(d) Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to have
been a confusion of ideas, assimilates the state to the individual, and
fails to distinguish Ethics from Politics. He thinks that to be most of
a state which is most like one man, and in which the citizens have the
greatest uniformity of character. He does not see that the analogy is
partly fallacious, and that the will or character of a state or nation
is really the balance or rather the surplus of individual wills, which
are limited by the condition of having to act in common. The movement
of a body of men can never have the pliancy or facility of a single
man; the freedom of the individual, which is always limited, becomes
still more straitened when transferred to a nation. The powers of
action and feeling are necessarily weaker and more balanced when they
are diffused through a community; whence arises the often discussed
question, ‘Can a nation, like an individual, have a conscience?’ We
hesitate to say that the characters of nations are nothing more than
the sum of the characters of the individuals who compose them; because
there may be tendencies in individuals which react upon one another. A
whole nation may be wiser than any one man in it; or may be animated by
some common opinion or feeling which could not equally have affected
the mind of a single person, or may have been inspired by a leader of
genius to perform acts more than human. Plato does not appear to have
analysed the complications which arise out of the collective action of
mankind. Neither is he capable of seeing that analogies, though
specious as arguments, may often have no foundation in fact, or of
distinguishing between what is intelligible or vividly present to the
mind, and what is true. In this respect he is far below Aristotle, who
is comparatively seldom imposed upon by false analogies. He cannot
disentangle the arts from the virtues—at least he is always arguing
from one to the other. His notion of music is transferred from harmony
of sounds to harmony of life: in this he is assisted by the ambiguities
of language as well as by the prevalence of Pythagorean notions. And
having once assimilated the state to the individual, he imagines that
he will find the succession of states paralleled in the lives of
individuals.