Volume 10

Plato : with an English translation.

  • Plato.
Date:
1914-1935
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Plato : with an English translation. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    20/540 (page 16)
    and Spartan order, a practical via media between the two extremes of contemporary Greece/’ ^ yet it must be confessed that there is much more of the Spartan element in the mixture than of the Athenian, much less of democracy than of aristocracy. The Athenian Stranger” of the Laws is no less of an anti-democrat than the Socrates ” of the Republic \ and his con- viction of the natural perversity and stupidity of the average man has increased with the passing of the years. The saying vox populi, vox dei is, for Plato, the supreme lie. Politics and Ethics are, naturally, the subjects with which the Laivs is mainly concerned; but in the Tenth Book we get something also of psycho- logical and metaphysical doctrine, in his vindication of Religion in that Book—to which reference has been made above—Plato elaborates that view of Soul as the principle of self-movement which he had indicated, much earlier, in the Phaedrus. His dis- cussion of the relation of Soul to Motion, on the one hand, and to Reason, on the other, together with his new classification of the kinds of motion, and his distinction between primary and secondary motions, form the most valuable additions to Platonic philosophy which the Laivs contains. In conclusion, be it said that besides much that is tedious in matter and ungraceful in style, the Laws also contains (to quote Jowett) a few passages which are very grand and noble” ; and ‘^no other writing of Plato shows so profound an insight into the world and into human nature as the LaivsP In it the philosopher-statesman has garnered the last ^ E, Barker, Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle^ p. 202.