the father of the inductive method; became the starting point for the scientific study of nature and psychology in the eleventh century; was a large element in the humanistic movement, which at the close of the middle ages created modern natural science; created conceptions which, developing down through the centuries in two diverging lines, indirectly found highest expression in the idealism of Hegel and the evolution of Spencer, and is likely to furnish in broad outlines, especially as presented by Aristotle, ground for the reconciliation of the opposite poles of philosophy in a spiritual evolution.
What was Plato's central idea? It was the existence of fixed principles in the universe, principles realized in the consciousness of man, through pursuit of knowledge. Socrates aimed at a permanent ground for ethical wisdom in a time when the old foundations of conduct and of divine and human law were shaken. He was the progenitor of the inductive method, in that he sought in numerous instances and opinions the essential common ground or principle, and aimed at exact definition. The class concept, general notion, universal truth, was the object of his search. And we find him, for instance, in Plato, tracing through the ten books of the "Republic" the essential character of justice. Plato, following Socrates, sought a foundation for ethical conceptions in a metaphysical theory, the Doctrine of Ideas, a magnificent illustration of the truth that speculative philosophy grows out of man's earnest desire to know why he is here, and what is the meaning of his moral nature.
It will help much any view in the field of philoso-
