ciples that thronged to his lectures, he passed the greater part of his long life,—he died 348 B.C., at the age of eighty-one years,—laboring incessantly upon the great works that bear his name.
Plato imitated in his writings the method of Socrates in conversation. The discourse is carried on by questions and answers, hence the term Dialogues that attaches to his works. He attributes to his master, Socrates, much of the philosophy that he teaches: yet his Dialogues are all deeply tinged with his own genius and thought. In the Republic Plato portrays his conception of an ideal state. He was opposed to the republic of Athens, and his system, in some of its main features, was singularly like the Feudal System of mediæval Europe.
The Phædo is a record of the last conversation of Socrates with his disciples—an immortal argument for the immortality of the soul.
Plato believed not only in a future life (post-existence), but also in pre-existence; teaching that the ideas of reason, or our intuitions, are reminiscences of a past experience.[1] Plato's doctrines have exerted a profound influence upon all schools of thought and philosophies since his day. In some of his precepts he made a close approach to the teachings of Christianity. " We ought to become like God," he said, " as far as this is possible; and to become like Him is to become holy and just and wise."
Aristotle.—As Socrates was surpassed by his pupil Plato, so in turn was Plato excelled in certain respects by his disciple Aristotle, " the master of those who know." In him the philosophical genius of the Hellenic intellect reached its culmination. He was born in the
- ↑ In the following lines from Wordsworth we catch a glimpse of Plato's doctrine of pre-existence:—
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
Nor yet in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home."—Ode on Immortality.
