his philosophy or his history is entirely and simply A PRIORI. ON
EST DE SON SIECLE MEME QUAND ON Y PROTESTE, and so we find in him
continual references to the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean
system, the general characteristics of Greek tyrannies and Greek
democracies. For while, in his account of the method of forming an
ideal state, he says that the political artist is indeed to fix his
gaze on the sun of abstract truth in the heavens of the pure
reason, but is sometimes to turn to the realisation of the ideals
on earth: yet, after all, the general character of the Platonic
method, which is what we are specially concerned with, is
essentially deductive and A PRIORI. And he himself, in the
building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced], making a clean sweep of all
history and all experience; and it was essentially as an A PRIORI
theorist that he is criticised by Aristotle, as we shall see later.

To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme of the
laws of political revolutions as drawn out by Plato, we must first
note that the primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the
general principle, common to the vegetable and animal worlds as
well as to the world of history, that all created things are fated
to decay - a principle which, though expressed in the terms of a
mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet perhaps in its essence
scientific. For we too must hold that a continuous redistribution
of matter and motion is the inevitable result of the nominal
persistence of Force, and that perfect equilibrium is as impossible
in politics as it certainly is in physics.

The secondary causes which mar the perfection of the Platonic 'city
of the sun' are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race