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The Comte De Gabalis

By Abbé N. de Montfaucon de Villars

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Plato, His Place as a Philosopher

429 B.C. PLATO, 347 B.C.

HIS PLACE AS A PHILOSOPHER.

G"Yes, there is a mother-dotrine, a synthesis of religions and philosophies. It develops and deepens as the ages roll along, but its foundation and centre remain the same. We have still to show the providential reasons for its different forms, according to race and time. We must re-establish the chain of the great initiates, who were the real initiators of humanity. Then, the might of each of them will be multiplied by that of all the rest, and the unity of truth will appear in the very diversity of its expression. Like everything in nature, Greece has had her dawn, the full blaze of her sun, and her decline. Such is the law of days, of men, and nations, of earths and heavens. Orpheus is the initiate of the dawn, Pythagoras the initiate of the full daylight, and Plato that of the setting sun of Greece, a setting of glowing purple which becomes the rose of a new dawn, the dawn of humanity. Plato follows Pythagoras, just as the torch-bearer followed the great hierophant in the mysteries of Eleusis." EXTRACTS, PAGES 61, 62.

PLATO MEETS HIS MASTER.
"At the age of twenty-seven he had written several tragedies and was about to offer one for competition. It was about this time that Plato met Socrates, who was discussing with some youths in the gardens of the [paragraph continues]Academy. He was speaking about the Just and the Unjust, the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. The poet drew near to the philosopher, listened to him, and returned on the morrow and for several days afterwards. At the end of a few weeks, his mind had undergone a complete revolution. . . . Another Plato had been born in him, as he listened to the words of the one who called himself 'the one who brings souls to birth.' The important thing, he (Socrates) said, was to believe in the Just and the True, and to apply them to life. Plato had received from Socrates the great impulse, the active male principle of his life, his faith in justice and truth. He was indebted for the science and substance of his ideas to his initiation into the Mysteries, and his genius consists in the new form, at once poetic and dialectic, he was enabled to give to them." EXTRACTS PAGES 69, 72, 83, EDOUARD SCHURE, "HERMES AND PLATO." TRANSLATED BY F. ROTHWELL, B.A.