Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life is commonplace. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. Plato, especially, has no external biography.
Plato stands between the truth and every man's mind, and has almost impressed language and the primary forms of thought with his name and seal.
The first period of a nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength. Children cry, scream, and stamp with fury, unable to express their desires. As soon as they can speak and tell their wants they become gentle. With nations he is as a god to them who can rightly divide and define. This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the account which the human mind gives to itself of the constitution of the world.
Two cardinal facts lie ever at the base of thought: Unity and Variety—oneness and otherness.
To this partiality the history of nations corresponds. The country of unity, faithful to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense fate, is Asia; on the other side, the genius of Europe is active and creative. If the East loves infinity, the West delights in boundaries. Plato came to join and enhance the energy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia is in his brain. No man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable; but having paid his homage, as for the human race, to the illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the human race affirmed: "And yet things are knowable!" Full of the genius of Europe, he said "Culture," he said "Nature," but he failed not to add, "There is also the divine."
This leads us to the central figure which he has established in his academy. Socrates and Plato are the double-star which the most powerful instrument will not entirely separate. Socrates, in his traits and genius, is the best example of that synthesis which constitutes Plato's extraordinary power.
Socrates, a man of humble stem, and a personal homeliness so remarkable as to be a cause of wit in others, was a cool fellow, with a knowledge of his man, be he whom he might whom he talked with, which laid the companion open to certain defeat in debate; and in debate he immoderately delighted. He was what in our country people call "an old one." This hard-headed humorist, whose drollery diverted the young patricians, turns out in the sequel to have a probity as invincible as his logic, and to be, under cover of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When accused before the judges, he affirmed the immortality of the soul and a future reward and punishment, and, refusing to recant, was condemned to die; he entered the prison and took away all ignominy from the place. The fame of this prison, the fame of the discourses there, and the drinking of the hemlock, are one of the most precious passages in the history of the world.
The rare coincidence in one ugly body of the droll and the martyr, the keen street debater with the sweetest saint known to any history at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of Plato, and the figure of Socrates placed itself in the foreground of the scene as the fittest dispenser of the intellectual treasures he had to communicate.
It remains to say that the defect of Plato is that he is literary, and never otherwise. His writings have not the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess.
And he had not a system. The acutest German, the lovingest disciple could never tell what Platonism was. No power of genius has ever yet had the smallest success in explaining existence. The perfect enigma remains.