gence of
all things; given by metaphysics better than the Eleatic Stranger in
the words--'The higher ideas can hardly be set forth except through
the medium of examples; every man seems to know all things in a kind of
dream, and then again nothing when he is awake?' Or where is the value
of metaphysical pursuits more truly expressed than in the words,--'The
greatest and noblest things have no outward image of themselves visible
to man: therefore we should learn to give a rational account of them?'

III. The political aspects of the dialogue are closely connected
with the dialectical. As in the Cratylus, the legislator has 'the
dialectician standing on his right hand;' so in the Statesman, the king
or statesman is the dialectician, who, although he may be in a private
station, is still a king. Whether he has the power or not, is a mere
accident; or rather he has the power, for what ought to be is ('Was
ist vernunftig, das ist wirklich'); and he ought to be and is the true
governor of mankind. There is a reflection in this idealism of the
Socratic 'Virtue is knowledge;' and, without idealism, we may remark
that knowledge is a great part of power. Plato does not trouble himself
to construct a machinery by which 'philosophers shall be made kings,' as
in the Republic: he merely holds up the ideal, and affirms that in some
sense science is really supreme over human life.

He is struck by the observation 'quam parva sapientia regitur mundus,'
and is touched with a feeling of the ills which afflict states. The
condition of Megara before and during the Peloponnesian War, of Athens
under the Thirty and afterwards, of Syracuse and the other Sicilian
cities in their alternations of democratic excess and tyranny, might
naturally suggest such reflections. Some states he sees already
shipwrecked, others foundering for want of a pilot; and he wonders not
at their destruction, but at their endurance. For they ought to have
perished long ago, if they had depended on the wisdom of their rulers.
The mingled pathos and satire of this remark is characteristic of
Plato's later style.

The king is the personification of political science. And yet he is
something more than this,--the perfectly good and wise tyrant of the
Laws, whose will is better than any law. He is the special providence
who is always interfering with and regulating all things. Such a
conception has sometimes been entertained by modern theologians, and by
Plato himself, of