Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/18

x of the eternal and divine realities, to which true education should direct the spiritual vision. At the beginning of Book VII. occurs the most famous of Plato’s similes. This world is likened to a cave wherein we sit as prisoners, facing away from the light, and seeing only distorted shadows of realities.

Books VIII. and IX. form, again, a single important section. Here the baser forms of commonwealth are treated as progressive stages of degeneracy and decay from the ideal State. The analogy with the individual man is still insisted upon at every stage. The whole discussion has close and practical relations with the actual history of various Greek city-States, and is full of political wisdom.

Book X. is largely taken up with a renewed attack upon poetry in what men still consider its noblest forms. Especially to be condemned, as we are told, is its effect in widening our human sympathies! Lastly, the rewards of justice are described. Since they are often clearly inadequate as seen in this life, the immortality of the soul, and the unerring equity of the Divine Judge, are revealed in a magnificent myth, or vision of judgment.

The thoughtful reader will prefer to keep his notebook in hand, and to build up for himself a much more detailed analysis. He should not fail to notice the consummate grace with which every transition in the wide-ranging discussion is managed, and often concealed. No one can or should read the “Republic” in a spirit of unquestioning approval. The furious assault by this great poet, myth-maker, and imaginative artist generally, upon his fellow-craftsmen in that guild must remind us that he is at times a perverse, even a self-contradictory doctrinaire. The proposal to dissolve all true family ties is a still more atrocious attack on the holiest and most helpful of human institutions. In regarding our earthly life as a mere purgatorial transition between two other and infinitely more important states of being, Plato again broke boldly with the prevailing Hellenic sentiments of his day. Here, however, the large Hebraic and Oriental element in the creeds of Christendom enables us to understand, often to sympathize with, utterances which then seemed novel and startling. In general, no thoughtful man or woman can turn the pages of the “Republic” without infinite enrichment and widening of