ose pleasant old games of
ours, an argument, that he wished to manifest his righteousness to
the world.... The only method for him, according to Plato, would be
Glaucon's, of calumny and persecution, the scourge and the cross?'

'What words are these, Raphael? Material scourges and crosses for an
eternal and spiritual idea?'

'Did you ever yet, Hypatia, consider at leisure what the archetype of
man might be like?'

Hypatia started, as at a new thought, and confessed--as every
Neo--Platonist would have done--that she had never done so.

'And yet our master, Plato, bade us believe that there was a substantial
archetype of each thing, from a flower to a nation, eternal in the
heavens. Perhaps we have not been faithful Platonists enough heretofore,
my dearest tutor. Perhaps, being philosophers, and somewhat of Pharisees
to boot, we began all our lucubrations as we did our prayers, by
thanking God that we were not as other men were; and so misread another
passage in the _Republic_, which we used in pleasant old days to be fond
of quoting.'

'What was that?' asked Hypatia, who became more and more interested
every moment.

'That philosophers were men.'

'Are you mocking me? Plato defines the philosopher as the man who
seeks after the objects of knowledge, while others seek after those of
opinion.'

'And most truly. But what if, in our eagerness to assert that wherein
the philosopher differed from other men, we had overlooked that in which
he resembled other men; and so forgot that, after all, man was a genus
whereof the philosopher was only a species?'

Hypatia sighed.

'Do you not think, then, that as the greater contains the less, and the
archetype of the genus that of the species, we should have been wiser if
we had speculated a little more on the archetype of man as man,
before we meddled with a part of that archetype,--the archetype of the
philosopher?.... Certainly it would have been the easier course, for
there are more men than philosophers, Hypatia; and every man is a real
man, and a fair subject for examination, while every philosopher is not
a real philosopher--our friends the Academics, for instance, and even a
Neo-Platonist or two whom we know? You seem impatient. Shall I cease?'

'You mistook the cause of my impatience,' answered she, looking up at
him with her great sad eyes. 'Go on.'

'Now--for I am going to be terribly scholastic--is it not the very
definition of man, that he is, alone of all