Sublime

First, his insistence that philosophy must be relevant to real life is one that I resonate with.

All these were materialists; Plato was not. Plato saw that God is not any bodily thing, but that all things have their being from God, and from something immutable. He was right, also, in saying that perception is not the source of truth. Platonists are the best in logic and ethics, and nearest to Christianity. “It is said that Plotinus, that lived

In fact, they flirted; and Lydgate was secure in the belief that they did nothing else. If a man could not love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time? Really, the men in Middlemarch, except Mr Farebrother, were great bores, and Lydgate did not care about commercial politics or cards: what was he to do for relaxation?

Socrates told his students that in good systems of education, there is a certain limit you should not go beyond. In geometry, he said, it is enough to know how to measure the land when you want to sell it or buy it, or how to share an inheritance, or to divide work among workers. He did not like too many sophisticated sciences; though he knew all o

What most men have taken from Plato is belief in a supersensible intellectual world and in the superiority of the immortal soul to the mortal body. But Plato was many-sided, and in some respects could be regarded as teaching scepticism. The Platonic Socrates professes to know nothing; we naturally treat this as irony, but it could be taken seriousl

“Platonism,” he says, “is part of the vital structure of Christian theology, with which no other philosophy, I venture to say, can work without friction.” There is, he says, an “utter impossibility of excising Platonism from Christianity without tearing Christianity to pieces.” He points out that Saint Augustine speaks of Plato’s system as “the mos

Part II. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle