Pagina 9 van 1391

We are thus led on to the conception of a higher State, in which

'no man calls anything his own,' and in which there is neither

'marrying nor giving in marriage,' and 'kings are philosophers'

and 'philosophers are kings;' and there is another and higher

education, intellectual as well as moral and religious, of

science as well as of art, and not of youth only but of the whole

of life. Such a State is hardly to be realized in this world and

quickly degenerates. To the perfect ideal succeeds the government

of the soldier and the lover of honour, this again declining into

democracy, and democracy into tyranny, in an imaginary but

regular order having not much resemblance to the actual facts.

When 'the wheel has come full circle' we do not begin again with

a new period of human life; but we have passed from the best to

the worst, and there we end.