duct; since no one errs or sins willingly. This, at all events, was true of Socrates himself, and made the basis of his adjustment in that fearless and rational freedom of right conduct, which has held the admiration of mankind.
Cicero's memorable statement, that Socrates called Philosophy down from the heavens and established her in the abodes of men, and, as we say, set her upon the study of man, is eulogy which Socrates may well deserve, but which, in justice, he must share at least with Democritus and the Sophists.
A number of gifted human beings seem bound together in the personality of Plato; and the adjustment wherein so manifold a nature could bring its different faculties to harmonious action had need to include more than one field of satisfying activity, more than one fount of peace. Plato was hotly in love with mortal beauty; and doubtless often had to bridle what we of northern climes and modern times might call his sensuality. More constantly, however, the image-building, story-building imagination of this poet and dramatist, superseding the importunities of sense, dispersed his passion in poetic myths, or employed his faculties in dramas of the mind, with plots formed from the stress and pitfalls of dialectic. Plato's desires change and are transfigured as they pass from the lower to the higher planes of his nature. Its topmost needs were those of its metaphysical energies; its sublimest
