| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: 'Phaedrus;' Th. Martin's 'Etudes sur le Timee;' Mr. Poste's edition and
translation of the 'Philebus;' the Translation of the 'Republic,' by
Messrs. Davies and Vaughan, and the Translation of the 'Gorgias,' by Mr.
Cope.
I have also derived much assistance from the great work of Mr. Grote, which
contains excellent analyses of the Dialogues, and is rich in original
thoughts and observations. I agree with him in rejecting as futile the
attempt of Schleiermacher and others to arrange the Dialogues of Plato into
a harmonious whole. Any such arrangement appears to me not only to be
unsupported by evidence, but to involve an anachronism in the history of
philosophy. There is a common spirit in the writings of Plato, but not a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: nothing--you are doing so.
And may there not be a silence of the speaker? said Dionysodorus.
Impossible, said Ctesippus.
Or a speaking of the silent?
That is still more impossible, he said.
But when you speak of stones, wood, iron bars, do you not speak of the
silent?
Not when I pass a smithy; for then the iron bars make a tremendous noise
and outcry if they are touched: so that here your wisdom is strangely
mistaken; please, however, to tell me how you can be silent when speaking
(I thought that Ctesippus was put upon his mettle because Cleinias was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: his wife.
On the following day Giardini took the Count up to the room where the
Gambaras lodged. Though Marianna fully knew her lover's noble soul,--
for there are natures which quickly enter into each other's spirit,--
Marianna was too good a housewife not to betray her annoyance at
receiving such a fine gentleman in so humble a room. Everything was
exquisitely clean. She had spent the morning in dusting her motley
furniture, the handiwork of Signor Giardini, who had put it together,
at odd moments of leisure, out of the fragments of the instruments
rejected by Gambara.
Andrea had never seen anything quite so crazy. To keep a decent
Gambara |
