Dr. Vaughan, in his heavy and unartistic life of Thomas Aquinas, has drawn a striking resemblance between Plato and the Mediaeval doctor:  “Both,” he says, “were nobly born, both were grave from youth, both loved truth with an intensity of devotion.  If Plato was instructed by Socrates, Aquinas was taught by Albertus Magnus; if Plato travelled into Italy, Greece, and Egypt, Aquinas went to Cologne, Naples, Bologna, and Rome; if Plato was famous for his erudition, Aquinas was no less noted for his universal knowledge.  Both were naturally meek and gentle; both led lives of retirement and contemplation; both loved solitude; both were celebrated for self-control; both were brave; both held their pupils spell-bound by their brilliant mental gifts; both passed their time in lecturing to the schools (what the Pythagoreans were to Plato, the Benedictines were to the angelical); both shrank from the display of self; both were great dialecticians; both reposed on eternal ideas; both were oracles to their generation.”  But if Aquinas had the soul of Plato, he also had the scholastic gifts of Aristotle, to whom the Church is indebted for method and nomenclature as it was to Plato for synthesis and that exalted Realism which went hand in hand with Christianity.  How far he was indebted to Plato it is difficult to say.  He certainly had not studied his dialectics through translations or in the original, but had probably imbibed the spirit of this great philosopher through Saint Augustine and other orthodox Fathers who were his admirers.

Although both Plato and Aristotle accepted “universals” as the foundation of scientific inquiry, the former arrived at them by consciousness, and the other by reasoning.  The spirit of the two great masters of thought was as essentially different as their habits and lives.  Plato believed that God governed the world; Aristotle believed that it was governed by chance.  The former maintained that mind is divine and eternal; the latter that it is a form of the body, and consequently mortal.  Plato thought that the source of happiness was in virtue and resemblance to God; while Aristotle placed it in riches and outward prosperity.  Plato believed in prayer; but Aristotle thought that God would not hear or answer it, and therefore that it was useless.  Plato believed in happiness after death; while Aristotle supposed that death ended all pleasure.  Plato lived in the world of abstract ideas; Aristotle in the realm of sense and observation.  The one was religious; the other secular and worldly.  With both the passion for knowledge was boundless, but they differed in their conceptions of knowledge; the one basing it on eternal ideas and the deductions to be drawn from them, and the other on physical science,—­the phenomena of Nature,—­those things which are cognizable by the senses.  The spiritual life of Plato was “a longing after love and of eternal ideas, by the contemplation of which the soul sustains itself and becomes participant in immortality.”  The life of Aristotle was not spiritual, but intellectual.  He was an incarnation of mere intellect, the architect of a great temple of knowledge, which received the name of Organum, or the philosophy of first principles.