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Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of these

vast metaphysical conceptions to practical and political life. In

the first enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to see them everywhere,

and to apply them in the most remote sphere. They do not

understand that the experience of ages is required to enable them

to fill up 'the intermediate axioms.' Plato himself seems to have

imagined that the truths of psychology, like those of astronomy

and harmonics, would be arrived at by a process of deduction, and

that the method which he has pursued in the Fourth Book, of

inferring them from experience and the use of language, was

imperfect and only provisional. But when, after having arrived at

the idea of good, which is the end of the science of dialectic,

he is asked, What is the nature, and what are the divisions of

the science?