PLATO’S PHILOSOPHICAL SYSTEM.—Plato was an enthusiast in the pursuit of truth. He believed in a personal God, rational, immutable, eternal. He realized that man could never attain absolute wisdom, possible to God alone; and looked upon philosophy as “a longing after heavenly wisdom.” He sought to correct abuses, to elevate humanity; and made man’s highest duty consist in searching out God and imitating the perfection of the Almighty as his rule of conduct. The four cardinal virtues were wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice; but none could be virtuous without aid from on high. (_Read Bulkley’s “Plato’s Best Thoughts.”_) The soul, an emanation from the Supreme Mind, was immortal. It existed before its union with the body, and all earthly knowledge is but the recollection of what it possessed in some former state. When, disembodied, it stood face to face with kindred immaterial essences, it acquired those _ideas_, or _forms_, which figure so prominently in the Platonic system—interpreted by some to mean veritable objective existences too subtile to be discerned by the eye of flesh, and by others explained as mere intuitions or generalizations having no objective reality. Plato regarded men as free agents, to be rewarded or punished in a future life for their deeds in this. His poetical fancy fixed on some distant star as the abode of the blessed. The earth he supposed to occupy the centre of the universe. It was not eternal, but was made by an intelligent God, who breathed into it a soul; so it was a living creature, self-active, and gifted with the beautiful form of the sphere. Nor did the philosopher forget to train the reasoning powers, by the study of mathematics. The importance he attached to this science may be inferred from the sign on his school: “Let no one enter here who is a stranger to geometry.” Plato has the honor of having been the inventor of geometrical analysis. PLATO’S WORKS, which have descended to us unimpaired, are in the form of dialogues—a delightful method of conveying philosophical instruction, when, as in Plato’s case, the personages introduced as speakers are salient characters, and their idiosyncrasies are maintained throughout with discrimination. The dull lessons of dialectics are thus enlivened by graphic portraitures and happy strokes of humor. Plato’s language is the perfection of Attic prose, beautified by a poetical tinge. “If Jupiter should speak Greek,” said ancient critics, “it would be Plato’s.” What Socrates dreamed on the night before the young Plato entered his school—that a cygnet came from the grove of Academus, and, after nestling on his breast for a time, took its flight heavenward, singing sweetly as it rose—is recorded as presaging his pupil’s sweet mastery of words.