for its author had turned away in despair from existing politics. He
has no proposals, in that dialogue at least, for making the best of
things as they are. The first lesson his philosopher has to learn is
to turn away from this world of becoming and decay, and to look upon
the unchanging eternal world of ideas. Thus his ideal city is, as he
says, a pattern laid up in heaven by which the just man may rule his
life, a pattern therefore in the meantime for the individual and not
for the statesman. It is a city, he admits in the Laws, for gods or
the children of gods, not for men as they are.

Aristotle has none of the high enthusiasm or poetic imagination of
Plato. He is even unduly impatient of Plato's idealism, as is shown by
the criticisms in the second book. But he has a power to see the
possibilities of good in things that are imperfect, and the patience
of the true politician who has learned that if he would make men what
they ought to be, he must take them as he finds them. His ideal is
constructed not of pure reason or poetry, but from careful and
sympathetic study of a wide range of facts. His criticism of Plato in
the light of history, in Book II. chap, v., though as a criticism it
is curiously inept, reveals his own attitude admirably: "Let us
remember that we should not disregard the experience of ages; in the
multitude of years, these things, if they were good, would certainly
not have been unknown; for almost everything has been found out,
although sometimes they are not put together; in other cases men do
not use the knowledge which they have." Aristotle in his Constitutions
had made a study of one hundred and fifty-eight constitutions of the
states of his day, and the fruits of that study are seen in the
continual reference to concrete political experience, which makes the
Politics in some respects a critical history of the workings of the
institutions of the Greek city state. In Books IV., V., and VI. the