he arose at a time when doubt and sensuality, as represented by the teachings of Pyrrho and the distorted dicta of Epicurus, had corrupted the Athenian mind and heart. The Sophists, too, juggled with words, and the people had come to delight in verbal pyrotechnics and to care nothing for truth. He was the son of Sophroniscus, a sculptor. Diogenes tells us that, having zealously attended the lectures of Anaxagoras and Archelaus, he was observed by a rich Athenian, who gave him the means of pursuing his studies in philosophy. This entrancing study did not prevent him from entering the army and doing his duty as a citizen. He was not a dreamer, though the hidden dæmon, on whose direction he depended, dwelt within him. He served as a soldier in the campaign of Potidæa, at Delium, when he saved his pupil, Xenophon, and at Amphipolis. And yet he lived in a world of beautiful dreams. Plato, his disciple, represents the idealistic side of his nature; Aristotle and Xenophon, no less his acolytes, the practical side. The splendid Alcibiades was not easily moulded. His inner voice warned him not to interfere in politics, though he desired, above all things, to elevate his countrymen morally and socially. He seems to have yielded to popular superstition whenever he did not clash with the great objective truths on which the base of his moral teaching rested. Nevertheless, B.C. 399, when he was seventy years of age, he was accused of not believing in the national deities and of corrupting youth. He was neutral in politics, and when he had interfered, three times in his life, it had been for the unpopular side. He had loved the younger Pericles and admired Critias and Alcibiades; he was aristocratic in his tendencies. Besides, we are told, on good authority, that Socrates had endeavored to lure the son of the rich Anytus from leather-selling to philosophy. Again, Socrates was scornful and satirical; no guilty man escaped his sarcasm and irony. And his power of eloquent indignation was so great that even the victims of it forgot his fat body, his two full eyes, his careless dress, and thought for the moment that he was an avenging god. Truth and morality were real things; so he thought, and, when by a small majority, he was condemned to die, he would not violate law, which was sacred. He might have bought himself off by a fine, he might have bribed the factions, he might have escaped by the help of his friends. He was forced to wait thirty days until the sacred

trireme came from Delphos. "In this interval," Dr. Browne says, in his "History of Greek Classical Literature "-a book which ought to be revived-" we are indebted for that conversation on the immortality of the soul, which Plato has embodied in his Phædo,' and although Plato was not himself present, it is so Socratic that there can be little doubt that it was faithfully reported by those who were with him at his last moments." He drank the hemlock, not for love of death, but for love of the law. Socrates was not a conscious teacher of systematic philosophy, he was a moral teacher, with a set of principles. The perfect intellect was the Omega of life. Knowledge, to him, was the first of all things in the way to the supreme good-which was truth. He believed in an omnipotent supreme being, the first cause, and that the rational in man was a part of this Governing Being. In the after life, all would be well with the noble soul, he believed. To be like this Supreme Being, we must cultivate our intellect at the expense of the lower qualities. Virtue was science; perfect knowledge was perfect virtue; therefore ignorance was the only sin, and that an involuntary sin. The entirely wise man -the possessor of perfect science-could not sin.

Although it seems difficult to formulate exactly the principles of Socrates, and to discover their central point, the fact that Plato's system is set in one key makes it easier to analyze Platonism. The human soul is of the same spirit as the Supreme Being; it neither begins nor ends; the soul knew itself and still remembers some of its knowledge. The splendor of another world is reflected upon it. Plato systematized previous theories; Aristotle followed his example. It was reserved for St. Thomas Aquinas to meet sophisms, with fuller knowledge than Socrates, and to make a summa of the best that had preceded him. The philosophical movement is not of one time; it goes on, widening, classifying, perfecting itself from epoch to epoch.

Aristocles (born B.C. 429), called Plato from the breadth of his shoulders, offers a striking example of this. Having gathered the best that had preceded him, he made a great leap forward by developing his own theory above the ruins of old errors. His methods are improved upon those of Socrates. He meets Protagoras with the assertion that all knowledge is not the result of materialistic contact-or, in other words, of

sensation. And he opposed himself to the Eleatic assertion that no knowledge can be obtained through the senses. He held that man was composed of body and soul, intimately related. The apprehension of the intellect is pure and immutable; the apprehension of the senses non-essential, changeable. The body is an impediment to truth. When the soul is free from the body, it may, unblinded, see truth. All that exists, exists only so far as it participates in the absolute and unchangeable Divine Idea, of which the soul is part. God and the highest good are the same; the highest idea is good. He believes in the living soul and in the Deity who pervades the universe. He has been called a Pantheist as not having the fixed idea of a personal intelligence. But a careful reading of the four dialogues collected here will, I fancy, show that he was much more than a believer in an abstract, pervasive, eternal principle. The soul of the world permeates the world, and from it come other souls, to be supported by it. Plato is a firm believer in the immortality of the soul. In the most poetical of the dialogues," Phædo," we find this philosopher, who would have, in an ideal republic, driven poets into the wilderness, crowned with flowers, invalidating his arguments by an ascent into the myths of the singers. He held, with Pythagoras, the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, so fascinating in all ages to the imagination, and from this followed the theory of the reminiscences of the half-awakened soul, which Wordsworth calls the "trailing clouds of glory." According to Plato man may choose the good, and this the philosopher, free and unconstrained, will do-for God is not fate. Plato was a soldier, like Socrates. Unlike Socrates, to whose influence he acknowledged that he owed all, he founded a school.

Aristotle (born B.C. 384), his most distinguished pupil, was not an Athenian. His father was court physician to Amyntas II, King of Macedon; he was not of noble descent, as was Plato, who claimed King Codrus and Solon among his ancestors. His father, a learned man, directed his tastes. At the age of seventeen he was left alone in the world, but his inherited fortune enabled him to pursue his studies. At Athens, he deserved the praise of Plato, who called him " the mind of the school." He did not hesitate to argue with his preceptor. He loved Plato; but between Plato and truth, he chose truth. It is said that, on a day when Aristotle was the only pupil present

at a lecture, Plato said that so long as he had Aristotle, he had the better half of Athens. Aristotle founded the Peripatetic school. After the death of Plato, he became (B.C. 324) tutor to Alexander, who, later, rewarded him munificently. But, when Alexander died, the enemies of Aristotle at Athens prepared to end him or to make him give up the enormous sum which Alexander had given him. To prevent the Athenians from committing another crime, he went to the island of Euboea, where he died B.C. 322.

Aristotle was the idol of the philosophical world until the Renaissance. While Plato is of imagination all compact, Aristotle is practical, systematic, regular. Plato was an idealist, he was a poet at heart, and he had the dramatic faculty, as one may see from even a slight reading of the dialogues. Plato had inspiration, and exquisite grace of literary utterance; Aristotle had neither, but he was a master of analysis. Plato sometimes forgot man and that he was a man; Aristotle was always in sight of earth; he was the most practical, the serenest, the most learned man of his time. Logic stood first with him-his chief treatise on this subject is the "Organum." That the world owes to him the formulation of the deductive method is too well known to be repeated here; it is a common fallacy that Bacon founded the inductive system; he merely elaborated the suggestions of Aristotle. Aristotle held that death finished the good and bad; he doubted that the soul could exist apart from the body. Reason was omnipresent and divine. As modern scientists use the atomic theory as a tool, so Christian philosophers have adopted the methods of Aristotle in systematizing truth.

Aristotle's "Poetics" and " Politics " cut clear to the causes of things. The "Poetics" is better known; the "Politics " the more important. Ethics and politics, with Aristotle, are inseparable. The State must be founded on a basis of good. The greatest good of each family must be safeguarded, so far as the good of the State can be safeguarded. The morality of the people determines the morality of the State. It is, therefore, the duty of the State to direct education; and, as the moral condition of the citizen is a prime factor in the State, each citizen should be trained, so far as possible, in the science of politics. Administrators of private education should be efficient in the science of legislation. Aristotle's views on

politics are worthy of the closest study. He hated most, after monarchical tyranny, the rule of the mob. He was in favor of a property qualification for the exercise of the highest privileges of citizenship. He believed, though, he was more aristocratic than democratic, that the legislator should secure the goodwill of the middle classes, as they are the ballast of the ship of the State. He had no sympathy with communism. The basis of his system was the union of families for common contentment and progress. Ethics stood at one end of his political system; economics at the other.

At the end of the beginning of the twentieth century, it becomes us to look back, and to discover the beginning of things, when the pollen flew from the plant and the seeds were sown. The self-sufficiency (aúraрxea) which Aristotle loved in the State is not that modern self-sufficiency which we find in individuals who have lost the possibility of looking intelligently forward because they are not sufficiently cultured to look backward.

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