The Synoptic Mind: An Ideal of Leadership

Extract

To be able to reflect the mind and sentiment of one's own generation and be the interpreter of its aspirations is a great thing, but to succeed in giving to a noble and enduring ideal of humanity its classic expression, to voice clearly the deepest needs and highest dreams of many centuries, is the supreme performance, which is beyond the power of all but the few geniuses who are large enough to represent our race. Of all the saints, sages, and saviours who have studied the drama of human life, no one has ever surveyed it from a greater height than Plato, nor has any mind surpassed his in comprehensiveness and insight. And his conclusion, his matured conviction, was that humanity's most urgent need is for adequate leadership. The goal of the ideal system of education which is outlined in the Republic was the discovery, selection, and training of what he calls “synoptic-minded men” to be the leaders of the state. The youths to be prepared for this high function were first to be selected from those apparently most promising, and then submitted to a course of physical and mental discipline lasting through the greater part of life. This was a sifting process, and from time to time the failures were dropped. The finer natures continued their elementary studies till the age of twenty, when they were submitted to a new test of their capacity for leadership. Up to that time their manner of study was to be appropriate to youth. Their knowledge, being necessarily a mass of unconnected and unrelated fragments, could not be embraced in a unitary view. But when the synthetic powers ripen, the time arrives to attempt an organization of the mental content, to put together the things that have been, and are being, learned, and comprehensiveness becomes an ideal of the mind.