f the Platonic 'city of
the sun' are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race consequent
on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation of physical
achievements over mental culture; while the hierarchical succession of
Timocracy and Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny, is dwelt on at great
length and its causes analysed in a very dramatic and psychological
manner, if not in that sanctioned by the actual order of history.

And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic succession of
states represents rather the succession of ideas in the philosophic mind
than any historical succession of time.

Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the theory of
the periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be scientific, it
must be universal, and so true of all the other states as well as of the
ideal. Besides, a state usually changes into its contrary and not to the
form next to it; so the ideal state would not change into Timocracy;
while Oligarchy, more often than Tyranny, succeeds Democracy. Plato,
besides, says nothing of what a Tyranny would change to. According to
the cycle theory it ought to pass into the ideal state again, but as a
fact one Tyranny is changed into another as at Sicyon, or into a
Democracy as at Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at Carthage. The
example of Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often followed by a
Tyranny, as at Leontini and Gela. Besides, it is absurd to represent
greed as the chief motive of decay, or to talk of avarice as the root of
Oligarchy, when in nearly all true oligarchies money-making is forbidden
by law. And finally the Platonic theory neglects the different kinds of
democracies and of tyrannies.

Now nothing can be more important than this passage in Aristotle's
Politics (v. 12.), which may be said to mark an era in the evolution of
historical criticism. For there is nothing on which Aristotle insists so
strongly as that the generalisations from facts ought to be added to the
data of the a priori method--a principle which we know to be true not
merely of deductive speculative politics but of physics also: for are not
the residual phenomena of chemists a valuable source of improvement in
theory?

His own method is essentially historical though by no means empirical. On
the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly styled il maestro di color
che sanno, may be said to have apprehended clearly that the true method
i