| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: cold. How is this? Protagoras will reply that the wind is hot to him who
is cold, cold to him who is hot. And "is" means "appears," and when you
say "appears to him," that means "he feels." Thus feeling, appearance,
perception, coincide with being. I suspect, however, that this was only a
"facon de parler," by which he imposed on the common herd like you and me;
he told "the truth" (in allusion to the title of his book, which was called
"The Truth") in secret to his disciples. For he was really a votary of
that famous philosophy in which all things are said to be relative; nothing
is great or small, or heavy or light, or one, but all is in motion and
mixture and transition and flux and generation, not "being," as we
ignorantly affirm, but "becoming." This has been the doctrine, not of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rivers to the Sea by Sara Teasdale: The bitter crowd that barters in a mart,
Veiling her pride while tears of pity start,
I hide my glory thru a jealous fear.
My crown shall stay a sweet and secret thing
Kept pure with prayer at evensong and morn,
And when you come to take it from my head,
I shall not weep, nor will a word be said,
But I shall kneel before you, oh my king,
And bind my brow forever with a thorn.
TO A CASTILIAN SONG
WE held the book together timidly,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: profess to teach). But there is another point which we failed to observe,
and in which Gorgias has never instructed Meno, nor Prodicus Socrates.
This is the nature of right opinion. For virtue may be under the guidance
of right opinion as well as of knowledge; and right opinion is for
practical purposes as good as knowledge, but is incapable of being taught,
and is also liable, like the images of Daedalus, to 'walk off,' because not
bound by the tie of the cause. This is the sort of instinct which is
possessed by statesmen, who are not wise or knowing persons, but only
inspired or divine. The higher virtue, which is identical with knowledge,
is an ideal only. If the statesman had this knowledge, and could teach
what he knew, he would be like Tiresias in the world below,--'he alone has
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