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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