THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

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THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY
children, who will thus be protected from the habits of their parents"
(540) . We cannot build Utopia with young people corrupted at every
turn by the example of their elders. We must start, so far as we can, with
a clean slate. It is quite possible
that some enlightened ruler will empower
us to make such a beginning with some part or colony of his realm. (One
ruler did, as we shall see.) In any case we must give to every child, and
from the outset, full equality of educational opportunity;
there is no
telling where the light of talent or genius will break out; we must seek
it impartially everywhere, in every rank and race. The first turn on our
road is universal education.
"
For the first ten years of life, education shall be predominantly physical;
every school is to have a gymnasium and a playground; play and sport are
to be the entire curriculum; and in this first decade such health will be
stored up as will make all medicine unnecessary. "To require the help of
medicine because by lives of indolence and luxury men have filled them-
selves like pools with waters and . . . winds, flatulence and catarrh is
not this a . . .
disgrace? Our present system of medicine may be said to
educate diseases," to draw them out into a long existence, rather than to
cure them. But this is an absurdity of the idle rich. "When a carpenter
is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready remedy an emetic, or a
purge, or cautery, or the knife. And if anyone tells him that he must go
through a course of dietetics, and swathe and swaddle his head, and all
that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that
he sees no good in a life that is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect
of his ordinary calling; and therefore, saying good-bye to this sort of
physicians, he resumes his customary diet, and either gets well and lives
and does his business, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has done
with it" . (405-6) We cannot afford to have a nation of malingerers and
invalids; Utopia must begin in the body of man.
But mere athletics and gymnastics would make a man too one-sided.
"How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage? for
they seem to be inconsistent with each other" (375). We do not want a
nation of prize-fighters and weight-lifters. Perhaps music will solve our
problem: through music the soul learns harmony and rhythm, and even
a disposition to justice; for "can he who is harmoniously constituted ever
be unjust? Is not this, Glaucon, why musical training is so powerful,
because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the
soul, bearing grace in their movements and making the soul graceful?"
(401; Protagoras, 326). Music moulds character, and therefore shares in
determining social and political issues. "Damon tells me and I can quite
believe it that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of
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the state change with them."
M
Cf. Daniel O'Connell: "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who
makes its laws."