The Republic, Introductions to Volumes I and II

The Loeb Classical Library Edition
Translation and Analysis by Paul Shorey

Republic, Book I
Republic, Book II
Republic, Book III
Republic, Book IV
Republic, Book V

Introduction to The Republic, Volume II

Republic, Book VI
Republic, Book VII
Republic, Book VIII
Republic, Book IX
Republic, Book X

Introduction to The Republic, Volume I

Analyses of the Republic abound. 1 The object of this sketch is not to follow all the windings of its ideas, but to indicate sufficiently their literary framework and setting. Socrates speaks in the first person, as in the Charmides and the Lysis, He relates to Critias, Timaeus, Hermocrates, and an unnamed fourth person, as we learn from the introduction of the Timaeus, a conversation which took place yesterday at the Peiraeus. The narrative falls on the day of the Lesser Panathenaea, and its scene, like that of the Timaeus, Proclus affirms to be the city or the Acropolis, a more suitable place, he thinks, for the quieter theme and the fit audience but few than the noisy seaport, apt symbol of Socrates’ contention with, the sophists. 2

The Timaeus, composed some time later than the Republic, is by an afterthought represented as its |viii| sequel. And the Republic, Timaeus, and unfinished Critias constitute the first of the trilogies in which Aristophanes of Byzantium arranged the Platonic dialogues. 3 The Timaeus accordingly opens with a brief recapitulation of the main political and social features of the Republic. But nothing can be inferred from the variations of this slight summary. 4 The dramatic date of the dialogue is plausibly assigned by Boeckh 5 to the year 411 or 410. 6 Proof is impossible because Plato admits anachronisms in his dramas. 7

Socrates tells how he went down to the Peiraeus to attend the new festival of the Thracian Artemis, Bendis, 8 and, turning homewards, was detained by |ix| a group of friends who took him to the house of Polemarchus, brother of the orator Lysias. 9 A goodly company was assembled there, Lysias and a younger brother Euthydemus—yea, and Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, 10 Charmantides of the deme Paiania, 11 Cleitophon, 12 and conspicuous among them the venerable Cephalus, crowned from a recent sacrifice and a prefiguring type of the happy old age of the just man. 13 A conversation springs up which Socrates guides to an inquiry into the definition and nature of justice (330d, 331c, 332b) and to the conclusion that the conventional Greek formula, Help your friends and harm your enemies, cannot be right (335e-336a), since it is not the function (ἔργον, 335d) of the good man to do evil to any. The sophist |x| Thrasymachus, intervening brutally (336b), affirms the immoralist thesis that justice is only the advantage of the (politically) stronger, and with humorous dramatic touches of character portrayal is finally silenced (350c-d), much as Callicles is refuted in the Gorgias. The conclusion, in the manner of the minor dialogues, is that Socrates knows nothing (354c). For since he does not know what justice is, he cannot a fortiori determine the larger question raised by Thrasymachus’s later contention (352d), whether the just life or the unjust life is the happier.

Either the first half or the whole of this book detached would be a plausible companion to such dialogues as the Charmides and Laches, which deal in similar manner with two other cardinal virtues, temperance and bravery. It is an easy but idle and unverifiable conjecture that it was in Plato’s original intention composed as a separate work, perhaps a discarded sketch for the Gorgias, and only by an afterthought became an introduction for the Republic. 14It is now an excellent introduction and not, in view of the extent of the Republic, disproportionate in length. That is all we know or can know.

The second book opens with what Mill describes as a monument of the essential fairness of Plato’s mind 15 —a powerful restatement of the theory of Thrasymachus by the brothers of Plato, Glaucon and Adeimantus. They are not content with the dialectic that reduced Thrasymachus to silence (358b). They demand a demonstration which will convince the youth hesitating at the crossroads of virtue and |xi| vice (365a-b) 16 that it is realty and intrinsically better to be than to seem just. 17

It is Plato’s method always to restate a satirized and controverted doctrine in its most plausible form before proceeding to a definitive refutation. 18 As he himself says in the Phaedrus (272c), it is right to give the wolf too a hearing.

It is also characteristic of Plato that he prefers to put the strongest statement of the sophistic, immoralist, Machiavellian, Hobbesian, Nietzschean political ethics in the mouths of speakers who are themselves on the side of the angels. 19 There is this historical justification of the procedure, that there exists not a shred of evidence that any contemporary or predecessor of Plato could state any of their theories which he assailed as well, as fully, as coherently, as systematically, as he has done it for them.

In response to the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus, Socrates proposes to study the nature of justice and injustice writ large in the larger organism of the state, and to test the conceptions so won by their application to the individual also (368e, 369a). Plato, though he freely employs |xii| metaphor, symbolism, and myth, never bases his argument on them. 20 The figurative language here, as elsewhere, serves as a transition to, a framework for, an illustration of, the argument. Man is a social and political animal, and nothing but abstract dialectics can come of the attempt to isolate his psychology and ethics from the political and social environment that shapes them. 21 The question whether the main subject of the Republic is justice or the state is, as Proclus already in effect said, a logomachy. 22 The construction of an ideal state was a necessary part of Plato’s design, and actually occupies the larger part of the Republic. But it is, as he repeatedly tells us, logically subordinated to the proof that the just is the happy life. 23

It is idle to object that it is not true and cannot be proved that righteousness is verifiably happiness. The question still interests humanity, and Plato’s discussion of it, whether it does or does not amount to a demonstration, still remains the most instructive and suggestive treatment of the theme in all literature.

There is little profit also in scrutinizing too curiously the unity or lack of unity of design in the Republic, the |xiii| scale and proportion of the various topics introduced, the justification and relevance of what may seem to some modern readers disproportionate digressions. The rigid, undeviating logic which Poe postulates for the short story or poem has no application to the large-scale masterpieces of literature as we actually find them. And it is the height of naivete for philological critics who have never themselves composed any work of literary art to schoolmaster such creations by their own a priori canons of the logic and architectonic unity of composition. Such speculations have made wild work of Homeric criticism. They have been applied to Demosthenes On the Crown and Virgil’s Aeneid. Their employment either in criticism of the Republic or in support of unverifiable hypotheses about the order of composition of its different books is sufficiently disposed of by the common sense of the passages which I have quoted below 24 For the reader who intelligently follows the |xiv| main argument of the Republic, minor disproportions and irrelevancies disappear in the total impression of the unity and designed convergence of all its parts in a predetermined conclusion. If it pleases Plato to dwell a little longer than interests the modern reader on the expurgation of Homer (379d-394), the regulation of warfare between Greek states (469-471c), the postulates of elementary logic (438-439), the programme of the higher education (521 ff.) and its psychological presuppositions (522-524), and the justification of the banishment of the poets (595-608c), criticism has only to note and accept the fact.

Socrates constructs the indispensable minimum (369d-e) of a state or city from the necessities of human life, food, shelter, clothing, the inability of the isolated individual to provide for these needs and the principle of the division of labour. 25 Plato is aware that the historic origin of society is to be looked for in the family and the clan. But he reserves this aspect of the subject for the Laws. 26 The hypothetical, simple primitive state, which Glaucon stigmatizes as a city of pigs (372d), is developed into a normal modern society or city by the demand for customary luxuries, and by Herbert Spencer’s principle of the multiplication of effects, one thing leading to another (373-374). The luxurious and inflamed city (372e) is then purged and purified by the reform of ordinary Greek education, 27 in which the expurgation of Homer and Homeric mythology holds a place that may weary the modern reader but is not |xv| disproportionate to the importance of the matter for Plato’s generation and for the Christian Fathers who quote it almost entire. Luxury makes war unavoidable (373e). The principle of division of labour (374b-e) is applied to the military class, who receive a special education, and who, to secure the disinterested use of their power, 28 are subjected to a Spartan discipline and not permitted to touch gold or to own property (416-417).

In such a state the four cardinal virtues, the definitions of which were vainly sought in the minor dialogues, are easily seen to be realizations on a higher plane of the principle of the division of labour. 29 It is further provisionally assumed that the four cardinal virtues constitute and in some sort define goodness. 30 The wisdom of such a state resides predominantly in the rulers (428): its bravery in the soldiers (429). who acquire from their education a fixed and settled right opinion as to what things are really to be feared. Its sobriety, moderation, and temperance (sophrosyne) are the willingness of all classes to accept this division of function (431e). Its justice is the fulfillment of its own function by every class (433). A provisional psychology (435c-d) discovers in the human soul faculties corresponding to the three social classes (435e ff.). 31 And the social and political definitions of these virtues are then seen to |xvi| fit the individual. Sobriety and temperance are the acceptance by every faculty of this higher division of labour (441-442). Justice is the performance by every faculty of its proper task (433a-b with 441d). These definitions will stand the test of vulgar instances. The man whose own soul is inherently just in this ideal sense of the word will also be just in the ordinary relations of life. He will not pick and steal and cheat and break his promises (442e-443a). Justice in man and state is health. It is as absurd to maintain that the unjust man can be happier than the just as it would be to argue that the unhealthy man is happier than the healthy (445a). 32 Our problem is apparently solved.

It has been argued that this conclusion marks the end of a first edition of the Republic to which there are vague references in antiquity. There can be no proof for such an hypothesis. 33 Plato’s plan from the first presumably contemplated an ideal state governed by philosophers (347d), and there is distinct reference in the first four books to the necessity of securing the perpetuity of the reformed state by the superior intelligence of its rulers. 34 |xvii|

The transition at the beginning of the fifth book is quite in Plato’s manner and recalls the transition in the Phaedo (84c) to a renewal of the discussion of immortality. Here Glaucon and Adeimantus, as there Simmias and Cebes, are conversing in low tones and are challenged by Socrates to speak their mind openly (449b). They desire a fuller explanation and justification of the paradox, too lightly let fall by Socrates, that the guardians will have all things in common, including wives and children (449c, cf. 424a). Socrates, after some demur, undertakes to expound this topic and in general the preconditions of the realization of the ideal state under the continued metaphor of three waves of paradox. They are (1) the exercise of the same functions by men and women (457a, 453 to 457): (2) the community of wives (457c): (3) (which is the condition of the realization of all these ideals) the postulate that either philosophers must become kings or kings philosophers.

The discussion of these topics and the digressions which they suggest give to this transitional book an appearance of confusion which attention to the clue of the three waves of paradox and the distinction between the desirability and the possibility of the Utopia contemplated will remove. 35 The last few pages of the book deprecate prevailing prejudice against the philosophers and prepare the way for the theory and description of the higher education in Books VI and VII by distinguishing from the many pretenders the true philosophers who are those who are lovers of ideas, capable of appreciating them, and able to reason in abstractions. 36 Whatever the metaphysical |xviii| implications of this passage 37 its practical significance for the higher education and the main argument of the Republic is that stated here.

The sixth book continues this topic with an enumeration of the qualities of the perfect student, the natural endowments that are the prerequisites of the higher education (485 ff.) and the reasons why so few (496a) of those thus fortunately endowed are saved (494a) for philosophy from the corrupting influences of the crowd and the crowd-compelling sophists.38

In an ideal state these sports of nature (as Huxley styles them) will be systematically selected (499b ff.), tested through all the stages of ordinary education and finally conducted by the longer way (504b with 435d) of the higher education in the abstract sciences and mathematics and dialectics to the apprehension of the idea of good, which will be their guide in the conduct of the state. This simple thought is expressed in a series of symbols—the sun (506e ff.), the divided line (509d), the cave (514 ff.)—which has obscured its plain meaning for the majority of readers. 39 For the purposes of the Republic and apart from disputable metaphysical implications it means simply that ethics and politics ought to be something more than mere empiricism. Their principles and practice must be consistently related to a clearly conceived final standard and ideal of human welfare and good. To conceive such a standard and apply it systematically |xix| to the complications of institutions, law, and education is possible only for first-class minds who have undergone a severe discipline in abstract thought, supplemented by a long experience in affairs (484a, 539e). But it is even more impossible that the multitude should be critics than that they should be philosophers (494a). And so this which is Plato’s plain meaning has been lost in the literature of mystic and fanciful interpretation of the imagery in which he clothes it.

From these heights the seventh book descends to a sober account of the higher education in the mathematical sciences and dialectic (521c ff.). The passage is an interesting document for Plato’s conception of education and perhaps for the practice in his Academy. It also is the chief text for the controverted question of Plato’s attitude towards science and the place of Platonism in the history of science, but it need not further detain us here. 40 This book, in a sense, completes the description of the ideal state.

The eighth book, one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in Plato, is a rapid survey of the divergence, the progressive degeneracy from the ideal state in the four types to which Plato thinks the tiresome infinity of the forms of government that minute research enumerates among Greeks and barbarians may be conveniently reduced (544c-d). These are the timocracy, whose principle is honour (545c ff.), the oligarchy, which regards wealth (550c ff., 551c), the democracy, whose slogan is |xx| liberty, or doing as one likes (557b-e),the tyranny, enslaved to appetite. In this review history, satire, political philosophy, and the special literary motives of the Republic are blended in a mixture hopelessly disconcerting to all literal-minded critics from Aristotle down.

In the first two types Plato is evidently thinking of the better (544c) and the worse aspects (548a) of Sparta. In his portrayal of the democratic state he lets himself go in satire of fourth-century Athens (557b ff.), intoxicated with too heady draughts of liberty (562d) and dying of the triumph of the liberal party. His picture of the tyrant is in part a powerful restatement of Greek commonplace (565a-576) and in part a preparation for the return to the main argument of the Republic (577 ff.) by direct application of the analogy between the individual and the state with which he began.

In the ninth book all the lines converge on the original problem. After adding the final touches to the picture of the terrors and inner discords (576-580) of the tyrant’s soul, Plato finally decides the issue between the just and the unjust life by three arguments. The just life is proved the happier (1) by the analogy with the contrasted happiness of the royal (ideal) and the unhappiness of the tyrannized state (577c ff.), (2) by reason of an argument which Plato never repeats but which John Stuart Mill seriously accepts (582-583): The man who lives mainly for the higher spiritual satisfactions has necessarily had experience of the pleasures of sense and ambition also. He only can compare and judge. The devotees of sense and ambition know little or nothing of the higher happiness of the intellect and the soul. |xxi| (3) The third and perhaps the most weighty proof is the principle on which the Platonic philosophy or science of ethics rests, the fact that the pleasures of sense are essentially negative, not to say worthless, because they are preconditioned by equivalent wants which are pains. 41 This principle is clearly suggested in the Gorgias, Meno, Phaedrus, and Phaedo, and is elaborately explained in the psychology of the Philebus. It is in fact the basis of the Platonic ethics, which the majority of critics persist in deducing from their notion of Plato’s metaphysics. These three arguments, however, are not the last word. For final conviction Plato falls back on the old analogy of health and disease, with which the fourth book provisionally concluded the argument, and which as we there saw is all that the scientific ethics of Leslie Stephen can urge in the last resort. 42 The immoral soul is diseased and cannot enjoy true happiness. This thought is expressed in the image of the many-headed beast (588c ff.) and confirmed in a final passage of moral eloquence which forms a climax and the apparent conclusion of the whole (591-592).

The tenth book may be regarded either as an appendix and after-piece or as the second and higher climax prepared by an intervening level tract separating it from the eloquent conclusion of the ninth book. The discussion in the first half of the book of the deeper psychological justification of the banishment of imitative poets is interesting in itself. It is something that Plato had to say and that could be |xxii| said here with the least interruption of the general design. But its chief service is that it rests the emotions between two culminating points and so allows each its full force. Whether by accident or design, this method of composition is found in the Iliad, where the games of the twenty-third book relieve the emotional tension of the death of Hector in the twenty-second and prepare us for the final climax of the ransom of his body and his burial in the twenty-fourth. It is also found in the oration On the Crown, which has two almost equally eloquent perorations separated by a tame level tract. In Plato’s case there is no improbability in the assumption of conscious design. The intrinsic preferability of justice has been proved and eloquently summed up. The impression of that moral eloquence would have been weakened if Plato had immediately proceeded to the myth that sets forth the rewards that await the just man in the life to come. And the myth itself is much more effective after an interval of sober argument and discussion. Then that natural human desire for variation and relief of monotony for which the modulations of Plato’s art everywhere provide makes us welcome the tale of Er the son of Arminius (614b), the angel from over there (614d). And we listen entranced to the myth that was saved and will save us if we believe it—believe that the soul is immortal, capable of infinite issues of good and evil, of weal or woe. So shall we hold ever to the upward way and follow righteousness and sobriety with clear-eyed reason that we may be dear to ourselves and to God, both in the time of our sojourn and trial here below and also when, like victors in the games, we receive the final crown and |xxiii| prize, that thus both here and in all the millennial pilgrim’s progress of the soul of which we fable we shall fare well (621c-d).

This summary presents only the bare framework of the ideas of the Republic. But we may fittingly add here a partial list of the many brilliant passages of description, character-painting, satire, imagery, and moral eloquence dispersed through the work.

They include the dramatic introduction (327-331) with the picture of the old age of the just man, prefiguring the conclusion of the whole work: the angry intervention of Thrasymachus (336b ff.): the altercation between Thrasymachus and Cleitophon (340): Thrasymachus perspiring under Socrates’ questions because it was a hot day (350d): the magnificent restatement of the case for injustice by Glaucon and Adeimantus (357-367): the Wordsworthian idea of the influence of a beautiful environment on the young soul (401): the satiric description of the valetudinarian and malade imaginaire (406-407): the eloquent forecast of the fate of a society in which the guardians exploit their charges and the watchdogs become grey wolves (416-417): the satire on the lazy workman’s or socialist paradise (420d-e): the completion of the dream and the first of three noble statements of what Emerson calls the sovereignty of ethics, the moral ideal, the anticipated Stoic principle that nothing really matters but the good will (443-444: cf. 591e, 618c): the soul that contemplates all time and all existence (486a): the allegory of the disorderly ship and the riotous crew (488-489): the power of popular assemblies to |xxiv| corrupt the youthful soul and all souls that have not a footing somewhere in eternity (492): the great beast that symbolizes the public (493a-b)—not to be confused, as often happens, with the composite beast that is an allegory of the mixed nature of man: the little bald tinker who marries his master’s daughter, an allegory of the unworthy wooers of divine philosophy (495e): the true philosophers whose contemplation of the heavens and of eternal things leaves them no leisure for petty bickerings and jealousies (500c-d): the sun as symbol of the idea of good (507-509): the divided line illustrating the faculties of mind and the distinction between the sciences and pure philosophy or dialectics (510-511): the prisoners in the fire-lit cave, an allegory of the unphilosophic, unreleased mind (514-518): the entire eighth book, which Macaulay so greatly admired: and especially its satire on democracy doing as it likes, the inspiration of Matthew Arnold (562-563): Plato’s evening prayer, as it has been called, anticipating all that is true and significant in the Freudian psychology (571): the description of the tortured tyrant’s soul, applied by Tacitus to the Roman emperors (578-579): the comparison of the shadows we are and the shadows we pursue with the Greeks and Trojans who fought for a phantom Helen (586b-c): the likening of the human soul to a many-headed beast (588c): the city of which the pattern is laid up in heaven (592a-b): the spell of Homer (607c-d): the crowning myth of immortality (614-621).

The Republic is the central and most comprehensive work of Plato’s maturity. It may have been composed |xxv| between the years 380 and 370 B.C. in the fifth or sixth decade of Plato’s life. 43

The tradition that the earlier books were published earlier can neither be proved nor disproved. 44

The invention of printing has given to the idea of publication a precision of meaning which it could not bear in the Athens of the fourth century B.C. Long before its formal completion the plan and the main ideas of Plato’s masterpiece were doubtless familiar, not only to the students of the Academy but to the rival school of Isocrates and the literary gossips of Athens.

Unlike the presumably earlier Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Euthyphro, Meno, Protagoras, Gorgias, Euthydemus, the Republic is a positive, not to say a dogmatic, exposition of Plato’s thought, and not, except in the introductory first book, an idealizing dramatization |xxvi| of Socrates’ talks with Athenian youths and sophists.

Aristotle cites the Republic as the Politeia, 45 and this was the name given to it by Plato. In 527c it is playfully called the Kallipolis. The secondary title ἢ περὶ δικαίου is not found in the best manuscripts, and, as the peculiar use of ἢ indicates, was probably added later.

But, as already said, we cannot infer from this that the ethical interest is subordinated to the political. 46 The two are inseparable. The distinction between ethics and politics tends to vanish in early as in recent philosophy. Even Aristotle, who first perhaps wrote separate treatises on ethics and politics, combines them as ἢ περὶ τὰ ἀνθρώπινα φιλοσοφία. He speaks of ethics as a kind of politics. And though he regards the family and the individual as historically preceding the state, in the order of nature and the idea the state is prior. The modern sociologist who insists that the psychological and moral life of the individual apart from the social organism is an unreal abstraction is merely returning to the standpoint of the Greek who could not conceive man as a moral being outside of the polis. 47 In the consciously figurative language of Plato, 48 the idea of justice is reflected both in the individual and the state, the latter merely exhibits it on a larger scale. Or, to put it more simply, the true and only aim of the political art is to make the citizens happier by making them better. 49 And though good men |xxvii| arise sporadically, 50 and are preserved by the grace of God in corrupt states, 51 the only hope for mankind is in a state governed by philosophical wisdom (473d), and the ideal man can attain to his full stature and live a complete life only in the ideal city. 52

The larger part of the Republic is in fact occupied with the ideal state, with problems of education and social control, but, as already said, we are repeatedly reminded (supra, p. xii) that all these discussions are in Plato’s intention subordinated to the main ethical proof that the just life is happier than the unjust. Ethics takes precedence in that the final appeal is to the individual will and the individual thirst for happiness. Plato is to that extent an individualist and a utilitarian. Politics is primary in so far as man’s moral life cannot exist outside of the state.

There are hints of the notion of an ideal state before Plato. 53 And the literary motif of Utopia has a long history. 54 But it was the success of the Republic and Laws that made the portrayal of the best state the chief problem, not to say the sole theme, of Greek political science. In Plato this was due to an idealistic temper and a conviction of the irremediable corruption of Greek social and political life. The place |xxviii| assigned to the ideal state in Aristotle’s Politics is sometimes deplored by the admirers of the matter-of-fact and inductive methods of the first and fifth books. And in our own day the value of this motif for the serious science of society is still debated by sociologists.

The eternal fascination of the literary motif is indisputable, and we may enjoy without cavil the form which the artist Plato preferred for the exposition of his thought, while careful to distinguish the thoughts themselves from their sometimes fantastic embodiment. But we must first note one or two of the fundamental differences between the presuppositions of Plato’s speculations and our own. (1) Plato’s state is a Greek city, not a Persian empire, a European nation, or a conglomerate America. To Greek feeling complete and rational life was impossible for the inhabitant of a village or the subject of a satrap. It was attainable only through the varied social and political activities of the Greek polis, equipped with agora, gymnasium, assembly, theatre, and temple-crowned acropolis. It resulted from the action and interaction upon themselves and the world of intelligent and equal freemen conscious of kinship and not too numerous for self-knowledge or too few for self-defence. From this point of view Babylon, Alexandria, Rome, London, and New York would not be cities but chaotic aggregations of men. And in the absence of steam, telegraphy, and representative government the empires of Darius, Alexander, and Augustus would not be states but loose associations of cities, tribes, and provinces. Much of Plato’s sociology is therefore inapplicable to modern conditions. But though we recognize, we must not |xxix| exaggerate the difference. The Stoic and Christian city of God, the world citizenship into which the subjects of Rome were progressively adopted, the mediaeval papacy and empire, the twentieth-century democratic nation are the expressions of larger and perhaps more generous ideals. But in respect of the achievement of a complete life for all their members, they still remain failures or experiments. The city-state, on the other hand, has once and again at Athens and Florence so nearly solved its lesser problem as to make the ideal city appear not altogether a dream. And, accordingly, modern idealists are returning to the conception of smaller cantonal communities, inter-connected, it is true, by all the agencies of modern science and industrialism, but in their social tissue and structure not altogether incomparable to the small city-state which Plato contemplated as the only practical vehicle of the higher life.

(2) The developments of science and industry have made the idea of progress an essential part of every modern Utopia. The subjugation of nature by man predicted in Bacon’s New Atlantis has come more and more to dominate all modern dreams of social reform. It is this which is to lay the spectre of Malthusianism. It is this which is to give us the four-hour day and will furnish the workman’s dwelling with all the labour-saving conveniences of electricity, supply his table with all the delicacies of all the seasons, entertain his cultivated leisure with automatic reproductions of all the arts, and place flying machines and automobiles at his disposal when he would take the air.

This is not the place to estimate the part of illusion in these fancies. It is enough to observe that in dwelling too complacently upon them modern utopians |xxx| are apt to forget the moral and spiritual preconditions of any fundamental betterment of human life. Whereas Plato, conceiving the external condition of man’s existence to be essentially fixed, has more to tell us of the discipline of character and the elevation of intelligence. In Xavier Demaistre’s Voyage autour de ma chambre, Plato, revisiting the glimpses of the moon, is made to say, In spite of your glorious gains in physical science, my opinion of human nature is unchanged—but I presume that your control of human nature, has by this time made possible that ideal Republic which in the conditions of my own age I regarded as an impracticable dream. Demaistre was sorely embarrassed for a reply. Have we one ready?

Living in a milder climate and before the birth of the modern industrial proletariat, Plato is less haunted than we by the problem of pauperism. 55 And his austerity of temper would have left him indifferent, if not hostile, to the ideal of universal luxury and ease. It was not the life he appointed for his guardians, and the demand of the workers for it he has satirized in advance (420d-e). If we add to the two points here considered some shades of ethical and religious feeling, associated with Christianity, we shall have nearly exhausted the list of fundamental differences between Plato’s political and social thought and our own. The Republic, if we look beneath the vesture of paradox to the body of its substantive thought, might |xxxi| seem a book of yesterday or tomorrow. The conception of society as an organism, with the dependence of laws and institutions upon national temperament and customs, the omnipotence of public opinion, the division of labour and the reasons for it, the necessity of specialization, the formation of a trained standing army, the limitation of the right of private property, the industrial and political equality of women, the reform of the letter of the creeds in order to save the spirit, the proscription of unwholesome art and literature, the reorganization of education, eugenics, the kindergarten method, the distinction between higher and secondary education, the endowment of research, the application of the higher mathematics to astronomy and physics—all this and much more may be read in it by him who runs.

A critical interpretation would first remove some obstacles to a true appreciation interposed by captious cavils or over-ingenious scholarship, and then proceed to study Plato’s ideas (1) as embedded in the artistic structure of the Republic, (2) as the outgrowth of Plato’s thought and experience as a whole, and of the suggestions that came to him from his predecessors and contemporaries. The Republic is, in Huxley’s words, a noble, philosophical romance—it is a discussion of ethics, politics, sociology, religion and education cast in the form of a Utopia or an Emile. The criticism of Plato’s serious meanings is one thing. The observation of the way in which they are coloured and heightened by the exigencies of this special literary form is another. Plato himself has told us that the Republic is a fairy-tale or fable about justice. And he has warned us that every such finished composition must contain a large measure of what in contrast to |xxxii| the severity of pure dialectic he calls jest or play. 56 Within the work itself the artistic illusion had to be preserved. But even there Plato makes it plain that his chief purpose is to embody certain ideas in an ideal, not to formulate a working constitution or body of legislation for an actual state. An ideal retains its value even though it may never be precisely realized in experience. It is a pattern laid up in heaven for those who can see and understand. Plato will not even assert that the education which he prescribes is the best. He is certain only that the best education, whatever it may be, is a precondition of the ideal state (416b-c). Somewhere in the infinite past or future—it may be in the barbarian world beyond our ken—the true city may be visioned whenever and wherever political power and philosophic wisdom are wedded and not as now divorced. He affirms no more.

It is a waste of ink to refute the paradoxes or harp upon the omissions of the Republic in disregard of these considerations. The paradoxes are softened and explained, the omissions supplied in the Politicus and the Laws, which express fundamentally identical ethical and political convictions from a slightly different point of view and a perhaps somewhat sobered mood. 57 To assume that differences which are easily explained by the moulding of the ideas in their literary framework are caused by revolutions in Plato’s beliefs is to violate all canons of sound criticism and all the established presumptions of the unity of Plato’s thought.

The right way to read the Republic is fairly indicated |xxxiii| by casual utterances of such critics as Renan, Pater, Emerson, and Emile Faguet. The captious attitude of mind is illustrated by the set criticism of Aristotle, the Christian Fathers, Zeller, De Quincey, Landor, Spencer, and too large a proportion of professional philologists and commentators. As the poet too, says Emerson, he (Plato) is only contemplative. He did not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an institution. All his painting in the Republic must be esteemed mythical with the intent to bring out, sometimes in violent colours, his thought.

This disposes at once of all criticism, hostile or friendly, aesthetic or philological, that scrutinizes the Republic as if it were a bill at its second reading in Parliament, or a draft of a constitution presented to an American state convention. The greater the ingenuity and industry applied to such interpretations the further we are led astray. Even in the Laws Plato warns us that we are not yet, but are only becoming, legislators.

In the Republic it suits Plato’s design to build up the state from individual units and their economic needs. But his critics, from Aristotle to Sir Henry Maine, derive their conception of the patriarchal theory of society from his exposition of it in the Laws.

He embodies his criticism of existing Greek institutions in a scheme for the training of his soldiers, supplemented by the higher education of the guardians. But we cannot infer, as hasty critics have done, from 421a that he would not educate the masses at all. The banishment of Homer is a vivid expression of Plato’s demand that theology be purified and art moralized. But Milton wisely declined to treat it as a serious argument against the liberty of unlicensed |xxxiiv| printing in England. And nothing can be more preposterous than the statement still current in books of supposed authority that the severity of dialectics had suppressed in Plato the capacity for emotion and the appreciation of beauty. The abolition of private property among the ruling classes is partly the expression of a religious, a Pythagorean, not to say a Christian, ideal, which Plato reluctantly renounces in the Laws. 58 But it is mainly a desperate attempt to square the circle of politics and justify the rule of the intelligent few by an enforced disinterestedness and the annihilation of all possible sinister interests. 59 All criticism that ignores this vital point is worthless. 60 The same may be said of the community of wives, which is further, as Schopenhauer remarks, merely a drastic expression of the thought that the breeding of men ought to be as carefully managed as that of animals. It is abandoned in the Laws. The detailed refutations of Aristotle are beside the mark, and the denunciations of the Christian Fathers and De Quincey and Landor are sufficiently met by Lucian’s remark that those who find in the Republic an apology for licentiousness little apprehend in what sense the divine philosopher meant his doctrine of communistic marriage.

It is the height of naivete to demonstrate by the statistics of a Parisian creche that the children of the guardians would die in infancy, or to inquire too curiously into the risks they would run in accompanying their parents on horseback to war (466f, 467f). |xxxv|

The comparison of the individual to the state is a suggestive analogy for sociology and at the same time a literary motif that is worth precisely what the writer’s tact and skill can make of it. Plato’s use of the idea is most effective. By subtle artifices of style the cumulative effect of which can be felt only in the original, the reader is brought to conceive of the social organism as one monster man or leviathan, whose sensuous appetites are the unruly mechanic mob, whose disciplined emotions are the trained force that checks rebellion within and guards against invasion from without, and whose reason is the philosophic statesmanship that directs each and all for the good of the whole. And conversely the individual man is pictured as a biological colony of passions and appetites which swarm like worms within our living clay—a curious compound of beast and man which can attain real unity and personality only by the conscious domination of the monarchical reason. The origination of this idea apparently belongs to Plato. But he can hardly be held responsible for the abuse of it by modern sociologists, or for Herbert Spencer’s ponderous demonstration that with the aid of Huxley and Carpenter he can discover analogies between the body politic and the physiological body in comparison with which those of Plato are mere child’s-play.

It is unnecessary to multiply illustrations of such matter-of-fact and misconceived criticism. Enough has been said perhaps to prepare the way for the broad literary common-sense appreciation of the Republic, which an intelligent reader, even of a translation, will arrive at for himself if he reads without prejudice and without checking at every little apparent oddity in the reasoning or the expression. |xxxvi|

The proper historical background for such a broad understanding of Plato’s political and social philosophy is Thucydides’ account of the thirty years’ Peloponnesian war, which Hobbes translated in order to exhibit to England and Europe the evils of unbridled democracy. Thucydides’ history is the ultimate source of all the hard-headed cynical political philosophy of Realpolitik and the Superman, from Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Hobbes to Nietzsche and Bernardi. And in recent years the speeches which he attributes to the Athenian ambassadors proposing to violate the neutrality of Melos have been repeatedly rediscovered and quoted. They are merely the most drastic expression of a philosophy of life and politics which pervades the entire history and which I studied many years ago in a paper on the Implicit Ethics and Psychology of Thucydides, 61 some of the ideas of which are reproduced apparently by accident in Mr. Cornford’s Thucydides Mythistoricus. The moral disintegration of a prolonged world war is the predestined medium for the culture of this poisonous germ. And the Peloponnesian war was a world war for the smaller international system of the Greek states. It was for Greece that suicide which our civil war may prove to have been for the old American New England and Virginia, and which we pray the World War may not prove to have been for Europe. The analogy, which we need not verify in detail, is startling, though the scale in Greece was infinitely smaller. In both cases we see an inner ring or focus of intense higher civilization encompassed by a vast |xxxvii| outer semi-civilized or barbarian world of colonization, places in the sun, trade monopolies, and spheres of influence. In both the inner ring is subdivided into jealous states whose unstable equilibrium depends on the maintenance of the balance of power between two great systems, one commercial, democratic, and naval, the other authoritative, disciplined, military. The speeches of Pericles and King Archidamus in Thucydides analyse, contrast, and develop the conflicting ideals and weigh sea power against land power, as the speeches of rival prime ministers have done in our day. I merely suggest the parallel. What concerns us here is that to understand Plato we must compare, I do not say identify, him with Renan writing about la réforme intellectuelle et morale of France after the année terrible, or, absit omen, an English philosopher of 1950 speculating on the decline and fall of the British Empire, or an American philosopher of 1980 meditating on the failure of American democracy. The background of the comparatively optimistic Socrates was the triumphant progressive imperialistic democracy of the age of Pericles, and the choric odes of the poets and prophets of the imaginative reason, Aeschylus and Sophocles. The background of Plato, the experience that ground to devilish colours all his dreams and permanently darkened his vision of life, was the world war that made shipwreck of the Periclean ideal and lowered the level of Hellenic civilization in preparation for its final overthrow. The philosophy which he strove to overcome in himself and others was the philosophy of the political speeches in Thucydides and of those bitter disillusionized later plays of Euripides. His |xxxviii| middle age fell and his Republic was conceived in an Athens stagnating under the hateful oppression of the Spartan Junker dominating Greece in alliance with the unspeakable Persian. The environment of his old age and its masterpiece, the Laws, was the soft, relaxed, sensuous, cynical, pococurante, fin de siècle Athens of the New Comedy, drifting helplessly to the catastrophe of Chaeronea—the Athens which Isocrates expected to save by treaties of peace with all mankind and shutting up the wine-shops, and which Demosthenes vainly admonished to build up its fleet and drill its armies against the Macedonian peril. When Plato is characterized as an unpatriotic, undemocratic, conservative reactionary, false to the splendid Periclean tradition, we must remember that Pericles’ funeral oration had become for all but the fourth of July orators of Plato’s generation as intolerable and ironic a mockery as Lowell’s Commemoration Ode and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address will seem to America if democracy fails to unify us into a real people. His philosophy was reactionary in the sense that it was his own inevitable psychological and moral reaction against the sophistical ethics 62 of the Superman on one side and on the other against the cult of inefficiency and indiscipline which he had come to regard as wholly inseparable from unlimited democracy. This reactionary aspect of Plato’s political and social philosophy has been vividly depicted, though perhaps with some strained allusions to the democracy of contemporary France, in Faguet’s five chapters on the hatreds of Plato. |xxxix|

The equivocal labels radical and conservative mean little in their application to minds of the calibre of a Plato or even of a Burke. What really matters is the kind of conservative, the kind of radical that you are. As Mill says, there is a distinction ignored in all political classification, and more important than any political classification, the difference between superior and inferior minds.

As a thinker for all time, Plato in logical grasp and coherency of consecutive and subtle thought, stands apart from and above a Renan, a Burke, an Arnold, or a Ruskin. But as a man, his mood, inevitably determined by his historical environment, was that of Matthew Arnold in the ‘sixties, endeavouring to prick with satire the hide of the British Philistine, or of Ruskin in the ‘seventies embittered by the horrors of the Franco-Prussian War and seeking consolation in the political economy of the future. We may denominate him a conservative and a reactionary, in view of this personal mood and temper, and his despair of the democracy of fin de siècle Athens. But his Utopian Republic advocated not only higher education and votes, but offices for women, and a eugenic legislation that would stagger Oklahoma. And so if you turn to Professor Murray’s delightful Euripides and his Age, you will read that Euripides is the child of a strong and splendid tradition and is, together with Plato, the first of all rebels against it. Suppose Professor Murray had written, Bernard Shaw is the child of a strong and splendid tradition and, together with Matthew Arnold, the first of all rebels against it, I think we should demur, and feel that something was wrong. We should decline to bracket Arnold |xl| and Shaw as rebels to English tradition, despite the fact that both endeavoured to stir up the British Philistine with satire and wit. As a matter of fact, Plato detested Euripides and all his works, and generally alludes to him with Aristophanic irony.

If we pass by the terrible arraignment in the Gorgias of the democracy that was guilty of the judicial murder of Socrates, the political philosophy of the minor dialogues is mainly a Socratic canvassing of definitions, and an apparently vain but illuminating quest for the supreme art of life, the art that will make us happy, the political or royal art, which guides and controls all else, including music, literature, and education. This conception is represented in the Republic by the poetic allegory of the Idea of Good and the description of the higher education of the true statesman which alone lends it real content. The matter is quite simple, and has been confused only by the refusal to accept Plato’s own plain statements about it and the persistent tendency to translate Plato’s good poetry into bad metaphysics. 63

The metaphysics of the Idea of Good will be treated in the introduction to the second volume. Here it is enough to quote Mr. Chesterton, who, whether by accident or design, in a lively passage of his Heretics, expresses the essential meaning of the doctrine in the political, ethical, and educational philosophy of the Republic quite sufficiently for practical purposes.

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about ‘liberty’; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing |xli| what is good. We are fond of talking about ‘progress’: that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about ‘education’: that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, ‘Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty.’ That is, logically rendered, ‘Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.’ He says, ‘Away with your old moral formulae: I am for progress.’ This, logically stated, means, ‘Let us not settle what is good: but let us settle whether we are getting more of it.’ He says, ‘Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education.’ This, clearly expressed, means, ‘We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children.’ So far Mr. Chesterton.

Plato “does not tell us in a quotable formula what the good is, because it remains an inexhaustible ideal.”

Plato’s Idea of Good, then, means that the education of his philosophic statesmen must lift them to a region of thought which transcends the intellectual confusion in which these dodges and evasions alike of the ward boss and the gushing settlement-worker dwell. He does not tell us in a quotable formula what the good is, because it remains an inexhaustible ideal. But he portrays with entire lucidity his own imaginative conception of Greek social good in his Republic and Laws.

The doctrine of the Idea of Good is simply the postulate that social well-being must be organized not by rule-of-thumb, hand-to-mouth opportunist politicians, but by highly trained statesmen systematically keeping in view large and consciously apprehended ends. The only way to compass this, Plato affirms, is first to prepare and test your rulers by the severest education physical and mental, theoretical and |xlii| practical that the world has yet seen, and secondly to insure their freedom from what Bentham calls sinister interests by taking away from them their safe-deposit vaults and their investments in corporation stock and requiring them to live on a moderate salary and a reasonable pension.

This, or so much of it as may be translated into modern terms, is the essence of Plato’s social and political philosophy.

But Plato’s Republic, whatever its contributions to political theory or its suggestiveness to the practical politician or social reformer, is not a treatise on political science or a text-book of civics. It is the City of God in which Plato’s soul sought refuge from the abasement of Athenian politics which he felt himself impotent to reform. The philosopher, he says (496d) with unmistakable reference to Socrates (Apology 31e) and apology for himself, knows that no politician is honest nor is there any champion of justice at whose side he may fight and be saved. He resembles a man fallen among wild beasts. He is unwilling to share and impotent singly to oppose their rapine. He is like one who in a driving storm of dust and sleet stands aside under shelter of a wall and seeing others filled full with all iniquity, must be content to live his own life, keep his soul unspotted from the world, and depart at last with peace and good will and gracious hopes. This is something. But how much more could he accomplish for himself and others, Plato wistfully adds, in a society in harmony with his true nature. And so he plays (it is his own word) with the construction of such a state. But when the dream is finished, his epilogue is: We have built a city in words, since it exists nowhere on earth, though there may be a |xliii| pattern of it laid up in heaven. But whether it exists or not, the true philosopher will concern himself with the politics of this city only, of this city only will he constitute himself a citizen. As Emerson puts it, he was born to other politics. The witty and cynical Lucian mocks at this city in the clouds where Socrates lives all alone by himself, governed by his own laws. And I have no time to answer him now, even by enumeration of the great spirits who have taken refuge in the Platonic City of God. It was there that St. Augustine found consolation and hope in the crash and downfall of the Roman Empire. And fifteen hundred years later an unwonted glow suffuses the arid style of Kant when he speaks of the man who is conscious of an inward call to constitute himself by his conduct in this world the citizen of a better.

But to those political and social philosophers who disdain a fugitive and cloistered virtue and ask for some more helpful practical lesson than this, Plato’s Republic offers two main suggestions.

The first is the way of St. Francis: the acceptance of the simple life, which by a startling coincidence Glaucon, in reply to Socrates, and the Pope, in remonstrance with St. Francis, designate as a city of pigs. 64 But if we insist on a sophisticated civilization, a fevered city as Plato styles it, we shall find no remedy for the ills to which human nature is heir so long as our guiding principle is the equality of unequals (558c) and the liberty of every one to do as he pleases. The only way of political and social salvation for such a state is self-sacrificing discipline, specialized efficiency, and government administered by men whom we have |xliv| educated for the function and whom we compel to be unselfish.

We shall not wrong them by this suppression of their lower selves. For they will find in it their highest happiness and so apprehend the full meaning of old Hesiod’s saying that the half is more than the whole. 65 All this, though often confounded with the gospel of the strong man, is in Plato’s intentions its diametrical opposite. Plato’s strong man is not, and is not permitted to be, strong for himself. And finding his own happiness in duty fulfilled he will procure through just and wise government as much happiness as government and education can bestow upon men. Plato never loses faith in the leadership of the right leaders nor in the government of scholars and idealists, provided always that the scholarship is really the highest and severest that the age can furnish, the idealism tempered by long apprenticeship to practical administration, and the mortal nature which cannot endure the temptations of irresponsible power held in check by self-denying ordinances of enforced disinterestedness.

Such scholars in politics and such idealists, and they only, can do for us what the practical politician and the opportunist who never even in dreams have seen the things that are more excellent, can never achieve. Think you (Republic 500) that such a man, if called to the conduct of human affairs and given the opportunity not merely to mould his own soul but to realize and embody his vision in the institutions and characters of men, will be a contemptible artisan of sobriety and righteousness and all social and human virtue? Will he not like an artist glance frequently back and forth |xlv| from his model, the city in the clouds, home of the absolute good, the true and the beautiful, to the mortal copy which he fashions so far as may be in its image? And so mixing and mingling the pigments on his palette he will reproduce the true measure and likeness of man which even old Homer hints is or ought to be the likeness of God.

The Text

Convention requires that something should be said about the text. How little need be said appears from the fact that the translation was originally made from two or three texts taken at random. The text of this edition was for convenience set up from the Teubner text, and the adjustments in either case have presented no difficulty. I have tried to indicate all really significant divergences and my reasons. That is all that the student of Plato’s philosophy or literary art needs. The tradition of the text of the Republic is excellent. 66 The chief manuscripts have been repeatedly collated, and the Republic has been printed in many critical editions that record variations significant and insignificant. The text criticism of Plato today is a game that is played for its own sake, and not for any important results for the text itself or the interpretation. The validity of a new text today depends far more on acquaintance with Platonic Greek and Platonic thought than on any rigour of the text-critical and palaeographic game. Nothing whatever results from the hundred and six pages of |xlvi| Textkritik in the Appendix to Professor Wilamowitz’s Platon. Adam repeatedly changed his mind about the readings of his preliminary text edition when he came to write his commentary, and with a candour rare in the irritabile genus of text critics withdrew an emendation which I showed to be superfluous by a reference to the Sophist.

The Jowett and Campbell edition devotes about a hundred pages of costly print to what are for the most part unessential and uncertain variations. As I said in reviewing it (American Journal of Philology xvi. pp. 229 ff.): “There is something disheartening in the exiguity of the outcome of all this toil, and one is tempted to repeat Professor Jowett’s heretical dictum, that ‘such inquiries have certainly been carried far enough and need no longer detain us from more important subjects.’ There is really not much to be done with the text of Plato. The game must be played strictly according to the rules, but when it is played out we feel that it was hardly worth the midnight oil. The text of this edition must have cost Professor Campbell a considerable portion of the leisure hours of two or three years. Yet, as he himself says at the close of his interesting, if discursive, essay: ‘Were the corruptions and interpolations of the text of the Republic as numerous as recent scholars have imagined, the difference of meaning involved would be still infinitesimal. Some feature of an image might be obscured, or some idiomatic phrase enfeebled, but Plato’s philosophy would remain uninjured.’

“Of the twelve passages which Professor Campbell regards as still open to suspicion (vol. ii. p. 115), only two affect the sense even slightly. 387c φρίττειν δὴποιεῖ ὡς οἴεται, for which our editors read |xlvii| ὡς οἷόν τε (which they refer to q, and the correction of Par. A by q, not to Par. A, as hitherto), rejecting Hermann’s more vigorous ὅσ’ ἔτη and not venturing to insert in the text L. C.’s suggestion, ὡς ἐτεά. In ix. 581e, τῆς ἡδονῆς οὐ πάνυ πόρρω, there is no real difficulty if we accept, with nearly all editors, Graser’s τί οὶώμεθα and place interrogation points after μανθάνοντα and πόρρω. Professor Jowett would retain ποιώμεθα and take the words τῆς ἡδονῆς οὐ πάνυ πόρρω as ironical: I do not care to try to convert anyone whose perceptions of Greek style do not tell him that this is impossible. Professor Campbell’s suggestion, τῆς ἀληθινῆς, of which he thinks ἡδονῆς a substituted gloss, does not affect the meaning and supplies a plausible remedy for the seemingly objectionable repetition of ἡδονῆς. But it is, I think, unnecessary. The Platonic philosopher thinks that sensual pleasures are no pleasures. Cf. Philebus 44c-d ὥστε καὶ αὐτὸ τοῦτο αὐτῆς τὸ ἐπαγωγὸν γοήτευμα, οὐχ ἡδονήν, εἶναι.. The difficulties in 388e, 359c, 567e, 590d, 603c, 615c are too trifling for further debate. 439e ποτὲ ἀκούσας τι πιστεύω τούτῳ is certainly awkward. L. C.’s suggestion, οὐ πιστεύω τούτῳ, with changed reference of τούτῳ, equally so. 533e ὃ ἂν μόνον δηλοῖ πως τὴν ἕξιν σαφηνείᾳ λέγειν ἐν ψυχῇ is impossible, and the ingenuity is wasted that is spent upon it in the commentary to this result: ‘An expression which may indicate with a clearness proportioned to the mental condition that of which it speaks as existing in the mind.’ All we want is the thought of Charmides 163d δήλου δὲ μόνον ἐφ’ ὅτι ἂν φέρῃς τοὔνομα ὅτι ἂν λέγῃς, and that is given by the only tolerable text yet proposed, that of Hermann … , |xlviii| which is ignored by our editors and which is indeed too remote from the mss. to be susceptible of proof. In 562b the unwarranted ὑπερπλοῦτος, which B. J. defends more suo, may be emended by deleting ὑπερ or by L. C.’s plausible suggestion, που λοῦτος. In 568d L. C.’s suggestion, πωλουμένων, is as easy a way as any of securing the required meaning which grammar forbids us to extract from ἀποδομένων.

“Of the 29 passages in which the present text relies on conjectures by various hands, none affects the sense except possibly the obvious παισὶν for πᾶσὶν (494b and 431c), Schneider’s palmary καὶ ἔτίμα μάλιστα for καὶ ἔτι μάλιστα, 554b, Graser’s τί οἰώμεθα, 581d, Vermehren’s χαίρων καὶ δυσχεραίνων, which restores concinnity in 401e, and L. C.’s διὰ τοῦ bis, 440c, for διὰ τὸ, an emendation which was pencilled on the margin of my Teubner text some years ago. The others restore a paragogic ν or a dropped ἂν or an iota subscript, or smooth out an anacoluthon. Professor Campbell himself suggests some fifteen emendations in addition to the one admitted to the text (vol. ii. p. 123): three or four of these have already been considered. Of the others the most important are the (in the context) cacophonous ἀξίως, 496a, for ἀξίαν which is better omitted altogether, with Hermann: ἐγγύς τι τῶν τοῦ σώματος for εἶναι, 518d, which is clever and would commend itself but for a lingering doubt whether the phrase had not a half-humorous suggestion in Plato’s usage: and ἢ οὐκ (sic q) … ἀλλοίαν τε |Stallbaum for τοι| φήσεις, 500 A. It is unnecessary to follow Professor Campbell in his recension of the superfluous emendations of Cobet, |xlvix| Madvig and others not admitted into the text. The man who prints an emendation that is not required but is merely possible Greek in the context is a thief of our time and should be suppressed by a conspiracy of silence. I could wish, however, that our editors had followed Hermann in admitting Nagelsbach’s ἔτι ἀδυναμία, supported by a quotation from Iamblichus, for ἐπ᾽ ἀδυναμία in 532b-c. ἐπ᾽ ἀδυναμία βλέπειν ‘to look powerlessly,’ i.e. ‘to be without the power to see,’ as our editors construe, after Schneider, makes large demands on our faith in the flexibility of Greek idiom, and Stallbaum’s ‘bei dem Unvermögen zu sehen’ is not much better. Moreover, the ἔτι adds a touch that is needed; cf. 516a πρῶτον μὲν, etc. For the rest, all this matter, with much besides, is conscientiously repeated in the commentary, though exhaustiveness is after all not attained, and many useful readings recorded in Stallbaum or Hermann are ignored. I have noted the following points, which might (without much profit) be indefinitely added to. In 332e no notice is taken of the plausible προσπολεμεῖν approved by Ast and Stephanus. In 365b ἐὰν μὴ καὶ δοκῶ, which has sufficient ms. authority, is better than ἐὰν καὶ μὴ δοκῶ. The thought is: ‘I shall profit nothing from being just (even) if I seem the opposite.’ What our editors mean by saying that ἐὰν καὶ μὴ δοκῶ is more idiomatic I cannot guess. In 365d, καὶ (οὐδ’ Jowett and Campbell) ἡμῖν μελητέον τοῦ λανθάνειν, I think the consensus of the mss. could be defended, despite the necessity for a negative that nearly all editors have felt here. The argument of the entire passage would run: There exist (1) political clubs ἐπὶ τὸ λανθάνειν, and (2) teachers of persuasion |l| who will enable us to evade punishment if detected. But, you will say, we cannot (1) elude or (2) constrain the gods. The answer is (transferring the question to the higher sphere), as for gods, perhaps (1) they do not exist or are careless of mankind, or (2) can be persuaded or bought off by prayers and ceremonies. Accordingly, we must either (1) try to escape detection, as on the previous supposition, before the gods were introduced into the argument, or (2) invoke priests and hierophants as in the former case teachers of the art of persuasion. The logic of καὶ ἡμῖν μελητέον τοῦ λανθάνειν is loose, but it is quite as good as that of εἰ μὴ εἰσὶν as an answer to θεοὺς οὔτε λανθάνειν δυνατόν, and it is not absolutely necessary to read οὐδ’, οὔκουντί or ἀμελητέον. The καὶ of καὶ ἡμῖν indicates an illogical but perfectly natural antithesis between ‘us’ on the present supposition and the members of the political clubs above. In 378d our editors follow Baiter in punctuating after γραυσί. The antithesis thus secured between παιδία εὐθὺς and πρεσβυτέροις γιγνομένοις (an γενομένοις?) favours this. The awkwardness of the four times repeated ambiguous καὶ, and the difficulty of the dative with λογοποιεῖν and the emphasis thus lost of the triplet καὶ γέρουσι καὶ γραυσί, καὶ πρεσβυτέροις γιγνομένοις are against it. 397a, L. G. accepts Madvig’s (Schneider’s?) μιμήσεται for διηγήσεται, adversante B. J., but διηγήσεται seems to be favoured by the balance of the sentence: πάντα τε μᾶλλον διηγήσεται καὶ οὐδὲν ἑαυτοῦ ἀνάξιον οἰήσεται εἶναι, ὥστε πάντα ἐπιχειρήσει μιμεῖσθαι. 442c Σοφὸν δέ γε ἐκείνῳ τῷ σμικρῷ μέρει, τῷ ὃ ἦρχέν τ’ ἐν αὐτῷ καὶ ταῦτα παρήγγελλεν, ἔχον αὖ κἀκεῖνο, etc. Our editors seem to feel no difficulty in the τῷ ὃ, etc., nor do they note the omission of |li| τῷ by Par. K and Mon. A simple remedy would be to omit the τῷ before ὃ and insert it after παρήγγελλεν, reading τῷ ἔχειν. In 451a-b, in reading ὥστε εὖ (for οὐ) με παραμυθεῖ, our editors, here as elsewhere, overestimate the possibilities of Socratic irony. 500a. In arguing against the repetition of ἀλλοίαν in a different sense, 499e-500a, our editors should not have ignored the reading of M, ἀλλ᾽ οἵαν (recorded, it is true, in the footnotes to the text), which, with the pointing and interrogation marks of Hermann, yields a much more vivacious and idiomatic text than that adopted here. Moreover, ἄλλα ἀποκρινεῖσθαι fits the defiant οὐκ αὖ δοκεῖ above much better if taken in the sense ‘contradict us’ than in the sense ‘change their reply.’ In 521c Hermann’s οὖσα ἐπάνοδος (after Iamblichus) is the only readable idiomatic text here. Only desperate ingenuity can construe the others. In 606c the text or footnotes should indicate Hermann’s δὴ (for δὲ), which the commentary rightly prefers.”

These observations are not intended as a renewal of Jowett’s attack on text criticism or an illiberal disparagement of an indispensable technique. They merely explain why it was not thought necessary to waste the limited space of this edition by reprinting information which would interest a half dozen specialists at the most and which they know where to find in more detail than could possibly be given here.

The Republic has been endlessly edited, commented, summarized, and paraphrased (cf. supra, p. vii). The chief editions are enumerated in Ueberweg-Praechter, Die Philosophic des Altertums, 12th ed., Berlin (1926), pp. 190 ff. Schneidewin’s edition is curt, critical, and |lii| sagacious. Stallbaum’s Latin commentary is still useful for idioms and parallel passages. The two most helpful editions are English. The great three-volume work of Jowett and Campbell was critically reviewed by me in American Journal of Philology vol. xvi. pp. 223 ff., and from another point of view in the New York Nation, vol. lxi. (1895) pp. 82-84. Adam’s painstaking and faithful commentary does not supersede, but indispensably supplements, Jowett and Campbell’s. Apelt’s German translation is, with a few exceptions, substantially correct, and the appended notes supply most of the information which the ordinary reader needs.

The history of the Platonic text is most amply set forth in the excellent and readable book of Alline (Histoire du texte de Platon, par Henri Alline, Paris, 1915). Other general discussions of the text and its history are: H. Usener, Unser Platontext (Kleine Schriften, vol. ii. pp. 104-162): M. Schanz, Studien zur Geschichte des platonischen Textes, Würzburg, 1874: Wohlrab, Die Platon-Handschriften und ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen, Jahrbücher fur klassische Philologie, Suppl. 15 (1887), pp. 641-728. Cf. further Ueberweg-Praechter, vol. i., appendix pp. 67 ff. The manuscripts of Plato are enumerated end described by Jowett and Campbell, vol. ii. pp. 67-131, Essay II. On the Text of this Edition of Plato’s Republic; less fully by Adam, who did not live to write a proposed introductory volume supplementing his commentary (The Republic of Plato, vol. i. pp. xiii-xvi): and, sufficiently for the ordinary student, by Maurice Croiset in the Budé Plato, vol. i. pp. 14-18.

The best manuscript is thought to be Parisinus graecus 1807 (ninth century), generally designated A; then come in more or less disputed order of merit, Venetus 185, Bekker’s II, Burnet’s D (12th Century), Malatestianus, plut. xxviii. 4 Burnet’s M; Vindobonensis 55 (14th Century); Monacensis 237; Bekker’s and Adam’s q; but Burnet indicates its readings by scr. Mon.

The Translation

There are several excellent translations of the Republic in print. I have not hoped or tried to produce a better piece of English composition than some of these. My chief endeavor has been, while usually following the text closely, to use a justifiable apparent freedom in order to bring out the precise meaning of the passages which long experience as a teacher and a reviewer has taught me are liable to misapprehension. I have tried to make such passages as intelligible as possible to an attentive and educated English reader. Other readers will continue to make as wild work of the Republic as they will of the Bible. My aim requires the employment sometimes of two apparent synonyms for one word, and the rendering of the same word differently in different contexts or even when repeated within a few lines. The thing cannot be done in any other way, and it can be safely attempted only by a translator who understands the shades of Plato’s thought as well as something of the niceties of the Greek language.

Bibliography

La République. E. Chambry. Books 1-3, with introduction by A. Diès, 1932. Text and translation. Budé, Paris.

For work on Plato in general year by year, L’Année Philologique should be consulted. In Lustrum iv., pp. 5-308 and vol. v. pp. 321-638. H. Cherniss surveys work done on the years 1950-1957 alone.

Endnotes

1^ Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, vol. iii. pp. xvi-clvii: Grote’s Plato, vol. iv. pp. 1-94; Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, iii. pp. 54-105; William Boyd, An Introduction to the Republic of Plato, London, 1904, pp. 196 ff.; Richard Lewis Nettleship, Lectures on the Republic of Plato, London, 1904; Ueberweg-Praechter, Geschichte der Philosophie, Altertum, pp. 231-234 and 269-279; Wilamowitz, Platon 2, i. pp. 393-449: etc.

2^ Cf. Proclus, In Rem Publicam Commentarii vol. i. p. 17. 3 Kroll. Cf. also Laws 705a.

3^ Cf. Diogenes Laertius, iii. 61, and Zeller, Philosophie der Griechen 4, vol. ii. pt. i. pp. 494 f., n. 2.

4^ Proclus tries to show that the points selected for emphasis are those which prefigure the constitution and government of the universe by the Creator (In Timaeus 17e-f). His reasoning is differently presented but hardly more fantastic than that of modern critics who endeavour to determine by this means the original design or order of publication of the parts of the Republic. Cf. further Taylor, Plato, p. 264, n. 2.

5^ Kleine Schriften, iv. pp. 437 ff., especially 448.

6^ A. E. Taylor, Plato, p. 263, n. 1, argues that this is the worst of all possible dates.

7^ Cf. Jowett and Campbell, vol. iii. pp. 2-3: Zeller, vol. ii. pt. i. p. 489. Arguments are based on the circumstances of the family of Lysias, the presumable age of Socrates, Glaucon, Adeimantus and Thrasymachus, and the extreme old age of Sophocles.

8^ The religion of Bendis may have been known at Athens as early as Cratinus’s Thraittai (443 B.C.), Kock, Fragmenta, i. 34. Mommsen, Feste der Stadt Athen, p. 490, cites inscriptions to prove its establishment in Attica as early as 429-428 B.C. But he thinks Plato’s inasmuch as this was the first celebration may refer to special ceremonies first instituted circa 411 B.C.

9^ See Lysias in any classical dictionary. He returned to Athens from Thurii circa 412 B.C. Polemarchus was the older brother. He was a student of philosophy (Phaedrus 257b). Whether he lived with Cephalus or Cephalus with him cannot be inferred with certainty. Lysias perhaps had a separate house at the Peiraeus (cf. Phaedrus 227b). The family owned three houses in 404 B.C. (Lysias, Orations 12. 18), and Blass (Attische Beredsamkeit, i. p. 347) infers from Lysias, 12. 16 that Polemarchus resided at Athens. Lysias takes no part in the conversation. He was no philosopher (Phaedrus 257b).

10^ A noted sophist and rhetorician. Cf. Phaedrus 266c, Zeller 6, i. pp. 1321 ff.; Blass, Attische Beredsamkeit2, i. pp. 244-258; Sidgwick, Journal of Philology (English), v. pp. 78-79, who denies that Thrasymachus was, properly speaking, a sophist: Diels, Fragmente 3, ii. pp. 276-282.

11^ Blass, op. cit. ii. p. 19.

12^ Apparently a partisan of Thrasymachus. His name is given to a short, probably spurious, dialogue, of which the main thought is that Socrates, though excellent in exhortation or protreptic, is totally lacking in a positive and coherent philosophy. Grote and others have conjectured it to be a discarded introduction to the Republic.

13^ Cf. Republic 329d, 331a with 613b-c.

14^ Cf. infra, p. xxv, note 44.

15^ Cf. Dissertations and Discussions, vol. iv. p. 311.

16^ Cf. my Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 25, n. 164.

17^ Cf. Republic 362a with 367e.

18^ Cf. my Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 8: …the elaborate refutations which Plato thinks fit to give of the crudest form of hostile theories sometimes produce an impression of unfairness upon modern critics. They forget two things: First, that he always goes on to restate the theory and refute its fair meaning: second, that in the case of many doctrines combated by Plato there is no evidence that they were ever formulated with the proper logical qualifications except by himself.

19^ Cf. Republic 368a-b.

20^ Cf. my review of Barker, Greek Political Theory, in the Philosophical Review, vol. xxix., 1920, p. 86: To say (on p. 119) that ‘by considering the temper of the watchdog Plato arrives at the principle,’ etc., is to make no allowance for Plato’s literary art and his humour. Plato never really deduces his conclusions from the figurative analogies which he uses to illustrate them.

21^ Cf., e.g., Republic 544d-e, and infra, p. xxvi.

22^ Cf. the long discussion of Stallbaum in his Introduction to the Republic, pp. vii-lxv. For Proclus cf. In Platonis Rem Publicam Commentarii p. 349 (ed. of Kroll, p. 5 and p. 11).

23^ Cf. Republic 352d, 367e, 369a, 427d, 445a-b, 576c, and especially 472b with 588b and 612b.

24^ Cf. my review of Diesendruck’s Struktur und Charakter des Platonischen Phaidros, Classical Philology vol. xxiii., 1928, pp. 79 f.: In the Introduction to the Republic, Jowett writes, ‘Nor need anything be excluded from the plan of a great work to which the mind is naturally led by the association of ideas and which does not interfere with the general purpose.’ Goethe in conversation with Eckermann said on May 6, 1827, ‘Da kommen sie und fragen, welche Idee ich in meinem Faust zu verkorpern gesucht. Als ob ich das selber wusste und aussprechen konnte.’ Or with more special application to the Phaedrus I may quote Bourguet’s review of Raeder, ‘Cet ensemble, on pensera sans doute que M. Raeder a eu tort de lejuger mal construit. Au lieu d’une imperfection d’assemblage, c’est le plan raerae que le sujet indiquait. Et peut-etre est-il permis d’ajouter qu’on arrive ainsi a une autre idee de la composition, plus large et plus profonde, que celle qui est d’ordinaire acceptee, trop asservie a des canons d’ecole.’

25^ Cf. Republic 369b-372c and my paper on The Idea of Justice in Plato’s Republic, The Ethical Record, January 1890.

26^ Republic 677 ff., 680a-b ff.

27^ Cf. my paper, Some Ideals of Education in Plato’s Republic, The Educational Bi-Monthly, February 1908.

28^ Cf. my article, Plato and His Lessons for Today, in the Independent, vol. lx., 1906, pp. 953-256.

29^ Cf. Republic 433, 443c and Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 15-16.

30^ Cf. Republic 427e with 449a, and Gorgias 507c.

31^ There is no real evidence that this is derived from a Pythagorean doctrine of the three lives. There is a considerable recent literature that affirms it. It is enough here to refer to Mr. A. E. Taylor’s Plato, p. 281, and Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy 3, p. 296, n. 2.

32^ Cf. my paper on The Idea of Good in Plato’s Republic, University of Chicago Studies in Classical Philology, vol. i. p. 194: Utilitarian ethics differs from the evolutionist, says Leslie Stephen…in that the one lays down as a criterion the happiness, the other the health of the society. Mr. Stephen adds, the two are not really divergent, and this is the thesis which Plato strains every nerve to prove throughout the Republic and Laws.

33^ Cf. infra, p. xxv, note b.

34^ Cf. Republic 412a with 429a, 497c-d, 502d. Cf. also the longer way, 435d with 504b-c, and further, The Unity of Plato’s Thought, note 650, and the article Plato’s Laws and the Unity of Plato’s Thought, Classical Philology, October 1914.

35^ Cf. Republic 452e, 457c, 457d-e, 458a-b, 461e, 466d, 471c, 472d, 473c-d.

36^ Cf. Republic 474 b, 475d-e. 477-480, 479a-b.

37^ Cf. The Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 55-56.

38Cf. Republic 490e, 492 ff.

39^ Cf. my paper on The Idea of Good, The Unity of Plato’s Thought, i pp. 16 ff. and 74, and my article Summum Bonum in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

40^ Cf. my paper, Platonism and the History of Science, American Philosophical Society’s Proceedings, vol. lxvi., 1927, pp. 171 ff.

41^ Cf. Republic 583b ff. and Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 23 f. and 26 f., and The Idea of Good in Plato’s Republic, pp. 192 ff.

42^ Cf. supra, p. xvi, note 32.

43^ Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 78, n. 606: Zeller, Plato 4, p. 551, discusses the evidence and anticipates without accepting Taylor’s argument (Plato, p. 20) that the quotation of the sentence about philosophers being kings (Republic 473c-d, 499b-c) by the author of the seventh Epistle proves that the Republic was already written in the year 388/7.

44^ Cf. Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae, xiv. 3. 3 and other passages cited by Henri Alline, Histoire du texte de Platon, p. 14, and Hirmer, Entstehung und Komp. d. Plat. Republic, Jahrbücher fur klassische Philologie, Suppl., N.F., vol. xxiii. p. 654; Wilamowitz, i. pp. 209 ff. on the Thrasymachus; Hans Raeder, Platons philosophische Entwicklung, pp. 187 ff.: Ueberweg-Praechter (Geschichte der Philosophie, Altertum,), p. 217. Cf. Ivo Bruns, Das literarische Portrat der Griechen, etc., p. 322: Vor allem aber bestimmt mich der Gesammtscharakter des ersten Buches, welches zu keinem anderen Zwecke geschrieben sein kann, als demjenigen, den es in dem jetzigen Zusammenhange erfullt, namlich, als Einleitung in ein grosseres Ganzes zu dienen. Es kann nie dazu bestimmt gewesen sein, eine Sonderexistenz zu fiihren, wie etwa der Charmides.

45^ Politics, 1264b 24. The plural also occurs, ibid. 1293b 1.

46^ Cf. supra, p. xii, note c.

47^ Cf. supra, p. xii.

48^ Republic 368d-369a. It is uncritical to press the metaphysical suggestions of this passage.

49^ Euthydemus 291c ff., Gorgias 521d, Euthyphro 2d.

50^ Republic 520b, Protagoras 320a, Meno 92d-e, Laws 642c, 951b.

51^ Meno 99e, Republic 493a.

52^ Cf. Republic 497a: Spencer, Ethics, vol. i. p. 280.

53^ Cf. Newman, Politics of Aristotle, vol. i. pp. 85 ff.

54^ Cf. the immense literature of the subject it is enough to refer to Alfred Dorens’ Wünschraume und Wünschzeiten in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, 1924-1925, Berlin, 1927: Fr. Kleinwächter, Die Staats Romane, Vienna, 1891: Edgar Salin, Platon und die griechische Utopie, Leipzig, 1921. An incomplete list collected from these essays includes more than fifty examples.

55^ Cf., however, Pohlmann, Geschichte der sozialen Frage und des Sozialismm in der antiken Welt, who, however, in the opinion of some of his critics, exaggerates the industrialism and industrial problems of Athens.

56^ Phaedrus 278e.

57^ Cf. my paper, Plato’s Laws and the Unity of Plato’s Thought, Classical Philology vol. ix., 1914, pp. 345-369.

58^ Republic 416, 462-463, 465b, Timaeus 18b, Laws 739b-d.

59^ Cf. supra, p. xv., and infra, p. xlii.

60^ Even Newman, for example, seems to accept the Aristotelian objection that such a military caste will tyrannize. See Newman’s Politics of Aristotle, vol. i. pp. 326 f.

61^ Transactions of American Philological Association, vol. xxiv. pp. 66 if. The Dial, Chicago, 1907, xliii. p. 202.

62^ Cf. my paper on the Interpretation of the Timaeus, American Journal of Philology vol. ix. pp. 395 ff.

63^ Cf. my article Summum Bonum in Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics.

64^ Matthew Paris apud Sabatier, Life of St. Francis, p. 97 vade frater et quaere porcus (sic), etc.

65^ Cf. Republic 419, 420b-c, 466b-c.

66^ Cf. the work of Alline referred to supra, p. xxv, note b.

Prefatory Note and Introduction to The Republic, Volume II

While actively engaged, so far as his failing strength would permit, in completing for publication this the second volume of his translation of the Republic of Plato, Professor Shorey passed away on April 24, 1934, in the seventy-eighth year of his life. In justice to him as well as to the many thousands of readers who will study and cherish this last and perhaps the greatest scholarly work of the distinguished Platonist, the Editors of the Loeb Classical Library desire to place on record here a brief statement of the pertinent facts relating to the composition and the proof-revision of this volume. Behind the bare narrative lies a record of unwavering courage in the face of fast-approaching death on the part of the veteran scholar and of dauntless determination both to achieve a long-cherished purpose and to fulfill an obligation entered into many years before with his friend Dr. James Loeb and his collaborators in the editing of the Library; and the Editors thought it right to offer this volume to the public as nearly as possible approximating to the condition in which the latest proofs passed under the author’s eye.

The translation had been finished and was in Professor Shorey’s hands in proof form for about two years and had been partially, though not finally, revised by him. The Introduction was dictated by him, paragraph by paragraph, in the scant hours of work permitted him by his physicians after his first break-down in December 1933. The same is true of those notes accompanying the translation which are of an interpretative, literary or philosophical character. The many notes on Platonic diction and on matters of Greek grammar and idiom were in large part compiled from Professor Shorey’s jottings on the well-filled margins of his desk-copy of the Republic by his research secretary, Miss Stella Lange, who had assisted |vi| him in that capacity during the preparation of What Plato Said, to which important work she added many references in the notes of this volume. The critical notes under the text were added by Miss Lange during the revision of the proofs, often from notes made by Professor Shorey himself.

The assembling in the form of copy for the printer of all the material which is found in the Introduction and notes has been the work of Miss Lange, undertaken at the request of Mrs. Shorey; and she has read all the galley and page proofs of the volume in cooperation with Dr. Page and myself. Miss Lange’s familiarity with her teacher’s Platonic studies, his methods of work, his views on the interpretation of passages of peculiar difficulty has rendered her cooperation invaluable, and generous acknowledgements are due to her for her fidelity to the heavy task which she willingly undertook.

To the writer of these words it would have been a grateful task, had this been an appropriate place, to add a personal tribute to his colleague of many years at the University of Chicago. The familiar correspondence which grew out of their renewed relationship during the preparation of the two volumes of the Republic has illuminated for him in unexpected ways the life of tremendous and varied activities of the great scholar and humanist during the years which for the ordinary man would have been a period of decreasing labours. The literary and scholarly productivity of Professor Shorey in these later years falls little short of heroism. But the readers of this interpretation of the Republic who would know more about the remarkable man and his life are referred to the review of his career which introduces the July 1934 number of Classical Philology, the journal which he edited for twenty-five years, and especially to President George Norlin’s eloquent appreciation of Paul Shorey the Teacher, on pp. 188-191.

For the Editors
Edward Capps
September 18, 1934

Introduction to The Republic, Volume II.

There is a sufficient outline of the Republic in the introduction to the first volume. Here it remains to consider more argumentatively certain topics of the last five books which were treated summarily there. They may be listed as (1) the theory of ideas and the idea of good, (2) the higher education and Plato’s attitude toward science, (3) some further details of Plato’s political theories, (4) the logic and psychology of the main ethical argument of the Republic, (5) the banishment of poetry, (6) the concluding myth.

The Theory of Ideas. Regarded as metaphysics, Plato’s theory of ideas is, technically speaking, the deliberate and conscious hypostatization of all concepts—the affirmation that every abstract general notion of the human mind is also somehow, somewhere, in some sense, an objective entity, a real thing, outside of any mind. Some philologians and some sensitive aesthetic critics object to the use of the words concept and hypostatization in this connexion. They have a right to their personal distaste, but it contributes nothing to the interpretation of Plato. Both words convey definite meanings to students of philosophy and there are no words that can replace them. The Socratic dialogues are in fact largely concerned with the definition of concepts, general or abstract ideas, |x| general terms, Begriffe, call them what you will, and some convenient synonym for this meaning is indispensable in any rational discussion of Plato’s philosophy. The Platonic word eidos may have retained some of the associations of physical form, and the modern psychology of the concept may involve in some cases a more developed logic than Plato possessed. The word eidos or idea in Herodotus, Thucydides, Democritus, the Hippocratic corpus and Isocrates 1 may show the meaning concept or Begriff imperfectly freed from the association of physical form, but that does not justify the inference that it was never so freed in Plato. The terminology of the transcendental idea is indistinguishable from the terminology of the concept and the definition. 2 It is impossible to say at what point the metaphysical doctrine emerges in the minor dialogues, or—on the, I believe, mistaken hypothesis that the later dialogues abandon it—just when the change took place. The logic of the definition in the minor dialogues implies a practically sufficient notion of the nature of a concept, 3 and it is sophistry |xi| to try to suppress so plain a fact by capitalizing the word Form and insisting that Plato always or till his latest works visualized the Forms as types. He did for some purposes and for others he did not, and he always knew what he was doing. The ideas, as I have often pointed out, are ideals, types, or hypostatized concepts or simply concepts according to the purpose and the context.4

Many interpreters of Plato seem to assume that philosophy is, like mathematics or chemistry, a progressive |xii| science; that Plato, though a great artist, was a primitive thinker whose methods and opinions have only an historical interest today; and that his doctrine of ideas is the endeavour of an immature mind to deal with a problem which modern psychology or the common sense of any dissertation-writing philologian can settle in a paragraph. These assumptions close the door to any real understanding of Plato’s philosophy. The ultimate nature of general ideas, of abstract and conceptual thought in relation both to the human mind and to the universe is as much a matter of debate today as it was in the age of the schoolmen. This plain fact of literary history is not affected by the opinion of a certain number of materialists and behaviourists that the matter is quite simple and that there is or ought to be no problem. They may or may not be right. But the discussion continues, as any bibliography of psychology and philosophy will show. The entire literature of the meaning of meaning and of imageless thought is a renewal of the controversy in other terms.

A great many thinkers are not satisfied with the simple evasion of Aristotle that the human mind is such as to be able to experience this, namely the separation in thought of things inseparable in experience. They cannot find any enlightenment in the modern tautology that a general idea is an image of a particular idea plus a feeling of generality. And they are not convinced that the movements of the body, even if we concede that they run exactly parallel to the movements of the mind, really explain them. And if we turn to the other side of the problem we find that many of the leaders of modern |xiii| physics and mathematics are unable to conceive and refuse to admit that there is nothing in the objective universe corresponding to the ideas, the concepts, the laws, the principles by which they get their results.

The Platonic theory of ideas is a convenient shorthand, symbolic expression of the opinions that I have thus summarized. If we disregard the rhetoric and physical imagery of the myths by which Plato exalts the importance of the doctrine or makes it the expression of the ideal for ethics, politics and aesthetics, all that it affirms is, first, that conceptual thought is a distinct and differentiated prerogative of man not sufficiently accounted for by the structure of his body and the sensations which he shares with the animals; and second, that there must be something in the universe, something in the nature of things, that corresponds to our concepts and our ideals—to the principles, for example, of ethics and mathematics. These affirmations of Plato are primitive animism only in the sense in which the same could be said of the beliefs of some of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of today or of Matthew Arnold when he talks of a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness. This is not reading modern philosophies into Plato. It is merely giving him credit for knowing and intending what he in fact says. The opposite interpretation underrates his intelligence and really does read into his writings modern ideas, the notions, namely, of modern anthropologists as to how savages think. Gomperz’ comparison of the doctrine of ideas to Iroquois animism (iii. 323; cf. iii. 1-2), Ogden and Richards’ designation of the ideas as name-souls (The Meaning |xiv| of Meaning, p. 45), Jowett’s illustration of what he deems hair-splitting refinements in Plato by the distinction so plentiful in savage languages, Cornford’s fancy (From Religion to Philosophy, p. 254) that the idea is a group-soul related to its group as a mystery-demon like Dionysus is related to the group, of worshippers, his thiasos, and all similar utterances are uncritical, whatever airs of science or pseudo-science they assume. The relevant illustrations of Plato’s doctrine of ideas are to be sought in the most subtle debates of the schoolmen, or in modern psychological and epistemological literature about the meaning of meaning. 5

There were, of course, some other more special considerations that determined Plato’s deliberate and defiant hypostatization of all concepts. It accepted a natural tendency of the human, and not merely of the primitive, mind, and rendered it harmless by applying it consistently to everything. If all concepts are hypostatized, the result for practical logic and for everything except metaphysics and ultimate epistemological psychology is to leave concepts where they were, as indispensable instruments of human thinking. The hypostatization of abstractions operated practically as a short answer to the sophisms of crude nominalists who obstructed ordinary reasoning by raising ultimate objections to the validity of all abstractions or general terms. This motive is distinctly apparent in Plato’s writings and there is a strong presumption that he was conscious of it.

However that may be, Plato did in fact, partly as a matter of imaginative style, partly as a matter of |xv| metaphysics, speak of concepts as if they were real objects. He did, as his writings conclusively show, hypostatize all concepts, and all attempts to show that he hypostatized only a few of the sublimer or :more dignified concepts are a priori improbable because they deprive the doctrine of all rational meaning and consistency, 6 and they are also refuted by the incontrovertible evidence of the dialogues themselves. Plato affirms this monstrous paradox, not because he is a naïve thinker unacquainted with the elementary psychology of abstraction and generalization, 7 but because, as we have said, he regards it as the most convenient expression of his rejection of all materialistic and relativistic philosophies 8 and of all crude nominalism. 9 He recognized that the doctrine is a paradox hard to accept but also hard to reject. 10 But he deliberately affirmed it as the most convenient alternative to inacceptable or unworkable philosophies. 11 He perhaps, as we have already suggested, justified this procedure to himself, and we may certainly justify it for him, by the reflection that the theory is no more of a paradox than that involved in every theology and ultimately in all science and philosophy except the crudest dogmatic materialism. And we may find further confirmation of this opinion in the fact that both the metaphysics and the transcendental physics of the past two decades discover |xvi| more helpful analogies in the Platonic theory of ideas and in Plato’s applications of it to the philosophy of nature than they do in any other philosophy of the past.

In disregard of these considerations many critics in every age, and notably Natorp and Stewart in ours, have tried to free Plato from the stigma of paradox or naivete by trying to show that this uncompromising realism (in the proper medieval sense of the word) is not to be taken seriously, and that it was only a poetic and emphatic form of conceptualism. This, as we have seen, is at the best a half truth. All Platonic ideas are also concepts, but we cannot infer that they were only concepts. 12 For many purposes of logic, ethics and politics Plato practically treats them as concepts. Why not? No reasonable writer obtrudes his ultimate metaphysics into everything. And Plato is always particularly careful to distinguish metaphysical hypotheses and their imaginative embodiments in myth and allegory from the simple truths of a working logic and a practical ethics which are all that he dogmatically affirms. 13 But he always affirms the metaphysical idea when challenged. To this extent Natorp and those who agree with him are right. But they pay too high a price for their Tightness on this point when they insist on deducing all Plato’s opinions from his ontology, and obtrude the metaphysical idea into passages where the doctrine at the most lends rhetorical and poetical colouring to the practical affirmation of the necessity of concepts and the value of ideals. |xvii|

An example will perhaps make these distinctions more plain. Plato in the Republic (501) says that his philosophic statesman will contemplate the divine pattern of justice as an artist looks away to his model, and that like the artist he will frequently glance from the copy that he is producing to the model and back again to the copy. 14 This may reasonably be understood as only a heightened way of saying that the true statesman must be guided by definite conceptions and strive for the realization of clearly apprehended ideals. The fact that Plato, the metaphysician, believed the transcendental reality of the idea to be a necessary assumption of ultimate epistemology adds nothing to the practical meaning of this passage. When in the Phaedrus, however (247d, 249b-c), Plato says that every human soul has beheld the idea of justice in prenatal vision, since otherwise it would not have the power to reduce the confused multiplicity of sensation to the unities of conceptual thought, he is clothing in mythical garb an epistemological argument for the reality of the transcendental idea, and he is not, as in the Republic passage, thinking mainly of the explicit affirmation that the true statesman must have submitted to a higher education in conceptual thinking and have thus framed in his mind ideals to guide his practice. The historian of philosophy who, without calling attention to this distinction, merely cites the two passages together in a footnote, only confuses the uncritical reader.

But again in the Parmenides (135a-c), the Sophist (246-247), the Cratylus (1-39d f.; cf. What Plato Said, pp. 266-267), the Politicus (283-284, What Plato Said, p. 309), the Timaeus (51-52 and What Plato Said, p. |xviii| 613 on 28a-b), there are passages in which, without mythical dress, and with no specific reference to the practical value of concepts and ideals, Plato postulates the transcendental ideas as an epistemological necessity, and the only escape from materialism and the flux of relativity. No legerdemain of interpretation or speculations about the chronology of the evolution of Plato’s thought can explain away these passages, and the interpreter who realizes that some virtual equivalent of the Platonic idea is still today the alternative to thorough-going and unequivocal materialism will not desire to explain them away.

All that is needed in order to understand Plato and to do justice to him as a rational philosopher is to remember again 15 that, though the doctrine of ideas is always in the background of his mind and would I always be reaffirmed on a challenge, he is not always thinking explicitly of it when he is speaking of logic, ethics, or politics, and we need not think of it in order to enjoy his art or apprehend his meaning. The transcendental idea, for example, is not needed in the Republic except for the characterization of the philosophic mind and the higher education of the Platonic rulers. 16 It is not indispensable even there. The concept will serve. The philosopher is he who can think and reason consecutively in abstractions. 17 |xix| The curriculum of the higher education is designed to develop this faculty in those naturally fitted to receive it. 18 The thought and the practical conclusions will not be affected if we treat the accompanying symbolic rhetoric as surplusage. Such statements as that the philosopher is concerned with pure being, 19 dwells in a world of light, 20 is devoted to the most blessed part of reality, 21 satisfies and fills the continent part of his soul, 22 undoubtedly suggest the metaphysical background of Plato’s thought and the emotional and imaginative connotations of his ideas. But in the context of the Republic they are little more than an expression of the intensity of Plato’s feeling about his political and educational ideas.

It is obvious that the concept or idea is in many eloquent Platonic passages an ideal, a type, a pattern, to which aesthetic, moral and social experience may approximate but which they never perfectly realize, just as mathematical conceptions are ideals never actually met with in the world of sense. 23 It is possible, though not probable, that in some of the minor dialogues we get glimpses of a stage of Plato’s youthful thought in which, though he already uses, in speaking of the concept or the definition, much of the terminology associated with the doctrine of ideas, |xx| he has not yet consciously and systematically hypostatized the concept. 24 These and similar qualifications and speculative possibilities do not in the least alter the fact that throughout the main body of his work Plato is ready to affirm the metaphysical theory of the hypostatized idea whenever the issue is raised, 25 and there is not an iota of evidence in his own writings that he ever abandoned or altered the doctrine, however much he varied the metaphors and the terms in which he expressed it. It is quite certain that he did not, except in obviously mythical or poetical passages, say more of the ideas than that they exist and that they are in some sense real. 26 He did not say that they are the thoughts of God. 27 There is no indication in his writings that he said that they are numbers. 2 |xxi| And he never admitted that they are only thoughts in the human mind, 29 though for practical purposes, as we have said, they may usually be treated as such when no metaphysical issue is involved.

It ought not to be necessary to debate these questions further. The only question open to debate is the extent of Plato’s consciousness of what some critics think the modern meanings that I have read into him. The question of course is not whether he |xxii| could feel all the associations and connotations of the modern words in which we have to express his meaning, but whether his meaning is on the whole substantially that which I have attributed to him.

The obvious conclusion is that we can infer nothing as to the composition or date of the Republic from the fact that the ideas are not mentioned where there is no reason for mentioning them, and that all hypotheses that different stages of the evolution of Plato’s thought are indicated by the various aspects in which the ideas are presented when they are mentioned are uncritical. 30 There is no occasion for the metaphysical doctrine of ideas in the first four books. But the general concept, the type, the ideal are referred to in language which could be understood of the ideas. The fact that it does not necessarily have to be so understood is no proof that the doctrine was not present to Plato’s mind at the time.

In the fifth, sixth, and seventh books the theory is explicitly enunciated, 31 illustrated by imagery and applied to education. There is even a much disputed but certain anticipation of the later doctrine that while the idea is a unity its relation to things and to other ideas seems to break it up into a plurality.32

The uncompromising statement of the subject in the tenth book is sometimes taken to represent an earlier and more naive form of the doctrine. But the style of the passage is evidently that of a defiant affirmation of the whole length of the paradox, or rather perhaps of an expert explaining the matter to |xxiii| laymen. 33 The fact that the argument of the third man is distinctly mentioned in the same connexion is in itself evidence that the passage does not represent an earlier and more primitive stage of Plato’s thought. For the third man is mentioned in the Parmenides.34 But there would not be much profit in further discussion of hypotheses that have no basis in the text of Plato or in the philosophical probabilities of the case.

The Idea of Good. All that has been said of the ideas in general applies to the idea of good. It is the hypostatization of the concept good. Its significance in the Platonic system is that of its importance in human thought. In ethics it is what modern ethical philosophy calls the sanction. In politics it is the ideal, whatever it may be, of social welfare. In theology and the philosophy of nature it is the teleological principle, the design that implies a designing mind in the universe.

The first of these meanings is predominant in the minor dialogues where all problems and all attempted definitions point to an unknown good so consistently and systematically that Plato must have been aware of the reference. 35 The second meaning is most prominent in the Republic, but there is explicit reference to the first and to the discussions of the minor dialogues. In any case, ethical and social good are not sharply separable in Plato.

The idea of good is nowhere defined, but its supreme importance and all of its meanings are symbolized in the images of the sun and the cave. Its main meaning |xxiv| for the Republic is the ideal of social welfare on which the statesman, as opposed to the opportunist politician, must fix his eye, and which he can apprehend only by a long course of higher education which will enable him to grasp it. Plato rightly feels that no other definition is possible or desirable unless the entire polity of the Republic was to be taken as its definition. The Timaeus is the poetical embodiment of the third meaning, though single phrases of the Republic glance at it. 36 If there is a beneficent creator, his purpose, his idea of good, is the chief cause of the existence of the world and the best key to the understanding of it.

I am not attributing these three meanings of the good to Plato by an imposed symmetry of my own. It is what Plato himself says and the chief problem of my interpretation is not to understand Plato but to account for the failure to recognize his plain meaning.

In view of my repeated expositions of Plato’s doctrine of the idea of good there would be little point in attempting here once more to set it forth in a smooth, consecutive, literary statement. 37 It will be more to my purpose to enumerate in the briefest, baldest, most explicit fashion some of my reasons for feeling that I have been misunderstood, and that the definite issues raised by my arguments have never |xxv| been Metaphysics I have never intended to deny that Plato’s language about the idea of good is in large part the language of poetry and religion, that he intends to suggest by it the ineffable and infinite unknowable beyond our ken, and that his eloquence has been a source of inspiration to many readers who care little for his dialectics and for the critical interpretation of his specific thought. What I have been trying to say is that the mere repetition of Plato’s rhetoric or the attempt to better it in our own paraphrases will not contribute much to the interpretation of the precise meaning of the passages of the Republic in question, assuming that in addition to their inspirational value they are intended to convey some definite meaning and are not merely ejaculations thrown out at an infinite object.

In the first place, then, since all Platonic ideas are hypostatized concepts the hypostatization of the idea of good is presumably irrelevant to its main significance for the ethical and political thought of the Republic. It does, of course, suggest the metaphysical background of Plato’s thought; there are a few sentences in which it involves the goodness which teleologists discover in the structure of the universe and in the designs of its creator, the theme of the Timaeus; 38 and since goodness is the chief attribute of God in religious literature from the New Testament to Whittier’s hymn, there is a certain plausibility in identifying it with God himself. But the text of Plato, and especially the text of the Republic, does not justify any of these extensions of the idea if taken absolutely. The idea of good is undoubtedly the most important of ideas, but it is |xxvi| not true that it is the most comprehensive in the sense that all other ideas are deduced from it, 39 as in some Platonizing pantheistic philosophies they are deduced from the idea of Being. There is no hint of such deduction in Plato’s writings. It is only teleological ideas in ethics, politics and cosmogony that are referred to the idea of good as the common generalization or idea that includes them all. Even the ideas are not in Plato’s own reasoning deduced from the idea of good. It is merely said that a scientific moralist, a true statesman, will be able so to deduce them, and that the higher education is designed to give him this ability. In Republic 534b-c, the dialectician is he who is able ἑκάστου…λόγον…διδόναι and the idea of good is a special example of the ἔκαστον. It is not said that the man who does not know the idea of good does not know any other idea, but that he does not know ἄλλο ἀγαθὸν οὐδέν.

It is not even true that Plato’s philosophic ethics is deduced from the idea of good. He only says that the ethics of the guardians will be so deduced. So far as Plato himself expounds a scientific ethics it rests on the preferability of the intellectual life and the comparative worthlessness of the pleasures of sense. 40 The idea of good in the dialogues is a regulative not a substantive concept.

Whatever its religious suggestions it cannot in any metaphysical or literal sense be identified with the Deity. 41 The idea of God was taken by Plato |xxvii| from the religion of the Greek people and purified by criticism. The idea of good came to him on an altogether different line of thought. It is the outcome of those Socratic quests for definitions of ethical virtues and social ends which always break down because the interlocutors are never able to discover the sanction which makes the proposed virtue or end a good and desirable thing. 42

When these misapprehensions are cleared away I trust that I shall not any longer be misunderstood if I say that the chief and essential meaning of the idea of good in the Republic is precisely that conception of an ultimate sanction for ethics and politics which the minor dialogues sought in vain. Plato does not profess to have discovered it in the Republic except so far as it is implied in the entire ethical, social and political ideals of his reformed state. He intentionally and wisely refuses to define it in a formula. 43 He merely affirms that it is something which can be apprehended only by those who have received the training and the discipline of his higher education. |xxviii| The consummation of this education is characterized briefly and soberly as a vision, just as in the Symposium the long ascent of the scale of beauty culminates in a vision which alone makes life worth living. 44 This language expresses the intensity of Plato’s feeling about the intellectual life and his own ethical and social ideals, but it does not make him a visionary or a mystic in the ordinary sense of the words.

If the interpretation here outlined is in itself a rational sequence of thought and makes sense of what Plato says, it surely creates a presumption which cannot be rebutted by evading issues and charging me with insensibility to Plato’s deeper religious and mystic meanings. It can be refuted only by giving specific answers to specific arguments and testing them by the texts. The interpretation of the images, symbols, allegories (the synonym does not matter) of the sun, the divided line and the cave, provides the chief test, as the too literal acceptance of them is perhaps the main cause of misunderstanding.

The aptness of the sun as a symbol of Plato’s idea of good might be illustrated by many quotations from modern poetry and from the literature of sun-worship. It would be interesting to compare what Plato says of the sun as the primal source of light, heat, life, growth, all things, with the language of modern science. Herbert Spencer, for example, innocently says (First Principles of a New System of Philosophy, 1865, American edition p. 454): Until I recently |xxix| consulted his Outlines of Astronomy on another question I was not aware that so far back as 1838 Sir John Herschel had enunciated the doctrine that ‘the sun’s rays are the ultimate source of almost every motion which takes place on the surface of the earth.’ Another line of illustration would lead through the Latin poet Manilius and Plotinus to Goethe’s Wär’ nicht das Auge sonnenhaft. 46 This thought might be extended to include modern debates on the nice preadjustment of the eye to its function of vision. Does it, or does it not, imply a creator and a design? Lastly, Plato’s statement that, as the sun is the source of light, but is not itself light (508b), so the idea of good is not knowledge or being but the cause of both and something that is beyond and transcends being—this superhuman hyperbole (509b-c) is the source of all so-called negative theologies and transcendental metaphysics from Philo and Plotinus to the present day.

But our present concern is not with these things but with the direct evidence that the idea of good is essentially for the interpretation of the Republic what modern ethical theory calls the sanction. One sentence I admit seems to identify the idea of good with God. The sun, it is said, is that which the Good created in the visible world to be its symbol and analogue. This would seem to identify the idea of good with the Demiurgos of the Timaeus, who is both the supreme God and a personification of the idea of good or the principle of teleology in nature. But we have already seen that it is uncritical to press Plato’s language about God, a word which he accepts from traditional religion and employs as |xxx| freely for edification and the rejection of militant atheism as Matthew Arnold does. Moreover, there are other sentences in this part of the Republic which, if pressed, are irreconcilable with the identification of the idea of good with God. In any case, apart from one or two sentences of vague and disputable meaning, the acceptance of the idea of good as the sanction more nearly lends an intelligible and reasonable meaning to everything that Plato says than does any other interpretation. On this view, then, I repeat, the idea of good is simply the hypostatization of what the idea of good means for common sense in modern usage. It is the good purpose in some mind able to execute its purposes. It is what such a mind conceives to be the supreme end to which all other ends are subordinated and referred.

The divided line and the cave are also images and symbols employed to bring out certain other aspects of the theory of ideas and of the idea of good in particular. The main object common to both is to put the thought Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis into a proportion. The four terms of such a proportion may be secured either by invention or by forcing special meanings on some of the terms. In the case of the cave, the cave itself, the fettered prisoners, the fire and the apparatus by which the shadows of graven images are cast on the wall of the cave are clearly inventions. There is a real analogy between the release of the prisoners with their ascent to the light of day (515c ff.) and the Socratic elenchus which releases the mind and draws it up from a world of sense to the world of thought (517b-c). But it is obvious that all the details of the imagery cannot be pressed and that we need not ask too curiously to |xxxi| what in Plato’s serious thought every touch that fills out the picture corresponds.

On my interpretation critics have likewise erred by refusing to admit a similar qualification of their too literal acceptance of the image of the divided line. The proportion: ideas are to things as things are to their reflections in mirrors or in water, has only three terms. The fourth term is found in mathematical ideas, which in their use in education and in respect of the method by which the mind deals with them are in some sort intermediate between ideas and things. We thus get our proportion. But in the description of it Plato is careful to distinguish the mathematical ideas only by the method of their treatment in science, not in dialectics, and not as entities of another kind. This raises the presumption that Plato, as usual, knows what he is doing and does not intend to distinguish objectively mathematical ideas as ideas from other ideas. I support this presumption by pointing out that in the later and final interpretation of the line Plato names the objective correlates of the mental processes corresponding to three divisions of the line but omits the fourth on the pretext that it would take too long. (Cf. on 534a.) He names the mathematical attitude of mind or method but does not name its objects as something distinct from ideas or a distinct kind of ideas. I go on to show that there is no evidence in the Platonic writings for the doctrine that mathematical ideas differ in themselves from other concepts, and that the testimony of Aristotle is too confused to prove anything. 47 These assumptions raise a definite issue which can only be met by equally definite arguments. Instead of that |xxxii| critics rebuke me for attributing insincerity to Plato, or at the best they ask, How could Aristotle be mistaken?

Plato himself regards all literature except dialectics as a form of play and much that passes for dialectics as conscious or unconscious jesting. Whenever he himself employs imagery, symbolism and myth or an eristic dialectic he is careful to warn us that it is not to be taken too literally or seriously, 48 and he usually points out just how much of his apparent conclusions it is necessary to accept for the carrying on of the argument. Now the particular synonyms I employ to describe this characteristic trait of Plato’s method and style are obviously irrelevant to my main argument. Yet if in view of the frequency of the idea and word παίζειν {play} in Plato I express the thought that the intermediate place of mathematical ideas in the proportion of the divided line is not to be taken literally and add that the ambiguous coinage εἰκασία, or conjecture, is a term of disparagement playfully thrown in to secure symmetry of subdivision in the two worlds and to suggest a depth below the lowest depth, 49 I am sternly told that It is surely a strange reading of the character of Plato as a seeker after truth to maintain that in the very heart of his greatest work and at the very core of the problem of knowledge he should disturb and confuse those who are seeking to understand his doctrine with a little wholly uncalled-for ‘playfulness,’ even though it should be for the sake of ‘symmetry.’ 50 Now I am quite willing to substitute |xxxiii| some other expression for playfully thrown in. But my precise expression, I repeat, is not the point. Plato in fact does here, as elsewhere, resort to artificial constructions and inventions in order to express the relation between the ideas and what we call realities by proportion. The εἰκόνες {likeness} and εἰκασία {conjecture} are in fact introduced here to complete the symmetry of such a proportion and to suggest ironical disparagement of the inferior type of thought. They contribute nothing further to the solution of the problem of knowledge. To recognize this plain fact is not to impugn the character of Plato, and to rebuke my frivolity with solemn eloquence is no answer to my argument. Plato himself never thinks it incompatible with a serious search for truth to mingle jest with earnest and seriousness with irony.

Similarly of the ἀνυπόθετον {idea of the good, ethical} (510b). It obviously suggests to modern interpreters the metaphysical first principle, the Unconditioned, the absolute ground, the noumenon, call it what you will. Plato himself may have been willing to let the word convey such overtones, and those who are not interested in his precise meanings may stop there and cry with Rousseau, O Mighty Being! But it is also equally obvious that the ἀνυπόθετον has a definite and less purely emotional meaning in its context. It expresses Plato’s distinction between the man of science, who starts from assumptions that he does not allow to be questioned (510c-d), and the philosopher or Platonic dialectician, who is able and willing to carry the discussion back, not necessarily always to a metaphysical first principle, but at least to a proposition on which both parties to the argument agree and which therefore is not arbitrarily assumed as an hypothesis |xxxiv| by the questioner. This meaning could be illustrated by the Crito, in which it is said that all discussion is vain without such a starting-point of agreement. 51 It is the essential meaning of the passage in the Phaedo (101d-e), where ἱκανόν, the adequate, the sufficient, is for all practical purposes a virtual synonym of the ἀνυπόθετον, though it does not suggest the possible metaphysical connotations of the word.

Now this distinction between dialectics or philosophy and the sciences is repeatedly borrowed by Aristotle 52 and even retains much of its validity under the changed conditions of modern thought. There will always be these two ways of thinking and these two types of mind. The passage, then, makes good sense so interpreted and lends a rational meaning to the ἀνυπόθετον without denying the mystic overtones which are all that seem to interest some interpreters of Plato.

To return to the political and social idea of good, Plato’s conception of ultimate good in this sense must be gathered from his writings as a whole. Neither in the Republic nor elsewhere does he commit himself to a defining formula of social welfare. It is enough for his purpose to emphasize the distinction between the statesman and the politician and describe the education and the way of life that will produce the statesman and develop in him the ideals and the unity of purpose that distinguish him. But it would not be difficult to gather Plato’s general conception of political and social good from the Republic and the Laws and certain passages of the Gorgias and Politicus. The true statesman’s chief aim will be not |xxxv| wealth and power and amusements, but the virtue of the citizens. 53 A sober disciplined life is preferable to the unlimited license and expansiveness of an imperialistic and decadent democracy. The statesman’s chief instruments for realizing his ideals will be the control of education and what today is called eugenics. 54

Is this plain common sense, then, all that is meant by Plato’s idealistic eloquence and the imagery of the sun, the divided line and the cave? I never meant to say that it is all, but it is the central core of meaning without which Plato’s transcendentalism is only a rhapsody of words. If nature is more than mechanism, if there is a God, as Plato himself believes and believes indispensable to morality and social order, his purposes, his idea of good, or, metaphysically or mythologically speaking, the idea of good which he contemplates as a pattern, 55 becomes the first and chief cause of the ordered world, and such understanding of his purposes as is possible for us is a better explanation of things than the material instruments that serve his ends. 56 This is the type of explanation that the Socrates of the Phaedo desires but cannot discover and that the Timaeus ventures to present only in mythical and poetical form. 57 It has little place in the Republic, though we may suppose it to be in the background of Plato’s mind and to be suggested by his allegories. The idea of good in |xxxvi| this sense, like the heat and light of the sun, is both the cause of the things we think real and the condition of our apprehension and understanding of them. It is not the substance of things; it is not their being, but something apart from and transcending being in the ordinary sense of the word (509b). But the allegory and the transcendental language apply equally well to the ethical and political ideas which are the chief theme of the Republic, and it is not necessary to look further. The cause of any political or social institution is the purpose or idea of good in some controlling mind, and, as Coleridge said and Mill repeated after him, the best way to understand any human institution or contrivance is to appreciate that purpose. That will throw a flood of light on everything. 58

I have never meant to deny the mystic and metaphysical suggestions of Plato’s language. I have merely tried to bring out the residuum of practical and intelligible meaning for the political and ethical philosophy of the Republic. It is a meaning that is still true today, and it is the only interpretation that makes intelligible sense of what Plato says. That surely creates a presumption which can be met only by definite arguments.

Whatever the more remote suggestions of the idea of good for general or ethical philosophy, this its simple practical meaning for the Republic is clearly indicated by Plato himself. It symbolizes the distinction between the ideal statesman and the politician of decadent Athens and marks the purpose and goal of all the studies of the Platonic higher education. The guardians have already received in a purified |xxxvii| form the normal Greek education in gymnastics and music, described in the Protagoras 325c ff., and virtually repeated in the education prescribed for the entire citizenship in the haws. The product of this Platonic elementary and secondary education would be a band of healthy, wholesome, sunburnt boys and girls, who, in Ruskin’s phrase, have had all the nonsense boxed and raced and spun out of them. They would have dipped into fewer books than our graduates, but they would know a few of the world’s greatest books by heart, they would have no theory of art or sentimentality about it, but their taste would have been refined, almost to infallibility, by hearing only the best music and seeing only the best statues. They would have heard of fewer things but would know what they did know perfectly. They would have never studied a text-book of civics, ethics, or sociology, but the essential principles of obedience, patriotism, modesty, order, temperance, good manners, would have been so instilled into them that the possibility of violating them would hardly occur to their minds. They would not only be strong and healthy, but through gymnastics, choral singing and dancing, and military drill, would have acquired the mastery of their bodies and a dignified and graceful bearing.

But already in the age of the sophists Athens had become too sophisticated for her ambitious youth to remain content with this simple old Greek education however reformed and idealized. There was a demand for a higher university education, which was met first by the sophists, and then in the next generation by Plato himself and his great rival, the orator Isocrates, who conducted academies side by |xxxviii| side in Athens for forty years. The content of this higher education is given in every age by the knowledge of that age. What else can it be? These Greek teachers did not offer electives in the chemistry of the carbon compounds, or the origin of Shintoism in Japan, or the evolution of the English novel from Tom Jones to Ulysses, for the simple reason that these interesting branches of study had not yet been developed. The sophists taught a practical theory of politics and business and the new art of rhetoric, promising to make their pupils effective speakers and shrewd men of affairs. 59 The publicist Isocrates taught what he knew, the application of this sophistic doctrine to the composition of more serious political and ethical essays. Plato taught what we should call ethics, sociology and philosophy, but what he called dialectics—the closely reasoned argumentative discussion of problems of ethics, politics, social life, philosophy and religion.

But with wider experience Plato came to feel that the Socratic method of plunging mere lads directly into these difficult questions was unwise. It was doubtless stimulating; but it unsettled their moral faith, confused their minds, and converted them into pert and precocious disputants. 60 Dialectics demanded a preparatory training in some simpler methods of close, consecutive, abstract thinking. This preparation Plato found in the new sciences of arithmetic and geometry and in the sciences which he was among the first to constitute or predict—the sciences of mathematical astronomy, |xxxix| physics, and acoustics. 61 By these studies the youthful mind could be gradually lifted out of the region of loose pictorial thinking, habituated to the thin pure air of abstractions, taught the essential nature of definitions, axioms, principles, and rules of logic, and made capable of following with continuous attention long trains of reasoning. We value mathematics and the exact sciences largely for their practical applications. 62 In the Republic Plato prized them as the indispensable preparation for equally severe abstract thinking about the more complex and difficult problems of life, morals and society. 63 In his Republic he combines this idea drawn from the practice of his own school with his fundamental political and social ideal, the government of mankind by the really wise, and not by the politicians who happen to get the votes. We need not stop to ask whether a Utopia designed for a small Greek city is applicable to a democracy of 120 millions inhabiting a territory of three million square miles. We are concerned with the ideal and its embodiment in a theory of education.

The Platonic rulers are chosen by a process of progressive selection through ever higher educational tests applied to young men and women who have stood most successfully the tests of the lower education. 64 Through arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, |xl| mechanics and acoustics, so far as these admit of mathematical treatment, they are led up to the final test in ethics and sociology, which is not speech-making or slumming, or the running of university settlements, but the power of close, exact, consecutive reasoning about complex moral phenomena. It must not be forgotten, however, that this theoretical discipline is supplemented by many years of practical experience in minor offices of administration. 65

The consummation of it all is described poetically as the vision of the idea of good (540a)—which, however, as we have seen, turns out to mean for all practical purposes the apprehension of some rational unified conception of the social aim and human well-being, and the consistent relating of all particular beliefs and measures to that ideal—a thing which can be achieved only by the most highly disciplined intelligence. For in Plato’s time as in ours the opinions of the average man are not so unified and connected, but jostle one another in hopeless confusion in his brain. Plato’s conception of the higher education, then, may be summed up in a sentence: Until a man is able to abstract and define rationally his idea of good, and unless he can run the gauntlet of all objections and is ready to meet them, not by appeals to opinion but to absolute truth, never faltering at any stage of the argument—unless he can do all this he knows neither the idea of good nor any other good. He apprehends only a shadow of opinion, not true and real knowledge. 66

Starting from the sound psychological principle that the old-fashioned rote recitation of a text-book |xli| is an abomination, that verbal knowledge is no knowledge, that the concrete must precede the abstract, that we must visualize before we theorize, and apprehend objects before we analyse relations, we have in practice abandoned altogether the attempt to teach young people hard consecutive abstract thinking. We scorn to drill them in the old-fashioned studies that developed this power, such as grammatical analysis, parsing, puzzling problems in arithmetic, algebra, or mechanics, elementary logic,—mental science, as it was called,—and the exact, if incomplete, methods of the orthodox political economy; and instead of this we encourage them to have and express opinions about large and vague questions of literary criticism, aesthetics, ethics and social reform. A true apprehension of Plato’s ideal of education would not swing the pendulum back again to the other extreme, but it would help us to realize that no multiplication of entertaining knowledge, and no refinements of the new psychology, can alter the fact that all instruction is wasted on a flabby mind, and that true education, while it will not neglect entertainment, useful knowledge, and the training of the eye and hand, will always consist largely in the development of firm, hard, intellectual muscle. The studies best adapted to this end will always retain a value independent of practical utility or superficial attractiveness; for to change the figure and adapt Plato’s own language: By such studies the eye of the mind, more precious than a thousand bodily eyes, is purged and quickened and made more keen for whatever truth higher education or life or business may present to it (527d-e). |xlii|

Plato’s own account of the curriculum of his higher education ought to be a sufficient answer to the charge that in the training of his guardians he manifests an anti-scientific spirit. It is only by wresting phrases from their context and refusing to make allowances for the quality of Plato’s rhetoric that the imputation of hostility to modern experimental science can be fastened upon him. 67 As I have shown elsewhere 68 and point out again in the notes, Plato is (1) using scientific studies to develop the faculty of abstract reasoning; (2) incidentally predicting the mathematical astronomy and physics of the future. 69 Both purposes tempt him to hammer his main point with Emersonian emphasis and to surprise attention with Ruskinian boutades in order to mark more clearly the distinction between himself and contemporary empiricists. Hence his satire of the substitution of experiment for mathematics in acoustics (531a-b), and the intentional epigrammatic extravagance of his leave the stars alone (530b). It is uncritical to quote these sentences apart from their entire context and treat them as if they were a deliberate and systematic attack on modern experimental science.

The Four Polities. The description of the four degenerate types of state in the eighth book relieves the strain of dialectics and the tedium of continuous argument by one of the most brilliant pieces of writing in Plato. Macaulay says it is …beyond all criticism. I |xliii| remember nothing in Greek philosophy superior to this in profundity, ingenuity and eloquence. It serves further to lead up to the embodiment in the tyrant of the analogical argument that the unhappiness of the worst man matches the misery of the worst state. The objections to the book or to its place in the economy of the Republic raised by Aristotle and others are mostly captious irrelevances. 70 The transition from the ideal state is resumed at the point where it was interrupted at the beginning of the fifth book, 71 and it is pretended that Books V., VI. and VII. are a digression, though they are obviously an indispensable part of the Republic. 72 Matter-of-fact critics have argued that an ideal or perfect state would contain within itself no seeds of destruction and could not decay. But as Plato himself said, the philosophic state is a pattern or ideal which retains its value even if imperfectly realized. 73 It is a fundamental Platonic principle that only the divine is eternal and unchangeable. 74 All treated and material things are subject to change. The universe itself is only as good as the Demiurgos was able to make it, and the created gods are preserved from destruction only by his sustaining will. 75

The riddle of the nuptial number that determines |xliv| the beginning of the decline has never been solved to the satisfaction of a majority of competent critics. The solution would contribute something to our knowledge of early Greek mathematical terminology but nothing to our understanding of Plato’s thought. Emerson’s definitive word about it is, He (Plato) sometimes throws a little mathematical dust into our eyes. The meaning of the number is simply Burke’s statement (iv. p. 312) in Regicide Peace, p. 2, I doubt whether the history of man kind is yet complete enough, if ever it can be so, to furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes which necessarily affect the fortune of a state. 76 But though the ultimate causes of degeneration |xlv| escape our ken, Plato mentions a practical point that is of considerable significance today. Revolutions are due to the divisions and discords of the dominant and educated classes. 77 The allegory of the four metals is kept up. The decline begins when the rulers no longer breed true and the gold is mixed with base alloy. 78

The limitation of the degenerate types of state to four is conscious and artistic. It should not be used to prove Plato’s impatience of facts. There are endless minor varieties of social and political structure among the barbarians (544c-d). Plato leaves it to Aristotle and the political and social science departments of the American universities to collect them. 79 The sequence, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny does not always reproduce the actual history of cities of Greece, but it anticipates many of the vicissitudes of modern history more suggestively than Aristotle’s laborious collection of instances. 80 Plato occasionally forgets himself or lets himself go in contemporary satire or allusion that points to Athens |xlvi| rather than to any one of his four or five types. 81 But the consistency of his hypothesis is sufficiently maintained to satisfy any reasonable reader. The individual types corresponding to the four political patterns are the earliest and among the best systematic character-sketches in extant European literature and may be counted among the sources of the Characters of Theophrastus and their successors. 82

The Ethical Argument. Book IX. sums up and concludes the main ethical argument of the Republic. This is not the place for a systematic exposition of the Platonic ethics. Ethical philosophy as distinguished from exhortation and the code can always be stated in the form of a discussion of the validity of the moral law and the motives for obedience to it, in other words, the quest for the sanction. 83 But this mode of statement is especially suited to ages of so-called enlightenment and transition when the very existence of a moral law or its binding force is challenged, whether seriously or as an intellectual game.

Such in Plato’s opinion was the age in which he lived. The main drift of the speculations of the pre-Socratic philosophers had been in the direction of materialism if not exactly atheism. 84 The popularization |xlvii| of these ideas by the so-called sophists and their application to education, morals, politics and criticism of life had further tended to do away with all traditional moral and religious checks upon instinct and individualism. And the embittered class conflicts and the long demoralization of the thirty years’ war had completed the work of moral and spiritual disintegration. 85 The Greeks had lost their old standards and had acquired no new, more philosophic, principles to take their place. 86 Plato’s ears were dinned, lie said, by the negations of materialists, atheists, relativists, and immoralists. 87 How to answer them was the chief problem of his ethical philosophy. To satirize these immoralists or to depict their defeat in argument was one of the main motives of his dramatic art. 88

The evidence in support of Plato’s interpretation of contemporary Greek life and thought has been repeatedly collected from Aristophanes, Euripides, and Thucydides, the fragments of the sophists and the pre-Socratics and Plato’s own writings. 89 This conservative view of the Greek enlightenment has in turn often been challenged by modern historians of liberal or radical tendencies, a Grote, a |xlviii| Mill, a Gomperz, and their followers. 90 The interpreter of the Republic need only note the sincerity and intensity of Plato’s conviction and its effect upon the form of his presentation of ethics.

A complete study of the Platonic ethics would incorporate many other ideas drawn from the Protagoras, the Philebus, the Laws, the minor Socratic dialogues, and perhaps from the Phaedrus and Symposium. 91 But the two chief ethical dialogues, the Gorgias and the Republic, are cast in the form of an answer to dogmatic and unabashed ethical nihilism. What is to be said to an uncompromising immoralist? Is it possible to convince him, or failing that, to refute or seem to refute him to the edification of the bystander? 92 The serious aim of both Gorgias and Republic is to convince and refute, but there are parts of the Gorgias and of the first book of the Republic in which the chief dramatic purpose is the exhibition of Socrates’ superiority in argument to the sceptic.

Many commentators ancient and modern object that Plato has not proved his case. They are not necessarily such immoralists as Plato had in mind. Such moralists as Grote, Mill and Leslie Stephen say that all men of goodwill would like to believe in the identity of virtue and happiness, but that the facts of experience are against it. 93 It is at best a general |xlix| tendency or probability, not an invariable rule. Dryden is not sure that the law can always be verified on individuals, but is half humorously certain that it infallibly applies to nations, because in their case Providence is too deeply engaged.

The problem is too large to be incidentally solved by a commentator on the Republic. It is, as Plato himself would admit, partly a question of faith, 94 and partly of the kind of evidence that is admitted as relevant. Do you ask for sanctions? exclaims John Morley. One whose conscience has been strengthened from youth in this faith can know no greater bitterness than the stain cast by a wrong act…and the discords that have become the ruling harmony of his days. 95 That is the kind of evidence to which Plato appeals when he argues that his |xlx| guardians will find more happiness in duty fulfilled than they would by grasping at what are commonly thought the good things of life. 96 It is an argument that will not appeal to men of stunted moral sensibilities. The issue is, as Plato says, whether they are the best judges. 97 The question has always been debated and always will be debatable, and there is little to add to the considerations on either side which Cicero develops in his perpetual reargument of the Stoic paradox, that virtue alone suffices for a happy life, and that the sage will be happy on the rack. Matthew Arnold, Emerson and George Eliot are as fixed in the faith as Plato. Experience, says Arnold, is perpetually sending the denier who says in his heart, There is no God, back to school to learn his lesson better. 98 The writers most in vogue today would agree with Mill and Leslie Stephen, if not with Thrasymachus and Callicles. 99 It is not necessary to determine this controversy in order to justify the Republic. To condemn the Republic because it is not a demonstration that leaves no room for doubt is to affirm that the question is not worth discussing, or that Plato’s treatment of it falls short of what could reasonably be expected. If it is not a proof, has any one come nearer to a demonstration? 100 |li|

As to the desirability of the attempt, Plato thought that it is not safe to expose young minds to the unanswered propaganda of philosophies of immoralism and relativity. And recent experience of an amoral and irreligious education of the masses has not yet proved him wrong. 101 He believed in his own arguments and in the doctrine which he taught. But apart from that he also believed that civilized society would disintegrate if morality were not effectively preached. 102 The charge hinted by Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics x., 1172 a 34-35) and often repeated that this implies the economy of truth 103 and the inner or double doctrine is sufficiently refuted by the depth and intensity of Plato’s own adamantine moral faith. 104 But however that may be, the question which he asks in his Laws still brings heart-searchings to the parent who has inherited a conscience from a generation that had not been swept from its moorings: What is a father to tell his son? 105 But I cannot give more space to these eternal controversies and must turn to the direct summing-up of Plato’s argument in the ninth book.

Plato sums up the conclusions of the Republic in three formal arguments. The first is the broad |lii| analogy between the individual and the state, which runs through the entire work. 106 Plato feels that here he is not only clinching the subject, but finally grappling with the problem debated in the Gorgias and to which he returns in the Laws. He is gathering up all his forces for a defiant reply to the immoralist and ethical nihilist. The result is an elaboration, an intensity, an insistency, a repetition that are offensive to readers who feel distaste for anything that savours of moral didacticism.

The argumentative force of such an analogy is the cumulative impression of the detail that makes it plausible. Plato points the application of this argument by a psychological portrait of the typical tyrannical man, developed out of the democratic man as the democrat was developed from the oligarch. The literary symmetry strains the logic a little, for while the democratic man is the typical citizen of a democracy, the typical citizen of a tyranny is not the tyrant himself, but any one of those whom he oppresses. But it does not matter. To heighten his effect Plato describes first the soul of the man destined to become a Greek tyrant, and then the intensification of all its defects and miseries by the actual possession and exercise of usurped power.

Latent in all men are lawless instincts and appetites which reason and disciplined emotion hold in check, but which are sometimes revealed in dreams (571b f.). In the tyrannical soul these lower propensities are unleashed. The censor, to borrow the language of a fashionable modern psychology, is dethroned, all control is abolished and the soul is at the mercy of the instincts of the night. Plato depicts the rake’s |liii| progress of what again in modern terminology we may call the typical gangster and boss in a lawless democracy. He is the son of a democratic father, but, unlike his father, does not settle down into a tolerable compromise between the caprices of unregulated desire and the principles of tradition (572d). In him desire grown great, a monstrous Eros, a ruling passion with its attendant train of appetites, usurps the throne and seizes the empty citadel of the mind, vacant of the only true guardians, the precepts of culture and right reason (573a). He wastes his portion of the family inheritance, encroaches on the portion of his brothers, and if further advances are refused him does not shrink from the last outrage that Greek conservatism attributed to the younger generation—and strikes his father. 107 He becomes the chosen leader of a gang of like-minded roisterers from whom he is distinguished only by a more enterprising spirit and the greater strength of the principle of desire in his soul; and the gang, if few, terrorize the city with crime (575a-b), if many, strike the father- and mother-land, overthrow the constitution and establish a tyranny (575d).

A modern moralist might improve the text that the gangster lives in an atmosphere of greed, suspicion and fear, and is destined finally to be shot by an ambitious rival. Plato, speaking in terms of Greek experience, makes the tyrannical man fulfill his nature and perfect his type by becoming an actual tyrant of a Greek city. And he then describes, perhaps in reminiscence of his own observations at the court of Dionysius at Syracuse, and in |liv| prophetic anticipation of Caligula and Louis Napoleon, the hell of suspicion, fear and insatiate and unsatisfied desires in which such a tyrant lives. 108 As the city which he misrules is, for all the splendour of the court and the courtiers, as a whole the most miserable of states, so is he, to the eye that can penetrate the dazzling disguise of pomp and power, the farced title running ‘fore the king, the most miserable of men (577-579).

It is obvious that Plato forces the note a little in the interest of his thesis. In actual history the tyrant need not be the sensualist of Plato’s description. He may be only a cold-blooded, hard-headed Machiavellian,—in Plato’s language a lover of honour and victory, not a lover of the pleasures that money purchases. But these cavils of a meticulous logic are beside the mark. The real argument, as we have said, is the psychological analysis and the facts of Greek experience that lend plausibility to the analogy. It prepares us to receive the more strictly philosophic and scientific arguments that are to follow.

The gist of the second argument is that the intellectual, the philosopher, has necessarily experienced all three kinds of pleasure in his life, while the representatives of the two other types have no experience of the pleasures of pure intelligence (581-582). To this is added the consideration that the organ or instrument of all such judgements, reason and rational |lv| speech, is the special possession of the philosopher (582a). This argument is never mentioned again by Plato and is by many critics, including Leslie Stephen, 109 rejected as a fallacy. But John Stuart Mill accepts and makes use of it.

The issue thus raised is really the old question of a distinction of quality and value in pleasure. No one can judge or prescribe another’s pleasure, it is argued; pleasure qua pleasure admits no differences. 110 But is there any such thing as pleasure qua pleasure? Are there not always inseparable accompaniments and consequences? And though the hog may be sole judge of his own pleasures, is it on the whole as desirable or as pleasurable to be a hog as a man? 111 There is room for interminable argument, for the entire problem of relativity is involved. If all judgements are relative, Plato elsewhere argues, we are committed to chaos. The dog-faced baboon, and not man or God, is the measure of all things. 112 The very existence of the arts and the sciences presupposes that things are measured against standards and not merely against one another. 113 Thus, though the argument is not repeated by Plato in this form, it suggests and implies most of the fundamental questions of his ethical philosophy. |lvi|

The third argument, drawn from the negativity of the pleasure of sense, is the basis of the Platonic ethics, so far as it is an arguable doctrine. It is necessary to dwell upon this point, for it is commonly said that Plato’s ethical philosophy is deduced from the idea of good. 114 That is true only from one quite special point of view. The idea of good, as we have seen, is a postulate of the logic of ethics and of the higher education of the philosopher. It is a blank cheque that supports the credit of the system but which is not filled in. No virtue and no particular good is adequately defined until it is explicitly related to an idea of good (505a, 506a). It may be defined provisionally and sufficiently for a given purpose in terms of psychology or tradition or with a tacit reference to an implied conception of good (504a-b). But nowhere in Plato’s writings are definite controversial arguments or substantive principles of ethical philosophy or rules of practice deduced from the idea of good. It is merely said that an ethical philosophy is not complete until we have decided what is our sanction.

But such principles are deduced from the negativity of the lower pleasures throughout Plato’s writings. 115 This supplies the missing link in the argument of the Protagoras that virtue and happiness depend on the correct estimate of pleasures and pains. 116 The doctrine is implied in the Phaedo (83-84). It is distinctly suggested in the Gorgias (493 ff.). It crowns the |lvii| argument of the Republic (583b ff.). It is elaborated in the Philebus in order to reach a final settlement of the controversy dramatized in the Gorgias. It is tacitly employed in the endeavour of the Laws (660e-663e) to attach a practicable edifying conclusion to the utilitarian arguments of the Protagoras. The statement of the doctrine in the Republic, though briefer than that of the Philebus, touches on all the essential points, as the notes will show. It cannot be proved to be either a resume or an imperfect anticipation of the developed theory. It cannot be used to date the ninth book of the Republic relatively to the Philebus. 117

I am not here speaking of the absolute truth of the doctrine, but only of its demonstrable relation to Plato’s ethical philosophy. As I have elsewhere said, 118 Plato teaches that sensuous pleasures are in their nature impure and illusory. They are preconditioned by, and mixed with, desire, want, pain. Surgit amari aliquid is ever true of them. They are the relief of an uneasiness, the scratching of an itch, the filling of a vacuum. 119 To treat them as real, or to make them one’s aim (except so far as our human estate requires), is to seek happiness in a process |lviii| rather than a state, 120 in becoming rather than in being. It is to bind oneself to the wheel of Ixion and pour water into the bottomless jar of the Danaids. 121 Far happier, far more pleasurable, is the life that consistently aims at few and calm pleasures, to which the sensualist would hardly give the name, a life which he would regard as torpor or death. 122

Both the physiology and the psychology of this doctrine have been impugned. It has been argued that, up to the point of fatigue, the action of healthy nerves involves no pain, and must yield a surplus of positive sensuous pleasure. It is urged that the present uneasiness of appetite is normally more than counterbalanced by the anticipation of immediate satisfaction. Such arguments will carry no weight with those who accept Plato’s main contention, that the satisfactions of sense and ambition, however necessary, have no real worth, and that to seek our true life in them is to weave and unweave the futile web of Penelope. Whatever qualifications modern psychology may attach to the doctrine, it is the logical basis of Plato’s ethics. The unfeigned |lix| recognition of the inherent worthlessness of the lower pleasures removes at once the motive and the lures to evil. 123 It is the chief link in the proof that virtue is happiness. It insures the domination of reason over feeling and appetite. It moulds man into that likeness to the divine pattern which is Plato’s expression for the ethical ideal, 124 for the divine life knows neither pleasure nor pain. 125 It is the serious argument that explains Plato’s repudiation of the hedonistic formulas of the Protagoras 126 and justifies the noble anti-hedonistic rhetoric of the Gorgias. 127 the Phaedo, 128 and the Philebus (in fine).

Regarded as a logical system, then, and metaphysics apart, the Platonic ethics is not to be deduced from the idea of good. It is best studied and expounded under a few simple heads: (1) illustrations in the minor dialogues of the necessity and the difficulty of defining ethical terms; (2) the search for arguments that will convince, or at least confute, the ethical nihilism of a war-weary, cynical and over-enlightened generation—for proof, in short, that virtue and happiness coincide; (3) the attempt to find a compromise between the necessity of acknowledging the truth in a certain sense of hedonistic utilitarianism and our justifiable idealistic distaste for that way of describing the moral life; (4) as an essential part of the argument of both (2) and (3), the principle of the comparative worthlessness of the |lx| lower or sensual pleasures, which, except so far as necessary, are bought at too high a price, because they are preconditioned by pain. 129

These categories are not of my invention. They are the topics on which ethical discussion actually turns in the dialogues. The Republic supplies ample illustration of all these topics. The first book, like the Gorgias, dramatizes Socrates’ dialectic superiority to the immoralist. The second book restates the issue in its most fundamental form. The fourth book resumes and for practical purposes provisionally solves the puzzles of the definition of the virtues in the minor Socratic dialogues. The allegory of the idea of good, rightly understood, shows what Plato meant in these minor dialogues by making the failure to define virtue always turn on the inability to discover the good. The ninth book, as we have seen, sums up the argument and adds a sufficiently explicit exposition of the doctrine of the negativity of pleasure, which, as the Philebus shows, is the indispensable basis of the scientific and calculating ethics postulated in the Protagoras.

But true virtue is something more than argument, and its mood, as an eloquent passage of the Phaedo protests, is not that of the prudential, calculating reason. 130 And so the argument of the ninth book, like that of the fourth, culminates in an appeal through imagery and analogy to the imaginative reason and the soul. There (444-445) it was urged that the health and harmony of the soul must be still more indispensable |lxi| to true happiness than that of the body. And we saw that the most scientific of modern ethical philosophies is finally forced back upon the same analogy. 131 In the conclusion of the ninth book the motif recurs with still greater elaboration and in a more eloquent climax. Every animal of the barnyard, Plato says in anticipation of Emerson and Freud, has found lodgement within this external sheath of humanity. And the issue for every human soul is whether it chooses to foster the snake, the lion and the ape, or the man, the mind, and the god within the mind. 132 Surely the wiser choice is that which values all the so-called goods, for which men scramble and contend, only as they tend to preserve or destroy the true constitution and health of the soul. This polity of the sober and righteous soul is the symbol of that City of God which may exist nowhere on earth but on which as a pattern laid up in heaven he who will may fix his eyes and constitute himself its citizen. 133

The Banishment of Poetry. A characteristic feature of Plato’s art both in great and little matters is the climax after the apparent climax. 134 The tenth book of the Republic, which is in a sense an appendix, adds the climax of the originally disavowed religious sanction of immortality to that of the appeal to the imaginative reason. The intervening digression in defence of the banishment of the poets is in effect, if not in Plato’s conscious intention, a relieving interval of calm between the two peaks of feeling. For the rest, the deeper psychology of the |lxii| philosophic books and the theory of ideas expounded there invited a reconsideration of the subject and provided arguments based, not on the content of the Homeric epic, but on the essential nature of poetry and its influence.

The two arguments that have exercised the defenders of poetry from Aristotle to Arnold 135 are that poetry is not truth but imitation, a copy of a copy, and that poetry fosters emotion and so weakens the salutary control of feeling by the reason and the will. In support of the first the theory of ideas is invoked in a form so intentionally simplified that it has given rise to the fantastic hypothesis that this book must represent an earlier period of Plato’s philosophy. 136 God made one idea of a couch. The artisan copies it in many material couches. The artist with words or colours copies, not the idea, but the copy. This argument of course could be and has been answered in its own terms by the claim of Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi that the genius of the artist does directly apprehend the idea or essence of things and reveal it to those who can see only through his eyes. 137 But the real question whether art deals with truth or appearance is independent of Plato’s half-serious formulation of it in the language of the theory of ideas. It is still debated, and it is the business of the interpreters of Plato to understand, not necessarily to pronounce judgement.

The question whether poetry’s chief function is to |lxiii| stimulate and exercise emotion, or to relieve, purge, 138 refine, purify, sublimate and exalt it, likewise raises an issue which still divides psychologists, educators and critics. Its determination perhaps involves a great and deliberate choice in the acceptance and management of life as a whole. Plato’s decision to banish the honeyed Muse from his ideal city represents only one aspect of his many-sided nature. It is obviously not, as is sometimes absurdly said, an expression of his insensibility to Hellenic poetry and art. It was his own sensitiveness that made him fear Its power. He himself wrote verse in youth, 139 His imagery, the invention of his myths and the poetic quality of his prose rank him with the world’s major poets. 140 He quotes poetry with exquisite and fond aptness throughout his writings. 141 And there are no more wistful words than his reluctant dismissal of the supreme poet, the author and source of all these beauties of epic and tragedy, the Ionian father of the rest—Homer. 142 However, Plato’s ethical convictions gave him the courage of Guyon (Faery Queene, ii. xii. 83) in dealing with these enchantments:

But all those pleasaunt bowres and Pallace brave
Guyon broke downe with rigour pittilesse;
Ne ought their goodly workmanship might save
Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse. 143

The Doctrine of Immortality. The guerdons of righteousness, worldly or other-worldly, were explicitly excluded in the original formulation of the question whether justice is or is not intrinsically its own reward. 144 But now, having proved his case independently of these, Plato thinks that no one can fairly object if he points out that in fact honesty is usually the best policy even in this world, and that there is good hope that the legends of a life and judgement to come are in essence true. 145 There are hints of a life after death earlier in the Republic. 146 And nothing can be inferred from Glaucon’s perhaps affected surprise at Socrates’ offer to prove it. The immortality of the soul as an article of faith and hope, a sanction of moral law, an inspiration of poetry, will be treated lightly by no student of humanity. But there is a certain lack of intellectual seriousness in taking it seriously as a thesis of metaphysical demonstration. 147 Plato’s belief in immortality was a conviction of the psychological and moral impossibility of sheer materialism, and a broad faith in the unseen, the spiritual, the ideal. The logical obstacles to a positive demonstration of personal immortality were as obvious to him as they are to his critics. 148

Plato’s belief in immortality was a conviction of the psychological and moral impossibility of sheer materialism, and a broad faith in the unseen, the spiritual, the ideal

The immortality of the individual soul |lxv| is for Plato a pious hope 149 and an ethical postulate 150 rather than a demonstrable certainty. 151 He essays various demonstrations, but nearly always in connexion with a myth, and of all the proofs attempted but one is repeated. 152 In the Apology Socrates, addressing his judges, affects to leave the question open. 153 But we cannot infer from this that the Apology antedates Plato’s belief in immortality, and Socrates’ language in Crito 54b is precisely in the tone of the Gorgias and the Phaedo 154

Immortality was affirmed before Plato by Pythagorean and Orphic mystics, and in the magnificent poetry of Pindar’s Second Olympian Ode it is distinctly associated with a doctrine of future rewards and punishments. But Plato was the first great writer to enforce it by philosophical arguments, or impress it upon the imagination by vivid eschatological myths. And the Platonic dialogues, as Rohde shows, 155 remained the chief source of the hopes and aspirations of the educated minority throughout subsequent antiquity. Plato’s name was the symbol and rallying point of the entire religious and philosophic |lxvi| opposition to the dogmatic materialism of the Epicureans and of the positive wing of the Peripatetics. Cicero and Plutarch were in this his disciples. The more wistful and religious spirits of Stoicism—a Seneca, a Marcus Aurelius—came more and more to see in Platonism the hopeful alternative of the great perhaps. Neo-Platonists and Neo-Pythagoreans never grew weary of expanding and allegorizing the great myths of the Gorgias, Phaedo, and Republic. They were directly or indirectly the chief inspiration of the sixth book of the Aeneid, and in the majority of later sepulchral epigrams that express the hope of immortality a Platonic colouring is perceptible. All this was due far more to the spell of Plato’s genius than to the force of his arguments. That the soul is the principle of motion (Phaedrus 245c ff., Laws 893b ff.), that it must have pre-existed because its apprehension of the ideas is reminiscence (Phaedo 72e ff.), that it could be destroyed only by its own specific evil, injustice, which does not in fact destroy it (Republic 608-611), that it cannot cease to exist because the idea of life which is essentially present with it will not admit its opposite (Phaedo 105d-e)—these arguments may convince metaphysicians, but they will not stir the emotion of conviction that is fostered by the serene confidence of Socrates in the hour of death (Phaedo 114-118), by the vivid vision of the scarred and naked soul shivering at the bar of Rhadamanthus (Gorgias 524d-e), by the detailed verisimilitude of the message brought back by the Angel from there, Er, the son of Armenius (Republic 614b ff.).

The Epicureans and the more austere Stoics |lxvii| censured this mythological symbolism as unworthy of a philosopher; and Emerson contrasts Plato’s license of affirmation with the self-restraint of the Author of Christianity, who refused to entertain the populace with that picture. But Plato has anticipated their criticism, saying in substance: No reasonable man will affirm that these things are precisely as I have described them. But since the soul is immortal, something of the kind must be true, and we ought to repeat and croon it over to ourselves in order to keep faith and hope alive (Phaedo 114d). This plea could be rejected only by those who are willing to affirm that Plato’s poetical imaginings have seen more harmful in the encouragement of superstition than helpful in the maintenance of religious hope and moral faith. 156

But what of the metaphysical arguments? Did Plato himself take them seriously? And are they, therefore, to be taken seriously by the interpreters of his philosophy? Are they essential links in a system? Can we find in them clues to the progress and development of his thought and even date the dialogues with their aid? It is not necessary to answer these questions here. On the validity of the arguments it would be idle to waste words. Some of them, reinforced by the Theaetetus, may help to show the inadequacy of a dogmatic materialistic psychology. At the most they prove the eternity of something other than matter which may be called soul. They do not prove the immortality of the individual soul, which is nevertheless plainly taken as proved in the eschatological myths and their ethical applications. |lxviii| That the supreme dialectician, Plato, was himself unaware of that which is so readily perceived by every puny whipster who thinks to get his sword is to me unthinkable. A semblance of precedent proof was essential even to the literary effect of the concluding myths. And Plato himself in the Laws has warned us that an affirmative answer to some questions is required for the salvation of society and the moral government of mankind. 157

But the myth itself is the really significant expression of Plato’s hope and faith, and of its influence, hardly less than that of some national religions, upon the souls of men. After enumerating the blessings that normally attend the old age of the righteous man in this world, he says, we may fitly allow our imagination to dwell upon the rewards that await him in the world to come.

The enormous literature of the Platonic myths 158 deals partly with their conjectural sources, partly with their place and function in Plato’s art and philosophy, and too little with the framework of definite meaning as distinguished from the remoter and more fanciful suggestions with which the ingenuity of commentators has sometimes obscured it. Leaving the translation and the notes to speak for themselves, I need here say only a few words on this last point. |lxix|

If I may use without entirely adopting Professor Stewart’s distinction between myth and allegory, the distinctive feature of the Platonic myth is that it embodies and reconciles the conflicting excellences of both—the transcendental feeling, the poetic mysticism of the true myth and the, to Professor Stewart, almost offensive lucidity of the allegory. In this it only exalts and intensifies a feature of Plato’s style as a whole. He is unique in his power to reconcile formal dialectic and deliberate rhetoric with imagination and sincerity of feeling. He announces the effect that he intends to produce and produces it in defiance of the psychology of Goethe’s Da fühlt man Absicht und man wird verstimmt. He can pour his imagination, his poetry, his mysticism, his exhortation, and his edification into a pre-determined logical mould. He modulates from one chord to the other at the precise moment when satiety begins. 159 He starts from a definition, proceeds by analysis and division through firstlies and secondlies to perorations that sweep the emotional reader off his feet and make him forget or deny the dialectic that conducted him to the mount of vision. As Emerson puts it, He points and quibbles; and by and by comes a sentence that moves the sea and land. 160

The definite thoughts embodied in the myth of Er the son of Armenius belong to Plato’s permanent stock of opinions and do not differ appreciably from those of his other myths or the implied conclusions of his arguments. 161 The saving faith in immortality and judgement to come cannot rest on scientific demonstration only. It needs the confirmations of imagination, intuition, vision, revelation. The universe is a wonderful place whose structure is known to us only imperfectly and in part. Symbols are the fit expression of our dim apprehensions of its infinite possibilities. Heaven and hell are symbols of the most vital of all divisions, that which separates the virtuous from the vicious will. Purgatory may mark the distinction between remediable and curable wrong and that which admits of no pardon. 162 They are perhaps states of mind rather than places, but imagination may use what our imperfect science knows or divines of the world beneath our feet or the universe above our heads to give them a local habitation and a name, and our fancy may play in like manner with the ultimate unanswerable questions of philosophy: Whence comes evil? 163 and are our wills free? 164 If the soul is immortal and lives through endless transformations and transmigrations, it may be that the evil which baffles us here had its origin in some defect of will in worlds before the man (Republic 613a). Perhaps a great choice was offered to us and we chose wrong under the influence of mistaken ideas acquired in a former misspent life (618-619). Whatever the |lxxi| measure of truth in these fancies two principles of religion and morals stand fast. God is blameless (617e), and we must always blame rather ourselves. 165 Our wills are somehow ours to make them his; though we must think of the sins of others as due solely to ignorance. 166 It matters not that the Aristotelians will argue that this is reasoning in a circle. 167 We know and must believe that virtue is free (617e). And all the divinations of the soul and all the profounder interpretations of experience reiterate the lesson that the way of life that will present us fearless at the bar of eternal justice is the way that will yield the truest happiness here. 168 If we hold to that faith, then both in our earthly pilgrimage and in all the adventures of the soul hereafter, with us it will be well.

The Text

As regards the text I have little to add to what was said in the first volume, except a few qualifications to avoid misunderstanding. I have tried to be a little more careful than I was in the first volume in correcting minor inconsistencies due to the reprinting of the Teubner text of Hermann. But the opportunities which these might afford to captious criticism do not in the least affect the main principle or its applications. That is simply that the variations between the |lxxii| chief modern editions rarely make any difference for Plato’s thought or even for his style, and that the decision between different readings in the case of Plato should usually turn, not on any scientific principle of text criticism, but on knowledge of Plato and knowledge of the Greek language. To put it drastically: for all practical purposes of the student of the Greek language, literature and philosophy, Hermann’s text of the Republic is quite as good as the more scientific text of Burnet or the text that might be constructed from the critical notes in Wilamowitz’ appendix. Hermann’s judgement on questions of Greek idiom and Platonic usage was quite as good as theirs. This is not meant as an illiberal disparagement of the great and indispensable special disciplines of text criticism and paleography. It is merely a commonsense vindication of the intellectual right of those who prefer to do so to approach the study of Plato from another point of view.

The Translation

As regards the translation, I impenitently reaffirm the principles that I stated in the preface to the first volume—whatever errors of judgement I may commit in their application. Much of the Republic can be made easy reading for any literate reader. But some of the subtler and more metaphysical passages can be translated in that way only at the cost of misrepresentation of the meaning. In order to bring out the real significance of Plato’s thought it is sometimes necessary to translate the same phrase in two ways, sometimes to vary a phrase which Plato repeats or |lxxiii| repeat a synonym which he prefers to vary. It is often desirable to use two words to suggest the two-fold associations of one. To take the simplest example, it is even more misleading to translate eidos Form than it is to translate it idea—idea or form (without a capital letter) is less likely to be (misunderstood.

Again, Plato did not write in the smooth, even style which Dionysius of Halicarnassus admired in Lysias and Matthew Arnold in Addison, and it is not the business of the translator to clothe him in the garb of that style.

Provided the meaning is plain and the emphasis right, he allows himself unlimited freedom in anacoluthons, short cuts, sharp corners, ellipses and generally in what I have elsewhere called illogical idiom. Anyone who does not like that style should give his days and nights to the study of Isocrates and Lysias. According to his mood and the context Plato’s style ranges from Attic simplicity to metaphysical abstraction, from high-flown poetical prose to plain colloquial diction. And his colloquialism, though usually kept within the bounds of Attic urbanity, is not lacking in Aristophanic touches which, if rightly rendered, shock the taste of critics who approach him with a stronger sense of the dignity of philosophy than they have of Greek idiom. In deference to friendly criticism I have generally suppressed or transferred to footnotes my attempts to reproduce this feature of Plato’s style. But I am not convinced. As Taine aptly says (Life and Letters, p. 53), M. Cousin’s elegant Plato is not at all like the easy…but always natural Plato of reality. He would shock us if we saw him as he is.

Endnotes

1^ Cf. Shorey, De Platonis Idearum Doctrina, Munich, 1884, p. 1, and review of A. E. Taylor’s Varia Socratica, in Classical Philology vi., 1911, pp.361 ff.; Ritter, Neue Untersuchungen, Munich, 1910, pp. 228-326; Lewis Campbell, The Theaetetus of Plato, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1883, pp. 268-269; C. M. Gillespie, The Use of Eidos and Idea in Hippocrates, Classical Quarterly, vi., 1912, pp. 178-203; Zeller, ii. I 4, pp. 658, n. 2 and 661, n. 1; Wilamowitz, Platon, ii. pp. 248 ff.; Friedlander, Platon, i. pp. 16 ff.

2^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 75.

3^ It is hard to understand the acceptance by several scholars of Stenzel’s view that the concept and consequently the idea is a late discovery in the Platonic dialogues, a result in fact of the analyses of the Sophist. He must take concept in some very esoteric significance. For to common sense nothing can be plainer than that the concept is implied in Socrates’ attempts to define ethical terms and that it distinctly emerges together with the terminology at least of the idea in the minor dialogues of Plato and especially in the Euthyphro. Stenzel’s thought seems to be that the concept involves predication and that predication can be fully understood only after the analysis of sentence structure in the Sophist and the discovery of the meaning of is. But surely the conscious analysis of sentence structure and the function of the copula is one thing and the correct use of predication, of propositions and the conversion of propositions and their combination in virtual syllogisms is another. All the elements of a sound logic are present in Plato’s minor dialogues. They are correctly employed in inductive and deductive reasoning, in the quest for definitions and in the testing of them when found. If Stenzel means that the nature of the concept, of the general idea, of abstractions is not definitively understood in the minor dialogues his postulate proves or demands too much. The ultimate nature of the concept is still debated today. But for all practical purposes of common sense any one who consistently endeavours to define abstract and general terms and who applies a sound logic to the testing of the definitions proposed, has a sufficient notion of the concept. And anyone who apprehends the concept may go on to hypostatize it either by an instinctive tendency of human nature and speech, or with conscious metaphysics as Plato did.

4^ Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 27 ff.

5^ See Shorey in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, pp. 579-583.

6^ Cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 1043 b 21 and 991 b 6; Ross, i. pp. 192 and 199; and What Plato Said, p. 584.

7^ Cf. Charmides 158e, Phaedo 96b, What Plato Said, p. 533, Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 47-48.

8^ Cf. Cratylus 440b-c.

9^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 574.

10^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 586, on Parmenides 135c.

11^ Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 39, 268, 574.

12^ See Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 30, What Plato Said, p. 585, on Parmenides 132b.

13^ Cf. Meno 81d-e and What Plato Said, p. 515, on Meno 86b.

14^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 458, on Euthyphro 6e.

15^ See supra, p. xvi.

16^ Cf. Vol. I. pp. xl-xli, and What Plato Said, pp. 226-227. It is also used in an intentionally crude form to confirm the banishment of the poets. The poet does not deal in essential truth, he copies the copy of the reality. Cf. infra, p. lxii, on 596 a ff. and What Plato Said, p. 249. Stenzel’s justification of this (Platon der Erzieher, p. 175) by the consideration that good joiners’ work involves mathematics seems fanciful and is certainly not in Plato’s text.

17^ Supra, Vol. I. pp. 516 ff.

18^ Cf. supra, Vol. I. pp. 516-517, 520-521, What Plato Said, pp. 233-234.

19^ Republic 477a ff., 479e, 484b, 486a, 500b.

20^ Republic 517b, 518a, 518c, 520d.

21^ Republic 526e.

22^ Republic 586b, Gorgias 493b.

23^ Phaedo 74 a. For the threefold aspect of the Platonic ideas in metaphysics, logic and aesthetics see my Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 27, and T. E. Jessup, The Metaphysics of Plato, Journal of Philosophical Studies (1930), pp. 41-42. See supra, Vol. I. pp. 504-505.

24^ See Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 31, What Plato Said, p. 458.

25^ Cf. supra, pp. xvi and xviii.

26^ Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 28 and p. 29, n. 188.

27^ This Neoplatonic doctrine—based on a misinterpretation of such passages as Republic 597b f.—was adopted by many Christian fathers and mediaeval scholars. Cf. Alcinous in Hermann, Plato, vi. p. 163; Baumgartner, Philos. des Alarms de Insulis, p. 54; Zeller ii. I 4, p. 664, n. 5; Taylor, Mediaeval Mind, ii. pp. 485-486; Webb, Studies in the History of Natural Theology p. 241; Harris, Duns Scotus, ii. p. 195; C. G. Field, The Origin and Development of Plato’s Theory of Ideas, pp. 21-22; Otto Kluge, Darstellung u. Beurteilung der Einwendungen des Aristotle gegen die Platon Ideenlehre, p. 24.

28^ It is very difficult to argue with those who attribute this doctrine of ideas and numbers to Plato. Sometimes they seem to affirm it only on the authority of Aristotle, which they admit is in most cases hopelessly confused with his statements about Speusippus and Xenocrates and other members of the Academy. Sometimes they seem to admit that the doctrine is not to be found in Plato’s extant writings. Sometimes they hint rather than say that certain passages of the Philebus and the Timaeus suggest that Plato’s mind was working in this direction, though they are usually too cautious now to affirm anything positive about Philebus 15-16d, or Timaeus 53b. I have more than once shown that there is no difficulty in treating numerical ideas precisely like other ideas in their relation to concretes. The number five is to five apples as redness is to red apples. It is present with them. I have repeatedly collected and interpreted the Platonic passages that probably misled uncritical students of the Academy (cf. What Plato Said, p. 605, and infra on Republic525d, 526a). And the distinction that there is only one idea while there are many numbers of the same kind is quite pointless. There Is one idea of redness that is metaphysically or teleologically really present entire in many red things and there is one idea of five or fiveness which is similarly present in many groups of five. There is no more difficulty about the fives that are present as factors in ten, fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five than there is about any other ideas that may mingle with or enter into the definition of another idea. The whole theory is a piece of scholastic hair-splitting to which a sound interpretation of what Plato says lends no support. And there is no space and no need to transcribe here the exhaustive collections of Robin (La Theorie platonicienne des Idees et des Nombres d’apres Aristote) or Ross’s repeated summaries of them in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. If Plato’s mind was really working towards such conclusions, why is there no hint of them in his huge work of the Laws, or—if we grant them genuine for the sake of the argument—in the Epistles?

29^ Cf. Parmenides 132b-c, and What Plato Said, p. 585, and ibid. p. 594 on Sophist 250b, Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 30.

30^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 560, Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 35 and n. 238.

31^ Republic 476a f. Cf. Vol. I. pp. Republic 516-517, 505a ff., 517b ff.

32^ Cf. Republic 476a, Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 34.

33^ Cf. Republic 597a ὥς γ᾽ ἂν δόξειεν τοῖς περὶ τοὺς τοιούσδε λόγους διατρίβουσιν.

34^ Republic 132 e-133 a. Cf. infra on Republic 597c.

35^ See What Plato Said, pp. 71-73, with marginal references there.

36^ Cf. infra, pp. xxv and 102.

37^ See my paper, The Idea of Good in Plato’s Republic, University of Chicago Studies in Classical Philology, vol. i. (1895), pp. 188-239; my article, Summum Bonum, in Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. xii. pp. 44-48; my review of Jowett and Campbell’s Republic, The Nation, 61, 1895, pp. 83-84; Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 17 and n. 94; What Plato Said, pp. 71-72, 230 ff., 534 on Phaedo 99a.

38^ Cf. on Republic 508b and 509b; Zeller ii. l⁴ pp. 687-688.

39^ Cf. my review of Paul Hinneberg, Die Kultur der Gegenwart, Classical Philology vi. p. 108.

40^ Cf. Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 24, and infra, pp. lvi f.

41^ Cf. my Idea of Good, pp. 188-189, Unity of Plato’s Thought, n. 94, What Plato Said, p. 231.

42^ For the idea of good and God cf. also V. Brochard, Les Mythes dans la philos. de Platon, L’Année Philologique, 1900, p. 11; Pierre Bovet, Le Dieu de Platan, Paris, 1902, p. 177; Raeder, Platos philosophische Entwicklung, pp. 237, 381 f.; Zeller, Philosophische d. Gr. ii. I 4, p. 718, n. 1, pp. 667, 694, 707 ff.; Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics (English trans.), ii. p. 327; Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, iii. pp. 85 and 21 1; Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, ii. p. 126; Gustave Schneider, Die plat. Metaphysik, p. 109; Taylor, Plato, pp. 85-89; Adam, The Vitality of Platonism, pp. 22 and 132; The Religious Teachers of Greece, pp. 442 f., with my review in Philosophical Review vol. 18, pp. 62-63; Apelt, Beitrage zur Geschichte der griechischen Philososophische, Vorrede, p. vi.; H. Tietzel, Die Idee des Guten in Platons Staat und der Gottesbegriff, Progr. Wetzlar, 1894.

43^ Cf. infra on Republic 506e, p. 95, note f.

44^ Republic 516b, 517b-c, Symposium 210b ff. Cf. Republic 500b-c.

45^ Cf. infra, pp. 100-101, on Republic 508a.

46^ Cf. infra, p. 101, note c. on 508b.

47^ Cf. supra, pp. xx-xxi, Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 82 f.

48^ Cf. infra on 539c, p. 227, note d.

49^ Idea of Good, p. 229.

50^ H. J. Paton, Plato’s Theory of Eikasia, Aristotelian Society, 1922, p. 69.

51^ Crito 49d, infra, p. 175, note c, on 527e.

52^ Cf. infra, p. 111.

53^ Gorgias 513e, 517b-c, 504d-e, Laws 705d-e, 693b-c, 770d, 962d, 963a.

54^ Politicus 309-310, Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 62, n. 481: Laws and Republic passim.

55^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 613 on Timaeus 23a-b.

56^ Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 329, 346-347.

57^ Cf. my Idea of Good, p. 232.

58^ Cf. my Idea of Good, p. 227.

59^ Cf. Protagoras 318-319, Gorgias 459e, 456-457.

60^ Cf. infra, p. 220, note a, on Republic537d ff.

61^ Cf. notes on Book vii. 521 ff., esp. on 521c, 523a, 527a.

62^ Cf. on 525c.

63^ Herbert Spencer speaks of Social science…the science standing above all others in subtlety and complexity: the science which the highest intelligence alone can master…—the science now taught to undergraduates who have not received the Platonic preparation.

64^ Cf. 537a-b, d.

65^ Cf. 539e-540a.

66^ See Republic 534b-c and notes.

67^ Cf. on Republic 529a, 530b.

68^ Platonism and the History of Science, American Philosophical Society Proceedings lxvi. pp. 171 f., What Plato Said, pp. 235-236.

69^ Cf. on Republic 530b.

70^ Cf. Aristotle Politics 1316 a 1 f. ἐν δὲ τῇ Πολιτείᾳ λέγεται μὲν περὶ τῶν μεταβολῶν ὑπὸ τοῦ Σωκράτους, οὐ μέντοι λέγεται καλῶς {The subject of revolutions is discussed by Socrates in the Republic, but is not discussed well.}, which is rather cool after all his borrowings from Republic viii. in the preceding pages. And in 1286 b 15 ff. he seems to accept the development of Republic viii. See also Frutiger, Mythes de Platon, p. 42.

71^ Cf. Vol. I. on Republic 449a-b.

72^ Cf. Vol. I. p. xvi, What Plato Said, p. 225.

73^ Cf. on 499d and What Plato Said, p. 564.

74^ Cf. Symposium 207-208, Republic vii. on the heavens, 530b.

75^ Cf. Timaeus 37d, 41c-d, What Plato Said, p. 335.

76^ For Aristotle’s opinion cf. Politics 1316 a 5 ff. For discussions of the number cf. Zeller, Phil. d. Gr. ii. I 4, pp. 857-860; Jowett’s translation of the Republic (1888), pp.| cxxx ff.; Adam, Republic, vol. ii. pp. 264-312; Ueberweg-Praechter, Geschichte der Philosophie, Altertum, (1926), 94* ff.; Paul Tannery, Le Nombre Nuptial dans Platon, Rev. Philos. i., 1876, pp. 170-188; Georg Albert, Die platonische Zahl, Wien, 1896, and Der Sinn der plat. Zahl, Philologus, vol. I 66 (1907), pp. 153-156; J. Dupuis, Le Nombre Géométrique de Platon, Annuaire de l’Assoc. des Et. grecques, vol. 18, pp. 218-255; Frutiger, Mythes de Platon, pp. 47-48. Cf. also Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, iii. p. 336, C. Ritter, Platons Stellung zu den Aufgaben der Naturwissenschaft, pp. 91-94; Friedländer, Platon, i. p. 108; G. Kafka in Philologus 73, pp. 109-121; D. B. Monro in Class. Rev. vi. (1892) pp. 152-156; and Adam, ibid. pp. 240-244, and xvi. pp. 17-23; Fr. Hultsch in Phil. Woch. xii. (1892) pp. 1256-1258. Cf. further Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, p. 25 It is to be observed that Plato’s ‘perfect year’ is also 36,000 solar years (Adam’s Republic, vol. ii. p. 302), and that it is probably connected with the precession of the equinoxes; Carl Vering, Platons Staat, p. 167 Den Biologen wird die Zahlenmystik Platons an die Mendelschen Vererbungstabellen erinnern, durch welche die geniale Ahnung Platons, dass es zahlenmassig darstellbare Vererbungsgesetze geben müsse, nach mehr als 2000 Jahren ihre wissenschaftliche Rechtfertigung gefunden hat. Cf. Baudrillart, J. Bodin et son temps, p. 360 …A tout cela Bodin ajoute des calculs cabalistiques sur la duree des empires, sur le nombre nuptial…

77^ Republic 545d, Laws 683e, 682d-e, Classical Philology xvii. pp. 154-155. Cf. Aristotle Politics 1305 a 39.

78^ Republic 547b. Cf. 415a-b.

79^ Aristotle says that there are not only more kinds of government than these, but there are many sub-species of each. Cf. Aristotle Politics vi., 1288 ff., 1279 b, 1229 a 8, 1289 a 8, Newman, vol. i. pp. 494 ff., and also Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 62-63.

80^ The case of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon is one of the most outstanding examples.

81^ Cf., e.g., Republic549c and 553a with Adam’s notes, 551b, 556e, 562d, 563c, 565b.

82^ Cf. also Matthew Arnold’s description of the Barbarians and the Philistines in Culture and Anarchy.

83^ Cf. Mill, Dissertations and Discussions iii. p. 300 The question concerning the summum bonum or what is the same thing, concerning the foundation of morality, etc.

84^ This has recently been denied. But the essential truth of the generalization is not appreciably affected by a few fragments whose religious, ethical and spiritual purpose is doubtful.

85^ See T. R. Glover, Democracy in the Ancient World, pp. 75-77; supra, Vol. I. p. xxxvi: What Plato Said, pp. 6, 141-142.

86^ Cf. Republic 538c-e.

87^ Cf. Republic 358c, Protagoras 333c, Euthydemus 279b, Philebus66e, Gorgias 470d, Laws 662c, 885d, Sophist 265c, Phaedo 92d.

88^ Cf. Gorgias 527a-b, Republic i., Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 25.

89^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 503, on Gorgias 461c, for references, and ibid. pp. 137, 145, 215 ff., 392-393, also W. Jaeger, Die griechische Staatsethik im Zeitalter des Platon, Die Antike, Bd. x. Heft 1, esp. p. 8.

90^ Cf. e.g., Greek Thinkers, vol. i. ch. iv., especially pp. 403-411.

91^ See International Journal of Ethics, January 1929, pp. 232-233; What Plato Said, pp. 317, and 364; Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 9-27.

92^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 141.

93^ Cf. e.g., Science of Ethics, pp. 397-398, 434, and the whole problem of the book of Job. Cf. also Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, pp. 172-173.

94^ Cf. Gorgias 526d, Laws 728, 904d-e, Crito 54b-c; and Arnold, God and the Bible, chap. iii. p. 136: These truths…are the matter of an immense experience which is still going forward…But if any man is so entirely without affinity for them…for him Literature and Dogma was not written.<

95^ Cf. also Morley, Rousseau, ii. 280, Voltaire, p. 293; Faguet, Pour qu’on Use Platon, pp. 99-101, 138; Gomperz, Greek Thinkers, iv. 257-258, 293-294; Huxley, Science and Hebrew Tradition, p. 339, and the entire controversy arising out of his Evolution and Ethics; Arcesilas apud Brochard, Les Sceptiques grecs, p. 171. Cf. George Eliot’s novels passim, and Mill’s Those whose conscientious feelings are so weak as to allow of their asking this question, which is practically equivalent to Shaftesbury’s If any gentleman asks why he should not wear a dirty shirt I reply that he must be a very dirty gentleman to ask the question. Cf. also Cicero, De officiis, iii. 29; Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, passim, e.g. 426 ff., and the arguments of Hazlitt, Macaulay and others against the Utilitarians. Such passages are a conclusive answer to the objection that Plato has not proved his case.

96^ Republic 419-420. Cf. Vol. I. pp. 314-315.

97^ Cf. Republic 580d ff., Laws 658-659.

98^ i>God and the Bible, p. xxxv.

99^ Brochard, La Morale de Platon, says: Aucun moraliste moderne n’entreprendrait de defendre la doctrine de Platon, qui apparait comme une gageure. Cf. Westermarck, Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, i. pp. 17, 18, 321, and passim.

100^ Cf. Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, p. 354: Evolution implies that there must be at least an approximate coincidence, and there is no apparent a priori reason why the coincidence should not be indefinitely close.

101^ See my article in the June 1934, number of the Atlantic Monthly, pp. 722-723.

102^ Cf. Laws 890d, 907c, 718d.

103^ Laws 663c-d What Plato Said, p. 364) may imply economy in theology, but not in ethical religion. Cf. also What Plato Said, p. 626, and Isocrates Antidosis 283 καὶ ταῦτα καὶ ταῖς ἀληθείαις οὕτως ἔχει, καὶ συμφέρει τὸν τρόπον τοῦτον λέγεσθαι περὶ αὐτῶν. Cf. Harnack, History of Dogma, pp. 183-184: Gregory of Nazianzus speaks of a necessary and salutary οἰκονομηθῆναι τὴν ἀλήθειαν.

104^ Cf. Republic 618e, Laws 662b.

105^ Cf. Laws 662d-663a, What Plato Said, p. 364.

106^ Cf. Vol. I. p. xxxv.

107^ Republic 574 c. Cf. Aristophanes Clouds 1321 ff., 1421 ff.

108^ Cf. Tacitus, Annals vi. 6 neque frustra praestantissimus sapientiae firmare solitus est, si recludantur tyrannonim mentes, posse aspici laniatus et ictus, quando ut corpora verberibus, ita saevitia, libidine, malis consultis animus dilaceretur. {With profound meaning was it often affirmed by the greatest teacher of philosophy that, could the minds of tyrants be laid bare, there would be seen gashes and wounds; for, as the body is lacerated by scourging, so is the spirit by brutality, by lust and by evil thoughts.}

109^ He calls it a familiar short cut to the desired conclusion (Science of Ethics, p. 399). Cf. also Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, p. 148.

110^ Cf. Gorgias 494e (What Plato Said, p. 508) and 499b. See too Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, p. 400.

111^ Cf. Philebus 67b, What Plato Said, p. 611. There is no space to repeat or quote here the arguments against the utilitarian point of view set forth by Macaulay and others. Cf. also Sidgwick, Method of Ethics, pp. 93-94, 121.

112^ Cf. Theaetetus 161c, Laws 716c.

113^ Cf. Politicus 284b-c, 285a-b.

114^ Cf. W. H. Fairbrother, The Relation of Ethics to Metaphysics, Mind, xiii., 1904, p. 43; Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 1886, p. xxvi. Cf. supra, p. xxvi.

115^ Cf. supra, p. xxvi.

116^ Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 130-131.

117^ Though the Philebus is in fact later than the Republic, as Mill said long before style statistics were thought of.

118^ Unity of Plato’s Thought, p. 24.

119^ Already in the Gorgias 493e, 494c and the Phaedrus 258e ὧν προλυπηθῆναι δεῖ ἢ μηδὲ ἡσθῆναι, etc.; Republic 584a-b. It has even been argued that the Phaedrus passage takes for granted the fuller discussion of the Philebus (W. H. Thompson, Phaedrus, ad loc.), and why not? Anything may be argued if the dialogues are supposed to grow out of one another and not out of Plato’s mind.

120^ Philebus 53c ff., 54e virtually = Gorgias 493e. Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 322-323. The literal-minded objection of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1174 b, and some moderns, that pleasure is not literally = κίνησις {moving}, is beside the point.

121^ Gorgias 493b τετρημένος εἴη πίθος, etc., Phaedo 84a ἀνήνυτον ἔργον … Πηνελόπης ἱστὸν, Gorgias 507e, Philebus 54e.

122^ Phaedo 64b, Gorgias 492e, Philebus 54e καί φασι ζῆν οὐκ ἂν δέξασθαι, etc. In Laws 733, 734b, the hedonistic calculus of the Protagoras is retained, but is applied not directly to the individual acts, but to types of life. The life of moderate pleasures is a priori the more pleasurable because it necessarily yields a more favourable balance than the life of intense pleasures.

123^ Phaedo 66c, Republic 586a-b, 588.

124^ Theaetetus176b ff., Laws 716d, 728a-b, Republic 352a-b, 612e, Philebus 39e.

125^ Philebus 33b.

126^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 500.

127^ Republic 512d-e, What Plato Said, p. 149.

128^ Phaedo 69a, What Plato Said, pp. 171 and 174.

129^ See my review of Lodge in International Journal of Ethics, xxxix. pp. 232-233, and for the ethical argument of the Republic as a whole my Idea of Justice in Plato’s Republic, The Ethical Record, January 1890, pp. 185-199.

130^ Phaedo 69a f., What Plato Said, p. 500.

131^ Cf. Vol. I. p. xvi.

132^ Republic 589d-e. Cf. Timaeus 90a-b.

133^ Cf. Vol. I. pp. xlii-xliii.

134^ Cf. supra, Vol. I. pp. xxi-xxii, What Plato Said, pp. 140, 189, 248, infra, p. 104.

135^ Sidney’s Defense of Poesy is probably the most familiar.

136^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 249, supra, p. xviii.

137^ For, don’t you mark, we’re made so that we love|First when we see them painted, things we have passed|Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;|And so they are better, painted—better to us.

138^ Aristotle’s doctrine of κάθαρσις. Cf. my review of Finsler, Platon und die aristotelische Poetik, Classical Philology iii. pp. 461-462; also The Nation, xc. (1910) p. 319; Sikes, Greek View of Poetry, pp. 118-125.

139^ Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 17 ff.

140^ Cf. Friedländer, Platon, i. pp. 196 and 200: Sidney, in English Men of Letters, p. 150 Of all the philosophers he is the most poetical; Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome, p. 57 But when we remember that the great poet Plato (as he must be called) banished poets from his Republic, we have a glimmer of why the great Greek Emperor banished sculptors from his empire.

141^ What Plato Said, pp. 7-9; Unity of Plato’s Thought, pp. 81-82.

142^ Republic 607c-d: cf. What Plato Said, p. 250.

143^ See also my review of Pater, Plato and Platonism in The Dial, xiv. (1893) p. 211.

144^ Cf. Republic Bk. ii., especially 367b-e.

145^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 251.

146^ Cf. Republic 330d-e and Vol. I. p. 16.

147^ Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 180, 177, 535.

148^ See my review of Gaye, The Platonic Conception of Immortality, in Philosophical Review xiv., 1905, pp. 590-595.

149^ Phaedo 114d χρὴ τὰ τοιαῦτα ὥσπερ ἐπᾴδειν ἑαυτῷ, Gorgias 524a-b, Phaedo 67b.

150^ Republic 608c ff., Laws 881a, 967d-e, 959a-b; with τὸν δὲ ὄντα ἡμῶν ἕκαστον ὄντως, ἀθάνατον |εἶναι| ψυχὴν cf. Phaedo 115d-e, and with the idea, 959b, that the only βοήθεια at the bar of Hades is a just life in this world, cf. Gorgias 522c-d, 526e, Crito 54b.

151^ Phaedo 85c τὸ μὲν σαφὲς εἰδέναι ἐν τῷ νῦν βίῳ ἢ ἀδύνατον (εἶναι) ψυχήν. Cf. 107a-b, Timaeus 72d, Meno 86a-b, Phaedrus 265c.

152^ That based on the theory that the soul is the source of all motion, Phaedrus 245c ff., Laws 893b ff.

153^ Apology 40d. Cf. also Phaedo 91b.

154^ Cratylus 403d-e implies the doctrine of Phaedo 67, 68.

155^ Psyche 5th and 6th ed. vol. ii. p. 265.

156^ Cf. my article in the June 1934 Atlantic Monthly, p. 721.

157^ Cf. supra, p. li.

158^ Cf., e.g., L. Couturat, De mythis Platonicis, Stewart, The Myths of Plato, with my review in Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method, 3, pp. 495-498; P. Frutiger, Les Mythes de Platon; Karl Bernhardt, Platons Mythen, Bonn, 1927; Friedlander, Platon, i. pp. 199 ff.; W. Willi, Versuch einer Grundlegung der platonischen Mythopoiie; J. Tate, Socrates and the Myths, Classical Quarterly, xxvii. (April 1933) pp. 74-80; V. Brochard, Les Mythes dans la philosophie de Platon, L’Année Philologique, 1900, pp. 1-13.

159^ Cf. e.g., Phaedo 115a, 77e-78a, Euthyphro 6b-c, 11 b-c, Gorgias 507e. The little sermons scattered through the Laws have the same effect. Cf. in Goethe’s Faust the chorus of angels followed by the devil. Cf. Carl Vering, Platons Staat, p. 7 Ein Dialog Platons wirkt niemals ermüdend; jedesmal greift der Dichter Platon sofort ein, wenn der Philosoph durch ein schweres Problem dem Leser hart zugesetzt hat. Cf. also Sikes, Greek View of Poetry, p. 128.

160^ Cf. e.g., Symposium 211-212, Gorgias, in fine, Phaedo 114c, Republic, in fine.

161^ Cf. the notes on 614 ff.

162^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 536, on Phaedo 113d and 113e.

163^ Cf. What Plato Said, p. 578, on Theaetetus 176a.

164^ Cf. What Plato Said, pp. 644-645, on Laws 904c.

165^ Cf. Laws 727b, Republic 619c, Phaedo 90d, Cratylus 411c, etc.

166^ Cf. Protagoras 345d-e, 358c-d, Laws 734b, and What Plato Said, p. 640, on 860d.

167^ Cf. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1114b 19.

168^ Republic 621c. Cf. Gorgias 526d-e, Phaedo 114e.

Top ↑

• Back
• Next