| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: only the desert's waste, he shall see a blue sea! On that sea the sun
shines always, and the water is blue as burning amethyst, and the foam is
white on the shore. A great land rises from it, and he shall see upon the
mountain-tops burning gold."
The mother said, "He shall reach it?"
And he smiled curiously.
She said, "It is real?"
And he said, "What IS real?"
And she looked up between his half-closed eyelids, and said, "Touch."
And he leaned forward and laid his hand upon the sleeper, and whispered to
it, smiling; and this only she heard--"This shall be thy reward--that the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twilight Land by Howard Pyle: the prince's soul. "Alas!" he cried, "my heart misgives me that
something strange has happened. Tell me, is this not my foster-son, the prince?"
The raven answered "Croak!" and nothing else; but the good old
man understood it all, and the tears ran down his cheeks and
trickled over his beard. "Whether man or raven, you shall still
be my son," said he, and he held the raven close in his arms and
caressed it.
He had a golden cage made for the bird, and every day he would
walk with it in the garden, talking to it as a father talks to
his son.
One day when they were thus in the garden together a strange lady
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: although this science contains indeed a number of correct and very
excellent precepts, there are, nevertheless, so many others, and these
either injurious or superfluous, mingled with the former, that it is
almost quite as difficult to effect a severance of the true from the false
as it is to extract a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble.
Then as to the analysis of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns,
besides that they embrace only matters highly abstract, and, to
appearance, of no use, the former is so exclusively restricted to the
consideration of figures, that it can exercise the understanding only on
condition of greatly fatiguing the imagination; and, in the latter, there
is so complete a subjection to certain rules and formulas, that there
Reason Discourse |
