It must be admitted that these principles are difficult of application.  Yet a criticism may be worth making which rests only on probabilities or impressions.  Great disputes will arise about the merits of different passages, about what is truly characteristic and original or trivial and borrowed.  Many have thought the Laws to be one of the greatest of Platonic writings, while in the judgment of Mr. Grote they hardly rise above the level of the forged epistles.  The manner in which a writer would or would not have written at a particular time of life must be acknowledged to be a matter of conjecture.  But enough has been said to show that similarities of a certain kind, whether criticism is able to detect them or not, may be such as must be attributed to an original writer, and not to a mere imitator.

(d) Applying these principles to the case of the Laws, we have now to point out that they contain the class of refined or unconscious similarities which are indicative of genuineness.  The parallelisms are like the repetitions of favourite thoughts into which every one is apt to fall unawares in conversation or in writing.  They are found in a work which contains many beautiful and remarkable passages.  We may therefore begin by claiming this presumption in their favour.  Such undesigned coincidences, as we may venture to call them, are the following.  The conception of justice as the union of temperance, wisdom, courage (Laws; Republic):  the latent idea of dialectic implied in the notion of dividing laws after the kinds of virtue (Laws); the approval of the method of looking at one idea gathered from many things, ’than which a truer was never discovered by any man’ (compare Republic):  or again the description of the Laws as parents (Laws; Republic):  the assumption that religion has been already settled by the oracle of Delphi (Laws; Republic), to which an appeal is also made in special cases (Laws):  the notion of the battle with self, a paradox for which Plato in a manner apologizes both in the Laws and the Republic:  the remark (Laws) that just men, even when they are deformed in body, may still be perfectly beautiful in respect of the excellent justice of their minds (compare Republic):  the argument that ideals are none the worse because they cannot be carried out (Laws; Republic):  the near approach to the idea of good in ’the principle which is common to all the four virtues,’ a truth which the guardians must be compelled to recognize (Laws; compare Republic):  or again the recognition by reason of the right pleasure and pain, which had previously been matter of habit (Laws; Republic):  or the blasphemy of saying that the excellency of music is to give pleasure (Laws; Republic):  again the story of the Sidonian Cadmus (Laws), which is a variation of the Phoenician tale of the earth-born men (Republic):  the comparison of philosophy to a yelping she-dog, both in the Republic and in the Laws:  the remark that no man can practise two