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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: consequent on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation
of physical achievements over mental culture; while the
hierarchical succession of Timocracy and Oligarchy, Democracy and
Tyranny, is dwelt on at great length and its causes analysed in a
very dramatic and psychological manner, if not in that sanctioned
by the actual order of history.
And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic
succession of states represents rather the succession of ideas in
the philosophic mind than any historical succession of time.
Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the
theory of the periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be
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