of the other. Failing to draw this distinction so good a physician as the late Professor Tyndall went out of his way to deal (in some of his writings) feeble blows at the teleologist. It was an instance of dealing blows into the air, vires in ventos effundere (Virg.)

Professor HULL'S reply.-That water "further expands in the act of congelation," as Dr. Irving points out, is of interest; though I question whether the experiment at Wellington College proves more than that at zero of Cent. the expansion had reached its maximum ; and water being incompressible ex necessitate burst the bomb.

As regards Dr. Irving's "wonder" that as a geologist I did not enter upon the agency of water in eroding mountains, etc., my reply is that these were outside the range of my subject. My object was to point out the abnormal characteristics of water, and their evidence of Design in Nature. Until I received Dr. Irving's criticism I was not aware that this subject had been treated by a Senior Wrangler of Cambridge, or any other writers; the advantage of this is, that both essays, that of Canon J. M. Wilson and my own, are original.

507TH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.

MONDAY, APRIL 18TH, 1910.

PROFESSOR E. HULL, F.R.S. (VICE-PRESIDENT), IN THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the 505th Ordinary General Meeting were read and confirmed.

The following lecture was then delivered by the author :—

PLATO'S

THEORY OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN RELATION TO THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF HUMAN NATURE. By the Rev. H. J. R. MARSTON, M.A.

THE

HE acknowledged greatness of Plato as a writer and a thinker, and his perennial influence upon thought, especially in connection with education, justify me in approaching what is, perhaps, the most interesting and thorny of problems, through the great Greek thinker. Moreover, there are in his opinions, especially as expressed in the Republic and the Laws, certain phases on which he insists, which have visible affinities with opinions of leading educationalists in the present day.

This is specially true of the emphasis which Plato lays upon the State. For weal or for woe during the last generation and a half in England, in France, in Germany and in America it has passed into an axiom, or at least, an assumption, that the State has to have the first and the last word in education.

This subject has divided mankind always, and there are incidental advantages in passing from the beat and din of current controversy to the calm and the cool of the academic grove, and in trying to gather first principles from one whose voice has long been mute, although his spirit still rules ours from his immortal urn.

I will trouble my audience, for the sake of clearness, and of what will come after, by indicating how this subject arises in the Politeia. That wonderful dialogue begins by describing a gathering, friendly and domestic, of Athenians. They are discussing the nature of justice. And Socrates, who is amongst them, suggests that they should study justice on a large scalein large letters, to use a favourite Platonic image: that they should not seek for it in the individual man, but as expressed and embodied in the State. They agree. They then proceed to discuss what the State is, how it originates, how it works itself out. They arrive at the conclusion that the principal thing in a State is the ruling class.

The question then naturally arises-How is this ruling class to be educated? They then proceed to discuss the nature of the education of the guardians. Thus there are three great subjects which alternate and interweave themselves throughout the whole of the Politeia. The first is the nature and office of the State. The second is the essence and the issues of justice. The third is the scope and the method of education. Thus it is that education, though only the third of the subjects engaging the mind of Plato, becomes a permanent and striking matter in the course of his meditations.

In the next place let me review what is in general terms the ground and scale of Platonic education. It begins with morals. It then proceeds to music. Music, however, we must understand not in the limited and technical sense, but mousike, that is to say, the whole art of the muses. It involves elocution and general culture, λéğış, a mode of diction and demeanour proper to the guardians. From music he passes on to gymnastic, which is to have the same effect upon the body as Movσikη has upon the soul. Gymnastic is to be followed, so it appears, by arithmetic; arithmetic does not mean that painful, mechanical form of study from which I have a hereditary and an instinctive aversion. (Laughter.) But it means the whole of the great science of number and of measurement, for which I have a profound but distant admiration.

Following arithmetic comes dialectic, which covers a great deal of what we should call moral and mental philosophy. Finally, the close and climax of the Platonic graduation of knowledge, of the scheme of education, is philosophy itself. Philosophy meant to Plato the power acquired by the highest intellects of contemplating pure truth, a power which, unhappily, he has at last to confess, is only attainable by the rarest and most gifted of the intellects of mankind.

I shall have to criticize at some length and with some asperity a great deal that is contained in Plato's theory of education. I must begin by saying that the whole scheme at once attracts and arrests us by certain admirable and striking features. (Hear, hear.) In the first place there is displayed throughout the whole of the Politeia immense, I might almost call it a preter-natural, ardour for knowledge. In the second place it exhibits a highly admirable belief in the value and importance of educating the faculties of both mind and body; and in the third place it exhibits a breadth of view and speculative freedom and grandeur which it may be said is very far remote indeed from, and apparently but slenderly understood by many of the most clamorous, and by many of the most obtrusive, advocates of education in the present day. (Hear, hear.)

It is

This is the scheme of education which one gathers from the Politeia. I would not have you suppose that it is categorically set forth as in the Code proceeding from Whitehall. mainly apparent in these parts: in the third book, in part of the fifth book, in part of the sixth book, and in the tenth book, where it divides with justice the honour of bringing the dialogue to a magnificent climax.

This system of education which Plato here unfolds rests upon one single thought, the exclusive supremacy of the State in education. Education by the State and for the State is the distinguishing conception of Plato's theory. Nothing may be allowed to interfere with that conception. That is the root, and it is the centre, and it is the close, of all Plato's cogitations. It therefore now becomes my duty to describe Plato's ideal state. I will begin by describing it succinctly. Plato's ideal state is an aristocracy. That aristocracy rests upon a divinelymade distinction of classes. That distinction of classes is rigorously defended by a division of labour. It is an axiom with Plato-one man, one job. This is again and again insisted upon. A cobbler must cobble shoes in æternum. shepherd must do nothing but tend sheep. A soldier must always be soldiering, and a guardian must always, from morn till night, and again from night till morn, be occupied in protecting the State.

A

This view of the State necessarily involves that the State should govern education. Accordingly, the whole question of education for Plato is ruled by one consideration. Is this, or that, a good thing for the State or not? Does this, or that, tend to make a good citizen, or a better citizen than something

else? If so, it shall be pro tanto incorporated in the scheme of education. If not, it shall be peremptorily ruled out. That must be carefully remembered as we are discussing Plato's theory of education and what follows from it.

There is another important, a painful element which it is impossible to pass over in describing Plato's ideal State. It became necessary for Plato in constructing his ideal State to enquire, how shall this State be preserved? It can only be preserved, said Plato, by the perfection of its guardians. What is it which the guardians of a State are most likely to be corrupted by? It is, said he, "by discord." All states ultimately come to ruin through discord. Our State, therefore, at least in its guardian class, must be wholly immune from discord. But what are the things which cause discord? "Private property, personal ownership, 'Mine and thine.'" These terms, therefore, must be banished from our guardians. They must never know the sound or the meaning of "Mine and thine." They must, in short, be absolutely communistic. With remorseless logic, he carries this out into every detail of life; he sweeps away family obligations. To this he sacrifices the purity, and the naturalness, of woman. Under this head he sanctions sins from which modern legislatures would recoil; this is the sole test of what things are fit and not fit to be enjoyed and practised by the guardians of the State. It is melancholy, that we have to contemplate in the man whom Dr. Jowett has called "the father of idealism" and the greatest metaphysical writer of the world, such a lapse from the high standard of morality which has been introduced by the Gospel.

But two things are to be borne in mind. First, that Plato is only here arguing upon ideal conditions; and secondly, that he was not acquainted with the sacred morality of the Old Testament, still less with the more lofty and sacred morality of the New. Those things must be said in mitigation of any sentence which we pronounce upon Plato's doctrine of communism.

But, those things being said, do not prevent me from saying this, viz., that the Politeia of Plato furnishes the most illustrious proof in the world, that the theory of a proprietary state is logically inseparable from a communistic view which endangers private property, personal liberty, sexual purity, and intellectual originality.

Such, then, is Plato's State; and I now pass to enquire, what is the influence of such a State upon education, even from