ONE:And so, with the dissolution of our bodily organism, the music of consciousness would pass away for ever. Perhaps no form of psychology taught in the Greek schools has approached nearer to modern thought than this. It was professed at Thebes by two Pythagoreans, Cebes and Simmias, in the time of Plato. He rightly regarded them as formidable opponents, for they were ready to grant whatever he claimed for the soul in the way of immateriality and superiority to the body, while denying the possibility of its separate existence. We may so far anticipate the course of our exposition as to mention that the direct argument by which he met them was a reference to the moving power of mind, and to the constraint exercised by reason over passionate impulse; characteristics which the analogy with a musical harmony failed to explain. But his chief reliance was on an order of considerations, the historical genesis of which we shall now proceed to trace.
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ONE:We have, thirdly, to consider a form of individualism249 directly opposed in character to those already specified. It is the complete withdrawal from public affairs for the sake of attending exclusively to ones private duties or pleasures. Such individualism is the characteristic weakness of conservatives, who are, by their very nature, the party of timidity and quiescence. To them was addressed the exhortation of Cato, capessenda est respublica. The two other forms of which we have spoken are, on the contrary, diseases of liberalism. We see them exemplified when the leaders of a party are harassed by the perpetual criticism of their professed supporters; or, again, when an election is lost because the votes of the Liberal electors are divided among several candidates. But when a partygenerally the Conservative partyloses an election because its voters will not go to the poll, that is owing to the lazy individualism which shuns political contests altogether. It was of this disease that the public life of Athens really perished; and, so far, Hegel is on the right track; but although its action was more obviously and immediately fatal in antiquity, we are by no means safe from a repetition of the same experience in modern society. Nor can it be said that Plato reacted against an evil which, in his eyes, was an evil only when it deprived a very few properly-qualified persons of political supremacy. With regard to all others he proposed to sanction and systematise what was already becoming a common customnamely, entire withdrawal from the administration of affairs in peace and war. Hegel seems to forget that it is only a single class, and that the smallest, in Platos republic which is not allowed to have any private interests; while the industrial classes, necessarily forming a large majority of the whole population, are not only suffered to retain their property and their families, but are altogether thrown back for mental occupation on the interests arising out of these. The resulting state of things would have found its best parallel, not in old Greek city life, but in modern Europe, as it was between the Reformation and the French Revolution.You got us all worked up and worried, he told Sandy, with your suspicions. And all the time
