s too partial and accidental to admit of our regarding
it as a separate virtue or habit. We are tempted also to doubt whether
Plato is right in supposing that an offender, however justly condemned,
could be expected to acknowledge the justice of his sentence; this is
the spirit of a philosopher or martyr rather than of a criminal.

We may observe how nearly Plato approaches Aristotle's famous thesis,
that 'good actions produce good habits.' The words 'as healthy practices
(Greek) produce health, so do just practices produce justice,' have
a sound very like the Nicomachean Ethics. But we note also that an
incidental remark in Plato has become a far-reaching principle in
Aristotle, and an inseparable part of a great Ethical system.

There is a difficulty in understanding what Plato meant by 'the longer
way': he seems to intimate some metaphysic of the future which will not
be satisfied with arguing from the principle of contradiction. In the
sixth and seventh books (compare Sophist and Parmenides) he has given
us a sketch of such a metaphysic; but when Glaucon asks for the final
revelation of the idea of good, he is put off with the declaration
that he has not yet studied the preliminary sciences. How he would have
filled up the sketch, or argued about such questions from a higher point
of view, we can only conjecture. Perhaps he hoped to find some a priori
method of developing the parts out of the whole; or he might have asked
which of the ideas contains the other ideas, and possibly have stumbled
on the Hegelian identity of the 'ego' and the 'universal.' Or he may
have imagined that ideas might be constructed in some manner analogous
to the construction of figures and numbers in the mathematical sciences.
The most certain and necessary truth was to Plato the universal; and to
this he was always seeking to refer all knowledge or opinion, just as in
modern times we seek to rest them on the opposite pole of induction and
experience. The aspirations of metaphysicians have always tended to
pass beyond the limits of human thought and language: they seem to have
reached a height at which they are 'moving about in worlds unrealized,'
and their conceptions, although profoundly affecting their own minds,
become invisible or unintelligible to others. We are not therefore
surprized to find that Plato himself has nowhere clearly explained his
doctrine of ideas; or that his school in a later generation, like his
contemporaries Glauco