You must beware of exaggerating the revolution in philosophy produced by Socrates and the Sophists. It may indeed be true in their case that they despised scientific speculation, and did not care to make researches into the constitution of the universe. Gorgias even erected into a theory his scepticism regarding the reality of our knowledge, and wrote a famous tract on the impossibility of knowing anything; and he was by no means the only nihilist in the course of Greek philosophy. But when we come to Plato, we find high physical speculation, we find high theories of the universe, we find all the learning of his predecessors woven into his system, or utilised by way of illustration. The ideas of the Pythagoreans in particular, influenced him constantly, and his advocacy of a training in geometry, which may, more than people think, have shaped the curriculum of modern public schools in Europe, is Pythagorean in spirit. But in spite of this strong recommendation, it does not appear that Plato himself made any advances in that science. His aim was for the moral reform of the individual, and with him of society, by metaphysical and ethical training. He had a higher opinion of the value of education than even the modern democrat, or English Radical, who imagines that by infusing knowledge into the masses, you can make them equal to the classes in refinement and in the amenities of life. But Plato’s education was intended strictly for the ruling minority; he did not think the artisan or the labourer fit for this high privilege, and in all his ideal schemes, he set up either the exceptional man as a monarch (in the _Politicus_), a small oligarchy of guardians (in the _Republic_), or a fixed code of strict _Laws_, with severe penalties for any violation or even questioning of them--all clearly aristocratic forces,--as the safeguards of society. And in spite of all these ethical safeguards, he did not believe that any state, even if ideally constructed, would last for ever, but that it must live through a youth and a maturity and ultimately reach the decrepitude of age.