| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: first causes of the pre-Socratic philosophers with the final causes of
Socrates himself. There is no intelligible account of the relation of
numbers to the universal ideas, or of universals to the idea of good. He
found them all three, in the Pythagorean philosophy and in the teaching of
Socrates and of the Megarians respectively; and, because they all furnished
modes of explaining and arranging phenomena, he is unwilling to give up any
of them, though he is unable to unite them in a consistent whole.
Lastly, Plato, though an idealist philosopher, is Greek and not Oriental in
spirit and feeling. He is no mystic or ascetic; he is not seeking in vain
to get rid of matter or to find absorption in the divine nature, or in the
Soul of the universe. And therefore we are not surprised to find that his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: organization, but as equivalent to a degenerating, a waning type
of man, as involving his mediocrising and depreciation: where
have WE to fix our hopes? In NEW PHILOSOPHERS--there is no other
alternative: in minds strong and original enough to initiate
opposite estimates of value, to transvalue and invert "eternal
valuations"; in forerunners, in men of the future, who in the
present shall fix the constraints and fasten the knots which will
compel millenniums to take NEW paths. To teach man the future of
humanity as his WILL, as depending on human will, and to make
preparation for vast hazardous enterprises and collective
attempts in rearing and educating, in order thereby to put an end
Beyond Good and Evil |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: nothing of life? There comes a time when wives will pardon defects in
the husband who spares her annoyances, considering annoyances in the
same category as misfortunes. What conciliating power, what wise
experience would uphold and enlighten the home of this young pair?
Paul and his wife would doubtless think they loved when they had
really not advanced beyond the endearments and compliments of the
honeymoon. Would Paul in that early period yield to the tyranny of his
wife, instead of establishing his empire? Could Paul say, "No?" All
was peril to a man so weak where even a strong man ran some risks.
The subject of this Study is not the transition of a bachelor into a
married man,--a picture which, if broadly composed, would not lack the
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