hardly be said to express
the design of the writer. The truth is, that we may as well speak of
many designs as of one; nor need anything be excluded from the plan of
a great work to which the mind is naturally led by the association of
ideas, and which does not interfere with the general purpose. What kind
or degree of unity is to be sought after in a building, in the plastic
arts, in poetry, in prose, is a problem which has to be determined
relatively to the subject-matter. To Plato himself, the enquiry 'what
was the intention of the writer,' or 'what was the principal argument
of the Republic' would have been hardly intelligible, and therefore had
better be at once dismissed (cp. the Introduction to the Phaedrus).

Is not the Republic the vehicle of three or four great truths which,
to Plato's own mind, are most naturally represented in the form of the
State? Just as in the Jewish prophets the reign of Messiah, or 'the day
of the Lord,' or the suffering Servant or people of God, or the 'Sun of
righteousness with healing in his wings' only convey, to us at least,
their great spiritual ideals, so through the Greek State Plato reveals
to us his own thoughts about divine perfection, which is the idea of
good--like the sun in the visible world;--about human perfection, which
is justice--about education beginning in youth and continuing in later
years--about poets and sophists and tyrants who are the false teachers
and evil rulers of mankind--about 'the world' which is the embodiment of
them--about a kingdom which exists nowhere upon earth but is laid up
in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life. No such inspired
creation is at unity with itself, any more than the clouds of heaven
when the sun pierces through them. Every shade of light and dark, of
truth, and of fiction which is the veil of truth, is allowable in a work
of philosophical imagination. It is not all on the same plane; it easily
passes from ideas to myths and fancies, from facts to figures of speech.
It is not prose but poetry, at least a great part of it, and ought not
to be judged by the rules of logic or the probabilities of history. The
writer is not fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole; they take
possession of him and are too much for him. We have no need therefore
to discuss whether a State such as Plato has conceived is practicable or
not, or whether the outward form or the inward life came first into the
mind of the writer. For the pract