ns are to stand like a rampart impregnable against the
world or the Persian host; in time of peace the preparation for war and
their duties to the State, which are also their duties to one another,
take up their whole life and time. The only other interest which is
allowed to them besides that of war, is the interest of philosophy. When
they are too old to be soldiers they are to retire from active life
and to have a second novitiate of study and contemplation. There is an
element of monasticism even in Plato's communism. If he could have done
without children, he might have converted his Republic into a religious
order. Neither in the Laws, when the daylight of common sense breaks in
upon him, does he retract his error. In the state of which he would be
the founder, there is no marrying or giving in marriage: but because of
the infirmity of mankind, he condescends to allow the law of nature to
prevail.

(c) But Plato has an equal, or, in his own estimation, even greater
paradox in reserve, which is summed up in the famous text, 'Until kings
are philosophers or philosophers are kings, cities will never cease
from ill.' And by philosophers he explains himself to mean those who
are capable of apprehending ideas, especially the idea of good. To the
attainment of this higher knowledge the second education is directed.
Through a process of training which has already made them good citizens
they are now to be made good legislators. We find with some surprise
(not unlike the feeling which Aristotle in a well-known passage
describes the hearers of Plato's lectures as experiencing, when they
went to a discourse on the idea of good, expecting to be instructed in
moral truths, and received instead of them arithmetical and mathematical
formulae) that Plato does not propose for his future legislators any
study of finance or law or military tactics, but only of abstract
mathematics, as a preparation for the still more abstract conception of
good. We ask, with Aristotle, What is the use of a man knowing the idea
of good, if he does not know what is good for this individual, this
state, this condition of society? We cannot understand how Plato's
legislators or guardians are to be fitted for their work of statesmen by
the study of the five mathematical sciences. We vainly search in Plato's
own writings for any explanation of this seeming absurdity.

The discovery of a great metaphysical conception seems to ravish the
mind with a prophe