Page:The Republic by Plato.djvu/32

xxiv 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 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 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 (cp. the Introduction to the “Phædrus,” vol. i.).

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.