Essays and Lectures. Wilde Oscar

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СКАЧАТЬ gave to the early Greeks those same lessons which we of modern days draw, in somewhat less artistic fashion, from the study of statistics and the laws of physiology.

      In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural influence. The Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and then punishment, are no longer ‘viper-tressed goddesses with eyes and mouth aflame,’ but those evil thoughts which harbour within the impure soul. In this, as in all other points, to arrive at Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere of scientific and modern thought.

      But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as essentially a reductio ad absurdum of life, he was fully conscious of the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education and circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.

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      1

      Plato’s Laws; Æschylus’ Prometheus Bound.

      2

      Somewhat in the same spirit Plato, in his Laws, appeals to the local position of Ilion among the rivers of the plain, as a proof that it was not built till long after the Deluge.

      3

      Plutarch remarks that the only evidence Greece possesses of the truth that the legendary power of Athens is no ‘romance or idle story,’ is the public and sacred buildings. This is an instance of the exaggerated importance given to ruins against which Thucydides is warning us.

      4

      The fictitious sale in the Roman marriage per coemptionem was originally, of course, a real sale.

      5

      Notably, of course, in the case of heat a

1

Plato’s Laws; Æschylus’ Prometheus Bound.

2

Somewhat in the same spirit Plato, in his Laws, appeals to the local position of Ilion among the rivers of the plain, as a proof that it was not built till long after the Deluge.

3

Plutarch remarks that the only evidence Greece possesses of the truth that the legendary power of Athens is no ‘romance or idle story,’ is the public and sacred buildings. This is an instance of the exaggerated importance given to ruins against which Thucydides is warning us.

4

The fictitious sale in the Roman marriage per coemptionem was originally, of course, a real sale.

5

Notably, of course, in the case of heat and its laws.

СКАЧАТЬ