
the conversation was held (the year 411 B.C. which is proposed by
him will do as well as any other); for a writer of fiction, and
especially a writer who, like Plato, is notoriously careless of
chronology (cp. Rep., Symp., etc.), only aims at general
probability. Whether all the persons mentioned in the Republic
could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty which would
have occurred to an Athenian reading the work forty years later, or
to Plato himself at the time of writing (any more than to
Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas); and need not greatly
trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having no answer
‘which is still worth asking,’ because the
investigation shows that we cannot argue historically from the
dates in Plato; it would be useless therefore to waste time in
inventing far-fetched reconcilements of them in order to avoid
chronological difficulties, such, for example, as the conjecture of
C.F. Hermann, that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the brothers but
the uncles of Plato (cp. Apol.), or the fancy of Stallbaum that
Plato intentionally left anachronisms indicating the dates at which
some of his Dialogues were written.

The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus,
Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus.
Cephalus appears in the introduction only, Polemarchus drops at the
end of the first argument, and Thrasymachus is reduced to silence
at the close of the first book. The main discussion is carried on
by Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Among the company are Lysias
(the orator) and Euthydemus, the sons of Cephalus and brothers of
Polemarchus, an unknown Charmantides—these are mute auditors;
also there is Cleitophon, who once interrupts, where, as in the
Dialogue which bears his name, he appears as the friend and ally of
Thrasymachus.

Cephalus, the patriarch of the house, has been appropriately
engaged in offering a sacrifice. He is the pattern of an old man
who has almost done with life, and is at peace with himself and
with all mankind. He feels that he is drawing nearer to the world
below, and seems to linger around the memory of the past. He is
eager that Socrates should come to visit him, fond of the poetry of
the last generation, happy in the consciousness of a well-spent
life, glad at having escaped from the tyranny of youthful lusts.
His love of conversation, his affection, his indifference to
riches, even his garrulity, are interesting traits of character. He
is not one of those who have nothing to say, because their whole
mind has been absorbed in making money. Yet he acknowledges that
riches have the advantage of placing men above the temptation to
dishonesty or falsehood. The respectful attention shown to him by
Socrates, whose love of conversation, no less than the mission
imposed upon him by the Oracle, leads him to ask questions of all
men, young and old alike, should also be noted. Who better suited
to raise the question of justice than Cephalus, whose life might
seem to be the expression of it? The moderation with which old age
is pictured by Cephalus as a very tolerable portion of existence is
characteristic, not only of him, but of Greek feeling generally,
and contrasts with the exaggeration of Cicero in the De Senectute.
The evening of life is described by Plato in the most expressive
manner, yet with the fewest possible touches. As Cicero remarks
(Ep. ad Attic.), the aged Cephalus would have been out of place in
the discussion which follows, and which he could neither have
understood nor taken part in without a violation of dramatic
propriety (cp. Lysimachus in the Laches).

His ‘son and heir’ Polemarchus has the frankness and
impetuousness of youth; he is for detaining Socrates by force in
the opening scene, and will not ‘let him off’ on the
subject of women and children. Like Cephalus, he is limited in his
point of view, and represents the proverbial stage of morality
which has rules of life rather than principles; and he quotes
Simonides (cp. Aristoph. Clouds) as his father had quoted Pindar.
But after this he has no more to say; the answers which he makes
are only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates. He has not
yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glaucon and
Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them;
he belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is
incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a
degree that he does not know what he is saying. He is made to admit
that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the analogy of
the arts. From his brother Lysias (contra Eratosth.) we learn that
he fell a victim to the Thirty Tyrants, but no allusion is here
made to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus and his
family were of Syracusan origin, and had migrated from Thurii to
Athens.

The ‘Chalcedonian giant,’ Thrasymachus, of whom we
have already heard in the Phaedrus, is the personification of the
Sophists, according to Plato’s conception of them, in some of
their worst characteristics. He is vain and blustering, refusing to
discourse unless he is paid, fond of making an oration, and hoping
thereby to escape the inevitable Socrates; but a mere child in
argument, and unable to foresee that the next ‘move’
(to use a Platonic expression) will ‘shut him up.’ He
has reached the stage of framing general notions, and in this
respect is in advance of Cephalus and Polemarchus. But he is
incapable of defending them in a discussion, and vainly tries to
cover his confusion with banter and insolence. Whether such
doctrines as are attributed to him by Plato were really held either
by him or by any other Sophist is uncertain; in the infancy of
philosophy serious errors about morality might easily grow
up—they are certainly put into the mouths of speakers in
Thucydides; but we are concerned at present with Plato’s
description of him, and not with the historical reality. The
inequality of the contest adds greatly to the humour of the scene.
The pompous and empty Sophist is utterly helpless in the hands of
the great master of dialectic, who knows how to touch all the
springs of vanity and weakness in him. He is greatly irritated by
the irony of Socrates, but his noisy and imbecile rage only lays
him more and more open to the thrusts of his assailant. His
determination to cram down their throats, or put ‘bodily into
their souls’ his own words, elicits a cry of horror from
Socrates. The state of his temper is quite as worthy of remark as
the process of the argument. Nothing is more amusing than his
complete submission when he has been once thoroughly beaten. At
first he seems to continue the discussion with reluctance, but soon
with apparent good-will, and he even testifies his interest at a
later stage by one or two occasional remarks. When attacked by
Glaucon he is humorously protected by Socrates ‘as one who
has never been his enemy and is now his friend.’ From Cicero
and Quintilian and from Aristotle’s Rhetoric we learn that
the Sophist whom Plato has made so ridiculous was a man of note
whose writings were preserved in later ages. The play on his name
which was made by his contemporary Herodicus (Aris. Rhet.),
‘thou wast ever bold in battle,’ seems to show that the
description of him is not devoid of verisimilitude.

When Thrasymachus has been silenced, the two principal
respondents, Glaucon and Adeimantus, appear on the scene: here, as
in Greek tragedy (cp. Introd. to Phaedo), three actors are
introduced. At first sight the two sons of Ariston may seem to wear
a family likeness, like the two friends Simmias and Cebes in the
Phaedo. But on a nearer examination of them the similarity
vanishes, and they are seen to be distinct characters. Glaucon is
the impetuous youth who can ‘just never have enough of
fechting’ (cp. the character of him in Xen. Mem. iii. 6); the
man of pleasure who is acquainted with the mysteries of love; the
‘juvenis qui gaudet canibus,’ and who improves the
breed of animals; the lover of art and music who has all the
experiences of youthful life. He is full of quickness and
penetration, piercing easily below the clumsy platitudes of
Thrasymachus to the real difficulty; he turns out to the light the
seamy side of human life, and yet does not lose faith in the just
and true. It is Glaucon who seizes what may be termed the ludicrous
relation of the philosopher to the world, to whom a state of
simplicity is ‘a city of pigs,’ who is always prepared
with a jest when the argument offers him an opportunity, and who is
ever ready to second the humour of Socrates and to appreciate the
ridiculous, whether in the connoisseurs of music, or in the lovers
of theatricals, or in the fantastic behaviour of the citizens of
democracy. His weaknesses are several times alluded to by Socrates,
who, however, will not allow him to be attacked by his brother
Adeimantus. He is a soldier, and, like Adeimantus, has been
distinguished at the battle of Megara (anno 456?)…The character
of Adeimantus is deeper and graver, and the profounder objections
are commonly put into his mouth. Glaucon is more demonstrative, and
generally opens the game. Adeimantus pursues the argument further.
Glaucon has more of the liveliness and quick sympathy of youth;
Adeimantus has the maturer judgment of a grown-up man of the world.
In the second book, when Glaucon insists that justice and injustice
shall be considered without regard to their consequences,
Adeimantus remarks that they are regarded by mankind in general
only for the sake of their consequences; and in a similar vein of
reflection he urges at the beginning of the fourth book that
Socrates fails in making his citizens happy, and is answered that
happiness is not the first but the second thing, not the direct aim
but the indirect consequence of the good government of a State. In
the discussion about religion and mythology, Adeimantus is the
respondent, but Glaucon breaks in with a slight jest, and carries
on the conversation in a lighter tone about music and gymnastic to
the end of the book. It is Adeimantus again who volunteers the
criticism of common sense on the Socratic method of argument, and
who refuses to let Socrates pass lightly over the question of women
and children. It is Adeimantus who is the respondent in the more
argumentative, as Glaucon in the lighter and more imaginative
portions of the Dialogue. For example, throughout the greater part
of the sixth book, the causes of the corruption of philosophy and
the conception of the idea of good are discussed with Adeimantus.
Glaucon resumes his place of principal respondent; but he has a
difficulty in apprehending the higher education of Socrates, and
makes some false hits in the course of the discussion. Once more
Adeimantus returns with the allusion to his brother Glaucon whom he
compares to the contentious State; in the next book he is again
superseded, and Glaucon continues to the end.

Thus in a succession of characters Plato represents the
successive stages of morality, beginning with the Athenian
gentleman of the olden time, who is followed by the practical man
of that day regulating his life by proverbs and saws; to him

succeeds the wild generalization of the Sophists, and lastly come
the young disciples of the great teacher, who know the sophistical
arguments but will not be convinced by them, and desire to go
deeper into the nature of things. These too, like Cephalus,
Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, are clearly distinguished from one
another. Neither in the Republic, nor in any other Dialogue of
Plato, is a single character repeated.

The delineation of Socrates in the Republic is not wholly
consistent. In the first book we have more of the real Socrates,
such as he is depicted in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, in the
earliest Dialogues of Plato, and in the Apology. He is ironical,
provoking, questioning, the old enemy of the Sophists, ready to put
on the mask of Silenus as well as to argue seriously. But in the
sixth book his enmity towards the Sophists abates; he acknowledges
that they are the representatives rather than the corrupters of the
world. He also becomes more dogmatic and constructive, passing
beyond the range either of the political or the speculative ideas
of the real Socrates. In one passage Plato himself seems to
intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who had passed
his whole life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and not to be
always repeating the notions of other men. There is no evidence
that either the idea of good or the conception of a perfect state
were comprehended in the Socratic teaching, though he certainly
dwelt on the nature of the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen.
Mem.; Phaedo); and a deep thinker like him, in his thirty or forty
years of public teaching, could hardly have failed to touch on the
nature of family relations, for which there is also some positive
evidence in the Memorabilia (Mem.) The Socratic method is nominally
retained; and every inference is either put into the mouth of the
respondent or represented as the common discovery of him and
Socrates. But any one can see that this is a mere form, of which
the affectation grows wearisome as the work advances. The method of
enquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by the help
of interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from various points
of view. The nature of the process is truly characterized by
Glaucon, when he describes himself as a companion who is not good
for much in an investigation, but can see what he is shown, and
may, perhaps, give the answer to a question more fluently than
another.

Neither can we be absolutely certain that Socrates himself
taught the immortality of the soul, which is unknown to his
disciple Glaucon in the Republic (cp. Apol.); nor is there any
reason to suppose that he used myths or revelations of another
world as a vehicle of instruction, or that he would have banished
poetry or have denounced the Greek mythology. His favorite oath is
retained, and a slight mention is made of the daemonium, or
internal sign, which is alluded to by Socrates as a phenomenon
peculiar to himself. A real element of Socratic teaching, which is
more prominent in the Republic than in any of the other Dialogues
of Plato, is the use of example and illustration (Greek):
‘Let us apply the test of common instances.’
‘You,’ says Adeimantus, ironically, in the sixth book,
‘are so unaccustomed to speak in images.’ And this use
of examples or images, though truly Socratic in origin, is enlarged
by the genius of Plato into the form of an allegory or parable,
which embodies in the concrete what has been already described, or
is about to be described, in the abstract. Thus the figure of the
cave in Book VII is a recapitulation of the divisions of knowledge
in Book VI. The composite animal in Book IX is an allegory of the
parts of the soul. The noble captain and the ship and the true
pilot in Book VI are a figure of the relation of the people to the
philosophers in the State which has been described. Other figures,
such as the dog, or the marriage of the portionless maiden, or the
drones and wasps in the eighth and ninth books, also form links of
connexion in long passages, or are used to recall previous
discussions.

Plato is most true to the character of his master when he
describes him as ‘not of this world.’ And with this
representation of him the ideal state and the other paradoxes of
the Republic are quite in accordance, though they cannot be shown
to have been speculations of Socrates. To him, as to other great
teachers both philosophical and religious, when they looked upward,
the world seemed to be the embodiment of error and evil. The common
sense of mankind has revolted against this view, or has only
partially admitted it. And even in Socrates himself the sterner
judgement of the multitude at times passes into a sort of ironical
pity or love. Men in general are incapable of philosophy, and are
therefore at enmity with the philosopher; but their
misunderstanding of him is unavoidable: for they have never seen
him as he truly is in his own image; they are only acquainted with
artificial systems possessing no native force of truth— words
which admit of many applications. Their leaders have nothing to
measure with, and are therefore ignorant of their own stature. But
they are to be pitied or laughed at, not to be quarrelled with;
they mean well with their nostrums, if they could only learn that
they are cutting off a Hydra’s head. This moderation towards
those who are in error is one of the most characteristic features
of Socrates in the Republic. In all the different representations
of Socrates, whether of Xenophon or Plato, and amid the differences
of the earlier or later Dialogues, he always retains the character
of the unwearied and disinterested seeker after truth, without
which he would have ceased to be Socrates.

Leaving the characters we may now analyse the contents of the
Republic, and then proceed to consider (1) The general aspects of
this Hellenic ideal of the State, (2) The modern lights in which

the thoughts of Plato may be read.

BOOK I.

The Republic opens with a truly Greek scene—a festival in
honour of the goddess Bendis which is held in the Piraeus; to this
is added the promise of an equestrian torch-race in the evening.
The whole work is supposed to be recited by Socrates on the day
after the festival to a small party, consisting of Critias,
Timaeus, Hermocrates, and another; this we learn from the first
words of the Timaeus.

When the rhetorical advantage of reciting the Dialogue has been
gained, the attention is not distracted by any reference to the
audience; nor is the reader further reminded of the extraordinary
length of the narrative. Of the numerous company, three only take
any serious part in the discussion; nor are we informed whether in
the evening they went to the torch-race, or talked, as in the
Symposium, through the night. The manner in which the conversation
has arisen is described as follows:—Socrates and his
companion Glaucon are about to leave the festival when they are
detained by a message from Polemarchus, who speedily appears
accompanied by Adeimantus, the brother of Glaucon, and with playful
violence compels them to remain, promising them not only the
torch-race, but the pleasure of conversation with the young, which
to Socrates is a far greater attraction. They return to the house
of Cephalus, Polemarchus’ father, now in extreme old age, who
is found sitting upon a cushioned seat crowned for a sacrifice.
‘You should come to me oftener, Socrates, for I am too old to
go to you; and at my time of life, having lost other pleasures, I
care the more for conversation.’ Socrates asks him what he
thinks of age, to which the old man replies, that the sorrows and
discontents of age are to be attributed to the tempers of men, and
that age is a time of peace in which the tyranny of the passions is
no longer felt. Yes, replies Socrates, but the world will say,
Cephalus, that you are happy in old age because you are rich.
‘And there is something in what they say, Socrates, but not
so much as they imagine—as Themistocles replied to the
Seriphian, “Neither you, if you had been an Athenian, nor I,
if I had been a Seriphian, would ever have been famous,” I
might in like manner reply to you, Neither a good poor man can be
happy in age, nor yet a bad rich man.’ Socrates remarks that
Cephalus appears not to care about riches, a quality which he
ascribes to his having inherited, not acquired them, and would like
to know what he considers to be the chief advantage of them.
Cephalus answers that when you are old the belief in the world
below grows upon you, and then to have done justice and never to
have been compelled to do injustice through poverty, and never to
have deceived anyone, are felt to be unspeakable blessings.
Socrates, who is evidently preparing for an argument, next asks,
What is the meaning of the word justice? To tell the truth and pay
your debts? No more than this? Or must we admit exceptions? Ought
I, for example, to put back into the hands of my friend, who has
gone mad, the sword which I borrowed of him when he was in his
right mind? ‘There must be exceptions.’ ‘And
yet,’ says Polemarchus, ‘the definition which has been
given has the authority of Simonides.’ Here Cephalus retires
to look after the sacrifices, and bequeaths, as Socrates
facetiously remarks, the possession of the argument to his heir,
Polemarchus…

The description of old age is finished, and Plato, as his manner
is, has touched the key-note of the whole work in asking for the
definition of justice, first suggesting the question which Glaucon
afterwards pursues respecting external goods, and preparing for the
concluding mythus of the world below in the slight allusion of
Cephalus. The portrait of the just man is a natural frontispiece or
introduction to the long discourse which follows, and may perhaps
imply that in all our perplexity about the nature of justice, there
is no difficulty in discerning ‘who is a just man.’ The
first explanation has been supported by a saying of Simonides; and
now Socrates has a mind to show that the resolution of justice into
two unconnected precepts, which have no common principle, fails to
satisfy the demands of dialectic.

…He proceeds: What did Simonides mean by this saying of his?
Did he mean that I was to give back arms to a madman? ‘No,
not in that case, not if the parties are friends, and evil would
result. He meant that you were to do what was proper, good to
friends and harm to enemies.’ Every act does something to
somebody; and following this analogy, Socrates asks, What is this
due and proper thing which justice does, and to whom? He is
answered that justice does good to friends and harm to enemies. But
in what way good or harm? ‘In making alliances with the one,
and going to war with the other.’ Then in time of peace what
is the good of justice? The answer is that justice is of use in
contracts, and contracts are money partnerships. Yes; but how in
such partnerships is the just man of more use than any other man?
‘When you want to have money safely kept and not used.’
Then justice will be useful when money is useless. And there is
another difficulty: justice, like the art of war or any other art,
must be of opposites, good at attack as well as at defence, at
stealing as well as at guarding. But then justice is a thief,
though a hero notwithstanding, like Autolycus, the Homeric hero,
who was ‘excellent above all men in theft and
perjury’—to such a pass have you and Homer and
Simonides brought us; though I do not forget that the thieving must
be for the good of friends and the harm of enemies. And still there
arises another question: Are friends to be interpreted as real or
seeming; enemies as real or seeming? And are our friends to be only
the good, and our enemies to be the evil? The answer is, that we
must do good to our seeming and real good friends, and evil to our
seeming and real evil enemies—good to the good, evil to the
evil. But ought we to render evil for evil at all, when to do so
will only make men more evil? Can justice produce injustice any
more than the art of horsemanship can make bad horsemen, or heat
produce cold? The final conclusion is, that no sage or poet ever
said that the just return evil for evil; this was a maxim of some
rich and mighty man, Periander, Perdiccas, or Ismenias the Theban
(about B.C. 398–381)…

Thus the first stage of aphoristic or unconscious morality is
shown to be inadequate to the wants of the age; the authority of
the poets is set aside, and through the winding mazes of dialectic
we make an approach to the Christian precept of forgiveness of
injuries. Similar words are applied by the Persian mystic poet to
the Divine being when the questioning spirit is stirred within
him:—‘If because I do evil, Thou punishest me by evil,
what is the difference between Thee and me?’ In this both
Plato and Kheyam rise above the level of many Christian (?)
theologians. The first definition of justice easily passes into the
second; for the simple words ‘to speak the truth and pay your
debts’ is substituted the more abstract ‘to do good to
your friends and harm to your enemies.’ Either of these
explanations gives a sufficient rule of life for plain men, but
they both fall short of the precision of philosophy. We may note in
passing the antiquity of casuistry, which not only arises out of
the conflict of established principles in particular cases, but
also out of the effort to attain them, and is prior as well as
posterior to our fundamental notions of morality. The
‘interrogation’ of moral ideas; the appeal to the
authority of Homer; the conclusion that the maxim, ‘Do good
to your friends and harm to your enemies,’ being erroneous,
could not have been the word of any great man, are all of them very

characteristic of the Platonic Socrates.

…Here Thrasymachus, who has made several attempts to
interrupt, but has hitherto been kept in order by the company,
takes advantage of a pause and rushes into the arena, beginning,
like a savage animal, with a roar. ‘Socrates,’ he says,
‘what folly is this?—Why do you agree to be vanquished
by one another in a pretended argument?’ He then prohibits
all the ordinary definitions of justice; to which Socrates replies
that he cannot tell how many twelve is, if he is forbidden to say 2
x 6, or 3 x 4, or 6 x 2, or 4 x 3. At first Thrasymachus is
reluctant to argue; but at length, with a promise of payment on the
part of the company and of praise from Socrates, he is induced to
open the game. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘my answer is
that might is right, justice the interest of the stronger: now
praise me.’ Let me understand you first. Do you mean that
because Polydamas the wrestler, who is stronger than we are, finds
the eating of beef for his interest, the eating of beef is also for
our interest, who are not so strong? Thrasymachus is indignant at
the illustration, and in pompous words, apparently intended to
restore dignity to the argument, he explains his meaning to be that
the rulers make laws for their own interests. But suppose, says
Socrates, that the ruler or stronger makes a mistake—then the
interest of the stronger is not his interest. Thrasymachus is saved
from this speedy downfall by his disciple Cleitophon, who
introduces the word ‘thinks;’—not the actual
interest of the ruler, but what he thinks or what seems to be his
interest, is justice. The contradiction is escaped by the unmeaning
evasion: for though his real and apparent interests may differ,
what the ruler thinks to be his interest will always remain what he
thinks to be his interest.

Of course this was not the original assertion, nor is the new
interpretation accepted by Thrasymachus himself. But Socrates is
not disposed to quarrel about words, if, as he significantly
insinuates, his adversary has changed his mind. In what follows
Thrasymachus does in fact withdraw his admission that the ruler may
make a mistake, for he affirms that the ruler as a ruler is
infallible. Socrates is quite ready to accept the new position,
which he equally turns against Thrasymachus by the help of the
analogy of the arts. Every art or science has an interest, but this
interest is to be distinguished from the accidental interest of the
artist, and is only concerned with the good of the things or
persons which come under the art. And justice has an interest which
is the interest not of the ruler or judge, but of those who come
under his sway.

Thrasymachus is on the brink of the inevitable conclusion, when
he makes a bold diversion. ‘Tell me, Socrates,’ he
says, ‘have you a nurse?’ What a question! Why do you
ask? ‘Because, if you have, she neglects you and lets you go
about drivelling, and has not even taught you to know the shepherd
from the sheep. For you fancy that shepherds and rulers never think
of their own interest, but only of their sheep or subjects, whereas
the truth is that they fatten them for their use, sheep and
subjects alike. And experience proves that in every relation of
life the just man is the loser and the unjust the gainer,
especially where injustice is on the grand scale, which is quite
another thing from the petty rogueries of swindlers and burglars
and robbers of temples. The language of men proves this—our
‘gracious’ and ‘blessed’ tyrant and the
like—all which tends to show (1) that justice is the interest
of the stronger; and (2) that injustice is more profitable and also
stronger than justice.’

Thrasymachus, who is better at a speech than at a close
argument, having deluged the company with words, has a mind to
escape. But the others will not let him go, and Socrates adds a
humble but earnest request that he will not desert them at such a
crisis of their fate. ‘And what can I do more for you?’
he says; ‘would you have me put the words bodily into your
souls?’ God forbid! replies Socrates; but we want you to be
consistent in the use of terms, and not to employ
‘physician’ in an exact sense, and then again
‘shepherd’ or ‘ruler’ in an
inexact,—if the words are strictly taken, the ruler and the
shepherd look only to the good of their people or flocks and not to
their own: whereas you insist that rulers are solely actuated by
love of office. ‘No doubt about it,’ replies
Thrasymachus. Then why are they paid? Is not the reason, that their
interest is not comprehended in their art, and is therefore the
concern of another art, the art of pay, which is common to the arts
in general, and therefore not identical with any one of them? Nor
would any man be a ruler unless he were induced by the hope of
reward or the fear of punishment;—the reward is money or
honour, the punishment is the necessity of being ruled by a man
worse than himself. And if a State (or Church) were composed
entirely of good men, they would be affected by the last motive
only; and there would be as much ‘nolo episcopari’ as
there is at present of the opposite…

The satire on existing governments is heightened by the simple
and apparently incidental manner in which the last remark is
introduced. There is a similar irony in the argument that the
governors of mankind do not like being in office, and that
therefore they demand pay.

…Enough of this: the other assertion of Thrasymachus is far
more important—that the unjust life is more gainful than the
just. Now, as you and I, Glaucon, are not convinced by him, we must
reply to him; but if we try to compare their respective gains we
shall want a judge to decide for us; we had better therefore
proceed by making mutual admissions of the truth to one
another.

Thrasymachus had asserted that perfect injustice was more
gainful than perfect justice, and after a little hesitation he is
induced by Socrates to admit the still greater paradox that
injustice is virtue and justice vice. Socrates praises his
frankness, and assumes the attitude of one whose only wish is to
understand the meaning of his opponents. At the same time he is
weaving a net in which Thrasymachus is finally enclosed. The
admission is elicited from him that the just man seeks to gain an
advantage over the unjust only, but not over the just, while the
unjust would gain an advantage over either. Socrates, in order to
test this statement, employs once more the favourite analogy of the
arts. The musician, doctor, skilled artist of any sort, does not
seek to gain more than the skilled, but only more than the
unskilled (that is to say, he works up to a rule, standard, law,
and does not exceed it), whereas the unskilled makes random efforts
at excess. Thus the skilled falls on the side of the good, and the
unskilled on the side of the evil, and the just is the skilled, and
the unjust is the unskilled.

There was great difficulty in bringing Thrasymachus to the
point; the day was hot and he was streaming with perspiration, and
for the first time in his life he was seen to blush. But his other
thesis that injustice was stronger than justice has not yet been
refuted, and Socrates now proceeds to the consideration of this,
which, with the assistance of Thrasymachus, he hopes to clear up;
the latter is at first churlish, but in the judicious hands of
Socrates is soon restored to good-humour: Is there not honour among
thieves? Is not the strength of injustice only a remnant of
justice? Is not absolute injustice absolute weakness also? A house
that is divided against itself cannot stand; two men who quarrel
detract from one another’s strength, and he who is at war
with himself is the enemy of himself and the gods. Not wickedness
therefore, but semi-wickedness flourishes in states, —a
remnant of good is needed in order to make union in action
possible,— there is no kingdom of evil in this world.

Another question has not been answered: Is the just or the
unjust the happier? To this we reply, that every art has an end and
an excellence or virtue by which the end is accomplished. And is
not the end of the soul happiness, and justice the excellence of
the soul by which happiness is attained? Justice and happiness
being thus shown to be inseparable, the question whether the just
or the unjust is the happier has disappeared.

Thrasymachus replies: ‘Let this be your entertainment,
Socrates, at the festival of Bendis.’ Yes; and a very good
entertainment with which your kindness has supplied me, now that
you have left off scolding. And yet not a good
entertainment—but that was my own fault, for I tasted of too
many things. First of all the nature of justice was the subject of
our enquiry, and then whether justice is virtue and wisdom, or evil
and folly; and then the comparative advantages of just and unjust:
and the sum of all is that I know not what justice is; how then
shall I know whether the just is happy or not?…

Thus the sophistical fabric has been demolished, chiefly by
appealing to the analogy of the arts. ‘Justice is like the
arts (1) in having no external interest, and (2) in not aiming at
excess, and (3) justice is to happiness what the implement of the
workman is to his work.’ At this the modern reader is apt to
stumble, because he forgets that Plato is writing in an age when
the arts and the virtues, like the moral and intellectual
faculties, were still undistinguished. Among early enquirers into
the nature of human action the arts helped to fill up the void of
speculation; and at first the comparison of the arts and the
virtues was not perceived by them to be fallacious. They only saw
the points of agreement in them and not the points of difference.
Virtue, like art, must take means to an end; good manners are both
an art and a virtue; character is naturally described under the
image of a statue; and there are many other figures of speech which
are readily transferred from art to morals. The next generation
cleared up these perplexities; or at least supplied after ages with
a further analysis of them. The contemporaries of Plato were in a
state of transition, and had not yet fully realized the
common-sense distinction of Aristotle, that ‘virtue is
concerned with action, art with production’ (Nic. Eth.), or
that ‘virtue implies intention and constancy of
purpose,’ whereas ‘art requires knowledge only’.
And yet in the absurdities which follow from some uses of the
analogy, there seems to be an intimation conveyed that virtue is
more than art. This is implied in the reductio ad absurdum that
‘justice is a thief,’ and in the dissatisfaction which
Socrates expresses at the final result.

The expression ‘an art of pay’ which is described as
‘common to all the arts’ is not in accordance with the
ordinary use of language. Nor is it employed elsewhere either by
Plato or by any other Greek writer. It is suggested by the
argument, and seems to extend the conception of art to doing as
well as making. Another flaw or inaccuracy of language may be noted
in the words ‘men who are injured are made more
unjust.’ For those who are injured are not necessarily made
worse, but only harmed or ill-treated.

The second of the three arguments, ‘that the just does not
aim at excess,’ has a real meaning, though wrapped up in an
enigmatical form. That the good is of the nature of the finite is a
peculiarly Hellenic sentiment, which may be compared with the
language of those modern writers who speak of virtue as fitness,
and of freedom as obedience to law. The mathematical or logical
notion of limit easily passes into an ethical one, and even finds a
mythological expression in the conception of envy (Greek). Ideas of
measure, equality, order, unity, proportion, still linger in the
writings of moralists; and the true spirit of the fine arts is
better conveyed by such terms than by superlatives.

‘When workmen strive to do better than well, They do
confound their skill in covetousness.’ (King John.)

The harmony of the soul and body, and of the parts of the soul
with one another, a harmony ‘fairer than that of musical
notes,’ is the true Hellenic mode of conceiving the
perfection of human nature.

In what may be called the epilogue of the discussion with
Thrasymachus, Plato argues that evil is not a principle of
strength, but of discord and dissolution, just touching the
question which has been often treated in modern times by
theologians and philosophers, of the negative nature of evil. In
the last argument we trace the germ of the Aristotelian doctrine of
an end and a virtue directed towards the end, which again is
suggested by the arts. The final reconcilement of justice and
happiness and the identity of the individual and the State are also
intimated. Socrates reassumes the character of a
‘know-nothing;’ at the same time he appears to be not
wholly satisfied with the manner in which the argument has been
conducted. Nothing is concluded; but the tendency of the
dialectical process, here as always, is to enlarge our conception
of ideas, and to widen their application to human life.

BOOK II.

Thrasymachus is pacified, but the intrepid Glaucon insists on
continuing the argument. He is not satisfied with the indirect
manner in which, at the end of the last book, Socrates had disposed
of the question ‘Whether the just or the unjust is the
happier.’ He begins by dividing goods into three
classes:—first, goods desirable in themselves; secondly,
goods desirable in themselves and for their results; thirdly, goods
desirable for their results only. He then asks Socrates in which of
the three classes he would place justice. In the second class,
replies Socrates, among goods desirable for themselves and also for
their results. ‘Then the world in general are of another
mind, for they say that justice belongs to the troublesome class of
goods which are desirable for their results only. Socrates answers
that this is the doctrine of Thrasymachus which he rejects. Glaucon
thinks that Thrasymachus was too ready to listen to the voice of
the charmer, and proposes to consider the nature of justice and
injustice in themselves and apart from the results and rewards of
them which the world is always dinning in his ears. He will first
of all speak of the nature and origin of justice; secondly, of the
manner in which men view justice as a necessity and not a good; and
thirdly, he will prove the reasonableness of this view.

‘To do injustice is said to be a good; to suffer injustice
an evil. As the evil is discovered by experience to be greater than
the good, the sufferers, who cannot also be doers, make a compact
that they will have neither, and this compact or mean is called
justice, but is really the impossibility of doing injustice. No one
would observe such a compact if he were not obliged. Let us suppose
that the just and unjust have two rings, like that of Gyges in the
well-known story, which make them invisible, and then no difference
will appear in them, for every one will do evil if he can. And he
who abstains will be regarded by the world as a fool for his pains.
Men may praise him in public out of fear for themselves, but they
will laugh at him in their hearts (Cp. Gorgias.)

‘And now let us frame an ideal of the just and unjust.
Imagine the unjust man to be master of his craft, seldom making
mistakes and easily correcting them; having gifts of money, speech,
strength—the greatest villain bearing the highest character:
and at his side let us place the just in his nobleness and
simplicity—being, not seeming—without name or
reward— clothed in his justice only—the best of men who
is thought to be the worst, and let him die as he has lived. I
might add (but I would rather put the rest into the mouth of the
panegyrists of injustice—they will tell you) that the just
man will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out,
and will at last be crucified (literally impaled)—and all
this because he ought to have preferred seeming to being. How
different is the case of the unjust who clings to appearance as the
true reality! His high character makes him a ruler; he can marry
where he likes, trade where he likes, help his friends and hurt his
enemies; having got rich by dishonesty he can worship the gods
better, and will therefore be more loved by them than the
just.’

I was thinking what to answer, when Adeimantus joined in the
already unequal fray. He considered that the most important point
of all had been omitted:—‘Men are taught to be just for
the sake of rewards; parents and guardians make reputation the
incentive to virtue. And other advantages are promised by them of a
more solid kind, such as wealthy marriages and high offices. There
are the pictures in Homer and Hesiod of fat sheep and heavy
fleeces, rich corn-fields and trees toppling with fruit, which the
gods provide in this life for the just. And the Orphic poets add a
similar picture of another. The heroes of Musaeus and Eumolpus lie
on couches at a festival, with garlands on their heads, enjoying as
the meed of virtue a paradise of immortal drunkenness. Some go
further, and speak of a fair posterity in the third and fourth
generation. But the wicked they bury in a slough and make them
carry water in a sieve: and in this life they attribute to them the
infamy which Glaucon was assuming to be the lot of the just who are
supposed to be unjust.

‘Take another kind of argument which is found both in
poetry and prose:— “Virtue,” as Hesiod says,
“is honourable but difficult, vice is easy and
profitable.” You may often see the wicked in great prosperity
and the righteous afflicted by the will of heaven. And mendicant
prophets knock at rich men’s doors, promising to atone for
the sins of themselves or their fathers in an easy fashion with
sacrifices and festive games, or with charms and invocations to get
rid of an enemy good or bad by divine help and at a small
charge;—they appeal to books professing to be written by
Musaeus and Orpheus, and carry away the minds of whole cities, and
promise to “get souls out of purgatory;” and if we
refuse to listen to them, no one knows what will happen to us.

‘When a lively-minded ingenuous youth hears all this, what
will be his conclusion? “Will he,” in the language of
Pindar, “make justice his high tower, or fortify himself with
crooked deceit?” Justice, he reflects, without the appearance
of justice, is misery and ruin; injustice has the promise of a
glorious life. Appearance is master of truth and lord of happiness.
To appearance then I will turn,—I will put on the show of
virtue and trail behind me the fox of Archilochus. I hear some one
saying that “wickedness is not easily concealed,” to
which I reply that “nothing great is easy.” Union and
force and rhetoric will do much; and if men say that they cannot
prevail over the gods, still how do we know that there are gods?
Only from the poets, who acknowledge that they may be appeased by
sacrifices. Then why not sin and pay for indulgences out of your
sin? For if the righteous are only unpunished, still they have no
further reward, while the wicked may be unpunished and have the
pleasure of sinning too. But what of the world below? Nay, says the
argument, there are atoning powers who will set that matter right,
as the poets, who are the sons of the gods, tell us; and this is
confirmed by the authority of the State.

‘How can we resist such arguments in favour of injustice?
Add good manners, and, as the wise tell us, we shall make the best
of both worlds. Who that is not a miserable caitiff will refrain
from smiling at the praises of justice? Even if a man knows the
better part he will not be angry with others; for he knows also
that more than human virtue is needed to save a man, and that he
only praises justice who is incapable of injustice.

‘The origin of the evil is that all men from the
beginning, heroes, poets, instructors of youth, have always
asserted “the temporal dispensation,” the honours and
profits of justice. Had we been taught in early youth the power of
justice and injustice inherent in the soul, and unseen by any human
or divine eye, we should not have needed others to be our
guardians, but every one would have been the guardian of himself.
This is what I want you to show, Socrates;—other men use
arguments which rather tend to strengthen the position of
Thrasymachus that “might is right;” but from you I
expect better things. And please, as Glaucon said, to exclude
reputation; let the just be thought unjust and the unjust just, and
do you still prove to us the superiority of justice’…

The thesis, which for the sake of argument has been maintained
by Glaucon, is the converse of that of Thrasymachus—not right
is the interest of the stronger, but right is the necessity of the
weaker. Starting from the same premises he carries the analysis of
society a step further back;—might is still right, but the
might is the weakness of the many combined against the strength of
the few.

There have been theories in modern as well as in ancient times
which have a family likeness to the speculations of Glaucon; e.g.
that power is the foundation of right; or that a monarch has a
divine right to govern well or ill; or that virtue is self-love or
the love of power; or that war is the natural state of man; or that
private vices are public benefits. All such theories have a kind of
plausibility from their partial agreement with experience. For
human nature oscillates between good and evil, and the motives of
actions and the origin of institutions may be explained to a
certain extent on either hypothesis according to the character or
point of view of a particular thinker. The obligation of
maintaining authority under all circumstances and sometimes by
rather questionable means is felt strongly and has become a sort of
instinct among civilized men. The divine right of kings, or more
generally of governments, is one of the forms under which this
natural feeling is expressed. Nor again is there any evil which has
not some accompaniment of good or pleasure; nor any good which is
free from some alloy of evil; nor any noble or generous thought
which may not be attended by a shadow or the ghost of a shadow of
self-interest or of self-love. We know that all human actions are
imperfect; but we do not therefore attribute them to the worse
rather than to the better motive or principle. Such a philosophy is
both foolish and false, like that opinion of the clever rogue who
assumes all other men to be like himself. And theories of this sort
do not represent the real nature of the State, which is based on a
vague sense of right gradually corrected and enlarged by custom and
law (although capable also of perversion), any more than they
describe the origin of society, which is to be sought in the family
and in the social and religious feelings of man. Nor do they
represent the average character of individuals, which cannot be
explained simply on a theory of evil, but has always a
counteracting element of good. And as men become better such
theories appear more and more untruthful to them, because they are
more conscious of their own disinterestedness. A little experience
may make a man a cynic; a great deal will bring him back to a truer
and kindlier view of the mixed nature of himself and his fellow
men.

The two brothers ask Socrates to prove to them that the just is
happy when they have taken from him all that in which happiness is
ordinarily supposed to consist. Not that there is (1) any absurdity
in the attempt to frame a notion of justice apart from
circumstances. For the ideal must always be a paradox when compared
with the ordinary conditions of human life. Neither the Stoical
ideal nor the Christian ideal is true as a fact, but they may serve
as a basis of education, and may exercise an ennobling influence.
An ideal is none the worse because ‘some one has made the
discovery’ that no such ideal was ever realized. And in a few
exceptional individuals who are raised above the ordinary level of
humanity, the ideal of happiness may be realized in death and
misery. This may be the state which the reason deliberately
approves, and which the utilitarian as well as every other moralist
may be bound in certain cases to prefer.

Nor again, (2) must we forget that Plato, though he agrees
generally with the view implied in the argument of the two
brothers, is not expressing his own final conclusion, but rather
seeking to dramatize one of the aspects of ethical truth. He is
developing his idea gradually in a series of positions or
situations. He is exhibiting Socrates for the first time undergoing
the Socratic interrogation. Lastly, (3) the word
‘happiness’ involves some degree of confusion because
associated in the language of modern philosophy with conscious
pleasure or satisfaction, which was not equally present to his
mind.

Glaucon has been drawing a picture of the misery of the just and
the happiness of the unjust, to which the misery of the tyrant in
Book IX is the answer and parallel. And still the unjust must
appear just; that is ‘the homage which vice pays to
virtue.’ But now Adeimantus, taking up the hint which had
been already given by Glaucon, proceeds to show that in the opinion
of mankind justice is regarded only for the sake of rewards and
reputation, and points out the advantage which is given to such
arguments as those of Thrasymachus and Glaucon by the conventional
morality of mankind. He seems to feel the difficulty of
‘justifying the ways of God to man.’ Both the brothers
touch upon the question, whether the morality of actions is
determined by their consequences; and both of them go beyond the
position of Socrates, that justice belongs to the class of goods
not desirable for themselves only, but desirable for themselves and
for their results, to which he recalls them. In their attempt to
view justice as an internal principle, and in their condemnation of
the poets, they anticipate him. The common life of Greece is not
enough for them; they must penetrate deeper into the nature of
things.

It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of
Glaucon and Adeimantus, but is taken by Socrates to mean all
virtue. May we not more truly say that the old-fashioned notion of
justice is enlarged by Socrates, and becomes equivalent to
universal order or well-being, first in the State, and secondly in
the individual? He has found a new answer to his old question
(Protag.), ‘whether the virtues are one or many,’ viz.
that one is the ordering principle of the three others. In seeking
to establish the purely internal nature of justice, he is met by
the fact that man is a social being, and he tries to harmonise the
two opposite theses as well as he can. There is no more
inconsistency in this than was inevitable in his age and country;
there is no use in turning upon him the cross lights of modern
philosophy, which, from some other point of view, would appear
equally inconsistent. Plato does not give the final solution of
philosophical questions for us; nor can he be judged of by our
standard.

The remainder of the Republic is developed out of the question
of the sons of Ariston. Three points are deserving of remark in
what immediately follows:—First, that the answer of Socrates
is altogether indirect. He does not say that happiness consists in
the contemplation of the idea of justice, and still less will he be
tempted to affirm the Stoical paradox that the just man can be
happy on the rack. But first he dwells on the difficulty of the
problem and insists on restoring man to his natural condition,
before he will answer the question at all. He too will frame an
ideal, but his ideal comprehends not only abstract justice, but the
whole relations of man. Under the fanciful illustration of the
large letters he implies that he will only look for justice in
society, and that from the State he will proceed to the individual.
His answer in substance amounts to this,—that under
favourable conditions, i.e. in the perfect State, justice and
happiness will coincide, and that when justice has been once found,
happiness may be left to take care of itself. That he falls into
some degree of inconsistency, when in the tenth book he claims to
have got rid of the rewards and honours of justice, may be
admitted; for he has left those which exist in the perfect State.
And the philosopher ‘who retires under the shelter of a
wall’ can hardly have been esteemed happy by him, at least
not in this world. Still he maintains the true attitude of moral
action. Let a man do his duty first, without asking whether he will
be happy or not, and happiness will be the inseparable accident
which attends him. ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his
righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto
you.’

Secondly, it may be remarked that Plato preserves the genuine
character of Greek thought in beginning with the State and in going
on to the individual. First ethics, then politics—this is the
order of ideas to us; the reverse is the order of history. Only
after many struggles of thought does the individual assert his
right as a moral being. In early ages he is not ONE, but one of
many, the citizen of a State which is prior to him; and he has no
notion of good or evil apart from the law of his country or the
creed of his church. And to this type he is constantly tending to
revert, whenever the influence of custom, or of party spirit, or
the recollection of the past becomes too strong for him.

Thirdly, we may observe the confusion or identification of the
individual and the State, of ethics and politics, which pervades
early Greek speculation, and even in modern times retains a certain
degree of influence. The subtle difference between the collective
and individual action of mankind seems to have escaped early
thinkers, and we too are sometimes in danger of forgetting the
conditions of united human action, whenever we either elevate
politics into ethics, or lower ethics to the standard of politics.
The good man and the good citizen only coincide in the perfect
State; and this perfection cannot be attained by legislation acting
upon them from without, but, if at all, by education fashioning
them from within.

…Socrates praises the sons of Ariston, ‘inspired
offspring of the renowned hero,’ as the elegiac poet terms
them; but he does not understand how they can argue so eloquently
on behalf of injustice while their character shows that they are
uninfluenced by their own arguments. He knows not how to answer
them, although he is afraid of deserting justice in the hour of
need. He therefore makes a condition, that having weak eyes he
shall be allowed to read the large letters first and then go on to
the smaller, that is, he must look for justice in the State first,
and will then proceed to the individual. Accordingly he begins to
construct the State.

Society arises out of the wants of man. His first want is food;
his second a house; his third a coat. The sense of these needs and
the possibility of satisfying them by exchange, draw individuals
together on the same spot; and this is the beginning of a State,
which we take the liberty to invent, although necessity is the real
inventor. There must be first a husbandman, secondly a builder,
thirdly a weaver, to which may be added a cobbler. Four or five
citizens at least are required to make a city. Now men have
different natures, and one man will do one thing better than many;
and business waits for no man. Hence there must be a division of
labour into different employments; into wholesale and retail trade;
into workers, and makers of workmen’s tools; into shepherds
and husbandmen. A city which includes all this will have far
exceeded the limit of four or five, and yet not be very large. But
then again imports will be required, and imports necessitate
exports, and this implies variety of produce in order to attract
the taste of purchasers; also merchants and ships. In the city too
we must have a market and money and retail trades; otherwise buyers
and sellers will never meet, and the valuable time of the producers
will be wasted in vain efforts at exchange. If we add hired
servants the State will be complete. And we may guess that
somewhere in the intercourse of the citizens with one another
justice and injustice will appear.

Here follows a rustic picture of their way of life. They spend
their days in houses which they have built for themselves; they
make their own clothes and produce their own corn and wine. Their
principal food is meal and flour, and they drink in moderation.
They live on the best of terms with each other, and take care not
to have too many children. ‘But,’ said Glaucon,
interposing, ‘are they not to have a relish?’
Certainly; they will have salt and olives and cheese, vegetables
and fruits, and chestnuts to roast at the fire. ‘’Tis a
city of pigs, Socrates.’ Why, I replied, what do you want
more? ‘Only the comforts of life,—sofas and tables,
also sauces and sweets.’ I see; you want not only a State,
but a luxurious State; and possibly in the more complex frame we
may sooner find justice and injustice. Then the fine arts must go
to work—every conceivable instrument and ornament of luxury
will be wanted. There will be dancers, painters, sculptors,
musicians, cooks, barbers, tire-women, nurses, artists; swineherds
and neatherds too for the animals, and physicians to cure the
disorders of which luxury is the source. To feed all these
superfluous mouths we shall need a part of our neighbour’s
land, and they will want a part of ours. And this is the origin of
war, which may be traced to the same causes as other political
evils. Our city will now require the slight addition of a camp, and
the citizen will be converted into a soldier. But then again our
old doctrine of the division of labour must not be forgotten. The
art of war cannot be learned in a day, and there must be a natural
aptitude for military duties. There will be some warlike natures
who have this aptitude—dogs keen of scent, swift of foot to
pursue, and strong of limb to fight. And as spirit is the
foundation of courage, such natures, whether of men or animals,
will be full of spirit. But these spirited natures are apt to bite
and devour one another; the union of gentleness to friends and
fierceness against enemies appears to be an impossibility, and the
guardian of a State requires both qualities. Who then can be a
guardian? The image of the dog suggests an answer. For dogs are
gentle to friends and fierce to strangers. Your dog is a
philosopher who judges by the rule of knowing or not knowing; and
philosophy, whether in man or beast, is the parent of gentleness.
The human watchdogs must be philosophers or lovers of learning
which will make them gentle. And how are they to be learned without
education?

But what shall their education be? Is any better than the
old-fashioned sort which is comprehended under the name of music
and gymnastic? Music includes literature, and literature is of two
kinds, true and false. ‘What do you mean?’ he said. I
mean that children hear stories before they learn gymnastics, and
that the stories are either untrue, or have at most one or two
grains of truth in a bushel of falsehood. Now early life is very
impressible, and children ought not to learn what they will have to
unlearn when they grow up; we must therefore have a censorship of
nursery tales, banishing some and keeping others. Some of them are
very improper, as we may see in the great instances of Homer and
Hesiod, who not only tell lies but bad lies; stories about Uranus
and Saturn, which are immoral as well as false, and which should
never be spoken of to young persons, or indeed at all; or, if at
all, then in a mystery, after the sacrifice, not of an Eleusinian
pig, but of some unprocurable animal. Shall our youth be encouraged
to beat their fathers by the example of Zeus, or our citizens be
incited to quarrel by hearing or seeing representations of strife
among the gods? Shall they listen to the narrative of Hephaestus
binding his mother, and of Zeus sending him flying for helping her
when she was beaten? Such tales may possibly have a mystical
interpretation, but the young are incapable of understanding
allegory. If any one asks what tales are to be allowed, we will
answer that we are legislators and not book-makers; we only lay
down the principles according to which books are to be written; to
write them is the duty of others.

And our first principle is, that God must be represented as he
is; not as the author of all things, but of good only. We will not
suffer the poets to say that he is the steward of good and evil, or
that he has two casks full of destinies;—or that Athene and
Zeus incited Pandarus to break the treaty; or that God caused the
sufferings of Niobe, or of Pelops, or the Trojan war; or that he
makes men sin when he wishes to destroy them. Either these were not
the actions of the gods, or God was just, and men were the better
for being punished. But that the deed was evil, and God the author,
is a wicked, suicidal fiction which we will allow no one, old or
young, to utter. This is our first and great principle—God is
the author of good only.

And the second principle is like unto it:—With God is no
variableness or change of form. Reason teaches us this; for if we
suppose a change in God, he must be changed either by another or by
himself. By another?—but the best works of nature and art and
the noblest qualities of mind are least liable to be changed by any
external force. By himself?—but he cannot change for the
better; he will hardly change for the worse. He remains for ever
fairest and best in his own image. Therefore we refuse to listen to
the poets who tell us of Here begging in the likeness of a
priestess or of other deities who prowl about at night in strange
disguises; all that blasphemous nonsense with which mothers fool
the manhood out of their children must be suppressed. But some one
will say that God, who is himself unchangeable, may take a form in
relation to us. Why should he? For gods as well as men hate the lie
in the soul, or principle of falsehood; and as for any other form
of lying which is used for a purpose and is regarded as innocent in
certain exceptional cases—what need have the gods of this?
For they are not ignorant of antiquity like the poets, nor are they
afraid of their enemies, nor is any madman a friend of theirs. God
then is true, he is absolutely true; he changes not, he deceives
not, by day or night, by word or sign. This is our second great
principle—God is true. Away with the lying dream of Agamemnon
in Homer, and the accusation of Thetis against Apollo in
Aeschylus…

In order to give clearness to his conception of the State, Plato
proceeds to trace the first principles of mutual need and of
division of labour in an imaginary community of four or five
citizens. Gradually this community increases; the division of
labour extends to countries; imports necessitate exports; a medium
of exchange is required, and retailers sit in the market-place to
save the time of the producers. These are the steps by which Plato
constructs the first or primitive State, introducing the elements
of political economy by the way. As he is going to frame a second
or civilized State, the simple naturally comes before the complex.
He indulges, like Rousseau, in a picture of primitive life—an
idea which has indeed often had a powerful influence on the
imagination of mankind, but he does not seriously mean to say that
one is better than the other (Politicus); nor can any inference be
drawn from the description of the first state taken apart from the
second, such as Aristotle appears to draw in the Politics. We
should not interpret a Platonic dialogue any more than a poem or a
parable in too literal or matter-of-fact a style. On the other
hand, when we compare the lively fancy of Plato with the dried-up
abstractions of modern treatises on philosophy, we are compelled to
say with Protagoras, that the ‘mythus is more
interesting’ (Protag.)

Several interesting remarks which in modern times would have a
place in a treatise on Political Economy are scattered up and down
the writings of Plato: especially Laws, Population; Free Trade;
Adulteration; Wills and Bequests; Begging; Eryxias, (though not
Plato’s), Value and Demand; Republic, Division of Labour. The
last subject, and also the origin of Retail Trade, is treated with
admirable lucidity in the second book of the Republic. But Plato
never combined his economic ideas into a system, and never seems to
have recognized that Trade is one of the great motive powers of the
State and of the world. He would make retail traders only of the
inferior sort of citizens (Rep., Laws), though he remarks, quaintly
enough (Laws), that ‘if only the best men and the best women
everywhere were compelled to keep taverns for a time or to carry on
retail trade, etc., then we should knew how pleasant and agreeable
all these things are.’

The disappointment of Glaucon at the ‘city of pigs,’
the ludicrous description of the ministers of luxury in the more
refined State, and the afterthought of the necessity of doctors,
the illustration of the nature of the guardian taken from the dog,
the desirableness of offering some almost unprocurable victim when
impure mysteries are to be celebrated, the behaviour of Zeus to his
father and of Hephaestus to his mother, are touches of humour which
have also a serious meaning. In speaking of education Plato rather
startles us by affirming that a child must be trained in falsehood
first and in truth afterwards. Yet this is not very different from
saying that children must be taught through the medium of
imagination as well as reason; that their minds can only develope
gradually, and that there is much which they must learn without
understanding. This is also the substance of Plato’s view,
though he must be acknowledged to have drawn the line somewhat
differently from modern ethical writers, respecting truth and
falsehood. To us, economies or accommodations would not be
allowable unless they were required by the human faculties or
necessary for the communication of knowledge to the simple and
ignorant. We should insist that the word was inseparable from the
intention, and that we must not be ‘falsely true,’ i.e.
speak or act falsely in support of what was right or true. But
Plato would limit the use of fictions only by requiring that they
should have a good moral effect, and that such a dangerous weapon
as falsehood should be employed by the rulers alone and for great
objects.

A Greek in the age of Plato attached no importance to the
question whether his religion was an historical fact. He was just
beginning to be conscious that the past had a history; but he could
see nothing beyond Homer and Hesiod. Whether their narratives were
true or false did not seriously affect the political or social life
of Hellas. Men only began to suspect that they were fictions when
they recognised them to be immoral. And so in all religions: the
consideration of their morality comes first, afterwards the truth
of the documents in which they are recorded, or of the events
natural or supernatural which are told of them. But in modern
times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than in Catholic,
we have been too much inclined to identify the historical with the
moral; and some have refused to believe in religion at all, unless
a superhuman accuracy was discernible in every part of the record.
The facts of an ancient or religious history are amongst the most
important of all facts; but they are frequently uncertain, and we
only learn the true lesson which is to be gathered from them when
we place ourselves above them. These reflections tend to show that
the difference between Plato and ourselves, though not unimportant,
is not so great as might at first sight appear. For we should agree
with him in placing the moral before the historical truth of
religion; and, generally, in disregarding those errors or
misstatements of fact which necessarily occur in the early stages
of all religions. We know also that changes in the traditions of a
country cannot be made in a day; and are therefore tolerant of many
things which science and criticism would condemn.

We note in passing that the allegorical interpretation of
mythology, said to have been first introduced as early as the sixth
century before Christ by Theagenes of Rhegium, was well established
in the age of Plato, and here, as in the Phaedrus, though for a
different reason, was rejected by him. That anachronisms whether of
religion or law, when men have reached another stage of
civilization, should be got rid of by fictions is in accordance
with universal experience. Great is the art of interpretation; and
by a natural process, which when once discovered was always going
on, what could not be altered was explained away. And so without
any palpable inconsistency there existed side by side two forms of
religion, the tradition inherited or invented by the poets and the
customary worship of the temple; on the other hand, there was the
religion of the philosopher, who was dwelling in the heaven of
ideas, but did not therefore refuse to offer a cock to Aesculapius,
or to be seen saying his prayers at the rising of the sun. At
length the antagonism between the popular and philosophical
religion, never so great among the Greeks as in our own age,
disappeared, and was only felt like the difference between the
religion of the educated and uneducated among ourselves. The Zeus
of Homer and Hesiod easily passed into the ‘royal mind’
of Plato (Philebus); the giant Heracles became the knight-errant
and benefactor of mankind. These and still more wonderful
transformations were readily effected by the ingenuity of Stoics
and neo-Platonists in the two or three centuries before and after
Christ. The Greek and Roman religions were gradually permeated by
the spirit of philosophy; having lost their ancient meaning, they
were resolved into poetry and morality; and probably were never
purer than at the time of their decay, when their influence over
the world was waning.

A singular conception which occurs towards the end of the book
is the lie in the soul; this is connected with the Platonic and
Socratic doctrine that involuntary ignorance is worse than
voluntary. The lie in the soul is a true lie, the corruption of the
highest truth, the deception of the highest part of the soul, from
which he who is deceived has no power of delivering himself. For
example, to represent God as false or immoral, or, according to
Plato, as deluding men with appearances or as the author of evil;
or again, to affirm with Protagoras that ‘knowledge is
sensation,’ or that ‘being is becoming,’ or with
Thrasymachus ‘that might is right,’ would have been
regarded by Plato as a lie of this hateful sort. The greatest
unconsciousness of the greatest untruth, e.g. if, in the language
of the Gospels (John), ‘he who was blind’ were to say
‘I see,’ is another aspect of the state of mind which
Plato is describing. The lie in the soul may be further compared
with the sin against the Holy Ghost (Luke), allowing for the
difference between Greek and Christian modes of speaking. To this
is opposed the lie in words, which is only such a deception as may
occur in a play or poem, or allegory or figure of speech, or in any
sort of accommodation,—which though useless to the gods may
be useful to men in certain cases. Socrates is here answering the
question which he had himself raised about the propriety of
deceiving a madman; and he is also contrasting the nature of God
and man. For God is Truth, but mankind can only be true by
appearing sometimes to be partial, or false. Reserving for another
place the greater questions of religion or education, we may note
further, (1) the approval of the old traditional education of
Greece; (2) the preparation which Plato is making for the attack on
Homer and the poets; (3) the preparation which he is also making
for the use of economies in the State; (4) the contemptuous and at
the same time euphemistic manner in which here as below he alludes
to the ‘Chronique Scandaleuse’ of the gods.

BOOK III.

There is another motive in purifying religion, which is to
banish fear; for no man can be courageous who is afraid of death,
or who believes the tales which are repeated by the poets
concerning the world below. They must be gently requested not to
abuse hell; they may be reminded that their stories are both untrue
and discouraging. Nor must they be angry if we expunge obnoxious
passages, such as the depressing words of Achilles—‘I
would rather be a serving-man than rule over all the dead;’
and the verses which tell of the squalid mansions, the senseless
shadows, the flitting soul mourning over lost strength and youth,
the soul with a gibber going beneath the earth like smoke, or the
souls of the suitors which flutter about like bats. The terrors and
horrors of Cocytus and Styx, ghosts and sapless shades, and the
rest of their Tartarean nomenclature, must vanish. Such tales may
have their use; but they are not the proper food for soldiers. As
little can we admit the sorrows and sympathies of the Homeric
heroes:—Achilles, the son of Thetis, in tears, throwing ashes
on his head, or pacing up and down the sea-shore in distraction; or
Priam, the cousin of the gods, crying aloud, rolling in the mire. A
good man is not prostrated at the loss of children or fortune.
Neither is death terrible to him; and therefore lamentations over
the dead should not be practised by men of note; they should be the
concern of inferior persons only, whether women or men. Still worse
is the attribution of such weakness to the gods; as when the
goddesses say, ‘Alas! my travail!’ and worst of all,
when the king of heaven himself laments his inability to save
Hector, or sorrows over the impending doom of his dear Sarpedon.
Such a character of God, if not ridiculed by our young men, is
likely to be imitated by them. Nor should our citizens be given to
excess of laughter—‘Such violent delights’ are
followed by a violent re-action. The description in the Iliad of
the gods shaking their sides at the clumsiness of Hephaestus will
not be admitted by us. ‘Certainly not.’

Truth should have a high place among the virtues, for falsehood,
as we were saying, is useless to the gods, and only useful to men
as a medicine. But this employment of falsehood must remain a
privilege of state; the common man must not in return tell a lie to
the ruler; any more than the patient would tell a lie to his
physician, or the sailor to his captain.

In the next place our youth must be temperate, and temperance
consists in self-control and obedience to authority. That is a
lesson which Homer teaches in some places: ‘The Achaeans
marched on breathing prowess, in silent awe of their
leaders;’—but a very different one in other places:
‘O heavy with wine, who hast the eyes of a dog, but the heart
of a stag.’ Language of the latter kind will not impress
self-control on the minds of youth. The same may be said about his
praises of eating and drinking and his dread of starvation; also
about the verses in which he tells of the rapturous loves of Zeus
and Here, or of how Hephaestus once detained Ares and Aphrodite in
a net on a similar occasion. There is a nobler strain heard in the
words:—‘Endure, my soul, thou hast endured
worse.’ Nor must we allow our citizens to receive bribes, or
to say, ‘Gifts persuade the gods, gifts reverend
kings;’ or to applaud the ignoble advice of Phoenix to
Achilles that he should get money out of the Greeks before he
assisted them; or the meanness of Achilles himself in taking gifts
from Agamemnon; or his requiring a ransom for the body of Hector;
or his cursing of Apollo; or his insolence to the river-god
Scamander; or his dedication to the dead Patroclus of his own hair
which had been already dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius;
or his cruelty in dragging the body of Hector round the walls, and
slaying the captives at the pyre: such a combination of meanness
and cruelty in Cheiron’s pupil is inconceivable. The amatory
exploits of Peirithous and Theseus are equally unworthy. Either
these so-called sons of gods were not the sons of gods, or they
were not such as the poets imagine them, any more than the gods
themselves are the authors of evil. The youth who believes that
such things are done by those who have the blood of heaven flowing
in their veins will be too ready to imitate their example.

Enough of gods and heroes;—what shall we say about men?
What the poets and story-tellers say—that the wicked prosper
and the righteous are afflicted, or that justice is another’s
gain? Such misrepresentations cannot be allowed by us. But in this
we are anticipating the definition of justice, and had therefore
better defer the enquiry.

The subjects of poetry have been sufficiently treated; next
follows style. Now all poetry is a narrative of events past,
present, or to come; and narrative is of three kinds, the simple,
the imitative, and a composition of the two. An instance will make
my meaning clear. The first scene in Homer is of the last or mixed
kind, being partly description and partly dialogue. But if you
throw the dialogue into the ‘oratio obliqua,’ the
passage will run thus: The priest came and prayed Apollo that the
Achaeans might take Troy and have a safe return if Agamemnon would
only give him back his daughter; and the other Greeks assented, but
Agamemnon was wroth, and so on—The whole then becomes
descriptive, and the poet is the only speaker left; or, if you omit
the narrative, the whole becomes dialogue. These are the three
styles—which of them is to be admitted into our State?
‘Do you ask whether tragedy and comedy are to be
admitted?’ Yes, but also something more—Is it not
doubtful whether our guardians are to be imitators at all? Or
rather, has not the question been already answered, for we have
decided that one man cannot in his life play many parts, any more
than he can act both tragedy and comedy, or be rhapsodist and actor
at once? Human nature is coined into very small pieces, and as our
guardians have their own business already, which is the care of
freedom, they will have enough to do without imitating. If they
imitate they should imitate, not any meanness or baseness, but the
good only; for the mask which the actor wears is apt to become his
face. We cannot allow men to play the parts of women, quarrelling,
weeping, scolding, or boasting against the gods,—least of all
when making love or in labour. They must not represent slaves, or
bullies, or cowards, drunkards, or madmen, or blacksmiths, or
neighing horses, or bellowing bulls, or sounding rivers, or a
raging sea. A good or wise man will be willing to perform good and
wise actions, but he will be ashamed to play an inferior part which
he has never practised; and he will prefer to employ the
descriptive style with as little imitation as possible. The man who
has no self-respect, on the contrary, will imitate anybody and
anything; sounds of nature and cries of animals alike; his whole
performance will be imitation of gesture and voice. Now in the
descriptive style there are few changes, but in the dramatic there
are a great many. Poets and musicians use either, or a compound of
both, and this compound is very attractive to youth and their
teachers as well as to the vulgar. But our State in which one man
plays one part only is not adapted for complexity. And when one of
these polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself
and his poetry we will show him every observance of respect, but at
the same time tell him that there is no room for his kind in our
State; we prefer the rough, honest poet, and will not depart from
our original models (Laws).

Next as to the music. A song or ode has three parts,—the
subject, the harmony, and the rhythm; of which the two last are
dependent upon the first. As we banished strains of lamentation, so
we may now banish the mixed Lydian harmonies, which are the
harmonies of lamentation; and as our citizens are to be temperate,
we may also banish convivial harmonies, such as the Ionian and pure
Lydian. Two remain—the Dorian and Phrygian, the first for
war, the second for peace; the one expressive of courage, the other
of obedience or instruction or religious feeling. And as we reject
varieties of harmony, we shall also reject the many-stringed,
variously-shaped instruments which give utterance to them, and in
particular the flute, which is more complex than any of them. The
lyre and the harp may be permitted in the town, and the
Pan’s-pipe in the fields. Thus we have made a purgation of
music, and will now make a purgation of metres. These should be
like the harmonies, simple and suitable to the occasion. There are
four notes of the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre,
3/2, 2/2, 2/1, which have all their characteristics, and the feet
have different characteristics as well as the rhythms. But about
this you and I must ask Damon, the great musician, who speaks, if I
remember rightly, of a martial measure as well as of dactylic,
trochaic, and iambic rhythms, which he arranges so as to equalize
the syllables with one another, assigning to each the proper
quantity. We only venture to affirm the general principle that the
style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style; and
that the simplicity and harmony of the soul should be reflected in
them all. This principle of simplicity has to be learnt by every
one in the days of his youth, and may be gathered anywhere, from
the creative and constructive arts, as well as from the forms of
plants and animals.

Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness
or unseemliness. Sculpture and painting equally with music must
conform to the law of simplicity. He who violates it cannot be
allowed to work in our city, and to corrupt the taste of our
citizens. For our guardians must grow up, not amid images of
deformity which will gradually poison and corrupt their souls, but
in a land of health and beauty where they will drink in from every
object sweet and harmonious influences. And of all these influences
the greatest is the education given by music, which finds a way
into the innermost soul and imparts to it the sense of beauty and
of deformity. At first the effect is unconscious; but when reason
arrives, then he who has been thus trained welcomes her as the
friend whom he always knew. As in learning to read, first we
acquire the elements or letters separately, and afterwards their
combinations, and cannot recognize reflections of them until we
know the letters themselves;—in like manner we must first
attain the elements or essential forms of the virtues, and then
trace their combinations in life and experience. There is a music
of the soul which answers to the harmony of the world; and the
fairest object of a musical soul is the fair mind in the fair body.
Some defect in the latter may be excused, but not in the former.
True love is the daughter of temperance, and temperance is utterly
opposed to the madness of bodily pleasure. Enough has been said of
music, which makes a fair ending with love.

Next we pass on to gymnastics; about which I would remark, that
the soul is related to the body as a cause to an effect, and
therefore if we educate the mind we may leave the education of the
body in her charge, and need only give a general outline of the
course to be pursued. In the first place the guardians must abstain
from strong drink, for they should be the last persons to lose
their wits. Whether the habits of the palaestra are suitable to
them is more doubtful, for the ordinary gymnastic is a sleepy sort
of thing, and if left off suddenly is apt to endanger health. But
our warrior athletes must be wide-awake dogs, and must also be
inured to all changes of food and climate. Hence they will require
a simpler kind of gymnastic, akin to their simple music; and for
their diet a rule may be found in Homer, who feeds his heroes on
roast meat only, and gives them no fish although they are living at
the sea-side, nor boiled meats which involve an apparatus of pots
and pans; and, if I am not mistaken, he nowhere mentions sweet
sauces. Sicilian cookery and Attic confections and Corinthian
courtezans, which are to gymnastic what Lydian and Ionian melodies
are to music, must be forbidden. Where gluttony and intemperance
prevail the town quickly fills with doctors and pleaders; and law
and medicine give themselves airs as soon as the freemen of a State
take an interest in them. But what can show a more disgraceful
state of education than to have to go abroad for justice because
you have none of your own at home? And yet there IS a worse stage
of the same disease—when men have learned to take a pleasure
and pride in the twists and turns of the law; not considering how
much better it would be for them so to order their lives as to have
no need of a nodding justice. And there is a like disgrace in
employing a physician, not for the cure of wounds or epidemic
disorders, but because a man has by laziness and luxury contracted
diseases which were unknown in the days of Asclepius. How simple is
the Homeric practice of medicine. Eurypylus after he has been
wounded drinks a posset of Pramnian wine, which is of a heating
nature; and yet the sons of Asclepius blame neither the damsel who
gives him the drink, nor Patroclus who is attending on him. The
truth is that this modern system of nursing diseases was introduced
by Herodicus the trainer; who, being of a sickly constitution, by a
compound of training and medicine tortured first himself and then a
good many other people, and lived a great deal longer than he had
any right. But Asclepius would not practise this art, because he
knew that the citizens of a well-ordered State have no leisure to
be ill, and therefore he adopted the ‘kill or cure’
method, which artisans and labourers employ. ‘They must be at
their business,’ they say, ‘and have no time for
coddling: if they recover, well; if they don’t, there is an
end of them.’ Whereas the rich man is supposed to be a
gentleman who can afford to be ill. Do you know a maxim of
Phocylides—that ‘when a man begins to be rich’
(or, perhaps, a little sooner) ‘he should practise
virtue’? But how can excessive care of health be inconsistent
with an ordinary occupation, and yet consistent with that practice
of virtue which Phocylides inculcates? When a student imagines that
philosophy gives him a headache, he never does anything; he is
always unwell. This was the reason why Asclepius and his sons
practised no such art. They were acting in the interest of the
public, and did not wish to preserve useless lives, or raise up a
puny offspring to wretched sires. Honest diseases they honestly
cured; and if a man was wounded, they applied the proper remedies,
and then let him eat and drink what he liked. But they declined to
treat intemperate and worthless subjects, even though they might
have made large fortunes out of them. As to the story of Pindar,
that Asclepius was slain by a thunderbolt for restoring a rich man
to life, that is a lie—following our old rule we must say
either that he did not take bribes, or that he was not the son of a
god.

Glaucon then asks Socrates whether the best physicians and the
best judges will not be those who have had severally the greatest
experience of diseases and of crimes. Socrates draws a distinction
between the two professions. The physician should have had
experience of disease in his own body, for he cures with his mind
and not with his body. But the judge controls mind by mind; and
therefore his mind should not be corrupted by crime. Where then is
he to gain experience? How is he to be wise and also innocent? When
young a good man is apt to be deceived by evil-doers, because he
has no pattern of evil in himself; and therefore the judge should
be of a certain age; his youth should have been innocent, and he
should have acquired insight into evil not by the practice of it,
but by the observation of it in others. This is the ideal of a
judge; the criminal turned detective is wonderfully suspicious, but
when in company with good men who have experience, he is at fault,
for he foolishly imagines that every one is as bad as himself. Vice
may be known of virtue, but cannot know virtue. This is the sort of
medicine and this the sort of law which will prevail in our State;
they will be healing arts to better natures; but the evil body will
be left to die by the one, and the evil soul will be put to death
by the other. And the need of either will be greatly diminished by
good music which will give harmony to the soul, and good gymnastic
which will give health to the body. Not that this division of music
and gymnastic really corresponds to soul and body; for they are
both equally concerned with the soul, which is tamed by the one and
aroused and sustained by the other. The two together supply our
guardians with their twofold nature. The passionate disposition
when it has too much gymnastic is hardened and brutalized, the
gentle or philosophic temper which has too much music becomes
enervated. While a man is allowing music to pour like water through
the funnel of his ears, the edge of his soul gradually wears away,
and the passionate or spirited element is melted out of him. Too
little spirit is easily exhausted; too much quickly passes into
nervous irritability. So, again, the athlete by feeding and
training has his courage doubled, but he soon grows stupid; he is
like a wild beast, ready to do everything by blows and nothing by
counsel or policy. There are two principles in man, reason and
passion, and to these, not to the soul and body, the two arts of
music and gymnastic correspond. He who mingles them in harmonious
concord is the true musician,—he shall be the presiding
genius of our State.

The next question is, Who are to be our rulers? First, the elder
must rule the younger; and the best of the elders will be the best
guardians. Now they will be the best who love their subjects most,
and think that they have a common interest with them in the welfare
of the state. These we must select; but they must be watched at
every epoch of life to see whether they have retained the same
opinions and held out against force and enchantment. For time and
persuasion and the love of pleasure may enchant a man into a change
of purpose, and the force of grief and pain may compel him. And
therefore our guardians must be men who have been tried by many
tests, like gold in the refiner’s fire, and have been passed
first through danger, then through pleasure, and at every age have
come out of such trials victorious and without stain, in full
command of themselves and their principles; having all their
faculties in harmonious exercise for their country’s good.
These shall receive the highest honours both in life and death. (It
would perhaps be better to confine the term ‘guardians’
to this select class: the younger men may be called
‘auxiliaries.’)

And now for one magnificent lie, in the belief of which, Oh that
we could train our rulers!—at any rate let us make the
attempt with the rest of the world. What I am going to tell is only
another version of the legend of Cadmus; but our unbelieving
generation will be slow to accept such a story. The tale must be
imparted, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, lastly to the
people. We will inform them that their youth was a dream, and that
during the time when they seemed to be undergoing their education
they were really being fashioned in the earth, who sent them up
when they were ready; and that they must protect and cherish her
whose children they are, and regard each other as brothers and
sisters. ‘I do not wonder at your being ashamed to propound
such a fiction.’ There is more behind. These brothers and
sisters have different natures, and some of them God framed to
rule, whom he fashioned of gold; others he made of silver, to be
auxiliaries; others again to be husbandmen and craftsmen, and these
were formed by him of brass and iron. But as they are all sprung
from a common stock, a golden parent may have a silver son, or a
silver parent a golden son, and then there must be a change of
rank; the son of the rich must descend, and the child of the
artisan rise, in the social scale; for an oracle says ‘that
the State will come to an end if governed by a man of brass or
iron.’ Will our citizens ever believe all this? ‘Not in
the present generation, but in the next, perhaps, Yes.’

Now let the earthborn men go forth under the command of their
rulers, and look about and pitch their camp in a high place, which
will be safe against enemies from without, and likewise against
insurrections from within. There let them sacrifice and set up
their tents; for soldiers they are to be and not shopkeepers, the
watchdogs and guardians of the sheep; and luxury and avarice will
turn them into wolves and tyrants. Their habits and their dwellings
should correspond to their education. They should have no property;
their pay should only meet their expenses; and they should have
common meals. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from
God, and this divine gift in their souls they must not alloy with
that earthly dross which passes under the name of gold. They only
of the citizens may not touch it, or be under the same roof with
it, or drink from it; it is the accursed thing. Should they ever
acquire houses or lands or money of their own, they will become
householders and tradesmen instead of guardians, enemies and
tyrants instead of helpers, and the hour of ruin, both to
themselves and the rest of the State, will be at hand.

The religious and ethical aspect of Plato’s education will
hereafter be considered under a separate head. Some lesser points
may be more conveniently noticed in this place.

1. The constant appeal to the authority of Homer, whom, with
grave irony, Plato, after the manner of his age, summons as a
witness about ethics and psychology, as well as about diet and
medicine; attempting to distinguish the better lesson from the
worse, sometimes altering the text from design; more than once
quoting or alluding to Homer inaccurately, after the manner of the
early logographers turning the Iliad into prose, and delighting to
draw far-fetched inferences from his words, or to make ludicrous
applications of them. He does not, like Heracleitus, get into a
rage with Homer and Archilochus (Heracl.), but uses their words and
expressions as vehicles of a higher truth; not on a system like
Theagenes of Rhegium or Metrodorus, or in later times the Stoics,
but as fancy may dictate. And the conclusions drawn from them are
sound, although the premises are fictitious. These fanciful appeals
to Homer add a charm to Plato’s style, and at the same time
they have the effect of a satire on the follies of Homeric
interpretation. To us (and probably to himself), although they take
the form of arguments, they are really figures of speech. They may
be compared with modern citations from Scripture, which have often
a great rhetorical power even when the original meaning of the
words is entirely lost sight of. The real, like the Platonic
Socrates, as we gather from the Memorabilia of Xenophon, was fond
of making similar adaptations. Great in all ages and countries, in
religion as well as in law and literature, has been the art of
interpretation.

2. ‘The style is to conform to the subject and the metre
to the style.’ Notwithstanding the fascination which the word
‘classical’ exercises over us, we can hardly maintain
that this rule is observed in all the Greek poetry which has come
down to us. We cannot deny that the thought often exceeds the power
of lucid expression in Aeschylus and Pindar; or that rhetoric gets
the better of the thought in the Sophist-poet Euripides. Only
perhaps in Sophocles is there a perfect harmony of the two; in him
alone do we find a grace of language like the beauty of a Greek
statue, in which there is nothing to add or to take away; at least
this is true of single plays or of large portions of them. The
connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is
not unfrequently a tangled thread which in an age before logic the
poet was unable to draw out. Many thoughts and feelings mingled in
his mind, and he had no power of disengaging or arranging them. For
there is a subtle influence of logic which requires to be
transferred from prose to poetry, just as the music and perfection
of language are infused by poetry into prose. In all ages the poet
has been a bad judge of his own meaning (Apol.); for he does not
see that the word which is full of associations to his own mind is
difficult and unmeaning to that of another; or that the sequence
which is clear to himself is puzzling to others. There are many
passages in some of our greatest modern poets which are far too
obscure; in which there is no proportion between style and subject,
in which any half-expressed figure, any harsh construction, any
distorted collocation of words, any remote sequence of ideas is
admitted; and there is no voice ‘coming sweetly from
nature,’ or music adding the expression of feeling to
thought. As if there could be poetry without beauty, or beauty
without ease and clearness. The obscurities of early Greek poets
arose necessarily out of the state of language and logic which
existed in their age. They are not examples to be followed by us;
for the use of language ought in every generation to become clearer
and clearer. Like Shakespere, they were great in spite, not in
consequence, of their imperfections of expression. But there is no
reason for returning to the necessary obscurity which prevailed in
the infancy of literature. The English poets of the last century
were certainly not obscure; and we have no excuse for losing what
they had gained, or for going back to the earlier or transitional
age which preceded them. The thought of our own times has not
out-stripped language; a want of Plato’s ‘art of
measuring’ is the rule cause of the disproportion between
them.

3. In the third book of the Republic a nearer approach is made
to a theory of art than anywhere else in Plato. His views may be
summed up as follows:—True art is not fanciful and imitative,
but simple and ideal,— the expression of the highest moral
energy, whether in action or repose. To live among works of plastic
art which are of this noble and simple character, or to listen to
such strains, is the best of influences,—the true Greek
atmosphere, in which youth should be brought up. That is the way to
create in them a natural good taste, which will have a feeling of
truth and beauty in all things. For though the poets are to be
expelled, still art is recognized as another aspect of
reason—like love in the Symposium, extending over the same
sphere, but confined to the preliminary education, and acting
through the power of habit; and this conception of art is not
limited to strains of music or the forms of plastic art, but
pervades all nature and has a wide kindred in the world. The
Republic of Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an artistic as
well as a political side.

There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts; only
in two or three passages does he even allude to them (Rep.; Soph.).
He is not lost in rapture at the great works of Phidias, the
Parthenon, the Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He would
probably have regarded any abstract truth of number or figure as
higher than the greatest of them. Yet it is hard to suppose that
some influence, such as he hopes to inspire in youth, did not pass
into his own mind from the works of art which he saw around him. We
are living upon the fragments of them, and find in a few broken
stones the standard of truth and beauty. But in Plato this feeling
has no expression; he nowhere says that beauty is the object of
art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form
(Phaedrus); he does not distinguish the fine from the mechanical
arts. Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than he
expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that the greatest
perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost entire
silence about them. In one very striking passage he tells us that a
work of art, like the State, is a whole; and this conception of a
whole and the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may be
regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating
principles of Greek art (Xen. Mem.; and Sophist).

4. Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had
better not be in robust health; and should have known what illness
is in his own person. But the judge ought to have had no similar
experience of evil; he is to be a good man who, having passed his
youth in innocence, became acquainted late in life with the vices
of others. And therefore, according to Plato, a judge should not be
young, just as a young man according to Aristotle is not fit to be
a hearer of moral philosophy. The bad, on the other hand, have a
knowledge of vice, but no knowledge of virtue. It may be doubted,
however, whether this train of reflection is well founded. In a
remarkable passage of the Laws it is acknowledged that the evil may
form a correct estimate of the good. The union of gentleness and
courage in Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox, yet was
afterwards ascertained to be a truth. And Plato might also have
found that the intuition of evil may be consistent with the
abhorrence of it. There is a directness of aim in virtue which
gives an insight into vice. And the knowledge of character is in
some degree a natural sense independent of any special experience
of good or evil.

5. One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because
unGreek and also very different from anything which existed at all
in his age of the world, is the transposition of ranks. In the
Spartan state there had been enfranchisement of Helots and
degradation of citizens under special circumstances. And in the
ancient Greek aristocracies, merit was certainly recognized as one
of the elements on which government was based. The founders of
states were supposed to be their benefactors, who were raised by
their great actions above the ordinary level of humanity; at a
later period, the services of warriors and legislators were held to
entitle them and their descendants to the privileges of citizenship
and to the first rank in the state. And although the existence of
an ideal aristocracy is slenderly proven from the remains of early
Greek history, and we have a difficulty in ascribing such a
character, however the idea may be defined, to any actual Hellenic
state—or indeed to any state which has ever existed in the
world—still the rule of the best was certainly the aspiration
of philosophers, who probably accommodated a good deal their views
of primitive history to their own notions of good government. Plato
further insists on applying to the guardians of his state a series
of tests by which all those who fell short of a fixed standard were
either removed from the governing body, or not admitted to it; and
this ‘academic’ discipline did to a certain extent
prevail in Greek states, especially in Sparta. He also indicates
that the system of caste, which existed in a great part of the
ancient, and is by no means extinct in the modern European world,
should be set aside from time to time in favour of merit. He is
aware how deeply the greater part of mankind resent any
interference with the order of society, and therefore he proposes
his novel idea in the form of what he himself calls a
‘monstrous fiction.’ (Compare the ceremony of
preparation for the two ‘great waves’ in Book v.) Two
principles are indicated by him: first, that there is a distinction
of ranks dependent on circumstances prior to the individual:
second, that this distinction is and ought to be broken through by
personal qualities. He adapts mythology like the Homeric poems to
the wants of the state, making ‘the Phoenician tale’
the vehicle of his ideas. Every Greek state had a myth respecting
its own origin; the Platonic republic may also have a tale of
earthborn men. The gravity and verisimilitude with which the tale
is told, and the analogy of Greek tradition, are a sufficient
verification of the ‘monstrous falsehood.’ Ancient
poetry had spoken of a gold and silver and brass and iron age
succeeding one another, but Plato supposes these differences in the
natures of men to exist together in a single state. Mythology
supplies a figure under which the lesson may be taught (as
Protagoras says, ‘the myth is more interesting’), and
also enables Plato to touch lightly on new principles without going
into details. In this passage he shadows forth a general truth, but
he does not tell us by what steps the transposition of ranks is to
be effected. Indeed throughout the Republic he allows the lower
ranks to fade into the distance. We do not know whether they are to
carry arms, and whether in the fifth book they are or are not
included in the communistic regulations respecting property and
marriage. Nor is there any use in arguing strictly either from a
few chance words, or from the silence of Plato, or in drawing
inferences which were beyond his vision. Aristotle, in his
criticism on the position of the lower classes, does not perceive
that the poetical creation is ‘like the air,
invulnerable,’ and cannot be penetrated by the shafts of his
logic (Pol.).

6. Two paradoxes which strike the modern reader as in the
highest degree fanciful and ideal, and which suggest to him many
reflections, are to be found in the third book of the Republic:
first, the great power of music, so much beyond any influence which
is experienced by us in modern times, when the art or science has
been far more developed, and has found the secret of harmony, as
well as of melody; secondly, the indefinite and almost absolute
control which the soul is supposed to exercise over the body.

In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we
may also observe among certain masters of the art, not unknown to
us, at the present day. With this natural enthusiasm, which is felt
by a few only, there seems to mingle in Plato a sort of Pythagorean
reverence for numbers and numerical proportion to which Aristotle
is a stranger. Intervals of sound and number are to him sacred
things which have a law of their own, not dependent on the
variations of sense. They rise above sense, and become a connecting
link with the world of ideas. But it is evident that Plato is
describing what to him appears to be also a fact. The power of a
simple and characteristic melody on the impressible mind of the
Greek is more than we can easily appreciate. The effect of national
airs may bear some comparison with it. And, besides all this, there
is a confusion between the harmony of musical notes and the harmony
of soul and body, which is so potently inspired by them.

The second paradox leads up to some curious and interesting
questions—How far can the mind control the body? Is the
relation between them one of mutual antagonism or of mutual
harmony? Are they two or one, and is either of them the cause of
the other? May we not at times drop the opposition between them,
and the mode of describing them, which is so familiar to us, and
yet hardly conveys any precise meaning, and try to view this
composite creature, man, in a more simple manner? Must we not at
any rate admit that there is in human nature a higher and a lower
principle, divided by no distinct line, which at times break
asunder and take up arms against one another? Or again, they are
reconciled and move together, either unconsciously in the ordinary
work of life, or consciously in the pursuit of some noble aim, to
be attained not without an effort, and for which every thought and
nerve are strained. And then the body becomes the good friend or
ally, or servant or instrument of the mind. And the mind has often
a wonderful and almost superhuman power of banishing disease and
weakness and calling out a hidden strength. Reason and the desires,
the intellect and the senses are brought into harmony and obedience
so as to form a single human being. They are ever parting, ever
meeting; and the identity or diversity of their tendencies or
operations is for the most part unnoticed by us. When the mind
touches the body through the appetites, we acknowledge the
responsibility of the one to the other. There is a tendency in us
which says ‘Drink.’ There is another which says,
‘Do not drink; it is not good for you.’ And we all of
us know which is the rightful superior. We are also responsible for
our health, although into this sphere there enter some elements of
necessity which may be beyond our control. Still even in the
management of health, care and thought, continued over many years,
may make us almost free agents, if we do not exact too much of
ourselves, and if we acknowledge that all human freedom is limited
by the laws of nature and of mind.

We are disappointed to find that Plato, in the general
condemnation which he passes on the practice of medicine prevailing
in his own day, depreciates the effects of diet. He would like to
have diseases of a definite character and capable of receiving a
definite treatment. He is afraid of invalidism interfering with the
business of life. He does not recognize that time is the great
healer both of mental and bodily disorders; and that remedies which
are gradual and proceed little by little are safer than those which
produce a sudden catastrophe. Neither does he see that there is no
way in which the mind can more surely influence the body than by
the control of eating and drinking; or any other action or occasion
of human life on which the higher freedom of the will can be more
simple or truly asserted.

7. Lesser matters of style may be remarked.

(1) The affected ignorance of music, which is Plato’s way
of expressing that he is passing lightly over the subject.

(2) The tentative manner in which here, as in the second book,
he proceeds with the construction of the State.

(3) The description of the State sometimes as a reality, and
then again as a work of imagination only; these are the arts by
which he sustains the reader’s interest.

(4) Connecting links, or the preparation for the entire
expulsion of the poets in Book X.

(5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the
valetudinarian, the satirical jest about the maxim of Phocylides,
the manner in which the image of the gold and silver citizens is
taken up into the subject, and the argument from the practice of
Asclepius, should not escape notice.

BOOK IV.

Adeimantus said: ‘Suppose a person to argue, Socrates,
that you make your citizens miserable, and this by their own
free-will; they are the lords of the city, and yet instead of
having, like other men, lands and houses and money of their own,
they live as mercenaries and are always mounting guard.’ You
may add, I replied, that they receive no pay but only their food,
and have no money to spend on a journey or a mistress. ‘Well,
and what answer do you give?’ My answer is, that our
guardians may or may not be the happiest of men,—I should not
be surprised to find in the long-run that they were,—but this
is not the aim of our constitution, which was designed for the good
of the whole and not of any one part. If I went to a sculptor and
blamed him for having painted the eye, which is the noblest feature
of the face, not purple but black, he would reply: ‘The eye
must be an eye, and you should look at the statue as a
whole.’ ‘Now I can well imagine a fool’s
paradise, in which everybody is eating and drinking, clothed in
purple and fine linen, and potters lie on sofas and have their
wheel at hand, that they may work a little when they please; and
cobblers and all the other classes of a State lose their
distinctive character. And a State may get on without cobblers; but
when the guardians degenerate into boon companions, then the ruin
is complete. Remember that we are not talking of peasants keeping
holiday, but of a State in which every man is expected to do his
own work. The happiness resides not in this or that class, but in
the State as a whole. I have another remark to make:—A middle
condition is best for artisans; they should have money enough to
buy tools, and not enough to be independent of business. And will
not the same condition be best for our citizens? If they are poor,
they will be mean; if rich, luxurious and lazy; and in neither case
contented. ‘But then how will our poor city be able to go to
war against an enemy who has money?’ There may be a
difficulty in fighting against one enemy; against two there will be
none. In the first place, the contest will be carried on by trained
warriors against well-to-do citizens: and is not a regular athlete
an easy match for two stout opponents at least? Suppose also, that
before engaging we send ambassadors to one of the two cities,
saying, ‘Silver and gold we have not; do you help us and take
our share of the spoil;’—who would fight against the
lean, wiry dogs, when they might join with them in preying upon the
fatted sheep? ‘But if many states join their resources, shall
we not be in danger?’ I am amused to hear you use the word
‘state’ of any but our own State. They are
‘states,’ but not ‘a state’—many in
one. For in every state there are two hostile nations, rich and
poor, which you may set one against the other. But our State, while
she remains true to her principles, will be in very deed the
mightiest of Hellenic states.

To the size of the state there is no limit but the necessity of
unity; it must be neither too large nor too small to be one. This
is a matter of secondary importance, like the principle of
transposition which was intimated in the parable of the earthborn
men. The meaning there implied was that every man should do that
for which he was fitted, and be at one with himself, and then the
whole city would be united. But all these things are secondary, if
education, which is the great matter, be duly regarded. When the
wheel has once been set in motion, the speed is always increasing;
and each generation improves upon the preceding, both in physical
and moral qualities. The care of the governors should be directed
to preserve music and gymnastic from innovation; alter the songs of
a country, Damon says, and you will soon end by altering its laws.
The change appears innocent at first, and begins in play; but the
evil soon becomes serious, working secretly upon the characters of
individuals, then upon social and commercial relations, and lastly
upon the institutions of a state; and there is ruin and confusion
everywhere. But if education remains in the established form, there
will be no danger. A restorative process will be always going on;
the spirit of law and order will raise up what has fallen down. Nor
will any regulations be needed for the lesser matters of
life—rules of deportment or fashions of dress. Like invites
like for good or for evil. Education will correct deficiencies and
supply the power of self-government. Far be it from us to enter
into the particulars of legislation; let the guardians take care of
education, and education will take care of all other things.

But without education they may patch and mend as they please;
they will make no progress, any more than a patient who thinks to
cure himself by some favourite remedy and will not give up his
luxurious mode of living. If you tell such persons that they must
first alter their habits, then they grow angry; they are charming
people. ‘Charming,—nay, the very reverse.’
Evidently these gentlemen are not in your good graces, nor the
state which is like them. And such states there are which first
ordain under penalty of death that no one shall alter the
constitution, and then suffer themselves to be flattered into and
out of anything; and he who indulges them and fawns upon them, is
their leader and saviour. ‘Yes, the men are as bad as the
states.’ But do you not admire their cleverness? ‘Nay,
some of them are stupid enough to believe what the people tell
them.’ And when all the world is telling a man that he is six
feet high, and he has no measure, how can he believe anything else?
But don’t get into a passion: to see our statesmen trying
their nostrums, and fancying that they can cut off at a blow the
Hydra-like rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play. Minute
enactments are superfluous in good states, and are useless in bad
ones.

And now what remains of the work of legislation? Nothing for us;
but to Apollo the god of Delphi we leave the ordering of the
greatest of all things—that is to say, religion. Only our
ancestral deity sitting upon the centre and navel of the earth will
be trusted by us if we have any sense, in an affair of such
magnitude. No foreign god shall be supreme in our realms…

Here, as Socrates would say, let us ‘reflect on’
(Greek) what has preceded: thus far we have spoken not of the
happiness of the citizens, but only of the well-being of the State.
They may be the happiest of men, but our principal aim in founding
the State was not to make them happy. They were to be guardians,
not holiday-makers. In this pleasant manner is presented to us the
famous question both of ancient and modern philosophy, touching the
relation of duty to happiness, of right to utility.

First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral
ideas. The utilitarian principle is valuable as a corrective of
error, and shows to us a side of ethics which is apt to be
neglected. It may be admitted further that right and utility are
co-extensive, and that he who makes the happiness of mankind his
object has one of the highest and noblest motives of human action.
But utility is not the historical basis of morality; nor the aspect
in which moral and religious ideas commonly occur to the mind. The
greatest happiness of all is, as we believe, the far-off result of
the divine government of the universe. The greatest happiness of
the individual is certainly to be found in a life of virtue and
goodness. But we seem to be more assured of a law of right than we
can be of a divine purpose, that ‘all mankind should be
saved;’ and we infer the one from the other. And the greatest
happiness of the individual may be the reverse of the greatest
happiness in the ordinary sense of the term, and may be realised in
a life of pain, or in a voluntary death. Further, the word
‘happiness’ has several ambiguities; it may mean either
pleasure or an ideal life, happiness subjective or objective, in
this world or in another, of ourselves only or of our neighbours
and of all men everywhere. By the modern founder of Utilitarianism
the self-regarding and disinterested motives of action are included
under the same term, although they are commonly opposed by us as
benevolence and self-love. The word happiness has not the
definiteness or the sacredness of ‘truth’ and
‘right’; it does not equally appeal to our higher
nature, and has not sunk into the conscience of mankind. It is
associated too much with the comforts and conveniences of life; too
little with ‘the goods of the soul which we desire for their
own sake.’ In a great trial, or danger, or temptation, or in
any great and heroic action, it is scarcely thought of. For these
reasons ‘the greatest happiness’ principle is not the
true foundation of ethics. But though not the first principle, it
is the second, which is like unto it, and is often of easier
application. For the larger part of human actions are neither right
nor wrong, except in so far as they tend to the happiness of
mankind (Introd. to Gorgias and Philebus).

The same question reappears in politics, where the useful or
expedient seems to claim a larger sphere and to have a greater
authority. For concerning political measures, we chiefly ask: How
will they affect the happiness of mankind? Yet here too we may
observe that what we term expediency is merely the law of right
limited by the conditions of human society. Right and truth are the
highest aims of government as well as of individuals; and we ought
not to lose sight of them because we cannot directly enforce them.
They appeal to the better mind of nations; and sometimes they are
too much for merely temporal interests to resist. They are the
watchwords which all men use in matters of public policy, as well
as in their private dealings; the peace of Europe may be said to
depend upon them. In the most commercial and utilitarian states of
society the power of ideas remains. And all the higher class of
statesmen have in them something of that idealism which Pericles is
said to have gathered from the teaching of Anaxagoras. They
recognise that the true leader of men must be above the motives of
ambition, and that national character is of greater value than
material comfort and prosperity. And this is the order of thought
in Plato; first, he expects his citizens to do their duty, and then
under favourable circumstances, that is to say, in a well-ordered
State, their happiness is assured. That he was far from excluding
the modern principle of utility in politics is sufficiently evident
from other passages; in which ‘the most beneficial is
affirmed to be the most honourable’, and also ‘the most
sacred’.

We may note

(1) The manner in which the objection of Adeimantus here, is
designed to draw out and deepen the argument of Socrates.

(2) The conception of a whole as lying at the foundation both of
politics and of art, in the latter supplying the only principle of
criticism, which, under the various names of harmony, symmetry,
measure, proportion, unity, the Greek seems to have applied to
works of art.

(3) The requirement that the State should be limited in size,
after the traditional model of a Greek state; as in the Politics of
Aristotle, the fact that the cities of Hellas were small is
converted into a principle.

(4) The humorous pictures of the lean dogs and the fatted sheep,
of the light active boxer upsetting two stout gentlemen at least,
of the ‘charming’ patients who are always making
themselves worse; or again, the playful assumption that there is no
State but our own; or the grave irony with which the statesman is
excused who believes that he is six feet high because he is told
so, and having nothing to measure with is to be pardoned for his
ignorance—he is too amusing for us to be seriously angry with
him.

(5) The light and superficial manner in which religion is passed
over when provision has been made for two great
principles,—first, that religion shall be based on the
highest conception of the gods, secondly, that the true national or
Hellenic type shall be maintained…

Socrates proceeds: But where amid all this is justice? Son of
Ariston, tell me where. Light a candle and search the city, and get
your brother and the rest of our friends to help in seeking for
her. ‘That won’t do,’ replied Glaucon, ‘you
yourself promised to make the search and talked about the impiety
of deserting justice.’ Well, I said, I will lead the way, but
do you follow. My notion is, that our State being perfect will
contain all the four virtues—wisdom, courage, temperance,
justice. If we eliminate the three first, the unknown remainder
will be justice.

First then, of wisdom: the State which we have called into being
will be wise because politic. And policy is one among many kinds of
skill,—not the skill of the carpenter, or of the worker in
metal, or of the husbandman, but the skill of him who advises about
the interests of the whole State. Of such a kind is the skill of
the guardians, who are a small class in number, far smaller than
the blacksmiths; but in them is concentrated the wisdom of the
State. And if this small ruling class have wisdom, then the whole
State will be wise.

Our second virtue is courage, which we have no difficulty in
finding in another class—that of soldiers. Courage may be
defined as a sort of salvation—the never-failing salvation of
the opinions which law and education have prescribed concerning
dangers. You know the way in which dyers first prepare the white
ground and then lay on the dye of purple or of any other colour.
Colours dyed in this way become fixed, and no soap or lye will ever
wash them out. Now the ground is education, and the laws are the
colours; and if the ground is properly laid, neither the soap of
pleasure nor the lye of pain or fear will ever wash them out. This
power which preserves right opinion about danger I would ask you to
call ‘courage,’ adding the epithet
‘political’ or ‘civilized’ in order to
distinguish it from mere animal courage and from a higher courage
which may hereafter be discussed.

Two virtues remain; temperance and justice. More than the
preceding virtues temperance suggests the idea of harmony. Some
light is thrown upon the nature of this virtue by the popular
description of a man as ‘master of himself’—which
has an absurd sound, because the master is also the servant. The
expression really means that the better principle in a man masters
the worse. There are in cities whole classes—women, slaves
and the like—who correspond to the worse, and a few only to
the better; and in our State the former class are held under
control by the latter. Now to which of these classes does
temperance belong? ‘To both of them.’ And our State if
any will be the abode of temperance; and we were right in
describing this virtue as a harmony which is diffused through the
whole, making the dwellers in the city to be of one mind, and
attuning the upper and middle and lower classes like the strings of
an instrument, whether you suppose them to differ in wisdom,
strength or wealth.

And now we are near the spot; let us draw in and surround the
cover and watch with all our eyes, lest justice should slip away
and escape. Tell me, if you see the thicket move first. ‘Nay,
I would have you lead.’ Well then, offer up a prayer and
follow. The way is dark and difficult; but we must push on. I begin
to see a track. ‘Good news.’ Why, Glaucon, our dulness
of scent is quite ludicrous! While we are straining our eyes into
the distance, justice is tumbling out at our feet. We are as bad as
people looking for a thing which they have in their hands. Have you
forgotten our old principle of the division of labour, or of every
man doing his own business, concerning which we spoke at the
foundation of the State—what but this was justice? Is there
any other virtue remaining which can compete with wisdom and
temperance and courage in the scale of political virtue? For
‘every one having his own’ is the great object of
government; and the great object of trade is that every man should
do his own business. Not that there is much harm in a carpenter
trying to be a cobbler, or a cobbler transforming himself into a
carpenter; but great evil may arise from the cobbler leaving his
last and turning into a guardian or legislator, or when a single
individual is trainer, warrior, legislator, all in one. And this
evil is injustice, or every man doing another’s business. I
do not say that as yet we are in a condition to arrive at a final
conclusion. For the definition which we believe to hold good in
states has still to be tested by the individual. Having read the
large letters we will now come back to the small. From the two
together a brilliant light may be struck out…

Socrates proceeds to discover the nature of justice by a method
of residues. Each of the first three virtues corresponds to one of
the three parts of the soul and one of the three classes in the
State, although the third, temperance, has more of the nature of a
harmony than the first two. If there be a fourth virtue, that can
only be sought for in the relation of the three parts in the soul
or classes in the State to one another. It is obvious and simple,
and for that very reason has not been found out. The modern
logician will be inclined to object that ideas cannot be separated
like chemical substances, but that they run into one another and
may be only different aspects or names of the same thing, and such
in this instance appears to be the case. For the definition here
given of justice is verbally the same as one of the definitions of
temperance given by Socrates in the Charmides, which however is
only provisional, and is afterwards rejected. And so far from
justice remaining over when the other virtues are eliminated, the
justice and temperance of the Republic can with difficulty be
distinguished. Temperance appears to be the virtue of a part only,
and one of three, whereas justice is a universal virtue of the
whole soul. Yet on the other hand temperance is also described as a
sort of harmony, and in this respect is akin to justice. Justice
seems to differ from temperance in degree rather than in kind;
whereas temperance is the harmony of discordant elements, justice
is the perfect order by which all natures and classes do their own
business, the right man in the right place, the division and
co-operation of all the citizens. Justice, again, is a more
abstract notion than the other virtues, and therefore, from
Plato’s point of view, the foundation of them, to which they
are referred and which in idea precedes them. The proposal to omit
temperance is a mere trick of style intended to avoid monotony.

There is a famous question discussed in one of the earlier
Dialogues of Plato (Protagoras; Arist. Nic. Ethics), ‘Whether
the virtues are one or many?’ This receives an answer which
is to the effect that there are four cardinal virtues (now for the
first time brought together in ethical philosophy), and one supreme
over the rest, which is not like Aristotle’s conception of
universal justice, virtue relative to others, but the whole of
virtue relative to the parts. To this universal conception of
justice or order in the first education and in the moral nature of
man, the still more universal conception of the good in the second
education and in the sphere of speculative knowledge seems to
succeed. Both might be equally described by the terms
‘law,’ ‘order,’ ‘harmony;’ but
while the idea of good embraces ‘all time and all
existence,’ the conception of justice is not extended beyond
man.

…Socrates is now going to identify the individual and the
State. But first he must prove that there are three parts of the
individual soul. His argument is as follows:—Quantity makes
no difference in quality. The word ‘just,’ whether
applied to the individual or to the State, has the same meaning.
And the term ‘justice’ implied that the same three
principles in the State and in the individual were doing their own
business. But are they really three or one? The question is
difficult, and one which can hardly be solved by the methods which
we are now using; but the truer and longer way would take up too
much of our time. ‘The shorter will satisfy me.’ Well
then, you would admit that the qualities of states mean the
qualities of the individuals who compose them? The Scythians and
Thracians are passionate, our own race intellectual, and the
Egyptians and Phoenicians covetous, because the individual members
of each have such and such a character; the difficulty is to
determine whether the several principles are one or three; whether,
that is to say, we reason with one part of our nature, desire with
another, are angry with another, or whether the whole soul comes
into play in each sort of action. This enquiry, however, requires a
very exact definition of terms. The same thing in the same relation
cannot be affected in two opposite ways. But there is no
impossibility in a man standing still, yet moving his arms, or in a
top which is fixed on one spot going round upon its axis. There is
no necessity to mention all the possible exceptions; let us
provisionally assume that opposites cannot do or be or suffer
opposites in the same relation. And to the class of opposites
belong assent and dissent, desire and avoidance. And one form of
desire is thirst and hunger: and here arises a new
point—thirst is thirst of drink, hunger is hunger of food;
not of warm drink or of a particular kind of food, with the single
exception of course that the very fact of our desiring anything
implies that it is good. When relative terms have no attributes,
their correlatives have no attributes; when they have attributes,
their correlatives also have them. For example, the term
‘greater’ is simply relative to ‘less,’ and
knowledge refers to a subject of knowledge. But on the other hand,
a particular knowledge is of a particular subject. Again, every
science has a distinct character, which is defined by an object;
medicine, for example, is the science of health, although not to be
confounded with health. Having cleared our ideas thus far, let us
return to the original instance of thirst, which has a definite
object—drink. Now the thirsty soul may feel two distinct
impulses; the animal one saying ‘Drink;’ the rational
one, which says ‘Do not drink.’ The two impulses are
contradictory; and therefore we may assume that they spring from
distinct principles in the soul. But is passion a third principle,
or akin to desire? There is a story of a certain Leontius which
throws some light on this question. He was coming up from the
Piraeus outside the north wall, and he passed a spot where there
were dead bodies lying by the executioner. He felt a longing desire
to see them and also an abhorrence of them; at first he turned away
and shut his eyes, then, suddenly tearing them open, he
said,—‘Take your fill, ye wretches, of the fair
sight.’ Now is there not here a third principle which is
often found to come to the assistance of reason against desire, but
never of desire against reason? This is passion or spirit, of the
separate existence of which we may further convince ourselves by
putting the following case:—When a man suffers justly, if he
be of a generous nature he is not indignant at the hardships which
he undergoes: but when he suffers unjustly, his indignation is his
great support; hunger and thirst cannot tame him; the spirit within
him must do or die, until the voice of the shepherd, that is, of
reason, bidding his dog bark no more, is heard within. This shows
that passion is the ally of reason. Is passion then the same with
reason? No, for the former exists in children and brutes; and Homer
affords a proof of the distinction between them when he says,
‘He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul.’

And now, at last, we have reached firm ground, and are able to
infer that the virtues of the State and of the individual are the
same. For wisdom and courage and justice in the State are severally
the wisdom and courage and justice in the individuals who form the
State. Each of the three classes will do the work of its own class
in the State, and each part in the individual soul; reason, the
superior, and passion, the inferior, will be harmonized by the
influence of music and gymnastic. The counsellor and the warrior,
the head and the arm, will act together in the town of Mansoul, and
keep the desires in proper subjection. The courage of the warrior
is that quality which preserves a right opinion about dangers in
spite of pleasures and pains. The wisdom of the counsellor is that
small part of the soul which has authority and reason. The virtue
of temperance is the friendship of the ruling and the subject
principles, both in the State and in the individual. Of justice we
have already spoken; and the notion already given of it may be
confirmed by common instances. Will the just state or the just
individual steal, lie, commit adultery, or be guilty of impiety to
gods and men? ‘No.’ And is not the reason of this that
the several principles, whether in the state or in the individual,
do their own business? And justice is the quality which makes just
men and just states. Moreover, our old division of labour, which
required that there should be one man for one use, was a dream or
anticipation of what was to follow; and that dream has now been
realized in justice, which begins by binding together the three
chords of the soul, and then acts harmoniously in every relation of
life. And injustice, which is the insubordination and disobedience
of the inferior elements in the soul, is the opposite of justice,
and is inharmonious and unnatural, being to the soul what disease
is to the body; for in the soul as well as in the body, good or bad
actions produce good or bad habits. And virtue is the health and
beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice is the disease and
weakness and deformity of the soul.

Again the old question returns upon us: Is justice or injustice
the more profitable? The question has become ridiculous. For
injustice, like mortal disease, makes life not worth having. Come
up with me to the hill which overhangs the city and look down upon
the single form of virtue, and the infinite forms of vice, among
which are four special ones, characteristic both of states and of
individuals. And the state which corresponds to the single form of
virtue is that which we have been describing, wherein reason rules
under one of two names—monarchy and aristocracy. Thus there
are five forms in all, both of states and of souls…

In attempting to prove that the soul has three separate
faculties, Plato takes occasion to discuss what makes difference of
faculties. And the criterion which he proposes is difference in the
working of the faculties. The same faculty cannot produce
contradictory effects. But the path of early reasoners is beset by
thorny entanglements, and he will not proceed a step without first
clearing the ground. This leads him into a tiresome digression,
which is intended to explain the nature of contradiction. First,
the contradiction must be at the same time and in the same
relation. Secondly, no extraneous word must be introduced into
either of the terms in which the contradictory proposition is
expressed: for example, thirst is of drink, not of warm drink. He
implies, what he does not say, that if, by the advice of reason, or
by the impulse of anger, a man is restrained from drinking, this
proves that thirst, or desire under which thirst is included, is
distinct from anger and reason. But suppose that we allow the term
‘thirst’ or ‘desire’ to be modified, and
say an ‘angry thirst,’ or a ‘revengeful
desire,’ then the two spheres of desire and anger overlap and
become confused. This case therefore has to be excluded. And still
there remains an exception to the rule in the use of the term
‘good,’ which is always implied in the object of
desire. These are the discussions of an age before logic; and any
one who is wearied by them should remember that they are necessary
to the clearing up of ideas in the first development of the human
faculties.

The psychology of Plato extends no further than the division of
the soul into the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements,
which, as far as we know, was first made by him, and has been
retained by Aristotle and succeeding ethical writers. The chief
difficulty in this early analysis of the mind is to define exactly
the place of the irascible faculty (Greek), which may be variously
described under the terms righteous indignation, spirit, passion.
It is the foundation of courage, which includes in Plato moral
courage, the courage of enduring pain, and of surmounting
intellectual difficulties, as well as of meeting dangers in war.
Though irrational, it inclines to side with the rational: it cannot
be aroused by punishment when justly inflicted: it sometimes takes
the form of an enthusiasm which sustains a man in the performance
of great actions. It is the ‘lion heart’ with which the
reason makes a treaty. On the other hand it is negative rather than
positive; it is indignant at wrong or falsehood, but does not, like
Love in the Symposium and Phaedrus, aspire to the vision of Truth
or Good. It is the peremptory military spirit which prevails in the
government of honour. It differs from anger (Greek), this latter
term having no accessory notion of righteous indignation. Although
Aristotle has retained the word, yet we may observe that
‘passion’ (Greek) has with him lost its affinity to the
rational and has become indistinguishable from ‘anger’
(Greek). And to this vernacular use Plato himself in the Laws seems
to revert, though not always. By modern philosophy too, as well as
in our ordinary conversation, the words anger or passion are
employed almost exclusively in a bad sense; there is no connotation
of a just or reasonable cause by which they are aroused. The
feeling of ‘righteous indignation’ is too partial and
accidental to admit of our regarding it as a separate virtue or
habit. We are tempted also to doubt whether Plato is right in
supposing that an offender, however justly condemned, could be
expected to acknowledge the justice of his sentence; this is the
spirit of a philosopher or martyr rather than of a criminal.

We may observe how nearly Plato approaches Aristotle’s
famous thesis, that ‘good actions produce good habits.’
The words ‘as healthy practices (Greek) produce health, so do
just practices produce justice,’ have a sound very like the
Nicomachean Ethics. But we note also that an incidental remark in
Plato has become a far-reaching principle in Aristotle, and an
inseparable part of a great Ethical system.

There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by
‘the longer way’: he seems to intimate some metaphysic
of the future which will not be satisfied with arguing from the
principle of contradiction. In the sixth and seventh books (compare
Sophist and Parmenides) he has given us a sketch of such a
metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for the final revelation of the
idea of good, he is put off with the declaration that he has not
yet studied the preliminary sciences. How he would have filled up
the sketch, or argued about such questions from a higher point of
view, we can only conjecture. Perhaps he hoped to find some a
priori method of developing the parts out of the whole; or he might
have asked which of the ideas contains the other ideas, and
possibly have stumbled on the Hegelian identity of the
‘ego’ and the ‘universal.’ Or he may have
imagined that ideas might be constructed in some manner analogous
to the construction of figures and numbers in the mathematical
sciences. The most certain and necessary truth was to Plato the
universal; and to this he was always seeking to refer all knowledge
or opinion, just as in modern times we seek to rest them on the
opposite pole of induction and experience. The aspirations of
metaphysicians have always tended to pass beyond the limits of
human thought and language: they seem to have reached a height at
which they are ‘moving about in worlds unrealized,’ and
their conceptions, although profoundly affecting their own minds,
become invisible or unintelligible to others. We are not therefore
surprized to find that Plato himself has nowhere clearly explained
his doctrine of ideas; or that his school in a later generation,
like his contemporaries Glaucon and Adeimantus, were unable to
follow him in this region of speculation. In the Sophist, where he
is refuting the scepticism which maintained either that there was
no such thing as predication, or that all might be predicated of
all, he arrives at the conclusion that some ideas combine with
some, but not all with all. But he makes only one or two steps
forward on this path; he nowhere attains to any connected system of
ideas, or even to a knowledge of the most elementary relations of
the sciences to one another.

BOOK V.

I was going to enumerate the four forms of vice or decline in
states, when Polemarchus—he was sitting a little farther from
me than Adeimantus—taking him by the coat and leaning towards
him, said something in an undertone, of which I only caught the
words, ‘Shall we let him off?’ ‘Certainly
not,’ said Adeimantus, raising his voice. Whom, I said, are
you not going to let off? ‘You,’ he said. Why?
‘Because we think that you are not dealing fairly with us in
omitting women and children, of whom you have slily disposed under
the general formula that friends have all things in common.’
And was I not right? ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but
there are many sorts of communism or community, and we want to know
which of them is right. The company, as you have just heard, are
resolved to have a further explanation.’ Thrasymachus said,
‘Do you think that we have come hither to dig for gold, or to
hear you discourse?’ Yes, I said; but the discourse should be
of a reasonable length. Glaucon added, ‘Yes, Socrates, and
there is reason in spending the whole of life in such discussions;
but pray, without more ado, tell us how this community is to be
carried out, and how the interval between birth and education is to
be filled up.’ Well, I said, the subject has several
difficulties—What is possible? is the first question. What is
desirable? is the second. ‘Fear not,’ he replied,
‘for you are speaking among friends.’ That, I replied,
is a sorry consolation; I shall destroy my friends as well as
myself. Not that I mind a little innocent laughter; but he who
kills the truth is a murderer. ‘Then,’ said Glaucon,
laughing, ‘in case you should murder us we will acquit you
beforehand, and you shall be held free from the guilt of deceiving
us.’

Socrates proceeds:—The guardians of our state are to be
watch-dogs, as we have already said. Now dogs are not divided into
hes and shes—we do not take the masculine gender out to hunt
and leave the females at home to look after their puppies. They
have the same employments—the only difference between them is
that the one sex is stronger and the other weaker. But if women are
to have the same employments as men, they must have the same
education—they must be taught music and gymnastics, and the
art of war. I know that a great joke will be made of their riding
on horseback and carrying weapons; the sight of the naked old
wrinkled women showing their agility in the palaestra will
certainly not be a vision of beauty, and may be expected to become
a famous jest. But we must not mind the wits; there was a time when
they might have laughed at our present gymnastics. All is habit:
people have at last found out that the exposure is better than the
concealment of the person, and now they laugh no more. Evil only
should be the subject of ridicule.

The first question is, whether women are able either wholly or
partially to share in the employments of men. And here we may be
charged with inconsistency in making the proposal at all. For we
started originally with the division of labour; and the diversity
of employments was based on the difference of natures. But is there
no difference between men and women? Nay, are they not wholly
different? THERE was the difficulty, Glaucon, which made me
unwilling to speak of family relations. However, when a man is out
of his depth, whether in a pool or in an ocean, he can only swim
for his life; and we must try to find a way of escape, if we
can.

The argument is, that different natures have different uses, and
the natures of men and women are said to differ. But this is only a
verbal opposition. We do not consider that the difference may be
purely nominal and accidental; for example, a bald man and a hairy
man are opposed in a single point of view, but you cannot infer
that because a bald man is a cobbler a hairy man ought not to be a
cobbler. Now why is such an inference erroneous? Simply because the
opposition between them is partial only, like the difference
between a male physician and a female physician, not running
through the whole nature, like the difference between a physician
and a carpenter. And if the difference of the sexes is only that
the one beget and the other bear children, this does not prove that
they ought to have distinct educations. Admitting that women differ
from men in capacity, do not men equally differ from one another?
Has not nature scattered all the qualities which our citizens
require indifferently up and down among the two sexes? and even in
their peculiar pursuits, are not women often, though in some cases
superior to men, ridiculously enough surpassed by them? Women are
the same in kind as men, and have the same aptitude or want of
aptitude for medicine or gymnastic or war, but in a less degree.
One woman will be a good guardian, another not; and the good must
be chosen to be the colleagues of our guardians. If however their
natures are the same, the inference is that their education must
also be the same; there is no longer anything unnatural or
impossible in a woman learning music and gymnastic. And the
education which we give them will be the very best, far superior to
that of cobblers, and will train up the very best women, and
nothing can be more advantageous to the State than this. Therefore
let them strip, clothed in their chastity, and share in the toils
of war and in the defence of their country; he who laughs at them
is a fool for his pains.

The first wave is past, and the argument is compelled to admit
that men and women have common duties and pursuits. A second and
greater wave is rolling in-community of wives and children; is this
either expedient or possible? The expediency I do not doubt; I am
not so sure of the possibility. ‘Nay, I think that a
considerable doubt will be entertained on both points.’ I
meant to have escaped the trouble of proving the first, but as you
have detected the little stratagem I must even submit. Only allow
me to feed my fancy like the solitary in his walks, with a dream of
what might be, and then I will return to the question of what can
be.

In the first place our rulers will enforce the laws and make new
ones where they are wanted, and their allies or ministers will
obey. You, as legislator, have already selected the men; and now
you shall select the women. After the selection has been made, they
will dwell in common houses and have their meals in common, and
will be brought together by a necessity more certain than that of
mathematics. But they cannot be allowed to live in licentiousness;
that is an unholy thing, which the rulers are determined to
prevent. For the avoidance of this, holy marriage festivals will be
instituted, and their holiness will be in proportion to their
usefulness. And here, Glaucon, I should like to ask (as I know that
you are a breeder of birds and animals), Do you not take the
greatest care in the mating? ‘Certainly.’ And there is
no reason to suppose that less care is required in the marriage of
human beings. But then our rulers must be skilful physicians of the
State, for they will often need a strong dose of falsehood in order
to bring about desirable unions between their subjects. The good
must be paired with the good, and the bad with the bad, and the
offspring of the one must be reared, and of the other destroyed; in
this way the flock will be preserved in prime condition. Hymeneal
festivals will be celebrated at times fixed with an eye to
population, and the brides and bridegrooms will meet at them; and
by an ingenious system of lots the rulers will contrive that the
brave and the fair come together, and that those of inferior breed
are paired with inferiors—the latter will ascribe to chance
what is really the invention of the rulers. And when children are
born, the offspring of the brave and fair will be carried to an
enclosure in a certain part of the city, and there attended by
suitable nurses; the rest will be hurried away to places unknown.
The mothers will be brought to the fold and will suckle the
children; care however must be taken that none of them recognise
their own offspring; and if necessary other nurses may also be
hired. The trouble of watching and getting up at night will be
transferred to attendants. ‘Then the wives of our guardians
will have a fine easy time when they are having children.’
And quite right too, I said, that they should.

The parents ought to be in the prime of life, which for a man
may be reckoned at thirty years—from twenty-five, when he has
‘passed the point at which the speed of life is
greatest,’ to fifty-five; and at twenty years for a
woman—from twenty to forty. Any one above or below those ages
who partakes in the hymeneals shall be guilty of impiety; also
every one who forms a marriage connexion at other times without the
consent of the rulers. This latter regulation applies to those who
are within the specified ages, after which they may range at will,
provided they avoid the prohibited degrees of parents and children,
or of brothers and sisters, which last, however, are not absolutely
prohibited, if a dispensation be procured. ‘But how shall we
know the degrees of affinity, when all things are common?’
The answer is, that brothers and sisters are all such as are born
seven or nine months after the espousals, and their parents those
who are then espoused, and every one will have many children and
every child many parents.

Socrates proceeds: I have now to prove that this scheme is
advantageous and also consistent with our entire polity. The
greatest good of a State is unity; the greatest evil, discord and
distraction. And there will be unity where there are no private
pleasures or pains or interests—where if one member suffers
all the members suffer, if one citizen is touched all are quickly
sensitive; and the least hurt to the little finger of the State
runs through the whole body and vibrates to the soul. For the true
State, like an individual, is injured as a whole when any part is
affected. Every State has subjects and rulers, who in a democracy
are called rulers, and in other States masters: but in our State
they are called saviours and allies; and the subjects who in other
States are termed slaves, are by us termed nurturers and
paymasters, and those who are termed comrades and colleagues in
other places, are by us called fathers and brothers. And whereas in
other States members of the same government regard one of their
colleagues as a friend and another as an enemy, in our State no man
is a stranger to another; for every citizen is connected with every
other by ties of blood, and these names and this way of speaking
will have a corresponding reality—brother, father, sister,
mother, repeated from infancy in the ears of children, will not be
mere words. Then again the citizens will have all things in common,
in having common property they will have common pleasures and
pains.

Can there be strife and contention among those who are of one
mind; or lawsuits about property when men have nothing but their
bodies which they call their own; or suits about violence when
every one is bound to defend himself? The permission to strike when
insulted will be an ‘antidote’ to the knife and will
prevent disturbances in the State. But no younger man will strike
an elder; reverence will prevent him from laying hands on his
kindred, and he will fear that the rest of the family may
retaliate. Moreover, our citizens will be rid of the lesser evils
of life; there will be no flattery of the rich, no sordid household
cares, no borrowing and not paying. Compared with the citizens of
other States, ours will be Olympic victors, and crowned with
blessings greater still—they and their children having a
better maintenance during life, and after death an honourable
burial. Nor has the happiness of the individual been sacrificed to
the happiness of the State; our Olympic victor has not been turned
into a cobbler, but he has a happiness beyond that of any cobbler.
At the same time, if any conceited youth begins to dream of
appropriating the State to himself, he must be reminded that
‘half is better than the whole.’ ‘I should
certainly advise him to stay where he is when he has the promise of
such a brave life.’

But is such a community possible?—as among the animals, so
also among men; and if possible, in what way possible? About war
there is no difficulty; the principle of communism is adapted to
military service. Parents will take their children to look on at a
battle, just as potters’ boys are trained to the business by
looking on at the wheel. And to the parents themselves, as to other
animals, the sight of their young ones will prove a great incentive
to bravery. Young warriors must learn, but they must not run into
danger, although a certain degree of risk is worth incurring when
the benefit is great. The young creatures should be placed under
the care of experienced veterans, and they should have
wings—that is to say, swift and tractable steeds on which
they may fly away and escape. One of the first things to be done is
to teach a youth to ride.

Cowards and deserters shall be degraded to the class of
husbandmen; gentlemen who allow themselves to be taken prisoners,
may be presented to the enemy. But what shall be done to the hero?
First of all he shall be crowned by all the youths in the army;
secondly, he shall receive the right hand of fellowship; and
thirdly, do you think that there is any harm in his being kissed?
We have already determined that he shall have more wives than
others, in order that he may have as many children as possible. And
at a feast he shall have more to eat; we have the authority of
Homer for honouring brave men with ‘long chines,’ which
is an appropriate compliment, because meat is a very strengthening
thing. Fill the bowl then, and give the best seats and meats to the
brave—may they do them good! And he who dies in battle will
be at once declared to be of the golden race, and will, as we
believe, become one of Hesiod’s guardian angels. He shall be
worshipped after death in the manner prescribed by the oracle; and
not only he, but all other benefactors of the State who die in any
other way, shall be admitted to the same honours.

The next question is, How shall we treat our enemies? Shall
Hellenes be enslaved? No; for there is too great a risk of the
whole race passing under the yoke of the barbarians. Or shall the
dead be despoiled? Certainly not; for that sort of thing is an
excuse for skulking, and has been the ruin of many an army. There
is meanness and feminine malice in making an enemy of the dead
body, when the soul which was the owner has fled—like a dog
who cannot reach his assailants, and quarrels with the stones which
are thrown at him instead. Again, the arms of Hellenes should not
be offered up in the temples of the Gods; they are a pollution, for
they are taken from brethren. And on similar grounds there should
be a limit to the devastation of Hellenic territory—the
houses should not be burnt, nor more than the annual produce
carried off. For war is of two kinds, civil and foreign; the first
of which is properly termed ‘discord,’ and only the
second ‘war;’ and war between Hellenes is in reality
civil war—a quarrel in a family, which is ever to be regarded
as unpatriotic and unnatural, and ought to be prosecuted with a
view to reconciliation in a true phil-Hellenic spirit, as of those
who would chasten but not utterly enslave. The war is not against a
whole nation who are a friendly multitude of men, women, and
children, but only against a few guilty persons; when they are
punished peace will be restored. That is the way in which Hellenes
should war against one another—and against barbarians, as
they war against one another now.

‘But, my dear Socrates, you are forgetting the main
question: Is such a State possible? I grant all and more than you
say about the blessedness of being one family—fathers,
brothers, mothers, daughters, going out to war together; but I want
to ascertain the possibility of this ideal State.’ You are
too unmerciful. The first wave and the second wave I have hardly
escaped, and now you will certainly drown me with the third. When
you see the towering crest of the wave, I expect you to take pity.
‘Not a whit.’

Well, then, we were led to form our ideal polity in the search
after justice, and the just man answered to the just State. Is this
ideal at all the worse for being impracticable? Would the picture
of a perfectly beautiful man be any the worse because no such man
ever lived? Can any reality come up to the idea? Nature will not
allow words to be fully realized; but if I am to try and realize
the ideal of the State in a measure, I think that an approach may
be made to the perfection of which I dream by one or two, I do not
say slight, but possible changes in the present constitution of
States. I would reduce them to a single one—the great wave,
as I call it. Until, then, kings are philosophers, or philosophers
are kings, cities will never cease from ill: no, nor the human
race; nor will our ideal polity ever come into being. I know that
this is a hard saying, which few will be able to receive.
‘Socrates, all the world will take off his coat and rush upon
you with sticks and stones, and therefore I would advise you to
prepare an answer.’ You got me into the scrape, I said.
‘And I was right,’ he replied; ‘however, I will
stand by you as a sort of do-nothing, well-meaning ally.’
Having the help of such a champion, I will do my best to maintain
my position. And first, I must explain of whom I speak and what
sort of natures these are who are to be philosophers and rulers. As
you are a man of pleasure, you will not have forgotten how
indiscriminate lovers are in their attachments; they love all, and
turn blemishes into beauties. The snub-nosed youth is said to have
a winning grace; the beak of another has a royal look; the
featureless are faultless; the dark are manly, the fair angels; the
sickly have a new term of endearment invented expressly for them,
which is ‘honey-pale.’ Lovers of wine and lovers of
ambition also desire the objects of their affection in every form.
Now here comes the point:—The philosopher too is a lover of
knowledge in every form; he has an insatiable curiosity. ‘But
will curiosity make a philosopher? Are the lovers of sights and
sounds, who let out their ears to every chorus at the Dionysiac
festivals, to be called philosophers?’ They are not true
philosophers, but only an imitation. ‘Then how are we to
describe the true?’

You would acknowledge the existence of abstract ideas, such as
justice, beauty, good, evil, which are severally one, yet in their
various combinations appear to be many. Those who recognize these
realities are philosophers; whereas the other class hear sounds and
see colours, and understand their use in the arts, but cannot
attain to the true or waking vision of absolute justice or beauty
or truth; they have not the light of knowledge, but of opinion, and
what they see is a dream only. Perhaps he of whom we say the last
will be angry with us; can we pacify him without revealing the
disorder of his mind? Suppose we say that, if he has knowledge we
rejoice to hear it, but knowledge must be of something which is, as
ignorance is of something which is not; and there is a third thing,
which both is and is not, and is matter of opinion only. Opinion
and knowledge, then, having distinct objects, must also be distinct
faculties. And by faculties I mean powers unseen and
distinguishable only by the difference in their objects, as opinion
and knowledge differ, since the one is liable to err, but the other
is unerring and is the mightiest of all our faculties. If being is
the object of knowledge, and not-being of ignorance, and these are
the extremes, opinion must lie between them, and may be called
darker than the one and brighter than the other. This intermediate
or contingent matter is and is not at the same time, and partakes
both of existence and of non-existence. Now I would ask my good
friend, who denies abstract beauty and justice, and affirms a many
beautiful and a many just, whether everything he sees is not in
some point of view different—the beautiful ugly, the pious
impious, the just unjust? Is not the double also the half, and are
not heavy and light relative terms which pass into one another?
Everything is and is not, as in the old riddle—‘A man
and not a man shot and did not shoot a bird and not a bird with a
stone and not a stone.’ The mind cannot be fixed on either
alternative; and these ambiguous, intermediate, erring,
half-lighted objects, which have a disorderly movement in the
region between being and not-being, are the proper matter of
opinion, as the immutable objects are the proper matter of
knowledge. And he who grovels in the world of sense, and has only
this uncertain perception of things, is not a philosopher, but a
lover of opinion only…

The fifth book is the new beginning of the Republic, in which
the community of property and of family are first maintained, and
the transition is made to the kingdom of philosophers. For both of
these Plato, after his manner, has been preparing in some chance
words of Book IV, which fall unperceived on the reader’s
mind, as they are supposed at first to have fallen on the ear of
Glaucon and Adeimantus. The ‘paradoxes,’ as Morgenstern
terms them, of this book of the Republic will be reserved for
another place; a few remarks on the style, and some explanations of
difficulties, may be briefly added.

First, there is the image of the waves, which serves for a sort
of scheme or plan of the book. The first wave, the second wave, the
third and greatest wave come rolling in, and we hear the roar of
them. All that can be said of the extravagance of Plato’s
proposals is anticipated by himself. Nothing is more admirable than
the hesitation with which he proposes the solemn text, ‘Until
kings are philosophers,’ etc.; or the reaction from the
sublime to the ridiculous, when Glaucon describes the manner in
which the new truth will be received by mankind.

Some defects and difficulties may be noted in the execution of
the communistic plan. Nothing is told us of the application of
communism to the lower classes; nor is the table of prohibited
degrees capable of being made out. It is quite possible that a
child born at one hymeneal festival may marry one of its own
brothers or sisters, or even one of its parents, at another. Plato
is afraid of incestuous unions, but at the same time he does not
wish to bring before us the fact that the city would be divided
into families of those born seven and nine months after each
hymeneal festival. If it were worth while to argue seriously about
such fancies, we might remark that while all the old affinities are
abolished, the newly prohibited affinity rests not on any natural
or rational principle, but only upon the accident of children
having been born in the same month and year. Nor does he explain
how the lots could be so manipulated by the legislature as to bring
together the fairest and best. The singular expression which is
employed to describe the age of five-and-twenty may perhaps be
taken from some poet.

In the delineation of the philosopher, the illustrations of the
nature of philosophy derived from love are more suited to the
apprehension of Glaucon, the Athenian man of pleasure, than to
modern tastes or feelings. They are partly facetious, but also
contain a germ of truth. That science is a whole, remains a true
principle of inductive as well as of metaphysical philosophy; and
the love of universal knowledge is still the characteristic of the
philosopher in modern as well as in ancient times.

At the end of the fifth book Plato introduces the figment of
contingent matter, which has exercised so great an influence both
on the Ethics and Theology of the modern world, and which occurs
here for the first time in the history of philosophy. He did not
remark that the degrees of knowledge in the subject have nothing
corresponding to them in the object. With him a word must answer to
an idea; and he could not conceive of an opinion which was an
opinion about nothing. The influence of analogy led him to invent
‘parallels and conjugates’ and to overlook facts. To us
some of his difficulties are puzzling only from their simplicity:
we do not perceive that the answer to them ‘is tumbling out
at our feet.’ To the mind of early thinkers, the conception
of not-being was dark and mysterious; they did not see that this
terrible apparition which threatened destruction to all knowledge
was only a logical determination. The common term under which,
through the accidental use of language, two entirely different
ideas were included was another source of confusion. Thus through
the ambiguity of (Greek) Plato, attempting to introduce order into
the first chaos of human thought, seems to have confused perception
and opinion, and to have failed to distinguish the contingent from
the relative. In the Theaetetus the first of these difficulties
begins to clear up; in the Sophist the second; and for this, as
well as for other reasons, both these dialogues are probably to be
regarded as later than the Republic.

BOOK VI.

Having determined that the many have no knowledge of true being,
and have no clear patterns in their minds of justice, beauty,
truth, and that philosophers have such patterns, we have now to ask
whether they or the many shall be rulers in our State. But who can
doubt that philosophers should be chosen, if they have the other
qualities which are required in a ruler? For they are lovers of the
knowledge of the eternal and of all truth; they are haters of
falsehood; their meaner desires are absorbed in the interests of
knowledge; they are spectators of all time and all existence; and
in the magnificence of their contemplation the life of man is as
nothing to them, nor is death fearful. Also they are of a social,
gracious disposition, equally free from cowardice and arrogance.
They learn and remember easily; they have harmonious,
well-regulated minds; truth flows to them sweetly by nature. Can
the god of Jealousy himself find any fault with such an assemblage
of good qualities?

Here Adeimantus interposes:—‘No man can answer you,
Socrates; but every man feels that this is owing to his own
deficiency in argument. He is driven from one position to another,
until he has nothing more to say, just as an unskilful player at
draughts is reduced to his last move by a more skilled opponent.
And yet all the time he may be right. He may know, in this very
instance, that those who make philosophy the business of their
lives, generally turn out rogues if they are bad men, and fools if
they are good. What do you say?’ I should say that he is
quite right. ‘Then how is such an admission reconcileable
with the doctrine that philosophers should be kings?’

I shall answer you in a parable which will also let you see how
poor a hand I am at the invention of allegories. The relation of
good men to their governments is so peculiar, that in order to
defend them I must take an illustration from the world of fiction.
Conceive the captain of a ship, taller by a head and shoulders than
any of the crew, yet a little deaf, a little blind, and rather
ignorant of the seaman’s art. The sailors want to steer,
although they know nothing of the art; and they have a theory that
it cannot be learned. If the helm is refused them, they drug the
captain’s posset, bind him hand and foot, and take possession
of the ship. He who joins in the mutiny is termed a good pilot and
what not; they have no conception that the true pilot must observe
the winds and the stars, and must be their master, whether they
like it or not;—such an one would be called by them fool,
prater, star-gazer. This is my parable; which I will beg you to
interpret for me to those gentlemen who ask why the philosopher has
such an evil name, and to explain to them that not he, but those
who will not use him, are to blame for his uselessness. The
philosopher should not beg of mankind to be put in authority over
them. The wise man should not seek the rich, as the proverb bids,
but every man, whether rich or poor, must knock at the door of the
physician when he has need of him. Now the pilot is the
philosopher—he whom in the parable they call star-gazer, and
the mutinous sailors are the mob of politicians by whom he is
rendered useless. Not that these are the worst enemies of
philosophy, who is far more dishonoured by her own professing sons
when they are corrupted by the world. Need I recall the original
image of the philosopher? Did we not say of him just now, that he
loved truth and hated falsehood, and that he could not rest in the
multiplicity of phenomena, but was led by a sympathy in his own
nature to the contemplation of the absolute? All the virtues as
well as truth, who is the leader of them, took up their abode in
his soul. But as you were observing, if we turn aside to view the
reality, we see that the persons who were thus described, with the
exception of a small and useless class, are utter rogues.

The point which has to be considered, is the origin of this
corruption in nature. Every one will admit that the philosopher, in
our description of him, is a rare being. But what numberless causes
tend to destroy these rare beings! There is no good thing which may
not be a cause of evil— health, wealth, strength, rank, and
the virtues themselves, when placed under unfavourable
circumstances. For as in the animal or vegetable world the
strongest seeds most need the accompaniment of good air and soil,
so the best of human characters turn out the worst when they fall
upon an unsuitable soil; whereas weak natures hardly ever do any
considerable good or harm; they are not the stuff out of which
either great criminals or great heroes are made. The philosopher
follows the same analogy: he is either the best or the worst of all
men. Some persons say that the Sophists are the corrupters of
youth; but is not public opinion the real Sophist who is everywhere
present—in those very persons, in the assembly, in the
courts, in the camp, in the applauses and hisses of the theatre
re-echoed by the surrounding hills? Will not a young man’s
heart leap amid these discordant sounds? and will any education
save him from being carried away by the torrent? Nor is this all.
For if he will not yield to opinion, there follows the gentle
compulsion of exile or death. What principle of rival Sophists or
anybody else can overcome in such an unequal contest? Characters
there may be more than human, who are exceptions—God may save
a man, but not his own strength. Further, I would have you consider
that the hireling Sophist only gives back to the world their own
opinions; he is the keeper of the monster, who knows how to flatter
or anger him, and observes the meaning of his inarticulate grunts.
Good is what pleases him, evil what he dislikes; truth and beauty
are determined only by the taste of the brute. Such is the
Sophist’s wisdom, and such is the condition of those who make
public opinion the test of truth, whether in art or in morals. The
curse is laid upon them of being and doing what it approves, and
when they attempt first principles the failure is ludicrous. Think
of all this and ask yourself whether the world is more likely to be
a believer in the unity of the idea, or in the multiplicity of
phenomena. And the world if not a believer in the idea cannot be a
philosopher, and must therefore be a persecutor of philosophers.
There is another evil:—the world does not like to lose the
gifted nature, and so they flatter the young (Alcibiades) into a
magnificent opinion of his own capacity; the tall, proper youth
begins to expand, and is dreaming of kingdoms and empires. If at
this instant a friend whispers to him, ‘Now the gods lighten
thee; thou art a great fool’ and must be educated—do
you think that he will listen? Or suppose a better sort of man who
is attracted towards philosophy, will they not make Herculean
efforts to spoil and corrupt him? Are we not right in saying that
the love of knowledge, no less than riches, may divert him? Men of
this class (Critias) often become politicians—they are the
authors of great mischief in states, and sometimes also of great
good. And thus philosophy is deserted by her natural protectors,
and others enter in and dishonour her. Vulgar little minds see the
land open and rush from the prisons of the arts into her temple. A
clever mechanic having a soul coarse as his body, thinks that he
will gain caste by becoming her suitor. For philosophy, even in her
fallen estate, has a dignity of her own—and he, like a bald
little blacksmith’s apprentice as he is, having made some
money and got out of durance, washes and dresses himself as a
bridegroom and marries his master’s daughter. What will be
the issue of such marriages? Will they not be vile and bastard,
devoid of truth and nature? ‘They will.’ Small, then,
is the remnant of genuine philosophers; there may be a few who are
citizens of small states, in which politics are not worth thinking
of, or who have been detained by Theages’ bridle of ill
health; for my own case of the oracular sign is almost unique, and
too rare to be worth mentioning. And these few when they have
tasted the pleasures of philosophy, and have taken a look at that
den of thieves and place of wild beasts, which is human life, will
stand aside from the storm under the shelter of a wall, and try to
preserve their own innocence and to depart in peace. ‘A great
work, too, will have been accomplished by them.’ Great, yes,
but not the greatest; for man is a social being, and can only
attain his highest development in the society which is best suited
to him.

Enough, then, of the causes why philosophy has such an evil
name. Another question is, Which of existing states is suited to
her? Not one of them; at present she is like some exotic seed which
degenerates in a strange soil; only in her proper state will she be
shown to be of heavenly growth. ‘And is her proper state ours
or some other?’ Ours in all points but one, which was left
undetermined. You may remember our saying that some living mind or
witness of the legislator was needed in states. But we were afraid
to enter upon a subject of such difficulty, and now the question
recurs and has not grown easier:—How may philosophy be safely
studied? Let us bring her into the light of day, and make an end of
the inquiry.

In the first place, I say boldly that nothing can be worse than
the present mode of study. Persons usually pick up a little
philosophy in early youth, and in the intervals of business, but
they never master the real difficulty, which is dialectic. Later,
perhaps, they occasionally go to a lecture on philosophy. Years
advance, and the sun of philosophy, unlike that of Heracleitus,
sets never to rise again. This order of education should be
reversed; it should begin with gymnastics in youth, and as the man
strengthens, he should increase the gymnastics of his soul. Then,
when active life is over, let him finally return to philosophy.
‘You are in earnest, Socrates, but the world will be equally
earnest in withstanding you—no more than Thrasymachus.’
Do not make a quarrel between Thrasymachus and me, who were never
enemies and are now good friends enough. And I shall do my best to
convince him and all mankind of the truth of my words, or at any
rate to prepare for the future when, in another life, we may again
take part in similar discussions. ‘That will be a long time
hence.’ Not long in comparison with eternity. The many will
probably remain incredulous, for they have never seen the natural
unity of ideas, but only artificial juxtapositions; not free and
generous thoughts, but tricks of controversy and quips of
law;—a perfect man ruling in a perfect state, even a single
one they have not known. And we foresaw that there was no chance of
perfection either in states or individuals until a necessity was
laid upon philosophers—not the rogues, but those whom we
called the useless class—of holding office; or until the sons
of kings were inspired with a true love of philosophy. Whether in
the infinity of past time there has been, or is in some distant
land, or ever will be hereafter, an ideal such as we have
described, we stoutly maintain that there has been, is, and will be
such a state whenever the Muse of philosophy rules. Will you say
that the world is of another mind? O, my friend, do not revile the
world! They will soon change their opinion if they are gently
entreated, and are taught the true nature of the philosopher. Who
can hate a man who loves him? Or be jealous of one who has no
jealousy? Consider, again, that the many hate not the true but the
false philosophers—the pretenders who force their way in
without invitation, and are always speaking of persons and not of
principles, which is unlike the spirit of philosophy. For the true
philosopher despises earthly strife; his eye is fixed on the
eternal order in accordance with which he moulds himself into the
Divine image (and not himself only, but other men), and is the
creator of the virtues private as well as public. When mankind see
that the happiness of states is only to be found in that image,
will they be angry with us for attempting to delineate it?
‘Certainly not. But what will be the process of
delineation?’ The artist will do nothing until he has made a
tabula rasa; on this he will inscribe the constitution of a state,
glancing often at the divine truth of nature, and from that
deriving the godlike among men, mingling the two elements, rubbing
out and painting in, until there is a perfect harmony or fusion of
the divine and human. But perhaps the world will doubt the
existence of such an artist. What will they doubt? That the
philosopher is a lover of truth, having a nature akin to the
best?—and if they admit this will they still quarrel with us
for making philosophers our kings? ‘They will be less
disposed to quarrel.’ Let us assume then that they are
pacified. Still, a person may hesitate about the probability of the
son of a king being a philosopher. And we do not deny that they are
very liable to be corrupted; but yet surely in the course of ages
there might be one exception—and one is enough. If one son of
a king were a philosopher, and had obedient citizens, he might
bring the ideal polity into being. Hence we conclude that our laws
are not only the best, but that they are also possible, though not
free from difficulty.

I gained nothing by evading the troublesome questions which
arose concerning women and children. I will be wiser now and
acknowledge that we must go to the bottom of another question: What
is to be the education of our guardians? It was agreed that they
were to be lovers of their country, and were to be tested in the
refiner’s fire of pleasures and pains, and those who came
forth pure and remained fixed in their principles were to have
honours and rewards in life and after death. But at this point, the
argument put on her veil and turned into another path. I hesitated
to make the assertion which I now hazard,—that our guardians
must be philosophers. You remember all the contradictory elements,
which met in the philosopher— how difficult to find them all
in a single person! Intelligence and spirit are not often combined
with steadiness; the stolid, fearless, nature is averse to
intellectual toil. And yet these opposite elements are all
necessary, and therefore, as we were saying before, the aspirant
must be tested in pleasures and dangers; and also, as we must now
further add, in the highest branches of knowledge. You will
remember, that when we spoke of the virtues mention was made of a
longer road, which you were satisfied to leave unexplored.
‘Enough seemed to have been said.’ Enough, my friend;
but what is enough while anything remains wanting? Of all men the
guardian must not faint in the search after truth; he must be
prepared to take the longer road, or he will never reach that
higher region which is above the four virtues; and of the virtues
too he must not only get an outline, but a clear and distinct
vision. (Strange that we should be so precise about trifles, so
careless about the highest truths!) ‘And what are the
highest?’ You to pretend unconsciousness, when you have so
often heard me speak of the idea of good, about which we know so
little, and without which though a man gain the world he has no
profit of it! Some people imagine that the good is wisdom; but this
involves a circle,—the good, they say, is wisdom, wisdom has
to do with the good. According to others the good is pleasure; but
then comes the absurdity that good is bad, for there are bad
pleasures as well as good. Again, the good must have reality; a man
may desire the appearance of virtue, but he will not desire the
appearance of good. Ought our guardians then to be ignorant of this
supreme principle, of which every man has a presentiment, and
without which no man has any real knowledge of anything?
‘But, Socrates, what is this supreme principle, knowledge or
pleasure, or what? You may think me troublesome, but I say that you
have no business to be always repeating the doctrines of others
instead of giving us your own.’ Can I say what I do not know?
‘You may offer an opinion.’ And will the blindness and
crookedness of opinion content you when you might have the light
and certainty of science? ‘I will only ask you to give such
an explanation of the good as you have given already of temperance
and justice.’ I wish that I could, but in my present mood I
cannot reach to the height of the knowledge of the good. To the
parent or principal I cannot introduce you, but to the child
begotten in his image, which I may compare with the interest on the
principal, I will. (Audit the account, and do not let me give you a
false statement of the debt.) You remember our old distinction of
the many beautiful and the one beautiful, the particular and the
universal, the objects of sight and the objects of thought? Did you
ever consider that the objects of sight imply a faculty of sight
which is the most complex and costly of our senses, requiring not
only objects of sense, but also a medium, which is light; without
which the sight will not distinguish between colours and all will
be a blank? For light is the noble bond between the perceiving
faculty and the thing perceived, and the god who gives us light is
the sun, who is the eye of the day, but is not to be confounded
with the eye of man. This eye of the day or sun is what I call the
child of the good, standing in the same relation to the visible
world as the good to the intellectual. When the sun shines the eye
sees, and in the intellectual world where truth is, there is sight
and light. Now that which is the sun of intelligent natures, is the
idea of good, the cause of knowledge and truth, yet other and
fairer than they are, and standing in the same relation to them in
which the sun stands to light. O inconceivable height of beauty,
which is above knowledge and above truth! (‘You cannot surely
mean pleasure,’ he said. Peace, I replied.) And this idea of
good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and the author not
of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than either in
dignity and power. ‘That is a reach of thought more than
human; but, pray, go on with the image, for I suspect that there is
more behind.’ There is, I said; and bearing in mind our two
suns or principles, imagine further their corresponding
worlds—one of the visible, the other of the intelligible; you
may assist your fancy by figuring the distinction under the image
of a line divided into two unequal parts, and may again subdivide
each part into two lesser segments representative of the stages of
knowledge in either sphere. The lower portion of the lower or
visible sphere will consist of shadows and reflections, and its
upper and smaller portion will contain real objects in the world of
nature or of art. The sphere of the intelligible will also have two
divisions,—one of mathematics, in which there is no ascent
but all is descent; no inquiring into premises, but only drawing of
inferences. In this division the mind works with figures and
numbers, the images of which are taken not from the shadows, but
from the objects, although the truth of them is seen only with the
mind’s eye; and they are used as hypotheses without being
analysed. Whereas in the other division reason uses the hypotheses
as stages or steps in the ascent to the idea of good, to which she
fastens them, and then again descends, walking firmly in the region
of ideas, and of ideas only, in her ascent as well as descent, and
finally resting in them. ‘I partly understand,’ he
replied; ‘you mean that the ideas of science are superior to
the hypothetical, metaphorical conceptions of geometry and the
other arts or sciences, whichever is to be the name of them; and
the latter conceptions you refuse to make subjects of pure
intellect, because they have no first principle, although when
resting on a first principle, they pass into the higher
sphere.’ You understand me very well, I said. And now to
those four divisions of knowledge you may assign four corresponding
faculties—pure intelligence to the highest sphere; active
intelligence to the second; to the third, faith; to the fourth, the
perception of shadows—and the clearness of the several
faculties will be in the same ratio as the truth of the objects to
which they are related…

Like Socrates, we may recapitulate the virtues of the
philosopher. In language which seems to reach beyond the horizon of
that age and country, he is described as ‘the spectator of
all time and all existence.’ He has the noblest gifts of
nature, and makes the highest use of them. All his desires are
absorbed in the love of wisdom, which is the love of truth. None of
the graces of a beautiful soul are wanting in him; neither can he
fear death, or think much of human life. The ideal of modern times
hardly retains the simplicity of the antique; there is not the same
originality either in truth or error which characterized the
Greeks. The philosopher is no longer living in the unseen, nor is
he sent by an oracle to convince mankind of ignorance; nor does he
regard knowledge as a system of ideas leading upwards by regular
stages to the idea of good. The eagerness of the pursuit has
abated; there is more division of labour and less of comprehensive
reflection upon nature and human life as a whole; more of exact
observation and less of anticipation and inspiration. Still, in the
altered conditions of knowledge, the parallel is not wholly lost;
and there may be a use in translating the conception of Plato into
the language of our own age. The philosopher in modern times is one
who fixes his mind on the laws of nature in their sequence and
connexion, not on fragments or pictures of nature; on history, not

on controversy; on the truths which are acknowledged by the few,
not on the opinions of the many. He is aware of the importance of
‘classifying according to nature,’ and will try to
‘separate the limbs of science without breaking them’
(Phaedr.). There is no part of truth, whether great or small, which
he will dishonour; and in the least things he will discern the
greatest (Parmen.). Like the ancient philosopher he sees the world
pervaded by analogies, but he can also tell ‘why in some
cases a single instance is sufficient for an induction’
(Mill’s Logic), while in other cases a thousand examples
would prove nothing. He inquires into a portion of knowledge only,
because the whole has grown too vast to be embraced by a single
mind or life. He has a clearer conception of the divisions of
science and of their relation to the mind of man than was possible
to the ancients. Like Plato, he has a vision of the unity of
knowledge, not as the beginning of philosophy to be attained by a
study of elementary mathematics, but as the far-off result of the
working of many minds in many ages. He is aware that mathematical
studies are preliminary to almost every other; at the same time, he
will not reduce all varieties of knowledge to the type of
mathematics. He too must have a nobility of character, without
which genius loses the better half of greatness. Regarding the
world as a point in immensity, and each individual as a link in a
never-ending chain of existence, he will not think much of his own
life, or be greatly afraid of death.

Adeimantus objects first of all to the form of the Socratic
reasoning, thus showing that Plato is aware of the imperfection of
his own method. He brings the accusation against himself which
might be brought against him by a modern logician—that he
extracts the answer because he knows how to put the question. In a
long argument words are apt to change their meaning slightly, or
premises may be assumed or conclusions inferred with rather too
much certainty or universality; the variation at each step may be
unobserved, and yet at last the divergence becomes considerable.
Hence the failure of attempts to apply arithmetical or algebraic
formulae to logic. The imperfection, or rather the higher and more
elastic nature of language, does not allow words to have the
precision of numbers or of symbols. And this quality in language
impairs the force of an argument which has many steps.

The objection, though fairly met by Socrates in this particular
instance, may be regarded as implying a reflection upon the
Socratic mode of reasoning. And here, as elsewhere, Plato seems to
intimate that the time had come when the negative and interrogative
method of Socrates must be superseded by a positive and
constructive one, of which examples are given in some of the later
dialogues. Adeimantus further argues that the ideal is wholly at
variance with facts; for experience proves philosophers to be
either useless or rogues. Contrary to all expectation Socrates has
no hesitation in admitting the truth of this, and explains the
anomaly in an allegory, first characteristically depreciating his
own inventive powers. In this allegory the people are distinguished
from the professional politicians, and, as elsewhere, are spoken of
in a tone of pity rather than of censure under the image of
‘the noble captain who is not very quick in his
perceptions.’

The uselessness of philosophers is explained by the circumstance
that mankind will not use them. The world in all ages has been
divided between contempt and fear of those who employ the power of
ideas and know no other weapons. Concerning the false philosopher,
Socrates argues that the best is most liable to corruption; and
that the finer nature is more likely to suffer from alien
conditions. We too observe that there are some kinds of excellence
which spring from a peculiar delicacy of constitution; as is
evidently true of the poetical and imaginative temperament, which
often seems to depend on impressions, and hence can only breathe or
live in a certain atmosphere. The man of genius has greater pains
and greater pleasures, greater powers and greater weaknesses, and
often a greater play of character than is to be found in ordinary
men. He can assume the disguise of virtue or disinterestedness
without having them, or veil personal enmity in the language of
patriotism and philosophy,—he can say the word which all men
are thinking, he has an insight which is terrible into the follies
and weaknesses of his fellow-men. An Alcibiades, a Mirabeau, or a
Napoleon the First, are born either to be the authors of great
evils in states, or ‘of great good, when they are drawn in
that direction.’

Yet the thesis, ‘corruptio optimi pessima,’ cannot
be maintained generally or without regard to the kind of excellence
which is corrupted. The alien conditions which are corrupting to
one nature, may be the elements of culture to another. In general a
man can only receive his highest development in a congenial state
or family, among friends or fellow-workers. But also he may
sometimes be stirred by adverse circumstances to such a degree that
he rises up against them and reforms them. And while weaker or
coarser characters will extract good out of evil, say in a corrupt
state of the church or of society, and live on happily, allowing
the evil to remain, the finer or stronger natures may be crushed or
spoiled by surrounding influences—may become misanthrope and
philanthrope by turns; or in a few instances, like the founders of
the monastic orders, or the Reformers, owing to some peculiarity in
themselves or in their age, may break away entirely from the world
and from the church, sometimes into great good, sometimes into
great evil, sometimes into both. And the same holds in the lesser
sphere of a convent, a school, a family.

Plato would have us consider how easily the best natures are
overpowered by public opinion, and what efforts the rest of mankind
will make to get possession of them. The world, the church, their
own profession, any political or party organization, are always
carrying them off their legs and teaching them to apply high and
holy names to their own prejudices and interests. The
‘monster’ corporation to which they belong judges right
and truth to be the pleasure of the community. The individual
becomes one with his order; or, if he resists, the world is too
much for him, and will sooner or later be revenged on him. This is,
perhaps, a one-sided but not wholly untrue picture of the maxims
and practice of mankind when they ‘sit down together at an
assembly,’ either in ancient or modern times.

When the higher natures are corrupted by politics, the lower
take possession of the vacant place of philosophy. This is
described in one of those continuous images in which the argument,
to use a Platonic expression, ‘veils herself,’ and
which is dropped and reappears at intervals. The question is
asked,—Why are the citizens of states so hostile to
philosophy? The answer is, that they do not know her. And yet there
is also a better mind of the many; they would believe if they were
taught. But hitherto they have only known a conventional imitation
of philosophy, words without thoughts, systems which have no life
in them; a (divine) person uttering the words of beauty and
freedom, the friend of man holding communion with the Eternal, and
seeking to frame the state in that image, they have never known.
The same double feeling respecting the mass of mankind has always
existed among men. The first thought is that the people are the
enemies of truth and right; the second, that this only arises out
of an accidental error and confusion, and that they do not really
hate those who love them, if they could be educated to know
them.

In the latter part of the sixth book, three questions have to be
considered: 1st, the nature of the longer and more circuitous way,
which is contrasted with the shorter and more imperfect method of
Book IV; 2nd, the heavenly pattern or idea of the state; 3rd, the
relation of the divisions of knowledge to one another and to the
corresponding faculties of the soul

1. Of the higher method of knowledge in Plato we have only a
glimpse. Neither here nor in the Phaedrus or Symposium, nor yet in
the Philebus or Sophist, does he give any clear explanation of his
meaning. He would probably have described his method as proceeding
by regular steps to a system of universal knowledge, which inferred
the parts from the whole rather than the whole from the parts. This
ideal logic is not practised by him in the search after justice, or
in the analysis of the parts of the soul; there, like Aristotle in
the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues from experience and the common
use of language. But at the end of the sixth book he conceives
another and more perfect method, in which all ideas are only steps
or grades or moments of thought, forming a connected whole which is
self-supporting, and in which consistency is the test of truth. He
does not explain to us in detail the nature of the process. Like
many other thinkers both in ancient and modern times his mind seems
to be filled with a vacant form which he is unable to realize. He
supposes the sciences to have a natural order and connexion in an
age when they can hardly be said to exist. He is hastening on to
the ‘end of the intellectual world’ without even making
a beginning of them.

In modern times we hardly need to be reminded that the process
of acquiring knowledge is here confused with the contemplation of
absolute knowledge. In all science a priori and a posteriori truths
mingle in various proportions. The a priori part is that which is
derived from the most universal experience of men, or is
universally accepted by them; the a posteriori is that which grows
up around the more general principles and becomes imperceptibly one
with them. But Plato erroneously imagines that the synthesis is
separable from the analysis, and that the method of science can
anticipate science. In entertaining such a vision of a priori
knowledge he is sufficiently justified, or at least his meaning may
be sufficiently explained by the similar attempts of Descartes,
Kant, Hegel, and even of Bacon himself, in modern philosophy.
Anticipations or divinations, or prophetic glimpses of truths
whether concerning man or nature, seem to stand in the same
relation to ancient philosophy which hypotheses bear to modern
inductive science. These ‘guesses at truth’ were not
made at random; they arose from a superficial impression of
uniformities and first principles in nature which the genius of the
Greek, contemplating the expanse of heaven and earth, seemed to
recognize in the distance. Nor can we deny that in ancient times
knowledge must have stood still, and the human mind been deprived
of the very instruments of thought, if philosophy had been strictly
confined to the results of experience.

2. Plato supposes that when the tablet has been made blank the
artist will fill in the lineaments of the ideal state. Is this a
pattern laid up in heaven, or mere vacancy on which he is supposed
to gaze with wondering eye? The answer is, that such ideals are
framed partly by the omission of particulars, partly by imagination
perfecting the form which experience supplies (Phaedo). Plato
represents these ideals in a figure as belonging to another world;
and in modern times the idea will sometimes seem to precede, at
other times to co-operate with the hand of the artist. As in
science, so also in creative art, there is a synthetical as well as
an analytical method. One man will have the whole in his mind
before he begins; to another the processes of mind and hand will be
simultaneous.

3. There is no difficulty in seeing that Plato’s divisions
of knowledge are based, first, on the fundamental antithesis of
sensible and intellectual which pervades the whole pre-Socratic
philosophy; in which is implied also the opposition of the
permanent and transient, of the universal and particular. But the
age of philosophy in which he lived seemed to require a further
distinction;—numbers and figures were beginning to separate
from ideas. The world could no longer regard justice as a cube, and
was learning to see, though imperfectly, that the abstractions of
sense were distinct from the abstractions of mind. Between the
Eleatic being or essence and the shadows of phenomena, the
Pythagorean principle of number found a place, and was, as
Aristotle remarks, a conducting medium from one to the other. Hence
Plato is led to introduce a third term which had not hitherto
entered into the scheme of his philosophy. He had observed the use
of mathematics in education; they were the best preparation for
higher studies. The subjective relation between them further
suggested an objective one; although the passage from one to the
other is really imaginary (Metaph.). For metaphysical and moral
philosophy has no connexion with mathematics; number and figure are
the abstractions of time and space, not the expressions of purely
intellectual conceptions. When divested of metaphor, a straight
line or a square has no more to do with right and justice than a
crooked line with vice. The figurative association was mistaken for
a real one; and thus the three latter divisions of the Platonic
proportion were constructed.

There is more difficulty in comprehending how he arrived at the
first term of the series, which is nowhere else mentioned, and has
no reference to any other part of his system. Nor indeed does the
relation of shadows to objects correspond to the relation of
numbers to ideas. Probably Plato has been led by the love of
analogy (Timaeus) to make four terms instead of three, although the
objects perceived in both divisions of the lower sphere are equally
objects of sense. He is also preparing the way, as his manner is,
for the shadows of images at the beginning of the seventh book, and
the imitation of an imitation in the tenth. The line may be
regarded as reaching from unity to infinity, and is divided into
two unequal parts, and subdivided into two more; each lower sphere
is the multiplication of the preceding. Of the four faculties,
faith in the lower division has an intermediate position (cp. for
the use of the word faith or belief, (Greek), Timaeus), contrasting
equally with the vagueness of the perception of shadows (Greek) and
the higher certainty of understanding (Greek) and reason
(Greek).

The difference between understanding and mind or reason (Greek)
is analogous to the difference between acquiring knowledge in the
parts and the contemplation of the whole. True knowledge is a
whole, and is at rest; consistency and universality are the tests
of truth. To this self-evidencing knowledge of the whole the
faculty of mind is supposed to correspond. But there is a knowledge
of the understanding which is incomplete and in motion always,
because unable to rest in the subordinate ideas. Those ideas are
called both images and hypotheses—images because they are
clothed in sense, hypotheses because they are assumptions only,
until they are brought into connexion with the idea of good.

The general meaning of the passage, ‘Noble, then, is the
bond which links together sight…And of this kind I spoke as the
intelligibleɉ۪ so far as the thought contained in it admits
of being translated into the terms of modern philosophy, may be
described or explained as follows:—There is a truth, one and
self-existent, to which by the help of a ladder let down from
above, the human intelligence may ascend. This unity is like the
sun in the heavens, the light by which all things are seen, the
being by which they are created and sustained. It is the IDEA of
good. And the steps of the ladder leading up to this highest or
universal existence are the mathematical sciences, which also
contain in themselves an element of the universal. These, too, we
see in a new manner when we connect them with the idea of good.
They then cease to be hypotheses or pictures, and become essential
parts of a higher truth which is at once their first principle and
their final cause.

We cannot give any more precise meaning to this remarkable
passage, but we may trace in it several rudiments or vestiges of
thought which are common to us and to Plato: such as (1) the unity
and correlation of the sciences, or rather of science, for in
Plato’s time they were not yet parted off or distinguished;
(2) the existence of a Divine Power, or life or idea or cause or
reason, not yet conceived or no longer conceived as in the Timaeus
and elsewhere under the form of a person; (3) the recognition of
the hypothetical and conditional character of the mathematical
sciences, and in a measure of every science when isolated from the
rest; (4) the conviction of a truth which is invisible, and of a
law, though hardly a law of nature, which permeates the
intellectual rather than the visible world.

The method of Socrates is hesitating and tentative, awaiting the
fuller explanation of the idea of good, and of the nature of
dialectic in the seventh book. The imperfect intelligence of
Glaucon, and the reluctance of Socrates to make a beginning, mark
the difficulty of the subject. The allusion to Theages’
bridle, and to the internal oracle, or demonic sign, of Socrates,
which here, as always in Plato, is only prohibitory; the remark
that the salvation of any remnant of good in the present evil state
of the world is due to God only; the reference to a future state of
existence, which is unknown to Glaucon in the tenth book, and in
which the discussions of Socrates and his disciples would be
resumed; the surprise in the answers; the fanciful irony of
Socrates, where he pretends that he can only describe the strange
position of the philosopher in a figure of speech; the original
observation that the Sophists, after all, are only the
representatives and not the leaders of public opinion; the picture
of the philosopher standing aside in the shower of sleet under a
wall; the figure of ‘the great beast’ followed by the
expression of good-will towards the common people who would not
have rejected the philosopher if they had known him; the
‘right noble thought’ that the highest truths demand
the greatest exactness; the hesitation of Socrates in returning
once more to his well-worn theme of the idea of good; the ludicrous
earnestness of Glaucon; the comparison of philosophy to a deserted
maiden who marries beneath her—are some of the most
interesting characteristics of the sixth book.

Yet a few more words may be added, on the old theme, which was
so oft discussed in the Socratic circle, of which we, like Glaucon
and Adeimantus, would fain, if possible, have a clearer notion.
Like them, we are dissatisfied when we are told that the idea of
good can only be revealed to a student of the mathematical
sciences, and we are inclined to think that neither we nor they
could have been led along that path to any satisfactory goal. For
we have learned that differences of quantity cannot pass into
differences of quality, and that the mathematical sciences can
never rise above themselves into the sphere of our higher thoughts,
although they may sometimes furnish symbols and expressions of
them, and may train the mind in habits of abstraction and
self-concentration. The illusion which was natural to an ancient
philosopher has ceased to be an illusion to us. But if the process
by which we are supposed to arrive at the idea of good be really
imaginary, may not the idea itself be also a mere abstraction? We
remark, first, that in all ages, and especially in primitive
philosophy, words such as being, essence, unity, good, have exerted
an extraordinary influence over the minds of men. The meagreness or
negativeness of their content has been in an inverse ratio to their
power. They have become the forms under which all things were
comprehended. There was a need or instinct in the human soul which
they satisfied; they were not ideas, but gods, and to this new
mythology the men of a later generation began to attach the powers

and associations of the elder deities.

The idea of good is one of those sacred words or forms of
thought, which were beginning to take the place of the old
mythology. It meant unity, in which all time and all existence were
gathered up. It was the truth of all things, and also the light in
which they shone forth, and became evident to intelligences human
and divine. It was the cause of all things, the power by which they
were brought into being. It was the universal reason divested of a
human personality. It was the life as well as the light of the
world, all knowledge and all power were comprehended in it. The way
to it was through the mathematical sciences, and these too were
dependent on it. To ask whether God was the maker of it, or made by
it, would be like asking whether God could be conceived apart from
goodness, or goodness apart from God. The God of the Timaeus is not
really at variance with the idea of good; they are aspects of the
same, differing only as the personal from the impersonal, or the
masculine from the neuter, the one being the expression or language
of mythology, the other of philosophy.

This, or something like this, is the meaning of the idea of good
as conceived by Plato. Ideas of number, order, harmony, development
may also be said to enter into it. The paraphrase which has just
been given of it goes beyond the actual words of Plato. We have
perhaps arrived at the stage of philosophy which enables us to
understand what he is aiming at, better than he did himself. We are
beginning to realize what he saw darkly and at a distance. But if
he could have been told that this, or some conception of the same
kind, but higher than this, was the truth at which he was aiming,
and the need which he sought to supply, he would gladly have
recognized that more was contained in his own thoughts than he
himself knew. As his words are few and his manner reticent and
tentative, so must the style of his interpreter be. We should not
approach his meaning more nearly by attempting to define it
further. In translating him into the language of modern thought, we
might insensibly lose the spirit of ancient philosophy. It is
remarkable that although Plato speaks of the idea of good as the
first principle of truth and being, it is nowhere mentioned in his
writings except in this passage. Nor did it retain any hold upon
the minds of his disciples in a later generation; it was probably
unintelligible to them. Nor does the mention of it in Aristotle
appear to have any reference to this or any other passage in his
extant writings.

BOOK VII.

And now I will describe in a figure the enlightenment or
unenlightenment of our nature:—Imagine human beings living in
an underground den which is open towards the light; they have been
there from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can
only see into the den. At a distance there is a fire, and between
the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built
along the way, like the screen over which marionette players show
their puppets. Behind the wall appear moving figures, who hold in
their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and
animals, wood and stone, and some of the passers-by are talking and
others silent. ‘A strange parable,’ he said, ‘and
strange captives.’ They are ourselves, I replied; and they
see only the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the
wall of the den; to these they give names, and if we add an echo
which returns from the wall, the voices of the passengers will seem
to proceed from the shadows. Suppose now that you suddenly turn
them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at
the real images; will they believe them to be real? Will not their
eyes be dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light
to something which they are able to behold without blinking? And
suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged ascent
into the presence of the sun himself, will not their sight be
darkened with the excess of light? Some time will pass before they
get the habit of perceiving at all; and at first they will be able
to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water; then they
will recognize the moon and the stars, and will at length behold
the sun in his own proper place as he is. Last of all they will
conclude:—This is he who gives us the year and the seasons,
and is the author of all that we see. How will they rejoice in
passing from darkness to light! How worthless to them will seem the
honours and glories of the den! But now imagine further, that they
descend into their old habitations;—in that underground
dwelling they will not see as well as their fellows, and will not
be able to compete with them in the measurement of the shadows on
the wall; there will be many jokes about the man who went on a
visit to the sun and lost his eyes, and if they find anybody trying
to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to
death, if they can catch him. Now the cave or den is the world of
sight, the fire is the sun, the way upwards is the way to
knowledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea of good is last
seen and with difficulty, but when seen is inferred to be the
author of good and right—parent of the lord of light in this
world, and of truth and understanding in the other. He who attains
to the beatific vision is always going upwards; he is unwilling to
descend into political assemblies and courts of law; for his eyes
are apt to blink at the images or shadows of images which they
behold in them—he cannot enter into the ideas of those who
have never in their lives understood the relation of the shadow to
the substance. But blindness is of two kinds, and may be caused
either by passing out of darkness into light or out of light into
darkness, and a man of sense will distinguish between them, and
will not laugh equally at both of them, but the blindness which
arises from fulness of light he will deem blessed, and pity the
other; or if he laugh at the puzzled soul looking at the sun, he
will have more reason to laugh than the inhabitants of the den at
those who descend from above. There is a further lesson taught by
this parable of ours. Some persons fancy that instruction is like
giving eyes to the blind, but we say that the faculty of sight was
always there, and that the soul only requires to be turned round
towards the light. And this is conversion; other virtues are almost
like bodily habits, and may be acquired in the same manner, but
intelligence has a diviner life, and is indestructible, turning
either to good or evil according to the direction given. Did you
never observe how the mind of a clever rogue peers out of his eyes,
and the more clearly he sees, the more evil he does? Now if you
take such an one, and cut away from him those leaden weights of
pleasure and desire which bind his soul to earth, his intelligence
will be turned round, and he will behold the truth as clearly as he
now discerns his meaner ends. And have we not decided that our
rulers must neither be so uneducated as to have no fixed rule of
life, nor so over-educated as to be unwilling to leave their
paradise for the business of the world? We must choose out
therefore the natures who are most likely to ascend to the light
and knowledge of the good; but we must not allow them to remain in
the region of light; they must be forced down again among the
captives in the den to partake of their labours and honours.
‘Will they not think this a hardship?’ You should
remember that our purpose in framing the State was not that our
citizens should do what they like, but that they should serve the
State for the common good of all. May we not fairly say to our
philosopher,—Friend, we do you no wrong; for in other States
philosophy grows wild, and a wild plant owes nothing to the
gardener, but you have been trained by us to be the rulers and
kings of our hive, and therefore we must insist on your descending
into the den. You must, each of you, take your turn, and become
able to use your eyes in the dark, and with a little practice you
will see far better than those who quarrel about the shadows, whose
knowledge is a dream only, whilst yours is a waking reality. It may
be that the saint or philosopher who is best fitted, may also be
the least inclined to rule, but necessity is laid upon him, and he
must no longer live in the heaven of ideas. And this will be the
salvation of the State. For those who rule must not be those who
are desirous to rule; and, if you can offer to our citizens a
better life than that of rulers generally is, there will be a
chance that the rich, not only in this world’s goods, but in
virtue and wisdom, may bear rule. And the only life which is better
than the life of political ambition is that of philosophy, which is
also the best preparation for the government of a State.

Then now comes the question,—How shall we create our
rulers; what way is there from darkness to light? The change is
effected by philosophy; it is not the turning over of an
oyster-shell, but the conversion of a soul from night to day, from
becoming to being. And what training will draw the soul upwards?
Our former education had two branches, gymnastic, which was
occupied with the body, and music, the sister art, which infused a
natural harmony into mind and literature; but neither of these
sciences gave any promise of doing what we want. Nothing remains to
us but that universal or primary science of which all the arts and
sciences are partakers, I mean number or calculation. ‘Very
true.’ Including the art of war? ‘Yes,
certainly.’ Then there is something ludicrous about Palamedes
in the tragedy, coming in and saying that he had invented number,
and had counted the ranks and set them in order. For if Agamemnon
could not count his feet (and without number how could he?) he must
have been a pretty sort of general indeed. No man should be a
soldier who cannot count, and indeed he is hardly to be called a
man. But I am not speaking of these practical applications of
arithmetic, for number, in my view, is rather to be regarded as a
conductor to thought and being. I will explain what I mean by the
last expression:—Things sensible are of two kinds; the one
class invite or stimulate the mind, while in the other the mind
acquiesces. Now the stimulating class are the things which suggest
contrast and relation. For example, suppose that I hold up to the
eyes three fingers—a fore finger, a middle finger, a little
finger—the sight equally recognizes all three fingers, but
without number cannot further distinguish them. Or again, suppose
two objects to be relatively great and small, these ideas of
greatness and smallness are supplied not by the sense, but by the
mind. And the perception of their contrast or relation quickens and
sets in motion the mind, which is puzzled by the confused
intimations of sense, and has recourse to number in order to find
out whether the things indicated are one or more than one. Number
replies that they are two and not one, and are to be distinguished
from one another. Again, the sight beholds great and small, but
only in a confused chaos, and not until they are distinguished does
the question arise of their respective natures; we are thus led on
to the distinction between the visible and intelligible. That was
what I meant when I spoke of stimulants to the intellect; I was
thinking of the contradictions which arise in perception. The idea
of unity, for example, like that of a finger, does not arouse
thought unless involving some conception of plurality; but when the
one is also the opposite of one, the contradiction gives rise to
reflection; an example of this is afforded by any object of sight.
All number has also an elevating effect; it raises the mind out of
the foam and flux of generation to the contemplation of being,
having lesser military and retail uses also. The retail use is not
required by us; but as our guardian is to be a soldier as well as a
philosopher, the military one may be retained. And to our higher
purpose no science can be better adapted; but it must be pursued in
the spirit of a philosopher, not of a shopkeeper. It is concerned,
not with visible objects, but with abstract truth; for numbers are
pure abstractions—the true arithmetician indignantly denies
that his unit is capable of division. When you divide, he insists
that you are only multiplying; his ‘one’ is not
material or resolvable into fractions, but an unvarying and
absolute equality; and this proves the purely intellectual
character of his study. Note also the great power which arithmetic
has of sharpening the wits; no other discipline is equally severe,
or an equal test of general ability, or equally improving to a
stupid person.

Let our second branch of education be geometry. ‘I can
easily see,’ replied Glaucon, ‘that the skill of the
general will be doubled by his knowledge of geometry.’ That
is a small matter; the use of geometry, to which I refer, is the
assistance given by it in the contemplation of the idea of good,
and the compelling the mind to look at true being, and not at
generation only. Yet the present mode of pursuing these studies, as
any one who is the least of a mathematician is aware, is mean and
ridiculous; they are made to look downwards to the arts, and not
upwards to eternal existence. The geometer is always talking of
squaring, subtending, apposing, as if he had in view action;
whereas knowledge is the real object of the study. It should
elevate the soul, and create the mind of philosophy; it should
raise up what has fallen down, not to speak of lesser uses in war
and military tactics, and in the improvement of the faculties.

Shall we propose, as a third branch of our education, astronomy?
‘Very good,’ replied Glaucon; ‘the knowledge of
the heavens is necessary at once for husbandry, navigation,
military tactics.’ I like your way of giving useful reasons
for everything in order to make friends of the world. And there is
a difficulty in proving to mankind that education is not only
useful information but a purification of the eye of the soul, which
is better than the bodily eye, for by this alone is truth seen.
Now, will you appeal to mankind in general or to the philosopher?
or would you prefer to look to yourself only? ‘Every man is
his own best friend.’ Then take a step backward, for we are
out of order, and insert the third dimension which is of solids,
after the second which is of planes, and then you may proceed to
solids in motion. But solid geometry is not popular and has not the
patronage of the State, nor is the use of it fully recognized; the
difficulty is great, and the votaries of the study are conceited
and impatient. Still the charm of the pursuit wins upon men, and,
if government would lend a little assistance, there might be great
progress made. ‘Very true,’ replied Glaucon; ‘but
do I understand you now to begin with plane geometry, and to place
next geometry of solids, and thirdly, astronomy, or the motion of
solids?’ Yes, I said; my hastiness has only hindered us.

‘Very good, and now let us proceed to astronomy, about
which I am willing to speak in your lofty strain. No one can fail
to see that the contemplation of the heavens draws the soul
upwards.’ I am an exception, then; astronomy as studied at
present appears to me to draw the soul not upwards, but downwards.
Star-gazing is just looking up at the ceiling—no better; a
man may lie on his back on land or on water—he may look up or
look down, but there is no science in that. The vision of knowledge
of which I speak is seen not with the eyes, but with the mind. All
the magnificence of the heavens is but the embroidery of a copy
which falls far short of the divine Original, and teaches nothing
about the absolute harmonies or motions of things. Their beauty is
like the beauty of figures drawn by the hand of Daedalus or any
other great artist, which may be used for illustration, but no
mathematician would seek to obtain from them true conceptions of
equality or numerical relations. How ridiculous then to look for
these in the map of the heavens, in which the imperfection of
matter comes in everywhere as a disturbing element, marring the
symmetry of day and night, of months and years, of the sun and
stars in their courses. Only by problems can we place astronomy on
a truly scientific basis. Let the heavens alone, and exert the
intellect.

Still, mathematics admit of other applications, as the
Pythagoreans say, and we agree. There is a sister science of
harmonical motion, adapted to the ear as astronomy is to the eye,
and there may be other applications also. Let us inquire of the
Pythagoreans about them, not forgetting that we have an aim higher
than theirs, which is the relation of these sciences to the idea of
good. The error which pervades astronomy also pervades harmonics.
The musicians put their ears in the place of their minds.
‘Yes,’ replied Glaucon, ‘I like to see them
laying their ears alongside of their neighbours’
faces—some saying, “That’s a new note,”
others declaring that the two notes are the same.’ Yes, I
said; but you mean the empirics who are always twisting and
torturing the strings of the lyre, and quarrelling about the
tempers of the strings; I am referring rather to the Pythagorean
harmonists, who are almost equally in error. For they investigate
only the numbers of the consonances which are heard, and ascend no
higher,—of the true numerical harmony which is unheard, and
is only to be found in problems, they have not even a conception.
‘That last,’ he said, ‘must be a marvellous
thing.’ A thing, I replied, which is only useful if pursued
with a view to the good.

All these sciences are the prelude of the strain, and are
profitable if they are regarded in their natural relations to one
another. ‘I dare say, Socrates,’ said Glaucon;
‘but such a study will be an endless business.’ What
study do you mean—of the prelude, or what? For all these
things are only the prelude, and you surely do not suppose that a
mere mathematician is also a dialectician? ‘Certainly not. I
have hardly ever known a mathematician who could reason.’ And
yet, Glaucon, is not true reasoning that hymn of dialectic which is
the music of the intellectual world, and which was by us compared
to the effort of sight, when from beholding the shadows on the wall
we arrived at last at the images which gave the shadows? Even so
the dialectical faculty withdrawing from sense arrives by the pure
intellect at the contemplation of the idea of good, and never rests
but at the very end of the intellectual world. And the royal road
out of the cave into the light, and the blinking of the eyes at the
sun and turning to contemplate the shadows of reality, not the
shadows of an image only—this progress and gradual
acquisition of a new faculty of sight by the help of the
mathematical sciences, is the elevation of the soul to the
contemplation of the highest ideal of being.

‘So far, I agree with you. But now, leaving the prelude,
let us proceed to the hymn. What, then, is the nature of dialectic,
and what are the paths which lead thither?’ Dear Glaucon, you
cannot follow me here. There can be no revelation of the absolute
truth to one who has not been disciplined in the previous sciences.
But that there is a science of absolute truth, which is attained in
some way very different from those now practised, I am confident.
For all other arts or sciences are relative to human needs and
opinions; and the mathematical sciences are but a dream or
hypothesis of true being, and never analyse their own principles.
Dialectic alone rises to the principle which is above hypotheses,
converting and gently leading the eye of the soul out of the
barbarous slough of ignorance into the light of the upper world,
with the help of the sciences which we have been
describing—sciences, as they are often termed, although they
require some other name, implying greater clearness than opinion
and less clearness than science, and this in our previous sketch
was understanding. And so we get four names—two for
intellect, and two for opinion,—reason or mind,
understanding, faith, perception of shadows—which make a
proportion— being:becoming::intellect:opinion—and
science:belief::understanding: perception of shadows. Dialectic may
be further described as that science which defines and explains the
essence or being of each nature, which distinguishes and abstracts
the good, and is ready to do battle against all opponents in the
cause of good. To him who is not a dialectician life is but a
sleepy dream; and many a man is in his grave before his is well
waked up. And would you have the future rulers of your ideal State
intelligent beings, or stupid as posts? ‘Certainly not the
latter.’ Then you must train them in dialectic, which will
teach them to ask and answer questions, and is the coping-stone of
the sciences.

I dare say that you have not forgotten how our rulers were
chosen; and the process of selection may be carried a step
further:—As before, they must be constant and valiant,
good-looking, and of noble manners, but now they must also have
natural ability which education will improve; that is to say, they
must be quick at learning, capable of mental toil, retentive,
solid, diligent natures, who combine intellectual with moral
virtues; not lame and one-sided, diligent in bodily exercise and
indolent in mind, or conversely; not a maimed soul, which hates
falsehood and yet unintentionally is always wallowing in the mire
of ignorance; not a bastard or feeble person, but sound in wind and
limb, and in perfect condition for the great gymnastic trial of the
mind. Justice herself can find no fault with natures such as these;
and they will be the saviours of our State; disciples of another
sort would only make philosophy more ridiculous than she is at
present. Forgive my enthusiasm; I am becoming excited; but when I
see her trampled underfoot, I am angry at the authors of her
disgrace. ‘I did not notice that you were more excited than
you ought to have been.’ But I felt that I was. Now do not
let us forget another point in the selection of our
disciples—that they must be young and not old. For Solon is
mistaken in saying that an old man can be always learning; youth is
the time of study, and here we must remember that the mind is free
and dainty, and, unlike the body, must not be made to work against
the grain. Learning should be at first a sort of play, in which the
natural bent is detected. As in training them for war, the young
dogs should at first only taste blood; but when the necessary
gymnastics are over which during two or three years divide life
between sleep and bodily exercise, then the education of the soul
will become a more serious matter. At twenty years of age, a
selection must be made of the more promising disciples, with whom a
new epoch of education will begin. The sciences which they have
hitherto learned in fragments will now be brought into relation
with each other and with true being; for the power of combining
them is the test of speculative and dialectical ability. And
afterwards at thirty a further selection shall be made of those who
are able to withdraw from the world of sense into the abstraction
of ideas. But at this point, judging from present experience, there
is a danger that dialectic may be the source of many evils. The
danger may be illustrated by a parallel case:—Imagine a
person who has been brought up in wealth and luxury amid a crowd of
flatterers, and who is suddenly informed that he is a
supposititious son. He has hitherto honoured his reputed parents
and disregarded the flatterers, and now he does the reverse. This
is just what happens with a man’s principles. There are
certain doctrines which he learnt at home and which exercised a
parental authority over him. Presently he finds that imputations
are cast upon them; a troublesome querist comes and asks,
‘What is the just and good?’ or proves that virtue is
vice and vice virtue, and his mind becomes unsettled, and he ceases
to love, honour, and obey them as he has hitherto done. He is
seduced into the life of pleasure, and becomes a lawless person and
a rogue. The case of such speculators is very pitiable, and, in
order that our thirty years’ old pupils may not require this
pity, let us take every possible care that young persons do not
study philosophy too early. For a young man is a sort of puppy who
only plays with an argument; and is reasoned into and out of his
opinions every day; he soon begins to believe nothing, and brings
himself and philosophy into discredit. A man of thirty does not run
on in this way; he will argue and not merely contradict, and adds
new honour to philosophy by the sobriety of his conduct. What time
shall we allow for this second gymnastic training of the
soul?—say, twice the time required for the gymnastics of the
body; six, or perhaps five years, to commence at thirty, and then
for fifteen years let the student go down into the den, and command
armies, and gain experience of life. At fifty let him return to the
end of all things, and have his eyes uplifted to the idea of good,
and order his life after that pattern; if necessary, taking his
turn at the helm of State, and training up others to be his
successors. When his time comes he shall depart in peace to the
islands of the blest. He shall be honoured with sacrifices, and
receive such worship as the Pythian oracle approves.

‘You are a statuary, Socrates, and have made a perfect
image of our governors.’ Yes, and of our governesses, for the
women will share in all things with the men. And you will admit
that our State is not a mere aspiration, but may really come into
being when there shall arise philosopher-kings, one or more, who
will despise earthly vanities, and will be the servants of justice
only. ‘And how will they begin their work?’ Their first
act will be to send away into the country all those who are more
than ten years of age, and to proceed with those who are
left…

At the commencement of the sixth book, Plato anticipated his
explanation of the relation of the philosopher to the world in an
allegory, in this, as in other passages, following the order which
he prescribes in education, and proceeding from the concrete to the
abstract. At the commencement of Book VII, under the figure of a
cave having an opening towards a fire and a way upwards to the true
light, he returns to view the divisions of knowledge, exhibiting
familiarly, as in a picture, the result which had been hardly won
by a great effort of thought in the previous discussion; at the
same time casting a glance onward at the dialectical process, which
is represented by the way leading from darkness to light. The
shadows, the images, the reflection of the sun and stars in the
water, the stars and sun themselves, severally
correspond,—the first, to the realm of fancy and
poetry,—the second, to the world of sense,—the third,
to the abstractions or universals of sense, of which the
mathematical sciences furnish the type,—the fourth and last
to the same abstractions, when seen in the unity of the idea, from
which they derive a new meaning and power. The true dialectical
process begins with the contemplation of the real stars, and not
mere reflections of them, and ends with the recognition of the sun,
or idea of good, as the parent not only of light but of warmth and
growth. To the divisions of knowledge the stages of education
partly answer:—first, there is the early education of
childhood and youth in the fancies of the poets, and in the laws
and customs of the State;—then there is the training of the
body to be a warrior athlete, and a good servant of the
mind;—and thirdly, after an interval follows the education of
later life, which begins with mathematics and proceeds to
philosophy in general.

There seem to be two great aims in the philosophy of
Plato,—first, to realize abstractions; secondly, to connect
them. According to him, the true education is that which draws men
from becoming to being, and to a comprehensive survey of all being.
He desires to develop in the human mind the faculty of seeing the
universal in all things; until at last the particulars of sense
drop away and the universal alone remains. He then seeks to combine
the universals which he has disengaged from sense, not perceiving
that the correlation of them has no other basis but the common use
of language. He never understands that abstractions, as Hegel says,
are ‘mere abstractions’—of use when employed in
the arrangement of facts, but adding nothing to the sum of
knowledge when pursued apart from them, or with reference to an
imaginary idea of good. Still the exercise of the faculty of
abstraction apart from facts has enlarged the mind, and played a
great part in the education of the human race. Plato appreciated
the value of this faculty, and saw that it might be quickened by
the study of number and relation. All things in which there is
opposition or proportion are suggestive of reflection. The mere
impression of sense evokes no power of thought or of mind, but when
sensible objects ask to be compared and distinguished, then
philosophy begins. The science of arithmetic first suggests such
distinctions. The follow in order the other sciences of plain and
solid geometry, and of solids in motion, one branch of which is
astronomy or the harmony of the spheres,—to this is appended
the sister science of the harmony of sounds. Plato seems also to
hint at the possibility of other applications of arithmetical or
mathematical proportions, such as we employ in chemistry and
natural philosophy, such as the Pythagoreans and even Aristotle
make use of in Ethics and Politics, e.g. his distinction between
arithmetical and geometrical proportion in the Ethics (Book V), or
between numerical and proportional equality in the Politics.

The modern mathematician will readily sympathise with
Plato’s delight in the properties of pure mathematics. He
will not be disinclined to say with him:—Let alone the
heavens, and study the beauties of number and figure in themselves.
He too will be apt to depreciate their application to the arts. He
will observe that Plato has a conception of geometry, in which
figures are to be dispensed with; thus in a distant and shadowy way
seeming to anticipate the possibility of working geometrical
problems by a more general mode of analysis. He will remark with
interest on the backward state of solid geometry, which, alas! was
not encouraged by the aid of the State in the age of Plato; and he
will recognize the grasp of Plato’s mind in his ability to
conceive of one science of solids in motion including the earth as
well as the heavens,—not forgetting to notice the intimation
to which allusion has been already made, that besides astronomy and
harmonics the science of solids in motion may have other
applications. Still more will he be struck with the
comprehensiveness of view which led Plato, at a time when these
sciences hardly existed, to say that they must be studied in
relation to one another, and to the idea of good, or common
principle of truth and being. But he will also see (and perhaps
without surprise) that in that stage of physical and mathematical
knowledge, Plato has fallen into the error of supposing that he can
construct the heavens a priori by mathematical problems, and
determine the principles of harmony irrespective of the adaptation
of sounds to the human ear. The illusion was a natural one in that
age and country. The simplicity and certainty of astronomy and
harmonics seemed to contrast with the variation and complexity of
the world of sense; hence the circumstance that there was some
elementary basis of fact, some measurement of distance or time or
vibrations on which they must ultimately rest, was overlooked by
him. The modern predecessors of Newton fell into errors equally
great; and Plato can hardly be said to have been very far wrong, or
may even claim a sort of prophetic insight into the subject, when
we consider that the greater part of astronomy at the present day
consists of abstract dynamics, by the help of which most
astronomical discoveries have been made.

The metaphysical philosopher from his point of view recognizes
mathematics as an instrument of education,—which strengthens
the power of attention, developes the sense of order and the
faculty of construction, and enables the mind to grasp under simple
formulae the quantitative differences of physical phenomena. But
while acknowledging their value in education, he sees also that
they have no connexion with our higher moral and intellectual
ideas. In the attempt which Plato makes to connect them, we easily
trace the influences of ancient Pythagorean notions. There is no
reason to suppose that he is speaking of the ideal numbers; but he
is describing numbers which are pure abstractions, to which he
assigns a real and separate existence, which, as ‘the
teachers of the art’ (meaning probably the Pythagoreans)
would have affirmed, repel all attempts at subdivision, and in
which unity and every other number are conceived of as absolute.
The truth and certainty of numbers, when thus disengaged from
phenomena, gave them a kind of sacredness in the eyes of an ancient
philosopher. Nor is it easy to say how far ideas of order and
fixedness may have had a moral and elevating influence on the minds
of men, ‘who,’ in the words of the Timaeus,
‘might learn to regulate their erring lives according to
them.’ It is worthy of remark that the old Pythagorean
ethical symbols still exist as figures of speech among ourselves.
And those who in modern times see the world pervaded by universal
law, may also see an anticipation of this last word of modern
philosophy in the Platonic idea of good, which is the source and
measure of all things, and yet only an abstraction (Philebus).

Two passages seem to require more particular explanations.
First, that which relates to the analysis of vision. The difficulty
in this passage may be explained, like many others, from
differences in the modes of conception prevailing among ancient and
modern thinkers. To us, the perceptions of sense are inseparable
from the act of the mind which accompanies them. The consciousness
of form, colour, distance, is indistinguishable from the simple
sensation, which is the medium of them. Whereas to Plato sense is
the Heraclitean flux of sense, not the vision of objects in the
order in which they actually present themselves to the experienced
sight, but as they may be imagined to appear confused and blurred
to the half-awakened eye of the infant. The first action of the
mind is aroused by the attempt to set in order this chaos, and the
reason is required to frame distinct conceptions under which the
confused impressions of sense may be arranged. Hence arises the
question, ‘What is great, what is small?’ and thus
begins the distinction of the visible and the intelligible.

The second difficulty relates to Plato’s conception of
harmonics. Three classes of harmonists are distinguished by
him:—first, the Pythagoreans, whom he proposes to consult as
in the previous discussion on music he was to consult
Damon—they are acknowledged to be masters in the art, but are
altogether deficient in the knowledge of its higher import and
relation to the good; secondly, the mere empirics, whom Glaucon
appears to confuse with them, and whom both he and Socrates
ludicrously describe as experimenting by mere auscultation on the
intervals of sounds. Both of these fall short in different degrees
of the Platonic idea of harmony, which must be studied in a purely
abstract way, first by the method of problems, and secondly as a
part of universal knowledge in relation to the idea of good.

The allegory has a political as well as a philosophical meaning.
The den or cave represents the narrow sphere of politics or law
(compare the description of the philosopher and lawyer in the
Theaetetus), and the light of the eternal ideas is supposed to
exercise a disturbing influence on the minds of those who return to
this lower world. In other words, their principles are too wide for
practical application; they are looking far away into the past and
future, when their business is with the present. The ideal is not
easily reduced to the conditions of actual life, and may often be
at variance with them. And at first, those who return are unable to
compete with the inhabitants of the den in the measurement of the
shadows, and are derided and persecuted by them; but after a while
they see the things below in far truer proportions than those who
have never ascended into the upper world. The difference between
the politician turned into a philosopher and the philosopher turned
into a politician, is symbolized by the two kinds of disordered
eyesight, the one which is experienced by the captive who is
transferred from darkness to day, the other, of the heavenly
messenger who voluntarily for the good of his fellow-men descends
into the den. In what way the brighter light is to dawn on the
inhabitants of the lower world, or how the idea of good is to
become the guiding principle of politics, is left unexplained by
Plato. Like the nature and divisions of dialectic, of which Glaucon
impatiently demands to be informed, perhaps he would have said that
the explanation could not be given except to a disciple of the
previous sciences. (Symposium.)

Many illustrations of this part of the Republic may be found in
modern Politics and in daily life. For among ourselves, too, there
have been two sorts of Politicians or Statesmen, whose eyesight has
become disordered in two different ways. First, there have been
great men who, in the language of Burke, ‘have been too much
given to general maxims,’ who, like J.S. Mill or Burke
himself, have been theorists or philosophers before they were
politicians, or who, having been students of history, have allowed
some great historical parallel, such as the English Revolution of
1688, or possibly Athenian democracy or Roman Imperialism, to be
the medium through which they viewed contemporary events. Or
perhaps the long projecting shadow of some existing institution may
have darkened their vision. The Church of the future, the
Commonwealth of the future, the Society of the future, have so
absorbed their minds, that they are unable to see in their true
proportions the Politics of today. They have been intoxicated with
great ideas, such as liberty, or equality, or the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, or the brotherhood of humanity,
and they no longer care to consider how these ideas must be limited
in practice or harmonized with the conditions of human life. They
are full of light, but the light to them has become only a sort of
luminous mist or blindness. Almost every one has known some
enthusiastic half-educated person, who sees everything at false
distances, and in erroneous proportions.

With this disorder of eyesight may be contrasted
another—of those who see not far into the distance, but what
is near only; who have been engaged all their lives in a trade or a
profession; who are limited to a set or sect of their own. Men of
this kind have no universal except their own interests or the
interests of their class, no principle but the opinion of persons
like themselves, no knowledge of affairs beyond what they pick up
in the streets or at their club. Suppose them to be sent into a
larger world, to undertake some higher calling, from being
tradesmen to turn generals or politicians, from being schoolmasters
to become philosophers:—or imagine them on a sudden to
receive an inward light which reveals to them for the first time in
their lives a higher idea of God and the existence of a spiritual
world, by this sudden conversion or change is not their daily life
likely to be upset; and on the other hand will not many of their
old prejudices and narrownesses still adhere to them long after
they have begun to take a more comprehensive view of human things?
From familiar examples like these we may learn what Plato meant by
the eyesight which is liable to two kinds of disorders.

Nor have we any difficulty in drawing a parallel between the
young Athenian in the fifth century before Christ who became
unsettled by new ideas, and the student of a modern University who
has been the subject of a similar ‘aufklarung.’ We too
observe that when young men begin to criticise customary beliefs,
or to analyse the constitution of human nature, they are apt to
lose hold of solid principle (Greek). They are like trees which
have been frequently transplanted. The earth about them is loose,
and they have no roots reaching far into the soil. They
‘light upon every flower,’ following their own wayward
wills, or because the wind blows them. They catch opinions, as
diseases are caught—when they are in the air. Borne hither
and thither, ‘they speedily fall into beliefs’ the
opposite of those in which they were brought up. They hardly retain
the distinction of right and wrong; they seem to think one thing as
good as another. They suppose themselves to be searching after
truth when they are playing the game of ‘follow my
leader.’ They fall in love ‘at first sight’ with
paradoxes respecting morality, some fancy about art, some novelty
or eccentricity in religion, and like lovers they are so absorbed
for a time in their new notion that they can think of nothing else.
The resolution of some philosophical or theological question seems
to them more interesting and important than any substantial
knowledge of literature or science or even than a good life. Like
the youth in the Philebus, they are ready to discourse to any one
about a new philosophy. They are generally the disciples of some
eminent professor or sophist, whom they rather imitate than
understand. They may be counted happy if in later years they retain
some of the simple truths which they acquired in early education,
and which they may, perhaps, find to be worth all the rest. Such is
the picture which Plato draws and which we only reproduce, partly
in his own words, of the dangers which beset youth in times of
transition, when old opinions are fading away and the new are not
yet firmly established. Their condition is ingeniously compared by
him to that of a supposititious son, who has made the discovery
that his reputed parents are not his real ones, and, in
consequence, they have lost their authority over him.

The distinction between the mathematician and the dialectician
is also noticeable. Plato is very well aware that the faculty of
the mathematician is quite distinct from the higher philosophical
sense which recognizes and combines first principles. The contempt
which he expresses for distinctions of words, the danger of
involuntary falsehood, the apology which Socrates makes for his
earnestness of speech, are highly characteristic of the Platonic
style and mode of thought. The quaint notion that if Palamedes was
the inventor of number Agamemnon could not have counted his feet;
the art by which we are made to believe that this State of ours is
not a dream only; the gravity with which the first step is taken in
the actual creation of the State, namely, the sending out of the
city all who had arrived at ten years of age, in order to expedite
the business of education by a generation, are also truly Platonic.
(For the last, compare the passage at the end of the third book, in
which he expects the lie about the earthborn men to be believed in
the second generation.)

BOOK VIII.

And so we have arrived at the conclusion, that in the perfect
State wives and children are to be in common; and the education and
pursuits of men and women, both in war and peace, are to be common,
and kings are to be philosophers and warriors, and the soldiers of
the State are to live together, having all things in common; and
they are to be warrior athletes, receiving no pay but only their
food, from the other citizens. Now let us return to the point at
which we digressed. ‘That is easily done,’ he replied:
‘You were speaking of the State which you had constructed,
and of the individual who answered to this, both of whom you
affirmed to be good; and you said that of inferior States there
were four forms and four individuals corresponding to them, which
although deficient in various degrees, were all of them worth
inspecting with a view to determining the relative happiness or
misery of the best or worst man. Then Polemarchus and Adeimantus
interrupted you, and this led to another argument,—and so
here we are.’ Suppose that we put ourselves again in the same
position, and do you repeat your question. ‘I should like to
know of what constitutions you were speaking?’ Besides the
perfect State there are only four of any note in
Hellas:—first, the famous Lacedaemonian or Cretan
commonwealth; secondly, oligarchy, a State full of evils; thirdly,
democracy, which follows next in order; fourthly, tyranny, which is
the disease or death of all government. Now, States are not made of
‘oak and rock,’ but of flesh and blood; and therefore
as there are five States there must be five human natures in
individuals, which correspond to them. And first, there is the
ambitious nature, which answers to the Lacedaemonian State;
secondly, the oligarchical nature; thirdly, the democratical; and
fourthly, the tyrannical. This last will have to be compared with
the perfectly just, which is the fifth, that we may know which is
the happier, and then we shall be able to determine whether the
argument of Thrasymachus or our own is the more convincing. And as
before we began with the State and went on to the individual, so
now, beginning with timocracy, let us go on to the timocratical
man, and then proceed to the other forms of government, and the
individuals who answer to them.

But how did timocracy arise out of the perfect State? Plainly,
like all changes of government, from division in the rulers. But
whence came division? ‘Sing, heavenly Muses,’ as Homer
says;—let them condescend to answer us, as if we were
children, to whom they put on a solemn face in jest. ‘And
what will they say?’ They will say that human things are
fated to decay, and even the perfect State will not escape from
this law of destiny, when ‘the wheel comes full circle’
in a period short or long. Plants or animals have times of
fertility and sterility, which the intelligence of rulers because
alloyed by sense will not enable them to ascertain, and children
will be born out of season. For whereas divine creations are in a
perfect cycle or number, the human creation is in a number which
declines from perfection, and has four terms and three intervals of
numbers, increasing, waning, assimilating, dissimilating, and yet
perfectly commensurate with each other. The base of the number with
a fourth added (or which is 3:4), multiplied by five and cubed,
gives two harmonies:—the first a square number, which is a
hundred times the base (or a hundred times a hundred); the second,
an oblong, being a hundred squares of the rational diameter of a
figure the side of which is five, subtracting one from each square
or two perfect squares from all, and adding a hundred cubes of
three. This entire number is geometrical and contains the rule or
law of generation. When this law is neglected marriages will be
unpropitious; the inferior offspring who are then born will in time
become the rulers; the State will decline, and education fall into
decay; gymnastic will be preferred to music, and the gold and
silver and brass and iron will form a chaotic mass—thus
division will arise. Such is the Muses’ answer to our
question. ‘And a true answer, of course: —but what more
have they to say?’ They say that the two races, the iron and
brass, and the silver and gold, will draw the State different
ways;— the one will take to trade and moneymaking, and the
others, having the true riches and not caring for money, will
resist them: the contest will end in a compromise; they will agree
to have private property, and will enslave their fellow-citizens
who were once their friends and nurturers. But they will retain
their warlike character, and will be chiefly occupied in fighting
and exercising rule. Thus arises timocracy, which is intermediate
between aristocracy and oligarchy.

The new form of government resembles the ideal in obedience to
rulers and contempt for trade, and having common meals, and in
devotion to warlike and gymnastic exercises. But corruption has
crept into philosophy, and simplicity of character, which was once
her note, is now looked for only in the military class. Arts of war
begin to prevail over arts of peace; the ruler is no longer a
philosopher; as in oligarchies, there springs up among them an
extravagant love of gain—get another man’s and save
your own, is their principle; and they have dark places in which
they hoard their gold and silver, for the use of their women and
others; they take their pleasures by stealth, like boys who are
running away from their father—the law; and their education
is not inspired by the Muse, but imposed by the strong arm of
power. The leading characteristic of this State is party spirit and
ambition.

And what manner of man answers to such a State? ‘In love
of contention,’ replied Adeimantus, ‘he will be like
our friend Glaucon.’ In that respect, perhaps, but not in
others. He is self-asserting and ill-educated, yet fond of
literature, although not himself a speaker,—fierce with
slaves, but obedient to rulers, a lover of power and honour, which
he hopes to gain by deeds of arms,—fond, too, of gymnastics
and of hunting. As he advances in years he grows avaricious, for he
has lost philosophy, which is the only saviour and guardian of men.
His origin is as follows:—His father is a good man dwelling
in an ill-ordered State, who has retired from politics in order
that he may lead a quiet life. His mother is angry at her loss of
precedence among other women; she is disgusted at her
husband’s selfishness, and she expatiates to her son on the
unmanliness and indolence of his father. The old family servant
takes up the tale, and says to the youth:—‘When you
grow up you must be more of a man than your father.’ All the
world are agreed that he who minds his own business is an idiot,
while a busybody is highly honoured and esteemed. The young man
compares this spirit with his father’s words and ways, and as
he is naturally well disposed, although he has suffered from evil
influences, he rests at a middle point and becomes ambitious and a
lover of honour.

And now let us set another city over against another man. The
next form of government is oligarchy, in which the rule is of the
rich only; nor is it difficult to see how such a State arises. The
decline begins with the possession of gold and silver; illegal
modes of expenditure are invented; one draws another on, and the
multitude are infected; riches outweigh virtue; lovers of money
take the place of lovers of honour; misers of politicians; and, in
time, political privileges are confined by law to the rich, who do
not shrink from violence in order to effect their purposes.

Thus much of the origin,—let us next consider the evils of
oligarchy. Would a man who wanted to be safe on a voyage take a bad
pilot because he was rich, or refuse a good one because he was
poor? And does not the analogy apply still more to the State? And
there are yet greater evils: two nations are struggling together in
one—the rich and the poor; and the rich dare not put arms
into the hands of the poor, and are unwilling to pay for defenders
out of their own money. And have we not already condemned that
State in which the same persons are warriors as well as
shopkeepers? The greatest evil of all is that a man may sell his
property and have no place in the State; while there is one class
which has enormous wealth, the other is entirely destitute. But
observe that these destitutes had not really any more of the
governing nature in them when they were rich than now that they are
poor; they were miserable spendthrifts always. They are the drones
of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature
with a sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of
them without stings and some of them have dreadful stings; in other
words, there are paupers and there are rogues. These are never far
apart; and in oligarchical cities, where nearly everybody is a
pauper who is not a ruler, you will find abundance of both. And
this evil state of society originates in bad education and bad
government.

Like State, like man,—the change in the latter begins with
the representative of timocracy; he walks at first in the ways of
his father, who may have been a statesman, or general, perhaps; and
presently he sees him ‘fallen from his high estate,’
the victim of informers, dying in prison or exile, or by the hand
of the executioner. The lesson which he thus receives, makes him
cautious; he leaves politics, represses his pride, and saves pence.
Avarice is enthroned as his bosom’s lord, and assumes the
style of the Great King; the rational and spirited elements sit
humbly on the ground at either side, the one immersed in
calculation, the other absorbed in the admiration of wealth. The
love of honour turns to love of money; the conversion is
instantaneous. The man is mean, saving, toiling, the slave of one
passion which is the master of the rest: Is he not the very image
of the State? He has had no education, or he would never have
allowed the blind god of riches to lead the dance within him. And
being uneducated he will have many slavish desires, some beggarly,
some knavish, breeding in his soul. If he is the trustee of an
orphan, and has the power to defraud, he will soon prove that he is
not without the will, and that his passions are only restrained by
fear and not by reason. Hence he leads a divided existence; in
which the better desires mostly prevail. But when he is contending
for prizes and other distinctions, he is afraid to incur a loss
which is to be repaid only by barren honour; in time of war he
fights with a small part of his resources, and usually keeps his
money and loses the victory.

Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy
and the oligarchical man. Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion
of an oligarchy; and they encourage expensive habits in order that
they may gain by the ruin of extravagant youth. Thus men of family
often lose their property or rights of citizenship; but they remain
in the city, full of hatred against the new owners of their estates
and ripe for revolution. The usurer with stooping walk pretends not
to see them; he passes by, and leaves his sting—that is, his
money—in some other victim; and many a man has to pay the
parent or principal sum multiplied into a family of children, and
is reduced into a state of dronage by him. The only way of
diminishing the evil is either to limit a man in his use of his
property, or to insist that he shall lend at his own risk. But the
ruling class do not want remedies; they care only for money, and
are as careless of virtue as the poorest of the citizens. Now there
are occasions on which the governors and the governed meet
together,—at festivals, on a journey, voyaging or fighting.
The sturdy pauper finds that in the hour of danger he is not
despised; he sees the rich man puffing and panting, and draws the
conclusion which he privately imparts to his
companions,—‘that our people are not good for
much;’ and as a sickly frame is made ill by a mere touch from
without, or sometimes without external impulse is ready to fall to
pieces of itself, so from the least cause, or with none at all, the
city falls ill and fights a battle for life or death. And democracy
comes into power when the poor are the victors, killing some and
exiling some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the
rest.

The manner of life in such a State is that of democrats; there
is freedom and plainness of speech, and every man does what is
right in his own eyes, and has his own way of life. Hence arise the
most various developments of character; the State is like a piece
of embroidery of which the colours and figures are the manners of
men, and there are many who, like women and children, prefer this
variety to real beauty and excellence. The State is not one but
many, like a bazaar at which you can buy anything. The great charm
is, that you may do as you like; you may govern if you like, let it
alone if you like; go to war and make peace if you feel disposed,
and all quite irrespective of anybody else. When you condemn men to
death they remain alive all the same; a gentleman is desired to go
into exile, and he stalks about the streets like a hero; and nobody
sees him or cares for him. Observe, too, how grandly Democracy sets
her foot upon all our fine theories of education,—how little
she cares for the training of her statesmen! The only qualification
which she demands is the profession of patriotism. Such is
democracy;—a pleasing, lawless, various sort of government,
distributing equality to equals and unequals alike.

Let us now inspect the individual democrat; and first, as in the
case of the State, we will trace his antecedents. He is the son of
a miserly oligarch, and has been taught by him to restrain the love
of unnecessary pleasures. Perhaps I ought to explain this latter
term:—Necessary pleasures are those which are good, and which
we cannot do without; unnecessary pleasures are those which do no
good, and of which the desire might be eradicated by early
training. For example, the pleasures of eating and drinking are
necessary and healthy, up to a certain point; beyond that point
they are alike hurtful to body and mind, and the excess may be
avoided. When in excess, they may be rightly called expensive
pleasures, in opposition to the useful ones. And the drone, as we
called him, is the slave of these unnecessary pleasures and
desires, whereas the miserly oligarch is subject only to the
necessary.

The oligarch changes into the democrat in the following
manner:—The youth who has had a miserly bringing up, gets a
taste of the drone’s honey; he meets with wild companions,
who introduce him to every new pleasure. As in the State, so in the
individual, there are allies on both sides, temptations from
without and passions from within; there is reason also and external
influences of parents and friends in alliance with the oligarchical
principle; and the two factions are in violent conflict with one
another. Sometimes the party of order prevails, but then again new
desires and new disorders arise, and the whole mob of passions gets
possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the soul, which they
find void and unguarded by true words and works. Falsehoods and
illusions ascend to take their place; the prodigal goes back into
the country of the Lotophagi or drones, and openly dwells there.
And if any offer of alliance or parley of individual elders comes
from home, the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and
permit no one to enter,—there is a battle, and they gain the
victory; and straightway making alliance with the desires, they
banish modesty, which they call folly, and send temperance over the
border. When the house has been swept and garnished, they dress up
the exiled vices, and, crowning them with garlands, bring them back
under new names. Insolence they call good breeding, anarchy
freedom, waste magnificence, impudence courage. Such is the process
by which the youth passes from the necessary pleasures to the
unnecessary. After a while he divides his time impartially between
them; and perhaps, when he gets older and the violence of passion
has abated, he restores some of the exiles and lives in a sort of
equilibrium, indulging first one pleasure and then another; and if
reason comes and tells him that some pleasures are good and
honourable, and others bad and vile, he shakes his head and says
that he can make no distinction between them. Thus he lives in the
fancy of the hour; sometimes he takes to drink, and then he turns
abstainer; he practises in the gymnasium or he does nothing at all;
then again he would be a philosopher or a politician; or again, he
would be a warrior or a man of business; he is

‘Every thing by starts and nothing long.’

There remains still the finest and fairest of all men and all
States— tyranny and the tyrant. Tyranny springs from
democracy much as democracy springs from oligarchy. Both arise from
excess; the one from excess of wealth, the other from excess of
freedom. ‘The great natural good of life,’ says the
democrat, ‘is freedom.’ And this exclusive love of
freedom and regardlessness of everything else, is the cause of the
change from democracy to tyranny. The State demands the strong wine
of freedom, and unless her rulers give her a plentiful draught,
punishes and insults them; equality and fraternity of governors and
governed is the approved principle. Anarchy is the law, not of the
State only, but of private houses, and extends even to the animals.
Father and son, citizen and foreigner, teacher and pupil, old and
young, are all on a level; fathers and teachers fear their sons and
pupils, and the wisdom of the young man is a match for the elder,
and the old imitate the jaunty manners of the young because they
are afraid of being thought morose. Slaves are on a level with
their masters and mistresses, and there is no difference between
men and women. Nay, the very animals in a democratic State have a
freedom which is unknown in other places. The she-dogs are as good
as their she-mistresses, and horses and asses march along with
dignity and run their noses against anybody who comes in their way.
‘That has often been my experience.’ At last the
citizens become so sensitive that they cannot endure the yoke of
laws, written or unwritten; they would have no man call himself
their master. Such is the glorious beginning of things out of which
tyranny springs. ‘Glorious, indeed; but what is to
follow?’ The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; for
there is a law of contraries; the excess of freedom passes into the
excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the greater the
slavery. You will remember that in the oligarchy were found two
classes—rogues and paupers, whom we compared to drones with
and without stings. These two classes are to the State what phlegm
and bile are to the human body; and the State-physician, or
legislator, must get rid of them, just as the bee-master keeps the
drones out of the hive. Now in a democracy, too, there are drones,
but they are more numerous and more dangerous than in the
oligarchy; there they are inert and unpractised, here they are full
of life and animation; and the keener sort speak and act, while the
others buzz about the bema and prevent their opponents from being
heard. And there is another class in democratic States, of
respectable, thriving individuals, who can be squeezed when the
drones have need of their possessions; there is moreover a third
class, who are the labourers and the artisans, and they make up the
mass of the people. When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but
they cannot be brought together unless they are attracted by a
little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey, of which
the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste
only to the mob. Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven
mad by the stings of the drones, and so become downright oligarchs
in self-defence. Then follow informations and convictions for
treason. The people have some protector whom they nurse into
greatness, and from this root the tree of tyranny springs. The
nature of the change is indicated in the old fable of the temple of
Zeus Lycaeus, which tells how he who tastes human flesh mixed up
with the flesh of other victims will turn into a wolf. Even so the
protector, who tastes human blood, and slays some and exiles others
with or without law, who hints at abolition of debts and division
of lands, must either perish or become a wolf—that is, a
tyrant. Perhaps he is driven out, but he soon comes back from
exile; and then if his enemies cannot get rid of him by lawful
means, they plot his assassination. Thereupon the friend of the
people makes his well-known request to them for a body-guard, which
they readily grant, thinking only of his danger and not of their
own. Now let the rich man make to himself wings, for he will never
run away again if he does not do so then. And the Great Protector,
having crushed all his rivals, stands proudly erect in the chariot
of State, a full-blown tyrant: Let us enquire into the nature of
his happiness.

In the early days of his tyranny he smiles and beams upon
everybody; he is not a ‘dominus,’ no, not he: he has
only come to put an end to debt and the monopoly of land. Having
got rid of foreign enemies, he makes himself necessary to the State
by always going to war. He is thus enabled to depress the poor by
heavy taxes, and so keep them at work; and he can get rid of bolder
spirits by handing them over to the enemy. Then comes unpopularity;
some of his old associates have the courage to oppose him. The
consequence is, that he has to make a purgation of the State; but,
unlike the physician who purges away the bad, he must get rid of
the high-spirited, the wise and the wealthy; for he has no choice
between death and a life of shame and dishonour. And the more hated
he is, the more he will require trusty guards; but how will he
obtain them? ‘They will come flocking like birds—for
pay.’ Will he not rather obtain them on the spot? He will
take the slaves from their owners and make them his body-guard;
these are his trusted friends, who admire and look up to him. Are
not the tragic poets wise who magnify and exalt the tyrant, and say
that he is wise by association with the wise? And are not their
praises of tyranny alone a sufficient reason why we should exclude
them from our State? They may go to other cities, and gather the
mob about them with fine words, and change commonwealths into
tyrannies and democracies, receiving honours and rewards for their
services; but the higher they and their friends ascend constitution
hill, the more their honour will fail and become ‘too
asthmatic to mount.’ To return to the tyrant—How will
he support that rare army of his? First, by robbing the temples of
their treasures, which will enable him to lighten the taxes; then
he will take all his father’s property, and spend it on his
companions, male or female. Now his father is the demus, and if the
demus gets angry, and says that a great hulking son ought not to be
a burden on his parents, and bids him and his riotous crew begone,
then will the parent know what a monster he has been nurturing, and
that the son whom he would fain expel is too strong for him.
‘You do not mean to say that he will beat his father?’
Yes, he will, after having taken away his arms. ‘Then he is a
parricide and a cruel, unnatural son.’ And the people have
jumped from the fear of slavery into slavery, out of the smoke into
the fire. Thus liberty, when out of all order and reason, passes
into the worst form of servitude…

In the previous books Plato has described the ideal State; now
he returns to the perverted or declining forms, on which he had
lightly touched at the end of Book IV. These he describes in a
succession of parallels between the individuals and the States,
tracing the origin of either in the State or individual which has
preceded them. He begins by asking the point at which he digressed;
and is thus led shortly to recapitulate the substance of the three
former books, which also contain a parallel of the philosopher and
the State.

Of the first decline he gives no intelligible account; he would
not have liked to admit the most probable causes of the fall of his
ideal State, which to us would appear to be the impracticability of
communism or the natural antagonism of the ruling and subject
classes. He throws a veil of mystery over the origin of the
decline, which he attributes to ignorance of the law of population.
Of this law the famous geometrical figure or number is the
expression. Like the ancients in general, he had no idea of the
gradual perfectibility of man or of the education of the human
race. His ideal was not to be attained in the course of ages, but
was to spring in full armour from the head of the legislator. When
good laws had been given, he thought only of the manner in which
they were likely to be corrupted, or of how they might be filled up
in detail or restored in accordance with their original spirit. He
appears not to have reflected upon the full meaning of his own
words, ‘In the brief space of human life, nothing great can
be accomplished’; or again, as he afterwards says in the
Laws, ‘Infinite time is the maker of cities.’ The order
of constitutions which is adopted by him represents an order of
thought rather than a succession of time, and may be considered as
the first attempt to frame a philosophy of history.

The first of these declining States is timocracy, or the
government of soldiers and lovers of honour, which answers to the
Spartan State; this is a government of force, in which education is
not inspired by the Muses, but imposed by the law, and in which all
the finer elements of organization have disappeared. The
philosopher himself has lost the love of truth, and the soldier,
who is of a simpler and honester nature, rules in his stead. The
individual who answers to timocracy has some noticeable qualities.
He is described as ill educated, but, like the Spartan, a lover of
literature; and although he is a harsh master to his servants he
has no natural superiority over them. His character is based upon a
reaction against the circumstances of his father, who in a troubled
city has retired from politics; and his mother, who is dissatisfied
at her own position, is always urging him towards the life of
political ambition. Such a character may have had this origin, and
indeed Livy attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of
a similar kind. But there is obviously no connection between the
manner in which the timocratic State springs out of the ideal, and
the mere accident by which the timocratic man is the son of a
retired statesman.

The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even
less historical foundation. For there is no trace in Greek history
of a polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into an oligarchy of
wealth, or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a democracy. The
order of history appears to be different; first, in the Homeric
times there is the royal or patriarchal form of government, which a
century or two later was succeeded by an oligarchy of birth rather
than of wealth, and in which wealth was only the accident of the
hereditary possession of land and power. Sometimes this
oligarchical government gave way to a government based upon a
qualification of property, which, according to Aristotle’s
mode of using words, would have been called a timocracy; and this
in some cities, as at Athens, became the conducting medium to
democracy. But such was not the necessary order of succession in
States; nor, indeed, can any order be discerned in the endless
fluctuation of Greek history (like the tides in the Euripus),
except, perhaps, in the almost uniform tendency from monarchy to
aristocracy in the earliest times. At first sight there appears to
be a similar inversion in the last step of the Platonic succession;
for tyranny, instead of being the natural end of democracy, in
early Greek history appears rather as a stage leading to democracy;
the reign of Peisistratus and his sons is an episode which comes
between the legislation of Solon and the constitution of
Cleisthenes; and some secret cause common to them all seems to have
led the greater part of Hellas at her first appearance in the dawn
of history, e.g. Athens, Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, and nearly every
State with the exception of Sparta, through a similar stage of
tyranny which ended either in oligarchy or democracy. But then we
must remember that Plato is describing rather the contemporary
governments of the Sicilian States, which alternated between
democracy and tyranny, than the ancient history of Athens or
Corinth.

The portrait of the tyrant himself is just such as the later
Greek delighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in
the lives of mediaeval saints or mythic heroes, the conduct and
actions of one were attributed to another in order to fill up the
outline. There was no enormity which the Greek was not today to
believe of them; the tyrant was the negation of government and law;
his assassination was glorious; there was no crime, however
unnatural, which might not with probability be attributed to him.
In this, Plato was only following the common thought of his
countrymen, which he embellished and exaggerated with all the power
of his genius. There is no need to suppose that he drew from life;
or that his knowledge of tyrants is derived from a personal
acquaintance with Dionysius. The manner in which he speaks of them
would rather tend to render doubtful his ever having
‘consorted’ with them, or entertained the schemes,
which are attributed to him in the Epistles, of regenerating Sicily
by their help.

Plato in a hyperbolical and serio-comic vein exaggerates the
follies of democracy which he also sees reflected in social life.
To him democracy is a state of individualism or dissolution; in
which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a people
animated by a common spirit of liberty, rising as one man to repel
the Persian host, which is the leading idea of democracy in
Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems to think. But if he is not
a believer in liberty, still less is he a lover of tyranny. His
deeper and more serious condemnation is reserved for the tyrant,
who is the ideal of wickedness and also of weakness, and who in his
utter helplessness and suspiciousness is leading an almost
impossible existence, without that remnant of good which, in
Plato’s opinion, was required to give power to evil (Book I).
This ideal of wickedness living in helpless misery, is the reverse
of that other portrait of perfect injustice ruling in happiness and
splendour, which first of all Thrasymachus, and afterwards the sons
of Ariston had drawn, and is also the reverse of the king whose
rule of life is the good of his subjects.

Each of these governments and individuals has a corresponding
ethical gradation: the ideal State is under the rule of reason, not
extinguishing but harmonizing the passions, and training them in
virtue; in the timocracy and the timocratic man the constitution,
whether of the State or of the individual, is based, first, upon
courage, and secondly, upon the love of honour; this latter virtue,
which is hardly to be esteemed a virtue, has superseded all the
rest. In the second stage of decline the virtues have altogether
disappeared, and the love of gain has succeeded to them; in the
third stage, or democracy, the various passions are allowed to have
free play, and the virtues and vices are impartially cultivated.
But this freedom, which leads to many curious extravagances of
character, is in reality only a state of weakness and dissipation.
At last, one monster passion takes possession of the whole nature
of man—this is tyranny. In all of them excess—the
excess first of wealth and then of freedom, is the element of
decay.

The eighth book of the Republic abounds in pictures of life and
fanciful allusions; the use of metaphorical language is carried to
a greater extent than anywhere else in Plato. We may remark,

(1), the description of the two nations in one, which become
more and more divided in the Greek Republics, as in feudal times,
and perhaps also in our own;

(2), the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pythagorean
formula as equality among unequals;

(3), the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are
characteristic of liberty, as foreign mercenaries and universal
mistrust are of the tyrant;

(4), the proposal that mere debts should not be recoverable by
law is a speculation which has often been entertained by reformers
of the law in modern times, and is in harmony with the tendencies
of modern legislation. Debt and land were the two great
difficulties of the ancient lawgiver: in modern times we may be
said to have almost, if not quite, solved the first of these
difficulties, but hardly the second.

Still more remarkable are the corresponding portraits of
individuals: there is the family picture of the father and mother
and the old servant of the timocratical man, and the outward
respectability and inherent meanness of the oligarchical; the
uncontrolled licence and freedom of the democrat, in which the
young Alcibiades seems to be depicted, doing right or wrong as he
pleases, and who at last, like the prodigal, goes into a far
country (note here the play of language by which the democratic man
is himself represented under the image of a State having a citadel
and receiving embassies); and there is the wild-beast nature, which
breaks loose in his successor. The hit about the tyrant being a
parricide; the representation of the tyrant’s life as an
obscene dream; the rhetorical surprise of a more miserable than the
most miserable of men in Book IX; the hint to the poets that if
they are the friends of tyrants there is no place for them in a
constitutional State, and that they are too clever not to see the
propriety of their own expulsion; the continuous image of the
drones who are of two kinds, swelling at last into the monster
drone having wings (Book IX),—are among Plato’s
happiest touches.

There remains to be considered the great difficulty of this book
of the Republic, the so-called number of the State. This is a
puzzle almost as great as the Number of the Beast in the Book of
Revelation, and though apparently known to Aristotle, is referred
to by Cicero as a proverb of obscurity (Ep. ad Att.). And some have
imagined that there is no answer to the puzzle, and that Plato has
been practising upon his readers. But such a deception as this is
inconsistent with the manner in which Aristotle speaks of the
number (Pol.), and would have been ridiculous to any reader of the
Republic who was acquainted with Greek mathematics. As little
reason is there for supposing that Plato intentionally used obscure
expressions; the obscurity arises from our want of familiarity with
the subject. On the other hand, Plato himself indicates that he is
not altogether serious, and in describing his number as a solemn
jest of the Muses, he appears to imply some degree of satire on the
symbolical use of number. (Compare Cratylus; Protag.)

Our hope of understanding the passage depends principally on an
accurate study of the words themselves; on which a faint light is
thrown by the parallel passage in the ninth book. Another help is
the allusion in Aristotle, who makes the important remark that the
latter part of the passage (Greek) describes a solid figure.
(Pol.—‘He only says that nothing is abiding, but that
all things change in a certain cycle; and that the origin of the
change is a base of numbers which are in the ratio of 4:3; and this
when combined with a figure of five gives two harmonies; he means
when the number of this figure becomes solid.’) Some further
clue may be gathered from the appearance of the Pythagorean
triangle, which is denoted by the numbers 3, 4, 5, and in which, as
in every right-angled triangle, the squares of the two lesser sides
equal the square of the hypotenuse (9 + 16 = 25).

Plato begins by speaking of a perfect or cyclical number (Tim.),
i.e. a number in which the sum of the divisors equals the whole;
this is the divine or perfect number in which all lesser cycles or
revolutions are complete. He also speaks of a human or imperfect
number, having four terms and three intervals of numbers which are
related to one another in certain proportions; these he converts
into figures, and finds in them when they have been raised to the
third power certain elements of number, which give two
‘harmonies,’ the one square, the other oblong; but he
does not say that the square number answers to the divine, or the
oblong number to the human cycle; nor is any intimation given that
the first or divine number represents the period of the world, the
second the period of the state, or of the human race as Zeller
supposes; nor is the divine number afterwards mentioned (Arist.).
The second is the number of generations or births, and presides
over them in the same mysterious manner in which the stars preside
over them, or in which, according to the Pythagoreans, opportunity,
justice, marriage, are represented by some number or figure. This
is probably the number 216.

The explanation given in the text supposes the two harmonies to
make up the number 8000. This explanation derives a certain
plausibility from the circumstance that 8000 is the ancient number
of the Spartan citizens (Herod.), and would be what Plato might
have called ‘a number which nearly concerns the population of
a city’; the mysterious disappearance of the Spartan
population may possibly have suggested to him the first cause of
his decline of States. The lesser or square ‘harmony,’
of 400, might be a symbol of the guardians,—the larger or
oblong ‘harmony,’ of the people, and the numbers 3, 4,
5 might refer respectively to the three orders in the State or
parts of the soul, the four virtues, the five forms of government.
The harmony of the musical scale, which is elsewhere used as a
symbol of the harmony of the state, is also indicated. For the
numbers 3, 4, 5, which represent the sides of the Pythagorean
triangle, also denote the intervals of the scale.

The terms used in the statement of the problem may be explained
as follows. A perfect number (Greek), as already stated, is one
which is equal to the sum of its divisors. Thus 6, which is the
first perfect or cyclical number, = 1 + 2 + 3. The words (Greek),
‘terms’ or ‘notes,’ and (Greek),
‘intervals,’ are applicable to music as well as to
number and figure. (Greek) is the ‘base’ on which the
whole calculation depends, or the ‘lowest term’ from
which it can be worked out. The words (Greek) have been variously
translated—‘squared and cubed’ (Donaldson),
‘equalling and equalled in power’ (Weber), ‘by
involution and evolution,’ i.e. by raising the power and
extracting the root (as in the translation). Numbers are called
‘like and unlike’ (Greek) when the factors or the sides
of the planes and cubes which they represent are or are not in the
same ratio: e.g. 8 and 27 = 2 cubed and 3 cubed; and conversely.
‘Waxing’ (Greek) numbers, called also
‘increasing’ (Greek), are those which are exceeded by
the sum of their divisors: e.g. 12 and 18 are less than 16 and 21.
‘Waning’ (Greek) numbers, called also
‘decreasing’ (Greek) are those which succeed the sum of
their divisors: e.g. 8 and 27 exceed 7 and 13. The words translated
‘commensurable and agreeable to one another’ (Greek)
seem to be different ways of describing the same relation, with
more or less precision. They are equivalent to ‘expressible
in terms having the same relation to one another,’ like the
series 8, 12, 18, 27, each of which numbers is in the relation of
(1 and 1/2) to the preceding. The ‘base,’ or
‘fundamental number, which has 1/3 added to it’ (1 and
1/3) = 4/3 or a musical fourth. (Greek) is a
‘proportion’ of numbers as of musical notes, applied
either to the parts or factors of a single number or to the
relation of one number to another. The first harmony is a
‘square’ number (Greek); the second harmony is an
‘oblong’ number (Greek), i.e. a number representing a
figure of which the opposite sides only are equal. (Greek) =
‘numbers squared from’ or ‘upon diameters’;
(Greek) = ‘rational,’ i.e. omitting fractions, (Greek),
‘irrational,’ i.e. including fractions; e.g. 49 is a
square of the rational diameter of a figure the side of which = 5:
50, of an irrational diameter of the same. For several of the
explanations here given and for a good deal besides I am indebted
to an excellent article on the Platonic Number by Dr. Donaldson
(Proc. of the Philol. Society).

The conclusions which he draws from these data are summed up by
him as follows. Having assumed that the number of the perfect or
divine cycle is the number of the world, and the number of the
imperfect cycle the number of the state, he proceeds: ‘The
period of the world is defined by the perfect number 6, that of the
state by the cube of that number or 216, which is the product of
the last pair of terms in the Platonic Tetractys (a series of seven
terms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27); and if we take this as the basis of
our computation, we shall have two cube numbers (Greek), viz. 8 and
27; and the mean proportionals between these, viz. 12 and 18, will
furnish three intervals and four terms, and these terms and
intervals stand related to one another in the sesqui-altera ratio,
i.e. each term is to the preceding as 3/2. Now if we remember that
the number 216 = 8 x 27 = 3 cubed + 4 cubed + 5 cubed, and 3
squared + 4 squared = 5 squared, we must admit that this number
implies the numbers 3, 4, 5, to which musicians attach so much
importance. And if we combine the ratio 4/3 with the number 5, or
multiply the ratios of the sides by the hypotenuse, we shall by
first squaring and then cubing obtain two expressions, which denote
the ratio of the two last pairs of terms in the Platonic Tetractys,
the former multiplied by the square, the latter by the cube of the
number 10, the sum of the first four digits which constitute the
Platonic Tetractys.’ The two (Greek) he elsewhere explains as
follows: ‘The first (Greek) is (Greek), in other words (4/3 x
5) all squared = 100 x 2 squared over 3 squared. The second
(Greek), a cube of the same root, is described as 100 multiplied
(alpha) by the rational diameter of 5 diminished by unity, i.e., as
shown above, 48: (beta) by two incommensurable diameters, i.e. the
two first irrationals, or 2 and 3: and (gamma) by the cube of 3, or
27. Thus we have (48 + 5 + 27) 100 = 1000 x 2 cubed. This second
harmony is to be the cube of the number of which the former harmony
is the square, and therefore must be divided by the cube of 3. In
other words, the whole expression will be: (1), for the first
harmony, 400/9: (2), for the second harmony, 8000/27.’

The reasons which have inclined me to agree with Dr. Donaldson
and also with Schleiermacher in supposing that 216 is the Platonic
number of births are: (1) that it coincides with the description of
the number given in the first part of the passage (Greek…): (2)
that the number 216 with its permutations would have been familiar
to a Greek mathematician, though unfamiliar to us: (3) that 216 is
the cube of 6, and also the sum of 3 cubed, 4 cubed, 5 cubed, the
numbers 3, 4, 5 representing the Pythagorean triangle, of which the
sides when squared equal the square of the hypotenuse (9 + 16 =
25): (4) that it is also the period of the Pythagorean
Metempsychosis: (5) the three ultimate terms or bases (3, 4, 5) of
which 216 is composed answer to the third, fourth, fifth in the
musical scale: (6) that the number 216 is the product of the cubes
of 2 and 3, which are the two last terms in the Platonic Tetractys:
(7) that the Pythagorean triangle is said by Plutarch (de Is. et
Osir.), Proclus (super prima Eucl.), and Quintilian (de Musica) to
be contained in this passage, so that the tradition of the school
seems to point in the same direction: (8) that the Pythagorean
triangle is called also the figure of marriage (Greek).

But though agreeing with Dr. Donaldson thus far, I see no reason
for supposing, as he does, that the first or perfect number is the
world, the human or imperfect number the state; nor has he given
any proof that the second harmony is a cube. Nor do I think that
(Greek) can mean ‘two incommensurables,’ which he
arbitrarily assumes to be 2 and 3, but rather, as the preceding
clause implies, (Greek), i.e. two square numbers based upon
irrational diameters of a figure the side of which is 5 = 50 x
2.

The greatest objection to the translation is the sense given to
the words (Greek), ‘a base of three with a third added to it,
multiplied by 5.’ In this somewhat forced manner Plato
introduces once more the numbers of the Pythagorean triangle. But
the coincidences in the numbers which follow are in favour of the
explanation. The first harmony of 400, as has been already
remarked, probably represents the rulers; the second and oblong
harmony of 7600, the people.

And here we take leave of the difficulty. The discovery of the
riddle would be useless, and would throw no light on ancient
mathematics. The point of interest is that Plato should have used
such a symbol, and that so much of the Pythagorean spirit should
have prevailed in him. His general meaning is that divine creation
is perfect, and is represented or presided over by a perfect or
cyclical number; human generation is imperfect, and represented or
presided over by an imperfect number or series of numbers. The
number 5040, which is the number of the citizens in the Laws, is
expressly based by him on utilitarian grounds, namely, the
convenience of the number for division; it is also made up of the
first seven digits multiplied by one another. The contrast of the
perfect and imperfect number may have been easily suggested by the
corrections of the cycle, which were made first by Meton and
secondly by Callippus; (the latter is said to have been a pupil of
Plato). Of the degree of importance or of exactness to be
attributed to the problem, the number of the tyrant in Book IX (729
= 365 x 2), and the slight correction of the error in the number
5040/12 (Laws), may furnish a criterion. There is nothing
surprising in the circumstance that those who were seeking for
order in nature and had found order in number, should have imagined
one to give law to the other. Plato believes in a power of number
far beyond what he could see realized in the world around him, and
he knows the great influence which ‘the little matter of 1,
2, 3’ exercises upon education. He may even be thought to
have a prophetic anticipation of the discoveries of Quetelet and
others, that numbers depend upon numbers; e.g.—in population,
the numbers of births and the respective numbers of children born
of either sex, on the respective ages of parents, i.e. on other
numbers.

BOOK IX.

Last of all comes the tyrannical man, about whom we have to
enquire, Whence is he, and how does he live—in happiness or
in misery? There is, however, a previous question of the nature and
number of the appetites, which I should like to consider first.
Some of them are unlawful, and yet admit of being chastened and
weakened in various degrees by the power of reason and law.
‘What appetites do you mean?’ I mean those which are
awake when the reasoning powers are asleep, which get up and walk
about naked without any self-respect or shame; and there is no
conceivable folly or crime, however cruel or unnatural, of which,
in imagination, they may not be guilty. ‘True,’ he
said; ‘very true.’ But when a man’s pulse beats
temperately; and he has supped on a feast of reason and come to a
knowledge of himself before going to rest, and has satisfied his
desires just enough to prevent their perturbing his reason, which
remains clear and luminous, and when he is free from quarrel and
heat,—the visions which he has on his bed are least irregular
and abnormal. Even in good men there is such an irregular
wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

To return:—You remember what was said of the democrat;
that he was the son of a miserly father, who encouraged the saving
desires and repressed the ornamental and expensive ones; presently
the youth got into fine company, and began to entertain a dislike
to his father’s narrow ways; and being a better man than the
corrupters of his youth, he came to a mean, and led a life, not of
lawless or slavish passion, but of regular and successive
indulgence. Now imagine that the youth has become a father, and has
a son who is exposed to the same temptations, and has companions
who lead him into every sort of iniquity, and parents and friends
who try to keep him right. The counsellors of evil find that their
only chance of retaining him is to implant in his soul a monster
drone, or love; while other desires buzz around him and mystify him
with sweet sounds and scents, this monster love takes possession of
him, and puts an end to every true or modest thought or wish. Love,
like drunkenness and madness, is a tyranny; and the tyrannical man,
whether made by nature or habit, is just a drinking, lusting,
furious sort of animal.

And how does such an one live? ‘Nay, that you must tell
me.’ Well then, I fancy that he will live amid revelries and
harlotries, and love will be the lord and master of the house. Many
desires require much money, and so he spends all that he has and
borrows more; and when he has nothing the young ravens are still in
the nest in which they were hatched, crying for food. Love urges
them on; and they must be gratified by force or fraud, or if not,
they become painful and troublesome; and as the new pleasures
succeed the old ones, so will the son take possession of the goods
of his parents; if they show signs of refusing, he will defraud and
deceive them; and if they openly resist, what then? ‘I can
only say, that I should not much like to be in their place.’
But, O heavens, Adeimantus, to think that for some new-fangled and
unnecessary love he will give up his old father and mother, best
and dearest of friends, or enslave them to the fancies of the hour!
Truly a tyrannical son is a blessing to his father and mother! When
there is no more to be got out of them, he turns burglar or
pickpocket, or robs a temple. Love overmasters the thoughts of his
youth, and he becomes in sober reality the monster that he was
sometimes in sleep. He waxes strong in all violence and
lawlessness; and is ready for any deed of daring that will supply
the wants of his rabble-rout. In a well-ordered State there are
only a few such, and these in time of war go out and become the
mercenaries of a tyrant. But in time of peace they stay at home and
do mischief; they are the thieves, footpads, cut-purses,
man-stealers of the community; or if they are able to speak, they
turn false-witnesses and informers. ‘No small catalogue of
crimes truly, even if the perpetrators are few.’ Yes, I said;
but small and great are relative terms, and no crimes which are
committed by them approach those of the tyrant, whom this class,
growing strong and numerous, create out of themselves. If the
people yield, well and good, but, if they resist, then, as before
he beat his father and mother, so now he beats his fatherland and
motherland, and places his mercenaries over them. Such men in their
early days live with flatterers, and they themselves flatter
others, in order to gain their ends; but they soon discard their
followers when they have no longer any need of them; they are
always either masters or servants,—the joys of friendship are
unknown to them. And they are utterly treacherous and unjust, if
the nature of justice be at all understood by us. They realize our
dream; and he who is the most of a tyrant by nature, and leads the
life of a tyrant for the longest time, will be the worst of them,
and being the worst of them, will also be the most miserable.

Like man, like State,—the tyrannical man will answer to
tyranny, which is the extreme opposite of the royal State; for one
is the best and the other the worst. But which is the happier?
Great and terrible as the tyrant may appear enthroned amid his
satellites, let us not be afraid to go in and ask; and the answer
is, that the monarchical is the happiest, and the tyrannical the
most miserable of States. And may we not ask the same question
about the men themselves, requesting some one to look into them who
is able to penetrate the inner nature of man, and will not be
panic-struck by the vain pomp of tyranny? I will suppose that he is
one who has lived with him, and has seen him in family life, or
perhaps in the hour of trouble and danger.

Assuming that we ourselves are the impartial judge for whom we
seek, let us begin by comparing the individual and State, and ask
first of all, whether the State is likely to be free or
enslaved—Will there not be a little freedom and a great deal
of slavery? And the freedom is of the bad, and the slavery of the
good; and this applies to the man as well as to the State; for his
soul is full of meanness and slavery, and the better part is
enslaved to the worse. He cannot do what he would, and his mind is
full of confusion; he is the very reverse of a freeman. The State
will be poor and full of misery and sorrow; and the man’s
soul will also be poor and full of sorrows, and he will be the most
miserable of men. No, not the most miserable, for there is yet a
more miserable. ‘Who is that?’ The tyrannical man who
has the misfortune also to become a public tyrant. ‘There I
suspect that you are right.’ Say rather, ‘I am
sure;’ conjecture is out of place in an enquiry of this
nature. He is like a wealthy owner of slaves, only he has more of
them than any private individual. You will say, ‘The owners
of slaves are not generally in any fear of them.’ But why?
Because the whole city is in a league which protects the
individual. Suppose however that one of these owners and his
household is carried off by a god into a wilderness, where there
are no freemen to help him—will he not be in an agony of
terror?—will he not be compelled to flatter his slaves and to
promise them many things sore against his will? And suppose the
same god who carried him off were to surround him with neighbours
who declare that no man ought to have slaves, and that the owners
of them should be punished with death. ‘Still worse and
worse! He will be in the midst of his enemies.’ And is not
our tyrant such a captive soul, who is tormented by a swarm of
passions which he cannot indulge; living indoors always like a
woman, and jealous of those who can go out and see the world?

Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be
still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he
is not master of himself; like a sick man who is compelled to be an
athlete; the meanest of slaves and the most abject of flatterers;
wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always
in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the
representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse
with command; he is more and more faithless, envious,
unrighteous,—the most wretched of men, a misery to himself
and to others. And so let us have a final trial and proclamation;
need we hire a herald, or shall I proclaim the result? ‘Made
the proclamation yourself.’ The son of Ariston (the best) is
of opinion that the best and justest of men is also the happiest,
and that this is he who is the most royal master of himself; and
that the unjust man is he who is the greatest tyrant of himself and
of his State. And I add further—‘seen or unseen by gods
or men.’

This is our first proof. The second is derived from the three
kinds of pleasure, which answer to the three elements of the
soul—reason, passion, desire; under which last is
comprehended avarice as well as sensual appetite, while passion
includes ambition, party-feeling, love of reputation. Reason,
again, is solely directed to the attainment of truth, and careless
of money and reputation. In accordance with the difference of
men’s natures, one of these three principles is in the
ascendant, and they have their several pleasures corresponding to
them. Interrogate now the three natures, and each one will be found
praising his own pleasures and depreciating those of others. The
money-maker will contrast the vanity of knowledge with the solid
advantages of wealth. The ambitious man will despise knowledge
which brings no honour; whereas the philosopher will regard only
the fruition of truth, and will call other pleasures necessary
rather than good. Now, how shall we decide between them? Is there
any better criterion than experience and knowledge? And which of
the three has the truest knowledge and the widest experience? The
experience of youth makes the philosopher acquainted with the two
kinds of desire, but the avaricious and the ambitious man never
taste the pleasures of truth and wisdom. Honour he has equally with
them; they are ‘judged of him,’ but he is ‘not
judged of them,’ for they never attain to the knowledge of
true being. And his instrument is reason, whereas their standard is
only wealth and honour; and if by reason we are to judge, his good
will be the truest. And so we arrive at the result that the
pleasure of the rational part of the soul, and a life passed in
such pleasure is the pleasantest. He who has a right to judge
judges thus. Next comes the life of ambition, and, in the third
place, that of money-making.

Twice has the just man overthrown the unjust—once more, as
in an Olympian contest, first offering up a prayer to the saviour
Zeus, let him try a fall. A wise man whispers to me that the
pleasures of the wise are true and pure; all others are a shadow
only. Let us examine this: Is not pleasure opposed to pain, and is

there not a mean state which is neither? When a man is sick,
nothing is more pleasant to him than health. But this he never
found out while he was well. In pain he desires only to cease from
pain; on the other hand, when he is in an ecstasy of pleasure, rest
is painful to him. Thus rest or cessation is both pleasure and
pain. But can that which is neither become both? Again, pleasure
and pain are motions, and the absence of them is rest; but if so,
how can the absence of either of them be the other? Thus we are led
to infer that the contradiction is an appearance only, and witchery
of the senses. And these are not the only pleasures, for there are
others which have no preceding pains. Pure pleasure then is not the
absence of pain, nor pure pain the absence of pleasure; although
most of the pleasures which reach the mind through the body are
reliefs of pain, and have not only their reactions when they
depart, but their anticipations before they come. They can be best
described in a simile. There is in nature an upper, lower, and
middle region, and he who passes from the lower to the middle
imagines that he is going up and is already in the upper world; and
if he were taken back again would think, and truly think, that he
was descending. All this arises out of his ignorance of the true
upper, middle, and lower regions. And a like confusion happens with
pleasure and pain, and with many other things. The man who compares
grey with black, calls grey white; and the man who compares absence
of pain with pain, calls the absence of pain pleasure. Again,
hunger and thirst are inanitions of the body, ignorance and folly
of the soul; and food is the satisfaction of the one, knowledge of
the other. Now which is the purer satisfaction—that of eating
and drinking, or that of knowledge? Consider the matter thus: The
satisfaction of that which has more existence is truer than of that
which has less. The invariable and immortal has a more real
existence than the variable and mortal, and has a corresponding
measure of knowledge and truth. The soul, again, has more existence
and truth and knowledge than the body, and is therefore more really
satisfied and has a more natural pleasure. Those who feast only on
earthly food, are always going at random up to the middle and down
again; but they never pass into the true upper world, or have a
taste of true pleasure. They are like fatted beasts, full of
gluttony and sensuality, and ready to kill one another by reason of
their insatiable lust; for they are not filled with true being, and
their vessel is leaky (Gorgias). Their pleasures are mere shadows
of pleasure, mixed with pain, coloured and intensified by contrast,
and therefore intensely desired; and men go fighting about them, as
Stesichorus says that the Greeks fought about the shadow of Helen
at Troy, because they know not the truth.

The same may be said of the passionate element:—the
desires of the ambitious soul, as well as of the covetous, have an
inferior satisfaction. Only when under the guidance of reason do
either of the other principles do their own business or attain the
pleasure which is natural to them. When not attaining, they compel
the other parts of the soul to pursue a shadow of pleasure which is
not theirs. And the more distant they are from philosophy and
reason, the more distant they will be from law and order, and the
more illusive will be their pleasures. The desires of love and
tyranny are the farthest from law, and those of the king are
nearest to it. There is one genuine pleasure, and two spurious
ones: the tyrant goes beyond even the latter; he has run away
altogether from law and reason. Nor can the measure of his
inferiority be told, except in a figure. The tyrant is the third
removed from the oligarch, and has therefore, not a shadow of his
pleasure, but the shadow of a shadow only. The oligarch, again, is
thrice removed from the king, and thus we get the formula 3 x 3,
which is the number of a surface, representing the shadow which is
the tyrant’s pleasure, and if you like to cube this
‘number of the beast,’ you will find that the measure
of the difference amounts to 729; the king is 729 times more happy
than the tyrant. And this extraordinary number is NEARLY equal to
the number of days and nights in a year (365 x 2 = 730); and is
therefore concerned with human life. This is the interval between a
good and bad man in happiness only: what must be the difference
between them in comeliness of life and virtue!

Perhaps you may remember some one saying at the beginning of our
discussion that the unjust man was profited if he had the
reputation of justice. Now that we know the nature of justice and
injustice, let us make an image of the soul, which will personify
his words. First of all, fashion a multitudinous beast, having a
ring of heads of all manner of animals, tame and wild, and able to
produce and change them at pleasure. Suppose now another form of a
lion, and another of a man; the second smaller than the first, the
third than the second; join them together and cover them with a
human skin, in which they are completely concealed. When this has
been done, let us tell the supporter of injustice that he is
feeding up the beasts and starving the man. The maintainer of
justice, on the other hand, is trying to strengthen the man; he is
nourishing the gentle principle within him, and making an alliance
with the lion heart, in order that he may be able to keep down the
many-headed hydra, and bring all into unity with each other and
with themselves. Thus in every point of view, whether in relation
to pleasure, honour, or advantage, the just man is right, and the
unjust wrong.

But now, let us reason with the unjust, who is not intentionally
in error. Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the
man, or rather to the God in man; the ignoble, that which subjects
the man to the beast? And if so, who would receive gold on
condition that he was to degrade the noblest part of himself under
the worst?—who would sell his son or daughter into the hands
of brutal and evil men, for any amount of money? And will he sell
his own fairer and diviner part without any compunction to the most
godless and foul? Would he not be worse than Eriphyle, who sold her
husband’s life for a necklace? And intemperance is the
letting loose of the multiform monster, and pride and sullenness
are the growth and increase of the lion and serpent element, while
luxury and effeminacy are caused by a too great relaxation of
spirit. Flattery and meanness again arise when the spirited element
is subjected to avarice, and the lion is habituated to become a
monkey. The real disgrace of handicraft arts is, that those who are
engaged in them have to flatter, instead of mastering their
desires; therefore we say that they should be placed under the
control of the better principle in another because they have none
in themselves; not, as Thrasymachus imagined, to the injury of the
subjects, but for their good. And our intention in educating the
young, is to give them self-control; the law desires to nurse up in
them a higher principle, and when they have acquired this, they may
go their ways.

‘What, then, shall a man profit, if he gain the whole
world’ and become more and more wicked? Or what shall he
profit by escaping discovery, if the concealment of evil prevents
the cure? If he had been punished, the brute within him would have
been silenced, and the gentler element liberated; and he would have
united temperance, justice, and wisdom in his soul—a union
better far than any combination of bodily gifts. The man of
understanding will honour knowledge above all; in the next place he
will keep under his body, not only for the sake of health and
strength, but in order to attain the most perfect harmony of body
and soul. In the acquisition of riches, too, he will aim at order
and harmony; he will not desire to heap up wealth without measure,
but he will fear that the increase of wealth will disturb the
constitution of his own soul. For the same reason he will only
accept such honours as will make him a better man; any others he
will decline. ‘In that case,’ said he, ‘he will
never be a politician.’ Yes, but he will, in his own city;
though probably not in his native country, unless by some divine
accident. ‘You mean that he will be a citizen of the ideal
city, which has no place upon earth.’ But in heaven, I
replied, there is a pattern of such a city, and he who wishes may
order his life after that image. Whether such a state is or ever
will be matters not; he will act according to that pattern and no
other…

The most noticeable points in the 9th Book of the Republic
are:—(1) the account of pleasure; (2) the number of the
interval which divides the king from the tyrant; (3) the pattern
which is in heaven.

1. Plato’s account of pleasure is remarkable for
moderation, and in this respect contrasts with the later Platonists
and the views which are attributed to them by Aristotle. He is not,
like the Cynics, opposed to all pleasure, but rather desires that
the several parts of the soul shall have their natural
satisfaction; he even agrees with the Epicureans in describing
pleasure as something more than the absence of pain. This is proved
by the circumstance that there are pleasures which have no
antecedent pains (as he also remarks in the Philebus), such as the
pleasures of smell, and also the pleasures of hope and
anticipation. In the previous book he had made the distinction
between necessary and unnecessary pleasure, which is repeated by
Aristotle, and he now observes that there are a further class of
‘wild beast’ pleasures, corresponding to
Aristotle’s (Greek). He dwells upon the relative and unreal
character of sensual pleasures and the illusion which arises out of
the contrast of pleasure and pain, pointing out the superiority of
the pleasures of reason, which are at rest, over the fleeting
pleasures of sense and emotion. The pre-eminence of royal pleasure
is shown by the fact that reason is able to form a judgment of the
lower pleasures, while the two lower parts of the soul are
incapable of judging the pleasures of reason. Thus, in his
treatment of pleasure, as in many other subjects, the philosophy of
Plato is ‘sawn up into quantities’ by Aristotle; the
analysis which was originally made by him became in the next
generation the foundation of further technical distinctions. Both
in Plato and Aristotle we note the illusion under which the
ancients fell of regarding the transience of pleasure as a proof of
its unreality, and of confounding the permanence of the
intellectual pleasures with the unchangeableness of the knowledge
from which they are derived. Neither do we like to admit that the
pleasures of knowledge, though more elevating, are not more lasting
than other pleasures, and are almost equally dependent on the
accidents of our bodily state (Introduction to Philebus).

2. The number of the interval which separates the king from the
tyrant, and royal from tyrannical pleasures, is 729, the cube of 9.
Which Plato characteristically designates as a number concerned
with human life, because NEARLY equivalent to the number of days
and nights in the year. He is desirous of proclaiming that the
interval between them is immeasurable, and invents a formula to
give expression to his idea. Those who spoke of justice as a cube,
of virtue as an art of measuring (Prot.), saw no inappropriateness
in conceiving the soul under the figure of a line, or the pleasure
of the tyrant as separated from the pleasure of the king by the
numerical interval of 729. And in modern times we sometimes use
metaphorically what Plato employed as a philosophical formula.
‘It is not easy to estimate the loss of the tyrant, except
perhaps in this way,’ says Plato. So we might say, that
although the life of a good man is not to be compared to that of a
bad man, yet you may measure the difference between them by valuing
one minute of the one at an hour of the other (‘One day in
thy courts is better than a thousand’), or you might say that
‘there is an infinite difference.’ But this is not so
much as saying, in homely phrase, ‘They are a thousand miles
asunder.’ And accordingly Plato finds the natural vehicle of
his thoughts in a progression of numbers; this arithmetical formula
he draws out with the utmost seriousness, and both here and in the
number of generation seems to find an additional proof of the truth
of his speculation in forming the number into a geometrical figure;
just as persons in our own day are apt to fancy that a statement is
verified when it has been only thrown into an abstract form. In
speaking of the number 729 as proper to human life, he probably
intended to intimate that one year of the tyrannical = 12 hours of
the royal life.

The simple observation that the comparison of two similar solids
is effected by the comparison of the cubes of their sides, is the
mathematical groundwork of this fanciful expression. There is some
difficulty in explaining the steps by which the number 729 is
obtained; the oligarch is removed in the third degree from the
royal and aristocratical, and the tyrant in the third degree from
the oligarchical; but we have to arrange the terms as the sides of
a square and to count the oligarch twice over, thus reckoning them
not as = 5 but as = 9. The square of 9 is passed lightly over as
only a step towards the cube.

3. Towards the close of the Republic, Plato seems to be more and
more convinced of the ideal character of his own speculations. At
the end of the 9th Book the pattern which is in heaven takes the
place of the city of philosophers on earth. The vision which has
received form and substance at his hands, is now discovered to be
at a distance. And yet this distant kingdom is also the rule of
man’s life. (‘Say not lo! here, or lo! there, for the
kingdom of God is within you.’) Thus a note is struck which
prepares for the revelation of a future life in the following Book.
But the future life is present still; the ideal of politics is to
be realized in the individual.

BOOK X.

Many things pleased me in the order of our State, but there was
nothing which I liked better than the regulation about poetry. The
division of the soul throws a new light on our exclusion of
imitation. I do not mind telling you in confidence that all poetry
is an outrage on the understanding, unless the hearers have that
balm of knowledge which heals error. I have loved Homer ever since
I was a boy, and even now he appears to me to be the great master
of tragic poetry. But much as I love the man, I love truth more,
and therefore I must speak out: and first of all, will you explain
what is imitation, for really I do not understand? ‘How
likely then that I should understand!’ That might very well
be, for the duller often sees better than the keener eye.
‘True, but in your presence I can hardly venture to say what
I think.’ Then suppose that we begin in our old fashion, with
the doctrine of universals. Let us assume the existence of beds and
tables. There is one idea of a bed, or of a table, which the maker
of each had in his mind when making them; he did not make the ideas
of beds and tables, but he made beds and tables according to the
ideas. And is there not a maker of the works of all workmen, who
makes not only vessels but plants and animals, himself, the earth
and heaven, and things in heaven and under the earth? He makes the
Gods also. ‘He must be a wizard indeed!’ But do you not
see that there is a sense in which you could do the same? You have
only to take a mirror, and catch the reflection of the sun, and the
earth, or anything else—there now you have made them.
‘Yes, but only in appearance.’ Exactly so; and the
painter is such a creator as you are with the mirror, and he is
even more unreal than the carpenter; although neither the carpenter
nor any other artist can be supposed to make the absolute bed.
‘Not if philosophers may be believed.’ Nor need we
wonder that his bed has but an imperfect relation to the truth.
Reflect:—Here are three beds; one in nature, which is made by
God; another, which is made by the carpenter; and the third, by the
painter. God only made one, nor could he have made more than one;
for if there had been two, there would always have been a
third—more absolute and abstract than either, under which
they would have been included. We may therefore conceive God to be
the natural maker of the bed, and in a lower sense the carpenter is
also the maker; but the painter is rather the imitator of what the
other two make; he has to do with a creation which is thrice
removed from reality. And the tragic poet is an imitator, and, like
every other imitator, is thrice removed from the king and from the
truth. The painter imitates not the original bed, but the bed made
by the carpenter. And this, without being really different, appears
to be different, and has many points of view, of which only one is
caught by the painter, who represents everything because he
represents a piece of everything, and that piece an image. And he
can paint any other artist, although he knows nothing of their
arts; and this with sufficient skill to deceive children or simple
people. Suppose now that somebody came to us and told us, how he
had met a man who knew all that everybody knows, and better than
anybody:—should we not infer him to be a simpleton who,
having no discernment of truth and falsehood, had met with a wizard
or enchanter, whom he fancied to be all-wise? And when we hear
persons saying that Homer and the tragedians know all the arts and
all the virtues, must we not infer that they are under a similar
delusion? they do not see that the poets are imitators, and that
their creations are only imitations. ‘Very true.’ But
if a person could create as well as imitate, he would rather leave
some permanent work and not an imitation only; he would rather be
the receiver than the giver of praise? ‘Yes, for then he
would have more honour and advantage.’

Let us now interrogate Homer and the poets. Friend Homer, say I
to him, I am not going to ask you about medicine, or any art to
which your poems incidentally refer, but about their main
subjects—war, military tactics, politics. If you are only
twice and not thrice removed from the truth—not an imitator
or an image-maker, please to inform us what good you have ever done
to mankind? Is there any city which professes to have received laws
from you, as Sicily and Italy have from Charondas, Sparta from
Lycurgus, Athens from Solon? Or was any war ever carried on by your
counsels? or is any invention attributed to you, as there is to
Thales and Anacharsis? Or is there any Homeric way of life, such as
the Pythagorean was, in which you instructed men, and which is
called after you? ‘No, indeed; and Creophylus (Flesh-child)
was even more unfortunate in his breeding than he was in his name,
if, as tradition says, Homer in his lifetime was allowed by him and
his other friends to starve.’ Yes, but could this ever have
happened if Homer had really been the educator of Hellas? Would he
not have had many devoted followers? If Protagoras and Prodicus can
persuade their contemporaries that no one can manage house or State
without them, is it likely that Homer and Hesiod would have been
allowed to go about as beggars—I mean if they had really been
able to do the world any good?— would not men have compelled
them to stay where they were, or have followed them about in order
to get education? But they did not; and therefore we may infer that
Homer and all the poets are only imitators, who do but imitate the
appearances of things. For as a painter by a knowledge of figure
and colour can paint a cobbler without any practice in cobbling, so
the poet can delineate any art in the colours of language, and give
harmony and rhythm to the cobbler and also to the general; and you
know how mere narration, when deprived of the ornaments of metre,
is like a face which has lost the beauty of youth and never had any
other. Once more, the imitator has no knowledge of reality, but
only of appearance. The painter paints, and the artificer makes a
bridle and reins, but neither understands the use of them—the
knowledge of this is confined to the horseman; and so of other
things. Thus we have three arts: one of use, another of invention,
a third of imitation; and the user furnishes the rule to the two
others. The flute-player will know the good and bad flute, and the
maker will put faith in him; but the imitator will neither know nor
have faith— neither science nor true opinion can be ascribed
to him. Imitation, then, is devoid of knowledge, being only a kind
of play or sport, and the tragic and epic poets are imitators in
the highest degree.

And now let us enquire, what is the faculty in man which answers
to imitation. Allow me to explain my meaning: Objects are
differently seen when in the water and when out of the water, when
near and when at a distance; and the painter or juggler makes use
of this variation to impose upon us. And the art of measuring and
weighing and calculating comes in to save our bewildered minds from
the power of appearance; for, as we were saying, two contrary
opinions of the same about the same and at the same time, cannot
both of them be true. But which of them is true is determined by
the art of calculation; and this is allied to the better faculty in
the soul, as the arts of imitation are to the worse. And the same
holds of the ear as well as of the eye, of poetry as well as
painting. The imitation is of actions voluntary or involuntary, in
which there is an expectation of a good or bad result, and present
experience of pleasure and pain. But is a man in harmony with
himself when he is the subject of these conflicting influences? Is
there not rather a contradiction in him? Let me further ask,
whether he is more likely to control sorrow when he is alone or
when he is in company. ‘In the latter case.’ Feeling
would lead him to indulge his sorrow, but reason and law control
him and enjoin patience; since he cannot know whether his
affliction is good or evil, and no human thing is of any great
consequence, while sorrow is certainly a hindrance to good counsel.
For when we stumble, we should not, like children, make an uproar;
we should take the measures which reason prescribes, not raising a
lament, but finding a cure. And the better part of us is ready to
follow reason, while the irrational principle is full of sorrow and
distraction at the recollection of our troubles. Unfortunately,
however, this latter furnishes the chief materials of the imitative
arts. Whereas reason is ever in repose and cannot easily be
displayed, especially to a mixed multitude who have no experience
of her. Thus the poet is like the painter in two ways: first he
paints an inferior degree of truth, and secondly, he is concerned
with an inferior part of the soul. He indulges the feelings, while
he enfeebles the reason; and we refuse to allow him to have
authority over the mind of man; for he has no measure of greater
and less, and is a maker of images and very far gone from
truth.

But we have not yet mentioned the heaviest count in the
indictment—the power which poetry has of injuriously exciting
the feelings. When we hear some passage in which a hero laments his
sufferings at tedious length, you know that we sympathize with him
and praise the poet; and yet in our own sorrows such an exhibition
of feeling is regarded as effeminate and unmanly (Ion). Now, ought
a man to feel pleasure in seeing another do what he hates and
abominates in himself? Is he not giving way to a sentiment which in
his own case he would control?—he is off his guard because
the sorrow is another’s; and he thinks that he may indulge
his feelings without disgrace, and will be the gainer by the
pleasure. But the inevitable consequence is that he who begins by
weeping at the sorrows of others, will end by weeping at his own.
The same is true of comedy,—you may often laugh at buffoonery
which you would be ashamed to utter, and the love of coarse
merriment on the stage will at last turn you into a buffoon at
home. Poetry feeds and waters the passions and desires; she lets
them rule instead of ruling them. And therefore, when we hear the
encomiasts of Homer affirming that he is the educator of Hellas,
and that all life should be regulated by his precepts, we may allow
the excellence of their intentions, and agree with them in thinking
Homer a great poet and tragedian. But we shall continue to prohibit
all poetry which goes beyond hymns to the Gods and praises of
famous men. Not pleasure and pain, but law and reason shall rule in
our State.

These are our grounds for expelling poetry; but lest she should
charge us with discourtesy, let us also make an apology to her. We
will remind her that there is an ancient quarrel between poetry and
philosophy, of which there are many traces in the writings of the
poets, such as the saying of ‘the she-dog, yelping at her
mistress,’ and ‘the philosophers who are ready to
circumvent Zeus,’ and ‘the philosophers who are
paupers.’ Nevertheless we bear her no ill-will, and will
gladly allow her to return upon condition that she makes a defence
of herself in verse; and her supporters who are not poets may speak
in prose. We confess her charms; but if she cannot show that she is
useful as well as delightful, like rational lovers, we must
renounce our love, though endeared to us by early associations.
Having come to years of discretion, we know that poetry is not
truth, and that a man should be careful how he introduces her to
that state or constitution which he himself is; for there is a
mighty issue at stake—no less than the good or evil of a
human soul. And it is not worth while to forsake justice and virtue
for the attractions of poetry, any more than for the sake of honour
or wealth. ‘I agree with you.’

And yet the rewards of virtue are greater far than I have
described. ‘And can we conceive things greater still?’
Not, perhaps, in this brief span of life: but should an immortal
being care about anything short of eternity? ‘I do not
understand what you mean?’ Do you not know that the soul is
immortal? ‘Surely you are not prepared to prove that?’
Indeed I am. ‘Then let me hear this argument, of which you
make so light.’

You would admit that everything has an element of good and of
evil. In all things there is an inherent corruption; and if this
cannot destroy them, nothing else will. The soul too has her own
corrupting principles, which are injustice, intemperance,
cowardice, and the like. But none of these destroy the soul in the
same sense that disease destroys the body. The soul may be full of
all iniquities, but is not, by reason of them, brought any nearer
to death. Nothing which was not destroyed from within ever perished
by external affection of evil. The body, which is one thing, cannot
be destroyed by food, which is another, unless the badness of the
food is communicated to the body. Neither can the soul, which is
one thing, be corrupted by the body, which is another, unless she
herself is infected. And as no bodily evil can infect the soul,
neither can any bodily evil, whether disease or violence, or any
other destroy the soul, unless it can be shown to render her unholy
and unjust. But no one will ever prove that the souls of men become
more unjust when they die. If a person has the audacity to say the
contrary, the answer is—Then why do criminals require the
hand of the executioner, and not die of themselves?
‘Truly,’ he said, ‘injustice would not be very
terrible if it brought a cessation of evil; but I rather believe
that the injustice which murders others may tend to quicken and
stimulate the life of the unjust.’ You are quite right. If
sin which is her own natural and inherent evil cannot destroy the
soul, hardly will anything else destroy her. But the soul which
cannot be destroyed either by internal or external evil must be
immortal and everlasting. And if this be true, souls will always
exist in the same number. They cannot diminish, because they cannot
be destroyed; nor yet increase, for the increase of the immortal
must come from something mortal, and so all would end in
immortality. Neither is the soul variable and diverse; for that
which is immortal must be of the fairest and simplest composition.
If we would conceive her truly, and so behold justice and injustice
in their own nature, she must be viewed by the light of reason pure
as at birth, or as she is reflected in philosophy when holding
converse with the divine and immortal and eternal. In her present
condition we see her only like the sea-god Glaucus, bruised and
maimed in the sea which is the world, and covered with shells and
stones which are incrusted upon her from the entertainments of
earth.

Thus far, as the argument required, we have said nothing of the
rewards and honours which the poets attribute to justice; we have
contented ourselves with showing that justice in herself is best
for the soul in herself, even if a man should put on a Gyges’
ring and have the helmet of Hades too. And now you shall repay me
what you borrowed; and I will enumerate the rewards of justice in
life and after death. I granted, for the sake of argument, as you
will remember, that evil might perhaps escape the knowledge of Gods
and men, although this was really impossible. And since I have
shown that justice has reality, you must grant me also that she has
the palm of appearance. In the first place, the just man is known
to the Gods, and he is therefore the friend of the Gods, and he
will receive at their hands every good, always excepting such evil
as is the necessary consequence of former sins. All things end in
good to him, either in life or after death, even what appears to be
evil; for the Gods have a care of him who desires to be in their
likeness. And what shall we say of men? Is not honesty the best
policy? The clever rogue makes a great start at first, but breaks
down before he reaches the goal, and slinks away in dishonour;
whereas the true runner perseveres to the end, and receives the
prize. And you must allow me to repeat all the blessings which you
attributed to the fortunate unjust—they bear rule in the
city, they marry and give in marriage to whom they will; and the
evils which you attributed to the unfortunate just, do really fall
in the end on the unjust, although, as you implied, their
sufferings are better veiled in silence.

But all the blessings of this present life are as nothing when
compared with those which await good men after death. ‘I
should like to hear about them.’ Come, then, and I will tell
you the story of Er, the son of Armenius, a valiant man. He was
supposed to have died in battle, but ten days afterwards his body
was found untouched by corruption and sent home for burial. On the
twelfth day he was placed on the funeral pyre and there he came to
life again, and told what he had seen in the world below. He said
that his soul went with a great company to a place, in which there
were two chasms near together in the earth beneath, and two
corresponding chasms in the heaven above. And there were judges
sitting in the intermediate space, bidding the just ascend by the
heavenly way on the right hand, having the seal of their judgment
set upon them before, while the unjust, having the seal behind,
were bidden to descend by the way on the left hand. Him they told
to look and listen, as he was to be their messenger to men from the
world below. And he beheld and saw the souls departing after
judgment at either chasm; some who came from earth, were worn and
travel-stained; others, who came from heaven, were clean and
bright. They seemed glad to meet and rest awhile in the meadow;
here they discoursed with one another of what they had seen in the
other world. Those who came from earth wept at the remembrance of
their sorrows, but the spirits from above spoke of glorious sights
and heavenly bliss. He said that for every evil deed they were
punished tenfold—now the journey was of a thousand
years’ duration, because the life of man was reckoned as a
hundred years—and the rewards of virtue were in the same
proportion. He added something hardly worth repeating about infants
dying almost as soon as they were born. Of parricides and other
murderers he had tortures still more terrible to narrate. He was
present when one of the spirits asked— Where is Ardiaeus the
Great? (This Ardiaeus was a cruel tyrant, who had murdered his
father, and his elder brother, a thousand years before.) Another
spirit answered, ‘He comes not hither, and will never come.
And I myself,’ he added, ‘actually saw this terrible
sight. At the entrance of the chasm, as we were about to reascend,
Ardiaeus appeared, and some other sinners—most of whom had
been tyrants, but not all—and just as they fancied that they
were returning to life, the chasm gave a roar, and then wild,
fiery-looking men who knew the meaning of the sound, seized him and
several others, and bound them hand and foot and threw them down,
and dragged them along at the side of the road, lacerating them and
carding them like wool, and explaining to the passers-by, that they
were going to be cast into hell.’ The greatest terror of the
pilgrims ascending was lest they should hear the voice, and when
there was silence one by one they passed up with joy. To these
sufferings there were corresponding delights.

On the eighth day the souls of the pilgrims resumed their
journey, and in four days came to a spot whence they looked down
upon a line of light, in colour like a rainbow, only brighter and
clearer. One day more brought them to the place, and they saw that
this was the column of light which binds together the whole
universe. The ends of the column were fastened to heaven, and from
them hung the distaff of Necessity, on which all the heavenly
bodies turned—the hook and spindle were of adamant, and the
whorl of a mixed substance. The whorl was in form like a number of
boxes fitting into one another with their edges turned upwards,
making together a single whorl which was pierced by the spindle.
The outermost had the rim broadest, and the inner whorls were
smaller and smaller, and had their rims narrower. The largest (the
fixed stars) was spangled—the seventh (the sun) was
brightest—the eighth (the moon) shone by the light of the
seventh—the second and fifth (Saturn and Mercury) were most
like one another and yellower than the eighth—the third
(Jupiter) had the whitest light—the fourth (Mars) was
red—the sixth (Venus) was in whiteness second. The whole had
one motion, but while this was revolving in one direction the seven
inner circles were moving in the opposite, with various degrees of
swiftness and slowness. The spindle turned on the knees of
Necessity, and a Siren stood hymning upon each circle, while
Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos, the daughters of Necessity, sat on
thrones at equal intervals, singing of past, present, and future,
responsive to the music of the Sirens; Clotho from time to time
guiding the outer circle with a touch of her right hand; Atropos
with her left hand touching and guiding the inner circles; Lachesis
in turn putting forth her hand from time to time to guide both of
them. On their arrival the pilgrims went to Lachesis, and there was
an interpreter who arranged them, and taking from her knees lots,
and samples of lives, got up into a pulpit and said: ‘Mortal
souls, hear the words of Lachesis, the daughter of Necessity. A new
period of mortal life has begun, and you may choose what divinity
you please; the responsibility of choosing is with you—God is
blameless.’ After speaking thus, he cast the lots among them
and each one took up the lot which fell near him. He then placed on
the ground before them the samples of lives, many more than the
souls present; and there were all sorts of lives, of men and of
animals. There were tyrannies ending in misery and exile, and lives
of men and women famous for their different qualities; and also
mixed lives, made up of wealth and poverty, sickness and health.
Here, Glaucon, is the great risk of human life, and therefore the
whole of education should be directed to the acquisition of such a
knowledge as will teach a man to refuse the evil and choose the
good. He should know all the combinations which occur in
life—of beauty with poverty or with wealth,— of
knowledge with external goods,—and at last choose with
reference to the nature of the soul, regarding that only as the
better life which makes men better, and leaving the rest. And a man
must take with him an iron sense of truth and right into the world
below, that there too he may remain undazzled by wealth or the
allurements of evil, and be determined to avoid the extremes and
choose the mean. For this, as the messenger reported the
interpreter to have said, is the true happiness of man; and any
one, as he proclaimed, may, if he choose with understanding, have a
good lot, even though he come last. ‘Let not the first be
careless in his choice, nor the last despair.’ He spoke; and
when he had spoken, he who had drawn the first lot chose a tyranny:
he did not see that he was fated to devour his own
children—and when he discovered his mistake, he wept and beat
his breast, blaming chance and the Gods and anybody rather than
himself. He was one of those who had come from heaven, and in his
previous life had been a citizen of a well-ordered State, but he
had only habit and no philosophy. Like many another, he made a bad
choice, because he had no experience of life; whereas those who
came from earth and had seen trouble were not in such a hurry to
choose. But if a man had followed philosophy while upon earth, and
had been moderately fortunate in his lot, he might not only be
happy here, but his pilgrimage both from and to this world would be
smooth and heavenly. Nothing was more curious than the spectacle of
the choice, at once sad and laughable and wonderful; most of the
souls only seeking to avoid their own condition in a previous life.
He saw the soul of Orpheus changing into a swan because he would
not be born of a woman; there was Thamyras becoming a nightingale;
musical birds, like the swan, choosing to be men; the twentieth
soul, which was that of Ajax, preferring the life of a lion to that
of a man, in remembrance of the injustice which was done to him in
the judgment of the arms; and Agamemnon, from a like enmity to
human nature, passing into an eagle. About the middle was the soul
of Atalanta choosing the honours of an athlete, and next to her
Epeus taking the nature of a workwoman; among the last was
Thersites, who was changing himself into a monkey. Thither, the
last of all, came Odysseus, and sought the lot of a private man,
which lay neglected and despised, and when he found it he went away
rejoicing, and said that if he had been first instead of last, his
choice would have been the same. Men, too, were seen passing into
animals, and wild and tame animals changing into one another.

When all the souls had chosen they went to Lachesis, who sent
with each of them their genius or attendant to fulfil their lot. He
first of all brought them under the hand of Clotho, and drew them
within the revolution of the spindle impelled by her hand; from her
they were carried to Atropos, who made the threads irreversible;
whence, without turning round, they passed beneath the throne of
Necessity; and when they had all passed, they moved on in scorching
heat to the plain of Forgetfulness and rested at evening by the
river Unmindful, whose water could not be retained in any vessel;
of this they had all to drink a certain quantity—some of them
drank more than was required, and he who drank forgot all things.
Er himself was prevented from drinking. When they had gone to rest,
about the middle of the night there were thunderstorms and
earthquakes, and suddenly they were all driven divers ways,
shooting like stars to their birth. Concerning his return to the
body, he only knew that awaking suddenly in the morning he found
himself lying on the pyre.

Thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved, and will be our
salvation, if we believe that the soul is immortal, and hold fast
to the heavenly way of Justice and Knowledge. So shall we pass
undefiled over the river of Forgetfulness, and be dear to ourselves
and to the Gods, and have a crown of reward and happiness both in
this world and also in the millennial pilgrimage of the other.

The Tenth Book of the Republic of Plato falls into two
divisions: first, resuming an old thread which has been
interrupted, Socrates assails the poets, who, now that the nature
of the soul has been analyzed, are seen to be very far gone from
the truth; and secondly, having shown the reality of the happiness
of the just, he demands that appearance shall be restored to him,
and then proceeds to prove the immortality of the soul. The
argument, as in the Phaedo and Gorgias, is supplemented by the
vision of a future life.

Why Plato, who was himself a poet, and whose dialogues are poems
and dramas, should have been hostile to the poets as a class, and
especially to the dramatic poets; why he should not have seen that
truth may be embodied in verse as well as in prose, and that there
are some indefinable lights and shadows of human life which can
only be expressed in poetry—some elements of imagination
which always entwine with reason; why he should have supposed epic
verse to be inseparably associated with the impurities of the old
Hellenic mythology; why he should try Homer and Hesiod by the
unfair and prosaic test of utility,—are questions which have
always been debated amongst students of Plato. Though unable to
give a complete answer to them, we may show—first, that his
views arose naturally out of the circumstances of his age; and
secondly, we may elicit the truth as well as the error which is
contained in them.

He is the enemy of the poets because poetry was declining in his
own lifetime, and a theatrocracy, as he says in the Laws, had taken
the place of an intellectual aristocracy. Euripides exhibited the
last phase of the tragic drama, and in him Plato saw the friend and
apologist of tyrants, and the Sophist of tragedy. The old comedy
was almost extinct; the new had not yet arisen. Dramatic and lyric
poetry, like every other branch of Greek literature, was falling
under the power of rhetoric. There was no ‘second or
third’ to Aeschylus and Sophocles in the generation which
followed them. Aristophanes, in one of his later comedies (Frogs),
speaks of ‘thousands of tragedy-making prattlers,’
whose attempts at poetry he compares to the chirping of swallows;
‘their garrulity went far beyond
Euripides,’—‘they appeared once upon the stage,
and there was an end of them.’ To a man of genius who had a
real appreciation of the godlike Aeschylus and the noble and gentle
Sophocles, though disagreeing with some parts of their
‘theology’ (Rep.), these ‘minor poets’ must
have been contemptible and intolerable. There is no feeling
stronger in the dialogues of Plato than a sense of the decline and
decay both in literature and in politics which marked his own age.
Nor can he have been expected to look with favour on the licence of
Aristophanes, now at the end of his career, who had begun by
satirizing Socrates in the Clouds, and in a similar spirit forty
years afterwards had satirized the founders of ideal commonwealths
in his Eccleziazusae, or Female Parliament (Laws).

There were other reasons for the antagonism of Plato to poetry.
The profession of an actor was regarded by him as a degradation of
human nature, for ‘one man in his life’ cannot
‘play many parts;’ the characters which the actor
performs seem to destroy his own character, and to leave nothing
which can be truly called himself. Neither can any man live his
life and act it. The actor is the slave of his art, not the master
of it. Taking this view Plato is more decided in his expulsion of
the dramatic than of the epic poets, though he must have known that
the Greek tragedians afforded noble lessons and examples of virtue
and patriotism, to which nothing in Homer can be compared. But
great dramatic or even great rhetorical power is hardly consistent
with firmness or strength of mind, and dramatic talent is often
incidentally associated with a weak or dissolute character.

In the Tenth Book Plato introduces a new series of objections.
First, he says that the poet or painter is an imitator, and in the
third degree removed from the truth. His creations are not tested
by rule and measure; they are only appearances. In modern times we
should say that art is not merely imitation, but rather the
expression of the ideal in forms of sense. Even adopting the humble
image of Plato, from which his argument derives a colour, we should
maintain that the artist may ennoble the bed which he paints by the
folds of the drapery, or by the feeling of home which he
introduces; and there have been modern painters who have imparted
such an ideal interest to a blacksmith’s or a
carpenter’s shop. The eye or mind which feels as well as sees
can give dignity and pathos to a ruined mill, or a straw-built shed
(Rembrandt), to the hull of a vessel ‘going to its last
home’ (Turner). Still more would this apply to the greatest
works of art, which seem to be the visible embodiment of the
divine. Had Plato been asked whether the Zeus or Athene of Pheidias
was the imitation of an imitation only, would he not have been
compelled to admit that something more was to be found in them than
in the form of any mortal; and that the rule of proportion to which
they conformed was ‘higher far than any geometry or
arithmetic could express?’ (Statesman.)

Again, Plato objects to the imitative arts that they express the
emotional rather than the rational part of human nature. He does
not admit Aristotle’s theory, that tragedy or other serious
imitations are a purgation of the passions by pity and fear; to him
they appear only to afford the opportunity of indulging them. Yet
we must acknowledge that we may sometimes cure disordered emotions
by giving expression to them; and that they often gain strength
when pent up within our own breast. It is not every indulgence of
the feelings which is to be condemned. For there may be a
gratification of the higher as well as of the lower—thoughts
which are too deep or too sad to be expressed by ourselves, may
find an utterance in the words of poets. Every one would
acknowledge that there have been times when they were consoled and
elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or
by the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, in the
earlier part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect
of harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth
Book he regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks
only ‘What good have they done?’ and is not satisfied
with the reply, that ‘They have given innocent pleasure to
mankind.’

He tells us that he rejoices in the banishment of the poets,
since he has found by the analysis of the soul that they are
concerned with the inferior faculties. He means to say that the
higher faculties have to do with universals, the lower with
particulars of sense. The poets are on a level with their own age,
but not on a level with Socrates and Plato; and he was well aware
that Homer and Hesiod could not be made a rule of life by any
process of legitimate interpretation; his ironical use of them is
in fact a denial of their authority; he saw, too, that the poets
were not critics—as he says in the Apology, ‘Any one
was a better interpreter of their writings than they were
themselves. He himself ceased to be a poet when he became a
disciple of Socrates; though, as he tells us of Solon, ‘he
might have been one of the greatest of them, if he had not been
deterred by other pursuits’ (Tim.) Thus from many points of
view there is an antagonism between Plato and the poets, which was
foreshadowed to him in the old quarrel between philosophy and
poetry. The poets, as he says in the Protagoras, were the Sophists
of their day; and his dislike of the one class is reflected on the
other. He regards them both as the enemies of reasoning and
abstraction, though in the case of Euripides more with reference to
his immoral sentiments about tyrants and the like. For Plato is the
prophet who ‘came into the world to convince
men’—first of the fallibility of sense and opinion, and
secondly of the reality of abstract ideas. Whatever strangeness
there may be in modern times in opposing philosophy to poetry,
which to us seem to have so many elements in common, the
strangeness will disappear if we conceive of poetry as allied to
sense, and of philosophy as equivalent to thought and abstraction.
Unfortunately the very word ‘idea,’ which to Plato is
expressive of the most real of all things, is associated in our
minds with an element of subjectiveness and unreality. We may note
also how he differs from Aristotle who declares poetry to be truer
than history, for the opposite reason, because it is concerned with
universals, not like history, with particulars (Poet).

The things which are seen are opposed in Scripture to the things
which are unseen—they are equally opposed in Plato to
universals and ideas. To him all particulars appear to be floating
about in a world of sense; they have a taint of error or even of
evil. There is no difficulty in seeing that this is an illusion;
for there is no more error or variation in an individual man,
horse, bed, etc., than in the class man, horse, bed, etc.; nor is
the truth which is displayed in individual instances less certain
than that which is conveyed through the medium of ideas. But Plato,
who is deeply impressed with the real importance of universals as
instruments of thought, attributes to them an essential truth which
is imaginary and unreal; for universals may be often false and
particulars true. Had he attained to any clear conception of the
individual, which is the synthesis of the universal and the
particular; or had he been able to distinguish between opinion and
sensation, which the ambiguity of the words (Greek) and the like,
tended to confuse, he would not have denied truth to the
particulars of sense.

But the poets are also the representatives of falsehood and
feigning in all departments of life and knowledge, like the
sophists and rhetoricians of the Gorgias and Phaedrus; they are the
false priests, false prophets, lying spirits, enchanters of the
world. There is another count put into the indictment against them
by Plato, that they are the friends of the tyrant, and bask in the
sunshine of his patronage. Despotism in all ages has had an
apparatus of false ideas and false teachers at its service—in
the history of Modern Europe as well as of Greece and Rome. For no
government of men depends solely upon force; without some
corruption of literature and morals—some appeal to the
imagination of the masses—some pretence to the favour of
heaven—some element of good giving power to evil, tyranny,
even for a short time, cannot be maintained. The Greek tyrants were
not insensible to the importance of awakening in their cause a
Pseudo–Hellenic feeling; they were proud of successes at the
Olympic games; they were not devoid of the love of literature and
art. Plato is thinking in the first instance of Greek poets who had
graced the courts of Dionysius or Archelaus: and the old spirit of
freedom is roused within him at their prostitution of the Tragic
Muse in the praises of tyranny. But his prophetic eye extends
beyond them to the false teachers of other ages who are the
creatures of the government under which they live. He compares the
corruption of his contemporaries with the idea of a perfect
society, and gathers up into one mass of evil the evils and errors
of mankind; to him they are personified in the rhetoricians,
sophists, poets, rulers who deceive and govern the world.

A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the
imitative arts is that they excite the emotions. Here the modern
reader will be disposed to introduce a distinction which appears to
have escaped him. For the emotions are neither bad nor good in
themselves, and are not most likely to be controlled by the attempt
to eradicate them, but by the moderate indulgence of them. And the
vocation of art is to present thought in the form of feeling, to
enlist the feelings on the side of reason, to inspire even for a
moment courage or resignation; perhaps to suggest a sense of
infinity and eternity in a way which mere language is incapable of
attaining. True, the same power which in the purer age of art
embodies gods and heroes only, may be made to express the
voluptuous image of a Corinthian courtezan. But this only shows
that art, like other outward things, may be turned to good and also
to evil, and is not more closely connected with the higher than
with the lower part of the soul. All imitative art is subject to
certain limitations, and therefore necessarily partakes of the
nature of a compromise. Something of ideal truth is sacrificed for
the sake of the representation, and something in the exactness of
the representation is sacrificed to the ideal. Still, works of art
have a permanent element; they idealize and detain the passing
thought, and are the intermediates between sense and ideas.

In the present stage of the human mind, poetry and other forms
of fiction may certainly be regarded as a good. But we can also
imagine the existence of an age in which a severer conception of
truth has either banished or transformed them. At any rate we must
admit that they hold a different place at different periods of the
world’s history. In the infancy of mankind, poetry, with the
exception of proverbs, is the whole of literature, and the only
instrument of intellectual culture; in modern times she is the
shadow or echo of her former self, and appears to have a precarious
existence. Milton in his day doubted whether an epic poem was any
longer possible. At the same time we must remember, that what Plato
would have called the charms of poetry have been partly transferred
to prose; he himself (Statesman) admits rhetoric to be the
handmaiden of Politics, and proposes to find in the strain of law
(Laws) a substitute for the old poets. Among ourselves the creative
power seems often to be growing weaker, and scientific fact to be
more engrossing and overpowering to the mind than formerly. The
illusion of the feelings commonly called love, has hitherto been
the inspiring influence of modern poetry and romance, and has
exercised a humanizing if not a strengthening influence on the
world. But may not the stimulus which love has given to fancy be
some day exhausted? The modern English novel which is the most
popular of all forms of reading is not more than a century or two
old: will the tale of love a hundred years hence, after so many
thousand variations of the same theme, be still received with
unabated interest?

Art cannot claim to be on a level with philosophy or religion,
and may often corrupt them. It is possible to conceive a mental
state in which all artistic representations are regarded as a false
and imperfect expression, either of the religious ideal or of the
philosophical ideal. The fairest forms may be revolting in certain
moods of mind, as is proved by the fact that the Mahometans, and
many sects of Christians, have renounced the use of pictures and
images. The beginning of a great religion, whether Christian or
Gentile, has not been ‘wood or stone,’ but a spirit
moving in the hearts of men. The disciples have met in a large
upper room or in ‘holes and caves of the earth’; in the
second or third generation, they have had mosques, temples,
churches, monasteries. And the revival or reform of religions, like
the first revelation of them, has come from within and has
generally disregarded external ceremonies and accompaniments.

But poetry and art may also be the expression of the highest
truth and the purest sentiment. Plato himself seems to waver
between two opposite views —when, as in the third Book, he
insists that youth should be brought up amid wholesome imagery; and
again in Book X, when he banishes the poets from his Republic.
Admitting that the arts, which some of us almost deify, have fallen
short of their higher aim, we must admit on the other hand that to
banish imagination wholly would be suicidal as well as impossible.
For nature too is a form of art; and a breath of the fresh air or a
single glance at the varying landscape would in an instant revive
and reillumine the extinguished spark of poetry in the human
breast. In the lower stages of civilization imagination more than
reason distinguishes man from the animals; and to banish art would
be to banish thought, to banish language, to banish the expression
of all truth. No religion is wholly devoid of external forms; even
the Mahometan who renounces the use of pictures and images has a
temple in which he worships the Most High, as solemn and beautiful
as any Greek or Christian building. Feeling too and thought are not
really opposed; for he who thinks must feel before he can execute.
And the highest thoughts, when they become familiarized to us, are
always tending to pass into the form of feeling.

Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and
society. But he feels strongly the unreality of their writings; he
is protesting against the degeneracy of poetry in his own day as we
might protest against the want of serious purpose in modern
fiction, against the unseemliness or extravagance of some of our
poets or novelists, against the time-serving of preachers or public
writers, against the regardlessness of truth which to the eye of
the philosopher seems to characterize the greater part of the
world. For we too have reason to complain that our poets and
novelists ‘paint inferior truth’ and ‘are
concerned with the inferior part of the soul’; that the
readers of them become what they read and are injuriously affected
by them. And we look in vain for that healthy atmosphere of which
Plato speaks,—‘the beauty which meets the sense like a
breeze and imperceptibly draws the soul, even in childhood, into
harmony with the beauty of reason.’

For there might be a poetry which would be the hymn of divine
perfection, the harmony of goodness and truth among men: a strain
which should renew the youth of the world, and bring back the ages
in which the poet was man’s only teacher and best
friend,—which would find materials in the living present as
well as in the romance of the past, and might subdue to the fairest
forms of speech and verse the intractable materials of modern
civilisation,—which might elicit the simple principles, or,
as Plato would have called them, the essential forms, of truth and
justice out of the variety of opinion and the complexity of modern
society,—which would preserve all the good of each generation
and leave the bad unsung,—which should be based not on vain
longings or faint imaginings, but on a clear insight into the
nature of man. Then the tale of love might begin again in poetry or
prose, two in one, united in the pursuit of knowledge, or the
service of God and man; and feelings of love might still be the
incentive to great thoughts and heroic deeds as in the days of
Dante or Petrarch; and many types of manly and womanly beauty might
appear among us, rising above the ordinary level of humanity, and
many lives which were like poems (Laws), be not only written, but
lived by us. A few such strains have been heard among men in the
tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, whom Plato quotes, not, as
Homer is quoted by him, in irony, but with deep and serious
approval,—in the poetry of Milton and Wordsworth, and in
passages of other English poets,—first and above all in the
Hebrew prophets and psalmists. Shakespeare has taught us how great
men should speak and act; he has drawn characters of a wonderful
purity and depth; he has ennobled the human mind, but, like Homer
(Rep.), he ‘has left no way of life.’ The next greatest
poet of modern times, Goethe, is concerned with ‘a lower
degree of truth’; he paints the world as a stage on which
‘all the men and women are merely players’; he
cultivates life as an art, but he furnishes no ideals of truth and
action. The poet may rebel against any attempt to set limits to his
fancy; and he may argue truly that moralizing in verse is not
poetry. Possibly, like Mephistopheles in Faust, he may retaliate on
his adversaries. But the philosopher will still be justified in
asking, ‘How may the heavenly gift of poesy be devoted to the
good of mankind?’

Returning to Plato, we may observe that a similar mixture of
truth and error appears in other parts of the argument. He is aware
of the absurdity of mankind framing their whole lives according to
Homer; just as in the Phaedrus he intimates the absurdity of
interpreting mythology upon rational principles; both these were
the modern tendencies of his own age, which he deservedly
ridicules. On the other hand, his argument that Homer, if he had
been able to teach mankind anything worth knowing, would not have
been allowed by them to go about begging as a rhapsodist, is both
false and contrary to the spirit of Plato (Rep.). It may be
compared with those other paradoxes of the Gorgias, that ‘No
statesman was ever unjustly put to death by the city of which he
was the head’; and that ‘No Sophist was ever defrauded
by his pupils’ (Gorg.)…

The argument for immortality seems to rest on the absolute
dualism of soul and body. Admitting the existence of the soul, we
know of no force which is able to put an end to her. Vice is her
own proper evil; and if she cannot be destroyed by that, she cannot
be destroyed by any other. Yet Plato has acknowledged that the soul
may be so overgrown by the incrustations of earth as to lose her
original form; and in the Timaeus he recognizes more strongly than
in the Republic the influence which the body has over the mind,
denying even the voluntariness of human actions, on the ground that
they proceed from physical states (Tim.). In the Republic, as
elsewhere, he wavers between the original soul which has to be
restored, and the character which is developed by training and
education…

The vision of another world is ascribed to Er, the son of
Armenius, who is said by Clement of Alexandria to have been
Zoroaster. The tale has certainly an oriental character, and may be
compared with the pilgrimages of the soul in the Zend Avesta (Haug,
Avesta). But no trace of acquaintance with Zoroaster is found
elsewhere in Plato’s writings, and there is no reason for
giving him the name of Er the Pamphylian. The philosophy of
Heracleitus cannot be shown to be borrowed from Zoroaster, and
still less the myths of Plato.

The local arrangement of the vision is less distinct than that
of the Phaedrus and Phaedo. Astronomy is mingled with symbolism and
mythology; the great sphere of heaven is represented under the
symbol of a cylinder or box, containing the seven orbits of the
planets and the fixed stars; this is suspended from an axis or
spindle which turns on the knees of Necessity; the revolutions of
the seven orbits contained in the cylinder are guided by the fates,
and their harmonious motion produces the music of the spheres.
Through the innermost or eighth of these, which is the moon, is
passed the spindle; but it is doubtful whether this is the
continuation of the column of light, from which the pilgrims
contemplate the heavens; the words of Plato imply that they are
connected, but not the same. The column itself is clearly not of
adamant. The spindle (which is of adamant) is fastened to the ends
of the chains which extend to the middle of the column of
light—this column is said to hold together the heaven; but
whether it hangs from the spindle, or is at right angles to it, is
not explained. The cylinder containing the orbits of the stars is
almost as much a symbol as the figure of Necessity turning the
spindle;—for the outermost rim is the sphere of the fixed
stars, and nothing is said about the intervals of space which
divide the paths of the stars in the heavens. The description is
both a picture and an orrery, and therefore is necessarily
inconsistent with itself. The column of light is not the Milky
Way—which is neither straight, nor like a rainbow—but
the imaginary axis of the earth. This is compared to the rainbow in
respect not of form but of colour, and not to the undergirders of a
trireme, but to the straight rope running from prow to stern in
which the undergirders meet.

The orrery or picture of the heavens given in the Republic
differs in its mode of representation from the circles of the same
and of the other in the Timaeus. In both the fixed stars are
distinguished from the planets, and they move in orbits without
them, although in an opposite direction: in the Republic as in the
Timaeus they are all moving round the axis of the world. But we are
not certain that in the former they are moving round the earth. No
distinct mention is made in the Republic of the circles of the same
and other; although both in the Timaeus and in the Republic the
motion of the fixed stars is supposed to coincide with the motion
of the whole. The relative thickness of the rims is perhaps
designed to express the relative distances of the planets. Plato
probably intended to represent the earth, from which Er and his
companions are viewing the heavens, as stationary in place; but
whether or not herself revolving, unless this is implied in the
revolution of the axis, is uncertain (Timaeus). The spectator may
be supposed to look at the heavenly bodies, either from above or
below. The earth is a sort of earth and heaven in one, like the
heaven of the Phaedrus, on the back of which the spectator goes out
to take a peep at the stars and is borne round in the revolution.
There is no distinction between the equator and the ecliptic. But
Plato is no doubt led to imagine that the planets have an opposite
motion to that of the fixed stars, in order to account for their
appearances in the heavens. In the description of the meadow, and
the retribution of the good and evil after death, there are traces
of Homer.

The description of the axis as a spindle, and of the heavenly
bodies as forming a whole, partly arises out of the attempt to
connect the motions of the heavenly bodies with the mythological
image of the web, or weaving of the Fates. The giving of the lots,
the weaving of them, and the making of them irreversible, which are
ascribed to the three Fates—Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos, are
obviously derived from their names. The element of chance in human
life is indicated by the order of the lots. But chance, however
adverse, may be overcome by the wisdom of man, if he knows how to
choose aright; there is a worse enemy to man than chance; this
enemy is himself. He who was moderately fortunate in the number of
the lot—even the very last comer—might have a good life
if he chose with wisdom. And as Plato does not like to make an
assertion which is unproven, he more than confirms this statement a
few sentences afterwards by the example of Odysseus, who chose
last. But the virtue which is founded on habit is not sufficient to
enable a man to choose; he must add to virtue knowledge, if he is
to act rightly when placed in new circumstances. The routine of
good actions and good habits is an inferior sort of goodness; and,
as Coleridge says, ‘Common sense is intolerable which is not
based on metaphysics,’ so Plato would have said, ‘Habit
is worthless which is not based upon philosophy.’

The freedom of the will to refuse the evil and to choose the
good is distinctly asserted. ‘Virtue is free, and as a man
honours or dishonours her he will have more or less of her.’
The life of man is ‘rounded’ by necessity; there are
circumstances prior to birth which affect him (Pol.). But within
the walls of necessity there is an open space in which he is his
own master, and can study for himself the effects which the
variously compounded gifts of nature or fortune have upon the soul,
and act accordingly. All men cannot have the first choice in
everything. But the lot of all men is good enough, if they choose
wisely and will live diligently.

The verisimilitude which is given to the pilgrimage of a
thousand years, by the intimation that Ardiaeus had lived a
thousand years before; the coincidence of Er coming to life on the
twelfth day after he was supposed to have been dead with the seven
days which the pilgrims passed in the meadow, and the four days
during which they journeyed to the column of light; the precision
with which the soul is mentioned who chose the twentieth lot; the
passing remarks that there was no definite character among the
souls, and that the souls which had chosen ill blamed any one
rather than themselves; or that some of the souls drank more than
was necessary of the waters of Forgetfulness, while Er himself was
hindered from drinking; the desire of Odysseus to rest at last,
unlike the conception of him in Dante and Tennyson; the feigned
ignorance of how Er returned to the body, when the other souls went
shooting like stars to their birth,—add greatly to the
probability of the narrative. They are such touches of nature as
the art of Defoe might have introduced when he wished to win
credibility for marvels and apparitions.

There still remain to be considered some points which have been
intentionally reserved to the end: (1) the Janus-like character of
the Republic, which presents two faces—one an Hellenic state,
the other a kingdom of philosophers. Connected with the latter of
the two aspects are (2) the paradoxes of the Republic, as they have
been termed by Morgenstern: (a) the community of property ; (b) of
families; (c) the rule of philosophers; (d) the analogy of the
individual and the State, which, like some other analogies in the
Republic, is carried too far. We may then proceed to consider (3)
the subject of education as conceived by Plato, bringing together
in a general view the education of youth and the education of
after-life; (4) we may note further some essential differences
between ancient and modern politics which are suggested by the
Republic; (5) we may compare the Politicus and the Laws; (6) we may
observe the influence exercised by Plato on his imitators; and (7)
take occasion to consider the nature and value of political, and
(8) of religious ideals.

1. Plato expressly says that he is intending to found an
Hellenic State (Book V). Many of his regulations are
characteristically Spartan; such as the prohibition of gold and
silver, the common meals of the men, the military training of the
youth, the gymnastic exercises of the women. The life of Sparta was
the life of a camp (Laws), enforced even more rigidly in time of
peace than in war; the citizens of Sparta, like Plato’s, were
forbidden to trade—they were to be soldiers and not
shopkeepers. Nowhere else in Greece was the individual so
completely subjected to the State; the time when he was to marry,
the education of his children, the clothes which he was to wear,
the food which he was to eat, were all prescribed by law. Some of
the best enactments in the Republic, such as the reverence to be
paid to parents and elders, and some of the worst, such as the
exposure of deformed children, are borrowed from the practice of
Sparta. The encouragement of friendships between men and youths, or
of men with one another, as affording incentives to bravery, is
also Spartan; in Sparta too a nearer approach was made than in any
other Greek State to equality of the sexes, and to community of
property; and while there was probably less of licentiousness in
the sense of immorality, the tie of marriage was regarded more
lightly than in the rest of Greece. The ‘suprema lex’
was the preservation of the family, and the interest of the State.
The coarse strength of a military government was not favourable to
purity and refinement; and the excessive strictness of some
regulations seems to have produced a reaction. Of all Hellenes the
Spartans were most accessible to bribery; several of the greatest
of them might be described in the words of Plato as having a
‘fierce secret longing after gold and silver.’ Though
not in the strict sense communists, the principle of communism was
maintained among them in their division of lands, in their common
meals, in their slaves, and in the free use of one another’s
goods. Marriage was a public institution: and the women were
educated by the State, and sang and danced in public with the
men.

Many traditions were preserved at Sparta of the severity with
which the magistrates had maintained the primitive rule of music
and poetry; as in the Republic of Plato, the new-fangled poet was
to be expelled. Hymns to the Gods, which are the only kind of music
admitted into the ideal State, were the only kind which was
permitted at Sparta. The Spartans, though an unpoetical race, were
nevertheless lovers of poetry; they had been stirred by the Elegiac
strains of Tyrtaeus, they had crowded around Hippias to hear his
recitals of Homer; but in this they resembled the citizens of the
timocratic rather than of the ideal State. The council of elder men
also corresponds to the Spartan gerousia; and the freedom with
which they are permitted to judge about matters of detail agrees
with what we are told of that institution. Once more, the military
rule of not spoiling the dead or offering arms at the temples; the
moderation in the pursuit of enemies; the importance attached to
the physical well-being of the citizens; the use of warfare for the
sake of defence rather than of aggression—are features
probably suggested by the spirit and practice of Sparta.

To the Spartan type the ideal State reverts in the first
decline; and the character of the individual timocrat is borrowed
from the Spartan citizen. The love of Lacedaemon not only affected
Plato and Xenophon, but was shared by many undistinguished
Athenians; there they seemed to find a principle which was wanting
in their own democracy. The (Greek) of the Spartans attracted them,
that is to say, not the goodness of their laws, but the spirit of
order and loyalty which prevailed. Fascinated by the idea, citizens
of Athens would imitate the Lacedaemonians in their dress and
manners; they were known to the contemporaries of Plato as
‘the persons who had their ears bruised,’ like the
Roundheads of the Commonwealth. The love of another church or
country when seen at a distance only, the longing for an imaginary
simplicity in civilized times, the fond desire of a past which
never has been, or of a future which never will be,—these are
aspirations of the human mind which are often felt among ourselves.
Such feelings meet with a response in the Republic of Plato.

But there are other features of the Platonic Republic, as, for
example, the literary and philosophical education, and the grace
and beauty of life, which are the reverse of Spartan. Plato wishes
to give his citizens a taste of Athenian freedom as well as of
Lacedaemonian discipline. His individual genius is purely Athenian,
although in theory he is a lover of Sparta; and he is something
more than either—he has also a true Hellenic feeling. He is
desirous of humanizing the wars of Hellenes against one another; he
acknowledges that the Delphian God is the grand hereditary
interpreter of all Hellas. The spirit of harmony and the Dorian
mode are to prevail, and the whole State is to have an external
beauty which is the reflex of the harmony within. But he has not
yet found out the truth which he afterwards enunciated in the
Laws—that he was a better legislator who made men to be of
one mind, than he who trained them for war. The citizens, as in
other Hellenic States, democratic as well as aristocratic, are
really an upper class; for, although no mention is made of slaves,
the lower classes are allowed to fade away into the distance, and
are represented in the individual by the passions. Plato has no
idea either of a social State in which all classes are harmonized,
or of a federation of Hellas or the world in which different
nations or States have a place. His city is equipped for war rather
than for peace, and this would seem to be justified by the ordinary
condition of Hellenic States. The myth of the earth-born men is an
embodiment of the orthodox tradition of Hellas, and the allusion to
the four ages of the world is also sanctioned by the authority of
Hesiod and the poets. Thus we see that the Republic is partly
founded on the ideal of the old Greek polis, partly on the actual
circumstances of Hellas in that age. Plato, like the old painters,
retains the traditional form, and like them he has also a vision of
a city in the clouds.

There is yet another thread which is interwoven in the texture
of the work; for the Republic is not only a Dorian State, but a
Pythagorean league. The ‘way of life’ which was
connected with the name of Pythagoras, like the Catholic monastic
orders, showed the power which the mind of an individual might
exercise over his contemporaries, and may have naturally suggested
to Plato the possibility of reviving such ‘mediaeval
institutions.’ The Pythagoreans, like Plato, enforced a rule
of life and a moral and intellectual training. The influence
ascribed to music, which to us seems exaggerated, is also a
Pythagorean feature; it is not to be regarded as representing the
real influence of music in the Greek world. More nearly than any
other government of Hellas, the Pythagorean league of three hundred
was an aristocracy of virtue. For once in the history of mankind
the philosophy of order or (Greek), expressing and consequently
enlisting on its side the combined endeavours of the better part of
the people, obtained the management of public affairs and held
possession of it for a considerable time (until about B.C. 500).
Probably only in States prepared by Dorian institutions would such
a league have been possible. The rulers, like Plato’s
(Greek), were required to submit to a severe training in order to
prepare the way for the education of the other members of the
community. Long after the dissolution of the Order, eminent
Pythagoreans, such as Archytas of Tarentum, retained their
political influence over the cities of Magna Graecia. There was
much here that was suggestive to the kindred spirit of Plato, who
had doubtless meditated deeply on the ‘way of life of
Pythagoras’ (Rep.) and his followers. Slight traces of
Pythagoreanism are to be found in the mystical number of the State,
in the number which expresses the interval between the king and the
tyrant, in the doctrine of transmigration, in the music of the
spheres, as well as in the great though secondary importance
ascribed to mathematics in education.

But as in his philosophy, so also in the form of his State, he
goes far beyond the old Pythagoreans. He attempts a task really
impossible, which is to unite the past of Greek history with the
future of philosophy, analogous to that other impossibility, which
has often been the dream of Christendom, the attempt to unite the
past history of Europe with the kingdom of Christ. Nothing actually
existing in the world at all resembles Plato’s ideal State;
nor does he himself imagine that such a State is possible. This he
repeats again and again; e.g. in the Republic, or in the Laws
where, casting a glance back on the Republic, he admits that the
perfect state of communism and philosophy was impossible in his own
age, though still to be retained as a pattern. The same doubt is
implied in the earnestness with which he argues in the Republic
that ideals are none the worse because they cannot be realized in
fact, and in the chorus of laughter, which like a breaking wave
will, as he anticipates, greet the mention of his proposals; though
like other writers of fiction, he uses all his art to give reality
to his inventions. When asked how the ideal polity can come into
being, he answers ironically, ‘When one son of a king becomes
a philosopher’; he designates the fiction of the earth-born
men as ‘a noble lie’; and when the structure is finally
complete, he fairly tells you that his Republic is a vision only,
which in some sense may have reality, but not in the vulgar one of
a reign of philosophers upon earth. It has been said that Plato
flies as well as walks, but this falls short of the truth; for he
flies and walks at the same time, and is in the air and on firm
ground in successive instants.

Niebuhr has asked a trifling question, which may be briefly
noticed in this place—Was Plato a good citizen? If by this is
meant, Was he loyal to Athenian institutions?—he can hardly
be said to be the friend of democracy: but neither is he the friend
of any other existing form of government; all of them he regarded
as ‘states of faction’ (Laws); none attained to his
ideal of a voluntary rule over voluntary subjects, which seems
indeed more nearly to describe democracy than any other; and the
worst of them is tyranny. The truth is, that the question has
hardly any meaning when applied to a great philosopher whose
writings are not meant for a particular age and country, but for
all time and all mankind. The decline of Athenian politics was
probably the motive which led Plato to frame an ideal State, and
the Republic may be regarded as reflecting the departing glory of
Hellas. As well might we complain of St. Augustine, whose great
work ‘The City of God’ originated in a similar motive,
for not being loyal to the Roman Empire. Even a nearer parallel
might be afforded by the first Christians, who cannot fairly be
charged with being bad citizens because, though ‘subject to
the higher powers,’ they were looking forward to a city which
is in heaven.

2. The idea of the perfect State is full of paradox when judged
of according to the ordinary notions of mankind. The paradoxes of
one age have been said to become the commonplaces of the next; but
the paradoxes of Plato are at least as paradoxical to us as they
were to his contemporaries. The modern world has either sneered at
them as absurd, or denounced them as unnatural and immoral; men
have been pleased to find in Aristotle’s criticisms of them
the anticipation of their own good sense. The wealthy and
cultivated classes have disliked and also dreaded them; they have
pointed with satisfaction to the failure of efforts to realize them
in practice. Yet since they are the thoughts of one of the greatest
of human intelligences, and of one who had done most to elevate
morality and religion, they seem to deserve a better treatment at
our hands. We may have to address the public, as Plato does poetry,
and assure them that we mean no harm to existing institutions.
There are serious errors which have a side of truth and which
therefore may fairly demand a careful consideration: there are
truths mixed with error of which we may indeed say, ‘The half
is better than the whole.’ Yet ‘the half’ may be
an important contribution to the study of human nature.

(a) The first paradox is the community of goods, which is
mentioned slightly at the end of the third Book, and seemingly, as
Aristotle observes, is confined to the guardians; at least no
mention is made of the other classes. But the omission is not of
any real significance, and probably arises out of the plan of the
work, which prevents the writer from entering into details.

Aristotle censures the community of property much in the spirit
of modern political economy, as tending to repress industry, and as
doing away with the spirit of benevolence. Modern writers almost
refuse to consider the subject, which is supposed to have been long
ago settled by the common opinion of mankind. But it must be
remembered that the sacredness of property is a notion far more
fixed in modern than in ancient times. The world has grown older,
and is therefore more conservative. Primitive society offered many
examples of land held in common, either by a tribe or by a
township, and such may probably have been the original form of
landed tenure. Ancient legislators had invented various modes of
dividing and preserving the divisions of land among the citizens;
according to Aristotle there were nations who held the land in
common and divided the produce, and there were others who divided
the land and stored the produce in common. The evils of debt and
the inequality of property were far greater in ancient than in
modern times, and the accidents to which property was subject from
war, or revolution, or taxation, or other legislative interference,
were also greater. All these circumstances gave property a less
fixed and sacred character. The early Christians are believed to
have held their property in common, and the principle is sanctioned
by the words of Christ himself, and has been maintained as a
counsel of perfection in almost all ages of the Church. Nor have
there been wanting instances of modern enthusiasts who have made a
religion of communism; in every age of religious excitement notions
like Wycliffe’s ‘inheritance of grace’ have
tended to prevail. A like spirit, but fiercer and more violent, has
appeared in politics. ‘The preparation of the Gospel of
peace’ soon becomes the red flag of Republicanism.

We can hardly judge what effect Plato’s views would have
upon his own contemporaries; they would perhaps have seemed to them
only an exaggeration of the Spartan commonwealth. Even modern
writers would acknowledge that the right of private property is
based on expediency, and may be interfered with in a variety of
ways for the public good. Any other mode of vesting property which
was found to be more advantageous, would in time acquire the same
basis of right; ‘the most useful,’ in Plato’s
words, ‘would be the most sacred.’ The lawyers and
ecclesiastics of former ages would have spoken of property as a
sacred institution. But they only meant by such language to oppose
the greatest amount of resistance to any invasion of the rights of
individuals and of the Church.

When we consider the question, without any fear of immediate
application to practice, in the spirit of Plato’s Republic,
are we quite sure that the received notions of property are the
best? Is the distribution of wealth which is customary in civilized
countries the most favourable that can be conceived for the
education and development of the mass of mankind? Can ‘the
spectator of all time and all existence’ be quite convinced
that one or two thousand years hence, great changes will not have
taken place in the rights of property, or even that the very notion
of property, beyond what is necessary for personal maintenance, may
not have disappeared? This was a distinction familiar to Aristotle,
though likely to be laughed at among ourselves. Such a change would
not be greater than some other changes through which the world has
passed in the transition from ancient to modern society, for
example, the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, or the abolition
of slavery in America and the West Indies; and not so great as the
difference which separates the Eastern village community from the
Western world. To accomplish such a revolution in the course of a
few centuries, would imply a rate of progress not more rapid than
has actually taken place during the last fifty or sixty years. The
kingdom of Japan underwent more change in five or six years than
Europe in five or six hundred. Many opinions and beliefs which have
been cherished among ourselves quite as strongly as the sacredness
of property have passed away; and the most untenable propositions
respecting the right of bequests or entail have been maintained
with as much fervour as the most moderate. Some one will be heard
to ask whether a state of society can be final in which the
interests of thousands are perilled on the life or character of a
single person. And many will indulge the hope that our present
condition may, after all, be only transitional, and may conduct to
a higher, in which property, besides ministering to the enjoyment
of the few, may also furnish the means of the highest culture to
all, and will be a greater benefit to the public generally, and
also more under the control of public authority. There may come a
time when the saying, ‘Have I not a right to do what I will
with my own?’ will appear to be a barbarous relic of
individualism;— when the possession of a part may be a
greater blessing to each and all than the possession of the whole
is now to any one.

Such reflections appear visionary to the eye of the practical
statesman, but they are within the range of possibility to the
philosopher. He can imagine that in some distant age or clime, and
through the influence of some individual, the notion of common
property may or might have sunk as deep into the heart of a race,
and have become as fixed to them, as private property is to
ourselves. He knows that this latter institution is not more than
four or five thousand years old: may not the end revert to the
beginning? In our own age even Utopias affect the spirit of
legislation, and an abstract idea may exercise a great influence on
practical politics.

The objections that would be generally urged against
Plato’s community of property, are the old ones of Aristotle,
that motives for exertion would be taken away, and that disputes
would arise when each was dependent upon all. Every man would
produce as little and consume as much as he liked. The experience
of civilized nations has hitherto been adverse to Socialism. The
effort is too great for human nature; men try to live in common,
but the personal feeling is always breaking in. On the other hand
it may be doubted whether our present notions of property are not
conventional, for they differ in different countries and in
different states of society. We boast of an individualism which is
not freedom, but rather an artificial result of the industrial
state of modern Europe. The individual is nominally free, but he is
also powerless in a world bound hand and foot in the chains of
economic necessity. Even if we cannot expect the mass of mankind to
become disinterested, at any rate we observe in them a power of
organization which fifty years ago would never have been suspected.
The same forces which have revolutionized the political system of
Europe, may effect a similar change in the social and industrial
relations of mankind. And if we suppose the influence of some good
as well as neutral motives working in the community, there will be
no absurdity in expecting that the mass of mankind having power,
and becoming enlightened about the higher possibilities of human
life, when they learn how much more is attainable for all than is
at present the possession of a favoured few, may pursue the common
interest with an intelligence and persistency which mankind have
hitherto never seen.

Now that the world has once been set in motion, and is no longer
held fast under the tyranny of custom and ignorance; now that
criticism has pierced the veil of tradition and the past no longer
overpowers the present,—the progress of civilization may be
expected to be far greater and swifter than heretofore. Even at our
present rate of speed the point at which we may arrive in two or
three generations is beyond the power of imagination to foresee.
There are forces in the world which work, not in an arithmetical,
but in a geometrical ratio of increase. Education, to use the
expression of Plato, moves like a wheel with an ever-multiplying
rapidity. Nor can we say how great may be its influence, when it
becomes universal,—when it has been inherited by many
generations,—when it is freed from the trammels of
superstition and rightly adapted to the wants and capacities of
different classes of men and women. Neither do we know how much
more the co-operation of minds or of hands may be capable of
accomplishing, whether in labour or in study. The resources of the
natural sciences are not half-developed as yet; the soil of the
earth, instead of growing more barren, may become many times more
fertile than hitherto; the uses of machinery far greater, and also
more minute than at present. New secrets of physiology may be
revealed, deeply affecting human nature in its innermost recesses.
The standard of health may be raised and the lives of men prolonged
by sanitary and medical knowledge. There may be peace, there may be
leisure, there may be innocent refreshments of many kinds. The
ever-increasing power of locomotion may join the extremes of earth.
There may be mysterious workings of the human mind, such as occur
only at great crises of history. The East and the West may meet
together, and all nations may contribute their thoughts and their
experience to the common stock of humanity. Many other elements
enter into a speculation of this kind. But it is better to make an
end of them. For such reflections appear to the majority
far-fetched, and to men of science, commonplace.

(b) Neither to the mind of Plato nor of Aristotle did the
doctrine of community of property present at all the same
difficulty, or appear to be the same violation of the common
Hellenic sentiment, as the community of wives and children. This
paradox he prefaces by another proposal, that the occupations of
men and women shall be the same, and that to this end they shall
have a common training and education. Male and female animals have
the same pursuits—why not also the two sexes of man?

But have we not here fallen into a contradiction? for we were
saying that different natures should have different pursuits. How
then can men and women have the same? And is not the proposal
inconsistent with our notion of the division of labour?—These
objections are no sooner raised than answered; for, according to
Plato, there is no organic difference between men and women, but
only the accidental one that men beget and women bear children.
Following the analogy of the other animals, he contends that all
natural gifts are scattered about indifferently among both sexes,
though there may be a superiority of degree on the part of the men.
The objection on the score of decency to their taking part in the
same gymnastic exercises, is met by Plato’s assertion that
the existing feeling is a matter of habit.

That Plato should have emancipated himself from the ideas of his
own country and from the example of the East, shows a wonderful
independence of mind. He is conscious that women are half the human
race, in some respects the more important half (Laws); and for the
sake both of men and women he desires to raise the woman to a
higher level of existence. He brings, not sentiment, but philosophy
to bear upon a question which both in ancient and modern times has
been chiefly regarded in the light of custom or feeling. The Greeks
had noble conceptions of womanhood in the goddesses Athene and
Artemis, and in the heroines Antigone and Andromache. But these
ideals had no counterpart in actual life. The Athenian woman was in
no way the equal of her husband; she was not the entertainer of his
guests or the mistress of his house, but only his housekeeper and
the mother of his children. She took no part in military or
political matters; nor is there any instance in the later ages of
Greece of a woman becoming famous in literature. ‘Hers is the
greatest glory who has the least renown among men,’ is the
historian’s conception of feminine excellence. A very
different ideal of womanhood is held up by Plato to the world; she
is to be the companion of the man, and to share with him in the
toils of war and in the cares of government. She is to be similarly
trained both in bodily and mental exercises. She is to lose as far
as possible the incidents of maternity and the characteristics of
the female sex.

The modern antagonist of the equality of the sexes would argue
that the differences between men and women are not confined to the
single point urged by Plato; that sensibility, gentleness, grace,
are the qualities of women, while energy, strength, higher
intelligence, are to be looked for in men. And the criticism is
just: the differences affect the whole nature, and are not, as
Plato supposes, confined to a single point. But neither can we say
how far these differences are due to education and the opinions of
mankind, or physically inherited from the habits and opinions of
former generations. Women have been always taught, not exactly that
they are slaves, but that they are in an inferior position, which
is also supposed to have compensating advantages; and to this
position they have conformed. It is also true that the physical
form may easily change in the course of generations through the
mode of life; and the weakness or delicacy, which was once a matter
of opinion, may become a physical fact. The characteristics of sex
vary greatly in different countries and ranks of society, and at
different ages in the same individuals. Plato may have been right
in denying that there was any ultimate difference in the sexes of
man other than that which exists in animals, because all other
differences may be conceived to disappear in other states of
society, or under different circumstances of life and training.

The first wave having been passed, we proceed to the
second—community of wives and children. ‘Is it
possible? Is it desirable?’ For as Glaucon intimates, and as
we far more strongly insist, ‘Great doubts may be entertained
about both these points.’ Any free discussion of the question
is impossible, and mankind are perhaps right in not allowing the
ultimate bases of social life to be examined. Few of us can safely
enquire into the things which nature hides, any more than we can
dissect our own bodies. Still, the manner in which Plato arrived at
his conclusions should be considered. For here, as Mr. Grote has
remarked, is a wonderful thing, that one of the wisest and best of
men should have entertained ideas of morality which are wholly at
variance with our own. And if we would do Plato justice, we must
examine carefully the character of his proposals. First, we may
observe that the relations of the sexes supposed by him are the
reverse of licentious: he seems rather to aim at an impossible
strictness. Secondly, he conceives the family to be the natural
enemy of the state; and he entertains the serious hope that an
universal brotherhood may take the place of private
interests—an aspiration which, although not justified by
experience, has possessed many noble minds. On the other hand,
there is no sentiment or imagination in the connections which men
and women are supposed by him to form; human beings return to the
level of the animals, neither exalting to heaven, nor yet abusing
the natural instincts. All that world of poetry and fancy which the
passion of love has called forth in modern literature and romance
would have been banished by Plato. The arrangements of marriage in
the Republic are directed to one object— the improvement of
the race. In successive generations a great development both of
bodily and mental qualities might be possible. The analogy of
animals tends to show that mankind can within certain limits
receive a change of nature. And as in animals we should commonly
choose the best for breeding, and destroy the others, so there must
be a selection made of the human beings whose lives are worthy to
be preserved.

We start back horrified from this Platonic ideal, in the belief,
first, that the higher feelings of humanity are far too strong to
be crushed out; secondly, that if the plan could be carried into
execution we should be poorly recompensed by improvements in the
breed for the loss of the best things in life. The greatest regard
for the weakest and meanest of human beings—the infant, the
criminal, the insane, the idiot, truly seems to us one of the
noblest results of Christianity. We have learned, though as yet
imperfectly, that the individual man has an endless value in the
sight of God, and that we honour Him when we honour the darkened
and disfigured image of Him (Laws). This is the lesson which Christ
taught in a parable when He said, ‘Their angels do always
behold the face of My Father which is in heaven.’ Such
lessons are only partially realized in any age; they were foreign
to the age of Plato, as they have very different degrees of
strength in different countries or ages of the Christian world. To
the Greek the family was a religious and customary institution
binding the members together by a tie inferior in strength to that
of friendship, and having a less solemn and sacred sound than that
of country. The relationship which existed on the lower level of
custom, Plato imagined that he was raising to the higher level of
nature and reason; while from the modern and Christian point of
view we regard him as sanctioning murder and destroying the first
principles of morality.

The great error in these and similar speculations is that the
difference between man and the animals is forgotten in them. The
human being is regarded with the eye of a dog— or
bird-fancier, or at best of a slave-owner; the higher or human
qualities are left out. The breeder of animals aims chiefly at size
or speed or strength; in a few cases at courage or temper; most
often the fitness of the animal for food is the great desideratum.
But mankind are not bred to be eaten, nor yet for their superiority
in fighting or in running or in drawing carts. Neither does the
improvement of the human race consist merely in the increase of the
bones and flesh, but in the growth and enlightenment of the mind.
Hence there must be ‘a marriage of true minds’ as well
as of bodies, of imagination and reason as well as of lusts and
instincts. Men and women without feeling or imagination are justly
called brutes; yet Plato takes away these qualities and puts
nothing in their place, not even the desire of a noble offspring,
since parents are not to know their own children. The most
important transaction of social life, he who is the idealist
philosopher converts into the most brutal. For the pair are to have
no relation to one another, except at the hymeneal festival; their
children are not theirs, but the state’s; nor is any tie of
affection to unite them. Yet here the analogy of the animals might
have saved Plato from a gigantic error, if he had ‘not lost
sight of his own illustration.’ For the ‘nobler sort of
birds and beasts’ nourish and protect their offspring and are
faithful to one another.

An eminent physiologist thinks it worth while ‘to try and
place life on a physical basis.’ But should not life rest on
the moral rather than upon the physical? The higher comes first,
then the lower, first the human and rational, afterwards the
animal. Yet they are not absolutely divided; and in times of
sickness or moments of self-indulgence they seem to be only
different aspects of a common human nature which includes them
both. Neither is the moral the limit of the physical, but the
expansion and enlargement of it,—the highest form which the
physical is capable of receiving. As Plato would say, the body does
not take care of the body, and still less of the mind, but the mind
takes care of both. In all human action not that which is common to
man and the animals is the characteristic element, but that which
distinguishes him from them. Even if we admit the physical basis,
and resolve all virtue into health of body ‘la facon que
notre sang circule,’ still on merely physical grounds we must
come back to ideas. Mind and reason and duty and conscience, under
these or other names, are always reappearing. There cannot be
health of body without health of mind; nor health of mind without
the sense of duty and the love of truth (Charm).

That the greatest of ancient philosophers should in his
regulations about marriage have fallen into the error of separating
body and mind, does indeed appear surprising. Yet the wonder is not
so much that Plato should have entertained ideas of morality which
to our own age are revolting, but that he should have contradicted
himself to an extent which is hardly credible, falling in an
instant from the heaven of idealism into the crudest animalism.
Rejoicing in the newly found gift of reflection, he appears to have
thought out a subject about which he had better have followed the
enlightened feeling of his own age. The general sentiment of Hellas
was opposed to his monstrous fancy. The old poets, and in later
time the tragedians, showed no want of respect for the family, on
which much of their religion was based. But the example of Sparta,
and perhaps in some degree the tendency to defy public opinion,
seems to have misled him. He will make one family out of all the
families of the state. He will select the finest specimens of men
and women and breed from these only.

Yet because the illusion is always returning (for the animal
part of human nature will from time to time assert itself in the
disguise of philosophy as well as of poetry), and also because any
departure from established morality, even where this is not
intended, is apt to be unsettling, it may be worth while to draw
out a little more at length the objections to the Platonic
marriage. In the first place, history shows that wherever polygamy
has been largely allowed the race has deteriorated. One man to one
woman is the law of God and nature. Nearly all the civilized
peoples of the world at some period before the age of written
records, have become monogamists; and the step when once taken has
never been retraced. The exceptions occurring among Brahmins or
Mahometans or the ancient Persians, are of that sort which may be
said to prove the rule. The connexions formed between superior and
inferior races hardly ever produce a noble offspring, because they
are licentious; and because the children in such cases usually
despise the mother and are neglected by the father who is ashamed
of them. Barbarous nations when they are introduced by Europeans to
vice die out; polygamist peoples either import and adopt children
from other countries, or dwindle in numbers, or both. Dynasties and
aristocracies which have disregarded the laws of nature have
decreased in numbers and degenerated in stature; ‘mariages de
convenance’ leave their enfeebling stamp on the offspring of
them (King Lear). The marriage of near relations, or the marrying
in and in of the same family tends constantly to weakness or idiocy
in the children, sometimes assuming the form as they grow older of
passionate licentiousness. The common prostitute rarely has any
offspring. By such unmistakable evidence is the authority of
morality asserted in the relations of the sexes: and so many more
elements enter into this ‘mystery’ than are dreamed of
by Plato and some other philosophers.

Recent enquirers have indeed arrived at the conclusion that
among primitive tribes there existed a community of wives as of
property, and that the captive taken by the spear was the only wife
or slave whom any man was permitted to call his own. The partial
existence of such customs among some of the lower races of man, and
the survival of peculiar ceremonies in the marriages of some
civilized nations, are thought to furnish a proof of similar
institutions having been once universal. There can be no question
that the study of anthropology has considerably changed our views
respecting the first appearance of man upon the earth. We know more
about the aborigines of the world than formerly, but our increasing
knowledge shows above all things how little we know. With all the
helps which written monuments afford, we do but faintly realize the
condition of man two thousand or three thousand years ago. Of what
his condition was when removed to a distance 200,000 or 300,000
years, when the majority of mankind were lower and nearer the
animals than any tribe now existing upon the earth, we cannot even
entertain conjecture. Plato (Laws) and Aristotle (Metaph.) may have
been more right than we imagine in supposing that some forms of
civilisation were discovered and lost several times over. If we
cannot argue that all barbarism is a degraded civilization, neither
can we set any limits to the depth of degradation to which the
human race may sink through war, disease, or isolation. And if we
are to draw inferences about the origin of marriage from the
practice of barbarous nations, we should also consider the remoter
analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals, especially the
carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring
which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory
of marriage. If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were
almost animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to
argue from what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to
the civilized man. The record of animal life on the globe is
fragmentary,—the connecting links are wanting and cannot be
supplied; the record of social life is still more fragmentary and
precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such
institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from
outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of China, Assyria,
and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly unknown to
us.

Such speculations are apt to be unsettling, because they seem to
show that an institution which was thought to be a revelation from
heaven, is only the growth of history and experience. We ask what
is the origin of marriage, and we are told that like the right of
property, after many wars and contests, it has gradually arisen out
of the selfishness of barbarians. We stand face to face with human
nature in its primitive nakedness. We are compelled to accept, not
the highest, but the lowest account of the origin of human society.
But on the other hand we may truly say that every step in human
progress has been in the same direction, and that in the course of
ages the idea of marriage and of the family has been more and more
defined and consecrated. The civilized East is immeasurably in
advance of any savage tribes; the Greeks and Romans have improved
upon the East; the Christian nations have been stricter in their
views of the marriage relation than any of the ancients. In this as
in so many other things, instead of looking back with regret to the
past, we should look forward with hope to the future. We must
consecrate that which we believe to be the most holy, and that
‘which is the most holy will be the most useful.’ There
is more reason for maintaining the sacredness of the marriage tie,
when we see the benefit of it, than when we only felt a vague
religious horror about the violation of it. But in all times of
transition, when established beliefs are being undermined, there is
a danger that in the passage from the old to the new we may
insensibly let go the moral principle, finding an excuse for
listening to the voice of passion in the uncertainty of knowledge,
or the fluctuations of opinion. And there are many persons in our
own day who, enlightened by the study of anthropology, and
fascinated by what is new and strange, some using the language of
fear, others of hope, are inclined to believe that a time will come
when through the self-assertion of women, or the rebellious spirit
of children, by the analysis of human relations, or by the force of
outward circumstances, the ties of family life may be broken or
greatly relaxed. They point to societies in America and elsewhere
which tend to show that the destruction of the family need not
necessarily involve the overthrow of all morality. Wherever we may
think of such speculations, we can hardly deny that they have been
more rife in this generation than in any other; and whither they
are tending, who can predict?

To the doubts and queries raised by these ‘social
reformers’ respecting the relation of the sexes and the moral
nature of man, there is a sufficient answer, if any is needed. The
difference about them and us is really one of fact. They are
speaking of man as they wish or fancy him to be, but we are
speaking of him as he is. They isolate the animal part of his
nature; we regard him as a creature having many sides, or aspects,
moving between good and evil, striving to rise above himself and to
become ‘a little lower than the angels.’ We also, to
use a Platonic formula, are not ignorant of the dissatisfactions
and incompatibilities of family life, of the meannesses of trade,
of the flatteries of one class of society by another, of the
impediments which the family throws in the way of lofty aims and
aspirations. But we are conscious that there are evils and dangers
in the background greater still, which are not appreciated, because
they are either concealed or suppressed. What a condition of man
would that be, in which human passions were controlled by no
authority, divine or human, in which there was no shame or decency,
no higher affection overcoming or sanctifying the natural
instincts, but simply a rule of health! Is it for this that we are
asked to throw away the civilization which is the growth of
ages?

For strength and health are not the only qualities to be
desired; there are the more important considerations of mind and
character and soul. We know how human nature may be degraded; we do
not know how by artificial means any improvement in the breed can
be effected. The problem is a complex one, for if we go back only
four steps (and these at least enter into the composition of a
child), there are commonly thirty progenitors to be taken into
account. Many curious facts, rarely admitting of proof, are told us
respecting the inheritance of disease or character from a remote
ancestor. We can trace the physical resemblances of parents and
children in the same family—

‘Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat’;

but scarcely less often the differences which distinguish
children both from their parents and from one another. We are told
of similar mental peculiarities running in families, and again of a
tendency, as in the animals, to revert to a common or original
stock. But we have a difficulty in distinguishing what is a true
inheritance of genius or other qualities, and what is mere
imitation or the result of similar circumstances. Great men and
great women have rarely had great fathers and mothers. Nothing that
we know of in the circumstances of their birth or lineage will
explain their appearance. Of the English poets of the last and two
preceding centuries scarcely a descendant remains,—none have
ever been distinguished. So deeply has nature hidden her secret,
and so ridiculous is the fancy which has been entertained by some
that we might in time by suitable marriage arrangements or, as
Plato would have said, ‘by an ingenious system of
lots,’ produce a Shakespeare or a Milton. Even supposing that
we could breed men having the tenacity of bulldogs, or, like the
Spartans, ‘lacking the wit to run away in battle,’
would the world be any the better? Many of the noblest specimens of
the human race have been among the weakest physically. Tyrtaeus or
Aesop, or our own Newton, would have been exposed at Sparta; and
some of the fairest and strongest men and women have been among the
wickedest and worst. Not by the Platonic device of uniting the
strong and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of sentiment
and morality, nor yet by his other device of combining dissimilar
natures (Statesman), have mankind gradually passed from the
brutality and licentiousness of primitive marriage to marriage
Christian and civilized.

Few persons would deny that we bring into the world an
inheritance of mental and physical qualities derived first from our
parents, or through them from some remoter ancestor, secondly from
our race, thirdly from the general condition of mankind into which
we are born. Nothing is commoner than the remark, that ‘So
and so is like his father or his uncle’; and an aged person
may not unfrequently note a resemblance in a youth to a
long-forgotten ancestor, observing that ‘Nature sometimes
skips a generation.’ It may be true also, that if we knew
more about our ancestors, these similarities would be even more
striking to us. Admitting the facts which are thus described in a
popular way, we may however remark that there is no method of
difference by which they can be defined or estimated, and that they
constitute only a small part of each individual. The doctrine of
heredity may seem to take out of our hands the conduct of our own
lives, but it is the idea, not the fact, which is really terrible
to us. For what we have received from our ancestors is only a
fraction of what we are, or may become. The knowledge that
drunkenness or insanity has been prevalent in a family may be the
best safeguard against their recurrence in a future generation. The
parent will be most awake to the vices or diseases in his child of
which he is most sensible within himself. The whole of life may be
directed to their prevention or cure. The traces of consumption may
become fainter, or be wholly effaced: the inherent tendency to vice
or crime may be eradicated. And so heredity, from being a curse,
may become a blessing. We acknowledge that in the matter of our
birth, as in our nature generally, there are previous circumstances
which affect us. But upon this platform of circumstances or within
this wall of necessity, we have still the power of creating a life
for ourselves by the informing energy of the human will.

There is another aspect of the marriage question to which Plato
is a stranger. All the children born in his state are foundlings.
It never occurred to him that the greater part of them, according
to universal experience, would have perished. For children can only
be brought up in families. There is a subtle sympathy between the
mother and the child which cannot be supplied by other mothers, or
by ‘strong nurses one or more’ (Laws). If Plato’s
‘pen’ was as fatal as the Creches of Paris, or the
foundling hospital of Dublin, more than nine-tenths of his children
would have perished. There would have been no need to expose or put
out of the way the weaklier children, for they would have died of
themselves. So emphatically does nature protest against the
destruction of the family.

What Plato had heard or seen of Sparta was applied by him in a
mistaken way to his ideal commonwealth. He probably observed that
both the Spartan men and women were superior in form and strength
to the other Greeks; and this superiority he was disposed to
attribute to the laws and customs relating to marriage. He did not
consider that the desire of a noble offspring was a passion among
the Spartans, or that their physical superiority was to be
attributed chiefly, not to their marriage customs, but to their
temperance and training. He did not reflect that Sparta was great,
not in consequence of the relaxation of morality, but in spite of
it, by virtue of a political principle stronger far than existed in
any other Grecian state. Least of all did he observe that Sparta
did not really produce the finest specimens of the Greek race. The
genius, the political inspiration of Athens, the love of
liberty—all that has made Greece famous with posterity, were
wanting among the Spartans. They had no Themistocles, or Pericles,
or Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Socrates, or Plato. The individual
was not allowed to appear above the state; the laws were fixed, and
he had no business to alter or reform them. Yet whence has the
progress of cities and nations arisen, if not from remarkable
individuals, coming into the world we know not how, and from causes
over which we have no control? Something too much may have been
said in modern times of the value of individuality. But we can
hardly condemn too strongly a system which, instead of fostering
the scattered seeds or sparks of genius and character, tends to
smother and extinguish them.

Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither
Christianity, nor any other form of religion and society, has
hitherto been able to cope with this most difficult of social
problems, and that the side from which Plato regarded it is that
from which we turn away. Population is the most untameable force in
the political and social world. Do we not find, especially in large
cities, that the greatest hindrance to the amelioration of the poor
is their improvidence in marriage?—a small fault truly, if
not involving endless consequences. There are whole countries too,
such as India, or, nearer home, Ireland, in which a right solution
of the marriage question seems to lie at the foundation of the
happiness of the community. There are too many people on a given
space, or they marry too early and bring into the world a sickly
and half-developed offspring; or owing to the very conditions of
their existence, they become emaciated and hand on a similar life
to their descendants. But who can oppose the voice of prudence to
the ‘mightiest passions of mankind’ (Laws), especially
when they have been licensed by custom and religion? In addition to
the influences of education, we seem to require some new principles
of right and wrong in these matters, some force of opinion, which
may indeed be already heard whispering in private, but has never
affected the moral sentiments of mankind in general. We unavoidably
lose sight of the principle of utility, just in that action of our
lives in which we have the most need of it. The influences which we
can bring to bear upon this question are chiefly indirect. In a
generation or two, education, emigration, improvements in
agriculture and manufactures, may have provided the solution. The
state physician hardly likes to probe the wound: it is beyond his
art; a matter which he cannot safely let alone, but which he dare
not touch:

‘We do but skin and film the ulcerous place.’

When again in private life we see a whole family one by one
dropping into the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady, and
the parents perhaps surviving them, do our minds ever go back
silently to that day twenty-five or thirty years before on which
under the fairest auspices, amid the rejoicings of friends and
acquaintances, a bride and bridegroom joined hands with one
another? In making such a reflection we are not opposing physical
considerations to moral, but moral to physical; we are seeking to
make the voice of reason heard, which drives us back from the
extravagance of sentimentalism on common sense. The late Dr. Combe
is said by his biographer to have resisted the temptation to
marriage, because he knew that he was subject to hereditary
consumption. One who deserved to be called a man of genius, a
friend of my youth, was in the habit of wearing a black ribbon on
his wrist, in order to remind him that, being liable to outbreaks
of insanity, he must not give way to the natural impulses of
affection: he died unmarried in a lunatic asylum. These two little
facts suggest the reflection that a very few persons have done from
a sense of duty what the rest of mankind ought to have done under
like circumstances, if they had allowed themselves to think of all
the misery which they were about to bring into the world. If we
could prevent such marriages without any violation of feeling or
propriety, we clearly ought; and the prohibition in the course of
time would be protected by a ‘horror naturalis’ similar
to that which, in all civilized ages and countries, has prevented
the marriage of near relations by blood. Mankind would have been
the happier, if some things which are now allowed had from the
beginning been denied to them; if the sanction of religion could
have prohibited practices inimical to health; if sanitary
principles could in early ages have been invested with a
superstitious awe. But, living as we do far on in the world’s
history, we are no longer able to stamp at once with the impress of
religion a new prohibition. A free agent cannot have his fancies
regulated by law; and the execution of the law would be rendered
impossible, owing to the uncertainty of the cases in which marriage
was to be forbidden. Who can weigh virtue, or even fortune against
health, or moral and mental qualities against bodily? Who can
measure probabilities against certainties? There has been some good
as well as evil in the discipline of suffering; and there are
diseases, such as consumption, which have exercised a refining and
softening influence on the character. Youth is too inexperienced to
balance such nice considerations; parents do not often think of
them, or think of them too late. They are at a distance and may
probably be averted; change of place, a new state of life, the
interests of a home may be the cure of them. So persons vainly
reason when their minds are already made up and their fortunes
irrevocably linked together. Nor is there any ground for supposing
that marriages are to any great extent influenced by reflections of
this sort, which seem unable to make any head against the
irresistible impulse of individual attachment.

Lastly, no one can have observed the first rising flood of the
passions in youth, the difficulty of regulating them, and the
effects on the whole mind and nature which follow from them, the
stimulus which is given to them by the imagination, without feeling
that there is something unsatisfactory in our method of treating
them. That the most important influence on human life should be
wholly left to chance or shrouded in mystery, and instead of being
disciplined or understood, should be required to conform only to an
external standard of propriety—cannot be regarded by the
philosopher as a safe or satisfactory condition of human things.
And still those who have the charge of youth may find a way by
watchfulness, by affection, by the manliness and innocence of their
own lives, by occasional hints, by general admonitions which every
one can apply for himself, to mitigate this terrible evil which
eats out the heart of individuals and corrupts the moral sentiments
of nations. In no duty towards others is there more need of
reticence and self-restraint. So great is the danger lest he who
would be the counsellor of another should reveal the secret
prematurely, lest he should get another too much into his power; or
fix the passing impression of evil by demanding the confession of
it.

Nor is Plato wrong in asserting that family attachments may
interfere with higher aims. If there have been some who ‘to
party gave up what was meant for mankind,’ there have
certainly been others who to family gave up what was meant for
mankind or for their country. The cares of children, the necessity
of procuring money for their support, the flatteries of the rich by
the poor, the exclusiveness of caste, the pride of birth or wealth,
the tendency of family life to divert men from the pursuit of the
ideal or the heroic, are as lowering in our own age as in that of
Plato. And if we prefer to look at the gentle influences of home,
the development of the affections, the amenities of society, the
devotion of one member of a family for the good of the others,
which form one side of the picture, we must not quarrel with him,
or perhaps ought rather to be grateful to him, for having presented
to us the reverse. Without attempting to defend Plato on grounds of
morality, we may allow that there is an aspect of the world which
has not unnaturally led him into error.

We hardly appreciate the power which the idea of the State, like
all other abstract ideas, exercised over the mind of Plato. To us
the State seems to be built up out of the family, or sometimes to
be the framework in which family and social life is contained. But
to Plato in his present mood of mind the family is only a
disturbing influence which, instead of filling up, tends to
disarrange the higher unity of the State. No organization is needed
except a political, which, regarded from another point of view, is
a military one. The State is all-sufficing for the wants of man,
and, like the idea of the Church in later ages, absorbs all other
desires and affections. In time of war the thousand citizens are to
stand like a rampart impregnable against the world or the Persian
host; in time of peace the preparation for war and their duties to
the State, which are also their duties to one another, take up
their whole life and time. The only other interest which is allowed
to them besides that of war, is the interest of philosophy. When
they are too old to be soldiers they are to retire from active life
and to have a second novitiate of study and contemplation. There is
an element of monasticism even in Plato’s communism. If he
could have done without children, he might have converted his
Republic into a religious order. Neither in the Laws, when the
daylight of common sense breaks in upon him, does he retract his
error. In the state of which he would be the founder, there is no
marrying or giving in marriage: but because of the infirmity of
mankind, he condescends to allow the law of nature to prevail.

(c) But Plato has an equal, or, in his own estimation, even
greater paradox in reserve, which is summed up in the famous text,
‘Until kings are philosophers or philosophers are kings,
cities will never cease from ill.’ And by philosophers he
explains himself to mean those who are capable of apprehending
ideas, especially the idea of good. To the attainment of this
higher knowledge the second education is directed. Through a
process of training which has already made them good citizens they
are now to be made good legislators. We find with some surprise
(not unlike the feeling which Aristotle in a well-known passage
describes the hearers of Plato’s lectures as experiencing,
when they went to a discourse on the idea of good, expecting to be
instructed in moral truths, and received instead of them
arithmetical and mathematical formulae) that Plato does not propose
for his future legislators any study of finance or law or military
tactics, but only of abstract mathematics, as a preparation for the
still more abstract conception of good. We ask, with Aristotle,
What is the use of a man knowing the idea of good, if he does not
know what is good for this individual, this state, this condition
of society? We cannot understand how Plato’s legislators or
guardians are to be fitted for their work of statesmen by the study
of the five mathematical sciences. We vainly search in
Plato’s own writings for any explanation of this seeming
absurdity.

The discovery of a great metaphysical conception seems to ravish
the mind with a prophetic consciousness which takes away the power
of estimating its value. No metaphysical enquirer has ever fairly
criticised his own speculations; in his own judgment they have been
above criticism; nor has he understood that what to him seemed to
be absolute truth may reappear in the next generation as a form of
logic or an instrument of thought. And posterity have also
sometimes equally misapprehended the real value of his
speculations. They appear to them to have contributed nothing to
the stock of human knowledge. The IDEA of good is apt to be
regarded by the modern thinker as an unmeaning abstraction; but he
forgets that this abstraction is waiting ready for use, and will
hereafter be filled up by the divisions of knowledge. When mankind
do not as yet know that the world is subject to law, the
introduction of the mere conception of law or design or final
cause, and the far-off anticipation of the harmony of knowledge,
are great steps onward. Even the crude generalization of the unity
of all things leads men to view the world with different eyes, and
may easily affect their conception of human life and of politics,
and also their own conduct and character (Tim). We can imagine how
a great mind like that of Pericles might derive elevation from his
intercourse with Anaxagoras (Phaedr.). To be struggling towards a
higher but unattainable conception is a more favourable
intellectual condition than to rest satisfied in a narrow portion
of ascertained fact. And the earlier, which have sometimes been the
greater ideas of science, are often lost sight of at a later
period. How rarely can we say of any modern enquirer in the
magnificent language of Plato, that ‘He is the spectator of
all time and of all existence!’

Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of
these vast metaphysical conceptions to practical and political
life. In the first enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to see them
everywhere, and to apply them in the most remote sphere. They do
not understand that the experience of ages is required to enable
them to fill up ‘the intermediate axioms.’ Plato
himself seems to have imagined that the truths of psychology, like
those of astronomy and harmonics, would be arrived at by a process
of deduction, and that the method which he has pursued in the
Fourth Book, of inferring them from experience and the use of
language, was imperfect and only provisional. But when, after
having arrived at the idea of good, which is the end of the science
of dialectic, he is asked, What is the nature, and what are the
divisions of the science? He refuses to answer, as if intending by
the refusal to intimate that the state of knowledge which then
existed was not such as would allow the philosopher to enter into
his final rest. The previous sciences must first be studied, and
will, we may add, continue to be studied tell the end of time,
although in a sense different from any which Plato could have
conceived. But we may observe, that while he is aware of the
vacancy of his own ideal, he is full of enthusiasm in the
contemplation of it. Looking into the orb of light, he sees
nothing, but he is warmed and elevated. The Hebrew prophet believed
that faith in God would enable him to govern the world; the Greek
philosopher imagined that contemplation of the good would make a
legislator. There is as much to be filled up in the one case as in
the other, and the one mode of conception is to the Israelite what
the other is to the Greek. Both find a repose in a divine
perfection, which, whether in a more personal or impersonal form,
exists without them and independently of them, as well as within
them.

There is no mention of the idea of good in the Timaeus, nor of
the divine Creator of the world in the Republic; and we are
naturally led to ask in what relation they stand to one another. Is
God above or below the idea of good? Or is the Idea of Good another
mode of conceiving God? The latter appears to be the truer answer.
To the Greek philosopher the perfection and unity of God was a far
higher conception than his personality, which he hardly found a
word to express, and which to him would have seemed to be borrowed
from mythology. To the Christian, on the other hand, or to the
modern thinker in general, it is difficult, if not impossible, to
attach reality to what he terms mere abstraction; while to Plato
this very abstraction is the truest and most real of all things.
Hence, from a difference in forms of thought, Plato appears to be
resting on a creation of his own mind only. But if we may be
allowed to paraphrase the idea of good by the words
‘intelligent principle of law and order in the universe,
embracing equally man and nature,’ we begin to find a
meeting-point between him and ourselves.

The question whether the ruler or statesman should be a
philosopher is one that has not lost interest in modern times. In
most countries of Europe and Asia there has been some one in the
course of ages who has truly united the power of command with the
power of thought and reflection, as there have been also many false
combinations of these qualities. Some kind of speculative power is
necessary both in practical and political life; like the
rhetorician in the Phaedrus, men require to have a conception of
the varieties of human character, and to be raised on great
occasions above the commonplaces of ordinary life. Yet the idea of
the philosopher-statesman has never been popular with the mass of
mankind; partly because he cannot take the world into his
confidence or make them understand the motives from which he acts;
and also because they are jealous of a power which they do not
understand. The revolution which human nature desires to effect
step by step in many ages is likely to be precipitated by him in a
single year or life. They are afraid that in the pursuit of his
greater aims he may disregard the common feelings of humanity, he
is too apt to be looking into the distant future or back into the
remote past, and unable to see actions or events which, to use an
expression of Plato’s ‘are tumbling out at his
feet.’ Besides, as Plato would say, there are other
corruptions of these philosophical statesmen. Either ‘the
native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast
of thought,’ and at the moment when action above all things
is required he is undecided, or general principles are enunciated
by him in order to cover some change of policy; or his ignorance of
the world has made him more easily fall a prey to the arts of
others; or in some cases he has been converted into a courtier, who
enjoys the luxury of holding liberal opinions, but was never known
to perform a liberal action. No wonder that mankind have been in
the habit of calling statesmen of this class pedants, sophisters,
doctrinaires, visionaries. For, as we may be allowed to say, a
little parodying the words of Plato, ‘they have seen bad
imitations of the philosopher-statesman.’ But a man in whom
the power of thought and action are perfectly balanced, equal to
the present, reaching forward to the future, ‘such a
one,’ ruling in a constitutional state, ‘they have
never seen.’

But as the philosopher is apt to fail in the routine of
political life, so the ordinary statesman is also apt to fail in
extraordinary crises. When the face of the world is beginning to
alter, and thunder is heard in the distance, he is still guided by
his old maxims, and is the slave of his inveterate party
prejudices; he cannot perceive the signs of the times; instead of
looking forward he looks back; he learns nothing and forgets
nothing; with ‘wise saws and modern instances’ he would
stem the rising tide of revolution. He lives more and more within
the circle of his own party, as the world without him becomes
stronger. This seems to be the reason why the old order of things
makes so poor a figure when confronted with the new, why churches
can never reform, why most political changes are made blindly and
convulsively. The great crises in the history of nations have often
been met by an ecclesiastical positiveness, and a more obstinate
reassertion of principles which have lost their hold upon a nation.
The fixed ideas of a reactionary statesman may be compared to
madness; they grow upon him, and he becomes possessed by them; no
judgement of others is ever admitted by him to be weighed in the
balance against his own.

(d) Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to
have been a confusion of ideas, assimilates the state to the
individual, and fails to distinguish Ethics from Politics. He
thinks that to be most of a state which is most like one man, and
in which the citizens have the greatest uniformity of character. He
does not see that the analogy is partly fallacious, and that the
will or character of a state or nation is really the balance or
rather the surplus of individual wills, which are limited by the
condition of having to act in common. The movement of a body of men
can never have the pliancy or facility of a single man; the freedom
of the individual, which is always limited, becomes still more
straitened when transferred to a nation. The powers of action and
feeling are necessarily weaker and more balanced when they are
diffused through a community; whence arises the often discussed
question, ‘Can a nation, like an individual, have a
conscience?’ We hesitate to say that the characters of
nations are nothing more than the sum of the characters of the
individuals who compose them; because there may be tendencies in
individuals which react upon one another. A whole nation may be
wiser than any one man in it; or may be animated by some common
opinion or feeling which could not equally have affected the mind
of a single person, or may have been inspired by a leader of genius
to perform acts more than human. Plato does not appear to have
analysed the complications which arise out of the collective action
of mankind. Neither is he capable of seeing that analogies, though
specious as arguments, may often have no foundation in fact, or of
distinguishing between what is intelligible or vividly present to
the mind, and what is true. In this respect he is far below
Aristotle, who is comparatively seldom imposed upon by false
analogies. He cannot disentangle the arts from the virtues—at
least he is always arguing from one to the other. His notion of
music is transferred from harmony of sounds to harmony of life: in
this he is assisted by the ambiguities of language as well as by
the prevalence of Pythagorean notions. And having once assimilated
the state to the individual, he imagines that he will find the
succession of states paralleled in the lives of individuals.

Still, through this fallacious medium, a real enlargement of
ideas is attained. When the virtues as yet presented no distinct
conception to the mind, a great advance was made by the comparison
of them with the arts; for virtue is partly art, and has an outward
form as well as an inward principle. The harmony of music affords a
lively image of the harmonies of the world and of human life, and
may be regarded as a splendid illustration which was naturally
mistaken for a real analogy. In the same way the identification of
ethics with politics has a tendency to give definiteness to ethics,
and also to elevate and ennoble men’s notions of the aims of
government and of the duties of citizens; for ethics from one point
of view may be conceived as an idealized law and politics; and
politics, as ethics reduced to the conditions of human society.
There have been evils which have arisen out of the attempt to
identify them, and this has led to the separation or antagonism of
them, which has been introduced by modern political writers. But we
may likewise feel that something has been lost in their separation,
and that the ancient philosophers who estimated the moral and
intellectual wellbeing of mankind first, and the wealth of nations
and individuals second, may have a salutary influence on the
speculations of modern times. Many political maxims originate in a
reaction against an opposite error; and when the errors against
which they were directed have passed away, they in turn become
errors.

3. Plato’s views of education are in several respects
remarkable; like the rest of the Republic they are partly Greek and
partly ideal, beginning with the ordinary curriculum of the Greek
youth, and extending to after-life. Plato is the first writer who
distinctly says that education is to comprehend the whole of life,
and to be a preparation for another in which education begins
again. This is the continuous thread which runs through the
Republic, and which more than any other of his ideas admits of an
application to modern life.

He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught;
and he is disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the
virtues are one and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the
sensible world into his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the
Republic the involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in
the Timaeus, Sophist, and Laws (Protag., Apol., Gorg.). Nor do the
so-called Platonic ideas recovered from a former state of existence
affect his theory of mental improvement. Still we observe in him
the remains of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must
be elicited from within, and is to be sought for in ideas, not in
particulars of sense. Education, as he says, will implant a
principle of intelligence which is better than ten thousand eyes.
The paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred notion that
all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely renounced; the first is
seen in the supremacy given to justice over the rest; the second in
the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual, and
to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good.
The world of sense is still depreciated and identified with
opinion, though admitted to be a shadow of the true. In the
Republic he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice
arises chiefly from ignorance and may be cured by education; the
multitude are hardly to be deemed responsible for what they do. A
faint allusion to the doctrine of reminiscence occurs in the Tenth
Book; but Plato’s views of education have no more real
connection with a previous state of existence than our own; he only
proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there already.
Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel,
but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light.

He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into
true and false, and then goes on to gymnastics; of infancy in the
Republic he takes no notice, though in the Laws he gives sage
counsels about the nursing of children and the management of the
mothers, and would have an education which is even prior to birth.
But in the Republic he begins with the age at which the child is
capable of receiving ideas, and boldly asserts, in language which
sounds paradoxical to modern ears, that he must be taught the false
before he can learn the true. The modern and ancient philosophical
world are not agreed about truth and falsehood; the one identifies
truth almost exclusively with fact, the other with ideas. This is
the difference between ourselves and Plato, which is, however,
partly a difference of words. For we too should admit that a child
must receive many lessons which he imperfectly understands; he must
be taught some things in a figure only, some too which he can
hardly be expected to believe when he grows older; but we should
limit the use of fiction by the necessity of the case. Plato would
draw the line differently; according to him the aim of early
education is not truth as a matter of fact, but truth as a matter
of principle; the child is to be taught first simple religious
truths, and then simple moral truths, and insensibly to learn the
lesson of good manners and good taste. He would make an entire
reformation of the old mythology; like Xenophanes and Heracleitus
he is sensible of the deep chasm which separates his own age from
Homer and Hesiod, whom he quotes and invests with an imaginary
authority, but only for his own purposes. The lusts and treacheries
of the gods are to be banished; the terrors of the world below are
to be dispelled; the misbehaviour of the Homeric heroes is not to
be a model for youth. But there is another strain heard in Homer
which may teach our youth endurance; and something may be learnt in
medicine from the simple practice of the Homeric age. The
principles on which religion is to be based are two only: first,
that God is true; secondly, that he is good. Modern and Christian
writers have often fallen short of these; they can hardly be said
to have gone beyond them.

The young are to be brought up in happy surroundings, out of the
way of sights or sounds which may hurt the character or vitiate the
taste. They are to live in an atmosphere of health; the breeze is
always to be wafting to them the impressions of truth and goodness.
Could such an education be realized, or if our modern religious
education could be bound up with truth and virtue and good manners
and good taste, that would be the best hope of human improvement.
Plato, like ourselves, is looking forward to changes in the moral
and religious world, and is preparing for them. He recognizes the
danger of unsettling young men’s minds by sudden changes of
laws and principles, by destroying the sacredness of one set of
ideas when there is nothing else to take their place. He is afraid
too of the influence of the drama, on the ground that it encourages
false sentiment, and therefore he would not have his children taken
to the theatre; he thinks that the effect on the spectators is bad,
and on the actors still worse. His idea of education is that of
harmonious growth, in which are insensibly learnt the lessons of
temperance and endurance, and the body and mind develope in equal
proportions. The first principle which runs through all art and
nature is simplicity; this also is to be the rule of human
life.

The second stage of education is gymnastic, which answers to the
period of muscular growth and development. The simplicity which is
enforced in music is extended to gymnastic; Plato is aware that the
training of the body may be inconsistent with the training of the
mind, and that bodily exercise may be easily overdone. Excessive
training of the body is apt to give men a headache or to render
them sleepy at a lecture on philosophy, and this they attribute not
to the true cause, but to the nature of the subject. Two points are
noticeable in Plato’s treatment of gymnastic:—First,
that the time of training is entirely separated from the time of
literary education. He seems to have thought that two things of an
opposite and different nature could not be learnt at the same time.
Here we can hardly agree with him; and, if we may judge by
experience, the effect of spending three years between the ages of
fourteen and seventeen in mere bodily exercise would be far from
improving to the intellect. Secondly, he affirms that music and
gymnastic are not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended,
the one for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body,
but that they are both equally designed for the improvement of the
mind. The body, in his view, is the servant of the mind; the
subjection of the lower to the higher is for the advantage of both.
And doubtless the mind may exercise a very great and paramount
influence over the body, if exerted not at particular moments and
by fits and starts, but continuously, in making preparation for the
whole of life. Other Greek writers saw the mischievous tendency of
Spartan discipline (Arist. Pol; Thuc.). But only Plato recognized
the fundamental error on which the practice was based.

The subject of gymnastic leads Plato to the sister subject of
medicine, which he further illustrates by the parallel of law. The
modern disbelief in medicine has led in this, as in some other
departments of knowledge, to a demand for greater simplicity;
physicians are becoming aware that they often make diseases
‘greater and more complicated’ by their treatment of
them (Rep.). In two thousand years their art has made but slender
progress; what they have gained in the analysis of the parts is in
a great degree lost by their feebler conception of the human frame
as a whole. They have attended more to the cure of diseases than to
the conditions of health; and the improvements in medicine have
been more than counterbalanced by the disuse of regular training.
Until lately they have hardly thought of air and water, the
importance of which was well understood by the ancients; as
Aristotle remarks, ‘Air and water, being the elements which
we most use, have the greatest effect upon health’ (Polit.).
For ages physicians have been under the dominion of prejudices
which have only recently given way; and now there are as many
opinions in medicine as in theology, and an equal degree of
scepticism and some want of toleration about both. Plato has
several good notions about medicine; according to him, ‘the
eye cannot be cured without the rest of the body, nor the body
without the mind’ (Charm.). No man of sense, he says in the
Timaeus, would take physic; and we heartily sympathize with him in
the Laws when he declares that ‘the limbs of the rustic worn
with toil will derive more benefit from warm baths than from the
prescriptions of a not over wise doctor.’ But we can hardly
praise him when, in obedience to the authority of Homer, he
depreciates diet, or approve of the inhuman spirit in which he
would get rid of invalid and useless lives by leaving them to die.
He does not seem to have considered that the ‘bridle of
Theages’ might be accompanied by qualities which were of far
more value to the State than the health or strength of the
citizens; or that the duty of taking care of the helpless might be
an important element of education in a State. The physician himself
(this is a delicate and subtle observation) should not be a man in
robust health; he should have, in modern phraseology, a nervous
temperament; he should have experience of disease in his own
person, in order that his powers of observation may be quickened in
the case of others.

The perplexity of medicine is paralleled by the perplexity of
law; in which, again, Plato would have men follow the golden rule
of simplicity. Greater matters are to be determined by the
legislator or by the oracle of Delphi, lesser matters are to be
left to the temporary regulation of the citizens themselves. Plato
is aware that laissez faire is an important element of government.
The diseases of a State are like the heads of a hydra; they
multiply when they are cut off. The true remedy for them is not
extirpation but prevention. And the way to prevent them is to take
care of education, and education will take care of all the rest. So
in modern times men have often felt that the only political measure
worth having—the only one which would produce any certain or
lasting effect, was a measure of national education. And in our own
more than in any previous age the necessity has been recognized of
restoring the ever-increasing confusion of law to simplicity and
common sense.

When the training in music and gymnastic is completed, there
follows the first stage of active and public life. But soon
education is to begin again from a new point of view. In the
interval between the Fourth and Seventh Books we have discussed the
nature of knowledge, and have thence been led to form a higher
conception of what was required of us. For true knowledge,
according to Plato, is of abstractions, and has to do, not with
particulars or individuals, but with universals only; not with the
beauties of poetry, but with the ideas of philosophy. And the great
aim of education is the cultivation of the habit of abstraction.
This is to be acquired through the study of the mathematical
sciences. They alone are capable of giving ideas of relation, and
of arousing the dormant energies of thought.

Mathematics in the age of Plato comprehended a very small part
of that which is now included in them; but they bore a much larger
proportion to the sum of human knowledge. They were the only
organon of thought which the human mind at that time possessed, and
the only measure by which the chaos of particulars could be reduced
to rule and order. The faculty which they trained was naturally at
war with the poetical or imaginative; and hence to Plato, who is
everywhere seeking for abstractions and trying to get rid of the
illusions of sense, nearly the whole of education is contained in
them. They seemed to have an inexhaustible application, partly
because their true limits were not yet understood. These Plato
himself is beginning to investigate; though not aware that number
and figure are mere abstractions of sense, he recognizes that the
forms used by geometry are borrowed from the sensible world. He
seeks to find the ultimate ground of mathematical ideas in the idea
of good, though he does not satisfactorily explain the connexion
between them; and in his conception of the relation of ideas to
numbers, he falls very far short of the definiteness attributed to
him by Aristotle (Met.). But if he fails to recognize the true
limits of mathematics, he also reaches a point beyond them; in his
view, ideas of number become secondary to a higher conception of
knowledge. The dialectician is as much above the mathematician as
the mathematician is above the ordinary man. The one, the
self-proving, the good which is the higher sphere of dialectic, is
the perfect truth to which all things ascend, and in which they
finally repose.

This self-proving unity or idea of good is a mere vision of
which no distinct explanation can be given, relative only to a
particular stage in Greek philosophy. It is an abstraction under
which no individuals are comprehended, a whole which has no parts
(Arist., Nic. Eth.). The vacancy of such a form was perceived by
Aristotle, but not by Plato. Nor did he recognize that in the
dialectical process are included two or more methods of
investigation which are at variance with each other. He did not see
that whether he took the longer or the shorter road, no advance
could be made in this way. And yet such visions often have an
immense effect; for although the method of science cannot
anticipate science, the idea of science, not as it is, but as it
will be in the future, is a great and inspiring principle. In the
pursuit of knowledge we are always pressing forward to something
beyond us; and as a false conception of knowledge, for example the
scholastic philosophy, may lead men astray during many ages, so the
true ideal, though vacant, may draw all their thoughts in a right
direction. It makes a great difference whether the general
expectation of knowledge, as this indefinite feeling may be termed,
is based upon a sound judgment. For mankind may often entertain a
true conception of what knowledge ought to be when they have but a
slender experience of facts. The correlation of the sciences, the
consciousness of the unity of nature, the idea of classification,
the sense of proportion, the unwillingness to stop short of
certainty or to confound probability with truth, are important
principles of the higher education. Although Plato could tell us
nothing, and perhaps knew that he could tell us nothing, of the
absolute truth, he has exercised an influence on the human mind
which even at the present day is not exhausted; and political and
social questions may yet arise in which the thoughts of Plato may
be read anew and receive a fresh meaning.

The Idea of good is so called only in the Republic, but there
are traces of it in other dialogues of Plato. It is a cause as well
as an idea, and from this point of view may be compared with the
creator of the Timaeus, who out of his goodness created all things.
It corresponds to a certain extent with the modern conception of a
law of nature, or of a final cause, or of both in one, and in this
regard may be connected with the measure and symmetry of the
Philebus. It is represented in the Symposium under the aspect of
beauty, and is supposed to be attained there by stages of
initiation, as here by regular gradations of knowledge. Viewed
subjectively, it is the process or science of dialectic. This is
the science which, according to the Phaedrus, is the true basis of
rhetoric, which alone is able to distinguish the natures and
classes of men and things; which divides a whole into the natural
parts, and reunites the scattered parts into a natural or organized
whole; which defines the abstract essences or universal ideas of
all things, and connects them; which pierces the veil of hypotheses
and reaches the final cause or first principle of all; which
regards the sciences in relation to the idea of good. This ideal
science is the highest process of thought, and may be described as
the soul conversing with herself or holding communion with eternal
truth and beauty, and in another form is the everlasting question
and answer—the ceaseless interrogative of Socrates. The
dialogues of Plato are themselves examples of the nature and method
of dialectic. Viewed objectively, the idea of good is a power or
cause which makes the world without us correspond with the world
within. Yet this world without us is still a world of ideas. With
Plato the investigation of nature is another department of
knowledge, and in this he seeks to attain only probable conclusions
(Timaeus).

If we ask whether this science of dialectic which Plato only
half explains to us is more akin to logic or to metaphysics, the
answer is that in his mind the two sciences are not as yet
distinguished, any more than the subjective and objective aspects
of the world and of man, which German philosophy has revealed to
us. Nor has he determined whether his science of dialectic is at
rest or in motion, concerned with the contemplation of absolute
being, or with a process of development and evolution. Modern
metaphysics may be described as the science of abstractions, or as
the science of the evolution of thought; modern logic, when passing
beyond the bounds of mere Aristotelian forms, may be defined as the
science of method. The germ of both of them is contained in the
Platonic dialectic; all metaphysicians have something in common
with the ideas of Plato; all logicians have derived something from
the method of Plato. The nearest approach in modern philosophy to
the universal science of Plato, is to be found in the Hegelian
‘succession of moments in the unity of the idea.’ Plato
and Hegel alike seem to have conceived the world as the correlation
of abstractions; and not impossibly they would have understood one
another better than any of their commentators understand them
(Swift’s Voyage to Laputa. ‘Having a desire to see
those ancients who were most renowned for wit and learning, I set
apart one day on purpose. I proposed that Homer and Aristotle might
appear at the head of all their commentators; but these were so
numerous that some hundreds were forced to attend in the court and
outward rooms of the palace. I knew, and could distinguish these
two heroes, at first sight, not only from the crowd, but from each
other. Homer was the taller and comelier person of the two, walked
very erect for one of his age, and his eyes were the most quick and
piercing I ever beheld. Aristotle stooped much, and made use of a
staff. His visage was meagre, his hair lank and thin, and his voice
hollow. I soon discovered that both of them were perfect strangers
to the rest of the company, and had never seen or heard of them
before. And I had a whisper from a ghost, who shall be nameless,
“That these commentators always kept in the most distant
quarters from their principals, in the lower world, through a
consciousness of shame and guilt, because they had so horribly
misrepresented the meaning of these authors to posterity.” I
introduced Didymus and Eustathius to Homer, and prevailed on him to
treat them better than perhaps they deserved, for he soon found
they wanted a genius to enter into the spirit of a poet. But
Aristotle was out of all patience with the account I gave him of
Scotus and Ramus, as I presented them to him; and he asked them
“whether the rest of the tribe were as great dunces as
themselves?”’). There is, however, a difference between
them: for whereas Hegel is thinking of all the minds of men as one
mind, which developes the stages of the idea in different countries
or at different times in the same country, with Plato these
gradations are regarded only as an order of thought or ideas; the
history of the human mind had not yet dawned upon him.

Many criticisms may be made on Plato’s theory of
education. While in some respects he unavoidably falls short of
modern thinkers, in others he is in advance of them. He is opposed
to the modes of education which prevailed in his own time; but he
can hardly be said to have discovered new ones. He does not see
that education is relative to the characters of individuals; he
only desires to impress the same form of the state on the minds of
all. He has no sufficient idea of the effect of literature on the
formation of the mind, and greatly exaggerates that of mathematics.
His aim is above all things to train the reasoning faculties; to
implant in the mind the spirit and power of abstraction; to explain
and define general notions, and, if possible, to connect them. No
wonder that in the vacancy of actual knowledge his followers, and
at times even he himself, should have fallen away from the doctrine
of ideas, and have returned to that branch of knowledge in which
alone the relation of the one and many can be truly seen—the
science of number. In his views both of teaching and training he
might be styled, in modern language, a doctrinaire; after the
Spartan fashion he would have his citizens cast in one mould; he
does not seem to consider that some degree of freedom, ‘a
little wholesome neglect,’ is necessary to strengthen and
develope the character and to give play to the individual nature.
His citizens would not have acquired that knowledge which in the
vision of Er is supposed to be gained by the pilgrims from their
experience of evil.

On the other hand, Plato is far in advance of modern
philosophers and theologians when he teaches that education is to
be continued through life and will begin again in another. He would
never allow education of some kind to cease; although he was aware
that the proverbial saying of Solon, ‘I grow old learning
many things,’ cannot be applied literally. Himself ravished
with the contemplation of the idea of good, and delighting in solid
geometry (Rep.), he has no difficulty in imagining that a lifetime
might be passed happily in such pursuits. We who know how many more
men of business there are in the world than real students or
thinkers, are not equally sanguine. The education which he proposes
for his citizens is really the ideal life of the philosopher or man
of genius, interrupted, but only for a time, by practical
duties,—a life not for the many, but for the few.

Yet the thought of Plato may not be wholly incapable of
application to our own times. Even if regarded as an ideal which
can never be realized, it may have a great effect in elevating the
characters of mankind, and raising them above the routine of their
ordinary occupation or profession. It is the best form under which
we can conceive the whole of life. Nevertheless the idea of Plato
is not easily put into practice. For the education of after life is
necessarily the education which each one gives himself. Men and
women cannot be brought together in schools or colleges at forty or
fifty years of age; and if they could the result would be
disappointing. The destination of most men is what Plato would call
‘the Den’ for the whole of life, and with that they are
content. Neither have they teachers or advisers with whom they can
take counsel in riper years. There is no ‘schoolmaster
abroad’ who will tell them of their faults, or inspire them
with the higher sense of duty, or with the ambition of a true
success in life; no Socrates who will convict them of ignorance; no
Christ, or follower of Christ, who will reprove them of sin. Hence
they have a difficulty in receiving the first element of
improvement, which is self-knowledge. The hopes of youth no longer
stir them; they rather wish to rest than to pursue high objects. A
few only who have come across great men and women, or eminent
teachers of religion and morality, have received a second life from
them, and have lighted a candle from the fire of their genius.

The want of energy is one of the main reasons why so few persons
continue to improve in later years. They have not the will, and do
not know the way. They ‘never try an experiment,’ or
look up a point of interest for themselves; they make no sacrifices
for the sake of knowledge; their minds, like their bodies, at a
certain age become fixed. Genius has been defined as ‘the
power of taking pains’; but hardly any one keeps up his
interest in knowledge throughout a whole life. The troubles of a
family, the business of making money, the demands of a profession
destroy the elasticity of the mind. The waxen tablet of the memory
which was once capable of receiving ‘true thoughts and clear
impressions’ becomes hard and crowded; there is not room for
the accumulations of a long life (Theaet.). The student, as years
advance, rather makes an exchange of knowledge than adds to his
stores. There is no pressing necessity to learn; the stock of
Classics or History or Natural Science which was enough for a man
at twenty-five is enough for him at fifty. Neither is it easy to
give a definite answer to any one who asks how he is to improve.
For self-education consists in a thousand things, commonplace in
themselves,—in adding to what we are by nature something of
what we are not; in learning to see ourselves as others see us; in
judging, not by opinion, but by the evidence of facts; in seeking
out the society of superior minds; in a study of lives and writings
of great men; in observation of the world and character; in
receiving kindly the natural influence of different times of life;
in any act or thought which is raised above the practice or
opinions of mankind; in the pursuit of some new or original
enquiry; in any effort of mind which calls forth some latent
power.

If any one is desirous of carrying out in detail the Platonic
education of after-life, some such counsels as the following may be
offered to him:— That he shall choose the branch of knowledge
to which his own mind most distinctly inclines, and in which he
takes the greatest delight, either one which seems to connect with
his own daily employment, or, perhaps, furnishes the greatest
contrast to it. He may study from the speculative side the
profession or business in which he is practically engaged. He may
make Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, Bacon the friends and
companions of his life. He may find opportunities of hearing the
living voice of a great teacher. He may select for enquiry some
point of history or some unexplained phenomenon of nature. An hour
a day passed in such scientific or literary pursuits will furnish
as many facts as the memory can retain, and will give him ‘a
pleasure not to be repented of’ (Timaeus). Only let him
beware of being the slave of crotchets, or of running after a Will
o’ the Wisp in his ignorance, or in his vanity of attributing
to himself the gifts of a poet or assuming the air of a
philosopher. He should know the limits of his own powers. Better to
build up the mind by slow additions, to creep on quietly from one
thing to another, to gain insensibly new powers and new interests
in knowledge, than to form vast schemes which are never destined to
be realized. But perhaps, as Plato would say, ‘This is part
of another subject’ (Tim.); though we may also defend our
digression by his example (Theaet.).

4. We remark with surprise that the progress of nations or the
natural growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on
political philosophy seem hardly ever to have attracted the
attention of Plato and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with
the mutability of human affairs; they could moralize over the ruins
of cities and the fall of empires (Plato, Statesman, and
Sulpicius’ Letter to Cicero); by them fate and chance were
deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and to have had a great
share in political events. The wiser of them like Thucydides
believed that ‘what had been would be again,’ and that
a tolerable idea of the future could be gathered from the past.
Also they had dreams of a Golden Age which existed once upon a time
and might still exist in some unknown land, or might return again
in the remote future. But the regular growth of a state enlightened
by experience, progressing in knowledge, improving in the arts, of
which the citizens were educated by the fulfilment of political
duties, appears never to have come within the range of their hopes
and aspirations. Such a state had never been seen, and therefore
could not be conceived by them. Their experience (Aristot. Metaph.;
Plato, Laws) led them to conclude that there had been cycles of
civilization in which the arts had been discovered and lost many
times over, and cities had been overthrown and rebuilt again and
again, and deluges and volcanoes and other natural convulsions had
altered the face of the earth. Tradition told them of many
destructions of mankind and of the preservation of a remnant. The
world began again after a deluge and was reconstructed out of the
fragments of itself. Also they were acquainted with empires of
unknown antiquity, like the Egyptian or Assyrian; but they had
never seen them grow, and could not imagine, any more than we can,
the state of man which preceded them. They were puzzled and
awestricken by the Egyptian monuments, of which the forms, as Plato
says, not in a figure, but literally, were ten thousand years old
(Laws), and they contrasted the antiquity of Egypt with their own
short memories.

The early legends of Hellas have no real connection with the
later history: they are at a distance, and the intermediate region
is concealed from view; there is no road or path which leads from
one to the other. At the beginning of Greek history, in the
vestibule of the temple, is seen standing first of all the figure
of the legislator, himself the interpreter and servant of the God.
The fundamental laws which he gives are not supposed to change with
time and circumstances. The salvation of the state is held rather
to depend on the inviolable maintenance of them. They were
sanctioned by the authority of heaven, and it was deemed impiety to
alter them. The desire to maintain them unaltered seems to be the
origin of what at first sight is very surprising to us—the
intolerant zeal of Plato against innovators in religion or politics
(Laws); although with a happy inconsistency he is also willing that
the laws of other countries should be studied and improvements in
legislation privately communicated to the Nocturnal Council (Laws).
The additions which were made to them in later ages in order to
meet the increasing complexity of affairs were still ascribed by a
fiction to the original legislator; and the words of such
enactments at Athens were disputed over as if they had been the
words of Solon himself. Plato hopes to preserve in a later
generation the mind of the legislator; he would have his citizens
remain within the lines which he has laid down for them. He would
not harass them with minute regulations, he would have allowed some
changes in the laws: but not changes which would affect the
fundamental institutions of the state, such for example as would
convert an aristocracy into a timocracy, or a timocracy into a
popular form of government.

Passing from speculations to facts, we observe that progress has
been the exception rather than the law of human history. And
therefore we are not surprised to find that the idea of progress is
of modern rather than of ancient date; and, like the idea of a
philosophy of history, is not more than a century or two old. It
seems to have arisen out of the impression left on the human mind
by the growth of the Roman Empire and of the Christian Church, and
to be due to the political and social improvements which they
introduced into the world; and still more in our own century to the
idealism of the first French Revolution and the triumph of American
Independence; and in a yet greater degree to the vast material
prosperity and growth of population in England and her colonies and
in America. It is also to be ascribed in a measure to the greater
study of the philosophy of history. The optimist temperament of
some great writers has assisted the creation of it, while the
opposite character has led a few to regard the future of the world
as dark. The ‘spectator of all time and of all
existence’ sees more of ‘the increasing purpose which
through the ages ran’ than formerly: but to the inhabitant of
a small state of Hellas the vision was necessarily limited like the
valley in which he dwelt. There was no remote past on which his eye
could rest, nor any future from which the veil was partly lifted up
by the analogy of history. The narrowness of view, which to
ourselves appears so singular, was to him natural, if not
unavoidable.

5. For the relation of the Republic to the Statesman and the
Laws, and the two other works of Plato which directly treat of
politics, see the Introductions to the two latter; a few general
points of comparison may be touched upon in this place.

And first of the Laws.

(1) The Republic, though probably written at intervals, yet
speaking generally and judging by the indications of thought and
style, may be reasonably ascribed to the middle period of
Plato’s life: the Laws are certainly the work of his
declining years, and some portions of them at any rate seem to have
been written in extreme old age.

(2) The Republic is full of hope and aspiration: the Laws bear
the stamp of failure and disappointment. The one is a finished work
which received the last touches of the author: the other is
imperfectly executed, and apparently unfinished. The one has the
grace and beauty of youth: the other has lost the poetical form,
but has more of the severity and knowledge of life which is
characteristic of old age.

(3) The most conspicuous defect of the Laws is the failure of
dramatic power, whereas the Republic is full of striking contrasts
of ideas and oppositions of character.

(4) The Laws may be said to have more the nature of a sermon,
the Republic of a poem; the one is more religious, the other more
intellectual.

(5) Many theories of Plato, such as the doctrine of ideas, the
government of the world by philosophers, are not found in the Laws;
the immortality of the soul is first mentioned in xii; the person
of Socrates has altogether disappeared. The community of women and
children is renounced; the institution of common or public meals
for women (Laws) is for the first time introduced (Ar. Pol.).

(6) There remains in the Laws the old enmity to the poets, who
are ironically saluted in high-flown terms, and, at the same time,
are peremptorily ordered out of the city, if they are not willing
to submit their poems to the censorship of the magistrates
(Rep.).

(7) Though the work is in most respects inferior, there are a
few passages in the Laws, such as the honour due to the soul, the
evils of licentious or unnatural love, the whole of Book x.
(religion), the dishonesty of retail trade, and bequests, which
come more home to us, and contain more of what may be termed the
modern element in Plato than almost anything in the Republic.

The relation of the two works to one another is very well
given:

(1) by Aristotle in the Politics from the side of the
Laws:—

‘The same, or nearly the same, objections apply to
Plato’s later work, the Laws, and therefore we had better
examine briefly the constitution which is therein described. In the
Republic, Socrates has definitely settled in all a few questions
only; such as the community of women and children, the community of
property, and the constitution of the state. The population is
divided into two classes—one of husbandmen, and the other of
warriors; from this latter is taken a third class of counsellors
and rulers of the state. But Socrates has not determined whether
the husbandmen and artists are to have a share in the government,
and whether they too are to carry arms and share in military
service or not. He certainly thinks that the women ought to share
in the education of the guardians, and to fight by their side. The
remainder of the work is filled up with digressions foreign to the
main subject, and with discussions about the education of the
guardians. In the Laws there is hardly anything but laws; not much
is said about the constitution. This, which he had intended to make
more of the ordinary type, he gradually brings round to the other
or ideal form. For with the exception of the community of women and
property, he supposes everything to be the same in both states;
there is to be the same education; the citizens of both are to live
free from servile occupations, and there are to be common meals in
both. The only difference is that in the Laws the common meals are
extended to women, and the warriors number about 5000, but in the
Republic only 1000.’

(2) by Plato in the Laws (Book v.), from the side of the
Republic:—

‘The first and highest form of the state and of the
government and of the law is that in which there prevails most
widely the ancient saying that “Friends have all things in
common.” Whether there is now, or ever will be, this
communion of women and children and of property, in which the
private and individual is altogether banished from life, and things
which are by nature private, such as eyes and ears and hands, have
become common, and all men express praise and blame, and feel joy
and sorrow, on the same occasions, and the laws unite the city to
the utmost,—whether all this is possible or not, I say that
no man, acting upon any other principle, will ever constitute a
state more exalted in virtue, or truer or better than this. Such a
state, whether inhabited by Gods or sons of Gods, will make them
blessed who dwell therein; and therefore to this we are to look for
the pattern of the state, and to cling to this, and, as far as
possible, to seek for one which is like this. The state which we
have now in hand, when created, will be nearest to immortality and
unity in the next degree; and after that, by the grace of God, we
will complete the third one. And we will begin by speaking of the
nature and origin of the second.’

The comparatively short work called the Statesman or Politicus
in its style and manner is more akin to the Laws, while in its
idealism it rather resembles the Republic. As far as we can judge
by various indications of language and thought, it must be later
than the one and of course earlier than the other. In both the
Republic and Statesman a close connection is maintained between
Politics and Dialectic. In the Statesman, enquiries into the
principles of Method are interspersed with discussions about
Politics. The comparative advantages of the rule of law and of a
person are considered, and the decision given in favour of a person
(Arist. Pol.). But much may be said on the other side, nor is the
opposition necessary; for a person may rule by law, and law may be
so applied as to be the living voice of the legislator. As in the
Republic, there is a myth, describing, however, not a future, but a
former existence of mankind. The question is asked, ‘Whether
the state of innocence which is described in the myth, or a state
like our own which possesses art and science and distinguishes good
from evil, is the preferable condition of man.’ To this
question of the comparative happiness of civilized and primitive
life, which was so often discussed in the last century and in our
own, no answer is given. The Statesman, though less perfect in
style than the Republic and of far less range, may justly be
regarded as one of the greatest of Plato’s dialogues.

6. Others as well as Plato have chosen an ideal Republic to be
the vehicle of thoughts which they could not definitely express, or
which went beyond their own age. The classical writing which
approaches most nearly to the Republic of Plato is the ‘De
Republica’ of Cicero; but neither in this nor in any other of
his dialogues does he rival the art of Plato. The manners are
clumsy and inferior; the hand of the rhetorician is apparent at
every turn. Yet noble sentiments are constantly recurring: the true
note of Roman patriotism—‘We Romans are a great
people’—resounds through the whole work. Like Socrates,
Cicero turns away from the phenomena of the heavens to civil and
political life. He would rather not discuss the ‘two
Suns’ of which all Rome was talking, when he can converse
about ‘the two nations in one’ which had divided Rome
ever since the days of the Gracchi. Like Socrates again, speaking
in the person of Scipio, he is afraid lest he should assume too
much the character of a teacher, rather than of an equal who is
discussing among friends the two sides of a question. He would
confine the terms King or State to the rule of reason and justice,
and he will not concede that title either to a democracy or to a
monarchy. But under the rule of reason and justice he is willing to
include the natural superior ruling over the natural inferior,
which he compares to the soul ruling over the body. He prefers a
mixture of forms of government to any single one. The two portraits
of the just and the unjust, which occur in the second book of the
Republic, are transferred to the state—Philus, one of the
interlocutors, maintaining against his will the necessity of
injustice as a principle of government, while the other, Laelius,
supports the opposite thesis. His views of language and number are
derived from Plato; like him he denounces the drama. He also
declares that if his life were to be twice as long he would have no
time to read the lyric poets. The picture of democracy is
translated by him word for word, though he had hardly shown himself
able to ‘carry the jest’ of Plato. He converts into a
stately sentence the humorous fancy about the animals, who
‘are so imbued with the spirit of democracy that they make
the passers-by get out of their way.’ His description of the
tyrant is imitated from Plato, but is far inferior. The second book
is historical, and claims for the Roman constitution (which is to
him the ideal) a foundation of fact such as Plato probably intended
to have given to the Republic in the Critias. His most remarkable
imitation of Plato is the adaptation of the vision of Er, which is
converted by Cicero into the ‘Somnium Scipionis’; he
has ‘romanized’ the myth of the Republic, adding an
argument for the immortality of the soul taken from the Phaedrus,
and some other touches derived from the Phaedo and the Timaeus.
Though a beautiful tale and containing splendid passages, the
‘Somnium Scipionis; is very inferior to the vision of Er; it
is only a dream, and hardly allows the reader to suppose that the
writer believes in his own creation. Whether his dialogues were
framed on the model of the lost dialogues of Aristotle, as he
himself tells us, or of Plato, to which they bear many superficial
resemblances, he is still the Roman orator; he is not conversing,
but making speeches, and is never able to mould the intractable
Latin to the grace and ease of the Greek Platonic dialogue. But if
he is defective in form, much more is he inferior to the Greek in
matter; he nowhere in his philosophical writings leaves upon our
minds the impression of an original thinker.

Plato’s Republic has been said to be a church and not a
state; and such an ideal of a city in the heavens has always
hovered over the Christian world, and is embodied in St.
Augustine’s ‘De Civitate Dei,’ which is suggested
by the decay and fall of the Roman Empire, much in the same manner
in which we may imagine the Republic of Plato to have been
influenced by the decline of Greek politics in the writer’s
own age. The difference is that in the time of Plato the
degeneracy, though certain, was gradual and insensible: whereas the
taking of Rome by the Goths stirred like an earthquake the age of
St. Augustine. Men were inclined to believe that the overthrow of
the city was to be ascribed to the anger felt by the old Roman
deities at the neglect of their worship. St. Augustine maintains
the opposite thesis; he argues that the destruction of the Roman
Empire is due, not to the rise of Christianity, but to the vices of
Paganism. He wanders over Roman history, and over Greek philosophy
and mythology, and finds everywhere crime, impiety and falsehood.
He compares the worst parts of the Gentile religions with the best
elements of the faith of Christ. He shows nothing of the spirit
which led others of the early Christian Fathers to recognize in the
writings of the Greek philosophers the power of the divine truth.
He traces the parallel of the kingdom of God, that is, the history
of the Jews, contained in their scriptures, and of the kingdoms of
the world, which are found in gentile writers, and pursues them
both into an ideal future. It need hardly be remarked that his use
both of Greek and of Roman historians and of the sacred writings of
the Jews is wholly uncritical. The heathen mythology, the Sybilline
oracles, the myths of Plato, the dreams of Neo–Platonists are
equally regarded by him as matter of fact. He must be acknowledged
to be a strictly polemical or controversial writer who makes the
best of everything on one side and the worst of everything on the
other. He has no sympathy with the old Roman life as Plato has with
Greek life, nor has he any idea of the ecclesiastical kingdom which
was to arise out of the ruins of the Roman empire. He is not blind
to the defects of the Christian Church, and looks forward to a time
when Christian and Pagan shall be alike brought before the
judgment-seat, and the true City of God shall appear…The work of
St. Augustine is a curious repertory of antiquarian learning and
quotations, deeply penetrated with Christian ethics, but showing
little power of reasoning, and a slender knowledge of the Greek
literature and language. He was a great genius, and a noble
character, yet hardly capable of feeling or understanding anything
external to his own theology. Of all the ancient philosophers he is
most attracted by Plato, though he is very slightly acquainted with
his writings. He is inclined to believe that the idea of creation
in the Timaeus is derived from the narrative in Genesis; and he is
strangely taken with the coincidence (?) of Plato’s saying
that ‘the philosopher is the lover of God,’ and the
words of the Book of Exodus in which God reveals himself to Moses
(Exod.) He dwells at length on miracles performed in his own day,
of which the evidence is regarded by him as irresistible. He speaks
in a very interesting manner of the beauty and utility of nature
and of the human frame, which he conceives to afford a foretaste of
the heavenly state and of the resurrection of the body. The book is
not really what to most persons the title of it would imply, and
belongs to an age which has passed away. But it contains many fine
passages and thoughts which are for all time.

The short treatise de Monarchia of Dante is by far the most
remarkable of mediaeval ideals, and bears the impress of the great
genius in whom Italy and the Middle Ages are so vividly reflected.
It is the vision of an Universal Empire, which is supposed to be
the natural and necessary government of the world, having a divine
authority distinct from the Papacy, yet coextensive with it. It is
not ‘the ghost of the dead Roman Empire sitting crowned upon
the grave thereof,’ but the legitimate heir and successor of
it, justified by the ancient virtues of the Romans and the
beneficence of their rule. Their right to be the governors of the
world is also confirmed by the testimony of miracles, and
acknowledged by St. Paul when he appealed to Caesar, and even more
emphatically by Christ Himself, Who could not have made atonement
for the sins of men if He had not been condemned by a divinely
authorized tribunal. The necessity for the establishment of an
Universal Empire is proved partly by a priori arguments such as the
unity of God and the unity of the family or nation; partly by
perversions of Scripture and history, by false analogies of nature,
by misapplied quotations from the classics, and by odd scraps and
commonplaces of logic, showing a familiar but by no means exact
knowledge of Aristotle (of Plato there is none). But a more
convincing argument still is the miserable state of the world,
which he touchingly describes. He sees no hope of happiness or
peace for mankind until all nations of the earth are comprehended
in a single empire. The whole treatise shows how deeply the idea of
the Roman Empire was fixed in the minds of his contemporaries. Not
much argument was needed to maintain the truth of a theory which to
his own contemporaries seemed so natural and congenial. He speaks,
or rather preaches, from the point of view, not of the
ecclesiastic, but of the layman, although, as a good Catholic, he
is willing to acknowledge that in certain respects the Empire must
submit to the Church. The beginning and end of all his noble
reflections and of his arguments, good and bad, is the aspiration
‘that in this little plot of earth belonging to mortal man
life may pass in freedom and peace.’ So inextricably is his
vision of the future bound up with the beliefs and circumstances of
his own age.

The ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More is a surprising
monument of his genius, and shows a reach of thought far beyond his
contemporaries. The book was written by him at the age of about 34
or 35, and is full of the generous sentiments of youth. He brings
the light of Plato to bear upon the miserable state of his own
country. Living not long after the Wars of the Roses, and in the
dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is indignant at the
corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the nobility and gentry,
at the sufferings of the poor, at the calamities caused by war. To
the eye of More the whole world was in dissolution and decay; and
side by side with the misery and oppression which he has described
in the First Book of the Utopia, he places in the Second Book the
ideal state which by the help of Plato he had constructed. The
times were full of stir and intellectual interest. The distant
murmur of the Reformation was beginning to be heard. To minds like
More’s, Greek literature was a revelation: there had arisen
an art of interpretation, and the New Testament was beginning to be
understood as it had never been before, and has not often been
since, in its natural sense. The life there depicted appeared to
him wholly unlike that of Christian commonwealths, in which
‘he saw nothing but a certain conspiracy of rich men
procuring their own commodities under the name and title of the
Commonwealth.’ He thought that Christ, like Plato,
‘instituted all things common,’ for which reason, he
tells us, the citizens of Utopia were the more willing to receive
his doctrines (‘Howbeit, I think this was no small help and
furtherance in the matter, that they heard us say that Christ
instituted among his, all things common, and that the same
community doth yet remain in the rightest Christian
communities’ (Utopia).). The community of property is a fixed
idea with him, though he is aware of the arguments which may be
urged on the other side (‘These things (I say), when I
consider with myself, I hold well with Plato, and do nothing marvel
that he would make no laws for them that refused those laws,
whereby all men should have and enjoy equal portions of riches and
commodities. For the wise men did easily foresee this to be the one
and only way to the wealth of a community, if equality of all
things should be brought in and established’ (Utopia).). We
wonder how in the reign of Henry VIII, though veiled in another
language and published in a foreign country, such speculations
could have been endured.

He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than any one
who succeeded him, with the exception of Swift. In the art of

feigning he is a worthy disciple of Plato. Like him, starting from
a small portion of fact, he founds his tale with admirable skill on
a few lines in the Latin narrative of the voyages of Amerigo
Vespucci. He is very precise about dates and facts, and has the
power of making us believe that the narrator of the tale must have
been an eyewitness. We are fairly puzzled by his manner of mixing
up real and imaginary persons; his boy John Clement and Peter
Giles, citizen of Antwerp, with whom he disputes about the precise
words which are supposed to have been used by the (imaginary)
Portuguese traveller, Raphael Hythloday. ‘I have the more
cause,’ says Hythloday, ‘to fear that my words shall
not be believed, for that I know how difficultly and hardly I
myself would have believed another man telling the same, if I had
not myself seen it with mine own eyes.’ Or again: ‘If
you had been with me in Utopia, and had presently seen their
fashions and laws as I did which lived there five years and more,
and would never have come thence, but only to make the new land
known here,’ etc. More greatly regrets that he forgot to ask
Hythloday in what part of the world Utopia is situated; he
‘would have spent no small sum of money rather than it should
have escaped him,’ and he begs Peter Giles to see Hythloday
or write to him and obtain an answer to the question. After this we
are not surprised to hear that a Professor of Divinity (perhaps
‘a late famous vicar of Croydon in Surrey,’ as the
translator thinks) is desirous of being sent thither as a
missionary by the High Bishop, ‘yea, and that he may himself
be made Bishop of Utopia, nothing doubting that he must obtain this
Bishopric with suit; and he counteth that a godly suit which
proceedeth not of the desire of honour or lucre, but only of a
godly zeal.’ The design may have failed through the
disappearance of Hythloday, concerning whom we have ‘very
uncertain news’ after his departure. There is no doubt,
however, that he had told More and Giles the exact situation of the
island, but unfortunately at the same moment More’s
attention, as he is reminded in a letter from Giles, was drawn off
by a servant, and one of the company from a cold caught on
shipboard coughed so loud as to prevent Giles from hearing. And
‘the secret has perished’ with him; to this day the
place of Utopia remains unknown.

The words of Phaedrus, ‘O Socrates, you can easily invent
Egyptians or anything,’ are recalled to our mind as we read
this lifelike fiction. Yet the greater merit of the work is not the
admirable art, but the originality of thought. More is as free as
Plato from the prejudices of his age, and far more tolerant. The
Utopians do not allow him who believes not in the immortality of
the soul to share in the administration of the state (Laws),
‘howbeit they put him to no punishment, because they be
persuaded that it is in no man’s power to believe what he
list’; and ‘no man is to be blamed for reasoning in
support of his own religion (‘One of our company in my
presence was sharply punished. He, as soon as he was baptised,
began, against our wills, with more earnest affection than wisdom,
to reason of Christ’s religion, and began to wax so hot in
his matter, that he did not only prefer our religion before all
other, but also did despise and condemn all other, calling them
profane, and the followers of them wicked and devilish, and the
children of everlasting damnation. When he had thus long reasoned
the matter, they laid hold on him, accused him, and condemned him
into exile, not as a despiser of religion, but as a seditious
person and a raiser up of dissension among the
people’).’ In the public services ‘no prayers be
used, but such as every man may boldly pronounce without giving
offence to any sect.’ He says significantly, ‘There be
that give worship to a man that was once of excellent virtue or of
famous glory, not only as God, but also the chiefest and highest
God. But the most and the wisest part, rejecting all these, believe
that there is a certain godly power unknown, far above the capacity

and reach of man’s wit, dispersed throughout all the world,
not in bigness, but in virtue and power. Him they call the Father
of all. To Him alone they attribute the beginnings, the
increasings, the proceedings, the changes, and the ends of all
things. Neither give they any divine honours to any other than
him.’ So far was More from sharing the popular beliefs of his
time. Yet at the end he reminds us that he does not in all respects
agree with the customs and opinions of the Utopians which he
describes. And we should let him have the benefit of this saving
clause, and not rudely withdraw the veil behind which he has been
pleased to conceal himself.

Nor is he less in advance of popular opinion in his political
and moral speculations. He would like to bring military glory into
contempt; he would set all sorts of idle people to profitable
occupation, including in the same class, priests, women, noblemen,
gentlemen, and ‘sturdy and valiant beggars,’ that the
labour of all may be reduced to six hours a day. His dislike of
capital punishment, and plans for the reformation of offenders; his
detestation of priests and lawyers (Compare his satirical
observation: ‘They (the Utopians) have priests of exceeding
holiness, and therefore very few.); his remark that ‘although
every one may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves and cruel
man-eaters, it is not easy to find states that are well and wisely
governed,’ are curiously at variance with the notions of his
age and indeed with his own life. There are many points in which he
shows a modern feeling and a prophetic insight like Plato. He is a
sanitary reformer; he maintains that civilized states have a right
to the soil of waste countries; he is inclined to the opinion which
places happiness in virtuous pleasures, but herein, as he thinks,
not disagreeing from those other philosophers who define virtue to
be a life according to nature. He extends the idea of happiness so
as to include the happiness of others; and he argues ingeniously,
‘All men agree that we ought to make others happy; but if
others, how much more ourselves!’ And still he thinks that
there may be a more excellent way, but to this no man’s
reason can attain unless heaven should inspire him with a higher
truth. His ceremonies before marriage; his humane proposal that war
should be carried on by assassinating the leaders of the enemy, may
be compared to some of the paradoxes of Plato. He has a charming
fancy, like the affinities of Greeks and barbarians in the Timaeus,
that the Utopians learnt the language of the Greeks with the more
readiness because they were originally of the same race with them.
He is penetrated with the spirit of Plato, and quotes or adapts
many thoughts both from the Republic and from the Timaeus. He
prefers public duties to private, and is somewhat impatient of the
importunity of relations. His citizens have no silver or gold of
their own, but are ready enough to pay them to their mercenaries.
There is nothing of which he is more contemptuous than the love of
money. Gold is used for fetters of criminals, and diamonds and
pearls for children’s necklaces (When the ambassadors came
arrayed in gold and peacocks’ feathers ‘to the eyes of
all the Utopians except very few, which had been in other countries
for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of apparel seemed
shameful and reproachful. In so much that they most reverently
saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lords—passing
over the ambassadors themselves without any honour, judging them by
their wearing of golden chains to be bondmen. You should have seen
children also, that had cast away their pearls and precious stones,
when they saw the like sticking upon the ambassadors’ caps,
dig and push their mothers under the sides, saying thus to
them—“Look, though he were a little child still.”
But the mother; yea and that also in good earnest: “Peace,
son,” saith she, “I think he be some of the
ambassadors’ fools.”’)

Like Plato he is full of satirical reflections on governments
and princes; on the state of the world and of knowledge. The hero
of his discourse (Hythloday) is very unwilling to become a minister
of state, considering that he would lose his independence and his
advice would never be heeded (Compare an exquisite passage, of
which the conclusion is as follows: ‘And verily it is
naturally given…suppressed and ended.’) He ridicules the
new logic of his time; the Utopians could never be made to
understand the doctrine of Second Intentions (‘For they have
not devised one of all those rules of restrictions, amplifications,
and suppositions, very wittily invented in the small Logicals,
which here our children in every place do learn. Furthermore, they
were never yet able to find out the second intentions; insomuch
that none of them all could ever see man himself in common, as they
call him, though he be (as you know) bigger than was ever any
giant, yea, and pointed to of us even with our finger.’) He
is very severe on the sports of the gentry; the Utopians count
‘hunting the lowest, the vilest, and the most abject part of
butchery.’ He quotes the words of the Republic in which the
philosopher is described ‘standing out of the way under a
wall until the driving storm of sleet and rain be overpast,’
which admit of a singular application to More’s own fate;
although, writing twenty years before (about the year 1514), he can
hardly be supposed to have foreseen this. There is no touch of
satire which strikes deeper than his quiet remark that the greater
part of the precepts of Christ are more at variance with the lives
of ordinary Christians than the discourse of Utopia (‘And yet
the most part of them is more dissident from the manners of the
world now a days, than my communication was. But preachers, sly and
wily men, following your counsel (as I suppose) because they saw
men evil-willing to frame their manners to Christ’s rule,
they have wrested and wried his doctrine, and, like a rule of lead,
have applied it to men’s manners, that by some means at the
least way, they might agree together.’)

The ‘New Atlantis’ is only a fragment, and far
inferior in merit to the ‘Utopia.’ The work is full of
ingenuity, but wanting in creative fancy, and by no means impresses
the reader with a sense of credibility. In some places Lord Bacon
is characteristically different from Sir Thomas More, as, for
example, in the external state which he attributes to the governor
of Solomon’s House, whose dress he minutely describes, while
to Sir Thomas More such trappings appear simple ridiculous. Yet,
after this programme of dress, Bacon adds the beautiful trait,
‘that he had a look as though he pitied men.’ Several
things are borrowed by him from the Timaeus; but he has injured the
unity of style by adding thoughts and passages which are taken from
the Hebrew Scriptures.

The ‘City of the Sun’ written by Campanella
(1568–1639), a Dominican friar, several years after the
‘New Atlantis’ of Bacon, has many resemblances to the
Republic of Plato. The citizens have wives and children in common;
their marriages are of the same temporary sort, and are arranged by
the magistrates from time to time. They do not, however, adopt his
system of lots, but bring together the best natures, male and
female, ‘according to philosophical rules.’ The infants
until two years of age are brought up by their mothers in public
temples; and since individuals for the most part educate their
children badly, at the beginning of their third year they are
committed to the care of the State, and are taught at first, not
out of books, but from paintings of all kinds, which are emblazoned
on the walls of the city. The city has six interior circuits of
walls, and an outer wall which is the seventh. On this outer wall
are painted the figures of legislators and philosophers, and on
each of the interior walls the symbols or forms of some one of the
sciences are delineated. The women are, for the most part, trained,
like the men, in warlike and other exercises; but they have two
special occupations of their own. After a battle, they and the boys
soothe and relieve the wounded warriors; also they encourage them
with embraces and pleasant words. Some elements of the Christian or
Catholic religion are preserved among them. The life of the
Apostles is greatly admired by this people because they had all
things in common; and the short prayer which Jesus Christ taught
men is used in their worship. It is a duty of the chief magistrates
to pardon sins, and therefore the whole people make secret
confession of them to the magistrates, and they to their chief, who
is a sort of Rector Metaphysicus; and by this means he is well
informed of all that is going on in the minds of men. After
confession, absolution is granted to the citizens collectively, but
no one is mentioned by name. There also exists among them a
practice of perpetual prayer, performed by a succession of priests,
who change every hour. Their religion is a worship of God in
Trinity, that is of Wisdom, Love and Power, but without any
distinction of persons. They behold in the sun the reflection of
His glory; mere graven images they reject, refusing to fall under
the ‘tyranny’ of idolatry.

Many details are given about their customs of eating and
drinking, about their mode of dressing, their employments, their
wars. Campanella looks forward to a new mode of education, which is
to be a study of nature, and not of Aristotle. He would not have
his citizens waste their time in the consideration of what he calls
‘the dead signs of things.’ He remarks that he who
knows one science only, does not really know that one any more than
the rest, and insists strongly on the necessity of a variety of
knowledge. More scholars are turned out in the City of the Sun in
one year than by contemporary methods in ten or fifteen. He
evidently believes, like Bacon, that henceforward natural science
will play a great part in education, a hope which seems hardly to
have been realized, either in our own or in any former age; at any
rate the fulfilment of it has been long deferred.

There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this
work, and a most enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has little
or no charm of style, and falls very far short of the ‘New
Atlantis’ of Bacon, and still more of the
‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More. It is full of
inconsistencies, and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a
superficial acquaintance with his writings. It is a work such as
one might expect to have been written by a philosopher and man of
genius who was also a friar, and who had spent twenty-seven years
of his life in a prison of the Inquisition. The most interesting
feature of the book, common to Plato and Sir Thomas More, is the
deep feeling which is shown by the writer, of the misery and
ignorance prevailing among the lower classes in his own time.
Campanella takes note of Aristotle’s answer to Plato’s
community of property, that in a society where all things are
common, no individual would have any motive to work (Arist. Pol.):
he replies, that his citizens being happy and contented in
themselves (they are required to work only four hours a day), will
have greater regard for their fellows than exists among men at
present. He thinks, like Plato, that if he abolishes private
feelings and interests, a great public feeling will take their
place.

Other writings on ideal states, such as the ‘Oceana’
of Harrington, in which the Lord Archon, meaning Cromwell, is
described, not as he was, but as he ought to have been; or the
‘Argenis’ of Barclay, which is an historical allegory
of his own time, are too unlike Plato to be worth mentioning. More
interesting than either of these, and far more Platonic in style
and thought, is Sir John Eliot’s ‘Monarchy of
Man,’ in which the prisoner of the Tower, no longer able
‘to be a politician in the land of his birth,’ turns
away from politics to view ‘that other city which is within
him,’ and finds on the very threshold of the grave that the
secret of human happiness is the mastery of self. The change of
government in the time of the English Commonwealth set men thinking
about first principles, and gave rise to many works of this
class…The great original genius of Swift owes nothing to Plato;
nor is there any trace in the conversation or in the works of Dr.
Johnson of any acquaintance with his writings. He probably would
have refuted Plato without reading him, in the same fashion in
which he supposed himself to have refuted Bishop Berkeley’s
theory of the non-existence of matter. If we except the so-called
English Platonists, or rather Neo–Platonists, who never
understood their master, and the writings of Coleridge, who was to
some extent a kindred spirit, Plato has left no permanent
impression on English literature.

7. Human life and conduct are affected by ideals in the same way
that they are affected by the examples of eminent men. Neither the
one nor the other are immediately applicable to practice, but there
is a virtue flowing from them which tends to raise individuals
above the common routine of society or trade, and to elevate States
above the mere interests of commerce or the necessities of
self-defence. Like the ideals of art they are partly framed by the
omission of particulars; they require to be viewed at a certain
distance, and are apt to fade away if we attempt to approach them.
They gain an imaginary distinctness when embodied in a State or in
a system of philosophy, but they still remain the visions of
‘a world unrealized.’ More striking and obvious to the
ordinary mind are the examples of great men, who have served their
own generation and are remembered in another. Even in our own
family circle there may have been some one, a woman, or even a
child, in whose face has shone forth a goodness more than human.
The ideal then approaches nearer to us, and we fondly cling to it.
The ideal of the past, whether of our own past lives or of former
states of society, has a singular fascination for the minds of
many. Too late we learn that such ideals cannot be recalled, though
the recollection of them may have a humanizing influence on other
times. But the abstractions of philosophy are to most persons cold
and vacant; they give light without warmth; they are like the full
moon in the heavens when there are no stars appearing. Men cannot
live by thought alone; the world of sense is always breaking in
upon them. They are for the most part confined to a corner of
earth, and see but a little way beyond their own home or place of
abode; they ‘do not lift up their eyes to the hills’;
they are not awake when the dawn appears. But in Plato we have
reached a height from which a man may look into the distance and
behold the future of the world and of philosophy. The ideal of the
State and of the life of the philosopher; the ideal of an education
continuing through life and extending equally to both sexes; the
ideal of the unity and correlation of knowledge; the faith in good
and immortality—are the vacant forms of light on which Plato
is seeking to fix the eye of mankind.

8. Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in
Greek Philosophy, float before the minds of men in our own day: one
seen more clearly than formerly, as though each year and each
generation brought us nearer to some great change; the other almost
in the same degree retiring from view behind the laws of nature, as
if oppressed by them, but still remaining a silent hope of we know
not what hidden in the heart of man. The first ideal is the future
of the human race in this world; the second the future of the
individual in another. The first is the more perfect realization of
our own present life; the second, the abnegation of it: the one,
limited by experience, the other, transcending it. Both of them
have been and are powerful motives of action; there are a few in
whom they have taken the place of all earthly interests. The hope
of a future for the human race at first sight seems to be the more
disinterested, the hope of individual existence the more
egotistical, of the two motives. But when men have learned to
resolve their hope of a future either for themselves or for the
world into the will of God—‘not my will but
Thine,’ the difference between them falls away; and they may
be allowed to make either of them the basis of their lives,
according to their own individual character or temperament. There
is as much faith in the willingness to work for an unseen future in
this world as in another. Neither is it inconceivable that some
rare nature may feel his duty to another generation, or to another
century, almost as strongly as to his own, or that living always in
the presence of God, he may realize another world as vividly as he
does this.

The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by
us under similitudes derived from human qualities; although
sometimes, like the Jewish prophets, we may dash away these figures
of speech and describe the nature of God only in negatives. These
again by degrees acquire a positive meaning. It would be well, if
when meditating on the higher truths either of philosophy or
religion, we sometimes substituted one form of expression for
another, lest through the necessities of language we should become
the slaves of mere words.

There is a third ideal, not the same, but akin to these, which
has a place in the home and heart of every believer in the religion
of Christ, and in which men seem to find a nearer and more familiar
truth, the Divine man, the Son of Man, the Saviour of mankind, Who
is the first-born and head of the whole family in heaven and earth,
in Whom the Divine and human, that which is without and that which
is within the range of our earthly faculties, are indissolubly
united. Neither is this divine form of goodness wholly separable
from the ideal of the Christian Church, which is said in the New
Testament to be ‘His body,’ or at variance with those
other images of good which Plato sets before us. We see Him in a
figure only, and of figures of speech we select but a few, and
those the simplest, to be the expression of Him. We behold Him in a
picture, but He is not there. We gather up the fragments of His
discourses, but neither do they represent Him as He truly was. His
dwelling is neither in heaven nor earth, but in the heart of man.
This is that image which Plato saw dimly in the distance, which,
when existing among men, he called, in the language of Homer,
‘the likeness of God,’ the likeness of a nature which
in all ages men have felt to be greater and better than themselves,
and which in endless forms, whether derived from Scripture or
nature, from the witness of history or from the human heart,
regarded as a person or not as a person, with or without parts or
passions, existing in space or not in space, is and will always
continue to be to mankind the Idea of Good.