| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: body.
The creative powers were aware of our tendency to excess. And so when they
made the belly to be a receptacle for food, in order that men might not
perish by insatiable gluttony, they formed the convolutions of the
intestines, in this way retarding the passage of food through the body,
lest mankind should be absorbed in eating and drinking, and the whole race
become impervious to divine philosophy.
The creation of bones and flesh was on this wise. The foundation of these
is the marrow which binds together body and soul, and the marrow is made
out of such of the primary triangles as are adapted by their perfection to
produce all the four elements. These God took and mingled them in due
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: ship under a false name and domicile? It was possible, as
anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded as a
solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog. For why
should this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the
others were rummaged or removed? and where had Jos. come
by that second chest, with which (according to the clerk at the
What Cheer) he had started for Honolulu?
"And how have YOU fared?" inquired the captain, whom I
found luxuriously reclining in our mound of litter. And the
accent on the pronoun, the heightened colour of the speaker's
face, and the contained excitement in his tones, advertised me
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: it was so long known during the Middle Ages.
But they did little but comment, though there was no Neoplatonic or
mystic element in their commentaries. It seems as if Alexandria was
preordained, by its very central position, to be the city of
commentators, not of originators. It is worthy of remark, that
Philoponus, who may be considered as the man who first introduced the
simple warriors of the Koreish to the treasures of Greek thought, seems
to have been the first rebel against the Neoplatonist eclecticism. He
maintained, and truly, that Porphyry, Proclus, and the rest, had
entirely misunderstood Aristotle, when they attempted to reconcile him
with Plato, or incorporate his philosophy into Platonism. Aristotle was
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