Part II

American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 6 (May, 1925): 683-702.

Abstract: Resume of Part I. Plato formulated radical questions about society, but his method of answering them was in effect not a model but a warning. The chief significance of Plato for sociology is as an illustration of what sociology is not. This fact is shown by the course of debate or monologue in each of Books iv-x. Sociology is trying to be science, not philosophy; or if it is ultimately to merge into a realistic philosophy, it will not be a philosophy of the dialectical type. The social philosophers, from earliest to latest, are worth study by the sociologists in the degree in which they are interpreted in the light of this destinction.

Plato and the sociologists are alike in this respect: each asked the question, What is the nature of human society, and what is wise conduct in it?

Plato tried to answer the question by setting in order the casual accumulations of ideas in his own mind.

The sociologists came to consciousness in a condition of aggressive discontent with that way of trying to get answers to the question. They had been surfeited with futile reasonings about society after the general Platonic plan. They determined to start a program of searching into the objective facts of human society, whatever these facts might do to previously formed opinions. Now, as I have said, our minds cannot work at all except by giving credit to previous mental operations in connection with inquiry into things external to the mind. The difference between dialectic and science is radically a difference of ratio and of primacy between the opinion factor and the discovery factor in the mental equation. Dialectic says, "Think in order to know."Science says, "Learn in order to know."

As compared with other men of his period, Plato had learned very much about the world as it had disclosed itself up to that time. Compared with all men, both before and since his time, Plato was a babe in the wood. His accumulation of knowledge was a beggarly basis for deductions about the influences evolving human situations.

Following Professor Shorey's hint, my guess is that if the Socratic method of cross-examination had been turned upon Plato himself, he would have acknowledged something like this:

I have discovered that much in human society depends upon leaders.

I have discovered that there are good and bad leaders.

Good leaders make for the prosperity of the led.

Bad leaders make for the misfortune of the led.

I have discovered many reasons why leaders become bad, and I infer that it is necessary to put in place of these reasons influences that will tend to make them good.

The most potent influence that I know of is education, and the sort of education that makes most for the qualities that we want in leaders is the sort of education that we should try to introduce.

I am not sure just what the best education would be, but there are certain things to be said in favor of the following kinds of instruction.

Now all these are platitudes. They appeal so directly, however, to fairly sophisticated common sense that it is hard work to maintain discussion against them. This fact was symbolized in the feeble opposition of the two brothers to Socrates.

But suppose someone ventures the question, If all these commonplaces are as true as they look, what is there about human society which, all the intervening two thousand years and more, has prevented the adoption of Plato's program and the production of ideal leaders? Thereupon the whole question of the essential nature of human society is thrown wide open, and we realize that Plato has asked the question more than he has answered it. I am using The Republic as the first of a long series of exhibits, down through the philosophies of history, which show that the dialectical method of trying to answer the question has been tried over and over again during the intervening centuries, with the chief total result that the prospect grows dimmer and dimmer of ever getting an answer by that method. These futile efforts to explain society are instructive in the degree in which we are aware that they were all first and foremost exhibitions of the foreordained futility of the dialectical method as a means of discovering objective reality. The more we concern ourselves with conclusions reached by that method, whether by Plato or by the latest soap-box orator, the more we confuse ourselves and obstruct the passage of human intelligence from faith in opinion over to reliance upon research. The path of the ages is strewn thick with the debris of dialectical attempts to command knowledge. A certain acquaintance with these attempts is necessary for the general sophistication of social scientists. Whether the absolute quantity of acquaintance with those attempts bulks much or little, the result will be a mental miscarriage unless it takes shape as consciousness of the emptiness of the dialectic method and the relative promise of the method of positive science.

Before attempting to characterize Book iv, it will be well to recall Professor Shorey's pointer (above, p. 517) that Plato was not, and knew he was not conducting an inquiry into practicability. He was dramatizing certain of his own opinions. More specifically, he was staging a pageant of moral values correlated so as to exhibit his estimate of their relativities.

Now it is not my business to deal with these judgments with reference to their antecedents. That is, I am not now interested in the question, How did it come about that Plato held such and such opinions? That is a perfectly legitimate question in its time and place. I am not denying that there are times and places in which attempts to answer that question might be profitable. This is not the time and place. We are dealing with the relation of Plato to sociology. Our proposition is that the chief significance of Plato for sociology is as a brilliant example of what sociology is not.¹ Sociology is an attempt to be the precise opposite of that which was most conspicuous in Plato's method. As I have said before, the only things in common between Plato and the sociologists are, first, desire to understand human society, second, desire to improve human society. Compared by means of the technique to be relied upon in finding out about society, Plato is as different from the sociologists as a musical composer is from a newspaper reporter.² Plato was rationalizing. That is, he was organizing his stock of theological, psychological, aesthetic, and moral ideas into a coherent system. Using the more dignified word, he was philosophizing. Far be it from me, as I have protested before, to deny that there is a function for philosophizing in the conduct of life. Without philosophy, in its gradations from the most naive reflection to the most comprehensive and logical systematizations, we could not attain to a plane above idiocy. Philosophizing is to the general conduct of life as the annual stock-taking to a business. Philosophy in its matured form may be likened to a system of accounting, which is the completest development of the rudimentary device of keeping a day-book. But, as I have said, dialectical philosophy is essentially an appeal to the already known. Science is perpetual adventure into the unknown. That which differentiates sociology from philosophy in general, and from the philosophy of history in particular, is that the leaders in creating the later discipline decided to cut loose from the methods of dialectics, and to stake their existence upon the methods of scientific research.

Passing then to Book iv of The Republic, we find Plato expounding in an elementary form what we now speak of as the functional view of society, in contrast with basic assumptions that life is to be conducted as an affair of detached individuals, each estimating values by the measure of their worth in terms of his own happiness. Socrates leads the discussion in such a way that it outlines, stroke by stroke, a picture of the state as a co-operating whole, and not allowed to increase in size beyond the number "consistent with unity" (iv. 423. B). Quite in the spirit of our modern protective tariff protagonists, Socrates says (loc. cit.): "Let our city be accounted neither large nor small, but one and self-sufficing."

As a condition of realizing a city-state of this sort, "each individual should be put to the use for which nature intended him, one to one work, and then every man would do his own business, and be one and not many; and so the whole city would be one and not many" (iv. 423. D).

According to Socrates, this ideal is to be realized by attending to "the one great thing," viz., "education and nurture." If this fundamental matter is attended to, citizens will easily see their way through such trifling matters of detail as "marriage, the possession of women, and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common"(iv. 423. A). In the same spirit, Socrates repeats, a moment later, on the supposition that citizens are properly educated there will be no need to impose laws covering the "ordinary dealings between man and man'; "What regulations are necessary they will find out soon enough for themselves" (iv. 425. D)..

It should be noted that throughout the argument the religious note is clear and persistent. With inattention to certain details, a reader might get the impression that the theology of John Milton was uttering itself. Whatever the cogency of the logical argument, Socrates repeatedly reminds his hearers that everything depends at last upon the favor of the gods.

The reasoning converges upon a more precise description of justice than had previously been reached. In brief it is as follows:

Socrates summarizes (iv. 427. E): "I mean to begin with the assumption that our state, if rightly ordered, is perfect."³ "Being perfect, it is therefore wise and valiant and temperate and just."(loc. cit.) A state embodying the four cardinal virtues, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, is the virtuous state.

For our purposes it would be a waste of time to examine the question whether Socrates had reasoned in a circle during this part of the argument. His auditors were carried with him, and we need not be finical about details in the technique, since we are pointing out the inconclusiveness of the entire method—the greater which includes the less.

Nor need we stop for inquiry whether Socrates found a clear distinction between the concepts "temperance" and "justice." This again is a detail important to his disciples, not to us. The main strategy of the argument is its persuasiveness as bearing upon the question of justice of, for, by individuals. Abbreviated, the further argument is this: Justice is a sort of reduced miniature of the perfect state. It is "doing one's own business, and not being a busybody" (iv. 433. A); it is "the having and doing what is a man's own, and belongs to him" (iv. 433. E). The carpenter does not do the business of the cobbler, nor the cobbler that of the trader, nor the trader that of the warrior, nor the warrior that of legislators and "guardians"(iv. 434. A).

In a word, "the just man, then, if we regard the idea of justice only, will be just like the state"(iv. 435. B).

Whatever be the worth of this conclusion, our main point is that, in the exercise of bringing his hearers to adoption of the conclusion, Socrates appears as performing a skilful process of persuasion, not a piece of research ending in discovery. As in every other case of deductive reasoning, the conclusion was safely packed away in the premises before the argument began. Whether it is anywhere else or not, the conclusion is in cold storage in the premises. The task is to persuade the listeners to the argument that it is there, and to enlist them in extracting it from that depository and adopting it as their own. In other words, it is an operation upon the mental processes of the unconvinced, to induce them to adopt intellectual values which they had not previously recognized. It is an affair of subjective valuation, not a search into realities that are outside the mind. For example, after everything in the Platonic philosophy has been discussed for centuries, Nietzsche may come along and pooh-pooh the whole system. He may allege that the world is not for the just man, nor for the just state; it is for the superman and the superstate. In other words, he may allege a scale of values that is virtually identical with that in Thrasymachus' mind, in Book i; and so long as our own thinking is the final standard, we are at liberty to go with Plato or with Nietzsche. Nothing is decisive.

The book comes to a close by way of a detour through equally inconclusive mental philosophy (iv. 435. D ff.), which even Jowett, the editor, calls "a tiresome digression"(Introduction, p. 75).

In discussion of Book iv I quoted, without comment, a remark which appeared to have been received by the company as too commonplace for argument, viz.: "If our citizens are well educated, and grow into sensible men, they will easily see their way through all these, as well as other matters which I omit, such, for example, as marriage, the possession of women, and the procreation of children, which will all follow the general principle that friends have all things in common" (iv. 424. A). The remark did not seem as axiomatic to the company as their assent indicated, and their recall of it presents the central theme of Book v.

That is, in the character of Socrates, Plato is brought up against the enigma of the relations of the sexes, of the relations of parents as such, and of parents, as citizens, to children; and of the relations of the state to each and all of these.

At intervals for more than two thousand years, the ideas that Plato outlines in Book v have furnished subject-matter for ponderous theological and philosophical argumentation. Since certain people began to call themselves sociologists, many of them have supposed that they cannot lay a proper foundation for their science unless they go back to Plato, and particularly to his suggestions about the relations of the sexes. In denial of all this, I simply vary the expression of my whole purpose in giving so much time to The Republic. My main thesis is this: For any supposed direct bearing upon sociology, considered as a method and technique of research, The Republic has no significance whatsoever. The sociologist is no more bound to square his ideas of procedure with the argument of The Republic than he is to reach an understanding with the Ptolemaic conception of the universe. Plato's systematology was utterly foreign to our systematology. He was trying to do what we are trying not to do. For the sociologist, Plato's thinking has the same status that any other human phenomenon has, viz., something which may be studied in our ways. It is not something which can furnish a model for our ways of study. My constant refrain is: The Republic is no more sociology than an apple-tree is botany or an elephant zoology.

It betrays an atrophied sense of humor for a sociologist to suppose that he must try to adjust Plato's ideas of the relations of the sexes to modern standards, not to say modern standards to Plato's ideas. Those ideas were incidents in the development of a civilization different from ours. If we are studying the comparative evolution of societies, Athenian civilization in particular and Hellenic civilization in general are of course of inestimable importance as concrete cases. What any philosopher, in the course of the evolution of any civilization, thought about the past, present, or future of that civilization is of interest to us simply for what his mode of thinking is worth as a mode of thinking, not because of any authority attributable to his opinions, unless those opinions rest upon bases which we now regard as sufficient.

As to Plato's vision of a Utopia of sex relations, as sociologists we have no more occasion to concern ourselves with it than with the Walhalla of Nordic mythology or the happy hunting-grounds of North American Indians. Whether Plato's sex scheme is a patch that fits into his social garment, is his affair, not ours. At all events, he was talking from and to a man's civilization. To a Greek of Plato's time, as to Hebrew worthies from Abraham to David, women, whether wives, concubines, slaves, or professional prostitutes, were chiefly items of sheer biological convenience. Morals, in our sense, played a very minor role in any consideration of them. We could no more expect Plato than King Solomon to write a treatise on the social relations of women that would conform to modern views, whether popular or scientific. The proposals of Plato, then, in this fifth book have no more claim to consideration as having a bearing on sociological problems than the institutions of child widowhood and the suttee in India, or the institution of celibacy in the Romish church. Each is a phenomenon of certain social groups. Neither is a term in social science.

Not then as matters of sociology, but as curiosities of culture history, several items in this Book v are worthy of mention. For instance, first, Plato spoke, in the person of Socrates, not in the tone of his own time, but very much in the spirit of the latest half-century, about the latent equality of women with men, and the economy of giving them equal educational opportunities. This from the point of view that they were by nature equipped with as authentic capacity as men for "guardianship "in the sense explained in the second book (v. 451. C ff.).

In the second place, Plato had a very modern attitude toward what he would probably have been delighted to call "eugenics"(v. 459. A ff.).

In the third place, Plato appeals in form to the pragmatic test of what is good or bad for the state, i.e., whether a device will work or not (v. 462. A ff.). For example, he proposes to test social devices by their relative usefulness in gaining the purposes of the state, e.g., in preventing "discord and distraction."This is a naive gesture in the direction of experimental science. The context plainly shows, however, that Plato's actual process is not a scientific testing, i.e., any sort of experiment to show whether the desired effect can be produced in practice; but his process is still quick reference back to the stock of ideas in his mind, to discover whether the proposal and those ideas are compatible. This is the precise opposite of a positive or scientific method.

In the fourth place, Plato reaches far ahead of his time in picturing the fraternal relation as the basic economy of a state (v. 463. B). "Then in our city the language of harmony and concord will be more often heard than in any other. As I was describing before, when anyone is well or ill, the universal word will be 'with me it is well' or it is ill (v. 463. E); i.e., as it was expressed four centuries later, "rejoice with them that do rejoice and weep with them that weep."

In the fifth place, Plato discloses ideas about war which in some respects are more humane than the best of our modern codes, and far better than the practices of all the nations at times in the German war (v. 469. B ff.).

In the sixth place, Plato distinctly formulates his knowledge that the whole scheme which he has unfolded is literally visionary in more than one sense. He says (v. 473. D):

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils-no, nor the human race, as I believe-and then only will this our state have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.

This passage alone is enough to show that in Plato's mind The Republic was not a political or social platform, but a dramatization of the author's scale of moral values. In his day, pragmatism had not been formulated as a technique of evaluating moral conceptions. Plato was not at all abashed by the consideration that his moral values were not available for immediate use. To him moral values had an absolute, intrinsic worth, whether they could be realized in the concrete or not. The Republic was a device for exhibiting some of them in the stage setting of a vaguely imagined state. When he says in substance, "Of course these things cannot come in reality till kings are philosophers and philosophers kings," it would seem as though even the sententious owls who have been treating the discussion as if it were a constituent convention, with plenary power to put its findings into force as a basic law, would discover that they had completely misunderstood Plato's purpose. Thousands of pages have been printed on the physics and politics and psychology and ethics of Plato's views about community of property and of women, for example.⁴ The literal fact is that we certainly cannot tell from The Republic what Plato, as a practical citizen, would have recommended as a working system of property and sex relations. He was picturing, on the one hand, certain unfortunate workings of existing property and sex relations, and he was picturing, on the other hand, human beings in certain imaginary relations in which those unfortunate incidents were not supposed to be present. Therefore he is interpreted as having made the serious proposal that philosophers should be made kings, and that having become kings they should function as philosophers, in order to realize these ideal relations!⁵ What Plato was really driving at was that men would have to become much wiser than they were, before goods of higher orders than their current conditions could be attained. Again I say that the most evident phenomenon in the treatment of The Republic throughout the centuries has been absence of a sense of humor.

Seventh, and finally, Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates a notable analysis which presently takes the form of antithesis between knowledge and opinion (v. 476. D ff.). It is a pathetic outreaching after the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity. It ends, however, with a subjective standard. It is implied, rather than affirmed, that knowledge is seeing "the absolute and eternal and immutable"(v. 479. E). It is also implied, rather than stated, that having the thought, or rather using the word for the category "absolute"or "eternal"or "immutable,"is seeing the same. This advertisement of illusion sufficiently distinguishes the contrast between Plato's criteria of knowledge and our modern conception of objectivity.

Remember that I am deliberately not trying to treat The Republic as it might most properly and probably be treated by philosopher, psychologist, culture historian, literary historian, moralist, or literary critic; I am trying to show that it is not sociology, and that it is an injustice and a misfortune for students to be introduced to The Republic as though it were sociology.

Whatever its failure of attainment, sociology in the United States has made a brave struggle to become something different from dialectical social philosophy. It is trying to be science, in distinction from philosophy, or at least as the price it pays for expectancy of becoming sometime in one of its aspects a part of a positive philosophy which is evolving in antithesis with dialectical philosophy. A long line of thinkers, from Plato to—let us say—Benjamin Kidd or Oswald Spengler, have been more or less confounded, even by some sociological teachers, with sociologists. I am urging that sociologists ought to be acquainted with this long line of social philosophers, for the sake of discovering that they brought the very thought of social theory into such disrepute that a species of scholar had to be differentiated in sharp antagonism with the most characteristic of their works, and with that part of their method which had vitiated and emasculated previous attempts to become social science (history and economics in particular). These more positive social sciences, say after 18oo, had nevertheless failed fully to emancipate themselves from dialectical influences, and a still more complete break with dialectic was attempted by the sociologists. Having stated this thesis repeatedly, and illustrated it at considerable length in connection with the first five books of The Republic, I shall try to say more briefly what needs to be said about the other five books.

Book vi of The Republic, then, is more involved and elusive than either of the previous divisions of the argument. Fortunately for our purpose to be brief, it is also the most remotely related to sociology. It is a multiplied variation of the antiphonal themes: the perfect "guardian"must be a philosopher (vi. 5o3. B), and only the perfect philosopher is fit to be a "guardian"(vi. 484. B). Development of these propositions merges into discussion of the problem, What is the good? (vi 505. D; cf. 506. B, 508. E). The conclusion is so attenuated that it seems to have been too subtle even for Plato's further purposes. Jowett says:

It is remarkable that although Plato speaks of the idea of good as the first principle of truth and being, it is nowhere mentioned in his writings except in this passage. Nor did it retain any hold upon his disciples in a later generation; it was probably unintelligible to them. Nor does the mention of it in Aristotle appear to have any reference to this or any other passage in his extant writings.⁶

I confess I should be skeptical whether a man was endowed with the makings of a good sociologist if he could read The Republic without finding himself in a fight with himself to resist its fascinations. It has exhaustless lure for anyone with imagination, or with intellectual curiosity. There are many situations in which readings from The Republic would be salutary exercises in mental gymnastics and in moral stimulation. My constant contention, however, is that, for the sociologist as such, in the development of his own proper procedure, neither The Republic nor any of its successors in relying upon a dialectical method has anything but a negative and precautionary value. For anyone engaged in trying to get positive knowledge, it is a snare and a delusion. I mean by that not necessarily in the judgments at which it arrives, but in the processes of arriving at the judgments. They are abhorrent to the methodology of science, and they tend to disqualify the mind for scientific criticism.

Book vii reaches the most transcendental level in the scheme of The Republic. Its central theme is the nature of true enlightenment, and the means of attaining it. The discussion ranges from elementary pedagogy—the value of arithmetic, then geometry, then astronomy, etc., in education—to pure speculation about dialectic, which is "the science of absolute truth."

The exposition starts with what Socrates refers to as an "allegory,"and it may be noticed in passing that one of the particulars in which The Republic is alien to our present conception of sociology is that its technique makes almost precisely the same use of analogy which was among the futilities of sociology in its beginnings. Analogical reasoning, with the illusions which are direct consequences of it, may be said to constitute one of the main threads of the discussion. In this case the figure employed is that of men who had been chained from childhood in an immovable position in an underground den. "Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance." They can see only vaguely the shadows that it casts. Then some of them are liberated and compelled to walk into the light until they return to the cave and try to make their new outlook plausible to their lifelong associates.

This is Plato's way of picturing the relation of a conceivable few who become philosophers, or gain complete enlightenment, when they mingle with ordinary men. In Socrates' own words (vii. 517. B):

The entire allegory you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world, according to my poor belief, which at your desire, I have expressed—whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But, whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which he who would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eye fixed.

The rest of Book vili is virtually an amplification of this passage. When stated in forms of application, which, as we have seen, Plato knew to be only conceptual, not practicable, the implications are in the direction of Socrates' further explanation (vi. 519. C, D):

The business of us who are the founders of the state will be to compel the best minds to attain that knowledge which we have already shown to be the greatest of all—they must continue to ascend until they arrive at the good; but when they have ascended and seen enough, we must not allow them to do as they do now. . I mean that they (now) remain in the upper world; but this must not be allowed; they must be made to descend again among the prisoners in the den, and partake of their labors and honors, whether they are worth having or not.

Again I reword my entire case for Sociology vs. The Republic.

Nothing human is beyond the range of the sociologist's legitimate interest. The kind of discourse which fills The Republic is not an exception to the principle. The sociologist's legitimate interests, however, fall into two classes, viz., first, those which are immediately connected with the technical processes for which he is responsible as a specialist; second, those which he shares with all enlightened men in their need of organizing knowledge of all sorts into rational conduct of life. In the former connection, the sociologist has only the remotest and most attenuated interest in The Republic. Association of the two in any closer sense is as preposterous as it would be to inject readings from Browning into the calculations of a statistical commission. As personalities, statisticians, like other men, may enlarge their horizon by reading the poets. As technicians, they must relentlessly exclude poetry from their procedure. Precisely the same is true of the sociologists and the whole literature of dialectic.

Once more placing the aims of the Platonic and of the sociological method side by side should help to exhibit the truth of my contention. Sociology has become a collection of techniques adapted to the purpose of discovering, interpreting, and eventually, we hope, in some degree, controlling the different causal factors that operate in human group relations. Dialectic, Plato's ultimate reliance for derivation of knowledge, is described a little later by Socrates in these words (vii. 532. A):

This is the progress which I (you) call dialectic: When a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible.

Is it not plain that the relation of sociology to such procedure is identical with that of statistics to poetry?

Now that sociology has arrived at a rather secure consciousness of its own vocation, it will be wholesome penance for the sociologists to reflect upon the further dictum of Socrates (vii. 534. E): "Dialectic, then, as you will agree, is the coping-stone of the sciences, and is set over them; no other science can be placed higher—the nature of knowledge can no farther go."

Within the memory of men now living—possibly since the birth of the youngest child—virtually the same proposition has been asserted, the word dialectic giving place to the term sociology! It is not for nothing that I plead for clarification of fundamental historical and methodological ideas at the outset of sociological study.

Whether students of psychology and pedagogy have more to learn professionally than the sociologists have from this seventh book of The Republic, or from any other part of it, is not for the sociologist to decide. For our purposes all its rationalizing amounts simply to a setting up of mental images which have conceivable value only as their contrast with reality may serve to stimulate effort toward producing men more like the picture. As adventurers in gaining knowledge, we may conclude with Glaucon (vi. 54o. C), "You are a sculptor, Socrates, and have made statues of our governors faultless in beauty." As an artistic presentation of types of civic excellence contemplated as ideals, The Republic has almost the same relative standing in literature which Raphael's "Transfiguration"has among paintings. This does not affect my argument. I am not questioning the eminence of The Republic as a work of art. I am simply pointing out that it is not a work of science, more particularly not of social science, most particularly not of sociology.

Book viii of The Republic might easily be mistaken for an excursion into political science. On the surface it is what modern professors have often announced as a course in "comparative constitutions."In reality it uses a very inadequate equipment of scenery to stage a further pageant of civic virtues and vices, to make the former look attractive and desirable, the latter repulsive and contemptible. Socrates summarily classifies the Hellenic states as (1) aristocracy, (2) oligarchy, (3) democracy, (4) tyranny (viii. 544. C). Assuming that these types are as clear and unequivocal as their names, he proceeds to dispose of them by scheduling the imperfections which are associated in his mind with the name of the type. In other words, the name is treated as though it stood for a complete inventory of qualities, quite fixed in their character and proportions. We may see the fallacy in a conceivable modern parallel. Suppose we give to the British government the name "imperialism, to the American government the name "republic," to the French government the name "democracy,"and to the Russian government the name "sovietism."

Then suppose we proceed to give a rating to these four governments, not on the basis of adequate investigation into the ways in which they actually function, but by striking a balance-sheet between the evil and the good which tradition has charged or credited to the type. By this method Great Britain, as a typical imperialism, might be loaded down with every alleged imperialistic sin from Sennacherib to Wilhelm II, with no offsets for any actual merits; while America might get the benefit of all the goodness which Plato lodges in the conceptual pattern "republic," with no discount for its failures in practice. It is not to be supposed that Plato would apply his scheme of classification with quite that degree of naivete in a concrete case, but this is the ground-pattern of premise and conclusion which his method presents. That pattern of procedure lends itself to the main purpose which we have found in The Republic, viz., persuasion that certain models of conduct are admirable, others despicable. The procedure is utterly out of place in any sort of social science which seriously pursues the aim of objectivity. With that perception we find ourselves absolved from all apparent obligation to treat Book viii as having a claim to the attention of sociologists.

A mystical mathematical symbolism applied to the birth-rate has a place in the argument of Book viii (546. B ff.), as well as a recurrence of the figure of the metals. The former especially presents a puzzle for the literary interpreter, but each is negligible for the sociologist.

In Book ix Socrates appears less than ever in the character of a positive scientist, and becomes more of a preacher. He is reaching the climax of his persuasion that certain types of civic character are odious and their opposites exemplary. For this purpose, after a short excursus into moral philosophy and psychology, to determine "the nature and number of the appetites," he exploits the abstraction "the tyrannical man."The sterility of the method illustrated in Book viii is still more impressive here. It is not observation of cases and generalization of facts. It is deduction from concepts, or it is raising familiar details to the rank of universals. The same method is followed when attention shifts to arrangement of a scale of pains and pleasures (ix. 58o. B ff.), and the greater and less reality of different orders of pleasure(ix. 583. Bff.). The dialectic arrives at a synthesis which projects its zenith of sentiment and its nadir of knowledge in the"calculation"that the king lives "729 times more pleasantly, and the tyrant more painfully by the same interval" (ix. 587. C). The indications in the context are that the auditors were correspondingly impressed, and it would be a pity to break the spell. On the outside, without interrupting the solemnities, we may irreverently whisper to ourselves the refrain by which we keep ourselves reminded of realities: This dramatization of good and bad is adroit persuasion, but it is not science.

At the end of the book Plato has expressly admonished readers that he has not been dealing with things as they ever can be in this world, but with conceptions which point toward fulfilment only in a higher life. At the end of a crescendo which expresses the moral achievements of the truly wise man (ix. 59r. B ff.), and in answer to Glaucon's safe qualification, "You mean that he will be a ruler in the city of which we are the founders, and which exists in idea only, for I do not believe that there is such a one anywhere on earth?" Socrates concludes: "In heaven, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding may take up his abode there. But whether such a one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other."

From the spiritual outlook reached in Book ix, the opening of the tenth and last book once more introduces an anticlimax. It drops to the lower level of a denunciation of poetry. Plato, to be sure, alleges moral grounds for his desire to banish poetry from the state, but his contentions are so debatable in themselves that injection of them into a more comprehensive ethical argument impresses the reader as frivolous. It is a curious trifle that Plato's indictment of poetry pivots upon the primary count that poetry is imitation, and imitation is "ruinous to the understanding"(x. 595. B), and thereupon immoral. Persons whose minds work that way might pounce upon that word "imitation"and triumphantly declare that it destroys my whole case for the dissociation of The Republic and sociology, because here is a premonition of Tarde's theory of imitation!

Not so much judgment as temperament will determine whether the reader will feel that the discourse has returned to its highest level when Socrates introduces his beliefs about the immortality of the soul (x. 6o8. C). Whatever may be the intrinsic worth of the ensuing argument, it is inconceivable that any competent person would contend that it is sociology, or has any connection with sociology, except in the sense that everything is connected with everything.

Nor can the impression of anticlimax be much relieved by Socrates' recourse to a mythological tale to support his beliefs about immortality (x. 6r4. B). Incidentally, the defenders of poetry have quite as strong a case against Plato as he has against the poets, when he uses mythological material for his own purposes.

Nearly hidden in the story, however, and in the morals that Socrates draws from it, are two sentences which, it seems to me, might well have been inscribed upon the title-page of The Republic. Better than any others that I can select, they epitomize the animus and the argument of the whole work, and distinguish it from sociology in the strict sense, viz. (x. 618. B, C):

And here, my dear Glaucon, is the supreme peril of our human state; and therefore the utmost care should be taken. Let each one leave every other kind of knowledge, and seek and follow one thing only, if peradventure he may be able to learn and may find someone who will make him able to learn and discern between good and evil, and so to choose always and everywhere the better life as he has opportunity.

The difference between Plato and the sociologists does not consist in the contrast between presence and absence of desire for all the knowledge within reach of men, and for the best life that mortals can achieve.

The contrast is in the fact that Plato believed dialectic to be the pass-key to that knowledge, whereas everyone who understands the rudiments of the scientific method has discovered that dialectic is not, never was, and never can be a pass-key to that knowledge.

We may picture the scheme of knowledge as it appeared to Plato in this crude way: Knowledge is a complete picture. It has been chopped up into fragments and scattered through men's minds. If men would use the supreme patience that would be necessary to assemble all those bits of knowledge and fit them perfectly to one another, which is the work of dialectic, they would at last find the one place appointed to each fragment, and fit each fragment into its foreordained place, as in an infinite Chinese puzzle.

To science, on the contrary, objective reality is an unknown number of detachable leaves each of which contains information important in itself, but the leaves so far in sight cannot present their full meaning till they are read in connection with perhaps an infinite number of leaves, some of which have not yet come to light. So far, we have been able to spell out what may prove, for all we know, to be only a few of the easiest words and sentences of the leaves that we have discovered. The processes of deciphering these leaves are not processes of turning our minds inward upon themselves. They are processes of focusing our minds upon the physical things and the human behaviors outside our minds, that is, upon the characters in which the leaves are written, and progressively storing our minds with transcripts of this reality. With each addition to this record, the partialness of this store becomes more evident.

On the other hand, as I said early in these notes, the scientific method at every step has a use for a dialectic of its own, which, like accounting in a business, is not a creator of reality, but a way of reporting discovery.

I have nothing but applause for Plato in his work of teaching men how to use the knowledge which they had. I have no patience with begoggled leaders of the blind who see no difference between Plato's pedagogy and special pleading, on the one hand, and scientific methodology on the other. Indeed, it is a safe reading of all the leaves of reality which men have thus far deciphered to conclude that Plato was right, not in the details of his mental picture, but in his judgment of the most durable human attitude, when he spoke through Socrates these closing words of the symposium (X. 621. C):

And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved, and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness, and our soul will not be defiled. Wherefore my counsel is, that we hold fast ever to the heavenly way, and follow after justice and virtue always, considering that the soul is immortal and able to endure every sort of good and every sort of evil. Thus shall we live dear to one another and to the gods, both while remaining here and when, like conquerors in the games, who go round to gather gifts, we receive our reward. And it shall be well with us both in this life and in the pilgrimage of a thousand years which we have been describing.

By some uncanny law of contrast, which may be in alliance with some deeper law of likeness, I am reminded of that laboriously satirical and cynical book which Erasmus wrote in 15o9, The Praise of Folly. There can be no doubt that in a general way this pathbreaker for the later humanism was actuated by the same purpose with Plato, viz., to convince men of the foolishness of folly. With this association in mind, I can think of no more revealing substitute for the title, The Republic, than the legend The Praise of Wisdom. The suggestion is the more appropriate when we remember that, in the Socratic and the Platonic philosophies, wisdom and virtue were so closely related as to be practically identical.

Ever since the phrase "social science" came into use, people who called it social science to dope their minds into dreams of how nice it would be if two and two made six; or what a pleasant time might be had by all if there were no human nature in human nature; or what delightful things might happen if everybody always saw everything through the dreamers' eyes, and weighed everything in the dreamers' scales,—not only many people of this type, but others much wiser have derived no end of aid and comfort from incontinent misinterpretation of The Republic. With details changed, the same malfeasance has been comfortable in treatment of a long line of dialecticians, not ending with the philosophers of history.

This survey has been for the sake of lifting up one voice against a stupidity and an abuse which have embarrassed the efforts of all the social sciences to become effectively objective. In a word, there are various angles from which The Republic is both interesting and instructive. Considered as sociology it is neither.

The gist of the whole matter is this: Sociologists as such should study moral philosophers, philosophers of history, and all others whose method is chiefly dialectical, not as models, but as problems.

Notes