That it really is impossible after all to learn, to be taught what you are entirely ignorant of, was and still is a fact of experience, manifest especially in regard to music. Now that "music of the spheres" in its largest sense, its completest orchestration, the harmonious order of the whole universe (kosmos)+ was what souls had heard of old; found echoes of here; might recover in its entirety, amid the influences of the melodious colour, sounds, manners, the enforced modulating discipline, which would make the whole life of a citizen of the Perfect City an education in music. We are now with Plato, you see! in his reproduction, so fully detailed for us in The [71] Republic, of the earlier and vaguer Pythagorean brotherhood. Musical imagery, the notions of proportion and the like, have ever since Plato wrote played a large part in the theory of morals; have come to seem almost a natural part of language concerning them. Only, wherever in Plato himself you find such imagery, you may note Pythagorean influence. The student of The Republic hardly needs to be reminded how all- pervasive in it that imagery is; how emphatic, in all its speculative theory, in all its practical provisions, is the desire for harmony; how the whole business of education (of gymnastic even, the seeming rival of music) is brought under it; how large a part of the claims of duty, of right conduct, for the perfectly initiated, comes with him to be this, that it sounds so well. Plêmmeleia,+ discordancy,--all faultiness resolves itself into that. "Canst play on this flute?" asks Hamlet:-- on human nature, with all its stops, of whose capricious tuneableness, or want of tune, he is himself the representative. Well! the perfect state, thinks Plato, can. For him, music is still everywhere in the world, and the whole business of philosophy only as it were the correct editing of it: as it will be the whole business of the state to repress, in the great concert, the jarring self-assertion (pleonexia)+ of those whose voices have large natural power in them. How, in detail, rhythm, the limit (peras)+ is enforced in Plato's Republic there is no time to [72] show. Call to mind only that the perfect visible equivalent of such rhythm is in those portrait-statues of the actual youth of Greece--legacy of Greek sculpture more precious by far than its fancied forms of deity--the quoit-player, the diadumenus, the apoxyomenus; and how the most beautiful type of such youth, by the universal admission of the Greeks themselves, had issued from the severe schools of Sparta, that highest civic embodiment of the Dorian temper, like some perfect musical instrument, perfectly responsive to the intention, to the lightest touch, of the finger of law.--Yet with a fresh setting of the old music in each succeeding generation. For in truth we come into the world, each one of us, "not in nakedness," but by the natural course of organic development clothed far more