reek and partly ideal,
beginning with the ordinary curriculum of the Greek youth, and extending
to after-life. Plato is the first writer who distinctly says that
education is to comprehend the whole of life, and to be a preparation
for another in which education begins again. This is the continuous
thread which runs through the Republic, and which more than any other of
his ideas admits of an application to modern life.

He has long given up the notion that virtue cannot be taught; and he is
disposed to modify the thesis of the Protagoras, that the virtues are
one and not many. He is not unwilling to admit the sensible world
into his scheme of truth. Nor does he assert in the Republic the
involuntariness of vice, which is maintained by him in the Timaeus,
Sophist, and Laws (Protag., Apol., Gorg.). Nor do the so-called Platonic
ideas recovered from a former state of existence affect his theory
of mental improvement. Still we observe in him the remains of the old
Socratic doctrine, that true knowledge must be elicited from within, and
is to be sought for in ideas, not in particulars of sense. Education, as
he says, will implant a principle of intelligence which is better than
ten thousand eyes. The paradox that the virtues are one, and the kindred
notion that all virtue is knowledge, are not entirely renounced; the
first is seen in the supremacy given to justice over the rest; the
second in the tendency to absorb the moral virtues in the intellectual,
and to centre all goodness in the contemplation of the idea of good. The
world of sense is still depreciated and identified with opinion, though
admitted to be a shadow of the true. In the Republic he is evidently
impressed with the conviction that vice arises chiefly from ignorance
and may be cured by education; the multitude are hardly to be deemed
responsible for what they do. A faint allusion to the doctrine of
reminiscence occurs in the Tenth Book; but Plato's views of education
have no more real connection with a previous state of existence than
our own; he only proposes to elicit from the mind that which is there
already. Education is represented by him, not as the filling of a
vessel, but as the turning the eye of the soul towards the light.

He treats first of music or literature, which he divides into true and
false, and then goes on to gymnastics; of infancy in the Republic he
takes no notice, though in the Laws he gives sage counsels about the
nursing of childre