It is not my purpose to attempt a discussion of Platonic Idealism. It has fascinated many of the most subtle minds of the race down to our own times. It is the foundation of much Christian theology. Its re-affirmation at the time of the Renaissance has brought with it the restatement of many problems which must be considered in the course of one’s education. My point is that Plato with all his genius contributed to the tradition of liberal education a system of values very different from the humanism and agnosticism of Socrates. His influence has often tended to make the aim of education mere intellectuality, rather than intelligent grappling with the problems of living, and to transform the search for the good life into a flight from the realities of experience. Go one step further and you land in ascetic mysticism. The Soul, the Knower, is no more at home in the world of objects than is the philosopher in the market place. It belongs to the spiritual world, the higher realms of Being, in which ideas are forever pure and free of distortion by matter. In the Phædo, Plato says that if we are to have pure knowledge, the soul must be quit of the body which ever thwarts it. Body and soul belong to different worlds. Plato thus prepares the way for St. Paul and his doctrine that the spirit lusteth against the flesh and the flesh against the spirit, and that to be present in the body is to be absent from the Lord. If matter is corruption and mankind is during life chained to the material body, human nature ceases to be trustworthy. Plato’s distrust of human nature bears fruit some centuries later in the statement that the natural man is sin and death, and in the doctrine of regeneration. And unregenerate man is prone to error. Knowledge of the truth comes by divine revelation and is to be sustained by infallible authority. Dissent is heresy; assent may be required in the interest of salvation. We have not yet reached the position of Tertullian, “I believe that which is absurd,” but Platonism is headed in that direction. Knowledge which feeds on itself in the end eats itself up.