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

is singular that wherever we find a man higher by a whole head than
any of his contemporaries, it is sure to come into doubt what are
his real works. Thus Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakespeare. For these
men magnetize their contemporaries, so that their companions can do
for them what they can never do for themselves; and the great man does
thus live in several bodies, and write, or paint or act, by many
hands; and after some time it is not easy to say what is the authentic
work of the master and what is only of his school.

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his own times. What is
a great man but one of great affinities, who takes up into himself all
arts, sciences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare nothing; he
can dispose of every thing. What is not good for virtue, is good for
knowledge. Hence his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But the
inventor only knows how to borrow; and society is glad to forget the
innumerable laborers who ministered to this architect, and reserves
all its gratitude for him. When we are praising Plato, it seems we are
praising quotations from Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. Be it so.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all
forests and mines and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation
from all his ancestors. And this grasping inventor puts all nations
under contribution.

Plato absorbed the learning of his times,- Philolaus, Timaeus,
Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what else; then his master, Socrates;
and finding himself still capable of a larger synthesis,- beyond all
example then or since,- he traveled into Italy, to gain what
Pythagoras had for him; then into Egypt, and perhaps still farther
East, to import the other element, which Europe wanted, into the
European mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as the
representative of philosophy. He says, in the Republic, "Such a genius
as philosophers must of necessity have, is wont but seldom in all
its parts to meet in one man, but its different parts generally spring
up in different persons." Every man who would do anything well, must
come to it from a higher ground. A philosopher must be more than a
philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of a poet, stands upon
the highest place of the poet, and (though I doubt he wanted the
decisive gift of lyric expression), mainly is not a poet because he
chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose.

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell
you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their
house and street life was trivial and commonplace. If you would know
their tastes and complexions, the most admiring of their readers
most resembles them. Plato especially has no external biography. If he
had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing of them. He ground
them all into paint. As a good chimney burns its smoke, so a
philosopher converts the value of all his fortunes into his
intellectual performances.