nd reason and
duty and conscience, under these or other names, are always reappearing.
There cannot be health of body without health of mind; nor health of
mind without the sense of duty and the love of truth (Charm).

That the greatest of ancient philosophers should in his regulations
about marriage have fallen into the error of separating body and mind,
does indeed appear surprising. Yet the wonder is not so much that Plato
should have entertained ideas of morality which to our own age are
revolting, but that he should have contradicted himself to an extent
which is hardly credible, falling in an instant from the heaven of
idealism into the crudest animalism. Rejoicing in the newly found gift
of reflection, he appears to have thought out a subject about which he
had better have followed the enlightened feeling of his own age. The
general sentiment of Hellas was opposed to his monstrous fancy. The old
poets, and in later time the tragedians, showed no want of respect for
the family, on which much of their religion was based. But the example
of Sparta, and perhaps in some degree the tendency to defy public
opinion, seems to have misled him. He will make one family out of all
the families of the state. He will select the finest specimens of men
and women and breed from these only.

Yet because the illusion is always returning (for the animal part of
human nature will from time to time assert itself in the disguise of
philosophy as well as of poetry), and also because any departure from
established morality, even where this is not intended, is apt to be
unsettling, it may be worth while to draw out a little more at length
the objections to the Platonic marriage. In the first place, history
shows that wherever polygamy has been largely allowed the race has
deteriorated. One man to one woman is the law of God and nature. Nearly
all the civilized peoples of the world at some period before the age of
written records, have become monogamists; and the step when once taken
has never been retraced. The exceptions occurring among Brahmins or
Mahometans or the ancient Persians, are of that sort which may be said
to prove the rule. The connexions formed between superior and
inferior races hardly ever produce a noble offspring, because they are
licentious; and because the children in such cases usually despise the
mother and are neglected by the father who is ashamed of them.
Barbarous nations when they are introduced by Europeans t