hand, the personality of Plato counts for everything. If we approach
him as a thinker, it is true, we discard everything except his ideas;
but if we approach him as a great writer, ideas are but part of the
rich and illuminating whole which he offers us. One can imagine a man
fully acquainting himself with the work of Aristotle and yet remaining
almost devoid of culture; but one cannot imagine a man coming into
intimate companionship with Plato and remaining untouched by his rich,
representative personality.

From such a companionship something must flow besides an enlargement
of ideas or a development of the power of clear thinking; there must
flow also the stimulating and illuminating impulse of a fresh contact
with a great nature; there must result a certain liberation of the
imagination, a certain widening of experience, a certain ripening of
the mind of the student. The beauty of form, the varied and vital
aspects of religious, social, and individual character, the splendour
and charm of a nobly ordered art in temples, speech, manners, and
dress, the constant suggestion of the deep humanism behind that art
and of the freshness and reality of all its forms of expression,--these
things are as much and as great a part of the "Dialogues" as the
thought; and they are full of that quality which enriches and ripens
the mind that comes under their influence. In these qualities of his
style, quite as much as in his ideas, is to be found the real Plato,
the great artist, who refused to consider philosophy as an abstract
creation of the mind, existing, so far as man is concerned, apart from
the mind which formulates it, but who saw life in its totality and
made thought luminous and real by disclosing it at all points against
the background of the life, the nature, and the habits of the thinker.
This is the method of culture as distinguished from that of scholarship;
and this is also the disclosure of the personality of Plato as