Socrates had been dead sixteen years, and Plato was a man of forty-five, when far away in the north in the little town of Stagira, on the peninsula of Mount Athos in Macedoniawas, in 384 B.C., born a "man of men," the one above all others to whom the phrase of Milton may be applied.

The child of an Asklepiad, Nicomachus, physician to the father of Philip, there must have been a rare conjunction of the planets at the birth of the great Stagirite.

In the first circle of the "Inferno," Virgil leads Dante into a wonderful company, "star-seated" on the verdure (he says)--the philosophic family looking with reverence on "the Master of those who know"-- il maestro di color che sanno.( 28) And with justice has Aristotle been so regarded for these twenty-three centuries.

No man has ever swayed such an intellectual empire--in logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, psychology, ethics, poetry, politics and natural history, in all a creator, and in all still a master.

The history of the human mind--offers no parallel to his career.