the very last asking: _Que scais-je?_ Who knows?--in the very spirit of that old Socratic contention, that all true philosophy is but a refined sense of one’s ignorance.” The essay, we must not forget, was the form chosen by himself. Nowhere does he better illustrate his conception of philosophic truth, of the philosophic temper, than in that harmony of essays, written for delivery as lectures, and printed as _Plato and Platonism_. Philosophy clothes herself with humanity, or rather retains the clothes of which dialectic would deprive her, and we watch her as a human being, are nervous for her in the difficult places, as she threads her way through the lives of men and the history of a nation. Pater is engaged in portraiture, not in exposition, so humane has his subject become. The three philosophers whose images are impressed upon the theories of “the flux,” of “the one,” and of “number,” Heraclitus, Parmenides, Pythagoras, are no longer outline drawings, like illustrations in a classical dictionary, but coloured and modelled with something of Blake’s enthusiastic vision, softened and quieted, till the enthusiasm is like summer lightning behind the hills, clear and bright but without menace for his general intention. Their portraits, inset in the “Plato” like the vignettes that encircle the central picture in those old engraved frontispieces, are curiously suggestive of paragraphs of Nietzsche’s _Early Greek Philosophy_. They are ruled by just such a conception of truth, but are without the spirit of proselytism, so inconsistent with it, and yet so characteristic of the man who preached rather than denounced his version of the Eternal Recurrence. It is hard to know which is most admirable--the delicate disentangling of Socrates from Plato, the clearly visualised picture of the Sophists (there never was a book on philosophy so full of concrete vision), the synthesis of Plato’s personality, lover, seer, observer, “who has lingered too long in the brazier’s workshops” to be able to speak of “dumb matter,” or the beautiful appreciation of the method of the dialogues and of the often travestied aims of Socratean talk, which represent both the “demand for absolute certainty, in any truth or knowledge worthy of the name,” and Plato’s method of learning and teaching, the essential quality of these conversations with himself being their endlessness. Then there is the dream, to the making of which has gone so much knowledge content to be hidden by the perfection of its service, of the city of Lacedaemon in Sparta, so necessary a prelude to the account of Plato’s dreamed republic. Finally, perhaps because dearest to himself, there is the chapter on Plato’s aesthetics, which, to Pater, were not what some have made them, but of immediate import to men living their lives, and suggested a purpose, a hope “to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic