United States or Ecuador ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Consider the goddess Athene, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus, even as among the fables of the poor heathen folk of seas thou never knewest goddesses are fabled to leap out from the armpits or feet of their fathers. Thou must know that what Plato, in the 'Cratylus, made Socrates say in jest, the learned among us practise in sad earnest.

From this intelligible world, replete with omniform ideas, this sensible world, according to Plato, perpetually flows, depending on its artificer intellect, in the same manner as shadow on its forming substance.

Thus the influence of the poets is added to our want of discipline at home, and our tender and delicate manner of living, so that between them they have deprived virtue of all its vigor and energy. Plato, therefore, was right in banishing them from his commonwealth, where he required the best morals, and the best form of government.

Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became what shall I call it? secretarial.

But what wantonness is it to commend lust! You produce Themistocles and Demosthenes; to these you add Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato. What! do you then call studies lust?

Augustine would have blamed paganism less, if, in place of a temple to Cybele, it had raised a shrine to Plato, in which his works might have been publicly read. St.

Just as the death of Socrates inspired in Plato the out-reaching hope of a hereafter, so these Jewish martyrdoms quickened the doubtful guess, the dim conjecture, into fervid conviction. From this period dates the settled Jewish belief in immortality. The form which that belief assumed is seen in the book of Daniel.

Not less positive is the acknowledgment which Augustine makes of the benefits which he had received from Plato.

The lives of authors and artists exhibit a most painful disease in that jealousy which is the perpetual fever of their existence. Why does PLATO never mention XENOPHON, and why does XENOPHON inveigh against PLATO, studiously collecting every little rumour which may detract from his fame? They wrote on the same subject!

I go to death, you to life; which of the two is better only God knows." Two lessons of supreme importance are to be learned from Plato. In the first place he insists on credentials from the accepted teachers of a nation. On examination most of them, like Gorgias, would be found incapable of defining the subjects for the teaching of which they receive money.