Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/83

Rh of hearing the living voice of a great teacher. He may select for inquiry some point of history or some unexplained phenomenon of nature. An hour a day passed in such scientific or literary pursuits will furnish as many facts as the memory can retain, and will give him “a pleasure not to be repented of” (“Timæus,” 59 D). Only let him beware of being the slave of crotchets, or of running after a will-o’-the-wisp in his ignorance, or in his vanity of attributing to himself the gifts of a poet or assuming the air of a philosopher. He should know the limits of his own powers. Better to build up the mind by slow additions, to creep on quietly from one thing to another, to gain insensibly new powers and new interests in knowledge, than to form vast schemes which are never destined to be realized. But perhaps, as Plato would say, “This is part of another subject” (“Tim.” 87 B); though we may also defend our digression by his example (“Theæt.” 72, 77).

IV. We remark with surprise that the progress of nations or the natural growth of institutions which fill modern treatises on political philosophy seem hardly ever to have attracted the attention of Plato and Aristotle. The ancients were familiar with the mutability of human affairs; they could moralize over the ruins of cities and the fall of empires (cp. Plato, “Statesman” 301, 302, and Sulpicius’s “Letter to Cicero, ad Fam,” iv. 5); by them fate and chance were deemed to be real powers, almost persons, and to have had a great share in political events. The wiser of them like Thucydides believed that “what had been would be again,” and that a tolerable idea of the future could be gathered from the past. Also they had dreams of a golden age which existed once upon a time and might still exist in some unknown land, or might return again in the remote future. But the regular growth of a state enlightened by experience, progressing in knowledge, improving in the arts, of which the citizens were educated by the fulfilment of political duties, appears never to have come within the range of their hopes and aspirations. Such a state had never been seen, and therefore could not be conceived by them. Their experience (cp. Aristot. “Metaph.” xi. 21; Plato, “Laws” iii. 676–679) led them to conclude that there had been cycles of civilization in which the arts had been discovered and lost many times over,