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But, it is urged, there is no such thing as intelligence in the sense of a control of passion by reason, desire by thought. Granted; it is so much easier to admit objections than to refute them! Let intelligence be interpreted as you will, so be it you recognize in it a delayed response, a moment of reprieve before execution, giving time for the appearance of new impulses, motives, tendencies, and allowing each element in the situation to fall into its place in a co?rdinated whole. Let intelligence be a struggle of impulses, a survival of the fittest desire; let us contrast not reason with passion, but response delayed by the rich interplay of motive forces, with response immediately following upon the first-appearing impulse. Let impulse mean for us fruit that falls unripe from the tree, because too weak to hang till it is mature. Let us understand intelligence as not a faculty superadded to impulse, but rather that co?rdination of impulses which is wrought out by the blows of hard experience. The Socratic ethic fits quite comfortably into this scheme; intelligence is delayed response and morality means, Take your time.

It is charged that the Socratic view involves determinism; and this charge, too, is best met with open-armed admission. We need not raise the question of the pragmatic value of the problem. But to suppose that determinism destroys moral responsibility is to betray the mid-Victorian origin of one's philosophy. Men of insight like Socrates, Plato, and Spinoza, saw without the necessity of argument that moral responsibility is not a matter of freedom of will, but a relation of means to ends, a responsibility of the agent to himself, an intelligent co?rdination of impulses by one's ultimate purposes. Any other morality, whatever pretty name it may display, is the emasculated morality of slaves.

The Secularization of Morals

The great problem involved in the Socratic ethic lies, apparently, in the bearings of the doctrine on social unity and stability. Apparently; for it is wholesome to remember that social organization, like the Sabbath, was made for man, and not the other way about. If social organization demands of the individual more sacrifices than its advantages are worth to him, then the stability of that organization is not a problem, it is a misfortune. But if the state does not demand such sacrifices, the advantage of the individual will be in social behavior; and the question whether he will behave socially becomes a question of how much intelligence he has, how clear-eyed he is in ferreting out his own advantage. In a state that does not ask more from its members than it gives, morality and intelligence and social behavior will not quarrel. The social problem appears here as the twofold problem of, first, making men intelligent, and, second, making social organization so great an advantage to the individual as to insure social behavior in all intelligent men.

"How to make our ideas clear";--what if that be the social problem? What a wealth of import in that little phrase of Socrates,--?? ??--"what is it?" What is my good, my interest? What do I really want?--To find the answer to that, said Robert Louis Stevenson, is to achieve wisdom and old age. What is my country? What is patriotism? "If you wish to converse with me," said Voltaire, "you must define your terms." If you wish to be moral, you must define your terms. If our civilization is to keep its head above the flux of time, we must define our terms.

For these are the critical days of the secularization of moral sanctions; the theological navel-string binding men to "good behavior" has snapped. What are the leaders of men going to do about it? Will they try again the old gospel of self-sacrifice? But a world fed on self-sacrifice is a world of lies, a world choking with the stench of hypocrisy. To preach self-sacrifice is not to solve, it is precisely to shirk, the problem of ethics,--the problem of eliminating individual self-sacrifice while preserving social stability: the problem of reconciling the individual as such with the individual as citizen. Or will our leaders try to replace superstition with an extended physical compulsion, making the policeman and the prison do all the work of social co?rdination? But surely compulsion is a last resort; not because it is "wrong," but because it is inexpedient, because it rather cuts than unties the knot, because it produces too much friction to allow of movement. Compulsion is warranted when there is question of preventing the interference of one individual or group with another; but it is a poor instrument for the establishment or maintenance of ideals. Suppose we stop moralizing, suppose we reduce regimentation, suppose we begin to define our terms. Suppose we let people know quite simply that moral codes are born not in heaven but in social needs; and suppose we set about finding a way of spreading intelligence so that individual treachery to real communal interest, and communal exploitation of individual allegiance, may both appear on the surface, as they are at bottom, unintelligently suicidal. Is that too much to hope for? Perhaps. But then again, it may be, the worth and meaning of life lie precisely in this, that there is still a possibility of organizing that experiment.

"Happiness" and "Virtue"

The Socratic Challenge

But if individual and social health and happiness depend on intelligence rather than on "virtue," and if the exaltation of intelligence was a cardinal element in the Athenian view of life, why did the Socratic ethic fail to save Athens from decay? And why did the supposedly intelligent Athenians hail this generous old Dr. Johnson of philosophy into court and sentence him to death?

The answer is, Because the Athenians refused to make the Socratic experiment. They were intelligent, but not intelligent enough. They could diagnose the social malady, could trace it to the decay of supernatural moral norms; but they could not find a cure, they had not the vision to see that salvation lay not in the compulsory retention of old norms, but in the forging of new and better ones, capable of withstanding the shock of questioning and trial. What they saw was chaos; and like most statesmen they longed above all things for order. They were not impressed by Socrates' allegiance to law, his cordial admission of the individual's obligations to the community for the advantages of social organization. They listened to the disciples: to Antisthenes, who laughed at patriotism; to Aristippus, who denounced all government; to Plato, scorner of democracy; and they attacked the master because it was he, they thought, who was the root of the evil. They could not see that this man was their ally and not their foe; that rescue for Athens lay in helping him rather than in sentencing him to die. And how well they could have helped him! For to preach intelligence is not enough; there remains to provide for every one the instrumentalities of intelligence. What men needed, what Athenian statesmanship might have provided, was an organization of intelligence for intelligence, an organization of all the forces of intelligence in the state in a persistent intellectual campaign. If that could not save Athens, Athens could not be saved. But the myopic leaders of the Athenian state could not see salvation in intelligence, they could only see it in hemlock. And Socrates had to die.

It will take a wise courage to accept the Socratic challenge,--such courage as battle-fields and senate-chambers are not wont to show. But unless that wise courage comes to us our civilization will go as other civilizations have come and gone, "kindled and put out like a flame in the night."

PLATO: PHILOSOPHY AS POLITICS

The Man and the Artist

Plato was twenty-eight when Socrates died; and though he was not present at the drinking of the hemlock, yet the passing of the master must have been a tragic blow to him. It brought him face to face with death, the mother of metaphysics. Proudest of all philosophers, he did not hide his sense of debt to Socrates: "I thank the gods," he said, "that I was born freeman, not slave; Greek, not barbarian; man, not woman; but above all that I was born in the time of Socrates." The old philosopher gone, Athens became for a time intolerable to Plato ; and the young philosopher sailed off to see foreign shores and take nourishment of other cultures. He liked the peaceful orderliness and aged dignity with which a long dominant priesthood had invested Egypt; beside this mellow civilization, he was willing to be told, the culture of his native Athens was but a precarious ethnological sport. He liked the Pythagoreans of southern Italy, with their aristocratic approach to the problem of social construction and their communal devotion to plain living and high thinking; above all he liked their emphasis on harmony as the fundamental pervasive relation of all things and as the ideal in which our human discords might be made to resolve themselves had men artistry enough. Other lands he saw and learnt from: stories tell how he risked his handsome head to build an ideal state in Syracuse; how he was sold into slavery and redeemed by a friend; and how he passed down through Palestine even to India, absorbing the culture of their peoples with a kind of osmotic genius. And at last, after twelve years of wandering, he heard again the call of Athens, and went home, stored with experience and ripe with thought.

How to Solve the Social Problem

We observe this at the outset in the more-mystified-than mystifying theory of ideas. Obviously, the theory of ideas belongs to Socrates; the Platonic element is a theory not of ideas so much as of ideals. Socrates wants truth, but Plato wants beauty, harmony. Socrates is bent on argument, and points you to a concept; Plato is a poet with a vision, and points you to the picture that he sees. Understanding, says Plato, is of the earth earthly; but poetic vision is divine. Hence the maze of quibbling in the dialogues; it is Plato and not Socrates who is culprit here. Reasoning was an alien art to Plato; try as he might to become a mathematician he remained always a poet,--and perhaps most so when he dealt with numbers. Dialectic was in Plato's day a recent invention; he plays with it like a youth in the breakers, letting it now raise him to heights of ecstatic vision and now bury him in the deadliest logic-chopping. But--let us not doubt it--he knows when he is logic-chopping; he goes on, partly that he may paint his picture, partly for the mere joy of parrying pros and cons; this new game, he feels, is a sport for the gods.

All this, as was said, is but an embellishment of the Socratic doctrine that salvation lies in brains. But Plato rushes on. Not only may everything be brought under a concept, an Idea, but it may be brought under a perfect Form, an Ideal. Things are not what they might be. Men are not such as men might be, states are often sorry states, beds might be more ideal beds, even dirt could be more perfectly dirt. To all things that are, there correspond perfect Ideals of what they might be, in a thoroughly harmonious world. To say that these Ideals are real, that they exist, is only to claim for them that they are operative, and get results. Whether his supernaturalism was only part of his political theory, others may dispute; let it suffice us at present that Plato believed that the Ideals could and did operate through human agency. The distinctive thing about man is that perceiving the thing that is, he can conceive the thing that might be. He is the forward-looking, ideal-making animal; through him, if he but will it, proceeds creation. The brute may be a thinker, but man may be also an artist. Out of the abundance of the sexual instinct emerges this ideal-seeking and -making quality; from which come art and ethics and religion. William Morris looks at a slum and conceives Utopia; and forthwith begins to make for Utopia even though the road lead him through a jail. Is it that William Morris loves "humanity"? Not at all; he loves beauty and his dream; he is uncomfortable with all this dirt and despair before him; it is his fortune or misfortune that he cannot see these slums without falling thrall to a vision of better things. So with most of us "reformers": we wish to change things, not because we love our fellows much more than "conservatives" do, nor because we believe that happiness varies with income; but because we hear the call of the beautiful, and see in the mind's eye another form wherein the world might come more pleasingly to sight.

What we have to do, says Plato, is to make people conceive a better world, so that they may see this world as ugly, and may strive to reshape it. We must conceive the perfect Forms of things, and batter this poor world till it reform itself and take these perfect shapes. To learn to see--and seeing learn to make--these perfect Forms: that is the task of philosophers. To make philosophers: that is the social problem.

On Making Philosopher-Kings

It is simple, isn't it? Give us enough philosophers, and the beautiful city will walk out of the picture into the fact. But how make philosophers? And perhaps there is a perfect Form for philosophers, too? How shall we "see--and seeing learn to make"--the perfect philosopher?

Let us not worry about this little matter of dialectics, says Plato; we know quite well some of the things we must do in order that we may have more and greater philosophers. It is quite clear that one thing we must do is to give our best brains to education.

Is that trite? Not at all. Do we give our best brains to education? Do we offer more to our ministers or commissioners of education than to our presidents, or governors, or mayors, or bank presidents, or pugilists? Or do we honor them more? When Plato says that the office of minister of education is "of all the great offices of state the greatest," and that the citizens should elect their very best man to this office, he is not pronouncing a platitude, he is making a radical, a revolutionary proposition. It has never been done, and it will not soon be done; for men, naturally enough, are more interested in making money than in making philosophers. And yet, says Plato, gently but resolutely, we may as well understand that until we give our best brains to the problem of making philosophers our much-ado about social ills will amount to noise and wind, and nothing more. "How charming people are!" he writes, drawing an analogy between the individual and the body politic; "they are always doctoring--and thereby increasing and complicating--their disorders, fancying they will be cured by some nostrum which somebody advises them to try,--never getting better but always growing worse.... Are they not as good as a play, trying their hand at legislation, and imagining that by reforms they will make an end to the dishonesties and rascalities of mankind, not knowing that they are in reality cutting away at the heads of a hydra?"

Notice that the aim of the educational process is, for Plato, not so much the general spread of intelligence as the discovery and development of the superior man. It is very na?ve, thinks Plato, to look to the masses as the source and hope of social improvement; the proper function of the masses is to toil as cheerfully as may be for the development and support of the genius who will make them happy--so far as they are capable of happiness. To aim directly at the elevation of all is to open the door to mediocrity and futility; to find and nurse the potential genius,--that is an end worthy the educator's subtle art.

In this search for genius all souls shall be tried. Education must be universal and compulsory; children belong not to parents but to the state and to the future. And education cannot begin too early. Cleinias, asking whether education should begin at birth, is astonished to be answered, "No, before"; and if Plato could have his way, no doubt there would be a realization of Dr. Holmes' suggestion that a man's education should begin two thousand years before he is born. The chief concern at the outset will be to develop the body, and not to fill the soul with letters; let the child be taught his letters at ten, but not before. Music will share with gymnastics the task of rounded development. The boy who tells his teacher that the athletic field is as important and necessary a part of education as the lecture-room is right. "How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?" Music mixed with athletics will do it. "I am quite aware that your mere athlete becomes too much of a savage, and that the musician is melted and softened beyond what is good for him." There is a determination here that even the genius shall be healthy; Plato will not tolerate the notion that to be a genius one needs to be sick: let the genius have his say, but let him, too, be reminded that he is no disembodied spirit. And let art take care lest its vaunted purgation be a purgation of our strength and manhood; poetry and soft music may make men slaves. No man shall bother with music after the age of sixteen.

At twenty a general test will weed out those who give indication that further educative labor will be wasted on them; the others will go on for another decade, and a second test will eliminate those who will in the meantime have reached the limit of their capacities for development. The final survivors will then--and not before--be introduced to philosophy. "They must not be allowed to taste the dear delight too early; that is a thing especially to be avoided; for young men, as you may have observed, when they first get the taste in their mouths, argue for amusement, and are always contradicting and refuting, like puppy-dogs that delight to tear and pull at all who come near them.... And when they have made many conquests and received defeats at the hands of many, they violently and speedily get into a way of not believing anything that they believed before, and hence not only they, but philosophy generally, have a bad name with the rest of the world."

Five happy years are given to the study of philosophy. Gradually, the student learns to see the universal behind the particular, to judge the part by relating it to the whole; the fragments of his experience fall into a harmonious philosophy of life. The sciences which he has learned are now united as a consistent application of intelligence to life; indeed, the faculty of uniting the sciences and focussing them on the central problems of life, is precisely the criterion of the true philosopher. But involved in this is a certain practical quality, a sense for realities and limitations. One must study books--and men; one should read much, but live more. So Plato legislates that his new philosophers shall spend the years from thirty-five to fifty in the busy din of practical life; they must, in his immortal image, go back into the cave. The purpose of higher education is to detach us for a time from the life of action, but only so that we may later return to it with a better perspective. To be put for a goodly time upon one's own resources, to butter one's own bread for a while,--that is an almost indispensable prerequisite to greatness. Out of such a test men come with the scars of many wounds; but to those who are not fools every scar is the mark of a lesson learned.

And now here are our philosophers, ripe and fifty, hardened by the tests of learning and of life. What shall we do with them? Put them away in a lecture-room and pay no further attention to them? Give them, as their life-work, the problem of finding how Spinoza deduces, or fails to deduce, the Many from the One? Have them fill learned esoteric journals with unintelligible jargon about the finite and the infinite, or space and time, or the immateriality of roast beef? No, says Plato; let them govern the state.

That, of course, is the heart and soul of Plato.

Dishonest Democracy

Let us get back to the circumference and approach this same point by another route.

Culture and Slavery

There is much exaggeration here, of course, as might be expected of one whose material and social concerns were bound up with the oligarchical party at Athens, whose friends and relatives had died in battle against the armies of the democracy; whose early years had seen the democratic mismanagement of the Peloponnesian war and the growth of a disorderly individualism in Athens. But there are also lessons here for those who are strong enough to learn even from their enemies. To press home these lessons at this point would take us too far afield; our plan for the moment is to follow Plato's guidance until he has led us out into a clear view of his position.

We shall suppose such a scheme of education as Plato desires; we shall suppose that a moderate number of those who entered the lists at birth have survived test after test, have "tasted the dear delight" of philosophy for five years, and have passed safely through the ordeal of practical affairs; these men now automatically become the rulers of the Platonic state: let us observe them in their work and in their lives.

To the guardians it is a matter of first principles that the function of the state--and therefore their function--is a positive function; they are to lead the people, and not merely to serve as an umpire of disputes. They are the protagonists of a social evolution that has at last become conscious; they are resolved that henceforth social organization shall be a far-seeing plan and not a haphazard flux of expediencies of control. They know that they are asked to be experts in foresight and co?rdination; they will legislate accordingly, and will no more think of asking the people what laws should be passed than a physician would ask the people what measures should be taken to preserve the public health.

And first of all they will control population; they will consider this to be the indispensable prerequisite to a planned development. The state must not be larger than is consistent with unity and with the efficacy of central control. People may mate as they will,--that is their own concern; but they must understand quite clearly that procreation is an affair of the state. Children must be born not of love but of science; marriage will be a temporary relation, allowing frequent remating for the sake of beautiful offspring. Men shall not have children before thirty, nor after forty. Deformed or incurably diseased children will be exposed to die. Children must leave their mothers at birth, and be brought up by the state. Women must be freed from bondage to their children, if women are to be real citizens, interested in the public weal, and loving not a narrow family but the great community.

For women are to be citizens; it would be foolish to let half the people be withdrawn from interest in and service to the state. Women will receive all the educational advantages offered to men; they will even wrestle with them, naked, in the games. If any of them--and surely some of them will--pass all the tests, they shall be guardians, too. People are to be divided, for political purposes, not by difference of sex, but by difference of capacity. Some women may be fit not for housekeeping but for ruling,--let them rule; some men may be fit not for ruling but for housekeeping,--let them keep house.

Without family, and without clearly ascertainable relationship between any man and any child, there can be no individual inheritance of property; the guardians will have all things in common, and without Tertullian's exception. Shut off from the possibility of personal bequests or of "founding a family," the guardians will have no stimulus to laying up a hoard of material goods; nay, they will not be moved to such hoarding by fear of the morrow, for a modest but sufficient maintenance will be supplied them by the working classes. There will be no money in use among them; they will live a hard simple life, devoted to the problems of communal defence and development. Freed from family ties, from private property and luxury, from violence and litigation, and all distinctions of Mine and Thine, they will have no reason to oppress the workers in order to lay up stores for themselves; they will be happy in the exercise of their high responsibilities and powers. They will not be tempted to legislate for the good of their own class rather than for the good of the community; their joy will lie in the creation of a prosperous and harmonious state.

Under their direction will be the soldiers, also specially selected and trained, and supported by the workers. But these workers?

They will be those who have been eliminated in the tests. The demands of specialization will have condemned them to labor for those who have the gift of guidance. They shall have no voice in the direction of the state; that, as said, is a reward for demonstrated capacity, and not a "natural right." Frankly, there are some people who are not fit to be other than slaves; and to varnish that fact with oratory about "the dignity of labor" is merely to give an instance of the indignities to which a democratic politician will descend. These workers are incapable of a subtler happiness than that of knowing that they are doing what they are fit to do, and are contributing to the maintenance of communal prosperity. Such as they are, these workers, like the other members of the state, will find their highest possibilities of development in such an organized society. And to make sure that they will not rebel, they will have been taught by "royal lies" that their position and function in the state have been ordained by the gods. There is no sense in shivering at this quite judicious juggling with the facts; there are times when truth is a barrier to content, and must be set aside. Physicians have been known to cure ailments with a timely lie. Labor stimulated by such deception may be slavery, if you wish to call it so; but it is the inevitable condition of order, and order is the inevitable condition of culture and communal success.

Plasticity and Order

The Meaning of Justice

But what is justice?--asks Plato. Don't you see that our notion of justice is the very crux of the whole business? Is justice merely a matter of telling the truth? Nonsense; it may be well to have our children believe that; but those who are not children know that if a lie is a better instrument of achievement than the truth in some given juncture of events, then a lie is justified. Truth is a social value, and has its justification only in that; if untruth prove here and there of social value, then untruth is just. The confusion of justice with some absolute eternal law comes of a separation of ethics from politics, and an attempt to arrive at a definition of justice from the study of individuals. But morals grow out of politics; justice is essentially a political relation. And taking the state as a whole, it is clear that nothing is "good" unless it works; that it would be absurd to say that justice demands of a state that it should be ordered in such a way as to make for its own decay. Social organization must be effective, and lies and class-divisions are justified if they make for the effectiveness of a political order. Surely social effectiveness forbids that men fit to legislate should live out their lives as cobblers, or that men should rule whose natural aptitude is for digging ditches. Justice means, for politics at least, that each member of society is minding his natural business, is doing that for which he is fitted by his own natural capacity. Injustice is the encroachment of one part on another; justice is the efficient functioning of each part. Justice, then, is social co?rdination and harmony. It is not "the interest of the stronger," it is the harmony of the whole. So in the individual, justice is the harmonious operation of a unified personality; each element in one's nature doing that which it is fitted to do; again it is not mere strength or forcefulness, but harmonious, organized strength; it is effective order. And effective order demands a class division. You may mouth as you please the delusive delicacies of democracy; but classes you will have, for men will always be some of gold and some of silver and some of brass. And the brass must not pass itself off as silver, nor the silver as gold. Give the brass all the time and opportunity in the world, and it will still be brass. Of course brass will not believe that it is brass, but we had better make it understand once for all that it is so, even if we have to tell a thousand lies to get the truth believed.

And as for variation and plasticity, remember that these too are valueless except as they make for a better society. They assuredly make for change; but change is not betterment. History is a chaos of variations; without some organ for their control they cancel one another and terminate inevitably in futility. Our problem is not how to change, but how to set our best brains to controlling change for the sake of a finer life.

The Future of Plato

FRANCIS BACON AND THE SOCIAL POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENCE

From Plato to Bacon

Character

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