He admits that democracy may be considered as a form of government ("... if democracy be a real form of government...."), and he admits too that "... multitudes, of which each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together, may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively.... Hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole. [Observe that he is still speaking of a democracy in which slaves and artisans are not citizens.] Doubtless too democracy is the most tolerable of perverted governments, and Plato has already made these distinctions, but his point of view is not the same as mine. For he lays down the principle that of all good constitutions democracy is the worst, but the best of bad ones." But still Aristotle cannot help thinking that democracy is a sociological mistake "... It must be admitted that we cannot raise to the rank of citizens all those, even the most useful, who are necessary to the existence of the State." Democracy has this drawback that it cannot constitutionally retain within itself and encourage eminent men. In a democracy "if there be some one person or more than one, although not enough to make up the whole complement of a State, whose virtue is so pre-eminent that the virtues or the capacity of all the rest admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be no longer regarded as part of a State; for justice will not be done to the superior, if he is reckoned only as the equal of those who are so far inferior to him in virtue and in political capacity. Such an one may truly be deemed a God among men. Hence we see that legislation is necessarily concerned only with those who are equal in birth and in power; and that for men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law--they are themselves a law. Anyone would be ridiculous who attempted to make laws for them: they would probably retort what, in the fable of Antisthenes, the lions said to the hares--'where are your claws?'--when in the council of the beasts the latter began haranguing and claiming equality for all. And for this reason democratic States have instituted ostracism; equality is above all things their aim, and therefore they ostracise and banish from the city for a time those who seem to predominate too much through their wealth, or the number of their friends, or through any other political influence. Mythology tells us that the Argonauts left Heracles behind for a similar reason; the ship Argo would not take him because she feared that he would have been too much for the rest of the crew."