| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: The youths who are satisfied with the ordinary pleasures of life,
and do not sigh after ideal phantoms of love and friendship, will
never arrive at great maturity of understanding; but if these
reveries are cherished, as is too frequently the case with women,
when experience ought to have taught them in what human happiness
consists, they become as useless as they are wretched. Besides,
their pains and pleasures are so dependent on outward circumstances,
on the objects of their affections, that they seldom act from the
impulse of a nerved mind, able to choose its own pursuit.
Having had to struggle incessantly with the vices of mankind,
Maria's imagination found repose in pourtraying the possible virtues
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: concerning himself or other men.
True.
Then how will this knowledge or science teach him to know what he knows?
Say that he knows health;--not wisdom or temperance, but the art of
medicine has taught it to him;--and he has learned harmony from the art of
music, and building from the art of building,--neither, from wisdom or
temperance: and the same of other things.
That is evident.
How will wisdom, regarded only as a knowledge of knowledge or science of
science, ever teach him that he knows health, or that he knows building?
It is impossible.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: disappeared? It naturally would.
Y.M. But here in this novel is one which seems to promise.
In the Adirondack woods is a wage-earner and lay preacher in the
lumber-camps who is of noble character and deeply religious. An
earnest and practical laborer in the New York slums comes up
there on vacation--he is leader of a section of the University
Settlement. Holme, the lumberman, is fired with a desire to
throw away his excellent worldly prospects and go down and save
souls on the East Side. He counts it happiness to make this
sacrifice for the glory of God and for the cause of Christ. He
resigns his place, makes the sacrifice cheerfully, and goes to
What is Man? |
