| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum: hard. Then, thrusting in her hand, she pulled the thing out, and
discovered it to be a large sized golden key--rather old, but still
bright and of perfect shape.
"What did I tell you?" cried the hen, with a cackle of triumph. "Can
I tell metal when I bump into it, or is the thing a rock?"
"It's metal, sure enough," answered the child, gazing thoughtfully at
the curious thing she had found. "I think it is pure gold, and it must
have lain hidden in the sand for a long time. How do you suppose it came
there, Billina? And what do you suppose this mysterious key unlocks?"
"I can't say," replied the hen. "You ought to know more about locks
and keys than I do."
Ozma of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: talking to my youth. Listen:--
Thus, my friend, we have declared and defined the nature of the subject.
Keeping the definition in view, let us now enquire what advantage or
disadvantage is likely to ensue from the lover or the non-lover to him who
accepts their advances.
He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of
course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible. Now
to him who has a mind diseased anything is agreeable which is not opposed
to him, but that which is equal or superior is hateful to him, and
therefore the lover will not brook any superiority or equality on the part
of his beloved; he is always employed in reducing him to inferiority. And
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: both having a distinctness and individuality of their own. To reduce our
conception of mind to a succession of feelings and sensations is like the
attempt to view a wide prospect by inches through a microscope, or to
calculate a period of chronology by minutes. The mind ceases to exist when
it loses its continuity, which though far from being its highest
determination, is yet necessary to any conception of it. Even an inanimate
nature cannot be adequately represented as an endless succession of states
or conditions.
Paragraph II. Another division of the subject has yet to be considered:
Why should the doctrine that knowledge is sensation, in ancient times, or
of sensationalism or materialism in modern times, be allied to the lower
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