| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: ALCIBIADES: Impossible.
SOCRATES: Then you or any one who means to govern and superintend, not
only himself and the things of himself, but the state and the things of the
state, must in the first place acquire virtue.
ALCIBIADES: That is true.
SOCRATES: You have not therefore to obtain power or authority, in order to
enable you to do what you wish for yourself and the state, but justice and
wisdom.
ALCIBIADES: Clearly.
SOCRATES: You and the state, if you act wisely and justly, will act
according to the will of God?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: Sophist. In the Statesman the king or statesman is discovered by a similar
process; and we have a summary, probably made for the first time, of
possessions appropriated by the labour of man, which are distributed into
seven classes. We are warned against preferring the shorter to the longer
method;--if we divide in the middle, we are most likely to light upon
species; at the same time, the important remark is made, that 'a part is
not to be confounded with a class.' Having discovered the genus under
which the king falls, we proceed to distinguish him from the collateral
species. To assist our imagination in making this separation, we require
an example. The higher ideas, of which we have a dreamy knowledge, can
only be represented by images taken from the external world. But, first of
Statesman |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: would be closed for a long time. Crowds are occasionally
easy-going masters, as were Heliogabalus and Tiberius, but they
are also violently capricious. A civilisation, when the moment
has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the
mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything
postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely
the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their
growing indifference with respect to all general beliefs.
BOOK III
THE CLASSIFICATION AND DESCRIPTION OF THE DIFFERENT KINDS OF
CROWDS
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