PLATO, who, along with Aristotle, represents to modern Europe the whole compass of Greek speculation, was born at Athens in the year 429 B. C. , shortly after the com mencement of the Peloponnesian war, and the same year in which Pericles died. He was of a good family—being connected on the Mother's with Solon, and on the father's side with Codrus, one of the ancient kings of Athens. He received a good education, according to the common practice of the Greeks, in music, gymnastics, and literature. His rich and gorgeous imagination is said at first to have essayed its powers in poetry; but when about 20 years of age, having become acquainted with Socrates, he threw all his verses into the fire, and consecrated his great intellect to philosophy. When he was 20 years old the political troubles, of which the death of Socrates was only one terrible symptom, forced him to leave Athens for a season, and he resided at Megara, with Euclid, the founder of the Megaric sect. The disturbed stake of his native country, doubtless, was one cause of the frequent travels which lie is reported to have made. Of these,• his three visits to Sicily, during the time of the elder and younger Dionysius, are the most celebrated and the best authenticated. That he visited Italy is extremely probable; at all events, he was most closely connected with Archytas and the Pythago rean philosophers; though, as Aristotle (hletaph. i. 6) justly remarks, he borrowed from Heracleitus as well as from Pythagoras, and put it stamp of freshness and originality on all that he borrowed. After returning from his first visit to Sicily, being then in his for tieth year, he commenced teaching philosophy publicly, in the Academia, a pleasant gar den in the most beautiful suburb of Athens, and there gathered around him a large school of distinguished followers, who maintained a regular succession after his death, under the name of the philosophers of the academy. He lived to the age of 82; was never married, and must hav6 possessed some independent property, as he expresses himself strongly against teaching philosophy for fees, and we nowhere read of his having held any public office from which he could have derived emolument. Such are the few reliable facts known as to the life of Plato.
The principles of his philosophy are happily better known ; for all his great works have been preserved, and have always been extensively read wherever the language was known. The only danger to which the students of his philosophy have been exposed is the confusion of the doctrines distinctly taught by him with the exaggeration of these as afterwards worked out by the Neoplatonists of Alexandria; but this is a danger which the exact critical scholarship of modern times has put out of the way for all persons who exercise common precaution in the acquisition of knowledge. The distinctive character of the Platonic philosophy is expressed by the word idealism, as opposed to realism, materialism, or sensationalism, using these words in their most general and least technical sense, the capacity of forming and using ideas being taken as an essential virtue or qual ity of mind, as contrasted with matter; of thought as contrasted with sensation, of the internal forces of individuals and of the universe, as contrasted with the external forms by which these forces are manifested. As such, the ideal philosophy stands generally
opposed to that kind of mental action which draws its stores principally from without, and is not strongly determined to mold the materials thus received by any type of thought or hue of emotion derived from within. In other words, the philosophy of Plato is essen• tinily a poetical and an artistical philosophy; for poetry, painting, and music all grow out of idealism, or those lofty inborn conceptions by which genius is distinguished from tal ent. It is also, at the same time, a scientific philosophy, for the purest science, as mathe matics—on which Plato is well known to have placed the highest vale e—is a science of mere ideas or forms conditioned by the intellect which deduces their laws; and, above all, it is essentially a moral and a theological philosophy; for practice, or action is the highest aim of man, and morality is the ideal of action; and God, as cause of all, is the ideal of ideals, the supreme power, virtue, and excellence to which all contemplation recurs, did from which all action and original energy proceed. The distinctive excel lence of the Platonic philosophy is identical with its distinctive character, and consists in that grand union of abstract thought, imaginative decoration, emotional purity, and noble activity, which is the model of a complete and richly endowed humanity. The poCtical element in Plato, so wonderfully combined with the analytical, shows itself not only in those gorgeous,myths which form the peroration of Some of his profoundest dia logues, but in that very dialogic form itself, of which the situation is often extremely dramatic; though this form of philosophic discussion perhaps owes its existence more to the lively temper and out-of-door habits of the Greeks, than to the special dramatic tal ent of Plato. On the other hand, the defects of the Platonic philosophy arise from its essential one-sidedness, as a polemical assertion of the rights of thought against the minis of the mere senses, of the stability of the eternal type against the constant change that characterizes the ephemeral form. In his zeal to submit all that is external to the upper atorial power of internal conception, the philosopher of ideas is apt to forget the obsti nate and unpliable nature of that external world which he would regulate, and after prn jectinm a grand new scheme of society, according to what appears a perfect model, shows like the architect who, after drawing out the model of a marble temple, finds lie has only bricks to build it with. For this reason, extremely practical men, and those who are compelled to reason chiefly by an extensive induction from external facts, have ever felt an instinctive aversion to the Platonic philosophy; and Plato himself, by some of the strange and startling conclusions, in matters of social science, to which his ideal philosophy led, has, it must be confessed. put into the hands of his adversaries the most efficient weapons by which his ideal system may be combated.