Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/73

Rh education have no more real connection with a previous state of existence than our own; he only proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there already. Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul toward the light.

He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and false, and then goes on to gymnastics; of infancy in the “Republic” he takes no notice, though in the “Laws” he gives sage counsels about the nursing of children and the management of the mothers, and would have an education which is even prior to birth. But in the “Republic” he begins with the age at which the child is capable of receiving ideas, and boldly asserts, in language which sounds paradoxical to modern ears, that he must be taught the false before he can learn the true. The modern and ancient philosophical world are not agreed about truth and falsehood; the one identifies truth almost exclusively with fact, the other with ideas. This is the difference between ourselves and Plato, which is, however, partly a difference of words (cp. supra, p. xxxviii). For we too should admit that a child must receive many lessons which he imperfectly understands; he must be taught some things in a figure only, some, too, which he can hardly be expected to believe when he grows older; but we should limit the use of fiction by the necessity of the case. Plato would draw the line differently; according to him the aim of early education is not truth as a matter of fact, but truth as a matter of principle; the child is to be taught first simple religious truths, and then simple moral truths, and insensibly to learn the lesson of good manners and good taste. He would make an entire reformation of the old mythology; like Xenophanes and Heracleitus he is sensible of the deep chasm which separates his own age from Homer and Hesiod, whom he quotes and invests with an imaginary authority, but only for his own purposes. The lusts and treacheries of the gods are to be banished; the terrors of the world below are to be dispelled; the misbehavior of the Homeric heroes is not to be a model for youth. But there is another strain heard in Homer which may teach our youth endurance; and something may be learned in medicine from the simple practice of the Homeric age. The principles on which religion is to be based are two only: first,