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Rh world, who are driven by business, who are oppressed by the law courts, whose only amusement is evil gossip about their neighbors. The philosopher, on the contrary, according to Plato, has infinite leisure, and accordingly thinks of the infinite, but does not know who his next neighbor is, and never dreams of the law courts, or of finishing his business at any fixed hour. His life is a sort of artistic game; his are not the passions of the world; his is the reflection that comprehends the world. The Thracian servant maids laugh at him, as the one in the story laughed at Thales, because he stares at the heavens, and hence occasionally falls into wells. But what is he in the sight of the gods, and what are the servant maids? When they are some day asked to look into the heavens, and to answer concerning the truth, what scorn will not be their lot? After some such fashion does Plato seek to glorify the contemplative separation from the pettiness of life which shall give to the philosopher his freedom. And yet, as we know, this freedom, this sublime playfulness, of even a Plato, does not suggest the real justification of his work. This game of reflection is like all the rest of our insight, indirectly valuable because from it all there is a return to life possible, and in case of a great thinker like Plato, certain to occur. The coming humanity shall learn from the critic who, standing indeed outside of life, embodied in his reflection the meaning of it.

Thus far, then, my thought has been simply this. Humanity depends, for its spirituality and its whole civilization, upon faiths and passions that are in the first place instinctive, inarticulate, and in part unconscious. The philosopher tries to formulate and to criticise these instincts. What he does will always have a two-fold limitation. It will, on the one hand, be criticism from the point of view of a single man, of a single age, of a single group of ideals, as Plato or Aristotle embodied the faith of but one great age of Greek life, and did that from a