effort which he makes is, first, to realize abstractions, secondly,
to connect them. In the attempt to realize them, he was carried into a
transcendental region in which he isolated them from experience, and we
pass out of the range of science into poetry or fiction. The fancies of
mythology for a time cast a veil over the gulf which divides phenomena
from onta (Meno, Phaedrus, Symposium, Phaedo). In his return to earth
Plato meets with a difficulty which has long ceased to be a difficulty
to us. He cannot understand how these obstinate, unmanageable ideas,
residing alone in their heaven of abstraction, can be either combined
with one another, or adapted to phenomena (Parmenides, Philebus,
Sophist). That which is the most familiar process of our own minds, to
him appeared to be the crowning achievement of the dialectical art. The
difficulty which in his own generation threatened to be the destruction
of philosophy, he has rendered unmeaning and ridiculous. For by his
conquests in the world of mind our thoughts are widened, and he has
furnished us with new dialectical instruments which are of greater
compass and power. We have endeavoured to see him as he truly was, a
great original genius struggling with unequal conditions of knowledge,
not prepared with a system nor evolving in a series of dialogues ideas
which he had long conceived, but contradictory, enquiring as he goes
along, following the argument, first from one point of view and then
from another, and therefore arriving at opposite conclusions, hovering
around the light, and sometimes dazzled with excess of light, but always
moving in the same element of ideal truth. We have seen him also in his
decline, when the wings of his imagination have begun to droop, but his
experience of life remains, and he turns away from the contemplation of
the eternal to take a last sad look at human affairs.

...

And so having brought into the world 'noble children' (Phaedr.), he
rests from the labours of authorship. More than two thousand two hundred
years have passed away since he returned to the place of Apollo and
the Muses. Yet the echo of his words continues to be heard among men,
because of all philosophers he has the most melodious voice. He is the
inspired prophet or teacher who can never die, the only one in whom the
outward form adequately represents the fair soul within; in whom the
thoughts of all who went before him are reflected and of all who come
after him are p