Dialogues

say, the eternity of it (XII 967). Yet in the “Timaeus” (31 and following) he had himself allowed that God made the world out of preexisting materials: in the “Statesman” (273 B) he says that there were seeds of evil in the world arising out of the remains of a former chaos which could not be got rid of; and even in the Tenth Book of the Laws (896 E) he has admitted that there are two souls, a good and evil. In the “Meno,” the “Phaedrus,” and the “Phaedo,” he had spoken of the recovery of ideas from a former state of existence. But now he has attained to a clearer point of view: he has discarded these fancies. From meditating on the priority of the human soul to the body, he has learnt the nature of soul absolutely. The power of the best, of which he gave an intimation in the “Phaedo” and in the Republic, now, as in the “Philebus,” takes the form of an intelligence or person. He no longer, like Anaxagoras, supposes mind to be introduced at a certain time into the world and to give order to a preexisting chaos, but to be prior to the chaos, everlasting and evermoving, and the source of order and intelligence in all things. This appears to be the last form of Plato’s religious philosophy, which might almost be summed up in the words of Kant, “the starry heaven above and the moral law within.” Or rather, perhaps, “the starry heaven above and mind prior to the world.”

IV. The remarks about retail trade, about adulteration, and about mendicity, have a very modern character. Greek social life was more like our own than we are apt to suppose. There was the same division of ranks, the same aristocratic and democratic feeling, and, even in a democracy, the same preference for land and for agricultural pursuits. Plato may be claimed as the first free trader, when he prohibits the imposition of customs on imports and exports, though he was clearly not aware of the importance of the principle which he enunciated (VIII 847 B, C). The discredit of retail trade he attributes to the rogueries of traders, and is inclined to believe that if a nobleman would keep a shop, which heaven forbid! retail trade might become honourable (XI 918). He has hardly lighted upon the true reason, which appears to be the essential distinction between buyers and sellers, the one class being necessarily in some degree dependent on the other. When he proposes to fix prices “which would allow a moderate gain” (XI 920), and to regulate trade in several minute particulars, we must remember that this is by no means so absurd in a city consisting of 5,040 citizens, in which almost everyone would know and become known to everybody else, as in our own vast population. Among ourselves we are very far from allowing every man to charge what he pleases. Of many things the prices are fixed by law. Do we not often hear of wages being adjusted in proportion to the profits of employers? The objection to regulating them by law and thus avoiding the conflicts which continually arise between the buyers and sellers of labour, is not so much the undesirableness as the impossibility of doing so. Wherever free competition is not reconcileable either with the order of society, or, as in the case of adulteration, with common honesty, the government may lawfully interfere. The only question is⁠—Whether the interference will be effectual, and whether the evil of interference may not be greater than the evil which is prevented by it.

He would prohibit beggars, because in a well-ordered state no good man would be left to starve (XI 936 B). This again is a prohibition which might have been easily enforced, for there is no difficulty in maintaining the poor when the population is small. In our own times the difficulty of pauperism is rendered far greater, (1) by the enormous numbers, (2) by the facility of locomotion, (3) by the increasing tenderness for human life and suffering. And the only way of meeting the difficulty seems to be by modern nations subdividing themselves into small bodies having local knowledge and acting together in the spirit of ancient communities (compare Aristotle Politics VI 5, §§ 5⁠–⁠11)

V. Regarded as the framework of a polity the Laws are deemed by Plato to be a decline from the Republic, which is the dream of his earlier years (Laws V 739). He nowhere imagines that he has reached a higher point of speculation. He is only descending to the level of human things, and he often returns to his original idea. For the guardians of the Republic, who were the elder citizens, and were all supposed to be philosophers, is now substituted a special body, who are to review and amend the laws, preserving the spirit of the legislator. These are the Nocturnal Council, who, although they are not specially trained in dialectic, are not wholly destitute of it; for they must know the relation of particular virtues to the general principle of virtue (XII 965). Plato has been arguing throughout the Laws that temperance is higher than courage, peace than war, that the love of both must enter into the character of the good citizen. And at the end the same thought is summed up by him in an abstract form. The true artist or guardian must be able to reduce the many to the one, than which, as he says with an enthusiasm worthy of the “Phaedrus” or “Philebus,” “no more philosophical method was ever devised by the wit of man” (XII 965 C). But the sense of unity in difference can only be acquired by study; and Plato does not explain to us the nature