The ablest part of the lectures of Archer Butler, of Dublin, is devoted to the Platonic philosophy.  It is at once a criticism and a eulogium.  No modern writer has written more enthusiastically of what he considers the crowning excellence of the Greek philosophy.  The dialectics of Plato, his ideal theory, his physics, his psychology, and his ethics are most ably discussed, and in the spirit of a loving and eloquent disciple.  Butler represents the philosophy which he so much admires as a contemplation of, and a tendency to, the absolute and eternal good.  As the admirers of Ralph Waldo Emerson claim that he, more than any other man of our times, entered into the spirit of the Platonic philosophy, I introduce some of his most striking paragraphs of subdued but earnest admiration of the greatest intellect of the ancient Pagan world, hoping that they may be clearer to others than they are to me:—­

These sentences [of Plato] contain the culture of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these are the fountain-head of literatures.  A discipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals, or practical wisdom.  There never was such a range of speculation.  Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought.  Great havoc makes he among our originalities.  We have reached the mountain from which all these drift-bowlders were detached....  Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed.  The unity of Asia and the detail of Europe, the infinitude of the Asiatic soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-making, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe Plato came to join, and by contact to enhance the energy of each.  The excellence of Europe and Asia is in his brain.  Metaphysics and natural philosophy expressed the genius of Europe; he substricts the religion of Asia as the base.  In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of the two elements....  The physical philosophers had sketched each his theory of the world; the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit,—­theories mechanical and chemical in their genius.  Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all natural laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, to be no theories of the world, but bare inventories and lists.  To the study of Nature he therefore prefixes the dogma,—­’Let us declare the cause which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and compose the universe.  He was good; ... he wished that all things should be as much as possible like himself.’...

Plato ... 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, or extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this second sight discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction....  His definition of ideas as what is simple, permanent, uniform, and self-existent, forever discriminating them from the notions of the understanding, marks an era in the world.