| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: lives, and we can no longer dismiss them from our mind. Many of them
express relations of terms to which nothing exactly or nothing at all in
rerum natura corresponds. We are not such free agents in the use of them
as we sometimes imagine. Fixed ideas have taken the most complete
possession of some thinkers who have been most determined to renounce them,
and have been vehemently affirmed when they could be least explained and
were incapable of proof. The world has often been led away by a word to
which no distinct meaning could be attached. Abstractions such as
'authority,' 'equality,' 'utility,' 'liberty,' 'pleasure,' 'experience,'
'consciousness,' 'chance,' 'substance,' 'matter,' 'atom,' and a heap of
other metaphysical and theological terms, are the source of quite as much
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare: Nor hath loues minde of any iudgement taste:
Wings and no eyes, figure, vnheedy haste.
And therefore is Loue said to be a childe,
Because in choise he is often beguil'd,
As waggish boyes in game themselues forsweare;
So the boy Loue is periur'd euery where.
For ere Demetrius lookt on Hermias eyne,
He hail'd downe oathes that he was onely mine.
And when this Haile some heat from Hermia felt,
So he dissolu'd, and showres of oathes did melt,
I will goe tell him of faire Hermias flight:
A Midsummer Night's Dream |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: But, to set before either the painter or the historian the
inculcation of moral lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued,
is to miss entirely the true motive and characteristic both of art
and history, which is in the one case the creation of beauty, in
the other the discovery of the laws of the evolution of progress:
IL NE FAUT DEMANDER DE L'ART QUE L'ART, DU PASSE QUE LE PASSE.
Herodotus wrote to illustrate the wonderful ways of Providence and
the nemesis that falls on sin, and his work is a good example of
the truth that nothing can dispense with criticism so much as a
moral aim. Thucydides has no creed to preach, no doctrine to
prove. He analyses the results which follow inevitably from
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