He had sat at the feet of the great master of dialectic, and, with the hot enthusiasm of a reformer, painted a picture of the idealized man, living in a community where the supremacy of the intellect was to be recognized as authoritative, where the individual and family were to be absorbed in the state, and where a lofty communism was to be established, and in which Virtue, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were to be sovereign entities. But the Platonic Communism was one where equality and humanity were left out. Plato could not escape the Time-Spirit. The Platonic Republic was his Athens idealized. " The very age and body of the time " gave to the philosopher's dream its form and pressure. The actual Hellenic Republics were not based upon the rights of man ; a few ruled over a nation of protelariats and slaves. When they came into rough contact with the vigorous Roman civilization, they were shattered like iridescent bubbles. Even so wise-browed a philosopher as Plato failed to recognize sufficiently the human element. His imaginary republic was air-drawn, fantastic ; a philosophic dream, with little grasp on life's realities. It was not broad-based. It did not recognize sufficiently the law of growth. It had no place in our work-a-day world. It interests us now chiefly from the superb literary skill with which it was constructed ; a prodigy of intellect and art. But it was not the Democratic Ideal. Aristotle -- fhat other imperial Greek genius, whom Dante called " the master of those that know ;" who had less imaginative mysticism than Plato, but a stronger hold on realities ; whose fertile genius touched almost every subject that came within ancient