ONE:Neo-Platonism may itself furnish us with no inapt image of the age in which it arose. Like the unformed Matter about which we have been hearing so much, the consciousness of that period was in itself dark, indeterminate and unsteady, uncreative, unspontaneous, unoriginating, but with a receptive capacity which enabled it to seize, reflect, and transmit the power of living Reason, the splendour of eternal thought."Why, the corner house," Isidore cried. "Forty of these notes form part of the money taken from the body of that poor murdered fellow in the corner house. Here they are--190793 to 190832. Now which of you was it who came here tonight with these particular notes in your pocket?"
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ONE:So far Aristotle gives us a purely superficial and sensational view of the drama. Yet he could not help seeing that there was a moral element in tragedy, and he was anxious to show, as against Plato, that it exercised an improving effect on the audience. The result is his famous theory of the Catharsis, so long misunderstood, and not certainly understood even now. The object of Tragedy, he tells us, is to purify (or purge away) pity and terror by means of those emotions themselves. The Poetics seems originally to have contained an explanation of this mysterious utterance, now lost, and critics have endeavoured to supply the gap by writing eighty treatises on the subject. The result has been at least to show what Aristotle did not mean. The popular version of his dictum, which is that tragedy purges the passions by pity and terror, is clearly inconsistent with the wording of the original text. Pity and terror are both the object and the instrument of purification. Nor yet does he mean, as was once supposed,306 that each of these emotions is to counterbalance and moderate the other; for this would imply that they are opposed to one another, whereas in the Rhetoric he speaks of them as being akin; while a parallel passage in the Politics188 shows him to have believed that the passions are susceptible of homoeopathic treatment. Violent enthusiasm, he tells us, is to be soothed and carried off by a strain of exciting, impassioned music. But whence come the pity and terror which are to be dealt with by tragic poetry? Not, apparently, from the piece itself, for to inoculate the patient with a new disease, merely for the sake of curing it, could do him no imaginable good. To judge from the passage in the Politics already referred to, he believes that pity and terror are always present in the minds of all, to a certain extent; and the theory apparently is, that tragedy brings them to the surface, and enables them to be thrown off with an accompaniment of pleasurable feeling. Now, of course, we have a constant capacity for experiencing every passion to which human nature is liable; but to say that in the absence of its appropriate external stimulus we are ever perceptibly and painfully affected by any passion, is to assert what is not true of any sane mind. And, even were it so, were we constantly haunted by vague presentiments of evil to ourselves or others, it is anything but clear that fictitious representations of calamity would be the appropriate means for enabling us to get rid of them. Zeller explains that it is the insight into universal laws controlling our destiny, the association of misfortune with a divine justice, which, according to Aristotle, produces the purifying effect;189 but this would be the purgation of pity and terror, not by themselves, but by the intellectual framework in which they are set, the concatenation of events, the workings of character, or the reference of everything to an eternal cause. The truth is that Aristotles explanation of the moral effect produced by tragedy is307 irrational, because his whole conception of tragedy is mistaken. The emotions excited by its highest forms are not terror and pity, but admiration and love, which, in their ideal exercise, are too holy for purification, too high for restriction, and too delightful for relief."Box 11a, grand tier?" he suggested. "Miss Lawrence?"
FORE:"But, madame, you do not mean to send that child to Maastricht by itself?"Planing machines of the most improved construction are driven by two belts instead of one, and many mechanical expedients have been adopted to move the belts differentially, so that both should not be on the driving pulley at the same time, but move one before the other in alternate order. This is easily attained by simply arranging the two belts with the distance between them equal to one and one-half or one and three-fourth times the width of the driving pulley. The effect is the same as that accomplished by differential shifting gearing, with the advantage of permitting an adjustment of the relative movement of the belts.
FORE:"There was nothing else for it," she said. "I wish I had killed him, then I should have got the notes and returned home comfortably. As it is half the officers in London are looking for the car at the present moment. See that!"IX.
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