clearly as he now discerns his meaner ends. And have we not decided that our rulers must neither be so uneducated as to have no fixed rule of life, nor so over-educated as to be unwilling to leave their paradise for the business of the world? While we must choose out the natures who are most likely to ascend to the light and knowledge of the good, we must not allow them to remain in that region of light, but must force them to descend again among the captives in the den to partake of their labours and honours. Nor is this unjust to them, for our purpose in framing the State was not that our citizens should do what they like, but that they should serve the State for the common good of all. May we not fairly say to the philosopher: In other states philosophy grows wild, and a wild plant owes nothing to the gardener, but you we have trained to be the rulers of our hive, and therefore we must insist on your descending into the darkness of the den? You must each of you take your turn and become able to use your eyes in the dark, and with a little practice you will see far better than those who quarrel about the shadows, whose knowledge is a dream only, whilst yours is a waking reality. It may be, the saint or philosopher who is best fitted, may also be the least inclined to rule, but necessity is laid upon him, and he must no longer live in the heaven of ideas. And this will be the salvation of the State.' し

Aristotle 'the master of the wise,' according to the great poet of the Middle Ages, the tyrant of the schools, and champion of the Obscurantists, according to Bacon and the Renaissance, was born at Stagira, a Greek colony in Thrace, in the year 385 B.C. He came to Athens in

his 17th year and studied under Plato for twenty years. On Plato's death in 347 B.C. he went with Xenocrates to reside at the court of his former pupil Hermias, the ruler of the Mysian cities of Assos and Atarneus. On the overthrow and death of Hermias in 344, he retired to Mitylene, from whence he was invited in 342 by Philip, King of Macedon, to superintend the education of his son Alexander, then a boy of 13. When Alexander set out on his Persian expedition in 335 B. C. Aristotle returned to Athens and taught in the Lyceum. As he lectured while walking his disciples were called Peripatetics'. On the death of Alexander, Aristotle left Athens to escape from a charge of impiety, 'desiring', as he said, 'to save the Athenians from sinning a second time against philosophy', and settled at Chalcis in Euboea, where he died 322 B.C.

It is worth while to pause and reflect for a moment on the succession here brought before us; Alexander the disciple of Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, the disciple of Socrates. That four such names, each supreme in his own line, should have been thus linked together, is a fact unparalleled in the history of the world; and its momentous nature is seen in its consequences, the Hellenizing of East and West by the sword of Alexander and by the writings of Plato and Aristotle. The work of Alexander might perhaps have been done by a meaner instrument, but without the 'great twin brethren' the whole course of human development must have been different. Science, Law, Philosophy, Theology, owe their present form and almost their existence to them. When Plato, griev

1 The form shows that the word is derived from Teρiñaréw not fron περίπατος.

ing over the helplessness and the isolation of the solitary thinker, sighed for a philosophic governor to carry out his ideas in action, he little dreamt that he was laying the foundation of a spiritual kingdom which was to embrace the whole of the civilized world. Then again, reflect on what is meant by twenty years of philosophic intercourse between a Plato and an Aristotle. Zeller has conclusively shown the falsehood of various scandalous anecdotes in which the latter is represented as guilty, among other faults, of disrespect and ingratitude towards his master. On the contrary there seems every reason to believe that tradition has preserved the spirit, if not the precise facts, of the relationship between them, when it attributes to Plato the saying that 'Aristotle was the intellect of his school' (voûs Tŷs diaтpißês), and to Aristotle the epitaph in which Plato is described as 'one whom it would be profanity in a bad man even to praise' (ἀνδρὸς, ὃν οὐδ ̓ αἰνεῖν τοῖσι κακοῖσι θέμις). No wonder that the mind of the disciple became to such a degree saturated with the thoughts of his master that, in the words of Sir A. Grant, 'almost every page of Aristotle's Logical, Rhetorical, Ethical, Political and Metaphysical writings bears traces of a relation to some part or other of Plato's dialogues'.'

But though it would hardly be going too far to say that Aristotle's philosophy, setting aside his Logic and Natural History, was, in the main, little more than an expansion and elaboration of the guesses and hints of Plato; though the groundwork of the two systems is the same, yet nothing can be more dissimilar than the impressions produced by the writings of the two men. The

1 Ethics of Aristotle, Vol. I. p. 180.

vague mysticism, the high poetic imagination, the reforming and revolutionary tendencies of the master, were altogether alien to the scholar. While Plato's aim was to modify or reform existing fact or opinion by the standard of the idea in his own mind, Aristotle's aim is to correct and develop the idea, which he usually accepts from Plato, by a reference to existing fact or opinion'. While Plato is overpowered by the sense of a surrounding infinity, which the intellect of man is powerless to grasp, but to which it is nevertheless drawn by an irresistible attraction; while he appears oppressed by the consciousness of the necessary incompleteness of all human knowledge, and seeks rather to throw new lights on the various objects of thought, than to bring them under fixed and definite formularies; Aristotle on the contrary cared only for what is clear, precise, defined, and made it his chief aim to map out the whole of existing knowledge in definite compartments and to sum up results in technical formulas of universal application. Probably one reason for his popularity in the Middle Ages was the almost magical virtue which he thus appears to attribute to formulas. Corresponding with this difference in tone and feeling is the difference of style: there is an inimitable charm and grace in almost every sentence of Plato, but Aristotle, of set purpose, adopts a style which is, for the most part, as dry and unadorned as Euclid, though perhaps we may be dis

1 See Ethics, x. 8, συμφωνεῖν τοῖς λόγοις εοίκασιν αἱ τῶν σοφῶν δόξαι. πίστιν μὲν οὖν καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα ἔχει τινά, τὸ δ ̓ ἀληθὲς ἐν τοῖς πρακτοῖς ἐκ τῶν ἔργων καὶ τοῦ βίου κρίνεται· ἐν τούτοις γὰρ τὸ κύριον. σκοπεῖν δὴ τὰ προειρημένα χρὴ ἐπὶ τὰ ἔργα καὶ τὸν βίον ἐπιφέροντας, καὶ συνᾳδόντων μὲν τοῖς ἔργοις ἀποδεκτέον, διαφωνούντων δὲ λόγους ὑποληπτέον.

posed to think, as we study his writings more carefully, that no other style could have given so strong an impression of the earnest truthfulness and the philosophic calm of the author'. For a further account of the relation between them, I borrow again from Sir Alexander Grant.

'While Aristotle is far more scientific, he is wanting in the moral earnestness, the tenderness, and the enthusiasm of Plato... On the other hand he is more safe than Plato. He is quite opposed to anything unnatural (such as communism) in life or institutions... And on all questions he endeavours to put himself in harmony with the opinions of the multitude, to which he thinks a certain validity must be ascribed' (p. 215). 'Plato's rich and manifold contributions to logic, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, and natural religion, were too much scattered up and down in his works, too much overlaid by conversational prolixity, too much coloured by poetry or wit, sometimes too subtly or slightly indicated, to be readily available for the world in general, and they thus required a process of codification. Aristotle with the greatest gifts for the analytic systematizing of philosophy that have ever been seen, unconsciously applied himself to the required task' (p. 181.)

Thus Plato's Dialectic method was developed by Aristotle into the strict technical science of Logic: Plato's Ideas, though shorn of their separate supra-mundane existence, still survived in the Aristotelian Form, as opposed to Matter. Aristotle distinguished three movements or aspects of the former, and, by adding to these the antagonistic principle of Matter, he arrived at his

1 For a more unfavourable view of Aristotle's style, see Cope, Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric, p. 132.