Kabanata Kabanata 13 · Many things pleased me in the order of our State, but there was（4）

Recent enquirers have indeed arrived at the conclusion that among

primitive tribes there existed a community of wives as of property, and

that the captive taken by the spear was the only wife or slave whom any

man was permitted to call his own. The partial existence of such

customs among some of the lower races of man, and the survival of

peculiar ceremonies in the marriages of some civilized nations, are

thought to furnish a proof of similar institutions having been once

universal. There can be no question that the study of anthropology has

considerably changed our views respecting the first appearance of man

upon the earth. We know more about the aborigines of the world than

formerly, but our increasing knowledge shows above all things how

little we know. With all the helps which written monuments afford, we

do but faintly realize the condition of man two thousand or three

thousand years ago. Of what his condition was when removed to a

distance 200,000 or 300,000 years, when the majority of mankind were

lower and nearer the animals than any tribe now existing upon the

earth, we cannot even entertain conjecture. Plato (Laws) and Aristotle

(Metaph.) may have been more right than we imagine in supposing that

some forms of civilisation were discovered and lost several times over.

If we cannot argue that all barbarism is a degraded civilization,

neither can we set any limits to the depth of degradation to which the

human race may sink through war, disease, or isolation. And if we are

to draw inferences about the origin of marriage from the practice of

barbarous nations, we should also consider the remoter analogy of the

animals. Many birds and animals, especially the carnivorous, have only

one mate, and the love and care of offspring which seems to be natural

is inconsistent with the primitive theory of marriage. If we go back to

an imaginary state in which men were almost animals and the companions

of them, we have as much right to argue from what is animal to what is

human as from the barbarous to the civilized man. The record of animal

life on the globe is fragmentary,—the connecting links are wanting and

cannot be supplied; the record of social life is still more fragmentary

and precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such

institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from

outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of China, Assyria, and

Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly unknown to us.

Such speculations are apt to be unsettling, because they seem to show

that an institution which was thought to be a revelation from heaven,

is only the growth of history and experience. We ask what is the origin

of marriage, and we are told that like the right of property, after

many wars and contests, it has gradually arisen out of the selfishness

of barbarians. We stand face to face with human nature in its primitive

nakedness. We are compelled to accept, not the highest, but the lowest

account of the origin of human society. But on the other hand we may

truly say that every step in human progress has been in the same

direction, and that in the course of ages the idea of marriage and of

the family has been more and more defined and consecrated. The

civilized East is immeasurably in advance of any savage tribes; the

Greeks and Romans have improved upon the East; the Christian nations

have been stricter in their views of the marriage relation than any of

the ancients. In this as in so many other things, instead of looking

back with regret to the past, we should look forward with hope to the

future. We must consecrate that which we believe to be the most holy,

and that ‘which is the most holy will be the most useful.’ There is

more reason for maintaining the sacredness of the marriage tie, when we

see the benefit of it, than when we only felt a vague religious horror

about the violation of it. But in all times of transition, when

established beliefs are being undermined, there is a danger that in the

passage from the old to the new we may insensibly let go the moral

principle, finding an excuse for listening to the voice of passion in

the uncertainty of knowledge, or the fluctuations of opinion. And there

are many persons in our own day who, enlightened by the study of

anthropology, and fascinated by what is new and strange, some using the

language of fear, others of hope, are inclined to believe that a time

will come when through the self-assertion of women, or the rebellious

spirit of children, by the analysis of human relations, or by the force

of outward circumstances, the ties of family life may be broken or

greatly relaxed. They point to societies in America and elsewhere which

tend to show that the destruction of the family need not necessarily

involve the overthrow of all morality. Wherever we may think of such

speculations, we can hardly deny that they have been more rife in this

generation than in any other; and whither they are tending, who can

predict?

To the doubts and queries raised by these ‘social reformers’ respecting

the relation of the sexes and the moral nature of man, there is a

sufficient answer, if any is needed. The difference about them and us

is really one of fact. They are speaking of man as they wish or fancy

him to be, but we are speaking of him as he is. They isolate the animal

part of his nature; we regard him as a creature having many sides, or

aspects, moving between good and evil, striving to rise above himself

and to become ‘a little lower than the angels.’ We also, to use a

Platonic formula, are not ignorant of the dissatisfactions and

incompatibilities of family life, of the meannesses of trade, of the

flatteries of one class of society by another, of the impediments which

the family throws in the way of lofty aims and aspirations. But we are

conscious that there are evils and dangers in the background greater

still, which are not appreciated, because they are either concealed or

suppressed. What a condition of man would that be, in which human

passions were controlled by no authority, divine or human, in which

there was no shame or decency, no higher affection overcoming or

sanctifying the natural instincts, but simply a rule of health! Is it

for this that we are asked to throw away the civilization which is the

growth of ages?

For strength and health are not the only qualities to be desired; there

are the more important considerations of mind and character and soul.

We know how human nature may be degraded; we do not know how by

artificial means any improvement in the breed can be effected. The

problem is a complex one, for if we go back only four steps (and these

at least enter into the composition of a child), there are commonly

thirty progenitors to be taken into account. Many curious facts, rarely

admitting of proof, are told us respecting the inheritance of disease

or character from a remote ancestor. We can trace the physical

resemblances of parents and children in the same family—

‘Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat’;

but scarcely less often the differences which distinguish children both

from their parents and from one another. We are told of similar mental

peculiarities running in families, and again of a tendency, as in the

animals, to revert to a common or original stock. But we have a

difficulty in distinguishing what is a true inheritance of genius or

other qualities, and what is mere imitation or the result of similar

circumstances. Great men and great women have rarely had great fathers

and mothers. Nothing that we know of in the circumstances of their

birth or lineage will explain their appearance. Of the English poets of

the last and two preceding centuries scarcely a descendant

remains,—none have ever been distinguished. So deeply has nature hidden

her secret, and so ridiculous is the fancy which has been entertained

by some that we might in time by suitable marriage arrangements or, as

Plato would have said, ‘by an ingenious system of lots,’ produce a

Shakespeare or a Milton. Even supposing that we could breed men having

the tenacity of bulldogs, or, like the Spartans, ‘lacking the wit to

run away in battle,’ would the world be any the better? Many of the

noblest specimens of the human race have been among the weakest

physically. Tyrtaeus or Aesop, or our own Newton, would have been

exposed at Sparta; and some of the fairest and strongest men and women

have been among the wickedest and worst. Not by the Platonic device of

uniting the strong and fair with the strong and fair, regardless of

sentiment and morality, nor yet by his other device of combining

dissimilar natures (Statesman), have mankind gradually passed from the

brutality and licentiousness of primitive marriage to marriage

Christian and civilized.

Few persons would deny that we bring into the world an inheritance of

mental and physical qualities derived first from our parents, or

through them from some remoter ancestor, secondly from our race,

thirdly from the general condition of mankind into which we are born.

Nothing is commoner than the remark, that ‘So and so is like his father

or his uncle’; and an aged person may not unfrequently note a

resemblance in a youth to a long-forgotten ancestor, observing that

‘Nature sometimes skips a generation.’ It may be true also, that if we

knew more about our ancestors, these similarities would be even more

striking to us. Admitting the facts which are thus described in a

popular way, we may however remark that there is no method of

difference by which they can be defined or estimated, and that they

constitute only a small part of each individual. The doctrine of

heredity may seem to take out of our hands the conduct of our own

lives, but it is the idea, not the fact, which is really terrible to

us. For what we have received from our ancestors is only a fraction of

what we are, or may become. The knowledge that drunkenness or insanity

has been prevalent in a family may be the best safeguard against their

recurrence in a future generation. The parent will be most awake to the

vices or diseases in his child of which he is most sensible within

himself. The whole of life may be directed to their prevention or cure.

The traces of consumption may become fainter, or be wholly effaced: the

inherent tendency to vice or crime may be eradicated. And so heredity,

from being a curse, may become a blessing. We acknowledge that in the

matter of our birth, as in our nature generally, there are previous

circumstances which affect us. But upon this platform of circumstances

or within this wall of necessity, we have still the power of creating a

life for ourselves by the informing energy of the human will.

There is another aspect of the marriage question to which Plato is a

stranger. All the children born in his state are foundlings. It never

occurred to him that the greater part of them, according to universal

experience, would have perished. For children can only be brought up in

families. There is a subtle sympathy between the mother and the child

which cannot be supplied by other mothers, or by ‘strong nurses one or

more’ (Laws). If Plato’s ‘pen’ was as fatal as the Creches of Paris, or

the foundling hospital of Dublin, more than nine-tenths of his children

would have perished. There would have been no need to expose or put out

of the way the weaklier children, for they would have died of

themselves. So emphatically does nature protest against the destruction

of the family.

What Plato had heard or seen of Sparta was applied by him in a mistaken

way to his ideal commonwealth. He probably observed that both the

Spartan men and women were superior in form and strength to the other

Greeks; and this superiority he was disposed to attribute to the laws

and customs relating to marriage. He did not consider that the desire

of a noble offspring was a passion among the Spartans, or that their

physical superiority was to be attributed chiefly, not to their

marriage customs, but to their temperance and training. He did not

reflect that Sparta was great, not in consequence of the relaxation of

morality, but in spite of it, by virtue of a political principle

stronger far than existed in any other Grecian state. Least of all did

he observe that Sparta did not really produce the finest specimens of

the Greek race. The genius, the political inspiration of Athens, the

love of liberty—all that has made Greece famous with posterity, were

wanting among the Spartans. They had no Themistocles, or Pericles, or

Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Socrates, or Plato. The individual was not

allowed to appear above the state; the laws were fixed, and he had no

business to alter or reform them. Yet whence has the progress of cities

and nations arisen, if not from remarkable individuals, coming into the

world we know not how, and from causes over which we have no control?

Something too much may have been said in modern times of the value of

individuality. But we can hardly condemn too strongly a system which,

instead of fostering the scattered seeds or sparks of genius and

character, tends to smother and extinguish them.

Still, while condemning Plato, we must acknowledge that neither

Christianity, nor any other form of religion and society, has hitherto

been able to cope with this most difficult of social problems, and that

the side from which Plato regarded it is that from which we turn away.

Population is the most untameable force in the political and social

world. Do we not find, especially in large cities, that the greatest

hindrance to the amelioration of the poor is their improvidence in

marriage?—a small fault truly, if not involving endless consequences.

There are whole countries too, such as India, or, nearer home, Ireland,

in which a right solution of the marriage question seems to lie at the

foundation of the happiness of the community. There are too many people

on a given space, or they marry too early and bring into the world a

sickly and half-developed offspring; or owing to the very conditions of

their existence, they become emaciated and hand on a similar life to

their descendants. But who can oppose the voice of prudence to the

‘mightiest passions of mankind’ (Laws), especially when they have been

licensed by custom and religion? In addition to the influences of

education, we seem to require some new principles of right and wrong in

these matters, some force of opinion, which may indeed be already heard

whispering in private, but has never affected the moral sentiments of

mankind in general. We unavoidably lose sight of the principle of

utility, just in that action of our lives in which we have the most

need of it. The influences which we can bring to bear upon this

question are chiefly indirect. In a generation or two, education,

emigration, improvements in agriculture and manufactures, may have

provided the solution. The state physician hardly likes to probe the

wound: it is beyond his art; a matter which he cannot safely let alone,

but which he dare not touch:

‘We do but skin and film the ulcerous place.’

When again in private life we see a whole family one by one dropping

into the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady, and the parents

perhaps surviving them, do our minds ever go back silently to that day

twenty-five or thirty years before on which under the fairest auspices,

amid the rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and

bridegroom joined hands with one another? In making such a reflection

we are not opposing physical considerations to moral, but moral to

physical; we are seeking to make the voice of reason heard, which

drives us back from the extravagance of sentimentalism on common sense.

The late Dr. Combe is said by his biographer to have resisted the

temptation to marriage, because he knew that he was subject to

hereditary consumption. One who deserved to be called a man of genius,

a friend of my youth, was in the habit of wearing a black ribbon on his

wrist, in order to remind him that, being liable to outbreaks of

insanity, he must not give way to the natural impulses of affection: he

died unmarried in a lunatic asylum. These two little facts suggest the

reflection that a very few persons have done from a sense of duty what

the rest of mankind ought to have done under like circumstances, if

they had allowed themselves to think of all the misery which they were

about to bring into the world. If we could prevent such marriages

without any violation of feeling or propriety, we clearly ought; and

the prohibition in the course of time would be protected by a ‘horror

naturalis’ similar to that which, in all civilized ages and countries,

has prevented the marriage of near relations by blood. Mankind would

have been the happier, if some things which are now allowed had from

the beginning been denied to them; if the sanction of religion could

have prohibited practices inimical to health; if sanitary principles

could in early ages have been invested with a superstitious awe. But,

living as we do far on in the world’s history, we are no longer able to

stamp at once with the impress of religion a new prohibition. A free

agent cannot have his fancies regulated by law; and the execution of

the law would be rendered impossible, owing to the uncertainty of the

cases in which marriage was to be forbidden. Who can weigh virtue, or

even fortune against health, or moral and mental qualities against

bodily? Who can measure probabilities against certainties? There has

been some good as well as evil in the discipline of suffering; and

there are diseases, such as consumption, which have exercised a

refining and softening influence on the character. Youth is too

inexperienced to balance such nice considerations; parents do not often

think of them, or think of them too late. They are at a distance and

may probably be averted; change of place, a new state of life, the

interests of a home may be the cure of them. So persons vainly reason

when their minds are already made up and their fortunes irrevocably

linked together. Nor is there any ground for supposing that marriages

are to any great extent influenced by reflections of this sort, which

seem unable to make any head against the irresistible impulse of

individual attachment.

Lastly, no one can have observed the first rising flood of the passions

in youth, the difficulty of regulating them, and the effects on the

whole mind and nature which follow from them, the stimulus which is

given to them by the imagination, without feeling that there is

something unsatisfactory in our method of treating them. That the most

important influence on human life should be wholly left to chance or

shrouded in mystery, and instead of being disciplined or understood,

should be required to conform only to an external standard of

propriety—cannot be regarded by the philosopher as a safe or

satisfactory condition of human things. And still those who have the

charge of youth may find a way by watchfulness, by affection, by the

manliness and innocence of their own lives, by occasional hints, by

general admonitions which every one can apply for himself, to mitigate

this terrible evil which eats out the heart of individuals and corrupts

the moral sentiments of nations. In no duty towards others is there

more need of reticence and self-restraint. So great is the danger lest

he who would be the counsellor of another should reveal the secret

prematurely, lest he should get another too much into his power; or fix

the passing impression of evil by demanding the confession of it.

Nor is Plato wrong in asserting that family attachments may interfere

with higher aims. If there have been some who ‘to party gave up what

was meant for mankind,’ there have certainly been others who to family

gave up what was meant for mankind or for their country. The cares of

children, the necessity of procuring money for their support, the

flatteries of the rich by the poor, the exclusiveness of caste, the

pride of birth or wealth, the tendency of family life to divert men

from the pursuit of the ideal or the heroic, are as lowering in our own

age as in that of Plato. And if we prefer to look at the gentle

influences of home, the development of the affections, the amenities of

society, the devotion of one member of a family for the good of the

others, which form one side of the picture, we must not quarrel with

him, or perhaps ought rather to be grateful to him, for having

presented to us the reverse. Without attempting to defend Plato on

grounds of morality, we may allow that there is an aspect of the world

which has not unnaturally led him into error.

We hardly appreciate the power which the idea of the State, like all

other abstract ideas, exercised over the mind of Plato. To us the State

seems to be built up out of the family, or sometimes to be the

framework in which family and social life is contained. But to Plato in

his present mood of mind the family is only a disturbing influence

which, instead of filling up, tends to disarrange the higher unity of

the State. No organization is needed except a political, which,

regarded from another point of view, is a military one. The State is

all-sufficing for the wants of man, and, like the idea of the Church in

later ages, absorbs all other desires and affections. In time of war

the thousand citizens are to stand like a rampart impregnable against

the world or the Persian host; in time of peace the preparation for war

and their duties to the State, which are also their duties to one

another, take up their whole life and time. The only other interest

which is allowed to them besides that of war, is the interest of

philosophy. When they are too old to be soldiers they are to retire

from active life and to have a second novitiate of study and

contemplation. There is an element of monasticism even in Plato’s

communism. If he could have done without children, he might have

converted his Republic into a religious order. Neither in the Laws,

when the daylight of common sense breaks in upon him, does he retract

his error. In the state of which he would be the founder, there is no

marrying or giving in marriage: but because of the infirmity of

mankind, he condescends to allow the law of nature to prevail.

(c) But Plato has an equal, or, in his own estimation, even greater

paradox in reserve, which is summed up in the famous text, ‘Until kings

are philosophers or philosophers are kings, cities will never cease

from ill.’ And by philosophers he explains himself to mean those who

are capable of apprehending ideas, especially the idea of good. To the

attainment of this higher knowledge the second education is directed.

Through a process of training which has already made them good citizens

they are now to be made good legislators. We find with some surprise

(not unlike the feeling which Aristotle in a well-known passage

describes the hearers of Plato’s lectures as experiencing, when they

went to a discourse on the idea of good, expecting to be instructed in

moral truths, and received instead of them arithmetical and

mathematical formulae) that Plato does not propose for his future

legislators any study of finance or law or military tactics, but only

of abstract mathematics, as a preparation for the still more abstract

conception of good. We ask, with Aristotle, What is the use of a man

knowing the idea of good, if he does not know what is good for this

individual, this state, this condition of society? We cannot understand

how Plato’s legislators or guardians are to be fitted for their work of

statesmen by the study of the five mathematical sciences. We vainly

search in Plato’s own writings for any explanation of this seeming

absurdity.

The discovery of a great metaphysical conception seems to ravish the

mind with a prophetic consciousness which takes away the power of

estimating its value. No metaphysical enquirer has ever fairly

criticised his own speculations; in his own judgment they have been

above criticism; nor has he understood that what to him seemed to be

absolute truth may reappear in the next generation as a form of logic

or an instrument of thought. And posterity have also sometimes equally

misapprehended the real value of his speculations. They appear to them

to have contributed nothing to the stock of human knowledge. The IDEA

of good is apt to be regarded by the modern thinker as an unmeaning

abstraction; but he forgets that this abstraction is waiting ready for

use, and will hereafter be filled up by the divisions of knowledge.

When mankind do not as yet know that the world is subject to law, the

introduction of the mere conception of law or design or final cause,

and the far-off anticipation of the harmony of knowledge, are great

steps onward. Even the crude generalization of the unity of all things

leads men to view the world with different eyes, and may easily affect

their conception of human life and of politics, and also their own

conduct and character (Tim). We can imagine how a great mind like that

of Pericles might derive elevation from his intercourse with Anaxagoras

(Phaedr.). To be struggling towards a higher but unattainable

conception is a more favourable intellectual condition than to rest

satisfied in a narrow portion of ascertained fact. And the earlier,

which have sometimes been the greater ideas of science, are often lost

sight of at a later period. How rarely can we say of any modern

enquirer in the magnificent language of Plato, that ‘He is the

spectator of all time and of all existence!’

Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of these vast

metaphysical conceptions to practical and political life. In the first

enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to see them everywhere, and to apply

them in the most remote sphere. They do not understand that the

experience of ages is required to enable them to fill up ‘the

intermediate axioms.’ Plato himself seems to have imagined that the

truths of psychology, like those of astronomy and harmonics, would be

arrived at by a process of deduction, and that the method which he has

pursued in the Fourth Book, of inferring them from experience and the

use of language, was imperfect and only provisional. But when, after

having arrived at the idea of good, which is the end of the science of

dialectic, he is asked, What is the nature, and what are the divisions

of the science? He refuses to answer, as if intending by the refusal to

intimate that the state of knowledge which then existed was not such as

would allow the philosopher to enter into his final rest. The previous

sciences must first be studied, and will, we may add, continue to be

studied till the end of time, although in a sense different from any

which Plato could have conceived. But we may observe, that while he is

aware of the vacancy of his own ideal, he is full of enthusiasm in the

contemplation of it. Looking into the orb of light, he sees nothing,

but he is warmed and elevated. The Hebrew prophet believed that faith

in God would enable him to govern the world; the Greek philosopher

imagined that contemplation of the good would make a legislator. There

is as much to be filled up in the one case as in the other, and the one

mode of conception is to the Israelite what the other is to the Greek.

Both find a repose in a divine perfection, which, whether in a more

personal or impersonal form, exists without them and independently of

them, as well as within them.

There is no mention of the idea of good in the Timaeus, nor of the

divine Creator of the world in the Republic; and we are naturally led

to ask in what relation they stand to one another. Is God above or

below the idea of good? Or is the Idea of Good another mode of

conceiving God? The latter appears to be the truer answer. To the Greek

philosopher the perfection and unity of God was a far higher conception

than his personality, which he hardly found a word to express, and

which to him would have seemed to be borrowed from mythology. To the

Christian, on the other hand, or to the modern thinker in general, it

is difficult, if not impossible, to attach reality to what he terms

mere abstraction; while to Plato this very abstraction is the truest

and most real of all things. Hence, from a difference in forms of

thought, Plato appears to be resting on a creation of his own mind

only. But if we may be allowed to paraphrase the idea of good by the

words ‘intelligent principle of law and order in the universe,

embracing equally man and nature,’ we begin to find a meeting-point

between him and ourselves.

The question whether the ruler or statesman should be a philosopher is

one that has not lost interest in modern times. In most countries of

Europe and Asia there has been some one in the course of ages who has

truly united the power of command with the power of thought and

reflection, as there have been also many false combinations of these

qualities. Some kind of speculative power is necessary both in

practical and political life; like the rhetorician in the Phaedrus, men

require to have a conception of the varieties of human character, and

to be raised on great occasions above the commonplaces of ordinary

life. Yet the idea of the philosopher-statesman has never been popular

with the mass of mankind; partly because he cannot take the world into

his confidence or make them understand the motives from which he acts;

and also because they are jealous of a power which they do not

understand. The revolution which human nature desires to effect step by

step in many ages is likely to be precipitated by him in a single year

or life. They are afraid that in the pursuit of his greater aims he may

disregard the common feelings of humanity, he is too apt to be looking

into the distant future or back into the remote past, and unable to see

actions or events which, to use an expression of Plato’s ‘are tumbling

out at his feet.’ Besides, as Plato would say, there are other

corruptions of these philosophical statesmen. Either ‘the native hue of

resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,’ and at the

moment when action above all things is required he is undecided, or

general principles are enunciated by him in order to cover some change

of policy; or his ignorance of the world has made him more easily fall

a prey to the arts of others; or in some cases he has been converted

into a courtier, who enjoys the luxury of holding liberal opinions, but

was never known to perform a liberal action. No wonder that mankind

have been in the habit of calling statesmen of this class pedants,

sophisters, doctrinaires, visionaries. For, as we may be allowed to

say, a little parodying the words of Plato, ‘they have seen bad

imitations of the philosopher-statesman.’ But a man in whom the power

of thought and action are perfectly balanced, equal to the present,

reaching forward to the future, ‘such a one,’ ruling in a

constitutional state, ‘they have never seen.’