He is unpractical, and even absurd, in his curious prudery about the tales and legends which children are to learn. He objects to Homer, to the tragedies, still more to the comedies, and, no doubt, to the folk-lore of the day, as inculcating base and immoral views of the gods and their relations to men. Fairy tales are always to represent God as one and as perfectly good. He even goes so far--but here he can hardly be in earnest--as to recommend that children shall learn by heart his laws instead of poetry and myths![57] Throughout all his remarks on this subject, he evidently ignores the culture of the imagination as such, which we recognize as so important that we even tolerate or overlook immoralities or manifest fictions in aiming at this kind of amusement and culture of children. Indeed, it is certain that when children are taught fairy tales _as such_, the immoral acts of real life, such as robbery and murder, are only accessories to the imaginary life, in which there is generally some rude justice. Even apart from this particular question, we find all through Plato’s theory of education a very mischievous dislike of any liberty of opinion, or liberty of life, in the youth of his State. He goes so far in the “Laws” as to make heresy of opinion penal, and to punish with imprisonment those who will not conform to the doctrines of the lawgiver. If there be anything which would tempt us to reject the “Laws,” as not the genuine work of Socrates’ disciple, it is this strange narrowness of view, which makes Grote argue that the actual Athens of Plato’s day was superior to the ideal he constructed. But doctrinaires of all ages hate human liberty. Nor do the Greeks ever seem to have been forced by the pressure of circumstances to mark off the close of formal education by a fixed period, like our graduation at a university, when the young man is expected to strike out into the world and henceforth educate himself in practical life.