THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

PLATO 23
Music is valuable not only because it brings refinement of feeling and
character, but also because it preserves and restores health. There are
some diseases which can be treated only through the mind (Charmides,
157) : so the Corybantic priest treated hysterical women with wild pipe
music, which excited them to dance and dance till they fell to the
ground exhausted, and went to sleep; when they awoke they were cured.
The unconscious sources of human thought are touched and soothed by
such methods; and it is in these substrata of behavior and feeling that
genius
sinks its roots. "No man when conscious attains to true or in-
spired intuition, but rather when the power
of intellect is fettered in
sleep or by disease or dementia"; the prophet (mantike) or genius is akin
to the madman (manike) (Phcedrus, 244) .
Plato passes on to a remarkable anticipation of "psychoanalysis." Our
political psychology is perplexed, he argues,
because we have not ade-
quately studied the various appetites or instincts of man. Dreams may
give us a clue to some of the subtle and more elusive of these dispositions.
Certain of the unnecessary pleasures and instincts are deemed to be un-
lawful; every man appears to have them, but in some persons they are
subjected to the control of law and reason ["sublimated"], and the better
desires prevailing over them, they are either wholly suppressed, or reduced
in strength and number; while in other persons these desires are stronger
and more abundant. I mean particularly those desires which are awake
when the reasoning and taming and ruling power ["censor"] of the personality
is asleep; the wild beast in our nature, gorged with meat and
drink, starts up and walks about naked, and surfeits at his will; and there
is no conceivable folly or crime, however shameless or unnatural not excepting
incest or parricide ["(Edipus complex"] of which such a nature may
not be guilty. . . . But when a man's pulse is healthy and temperate, and he
goes to sleep cool and rational, . . . having indulged his appetites neither
too much nor too little, but just enough to lay them to sleep, ... he is then
least likely to be the sport of fanciful and lawless visions. ... In all of us,
even in good men, there is such a latent wild beast nature, which peers out
in sleep (571-2).
Music and measure lend grace and health to the soul and to the body;
but again, too much music is as dangerous as too much athletics. To be
merely an athlete is to be nearly a savage; and to be merely a
musician is to be "melted and softened beyond what is good" (410).
The two must be combined; and after sixteen the individual practice
of music must be abandoned, though choral singing, like communal
games, will go on throughout life,. Nor is music to be merely music;
it must be used to provide attractive forms for the sometimes unappetizing
contents of mathematics, history and science; there is no
reason why for the young these difficult studies shpuld not be smoothed
into verse and! beautified with song. Even then these studies are not to be