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by some that we might in time by suitable marriage arrangements or, as
Plato would have said, ‘by an ingenious system of lots,’ produce a
Shakespeare or a Milton. Even supposing that we could breed men having
the tenacity of bulldogs, or, like the Spartans, ‘lacking the wit to
run away in battle,’ would the world be any the better? Many of the
noblest specimens of the human race have been among the weakest
physically. Tyrtaeus or Aesop, or our own Newton, would have been
exposed at Sparta; and some of the fairest and strongest men and women
have been among the wickedest and worst. Not by the Platonic device of
uniting the strong and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of
sentiment and morality, nor yet by his other device of combining
dissimilar natures (Statesman), have mankind gradually passed from the
brutality and licentiousness of primitive marriage to marriage
Christian and civilized.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And first of the Laws.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The same, or nearly the same, objections apply to Plato’s later work,
the Laws, and therefore we had better examine briefly the constitution
which is therein described. In the Republic, Socrates has definitely
settled in all a few questions only; such as the community of women and