Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the
shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add
any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the
thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity, and are tinged
with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out
of night, to be his men,--Platonists! the Alexandrians, a constellation
of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More,
John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Ralph Cudworth,
Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus, and Picus Mirandola.
Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometanism draws
all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly,
from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a
town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An Englishman reads and
says, "how English!" a German--"how Teutonic!" an Italian--"how Roman
and how Greek!" As they say that Helen of Argos had that universal
beauty that everybody felt related to her, so Plato seems, to a reader
in New England, an American genius.
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