book is not really what to most persons the title of it would imply, and

belongs to an age which has passed away. But it contains many fine

passages and thoughts which are for all time.

The short treatise de Monarchia of Dante is by far the most remarkable of

mediæval ideals, and bears the impress of the great genius in whom Italy

and the Middle Ages are so vividly reflected. It is the vision of an

Universal Empire, which is supposed to be the natural and necessary

government of the world, having a divine authority distinct from the

Papacy, yet coextensive with it. It is not 'the ghost of the dead Roman

Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof,' but the legitimate heir

and successor of it, justified by the ancient virtues of the Romans and

the beneficence of their rule. Their right to be the governors of the

world is also confirmed by the testimony of miracles, and acknowledged by

St. Paul when he appealed to Cæsar, and even more emphatically by Christ

Himself, Who could not have made atonement for the sins of men if He had

not been condemned by a divinely authorized tribunal. The necessity for

the establishment of an Universal Empire is proved partly by a priori

arguments such as the unity of God and the unity of the family or nation;

partly by perversions of Scripture and history, by false analogies of

nature, by misapplied quotations from the classics, and by odd scraps and

commonplaces of logic, showing a familiar but by no means exact knowledge

of Aristotle (of Plato there is none). But a more convincing argument

still is the miserable state of the world, which he touchingly describes.

He sees no hope of happiness or peace for mankind until all nations of the

earth are comprehended in a single empire. The whole treatise shows how

deeply the idea of the Roman Empire was fixed in the minds of his

contemporaries. Not much argument was needed to maintain the truth of a

theory which to his own {ccxxi} contemporaries seemed so natural and

congenial. He speaks, or rather preaches, from the point of view, not of

the ecclesiastic, but of the layman, although, as a good Catholic, he is

willing to acknowledge that in certain respects the Empire must submit to

the Church. The beginning and end of all his noble reflections and of his

arguments, good and bad, is the aspiration 'that in this little plot of

earth belonging to mortal man life may pass in freedom and peace.' So

inextricably is his vision of the future bound up with the beliefs and

circumstances of his own age.

The 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is a surprising monument of his genius,

and shows a reach of thought far beyond his contemporaries. The book was

written by him at the age of about 34 or 35, and is full of the generous

sentiments of youth. He brings the light of Plato to bear upon the

miserable state of his own country. Living not long after the Wars of the

Roses, and in the dregs of the Catholic Church in England, he is indignant

at the corruption of the clergy, at the luxury of the nobility and gentry,

at the sufferings of the poor, at the calamities caused by war. To the eye

of More the whole world was in dissolution and decay; and side by side

with the misery and oppression which he has described in the First Book of

the Utopia, he places in the Second Book the ideal state which by the help

of Plato he had constructed. The times were full of stir and intellectual

interest. The distant murmur of the Reformation was beginning to be heard.

To minds like More's, Greek literature was a revelation: there had arisen

an art of interpretation, and the New Testament was beginning to be

understood as it had never been before, and has not often been since, in

its natural sense. The life there depicted appeared to him wholly unlike

that of Christian commonwealths, in which 'he saw nothing but a certain

conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and

title of the Commonwealth.' He thought that Christ, like Plato,

'instituted all things common,' for which reason, he tells us, the

citizens of Utopia were the more willing to receive his doctrines[5]. The

community of {ccxxii} property is a fixed idea with him, though he is

aware of the arguments which may be urged on the other side[6]. We wonder

how in the reign of Henry VIII, though veiled in another language and

published in a foreign country, such speculations could have been endured.

[Footnote 5: 'Howbeit, I think this was no small help and furtherance in

the matter, that they heard us say that Christ instituted among his, all

things common, and that the same community doth yet remain in the rightest

Christian communities' (Utopia, English Reprints, p. 144).]

[Footnote 6: 'These things (I say), when I consider with myself, I hold

well with Plato, and do nothing marvel that he would make no laws for them

that refused those laws, whereby all men should have and enjoy equal

portions of riches and commodities. For the wise men did easily foresee

this to be the one and only way to the wealth of a community, if equality

of all things should be brought in and established' (Utopia, English

Reprints, p. 67, 68).]

He is gifted with far greater dramatic invention than any one who

succeeded him, with the exception of Swift. In the art of feigning he is a

worthy disciple of Plato. Like him, starting from a small portion of fact,

he founds his tale with admirable skill on a few lines in the Latin

narrative of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci. He is very precise about

dates and facts, and has the power of making us believe that the narrator

of the tale must have been an eyewitness. We are fairly puzzled by his

manner of mixing up real and imaginary persons; his boy John Clement and

Peter Giles, citizen of Antwerp, with whom he disputes about the precise

words which are supposed to have been used by the (imaginary) Portuguese

traveller, Raphael Hythloday. 'I have the more cause,' says Hythloday, 'to

fear that my words shall not be believed, for that I know how difficultly

and hardly I myself would have believed another man telling the same, if

I had not myself seen it with mine own eyes.' Or again: 'If you had been

with me in Utopia, and had presently seen their fashions and laws as I did

which lived there five years and more, and would never have come thence,

but only to make the new land known here,' etc. More greatly regrets that

he forgot to ask Hythloday in what part of the world Utopia is situated;

he 'would have spent no small sum of money rather than it should have

escaped him,' and he begs Peter Giles to see Hythloday or write to him and

obtain an answer to the question. After this we are not surprised to hear

that a Professor of Divinity (perhaps 'a late famous vicar of Croydon in

Surrey,' as the translator thinks) is desirous of being sent thither as a

missionary by the High Bishop, 'yea, and that he may himself be made

Bishop of Utopia, nothing doubting that he must obtain this Bishopric with

suit; and he counteth that a godly {ccxxiii} suit which proceedeth not of

the desire of honour or lucre, but only of a godly zeal.' The design may

have failed through the disappearance of Hythloday, concerning whom we

have 'very uncertain news' after his departure. There is no doubt,

however, that he had told More and Giles the exact situation of the

island, but unfortunately at the same moment More's attention, as he is

reminded in a letter from Giles, was drawn off by a servant, and one of

the company from a cold caught on shipboard coughed so loud as to prevent

Giles from hearing. And 'the secret has perished' with him; to this day

the place of Utopia remains unknown.

The words of Phaedrus (275 B), 'O Socrates, you can easily invent

Egyptians or anything,' are recalled to our mind as we read this lifelike

fiction. Yet the greater merit of the work is not the admirable art, but

the originality of thought. More is as free as Plato from the prejudices

of his age, and far more tolerant. The Utopians do not allow him who

believes not in the immortality of the soul to share in the administration

of the state (cp. Laws x. 908 foll.), 'howbeit they put him to no

punishment, because they be persuaded that it is in no man's power to

believe what he list'; and 'no man is to be blamed for reasoning in

support of his own religion[7].' In the public services 'no prayers be

used, but such as every man may boldly pronounce without giving offence to

any sect.' He says significantly, 'There be that give worship to a man

that was once of excellent virtue or of famous glory, not only as God, but

also the chiefest and highest God. But the most and the wisest part,

rejecting all these, believe that there is a certain godly power unknown,

far above the capacity and reach of man's wit, dispersed throughout all

the world, not in bigness, but in virtue and power. Him they call the

Father of all. To Him alone they attribute the beginnings, the

increasings, the proceedings, {ccxxiv} the changes, and the ends of all

things. Neither give they any divine honours to any other than him.' So

far was More from sharing the popular beliefs of his time. Yet at the end

he reminds us that he does not in all respects agree with the customs and

opinions of the Utopians which he describes. And we should let him have

the benefit of this saving clause, and not rudely withdraw the veil behind

which he has been pleased to conceal himself.

[Footnote 7: 'One of our company in my presence was sharply punished. He,

as soon as he was baptised, began, against our wills, with more earnest

affection than wisdom, to reason of Christ's religion, and began to wax so

hot in his matter, that he did not only prefer our religion before all

other, but also did despise and condemn all other, calling them profane,

and the followers of them wicked and devilish, and the children of

everlasting damnation. When he had thus long reasoned the matter, they

laid hold on him, accused him, and condemned him into exile, not as a

despiser of religion, but as a seditious person and a raiser up of

dissension among the people' (p. 145).]

Nor is he less in advance of popular opinion in his political and moral

speculations. He would like to bring military glory into contempt; he

would set all sorts of idle people to profitable occupation, including in

the same class, priests, women, noblemen, gentlemen, and 'sturdy and

valiant beggars,' that the labour of all may be reduced to six hours a

day. His dislike of capital punishment, and plans for the reformation of

offenders; his detestation of priests and lawyers[8]; his remark that

'although every one may hear of ravenous dogs and wolves and cruel

man-eaters, it is not easy to find states that are well and wisely

governed,' are curiously at variance with the notions of his age and

indeed with his own life. There are many points in which he shows a modern

feeling and a prophetic insight like Plato. He is a sanitary reformer; he

maintains that civilized states have a right to the soil of waste

countries; he is inclined to the opinion which places happiness in

virtuous pleasures, but herein, as he thinks, not disagreeing from those

other philosophers who define virtue to be a life according to nature. He

extends the idea of happiness so as to include the happiness of others;

and he argues ingeniously, 'All men agree that we ought to make others

happy; but if others, how much more ourselves!' And still he thinks that

there may be a more excellent way, but to this no man's reason can attain

unless heaven should inspire him with a higher truth. His ceremonies

before marriage; his _humane_ proposal that war should be carried on by

assassinating the leaders of the enemy, may be compared to some of the

paradoxes of Plato. He has a charming fancy, like the affinities of Greeks

and barbarians in the Timaeus, that the Utopians learnt the language of

the Greeks with the more readiness because they were originally of the

same race with them. He is penetrated with the spirit of Plato, and quotes

or adapts many {ccxxv} thoughts both from the Republic and from the

Timaeus. He prefers public duties to private, and is somewhat impatient of

the importunity of relations. His citizens have no silver or gold of their

own, but are ready enough to pay them to their mercenaries (cp. Rep. iv.

422, 423). There is nothing of which he is more contemptuous than the love

of money. Gold is used for fetters of criminals, and diamonds and pearls

for children's necklaces[9].

[Footnote 8: Compare his satirical observation: 'They (the Utopians) have

priests of exceeding holiness, and therefore very few' (p. 150).]

[Footnote 9: When the ambassadors came arrayed in gold and peacocks'

feathers 'to the eyes of all the Utopians except very few, which had been

in other countries for some reasonable cause, all that gorgeousness of

apparel seemed shameful and reproachful. In so much that they most

reverently saluted the vilest and most abject of them for lords--passing

over the ambassadors themselves without any honour, judging them by their

wearing of golden chains to be bondmen. You should have seen children

also, that had cast away their pearls and precious stones, when they saw

the like sticking upon the ambassadors' caps, dig and push their mothers

under the sides, saying thus to them--"Look, mother, how great a lubber

doth yet wear pearls and precious stones, as though he were a little child

still." But the mother; yea and that also in good earnest: "Peace, son,"

saith she, "I think he be some of the ambassadors' fools"' (p. 102).]

Like Plato he is full of satirical reflections on governments and princes;

on the state of the world and of knowledge. The hero of his discourse

(Hythloday) is very unwilling to become a minister of state, considering

that he would lose his independence and his advice would never be

heeded[10]. He ridicules the new logic of his time; the Utopians could

never be made to understand the doctrine of Second Intentions[11]. He is

very severe on the sports of the gentry; the Utopians count 'hunting the

lowest, the vilest, and the most abject part of butchery.' He quotes the

words of the Republic in which the philosopher is described 'standing out

of the way under a wall until the driving storm of sleet and rain be

overpast,' which admit of a singular application to More's own fate;

although, writing twenty years before (about the year 1514), {ccxxvi} he

can hardly be supposed to have foreseen this. There is no touch of satire

which strikes deeper than his quiet remark that the greater part of the

precepts of Christ are more at variance with the lives of ordinary

Christians than the discourse of Utopia[12].

[Footnote 10: Cp. an exquisite passage at p. 35, of which the conclusion

is as follows: 'And verily it is naturally given ... suppressed and

ended.']

[Footnote 11: 'For they have not devised one of all those rules of

restrictions, amplifications, and suppositions, very wittily invented in

the small Logicals, which here our children in every place do learn.

Furthermore, they were never yet able to find out the second intentions;

insomuch that none of them all could ever see man himself in common, as

they call him, though he be (as you know) bigger than was ever any giant,

yea, and pointed to of us even with our finger.']

[Footnote 12: 'And yet the most part of them is more dissident from the

manners of the world now a days, than my communication was. But preachers,

sly and wily men, following your counsel (as I suppose) because they saw

men evil-willing to frame their manners to Christ's rule, they have

wrested and wried his doctrine, and, like a rule of lead, have applied it

to men's manners, that by some means at the least way, they might agree

together.']

The 'New Atlantis' is only a fragment, and far inferior in merit to the

'Utopia.' The work is full of ingenuity, but wanting in creative fancy,

and by no means impresses the reader with a sense of credibility. In some

places Lord Bacon is characteristically different from Sir Thomas More,

as, for example, in the external state which he attributes to the governor

of Solomon's House, whose dress he minutely describes, while to Sir Thomas

More such trappings appear simple ridiculous. Yet, after this programme of

dress, Bacon adds the beautiful trait, 'that he had a look as though he

pitied men.' Several things are borrowed by him from the Timaeus; but he

has injured the unity of style by adding thoughts and passages which are

taken from the Hebrew Scriptures.

The 'City of the Sun' written by Campanella (1568-1639), a Dominican

friar, several years after the 'New Atlantis' of Bacon, has many

resemblances to the Republic of Plato. The citizens have wives and

children in common; their marriages are of the same temporary sort, and

are arranged by the magistrates from time to time. They do not, however,

adopt his system of lots, but bring together the best natures, male and

female, 'according to philosophical rules.' The infants until two years of

age are brought up by their mothers in public temples; and since

individuals for the most part educate their children badly, at the

beginning of their third year they are committed to the care of the State,

and are taught at first, not out of books, but from paintings of all

kinds, which are emblazoned on the walls of the city. The city has six

interior circuits of walls, and an outer wall which is the seventh. On

this outer wall are painted the figures of legislators and philosophers,

and {ccxxvii} on each of the interior walls the symbols or forms of some

one of the sciences are delineated. The women are, for the most part,

trained, like the men, in warlike and other exercises; but they have two

special occupations of their own. After a battle, they and the boys soothe

and relieve the wounded warriors; also they encourage them with embraces

and pleasant words (cp. Plato, Rep. v. 468). Some elements of the

Christian or Catholic religion are preserved among them. The life of the

Apostles is greatly admired by this people because they had all things in

common; and the short prayer which Jesus Christ taught men is used in

their worship. It is a duty of the chief magistrates to pardon sins, and

therefore the whole people make secret confession of them to the

magistrates, and they to their chief, who is a sort of Rector

Metaphysicus; and by this means he is well informed of all that is going

on in the minds of men. After confession, absolution is granted to the

citizens collectively, but no one is mentioned by name. There also exists

among them a practice of perpetual prayer, performed by a succession of

priests, who change every hour. Their religion is a worship of God in

Trinity, that is of Wisdom, Love and Power, but without any distinction of

persons. They behold in the sun the reflection of His glory; mere graven

images they reject, refusing to fall under the 'tyranny' of idolatry.

Many details are given about their customs of eating and drinking, about

their mode of dressing, their employments, their wars. Campanella looks

forward to a new mode of education, which is to be a study of nature, and

not of Aristotle. He would not have his citizens waste their time in the

consideration of what he calls 'the dead signs of things.' He remarks that

he who knows one science only, does not really know that one any more than

the rest, and insists strongly on the necessity of a variety of knowledge.

More scholars are turned out in the City of the Sun in one year than by

contemporary methods in ten or fifteen. He evidently believes, like Bacon,

that henceforward natural science will play a great part in education, a

hope which seems hardly to have been realized, either in our own or in any

former age; at any rate the fulfilment of it has been long deferred.

There is a good deal of ingenuity and even originality in this {ccxxviii}

work, and a most enlightened spirit pervades it. But it has little or no

charm of style, and falls very far short of the 'New Atlantis' of Bacon,

and still more of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More. It is full of

inconsistencies, and though borrowed from Plato, shows but a superficial

acquaintance with his writings. It is a work such as one might expect to

have been written by a philosopher and man of genius who was also a friar,

and who had spent twenty-seven years of his life in a prison of the

Inquisition. The most interesting feature of the book, common to Plato and

Sir Thomas More, is the deep feeling which is shown by the writer, of the

misery and ignorance prevailing among the lower classes in his own time.

Campanella takes note of Aristotle's answer to Plato's community of

property, that in a society where all things are common, no individual

would have any motive to work (Arist. Pol. ii. 5, § 6): he replies, that

his citizens being happy and contented in themselves (they are required to

work only four hours a day), will have greater regard for their fellows

than exists among men at present. He thinks, like Plato, that if he

abolishes private feelings and interests, a great public feeling will take

their place.

Other writings on ideal states, such as the 'Oceana' of Harrington, in

which the Lord Archon, meaning Cromwell, is described, not as he was, but

as he ought to have been; or the 'Argenis' of Barclay, which is an

historical allegory of his own time, are too unlike Plato to be worth

mentioning. More interesting than either of these, and far more Platonic

in style and thought, is Sir John Eliot's 'Monarchy of Man,' in which the

prisoner of the Tower, no longer able 'to be a politician in the land of

his birth,' turns away from politics to view 'that other city which is

within him,' and finds on the very threshold of the grave that the secret

of human happiness is the mastery of self. The change of government in the

time of the English Commonwealth set men thinking about first principles,

and gave rise to many works of this class.... The great original genius of

Swift owes nothing to Plato; nor is there any trace in the conversation or

in the works of Dr. Johnson of any acquaintance with his writings. He

probably would have refuted Plato without reading him, in the same fashion

in which he supposed himself to have refuted Bishop Berkeley's theory of

the non-existence of matter. If we {ccxxix} except the so-called English

Platonists, or rather Neo-Platonists, who never understood their master,

and the writings of Coleridge, who was to some extent a kindred spirit,

Plato has left no permanent impression on English literature.

* * * * *

VII. Human life and conduct are affected by ideals in the same way that

they are affected by the examples of eminent men. Neither the one nor the

other are immediately applicable to practice, but there is a virtue

flowing from them which tends to raise individuals above the common

routine of society or trade, and to elevate States above the mere

interests of commerce or the necessities of self-defence. Like the ideals

of art they are partly framed by the omission of particulars; they require

to be viewed at a certain distance, and are apt to fade away if we attempt

to approach them. They gain an imaginary distinctness when embodied in a

State or in a system of philosophy, but they still remain the visions of

'a world unrealized.' More striking and obvious to the ordinary mind are

the examples of great men, who have served their own generation and are

remembered in another. Even in our own family circle there may have been

some one, a woman, or even a child, in whose face has shone forth a

goodness more than human. The ideal then approaches nearer to us, and we

fondly cling to it. The ideal of the past, whether of our own past lives

or of former states of society, has a singular fascination for the minds

of many. Too late we learn that such ideals cannot be recalled, though the

recollection of them may have a humanizing influence on other times. But

the abstractions of philosophy are to most persons cold and vacant; they

give light without warmth; they are like the full moon in the heavens when

there are no stars appearing. Men cannot live by thought alone; the world

of sense is always breaking in upon them. They are for the most part

confined to a corner of earth, and see but a little way beyond their own

home or place of abode; they 'do not lift up their eyes to the hills';

they are not awake when the dawn appears. But in Plato we have reached a

height from which a man may look into the distance (Rep. iv. 445 C) and

behold the future of the world and of philosophy. The ideal of the State

and of the life of the philosopher; the ideal of an education {ccxxx}

continuing through life and extending equally to both sexes; the ideal of

the unity and correlation of knowledge; the faith in good and

immortality--are the vacant forms of light on which Plato is seeking to

fix the eye of mankind.

* * * * *

VIII. Two other ideals, which never appeared above the horizon in Greek

Philosophy, float before the minds of men in our own day: one seen more

clearly than formerly, as though each year and each generation brought us

nearer to some great change; the other almost in the same degree retiring

from view behind the laws of nature, as if oppressed by them, but still

remaining a silent hope of we know not what hidden in the heart of man.

The first ideal is the future of the human race in this world; the second

the future of the individual in another. The first is the more perfect

realization of our own present life; the second, the abnegation of it: the

one, limited by experience, the other, transcending it. Both of them have

been and are powerful motives of action; there are a few in whom they have

taken the place of all earthly interests. The hope of a future for the

human race at first sight seems to be the more disinterested, the hope of

individual existence the more egotistical, of the two motives. But when

men have learned to resolve their hope of a future either for themselves

or for the world into the will of God--'not my will but Thine,' the

difference between them falls away; and they may be allowed to make either

of them the basis of their lives, according to their own individual

character or temperament. There is as much faith in the willingness to

work for an unseen future in this world as in another. Neither is it

inconceivable that some rare nature may feel his duty to another

generation, or to another century, almost as strongly as to his own, or

that living always in the presence of God, he may realize another world as

vividly as he does this.

The greatest of all ideals may, or rather must be conceived by us under

similitudes derived from human qualities; although sometimes, like the

Jewish prophets, we may dash away these figures of speech and describe the

nature of God only in negatives. These again by degrees acquire a positive

meaning. It would be well, if when meditating on the higher truths either

of ccxxxi} philosophy or religion, we sometimes substituted one form of

expression for another, lest through the necessities of language we should

become the slaves of mere words.

There is a third ideal, not the same, but akin to these, which has a place

in the home and heart of every believer in the religion of Christ, and in

which men seem to find a nearer and more familiar truth, the Divine man,

the Son of Man, the Saviour of mankind, Who is the first-born and head of

the whole family in heaven and earth, in Whom the Divine and human, that

which is without and that which is within the range of our earthly

faculties, are indissolubly united. Neither is this divine form of

goodness wholly separable from the ideal of the Christian Church, which is

said in the New Testament to be 'His body,' or at variance with those

other images of good which Plato sets before us. We see Him in a figure

only, and of figures of speech we select but a few, and those the

simplest, to be the expression of Him. We behold Him in a picture, but He

is not there. We gather up the fragments of His discourses, but neither do

they represent Him as He truly was. His dwelling is neither in heaven nor

earth, but in the heart of man. This is that image which Plato saw dimly

in the distance, which, when existing among men, he called, in the

language of Homer, 'the likeness of God' (Rep. vi. 501 B), the likeness of

a nature which in all ages men have felt to be greater and better than

themselves, and which in endless forms, whether derived from Scripture or

nature, from the witness of history or from the human heart, regarded as a

person or not as a person, with or without parts or passions, existing in

space or not in space, is and will always continue to be to mankind the

Idea of Good.

THE REPUBLIC.