Stranger: The error was just as if someone who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, and have no ties or common language, they include under the single name of “barbarians,” and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also. Or suppose that in dividing numbers you were to cut off ten thousand from all the rest, and make of it one species, comprehending the rest under another separate name, you might say that here too was a single class, because you had given it a single name. Whereas you would make a much better and more equal and logical classification of numbers, if you divided them into odd and even; or of the human species, if you divided them into male and female; and only separated off Lydians or Phrygians, or any other tribe, and arrayed them against the rest of the world, when you could no longer make a division into parts which were also classes.
Young Socrates: Very true; but I wish that this distinction between a part and a class could still be made somewhat plainer.
Stranger: O Socrates, best of men, you are imposing upon me a very difficult task. We have already digressed further from our original intention than we ought, and you would have us wander still further away. But we must now return to our subject; and hereafter, when there is a leisure hour, we will follow up the other track; at the same time, I wish you to guard against imagining that you ever heard me declare—
Young Socrates: What?
Stranger: That a class and a part are distinct.
Young Socrates: What did I hear, then?
Stranger: That a class is necessarily a part, but there is no similar necessity that a part should be a class; that is the view which I should always wish you to attribute to me, Socrates.
Young Socrates: So be it.
Stranger: There is another thing which I should like to know.
Young Socrates: What is it?
Stranger: The point at which we digressed; for, if I am not mistaken, the exact place was at the question, Where you would divide the management of herds. To this you appeared rather too ready to answer that there were two species of animals; man being one, and all brutes making up the other.
Young Socrates: True.
Stranger: I thought that in taking away a part, you imagined that the remainder formed a class, because you were able to call them by the common name of brutes.
Young Socrates: That again is true.
Stranger: Suppose now, O most courageous of dialecticians, that some wise and understanding creature, such as a crane is reputed to be, were, in imitation of you, to make a similar division, and set up cranes against all other animals to their own special glorification, at the same time jumbling together all the others, including man, under the appellation of brutes—here would be the sort of error which we must try to avoid.
Young Socrates: How can we be safe?
Stranger: If we do not divide the whole class of animals, we shall be less likely to fall into that error.
Young Socrates: We had better not take the whole?
Stranger: Yes, there lay the source of error in our former division.
Young Socrates: How?
Stranger: You remember how that part of the art of knowledge which was concerned with command, had to do with the rearing of living creatures—I mean, with animals in herds?
Young Socrates: Yes.
Stranger: In that case, there was already implied a division of all animals into tame and wild; those whose nature can be tamed are called tame, and those which cannot be tamed are called wild.
Young Socrates: True.
Stranger: And the political science of which we are in search, is and ever was concerned with tame animals, and is also confined to gregarious animals.