The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: virtue, and the like. These are the platitudes and falsehoods in which
history is disguised. The taking of Athens is hardly mentioned.
The author of the Menexenus, whether Plato or not, is evidently intending
to ridicule the practice, and at the same time to show that he can beat the
rhetoricians in their own line, as in the Phaedrus he may be supposed to
offer an example of what Lysias might have said, and of how much better he
might have written in his own style. The orators had recourse to their
favourite loci communes, one of which, as we find in Lysias, was the
shortness of the time allowed them for preparation. But Socrates points
out that they had them always ready for delivery, and that there was no
difficulty in improvising any number of such orations. To praise the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: than we are, have handed it down to us. To know how to proceed by regular
steps from one to many, and from many to one, is just what makes the
difference between eristic and dialectic. And the right way of proceeding
is to look for one idea or class in all things, and when you have found one
to look for more than one, and for all that there are, and when you have
found them all and regularly divided a particular field of knowledge into
classes, you may leave the further consideration of individuals. But you
must not pass at once either from unity to infinity, or from infinity to
unity. In music, for example, you may begin with the most general notion,
but this alone will not make you a musician: you must know also the number
and nature of the intervals, and the systems which are framed out of them,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: voice, "you place me in a strange dilemma. The motives of my conduct
were to have died with me. To reveal them I must disclose to you some
secret wounds, must place the honor of my family in your keeping, and
must speak of myself, a delicate matter, as you will fully understand.
I hope, monsieur, that it will all remain a secret between us. You
will, no doubt, be able to find in the formulas of the law one which
will allow of judgment being pronounced without any betrayal of my
confidences."
"So far as that goes, it is perfectly possible, Monsieur le Marquis."
"Some time after my marriage," said M. d'Espard, "my wife having run
into considerable expenses, I was obliged to have recourse to
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