s so undemocratic that Plato could
not work out a solution for the problem whose terms he clearly saw.

While he affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in
society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional
status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education,
he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall
by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.
Consequently the testing and sifting function of education only shows
to which one of three classes an individual belongs. There being no
recognition that each individual constitutes his own class, there could
be no recognition of the infinite diversity of active tendencies and
combinations of tendencies of which an individual is capable. There
were only three types of faculties or powers in the individual's
constitution. Hence education would soon reach a static limit in each
class, for only diversity makes change and progress.

In some individuals, appetites naturally dominate; they are assigned
to the laboring and trading class, which expresses and supplies human
wants. Others reveal, upon education, that over and above appetites,
they have a generous, outgoing, assertively courageous disposition.
They become the citizen-subjects of the state; its defenders in war; its
internal guardians in peace. But their limit is fixed by their lack of
reason, which is a capacity to grasp the universal. Those who possess
this are capable of the highest kind of education, and become in time
the legislators of the state--for laws are the universals which control
the particulars of experience. Thus it is not true that in intent, Plato
subordinated the individual to the social whole. But it is true that
lacking the perception of the uniqueness of every individual, his
incommensurability with others, and consequently not recognizing that a
society might change and yet be stable, his doctrine of limited powers
and classes came in net effect to the idea of the subordination of
individuality. We cannot better Plato's conviction that an individual is
happy and society well organized when each individual engages in those
activities for which he has a natural equipment, nor his conviction that
it is the primary office of education to discover this equipment to its
possessor and train him for its effective use. But progress in
knowledge has made us aware of the superficiality of Plato's l