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We find with some surprise (not unlike the feeling which

Aristotle in a well-known passage describes the hearers of

Plato's lectures as experiencing, when they went to a discourse

on the idea of good, expecting to be instructed in moral truths,

and received instead of them arithmetical and mathematical

formulae) that Plato does not propose for his future legislators

any study of finance or law or military tactics, but only of

abstract mathematics, as a preparation for the still more

abstract conception of good. We ask, with Aristotle, What is the

use of a man knowing the idea of good, if he does not know what

is good for this individual, this state, this condition of

society? We cannot understand how Plato's legislators or

guardians are to be fitted for their work of statesmen by the

study of the five mathematical sciences. We vainly search in

Plato's own writings for any explanation of this seeming

absurdity.