Pagina 568 di 1391

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 children and the management of the

mothers, and would have an education which is even prior to

birth. But in the Republic he begins with the age at which the

child is capable of receiving ideas, and boldly asserts, in

language which sounds paradoxical to modern ears, that he must be

taught the false before he can learn the true. The modern and

ancient philosophical world are not agreed about truth and

falsehood; the one identifies truth almost exclusively with fact,

the other with ideas. This is the difference between ourselves

and Plato, which is, however, partly a difference of words.