It Is Ever Thus, When The Soul
Is Appointed Arbiter Over Reason.
It is ever thus, when gentle,
god-fearing dreamers meddle with worldly affairs.
Beware of the wrath of
the lamb!
So rapidly did the virus act, that soon we find Plato declaring that all
the useful arts are degrading; that "so long as a man tries to study
any sensible object, he can never be said to be learning anything"; in
other words, that the kind of person to whom one looks for common sense
should be excluded from the management of his most refined republic. It
needed courage of a rather droll kind to make such propositions in
Greece, under the shadow of the Parthenon. And hand in hand with this
feudalism in philosophy there began that unhealthy preoccupation with
the morals of our fellow-creatures, that miasma of puritanism, which has
infected life and literature up to this moment.
The Renaissance brought many fine things to England. But the wicked
fairy was there with her gift: Pythagoras and Plato. We were not like
the Italians who, after the first rapture of discovery was over, soon
outgrew these distracted dialectics; we stuck fast in them. Hence our
Platonic touch: our demi-vierge attitude in matters of the mind, our
academic horror of clean thinking. How Plato hated a fact! He could
find no place for it in his twilight world of abstractions. Was it not
he who wished to burn the works of Democritus of Abdera, most exact and
reasonable of old sages?
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