Selections from Plato
From introduction;
it has often been observed that the eminent figures of the world's intellectual history have been, in a singular degree, men of their own age ; men whose sympathies were keenly attuned to the impulses of a certain special period of human development, their works rooted in its cravings, addressed to its capacities, racy of the soil in which they grew.
This is doubtless true ; but it is also true that the very greatest have commonly been men not of one but of two ages. They help to forward some great change and advance in the development of the human spirit : they help it, but they are also its product, and not less are they the product of the order which they displace.
They look before and after; and we see those few towering figures touched with the sunset light of one epoch and the dawn of another. There is Shakespeare, for instance, so full of the feudal spirit, with all its stateliness and splendour, yet so genially alive to the exuberant democratic vitality of the new era, whose figures, grotesque, jovial, audacious, and unabashed, mingle in his pages with the stately procession of courtiers and princes, and justify their claim to be there by their own inherent human interest.
There is Dante, in whom the dying spirit of unquestioning faith, reverence, and submission was so deeply blended with the new spirit of haughty independence and individuality.
There is Homer, whose action moves in a primitive world of heroic simplicity, where gods walk on earth with men, yet in whom we can clearly perceive, ever recurrent, yet ever coming, as it were, from another world of thought, a sad, meditative, questioning strain, laden with a sense of the mystery and pathos of life
"Selections from Plato" is a valuable resource for anyone interested in delving into the profound ideas of one of the greatest philosophers in history. The book provides readers with a rich tapestry of philosophical insights that continue to resonate in the modern world.