Now what hinders this strengthening macrocosmic unity, the oneness of the political organism with itself, is that the unit, the individual, the microcosm, fancies itself, or would fain be, a rival macrocosm, independent, many-sided, all-sufficient. To make him that, as you know, had been the conscious aim of the Athenian system in the education of its youth, as also in its later indirect education of the citizen by the way of political life. It was the ideal of one side of the Greek character in general, of much that was brilliant in it and seductive to others. In this sense, Pericles himself interprets the educational function of the city towards the citizen:--to take him as he is, and develope him to the utmost on all his various sides, with a variety in those parts however, as Plato thinks, by no means likely to promote the unity of the whole, of the state as such, which must move all together if it is to move at all, at least against its foes. With this at first sight quite limited purpose then, paradoxical as it might seem to those whose very ideal lay precisely in such manifold development, to Plato himself perhaps, manifold as his own genius and culture conspicuously were--paradoxical [241] as it might seem, Plato's demand is for the limitation, the simplifying, of those constituent parts or units; that the unit should be indeed no more than a part, it might be a very small part, in a community, which needs, if it is still to subsist, the wholeness of an army in motion, of the stars in their courses, of well-concerted music, if you prefer that figure, or, as the modern reader might perhaps object, of a machine. The design of Plato is to bring back the Athenian people, the Greeks, to thoughts of order, to disinterestedness in their functions, to that self-concentration of soul on one's own part, that loyal concession of their proper parts to others, on which such order depends, to a love of it, a sense of its extreme aesthetic beauty and fitness, according to that indefectible definition of Justice, of what is right, to hen prattein, to ta hautou prattein+, in opposition, as he thinks, to those so fascinating conditions of Injustice, poikilia, pleonexia, polypragmosynê,+ figuring away, as they do sometimes, so brilliantly.