Five happy years are given to the study of philosophy. Gradually, the student learns to see the universal behind the particular, to judge the part by relating it to the whole; the fragments of his experience fall into a harmonious philosophy of life. The sciences which he has learned are now united as a consistent application of intelligence to life; indeed, the faculty of uniting the sciences and focussing them on the central problems of life, is precisely the criterion of the true philosopher.[34] But involved in this is a certain practical quality, a sense for realities and limitations. One must study books--and men; one should read much, but live more. So Plato legislates that his new philosophers shall spend the years from thirty-five to fifty in the busy din of practical life; they must, in his immortal image, go back into the cave. The purpose of higher education is to detach us for a time from the life of action, but only so that we may later return to it with a better perspective. To be put for a goodly time upon one's own resources, to butter one's own bread for a while,--that is an almost indispensable prerequisite to greatness. Out of such a test men come with the scars of many wounds; but to those who are not fools every scar is the mark of a lesson learned.
And now here are our philosophers, ripe and fifty, hardened by the tests of learning and of life. What shall we do with them? Put them away in a lecture-room and pay no further attention to them? Give them, as their life-work, the problem of finding how Spinoza deduces, or fails to deduce, the Many from the One? Have them fill learned esoteric journals with unintelligible jargon about the finite and the infinite, or space and time, or the immateriality of roast beef? No, says Plato; let them govern the state.
Did Plato mean it? Was he so enraged at the state-murder of the most beloved of philosophers that he forearmed himself against such a _contretemps_ in his Utopia by making the philosophers supreme?--Was it only his magnificent journalistic revenge? Was it merely his reaction to the observed cramping and mediocritization of superior intellects in a democracy? Was it but Plato's dramatic way of emphasizing the Socratic plea for intelligence as the basis of morals and social life? Perhaps all this; but much more. It was his sober judgment; it was the influence of the Egyptian priesthood and the Pythagorean brotherhood coming to the surface in him; it was the long-accumulated deposit of the stream of his personal experience.