This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written: 'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the _Republic_, 'as he appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned, for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and strange things had grown round him, shells and seaweed and stones, so that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to us now encompassed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real nature.' (_Republic_, 611.) Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with no effect on the rest of the universe (_Sophist_, 248, 249); it is a living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as glorious as possible (_Tim._ 29 D). There is no envy, Plato says, in the Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is towards the life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed. None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be significant for him. He does not turn aside,--as some souls, intoxicated with the Divine, have done,--from this world altogether. Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there what the universe really is (_Republic_, Book vi, _fin._; vii, _init._). The very passage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end of the _Republic_. Now the _Republic_ is a Utopia, and no one writes a Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime importance to man and helps him to advance.