But now we have to look for justice. Find the other three cardinal virtues first, and then justice will be distinguishable. Wisdom is in the guardians; if they be wise, the whole state will be wise. Courage we find in the soldiers; courage is the true estimate of danger, and that has been ingrained in them by their education. Temperance, called mastery of self, is really the mastery of the better over the baser qualities; as in our state the better class controls the inferior. Temperance would seem to lie in the harmonious inter-relation of the different classes. Obviously, the remaining virtue of the state is the constant performance of his own particular function in the state, and not his neighbour's, by each member of the state. Let us see how that works out in the individual.
Shall we not find that there are three several qualities in the individual, each of which must in like manner do its own business, the intellectual, the passionate or spirited, and the lustful? They must be separate, because one part of a thing cannot be doing contradictory things at the same time; your lusts bid you do what your intelligence forbids; and the emotional quality is distinct from both desire and reason, though in alliance with reason. Well, here you have wisdom and courage in the intellectual and spiritual parts, temperance in their mastery over desire; and justice is the virtue of the soul as a whole; of each part never failing to perform its own function and that alone. To ask, now, whether justice or injustice is the more profitable becomes ridiculous.
Now we shall find that virtue is one, but that vice has several forms; as there is but one form of perfect state—ours—whether it happens to be called a monarchy if there be but one guardian, or an aristocracy if there be more; and, as it has four principal imperfect forms, so there are four main vices.
Here Glaucon and Adeimantus refused to let me go on; I had shirked a serious difficulty. What about women and children? My saying that the soldiers were to live in common might mean anything. What kind of communism was I demanding? Well, there are two different questions: What is desirable? And, What is possible? First, then, our defenders are our watch-dogs. Glaucon knows all about dogs; we don't differentiate in the case of males and females; the latter hunt with the pack. If women are similarly to have the same employments as men, they must have the same education in music and gymnastic. We must not mind ribald comments. But should they share masculine employments? Do they differ from men in such a way that they should not? Women bear children, and men beget them; but apart from that the differences are really only in degrees of capacity, not essential distinctions of quality; even as men differ among themselves. The natures being the same, the education must be the same, and the same careers must be open.
But a second and more alarming wave threatens us: Community of wives and children. "You must prove both the possibility and desirability of that." Men and women must be trained together and live together, but not in licentiousness. They must be mated with the utmost care for procreation, the best being paired at due seasons, nominally by lot, and for the occasion. The offspring of the selected will have a common nursery; the mothers will not know which were their own children. Parentage will be permissible only between twenty-five and fifty-five, and between twenty and forty. The children begotten in the same batch of espousals will be brothers and sisters.
The absence of "mine" and "thine" will ensure unity, because it abolishes the primary cause of discord; common maintenance by the state removes all temptation either to meanness or cringing. Our guardians will be uncommonly happy. As to practicability: communism is suitable for war. The youngsters will be taken to watch any fighting; cowards will be degraded; valour will be honoured, and death on the field, with other supreme services to the state, will rank the hero among demigods. Against Greeks war must be conducted as against our own kith and kin. But as to the possibility of all this—this third threatening wave is the most terrific of all.
IV.—Of Philosophy in Rulers
It will be possible then, and only then, when kings are philosophers or philosophers kings. "You will be mobbed and pelted for such a proposition." Still, it is the fact. The philosopher desires all knowledge. You know that justice, beauty, good, and so on, are single, though their presentation is multiplex and variable. Curiosity about the multiplex particulars is not desire of knowledge, which is of the one constant idea—of that which is, as ignorance is of that which is not. What neither is nor is not, that which fluctuates and changes, is the subject matter of opinion, a state between knowledge and ignorance. Beauty is beauty always and everywhere; the things that look beautiful may be ugly from another point of view. Experience of beautiful things, curiosity about them, must be distinguished from knowledge of beauty; the philosopher is not to be confounded with the connoisseur, not knowledge with opinion. The philosopher is he who has in his mind the perfect pattern of justice, beauty, truth; his is the knowledge of the eternal; he contemplates all time and all existence; no praises are too high for his character. "No doubt; still, if that is so, why do professed philosophers always show themselves either fools or knaves in ordinary affairs?" A ship's crew which does not understand that the art of navigation demands a knowledge of the stars, will stigmatise a properly qualified pilot as a star-gazing idiot, and will prevent him from navigating. The world assumes that the philosopher's abstractions are folly, and rejects his guidance. The philosopher is the best kind of man; the corrupted philosopher is the worst; and the corrupted influences brought to bear are irresistible to all but the very strongest natures. The professional teachers of philosophy live not by leading popular opinion, but by pandering to it; a bastard brood trick themselves out as philosophers, while the true philosopher withdraws himself from so gross a world. Small wonder that philosophy gets discredited! Not in the soil of any existing state can philosophy grow naturally; planted in a suitable state, her divinity will be apparent.
I need no longer hesitate to say that we must make our guardians philosophers. The necessary combination of qualities is extremely rare. Our test must be thorough, for the soul must be trained up by the pursuit of all kinds of knowledge to the capacity for the pursuit of the highest—higher than justice and wisdom—the idea of the good. "But what is the good—pleasure, knowledge?" No. To see and distinguish material things, the faculty of sight requires the medium of light, whose source is the sun. The good is to the intellectual faculty what the sun is to that of vision: it is the source and cause of truth, which is the light whereby we perceive ideas; it is not truth nor the ideas, but above them; their cause, as the sun is the source of light and the cause of growth.
Again, as the material things with which the eye is concerned are in two categories—the copies, reflections or shadows of things, and actual things—correspondingly the things perceived by the intellect are in a secondary region—as the mathematical—where everything is derived from hypotheses which are assumed to be first principles; or in a supreme region, in which hypotheses are orly the steps by which we ascend to the real ultimate first principles themselves. And it will follow further that the mind has four faculties appropriate to these four divisions, which we call respectively pure reason (the highest), understanding, conviction, and perception of shadows; the first pair being concerned with being, the field of the intellect; the second pair with becoming, the field of opinion.