the improvement of the offender...  Finally, he repeats twice over, as with the voice of a prophet, that the crimes of the fathers are not to be visited upon the children.  In this respect he is nobly distinguished from the Oriental, and indeed from the spirit of Athenian law (compare Telfy,—­dei kai autous kai tous ek touton atimous einai), as the Hebrew in the age of Ezekial is from the Jewish people of former ages.

Of all Plato’s provisions the object is to bring the practice of the law more into harmony with reason and philosophy; to secure impartiality, and while acknowledging that every citizen has a right to share in the administration of justice, to counteract the tendency of the courts to become mere popular assemblies.

...

Thus we have arrived at the end of the writings of Plato, and at the last stage of philosophy which was really his.  For in what followed, which we chiefly gather from the uncertain intimations of Aristotle, the spirit of the master no longer survived.  The doctrine of Ideas passed into one of numbers; instead of advancing from the abstract to the concrete, the theories of Plato were taken out of their context, and either asserted or refuted with a provoking literalism; the Socratic or Platonic element in his teaching was absorbed into the Pythagorean or Megarian.  His poetry was converted into mysticism; his unsubstantial visions were assailed secundum artem by the rules of logic.  His political speculations lost their interest when the freedom of Hellas had passed away.  Of all his writings the Laws were the furthest removed from the traditions of the Platonic school in the next generation.  Both his political and his metaphysical philosophy are for the most part misinterpreted by Aristotle.  The best of him—­his love of truth, and his ’contemplation of all time and all existence,’ was soonest lost; and some of his greatest thoughts have slept in the ear of mankind almost ever since they were first uttered.

We have followed him during his forty or fifty years of authorship, from the beginning when he first attempted to depict the teaching of Socrates in a dramatic form, down to the time at which the character of Socrates had disappeared, and we have the latest reflections of Plato’s own mind upon Hellas and upon philosophy.  He, who was ‘the last of the poets,’ in his book of Laws writes prose only; he has himself partly fallen under the rhetorical influences which in his earlier dialogues he was combating.  The progress of his writings is also the history of his life; we have no other authentic life of him.  They are the true self of the philosopher, stripped of the accidents of time and place.  The great effort which he makes is, first, to realize abstractions, secondly, to connect them.  In the attempt to realize them, he was carried into a transcendental region in which he isolated them from experience, and we pass out of the range of science into poetry or fiction.  The fancies of mythology for a time