problems of human living. He set the precedent for all subsequent liberal education. The herd loves nothing so little as the Socratic dealing with its opinions. Such questioning is a challenge to popular faiths; it demands that men reorient their minds to the values of experience. It arouses in the opinionated the unwelcome suspicion that possibly they may be deceiving themselves. It carries with it the suggestion that those who uncritically accept dogma and custom are possibly intellectually less alert than the critically minded few. It gives the hint that conformity and moral earnestness are not enough for the good life and that those who lay claim to ideas they have not thought out are a little ridiculous. Every man who rises out of crowd-mindedness into independent thinking weakens to that extent the faith of the crowd in itself, and puts it on the defensive. Aristophanes gained popularity in Athenian democracy by holding up the figure of Socrates to ridicule. And when Socrates’ challenge could no longer be met with laughter, the Fundamentalists of his day condemned the old philosopher to death on the charge that he was corrupting the youth. As Woodrow Wilson once said, “The human race has inexhaustible resources for resisting the introduction of knowledge.” How the influence of Socrates survives in the work of his pupil Plato every school boy knows. It is also a matter of common knowledge that in the beautiful dialogues which Plato wrote many years after his master’s death, the figure of Socrates becomes little more at times than a vehicle of the author’s own thought. But not every one thinks of the dialogues as primarily a record of a great work of adult education. The Socratic method of education is retained by Plato, but he modifies the objectives. Plato has something to “teach.” Knowledge is still found by the method of clarifying men’s thinking. But if men are to live the life of reason, their knowledge must give them a definite outlook on life. Plato seeks something to tie to. He is occupied with the search for reality, “pure being.” His interest in mathematics leads him to attempt to construe the world according to principles of abstract thought. The world of _ideas_ is seen to be the ultimate reality, the world of objects is but a manifestation,--as James put it, but a “stereotyped copy of the deluxe edition” which exists in the eternal. Hence knowledge is not only clear thinking; to know is to possess reality. The real world consists of form, of idea, of universal and abstract principle. Education becomes philosophic contemplation of the ideas of the good, the true, the beautiful. A Francis Bacon or an Isaac Newton in Plato’s situation would doubtless have developed a logic of science. Plato elaborates a metaphysic. But it would be an error to suppose that Plato is occupied merely with meditation upon the transcendental. All knowledge is one. The truth, of which the mind