is no dialectician, sears to no speculative heights, and is no nearer than other people to a vision of the Self-Existent Ideas, but who, at every personal sacrifice, persistently acts up to the rules of Virtue acknowledged by the worthiest of his countrymen. It is not obvious what place there was for Aristeides in the Platonic theory of Virtue, nor how he was to be adjusted to the doctrine of Plate and of the historical Sokrates, that virtue is a branch of knowledge, and that no one is unjust willingly. Aristeides probably had the same notions of justice as his contemporarics, and could as little as any of them have answcred Sokratic interrogatories by a definition of it which would have been proof against all objections. The conformity of his will to it, the never being unjust willingly, was probably the chief moral difference between him and ordinary inen. Plato might indeed have said that Aristeides had the most indispensable point of knowledge—he knew that the just man must be the happiest. But Aristeidcs was not. the kind of man of whom Plate has, more or less successfully, proved this ; and the true Platonic doctrine is, that it is impossible to be just, without knowing (in the high Platonic meaning of _knowledge) What justice is.[1]
- ↑ The historical Sokrates of the Memorabilia (iv. 4), being challenged by the Sophist Hippias to give over merely tennenting others, and commit himself to a positive opinion about justice, replies by a definition which would have included Aristcides, but not the Platonic ruler or philosopher: Justice, he says, is τὸ νόμιμον—conformity to the laws of the country. This definition, which exactly suited the unideal and practical Xenophon, does not satisfy the Sophist, who is here again represented asceontending for a higher law. He objects, that the laws cannot be the standard of virtue, since the communities which enact thom often change their mind, and abrogate the laws they have made. To which Sokrates
