It begins

From Richard Mitchell,

"...It is childish and idealistic to imagine that we can, especially in this busiest and most technically demanding of worlds, plainly and simply lived as Jesus lived. No, we do not make those reservations, but suppose rather than, in the case of this one life among billions, we can launch ourselves, all at once, and as if by magic, in the the Way in which he walked. And this is because we imagine that the Way of Socrates is barricaded by the wall of an intelligence tests, and the Way of Jesus is not, that the regularly examined life requires a lot of hard mental labor, and that the good life is as natural and automatic as the singing of the birds."



Only one person seems to this that Socrates was not special......................Socrates himself.



But we don't really accept this because he was considered the wisest of men....



"There is a curious contradiction in us when we say that Socrates is an inimitable one in billions because of the power of his mind, and thus deny the power of his mind to judge truly as to whether he was an inimitable one in billions. Our minds, which are not up to the work of imitating him, are nevertheless quiet strong enough to overrule him. Strange."





"The Gift of Fire" - pages 19-20