The most complete and systematic exhibition of the of nions of Plato will be found in the Republic, or ideal commonwealth, of which an exc ]lent English translation has !Teen recently made by Davies and Vaughan. The Reyouolic is not, as the title would lead us to suppose, a political work, like the Politics of Aristotle. It is, as baron Bunsen well remarked. not so much a state as a church with which this great work has to do; or at least, both a state and a church; and the church is the superior end dominating element. In the Republic, accordingly. we find the necessity of virtue to.the very idea of social life proved in the first book; then the whole process of a complete Moral and scientific education is set forth with such fullness as to throw the strictly political part of the book, including the germs of what is now called political economy, very much into the shade The principles anti government of an ideal moral organism, of which the rulers shall be types of fully developed and perfectly educated men, is the real subject of the Republic, which accordingly forms a remarkable contrast to the inductive results of the thoroughly practical work of Aristotle on the same subject. Plato's com monwealth is a theoretical coustruction of a perfect ideal state of society; Aristotle's is a practical discussion on the best form of political government possible under existing conditions. Of the value of Plato's work, both suggestively in the world of polities, and dogmatically in the region of moral and religious speculation, there can be no doubt ; but as a practical treatise on politics, it is vitiated throughout, both by its original scheme and by an iulterent vice in the author's mind, which prevented him from recog nizing the force of the actual in that degree which necessarily belongs to such a complex art as human government. Of this fault, the author was himself sufficiently conscious, and has accordingly, in another large political treatise, the Laws, endeavored, for prac tical purposes, to make sonic sort of compromise between the transcendental scheme of his Commonwealth rind the conditions of existing society. But, however he might modify individual opinions, there was a one-sidedness about Plato's mind which rendered it impossible for him to struggle successfully with the difficulties of complex practical politics. He was too_ much possessed with the idea of order, and, moreover, had planted himself with too manifest a polemical attitude against Athenian democracy, to give due weight to the opposite principle of freedom, proved by experience to be so indispensable to every healthy and vigorous political development.
Physical science, in the days of Plato, stood on no basis sufficiently sure or broad to authorize a philosophy of the material universe with any prospect of success. Never theless, in his Timms, the great philosopher of ideas has attempted this; and it is a work which, however valueless in the face of the grand results of modern chemical and kinetical research, will ever be consulted with advantage, as a grand constrnctive sum mary of the most important facts and theories of nature, known to the Greeks, before the tkccurate observations of Aristotle, and the extended mathematics of the Alexandrian school. The great question as to what matter is, and whence, Plato nowhere seems to settle very clearly; but the general tendency of ancient thought was towards a dualism, which recognized the independent existence of a not very tractable element called mat-, ter, in which Plato seems to have acquiesced.
The works of Plato were extensively studied by the church fathers, one of whom joyfully recognizes, in the great teacher of the academy, the schoolmaster who, in the fullness of time, was destined to educate the heathen for Christ, as Moses did the Jews. A lofty passion for Plato likewise seized the literary circle of the Medici at the period of the revival of letters in Italy. Since that time, the tyrannous sway of Aristotle, charac teristic of the middle awes, has always been kept in check by a strong band of enthusi astic Phttouists in various parts of Europe. Since the French revolution particularly, tile study of Plato has been pursued with renewed vigor in Germany, France, and Eng land; and many of our distinguished authors, without expressly professing Platonism— as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning, Ruskin, etc.—have formed a strong and a growing party of adherents, who could find no common banner under which they could at once so conveniently and so honorably muster as that of Plato. The amount of learned labor expended OD the text of Plato during the present century, has been in pro portion: and in this department the names of Bekker, Ast, and Stallbaum stand pre-emi neut. Prof. Jowett also, in Oxford, hag made Plato his standard author for many years; from his hand we had, in 1871, his translation of the Dialogues of Plato. Mr. Grote, the historian of Greece, published his Platc and the other Companions of Soc•atesin 1864. One of the best accounts of the Platonic philosophy is given in Zeller's Phil. der Griechen, of which the part on Plato and the Older Academy was translated in 1876.