l frame
his life with a view to this unknown future. Even in the Republic he
introduces a future life as an afterthought, when the superior happiness
of the just has been established on what is thought to be an immutable
foundation. At the same time he makes a point of determining his main
thesis independently of remoter consequences.

(3) Plato's theory of punishment is partly vindictive, partly
corrective. In the Gorgias, as well as in the Phaedo and Republic, a few
great criminals, chiefly tyrants, are reserved as examples. But most men
have never had the opportunity of attaining this pre-eminence of evil.
They are not incurable, and their punishment is intended for their
improvement. They are to suffer because they have sinned; like sick men,
they must go to the physician and be healed. On this representation of
Plato's the criticism has been made, that the analogy of disease and
injustice is partial only, and that suffering, instead of improving men,
may have just the opposite effect.

Like the general analogy of the arts and the virtues, the analogy
of disease and injustice, or of medicine and justice, is certainly
imperfect. But ideas must be given through something; the nature of the
mind which is unseen can only be represented under figures derived from
visible objects. If these figures are suggestive of some new aspect
under which the mind may be considered, we cannot find fault with them
for not exactly coinciding with the ideas represented. They partake
of the imperfect nature of language, and must not be construed in too
strict a manner. That Plato sometimes reasons from them as if they were
not figures but realities, is due to the defective logical analysis of
his age.

Nor does he distinguish between the suffering which improves and the
suffering which only punishes and deters. He applies to the sphere of
ethics a conception of punishment which is really derived from criminal
law. He does not see that such punishment is only negative, and supplies
no principle of moral growth or development. He is not far off the
higher notion of an education of man to be begun in this world, and to
be continued in other stages of existence, which is further developed
in the Republic. And Christian thinkers, who have ventured out of the
beaten track in their meditations on the 'last things,' have found a ray
of light in his writings. But he has not explained how or in what way
punishment is to contribute to the improve