logy,
a nervous temperament; he should have experience of disease in his own
person, in order that his powers of observation may be quickened in the
case of others.

The perplexity of medicine is paralleled by the perplexity of law; in
which, again, Plato would have men follow the golden rule of simplicity.
Greater matters are to be determined by the legislator or by the oracle
of Delphi, lesser matters are to be left to the temporary regulation
of the citizens themselves. Plato is aware that laissez faire is an
important element of government. The diseases of a State are like the
heads of a hydra; they multiply when they are cut off. The true remedy
for them is not extirpation but prevention. And the way to prevent them
is to take care of education, and education will take care of all the
rest. So in modern times men have often felt that the only political
measure worth having--the only one which would produce any certain or
lasting effect, was a measure of national education. And in our own more
than in any previous age the necessity has been recognized of restoring
the ever-increasing confusion of law to simplicity and common sense.

When the training in music and gymnastic is completed, there follows the
first stage of active and public life. But soon education is to begin
again from a new point of view. In the interval between the Fourth and
Seventh Books we have discussed the nature of knowledge, and have thence
been led to form a higher conception of what was required of us. For
true knowledge, according to Plato, is of abstractions, and has to do,
not with particulars or individuals, but with universals only; not with
the beauties of poetry, but with the ideas of philosophy. And the great
aim of education is the cultivation of the habit of abstraction. This
is to be acquired through the study of the mathematical sciences. They
alone are capable of giving ideas of relation, and of arousing the
dormant energies of thought.

Mathematics in the age of Plato comprehended a very small part of that
which is now included in them; but they bore a much larger proportion to
the sum of human knowledge. They were the only organon of thought which
the human mind at that time possessed, and the only measure by which
the chaos of particulars could be reduced to rule and order. The
faculty which they trained was naturally at war with the poetical
or imaginative; and hence to Plato, who is everywhere seeking for
abstractions a