)2> 356' ye? J ^ atltaca, Slew ^nrk LIBRARV (JF;^ THE SAGE SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY ..CO'i'iELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 3 1924 092 280 027 DATE DUE _^ Bf€-:- ■'-— __ ^^ #___ _ — ■■^^M^'^T "I^W-f- V. — — - — t ' — — — 1 — A r) A. CAVLOHD PRINTED IN U S.». WHESSISSP ^-r-f J- Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924092280027 PREFACE I'N publishing a third edition of the Republic of Plato (originally included in my edition of Plato's works) , I have to acknowledge the assistance of sev- eral friends, especially of my secretary, Mr. Matthew Knight, now residing for his health at Davos, and of Mr. Frank Fletcher, Exhibitioner of BaUiol College. To their accuracy and scholarship I am under great obhgations. The excellent index, in which are con- tained references to the other dialogues as well as to the Repubhc, is entirely the work of Mr. Knight. I am also considerably indebted to Mr. J. W- Mackail, Fellow of BaUiol College, who read over the whole book in the previous edition, and noted several inac- curacies. The additions and alterations both in the introduc- tion and in the text, affect at least a third of the work. CONTENTS PAGD PLATO'S LIFE . ,• vii PLATO'S WRITINGS xxiii PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY xlv INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS 1 PLATO'S LIFE PLATO'S LIFE There is hardly another philosopher of antiquity ■with whose life we are so intimately acquainted as with Plato's; yet even in his case, traditiort is often uncertain and still more often incomplete. Born some years after the commencement of the Pelopon- nesian war, the son of an ancient aristocratic house, favoured also by wealth, no less than birth, he must have found in lus education and surroundings abun- dant intellectual food; and even without the express testimony of history, we might conclude that he profited by these advantages to the fullest expansion of his brilliant genius. Among the few further par- ticulars that have descended to us respecting his earlier years, our attention is principally drawn to three points, important in their iiifluence on his mental development. Of these we may notice first the general condi- tion of his country, and the political position of his family. Plato's youth coincided with that unhappy period succeeding the Sicilian defeat when all the f aiolts of the previous Athenian government were so terribly avenged, all the disadvantages of unlimited democ- racy so nakedly exposed, all the pernicious results of the self-seelang ethics and sophistical culture of the time so unreservedly displayed. He himself belonged to a social class and to a family which regarded the existing constitution with undisguised, and not always groundless discontent. Several of his nearest relations were among the spokesmen of the aristocratic party. But when that party had viii PLATO'S LIFE / itself been raised to power by the common eneniy, on the ruins of Athenian greatness, it so misused its strength that the eyes of its bhndest adherently were inevitably opened. It is easy to see how a noble, high-minded youth, in the midst of such experiences and influences, might be disgusted, not only with democracy, but with existing State systems in gen- eral, and take refuge in political Utopias, which would further tend to draw off his mind/ from the actual towards the ideal. ' Again, there were other circumstances simulta- neously working in the same direction./ We know that Plato in his youth occupied himself with poetical attempts, and the artistic ability already evinced by some of his earliest writings, coupled with the poetical character of his whole system, would lead us to sup- pose that these studies went far beyond the super- ficiality of a fashionable pursuit. There is, therefore, little reason to doubt (however untrustworthy may be our more precise information on the subject) that he was intimate with the great poets of his country. Lastly, he had, even before his acquaintance with Socrates, turned his attention to philosophy, and through Cratylus the Heraclitean had become ac- quainted with a doctrine which, in combination with other elements, essentially contributed to his later system. All these influences, however, appear as of little importance by the side of Plato's acquaintance with Socrates. We can not, of course, say what direction his mind might have taken without this teacher, but the question may well remain unanswered. We know enough to prove from all historical traces that the deepest, most lasting, most decisive impression was produced by the philosophic reformer on his con- genial disciple. Plato himself is said to have es- PLATO'S LIFE ix teemed it. as the highest of Fortune's favors, that he should have been born in the lifetime of Socrates, and later tradition has adorned with a significant myth the first meeting of the two men. But apart from this, the fact must always be regarded as one of those remarkable contingencies which are too im- portant in their bearing on the course of history to be severed from it in our thought. During a long and confidential intercourse, Plato penetrated so deeply into the spirit of his distinguished friend that the -portrait of that spirit which he was able to be- queath to us is at once the most faithful and the most ideal that we possess. Whether at that time he di- rected his attention to other teachers of philosophy, and if so, to what extent, we do not know; but it is scarcely credible that a youth so highly, educated, and so eager for knowledge — whose first impulse, more- over, towards philosophy had not come from Socrates — should have made no attempt until his thirtieth year to inform himself as to the achievements of the earlier philosophers, should have learned nothing from his friend Euclid about the Eleatics, nor from Simmias and Cebes about Philqlaus: that he shoiild have inquired no further respecting the doctrines con- tinually brought to the surface by the public lectures and disputations of the Sophists, and left unread the writings of Anaxagoras, so easily to-be obtained in Athens. It is nevertheless probable that the over- powering influence of the Socratic teaching may have temporarily weakened his interest in the earlier nat- ural philosophies, and that close and repeated study may afterwards have given him a deeper insight into their doctrines. Similarly, his own imaginative nature, under the restraining influence of his master's dialectic, was probably habituated to severer thought and more cautious investigation; perhaps, indeed, his X PLATO'S LIFE idealistic tendendes received at first an absolute check; and conceptual science, together with the art of forming concepts, was only to be attained by him — a stranger like his contemporaries to all such things — through the dry prosaic method of the So- cratic inquiry. But Plato needed this schooling to give him the repose and certainty of the scientific method — to develope him from a poet into a philos- opher; nor did he in the process permanently lose anything for which his natural temperament designed him. Socrates' conceptual philosophy had given him a glance into a new world, and he forthwith set out to explore it. The tragic end of his aged master, a consumma- tion which he seems at the outset to have thought wholly impossible, must have been a fearful blow to Plato; and one consequence of this shock, which still seems long years afterwards to vibrate so sensibly in the thrilling description of the Phsedb, may have been pierhaps the illness which prevented the faithful dis- ciple from attending his master at the last. We are, however, more immediately concerned with the in- quiry as to the effect of the fate of Socrates on Plato's philosophic development and view of the world; and if for this inquiry we are thrown upon conjectures, these are not entirely devoid of probability. On the one hand, for example, we shall find no difficulty in understanding how his reverence for his departed teacher was immeasurably increased by the destiny which overtook him, and the magnanimity with which he yielded to it; how the martyr of philosophy, faithful unto death, became idealized in his heart and memory as the very type of the true philosopher; how principles tested by this fiery ordeal received in his eyes the consecration of a higher truth; how at once his judgment on the men and circumstances con- PLATO'S LIFE 3d • cemed in the sacrifice of Socrates grew harder, and his hope as to any political efficiency in those cir- cumstances fainter; nay, how the general tendency was fostered in him to contemplate reality in a gloomy light, and to escape from the ills of the present hfe into a higher, supersensuous world. On the other hand, it may perhaps have been better for his scientific growth that his connection with Socrates lasted no longer than it did. During the years of their intercourse he had made his teacher's spirit his own, in completer fulness than was possible to any of his fellow students; it was now for him to per- fect the Socratic science by the addition of new ele- ments, and to fit himself by the utmost expansion in many directions for erecting it on an independent basis: his apprenticeship (Lahrjahre) was over, his travelling time ( Wander jahre) was come. After the death of Socrates, Plato, with others of his pupils, first betook himself to Megara, where a circle of congenial minds had gathered round Euclid. He afterwards undertook journeys which led him to Egypt, Cyrene, Magna Grsecia, and Sicily. Owing to the meagreness, and sometimes the contradictori- ness, of the traditions, it is impossible to ascertain with certainty how long he continued in Megara, when he commenced his travels, whether they im- mediately succeeded the Megaric sojourn, or a return to Athens intervened; whether his stay in Athens was long or short; and whether he had or had not become a teacher of philosophy before his departure. But if he really returned from Sicily only ten or twelve years after the death of Socrates, there is great prob- ability, and even some external evidence, that long before his journey he had settled in Athens, and there worked as teacher and author; even granting that at this period his instructions were confined to xii PLATO'S LIFE a select few, and that the opening of his school in the Academy took place later on. What, in this case, we are to think about the journey to Egypt and Cyrene — whether the visit to Sicily was im- mediately connected with it, or whether Plato first returned to Athens from Egypt, and only under- took the Italian journey after an interval of some years, can not be certainly determined, but there is a good deal in favor of the latter alternative. If, indeed, Plato had already attained to man- hood when he visited the countries of the south and west; had already, that is, before his personal acquaintance with the Italian Pythagoreans, found the scientific bases of his system, and laid them down in writings, these journeys can not have had the striking effect on his philosophical development which is often ascribed to them in ancient and modern days. Besides the general enlargement of his views and knowledge of human nature, his chief gain from them seems to have consisted in a closer acquaintance with the Pythagorean school (whose principal written book he appears to have pur- chased), and in a deeper study of mathematics. To this study, Theodorus is said to have introduced him, and we have at any rate no proof against the correctness of the statement. He may have re- ceived futher mathematical instruction from Archy- tas and other Pythagoreans, so that we can scarcely be wrong in connecting with this journey his predilection for science, and his remarkable knowledge of it: while, on the contrary, the stories about the mathematical lore, priestly mysteries, and political ideas which he is stated to have acquired in Egypt, are in the highest degree improbable. In Sicily, Plato visited the court of Dionysius the elder. But in spite of his close intimacy with Dion, PLATO'S LIFE xiii he gave great offence there by his plain speaking, and the tyrant in wrath delivered up the trouble- some moralizer to the Spartan ambassador PoUis, by whom he was exposed for sale in the slave- market of iEgina. Ransomed by Anniceris, a Cyrenian, he thence returned to his native city. Plato seems now to have made his first formal appearance as a teacher. Following the example of Socrates, who had sought out intelligent youths in the Gymnasia and other public places, — he, too, first chose as the scene of his labours a gymnasium, the Academy, whence, however, he subsequently withdrew into his own garden, which was adjacent. Concerning his manner of instruction tradition tells us nothing; but if we consider how decidedly he expresses himself against the rhetoricians who made long speeches, but knew neither how to ask questions nor how to answer them; and how low, on the same ground, was his estimation of written exposition, open to every misunderstanding and abuse, — in comparison with the hving personal agency of conversation, — if we mark the fact, that in his own works, the development of thought by dialogue is a law, from which in his long hterary career he allowed himself not a single noteworthy departure, — we can scarcely doubt that in his oral teaching he remained true to these main principles. On the other hand, however, we hear of a dis- course on the Good, published by Aristotle and some of his fellow pupils, and belonging to Plato's later years. Aristotle himself mentions discourses on Philosophy; and that these were not conversa- tions, but in their general character at any rate continuous discourses, is witnessed partly by express testimony, partly by their internal evidence, which can be taken in no other way. Also, there are many xiv PLATO'S LIFE portions of the Platonic system which from their nature could not well be imparted conversationally. It is most probable, therefore, that Plato, accord- ing to circumstances, made use of both forms; while the supposition must be admitted that as in his writings, so in his verbal instruction, question and answer gave place to unbroken exposition, in proportion, partly to the diminished vivacity of increasing years, partly to the necessary advance in his teaching, from preparatory inquiries to the dogmatic statement of his doctrine in detail. That, side by side with the communications in- tended for the narrower circle of his friends, he should have given other discourses designed for the general pubhc, is not likely. It is more credible that he may have brought his writings into connec- tion with his spoken instruction, and imparted them to his scholars by way of stimulus to their memories. On this point, however, we are entirely without in- formation. Plato doubtless combined with intel- lectual intercourse that friendly Kfe-in-common to which he himself had been accustomed in the Socratic circle and the Pythagorean Society. With a phil- osopher so little able to separate philosophic from moral endeavour, it might be expected that com- munity of knowledge would naturally grow into community of hfe. In this way he appears to have joined his scholars at stated intervals in social re- pasts. There can be no doubt, from what we know of his sentiments on the subject, that his instruc- tions were altogether gratuitous; and if, on certain occasions, he accepted presents from some of his rich friends, there is no reason to conclude that such voluntary offerings were therefore customary among his disciples in the Academy. Plato's sphere of work seemed to him to be PLATO'S LIFE xv limited to this intellectual and educational activity, more and more, as experience deepened his convic- tion that in the then state of Athens, no diplomatic career was compatible with the principles he held. The desire, however, that it might be otherwise was none the less strong in him; and that he had not abandoned the hope of somehow and somewhere gratifying this desire is proved by his two great political works, which are designed not merely to set forth theoretical ideals, but at the same time to exert a regulative influence on actual conditions. Consequently though he, as Uttle as his great master, himself wished to be a statesman, both may cer- tainly be credited with the a,im of forming states- men; and if he repudiated political activity in circumstances which he considered hopeless, there was, at the same time, nothing in his principles to keep him back from it, should there arise a favor- able opportunity for the reaKzation of his ideas. Such an opportunity seemed to offer after the death of the elder Dionysius, when Dion, and, at his in- stigation, Dionysius the younger, invited him press- ingly to Syracuse. Could this potentate indeed be won over to Philosophy and to Plato's political behefs — (and of this Plato, or at any rate Dion, appears certainly to have indulged a hope), the most important results might be expected to follow, not only in his own kingdom, but in all Sicily and Magna Grsecia, indeed throughout the Hellenic states. Meanwhile the event proved, only too soon, how insufficiently this hope was founded. When Plato arrived in Syracuse, the young Prince re- ceived him most politely, and at first showed lively interest in the philosopher and his endeavors; but he very shortly became weary of these serious con- versations, and when his jealousy of Dion, which XVI PLATO'S LIFE was not entirely groundless, had led to an open rupture with that statesman, and at length to, the banishment of the latter, Plato must have been glad to escape from the painful position in which he found himself, by a second return home. Never- theless, after some years, at the renewed solicitations of the tyrant and entreaties of his friends, he re- solved upon yet another voyage to Sicily. His immediate aim was doubtless to attempt a recon- ciliation between Dion and Dionysius; to this may have linked themselves more distantly, new pohtical hopes: the undertaking, however, turned out so unfortunately that Plato was even in considerable danger from the mistrust of the passionate prince, and only evaded it by the intervention of the Pytha- goreans, who were then at the head of the Tarentine state. Whether, after his return, he approved of Dion's hostile aggression on Dionysius, we do not know; but for his own part, from this time, having now attained his seventieth year, he seems to have renounced all active interference with poUtics. The activity of his intellect, however, continued amidst the reverence of countrymen and foreigners, una- bated till his death, which after a happy and peace- ful old age, is said to have overtaken him at a wedding feast. Even in antiquity, the character of Plato was the subject of many calumnies. The jests of the comic poets which have come down to us are indeed harm- less enough, and concern the philosopher more than the man; but there are other reproaches, for the silencing of which Seneca's apology — that the hfe of a philosopher can never entirely correspond with his doctrine, — is scarcely sufficient. On the one hand, he is accused of connections, which, if proved, would forever throw a shadow on his mem- PLATO'S LIFE xvii ory; on the other of unfriendly, an& even of hostile behavior towards several of his fellow disciples. He has also been charged with censoriousness and self-love; not to mention the seditious behavior after the death of Socrates which scandal has laid to his account. His relation with the Syracusan court was early made the handle for divers accusa- tions, such as love of pleasure, avarice, flattery of tyrants; and his political character has especially suffered at the hands of those who were themselves unable to grasp his ideas. Lastly, if we are to be- lieve his accusers, he not only, as an author, allowed himself numerous false assertions respecting his predecessors, but also such indiscriminate quotation from their works, that a considerable portion of his own writings can be nothing more than a robbery from them. All these complaints, however, so far as we are in a position to test them, appear so un- founded that scarcely a fraction of them will stand the process of investigation; and the rest are sup- ported by such weak evidence, that they ought not to affect that reverence for the character of the philosopher which is certain to ensue from the pe- rusal of his works. So far as a man may be judged by what he has written, only the very highest opinion can be formed of the personality of Plato. To appreciate him correctly, however, he must be meas- ured by a standard that takes account of his natural disposition and historical place. Plato was a Greek, and he was proud of being one. He belonged to a rank and to a family, the prejudices as well as the ad- vantages of which he was content to share. He lived at a time when Greece had touched the high- est point of her national life, and was steadily de- clining from political greatness. His nature was ideal, adapted rather to artistic creation and sden- xviii PLATO'S LIFE tific research than to practical action; which ten- dency, nourished and confirmed by the whole course of his hfe, and the strong influence of the Socratic School, could not fail to be still further strength- ened by his own political experiences. From such a temperament and such influences might be evolved all the virtues of a man and a philosopher, but nought of the grandeur of a politician. Plato might desire the very best for his country, and be ready to sacrifice for her sake everything except his convic- tions: but that he should have thrown himself into the turmoil of political hfe, for which he was quite unfitted, — that he should have lavished his soul's strength in propping up a constitution, the founda- tions of which he thought rotten, — that he should have used means that he felt to be useless to stem the torrent of opposing fate, — that he, like Demos- thenes, should have led the forlorn hope among the ruins of Grecian freedom, — would be too much to expect. His province was to examine into State problems and the conditions of their solution; their practical realization he abandoned to others. Thus inner disposition and outward circumstances alike designed him for philosophy rather than state- craft. But even his philosophy had to be pursued differently from that of Socrates, nor could his habits of life exactly resemble his master's. He desired to be true in the main to the Socratic pattern, and by no means to return to the mode of teaching adopted by the Sophists. But aiming as he did at the for- mation and propagation of a comprehensive system, — aphoristic conversation, conditioned by a hundred accidental circumstances, was not enough for him; he wanted more extensive machinery, skilled labor, intellectual quiet; he wanted hearers who would follow his inquiries in their entire connection, and PLATO'S LIFE xix • devote to them their whole time; his philosophy- was forced to withdraw itself from street and mar- ket, within the precincts of a school. Here already were many deviations from the Socratic way of hfe; many more sprang from Plato's own habits and inclinations, which were generally opposed to it. Simplicity and temperance were indeed required by his principles, and are ex- pressly ascribed to him; but the entire freedom from wants and possessions to which Socrates at- tained, would not have suited a man of his education and circimistances. Himself full of artistic taste, he could not deny all worth to hfe's external adorn- ments; extending his scientific research unreser- vedly to all- reality, he could hardly, in ordinary life, be so indifferent to the outward, as they who, like Socrates, were satisfied with moral introspection. Socrates, in spite of his anti-democratic politics, was, by nature, a thorough man of the people: Plato's personahty, like his philosophy, bears a more aristocratic stamp. He loves to shut himself up in his own circle, to ward off what is vulgar and dis- turbing; his interest and solicitude are not for all without distinction, but only or chiefly for the elect who are capable of sharing lus culture, his knowledge, his view of life. The aristocracy of intelhgence on which his State rests has deep roots in the character of Plato. But precisely to this circumstance are owing the grandeur and completeness that make his character in its particular sphere unique. As Plato in his capacity of philosopher unites the boldest idealism with rare acuteness of thought, a disposition for abstract critical inquiry with the freshness of artistic creativeness ; — so does he, as a man, com- bine severity of morail principles with lively sus^ ceptibility for beauty, nobility and loftiness of mind XX PLATO'S LIFE with tenderness of feeling, passion with self-control, enthusiasm for his purpose with philosophic calm, gravity with mildness, magnanimity with human kindness, dignity with gentleness. He is great because he knew how to blend these apparently con- flicting traits into unity, to complement opposites by means of each other, to develope on all sides the exuberance of his powers and capabihties into a per- fect harmony, without losing himself in their mul- tiplicity. That moral beauty and soundness of the whole life, which Plato, as a true Greek, requires be- fore all things, he has, if his nature be tridy repre- sented in his works, brought to typical perfection in his own personality. Nor is the picture marred by incongruity of outward semblance with inward reality, for his bodily strength and beauty have been especially recorded. . But throughout, the most strik- ing peculiarity of the philosopher is that close con- nection of his character with his scientific aims, which he owes to the Socratic school. The moral perfection of his life is rooted in the clearness of his understanding; it is light of science which disperses the mists of his soul, and causes that Olympian serenity which breathes so refreshingly from his works. In a word, Plato's is an Apollo-Uke nature, and it is a fitting testimony to the imjjression pro- duced by himself on his contemporaries, and by his writings on after generations, that many myths should have placed him, hke Pythagoras, in the closest union with the god who, in the bright clear- ness of his spirit, was to the Greeks the very type of moral beauty, proportion, and harmony. PLATO'S WKITINGS PLATO'S WRITINGS The most eloquent monument of the Platonic spirit, and the most important source for our knowledge of the Platonic doctrine, are in the writ- ings of the philosopher himself. His literary activ- ity extends over the greater part of his Ufe, a period of more than fifty years, — and by a special favor of Fortune, it has so happened that not one of the works which he intended for pubhcity has been lost. This is at any rate a reasonable inference from the fact that no reliable trace of the existence of any Platonic writing no longer in our possession has; come down to us; for the spuriousness of the lost dialogues of which we do hear is beyond question, and some other writings which might be supposed to be Platonic — the " Division " Discourses about Philosophy, and about the Good, " the unwritten doctrines " — originally never claimed to be the works of Plato at all. There is no ground even for think- ing that any Platonic writing was ever more com- plete than it is now. Fortune has indeed bestowed less care on the purity of the Platonic collection. Even the learned among the Greeks regarded as spurious several of the writings that bore Plato's name; the critics of our own century, sometimes unanimously, sometimes by an overwhelming majority, have rejected a still greater number; others are yet upon their trial, and among these, as formerly happened on the first appearance of Ast and Socher, is to be found more than one work the repudiation of which would con- siderably affect our apprehensions of the Platonic xxiv PLATO'S WRITINGS philosophy. Though an exhaustive investigation of this subject would exceed the limits of the present treatise, we must to a certain extent examine it, and notice the points of view on which our judgment of it depends. With regard then first to the external evidence, from the consideration of which every such inquiry must start, — by far the most important is that of Aristotle. For setting this aside, very few remarks of ancient authors concerning the works of Plato have been handed down to us, either from his own or the succeeding century; and these relate almost entirely to writings which Aristotle, too, distinctly ascribes to Plato. Towards the end of the third century, Aristophanes of Byzantium first ar- ranged a portion of the works in those five Trilogies which we know from Diog. iii. 61 ; and fully two cent- uries later, Thrasylus made a catalogue of them in nine Tetralogies, which catalogue, with a few very unimportant exceptions, contains all the writings transmitted to us as Platonic. Grote thinks we may place entire confidence, not only in the statements of Aristophanes, Ibut even in the catalogue of Thrasylus. It can not be supposed, he argues, that the school of Athens, which was continued in an un- broken line from its commencement, should not have been completely and accurately informed of all that its founder had written. On the contrary, there can be no doubt that his very handwriting was carefully preserved there: and the members of the Academy were thus in a position to furnish the most trust- worthy information to anyone who sought it, con- cerning the authenticity or the text of a Platonic work. Such an opportunity would surely not have been neglected by Demetrius Phalereus and his successors at the founding of the Alexandrian Li- brary. They would either have procured copies of PLATO'S WRITINGS xxv ♦ the original manuscripts of Plato, or have instituted inquiries in Athens as to the authenticity of the works which they received into their collection, causing a catalogue to be made of all the undoubted writings; and since Aristophanes certainly and Thrasylus probably, followed in their catalogues the Alexandrian tradition, the statements of these writers may be fairly supposed entitled to a high degree of credit. This theory, however, rests wholly upon a series of uncertain presuppositions. It may be that the original manuscripts of Plato, or copies of his works used by himself, were preserved in the Acad- emy, though not a particle of historical evidence on the subject exists; but even supposing such to have been the case, who can guarantee that not only Plato's personal disciples, but their successors, were so convinced of the completeness of their collection, and so jealously watchful over its purity, as to deny admittance to every book not included in it, and represented to them as Platonic? Not to mention that there are many conceivable cases in which the manuscript collection in possession of the school might have to be completed by genuine Platonic works. And granted that the Academy had indeed never admitted any spurious writing into their hbrary, how can we be sure that the Alexandrian librarians were equally scrupulous? They certainly might, on the above presupposition, have informed themselves in Athens as to the works which were there acknowledged to be authentic, but how can we know that they actually did this? There is not the slightest warrant for the assertion; but on the other hand we are told that the high prices paid for writ- ings in Alexandria and Pergamus gave great en- couragement to forgery, and that in particular many works were falsely attributed to Aristotle, in xxvi PLATO'S WRITINGS order that they might be bought by Ptolemy Phila- delphus. When we further consider the state of literary criticism in the post Aristotelian period, it seems unreasonable to credit the Alexandrians with having tested the authenticity of works bearing illus- trious names, so carefully and accurately as Grote presupposes. The catalogues of Aristophanes and Thrasylus therefore merely prove that the writings they include were held to be Platonic at the time of these grammarians; whether they really were so or not, can only be determined by a particular inquiry into each work, according to the general rules of criticism. The statements of Aristotle afford a much safer criterion; but even with regard to these, the case is by no means so simple as might be supposed. In the first place, it is sometimes doubtful whether the writing or the passage which refers to a saying of Plato's in truth emanates from Aristotle; and this doubt has already destroyed or weakened the argu- mentative force of some quotations. But even though the Aristotelian authorship of a passage apparently relating to Platonic writings be fully estabUshed, the reference is not always of a kind that implies an unequivocal recognition of the writings. If not merely the name of the writing is given, but also that of the author; if Aristotle says, " Plato re- marks in the Timasus, Republic," &c., there can of course be no hesitation as to his meaning. But not unfrequently the writing in which some passage is to be found is named without mention of its author; or conversely, utterances and opinions are ascribed to Plato, and nothing is stated concerning the writ- ings in which they occur; or lastly, reference is made to theories and expressions contained in our Platonic collection, and yet there is no allusion either to Plato PLATO'S WRITINGS xxvii • as their author, or to a particular writing as their source. It also happens sometimes that a passage from some dialogue is quoted with an express men- tion of the dialogue, and yet is attributed to Socrates, and not to Plato. In all these cases, the question arises whether or not we can claim Aristotelian evi- dence for the Platonic origin of the writings con- cerned; but a portion of them only need occasion us any serious doubt. If Aristotle, in naming a dia- logue, remarks, " Socrates here maintains this or that," he always means by it that Plato in this dialogue has put the remark into the mouth of Socrates. For not only does he employ the same mode of expression as to writings which he elsewhere most emphatically attributes to Plato, but he never quotes an opinion or a saying of Socrates from any writing that is not in our Platonic collection; though he must certainly have been acquainted with the Socratic dialogues of Xenophon, iEschines, and Antisthenes. Indeed the Socratic utterances are regarded by him as so com- pletely identical with Plato's works, that he even designates the Laws as Socratic, although Socrates never appears in them, and is probably not intended by the Athenian stranger; and he quotes views which were entirely originated by Plato and put in the mouth of his master, simply as the views of Socrates, without any discrimination of the Platonic from the historic Socrates. If, therefore, a dialogue in our collection is thus treated by Aristotle, we may be certain that he considers it a work of Plato. The same holds good as to dialogues which are cited with- out the name either of Socrates or Plato. This kind of quotation only presupposes that the writing in question is known to the reader, and will not be mis- taken for anything else; we therefore find it employed about other works that are universally famous; but xxviii PLATO'S WRITINGS among the philosophic writings which Aristotle men- tions in this way, there is none which does not belong to our Platonic collection: the Platonic writings, as before remarked, are the only writings of the Socratie school to which he ever refers. This circumstance makes it extremely probable that Aristotle really in- tends to ascribe all the writings quoted by him in this form to Plato, otherwise we should certainly have had a right to expect that those which he considered spurious, especially if in their style and treatment they might claim to be Platonic, would not have been introduced without some hint as to the true state of the case. For he could not presuppose this to be necessarily known to his readers. As to those passages which attribute to Plato or Socrates theories and sayings to be met vidth in the Platonic writings, but which do not mention the writ- ings, Aristotle himself very often furnishes us with a proof that he is really referring to these by his use of the present tense: " Plato maintains," " Socrates says," and the like. When he employs this form of expression, it is a sure indication that he has in his mind those Socratie or Platonic discourses which are laid down in writings; and when we find these very discourses in a work that tradition assures us to be Platonic, it is hardly possible to doubt that this is the work to which the quotation relates. An appeal of this kind to Socratie or Platonic utterances, there- fore, if these conditions fully obtain, has no less force than the literal mention of the particular writing, and the express acknowledgement of its Platonic origin. On the other hand, however, we must not conclude that Aristotle, whenever he makes use of the preterite in mentioning a doctrine of Socrates or Plato, refers only indirectly or not at all, to the writings that con- tain it. Several cases are here to be distinguished. PLATO*S WHITINGS xxlx In the first place, the perfect tense may properly be employed, and is very commonly employed by Aristotle, in quoting the sayings of Plato, or of the Platonic Socrates, from a writing. It is somewhat different with the narrative forms — the imperfect and aorist. These are only used in respect to Socrates when some theory is to be ascribed to the historic Socrates, supposing it to have become known to Aristotle through certain writings. For it might very well be said of the Platonic Socrates that he maintains something (in the present), or that some- thing is in question as said by him (in the perfect), but not that he formerly has said something, because as this ideal person he exists for the reader of the Platonic writings, and for him only, in the present; he has no existence independently of the reader and belonging to the past. If, however, Plato himself is mentioned as having said or thought something, this consideration has no longer any force. His utterances are not merely sayings which are present to us in his works, but also acts which he completed in the com- pilation of those works; in that case, therefore, a his- toric tense, as well as a present, might be used in quoting them. Though this does not occur very fre- quently, it is sometimes to be met with, and we have consequently no right to conclude from the use of the preterite in the quotation of a Platonic saying, that it is not derived from any written work. But there are also many passages in Aristotle where neither Plato nor any one of his dialogues is mentioned, but which have internal evidence to show that Aristotle in writing them had definitely in view particular works of Plato, and which very often allude to these unmistakably, though indirectly. The argu- mentative value of these passages can only be deter- mined in each case by an appeal to the ordinary rules XXX PLATO'S WRITINGS of criticism. The more perfect is the coincidence between the passage in Aristotle and the correspond- ing passage of a Platonic dialogue, and the less reason we have for supposing that the author of the dialogue made use of the Aristotelian writing, the clearer it becomes that the dialogue in question was known to Aristotle, and the greater the probabihty that this, like other portions of our Platonic collection, simi- larly quoted and employed, was recognised by him as genuine. Among the writings that have been transmitted to us as Platonic, those which are most frequently criti- cised by Aristotle, with continual mention both of the author and the dialogue, are the three great expository works — the Republic, the Timseus, and the Laws. Besides these, the Phaedo only is expressly designated by him as a work of Plato. The Phsedrus is once named, and its definition of the soul is twice quoted as Platonic. The speech of Aristophanes from the Symposium is treated in a manner that presupposes the authenticity of that dialogue; and the same may be said of the allusions to the Gorgias, Meno, and Lesser Hippias. The Thesetetus is not actually men- tioned, but passages are adduced as from Platonic writings, which are only there to be found. Similarly the Philebus is not named by Aristotle ; but in certain passages of his Ethics he evidently has it in mind, and in one of these passages he cites expressly from a Platonic exposition, propositions which the Philebus alone contains. We therefore can not doubt that he was acquainted with this dialogue and recognised its authenticity. There are also in the writings of Aris- totle many indications, which sometimes taken inde- pendently, sometimes in their coincidence, unmistak- ably prove that both the Sophist and the Politicus were regarded by him as Platonic; and as the Politicus PLATO'S WRITINGS xxxi • is plainly referred to in the Laws, it has the further support of all the evidence on the side of the latter. It is clear from the Rhetoric that the Apology was acknowledged by Aristotle; but some doubt exists with regard to the Menexenus. He nowhere men- tions the Parmenides; there is only one minor par- ticular, which may possibly be quoted from it. But if the Philebus really alludes to the Parmenides, the evidence for the one dialogue would indirectly apply to the other. The Protagoras, too, is never specified; but it was apparently known to Aristotle, and used by him as a historical authority. He seems also to have been acquainted with the Lysis, Charmides, and Laches; though this is not so certain as in the case of the Protagoras. It is still more doubtful whether or not two passages relate to the Cratylus and the Greater Hippias. The Euthydemus is indeed re- ferred to by Eudemus; but the fallacies which Aris- totle quotes from the sophist of that name are not to be found in the Platonic dialogue; and though certainly on the supposition of its genuineness, we should expect Aristotle to have used it in his exam- ination of fallacies which often brought him in contact with it, this relation of the two expositions is not suffi- ciently established to serve as proof for the authen- ticity of the Euthydemus. If, then, any dialogue in our collection is mentioned by Aristotle as Platonic, or used by him in a manner that presupposes it to be so, this circumstance is greatly in favor of its authenticity. For twenty years before the death of Plato, Aristotle was a mem- ber of the Platonic School at Athens ; after that event he quitted the city, but returned twelve or thirteen years later for the rest of his life. That during the lifetime of the master any writing should have been falsely regarded as his work, by scholars who were^ xxxii PLATO'S WRITINGS already well instructed on the subject, or had the opportunity at any moment of becoming so, is quite impossible. Even in the generation succeeding his death, while Speusippus and Xenocrates were at the head of the Academy, and Aristotle and other per- sonal disciples of Plato hved in Athens, this could only have occurred under quite peculiar conditions, and to a very limited extent. It is indeed conceivable that some one of the less important dialogues might after the death of Plato have been admitted even by his immediate disciples without previous acquaintance with^ it, as an earlier work that had escaped their attention, or under certain circumstances as a pos- thumous bequest. Cases of this kind have occurred in our own times, though we are so much richer than the ancients in resources, and more practised in liter- ary criticism. It might still more easily happen that an imperfect sketch of Plato's, completed by another after his death — an unfinished writing, worked up by one of his disciples — might be received as wholly genuine, without accurate discrimination of the orig- inal from the later ingredients. But it is incredible that such things should frequently have repeated themselves in the first generation after the master's death; or that reputed works of his, which, had they existed, must on account of their importance have been owned during his lifetime by the School, should afterwards have emerged, and have been universally recognised. If the testimony of Aristotle to Platonic writings, so far as it is clear and undoubted, does not absolutely guarantee their authenticity, it is at all events so strong an argument in their favor, that only the weightiest internal evidence should be suf- fered to countervail it; and if any criticism of the Platonic collection starts from presuppositions requir- ing the rejection of numerous works recognised by PLATO'S WRITINGS xxxiji • Aristotle, there is enough in this one circumstance to prove these presuppositions incorrect. But if the evidence of Aristotle has this importance on the side of the writings from which he quotes, can we with certainty conclude that those about which he is silent are spurious? No one would maintain this without some qualification. Aristotle is not passing judgment on Plato's works as a literary historian who is bound to furnish a complete catalogue of them, and to tell all that he knows. Nor does he deal with them as a modern writer of the history of philosophy, whose object it is to combine their whole philosophic content into a representation of the Platonic theory; he only mentions them when occasion offers, in stating his own views, or criticising or opposing those of Plato and Socrates. We must not expect him, there- fore, to name everything that is known to him as Platonic, but only such writings as it was necessary or desirable to mention for the purposes of any scien- tific discussion he might happen to be pursuing. Even this canon, however, must be cautiously applied, Plato's works are for us the sole, or at any rate the principal, source of our knowledge concerning his system: we cannot speak of the Platonic philosophy without continually recurring to them. In the case of Aristotle it was otherwise. He owes his knowledge of the Platonic doctrines in the first place to verbal communication and personal intercourse; in the sec- ond place only, to the writings of Plato. They were to him but subsidiary sources; in the exposition of the doctrines, he uses them sometimes for the con- firmation of that which he already knows from Plato'$ oral discourses; but he has no occasion to enter more deeply into their contents except on subjects which were not examined in those discourses. Of such sub- jects, the most important seem to be the application xxxiv PLATO'S WRITINGS of philosophical principles to the explanation of nature and to political institutions : hence the numer- ous quotations from the Republic, the Tim«us, and the Laws. The metaphysical bases of the system, on the other hand, are indeed frequently and searchingly criticised by Aristotle, but in by far the greater num- ber of cases on the ground of Plato's discourses: the propaedeutic inquiries into the conception of knowl- edge, true virtue, and the art of governing, love, the right scientific method, and its opposition to the Sophistic teaching, are seldom touched upon. Only one of the many passages from which we derive our knowledge of the theory of ideas is quoted by him; he makes no allusion to what is said on this subject in the Republic, Timseus, Symposium, Phsedrus, and Theaetetus; nor to the explanations of the Sophist, Parmenides, and Philebus, though there was abun- dant opportunity for it. Even the well-known dis- cussions of the Republic upon the Good are merely glanced at with an uncertain hint, despite the fre- quent occasions when they might have been aptly introduced. If we turn to those dialogues the authen- ticity of which has never been questioned, we find the Protagoras, as before remarked, apparently made use of in some passages, but it is never named, and nothing is quoted from it as Platonic. The Thea^- tetus is twice mentioned, the Gorgias and the Sympo- sium once; and none of these quotations relate to the main content of the dialogues — they are only inci- dental recollections of certain particulars in them, the notice of which seems entirely fortuitous. All this being considered, we may well hesitate to conclude from Aristotle's silence with regard to any Platonic writing, that he was unacquainted with it; and this so much the more, as we do not even possess the whole of Aristotle's works, and some lost writing or frag- PLATO'S WRITINGS xxxv ment might very possibly contain citations from dialogues for which we have now no Aristotelian evidence. It is certainly surprising that Aristotle should assert that Plato never inquired wherein the participation of things in ideas consists; while in the Parmenides the difficulties with which this theory has to contend are clearly pointed out. But it is not more surprising than that he should assail the doc- trine of ideas with the question: " Who formed the things of sense after the pattern of the ideas?" — though it is distinctly stated in the Timasus that the Creator of the world did this in looking on the eternal archetypes. Nor, again, that he should maintain, notwithstanding the well-known explanation in the Phffido, often alluded to by himself — notwithstand- ing the doctrine in the Republic, of the Good being the absolute end of the world — that the final cause is not touched by the ideas. We should have expected that in attacking Plato about the r/otro? avdpcoTro?, Aristotle, had he been acquainted with the Parmen- ides, would have referred to the fact that in that dialogue the same objection is raised. But might we not also have expected after the further stricture: " Plato ought then to assume ideas of art produc- tions, mere relations, &c., which he does not," some such remark as this: "In his writings he certainly does speak of such ideas " ? And in the discussions concerning the Platonic theory of the world-soul, should we not have anticipated some mention of the passage in the Laws about the evil soul, which has given so many handles to criticism? Many other things besides these might reasonably have been looked for on the supposition that the writings of Plato had the same significance, as sources of his doctrines, for Aristotle as for us, and were used by him in a sdmilar manner. But this we have no right xxxvi PLATO'S WRITINGS to presuppose; and therefore his not alluding to a writing is by no means sufficient to prove that it was unknown to him, or that he did not acknowledge it to be Platonic. By means of Aristotle's testimony, supplemented sometimes from other quarters, we are thus enabled to ascribe a number of writings to Plato with all the certainty that can be attained in this way. These works acquaint us with the scientific and literary character of their author, and so furnish us with a criterion for the criticism of other works or portions of works which are either insufficiently supported by external evidence, or in their form or contents are open to suspicion. Great care, however, is necessary in fixing and applying this standard; and in some cases even the most cautious weighing of favorable and adverse considerations can not insure absolute certainty. In the first place we must decide, on which of the dialogues noticed by Aristotle our Platonic criterion is to be based. If we confine ourselves to those which he expressly attributes to Plato, we shall have only the Republic, the Timteus, the Phsedo, and the Laws; and important as these works are, it is questionable whether they represent the scientific and literary individuality of the many-sided Plato ex- haustively enough to make everything appear un- Platonic that at all departs from their type. If, on the other hand, we also take into account those writ- ings of which Aristotle makes use without mentioning their author, or from which he quotes something that Plato, has said, without naming the dialogue, — we find that the Philebus is as well attested as the Theas- tetus; the Sophist, Politicus, Meno, and the Lesser Hippias, as the Gorgias and Symposium; and all of them better than the Protagoras, the authenticity of which no one doubts. Our Platonic criterion must. PLATO'S WRITINGS rxxm • in this case, therefore be considerably wider than that of Ueberweg and Schaarschmidt. Moreover it must not be imagined that each divergence in a dialogue from those works considered normal is necessarily a proof of its spuriousness ; these normal works them- selves present deviations one from the other, equal in importance to many that have formed the basis of adverse judgments. If it be objected against the Philebus that it wants dramatic liveliness, and the flow of conversational development, the Protagoras may be charged with meagreness of scientific con- tent, with the entire failure of the theory of ideas, with the apparent barrenness of result in the whole inquiry, and the fatiguing prolixity of the discus- sion about the verse of Simonides. If the antinomic development of conceptions is pecuUar to the Par- menides, and elaborate classifications to the Sophist and Politicus, — the Timaeus stands alone not only in its theories of the Creator and antemundane mat- ter, the mathematical construction of the elements, the arithmetical division, and distribution of the soul in space, but in its minute treatment of the whole subject of Physics, to which no other dialogue makes an approach. The Laws are separated by a far greater interval from the Repubhc and from the other normal works than from the Politicus, and in an artistic point of view are open to much graver criticism than the dialectical dialogues; the later form of the Platonic philosophy, known to us through Aristotle, has a much more abstruse and formal char- acter than the logical and metaphysical statements of the Laws. We cannot, indeed, go quite so far, as Grote, who sometimes speaks as if Plato in none' of his works had the least regard to those already written, and thought nothing of contradicting him-| self in the most glaring manner, even in one and thej rmiii PLATO'S WRITINGS same dialogue. But we ought not, on the other hand, to forget that so exuberant a spirit as Plato's was not limited for its expression to one particular form; that the purpose of a dialogue might make it neces- sary to emphasize some points in it, and to pass slightly over others: that the nature of a subject or the readers for whom it was intended might require the style of a work to be more or less ornate, and the treatment to be more or less popular ; that much that now seems to us incomprehensible might be explained by special occasions and personal refer- ences; that as we might have anticipated, even with- out the evidence establishing it, during the sixty years of Plato's literary activity both his philosophy and his artistic method underwent a considerable change, and that on this account, if on no other, a standard derived from a portion of his works can not be applicable to them all without condition or modi- fication. These considerations certainly render a decision concerning the genuineness of Platonic writ- ings, so far as this depends on internal argtiments, very difficult and complicated. It is not enough simply to compare one dialogue with others, we must inquire whether Plato, as we know him from his undoubted works, might be supposed to have pro- duced the writing in question at a certain date and under certain circumstances. This of course can not always be answered with equal assurance, either affirmatively or negatively. It is sometimes hard to distinguish with perfect accuracy the work of a tol- erably expert imitator from a less important work of the master; what is un-Platohic from what is unfinished, or the result of Plato's advanced age; and therefore it is almost unavoidable that among the dialogues which can be vouched for as Platonic, or the reverse, others should creep in, with respect PLATO'S WRITINGS xxxix to which a certain degree of probability is all we can attain. Those writings, however, on which our knowledge and estimate of the Platonic philosophy chiefly depend, can well maintain their ground in any impartial investigation; while, on the other hand, our general view of Platonism would be very little affected by the genuineness or spuriousness of several of the lesser dialogues. It is impossible in this place to pursue this subject more particularly, or to discuss the reasons which may be urged for or against the Platonic origin of each work. But it seems necessary to point out those writings on which, as original sources of the Platonic philosophy, our exposition of that phil- osophy will be founded, if even the critical grounds which determine the position of these writings should not at once be explained, and receive only partial notice hereafter. Our collection of Platonic works contains, besides those dialogues which even in ancient times were acknowledged to be spurious, thirty-five dialogues, thirteen letters, and a number of definitions, mostly relating to ethics. Among these there are a few — the Protagoras, Phsedrus, Symposium, Gorgias, Theastetus, and Republic — the authenticity of which has never been questioned: the Pha2do also has been as little affected by the suspicion of Panaetius (if it really existed) — as the Timeeus by Schelling's tem- porary doubt. The genuineness of all these works may be considered as fully established. There are, be- sides, several other important dialogues — the Phile- bus, Sophist, Politicus, Parmenides, and Cratylus, — which, in spite 6f the repeated assaults upon them in modern days, are certainly to be regarded as Pla- tonic — not only on the strength of the Aristotelian testimony which can be cited for most of theni, but xl PLATO'S WRITINGS also on account of conclusive internal evidence. The position of the Laws will be the subject of a future discussion. There is all the less reason to mistrust the Critias, since its contents, so far as they go, are entirely in harmony with the opening of the Timaeus. The Meno is protected by a clear reference in the Phaedo, as well as by Ajistotle's quotations; and though not one of Plato's most perfect dialogues, there is no good reason to suspect its authenticity. The Euthydemus is at any rate made use of by Eude- mus, and, though often attacked, may be easily de- fended, if we bear in mind the proper design of this dialogue, and sufficiently discriminate between what is seriously intended and what is satirical exaggera- tion or irony: it would be hard to deny to Plato on trivial grounds so charming a sketch, abounding in comic power and humor. The Apology, which was known to Aristotle, is as little really doubtful as the Crito: both are perfectly comprehensible if we regard the one as in the main a true statement of facts, and the other as apparently a freer representa- tion of the motives which deterred Socrates from flight. We may consider the Lysis, Charmides, and Laches, with all of which Aristotle seems to have been acquainted, to be youthful productions, written when Plato had not as yet essentially advanced be- yond the Socratic standpoint; the Lesser Hippias, which is supported by very decisive Aristotelian evi- dence, as a first attempt; and the Euthyphro as an occasional writing, of a slight and hasty character. On the other hand, there are so many weighty inter- nal arguments against the Menexenus, that notwith- standing the passages in Aristotle's Rhetoric, it is difficult to believe this work Platonic: if Aristotle really meant to attest it, we might suppose that in this one instance he was deceived by a forgery ven-- PLATO'S WRITINGS xli tured upon soon after Plato's death. The Ion is probably, and the Greater Hippias and First Alci- biades are still more probably, spurious. The re- mainder of the dialogues in our collection, the Second Alcibiades, the Theages, the Anterasti, Hipparchus, Minos, Clitophon, and Epinomis, have been rightly abandoned almost vmanimously by all modern critics with the exception of Grote. It is impossible for a moment to allow any genuineness to the Definitions; and Karsten and Steinhart, following the example of Meiners, Hermann, and others, have conclusively shown that the Letters, as has so often happened, were foisted upon their reputed author at various dates. It has indeed been questioned whether even the undoubted works of Plato present a true picture of his system. According to some, partly to increase his own importance, partly as a precautionary meas- ure, Plato designedly concealed in his writings the real sense and connection of his doctrines, and only disclosed this in secret to his more confidential pupils. This notion has been, however, since Schleiermacher j^stly and almost universally abandoned. It can be supported neither on Platonic nor Aristotelian evi- dence : the assertions of later writers who transferred their conceptions of the Pythagorean mystical doc- trine to Plato, consequently prove nothing. It is besides utterly incredible in itself that a philosopher like Plato should have spent a long life in literary labors, designed not to impart his views, but to hide them; a purpose far more effectually and simply carried out by silence. Further he himself assigns the same content to the written as to the spoken word, when he makes the aim of the one to be the reminding us of the other. And Aristotle could not have been aware of any essential difference between xlii PLATO'S WRITINGS Plato's oral and written teaching, otherwise he would not have based his own exposition and criticism equally on both, without ever drawing attention to the fact that the true sense of the writings could only be deter- mined by the spoken comments of their author. Still less would he have taken the mythical or half mythical portions in a literal manner, only possible to one who had never conceived the idea of a secret doctrine per- vading them. Nor can this theory be brought into connection with Plato's habit of indirectly hinting at his opinion and gradually arriving at it, instead of distinctly stating it when formed; with his occa- sional pursuit, in pure caprice as it might seem, of accidental digressions; with the confessions of ignor- ance or the doubting questions that, instead of a fixed unequivocal decision, conclude many of the dialogues; or with the method that in particular cases invests philosophic thoughts with the many-colored veil of the mythus. All this, it is true, is found in Plato; and the reasons for such a method will hereafter disclose themselves. Meanwhile the form of the dia- logues will offer no insuperable hindrance to their comprehension by anyone who has penetrated their aim and plan, and learned to consider each in the light of the whole, and as explicable only in its rela- tion to others; nor again is there anything in this form to weaken the belief that in the writings of Plato we have trustworthy records of his philosophy. If, lastly, we find in these writings, side by side with philosophic inquiry, a considerable space allotted to historical description and dramatic imagery, it is yet easy in some cases to separate these elements, in others to recognise the philosophic kernel which they themselves contain. PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY The Platonic philosophy is on the one side the completion of the Socratic; but on the other, an extension and an advance upon it. As Socrates in his philosophic inquiries concerned himself with the moral quite as much as with the intellectual life — as with him right action was inseparably united with right cognition, philosophy with morality and re- ligion, being indeed one and the same thing — so is it in Plato; arif^, {"^m^ he aim of the one philo°"p^^^ was to ground inte lligence and conduct on concep- tual knuvviedM'ti, sti Lu the other the standard of all acti on— aud of a ll UUliU C tionS is t^'' r'rmt;pnr^p|qt:i^ nf ^ jp|vp.r sfll meas Flatn's views concerning the problem ancl principle of philosophy thus rest en- tirely on a Socratic basis. But that which had been with Socrates only a universal axiom became with Plato a system; that which the former had laid down as the principle of knowledge was announced by the latter as the principle of metaphysics. Socra- tes had sought that conceptual knowledge for which he claimed existence, but he had only reduced to their primary concept particular activities and phenomena in connection with the given case. He had never attempted to gain a whole from scientifically com- bined concepts, and thus to explain the totahty of the Real. He confined himself on principle to ethi- cal inquiries, and even these he pursued, not syste- matically, but in a merely inductory manner. It was Plato who first expanded the Socratic philos- ophy into a system, combined its ethics with the earlier natural philosophy, and founded both in dia- xlvi PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY lectics, or the pure science of ideas. Ellt-tJ*®-*®*^" sity immediately became a ppp^^^t ^^f « prfnoiplp— noL nnl y in p;-uide thought in the scier i tjfir mP^^"'^ i ^"^ gT^tn-LiThpT-pi-pt TTi^^tpri'Q] tVimgs in thpjf ^ccpppp a^nrl ex istence- Platn, in transcending the Socratic ethics, transcends also the Socratic acceptation of concep- tual knowledge. The cogn itinn nf I'dpag!. Socrates h ad said, is the condition of all true i ^nyrlprtprp yid r ight -actj jnn. Therefore, concludes Plato, jngica] thmip ;ht iT <'^r,n,^ ^r- ue knowledg e. All other ways of knowing- — pj-PQpn1:abnn, ^nyisagement — afford |nn "Hr^tifir mrt^inty n^ f^nnviVtlnn But if the |nc nowledp -f nf tJip irlpp iValnnf TPP^ ^""^IpfJCfii. tN'° ||rjmj.jri1 y I ii .~ indiirl injj tn F]°^" i ^""""^" ^^^T'^• il^np |lh'k ' e s imp os- sible Jo^JbiiB§,elf^ the explanation., of the phenomenal world. He perfects the conceptual philosophy into a"lystem, but is not impelled, like his successor, to enter deeply into particulars: to him the idea only is the true object of thought; the individual phe- nomenon possesses no interest. He can indeed make use of it to bring to light the idea in which it par- ticipates, but that thorough completeness with which Aristotle works his way through empirical data is not his concern. The study of particulars seems to him scarcely more than an intellectual pastime, and if he has for a while occupied himself with it, he always return?, as if wearied out, to the contempla?- W xlviii PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY tion of pure ideas. In this respect also, he stands midway between Socrates and Aristotle; between the philosopher who first taught the development of the concept from presentation or envisagement, and him who more completely than any other Greek thinker has carried it into all the spheres of actual existence. In the same proportion, however, that Plato advanced beyond Socrates, it was inevitable that he should go back to the pre-Socratic doctrines, and regard as his co-disciples those who were then seeking to apply those theories to the perfecting of the Socratic doctrine. To what an extent he did both is well known. Plato is the first of the Greek phil- osophers who not merely knew and made use of his predecessors, but consciously completed their prin- ciples by means of each other, and bound them all together in one higher principle. What Socrates had taught with regard to the concept of knowledge; Parmenides and Heraclitus, the Megarians and Cynics, on the difference between knowledge and opinion; Heraclitus, Zeno, and the Sophists, on the subjectivity of sense perception — all this he built up into a developed theory of knowledge. The Eleatic principle of Being, and the Heraclitean of Becoming, the doctrine of the unity and that of the multiplicity of things, he has, in his doctrine of Ideas, quite as much blended as opposed; while at the same time he has perfected both by means of the Anaxa- gorean conception of Spirit, the Megaro-Socratic conception of the Good, and the idealised Pytha- gorean numbers. These latter, properly understood, appear in the theory of the World-soul, and the mathematical laws, as the mediating element between the idea and the world of sense. Their one element, the concept of the Unlimited, held absolutely and combined with the Heraclitean view of the sensible PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY x\h » world, gives the Platonic definition of Matter. The cosmological part of the Pythagorean system is re- peated in Plato's conception of the universe: while in his theory of the elements and of physics proper, Empedocles and Anaxagoras, and more distantly the Atomistic and older Ionic natural philosophies, find their echoes. His psychology is deeply coloured with the teaching of Anaxagoras on the immaterial nature of mind, and with that of Pythagoras on im- mortality. In his ethics, the Socratic basis can as little be mistaken as, in his politics, his sympathy with the Pythagorean aristocracy. Yet Plato is neither the envious imitator that calumny has called him, nor the irresolute eclectic, who only owed it to favoring circumstances that what was scattered about in earlier systems united in him to form a harmonious whole. We may say more truly that this blending of the rays of hitherto isolated genius into one focus is the work of his originality and the fruit of his philosophic principle. The Socratic con- ceptual philosophy is from the outset directed to the contemplation of things in all their aspects, the dia- lectic combination of those various definitions of which now one, and now another, is mistaken by a one-sided apprehension for the whole — to the reduc- tion of the multiplicity of experience to its permanent base, Plato applies this method universally, seeking not merely the essential nature of moral activities, but the essential nature of the Real. He is thus inevitably directed towards the assumptions of his predecessors, which had all started from some true perception; but while these assumptions had related entirely and exclusively to one another, Plato's scien- tific principles required that he should fuse them all into a higher and more comprehenjsive theory of the world. As therefore Plato's knowledge of the earliwc" 1 PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY doctrines gave him the most decided impulse in the development of the Socratic teaching, it was con- versely that development which alone enabled him to use the combined achievements of the other phil- osophers for his own system. The Socratic concep- tual philosophy was transplanted by him into the fruitful and well-tilled soil of the previous natural philosophy, thence to appropriate to itself all kin- dred matter; and in thus permeating the older speculation with the spirit of Socrates, purifying and reforming it by dialectic, which was itself extended to metaphysical speculation, — in thus perfecting ethics by natural philosophy and natural philosophy by ethics — Plato has accomplished one of the great- est intellectual creations ever known. Philosophy could not indeed permanently remain in the form then given to it. Aristotle soon made very essential al- terations in the theories of his master; the older Academy itself could not maintain them in their purity, and the later systems that thought to repro- duce the system of Plato were self-deceived. But this is precisely Plato's greatness, — that he was able to give the progress of Philosophy an impulse so powerful, so far transcending the limits of his own system, and to proclaim the deepest principle of all right speculation — the Idealism of thought — with such energy, such freshness of youthful enthusiasm, that to him, despite all his scientific deficiencies, be- longs the honor of forever conferring philosophic consecration on those in whom that principle lives. In Plato's scientific method, also, we recognise the deepening, the purification and the progress of the Socratic philosophy. From the principle of concep- tual knowledge arises, as its immediate consequence, that dialectic of which Socrates must be considered the author. But while Socrates contented himself PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY U with developing the concept out of mere envisage- ment, Plato further demanded that conceptual science should be drawn out by methodical classification into a system; while Socrates, in forming concepts, starts from the contingencies of the given case, and never goes beyond the particular, Plato requires than thought shall rise, by continued analysis, from con-j ditioned to unconditioned, from the phenomenon tol the idea, from particular ideas to the highest andl most universal. The Socratic dialectic only set itself! to gain the art of right thinking for the immediate use of individuals to purify their crude presentations into concepts : the practice of dialectic was therefore at the same time education; intellectual and moral activity coincided, as much for the work of the phil- osopher in itself as for its effect on others. The Platonic dialectic, on the other hand, was subservient to the formation of a system: it has, therefore, as compared with the Socratic, larger outlines and a more fixed form. What in the one was a matter of personal discipline, in the other becomes conscious method reduced to general rules ; whereas the former aimed at educating individuals by true concepts, the latter seeks out the nature and connection of con- cepts, in themselves: it inquires not merely into moral problems and activities, but into the essential nature of the Real, proposing as its end a scien- tific representation of the universe. But Plato does not go so far in this direction as Aristotle; the tech- nicalities of logic were not formed by him, as by his pupil, into an exact, minutely particularising theory; neither for the deviation nor for the systematic ap- plication of concepts does he summon to his aid such a mass of experimental material. He cares far less for that equal spread of scientific knowledge into all departments which Aristotle desired, than for the Hi PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY .contemplation of the idea as such. He regards the 1 Empirical partly as a mere help to the attainment jof the Idea — a ladder to be left behind if we would Wain the heights of thought; partly as a type of the nature and inherent force of the ideas — a world of Bhadows, to which the Philosopher only temporarily flescends, forthwith to return into the region of light and of pure being. Whereas, therefore, Socrates in khe main confines himself to a search for concepts, the cognition of which is for him moral education; whereas Aristotle extends induction and demonstra- tion, purely in the interests of science, over all the Actual, — the special peculiarity of Plato is that moral education, intellectual teaching, and, in science itself, the formation of concepts and their develop- ment, in spite of partial separation, are yet, with him, internally held together and united by their common aim, both leading to that contemplation of the idea, which is at the same time life in the idea. This position is not indeed invariable. We see, in the dialogues, Socratic induction at first decidedly predominating over the constructive element, then both intermingling, and, lastly, inductive prepara- tion receding before systematic deduction; corres- ponding to which there is also a gradual change from the form of conversation to that of continued exposi- tion. But the fundamental character of the method is never effaced; and however deeply Plato may Isometimes go into particulars, his ultimate design is only to exhibit with all possible clearness and direct- Iness the Idea shining through the phenomenon; to /point out its reflection in the finite; to fill with its I Ught not only the intellect, but the whole man. ' This speciality in the philosophy of Plato explains the form which he selected for its communication. An artistic nature was indispensable for the produo PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY liii tion of such a philosophy ; conversely, this philosophy would infallibly demand to be informed artistically. The phenomenon, placed in such direct I'elation to the idea, becomes a beautiful phenomenon; the per- ception of the idea in the phenomenon an aesthfetic perception. Where science and life so completely interpenetrate one another, as with Plato, science can only impart itself in lively description; and as the communicating medium is ideal, this description will necessarily be poetical. At the same time, however, the exposition must be dialectical, if it is to cor- respond with the subject matter of conceptual phil- osophy. Plato satisfies both these requirements in the philosophic dialogue, by means of which he occu' pies a middle position between the personal converse of Socrates and the purely scientific continuous ex- poslition of Aristotle. The Socratic conversation is here idealised, the contingency of its motives and conduct is corrected by a stricter method — the de- fects of personahties are covered by artistic treat- ment. Yet the specialty of i verbal intercourse, the reciprocal kindling of thought, is still retained. Phil- osophy is set forth, not inerely as a doctrine, but as a living power, in the jperson of the true philosopher, and a moral and artistic effect is thus produced, of a kind that would have been impossible to bare scien- tific inquiry. Unbroken discourse is doubtless better suited to the latter; and Plato himself shows this, for in proportion as his scientific discussions gain in depth and scope, they lose in freedom of conversa- tional movement. In the earlier works, this freedom not unfrequently disturbs the clearness of the logic, while in the dialectical dialogues of the middle order it is more and more subordinated to the logical de- li^elopment of thought. In the later writings, dialogue is indeed employed with the accustomed skill for in* liv PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY troductory discussions or personal delineations; but so far as the exposition of the system is concerned it sinks into a mere form, and in the Timaeus is dis- carded at the very commencement. We need not, with Hermann, conclude from this that the form of dialogue had for Plato a merely external value; that, in fact, it was like some favorite and traditional fashion of dress inherited from his predecessors, adopted in his first attempts as a Socratic pupil, and then adhered to out of piety and loyal attachment, in opposition to general usage. He certainly had an external motive for the choice of this form in the conversations of his master, and a pattern for its artistic treatment in dramatic poetry, especially such as dealt with reflections, morals, and manners, like that of Epicharmus, Sophron, and Euripides; but it can not be proved that before his time dialogue was already much in vogue for philosophic exposi- tion ; and even if it could, we might still be sure that Plato, independent and creative as he was, and en- dowed with rare artistic feeling, would never on such purely external grounds have held to a form all his life long, even when it was most irksome to him; that mere antiquity would not have determined him in its choice, nor custom in its persistent employ- ment, unless there had been the closest internal con- nection between that form and his whole conception of philosophy. What this connection was Plato him- self points out, when in the Phaedrus he censures writing, as compared with speech, with its inability to defend itself, and its openness to all attacks and misconceptions; for if this censure holds good of written exposition in general, Plato must have been conscious that even his dialogues could not entirely escape it. Yet, on the other hand, his conviction of the advantages of speech presupposes the design of PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY Iv • appropriating as far as possible those advantages to his writing, that " image of the living and animated word; " and if those advantages, in Plato's opinion, depend upon the art of scientific dialogue, we may reasonably derive from this his own application of that art. But the dialogues themselves manifest be- yond possibility of mistake the design of compelling the reader, by their peculiar form, to the independent origination of thoughts. " Why should there so often be found in them, after the destruction of imaginary knowledge by the essentially Socratic method of proving ignorance, only isolated and apparently un- connected lines of inquiry? why should some of these be hidden by others? why should the argument at last resolve itself in apparent contradictions? un- less Plato presupposes his reader to be capable of completing by his own active participation what is wanting in any given inquiry, of discovering the central point in that inquiry, and of subordinating all the rest to that one point — presupposes also that only such a reader will attain any conviction of hav- ing imderstood at all." The above-named peculiarities are unfavorable to the systematic objective devel- opment of science. Since, therefore, Plato has em- ployed them with the most consummate art and the most deliberate intention, he must have had a special reason for it, and this can only be that he considered objective exposition as generally insufficient, and sought instead for some other manner which should stimulate the reader to possess knowledge as a self- generated thing, in which objective instruction should be conditioned by previous subjective culture. If this were the design of Plato, and he were at the same time convinced that the form of dialogue suited it better than continuous discourse, it naturally fol- lows that he would select that form for his writings. IvI PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY Thought is to him a conversation of the soul with itself; philosophic communication, an engendering of truth in another; the logical element is therefore essentially dialogical. His writings, too, were prob- ably in the first instance designed, not for the gen- eral public; but for his friends, to whom he himself would have imparted them: they were intended to remind those friends of the substance of the scientific conversations he was accustomed to carry on with them, or perhaps as a substitute for these. What therefore could be more natural than that he should adopt the form of their usual intercourse — that of the Socratic dialogue? Stricter science, in the sequel, wisely abandoned this form; but for Plato it was according to nature, and he stands alone and un- approached among all writers of philosophic dia- logues, before and after him, because in the case of no other writer did the conditions under which his dialogues were produced exist in similar measure — in his person that rare combination of intellectual and artistic gifts, in his philosophy that equal per- fection and inner fusion of the theoretical and prac- tical, of the philosophic Eros, and of dialectic. The central point of the dialogues is Socrates. Not only does he appear in most of them as the leader in conversation, in the rest as an acute and important listener and occasional speaker, but his personality is pre-eminently the bond which artis- tically unites the several pieces; and some of the most powerful and most delightful of the dialogues are devoted quite as much to the painting of this personality as to the philosophic development of doc- trine. This trait is primarily a tribute of gratitude and veneration offered by the disciple to his master. Plato is conscious that he owes to Socrates what is best in his spiritual life, and, under this conviction. PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY M gives back to him in his writings the noblest fruits of the borrowed seed as his own. That Socrates should be brought forward was necessary, too, on artistic grounds; for the unity of the Platonic doc- trine, and the intimate connection of all the writings devoted to it, could in no way be more artistically represented than by their association with one and the same personality; and that the personality of Socrates was far more suitable than any other; that a nobler, pleasanter picture — a picture more capable of ideahsation — resulted from Plato's placing his opinions in the mouth of Socrates, instead of enun- ciating them himself, needs no proof. His procedure has doubtless another and a deeper reason, rooted in the foundations of his manner of thought. Philosophy, according to his acceptation, being not merely a set of doctrines but the perfecting of the whole spiritual Uf e ; and science, not a finished, communicable system, apart from the person that knows, but personal activity and mental develop- ment, — true philosophy could only be represented in the perfect philosopher, in the personality, words, and demeanor of Socrates. This view of Philosophy is closely connected with another trait, by which Plato's literary individuality is marked with special clearness. This is his employment of myths, which he loves to combine with philosophic inquiry, and especially to bring forward for the opening or con- clusion of a discussion. Here however, another motive comes into play. On the one side, the mythus is the expression of the religious and poetical char- acter of the Platonic philosophy. Plato makes use of the traditions of the popular faith and of the mys- teries (in which beneath the veil of fable he divines a deeper meaning) for the artistic representation of his ideas; he also extends and multiplies them by Iviii PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY original inventions, which rise from the transparent personification of philosophic conceptions, into lively epic description fully and exuberantly drawn out. But, on the other side, the mythus is not a mere gar- iment, thrown over a thought that had previously ex- fisted in a purely scientific gViqppjJn rriftny ^ases it is for Plato a positive neces sit y, and his nnasterly use of it is a consequence of the fact, that he doe s not turn ' Back u^ oaJjie path of reflectio n to seek a picture for Els thought, but~th at-ifom4b&- vcrv outset, like a, rrea- tive artis t^_he_t hinks in pictures; that the myth ns does not reiterate that which Jhe author has elsewhere ^^ "gialectieallv expressed. buFseizes bv anticipationPaP ^'^^^ with a pr £seB timent r4ba t for which logical e xprpssio n-^ ' i s still wanting. The Platonic myths, in short, almost always pomt t"o^ gap in scientific knowledge: they are introduced where something has to be set forth, which the philosopher indeed acknowledges as true, but which he has no means of establishing scientific- ally. This takes place chiefly in two cases : ( 1 ) when it is required to explain the origin of material things, the methodical derivation of which is impossible, ac- cording to the presuppositions of Plato's system; and (2) when circumstances are to be described which have no analogy with our present experience, and which can not be more exactly delineated. The first is found in the mythological cosmogony of the Timseus; the second in the narrations concerning the future life and the primeval history of man; for the essential purport of these latter is also the determina- tion of the state in which human society would find itself under altered, ideal conditions. When Plato in these cases adopts the mythical representation, he indirectly confesses that his ordinary style would be impossible to him. His myths are consequently not only a proof of his artistic ability, and an effect PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY lix • of the intimate relation still subsisting between his philosophy and his poetry, but they also betray the boundaries of his methodical thought. However admirable in themselves, therefore, they are, in a scientific point of view, rather a sign of weakness than of strength: they indicate the point at which it becomes evident that as yet he can not be wholly a philosopher, because he is still too much of a poet. Plato's more comprehensive and methodical de- velopment of philosophy necessitates also a clearer distinction of its several branches with him than with earlier philosophers. Yet the dividing lines are not so sharply drawn in his writings as in those of Aris- totle; nor is the precise determination of each branch quite certain. Modern writers have not unfrequently ascribed to Plato classifications which are manifestly alien to him; and the same is true of the previously mentioned attempts of the old grammarians to ar- range his works according to their contents. Though the external evidence in its favor is insufficient, there is far more to be said for the theory that he divided the whole subject matter of philosophy into three parts: Dialectics (or Logic), Physics, and Ethics. For not only is this distribution presupposed by Aris- totle and employed by Xenocrates, but the most important of the dialogues, in regard to their main subject, fall into three corresponding groups; though scarcely one dialogue is wholly contained in either. The Timasus, and, so far as Anthropology may be classed under Physics, the Phaedo also, is physical as to contents; the Republic, Politicus, Philebus, Gor- gias, ethical ; the Thesetetus, Sophist and Parmenides, dialectical. We may therefore venture to derive this division from Plato, though it is never brought for- ward in his writings, and at any rate can not be proved in the case of his oral discourses. But, however Ix PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY applicable it may be, it does not exhaust the philo- sophic content of the dialogues. It has already been pointed out that in these the Socratic induction,— discussion for scientific preparation and moral edu- cation, — is combined with systematic development of doctrine, and at first even asserts itself to a far greater extent. What place, then, is to be assigned to such arguments? Where are we to arrange all those refu- tations of popular opinion and of customary virtue, of the Sophists and their Eudasmonistic theories^ all those passages which treat of the conception and the method of knowledge, the oneness of virtue, and the relation of knowledge to moral action, of philo- sophic love and the stages of its development? It is usual to place one part of them under Dialectic, another under Ethics. But by this procedure, either the coherent exposition of these sciences is inter- rupted by elementary discussions which Plato, even where he introduces them, has left far behind — or the inquiries concerning true knowledge and right action, always in him so closely intermingled, are forced widely apart. To renounce an articulate division of the exposition based on the contents, and to adhere only to the conjectural arrangement of the dialogues, seems unadvisable ; for if we thus gain a true representation of the order in which Plato pro- pounded his thoughts, we get none of their internal connection; and it is evident from the frequent dis- cussion in widely distant dialogues of one and the same thought, that the two orders do not necessarily coincide. Unless we would follow Plato even in his repetitions — in the want of perfect systematic clear- ness inseparable from his manner of explanation — we must, in considering dialogues which are the stronghold of any particular doctrine, adduce all parallel instances from among the other dialogues. PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY Ixi • But if in this manner the order of the writings be once abandoned, we have no longer any reason for adhering to it at all; the problem wiU rather be to place ourselves at the inner source and centre of the Platonic system, and to rally round this nucleus the elements of that system, according to their internal relation in the mind of their author. On this subject Plato himself gives a pregnant hint. The highest division of the thinkable, he says, and the proper/ object of philosophy is this: "What the reason as such attains by means of the dialectic faculty, usin^ the hypotheses not as first principles, but merely an hypotheses, like steps and points of departure, ii . ^ order to reach out from them to the unconditioned! the first principle of all things; and laying hold of this, and then of that which follows from it, it again descends to the last step; so that it nowhere makesV use of any sensible object but proceeds wholly from\ ideas, through ideas, to ideas." In this passage, and \ also in a noteworthy passage of Aristotle, a double ^ way is clearly traced out for thought: the way from beneath, upward; and that from above, downward: the inductive ascent to the idea, effected by the can- celling of final hypotheses, and the systematic descent from the idea to the particular. INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS The Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception of the Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearer approaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Soph- ist; the Pohticus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions of the State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws ; as works of art, the Sympo- sium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no other Dialogue of Plato has the same large- ness of view and the same perfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, or con- tains more of thoge thoughts which are new as well as old, and not of one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper irony or a greater wealth of humor or imagery, or more dramatic power. Nor in any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave hfe and speculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. The Republic is the centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped; here philosophy reaches the highest point to which ancient thinkers ever attained. Plato among the Greeks, like Racon among the moderns, was the first who con- ceived a method of knowledge, although neither of them always distinguished the bare outline or form from the substance of truth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction of science which was not yet realized. He was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in hiip, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future 2 ANALYSIS knowledge are contained. The sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many instruments of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses of Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and acci- dents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary — these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato. The greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference between words and things, has been most strenuously insisted on by him, although he has not always avoided the confusion of them in his own writings. But he does not bind up truth in logical formulae, — logic is still veiled in metaphysics ; and the science which he imagines to " contemplate all truth and all existence " is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism which Aristotle claims to have dis- covered. Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of a still larger design which was to have included an ideal history of Athens, as well as a political and physical philosophy. The fragment of the Critias has given birth to a world-famous fiction, second only in importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is said as a fact to have in- spired some of the early navigators of the sixteenth century. This mythical tale, of which the subject was a history of the wars of the Athenians against the Island of Atlantis, is supposed to be founded upon an unfinished poem of Solon, to which it would have ANALYSIS 3 • stood in the same relation as the writings of the logog- raphers to the poems of Homer. It would have told of a struggle for Liberty, intended to represent the conflict of Persia and Hellas. We may judge from the noble commencement of the Timaeus, from the fragment of the Critias itself, and from the third book of the Laws, in what manner Plato would have treated this high argument. We can only guess why the great design was abandoned; perhaps because Plato became sensible of some incongruity in a fictitious history, or because he had lost his interest in it, or because advancing years forbade the completion of it; and we may please ourselves with the fancy that had this imaginary narrative ever been finished, we should have found Plato himself sympathizing with the struggle for Hellenic independence, singing a hymn of triumph over Marathon and Salamis, per- haps making the reflection of Herodotus where he contemplates the growth of the Athenian empire — " How brave a thing is freedom of speech, which has made the Athenians so far exceed every other state of Hellas in greatness! " or, more probably, attrib- uting the victory to the ancient good order of Athens and to the favor of Apollo and Athene. Again, Plato may be regarded as the " captain " (apxvyof) or leader of a goodly band of followers; for in the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero's De Republica, of St. Augustine's City of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other imaginary States which are framed upon the same model. The extent to which Aristotle or the Aristotelian school were indebted to him in the Politics has been little recognized, and the recognition is the more necessary because it is not made by Aris- totle himself. The two philosophers had more in com- jnon than they were conscious of; and probably some 4 ANALYSIS elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle. In English philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only in the works of the Cambridge Pla- tonists, but in great original writers like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas. That there is a truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears witness to herself, is a conviction which in our own generation has been enthusiastically asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground. Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence. The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descend- ants. Like Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly impressed with the imity of knowledge; in the early Church he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the Revival of Literature on politics. Even the frag- ments of his words when " repeated at second-hand " have in all ages ravished the hearts of men, wlio have seen reflected in them their own higher nature. He is the father of idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature. And many of the latest conceptions of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the unity of knowledge, the reign of law, and the equality of the sexes, have been anticipated in a dream by him. ARGUMENT The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the nature of which is first hinted at by Ceph- alus, the just and blameless old man — then discussed on the basis of proverbial morality by Socrates and Polemarchus — then caricatured by Thrasjrmachus and partially explained by Socrates — reduced to an ANALYSIS 8 abstraction by Glaucon and Adeimantus, and having become invisible in the individual reappears at length in the ideal State which is constructed by Socrates. The first care of the rulers is to be education, of which an outline is drawn after the old Hellenic model, providing only for an improved religion and morality, and more simphcity in music and gymnastic, a man- lier strain of poetry, and greater harmony of the indi- vidual and the State. We are thus led on to the con- ception of a higher State, in which " no man calls anything his own," and in which there is neither " marrying nor giving in marriage," and " kings are philosophers" and "philosophers are kings;" and there is another and higher education, intellectual as well as moral and religious, of science as well as of art, and not of youth only but of the whole of life. Such a State is hardly to be realized in this world and would quickly degenerate. To the perfect ideal succeeds the government of the soldier and the lover of honor, this again declining into democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but regular order hav- ing not much resemblance to the actual facts. When " the wheel has come full circle " we do not begin again with a new period of human life ; but we have passed from the best to the worst, and there we end. The Subject is then changed and the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy which had been more lightly treated in the earlier books of the Republic is now resumed and fought out to a conclusion. Poetry is discovered to be an imitation thrice removed from the truth, and Homer, as well as the dramatic poets, hav- ing been condemned as an imitator, is sent into ban- ishment along with them. And the idea of the State is supplemented by the revelation of a future life. The division into books, like all similar divisions,* 'Cp. Sir G. C. Lewis in the Classical Museum, vol. ii. p. 1. 6 ANALYSIS is probably later than the age of Plato, The natural divisions are five in number; — (1) Book I and the first half of Book II dow^n to the paragraph begin- ning, " I had always admired the genius of Glaueon and Adeimantus," which is introductory; the first book containing a refutation of the popular and so- phistical notions of justice, and concluding, like some of the earlier Dialogues, without arriving at any defi- nite result. To this is appended a restatement of the nature of justice according to common opinion, and an answer is demanded to the question — What is justice, stripped of appearances? The second division (2) includes the remainder of the second and the whole of the third and fourth books, which are mainly occupied with the construction of the first State and the first education. The third division (3) consists of the fifth, sixth, and seventh books, in which philos- ophy rather than justice is the subject of inquiry, and the second State is constructed on principles of com- munism and ruled by philosophers, and the contem- plation of the idea of good takes the place of the social and political virtues. In the eighth and ninth books (4) the perversions of States and of the indi- viduals who correspond to them are reviewed in suc- cession ; and the nature of pleasure and the principle of tyranny are further analyzed in the individual man. The tenth book (5) is the conclusion of the whole, in which the relations of philosophy to poetry are finally determined, and the happiness of the citizens in this life, which has now been assured, is crowned by the vision of another. Or a more general division into two parts may be adopted; the first (Books I-IV) containing the de- scription of a State framed generally in accordance with Hellenic notions of religion and morality, while in the second (Books V-X) the Hellenic State is ANALYSIS 7 transformed into an ideal kingdom of philosophy, of which all other governments are the perversions. These two points of view are really opposed, and the opposition is only veiled by the genius of Plato. The Republic, like the Phaedrus, is an imperfect whole; the higher light of philosophy breaks through the regularity of the Hellenic temple, which at last fades away into the heavens. Whether this imperfection of structure arises from an enlargement of the plan; or from the imperfect reconcilement in the writer's own mind of the struggling elements of thought which are now first brought together by him ; or, perhaps, from the composition of the work at differ- ent times — are questions, like the similar question about the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are worth asking, but which cannot have a distinct answer. In the age of Plato there was no regular mode of pub- lication, and an author would have the less scruple in altering or adding to a work which was known only to a few of his friends. There is no absurdity in supposing that he may have laid his labors aside for a time, or turned from one work to another; and such interruptions would be more likely to occur in the case of a long than of a short writing. In all attempts to determine the chronological order of the Platonic writings on internal evidence, this uncer- tainty about any single Dialogue being composed at one time is a disturbing element, which must be ad- mitted to affect longer works, such as the Republic and the Laws, more than shorter ones. But, on the other hand, the seeming discrepancies of the Repub- lic may only arise out of the discordant elements which the philosopher has attempted to unite in a single whole, perhaps without being himself able to recognize the inconsistency which is obvious to us. For there is a judgment of after ages which few great 8 ANALYSIS writers have ever been able to anticipate for them- selves. They do not perceive the want of connection in their own writings, or the gaps in their systems which are visible enough to those who come after them. In the beginnings of literature and philoso- phy, amid the first efforts of thought and language, more inconsistencies occur than now, when the paths of speculation are well worn and the meaning of words precisely defined. For consistency, too, is the growth of time; and some of the greatest creations of the human mind have been wanting in unity. Tried by this test, several of the Platonic Dialogues, according to our modern ideas, appear to be defective, but the deficiency is no proof that they were composed at different times or by different hands. And the supposition that the Republic was written uninter- ruptedly and by a continuous effort is in some degree confirmed by the numerous references from one part of the work to another. The second title, " Concerning Justice," is not the one by which the Republic is quoted, either by Aris- totle or generally in antiquity, and, like the other sec- ond titles of the Platonic Dialogues, may therefore be assumed to be of later date. Morgenstern and others have asked whether the definition of justice, which is the professed aim, or the construction of the State is the principal argument of the work. The answer is, that the two blend in one, and are two faces of the same truth ; for justice is the order of the State, and the State is the visible embodiment of justice under the conditions of human society. The one is the soul and the other is the body, and the Greek ideal of the State, as of the individual, is a fair mind in a fair bodj^ In Hegelian phraseology the state is the reality of which justice is the ideal. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of God is within. ANALYSIS 9 • and yet develops into a Church or external kingdom; " the house not made with hands, eternal in the heav- ens," is reduced to the proportions of an earthly build- ing. Or, to use a Platonic image, justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through the whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is completed, the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the same or different names throughout the work, both as the inner law of the individual soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and punishments in another life. The virtues are based on justice,- of which common honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice is based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is reflected both in the institutions of states and in motions of the heavenly bodies. The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather than the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications that the same law is sup- posed to reign over the State, over nature, and over man. Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient and in modern times. There is a stage of criticism in which aU workSj whether of nature or of art, are referred to design. Now in ancient writ- ingSj and indeed in literature generally, there remains often a large element which was not comprehended in the original design. For the plan grows under the author's hand ; new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end before he begins. The reader who seeks to find some one idea under which the whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the vaguest and most general. Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the ordinary explanations of the argument of 10 ANALYSIS the Republic, imagines himself to have found the true argument " in the representation of human life in a State perfected by justice, and governed according to the idea of good." There may be some use in such general descriptions, but they can hardly be said to express the design of the writer. The truth is, that we may as well speak of many designs as of one ; nor need anything be excluded from the plan of a great work to which the mind is naturally led by the asso- ciation of ideas, and which does not interfere with the general purpose. What kind or degree of unity is to be sought after in a building, in the plastic arts, in poetry, in prose, is a problem which has to be deter- mined relatively to the subject-matter. To Plato himself, the inquiry " what was the intention of the writer," or " what was the principal argimient of the Republic " would have been hardly intelHgible, and therefore had better be at once dismissed. Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which, to Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah, or " the day of the Lord," or the suffering Servant or people of God, or the " Sun of righteousness with healing in his wings " only convey, to us at least, their great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of good — like the sun in the visible world ; — about himfian perfection, which is justice — about education beginning in youth and continuing in later years — about poets and soph- ists and tyrants who are the false teachers and evil rulers of mankind — about " the world " which is the embodiment of them — about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life. No such inspired ANALYSIS 11 creation is at unity with itself, any more than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them. Every shade of light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is allowable in a work of philosophical imagination. It is not all on the same plane; it easily pesses from ideas to myths and fan- cies, from facts to figures of speech. It is not prose but poetry, at least a great part of it, and ought not to be judged by the rules of logic or the probabilities of history. The writer is not fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole; they take possession of him and are too much for him. We have no need therefore to discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable or not, or whether the outward form or the inward life came first into the mind of the writer. For the practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth; and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear the greatest " marks of design " — justice more than the external frame-work of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science of dialectic or the organi- zation of ideas has no real content ; but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato reaches the " summit of speculation," and these, although they fail to satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker, may therefore be regarded as the most important, as they are also the most original, portions of the work. It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the conversation was held (the year 411 b. c. which is proposed by him will do as well as any other) ; for a writer of fiction, and especially a writer who, like Plato, is notoriously care- 12 ANALYSIS less of chronology, only aims at general probability. Whether aU the persons mentioned in the Republip could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty which would have occurred to an Athenian reading the work forty years later, or to Plato himself at the time of writing (any more than to Shakespeare re- specting one of his own dramas) ; and need not greatly trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having no answer " which is stiU worth asking," be- cause the investigation shows that we can not argue historically from the dates in Plato ; it would be use- less therefore to waste time in inventing far-fetched reconcilements of them in order to avoid chronological difficulties, such, for example, as the conjecture of C F. Hermann, that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the brothers but the uncles of Plato, or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato intentionally left anachro- nisms indicating the dates at which some of his Dia- logues were written. CHABACTERS The principal characters in the Republic are Ceph- alus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Cephalus appears in the introduc- tion only, Polemarchus drops at the end of the first argument, and Thrasymachus is reduced to silence at the close of the first book. The main discussion is carried on by Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Among the company are Lysias (the orator) and Euthydemus, the sons of Cephalus and brothers of Polemarchus, an imknown Charmantides — these are mute auditors; also there is Cleitophon, who once interrupts, where, as in the Dialogue which bears his name, he appears as the friend and ally of Thrasy- machus. ANALYSIS 13 « Cephalus, the patriarch of the house, has been appropriately engaged in offering a sacrifice. He is the pattern of an old man who has almost done with Hfe, and is at peace with himself and with all mankind. He feels that he is drawing nearer to the world below, and seems to hnger around the memory of the past. He is eager that Socrates should come to visit him, fond of the poetry of the last generation, happy in the consciousness of a well-spent life, glad at having escaped from the tyranny of youthful lusts. His love of conversation, his affection, his indiffer- ence to riches, even his garrulity, are interesting traits of character. He is not one of those who have noth- ing to say, because their whole mind has been absorbed in making money. Yet he acknowledges that riches have the advantage of placing men above the tempta- tion to dishonesty or falsehood. The respectful atten- tion shown to him by Socrates, whose love of conver- sation, no less than the mission imposed upon him by the Oracle, leads him to ask questions of all men, young and old alike, should also be noted. Who better suited to raise the question of justice than Cephalus, whose hfe might seem to be the expression of it? The moderation with which old age is pictured by Ceph- alus as a very tolerable portion of existence is char- acteristic, not only of him, but of Greek feeling generally, and contrasts with the exaggeration of Cicero in the De Senectute. The evening of life is described by Plato in the most expressive manner, yet with the fewest possible touches. As Cicero remarks (Ep. ad Attic, iv. 16), the aged Cephalus would have been out of place in the discussion which follows, and which he could neither have understood nor taken part in without a violation of dramatic propriety. His " son and heir " Polemarchus has the frank- 14 ANALYSIS ness and impetuousness of youth ; he is for detaining Socrates by force in the opening scene, and will not " let him off " on the subject of women and children. Like Cephalus, he is limited in his point of view, and represents the proverbial stage of morality which has rules of life rather than principles; and he quotes Simonides as his father had quoted Pindar. But after this he has no more to say; the answers which he makes are only elicited from him by the dialectic of Socrates. He has not yet experienced the influ- ence of the Sophists like Glaucon and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying. He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the analogy of the arts. From his brother Lysias we learn that he fell a victim to the Thirty Tyrants, but no allusion is here made to his fate, nor to the circumstance that Cephalus and his family were of Syracusan origin, and had migrated from Thurii to Athens. The " Chalcedonian giant," Thrasymachus, of whom we have already heard in the Phaedrus, is the personification of the Sophists, according to Plato's conception of them, in some of their worst character- istics. He is vain and blustering, refusing to dis- course unless he is paid, fond of making an oration, and hoping thereby to escape the inevitable Socrates ; but a mere child in argument, and unable to foresee that the next " move " (to use a Platonic expression) will " shut him up." He has reached the stage of framing general notions, and in this respect is in ad- vance of Cephalus and Polemarchus. But he is in- capable of defending them in a discussion, and vainly tries to cover his confusion in banter and insolence. ANALYSIS 15 • Whether such doctrines as are attributed to him by Plato were really held either by him or by any other Sophist is uncertain; in the infancy of philosophy serious errors about morality might easily grow up — they are certainly put into the mouths of speakers in Thucydides; but we are concerned at present with Plato's description of him, and not with the historical reality. The inequality of the contest adds greatly to the humor of the scene. The pompous and empty Sophist is utterly helpless in the hands of the great master of dialectic, who knows how to touch aU the springs of vanity and weakness in him. He is greatly irritated by the irony of Socrates, but his noisy and imbecile rage only lays him more and more open to the thrusts of his assailant. His determina- tion to cram down their throats, or put " bodily into their souls " his own words, elicits a cry of horror from Socrates. The state of his temper is quite as worthy of remark as the process of the argument. Nothing is more amusing than his complete submission when he has been once thoroughly beaten. At first he seems to continue the discussion with reluctance, but- soon with apparent good-will, and he even testifies his in- terest at a later stage by one or two occasional remarks. When attacked by Glaucon he is humor- ously protected by Socrates " as one who has never been his enemy and is now his friend." From Cicero and Quintilian and from Aristotle's Rhetoric we learn that the Sophist whom Plato has made so ridiculous was a man of note whose writings were preserved in later ages. The play on his name which was made by his contemporary Herodicus, " thou wast ever bold in battle," seems to show that the description of him is not devoid of verisimilitude. When Thrasymachus has been silenced, the two principal respondents, Glaucon and Adeimantus, ap- 16 AN^ALYSIS pear on the scene: here, as in Greek tragedy, three actors are introduced. At first sight the two sons of Ariston may seem to wear a family Hkeness, like the two friends Simmias and Cebes in the Phaedo. But on a nearer examination of them the similarity van- ishes, and they are seen to be distinct characters. Glaucon is the impetuous youth who can " just never have enough of fechting " (cp. the character of him in Xen. Mem. iii. 6) ; the man of pleasure who is ac- quainted with the mysteries of love; the " juvenis qui gaudet canibus," and who improves the breed of ani- mals ; the lover of art and music who has all the expe- riences of youthful life. He is full of quickness and penetration, piercing easily below the clumsy plati- tudes of Thrasymachus to the real difficulty; he turns out to the light the seamy side of human life, and yet does not lose faith in the just and true. It is Glaucon who seizes what may be termed the ludicrous relation of the philosopher to the world, to whom a state of simplicity is " a dty of pigs," who is always prepared with a jest when the argument offers him an oppor- tunity, and who is ever ready to second the humor of Socrates and to appreciate the ridiculous, whether in the connoisseurs of music, or in the lovers of theatri- cals, or in the fantastic behavior of the citizens of democracy. His weaknesses are several times alluded to by Socrates, who, however, will not allow him to be attacked by his brother Adeimantus. He is a soldier, and, like Adeimantus, has been distinguished at the battle of Megara. The character of Adeimantus is deeper and graver, and the profounder objections are commonly put into his mouth. Glaucon is more demonstrative, and gen- erally opens the game. Adeimantus pursues the ar- gument further. Glaucon has more of the hvelinesa and quidk sympathy of youth; Adeimantus has the ANALYSIS 17 • maturer judgment of a grown-up man of the world. In the second book, when Glaucon insists that justice and injustice shall be considered without regard to their consequences, Adeimantus remarks that they are regarded by mankind in general only for the sake of their consequences ; and in a similar vein of reflection he urges at the beginning of the fourth book that Soc- rates fails in making his citizens happy, and is an- swered that happiness is not the first but the second thing, not the direct aim but the indirect consequence of the good government of a State. In the discussion about religion and mythology, Adeimantus is the respondent, but Glaucon breaks in with a slight jest, and carries on the conversation in a hghter tone about music and gymnastic to the end of the book. It is Adeimantus again who volunteers the criticism of common sense on the Socratic method of argument, and who refuses to let Socrates pass lightly over the question of women and children. It is Adeimantus who is the respondent in the more argiunentative, as Glaucon in the lighter and more imaginative portions of the Dialogue. For example, throughout the greater part of the sixth book, the causes of the corruption of philosophy and the conception of the idea of good are discussed with Adeimantus. Then Glaucon resumes his place of principal respondent; but he has a difficulty in apprehending the higher education of Socrates, and makes some false hits in the course of the discussion. Once more Adeimantus returns with the allusion to his brother Glaucon whom he compares to the contentious State; in the next book he is again superseded, and Glaucon continues to the end. Thus in a succession of characters Plato represents the successive stages of morality, beginning with the Athenian gentleman of the olden time, who is fol- 18 ANALYSIS lowed by the practical man of that day regulating his life by proverbs and saws; to him succeeds the wild generalization of the Sophists, and lastly come the young disciples of the great teacher, who know the sophistical arguments but will not be convinced by them, and desire to go deeper into the nature of things. These too, like Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasyma- chus, are clearly distinguished from one another. Neither in the Republic, nor in any other Dialogue of Plato, is a single character repeated. The delineation of Socrates in the Republic is not wholly consistent. In the first book we have more of the real Socrates, such as he is depicted in the Memo- rabilia of Xenophon, in the earliest Dialogues of Plato, and in the Apology. He is ironical, provoking, questioning, the old enemy of the Sophists, ready to put on the mask of Silenus as well as to argue seri- ously. But in the sixth book his enmity towards the Sophists abates; he acknowledges that they are the representatives rather than the corrupters of the world. He also becomes more dogmatic and con- structive, passing beyond the range either of the polit- ical or the speculative ideas of the real Socrates. In one passage Plato himself seems to intimate that the time had now come for Socrates, who had passed his whole life in philosophy, to give his own opinion and not to be always repeating the notions of other men. There is no evidence that either the idea of good or the conception of a perfect state were comprehended in the Socratic teaching, though he certainly dwelt on the nature of the universal and of final causes (cp. Xen. Mem. i. 4', Phaedo 97) ; and a deep thinker like him, in his thirty or forty years of public teaching, could hardly have failed to touch on the nature of family relations, for which there is also some positive evidence in the Memorabilia (Mem. i. 2, 51 foil.). ANALYSIS 19 The Socratic method is nominally retained; and every inference is either put into the mouth of the respond- ent or represented as the common discovery of him and Socrates. But any one can see that this is a mere form, of which the affectation grows wearisome as the work advances. The method of inquiry has passed into a method of teaching in which by the help of interlocutors the same thesis is looked at from various points of view. The nature of the process is truly characterized by Glaucon, when he describes himself as a companion who is not good for much in an inves- tigation, but can see what he is shown, and may, per- haps, give the answer to a question more fluently than another. Neither can we be absolutely certain that Socrates himself taught the immortality of the soul, which is unknown to his disciple Glaucon in the Republic; nor is there any reason to suppose that he used myths or revelations of another world as a vehicle of instruc- tion, or that he would have banished poetry or have denounced the Greek mythology. His favorite oath is retained, and a slight mention is made of the dae- monium, or internal sign, which is alluded to by Soc- rates as a phenomenon peculiar to himself. A real element of Socratic teaching, which is more prom- inent in the Republic than in any of the other Dia- logues of Plato, is the use of example and illustra- tion ( TO, (popriKoi. aiiT^ vpotTifiepovTei ) : " Let US apply the test of common instances." " You," says Adei- mantus, ironically, in the sixth book, " are so unac- customed to speak in images." And this use of exam- ples or images, though truly Socratic in origin, is enlarged by the genius of Plato into the form of an allegory or parable, which embodies in the concrete what has been already described, or is about to be described, in the abstract. Thus the figure of the cave 20 ANALYSIS in Book VII is a recapitulation of the divisions of knowledge in Book VI. The composite animal in Book IX is an allegory of the parts of the soul. The noble captain and the ship and the true pilot in Book VI are a figure of the relation of the people to the philosophers in the State which has been described. Other figures, such as the dog in the second, third, and fourth books, or the marriage of the portionless maiden in the sixth book, or the drones and wasps in the eighth and ninth books, also form links of connec- tion in long passages, or are used to recall previous discussions- Plato is most true to the character of his master when he describes him as " not of this world." And with this representation of him the ideal state and the other paradoxes of the Republic are quite in accord- ance, though they can not be shown to have been spec- ulations of Socrates. To him, as to other great teach- ers both philosophical and religious, when they looked upward, the world seemed to be the embodiment of error and evil. The common sense of mankind has revolted against this view, or has only partially ad- mitted it. And even in Socrates himself the sterner judgment of the multitude at times passes into a sort of ironical pity or love. Men in general are incapable of philosophy, and are therefore at enmity with the philosopher; but their misunderstanding of him is unavoidable : for they have never seen him as he truly is in his own image; they are only acquainted with artificial systems possessing no native force of truth — words which admit of many applications. Their lead- ers have nothing to medsure with, and are therefore ignorant of their own stature. But they are to be pitied or laughed at, pot to be quarrelled with; they mean well with their nostrums, if they could only , learn that they are cutting off a Hydra's head. This ANALYSIS 21 « [moderation towards those who are in error is one of the most charajcteristie features of Socrates in the iRepubhe. In all the different representations of Socrates, whether of Xenophon or Plato, and amid the diflFerences of the earlier or later Dialogues, he always retains the character of the unwearied and disinterested seeker after truth, without which he would have ceased to be Socrates. Leaving the characters we may now analyze the contents of the Republic, and then proceed to con- sider (1) The general aspects of this Hellenic ideal of the State, (2) The modern lights in which the thoughts of Plato may be read. BOOK I The Republic opens with a truly Greek scene — a festival in honor of the goddess Bendis which is held in the Piraeus; to this is added the promise of an equestrian torch-race in the evening. The whole work is supposed to be recited by Socrates on the day after the festival to a small party, consisting of Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and another; this we learn from the first words of the Timaeus. When the rhetorical advantage of reciting the Dia- logue has been gained, the attention is not distracted by any reference to the audience; nor is the reader further reminded of the extraordinary length of the narrative. Of the numerous company, three only take any serious part in the discussion; nor are we informed whether in the evening they went to the torch-race, or talked, as in the Symposium, through the night. The manner in which the conversation has arisen is described as follows : — Socrates and his companion Glaucon are about to leave the festival 22 ANALYSIS when they are detained by a message from Polemar- chus, who speedily appears accompanied by Adeiman- tus, the brother of Glaucon, and with playful violence compels them to remain, promising them not only the torch-race, but the pleasure of conversation with the young, which to Socrates is a far greater attraction. They return to the house of Cephalus, Polemarchus' father, now in extreme old age, who is found sitting upon a cushioned seat crowned for a sacrifice. " You should come to me oftener, Socrates, for I am too old to go to you; and at my time of life, having lost other pleasures, I care the more for conversation." Soc- rates asks him what he thinks of age, to which the old man replies, that the sorrows and discontents of age are to be attributed to the tempers of men, and that age is a time of peace in which the tyranny of the passions is no longer felt. Yes, replies Socrates, but the world will say, Cephalus, that you are happy in old age because you are rich. " And there is some- thing in what they say, Socrates, but not so much as they imagine — as Themistocles replied to the Seriph- ian, ' Neither you, if you had been an Athenian, nor I, if I had been a Seriphian, would ever have been famous,' I might in like manner reply to you, Neither a good poor man can be happy in age, nor yet a bad rich man." Socrates remarks that Cephalus appears not to care about riches, a quality which he ascribes to his having inherited, not acquired them, and would like to know what he considers to be the chief advantage of them. Cephalus answers that when you are old the belief in the world below grows upon you, and then to have done justice and never to have been compelled to do injustice through poverty, and never to have deceived any one, are felt to be unspeakable blessings. Socrates, who is evidently preparing for an argument, next askss, What is the meaning of the word justice? ANALYSIS 23 To tell the truth and pay your debts? No more than this? Or must we admit exceptions? Ought I, for example, to put back into the hands of my friend, who has gone mad, the sword which I borrowed of him when he was in his right mind? " There must be exceptions." " And yet," says Polemarchus, " the defmition which has been given has the authority of Simonides." Here Cephalus retires to look after the sacrifices, and bequeaths, as Socrates facetiously re- marks, the possession of the argument to his heir, Polemarchus. The description of old age is finished, and Plato, as his manner is, has touched the key-note of the whole work in asking for the definition of justice, first sug- gesting the question which Glaucon afterwards pur- sues respecting external goods, and preparing for the concluding mythus of the world below in the slight allusion of Cephalus. The portrait of the just man is a natural frontispiece or introduction to the long discourse which follows, and may perhaps imply that in all our perplexity about the nature of justice, there is no difficulty in discerning " who is a just man." The first explanation has been supported by a saying of Simonides; and now Socrates has a mind to show that the resolution of justice into two unconnected precepts, which have no common principle, fails to satisfy the demands of dialectic. He proceeds: What did Simonides mean by this saying of his? Did he mean that I was to give back arms to a madman? " No, not in that case, not if the parties are friends, and evil would result. He meant that you were to do what was proper, got«| to friends and harm to enemies." Every act does something to somebody; and following this analogy, Socrates 24 a:!^alysis asks, What is this due and proper thing which justice does, and to whom? He is answered that justice does good to friends and harm to enemies. But in what way good or harm? " In making alliances with the one, and going to war with the other." Then in time of peace what is the good of justice? The answer is that justice is of use in contracts, and contracts are money partnerships. Yes; but how in such partner- ships is the just man of more use than any other man? " When you want to have money safely kept and not used." Then justice will be useful when money is useless. And there is another difficulty: justice, like the art of war or any other art, must be of opposites, good at attack as well as at defence, at steahng as well as at guarding. But then justice is a thief, though a hero notwithstanding, Uke Autolycus, the Homeric hero, who was " excellent above all men in theft and perjury" — to such a pass have you and Homer and Simonides brought us; though I do not forget that the thieving must be for the good of friends and the harm of enemies. And still there arises another question : Are friends to be interpreted as real or seeming ; enemies as real or seeming? And are our friends to be only the good, and our enemies to be the evil? The answer is, that we must do good to our seeming and real good friends, and evil to our seeming and real evil enemies — good to the good, evil to the evil. But ought we to render evil for evil at all, when to do so will only make men more evil? Can justice produce injustice any more than the art of horsemanship can make bad horsemen, or heat pro- duce cold? The final conclusion is, that no sage or poet ever said that the just return evil for evil; this was a maxim of some rich and mighty man, Peri- ander, Perdiccas, or Ismenias the Theban (about b. c 398-381). ANALYSIS 25 Thus the first stage of aphoristic or unconscious morality is shown to be inadequate to the wants of the age; the authority of the poets is set aside, and through the winding mazes of dialectic we make an approach to the Christian precept of forgiveness of injuries. Similar words are applied by the Persian mystic poet to the Divine being when the questioning spirit is stirred within him : — "If because I do evil. Thou punishest me by evil, what is the difference between Thee and me?" In this both Plato and Kheyam rise above the level of many Christian ( ?) theologians. The first definition of justice easily passes into the second ; for the simple words " to speak the truth and pay your debts " is substituted the more abstract "to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies." Either of these explanations gives a sufficient rule of life for plain men, but they both fall short of the precision of philosophy. We may note in passing the antiquity of casuistry, which not only arises out of the confiict of established principles in particular cases, but also out of the effort to attain them, and is prior as well as posterior to our fimda- mental notions of morality. The " interrogation " of moral ideas; the appeal to the authority of Homer; the conclusion that the maxim, " Do good to your friends and harm to your enemies," being erroneous, could not have been the word of any great man, are all of them very characteristic of the Platonic Socrates. Here Thrasymachus, who has made several at- tempts to interrupt, but has hitherto been kept in order by the company, takes advantage of a pause and rushes into the arena, beginning, like a savage ani- mal, with a roar. " Socrates," he says, " what folly is this? — Why do you agree to be vanquished by one another in a pretended argument? " He then pro- 26 ANALYSIS hibits all the ordinary definitions of justice; to whicK Socrates replies that he cannot tell how many twelve is, if he is forbidden to say 2 x 6, or 3 x 4, or 6 x 2, or 4x3. At first Thrasymachus is reluctant to argue J but at length, with a promise of payment on the part of the company and of praise from Socrates, he is induced to open the game. " Listen," he says; " my answer is that might is right, justice the interest of the stronger: now praise me." Let me understand you first. Do you mean that because Polydamas the wrestler, who is stronger than we are, finds the eating of beef for his interest, the eating of beef is also for our interest, who are not so strong? Thrasymachus is indignant at the illustration, and in pompous words, apparently intended to restore dignity to the argu- ment, he explains his meaning to be that the rulers make laws for their own interests. But suppose, says Socrates, that the ruler or stronger makes a mis- take — then the interest of the stronger is not his interest. Thrasymachus is saved from this speedy downfall by his disciple Cleitophon, who introduces the word " thinks; " — not the actual interest of the ruler, but what he thinks or what seems to be his inter- est, is justice. The contradiction is escaped by the unmeaning evasion : for though his real and apparent interests may differ, what the ruler thinks to be his interest will always remain what he thinks to be his interest. Of course this was not the original assertion, nor is the new interpretation accepted by Thrasymachus himself. But Socrates is not disposed to quarrel about words, if, as he significantly insinuates, his ad- versary has changed his mind. In what follows Thra- symachus does in fact withdraw his admission that the rioler may make a mistake, for he afiirms that the ruler as a ruler is infallible. Socrates is quite ready ANALYSIS 27 to accept the new position, which he equally turns against Thrasymachus by the help of the analogy of the arts. Every art or science has an interest, but this interest is to be distinguished from the accidental interest of the artist, and is only concerned with the good of the things or persons which come under the art. And justice has an interest which is the interest not of the ruler or judge, but of those who come under his sway. Thrasymachus is on the brink of the inevitable con- clusion, when he makes a bold diversion. " Tell me, Socrates," he says, " have you a nurse? " What a question! Why do you ask? " Because, if you have, she neglects you and lets you go about drivelling, and has not even taught you to know the shepherd from the sheep. For you fancy that shepherds and rulers never think of their own interest, but only of their sheep or subjects, whereas the truth is that they fatten them for their use, sheep and subjects alike. And experience proves that in every relation of life the just man is the loser and the unjust the gainer, espe- cially where injustice is on the grand scale, which is quite another thing from the petty rogueries of swin- dlers and burglars and robbers of temples. The language of men proves this — our ' gracious ' and ' blessed ' tyrant and the like — all which tends to show (1) that justice is the interest of the stronger; and (2) that injustice is more profitable and also stronger than justice." Thrasymachus, who is better at a speech than at a close argimient, having deluged the company with words, has a mind to escape. But the others will not let him go, and Socrates adds a humble but earnest request that he will not desert them at such a crisis of their fate. " And what can I do more for you? " he says ; " would you have me put the words bodily 28 ANALYSIS into your souli?" God forbid! replies Socrates; but we want you to be consistent in the use of terms, and not to employ " physician " in an exact sense, and then again " shepherd " or " ruler " in an inex- act, — if the words are strictly taken, the ruler and the shepherd look only to the good of their people or flocks and not to their own: whereas you insist that rulers are solely actuated by love of office. " No doubt about it," replies Thrasymachus. Then why are they paid? Is not the reason, that their interest is not comprehended in their art, and is therefore the concern of another art, the art of pay, which is com- mon to the arts in general, and therefore not identical with any one of them? Nor would any man be a ruler unless he were induced by the hope of reward or the fear of punishment; — the reward is money or honor, the punishment is the necessity of being ruled by a man worse than himself. And if a State [or Church] were composed entirely of good men, they would be affected by the last motive only; and there would be as much " nolo episcopari " as there is at present of the opposite. The satire on existing governments is heightened by the simple and apparently incidental manner in which the last remark is introduced. There is a sim- ilar irony in the argument that the governors of man- kind do not like being in office, and that therefore they demand pay. Enough of this: the other assertion of Thrasy- machus is far more important — that the unjust life is more gainful than the just. Now, as you and I, Glaucon, are not convinced by him, we must reply to him ; but if we try to compare their respective gains we shall want a judge to decide for us; we had better ANALYSIS 2& / • therefore proceed by making mutual admissions of the truth to one another. Thrasymachus had asserted that perfect injustice was more gainful than perfect justice, and after a little hesitation he is induced by Socrates to admit the still greater paradox that injustice is virtue and justice vice. Socrates praises his frankness, and as- sumes the attitude of one whose only wish is to under- stand the meaning of his opponents. At the same time he is weaving a net in which Thrasymachus is finally enclosed. The admission is elicited from him that the just man seeks to gain an advantage over the unjust only, but not over the just, while the unjust would gain an advantage over either. Socrates, in order to test this statement, employs once more the favorite analogy of the arts. The musician, doctor, skilled artist of any sort, does not seek to gain more than the skilled, but only more than the unskilled (that is to say, he works up to a rule, standard, law, and does not exceed it) , whereas the unskilled makes ran- dom efforts at excess. Thus the skilled falls on the side of the good, and the unskilled on the side of the evil, and the just is the skilled, and the unjust is the unskilled. There was great difficulty in bringing Thrasyma- chus to the point ; the day was hot and he was stream- ing with perspiration, and for the first time in his life he was seen to blush. But his other thesis that injus- tice was stronger than justice has not yet been refuted, and Socrates now proceeds to the consideration of this, which, with the assistance of Thrasymachus, he hopes to clear up; the latter is at first churlish, but in the judicious hands of Socrates is soon restored to good-humor: Is there not honor among thieves? Is not the strength of injustice only a remnant of jus- tice? Is not absolute injustice absolute weakness 30 ANALYSIS also? A house that is divided against itself can not stand; two men who quarrel detract from one an- other's strength, and he who is at war with himself is the enemy of himself and the gods. Not wickedness therefore, but semi-wickedness flourishes in states, — a remnant of good is needed in order to make union in action possible, — there is no kingdom of evil in this world. Another question has not been answered: Is the just or the unjust the happier? To this we reply, that every art has an end and an excellence or virtue by which the end is accomplished. And is not the end of the soul happiness, and justice the excellence of the soul by which happiness is attained? Justice and happiness being thus shown to be inseparable, the question whether the just or the unjust is the happier has disappeared. Thrasymachus replies: "Let this be your enter- tainment, Socrates, at the festival of Bendis." Yes; and a very good entertainment with which your kind- ness has supplied me, now that you have left off scold- ing. And yet not a good entertainment — but that was my own fault, for I tasted of too many things. First of all the nature of justice was the subject of our inquiry, and then whether justice is virtue and wisdom, or evil and folly; and then the comparative advantages of just and unjust: and the sum of all is that I know not what justice is; how then shall I know whether the just is happy or not? Thus the sophistical fabric has been demolished, chiefly by appealing to the analogy of the arts. "Justice is like the arts (1) in having no external interest, and (2) in not aiming at excess, and (3) justice is to happiness what the implement of the workman is to his work." At this the modern reader ANALYSIS 31 is apt to stumble, because he forgets that Plato is writing in an age when the arts and the virtues, like the moral and intellectual faculties, were still undis- tinguished. Among early inquirers into the nature of human action the arts helped to fill up the void of speculation; and at first the comparison of the arts and the virtues was not perceived by them to be falla- cious. They only saw the points of agreement in them and not the points of difference. Virtue, like art, must take means to an end; good manners are both an art and a virtue; character is naturally de- scribed under the image of a statue; and there are many other figures of speech which are readily trans- ferred from art to morals. The next generation cleared up these perplexities; or at least supplied after ages with a further analysis of them. The con- temporaries of Plato were in a state of transition, and had not yet fully realized the common-sense distinc- tion of Aristotle, that " virtue is concerned with action, art with production " (Nic. Eth. vi. 4) , or that " vir- tue implies intention and constancy of purpose," whereas "art requires knowledge only" (Nic. Eth. ii. 3). And yet in the absurdities which follow from some uses of the analogy, there seems to be an intima- tion conveyed that virtue is more than art. This is implied in the reductio ad absurdum that " justice is a thief," and in the dissatisfaction which Socrates ex- presses at the final result. The expression " an art of pay " which is described as " common to all the arts " is not in accordance with the ordinary use of language. Nor is it employed elsewhere either by Plato or by any other Greek writer. It is suggested by the argument, and seems to extend the conception of art to doing as well as making. Another flaw or inaccuracy of language may be noted in the words " men who are injured axe 32 ANALYSIS made more unjust." For those who are injured are not necessarily made worse, but only harmed or iU- treated. The second of the three argimients, " that the just does not aim at excess," has a real meaning, though wrapped up in an enigmatical form. That the good is of the nature of the finite is a peculiarly Hellenic sentiment, which may be compared with the language of those modern writers who speak of virtue as fitness, and of freedom as obedience to law. The mathematical or logical notion of limit easily passes into an ethical one, and even finds a mythological expression in the conception of envy {^66vo<;). Ideas of measure, equality, order, unity, proportion, still linger in the writings of moralists; and the true spirit of the fine arts is better conveyed by such terms than by super- latives. " When workmen strive to do better than well, They do confound their skill in covetousness." (King John, Act iv. Sc. 2.) The harmony of the soul and body, and of the parts of the soul with one another, a harmony " fairer than that of musical notes," is the true Hel- lenic mode of conceiving the perfection of human nature. In what may be called the epilogue of the discussion with Thrasymachus, Plato argues that evil is not a principle of strength, but of discord and dissolution, just touching the question which has been often treated in modern times by theologians and philos- ophers, of the negative nature of evil. In the last argument we trace the germ of the Aristotelian doc- trine of an end and a virtue directed towards the end, which again is suggested by the arts. The final recon- ANALYSIS 33 cilement of justice and happiness and the identity of the individual and the State are also intimated. Socrates reassumes the character of a " know-noth- ing; " at the same time he appears to be not wholly satisfied with the manner in which the argument has been conducted. Nothing is concluded ; but the tend- ency of the dialectical process, here as always, is to enlarge our conception of ideas, and to widen their application to human hfe. BOOK II Thrasymachus is pacified, but the intrepid Glaucon insists on continuing the argument. He is not satis- fied with the indirect manner in which, at the end of the last book, Socrates had disposed of the question " Whether the just or the unjust is the happier." He begins by dividing goods into three classes : — first, goods desirable in themselves; secondly, goods desir- able in themselves and for their results; thirdly, goods desirable for their results only. He then asks Socrates in which of the three classes he would place justice. In the second class, replies Socrates, among goods desirable for themselves and also for their re- sults. " Then the world in general are of another mind, for they say that justice belongs to the trouble- some class of goods which are desirable for their re- sults only. Socrates answers that this is the doctrine of Thrasymachus which he rejects. Glaucon thinks that Thrasymachus was too ready to listen to the voice of the charmer, and proposes to consider the nature of justice and injustice in themselves and apart from the results and rewards of them which the world is always dinning in his ears. He will first of all speak of the nature and origin of justice; secondly, of the manner in which men view justice as a necessity and, 34 ANALYSIS not a good ; and thirdly, he will prove the reasonable- ness of this view. " To do injustice is said to be a good; to suffer in- justice an evil. As the evil is discovered by experi- ence to be greater than the good, the sufferers, who can not also be doers, make a compact that they will have neither, and this compact or mean is called jus- tice, but is really the impossibility of doing injustice. No one would observe such a compact if he were not obliged. Let us suppose that the just and unjust have two rings, like that of Gyges in the well-known story, which make them invisible, and then no differ- ence will appear in them, for every one will do evil if he can. And he who abstains will be regarded by the world as a fool for his pains. Men may praise him in public out of fear for themselves, but they will laugh at him in their hearts. " And now let us frame an ideal of the just and unjust. Imagine the unjust man to be master of his craft, seldom making mistakes and easily correcting them; having gifts of money, speech, strength — the greatest villain bearing the highest character: and at his side let us place the just in his nobleness and sim- plicity — being, not seeming — without name or re- ward — clothed in his justice only — the best of men who is thought to be the worst, and let him die as he has lived. I might add (but I would rather put the rest into the mouth of the panegyrists of injustice — they will tell you) that the just man will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out, and will at last be crucified [literally impaled] — and all this be- cause he ought to have preferred seeming to being. How different is the case of the unjust who clings to appearance as the true reality! His high character makes him a ruler ; he can marry where he likes, trade where he likes, help his friends and hurt his enemies; ANALYSIS 35 • having got rich by dishonesty he can worship the gods better, and will therefore be more loved by them than the just." I was thinking what to answer, when Adeimantus joined in the already unequal fray. He considered that the most important point of all had been omitted: — " Men are taught to be just for the sake of rewards; parents and guardians make reputation the incentive to virtue. And other advantages are promised by them of a more solid kind, such as wealthy marriages and high offices. There are the pictures in Homer and Hesiod of fat sheep and heavy fleeces, rich corn-fields and trees toppling with fruit, which the gods provide in this life for the just. And the Orphic poets add a similar picture of another. The heroes of Musaeus and Eumolpus lie on couches at a festival, with garlands on their heads, enjoying as the meed of virtue a paradise of immortal drunken- ness. Some go further, and speak of a fair posterity in the third and fourth generation. But the wicked they bury in a slough and make them carry water in a sieve: and in this life they attribute to them the infamy which Glaucon was assuming to be the lot of the just who are supposed to be unjust. " Take another kind of argument which is found both in poetry and prose : — ' Virtue,' as Hesiod says, ' is honorable but difficult, vice is easy and profitable.' You may often see the wicked in great prosperity and the righteous afflicted by the will of heaven. And mendicant prophets knock at rich men's doors, promis- ing to atone for the sins of themselves or their fathers in an easy fashion with sacrifices and festive games, or with charms and invocations to get rid of an enemy good or bad by divine help and at a small charge ; — they appeal to books professing to be written by Musaeus and Orpheus, and carry away the minds of 36 ANALYSIS whole cities, and promise to ' get souls out of purga- tory ; ' and if we refuse to listen to them, no one knows what will happen to us. " When a lively-minded ingenuous youth hears all this, what will be his conclusion? ' Will he,' in the language of Pindar, ' make justice his high tower, or fortify himself with crooked deceit? ' Justice, he re- flects, without the appearance of justice, is misery and ruin; injustice has the promise of a glorious life. Appearance is master of truth and lord of happiness. To appearance then I will turn, — I will put on the show of virtue and trail behind me the fox of Archi- lochus. I hear some one saying that ' wickedness is not easily concealed,' to which I reply that ' nothing great is easy.' Union and force and rhetoric will do much; and if men say that they can not prevail over the gods, still how do we know that there are gods? Only from the poets, who acknowledge that they may be appeased by sacrifices. Then why not sin and pay for indulgences out of your sin? For if the righteous are only unpunished, still they have no further re- ward, while the wicked may be unpunished and have the pleasure of sinning too. But what of the world below? Nay, says the argument, there are atoning powers who will set that matter right, as the poets, who are the sons of the gods, tell us ; and this is con- firmed by the authority of the State, " How can we resist such arguments in favor of injustice? Add good manners, and, as the wise tell us, we shall make the best of both worlds. Who that is not a miserable caitiff will refrain from smiling at the praises of justice? Even if a man knows the better part he will not be angry with others; for he knows also that more than human virtue is needed to save a man, and that he only praises justice who is incapable of injustice. ANALYSIS 37 • " The origin of the evil is that all men from the beginning, heroes, poets, instructors of youth, have always asserted * the temporal dispensation,' the honors and profits of justice. Had we been taught in early youth the power of justice and injustice in- herent in the soul, and unseen by any human or divine eye, we should not have needed others to be our guardians, but every one would have been the guard- ian of himself. This is what I want you to show, Socrates ; — other men use arguments which rather tend to strengthen the position of Thrasymachus that ' might is right ; ' but from you I expect better things. And please, as Glaucon said, to exclude reputation; let the just be thought unjust and the unjust just, and do you still prove to us the superiority of justice." The thesis, which for the sake of argument has been maintained by Glaucon, is the converse of that of Thrasymachus — not right is the interest of the stronger, but right is the necessity of the weaker. Starting from the same premises he carries the analy- sis of society a step further back; — might is still right, but the might is the weakness of the many com- bined against the strength of the few. There have been theories in modem as well as in ancient times which have a family likeness to the speculations of Glaucon; e. g. that power is the foundation of right; or that a monarch has a divine right to govern well or ill; or that virtue is self-love or the love of power ; or that war is the natural state of man; or that private vices are public benefits. All such theories have a kind of plausibihty from their partial agreement with experience. For himaan nature oscillates between good and evil, and the mo- tives of actions and the origin of institutions may be CXf)km?4 \9 a pertain e:^\^i\\ on §}%r h7|)otJf§i§ S8 ANALYSIS according to the character or point of view of a par- ticular thinker. The obhgation of maintaining au- thority under all circumstances and sometimes by rather questionable means is felt strongly and has be- come a sort of instinct among civilized men. The divine right of kings, or more generally of govern- ments, is one of the forms under which this natural feeling is expressed. Nor again is there any evil which has not some accompaniment of good or pleas- ure; nor any good which is free from some alloy of evil; nor any noble or generous thought which may not be attended by a shadow or the ghost of a shadow of self-interest or of self-love. We know that all human actions are imperfect ; but we do not therefore attribute them to the worse rather than to the better motive or principle. Such a philosophy is both fool- ish and false, like that opinion of the clever rogue who assumes all other men to be like himself. And theo- ries of this sort do not represent the real nature of the State, which is based on a vague sense of right gradually corrected and enlarged by custom and law (although capable also of perversion), any more than they describe the origin of society, which is to be sought in the family and in the social and religious feelings of man. Nor do they represent the average character of individuals, which can not be explained simply on a theory of evil, but has always a counter- acting element of good. And as men become better such theories appear more and more untruthful to them, because they are more conscious of their own disinterestedness. A little experience may make a man a cynic; a great deal will bring him back to a truer and kindlier view of the mixed nature of him- self and his fellow men. The two brothers ask Socrates to prove to them that the just is happy when they have taken from ANALYSIS 89 • him all that in which happiness is ordinarily supposed to consist. Not that there is (1) any absurdity in the attempt to frame a notion of justice apart from circumstances. For the ideal must always be a para- dox when compared with the ordinary conditions of human hfe. Neither the Stoical ideal nor the Chris- tian ideal is true as a fact, but they may serve as a basis of education, and may exercise an ennobling in- fluence. An ideal is none the worse because " some one has made the discovery " that no such ideal was ever realized. And in a few exceptional individuals who are raised above the ordinary level of humanity, the ideal of happiness may be realized in death and misery. This may be the state which the reason de- liberately approves, and which the utilitarian as well as every other moralist may be boxmd in certain cases to prefer. Nor again, (2) must we forget that Plato, though he agrees generally with the view implied in the argu- ment of the two brothers, is not expressing his ovsn final conclusion, but rather seeking to dramatize one of the aspects of ethical truth. He is developing his idea gradually in a series of positions or situations. He is exhibiting Socrates for the first time under- going the Socratic interrogation. Lastly, (3) the word " happiness " involves some degree of confusion because associated in the language of modern phi- losophy with conscious pleasure or satisfaction, which was not equally present to his mind. Glaucon has been drawing a picture of the misery of the just and the happiness of the unjust, to which the misery of the tyrant in Book IX is the answer and parallel. And still the unjust must appear just; that is " the homage which vice pays to virtue." But now Adeimantus, taking up the hint which had been already given by Glaucon, proceeds to show that in 40 ANALYSIS the opinion of mankind justice is regarded only for the sake of rewards and reputation, and points out the advantage which is given to such arguments as those of Thrasymachus and Glaucon by the conven- tional morality of mankind. He seems to feel the difficulty of " justifying the ways of God to man." Both the brothers touch upon the question, whether the morality of actions is determined by their conse- quences; and both of them go beyond the position of Socrates, that justice belongs to the class of goods not desirable for themselves only, but desirable for themselves and for their results, to which he recalls them. In their attempt to view justice as an internal principle, and in their condemnation of the poets, they anticipate him. The common life of Greece is not enough for them; they must penetrate deeper into the nature of things. It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but is taken by Socrates to mean all virtue. May we not more truly say that the old-fashioned notion of justice is enlarged by Socrates, and becomes equivalent to universal order or well-being, first in the State, and secondly in the individual? He has found a new answer to his old question, " whether the virtues are one or many," viz. that one is the ordering principle of the three others. In seeking to estabhsh the purely internal nature of justice, he is met by the fact that man is a social be- ing, and he tries to harmonize the two opposite theses as well as he can. There is no more inconsistency in this than was inevitable in his age and country ; there is no use in turning upon him the cross lights of modern philosophy, which, from some other point of view, would appear equally inconsistent. Plato does not give the final solution of philosophical questions for us; nor can he be judged of by our standard. ANALYSIS 41 The remainder of the Republic is developed out of the question of the sons of Ariston. Three points are deserving of remark in what immediately follows: — First, that the answer of Socrates is altogether in- direct. He does not say that happiness consists in the contemplation of the idea of justice, and still less will he be tempted to affirm the Stoical paradox that the just man can be happy on the rack. But first he dwells on the difficulty of the problem and insists on restor- ing man to his natural condition, before he will answer the question at all. He too will frame an ideal, but his ideal comprehends not only abstract justice, but the whole relations of man. Under the fanciful illus- tration of the large letters he implies that he will only look for justice in society, and that from the State he will proceed to the individual. His answer in substance amounts to this, — that under favorable conditions, i. e. in the perfect State, justice and hap- piness will coincide, and that when justice has been once found, happiness may be left to take care of it- self. That he falls into some degree of inconsistency, when in the tenth book he claims to have got rid of the rewards and honors of justice, may be admitted; for he has left those which exist in the perfect State. And the philosopher " who retires under the shelter: of a wall " can hardly have been esteemed happy by him, at least not in this world. Still he maintains the true attitude of moral action. Let a man do his duty first, without asking whether he will be happy or not, and happiness will be the inseparable accident which attends him. " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added imto you." Secondly, it may be remarked that Plato preserves the genuine character of Greek thought in beginning with the State and in going on to the individual 42 ANALYSIS First ethics, then politics — this is the order of ideas to us; the reverse is the order of history. Only^fter many struggles of thought does the individual ;4ssert his right as a moral being. In early ages he is not one^ but one of many, the citizen of a State which is prior to him; and he has no notion of good or evil apart from the law of his country or the creed of his church. And to this type he is constantly tending to revert, whenever the influence of custom, or of party spirit, or the recollection of the past becomes too strong for him. Thirdly, we may observe the confusion or identi- fication of the individual and the State, of ethics and politics, which pervades early Greek speculation, and even in modern timies retains a certain degree of in- fluence. The subtle difference between the collective and individual action of mankind seems to have es- caped early thinkers, and we too are sometimes in danger of forgetting the conditions of united human action, whenever we either elevate politics into ethics, or lower ethics to the standard of politics. The good man and the good citizen only coincide in the perfect State ; and this perfection can not be attained by legis- lation acting upon them from without, but, if at all, by education fashioning them from within. Socrates praises the sons of Ariston, " inspired off- spring of the renowned hero," as the elegiac poet terms them; but he does not understand how they can argue so eloquently on behalf of injustice while their character shows that they are uninfluenced by their own arguments. He knows not how to answer them, although he is afraid of deserting justice in the hour of need. He therefore makes a condition, that having weak eyes he shall be allowed to read the large letters first and then go on to the smaller, that is, he must look for justice in the State first, and will then ANALYSIS 48 « proceed to the individual. Accordingly he begins to construct the State. Society arises out of the wants of man. His first want is food; his second a house; his third a coat. The sense of these needs and the possibility of satisfy- ing them by exchange, draw individuals together on the same spot; and this is the beginning of a State, which we take the liberty to invent, although necessity is the real inventor. There must be first a husband- man, secondly a builder, thirdly a weaver, to which may be added a cobbler. Four or five citizens at least are required to make a city. Now men have different natures, and one man will do one thing better than many; and business waits for no man. Hence there must be a division of labor into different employ- ments ; into wholesale and retail trade ; into workers, and makers of workmen's tools; into shepherds and husbandmen. A city which includes all this will have far exceeded the limit of four or five, and yet not be very large. But then again imports will be required, and imports necessitate exports, and this implies vari- ety of produce in order to attract the taste of pur- chasers ; also merchants and ships. In the city too we must have a market and money and retail trades; otherwise buyers and sellers will never meet, and the valuable time of the producers will be wasted in vain efforts at exchange. If we add hired servants the State will be complete. And we may guess that somewhere in the intercourse of the citizens with one another justice and injustice will appear. Here follows a rustic picture of their way of life. They spend their days in houses which they have built for themselves; they make their own clothes and produce their own corn and wine. Their principal food is meal and flour, and they drink in moderation. They live on the best of terms with each other, and 44 ANALYSIS take care not to have too many children. " But," said Glaucon, interposing, " are they not to have a reUsh? " Certainly; they will have salt and olives and cheese, vegetables and fruits, and chestnuts to roast at the fire. " 'Tis.a city of pigs, Socrates." Why, I repHed, what do you want more? " Only the comforts of life, — sofas and tables, also sauces and sweets." I see ; you want not only a State, but a luxurious State; and possibly in the more complex frame we may sooner find justice and injustice. Then the fine arts must go to work — every conceivable instrument and ornament of luxury will be wanted. There will be dancers, painters, sculptors, musicians, cooks, barbers, tire-women, nurses, artists; swineherds and neat- herds too for the animals, and physicians to cure the disorders of which luxury is the source. To feed all these superfluous mouths we shall need a part of our neighbors' land, and they will want a part of ours. And this is the origin of war, which may be traced to the same causes as other political evils. Our city will now require the slight addition of a camp, and the citizen will be converted into a soldier. But then again our old doctrine of the division of labor must not be forgotten. The art of war can not be learned in a day, and there must be a natural aptitude for military duties. There will be some warlike natures who have this aptitude — dogs keen of scent, swift of foot to pursue, and strong of limb to fight. And as spirit is the foundation of courage, such natures, whether of men or animals, will be full of spirit. But these spirited natures are apt to bite and devour one an- other; the union of gentleness to friends and fierce- ness against enemies appears to be an impossibility, and the guardian of a State requires both qualities. Who then can be a guardian? The image of the dog suggests an answer. For dogs are gentle to friends ANALYSIS 45 • and fierce to strangers. Your dog is a philosopher who Judges by the rule of knowing or not knowing; and philosophy, whether in man or beast, is the parent of gentleness. The hirnian watchdogs must be phi- losophers or lovers of learning which will make them gentle. And how are they to be learned without edu- cation? But what shall their education be? Is any better than the old-fashioned sort which is comprehended under the name of music and gymnastic? Music in- cludes literature, and literature is of two kinds, true and false. " What do you mean? " he said. I mean that children hear stories before they learn gymnas- tics, and that the stories are either untrue, or have at most one or two grains of truth in a bushel of false- hood. Now early life is very impressible, and chil- dren ought not to learn what they will have to unlearn when they grow up ; we must therefore have a censor- ship of nursery tales, banishing some and keeping others. Some of them are very improper, as we may see in the great instances of Homer and Hesiod, who not only tell Ues but bad lies; stories about Uranus and Saturn, which are immoral as well as false, and which should never be spoken of to young persons, or indeed at all ; or, if at all, then in a mystery, after the sacrifice, not of an Eleusinian pig, but of some un- procurable animal. Shall our youth be encouraged to beat their fathers by the example of Zeus, or our citizens be incited to quarrel by hearing or seeing representations of strife among the gods? Shall they listen to the narrative of Hephaestus binding his mother, and of Zeus sending him flying for helping her when she was beaten? Such tales may possibly have a mystical interpretation, but the young are in- capable of understanding allegory. If any one asks what tales are to be allowed, we will answer that we 46 ANALYSIS are legislators and not book-makers; we only lay- down the principles according to which books are to be written; to write them is the duty of others. And our first principle is, that God must be repre- sented as he is; not as the author of all things, but of good only. We will not suffer the poets to say that he is the steward of good and evil, or that he has two casks full of destinies; — or that Athene and Zeus incited Pandarus to break the treaty; or that God caused the sufferings of Niobe, or of Pelops, or the Trojan war; or that he makes men sin when he wishes to destroy them. Either these were not the actions of the gods, or God was just, and men were the better for being punished. But that the deed was evil, and God the author, is a wicked, suicidal fiction which we will allow no one, old or young, to utter. This is our first and great principle — God is the author of good only. And the second principle is like unto it: — With God is no variableness or change of form. Reason teaches us this; for if we suppose a change in God, he must be changed either by another or by himself. By another? — but the best works of nature and art and the noblest qualities of mind are least liable to be changed by any external force. By himself^ — but he can not change for the better ; he will hardly change for the worse. He remains for ever fairest and best in his own image. Therefore we refuse to listen to the poets who tell us of Here begging in the likeness of a priestess or of other deities who prowl about at night in strange disguises ; all that blasphemous non- sense with which mothers fool the manhood out of their children must be suppressed. Bxit some one will say that God, who is himself imchaneeable, may take a form in relation to us. Why should he? For gods as well as men hate the lie in the soul, or principle of ANALYSIS 4T falsehood; and as for any other form of lying which is used for a purpose and is regarded as innocent in certain exceptional cases — what need have the gods of this? For they are not ignorant of antiquity like the poets, nor are they afraid of their enemies, nor is any madman a friend of theirs. God then is true, he is absolutely true ; he changes not, he deceives not, by day or night, by word or sign. This is our second great principle — God is true. Away with the lying dream of Agamemnon in Homer, and the accusation of Thetis against Apollo in Aeschylus. In order to give clearness to his conception of the State, Plato proceeds to trace the first principles of mutual need and of division of labor in an imaginary community of four or five citizens. Gradually this community increases; the division of labor extends to countries; imports necessitate exports; a medium of exchange is required, and retailers sit in the market- place to save the time of the producers. These are the steps by which Plato constructs the first or prim- itive State, introducing the elements of political econ- omy by the way. As he is going to frame a second or civilized State, the simple naturally comes before the complex. He indulges, like Rousseau, in a pic- ture of primitive life — an idea which has indeed often had a powerful influence on the imagination of man- kind, but he does not seriously mean to say that one is better than the other; nor can any inference be drawn from the description of the first state taken apart from the second, such as Aristotle appears to draw in the Politics, iv. 4, 12. We should not inter- pret a Platonic dialogue any more than a poem or a parable in too literal or matter-of-fact a style. On the other hand, when we compare the lively fancy of Flato with the dried-up abstractions of modern tr«r 48 ANALYSIS tises on philosophy, we are compelled to say with Protagoras, that the " mythus is more interesting." Several interesting remarks which in modern times would have a place in a treatise on Political Economy are scattered up and down the writings of Plato. The Division of Labor and also the origin of Retail Trade are treated with admirable lucidity in the sec- ond book of the Republic. But Plato never com- bined his economic ideas into a system, and never seems to have recognized that Trade is one of the great motive powers of the State and of the world. He would make retail traders only of the inferior sort of citizens, though he remarks, quaintly enough, that " if only the best men and the best women every- where were compelled to keep taverns for a time or to carry on retail trade, etc., then we should know how pleasant and agreeable all these things are." The disappointment of Glaucon at the " city of pigs," the ludicrous description of the ministers of luxury in the more refined State, and the afterthought of the necessity of doctors, the illustration of the na- ture of the guardian taken from the dog, the desira- bleness of offering some almost unprocurable victim when impure mysteries are to be celebrated, the be- havior of Zeus to his father and of Hephaestus to hia mother, are touches of humor which have also a serious meaning. In speaking of education Plato rather startles us by affirming that a child must be trained in falsehood first and in truth afterwards. Yet this is not very different from saying that children must be taught through the medium of imagination as well as reason; that their minds can only develop grad- ually, and that there is much which they must learn vdthout understanding. This is also the substance of Plato's view, though he must be acknowledged to J)ftve #§wp thf Ijn? son^9wJt«i^ differently U9m mo4' ANALYSIS 49 • em ethical writers, respecting truth and falsehood. To us, economies or accommodations would not be allowable unless they were required by the human faculties or necessary for the communication of knowl- edge to the simple and ignorant. We should insist that the word was inseparable from the intention, and that we must not be " falsely true," i. e. speak or act falsely in support of what was right or true. But Plato would limit the use of fictions only by requiring that they should have a good moral effect, and that such a dangerous weapon as falsehood should be em- ployed by the rulers alone and for great objects. A Greek in the age of Plato attached no impor- tance to the question whether his rehgion was an historical fact. He was just beginning to be con- scious that the past had a history; but he could see nothing beyond Homer and Hesiod. Whether their narratives were true or false did not seriously affect the political or social hf e of Hellas. Men only began to suspect that they were fictions when they recog- nized them to be immoral. And so in all religions: the consideration of their morality comes first, after- wards the truth of the documents in which they are recorded, or of the events natural or supernatural which are told of them. But in modern times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than in Cath- olic, we have been too much inclined to identify the historical with the moral; and some have refused to beheve in religion at all, tmless a superhuman accu- racy was discernible in every part of the record. The facts of an ancient or religious history are among the most important of all facts; but they are frequently uncertain, and we only learn the true lesson which is to be gathered from them when we place ourselves above them. These reflections tend to show that the difference between Plato and ourselves, though not 60 ANALYSIS unimportant, is not so great as might at first sight appear. For we should agree with him in placing the moral before the historical truth of religion ; and, generally, in disregarding those errors or misstate- ments of fact which necessarily occur in the early stages of all religions. We know also that changes in the traditions of a country can not be made in a day ; and are therefore tolerant of many things which science and criticism would condemn. We note in passing that the allegorical interpre- tation of mythology, said to have been first introduced as early as the sixth century before Christ by Theag- enes of Rhegium, was well established in the age of Plato, and here, as in the Phaedrus, though for a dif- ferent reason, was rejected by him. That anachro- nisms whether of religion or law, when men have reached another stage of civilization, should be got rid of by fictions is in accordance with universal ex- perience. Great is the art of interpretation; and by a natural process, which when once discovered was always going on, what could not be altered was ex- plained away. And so without any palpable incon- sistency there existed side by side two forms of relig- ion, the tradition inherited or invented by the poets and the customary worship of the temple; on the other hand, there was the religion of the philosopher, who was dwelling in the heaven of ideas, but did not therefore refuse to offer a cock to ^sculapius, or to be seen saying his prayers at the rising of the sun. At length the antagonism between the popular and philosophical religion, never so great among the Greeks as in our own age, disappeared, and was only felt like the difference between the religion of the educated and uneducated among ourselves. The Zeus of Homer and Hesiod easily passed into the " royal mind " of Plato; the giant Heracles became ANALYSIS 51 the knight-errant and benefactor of mankind. These and still more wonderful transformations were read- ily effected by the ingenuity of Stoics and neo-Plato- nists in the two or three centuries before and after Christ. The Greek and Roman religions were grad- ually permeated by the spirit of philosophy; having lost their ancient meaning, they were resolved into poetry and morality; and probably were never purer than at the time of their decay, when their influence over the world was waning. A singular conception which occurs towards the end of the book is the lie in the soul ; this is connected with the Platonic and Socratio doctrine that involun- tary ignorance is worse than voluntary. The lie in the soul is a true lie, the corruption of the highest truth, the deception of the highest part of the soul, from which he who is deceived has no power of deliv- ering himself. For example, to represent God as false or immoral, or, according to Plato, as deluding men with appearances or as the author of evil; or again, to affirm with Protagoras that " knowledge is sensation," or that " being is becoming," or with Thrasymachus " that might is right," would have been regarded by Plato as a lie of this hateful sort. The greatest unconsciousness of the greatest untruth, e. g. if, in the language of the Gospels (John iv. 41), " he who was blind " were to say " I see," is another aspect of the state of mind which Plato is describing. The lie in the soul may be further compared with the sin against the Holy Ghost (Luke xii. 10), allowing for the difference between Greek and Christian modes of speaking. To this is opposed the lie in words, which is only such a deception as may occur in a play or poem, or allegory or figure of speech, or in any sort of accommodation, — which though useless to the gods may be useful to men in certain cases. Socrates 52 ANALYSIS is here answering the question which he had himself raised about the propriety of deceiving a madman; and he is also contrasting the nature of God and man. For God is Truth, but mankind can only be true by appearing sometimes to be partial, or false. Resell' ing for another place the greater questions of religion or education, we may note further, (1) the approval of the old traditional education of Greece; (2) the preparation which Plato is making for the attack on Homer and the poets; (3) the preparation which he is also making for the use of economies in the State; (4) the contemptuous and at the same time euphemis- tic manner in which here as below he alludes to the Chronique Scandaleuse of the gods. BOOK III There is another motive in purifying religion, which is to banish fear; for no man can be courageous who is afraid of death, or who believes the tales which are repeated by the poets concerning the world below. They must be gently requested not to abuse hell ; they may be reminded that their stories are both untrue and discouraging. Nor must they be angry if we expunge obnoxious passages, such as the depressing words of Achilles — "I would rather be a serving- man than rule over all the dead ; " and the verses which tell of the squalid mansions, the senseless shadows, the flitting soul mourning over lost strength a,nd youth, the soul with a gibber going beneath the earth like smoke, or the souls of the suitors which flutter about like bats. The terrors and horrors of Cocytus and Styx, ghosts and sapless shades, and the rest of their Tartarean nomenclature, must vanish. Such tales may have their use ; but they are not the proper food for soldiers. As little can we admit the sorrows ANALYSIS 53 arid sympathies of the Homeric heroes: — Achilles, the son of Thetis, in tears, throwing ashes on his head, or pacing up and down the sea-shore in distraction; or Priam, the cousin of the gods, crying aloud, rolling in the mire. A good man is not prostrated at the loss of children or fortune. Neither is death terrible to him ; and therefore lamentations over the dead should not be practised by men of note; they should be the concern of inferior persons only, whether women or men. Still worse is the attribution of such weakness to the gods; as when the goddesses say, " Alasl my travail! " and worst of all, when the king of heaven himself laments his inability to save Hector, or sor- rows over the impending doom of his dear Sarpedon. Such a character of God, if not ridiculed by our young men, is likely to be imitated by them. Nor should our citizens be given to excess of laughter — " Such violent delights " are followed by a violent reaction. The description in the Iliad of the gods shaking their sides at the clumsiness of Hephaestus will not be admitted by us. " Certainly not." Truth should have a high place among the virtues, for falsehood, as we were saying, is useless to the gods, and only useful to men as a medicine. But this em- ployment of falsehood must remain a privilege of state; the common man must not in return tell a lie to the ruler; any more than the patient would tell a lie to his physician, or the sailor to his captain. In the next place our youth must be temperate, and temperance consists in self-control and obedience to authority. That is a lesson which Homer teaches in some places: " The Achaeans marched on breathing prowess, in silent awe of their leaders ; " — but a very different one in other places : " O heavy with wine* who hast the eyes of a dog, but the heart of a stag." Language of the latter kind will not impress self* 54 ANALYSIS control on the minds of youth. The same may be said about his praises of eating and drinking and his dread of starvation; also about the verses in which he tells of the rapturous loves of Zeus and Here, or of how Hephaestus once detained Ares and Aphro- dite in a net on a similar occasion. There is a nobler strain heard in the words : — " Endure, my soul, thou hast endured worse." Nor must we allow our citizens to receive bribes, or to say, " Gifts persuade the gods, gifts reverend kings ; " or to applaud the ignoble advice of Phoenix to Achilles that he should get money out of the Greeks before he assisted them; or the meanness of Achilles himself in taking gifts from Agamemnon ; or his requiring a ransom for the body of Hector; or his cursing of Apollo ; or his insolence to the river-god Scamander; or his dedication to the dead Patroclus of his own hair which had been already dedicated to the other river-god Spercheius; or his cruelty in dragging the body of Hector round the walls, and slaying the captives at the pyre: such a combination of meanness and cruelty in Cheiron's pupil is inconceivable. The amatory exploits of Pei- rithous and Theseus are equally unworthy. Either these so-called sons of gods were not the sons of gods, or they were not such as the poets imagine them, any more than the gods themselves are the authors of evil. The youth who believes that such things are done by those who have the blood of heaven flowing in their veins will be too ready to imitate their example. Enough of gods and heroes ; — what shall we say about men? What the poets and story-tellers say — that the wicked prosper and the righteous are afflicted, or that justice is another's gain? Such misrepresen- tations can not be allowed by us. But in this we are anticipating the definition of justice, and had there- fore better defer the inquiry. ANA1.YSIS 55 « The subjects of poetry have been sufficiently treated; next follows style. Now aU poetry is a narrative of events past, present, or to come; and narrative is of three kinds, the simple, the imitative, and a composition of the two. An instance will make my meaning clear. The first scene in Homer is of the last or mixed kind, being partly description and partly dialogue. But if you throw the dialogue into the " oratio obliqua," the passage will run thus : The priest came and prayed Apollo that the Achaeans might take Troy and have safe return if Agamem- non would only give him back his daughter; and the other Greeks assented, but Agamemnon was vvrroth, and so on — The whole then becomes descriptive, and the poet is the only speaker left; or, if you omit the narrative, the whole becomes dialogue. These are the three styles — which of them is to be admitted into our State? " Do you ask whether tragedy and comedy are to be admitted?" Yes, but also some- thing more — Is it not doubtful whether our guardi- ans are to be imitators at all? Or rather, has not the question been already answered, for we have decided that one man can not in his life play many parts, any more than he can act both tragedy and comedy, or be rhapsodist and actor at once? Human nature is coined into very small pieces, and as our guardians have their own business already, which is the care of freedom, they will have enough to do without imitat- ing. If they imitate they should imitate, not any meanness or baseness, but the good only; for the mask which the actor wears is apt to become his face. We can not allow men to play the parts of women, quar- relling, weeping, scolding, or boasting against the gods, — least of all when making love or in labor. They must not represent slaves, or bullies, or cowards, or drunkards, or madmen, or blacksmiths, or neighing 66 ANALYSIS horses, or bellowing bulls, or sounding rivers, or a raging sea. A good or wise man will be willing to perform good and wise actions, but he will be ashamed to play an inferior part which he has never practised; and he will prefer to employ the descriptive style with as little imitation as possible. The man who has no self-respect, on the contrary, will imitate anybody and anything; sounds of nature and cries of animals alike; his whole performance will be imitation of gesture and voice. Now in the descriptive style there are few changes, but in the dramatic there are a great many. Poets and musicians use either, or a compound of both, and this compound is very attractive to youth and their teachers as well as to the vulgar. But our State in which one man plays one part only is not adapted for complexity. And when one of these pol- yphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and his poetry we will show him every ob- servance of respect, but at the same time tell him that there is no room for his kind in our State; we prefer the rough, honest poet, and wiU not depart from our original models. Next as to the music. A song or ode has three parts, — the subject, the harmony, and the rhythm; of which the two last are dependent upon the first. As we banished strains of lamentation, so we may now banish the mixed Lydian harmonies, which are the harmonies of lamentation ; and as our citizens are to be temperate, we may also banish convivial har- monies, such as the Ionian and pure Lydian. Two remain — the Dorian and Phrygian, the first for war, the second for peace; the one expressive of courage, the other of obedience or instruction or religious feel- ing. And as we reject varieties of harmony, we shall also reject the many-stringed, variously -shaped in- struments which give utterance to them, and in par- ANALYSIS 57 ticular the flute, which is more complex than any of thetn. The lyre and the harp may be permitted in the town, and the Pan's-pipe in the fields. Thus we have made a purgation of music, and will now make a purgation of metres. These should be like the har- monies, simple and suitable to the occasion. There are four notes of the tetrachord, and there are three ratios of metre, |, f , f , which have all their charac- teristics, and the feet have different characteristics as well as the rhythms. But about this you and I must ask Damon, the great musician, who speaks, if I remember rightly, of a martial measure as well as of dactylic, trochaic, and iambic rhythms, which he ar- ranges so as to equalize the syllables with one another, assigning to each the proper quantity. We only ven- ture to affirm the general principle that the style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style; and that the simplicity and harmony of the soul should be reflected in them all. This principle of simplicity has to be learned by every one in the days of his youth, and may be gathered anywhere, from the creative and constructive arts, as well as from the forms of plants and animals. Other artists as well as poets should be warned against meanness or unseemliness. Sculpture and painting equally with music must conform to the law of simplicity. He who violates it can not be allowed to work in our city, and to corrupt the taste of our citizens. For our guardians must grow up, not amid images of deformity which will gradually poison and corrupt their souls, but in a land of health and beauty where they will drink in from every object sweet and harmonious influences. And of all these influences the greatest is the education given by music, which fmds a way into the innermost soul and imparts to it the sense of beauty and of deformity. At first the 68 ANALYSIS effect is unconscious; but when reason arrives, then he who has been thus trained welcomes her as the friend whom he always knew. As in learning to read, first we acquire the elements or letters separately, and afterwards their combinations, and can not recognize reflections of them until we know the letters them- selves ; — in like manner we must first attain the ele- ments or essential forms of the virtues, and then trace their combinations in life and experience. There is a music of the soul which answers to the harmony of the world; and the fairest object of a musical soul is the fair mind in the fair body. Some defect in the latter may be excused, but not in the former. True love is the daughter of temperance, and temperance is utterly opposed to the madness of bodily pleasure. Enough has been said of music, which makes a fair ending with love. Next we pass on to gymnastics; about which I would remark, that the soul is related to the body as a cause to an effect, and therefore if we educate the mind we may leave the education of the body in her charge, and need only give a general outline of the course to be pursued. In the first place the guard- ians must abstain from strong drink, for they should be the last persons to lose their wits. Whether the habits of the palaestra are suitable to them is more doubtful, for the ordinary gymnastic is a sleepy sort of thing, and if left off suddenly is apt to endanger health. But our warrior athletes must be wide-awake dogs, and must also be inured to all changes of food and climate. Hence they will require a simpler kind of gymnastic, akin to their simple music; and for their diet a rule may be found in Homer, who feeds his heroes on roast meat only, and gives them no fish although they are living at the sea-side, nor boiled meats which involve an apparatus of pots and pans; ANALYSIS 59 and, if I am not mistaken, he nowhere mentions sweet sauces. Sicilian cookery and Attic confections and Corinthian courtezans, which are to gymnastic what Lydian and Ionian melodies are to music, must be forbidden. Where gluttony and intemperance pre- vail the town quickly fills with doctors and pleaders; and law and medicine give themselves airs as soon as the freemen of a State take an interest in them. But what can show a more disgraceful state of educa- tion than to have to go abroad for justice because you have none of your own at home? And yet there is a worse stage of the same disease — when men have learned to take a pleasure and pride in the twists and turns of the law ; not considering how much bet- ter it would be for them so to order their lives as to have no need of a nodding justice. And there is a like disgrace in employing a physician, not for the cure of wounds or epidemic disorders, but because a man has by laziness and luxury contracted diseases which were unknown in the days of Asclepius. How simple is the Homeric practice of medicine. Eurypy- lus after he has been wounded drinks a posset of Pramnian wine, which is of a heating nature; and yet the sons of Asclepius blame neither the damsel who gives him the drink, nor Patroclus who is attend- ing on him. The truth is that this modern system of nursing diseases was introduced by Herodicus the trainer ; who, being of a sickly constitution, by a com- pound of training and medicine tortured first himself and then a good many other people, and lived a great deal longer than he had any right. But Asclepius would not practise this art, because he knew that the citizens of a well-ordered State have no leisure to be ill, and therefore he adopted the " kill or cure " method, which artisans and laborers employ. " They must be at their business," they say, " and have no 60 ANALYSIS time for coddling: if they l-ecover, well ; if they don't, there is an end of them." Whereas the rich man is supposed to be a gentleman who can afford to be iU. Do you know a maxim of Phocylides — that " when a man begins to be rich " (or, perhaps, a little sooner) " he should practise virtue "? But how can excessive care of health be inconsistent with an oi*dinary occu- pation, and yet consistent with that practice of virtue which Phocylides inculcates? When a student imag-- ines that philosophy gives him a headache, he never does anything; he is always unwell. This was the reason why Asclepius and his sons practised no such art. They were acting in the interest of the public* and did not wish to preserve useless lives, or raise up a puny offspring to wretched sires. Honest diseases they honestly Cured ; and if a man was Wounded, they applied the proper remedies, and then let him eat and drink what he liked. But they declined to treat in- temperate and worthless subjects, even though they might have made large fortunes out of them. As to the story of Pindar, that Asclepius was slain by a thunderbolt for restoring a rich man to life, that is a lie -^ following our old rule we must say either that he did not take bribes, or that he was not the son of a god. Glaticon then asks Socrates whether the best physi- cians and the best judges will not be those who have severally the greatest experience of diseases and of crimes. Socrates draws a distinction between the two professions. The physician should have had experi- ence of disease in his own body, for he cures with his mind and not with his body. But the judge controls mind by mind; and therefore his mind should not be corrupted by crime. Where then is he to gain experience? How is he to be wise and also innocent? When yoxmg a good man is apt to be deceived by ANALYSIS 61 evil-doers, because he has no pattern of evil in him- self; and therefore the judge should be of a certain age; his youth should have been innocent, and he should have acquired insight into evil not by the prac- tice of it, but by the observation of it in others. This is the ideal of a judge; the criminal turned detective is wonderfully suspicious, but when in company with good men who have experience, he is at fault, for he foolishly imagines that every one is as bad as himself. Vice may be known of virtue, but can not know virtue. This is the sort of medicine and this the sort of law which will prevail in our State; they will be healing arts to better natures; but the evil body will be left to die by the one, and the evil soul will be put to death by the other. And the need of either will be greatly diminished by good music which will give harmony to the soul, and good gymnastic which will give health to the body. Not that this division of music and gym- nastic really corresponds to soul and body; for they are both equally concerned with the soul, which is tamed by the one and aroused and sustained by the other. The two together supply our guardians with their twofold nature. The passionate disposition when it has two much gymnastic is hardened and brutalized, the gentle or philosophic temper which has too much music becomes enervated. While a man is allowing music to pour like water through the fim^nel of his ears, the edge of his soul gradually wears away, and the passionate or spirited element is melted out of him. Too little spirit is easily exhausted; too much quickly passes into nervous irritability. So, again, the athlete by feeding and training has his courage doubled, but he soon grows stupid; he is like a wild beast, ready to do everything by blows and nothing by counsel or policy. There are two principles in man, reason and passion, and to these, not to the soul 62 ANALYSIS and body, the two arts of music and gymnastic corre- spond. He who mingles them in harmonious concord is the true musician, — he shall be the presiding genius of our State. The next question is, Who are to be our rulers? First, the elder must rule the younger; and the best of the elders will be the best guardians. Now they will be the best who love their subjects most, and think that they have a common interest with them in the welfare of the state. These we must select ; but they must be watched at every epoch of life to see whether they have retained the same opinions and held out against force and enchantment. For time and per- suasion and the love of pleasure may enchant a man into a change of purpose, and the force of grief and pain may compel him. And therefore our guardians must be men who have been tried by many tests, like gold in the refiner's fire, and have been passed first through danger, then through pleasure, and at every age have come out of such trials victorious and with- out stain, in full command of themselves and their principles; having all their faculties in harmonious exercise for their country's good. These shall receive the highest honors both in life and death. (It would perhaps be better to confine the term " guardians " to this select class: the younger men may be called " auxiliaries.") And now for one magnificent lie, in the belief of which. Oh that we could train our rulers ! — at any rate let us make the attempt with the rest of the world. What I am going to tell is only another version of the legend of Cadmus; but our unbelieving generation will be slow to accept such a story. The tale must be imparted, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, lastly to the people. We will inform them that their youth was a dream, and that during the time when they ANALYSIS 63 seemed to be undergoing thei^ education they were really being fashioned in the earth, who sent them up when they were ready; and that they must protect and cherish her whose children they are, and regard each other as brothers and sisters. " I do not wonder at your being ashamed to propound such a fiction." There is more behind. These brothers and sisters have different natures, and some of them God framed to rule, whom he fashioned of gold; others he made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again to be hus- bandmen and craftsmen, and these were formed by him of brass and iron. But as they are all sprung from a common stock, a golden parent may have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son, and then there must be a change of rank; the son of the rich must descend, and the child of the artisan rise, in the social scale; for an oracle says "that the State will come to an end if governed by a man of brass or iron." Will our citizens ever believe all this? " Not in the present generation, but in the next, perhaps. Yes." Now let the earthborn men go forth under the command of their rulers, and look about and pitch their camp in a high place, which will be safe against enemies from without, and likewise against insur- rections from within. There let them sacrifice and set up their tents ; for soldiers they are to be and not shopkeepers, the watchdogs and guardians of the sheep; and luxury and avarice will turn them into wolves and tyrants. Their habits and their dwellings should correspond to their education. They should have no property; their pay should only meet their expenses ; and they should have common meals. Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God, and this divine gift in their souls they must not alloy with that eajthly dross which passes under the name of 64 ANALYSIS gold. They bhly bi the ditizehs may not touch itj or be under the same roof with it, or drihk from it; it is the accursed thing. Should they evfer acquire houses or lands or money of their own^ they will become householders and tradesmen instead of guard- ians, enemies and tyrants instead of helper^, and the hour of ruin, both to. thettiselves &nd the rest of the State, will be at handi The religious and ethical aspect of Plato's educa- tion will hereafter be considered under a separate head. Some lessel* points tnay be more conveniently noticed in this place. 1. The constant appeal to the authority of Homer, whom, with grave irony, Plato, after the manner of his age, summons as a witness about ethics and psy- chology, as well as about diet and medicine j attempt- ing to distinguish the better lessOh from the worse, sometimes altering the text from design; more than once quoting or alludiilg to Homer inaccurately, after the manner of the early logographers turning the Iliad into prose, and delightirig to drdw fdr-fetched inferences from his Ivorda, 6r td tnake ludicrous applications of them. He does not, like HeracleitUs, get into a rage with Homer and Archilochus (Heracl. Frag. 119, ed. By water), but uses their words and expressions as vehicles of a higher truth? hot on a system like Theagenes of Rhegium or MetrodorUs, Or in later times the Stoics, but as fancy may dictate. And the conclusions di'awn from them are sound, although the premises are fictitious. These faticiful appeals to Honler add a charm to Plato's style, and at the same time they haVe the eiFect of a satire on the follies of Homeric interpretation. To us (and probably to himself), although they take the form of arguments, they are really figures of speech* They ANALYSIS 65 may be compared with modern citations from Scrips ture, which have often a great rhetorical power even when the original meaning of the words is entirely lost sight of. The real, hke the Platonic Socrates, as we gather from the Memorabilia of Xenophon, was fond of making similar adaptations (i. 2, 58; ii. 6, 11). Great in all ages and countries, in religion as well as in law and literature, has been the art of interpretation. 2. " The style is to conform to the subject and the metre to the style." Notwithstanding the fascination which the word " classical " exercises over us, we can hardly maintain that this rule is observed in all the Greek poetry which has come down to us. We can not deny that the thought often exceeds the power of lucid expression in ^schylus and Pindar; or that rhetoric gets the better of the thought in the Sophist^ poet Euripides. Only perhaps in Sophocles is there a perfect harmony of the two; in him alone do we find a grace of language like the beauty of a Greek statue, in which there is nothing to add or to take away; at least this is true of single plays or of large portions of them. The connection in the Tragic Choruses and in the Greek lyric poets is not unfre- quently a tangled thread which in an age before logic the poet was unable to draw out. Many thoughts and feelings mingled in his mind, and he had no power of disengaging or arranging them. For there is a subtle influence of logic which requires to be trans- ferred from prose to poetry, just as the music and perfection of language are infused by poetry into prose. In all ages the poet has been a bad judge of his own meaning; for he does not see that the word which is full of associations to his own mind is difficult and unmeaning to that of another; or that the se- quence which is clear to himself is puzzling to others, 66 ANALYSIS There are many passages in some of our greatest mod- ern poets which are far too obscure; in which there is no proportion between style and subject; in which any half-expressed figure, any harsh construction, any distorted collocation of words, any remote sequence of ideas is admitted ; and there is no voice " coming sweetly from nature," or music adding the expression of feeling to thought. As if there could be poetry without beauty, or beauty without ease and clearness. The obscurities of early Greek poets arose necessarily out of the state of language and logic which existed in their age. They are not examples to be followed by us ; for the use of language ought in every genera- tion to become clearer and clearer. Like Shake- speare, they were great in spite, not in consequence, of their imperfections of expression. But there is no reason for returning to the necessary obscurity which prevailed in the infancy of literature. The English poets of the last century were certainly not obscure; and we have no excuse for losing what they had gained, or for going back to the earlier or transitional age which preceded them. The thought of our own times has not outstripped language; a want of Plato's " art of measuring " is the real cause of the disproportion between them. 3. In the third book of the Republic a nearer ap- proach is made to a theory of ^rt than anywhere else in Plato. His views may be summed up as fol- lows : — True art is not fanciful and imitative, but simple and ideal, — the expression of the highest moral energy, whether in. action or repose. To live among works of plastic art which are of this noble and simple character, or to listen to such strains, is the best of influences, — the true Greek atmosphere, in which youth should be brought up. That is the way ANALYSIS 67 to create in them a natural good taste, which will have a feeling of truth and beauty in all things. For though the poets are to be expelled, still art is recog- nized as another aspect of reason — like love in the Symposium, extending over the same sphere, but confined to the preliminary education, and acting through the power of habit; and this conception of art is not limited to strains of music or the forms of plastic art, but pervades all nature and has a wide kindred in the world. The Republic of Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an artistic as well as a political side. There is hardly any mention in Plato of the crea- tive arts; only in two or three passages does he even allude to them. He is not lost in rapture at the great works of Phidias, the Parthenon, the Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He would probably have regarded any abstract truth of number or figure as higher than the greatest of them. Yet it is hard to suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to in- spire in youth, did not pass into his own mind from the works of art which he saw around him. We are living upon the fragments of them, and find in a few broken stones the standard of truth and beauty. But in Plato this feeling has no expression; he nowhere says that beauty is the object of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form; he does not distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts. Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than he expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that the greatiest perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost entire silence about them. In one very striking passage he tells us that a work of art, like the State, is a whole ; and this conception of a whole and the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may 68 ANALYSIS be regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating principles of Greek art (cp. Xen. Mem. iii. 10, 6). 4. Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had better not be in robust health; and should have known what illness is in his own person. But the judge ought to have had no similar experi^ ence of evil; he is to be a good man who, having passed his youth in innocence, became acquainted late in life with the vices of others. And therefore, ac- cording to Plato, a judge should not be young, just as a young man according to Aristotle is not fit to be a hearer of moral philosophy. The bad, on the other hand, have a knowledge of vice, but no knowledge of virtue. It may be doubted, however, whether this train of reflection is well founded. In a remarkable passage of the Laws it is acknowledged that the evil may form a correct estimate of the good. The union of gentleness and courage in Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox, yet was afterwards ascertained to be a truth. And Plato might also have found that the intuition of evil may be consistent with the abhor- rence of it. There is a directness of aim in virtue which gives an insight into vice. And the knowledge of character is in some degree a natural sense independent of any special experience of good or evil. 5. One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because un-Greek and also very different from anything which existed at all in his age of the world, is the transposition of ranks. In the Spartan state there had been enfranchisement of Helots and degra- dation of citizens under special circumstances. And in the ancient Greek aristocracies, merit was certainly reeognized as one of the elements on which govern" ment was based. The founders of states were sup« ANALYSIS 6& « posed to be their benefactors, who were raised by their great actions above the ordinary level of human- ity; at a later period, the services of warriors and legislators were held to entitle them and their de- scendants to the privileges of citizenship and to the the first rank in the state. And although the exist- ence of an ideal aristocracy is slenderly proven from the remains of early Greek history, and we have a difficulty in ascribing such a character, however the idea may be defined, to any actual Hellenic state — or indeed to any state which has ever existed in the world — still the rule of the best was certainly the aspiration of philosophers, who probably accommo- dated a good deal their views of primitive history to their own notions of good government. Plato further insists on applying to the guardians of his state a series of tests by which all those who fell short of a fixed standard were either removed from the govern- ing body, or not admitted to it; and this " academic " discipline did to a certain extent prevail in Greek states, especially in Sparta. He also indicates that the system of caste, which existed in a great part of the ancient, and is by no means extinct in the modern European world, should be set aside from time to time in favor of merit. He is aware how deeply the greater part of mankind resent any interference with the order of society, and therefore he proposes his novel idea in the form of what he himself calls a "monstrous fiction." (Compare the ceremony of preparation for the two " great waves " in Book v.) Two principles are indicated by him: first, that there is a distinction of ranks dependent on circumstances prior to the individual : second, that this distinction is and ought to be broken through by personal qualities. He adapts mythology like the Homeric poems to the 70 ANALYSIS vehicle of his ideas. Every Greek state had a myth respecting its own origin ; the Platonic republic may also have a tale of earthborn men. The gravity and verisimilitude with which the tale is told, and the analogy of Greek tradition, are a sufficient verifica- tion of the " monstrous falsehood." Ancient poetry had spoken of a gold and silver and brass and iron age succeeding one another, but Plato supposes these differences in the natures of men to exist together in a single state. Mythology supplies a figure under which the lesson may be taught (as Protagoras says, "the myth is more interesting"), and also enables Plato to touch lightly on new principles without go- iiig into details. In this passage he shadows forth a /general truth, but he does not tell us by what steps y the transposition of ranks is to be effected. Indeed throughout the Republic he allows the lower ranks to fade into the distance. We do not know whether they are to carry arms, and whether in the fifth book they are or are not included in the communistic regulations respecting property and marriage. Nor is there any use in arguing strictly either from a few chance words, or from the silence of Plato, or in drawing in- ferences which were beyond his vision. Aristotle, in his criticism on the position of the lower classes, does not perceive that the poetical creation is " like the air, invulnerable," and can not be penetrated by the shafts of his logic. 6. Two paradoxes which strike the modern reader as in the highest degree fanciful and ideal, and which suggest to him many reflections, are to be found in the third book of the Republic : first, the great power of music, so much beyond any influence which is expe- rienced by us in modern times, when the art or science has been far more developed, and has found the secret of harmony, a.% well as of melody: secondly, the in- ANALYSIS 71 definite and almost absolute control which the soul is supposed to exercise over the body. In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we may also observe among certain masters of the art, not unknown to us, at the present day. With this natural enthusiasm, which is felt by a few only, there seems to mingle in Plato a sort of Pytha- gorean reverence for numbers and numerical propor- tion to which Aristotle is a stranger. Intervals of sound and number are to him sacred things which have a law of their own, not dependent on the varia- tions of sense. They rise above sense, and become a connecting link with the world of ideas. But it is evident that Plato is describing what to him appears to be also a fact. The power of a simple and character- istic melody on the impressible mind of the Greek is more than we can easily appreciate. The effect of national airs may bear some comparison with it. And, besides all this,, there is a confusion between the harmony of musical notes and the harmony of soul and body, which is so potently inspired by them. The second paradox leads up to some curious and interesting questions — 5ow far can the mind con- trol the body? Is the relation between them one of mutual antagonism or of mutual harmony? Are they two or one, and is either of them the cause of the other? May we not at times drop the opposition be- tween them, and the mode of describing them, which is so familiar to us, and yet hardly conveys any pre- cise meaning, and try to view this composite creature, man, in a more simple manner? Must we not at any rate admit that there is in human nature a higher and a lower principle, divided by no distinct line, which at times break asunder and take up arms against one another? Or again, they are reconciled and move together, either unconsciously in the ordinary work 72 ANALYSIS of life, or consciously in the pursuit of some noble aim, to be attained not without an effort, and for which every thought and nerve are strained. And then the body becomes the good friend or ally, or servant or instrument of the mind. And the mind has often a wonderful and almost superhuman power of banishing disease and weakness and calling out a hid- den strength. Reason and the desires, the intellect and the senses are brought into harmony and obedi- ence so as to form a single human being. They are ever parting, ever meeting; and the identity or di- versity of their tendencies or operations is for the most part unnoticed by us. When the mind touches the body through the appetites, we acknowledge the re- sponsibility of the one to the other. There is a tend- ency in us which says " Drink." There is another which says, " Do not drink; it is not good for you," And we all of us know which is the rightful superior. We are also responsible for our health, although into this sphere there enter some elements of necessity which may be beyond our control. Still even in the management of health, care and thought, continued over many years, may make us almost free agents, if we do not exact too much of ourselves, and if we ac- knowledge that all human freedom is limited by the laws of nature and of mind. We are disappointed to find that Plato, in the gen- eral condemnation which he passes on the practice of medicine prevailing in his own day, depreciates the effects of diet. He would like to have diseases of a definite character and capable of receiving a definite treatment. He is afraid of invalidism interfering with the business of life. He does not recognize that time is the great healer both of mental and bodily dis- orders; and that remedies which are gradual and proceed little by little are safer than those which pro* ANALYSIS 73 duce a sudden catastrophe. Neither does he see that there is no way in which the mind can more surely in- fluence the hody than hy the control of eating and drinking; or any other action or occasion of human life on which the higher freedom of the will can be more simply or truly asserted. 7. Lesser matters of style may be remarked. (1) The affected ignorance of music, which is Plato's way of expressing that he is passing lightly over the subject. (2) The tentative manner in which here, as in the second book, he proceeds with the construction of the State. (3) The description of the State some- times as a reality, and then again as a work of imag- ination only; these are the arts by which he sustains the reader's interest. (4) Connecting links, or the preparation for the entire expulsion of the poets in Book X. (5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the valetudinarian, the satirical jest about the maxim of Phocylides, the manner in which the image of the gold and silver citizens is taken up into the subject, and the argument from the practice of Asclepius, should not escape notice. BOOK rv Adeimantus said: " Suppose^a^^^rson to argue, Socrates, that you make yoxir citizens miserable, and this by their own free-will; they are the lords of the city, and yet instead of having, like other men, lands and houses and money of their own, they live as mer- cenaries and are always mounting guard." You may add, I replied, that they receive no pay but only their food, and have no money to spend on a journey or a mistress. " Well, and what answer do you give? " My answer is, that our guardians may or may not be the happiest of men, — I should not be surprised to 74 ANALYSIS find in the long-run that they were, — but this is not jthe aim of our constitution, which was designed for I the good of the whole and not of any one part. If I went to a sculptor and blamed him for having painted the eye, which is the noblest feature of the face, not purple but black, he would reply: " The eye must be an eye, and you should look at the statue as a whole." " Now I can well imagine a fool's paradise, in which everybody is eating and drinking, clothed in purple and fine linen, and potters lie on sofas and have their wheel at hand, that they may work a little when they please; and cobblers and all the other classes of a State lose their distinctive character. And a State may get on without cobblers; but when the guardians degenerate into boon companions, then the ruin is complete. Remember that we are not talking of peasants keeping holiday, but of a State in which / every man is expected to do his own work. The hap- ' piness resides not in this or that class, but in the State I as a whole. I have another remark to make : — A middle condition is best for artisans ; they should have money enough to buy tools, and not enough to be independent of business. And will not the same con- dition be best for our citizens? If they are poor, they will be mean; if rich, luxurious and lazy; and in neither case contented. " But then how will our poor city be able to go to war against an enemy who has money? " There may be a difficulty in fighting against one enemy; against two there will be none. In the first place, the contest will be carried on by trained warriors against well-to-do citizens: and is not a regular athlete an easy match for two stout onponents at least? Suppose also, that before engag- ing we send ambassadors to one of the two cities, say- ing, " Silver and gold we have not; do you help us and take our share of the spoil ; " — who would fight ANALYSIS 76 against the lean, wiry dogs, whSn they might join with them in preying upon the fatted sheep? " But if many states join their resources, shall we not be in danger? " I am amused to hear you use the word " state " of any but our own State. They are " states," but not " a state " — many in one. For in every state there are two hostile nations, rich and poor, which you may set one against the other. But our State, while she remains true to her principles, will be in very deed the mightiest of Hellenic states. To the size of the state there is no hmit but the necessity of unity; it must be neither too large nor too small to be one. This is a matter of secondary importance, like the principle of transposition which was intimated in the parable of the earthborn men. The meaning there implied was that every man should do that for which he was fitted, and be at one with himself, and then the whole city would be united. But all these things are secondary, if education, which is the great matter, be duly regarded. When the wheel has once been set in motion, the speed is always increasing; and each generation improves upon the preceding, both in physical and in moral qualities. The care of the governors should be directed to pre- serve music and gymnastic from innovation; alter the songs of a country, Damon says, and you will soon end by altering its laws. The change appears inno- cent at first, and begins in play; but the evil soon becomes serious, working secretly upon the characters of individuals, then upon social and commercial rela- tions, and lastly upon the institutions of a state; and there is ruin and confusion everj'Tvhere. But if edu- cation remains in the established form, there will be no danger. A restorative process will be always going on; the spirit of law and order will raise up what has fallen down. Nor will any regulations bo 76 ANALYSIS needed for the ksser matters of life — rules of deport- ment or fashions of dress. Like invites like for good or for evil. Education will correct deficiencies and supply the power of self-government. Far be it from tis to enter into the particulars of legislation ; let the guardians take care of education, and education will take eare of all other things. But without education they may patch and mend as they please; they will make no progress, any more than a patient who thinks to cure himself by some favorite remedy and will not give up his luxurious mode of living. If you tell such persons that they must first alter their habits, then they grow angry; they are dharming people. " Charming, — nay, the very reverse." Evidently these gentlemen are not fa your good graces, nor the state which is like them. And such states there are which first ordain under penalty of death that no one shall alter the constitu* tion, and then suffer themselves to be flattered into and out of anything; and he who indulges them and fawns upon them, is their leader and savior. " Yes, the men are as bad as the states." But do you not admire their cleverness? " Nay, some of them are stupid enough to believe what the people tell them." And when aU the world is telling a man that he is six feet high, and he has no measure, how can he believe anything else? But don't get into a passion: to see our Statesmen trying their nostrums, and fancy* ing that they can cut off at a blow the Hydra-like rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play. Minute enactments are superfluous in good states, and are useless in bad ones. And now what remains of the work of legislation? Nothing for us; but to Apollo the god of Delphi we leave the ordering of the greatest of all things — that is to say, religion. Only our ancestral deity sit- ANALYSIS 77 ting upon the center and navel of the earth will be trusted by us if we have any sense, in an affair of such magnitude. No foreign god shall be supreme in our realms. . . . Here, as Socrates would say, let us " reflect on " {a-Koir&fiev) what has preceded: thus far we have spoken not of the happiness of the citizens, but only of the well-being of the State. They may be the hap- piest of men, but our principal aim in founding the State was not to make them happy. They were to be guardians, not holiday-makers. In this pleasant manner is presented to us the famous question both of ancient and modern philosophy, touching the rela- tion of duty to happiness, of right to utility. First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral ideas. The utilitarian principle is valuable as a corrective of error, and shows to us a side of ethics which is apt to be neglected. It may be ad- mitted further that right and utility are coextensive, and that he who makes the happiness of mankind his object has one of the highest and noblest motives of human action. But utility is not the historical basis of morahty; nor the aspect in which moral and relig- ious ideas commonly occur to the mind. The greatest happiness of all is, as we believe, the far-off result of the divine government of the universe. The great- est happiness of the individual is certainly to be found in a life of virtue and goodness. But we seem to be more assured of a law of right than we can be of a divine purpose, that " all mankind should be saved ; " and we infer the one from the other. And the great- est happiness of the individual may be the reverse of the greatest happiness in the ordinary sense of the term, and may be realized in a life of pain, or in a voluntary death. Further, the word "happiness" 78 ANALYSIS has several ambiguities; it may mean either pleasure or an ideal life, happiness subjective or objective, in this world or in another, of ourselves only or of our neighbors and of all men everywhere. By the modern founder of Utilitarianism the self-regarding and dis- interested motives of action are included under the same term, although they are commonly opposed by us as benevolence and self-love. The word happiness has not the definiteness or the sacredness of " truth " and " right; " it does not equally appeal to our higher nature, and has not sunk into the conscience of man- kind. It is associated too much with the comforts and conveniences of life ; too little with " the goods of the soul which we desire for their own sake." In a great trial, or danger, or temptation, or in any great and heroic action, it is scarcely thought of. For these I reasons " the greatest happiness " principle is not the [true foundation of ethics. But though not the first principle, it is the second, which is like unto it, and is often of easier application. For the larger" part of human actions are neither right nor wrong, except in so far as they tend to the happiness of mankind. The same question reappears in politics, where the useful or expedient seems to claim a larger sphere and to have a greater authority. For concerning political measures, we chiefly ask: How will they affect the happiness of mankind? Yet here too we may observe that what we term expediency is merely the law of right limited by the conditions of human society. Right and truth are the highest aims of government as well as of individuals; and we ought not to lose sight of them because we can not directly enforce them. They appeal to the better mind of nations ; and sometimes they are too much for merely temporal interests to resist. They are the watch- words which all men use in matters of public policy. ANALYSIS 79 as well as in their private dealings; the peace of Europe may be said to depend upon them. In the most commercial and utilitarian states of society the power of ideas remains. And all the higher class of/ statesmen have in them something of that idealism which Pericles is said to have gathered from the teaching of Anaxagoras. They recognize that the true leader of men must be above the motives of ambi tion, and that national character is of greater value than material comfort and prosperity. And this is the order of thought in Plato; first, he expects his citizens to do their duty, and then under favorable circumstances, that is to say, in a well-ordered State, their happiness is assured. That he was far fromJ excluding the modern principle of utility in politics is sufficiently evident from other passages, in which " the most beneficial is affirmed to be the most honor- able," and also " the most sacred." We may note (1) The manner in which the objec- tion of Adeimantus here is designed to draw out and deepen the argument of Socrates. (2) The concep- tion of a whole as lying at the foundation both of poli- tics and of art, in the latter supplying the only prin- ciple of criticism, which, under the various names of harmony, symmetry, measure, proportion, unity, the Greek seems to have applied to works of art. (3) The requirement that the State should be limited in size, after the traditional model of a Greek state; as in the Politics of Aristotle, the fact that the cities of Hellas were small is converted into a principle. (4) The humorous pictures of the lean dogs and the fatted sheep, of the light active boxer upsetting two stout gentlemen at least, of the " charming " patients who are always making themselves worse; or again, the playful assumption that there is no State but our own; or the grave irony with which the statesman is J i/t /^ 80 ANALYSIS excused who believes that he is six feet high because he is told sOj and having nothing to measure with is to be pardoned for his ignorance — he is too amusing for us to be seriously angry with him. (5) The light ftnd supelrfldal manner in which religion is passed over When provision has been made for two great principlesj — first, that religion shall be based on the highest conception of the gods, secondly, that the true national or Hellenic type shall be main- tained. . . . Socrates proceeds s But where amid all this is jus- tice? Son of Ariston, tell me where. Light a candle and search the city, and get your brother and the rest of our friends to help in seeking for her. " That won't do," replied Glaucon, " you yourself promised to make the search and talked about the impiety of deserting justice." Well, I said, I will lead the way, but do you follow. My nntinn is, ffia^ nnr Statc being perfect will contain all tV ip fnnr virtnpg"— wisdomi courage, temperance, justice. Tf we eliminate th e three first, the unknown remainder will be Justice. I'lrst th en, of wisdonl; the State which we have Cancel into being "will be wise because politic. And policy is one among many kinds of skill, — not the skill of the carpenter, or of the worker in metal, or of the husbandman, but the skiU of him who advises about the interests of the whole State. Of such a kind is the skill of the guardians, who are a small class in nvmlber, far smaller than the blacksmiths; but in them is concentrated the wisdom of the State. And if this small ruling class have wisdom, then the whole State will be wise. Our second virtue is courage , which we have no difficulty in rinding in another class — that of soldiers. Courage may be defined as a sort of salvation — the ANALYSIS . 81 never-failing salvation of the opiniom which law ancl education have prescribed concerning dangers. You know the way in which dyers first prepare the white groxind and then lay on the dye of purple or of any other color. Colors dyed in this way become fixed, and no soap or lye will ever wash them out. Now the ground is education, and the laws are the colors; and if the ground is properly laid, neither the soap of pleasure nor the lye of pain or fear will ever wash them put. This p o wer which preserves JJ ght o pinion ahcmt dan gpr I wnvilH nslr ynn to nail - nnnrage.^' adding th e epithet " political " or " civilized '' in order " tcrdiStinguisn it from mere animal courage and fro m T higher courage which may hereafter be discu ssed. / ^J^ysio—JiirfufH r£maiHLL_ _temperance and justice,. More than the preceding virtues temperance sug gest^ t.hf ; idea, of harmony . Some light is thrown upon th© nature of this virtue by the popular description of a man as " master of himself " — which has an absurd sound, because the master is also the servant. The expression really means that the better principle in a man masters the worse. There are in cities whole classes — women, slaves, and the like — who corre^- spond to the worse, and a few only to the better; and in our State the former class are held under con- trol by the latter. Now to which of these classes does temperance belong? " To both of them," And our State if any will be the abode of temperance; and we were right in describing this virtue as a harmony which is diffused through the whole, making the dwell' ers in the city to be of one mind, and attuning the upper and middle and lower classes like the strings of an instrument, whether you suppose them to differ in wisdom, strength, or wealth. And now we are near the spot ; let us draw in mA surround the cover and watch with all our eyes, lest 82 ANALYSIS justice should slip away and escape. Tell me, if you see the thicket move first. " Nay, I would have you lead." Well then, offer up a prayer and follow. The way is dark and difficult; but we must push on. I begin to see a track. " Good news." Why, Glaucon, our dulness of scent is quite ludicrous ! While we are straining our eyes into the distance, justice is tum- bling out at our feet. We are as bad as people look- ing for a thing which they have in their hands. Have you forgotten our old principle of the division of labor, or of every man doing his own business, concerning which we spoke at the foundation of the State — what but this was justice? Is there any other virtue remaining which can compete with wisdom and tem- perance and courage in the scale of political virtue? For " every one having his own " is the great object of government; and the great object of trade is that every man should do his own business. Not that there is much harm in a carpenter trying to be a cobbler, or a cobbler transforming himself into a carpenter; but great evil may arise from the cobbler leaving his last and turning into a guardian or legislator, or when a single individual is trainer, warrior, legislator, all in one. And this evil is injustice, or every man doing another's business. I do not say that as yet we are in a condition to arrive at a final conclusion. For the definition which we believe to hold good in states has still to be tested by the individual. Having read the large letters we will now come back to the small. From the two together a brilliant fight may be struck out. . . . Socrates proceeds to discover the nature of justice by a method of residues, jliach of the first three virtues corresponds tn one nf the thre,e parts nf thp soul a^ jppp^ tbp threejda sses in the State,^ althoug h ANALYSIS 83 th e third, temperance, h^ s mnre. nf ihe natnrp nf a. harmony than" the first two. — Tf therp h£ _a fourth virtue, th at c an only be sought for in tHp rplatinn nf 't he three parts m the soul or classes in the S tate to "^e another. It is obvious and simple. an3"7or~ftalr _verv reason ha s not been found out. The modern logician will be liicliiied to object that ideas can not be separated Uke chemical substances, but that they run into one another and may be only different as- pects or names of the same thing, and such in this instance appears to be the case. For the definition here given of justice is verbally the same as one of the definitions of temperance given by Socrates in the Charmides, which however is only provisional, and is afterwards rejected. And so far from justice remaining over when the other virtues are eliminated, the justice and temperance of the Republic can with difficulty be distinguished. Temperance appears to be the virtue of a part only, and one of three, whereas justice is a universal virtue of the whole soul. Yet on the other hand temperance is also described as a sort of harmony, and in this respect is akin to justice. Justice seems to differ from temperance in degree rather than in kind; whereas temperance is the har-^ mony of discordant elements, justice is the perfect order by which all natures and classes do their own business, the right man in the right place, the division and cooperation of all the citizens. Justice, again, is a more abstract notion than the other virtues, and therefore, from Plato's point of view, the foundation of them, to which they are referred and which in idea precedes them. The proposal to omit temperance is a mere trick of style intended to avoid monotony. There is a famous question discussed in one of the earlier Dialogues of Plato, " Whether the virtues are one or many? " This receives an answer which is to "N^ 84 ANALYSIS the effect that there are four cardinal virtues (now for the first time brought together in ethical philos- ophy), and one supreme over the rest, which is not like Aristotle's conception of universal justice, virtue relative to others, but the whole of virtue relative to the parts. To this universal conception of justice or order in the first education and in the moral nature of man, the still more universal conception of the good in the second education and in the sphere of specu- lative knowledge seems to succeed. Both might be equally described by the terms " law," " order," " har- mony; " but while the idea of good embraces " all time and all existence." the conception of justice is not extended beyond man . . . . Socrates is now going to identify the individ- ual and the State. But first he must prove that there are three parts of the individual soul. His argument is as follows : — Quantity makes no difference in qual- ity. The word " just," whether applied to the indi- vidual or to the State, has the same meaning. And the term " justice " implied that the same three prin- ciples in the State and in the individual were doing their own business. But are they really three or one? The question is difficult, and one which can hardly be solved by the methods which we are now using; but the truer and longer way would take up too much of our time. " The shorter will satisfy me." Well then, you would admit that the qualities of states mean the qualities of the individuals who compose them? The Scythians and Thracians are passionate, our own race intellectual, and the Egyptians and Phoenicians covetous, because the individual members of each have such and such a character; the difficulty is to determine whether the several principles are one or three; whether, that is to say, we reason with one ANALYSIS 85 • part of our natufe, desire with another, are angry with another, or whether the whole soul comes into play in each sort of action. This inquiry, however, requires a very exact definition of terms. The same thing in the same relation can not be affected in two opposite ways. But there is no impossibility in a man standing still, yet moving his arms, or in a top which is fixed on one spot going round upon its axis. There is no necessity to mention all the possible ex- ceptions; let us provisionally assxmie that opposites can not do or be or suffer opposites in the same rela- tion. And to the class of opposites belong assent and dissent, desire and avoidance. And one form of desire is thirst and hunger: and here arises a new point — thirst is thirst of drink, hunger is hunger of food ; not of warm drink or of a particular kind of food, with the single exception of course that the very fact of our desiring anything implies that it is good. When relative terms have no attributes, their correlatives have no attributes; when they have attributes, their correlatives also have them. For example, the term " greater " is simply relative to " less," and knowledge refers to a subject of knowledge. But on the other hand, a particular knowledge is of a particular sub- ject. Again, every science has a distinct character, which is defined by an object; medicine, for example, is the science of health, although not to be confounded with health. Having cleared our ideas thus far, let us return to the original instance of thirst, which has a definite object — drink. Now the thirsty soul may feel two distinct impulses; the animal one saying "Drink;" the rational one, which says "Do not drink." The two impulses are contradictory; and therefore we may assume that they spring from dis- tinct principles in the soul. But is passion a third prindpl?* or akin to desire? There is a storj' of a 86 ANALYSIS certain Leontius which throws some light on this ques- tion. He was coming up from the Piraeus outside the north wall, and he passed a spot where there were dead bodies lying by the executioner. He felt a long- ing desire to see them and also an abhorrence of them; at first he turned away and shut his eyes, then, sud- denly tearing them open, he said, — " Take your fill, ye wretches, of the fair sight." Now is there not here a third principle which is often found to come to the assistance of reason against desire, but never of desire against reason? This is passion or spirit, of the sep- arate existence of which we may further convince our- selves by putting the following case : — When a man suffers justly, if he be of a generous nature he is not indignant at the hardships which he undergoes; but when he suffers unjustly, his indignation is his great support; hunger and thirst can not tame him; the spirit within him must do or die, until the voice of the shepherd, that is, of reason, bidding his dog bark no more, is heard within. This shows that passion is the ally of reason. Is passion then the same with reason? No, for the former exists in children and brutes; and Homer affords a proof of the distinction between them when he says, " He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul." And now, at last, we have reached firm ground, and are able to infer that the virtues of the State and of the individual are the same. For wisdom and courage and justice in the State are severally the wisdom and courage and justice in the individuals who form the State. Each of the three classes will do the work of its own class in the State, and each part in the indi- vidual soul; reason, the superior, and passion, the inferior, will be harmonized by the influence of music and gymnastic. The counsellor and the warrior, the head ^nd the arjoou wUl act together in the town of ANALYSIS 87 • Mansoul, and keep thfe desires in proper subjection. The courage of the warrior is that quality which pre- serves a right opinion about dangers in spite of pleas- ures and pains. The wisdom of the counsellor is that small part of the soul which has authority and reason. The virtue of temperance is the friendship of the rul- ing and the subject principles, both in the State and in the individual. Of justice we have already spoken; and the notion already given of it may be confirmed by common instances. Will the just state or the just individual steal, lie, commit adultery, or be guilty of impiety to gods and men? "No." And is not the reason of this that the several principles, whether in the state or in the individual, do their own business? And justice is the quality which makes just men and just states. Moreover, our old division of labor, which required that there should be one man for one use, was a dream or anticipation of what was to follow; and that dream has now been realized in justice, which begins by binding together the three chords of the soul, and then acts harmoniously in every relation of life. And injustice, which is the insubordinatio n and disobedience of the inferior elements m the soul, is the opposite of justice, and is inharmonious and un- natural, being to the soul what disease is to the body : for in the soul as well as in the body, good or bac actions produce good or bad habits. And virtue is the health and beauty and well-being of the soul, anc vice is the disease and weakness and deformity of the soul. Again the old question returns upon us: Is justice or injustice the more profitable? The question has become ridiculous. For injustice, like mortal disease, makes life not worth having. Come up with me to the hill which overhangs the city and look down upon the single form of virtue, and the infinite forms of vice. 88 ANALYSIS among which are four special ones, characteristic both of states and of individuals. And the state which corresponds to the single form of virtue is that which we have been describing, wherein reason rules under one of two names — monarchy and aristocracy. Thus there are five forms in all, both of states and of souls. . . . In attempting to prove that the soul has three sep- arate faculties, Plato takes occasion to discuss what makes difference of faculties. And the criterion which he proposes is different in the working of the faculties. The same faculty can not produce contra- dictory effects. But the path of early reasoners is beset by thorny entanglements, and he will not pro- ceed a step without first clearing the ground. This leads him into a tiresome digression, which is in- tended to explain the nature of contradiction. First, the contradiction must be at the same time and in the same relation. Secondly, no extraneous word must be introduced into either of the terms in which the contradictory proposition is expressed : for example, thirst is of drink, not of warm drink. He implies, what he does not say, that if, by the advice of reason, or by the impulse of anger, a man is restrained from drinking, this proves that thirst, or desire under which thirst is included, is distinct from anger and reason. But suppose that we allow the term " thirst " or " desire " to be modified, and say an " angry thirst," or a " revengeful desire," then the two spheres of desire and anger overlap and become confused. This case therefore has to be excluded. And still there remains an exception to the rule in the use of the term " good," which is always implied in the object of desire. These are the discussions of an age before logic; and any one who is wearied by them should ANALYSIS 89 remember that they are necessary to the clearing up of ideas in, the first development of the hmnan fac- ulties. The psychology of Plato extends no further than the divisibn of the soul into the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, ais far as we know, was first made by him, and has been retained by Aristotle and succeeding ethical writers. The chief difficulty in this early analysis of the mind is to define exactly the place of the irascible faculty {Ovii&s), which may be variously described under the terms righteous indignation, spirit, passion. It is the foundation of courage, which includes in Plato jnoral courage, the courage of enduring pain, and of surmounting intel- lectual difficulties, as well as of meeting dangers in war. Though irrational, it inclines to side with the rational: it can not be aroused by punishment when I justly inflicted: it sometimes takes the form of an enthusiasm which sustains a man in the performance of great actions. It is the " lion heart " with which the reason makes a treaty. On the other hand it is negative rather than positive ; it is indignant at wrong or falsehood, but does not, like Love in the Sympo- sium and Phaedrus, aspire to the vision of Truth or I Good. It is the peremptory military spirit which I prevails in the government of honor. It differs from anger {op-^n), this latter term having no accessory notion of righteous indignation. Although Aristotle has retained the word, yet we may observe that " pas- sion " {6viJi prr , V>nt thp ntVipr I'g nT^ Pr^mg an d JS the mightiest nf g]] pnr- fgpnitipg- Tfjhpjng IB tlip nhjp^^j; pf Irnnwl- edge. and n^t-b^inf ^ nf ig nnranra, and these are the extremes, opinion must lie between them, and may be called darker than the one and brighter than the other. This intermediate or contingent matter is and is not at the same time, and partakes both of existence and of non-existence. Now I would ask my good friend, who denies abstract beauty and justice, and affirms a many beautiful and a many just, whether everything he sees is not in some point of view differ- ent — the beautiful ugly, the pious impious, the just unjust? Is not the double also the half, and are not heavy and light relative terms which pass into one another? Everything is and is not, as in the old rid- dle — "A man and not a man shot and did not shoot a bird and not a bird with a stone and not a stone." The mind can not be fixed o n e i ther alternative; _ag^ ANALYSIS 108 • ^ tljRSft flmTiignnns. intprmeHia.tp, prr mg, half-li gjhtgd obiects. syhwh have a. fl{so rderly moveme nt- in the re fflOn h ^tW^" Tiping gT^f^Jnrv^^J^p^•nJT^J^P_f^|f; prnppT matter of opinion , as the immut^leobjects are th^ proper matter of knowledge. And he who grovels i: the world of sense, and has only this uncertain peri ception of things, is not a philosopher, but a lover o: opinion only. . . . The fifth book is the new beginning of the Repub- lic, in which the community of property and of family are first maintained, and the transition is made to the kingdom of philosophers. For both of these Plato, after his manner, has been preparing in some chance words of Book IV, which fall unperceived on the reader's mind, as they are supposed at first to have fallen on the ear of Glaucon and Adeimantus. The " paradoxes," as Morgenstern terms theni, of this book of the Republic will be reserved for another place ; a few remarks on the style, and some explana- tions of difficulties, may be briefly added. First, there is the image of the waves, which serves for a sort of scheme or plan of the book. The first wave, the second wave, the third and greatest wave come rolling in, and we hear the roar of them. All that can be said of the extravagance of Plato's pro- posals is anticipated by himself. Nothing is more admirable than the hesitation with which he proposes the solemn text, " Until kings are philosophers," &c. ; or the reaction from the sublime to the ridiculous, when Glaucon describes the manner in which the new truth will be received by mankind. Some defects and difficulties may be noted in the execution of the communistic plan. Nothing is told us of the application of communism to the lower classes ; nor is the table of prohibited degrees capable ^ 104 ANALYSIS of being made out. It is quite possible that a child born at one hymeneal festival may marry one of its own brothers or sisters, or even one of its parents, at another. Plato is afraid of incestuous unions, but at the same time he does not wish to bring before us the fact that the city would be divided into families of those born seven and nine months after each hyme- neal festival. If it were worth while to argue seri- ously about such fancies, we might remark that while all the old affinities are abolished, the newly prohibited affinity rests not on any natural or rational principle, but only upon the accident of children having been born in the same month and year. Nor does he ex- plain how the lots could be so manipulated by the legislature as to bring together the fairest and best. The singular expression which is employed to describe the age of five-and-twenty may perhaps be taken from some poet. In the delineation of the philosopher, the illustra- tions of the nature of philosophy derived from love are more suited to the apprehension of Glaucon, the Athenian man of pleasure, than to modern taste or feelings. They are partly facetious, but also contain a germ of truth. That science is a whole, remains a true principle of inductive as well as of metaphys- ical philosophy; and the love of universal knowledge is still the characteristic of the philosopher in modem as well as in ancient times. At the end of the fifth book Plato introduces the fig gient of contingent matter, w hich has exercised so great an influence both on the Jithics and Theology of the modern world, and which occurs here for the first time in the history of philosophy. He did not remark that the degrees of knowledge in the subject have nothing corresponding to them in the object. With him a word must answer to an idea ; and he could not ANALYSIS 105 • conceive of an opinion which was an opinion about nothing. The influence of analogy led him to invent " parallels and conjugates " and to overlook facts. To us some of his difficulties are puzzling only from their simplicity: we do not perceive that the answer to them " is tumbling out at our feet." To the mind of early thinkers, the conception of not-being was dark and mysterious; they did not see that this terrible apparition which threatened destruction to all knowl- edge was only a logical determination. The common term under which, through the accidental use of lan- guage, two entirely different ideas were included was another source of confusion. Thus through the am- biguity of SoKeiv, (f)aiveTat,, ioucev, k.t.\, Plato, at- tempting to introduce order into the first chaos of human thought, seems to have confused perception and opinion, and to have failed to distinguish the con- tingent from the relative. In the Theaetetus the first of these difficulties begins to clear up ; in the Sophist the second ; and for this, as well as for other reasons, both these dialogues are probably to be regarded as later than the RepubUc. BOOK VI Having determined that the many have no knowl- eA ge. of tru e heinfy. and have nn olear pfltt.erns in thei r j ninds of justice, beau ty^Jrutb^ and that, philnspphprg "TWf gnrh pattprns, we havfi jiow to ask -wliether they - or the many shall be rulers in our St ate. But who ican'Houbt that philosophers should be chosen, if they have the other qualities which are required in a ruler? For they are lovers of the knowledge of the eternal and of all truth ; they, are haters of falsehood ; their meaner de sires are absorbed in the in tprpstg nf 1rnm».l- prlgp; tlTP^^rpjj peetatnrs nf ^ajjjjm p and qI] p\ is|tmgp; u 1/1'' 106 ANALYSIS and in the magnificence of their contemp l ation the life of man is as nothing to t hem, nor is death fearful Also they are of a social, gracious disgogi tion, equal ly ^reg ^om cowardice~andr a rrogance^-Ihey-leam-and remember easil y ; Jhe-yL-ha-ve-JiarmoniouS; wel 1 -regu- lated minds; t r uth fl o_ws„ to jthem-Sweetly-Jby^Bature..^ Canthe god of Jealousy himself find any fault with such an assemblage of good qualities? Here Adeimantus interposes : — " No man can an- swer you, Socrates; but every man feels that this is owing to his own deficiency in argument. He is driven from one position to another, until he has noth- ing more to say, just as an unskilful player at draughts is reduced to his last move by a more skilled opponent. And yet all the time he may be right. He may know, in this very instance, that those who make philosophy the business of their lives, generally turn out rogues if they are bad men, and fools if they are good. What do you say? " I should say that he is quite right. " Then how is such an admission recon- cilable with the doctrine that philosophers should be kings? " I shall answer you in a parable which will also let you see how poor a hand I am at the invention of alle- gories. The relation of good men to their govern- ments is so peculiar, that in order to defend them I must take an illustration from the world of fiction. Conceive the captain of a ship, taller by a head and shoulders than any of the crew, yet a little deaf, a little blind, and rather ignorant of the seaman's art. The sailors want to steer, although they know nothing of the art; and they have a theory that it can not be learned. If the helm is refused them, they drug the captain's posset, bind him hand and foot, and take possession of the ship. He who joins in the mutiny is termed a good pilot and what not; they have no ANALYSIS 107 • conception that the true pilot must observe the winds and the stars, and must be their master, whether they hke it or not; — such an one would be called by them fool, prater, star-gazer. This is my parable; which I will beg you to interpret for me to those gentlemen who ask why the philosopher has such an evil name, and to explain to them that not he, but those who will not use him, are to blame for his uselessness. The"7 philosopher should not beg of mankind to be put in V authority over them. The wise man should not seek \ the rich, as the proverb bids, but every man, whether y rich or poor, must knock at the door of the physician'^ when he has need of him. Now the pilot is the philos- opher — he whom in the parable they call star-gazer, and the mutinous sailors are the mob of politicians by whom he is rendered useless. Not that these are the worst enemies of philosophy, who is far more dis- honored by her own professing sons when they are corrupted by the world. Need I recall the original image of the philosopher? Did we not say of him just now, that he loved truth and hated falsehood, and that he could not rest in the mutiplicity of phenomena, but was led by a sympathy in his own nature to the contemplation of the absolute? All the virtues as well as truth, who is the leader of them, took up their abode in his soul. But as you were observing, if we turn aside to view the reality, we see that the persons who were thus described, with the exception of a small and useless class, are utter rogues. The point which has to be considered, is the origin of this corruption in nature. Every one wiU admit that the philosopher, in our description of him, is a rare being. But what numberless causes tend to des- troy these rare beings! There is no good thing which may not be a cause of evil — health, wealth, strength, rarJs, and the virtues themselves, when placed undeu 108 ANALYSIS unfavorable circumstances. For as in the animal or vegetable world the strongest seeds most need the accompaniment of good air and soil, so the best of human characters turn out the worst when they fall upon an unsuitable soil ; whereas weak natures hardly ever do any considerable good or harm ; they are not the stuff out of which either great criminals or great heroes are made. The philosopher follows the same analogy: he is either the best or the worst of all men. Some persons say that the Sophists are the corrupters of youth; but is not public opinion the real Sophist who is everywhere present — in those yery persons, in the assembly, in the courts, in the camp, in the applauses and hisses of the theatre reechoed by the surrounding hills? Will not a young man's heart leap amid these discordant sounds? and will any education save him from being carried away by the torrent? Nor is this all. For if he will not yield to opinion, there follows the gentle compulsion of exile or death. What principle of rival Sophists or anybody else can overcome in such an unequal contest? Characters there may be more than human, who are exceptions — God may save a man, but not his own strength. Fur- ther, I would have you consider that the hireling Soph- ist only gives back to the world their own opinions; he is the keeper of the monster, who knows how to flatter or anger him, and observes the meaning of his inarticulate grunts. Good is what pleases him, evil what he dislikes; truth and beauty are determined only by the taste of the brute. Such is the Sophist's wisdom, and such is the condition of those who make public opinion the test of truth, whether in art or in morals. The curse is laid upon them of being and doing what it approves, and when they attempt first principles the failure is ludicrous. Think of all this and ask yourself whether the world is more likely to ANALYSIS 109 be a b eliever i n the umty o f thp irifffl, nr i n the multi- plicitjLpf |)henomenar~ And the world if not a believer in the ideacah not be'a philosoph er, and jmiist there- f Qie-bs ji persecutor of philosophe rs. There is another evil : — the world does not like to lose the gifted na- ture, and so they flatter the young [Alcibiades] into a magnificent opinion of his own capacity; the tall, proper youth begins to expand, and is dreaming of kingdoms and empires. If at this instant a friend whispers to him, " Now the gods lighten thee; thou art a great fool " and must be educated — do you think that he will listen? Or suppose a better sort of man who is attracted towards philosophy, will they not make Herculean efforts to spoil and corrupt him? Are we not right in saying that the love of knowledge, no less than riches, may divert him? Men of this class [Critias] often become politicians — they are the au- thors of great mischief in states, and sometimes also of great good. And thus philosophy is deserted by her natural protectors, and others enter in and dis- honor her. Vulgar little minds see the land open and rush from the prisons of the arts into her temple. A clever mechanic having a soul coarse as his body, thinks that he wiU gain caste by becoming her suitor. For philosophy, even in her fallen estate, has a dig- nity of her own — and he, like a bald little black- smith's apprentice as he is, having made some money and got out of durance, washes and dresses himself as a bridegroom and marries his master's daughter. What will be the issue of such marriages? Will they not be vile and bastard, devoid of truth and nature? " They will." Small, then, is the remnant of genuine philosophers; there may be a few who are citizens of small states, in which politics are not worth think- ing of, or who have been detained by Theages' bridle of iU health; for my own case of the oracular sign 110 ANALYSIS is almost unique, and too rare to be worth mention- ing. And these few when they have tasted the pleas- ures of philosophy, and have taken a look at that den of thieves and place of wild beasts, which is human life, will stand aside from the storm under the shelter of a wall, and try to preserve their own innocence and to depart in peace. " A great work, too, will have been accomplished by them." Great, yes, but not the greatest; for man is a social being, and can only at- tain his highest development in the society which is best suited to him. Enough, then, of the causes why philosophy has such an evil name. Another question is, Which of existing states is suited to her? Not one of them; at present she is like some exotic seed which degen- erates in a strange soil; only in her proper state will she be shown to be of heavenly growth. " And is her proper state ours or some other? " Ours in all points but one, which was left undetermined. You may re- member our saying that some living mind or witness of the legislator was needed in states. But we were afraid to enter upon a subject of such difficulty, and now the question recurs and has not grown easier : — How may philosophy be safely studied? Let us bring her into the light of day, and make an end of the inquiry. In the first place, I say boldly that nothing can be worse than the present mode of study. Persons usu- ally pick up a little philosophy in early youth, and in the intervals of business, but they never master the real difficulty, which is dialectic. Later, perhaps, they occasionally go to a lecture on philosophy. Years advance, and the sun of philosophy, unlike that of Heracleitus, sets never to rise again. This order of education should be reversed; it should begin with gymnastics in youth, and as the man strengthens, he ANALYSIS 111 • should increase the gymnastics of his soul. Then, when active life is over, let him finally return to philos- ophy. " You are in earnest, Socrates, but the world will be equally earnest in withstanding you — no one more than Thrasymachus." Do not make a quarrel between Thrasymachus and me, who were never ene- mies and are now good friends enough. And I shall do my best to convince him and all mankind of the truth of my words, or at any rate to prepare for the future when, in another life, we may again take part in similar discussions. " That wiU be a long time hence." Not long in comparison with eternity. The many will probably remain incredulous, for they have never seen the natural unity of ideas, but only artificial juxtapositions; not free and generous thoughts, but tricks of controversy and quips of law; — a perfect man ruling in a perfect state, even a single one they have not known. And we foresaw that there was no chance of perfection either in states or individuals until a necessity was laid upon philosophers — not the rogues, but those whom we called the useless class — of holding office; or until the sons of kings were in- spired with a true love of philosophy. Whether in the infinity of past time there has been, or is in some dis- tant land, or ever will be hereafter, an ideal such as we have described, we stoutly maintain that there has been, is, and wiU be such a state whenever the Muse of philosophy rules. Will you say that the world is of another mind? O, my friend, do not revile thef world! They will soon change their opinion if they I are gently entreated, and are taught the true nature of the philosopher. Who can hate a man who loves him? or be jealous of one who has no jealousy? Con- sider, again, that the many hate not the true but the false philosophers — the pretenders who force their W9.y m witiiQut iovitation, and are dwa^s speaking ( 112 ANALYSIS \oi persons and not of principles, which is unlike the spirit of philosophy. For the true philosopher de- spises earthly strife; his eye is fixed on the eternal order in accordance with whifl] Hp mnnlds himself into the Divine ima ge (and not himself only, but other men) , and is the creator of thevirtues private as well as public. When mankind see that the happiness of states is only to be found in that image, will they be angry with us for attempting to delineate it? " Cer- tainly not. But what will be the process of delinea- tion? " The artist will do nothing until he has made a tabula rasa; on this he will inscribe the constitution of a state, glancing often at the divine truth of nature, and from that deriving the godlike among men, min- gling the two elements, rubbing out and painting in, until there is a perfect harmony or fusion of the divine and human. But perhaps the world will doubt the existence of such an artist. What will they doubt? That the philosopher is a lover of truth, having a nature akin to the best? — and if they admit this will they still quarrel with us for making philosophers our kings? " They will be less disposed to quarrel." Let us assume then that they are pacified. Still, a person may hesitate about the probability of the son of a king being a philosopher. And we do not deny that they are very liable to be corrupted ; but yet surely in, the course of ages there might be one exception — and one is enough. If one son of a king were a philosopher, and had obedient citizens, he might bring the ideal polity into being. Hence we conclude that our laws are nojLOllbLlh e_best, but that they are also possible^ rtTinu gh not free fr"m fliffir'nlty- I gained nothing by evading the troublesome ques- tions which arose concerning women and children. I will be wiser now and acknowledge that we must go to ANALYSIS U3 education of our guardians? It was agreed that they were to be lovers of their country, and were to be tested in the refiner's fire of pleasures and pains, and those who came forth pure and remained fixed in their principles were to have honors and rewards in life and after death. But at this point, the argument put on her veil and turned into another path. I hesitated to make the assertion which I now hazard, — that our guardians must be philosophers. You remember all the contradictory elements, which met in the philoso- pher — how difficult to find them all in a single per- son! Intelligence and spirit are not often combined with steadiness; the stolid, fearless, nature is averse to intellectual toil. And yet these opposite elements are all necessary, and therefore, as we were saying before, the aspirant must be tested in pleasures and dangers; and also, as we must now further add, in the highest branches of knowledge. You wiU remem- ber, that when we spoke of the virtues mention was made of a longer road, which you were satisfied to leave unexplored. " Enough seemed to have been said." Enough, my friend; but what is enough while anything remains wanting? Of all men the guardian must not faint in the search after truth; he must be prepared to take the longer road, or he will never reach th at higher region which is above the ^"ht- virtnpg; gnrl of the virtues too he must not only gpt. an outline, but a. flpar and disti nct vision. (Strange that we should be so precise about trifles, so careless about the high- est truths!) "And what are the highest?" You to pretend unconsciousness, when you have so often heard m^ speak of the idea of good, about which we know so little, and without which though a man gain the world he has no profit of it! Some people imagine that the good is wisdom ; but this involves a circle, — • the good, they say, is wisdom, wisdom has to do with 114 ANALYSIS the good. According to others the good is pleasure; but then comes the absurdity that good is bad, for there are bad pleasures as well as good. Again, t he jgo od must have reality : a man may desire the ap- pearance of virtue, but he will not desire the appear- ance of good. Ought our guardians then to be igno- rant of this supreme principle, of which every man has a presentiment, and without which no man has any real knowledge of anything? " But, Socrates, what is this supreme principle, knowledge or pleasure, or what? You may think me troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always repeating the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own." fan T_ggy whflt T H p not know? " Yo u may offerjg,n opinion ." And will the blindness and crookedness of opmion content you when you might have the light and certainty pf science? " I will only ask you to give such an explanation of the good as you have given already of temperance and justice." I wish that I could, bu t in my present mood I can not reach to the height of the knowledge of the good. To the parent or principal I can not introduce you, but to the child begotten in his image, which I may compare with the interest on the principal, I will. (Audit the account, and do not let me give you a false statement of the debt. ) You remember our old distinction of the many beautiful and the one beautiful, the particular and the universal, the objects of sight and the objects of thought? Did you ever consider that the objects of sight imply a faculty of sight which is the most com- plex and costly of our senses, requiring not only ob- jects of sense, butalso a medium , which is light; with- out which the sight wUT not distinguish between colors and all will be a blank? For light is the noble bond between the perceiving faculty and the thing per- ceived, and the god who gives us light is the sun, who ANALYSIS 115 is the eye of the day, but is not to be confounded with the eye of man. This eye of the day or sun is what I call the child of the good, standing in the same rela- tion to the visible world as fhp gnnrl fr> tliP mtHlp'^ual. When the sun shines the eye sees, and in the intel- lectual world where truth is, there is sight and Ught. Now that which is the sun* of intelligent natures, is the idea of good, the cause of knowledge and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and standing in the same relation to them in which the sun stands to light. O inconceivable height of beauty, which is above knowledge and above truth! (" You can not surely mean pleasure," he said. Peace, I replied.) And this idea of good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and the author not of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than either in dignity and power. " That is a reach of thought more than hu- man; but, pray, go on with the image, for I suspect that there is more behind." There is, I said; and bearing in mind our two suns or principles, imaginel«. further their corresponding worlds — one of the visi-f^ ble, the other of the intelligible; you may assist your fancy by figuring the distinction under the image of a line divided into two unequal parts, and may again subdivide each part into two lesser segments repre- sentative of the stages of knowledge in either sphere. I The lower portion of the lQweE-er-^vmhle_sphere will consist of shadows and reflections, and its upper and smaller portion will contain real objects in the world of nature or of art. The sphere of the intelligible will also have two divisions^ — one of mathematics, in which there is no ascent but all is descent ; no inquir - in g into prpmisesr-bttjjml y drawinp; of inferences . In this division the mind works with figures and numbers, the images of which are taken not from the shadows, but from the objects, although the truth of them is ' 116 ANALYSIS v/(J seen only with the mind's eye ; and they are jised as hypotheses without being analyzed. Whereas i n the other division reason uses the hypotheses as stages o r steps in the ascent to the idea of good, t ojvhioh she f astens them, and then again descends, walking firmly m the region of ideas, and nf ideas on l y^ in her ascent as well as descent, and finally resting in them. " I partly understand," he rephed; " you mean that the \ ideas of science are superior to the hypothetical, meta- phorical conceptions of geometry and the other arts or sciences, whichever is to be the name of them; and the latter conceptions you refuse to make subjects of pure intellect, because they have no first principle, although when resting on a first principle, they pass into the higher sphere." You tmderstand me very well, I said. Anrl n ow to those four _d ivisions o f kpnwlpdgp ynn may a«;«!ign fonr c o rrfsponding f^ . f"^ nlties — pnrp in tpHigpripp to thp highest sphere: ac- jive intelligence to the second: to the third" faith ^tr) it he fourth, the perception of shadows — and the clear - fness of the several faculties will be inthe same ratio |ggjJTPtrptb of thp oVijppts to whlfib tlipy qTff re- lated. ■ . . Like Socrates, we may recapitulate the virtues of the philosopher. In language which seems to reach beyond the horizon of that age and country, he is described as " the spectator of all time and all exist- ence." He has the noblest gifts of nature, and makes the highest use of them. All his desires are absorbed in the love of wisdom, which is the love of truth. None of the graces of a beautiful soul are wanting in him; neither can he fear death, or think much of human life. The ideal of modern times hardly retains the simplicity of the antique; there is not the same orig- inality either in truth or error which characterized the ANALYSIS 117 <• Greeks. The philosopher is no longer living in the unseen, nor is he sent by an oracle to convince mankind of ignorance; nor does he regard knowledge as a_ SY gtem of ideas leading upwards by re p fular stages to the idea of good. The eagerness of the pursuit has abated; there is more division of labor and less of comprehensive reflection upon nature and human hfe as a whole; more of exact observation and less of anticipation and inspiration. Still, in the altered con- ditions of knowledge, the parallel is not wholly lost; and there may be a use in translating the conception of Plato into the language of our own age. The philosopher in modern times is one who fixes his mind on the laws of nature in their sequence and connection, not on fragments or pictures of nature; on history, not on controversy ; on the truths which are acknowl- edged by the few, not on the opinions of the many. He is aware of the importance of " classifying accord- ing to nature," and will try to " separate the limbs of science without breaking them." There is no part of truth, whether great or small, which he wiU dis- honor ; and in the least things he will discern the great- est. Like the ancient philosopher he sees the world pervaded by analogies, but he can also tell " why in some cases a single instance is sufficient for an induc- tion " (Mill's Logic, 3, 3, 3), while in other cases a thousand examples would prove nothing. He inquires into a portion of knowledge only, because the whole has grown too vast to be embraced by a single mind or life. He has a clearer conception of the divisions of science and of their relation to the mind of man than was possible to the ancients. Like Plato, he has a vision of the unity of knowledge, not as the begin- ning of philosophy to be attained by a study of ele- mentary mathematics, but as the far-off result of the working of many minds in many ages. He is aware 118 ANALYSIS that mathematical studies are preliminary to almost every other; at the same time, he will not reduce all varieties of knowledge to the type of mathematics. He too must have a nobility of character, without which genius loses the better half of greatness. Re- garding the world as a point in immensity, and each individual as a link in a never-ending chain of exist- ence, he will not think much of his own life, or be greatly afraid of death. Adeimantus objects first of all to the form of the Socratic reasoning, thus showing that Plato is aware of the imperfection of his own method. He brings the accusation against himself which might be brought against him by a modern logician — that he extracts the answer because he knows how to put the question- In a long argument words are apt to change their meaning slightly, or premises may be assumed or con- clusions inferred with rather too much certainty or universality ; the variation at each step may be unob- served, and yet at last the divergence becomes con- siderable. Hence the failure of attempts to apply arithmetical or algebraic formulae to logic. The im- perfection, or rather the higher and more elastic nature of language, does not allow words to have the precision of numbers or of symbols. And this quality in language impairs the force of an argument which has many steps. The objection, though fairly met by Socrates in this particular instance, may be regarded as implying a reflection upon the Socratic mode of reasoning. And here Plato seems to intimate that the time had come when the negative and interrogative method of Socrates must be superseded by a positive and con- structive one, of which examples are given in some of the later dialogues. Adeimantus further argues that the ideal is whoUy at variance with facts; fou ANALYSIS 119 « experience proves philosophers to be either useless or rogues. Contrary to all expectation Socrates has no hesitation in admitting the truth of this, and explains the anomaly in an allegory, first characteristically depreciating his own inventive powers. In this alle- gory the people are distinguished from the profes- sional politicians, and are spoken of in a tone of pity rather than of censure under the image of " the noble captain who is not very quick in his percep- tions." The uselessness of philosophers is explained by the circumstance that mankind will not use them. The world in all ages has been divided between contempt and fear of those who employ the power of ideas and know no other weapons. Concerning the false philos- opher, Socrates argues that the best is most liable to corruption; and that the finer nature is more likely to suffer from alien conditions. We too observe that there are some kinds of excellence which spring from a peculiar delicacy of constitution; as is evidently true of the poetical and imaginative temperament, which often seems to depend on impressions, and hence can only breathe or live in a certain atmosphere. The man of genius has greater pains and greater pleas- ures, greater powers and greater weaknesses, and often a greater play of character than is to be found in ordinary men. He can assume the disguise of virtue or disinterestedness without having them, or veil personal enmity in the language of patriotism and philosophy, — he can say the word which aU men are thinking, he has an insight which is terrible into the follies and weaknesses of his fellow-men. An Alcibiades, a Mirabeau, or a Napoleon the First, are born either to be the authors of great evils in states, or "of great good, when they are drawn in that direction." 120 ANALYSIS Yet the thesis, " corruptio optimi pessima," can not be maintained generally or without regard to the kind of excellence which is corrupted. The alien con- ditions which are corrupting to one nature, may be the elements of culture to another. In general a man can only receive his highest development in a con- genial state or family, among friends or fellow-work- ers. But also he may sometimes be stirred by adverse circumstances to such a degree that he rises up against them and reforms them. And while weaker or coarser ■ characters will extract good out of evil, say in a cor- rupt state of the church or of society, and live on hap- pily, allowing the evil to remain, the finer or stronger natures may be crushed or spoiled by surrounding influences — may become misanthrope and philan- thrope by turns ; or in a few instances, like the f oimd- ers of the monastic orders, or the Reformers, owing to some peculiarity in themselves or in their age, may break away entirely from the world and from the church, sometimes into great good, sometimes into great evil, sometimes into both. And the same holds in the lesser sphere of a convent, a school, a family. Plato would have us consider how easily the best natures are overpowered by public opinion, and what efforts the rest of mankind will make to get posses- sion of them. The world, the church, their own pro- fession, any political or party organization, are always carrying them off their legs and teaching them to apply high and holy names to their own prejudices and interests. The " monster " corporation to which they belong judges right and truth to be the pleasure of the community. The individual becomes one with his order; or, if he resists, the world is too much for him, and will sooner or later be revenged on him. This is, perhaps, a one-sided but not wholly untrue picture of the maxims and practice of mankind when ANALYSIS 121 » they " sit down together at an assembly," either in ancient or modern times. When the higher natures are corrupted by pohtics, the lower take possession of the vacant place of philos- ophy. This is described in one of those continuous images in which the argument, to use a Platonic ex- pression, " veils herself," and which is dropped and reappears at intervals. The question is asked, — Why are the citizens of states so hostile to philosophy? The answer is, that they do not know her. And yet there is also a better mind of the many; they would believe if they were taught. But hitherto they have only known a conventional imitation of philosophy, words without thoughts, systems which have no life in them; a [divine] person uttering the words of beauty and freedom, the friend of man holding com- munion with the Eternal, and seeking to frame the state in that image, they have never known. The same double feeling respecting the mass of mankind has always existed among men. The first thought is that the people are the enemies of truth and right; the second, that this only arises out of an accidental error and confusion, and that they do not really hate those who love them, if they could be educated to I know them. In the latter part of the sixth book, three questions have to be considered: 1st, the nature of the longer and more circuitous way, which is contrasted with the shorter and more imperfect method of Book IV; 2nd, the heavenly pattern or idea of the state ; 3rd, _tbp rH f itinn nf the di^ n's in ns nf k nowledge to one another a nd to the corresponding faculties of the s otiI. 1. Of the higher method of knowledge in Plato we have only a glimpse. Neither here nor in the Phae- drus or Symposium, nor yet in the Philebus or Soph- ist, does he give any clear explanation of his meaning. \ 122 ANALYSIS He would probably have described his method as pro- ceeding by regular steps to a system of universal knowledge, which inferred the parts from the whole rather than the whole from the part s. This ideal logic is not practised by him in the search after jus- tice, or in the analysis of the parts of the soul ; there, like Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, he argues from experience and the common use of language. But at the end of the sixth book he conceives another and more perfect method, in which all ideas are only steps or grades or moments of thought, forming a connected whole w ]\\ch ^h sp1f-gnppr.Tting, and in, which co nsiBtfnry is th^ t^g^" "f t^i^tVi He does not explain to us in detail the nature of the process. Like many other thinkers both in ancient and modern times his mind seems to be filled with a vacant form which he is unable to realize. He supposes the sciences to have a natural order and connection in an age when they can hardly be said to exist. He is hastening on to the " end of the intellectual world " without even making a beginning of them. In modern times we hardly need to be reminded that the process of acquiring knowledge is here con- fused with the contemplation of absolute knowledge. In all science a priori and a posteriori truths mingle in various proportions. The a priori part is that which is derived from the most universal experience of men, or is universally accepted by them; the a posteriori is that which grows up around the more general prin- ciples and becomes imperceptibly one with them. But Plato erroneously imagines that the synthesis is sep- arable from the analysis, and that the method of sci- ence can anticipate science. In entertaining such a vision of a priori knowledge he is sufficiently justified, or at least his meaning may be sufficiently explained by the similar attempts of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, ANALYSIS 123 • and even of Bacon himself, in modern philosophy. Anticipat ions or divinations, or prophetic glim psps nf truths w hpther conce rning man or n atnrCr f^m^ tnTL stand in the same relation to ancient p hilos ophy whi dilt^/i hypotheses bear to modem inductive scien ce. Th^sc ' " guesses at truth " were not made at random; they arose from a superficial impression of uniformities and first principles in nature which the genius of the Greek, contemplating the expanse of heaven and earth, seemed to recognize in the distance. Nor can we deny that in ancient times knowledge must have stood still, and the human mind been deprived of the very instruments of thought, if philosophy had been strictly confined to the results of experience. -'-' 2. Plato supposes that when the tablet has been made blank the artist will fill in the lineaments of the ideal state. Is this a pattern laid up in heaven, or mere vacancy on which he is supposed to gaze with wondering eye? The answer is, that such ideals are framed partly by the omission of particulars, partly by imagination perfecting the form which experience supplies. Plato represents these ideals in a figure as belonging to another world ; and in modern times the idea will sometimes seem to precede, at other times to cooperate with the hand of the artist. As in sci- ence, so also in creative art, there is a synthetical as well as an analytical method. One man will have the whole in his mind before he begins; to another the processes of mind and hand will be simultaneous. 3. There is no difiiculty in seeing that Plato's divi- sions of knowledge are based, first, on the funda- mental antithesis of sensible and intellectual which pervades the whole pre-Socratic philosophy; in which is implied also the opposition of the permanent and transient, of the universal and particular. But the age of philosophy in which he lived seemed to require 124 ANALYSIS a further distinction; — numbers and figures were beginning to separate from ideas. The world could no longer regard justice as a cube, and was learning to see, though imperfectly, that the abstractions of sense were distinct from the abstractions of mind. Between the Eleatic being or essence and the shadows of phenomena, the Pythagorean principle of number found a place, and was, as Aristotle remarks, a con- ducting medium from one to the other. Hence Plato is led to introduce a third term which had not hitherto entered into the scheme of his philosophy. He had observed the use of mathematics in education; they were the best preparation for higher studies. The subjective relation between them further suggested an objective one; although the passage from one to the other is really imaginary. For metaphysical and moral philosophy has no connection with mathematics ; number and figure are the abstractions of time and space, not the expressions of purely intellectual con- ceptions. When divested of metaphor, a straight line or a square has no more to do with right and justice than a crooked line with vice. The figurative asso- ciation was mistaken for a real one; and thus the three latter divisions of the Platonic proportion were constructed. There is more difficulty in comprehending how he arrived at the first term of the series, which is nowhere else mentioned, and has no reference to any other part of his system. Nor indeed does the relation of shad- ows to objects correspond to the relation of numbers to ideas. Probably Plato has been led by the love of analogy to make four terms instead of three, al- though the objects perceived in both divisions of the lower sphere are equally objects of sense. He is also preparing the way, as his manner is, for the shadows of images at the beginning of the seventh book, and ANALYSIS 125 the imitation of an imitation in the tenth. -The line may be regarded as reaching from un it y to infinity, _ and IS diviided intotwo unequal partsTand subdivided "^ int o two more ; each lower sphere is the multiplication of the preced ing.— (Jf the four faculties, laiHTiirthe lower division has an intermediate position (tti'o-tw), contrasting equally with the vagueness of the per- ception of shadows {eUaa-la) and the higher certainty of understanding {Bidvoia) and reason (vov?) . The difference between understanding and mind or reason (voOs) is analogous to the difference between acquiring knowledge in the parts and the contempla- tion of the whole. True knowledge is a whole, and is at rest; consistency and universality are the test s of truth. To this self -evidencing knowledge of the" whole the faculty of mind is supposed to correspond. But there is a knowledge of the understanding which is incomplete and in motion always, because unable to rest in the subordinate ideas. Those ideas are called both images and hypotheses — images because they are clothed in sense, hypotheses because they are as- sumptions only, until they are brought into connection . with the idea of good. 1/^ The general meaning of the passage beginning = " Noble, then, is the bond which links together sight and visibility," and continuing to the end of Book VI, so far as the thought contained in it admits of being translated into the terms of modern philosophy, may be described or explained as follows : — There is a truth^^^n g and self-existen i ^ to which by the help of~ 1i larj^rTet down frnm flbnve, t.he-himia n intelligen ce may a scend. This unity is like the sun in the heavens, the light by which all things are seen, the being by which they are created and sustained. It is the ideui of good. And the steps of the ladder leading up to/ this highest or universal existence are the mathemat-' 126 ANALYSIS ical sciences, which also contain in themselves an ele- ment of the miiversal. These, too, we see in a new manner when we connect them with the idea of good. They then cease to be hypotheses or pictures, and become essential parts of a higher truth which is at once their first principle and their final cause. We can not give any more precise meaning to this remarkable passage, but we may trace in it several rudiments or vestiges of thought which are common to us and to Plato: such as (1) the unity and cor- relation of the sciences, or rather of science, for in Plato's time they were not yet parted off or distin- guished; (2) the existence of a Divine Power, or hfe or idea or cause or reason, not yet conceived or no longer conceived as in the Timaeus and elsewhere under the form of a person; (3) the recognition of the hypothetical and conditional character of the mathematical sciences, and in a measure of every science when isolated from the rest; (4) the convic- tion of a truth which is invisible, and of a law, though hardly a law of nature, which permeates the intel- lectual rather than the visible world. The method of Socrates is hesitating and tentative, awaiting the fuller explanation of the idea of good, and of the nature of dialectic in the seventh book. The imperfect intelligence of Glaucon, and the reluctance of Socrates to make a beginning, mark the difficulty of the subject. The allusion to Theages' bridle, and to the internal oracle, or demonic sign, of Socrates, which here, as always in Plato, is only prohibitory; the remark that the salvation of any remnant of good in the present evil state of the world is due to God only; the reference to a future state of existence, which is unknown to Glaucon in the tenth book, and in which the discussions of Socrates and his disci- ples would be resumed; the surprise in the answers; ANALYSIS 127 the fanciful irony of Socrates, where he pretends that he can only describe the strange position of the philosopher in a figure of speech; the original observation that the Sophists, after all, are only the representatives and not the leaders of public opin- ion; the picture of the philosopher standing aside in the shower of sleet under a wall; the figure of " the great beast " followed by the expression of good-will towards the conunon people who would not have rejected the philosopher if they had known him; the "right noble thought" that the highest truths demand the greatest exactness; the hesitation of Socrates in returning once more to his well-worn theme of the idea of good; the ludicrous earnest- ness of Glaucon; the comparison of philosophy to a deserted maiden who marries beneath her — are some of the most interesting characteristics of the sixth book. Yet a few more words may be added, on the old theme, which was so oft discussed in the Socratic cir- cle, of which we, like Glaucon and Adeimantus, would fain, if possible, have a clearer notion. Like them, we are dissatisfied when we are told that the idea of good can only be revealed to a student of the mathe- matical sciences, and we are inclined to think that neither we nor they could have been led along that path to any satisfactory goal. For we have learned that differences of quantity can not pass into differ- ences of quality, and that the mathematical sciences can never rise above themselves into the sphere of our higher thoughts, although they may sometimes fur- nish symbols and expressions of them, and may train the mind in habits of abstraction and self -concentra- tion. The illusion which was natural to an ancient philosopher has ceased to be an illusion to us. But if the process by which we are supposed to arrive at 128 ANALYSIS the idea of good be really imaginary, may not the idea itself be also a mere abstraction? We remark, first, that in all ages, and especially in primitive philoso- phy, words such as being, essence, unity, good, have exerted an extraordinary influence over the minds of men. The meagreness or negativeness of their con- tent has been in an inverse ratio to their power. They have become the forms under which all things were comprehended. There was a need or instinct in the human soul which they satisfied ; they were not ideas, but gods, and to this new mythology the men of a later generation began to attach the powers and asso- ciations of the elder deities. ^ The idea of good is one of those sacred words or forms of thought, which were beginning to take the place of the old mythology. It meant unity, i n which all time and all existence were gathered upT It was the truth of all things, and also the light in which they shone forth, and became evident to intelligences human and divine. It was the cause of aU things, the power by which they were brought into being. It was the universal reason divested of a human per- sonality. It was the life as well as the light of the jWorld, all knowledge and all power were compre- ended in it. The way to it was through the mathe- atical sciences, and these too were dependent on it. ether God was the maker of it. or mad e by it, wnnld h e like asking whether God cou ldJB&~cbh- ceived apart fr om g oodness , or p^nndness apart from God^ The God of the Timaeus is not really af vari- ance with the idea of good ; they are aspects of the same, differing only as the personal from the imper- sonal, or the masculine from the neuter, the one being the expression or language of mythology, the other of philosophy. This, or something like this, is the meaning of the ANALYSIS 129 idea of good as conceived by Plato. Ideas of number, order, harmony, development may also be said to enter into it. The paraphrase which has just been given of it goes beyond the actual words of Plato. We have perhaps arrived at the stage of philosophy which enables us to understand what he is aiming at, better than he did himself. We are beginning to real- ize what he saw darkly and at a distance. But if he could have been told that this, or some conception of the same kind, but higher than this, was the truth at which he was aiming, and the need which he sought to supply, he would gladly have recognized that more was contained in his own thoughts than he himself knew. As his words are few and his manner reticent and tentative, so must the style of his interpreter be. We should not approach his meaning more nearly by attempting to define it further. In translating him into the language of modern thought, we might in- sensibly lose the spirit of ancient philosophy. It is remarkable that although Plato speaks of the idea of good as the first principle of truth and being, it is nowhere mentioned in his writings except in this pas- sage. Nor did it retain any hold upon the minds of his disciples in a later generation; it was probably unintelligible to them. Nor does the mention of it in Aristotle appear to have any reference to this or any other passage in his extant writings. ^. BOOK VII o^'f^ ^'^ And now I will describe in a figure the enlighten- ment or unenlightenment of our nature : — Imagine '^^ ^ human beings living in an underground den which is open towards the light; they have been there from childhood, having their necks and legs chained, and can only see into the den. At a distance there is a \i 130 ANALYSIS fire, and between the fire and the prisoners a raised way, and a low wall is built along the way, like the screen over which marionette players show their pup- pets. Behind the wall appear moving figures, who hold in their hands various works of art, and among them images of men and animals, wood and stone, and some of the passers-by are talking and others silent. "A strange parable," he said, "and strange cap- tives." They are ourselves, I rephed; and they , see only the shadows of the images which the fire throws on the wall of the den : to these thev give names? and if we add an echo which returns from the wall,_j the voices of the passengers will seem to proceed from the shadows . Suppose now that you suddenly turn them round and make them look with pain and grief to themselves at the real images ; will they believe them to be real? Will not their eyes be dazzled, and will they not try to get away from the light to something which they are able to behold without blinking? And suppose further, that they are dragged up a steep and rugged ascent into the presence of the sun himself, will n^t their sight be darkened with the excess of light? Some time will pass before they get the habit of perceiving at all; and at first they wiU be able to perceive only shadows and reflections in the water; then they wiU recognize the moon and the stars, and will at length behold the sun in his own proper place as he is. Last of all they will conclude : — This is he who gives us the year and the seasons, and is the author of all that we see. How will they rejoice in passing from darkness' to light! How worthless to them will seem the honors and glories of the den ! But now imagine further, that they descend into their old habitations ; — in that underground dwelling they will not see as well as their fellows, and will not be able to compete with them in the measurement of the ANALYSIS 131 • shadows on the wall; there will be many jokes about the man who went on a visit to the sim and lost his eyes, and if they find anybody trying to set free and enlighten one of their number, they will put him to- death, if they can catch him. Now the cave or den* is the world of sight, the fire is the sun, the way up- wards is the way to knowledge, and in the world of knowledge the idea of good is last seen and with dif- ficulty, but when seen is inferred to be the author of good and right — parent of the lord of fight in this world, and of truth and understanding in the other. TTp wbn flitains t.n the heatifif visinTi ig silmgyc gnixxg ju pwards; he is unwilling to descend into political ass emblies and courts of j aw; for his eyes are apt to blink at the images or shadows of images which they behold in them — he can not enter into the ideas of those who have never in their lives understood the relation of the shadow to the substance. But blind- ness is of two kinds, and may be caused either by pass- ing out of darkness into light or out of ligiht into darkness, and a man of sense will distinguish between them, and will not laugh equally at both of them, but the blindness which arises from fulness of light he will deem blessed, and pity the other; or if he laugh at the puzzled soul looking at the sun, he will have more reason to laugh than the inhabitants of the den at those who descend from above. There is a further lesson taught by this parable of ours. Some persons fancy that instruction is like giving eyes to the blind, but we say that the faculty of sight was always there, and that the soul only requires to be turned round towards the light. And this is conversion; other virtues are almost like bodily habits, and may be ac- quired in the same manner, but intelligence has a diviner life, and is indestructible, turning either to good or evil according to the direction given. Did 132 ANALYSIS you never observe how the mind of a clever rogue peers out of his eyes, and the more clearly he sees, the more evil he does? Now if you take such "an one, and cut away from him those leaden weights of pleas- ure and desire which bind his soul to earth, his intel- ligence will be turned round, and he will behold the |truth as clearly as he now discerns his meaner ends. nd have we not deci d ed t ha t o ur rulers must neit her, le so uneducated as to have no fixed rule of ] ife.-nor io over-educated as to be unwilling to leave th eir parja- jdise for the business of the world? We must choose 3ut therefore the natures who are most lik ely to as- cend tot he light and laiowledge of the good; but ~wg" nmst~not allow them to remain in the ^;egion of light; the y must be forced down again among th e captives in the den to partake of their labors and * honor si " Will they not think this a hardsE ipt^'- ]^ou should remember that our purpos e jn framing the State was not that our citizens should d o wEaTthey 'like, but that t hey should serve the State foFthe com- T ^nn ^nn d nf all. May we not fairly say tooiir philos- opher, — Friend, we do you no wrong; for in other States philosophy grows wild, and a wild plant owes nothing to the gardener, but you have been trained by us to be the rulers and kings of our hive, and there- fore we must insist on your descending into the den. You must, each of you, take your turn, and become able to use your eyes in the dark, and with a little practice you will see far better than those who quarrel about the shadows, whose knowledge is a dream only, while yours is a waking reality. I t may be that the saint or philosopher who is best fitted, may also be~ the least inclined to rul e, but necessit y is laid up on~ hini ^and he must no longer live in theJieavenjjiLideas.. Sjid thi s wilLbeJ he salvation jaLthe State. For thQ.se who rule mustJioLliejhose who are desirous to rule; ANALYSIS 133 and, if you can offer to our citizens a better life than that of rulers generally is, there will be a chance that the rich, not only in this world's goods, but in virtue and wisdom, may bear rule. And the only life which is better than the life of political ambition is that of philosophy, which is also the best preparation for the government of a State. Then now comes the question, — How shall we create our rulers; what way is there from darkness to light? The change is effected by philosophy; it is not the turning over of an oyster-shell, but the con- vers ion of a souj ^frohfi night to day, from becoming to bein g. And what training will draw the soul up- wards? Our former education had two branches, gymnastic, which was occupied with the body, and music, the sister art, which infused a natural harmony into mind and literature ; but neither of these sciences gave any promise of doing what we want. Nothing remains to us but that universal or primary science of which all the arts and sciences are partakers, I mean number or calculation. " Very true." Including the art of war? " Yes, certainly." Then there is some- thing ludicrous about Palamedes in the tragedy, com- ing in and saying that he had invented number, and had counted the ranks and set them in order. For if Agamemnon could not count his feet (and without nimiber how could he?) he must have been a pretty sort of general indeed. No man should be a soldier who can not count, and indeed he is hardly to be called a man. But I am not speaking of these practical applications of arithmetic, for number, in my view, is rather to be regarded as a conductor to thought and being. I will explain what I mean by the last expres- sion : — Things sensible are of two kinds ; the one class invite or stimulate the mind, while in the other the mind acquiesces. Now the stimulating class are 134 ANALYSIS the things which suggest? contrast and relation. For example, suppose that I hold up to the eyes three fingers — a fore finger, a middle finger, a little fin- ger — the sight equally recognizes aU three fingers, but without number can not further distinguish them. Or again, suppose two objects to be relatively great and small, these ideas of greatness and smallness are supplied not by the sense, but by the mind. And the perception of their contrast or relation quickens and sets in motion the mind, which is puzzled by the con- fused intimations of sense, and has recourse to number in order to find out whether the things indicated are one or more than one. Number replies that they are two and not one, and are to be distinguished from one another. Again, the sight beholds great and small, but only in a confused chaos, and not until they are distinguished does the question arise of their respect- ive natures ; we are thus led on to the distinction between the visible and intelligible. That was what I meant when I spoke of stimulants to the intellect; I was thinking of the contradictions which arise in perception. The idea of unity, for example, like that of a finger, does not arouse thought unless involving some conception of plurality; but when the one is also the opposite of one, the contradiction gives rise to reflection; an example of this is aiforded by any object of sight. All number has also an elevating effect; it raises the mind out of the foam and flux of generation to the contemplation of being, having lesser military and retail uses also. The retail use is not required by us; but as our guardian is to be a soldier as well as a philosopher, the military one may be retained. And to our higher purpose no science can be better adapted; but it must be pursued in the spirit of a philosopher, not of a shopkeeper. It is concerned, not with visible objects, but with abstract ANALYSIS 135 truth; for numbers are pure abstractions — the true arithmetician indignantly denies that his unit is capa- ble of division. When you divide, he insists that you are only multiplying; his " one " is not material or resolvable into fractions, but an unvarying and abso- lute equality; and this proves the purely intellectual character of his study. Note also the great power which arithmetic has of sharpening the wits ; no other discipline is equally severe, or an equal test of general ability, or equally improving to a stupid person. Let our second branch of education be geometry. " I can easily see," replied Glaucon, " that the skill of the general will be doubled by his knowledge of geometry," That is a small matter; the use of geom- etry, to which I refer, is the assistance given by it in the contemplation of the idea of good, and the com- pelling the mind tb look at true being, and not at generation only. Yet the present mode of pursuing these studies, as any one who is the least of a mathe- matician is aware, is mean and ridiculous; they are made to look downwards to the arts, and not upwards to eternal existence. The geometer is always talking of squaring, subtending, apposing, as if he had in view action; whereas knowledge is the real object of the study. It should elevate the soul, and create the mind of philosophy; it should raise up what has fallen down, not to speak of lesser uses in war and military tactics, and in the improvement of the faculties. Shall we propose, as a third branch of our educa- tion, astronomy? " Very good," replied Glaucon; " the knowledge of the heavens is necessary at once for husbandry, navigation, military tactics." I like your way of giving useful reasons for everything in order to make friends of the world. And there is a difficulty in proving to mankind that education is not only useful information but a purification of the eye 136 ANALYSIS of the soul, which is better than the bodily eye, for by this alone is truth seen. Now, will you appeal to mankind in general or to the philosopher? or would you prefer to look to yourself only? " Every man is his own best friend." Then take a step backward, for we are out of order, and insert the third dimension which is of solids, after the second which is of planes, and then you may proceed to solids in motion. But solid geometry is not popular and has not the patron- age of the State, nor is the use of it fully recognized; the difficulty is great, and the votaries of the study are conceited and impatient. Still the charm of the pursuit wins upon men, and, if government would lend a little assistance, there might be great progress made. "Very true," replied Glaucon; "but do I imderstand you now to begin with plane geometry, and to place next geometry of solids, and thirdly, astronomy, or the motion of solids?" Yes, I said; my hastiness has only hindered us. " Very good, and now let us proceed to astronomy, about which I am willing to speak in your lofty strain. No one can fail to see that the contemplation of the heavens draws the soul upwards." I am an exception, then; astronomy as studied at present appears to me to draw the soul not upwards, but downwards. Star- gazing is just looking up at the ceiling — no better; a man may lie on his back on land or on water — he may look up or look down, but there is no science in that. The vision of knowledge of which I speak is seen not with the eyes, but with the mind. All the magnificence of the heavens is but the embroidery of a copy which falls far short of the divine Original, and teaches nothing about the absolute harmonies or mo- tions of things. Their beauty is like the beauty of figures drawn by the hand of Daedalus or any other great artist, which may be used for illustration, but ANALYSIS 137 no .mathematician would seek tt) obtain from them true conceptions of equality or numerical relations. HoW ridiculous then to look for these in the map of the heavens, in which the imperfection of matter comes in everywhere as a disturbing element, marring the syriunetry of day and night, of months and years, of the sUn and stars in their courses. Only by prob- lems can we place astronomy on a truly scientific basis. Let the heavens alone, and exert the intellect. Still, mathematics admit of other applications, as the Pythagoreans say, and we agree. There is a sis- ter science of harmonical motion, adapted to the ear as astronomy is to the eye, and there may be other apphcations also. Let us inquire of the Pythagoreans about them, not forgetting that we have an aim higher than theirs, which is the relation of these sciences to the idea of good. The error which pervades astron- omy also pervades harmonics. The musicians put their ears in the place of their minds. " Yes," re- plied Glaucon, " I like to see them laying their ears alongside of their neighbors' faces — some saying, * That's a new note,' others declaring that the two notes are the same." Yes, I said; but you mean the empirics who are always twisting and torturing the strings of the lyre, and quarrelling about the tempers of the strings; I am referring rather to the Pytha- gorean harmonists, who are almost equally in error. For they investigate only the numbers of the conso- nances which are heard, and ascend no higher, — of the true numerical harmony which is unheard, and is only to be found in problems, they have not even a conception. " That last," he said, " must be a mar- vellous thing." A thing, I replied, which is only use- ful if pursued with a view to the good. All these sciences are the prelude of the strain, and are profitable if they are regarded in their natural 138 ANALYSIS relations to one another. " I dare say, Socrates," said Glaucon; " but such a study will be an endless busi- ness." What study do you mean — of the prelude, or what? For all these things are only the prelude, and you surely do not suppose that a mere mathema- tician is also a dialectician? " Certainly not. I have hardly ever known a mathematician who could rea- son." And yet, Glaucon, is not true reasoning that hymn of dialectic which is the music of the intellectual world, and which was by us compared to the effort of sight, when from beholding the shadows on the wall we arrived at last at the images which gave the shad- ows? Even so the dialectical faculty withdrawing from sense arrives by the pure intellect at the contem- plation of the idea of good, and never rests but at the very end of the intellectual world. And the royal road out of the cave into the light, and the blinking of the eyes at the sun and turning to contemplate the shadows of reality, not the shadows of an image only — this progress and gradual acquisition of a new faculty of sight by the help of the mathematical sci- ences, is the elevation of the soul to the contemplation of the highest ideal of being. " So far, I agree with you. But now, leaving the prelude, let us proceed to the hymn. What, then, is the nature of dialectic, and what are the paths which lead thither? " Dear Glaucon, you can not follow me here. There can be no revelation of the absolute truth to one who has not been disciplined in the previous sciences. But that there is a science of absolute tnith^ which is attained in some wav very Hifffi ^p nt from _ tho se now practised, 1 am confident . For all other "affs^r sciences are relative to human needs and opin- ions; and the mathematical sciences are but a dream or hypothesis of true being, and never analyze their own principles. Dialectic alone rises to the principle ANALYSIS 139 which is above hypotheses, convetting and gently leading the eyes of the soul out of the barbarous slough of ignorance into the light of the upper world, with the help of the sciences which we have been de- scribing -h sciences, as they are often termed, although they require some other name, implying greater clear- ness than opinion and less clearness than science, and this in our previous sketch was understanding. And. so we g etfolir names — two for inte llect, and two for opinion. — reason or mind, understand mg. faith .^ er- ^eption of sh ado ws — which make a prop ortions- being : becoming: intellect : op i nion — aMlicience: belief : ; imderstanding : perception of shadows. Dia- lectic may be further described as that science which defines and explains the essence or being of each na- ture, which distinguishes and abstracts the good, and is ready to do battle against all opponents in the cause of good. To him who is not a dialectician life is but a sleepy dream; and many a man is in his grave be- fore he is well waked up. And would you have the future rulers of your ideal State intelligent beings, or stupid as posts? " Certainly not the latter." Then you must train them in dialectic, which will teach them to ask and answer questions, and is the coping- stone of the sciences. I dare say that you have not forgotten how our rulers were chosen; and the process of selection may be carried a step further : — As before, they must be constant and valiant, good-looking, and of noble man- ners, but now they must also have natural ability which education will improve; that is to say, they must be quick at learning, capable of mental toil, retentive, solid, diligent natures, who combine intel- lectual with moral virtues; not lame and one-sided, diligent in bodily exercise and indolent in mind, or conversely; not a maimed soul, which hates false- 140 ANALYSIS hood and yet unintentionally is always wallowing in the mire of ignorance ; not a bastard or feeble person, but sound in wind and limb, and in perfect condition for the great gymnastic trial of the mind. Justice 'herself can fin d nn fg.nH witli na+nrps snrb as the sR| and they will be the saviors of ou r State j disciples of another sort v ypnld only maVp philncnpE jE- mnrp ridif- ulo us than she is at present. Forgive my enthusiasm; TTam becoming excited; but when I see her trampled under foot, I am angry at the authors of her disgrace. " I did not notice that you were more excited than you ought to have been." But I felt that I was. Now do not let us forget another point in the selection of our disciples — that they must be young and not old. For Solon is mistaken in saying that an old man can be always learning; youth is the time of study, and t^ here we must remember that the mind is free and dainty, and, unlike the body, must not be made to work against the grain. Learning should be at first a sort of play, in which the natural bent is detected. As in training them for war, the young dogs should at first only taste blood ; but when the necessary gym- nastics are over which during two or three years divide life between sleep and bodily exercise, then the educa- tion of the soul will become a more serious matter. At twenty years of age, a selection must be made of the more promising disciples, with whom a new epoch of education will begin. The sciences which they have hithpntn IpRrned in fracrme nts will now be brought into relation with ea ch other and with true being; for the powerof co mbimng Tliem is IheTestpf speculative ^n d dialectica Tabilitv. And afterwards at thirty a TurBier selecOorTshairiBe made of those who are able to withdraw from the world of sense into the abstrac- tion of ideas. But at this point, judging from present experience, there is a danger that dialectic may be the ANALYSIS , 141 source of many evils. The danger may be illustrated by a parallel case : — Imagine a person who has been brought up in wealth and luxury amid a crowd of flatterers, and who is suddenly informed that he is a supposititious son. He has hitherto honored his re- puted parents and disregarded the flatterers, and now he does the reverse. This is just what happens with a man's principles. There are certain doctrines which he learned at home and which exercised a parental authority over him. Presently he finds that imputa- tions are cast upon them ; a troublesome querist comes and asks, " What is the just and good? " or proves that virtue is vice and vice virtue, and his mind be- comes imsettled, and he ceases to love, honor, and obey them as he has hitherto done. He is seduced into the life of pleasure, and becomes a lawless person and a rogue. The case of such speculators is very pitiable, and, in order that our thirty years' old pupils may not require this pity, let us take every possible care that young persons do not study philosophy too early. For a young man is a sort of puppy who only^ plays with an argument; and is reasoned into and out^ of his opyiions every day; he soon begins to believe^ nothing, and brings himself and philosophy into dis- < credit. A man of thirty does not run on in this way;^ he will argue and not merely contradict, and adds new honor to philosophy by the sobriety of his conduct. What time shall we allow for this second gymnastic training of the soul? — say, twice the time required for the gymnastics of the body; six, or perhaps five years, to commence at thirty, and then for fifteen years let the student go down into the den, and com- mand armies, and gain experience of life. At fifty let him return to the end of all things, and have his eyes uplifted to the idea of good, and order his life after that pattern; if necessary, taking his turn at the 142 ANALYSIS helm of State, and training up others to be his suc- cessors. When his time comes he shall depart in peace to the islands of the blest. He shall be honored with sacrifices, and receive such worship as the Pythian oracle approves. " You are a statuary, Socrates, and have made a perfect image of our governors." Yes, and of our governesses, for the women will share in all things -with the men. And you will admit that our State is not a mere aspiration, but may really come into being when there shall arise philosopher-kings, one or more, who will despise earthly vanities, and will be the servants of justice only. " And how will they begin their work?" Their first act wiU be to send away into the country all those who are more than ten years of age, and to proceed with those who are left. . . . At the commencement of the sixth book, Plato anticipated his explanation of the relation of the phi- losopher to the world in an allegory, in this, as in other passages, following the order which he prescribes in education, and proceeding from the concrete to the abstract. At the commencement of Book VII, under the figure of a cave having an opening towards a fire and a way upwards to the true light, he returns to view the divisions of knowledge, exhibiting familiarly, as in a picture, the result which had been hardly won by a great effort of thought in the previous discussion ; at the same time casting a glance onward at the dia- lectical process, which is represented by the way lead- ing from darkness to light. The shadows, the images, the rPiflection of the sun a rid stars rn the w a.tpr, fhi^ stars and sun themselves, s pvprally pnrrespn nd. — the jrst. tp-th e realmof fancy and poetry. — the second , to the wOTld of_s£nse. -^Lthe third, to the abstiactions ANALYSIS 143 or universals of sense, of which the tnathematical sci-l ffices furnish the type, — the fourthand last to thi same abstractions, when seen in the unity ^TBSeT ' from which they derive a new mpaning {^x\^ jwtwpt The true dialectical process begins with the contempla- tion of the real stars, and not mere reflections of them, and ends with the recognition of the sun, or idea of good, as the parent not only of light but of warmth and growth. To the divisions of knowledge the stages of education partly answer : — first, there is the early education of childhood and youth in the fancies of the poets, and in the laws and customs of the State ; — then there is the training of the body to be a warrior athlete, and a good servant of the mind; — and thirdly, after an interval follows the education of later life, which begins with mathematics and proceeds to philosophy in general. There seem to be two great aims in the philosophy of Plato, — first, to realize abstractions ; ' secondly, to connect them. According to himj'the true educa- tion is that which draws men from becoming to beingf and to a comprehensive survey of all being. He desires to develop in the human mind the faculty of seeing the universal in all things; imtil at last the particulars of sense drop away and the universal alone remains. He then seeks to combine the universals which he has disengaged from sense, not perceiving that the correlation of them has no other basis but the common use of language. He never understands that abstractions, as Hegel says, are " mere abstrac- tions " — of use when employed in the arrangement of facts, but adding nothing to the sum of knowledge when pursued apart from them, or with reference to an imaginary idea of good. Still the exercise of the faculty of abstraction apart from facts has enlarged the mind, and played a great part in the education 144 ANALYSIS of the human race. Plato appreciated the value of this faculty, and saw that it might be quickened by the study of number and relation. All things in which there is opposition or proportion are suggestive of reflection. The mere impression of sense evokes no power of thought or of mind, but when sensible ob- jects ask to be compared and distinguished, then phi- losophy begins. The science of arithmetic first sug- gests such distinctions. There follow in order the other sciences of plane and solid geometry, and of solids in motion, one branch of which is astronomy or the harmony of the spheres, — to this is appended the sister science of the harmony of sounds. Plato seems also to hint at the possibility of other applications of arithmetical or mathematical proportions, such as we employ in chemistry and natural philosophy, such as the Pythagoreans and even Aristotle make use of in Ethics and Politics, e. g. his distinction between arith- metical and geometrical proportion in the Ethics, or between numerical and proportional equality in the Politics. The modern mathematician will readily sympathize with Plato's delight in the properties of pure mathe- matics. He will not be disinclined to say with him : — Let alone the heavens, and study the beauties of num- ber and figure in themselves. He too will be apt to depreciate their application to the arts. He will ob- serve that Plato has a conception of geometry, in which figures are to be dispensed with; thus in a dis- tant and shadowy way seeming to anticipate the pos- sibility of working geometrical problems by a more general mode of analysis. He will remark v/ith inter- est on the backward state of solid geometry, which, alas! was not encouraged by the aid of the State in the age of Plato; and he will recognize the grasp of Plato's mind in his ability to conceive of one science ANALYSIS . 145 of solids in motion including the earth as well as the heavens, — not forgetting to notice the intimation to which allusion has been already made, that besides astronomy and harmonics the science of solids in mo- tion may have other applications. Still more wiU he be struck with the comprehensiveness of view which led Plato, at a time when these sciences hardly existed, to say that they must be studied in relation to one another, and to the idea of good, or common principle of truth and being. But he will also see (and perhaps without surprise) that in that stage of physical and mathematical knowledge, Plato has fallen into the error of supposing that he can construct the heavens a priori by mathematical problems, and determine the principles of harmony irrespective of the adaptation of sounds to the human ear. The illusion was a nat- ural one in that age and country. The simplicity and certainty of astronomy and harmonics seemed to con- trast with the variation and complexity of the world of sense ; hence the circumstance that there was some elementary basis of fact, some measurement of dis- tance or time or vibrations on which they must ulti- mately rest, was overlooked by him. The modern predecessors of Newton fell into errors equally great; and Plato can hardly be said to have been very far wrong, or may even claim a sort of prophetic insight into ,the subject, when we consider that the greater part of astronomy at the present day consists of ab- stract dynamics, by the help of which most astronom- ical discoveries have been made. The metaphysical philosopher from his point of view recognizes mathematics as an instrument of edu- cation, — which strengthens the power of attention, develops the sense of order and the faculty of con- struction, and enables the mind to grasp under simple formulae the quantitative differences of physical jA^e- 146 ANALYSIS nomena. But while acknowledging their value in education, he sees also that they have no connection with our higher moral and intellectual ideas. In the attempt which Plato makes to connect them, we easily trace the influences of ancient Pythagorean notions. There is no reason to suppose that he is speaking of the ideal numbers; but he is describing numbers which are pure abstractions, to which he assigns a real and separate existence, which, as " the teachers of the art " (meaning probably the Pythagoreans) would have aiSrmed, repel all attempts at subdivision, and in which unity and every other number are conceived of as absolute. The truth and certainty of numbers, when thus disengaged from phenomena, gave them a kind of sacredness in the eyes of an ancient philoso- pher. Nor is it easy to say how far ideas of order and fixedness may have had a moral and elevating influ- ence on the minds of men, " who," in the words of the Timaeus, " might learn to regulate their erring lives according to them." It is worthy of remark that the old Pythagorean ethical symbols still exist as figures of speech among ourselves. And those who in mod- ern times see the world pervaded by universal law, may also see an anticipation of this last word of mod- ern philosophy in the Platonic idea of good, which is the source and measure of aU things, and yet only an abstraction. Two passages seem to require more particular ex- planations. First, that which relates to the analysis of vision. The difficulty in this passage may be explained, like many others, from differences in the modes of conception prevailing among ancient and modem thinkers. To us, the perceptions of sense are inseparable from the act of the mind which accom- panies them. The consciousness of form, color, dis- tance, is indistinguishable from tiie simple sensation, ANALYSIS 147 which is the medium of them. Whereas to Plato sense is the Heraclitean flux of sense, not the vision of ob- jects in the order in which they actually present them- selves to the experienced sight, but as they may be imagined to appear confused and blurred to the half- awakened eye of the infant. The first action of the mind is aroused by the attempt to set in order this chaos, and the reason is required to frame distinct conceptions under which the confused impressions of sense may be arranged. Hence arises the question, " What is great, what is small? " and thus begins the distinction of the visible and the intelligible. The second difiiculty relates to Plato's conception of harmonics. Three classes of harmonists are dis- tinguished by him: — first, the Pythagoreans, whom he proposes to consult as in the previous discussion on music he was to consult Damon — they are acknowl- edged to be masters in the art, but are altogether deficient in the knowledge of its higher import and relation to the good; secondly, the mere empirics, whom Glaucon appears to confuse with them, and whom both he and Socrates ludicrously describe as experimenting by mere auscultation on the intervals of sounds. Both of these fall short in diflPerent degrees of the Platonic idea of harmony, which must be stud- ied in a purely abstract way, first by the method of problems, and secondly as a part of universal knowl- edge in relation to the idea of good. The allegory has a political as well as a p hilosnp^ ^calmeaning. The den or cave represents the narrow sphere of politics or law, and the light of the eternal ideas is supposed to exercise a disturbing influence on the minds of those who return to this lower world. In other words, their principles are too wide for prac- tical application; they are looking far away into the past and future, when their business is with the pres« l'/^ 148 ANALYSIS ent. The ideal is not easily reduced to the conditions of actual life, and may often be at variance with them. /\nd at first. t.Tinse who return are unable to compete with the inhabitants of the den in the measurement ,J^' \ j)f the sha(lo wg;^nd are derided and persecuted by them; but after a while they see the things below in far truer proportions than those who have never as- cended into the upper world. The difference between the politician turned i nto a philosopher and the philos- ^her turned^nto a politician, is symbolized by the two kinds of disordered eyesight, the one which is ' experienced _by the captive who i«i transf erred t'rnm" ^f/ ^ darkness to d ay, the other, of the heav enl y messeng er ' who voluntaTiTy _fo r the "go od of his fellow-men d e- fends into the dm . In what way the brighter light is to dawn on the inhabitants of the lower world, or j how the idea of good is to become the guiding prin- I ciple of politics, is left unexplained by Plato. Like ' the nature and divisions of dialectic, of which Glaucon impatiently demands to be informed, perhaps he would have said that the explanation could not be given except to a disciple of the previous sciences. Many illustrations of this part of the Republic may be found in modern Politics and in daily life. For among ourselves, too, there have been two sorts of . Politicians or Statesmen, whose eyesight has become disordered in two different ways. First, there have been great men who, in the language of Burke, " have been too much given to general maxims," who, like J. S. Mill or Burke himself, have been theorists or philosophers before they were politicians, or who, hav- ing been students of history, have allowed some great historical parallel, such as the English Revolution of 1688, or possibly Athenian democracy or Roman Im- perialism, to be the medium through which they viewed contemporary events. Or perhaps the long ANALYSIS yv^^^li!^ , 149 « projecting shadow of some existing institution may- have darkened their vision. The Church of the future, the Commonwealth of the future, the Society of the future, have so absorbed their minds, that they are unable to see in their true proportions the Politics of to-day. They have been intoxicated with great ideas, such as liberty, or equality, or the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the brotherhood of human- ity, an d they no longer care to _consider hnw__thgsg ideas mu s t be limited in practice or h armonized with the conditions of human life. They are, full of lig ht. but the li ght to them has become only a sort of lun ii-_ nous mist or blindness. A lmost every one has known some enthusiastic half-educated person, who sees everything at false distances, and in erroneous pro- portions. With this disorder of eyesight may be contrasted another — of those who see not far into the distance, but what is near only; who have been engaged all their lives in a trade or a profession; who are limited to a set or sect of their own. Men of this kind have no universal except their own interests or the interests of their class, no principle but the opinion of persons like themselves, no knowledge of affairs beyond what they pick up in the streets or at their club. Suppose them to be sent into a larger world, to undertake some higher calling, from being tradesmen to turn generals or politicians, from being schoolmasters to become philosophers : — or imagine them on a sudden to re- ceive an inward light which reveals to them for the first time in their lives a higher idea of God and the existence of a spiritual world, by this sudden conver- sion or change is not their daily life likely to be upset ; and on the other hand will not many of their old prej- udices and narrownesses still adhere to them long after they have begun to take a more comprehensive view 150 ANALYSIS of human things? From familiar examples like these we may leam what Plato meant by the eyesight which is liable to' two kinds of disorders. Nor have we any difficulty in drawing a parallel between the young Athenian in the fifth century be- fore Christ who became unsettled by new ideas, and the student of a modern University who has been the subject of a similar " aufkldrung." We too observe that when yoimg men begin to criticize customary beliefs, or to analyze the constitution of human nature, they are apt to lose hold of solid principle . {atrav to fid^aiop avr&v i^oixerai) . They are like trees which have been frequently transplanted. The earth about them is loose, and they have no roots reaching far into the soil. They " light upon every flower," following their own wayward wills, or because the wind blows them. They catch opinions, as diseases are caught — when they are in the air. Borne hither and thither, " they speedily fall into beliefs" the opposite of those in which they were brought up. , They hardly retain the distinction of right and wrong; they seem to think one thing as good as another. They suppose them- selves to be searching after truth when they are play- ing the game of " follow my leader." They faU in love " at first sight " with paradoxes respecting mo- rality, some fancy about art, some novelty or eccen- tricity in religion, and like lovers they are so absorbed for a time in their new notion that they can think of nothing else. The resolution of some philosophical or theological question seems to them more interest- ing and important than any substantial knowledge of literature or science or even than a good life. Like the youth in the Philebus, they are ready to discourse to any one about a new philosophy. They are gen- erally the disciples of some eminent professor or soph- ist, whom they rather imitate than understand. They ANALYSIS 151 • may be counted happy if in later years they retain some of the simple truths which they acquired in early education, and which they may, perhaps, find to be worth aU the rest. Such is the picture which Plato draws and which we only reproduce, partly in his own words, of the dangers which beset youth in times of transition, when old opinions are fading away and the new are not yet firmly established. Their condi- tion is ingeniously compared by him to that of a sup- posititious son, who has made the discovery that his reputed parents are not his real ones, and, in conse- quence, they have lost their authority over him. The distinction between the mathematician and the dialectician is also noticeable. Plato is very well aware that the faculty of the mathematician is quite distinct from the higher philnsopbic^al sense which rec- ognizes and combiiies first principles ,^ The contempt which he expresses for distinctions of words, the dan- ger of involuntary falsehood, the apology which Soc- rates makes for his earnestness of speech, are highly characteristic of the Platonic style and mode of thought. The quaint notion that if Palamedes was the inventor of number Agamemnon could not have counted his feet; the art by which we are made to believe that this State of ours is not a dream only; the gravity with which the first step is taken in the actual creation of the State, namely, the sending out of the dty all who had arrived at ten years of age, in order to expedite the business of education by a generation, are also truly Platonic. (For the last, compare the passage at the end of the third book, in which he expects the lie about the earthborn men to be believed in the second generation.) 152 . ANALYSIS BOOK VIII And so we have arrived at the conclusion, that in the perfect State wives and children are to be in com- mon; and the education and pursuits of men and women, both in war and peace, are to be common, and kings are to be philosophers and warriors, and the sol- diers of the State are to live togethei', having all things in common; and they are to be warrior ath- letes, receiving no pay but only their food, from the other citizens. Now let us return to the point at which we digressed. " That is easily done," he replied: " You were speaking of the State which you had con- structed, and of the individual who answered to this, both of whom you affirmed to be good; and you said that of inferior States there were f otir forms and four individuals corresponding to them, which although deficient in various degrees, were all of them worth inspecting with a view to determining the relative happiness or misery of the best or worst man. Then Polemarchus and Adeimantus interrupted you, and this led to another argument, — and so here we are." Suppose that we put ourselves again in the same posi- tion, and do you repeat your question. " I should like to know of what constitutions you were speak- ing? " Besides the perfect State there are only four of any note in Hellas: — first, the famous Lacedae- monian or Cretan commonwealth; secondly, oli- garchy, a State fuU of evils; thirdly, democracy, which follows next in order; fourthly, tyranny, which is the disease or death of all government. Now, States are not made of " oak and rock," but of flesh and blood ; and therefore as there are five States there must be five human natures in individuals, which cor- respond to them. And first, there is the ambitious ANALYSIS 153 nature, which answers to the Lacedaemonian State; secondly, the oligarchical nature; thirdly, the demo- cratical; and fourthly^ the tyrannical. This last will have to be compared with the perfectly just, which is the fifth, that we may know which is the happier, and then we shall be able to determine whether the argument of Thrasymachus or our own is the more convincing. And as before we began with the State and went on to the individual, so now, beginning with timocracy, let us go on to the timocratical man, and then proceed to the other forms of government, and the individuals who answer to them. But how did timocracy arise out of the perfect State? Plainly, like all changes of government, from division in the rulers. But whence came division? " Sing, heavenly Muses," as Homer says ; — let them condescend to answer us, as if we were children, to whom they put on a solemn face in jest. " And what will they say? " They will say that human things are fated to decay, and even the perfect State will not escape from this law of destiny, when " the wheel comes full circle " in a period short or long. Plants or animals have times of fertility and sterility, which the intelligence of rulers because alloyed by sense will not enable them to ascertain, and children will be bom out of season. For whereas divine creations are in a perfect cycle or number, the human creation is in a number which declines from perfection, and has four terms and three intervals of numbers, increasing, waning, assimilating, dissimilating, and yet perfectly commensurate with each other. The base of the num- ber with a fourth added (or which is 3 : 4) , multiplied by five and cubed, gives two harmonies : — The first a square number, which is a hundred times the base (or a hundred times a hundred) ; the second, an ob- long, being a hundred squares of the rational diameter 154 ANALYSIS of a figure the side of which is five, subtracting one from each square or two perfect squares from all, and adding a hundred cubes of three. This entire num- ber is geometrical and contains the rule or law of gen- eration. When this law is neglected marriages will be unpropitious ; the inferior offspring who are then born will in time become the rulers; the State will decline, and education fall into decay; gymnastic will be preferred to music, and the gold and silver and brass and iron will form a chaotic mass — thus divi- sion will arise. Such is the Muses' answer to our ques- tion. " And a true answer, of course : — but what more have they to say ? " They say that the two races, the iron and brass, and the silver and gold, wiU draw the State different ways; — the one will take to trade and moneymaking, and the others, having the true riches and not caring for money, will resist them: the contest will end in a compromise; they will agree to have private property, and will enslave their fellow- citizens who were once their friends and ntui;urers. But they will retain their warlike character, and wiU be chiefly occupied in fighting and exercising rule. Thus arises timocracy, which is intermediate between aristocracy and oligarchy. The new form of government resembles the ideal in obedience to rulers and contempt for trade, in hav- ing common meals, and in devotion to warlike and gymnastic exercises. But corruption has crept into philosophy, and simplicity of character, which was once her note, is now looked for only in the military class. Arts of war begin to prevail over arts of peace ; the ruler is no longer a philosopher; as in oligarchies, there springs up among them an extravagant love of gain — : get another man's and save your own, is their principle; and they have dark places in which they hoard their gold and silver, for the use of their women ANALYSIS 155 • and others; they take their pleasures by stealth, hke boys who are running away from their father — the law ; and their education is not inspired by the Muse, but imposed by the strong arm of power. The lead- ing characteristic of this State is party spirit and ambition. And what manner of man answers to such a State? " In love of contention," replied Adeimantus, " he wiU be like our friend Glaucon." In that respect, perhaps, but not in others. He is self -asserting and ill-educated, yet fond of literature, although not him- self a speaker, — fierce with slaves, but obedient to rulers, a lover of power and honor, which he hopes to gain by deeds of arms, — fond, too, of gymnastics and of hunting. As he advances in years he grows avaricious, for he has lost philosophy, which is the only savior and guardian of men. His origin is as fol- lows : — His father is a good man dwelling in an ill- ordered State, who has retired from politics in order that he may lead a quiet life. His mother is angry at her loss of precedence among other women; she is disgusted at her husband's selfishness, and she expa- tiates to her son on the unmanliness and indolence of his father. The old family servant takes up the tale, and says to the youth: — " When you grow up you must be more of a man than your father." All the world are agreed that he who minds his own business is an idiot, while a busybody is highly honored and esteemed. The ypimg man compares this spirit with his father's words and ways, and as he is naturally well disposed, although he has suffered from evil influ- ences, he rests at a middle point and becomes ambi- tious and a lover of honor. And now let us set another city over against another man. The next form of government is oligarchy, in which the rule is of the rich only; nor is it difficult 156 ANALYSIS to see how such a State arises. The decline begins with the possession of gold and silver; illegal modes of expenditure are invented; one draws another on, and the multitude are infected; riches outweigh vir- tue; lovers of money take the place of lovers of honor; misers of politicians; and, in time, political privileges are confined by law to the rich, who do not shrink from violence in order to effect their purposes. Thus much of the origin, — let us next consider the evils of oligarchy. Would a man who wanted to be safe on a voyage take a bad pilot because he was rich, or refuse a good one because he was poor? And does not the analogy apply still more to the State? And there are yet greater evils : two nations are strug- gling together in one — the rich and the poor; and the rich dare not put arms into the hands of the poor, and are unwilhng to pay for defenders out of their ovni money. And have we not already condemned that State in which the same persons are warriors as well as shopkeepers? The greatest evil of all is that a man may sell his property and have no place in the State; while there is one class which has enormous wealth, the other is entirely destitute. But observe that these destitutes had not really any more of the governing nature in them when they were rich than now that they are poor; they were miserable spend- thrifts always. They are the drones of the hive; only whereas the actual drone is unprovided by nature with a sting, the two-legged things whom we call drones are some of them without stings and some of them have dreadful stings; in other words, there are pau- pers and there are rogues. These are never far apart; and in oligarchical cities, where nearly everybody is a pauper who is not a ruler, you will find abundance of both. And this evil state of society originates in bad education and bad government. ANALYSIS 167 Like State, like man, — the change in the latter begins with the representative of timoeracy; he walks at first in the ways of his father, who may have been a statesman, or general, perhaps; and presently he sees him " fallen from his high estate," the victim of informers, dying in prison or exile, or by the hand of the executioner. The lesson which he thus receives, makes him cautious; he leaves politics, represses his pride, and saves pence. Avarice is enthroned as his bosom's lord, and assumes the style of the Great King ; the rational and spirited elements sit humbly on the ground at either side, the one immersed in calculation, the other absorbed in the admiration of wealth. The love of honor turns to love of money ; the conversion is instantaneous. The man is mean, saving, toiling, the slave of one passion which is the master of the rest: Is he not the very image of the State? He has had no education, or he would never have allowed the blind god of riches to lead the dance within him. And being uneducated he will have many slavish desires, some beggarly, some knavish, breeding in his soul. If he is the trustee of an orphan, and has the power to defraud, he will soon prove that he is not without the will, and that his passions are only restrained by fear and not by reason. Hence he leads a divided existence; in which the better desires mostly pre- vail. But when he is contending for prizes and other distinctions, he is afraid to incur a loss which is to be repaid only by barren honor; in time of war he fights with a small part of his resources, and usu- ally keeps his money and loses the victory. Next comes democracy and the democratic man, out of oligarchy and the oligarchical man. Insatiable avarice is the ruling passion of an oligarchy ; and they encourage expensive habits in order that they may gain by the ruin of extravagant youth. Thus men 158 ANALYSIS of family often lose their property or rights of citizen- ship; but they remain in the city, full of hatred against the new owners of their estates and ripe for revolution. The usurer with stooping walk pretends not to see them; he passes by, and leaves his sting — that is, his money — in some other victim; and many a man has to pay the parent or principal sum multi- plied into a family of children, and is reduced into a state of dronage by him. The only way of dimin- ishing the evil is either to Umit a man in his use of his property, or to insist that he shall lend at his own risk. But the ruling class do not want remedies; they care only for money, and are as careless of virtue as the poorest of the citizens. Now there are occasions on which the governors and the governed meet to- gether, — at festivals, on a journey, voyaging or fighting. The sturdy pauper finds that in the hour of danger he is not despised; he sees the rich man puffing and panting, and draws the conclusion which he privately imparts to his companions, — " that our people are not good for much; " and as a sickly frame is made ill by a mere touch from without, or some- times without external impulse is ready to fall to pieces of itself, so from the least cause, or with none at all, the city falls ill and fights a battle for life or death. And democracy comes into power when the poor are the victors, killing some and exiling some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the rest. The manner of life in such a State is that of demo- crats; there is freedom and plainness of speech, and every man does what is right in his own eyes, and has his own way of life. Hence arise the most various developments of character; the State is like a piece of embroidery of which the colors and figures are the manners of men, and there are many who, like ANALYSIS 159 « women and children, prefer this variety to real beauty and excellence. The State is not one but many, like a bazaar at which you can buy anything. The great charm is, that you may do as you like; you may gov- ern if you like, let it alone if you like ; go to war and make peace if you feel disposed, and all quite irre- spective of anybody else. When you condemn men to death they remain alive all the same; a gentleman is desired to go into exile, and he stalks about the streets like a hero; and nobody sees him or cares for him. Observe, too, how grandly Democracy sets her foot upon all our fine theories of education, — how little she cares for the training of her statesmen ! The only qualification which she demands is the profession of patriotism. Such is democracy; — a pleasing, law- less, various sort of government, distributing equality to equals and unequals alike. Let us now inspect the individual democrat; and first, as in the case of the State, we will trace his ante- cedents. He is the son of a miserly oligarch, and has been taught by him to restrain the love of unnecessary pleasures. Perhaps I ought to explain this latter term: — Necessary pleasures are those which are good, and which we can not do without; unnecessary pleasures are those which do no good, and of which the desire might be eradicated by early training. Foi: example, the pleasures of eating and drinking are necessary and healthy, up to a certain point; beyond that point they are alike hurtful to body and mind, and the excess may be avoided. When in excess, they may be rightly called expensive pleasures, in opposi- tion to the useful ones. And the drone, as we called him, is the slave of these unnecessary pleasures and desires, whereas the miserly oligarch is subject only to the necessary. The oligarch changes into the democrat in the fol- 160 ANALYSIS lowing manner : — The youth who has had a miserly bringing up, gets a taste of the drone's honey; he meets with wild companions, who introduce him to every new pleasure. As in the State, so in the indi- vidual, there are allies on both sides, temptations from without and passions from within; there is reason also and external influences of parents and friends in alliance with the oligarchical principle; and the two factions are in violent conflict with one another. Sometimes the party of order prevails, but then again new desires and new disorders arise, and the whole mob of passions gets possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the soul, which they find void and unguarded by true words and works. Falsehoods and illusions ascend to take their place; the prodigal goes back into the country of the Lotophagi or drones, and openly dwells there. And if any offer of alliance or parley of individual elders comes from home, the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and permit no one to enter, — there is a battle, and they gain the victory; and straightway making alliance with the desires, they banish modesty, which they call folly, and send tem- perance over the border. When the house has been swept and garnished, they dress up the exiled vices, and, crowning them with garlands, bring them back under new names. Insolence they call good breeding, anarchy freedom, waste magnificence, impudence courage. Such is the process by which the youth passes from the necessary pleasures to the unneces- sary. After a while he divides his time impartially between them; and perhaps, when he gets older and the violence of passion has abated, he restores some of the exiles and lives in a sort of equilibrium, indul- ging first one pleasure and then another; and if rea- son comes and tells him that some pleasures are good and honorable, and others bad and vile, he shakes his ANALYSIS 161 head and says that he can make no distinction between them. Thus he lives in the fancy of the hour; some- times he takes to drink, and then he turns abstainer; he practises in the gymnasium or he does nothing at all; then again he would be a philosopher or a poli- tician; or again, he would be a warrior or a man of business ; he is " Every thing by starts and nothing long." There remains still the finest and fairest of all men and all States — tyranny and the tyrant. Tyranny springs from democracy much as democracy springs from oligarchy. Both arise from excess ; the one from excess of wealth, the other from excess of freedom. " The great natural good of life," says the democrat, " is freedom." And this exclusive love of freedom and regardlessness of everything else, is the cause of the change from democracy to tyranny. The State demands the strong wine of freedom, and unless her rulers give her a plentiful draught, punishes and in- sults them; equality and fraternity of governors and governed is the approved principle. Anarchy is the law, not of the State only, but of private houses, and extends even to the animals. Father and son, citizen and foreigner, teacher and pupil, old and young, are aU on a level; fathers and teachers fear their sons and pupils, and the wisdom of the young man is .a match for the elder, and the old imitate the jaunty manners of the young because they are afraid of being thought morose. Slaves are on a level with their masters and mistresses, and there is no difference between men and women. Nay, the very animals in a democratic State have a freedom which is unknown in other places. The she-dogs are as good as their she-mistresses, and horses and asses march along with dignity and run their noses against anybody who comes in their way. 162 ANALYSIS " That has often heen my experience." At last the citizens become so sensitive that they can not endure the yoke of laws, written or unwritten; they would have no man call himself their master. Such is the glorious beginning of things out of which tyranny springs. " Glorious, indeed ; but what is to follow? " The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; for there is a law of contraries; the excess of freedom passes into the excess of slavery, and the greater the freedom the greater the slavery. You will remember that in the oligarchy were found two classes — rogues and paupers, whom we compared to drones with and without stings. These two classes are to the State what phlegm and bile are to the human body; and the State-physician, or legislator, must get rid of them, just as the bee-master keeps the drones out of the hive. Now in a democracy, too, there are drones, but they are more numerous and more dangerous than in the oligarchy; there they are inert and unpractised, here they are full of life and animation; and the keener sort speak and act, while the others buzz about the bema and prevent their opponents from being heard. And there is another class in democratic States, of respectable, thriving individuals, who can be squeezed when the drones have need of their pos- sessions ; there is moreover a third class, who are the laborers and the artisans, and they make up the mass of the people. When the people meet, they are om- nipotent, but they can not be brought together unless they are attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey, of which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste only to the mob. Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven mad by the stings of the drones, and so become downright oligarchs in self-defence. Then follow informations and convictions for treason. The ANALYSIS 163 people have some protector whom they nurse into greatness, and from this root the tree of tyranny springs. The nature of the change is indicated in the old fable of the temple of Zeus Lycaeus, which tells how he who tastes human flesh mixed up with the flesh of other victims will turn into a wolf. Even so the protector, who tastes human blood, and slays some and exiles others with or without law, who hints at abolition of debts and division of lands, must either perish or become a wolf — that is, a tyrant. Perhaps he is driven out, but he soon comes back from exile; and then if his enemies can not get rid of him by law- ful means, they plot his assassination. Thereupon the friend of the people makes his well-known request to them for a body-guard, which they readily grant, thinking only of his danger and not of -their own. Now let the rich man make to himself wings, for he will never run away again if he does not do so then. And the Great Protector, having crushed all his rivals, stands proudly erect in the chariot of State, a full-blown tyrant: Let us inquire into the nature of his ha,ppiness. In the early days of his tyranny he smiles and beams upon everybody; he is not a " dominus," no, not he: he has only come to put an end to debt and the monop- oly of land. Having got rid of foreign enemies, he makes himself necessary to the State by always going to war. He is thus enabled to depress the poor by heavy taxes, and so keep them at work; and he can get rid of bolder spirits by handing them over to the enemy. Then comes unpopularity; some of his old associates have the courage to oppose him. The con- sequence is, that he has to make a purgation of the State; but, unlike the physician who purges away the bad, he must get rid of the high-spirited, the wise and the wealthy; for he has no choice between death 164 ANALYSIS and a life of shame and dishonor. And the more hated he is, the more he will require trusty guards; but how will he obtain them? " They will come flock- ing like birds — for pay," . Will he not rather obtain them on the spot? He wiU take the slaves from their owners and make them his body-guard; these are his trusted friends, who admire and look up to him. Are not the tragic poets wise who magnify and exalt the tyrant, and say that he is wise by association with the wise? And are not their praises of tyranny alone a sufficient reason why we should exclude them from our State? They may go to other cities, and gather the mob about them with fine words, and change com- monwealths into tyrannies and democracies, receiving honors and rewards for their services ; but the higher they and their friends ascend constitution hill, the more their honor will fail and become " too asthmatic to mount." To return to the tyrant — How will he support that rare army of his? First, by robbing the temples of their treasures, which will enable him to lighten the taxes; then he wiU take all his father's property, and spend it on his companions, male or female. Now his father is the demus, and if the demus gets angry, and says that a great hulking son ought not to be a burden on his parents, and bids him and his riotous crew begone, then will the parent know what a monster he has been nurturing, and that the son whom he would fain expel is too strong for him. " You do not mean to say that he will beat his father? " Yes, he will, after having taken away his arms. " Then he is a parricide and a cruel, un- natural son." And the people have jumped from the fear of slavery into slavery, out of the smoke into the fire. Thus liberty, when out of all order and reason, passes into the worst form of servi- tude. . « * ANALYSIS 165 • In tHe previous books Plato has described the ideal State; now he returns to the perverted or declining forms, on which he had lightly touched at the end of Book IV. These he describes in a succession of par- allels between the individuals and the States, tracing the origin of either in the State or individual which has preceded them. He begins by asking the point at which he digressed; and is thus led shortly to reca- pitulate the substance of the three former books, which also contain a parallel of the philosopher and the State. Of the first decline he gives no intelligible account ; he would not have liked to admit the most probable causes of the fall of his ideal State, which to us would appear to be the impracticability of communism or the natural antagonism of the ruling and subject classes. He throws a veil of mystery over the origin of the decline, which he attributes to ignorance of the law of population. Of this law the famous geomet- rical figure or number is the expression. Like the ancients in general, he had no idea of the gradual perfectibility of man or of the education of the human race. His ideal was not to be attained in the course of ages, but was to spring in full armor from the head of the legislator. When good laws had been given, he thought only of the manner in which they were hkely to be coriiipted, or of how they might be filled up in detail or restored in accordance with their orig- inal spirit. He appears not to have reflected upon the full meaning of his own words, " In the brief space of human life, nothing great can be accom- plished; " or again, as he afterwards says in the Laws, " Infinite time is the maker of cities." The order of constitutions which is adopted by him represents an order of thought rather than a succession of time, and may be considered as the first attempt to frame a philosophy of history. 166 ANALYSIS The first of these declining States is timocracy, or the government of soldiers and lovers of honor, which answers to the Spartan State; this is a government of force, in which education is not inspired by the Muses, but imposed by the law, and in which all the finer elements of organization have disappeared. The philosopher himself has lost the love of truth, and the soldier, who is of a simpler and honester nature, rules in his stead. The individual who answers to timocracy has some noticeable qualities. He is described as iU educated, but, like the Spartan, a lover of literature; and although he is a harsh master to his servants he has no natural superiority over them. His character is based upon a reaction against the circumstances of his father, who in a troubled city has retired from poli- tics; and his mother, who is dissatisfied at her own position, is always urging him towards the life of political ambition. Such a character may have had this origin, and indeed Livy attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of a similar kind. But there is obviously no connection between the manner in which the timocratic State springs out of the ideal, and the mere accident by which the timocratic man is the son of a retired statesman. The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even less historical foundation. For there is no trace in Greek history of a polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into an oligarchy of wealth, or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a democracy. The order of history appears to be different; fii'st, in the Homeric times there is the royal or patriarchal form of government, which a century or two later was succeeded by an oligarchy of birth rather than of wealth, and in which wealth was only the accident of the hereditary possession of land and power. Some- times this oUgarehical government gave way to a ANALYSIS 167 • government based upon a qualification of property, which, according to Aristotle's mode of using words, would have been called a timocracy ; and this in some cities, as at Athens, became the conducting medium to democracy. But such was not the necessary order of succession in States ; nor, indeed, can any order be discerned in the endless fluctuation of Greek history (hke the tides in the Euripus), except, perhaps, in the almost uniform tendency from monarchy to aris- tocracy in the earliest times. At first sight there appears to be a similar inversion in the last step of the Platonic succession ; for tyranny, instead of being the natural end of democracy, in early Greek history appears rather as a stage leading to democracy; the reign of Peisistratus and his sons is an episode which comes between the legislation of Solon and the con- stitution of Cleisthenes; and some secret cause com- mon to them all seems to have led the greater part of Hellas at her first appearance in the dawn of his- tory, e. g. Athens, Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, and nearly every State with the exception of Sparta, through a similar stage of tyranny which ended either in oli- garchy or democracy. But then we must remember that Plato is describing rather the contemporary gov- ernments of the Sicilian States, which alternated be- tween democracy and tyranny, than the ancient his- tory of Athens or Corinth. The portrait of the tyrant himself is just such as the later Greek delighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as in the lives of mediaeval saints or mythic heroes, the conduct and actions of one were attributed to another in order to fill up the outline. There was no enormity which the Greek was not ready to believe of them ; the tyrant was the negation of government and law; his assassination was glori- ous; there was no crime, however umiatural, which 168 ANALYSIS miglit not with probability be attributed to him. In this, Plato was only following the common thought of his countrymen, which he embelhshed and exag- gerated with all the power of his genius. There is no need to suppose that he drew from life ; or that his knowledge of tyrants is derived from a personal ac- quaintance with Dionysius. The manner in which he speaks of them would rather tend to render doubtful his ever having " consorted " with them, or enter- tained the schemes, which are attributed to him in the Epistles, of regenerating Sicily by their help. Plato in a hyperbohcal and serio-comic vein exag- gerates the follies of democracy which he also sees reflected in social hfe. To him democracy is a state of individualism or dissolution; in which every one is doing what is right in his own eyes. Of a people animated by a common spirit of liberty, rising as one man to repel the Persian host, which is the leading idea of democracy in Herodotus and Thucydides, he never seems to think. But if he is not a believer in liberty, still less is he a lover of tyranny. His deeper and more serious condemnation is reserved for the tyrant, who is the ideal of wickedness and also of weakness, and who in his utter helplessness and sus- piciousness is leading an almost impossible existence, without that remnant of good which, in Plato's opin- ion, was required to give power to evil. This ideal of wickedness living in helpless misery, is the reverse of that other portrait of perfect injustice ruling in happiness and splendor, which first of all Thrasy- machus, and afterwards the sons of Ariston had drawn, and is also the reverse of the king whose rule of life is the good of his subjects. Each of these governments and individuals has a corresponding ethical gradation; the ideal State is under the rule of reason, not extinguishing but har- ANALYSIS 169 monizing the passions, and training them in virtue; in the timoeracy and the timocratic man the consti- tution, whether of the State or of the individual, is based, first, upon courage, and secondly, upon the love of honor; this latter virtue, which is hardly to be esteemed a virtue, has superseded all the rest. In the second stage of decline the virtues have altogether disappeared, and the love of gain has succeeded to them; in the third stage, or democracy, the various passions are allowed to have free play, and the virtues and vices are impartially cultivated. But this free- dom, which leads to many curious extravagances of character, is in reality only a state of weakness and dissipation. At last, one monster passion takes possession of the whole nature of man — this is tyranny. In all of them excess — the excess first of wealth and then of freedom, is the element of decay. The eighth book of the Republic abounds in pic- tures of life and fanciful allusions; the use of meta- phorical language is carried to a greater extent than anywhere else in Plato. We may remark, ( 1 ) , the description of the two nations in one, which become more and more divided in the Greek Republics, as in feudal times, and perhaps also in our own; (2) , the notion of democracy expressed in a sort of Pytha- gorean formula as equality among unequals; (3), the free and easy ways of men and animals, which are characteristic of liberty, as foreign mercenaries and universal mistrust are of the tyrant; (4), the proposal that mere debts should not be recoverable by law is a speculation which has often been enter- tained by reformers of the law in modern times, and is in harmony with the tendencies of modern legisla- tion. Debt and land were the two great difficulties of the ancient lawgiver; in modem times we may 170 ANALYSIS be said to have almost, if not quite, solved the ^rst of these difficulties, but hardly the second. Still more remarkable are the corresponding por- traits of individuals: there is the family picture of the father and mother and the old servant of the timo- cratical man, and the outward respectabilily and in- herent meanness of the oligarchical; the uncontrolled license and freedom of the democrat, in which the young Alcibiades seems to be depicted, doing right or wrong as he pleases, and who at last, like the prodigal, goes into a far country (note here the play of lan- guage by which the democratic man is himself repre- sented under the image of a State having a citadel and receiving embassies) ; and there is the wild-beast nature, which breaks loose in his successor. The hit about the tyrant being a parricide; the representa- tion of the tyrant's hfe as an obscene dream; the rhetorical surprise of a more miserable than the most miserable of men in Book ix; the hint to the poets that if they are the friends of tyrants there is no place for them in a constitutional State, and that they are too clever not to see the propriety of their own expul- sion; the continuous image of the drones who are of two kinds, swelling at last into the monster drone having wings, — are among Plato's happiest touches. There remains to be considered the great difficulty of this book of the Republic, the so-called number of the. State. This is a puzzle almost as great as the Number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation, and though apparently known to Aristotle, is referred to by Cicero as a proverb of obscurity (Ep. ad Att* vii. 13, 5). And some have imagined that there is no answer to the puzzle, and that Plato has been practising upon his readers. But such a deception as this is inconsistent with the manner in which Aris- totle speaks of the number (Pol. v. 12, | 7), and ANALYSIS 171 woiQd have been ridiculous to any reader of the Re- public who was acquainted with Greek mathematics. As little reason is there for supposing that Plato in- tentionally used obscure expressions; the obscurity arises from our want of famiharity with the subject. On the other hand, Plato himself indicates that he is not altogether serious, and in describing his number as a solemn jest of the Muses, he appears to imply some degree of satire on the symbolical use of num- ber. Our hope of understanding the passage depends principally on an accurate study of the words them- selves ; on which a faint light is thrown by the parallel passage in the ninth book. Another help is the allu- sion in Aristotle, who makes the important remark that the latter part of the passage (from &v i7rirpiTo