The Historians' History of the World 04

That we can so do, that we can have Socrates as our master, we owe wholly and solely to the loyalty and poetic genius of the man (Plato) who set himself in the days of that agony to show that—hard as it may be to define uprightness, courage, piety and what other virtues there may be—the upright and courageous and therefore happy man has demonstrated in his own person the reality of these abstractions. This alone would have sufficed to make Plato a benefactor to mankind; but this is only a small part of his labours. With all that Socrates and the school of sophistry taught him, he combines mathematics and the mysticism of Pythagoras. He founded the school which was destined to serve the purposes of organised scientific work for nearly a thousand years, and which is the prototype of all such organisations. He lays down the fundamental lines of every philosophical science, constructing, and, where he thinks he has found a better way, demolishing the foundations he himself has laid. Many of his intuitions have only been verified after the lapse of centuries and tens of centuries; others still await verification. The force inherent in him is best proved by the energy of those who assure us that he has had his day. He has set Eros as the mediator between heaven and earth; this Eros has no worthier abode than the writings of Plato; through them, even to-day, Psyche is learning the road heavenwards. But Plato is a Greek in every fibre, he can only be understood through his people, and his people through him.

Plato was a poet; and though he fixed his mind wholly on the eternal type, unduly despising the individual phenomenon, and thrusting his own individuality completely into the background, yet this individuality with its poetic genius cast light and shade in bewildering alternation over every field of contemplation, like the full moon as she fleets over the mountains and plains of Attica.

Science needed the cool judgment and caution of the systematiser. She found it in the person of Aristotle, the master-builder among men (baumeisterlicher Mann), as Goethe calls him. At his hands science first received systematic treatment and method—the tools of her craft. The existence of the man and his work attest for all time the unnatural character of a division of the one and indivisible body of science though it be only into natural and abstract sciences. For even in the collection of material, he laboured for all branches alike. It is idle to inquire which were the greater, his personal achievements or those which owed their birth to his example. For his successors carried on the work in his spirit, even more truly when, often after vehement controversy, they advanced beyond him, than when they rested content with merely working out the plan of the master-builder. Sprung of a family of physicians, and endowed with the Ionian temperament, the natural science of Ionia is the most substantial contribution he made to the legacy bequeathed by Plato. But he had likewise made himself familiar with all the accepted tricks of oratory at Athens, he speaks with authority on logic, rhetoric, and poetry, and he is capable of treating all literary forms with the hand of a master. Yet he did not discover his own peculiar style until he combined the bald simplicity of Ionian scientific phraseology with Attic balance and Attic elegance. Thus he became the father of scientific prose, of the text-book no less than the lecture and the practical investigation. Even in halting translations he afforded nutriment to powerful intellects. His own words will have a modern ring to the end of time.