[T]he first true and correctly proportioned presentation of Platonism that has been given to the general reader."-Paul Shorey
Through his idiosyncratic presentation of Plato, Pater offers us an account of a peculiarly modern frame of mind. He converts Platos search for a primordial and transcendent unity into a poetic evocation of a material life that is prized in being lived from moment to moment.
The book is implicitly a manifesto, more authoritative for the way it seems rooted in an "historical" account of the great founder of Western philosophy. It conveys the mental world of fifth-century Greece through a doctrine of experience that is in the process of becoming the emblem of early Modernism.