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.
ONE:She paused as Gordon recoiled from her. His eyes were full of loathing.
THREE:On extending our survey still wider, we find that the existence of a thing everywhere depends on its unity.462 All bodies perish by dissolution, and dissolution means the loss of unity. Health, beauty, and virtue are merely so many different kinds of harmony and unison. Shall we then say that soul, as the great unifying power in Nature, is the One of which we are in search? Not so; for preceding investigations have taught us that soul is only an agent for transmitting ideas received from a higher power; and the psychic faculties themselves are held together by a unifying principle for which we have to account. Neither is the whole sum of existence the One, for its very name implies a plurality of parts. And the claims of the Nous to that distinction have been already disproved. In short, nothing that exists can be the One, for, as we have seen, unity is the cause of existence and must therefore precede it.
It was from the Epicureans, of whom we are told that there were a considerable number in these parts, that the most serious opposition to the impostor proceeded; but he contrived to silence their criticisms by denouncing them to the fanatical multitude as atheists and Christians. Towards Epicurus himself Alexander nourished an undying hatred; and when the oracle was consulted with regard to that226 philosophers fate, it made answer that he was bound in leaden chains and seated in a morass. The κ?ριαι δ?ξαι, or summary of the Epicurean creed, he publicly burned and threw its ashes into the sea; and one unfortunate town which contained a large school of Epicureans he punished by refusing its inhabitants access to the oracle. On the other hand, according to Lucian, he was on the best of terms with the disciples of Plato, Chrysippus, and Pythagoras.345If the earliest of Platos enquiries, while they deal with the same subjects and are conducted on the same method as those cultivated by Socrates, evince a breadth of view surpassing anything recorded of him by Xenophon, they also exhibit traces of an influence disconnected with and inferior in value to his. On more than one occasion121 Plato reasons, or rather quibbles, in a style which he has elsewhere held up to ridicule as characteristic of the Sophists, with such success that the name of sophistry has clung to it ever since.186 Indeed, some of the verbal fallacies employed are so transparent that we can hardly suppose them to be unintentional, and we are forced to conclude that the young despiser of human wisdom was resolved to maintain his thesis with any weapons, good or bad, which came to hand. And it seems much more likely that he learned the eristic art from Protagoras or from his disciples than from Socrates. Plato spent a large part of his life in opposing the Sophiststhat is to say, the paid professors of wisdom and virtue; but in spite of, or rather perhaps because of, this very opposition, he was profoundly affected by their teaching and example. It is quite conceivable, although we do not find it stated as a fact, that he resorted to them for instruction when a young man, and before coming under the influence of Socrates, an event which did not take place until he was twenty years old; or he may have been directed to them by Socrates himself. With all its originality, his style bears traces of a rhetorical training in the more elaborate passages, and the Sophists were the only teachers of rhetoric then to be found. His habit of clothing philosophical lessons in the form of a myth seems also to have been borrowed from them. It would, therefore, not be surprising that he should cultivate their argumentative legerdemain side by side with the more strict and severe discipline of Socratic dialectics.
