"esoteric" doctrines which were taught in the grove of Academus to students already prepared by a special course of instruction to receive them stand at the very opposite pole of Philosophy to those homely conversations which Socrates would hold with the first chance passer-by in the streets of a busy city. "Let no one enter here who has not studied Mathematics" was a phrase which summed up in a dogmatic canon of the school the views of the master touching the exclusion of the multitude from direct participation in Virtue and Philosophy.[1]
Aristotle brings us into a world where there is less of poetry and beautiful imagery, but in which the common man can see more clearly. If the landscapes are not so lovely, the roadways are better laid and the milestones are more legible. The contrast has been often enough already elaborated. Its essence seems to lie in the recognition by Aristotle that men are men, and not ideal philosophers. It hardly needed those famous passages in the "Ethics," in which Aristotle subjects the Theory of Ideas to a most searching
- ↑ Cf. Martineau: "Types of Ethical Theory": Plato, p. 97, vol. i.—"For the soul in its own essence, and for great and good souls among mankind, Plato certainly had the deepest reverence; but he had no share in the religious sentiment of democracy which dignifies man as man, and regards with indifference the highest personal qualities in comparison with the essential attributes of common humanity.—He rated so high the difficulty of attaining genuine insight and goodness that he thought it much if they could be realized even in a few; and had no hope that the mass of men, overborne by the pressure of material necessity and unchastened desires, could be brought, under the actual conditions of this world, to more than the mere beginnings of wisdom."
