29. MUSIC AND GYMNASTICS.--Although Plato attaches a high value to gymnastics, he gives precedence to music. Before forming the body, Plato, the idealist, would form the soul, because it is the soul, according to him, which, by its own virtue, gives to the body all the perfection of which it is capable. Even in physical exercises, the purpose should be to give increased vigor to the soul: “In the training of the body, our young men shall aim, above everything else, at augmenting moral power.” Note this striking picture of the man who trains only his body: “Let a man apply himself to gymnastics, and become trained, and eat much, and wholly neglect music and philosophy, and at first his body will become strengthened; but if he does nothing else, and holds no converse with the Muses, though his soul have some natural inclination to learn, yet if it remains uncultivated by acquiring knowledge, by inquiry, by discourse, in a word, by some department of music, that is, by intellectual education, it will insensibly become weak, deaf, and blind. Like a wild beast, such a man will live in ignorance and rudeness, with neither grace nor politeness.” However, Plato is far from despising health and physical strength. On the contrary, it is a reproach to him that he has imposed on the citizens of his Republic the obligation of being physically sound, and of having excluded from it all those whose infirmities and feeble constitution condemn them to “drag out a dying life.” The right to live, in Plato’s city, as in the most of ancient societies, belonged only to men of robust health. The weak, the ailing, the wretched, all who are of infirm constitution,--Plato does not go so far as ordering such to be killed, but, what amounts almost to the same thing,--“they shall be exposed,” that is, left to die. The good of the State demands that every man be sacrificed whose health renders him unfit for civil duties. This cruel and implacable doctrine shocks us in the case of him whom Montaigne calls the divine Plato, and shocks us even more when we discover it among contemporary philosophers, whom the inspirations of Christian charity or the feeling of human fraternity should have preserved from such rank heartlessness. Is it not Herbert Spencer who blames modern societies for nourishing the diseased and assisting the infirm?