Plato had begun by condemning poetry only in so far as it was inconsistent with true religion and morality. At last, with his usual propensity to generalise, he condemned it and, by implication, every imitative art _quâ_ art, as a delusion and a sham, twice removed from the truth of things, because a copy of the phenomena which are themselves unreal representations of an archetypal idea. His iconoclasm may remind us of other ethical theologians both before and after, whether Hebrew, Moslem, or Puritan. If he does not share their fanatical hatred for plastic and pictorial representations, it is only because works of that class, besides being of a chaster character, exercised far less power over the Greek imagination than epic and dramatic poetry. Moreover, the tales of the poets were, according to Plato, the worst lies of any, since they were believed to be true; whereas statues and pictures differed too obviously from their originals for any such illusion to be produced in their case. Like the Puritans, again, Plato sanctioned the use of religious hymns, with the accompaniment of music in its simplest and most elevated forms. Like them, also, he would have approved of literary fiction when it was employed for edifying purposes. Works like the _Faery Queen_, _Paradise Lost_, and the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, would have been his favourites in English literature; and he might have extended the same indulgence to fictions of the Edgeworthian type, where the virtuous characters always come off best in the end. The reformed system of education was to be not only moral and religious but also severely scientific. The place given to mathematics as the foundation of a right intellectual training is most remarkable, and shows how truly Plato apprehended the conditions under which knowledge is acquired and enlarged. Here, as in other respects, he is, more even than Aristotle, the precursor of Auguste Comte. He arranges the mathematical sciences, so far as they then existed, in their logical order; and his remarks on the most general ideas suggested by astronomy read like a divination of rational mechanics. That a recommendation of such studies should be put into the mouth of Socrates is a striking incongruity. The older Plato grew the farther he seems to have advanced from the humanist to the naturalistic point of view; and, had he been willing to confess it, Hippias and Prodicus were the teachers with whom he finally found himself most in sympathy.