The Republic
exercise may be easily overdone. Excessive training of the body is apt
to give men a headache or to render them sleepy at a lecture on
philosophy, and this they attribute not to the true cause, but to the
nature of the subject. Two points are noticeable in Plato’s treatment
of gymnastic:—First, that the time of training is entirely separated
from the time of literary education. He seems to have thought that two
things of an opposite and different nature could not be learnt at the
same time. Here we can hardly agree with him; and, if we may judge by
experience, the effect of spending three years between the ages of
fourteen and seventeen in mere bodily exercise would be far from
improving to the intellect. Secondly, he affirms that music and
gymnastic are not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended, the
one for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body, but that
they are both equally designed for the improvement of the mind. The
body, in his view, is the servant of the mind; the subjection of the
lower to the higher is for the advantage of both. And doubtless the
mind may exercise a very great and paramount influence over the body,
if exerted not at particular moments and by fits and starts, but
continuously, in making preparation for the whole of life. Other Greek
writers saw the mischievous tendency of Spartan discipline (Arist. Pol;
Thuc.). But only Plato recognized the fundamental error on which the
practice was based.
The subject of gymnastic leads Plato to the sister subject of medicine,
which he further illustrates by the parallel of law. The modern
disbelief in medicine has led in this, as in some other departments of
knowledge, to a demand for greater simplicity; physicians are becoming
aware that they often make diseases ‘greater and more complicated’ by
their treatment of them (Rep.). In two thousand years their art has
made but slender progress; what they have gained in the analysis of the
parts is in a great degree lost by their feebler conception of the
human frame as a whole. They have attended more to the cure of diseases
than to the conditions of health; and the improvements in medicine have
been more than counterbalanced by the disuse of regular training. Until
lately they have hardly thought of air and water, the importance of
which was well understood by the ancients; as Aristotle remarks, ‘Air
and water, being the elements which we most use, have the greatest
effect upon health’ (Polit.). For ages physicians have been under the
dominion of prejudices which have only recently given way; and now
there are as many opinions in medicine as in theology, and an equal
degree of scepticism and some want of toleration about both. Plato has
several good notions about medicine; according to him, ‘the eye cannot
be cured without the rest of the body, nor the body without the mind’
(Charm.). No man of sense, he says in the Timaeus, would take physic;
and we heartily sympathize with him in the Laws when he declares that
‘the limbs of the rustic worn with toil will derive more benefit from
warm baths than from the prescriptions of a not over wise doctor.’ But
we can hardly praise him when, in obedience to the authority of Homer,
he depreciates diet, or approve of the inhuman spirit in which he would
get rid of invalid and useless lives by leaving them to die. He does
not seem to have considered that the ‘bridle of Theages’ might be
accompanied by qualities which were of far more value to the State than
the health or strength of the citizens; or that the duty of taking care
of the helpless might be an important element of education in a State.
The physician himself (this is a delicate and subtle observation)
should not be a man in robust health; he should have, in modern
phraseology, a nervous temperament; he should have experience of
disease in his own person, in order that his powers of observation may
be quickened in the case of others.
The perplexity of medicine is paralleled by the perplexity of law; in
which, again, Plato would have men follow the golden rule of
simplicity. Greater matters are to be determined by the legislator or
by the oracle of Delphi, lesser matters are to be left to the temporary
regulation of the citizens themselves. Plato is aware that laissez
faire is an important element of government. The diseases of a State
are like the heads of a hydra; they multiply when they are cut off. The
true remedy for them is not extirpation but prevention. And the way to
prevent them is to take care of education, and education will take care
of all the rest. So in modern times men have often felt that the only
political measure worth having—the only one which would produce any
certain or lasting effect, was a measure of national education. And in
our own more than in any previous age the necessity has been recognized
of restoring the ever-increasing confusion of law to simplicity and
common sense.
When the training in music and gymnastic is completed, there follows
the first stage of active and public life. But soon education is to
begin again from a new point of view. In the interval between the
Fourth and Seventh Books we have discussed the nature of knowledge, and
have thence been led to form a higher conception of what was required
of us. For true knowledge, according to Plato, is of abstractions, and
has to do, not with particulars or individuals, but with universals
only; not with the beauties of poetry, but with the ideas of
philosophy. And the great aim of education is the cultivation of the
habit of abstraction. This is to be acquired through the study of the
mathematical sciences. They alone are capable of giving ideas of
relation, and of arousing the dormant energies of thought.
Mathematics in the age of Plato comprehended a very small part of that
which is now included in them; but they bore a much larger proportion
to the sum of human knowledge. They were the only organon of thought
which the human mind at that time possessed, and the only measure by
which the chaos of particulars could be reduced to rule and order. The
faculty which they trained was naturally at war with the poetical or
imaginative; and hence to Plato, who is everywhere seeking for
abstractions and trying to get rid of the illusions of sense, nearly
the whole of education is contained in them. They seemed to have an
inexhaustible application, partly because their true limits were not
yet understood. These Plato himself is beginning to investigate; though
not aware that number and figure are mere abstractions of sense, he
recognizes that the forms used by geometry are borrowed from the
sensible world. He seeks to find the ultimate ground of mathematical
ideas in the idea of good, though he does not satisfactorily explain
the connexion between them; and in his conception of the relation of
ideas to numbers, he falls very far short of the definiteness
attributed to him by Aristotle (Met.). But if he fails to recognize the
true limits of mathematics, he also reaches a point beyond them; in his
view, ideas of number become secondary to a higher conception of
knowledge. The dialectician is as much above the mathematician as the
mathematician is above the ordinary man. The one, the self-proving, the
good which is the higher sphere of dialectic, is the perfect truth to
which all things ascend, and in which they finally repose.
This self-proving unity or idea of good is a mere vision of which no
distinct explanation can be given, relative only to a particular stage
in Greek philosophy. It is an abstraction under which no individuals
are comprehended, a whole which has no parts (Arist., Nic. Eth.). The
vacancy of such a form was perceived by Aristotle, but not by Plato.
Nor did he recognize that in the dialectical process are included two
or more methods of investigation which are at variance with each other.
He did not see that whether he took the longer or the shorter road, no
advance could be made in this way. And yet such visions often have an
immense effect; for although the method of science cannot anticipate
science, the idea of science, not as it is, but as it will be in the
future, is a great and inspiring principle. In the pursuit of knowledge
we are always pressing forward to something beyond us; and as a false
conception of knowledge, for example the scholastic philosophy, may
lead men astray during many ages, so the true ideal, though vacant, may
draw all their thoughts in a right direction. It makes a great
difference whether the general expectation of knowledge, as this
indefinite feeling may be termed, is based upon a sound judgment. For
mankind may often entertain a true conception of what knowledge ought
to be when they have but a slender experience of facts. The correlation
of the sciences, the consciousness of the unity of nature, the idea of
classification, the sense of proportion, the unwillingness to stop
short of certainty or to confound probability with truth, are important
principles of the higher education. Although Plato could tell us
nothing, and perhaps knew that he could tell us nothing, of the
absolute truth, he has exercised an influence on the human mind which
even at the present day is not exhausted; and political and social
questions may yet arise in which the thoughts of Plato may be read anew
and receive a fresh meaning.
The Idea of good is so called only in the Republic, but there are
traces of it in other dialogues of Plato. It is a cause as well as an
idea, and from this point of view may be compared with the creator of
the Timaeus, who out of his goodness created all things. It corresponds
to a certain extent with the modern conception of a law of nature, or
of a final cause, or of both in one, and in this regard may be
connected with the measure and symmetry of the Philebus. It is
represented in the Symposium under the aspect of beauty, and is
supposed to be attained there by stages of initiation, as here by
regular gradations of knowledge. Viewed subjectively, it is the process
or science of dialectic. This is the science which, according to the
Phaedrus, is the true basis of rhetoric, which alone is able to
distinguish the natures and classes of men and things; which divides a
whole into the natural parts, and reunites the scattered parts into a
natural or organized whole; which defines the abstract essences or
universal ideas of all things, and connects them; which pierces the
veil of hypotheses and reaches the final cause or first principle of
all; which regards the sciences in relation to the idea of good. This
ideal science is the highest process of thought, and may be described
as the soul conversing with herself or holding communion with eternal
truth and beauty, and in another form is the everlasting question and
answer—the ceaseless interrogative of Socrates. The dialogues of Plato
are themselves examples of the nature and method of dialectic. Viewed
objectively, the idea of good is a power or cause which makes the world
without us correspond with the world within. Yet this world without us
is still a world of ideas. With Plato the investigation of nature is
another department of knowledge, and in this he seeks to attain only
probable conclusions (Timaeus).
If we ask whether this science of dialectic which Plato only half
explains to us is more akin to logic or to metaphysics, the answer is
that in his mind the two sciences are not as yet distinguished, any
more than the subjective and objective aspects of the world and of man,
which German philosophy has revealed to us. Nor has he determined
whether his science of dialectic is at rest or in motion, concerned
with the contemplation of absolute being, or with a process of
development and evolution. Modern metaphysics may be described as the