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Updated: June 8, 2025
Sir, It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality whatever. Thackeray.
It is this that the Brahmin and the Platonist seek; it is this that the mystic and the anchorite sigh for; towards this the teaching of the greatest of men would lead us: Lord Bacon himself says, "Nothing can fill, much less extend the soul of man, but God, and the contemplation of God." It is Life you want.
A Platonist who pretends that one is able to live with a young woman of whom one is fond, without becoming more than her friend, is a visionary who knows not what he says. My housekeeper was too young, too pretty, and above all too pleasant, she had too keen a wit, for me not to be captivated by all these qualities conjoined; I was bound to become her lover.
He wrote Behind the Veil , The Red Flag , Songs of the Heights and Deeps , and Essays on various poets, also a Life of Byron. Philosopher and poet, ed. at Oxf., took orders, and lived a quiet and placid life as a country parson and thinker. In philosophy he was a Platonist and mystic, and was an early opponent of Locke.
Horace, though at first a Platonist, then an Epicurean, then an Eclectic, was always somewhat of a "free lance." His mind was of that independent mould which can never be got to accept on anybody's authority the solution of problems which interest it.
When the misunderstanding is mutual, it may even lead to marriage. As a rule Beauty begets man's love, Power woman's. At least, so women tell me. But then, I am not beautiful. It must be said for the man that every lover is a species of Platonist he identifies the Beautiful with the Good and the True.
A considerable portion of Plato's Timaeus had been translated into Latin in the fourth century by Chalcidius with a very elaborate commentary based on ancient sources, while the Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison by the Roman Platonist Boethius in A. D. 525, was easily the most popular book of the Middle Ages.
With him were a Stoic, a Peripatetic, a Pythagorean, a Platonist, and a doctor, who began to tell stories so absurd and abounding in such monstrous superstition that he ended by leaving them in disgust.
And, again, it might be good for them, as well as for Christians, to be confounded and made like chaff before the wind, that so they too might learn His Name....And so on, through and in spite of all conceits, allegories, overstrained interpretations, Augustine went on evolving from the Psalms, and from the past, and from the future, the assertion of a Living, Present God, the eternal enemy of discord, injustice, and evil, the eternal helper and deliverer of those who were enslaved and crushed thereby in soul or body.... It was all most strange to Raphael.... Strange in its utter unlikeness to any teaching, Platonist or Hebrew, which he had ever heard before, and stranger still in its agreement with those teachings; in the instinctive ease with which it seemed to unite and justify them all by the talisman of some one idea and what that might be, his Jewish prejudices could not prevent his seeing, and yet would not allow him to acknowledge.
Such are, for example, the sayings: "Every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their best order; poetry, the best words in the best order."
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