FROM FOLKLORE TO SOCIOLOGY	7
fucius proposed that the family be the training agency (as it did in fact
become in China), Plato proposed that all education be undertaken by
the state.
Plato's belief that men behave as they have been taught to behave,
that society does the teaching, and that, therefore, a good society will
produce the kinds of human attributes necessary for its own maintenance
is entirely in accord with present understanding of the origins and nature
of human nature. His error, one all subsequent idealists have made, was
his assumption that the good society could be brought into being. At no
point did he even suggest how his planned social system was to become
an actuality. The fact was that a decadent city-state system was training
men to live in the ways of a decadent city-state system, the very system
that Plato proposed to replace. How to train them to behave in those
ways necessary for maintaining the proposed Republic until the Re-
public had become an actuality and how to make the Republic an actual-
ity until men had been trained to behave in the ways necessary for estab-
lishing the Republic were problems that Plato did not recognize, or at;
least did not face, perhaps because he, like many philosophers after him,
could find no solution to them.
Plato's plan was idealistic in that it presented a humanly desirable end
without providing a feasible means by which to achieve that end. More-
over, that end, the Republic, was at best a crude sketch of a workable
social system rather than an actual blueprint for one. Like all idealists,
Plato vastly underestimated the complexity of social organization, the
complexity and inexactitude of the educational processes, and the subtle-
tics of the individual human being. In his plan, everything was to go
according to plan, and men were to behave like a group of well-trained
seals. But i in social life nothing ever goes quite according to plan, and
men invariably evidence sufficient individual initiative and originality to
prove that they are men rather than seals.
Aristotelian "Redim"—Plato was a radical philosopher, for he strongly
disapproved of the then-current state of men's affairs and proposed a
revolutionary substitute for the malfunctioning city-state system. Aris-
totle broke with his master and went to the opposite extreme. The social
philosophy that he developed was in support of the status quo and was,
hence, conservative in character. Aristotle's philosophy appealed to the
political and economic leaders of Athens, for it justified their position
and conduct; Plato's idealism, on the other hand, had appealed mainly
to the humble, who had had no voice in the conduct of social affairs.
Because his philosophy flattered and reassured the important men of
his clay, Aristotle was highly regarded in Athens; and because he was an
inveterate collector of factual evidences, he has since been acclaimed as
the father of modern science. The authority of his name, if not his facts,