Imaginary Portraits. E-book. Formato PDF Walter Pater   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

Chie?y through the solicitations of my father, old Watteau has consented to place Antony with a teacher of painting here. I meet him betimes on the way to his lessons, as I return from Mass; for he still works with the masons, but making the most of late and early hours, of every moment of liberty. And then he has the feast-days, of which there are so many in this old-fashioned place. Ah! Such gifts as his, surely, may once in a way make much industry seem worth while. He makes a wonderful progress. And yet, far from being set-up, and too easily pleased with what, after all, comes to him so easily, he' has, my father thinks, too little self-approval for ultimate suc cess. He is apt, in truth, to fall out too hastily with himself and what he produces. Yet here also there is the golden mean. Yes! I could fancy myself offended by a sort of irony which sometimes crosses the half melancholy sweet ness of manner habitual with him; only that.

Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures. E-book. Formato PDF Walter Pater   -  Forgotten Books, 2017  - 

Plato has seemed to many to have been scarcely less than the creator of philosophy and it is an immense advance he makes, from the crude or turbid beginnings of scientific enquiry with the Ionians or the Eleatics, to that wide range of perfectly finished philosophical litera ture. His encyclopaedic View of the whole domain of knowledge is more than a mere step in a progress. Nothing that went before it, for compass and power and charm, had been really comparable to it. Plato's achievement may Well seem an absolutely fresh thing in the morn ing of the mind's history. Yet in truth the world Plato had entered into was already almost weary of philosophical debate, bewildered by the oppositions of sects, the claims' of rival schools. Language and the processes of thought were already become sophisticated, the very air he breathed sickly with off-cast speculative atoms.