Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/47

 his school in the Gymnasium of the Academy, where with one or two intervals he taught for a period of forty years. Aristotle was for twenty years his pupil, and there are many interesting accounts of the relation between pupil and master.

Plato had in him somewhat of the Puritan, while Aristotle was more a man of the world, and we may suppose that he often maintained his opinions with his customary sarcastic smile. He offended the more austere tastes of his master by nicety of dress, care of his shoes, display of finger rings, and a dudish cut of his hair. Contemporaries speak of Plato with admiration for his intellect and reverence for the beauty of his character, which was "elevated in Olympian cheerfulness above the world of change and decay."

In our purpose to touch upon some points of Plato's doctrines, we are treating of a transcendent genius whose work has profoundly affected the thought of the world. Platonism reappears as Neo-*Platonism in the second and third centuries of our era; is largely adopted in its new form a century later by St. Augustine, the great expounder of Christianity and teacher of the Middle Ages; arises again in the seventeenth century proclaiming that moral law is written in fixed characters in every rational mind; culminates in the grand idealism of Schelling and Hegel; is transmitted to-day in the magnificent idealistic ethics of such men as Caird, Green, and Bradley; gives the cardinal virtues to Christianity; furnishes a broad and inspiring ethical code for the present; speaks with an inspiration that largely meets the approval of the Christian world; inspired the Utopia and the New Atlantis and all ideal schemes of government and society; was, following Socrates,