C. B.’s Reviews > Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures > Status Update

'Platonic aesthetics, remember! as such, are ever in close connexion with Plato's ethics. It is life itself, action and character, he proposes to colour; to get something of that irrepressible conscience of art, that spirit of control, into the general course of life, above all into its energetic or impassioned acts.'

'If Socrates... seemed to become the teacher of another, it was but by thinking allowed for a few moments over his own lesson, or leaning upon that other as he went along that difficult way which each one must really prosecute for himself.'

'[Plato] seems to have no inclination for the responsibilities of definite theory; for a system such as that of the Neo-Platonists for instance... who, in a kind of prosaic and cold-blooded transcendentalism, developed as definite philosophic dogma... what in Plato is to the last rather poetry than metaphysical reasoning — the irrepressible because almost unconscious poetry.'

'Socrates, with all his singleness of purpose, had been... by natural constitution a twofold power, an embodied paradox ... The influence of which... there emerged on one hand the Cynic, on the other the Cyrenaic School, embodying respectively those opposed austerities and amenities of character, which, according to the temper of this or that disciple, had seemed to predominate in their common master.'