Laws
shall we give our state a head and eyes? 'Yes, but how do you apply the
figure?' The city will be the body or trunk; the best of our young men
will mount into the head or acropolis and be our eyes; they will look
about them, and inform the elders, who are the mind and use the younger
men as their instruments: together they will save the state. Shall this
be our constitution, or shall all be educated alike, and the special
training be given up? 'That is impossible.' Let us then endeavour to
attain to some more exact idea of education. Did we not say that the
true artist or guardian ought to have an eye, not only to the many, but
to the one, and to order all things with a view to the one? Can there be
any more philosophical speculation than how to reduce many things which
are unlike to one idea? 'Perhaps not.' Say rather, 'Certainly not.' And
the rulers of our divine state ought to have an exact knowledge of
the common principle in courage, temperance, justice, wisdom, which is
called by the name of virtue; and unless we know whether virtue is one
or many, we shall hardly know what virtue is. Shall we contrive some
means of engrafting this knowledge on our state, or give the matter up?
'Anything rather than that.' Let us begin by making an agreement. 'By
all means, if we can.' Well, are we not agreed that our guardians ought
to know, not only how the good and the honourable are many, but also how
they are one? 'Yes, certainly.' The true guardian of the laws ought to
know their truth, and should also be able to interpret and execute them?
'He should.' And is there any higher knowledge than the knowledge of the
existence and power of the Gods? The people may be excused for following
tradition; but the guardian must be able to give a reason of the faith
which is in him. And there are two great evidences of religion--the
priority of the soul and the order of the heavens. For no man of
sense, when he contemplates the universe, will be likely to substitute
necessity for reason and will. Those who maintain that the sun and the
stars are inanimate beings are utterly wrong in their opinions. The
men of a former generation had a suspicion, which has been confirmed
by later thinkers, that things inanimate could never without mind have
attained such scientific accuracy; and some (Anaxagoras) even in those
days ventured to assert that mind had ordered all things in heaven; but
they had no idea of the priority of mind, and they turned the world,
or more properly themselves, upside down, and filled the universe
with stones, and earth, and other inanimate bodies. This led to
great impiety, and the poets said many foolish things against the
philosophers, whom they compared to 'yelping she-dogs,' besides making
other abusive remarks. No man can now truly worship the Gods who does
not believe that the soul is eternal, and prior to the body, and the
ruler of all bodies, and does not perceive also that there is mind
in the stars; or who has not heard the connexion of these things with
music, and has not harmonized them with manners and laws, giving a
reason of things which are matters of reason. He who is unable to
acquire this knowledge, as well as the ordinary virtues of a citizen,
can only be a servant, and not a ruler in the state.
Let us then add another law to the effect that the Nocturnal Council
shall be a guard set for the salvation of the state. 'Very good.' To
establish this will be our aim, and I hope that others besides myself
will assist. 'Let us proceed along the road in which God seems to guide
us.' We cannot, Megillus and Cleinias, anticipate the details which will
hereafter be needed; they must be supplied by experience. 'What do you
mean?' First of all a register will have to be made of all those whose
age, character, or education would qualify them to be guardians. The
subjects which they are to learn, and the order in which they are to
be learnt, are mysteries which cannot be explained beforehand, but not
mysteries in any other sense. 'If that is the case, what is to be done?'
We must stake our all on a lucky throw, and I will share the risk by
stating my views on education. And I would have you, Cleinias, who are
the founder of the Magnesian state, and will obtain the greatest glory
if you succeed, and will at least be praised for your courage, if you
fail, take especial heed of this matter. If we can only establish the
Nocturnal Council, we will hand over the city to its keeping; none of
the present company will hesitate about that. Our dream will then become
a reality; and our citizens, if they are carefully chosen and well
educated, will be saviours and guardians such as the world hitherto has
never seen.
The want of completeness in the Laws becomes more apparent in the later
books. There is less arrangement in them, and the transitions are more
abrupt from one subject to another. Yet they contain several noble
passages, such as the 'prelude to the discourse concerning the honour
and dishonour of parents,' or the picture of the dangers attending the
'friendly intercourse of young men and maidens with one another,' or the
soothing remonstrance which is addressed to the dying man respecting his
right to do what he will with his own, or the fine description of the
burial of the dead. The subject of religion in Book X is introduced as
a prelude to offences against the Gods, and this portion of the work
appears to be executed in Plato's best manner.
In the last four books, several questions occur for consideration: among
them are (I) the detection and punishment of offences; (II) the nature
of the voluntary and involuntary; (III) the arguments against atheism,
and against the opinion that the Gods have no care of human affairs;
(IV) the remarks upon retail trade; (V) the institution of the Nocturnal
Council.
I. A weak point in the Laws of Plato is the amount of inquisition into
private life which is to be made by the rulers. The magistrate is
always watching and waylaying the citizens. He is constantly to receive
information against improprieties of life. Plato does not seem to be
aware that espionage can only have a negative effect. He has not yet
discovered the boundary line which parts the domain of law from that of
morality or social life. Men will not tell of one another; nor will
he ever be the most honoured citizen, who gives the most frequent
information about offenders to the magistrates.
As in some writers of fiction, so also in philosophers, we may observe
the effect of age. Plato becomes more conservative as he grows older,
and he would govern the world entirely by men like himself, who are
above fifty years of age; for in them he hopes to find a principle of
stability. He does not remark that, in destroying the freedom he is
destroying also the life of the State. In reducing all the citizens to
rule and measure, he would have been depriving the Magnesian colony of
those great men 'whose acquaintance is beyond all price;' and he would
have found that in the worst-governed Hellenic State, there was more of
a carriere ouverte for extraordinary genius and virtue than in his own.
Plato has an evident dislike of the Athenian dicasteries; he prefers a
few judges who take a leading part in the conduct of trials to a great
number who only listen in silence. He allows of two appeals--in each
case however with an increase of the penalty. Modern jurists would
disapprove of the redress of injustice being purchased only at an
increasing risk; though indirectly the burden of legal expenses, which
seems to have been little felt among the Athenians, has a similar
effect. The love of litigation, which is a remnant of barbarism quite
as much as a corruption of civilization, and was innate in the Athenian
people, is diminished in the new state by the imposition of severe
penalties. If persevered in, it is to be punished with death.
In the Laws murder and homicide besides being crimes, are also
pollutions. Regarded from this point of view, the estimate of such
offences is apt to depend on accidental circumstances, such as the
shedding of blood, and not on the real guilt of the offender or the
injury done to society. They are measured by the horror which they
arouse in a barbarous age. For there is a superstition in law as well as
in religion, and the feelings of a primitive age have a traditional hold
on the mass of the people. On the other hand, Plato is innocent of the
barbarity which would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children,
and he is quite aware that punishment has an eye to the future, and not
to the past. Compared with that of most European nations in the last
century his penal code, though sometimes capricious, is reasonable and
humane.
A defect in Plato's criminal jurisprudence is his remission of the
punishment when the homicide has obtained the forgiveness of the
murdered person; as if crime were a personal affair between
individuals, and not an offence against the State. There is a ridiculous
disproportion in his punishments. Because a slave may fairly receive
a blow for stealing one fig or one bunch of grapes, or a tradesman for
selling adulterated goods to the value of one drachma, it is rather
hard upon the slave that he should receive as many blows as he has taken
grapes or figs, or upon the tradesman who has sold adulterated goods
to the value of a thousand drachmas that he should receive a thousand
blows.
II. But before punishment can be inflicted at all, the legislator
must determine the nature of the voluntary and involuntary. The great
question of the freedom of the will, which in modern times has been worn
threadbare with purely abstract discussion, was approached both by Plato
and Aristotle--first, from the judicial; secondly, from the sophistical
point of view. They were puzzled by the degrees and kinds of crime; they
observed also that the law only punished hurts which are inflicted by a
voluntary agent on an involuntary patient.
In attempting to distinguish between hurt and injury, Plato says that
mere hurt is not injury; but that a benefit when done in a wrong spirit
may sometimes injure, e.g. when conferred without regard to right and
wrong, or to the good or evil consequences which may follow. He means
to say that the good or evil disposition of the agent is the principle
which characterizes actions; and this is not sufficiently described by
the terms voluntary and involuntary. You may hurt another involuntarily,
and no one would suppose that you had injured him; and you may hurt him
voluntarily, as in inflicting punishment--neither is this injury; but if
you hurt him from motives of avarice, ambition, or cowardly fear, this
is injury. Injustice is also described as the victory of desire or
passion or self-conceit over reason, as justice is the subordination of
them to reason. In some paradoxical sense Plato is disposed to affirm
all injustice to be involuntary; because no man would do injustice who
knew that it never paid and could calculate the consequences of what
he was doing. Yet, on the other hand, he admits that the distinction of
voluntary and involuntary, taken in another and more obvious sense, is
the basis of legislation. His conception of justice and injustice is
complicated (1) by the want of a distinction between justice and virtue,
that is to say, between the quality which primarily regards others, and
the quality in which self and others are equally regarded; (2) by the
confusion of doing and suffering justice; (3) by the unwillingness to
renounce the old Socratic paradox, that evil is involuntary.
III. The Laws rest on a religious foundation; in this respect they
bear the stamp of primitive legislation. They do not escape the almost
inevitable consequence of making irreligion penal. If laws are based