ment of mankind. He has not
followed out the principle which he affirms in the Republic, that 'God
is the author of evil only with a view to good,' and that 'they were
the better for being punished.' Still his doctrine of a future state of
rewards and punishments may be compared favourably with that perversion
of Christian doctrine which makes the everlasting punishment of human
beings depend on a brief moment of time, or even on the accident of
an accident. And he has escaped the difficulty which has often beset
divines, respecting the future destiny of the meaner sort of men
(Thersites and the like), who are neither very good nor very bad, by not
counting them worthy of eternal damnation.

We do Plato violence in pressing his figures of speech or chains of
argument; and not less so in asking questions which were beyond the
horizon of his vision, or did not come within the scope of his design.
The main purpose of the Gorgias is not to answer questions about a
future world, but to place in antagonism the true and false life, and
to contrast the judgments and opinions of men with judgment according
to the truth. Plato may be accused of representing a superhuman or
transcendental virtue in the description of the just man in the Gorgias,
or in the companion portrait of the philosopher in the Theaetetus; and
at the same time may be thought to be condemning a state of the world
which always has existed and always will exist among men. But
such ideals act powerfully on the imagination of mankind. And such
condemnations are not mere paradoxes of philosophers, but the natural
rebellion of the higher sense of right in man against the ordinary
conditions of human life. The greatest statesmen have fallen very far
short of the political ideal, and are therefore justly involved in the
general condemnation.

Subordinate to the main purpose of the dialogue are some other
questions, which may be briefly considered:--

a. The antithesis of good and pleasure, which as in other dialogues is
supposed to consist in the permanent nature of the one compared with the
transient and relative nature of the other. Good and pleasure, knowledge
and sense, truth and opinion, essence and generation, virtue and
pleasure, the real and the apparent, the infinite and finite, harmony or
beauty and discord, dialectic and rhetoric or poetry, are so many pairs
of opposites, which in Plato easily pass into one another, and are
seldom kept perfectly distinct