THREE:The final antithesis of conscious life is that between the398 individual and the state. In this sense, Aristotles Politics is the completion of his Ethics. It is only in a well-ordered community that moral habits can be acquired; and it is only in such a community that the best or intellectual life can be attained, although, properly speaking, it is not a social life. Nevertheless, the Politics, like every other portion of Aristotles system, reproduces within itself the elements of an independent whole. To understand its internal organisation, we must begin by disregarding Aristotles abortive classification (chiefly adapted from Plato) of constitutions into three legitimateMonarchy, Aristocracy, and Republic; and three illegitimateDemocracy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny. Aristotle distinguishes them by saying that the legitimate forms are governed with a view to the general good; the illegitimate with a view to the interests of particular classes or persons. But, in point of fact, as Zeller shows,291 he cannot keep up this distinction; and we shall better understand his true idea by substituting for it anotherthat between the intellectual and the material state. The object of the one is to secure the highest culture for a ruling caste, who are to abstain from industrial occupations, and to be supported by the labour of a dependent population. Such a government may be either monarchical or aristocratic; but it must necessarily be in the hands of a few. The object of the other is to maintain a stable equilibrium between the opposing interests of rich and poortwo classes practically distinguished as the few and the many. This end is best attained where supreme power belongs to the middle class. The deviations are represented by oligarchy and tyranny on the one side, and by extreme democracy on the other. Where such constitutions exist, the best mode of preserving them is to moderate their characteristic excess by borrowing certain institutions from the opposite form of government, or by modifying their own institutions in a conciliatory sense.Many civilians had been put to death, accused of having shot from the houses, and others for refusing to give up requisitioned food. Probably they had none, as preceding military divisions had already taken away all there was. Then some civilians were killed for refusing to work for the enemy. The houses of all these "condemned" had been burnt, and everything the soldiers fancied was looted. As a matter of fact, nearly all the soldiers I met later on were drunk, and they worried me constantly. Only when I had proved to be a Netherlander, they behaved a little better, and started abusing "the cursed Belgians," who, according to them, were all francs-tireurs.
FORE:"I have been robbed, I tell you. What was the trick I know not yet, but I shall find out."
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TWO:Nevertheless, by dint of pertinacious repetition, the founder of Neo-Platonism has succeeded in making the main outlines, and to a great extent the details, of his system so perfectly clear that probably no philosophy is now better understood than his. In this respect, Plotinus offers a remarkable contrast to the two great thinkers from whom his ideas are principally derived. While Plato and Aristotle construct each particular sentence with masterly clearness, the general drift of their speculations is by no means easy to ascertain; and, even now, critics take diametrically opposite views of the interpretation which is to be put on their teaching with regard to several most important points. The expositors of Neo-Platonism, on the contrary, show a rare unanimity in their accounts of its constitutive principles. What they differ about is its origin and its historical significance. And these are points on which we too shall have to enter, since all the ancient systems are interesting to us chiefly as historical phenomena, and Neo-Platonism more so than any other. Plotinus285 effected a vast revolution in speculative opinion, but he effected it by seizing on the thoughts of others rather than by any new thoughts or even new developments or applications of his own.
