In their attempt to view justice as an internal principle, and in their condemnation of the poets, they anticipate him.

The common life of Greece is not enough for them; they must penetrate deeper into the nature of things.
It has been objected that justice is honesty in the sense of Glaucon and Adeimantus, but is taken by Socrates to mean all virtue.

May we not more truly say that the old-fashioned notion of justice is enlarged by Socrates, and becomes equivalent to universal order or well-being, first in the State, and secondly in the individual?
He has found a new answer to his old question (Protag.), 'whether the virtues are one or many,' viz.

that one is the ordering principle of the three others.

In seeking to establish the purely internal nature of justice, he is met by the fact that man is a social being, and he tries to harmonise the two opposite theses as well as he can.