Plato's chief purpose, in writing upon education, had been to suggest a remedy for the social and moral conditions of his native Athens. Aristotle has no such purpose. He is, in a very deep sense, a cosmopolitan, and writes in the interest of science and universal utility. His range of vision is not confined to Athens, or even to Greece (though he is very proud of being a Greek), but ranges over the whole known world in time and space. Unlike Plato, too, who had been familiar mainly with institutions of the past in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle is deeply affected by the tendencies of the future, and, though no one lays greater stress than he upon the necessity of a knowledge of the past for him who would construct a sound social theory, he nevertheless declares that the whole of the past is shaped by something which is in the future, by the ultimate realization. This view comes out in a paradoxical way in his famous saying that "the State is prior to the individual," by which he means that it is man's political nature working in him that makes him an individual, and at the same time realizes itself in a State. And this brings us to Aristotle's conception of the State, which we must consider before taking up his theory of education, for the reason that to him, as to all the ancient world, education is a function of the State, and is conducted, primarily at least, for the ends of the State. Before venturing upon a theory of the State, Aristotle, true to his inductive principles, wrote the Constitutional Histories of over two hundred and fifty different states. One of these, the _Constitutional History of Athens_, has recently been discovered and published (see p. 96). He held that it was only by means of a broad induction, thus rendered possible, that he could discover the idea of the State, that is, its self-realizing form. Employing this method, then, he came to the conclusion that the State is that highest social institution which secures the highest good or happiness of man. Having, in a previous treatise, satisfied himself that this good is Worth (ἀρετή), and worth being in every case the full exercise of characteristic or differentiating faculty, he concludes that, since man's distinguishing faculty is reason, the State is the institution which secures to man the fullest and freëst exercise of this. It follows directly that the State is, simply and solely, the supreme educational institution, the university to which all other institutions are but preparatory. And two more conclusions follow: (1) that states will differ in constitution with the different educational needs of the peoples among whom they exist, and (2) that, since all education is but a preparation for some worthy activity, political education, the life of man as a citizen, is but a preparation for the highest activity, which, because it is highest, must necessarily be an end in itself. This activity, Aristotle