256 REY. H. J. CLARKE. 
not only had he at command, for the exposure of puzzle-headed 
sophistry, the resources of a clear and imperial intellect, but 
philosophy, to the extent to which it thenceforth bore the 
impress of his mind, was characterised by a splendour and a 
sublimity such as it had never manifested before. 
Upon the specific characteristics of the philosophy of his — 
illustrious disciple, Plato, I need not dwell: it may suflice if 
T call attention to the significance of his conception of an 
original and eternal Being, whose attributes he sums up in 
the designation ‘the Good,” and in whose existence he finds 
an ultimate ground and unifying principle for those ideas 
which constitute the intelligible, and for their manifestations 
under the conditions of space and time. He thereby fur- 
nishes a weighty testimony to the immense superiority of the 
ethical method of carrying an investigation up to the Funda- 
mental Cause. Yet it must not be overlooked that the epithet 
he thus applies does but reflect the notion he himself had 
formed of goodness,—a notion which had been, doubtless, in a 
measure stunted and distorted in the process of development by 
conventional maxims, and had not been determined by ade- 
quately expanded views of moral obligation and a proportion- 
ably deep sense of the need of inward purity, and which, 
therefore, left much to be desired. To what extent it may, 
in the range of indeterminate desire and aspiration, have tran- 
scended the ethical teaching on which it sheds a lustre cannot 
be known; but beyond that limit it offers to the grasp of 
thought, and as the characteristic of a philosophy, nothing 
but shadow. 
Further, it must be remarked that ideas and metaphysical 
conceits can never satisfy the demands of the rigorously 
inquisitive searcher after causes. But Plato has nothing 
better to offer, his inventive intellect having played him the 
common trick of forcing him to take unwittingly the sub- 
jective for the objective, a species of dialectical legerde- 
main which has often proved successful, but cannot in the 
end, when scrutinised attentively, and with due knowledge 
of the laws of thought, escape detection. But while to 
Ideas he ascribes reality, this his philosophy forbids him 
to concede to the vehicle of their sensible manifestation, 
which, as he conceives it, is ever becoming, never is. ‘The 
intellect, however, of his pre-eminently famous pupil could . 
not be satisfied without some definite conception of a really 
existent, although passively concurrent, material cause for 
all things of which the senses take account. Aristotle, » 
accordingly, assumed the existence of something which he 
