cast a veil over the gulf which divides phenomena from onta (Meno, Phaedrus, Symposium, Phaedo).  In his return to earth Plato meets with a difficulty which has long ceased to be a difficulty to us.  He cannot understand how these obstinate, unmanageable ideas, residing alone in their heaven of abstraction, can be either combined with one another, or adapted to phenomena (Parmenides, Philebus, Sophist).  That which is the most familiar process of our own minds, to him appeared to be the crowning achievement of the dialectical art.  The difficulty which in his own generation threatened to be the destruction of philosophy, he has rendered unmeaning and ridiculous.  For by his conquests in the world of mind our thoughts are widened, and he has furnished us with new dialectical instruments which are of greater compass and power.  We have endeavoured to see him as he truly was, a great original genius struggling with unequal conditions of knowledge, not prepared with a system nor evolving in a series of dialogues ideas which he had long conceived, but contradictory, enquiring as he goes along, following the argument, first from one point of view and then from another, and therefore arriving at opposite conclusions, hovering around the light, and sometimes dazzled with excess of light, but always moving in the same element of ideal truth.  We have seen him also in his decline, when the wings of his imagination have begun to droop, but his experience of life remains, and he turns away from the contemplation of the eternal to take a last sad look at human affairs.

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And so having brought into the world ‘noble children’ (Phaedr.), he rests from the labours of authorship.  More than two thousand two hundred years have passed away since he returned to the place of Apollo and the Muses.  Yet the echo of his words continues to be heard among men, because of all philosophers he has the most melodious voice.  He is the inspired prophet or teacher who can never die, the only one in whom the outward form adequately represents the fair soul within; in whom the thoughts of all who went before him are reflected and of all who come after him are partly anticipated.  Other teachers of philosophy are dried up and withered,—­ after a few centuries they have become dust; but he is fresh and blooming, and is always begetting new ideas in the minds of men.  They are one-sided and abstract; but he has many sides of wisdom.  Nor is he always consistent with himself, because he is always moving onward, and knows that there are many more things in philosophy than can be expressed in words, and that truth is greater than consistency.  He who approaches him in the most reverent spirit shall reap most of the fruit of his wisdom; he who reads him by the light of ancient commentators will have the least understanding of him.