Imagine A Line Divided
In The Republic (509d-510a), Plato describes the Divided Line this way:
Now take a line which has been cut into two unequal parts, and divide each of them again in the same proportion, and suppose the two main divisions to answer, one to the visible and the other to the intelligible, and then compare the subdivisions in respect of their clearness and want of clearness, and you will find that the first section in the sphere of the visible consists of images. And by images I mean, in the first place, shadows, and in the second place, reflections in water and in solid, smooth and polished bodies and the like: Do you understand?
Yes, I understand.
Imagine, now, the other section, of which this is only the resemblance, to include the animals which we see, and everything that grows or is made.
Read more about this topic: Analogy Of The Divided Line
Famous quotes containing the words imagine a, imagine, line and/or divided:
“From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)
“The generations of thy peers are fled.
And we ourselves shall go;
But thou possessest an immortal lot,
And we imagine thee exempt from age”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“Gascoigne, Ben Jonson, Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years, each line an act
Through which few labor, which no men retract.
This passion is the scholar’s heritage,”
—Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
“Southern women are ... all at heart abolitionists.”
—Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, U.S. diarist. As quoted in Divided Houses, ch. 1, by Leeann Whites (1992)