The worn and polished bed of the Ilissus, down which trickles the water of the fountain of Kallirrhoè, is richly coloured with blue and purple, owing to reflected light from the blue sky of a brilliant early morning in summer. The Acropolis, with the Parthenon (divided into two masses from this point of view), is relieved against the sky. To the right are some of the lofty columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the little café or refreshment house giving scale to them.
of philosophy for hundreds of years after it had sunk into political insignificance, and even after the sceptre in the realm of literature had passed to Alexandria. The man to whom this new departure was chiefly due was Socrates, a brave soldier, a genial friend, and an incorruptible citizen, as well as an original thinker. Greatly to his own astonishment, he was declared by the Delphian oracle to be the wisest of men—a statement which he could only credit in the sense that he was wiser than others inasmuch as he was aware of his own ignorance. He not only imparted a higher moral tone to the teaching of Greek philosophy than it ever had before, but also laid the foundation of the Logic of Definition, and anticipated in the sphere of ethics the principle of Induction on which Aristotle acted in the next century in various departments of his encyclopædic studies, and which was to be fully applied by Lord Bacon in the natural world nearly 2000 years afterwards. Before the days of Socrates the greatest, or at least the most ambitious, thinkers had made vain attempts to unveil the secrets of the physical universe, and in doing so had either ignored the traditional theology, or else explained it away, like Xenophanes, who held that the gods were the creation of human imagination, and that if oxen or lions were to become religious they would likewise make for themselves gods in their own image. With such impiety Socrates could have no sympathy, as we may judge from the fact that he even condemned the presumption of Anaxagoras in treating Helios and Selené (sun and moon) as if they were material bodies, whose motions and magnitudes could be ascertained by the intellect of man.
In Plato, the disciple and exponent of Socrates, Greek speculation may be said to have reached its culminating point. How greatly his thoughts have influenced the course of philosophy in subsequent times, even to our own day, may be judged from the following words of the late Professor Jowett in his introduction to the Republic, which is generally acknowledged to be the greatest and most suggestive of the numerous works of Plato:—
“He (Plato) was the greatest metaphysical genius whom the world has seen; and in him, more than in any other ancient thinker, the germs of future knowledge are contained. The sciences of logic and psychology, which have supplied so many instruments of thought to after-ages, are based on the analyses of Socrates and Plato. The principles of definition, the law of contradiction, the fallacy of arguing in a circle, the distinction between the essence and accidents of a thing or notion, between means and ends, between causes and conditions; also the division of the mind into the rational, concupiscent and irascible elements, or of pleasures and desires into necessary and unnecessary—these and other great forms of thought are all of them to be found in the Republic, and were probably first invented by Plato. The greatest of all logical truths, and the one of which writers on philosophy are most apt to lose sight, the difference between words and things, has been most strenuously insisted on by him.... In the Republic is to be found the original of Cicero’s De Republica, of St. Augustine’s City of God, of the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, and of the numerous other States which are framed upon the same model.... The Republic of Plato is also the first treatise upon education, of which the writings of Milton and Locke, Rousseau, Jean Paul, and Goethe are the legitimate descendants. Like Dante or Bunyan, he has a revelation of another life; like Bacon, he is profoundly impressed with the unity of knowledge; in the early Church he exercised a real influence on theology, and at the revival of literature on politics.... He is the father of idealism in philosophy, in politics, in literature; and many of the latest conceptions of modern thinkers and statesmen, such as the unity of knowledge, the reign of law, and the equality of the sexes, have been anticipated in a dream by him.”