Crossword-Solution: PLATONIST 9 letters, 28 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

SIR,—It has been said that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian, though the enormous majority of us, to be sure, live and die without being conscious of any invidious philosophic partiality whatever.

They may have been written in youth, or possibly like the works of some painters, may be partly or wholly the compositions of pupils; or they may have been the writings of some contemporary transferred by accident to the more celebrated name of Plato, or of some Platonist in the next generation who aspired to imitate his master.

The testimony of Xenophon is thus confirmed by that of Plato, and we are therefore justified in calling Socrates the first utilitarian; as indeed there is no side or aspect of philosophy which may not with reason be ascribed to him--he is Cynic and Cyrenaic, Platonist and Aristotelian in one.

The former was indeed not a Platonist, nor strictly speaking an Aristotelian—nor did he, like the modern Leibnitz, waste those precious hours which might be employed in the invention of a _fricasée_ or, _facili gradú_, the analysis of a sensation, in frivolous attempts at reconciling the obstinate oils and waters of ethical discussion.

But these physical attributes could easily be explained away as types of anything the Platonist pleased.(1) The Orphic Phanes, too, was almost as many-headed as a giant in a fairy tale, or as Purusha in the Rig-Veda.