unterpart in the threefold
rank of society. Man is indeed but a type of a larger cosmos, and it
is not as an individual but as a citizen that he finds his station and
duties, and is capable of realising his true life.

Thus we see how Plato is led to correct the shortcomings of
Socrates--his abrupt distinction between ignorance and knowledge, his
vagueness as to the meaning of the good, and his tendency to emphasise
the subjective side of virtue and withdraw the individual from the
community of which he is essentially a part. But in developing his
theory of ideas Plato has represented the true life of man as
consisting in the knowledge of, and indeed in absorption in, God, a
state to which man can only attain by the suppression of his natural
impulses and withdrawal from earthly life: and though there is not
wanting in Plato's later teaching the higher conception of the
transformation of the animal passions, he is not wholly successful in
overcoming the dualism between impulse and reason which besets some of
the earlier dialogues.

It is a striking proof of the vitality of Plato that his teaching has
affected every form of idealism and has helped to shape the history of
religious thought in all ages. Not only many of the early Fathers,
such as Clement and Origen, but the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, the
Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century, and also the German
theologians, Baur and Schleiermacher, have recognised numerous
coincidences between Christianity and Platonism: as Bishop Westcott has
said, 'Plato points to St. John.'[2] His influence may be detected in
some of the greatest Christian poetry of our own country, especially in
that of Wordsworth and Tennyson. For Plato believes, in common with
the greatest of every age, in 'that inborn passion for perfection,'
that innate though often unconscious yearning after the true, the
beautiful, the good,

'Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,'

which are the heritage of human nature.

{40}

3. The Ethics of _Aristotle_ does not essentially differ from that of
Plato. He is the first to treat of morals formally as a science,
which, however, in his hands becomes a division of politics. Man, says
Aristotle, is really a social animal. Even more decisively than Plato,
therefore, he treats man as a part of society. While in Plato there is
the foreshadowing of the truth that the goal of moral endeavour lies in
godlikeness, wit