The Republic
be equally earnest in withstanding you—no more than Thrasymachus.’ Do
not make a quarrel between Thrasymachus and me, who were never enemies
and are now good friends enough. And I shall do my best to convince him
and all mankind of the truth of my words, or at any rate to prepare for
the future when, in another life, we may again take part in similar
discussions. ‘That will be a long time hence.’ Not long in comparison
with eternity. The many will probably remain incredulous, for they have
never seen the natural unity of ideas, but only artificial
juxtapositions; not free and generous thoughts, but tricks of
controversy and quips of law;—a perfect man ruling in a perfect state,
even a single one they have not known. And we foresaw that there was no
chance of perfection either in states or individuals until a necessity
was laid upon philosophers—not the rogues, but those whom we called the
useless class—of holding office; or until the sons of kings were
inspired with a true love of philosophy. Whether in the infinity of
past time there has been, or is in some distant land, or ever will be
hereafter, an ideal such as we have described, we stoutly maintain that
there has been, is, and will be such a state whenever the Muse of
philosophy rules. Will you say that the world is of another mind? O, my
friend, do not revile the world! They will soon change their opinion if
they are gently entreated, and are taught the true nature of the
philosopher. Who can hate a man who loves him? Or be jealous of one who
has no jealousy? Consider, again, that the many hate not the true but
the false philosophers—the pretenders who force their way in without
invitation, and are always speaking of persons and not of principles,
which is unlike the spirit of philosophy. For the true philosopher
despises earthly strife; his eye is fixed on the eternal order in
accordance with which he moulds himself into the Divine image (and not
himself only, but other men), and is the creator of the virtues private
as well as public. When mankind see that the happiness of states is
only to be found in that image, will they be angry with us for
attempting to delineate it? ‘Certainly not. But what will be the
process of delineation?’ The artist will do nothing until he has made a
tabula rasa; on this he will inscribe the constitution of a state,
glancing often at the divine truth of nature, and from that deriving
the godlike among men, mingling the two elements, rubbing out and
painting in, until there is a perfect harmony or fusion of the divine
and human. But perhaps the world will doubt the existence of such an
artist. What will they doubt? That the philosopher is a lover of truth,
having a nature akin to the best?—and if they admit this will they
still quarrel with us for making philosophers our kings? ‘They will be
less disposed to quarrel.’ Let us assume then that they are pacified.
Still, a person may hesitate about the probability of the son of a king
being a philosopher. And we do not deny that they are very liable to be
corrupted; but yet surely in the course of ages there might be one
exception—and one is enough. If one son of a king were a philosopher,
and had obedient citizens, he might bring the ideal polity into being.
Hence we conclude that our laws are not only the best, but that they
are also possible, though not free from difficulty.
I gained nothing by evading the troublesome questions which arose
concerning women and children. I will be wiser now and acknowledge that
we must go to the bottom of another question: What is to be the
education of our guardians? It was agreed that they were to be lovers
of their country, and were to be tested in the refiner’s fire of
pleasures and pains, and those who came forth pure and remained fixed
in their principles were to have honours and rewards in life and after
death. But at this point, the argument put on her veil and turned into
another path. I hesitated to make the assertion which I now
hazard,—that our guardians must be philosophers. You remember all the
contradictory elements, which met in the philosopher—how difficult to
find them all in a single person! Intelligence and spirit are not often
combined with steadiness; the stolid, fearless, nature is averse to
intellectual toil. And yet these opposite elements are all necessary,
and therefore, as we were saying before, the aspirant must be tested in
pleasures and dangers; and also, as we must now further add, in the
highest branches of knowledge. You will remember, that when we spoke of
the virtues mention was made of a longer road, which you were satisfied
to leave unexplored. ‘Enough seemed to have been said.’ Enough, my
friend; but what is enough while anything remains wanting? Of all men
the guardian must not faint in the search after truth; he must be
prepared to take the longer road, or he will never reach that higher
region which is above the four virtues; and of the virtues too he must
not only get an outline, but a clear and distinct vision. (Strange that
we should be so precise about trifles, so careless about the highest
truths!) ‘And what are the highest?’ You to pretend unconsciousness,
when you have so often heard me speak of the idea of good, about which
we know so little, and without which though a man gain the world he has
no profit of it! Some people imagine that the good is wisdom; but this
involves a circle,—the good, they say, is wisdom, wisdom has to do with
the good. According to others the good is pleasure; but then comes the
absurdity that good is bad, for there are bad pleasures as well as
good. Again, the good must have reality; a man may desire the
appearance of virtue, but he will not desire the appearance of good.
Ought our guardians then to be ignorant of this supreme principle, of
which every man has a presentiment, and without which no man has any
real knowledge of anything? ‘But, Socrates, what is this supreme
principle, knowledge or pleasure, or what? You may think me
troublesome, but I say that you have no business to be always repeating
the doctrines of others instead of giving us your own.’ Can I say what
I do not know? ‘You may offer an opinion.’ And will the blindness and
crookedness of opinion content you when you might have the light and
certainty of science? ‘I will only ask you to give such an explanation
of the good as you have given already of temperance and justice.’ I
wish that I could, but in my present mood I cannot reach to the height
of the knowledge of the good. To the parent or principal I cannot
introduce you, but to the child begotten in his image, which I may
compare with the interest on the principal, I will. (Audit the account,
and do not let me give you a false statement of the debt.) You remember
our old distinction of the many beautiful and the one beautiful, the
particular and the universal, the objects of sight and the objects of
thought? Did you ever consider that the objects of sight imply a
faculty of sight which is the most complex and costly of our senses,
requiring not only objects of sense, but also a medium, which is light;
without which the sight will not distinguish between colours and all
will be a blank? For light is the noble bond between the perceiving
faculty and the thing perceived, and the god who gives us light is the
sun, who is the eye of the day, but is not to be confounded with the
eye of man. This eye of the day or sun is what I call the child of the
good, standing in the same relation to the visible world as the good to
the intellectual. When the sun shines the eye sees, and in the
intellectual world where truth is, there is sight and light. Now that
which is the sun of intelligent natures, is the idea of good, the cause
of knowledge and truth, yet other and fairer than they are, and
standing in the same relation to them in which the sun stands to light.
O inconceivable height of beauty, which is above knowledge and above
truth! (‘You cannot surely mean pleasure,’ he said. Peace, I replied.)
And this idea of good, like the sun, is also the cause of growth, and
the author not of knowledge only, but of being, yet greater far than
either in dignity and power. ‘That is a reach of thought more than
human; but, pray, go on with the image, for I suspect that there is
more behind.’ There is, I said; and bearing in mind our two suns or
principles, imagine further their corresponding worlds—one of the
visible, the other of the intelligible; you may assist your fancy by
figuring the distinction under the image of a line divided into two
unequal parts, and may again subdivide each part into two lesser
segments representative of the stages of knowledge in either sphere.
The lower portion of the lower or visible sphere will consist of
shadows and reflections, and its upper and smaller portion will contain
real objects in the world of nature or of art. The sphere of the
intelligible will also have two divisions,—one of mathematics, in which
there is no ascent but all is descent; no inquiring into premises, but
only drawing of inferences. In this division the mind works with
figures and numbers, the images of which are taken not from the
shadows, but from the objects, although the truth of them is seen only
with the mind’s eye; and they are used as hypotheses without being
analysed. Whereas in the other division reason uses the hypotheses as
stages or steps in the ascent to the idea of good, to which she fastens
them, and then again descends, walking firmly in the region of ideas,
and of ideas only, in her ascent as well as descent, and finally
resting in them. ‘I partly understand,’ he replied; ‘you mean that the
ideas of science are superior to the hypothetical, metaphorical
conceptions of geometry and the other arts or sciences, whichever is to
be the name of them; and the latter conceptions you refuse to make
subjects of pure intellect, because they have no first principle,
although when resting on a first principle, they pass into the higher
sphere.’ You understand me very well, I said. And now to those four
divisions of knowledge you may assign four corresponding faculties—pure
intelligence to the highest sphere; active intelligence to the second;
to the third, faith; to the fourth, the perception of shadows—and the
clearness of the several faculties will be in the same ratio as the
truth of the objects to which they are related...
Like Socrates, we may recapitulate the virtues of the philosopher. In
language which seems to reach beyond the horizon of that age and
country, he is described as ‘the spectator of all time and all
existence.’ He has the noblest gifts of nature, and makes the highest
use of them. All his desires are absorbed in the love of wisdom, which
is the love of truth. None of the graces of a beautiful soul are
wanting in him; neither can he fear death, or think much of human life.
The ideal of modern times hardly retains the simplicity of the antique;
there is not the same originality either in truth or error which
characterized the Greeks. The philosopher is no longer living in the
unseen, nor is he sent by an oracle to convince mankind of ignorance;
nor does he regard knowledge as a system of ideas leading upwards by
regular stages to the idea of good. The eagerness of the pursuit has
abated; there is more division of labour and less of comprehensive
reflection upon nature and human life as a whole; more of exact
observation and less of anticipation and inspiration. Still, in the
altered conditions of knowledge, the parallel is not wholly lost; and
there may be a use in translating the conception of Plato into the
language of our own age. The philosopher in modern times is one who
fixes his mind on the laws of nature in their sequence and connexion,
not on fragments or pictures of nature; on history, not on controversy;