| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: His sword did ne'er leave striking in the field.
Yet liv'st thou, Salisbury? though thy speech doth fail,
One eye thou hast, to look to heaven for grace:
The sun with one eye vieweth all the world.
Heaven, be thou gracious to none alive,
If Salisbury wants mercy at thy hands!
Bear hence his body; I will help to bury it,
Sir Thomas Gargrave, hast thou any life?
Speak unto Talbot; nay, look up to him.
Salisbury, cheer thy spirit with this comfort,
Thou shalt not die whiles--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: ALCIBIADES: So I suppose.
SOCRATES: Did you not acknowledge that madness was the opposite of
discretion?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And that there is no third or middle term between discretion and
indiscretion?
ALCIBIADES: True.
SOCRATES: And there cannot be two opposites to one thing?
ALCIBIADES: There cannot.
SOCRATES: Then madness and want of sense are the same?
ALCIBIADES: That appears to be the case.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: different times of his life, as new distinctions are realized, or new
stages of thought attained by him. We are not therefore justified, in
order to take away the appearance of inconsistency, in attributing to him
hidden meanings or remote allusions.
There are no external criteria by which we can determine the date of the
Meno. There is no reason to suppose that any of the Dialogues of Plato
were written before the death of Socrates; the Meno, which appears to be
one of the earliest of them, is proved to have been of a later date by the
allusion of Anytus.
We cannot argue that Plato was more likely to have written, as he has done,
of Meno before than after his miserable death; for we have already seen, in
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