haos of political life.

There have been many attempts since Plato to deduce from a single
philosophical principle all the phenomena which experience subsequently
verifies for us. Fichte thought he could predict the world-plan from the
idea of universal time. Hegel dreamed he had found the key to the
mysteries of life in the development of freedom, and Krause in the
categories of being. But the one scientific basis on which the true
philosophy of history must rest is the complete knowledge of the laws of
human nature in all its wants, its aspirations, its powers and its
tendencies: and this great truth, which Thucydides may be said in some
measure to have apprehended, was given to us first by Plato.

Now, it cannot be accurately said of this philosopher that either his
philosophy or his history is entirely and simply a priori. On est de son
siecle meme quand on y proteste, and so we find in him continual
references to the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean system, the
general characteristics of Greek tyrannies and Greek democracies. For
while, in his account of the method of forming an ideal state, he says
that the political artist is indeed to fix his gaze on the sun of
abstract truth in the heavens of the pure reason, but is sometimes to
turn to the realisation of the ideals on earth: yet, after all, the
general character of the Platonic method, which is what we are specially
concerned with, is essentially deductive and a priori. And he himself,
in the building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a
[Greek], making a clean sweep of all history and all experience; and it
was essentially as an a priori theorist that he is criticised by
Aristotle, as we shall see later.

To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme of the laws of
political revolutions as drawn out by Plato, we must first note that the
primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the general principle,
common to the vegetable and animal worlds as well as to the world of
history, that all created things are fated to decay--a principle which,
though expressed in the terms of a mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet
perhaps in its essence scientific. For we too must hold that a
continuous redistribution of matter and motion is the inevitable result
of the normal persistence of Force, and that perfect equilibrium is as
impossible in politics as it certainly is in physics.

The secondary causes which mar the perfection o