the place of the subterraneous pre-education of the earthborn inhabitants of the state; and therefore under this law none but a very small community could exist and continue, such as the Platonic one is to be, and as also in America lately, upon the very similar principle of common profits, and a common education from the tenderest period of childhood upwards, it has only been found possible to bring about the establishment of a small society. And in such subordinate forms the destinies of the human race cannot be fulfilled, but only by great civil unions, based throughout upon the system of united families in separate homes, as organic unity in its most finished form. The sacrifices, therefore, that are made upon the principles of falsehood and passion to such a subtly compounded commonwealth, cannot, all of them together, contribute any great advantage. Otherwise there are interwoven with the exposition of this theory maxims of national law, especially with regard to relation of war, containing strong censure of Hellenic immorality, although in this also Plato is not free from the contracted views arising from the opposition between Hellenes and barbarians.

This first section of our fourth main division concludes with the concession, that the state as described is only designed as a model, with a view to defining under what conditions perfect justice, and an individual of such a character, is possible, but that we must in reality be satisfied with what can be attained by the greatest possible approximation to that model. And this approximation is projected by a strict separation of those who, as possessed of subordinate natures, are only appointed to be conversant with material things, well in their industry and employment as their

as

ocular pleasure, from those who, as possessing the more honourable natures, are qualified for the cultivation of the faculty of pure knowledge, and can raise themselves out of the confused multiplicity of material things to the contemplation of the pure unity of ideas, and, consequently, to that of which the Platonic Socrates in the earlier dialogues so often shows those to be incapable, who are partly themselves engaged with the conduct of public affairs, partly with the education of those who are to govern. But this requisition is intended also to have the effect of excluding, in the actual commonwealth, that class entirely from the government, that the power of the state may be always in the hands of those men alone who also philosophise. Here an elucidation of what is to be understood by philosophising, naturally comes under consideration, and this is given by Plato in a somewhat forced discussion, in which, referring back to his principles as far as he could without directly quoting himself, he palpably presumes all that we know from those dialogues of which the Sophist is to be regarded as the germ. And now, while he explains, keeping close to his subject, that a nature which is in a condition to follow this object, must also possess all the qualities appropriate for governing, he suddenly transplants his reader out of the fantastic world of his Republic, though but for a short time, into the existing circumstances of that period, in order to gain a small space for self-justification against an accusation, which has been often, and even a short time since, again renewed, charging him with desertion of the interests of his native city, and even with endeavouring to make the youths distinguished for natural qualifications disinclined for public life/ When

Socrates has enunciated that principle, Adimantus takes the side of the opponents, who appeal to experience in confirmation of the fact, that they who employ themselves seriously upon philosophy have ever been useless to the state; while Socrates, in order to defend his position, entrenches himself behind the assertion, that the subject cannot be judged of upon the utterly corrupted state of things of that period, and expounds how in such universal confusion the true philosophical natures sink from foul treatment, and then base individuals of the hireling class possess themselves in a plausible manner of philosophy. These descriptions, in one of which it is impossible to mistake Alcibiades and those resembling him, while the other is especially pointed at the rhetorizing sophists, continually suggest to the mind the subjects of the earlier Platonic polemics, in order to justify his conduct. And at the same time, also, to conclude the subject by a tacit declaration, that until other principles can be made current in the state, and a more correct condition of morals and modes of living come to the assistance of theory, men of this description will always continue to come forward. And thus, this forms the transition to the second section of this part, in which the education of those who are destined for the government is to be more accurately described. Here then the idea of the good is represented to be the highest object to which the faculty of knowledge in man can apply itself. But it is to be regretted that not even that master-genius, rarely to be met with in speculative demonstration, but here displayed, is thought capable of coping with this subject; but the satisfactory discussion of it is referred to I know not what place still more grand than this,

while here the good is only most nobly extolled in images, and by a further extension of imaginative language, in such a manner, however, that undeniable reference is made to what in the Philebus is partly sketched and partly worked up upon this subject. And the style of execution is far more gratifying here than there; nay, even the image that the idea of the good stands in the same relation to the region of the intelligible, as the sun created by the good as its typical emblem does to the region of the visible, affords, by an excellent application of all the resulting relations, a clear and unimpeded survey of the whole subject, how that reason bears the same relation to the intelligible as the eye does to the visible, and that as light and the eye and here we may recollect what spontaneous activity in reference to light has been already attributed to the eye in the exposition of earlier theories—are not themselves indeed the sun, but more connected with it than anything else, so also human reason, requiring as it does such an effluence from the good in the exertion of its power of knowing, is not the good itself, but that which is most of all connected with it. And it affords us a deep glance into a subject, not improperly treated of in our author with much mystery, in what manner Plato conceived the identity of objective being and consciousness; that it is namely the same effluence of the good-the spiritual light so to speakwhich imparts truth to the intelligible essence of material things and to ideas, and to reason the power of knowing, which is likewise the truth of their being. And this means to say that the reason cannot know anything otherwise than with reference to the idea of the good, and by means of it, and that to the whole

range of the visible, or we might indeed say, the perceptible generally, no being whatever corresponds, and that there would indeed be nothing but the eternally inconstant flux of the non-existent, if flux were not stayed by the living operative influence of the idea of the good, and thus something at length produced, which although still participating in the inconstant and restless, may yet be referred to real existence. To all this, indeed, the reader only meets with slight allusions, but they carry the attentive mind, in conjunction with what is brought forward above in the general explanation of philosophy, back to the earlier dialectic dialogues, which now develope themselves to such results. But if, on the one hand, the two provinces of the visible and intelligible are placed parallel and compared with one another, neither is that subordination of the one to the other, with which we have already been made acquainted, here wanting. The sun, it is said, is only a type of the essential absolute good-the corporeal light bears a precisely similar relation to the spiritual, and when contemplated from the spiritual region is nothing but darkness, in which every mind gropes about which is enchanted by the charm of the terrestrial sun, and, without endeavouring to rise higher, lingers among the material things illuminated by it. And as the whole range of the visible world stands in the relation of a type to the intelligible, so is there in each of the two again a similar distinction; one thing real in its kind and the typical form of it. Now here it may surprise us that the subjects of mathematical thought, number and figure, are described as types of the ideas; meanwhile we should continue to be well satisfied that this branch of intellectual activity here attains a fixed posi