of the sophists had resulted in an attempt to reconstruct the moral and political union of citizens out of universal principles in place of local and antiquated traditions. Like the political reconstructions of Isokrates, thephilosophic reconstruction of social life contemplated by Plato looked to the whole range of Greek life, and did not attempt to glide back into days of narrow isolation beyond which the expansion of Greek intellect had now for ever passed. At the same time, the relations of the individual to the group, relations which the general loosening of social ties was rendering sharply distinct, became the great questions to which philosophy addressed itself. In the highly poetical and imaginative style of Plato these questions are put, directly or indirectly, again and again. Is human action to be regulated by eternal principles of justice or by personal self-interest? Is there a sanction for personal morality in a future state of personal reward or punishment? Does the government of the State properly belong to a few wisely experienced persons or to the many? Such are some of the Platonic problems in which the new Greek consciousness, social and personal, is expressed.
Perhaps the relations of the individual to the group are nowhere so curiously realised by Plato as in the social classification laid down in his Republic. Instead of accepting such classes as the social life of Athens might have supplied—freeman, metœc, slave—and thus anticipating the process by which English economists have built up their theories on a classification supplied by English life—landlord, capitalist, labourer; instead of adopting a plan like that of the Bráhman redacteurs of the Code Manu, viz. that of accepting certain existing classes, but arranging them according to religious theory; Plato sets out from an analysis of individual psychology
