n so many words. What is it, he asks (7 A-E), that men
quarrel over most passionately when they dispute? Is it not over the
great questions of justice and injustice, of beauty, goodness, and the
like? They do not quarrel thus over a question of physical size, simply
because they can settle such a dispute by reference to an unquestioned
standard, a standard measure, let us say.

If there is no corresponding standard for right and wrong, if each man
is really the judge and the measure for himself, then there is no sense,
Plato feels, in claiming that one man is wiser than another in conduct,
or indeed any man wiser than a dog-faced baboon (_Theaet._ 161 C-E).

2. Again, Plato feels most poignantly the inadequacy of all the goodness
and beauty we have ever actually seen in this world of space and time,
compared with the ideal we have of them in their perfection. How can we
have this sense of deficiency, he asks, unless somehow we apprehend
something supreme, over and above all the approaches to it that have as
yet appeared? (_Phaedo_, 74 E).

This vision of an absolute perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so
dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own,
that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an
exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's
Anthology, _The Spirit of Man_ (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is
the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and
the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the
same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study of
this world that our apprehension of that perfection is awakened at
all:--

'He who has thus been instructed in the science of Love, and
has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and
rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will
suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the
absolute Beauty ... he will see a Beauty eternal, not
growing or decaying, not waxing or waning, nor will it be
fair here and foul there ... as if fair to some and foul to
others ... but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and
everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful
things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither
increase nor diminution, nor any other change' (_Symp._
211).

All beautiful things remind man, Plato tells us in his mythologica