The Republic
therefore the whole people make secret confession of them to the
magistrates, and they to their chief, who is a sort of Rector
Metaphysicus; and by this means he is well informed of all that is
going on in the minds of men. After confession, absolution is granted
to the citizens collectively, but no one is mentioned by name. There
also exists among them a practice of perpetual prayer, performed by a
succession of priests, who change every hour. Their religion is a
worship of God in Trinity, that is of Wisdom, Love and Power, but
without any distinction of persons. They behold in the sun the
reflection of His glory; mere graven images they reject, refusing to
fall under the ‘tyranny’ of idolatry.
Many details are given about their customs of eating and drinking,
about their mode of dressing, their employments, their wars. Campanella
looks forward to a new mode of education, which is to be a study of
nature, and not of Aristotle. He would not have his citizens waste
their time in the consideration of what he calls ‘the dead signs of
things.’ He remarks that he who knows one science only, does not really
know that one any more than the rest, and insists strongly on the
necessity of a variety of knowledge. More scholars are turned out in
the City of the Sun in one year than by contemporary methods in ten or
fifteen. He evidently believes, like Bacon, that henceforward natural
science will play a great part in education, a hope which seems hardly
to have been realized, either in our own or in any former age; at any
rate the fulfilment of it has been long deferred.
There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this work,
and a most enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has little or no
charm of style, and falls very far short of the ‘New Atlantis’ of
Bacon, and still more of the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More. It is full of
inconsistencies, and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a
superficial acquaintance with his writings. It is a work such as one
might expect to have been written by a philosopher and man of genius
who was also a friar, and who had spent twenty-seven years of his life
in a prison of the Inquisition. The most interesting feature of the
book, common to Plato and Sir Thomas More, is the deep feeling which is
shown by the writer, of the misery and ignorance prevailing among the
lower classes in his own time. Campanella takes note of Aristotle’s
answer to Plato’s community of property, that in a society where all
things are common, no individual would have any motive to work (Arist.
Pol.): he replies, that his citizens being happy and contented in
themselves (they are required to work only four hours a day), will have
greater regard for their fellows than exists among men at present. He
thinks, like Plato, that if he abolishes private feelings and
interests, a great public feeling will take their place.
Other writings on ideal states, such as the ‘Oceana’ of Harrington, in
which the Lord Archon, meaning Cromwell, is described, not as he was,
but as he ought to have been; or the ‘Argenis’ of Barclay, which is an
historical allegory of his own time, are too unlike Plato to be worth
mentioning. More interesting than either of these, and far more
Platonic in style and thought, is Sir John Eliot’s ‘Monarchy of Man,’
in which the prisoner of the Tower, no longer able ‘to be a politician
in the land of his birth,’ turns away from politics to view ‘that other
city which is within him,’ and finds on the very threshold of the grave
that the secret of human happiness is the mastery of self. The change
of government in the time of the English Commonwealth set men thinking
about first principles, and gave rise to many works of this class...The
great original genius of Swift owes nothing to Plato; nor is there any
trace in the conversation or in the works of Dr. Johnson of any
acquaintance with his writings. He probably would have refuted Plato
without reading him, in the same fashion in which he supposed himself
to have refuted Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the non-existence of
matter. If we except the so-called English Platonists, or rather
Neo-Platonists, who never understood their master, and the writings of
Coleridge, who was to some extent a kindred spirit, Plato has left no
permanent impression on English literature.
7. Human life and conduct are affected by ideals in the same way that
they are affected by the examples of eminent men. Neither the one nor
the other are immediately applicable to practice, but there is a virtue
flowing from them which tends to raise individuals above the common
routine of society or trade, and to elevate States above the mere
interests of commerce or the necessities of self-defence. Like the
ideals of art they are partly framed by the omission of particulars;
they require to be viewed at a certain distance, and are apt to fade
away if we attempt to approach them. They gain an imaginary
distinctness when embodied in a State or in a system of philosophy, but
they still remain the visions of ‘a world unrealized.’ More striking
and obvious to the ordinary mind are the examples of great men, who
have served their own generation and are remembered in another. Even in
our own family circle there may have been some one, a woman, or even a
child, in whose face has shone forth a goodness more than human. The
ideal then approaches nearer to us, and we fondly cling to it. The
ideal of the past, whether of our own past lives or of former states of
society, has a singular fascination for the minds of many. Too late we
learn that such ideals cannot be recalled, though the recollection of
them may have a humanizing influence on other times. But the
abstractions of philosophy are to most persons cold and vacant; they
give light without warmth; they are like the full moon in the heavens
when there are no stars appearing. Men cannot live by thought alone;
the world of sense is always breaking in upon them. They are for the
most part confined to a corner of earth, and see but a little way
beyond their own home or place of abode; they ‘do not lift up their
eyes to the hills’; they are not awake when the dawn appears. But in
Plato we have reached a height from which a man may look into the
distance and behold the future of the world and of philosophy. The
ideal of the State and of the life of the philosopher; the ideal of an
education continuing through life and extending equally to both sexes;
the ideal of the unity and correlation of knowledge; the faith in good
and immortality—are the vacant forms of light on which Plato is seeking
to fix the eye of mankind.
8. Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in Greek
Philosophy, float before the minds of men in our own day: one seen more
clearly than formerly, as though each year and each generation brought
us nearer to some great change; the other almost in the same degree
retiring from view behind the laws of nature, as if oppressed by them,
but still remaining a silent hope of we know not what hidden in the
heart of man. The first ideal is the future of the human race in this
world; the second the future of the individual in another. The first is
the more perfect realization of our own present life; the second, the
abnegation of it: the one, limited by experience, the other,
transcending it. Both of them have been and are powerful motives of
action; there are a few in whom they have taken the place of all
earthly interests. The hope of a future for the human race at first
sight seems to be the more disinterested, the hope of individual
existence the more egotistical, of the two motives. But when men have
learned to resolve their hope of a future either for themselves or for
the world into the will of God—‘not my will but Thine,’ the difference
between them falls away; and they may be allowed to make either of them
the basis of their lives, according to their own individual character
or temperament. There is as much faith in the willingness to work for
an unseen future in this world as in another. Neither is it
inconceivable that some rare nature may feel his duty to another
generation, or to another century, almost as strongly as to his own, or
that living always in the presence of God, he may realize another world
as vividly as he does this.
The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by us under
similitudes derived from human qualities; although sometimes, like the
Jewish prophets, we may dash away these figures of speech and describe
the nature of God only in negatives. These again by degrees acquire a
positive meaning. It would be well, if when meditating on the higher
truths either of philosophy or religion, we sometimes substituted one
form of expression for another, lest through the necessities of
language we should become the slaves of mere words.
There is a third ideal, not the same, but akin to these, which has a
place in the home and heart of every believer in the religion of
Christ, and in which men seem to find a nearer and more familiar truth,
the Divine man, the Son of Man, the Saviour of mankind, Who is the
first-born and head of the whole family in heaven and earth, in Whom
the Divine and human, that which is without and that which is within
the range of our earthly faculties, are indissolubly united. Neither is
this divine form of goodness wholly separable from the ideal of the
Christian Church, which is said in the New Testament to be ‘His body,’
or at variance with those other images of good which Plato sets before
us. We see Him in a figure only, and of figures of speech we select but
a few, and those the simplest, to be the expression of Him. We behold
Him in a picture, but He is not there. We gather up the fragments of
His discourses, but neither do they represent Him as He truly was. His
dwelling is neither in heaven nor earth, but in the heart of man. This
is that image which Plato saw dimly in the distance, which, when
existing among men, he called, in the language of Homer, ‘the likeness
of God,’ the likeness of a nature which in all ages men have felt to be
greater and better than themselves, and which in endless forms, whether
derived from Scripture or nature, from the witness of history or from
the human heart, regarded as a person or not as a person, with or
without parts or passions, existing in space or not in space, is and
will always continue to be to mankind the Idea of Good.
THE REPUBLIC.
PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE.
Socrates, who is the narrator.
Glaucon.
Adeimantus.
Polemarchus.
Cephalus.
Thrasymachus.
Cleitophon.
And others who are mute auditors.
The scene is laid in the house of Cephalus at the Piraeus; and the
whole dialogue is narrated by Socrates the day after it actually took
place to Timaeus, Hermocrates, Critias, and a nameless person, who are
introduced in the Timaeus.
BOOK I.
I went down yesterday to the Piraeus with Glaucon the son of Ariston,
that I might offer up my prayers to the goddess (Bendis, the Thracian
Artemis.); and also because I wanted to see in what manner they would
celebrate the festival, which was a new thing. I was delighted with the
procession of the inhabitants; but that of the Thracians was equally,
if not more, beautiful. When we had finished our prayers and viewed the
spectacle, we turned in the direction of the city; and at that instant
Polemarchus the son of Cephalus chanced to catch sight of us from a
distance as we were starting on our way home, and told his servant to
run and bid us wait for him. The servant took hold of me by the cloak
behind, and said: Polemarchus desires you to wait.
I turned round, and asked him where his master was.
There he is, said the youth, coming after you, if you will only wait.