The first lesson his philosopher has to learn is to turn away from this world of becoming and decay, and to look upon the unchanging eternal world of ideas.

Thus his ideal city is, as he says, a pattern laid up in heaven by which the just man may rule his life, a pattern therefore in the meantime for the individual and not for the statesman.
It is a city, he admits in the Laws, for gods or the children of gods, not for men as they are.
Aristotle has none of the high enthusiasm or poetic imagination of Plato.

He is even unduly impatient of Plato's idealism, as is shown by the criticisms in the second book.

But he has a power to see the possibilities of good in things that are imperfect, and the patience of the true politician who has learned that if he would make men what they ought to be, he must take them as he finds them.

His ideal is constructed not of pure reason or poetry, but from careful and sympathetic study of a wide range of facts.