Theoretic arithmetic in three books Author:Thomas Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: when any one, celebrating his progenitors, enumerates rive-and- twenty of them, and refers their origin to Hercules, the son of Amphitryon, it appears to him a t... more »hing unworthy to be mentioned. For, as it is entirely owing to fortune that any one is able to enumerate iive-and-twenty progenitors from Hercules, he would laugh, even if any one could enumerate fifty from the same origin ; considering such as unable to reason, and liberate themselves from the arrogance of an insane soul. But, in every thing of this kind, the coryphaeus we are describing will be ridiculed by the vulgar, partly because he will be considered by them as arrogant, and partly because he is ignorant of, and dubious about, things before his feet. " Theodoras. You speak, Socrates, of things which certainly take place. " Socrates. But when any one, my friend, draws him on high, mid is willing that he should abandon the consideration of whether I injure you, or you me, for the speculation of justice and injustice, what each of them is, and in what they differ from all other things, or from each other; or that, dismissing the inquiry whether a king is happy who possesses abundance of gold, he should ascend to the contemplation of a kingdom, and universally of human felicity and misery, of what kind they are to any one, and after what manner it is proper for human nature to acquire this thing and fly from that;—about all these particulars when that little sharp soul, so conversant with law, is required to give a reason, then he in his turn is affected worse than the coryphaeus; for he becomes giddy, through being suspended from a lofty place of survey, and being unaccusfomed to look so high. He is also terrified, is filled with uncertainty, and speaks in a barbaric manner; so that he does not indeed excite l...« less