Statesman | Page 9

colour. And to
intelligent persons language is, or ought to be, a better instrument of
description than any picture. 'But what, Stranger, is the deficiency of
which you speak?' No higher truth can be made clear without an
example; every man seems to know all things in a dream, and to know
nothing when he is awake. And the nature of example can only be
illustrated by an example. Children are taught to read by being made to
compare cases in which they do not know a certain letter with cases in
which they know it, until they learn to recognize it in all its
combinations. Example comes into use when we identify something
unknown with that which is known, and form a common notion of both
of them. Like the child who is learning his letters, the soul recognizes
some of the first elements of things; and then again is at fault and
unable to recognize them when they are translated into the difficult
language of facts. Let us, then, take an example, which will illustrate
the nature of example, and will also assist us in characterizing the
political science, and in separating the true king from his rivals.
I will select the example of weaving, or, more precisely, weaving of
wool. In the first place, all possessions are either productive or
preventive; of the preventive sort are spells and antidotes, divine and
human, and also defences, and defences are either arms or screens, and
screens are veils and also shields against heat and cold, and shields

against heat and cold are shelters and coverings, and coverings are
blankets or garments, and garments are in one piece or have many parts;
and of these latter, some are stitched and others are fastened, and of
these again some are made of fibres of plants and some of hair, and of
these some are cemented with water and earth, and some are fastened
with their own material; the latter are called clothes, and are made by
the art of clothing, from which the art of weaving differs only in name,
as the political differs from the royal science. Thus we have drawn
several distinctions, but as yet have not distinguished the weaving of
garments from the kindred and co-operative arts. For the first process to
which the material is subjected is the opposite of weaving--I mean
carding. And the art of carding, and the whole art of the fuller and the
mender, are concerned with the treatment and production of clothes, as
well as the art of weaving. Again, there are the arts which make the
weaver's tools. And if we say that the weaver's art is the greatest and
noblest of those which have to do with woollen garments,-- this,
although true, is not sufficiently distinct; because these other arts
require to be first cleared away. Let us proceed, then, by regular steps:
--There are causal or principal, and co-operative or subordinate arts. To
the causal class belong the arts of washing and mending, of carding and
spinning the threads, and the other arts of working in wool; these are
chiefly of two kinds, falling under the two great categories of
composition and division. Carding is of the latter sort. But our concern
is chiefly with that part of the art of wool-working which composes,
and of which one kind twists and the other interlaces the threads,
whether the firmer texture of the warp or the looser texture of the woof.
These are adapted to each other, and the orderly composition of them
forms a woollen garment. And the art which presides over these
operations is the art of weaving.
But why did we go through this circuitous process, instead of saying at
once that weaving is the art of entwining the warp and the woof? In
order that our labour may not seem to be lost, I must explain the whole
nature of excess and defect. There are two arts of measuring--one is
concerned with relative size, and the other has reference to a mean or
standard of what is meet. The difference between good and evil is the
difference between a mean or measure and excess or defect. All things
require to be compared, not only with one another, but with the mean,

without which there would be no beauty and no art, whether the art of
the statesman or the art of weaving or any other; for all the arts guard
against excess or defect, which are real evils. This we must endeavour
to show, if the arts are to exist; and the proof of this will be a harder
piece of work than the demonstration of the existence of not-being
which we proved in our discussion about the Sophist. At present I am
content with the indirect proof