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Advancing into Analytics
From Excel to Python and R

George Mount
Advancing into Analytics
by George Mount
Copyright © 2021 Candid World Consulting, LLC. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North,
Sebastopol, CA 95472.
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April 2021: First Edition

Revision History for the First Edition
2021-04-15: First Release

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release details.
The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Advancing into Analytics, the cover image, and related trade dress
are trademarks of O’Reilly Media, Inc.
The views expressed in this work are those of the author, and do
not represent the publisher’s views. While the publisher and the
author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the information
and instructions contained in this work are accurate, the publisher
and the author disclaim all responsibility for errors or omissions,
including without limitation responsibility for damages resulting
from the use of or reliance on this work. Use of the information and
instructions contained in this work is at your own risk. If any code
samples or other technology this work contains or describes is
subject to open source licenses or the intellectual property rights of
others, it is your responsibility to ensure that your use thereof
complies with such licenses and/or rights.
978-1-492-09434-0
[LSI]
Preface

You’re about to partake in a significant and commendable learning

journey that will involve statistics, coding, and more. Before diving
in, I’d like to take some time to address my learning objectives for
you, how I arrived at this book, and what you should expect.

Learning Objective
By the end of this book, you should be able to conduct exploratory
data analysis and hypothesis testing using a programming
language. Exploring and testing relationships is core to analytics.
With the tools and frameworks you’ll pick up in this book, you will
be well positioned to continue learning more advanced data
analysis techniques.
We’ll be using Excel, R, and Python because these are powerful
tools, and because they make for a seamless learning journey. Few
books cover this combination, even though the progression from
spreadsheets into programming is common for analysts, myself
included.

Prerequisites
To meet these objectives, this book makes some technical and
technological assumptions.

Technical Requirements
I am writing this book on a Windows computer with the Office 365
version of Excel for desktop. As long as you have a paid version of
Excel 2010 or greater for either Windows or Mac installed on your
machine, you should be able to follow along with the majority of the
instruction in this book, with some variations, particularly with
PivotTables and data visualization.

NOTE
While Excel offers both free and paid versions online, a paid desktop
version is needed to access some of the features covered in this book.

R and Python are both free, open source tools available for all major
operating systems. I address how to install them later in the book.

Technological Requirements
This book assumes no prior knowledge of R or Python; that said, it
does rely on moderate knowledge of Excel to flatten that learning
curve.
The Excel topics you should be familiar with include the following:
Absolute, relative, and mixed cell references
Conditional logic and conditional aggregation (IF()
statements, SUMIF()/SUMIFS(), and so forth)
Combining data sources (VLOOKUP(), INDEX()/MATCH(), and
so forth)
Sorting, filtering, and aggregating data with PivotTables
Basic plotting (bar charts, line charts, and so forth)

If you would like more practice with these topics before moving on,
I suggest Excel 2019 Bible by Michael Alexander et al. (Wiley).
How I Got Here
Like many in our field, my route to analytics was circuitous. In
school, mathematics became a subject I actively avoided; too much
of it seemed entirely theoretical. I did have some coursework in
statistics and econometrics that caught my interest. It was a breath
of fresh air to apply mathematics to some concrete end.
This exposure to statistics was admittedly scant. I attended a liberal
arts college, where I picked up solid writing and thinking skills, but
few quantitative ones. When I got to my first full-time job, I was
floored by the depth and breadth of the data I was entrusted with
managing. Much of this data lived in spreadsheets and was hard to
get much value out of without intense cleaning and preparation.
Some of this “data wrangling” is to be expected; the New York
Times has reported that data scientists spend 50% to 80% of their
time preparing data for analysis. But I wondered if there were more
efficient ways to clean, manage, and store data. In particular, I
wanted to do this so I could spend more time analyzing the data.
After all, I always found statistical analysis somewhat palatable—
manual and error-prone spreadsheet data preparation, not so much.
Because I enjoyed writing (thank you, liberal arts degree), I started
blogging about tips I picked up in Excel. Through good grace and
hard work, the blog gained traction, and I attribute much of my
professional success to it. You are welcome to stop by at
stringfestanalytics.com; I still post regularly on Excel and analytics
more generally.
As I began to learn more about Excel, my interest spread to other
analytics tools and techniques. By this point, the open source
programming languages R and Python had gained significant
popularity in the data world. But while I made my way through
grasping these languages, I felt unnecessary friction in the learning
path.
“Excel Bad, Coding Good”
I noticed that for Excel users, most R or Python training sounded a
lot like this:

All along, you’ve been using Excel when you really should have
been programming. Look at all these problems Excel has caused!
Time to kick the habit entirely.
That’s the wrong attitude to take for a couple of reasons:
It’s not accurate
The choice between coding and spreadsheets is often framed
like a sort of struggle between good and evil. In reality, it’s
better to think of these as complementary tools rather than
substitutes. Spreadsheets have their place in analytics; so does
programming. Learning and using one does not negate the
other. Chapter 5 discusses this relationship.

It’s a poor instructional approach

Excel users intuitively understand how to work with data: they
can sort, filter, group, and join it. They know which
arrangements make for easy analysis, and which mean lots of
cleanup. This is a wealth of knowledge to build on. Good
instruction will use it to bridge the gap between spreadsheets
and coding. Unfortunately, most instruction instead burns the
bridge out of contempt.

Research indicates that relating what you’ve learned to what you

already know is powerful. As put by Peter C. Brown et al. in Make It
Stick: The Science of Successful Learning (Belknap Press):
The more you can explain about the way your new learning
relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the
new learning will be, and the more connections you create that
will help you remember it later.
As an Excel user, it can be hard to relate new ideas to what you
already know when you’re (wrongly) told that what you already
know is garbage. This book takes a different approach, building on
your prior knowledge of spreadsheets so that you’ll have a clear
framework in mind as we move into R and Python.

NOTE
Both spreadsheets and programming languages are valuable analytics
tools; there’s no need to abandon Excel once you’ve picked up R and
Python.

The Instructional Benefits of Excel

In fact, Excel is a uniquely fantastic analytics teaching tool:
It reduces cognitive overhead
Cognitive overhead is the number of logical connections or
jumps needed to understand something. Often an analytics
learning journey looks like this:
1. Learn a brand-new technique.
2. Learn how to implement the brand-new technique using
brand-new coding techniques.
3. Progress to more advanced techniques, without ever having
felt really comfortable with the basics.

It’s hard enough to learn the conceptual foundations of analytics.

To learn this while also learning how to code invites sky-high
cognitive overhead. For reasons I’ll discuss, there is great virtue
in practicing analytics via coding. But it’s better to isolate these
skill sets while mastering them.
It’s a visual calculator
The first mass-market offering of a spreadsheet was called
VisiCalc—literally, a visual calculator. This name points to one of
the application’s most important selling points. Especially to
beginners, programming languages can resemble a “black
box”—type the magic words, hit “run,” and presto: the results.
Chances are the program got it right, but it can be hard for a
newbie to pop open the hood and see why (or, perhaps more
critically, why not).
By contrast, Excel lets you watch an analysis take shape each
step of the way. It lets you calculate and recalculate visually.
Rather than just taking my (or a coding language’s) word for it,
you’ll build demonstrations in Excel to visualize key analytics
concepts.

NOTE
Excel provides the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of data
analytics without the need to learn a new programming language at the
same time. This greatly reduces cognitive overhead.
Book Overview
Now that you understand the spirit of the book and what I hope for
you to achieve, let’s review its structure.
Part I, Foundations of Analytics in Excel
Analytics stands on the shoulders of statistics. In this part, you
will learn how to explore and test relationships between
variables using Excel. You’ll also use Excel to build compelling
demonstrations of some of the most important concepts in
statistics and analytics. This grounding in statistical theory and
framework for conducting analysis will put you on solid footing
for data programming.

Part II, From Excel to R

Now that you are fluent in the fundamentals of data analysis, it’s
time to pick up a coding language or two. We’ll start with R, an
open source language built especially for statistical analysis. You
will see how to cleanly transfer what you’ve learned about
working with data from Excel into R. I conclude the section with
an end-to-end capstone exercise in R.

Part III, From Excel to Python

Python is another open source language worth learning for
analytics. In the same spirit as Part II, you’ll learn how to pivot
your Excel data chops into this language and conduct a complete
data analysis.
End-of-Chapter Exercises
When I read books, I tend to skip over the exercises at the end of
the chapter because I feel keeping the momentum of my reading is
more valuable. Don’t be like me!
I provide opportunity at the end of most chapters to practice what
you’ve learned. You can find the solutions to these drills in the
exercise-solutions folder of the accompanying repository, where
you’ll see them in a file named for each respective chapter.
Complete these drills, then compare your answers to the solutions.
You’ll be increasing your comprehension of the material while at the
same time providing a good example for me.

TIP
Learning is best done actively; without putting what you’ve read into
immediate practice, you’re likely to forget it.

This Is Not a Laundry List

One thing I love about analytics is there are almost always multiple
ways to do the same thing. It’s likely I’ll demonstrate how to do
something one way when you are familiar with another.
My focus for this book is on using Excel as a teaching tool for
analytics and helping readers transfer this knowledge to R and
Python. Were I to make this a brain dump of all the ways to
complete a given data-cleaning or analysis task, the book would
lose its focus around this particular objective.
You may prefer alternative ways of doing something; I may even
agree with you that, given different circumstances, there is a better
approach. However, given the circumstances of this book and its
objectives, I’ve decided to cover certain techniques and exclude
others. Doing otherwise would risk turning the book into a bland
how-to manual rather than a pointed guide for advancing into
analytics.

Don’t Panic
As an author, I hope you find me easygoing and approachable. I do,
however, have one rule for this book: don’t panic! There is an
admittedly steep learning curve at play here, since you’ll be
exploring not just probability and statistics but two programming
languages. This book will introduce you to concepts from statistics,
computer science, and more. They may initially be jarring, but you’ll
begin to internalize them over time. Allow yourself to learn by trial
and error.
I thoroughly believe that with the knowledge you possess about
Excel, this is an achievable order for one book. There may be
moments of frustration and impostor syndrome; it happens to all of
us. Don’t let these moments overshadow the real progress you’ll
make here.
Are you ready? I’ll see you over in Chapter 1.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:
Italic
Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, file
extensions, and dataset variables.

Constant width
Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer
to program elements such as code variable or function names,
 databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and
keywords.

TIP
This element signifies a tip or suggestion.

NOTE
This element signifies a general note.

WARNING
This element indicates a warning or caution.

Using Code Examples

Supplemental material (code examples, exercises, and so forth) is
available for download at
https://github.com/stringfestdata/advancing-into-analytics-book.
You can download and decompress a copy of the folder on your
computer or, if you are familiar with GitHub, clone it. This repository
contains completed copies of the scripts and workbooks for each
chapter in the main folder. All datasets needed to follow along with
this book are located in a separate subfolder of the datasets folder,
along with notes about its source and steps taken to gather and
clean it. Rather than operate directly on any of these Excel
workbooks, I suggest you make copies, as manipulating the source
files may affect later steps. All solutions for the end-of-chapter
exercises can be found in the exercise-solutions folder.
If you have a technical question or a problem using the code
examples, please email [email protected].
This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if
example code is offered with this book, you may use it in your
programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for
permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the
code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of
code from this book does not require permission. Selling or
distributing examples from O’Reilly books does require permission.
Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code
does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of
example code from this book into your product’s documentation
does require permission.
We appreciate, but generally do not require, attribution. An
attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For
example: “Advancing into Analytics by George Mount (O’Reilly).
Copyright 2021 George Mount, 978-1-492-09434-0.”
If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the
permission given above, feel free to contact us at
[email protected].

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Acknowledgments
First, I want to thank God for giving me this opportunity to cultivate
and share my talents. At O’Reilly, Michelle Smith and Jon Hassell
have been so enjoyable to work with, and I will be forever grateful
for their offer to have me write a book. Corbin Collins kept me
rolling during the book’s development. Danny Elfanbaum and the
production team turned the raw manuscript into an actual book.
Aiden Johnson, Felix Zumstein, and Jordan Goldmeier provided
invaluable technical reviews.
Getting people to review a book isn’t easy, so I have to thank John
Dennis, Tobias Zwingmann, Joe Balog, Barry Lilly, Nicole LaGuerre,
and Alex Bodle for their comments. I also want to thank the
communities who have made this technology and knowledge
available, often without direct compensation. I’ve made some
fantastic friends through my analytics pursuits, who have been so
giving of their time and wisdom. My educators at Padua Franciscan
High School and Hillsdale College made me fall in love with learning
and with writing. I doubt I’d have written a book without their
influence.
I also thank my mother and father for providing me the love and
support that I’m so privileged to have. Finally, to my late Papou:
thank you for sharing with me the value of hard work and decency.
Part I. Foundations of
Analytics in Excel
Chapter 1. Foundations of
Exploratory Data Analysis

“You never know what is gonna come through that door,” Rick
Harrison says in the opening of the hit show Pawn Stars. It’s the
same in analytics: confronted with a new dataset, you never know
what you are going to find. This chapter is about exploring and
describing a dataset so that we know what questions to ask of it.
The process is referred to as exploratory data analysis, or EDA.

What Is Exploratory Data Analysis?

American mathematician John Tukey promoted the use of EDA in his
book, Exploratory Data Analysis (Pearson). Tukey emphasized that
analysts need first to explore the data for potential research
questions before jumping into confirming the answers with
hypothesis testing and inferential statistics.
EDA is often likened to “interviewing” the data; it’s a time for the
analyst to get to know it and learn about what interesting things it
has to say. As part of our interview, we’ll want to do the following:
Classify our variables as continuous, categorical, and so
forth
Summarize our variables using descriptive statistics
Visualize our variables using charts

EDA gives us a lot to do. Let’s walk through the process using Excel
and a real-life dataset. You can find the data in the star.xlsx
workbook, which can be found in the datasets folder of this book’s
repository, under the star subfolder. This dataset was collected for a
study to examine the impact of class size on test scores. For this
and other Excel-based demos, I suggest you complete the following
steps with the raw data:

1. Make a copy of the file so that the original dataset is

unchanged. We’ll later be importing some of these Excel
files into R or Python, so any changes to the datasets will
impact that process.
2. Add an index column called id. This will number each row of
the dataset so that the first row has an ID of 1, the second
of 2, and so forth. This can be done quickly in Excel by
entering numbers into the first few rows of the column, then
highlighting that range and using Flash Fill to complete the
selection based on that pattern. Look for the small square
on the bottom right-hand side of your active cell, hover over
it until you see a small plus sign, then fill out the rest of
your range. Adding this index column will make it easier to
analyze data by group.
3. Finally, convert your resulting dataset into a table by
selecting any cell in the range, then going to the ribbon and
clicking on Insert → Table. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl + T
for Windows, Cmd + T for Mac. If your table has headers,
make sure the “My table has headers” selection is turned
on. Tables carry quite a few benefits, not the least of which
is their aesthetic appeal. It’s also possible to refer to
columns by name in table operations.
You can give the table a specific name by clicking anywhere
inside it, then going to the ribbon and clicking Table Design
→ Table Name under the Properties group, as shown in
Figure 1-1.
 Figure 1-1. The Table Name box

Doing these first few analysis tasks will be good practice for other
datasets you want to work with in Excel. For the star dataset, your
completed table should look like Figure 1-2. I’ve named my table
star. This dataset is arranged in a rectangular shape of columns
and rows.

Figure 1-2. The star dataset, arranged in rows and columns

You’ve probably worked with enough data to know that this is a

desirable shape for analysis. Sometimes, we need to clean up our
data to get it to the state we want; I will discuss some of these
data-cleaning operations later in the book. But for now, let’s count
our blessings and learn about our data and about EDA.
In analytics, we often refer to observations and variables rather
than rows and columns. Let’s explore the significance of these
terms.

Observations
In this dataset we have 5,748 rows: each is a unique observation.
In this case, measurements are taken at the student level;
observations could be anything from individual citizens to entire
nations.

Variables
Each column offers a distinct piece of information about our
observations. For example, in the star dataset we can find each
student’s reading score (treadssk) and which class type the student
was in (classk). We’ll refer to these columns as variables. Table 1-1
describes what each column in star is measuring:
Table 1-1. Descriptions of the star dataset’s
variables
Column Description

id Unique identifier/index column

tmathssk Total math scaled score

treadssk Total reading scaled score

classk Type of class

totexpk Teacher’s total years of experience

sex Sex

freelunk Qualified for free lunch?

race Race

schidkn School indicator

Ready for a tautology? We call them variables because their values

may vary across observations. If every observation we recorded
returned the same measurements, there wouldn’t be much to
analyze. Each variable can provide quite different information about
our observations. Even in this relatively small dataset, we have
text, numbers, and yes/no statements all as variables. Some
datasets can have dozens or even hundreds of variables.
It can help to classify these variable types, as these distinctions will
be important when we continue our analysis. Keep in mind that
these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary and may change based on
the purpose and circumstances of our analysis. You will see that
EDA, and analytics in general, is highly iterative.
 NOTE
Classifying variables is somewhat arbitrary and, like much of analytics,
built on rules of thumb rather than hard-and-fast-criteria.

I will discuss the different variable types as shown in Figure 1-3,

then classify the star dataset based on these distinctions.

Figure 1-3. Types of variables

There are further types of variables that could be covered here: for
example, we won’t consider the difference between interval and
ratio data. For a closer look at variable types, check out Sarah
Boslaugh’s Statistics in a Nutshell, 2nd edition (O’Reilly). Let’s work
our way down Figure 1-3, moving from left to right.

Categorical variables
Sometimes referred to as qualitative variables, these describe a
quality or characteristic of an observation. A typical question
answered by categorical variables is “Which kind?” Categorical
variables are often represented by nonnumeric values, although this
is not always the case.
An example of a categorical variable is country of origin. Like any
variable, it could take on different values (United States, Finland,
and so forth), but we aren’t able to make quantitative comparisons
between them (what is two times Indonesia, anyone?). Any unique
value that a categorical variable takes is known as a level of that
variable. Three levels of a country of origin could be US, Finland, or
Indonesia, for example.
Because categorical variables describe a quality of an observation
rather than a quantity, many quantitative operations on this data
aren’t applicable. For example, we can’t calculate the average
country of origin, but we could calculate the most common, or the
overall frequency count of each level.
We can further distinguish categorical values based on how many
levels they can take, and whether the rank-ordering of those levels
is meaningful.
Binary variables can only take two levels. Often, these variables are
stated as yes/no responses, although this is not always the case.
Some examples of binary variables:

Married? (yes or no)

Made purchase? (yes or no)
Wine type? (red or white)

In the case of wine type, we are implicitly assuming that our data of
interest only consists of red or white wine…but what happens if we
also want to analyze rosé? In that case, we can no longer include all
three levels and analyze the data as binary.
Any qualitiative variable with more than two levels is a nominal
variable. Some examples include:

Country of origin (US, Finland, Indonesia, and so forth)

Favorite color (orange, blue, burnt sienna, and so forth)
Wine type (red, white, rosé)
Note that something like an ID number is a categorical variable
stated numerically: while we could take an average ID number, this
figure is meaningless. Importantly, there is no intrinsic ordering of
nominal variables. For example, red as a color can’t inherently be
ordered higher or lower than blue. Since intrinsic ordering isn’t
necessarily clear, let’s look at some examples of its use.
Ordinal variables take more than two levels, where there is an
intrinsic ordering between these levels. Some examples of ordinal
variables:

Beverage size (small, medium, large)

Class (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior)
Weekdays (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday)
Here, we can inherently order levels: senior is higher than
freshman, whereas we can’t say the same about red versus blue.
While we can rank these levels, we can’t necessarily quantify the
distance between them. For example, the difference in size
between a small and medium beverage may not be the same as
that between a medium and large beverage.

Quantitative variables
These variables describe a measurable quantity of an observation.
A typical question answered by quantitative variables is “How
much?” or “How many?” Quantitative variables are nearly always
represented by numbers. We can further distinguish between
quantitative variables based on the number of values they can take.
Observations of a continuous variable can in theory take an infinite
number of values between any two other values. This sounds
complicated, but continuous variables are quite common in the
natural world. Some examples:
 Height (within a range of 59 and 75 inches, an observation
could be 59.1, 74.99, or any other value in between)
pH level
Surface area

Because we can make quantitative comparisons across observations

of continuous variables, a fuller range of analyses apply to them.
For example, it makes sense to take the average of continuous
variables, whereas with categorical ones, it doesn’t. Later in this
chapter, you’ll learn how to analyze continuous variables by finding
their descriptive statistics in Excel.
On the other hand, observations of a discrete variable can take only
a fixed number of countable values between any two values.
Discrete variables are quite common in the social sciences and
business. Some examples include:

Number of individuals in a household (within a range of 1

and 10, an observation could be 2 or 5, but not 4.3)
Units sold
Number of trees in a forest

Often, when we are dealing with discrete variables with many

levels, or many observations, we treat them as continuous for the
fuller range of statistical analysis that affords. For example, you
may have heard that the average US household has 1.93 children.
We know that no family actually has such a number of children.
After all, this is a discrete variable that comes in whole numbers.
However, across many observations this claim can be a helpful
representation of how many children are to be expected in a typical
household.
But wait, there’s more! In more advanced analytics, we will also
often recalculate and blend variables: for example, we may take a
logarithmic transformation of one variable so that it meets the
assumptions of a given analysis, or we may extract the meaning of
many variables into fewer using a method called dimensionality
reduction. These techniques are beyond the scope of this book.

Demonstration: Classifying Variables

Using what you’ve learned so far, classify the star variables using
the types covered in Figure 1-3. As you think through it, don’t
hesitate to investigate the data. I’ll give you an easy way to do so
here, and we’ll walk through a more thorough process later in this
chapter.
One quick way to get a sense of what type variables may be is by
finding the number of unique values they take. This can be done in
Excel by checking the filter preview. I’ve clicked on the drop-down
arrow next to the sex variable in Figure 1-4 and found it takes only
two distinct values. What kind of variable do you think this might
be? Take a moment to walk through the variables using this or
other methods.
 Figure 1-4. Using the filter preview to find how many distinct values a variable
takes

Table 1-2 shows how I decided to classify these variables.

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 3. In the third book of the Republic a nearer approach is made to
a theory of art than anywhere else in Plato. His views may be
summed up as follows:—True art is not fanciful and imitative, but
simple and ideal,—the expression of the highest moral energy,
whether in action or repose. To live among works of plastic art which
are of this noble and simple character, or to listen to such strains, is
the best of influences,—the true Greek atmosphere, in which youth
should be brought up. That is the way to create in them a natural
good taste, which will have a feeling of truth and beauty in all
things. For though the poets are to be expelled, still art is recognized
as another aspect of li reason—like love in the Symposium,
extending over the same sphere, but confined to the preliminary
education, and acting through the power of habit (vii. 522 A); and
this conception of art is not limited to strains of music or the forms
of plastic art, but pervades all nature and has a wide kindred in the
world. The Republic of Plato, like the Athens of Pericles, has an
artistic as well as a political side.
There is hardly any mention in Plato of the creative arts; only in
two or three passages does he even allude to them (cp. Rep. iv. 420;
Soph. 236 A). He is not lost in rapture at the great works of Phidias,
the Parthenon, the Propylea, the statues of Zeus or Athene. He
would probably have regarded any abstract truth of number or figure
(529 E) as higher than the greatest of them. Yet it is hard to
suppose that some influence, such as he hopes to inspire in youth,
did not pass into his own mind from the works of art which he saw
around him. We are living upon the fragments of them, and find in a
few broken stones the standard of truth and beauty. But in Plato this
feeling has no expression; he nowhere says that beauty is the object
of art; he seems to deny that wisdom can take an external form
(Phaedrus, 250 E); he does not distinguish the fine from the
mechanical arts. Whether or no, like some writers, he felt more than
he expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that the greatest
perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost entire
silence about them. In one very striking passage he tells us that a
work of art, like the State, is a whole; and this conception of a whole
and the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may be
regarded, if not as the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating
principles of Greek art (cp. Xen. Mem. iii. 10. 6; and Sophist, 235,
236).
4. Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had
better not be in robust health; and should have known what illness
is in his own person. But the judge ought to have had no similar
experience of evil; he is to be a good man who, having passed his
youth in innocence, became acquainted late in life with the vices of
others. And therefore, according to Plato, a judge should not be
young, just as a young man according to Aristotle is not fit to be a
hearer of moral philosophy. The bad, on the other hand, have a
knowledge of vice, but no knowledge lii of virtue. It may be doubted,
however, whether this train of reflection is well founded. In a
remarkable passage of the Laws (xii. 950 B) it is acknowledged that
the evil may form a correct estimate of the good. The union of
gentleness and courage in Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox,
yet was afterwards ascertained to be a truth. And Plato might also
have found that the intuition of evil may be consistent with the
abhorrence of it (cp. infra, ix. 582). There is a directness of aim in
virtue which gives an insight into vice. And the knowledge of
character is in some degree a natural sense independent of any
special experience of good or evil.
5. One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because un-
Greek and also very different from anything which existed at all in
his age of the world, is the transposition of ranks. In the Spartan
state there had been enfranchisement of Helots and degradation of
citizens under special circumstances. And in the ancient Greek
aristocracies, merit was certainly recognized as one of the elements
on which government was based. The founders of states were
supposed to be their benefactors, who were raised by their great
actions above the ordinary level of humanity; at a later period, the
services of warriors and legislators were held to entitle them and
their descendants to the privileges of citizenship and to the first rank
in the state. And although the existence of an ideal aristocracy is
slenderly proven from the remains of early Greek history, and we
have a difficulty in ascribing such a character, however the idea may
be defined, to any actual Hellenic state—or indeed to any state
which has ever existed in the world—still the rule of the best was
certainly the aspiration of philosophers, who probably
accommodated a good deal their views of primitive history to their
own notions of good government. Plato further insists on applying to
the guardians of his state a series of tests by which all those who fell
short of a fixed standard were either removed from the governing
body, or not admitted to it; and this ‘academic’ discipline did to a
certain extent prevail in Greek states, especially in Sparta. He also
indicates that the system of caste, which existed in a great part of
the ancient, and is by no means extinct in the modern European
world, should be set aside from time to time in favour of merit. He is
aware how deeply the greater part of liii mankind resent any
interference with the order of society, and therefore he proposes his
novel idea in the form of what he himself calls a ‘monstrous fiction.’
(Compare the ceremony of preparation for the two ‘great waves’ in
Book v.) Two principles are indicated by him: first, that there is a
distinction of ranks dependent on circumstances prior to the
individual: second, that this distinction is and ought to be broken
through by personal qualities. He adapts mythology like the Homeric
poems to the wants of the state, making ‘the Phoenician tale’ the
vehicle of his ideas. Every Greek state had a myth respecting its own
origin; the Platonic republic may also have a tale of earthborn men.
The gravity and verisimilitude with which the tale is told, and the
analogy of Greek tradition, are a sufficient verification of the
‘monstrous falsehood.’ Ancient poetry had spoken of a gold and
silver and brass and iron age succeeding one another, but Plato
supposes these differences in the natures of men to exist together in
a single state. Mythology supplies a figure under which the lesson
may be taught (as Protagoras says, ‘the myth is more interesting’),
and also enables Plato to touch lightly on new principles without
going into details. In this passage he shadows forth a general truth,
but he does not tell us by what steps the transposition of ranks is to
be effected. Indeed throughout the Republic he allows the lower
ranks to fade into the distance. We do not know whether they are to
carry arms, and whether in the fifth book they are or are not
included in the communistic regulations respecting property and
marriage. Nor is there any use in arguing strictly either from a few
chance words, or from the silence of Plato, or in drawing inferences
which were beyond his vision. Aristotle, in his criticism on the
position of the lower classes, does not perceive that the poetical
creation is ‘like the air, invulnerable,’ and cannot be penetrated by
the shafts of his logic (Pol. 2, 5, 18 foll.).
6. Two paradoxes which strike the modern reader as in the highest
degree fanciful and ideal, and which suggest to him many
reflections, are to be found in the third book of the Republic: first,
the great power of music, so much beyond any influence which is
experienced by us in modern times, when the art or science has
been far more developed, and has found liv the secret of harmony,
as well as of melody; secondly, the indefinite and almost absolute
control which the soul is supposed to exercise over the body.
In the first we suspect some degree of exaggeration, such as we
may also observe among certain masters of the art, not unknown to
us, at the present day. With this natural enthusiasm, which is felt by
a few only, there seems to mingle in Plato a sort of Pythagorean
reverence for numbers and numerical proportion to which Aristotle is
a stranger. Intervals of sound and number are to him sacred things
which have a law of their own, not dependent on the variations of
sense. They rise above sense, and become a connecting link with
the world of ideas. But it is evident that Plato is describing what to
him appears to be also a fact. The power of a simple and
characteristic melody on the impressible mind of the Greek is more
than we can easily appreciate. The effect of national airs may bear
some comparison with it. And, besides all this, there is a confusion
between the harmony of musical notes and the harmony of soul and
body, which is so potently inspired by them.
The second paradox leads up to some curious and interesting
questions—How far can the mind control the body? Is the relation
between them one of mutual antagonism or of mutual harmony? Are
they two or one, and is either of them the cause of the other? May
we not at times drop the opposition between them, and the mode of
describing them, which is so familiar to us, and yet hardly conveys
any precise meaning, and try to view this composite creature, man,
in a more simple manner? Must we not at any rate admit that there
is in human nature a higher and a lower principle, divided by no
distinct line, which at times break asunder and take up arms against
one another? Or again, they are reconciled and move together,
either unconsciously in the ordinary work of life, or consciously in
the pursuit of some noble aim, to be attained not without an effort,
and for which every thought and nerve are strained. And then the
body becomes the good friend or ally, or servant or instrument of
the mind. And the mind has often a wonderful and almost
superhuman power of banishing disease and weakness and calling
out a hidden strength. Reason and the desires, the intellect and the
senses are brought into harmony and obedience so as to form a lv
single human being. They are ever parting, ever meeting; and the
identity or diversity of their tendencies or operations is for the most
part unnoticed by us. When the mind touches the body through the
appetites, we acknowledge the responsibility of the one to the other.
There is a tendency in us which says ‘Drink.’ There is another which
says, ‘Do not drink; it is not good for you.’ And we all of us know
which is the rightful superior. We are also responsible for our health,
although into this sphere there enter some elements of necessity
which may be beyond our control. Still even in the management of
health, care and thought, continued over many years, may make us
almost free agents, if we do not exact too much of ourselves, and if
we acknowledge that all human freedom is limited by the laws of
nature and of mind.
We are disappointed to find that Plato, in the general
condemnation which he passes on the practice of medicine
prevailing in his own day, depreciates the effects of diet. He would
like to have diseases of a definite character and capable of receiving
a definite treatment. He is afraid of invalidism interfering with the
business of life. He does not recognize that time is the great healer
both of mental and bodily disorders; and that remedies which are
gradual and proceed little by little are safer than those which
produce a sudden catastrophe. Neither does he see that there is no
way in which the mind can more surely influence the body than by
the control of eating and drinking; or any other action or occasion of
human life on which the higher freedom of the will can be more
simple or truly asserted.
7. Lesser matters of style may be remarked. (1) The affected
ignorance of music, which is Plato’s way of expressing that he is
passing lightly over the subject. (2) The tentative manner in which
here, as in the second book, he proceeds with the construction of
the State. (3) The description of the State sometimes as a reality
(389 D; 416 B), and then again as a work of imagination only (cp.
534 C; 592 B); these are the arts by which he sustains the reader’s
interest. (4) Connecting links (e.g. 408 C with 379), or the
preparation (394 D) for the entire expulsion of the poets in Book x.
(5) The companion pictures of the lover of litigation and the
valetudinarian (405), the satirical jest about the maxim of Phocylides
(407), the manner in which lvi the image of the gold and silver
citizens is taken up into the subject (416 E), and the argument from
the practice of Asclepius (407), should not escape notice.

Republic IV.
ANALYSIS. BOOK IV. 419 Adeimantus said: ‘Suppose a person to
argue, Socrates, that you make your citizens miserable, and this by
their own free-will; they are the lords of the city, and yet instead of
having, like other men, lands and houses and money of their own,
they live as mercenaries and are always mounting guard.’ 420 You
may add, I replied, that they receive no pay but only their food, and
have no money to spend on a journey or a mistress. ‘Well, and what
answer do you give?’ My answer is, that our guardians may or may
not be the happiest of men,—I should not be surprised to find in the
long-run that they were,—but this is not the aim of our constitution,
which was designed for the good of the whole and not of any one
part. If I went to a sculptor and blamed him for having painted the
eye, which is the noblest feature of the face, not purple but black,
he would reply: ‘The eye must be an eye, and you should look at the
statue as a whole.’ ‘Now I can well imagine a fool’s paradise, in
which everybody is eating and drinking, clothed in purple and fine
linen, and potters lie on sofas and have their wheel at hand, that
they may work a little when they please; 421 and cobblers and all
the other classes of a State lose their distinctive character. And a
State may get on without cobblers; but when the guardians
degenerate into boon companions, then the ruin is complete.
Remember that we are not talking of peasants keeping holiday, but
of a State in which every man is expected to do his own work. The
happiness resides not in this or that class, but in the State as a
whole. I have another remark to make:—A middle condition is best
for artisans; they should have money enough to buy tools, and not
enough to be independent of business. And will not the same
condition be best for our citizens? If they are poor, they will be
mean; 422 if rich, luxurious and lazy; and in neither case contented.
‘But then how will our poor city be able to go to war against an
enemy who has money?’ There may be a difficulty in fighting against
one enemy; against two there will be none. In the first place, the
contest will be lvii carried on by trained warriors against well-to-do
citizens: and is not a regular athlete an easy match for two stout
opponents at least? Suppose also, that before engaging we send
ambassadors to one of the two cities, saying, ‘Silver and gold we
have not; do you help us and take our share of the spoil;’—who
would fight against the lean, wiry dogs, when they might join with
them in preying upon the fatted sheep? ‘But if many states join their
resources, shall we not be in danger?’ I am amused to hear you use
the word ‘state’ of any but our own State. 423 They are ‘states,’ but
not ‘a state’—many in one. For in every state there are two hostile
nations, rich and poor, which you may set one against the other. But
our State, while she remains true to her principles, will be in very
deed the mightiest of Hellenic states.
To the size of the state there is no limit but the necessity of unity;
it must be neither too large nor too small to be one. This is a matter
of secondary importance, like the principle of transposition which
was intimated in the parable of the earthborn men. The meaning
there implied was that every man should do that for which he was
fitted, and be at one with himself, and then the whole city would be
united. But all these things are secondary, if education, which is the
great matter, be duly regarded. 424 When the wheel has once been
set in motion, the speed is always increasing; and each generation
improves upon the preceding, both in physical and moral qualities.
The care of the governors should be directed to preserve music and
gymnastic from innovation; alter the songs of a country, Damon
says, and you will soon end by altering its laws. The change appears
innocent at first, and begins in play; but the evil soon becomes
serious, working secretly upon the characters of individuals, then
upon social and commercial relations, and lastly upon the institutions
of a state; and there is ruin and confusion everywhere. 425 But if
education remains in the established form, there will be no danger. A
restorative process will be always going on; the spirit of law and
order will raise up what has fallen down. Nor will any regulations be
needed for the lesser matters of life—rules of deportment or
fashions of dress. Like invites like for good or for evil. Education will
correct deficiencies and supply the power of self-government. Far be
it from us to enter into the lviii particulars of legislation; let the
guardians take care of education, and education will take care of all
other things.
But without education they may patch and mend as they please;
they will make no progress, any more than a patient who thinks to
cure himself by some favourite remedy and will not give up his
luxurious mode of living. 426 If you tell such persons that they must
first alter their habits, then they grow angry; they are charming
people. ‘Charming,—nay, the very reverse.’ Evidently these
gentlemen are not in your good graces, nor the state which is like
them. And such states there are which first ordain under penalty of
death that no one shall alter the constitution, and then suffer
themselves to be flattered into and out of anything; and he who
indulges them and fawns upon them, is their leader and saviour.
‘Yes, the men are as bad as the states.’ But do you not admire their
cleverness? ‘Nay, some of them are stupid enough to believe what
the people tell them.’ And when all the world is telling a man that he
is six feet high, and he has no measure, how can he believe
anything else? But don’t get into a passion: to see our statesmen
trying their nostrums, 427 and fancying that they can cut off at a
blow the Hydra-like rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play.
Minute enactments are superfluous in good states, and are useless
in bad ones.
And now what remains of the work of legislation? Nothing for us;
but to Apollo the god of Delphi we leave the ordering of the greatest
of all things—that is to say, religion. Only our ancestral deity sitting
upon the centre and navel of the earth will be trusted by us if we
have any sense, in an affair of such magnitude. No foreign god shall
be supreme in our realms….
Republic IV.
INTRODUCTION. Here, as Socrates would say, let us ‘reflect on’
(σκοπῶμεν) what has preceded: thus far we have spoken not of the
happiness of the citizens, but only of the well-being of the State.
They may be the happiest of men, but our principal aim in founding
the State was not to make them happy. They were to be guardians,
not holiday-makers. In this pleasant manner is presented to us the
famous question both of ancient and modern philosophy, touching
the relation of duty to happiness, of right to utility.
First duty, then happiness, is the natural order of our moral ideas.
The utilitarian principle is valuable as a corrective of lix error, and
shows to us a side of ethics which is apt to be neglected. It may be
admitted further that right and utility are co-extensive, and that he
who makes the happiness of mankind his object has one of the
highest and noblest motives of human action. But utility is not the
historical basis of morality; nor the aspect in which moral and
religious ideas commonly occur to the mind. The greatest happiness
of all is, as we believe, the far-off result of the divine government of
the universe. The greatest happiness of the individual is certainly to
be found in a life of virtue and goodness. But we seem to be more
assured of a law of right than we can be of a divine purpose, that ‘all
mankind should be saved;’ and we infer the one from the other. And
the greatest happiness of the individual may be the reverse of the
greatest happiness in the ordinary sense of the term, and may be
realised in a life of pain, or in a voluntary death. Further, the word
‘happiness’ has several ambiguities; it may mean either pleasure or
an ideal life, happiness subjective or objective, in this world or in
another, of ourselves only or of our neighbours and of all men
everywhere. By the modern founder of Utilitarianism the self-
regarding and disinterested motives of action are included under the
same term, although they are commonly opposed by us as
benevolence and self-love. The word happiness has not the
definiteness or the sacredness of ‘truth’ and ‘right’; it does not
equally appeal to our higher nature, and has not sunk into the
conscience of mankind. It is associated too much with the comforts
and conveniences of life; too little with ‘the goods of the soul which
we desire for their own sake.’ In a great trial, or danger, or
temptation, or in any great and heroic action, it is scarcely thought
of. For these reasons ‘the greatest happiness’ principle is not the
true foundation of ethics. But though not the first principle, it is the
second, which is like unto it, and is often of easier application. For
the larger part of human actions are neither right nor wrong, except
in so far as they tend to the happiness of mankind (cp. Introd. to
Gorgias and Philebus).
The same question reappears in politics, where the useful or
expedient seems to claim a larger sphere and to have a greater
authority. For concerning political measures, we chiefly ask: How will
they affect the happiness of mankind? Yet here too we may observe
that what we term expediency is merely the law of lx right limited by
the conditions of human society. Right and truth are the highest
aims of government as well as of individuals; and we ought not to
lose sight of them because we cannot directly enforce them. They
appeal to the better mind of nations; and sometimes they are too
much for merely temporal interests to resist. They are the
watchwords which all men use in matters of public policy, as well as
in their private dealings; the peace of Europe may be said to depend
upon them. In the most commercial and utilitarian states of society
the power of ideas remains. And all the higher class of statesmen
have in them something of that idealism which Pericles is said to
have gathered from the teaching of Anaxagoras. They recognise that
the true leader of men must be above the motives of ambition, and
that national character is of greater value than material comfort and
prosperity. And this is the order of thought in Plato; first, he expects
his citizens to do their duty, and then under favourable
circumstances, that is to say, in a well-ordered State, their happiness
is assured. That he was far from excluding the modern principle of
utility in politics is sufficiently evident from other passages; in which
‘the most beneficial is affirmed to be the most honourable’ (v. 457
B), and also ‘the most sacred’ (v. 458 E).
We may note (1) The manner in which the objection of
Adeimantus here, as in ii. 357 foll., 363; vi. ad init., etc., is designed
to draw out and deepen the argument of Socrates. (2) The
conception of a whole as lying at the foundation both of politics and
of art, in the latter supplying the only principle of criticism, which,
under the various names of harmony, symmetry, measure,
proportion, unity, the Greek seems to have applied to works of art.
(3) The requirement that the State should be limited in size, after
the traditional model of a Greek state; as in the Politics of Aristotle
(vii. 4, etc.), the fact that the cities of Hellas were small is converted
into a principle. (4) The humorous pictures of the lean dogs and the
fatted sheep, of the light active boxer upsetting two stout gentlemen
at least, of the ‘charming’ patients who are always making
themselves worse; or again, the playful assumption that there is no
State but our own; or the grave irony with which the statesman is
excused who believes that he is six feet high because he is told so,
and having nothing to measure with is to be pardoned for his
ignorance—he is too lxi amusing for us to be seriously angry with
him. (5) The light and superficial manner in which religion is passed
over when provision has been made for two great principles,—first,
that religion shall be based on the highest conception of the gods (ii.
377 foll.), secondly, that the true national or Hellenic type shall be
maintained….
 Republic IV.
ANALYSIS.Socrates proceeds: But where amid all this is justice? Son of
Ariston, tell me where. Light a candle and search the city, and get
your brother and the rest of our friends to help in seeking for her.
‘That won’t do,’ replied Glaucon, ‘you yourself promised to make the
search and talked about the impiety of deserting justice.’ Well, I said,
I will lead the way, but do you follow. My notion is, that our State
being perfect will contain all the four virtues—wisdom, courage,
temperance, justice. 428 If we eliminate the three first, the unknown
remainder will be justice.
First then, of wisdom: the State which we have called into being
will be wise because politic. And policy is one among many kinds of
skill,—not the skill of the carpenter, or of the worker in metal, or of
the husbandman, but the skill of him who advises about the
interests of the whole State. Of such a kind is the skill of the
guardians, 429 who are a small class in number, far smaller than the
blacksmiths; but in them is concentrated the wisdom of the State.
And if this small ruling class have wisdom, then the whole State will
be wise.
Our second virtue is courage, which we have no difficulty in
finding in another class—that of soldiers. Courage may be defined as
a sort of salvation—the never-failing salvation of the opinions which
law and education have prescribed concerning dangers. You know
the way in which dyers first prepare the white ground and then lay
on the dye of purple or of any other colour. Colours dyed in this way
become fixed, and no soap or lye will ever wash them out. 430 Now
the ground is education, and the laws are the colours; and if the
ground is properly laid, neither the soap of pleasure nor the lye of
pain or fear will ever wash them out. This power which preserves
right opinion about danger I would ask you to call ‘courage,’ adding
the epithet ‘political’ or ‘civilized’ in order to distinguish it from mere
animal courage and from a higher courage which may hereafter be
discussed.
 lxii Two virtues remain; temperance and justice. More than the
preceding virtues 431 temperance suggests the idea of harmony.
Some light is thrown upon the nature of this virtue by the popular
description of a man as ‘master of himself’—which has an absurd
sound, because the master is also the servant. The expression really
means that the better principle in a man masters the worse. There
are in cities whole classes—women, slaves and the like—who
correspond to the worse, and a few only to the better; and in our
State the former class are held under control by the latter. Now to
which of these classes does temperance belong? ‘To both of them.’
And our State if any will be the abode of temperance; and we were
right in describing this virtue as a harmony which is diffused through
the whole, 432 making the dwellers in the city to be of one mind,
and attuning the upper and middle and lower classes like the strings
of an instrument, whether you suppose them to differ in wisdom,
strength or wealth.
And now we are near the spot; let us draw in and surround the
cover and watch with all our eyes, lest justice should slip away and
escape. Tell me, if you see the thicket move first. ‘Nay, I would have
you lead.’ Well then, offer up a prayer and follow. The way is dark
and difficult; but we must push on. I begin to see a track. ‘Good
news.’ Why, Glaucon, our dulness of scent is quite ludicrous! While
we are straining our eyes into the distance, justice is tumbling out at
our feet. We are as bad as people looking for a thing which they
have in their hands. Have you forgotten our 433 old principle of the
division of labour, or of every man doing his own business,
concerning which we spoke at the foundation of the State—what but
this was justice? Is there any other virtue remaining which can
compete with wisdom and temperance and courage in the scale of
political virtue? For ‘every one having his own’ is the great object of
government; 434 and the great object of trade is that every man
should do his own business. Not that there is much harm in a
carpenter trying to be a cobbler, or a cobbler transforming himself
into a carpenter; but great evil may arise from the cobbler leaving
his last and turning into a guardian or legislator, or when a single
individual is trainer, warrior, legislator, all in one. And this evil is
injustice, or every man doing another’s business. I do not say that as
yet we are in a condition to arrive at a final conclusion. For the lxiii
definition which we believe to hold good in states has still to be
tested by the individual. Having read the large letters we will now
come back to the small. From the two together a brilliant light may
be struck out….
Republic IV.
INTRODUCTION.Socrates proceeds to discover the nature of justice by a
method of residues. Each of the first three virtues corresponds to
one of the three parts of the soul and one of the three classes in the
State, although the third, temperance, has more of the nature of a
harmony than the first two. If there be a fourth virtue, that can only
be sought for in the relation of the three parts in the soul or classes
in the State to one another. It is obvious and simple, and for that
very reason has not been found out. The modern logician will be
inclined to object that ideas cannot be separated like chemical
substances, but that they run into one another and may be only
different aspects or names of the same thing, and such in this
instance appears to be the case. For the definition here given of
justice is verbally the same as one of the definitions of temperance
given by Socrates in the Charmides (162 A), which however is only
provisional, and is afterwards rejected. And so far from justice
remaining over when the other virtues are eliminated, the justice
and temperance of the Republic can with difficulty be distinguished.
Temperance appears to be the virtue of a part only, and one of
three, whereas justice is a universal virtue of the whole soul. Yet on
the other hand temperance is also described as a sort of harmony,
and in this respect is akin to justice. Justice seems to differ from
temperance in degree rather than in kind; whereas temperance is
the harmony of discordant elements, justice is the perfect order by
which all natures and classes do their own business, the right man in
the right place, the division and co-operation of all the citizens.
Justice, again, is a more abstract notion than the other virtues, and
therefore, from Plato’s point of view, the foundation of them, to
which they are referred and which in idea precedes them. The
proposal to omit temperance is a mere trick of style intended to
avoid monotony (cp. vii. 528).
There is a famous question discussed in one of the earlier
Dialogues of Plato (Protagoras, 329, 330; cp. Arist. Nic. Ethics, vi.
13. 6), ‘Whether the virtues are one or many?’ This receives an
answer which is to the effect that there are four cardinal virtues lxiv
(now for the first time brought together in ethical philosophy), and
one supreme over the rest, which is not like Aristotle’s conception of
universal justice, virtue relative to others, but the whole of virtue
relative to the parts. To this universal conception of justice or order
in the first education and in the moral nature of man, the still more
universal conception of the good in the second education and in the
sphere of speculative knowledge seems to succeed. Both might be
equally described by the terms ‘law,’ ‘order,’ ‘harmony;’ but while the
idea of good embraces ‘all time and all existence,’ the conception of
justice is not extended beyond man.
Republic IV.
ANALYSIS. … Socrates is now going to identify the individual and the
State. But first he must prove that there are three parts of the
individual soul. His argument is as follows:—Quantity makes no
difference in quality. The word ‘just,’ whether applied to the
individual or to the State, has the same meaning. And the term
‘justice’ implied that the same three principles in the State and in the
individual were doing their own business. But are they really three or
one? The question is difficult, and one which can hardly be solved by
the methods which we are now using; but the truer and longer way
would take up too much of our time. ‘The shorter will satisfy me.’
Well then, you would admit that the qualities of states mean the
qualities of the individuals who compose them? The Scythians and
Thracians are passionate, our own race intellectual, 436 and the
Egyptians and Phoenicians covetous, because the individual
members of each have such and such a character; the difficulty is to
determine whether the several principles are one or three; whether,
that is to say, we reason with one part of our nature, desire with
another, are angry with another, or whether the whole soul comes
into play in each sort of action. This enquiry, however, requires a
very exact definition of terms. The same thing in the same relation
cannot be affected in two opposite ways. But there is no
impossibility in a man standing still, yet moving his arms, or in a top
which is fixed on one spot going round upon its axis. There is no
necessity to mention all the possible exceptions; 437 let us
provisionally assume that opposites cannot do or be or suffer
opposites in the same relation. And to the class of opposites belong
assent and dissent, desire and avoidance. And one form lxv of desire
is thirst and hunger: and here arises a new point—thirst is thirst of
drink, hunger is hunger of food; not of warm drink or of a particular
kind of food, 438 with the single exception of course that the very
fact of our desiring anything implies that it is good. When relative
terms have no attributes, their correlatives have no attributes; when
they have attributes, their correlatives also have them. For example,
the term ‘greater’ is simply relative to ‘less,’ and knowledge refers to
a subject of knowledge. But on the other hand, a particular
knowledge is of a particular subject. Again, every science has a
distinct character, which is defined by an object; medicine, for
example, is the science of health, although not to be confounded
with health. 439 Having cleared our ideas thus far, let us return to
the original instance of thirst, which has a definite object—drink.
Now the thirsty soul may feel two distinct impulses; the animal one
saying ‘Drink;’ the rational one, which says ‘Do not drink.’ The two
impulses are contradictory; and therefore we may assume that they
spring from distinct principles in the soul. But is passion a third
principle, or akin to desire? There is a story of a certain Leontius
which throws some light on this question. He was coming up from
the Piraeus outside the north wall, and he passed a spot where there
were dead bodies lying by the executioner. He felt a longing desire
to see them and also an abhorrence of them; at first he turned away
and shut his eyes, then, 440 suddenly tearing them open, he said,
—‘Take your fill, ye wretches, of the fair sight.’ Now is there not here
a third principle which is often found to come to the assistance of
reason against desire, but never of desire against reason? This is
passion or spirit, of the separate existence of which we may further
convince ourselves by putting the following case:—When a man
suffers justly, if he be of a generous nature he is not indignant at the
hardships which he undergoes: but when he suffers unjustly, his
indignation is his great support; hunger and thirst cannot tame him;
the spirit within him must do or die, until the voice of the shepherd,
that is, of reason, bidding his dog bark no more, is heard within.
This shows that passion is the ally of reason. 441 Is passion then the
same with reason? No, for the former exists in children and brutes;
and Homer affords a proof of the distinction between them when he
says, ‘He smote his breast, and thus rebuked his soul.’
lxvi And now, at last, we have reached firm ground, and are able
to infer that the virtues of the State and of the individual are the
same. For wisdom and courage and justice in the State are severally
the wisdom and courage and justice in the individuals who form the
State. Each of the three classes will do the work of its own class in
the State, and each part in the individual soul; reason, the superior,
and passion, the inferior, 442 will be harmonized by the influence of
music and gymnastic. The counsellor and the warrior, the head and
the arm, will act together in the town of Mansoul, and keep the
desires in proper subjection. The courage of the warrior is that
quality which preserves a right opinion about dangers in spite of
pleasures and pains. The wisdom of the counsellor is that small part
of the soul which has authority and reason. The virtue of
temperance is the friendship of the ruling and the subject principles,
both in the State and in the individual. Of justice we have already
spoken; and the notion already given of it may be confirmed by
common instances. Will the just state or the just individual 443 steal,
lie, commit adultery, or be guilty of impiety to gods and men? ‘No.’
And is not the reason of this that the several principles, whether in
the state or in the individual, do their own business? And justice is
the quality which makes just men and just states. Moreover, our old
division of labour, which required that there should be one man for
one use, was a dream or anticipation of what was to follow; and that
dream has now been realized in justice, which begins by binding
together the three chords of the soul, and then acts harmoniously in
every relation of life. 444 And injustice, which is the insubordination
and disobedience of the inferior elements in the soul, is the opposite
of justice, and is inharmonious and unnatural, being to the soul what
disease is to the body; for in the soul as well as in the body, good or
bad actions produce good or bad habits. And virtue is the health and
beauty and well-being of the soul, and vice is the disease and
weakness and deformity of the soul.
445 Again the old question returns upon us: Is justice or injustice
the more profitable? The question has become ridiculous. For
injustice, like mortal disease, makes life not worth having. Come up
with me to the hill which overhangs the city and look down upon the
single form of virtue, and the infinite forms of vice, lxvii among which
are four special ones, characteristic both of states and of individuals.
And the state which corresponds to the single form of virtue is that
which we have been describing, wherein reason rules under one of
two names—monarchy and aristocracy. Thus there are five forms in
all, both of states and of souls….
Republic IV.
INTRODUCTION. In attempting to prove that the soul has three separate
faculties, Plato takes occasion to discuss what makes difference of
faculties. And the criterion which he proposes is difference in the
working of the faculties. The same faculty cannot produce
contradictory effects. But the path of early reasoners is beset by
thorny entanglements, and he will not proceed a step without first
clearing the ground. This leads him into a tiresome digression, which
is intended to explain the nature of contradiction. First, the
contradiction must be at the same time and in the same relation.
Secondly, no extraneous word must be introduced into either of the
terms in which the contradictory proposition is expressed: for
example, thirst is of drink, not of warm drink. He implies, what he
does not say, that if, by the advice of reason, or by the impulse of
anger, a man is restrained from drinking, this proves that thirst, or
desire under which thirst is included, is distinct from anger and
reason. But suppose that we allow the term ‘thirst’ or ‘desire’ to be
modified, and say an ‘angry thirst,’ or a ‘revengeful desire,’ then the
two spheres of desire and anger overlap and become confused. This
case therefore has to be excluded. And still there remains an
exception to the rule in the use of the term ‘good,’ which is always
implied in the object of desire. These are the discussions of an age
before logic; and any one who is wearied by them should remember
that they are necessary to the clearing up of ideas in the first
development of the human faculties.
The psychology of Plato extends no further than the division of the
soul into the rational, irascible, and concupiscent elements, which, as
far as we know, was first made by him, and has been retained by
Aristotle and succeeding ethical writers. The chief difficulty in this
early analysis of the mind is to define exactly the place of the
irascible faculty (θυμός), which may be variously described under the
terms righteous indignation, spirit, passion. It is the foundation of
courage, which includes in Plato lxviii moral courage, the courage of
enduring pain, and of surmounting intellectual difficulties, as well as
of meeting dangers in war. Though irrational, it inclines to side with
the rational: it cannot be aroused by punishment when justly
inflicted: it sometimes takes the form of an enthusiasm which
sustains a man in the performance of great actions. It is the ‘lion
heart’ with which the reason makes a treaty (ix. 589 B). On the
other hand it is negative rather than positive; it is indignant at wrong
or falsehood, but does not, like Love in the Symposium and
Phaedrus, aspire to the vision of Truth or Good. It is the peremptory
military spirit which prevails in the government of honour. It differs
from anger (ὀργή), this latter term having no accessory notion of
righteous indignation. Although Aristotle has retained the word, yet
we may observe that ‘passion’ (θυμός) has with him lost its affinity
to the rational and has become indistinguishable from ‘anger’ (ὀργή).
And to this vernacular use Plato himself in the Laws seems to revert
(ix. 836 B), though not always (v. 731 A). By modern philosophy too,
as well as in our ordinary conversation, the words anger or passion
are employed almost exclusively in a bad sense; there is no
connotation of a just or reasonable cause by which they are
aroused. The feeling of ‘righteous indignation’ is too partial and
accidental to admit of our regarding it as a separate virtue or habit.
We are tempted also to doubt whether Plato is right in supposing
that an offender, however justly condemned, could be expected to
acknowledge the justice of his sentence; this is the spirit of a
philosopher or martyr rather than of a criminal.
We may observe (p. 444 D, E) how nearly Plato approaches
Aristotle’s famous thesis, that ‘good actions produce good habits.’
The words ‘as healthy practices (ἐπιτηδεύματα) produce health, so
do just practices produce justice,’ have a sound very like the
Nicomachean Ethics. But we note also that an incidental remark in
Plato has become a far-reaching principle in Aristotle, and an
inseparable part of a great Ethical system.
There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by ‘the
longer way’ (435 D; cp. infra, vi. 504): he seems to intimate some
metaphysic of the future which will not be satisfied with arguing
from the principle of contradiction. In the sixth and seventh books
(compare Sophist and Parmenides) he has given lxix us a sketch of
such a metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for the final revelation of
the idea of good, he is put off with the declaration that he has not
yet studied the preliminary sciences. How he would have filled up
the sketch, or argued about such questions from a higher point of
view, we can only conjecture. Perhaps he hoped to find some a
priori method of developing the parts out of the whole; or he might
have asked which of the ideas contains the other ideas, and possibly
have stumbled on the Hegelian identity of the ‘ego’ and the
‘universal.’ Or he may have imagined that ideas might be constructed
in some manner analogous to the construction of figures and
numbers in the mathematical sciences. The most certain and
necessary truth was to Plato the universal; and to this he was always
seeking to refer all knowledge or opinion, just as in modern times
we seek to rest them on the opposite pole of induction and
experience. The aspirations of metaphysicians have always tended to
pass beyond the limits of human thought and language: they seem
to have reached a height at which they are ‘moving about in worlds
unrealized,’ and their conceptions, although profoundly affecting
their own minds, become invisible or unintelligible to others. We are
not therefore surprized to find that Plato himself has nowhere clearly
explained his doctrine of ideas; or that his school in a later
generation, like his contemporaries Glaucon and Adeimantus, were
unable to follow him in this region of speculation. In the Sophist,
where he is refuting the scepticism which maintained either that
there was no such thing as predication, or that all might be
predicated of all, he arrives at the conclusion that some ideas
combine with some, but not all with all. But he makes only one or
two steps forward on this path; he nowhere attains to any connected
system of ideas, or even to a knowledge of the most elementary
relations of the sciences to one another (see infra).

Republic V.
ANALYSIS.BOOK V. 449 I was going to enumerate the four forms of
vice or decline in states, when Polemarchus—he was sitting a little
farther from me than Adeimantus—taking him by the coat and
leaning towards him, said something in an undertone, of which I
only caught the words, ‘Shall we let him off?’ ‘Certainly not,’ said
Adeimantus, raising his voice. Whom, I said, are you lxx not going to
let off? ‘You,’ he said. Why? ‘Because we think that you are not
dealing fairly with us in omitting women and children, of whom you
have slily disposed under the general formula that friends have all
things in common.’ And was I not right? ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but there
are many sorts of communism or community, and we want to know
which of them is right. The company, as you have just heard, are
resolved to have a further explanation.’ 450 Thrasymachus said, ‘Do
you think that we have come hither to dig for gold, or to hear you
discourse?’ Yes, I said; but the discourse should be of a reasonable
length. Glaucon added, ‘Yes, Socrates, and there is reason in
spending the whole of life in such discussions; but pray, without
more ado, tell us how this community is to be carried out, and how
the interval between birth and education is to be filled up.’ Well, I
said, the subject has several difficulties—What is possible? is the first
question. What is desirable? is the second. ‘Fear not,’ he replied, ‘for
you are speaking among friends.’ That, I replied, is a sorry
consolation; I shall destroy my friends as well as myself. 451 Not
that I mind a little innocent laughter; but he who kills the truth is a
murderer. ‘Then,’ said Glaucon, laughing, ‘in case you should murder
us we will acquit you beforehand, and you shall be held free from
the guilt of deceiving us.’
 Socrates proceeds:—The guardians of our state are to be watch-
dogs, as we have already said. Now dogs are not divided into hes
and shes—we do not take the masculine gender out to hunt and
leave the females at home to look after their puppies. They have the
same employments—the only difference between them is that the
one sex is stronger and the other weaker. But if women are to have
the same employments as men, they must have the same education
—they must be taught music and gymnastics, and the art of war.
452 I know that a great joke will be made of their riding on
horseback and carrying weapons; the sight of the naked old wrinkled
women showing their agility in the palaestra will certainly not be a
vision of beauty, and may be expected to become a famous jest. But
we must not mind the wits; there was a time when they might have
laughed at our present gymnastics. All is habit: people have at last
found out that the exposure is better than the concealment of the
lxxi person, and now they laugh no more. Evil only should be the
subject of ridicule.
453 The first question is, whether women are able either wholly or
partially to share in the employments of men. And here we may be
charged with inconsistency in making the proposal at all. For we
started originally with the division of labour; and the diversity of
employments was based on the difference of natures. But is there no
difference between men and women? Nay, are they not wholly
different? There was the difficulty, Glaucon, which made me
unwilling to speak of family relations. However, when a man is out of
his depth, whether in a pool or in an ocean, he can only swim for his
life; and we must try to find a way of escape, if we can.
454 The argument is, that different natures have different uses,
and the natures of men and women are said to differ. But this is only
a verbal opposition. We do not consider that the difference may be
purely nominal and accidental; for example, a bald man and a hairy
man are opposed in a single point of view, but you cannot infer that
because a bald man is a cobbler a hairy man ought not to be a
cobbler. Now why is such an inference erroneous? Simply because
the opposition between them is partial only, like the difference
between a male physician and a female physician, not running
through the whole nature, like the difference between a physician
and a carpenter. And if the difference of the sexes is only that the
one beget and the other bear children, this does not prove that they
ought to have distinct educations. 455 Admitting that women differ
from men in capacity, do not men equally differ from one another?
Has not nature scattered all the qualities which our citizens require
indifferently up and down among the two sexes? and even in their
peculiar pursuits, are not women often, though in some cases
superior to men, ridiculously enough surpassed by them? Women
are the same in kind as men, and have the same aptitude or want of
aptitude for medicine or gymnastic or war, 456 but in a less degree.
One woman will be a good guardian, another not; and the good
must be chosen to be the colleagues of our guardians. If however
their natures are the same, the inference is that their education
must also be the same; there is no longer anything unnatural or
impossible in a woman learning music lxxii and gymnastic. And the
education which we give them will be the very best, far superior to
that of cobblers, and will train up the very best women, and nothing
can be more advantageous to the State than this. 457 Therefore let
them strip, clothed in their chastity, and share in the toils of war and
in the defence of their country; he who laughs at them is a fool for
his pains.
The first wave is past, and the argument is compelled to admit
that men and women have common duties and pursuits. A second
and greater wave is rolling in—community of wives and children; is
this either expedient or possible? The expediency I do not doubt; I
am not so sure of the possibility. ‘Nay, I think that a considerable
doubt will be entertained on both points.’ I meant to have escaped
the trouble of proving the first, but as you have detected the little
stratagem I must even submit. 458 Only allow me to feed my fancy
like the solitary in his walks, with a dream of what might be, and
then I will return to the question of what can be.
 In the first place our rulers will enforce the laws and make new
ones where they are wanted, and their allies or ministers will obey.
You, as legislator, have already selected the men; and now you shall
select the women. After the selection has been made, they will dwell
in common houses and have their meals in common, and will be
brought together by a necessity more certain than that of
mathematics. But they cannot be allowed to live in licentiousness;
that is an unholy thing, which the rulers are determined to prevent.
For the avoidance of this, 459 holy marriage festivals will be
instituted, and their holiness will be in proportion to their usefulness.
And here, Glaucon, I should like to ask (as I know that you are a
breeder of birds and animals), Do you not take the greatest care in
the mating? ‘Certainly.’ And there is no reason to suppose that less
care is required in the marriage of human beings. But then our rulers
must be skilful physicians of the State, for they will often need a
strong dose of falsehood in order to bring about desirable unions
between their subjects. The good must be paired with the good, and
the bad with the bad, and the offspring of the one must be reared,
and of the other destroyed; in this way the flock will be preserved in
prime condition. 460 Hymeneal festivals will be celebrated at times
fixed with an eye to population, and the brides and bridegrooms will
lxxiii meet at them; and by an ingenious system of lots the rulers will
contrive that the brave and the fair come together, and that those of
inferior breed are paired with inferiors—the latter will ascribe to
chance what is really the invention of the rulers. And when children
are born, the offspring of the brave and fair will be carried to an
enclosure in a certain part of the city, and there attended by suitable
nurses; the rest will be hurried away to places unknown. The
mothers will be brought to the fold and will suckle the children; care
however must be taken that none of them recognise their own
offspring; and if necessary other nurses may also be hired. The
trouble of watching and getting up at night will be transferred to
attendants. ‘Then the wives of our guardians will have a fine easy
time when they are having children.’ And quite right too, I said, that
they should.
 The parents ought to be in the prime of life, which for a man may
be reckoned at thirty years—from twenty-five, 461 when he has
‘passed the point at which the speed of life is greatest,’ to fifty-five;
and at twenty years for a woman—from twenty to forty. Any one
above or below those ages who partakes in the hymeneals shall be
guilty of impiety; also every one who forms a marriage connexion at
other times without the consent of the rulers. This latter regulation
applies to those who are within the specified ages, after which they
may range at will, provided they avoid the prohibited degrees of
parents and children, or of brothers and sisters, which last, however,
are not absolutely prohibited, if a dispensation be procured. ‘But how
shall we know the degrees of affinity, when all things are common?’
The answer is, that brothers and sisters are all such as are born
seven or nine months after the espousals, and their parents those
who are then espoused, 462 and every one will have many children
and every child many parents.
Socrates proceeds: I have now to prove that this scheme is
advantageous and also consistent with our entire polity. The greatest
good of a State is unity; the greatest evil, discord and distraction.
And there will be unity where there are no private pleasures or pains
or interests—where if one member suffers all the members suffer, if
one citizen is touched all are quickly sensitive; and the least hurt to
the little finger of the State runs through the whole body and
vibrates to the soul. For the true lxxiv State, like an individual, is
injured as a whole when any part is affected. 463 Every State has
subjects and rulers, who in a democracy are called rulers, and in
other States masters: but in our State they are called saviours and
allies; and the subjects who in other States are termed slaves, are
by us termed nurturers and paymasters, and those who are termed
comrades and colleagues in other places, are by us called fathers
and brothers. And whereas in other States members of the same
government regard one of their colleagues as a friend and another
as an enemy, in our State no man is a stranger to another; for every
citizen is connected with every other by ties of blood, and these
names and this way of speaking will have a corresponding reality—
brother, father, sister, mother, repeated from infancy in the ears of
children, will not be mere words. 464 Then again the citizens will
have all things in common, in having common property they will
have common pleasures and pains.
Can there be strife and contention among those who are of one
mind; or lawsuits about property when men have nothing but their
bodies which they call their own; or suits about violence when every
one is bound to defend himself? 465 The permission to strike when
insulted will be an ‘antidote’ to the knife and will prevent
disturbances in the State. But no younger man will strike an elder;
reverence will prevent him from laying hands on his kindred, and he
will fear that the rest of the family may retaliate. Moreover, our
citizens will be rid of the lesser evils of life; there will be no flattery
of the rich, no sordid household cares, no borrowing and not paying.
Compared with the citizens of other States, ours will be Olympic
victors, and crowned with blessings greater still—they and their
children having a better maintenance during life, and after death an
honourable burial. 466 Nor has the happiness of the individual been
sacrificed to the happiness of the State (cp. iv. 419 E); our Olympic
victor has not been turned into a cobbler, but he has a happiness
beyond that of any cobbler. At the same time, if any conceited youth
begins to dream of appropriating the State to himself, he must be
reminded that ‘half is better than the whole.’ ‘I should certainly
advise him to stay where he is when he has the promise of such a
brave life.’
But is such a community possible?—as among the animals, so lxxv
also among men; and if possible, in what way possible? About war
there is no difficulty; the principle of communism is adapted to
military service. Parents will take their children to look on at a battle,
467 just as potters’ boys are trained to the business by looking on at
the wheel. And to the parents themselves, as to other animals, the
sight of their young ones will prove a great incentive to bravery.
Young warriors must learn, but they must not run into danger,
although a certain degree of risk is worth incurring when the benefit
is great. The young creatures should be placed under the care of
experienced veterans, and they should have wings—that is to say,
swift and tractable steeds on which they may fly away and escape.
468 One of the first things to be done is to teach a youth to ride.

Cowards and deserters shall be degraded to the class of

husbandmen; gentlemen who allow themselves to be taken
prisoners, may be presented to the enemy. But what shall be done
to the hero? First of all he shall be crowned by all the youths in the
army; secondly, he shall receive the right hand of fellowship; and
thirdly, do you think that there is any harm in his being kissed? We
have already determined that he shall have more wives than others,
in order that he may have as many children as possible. And at a
feast he shall have more to eat; we have the authority of Homer for
honouring brave men with ‘long chines,’ which is an appropriate
compliment, because meat is a very strengthening thing. Fill the
bowl then, and give the best seats and meats to the brave—may
they do them good! And he who dies in battle will be at once
declared to be of the golden race, and will, as we believe, become
one of Hesiod’s guardian angels. 469 He shall be worshipped after
death in the manner prescribed by the oracle; and not only he, but
all other benefactors of the State who die in any other way, shall be
admitted to the same honours.
The next question is, How shall we treat our enemies? Shall
Hellenes be enslaved? No; for there is too great a risk of the whole
race passing under the yoke of the barbarians. Or shall the dead be
despoiled? Certainly not; for that sort of thing is an excuse for
skulking, and has been the ruin of many an army. There is meanness
and feminine malice in making an enemy of the dead body, when
the soul which was the owner has fled—lxxvilike a dog who cannot
reach his assailants, and quarrels with the stones which are thrown
at him instead. Again, the arms of Hellenes should not be offered up
in the temples of the Gods; 470 they are a pollution, for they are
taken from brethren. And on similar grounds there should be a limit
to the devastation of Hellenic territory—the houses should not be
burnt, nor more than the annual produce carried off. For war is of
two kinds, civil and foreign; the first of which is properly termed
‘discord,’ and only the second ‘war;’ and war between Hellenes is in
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