THREE:Turning back once more from the melancholy decline of a great genius to the splendour of its meridian prime, we will endeavour briefly to recapitulate the achievements which entitle Plato to rank among the five or six greatest Greeks, and among the four or five greatest thinkers of all time. He extended the philosophy of mind until it embraced not only ethics and dialectics but also the study of politics, of religion, of social science, of fine art, of economy, of language, and of education. In other words, he showed how ideas could be applied to life on the most comprehensive scale. Further, he saw that the study of Mind, to be complete, necessitates a knowledge of physical phenomena and of the realities which underlie them; accordingly, he made a return on the objective speculations which had been temporarily abandoned, thus mediating between Socrates and early Greek thought; while on the other hand by his theory of classification he mediated between Socrates and Aristotle. He based physical science273 on mathematics, thus establishing a method of research and of education which has continued in operation ever since. He sketched the outlines of a new religion in which morality was to be substituted for ritualism, and intelligent imitation of God for blind obedience to his will; a religion of monotheism, of humanity, of purity, and of immortal life. And he embodied all these lessons in a series of compositions distinguished by such beauty of form that their literary excellence alone would entitle them to rank among the greatest masterpieces that the world has ever seen. He took the recently-created instrument of prose style and at once raised it to the highest pitch of excellence that it has ever attained. Finding the new art already distorted by false taste and overlaid with meretricious ornament, he cleansed and regenerated it in that primal fount of intellectual life, that richest, deepest, purest source of joy, the conversation of enquiring spirits with one another, when they have awakened to the desire for truth and have not learned to despair of its attainment. Thus it was that the philosopher��s mastery of expression gave added emphasis to his protest against those who made style a substitute for knowledge, or, by a worse corruption, perverted it into an instrument of profitable wrong. They moved along the surface in a confused world of words, of sensations, and of animal desires; he penetrated through all those dumb images and blind instincts, to the central verity and supreme end which alone can inform them with meaning, consistency, permanence, and value. To conclude: Plato belonged to that nobly practical school of idealists who master all the details of reality before attempting its reformation, and accomplish their great designs by enlisting and reorganising whatever spontaneous forces are already working in the same direction; but the fertility of whose own suggestions it needs more than one millennium to exhaust. There is nothing in heaven or earth that was not dreamt of in his philosophy:274 some of his dreams have already come true; others still await their fulfilment; and even those which are irreconcilable with the demands of experience will continue to be studied with the interest attaching to every generous and daring adventure, in the spiritual no less than in the secular order of existence.It would seem from this singular and touching expression of gratitude that the deathless idealism of Hellas found in Nero��s gift of a nominal liberty ample compensation for the very real and precious works of art of which she was despoiled on the occasion of his visit to her shores. At first sight, that visit looks like nothing better than a display of triumphant buffoonery on the one side and of servile adulation on the other. But, in reality, it was a turning-point in the history of civilisation, the awakening to new glories of a race in whom life had become, to all outward appearance, extinct. For more than a whole century the seat of intellectual supremacy had been established in Rome; and during the same period Rome herself had turned to the West rather than to the East for renovation and support. Caesar��s conquests were like the revelation of a new world; and three times over, when the two halves of the divided empire came into collision, the champion who commanded the resources of that world had won. Henceforth it was to her western provinces and to her western frontiers that Rome looked for danger, for aggrandisement, or for renown. In Horace��s time, men asked each other what the warlike Cantabrians were planning; and the personal presence of Augustus himself was needed before those unruly Iberians could be subdued. His adopted sons earned their first laurels at the expense of Alpine mountaineers. His later years are filled with German campaigns; and the great disaster of Varus must have riveted attention more closely than any victory to what was passing between the Rhine and the Elbe. Under Claudius, the conquest of Britain opened a new source of interest in the West, and, like Germany before, supplied a new title of triumph to the imperial family. Half the literary talent in Rome, the two Senecas, Lucan, and at a269 later period Martial and Quintilian, came from Spain, as also did Trajan, whose youth fall in this period.

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THREE:"You left that lady behind you?" he said. "Who is to testify to that? If you can prove such to be the case, why----"

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THREE:The last-named thinker would, no doubt, repudiate the title of pantheist; and it is certain that, under his treatment, pantheism has reverted, by a curious sort of atavism, to something much more nearly resembling the original doctrine of the Neo-Platonic school. Mr. Spencer tells us that the world is the manifestation of an unknowable Power. Plotinus said nearly the same, although not in such absolutely self-contradictory terms.524 Mr. Spencer constantly assumes, by speaking of354 it in the singular number, that the creative Power of which we know nothing is one; having, apparently, convinced himself of its unity by two methods of reasoning. First, he identifies the transcendent cause of phenomena with the absolute, which is involved in our consciousness of relation; leaving it to be inferred that as relativity implies plurality, absoluteness must imply unity. And, secondly, from the mutual convertibility of the physical forces, he infers the unity of that which underlies force. Plotinus also arrives at the same result by two lines of argument, one �� posteriori, and derived from the unity pervading all Nature; the other �� priori, and derived from the fancied dependence of the Many on the One. Even in his use of the predicate Unknowable without a subject, Mr. Spencer has been anticipated by Damascius, one of the last Neo-Platonists, who speaks of the supreme principle as τ? ?γνωστον.525 And the same philosopher anticipates the late Father Dalgairns in suggesting the very pertinent question, how, if we know nothing about the Unknowable, we know that it is unknowable.

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