| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: nature, in his distinction between bodily and mental, between necessary and
non-necessary pleasures. But he is also in advance of Plato; for he
affirms that pleasure is not in the body at all; and hence not even the
bodily pleasures are to be spoken of as generations, but only as
accompanied by generation (Nic. Eth.).
4. Plato attempts to identify vicious pleasures with some form of error,
and insists that the term false may be applied to them: in this he appears
to be carrying out in a confused manner the Socratic doctrine, that virtue
is knowledge, vice ignorance. He will allow of no distinction between the
pleasures and the erroneous opinions on which they are founded, whether
arising out of the illusion of distance or not. But to this we naturally
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: one could easily have guessed.
But for Ladies and Mamas there were none of these differences.
But Bessie Bell looked and looked and wondered, but her eyes brought
to her no way of knowing.
Bessie Bell could at length think of only one way to find out the
difference, and that was to ask--to let her ears help her eyes to
bring to her some way of knowing.
One day, a dear old lady with white curls all around under her
bonnet stopped near the playground and called Bessie Bell to her and
gave her some chocolate candy, every piece of candy folded up in its
own white paper.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: useless expenditure of money that you can easily refrain from is
immoral, in my opinion, and in yours, too, if you only consider it.
If you come, I shall be glad for my own sake, so long as you are
not inseparable from G----.
Do as you think best. But you must work, both with your head,
thinking and reading, and with your heart; that is, find out for
yourself what is really good and what is bad, although it seems to
be good. I kiss you.
L. T.
Dear Friend Ilyá:
There is always somebody or something that prevents me from
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