PLATO CALLED "TEXT FOR EVERY DISCOURSE"

"For myself I truly believe that Plato has great things in store for the young man and young woman who will study him today," said Professor C. B. Gulick '90 yesterday afternoon in his lecture on the eminent Greek philosopher, whose writings like Shakespeare's furnish "a text for every discourse." The lecture was the first of a series on five great authors to be given on successive Wednesdays during the next month for the benefit of Harvard and Radcliffe students.

Professor Gulick warned his hearers that a legend has sprung up ascribing to Plato much that he never said nor believed--for example, the over-worked and entirely erroneous conception of Platonic love.

"It is not easy to sum up Platonism in a paragraph," he stated, "but I think we may say that it is the determination to look beyond the things of sense in this perplexing world of change, of becoming, and of decay, with the conviction that behind it all there are abiding realities of youth, beauty, and goodness which the soul may grasp when it realizes its heavenly origin. It is the soul which is alive, not the body. It lives in the world of the ideas. These are more potent than acts. As Marcus Aurelius puts it, The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.'

"An American scholar for whom I have great respect, thought he has long been forgotten, has well said: The young man who is an enthusiastic student of Plato can never be a sciolist in regard to education, a quack in literature, a demagogue in politics, or an infidel in religion."