The Republic
fixed on one spot going round upon its axis. There is no necessity to
mention all the possible exceptions; let us provisionally assume that
opposites cannot do or be or suffer opposites in the same relation. And
to the class of opposites belong assent and dissent, desire and
avoidance. And one form of desire is thirst and hunger: and here arises
a new point—thirst is thirst of drink, hunger is hunger of food; not of
warm drink or of a particular kind of food, with the single exception
of course that the very fact of our desiring anything implies that it
is good. When relative terms have no attributes, their correlatives
have no attributes; when they have attributes, their correlatives also
have them. For example, the term ‘greater’ is simply relative to
‘less,’ and knowledge refers to a subject of knowledge. But on the
other hand, a particular knowledge is of a particular subject. Again,
every science has a distinct character, which is defined by an object;
medicine, for example, is the science of health, although not to be
confounded with health. Having cleared our ideas thus far, let us
return to the original instance of thirst, which has a definite
object—drink. Now the thirsty soul may feel two distinct impulses; the
animal one saying ‘Drink;’ the rational one, which says ‘Do not drink.’
The two impulses are contradictory; and therefore we may assume that
they spring from distinct principles in the soul. But is passion a
third principle, or akin to desire? There is a story of a certain
Leontius which throws some light on this question. He was coming up
from the Piraeus outside the north wall, and he passed a spot where
there were dead bodies lying by the executioner. He felt a longing
desire to see them and also an abhorrence of them; at first he turned
away and shut his eyes, then, suddenly tearing them open, he
said,—‘Take your fill, ye wretches, of the fair sight.’ Now is there
not here a third principle which is often found to come to the
assistance of reason against desire, but never of desire against
reason? This is passion or spirit, of the separate existence of which
we may further convince ourselves by putting the following case:—When a
man suffers justly, if he be of a generous nature he is not indignant
at the hardships which he undergoes: but when he suffers unjustly, his
indignation is his great support; hunger and thirst cannot tame him;
the spirit within him must do or die, until the voice of the shepherd,
that is, of reason, bidding his dog bark no more, is heard within. This
shows that passion is the ally of reason. Is passion then the same with
reason? No, for the former exists in children and brutes; and Homer
affords a proof of the distinction between them when he says, ‘He smote
his breast, and thus rebuked his soul.’
And now, at last, we have reached firm ground, and are able to infer
that the virtues of the State and of the individual are the same. For
wisdom and courage and justice in the State are severally the wisdom
and courage and justice in the individuals who form the State. Each of
the three classes will do the work of its own class in the State, and
each part in the individual soul; reason, the superior, and passion,
the inferior, will be harmonized by the influence of music and
gymnastic. The counsellor and the warrior, the head and the arm, will
act together in the town of Mansoul, and keep the desires in proper
subjection. The courage of the warrior is that quality which preserves
a right opinion about dangers in spite of pleasures and pains. The
wisdom of the counsellor is that small part of the soul which has
authority and reason. The virtue of temperance is the friendship of the
ruling and the subject principles, both in the State and in the
individual. Of justice we have already spoken; and the notion already
given of it may be confirmed by common instances. Will the just state
or the just individual steal, lie, commit adultery, or be guilty of
impiety to gods and men? ‘No.’ And is not the reason of this that the
several principles, whether in the state or in the individual, do their
own business? And justice is the quality which makes just men and just
states. Moreover, our old division of labour, which required that there
should be one man for one use, was a dream or anticipation of what was
to follow; and that dream has now been realized in justice, which
begins by binding together the three chords of the soul, and then acts
harmoniously in every relation of life. And injustice, which is the
insubordination and disobedience of the inferior elements in the soul,
is the opposite of justice, and is inharmonious and unnatural, being to
the soul what disease is to the body; for in the soul as well as in the
body, good or bad actions produce good or bad habits. And virtue is the
health and beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice is the disease
and weakness and deformity of the soul.
Again the old question returns upon us: Is justice or injustice the
more profitable? The question has become ridiculous. For injustice,
like mortal disease, makes life not worth having. Come up with me to
the hill which overhangs the city and look down upon the single form of
virtue, and the infinite forms of vice, among which are four special
ones, characteristic both of states and of individuals. And the state
which corresponds to the single form of virtue is that which we have
been describing, wherein reason rules under one of two names—monarchy
and aristocracy. Thus there are five forms in all, both of states and
of souls...
In attempting to prove that the soul has three separate faculties,
Plato takes occasion to discuss what makes difference of faculties. And
the criterion which he proposes is difference in the working of the
faculties. The same faculty cannot produce contradictory effects. But
the path of early reasoners is beset by thorny entanglements, and he
will not proceed a step without first clearing the ground. This leads
him into a tiresome digression, which is intended to explain the nature
of contradiction. First, the contradiction must be at the same time and
in the same relation. Secondly, no extraneous word must be introduced
into either of the terms in which the contradictory proposition is
expressed: for example, thirst is of drink, not of warm drink. He
implies, what he does not say, that if, by the advice of reason, or by
the impulse of anger, a man is restrained from drinking, this proves
that thirst, or desire under which thirst is included, is distinct from
anger and reason. But suppose that we allow the term ‘thirst’ or
‘desire’ to be modified, and say an ‘angry thirst,’ or a ‘revengeful
desire,’ then the two spheres of desire and anger overlap and become
confused. This case therefore has to be excluded. And still there
remains an exception to the rule in the use of the term ‘good,’ which
is always implied in the object of desire. These are the discussions of
an age before logic; and any one who is wearied by them should remember
that they are necessary to the clearing up of ideas in the first
development of the human faculties.
The psychology of Plato extends no further than the division of the
soul into the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, as
far as we know, was first made by him, and has been retained by
Aristotle and succeeding ethical writers. The chief difficulty in this
early analysis of the mind is to define exactly the place of the
irascible faculty (Greek), which may be variously described under the
terms righteous indignation, spirit, passion. It is the foundation of
courage, which includes in Plato moral courage, the courage of enduring
pain, and of surmounting intellectual difficulties, as well as of
meeting dangers in war. Though irrational, it inclines to side with the
rational: it cannot be aroused by punishment when justly inflicted: it
sometimes takes the form of an enthusiasm which sustains a man in the
performance of great actions. It is the ‘lion heart’ with which the
reason makes a treaty. On the other hand it is negative rather than
positive; it is indignant at wrong or falsehood, but does not, like
Love in the Symposium and Phaedrus, aspire to the vision of Truth or
Good. It is the peremptory military spirit which prevails in the
government of honour. It differs from anger (Greek), this latter term
having no accessory notion of righteous indignation. Although Aristotle
has retained the word, yet we may observe that ‘passion’ (Greek) has
with him lost its affinity to the rational and has become
indistinguishable from ‘anger’ (Greek). And to this vernacular use
Plato himself in the Laws seems to revert, though not always. By modern
philosophy too, as well as in our ordinary conversation, the words
anger or passion are employed almost exclusively in a bad sense; there
is no connotation of a just or reasonable cause by which they are
aroused. The feeling of ‘righteous indignation’ is too partial and
accidental to admit of our regarding it as a separate virtue or habit.
We are tempted also to doubt whether Plato is right in supposing that
an offender, however justly condemned, could be expected to acknowledge
the justice of his sentence; this is the spirit of a philosopher or
martyr rather than of a criminal.
We may observe how nearly Plato approaches Aristotle’s famous thesis,
that ‘good actions produce good habits.’ The words ‘as healthy
practices (Greek) produce health, so do just practices produce
justice,’ have a sound very like the Nicomachean Ethics. But we note
also that an incidental remark in Plato has become a far-reaching
principle in Aristotle, and an inseparable part of a great Ethical
system.
There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by ‘the longer
way’: he seems to intimate some metaphysic of the future which will not
be satisfied with arguing from the principle of contradiction. In the
sixth and seventh books (compare Sophist and Parmenides) he has given
us a sketch of such a metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for the final
revelation of the idea of good, he is put off with the declaration that
he has not yet studied the preliminary sciences. How he would have
filled up the sketch, or argued about such questions from a higher
point of view, we can only conjecture. Perhaps he hoped to find some a
priori method of developing the parts out of the whole; or he might
have asked which of the ideas contains the other ideas, and possibly
have stumbled on the Hegelian identity of the ‘ego’ and the
‘universal.’ Or he may have imagined that ideas might be constructed in
some manner analogous to the construction of figures and numbers in the
mathematical sciences. The most certain and necessary truth was to
Plato the universal; and to this he was always seeking to refer all
knowledge or opinion, just as in modern times we seek to rest them on
the opposite pole of induction and experience. The aspirations of
metaphysicians have always tended to pass beyond the limits of human
thought and language: they seem to have reached a height at which they
are ‘moving about in worlds unrealized,’ and their conceptions,
although profoundly affecting their own minds, become invisible or
unintelligible to others. We are not therefore surprized to find that
Plato himself has nowhere clearly explained his doctrine of ideas; or
that his school in a later generation, like his contemporaries Glaucon
and Adeimantus, were unable to follow him in this region of
speculation. In the Sophist, where he is refuting the scepticism which
maintained either that there was no such thing as predication, or that
all might be predicated of all, he arrives at the conclusion that some
ideas combine with some, but not all with all. But he makes only one or