| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: the Parmenides, the personal form which is attributed to them in the
Timaeus, the logical character which they assume in the Sophist and
Philebus, and the allusion to them in the Laws. In the Cratylus they dawn
upon him with the freshness of a newly-discovered thought.
The Meno goes back to a former state of existence, in which men did and
suffered good and evil, and received the reward or punishment of them until
their sin was purged away and they were allowed to return to earth. This
is a tradition of the olden time, to which priests and poets bear witness.
The souls of men returning to earth bring back a latent memory of ideas,
which were known to them in a former state. The recollection is awakened
into life and consciousness by the sight of the things which resemble them
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the
folds of the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret
Aubyn's name. The motion of the train set it dancing up and down
on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was reading. . . .
At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he
went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket.
They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared
to touch. . . . At length he opened the first volume. A familiar
letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb
of type. The little broken phrases fled across the page like
wounded animals in the open. . . . It was a horrible sight. . . .
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: two classes.
YOUNG SOCRATES: How would you divide them?
STRANGER: Of the whole class, some have life and some are without life.
YOUNG SOCRATES: True.
STRANGER: And by the help of this distinction we may make, if we please, a
subdivision of the section of knowledge which commands.
YOUNG SOCRATES: At what point?
STRANGER: One part may be set over the production of lifeless, the other
of living objects; and in this way the whole will be divided.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Certainly.
STRANGER: That division, then, is complete; and now we may leave one half,
Statesman |
