Among ideals
themselves infinite variety is consistent with perfect harmony, but
matter that has not yet developed or discovered its organic affinities
may well show groping and contradictory tendencies. When, however, these
embryonic disorders are once righted, each possible life knows its
natural paradise, and what some unintelligent outsider might say in
dispraise of that ideal will never wound or ruffle the self-justified
creature whose ideal it is, any more than a cat's aversion to water will
disturb a fish's plan of life.

[Sidenote: Theory that stations actually correspond to faculty.]

An aristocratic society might accordingly be a perfect heaven if the
variety and superposition of functions in it expressed a corresponding
diversity in its members' faculties and ideals. And, indeed, what
aristocratic philosophers have always maintained is that men really
differ so much in capacity that one is happier for being a slave,
another for being a shopkeeper, and a third for being a king. All
professions, they say, even the lowest, are or may be vocations. Some
men, Aristotle tells us, are slaves by nature; only physical functions
are spontaneous in them. So long as they are humanely treated, it is,
we may infer, a benefit for them to be commanded; and the contribution
their labour makes toward rational life in their betters is the highest
dignity they can attain, and should be prized by them as a sufficient
privilege.

Such assertions, coming from lordly lips, have a suspicious optimism
about them; yet the faithful slave, such as the nurse we find in the
tragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description. In other
regions it is surely true that to advance in conventional station would
often entail a loss in true dignity and happiness. It would seldom
benefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become a
prima donna. Scientific breeding might conceivably develop much more
sharply the various temperaments and faculties needed in the state; and
then each caste or order of citizens would not be more commonly
dissatisfied with its lot than men or women now are with their sex. One
tribe would run errands as persistently as the ants; another would sing
like the lark; a third would show a devil's innate fondness for stoking
a fiery furnace.

[Sidenote: Its falsity.]

Aristocracy logically involves castes. But such castes as exist in
India, and the social classes we find in the western world, ar