Our kings must be philosophers. But not, we must carefully note, because, as people are apt to fancy, philosophers as such necessarily despise or are unable to feel what is fascinating in the world of action, are un-formed or withered on one side, and, as regards the allurements of the world of sense, are but "corpses." For Plato certainly they are no starvelings. The philosophic, or aristocratic, or kingly, nature, as he conceives it, will be the perfect flower of the whole compass of natural endowments, promoted to the utmost by the artificial influences of society--kalokagathos +--capable therefore in the extreme degree of success in a purely "self-regarding" policy, of an [261] exploitation, in their own interests, of all that men in general value most, to the surfeiting, if they cared, of their ambition, their vanity, their love of liberty or license. Nor again must our kings be philosophers mainly because in such case the world will be very wisely, very knowingly, governed. Of course it would be well that wise men should rule. Even a Greek, still "a youth in the youth of the world," who indeed was not very far gone from an essentially youthful evaluation of things, was still apt to think with Croesus that the richest must of course be the happiest of men, and to have a head-ache when compelled to think, even he would have taken so much for granted. That it would be well that wise men should govern, wise after the Platonic standard, bringing, that is to say, particular details under coherent general rules, able to foresee and influence the future by their knowledge of the past:--there is no paradox in that: it belongs rather, you might complain, to the range of platitudes. But, remember! the hinge of Plato's whole political argument is, that the ruinous divisions of Athens, of Greece, of the entire social community, is the want of disinterestedness in its rulers; not that they are unfit to rule; rather, that they have often, it may be, a natural call to office--those exceptional high natures--but that they "abound" therein exclusively "in their own sense." And the precise point of paradox in philosophic kingship, [262] as Plato takes it, is this, that if we have philosophers for our kings, our archons, we shall be under a sort of rulers who as such have made sacrifice of themselves, and in coming to office at all must have taken upon them "the form of a servant."--