[Footnote 140: If we take the sentence from Aristotle's Politics, cited in a note immediately preceding, to the effect that all the citizens belonged to the city, and that each was a part of the city (viii. 1, p. 1337, a. 28) in conjunction with another passage in the Politics (i. 3, p. 1254, a. 10)--[Greek: To/ te ga\r mo/rion, ou) mo/non a)/llou e)sti\ mo/rion, a)lla\ kai\ _o(/lôs a)/llou_]--it is difficult to see how he can, consistently with these principles, assign to his citizens any individual self-regarding agency. Plato denies all such to his Guardians, and in so doing he makes deductions consistent with the principles of Aristotle, who lays down his principles too absolutely for the use which he afterwards makes of them.] [Footnote 141: Aristotel. Politic. ii. 5, p. 1263, b. 29. [Greek: phai/netai d' ei)=nai pa/mpan a)du/natos o( bi/os.]] [Side-note: Aristotle declares the Platonic Commonwealth impossible--In what sense this is true.] If we go through the separate objections which Aristotle advances as justifying his verdict, we shall find them altogether inadequate for the purpose. He shows certain inconveniences and difficulties as belonging to it,--which are by no means all real, but which, even conceding them in full force, would have to be set against the objections admitted by himself to bear against other actual societies before we can determine whether they are sufficiently weighty to render the scheme to which they belong impossible. The Platonic commonwealth, and the Aristotelian commonwealth, are both of them impossible, in my judgment, for the same reason: that all the various communities of mankind exist under established customs, beliefs, and sentiments, in complete discordance with them: and that we cannot understand from whence the force is to come, tending and competent to generate either of these two new systematic projects. Both of them require a simultaneous production of many reciprocally adapted elements: both therefore require an express initiative force, exceptional and belonging to some peculiar crisis--something analogous to Zeus in Krete, and to Apollo at Sparta. This is alike true of both: though the Platonic Republic, departing more widely from received principles and sentiments than the Aristotelian, would of course require a more potent initiative.[142] In the treatises of the two philosophers, each explains and vindicates the principles of his system, without including in the hypothesis any specification of a probable source from whence it was to acquire its first start. Where is the motive, operative, demiurgic force, ready to translate such an idea into reality?[143] But if we assume that either of them had once begun, there is no reason why it might not have continued. The causes which first brought about the Spartan constitution and discipline must have been very peculiar, though we have no historical account what they were. At any rate