advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage has been twofold:  on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all his teachings—­even Reincarnation—­as hypotheses,—­and men do not as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis.  On the other hand, how was any Church eager to burn out heresy and heretics to deal with him?  He was not to be stamped out; because his influence depended on no continuity of discipleship, no organization; because he survived merely as a tendency of thought.  No churchly fulminations might silence his batteries; because he had camouflaged them, and they were not to be seen.  Of course he did not invent his ideas; they are as old as Theosophy.  The Lodge sent him to proclaim them in the way he did:  the best way possible, since the Pythagorean effort had failed of its greatest success.  What we owe to him—­his genius and inestimable gift to the world—­is precisely that matchless camouflage.  It has been effective, in spite of efforts—­

That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as colts do their mothers.  A youth, it is said, who revered Plato always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as a Platonist.  But he never could have understood the inwardness of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato’s did to mysticism and the illumination of the Soul.  He adopted much of the teaching, but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist, either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon.  I am not going to trouble you much with Aristotle; let this from the Encyclopedia suffice:  “Philosophic differences” it says “are best felt by their practical effects:  philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism is a philosophy of individual substances:  practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world.”

Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato’s inspiration, and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the Brain-mind.  The most famous of Plato’s disciples, he did what he could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato’s message.  But Plato’s method had guarded that, so that for mystics it should always be there, Aristotle or no.  But for mere philosophers, seeming to improve on it, he had something tainted it.  It descended, as said, through the Neo-Platonists—­who turned it back Plato-ward—­to the Moslems:  through Avicenna, who Aristotelianized, to Averroes, who Platonized it again; and from him to Europe; where Bacon presently gave it another twist to out-Aristotle Aristotle (as someone said) to stagger the Stagirite—­and passed it on as the scientific method of today.  According to Coleridge, every man is by nature either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; and there is some truth in it.