Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/75

Rh and seventeen in mere bodily exercise would be far from improving to the intellect. Secondly, he affirms that music and gymnastics are not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended, the one for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body, but that they are both equally designed for the improvement of the mind. The body, in his view, is the servant of the mind; the subjection of the lower to the higher is for the advantage of both. And doubtless the mind may exercise a very great and paramount influence over the body, if exerted not at particular moments and by fits and starts, but continuously, in making preparation for the whole of life. Other Greek writers saw the mischievous tendency of Spartan discipline (Arist. “Pol.” viii. 4, § 1 foll.; Thuc. ii. 37, 39). But only Plato recognized the fundamental error on which the practice was based.

The subject of gymnastics leads Plato to the sister-subject of medicine, which he further illustrates by the parallel of law. The modern disbelief in medicine has led in this, as in some other departments of knowledge, to a demand for greater simplicity; physicians are becoming aware that they often make diseases “greater and more complicated” by their treatment of them (“Rep.” iv. 426 A). In 2,000 years their art has made but slender progress; what they have gained in the analysis of the parts is in a great degree lost by their feebler conception of the human frame as a whole. They have attended more to the cure of diseases than to the conditions of health; and the improvements in medicine have been more than counterbalanced by the disuse of regular training. Until lately they have hardly thought of air and water, the importance of which was well understood by the ancients; as Aristotle remarks, “Air and water, being the elements which we most use, have the greatest effect upon health” (“Polit.” vii. II, § 4). For ages physicians have been under the dominion of prejudices which have only recently given way; and now there are as many opinions in medicine as in theology, and an equal degree of scepticism and some want of toleration about both. Plato has several good notions about medicine; according to him, “the eye cannot be cured without the rest of the body, nor the body without the mind” (“Charm.” 156 E). No man of sense, he says in the “Timæus,” would take physic; and we heartily sympathize with him in the “Laws” when he declares that “the limbs of the