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 religion are an echo of his master's, or how far they are his own original ideas. We have another description of Socrates and his teaching in Xenophon's "Memorabilia," and there, like Plato, he appeals to the excellence of the creation round him to prove the wisdom of the great "World-builder;" he recognises the all-pervading and invisible presence of the Deity; he exalts the dignity of man, only "lower than the angels" in the possession of an immortal soul; and he points to signs and oracles to prove how closely we may be brought into actual communion with God. But in other respects, if Xenophon can be trusted, he preached a far lower standard of morality—upholding, in fact, the utilitarian doctrines so strongly condemned by the Platonic Socrates in the beginning of the "Republic." "You should test an action," he is made to say, "by its advantages to yourself. Be just, because justice brings its own reward with it; be modest, because immodesty never pays in society; be brave, because you gain glory thereby; be true and faithful, because truth will bring you friends, the most useful of all possessions." If this was really the tendency of Socratic teaching, it is clear that Plato took far higher ground than his master. Nothing, in fact, could be further from his thoughts than to degrade Virtue into a mere calculation of the chances of more or less possible happiness.

And in the "Philebus" (one of his latest Dialogues), where the relative nature of pleasure and knowledge