o the preliminary education, and acting through the power of
habit; and this conception of art is not limited to strains of music or
the forms of plastic art, but pervades all nature and has a wide kindred
in the world. The Republic of Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an
artistic as well as a political side.

There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts; only in two
or three passages does he even allude to them (Rep.; Soph.). He is
not lost in rapture at the great works of Phidias, the Parthenon, the
Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He would probably have regarded
any abstract truth of number or figure as higher than the greatest of
them. Yet it is hard to suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to
inspire in youth, did not pass into his own mind from the works of art
which he saw around him. We are living upon the fragments of them, and
find in a few broken stones the standard of truth and beauty. But in
Plato this feeling has no expression; he nowhere says that beauty is the
object of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form
(Phaedrus); he does not distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts.
Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than he expressed, it
is at any rate remarkable that the greatest perfection of the fine arts
should coincide with an almost entire silence about them. In one very
striking passage he tells us that a work of art, like the State, is a
whole; and this conception of a whole and the love of the newly-born
mathematical sciences may be regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any
rate as the regulating principles of Greek art (Xen. Mem.; and Sophist).

4. Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had better
not be in robust health; and should have known what illness is in his
own person. But the judge ought to have had no similar experience of
evil; he is to be a good man who, having passed his youth in innocence,
became acquainted late in life with the vices of others. And therefore,
according to Plato, a judge should not be young, just as a young man
according to Aristotle is not fit to be a hearer of moral philosophy.
The bad, on the other hand, have a knowledge of vice, but no knowledge
of virtue. It may be doubted, however, whether this train of reflection
is well founded. In a remarkable passage of the Laws it is acknowledged
that the evil may form a correct estimate of the good. The union of
gentleness and courage i