| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: barbarism succeeding the saturnalia of popular thought and the last
struggles of those civilizations which accumulated the treasures of
the world in one direction?
The commercial traveller! Is he not to the realm of ideas what our
stage-coaches are to men and things? He is their vehicle; he sets them
going, carries them along, rubs them up with one another. He takes
from the luminous centre a handful of light, and scatters it broadcast
among the drowsy populations of the duller regions. This human
pyrotechnic is a scholar without learning, a juggler hoaxed by
himself, an unbelieving priest of mysteries and dogmas, which he
expounds all the better for his want of faith. Curious being! He has
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: quasi genneteira (compare the Homeric form gegaasi); ora (with an omega),
or, according to the old Attic form ora (with an omicron), is derived apo
tou orizein, because it divides the year; eniautos and etos are the same
thought--o en eauto etazon, cut into two parts, en eauto and etazon, like
di on ze into Dios and Zenos.
'You make surprising progress.' True; I am run away with, and am not even
yet at my utmost speed. 'I should like very much to hear your account of
the virtues. What principle of correctness is there in those charming
words, wisdom, understanding, justice, and the rest?' To explain all that
will be a serious business; still, as I have put on the lion's skin,
appearances must be maintained. My opinion is, that primitive men were
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: proceed from the abstract to the concrete. We are searching into things
which are upon the utmost limit of human intelligence, and then of a sudden
we fall rather heavily to the earth. There are no intermediate steps which
lead from one to the other. But the abstract is a vacant form to us until
brought into relation with man and nature. God and the world are mere
names, like the Being of the Eleatics, unless some human qualities are
added on to them. Yet the negation has a kind of unknown meaning to us.
The priority of God and of the world, which he is imagined to have created,
to all other existences, gives a solemn awe to them. And as in other
systems of theology and philosophy, that of which we know least has the
greatest interest to us.
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