While oratory was thus attaining perfection in Greece, philosophy was making equal progress in the direction marked out by Socrates. Among the philosophers of the brighter period of Grecian history are the names of Plato and Aristotle, names that will ever be cherished and venerated while genius and worth continue to be held in admiration. Of the pupils of Socrates, Plato, born in Athens in 429 B.C., was by far the most distinguished, and the only one who fully appreciated the intellectual greatness and seized the profound conceptions of his master. In fact, he came to surpass Socrates in the profoundness of his views, and in the correctness and eloquence with which he expressed them. On the death of his teacher, Plato left Athens and passed twelve years in visiting different countries, engaged in philosophic investigation. Returning to Athens, he founded his school of philosophy in the Acade'mia, a beautiful spot in the suburbs of the city, adorned with groves, walks, and fountains, and which his name has immortalized. Here Philosophy With Plato dwelt, and burst the chains of mind; Here, with his stole across his shoulders flung, His homely garments with a leathern zone Confined, his snowy beard low clust'ring down Upon his ample chest, his keen dark eye Glancing from underneath the arched brow, He fixed his sandaled foot, and on his staff Leaned, while to his disciples he declared How all creation's mighty fabric rose From the abyss of chaos: next he traced The bounds of virtue and of vice; the source Of good and evil; sketched the ideal form Of beauty, and unfolded all the powers Of mind by which it ranges uncontrolled, And soars from earth to immortality. --HAYGARTH. To Plato, as the poet intimates in his closing lines, we owe the first formal development of the Socratic doctrine of the spirituality of the soul, and the first attempt toward demonstrating its immortality. As a late writer has well said, "It is the genius of Socrates that fills all Plato's philosophy, and their two minds have flowed out over the world together." Of his doctrine on this subject, as expressed in the Phoe'do, LORD BROUGHAM thus wrote: "The whole tenor of it refers to a renewal or continuation of the soul as a separate and individual existence after the dissolution of the body, and with a complete consciousness of personal identity: in short, to a continuance of the same rational being's existence after death. The liberation from the body is treated as the beginning of a new and more perfect life." Plato's only work on physical science is the Timoe'us. His works are all called "Dialogues," which the critics divide into two classes--those of search, and those of exposition. Among the latter, the Republic and the Laws give us the author's political views; and, on the former, More's Uto'pia and other works of like character in modern times are founded.