The nation, too, is not yet recognized as a great entity both natural and ethical, and therefore no consideration is given to the question of uniting the various city communities for the joint pursuit of higher objects. Each remains isolated. Plato thinks he has satisfied the claims produced by membership of the same nation by requiring that in wars waged by Greek States against one another the houses shall not be destroyed nor the fields laid waste, as if the war were against barbarians. The idea of humanity as a whole has not yet come in sight. It is, therefore, not possible for Plato and Aristotle to make their State work in co-operation with others to promote the general progress of mankind. They therefore establish their civilized State on a type which is hemmed in in every direction by narrow horizons. Moreover, the political community which they adopt as the type is at the very time when they are writing already a dying entity. While Aristotle is writing his _Politics_, his pupil, Alexander the Great, is founding an empire, and Rome is beginning to subject Italy to her rule. More important still than all external faults in their ideal [pg 051] of the civilized State is the fact that these two thinkers are unable to introduce into the community the energies which are needed for its maintenance. The idea of the civilized State is present with the vitality needed, only when the individual is by the impulse contained in his world-view moved so far as to devote himself to organized society with enthusiastic activity. Without civic idealism no civilized State! But to assume anything of that kind in the members of their State is impossible for Plato and Aristotle, since both have already reached the ideal of the wise man who withdraws himself prudently and gracefully from the world. Plato admits this. His wise citizens who are destined to be rulers devote themselves to the service of the State only when their turn comes, and are glad when they are set free and can again in retirement busy themselves, as wise among wise, with the world of pure Being. Aristotle, when he raises in the _Politics_ the question whether the contemplative life is not to be preferred to that of political activity, decides in theory in favour of the latter. “It is a mistake,” he says, “to value inactivity higher than activity, since happiness consists in activity.” But in the doctrine of virtue in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ there is nothing which could lead the individual to place his life at the service of the community. Plato and Aristotle cherish undoubtedly the ancient conviction that the individual ought to devote himself to the State, but they cannot find a foundation for it in their world-view. Like Epicurus and the adherents of the Porch, they are under the spell of an ethic in which there is present no will to attempt a transformation of the world.