495
Our teachers.—In our youth we take our teachers and guides from our times and from those circles which we accidentally come across; we are recklessly confident that our age is sure to have teachers who are more suited to us than to anybody else, and that we are bound to find them without having to seek very far. For this childishness we have to pay a heavy ransom in later years: we have to expiate our teachers in ourselves. Then perhaps we begin to look for the proper guides, throughout the whole world, the prehistoric times included—but it may be too late. And in the worst case we discover that they lived when we were young—and that, at that time, we missed our opportunity.
496
The evil principle.—Plato delightfully described how the philosophic thinker is bound to pass for the paragon of depravity in the midst of every existing society: for as a critic of all customs he is the antagonist of the moral man, and, unless he succeed in becoming the legislator of new customs, he lives on in the memory of men as the “evil principle.” From this we may conjecture to what extent the city of Athens, although pretty liberal and very fond of innovatious, abused the reputation of Plato in his lifetime: no wonder that he— who, as he himself has told us, was filled with a
