You Gentiles
preëminent. Plato's analysis of the ideal life still approaches your dreams most intimately.
Investigating the true nature of morality, Plato bodies forth his ideal of a perfect state, and, with the license of a dream giving free reign to his imagination, unfolds step by step his famous Republic. No considerations of practicality or of feasibility were there to check the career of his fantasy. The Republic is to him life as it should be and as he would like to see it: the apotheosis of human aspiration.
Contrast this with the visions of his almost contemporaries, the Jewish prophets, and in this contrast you will find again the key to our essential difference.
The Republic of Plato is an institution, organized with infinite ingenuity and dedicated to the delights of the body and the mind. It draws its inspiration from the pure joi de vivre of the ideal man of perfect physical and psychic health. You would seek in vain that extraneous compulsion of a God
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