is the ideal. Or, described in Christian language, the kingdom
of God is within, and yet develops into a Church or external kingdom;
"the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens,"
is reduced to the proportions of an earthly building. Or, to use
a Platonic image, justice and the State are the warp and the woof
which run through the whole texture. And when the constitution
of the State is completed, the conception of justice is not dismissed,
but reappears under the same or different names throughout the work,
both as the inner law of the individual soul, and finally
as the principle of rewards and punishments in another life.
The virtues are based on justice, of which common honesty in buying
and selling is the shadow, and justice is based on the idea of good,
which is the harmony of the world, and is reflected both in
the institutions of States and in motions of the heavenly bodies.
The Timaeus, which takes up the political rather than the ethical
side of the Republic, and is chiefly occupied with hypotheses
concerning the outward world, yet contains many indications that
the same law is supposed to reign over the State, over nature,
and over man.

Too much, however, has been made of this question both in ancient
and in modern times. There is a stage of criticism in which
all works, whether of nature or of art, are referred to design.
Now in ancient writings, and indeed in literature generally,
there remains often a large element which was not comprehended
in the original design. For the plan grows under the author's hand;
new thoughts occur to him in the act of writing; he has not worked
out the argument to the end before he begins. The reader who seeks
to find some one idea under which the whole may be conceived,
must necessarily seize on the vaguest and most general.