Timaeus — Plato
The text is shown on its own: no facing layer is held for this issue.
The movement of a body of men can never have the pHancy Republic. or facility of a single man; the freedom of the individual, which introduc is always limited, becomes still more straitened when transferred ^'°^" to a nation. The powers of action and feeling are necessarily weaker and more balanced when they are diffused through a community ; whence arises the often discussed question, ' Can a nation, like an individual, have a conscience?
We hesitate to say that the characters of nations are nothing more than the sum of the characters of the individuals who compose them; because there may be tendencies in individuals which react upon one another.
A whole nation may be wiser than any one man in it; or maybe animated by some common opinion or feeling which could not equally have affected the mind of a single person, or may have been inspired by a leader of genius to perform acts more than human. Plato does not appear to have analysed the complications which arise out of the collective action of mankind.
Neither is he capable of seeing that analogies, though specious as arguments, may often have no foundation in fact, or of distinguishing between what is intelligible or vividly present to the mind, and what is true. In this respect he is far below Aristotle, who is comparatively seldom imposed upon by false analogies. He cannot disentangle the arts from the virtues — at least he is always arguing from one to the other.
His notion of music is transferred from harmony of sounds to harmony of life : in this he is assisted by the ambiguities of language as well as by the prevalence of Pythagorean notions. And having once assimilated the state to the individual, he imagines that he will find the succession of states paralleled in the lives of individuals. Still, through this fallacious medium, a real enlargement of ideas is attained.
When the virtues as yet presented no distinct conception to the mind, a great advance was made by the comparison of them with the arts ; for virtue is partly art, and has an outward form as well as an inward principle. The harmony of music affords a lively image of the harmonies of the world and of human life, and may be regarded as a splendid illustration which was naturally mistaken for a real analogy.
In the same way the identification of ethics with politics has a tendency to give definiteness to ethics, and also to elevate and ennoble men's cc Republic. Introduction.
The Education of the Republic. notions of the aims of government and of the duties of citizens; for ethics from one point of view may be conceived as an ideahzed law and pohtics ; and poUtics, as ethics reduced to the conditions of human society. There have been evils which have arisen out of the attempt to identify them, and this has led to the separation or antagonism of them, which has been introduced by modern political writers. But we may likewise feel that something has been lost in their separation, and that the ancient philosophers who estimated the moral and intellectual wellbeing of mankind first, and the wealth of nations and individuals second, may have a salutary influence on the speculations of modern times. Many political maxims originate in a reaction against an opposite error; and when the errors against which they were directed have passed away, they in turn become errors.
III. Plato's views of education are in several respects remarkable ; like the rest of the Republic they are partly Greek and partly ideal, beginning with the ordinary curriculum of the Greek youth, and extending to after-life. Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation for another in which education begins again (vi. 498 D).
This is the continuous thread which runs through the Republic, and which more than any other of his ideas admits of an application to modern life. He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught ; and he is disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are one and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world into his scheme of truth.
Nor does he assert in the Republic the involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus, Sophist, and Laws (cp. Protag. 345 foil., 352, 355 ; Apol. 25 E; Gorg. 468, 509 E). Nor do the so-called Platonic ideas recovered from a former state of existence affect his theory of mental improvement.
Still we observe in him the remains of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from within, and is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense. Education, as he says, will implant a principle of intelligence which is better than ten
No commentary for this page under the selected tracks.
There is commentary on page 1.