was not himself deceived as to the theoretical insufficiency of his arguments. Their number would show this, and, besides, he expressly calls them proofs which amount to only human probability, and furnish practical postulates alone. With this view he introduces at the close of his arguments the myth of the lower world, and the state of departed souls, in order, by complying with the religious notions, and traditions of his countrymen, to gain a positive support for belief in the soul's immortality. Elsewhere Plato also speaks of the lower world, and of the future rewards and punishments of the good and the evil, in accordance with the popular notions, as though he saw the elements of a divine revelation therein; he tells of purifying punishment in Hades, analogous to a purgatory; he avails himself of the common notion to affirm that shades still subject to the corporeal principle will hover after death over their graves, seeking to recover their lifeless bodies, and at times he dilates upon the migration of the soul to various human and brute forms. On the whole, we find in Plato's proofs of immortality, as in his psychology generally, that dualism, which here expresses itself as hatred to the corporeal, and is connected with the tendency to seek the ultimate ground of evil in the nature of the "different" and the sensible world. ✓ VI. THE PLATONIC ETHICS.-The ground idea of the good, which in physics served only as an inventive conception, finds now, in the ethics, its true exhibition. Plato has developed it prominently according to three sides, as good, as individual virtue, and as ethical world in the state. The conception of duty remains in the background with him as with the older philosophers.

1. GOOD AND PLEASURE.-That the highest good can be nothing other than the idea of the good itself, has already been shown in the dialectics, where this idea was suffered to appear as the ultimate end of all our striving. But since the dialectics represent the supreme good as unattainable by human reason, and only cog nizable in its different modes of manifestation, we can, therefore only follow these different manifestations of the highest gooa, which represent not the good itself, but the good in becoming, where it appears as science, truth, beauty, virtue, &c. We are

thus not required to be equal to God, but only like him (Theat.) It is this point of view which lies at the basis of the graduated table of good, given in the Philebus.

In seeking the highest good, the conception of pleasure must be investigated. The Platonic stand-point here is the attempt to strike a balance between Hedonism, (the Cyrenian theory that pleasure is the highest good, cf. § XIII. 3), and Cynicism. While he will not admit with Aristippus that pleasure is the true good, neither will he find it as the Cynics maintain, simply in the negation of its contrary, pain, and thus deny that it belongs to the good things of human life. He finds his refutation of Hedonism in the indeterminateness and relativity of all pleasure, since that which at one time may seem as pleasure, under other circumstances may appear as pain; and since he who chooses pleasure without distinction, will find impure pleasures always combined in his life with more or less of pain; his refutation of Cynicism he establishes by showing the necessary connection between virtue and true pleasure, showing that there is a true and enduring pleasure, the pleasure of reason, found in the possession of truth and of goodness, while a rational condition separate from all pleasure, cannot be the highest good of a finite being. It is most prominently by this distinction of a true and false, of a pure and impure pleasure, that Plato adjusts the controversy of the two Socratic schools.-A detailed exhibition of the Philebus we must here omit. On the whole, in the Platonic apprehension of pleasure, we cannot but notice that same vacillation with which Plato every where treats of the relation between the corporeal and the spiritual, at one time considering the former as a hindrance to the latter, and at another as its serving instrument; now, regarding it as a concurring cause to the good, and then, as the ground of all ovil; here, as something purely negative, and there, as a positive substratum which supports all the higher intellectual developments; and in conformity with this, pleasure is also considered at one time as something equivalent to a moral act, and to knowledge, and at another as the means and accidental consequence of the good.

2. VIRTUE.-In his theory of virtue, Plato is wholly Socratic. He holds fast to the opinion that it is science (Protagoras), and therefore, teachable (Meno), and as to its unity, it follows from the dialectical principle that the one can be manifold, or the manifold one, that, therefore, virtue must both be regarded as one, and also in a different respect, as many. Plato thus brings out prominently the union and connection of all virtues, and is fond of painting, especially in the introductory dialogues, some single virtue as comprising in itself the sum of all the rest. Plato follows for the most part the fourfold division of virtues, as popu larly made; and first, in the Republic (IV. 441), he attempts a scientific derivation of them, by referring to each of the three parts of the soul its appropriate virtue The virtue of the reason he calls prudence or wisdom, the directing or measuring virtue, without whose activity valor would sink to brute impulse, and calm endurance to stupid indifference; the virtue of spirit is valor, the help-meet of reason, or spirit (Juuós) penetrated by science, which in the struggle against pleasure and pain, desire and fear, preserves the rational intelligence against the alarms with which sensuous desires, would seek to sway the soul; the virtue of the sensuous desires, and which has to reduce these within true and proper grounds, is temperance, and that virtue in fine to which belong the due regulation and mutual adjustment of the several powers of the soul, and which, therefore, constitutes the bond and the unity of the three other virtues, is justice.

In this last conception, that of justice, all the elements of moral culture meet together and centre, exhibiting the moral life of the individual as a perfect whole, and then, by requiring an application of the same principle to communities, the moral consideration is advanced beyond the narrow circle of individual life. Thus is established the whole of the moral world-Justice "in great letters," the moral life in its complete totality, is the state. In this is first actualized the demand for the complete harmony of the human life. In and through the state comes the complete formation of matter for the reason.

3. THE STATE. The Platonic state is generally regarded as

men.

an ideal or chimera, which it is impracticable to realize among This view of the case has even been ascribed to Plato, and it has been said that in his Republic he attempted to sketch only a fine ideal of a state constitution, while in the Laws he traced out a practicable philosophy of the state from the stand-point of the common consciousness. But in the first place, this was not Plato's true meaning. Although he acknowledges that the state he describes cannot be found on earth, and has its archetype only in heaven, by which the philosopher ought to form himself (IX. 592), still he demands that efforts should be made to realize it here, and he even attempts to show the conditions and means under which such a state could be made actual, not overlooking in all this the defects arising from the different characters and temperaments of men. A composition, dissociated from the idea, could only appear untrue to a philosopher like Plato, who saw the actual and the true only in the idea; and the common view which supposes that he wrote his Republic in the full consciousness of its impracticability, mistakes entirely the stand-point of the Platonic philosophy. Still farther the question whether such a state as the Platonic is attainable and the best, is generally perverted. The Platonic state is the Grecian state-idea given in a narrative form. It is no vain and powerless ideal to picture the idea as a rational principle in every moment of the world's history, since the idea itself is that which is absolutely actual, that which is essential and necessary in existing things. The truly ideal ought not to be actual, but is actual, and the only actual; if an idea were too good for existence, or the empirical actuality too bad for it, then were this a fault of the ideal itself. Plato has not given himself up merely to abstract theories; the philosopher cannot leap beyond his age, but can only see and grasp it in its This Plato has done. His stand-point is his own age. He looks upon the political life of the Greeks as then existing, and it is this life, exalted to its idea, which forms the real content of the Platonic Republic. Plato has here represented the Grecian morality in its substantial condition. If the Platonic Republic seems prominently an ideal which can never be realized

true content.

this is owing much less to its ideality than to the defects of the old political life. The most prominent characteristic of the Hellenic conception of the state, before the Greeks began to fall into unbridled licentiousness, was the constraint thrown upon personal subjective freedom, in the sacrifice of every individual interest to the absolute sovereignty of the state. With Plato also, the state is every thing. His political institutions, so loudly ridiculed by the ancients, are only the undeniable consequences following from the very idea of the Grecian state, which allowed neither to the individual citizen nor to a corporation, any lawful sphere of action independent of itself.

The grand feature of the Platonic state is, as has been said, the exclusive sacrifice of the individual to the state, the reference of moral to political virtue. Since man cannot reach his complete development in isolation but only as a member of an organic society (the state), Plato therefore concludes that the individual purpose should wholly conform to the general aim, and that the state must represent a perfect and harmonious unity, and be a counterpart of the moral life of the individual. In a perfect state all things, joy and sorrow, and even eyes, ears and hands, must be common to all, so that the social life would be as it were the life of one man. This perfect universality and unity, can only be actualized when every thing individual and particular falls away, and hence the difficulty of the Platonic Republic. Private property and domestic life (in place of which comes a community.of goods and of wives), the duty of education, the choice of rank and profession, the arts and sciences, all these must be subjected and placed under the exclusive and absolute control of the state. The individual may lay claim only to that happiness which belongs to him as a constituent element of the state. From this point Plato goes down into the minutest particulars, and gives the closest directions respecting gymnastics and music, which form the two means of culture of the higher ranks; respecting the study of mathematics, and philosophy, the choice of stringed instruments, and the proper measure of verse; respecting bodily exercise and the service of women in war; respecting marriage settlements, and the age at