§ 67. The educational book of Aristotle’s “Politics” (VII. in the now received order) is a mere fragment, which suggests many problems, and solves but few. Even with the help of some important corrections from the “Ethics,” we find it the narrow and old-fashioned scheme of a pedant Greek, written with admiration for the artificial discipline of Sparta, and unable to understand even the far more splendid Hellenic ideal sketched by Thucydides in his speech of Pericles. We know, however, from the “Ethics” that he felt the essential importance of family ties between husband and wife, between parents and children. Hence he rejects Plato’s proposal of abolishing the family, and insists that the ideal State must consist of households in the strict sense. But, on the other hand, he quite agrees with Plato’s view that the social and moral aspects of marriage are by no means inconsistent with a strict supervision of the producing of healthy children by the State. He foreshadowed the state of things anticipated above, when husband and wife will still feel the deep sanctity and thorough loyalty of their relation, and yet not leave to mere accident the most important product, nay, the only product, so far as the State is concerned, of their union. He is just as careful as Plato in recommending care of unborn children by attention to their mothers’ air and exercise. He is still more ruthless in advocating the destruction, either before or after birth, of illegitimate offspring. Neither can he, any more than Plato, imagine an ideal state capable of such expansion as to contain a great people, nor can he dispense with disabilities for most of its members, such as slaves and operatives. He does not contemplate the very long and elaborate after-training of Plato’s guardians, for he does not conceive this world as a preparation for another, but as an end in itself. And it is probably for this reason that he is so superior to Plato in analyzing the function of refined recreation, and the ennoblement of leisure by æsthetic pleasures. Thus he sees that music is to be utilized as a recreation for youth, as well as for a moral engine of education. He has explained in his “Poetic” that dramatic poetry is not mere fiction, to be banished from the ideal State as teaching falsehood or depicting crime, but a representation of human life deeper and more philosophic than history, inasmuch as history only widens the intellect, while the drama also purifies the emotions of the spectator. It may even be argued that history widens the intellect only so far as it is conceived as a drama--a development of human character--and not as a mere recitation of facts.