SOURCE: Taylor, A. E. “The Republic.” In Plato: The Man and His Work, pp. 263-98. London, Eng.: Methuen, 1948.

[In the following essay, first published in 1926 and revised in 1937, Taylor provides a detailed analysis of the ideas, language, and philosophy of Plato's Republic.]

The Republic is at once too long a work, and too well known by numerous excellent summaries and commentaries, to require or permit analysis on the scale we have found necessary in dealing with the Phaedo or Protagoras. We must be content to presume the student's acquaintance with its contents, and to offer some general considerations of the relation of its main theses to one another and to those of dialogues already examined.

To begin with, it is desirable to have a definite conception of the assumed date of the conversation and the character of the historical background presupposed. It should be clear that Athens is supposed to be still, to all appearance at any rate, at the height of her imperial splendour and strength.¹ Also, the time is apparently one of profound peace. No reference is made to military operations; though the company consists mainly of young men of military age, no explanation of their presence at home is offered. Yet Plato's two elder brothers, Adimantus and Glaucon, who are both young men, have already distinguished themselves in a battle near Megara (368c), which can hardly be any other than that of the year 424 (Thuc. iv. 72). We have to add that the sophist Thrasymachus is assumed to be at the height of his fame, and we know that he was already prominent enough to be made the butt of a jest in the first play of Aristophanes, produced in the year 427.² Similarly, the tone of Socrates' initial remarks about old age as an unknown road on which he will yet have to travel shows that we are to think of him as still very far from the age (sixty) at which a man officially became a γέρων at Athens. Damonides of Oea is referred to at 400b as still alive, and since we have the evidence of Isocrates for the statement that he “educated” Pericles, we cannot suppose him to have been born much, if at all, later than the year 500. All these considerations, taken together, suggest that the supposed date of the conversation must be about the time of the peace of Nicias (421 b.c.) or the preceding truce of 422. It is important to remember that Athens came out of the Archidamian war, though not quite on the terms she might have got, but for the folly of the democratic leaders after Sphacteria (425), far and away the richest and most powerful of the combatant states, with the main of her empire intact. For purposes of illustration the student should read by the side of the Republic, the Wasps and Peace of Aristophanes, as illustrative of the conditions of the time. Socrates must be thought of as being no more than middle-aged, somewhere about fifty years old, and we must bear in mind that it was at most a couple of years before that Aristophanes had brought him on the stage in the Clouds. Plato himself would be a mere child of some five to seven years.

There is nothing in the dialogue to support any of the fanciful modern speculations about a possible “earlier edition” without the central books which discuss the character and education of the “philosopher-kings,” or the possible existence of the first book by itself as a “dialogue of search.” On the contrary, the appearances are all in favour of regarding the whole as having been planned as a whole. It is not until we come to the sixth book that we are in sight of the “goodness” which is one and the same thing with knowledge; the goodness of the “guardians” of Republic ii.-iv. has been carefully marked as remaining all along at the level of “opinion.” It rises no higher than loyalty to a sound national tradition taken on trust, and is thus so far on a level with the “popular” goodness of the Phaedo, though the tradition in this case is that of a morally sounder society than that of Athens, or of any existing Greek πόλιs.³ Hence it is inconceivable that Plato should ever have composed a Republic which ignored the central points of Socratic ethics. The first book, again, serves its present purpose as an introduction to the whole work perfectly. In outline, all the main ideas which underlie the description of the ideal man and the ideal society are there, the conception of the life of measure (in the argument about πλεονεξία), the thought of happiness as dependent on “function” or vocation, and the rest; but all are stated, as they should be in an Introduction, in their abstract form; their real significance only becomes apparent as they are clothed with concrete detail in the full-length picture of the good man and the good community. To me it is inconceivable that Republic i. should ever have been planned except as the introduction to a work covering the ground of the Republic as we have it.⁴

It has sometimes been asked whether the Republic is to be regarded as a contribution to ethics or to politics. Is its subject “righteousness,” or is it the “ideal state”? The answer is that from the point of view of Socrates and Plato there is no distinction, except one of convenience, between morals and politics. The laws of right are the same for classes and cities as for individual men. But one must add that these laws are primarily laws of personal morality; politics is founded on ethics, not ethics on politics. The primary question raised in the Republic and finally answered at its close is a strictly ethical one, What is the rule of right by which a man ought to regulate his life? And it should be noted that the first simple answer offered to the question, that of Cephalus and Polemarchus, makes no reference at all to the πόλιs and its νόμοι, and this, no doubt, is why it is put into the mouths of speakers who were not Athenian πολι̑ται but protected aliens. The political reference is brought into the dialogue in the first instance by Thrasymachus, who insists on treating morality as a mere product and reflex of the habit of obedience to a political χσειττον or “sovereign.” Socrates finds it necessary to keep this political reference in view throughout his own argument, but he is careful to explain that the reason for studying the public life of classes and communities is simply that we see the principles of right and wrong “writ large” in them; we study the “larger letters” in order to make out the smaller by their aid. All through, the ultimate question is that raised by Glaucon and Adimantus, what right and wrong are “in the soul of the possessor.” This comes out most clearly of all in the part of the work which is written with most palpable passion, the accounts of the degenerate types of city and men. Each defective constitution is studied and the tone of public life fostered by it noted, in order that we may learn by this light to read the heart of the individual man. We see the real moral flaw in the outwardly decent man who regards becoming and remaining “well-off” as the finest thing in life, by considering the quality of national life in a merchant-city, like Carthage, where the “merchant-prince” is dominant and gives the tone to the whole community, and so on. The Republic, which opens with an old man's remarks about approaching death and apprehension of what may come after death, and ends with a myth of judgment, has all through for its central theme a question more intimate than that of the best form of government or the most eugenic system of propagation; its question is, How does a man attain or forfeit eternal salvation? For good or bad, it is intensely “other-worldly.” Man has a soul which can attain everlasting beatitude, and this beatitude it is the great business of life to attain. The social institutions or the education which fit him to attain it are the right institutions or education; all others are wrong. The “philosopher” is the man who has found the way which leads to this beatitude. At the same time, no man lives to himself, and the man who is advancing to beatitude himself is inevitably animated by the spirit of a missionary to the community at large. Hence the philosopher cannot be true to himself without being a philosopher-king; he cannot win salvation without bringing it down to his society. That is how the Republic views the relation between ethics and statesmanship.

The fundamental issue is raised in the introductory book with great artistic skill. From the simple observations of old Cephalus about the tranquillity with which a man conscious of no undischarged obligations can look forward to whatever the unseen world may have to bring, Socrates takes the opportunity to raise the question what δικαιοσύνη, taken in the sense of the supreme rule of right—“morality” as we might say—is. What is the rule by which a man should order the whole of his life? Before we can embark on the question seriously, we need to be satisfied that it is not already answered for us by the ordinary current moral maxims of the decent man; that there really is a problem to be solved. Next we have to see that the theories in vogue among the superficially “enlightened,” which pretend to answer the question in a revolutionary way, are hopelessly incoherent. Only when we have seen that neither current convention nor current anti-conventionalism has any solution of the problem are we in a position to raise it and answer it by the true method. Thus there are three points of view to be considered: that of the unphilosophical decent representative of current convention, sustained by Cephalus and his son Polemarchus; that of the “new morality,” represented by Thrasymachus; and that of sober philosophical thinking, represented by Socrates.

As to the first point of view, that of decent acquiescence in a respectable convention which has never been criticized, we note, and this may serve as a corrective to exaggerations about the extent to which “the Greeks” identified morality with the νόμοs of a “city,” that Plato has deliberately chosen as the exponent of moral convention a representative who, as a μέτοικοs, naturally makes no appeal to the “city” and its usages; the rule of Cephalus is specially characteristic not of a πόλιs but of a profession, and a profession which in all ages has enjoyed the reputation of sound and homely rectitude. The old man's morality is just that which is characteristic of the honourable merchant of all places. “Right,” according to him, means “giving to every man his own, and speaking the truth,” i.e. a man is to honour his business obligations and his word is to “be as good as his bond”; the man who acts thus has discharged the whole duty of man. The point of the conversation begun between Socrates and Cephalus, and continued with Polemarchus as respondent, is merely that this simple rule for business transactions cannot be regarded as a supreme principle of morality for two reasons. (1) There are cases where to adhere to the letter of it would be felt at once to be a violation of the spirit of right; (2) if you do try to put it into the form of a universal principle by explaining that “giving a man his own” means “treating him as he deserves,” “giving him his due,” however you understand the words “a man's due,” you get again a morally bad principle.⁵ Against Polemarchus, who thinks that morality can be reduced to “giving every one his due” in the sense of being a thoroughly valuable friend to your friends and a dangerous enemy to your foes (a working morality expressed in the “gnomic” verses of Solon and Theognis), it has to be shown that to make such a principle of conduct acceptable to a decent man's conscience, we must at least take our “friends” and “foes” to mean “the good” and “the bad” respectively, and that, even then, the principle is condemned by the fact that it makes it one half of morality to “do evil” to some one. The argument equally disposes incidentally of the “sophistic” conception of “goodness” as a kind of special accomplishment by showing: (1) that in any definite situation in life, the “accomplishment” needed to confer the benefit demanded by that situation is some kind of skill other than “goodness”; and (2) that all these accomplishments can be put to a morally bad, as well as to a morally good, use. Virtue, for example, will not make a man the best of all advisers about an investment, and the knowledge which does make a man a good counsellor on such a matter also makes him a very dangerous adviser, if he chooses to use it for a fraudulent end. This prepares us to discover later on that though “goodness” in the end is knowledge and nothing but knowledge, it is something quite different from the “arts” or “accomplishments” with which the professional “teachers of goodness” confound it.

When we come to the anti-conventional “immoralism” of the “enlightenment,” it is important to remark that Thrasymachus is made to overstate the position; as Glaucon says, at the opening of the second book, he has bungled the case. (As we know of no reason why Plato should misrepresent a prominent man of the preceding generation, the violence and exaggeration is presumably a genuine characteristic of the actual Thrasymachus, and it is used mainly for humorous effect. Thrasymachus, like modern authors whom one could name, must not be taken to mean all he says too seriously. Bluster is a mannerism with him, as it is in fact with some successful advocates. The serious statement of the immoralist case is reserved for Glaucon.) As Thrasymachus states the case, there is really no such thing as moral obligation. What men call “right” is “the interest of the superior.” (In this phrase, τὸ κρει̑ττον is to be taken as neuter, and what is meant is “the sovereign” in a community.) The theory is that right or morality is a synonym for conformity to νόμοs (the institutions and traditions of the community). But these institutions have been originally imposed on the community by the “sovereign” purely with a view to his own benefit, and the only reason why they should be respected is that the “sovereign” has the power to make you suffer if you do not respect them. Hence, unlike Hobbes, Thrasymachus feels no need to justify the absolutism of the “sovereign” by appeal to the “social contract” by which he has been invested with his sovereign powers; since he does not regard “right” as having any meaning, he has not to show that the sovereign has any right to obedience; it is sufficient to observe that his power to enforce obedience is guaranteed by the simple fact that he is the sovereign. Like the imaginary prehistoric kings and priests of Rousseau or Shelley, he has succeeded in imposing his will on the community and there is nothing more to be said. In practice this theory would work out exactly like that of Callicles in the Gorgias, but there is the important difference that, in theory, the two immoralists start from opposite assumptions. Callicles is a partisan of φύσιs who honestly believes that in the “order of things” the strong man has a genuine right to take full advantage of his strength; Thrasymachus is pushing the opposite view of all morality as mere “convention” to an extreme. The evidence for his theory is, in the first instance, simply the fact that all governments make “high treason,” the subversion of the sovereign, the gravest crime. The first care of every government is to ensure the constitution, whatever it is, against revolution. By pure confusion of thought the safeguarding of the constitution is then identified with the safeguarding of the private interests of the particular persons who happen at any moment to be exercising the function of sovereignty, Subsequently an appeal is made to the familiar facts about the “seamy side” of political and private life, the unscrupulosity and self-seeking of politicians, and the readiness of private men to cheat one another and the community, to job for their families and the like, when the chance offers. It would be easy to show that the indictment is drawn up with careful reference to features of contemporary Athenian life, but the reasoning of Thrasymachus rests on the further assumption that the seamy side of life is its only side; life is robbing and being robbed, cheating and being cheated, and nothing else. This is, after all, not an impartial picture even of a society groaning under the rule of a tyrant or a demagogue, and when Socrates comes to reply, he also finds no difficulty in appealing to equally “real” facts of a very different kind, e.g. the fact that a politician expects to get some sort of remuneration for his work, which shows that the work itself is not necessarily a “paying” thing. Even in the world as it is, the “strong man's” life is not all getting and no giving.

The fact is that Thrasymachus, like Mr. Shaw or Mr. Chesterton, has the journalist's trick of facile exaggeration. He is too good a journalist to be an esprit juste, and the consequence is that he lands himself in a dilemma. If his “sovereign” who has a view only to the interests of “number one” is meant to be an actual person or body of persons, it is obvious, as Socrates says, that he is not infallible. It is not true that the moral code and the institutions of any society are simply adapted to gratify the personal desires of the sovereign who, according to Thrasymachus, devises them, or to further his interests; judged by that standard, every existing set of νόμοι is full of blunders.⁶ But if you assume that the sovereign is always alive to his own interests and always embodies them in his regulations, your sovereign is a creature of theory, an “ideal,” and you lay yourself open at once to the line of argument adopted by Socrates to show that his worth depends on fulfilling a social function, independently of the question whether he gets any private advantage from his position or not. The “new morality” of Thrasymachus must therefore stand or fall on its own merits as an ethical theory; it derives no real support from his speculations about the origin of government in the strong man's “will to power.”

On the argument by which Socrates meets the strictly ethical assertion that “conventional” morality is a mere expression of the low intelligence and weakness of the “herd,” all I wish to remark here is that he is guided throughout by the Pythagorean analogy between tuned string, healthy body and healthy mind, which is the key to half the best thought of the Greek moralists. The immoralist's case is really disposed of in principle by the often misunderstood argument about πλεονεξία (Rep. [Republic] i. 349b-350c). The reasoning already contains in germ the whole doctrine of the “right mean” afterwards developed in the Philebus and the Ethics of Aristotle. The point is that in all applications of intelligence to the conduct of activity of any kind, the supreme wisdom is to know just where to stop, and to stop just there and nowhere else. The “wise man,” like the musician or the physician, knows what the fool or the quack never knows, “how much is enough.” The mistake common to the fool in the management of life and the bungler tuning a musical instrument or treating a sick man, is that they believe in the adage that you “can't have too much of a good thing.” On the strength of this misleading faith, one ruins his instrument, another kills his patient, and the third spoils his own life. There is a “just right” in all the affairs of life, and to go beyond it is to spoil your performance, and consequently to miss “happiness.” Once grasped, this point leads on to the other that the “just right” in any performance means the adequate discharge of function, and that happiness, in turn, depends on discharge of function. The introduction to the Republic thus leads us up to precisely the teleological conception of the rule of conduct from which Butler starts in the Preface to his Sermons. “Happiness” depends on “conformity to our nature as active beings.” What “active principles” that nature comprises and how they are organized into a “system” we learn in the immediately following books.

With the opening of the second book, we are introduced to the genuine version of the immoralist doctrine of which Thrasymachus had given a mere exaggeration, the theory that regard for moral rules is a pis aller, though one which is unfortunately unavoidable by ordinary humanity. The theory is often referred to as that of Glaucon and Adimantus, but it should be noted that Adimantus takes no part in the statement of the theory and that Glaucon, who does explain it fully, is careful to dissociate himself from it; it is given as a speculation widely current in educated circles of the time of the Archidamian war and supported by specious though, as Glaucon holds, unsound arguments. His own position is simply that of an advocate speaking from his brief. He undertakes to make an effective defence of the case which Thrasymachus had mismanaged, in order that it may really be disproved, not merely dismissed without thorough examination of its real merits. The important feature of his argument is not so much the well-known statement of the “social contract” theory of the origin of moral codes as the analysis of existing morality to which the historical speculation is meant to lead up. The point is that “men practise the rules of right not because they choose, but because they cannot help themselves.” At heart every one is set simply on gratifying his own passions, but you will best succeed in doing this by having the fear of your fellow-men before your eyes and abstaining from aggression on them. If you get the chance to gratify your passions without moral scruples, and can be sure not to be found out and made to suffer, you would be a fool not to benefit by your opportunity. This is the point of the imaginative fiction about the “ring of Gyges.” The real fact which gives the sting to the fiction is simply that we all know that there is no human virtue which would not be deteriorated by confidence of immunity from detection. None of us could safely be trusted to come through the ordeal with our characters undepraved. We are all prone to lower our standard when we believe that there is no eye, human or divine, upon us. There can be little doubt that a theory of this kind, which amounts to the view suggested as possible by Kant that no single human act has ever been done simply “from duty,” was a current one in the age of Socrates, and we can even name one of the sources upon which Plato is presumably drawing. The theory attempts to combine in one formula the two rival conceptions of “nature” and “convention” as regulative of action. It amounts to saying that there is a morality of unscrupulous egoism which is that of “nature” and is practised by us all when we are safe from detection, and another and very different “morality of convention,” a morality of mutual respect for “claims and counter-claims” which we are obliged to conform to, so far as our behaviour is exposed to the inspection of our fellows. This doctrine is taught in so many words in a long fragment, discovered at Oxyrhynchus, of Socrates' contemporary and rival, Antiphon the “sophist.”⁷ According to Antiphon, the “wise man,” who means to make a success of life, will practise “conventional justice” when he believes that his conduct will be observed by others, but will fall back on “natural justice” whenever he can be sure of not being found out. This is exactly the position Glaucon means to urge in his apologue. What he wants Socrates to prove is that the conception of the two rival moralities is a false one; that mutual respect of rights is the true morality of “nature,” as much as of “convention,” the course of conduct suitable to “our nature as agents.” The proof is supplied in the end by the doctrine of the “parts of the soul” in Republic iv., exactly as Butler attempts to supply a similar proof of the same thesis by his account of the hierarchy of the “active principles” in his three Sermons on Human Nature.

The contribution of Adimantus to the discussion is that he places the argument for regarding respect for the rights of one's neighbour as a mere cover for self-seeking on a basis independent of all speculations about moral origins. The tone of his speech is carefully differentiated from that of Glaucon. Glaucon, as he himself admits, is simply making the ablest forensic defence he can of his case, and can jest about the gusto with which he has thrown himself into the cause of a dubious client; Adimantus speaks from the heart in a vein of unmistakable moral indignation. He complains not of the speculations of dashing advanced thinkers, but of the low grounds on which the defence of morality is based by the very parties who might be presumed to have it most at heart. Parents who are sincerely anxious that their sons should grow up to be honest and honourable men regularly recommend virtue simply on the ground of its value as a means to worldly success and enjoyment; they never dwell on the intrinsic worth of virtue itself. On the contrary, their habitual insistence on the hardness of the path of virtue and the pleasantness of vicious courses suggests that they think virtue in itself no true good. And the poets all speak the same language. When you come to the representatives of religion, who might be expected to take the highest line, you find that they are worst of all. They terrify the sinner by their stories of judgment to come, but only as a preliminary step to assuring him that they will, for a small consideration, make his peace with Heaven by easy ritual performances and sacraments which involve no change of heart. The whole influence of religion and education seems to be thrown into the scale against a genuine inward morality, and this is a much more serious matter than the speculations of a few clever men about the “original contract” and the motives which prompted it. We need a new religion and a new educational system. (We must, of course, note that the indictment of religion is throughout aimed not at the official cultus of the city, but at the Orphic and similar sects; the vehemence with which Adimantus speaks seems to indicate an intense personal hostility to these debased “salvationists” which is presumably a real trait of the man's character.)

The effect of the two speeches, taken in conjunction, is to impose on Socrates the task of indicating, by a sound analysis of human nature, the real foundations of morality in the very constitution of man, and of showing how education and religion can be, and ought to be, made allies, not enemies, of a sound morality. This, we may say, is the simple theme of the whole of the rest of the dialogue. Some comments may be offered on the various stages of the demonstration. The theme has already been propounded in the demand of Glaucon that it shall be made clear how “justice” and “injustice” respectively affect the inner life of their possessor independently of any sanctions, human or divine. It is to the answer to this question that Socrates is really addressing himself in the picture of an ideally good man living in an ideal relation to society, which culminates in the description, given in Books VI.-VII., of the philosopher-king, his functions in society, and the discipline by which he is fitted for their discharge, as well as by the briefer studies, in Books VIII. and IX., of increasing degeneration from the true type of manhood. The answer to Adimantus, so far as his indictment of education is concerned, has to be found in the account of the training of the young into worthy moral character by a right appeal, through literature and art, to the imagination (Books III.-IV.); his attack on immoral religion may be said to be the direct occasion both of the regulation of early “nursery tales” with which Socrates opens his scheme of reform in Book II., and of the magnificent myth of judgment with which the dialogue closes, itself a specimen of the way in which the religious imagination may be made the most potent reinforcement of a noble rule of life. In dealing with the details of the positive contributions of the dialogue to both politics and religion, it is necessary to observe some caution, if we are to avoid specious misunderstandings. We must remember all through that the political problem of the right organization of a state is avowedly introduced not on its own account, but because we see human virtue and vice “writ large” in the conduct of a state or a political party, and may thus detect in the community the real moral significance of much that would escape our notice if we only studied humanity in the individual.⁸ Hence we shall probably be misunderstanding if we imagine, as has sometimes been imagined, that either Socrates or Plato is seriously proposing a detailed new constitution for Athens, and still more if we imagine that either would have approved of the introduction of the new constitution by revolution into a society wholly unprepared to receive it. The most we are entitled to say about any of the detailed proposals of the Republic is that Plato presents them as what, according to Socrates, is most in accord with the moral nature of man, and may therefore be expected to be approximately realized in a thoroughly sound condition of society.

(1) In the impressive picture given in Books II.-IV. of the working of the principle of specialization of function according to vocation, which will ultimately turn out to be the foundation of all “justice,” there are one or two points which have perhaps not received sufficient attention, and may therefore be briefly noted.

I think it is clear that we must not take the description of the three successive stages through which Socrates' community passes as meant to convey any speculation about the beginnings of civilization. The “first city” is already on the right side of the line which separates civilization from barbarism. Its inhabitants are already agriculturists, permanently cultivating a fixed territory; they are at home in the working of metals, and in some respects they exhibit an advance in economic organization on the Athens of the Periclean age. (Thus they have their clothes made by a distinct class of artisans, not woven in the house by the women of the family, as was still largely the custom at Athens.) The notion that we are reading a satire on Antisthenes and the “return to nature” is merely ludicrous. What is really described is, in the main, the condition of a normal πόλιs where the citizens are farming-folk. To me it seems clear that, so far as Plato has any particular historical development before his mind, he is thinking of what Athens itself had been before the period of victory and expansion which made her an imperial city and the centre of a world-wide sea-borne commerce. (This is suggested almost irresistibly by the assumption that even the “first city,” like Athens, requires to import a good many of its necessaries from elsewhere, and consequently contains merchants and sailors, and is already producing for the foreign market.) In the description of the steps by which this little society expands and becomes a city with a multitude of artificial wants, and trades which minister to them, thus acquiring a “superfluous population” which must somehow be provided for, we can hardly see anything but a conscious reflection of the actual expansion of Attica under Cimon and Pericles.

(2) We must, of course, note that not all the artificial wants which arise in the city as it becomes “luxurious” are meant to be condemned. Even the demand for delicacies for the table is an indication that the standard of living is rising, and all social students know that a rise in this standard is by no means an entirely unwholesome thing. It is more significant that one of the chief features of the development is the growth of professions like those of the actor and the impresario. People are beginning to feel the need of amusement, and this means, of course, that they are becoming conscious that they have minds, which need to be fed no less than their bodies. Presumably the reason why Socrates could not look for “justice” in the community of farmers, but has to wait for the “luxurious city” to come into existence and be reformed, is precisely that the members of the first society would hardly be alive to the fact that they have souls at all; they could not feel the need for a daily supply of any bread but that which perishes; they have no “social problem.”

(3) It has been asked why, when over-population leads to an acute social problem, aggressive warfare rather than colonization should be assumed as the only way out of the difficulty. The answer, of course, is simple. In the first place, peaceful colonization of derelict territories had never been a feasible procedure for a Greek city. The founders of the ancient and famous cities we call the “Greek colonies” had regularly had to wrest their sites from previous occupants not much inferior to themselves in “culture.” There was no America or Australia in the Mediterranean basin. And in the second, Socrates knows his countrymen and is well aware that a Greek “surplus population” would not be likely to transport itself across the seas in quest of a new home so long as there was a fair chance of a successful inroad on its neighbours. He is, as he says, not discussing the morality of the proceeding; he is merely noting that it is what the city would, in fact, do. (In theory, to be sure, it was a commonplace that an aggressive war of expansion is not a iustum bellum.) And the point he wishes to insist on is the perfectly sound one, that the experience of having to make common sacrifices and face common dangers in war, just or unjust (but when did any nation throw its soul into the prosecution of a war which it seriously believed to be unjust?), does more to generate self-devotion in citizens than any other. War gives the social reformer his chance, for the double reason that it produces the temper which is willing to live hard, make sacrifices, and submit to discipline, and, when it is hard contested and the issue doubtful, it makes the necessity for sacrifice and submission pressing and patent. We who have lived through the events of 1914-1918 should be able to understand this from our own experience.

(4) It is unhappily customary to make two bad mistakes about the nature of the reconstituted social structure which, in Socrates' narrative, emerges from the experience provided by a great war. It is called a “system of caste,” and the matter is then made worse by calling the δημιουργοί who form the third of Socrates' social classes, “the working class,” or “the industrial class.” The immediate consequence is that the social and political theory of the Republic suffers a complete travesty, due to the unconscious influence of ideas derived from our experience of modern “industrialism.” To guard against misconceptions of this kind, we must, in the first place, be clear on the point that there is no system of “caste” in the Republic. The characteristic of “caste” is that one is born into it, and that once born into a caste it is impossible to rise above it. You may forfeit your caste in various ways, as a Brahmin does by crossing the seas, but no one can become a Brahmin if he is not born one. Now Socrates believes, rightly or wrongly, that heredity is a powerful force in the intellectual and moral sphere; as a general rule, a man will find his natural place in the “class” to which his parents belong (all the more, no doubt, as procreation is to be placed under careful “eugenic” regulations). But the rule has its notable exceptions: there are those who prove quite unfitted for the work of the class into which they are born, and those who show themselves qualified to take their place in a higher class. Hence it is part of Socrates' idea that the early life of the individual shall be under close and constant surveillance, and subjected to repeated tests of character and intelligence. There is to be every opportunity for the discovery and degradation of the unworthy and the promotion of the worthy; no one is to be ensured by the accident of birth in a particular social status, and no one is to be excluded by it from rising to the highest eminence. This qualification of the principle of heredity by the antithetic principle of the “open career” for ability and character is absolutely destructive of “caste.” The philosopher-kings or the soldiers of the Socratic state are no more a “caste” than Napoleon's marshals. And, in the second place, the δημιουργοί do not correspond to what we call the “artisan” or “working” class, i.e. to wage-earners or persons who maintain themselves by selling their labour. They include our wage-earners, but they also include the great bulk of what we should call the civilian population, independently of economic status. The thought underlying the distinction of the three classes has primarily nothing to do with economic status. It is simply that in any full-grown society, you may distinguish three types of social service. There is a small section which serves the community directly by directing its public life, making rules and regulations and controlling policy. These are the “complete” or “full-grown” guardians. There is necessarily an executive arm, whose business it is to support the directive action of the first class by the necessary physical force against enemies from without and malcontents and offenders from within, the army and police. It is this body which Socrates calls by the name ἐπίκουροι, and it should be noted that he selects the word not merely for the appropriateness of its literal sense (“helpers,” “auxiliaries”), but because it was, as we can see e.g. from Herodotus, the technical name for the trained professional body-guard of monarchs, and therefore indicates the important point that the “executive” of the Socratic State is a carefully trained professional fighting force, not an amateur constabulary or militia. The associations of the word are the same as those of such an English expression as “the Guards,” and Socrates does not scruple to apply to his ἐπίκουροι the opprobrious name by which such permanent professional soldiers were called in Greek democracies, which objected on principle to their existence. They are, like the Ionian and Carian soldiers of an Amasis, μισθωτοί (“mercenaries”),⁹ except for two considerations—that they are citizens, not aliens, and that the only μισθόs they get is their “keep.” These two classes are distinguished by the fact that they are the only direct “servants of the public.” What remains is the whole bulk of the “civilian population,” with the exception of the “guardians”—every one who does not directly serve the public either as a statesman or as a soldier or policeman. Thus the δημιουργοί include not only all the so-called “working class,” but the whole body of professional men, and the whole class of employers of labour. Since the two superior classes are expressly forbidden to have any kind of property, personally or as classes, it follows that the whole “capital” of the State is in the hands of the δημιουργοί. A “merchant prince,” under such a classification, is just as much one of the “industrials” as his clerks and office-boys. Much purely perverse criticism of the scheme would have been obviated if this simple consideration had been duly kept in mind.

(5) An immediate consequence is that, in spite of all that has been said about the “socialism” or “communism” of the Republic, there is really neither socialism nor communism to be found in the work. The current confusions on the point are probably due mainly to the mistaken notion that the emphatic demand of Book IV.¹⁰ for the banishment of “wealth” and “penury” from society must be the proposal of a communist, or at least of a socialist. This assumption is, on the face of it, absurd. The point made in Book IV. is simply that a man's character and work in life will be spoiled equally by the possession of irresponsible wealth, with no adequate social duties attached to it, and by a penury which breaks his spirit and forces him to do bad and scamped work in order to keep himself alive. A man may be aware of these dangers without adopting either the socialist or the communist theory of the right economic organization of society. In point of fact, nothing much is said in the book about the economic organization of the only class who have any economic function at all, the δημιουργοί, but the implication of what is said is that there are differences of wealth among them, and that the “means of production and distribution” are individually owned and operated. In Book VIII. it is carefully indicated that one of the first signs of the degeneration of the ideal State into a “timocracy” is the acquisition of real and personal property by the two superior classes (they “appropriate lands and houses,” (viii. 547b)), but nothing is said of the first introduction of private property among the δημιουργοί, who thus must be presumed to have enjoyed it all along. There are other more general considerations which point to the same conclusion. For one thing, both pure communism and “State monopoly” of the means of production are so alien to the system of a Greek πόλιs—the “State ownership” of the silver mines at Laurium was an exception at Athens—that Socrates could not be presumed to be contemplating either, unless he expressly explained himself. For another, it is clear that agriculture is the assumed economic foundation of the life of his city, and agriculture is just the pursuit to which a “socialistic” economic system is least easy of application. Collectivism is historically an ideal of the “proletariat” of great towns; the farmer has always been tenacious of the very different ideal of peasant ownership. And it is noticeable that in the Laws Plato declares himself for peasant ownership in its extreme form. The citizens there not merely own their “holdings” but own them as their inalienable patrimonies, and “common cultivation” is expressly forbidden (v. 740a-b). We may fairly take it that if he had intended to represent his master as advocating views of a radically different type, he would have made the point unmistakable. Hence, it seems to me that we must recognize that the economic organization of the ideal city of the Republic is definitely “individualistic.” Yet we must not suppose that Plato is in any sense putting Socrates forward as a conscious “anti-socialist.” The real object of the one restriction of ownership on which the dialogue insists as fundamental, the prohibition of all property to the direct servants of the State, is not economic. The purpose is the same as that of the still more emphatic prohibition of family life, the elimination of the conflict between public duty and personal interest. What Socrates wants, as Bosanquet has said, is simply to divorce political power from financial influence. Wealth is to have no political influence in his society; it is “plutocracy,” not individual ownership, which he is determined to suppress. His rulers are much more in the position of a mediaeval military monastic order than in that of a collectivist bureaucracy.

(6) It may not be unnecessary to remark that, as there is no socialism, there is also no “community of women” in the Republic. If the reader will take the trouble to work out the consequences of the regulations prescribed for the mating of the guardians, he will find that the impulses of sex and the family affections connected with them are subjected to much severer restraint than any which has ever been adopted by a Christian society. It is plain that the governing classes, to whom the regulations are meant to apply, are expected to find no gratification for the sexual impulses except on the solemn occasions when they are called on to beget offspring for the State. The extension of the duties of the “guardian” to both sexes of itself carries the consequence that these occasions arise only at long intervals; and the self-denial implied in the acceptance of such a rule of life might prove to be even severer than that imposed on the monk by his vow of chastity, for the very reason that the inhibition has to be broken through at the time when the State so commands. Indeed, the overwhelming probability is that if any society should attempt to enforce on any part of itself regulations of the kind proposed in the Republic, the attempt would fail just because of their intolerable severity. No actual ruling class would be likely to consent to the absolute elimination of the affections of the family circle from its own life, even if it were prepared to reduce the gratification of the physical impulses of sex to the contemplated minimum. The true criticism on the whole treatment of sex in the Republic is that, like all non-Christian moralists, rigourist or relaxed, Socrates very much underestimates the significance of sex for the whole of the spiritual life. Whatever we may think on this point, it is important to remember that at any rate the general principles which underlie the treatment of the position of women in Republic v. are no personal “development” of Plato's; they belong to the actual Socrates. Aeschines, in the remains of his Aspasia, agrees with Plato in representing the philosopher as insisting that “the goodness of a woman is the same as that of a man,” and illustrating the thesis by the political abilities of Aspasia and the military achievements of the Persian “Amazon” Rhodogyne.¹¹ Hence the thought that the duties of statesmanship and warfare should be extended to women must be regarded as strictly Socratic, and the rest of the proposals of Republic v. are no more than necessary consequences of this position. If they are to be rejected, we must refute the assumption on which they are based, that the distinction of sex is one which only affects the individual in respect to the part to be played in contributing to procreation and the rearing of a new generation; we must be prepared to hold that the difference goes deeper and modifies the whole spiritual life profoundly.

(7) There are one or two remarks which may be made about the plan of moral and religious training laid down in Books II. and III., as supplementary to the many excellent studies of this part of the dialogue already in existence. We note that in the proposed purification of the stories by which religious impressions are to be communicated to the very young, it is not merely, nor even mainly, the Homeric mythology to which exception is taken. The crowning offenders are Hesiod and the other theogonists who have related stories of the violent subversion of older dynasties of gods by younger. This would, of course, include the Orphicists; Socrates has not forgotten that it was they against whom the denunciation of Adimantus had been more specially directed. It is even more instructive to observe that the attack on tragedy as propagating false religious conceptions is directly aimed at Aeschylus, who has often been mistaken in modern times for an exponent of the religion of simple-minded Athenians. This means two things. It means that to the Periclean age, even as late as the time of the peace of Nicias, Aeschylus was still the great representative of tragedy, in spite of the popularity and renown of Sophocles, who was clearly thought of, as he is thought of in Aristophanes' Frogs, as a follower, though a worthy follower, of the great originator of tragedy. If Sophocles had in his own day already been recognized as “the mellow glory of the Attic stage,” it would be a mystery why nothing is said of the very unsatisfactory part played by the gods in such a work as the King Oedipus. It also means that Socrates is alive to the fact that Aeschylus is no old-fashioned, simple-minded worshipper of Apollo of Delphi, or the Olympians generally. In fact, a “blasphemy” against Apollo is precisely one of the counts brought against him. If it is “atheism” to represent the Olympians as practising a questionable morality, Aeschylus, in spite of Dr. Verrall, is just as much an “atheist” as Euripides, and Socrates rightly makes the point.¹²

(8) Most of the specific criticisms contained in the discussion of the educational employment of poetry and music are, naturally enough, negative. Socrates clearly holds quite strongly that the tendency of the art of his own time is to a love of a relaxed and formless complexity and variety for its own sake, and he thinks it necessary, in the interests of character, as well as of taste, to revert to austerer and more “classical” standards. It is important to remember that these strictures are put into the mouth of Socrates, speaking not later than the peace of Nicias.

We must not, then, suppose that they are aimed at epigoni of a later generation. It is not the floridity of Timotheus or Agathon which is the object of attack, but the art of the Periclean age. We are only throwing dust in our own eyes if we suppose that Socrates wants merely to repress the cheap music-hall and the garish melodrama, or the equivalents of freak movements like Dada. He is seriously proposing to censure just what we consider the imperishable contributions of Athens to the art and literature of the world, because he holds that they have tendencies which are unfavourable to the highest development of moral personality. The magnitude of the sacrifice is the true measure of the value he ascribes to the end for which he purposes to make it. We shall not appreciate his position unless we understand quite clearly that he is in downright earnest with the consideration that the connexion between aesthetic taste and morality is so close that whatever tends to ennoble our aesthetic taste directly tends to elevate our character, and whatever tends to foster a “taste” for the debased in art tends equally to deprave a man's whole moral being. Whether we share this conviction or not, the recognition that Socrates holds it with as little qualification as Ruskin is the key to the understanding of the whole discussion of early education. We are allowed also to see incidentally that the suggested reforms in “musical” education are not meant to be limited to the censure of what is debased. It is meant that the young “guardian” is to be subjected from the first to the positive influences of lofty art of every description. (Painting, embroidery, architecture, and certain “minor arts”—one naturally thinks of the characteristic Athenian art of pottery as an example—are expressly specified, Republic iii. 401a ff.) The growing boy or girl is to live in an environment of beauty, and the appreciation of the beauty of the environment is expected to lead insensibly to appreciation of whatever is morally lovely and of good report in conduct and character. To Socrates' mind the moral employment of such epithets as “fair,” “foul,” “graceful,” “graceless,” is no mere metaphor, but a genuine analogy based on the fact that all sensible beauty is itself the expression and shadow of an inward beauty of character.¹³

(9) Since the whole of the early education contemplated in the Republic is based on an appeal to taste and imagination, it follows that, as Socrates is careful to insist, the “goodness” it produces, though it will be quite sufficient for every class except the statesmen, is not the true and philosophic goodness of which the Phaedo speaks. As we are carefully reminded, the self-devotion of even the fighting force of the reformed city is founded on “opinion,” not on knowledge; their virtue is absolute loyalty to a sound tradition which they have imbibed from their “social environment,” not loyalty to the claims of a summum bonum grasped by personal insight. Thus the virtue described and analysed in Book IV. is still “popular virtue”; its superiority over the goodness of the average Athenian, the respectability we have heard Protagoras preaching, is due simply to the superiority of the “social tradition” of the Socratic city over that of Periclean democracy. There is thus a double reason why we are bound to regard the picture of philosophers and their philosophic virtue drawn in the central books as an essential part of the argument, and to reject any speculations which treat this part of the Republic as an afterthought. The account of that supreme goodness which is indistinguishable from knowledge is absolutely necessary in any presentation of Socratic ethics. And again, since the statesmen of the Republic have to control and conserve the national traditions, they must have a goodness which is not simply the product of those conditions themselves. There would be no point in subjecting the good soldier to the control of a higher authority if the loyalty to established tradition which is the soldier's point of honour were the highest moral principle attainable. In a Republic without the central books, Sparta would have to figure not as an example of the second-best, but as the ideal community itself, whereas the whole point of the description of the “timocracy” in Book VIII. is that a State like Sparta, where the qualities of the mere soldier and sportsman are regarded as a moral ideal, has taken the first fatal step towards complete moral anarchy and, in the ordinary course of things, must be expected to take those which follow in due succession.

Recognition that the whole account of the virtues given in Republic iv. is thus provisional should save us from attaching too much importance to the famous doctrine of the “three parts” of the soul. We must be careful to understand that this doctrine does not profess to be original nor to be a piece of scientific psychology. We have already found it presupposed as something known in educated circles in the Gorgias and Phaedo, and have seen reason to think that it is Pythagorean in origin, as Posidonius is known to have maintained,¹⁴ and directly connected with the theory of the “three lives.” This means that we are to take it primarily as a working account of “active principles,” or “springs of action,” which sufficiently describes the leading types of “goodness,” as goodness can be exhibited in any form short of the highest. The scheme will thus be excellently applicable to the goodness of the φπίκουροι, for their life is still a form, though the worthiest form, of the φιλότιμοs βίοs. Loyalty to “honour,” “chivalry,” “ambition” (though a wholly unselfish ambition), is the utmost we demand of them; the life of duty remains for the best of them a struggle between a “higher” and a “lower,” though a struggle in which the “higher” regularly wins, and this justifies our recognition of a plurality of “parts of the soul” in them. It will be characteristic of their experience that there should be conflicts of “desire” with the tradition of loyalty, and that chivalrous sentiment should be required to act as the reinforcement of loyalty to tradition in the conflict. But the familiar Socratic doctrine is that the “philosopher” who has directly gazed for himself on that supreme good of which the Symposium has told us, necessarily desires the good he has beheld; to him “disobedience to the heavenly vision” would be impossible, exactly as in Christian theology sinful volition is held to be impossible to the saints who actually enjoy the beatific vision of God. Hence it must follow that, as a description of the moral life of the philosopher, the doctrine of the distinct “parts” of the soul becomes increasingly impossible as he makes progress towards the goal at which his activity is consciously directed. This is why the last word of Socrates on the doctrine is to remind us that it may be necessary to revise it when we have grasped the truth of the “divinity” of the soul (Rep. x. 611b ff.), and why we are told, when it is first introduced, that we must not expect to arrive at exact and certain truth by the line of inquiry we are now pursuing (iv. 435d).¹⁵ I do not think it needful to say more about the doctrine here, than to utter a word of warning against two possible misunderstandings. We must avoid every temptation to find a parallel between the “parts” or “figures” in the soul and the modern doctrine of the “three aspects” of a complete “mental process” (cognition, conation, feeling). Plato is not talking about “aspects” of this kind, but about rival springs of action, and the doctrine, as presented in the Republic, has no reference to anything but action and “active principles,” or “determining motives.” Also we must not make the blunder of trying to identify the θυμοειδέs with “will.” From the Socratic point of view, will cannot be distinguished from the judgment “this is good,” and this judgment is always, of course, a deliverance of the λογιστικόν. But the λογιστικόν may pronounce a true judgment, or it may be led into a false one under the influence of present appetite or of anger or ambition, or again, it may only be saved from false judgment because the “sense of honour” comes into collision with the promptings of appetite. To look in the scheme of the Republic for some facultas electiva, intervening between the formation of a judgment of “practical thinking” and the ensuing action, would be to misunderstand its whole character.

(10) We see then why there can never have been a “first Republic,” including the “guardians” and the scheme for their early education, but without the philosopher-king and his training in hard scientific thinking. The philosopher-king is doubly demanded as the only adequate embodiment of the Socratic conception of goodness, and also as the authority whose personal insight into good creates the public tradition by which the rest of society is to live. To do full justice to the conception we must not forget that Socrates' statesmen are expected to combine two characters which are not often united. They are to be original scientific thinkers of the first order, but equally, they are to be “saints.” In the account of the character which will be demanded of them and the natural endowments it presupposes, we hear, indeed, of the qualifications we also should demand of a scientific genius—intellectual quickness, retentive memory and the like—but we hear as much, if not more, of what we should regard as moral qualifications for sainthood, which may be wanting to a man without impairing his eminence in science. How serious Socrates is with this side of the matter is shown by the fact that his philosophers are to be selected exclusively from the best specimens of young people who have come out pre-eminently successful from the hard discipline by which the fighting-force is made. The “auxiliary” himself, as described in the earlier books, is expected to have all the moral elevation of Wordsworth's “Happy Warrior,” and the “Happy Warrior” is, in turn, only the raw material out of which years of hard intellectual labour will make the philosophic statesman. If we lose sight of either half of this ideal we shall form a sadly defective notion of what the Republic means by a “philosopher.” By thinking only of the sainthood, we might come to imagine that the philosopher is a kind of Yogi, bent on a selfish absorption into the divine calm of the Absolute; it would then be a mystery why he is to be trained for his vocation by years of severe mathematical study, and again why, when he has at last descried the vision of the good, he should at once be made to devote all his powers, throughout the prime of his life, to the work of government. If we think only of the science, and say merely that what is aimed at is that the highest intellectual attainments shall be employed in the business of governing the world, we shall be forgetting that many of the most eminent men of science would have been disqualified for the supreme position in Socrates' city by defects of character. From the point of view of intellectual eminence we could think, perhaps, of no names so illustrious as those of Galileo and Newton. But it may be taken as certain that both would, by the Socratic standard, be relegated to the class of δημιουργοί. The moral cheapness of the one man's character, the vein of small egotism in the other's, would debar them from being so much as ἐπίκουροι. What we need to understand clearly is that Socrates holds firmly to two positions at once—the position that only a moral hero or saint is fit to be a supreme ruler of men, and the further position that discipline in sheer hard thinking, which can only be won by personal service of science, is the immediate and indispensable path to the direct vision of good which makes the saint or hero. We are clearly here on Pythagorean ground. The underlying thought is just that which seems to have been distinctive of Pythagoras, the thought that “salvation” or “purification” of the soul is to be achieved by science (μαθήματα), not by a ritual of ceremonial holiness; the philosopher-kings embody the same ideal which had inspired the Pythagorean communities when they set to work to capture the government of the cities of Magna Graecia. There is no reason to doubt that the actual Socrates, whose standing complaint against Athenian democracy in the dialogues is that it has no respect, in matters of right and wrong, for the authority of the “man who knows,” shared these ideas. They are avowed by Plato himself in his correspondence, where they figure as the true explanation of his apparently Quixotic attempt to make Dionysius II into a possible constitutional monarch by an education in mathematics. No doubt Plato and his friends were expecting from science something more than it has to give, but, as Professor Burnet has said, their proceedings are unintelligible unless we understand that the expectation was passionately sincere.

How preoccupation with science was expected to ennoble character (provided that only the right type of person is allowed to meddle with it), we see most readily by comparing the courage pronounced in Book IV. to be all that is wanted of the ἐπίκουροι with the still higher type of courage declared in Book VI. to be part of the character of the philosopher. The “courage” demanded of the good soldier, in whose make-up θυμόs plays the leading part, was defined as steadfast loyalty in the face of perils and seductions to the right opinions inculcated in him by education. Its foundation is thus allegiance to a code of honour held with such passion that no fear of pain or death and no bait that can be offered to cupidity is able to overcome it. Clearly a courage like this will carry a man “over the top,” make him volunteer for a desperate enterprise, or win him a V.C. But there are situations in life which make a demand for a still higher degree of fortitude. It is matter of experience that a V.C. may not be equal to the task of duty imposed, for example, on a priest whose business it is to tend daily the last hours of the victims of some foul pestilence in a plague-smitten city. Or again a brave soldier, who will face deadly peril when his “blood is up” and the eyes of his comrades and his commander are on him, may not have the nerve of the scientific man who will quietly inoculate himself with some loathsome disorder to study its symptoms, or try the effects of some new and powerful anæsthetic upon himself, in order to decide on its possible utility in medicine. This is the sort of courage of which Socrates speaks as only possible to a man who “knows” the relative insignificance of the duration of any individual personal life from his habitual “contemplation of all time and all existence.” We should, probably, prefer, both in the case of the priest and in the case of the man of science, to speak of “faith,” but the point is that, in both cases, the agent is inspired by an absolutely assured personal conviction about the universal order and his own place in it. Without this absolute assurance of conviction, one is never wholly free from liability to illusion about one's own personal importance, and so never quite a free man. Because Socrates holds that the sciences form a ladder which leads up in the end to the vision of the “Good” as the clue to the whole scheme of existence, he looks to science, as its supreme service, to make us thus at last completely free men. From this point of view, clearly in the soul of the man who “knows,” the “parts” (μόρια) or “figures” (εἴδη) which have been distinguishable at a lower level of moral development will be finally fused. His life will have only one spring of action or active principle, his vision of the supreme good itself. The forms of virtue, at its highest level, will therefore lose their distinction. It might be possible for the average good civilian, or even for the good soldier of the State, to be characterized by one form of goodness more than by another. This is what is meant by the assignment of different virtues as characteristic to different sections of the community. It is not meant that so long as the shop-keeper or the farmer is “temperate,” it does not matter whether he is a coward. He could not be a good man at all, if he were that, and a society in which no one had any courage except the members of the army and police would be morally in a bad way. But fighting is not the civilian's trade. He will be none the less a valuable member of society as a shop-keeper or a farmer because he has not been trained to show all the pluck and presence of mind which would win a D.S.O. or a V.C., though the State would succumb in the hour of peril if its fighting-arm had no more martial courage than the average civilian. But if a man is inspired in all the acts of his life by the vision of the supreme good, he will be equal to all the emergencies of life alike; in having one virtue, he will necessarily have all. Substitute for “the good” God, and the principle of the unity of the virtues takes on the familiar form Ama et fac quod vis.

(II) The conception of science as the road to vision of the good leads us at once to consideration of the central metaphysical doctrine of the Republic, the doctrine of the “Form of Good” (ἰδέα τἀγαθου̑). As is usual when the forms are mentioned in a Platonic dialogue, their reality is neither explained nor proved. It is taken for granted that the company in the house of Polemarchus, or at least Glaucon and Adimantus who conduct the discussion with Socrates, know quite well what the theory means and will not dispute its truth. It is assumed also as known to every one that the mathematical sciences are concerned with forms; forms are the objects which we get to know from mathematics, though the mathematician leads us up to acquaintance with them by starting from the sensible “figures” which he employs as helps to our imagination. So far, we are told nothing we have not learned from the Phaedo. But there are two points of the first importance on which the Republic adds to that dialogue. (a) We now hear of a certain supreme “form,” the “Good” or “Form of Good,” which is the supreme object of the philosopher's study. We learn that, over and beyond the recognized mathematical studies, there is a still more ultimate discipline, “dialectic,” and that it is the function of “dialectic” to lead directly to this vision of the “good.” Further, we are told that this “good” is something Socrates cannot describe; it is not “reality or being,” but “on the other side” of both, though it is the source of all the reality (ἀλήθεια) and being (οὐσία) of everything. (b) The procedure of the mathematical sciences is criticized and contrasted with that of “dialectic,” with a view to explaining just why the ideal of science is realized in dialectic and in dialectic alone. Both points call for some special consideration.

(a) The Forms (ἰδέαι) In The Republic.—From the Phaedo, among other dialogues, we gather that there is a form corresponding to each “universal” predicate which can be significantly affirmed of a variety of logical subjects. The same thing is explicitly said in the Republic (vi. 507b, x. 596a); in the latter place the “form of bed (κλίνη) or table” (τράπεζα) is given as an example. (This seems at variance with the well-known statement of Aristotle that “we”—i.e. the Platonists—deny that there are “forms” of artificial things,¹⁶ but we must remember that Aristotle is speaking of the doctrine as elaborated in the Academy, not of the position ascribed to Socrates in the dialogues.) But in the Republic we learn that there is a “Form of Good” which is to the objects of knowledge and to knowing itself what the sun is to visible objects and to sight. This is then further explained by saying that the sun both makes the colours we see and supplies the eye with the source of all its seeing. In the same way, the “good” supplies the objects of scientific knowledge with their being (οὐσία) and renders them knowable. And as the sun is neither the colours we see nor the eye which sees them, so the “good” is something even more exalted than “being.”¹⁷ Later on, we find that the sciences form a hierarchy which has its culmination in the actual apprehension of this transcendent “good.”¹⁸ Now, since it is assumed in the Republic that scientific knowledge is knowledge of forms, the objects which are thus said to derive their being from “the good” must clearly mean the whole body of the forms. The “good” thus holds a pre-eminence among forms, and strictly speaking, it might be doubtful whether we ought to call it a “form” any more than we can call the sun a colour. At least, all the other forms must be manifestations or expressions of it. In the Phaedo nothing was said which would warrant this treatment of the forms as a hierarchy or ordered series with a first member of such a unique character; they appeared rather to be a vast plurality of which all the members stand on the same footing. Hence it is intelligible that the view should have been taken that the “good” of the Republic represents a Platonic development going far beyond anything we can attribute to Socrates himself. I think, however, that we must be careful not to exaggerate on this point. There can, at least, be no doubt that the “form of good” is identical with the supreme Beauty, the vision of which is represented in the Symposium as the goal of the pilgrimage of the philosophic lover. Hence, though it is true that the name “form of good” occurs nowhere but in the central section of the Republic, it would not be true to say that the object named does not appear in the Symposium with much the same character. Again, though the Phaedo does not name the “form of good,” the phrase εiδοs τἀγαθου̑ is verbally no more than a periphrase for τὸ ἀγαθόν (“the good”), just as similar periphrases occur constantly with the words φύσιφ, δύναμιs, in Plato.¹⁹ And it is in the Phaedo itself that we are told of Socrates' conviction that the ἀγαθὸν καὶ δέον (the “good and the ought”) is the principle which “holds everything together,” and thus the cause of all order in the universe.²⁰ The statements of the Republic merely make the implications of this passage of the Phaedo a little more explicit. If the good is the universal cause, it obviously must have just the character the Republic ascribes to it. Hence Professor Burnet seems to be right in holding that what is said of the “form of good” is strictly within the limits of Socratism, and that this explains the point of contact between Socrates and an Eleatic like Euclides of Megara.²¹ That Socrates finds himself unable to speak of this form of good except negatively, and that he can only characterize it positively by an imperfect analogy, is inevitable from the nature of the case. The same thing may be seen in any philosophy which does not simply deny or ignore the “Absolute” or supreme source of all reality. Because this source is ex hypothesi a source of all reality, you are bound to insist that it transcends, and is thus “wholly other” than, every particular real thing; every predicate you affirm of it belongs properly to some of its effects in contradistinction from others and can therefore only be asserted of the supreme source “analogically” and with the warning that the analogy is imperfect and would mislead if pressed unduly. At the same time, because it is the source of all reality, every predicate which expresses a “positive perfection” must, in its degree, characterize the source of all “perfections” and must be ascribed to it “analogically.” All we gain by knowledge of the “detail” of the universe must add to and enrich our conception of the source of reality, and yet we can never “comprehend” or completely “rationalize” that source. It remains, when all is said, an unexhausted and surprising “mystery.” Hence the necessity Christian theology has always felt itself under of incorporating the profound agnosticism of the “negative way,” or “way of remotion,” in itself and the grotesque aberrations into which it has always fallen in the hands of second-rate theologians who have attempted to know God as one may know the “general conic.” Hence also the tension between the affirmative and the negative moments in a metaphysic like that of Mr. Bradley. Hence equally the inevitable failure of “positive science” to complete its task of explaining everything. To explain everything would mean to get completely rid of all elements of “bare fact,” to deduce the whole detail of existence from a body of “laws,” perhaps from a single “law,” in themselves (or itself) “evident to the intellect,” as Descartes tried to deduce physics from geometry, because geometry appeared to him to involve no postulates which are not immediately “evident” as true. In fact, we only “rationalize” nature, in the sense of eliminating “bare fact” for which no explanation is forthcoming, at one point by reintroducing it somewhere else, as M. Meyerson has insisted in his series of illuminating works on the philosophy of the sciences. And it is just because science is under this restriction that its interest is perennial; if we could ever expect to “complete” it, we should have to anticipate a time when it would no longer interest us. Science is eternally progressive just because it is always tentative.²²

The language used in the Republic of the “Form of Good,” as the last paragraph has suggested, at once raises the question whether or not this form can be identified with God, of whom language of the same kind is used by Christian theologians and philosophers. We cannot answer this important question correctly except by making a distinctio sometimes forgotten. If the question means “is the Form of Good another name for the God recognized in the Platonic philosophy?” the answer must be definitely No, for the reason given by Burnet, that the good is a form, whereas God is not a form but a “soul,” the supremely good soul. When we come to deal with the Laws, we shall see the importance for Plato's own thought of this distinction. It is just because his God is not a form that God can play the part the Platonic philosophy assigns to Him. But if we mean “is the Good spoken of in the Republic identical with what Christian divines and philosophers have meant by God?” the answer must be modified. In one most important respect it is. The distinguishing characteristic of the “Form of Good” is that it is the transcendent source of all the reality and intelligibility of everything other than itself. Thus it is exactly what is meant in Christian philosophy by the ens realissimum, and is rightly regarded as distinct from and transcendent of the whole system of its effects or manifestations. And, as in the ens realissimum of Christian philosophers, so in the “Form of Good” the distinction, valid everywhere else, between essentia and esse, So-Sein and Sein, falls away. In other language, it transcends the distinction, too often treated as absolute, between value and existence. It is the supreme value and the source of all other value, and at the same time it is, though “beyond being,” the source of all existence. This explains why, when a man at last comes in sight of it at the culmination of his studies in “dialectic,” it is supposed to be grasped by direct vision, and for that reason is strictly “ineffable.” Neither Plato nor anyone else could tell another man what the good is, because it can only be apprehended by the most incommunicable and intimate personal insight. Thus, as it seems to me, metaphysically the Form of Good is what Christian philosophy has meant by God, and nothing else. From the Christian standpoint, the one comment which would suggest itself is that since, on Socrates' own showing, the distinction between essence and existence falls away in the good, it should not properly be called one of the forms at all, and hence Socrates and Plato are not fully alive to the significance of their own thought when they speak of a “God” who is a ψυχή and thus on a lower level of “reality” than the good. Their form of theism is only necessitated because, in fact though not in words, they are still haunted by a feeling that the good is, after all, a “value” or an essentia, and needs some intermediate link to connect it up with the hierarchy of “realities” or “existents.” On this point the last word of Greek constructive thought was said not by Plato but by Plotinus and Proclus. (Of course, also, we must remember that a specifically Christian philosophy is determined in its attitude towards the theistic problem by the fact that Christianity is an historical religion. It starts with the fact of the “Word made flesh,” itself a coalescence of existence and value, and to preserve its Christian character, it is bound to be true to that starting-point in its whole metaphysical construction.)

(b) The Criticism of the Sciences.—In studying the criticism Socrates passes upon the sciences and his theory about their limitations, we must not be misled by the fact that he deals throughout only with the various branches of mathematics as recognized in the fifth century. This was inevitable because he had before him no other examples of systematic and organized knowledge. In principle what he has to say is readily applicable to the whole great body of more “concrete” sciences which has grown up since his own day. If we speak of his comments as a criticism on the mathematical method, we must understand the phrase “mathematical method” in the same wide sense in which it is to be understood in reading Descartes, as meaning simply the method which aims at knowing exactly what its initial assumptions mean, and at deducing their implications exactly and in the right order. This is the method of all genuine science whatsoever; there is nothing in it, as Descartes rightly insisted, which involves any restriction to the special subject-matter, “number and quantity” (and, in fact, pure mathematics themselves have long ago outgrown the restriction). The point of the criticisms is that the μαθήματα themselves do not and cannot succeed in being absolutely true to the ideal of method they set before themselves. This is why we find that if we are to pursue the path of science to the end, we are driven to recognize the reality of “dialectic” as the crowning science of all sciences, and to demand that the existing μαθήματα shall themselves be reconstituted on a more certain basis by the light of the dialectician's results. The recognition of this necessity may well belong to the actual Socrates, since the most sensational thing in the whole history of fifth-century science had been the demonstration by the dialectician Zeno that the postulates of mathematics, as hitherto prosecuted by the Pythagoreans, contradict one another.²³ To save mathematical science in the face of Zeno's arguments it became necessary in the fourth century to reconstruct the whole system, and the reconstruction is preserved for us in the Elements of Euclid. The men by whom the actual reconstruction was done, Eudoxus, Theaetetus, and their companions, so far as they are known to us, were all associates of Plato himself in the Academy, and it is quite certain that this revision of the accepted first principles of mathematics was one of the chief problems to which the school devoted itself. In the Republic, which is concerned with the fifth century, we naturally hear nothing about the way in which the difficulty was subsequently met, but we are allowed to hear of the imminent need that the work should be done.

The main thought is quite simple. In all the sciences the objects we are really studying are objects which we have to think but cannot see or perceive by any of our senses. Yet the sciences throughout direct attention to these objects, which are, in fact, forms, by appealing in the first instance to sense. The geometer draws a figure which he calls a “square” and a line which he calls its “diagonal.” But when he demonstrates a proposition about the square and its diagonal, the objects of which he is speaking are not this visible figure and this visible line but the square and the diagonal, and these, of course, we do not see except “with the mind's eye” (vi. 510d-e). (It would not even be true to say, like Berkeley, that what he is talking about is this visible figure and an indefinite plurality of others which are “like” it, for the simple reason that we can construct no visible figure at all which exactly answers to his definition of a “square.”) Further, all through his reasoning the geometer or arithmetician depends on certain “postulates” (ὑποθέσειs) of which he “gives no account” (λόγοs), such as the “postulate” that every number is either odd or even, or that there are just three kinds of angle. It is meant that these postulates are neither immediately self-evident, nor is any proof given of them. They are “synthetic” in Kant's sense of the word, and they are assumed without proof (vi. 510c-d). Thus there are two initial restrictions on the thinking of the mathematicians, as represented by the existing state of their science. They depend upon sensible things like diagrams as sources of suggestion, though not as the objects of their demonstrations. What cannot be “illustrated” or “represented” to the eye falls outside the scope of their science. And they make no attempt to reach real self-evidence in their initial postulates. They show that their theorems follow by logical necessity from a group of unproved premisses, but they do not undertake to show that there is any necessity to admit these premisses themselves. Thus the whole body of conclusions is left, so to say, hanging in the air. The geometer's “results” in the end rest on a tacit agreement (ὁμολογία) between himself and his pupil or reader that the question whether his assumptions are justifiable shall not be asked. In strictness we cannot call the results “knowledge” so long as the assumptions from which they have been deduced are thus left unexamined (vii. 533c).²⁴

This suggests to us at once the possibility and necessity of a higher and more rigorous science, “dialectic.” Such a science would differ from the sciences in vogue in two ways: (1) it would treat the initial postulates of the sciences as mere starting-points to be used for the discovery of some more ultimate premisses which are not “postulated,” but strictly self-luminous and evident (ἀνυπόθετα), a real “principle of everything,” and when it had discovered such a principle (or principles), it would then deduce the consequences which follow; (2) and in this movement no appeal would be made to sensible aids to the imagination, the double process of ascent to the “starting-point of everything” and descent again from it would advance from “forms by means of forms to forms and terminate upon them” (vi. 511b-c). In fact, we may even say that “dialectic” would “destroy” (ἀναιρει̑ν) the postulates of the existing sciences (τὰs ὑποθέσειs ἀναιρου̑σα, vii. 533c), that is, it would deprive them of the character of ultimate postulates by showing that—so far as they are not actually false, as they may turn out to be—they are consequences of still more ultimate truths.

In this account of the aims of dialectic we recognize at once the method described in the Phaedo as that of σκέψιs ἐν λόγοιs on which Socrates had fallen back after his disillusionment about Anaxagoras. Only here the special emphasis is thrown on just that side of the dialectic method which the immediate purposes of the Phaedo permitted us to dismiss in a single sentence. We are contemplating the procedure there said to be necessary if anyone disputes an initial “postulate.” In that case, the Phaedo told us, our “postulate” will require to be itself deduced as a consequence from one more ultimate, and the process will have to be repeated until we come to a postulate which all parties are content to accept. In the last resort this would, of course, involve deduction from some principle which can be seen to possess unquestionable internal necessity. Thus, so far, the Republic agrees exactly with the Phaedo about the task of “dialectic,” except that it lays special stress on just that part of it which had not to be taken into account in the Phaedo because the company there were all willing to admit the doctrine of forms as a “postulate” without demanding any justification of it. It is clear from the Republic that if a disputant should refuse to make this admission, the theory of forms itself would require to be examined in the same way in which the postulates of the mathematician von Fach are to be investigated. In the one passage of the dialogues where any such examination is made, it is not put into the mouth of Socrates but into that of the Pythagorean Timaeus (Tim. 51b 7 ff.).

Though Socrates naturally confines himself to criticisms of the sciences which had attained some degree of organization in his own day, it is obvious that they would apply with equal force to any others. Physics, chemistry, biology, economics are all full of undefined “primitive notions” and undemonstrated assumptions, and it is part of the work of the students of these sciences themselves to make a steady effort to ascertain just what their untested pre-suppositions are, and to consider how far they are really required, and how far they form a consistent system. The progress made by pure mathematics in the last half-century has largely consisted in a more accurate and complete statement of the “primitive notions” and “indemonstrable postulates” of the science and the elimination of numerous conscious or tacit “postulates” as actually false. Thus, for example, the process by which the Infinitesimal Calculus has been purged of bad logic and false assumptions, or the development of “non-Euclidean geometry,” is an excellent illustration of the self-criticism and self-correction of thought which Socrates and Plato call “dialectic.” Socrates' complaint (vii. 533c) about the mathematician who gives the name of science to a procedure in which the starting-point is something one does not know, and the conclusion and the intermediate steps “combinations of things one does not know,” would be a perfectly correct description of the contents of any average text-book of the Calculus in vogue seventy years ago. And it is manifest that the same sort of scrutiny is required by such notions as “force,” “acceleration,” “atomicity,” “evolution,” “price.” They are all inevitably in practical use long before the sciences which employ them have formulated any very precise account of their meaning, and the progress of science as science (as distinct from its application to “commerce”) consists very largely in the steady correction of our first crude attempts to explain what we mean by them. The physicist of to-day may, like Democritus, make the “atomic structure of matter” a foundation-stone of his science, but he means by his “atom” something Democritus would not have recognized as “atomic” at all. Similarly we all talk of the “evolution” of species, but the view that new species originate by sudden and considerable “mutations,” if established, would change the whole character of the special “Darwinian” postulate about the character of the process; it would involve exactly what Socrates means by a “destruction” of the postulate. Thus, so far, we may say that what the Republic calls “dialectic” is, in principle, simply the rigorous and unremitting task of steady scrutiny of the indefinables and indemonstrables of the sciences, and that, in particular, his ideal, so far as the sciences with which he is directly concerned goes, is just that reduction of mathematics to rigorous deduction from expressly formulated logical premisses by exactly specified logical methods of which the work of Peano, Frege, Whitehead, and Russell has given us a magnificent example.

But the “reduction of all pure mathematics to logic” is only a part, and not the most important part, of what the Republic understands by “dialectic.” Such a unification of the sciences as the Republic contemplates would require a combination of the reduction of mathematics to logic with the Cartesian reduction of the natural sciences to geometry. When the task was finished, no proposition asserting “matter of fact,” devoid of internal necessity, should appear anywhere among the premisses from which our conclusions are ultimately drawn. The first principles to which the dialectician traces back all our knowledge ought to exhibit a self-evident necessity, so that science would end by transforming all “truths of fact” into what Leibniz called “truths of reason.” This involves a still more significant extension of the range of “science.” It implies that in a completed philosophy the distinctions between value and fact, essentia and esse, So-sein and Sein are transcended. The man who has attained “wisdom” would see that the reason why anything is, and the reason why it is what it is, are both to be found in the character of an ens realissimum of which it is self-evident that it is and that it is what it is, a self-explanatory “supreme being.” This is why dialectic is said to culminate in direct apprehension of “the good” as the source of both existence and character. The thought is that all science in the end can be transformed into a sort of “algebra,” but an algebra which is, as Burnet says, teleological. The demand for such a science is, in fact, already contained by implication in the remark of Socrates in the Phaedo that he hoped to find in Anaxagoras a solution of the problem of the shape and position of the earth based on proof that “it is best” that it should have just that shape and position and no other (Phaedo 97d-e). When a modern biologist explains the structure of an organism by the notion of “adaptation” to its environment he is thus using on a small scale the principle which the Republic would make the supreme universal principle of all scientific explanation whatsoever. Only, of course, the biological conception of “adaptation” stops short with a relative best; the particular environment of a particular species is taken as (relatively) constant and independent; the “best” realized in the development of the species is adequate adaptation to that given environment. When the principle is made universal, the “best” becomes an ethical and absolute best, since no place is left for an “environment” of everything. The “goodness of God,” or its equivalent, takes the place of the fixed “environment” as that to which the structure of things is conceived as “adapted.”

We need not suppose that Plato imagined this programme for the completion of science as capable of actual execution by human beings. We have learned from the Symposium that “philosophy” itself is a life of progress, it is not those who are already in possession of “wisdom,” but those who are endeavouring after it, who philosophize. The Timaeus reminds us with almost wearisome repetition that, in physical science in particular, all our results are inevitably provisional, the best we can reach with our present lights, and that we must be prepared to see them all superseded or modified. One of the standing contrasts between Plato and his great disciple Aristotle is just that this sense of the provisionality and progressiveness of science is so prominent in the one and so absent from the other. Plato never assumes, as Aristotle was so apt to assume, that he can do the world's scientific thinking for it once for all. This apparent finality, which made Aristotle so attractive to the thinkers of the thirteenth century, who were just recovering the thought of “Nature” as a field for study on her own account, makes the real value of Aristotle's science rather difficult for us to appreciate to-day. Plato was far too true to the Socratic conception of the insignificance of human knowledge by comparison with the vastness of the scientific problem to fall into the vein of cheap and easy dogmatism. But though the final “rationalization” of things may be an unattainable goal, there is no reason why we should not try to get as near to the goal as we can. If we cannot expel the element of “brute fact” for which we can see no reason from science, we may try, and we ought to try, to reduce it to a minimum. We cannot completely “mathematize” human knowledge, but the more we can mathematize it, the better. We shall see, when we come to speak of Plato's oral teaching in the Academy, how earnestly he set himself to carry out the programme by getting behind the mere assumption of the forms as the last word in philosophy, and deducing the forms themselves from the “good.”

(c) It should be unnecessary to dwell on the point that, with all his devotion to this demand for a critical metaphysic of the sciences, Plato is no champion of a mere vita contemplativa divorced from practical social activity. One could not even say that he, like Kant, conceives of “speculative” and “practical” reason as active in two distinct spheres of which one is subordinated to the other. To his mind, the two spheres are inseparable. The unification of science is only possible to one who is illuminated by the vision of the Good which is the principle of the unification, and the Good is only seen by the man who lives it. Hence the demand that the “philosopher” shall devote the best years of his working life to the arduous practice of governing, in all its details great or small, is only the other side of the conviction that without the “heroic” character no one will ever rise to the supreme rank in science itself. The “philosopher” is necessarily a missionary and a sort of lesser Providence to mankind because, on Socratic principles, the “Good” cannot be seen without drawing all who see it into its service. The “philosophers'” social activity is all the more effective that it is not pursued directly for its own sake, in the spirit of the well-meaning but tiresome persons of our own day who take up “social work” as they might take up typewriting or civil engineering, but issues naturally and inevitably, as a sort of “by-product,” from their aspiration after something else, just as the “great inventions” of modern times regularly issue from the discoveries of men who were not thinking at all of the applications of science to convenience and commerce, or as art, literature, social life have all owed an incalculable debt to St. Francis and his “little brethren,” who never gave a thought to any of them.

(12) This desultory chapter may be brought to an end by a few remarks on the impressive picture of Republic viii.-ix. about the stages of progressive degeneration through which personal and national character pass as the true ideal of life falls more completely out of view. It should be obvious that the primary interest of these sketches is throughout ethical, not political. The “imperfect” constitutions are examined in order to throw light on the different phases of personal human sinfulness, not in the interests of a theory of political institutions. We see the sinfulness of even “honourable” ambition or “business principles,” when they are made the mainspring of a man's life, more clearly by considering the type of national character exhibited by a community in which these motives determine the character of national life. Socrates is still adhering to his declared purpose of using the “larger letters” to decipher the smaller. In the sketches themselves, Socrates is all through “drawing with his eye on the object.” We are told in so many words that Sparta has furnished the model for the picture of the second-best society, where education is neglected and the highest moral ideal is to display the character of a good fighting-man and sportsman, i.e. the society in which “honourable ambition,” the pursuit of the cursus honorum, is thought the supreme virtue. As mankind go, a community of this kind is not a bad one; it is morally in a much healthier state than a society where every one regards “getting rich” as the great aim in life, and the “merchant prince” is the national hero. Rome, in its better days, would be an example of the kind of society intended, no less than Sparta. The point of Socrates' criticism is that when “ambition” becomes master instead of servant, it is not likely to remain “honourable” ambition, ambition to “serve.” From the first, the ambition of the “timocratic” State has not been aspiration to be pre-eminent in the best things; at their best, the Spartans made a very poor contribution to the positive pursuit of the highest life. When they were not at their best, their “ambition” took the form of mere devotion to military success; and at their worst, they were mere aspirants to the exercise of power and the accumulation of the wealth to be got by “empire,” as the “timocratic man,” in his old age, degenerates into the kind of character who is greedy of the power money will give him. It ought to have been impossible to find any idealization of Sparta in the picture. As I have written elsewhere, it would be truer to say that in the Republic we discern the shadows of the third-century ephors and of Nabis behind the “respectable” figure of Agesilaus.

It is generally admitted that the picture of the “democratic” city where every one does as he pleases, and the most typical of citizens is the gifted amateur who plays, as the mood takes him, at every kind of life from that of the voluptuary to that of the ascetic—a sort of Goethe, in fact—is a humorous satire on Athenian life and manners. Of course we should be alive to the further point that the satire would be wholly beside the mark if directed against the drab and decent bourgeois Athens of Plato's manhood. The burlesque is aimed directly against the Imperial democracy of the spacious days of Pericles when Athens was a busy home of world-commerce and the “new learning.” If we read the description side by side with the famous Funeral Oration in Thucydides, we shall see at once that the very notes of Athenian life which Pericles there selects as evidence of its superiority are carefully dwelt upon by Socrates for the opposite purpose of proving that, for all its surface brilliancy, such a life is at bottom so diseased that society is on the verge of complete collapse. I, at least, cannot avoid the conviction that Socrates sees in just what must have been the great charm of Athens for men like Sophocles, Protagoras, Herodotus—its apparently inexhaustible variety and freshness—the unmistakable “symptoms of the end.”²⁵ (Perhaps he was not very far wrong. What would probably have been the issue of the Periclean age if Alcibiades, the incarnation of its energy and versatility, had returned triumphant from the subjugation of Sicily? One may “hazard a wide solution.”)

We are given no hint of the source from which the picture of the intermediate society, where wealth is the great title to admiration and “merchant princes” control the national destiny, is taken. But I do not doubt that we can name the State which Plato has in mind. When we remember that, as we see from allusions in the Laws and in Aristotle's Politics,²⁶ there were just three cities whose constitutions impressed Greek thinkers by their appearance of being framed on definite principles—Sparta, Crete, and Carthage. I think it may safely be assumed that Carthage has supplied the hints for the Venice or Amsterdam of the Republic, just as we may presume that Socrates has the Carthaginians more than anyone else in mind in the earlier passage where he remarks on the exceptional aptitude of “Phoenicians” for commerce. The subsequent history of Carthage during the first two Punic wars affords an interesting commentary on what is said about the internal dissensions which paralyse the “oligarchical city.” On the concluding argument, by which the life of respect for right is pronounced far superior in happiness to the life of sating one's cupidities and ambitions,²⁷ there is no need to say much. The reasoning is that we have already met in the Gorgias, and turns on the application of the medical formula of “depletion and recovery from depletion” to the moral life. The “passions,” like the physical appetites of hunger and thirst, are capable of no permanent and progressive satisfaction. You feed full to-day, but to-morrow finds you as hungry again as though to-day had never been. What you mistake for happiness has been only the temporary arrest of a “depletion.” On the other hand, what you gain in knowledge and goodness is not won to-day to be “excreted” by the time to-morrow is upon you. It is permanently acquired. It is not with character and intellect as it is with bodily health, which is a mere balance between antithetic processes of waste and repair; character and intellect are κτήματα ἐs αἰεί. This is the reason for the distinction between the “false” pleasures of sensuality and ambition and the “true” pleasures of the philosophic life. The former are “false,” not in the sense that they are not really felt, but in the sense that they are not what they promise to be. “Alle Lust will Ewigkeit,” but no Ewigkeit is to be got out of the βίοs φιλοσώματοs or the βίοs φιλότιμοs, a truth which no special pleading for Hedonism can explain away. I will add one final caution against possible misinterpretation. Plato credits the “three lives” with distinctive pleasures, much as Mill talks of a distinction of “higher” and “lower” in pleasure.²⁸ But he gives a rational reason for his preference of the “philosopher's” pleasure where Mill gives an absurd one. Mill tries to persuade his readers that a jury of pleasure-tasters devoid of all moral principle would be unanimous in preferring the philosopher's pleasures, or, alternatively, that the dissentients may be disabled as no genuine connoisseurs.²⁹ Plato gives the right reason for the preference, that the issue is one which must be decided by “intelligence,” and it is just intelligence which the philosopher has and his rivals have not. This is what John Grote also meant when he said that Mill's argument is based on a misconception of our reason for attaching weight to the philosopher's verdict. We go to him, not as Mill assumes, for evidence, but for authority.³⁰

Notes

1. This is made especially clear by the tone of the satire on democracy viii. 557 ff., where it is unmistakably the powerful, opulent, and formidable democracy of the Archidamian war that Socrates is depicting. The year 411, assumed as the dramatic date by some commentators, is about the worst of all possible choices. It is rendered impossible by the fact that in the Republic, Cephalus, the father of Polemarchus and Lysias, is still alive, though an old man. The date is thus before his death and the removal of his sons to Thurii, whence they returned, after a good number of years, to Athens in 411 (Vit. Lysiae, c. 1).

2. Aristoph., Fr. 198.

3. This is why in Book IV. the virtues, as practised in the “reformed” city, are still distinguishable, so that different virtues are most specially prominent in different sections of society, and, again, why we are told at iv. 430c 3 that the account just given of courage is adequate only as a description of “citizen” courage, and may have to be revised later on. The “unity of the virtues” only emerges in Republic vi. when we come to discuss the character of the “philosopher-king.”

4. The only specious argument for an earlier Urstaat is that, at the beginning of the Timaeus, where Socrates is made to recapitulate the contents of the Republic (Tim. 17a-19a), nothing is said about the philosopher-kings and their education. Nothing, however, is said about the account of the “imperfect” types of men and societies in Republic viii.-ix. either. The silence of the Timaeus about everything which follows Republic v. can be explained conjecturally in more ways than one. The simplest explanation is that the real purpose of the recapitulation is to serve as an introduction to the projected but unfinished Critias. Any explanation of the facts must remain conjectural, since Plato wrote only the opening pages of the projected Critias, and we do not know how he meant to develop the story.

5. The apparent triviality of the examples chosen by Socrates to illustrate his point is only apparent. He takes simple illustrations, as Professor Burnet has said, because the issue at stake is most readily seen in such cases. Thus, e.g., the question whether one should return a weapon to a lunatic because it is his raises the problem whether it is the duty of a banker to honour all the cheques of a wealthy senile client, or of a solicitor to take his instructions for a manifestly insane will without any warning to his family; and these are questions of moment, not only for the casuist but for the legislator. Grotius has to begin with precisely the same kind of elementary example when he wants to discuss the problems connected with international good faith in the De iure belli et pacis.

6. For example, on Thrasymachus' theory, the δη̑μοs, which is the κρει̑ττον at Athens, must be supposed to have adopted the institution of ostracism in the interests of the δη̑μοs, as a safeguard against would-be “dictators.” But in actual working the institution favours the aspirant to a dictatorship by giving him a chance to remove the natural leaders of a “constitutional opposition.” The selection of magistrates by lot, again, must be supposed to have been adopted to equalize the chances of the citizens; but, as its ancient critics said, it may work the wrong way, since it gives the μισόδημοs as good a chance of office as anyone else, whereas he would be handicapped under an elective system by his known or suspected hostility to the constitution.

7. Oxyrhynchus Papyri, XI, no. 1364.

8. For example, punctuality is what is commonly considered a “minor social virtue.” A man is not thought much the worse of, if he is always late at an appointment. But when we see how the issue of a campaign or even of a war may be affected, if expected reinforcements arrive just a little too late, we are reminded that it is a dangerous thing to call any virtue a “minor” one. The contemplation of the “large letters” teaches us not to despise “minute particulars.”

9. Rep. iv. 419a-420a.

10. Rep. iv. 421d ff.

11. See the fragments of the Aspasia collated in H. Dittmar's Aeschines von Sphettos, 275-283.

12. It would be singularly unlikely that Aeschylus, who had fought at Marathon, should feel any particular devotion to a god who had “medized” all through the Persian wars. That he felt none is surely proved by the part Apollo is made to play all through the Orestean trilogy. The so-called naïveté of Aeschylus, like that of Herodotus, is a product of consummate art. In one important passage where the poet really is expressing personal religious conviction he is at pains to tell us that “popular orthodoxy” is against him (Agam. 757, δίχα δ' ἄλλων μονόφρων εἰμί).

13. Besides painting, embroidery, and architecture, the Republic (l.c.) mentions weaving, the manufacture of all “vessels” or “furniture” (σκευω̑ν), and appears to allude to gardening. There would be plenty of room in Socrates' city for the arts of design, if there is not much left for the poet and dramatist. It is an interesting question whether Socrates may not be right in what is his evident conviction that the greatest art does require a certain austerity and severe restriction in the matter of its vehicles of expression. I suggest the question without wishing to answer it.

14. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy³, 296 n. 2.

15. The suggestion is that in the man who achieves his eternal salvation, the elements of “mettle” and “concupiscence” are, so to say, transubstantiated, swallowed up in intellect. (Of course this “intellect” would not be a “cold, neutral” apprehension of truth, but an intellect on fire with intellectual “passion,” a white-hot intelligence.) The same suggestion is made more openly in the Timaeus (69c ff.). Since we cannot suppose the Pythagorean Timaeus to have learned about the “tripartite soul” for the first time from the conversation of Socrates two days before, the fact that he makes a point of the doctrine indicates that Plato regards it as Pythagorean.

16. Metaphysics, A. 991b 6, M. 1080a 6.

17. Rep. vi. 508b-509b. For the full understanding of the analogy with the sun it is necessary to understand the theory of colour-vision implied, which is fully expounded in the Timaeus. A colour is itself a kind of “flame” (Timaeus, 67c ff.), and the immediate organ of the sight by which it is apprehended is also itself a fire, like that of the sun, which is contained in the eye and issues forth from it in the act of vision (ibid. 45b ff.). Thus the sun, as the source of light, actually is also the source both of colour and of colour-vision. The well-known Neoplatonist formula that νου̑s and τὰ νοητά taken together as inseparable proceed immediately from the supreme reality “the One” is a perfectly correct transcript of the doctrine of the Republic into the terminology of technical metaphysics.

18. Rep. vii. 532a.

19. To take the first examples which come to hand: Phaedo, 98a 2, αἰτίαs ἄλλο εiδοs = another cause; Phaedrus, 246d 6, ἡ πτερου̑ δύναμιs = “a wing”; Timaeus, 70d 8, τὴν του̑ σώματοs φύσιν = the body.

20. The physicists are accused (Phaed. 99c 5) of falsely thinking that τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ δέον συνδει̑ καὶ συνέχει οὐδὺν. As one might say, “they forget that obligation is the ligature” which connects all things.

21. Greek Philosophy, Part I., 168-170.

22. The last word on the question whether the philosophy of the Republic and the dialogues generally is “rationalism” or not is briefly this. If we could fully comprehend “the good” we should see directly that it is through and through intelligible, and the only object which is wholly and perfectly intelligible; as we never can comprehend it completely, there is, in fact, always something mysterious, not yet understood, about it. It is free from all self-contradiction, but it always contains “surprises” for us. We can “see into it” to some extent, and it is the philosopher's duty to see further and further into it; but you will never “see through it.”

23. To take one of the simplest examples: you cannot advance a step in elementary geometry without recognizing that any terminated straight line can be bisected, and there is no doubt that the Pythagorean geometers made the assumption. But it is also one of their assumptions that points are “units having position.” If this is so, since a “unit” cannot be split, when I “bisect AB at C”; C cannot be a “point of AB,” and, in fact, cannot be a “point” at all. Thus one at least of the assumptions, “a straight line can be bisected at “a point,” “a point is a unit having position,” must be false. But the Pythagorean geometer cannot see his way to do without either. All Zeno's “antinomies” are of this type.

24. We may readily supply further examples in illustration of the two points on which Socrates dwells. Thus the notion that the visible diagram is either the object about which the geometer reasons, or at any rate, a necessary source of suggestion, is dispelled by the elementary consideration that e.g. a work on Conics commonly begins with propositions about the properties of the “general conic.” But you cannot draw even a rough diagram of a “general conic.” So the other point is well illustrated by the labour spent for centuries on trying to show that what we now know to be the arbitrary Euclidean postulate of parallels (that non-intersecting straight lines in the same plane are equidistant) is a necessity of thought.

25. Cf. V. Soloviev's saying that “visible and accelerated progress is a symptom of the end.”

26. Arist. Politics, B 11 (1272b 24 ff.; note that Aristotle too comments on the “plutocracy” of the Carthaginian scheme, and plutocracy is what is meant by “oligarchy” in the Republic). For a reference to Carthage in the Laws, see Laws, 674a, written, no doubt, after Plato's association with affairs in Sicily had made Carthage very much of an actuality to him. Commerce made Carthage an object of interest to Athens in the Periclean age (Aristoph. Knights, 174), and it has been plausibly suggested that the great plague of the third year of the Archidamian war was brought to Athens from Carthage by infected merchandise.

27. Republic, ix. 583b ff. Cf.

    Mete unto wombe and wombe eek unto mete,
    Shall God destroyen bothe,’ as Paulus seith.

28. Republic, 582a-e.

29. Mill's plea is a perfect example of the kind of argument the Greeks called a λόγοs ἀντιστρέφων, i.e. one which makes for neither party, because it can be equally well applied by the other. If the sage disables the judgment of the profligate on the plea that he must have lost the taste for the “higher pleasures” before he can prefer the lower, the profligate can equally retort on the sage with the adage about sour grapes. “You have taken to philosophy,” he may say, “because you are physically too old to enjoy debauchery.”

30. Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy, p. 47.

Works Cited

Nettleship, R. L.—“Lectures on the Republic of Plato” (vol. ii. of Philosophical Remains); Plato's Conception of Goodness and the Good; The Theory of Education in Plato's Republic in Hellenica², 61-165.

Natorp, P.—Platons Ideenlehre, 175-215.

Ritter, C.—Platon, ii. 3-39, 554-641 al.; Platons Staat, Darstellung des Inhalts. (Stuttgart, 1909.)

Raeder, H.—Platons philosophische Entwickelung, 181-245.

Barker, E.—Greek Political Theory: Plato and his Predecessors, 145-268.

Stewart, J. A.—Myths of Plato, 133-172 (Myth of Er), 471-474 (Myth of the Earth-born); Plato's Doctrine of Ideas, 47-62.

Shorey, P.—Plato's Republic. (London and New York, Vol. I. 1930, Vol. II. 1935.)

Diès, A.—Introduction to the edition of the dialogue in the Collection des Universités de France. (Paris, 1932.)

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations have occasionally been used:

E.G.Ph.³: Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (3rd edition), 1920.

E.R.E.: Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 1908-1921.

R.P.: Ritter and Preller, Historia Philosophiae Graecae (9th edition), 1913.