Page - 1055 - in The Complete Plato
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purveyor to our bodily wants?
Quite right.
The barest notion of a State must include four or five men.
Clearly.
And how will they proceed? Will each bring the result of his labors into a
common stock?—the individual husbandman, for example, producing for
four, and laboring four times as long and as much as he need in the provision
of food with which he supplies others as well as himself; or will he have
nothing to do with others and not be at the trouble of producing for them, but
provide for himself alone a fourth of the food in a fourth of the time, and in
the remaining three-fourths of his time be employed in making a house or a
coat or a pair of shoes, having no partnership with others, but supplying
himself all his own wants?
Adeimantus thought that he should aim at producing food only and not at
producing everything.
Probably, I replied, that would be the better way; and when I hear you say
this, I am myself reminded that we are not all alike; there are diversities of
natures among us which are adapted to different occupations.
Very true.
And will you have a work better done when the workman has many
occupations, or when he has only one?
When he has only one.
Further, there can be no doubt that a work is spoilt when not done at the
right time?
No doubt.
For business is not disposed to wait until the doer of the business is at
leisure; but the doer must follow up what he is doing, and make the business
his first object.
He must.
And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and
easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to
him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things. Undoubtedly.
Then more than four citizens will be required; for the husbandman will not
make his own plough or mattock, or other implements of agriculture, if they
are to be good for anything. Neither will the builder make his tools—and he,
1055
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book The Complete Plato"
The Complete Plato
- Title
- The Complete Plato
- Author
- Plato
- Date
- ~347 B.C.
- Language
- English
- License
- PD
- Size
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Pages
- 1612
- Keywords
- Philosophy, Antique, Philosophie, Antike, Dialogues, Metaphysik, Metaphysics, Ideologie, Ideology, Englisch
- Categories
- Geisteswissenschaften
- International