The Nocturnal Council is to consist of the priests who have obtained the rewards of virtue, of the ten eldest guardians of the law, and of the director and ex-directors of education; each of whom is to select for approval a younger coadjutor.  To this council the ‘Spectator,’ who is sent to visit foreign countries, has to make his report.  It is not an administrative body, but an assembly of sages who are to make legislation their study.  Plato is not altogether disinclined to changes in the law where experience shows them to be necessary; but he is also anxious that the original spirit of the constitution should never be lost sight of.

The Laws of Plato contain the latest phase of his philosophy, showing in many respects an advance, and in others a decline, in his views of life and the world.  His Theory of Ideas in the next generation passed into one of Numbers, the nature of which we gather chiefly from the Metaphysics of Aristotle.  Of the speculative side of this theory there are no traces in the Laws, but doubtless Plato found the practical value which he attributed to arithmetic greatly confirmed by the possibility of applying number and measure to the revolution of the heavens, and to the regulation of human life.  In the return to a doctrine of numbers there is a retrogression rather than an advance; for the most barren logical abstraction is of a higher nature than number and figure.  Philosophy fades away into the distance; in the Laws it is confined to the members of the Nocturnal Council.  The speculative truth which was the food of the guardians in the Republic, is for the majority of the citizens to be superseded by practical virtues.  The law, which is the expression of mind written down, takes the place of the living word of the philosopher.  (Compare the contrast of Phaedrus, and Laws; also the plays on the words nous, nomos, nou dianome; and the discussion in the Statesman of the difference between the personal rule of a king and the impersonal reign of law.) The State is based on virtue and religion rather than on knowledge; and virtue is no longer identified with knowledge, being of the commoner sort, and spoken of in the sense generally understood.  Yet there are many traces of advance as well as retrogression in the Laws of Plato.  The attempt to reconcile the ideal with actual life is an advance; to ’have brought philosophy down from heaven to earth,’ is a praise which may be claimed for him as well as for his master Socrates.  And the members of the Nocturnal Council are to continue students of the ‘one in many’ and of the nature of God.  Education is the last word with which Plato supposes the theory of the Laws to end and the reality to begin.