the education of the two sexes, as far as possible, both in music and gymnastic, and, as in the Republic, he would give to gymnastic a purely military character.  In marriage, his object is still to produce the finest children for the state.  As in the Statesman, he would unite in wedlock dissimilar natures—­ the passionate with the dull, the courageous with the gentle.  And the virtuous tyrant of the Statesman, who has no place in the Republic, again appears.  In this, as in all his writings, he has the strongest sense of the degeneracy and incapacity of the rulers of his own time.

In the Laws, the philosophers, if not banished, like the poets, are at least ignored; and religion takes the place of philosophy in the regulation of human life.  It must however be remembered that the religion of Plato is co-extensive with morality, and is that purified religion and mythology of which he speaks in the second book of the Republic.  There is no real discrepancy in the two works.  In a practical treatise, he speaks of religion rather than of philosophy; just as he appears to identify virtue with pleasure, and rather seeks to find the common element of the virtues than to maintain his old paradoxical theses that they are one, or that they are identical with knowledge.  The dialectic and the idea of good, which even Glaucon in the Republic could not understand, would be out of place in a less ideal work.  There may also be a change in his own mind, the purely intellectual aspect of philosophy having a diminishing interest to him in his old age.

Some confusion occurs in the passage in which Plato speaks of the Republic, occasioned by his reference to a third state, which he proposes (D.V.) hereafter to expound.  Like many other thoughts in the Laws, the allusion is obscure from not being worked out.  Aristotle (Polit.) speaks of a state which is neither the best absolutely, nor the best under existing conditions, but an imaginary state, inferior to either, destitute, as he supposes, of the necessaries of life—­apparently such a beginning of primitive society as is described in Laws iii.  But it is not clear that by this the third state of Plato is intended.  It is possible that Plato may have meant by his third state an historical sketch, bearing the same relation to the Laws which the unfinished Critias would have borne to the Republic; or he may, perhaps, have intended to describe a state more nearly approximating than the Laws to existing Greek states.

The Statesman is a mere fragment when compared with the Laws, yet combining a second interest of dialectic as well as politics, which is wanting in the larger work.  Several points of similarity and contrast may be observed between them.  In some respects the Statesman is even more ideal than the Republic, looking back to a former state of paradisiacal life, in which the Gods ruled over mankind, as the Republic looks forward to a coming kingdom of philosophers.  Of this kingdom of Cronos there is also mention in