as he is by no means colour-blind, by no means a colourless place. He will suffer it to come to him, as his pages convey it in turn to us, with the liveliest variety of hue, as in that conspicuously visual emblem of it, the outline of which (essentially characteristic of himself as it seems) he had really borrowed from the old Eleatic teacher who had tried so hard to close the bodily eye that he might the better apprehend the world unseen.-- And now (he writes in the seventh book of The Republic) take for a figure of human nature, as regards education and the lack thereof, some such condition as this. Think you see people as it were in some abode below-ground, like a cave, having its entrance spread out upwards towards the light, broad, across the whole cavern. Suppose them here from childhood; their legs and necks chained; so that there they stay, and can see only what is in front of them, being unable by reason of the chain to move their heads round about: and the light of a fire upon them, blazing from far above, behind their backs: between the fire and the prisoners away up aloft: and see beside it a low wall built along, as with the showmen, in front of the people lie the screens above which they exhibit their wonders. I see: he said. See, then, along this low wall, men, bearing vessels of all sorts wrought in stone and wood; and, naturally, some of the bearers talking, other silent. It is a strange figure you describe: said he: and strange prisoners.-- They are like ourselves: I answered! Republic, 514. [48] Metaphysical formulae have always their practical equivalents. The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides, with Socrates, and the Cynics or the Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of the One, as the Cyrenaic monochronos hêdonê+--the pleasure of the ideal now--is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion; and, as sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic for the understanding is found to be realisable enough as one of many phases of our so flexible human feeling. The abstract philosophy of the One might seem indeed to have been translated into the terms of a human will in the rigid, disinterested, renunciant career of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, its mortal coldness. Let me however conclude with a document of the Eleatic temper, nearer in its origin to the age of Plato: an ancient fragment of Cleanthes the Stoic, which has justly stirred the admiration of Stoical minds; though truly, so hard is it not to lapse from those austere heights, the One, the Absolute, has become in it after all, with much varied colour and detail in his relations to concrete things and persons, our father Zeus.