st. This conception
of the political or royal science as, from another point of view, the
science of sciences, which holds sway over the rest, is not originally
found in Aristotle, but in Plato.

The doctrine that virtue and art are in a mean, which is familiarized
to us by the study of the Nicomachean Ethics, is also first distinctly
asserted in the Statesman of Plato. The too much and the too little
are in restless motion: they must be fixed by a mean, which is also
a standard external to them. The art of measuring or finding a mean
between excess and defect, like the principle of division in the
Phaedrus, receives a particular application to the art of discourse. The
excessive length of a discourse may be blamed; but who can say what is
excess, unless he is furnished with a measure or standard? Measure is
the life of the arts, and may some day be discovered to be the single
ultimate principle in which all the sciences are contained. Other forms
of thought may be noted--the distinction between causal and co-operative
arts, which may be compared with the distinction between primary and
co-operative causes in the Timaeus; or between cause and condition in
the Phaedo; the passing mention of economical science; the opposition of
rest and motion, which is found in all nature; the general conception
of two great arts of composition and division, in which are contained
weaving, politics, dialectic; and in connexion with the conception of a
mean, the two arts of measuring.

In the Theaetetus, Plato remarks that precision in the use of terms,
though sometimes pedantic, is sometimes necessary. Here he makes the
opposite reflection, that there may be a philosophical disregard of
words. The evil of mere verbal oppositions, the requirement of an
impossible accuracy in the use of terms, the error of supposing that
philosophy was to be found in language, the danger of word-catching,
have frequently been discussed by him in the previous dialogues, but
nowhere has the spirit of modern inductive philosophy been more happily
indicated than in the words of the Statesman:--'If you think more about
things, and less about words, you will be richer in wisdom as you grow
older.' A similar spirit is discernible in the remarkable expressions,
'the long and difficult language of facts;' and 'the interrogation of
every nature, in order to obtain the particular contribution of each to
the store of knowledge.' Who has described 'the feeble intelli