BOOK I.

BOOK II.

BOOK III.

BOOK IV.

BOOK V.

BOOK VI.

BOOK VII.

BOOK VIII.

BOOK IX.

BOOK X.

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. 435, 436 ff), 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, 33. 18).

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. 25 C),

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,

iii. 698 ff.), singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis,

perhaps making the reflection of Herodotus (v. 78) 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. 215 D) 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, vol. ii. p 1.), 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. 47). 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., 193 A, 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. 34 A), 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. iv. 16), 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 τὰ φορτικὰ

αὐτῷ προσφέροντες, ‘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. Act. iv. Sc.

2.)

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 un-Greek

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 intelligible...’

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 to-day. 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 ‘aufklärung.’ 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 (ἅπαν τὸ βέβαιον

αὐτῶν ἐξοίχεται). 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 till 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