Here is an extract in which Socrates applies the maieutic art to the establishment of a moral truth, the belief in God:
“I will mention a conversation he once had in my presence with Aristodemus, surnamed the Little, concerning the gods. He knew that Aristodemus neither sacrificed to the gods, nor consulted the oracles, but ridiculed those who took part in these religious observances. ‘Tell me, Aristodemus,’ said he, ‘are there men whose talents you admire?’ ‘There are,’ he replied. ‘Then tell us their names,’ said Socrates. ‘In epic poetry I especially admire Homer; in dithyrambic, Melanippides; in tragedy, Sophocles; in statuary, Polycletus; in painting, Zeuxis.’ ‘But what artists do you think most worthy of admiration, those who form images destitute of sense and movement, or those who produce animated beings, endowed with the faculty of thinking and acting?’ ‘Those who form animated beings, for these are the work of intelligence and not of chance.’ ‘And which do you regard as the creation of intelligence, and which the product of chance, those works whose purpose cannot be recognized, or those whose utility is manifest?’ ‘It is reasonable to attribute to an intelligence the works which have some useful purpose.’”[31]
Socrates then points out to Aristodemus how admirably the different organs of the human body are adapted to the functions of life and to the use of man. And so proceeding from example to example, from induction to induction, always keeping the mind of his auditor alert by the questions he raises, and the answers that he suggests, forcing him to do his share of the work, and giving him an equal share in the train of reasoning, he finally brings him to the goal which is to make him recognize the existence of God.
27. The Republic of Plato.—“Would you form,” said J. J. Rousseau, “an idea of public education? read the Republic of Plato. It is the finest treatise on education ever written.” For truth’s sake we must discount the enthusiasm of Rousseau. The Republic doubtless contains some elements of a wise and practical scheme of education; but, on the whole, it is but an ideal creation, a compound of paradoxes and chimeras. In Plato’s ideal commonwealth, the individual and the family itself are sacrificed to the State. Woman becomes so much like man as to be subjected to the same gymnastic exercises; she too must be a soldier as he is. Children know neither father nor mother. From the day of their birth they are given in charge of common nurses, veritable public functionaries. In that common fold, “care shall be taken that no mother recognize her offspring.” We may guess that in making this pompous eulogy of the Republic, the paradoxical author of the Émile hoped to prepare the reader for giving a complaisant welcome to his own dreams.
28. The Education of Warriors and Magistrates.—Plato, by some unexplained recollection of the social constitution of the Hindoos, established three castes in his ideal State,—laborers and artisans, warriors, and magistrates. There was no education for laborers and artisans; it was sufficient for men of this caste to learn a trade. In politics, Plato is an aristocrat; he feels a disdain for the people, “that robust and indocile animal.” It should be observed, however, that the barriers which he set up between these three social orders are not insuperable. If a child of the inferior class gives evidence of exceptional qualities, he must be admitted to the superior class; and so if the son of a warrior or of a magistrate is notably incompetent and unworthy of his rank, he must suffer forfeiture, and become artisan or laborer.
As to the education which he designs for the warriors and the magistrates, Plato is minutely careful in regulating it. The education of the warriors comprises two parts,—music and gymnastics. The education of the magistrates consists of a training in philosophy of a high grade; they are initiated into all the sciences and into metaphysics. Plato’s statesmen must be, not priests, as in the East, but scholars and philosophers.
29. Music and Gymnastics.—Although Plato attaches a high value to gymnastics, he gives precedence to music. Before forming the body, Plato, the idealist, would form the soul, because it is the soul, according to him, which, by its own virtue, gives to the body all the perfection of which it is capable. Even in physical exercises, the purpose should be to give increased vigor to the soul: “In the training of the body, our young men shall aim, above everything else, at augmenting moral power.” Note this striking picture of the man who trains only his body: “Let a man apply himself to gymnastics, and become trained, and eat much, and wholly neglect music and philosophy, and at first his body will become strengthened; but if he does nothing else, and holds no converse with the Muses, though his soul have some natural inclination to learn, yet if it remains uncultivated by acquiring knowledge, by inquiry, by discourse, in a word, by some department of music, that is, by intellectual education, it will insensibly become weak, deaf, and blind. Like a wild beast, such a man will live in ignorance and rudeness, with neither grace nor politeness.” However, Plato is far from despising health and physical strength. On the contrary, it is a reproach to him that he has imposed on the citizens of his Republic the obligation of being physically sound, and of having excluded from it all those whose infirmities and feeble constitution condemn them to “drag out a dying life.” The right to live, in Plato’s city, as in the most of ancient societies, belonged only to men of robust health. The weak, the ailing, the wretched, all who are of infirm constitution,—Plato does not go so far as ordering such to be killed, but, what amounts almost to the same thing,—“they shall be exposed,” that is, left to die. The good of the State demands that every man be sacrificed whose health renders him unfit for civil duties. This cruel and implacable doctrine shocks us in the case of him whom Montaigne calls the divine Plato, and shocks us even more when we discover it among contemporary philosophers, whom the inspirations of Christian charity or the feeling of human fraternity should have preserved from such rank heartlessness. Is it not Herbert Spencer who blames modern societies for nourishing the diseased and assisting the infirm?
30. Religion and Art in Education.—Plato had formed a high ideal of the function of art in education, but this did not prevent him from being severe against certain forms of art, particularly comedy and tragedy, and poetry in general. He would have the poets expelled from the city and conducted to the frontier, though paying them homage with perfumes which will continue to be shed upon their heads, and with flowers with which they will ever be crowned. He admits no other poetry than that which reproduces the manners and discourse of a good man, and celebrates the brave deeds of the gods, or chants their glory. As a severe moralist and worshipper of the divine goodness, he condemns the poets of his time, either because they attribute to the divinity the vices and passions of men, or because they invest the imagination with base fears as they speak of Cocytus and the Styx, and portray a frightful hell and gods always mad with desire to persecute the human race. Elsewhere, in the Laws, Plato explains his conception of religion. He says that the religious books placed in the hands of children should be selected with as much care as the milk of a nurse. God is an infinite goodness who watches over men, and he should be honored, not by sacrifices and vain ceremonies, but by lives of justice and virtue.
For making men moral, Plato counts more upon art than upon religious feeling. To love letters, to hold converse with the Muses, to cultivate music and dancing, such, in the opinion of the noble spirits of Athens, is the natural route towards moral perfection. In their view, moral education is above all an education in art. The soul rises to the good through the beautiful. “Beautiful and good” (καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός) are two words constantly associated in the speech of the Greeks. Even to-day we have much to learn from reflections like these: “We ought,” says Plato, “to seek out artists who by the power of genius can trace out the nature of the fair and the graceful, that our young men, dwelling, as it were, in a healthful region, may drink in good from every quarter, whence any emanation from noble works may strike upon their eye or their ear, like a gale wafting health from salubrious lands, and win them imperceptibly from their earliest years into resemblance, love, and harmony with the true beauty of reason.