to him in the Politics has been little recognized, and the recognition
is the more necessary because it is not made by Aristotle himself.
The two philosophers had more in common than they were conscious of;
and probably some elements of Plato remain still undetected in Aristotle.
In English philosophy too, many affinities may be traced, not only
in the works of the Cambridge Platonists, but in great original
writers like Berkeley or Coleridge, to Plato and his ideas.
That there is a truth higher than experience, of which the mind bears
witness to herself, is a conviction which in our own generation has
been enthusiastically asserted, and is perhaps gaining ground.
Of the Greek authors who at the Renaissance brought a new
life into the world Plato has had the greatest influence.
The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education,
of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul,
and Goethe are the legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan,
he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly
impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church
he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the Revival
of Literature on politics. Even the fragments of his words when
"repeated at second-hand" have in all ages ravished the hearts
of men, who have seen reflected in them their own higher nature.
He is the father of idealism in philosophy, in politics,
in literature. And many of the latest conceptions of modern thinkers
and statesmen, such as the unity of knowledge, the reign of law,
and the equality of the sexes, have been anticipated in a dream
by him.

ARGUMENT

The argument of the Republic is the search after Justice, the nature