‘Did you ever yet, Hypatia, consider at leisure what the archetype of man might be like?’
Hypatia started, as at a new thought, and confessed—as every Neo—Platonist would have done—that she had never done so.
‘And yet our master, Plato, bade us believe that there was a substantial archetype of each thing, from a flower to a nation, eternal in the heavens. Perhaps we have not been faithful Platonists enough heretofore, my dearest tutor. Perhaps, being philosophers, and somewhat of Pharisees to boot, we began all our lucubrations as we did our prayers, by thanking God that we were not as other men were; and so misread another passage in the Republic, which we used in pleasant old days to be fond of quoting.’
‘What was that?’ asked Hypatia, who became more and more interested every moment.
‘That philosophers were men.’
‘Are you mocking me? Plato defines the philosopher as the man who seeks after the objects of knowledge, while others seek after those of opinion.’
‘And most truly. But what if, in our eagerness to assert that wherein the philosopher differed from other men, we had overlooked that in which he resembled other men; and so forgot that, after all, man was a genus whereof the philosopher was only a species?’
Hypatia sighed.
‘Do you not think, then, that as the greater contains the less, and the archetype of the genus that of the species, we should have been wiser if we had speculated a little more on the archetype of man as man, before we meddled with a part of that archetype,—the archetype of the philosopher?.... Certainly it would have been the easier course, for there are more men than philosophers, Hypatia; and every man is a real man, and a fair subject for examination, while every philosopher is not a real philosopher—our friends the Academics, for instance, and even a Neo-Platonist or two whom we know? You seem impatient. Shall I cease?’
‘You mistook the cause of my impatience,’ answered she, looking up at him with her great sad eyes. ‘Go on.’