In the essays on "Pragmatism" William James showed that the rationalist system, even that of the great philosopher, is in large measure determined by the thinker's peculiar "temperament." Elsewhere he speaks of the "Sentiment of Rationality." For a discussion of the various types of philosophical rationalism, the reader is referred to the criticisms by William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Dewey, and other Pragmatists. It is sufficient for our purpose to note the fact that the rationalist type of mind everywhere shows a tendency to assert the unreality of the world of everyday experience, and to seek comfort and security in the contemplation of a logically ordered system or world of "pure reason." Ideals, not concrete things, are the true realities. The world with which we are always wrestling is but a distorted manifestation, a jumbled, stereotyped copy of what James ironically referred to as "the de luxe edition which exists in the Absolute." The parable of the cave which Plato gives in the _Republic_ represents ordinary knowledge as a delusion, and the empirically known world as but dancing shadows on the wall of our subterranean prison. R. W. Livingstone, who sees in Platonism, from the very beginning, a certain world-weariness and turning away of the Greek spirit from the healthy realism which had formerly characterized it, says: For if Greece showed men how to trust their own nature and lead a simply human life, how to look straight in the face of the world and read the beauty that met them on the surface, certain Greek writers preached a different lesson from this. In opposition to directness they taught us to look past the "unimaginary and actual" qualities of things to secondary meanings and inner symbolism. In opposition to liberty and humanism they taught us to mistrust our nature, to see in it weakness, helplessness, and incurable taint, to pass beyond humanity to communion with God, to live less for this world than for one to come.... Perhaps to some people it may seem surprising that this writer is Plato. According to this view reality may be found only by means of "pure knowledge," and, to give a familiar quotation from the Phædo: If we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of the body; the soul in herself must behold things in themselves; and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire and of which we say that we are lovers; not while we live, but after death; for if, while in company with the body, the soul cannot have pure knowledge, one of two things follows--either knowledge is not to be obtained at all, or if at all after death.