impossibility, within such compass, of focussing
Plato in the political and philosophical meaning
of his time. One's feeling here is of having dese-
crated with small talk the Parthenon of philos-
ophy. Perhaps as we go on we shall be able to
see more clearly the still-living value of Plato's
thought: in almost everything that we shall
hereinafter discuss his voice will be heard, even
though unnamed. To-day, at last, he comes
again into his own -- as in Renaissance days --
after centuries dominated by the influence of his
first misinterpreter; and generations bred on the
throned lukewarmness of the Nicomachean Ethics
yield to a generation that is learning to feel the
hot constructive passion of the Republic. Dead
these two thousand and some hundred years,
Plato belongs to the future.

-66-