These
expansions, or extensions, consist in continuing the spiritual sight
where the horizon falls on our natural vision, and, by this second
sight, discovering the long lines of law which shoot in every direction.
Everywhere he stands on a path which has no end, but runs continuously
round the universe. Therefore, every word becomes an exponent of nature.
Whatever he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior senses.
His perception of the generation of contraries, of death out of life,
and life out of death,--that law by which, in nature, decomposition
is recomposition, and putrefaction and cholera are only signals of a
new creation; his discernment of the little in the large, and the large
in the small; studying the state in the citizen, and the citizen in
the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he exhibited the Republic
as an allegory on the education of the private soul; his beautiful
definitions of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line,
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of virtue, courage,
justice, temperance; his love of the apologue, and his apologues
themselves; the cave of Trophonius; the ring of Gyges; the charioteer
and two horses; the golden, silver, brass, and iron temperaments;
Theuth and Thamus; and the visions of Hades and the Fates--fables which
have imprinted themselves in the human memory like the signs of the
zodiac; his soliform eye and his boniform soul; his doctrine of
assimilation; his doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the
laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant justice throughout
the universe, instanced everywhere, but specially in the doctrine,
"what comes from God to us, returns from us to God," and in Socrates'
belief that the laws below are sisters of the laws above.
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