A geometrician, a little severe, thus addressed us one day: There is nothing in literature more dangerous than rhetorical sophists; and among these sophists none are more unintelligible and unworthy of being understood than the divine Plato.

The only useful idea to be found in him, is that of the immortality of the soul, which was already admitted among cultivated nations; but, then, how does he prove this immortality?

We cannot too forcibly appeal to this proof, in order to correctly appreciate this famous Greek. He asserts, in his “Ph?don,” that death is the opposite of life, that death springs from life, and the living from the dead, consequently that our souls will descend beneath the earth when we die.

If it is true that the sophist Plato, who gives himself out for the enemy of all sophists, reasons always thus, what have been all these pretended great men, and in what has consisted their utility?

The grand defect of the Platonic philosophy is the transformation of abstract ideas into realities. A man can only perform a fine action, because ............