Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/55

Rh converts into the most brutal. For the pair are to have no relation to one another, except at the hymeneal festival; their children are not theirs, but the State’s; nor is any tie of affection to unite them. Yet here the analogy of the animals might have saved Plato from a gigantic error, if he had “not lost sight of his own illustration” (ii. 375 D). For the “nobler sort of birds and beasts” (v. 459 A) nourish and protect their offspring and are faithful to one another.

An eminent physiologist thinks it worth while “to try and place life on a physical basis.” But should not life rest on the moral rather than upon the physical? The higher comes first, then the lower; first the human and rational, afterward the animal. Yet they are not absolutely divided; and in times of sickness or moments of self-indulgence they seem to be only different aspects of a common human nature which includes them both. Neither is the moral the limit of the physical, but the expansion and enlargement of it—the highest form which the physical is capable of receiving. As Plato would say, the body does not take care of the body, and still less of the mind, but the mind takes care of both. In all human action not that which is common to man and the animals is the characteristic element, but that which distinguishes him from them. Even if we admit the physical basis, and resolve all virtue into health of body—“le façon que notre sang circule,” still on merely physical grounds we must come back to ideas. Mind and reason and duty and conscience, under these or other names, are always reappearing. There cannot be health of body without health of mind; nor health of mind without the sense of duty and the love of truth (cp. “Charm.” 156 D, E).

That the greatest of ancient philosophers should in his regulations about marriage have fallen into the error of separating body and mind, does, indeed, appear surprising. Yet the wonder is not so much that Plato should have entertained ideas of morality which to our own age are revolting, but that he should have contradicted himself to an extent which is hardly credible, falling in an instant from the heaven of idealism into the crudest animalism. Rejoicing in the newly found gift of reflection, he appears to have thought out a subject about which he had better have followed the enlightened feeling of his own age. The general sentiment of Hellas was opposed to his