| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: very reverse of the truth, and that the most opposed are the most friendly;
for that everything desires not like but that which is most unlike: for
example, the dry desires the moist, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet,
the sharp the blunt, the void the full, the full the void, and so of all
other things; for the opposite is the food of the opposite, whereas like
receives nothing from like. And I thought that he who said this was a
charming man, and that he spoke well. What do the rest of you say?
I should say, at first hearing, that he is right, said Menexenus.
Then we are to say that the greatest friendship is of opposites?
Exactly.
Yes, Menexenus; but will not that be a monstrous answer? and will not the
Lysis |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: established government be obeyed--and no longer. This
principle being admitted, the justice of every particular
case of resistance is reduced to a computation of the
quantity of the danger and grievance on the one side, and of
the probability and expense of redressing it on the other."
Of this, he says, every man shall judge for himself.
But Paley appears never to have contemplated those cases
to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which
a people, as well and an individual, must do justice, cost
what it may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a
drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
