But as of races, so the
succession of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato has the
fortune, in the history of mankind, to mark an epoch.
Plato's fame does not stand on a syllogism, or on any masterpieces of
the Socratic, or on any thesis, as, for example, the immortality of
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school-man, or a geometer,
or the prophet of a peculiar message. He represents the privilege of
the intellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every fact to
successive platforms, and so disclosing, in every fact, a germ of
expansion. These expansions are in the essence of thought. The
naturalist would never help us to them by any discoveries of the extent
of the universe, but is as poor, when cataloguing the resolved nebula
of Orion, as when measuring the angles of an acre. But the Republic
of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to require, and so to
anticipate, the astronomy of Laplace. The expansions are organic. The
mind does not create what it perceives, any more than the eye creates
the rose. In ascribing to Plato the merit of announcing them, we only
say, here was a more complete man, who could apply to nature the whole
scale of the senses, the understanding, and the reason.
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