| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: when philosophy offers them purification and release from evil, they feel
that they ought not to resist her influence, and whither she leads they
turn and follow.
What do you mean, Socrates?
I will tell you, he said. The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the
soul was simply fastened and glued to the body--until philosophy received
her, she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not
in and through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of every sort of
ignorance; and by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her
own captivity. This was her original state; and then, as I was saying, and
as the lovers of knowledge are well aware, philosophy, seeing how terrible
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: reason, which had demonstrated the immediate inutility of his gifts,
the impossibility of entering and living in the sphere for which he
was fitted. Those eyes could at times flash lightnings. From those
lips a voice of thunder must surely proceed; it was a mouth like
Mirabeau's.
"I have seen such a grand fellow in the street," said I to Juste on
coming in.
"It must be our neighbor," replied Juste, who described, in fact, the
man I had just met. "A man who lives like a wood-louse would be sure
to look like that," he added.
"What dejection and what dignity!"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: even in the streets of the town, where the air had been baked all
day between white walls, it came in whiffs and pulses, like a
distant music. Half-way home, the last gold flicker vanished from
a great oak upon the left; and when they came forth beyond the
borders of the wood, the plain was already sunken in pearly
greyness, and a great, pale moon came swinging skyward through the
filmy poplars.
The Doctor sang, the Doctor whistled, the Doctor talked. He spoke
of the woods, and the wars, and the deposition of dew; he
brightened and babbled of Paris; he soared into cloudy bombast on
the glories of the political arena. All was to be changed; as the
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