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08310_Field_TCGG T75.txt
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were not new. But the means of arrested visual analysis,
namely the phonetic alphabet, was as new to the Greeks as the
movie camera in our century.
We can ask ourselves later why the fanatic specialism of
the Phoenicians, which hacked the alphabet out of the
hieroglyphic culture, did not release any further intellectual or
artistic activity in them. Meantime, it is relevant to note that
Cicero, the encyclopedic synthesizer of the Roman world, when
surveying the Greek world, reproves Socrates for having been
the first to make a split between mind and heart. The pre-
Socratics were still mainly in a nonliterate culture. Socrates
stood on the border between that oral world and the visual and
literate culture. But he wrote nothing. The Middle Ages regarded
Plato as the mere scribe or amanuensis of Socrates. And
Aquinas considered that neither Socrates nor Our Lord