[249] Its application certainly is on the surface: the Lacedaemonian details also--the military turn taken, the disinterestedness of the powerful, their monastic renunciation of what the world prizes most, above all the doctrine of a natural aristocracy with its "privileges and also its duties." Men are of simpler structure and capacities than you have fancied, Plato would assure us, and more decisively appointed to this rather than to that order of service. Nay, with the boldness proper to an idealist, he does not hesitate to represent them (that is the force of the mythus) as actually made of different stuff; and society, assuming a certain aristocratic humour in the nature of things, has for its business to sanction, safeguard, further promote it, by law. The state therefore, if it is to be really a living creature, will have, like the individual soul, those sensuous appetites which call the productive powers into action, and its armed conscience, and its far- reaching intellectual light: its industrial class, that is to say, its soldiers, its kings--the last, a kind of military monks, as you might think, on a distant view, their minds full of a kind of heavenly effulgence, yet superintending the labours of a large body of work- people in the town and the fields about it. Of the industrial or productive class, the artists and artisans, Plato speaks only in outline, but is significant in what he says; and enough remains of the actual fruits [250] of Greek industry to enable us to complete his outline for ourselves, as we may also, by aid of Greek art, together with the words of Homer and Pindar, equip and realise the full character of the true Platonic "war-man" or knight; and again, through some later approximate instances, discern something of those extraordinary, half-divine, philosophic kings.