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Plato is a philosopher who sometimes shows that he might have been a dramatist. Plato is a dramatist because of this: It is never enough for him to know the absolute solution of any problem. He wishes also to know, with the sympathetic imagination, just how men of every sort look at that problem. most of his dialogues, not all, Plato somewhere seeks to work his way toward the absolute truth by rigid systematic thinking. There he is purely philosopher. There the dialogue is only form, and the speakers courteously make way for the argument. But in no dialogue is this the only thing done. All sorts and conditions of men are introduced-a slave boy, a confidence man, an ignorant braggart, a rake, a youth eager for learning, a professor of things-in-general, a physician, a poet, a business man, a philosopher-a great range of people, historical and fictitious, representing every phase of the life of his time. These people are not masks. Some of them feel even to us as real as Shakespeare's Mercutio, or Polonius, or Dogberry. Often they are given their way with the argument. Often within the same dialogue first one and then another type of man takes the lead and fixes the plane of the conversation. Now they tussle at the problem like puppy dogs (Republic, VII., 539), Socrates tussling gayly with the rest. Now some one smothers discerning inquiry with a fine oration, and perhaps Socrates matches this with another of the same sort. Now an eager youth plunges courageously into a discussion beyond his depth, and Socrates follows him with joyful applause, often without a hint that there are depths in the problem which the

youth has not sounded. In many cases the dialogue ends with the question at issue unsettled. In such cases one sees that Plato's purpose in that dialogue is not to set forth the truth as he sees it, but to show men in struggle for the truth. The former were the Jachievement of a philosopher; the latter is the achievement of a dramatist whose drama is the whole spiritual journey of mankind. If I may borrow a figure from Pilgrim's Progress, I shall say that Plato, the Philosopher, had sight of the Celestial City; but that Plato, the Dramatist, kept also in view the long way back to the City of Destruction. He knew all the way stations upon that road, how many there are, how far apart, and how in one or another of themin Vanity Fair, in the Valley of Humiliation, in the Slough of Despond, in the Arbor of the Enchanted Ground-men dance or curse or pray or lie in perilous sleep far from the Celestial City.

PLATO THE LOVER.

This title is not a new invention. In several ways Plato distinctly claimed it for himself. For one thing, he called himself philo-sophos, lover of wisdom. This title meant two things. It meant for one thing that he would not be called sophos, wise. This was not mock humility. In one sense Plato was not humble. He was a proud man. He believed that he had found the way toward truth while most men wander blind and helpless in other ways. He believed that he had found some essential truth which the world must accept or perish for lack of. When he had these things in mind, he spoke with the dogmatic authority of a prophet. But just because he saw so far into the truth of things, he saw more clearly than most men ever do, that the whole truth is not to be compassed in this life, that none is Wise but God. And just because he felt so deeply the need of actual truth, to live by, now, he turned from all pretense of wisdom with instinctive hatred. There will be nothing new in this to any one who has learned Plato from his own writings. In most dialogues, the Platonic Socrates is more genuinely docile than his antagonists or disciples. On the day of his death, he warned those about him against letting their love of him add undue weight to his arguments, and bade them withstand him might and main, where he seemed astray.1

But the title philo-sophos meant more with Plato than a recognition that he was not like God,-wise. Above all things this title meant that he was quite literally a lover of wisdom, that his desire to be wise was a passion. In order to prepare one's self to appreciate Plato's passion for the Absolute Good, one might read some of those passages in the Bible which express the longing of the soul for God. The Psalmist says, "As the hart panteth for the water brooks, so longeth my soul for Thee." "My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living God." Moses declares that the first and greatest

commandment is "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength," and to this Christ adds, "and with all thy mind." The emotional tone of these and such passages is characteristically different from that of Plato, but his language is not less strong. One can imagine his quoting and approving all these passages. In the Phædrus and Symposium, Plato represents love as a principle which ranges through many forms from animal passion up to the purest longing for absolute truth. In all its forms it is intense, a mania, an ecstasy. In its highest form, it is holy fire in which the earthly soul is consumed and the heavenly soul is reborn.

But Plato is more than philo-sophos, lover of wisdom. With the same intensity and for the same reason he is phil-anthropos, lover of men. Love, says the wise woman, Diotima, in the Symposium, is not love of the beautiful and good only. Love is essentially love of "birth in beauty." "Some," she goes on, "beget earthly children, but some are more creative in their souls." "He who in youth has the seeds of temperance and justice implanted in him desires to implant them in others." Above all, when he finds a fair and noble and well-nourished soul, "he is full of speech about virtue and the nature and pursuits of a good man, and he tries to educate him, and they are married by a far closer, tie and have closer friendship than those who beget mortal children, for the children who are their com

mon offspring are fairer and more immortal." In such deep fashion would Plato, the pagan, realize the maxim, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

PLATO THE TEACHER.

Socrates and Plato have universal fame as teachers. Their fame is usually attributed to their development of the so-called Socratic method of teaching. That device requires, therefore, special consideration.

Socrates and Plato believed that the truth is latent in the soul; that to waken this latent truth into clear consciousness is very difficult; that the highest means of achieving this end is systematic reflection; and that systematic reflection in its stepby-step approach to clear knowledge takes naturally the verbal form of a series of questions and answers. They used this device in their own most difficult investigations, and with their most mature disciples. They sometimes used it with less mature disciples, and even with illiterate persons. (So, for example, in a passage from the Meno, much quoted in educational journals, Socrates, by a series of questions, leads an illiterate slave boy to see for himself the truth of a simple geometrical proposition.) They used the device at times ironically, that is, for the purpose of revealing to an antagonist the contradictions between his different assertions. Finally, it is not to be denied that they sometimes used the device in a manner which seems grossly sophistical, and it would be difficult to prove that in all such cases the sophistry is ironical.