"Emerson, Ralph W. - Representative Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

animals, men, may be milder, and the germs of love and benefit may be
multiplied.*(6)
PLATO

PLATO

or, The Philosopher

AMONG secular*(7) books, Plato only is entitled to Omar's*(8)
fanatical compliment to the Koran, when he said, "Burn the
libraries; for their value is in this book." These sentences contain
the culture of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; these
are the fountain-head of literatures. A discipline it is in logic,
arithmetic, taste, symmetry, poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology,
morals or practical wisdom. There was never such range of speculation.
Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated
among men of thought. Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We
have reached the mountain from which all these drift boulders were
detached. The Bible of the learned for twenty-two hundred years, every
brisk young man who says in succession fine things to each reluctant
generation,- Boethius, Rabelais, Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau,
Alfieri, Coleridge,- is some reader of Plato, translating into the
vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the men of grander
proportion suffer some deduction from the misfortune (shall I say?) of
coming after this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Copernicus,
Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, are likewise his debtors and
must say after him. For it is fair to credit the broadest
generalizer with all the particulars deducible from his thesis.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,- at once the glory and
the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to
add any idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, and the
thinkers of all civilized nations are his posterity and are tinged
with his mind. How many great men Nature is incessantly sending up out
of night, to be his men,- Platonists! the Alexandrians, a
constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, not less; Sir Thomas
More, Henry More, John Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor,
Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Marcilius Ficinus and Picus
Mirandola. Calvinism is in his Phaedo: Christianity is in it.
Mahometanism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of morals, the
Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysticism finds in Plato all its texts.
This citizen of a town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An
Englishman reads and says, "how English!" a German- "how Teutonic!" an
Italian- "how Roman and how Greek!" As they say that Helen of Argos
had that universal beauty that every body felt related to her, so
Plato seems to a reader in New England an American genius. His broad
humanity transcends all sectional lines.

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of the vexed question
concerning his reputed works,- what are genuine, what spurious. It