ether
Pythagoras, John Humphrey Noyes and Brigham Young were ahead of the
world or behind it is really not to the point--the many would not
tolerate them. So their idealism was diluted with danger until it became
as somber, sober and slaty-gray as the average existence, and fades as
well as shrinks in the wash.

A private good is no more possible for a community than it is for an
individual. We help ourselves only as we advance the race--we are happy
only as we minister to the whole. The race is one, and this is monism.

And here Socrates and Plato seemingly separate, for Socrates in his life
wanted nothing, not even joy, and Plato's desire was for peace and
happiness. Yet the ideal of justice in Plato's philosophy is very
exalted.

No writer in that flowering time of beauty and reason which we call "The
Age of Pericles" exerted so profound an influence as Plato. All the
philosophers that follow him were largely inspired by him. Those who
berated him most were, very naturally, the ones he had most benefited.
Teach a boy to write, and the probabilities are that his first essay,
when he has cut loose from his teacher's apron-strings and starts a
brownie bibliomag, will be in denunciation of the man who taught him to
push the pen and wield the Faber.

Xenophon was more indebted, intellectually, to Plato than to any other
living man, yet he speaks scathingly of his master. Plutarch, Cicero,
Iamblichus, Pliny, Horace and all the other Roman writers read Plato
religiously. The Christian Fathers kept his work alive, and passed it on
to Dante, Petrarch and the early writers of the Renaissance, so all of
their thought is well flavored with essence of Plato. Well does Addison
put into the mouth of Cato those well-known words:

It must be so--Plato, thou reasonest well!--
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror,
Of falling into nought? Why shrinks the soul
Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
'T is the divinity that stirs within us;
'T is heaven itself, that points out an hereafter,
And intimates eternity to man.

All of that English group of writers in Addison's day knew their Plato,
exactly as did Cato and the other great Romans of near two thousand
years before. From Plato you can prove that there is a life after this
for each individual soul, as Francis of Assisi proved, or you can take
your Plato, as d