neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which had
first raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in heaven
and earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with proportion and
use, so that man's works might justify themselves to his mind, now found
in Socrates its precise definition; and it was naturally where the Life
of Reason had been long cultivated that it came finally to be conceived.

[Sidenote: Plato gave the ideal its full expression.]

Socrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and his
utilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what
gives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism--if we choose to
take it symbolically--was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece were
not honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared
there in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, because
you knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul might
harbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problem
that seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato to
bring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit from
the depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals which had
inspired its legislators and been embodied in its sacred civic
traditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk of
evening; and it was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtues
that brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in so
sad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made him
censure the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to
see beauty flourish in the real world. It was love of freedom that made
him harsh to his ideal citizens, that they might be strong enough to
preserve the liberal life. And when he broke away from political
preoccupations and turned to the inner life, his interpretations proved
the absolute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothing
pertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality.

[Sidenote: Aristotle supplied its natural basis.]

Beyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever been
carried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision
to many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and
more enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and
adequacy, with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his ra