not incurable, and their punishment is intended for their improvement.
They are to suffer because they have sinned; like sick men, they must go to
the physician and be healed. On this representation of Plato's the
criticism has been made, that the analogy of disease and injustice is
partial only, and that suffering, instead of improving men, may have just
the opposite effect.

Like the general analogy of the arts and the virtues, the analogy of
disease and injustice, or of medicine and justice, is certainly imperfect.
But ideas must be given through something; the nature of the mind which is
unseen can only be represented under figures derived from visible objects.
If these figures are suggestive of some new aspect under which the mind may
be considered, we cannot find fault with them for not exactly coinciding
with the ideas represented. They partake of the imperfect nature of
language, and must not be construed in too strict a manner. That Plato
sometimes reasons from them as if they were not figures but realities, is
due to the defective logical analysis of his age.

Nor does he distinguish between the suffering which improves and the
suffering which only punishes and deters. He applies to the sphere of
ethics a conception of punishment which is really derived from criminal
law. He does not see that such punishment is only negative, and supplies
no principle of moral growth or development. He is not far off the higher
notion of an education of man to be begun in this world, and to be
continued in other stages of existence, which is further developed in the
Republic. And Christian thinkers, who have ventured out of the beaten
track in their meditations on the 'last things,' have found a ray of light
in his writings. But he has not explained how or in what way punishment is
to contribute to the improvement of mankind. He has not followed out the
principle which he affirms in the Republic, that 'God is the author of evil