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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.