“‘Bury me any way you like,’ answered Socrates, ‘if you get hold of me and I don’t escape you.’ He looked at us with a quiet smile and proceeded: ‘No, sirs, I can’t convince Crito that I am this Socrates who is now conversing with you. He thinks I am that one whom he will presently see dead, and he asks, if you please, how he is to bury me. I have been making a long speech to prove that when I have drunk the poison I shall not be with you any more, but shall have gone away to enjoy whatever blessings await the departed; only I am afraid it is all lost upon Crito, with all my consolations for myself and you. So you must be my sureties with Crito in a pledge just contrary to that which he gave to my judges. He went bail that I would remain here. You must go bail that I shall certainly not remain, but abscond and vanish. Then Crito will be less afflicted, and when he sees my body being burnt or buried he won’t grieve for me as if something unpleasant was happening to me, and he won’t say at the funeral that it is Socrates he is laying out or burying.’” Then the story of his painful and courageous death is told in language of extraordinary simplicity and dignified restraint. “Such, Echecrates, was the last end of our companion, as we should say, the best, the wisest, and the justest man of all we had ever known.” Socrates had done much towards giving Greek philosophy its new trend. The earlier philosophers had been chiefly concerned with the physical universe, trying to discover its origin, and thereby its “principle”; this had been apt to degenerate into that paltry inquisitiveness about mere phenomena which many people are still apt to dignify with the name of “natural science.” Socrates sought not so much the origin as the end of things; he made philosophy concern herself with the nature of reality, and incidentally with ethics and conduct. The development of ideal philosophy may probably be ascribed, in the main, to Plato rather than Socrates. Perhaps the general English reader will find the simplest exposition of the Platonic theory of Ideas in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.” Put very briefly, it is that the material world apprehended by the human senses is only a copy or pale reflection of the realities “laid up in heaven.” The soul comes into this world “Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness.” We recognise the forms of things by their likeness to the patterns apprehended by the soul elsewhere. Thus, as Plato says in the “Meno,” all learning is a process of recollection. The words of St. Paul to the Corinthians are almost a verbal echo of this teaching of Socrates: “For now we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known.”