[458a]
Permit me to
take a holiday, just as men of lazy minds are wont to feast themselves on
their own thoughts when they walk alone.1 Such persons, without waiting to discover
how their desires may be realized, dismiss that topic to save themselves the
labor of deliberating about possibilities and impossibilities, assume their
wish fulfilled, and proceed to work out the details in imagination, and take
pleasure in portraying what they will do when it is realized, thus making
still more idle a mind that is idle without that.2 I
too now succumb to this weakness3
1 Cf. Isocrates ii. 47, on “those who in solitude do not deliberate but imagine what they wish,” and Chesterton's saying, “All feeble spirits live in the future, because it is a soft job”; cf. further on day-dreams, Schmidt, Ethik der Griechen, ii. p. 71, and Lucian's Πλοῖον ἢ εὐχαί. Plato's description anticipates the most recent psychology in everything except the term “autistic thinking.”
3 Cf. Blaydes on Aristophanes Clouds 727.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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