we are busy with, or such an ancient monument of philosophic thought as
The Republic, as far as possible in the group of conditions,
intellectual, social, material, amid which it was actually produced, if
we would really understand it. That ages have their genius as well as
the individual; that in every age there is a peculiar ensemble of
conditions which determines [10] a common character in every product of
that age, in business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion
and manners, in men's very faces; that nothing man has projected from
himself is really intelligible except at its own date, and from its
proper point of view in the never-resting "secular process"; the
solidarity of philosophy, of the intellectual life, with common or
general history; that what it behoves the student of philosophic
systems to cultivate is the "historic sense": by force of these
convictions many a normal, or at first sight abnormal, phase of
speculation has found a reasonable meaning for us. As the strangely
twisted pine-tree, which would be a freak of nature on an English lawn,
is seen, if we replace it, in thought, amid the contending forces of
the Alpine torrent that actually shaped its growth, to have been the
creature of necessity, of the logic of certain facts; so, beliefs the
most fantastic, the "communism" of Plato, for instance, have their
natural propriety when duly correlated with those facts, those
conditions round about them, of which they are in truth a part.

In the intellectual as in the organic world the given product, its
normal or abnormal characteristics, are determined, as people say, by
the "environment." The business of the young scholar therefore, in
reading Plato, is not to take his side in a controversy, to adopt or
refute Plato's opinions, to modify, or make apology for, [11] what may
seem erratic or impossible in him; still less, to furnish himself with
arguments on behalf of some theory or conviction of his own. His duty