HOW TO GET STRONG
erson continues: "At last comes Plato the distributor; he can define. He leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. This defining is philosophy. In him the freest abandonment is united with the precision of a geometer. His daring imagination gives him the more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of highest flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician polish, his intrinsic evidence, edged by an irony so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorns the soundest health and strength of frame. According to the old sentence, 'If Jove should descend to the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.' He has a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor; and a humanity which makes him tender for the superstitions of the people. He has finished his thinking before he brings it to the reader; and he abounds in the surprises of a literary master. He has the opulence which furnishes at every turn the precise weapon he needs. As the rich man wears no more garments, drives no more horses, sits in no more chambers, than the poor, but has that one dress or equipage or instrument, which is fit for the hour and the need; so Plato in his plenty, is never restricted, but has the fit word.
"There is, indeed, no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did not possess and use,—epic, analysis, mania, intuition, music, satire, and irony, down to the customary and polite. His illustrations are poetry, and jests illustrations. He is a great average man—one who to the best thinking adds a proportion and equality to his faculties, so that men see in him their own dreams and glimpses made available, and made to pass for what they are. A great common-sense is his warrant and qualification to be the world's interpreter. What a price he sets on the feats of talent! What a value he gives to the art of gymnastics; what to geometry; what to music; what to astronomy, whose appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates!"
As we have already seen (page 11), Plato held him or her who was educated in mind and moral nature only, and not in body, also a cripple. But he lived up to his preaching.
"His name was at first Aristocles; and was changed to Plato because of the breadth of his shoulders; or of
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