Page:Ferrier Works vol 2 1888 LECTURES IN GREEK PHILOSOPHY.pdf/413

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358
GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

the power of his genius. Insist on these sophistical opinions as you choose, says Plato, I overthrow them all at one swoop, by asserting and by proving a certain construction or organisation of the soul, to which organisation we must look apart altogether from external considerations of honour or advantage. If justice consists in the due harmony of the three faculties of the soul, that is, in the obedience and submission of the inferior to the superior principles, no man can be just by appearing to be so when he is not, any more than a nation or state could delude a neighbouring nation or state, if the soldiers, the legislators, and the people, were in a state of anarchy; i.e., if the people were not working, if the military were in revolt, or the legislature overcome by imbecility. A soul in which the inferior principles reigned supreme, or one which presented the mere semblance, but not the reality, of justice, would be a soul disorganised, a soul untrue to its own constitution—a soul, in fact, which was not a soul; just as a state in which the relation of the governed and the governors was reversed, would be a state which had crumbled into dust. And even suppose the dissimulation to have been carried so far that both the soul and the state appear to be in health and preservation, surely both the man himself and the state itself would know that no balance of power, no true strength, no true life was within them, and that no security was theirs. Injustice, or the want of a proper equipoise among their various elements, would set them at variance