"REP MEN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

intellectual performances.
He was born 427 A.C., about the time of the death of Pericles; was
of patrician connection in his times and city, and is said to have had
an early inclination for war, but, in his twentieth year, meeting with
Socrates, was easily dissuaded from this pursuit and remained for
ten years his scholar, until the death of Socrates. He then went to
Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of Dionysius to the court
of Sicily, and went thither three times, though very capriciously
treated. He traveled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he stayed a
long time; some say three,- some say thirteen years. It is said he
went farther, into Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to
Athens, he gave lessons in the Academy to those whom his fame drew
thither; and died, as we have received it, in the act of writing, at
eighty-one years.
But the biography of Plato is interior. We are to account for the
supreme elevation of this man in the intellectual history of our
race,- how it happens that in proportion to the culture of men they
become his scholars; that, as our Jewish Bible has implanted itself in
the tabletalk and household life of every man and woman in the
European and American nations, so the writings of Plato have
preoccupied every school of learning, every lover of thought, every
church, every poet,- making it impossible to think, on certain levels,
except through him. He stands between the truth and every man's
mind, and has almost impressed language and the primary forms of
thought with his name and seal. I am struck, in reading him, with
the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. Here is the germ of
that Europe we know so well, in its long history of arts and arms;
here are all its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato,-
and in none before him. It has spread itself since into a hundred
histories, but has added no new element. This perpetual modernness
is the measure of merit in every work of art; since the author of it
was not misled by any thing short-lived or local, but abode by real
and abiding traits. How Plato came thus to be Europe, and
philosophy, and almost literature, is the problem for us to solve.
This could not have happened without a sound, sincere and catholic
man, able to honor, at the same time, the ideal, or laws of the
mind, and fate, or the order of nature. The first period of a
nation, as of an individual, is the period of unconscious strength.
Children cry, scream and stamp with fury, unable to express their
desires. As soon as they can speak and tell their want and the
reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, whilst the
perceptions are obtuse, men and women talk vehemently and
superlatively, blunder and quarrel: their manners are full of
desperation; their speech is full of oaths. As soon as, with
culture, things have cleared up a little, and they see them no
longer in lumps and masses but accurately distributed, they desist
from that weak vehemence and explain their meaning in detail. If the
tongue had not been framed for articulation, man would still be a
beast in the forest. The same weakness and want, on a higher plane,
occurs daily in the education of ardent young men and women. "Ah!