Timaeus — Plato

The Education of the Republic. cci thousand eyes. The paradox that the virtues are one, and the Republic. kindred notion that all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely re- Introducnounced ; the first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over '^'°^- the rest ; the second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual, and to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good.

The world of sense is still depreciated and identified with opinion, though omitted to be a shadow of the true. In the Republic he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice arises chiefly from ignorance and may be cured by education ; the multitude are hardly to be deemed responsible for what they do (v. 499 E).

A faint allusion to the doctrine of reminiscence occurs in the Tenth Book (621 A) ; but Plato's views of education have no more real connection with a previous state of existence than our own ; he only proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there already. Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light.

He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and false, and then goes on to gymnastics : of infancy in the Republic he takes no notice, though in the Laws he gives sage counsels about the nursing of children and the management of the mothers, and would have an education which is even prior to birth.

But in the Republic he begins with the age at which the child is capable of receiving ideas, and boldly asserts, in language which sounds paradoxical to modern ears, that he must be taught the false before he can learn the true. The modern and ancient philosophical world are not agreed about truth and falsehood ; the one identifies truth almost exclusively with fact, the other with ideas.

This is the difference between ourselves and Plato, which is, however, partly a difference of words (cp. supra, p. xxxviii). For we too should admit that a child must receive many lessons which he imperfectly understands; he must be taught some things in a figure only, some too which he can hardly be expected to believe when he grows older ; but we should limit the use of fiction by the necessity of the case.

Plato would draw the line differently ; according to him the aim of early education is not truth as a matter of fact, but truth as a matter of principle ; the child is to be taught first simple religious truths, and then simple moral truths, and insensibly to learn the lesson of good manners and good taste. He

The Education of the Republic. would make an entire reformation of the old mythology ; like Xenophancs and Heracleitus he is sensible of the deep chasm which separates his own age from Homer and Hesiod, whom he quotes and invests with an imaginary authority, but only for his own purposes.

The lusts and treacheries of the gods are to be banished; the terrors of the world below are to be dispelled; the misbehaviour of the Homeric heroes is not to be a model for youth. But there is another strain heard in Homer which may teach our youth endurance ; and something may be learnt in medicine from the simple practice of the Homeric age.

The principles on which religion is to be based are two only : first, that God is true; secondly, that he is good. Modern and Christian writers have often fallen short of these ; they can hardly be said to have gone beyond them. The young are to be brought up in happy surroundings, out of the way of sights or sounds which may hurt the character or vitiate the taste.

They are to live in an atmosphere of health ; the breeze is always to be wafting to them the impressions of truth and goodness. Could such an education be realized, or if our modern religious education could be bound up with truth and virtue and good manners and good taste, that would be the best hope of human improvement. Plato, like ourselves, is looking forward to changes in the moral and religious world, and is preparing for them.

He recognizes the danger of unsettling young men's minds by sudden changes of laws and principles, by destroying the sacredness of one set of ideas when there is nothing else to take their place. He is afraid too of the influence of the drama, on the ground that it encourages false sentiment, and therefore he would not have his children taken to the theatre ; he thinks that the effect on the spectators is bad, and on the actors still worse.

His idea of education is that of harmonious growth, in which are insensil)ly learnt the lessons of temperance and endurance, and the body and mind develope in equal proportions. The first principle which runs through all art and nature is simplicity ; this also is to be the rule of human life. The second stage of education is gymnastic, which answers to the period of muscular growth and development.

The simplicity which is enforced in music is extended to gymnastic ; Plato is aware that the training of the body may be inconsistent with the

The Education of the Republic. cciii training of the mind, and that bodily exercise may be easily over- Republic. done. Excessive training of the body is apt to give men a headache Introducor to render them sleepy at a lecture on philosophy, and this they attribute not to the true cause, but to the nature of the subject.

Two points are noticeable in Plato's treatment of gymnastic : — First, that the time of training is entirely separated from the time of literary education. He seems to have thought that two things of an opposite and different nature could not be learnt at the same time.

Here we can hardly agree with him ; and, if we may judge by experience, the effect of spending two or three years between the ages of seventeen and twenty in mere bodily exercise would be far from improving to the intellect.

Secondly, he affirms that music and gymnastic arc not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended, the one for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body, but that they are both equally designed for the improvement of the mind. The body, in his view, is the servant of the mind ; the subjection of the lower to the higher is for the advantage of both.

And doubtless the mind may exercise a very great and paramount influence over the body, if exerted not at particular moments and by fits and starts, but continuously, in making preparation for the whole of life. Other Greek writers saw the mischievous tendency of Spartan discipline (Arist. Pol. viii. 4, $ i foil. ; Thuc. ii. 2,7^ 39)« But only Plato recognized the fundamental error on which the practice was based.

The subject of gymnastic leads Plato to the sister subject of medicine, which he further illustrates by the parallel of law. The modern disbelief in medicine has led in this, as in some other departments of knowledge, to a demand for greater simplicity; physicians are becoming aware that they often make diseases * greater and more complicated ' by their treatment of them (Rep. iv. 426 A).

In two thousand years their art has made but slender progress ; what they have gained in the analysis of the parts is in a great degree lost by their feebler conception of the human frame as a whole. They have attended more to the cure of diseases than to the conditions of health ; and the improvements in medicine have been more than counterbalanced by the disuse of regular training.

Until lately they have hardly thought of air and water, the importance of which was well understood by the ancients; as Arjstotle remarks, 'Air and water, being the elements