MENO
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mind before the body.

The stream of ancient philosophy in the Alexandrian and Roman times widens
into a lake or sea, and then disappears underground to reappear after many
ages in a distant land. It begins to flow again under new conditions, at
first confined between high and narrow banks, but finally spreading over
the continent of Europe. It is and is not the same with ancient
philosophy. There is a great deal in modern philosophy which is inspired
by ancient. There is much in ancient philosophy which was 'born out of due
time; and before men were capable of understanding it. To the fathers of
modern philosophy, their own thoughts appeared to be new and original, but
they carried with them an echo or shadow of the past, coming back by
recollection from an elder world. Of this the enquirers of the seventeenth
century, who to themselves appeared to be working out independently the
enquiry into all truth, were unconscious. They stood in a new relation to
theology and natural philosophy, and for a time maintained towards both an
attitude of reserve and separation. Yet the similarities between modern
and ancient thought are greater far than the differences. All philosophy,
even that part of it which is said to be based upon experience, is really
ideal; and ideas are not only derived from facts, but they are also prior
to them and extend far beyond them, just as the mind is prior to the
senses.

Early Greek speculation culminates in the ideas of Plato, or rather in the
single idea of good. His followers, and perhaps he himself, having arrived
at this elevation, instead of going forwards went backwards from philosophy
to psychology, from ideas to numbers. But what we perceive to be the real
meaning of them, an explanation of the nature and origin of knowledge, will
always continue to be one of the first problems of philosophy.

Plato also left behind him a most potent instrument, the forms of logic--
arms ready for use, but not yet taken out of their armoury. They were the
late birth of the early Greek philosophy, and were the only part of it
which has had an uninterrupted hold on the mind of Europe. Philosophies