| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: all efforts to supply the want which the Greeks began to feel at the
beginning of the sixth century before Christ,--the want of abstract ideas.
Nor must we forget the uncertainty of chronology;--if, as Aristotle says,
there were Atomists before Leucippus, Eleatics before Xenophanes, and
perhaps 'patrons of the flux' before Heracleitus, Hegel's order of thought
in the history of philosophy would be as much disarranged as his order of
religious thought by recent discoveries in the history of religion.
Hegel is fond of repeating that all philosophies still live and that the
earlier are preserved in the later; they are refuted, and they are not
refuted, by those who succeed them. Once they reigned supreme, now they
are subordinated to a power or idea greater or more comprehensive than
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: McManus is the name -- James McManus. Some
call me Jimmy."
"Good-night, Jimmy," said Madame.
THE RATHSKELLER AND THE ROSE
Miss Posie Carrington had earned her suc-
cess. She began life handicapped by the family name
of "Boggs," in the small town known as Cranberry
Corners. At the age of eighteen she had acquired
the name of "Carrington" and a position in the
chorus of a metropolitan burlesque company.
Thence upward she had ascended by the legitimate and
 The Voice of the City |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: The wintry sleep of nature is symbolized in innumerable
stories of spell-bound maidens and fair-featured youths,
saints, martyrs, and heroes. Sometimes it is the sun,
sometimes the earth, that is supposed to slumber. Among the
American Indians the sun-god Michabo is said to sleep through
the winter months; and at the time of the falling leaves, by
way of composing himself for his nap, he fills his great pipe
and divinely smokes; the blue clouds, gently floating over the
landscape, fill the air with the haze of Indian summer. In the
Greek myth the shepherd Endymion preserves his freshness in a
perennial slumber. The German Siegfried, pierced by the thorn
 Myths and Myth-Makers |