"The object proposed or the complete development of a thing is its highest good; but independence which is first attained in the State is a complete development or the highest good and is therefore natural." "For as the State was formed to make life possible, so it exists to make life good."
"Thus we see that the State is a natural institution, that man is naturally a political animal and that one who is not a citizen of any State, if the cause of his isolation be natural and not accidental, is either a superhuman being or low in the scale of human civilization, as he stands alone like a 'blot' on the backgammon board. The 'clanless, lawless, hearthless man,' so bitterly described by Homer, is a case in point, for he is naturally a citizen of no state and a lover of war."[70]
Nor does Aristotle stop here. With a profound insight into the relation of man to society, and the dependence of the individual upon the social body, a relation which modern social psychology has worked out in greater detail, Aristotle asserts that the State is not merely the goal of the individual's development, but the source of his life.
"Again, in the order of nature the State is prior to the household or individual. For the whole must needs be prior to its part. For instance, if you take away the body which is the whole, there will not remain any such thing as a hand or foot, unless we use the same word in a different sense, as when we speak of a stone hand as a hand. For a hand separated from the body will be a disabled hand; whereas it is the faculty or function of a thing which makes it what it is, and therefore when things lose their function or faculty, it is not correct to call them the same things, but rather homonymous, i.e., different things having the same name. We see, then, the State is a natural institution, and also that it is prior to the individual. For if the individual as a separate unit is not independent, he must be a part and must bear the same relation to the State as the other parts to their wholes; and one who is incapable of association with others or is independent and has no need of such association, is no member of a State; in other words, he is either a brute or a God."[71]
And, moreover, when we look into the nature of the individual, we do not find him a being devoid of the sympathies and qualities which find their natural expression not only in the State, but in various social and friendly relations. There is "an impulse toward the life in common" (φιλία) which expresses itself in friendship, but which is also so essential to that recognition of others called justice that we may say "it is the most just of all just things." There is also a unity of disposition and purpose (ὁμόνοια) which may be called "political friendship."[72]
Plato's Ideal State.—How then is the State constituted and governed which is to provide for man's full development, his complete good? Evidently two principles must control. In the first place, it must be so constituted that every man may develop in it the full capacities of his nature, and thereby serve at once the perfection of the State and his own completeness; and in the second place, the State or social whole must be ruled by those best fitted for this work. Not the soldier, nor the plutocrat, nor the artisan, but the man who knows, is the suitable ruler for our ideal community. The soldier may defend, the artisan may support, but the scientific or intelligent man should rule. And it is evident that in settling this principle, we have also answered our first problem; for the soldier and the artisan will find his full development by doing the work which he can do well, not by meddling with a task in which he must necessarily fail. In order to guard against the greed which was so characteristic of the governments of his day, Plato would provide that the rulers and warriors should have no private property, and not even private families. Their eye should be single to the good of the whole. When asked as to the practicability of a State governed by such disinterested rulers, and with such wisdom, he admits indeed its difficulty, but he stoutly demands its necessity:
"Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils,—no, nor the human race, as I believe,—and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day."[73]
And yet the question of the actual existence of a perfect State is not the question of supreme importance. For Plato has grasped the thought that man is controlled not only by what he sees, but by what he images as desirable. And if a man has once formed the image of an ideal State or city of this kind, in which justice prevails, and life reaches fuller and higher possibilities than it has yet attained, this is the main thing:
"In heaven, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter: for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other."[74]
The Social as Law of Nature.—The social nature of man, thus vindicated by Plato and Aristotle, remained as the permanent possession of Greek thought. Even the Epicureans, who developed further the hedonistic theory of life, emphasized the values of friendship as among the choicest and most refined sources of pleasure. The Stoics, who in their independence of wants took up the tradition of the Cynics, were yet far from interpreting this as an independence of society. The disintegration of the Greek states made it impossible to find the social body in the old city-state, and so we find with the Stoics a certain cosmopolitanism. It is the highest glory of man to be a citizen not of Athens but of the universe,—not of the city of Cecrops, but of the city of Zeus. And through this conception the social nature of man was made the basis of a "natural law," which found its expression in the principles of Roman and modern jurisprudence.