Pagina 456 di 1391

Had he attained to any clear conception of the individual, which

is the synthesis of the universal and the particular; or had he

been able to distinguish between opinion and sensation, which the

ambiguity of the words (Greek) and the like, tended to confuse,

he would not have denied truth to the particulars of sense.

But the poets are also the representatives of falsehood and

feigning in all departments of life and knowledge, like the

sophists and rhetoricians of the Gorgias and Phaedrus; they are

the false priests, false prophets, lying spirits, enchanters of

the world. There is another count put into the indictment against

them by Plato, that they are the friends of the tyrant, and bask

in the sunshine of his patronage. Despotism in all ages has had

an apparatus of false ideas and false teachers at its service-in

the history of Modern Europe as well as of Greece and Rome. For

no government of men depends solely upon force; without some

corruption of literature and morals-some appeal to the

imagination of the masses-some pretence to the favour of

heaven-some element of good giving power to evil, tyranny, even

for a short time, cannot be maintained.