distinguish the fine from the mechanical arts. Whether or no, like some
writers, he felt more than he expressed, it is at any rate remarkable that
the greatest perfection of the fine arts should coincide with an almost
entire silence about them. In one very striking passage he tells us that a
work of art, like the State, is a whole; and this conception of a whole and
the love of the newly-born mathematical sciences may be regarded, if not as
the inspiring, at any rate as the regulating principles of Greek art (Xen.
Mem.; and Sophist).

4. Plato makes the true and subtle remark that the physician had better
not be in robust health; and should have known what illness is in his own
person. But the judge ought to have had no similar experience of evil; he
is to be a good man who, having passed his youth in innocence, became
acquainted late in life with the vices of others. And therefore, according
to Plato, a judge should not be young, just as a young man according to
Aristotle is not fit to be a hearer of moral philosophy. The bad, on the
other hand, have a knowledge of vice, but no knowledge of virtue. It may
be doubted, however, whether this train of reflection is well founded. In
a remarkable passage of the Laws it is acknowledged that the evil may form
a correct estimate of the good. The union of gentleness and courage in
Book ii. at first seemed to be a paradox, yet was afterwards ascertained to
be a truth. And Plato might also have found that the intuition of evil may
be consistent with the abhorrence of it. There is a directness of aim in
virtue which gives an insight into vice. And the knowledge of character is
in some degree a natural sense independent of any special experience of
good or evil.

5. One of the most remarkable conceptions of Plato, because un-Greek and
also very different from anything which existed at all in his age of the
world, is the transposition of ranks. In the Spartan state there had been