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Excerpt from Selections From Plato It has often been observed that the eminent figures of the world's intellectual history have been, in a singular degree, men of their own age; men whose sympathies were keenly attuned to the impulses of a certain special period of human development, their works rooted in its cravings, addressed to its capacities, racy of the soil in which they grew. This is doubtless true; but it is also true that the very greatest have commonly been men not of one but of two ages. They help to forward some great change and advance in the development of the human spirit: they help it, but they are also its product, and not less are they the product of the order which they displace. They look before and after; and we see those few towering figures touched with the sunset light of one epoch and the dawn of another. There is Shakespeare, for instance, so full of the feudal spirit, with all its stateliness and splendour, yet so genially alive to the exuberant democratic vitality of the new era, whose figures, grotesque, jovial, audacious, and unabashed, mingle in his pages with the stately procession of courtiers and princes, and justify their claim to be there by their own inherent human interest. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.