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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: them, whether they will believe us or not, that the moral, as well as
the intellectual culture, acquired by translating accurately one
dialogue of Plato, by making out thoroughly the sense of one chapter of
a standard author, is greater than they will get from skimming whole
folios of Schlegelian aesthetics, resumes, histories of philosophy, and
the like second-hand information, or attending seven lectures a-week
till their lives' end. It is better to know one thing, than to know
about ten thousand things. I cannot help feeling painfully, after
reading those most interesting Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, that
the especial danger of this time is intellectual sciolism, vagueness,
sentimental eclecticism--and feeling, too, as Socrates of old believed,
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