| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: they create an awful impression of themselves by the magnitude of their
enterprises; in Egypt, the king himself is not allowed to reign, unless he
have priestly powers, and if he should be of another class and has thrust
himself in, he must get enrolled in the priesthood. In many parts of
Hellas, the duty of offering the most solemn propitiatory sacrifices is
assigned to the highest magistracies, and here, at Athens, the most solemn
and national of the ancient sacrifices are supposed to be celebrated by him
who has been chosen by lot to be the King Archon.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Precisely.
STRANGER: But who are these other kings and priests elected by lot who now
come into view followed by their retainers and a vast throng, as the former
Statesman |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Pocket Diary Found in the Snow by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: while she wrote it, that it was too late for any help to reach her?
Did she see her doom approaching so clearly that she knew there was
no escape?
Muller breathed a deep breath before he continued his reading.
Later on his breath came more quickly still, and he clinched his
fist several times, as if deeply moved. He was not a cold man,
only thoroughly self-controlled. In his breast there lived an
unquenchable hatred of all evil. It was this that awakened the
talents which made him the celebrated detective he had become.
"I fear that it will be impossible for any one to save me now, but
perhaps I may be avenged. Therefore I will write down here all
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: world is indeed a paradox to them. Every abstraction is at first the enemy
of every other, yet they are linked together, each with all, in the chain
of Being. The struggle for existence is not confined to the animals, but
appears in the kingdom of thought. The divisions which arise in thought
between the physical and moral and between the moral and intellectual, and
the like, are deepened and widened by the formal logic which elevates the
defects of the human faculties into Laws of Thought; they become a part of
the mind which makes them and is also made up of them. Such distinctions
become so familiar to us that we regard the thing signified by them as
absolutely fixed and defined. These are some of the illusions from which
Hegel delivers us by placing us above ourselves, by teaching us to analyze
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