of eternal truth, and that there are certain principles concerning which there can be no dispute.  The soul apprehends the idea of goodness, greatness, etc.  It is in the celestial world that we are to find the realm of ideas.  Now, God is the supreme idea.  To know God, then, should be the great aim of life.  We know him through the desire which like feels for like.  The divinity within feels its affinity with the divinity revealed in beauty, or any other abstract idea.  The longing of the soul for beauty is love.  Love, then, is the bond which unites the human with the divine.  Beauty is not revealed by harmonious outlines that appeal to the senses, but is truth; it is divinity.  Beauty, truth, love, these are God, whom it is the supreme desire of the soul to comprehend, and by the contemplation of whom the mortal soul sustains itself.  Knowledge of God is the great end of life; and this knowledge is effected by dialectics, for only out of dialectics can correct knowledge come.  But man, immersed in the flux of sensualities, can never fully attain this knowledge of God, the object of all rational inquiry.  Hence the imperfection of all human knowledge.  The supreme good is attainable; it is not attained.  God is the immutable good, and justice the rule of the universe.  “The vital principle of Plato’s philosophy,” says Ritter, “is to show that true science is the knowledge of the good, is the eternal contemplation of truth, or ideas; and though man may not be able to apprehend it in its unity, because he is subject to the restraints of the body, he is nevertheless permitted to recognize it imperfectly by calling to mind the eternal measure of existence by which he is in his origin connected.”  To quote from Ritter again:—­

“When we review the doctrines of Plato, it is impossible to deny that they are pervaded with a grand view of life and the universe.  This is the noble thought which inspired him to say that God is the constant and immutable good; the world is good in a state of becoming, and the human soul that in and through which the good in the world is to be consummated.  In his sublimer conception he shows himself the worthy disciple of Socrates....  While he adopted many of the opinions of his predecessors, and gave due consideration to the results of the earlier philosophy, he did not allow himself to be disturbed by the mass of conflicting theories, but breathed into them the life-giving breath of unity.  He may have erred in his attempts to determine the nature of good; still he pointed out to all who aspire to a knowledge of the divine nature an excellent road by which they may arrive at it.”

That Plato was one of the greatest lights of the ancient world there can be no reasonable doubt.  Nor is it probable that as a dialectician he has ever been surpassed, while his purity of life and his lofty inquiries and his belief in God and immortality make him, in an ethical point of view, the most worthy of the disciples of Socrates.  He was to the Greeks what Kant was to the Germans; and these two great thinkers resemble each other in the structure of their minds and their relations to society.