Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/590

574 increase in racial uniformity and perhaps in uniformity of other sorts connected with immigration, and at the same time a decrease in uniformity of economic status and income and a probable decrease in the stability and social service-ability of family life. Some of these indications look toward progress, others look towards retrogression. As they cannot be reduced to a common denominator, the statistical method is unable to answer the question with which we started. But the indirect results of the investigation are more suggestive than the direct results. The inquiry leads by a new path to the familiar conclusion that the main problems which we are now facing are widely different from the main problems of the past. Political democracy and educational opportunity are to be justified on some theory other than that all individuals are equally endowed by nature. They presuppose a certain fluidity of industrial and social organization. That a new spirit of responsibility is stirring in social and industrial circles is evidenced by the public health movement, the conservation movement, the movement for better labor conditions, and the eugenic movement. Economic problems of present and future importance are less exclusively those of production and more largely those of distribution. The political problems are those growing out of an effort to harmonize our recent industrial changes with American political traditions and political theories.

Plato's political theories have too often been regarded as purely Utopian. It has not been enough recognized that they are based upon work of observation and analysis which may fairly be called scientific. Various problems suggested by Plato would not have occurred to him as questions of abstract speculative interest; and in dealing with these he sometimes advanced explanations that are surprisingly like familiar sociological doctrines of modern times. Thus in the second book of the Republic society is said to reveal the moral nature of the individual, written large. Similarly Herbert Spencer described the character of the aggregate as determined by the characters of the individuals composing it. Elsewhere, affirming homogeneity in the political group, Plato sought to account for the association of like citizens with like on the basis of unifying influences exercised by topography, geographical situation and climate. The same effects of natural environment on civilization are mentioned in a sketch of the origin of society in the Laws. Another proof of Plato's scientific insight is to be found in his discussion of the relation of women to the state. His method here was to study the nature of women as compared to that of men, with a view to discovering whether there was any essential difference between the social functions of the sexes. His conclusions on this point are well known. Not finding in the social economy a single occupation or art for which women could be deemed inherently unfitted, he recommended that they should have the same status as men, undergo the same training, follow the same pursuits, engage, like men, in the operations of war, hold the same offices. In other words, his treatment of this important problem was