d, courage is
the lowest of them. The treatment of moral questions is less speculative
but more human. The idea of good has disappeared; the excellences of
individuals--of him who is faithful in a civil broil, of the examiner
who is incorruptible, are the patterns to which the lives of the
citizens are to conform. Plato is never weary of speaking of the honour
of the soul, which can only be honoured truly by being improved. To make
the soul as good as possible, and to prepare her for communion with the
Gods in another world by communion with divine virtue in this, is the
end of life. If the Republic is far superior to the Laws in form and
style, and perhaps in reach of thought, the Laws leave on the mind
of the modern reader much more strongly the impression of a struggle
against evil, and an enthusiasm for human improvement. When Plato says
that he must carry out that part of his ideal which is practicable,
he does not appear to have reflected that part of an ideal cannot be
detached from the whole.

The great defect of both his constitutions is the fixedness which he
seeks to impress upon them. He had seen the Athenian empire, almost
within the limits of his own life, wax and wane, but he never seems
to have asked himself what would happen if, a century from the time at
which he was writing, the Greek character should have as much changed as
in the century which had preceded. He fails to perceive that the greater
part of the political life of a nation is not that which is given them
by their legislators, but that which they give themselves. He has never
reflected that without progress there cannot be order, and that mere
order can only be preserved by an unnatural and despotic repression. The
possibility of a great nation or of an universal empire arising never
occurred to him. He sees the enfeebled and distracted state of the
Hellenic world in his own later life, and thinks that the remedy is to
make the laws unchangeable. The same want of insight is apparent in his
judgments about art. He would like to have the forms of sculpture and of
music fixed as in Egypt. He does not consider that this would be fatal
to the true principles of art, which, as Socrates had himself taught,
was to give life (Xen. Mem.). We wonder how, familiar as he was with
the statues of Pheidias, he could have endured the lifeless and
half-monstrous works of Egyptian sculpture. The 'chants of Isis' (Laws),
we might think, would have been barbaro