The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

His Dialogues are among the precious possessions of mankind. Here for the first time philosophy took form, and by the very exuberance of youth achieved a perfection unrivaled in after days. Do you wish to hear noble discourse of love and friendship?—read the Lysis, the Charmides, and the Phaedrus. Would you know what a great and tender soul—the Platonic Socrates—thought of another life?—read the Phaedo, whose final pages are one of the peaks in the history of prose. Are you interested in the puzzles of the mind, in the mystery of knowledge?—read the Parmenides and the Theaetetus. Are you interested in anything?—read the Republic: here you shall find metaphysics, theology, ethics, psychology, theory of education, theory of statesmanship, theory of art; here you shall find feminism and birth-control, communism and socialism with all their virtues and their difficulties, eugenics and libertarian education, aristocracy and democracy, vitalism and psychoanalysis—what shall you not find here? No wonder Emerson awarded to the Republic the words which the occasionally pious Omar had written of the Koran: “Burn the libraries, for their value is in this book.”

As to Plato’s influence, how can we doubt? Consider the Academy which he founded, the first and longest-lived of the universities of the world. Consider the perpetual revival of Plato’s philosophy from the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria to the Cambridge Platonists of England. Consider the permeation of Christian theology with Platonic thought and symbolism, and the dominance of Plato in the culture of the earlier Middle Ages. Consider the enthusiastic Platonism of the Renaissance, when Lorenzo’s table recaptured some of the glory of the Symposium, and Pico della Mirandola burned candles devoutly before the Master’s image. Consider that at this moment, in a hundred countries and a thousand cities, a hundred thousand students, young and old, are absorbed in the Republic or the Dialogues, are being slowly and gratefully molded into a sensitive wisdom by the ardor and subtlety of Plato. Here is an immortality of the soul which makes almost insignificant the passing of the flesh.

3. ARISTOTLE All the world would agree that Aristotle must be in our list. The Middle Ages called him The Philosopher, as if to say that he embodied the type at the summit of its perfection. It is not that we love him; the texts he has left behind him expound so monotonously a passionless moderation that after feeling the radiance of Plato, we freeze at the touch of the Stagyrite’s tempered mind. But it is unfair to rate him by his books; we know now that they were but hasty notes made sometimes by himself, sometimes by his students, for the guidance or remembrance of his lectures; it would be absurd to judge him by comparing these technical fragments with the vivid dialogues through which Plato won for the first time a public audience for philosophy.

But let us once overcome this barrier of scholastic terminology and scornfully concentrated thought, and we shall find ourselves in the presence of an intellect of almost unbelievable depth and range. Here is a circumnavigation of the globe such as no mind has accomplished since; here every problem in science and philosophy has its consideration, its illumination, and a defensible solution; here knowledge is brought together as if through a thousand spies, and coordinated into a united vision of the world. Here the phraseology of philosophy is born, and today it is hardly possible to think without using the mintage of Aristotle’s brain. Here is wisdom: calm, temperate, and well nigh complete, as of a limitless intelligence majestically overspreading life. Here are new sciences, founded with almost casual ease, as if these supreme creations of the human intellect were but the recreations of a philosopher; here it is that biology appears, and embryology, and logic. Not that no man had ever thought of these matters before, but that none had controlled his thinking with patient observation, careful experiment, and systematic formulation of results. Barring astronomy and medicine, the history of science begins with the encyclopedic labors of the tireless Stagyrite.