"When they sing the praises of family and say that some one is a gentleman because he has had seven generations of wealthy ancestors, he [the philosopher] thinks that their sentiments only betray the dullness and narrowness of vision of those who utter them, and who are not educated enough to look at the whole, nor to consider that every man has had thousands and thousands of progenitors, and among them have been rich and poor, kings and slaves, Hellenes and barbarians, many times over. And when some one boasts of a catalogue of twenty-five ancestors, and goes back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, he cannot understand his poverty of ideas. Why is he unable to calculate that Amphitryon had a twenty-fifth ancestor, who might have been anybody, and was such as fortune made him, and he had a fiftieth, and so on? He is amused at the notion that he cannot do a sum, and thinks that a little arithmetic would have got rid of his senseless vanity." The type of life that is really noble or fine and good is to be found in the seeker for true beauty and goodness. External beauty of form and appearance has its value in kindling the desire for the higher forms of beauty,--beauty of mind, of institutions and laws, of science,--until finally the conception of the true beauty is reached. This true beauty, as distinct from the particular beauties, and true good, as distinct from seeming or partial good, are discovered only by the "philosopher," the seeker for wisdom. =Popular Morals.=--Nor did the more positively recognized types of moral excellence fare better. As recognized in common life, they were courage, prudence or moderation, holiness or a certain respect for the serious things of life, and justice: but none of these, Plato argues, is really an independent excellence, apart from conscious and intelligent action. Courage, for example, is not really courage unless one knows and foresees the danger in all its strength; otherwise there is merely reckless bravery. Prudence or moderation, to be really excellent, must be measured by wisdom. Even justice cannot be regarded as at bottom distinct from wisdom, the true measure of all the relations of life.