Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/72

lxiv speculations of modern times. Many political maxims originate in a reaction against an opposite error; and when the errors against which they were directed have passed away, they in turn become errors.

III. Plato’s views of education are in several respects remarkable; like the rest of the “Republic,” they are partly Greek and partly ideal, beginning with the ordinary curriculum of the Greek youth, and extending to after-life. Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation for another in which education begins again (vi. 498 D). This is the continuous thread which runs through the “Republic,” and which more than any other of his ideas admits of an application to modern life.

He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is disposed to modify the thesis of the “Protagoras,” that the virtues are one, and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world into his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the “Republic” the involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the “Timæus,” “Sophist,” and “Laws” (cp. “Protag.” 345 foll, 352, 355; “Apol.” 25 E; “Gorg.” 468, 509 E). Nor do the so-called Platonic ideas recovered from a former state of existence affect his theory of mental improvement. Still we observe in him the remains of the old Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from within, and is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense. Education, as he says, will implant a principle of intelligence which is better than 10,000 eyes. The paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred notion that all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely renounced; the first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over the rest; the second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual, and to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good. The world of sense is still depreciated and identified with opinion, though admitted to be a shadow of the true. In the “Republic” he is evidently impressed with the conviction that vice arises chiefly from ignorance and may be cured by education; the multitude are hardly to be deemed responsible for what they do (v. 499 E). A faint allusion to the doctrine of reminiscence occurs in the tenth book (621 A); but Plato’s views of