| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: teacher of virtue and education, and are the first who demanded pay in
return. How then can I do otherwise than invite you to the examination of
these subjects, and ask questions and consult with you? I must, indeed.
And I should like once more to have my memory refreshed by you about the
questions which I was asking you at first, and also to have your help in
considering them. If I am not mistaken the question was this: Are wisdom
and temperance and courage and justice and holiness five names of the same
thing? or has each of the names a separate underlying essence and
corresponding thing having a peculiar function, no one of them being like
any other of them? And you replied that the five names were not the names
of the same thing, but that each of them had a separate object, and that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: the Dreadful Quarantines were on. Then at last I did get there--I
slipped up secretly by water. All were gone. I could find no one
who could tell me anything. I could find no one who knew anything.
The house was wide open. There was no sign of life, but that the
cat came and rubbed up against me, and walked round and round me.
The Dreadful Fever was everywhere, and nobody could tell me
anything; and I searched everywhere, always and always alone--there
was no one to help me: everyone was trying to save from the Dreadful
Fever--''
Bessie Bell did not know what all that was about, but she felt so
sorry for the lady that she squeezed down ever so softly on her hand
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of
Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic
than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates.
Nor is there any real vulgarity in the fear which Socrates expresses that
he will get a beating from his mistress, Aspasia: this is the natural
exaggeration of what might be expected from an imperious woman. Socrates
is not to be taken seriously in all that he says, and Plato, both in the
Symposium and elsewhere, is not slow to admit a sort of Aristophanic
humour. How a great original genius like Plato might or might not have
written, what was his conception of humour, or what limits he would have
prescribed to himself, if any, in drawing the picture of the Silenus
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