[Footnote 3: The conditions that regulate the authoritative enforcement of actions, are exhaustively given in works on Jurisprudence, but they do not all concern Ethical Theory. The expedience of imposing a rule depends on the importance of the object compared with the cost of the machinery. A certain line of conduct may be highly beneficial, but may not be a fit case for coercion. For example, the law can enforce only a _minimum_ of service: now, if the case be such, that a minimum is useless, as in helping a ship in distress, or in supporting aged parents, it is much, better to leave the case to voluntary impulses, seconded by approbation or reward. Again, an offence punished by law must be, in its nature, definable; which, makes a difficulty in such cases as insult, and defamation, and many species of fraud. Farther, the offence must be easy of detection, so that the vast majority of offenders may not escape. This limits the action of the law in unchastity.] [Footnote 4: See, on the method of Sokrates, Appendix A.] [Footnote 5: In setting forth, the Ethical End, the language of Sokrates was not always consistent. He sometimes stated it, as if it included an independent reference to the happiness of others; at other times, he speaks as if the end was the agent's own happiness, to which, the happiness of others was the greatest and most essential means. The first view, although not always adhered to, prevails in Xenophon; the second appears most in Plato.] [Footnote 6: 'What Plato here calls the Knowledge of Good, or Reason,--the just discrimination and comparative appreciation, of Ends and Means--appears in the Politikus and the Euthydêmus, under the title of the Regal or Political Art, as employing or directing the results of all other arts, which are considered as subordinate: in the Protagoras, under the title of art of calculation or mensuration: in the Philêbus, as measure and proportion: in the Phaedrus (in regard to rhetoric) as the art of turning to account, for the main purpose of persuasion, all the special processes, stratagems, decorations, &c., imparted by professional masters. In the Republic, it is personified in the few venerable Elders who constitute the Reason of the society, and whose directions all the rest (Guardians and Producers) arc bound implicitly to follow: the virtue of the subordinates consisting in this implicit obedience. In the Leges, it is defined as the complete subjection in the mind, of pleasures and pains to right Reason, without which, no special aptitudes are worth, having. In the Xenophontic Memorabilia, it stands as a Sokratic authority under the title of Sophrosynê or Temperance: and the Profitable is declared identical with, the Good, as the directing and limiting principle for all human pursuits and proceedings.' (Grote's Plato, I., 362.)]