of speed the point
at which we may arrive in two or three generations is beyond the power
of imagination to foresee. There are forces in the world which work, not
in an arithmetical, but in a geometrical ratio of increase.
Education, to use the expression of Plato, moves like a wheel with
an ever-multiplying rapidity. Nor can we say how great may be its
influence, when it becomes universal,--when it has been inherited by
many generations,--when it is freed from the trammels of superstition
and rightly adapted to the wants and capacities of different classes
of men and women. Neither do we know how much more the co-operation of
minds or of hands may be capable of accomplishing, whether in labour or
in study. The resources of the natural sciences are not half-developed
as yet; the soil of the earth, instead of growing more barren, may
become many times more fertile than hitherto; the uses of machinery far
greater, and also more minute than at present. New secrets of physiology
may be revealed, deeply affecting human nature in its innermost
recesses. The standard of health may be raised and the lives of men
prolonged by sanitary and medical knowledge. There may be peace, there
may be leisure, there may be innocent refreshments of many kinds. The
ever-increasing power of locomotion may join the extremes of earth.
There may be mysterious workings of the human mind, such as occur only
at great crises of history. The East and the West may meet together, and
all nations may contribute their thoughts and their experience to the
common stock of humanity. Many other elements enter into a speculation
of this kind. But it is better to make an end of them. For such
reflections appear to the majority far-fetched, and to men of science,
commonplace.

(b) Neither to the mind of Plato nor of Aristotle did the doctrine of
community of property present at all the same difficulty, or appear to
be the same violation of the common Hellenic sentiment, as the community
of wives and children. This paradox he prefaces by another proposal,
that the occupations of men and women shall be the same, and that to
this end they shall have a common training and education. Male and
female animals have the same pursuits--why not also the two sexes of
man?

But have we not here fallen into a contradiction? for we were saying
that different natures should have different pursuits. How then can men
and women have the same? And is not the proposal inconsistent