Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/99

Rh know that one any more than the rest, and insists strongly on the necessity of a variety of knowledge. More scholars are turned out in the City of the Sun in one year than by contemporary methods in ten or fifteen. He evidently believes, like Bacon, that henceforward natural science will play a great part in education, a hope which seems hardly to have been realized, either in our own or in any former age; at any rate the fulfilment of it has been long deferred.

There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this work, and a most enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has little or no charm of style, and falls very far short of the “New Atlantis” of Bacon, and still more of the “Utopia” of Sir Thomas More. It is full of inconsistencies, and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a superficial acquaintance with his writings. It is a work such as one might expect to have been written by a philosopher and man of genius who was also a friar, and who had spent twenty-seven years of his life in a prison of the Inquisition. The most interesting feature of the book, common to Plato and Sir Thomas More, is the deep feeling which is shown by the writer, of the misery and ignorance prevailing among the lower classes in his own time. Campanella takes note of Aristotle’s answer to Plato’s community of property, that in a society where all things are common, no individual would have any motive to work (Arist. “Pol.” ii. 5, § 6); he replies that his citizens being happy and contented in themselves (they are required to work only four hours a day), will have greater regard for their fellows than exists among men at present. He thinks, like Plato, that if he abolishes private feelings and interests, a great public feeling will take their place.

Other writings on ideal States, such as the “Oceana” of Harrington, in which the Lord Archon, meaning Cromwell, is described, not as he was, but as he ought to have been; or the “Argenis” of Barclay, which is a historical allegory of his own time, are too unlike Plato to be worth mentioning. More interesting than either of these, and far more Platonic in style and thought, is Sir John Eliot’s “Monarchy of Man,” in which the prisoner of the Tower, no longer able “to be a politician in the land of his birth,” turns away from politics to view “that other city which is within him,” and finds on