Justice -- Early works to 1800; Political science -- Early works to 1800; Utopias -- Early works to 1800
Our second virtue is courage, which we have no difficulty in finding in
another class--that of soldiers. Courage may be defined as a sort of
salvation--the never-failing salvation of the opinions which law and
education have prescribed concerning dangers. You know the way in which
dyers first prepare the white ground and then lay on the dye of purple or
of any other colour. Colours dyed in this way become fixed, and no soap or
lye will ever wash them out. *430* Now the ground is education, and the
laws are the colours; and if the ground is properly laid, neither the soap
of pleasure nor the lye of pain or fear will ever wash them out. This
power which preserves right opinion about danger I would ask you to call
'courage,' adding the epithet 'political' or 'civilized' in order to
distinguish it from mere animal courage and from a higher courage which
may hereafter be discussed.
{lxii} Two virtues remain; temperance and justice. More than the preceding
virtues *431* temperance suggests the idea of harmony. Some light is
thrown upon the nature of this virtue by the popular description of a man
as 'master of himself'--which has an absurd sound, because the master is
also the servant. The expression really means that the better principle in
a man masters the worse. There are in cities whole classes--women, slaves
and the like--who correspond to the worse, and a few only to the better;
and in our State the former class are held under control by the latter.
Now to which of these classes does temperance belong? 'To both of them.'
And our State if any will be the abode of temperance; and we were right in
describing this virtue as a harmony which is diffused through the whole,
*432* making the dwellers in the city to be of one mind, and attuning the
upper and middle and lower classes like the strings of an instrument,
whether you suppose them to differ in wisdom, strength or wealth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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