eir attempt to view justice as an internal principle, and in their
condemnation of the poets, they anticipate him. The common life of
Greece is not enough for them; they must penetrate deeper into the
nature of things.

It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of Glaucon and
Adeimantus, but is taken by Socrates to mean all virtue. May we not
more truly say that the old-fashioned notion of justice is enlarged by
Socrates, and becomes equivalent to universal order or well-being, first
in the State, and secondly in the individual? He has found a new answer
to his old question (Protag.), 'whether the virtues are one or many,'
viz. that one is the ordering principle of the three others. In seeking
to establish the purely internal nature of justice, he is met by the
fact that man is a social being, and he tries to harmonise the two
opposite theses as well as he can. There is no more inconsistency in
this than was inevitable in his age and country; there is no use in
turning upon him the cross lights of modern philosophy, which, from some
other point of view, would appear equally inconsistent. Plato does not
give the final solution of philosophical questions for us; nor can he be
judged of by our standard.

The remainder of the Republic is developed out of the question of
the sons of Ariston. Three points are deserving of remark in what
immediately follows:--First, that the answer of Socrates is altogether
indirect. He does not say that happiness consists in the contemplation
of the idea of justice, and still less will he be tempted to affirm the
Stoical paradox that the just man can be happy on the rack. But first he
dwells on the difficulty of the problem and insists on restoring man to
his natural condition, before he will answer the question at all. He
too will frame an ideal, but his ideal comprehends not only abstract
justice, but the whole relations of man. Under the fanciful illustration
of the large letters he implies that he will only look for justice in
society, and that from the State he will proceed to the individual. His
answer in substance amounts to this,--that under favourable conditions,
i.e. in the perfect State, justice and happiness will coincide, and that
when justice has been once found, happiness may be left to take care
of itself. That he falls into some degree of inconsistency, when in
the tenth book he claims to have got rid of the rewards and honours
of justice, may be admitted; fo