concealed by impurities. And so in the Phædo the soul of the philosopher is spoken of as free from passion and desire. Again, Plato seems to waver between the view of the Phædrus and Republic, that the soul of the good man is that in which the lower elements are under control, and the more ascetic view of the Phado, that the good man is free from passions and desires altogether. Of course it is obvious that all turns on what is meant by desire. Plato often tends to regard desire as an altogether irrational element, though he sometimes sees that Reason, in order to act, necessarily implies desire (or at least the element of Ovuós or impulse). In the Phædo the desires are, indeed, distinctly ascribed to the body, whereas in the Philebus (35 C) they are ascribed to the soul. These apparent inconsistencies arise very much from our tending to understand Plato too literally, when he speaks of parts of the soul. Indeed it should be noted that he more often says εἴδη or γένη (“ forms ” or kinds," "aspects” as we might say) than uépn. We may reconcile all these passages, more or less, as follows:-The soul in its essence is Reason (voûs). By admixture with the body it shows itself in the forms of passion and desire, which we may therefore ascribe to the soul or to the body, according as we are thinking of the soul as embodied or as distinct from the body. When the soul in a future life is spoken of as being punished, it must be the soul as having desires. The soul escapes, i.e., does not need, punishment, just in so far as it is free from desire (appetite,

Ovμía). Only the soul of the tyrant which is altogether given over to desire is punished for ever. (This is a characteristically Hellenic touch, and need not be rejected, as by Mr. Archer-Hind. It is not more fanciful than any other part of the myths in the Gorgias and Republic. The tyrant is Plato's ideally bad man, opposed to the ideally good man, the philosopher.)

If then it is asked whether Plato thinks bodily existence necessary for the particular human soul, we can only answer by distinguishing the meanings of the words "body" and "soul." If by body be body as it exists

meant, as is ordinarily meant, our now, then Plato does hold that the soul can exist apart from the body. If by soul be meant the soul as we know it with its passions and desires, then evidently some sort of body must be supposed for it, else there would be no passions and desires. If we ask whether Plato believes in a personal immortality, we should need to ask ourselves further what we mean by personality; and we should note that it is not a conception which has become at all prominent in ancient ethics. We might perhaps expect that a consistent Platonist would have held that, just in so far as the soul becomes purified from passion and desire, it loses its materiality, its element of otherness (Oάrepov), and thus becomes reunited to its divine source. This is an interpretation which the mythical element in Plato might suggest. Yet Plato himself argues (in Rep., x. 611 A) that the number of the souls remains always the same; and the greatest

of the Neo-Platonists, Plotinus, holds explicitly that there exists a real plurality of souls, the highest being the soul of the world, of which the others are not mere parts. Was this position retained out of respect for the authority of the divine Plato, or was it rather from an intuition that the Universal apart from individual manifestation is a logical abstraction?

Personality, however, is something more than mere individual existence. The person in the ethical sense, the subject of rights and duties, must be the member of an organised society. And it might be argued that it is only in so far as any one ceases to be a mere individual, that he becomes in the true sense a person, only in so far as he identifies himself with something wider and higher than self. In his theory of ethics, as expounded in the Republic, Plato sees this fully. It is not because he makes his citizens merge their lives in the life of the community that his ethics is inadequate, but because his conception of the community is too abstract and too much limited by the prepossessions of aristocratic Hellenism. In his visions of another world, so far from his neglecting the value of the individual, it might even be contended that he exaggerates the significance of the mere individual existence so much in his doctrine of metempsychosis, as to neglect the greater ethical significance of the person, which, as just said, depends on membership of a society. He speaks indeed of the good man in the evil state as being the citizen of a heavenly city; but in his accounts of the life free from the trammels of the

body, there is no hint of a perfected community. His ideal in the Phado, and even in the Republic, is only an ideal for the philosophic few that escape from among the multitude who are "unworthy of education." May we not say, though it may sound paradoxical, that Plato has no adequate conception of personality just because his conception of the soul is too individualistic?

So

And yet individualism is not a fair charge to bring against Plato's doctrine of the soul. As we have seen, the soul is not conceived of by him as a selfsubsistent monad or atom. The soul is dependent for its life and its immortality on the eternal ideas, ultimately therefore on the Idea of the Good. that, as Prof. Jowett has said (Plato, vol. i. 4201), his ultimate argument is equivalent to this: "If God exists, then the soul exists after death." That is, Plato himself like most of the older Christian theologians, and unlike many who have supposed themselves Platonists, did not hold that the soul was immortal per se, but only because and in so far as it partakes in the divine nature and has the divine nature manifested in it. Immortality to him also was a hope (Ts μeyáλn, Phædo, 114 C), not a dogma.

2

1 Edit. 2: = vol. ii. 186 in edit. 3.

2 I have advisedly not complicated this statement by any reference to the doctrine of the resurrection, which, from the point of view of philosophy, may be regarded as the assertion of the continued existence of human personality plus the assertion that such personality will be connected with an organism of some sort— analogous to the present body according to popular belief, altogether different from it according to St. Paul (1 Cor. xv. 35-50).

V.

WHAT ARE ECONOMIC LAWS?1

I.

THE phrase "Economic Laws" has been used by theoretical students as implying the claim of Political Economy to be a science like the sciences of nature. It has been used, or misused, by practical persons to imply that they possess rules or maxims to guide them in social and political affairs. People have debated as to the amount of respect which economic laws deserve-whether they ought to be relegated to Saturn or fulfilled on this earth. It would have been wiser to ask first, what economic laws mean, or can mean. Whether they can mean anything at all has certainly not been a usual question. But in the January number of the Economic Review (for 1892) Professor Cunningham has propounded the thesis, "that economics is not a science of 'cause' and effect, but a pure science, like logic or

1 Reprinted, with a few alterations, from the Economic Review, July, 1892.

2 Art. "A Plea for Pure Theory." In my article, as originally written, I somewhat over-stated Prof. Cunningham's views. In the light of his "Reply" in the October number, I have modified some phrases and omitted others.