It seems curious to me here to make two further points of contact, which taken with the Zola point just made, seem to tax the extremes of the heavens and the earth. Plato's organic principle appears to emerge from some such consideration as this:--A boy ten years old is found to possess a wondrous manual deftness: he can do anything with his fingers: word is brought to Plato: what shall the State do with this boy? Why, says Plato, if he be manually so adroit, likely he will turn pickpocket: the plain course is to chop off his hands,--or to expose him to die in one of those highly respectable places such as decency requires for generally unavailable children. No, says the modern man: you are destroying his manifest gift, the very deepest outcome of his personality: he might be a pickpocket, true, but then he might be a great violinist, he might be a great worker in all manner of materials requiring deftness: instead of cutting off his hands, let us put him at an industrial school, let us set him to playing the violin, let us cherish him, let us develop his personality. So, Plato takes the gift of acquiring property--for it is a real gift and blessing to man, if properly developed--and he will chop it off, that is, he will crush out the desire of property by destroying the possibility of its exercise. And what is this in its outcome but the Nirvana of the Buddhists? My passions keep me in fear and hope; therefore I will annihilate them: when I neither think nor desire, then I shall rest, then I shall enjoy Nirvana. Plato institutes a Nirvana for the ills of marriage, of offspring, of property: and he realizes it by the slow death through inanition of the desire for love, for children, for property. And as we have found the Platonic Plato arguing himself into Zola, the dialectic Plato arguing himself into a dreaming Buddha, all for lack of the sense of personality, we now find the ideal Plato arguing himself, for the same lack, into a brawny Whitman. Think of Plato's community of property, and listen to Whitman's reverie, as he looks at some cattle. It is curious to notice how you cannot escape a certain sense of _naïveté_ in this, and how you are taken by it,--until a moment's thought shows you that the _naïveté_ is due to a cunning and bold contradiction of every fact in the case. "I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd: I stand and look at them long and long. Not one is dissatisfied--not one is demented with the mania of owning things: Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth."