anges
in the law where experience shows them to be necessary; but he is also
anxious that the original spirit of the constitution should never be
lost sight of.

The Laws of Plato contain the latest phase of his philosophy, showing in
many respects an advance, and in others a decline, in his views of life
and the world. His Theory of Ideas in the next generation passed
into one of Numbers, the nature of which we gather chiefly from the
Metaphysics of Aristotle. Of the speculative side of this theory there
are no traces in the Laws, but doubtless Plato found the practical value
which he attributed to arithmetic greatly confirmed by the possibility
of applying number and measure to the revolution of the heavens, and
to the regulation of human life. In the return to a doctrine of numbers
there is a retrogression rather than an advance; for the most barren
logical abstraction is of a higher nature than number and figure.
Philosophy fades away into the distance; in the Laws it is confined to
the members of the Nocturnal Council. The speculative truth which was
the food of the guardians in the Republic, is for the majority of the
citizens to be superseded by practical virtues. The law, which is the
expression of mind written down, takes the place of the living word of
the philosopher. (Compare the contrast of Phaedrus, and Laws; also the
plays on the words nous, nomos, nou dianome; and the discussion in the
Statesman of the difference between the personal rule of a king and
the impersonal reign of law.) The State is based on virtue and religion
rather than on knowledge; and virtue is no longer identified with
knowledge, being of the commoner sort, and spoken of in the sense
generally understood. Yet there are many traces of advance as well as
retrogression in the Laws of Plato. The attempt to reconcile the ideal
with actual life is an advance; to 'have brought philosophy down from
heaven to earth,' is a praise which may be claimed for him as well as
for his master Socrates. And the members of the Nocturnal Council are
to continue students of the 'one in many' and of the nature of God.
Education is the last word with which Plato supposes the theory of the
Laws to end and the reality to begin.

Plato's increasing appreciation of the difficulties of human affairs,
and of the element of chance which so largely influences them, is an
indication not of a narrower, but of a maturer mind, which had become
more conversant with reali