True (replies Sokrates)--yet nevertheless he can perform no great achievement, unless he meets with a community suited to him. Amidst such a community he will himself rise to greatness, and will preserve the public happiness as well as his own. But there exists no such community anywhere, at the present moment. Not one of those now existing is worthy of a philosophical disposition:[177] which accordingly becomes perverted, and degenerates into a different type adapted to its actual abode, like exotic seed transported to a foreign soil. But if this philosophical disposition were planted in a worthy community, so as to be able to assert its own superior excellence, it would then prove itself truly divine, leaving other dispositions and pursuits behind as merely human. [Footnote 177: Plato, Republic, vi. p. 497 B-C.] [Side-note: It must be such a community as Sokrates has been describing--But means must be taken to keep up a perpetual succession of philosophers as Rulers.] You mean by a worthy community (observes Adeimantus), such an one as that of which you have been drawing the outline?--I do (replies Sokrates): with this addition, already hinted but not explained, that there must always be maintained in it a perpetual supervising authority representing the scheme and purpose of the primitive lawgiver. This authority must consist of philosophers: and the question now arises--difficult but indispensable--how such philosophers are to be trained up and made efficient for the good of the city. [Side-note: Proper manner of teaching philosophy--Not to begin at a very early age.] The plan now pursued for imparting philosophy is bad. Some do not learn it at all: and even to those who learn it best, the most difficult part (that which relates to debate and discourse) is taught when they are youths just emerging from boyhood, in the intervals of practical business and money-getting.[178] After that period, in their mature age, they abandon it altogether; they will scarcely so much as go to hear an occasional lecture on the subject, without any effort of their own: accordingly it has all died out within them, when they become mature in years. This manner of teaching philosophy ought to be reversed. In childhood and youth, instruction of an easy character and suitable to that age ought to be imparted; while the greatest care is taken to improve and strengthen the body during its period of growth, as a minister and instrument to philosophy. As age proceeds, and the mind advances to perfection, the mental exercises ought to become more difficult and absorbing. Lastly, when the age of bodily effort passes away, philosophy ought to become the main and principal pursuit.[179]