This is the way he did it.  He advanced no dogma, formulated no system; but what he gave out, he gave rather as hypotheses.  His aim was to set in motion a method of thinking which should lead always back to the Spirit and Divine Truth.  He started no world-religion; founded no church—­not even such a quite unchurchly church as that which came to exist on the teachings of Confucius.  He never had the masses practicing their superstitions, nor a priesthood venting its lust of power, in his name.  Instead, he arranged things so, that wherever fine minds have aspired to the light of the Spirit, Plato has been there to guide them on their way.  So you are to see Star-Plato shining, you are to hear that voice from the Spheres at song, when Shelley, reaching his topmost note, sang: 

     “The One remains, the many change and pass;
          Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
     Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
          Stains the white radiance of Eternity";—­

and when Swinburne sings of Time and change that: 

     “Songs they can stop that earth found meet,
          But the Stars keep their ageless rhyme;
      Flowers they can slay that Spring thought sweet,
          But the Stars keep their Spring sublime,
     Actions and agonies control,
     And life and death, but not the Soul.”

In a poetic age—­in the time of Aeschylus, for example—­Plato would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to invent another class of poets, one above the present highest; and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato.  Because Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry.  But he came, living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry:  as who should say:  “God pity you!  I give you the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and you make answer, ’Charming Plato, how exquisitely poetic is your prose!’” So his bitterness against poetry is very natural.  Poetry is the inevitable vehicle of the highest truth; spiritual truth is poetry.  But the world in general does not know this.  Like Bacon, it looks on poetry as a kind of pleasurable lying.  Plato went through the skies Mercury to the Sun of Truth, its nearest attendant planet; and therefore was, and could not help being, Very-Poet of very-poets.  But Homer and others had lied loudly about the Gods; and, thought Plato, the Gods forbid that the truth he had to declare—­a vital matter—­ should be classed with their loud lying.

He masked the batteries of his Theosophy; camouflaged his great Theosophical guns; but fired them off no less effectively, landing his splendid shells at every ganglionic point in the history of European thought since.  Let a man soak his soul in Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall spring up there presently and bloom.  He prepares the soil:  suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the high teachings.  The