Cultural influence is never a passive process. One striking feature of the Renaissance is the manner in which great figures of antiquity are brought into focus not so much for purposes of detached analysis, that would have to wait for the scientific classicism of a later age, but as potent presences or myths that could match contemporary expectations and perplexities. Of no figure is this more true than Plato, lauded by Petrarch, who hardly knew his writings, as a preferable alternative to the Aristotle of the scholars. Raphael's mural of the two philosophers in the Stanza della Segnatura effectively summarizes the myth:Aristotle extends his hand to the plane of terrestrial reality, the field of science, but the white-haired Plato points upwards to the transcendent order of spiritual truth (see frontispiece). Petrarch's intuitive preference reflected his concern with two issues: one was that of eloquence, of a linguistic medium that might touch subjective response and so convert thought into action; the other one, closely related, was a preoccupation with moral philosophy. One can detect in these issues the seeds of the humanist programme. The art of rhetoric is directed primarily at the will, the seat of moral responsibility; it moves it, arouses it and directs it towards desirable goals. The stock complaint in anti-scholastic polemic is that the moderni, the professional philosophers of the schools, have been trained in a dialectical system so formal and abstract that it has lost its purchase on actual life. Plato,the Plato of Renaissance myth, fits into this polemic because his philosophy is seen as eloquent and morally inspiring. Above all, it stresses the immortality of the soul, the ultimate ground of subjectivity.