" 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 bowlders 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.
Pages:
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47