But it is in quite different company we must look for the tradition, the development, of Plato's actual method of learning and teaching. The Academy of Plato, the established seat of his [194] philosophy, gave name to a school, of which Lucian, in Greek, and in Latin, Cicero, are the proper representatives,--Cicero, the perfect embodiment of what is still sometimes understood to be the "academic spirit," surveying all sides, arraying evidence, ascertaining, measuring, balancing, tendencies, but ending in suspension of judgment. If Platonism from age to age has meant, for some, ontology, a doctrine of "being," or the nearest attainable approach to or substitution for that; for others, Platonism has been in fact only another name for scepticism, in a recognisable philosophic tradition. Thus, in the Middle Age, it qualifies in the Sic et Non the confident scholasticism of Abelard. It is like the very trick and impress of the Platonic Socrates himself again, in those endless conversations of Montaigne--that typical sceptic of the age of the Renaissance--conversations with himself, with the living, with the dead through their writings, which his Essays do but reflect. Typical Platonist or sceptic, he is therefore also the typical essayist. And the sceptical philosopher of Bordeaux does but commence the modern world, which, side by side with its metaphysical reassertions, from Descartes to Hegel, side by side also with a constant accumulation of the sort of certainty which is afforded by empirical science, has had assuredly, to check wholesomely the pretensions of one and of the other alike, its doubts.--"Their name is legion," says a modern writer. Reverent [195] and irreverent, reasonable and unreasonable, manly and unmanly, morbid and healthy, guilty and honest, wilful, inevitable--they have been called, indifferently, in an age which thirsts for intellectual security, but cannot make up its mind. Q'ue scais-je? it cries, in the words of Montaigne; but in the spirit also of the Platonic Socrates, with whom such dubitation had been nothing less than a religious duty or service.