--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 or the organisation of
ideas has no real content; but is only a type of the method or spirit in
which the higher knowledge is to be pursued by the spectator of all time
and all existence. It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato
reaches the 'summit of speculation,' and these, although they fail to
satisfy the requirements of a modern thinker, may therefore be regarded as
the most important, as they are also the most original, portions of the
work.

It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has been
raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which the conversation
was held (the year 411 B.C. which is proposed by him will do as well as any
other); for a writer of fiction, and especially a writer who, like Plato,