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man than this. For as there are misanthropists or haters of men, there are also
misologists or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is
ignorance of the world. Misanthropy arises out of the too great confidence of
inexperience;—you trust a man and think him altogether true and sound and
faithful, and then in a little while he turns out to be false and knavish; and
then another and another, and when this has happened several times to a man,
especially when it happens among those whom he deems to be his own most
trusted and familiar friends, and he has often quarreled with them, he at last
hates all men, and believes that no one has any good in him at all. You must
have observed this trait of character?
I have.
And is not the feeling discreditable? Is it not obvious that such an one
having to deal with other men, was clearly without any experience of human
nature; for experience would have taught him the true state of the case, that
few are the good and few the evil, and that the great majority are in the
interval between them.
What do you mean? I said.
I mean, he replied, as you might say of the very large and very small, that
nothing is more uncommon than a very large or very small man; and this
applies generally to all extremes, whether of great and small, or swift and
slow, or fair and foul, or black and white: and whether the instances you
select be men or dogs or anything else, few are the extremes, but many are in
the mean between them. Did you never observe this?
Yes, I said, I have.
And do you not imagine, he said, that if there were a competition in evil,
the worst would be found to be very few?
Yes, that is very likely, I said.
Yes, that is very likely, he replied; although in this respect arguments are
unlike men—there I was led on by you to say more than I had intended; but
the point of comparison was, that when a simple man who has no skill in
dialectics believes an argument to be true which he afterwards imagines to be
false, whether really false or not, and then another and another, he has no
longer any faith left, and great disputers, as you know, come to think at last
that they have grown to be the wisest of mankind; for they alone perceive the
utter unsoundness and instability of all arguments, or indeed, of all things,
which, like the currents in the Euripus, are going up and down in never-
ceasing ebb and flow.
That is quite true, I said.
470
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Buch The Complete Plato"
The Complete Plato
- Titel
- The Complete Plato
- Autor
- Plato
- Datum
- ~347 B.C.
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- PD
- Abmessungen
- 21.0 x 29.7 cm
- Seiten
- 1612
- Schlagwörter
- Philosophy, Antique, Philosophie, Antike, Dialogues, Metaphysik, Metaphysics, Ideologie, Ideology, Englisch
- Kategorien
- Geisteswissenschaften
- International