which he applies to the classification of the State. The individual soul he regards as composed of the appetite (ἐπιθυμία), naturally wild but capable of being tamed; the spirit (θυμός), courageous though capable of both good and evil; and the guiding intelligence (νοὕς), the source of wisdom and culture. This analysis of individual being Plato transfers to social life, and finds in his State (which, to apply the expression of Milton, is simply the citizen "writ large") three classes corresponding with these three elements of individuality. The philosophers, to whom he would intrust the government of his State, represent its νοὕς; the warriors or military class, its θυμός; the mob, its ἐπιθυμία.[1]
Plato's ideal communism of wives and property in his Utopia has recently met with apologists who would reduce the former to a State control of marriage and education, and remind us of the limited range within which the latter was to be confined. But for us the really significant fact is that Plato's ideal communism clearly results from his observing how personal inequalities of property had contributed to destroy the old Greek union of citizen and city, the State and its individual units. Men who agree with Aristotle's criticism on this ideal communism will do well to remember the social conditions which suggested that ideal, especially when we find similar conditions in Hebrew society producing, not merely an ideal Utopia, but organisations, like that of the Essenes, aiming at a practical return to the communism of the old Hebrew village community.
§ 63. But while the enlargement of Athenian ideas and the development of prose were leading to the severance of science from literature in Aristotle's dry theorising and collections of facts, the heart of literature was being
- ↑ See Rep. bk. iv. 440 E., etc. Cf. Hist Gk. Lit., Müller, vol. ii. p, 245.
