probity, honesty, austerity, morality, sobriety, and submissiveness. All
arts, except military music and war dances, will be eliminated from the
city. She needs neither poets nor painters not yet musicians, who corrupt
morals by softening them, and by making all feel the secret pang of
voluptuousness. All theories, whether aristocratic or tending more or less
to communism, are derived from the politics of Plato either by being
evolved from them or by harking back to them.

THE MASTER OF THE IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY.--Plato is for all thinkers,
even for his opponents, the greatest name in human philosophy. He is the
supreme authority of the idealistic philosophy--that is, of all philosophy
which believes that ideas govern the world, and that the world is
progressing towards a perfection which is somewhere and which directs and
attracts it. For those even who are not of his school, Plato is the most
prodigious of all the thinkers who have united psychological wisdom,
dialectical strength, the power of abstraction and creative imagination,
which last in him attains to the marvellous.



CHAPTER V

ARISTOTLE


A Man of Encyclopedic Learning; as Philosopher,
more especially Moralist and Logician.


ARISTOTLE, PUPIL OF PLATO.--Aristotle of Stagira was a pupil of