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 naïveté 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. 580. B ff.), and the greater and less reality of different orders of pleasure (ix. 583. Bff.). The dialectic arrives at a synthe

sis 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. 591. 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. 608. 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. 614. 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 1509, 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.