universal, or catholic, definitions (kath' holou)+ was after all but [85] an instrument for the plain knowledge of facts. Strange! out of the practical cautions of Socrates for the securing of clear and correct and sufficient conceptions about one's actual experience, for the attainment of a sort of thoroughly educated common-sense, came the mystic intellectualism of Plato--Platonism, with all its hazardous flights of soul. A rich contributor to the philosophic consciousness of Plato, Socrates was perhaps of larger influence still on the religious soul in him. As Plato accepted from the masters of Elea the theoretic principles of all natural religion--the principles of a reasonable monotheism, so from Socrates he derived its indispensable morality. It was Socrates who first of pagans comprised in one clear consciousness the authentic rudiments of such natural religion, and gave them clear utterance. Through him, Parmenides had conveyed to Plato the notion of a "Perfect Being," to brace and satisfy the abstracting intellect; but it was from Socrates himself Plato had learned those correspondent practical pieties, which tranquillise and re-assure the soul, together with the genial hopes which cheer the great teacher on the day of his death. Loyal to the ancient beliefs, the ancient usages, of the religion of many gods which he had found all around him, Socrates pierces through it to one unmistakable person, of perfect intelligence, power and goodness, who takes note [86] of him. In the course of his seventy years he has adjusted that thought of the invisible to the general facts and to many of the subtler complexities of man's experience in the world of sight. Sitivit anima mea, the Athenian philosopher might say, in Deum, in Deum vivum, as he was known at Sion. He has at least measured devoutly the place, this way and that, which a religion of infallible authority must fill; has already by implication concurred in it; and in fact has his reward at this depressing hour, as the action of the poison mounts slowly to the centre of his material existence. He is more than ready to depart to what before one has really crossed their threshold must necessarily seem the cold and empty spaces of the world no bodily eye can ever look on.