nal turn given to
philosophy, both by the Cyrenaics and the Cynics. He revived and
developed with much dialectical subtlety the metaphysical system of
Parmenides and the Eleatics, maintaining that there is but one absolute
existence, and that sense and sense-perceptions as against this [224]
are nothing. This one absolute existence was alone absolutely good,
and the good for man could only be found in such an absorption of
himself in this one absolute good through reason and contemplation, as
would bring his spirit into perfectness of union with it. Such
absorption raised a man above the troubles and pains of life, and thus,
in insensibility to these through reason, man attained his highest good.

The school is perhaps interesting only in so far as it marks the
continued survival of the abstract dialectic method of earlier
philosophy. As such it had a very definite influence, sometimes
through agreement, sometimes by controversy, on the systems of Plato
and Aristotle now to be dealt with.

{134}

CHAPTER XIV

PLATO

_Student and wanderer--The Dialogues--Immortal longings--Art is
love--Knowledge through remembrance--Platonic love_

[239]

This great master, the Shakespeare of Greek philosophy, as one may call
him, for his fertility, his variety, his humour, his imagination, his
poetic grace, was born at Athens in the year 429 B.C. He was of noble
family, numbering among his ancestors no less a man than the great
lawgiver Solon, and tracing back his descent even further to the [240]
legendary Codrus, last king of Athens. At a very early age he seems to
have begun to study the philosophers, Heraclitus more particularly, and
before he was twenty he had written a tragedy. About that time,
however, he met Socrates; and at once giving up all thought of poetic
fame he burnt his poem, and devoted himself to the hearing of Socrates.
For ten years he was his constant companion. When Socrates met his
death in 399, Plato and other followers of the master fled at first to
Megara, as already mentioned (above, p. 132); he then entered on a
period of extended travel, first to Cyrene and {135} Egypt, thence to
Italy and Sicily. In Italy he devoted himself specially to a study of
the doctrine of Pythagoras. It is said that at Syracuse he offended
the tyrant Dionysius the elder by his freedom of speech, and was
delivered up to the Spartans, who were then at war with Athens. [241]
Ultimately he was ransomed, and