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by Plato
translated by Benjamin Jowett
THE Republic of Plato is the longest of his works with the exception ofthe Laws, and is certainly the greatest of them. There are nearerapproaches to modern metaphysics in the Philebus and in the Sophist;the Politicus or Statesman is more ideal; the form and institutions ofthe State are more clearly drawn out in the Laws; as works of art, theSymposium and the Protagoras are of higher excellence. But no otherDialogue of Plato has the same largeness of view and the sameperfection of style; no other shows an equal knowledge of the world, orcontains more of those thoughts which are new as well as old, and notof one age only but of all. Nowhere in Plato is there a deeper ironyor a greater wealth of humor or imagery, or more dramatic power. Norin any other of his writings is the attempt made to interweave life andspeculation, or to connect politics with philosophy. The Republic isthe centre around which the other Dialogues may be grouped; herephilosophy reaches the highest point to which ancient thinkers everattained. Plato among the Greeks, like Bacon among the moderns, wasthe first who conceived a method of knowledge, although neither of themalways distinguished the bare outline or form from the substance oftruth; and both of them had to be content with an abstraction ofscience which was not yet realized. He was the greatest metaphysicalgenius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in any otherancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained. Thesciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so manyinstruments of thought to after-ages, are based upon the analyses ofSocrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law ofcontradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinctionbetween the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between meansand ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mindinto the rational, concupiscent, and irascible elements, or ofpleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary—these and othergreat forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, andwere probably first invented by Plato. The greatest of all logicaltruths, and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to losesight, the difference between words and things, has been moststrenuously insisted on by him, although he has not always avoided theconfusion of them in his own writings. But he does not bind up truthin logical formulae,—logic is still veiled in metaphysics; and thescience which he imagines to "contemplate all truth and all existence"is very unlike the doctrine of the syllogism which Aristotle claims tohave discovered.
Neither must we forget that the Republic is but the third part of astill larger design which was to have included an ideal history ofAthens, as well as a political and physical philosophy. The fragmentof the Critias has given birth to a world-famous fiction, second onlyin importance to the tale of Troy and the legend of Arthur; and is saidas a fact to have inspired some of the early navigators of thesixteenth century. This mythical tale, of which the subject was ahistory of the wars of the Athenians against the