Strona 487 z 1391

The love of another church or country when seen at a distance

only, the longing for an imaginary simplicity in civilized times,

the fond desire of a past which never has been, or of a future

which never will be,-these are aspirations of the human mind

which are often felt among ourselves. Such feelings meet with a

response in the Republic of Plato.

But there are other features of the Platonic Republic, as, for

example, the literary and philosophical education, and the grace

and beauty of life, which are the reverse of Spartan. Plato

wishes to give his citizens a taste of Athenian freedom as well

as of Lacedaemonian discipline. His individual genius is purely

Athenian, although in theory he is a lover of Sparta; and he is

something more than either-he has also a true Hellenic feeling.

He is desirous of humanizing the wars of Hellenes against one

another; he acknowledges that the Delphian God is the grand

hereditary interpreter of all Hellas. The spirit of harmony and

the Dorian mode are to prevail, and the whole State is to have an

external beauty which is the reflex of the harmony within. But he

has not yet found out the truth which he afterwards enunciated in

the Laws-that he was a better legislator who made men to be of

one mind, than he who trained them for war.