No, he said; there you are wrong, for I was going to ask another question—whether it is the State of which we are the founders and inventors, or some other?
Even our own State requires the addition of the living authority. Yes, I replied, ours in most respects; but you may remember my saying before, that some living authority would always be required in the State having the same idea of [D]the constitution which guided you when as legislator you were laying down the laws.
That was said, he replied.
Yes, but not in a satisfactory manner; you frightened us by interposing objections, which certainly showed that the discussion would be long and difficult; and what still remains is the reverse of easy.
What is there remaining?
The question how the study of philosophy may be so ordered as not to be the ruin of the State: All great attempts are attended with risk; ‘hard is the good,’ as men say.
[E] Still, he said, let the point be cleared up, and the enquiry will then be complete.
I shall not be hindered, I said, by any want of will, but, if at all, by a want of power: my zeal you may see for yourselves; and please to remark in what I am about to say how boldly and unhesitatingly I declare that States should pursue philosophy, not as they do now, but in a different spirit.
In what manner?
[498] The superficial study of philosophy which exists in the present day. At present, I said, the students of philosophy are quite young; beginning when they are hardly past childhood, they devote only the time saved from moneymaking and housekeeping to such pursuits; and even those of them who are reputed to have most of the philosophic spirit, when they come within sight of the great difficulty of the subject, I mean dialectic, take themselves off. In after life when invited by some one else, they may, perhaps, go and hear a lecture, and about this they make much ado, for philosophy is not considered 197 by them to be their proper business: at last, when they grow old, in most cases they are extinguished more [B]truly than Heracleitus’ sun, inasmuch as they never light up again[5].