an improvement. Plato, like ourselves,
is looking forward to changes in the moral and religious world, and is
preparing for them. He recognizes the danger of unsettling young men's
minds by sudden changes of laws and principles, by destroying the
sacredness of one set of ideas when there is nothing else to take their
place. He is afraid too of the influence of the drama, on the ground
that it encourages false sentiment, and therefore he would not have
his children taken to the theatre; he thinks that the effect on the
spectators is bad, and on the actors still worse. His idea of education
is that of harmonious growth, in which are insensibly learnt the lessons
of temperance and endurance, and the body and mind develope in equal
proportions. The first principle which runs through all art and nature
is simplicity; this also is to be the rule of human life.

The second stage of education is gymnastic, which answers to the period
of muscular growth and development. The simplicity which is enforced in
music is extended to gymnastic; Plato is aware that the training of the
body may be inconsistent with the training of the mind, and that bodily
exercise may be easily overdone. Excessive training of the body is
apt to give men a headache or to render them sleepy at a lecture on
philosophy, and this they attribute not to the true cause, but to the
nature of the subject. Two points are noticeable in Plato's treatment of
gymnastic:--First, that the time of training is entirely separated from
the time of literary education. He seems to have thought that two things
of an opposite and different nature could not be learnt at the same
time. Here we can hardly agree with him; and, if we may judge by
experience, the effect of spending three years between the ages of
fourteen and seventeen in mere bodily exercise would be far from
improving to the intellect. Secondly, he affirms that music and
gymnastic are not, as common opinion is apt to imagine, intended, the
one for the cultivation of the mind and the other of the body, but that
they are both equally designed for the improvement of the mind. The
body, in his view, is the servant of the mind; the subjection of the
lower to the higher is for the advantage of both. And doubtless the
mind may exercise a very great and paramount influence over the body,
if exerted not at particular moments and by fits and starts, but
continuously, in making preparation for the whole of life. Other Greek
wr