Страница 560 из 1391

(d) Plato, labouring under what, to modern readers, appears to

have been a confusion of ideas, assimilates the state to the

individual, and fails to distinguish Ethics from Politics. He

thinks that to be most of a state which is most like one man, and

in which the citizens have the greatest uniformity of character.

He does not see that the analogy is partly fallacious, and that

the will or character of a state or nation is really the balance

or rather the surplus of individual wills, which are limited by

the condition of having to act in common. The movement of a body

of men can never have the pliancy or facility of a single man;

the freedom of the individual, which is always limited, becomes

still more straitened when transferred to a nation.