| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been far inferior to
his own--say, one who had learned from Antiphon the Rhamnusian--would be
quite equal to the task of praising men to themselves. When we remember
that Antiphon is described by Thucydides as the best pleader of his day,
the satire on him and on the whole tribe of rhetoricians is transparent.
The ironical assumption of Socrates, that he must be a good orator because
he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher supposes, but is
rather to be regarded as fanciful. Nor can we say that the offer of
Socrates to dance naked out of love for Menexenus, is any more un-Platonic
than the threat of physical force which Phaedrus uses towards Socrates.
Nor is there any real vulgarity in the fear which Socrates expresses that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: unhappy to think of it. Dear children, if only you do not curse me
some day!----"
"But why should I curse you some day, mother?"
"Some day," she said, kissing him on the forehead, "you will find out
that I have wronged you. I am going to leave you, here, without money,
without"--and she hesitated--"without a father," she added, and at the
word she burst into tears and put the boy from her gently. A sort of
intuition told Louis that his mother wished to be alone, and he
carried off Marie, now half awake. An hour later, when his brother was
in bed, he stole down and out to the summer-house where his mother was
sitting.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: other mathematician who argued from probabilities and likelihoods in
geometry, would not be worth an ace.
THEAETETUS: But neither you nor we, Socrates, would be satisfied with such
arguments.
SOCRATES: Then you and Theodorus mean to say that we must look at the
matter in some other way?
THEAETETUS: Yes, in quite another way.
SOCRATES: And the way will be to ask whether perception is or is not the
same as knowledge; for this was the real point of our argument, and with a
view to this we raised (did we not?) those many strange questions.
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
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