medicine because by lives of indolence and luxury men have filled themselves like pools with waters and winds,… flatulence and catarrh—is not this a disgrace?…Our present system of medicine may be said to educate diseases," to draw them out into a long existence, rather than to cure. them. But this is an absurdity of the idle rich. "When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready remedy—an emetic, or a purge, or cautery, or the knife. And if anyone tells him that he must go through a course of dietetics, and swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life that is spent in nursing his dis- ease to the neglect of his ordinary calling; and therefore, say- ing good-bye to this sort of physicians, he resumes his cus- tomary diet, and either gets well and lives and does his busi- ness, or, if his constitution fails, he dies and has done with it" (405–6). We cannot afford to have a nation of malingerers and invalids; Utopia must begin in the body of man.
But mere athletics and gymnastics would make a man too one-sided. "How shall we find a gentle nature which has also great courage?—for they seem to be inconsistent with each other" (375). We do not want a nation of prize-fighters and weight-lifters. Perhaps music will solve our problem: through music the soul learns harmony and rhythm, and even a disposition to justice; for "can he who is harmoniously con- stituted ever be unjust? Is not this, Glaucon, why musical training is so powerful, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul, bearing grace in their movements and making the soul graceful?" (401; Protagoras, 326). Music moulds character, and therefore shares in determining social and political issues. "Damon tells me—and I can quite believe it—that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change with them."[1] Music is valuable not only because it brings refinement of
- ↑ Cf. Daniel O'Connell: "Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
