It is not necessary to linger in demonstrating the important part played by Ethics from this point onward in the development of Greek Philosophy. “I hold that Socrates, as all are agreed, was the first whose voice charmed away philosophy from the mysterious phenomena over which Nature herself has cast a veil, and with which all philosophers before his time busied themselves, and brought it face to face with social life, so as to investigate virtue and vice, and the general distinction between Good and Evil, and led it to pronounce its sentence that the heavenly bodies were either far removed from the sphere of our knowledge, or contributed nothing to right living, however much the knowledge of them might be attained.”[77] Although this well-known passage from Cicero’s “Academics” has been criticized for the too great emphasis which it lays on the alienation of Socrates from Natural Philosophy, and, moreover, as an attempt has been made to show above, it lays in like manner too much stress on the alienation of previous thinkers from Moral Philosophy, or, at any rate, from empirical Ethics, it expresses with great clearness the surpassing importance which the common life of humanity, as illumined by the light of virtuous ideals, was henceforward to assume as the end and aim of philosophical investigations and discussions. The overwhelming importance of Ethics in the philosophical system of Plato is directly or indirectly apparent in all his teaching; and where he, too, indulges in physical speculations, it is with the warning that probability is all that can be expected from such investigations, and that they constitute a wise and moderate recreation in the course of severer and more legitimate studies.[78] But it must be conceded that, while no writer has composed more beautiful panegyrics in praise of Virtue; while no teacher has depicted its surpassing importance to humanity with greater devotion of spirit or subtler charm of language; yet the severity of the intellectual processes which alone lead to a comprehension of what, in the Platonic system, Virtue is, has had the effect of making Virtue herself appear almost “too bright and good for human nature’s daily food;” too lofty and afar for the common man to attain; a mere abstraction to be preserved as a field appropriate to the gymnastics of metaphysicians, and to be shielded from the harsh contact of the common world and common men by the _chevaux de frise_ of dialectical subtlety. Excess of Reason in Plato has produced a similar result to that produced by excess of Emotion in modern Religion, and it is not without Justice that a great writer of the nineteenth century has described Plato as “putting men off with stars instead of sense,” and as teaching them to be anything but “practical men, honest men, continent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow to accept, and resolute never to betray one.”[79] The accessibility of Virtue to the common heart is conditioned in Plato’s