[427e]
admitting that it would be impious1 for you not to come to the aid of
justice by every means in your power.” “A true
reminder,” I said, “and I must do so, but you also must
lend a hand.” “Well,” he said, “we
will.” “I expect then,” said I,
“that we shall find it in this way. I think our city, if it has
been rightly founded is good in the full sense of the word.2”
“Necessarily,” he said. “Clearly, then, it
will be wise, brave, sober, and just.”
“Clearly.” “Then if we find any of these
qualities in it, the remainder3 will be that which we have not found?”
1 Cf. 368 B-C.
2 Cf. 434 E, 449 A. This in a sense begs the original question in controversy with Thrasymachus, by the assumption that justice and the other moral virtues are goods. Cf. Gorgias 507 C. See The Idea of Good in Plato's Republic, p. 205. For the cardinal virtues cf. Schmidt, Ethik der Griechen, i. p. 304, Pearson, Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes, pp. 173 f., and commentators on Pindar, Nem. iii. 74, which seems to refer to four periods of human life, and Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 9. 1-5, and iv. 6. 1-12. Plato recognizes other virtues even in the Republic(402 Cἐλευθεριότης and μεγαλοπρέπεια. Cf. 536 A), and would have been as ready to admit that the number four was a part of his literary machinery as Ruskin was to confess the arbitrariness of his Seven Lamps of Architecture.
3 It is pedantry to identify this with Mill's method of residues and then comment on the primitive naïveté of such an application of logic to ethics. One might as well speak of Andocides' employment of the method (De myst. 109) or of its use by Gorgias in the disjunctive dilemma of the Palamedes 11 and passim, or say that the dog of the anecdote employs it when he sniffs up one trail and immediately runs up the other. Plato obviously employs it merely as a literary device for the presentation of his material under the figure of a search. He, “in the infancy of philosophy,” is quite as well aware as his censors can be in the senility of criticism that he is not proving anything by this method, but merely setting forth what he has assumed for other reasons.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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