=1. His Inherited Tendencies.= (a) In the first place Plato was by instinct an aristocrat. His family was one of the most distinguished in Athens, and traced its descent from Solon and Codrus. In making an estimate of his philosophy one must take account of the caste of society in which he was born. His metaphysical theory of Ideas is aristocratic, and in it he turns from all that is of the earth earthy to what is above the life of “opinion.” His four cardinal virtues are possible only to the few. His political attitude was peculiar. He was hostile to the democracy, and yet his political idealism diverged so far from the practical politics of Athenian aristocracy that he completely abstained from public life. With Plato, philosophy once more retires to the school. Here we have the strange juxtaposition of Socrates, the teacher, who had been engaged in a practical reformation, whose father was an artisan and whose mother a midwife, and Plato, his adoring pupil and truest interpreter,――Plato, the idealist, “whose speculation is not like the Philistine, whose life is spent in the market place or the workshop, and whose world is measured by the narrow boundaries of his native town; it is the lord of the manor, who retires to his mansion, after having seen the world, and turns his gaze towards the distant horizon; disdaining the noise of the cross-roads, he mingles only in the best society, where is heard the most elegant, the noblest, and the loftiest language that has ever been spoken in the home of the Muses.”[29] (b) In the next place Plato had an instinctive love for the beautiful, and in this he was great, even in his time. Every Periclean Greek was artistic, but Plato was more than this. He is to be ranked among the great creators of the art of his day,――with Phidias and Sophocles. He represented in his person everything ideally Greek. He was a man of great beauty, a human Apollo, a man endowed with every physical and mental talent, and his moral character was almost ideal in its purposes. His real name was Aristocles, and he got his name Plato from his broad frame. The artistic development of the time appealed to him in his youth, and he was early interested in the writing of epic and dramatic poetry. This artistic instinct determined in no small measure not only the form of the presentation of his thought, but also the content of the thought itself. It determined his principle of conceiving the Ideas, the constitution of his State, his theory of pleasure, and his conception of the highest Good. The artistic form of the presentation of his writings was as important to him as the matter presented.