When we are praising Plato, it seems we are
praising quotations from Solon, and Sophron, and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations
under contribution.
Plato absorbed the learning of his times,--Philolaus, Timaeus,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates; and
finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,--beyond all example
then or since,--he traveled into Italy, to gain what Pythagoras had
for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still further east, to import
the other element, which Europe wanted, into the European mind. This
breadth entitles him to stand as the representative of philosophy. He
says, in the Republic, "Such a genius as philosophers must of necessity
have, is wont but seldom, in all its parts, to meet in one man; but
its different parts generally spring up in different persons." Every
man, who would do anything well, must come to it from a higher ground.
A philosopher must be more than a philosopher.
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