could only be the work of a
mighty intellect.' Like the Hebrews, he prohibits private rites; for the
avoidance of superstition, he would transfer all worship of the Gods
to the public temples. He would not have men and women consecrating
the accidents of their lives. He trusts to human punishments and not to
divine judgments; though he is not unwilling to repeat the old tradition
that certain kinds of dishonesty 'prevent a man from having a family.'
He considers that the 'ages of faith' have passed away and cannot now
be recalled. Yet he is far from wishing to extirpate the sentiment of
religion, which he sees to be common to all mankind--Barbarians as well
as Hellenes. He remarks that no one passes through life without, sooner
or later, experiencing its power. To which we may add the further remark
that the greater the irreligion, the more violent has often been the
religious reaction.

It is remarkable that Plato's account of mind at the end of the Laws
goes beyond Anaxagoras, and beyond himself in any of his previous
writings. Aristotle, in a well-known passage (Met.) which is an echo of
the Phaedo, remarks on the inconsistency of Anaxagoras in introducing
the agency of mind, and yet having recourse to other and inferior,
probably material causes. But Plato makes the further criticism, that
the error of Anaxagoras consisted, not in denying the universal agency
of mind, but in denying the priority, or, as we should say, the eternity
of it. Yet in the Timaeus he had himself allowed that God made the world
out of pre-existing materials: in the Statesman he says that there were
seeds of evil in the world arising out of the remains of a former chaos
which could not be got rid of; and even in the Tenth Book of the Laws he
has admitted that there are two souls, a good and evil. In the Meno, the
Phaedrus, and the Phaedo, he had spoken of the recovery of ideas from a
former state of existence. But now he has attained to a clearer point of
view: he has discarded these fancies. From meditating on the priority of
the human soul to the body, he has learnt the nature of soul absolutely.
The power of the best, of which he gave an intimation in the Phaedo
and in the Republic, now, as in the Philebus, takes the form of an
intelligence or person. He no longer, like Anaxagoras, supposes mind to
be introduced at a certain time into the world and to give order to
a pre-existing chaos, but to be prior to the chaos, everlasting and
evermo