The Republic
was never known to perform a liberal action. No wonder that mankind
have been in the habit of calling statesmen of this class pedants,
sophisters, doctrinaires, visionaries. For, as we may be allowed to
say, a little parodying the words of Plato, ‘they have seen bad
imitations of the philosopher-statesman.’ But a man in whom the power
of thought and action are perfectly balanced, equal to the present,
reaching forward to the future, ‘such a one,’ ruling in a
constitutional state, ‘they have never seen.’
But as the philosopher is apt to fail in the routine of political life,
so the ordinary statesman is also apt to fail in extraordinary crises.
When the face of the world is beginning to alter, and thunder is heard
in the distance, he is still guided by his old maxims, and is the slave
of his inveterate party prejudices; he cannot perceive the signs of the
times; instead of looking forward he looks back; he learns nothing and
forgets nothing; with ‘wise saws and modern instances’ he would stem
the rising tide of revolution. He lives more and more within the circle
of his own party, as the world without him becomes stronger. This seems
to be the reason why the old order of things makes so poor a figure
when confronted with the new, why churches can never reform, why most
political changes are made blindly and convulsively. The great crises
in the history of nations have often been met by an ecclesiastical
positiveness, and a more obstinate reassertion of principles which have
lost their hold upon a nation. The fixed ideas of a reactionary
statesman may be compared to madness; they grow upon him, and he
becomes possessed by them; no judgement of others is ever admitted by
him to be weighed in the balance against his own.
(d) Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to have
been a confusion of ideas, assimilates the state to the individual, and
fails to distinguish Ethics from Politics. He thinks that to be most of
a state which is most like one man, and in which the citizens have the
greatest uniformity of character. He does not see that the analogy is
partly fallacious, and that the will or character of a state or nation
is really the balance or rather the surplus of individual wills, which
are limited by the condition of having to act in common. The movement
of a body of men can never have the pliancy or facility of a single
man; the freedom of the individual, which is always limited, becomes
still more straitened when transferred to a nation. The powers of
action and feeling are necessarily weaker and more balanced when they
are diffused through a community; whence arises the often discussed
question, ‘Can a nation, like an individual, have a conscience?’ We
hesitate to say that the characters of nations are nothing more than
the sum of the characters of the individuals who compose them; because
there may be tendencies in individuals which react upon one another. A
whole nation may be wiser than any one man in it; or may be animated by
some common opinion or feeling which could not equally have affected
the mind of a single person, or may have been inspired by a leader of
genius to perform acts more than human. Plato does not appear to have
analysed the complications which arise out of the collective action of
mankind. Neither is he capable of seeing that analogies, though
specious as arguments, may often have no foundation in fact, or of
distinguishing between what is intelligible or vividly present to the
mind, and what is true. In this respect he is far below Aristotle, who
is comparatively seldom imposed upon by false analogies. He cannot
disentangle the arts from the virtues—at least he is always arguing
from one to the other. His notion of music is transferred from harmony
of sounds to harmony of life: in this he is assisted by the ambiguities
of language as well as by the prevalence of Pythagorean notions. And
having once assimilated the state to the individual, he imagines that
he will find the succession of states paralleled in the lives of
individuals.
Still, through this fallacious medium, a real enlargement of ideas is
attained. When the virtues as yet presented no distinct conception to
the mind, a great advance was made by the comparison of them with the
arts; for virtue is partly art, and has an outward form as well as an
inward principle. The harmony of music affords a lively image of the
harmonies of the world and of human life, and may be regarded as a
splendid illustration which was naturally mistaken for a real analogy.
In the same way the identification of ethics with politics has a
tendency to give definiteness to ethics, and also to elevate and
ennoble men’s notions of the aims of government and of the duties of
citizens; for ethics from one point of view may be conceived as an
idealized law and politics; and politics, as ethics reduced to the
conditions of human society. There have been evils which have arisen
out of the attempt to identify them, and this has led to the separation
or antagonism of them, which has been introduced by modern political
writers. But we may likewise feel that something has been lost in their
separation, and that the ancient philosophers who estimated the moral
and intellectual wellbeing of mankind first, and the wealth of nations
and individuals second, may have a salutary influence on the
speculations of modern times. Many political maxims originate in a
reaction against an opposite error; and when the errors against which
they were directed have passed away, they in turn become errors.
3. Plato’s views of education are in several respects remarkable; like
the rest of the Republic they are partly Greek and partly ideal,
beginning with the ordinary curriculum of the Greek youth, and
extending to after-life. Plato is the first writer who distinctly says
that education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a
preparation for another in which education begins again. This is the
continuous thread which runs through the Republic, and which more than
any other of his ideas admits of an application to modern life.
He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is
disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are
one and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world into
his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the Republic the
involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus,
Sophist, and Laws (Protag., Apol., Gorg.). Nor do the so-called
Platonic ideas recovered from a former state of existence affect his
theory of mental improvement. Still we observe in him the remains of
the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from
within, and is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense.
Education, as he says, will implant a principle of intelligence which
is better than ten thousand eyes. The paradox that the virtues are one,
and the kindred notion that all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely
renounced; the first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over the
rest; the second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the
intellectual, and to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the
idea of good. The world of sense is still depreciated and identified
with opinion, though admitted to be a shadow of the true. In the
Republic he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice arises
chiefly from ignorance and may be cured by education; the multitude are
hardly to be deemed responsible for what they do. A faint allusion to
the doctrine of reminiscence occurs in the Tenth Book; but Plato’s
views of education have no more real connection with a previous state
of existence than our own; he only proposes to elicit from the mind
that which is there already. Education is represented by him, not as
the filling of a vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul towards
the light.
He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and
false, and then goes on to gymnastics; of infancy in the Republic he
takes no notice, though in the Laws he gives sage counsels about the
nursing of children and the management of the mothers, and would have
an education which is even prior to birth. But in the Republic he
begins with the age at which the child is capable of receiving ideas,
and boldly asserts, in language which sounds paradoxical to modern
ears, that he must be taught the false before he can learn the true.
The modern and ancient philosophical world are not agreed about truth
and falsehood; the one identifies truth almost exclusively with fact,
the other with ideas. This is the difference between ourselves and
Plato, which is, however, partly a difference of words. For we too
should admit that a child must receive many lessons which he
imperfectly understands; he must be taught some things in a figure
only, some too which he can hardly be expected to believe when he grows
older; but we should limit the use of fiction by the necessity of the
case. Plato would draw the line differently; according to him the aim
of early education is not truth as a matter of fact, but truth as a
matter of principle; the child is to be taught first simple religious
truths, and then simple moral truths, and insensibly to learn the
lesson of good manners and good taste. He would make an entire
reformation of the old mythology; like Xenophanes and Heracleitus he is
sensible of the deep chasm which separates his own age from Homer and
Hesiod, whom he quotes and invests with an imaginary authority, but
only for his own purposes. The lusts and treacheries of the gods are to
be banished; the terrors of the world below are to be dispelled; the
misbehaviour of the Homeric heroes is not to be a model for youth. But
there is another strain heard in Homer which may teach our youth
endurance; and something may be learnt in medicine from the simple
practice of the Homeric age. The principles on which religion is to be
based are two only: first, that God is true; secondly, that he is good.
Modern and Christian writers have often fallen short of these; they can
hardly be said to have gone beyond them.
The young are to be brought up in happy surroundings, out of the way of
sights or sounds which may hurt the character or vitiate the taste.
They are to live in an atmosphere of health; the breeze is always to be
wafting to them the impressions of truth and goodness. Could such an
education be realized, or if our modern religious education could be
bound up with truth and virtue and good manners and good taste, that
would be the best hope of human improvement. Plato, like ourselves, is
looking forward to changes in the moral and religious world, and is
preparing for them. He recognizes the danger of unsettling young men’s
minds by sudden changes of laws and principles, by destroying the
sacredness of one set of ideas when there is nothing else to take their
place. He is afraid too of the influence of the drama, on the ground
that it encourages false sentiment, and therefore he would not have his
children taken to the theatre; he thinks that the effect on the
spectators is bad, and on the actors still worse. His idea of education
is that of harmonious growth, in which are insensibly learnt the
lessons of temperance and endurance, and the body and mind develope in
equal proportions. The first principle which runs through all art and
nature is simplicity; this also is to be the rule of human life.
The second stage of education is gymnastic, which answers to the period
of muscular growth and development. The simplicity which is enforced in
music is extended to gymnastic; Plato is aware that the training of the
body may be inconsistent with the training of the mind, and that bodily