In the absence of home-employments, women were to be, so far as possible, assimilated to men; to pass through the same bodily and mental training; to be enrolled in the army; and, if they showed the necessary capacity, to discharge the highest political functions. In this practical dialectic the identifying no less than the differentiating power of logic is displayed, and displayed also in defiance of common ideas, as in the modern classifications of zoology and botany. Plato introduces distinctions where they did not before exist, and annuls those which were already recognised. The sexes were to be assimilated, political life was to be identified with family life, and the whole community was to present an exact parallel with the individual soul. The ruling committee corresponded to reason, the army to passionate spirit, and the industrial classes to the animal desires; and each, in its perfect constitution, represented one of the cardinal virtues as reinterpreted by Plato. Wisdom belonged to the ruling part, courage to the intermediate executive power, and temperance or obedience to the organs of material existence; while justice meant the general harmony resulting from the fulfilment of their appropriate functions by all. We may add that the whole State reproduced the Greek family in a much deeper sense than Plato himself was aware of. For his aristocracy represents the man, whose virtue, in the words of Gorgias, was to ‘administer the State;’ and his industrial class takes the place of the woman, whose duty was ‘to order her house, and keep what is indoors, and obey her husband.’[146] Such was the celebrated scheme by which Plato proposed to regenerate mankind. We have already taken occasion to show how it was connected with his ethical and dialectical philosophy. We have now to consider in what relation it stands to the political experience of his own and other times, as well as to the revolutionary proposals of other speculative reformers. VI.