es 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 inquiry "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.

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
practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth; and the
highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear the
greatest "marks of design"--justice more than the external frame-work
of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science of
dialectic