5. PLATO, AS THE COMPLETE SOCRATICIST.—The attempts thus far to build upon the foundation pillars of the Socratic doctrine, started without a vigorous germinating principle, and ended fruitlessly. Plato was the only one of his scholars who has approached and represented _the whole_ Socrates. Starting from the Socratic idea of knowledge he brought into one focus the scattered elements and rays of truth which could be collected from his master or from the philosophers preceding him, and gave to philosophy a systematic completeness. Socrates had affirmed the principle that conception is the true being and the only actual, and had urged to a knowledge according to the conception; but these positions were no farther developed. His philosophy is not yet a system, but is only the first impulse toward a philosophical development and method. Plato is the first who has approached a systematic representation and development of the ideal world of conceptions true in themselves. The Platonic system is Socrates objectified, the blending and reconciling of preceding philosophy. SECTION XIV. PLATO. I. PLATO’S LIFE. 1. His YOUTH.—Plato, the son of Aristo, of a noble Athenian family, was born in the year 429 B. C. It was the year of the death of Pericles, the second year of the Peloponnesian war, so fatal to Athens. Born in the centre of Grecian culture and industry, and descended from an old and noble family, he received a corresponding education, although no farther tidings of this have been transmitted to us, than the insignificant names of his teachers. That the youth growing up under such circumstances should choose the seclusion of a philosophic life rather than a political career may seem strange, since many and favorable opportunities for the latter course lay open before him. Critias, one of the thirty tyrants, was the cousin of his mother, and Charmides, who subsequently, under the oligarchic rule at Athens, found his death at Thrasybulus on the same day with Critias, was his uncle. Notwithstanding this, he is never known to have appeared a single time as a public speaker in the assembly of the people. In view of the rising degeneracy and increasing political corruption of his native land, he was too proud to court for himself the favor of the many-headed _Demos_; and more attached to Doricism than to the democracy and practice of the Attic public life, he chose to make science his chief pursuit, rather than as a patriot to struggle in vain against unavoidable disaster, and become a martyr to his political opinions. He regarded the Athenian state as lost, and to hinder its inevitable ruin he would not bring a useless offering.