The Socrates of Xenophon is one of the simplest figures in the world. From the personal memories of that singularly limpid writer the outline of the great teacher detaches itself, as an embodiment of all that was clearest in the now adult Greek understanding, the adult Greek conscience. All that Socrates is seen to be in [76] those unaffected pages may be explained by the single desire to be useful to ordinary young men, whose business in life would be mainly with practical things; and at first sight, as delineators of their common master, Plato and Xenophon might seem scarcely reconcilable. But then, as Alcibiades alleges of him in the Symposium, Socrates had been ever in all respects a two-sided being; like some rude figure of Silenus, he suggests, by way of an outer case for the image of a god within. By a mind, of the compass Plato himself supposes, two quite different impressions may well have been made on two typically different observers. The speaker, to Xenophon so simple, almost homely, earthy, vernacular, becomes with Plato the mouth-piece of high and difficult and extraordinary thoughts. In the absence, then, of a single written word from Socrates himself, the question is forced upon us: had the true Socrates been really Socrates according to Xenophon, and all besides only a generous loan from the rich treasury of Plato's quite original and independent genius: or, had the master been indeed something larger and more many-sided than Xenophon could have thoroughly understood, presenting to his simpler disciple only what was of simpler stamp in himself, to the mystic and susceptible Plato all that far-reaching and fervid intellectuality, with which the Platonic Dialogues credit him. It is a problem about which probably no reader of [77] Plato ever quite satisfies himself:--how much precisely he must deduct from Socrates, as we find him in those Dialogues, by way of defining to himself the Socrates of fact.