ian phraseology the State is the reality of which justice is the
ideal. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom of God is
within, and yet develops into a Church or external kingdom; "the house
not made with hands, eternal in the heavens," is reduced to the
proportions of an earthly building. Or, to use a Platonic image,
justice and the State are the warp and the woof which run through the
whole texture. And when the constitution of the State is completed,
the conception of justice is not dismissed, but reappears under the
same or different names throughout the work, both as the inner law of
the individual soul, and finally as the principle of rewards and
punishments in another life. The virtues are based on justice, of
which common honesty in buying and selling is the shadow, and justice
is based on the idea of good, which is the harmony of the world, and is
reflected both in the institutions of States and in motions of the
heavenly bodies. The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather than
the ethical side of the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with
hypotheses concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications
that the same law is supposed to reign over the State, over nature, and
over man.

Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient and
in modern times. There is a stage of criticism in which all works,
whether of nature or of art, are referred to design. Now in ancient
writings, and indeed in literature generally, there remains often a
large element which was not comprehended in the original design. For
the plan grows under the author's hand; new thoughts occur to him in
the act of writing; he has not worked out the argument to the end
before he begins. The reader who seeks to find some one idea under
which the whole may be conceived, must necessarily seize on the vaguest
and most general. Thus Stallbaum, who is dissatisfied with the
ordinary explanations of the argument of the Republic, imagines himself
to have found the true argument "in the representation of human life in
a State perfected by justice and governed according to the idea of
good." There may be some use in such general descriptions, but they can
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 do