Page:Plato (IA platocollins00colliala).pdf/198

 ever doing so. The very beauty of Plato's style, his exuberant fancy, the myths and metaphors in which he clothed his noblest thoughts, were all so many offences to the shrewd common-sense of Aristotle, who reasoned rigidly from fact to fact, who analysed the constitutions of three hundred states before he wrote a line of his "Politics," and whose cold and keen temperament had little sympathy with a philosopher who "poetised rather than thought." As for the Platonic "Ideas"—the very foundation of Platonism—he regarded them as inconceivable and impossible, or, if possible, practically useless.

Plato's method of doubt and inquiry—carried far farther by his pupils than he ever intended it to be—resulted in the "New Academy," a school of Sceptics, of whom Pyrrho, originally a soldier in Alexander's army, was the leader. These Sceptics were a sign of the times. A weariness and despair of truth was creeping over society, and hence there grew up a feeling of indifference as to all moral distinctions, which the philosophers who professed it termed a "divine repose." Plato had said that there was no reality except in an ideal world, and Pyrrho and his followers pushed this doctrine so far as to deny the existence of any fixed standard of right and wrong, or of any certainty which sense or mind could perceive.

Socrates, it has been said, "sat for the portrait of the Stoic sage;" and Stoicism perhaps owes as much to Plato as to the Cynics, of which school it was the