laid up in heaven to be the pattern and rule of human life.
No such inspired creation is at unity with itself, any more
than the clouds of heaven when the sun pierces through them.
Every shade of light and dark, of truth, and of fiction which is
the veil of truth, is allowable in a work of philosophical imagination.
It is not all on the same plane; it easily passes from ideas
to myths and fancies, from facts to figures of speech. It is not
prose but poetry, at least a great part of it, and ought not to be
judged by the rules of logic or the probabilities of history.
The writer is not fashioning his ideas into an artistic whole;
they take possession of him and are too much for him.
We have no need therefore to discuss whether a State such as Plato
has conceived is practicable or not, or whether the outward form
or the inward life came first into the mind of the writer.
For the practicability of his ideas has nothing to do with their truth;
and the highest thoughts to which he attains may be truly said to bear
the greatest "marks of design"--justice more than the external frame-work
of the State, the idea of good more than justice. The great science
of dialectic or the organization of ideas has no real content;
but is only a type of the method or spirit in which the higher knowledge
is to be pursued by the spectator of all time and all existence.
It is in the fifth, sixth, and seventh books that Plato reaches
the "summit of speculation," and these, although they fail to satisfy
the requirements of a modern thinker, may therefore be regarded
as the most important, as they are also the most original, portions of
the work.

It is not necessary to discuss at length a minor question which has
been raised by Boeckh, respecting the imaginary date at which
the conversation was held (the year 411 B. C. which is proposed