These to him have no meaning,
except an allegoric one. But has he thrown them away for the sake of
getting a step nearer to Socrates, or Plato, or Aristotle? Surely not.
To them, as to the old Jewish sages, man is most important when regarded
not merely as a soul, but as a man, a social being of flesh and blood.
Aristotle declares politics to be the architectonical science, the
family and social relations to be the eternal master-facts of humanity.
Plato, in his Republic, sets before himself the Constitution of a State,
as the crowning problem of his philosophy. Every work of his, like
every saying of his master Socrates, deals with the common, outward,
vulgar facts of human life, and asserts that there is a divine meaning
in them, and that reverent induction from them is the way to obtain the
deepest truths. Socrates and Plato were as little inclined to separate
the man and the philosopher as Moses, Solomon, or Isaiah were. When
Philo, by allegorising away the simple human parts of his books, is
untrue to Moses's teaching, he becomes untrue to Plato's. He becomes
untrue, I believe, to a higher teaching than Plato's. He loses sight of
an eternal truth, which even old Homer might have taught him, when he
treats Moses as one section of his disciples in after years treated
Homer.
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