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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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ifigina hither , it charges two oboli , and if from the distance of Pontus or Egypt , having saved yourself , your wife , your children , your fortune , it lands you here and charges two drachmae ; and the man whose art has accomplished all this , goes down to the beach , and walks about his ship with a humble dress and demeanour . For he is aware , I take it , that it is impossible to tell whom among his passengers he lias benefited and whom he has harmed by not suffering them to be drowned , knowing that he has landed them no better men than he took them on board , either in
body or mind . He considers that if any one , being afflicted with great and incurable bodily diseases , has been saved from shipwreck , he is unfortunate in not having perished , as from having received any benefit : and if any one has many incurable diseases in what is of greater price than the body , J 113 mind , it is no benefit to this man to * be saved from death , whether by eea or by the executioner ; since it is not good for the bad man to live , for he must live badly . Therefore a pilot is not held in
reverence , though he saves our lives . Nor an engineer either , who is sometimes as potent a preserver as either a pilot or a general ; for he occasionally saves whole cities . Do you think as highly of him as you do of a rhetorician ? And yet , if he were to exalt his profession after your fashion , and call upon all men to become engineers , on account of the exalted excellence of the art , he would have enough to say . But you , in spite of all this , despise him and his art , and' would call him an
engineer as a term of disdain , and would not give your daughter to his son , or allow your son to marry his daughter . And yet , by your own account of yourself , what ground have you for looking down upon the engineer , and the other people whom I have mentioned ? I know you would say , you are better , and of a better sort . But if to be better does not consist in what I said ; if all excellence consists in being able to preserve ourselves and what belongs to us , no matter what sort of men we are ;
then your disdain of the engineer and the physician , and of the other arts which have our preservation in view , is ridiculous . But observe whether nobleness and goodness do not consist in something quite different from saving and being saved : for a true man should not make it his study to live as long as possible , but should commit this to God , and believing what the women say , that no man can escape his destiny , should consider in what manner , so long as he does live , lie may live
best . Should he assimilate himself to tthe government under which he lives ? and should you now study to resemble the Athenian people , that you may be a favourite with them ,- and may be powerful in the state ? Let us consider well , lest we should purchase this power at the expense of what we most value . For if you think that any one can teach you an art which will make you powerful in this state , being dissimilar to the government of it , whether for . better or worse , you are mistaken . You
must be , not even an imitator of it , but actually similar to it in your own nature , if you would have any success in courting the favour of the Athenian people . Whoever , therefore , shall make you most like to the Athenian people , will make you such a politician and > rhetorician , as you desire to become : for every person is pleased with ; discourse conformable to his own disposition , and displeased with that which iu unconformable to it . Can you say any thing against this ? ' C . * You seem to me , I do not know why , to speak well : but I am like most
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832 Plato s Dialogues ; the Gorgia * .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1834, page 832, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2640/page/14/
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