Will any private training enable the young man to stand firm against the overwhelming flood of popular opinion? or will he be carried away by the stream? Will he not have the notions of good and evil which the public in general have? No, indeed, even to make the attempt is a great piece of folly; such is inevitably the character of one who has had no other training in virtue other than that which is supplied by public opinion. (I speak of human virtue only; what is more than human is not included: for I would not have you ignorant that, in the present evil state of governments, whatever is saved and comes to good is saved by the power of God.)
I might compare him to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him – he would learn how to approach and handle it, also at what times and from what causes it is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of its different cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, it is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon it, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means, but calls this honorable and that dishonorable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights, and evil to be that which it dislikes; and he can give no other account of them except that the just and noble are the necessary.
Consider further: will the world ever be induced to believe in the existence of absolute beauty rather than of the many beautiful, or of the absolute in each kind rather than of the many in each kind? Then the world cannot possibly be a philosopher. And therefore philosophers must inevitably fall under the censure of the world.
—Plato, Republic, Book 5.
