Even the crude generalization of the unity of all things leads men to view the world with different eyes, and may easily affect their conception of human life and of politics, and also their own conduct and character (Tim).

We can imagine how a great mind like that of Pericles might derive elevation from his intercourse with Anaxagoras (Phaedr.).
To be struggling towards a higher but unattainable conception is a more favourable intellectual condition than to rest satisfied in a narrow portion of ascertained fact.

And the earlier, which have sometimes been the greater ideas of science, are often lost sight of at a later period.
How rarely can we say of any modern enquirer in the magnificent language of Plato, that 'He is the spectator of all time and of all existence!' Nor is there anything unnatural in the hasty application of these vast metaphysical conceptions to practical and political life.

In the first enthusiasm of ideas men are apt to see them everywhere, and to apply them in the most remote sphere.

They do not understand that the experience of ages is required to enable them to fill up 'the intermediate axioms.' Plato himself seems to have imagined that the truths of psychology, like those of astronomy and harmonics, would be arrived at by a process of deduction, and that the method which he has pursued in the Fourth Book, of inferring them from experience and the use of language, was imperfect and only provisional.