Athenian living who sets his hand to the true art
of politics; I am the only politician of my time." ¹
Philosophy was for him a study of human possi-
bilities in the light of human realities and limita-
tions; his daily food consisted of the problems
of human relations and endeavors: problems of
liberty versus order; of sex relations and the
family; of ideals of character and citizenship,
and the educational approaches to those ideals;
problems of the control of population, of heredity
and environment, of art and morals. With all
his liking for the poetry of mysticism, philosophy
none the less was to him preëminently an adven-
ture in this world; and unlike ourselves, who
follow one or another of his many leads, he sailed
virginal seas. Every reader in every age has
called him modern; but what age can there be
to which Plato will not still be modern?

Plato was twenty-eight when Socrates died; ²
and though he was not present at the drinking
of the hemlock, yet the passing of the master
must have been a tragic blow to him. It brought
him face to face with death, the mother of meta-
physics. Proudest of all philosophers, he did not
hide his sense of debt to Socrates: "I thank the
gods," he said, "that I was born freeman, not
slave; Greek, not barbarian; man, not woman;
but above all that I was born in the time of
Socrates." The old philosopher gone, Athens be-

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