consummate athlete whose body, with no superfluities, is the precise, the perfectly finished, instrument of his will. Hence, at once cause and effect of such "seamless" unity, his paradoxical new law of property in the City of the Perfect--mandatum novum, a "new commandment," we might fairly call it--ta tôn philôn koina.+ "And no one said that aught of the things he possessed was his own but they had all things common." Ah, you see! Put yourself in Plato's company, and inevitably, from time to time, he will seem to pass with you beyond the utmost horizon actually opened to him. Upon the aristocratic class therefore, in its two divisions, the army and the church or hierarchy, so to speak, the "rule" of Plato--poverty, obedience, contemplation, will be incumbent in its fullest rigour. "Like hired servants in their own house," they may not seem very enviable persons, on first thoughts. But remember again that Plato's charge against things as they are is partly in a theoretic interest-- the philosopher, [256] the philosophic soul, loves unity, but finds it nowhere, neither in the State nor in its individual members: it is partly also practical, and of the hour. Divided Athens, divided Greece, like some big, lax, self-neglectful person would be an easy prey to any well-knit adversary really at unity in himself. It is by way of introducing a constringent principal into a mass of amorphic particles, that Plato proclaims that these friends will have all things in common; and, challenged by the questions of his companions in the dialogue to say how far he will be ready to go in the application of so paradoxical a rule, he braces himself to a surprising degree of consistency. How far then will Plato, a somewhat Machiavelian theorist, as you saw, and with something of "fixed" ideas about practical things, taking desperate means towards a somewhat exclusively conceived ideal of social well-being, be ready to go? Now we have seen that the genuine citizens of his Perfect City will have much of monasticism, of the character of military monks, about them already, with their poverty, their obedience, their contemplative habit. And there is yet another indispensable condition of the monastic life. The great Pope Hildebrand, by the rule of celibacy, by making "regulars" to that extent of the secular clergy, succeeded, as many have thought, in his design of making them in very deed, soul and body, but parts of the corporate order they [257] belonged to; and what Plato is going to add to his rule of life, for the archontes,+ who are to be philopolides,+ to love the corporate body they belong to better than themselves, is in its actual effects something very like a law of celibacy. Difficult, paradoxical, as he admits it to be, he is pressed on by his hearers, and by the natural force of his argument, reluctantly to declare that the rule of communism will apply to a man's ownership of his wife and children.