The long treatise called the LAWS, being a modified scheme of a Republic, goes over the same ground with more detail.  We give the chief ethical points.  It is the purpose of the lawgiver to bring about happiness, and to provide all good things divine and human.  The divine things are the cardinal virtues—­Wisdom, Justice, Temperance, Courage; the human are the leading personal advantages—­Health, Beauty, Strength, Activity, Wealth.  He requires the inculcation of self-command, and a training in endurance.  The moral and religious feelings are to be guided in early youth, by the influence of Poetry and the other Fine Arts, in which, as before, a stringent censorship is to be exercised; the songs and dances are all to be publicly authorized.  The ethical doctrine that the just man is happy and the unjust miserable, is to be preached; and every one prohibited from contradicting it.  Of all the titles to command in society, Wisdom is the highest, although policy may require it to be conjoined with some of the others (Birth, Age, Strength, Accident, &c.).  It is to be a part of the constitution to provide public exhortations, or sermons, for inculcating virtue; Plato having now passed into an opposite phase as to the value of Rhetoric, or continuous address.  The family is to be allowed in its usual form, but with restraints on the age of marriage, on the choice of the parties, and on the increase of the number of the population.  Sexual intercourse is to be as far as possible confined to persons legally married; those departing from this rule are, at all events, to observe secresy.  The slaves are not to be of the same race as the masters.  As regards punishment, there is a great complication, owing to the author’s theory that wickedness is not properly voluntary.  Much of the harm done by persons to others is unintentional or involuntary, and is to be made good by reparation.  For the loss of balance or self-control, making the essence of injustice, there must be a penal and educational discipline, suited to cure the moral distemper; not for the sake of the past, which cannot be recalled, but of the future.  Under cover of this theory, the punishments are abundantly severe; and the crimes include Heresy, for which there is a gradation of penalties terminating in death.

We may now summarize the Ethics of Plato, under the general scheme as follows:—­

I.—­The Ethical Standard, or criterion of moral Right and Wrong.  This we have seen is, ultimately, the Science of Good and Evil, as determined by a Scientific or Wise man; the Idea of the Good, which only a philosopher can ascend to.  Plato gave no credit to the maxims of the existing society; these were wholly unscientific.

It is obvious that this vague and indeterminate standard would settle nothing practically; no one can tell what it is.  It is only of value as belonging to a very exalted and poetic conception of virtue, something that raises the imagination above common life into a sphere of transcendental existence.