Nor is he alive to the evils of confounding vice and crime; or to the necessity of governments abstaining from excessive interference with their subjects.
Yet this confusion of ethics and politics has also a better and a truer side.

If unable to grasp some important distinctions, Plato is at any rate seeking to elevate the lower to the higher; he does not pull down the principles of men to their practice, or narrow the conception of the state to the immediate necessities of politics.

Political ideals of freedom and equality, of a divine government which has been or will be in some other age or country, have greatly tended to educate and ennoble the human race.

And if not the first author of such ideals (for they are as old as Hesiod), Plato has done more than any other writer to impress them on the world.

To those who censure his idealism we may reply in his own words--'He is not the worse painter who draws a perfectly beautiful figure, because no such figure of a man could ever have existed' (Republic).
A new thought about education suddenly occurs to him, and for a time exercises a sort of fascination over his mind, though in the later books of the Laws it is forgotten or overlooked.