The most striking features of the scheme are the careful atten tion paid to the problems of the physical training of children in their earliest infancy, and the right utilization of the child's instinct for play, and the demand, made now for the first time, that in adolescence, the young shall be taught in institutions where expert instruction in all the various subjects is co-ordinated. It is from this proposal that the "grammar school," or secondary school, has taken its origin. Though we hear no more of "philoso pher-kings" the demand is still made that the members of the "Nocturnal Council," the supreme Council of the State, which is always in permanent session, and exercises a general control over administration, shall be thoroughly trained, not only in the exact sciences, but in the supreme science, which "sees the One in the Many and the Many in the One;" that is, they are to be "dialec ticians." The work is full of suggestions for the practical application of science, such, for example, as that of the necessity of strictly standardizing all weights and measures, or that of basing the Calendar on a solar year (of 365 days). The object of the ap parently arbitrary selection of the number of patrimonies and the scheme of sub-division of the whole society into smaller groups appears to be the practical one of making it easy to determine exactly what quotum each subdivision may justly be called on to contribute to the revenue or the defences.
At least two fundamental improvements are made on the Attic jurisprudence which Plato has adopted as the foundation of his own code. One great blot on the Heliastic system is removed by the regulations which ensure that trials for serious offences shall take place before a court which contains highly qualified magis trates, and shall proceed with due deliberation, and that there shall be provision for appeals from the primary tribunal to a "Court of Caseation." It is even more important, perhaps, that Laws IX. by drawing a clear distinction between f3X6.13n, detri ment, and a3tAta, infringement of rights, lays the foundation for the discrimination between civil and criminal actions at law.
An incidental passage in the Laws (822 a-b) and another in the Epinomis (987b) definitely show that Theophrastus was right in crediting Plato with belief in the earth's motion. In the Laws it is said that the real orbit of each planet is a single closed curve, in the Epinomis the view that the "circle of the stars" communicates its motion to those of the planets is called that of men "who know but little of the subject." The allusion is to the famous theory of the celestial motions put forward by Plato's friend and associate, the great mathematician Eudoxus.
According to this, the first great "geocentric" theory in scien tific astronomy, the movements of each planet can be analyzed into a combination of circular revolutions, the unmoved earth being taken as the common centre of all. What Plato asserts is
that each planet has only one "proper" revolution, the remaining revolutions are apparent, not real. The implication is that these apparent revolutions of the planet must be real motions of the earth from which we make our observations. The earth is thus a planet, though not a satellite of the sun. The language of the Epinomis—which may be safely regarded as at least true to Plato's thought—definitely makes the sun, itself, one of the planets. We have, therefore, to think of the earth as also a planet revolving with the rest round an unseen centre. We may infer from the words of Theophrastus that Plato, like some of the Pythagoreans, held that there is a luminary, the "central fire," at this centre. The period of the earth's revolution would cer tainly be taken to be the natural day, so that the motion ascribed to the earth is equivalent to the diurnal rotation, though from Plato's point of view, it is not a rotation on an axis, but a revolu tion round a centre. It follows that the alternation of day and night is no longer accounted for by a rotation of the "heaven of the fixed stars." This "outermost circle" is still credited in the Epinomis with a revolution in the sense E. to W., but its period is not specified. We need not suppose either that Plato could have specified the period or that he used it to explain any special appearances.' What is to Plato's credit is that he has the insight to see that, with all its attractions, the scheme of Eudoxus starts from a wrong pre-supposition, a stationary earth.
In Laws X. Plato, for a practical purpose, creates natural theology. There are three false beliefs which are fatal to moral character, atheism, denial of the moral government of the world, the belief that divine judgment can be bought off by offerings. Plato holds that he can disprove them all. The refutation of atheism turns on the identification of the soul with the "move ment which can move itself," already used in the Phaedrus. All motion is either communicated from without or self-initiated, and the ultimate source of all communicated motion must be self-initiated motion. The only thing which can move itself is a soul. It follows that all motion throughout the universe is ultimately initiated by souls. It is then inferred from the regular character of the great cosmic motions and their systematic unity, that the souls which originate them form a hierarchy with a "best soul," God, at their head. Disorderly and irregular motions are equally due to souls, but to bad and disordered souls, and since there are disorderly motions, it is inferred that the "best soul" cannot be the only soul.