Now if philosophy really is where Plato consistently puts it, and is all he claims for it, then, for those capable of it, who are capable also in the region of practice, it will be precisely "that better thing than being a king for those who must be our kings, our archons." You see that the various elements of Platonism are interdependent; that they really cohere. Just at this point then you must call to memory the greatness of the claim Plato makes for philosophy--a promise, you may perhaps think, larger than anything he has actually presented to his readers in the way of a philosophic revelation justifies. He seems, in fact, to promise all, or almost all, that in a later age natures great and high have certainly found in the Christian religion. If philosophy is only star-gazing, or only a condition of doubt, if what the sophist or the philistine says of it is all that can be said, it could hardly compete with the rewards which the vulgar world holds out to its servants. But for Plato, on the other hand, if philosophy is anything at all, it is nothing less than an "escape from the evils of the world," and homoiôsis tô theô,+ a being made like to God. It provides a satisfaction not for the intelligence only but for the whole nature of man, his imagination and faith, his affections, his capacity [265] for religious devotion, and for some still unimagined development of the capacities of sense. How could anything which belongs to the world of mere phenomenal change seem great to him who is "the spectator of all time and all existence"? "For the excellency" of such knowledge as that, we might say, he must "count all things but loss." By fear of punishment in some roundabout way, he might indeed be compelled to descend into "the cave," "to take in hand the wrongs of other people to set them right"; but of course the part he will take in your sorry exhibition of passing shadows, and dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"--you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being was filled with philosophic vision, that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, that fond student of philosophy, of this very philosophy of Plato, served the Roman people so well in peace and war--with so much disinterestedness, because, in fact, so reluctantly. Look onward, and what is strange and inexplicable in his realisation of the Platonic scheme--strange, if we consider how cold and [266] feeble after all were the rays of light on which he waited so devoutly--becomes clear in the person of Saint Louis, who, again, precisely because his whole