Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/66

lviii peace the preparation for war and their duties to the State, which are also their duties to one another, take up their whole life and time. The only other interest which is allowed to them besides that of war is the interest of philosophy. When they are too old to be soldiers they are to retire from active life and to have a second novitiate, of study and contemplation. There is an element of monasticism even in Plato’s communism. If he could have done without children, he might have converted his republic into a religious order. Neither in the “Laws” (v. 739 B), when the daylight of common-sense breaks in upon him, does he retract his error. In the State of which he would be the founder, there is no marrying or giving in marriage: but because of the infirmity of mankind, he condescends to allow the law of nature to prevail.

(γ) But Plato has an equal, or, in his own estimation, even greater paradox in reserve, which is summed up in the famous text, “Until kings are philosophers or philosophers are kings, cities will never cease from ill.” And by philosophers he explains himself to mean those who are capable of apprehending ideas, especially the idea of good. To the attainment of this higher knowledge the second education is directed. Through a process of training which has already made them good citizens they are now to be made good legislators. We find with some surprise (not unlike the feeling which Aristotle in a well-known passage describes the hearers of Plato’s lectures as experiencing, when they went to a discourse on the idea of good, expecting to be instructed in moral truths, and received instead of them arithmetical and mathematical formulæ) that Plato does not propose for his future legislators any study of finance or law or military tactics, but only of abstract mathematics, as a preparation for the still more abstract conception of good. We ask, with Aristotle, What is the use of a man knowing the idea of good, if he does not know what is good for this individual, this State, this condition of society? We cannot understand how Plato’s legislators or guardians are to be fitted for their work of statesmen by the study of the five mathematical sciences. We vainly search in Plato’s own writings for any explanation of this seeming absurdity.

The discovery of a great metaphysical conception seems to