insistency was as to the reality of mind and the validity of concepts mentally visualised, and tested, if not formed, by an argumentation which might be destructive or constructive, severe, stupendous, whimsical, but captivating usually, and always carried forward by a resistlessly creative imagination.
What other man ever had such joy in the work and play of his mind as Plato! Here was his real absorption, his real deliverance — that which veritably made his spiritual freedom and his peace. It satisfied him, and he trusted it. His was a great faith. His confidence was absolute in the convictions of his mind, as well as in the certainty of the realisation of its imperative demands. Magnificent as was his dialectic, strenuous as might be its arguments, Plato's faith was pinned to none of them. While willing to follow whither the living and breathing argument might lead, he may be no more serious in his reliance on its procedure or conclusion, than he is upon the truth of the illustrative tales he knows so well to weave. For, as the precursor of all that after him might be named Platonic or Neo-platonic, he is always conscious that no argument can compass the whole truth — of which the processes of dialectic mirror the broken rays. Throughout the Dialogues his parables, whether parables of the poetic imagination or the less obvious parables of dialectic, change and pass; and while he may have been earnest with them at the time,
