THREE:And now, looking back on his cosmology, we can see that Aristotle was never so near the truth as when he tried to bridge over the gulf between his two spheres, the one corruptible and the other eternal, by the idea of motion considered as a specific property of all matter, and persisting through all364 time; as a link between the celestial revolutions and the changes occurring on or near the earths surface; and, finally, as the direct cause of heat, the great agent acting in opposition to gravitywhich last view may have suggested Bacons capital discovery, that heat is itself a mode of motion.With regard to the propagation of the race, Platos methods are avowedly borrowed from those practised by bird-fanciers, horse-trainers, and cattle-breeders. It had long been a Greek custom to compare the people to a flock of sheep and their ruler to a shepherd, phrases which still survive in ecclesiastical parlance. Socrates habitually employed the same simile in his political discussions; and the rhetoricians used it as a justification of the governors who enriched themselves at the expense of those committed to their charge. Plato twisted the argument out of their hands and showed that the shepherd, as such, studies nothing but the good of his sheep. He failed to perceive that the parallel could not be carried out in every detail, and that, quite apart from more elevated considerations, the system which secures a healthy progeny in the one case cannot be transferred to creatures possessing a vastly more complex and delicate organisation. The destruction of sickly and deformed children could only be justified on the hypothesis that none but physical qualities were of any value to the community. Our philosopher forgets his own distinction between soul and body just when he most needed to remember it.
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