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TWO:According to Aristotle, the Heracleitean flux was inconsistent with the highest law of thought, and made all predication impossible. It has been shown that the master himself recognised a fixed recurring order of change which could be affirmed if nothing else could. But the principle of change, once admitted, seemed to act like a corrosive solvent, too powerful for any vessel to contain. Disciples were soon found who pushed it to extreme consequences with the effect of abolishing all certainty whatever. In Plato��s time it was impossible to argue with a Heracleitean; he could never be tied down to a definite statement. Every proposition became false as soon as it was uttered, or rather before it was out of the speaker��s mouth. At last, a distinguished teacher of the school declined to commit himself by using words, and disputed exclusively in dumb show. A dangerous speculative crisis had set in. At either extremity of the Hellenic world the path of scientific inquiry was barred; on the one hand by a theory eliminating non-existence from thought, and on the other hand by a theory identifying it with existence. The26 luminous beam of reflection had been polarised into two divergent rays, each light where the other was dark and dark where the other was light, each denying what the other asserted and asserting what the other denied. For a century physical speculation had taught that the universe was formed by the modification of a single eternal substance, whatever that substance might be. By the end of that period, all becoming was absorbed into being at Elea, and all being into becoming at Ephesus. Each view contained a portion of the truth, and one which perhaps would never have been clearly perceived if it had not been brought into exclusive prominence. But further progress was impossible until the two half-truths had been recombined. We may compare Parmenides and Heracleitus to two lofty and precipitous peaks on either side of an Alpine pass. Each commands a wide prospect, interrupted only on the side of its opposite neighbour. And the fertilising stream of European thought originates with neither of them singly, but has its source midway between.If, now, we proceed to compare the Republic with more recent schemes having also for their object the identification of public with private interests, nothing, at first sight, seems to resemble it so closely as the theories of modern Communism; especially those which advocate the abolition not only of private property but also of marriage. The similarity, however, is merely superficial, and covers a radical divergence, For, to begin with, the Platonic polity is not a system of Communism at all, in our sense of the word. It is not that the members of the ruling caste are to throw their property into a common fund; neither as individuals nor as a class do260 they possess any property whatever. Their wants are provided for by the industrial classes, who apparently continue to live under the old system of particularism. What Plato had in view was not to increase the sum of individual enjoyments by enforcing an equal division of their material means, but to eliminate individualism altogether, and thus give human feeling the absolute generality which he so much admired in abstract ideas. On the other hand, unless we are mistaken, modern Communism has no objection to private property as such, could it remain divided either with absolute equality or in strict proportion to the wants of its holders; but only as the inevitable cause of inequalities which advancing civilisation seems to aggravate rather than to redress. So also with marriage; the modern assailants of that institution object to it as a restraint on the freedom of individual passion, which, according to them, would secure the maximum of pleasure by perpetually varying its objects. Plato would have looked on such reasonings as a parody and perversion of his own doctrine; as in very truth, what some of them have professed to be, pleas for the rehabilitation of the flesh in its original supremacy over the spirit, and therefore the direct opposite of a system which sought to spiritualise by generalising the interests of life. And so, when in the Laws he gives his Communistic principles their complete logical development by extending them to the whole population, he is careful to preserve their philosophical character as the absorption of individual in social existence.154