The Republic | Page 7

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 enquiry '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 Phaedrus).
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. 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, is notoriously careless of chronology (cp. Rep., Symp.,
etc.), only aims at general probability. Whether all the persons mentioned in the Republic
could ever have met at any one time is not a difficulty which would have occurred to an
Athenian reading the work forty years later, or to Plato himself at the time of writing (any
more than to Shakespeare respecting one of his own dramas); and need not greatly
trouble us now. Yet this may be a question having no answer 'which is still worth asking,'
because the investigation shows that we cannot argue historically from the dates in Plato;
it would be useless therefore to waste time in inventing far-fetched reconcilements of
them in order to avoid chronological difficulties, such, for example, as the conjecture of
C.F. Hermann, that Glaucon and Adeimantus are not the brothers but the uncles of Plato
(cp. Apol.), or the fancy of Stallbaum that Plato intentionally left anachronisms indicating
the dates at which some of his Dialogues were written.
The principal characters in the Republic are Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus,
Socrates, Glaucon, and Adeimantus. Cephalus appears in the introduction only,