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 The theory of education in the Republic 
 
 olin 
 
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THE THEORY OF EDUCATION IN THE 
 REPUBLIC OF PLATO 
 
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 IN THE 
 
 REPUBLIC OF PLATO 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD LEWIS NETTLESHIP 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 
 1906 
 
Published October, igo6 
 
 Composed and Printed By 
 
 The University of Chicago Pre: 
 
 Chicago, Illinois, U. S. A. 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 The Essay which is here reprinted first appeared in 
 Hellenica: A Collection of Essays on Greek Poetry, Phi- 
 losophy, History, and Religion, edited by Evelyn Abbott, 
 M.A., LL.D., published by Rivingtons, London, 1880. 
 This volume is now difficult to obtain, and Professor Nettle- 
 ship 's essay, besides, is so valuable a contribution to the 
 history of education that a convenient edition in separate 
 form has long been desired by students of the subject. 
 This reprint is issued, accordingly, at the suggestion of the 
 Department of Education of the University of Chicago, 
 primarily to meet the needs of the Department, but also 
 with the hope that it will be found useful to a larger circle 
 of students both here and elsewhere. 
 
 William Bishop Owen 
 Department of Education 
 University of Chicago 
 September i, 1906 
 
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION IN THE 
 REPUBLIC OF PLATO 
 
 Some apology may seem to be due for printing an essay 
 upon a subject so well worn as the Platonic conception of 
 education, the more so as I have no new discoveries to detail 
 and no new theories to advance. But it seems true that 
 Greek thought is in a sense ever young; that while its lessons 
 are always being learned, they are always being forgotten and 
 misunderstood; and that, though much has been done for its 
 interpretation, and the study of it has established itself in the 
 curriculum of our schools and universities, we are still in 
 many respects only at the threshold, and often see it through a 
 veil of conventional platitudes, pretentious antiquarianism, 
 or sentimental finery. All that I have here attempted is to 
 draw renewed attention to some of the sahent and familiar 
 points in a subject which concerns us all, and to suggest re- 
 flection upon our own corresponding theory and practice. 
 
 The subject of education is treated by Plato in the Re- 
 public as an integral and vital part of the wider subject of 
 the well-being of human society, and it is scarcely possible 
 to give an intelligent account of his treatment without first 
 indicating the scope and plan of the work as a whole. The 
 Republic opens by asking the question. What is the nature of 
 justice ? and the first four books of it pursue the answer to this 
 question without any serious deviation. The real bearing of 
 the question is but poorly represented to us in its English 
 dress; it would be better expressed, if (following the sugges- 
 tion of Plato himself ') we substituted for it the question. How 
 are men to order their lives so as to Uve best ? which naturally 
 
 'i-344e; 352 d. 
 
 I 
 
2 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 involves the further question, What is to live well ? Various 
 representative answers to these questions are first propounded 
 and examined; the personal experience of the good old man 
 of the good old time, the half- understood maxims of the 
 educated man of the world, the sounding formulas of the un- 
 scrupulous and cynical rhetorician — all these are passed in 
 review, and found to be inadequate, ill-considered, or self- 
 destructive. Then the voice of society or its leaders is Hstened 
 to; current theories of the origin of law and morality, which 
 resolve the one into arbitrary convention and the other into 
 a calculation of rewards and punishments, or a system of 
 indulgences, are exhibited in their most naked form; imtil at 
 last we seem to be left with the whole of popular opinion 
 and experience arrayed upon the side of what is called 
 injustice, and upon the other side nothing but a bare con- 
 viction, to which the moral sense of man still cHngs, though 
 unable to justify itself for doing so. 
 
 Such a justification Socrates is now called upon to give. 
 We have had enough of verbal discussions ' in which every- 
 thing seems to depend upon the sense in which the particu- 
 lar disputant takes the particular word in dispute; nor can 
 we rest satisfied with theories which reduce morahty to its 
 material consequences, whether in this world or the next. 
 If justice and injustice, right and wrong, are not merely the 
 same thing viewed from different sides, but express real and 
 radical distinctions, they must admit of being exhibited "as 
 they are in themselves" — that is, not in their current equiva- 
 lents of wealth, success, popularity, and the reverse, but as 
 forces working for good or ill in the very soul of man.^ With 
 
 I 2. 367 b, M oiv iiiup fibvov ivSel^-Q t$ X47v, k.t, N. 
 ' 2. 366 e; 367 b and d; 358 b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 3 
 
 the demand for such an exhibition, the inquiry passes from 
 the domain of verbal definition and popular opinion to that 
 of psychology, and the question. How are we to order our 
 lives for the best ? becomes the question, What is the nature 
 of the hvin g principle' within us which Plato calls the soul ? 
 Though, however, this is the real import of the transition 
 now made in the dialogue, it is made in a form which would 
 be little expected by a modern student of moral psychology. 
 Instead of meeting the new requirement by analyzing the 
 human soul, Plato proceeds to analyze human society. The 
 reason for this is to be found in his conviction that in society 
 (to interpret his own familiar simile') we see man "writ 
 large;" in other words, that in the broad outUnes of the state, 
 with its classes, its trade and industry, its military and po- 
 litical institutions, the secret and subtle elements of human 
 nature come to the surface, take visible shape, and are unmis- 
 takably legible to the observer. If, then, we would study 
 human life successfully, we must begin from the outside and 
 work inwards; we must take the obvious facts and principles 
 without which society would not go on, and ask what they 
 mean, of what inner facts and principles are they the expo- 
 nents ? And, in order to do this, we must have a method. It 
 will not do to take society at any chance point on its surface 
 and probe it there; we must begin at the beginning, we must 
 look at it "in its growth."^ Not, however, in its historical, 
 but in its logical and psychological "growth;" for this seems 
 to be the explanation of the picture which Plato gives of "the 
 genesis of the state." He has begun with what he considered 
 the lowest stratimi of hfe, at the point where it is most nearly 
 
 ' Cf. 4. 445 a, oiroO Toirov f fwjuev. 3 2. 369 a, yiyvo/i^iiriv tSSiv. 
 . ' 2. 368 d. 
 
4 THEiTHEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 the mere keeping life alive, the mere satisfaction of necessary 
 wants; to this rudimentary basis he has gradually added the 
 higher factors of human nature, with their accompanying 
 needs; and throughout the structure, alike in its lower and 
 its higher ranges, he has shown us the same principle of effi- 
 ciency and well-being, a principle writ large on the face of 
 society,* but to be ultimately traced back to its analogue in 
 the constitution of the human soul itself. That principle, 
 to which he gives the name of justice, may be briefly explained 
 as follows rJEvery man has wants, of which he cannot get rid, 
 but which lie cannot himself satisfy.^ They are as various 
 as the want of food and clothes, the want of protection from 
 ^external violence, the want of assistance against his own 
 lower nature; but, whatever their character, they make him 
 individually insufficient for himself. On the other hand, 
 while all men need others, all men are, or may be, needed . 
 by others; the same limitation which forces the individual 
 into society also makes him a useful member of it; for the 
 
 I Cf. 4. 443 b-c, where it is stated that the principle of the division of 
 labor in trade and industry was a sort of " initial outline" (ipx^" ■'■^ "">' 
 riirov Tivi.) of justice, the first suggestion and rudimentary form of it, and, 
 further, that this principle was really only "an image" (etSul\.iv ti) of 
 justice, the truth being that justice is not merely concerned with "the external 
 doing one's own work," but with "the inward doing of what is in very 
 truth one's own;" so the harmonious working of the soul within itself is the 
 really essential condition of which external organization is merely the 
 "image" or outward expression. 
 
 ' The "insufficiency" of the individual is first illustrated from the 
 most obvious sphere, that of the necessary wants (2. 369 c ff.); but it holds 
 good in higher spheres too; cf. 9. 590 d-e (the divine reason which it is good 
 for a man to be governed by, if he has not got it in himself, is suppUed to 
 him from outside) . Similarly the industrial principle of association is applied 
 to the relation of the philosophers to the society of which they are members 
 (7. 519 e— 520 a). 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO S 
 
 diversity of individual character is not a mere diversity of 
 atoms, but has in it the capability of organization, or, in other 
 words, of forming a whole. These primary facts suggest, 
 as the true principle of human Hfe, that each social element 
 should do that which it is most fitted to do, thus contributing 
 to the common stock the best that it has to give, and receiv- 
 ing from each other element that of which it is itself most 
 in need. The more society is so ordered that this twofold 
 principle of division and association of work is carried out, 
 the more nearly will it approach its most natural and most 
 perfect form. The main part of the first section of the Re- 
 public, from the middle of the second to the end of the fourth 
 book, is occupied with the sketch of a society as it might be 
 conceived to be if this principle of harmonious co-operation 
 were reahzed, and it is an element in its realization that what 
 may be called the first system of education is developed. 
 
 Before considering that system in its details, it will be 
 well to see what was Plato's conception of education in gen- 
 eral, for by it his whole treatment of the subject is in a great 
 measure determined. We know in our own time what a 
 difference it may make in the spirit and working of an edu- 
 cational method, whether the idea with which it starts is that 
 of culture, or of training, or of useful accomplishment: 
 Plato's idea of the essence of education is most simply and! 
 comprehensively expressed in the word "nurture."^ ToL 
 him the human soul is emphatically and before all else some- 
 thing living, something which in the strict sense we can 
 neither create nor destroy, but which we can feed or starve, 
 nourish or poison. As in the case of other Uving things, of 
 
 I Cf., for the use of rpo^i) or cognate terms, 3. 401 b, e; 402 a; 403 c; 
 412 b; 4. 424 a; 6. 419 d-e; and Phaedrus, 247 e ff., where the metaphor 
 is enlarged upon. 
 
6 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 plants and animals,* the stronger and better the nature of 
 the soul, the more important is it what nourishment it gets, 
 "and a gifted soul in a corrupt society is like a good seed sown 
 in a strange soil; it grows crooked and unlike itself, loses 
 its proper virtue, and sinks at last to the level of its sur- 
 roimdings. And in another famousjiassage,' to which we 
 shall have to refer more than once, the young citizen who is 
 being educated is compared to an animal at pasture; from 
 the things which he sees and hears about him he assimilates, 
 little by little, the good or the evil which they embody, till 
 "many a little makes a mickle," which becomes part and 
 parcel of himself. It is this feehng of the assimilative power 
 of the soul which leads Plato to attach such immense im- 
 portance to the circumstances and environment of life, and 
 makes him on the whole more disposed to attribute moral 
 evil to bad nurture than to inherent vice. Among the various 
 elements which make up the complex creature man, he con- 
 ceives that there are few which are not open to good influaice. 
 Of what are usually called the lower desires there are indeed 
 some that are radically "wild,'." and with these there is only 
 one course possible — to stop their growth; but the others 
 admit of being "tamed," and made to take service under the 
 higher self. And thus it is with a sort of compassion that 
 Plato * looks upon some of the great criminals of the world, 
 who in his eyes had the capability of being its greatest bene- 
 factors, and owe their failure to its corruption or neglect. 
 Against the all-powerful influence of society,' he thinks 
 that no private teaching can hold its ground. It is not 
 
 ' 6. 497 b; 491 d — ^492 a. 4 6. 491 e. 
 ' 3. 401 c-d. s 6. 492 c-e. 
 
 39. 589 b.; 591 b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PIATO 7 
 
 the so-called enlightened leaders of public opinion, the 
 sophists of the day, who really teach and demoralize 
 the youth;' the real educator and the real sophist is 
 public opinion itself, whose voice, resounding in the 
 assembly and the law courts, in the theater and the 
 camp, is practically irresistible by the isolated efforts 
 of individuals. Such a power for evil can be counteracted 
 only by creating a power for good as penetrating, as uncon- 
 scious, and as universal; and to do this is the true function 
 of a public system of education. On the other hand, while 
 the inherent vitality of the soul makes the question of its 
 nourishment all-important, it also precludes a merely me- 
 chanical treatment of it. We can place it in a healthy atmos- 
 phere, but we cannot compel it to assimilate only the healthy 
 elements. The "eye of the soul"^ is not, as some "profes- 
 sors of education" seem to think, a bUnd eye into which 
 knowledge can be put; its power of vision can neither be 
 originally produced by education, nor entirely destroyed by 
 the want of it; it can only be "turned to the light," for which 
 it has an intrinsic capacity. And the same holds good of the 
 lower extremity of himian nature; as in the "wild" and un- 
 teachable element there is a power of growth which can be 
 dealt with only by being repressed, so among men there are 
 found moral "incurables," for whom society has no course 
 but to put them out of the way.^ 
 
 The very simphcity of these ideas, as in the case of some 
 others of Plato, is apt to conceal their importance. Every- 
 body admits in theory that the human self is a living being, 
 requiring a certain environment in order to grow properly, 
 
 I 6. 492 a-b. 3 3. 410 a; cf. 10. 615 e. 
 
 ' 7. S18 b-c. 
 
8 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 and capable of growing improperly in an immense variety of 
 ways. But it is mainly in dealing with the material circum- 
 stances of life that the truth of the principle is practically 
 realized, because there the consequences of its neglect are 
 palpable ; when we have to do with the mental atmosphere, 
 we are Hable to forget it. Then, again, the greater speciali- 
 zation of modern life makes it difi&cult for us to keep our hold 
 on universal elementary truths, which to the Greeks seemed 
 neither old nor simple. Modem education inevitably divides 
 itself under many heads; it is primary or higher, technical 
 or liberal, scientific or religious; the distinctions are real and 
 cannot be ignored; but in the controversies to which they 
 sometimes give rise it is well, just because it is hard, to re- 
 member that the ultimate subject of all education is a living 
 organism, whose vital power, though divisible in thought, 
 is really one and undivided; that its vital wants are equally 
 such, whether they be for fresh air, for useful knowledge, or 
 for religious truth; and that it will starve or degenerate in 
 mind if its natural mental nourishment be denied it, as surely 
 as it will in body if its bodily wants be neglected. 
 
 Such being Plato's general conception of the nature of 
 education, we may expect that any system of education which 
 he propounds will be a system for providing proper nurture 
 to the growing soul, or for adjusting it§^ surroundings to its 
 higher needs. It is also clear that the "particular character 
 of the system for attaining these ends must be determined by 
 the conception of the human nature which has to be fed, and 
 the needs to which its circumstances have to be adjusted. 
 And thus, in order to understand Plato's theory of education, 
 we must understand his psychology. 
 
 In giving some account of the psychology of the Republic, 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 9 
 
 we shall have to notice that, while the ground-plan of the 
 account of the soul remains on the whole the same, the po- 
 sition assigned to its various elements changes considerably 
 in different parts of the work; and these changes are neces- 
 sarily accompanied by changes in the view taken of education. 
 We will begin with the psychology of the first section of tne 
 work, only combining that of later sections where it seems to 
 be in substantial agreement. From this we gather that Plato 
 regarded the human soul as a complex whole, consisting of 
 three "forms," "kinds," or "parts,"' as he variously calls 
 them. The first of these, beginning at the lower end in the 
 scale of worth, is iiridufiia or "appetite." Plato' was aware 
 that in what he called the "appetitive" form of the soul he 
 was dealing with something too various to be easily described 
 by a single name. He seems to have chosen the name in 
 question because the bodily appetites, to which it was most 
 commonly appropriated, are, from their intensity, the most 
 obvious and conspicuous instances of their class. He has, 
 however, another name, suggested, not by the degree of in- 
 tensity of the activity, but by what seemed to him its most 
 typical object;' "because wealth is the principal instrument 
 by which the bodily appetites are satisfied, we call this ele- 
 ment of the soul the wealth-loving or gain-loving element." 
 This close association of things sometimes supposed to be so 
 far apart as sensuality and avarice,'* is very characteristic of 
 Plato; and we shall see later on by what facts he illustrates 
 it. For the present it is enough to observe that, though 
 Plato by no means confines the word translated "appetite" 
 
 I elSos, 4. 43S c; 439 e, etc.; T^^s, 4. 441 c; 443. d; /lipos, 4. 442 b. 
 " 9. 580 d-e. 3 9. 580 e — 581 a. 
 
 4 3. 390 b— 391 c; 4. 442 a; 8. 548 a-b. 
 
lo THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 to the above-mentioned instances,' yet when he speaks of 
 the "appetitive" as a specific form or part of the soul, he 
 intends primarily those desires of which bodily satisfaction 
 and wealth are the typical objects. Of such appetites he 
 distinguishes in a later book two kinds, "necessary" and " un- 
 necessary."" Necessary appetites are those which we cannot 
 get rid of, or those of which the satisfaction does us good; 
 unnecessary are those which are superfluous or harmful. In 
 these latter,' again, there is a subdivision into those which, 
 though in themselves unproductive and wasteful to the organ- 
 ism, are yet capable of regulation, and those which are in- 
 curably "wild," "bestial," " lawless," which make themselves 
 felt, even in the best men, when reason is in abeyance, but 
 which, unless repressed or reduced to a minimum, bring ruin 
 into life. These distinctions are graphically reproduced in 
 a somewhat generaUzed form in one of the allegorical figures 
 under which Plato represents his conception of human nature. 
 He asks us to imagine a being having the outward semblance 
 of a man,* but combining within three creatures — a man, 
 a lion, and "a beast with many heads, heads of beasts tame 
 and wild, and able to breed and change them at its will." 
 Of the first two there will be more to say presently; in the 
 third we readily recognize the psychological element of appe- 
 tite in the sense just described. The hydra-like creature 
 has in it an inherent capacity of growth and reproduction; 
 some of its oflFspring can be "tamed" and "domesticated,"' 
 and made serviceable to Ufe; others are radically untamable, 
 the inorganic, inhuman, "unnecessary," and possibly de- 
 
 1 Cf. e. g., s- 47S b; 9- S8o d. 4 9. 588 b ff. 
 
 2 8. 558 d S. 59. 589 b, Tidcureiuv. 
 39. S71 bff. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO ii 
 
 structive, appendage of our nature, which, while it can never 
 entirely divest itself of its humanity, touches God at one, 
 extremity and the beast at the other. 
 
 Though Plato represents appetite as the element which 
 occupies the largest space in the soul,' and though the men 
 who live for appetite more than for any other part of them- 
 selves are, in his view, the majority of mankind, we shall not 
 expect it to occupy the chief share of attention in his system 
 of education. The degree of education of which the appetites 
 are capable is expressed by his own word "taming,"^ and by 
 this he seems to mean such a regulation of them as shall 
 prevent them from interfering with the higher psychical 
 activities, and train them to contribute to the good of the 
 whole soul that basis of healthy physical life which is the 
 necessary ground-work of those activities. 
 
 The second element in the Platonic analysis of the soul 
 is not quite so easily described or understood. The Greek 
 words Bv/io^, TO dv/jLoeSie;, by which it is designated, are com- 
 monly translated "spirit;" and though this term covers only 
 a part of their meaning in the Republic, it will serve as well 
 as any other in the absence of a real equivalent. "Spirit" 
 is first introduced as being the indispensable foundation of 
 courage,' that element of hardihood and intrepidity which 
 is common to men with dogs and horses, and which makes 
 them "never say die;" at the same time it is represented as 
 the source of pugnacity and aggressiveness, with their possible 
 developments into ferocity and cruelty. It is only another 
 form of the same view, when "spirit" is said to be that part 
 of the soul which is peculiarly fostered and stimulated by' 
 
 - 4. 442 a; 9. 588 d; 4. 431 c. 3 2. 375 a-b. 
 ' Cf. 4. 442 a; 8. SS9 a-b; 9. 591 c"d. 
 
12 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 athletic exercises;' it is the "hard" element in human nature, 
 which, if rightly nurtured, becomes true bravery, but if ex- 
 clusively encouraged degenerates into blind brutality, surli- 
 ness, quarrelsomeness, or self-will. In all this we at once 
 recognize the "Hon" of the allegorical figure of man men- 
 tioned above. 
 
 So far the account of the "spirited" element is simple 
 enough. It has two other senses which are not quite so 
 obvious; the one attaching to the sense of anger which 
 Ov/jM'i so commonly has, the other to that of pugnacity. 
 From the former point of view, "spirit" appears as what we 
 may call righteous indignation. It is that which makes a 
 man's blood boil at the consciousness of suffering unjustly,^ 
 while it is characteristically absent when the suffering is felt 
 to be deserved. It is that, again,' which makes a man angry 
 with himself when he feels that he has let his appetites get 
 the better of his reason, whereas no one ever feels this anger 
 when he has let his better judgment prevail over his appetite. 
 These observations lead Plato to represent "spirit" as the 
 natural ally or servant of the rational or better self ;^ not that 
 it is never irrational, or may not be perverted by bad edu- 
 cation,^ but that it never seems to act with the lower appe- 
 tites against the reason; or, to use more modern phraseology, 
 if we are once convinced that in refusing to satisfy an appe- 
 tite we are acting reasonably, we may feel dissatisfaction, 
 but we do not feel indignation. In its third and last distinc- 
 tive use,° "spirit" is the root of ambition or the competitive 
 instinct. In this sense it is, as was said, a modification of 
 
 I 3. 410 c-d; 411 c-e; g. 590 a-b * 4. 440 b. 
 ' 4. 440 c-d. 5 4. 441 a. 
 
 3 4. 440 a-b. * 9. 581 a-b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 13 
 
 the fighting spirit, for the essence both of ambition and of 
 pugnacity is the desire to do better than somebody else. 
 And as in the other two senses,. so here "spirit" may have a 
 good or a bad development, into honorable rivalry on the 
 one hand, on the other into mere contentiousness. 
 
 It is not difficult to see how these various representations 
 of "spirit" may be connected. In all of them there is an ele- 
 ment of what we may call self-assertion and self-conscious- 
 ness. It is this, in the form of not choosing to be "put upon," 
 which makes us resist what we think injustice; it is this, in 
 the form of honorable pride, which makes us face danger 
 without flinching, and prompts us to measure ourselves 
 against others; it is the consciousness of a self which deserves 
 respect that makes us angry when we have disgraced our- 
 selves; and it is the feeling that there is no such self to fall 
 back upon which weakens us when we know that we are in 
 the wrong; and, lastly, it is often an exaggerated sense of our 
 own importance or power which breaks out into aggressive- 
 ness, hardens into self-wiU, or is nursed into bad temper. 
 
 It now remains to consider the third, and in Plato's mind 
 the highest, element in the constitution of the human soul, 
 that which he calls "the philosophic." And here much more 
 than in the case of the other two we shall have to notice con- 
 siderable modifications in his account in different parts of 
 the Republic. 
 
 Beginning with what we have called the first main section 
 of the work, we find the "philosophic" element at first charac- 
 terized in a way very far removed from what the English 
 word would lead us to expect. It is introduced' as a neces- 
 
 I 2. 375 b — 376 c. In this passage a selection of men is being made who 
 are to be " guardians " of the ideal state which is being constructed. But it 
 
14 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 sary psychological complement to the element of "spirit." 
 Unmitigated or unbalanced, the latter element would be a 
 source of mere indiscriminate pugnacity, and would result in 
 a destructive war of all against all. Clearly, if human nature 
 is to be adapted to the higher functions of civic society, it 
 must contain some counterbalancing factor, some quality of 
 gentleness to soften ferocity, some tendency to union to coun- 
 teract the feeling of mutual antagonism. The germs of such 
 an element Plato finds in some of the lower animals: the 
 well-bred dog, who had been already chosen to typify the 
 quahty of "spirit," is found to exhibit, along with the greatest 
 fierceness toward strangers, the greatest gentleness toward 
 those whom he knows; and this suggests, what is found to be 
 the fact when we come to look at human nature, that this com- 
 bination of qualities so opposite is not only possible, but 
 natural. But the question arises: Why call this softening, 
 unifying element "philosophic" ? Here again, half playfully 
 perhaps, yet not without a deeper meaning, Plato helps him- 
 self with the analogy of the dog. The dog judges of friends 
 and enemies by the test of knowledge ; those whom he knows 
 he treats as friends; those whom he does not know, as ene- 
 mies; with him, in a word, to know is to be fond; and as it 
 is the feeling of knowing those whom he knows which excites 
 his fondness, he may be said in a sense to be fond of knowing, 
 much as a person who likes the society of his inferiors might 
 be said to be fond of superiority. In so far, then, as the 
 quality of gentleness attaches to the consciousness of knowl- 
 edge and the pleasure which that consciousness excites, it 
 
 is clear (cf. g. 581 a-c; 4. 435 e — 436 a) that while here appearing to pick 
 _out certain qualities for a certain purpose, Plato is really enumerating the 
 qualities which he conceived to be present in different proportions in all 
 human beings. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO IS 
 
 may be said to arise from fondness of knowledge, and this 
 is almost equivalent to "philosophy" in its literal sense of 
 "love of knowledge" or "wisdom." 
 
 The first and simplest application of this somewhat 
 curious train of thought is obvious enough. Every one 
 has felt in one form or another the power of knowledge or 
 familiarity to breed a sort of liking. It is an instinctive 
 feehng, which often does not rise to the height of affection, 
 but remains a sense of quiet pleasure or comfort; it attaches 
 to things, to places, to persons; much of the love of home and 
 of country, and even of humanity, is traceable to its presence ; 
 much of the antipathy to foreigners or to novelties, to its 
 absence. In such a rudimentary feeling of attachment for 
 what belongs to us Plato saw the first germ of that which 
 seemed to him highest in human nature. We shall see 
 shortly how the germ developed under his hands. 
 
 Our next introduction^ to the "philosophic" element of 
 the soul is in a somewhat different context. It is still, in- 
 deed, the "gentle" or "tame" part in contradistinction to 
 the "wildness" and "hardness" of the "spirited" part, audit 
 is still intimately associated with knowledge; but the gentle- 
 ness of which it is now said to be the source is the result of 
 culture instead of doglike attachment, and the knowledge in 
 which it takes delight is the sense of something understood 
 rather than of something familiar. It now includes suscep- 
 tibility to the influences of language, of music, of painting, 
 of beauty in the widest sense of the word; it includes also the 
 quickness of perception which makes learning pleasant and 
 welcomes every fresh form of truth. It has also a more 
 purely moral aspect; it is that which produces love of order 
 
 ' 3. 410 b — 412 a. 
 
i6 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 and quietness, the impulse to obey rather than to resist, and 
 to use persuasion rather than force. Like "spirit," it is 
 capable of exaggeration and perversion; under the exclusive 
 or excessive influence of culture and refinement it develops 
 softness and effeminacy, or nervous sensibility and unstable- 
 ness. 
 
 When we again' meet with the highest form of the soul, 
 it is no longer under the name of "philosophic;" the intel- 
 lectual character in it now predominates over the emotional; 
 it is the calculative, deHberative, reasoning element in the 
 soul, that in virtue of which it guides and rules, that which 
 when fully developed becomes, not love of wisdom, but 
 wisdom. Its relation to the "spirited" element is also 
 changed; from being a merely complementary factor to it, 
 it has come to be its natural master, from whom issue the 
 dogmas and principles which in the well-trained soul 
 "appetite" cheerfully obeys and "spirit" fearlessly carries 
 out. 
 
 Such is the account of the "philosophic" part in the first 
 section of the Republic; in its most primitive character it is 
 the impulse of attraction to what is familiar because it is 
 familiar; then the substratum of gentleness and of culture; 
 lastly, reason in its regulative and ruhng capacity. 
 
 JlQ^sum up, then, briefly the results thus far arrived at, the 
 human soul, in Plato's view, is a triple being. It has for its 
 largest constituent appetite, the simple craving for present 
 satisfaction, capable of indefinite expansion, mostly amen- 
 able, but also partially unamenable, to reason. Secondly, it 
 implies an element of self-assertiveness and pugnacity, which 
 
 » 4. 439 d; 441 e; 442 c. In the fourth book the word (t>iKlxTBij>ov is 
 dropped, and the highest element in the soul is generally called "KoyuTTiKkv 
 or (436 a; cf. 9. 580 d) ^ /mvBdvoiiep. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 17 
 
 gives rise to qualities as various as courage and brutality, 
 ambition and contentiousness, just indignation and unreason- 
 ing bad temper. Lastly, there is in it a capacity of attraction 
 and receptivity, which, if not perverted into weakness of 
 character, develops, on the one side, into gentleness, sociable- 
 ness, love; on the other, into refinement, culture, and 
 wisdom. 
 
 Proceeding now to the later modifications of this psychol- 
 ogy, we find, as has been already observed, that they are 
 modifications not so much in the general constitution of the 
 soul as in the relationship of its constituent elements^ They 
 consist mainly in the widening and deepening of the concep- 
 tion of the "philosophic" element, and in the assignment to 
 it of a much more predominant position in the formation of 
 human character and the regulation of human conduct. 
 It is scarcely possible to make this clear without again refer- 
 ring shortly to the general structure of the Republic. The 
 first four books of it, as we saw, contain the discovery and 
 exhibition of a principle of human life, social and individual, 
 such as, if carried out, would realize the greatest well-being 
 of which man is capable. That principle is most simply 
 described as the harmonious co-operation of various elements, 
 whether those of the individual soul or those of the state; 
 and the ultimate hypothesis upon which the principle rests 
 is that these various elements have the capacity of forming 
 a whole, and that, therefore, in performing each their separate 
 function in the best way, they are also in the best way work- 
 ing for the good of the whole. According to this view, in a 
 normally constituted society each class would consist of 
 those individuals in whom a certain psychological quaHty 
 predominated, and who were therefore best fitted for a 
 
i8 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 certain kind of work; and the chief interest and duty of the 
 society would be to secure, firstly, that each of its members 
 should have his proper place in the organization of work; 
 and, secondly, that, having found his proper place, he should 
 be fitted by education or other means to do the particular 
 work of his life as well as possible, ' Of the work necessary 
 to the well-being of a state, Plato thought that there were 
 three principal kinds: the work of producing the material 
 commodities essential to life, the work of protecting the 
 state against external enemies and of preserving order within 
 it, and the work of legislation and government. For the 
 class of citizens engaged in the first kind of work he apparently 
 did not think that any pubUc system of education was neces- 
 sary — a fact which, however much at variance with modern 
 ideas, will not startle any one who is familiar with the 
 position of the industrial classes in Greek society, and 
 with the opinions entertained of them both by the public 
 and by philosophers. It was then for the classes who 
 are engaged in military and political functions — that is, 
 in what a Greek would consider the functions of a 
 citizen proper — that the education sketched in the 
 earlier part of the Republic is exclusively intended. That 
 education is a method for providing the natural and 
 proper nurture for the souls of the persons in question. Its 
 character (to anticipate for a moment what must be said 
 later) is emphatically non- technical; it teaches no knowledge 
 or mental accomplishment having a direct bearing upon the 
 functions eventually to be exercised by those who receive it; 
 it comes to an end at about twenty, when those functions 
 have hot yet begun, and its main object is to predispose the 
 soul, intellectually and morally, to the perception and execu- 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 19 
 
 tion of ideas and principles of which it dpes not as yet under- 
 staad the- fol-lr-beaipktgH^ut -upon-which it will afterwards 
 find that the jvglfare oj itself and society depends. 
 
 We may now return to the point at which it was necessary 
 to make this digression. It seems to have been in Plato's 
 mind,' even at the time when he was writing the first part of 
 the Republic, that the system of education contained in it was 
 imperfect and inadequate. Whether it was from design that 
 he deferred the expression of this feeling, or whether it was 
 forced from him by subsequent criticism, this is not the place 
 to discuss; it is, at any rate, certain that in what may be 
 called the second section of the work, comprising the fifth, 
 sixth, and seventh books, the education described in the pre- 
 ceding books is referred to and criticised as insufiicient for 
 the purpose of preparing citizens for the exercise of the most 
 important pubHc functions. This attitude of criticism adopt- 
 ed in the later toward the earlier section is, however, by no 
 means the only symptom of change on the part of the writer. 
 The question under discussion, the tone in which it is dis- 
 cussed, and the answer which is given to it, are very different 
 in the two parts. In the first the question is : What is the 
 true principle which should regulate human life, and what 
 would be the form of a society in which it was carried out ? 
 In the second it is : How could such an ideal society, with all 
 the consequences which it seems logically to entail, be actually 
 realized, and what is the root of the existing evils of man- 
 kind which hinder its realization ? In the first part, again, 
 the tone is that of a man who certainly sees much to criticise 
 
 - Indications of this feeling are found 3. 414 a and 416 b, compared with 
 6. 503 a-b, e. The want of " exactness " or completeness in the account of 
 education in the early books is parallel to that in the psychology (cf . 4. 435 d 
 with 6. 504 a-e). 
 
20 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 in existing institutions, but who is nevertheless disposed to 
 make the best of them, and does not despair of doing so. 
 In the second it is that of one oppressed by the sense of the 
 evil in the world, hoping for salvation only from remedies 
 which are themselves almost hopeless, diffident and yet de- 
 fiant, daringly paradoxical and yet terribly in earnest. And 
 lastly, the two answers are different. To the earlier question 
 the answer is : Allow, and if necessary compel, human nature 
 to develop normally, and provide it with the nurture which 
 its development demands; the rest will manage itself. To 
 the later it is : The cause of the ills of mankind is ignorance 
 of their true good and neglect of their noblest natures; train 
 those natures rightly and they will see what is the true good of 
 mankind; give them unlimited power and they will carry out 
 what the good requires. Such is the significance of the start- 
 ling demand made in the fifth book of the Republic, that 
 philosophers should be kings. We are here concerned with it, 
 not in its poUtical, but in its psychological and educational 
 aspect; in other words, we have to see how Plato's conception 
 of what we have already learned to know as the "philosophic 
 part" in the soul has expanded to the point at which we now 
 find it, giving its name to the whole man, embodying all gifts 
 and excellencies, and claiming to rule the world. 
 
 Between the account of the "philosophic" element which 
 we have gathered from the first four books of the Republic, 
 and that of the "philosophic nature" which we are about to 
 gather from the following three, the references made to the 
 same subject in the ninth book seem to occupy an inter- 
 mediate place,' and to form a kind of transition. In the 
 
 1 1 do not mean to imply that the ninth book was necessarily composed 
 before the sixth, though there is some ground for the supposition. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 21 
 
 ninth book, taking his departure from the triple division of 
 the soul with which we are now familiar, Plato divides man- 
 kind into three "primary kinds,'" according as one or other 
 of the three psychical elements predominates in the character. 
 To those in whom "appetite" predominates, the chief object 
 in life is the wealth by which appetite is satisfied; to the 
 "spirited" class it is the honor which rewards successful com- 
 petition; while to those in whom the "philosophic" side is the 
 strongest, it is truth. And accordingly they are called re- 
 spectively lovers of gain or wealth, lovers of contention or 
 honor, lovers of learning or wisdom — that is, "philosophers;" 
 and of these the last are said to enjoy the fullest experience 
 and to live the highest life. Here, then, we find the love of 
 knowing, which has all along underlain in different senses 
 the "philosophic" form of soul, interpreted as the love of 
 "knowing the nature of the truth,"^ or, to use an equivalent 
 Platonic phrase, "the nature of what is," and further, when 
 present in sufficient force, giving its name to a definite type 
 of character, and that the highest. The allegorical figure of 
 man in the same book, to which reference has already been 
 made, supplies some more additions to the conception. In 
 the triple creature which we are there asked to imagine, the 
 "man" — or, as he is called to distinguish him from the exter- 
 nal human semblance, the "inward man" — clearly represents 
 the "philosophic" element; and from this we see that in 
 Plato's view it is this element which constitutes the real hu- 
 manity, and therefore the real personality, in our complex 
 nature. But this is not all. The "inward man" is distinctly 
 asserted to be that which is "divine" or "the most divine" 
 in man.' To Plato there is a revelation of God in the human 
 
 I 9. 580 d ff. ' 581 b, e; 582 b, u. 
 
 3 9. 589 d, e; 590 d; cf., too, 6. 497 c, and 10. 611 e. 
 
2 2 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 soul, as there is in the physical world; his "celestial city'" 
 is not only a visionary type, it is also, like the "kingdom of 
 heaven," within us, and he who will may enter in and dwell 
 there. And once more, as it is this divine humanity which is 
 in the truest sense the self, the other parts of human nature 
 are conceived by Plato to find their highest activity and their 
 most real satisfaction in following and serving it as far as they 
 are able ; to become as human as possible, to live for humanity 
 in this sense, is the highest end of the half-animal nature 
 which forms the larger part of man. 
 
 Turning now from the ninth to the three central books of 
 the Republic, we find the attributes with which the "philo- 
 sophic" nature is invested in the former confirmed and devel- 
 oped in the latter. The point of departure is the same : the 
 "philosopher" is described, in accordance with his name,^ 
 as one who loves knowledge or wisdom, and "philosophy" 
 is the instinctive and indiscriminate craving to learn. The 
 man endowed with this passion is like a man with a great 
 appetite and a strong digestion; everything that will stay the 
 hunger of his soul is welcome food. Or, again, he is like a 
 man who is in love, not once or twice, but always and every- 
 where; as the lover finds nothing that is not beautiful in the 
 face of his beloved, so to the man born to be a "philosopher " 
 there is nothing in the face of truth which is not lovable. 
 This is the germ, the elementary condition, of philosophy; 
 it does not of itself make a full-grown philosopher, any more 
 than the possession of "spirit" necessarily makes a brave 
 man; but no true philosopher can be without it, any more 
 than a spiritless man can have real courage. But (and here 
 Plato takes his next great step)' these elementary qualities 
 
 I 9. 592 a-b. 3 6. 485 b — 487 a; 489 e — 490 c. 
 
 " 5- 474 c— 47S c; 6. 485 b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 23 
 
 are not only the germ of the true philosophic character, but 
 of all human excellence as well; or, rather, the philosophic 
 spirit cannot exist in its fulness and integrity without involv- 
 ing all that is called good and noble in human character. 
 Plato explains this somewhat startling idea by showing how 
 the whole company of virtues flows naturally and necessarily 
 from the single passion for truth. In one whose desires " set 
 strongly" toward one all-absorbing object, the channels of the 
 bodily appetites must run dry; and the "vision of all time and 
 all existence" which he enjoys will make human life seem but 
 a little thing, and death nothing to be feared. In a mind 
 which "reaches out after all that is human and divine" there 
 is no room for meanness or pettiness, nor can such a mind be 
 harsh or unfair in deaUngs with other men, for the motives 
 which make others so — avarice, conceit, or fear — do not 
 touch it. Add to these ethical qualities the intellectual gifts 
 without which love of knowledge is impossible, quickness to 
 learn and slowness to forget, with that mental grace or pro- 
 portion which predisposes the soul to receive truth, and we 
 have a fully endowed nature, such as "the god of blame him- 
 self coidd find no fault in." 
 
 We have here reached the culminating point in the develop- 
 ment of Plato's conception of "philosophy" in the Republic. 
 Beginning with the instinctive attraction to what is famiHar, 
 passing on into the ready receptivity for all that is admirable 
 in nature and art, with the unconscious grace and refinement 
 which accompany it, it has now become the consuming pas- 
 sion for what is true and real, at once the most human and the 
 most divine attribute of the soul, the crowning gift and com- 
 plete embodiment of perfect manhood. 
 
 Neither the later uses of the word " philosophy," nor its 
 
24 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 literal interpretation as "love of wisdom, " will much help the 
 modem reader to enter here into the spirit of Plato. Philos- 
 ophy to most of us is too much wrapped up in the associations 
 of books and systems, of technicaHties and jargon, to let us 
 feel the living spirit which it still is when it is anything more 
 than a set of phrases. And the love of truth, in spite of the 
 boasts of modern science, is still but rarely found to dominate 
 the character and mold the Hfe as Plato conceived that it 
 might do. The difficulty of understanding him is further 
 increased by the dispersion and differentiation which his idea 
 has undergone. When he spoke of "the truth" or of "what 
 is," we see that there entered into his feeling not only the 
 enthusiasm of the scientific discoverer, but also the passion 
 of the poet for beauty and the devoti^on of the saint to the 
 object of his worship. It would be beyond our present scope 
 to dwell at length upon this point; a reference to two pas- 
 sages in the Republic will sufficiently illustrate it. One is 
 that in which he describes the philosophic spirit as the desire 
 for union of the mind with reality; 
 
 It is in the nature of the real lover of learning to be ever struggling 
 up to being, and not to abide among the manifold and limited objects 
 of opinion; he wiU go on his way, and the edge of his love wiU not 
 grow dull nor its force abate, until he has got hold of the nature of being 
 with that part of his soul to which it belongs so to do, and that is the 
 part which is akin to being; with this he wiU draw near, and mingle 
 being with being, and beget intelligence and truth, and find knowledge 
 and true life and nourishment, and then, and not till then, he will cease 
 from his travail.' 
 
 The imagery of this passage shows us that to Plato the 
 process of knowledge was very far from being the mechanical 
 and external operation as which we are apt to regard it. To 
 I 6.'49o"a-b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 25 
 
 him the world of reality or fact, that which really is in spite 
 of what appears or what we fancy, is something of kindred 
 nature with what is highest in the human mind; the impulse 
 to know is the impulse to become one with that which is 
 "bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh," and truth is the 
 birth which allays the " travail of the soul." 
 
 In another passage* the effect of the same spirit upon the 
 formation of character is brought out in a way equally 
 remote from ordinary modes of thought : 
 
 The man whose mind is really set upon the things that are, has 
 not leisure to look down at the concerns of men, and to fight with them 
 and fill himself with envy and bitterness; that which he sees and gazes 
 upon is set fast and ever the same, it neither does nor suffers wrong, 
 but is all reasonable and in order. . This he imitates, and, as far as is 
 possible, becomes like it, for it surely cannot be that a man can live 
 in fellowship with what he admires without imitating it. So then the 
 philosopher, living in fellowship' with what is divine and orderly, 
 grows himself orderly and divine as far as man is able. 
 
 Such is Plato's conception of what in modem phrase we 
 should call the genuine study of the laws of nature and the 
 world. In the unchangeable order and beauty of the uni- 
 verse he sees the image on a vaster scale of the same reason 
 which is imperfectly reflected in human life, and he might 
 have said to Justice what Wordsworth has said to Duty : 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
 
 And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong. 
 
 We have now passed in review the main elements of that 
 human nature for which, as Plato conceived, it was the func- 
 tion of education to provide nurture. It may seem, perhaps, 
 that a disproportionate space has been given to what belongs, 
 not to education, but to psychology. But it is just the in- 
 
 I 6. 500 b-c. 
 
26 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 separableness of the two that is so characteristic of Plato's 
 treatment, and, whatever we may think of his analysis of 
 the soul in its details, we shall hardly escape the conclusion 
 that some such analysis is an indispensable condition of a 
 really rational theory of education; in other words, that 
 ^ neither a state nor an individual can undertake to educate in 
 a systematic way unless they start with some idea, not only 
 of what they wish to teach, nor only of the type of character 
 which they wish to produce, but also of the living being to 
 which the matter to be taught is relative, and upon which 
 the given character is to be impressed. The "practical" 
 man, who beheves in "results," will be disposed to regard 
 such psychological considerations as fanciful or far-fetched. 
 And yet the most fatally unpractical thing in the world is to 
 go on testing methods by results which take every factor into 
 account except the one upon which the whole result ultimately 
 depends. That factor in man is the human mind, in English- 
 men the English mind, in different classes of Englishmen the 
 minds of those classes; and to discuss what kinds of educa- 
 tion are in themselves the best, without considering mental 
 organization, is as idle as to discuss what is the best kind of 
 food in the abstract without regard to the stomach which has 
 to digest it. 
 
 Before passing on to our main subject, the methods by 
 which Plato proposed to meet the educational needs of the 
 soul, one preliminary observation must be made. It appears 
 from what has been already said that there is a certain want 
 of continuity in his psychology. Instead of following the 
 soul in an unbroken series from its earliest to its most ad- 
 ^ vanced phase of development, he has first given a picture of its 
 ;^" education up to a certain point, which is apparently meant to 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 27 
 
 be final) and has then made a fresh start, and represented the 
 previous course as a merely preliminary stage in a larger and 
 more elaborate system; and this fresh start coincides with a 
 fresh point of departure in the account of the highest or 
 " philosophic " element in the soul. The questions suggested 
 by these facts as to the composition of the Republic do not 
 concern us now; whatever they may be, and however they 
 may be answered, it may be assumed here that Plato, at 
 some time in his life, intended the sections of the Republic, 
 as we now have it, to form parts of one work. On this 
 assumption, the accounts which it contains both of the soul 
 and of education have been considered in this essay as form- 
 ing a logical, if not a literary, whole, and as supplying a fairly 
 complete and coherent representation of what Plato conceived 
 human nature in its fulness to be and to require. It must, 
 however, be remembered once for all that the Republic gives 
 us, not a detailed treatise on education, but certain leading 
 principles which admit of being appHed under various cir- 
 cumstances and in various ways. Our present object is not 
 primarily to discover the modifications which these principles 
 admit or require, but to exhibit the principles themselves in 
 their clearest light and fullest bearings. 
 
 The education of the average Greek gentleman, like that of 
 the average English gentleman, comprised a certain amount 
 of mental cultivation and a certain amount of athletic 
 exercise. The former, besides reading, writing, and some 
 elementary mathematics, consisted mainly in the reciting and 
 learning by heart of poetry, along with the elements of music, 
 and sometimes of drawing. Perhaps because so much of the 
 poetry was originally sung or accompanied, the word "music" 
 was sometimes apphed to the education in literature as well 
 
28 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 as in music proper, and it is in this wider sense that Plato 
 habitually uses it. Under the term "gymnastic" was under- 
 stood the whole system of diet and exercise which, varying 
 with the customs of different states, had for its common 
 object the production of bodily health and strength and the 
 preparation for military service. In this twofold method of 
 education, which the wisdom of the past had handed down, 
 Plato sees an unconscious recognition of the psychological 
 requirements of human nature on its two most important 
 sides.^ At first sight it would seem that "music" and 
 "gymnastic" were related to one another as mental to bodily 
 training, and this was no doubt the ordinary way of distin- 
 guishing them; but Plato, while himself adopting the popu- 
 lar phraseology at first, afterwards corrects it by asserting 
 that the soul, and not the body, is the primary object of 
 "gymnastic" as well as of "music, "^ and appeals to the fact 
 that exclusive devotion to physical exercises affects the char- 
 acter no less markedly than exclusive devotion to literary 
 and sesthetic culture. The truth is that "music" educates,^ 
 not the soul merely, but specifically the "philosophic" part 
 of the soul, through the medium of the eye and ear; while 
 "gymnastic," through bodily exercises, not only produces 
 bodily health and strength, but discipUnes the psychological 
 element of "spirit." It is through the gentle, responsive, 
 loving element that the soul is open to the influences of litera- 
 ture and art; it is this which makes it quick to assimilate, 
 ready to obey and to imitate, open-eyed and open-eared to 
 catch the sights and sounds of the living world. To satisfy 
 its cravings with the right food, to offer true nobility to its 
 
 " 2. 376 e, ^ xoXeTriK cipeTv /SeXriu t^s iwb toB ttoXXoC xP^""" eipiiii^VTii ; 
 cf. 3. 411 e, 9ebv iytay'' iLv, k.t.'K. 
 
 = 3. 410 b-c. 3 3. 410 c — ^412 a. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 29 
 
 admiration and true beauty to its love, to keep its perceptions ■ 
 wakeful and clear, to refine and balance its emotions — these 
 are, in Plato's opinion, the functions of "musical" education. 
 But it will not be truly "musical," truly "harmonious," 
 unless it be counterbalanced by something different.' If the 
 "philosophic" side of the soul be exclusively fostered, its 
 gentleness will turn into effeminacy, its sensitiveness into 
 irritability, its simple love into feverish desire.^ It is not 
 enough (though this is important) that the material presented 
 in "music" should itself be such as to brace the softer quali- 
 ties in the soul; it must be supplemented by nurture of an 
 altogether different kind acting upon altogether different 
 qualities. This is the office of "gymnastic," which, by bodily 
 exercises, develops and educates the element of "spirit." 
 For "spirit," though it has an instinctive tendency to ally 
 itself with reason, requires training if the tendency is to be- 
 come a habit. Proper "gymnastic" will discipline the wild 
 impulses of violence and pugnacity, developing the intelligent 
 courage of the citizen-soldier, instead of the blind ferocity of 
 the barbarian or the wild beast,' while it will counteract the 
 yielding, voluptuous, or nervous tendencies by encouraging 
 competition, endurance, and presence of mind. On the 
 other hand, excessive attention to it brings with it evils as 
 great as its undue neglect. The body then gradually swallows 
 up the mind; the whole man swells with the pride of con-' 
 scious strength; by degrees his courage sinks into brutality, 
 and his high spirit into insolence ; his senses, the windows of 
 the mind, are clogged and darkened, and his intelligence, / 
 neglected and starved, grows "weak, deaf, and blind.'|j 
 The problem, then, of education is to adjust these two com-l| • 
 
 1 3. 412 a; cf. 9. 591 d. 3 4. 430 b-c. 
 
 2 Cf. 3. 403'a; 404 d-e; 410 a. 
 
30 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 plementary but conflicting elements in human nature.* The 
 soul is like a stringed instrument, and education has to tune 
 it, tightening here and slackening there, that it may become 
 one instead of many, and its hfe a harmony instead of a dis- 
 cord. The man who can thus educate himself or others, 
 who can "combine music and gymnastic, and apply them in 
 due proportion to the soul," deserves, far more than any 
 musician, to be called a "musical" man. 
 / Of the two branches of education, "music," in its widest 
 sense,^ will clearly begin before "gymnastic," for we tell 
 stories to children before they can take athletic exercise. The 
 means employed by "music" in the Platonic system are 
 literature, music proper, and the other fine arts. Each of 
 these, in its different way, is capable of expressing certain 
 ethical characteristics, and by each these characteristics are 
 conveyed, through the eye or ear, to the soul.^ Of the various 
 means, literature, in the shape of stories and poetry, naturally 
 comes first,^ and the questions which Plato' raises regarding 
 the educational use of Hterature are two : firstly, what should 
 it express? and secondly, how should it express it? The 
 first question explains itself; the second concerns Hterary 
 form and style, and, as the ethical influence of form depepds 
 mainly, in Plato's view, on the degree to which it is dramatic, 
 this question to him comes to be: How far is the dramatic 
 element in literature good or bad for education? Such a 
 problem would not arise until a comparatively late stage, for 
 in young children the susceptibility to Hterary influence is 
 as yet too embryonic to admit such distinctions as dramatic 
 or undramatic, personal or impersonal, and the Uke. The, 
 
 I 3. 412 a; cf. 4, 443 d-e. 3 3. 400 c— 401 a. s 3. 392 c; 398 b. 
 "2. 376 e. 4 2. 376 e; 377 a. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 31 
 
 first question, then, is not as to the form but as to the sub- 
 stance of literature, regarded as an educational agent. 
 
 "In all work the beginning is of the greatest importance, 
 especially when we have to do with a young and tender crea- 
 ture, for then, more than at any other time, it receives the 
 particular fashion and stamp which we wish to impress upon 
 it;'" and so, "what the child hears when it is young generally 
 becomes fixed fast and indelibly in its mind. "^ This is 
 Plato's reason for giving so much consideration to the begin- 
 nings of education. The young soul, like the young body, ■^' 
 is plastic and malleable, and mothers and nurses, who take 
 such care that their children's limbs shall grow straight, 
 should remember how much more care is needed in the 
 handling and shaping of their minds.' What, then, are the 
 ideas which should be impressed most deeply on the minds of 
 children? Speaking generally, they will be such as we (' 
 should wish them to retain when they are grown up.* The 
 education of childhood should lay a foundation of character 
 which will not have to be cut away as years go on, but will 
 invite and sustain the superstructure of manhood. Such a 
 foundation Plato would see laid in certain rehgious or semi- 1 
 religious ideas; he would, in other words, have the funda- 
 mental elements of character developed in the first instance 
 by habitually putting before the minds of the young the true 
 nature of God, and of what is most godlike in man. In this 
 sense, then, that he would represent the primary moral ideas 
 to children as embodied in divine or superhuman beings, 
 Plato may be truly said to invest those ideas with a religious 
 sanction and to give his system of education a religious 
 
 I 2. 377 a-b. ^ 2. 378 d-e. 3 2. 377 c. 
 
 4 2. 377 b, iireiSiv TeKeuBwffiv; cf. 383 c, el fiiWovaiv, K, t. \. 
 
32 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 basis. The child is to be bred up in the belief that beings 
 greater and better than himself have behaved in a certain 
 way, and his natural impulse to imitate is thus to be utilized 
 in forming his own character." It would, however, be an 
 inversion of the real order of Plato's thought to say that he 
 conceives the ideas in question to owe their validity to their 
 superhuman embodiment. On the contrary, it is clear that 
 with him the moral is the criterion of the supernatural, not 
 the supernatural of the moral; and that if, and so far as, a 
 reUgious sanction means a sanction derived from a story of 
 miraculous events, he considers that sanction to belong to a 
 rudimentary stage of education and inteUigence. This will 
 appear more plainly if we examine the form in which what 
 we may call religious truth is supposed by him to be imparted. 
 Education, Plato says,^ must begin with literature, and 
 "Hterature is of two kinds, true and false; it is with the 
 latter kind that education must begin, for the literature which 
 we read to children consists of myths, and myths, speaking 
 I generally, are false, though they contain elements of truth 
 as well." The whole circle of Greek religious ideas, so far 
 as they found expression in language at all, did so mainly in 
 the form of myths. Instead of an authorized collection of 
 more or less historical books, Tvith a mass of authorized 
 doctrine more or less directly depending upon it, the Greeks 
 had a number of floating mythical stories, local and national, 
 some of which, receiving glorified shape from the genius of 
 poets or artists, exercised a special ascendency over the popu- 
 
 I This impulse is mostly insisted on by Plato in connection with what 
 is bad (2. 378 b; 3. 391 e), but it is implied in all that he says of early educa- 
 tion. Cf. 6. 500 c, ^ ofei Tivci fiTixav^v elvai, pT(f Tis o/uXct iyif'^yos, fi')) 
 liilieiffSai iKeim ; j 
 
 = 2. 376 e— 377 a. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 33 
 
 lar imagination. The bulk of these stories Plato unhesita- 
 tingly pronounces "false," and what he means by "false" 
 appears from a passage* where he is enumerating the cases 
 in which "falsehood in speech" may be useful and admissi- 
 ble. One of these cases is "the falsehood of the poet": for 
 "in mythology, owing to our ignorance of the actual truth of,' 
 what happened long ago, we make the falsehood as like the 
 truth as we possibly can, and so render it useful." The old 
 myths, then, are untrue, not because they necessarily misrep- 
 resent facts, but because the lapse of time prevents us from 
 knowing whether any facts underUe them, and what those 
 facts are. They are like pictures of which we are no longer 
 able to test the accuracy. And yet, in the same sentence 
 which tells us that myths are false because we do not know 
 the truth of what they say, we are told that we can "make 
 them like the truth." The explanation of this apparent con- 
 tradiction is found in an important distinction in the sense 
 of falsehood. In the sense that they can at best be only an 
 uncertain approximation to the truth, all myths and mythic 
 poetry are necessarily untrue. They may, however, be 
 untrue in another, and, to Plato, more serious, sense; they 
 may not only veil our want of historical knowledge, they may 
 also contradict our fundamental ideas about the subjects of 
 which they treat; they may be not only unhistorical, but 
 morally or metaphysically inconsistent and illogical.^ Their 
 subject-matter is the divine nature, gods and demigods; 
 of this nature we must have a more or less definite concep- 
 tion, and wherever a njyth contradicts that conception we 
 must pronounce it false. It is in this sense that Plato speaks 
 of the poet "telling his falsehood badly,"^ "when he makes a 
 
 1 2. 382 d. 3 2. 377 d-e; cf. 3. 388 c. 
 
 2 2. 380 c, oifre iiiuj}uva airh ainoti. 
 
34 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 bad likeness in language of the characters of gods and heroes, 
 like a painter who paints a picture not at all like what he 
 means to copy." And he gives numerous illustrations of his 
 meaning; the dismal accounts of Hades are "not true;'" the 
 stories of the changes of Proteus and Thetis, of the robberies 
 of Theseus and Peirithous, are "calumnies;"^ and it is a sort 
 of "blasphemy" against Achilles to say or to believe that he 
 was so avaricious as to accept Agamemnon's presents, and not 
 to give up the body of Hector without a price.' In one sense, 
 then (to recapitulate), all myths must be false, in so far as 
 we cannot know whether they represent what actually hap- 
 pened; in another sense they may be true or false, according 
 as they do or do not conform to the logical laws of their sub- 
 ject-matter. And as Plato seems to consider myths to be 
 the appropriate form for speaking of the divine nature, when 
 it has to be spoken of as a person or persons, he woiild seem 
 to conceive of specifically religious truth, so far as it implies 
 such a personal representation, as belonging to a rudimen- 
 tary stage of mental development. On the other hand, he 
 clearly sees no objection to employing this admittedly inade- 
 quate form of expression as an agent in education, nor to 
 telUng children rehgious stories which cannot pretend to be 
 historical. 
 
 This entire subordination of historical to moral truth in 
 rehgious education, strange as it may seem to us, was natural 
 to Plato. The mythology which occupied the Greek mind 
 was its own creation, the offspring of its early contact with 
 nature, developed by subsequent reflection; and the mind 
 from which it sprang felt itself competent to judge it. The 
 element of dogmatic fixity in their rehgion attached much 
 
 I 3. 386 b-c. 2 2. 381 d; 3. 391 c-d. 33. 391 a; cf.'a. 381 e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 3S 
 
 more to its ritual than to its ideas; these latter were a plastic 
 material, growing in accordance with the secret laws of 
 psychology and language, or the conscious design of poets. 
 In appljdng to them canons of criticism resting on no author- 
 ity but that of his own moral consciousness, Plato might 
 expect to offend many popular beliefs and prejudices, but 
 they would not be the beliefs or prejudices of a priesthood or 
 a church. It seems to be incident to reUgious- movements 
 and ideas that they rapidly gather around them an accretion 
 of mythical events and conceptions, and neither the Jewish 
 nor the Christian rehgion is an exception to the general rule. 
 But there is this great difference between them and the Greek 
 religion, that the literature to which the former attach them- 
 selves, large as is its infusion of poetry and mythology, still 
 purports in its most important parts to be historical, and 
 that with its historical character its religious significance 
 has come to be almost inseparably associated. And thus, 
 in religious education, we are not only met by the question 
 which Plato asked, whether the whole of this literature is 
 consistent with our ideas of the divine nature, but we have 
 also to settle the question, which did not present itself to 
 Plato, whether it is consistent with our canons of historical 
 evidence. Had Plato been writing now, he would have found 
 the second a more prominent question than the first, and we 
 cannot say with certainty what his advice would have been to 
 those who find themselves in the dilemma of teaching, or 
 seeing others teach, their children reUgious stories which 
 they themselves do not believe to be true. We may, how- 
 ever, conjecture that he would have made the moral worth 
 of those stories the final test, and that, if they had seemed to 
 him to embody ideas really vital to human life and character, 
 
36 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 he would have retained them, trusting to the child's mind to 
 assimilate what was valuable, and to later education to pre- 
 serve or to rectify its sense of historical truth. 
 
 The increased appreciation of the distinction between 
 truth of fact and truth of idea is often and rightly represented 
 as a characteristic acquisition of modern, as compared with 
 ancient, thought. Yet, in its ultimate analysis, the distinc- 
 tion is seen to exist only in abstraction. Neither "mere" 
 facts nor "mere" ideas form any part of our knowledge, but 
 facts which are interpreted into our mental experience, and 
 ideas which are referred to something independent of that 
 experience. The importance of a historical fact must depend, 
 in the last resort, upon its moral or ideal significance, or, in 
 other words, upon what it tells us of our own nature; and our 
 conception of the use and value of evidence is in advance of 
 that of the Greeks, not because we have discovered a new 
 sort of truth which was unknown to them, but because our 
 whole mental horizon has enormously expanded, and we are 
 far more vividly conscious of the possible bearings of one 
 part of our experience upon another. Our truth of fact is 
 more pregnant with thought than theirs, and our truth of 
 idea goes back into a deeper reaHty. 
 
 We have seen in what sense Plato bases education on 
 religion, and how he conceives that the mythical form in which 
 rehgious ideas are presented may be, in different ways, both 
 true and untrue. The next question is: What is that 
 religious truth which mythical literature may approximately 
 express, and by its conformity to which its educational value 
 is to be determined? Clearly it can be no other than the 
 most perfect and consistent conception which can be formed 
 of the divine nature. Plato accordingly begins by laying 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 37 
 
 down certain "outlines of theology, which the makers of 
 stories must not jDe allowed to transgress," for "God must 
 always be represented as he really is, whether in epic or in 
 tragedy."* The doctrines of Plato's state-reUgion are only 
 two, but they go to the root of the matter; the first is, that 
 God is good and the cause of good only;^ the second is, that 
 God is unchangeable and true.^ Thus simply stated, they 
 are the common property of all higher reUgious thought; but 
 Plato's appUcation of them is to some extent peculiar. The 
 primitive conception of the deity as the simple embodiment 
 of power readily leads in one direction to the belief that he 
 sends good and evil upon man according to his caprice, and 
 in another to the idea that he is jealous of human success. 
 To these deep-rooted tenets of the Greek popular rehgion 
 Plato opposes the simple logical position that what is in its 
 essence good cannot produce what is not good. As to the 
 difficulty of accounting for the undoubted preponderance of 
 evil in the world,* "either we must say that it is not the work 
 of God; or that, if the work of God, its infliction is just and 
 good, and those who suffer it are the better for being chas- 
 tised To say that bad men are miserable because 
 
 they need chastisement is allowable, but not to say that God 
 is the cause of their misery."^ In the emphasis with which 
 Plato insists on this truth, we see not only the resolution 
 of the philosopher to uphold his logical conception of the 
 divine nature, but also the anxiety of the legislator and 
 teacher to press home human responsibility. To encourage 
 the natural tendency to lay to the door of an irresponsible 
 being the evil which we ourselves have caused or deserved 
 
 ' 2. 379 a. 2 2. 379 a — 380 c. 3 2. 380 d — 383 b. 
 
 4iroXi> yi,p i\i/nw riryaSi, twv Kaxwv iiiuv, 2. 379 c. s 2. 380 a-b. 
 
38 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 is what no state -will do "if it is to be well governed."' In 
 the oracular words of the daughter of Necessity to the souls 
 about to enter on their earthly hfe: "Virtue owns no master; 
 as a man honors or dishonors her he will have more or less 
 of her. The guilt is with him who chooses. God is guilt- 
 
 iless.''^" 
 
 The apphcation of the other great reUgious principle is 
 still more strongly colored by Greek or Platonic ideas. The 
 liability to change by external influences, whether in organic 
 bodies, or in products of art, or in the human soul itself, 
 seems to Plato a universal symptom of inferiority or weak- 
 ness; least of all in the divine being, the absolutely best, 
 can he admit any variableness.^ Nor again in another and 
 
 I more obvious sense can he conceive of God as liable to 
 change.* The metamorphoses which play so large a part 
 in the stories about the Greek divinities are impossible to 
 a being who is already perfect; for no one, God or man, will 
 voluntarily change for the worse. It is not the representation 
 of the deity as having shape or simiHtude which offends Plato, 
 as it did the great Jewish teachers, but the indignity offered 
 to the divine essence by supposing it capable of wantonly 
 taking lower forms. Lastly, it is inconceivable that God 
 should be otherwise than true,' whether in the pecuKarly 
 Platonic sense of untruth," in which it means want of con- 
 formity in the mind to fact, ignorance of that which it is 
 vital to know, the "delusion" which makes us "believe a 
 lie;" or in the ordinary sense of deceiving others by word or 
 deed. ' In the first sense no man, much less God, could choose 
 
 I 2. 380 b; and cf. 10. 6ig c, oi yi,p eouTov ahiaaBai rwv xaKuv, k.t. X. 
 = 10.6176. 4 2. 38ib-e. ^382 a-b. 
 
 3 2. 380 e — 381 b. s 2. 381 e — 383 b. 7 382 c-e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 39 
 
 to be untrue; in the latter, there are some circumstances 
 under which men think lying admissible, but none of these 
 circumstances can apply to God. 
 
 Such is Plato's conception of the divine nature; and as 
 such, in its essence and its operation, he would have it pre- 
 sented by poets to the imagination of his future citizens, "if 
 they are to be men who reverence God and are like God as 
 far as it is possible for man to be so.'" These general reli- 
 gious ideas, however, are not the only ideas which he would 
 see embodied in poetry, and by which he would judge of 
 its right to a place in the education of a people. It should 
 be its function also to exhibit the moral ideal in all its various 
 manifestations; and we have next to ask how Plato con- 
 ceived of that ideal, and what are the specific qualities and 
 principles which he considered to be at once the true elements 
 of moral greatness and the legitimate material of poetical 
 art. Plato's "whole duty of man" is comprised in the fol 
 lowing list : Honor to parents, love of fellow-citizens, courage,' 
 truthfulness, self-control. Each of these deserves a few 
 words of notice. The honor due to father and mother is 
 set by Plato next to the honor due to the gods,^ and he de- 
 nounces the stories of the treatment of Cronos by his son 
 Zeus as "the greatest of lies about the greatest of things." 
 The mixed sentiment of awe, admiration, and modesty which 
 the Greeks associated with the untranslatable word atStos, 
 and which they regarded as the germ of all youthful virtue, 
 has its earliest and simplest expression in the feeling of chil- 
 dren for their parents; and to diffuse this feeling through 
 society, knitting old and young together by an instinctive 
 bond, and superseding the law of the state by the finer law 
 
 ' 2. 383 c. = 3. 386 a; 2. 377 e; 378 b. 
 
40 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 of family affection, was one of the fairest, though most im- 
 possible, dreams of Plato's life.' Equally important in his 
 eyes was the sense of fellowship among citizens.' The false 
 tales of the battles of the gods with one another are not to 
 be told to children, who should see in the Olympian com- 
 munity the glorified image of their own. Rather they are 
 to be taught that it is "very disgraceful lightly to quarrel 
 among themselves," "that citizen never falls out with citizen, 
 and that it is wicked to do it." Thus the earliest lessons of 
 education are to appeal to that element in the soul which, as 
 we have seen, Plato regarded as the highest and most dis- 
 tinctively human in man, the element in virtue of which he 
 is not a mere isolated atom and center of resistance, but 
 capable of attraction both to what is higher than himself and 
 to what is hke himself.^ 
 
 From the common groundwork of citizen-like feeling 
 we pass to the specific virtues of public Hfe, and the first of 
 these is courage,* or, as we might more Hterally and more 
 instructively translate the Greek word avhpeia, "manliness." 
 Plato's treatment of this quality is characteristically Greek. 
 The child who is to be one day a soldier and to fight for his 
 country must learn before all things not to be afraid of death. 
 Death, as the inevitable end of youth and strength and beauty, 
 as the entrance to a joyless and ineffectual phantom world, 
 seemed to the Greek imagination of all terrible things the 
 most terrible, and the man who could face it without flinching 
 the most worthy to be called a man. Plato, as usual, has 
 both a speculative and a practical interest in banishing from 
 poetry the ghastly pictures of Hades; they "are not true,"' 
 
 I 5. 463 d; 465 b. 3 Cf. 2. 375 c-d, and 376 b-c, -with 378 c. 
 
 ' 3- 386 a;l2.^378ib-c. * 3. 386 a— 388. ^^^6 c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 41 
 
 and they "do no good." "Not true," for to Plato it is dear 
 that a good man can have no reason for being afraid of death;' 
 and "they do no good,"^ for whatever scope they may give 
 to descriptive power, and however pleasant it may be to feel 
 the pulse quicken and the skin creep at reading them, they 
 only unnerve the character, and are bad for children who 
 are to learn "to be freemen, fearing slavery worse than 
 death."' But if a man need not be afraid to die himself, 
 neither need he be afraid for his friend to die,' and the ex- 
 penditure of tears and lamentations over the departed is 
 both uncalled for and unmanly, for a man ought to learn as 
 far as possible to lean upon himself, not upon others. And . 
 if it is weak to give way to excess of grief, it is no less so 
 to give way to the opposite emotion; laughter, like tears, 
 is not to be allowed to get the better of us, for the violent 
 expression of one feeling tends to produce an equally violent 
 reaction.' 
 
 These precepts, to which Plato is led by his conception 
 of moral truth, remind us of those which Lessing arrived at 
 by thinking out the laws of artistic propriety. Perhaps few 
 Englishmen will feel themselves or their children to be much 
 in need of such precepts. Many of us would be only too 
 glad sometimes if our sense of the pathetic or the ludicrous 
 could find more relief in expression. To the Greek of Plato's 
 time, as to some southern peoples now, the tendency to sud- 
 den and violent revulsions of feeling was a real cause and 
 symptom of weakness of character. To us, taught as we 
 are from early years by example and temperament to be 
 neutral and moderate in our language and gesture, an anal- 
 
 '387d. 3387 b. 53886. 
 
 ' 387 b-c. 4 387 d-e. 
 
42 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 ogous danger may perhaps be found in the tendency to nurse 
 suppressed emotion until it becomes a drain upon the mental 
 forces or breaks out in extravagant action. 
 
 In his treatment of truthfulness,' the virtue which comes 
 next upon his Hst, Plato is short and simple. Elsewhere,^ 
 in passages where truth is identified with "what is," we find 
 him basing the obligation to truthfulness upon the desire 
 to be in harmony with fact; here, where he is concerned pri- 
 marily with early education, he connects it naturally with 
 obedience. He would have the young citizens continually 
 conscious that they are living under authority, and that " to 
 say the thing that is not"^ to their elders is as "deadly and 
 destructive to the community" as it would be for the sailor 
 to lie to his officer or the patient to his doctor. Obedience, 
 too, is the basis of the remaining virtue of aco^poa-vvr]* which 
 in its literal sense describes the man who remains "sound 
 in mind," or, as we might say, "keeps his head," under the 
 stress of appetite and passion. "To obey those who are in 
 authority and to have authority over one's self "° is the fully 
 developed virtue of which the sentiment of atSeo? is the in- 
 stinctive germ. It is this law-loving spirit, whether the law 
 be the external law of the state or the voice of reason within 
 us, which is the enemy alike of forwardness and insolence, 
 of gluttony, drunkenness, and lust, of meanness and avarice. 
 The principle of balance and control, which so pervades the 
 Greek life and philosophy, comes out nowhere so prominently 
 as in the conception of this virtue. It is a principle which no 
 longer appeals strongly to the modern mind, to which it 
 tends to suggest rather the complacencies and prettinesses 
 
 ' 3. 389 b-d. 3 3. 389 c. s 389 d-e. 
 
 = E. g. 6. 485 c; 486 d. 43. 389 d— 391 d. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 43 
 
 of morality than its inward victories or struggles. But to 
 a people like the Greeks, combining such an extraordinary 
 sense of proportion with such an extraordinary capacity for 
 excess, a perfect self-mastery might well seem as high an 
 ideal as the humility and purity which take its place in the 
 Christian code. 
 
 The elements of moral greatness just enumerated form 
 the second main category in the legitimate material of poetry 
 in a well-ordered state. To trace them out in the lives and 
 actions of national heroes and great men, and to give them 
 fitting expression, is the true function of the masters of lan- 
 guage. The divine and the heroic, however, are not the only \ 
 subjects which Plato would allow to poets. There remains ' 
 the whole sphere of human life and nature to discover some 
 principle in which, was the original problem of the Re-public} 
 How, then, are poets to deal with this vast material ? What 
 canons can be laid down to which their imagination should 
 conform in drawing human nature, corresponding to the 
 canons of religious and moral truth which they are not to 
 transgress in drawing the divine ? Is the world really what 
 it is popularly represented, a scene of confusion and caprice, 
 in which the unjust are happy and the just miserable ?^ The * 
 answer to these questions is the Republic itself. If, as Plato 
 would have us believe, justice is the health, and injustice the 
 disease, of human life, individual and social;' if the triumph 
 of what is niost divine in the world is also the triumph of 
 what is most human,^ and man can only realize himself by 
 living at his highest ;^ if the life of the just man is in the hand of 
 God, who orders all things for good whatever the appearances 
 
 1 3- 392 a, vepl &v6piivtov rh XoiTrAi" S,v efj). 3 4.444 d e. 
 
 2 3. 392 b. 49. 589 c— 590 a. 5 9. 586 d-e. 
 
44 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 may be,' and if, when we come to look at the facts, even in 
 the judgment of the world, justice more often prospers than 
 not;^ if this is the truth, then children must be taught it, and 
 poets must sing it, and the contrary representations of popu- 
 lar literature are as great calumnies upon man as they are 
 upon gods and heroes. 
 
 Many reflections must be suggested to a modern reader 
 of the part of the Republic to which we have been referring, 
 partly as regards the nature and method of early education, 
 and partly also as regards the position and functions of poetry 
 and literature. One of the first points which must strike him, 
 accustomed as he is to hear the methods of imparting knowl- 
 edge, and the kind of knowledge to be imparted, made the 
 main subjects of discussion, is the almost exclusive attention 
 I given by Plato to the method of developing character, and the 
 kind of character to be developed. We are not, indeed, to 
 suppose that Plato intended children to be brought up in 
 ignorance of reading, writing, and arithmetic; besides this 
 elementary knowledge, he evidently contemplated some teach- 
 ing of the rudiments of such science as then existed.' | But 
 he does not dwell upon this early scientific education, except 
 to say that it will be comparatively unsystematic,^ and that 
 it should be made as little compulsory as possible, "for the 
 acquisition of knowledge ought not to be made a slavery to 
 any free man."^ Thus it remains true, on the whole, that 
 Plato regarded the formation of character in childhood and 
 early youth as a much more important part of education 
 than useful instruction or the training of the intellect.|, It 
 would, however, be a mistake to suppose that because this 
 
 1 10. 6i2 e — 613 b. 3 7. 536 d; 537 c; cf. 6. 498 b. 
 
 2 10. 613 b-e. ivpopdWftv, 536 d: x^^V, S37 '^- ^ 7- S36 e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 45 
 
 branch of education finds a comparatively small place in 
 modern theoretical discussions, it is therefore neglected in 
 modem practice; on the contrary, it is probably just because 
 it receives so much attention at home and at school that it is 
 thought capable of taking care of itself. The successes of 
 our public-school system have lain, much more than in any 
 particular stimulus that they have given to Hterary or scientific 
 activity, in the production of certain types of character and 
 the preparation for the art of life, and in these points we 
 naturally feel less need for method or even for consistency. 
 And yet perhaps our very feehng of security should make us 
 difi&dent. The names of " Christian," "scholar," and "gentle- 
 man" are as much in our mouths as those of the cardinal 
 virtues were in the mouths of the Greeks; but the ideas of 
 religion, culture, and manhood, which we attach to them, 
 are not less confused, and often not less untrue, than some 
 of those which Plato foxmd in the current hterature and 
 opinion of his day. 
 
 Our neglect of the theory of ethical education as compared 
 with Plato has also another explanation. In a small Greek 
 state, with the whole or greater part of its effective citizens 
 taking part in the conduct of affairs, the influence of personal 
 character upon society and politics was more direct and un- 
 mistakable than it can be in the vast organization of a modern 
 nation, where the members at the circumference may be al- 
 most unconscious of their connection with the center. Ulti- 
 mately, no doubt, it is as true now as it was in the times of Plato 
 and Aristotle that the character of a people is responsible 
 for its social and political life, and that education is mainly 
 important because it produces or modifies that character and 
 thus affects the pubUc interests. But the steps by which 
 
46 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 ethical and psychological agencies come to the surface in 
 politics are much more numerous now and much more difficult 
 to trace, and it is proportionately more easy to isolate particu- 
 lar aspects of the national life and to treat them as if they had 
 no connection with each other or the whole. And thus, while 
 it has become a commonplace that many of the evils of modern 
 society can be cured only by education, few people probably 
 can see the connection between the evil and the remedy. as 
 clearly, and express it as simply, as Plato did when he said 
 that the encouragement of ghostly fears and superstitions 
 tends to make bad soldiers, or that changes of fashion in 
 popular music are symptoms of poUtical revolution. 
 
 But the difference between ourselves and Plato in the rela- 
 tive importance attached to the education of character is not 
 greater than the difference in the means employed for that 
 education. In the first place, we have no really national 
 mythology which takes, or could be made to take, such a posi- 
 tion in education as did that of the Greek people. The Arthur 
 legend has indeed been recently made to yield the picture of 
 an "ideal knight," and the still more recent treatment of the 
 Scandinavian sagas has shown that the ideas which stirred 
 our forefathers are still aUve in ourselves. But the position of 
 Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Morris in this respect is very different 
 from that of the Greek dramatists. The myths with which 
 the latter worked had been handed down by a continuous 
 tradition, both literary and popular; and however freely a 
 poet might transform or modernize them, he was still sure of 
 appealing to the popular imagination, of which his material 
 had come to form an integral part. The characters of Celtic 
 and Scandinavian mythology are no longer domesticated 
 among us; we no longer regard them with either familiarity 
 
-•IN THE REPUBLIC OF ?LATO 47 
 
 or reverence; the ties which bound them to us have been 
 shattered beyond repair, and it is only here and there that we 
 dimly catch sight of them behind the crowd of classical and 
 Christian figures which has pressed in between us and them. 
 The place thus left vacant in education by our want of a 
 national mythology has been partially filled by other forms 
 of literature, of which the books of the Old and New Testa- 
 ments are the most conspicuous, while alongside of them there 
 has grown, up the miscellaneous mass of stories, romances, 
 allegories, and fairy-tales, comprised under the head of 
 "hterature for the young." It is from these two sources that j 
 our early conceptions of the divine and the heroic are mainly / 
 derived. What would Plato have thought of them? He 
 would no doubt have been surprised at the hard and fast Hne 
 which it is usual to draw between sacred and profane 
 literature, which robs the former of much of its legitimate 
 hterary effect, and the latter of much of its educational power. 
 There may seem to be a certain incongrmty in applying high 
 canons of criticism to the story-books of children; and indeed 
 their miscellaneous character and rapid multiphcation makes 
 such an appHcation almost impossible. Yet it would be a 
 fruitful work for a competent person to make such a collection 
 from the rehgious books, mythologies, and popular tales of 
 different peoples and ages as should appeal to and stimulate 
 the best elements in a child's imagination, without either 
 spoiling its simphcity, over-exciting its sensibihty, or nursing , 
 its conceit. In such a collection the most appropriate stories I 
 from the Bible would find their natural place. The circum- 
 stances which have led to the biblical writings being treated 
 as a single book, while investing them all with the same pro- 
 miscuous sanctity, have greatly increased the difi&culty of 
 
48 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 usingthem as a textbook of religion and morality. There is 
 much in the Old Testament which Plato's canons would ex- 
 clude from the education of the young, and some of the worst 
 expressions of Jewish fanaticism have served as the watch- 
 words of modem cruelty or cant. On the other hand, the direct 
 influence of example is much less in the case of the Old Testa- 
 ment than it was in that of the Greek poets. The heroes of 
 Jewish history do not Hve in the Enghsh mind as types to be 
 imitated in the same way that the Greek heroes lived in the 
 mind of their own nation. It is to the words with which their 
 names are associated, rather than to the deeds, that the 
 influence of the former is due, and this makes it all the more 
 important that their words should be purged from the baser 
 matter which adheres to them, and fitted to be in truth what 
 they are now only in name, a revelation of the divine nature 
 to the English people. With the New Testament the case is 
 different. Here it is the story of a life and a character to 
 which, more than to anything else, the power of the book has 
 been due; and Plato, if he might have warned us gently 
 against that literal imitation which is really no imitation, 
 would have found there aU, and more than all, the ideal of 
 heroic manhood which he sought for in vain in the figures of 
 his native mythology. And yet we must see that the very 
 exaltation of that character and life makes it difficult to pre- 
 sent it to children without falsifying it, and that we are not 
 teaching them to be Hke Jesus, either on the one hand by 
 making him so familiar to them that they can "play at being 
 him," or on the other by introducing him to them in a buckram 
 of ecclesiastical dogma. To us, as to Plato, the problem of 
 early rehgious education is, how to express the highest truth 
 i in the mfesti appropriate and the least inadequate forms. But 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 49 
 
 in the interval of more than two thousandfyears which sepa- 
 rates us from him, the spiritual inheritance of Europe has been 
 both enormously enriched and enormously incumbered; 
 enriched by the advent and expansion of new and potent reli- 
 gious ideas, which have carried the human mind to heights 
 scarcely dreamt of by him; but incumbered also by an under- 
 growth of theological tangle which makes it harder for us to 
 keep in view the grander outhnes of the truth and the light 
 toward which they tend. 
 
 The demand of Plato that poets should be teachers, and, 
 their subject-matter limited accordingly, will generally be 
 received with disgust or derision in the republic of letters. 
 This is due partly to the extreme simplicity and even crudity 
 of Plato's language, and the difficulty of translating it to suit 
 the complex conditions of our modern civihzation; partly to 
 a narrow conception of the scope of education on the one hand 
 and the responsibihties of Uterature on the other. Plato in 
 the Republic,^ as he tells us himself, "is not making poetry, 
 but foimding a commonwealth, and the founder should know 
 the outlines within which the invention of poets should be 
 exercised; but it is not his business to invent himself." 
 Hence to any one who thinks of the exuberant variety of the 
 poetic activity, these "outlines" are apt to seem a Procrustes 
 bed, and Plato's poet is pictured as a literary tailor who cuts 
 his wares to order. And this feeling is intensified by the fact 
 that Plato is much more concerned to criticise the current 
 literature of his time than to suggest fresh lines for writers to 
 work on, thus leaving the impression of an entirely hostile 
 attitude to poetry in general. Moreover, in reading proposals 
 like his, we are naturally more apt to seize upon the diffi- 
 
 1 2. 378 e— 379 a. 
 
so THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 culties or mistakes in them than on the essential truth which 
 they may contain. We are all agreed that a public censorship 
 of poetry would be impossible and self- destructive; we also 
 see that, as a matter of fact, the greatest poets have not often 
 been educators of their people. We forget that this idea of a 
 censorship is an accident of Plato's mind and circumstances, 
 and that the truest ideas are often those which are most slowly 
 reahzed in history. For what is the requirement here made, 
 if we look at it on its positive, not merely its negative, side ? 
 (It is that the poet should take his place in the commonwealth, 
 'not as an ornamental luxury, a caterer for the pleasure of 
 intellectual epicures,' but as an integral part of it, with a work 
 of his own, imprinting^ the first indelible ideas upon the souls 
 of the young, revealing' the inscrutable nature of God in 
 forms of imaginative truth, nerving^ the heart and chastening 
 the emotions by the power of heroic examples, interpreting' 
 to the fancy the language of facts, and surrounding" the mind 
 with an atmosphere of health and beauty. This is not a 
 position of which any poet need be ashamed. Few, if any, 
 have ever risen to it; but not a few, and those not the least, 
 have claimed it. The 'abilities of the poet, says Milton, 
 
 wheresoever they be found, are the inspired gift of God, rarely bestowed, 
 but yet to some — though most abuse — in every nation: and are of 
 power, besides the office of a pulpit, to inbreed and cherish in a great 
 people the seeds of virtue and pubUc civihty; to allay the perturbations 
 of the mind, and set the affections in right tune; to celebrate in glorious 
 and lofty hymns the throne and equipage of God's almightiness, and 
 
 ' 2. 373 b, where poets and artists are included in the list of "unneces- 
 sary" luxuries in the rpvtjiwaa, ir6XiS. 
 
 22.377 c. 3 2. 382 d. 4 3. 387 c; 389 e. 
 
 5 3. 401 c, Tois eitpvUs duva/ihovs Ixveiav rijv toO Ka\oO re Kal ei^X'i- 
 fwvos (piffiv, and cf. 402 c, where the "images of the letters," which "music" 
 has got to teach us to read, seem to be works of art. "S 3. 401 t. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO Si 
 
 what he suffers to be wrought with high providence in his church; to 
 sing victorious agonies of martyrs and saints, the deeds and triumphs 
 of just and pious nations, doing valiantly through faith against the ene- 
 mies of Christ; to deplore the general relapses of kingdoms and states 
 from justice and God's true worship. Lastly, whatsoever in religion 
 is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave, whatsoever hath passion 
 or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from 
 without, or the wily subtleties and refluxes of man's thoughts from 
 within; all these things, with a solid and treatable smoothness, to point 
 out and describe. 
 
 High words like these will perhaps provoke a smile or a 
 sigh in those who remember the bathos of unsuccessful 
 attempts to carry them into effect; and when to this is added 
 the thought of the pressure of modern life, so feverish and 
 yet so mechanical, so interesting and yet so unlovely, the 
 poet himself will sometimes lose heart, and become, instead 
 of "the trumpet which sings to battle," "the idle singer of an 
 empty day." Yet those who fancy that the lamp of imagina- 
 tion is waning before the dawn of industry and science might 
 reflect that our scientific insight into nature is scarcely more 
 in advance of the crude fancies of the Greeks than our imagi- 
 native interpretation of it is in advance of their naive mythol- 
 ogy* And if others are inclined to retire to a "shadowy isle 
 of bliss," and to leave education to school boards and minis- 
 ters, they should remember that the "immortal garland" 
 of poetry must be "run for, not without dust and heat." 
 They might consider too (to adapt Milton's words once more), 
 "What nation it is whereof they are, and whereof" (if they 
 knew it)" they are the governors; a nation not slow and dull, 
 but of quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit; acute to invent, 
 subtile and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any 
 point that human capacity can soar to." Such a nation is 
 worthy to be educated by men who have the genius to do it. 
 
52 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 We have heard Plato's answer to the first of the two ques- 
 tions which he raised about poets — the question, What ought 
 they to say? and may now pass on to the second, How ought 
 they to say it ? What is the manner or form of poetry best 
 fitted to the functions which have been assigned to it in edu- 
 cation ? By the form of poetry Plato understands merely the 
 mode in which the poet represents the personages in his poem 
 — that is, whether he speaks in his own person and simply 
 describes what they say and do, or whether he puts himself in 
 their place and makes them speak and act for themselves.' 
 The first of these manAers he calls "narrative,"^ the second 
 "imitative;" the two may of course be employed separately, 
 or combined in various proportions in the same work. The 
 type of the "imitative" manner is the drama, that of the 
 "narrative" certain kinds of choric hymns, while the epic 
 introduces them both. We shall, however, understand Plato 
 better if we banish from our minds this triple division of poetry 
 with its modem associations, and fix them upon the real ques- 
 tion which occupied him. That question is, whether "imi- 
 tation," or, as we might better say, impersonation, should be 
 the ruling principle in poetry, or whether some other principle 
 should rule; or, in other words: Is the poet to put himself 
 into as many and as various interesting personalities and 
 situations as he possibly can, and is the greatest poet he 
 who can do this to the greatest extent; or is he to observe 
 some principle of selection other than that of the merely in- 
 teresting, and is there some other criterion of poetic excellence 
 than the degree of "imitative" power? That this is the 
 real issue in Plato's mind appears from the following 
 passage : 
 
 13. 392 c ff. "3- 394 c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO S3 
 
 The well-regulated man, when he comes in his narrative to a speech 
 or a deed of a good man, will, it seems to me, want to give it in the 
 very person of that man, and of such imitation he will not be ashamed; 
 he will imitate the good man most of all, when he acts without stumbling 
 or folly; to a less extent arfd degree when he has been upset by disease, 
 or love, or drunkenness, or any other calamity. But when he comes 
 upon a person unworthy of himself, he will not like seriously to assimi- 
 late himself to his inferior, unless it be on the few occasions when he 
 does something good; partly he is unpracticed in imitating such 
 people, and partly, too, it goes against the grain to put himself into the 
 mold of natures worse than his own; his mind scorns to do such a 
 thing, unless it be in fun.' 
 
 On the other hand, 
 
 the lower the nature of the poet, the less will he discriminate in what 
 he says, or think anything unworthy of him, so that he will try to imitate 
 anything and everj^hing, in sober earnest and before a large audience, 
 such things even as thunder and wind and hail, the noises of wheels 
 and pulleys, the tones of trumpets, flutes, pipes, and all kinds of instru- 
 ments, and the voices of dogs, sheep, and birds. ^ 
 
 We see that Plato is here grouping together forms of imita- 
 tion which would be distinguished by a modern writer. As 
 art and literature advance, the primitive delight of mere 
 mimicry gives way to that of subtler kinds of reproduction, 
 and tends to confine itself to the less educated classes of 
 society. But though the dramatic poet stands on a dififerent 
 level from the actor, still more from the pantomimist, they 
 all agree in one point — that they are endowed with more 
 than ordinary capacity of losing their own personality in that 
 of others. It is in this common capacity that Plato sees a 
 danger — a danger both to the artist who possesses it, and, 
 in various degrees, to the audience which is able to follow 
 him in the exercise of it. His whole conception of the true 
 
 ' 396 c-e. 2 397 a. 
 
54 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 form of human society is based, as we saw, on the principle 
 that each member in it should have his work to do, and should 
 do it.' He is convinced of the impossibility of one man's 
 excelHng in many trades or professions; the same natural 
 law which makes every man the possible helpmate of others 
 imposes on him the necessity of accepting help from them. 
 I And if one man cannot do many things well, neither can he 
 ; imitate many things; and Plato (at least when he wrote the 
 Republic) did not think it possible for the same poet, or 
 even for the same actor, to excel both in tragedy and comedy. 
 This law of the limitation of human nature, which he foimd 
 to hold good in arts and professions, he would see observed 
 in the greatest of all arts and professions, the life of the citizen 
 who is engaged in the public service of the state. To men 
 for whom the good of the commonwealth is to be the para- 
 mount rule of conduct, whose " craft "^ is to be to maintain 
 the liberty of their country, what need is there of doing or 
 being anything except what bears upon their work? and 
 if not of doing and being, why of imitating ? For imitation, 
 bodily or mental, cannot remain mere imitation; if it begin 
 early and continue long, it results in a second nature.^ If, 
 then, the young are to put themselves into other characters 
 at all, let it be such characters as we wish them ultimately 
 to be, but no others, "lest from the imitation they catch 
 something of the reality." And thus the only poets who 
 will have work to do in a well-ordered state will be those who 
 will "imitate what is right, and that only;"* who will express 
 in their works the true type of character, and thereby help .to 
 
 ' 3- 394 e— 39S c; cf. 2. 370 a-c. 
 
 ' Siiiuovpyoiis iXeuBeplas t^s tSKcus itim &Kpi§eU, 3. 395 c. 
 
 3 3- 39S c-d. +3. 397"d. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 55 
 
 produce it. As for the great pantomimic genius, "the man 
 with the skill to turn himself into all kinds of people, and to 
 imitate everything,"' he may be allowed to be "divine and 
 miraculous and delightful;" but he will find no audience in a 
 society, where "twofold and manifold men do not exist, but 
 everybody does one thing." 
 
 The mitigated attack made upon the drama in the third 
 book of the Republic is renewed by Plato in the tenth with 
 greater vehemence and a more elaborate array of argument. 
 We need not here enter into the general theory of the nature 
 of artistic production which he there advances in order to 
 refute the extravagant claims of omniscience made for the 
 poets by their admirers; but his account of the psychological 
 effects of dramatic poetry may be noticed, as it develops 
 and illustrates that given in the earher book. Plato charges 
 dramatic writers, firstly,^ with depending mainly upon illusion 
 for their success; and, secondly,' with weakening character 
 by over-stimulating the emotions. The meaning of the 
 first charge is best seen from the analogy of painting by 
 which it is illustrated.* Painting and kindred arts produce 
 their effects by taking advantage of certain optical illusions; 
 the perception of the actual proportions of objects is kept in 
 abeyance by the mere appearance, until corrected by scientific 
 measurement. Similarly the poet takes advantage of illu- 
 sions of feeling;^ the aspects of character which he likes to 
 represent are not those where it is simple, quiet, consistent, 
 and rational, but rather its emotional aspects, with their 
 shifting lights and shadows, where the contrasts are strong 
 and the transitions rapid; and the element in his audience 
 
 1 397 e — 398 b. 3 605 c — 606 d; 605 b. s 604 d — 605 e. 
 ' 10. 602 c — 60s ''• * ^°^ '-"^" 
 
56 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 to which he appeals, and upon which he reckons for his 
 success, is not the sober judgment which sees life in its 
 
 f true proportions, but the illusory feelings of the moment 
 which care only for their immediate satisfaction. So that 
 judged by the worth both of what it represents and of what it 
 appeals to, dramatic poetry seems to condemn itself to 
 inferiority. The second charge against it is an expansion 
 of that made in the third book. Few people reflect that in 
 
 I putting themselves in the positions of others, they catch 
 
 ' something which becomes their own.* Yet this is the case 
 when, in seeing tragedy and comedy, we give unrestrained 
 way to emotions which we should be ashamed to indulge in 
 real life. We think it does not matter, because we stand 
 outside the circumstances which call them forth; but when 
 similar circumstances arise in our own experience, we find 
 that our will has been weakened and our self-respect under- 
 mined. 
 
 Two dominant ideas underlie all the objections urged by 
 Plato against the dramatic element in Uterature; the duty of 
 
 1 being true to ourselves, and the duty of being true to facts. 
 The two were in his mind closely related. As the burden of 
 his philosophy of knowledge was that we should learn to see 
 things as they are, not as they appear to us to be, so the bur- 
 den of his philosophy of conduct is that we should learn to be 
 what we really are, and not what our fancy makes us. And 
 as the belief in an objective world of reahty, an order of 
 existence which we do not create, but which we find and must 
 recognize, pervades his logical speculation, so it is the corre- 
 sponding conviction that the rational self in man is his most 
 real self, and that life in accordance with the rational order 
 
 1 606 b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 57 
 
 of the world is his truest life, which gives nerve and consist- 
 ency to his theories of morality. We have already seen 
 expressions of this conviction in the denial of the possibility 
 of change in the divine nature, and in the condemnation of 
 excessive indulgence of emotion. Order and immutability 
 seemed to Plato the attributes of what is best and highest both 
 in the physical and in the moral world, and it is just these 
 attributes which he missed in the capricious current of 
 feeling. The lower he went in human nature or in human 
 society, the more did he seem to find men the creatures of 
 their sentiment, and the less purpose or law did he discern 
 in their hves.' And art, especially dramatic art, seemed to 
 him to pander to this natural fickleness. It had no principle 
 of selection, no law of better and worse ;^ wherever it could 
 raise a laugh, or draw a sigh, or tickle an appetite, there it 
 was ready with its phantasmagoria of life. It had a direct 
 interest in "watering and nourishing "^ the lower and more 
 trivial impulses which reason calls upon us "to dry up," 
 and it stimulated the already too great tendency in us to do 
 everybody's business except our own, to be actors instead of 
 citizens, to play at life instead of living it. The words of 
 Bacon, in 'which he gives the reason why poetry "was ever 
 thought to have some participation of divineness," might 
 have been used by Plato in another sense to express why it 
 is so far from being divine; "poetry doth raise and erect the 
 mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the 
 mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto 
 the nature of things." 
 
 The very emphasis and fulness of Plato's polemic against 
 
 ' 4. 431 c; 3. 397 d; 10. 604 e; 608 a. 
 
 = 605 a-c. 3 10. 606 d. 
 
58 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 , dramatic literature must make us feel that he was writing in 
 a different atmosphere from our own. Few modem writers 
 on education in England would reckon the stage among the 
 most powerful agents, whether for good or bad; few/'too, 
 would regard a tendency to theatricality and effusiveness as 
 one of the most serious dangers to the English character. 
 Not the most extravagant admirer of our dramatists would 
 claim for them what Plato heard men claim for Homer, that 
 they have "educated their country, and deserve to be read 
 over and over again as authorities on human conduct and 
 education, and as models on which men may order the whole 
 of their lives."' Nor is the average Englishman likely to be 
 too "imitative" in the sense which alarmed Plato. The 
 suppleness of nature which made it hard for the Athenian 
 to be "one man and not many," is generally replaced in us by 
 a sturdiness and concentration, of which consistency and self- 
 respect, self-consciousness and selfishness, are respectively the 
 good and the bad developments. Yet it must be admitted that 
 these qualities are not incompatible with illusions and extra- 
 vagances of feeling, none the less dangerous because out- 
 wardly repressed; and though we are not, on the whole, a 
 nation of theater-goers, we are undoubtedly a nation of novel- 
 readers, and may find there the dramatic stimulants against 
 which Plato protested. It must be borne in mind, in com- 
 paring any ethical influence of literature in ancient and 
 modern times, that what in Greece was mainly a public of 
 spectators and listeners is now mainly a public of readers. 
 It is true that in the pulpit we have a medium of oral commu- 
 nication which they had not, but, speaking generally, it is not 
 now in the open places of the theater, the camp, the law- 
 
 I lo. 606 e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 59 
 
 courts, and the market-place, that the uttered word most 
 circulates and works; it is rather in silence or in solitude, 
 through the newspaper on the family table, the periodical at 
 the club, the poem or novel in the bedroom, that the modern 
 writer speaks to his fellow-men. And the difference in the 
 medium goes along with a difference in the effect. Instead 
 of the noisy publicity in which contagious feeling grows as it 
 spreads from man to man, till the individual is "borne help- 
 lessly along the stream,"^ and loses himself in an indiscrimi- 
 nate froth of exaggerated feeling, we brood over books in the 
 heated cells of our own imagination, build castles of the 
 fumes of our own emotions, and come forth to measure the 
 world by the mock-heroic standard of our own littleness. 
 But the craving for change and excitement, the desire to 
 escape from our own true selves with the responsibilities 
 which they entail, are not the less strong in us because we 
 are not bom actors or mimics; the mind can make its own 
 stage and act upon it, while the body remains immobile and 
 unexpressive. Nor does the . modern demand exceed the 
 modem supply. The novel, which absorbs so much of our 
 dramatic talent, lends itself with fatal ease to the promiscuous j 
 photography of situations and feelings. The increased sense 
 of the importance of human life and of the inexhaustible- 
 ness of its problems supplies a ready argument to those who 
 find anything and everything "interesting;" and there are 
 still writers of whom we might say metaphorically what 
 Plato intended literally, "that there is nothing which they 
 will not imitate — thunder and wind, trumpets and whistles, 
 dogs and sheep."^ 
 
 The same principles which guided Plato in his concep- 
 
 ' 6. 492 c. I 3. 397 a. ■■■■/i, 
 
6o THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 tion of the educational function of literature guided him 
 also in his treatment of the other constituents of "musical" 
 education, and led him to conclusions still more at variance 
 Mfith modern practice and theory. That poetry and litera- 
 ture, which express definite ideas, should be made to serve 
 the interests of society, is an intelligible if surprising proposal; 
 
 ) but that music, painting, and sculpture should be pressed into 
 the same service will seem to many a vague fancy, impracti- 
 cable in education, and destructive of art. Let us then see 
 what Plato's idea of the use of the arts in education precisely 
 was. "Music," he says,' "involves three elements — words, 
 harmony, rhythm," or, as we may say, to bring his meaning 
 nearer home, without pretending to give it an exact modem 
 equivalent, words, key, and time. As to the words, they must 
 conform to the same canons as the words of other poetry, 
 and the character of the two remaining elements must be 
 determined by that of the words. Those "harmonies" and 
 "rhythms," then, must be employed in musical composition 
 which will express the qualities which we wish to develop 
 in the soul. What these are we already know. They are 
 the qualities which result from the right nurture of the two 
 higher psychological elements in human nature, the "spirited" 
 and the "philosophic." We must therefore have a music of 
 
 • corresponding character, a music of war and a music of 
 peace,^ a "harmony" of violence and effort, and a "har- 
 mony" of conciliation and calm, a "harmony" to represent 
 the daring of the soldier and the endurance of the martyr, 
 and a "harmony" to express the accents of entreaty or per- 
 suasion, of submission or acquiescence. Other kinds than 
 these, and other instruments than these require, are super- 
 
 ' 3- 398 d. 2 3. 399 a-c. 
 
, IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 6i 
 
 fluous luxuries which must be "purged away'" in a healthy 
 state, whose object is not to stimulate every feverish craving 
 of its citizens, but to weave strongly those vital strains of 
 character which sustain the fabric of society. The same 
 principle will apply to the "rhythms,"^ and measures of music 
 and dance, as to the "harmonies" in which they are com- 
 posed; they must not develop in lawless independence, but 
 must be such as will express "the orderly and brave life." 
 
 There is then, according to Plato, a right and a wrong in 
 the musical relations of pitch and time, and this right and 
 wrong is in some sense akin to the right and wrong in human 
 nature and conduct. Goodness and badness of form, he says, 
 follow goodness and badness of rhythm, and goodness and 
 badness of rhythm follow goodness and badness of language, 
 and these again depend upon goodness and badness of charac- 
 ter.' Nor is it only in the movements of dance and song that 
 there is this correspondence; in all sensuous material there 
 is a similar capability of expression;* it is present in the forms 
 of painting and sculpture, of weaving and embroidery, of 
 building and manufacture, of animal and vegetable life; "in 
 all of these there is shapeliness or unshapeliness, and unshape- 
 liness and unrhythmicalness and inharmoniousness are the 
 kindred of badness of language and badness of character, 
 while the opposites are kindred and imitations of the opposite 
 character, the chastened and the good." The poets, then, are 
 not the only artists over whom the state should exercise con- 
 trol ;= attention must be given to the whole body of craftsmen, ' 
 and they must be prevented from expressing what is vicious 
 and unchastened, mean and unshapely, whether in the figures 
 of living things or in buildings or in any other work of art. 
 
 ' 399 e. 2 399 e — 400 c. 3 3. 400 c-d. * 401 a. s 401 b. 
 
62 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 The artists who should be encouraged by the state must be 
 "those who have the genius to track out the nature of what 
 is fair and shapely'" and to embody it anew in their works. 
 For the young citizens must not be allowed to grow up among 
 images of evil, lest their souls by daily contact gradually and 
 unconsciously assimilate the ugUness of their surroundings.' 
 Rather they should be like men living in a beautiful and 
 healthy place; from everything that they see and hear, loveli- 
 ness, like a breeze, should pass into their souls, and teach 
 them without their knowing it the truth of which it is a mani- 
 festation. In such an atmosphere they will acquire not only 
 a natural grace and proportion of bearing and character, 
 but an instinctive sense of what is fair and what is foul in 
 nature and in art; and this instinctive sense is a kind of 
 anticipation of a rational understanding of the nature of 
 good and evil; for the reason which is now presented to 
 them in forms of sense, and calls forth sensuous delight, is 
 the same reason which they will afterwards learn to know 
 in its own form as an intelhgible principle, and which they 
 will then recognize as an old friend with a new face.' 
 
 Such is the nature and such are the limits of the education 
 of "music." It has a more intellectual and a more emotional 
 aspect. From the former point of view, it is completed 
 when we have "learned to read"* the world of sights and 
 sounds which is about us. That world is like a language 
 which we have got to master; the sensible forms of good and 
 evil pass and repass before us in an infinite variety of com- 
 binations, like the letters of an alphabet which combine into 
 an infinity of words, great and small. No form can be dis- 
 regarded; acts and speeches which seem trivial, like the 
 
 • 401 c. ^[401 c-d. 3 3. 402 a. *'402 a-c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 63 
 
 little words in a book, may contain a world of meaning and 
 be the key to a character. And the true function of the 
 artist is to help us to learn this language of life; he is the 
 man who knows the shapes of the letters and the laws of their 
 combinations. In the "mirror" which he holds up we may 
 see reflected the images of courage, temperance, generosity, 
 and their opposites, and thus learn to know the realities when 
 we see them. Thus art should find its fulfilment" in life; 
 and he may most truly be said to be "musically" educated 
 whose eye and ear are trained to detect what is right and 
 wrong, not only in the creations of art, but also, so far as it 
 can be apprehended by the senses, in the actual world of 
 which art is the reflection. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we regard the emotional effects of 
 "musical" education, they may be summed up in two : that it 
 infuses a spirit of order,' and that it develops the " true love " 
 of beauty;^ the former being the more passive condition of 
 which the latter is the more active expression. To Plato 
 most of the evils of sensual passion fall under one of two heads, 
 unregulated variety or unregulated intensity. He considered 
 passion to be essentially '"many-headed," and capable of 
 indefinite multiplication and expansion; and one of his chief 
 charges against the art of his time was that it fostered and 
 satisfied the indiscriminate craving for emotional excitement. 
 In contrast with it, he demanded an art which should not 
 merely stimulate, but should also discipUne, the feelings; 
 which should not follow but lead them; which should chasten 
 their disorder and brace their indolence by making them move 
 in the delicate lines of proportion and beauty, and respond 
 
 '3.4046, auippoa'iyiiv; 4.4246, iyvofuaripov iraiBias; 425 a, eivoidav: 
 cf. 413 e. ' 3. 402 d — 403 c. 
 
64 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 to the quiet emphasis of hamiony and rhythm. For the 
 balance and symmetry which are essential to good artistic 
 work are also, he conceived, essential to true artistic feehng. 
 Love is the typical feeling awakened by sensuous beauty, 
 and the genmne love of genmne beauty is incompatible with 
 ungoverned emotion. The mere "mad"' intensity of animal 
 appetite has nothing to do with such love, which is not for 
 the body except so far as it is the expression of soul. " Where 
 beauty of inward character meets with beauty of outward 
 (form, each corresponding and harmonizing with the other, 
 ' and cast in a common mold, there is the fairest sight to a 
 man who has the eyes to see it. And what is most fair is also 
 most lovable."^ It is this perfect accord of the inward and 
 the outward which the truly "musical" man seeks and de- 
 lights in; but if it cannot be reahzed, if one or the other 
 element must be imperfect, he will surrender the outward; and 
 while no perfection of form will atone to him for defect of 
 soul, he " will not refuse to take pleasure in " a fair soul even 
 though it appear in an "inharmonious" body.^ 
 
 Before considering the general view here given of the 
 functions of art in education, a word must be said about the 
 relative position which Plato assigns to the various specific 
 arts. We are at once struck by the great prominence given 
 ! to music as compared with painting, sculpture, and architec- 
 ture and this may seem the more surprising when we 
 remember the excellence attained by the Greeks in the last 
 two and the rudimentary character of their achievements 
 in the first. It may be that Plato did not see in the sculp- 
 tors and architects of his time the signs of degeneracy which 
 drew his attention to the poets and musicians; but more 
 
 ' 3. 403 a. 2 402 d. 3 402 d. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 65 
 
 probably he estimated the practical influence of the former 
 upon the national character as less important than that of 
 the latter. The frame of mind in which pictures and statues, 
 and still more buildings, are most appreciated and enjoyed, 
 is rather one of open and undisturbed receptivity than of 
 active emotion, and to most temperaments the burning word 
 and the stirring melody have far more effect upon action 
 than brilliancy of coloring or majesty of form. But what- 
 ever may be the cause, it is a fact worthy of attention that 
 a philosophical iconoclast like Plato, in attacking the idols 
 of sensationalism both in knowledge and morality, should 
 have almost ignored the painters and sculptors, and confined 
 his assaults to the musicians and still more to the poets. 
 Another noticeable point is the simplicity and uniformity of 
 the criteria which Plato applies to the several arts. Propor- ^ 
 tion, in one form or another, is the single source to which he 
 refers all artistic excellence, in the musical relations of time 
 and tone no less than in those of space in the arts of form 
 and construction. And this leads us lastly to remark how 
 extremely rudimentary mTjst have been the music of which 
 he was speaking. He assumes throughout that music always 
 implies words, and the whole subject of harmony, in its 
 modern sense, is absent from his consideration. The truth 
 seems to be, paradoxical as it may sound, that it was the very 
 simphcity of Greek music which led Greek writers to assign 
 to it such a direct and important educational influence. As 
 in the early days of sculpture or painting the crudeness and 
 symbolism make the meaning of the artist more clear, when 
 compared with the subtle design and coloring of great masters, 
 so, when music was chiefly Hmited to an accompaniment 
 giving emphasis or precision to a recitation or a dance, its 
 
66 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 effect woxdd be more strongly recognized in proportion as 
 it was more simple. Even now there are dancing and march- 
 ing melodies which exercise a direct and almost physical 
 influence on a susceptible hearer, just because there is nothing 
 but the simple act of dancing or marching which they suggest; 
 and if music generally were intimately associated with a few 
 elementary acts and feelings, its power, being more easily 
 expressible, would be also more reducible to rule and to 
 practice, than when it has developed into a vast and inde- 
 pendent growth, speaking in its own language and obeying 
 its own laws of which it is itself the sole interpreter. 
 
 This difference, however, great as it is, and much as it 
 increases the difficulty of applying Plato's ideas to modem 
 music, does not except it from the general scope of his theory 
 concerning the educational use of art, the main features of 
 which we may now proceed to consider. Of these the cen- 
 tral and most characteristic one is undoubtedly the idea that 
 art may have, and ought to have, a definite function in the 
 development of character; and we have to ask how Plato 
 conceived this function to be exercised. "Education in 
 music," he says, "is so telling, because rhythm and harmony 
 sink so deeply into the inward part of the so^A, and take 
 hold of it so strongly, and make it graceful with the grace 
 which they bring with them."^ And again: "Gracefulness 
 and ungracefulness go along with rhythmicalness and un- 
 rhythmicalness, and rhythmicalness and unrhythmicalness 
 follow and resemble goodness of language, or the reverse; 
 the style of language, again, follows the character of soul, 
 and thus goodness of language, of harmony, of form, and of 
 rhythm go along with goodness of character."^ "Are the 
 
 1 3. 401 d. » 3. 400 c-e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 67 
 
 gestures and accents of a brave soul in trouble the same as 
 those of a cowardly one?" he asks in a closely analogous 
 passage of the Laws; "surely not; the very colors of the 
 two men are different."' From these few passages, which 
 could easily be multiplied, so much is clear that Plato was 
 in earnest with the idea that there is some real coimection 
 between character and artistic form, and that the common 
 element in both is found in the rightness of proportion which 
 is essential alike to beauty in art and goodness in conduct. 
 We shall perhaps understand him better 4f we reflect (what 
 the passages above will suggest) that in the early stages of 
 civilization the whole of life tends to be more symbolical, 
 and the connection between mental states and their physical 
 expression more immediate. In such stages speech has 
 something of the crudity of a language of signs, while gesture 
 and sound approach the delicacy and articulateness of words. 
 With the progress of civiHzation the symbolism of sense does 
 not, as is sometimes supposed, disappear, but it gets infinitely 
 more complex and subtle; colors and lines, tones and meas- 
 ures, instead of being like letters of an alphabet with fixed 
 and uniform values, become fitful centers of multitudinous 
 associations, so various to different sensibilites, and so re- 
 mote from their primitive significance, that men are tempted 
 to deny their validity or to relegate them to the sphere of 
 individual caprice. It is curious to see the human mind 
 thus refusing to recognize, or to be recognized by, its own 
 offspring as they grow up. In the infancy of art nobody 
 doubts but that it has a meaning, that mind speaks to mind 
 in it. Only when it has ceased to lisp and to point, when 
 the simple singer has grown into a "mighty-mouthed inven- 
 
 ' Laws, 2. 654 e. 
 
68 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 tor of harmonies," and the sculptor's one poor thought has 
 made way for 
 
 The thousand sounds and sights that broke 
 
 In on him at the chisel's stroke, 
 
 only then do men begin to question whether what they have 
 created is really their own, and to explain it away by chance, 
 by convention, by mechanics, by anything but mind. Yet 
 this is not really to be wondered at; for as soon as we try 
 to account for any but the simplest effects of art, they escape 
 us, the truth being that "accounting for" them merely means 
 translating one medium of expression into another and less 
 perfect one. Language and music and painting are all sig- 
 nificant, but the significance of one is not convertible with that 
 of another. We cannot listen to the meaning of color and 
 form, we must see it; we cannot make music speak in words 
 'without its ceasing to be music, any more than we can 
 resolve a poem into sound and rhythm without its poetry evap- 
 orating. And if the relationship of the arts to one another 
 is so difficult to express, much more so is the relationship 
 of art in general to other modes of human activity. Few 
 people, indeed, can seriously doubt that the character of an 
 imaginative man is ultimately affected by what he habitually 
 sees and hears; or, again, that what one person apprehends as 
 right or expedient, another person may apprehend as beauti- 
 ful; or, once more, that devotion similar in effect to that of the 
 saint for the being whom he worships, may be felt by the man 
 of science for the truth which he pursues. But when we have 
 made a few general statements such as these, we are brought 
 to a standstill by the intricacy of the subject and the limita- 
 tions of our analysis. The fact remains irrefragable that 
 to the vast majority of mankind art and conduct, reHgion 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 69 
 
 and science, are very different things, with little or nothing 
 in common; and that the attempt to fuse them generally 
 results in sermonizing pictures, rose-water morality, and unc- 
 tuous sciolism. And as, at most times and for most pur- 
 poses, it is of more practical importance to reaHze proxi- 
 mate differences than fundamental unities, the world at 
 large instinctively looks with suspicion upon those who, in 
 trying to see through the ordinary distinctions of life, appear 
 to be removing its ordinary landmarks. No one has insisted 
 more strongly than Plato himself upon the dangers of passing 
 too hastily "from the many to the one;" but for that very 
 reason we need not be afraid to follow him, when, with the 
 courage of his conviction that reason is one in its essence, he 
 leads us now and again to "a high rock" from which we may 
 see that it is one also in its manifestations. To Plato the 
 laws of proportion, which are the condition of beauty in art, 
 seemed to betoken the presence of the same mind as is re- 
 vealed in the immutable order of the universe, and more 
 imperfectly in the moral order of human life.^ He was very 
 far from identifying or confusing artistic beauty with moral 
 goodness ; but, beheving, as he did, that the whole physical 
 world is "the image of its maker, God manifest to sense,"^ 
 he could not but believe that in all things sensible, and there- 
 fore in the relations of figure, time, and tone, there is a right 
 and a wrong, a good and a bad, according as they do or do 
 not express and obey intelligence. And since bodily move- 
 ment and sight and hearing are among the most prominent 
 and important of our vital activities, especially in early life, 
 he drew the natural conclusion that it must make a difference 
 to the growth of the human soul and character, how, and 
 
 ' Timaeus, 47 b-d. ' Timaeus, 92 b. 
 
70 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 upon what occasions, those activities are exercised, and that 
 it is the function of the arts to provide for their exercise in 
 the best way and upon the best objects. It is, in fact, rather 
 the real simpHcity than the supposed vagueness of Plato's 
 ideas which makes them embarrassing. The luxuriant de- 
 velopment of the arts in modern times, in independence both 
 of one another and of the other elements of human Kfe, 
 makes it difficult to apply to them conceptions formed at a 
 time when they were modest and business-hke appendages 
 of reUgion, war, or public amusement; almost as difficult 
 as it would be to transfer the lessons learned on a school 
 driUing-ground to the evolutions of a modern army on the 
 battlefield. 
 
 Plato would have his young citizens, who are one day to 
 govern and protect the state, nerved and inspirited, soothed 
 and softened, by warlike and peaceful songs; he would have 
 them disciplined to order by the precision of time and tune, 
 of movement and voice ; he would oremind them of their duties 
 by the sculpturesque embodiments of undying types of true 
 manhood; he would make grace and dignity as natural to 
 them as the air which they breathe, and lead them to bear 
 themselves unconsciously as if they were in the presence of 
 others. In all this there is nothing strange. But from the 
 austere beauty of the conception of the Greek philosopher to 
 the confused jargon of modern aesthetic culture is a bewilder- 
 ing and unwelcome step. Our masterpieces of art are mostly 
 foreign, and speak a language unintelligible to the ordinary 
 English mind. Even if it were otherwise, they are meaning- 
 lessly arranged in galleries, cut adrift from the surroundings 
 for which they were made, but which they can never recover. 
 Our greatest artists are going back to an unreal or unnational 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 71 
 
 past, or "are making the public their master more than 
 necessity requires.'" Where are we to look for the "breeze 
 of beauty and health," for the craftsmen who "can track out 
 the nature of loveliness and grace " ? We may collect engrav- 
 ings and photographs, and china, and make ourselves learned 
 in the history of art; we may found museums and institutes, 
 and spread casts of Venus and Apollo through the land; we 
 may give thousands of pounds for pieces of clever vulgarity; 
 but we shall not make English life much more beautiful or 
 more joyous, unless we can produce art which will educate 
 the nation to see with its eyes and to hear with its ears the 
 country in which it dwells and the history which it inherits. 
 It is in music perhaps that the outlook is the least discoura- 
 ging. Here there is a possibility of acting upon large masses 
 with some effect; here social distinctions are less felt; here, 
 too, the English nature seems to show more aptitude and 
 susceptibility. We can hardly hope to make our great towns 
 beautiful, but it is not chimerical to look forward to a time 
 when they may each have their orchestra and chorus, and 
 adequate provision for hearing them. There is no need 
 to quarrel about the precise educational effect which modern 
 music has or may have. That it has some such effect will 
 not be denied except by those who wish to keep it to them- 
 selves, or by those who are irritated at the stupidity of its 
 would-be advocates. The apparent vagueness of its influence, 
 arising from the difficulty of formulating it, is neither a proof 
 of its unreality nor an argument against utilizing it. Every- , 
 body who is at all susceptible to music knows that he is better 
 for having it, and worse for being without it; he also probably 
 knows that the composers whom the world has agreed to 
 
 1 6. 493 d. 
 
72 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 call great are, some or all of them, those to whose music he 
 most likes to listen; more than this he need not be able to 
 say, for a fact is not made more of a fact by being talked or 
 written about. If it be once fully recognized that music has 
 a great emotional power over a considerable proportion of 
 English people, the proper application of the power becomes 
 a public duty, and it is only a question of time to discover 
 the best ways of doing it. 
 
 We have thus far considered Plato's conception of the 
 education in "music" mainly in its ethical and psychological 
 aspect, but we should represent him very imperfectly if we 
 omitted to mention the importance which he attaches to it 
 on social and political grounds. The often-quoted text, that 
 "the fashions of music are never changed without changes 
 in the most important laws of the commonwealth,"^ may 
 serve here as a point of departure. It is difficult for us to 
 understand the concern with which Plato urges the importance 
 of permanence and continuity in the system of "musical" 
 education • 
 
 It is in music that the guardians of our state must build their guard- 
 house; for it is here that lawlessness easily creeps in unperceived. 
 People think that it is only play, and does no harm. And what harm 
 does it do? Little by Uttle it gets a footing, and spreads gently and 
 silently into the habits and arrangements of life; from these it passes, 
 gathering force as it goes, into the transactions of business, and from 
 business it gets to the laws and the constitution, with licence full-grown in 
 its train, until it ends by ruining everything, both public and private.' 
 
 On the other hand, 
 
 when the play of children is good from the first, and they take in a spirit 
 of law through their music, then it has just the opposite effect, attending 
 
 I 4. 424 c. " Music " is here used in its modern sense. 
 ^ 424 d-e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 73 
 
 them at every step in life, making it grow, and building it up where it 
 had fallen down.' 
 
 And as in the other case the spirit of lawlessness, beginning 
 at the trifles of education, ends by overthrowing law itself, 
 so the law-loving temper, fostered from childhood, is the 
 pregnant germ of the full insight of the legislator and states- 
 man.^ If it only be started well, it will assimilate nourish- 
 ment and grow by its own inherent vitality. To people who 
 have thus lived in an atmosphere of order, the details of legisla- 
 tion will offer no difhculty; with an instinctive and inherited 
 tact they will regulate their lives wisely and well, whether 
 it be in the lesser matters of social behavior and usage, or 
 in the greater ones of business, commerce, and trade. 
 
 We have had occasion before to remark on the difference 
 between the small and simple civic communities of Greece 
 and the complex masses of modern nations in regard to the 
 directness and rapidity of the transmission of social and 
 pohtical changes. The passage just quoted brings that differ- 
 ence again vividly before us. To Plato, with the restlessness 
 and instability of Greek political life before his eyes, the one 
 thing needful seemed to be to establish in society a permanent 
 ethos, a traditional character, which should be able to resist 
 the shocks of party spirit and individual caprice. And if 
 this could be done only by a system of education, which should 
 receive each citizen at birth and retain its hold upon him 
 through life, it was no mere fancy to watch with a jealous 
 eye the first symptoms of innovation in the system, even in 
 matters so apparently trivial as popular songs. To us, with 
 our national gift for forming and carrying on traditional 
 modes of life and thought, it will often seem that in education 
 
 1 4. 423 a. ' 424;a;';[42S a-e. 
 
74 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 we need more exhortation to adopt new ideas than to remain 
 faithful to old ones. Our great schools and universities are 
 typical instances of the way in which prejudice and tradition 
 may uphold methods of teaching and social habits which 
 have ceased to have a reason for existence. As regards the 
 other part of Plato's opinion, that for men who are going to 
 serve their country in government and legislation the early 
 formation of a "constitutional" character is of much more 
 importance than a study of written systems or codes, we are 
 more nearly at one with him. If the Duke of Wellington 
 could say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing- 
 fields at Eton, we need not be surprised at Plato when he 
 speaks of children "receiving the spirit of law through their 
 music,"* or when he says that "one of the greatest tests of a 
 man's character is the show which he makes in his gymnas- 
 tics."^ The distrust in "technical" education for the higher 
 spheres of pubhc life, and the belief in the efficacy of a "liberal 
 culture," which glories in having nothing directly to do with 
 a profession, are both strong, sometimes perhaps too strong, 
 in the English mind. Even if the theory itself were in no 
 danger of being overdriven, the poverty of the culture which 
 we provide on the strength of it might give us some qualms. 
 The principle of our system, put at its best, is that, by taking 
 the mind through the greatest works of classical literature, 
 we both train it to habits of exactitude and observation, and 
 cultivate the taste, imagination, and judgment with the finest 
 and wisest thought of antiquity. We inherit the system from 
 an age when the language and literature of modern Europe 
 had only just begun to exist, and when great thoughts ade- 
 quately expressed could be found only in classical writers. 
 
 1 4. 42s a. ' 7. 537 b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 75 
 
 The value of the intellectual discipline gained in the curricu> 
 lum cannot seriously be disputed; but whether, as it is at 
 present worked, even when supplemented by the teaching 
 of parts of the Bible, it supplies the best and most natural 
 food to the "philosophic" element in the English mind, is 
 extremely doubtful. It is not, indeed, upon this ground, of 
 inadequacy for its professed purpose, that the system is 
 generally attacked; its assailants are more often persons who 
 are crying out for "practical" education, and who, if they 
 had their way, would eliminate from the culture of the human 
 mind the study of its own greatest works. But it is just this 
 which makes the question a serious one. For if the position 
 of the higher education is assailed from without by misguided 
 or mercenary ignorance, while its natural defenders are begin- 
 ning to doubt whether they have anything to defend, we may 
 well fear for its future. In the confusion and din which 
 surrounds the subject, nothing seems so important as to 
 come to a clear understanding of the point at issue. It 
 should be seen that convenient catchwords like "supply" 
 and "demand," or well-sounding oppositions like "words" 
 and "things," tell us absolutely nothing unless we realize 
 first by what the "demand" is made, and what "things" 
 are. It should be understood that the primary question is, 
 not whether to refine the taste, or to produce a gentleman, 
 or to teach useful knowledge, is the end of education; but 
 before all, how the whole man is to be made the best of; and 
 that, whether it be nature and her works, or man and his 
 works, which are studied (and neither can rightly be neg- 
 lected), it is ultimately mind in some form or another which 
 we have to educate, and mind in some form or another 
 through which alone it can be educated. The representatives 
 
76 .THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 of religion, literature, and science might then join hands over 
 their common subject-matter, instead of snatching at it by 
 turns, and trying each to undo the work of his supposed rival. 
 In the meantime, until we are nearer to such a result, two 
 lesser and more practicable things may be done by the 
 teachers of language : they may try to make classical educa- 
 tion less a matter of mere grammatical discipline or of imita- 
 tive ingenuity, and more a study of human thought and 
 character; and they may try to rescue our own English 
 literature from its present neglect, to treat it in the spirit 
 of the great men who have created scholarship, not on methods 
 combining the worst features of the traditional classical cur- 
 riculum, and, by making it speak to the youth of the nation, 
 give it a systematic place in the development of the national 
 character. 
 
 We may conclude Plato's representation of the political 
 and social importance of "musical" education by looking 
 with him for a moment at some of the consequences of its 
 neglect. In the eighth and nintb,^Goks of the Republic, Plato 
 has given us in a series of pictures an ideal history of the 
 fall of the human soul, both in the individual and in society. 
 He had previously shown us what he conceived that the life 
 of man might be if it were allowed to follow the highest law 
 of its development; he now shows us to what lowest depths 
 it might be supposed to sink if the logical principle of degene- 
 ration were allowed to work unchecked. He had followed 
 man up to the point at which he is nearest to God; he now 
 traces his descent to the point when he is on the verge of 
 passing into a beast. In this picture of the progress of evil 
 a strikingly prominent place is assigned to the gradually 
 increasing neglect of "music;" and nowhere does Plato 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 77 
 
 express more clearly his sense of the vital importance, social 
 and political, of a thing apparently so far removed from 
 society and politics as the early culture of the higher side 
 of human nature. The ideally best condition of life, indi- 
 vidual and social, had been represented by him as resulting 
 from the harmonious and normal development and opera- 
 tion of certain psychical forces. In accordance with this 
 view, the gradual declension from such a condition is repre- 
 sented as a continually increasing discord in the vital facul- 
 ties, beginning with the failure of the highest to perform 
 their proper functions, and the usurpation of their place by 
 lower ones, and ending with the complete inversion of the 
 true psychological relations, and the absolute dominion of 
 those activities which have no right even to exist in the 
 organism. And as the ideally best conditions were conceived 
 by Plato to depend upon a right system of education, main- 
 taining and transmitting a certain character, so the typical 
 forms of evil or imperfection in the world are pictured by him 
 as resulting from the abandonment or perversion of such a 
 system, the soul being thereby deprived of its proper nourish- 
 ment, and left a victim to the bad influences of its environ- 
 ment and its own lower nature. 
 
 The first effect of the neglect of "music" is a certain loss 
 of elevation in the general aim of life.' The "philosophic" 
 faculties, deprived of their true object, find exercise in calcu- 
 lating means to lower ends, and in this unnatural service lose 
 that simplicity and directness which are alone compatible 
 with the pursuit of truth in the interests of society. The 
 element of "spirit" rises into the place thus left vacant, and 
 makes the desire for distinction the ruling principle of life. 
 
 iCf. 8..S46.e; 548 b-c; 549 b; 547 d-e. 
 
78 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 But the falseness of its position reacts upon it; deprived of 
 the higher inspiration which its nature requires, it sinks 
 itself into mere personal ambition, while the meaner desires, 
 which it should have joined with reason to regulate or repress, 
 begin to hft up their heads. Such is Plato's psychological 
 diagnosis of certain well-known social phenomena. When 
 the best intellects in the community begin to be suspected of 
 being "too clever," and are kept out of high places in favor 
 of "honest and downright" men; when self-respect tends to 
 degenerate into self-will, and the desire for personal distinc- 
 tion becomes a passion; when ;moral rectitude is upheld more 
 by fear of disgrace than by inward conviction, and a chival- 
 rous bearing in public is compatible with the pursuit of 
 money and pleasure "in the dark,"' then we may suspect 
 that "the Muses are beginning to be neglected,"^ and that 
 "reason tempered with music, which is the only guardian- 
 angel of virtue,"' is being driven from its natural home in 
 the souls of men. 
 
 The continued neglect of education brings with it more 
 aggravated results.^ As the eye of the mind grows more and 
 more unaccustomed to the vision of beauty and truth, its 
 sight gets more and more narrowed to the -objects nearest to 
 it, and the "blind god" of wealth becomes the leader of the 
 "blind" soul. And the fresh downward step of the higher 
 self is accompanied by a fresh rise in the lower; the animal 
 appetites, which ambition had affected to despise and repress, 
 now, no longer "tamed" by reason or swayed by high pur- 
 pose, become noisy and importunate; and though respecta- 
 bility and self-interest may still keep them down, "want of 
 
 I Cf. 8. S47 d-e; 549 a; 548 a-b. 3 8. S49 b- 
 
 "8. S46d. 4554. b-d; 552 e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 79 
 
 education" leaves them free to engender a brood of "drone- 
 like" passions, unproductive and inorganic, the paupers and 
 criminals of the soul. The same "want of education," 
 operating over a wider area, produces analogous conditions 
 in a state, where the neglected and unnurtured children of 
 the upper classes first sink into unproductive spendthrifts, 
 and then swell the useless and dangerous elements of the 
 society which, in its blind devotion to money, had helped to 
 impoverish them. 
 
 It is a further stage in decline when the comparative 
 respectability and consistency of the pursuit of wealth gives 
 way to the mere restlessness of indiscriminate impulse, and 
 the satisfaction of the passing moment is erected into a 
 principle of life. Here, again, it is the "uneducated"' 
 soul which falls a victim. A father who believes in nothing 
 that does not pay gives his son a cheap education.^ The 
 son gets into fast society; its flashiness dazzles his- eyes, 
 which have never learned to look at anything but the ground ; 
 after a struggle perhaps he temporarily recovers his heredi- 
 tary steadiness, but his soul is still empty and barren, and 
 weeds, both native and exotic, have full liberty to grow 
 there. The "words of truth and beauty, which are the best' 
 garrison of souls whom God loves,"' have never been allowed 
 to hold their rightful citadel, and their vacant place is gradu- 
 ally occupied by the "false and swaggering"* theories, which 
 promise "initiation" into the "mysterious" knowledge of 
 the world.' Their key to the mystery is simple, and consists 
 in "calling insolence good breeding, anarchy freedom, 
 prodigality magnificence, and shamelessness manhood."" 
 
 ' 8. S59 d. 3 560 b. s 560 e. 
 
 "559 d — 560 a. 45600. 65606. 
 
8o THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 For a soul so circumstanced the best chance is that it may 
 stop in its career of license before it has become the victim 
 of any one dominant passion, and arrive at a sort of equili- 
 brium in its desires, satisfying them each in turn, and living 
 that life of so-called "freedom" which consists in being the 
 creature of the moment.' But if circumstances are not so 
 favorable to it,^ the trembling balance of discordant appe- 
 tites is sure to be overset, the irresistible impulse of passion 
 to absorb everything unless it be itself absorbed will assert 
 itself, and the easy-going "liberty and equality" of many- 
 colored caprice will settle down into the cruel and somber 
 "tyranny" of lust. 
 
 These meager fragments, from what forms perhaps the 
 most powerfully written section of the Republic, will suffice 
 to illustrate Plato's conception of the consequences of neglect- 
 ing the education of the reason through the imagination and 
 the emotions. They will show how strongly he felt the 
 truth, which we are sometimes in danger of forgetting, that 
 the evil in human Hfe is quite as much due to negative as to 
 positive conditions; that it is the absence of healthy and 
 bright surroundings, the want of healthy and interesting 
 employments, the abeyance of healthy and inspiring emotions, 
 which drag so many men down. We cannot help seeing this 
 in the case of the lower strata of society, where the pressure 
 of circimistances is so gross and palpable; but if we agree 
 with Plato, we shall feel that the more richly endowed and 
 the more delicately organized human nature is, the more 
 important, and also the more difficult, it is to educate it well, 
 and the more fatal are the consequences, both to itself and to 
 society, of educating it badly or not at all. And what is true 
 
 'S6ia-e. =9- 572 e— S73C- 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 8 1 
 
 of different natures, compared with one another, is true also 
 of the different elements in the same nature. Good, like 
 evil, begins at the top and radiates downward. If we can 
 secure that the highest faculties, intellectual and emotional, 
 are at their highest activity, the lower ones will not probably 
 be seriously disorganized; but no amount of decent regularity 
 in the working of the lower will guarantee the vitality of 
 the higher. 
 
 When the whole soul follows the philosophic element, and there 
 is no faction in it, the justice of each separate part is secured, and 
 each does its own work and reaps its own pleasures too, the best pleas- 
 ures, and also up to its measure the truest. But when any of the other 
 elements dominates, it not only fails to find its own pleasure itself, but 
 it compels the other elements to pursue a pleasure which is not their 
 own nor true.' 
 
 The evils arising from the neglect of "music" are not the 
 only evils which Plato describes in connection with it; we 
 have already seen what he considered to be the psychological 
 effects of its excessive or exclusive study. To obviate these 
 effects is, as we also saw, the proper function of gymnastic; 
 and we have now to complete our account of Plato's concep- 
 tion of that branch of education. Of this, as of music, he 
 lays down only certain general "outlines" or principles, 
 leaving the details to be filled in by those who have to apply 
 them. The most important of these principles, which we 
 have already had occasion to notice, is that gymnastic, though 
 concerned primarily with the body,^ is to be considered as 
 ultimately affecting the soul and the character, and owes to 
 this fact its educational importance. This principle at 
 once determines the general aim of bodily exercises; they 
 should aim "not so much at producing mere strength as at 
 
 I g. 586 e. ' 3. 410 c. 
 
82 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 awakening the spirited element in human nature."^ It is 
 the fault of the professional trainers that they ignore the 
 ieducational side of their business, and attend only to develop- 
 ing the muscles. And their system not only fails in an 
 ethical point of view, but even where it might be expected to 
 succeed it does not really do so. "The athletic habit of 
 body is a sleepy sort of habit, and is liable to upset the health. 
 We see how the professional athletes doze away their Hfe, and 
 how, if they deviate a little from their prescribed diet, they 
 get serious and violent diseases."^ A "finer kind of training " 
 is wanted for a man who is to serve his country as a soldier;' 
 he must have his wits wide awake, be quick of sight and hear- 
 ing, and able to endure changes of food and weather without 
 breaking down. Of the two elements in such a training, 
 diet and exercise, Plato, in the Republic, devotes much more 
 consideration to the former. The most characteristic point 
 in what he says of the latter is that for a certain period physi- 
 cal exercise should be pursued alone, to the exclusion of all 
 serious mental work.* This period would apparently be 
 from two to three years,' between the ages of seventeen and 
 twenty. Two reasons are given for this view: that "hard 
 work and sleep are enemies to study," and that "the figure 
 which a man makes in his gymnastic is one of the greatest 
 tests of his character."" Every one who knows anything of 
 EngHsh school-life will be ready to indorse both these state- 
 ments; but he will not probably consider the truth of them 
 a reason for making two years and a half of exclusive athletic 
 exercises a necessary part of education. We must remember, 
 however, that Plato was thinking of something more analo- 
 
 I 3. 410 b. 3 404 a-b. s Cf. 7. S37 b; S39 e. 
 
 " 3. 404 a. 4 7. 537 b. « 7. S37 ^- 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 83 
 
 gous to an incipient military service than to the games of our 
 schools. The exercises upon which so long a time was to be 
 spent would aim principally at disciplining the body for the 
 work of a soldier, and woulc^ include, if practicable, some 
 actual "taste of blood" on the batlefield.' Still, even with 
 this explanation, it is curious that his belief in the importance 
 of "specializing" work should have so far overruled his 
 consciousness of the dangers of one-sided development. 
 
 Plato has more to say on the other branch of gymnastic, 
 the system of diet and general management of the body; for 
 he is here brought into contact with the medical practice 
 of his day, and about this he held some strong opinions. 
 Impressed with the want of principle and purpose, of sim- 
 plicity and concentration, in all departments of Greek life, 
 ^ saw in the recent growth of luxury, with its attendant 
 crop of new diseases, and its new methods of medical treat- 
 ment, an analogous phenomenon to that which he observed 
 in the sphere of art. While the artists seemed to him to be 
 mainly engaged in catering for a morbid appetite for emo- 
 tional stimulants,^ helping to enervate morality and to fill 
 the law-courts with litigants, instead of to make men a law 
 to themselves, the doctors, he thought, were pampering a 
 luxurious valetudinarianism, and flattering the whims of rich 
 voluptuaries whose disorders were the result of their own 
 mismanagement.' The simplicity for which he had cried 
 aloud in art he now demanded in living, and upon the same 
 grounds. In a well-ordered society every man ought to have 
 his work to do; and if he has work to do, he must make him- 
 self fit to do it.^ The spiced luxuries of a feverish civiliza- 
 
 1 5. 466 e— 467 e; cf. 7. $37 a; 3- 404 a-b. ' 3. 404 e— 405 a. 
 3 3 405 c — ^408 b. * 3. 406 c. 
 
84 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 tion, with its "sauces from Sicily," its "grisettes from Cor- 
 inth," its "Athenian confectionery," have no more place in 
 his life than they would have if he were training for a race.* 
 Most of the long names which recent medicine has given to 
 diseases are, in Plato's opinion, the polite inventions of 
 doctors who will not offend their rich patients by telling 
 them the truth, that they have worked too little and eaten 
 too much.^ A man who is always wanting to see a physician, 
 except in case of accidents or epidemics, ought to be as much 
 ashamed of himself as a man who is always going into court 
 to get justice, because he has none of his own.^ We might 
 learn a lesson here from the despised artisan.^ He can- 
 not afford to be long in bed; his work will not wait for 
 him; and if he cannot be cured soon, he dies. But the rich 
 man is supposed to have no work to do, abstention from 
 which would make life not worth Hving.^ He is to be allowed 
 to give up his duties as a householder or a citizen, or to let 
 his brain lie fallow as long as he likes, whenever he fancies 
 that he has a sick headache. 
 
 Modern life would have supplied Plato with close anal- 
 ogies to the evils which he saw in the gymnastics and diete- 
 tics of his own day. Our public schools and universities 
 have no lack of the sleepy and brutalized athlete, who has 
 not an idea of doing anything except by force, whose percep- 
 tions are cloyed and dull, whose "life moves without grace 
 or rhythm,"" and who yet probably could not serve on a 
 campaign or a geographical expedition. Nor is the weU-to- 
 do valetudinarian an unfamiliar creature among us — the 
 
 "404 d; c£. 2. 373 a, where iratpai are similarly inserted between if a 
 and winiMTa. = 3. 405 d. 3 3. 405 a-d. 
 
 4406 c-d. s 3. 407 a-c. 63: 411 e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 85 
 
 man who "suffers torments if he depart at all from his accus- 
 tomed diet," and "is always in labor about his body."* Both 
 phenomena may be said to represent the bad sides of some- 
 thing which is intrinsically good; the exaggerated interest 
 taken in athletic exercises, while it partly defeats its own aim 
 by artificializing school life, and making games into pro- 
 fessions, is nevertheless the outcome of a genuine desire to 
 broaden the basis of education, and to lose no chance of 
 developing character out of strong national tendencies. So, 
 too, the attention given to diet and the less serious forms of 
 ailment, though it may sometimes restilt in making a man 
 "profitable neither to himself or society,"^ is a symptom of 
 the higher and more intelligent value which is set upon human 
 life. Every real advance in civilization, along with the higher 
 responsibilities and the more delicate public conscience which 
 it brings with it, entails also fresh forms of abuse and greater 
 necessity for taking trouble ; but the best modern minds will 
 not agree with Plato that it is the duty of society to let any- 
 body die who can be kept alive. If, however, we have 
 advanced upon his ideas in this point, we are still far from 
 having realized them in others. We have not yet found the 
 best way "to blend music with gymnastic and apply them 
 proportionately to the soul" of the average schoolboy; and 
 we have scarcely begun to entertain the idea that a man is 
 as much bound to manage his health properly as he is to 
 manage his morals, much less to diffuse the knowledge which 
 would enable him to do it. 
 
 Let us now gather up briefly the main threads in Plato's 
 account of "musical" education, which, in its wider sense, 
 as implying the harmonious development of the whole 
 
 ' 3. 406 b. and 407 c. ' 407 e. 
 
86 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 nature, includes "gymnastic" as well as "music." Its func- 
 tion is to provide nurture for the soul from childhood to 
 youth. Upon the lower or "appetitive" element its action 
 is more indirect than direct; it tames, regulates, or represses 
 its various manifestations, by encouraging interests and 
 emotions by which they are absorbed, or with which they are 
 incompatible, as the case may require. Upon the "spirited" 
 and "philosophic" elements it acts directly, by compelling 
 and encouraging their normal activity through the bodily 
 limbs and senses. The means which it employs for the 
 former are diet and exercise; for the latter they are poetry 
 and the arts. These last are the appropriate nurture of the 
 "philosophic" nature, not in its entirety, but in that phase 
 of its growth in which it is mainly imaginative and emotional, 
 not logical and reflective. By presenting to the soul the 
 true principles of human life in the sensuous material which 
 it is able to assimilate, they prepare it unconsciously for 
 assimilating them when presented at a later stage in a more 
 rational form. They teach it how to live by telling how 
 divine beings and great men live and have lived; they teach 
 it what to love by surrounding it with what is really lovable; 
 they foster its acquisitive instincts by encouraging the quick 
 and accurate use of the senses; they develop its tendency 
 to order and law by accustoming it to recognize severe sym- 
 metries of sound and form; and, finally, they introduce it 
 to manhood endowed with an instinctive capacity of doing 
 and saying the right thing at the right time, and with an 
 instinctive perception of what is right and wrong in the deeds 
 and words of others. In calling the capacity and perception 
 i thus acquired "instinctive," it is not intended that Plato 
 conceived them to be received at birth or got by natural 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 87 
 
 selection. No doubt Plato did attach immense importance 
 to natural endowment; no doubt also he believed that there 
 was some natural tendency in human nature toward what was 
 good for it; but we have abundantly seen that this belief 
 was more than counterbalanced by a conviction that mere 
 natural endowment may be simply destructive, and that a 
 mere tendency to what is good may ultimately tend to what 
 is bad.^ By "instinctive," then, is meant that the substance 
 of the education of "music" is appropriated and held by 
 the soul without real reflection; that, in Greek phraseology, 
 it feels neither the need nor the capacity to "give an account 
 of" it; that it is conscious of it only as part and parcel of 
 itself, not as an object which it can hold apart, look at, and 
 criticise. Such a condition of mind is not, of course, unre- 
 flective in the sense of implying any capriciousness or insta- 
 bility; on the contrary, the imperceptible degrees by which 
 it has been formed guarantee its depth and fixity. And, 
 accordingly, when Plato wishes to describe finally the effects 
 of "music" upon the character, he can find no better meta- 
 phor than one taken from the process of dyeing. The 
 dyers, he says,^ when they want to dye wool a fine purple, 
 first select white wool from among the various colors; then 
 they prepare it very carefully to receive the bloom, and then 
 at last they dye it; a dye put in in this way is fast forever, 
 whereas if otherwise treated it washes out in a ridiculous 
 manner. 
 
 "This then was what we were trying to do when we selected our 
 citizen-soldiers, and educated them by music and gynmastic; oiu- 
 whole object was that by obedience they should take in the laws like 
 a dye, so that their belief about danger and all other things might 
 become fast, through their having both the proper nature and the 
 1 6. 491 b. ' 4. 429 c — 430 b. 
 
88 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 proper nurture, and thus the influences of pleasure, pain, fear, and 
 appetite, which are more potent than all the soaps and solvents in the 
 world, might never be able to wash it out.'' „ 
 
 The question now arises: Is education so conceived 
 complete? Is the soul, when nurtured up to this point, 
 full-grown as far as education can make it? At one time 
 Plato seems to have thought that it was;' that at about 
 twenty a man must cease learning in the narrower sense of 
 the word, and get the rest of his knowledge in the practical 
 life of a citizen; and that it rested with those in authority 
 to watch his development and regulate his career accord- 
 ingly. But we have also seen that, in the second section of 
 the Republic, he clearly expresses his feeling of the imper- 
 fection of the education of "music," and assigns to it a 
 subordinate and preparatory function in a more elaborate 
 system.' There are two main points in which Plato finds it 
 imperfect: subjectively, from the side of the soul, it leaves 
 important capacities undeveloped; objectively, regarding 
 the matter which it imparts and the form in which it imparts 
 it, it stops short of the requirements of knowledge. On the 
 one hand, it teaches the "philosophic" nature to love what 
 is beautiful, but not to understand what is true;' it makes it 
 quick to recognize the forms of goodness presented to sense 
 or imagination, but not to see with the mind's eye the essen- 
 tial principles which those forms imperfectly express;* it 
 infuses into it indelible beUefs and convictions, attaching 
 to the particular characters and actions which have come 
 before it in the course of education, but it does not satisfy 
 the desire to know the laws to which those beliefs can be 
 
 1 3. 413 e — 414 a. 3 Cf. 3. 402 d and 403 c, with J. 475 d-e. 
 ' 7. 522 a; 6. 503 e £E. 4Cf. 3. 402 b-c with 5. 476 a-d. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 89 
 
 referred.' On the other hand, if we regard the matter which 
 it teaches, this consists mainly of ideas embodied in sen- 
 sible forms; the characters and deeds of individual men are 
 described in poetry, or suggested in music, or pictured in 
 painting and sculpture, with the view of stimulating imitation 
 and educating the sense for the corresponding realities in 
 life. The ideas thus imparted carry conviction to the soul, 
 not through their logical consistency and irrefragabiUty, but 
 through their familiarity; they are apprehended, not in the 
 systematic form of science in which each part is seen to be 
 connected with every other, but as a multitude of isolated 
 instances, each complete in itself, and containing its own 
 justification.^ A person in this mental condition does not 
 satisfy the requirements of what Plato understands by knowl- 
 edge; and here few thoughtful people would disagree with 
 him; where he differs from most of the world is in thinking 
 that the further mental progress, instead of being left to the 
 circumstances and choice of the individual, should be sys- 
 tematically provided for by a continued education. He seems 
 to have been led to this idea by reflecting upon the conse- 
 quences which seemed to him to follow from the neglect 
 of it. He was persuaded that the evils of human life had 
 their root in ignorance, and that if men could once realize 
 what their true interests required them to do, they would do 
 it. He did not expect that mankind at large should ever 
 have such a keen and profound perception of the truth, but 
 it seemed to him not impossible that a few exceptional per- 
 sons might arrive at it, and that society might allow itself 
 to be governed by them; at any rate, he was convinced that 
 
 I Cf. 3. 412 d — 414 a with 6. 503 a-e. 
 
 ' See the account of 54Ja and its objects, 4. 477 a — 480 a. 
 
90 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 this sovereignty of true knowledge was the ideal to be aimed 
 at; convinced that there is an intelligible principle pervading 
 and connecting, not only the life of men, but the life of the 
 whole universe ; convinced that to discern this principle and 
 to conform to it is the highest achievement of knowledge 
 and of conduct, and that to "rise by stepping-stones" toward 
 this height is the true education both of the individual and 
 of the human race. Of such a principle the education of 
 "music" had nothing to tell;' it showed examples and 
 types of courage, temperance, justice; but it did not show 
 "wherein they are good, "^ what is the end to which they all 
 converge, and which gives unity and meaning to their variety; 
 and without some such perception how can we be said to 
 "know" justice, or even to possess it? We may know it 
 in one form, but we might mistake it in another; we may 
 think we have got hold of it at one moment, in one place, 
 under one set of circumstances, but it may escape us when 
 we have changed our point of view. This is why the results 
 of the first education are "sketchy" and "inexact," and 
 require "filling up" and completing by a further education.' 
 But there was another consideration which led Plato to 
 the same conclusion. It has already been shown how the 
 conception of what he called the "philosophic" nature grows 
 under his hands in the Republic, and how from being a comple- 
 mentary psychological element it comes ultimately to be 
 represented as the germ of complete manhood. Though, how- 
 ever, it has in it this inherent capabihty, like other germs it 
 depends for its development upon its environment, and Plato 
 is the first to admit, and even to insist upon, the fact that 
 'ithis richly endowed "philosophic" nature, which might be the 
 
 I 7. 522 a. ' 6. 506 a. 
 
 36. 504 b, ixpipelas AX«r^; ibid., d, iroypO'^'^'' .... i/irepyaalav, k.t.\. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 91 
 
 cause of the greatest good to mankind, is generally the cause 
 of the greatest evils.* The reason of this strange phenom- 
 enon is found partly in the very gifts of the nature itself, 
 partly in the external advantages, so called, which it usually 
 commands.^ Driven by the native force of genius, it cannot 
 rest in the narrow conventionalities of common opinion.' 
 But its unquenchable thirst for what is real, its far-reaching 
 vision, its magnificent aspirations, find no true satisfaction or 
 guidance. The atmosphere in which it lives is public opinion 
 speaking through its hired mouthpieces, who think them- 
 selves its leaders; loud, exaggerated, irresistible, intolerant 
 of principles, and confident in facts, which are really nothing 
 but the dictates of its own caprice.* What can save a great 
 nature in such an atmosphere, especially if his force of mind 
 be supplemented by beauty and strength, wealth and con- 
 nections? His power is flattered by venal servility, his^ 
 ambition spoiled by easy triumphs ; he feels the world within 
 his grasp. And if some wiser man whisper in his ear the 
 hard truth that he is Hving the life of a fool, how should he 
 listen? Or if his better genius chance to make him listen, 
 how should he escape the clutches of the parasites, who had 
 looked forward to living upon his success ? So it is that the 
 philosophic nature is corrupted, and sinks to a life unworthy 
 of itself, while philosophy, deserted by her true kinsmen, 
 falls a victim to any jackanapes who can afford to despise his 
 own profession, and bears in this enforced and unnatural 
 union the wretched bastards who go about the world bearing 
 her name, and bringing shame upon their mother.^ Only 
 
 '6. 487 e. =6. 491 b-c. 
 
 3 6. 490 a, oi>K iinij4voi, M rots Sofafo/i^Kois ehat toWoTs ixAaTois, 
 
 4 6. 491 d — 495 c. s 6. 495 c. — 496 a. 
 
92 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 here and there, by some exceptional circumstance — ill- 
 health perhaps, or banishment, or pride, or possibly an inward 
 and inexplicable monition — a man of the true stufif is kept 
 back from public life and saved for philosophy; and those 
 poor few can do nothing better than stand aside out of the . 
 storm of the world, happy if they can live without sin and die 
 in hope.' Such is Plato's indictment against the society in 
 which he was hving. 
 
 No one of the forms of constitution now existing is worthy of the 
 philosophic nature. Therefore it is changed and distorted, and as a 
 seed sown in a strange soil will lose its virtue and become a victim to the 
 influences among which it lives, so in the present state of things this 
 kind of soul does not keep its force, but falls away to a nature not Its 
 own. But if it can find a form of society good enough for it, then men 
 will see that it was always really divine, and that all else in their nature 
 and ways of life is himian only." 
 
 It is, then, in the interests of society, whether we regard 
 them as endangered by want of real knowledge, or by the 
 neglect and corruption of its noblest natures, that Plato finds 
 a further education to be necessary; and the question is, 
 firstly. How did he conceive of the higher kind of appre- 
 hension which he called knowledge and the higher form of 
 object which he called truth, and by what means did he think 
 that the mind might be educated to the knowledge of such 
 truth ? and, secondly, How did he hope to avoid the dangers 
 attendant on the philosophic nature, and to make it an instru- 
 ment of salvation instead of destruction to society? These 
 two questions were to Plato reaUy one; for in his view the 
 dominant impulse of the philosophic nature is the impulse to 
 know the truth, and to know the truth of things is to know 
 the reason of them, and to know their reason completely 
 
 I 6. 496 a — 497 a. 2 6. 497 b-c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 93 
 
 would be to see them as convergent parts in a whole governed 
 by a single end, or, in Platonic language, a single "good;" 
 so that ultimately to know the truth of the world would be 
 to know "the good" of the world, or the "reason why" of 
 its existence, and to understand human Ufe thoroughly would 
 be to see the end or purpose which governs it in the light of 
 that larger end or purpose which makes the whole universe 
 luminous and intelligible. Thus the true interests of society 
 coincide with those of its highest natures; for the study of 
 what the good of man is and requires is the best way of satis- 
 fying the best impulse of those natures, and the same process 
 which develops the philosophic mind to its highest pitch, and 
 makes a man a true philosopher, will bring it also to the 
 knowledge of the principles which should guide human con- 
 duct, and will make a man a true statesman. Thus the 
 question with Plato comes to be : What is the education by 
 which the human mind may be brought nearer to that truth 
 which is at once the keystone of knowledge and the pole 
 star of conduct? And this question is most instructively 
 treated under three heads: firstly. What is the nature of 
 intellectual progress? the answer to which will give us a 
 scale of knowledge and truth up which education should lead 
 the mind; secondly. What is the nature and cause of human 
 ignorance, which keeps the mind from thus advancing ? and, 
 thirdly. What are the specific means by which this ignorance 
 may be removed, and the inherent capacity of the mind 
 developed and regulated ? The last only of these questions 
 concerns education directly ;~ but just as in the case of the 
 earUer education of character it was impossible to under- 
 stand Plato without considering the constituent elements out 
 of which the character had to be formed, so in order to make 
 
94 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 : intelligible his account of the later education of reason, it is 
 indispensable to consider in a general way how he conceived 
 the activity and sphere of reason; in other words, knavrtefige 
 and truth. And further, as Plato's manner of developing a 
 view by antagonism to an existing state of things is nowhere 
 more forcibly illustrated than in his treatment of this part of 
 his subject, we should be throwing away the half of our infor- 
 mation if, in examining the ideal of knowledge at which he 
 aimed, we neglected his picture of the ignorance from which 
 he wished to escape. 
 
 At the end of the sixth book of the Republic'- Plato gives 
 us, under the figure of a line divided into four parts, a series 
 of the objects of mental apprehension, and of the mental 
 operations which correspond to them, arranged in an ascend- 
 ing order of clearness and truth. At the bottom of the scale 
 of objects he places what he calls "images," and at the bot- 
 tom of the scale of mental activities the "perception of 
 images." By "images" he understands primarily shadows 
 and reflections, but he seems also to include imder the term 
 any perceivable object which reproduces or suggests another 
 in the same kind of way that shadows and reflections sug- 
 gest and reproduce the things which occasion them. Thus 
 all works of art may be called, more or less appropriately, 
 "images;" for it is common to them all to represent how 
 things appear, or what they suggest to sense or imagination, 
 by means of words, sounds, color, or form, which, however di- 
 rectly related to the things, cannot be identified with them.' 
 
 I 6. 509 d — 511 e. 
 
 "Cf. 10. 599 a; 6050; 3. 402 b-c; 7. 517 d, where the "'shadows of 
 images" would be, e. g., the representation or misrepresentation of the 
 existing laws (themselves only "images" of justice) by a rhetorician or 
 pleader. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 95 
 
 This is, of course, far from being a full account of what the arts 
 do; but they all do at least this, and Plato, for reasons which 
 we shall presently see, chose to emphasize this characteristic of 
 artistic representation, and to class together indiscriminately 
 all objects of perception to which it is common. Judged, 
 then, by the standard of clearness and truth, the lowest kind 
 of perception is that which perceives merely shadows, reflec- 
 tions, or analogous images, of things, whatever the medium 
 through which the image is conveyed. The Greek substan- 
 tive (eiKoaCa) used by Plato to describe this "perception of 
 images" means literally the act of making one thing hke 
 another. The corresponding verb, besides the correspond- 
 ing sense of copying or imitating, is commonly used in the 
 sense of "conjecturing," apparently because one of the most 
 obvious forms of conjecture is an inference drawn from 
 comparing — that is, mentally "making like" — one thing 
 to another. No doubt this double association of the verb 
 recommended the substantive to Plato's use; for it enabled 
 him conveniently to characterize the lowest stage of percep- 
 tion, not merely as a perception of "images," but also as 
 having only a "conjectural" certitude.^ It is obvious that 
 if we compare the knowledge about an object or an event 
 derived from a picture or a description with the knowledge 
 of a person who has seen the object or been present at the 
 event, the former is not only more indirect and superficial 
 than the latter, but the certainty which we are justified in 
 feeling about it is also less. 
 
 It would seem to be in relation to the last-mentioned sense 
 of elKaala that Plato calls the next stage in the scale of 
 
 I See 7. 516 c-d, for an application of eUaala in the sense of "conjec- 
 ture." 
 
96 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 knowledge ttio-ti?, "belief" or "conviction." Here, as in 
 the former case, when the word has so many associations, 
 it is important to seize the particular one which Plato appa- 
 rently intended to convey. The objects of "belief," he says, 
 are the things of which the images of the first stage are resem- 
 blances; in other words, what are ordinarily understood by 
 "real things." The differences in the mental state of a man 
 whose knowledge consists in "images" and that of one whose 
 knowledge is derived from personal contact are many, but 
 the one which is emphasized by Plato for his present pur- 
 pose is that the latter, besides being more clear and true, is 
 also more certain.^ 
 
 The two kinds of mental objects and operations just 
 described, while they differ from one another in important 
 respects, have certain other important points in common 
 when both compared with a higher stage of knowledge; 
 and they are accordingly comprised by Plato under the sin- 
 gle generic name of So^a, or, as it is usually translated, 
 "opinion."^ Neither the Greek word nor its English equi- 
 valent, in their ordinary usage, gives any indication of the 
 special meaning which Plato here intended to express. The 
 characteristic marks of what he chooses to call "opinion" 
 are the following: subjectively, it is a state of mind which 
 carries with it no guarantee either of truth or of permanence; 
 it may be either true or false^ (whereas what we understand 
 by "knowledge" must be true), and it is liable to be changed 
 or lost* (whereas when we really know a truth once we know 
 it always) ; objectively, it relates to a matter which is given 
 
 I Cf. lo. 6oi e — 602 b. = 7. 534 a. 
 
 35. 477 e; cf. Theaetetus, 187 b. 
 
 43.4126; cf. 6. 508 d; and Afe«o, 97 e — 98 a. ' 
 
IN^THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 97 
 
 in forms of sense, and which is manifold, particular, and 
 relative.' An illustration will best explain Plato's meaning. 
 A man has "opinion" about justice or beauty or weight or 
 size; that is, he "thinks" that certain things are just or 
 beautiful, heavy or large. His thought may be more or less 
 positive according to his nature and circumstances; but 
 however positive he may feel, he cannot use "thinking" as 
 equivalent to "knowing." If asked. What is justice ? What 
 is heaviness ? he will probably answer by pointing to this or 
 that instance of what he means; justice perhaps will be to 
 him bound up with certain particular laws, actions, or per- 
 sons, heaviness with certain particular materials. The 
 respective aggregates of these particular instances will make 
 up his conceptions; justice is to him this aggregate, and 
 nothing more. But now, suppose the actions or institutions 
 in which his conception of justice was embodied to be done 
 under different circumstances or worked under different 
 conditions, they may very likely appear to be unjust instead 
 of just. And similarly the materials with which alone he 
 associated heaviness will seem light and not heavy when put 
 alongside of materials which are heavier. The matter of 
 "opinion," then, whether it be moral or aesthetic, mathemati- 
 cal or physical (for in this respect there is no difference), is, 
 firstly, "manifold," consisting of a number of sensible or 
 imaginable objects; and, secondly, it is "particular" and 
 "relative," for each of its constituents depends for its charac- 
 ter upon its own particular position, and changes its charac- 
 ter as its relative position changes. And it is clear that these 
 characteristics belong equally to the matter in question, 
 whether it be apprehended directly in actual sensible experi- 
 
 j ' s- 47^ ^ — ^° ^- ■■■■■■ • 
 
98 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 ence, or indirectly through an artistic or other medium. The 
 condition of mind thus characterized is that of the majority 
 of people on most subjects, and of all people on many sub- 
 jects.' What we commonly call our knowledge, except 
 where we may have made a special study in a special direc- 
 tion, is either derived from the representation of other men 
 or from our own casual and limited observation of the parti- 
 cular objects with which we happen to have come in contact. 
 On the other hand, though the mind is for the most part 
 content to remain in this condition, there are occasions on 
 which it is conscious of its unsatisfactoriness. This must 
 be the case, for instance, as soon as it begins to see that the 
 sensible qualities of things, which it supposed to be fixed and 
 absolute, are after all variable and relative, and that the 
 same thing seems to have opposite attributes according as 
 its position is changed. This relativity," which is inherent 
 in the matter of sensation, whether in the physical or moral 
 world, is one of the first difficulties which stimulates thought 
 or reflection.^ The same thing seems to be both light and 
 heavy, both just and unjust; how can this be? Are then 
 lightness and heaviness, justice and injustice, one and the 
 same? To suppose this is to give the lie to one's own con- 
 sciousness. The dilemma forces the mind to advance and 
 to analyze further this perplexing matter of sensation, which, 
 instead of the clear and permanent thing which it seemed to 
 be, has become a "confused" center of contradictory and 
 fluctuating attributes.^ To detect distinctions in this con- 
 fusion; to ask, What then really is weight? What then 
 really is justice? and to distinguish finally the object of 
 
 I 5. 479 d, t4 rwv TToWuv woWh vltfitfia, 
 
 ' 7. 523 a — 524 d. 3 avyKix^iiivav Tt, 524 c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 99 
 
 sense, with its capacity of developing contradictions and of 
 "playing double,'" from the object of thought which can be 
 fixed and defined — these are the further steps which reflec- 
 tion takes, and with these we have left the domain of "opin- 
 ion" and entered upon that of science. And this brings us 
 to the next stage in the Platonic scale of mental objects and 
 activities. 
 
 When we reflect upon the meaning of "knowledge" or 
 "science " (for the Greek word is the same for both), it seems 
 incongruous to apply it to a state of mind which is liable to 
 error, or to an object-matter which is liable to change. We 
 cannot say that we "know" what justice is, if the embodi- , 
 ments of our conception may become unjust by a change of 
 relations, any more than we could say that we "knew" what 
 a triangle was, supposing that we found that the properties 
 of triangles as such varied with the size, color, or position of 
 the particular figures of which we demonstrated them. This, 
 however, is just what we do not find; we conceive that a 
 triangle is always and everywhere a triangle; that once 
 known it is always known; and in this belief we speak of 
 geometrical science or knowledge, which we distinguish 
 from our ordinary state of mind on ordinary subjects. What 
 we only "think" or "beHeve" is scattered about in a num- 
 ber of separate objects; what we "know" is one, and only 
 one, however many may be the instances in which we per- 
 ceive its truth. What we only "think" depends for its 
 character or validity upon its particular form or environ- 
 ment, and changes with them; what we "know" is indepen- 
 dent of its particular presentation, and remains true under 
 all apparent changes. The state of mind thus distinguished 
 
lOO THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 from "opinion" is what is commonly understood by "scien- 
 tific," and as the only sciences which could be said to exist in 
 Plato's time were mathematical, he took mathematics as the 
 type of the third stage in his scale of knowledge, though his 
 characterization of them would equally apply to all sciences or- 
 dinarily so called. The geometrician, Plato says,' uses sensible 
 figures in his reasoning, but does not really think of them. 
 What he really has in his thought is not the particular triangle 
 which he draws on paper, but the "triangle itself," which 
 the one on paper "is like" or "is an image of." Similarly 
 we might say of the botanist or political economist that, in 
 proportion as their subject-matter has reached a scientific 
 stage, they ignore the particular modifications under which 
 it is presented to them, and see through these to the essential 
 ' forms or laws of which they are symbols. In doing this they 
 have no more doubt than has the geometrician that they are 
 nearer to the truth than if they allowed themselves to attend 
 to nothing but the particular circumstances of the place or 
 the moment. Whatever popular prejudices may be violated 
 by the scientific mode of thought, and whatever metaphy- 
 sical difficulties may be raised by the assimiption of degrees 
 of reality, the best minds are practically, if not theoretically, 
 convinced that there is a difference between "thinking" and 
 "knowing," and that in the latter they are more in conform- 
 ity with what is real than in the former. 
 
 The word Sidvoia, which Plato^ appropriated to the 
 form of mental activity just described, had no more fixed 
 connotation in ordinary Greek usage than such English words 
 as "thought," "intellect," "understanding." We have seen 
 what was the particular meaning which he wished to con- 
 
 [ i6. siod-e. .„ . . . 2 6. 511 d; 7.534a. -■;: 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO loi 
 
 vey by it — namely, that the next step in the scale of clearness 
 and truth above the mere certainty of opinion is that in 
 which the mind, while employing sensible objects, is really 
 occupied with something of which they are only symbols or 
 images. It is necessary to dwell at a little more length upon 
 Plato's conception of the distinction here involved, which 
 plays such a vital part in his theory of education and knowl- 
 edge. The opposition between sense and thought in vari- 
 ous forms had attracted the attention of Greek thinkers 
 from the earliest times. The apparent arbitrariness and 
 fluctuation, both of our physical sensations and of our moral 
 ideas, were continually contrasting themselves with the fixity 
 and substantiality which the simplest conception of knowl- 
 edge and the most rudimentary moral distinctions alike seem 
 to presuppose. The necessity for immutable principles, ifj 
 the world of nature and human life is to be explained, im- 
 pressed itself upon Plato with all the greater force that he 
 seems to have realized with peculiar vividness the muta- 
 biHty of much which ordinary experience pronounces perma- 
 nent. To the element of reality which his mind discovered 
 or surmised everywhere behind the appearance and change 
 which sensation shows us, he gave the name of "form." 
 It is a curious instance of the changes of fortune in the life of 
 language that the Greek word "idea," which Plato chose to 
 express what is most profoundly real, and least dependent 
 on the human mind for its reality, should have come to be 
 used for a mere mental creation or fiction, and that its 
 English equivalent "form" is now mainly suggestive of 
 what is superficial and unsubstantial. The history of the 
 word in Greek speculation before its employment by Plato 
 is very slight; we can only conjecture that to a Greek, pecu- 
 
I02 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 liarly organized for the perception of shape, and accustomed 
 to find significant and typical lines in all that he saw, it was 
 a natural transition from what is outwardly and visibly charac- 
 teristic to what is inwardly and theoretically essential. Every 
 people, like every individual thinker, has its favorite meta- 
 phors for expressing ultimate philosophical conceptions. 
 In the phraseology of Greek philosophy there is no phenom- 
 enon of which we are more constantly reminded than that 
 of vision, and the use of the word "form" by Plato is only 
 the most pregnant and far-reaching instance of a metaphor 
 which, in the way of analogy, simile, or suggestion, pervades 
 his speculation. We have here only to indicate in the brief- 
 est and most general way the meaning of the Platonic concep- 
 tion of "form," so far as it enters into the theory of knowl- 
 edge and education. It may be said to combine elements of 
 all the modern conceptions of essence, law, and ideal. Those 
 qualities or characteristics in a thing which most make it 
 what it is, and which contrast with others that are casual 
 and separable, are the "form" which characterizes and 
 individualizes the thing. That principle which gives con- 
 sistency and continuity to changing manifestations of activity 
 is the "form" which works itself out in a plastic material. 
 And once more : the aim or mark to which the various steps 
 in a process converge is the "form" to which the agent in 
 the process looks, and which he strives to attain. So that 
 alike in art, in science, in morality, it is the "form" which is 
 essential and important, the "form" which the imagination 
 discerns through the chaos of sense-impressions, the "form" 
 which the reason separates from the accidental conditions of 
 time and place, and the "form" in which the moral con- 
 sciousness finds rest and guidance amid the distractions 
 and contradictions of experience. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 103 
 
 Plato has various ways of expressing the mode in which 
 the "form" exists, and is apprehended. It is that which 
 really "is," as opposed to that which "seems;" that which ' 
 is "one," as opposed to that which is "many;" that which 
 is self-identical and permanent, as opposed to that which is 
 always becoming something else. Or, again, the sensible 
 world is only the "appearance" of the intelligible; the 
 things which we see and hear are "images," that only 
 "resemble" and suggest something which we cannot see or 
 hear; and each of these images or resemblances only "par- 
 ticipates in," but does not adequately embody, the reality 
 which is. grasped in and over it. The vivid and sometimes 
 crude manner in which Plato represents the relationship 
 between what is and what is not "form" has given rise to 
 much misunderstanding of him as well as to many real 
 difficulties, and has left a doubt whether he had himself 
 clearly apprehended what he was endeavoring to express. 
 The truth seems to be that no great genius, "stung by the 
 splendor of a sudden thought," can ever work out or even 
 conceive his idea with the coolness and completeness which 
 are necessary to make it consistently intelligible and to 
 guard it from misinterpretation. But we are here con- 
 cerned, not with the exaggerations and confusions, real or 
 supposed, to which Plato fell a victim, but with the central 
 truth which he saw clearly, and to which he held tenaciously. 
 
 Returning now to the scale of knowledge, we see that, 
 whether we regard the sense of unsatisfactoriness which 
 impels the mind to advance upon sensible opinion, or the 
 intellectual condition in which that impulse results, it is 
 what Plato understands by "forms," for which the mind 
 is looking, and in which it rests. The mathematical sciences. 
 
I04 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 which spring from, and are the answer to, questions raised 
 by the mathematical properties of sensible objects, take 
 account, not of the particular figures to which they refer, 
 but of the "objects themselves," of which those figures are 
 only the "images;" these "objects themselves" are clearly 
 what we have learned to know as "forms." Though, how- 
 ever, it is about the "form" of the triangle or of unity that 
 the geometrician and arithmetician really reason, not about 
 the figures on the paper, they cannot dispense with those 
 figures. They exercise inteUigence, but intelligence which 
 still has an appendage of sense, and is not therefore perfectly 
 intelligent. And, along with this imperfection in the knowl- 
 edge of which mathematics are a type, goes another one 
 which Plato expresses by saying that such knowledge is 
 "assumptive " or "hypothetical." 
 
 Geometricians, arithmeticians, and the like assmne the odd, the 
 even, the figures, the three kinds of angle, and other similar things, 
 according to the particular branch of the science with which they are 
 dealing; these they assume themselves to know, and make them hypothe- 
 ses and do not think themselves bound to give any further account of them 
 either to themselves or others; they suppose everyone to see the truth 
 of them. From these hypotheses they start, and when they have got 
 this start, they go on through the remaining steps, and arrive conclu 
 sively at the result which was the original object of their inquiry.' 
 
 Such a procedure does not satisfy the full conception of 
 knowledge or science; for "when the starting-point of the 
 argument is something assumed and not known, and the 
 end and intermediate steps depend for their connection upon 
 this unknown starting-point, how can such a conclusion 
 possibly constitute knowledge ?"^ By "hypotheses," then, 
 Plato understands, not assumptions temporarily made for 
 I 6. 510 c-d; 511 d. ' 7. 533 c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 105 
 
 certain definite purposes, but truths which, while really 
 depfending for their validity upon their connection with higher 
 truths, are treated as if they were independent of that con- 
 nection, and self-proven. In this sense, each one of the 
 "forms" of existence with which the special sciences are 
 concerned — number, figure, motion, etc. — is a "hypoth- 
 esis;" the special sciences are scientific so far as they follow 
 logically from these "hypotheses" which form their prin- 
 ciples; but so far as those principles themselves are not, 
 strictly speaking, "known," they do not satisfy the ideal 
 requirements of science. For science to Plato means expla- 
 nation and intelligibility; we "know" a truth when we can 
 "give account of" it, and the way in which we give account 
 of it is by showing its necessary connection with wider and 
 more independent truths. Progress in science is progress 
 from isolated to connected thought; and if we try to imagine 
 such a progress consimomated, we are led to the conception 
 of a universal science, in which every part is seen in its rela- 
 tion to every other part, and of which the whole forms a 
 perfect orb of truth, beginning and ending in itself. Of 
 such a science, as it might be if the speculative impulse of 
 the human mind were fully satisfied, Plato has given us a 
 picture,' though he is conscious that it is only a picture, and 
 that to realize what he is imagining is "a flight above "^ to 
 both himself and his readers. The whole matter of knowl- 
 edge is imaged as a perfectly graduated scale of the essential 
 "forms" of existence; each "form" is seen to be, not an 
 ultimate truth, but a "hypothesis," depending for its truth 
 upon one above it; the mind mounts from "form" to "form, " 
 using each as a "point of departure" to the next, until it 
 
 ' 6. sii b-c. " 6. 506 e; ci. 7. 532 6—533 a. 
 
lo6 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 reaches the topmost "unhypothetical principle," upon which 
 the whole chain hangs, and from which it can descend again 
 securely down the ladder of intelligible reality. In such a 
 perfect system of knowledge, as there woidd be nothing 
 "hypothetical" or unproven, so there would be no element of 
 sense or unintelligibility. The symbolism of sensible 
 appearances, which suggest imperfectly something which 
 they are not, and blur the intellectual vision with an unex- 
 plained residuum, would melt into the perfect transparency 
 of reason, when mind met mind face to face. 
 
 We have thus reached the highest stage in the Platonic 
 scale of mental development, that stage to which he applies 
 emphatically the name of "knowledge," and the object-matter 
 ;of which is the essential "forms" of existence without ad- 
 ' mixture of hypothesis or sense. Like the preceding stage, it 
 represents an inherent impulse in the mind; but, unlike it, 
 it leaves the impulse in the main unfulfilled. The different 
 specific sciences owe their existence to the dissatisfaction oc- 
 casioned to the mind by reflection upon its sensible experience. 
 This dissatisfaction they remove by revealing permanent 
 and consistent "forms" in what before seemed a fluctuating 
 chaos; but it still survives in the sense of incompleteness 
 and hmitation which the mind feels, when it finds that 
 each science rests upon an unproven basis and points be- 
 yond itself for the ultimate estabhshment of its conclusions. 
 The force or faculty in virtue of which the mind is perpet- 
 ually trying to rid itself of this dissatisfaction, to get out of 
 the region of "hypotheses," and to see truth as a whole of 
 parts, is called by Plato the "dialectical" faculty,' and the 
 ideal science which the completed exercise of that faculty 
 
 ^ 7- 533 a; cf. ibid., c, and 532 a. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 107 
 
 might be conceived to create is the "science of dialectiq," 
 the only form of science or knowledge which seemed to him 
 strictly to deserve the name.' The term "dialectic," which 
 plays almost as conspicuous a part in the Platonic philosophy 
 as "form," means originally nothing more than the process 
 of oral discussion by question and answer. Naturally a 
 prominent and familiar word among a people where ideas 
 were communicated so much more by talking than by read- 
 ing,' and specially consecrated to Plato by the example of 
 his master Socrates, it was adopted by him to describe the 
 process by which the mind endeavors to arrive at true con- 
 ceptions, whether by actual verbal discussion or by inward 
 "dialogue with itself." And as Plato conceived that the 
 truth exists in a certain form or order, and that the human 
 mind in learning and apprehending it must conform to that 
 order, he naturally used "dialectic" for that particular mode 
 of manipulating language and thought which seemed to him 
 most consonant with truth, and most fitted to lead to its 
 discovery. What that mode must be we have already had 
 some indication. If the only conception of reality which 
 satisfied Plato was that of a cosmos, which is neither a vacant 
 imity nor a crowded chaos, but a reasonable system of 
 interrelated elements, the only true logic or method of 
 knowledge must seem to him to be that which obeys the 
 two-fold requirement arising from such a conception; a 
 method which unifies without confounding, which specifies 
 without separating; a method which does not "break the 
 limbs" of truth,^ but follows and reveals the natural articu- 
 lations of its subject-matter till it has reached the perception 
 of its organic unity. Such a method is the true "dialectic," 
 
 ' 7. 533 c-e. ' Phaedrus, 265 e. 
 
io8 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 the only true method of learning, teaching, and investigat- 
 ing, because the only method which is in agreement with 
 the inherent constitution of the real world. And if the 
 method be supposed to have been carried through to the 
 utmost verge of truth, the moving process passes into a 
 completed result, and dialectic, instead of a logic of discovery 
 and definition, becomes the Hving expression of the truth 
 itself, the embodied logic of reality. Plato has nowhere 
 filled up the outline of his conception of "dialectic;" but 
 the greater part of his dialogues are practical illustrations 
 of the principle, and the suggestions of a theory which are 
 scattered up and down them are often more instructive as 
 well as more stimulating than the finished systems of other 
 men. 
 
 We have now seen how Plato conceived the natural order 
 in the ascent of the mind toward truth. It begins by seeing 
 things "darkly," through the uncertain "glass" of fancy; it 
 goes on to the certainty of direct sensible experience; from 
 the objects of sense and opinion, with their local and tem- 
 poral limitations, it advances to the perception of essential 
 "forms" and principles, which those objects symbolize or 
 suggest; and from the understanding of isolated principles 
 and their consequences it passes to the apprehension of them 
 as steps in a connected scale of existence. We have next 
 to -ask How far does the human mind actually obey this 
 principle of progress ? What is the actual state and opinion 
 of mankind as regards its "education," in the fuller sense 
 in which we have now come to use the word? Plato has 
 expressed his views upon this subject in the famous allegory 
 of the cave, with which the seventh book of the Republic 
 opens. The allegory, to be understood and appreciated. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 109 
 
 must be studied in its entirety. A few only of its main 
 features need be dwelt upon here. Mankind in general, 
 Plato gives us to understand, so far from advancing up the 
 road which leads to truth and light, remain for the most 
 part during their whole hfe in the state of mind which is fit 
 only for children. They are like men sitting boimd at the 
 bottom of a cave, lit by a fire to which their backs are turned, 
 able only to look straight before them at the wall of their 
 prison. The hving world of nature and man hes behind 
 them, and all that they know of it are its shadows and echoes, 
 the hazy, unsubstantial, artificial reproductions of the minds 
 of other men. At this moving world of phantasms they 
 stare, and in its reality they believe, with all the fixity and 
 fervor of men who have done a thing from their childhood. 
 They watch its vain shows as they pass and repass, observe 
 the order of their succession, and formulate a conjectural 
 science which is to enable them to predict the future. From 
 this condition there is for most men no escape, for they do 
 not know, and therefore cannot desire, any other sort of 
 existence. Only now and then, by some force of nature or 
 circumstances, a prisoner is set free from his chains, made 
 to stand on his feet and look around, to see with his own 
 eyes, and hear with his own ears, and step by step, perhaps, 
 to make his way to the upper air and the sunHght of knowl- 
 edge. But each stage in the process is grievous to him; 
 the first experience of actual life confuses him, and makes 
 him wish for his old world of fancy again, and the sudden 
 revelation of scientific truth dazzles his mind, which is used 
 only to empirical certitude. Only by slow degrees he gets an 
 insight into the principles which really govern the world, and 
 the supreme principle upon which they all depend; and if in 
 
no THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 compassion for the ignorance of mankind he tries to teach 
 them his new knowledge, he is received with ridicule and 
 opposition, which in the end may cost him his life. 
 
 Philosophy, like religion, has often begun by calling 
 /upon men to get rid of their prejudices and illusions. It is 
 customary, indeed, to look upon the two as antagonistic, and 
 to contrast the humility required by the gospel with the sup- 
 posed arrogance and self-sufficiency of the philosophic spirit. 
 Yet, if we take men so different, and so representative in 
 their differences, as Plato, Bacon, and Spinoza, we find them 
 all agreeing, not in a glorification of the human mind, but 
 in the imperative demand that it should shake off its 
 "chains" and turn to receive the light; that it should sur- 
 render its "idols" and "become as a little child;" that it 
 should look at things "under the form of eternity," not 
 through the vague confusion of its own imagination. To all 
 alike, however different their phraseology and their motive, 
 the conviction is common that there is an order of existence 
 or of nature which man does not make but finds; which he 
 must wait upon and not forestall, if he would attain to the 
 well-being, the power, or the freedom of which he is capable. 
 Passing from these common features to the details of 
 Plato's conception of human ignorance, we do not find him, 
 Uke Bacon, giving any classification of the false "shadows 
 and images," but we can gather many hints as to their nature. 
 Primarily they are the dim, exaggerated, and shallow repre- 
 sentations of things through the medium of art, hterature, and 
 rhetoric' In explaining Plato's antipathy to dramatic repre- 
 sentation, we have already had occasion to notice some of 
 his attacks upon art in general. Those attacks seem to be 
 
 ' Cf. 7. 517 d-e; lOi 600 e — 60a b; 605 c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO m 
 
 valid if, and so far as, artistic representation produces actual 
 illusion, and substitutes appearance for reality. To a mind 
 which is really fitted by nature and education to receive art 
 in the spirit of art, illusion, so far from being a necessary 
 element in aesthetic enjoyment, is a distinct bar to it. A 
 person who looks at a play exactly as if it were real life may 
 be vehemently moved for a moment, but will eventually 
 find the spectacle either so exciting or so wearisome that he 
 will wish to interrupt it or to go away. It is essential to the 
 perfect reception of artistic effect that the impulse to action 
 should be in abeyance, and the theoretic faculties at their 
 fullest activity. The after-effect may issue in acts, but at 
 the moment of seeing, or hearing, or reading, the work of art, 
 considered as such, demands that "wise passiveness" which 
 is only the other side of theoretic energy. But there are 
 comparatively few imaginative persons in whom the double 
 power of self-control and self-surrender, of entering in and 
 yet of standing outside, is so strong that they "cannot choose 
 but" hear or see. To most of us the message of art awakens 
 a cross echo in our own selves, and we go away with the flat- 
 tering feeling that the vapors or the rhetoric of egoism are 
 the universal types or tones of genius and truth. Then it is 
 that the artist, often without knowing it, and against his 
 will, becomes a "mimic and a Juggler" to the public;' the 
 spirit distilled in the crucible of imagination gets cloyed with 
 the lees of prejudice or sentiment; and the "impassioned 
 expression, which is in the countenance of all science," stiffens 
 into a masquerade which can "deceive children and fools."^ 
 The "shadows and echoes" among which Plato's pris- 
 oners live are not, however, only the illusions, intentional or 
 
 ' 10. S98 d. 2 10. 598 c. 
 
112 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 unintentional, produced by art and literature; they are also 
 the illusions of our own passions. It would be a great mis- 
 take to regard the darkness of the cave as a mere darkness 
 of intellectual ignorance, or the escape from it as a mere 
 intellectual enlightenment. In the mind of Plato, reason is 
 never for long dissociated from emotion, or knowledge from 
 purpose; the highest impulse to him is the impulse toward 
 truth, and the highest knowledge is knowledge of the end of 
 action. Thus the great reason why the spark of "divine"^ 
 intelligence is so nearly smothered in man is not primarily 
 the difficulty of learning or the mysteriousness of nature; 
 the fetters which bind the men in the cave are those "leaden 
 weights which the pleasures of gluttony and the like gather 
 round them, and which turn the eye of the soul to the earth."* 
 The "impulse" which, if it had sway,^ would carry the soul 
 out of the "sea" of earthly life to union with "the divine, 
 immortal, and eternal" to which it is "akin," is checked 
 and thwarted by no irresistible necessity or power of evil, 
 but by the "shells and stones and tangle" with which the 
 "delights of the table" gradually incrust it. The "painted 
 images of true pleasure,"'' with which men choose to dwell, 
 are the offspring of their own nature, which leads them about 
 " like cattle, with their heads down and eyes fixed upon their 
 ' dinners, feeding and breeding, and kicking and butting one 
 another because they cannot get enough." It is not the 
 thought of "this unsubstantial pageant" which leads Plato 
 like Shakespeare to call human life a "dream;"' rather it 
 is the same feehng as that of Lucretius when he cries to man, 
 
 Qui somno partem majorem conteris aevi, 
 Et vigilans stertis nee somnia cemere cessas. 
 
 I 7. 518 e. 2 y. Jig b. 3 10. 611 c — 612 a. 
 
 4 9. 586 a c. 5 7. 520 c; 5. 476 c-d; cf. Timaeus, $2 b-c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 113 
 
 It is because men will not rouse themselves to the reality 
 which is there if they had the eyes to see it, because they 
 mistake the passing shows of sense for the eternal essence of 
 which they are the mere outside, because they "fight about 
 shadows" of power and clutch after "phantoms of good," 
 that "before they are well awake in this world they find 
 themselves in the other, sleeping the heavy sleep of death."' 
 "How then" (and this is the third and last part of our 
 question) "are men to be led up to the light, as some are 
 said to have gone up from Hades to dwell with the gods in 
 heaven ?"^ Or, as we may also put it (for it is upon progress 
 in knowledge that the good of mankind depends), "what 
 kind of studies and practice will produce the men who are 
 to save society ? "' Or, once more (for the interest of society 
 is ultimately identical with that of its noblest natures), "how 
 is the commonwealth to handle philosophy so as not to be 
 destroyed by it?"'' Clearly it is important that society 
 should look to it; that her greatest sons, instead of being 
 criminals or outcasts, who owe their mother nothing for their 
 bringing up, should be bound to her by ties of mutual obUga- 
 tion.° The principle of justice which regulates other spheres 
 of life ought to hold good here too; the man who has the 
 philosophic faculty should not be allowed to do what he hkes 
 with it;' he should be induced to contribute his share to the 
 common good, and to help in "binding the commonwealth 
 together," while. his fellows should do for him what he can- 
 not do for himself, provide him with the necessary material 
 of life, and supply his soul with the nurture which it demands. 
 The general character, then, of the duty of society is clear: 
 
 1 7. 534 c-d. 3 6. 502 d. 5 7. 520 b. 
 
 2 7. 521 c. 46. 497 d. * 7.5196 — 520 a. 
 
114 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 it has to find a way for doing methodically and with the 
 greatest possible ease what now takes place exceptionally 
 by the force of circumstances and under almost insuperable 
 obstacles. And the general character of the education which 
 shall do this is also clear: it must be an education which 
 \ will help the soul to "see" the truth, to penetrate the dark- 
 ness which fancy and appetite spread between it and facts, to 
 follow its own "divine impulse," and to shake off the fetters 
 of its own forging. Some "professors of education,"' indeed, 
 talk as if the soul were like a blind eye and teaching were 
 "putting sight into it." But the truth is that the "eye of 
 the soul," the "organ with which it learns and understands," 
 is not like the eye of the body. The latter is more or less 
 independent of the rest of the organism, and can be moved 
 without it; but the former can be "turned to the light" only 
 if the whole soul be turned with it. The soul is not in pieces, 
 but continuous; knowledge in the highest sense is not an 
 independent act of a part of the self, but that imion of the 
 whole with truth in which the lower parts are taken up into 
 the higher according to their capacities.^ It is not possible 
 to be habitually living the life of the lower elements, and to 
 keep the higher at their greatest efi&ciency. Evil is the 
 "disease" of the soul,^ and to be or do evil and still expect 
 to exercise the highest psychical activity is as reasonable as 
 it would be, if body cured body by contact, to expect the 
 most diseased body to be the best healer. It is from this 
 point of view that Plato denies the possibility of getting to 
 know the real nature of evil by personally experiencing it; 
 the very experience which is to be the object of knowledge 
 spoils the instrument by which it is to be known. The 
 17. 5i8b-c. =9.5866. 3 4. 444 e— 445 b; 3. 409 a-e. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 115 
 
 "whole" soul then must be turned to the light, for the "eye| 
 of the soul " is the highest element in it, and carries with it 
 the other elements. 
 
 In another respect also the mental is unlike the bodily 
 vision. The bodily eye may lose its power of sight and have 
 it restored to it again, but the analogous faculty in the mind 
 can neither be created nor destroyed ; 
 
 the other virtues of the soul, as they are called, seem to be nearly akin 
 to those of the body, for they are not originally in existence, but are an 
 after-product of habit and practice; but the virtue of intelligence seems 
 to belong to something altogether more divine, something which never 
 loses its force, but is made serviceable or unserviceable, helpful or 
 harmful, according as it is turned to the light or not.' 
 
 The power of mental insight still remains active in the warped f 
 soul of the clever scoundrel ; it is the divine and immortal 
 part in the soul, that which makes it "capable of bearing all 
 good things,"^ but capable also of bearing "all evil things;" 
 it may be "buried in the mud" of ignorance or overgrown 
 with the "incrustations" of passion, but it is never so lost 
 that it cannot be lifted up, purged, and reillumined, or so 
 negative that anything else can be substituted for it. 
 
 The general principle, then, of the higher education is; 
 expressed in the term "conversion." ^ How is this to be 
 effected? Clearly the educational process must follow the 
 true and natural order of mental development. If the scale 
 of knowledge and truth is what it has been represented to , 
 be, education must be a method for leading the soul from 
 the lowest stage, where it apprehends nothing but "images," 
 through that of direct sensible experience, to the region of 
 essential "forms" of existence, and so finally to that percep- 
 tion of the systematic unity of truth which is the ideal of 
 
 "7. 5i8d — 519 a. 2 10. 621 c. 37. 518 d; 521 c. 
 
Il6 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 science. The first two steps are provided for if the education 
 in "music" be successfully carried through. Its function 
 was precisely to obviate the possible perversion of the imagi- 
 nation and emotions, by training them rightly; to prevent 
 people from being still children when they ought to be men, 
 by making childhood the real precursor of manhood; to 
 train the imagination so that it should not lead to an idolatry 
 of sensible forms which the mind can leave only with pain 
 and dif&culty, but that "when reason comes" she may be 
 "welcome" to the soul which has already learned to know 
 her unconsciously; to form habits which may not be mere 
 habits, but the basis for fresh acquisitions of character, and 
 convictions which shall not be merely fixed, but shall offer 
 a ready material for receiving the form of principles. In a 
 soul thus trained, with its imagination filled with fair sights 
 and sounds, its emotions instinctively responsive to what is 
 really lovable, its beliefs "dyed fast" with truth, the new 
 structure of knowledge has to be reared. The steadfastness 
 of opinion has to be translated into logical consistency; the 
 quickness and exactness of perception and fancy, into the 
 power of abstraction and reasoning; the love of things and 
 persons into the devotion to principles and ideas. What the 
 first step in the new "conversion" will be we already know 
 by anticipation. The mathematical sciences, which are at 
 once the product and the type of the third stage in the scale 
 of mental activity, are clearly marked out to be the instru- 
 ments for stimulating and training that activity. Those 
 sciences, as we saw, owe their existence to the difficulties 
 which the soul experiences when it reflects upon the matter 
 of sensuous opinion. It is in meeting those difficulties, in 
 obedience to an inherent speculative impulse, that the soul 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO ^^^ 
 
 passes from the supposed clearness and consistency of local 
 and temporal truth to the more transparent clearness and 
 the more rigorous consistency of a truth which is not sensible, 
 but intelligible. If, then, we could make the soul perform 
 methodically and under guidance the process which it is its 
 nature to perform imperfectly and at random, if the sciences 
 could be utilized for training its scientific faculties as the arts 
 were utihzed for training its artistic faculties, we should be 
 helping in the most effective, because the most natural, way 
 to "make the work of conversion easy." 
 
 Plato complains' that the true educational function of the 
 sciences has been ignored or neglected. Arithmetic has been 
 studied so far as is useful for trade and commerce, geometry 
 for the purposes of measurement, astronomy for its value in 
 navigation, harmonics in the interest of the professional 
 musician; but it is hard to make people beheve the truth 
 that each of these sciences may be made a means for "pur- 
 ging and rekindhng an organ of the soul which would other- 
 wise be spoiled and blinded, an organ more worth saving 
 than ten thousand eyes, for by it alone the truth is seen." 
 He does not, of course, deny the importance of such practical 
 appHcationsin their proper sphere; on the contrary, he him- 
 self emphasizes the practical utility of arithmetic and geom- 
 etry to a man who is to be a soldier and tactician.^ But he 
 points out that for such practical purposes a very slight 
 amount of science is necessary, and that the methods of study 
 which serve for such purposes are not the methods which 
 serve for education.' The mere empirical observation of 
 objects, which is all that is necessary for immediate utility, 
 
 I 7. sas^-^ijya-b, d-e; 531 a. 
 
 ' 7. 522 e; 526 d. 3 7. 526 d. 
 
Ii8 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 does not "lead the soul to look upwards,'" whereas the study 
 of the same objects in the scientific spirit is just what is wanted 
 to make "the natural inteUigence useful instead of useless."^ 
 For, as we have already been told, the really scientific man, 
 though he employs sensible objects in his reasoning, does 
 not "think of them." The numbers of the arithmetician 
 are such as "can only be manipulated by thought;"^ and if 
 we point out to him that the visible or tangible object which 
 represents his unit is not "one" at all, but is divisible into 
 infinite multiplicity, he will only laugh at our simplicity, 
 and will adhere to his assertion that one is one, and never 
 anything else, invariable and indivisible. Geometry, too, so 
 far as it is scientifically treated, relates to " what is invisible 
 and eternal,"* and not to the sensible figures which are 
 "becoming" something else at the very moment that we 
 speak of them. Nor will Plato admit that the case is really 
 different when we come to astronomy. Here, indeed, the 
 splendor and beauty of the visible objects with which the 
 science is concerned easily deceive us into thinking that this 
 merely sensible nature is in itself important and interesting. 
 But gazing up at the stars in open-mouthed wonderment will 
 no more give us knowledge than gazing at a very excellently 
 constructed diagram.' The whole celestial universe, so far 
 as it "has body and is visible," is subject to the same condi- 
 tions as other material things. It does not "admit of knowl- 
 edge" in the strict sense; it is a symbol, but not the truth 
 symbolized. The material heavenly bodies, as such, do not 
 realize the relations of figure and motion which they suggest;' 
 those relations "cannot be apprehended by sight, but by 
 
 ' 7. 529 a-b. 3 7. 526 a. s 529 c-e. 
 
 " 7- 53° c. 4 7. 527 b. 6 530 a-c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 119 
 
 thought only;" and it is as figures and diagrams for the 
 discovery and analysis of these intelligible relations that the 
 visible bodies ought to be used, if we are really to study 
 astronomy and thereby to educate the human intelligence. 
 The methods adopted in harmonics, or the science of sound, 
 admit of a similar reform; it too may be made to help in the 
 work of "conversion" by revealing the abstract numerical 
 conditions upon which musical harmony depends. But 
 this is not understood either by the professional musicians 
 who fight over the "smallest audible interval" and "set 
 their ears before their minds,"* or even by the Pythagorean 
 philosophers who,^ though they appreciate the true interest 
 of the subject, confine their investigations to what they can 
 hear, and do not go on to ask what relations of number pro- 
 duce harmony and what do not, and what is the cause of 
 each. 
 
 Plato's conception, then, of the educational function of 
 the sciences is, primarily, that they may be used to teach men 
 to think. This they do by presenting to the mind sensible 
 objects, and at the same time compelling it to ignore or 
 abstract from the particularity and limitation incident to 
 sense presentation, to fijc its attention solely upon the essen- 
 tial and universal "forms" which are confusedly "imaged" 
 to sense, and to deduce consistently the consequences which 
 follow from them. The difiiculties or misunderstandings 
 to which he has given occasion in expressing this conception 
 seem mainly due to the embarrassing combination of an 
 extremely limited and simple scientific experience with an 
 almost prophetic power of advancing upon it, or divining^ 
 its possibilities. In the childlike confidence inspired by the 
 
 ' 531 a-b. " S31 c. 
 
I20 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 still fresh perception of the nature of arithmetical and geo- 
 metrical truth, he leaps the barrier which modem thought 
 has erected between deductive and experimental science, 
 and boldly surmises a state of human knowledge in which 
 the whole web of cosmic conditions should be as rigorously 
 intelligible as the simplest relations of number and figure. 
 He sees how the senses confuse the reason in its early reflections 
 upon units and triangles, and how the reason sets the senses 
 at defiance and goes on its own way securely; and at a stroke 
 he pictures to himself the whole phenomenal world seen as 
 the symbol of an intelHgible order. He knows by experi- 
 ence how the study of mathematics quickens the mind and 
 compels the practice of abstract thinking, and there seems 
 to him to be no reason why the whole of human science 
 should not be pressed into the same high service, the educa- 
 tion of the human race. 
 
 We have, however, mentioned only one, and the lesser 
 one, of the motives which led Plato to advocate the study of 
 the sciences. The ten years between twenty and thirty, over 
 which he would continue that study, would be a very long 
 time to spend in the mere practice of logical thinking. But 
 the study has to him a real as well as a formal significance. 
 It serves not only as a mental gymnastic, helping the soul to 
 *jeach the place where the truth is to be found,* but also as 
 an actual introduction to the truth for which it is looking - 
 That this is Plato's conception appears both from his enu- 
 meration of the sciences themselves and, still more, from the 
 principle upon which he directs that they should be studied. 
 In his series of sciences — arithmetic, geometry, stereometry, 
 astronomy, and harmonics — he is clearly following an order 
 
 I 7. S26>. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 121 
 
 of progression in their respective subject-matters' — number, 
 planes, cubes, motion of cubes, motion of audible bodies. 
 We need not suppose the series to be intended to be com- 
 plete, even in the then condition of knowledge; we are 
 expressly told that there are many other forms of motion 
 which might be mentioned;^ still it would seem that Plato 
 meant to co-ordinate, in outline at least, those portions of the 
 knowledge of his time which could pretend to the name of 
 science. This appears more clearly from the passage in 
 which he indicates the method upon which they should be 
 studied. 
 
 If the pursuit of all these subjects which we have enumerated be 
 carried on to the point where they communicate with and are related 
 to one another, and their natural affinities be inferred, I think it is of some 
 use for our present purpose, and not labor spent in vain, as it other- 
 wise is.' 
 
 And again,^ when the age of twenty is reached, the branches 
 of knowledge which have been placed before the student in 
 boyhood "promiscuously," to be picked up without system 
 or constraint, "are to be brought together, so that he may 
 have a comprehensive view of their relationship to one 
 another, and to the nature of being." From these passages 
 we see that Plato regarded the sciences which he had enu- 
 merated, not as arbitrary and isolated pieces of knowledge, 
 still less as merely formal constructions, but as directly 
 related to the sum of being or reality, of which each one of 
 them expresses a particular aspect, and in which they all find 
 a common meeting-point. Number, extension, motion, are 
 primary "forms" of being; the first especially' is involved 
 in the simplest acts of thought, and underlies the processes 
 
 I See, e. g., 7. 528 b. ' 53° c-d. 
 
 3531 c-d. ♦S37C. 57.522 c. 
 
122 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 of all the arts and sciences. In learning to deal with them 
 we are not only preparing ourselves for dealing with more 
 important subjects, but we are actually setting our foot upon 
 that "ladder" of existence, the ascent of which would be the 
 5ummit of scientific attainment. And here we are reminded 
 Df the language in which Plato explains what he considers 
 :o be the imperfection or inadequacy of the knowledge of 
 vhich mathematics are a type. That knowledge, we were 
 ^Id, is "hypothetical;" that is, it rests upon principles 
 which are unproven, because they have not yet been appre- 
 hended in all their relations to other principles. In requiring, 
 then, that the study of the sciences should be constantly 
 directed to the perception of their mutual relationships, Plato 
 is clearly intending to remedy this characteristic defect by 
 pointing the way from the region of the "hypothetical" to 
 that of a self-demonstrated system of knowledge. To such 
 a system Plato, as we saw, gave the name of "dialectic," and 
 the impulse which leads, and the rules which guide, the mind 
 in the endeavor to realize it are the "dialectical" faculty 
 and method. Accordingly we find, as we might expect, that 
 in the power of perceiving the mutual relationships of the 
 particular sciences, Plato finds "the greatest test of the pres- 
 ence or absence of a dialectical nature," for "the man who 
 can see things together is a dialectician, and he who cannot 
 is not."' And as to "see things together," or in their natural 
 and necessary connection, is the same thing as to understand, 
 explain, or account for them, the "dialectician" is also 
 naturally described as the man who " can give account both 
 to himself and others of the essential nature of any given 
 thing."^ 
 
 ' 537 c. " 7- S33 t>; S34b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 123 
 
 The sciences, then, "ordinarily so called,"* are the "pre- 
 lude"^ or the "propaedeutic"' to "dialectical" science. The 
 study of them, as usually conducted, is far from making a 
 man a "dialectician," for it generally leaves him incapable 
 of "giving any account of" his knowledge,* and knowledge 
 thus unaccounted for is neither an intelligent nor a perma- 
 nent acquisition. But if studied on the principles above 
 suggested, they not only "purge and rekindle"' the mental 
 vision; they are not only "fellow-laborers in the work of 
 conversion,"" but they also directly prepare the way for a 
 higher study, partly by discovering and developing the requi- 
 site faculty for it, partly by introducing the mind to the 
 elementary basis in that structure of knowledge of which 
 "dialectic" is "the coping-stone."' 
 
 The study of the sciences during the ten years between 
 twenty and thirty is not, in Plato's plan, to claim the whole 
 time and energy of the citizen who is admitted to it. He is 
 to be at the same time serving his apprenticeship in military 
 service, and testing the courage of his moral convictions 
 under the various trials of pleasure and pain, fear and per- 
 suasion, which meet him in the course of his public duties.' 
 The study of "dialectic," on the other hand, which is to go 
 on from thirty to about thirty-five, is to concentrate the entire! 
 faculties of the student while it lasts.' Of the form and 
 substance of this "dialectical" science we can collect only 
 hints from Plato. And, firstly, as to its form. If we con- 
 ceive "dialectic" as a body of scientific truth, it would be 
 nothing less than a system of universal knowledge, in which 
 
 ' S33 d- ' S3I d- 3 536 d. 4 531 e. 
 sS27<i. *S33d. ' 534 e. 
 
 8 Cf. 6. 503 e; 3. 412 e— 413 e; 7. 537 d; 535 c. 9 S39 d. 
 
124 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 not only the "hypothetical" principles of the mathematical 
 and physical sciences, but those of all other branches of 
 human inquiry, found their place and justification, and were 
 seen to depend upon a single " unhypothetical principle." 
 Plato was as conscious as we are that no such universal 
 science was in existence, but perhaps he felt more strongly 
 than we do the importance of insisting upon its theoretical 
 necessity, and of keeping the outlines of it before the mind. 
 If, on the other hand, we think of the study of "dialectic" 
 as an educational study of the true method or logic of think- 
 ing, the simplest account of it is that it is "that education 
 ,'which will enable the student to question and answer in the 
 most scientific way."' This may seem to be a great fall from 
 the height to which we are carried by the conception of a 
 universal science, but this is mainly because we use oral dis- 
 cussion so comparatively little as a means for arriving at 
 truth, and because our ideas of science and speculation are 
 associated with printed books and systems, rather than with 
 the living processes of thought which produce them. If we 
 substitute for "the man who can question and answer in the 
 most scientific way," "the man who can elicit, whether from 
 his own mind or that of others, the truest thought on every 
 subject which comes before him," we shall have a more ade- 
 quate notion of what Plato meant. For if, as he conceived, 
 truth is a system in which no part can be fully known until 
 its connection with all other parts has been apprehended, 
 it follows that in proportion as a man can "give and take 
 account of" any subject, or part of a subject, he must have 
 the system before his mind. We can therefore understand 
 ho w^ Plato can say that "no other procedure can undertake 
 
 ' 7- S34 e- 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 125 
 
 to give a complete and methodical grasp of the essential 
 nature of any given thing."' For what is the case in what 
 is commonly called discussion ? Generally we go no further 
 with it than to produce a certain comfortable persuasion in 
 our own minds or that of others; we appeal to no higher 
 standard than the current opinions and desires of the public 
 which we address ;2 we are satisfied when we have turned a 
 smart phrase or won a verbal victory.' Even reasoning which 
 aspires to be "philosophical" is often only an artificial 
 arrangement of skilfully adjusted words, which seem to have 
 admirable coherence, but bear no relation to facts.* But let 
 us suppose a mind to which debate, whether outward or 
 inward, has no other object than the attainment of truth;' 
 a mind bent upon arriving at and imparting conviction, and 
 feeling that a lifetime is but a fragment in the eternity which 
 such a work demands;' suppose it filled with an insatiate 
 desire for reality,' which no fragment is so insignificant as 
 to escape,* no objection so formidable as to deter,^ no com- 
 plexity so great as to confuse,'" no hypothesis so ultimate as 
 to satisfy;" suppose, too, that such a mind had been trained 
 by many years' practice in the power of abstracting itself 
 from the immediate presentations of time and place, so that 
 it was able to "let go eyes and other senses, and make its 
 way to the real truth;"" and suppose that there is present in 
 it not only the general desire for truth and the belief in the 
 possibility of arriving at it, but also a conception, in outline 
 
 ' 533 b. = 533 ^- ^ 6. 499 a. 4 6. 498 e. 
 
 s 6. 499 a. * 498 d. 75. 475 b-c. 8 6. 485 b. 
 
 9 iffwep iv ftdxv Sii, irdprav, n. t. X., 7. 534 c. 
 
 10 iTri rui> &Wwv itivruiv i<pe\i))>, k. t. X., 534 b. 
 
 " 7- 533 c. " 7- S37 d. 
 
126 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 only, but not therefore the less firm or definite, of the form 
 in which the truth exists and in which it must be apprehended 
 by the mind, a conception leading us to look everywhere for 
 unity in multiplicity and differentiation in unity, so that, 
 while no piece of truth can be confounded with any other, no 
 piece can be isolated from any other; and suppose, lastly, 
 that this conception of the constitution of truth had borne fruit 
 in an approximate systematization of the existing sum of 
 knowledge, a logic of truth as complete as the state of the 
 human mind at the time admits, and that this logic had been 
 studied and practiced unremittingly for years : then we shall 
 perhaps have some idea of what Plato intended by the true 
 "dialectical" nature and the true "dialectical" education. 
 We shall probably feel that such an education must 
 
 , depend for its success more upon the spirit in which it is 
 imparted and received than upon its particular form and 
 matter. And certainly no one can be farther than Plato from 
 the idea that "dialectic" is a ready-made system of formulas 
 to be swallowed whole by the mind. He is never tired of 
 
 , insisting upon the importance of choosing the right natures 
 for the study of the sciences, and still more for that of "dia- 
 lectic." They must be, not "bastards," but "genmne" 
 children of philosophy;^ "sound in limb and sound in mind," 
 well grown and developed, not one-sided "cripples."^ They 
 must not only be quick to learn, but must have also the qual- 
 ities of intellectual retentiveness and endurance and love of 
 work, "for hard study makes a craven of the soul much more 
 than gymnastic; the work comes more home to it, for the 
 soul has it all to itself, and does not share it with the body."^ 
 Above all, they should be of the proper age, and should have 
 
 I 7- 535 c-d. = 536 b. 3 S3S b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 127 
 
 been "dyed" indelibly with the spirit of law and order, so 
 that they may combine, what it is hard to find in combina- 
 tion, constancy and steadiness of character with speculative 
 activity and aspiration.' Otherwise the study of dialectic 
 will continue to bring upon philosophy the charge which is so 
 often made against it, that it unsettles the mind and under- 
 mines morality.^ For, as we have already heard,' philosophy, 
 is a double-edged instrument; the speculative spirit which 
 demands to have its beliefs justified and its experience 
 accounted for may by a turn of the hand become the spirit 
 of revolution, denying the validity of all beliefs and the rea- 
 sonableness of any experience; and the same logical method 
 which, when rightly handled, guides us through the maze of 
 opinion and reveals the essential forms of truth, may be 
 applied by the intellectual gladiator to show that one thing 
 is no more true than another, and to confound real distinctions 
 in a mist of words. The danger lies in the transition from 
 the atmosphere of "opinion" to that of "knowledge." In 
 the former we seem to be surrounded by a world of solid and 
 permanent objects, each with a definite position and character 
 of its own, with which our ideas are inseparably bound up. 
 Our principles are materialized in particular persons and 
 things, and these in their turn are invested with the sanctity 
 of principles. Of the possible incongruity between an idea and 
 its local and temporal embodiment we are as yet uncon- 
 scious. But the mind has an inherent and a justifiable 
 impulse to advance upon this state; for, as a matter of fact, 
 truth is not merely local or temporal, and however necessary it 
 may be that our experience of it should be so, it will be con- 
 
 I 6. 503 c-e; cf. 7. S3S a; 539 d. 
 
 " 7- 537 e— 539 d. ^ 6. 497 d. 
 
128 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 tinually, so to say, giving the lie to that experience and break- 
 ing the limitations imposed upon it. And in this capacity 
 which the mind possesses of rising above itself/ asking itself 
 questions, feeHng dissatisfaction with its own results. He the 
 real condition and source of progress, intellectual and moral. 
 But the difficulty is to regulate the capacity rightly, to awaken 
 it at the right moment, and to exercise it in the right method. 
 The power of logical manipulation in clever people is often 
 far in advance of the strength of their character. The first 
 sense of command over logical formulas, not unlike that of 
 command over literary expression, is apt to upset the balance 
 of the mind, which feels as if it had the world at its command, 
 because it can set it up and knock it down again in syllo- 
 gisms. Many of ,us must have observed, as Plato had done, 
 
 that schoolboys, when they get their first taste of logic, make free 
 with it as if it were a game; they are for ever using it to contradict 
 people, and in inaitation of those who confute them they go and confute 
 others, as pleased as puppies to worry and tear every one who comes in 
 their way.^ 
 
 But there is a more serious danger than that arising from the 
 mere delight in the exercise of a new accomplishment. The 
 ' "flattering"' voice of pleasure is always encouraging the 
 intellect to find a flaw in the beliefs and institutions in which 
 we have been brought up. The "questioning spirit"^ comes 
 to us and asks : "What is honor?" "What is justice?" 
 We answer by pointing to this and that belief, this and that 
 course of action, according to what we have been taught. 
 But logic has no difficulty in confusing us, in showing that 
 this particular belief or action is in itself "no more right than 
 wrong;"^ for the particularity of the belief or the act is just 
 
 I 7. 524 a-b. " 7. 539 b. 3 7. 538 d. 
 
 4 538 d. 5 538 e; cf. 5. 479 a-b; 7. 524 a. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 129 
 
 what is unessential to their moral quality, as the particular 
 color or size is unessential to the mathematical quality of a 
 triangle. It is only as "partaking in" or "imaging" some- 
 thing which cannot be apprehended in the Umits of sensible 
 ■experience, that the particular phenomenon has a moral value. 
 But if the mind has not yet realized this,' if it has only 
 realized the relativity of the particular form of presentation, 
 it will probably identify the unessential and phenomenal 
 conditions with this essential reahty, and in ceasing to believe 
 in them will cease to believe in anything at all. Against such 
 a tragic result, which brings discredit on philosophy and 
 turns into enemies of society men capable of being its saviors, 
 Plato would guard by putting off real philosophical study ■ 
 till thirty, restricting it as far as possible to those characters 
 which combine the requisite moral constancy with the requi- 
 site speculative interest and ability, and preparing for it by 
 a long and severe discipline both in intellectual and practical 
 work. In other words, he would not have "the question" 
 asked until the mind is already on the way to answer it, or 
 the "reason why" given until it merely means the throwing 
 of a stronger light upon truth already seen. "Dialectic" 
 should "destroy hypotheses,"^ but only "in order to estab- 
 Ush them; " it should lead the mind to see through empirical 
 facts, but not into a darkness or vacuum, only into a wider 
 vista of clearer truth.* 
 
 A systematic study of philosophy, in the spirit and under 
 the conditions suggested by Plato, is as remote from the 
 modem theory and practice of education as a systematic 
 employment of the arts. His account of what actually took 
 
 I T(£ Te iXriBfi /i^ eiplffKV, 7. S39 a. ' 7- 533 <= • 
 
 3 Cf. 7- 520 c, and 532 a. 
 
130 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 place in his time might be appKed with slight modifications 
 to our own : 
 
 Those who study philosophy at all, do it in this way: when they are 
 just emerged from boyhood, in the intervals of business and money- 
 making, they go into the most difficult part of the subject, I mean logic, 
 and then they leave it; I am speaking of those who become the greatest 
 proficients; and in after-years, if they ever accept an invitation to listen 
 to a philosophical discussion, they are quite proud of themselves, for 
 they look upon it as a mere pastime; and as they draw toward old age, 
 their light goes out,' all but that of a very few, and is never kindled 
 again. 
 
 Philosophy in modern England has not even the advantage 
 — a dubious advantage perhaps — of that conventional 
 glory which attached to the word in the society of Plato's 
 day, when a "philosopher" seems to have combined in him- 
 self the lofty associations of the savant with the social prestige 
 of "the man of culture." It would hardly now be said of 
 philosophy that it is "a place full of fair names and shows,"" 
 into which the "escaped convicts" of other professions "are 
 glad to take a leap." In the popular estimation, it is a cold 
 and comfortless region, haunted mainly by the fancies of 
 dreamers, the sneers of skeptics, and the formulas of pedants. 
 Not, indeed, that it is looked upon with less suspicion on 
 that account. The cry is as loud now as it was in Plato's 
 time, that speculation unsettles and corrupts the mind of the 
 young. And if we may retort with him that the so-called 
 theories upon which society is so hard are often nothing but 
 its own opinions articulately expressed,' and though we may 
 not attach so much importance as he did to the love of specu- 
 lative truth and the dangers of its perversion, we cannot 
 deny that the forcible or adroit expression of what many men 
 I 6. 497 e — 498 a, ' 6. 495 c-d. 3 6. 493 a. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 131 
 
 are dumbly feeling has in itself an incalculable power, and 
 that not only are many honest minds needlessly perplexed 
 by speculative writing and discussion, but that much real 
 force of intellect and character is spoiled or frittered away by 
 the want of method and management in the higher branches 
 of our education. But though we may still feel the reality 
 and presence of Plato's difi&culties, we are as far as he could 
 be from any prospect of applying his remedies. If the idea 
 of concentrating the efforts of literary and artistic genius 
 upon education seemed chimerical, what are we to think of 
 the proposal that our best and ablest men should combine a 
 severe course of scientific study with the first ten years of 
 active life, and then give exclusive attention to logic and 
 metaphysics for five years more ? Or, even if the proposal 
 itself were more likely to find favor or attention, where is that 
 co-ordination of the sciences, and, still more, where is that 
 science of logic which could, with any confidence, be set 
 before an aspiring mind ? In the case of this, as of others 
 of the most valuable ideas in the Republic, we are reduced 
 to content ourselves with the crumbs which fall from the 
 "feast of reason." In the way of its literal execution we 
 can do hardly anything ; but we might do a little toward 
 carrying out some of its spirit. We might introduce more 
 continuity into the curriculum of our schools and universities, 
 trying to give the mind its natural food at the right times, 
 and not letting it be still sprawling on the ground when it 
 ought to be able to walk, nor asking it to climb a mountain 
 before it can find its way about the house. The writers and 
 supporters of our periodical literature might have more sense 
 of the responsibility of their calling, and realize more fully 
 that they spread truth or falsehood, as well as provide excite- 
 
132 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 ment or relaxation. Above all, we might convince ourselves 
 that speculation, when it deserves the name, does not mean 
 spinning cobwebs or playing with fireworks, but the finding 
 of clues in the chaos of fact, and the letting in the daylight 
 through the mist of prejudice ; and that the speculative 
 spirit, though it may have many counterfeits, is a real element 
 in human nature, and an element to which it owes both its 
 most splendid achievements and its most disastrous failures. 
 To discuss the details of any educational system, actual or 
 possible, would be far beyond the scope of an essay, and 
 would be especially fruitless when the position of the natural 
 sciences in education and their relation to philosophy is still 
 a subject of so much dispute. As long as the advocates of 
 scientific education suppose themselves, or are supposed, to 
 be in essential antagonism to those of a literary education, 
 and as long as metaphysics is understood to mean a mass 
 of exploded fancies, there can be no common ground between 
 ourselves and Plato. His whole theory hangs upon the 
 principle that the study of the sciences should be comple- 
 mentary to a previous training through literature and art, 
 and should itself be supplemented in turn by a study of 
 those universal logical principles to which it points, and in 
 which its problems find solution. Among ourselves the 
 educational use of science, apart from its teaching for practi- 
 cal application, can be said to have only just begun, and is 
 still mostly confined to the popularization of certain elemen- 
 tary truths with a view of stimulating early habits of obser- 
 vation and an interest in external nature. The idea 
 of a systematic exhibition of the leading principles of the 
 sciences, such as should not only train the mind to think, 
 but should awaken its perception of the real nature of the 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 133 
 
 world in which it lives, and " draw it gently out of the out- 
 landish slough" in which it is half buried, is still only an 
 idea. Nor can the existing teaching of philosophy be said 
 to satisfy Plato's requirements any better than that of science. 
 A not very profound knowledge of small portions of Plato 
 and Aristotle, a smattering of the history of philosophy mainly 
 derived from second-rate handbooks, or a familiarity with; 
 some generalized theory of evolution, represent the chief 
 part of what we can point to as the results in this branch of 
 education. Meantime the air teems with speculation and 
 discussion ; questions are raised and answered in news- 
 papers and periodicals which could hardly have been printed 
 twenty years ago without raising an uproar ; and there is no 
 lack of those "young men of talent, able to skim the surface 
 of everything that is said, and to draw inferences from it 
 as to the best way of leading their lives,"* of whom Plato 
 anxiously asked : "What are we to suppose that they will 
 do ?" In the dearth of really original contemporary specu- 
 lation, we seem to be driven back upon a work only less 
 difficult than that of creation — ^the work of interpreting the 
 past. The task of editing philosophical books for educa- 
 tional purposes requires, as much as any task, real editorial 
 genius, and as yet it has scarcely been attempted ; nor have 
 we any adequate collection of the most valuable parts of great 
 philosophical writings, such as can be put into the hands of 
 students. Perhaps, if the present interest in elementary 
 education is ever followed by an equal interest in its higher 
 grades, the expenditure of industry and ability upon primers 
 and handbooks will be paralleled by an effort to make acces- 
 sible to the more advanced minds of the community some of 
 
 I 2. 365 a. 
 
134 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 the original works which are now being made meat for the 
 babes. We cannot expect to revive the days when truth was 
 communicated by question and answer, though we may 
 adopt some of their method on a humble scale; but it is all 
 the more important that the few men in each generation 
 who might once have discussed philosophy in the streets of 
 Athens or the gardens of the Academy should make the 
 works of the great thinkers of the world, not a dead letter, 
 but a living voice, by entering into their spirit, interpreting 
 their speech, and carrying on their thought. 
 
 We have been thus far considering the Platonic education 
 in science and "dialectic" mainly in its formal aspect, and 
 we have found in it a method for leading the soul from the 
 stage in which its knowledge is held in the form of opinion 
 and imagination to that in which it is held in the form of an 
 intelligible system. But we have heard scarcely anything of 
 the matter or substance of the education : much about the 
 way in which it is to teach the mind to think, little of what it 
 is to teach. And the question which now remains to be 
 asked, and the answer to which puts the coping-stone to 
 Plato's theory of education, is : What is the ultimate lesson 
 which the human mind has got to learn, and for the sake of 
 which all this elaborate apparatus has been put together ? 
 In the language of Plato's allegory : Where is the upper air 
 to which the prisoners have to ascend, and what is the sun to 
 which their eyes have to be turned ? Or, in his technical 
 phraseology : What is that unhypothetical first principle 
 upon which the whole structure of truth depends, and to 
 grasp which is the crowning act of knowledge ? We have 
 already seen (p. 89) briefly and by anticipation what is 
 Plato's answer to these questions. It is "the form^of the 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO I35 
 
 good" which is "the greatest of all studies;"' it is this which 
 "comes last in the world of knowledge;"^ it is this which is 
 the end of the "dialectical" process,^ the ultimate principle 
 to which all the "hypotheses" of knowledge are to be 
 referred. 
 
 The word "good" has so many meanings and associa- 
 tions in English that it is important to be clear as to the par- 
 ticular sense in which its Greek equivalent was used by Plato. 
 That sense is perhaps most simply and most clearly illus- 
 trated in the familiar expressions, "What is the good of a 
 thing ?" and, "What is a thing good for ?" The answers 
 to both these questions will give us the use, purpose, or end 
 which the thing in question serves, and when we say a given 
 thing is "good" in this sense, we can generally paraphrase 
 the expression into "it does its work, or serves its purpose, 
 well." From this sense is to be distinguished what would 
 commonly be called the more "moral" sense of "good." 
 It is indeed difi&cult to say how far the two uses have modified 
 one another; but in the minds of most people there is a 
 tolerably marked distinction between the sense in which they 
 speak of "a good man" and that in which they speak of "a 
 good horse" or "a good plow." In the former case they 
 think primarily of a certain state of mind or character, sec- 
 ondarily of the end which it fulfils, or the work in which it 
 is manifested ; in the latter, the work which the horse or plow 
 does is the first consideration, the conditions of their doing 
 it come second. We shall understand, not only Plato, but 
 the whole of Greek moral philosophy, better, if we bear the 
 second use of "good" in mind ; if we accustom ourselves to 
 think of man as having a specific work to do, of morality as 
 
 I 6. 505 a. ^ 7. 517 b. 3 Cf. 6. sii b-c, and 7. 532 a-b. 
 
136 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 his doing that work well, of virtue or "goodness" as the 
 quality which makes him do it well, and of " the good " as that 
 which the work serves or realizes, and in serving and realizing 
 which it is itself "good." Unfortunately, the modern asso- 
 ciations with the word "good" in this sense are somewhat 
 narrow and misleading. When we ask. What is the "good" 
 of a thing ? we are apt to think of the "good" in question 
 as a purpose or end outside the thing itself, to which it is 
 made or supposed (perhaps only by ourselves) to contribute ; 
 and it is to this perversion of a true idea that the doctrine of 
 final causes owes much of its deserved disrepute. To con- 
 ceive of a thing as good for something, or having some good, 
 is, in the truest sense of the words, nothing more than to 
 conceive of it as having a meaning or being intelligible ; for, 
 strictly speaking, a thing of which the elements exist side by 
 side in no connection or order whatever, or a thing which 
 itself exists by the side of other things without standing in 
 any expressible relation to them, is to our intelligence an 
 inconceivable nonentity. And the moment that we mentally 
 interpret a thing, or, in other words, understand it, we give 
 it a reason for existing, whether that reason be a form which 
 it assumes, a purpose which it serves, a function which it 
 performs, or a substance which it is. We may protest as 
 vigorously as we can against the utilitarian or pietistic appH- 
 cations of such a conception ; we may warn students of 
 science against the dangerous tendency to anticipate nature, 
 and to translate facts into the formulas of their own wish or 
 fancy; but such protests and warnings touch only the abuse, 
 not the essence, of the conception that the world is not an 
 unmeaning chaos, but a something of which, however slowly 
 and with however many mistakes, we are discovering, and 
 not merely inventing, the significance. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 137 
 
 It seemed necessary to make these few preliminary 
 remarks in order to get a point of departure for considering 
 Plato's account of "the good " in the Republic. That account 
 may be treated conveniently under three heads, according 
 as "the good" is regarded from an ethical, a logical, or a 
 metaphysical and religious point of view. And, firstly, "the 
 good" is "that which every soul pursues, and for the sake 
 of which it does all that it does ;'"■ it is the object in Ufe which 
 all men more or less feel themselves to have, but which very 
 few clearly conceive or could clearly express ; it is that which 
 makes everything which we do seem worth doing, and every- 
 thing which we possess worth possessing;^ that about which 
 no one would willingly deceive himself, but of which everyone 
 says or thinks, "this at least is something real, and this is 
 what I really live for." ^ Theories of life apparently the most 
 opposite imply the existence of this conception; the man 
 who lives for pleasure does not really live for pleasure pure 
 and simple;'' he admits the distinction of "good" and "bad" 
 pleasures, and he chooses the good ones; in other words, 
 those which fall in with his general scheme of life, however 
 fragmentary or dim that scheme may be. So, too, with those 
 who live for knowledge;' it is not mere intellectual insight 
 which is their aim, but insight into something "good," some- 
 thing which they think worth knowing or having; for what 
 is all knowledge worth unless it have some relation to our 
 life, unless it show us what is the good in our life, and in the 
 world where it is lived? And yet, though everyone has, 
 more or less consciously, some such ultimate object, some- 
 thing about which he would wish to be sure, something which 
 
 1 6. 505 e. 3 505 d. s 505 b. 
 
 2 S°S b. * S°5 c- 
 
138 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 makes things worth doing and having, it is here more than 
 in any other point that the ignorance of mankind is most 
 conspicuous. Most people "have no one mark in life at 
 which to aim in all that they do,'" and are more sure about 
 anything almost than about the real object of their desire. 
 The immediate steps which they take, the present means 
 which they employ, seem to them much more clear than the 
 ultimate goal to which they aspire. And this xmcertainty of 
 aim reacts upon the rest of their hfe; the proximate advan- 
 tages which they grasp at elude them and turn out profitless, 
 just because they have no connection, no pervading purpose, 
 no whole in which they find a place.^ It is the same want of 
 unity and consistency which makes most of our moral ideas 
 and character so vague and insecure. We talk of our prin- 
 ciples of justice and honor, but how can we be said to under- 
 stand, or even to possess, a principle or a virtue, unless we 
 see "wherein they are good,'" unless we know what it is 
 which gives them their value, unless they are not isolated 
 fragments in a vague "sketch"* of life, but connected parts 
 in a fully wrought design ? How can a man order his own 
 life or that of others, if he has "no clear pattern in his soul"^ 
 to the ideal truth of which he can look for guidance ? How 
 can he maintain existing laws or institutions, or reform them 
 when they need it, if his acquaintance with them is the merely 
 empirical familiarity which a blind man might have with 
 things which he had often touched, or with a road along 
 which he had learned to walk straight ?" Such a man is only 
 half awake;' the good things which he supposes himself to 
 
 ' 7. 519 c. ' 6. 505 e; cf. 7. 534 c, oSre SKKo iya0iv oiSh. 
 
 3 6. 506 a. ♦ 6. 504 d, inroypaip^v .... TfKeaTirtfv iTepyarlav. 
 
 s 6. 484 c. 6 6. 484 c-d; 506 c; cf. 493 b, xp^vov rpt/Sj. 7 5. 476 c-d. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 139 
 
 secure are only images and shadows of the truth; his mental 
 grasp of them is conventional and uninteUigent,' and is liable 
 to be loosened by every logical objection. He can "give no 
 account" of them to himself or others, can see no single 
 "form" underlying their variety, but confuses what is essen- 
 tial in them with what is unessential, the fragment with the 
 whole, the resemblance with the reaUty. 
 
 It is the perception of "the good," then, which is required 1 
 to complete morality, to do away with the vagueness, the ' 
 aimlessness, the blindness, the fragmentariness, of life, and 
 to give it unity, completeness, and decision. But Plato sees , 
 in it the condition, not only of conduct, but of knowledge also. 
 What the sun is in the world of visible objects, that he con- 
 ceived "the good" to be in the sphere of intelligence.^ To 
 the complete fact of sight there are, in Plato's view, four 
 factors necessary: an eye capable of seeing, an object capable 
 of being seen, light in the eye and the object, and the sun of 
 which the light is an "effluence." The fact of knowledge 
 may be analogously analyzed: there must be a subject 
 capable of knowing and an object capable of being known, 
 there must be intelligence present in both making the one 
 intelligent and the other intelligible, and there must be a 
 source of intelligence from which it is diffused through the 
 twin world of subject and object, soul and being. Such a 
 source is "the good," which "supplies truth to the object of 
 knowledge, and gives to the subject the power of knowing." ' 
 Nor is this all : as the sun is the condition, not only of vision 
 and visibility, but also of birth, growth, and nurture to visible 
 things, so the objects of knowledge owe to "the good," not 
 only their truth, but also their very being and essence.* And 
 
 I 7. 534 c. ^ 6. 507 b— 509 b. 3 508 e. 4 509 b. 
 
I40 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 lastly, like the sun in the allegory of the cave, "the good" is 
 the crowning vision in the upward progress of the soul from 
 darkness to light; or, speaking without metaphor, if the 
 soul, in the strength of the dialectical impulse, penetrates 
 right through the imagery of sense, and traverses the whole 
 chain of intelligible relations, the "end of the intelligible'" 
 at which it arrives, the " unhypothetical first principle," upon 
 which it sees the whole structure of knowledge to depend, is 
 again "the good." In Plato's mind, then, the conception of 
 knowledge and truth, the conception of objective reality or 
 essence, and the conception of a systematic order or cosmos, 
 alike imphed the conception of a "good," which cannot be 
 identified with any of them, but is the condition or logical 
 prius of them all.' Things are known and understood so far 
 as they are seen as elements in a rational order; knowledge 
 is the perception of them as such, and things so perceived 
 are truly perceived. Again, a thing is what it is in virtue of 
 its position in such an order. As in the physical organism 
 the character of each organ depends upon its relation to the 
 whole, and has no existence apart from that relation;' as in 
 the larger whole of the state each member only preserves his 
 true individuality so long as he takes his proper place in the 
 organization of labor, and loses it when he ceases to do so ; * 
 so in the universal order of existence each constituent not 
 only is understood, but subsists, only so far as it remains true 
 to its place in the order, and as that place is determined by 
 the ruling principle, end, or "good" of the order, it is to this 
 ultimately that it owes what it is. Lastly, as a life without 
 purpose is blind, as qualities without unity and connection 
 
 ' 7. S32 a-b. ' irpeffPelf Kcd Svrdna iirep^x""'''*') 6- S°9 ''■ 
 
 3 4. 420 d. 1 4. 420 e — ^421 a; cf. 3. 417 b; 5. 466 b. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO 141 
 
 are sketchy and incomplete, so a system of truth without an 
 unconditional principle to depend on is baseless and 
 "dreamy ;" and such an unconditioned principle Plato could 
 only conceive in the form of an absolute end, which casts a 
 light backward through the whole system of existence, but is 
 itself above and beyond it. It thus becomes intelligible how 
 he could speak of sciences so abstract as the mathematical 
 as leading up to "the good,">Jof geometry as "making us see 
 the form of the good more easily,"^ and of the study of har- 
 mony as "useful for the investigation of the beautiful and 
 the good."' For if each science deals with a particular 
 "form" of universal being, and each "form" points to and 
 connects with the "form" above it, and ultimately the highest 
 "form," then even in the simple relations of number, figure, 
 and sound, we may expect to hear the faint "prelude"* to 
 the far-off "strain" of that fuller intelligence "whose voice 
 is the harmony of the world." 
 
 ■ From this conception of a logically implied condition or 
 postulate of the world of knowledge, it was to Plato an easy 
 step to the conception of a creative cause of the universe, 
 both material and intelligible, and we are not surprised to 
 hear the sun spoken of, not only as the " analogue,/but as the 1 
 "begotten child,"^ of the good. Plato seems here to have 
 combined the metaphysical conception which he expresses 
 in the Phado with the more mythological ideas of the TimcBus. 
 In the former dialogue" the "choice of the good and the best" 
 is represented as the essential characteristic of intelligence, 
 and anyone who holds that the universe is really the work of 
 intelligence is bound to show that "it is the good and right 
 
 I 7. 532 b-c. 3 >]. 531 c. 5 6. 508 c; 7. 517 c. 
 
 ' 7. 526 e. * 7. sz^ d. ' Phaedo, 99 a-c. 
 
142 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 which binds and holds it together ;" for it is folly to think 
 that we shall ever find "an Atlas" to support it "more mighty 
 and more immortal and more sustaining" than this. In the 
 Timceus^ "the maker and father of the universe," whom "it 
 is hard to find out and impossible to declare to everyone," 
 being himself good, and therefore incapable of envy, creates 
 the sensible world in all things as good, that is as like him- 
 self, as the conditions of sensible existence allow. The whole 
 material universe is thus the "image "' or expression to sense 
 of an intelhgible system, and though this intelligible system 
 is sometimes spoken of as the "pattern"' upon which the 
 Creator made the world, it seems to be practically absorbed 
 in the Creator himself when, at the end of the work,^ the 
 visible cosmos is said to be "the image of its maker, God 
 manifest to sense." In the light of these passages we may 
 interpret the account of the good in the Republic. It is the 
 final cause of the world ; not that 
 
 "far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves," 
 
 but the immanent reason in things, in virtue of which each 
 realizes its own end in realizing that of the whole. It is also 
 the eternally creative power which sustains existence; which 
 imagination represents in "picture-language"' as a person 
 making all things good, and which reason apprehends as the 
 " unhypothetical principle" which aU truth and goodness 
 lead up to and imply. Art, morality, and science have each 
 something to tell of it, for it is "in a manner the cause of all 
 that we know,"" whether in a more or a less perfect form. 
 It is foreshadowed in the child's story of the God who is per- 
 
 I Timaeus, 28 c — 29 c. ' Ibid., 30 c-d. 3 Ibid., 28 c — 29 a. 
 
 4 Ibid., 92 b. s Ibid., 29 b-d, elKdras \6yovs. * 7. 516 c. 
 
IN THE REPUBLIC OF PLATO I43 
 
 fectly good and unchangeable,' in the poem which presents 
 the "image of the good character'"' in its simpHcity and 
 integrity, in the beauty of line and melody which speak of 
 "that beauty in which all things work and move."^ Or, 
 again, it is the divine beneficence which does no evil, the 
 moral perfection in which our fragmentary virtues find their 
 "filling up,"* the spirit of a world where injustice is neither 
 done nor suffered,' and which we may look at until we 
 become like it. Or, once more," the sciences put us on the 
 ascent which leads to it, and surrender their hypotheses to 
 receive them from it again connected and established; phi- 
 losophy teaches us to find the outlines and articulations of its 
 presence under the motley confusion of appearances ;' and 
 the working life of mature and educated manhood supplies 
 the rough material in which those who have mastered their 
 lesson in theory may learn to understand and work it out in 
 practice. For we must not forget that the fifteen years of 
 training in sciences and dialectic are to be followed, in Plato's 
 scheme, by fifteen more years of pubhc service, "in order 
 that the citizen may not be behind the rest in experience ;'" 
 and during all this time he is to be tested in the strength of 
 his mind and character "whether he will stand being pulled 
 about this way and that, or will blench at all." Not till he has 
 "passed through this trial and shown himself foremost both 
 in action and in knowledge," is he to be made "to turn the 
 eye of his soul upward and look at the very good itself, which 
 is the universal source of light."" Then at last the world will 
 lie open before his mind, ordered and intelligible, connected 
 
 I 2. 380 b— 383 a. 4 6. 504 d. 7 7. S34 b-c. 
 
 ' 3- 397 d; 401 b. 5 6. 500 c. 8 7. 539 e. 
 
 3 Timaeus, 47 b-d. 6 7. S33 c-d; ^i-jh- ' 1- 54° a. 
 
144 THE THEORY OF EDUCATION 
 
 and pervaded by a single principle which he can trace in 
 many forms and combinations,' but can distinguish from 
 them all. Then the shadows and images of everyday life 
 will acquire their true meaning, for he will see through and 
 over them to the realities which they reflect.^ The isolated 
 and self-contradictory majdms of popular moraHty will 
 interpret themselves into fragments of a single perfection, 
 which human life suggests, though it does not realize it.' 
 The separate sciences will cease to talk "in dreams, "* au J 
 will point beyond themselves to the waking vision of an 
 absolute being. Philosophy will be, not a cunning device of 
 words or an occupation for a listless hour, but the articu- 
 late language of truth which a lifetime is too short for 
 learning. Only eternity can interpret that language fully,' 
 but to understand it is the nearest approach to heaven upon 
 earth, and to study it is true education." 
 
 ' 7- 534 c; cf. s. 476 a. = 7. 520 c. 
 
 3 6. 501 b. 4 7. 533 c. 5 6. 498 c-d. 
 
 ' 7. 519 c, Tois iv TaiSHi} iu/j^rnvs Siarpipav .... ijyoinevoi iv /uiKdpuv