| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from United States Declaration of Independence: He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate
and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation
till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended,
he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of
large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish
the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right
inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual,
uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their
Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them
United States Declaration of Independence |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely than we do;
so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and
obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower
prudential regions, we find, in the nature of some of the
spiritual excitements which we have been studying, good reasons
for idealizing obedience. Obedience may spring from the general
religious phenomenon of inner softening and self-surrender and
throwing one's self on higher powers. So saving are these
attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they
become ideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whose
fallibility we see through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: arises owing to the childhood of the human mind, like the parallel
difficulty respecting Not-being. Men had only recently arrived at the
notion of opinion; they could not at once define the true and pass beyond
into the false. The very word doxa was full of ambiguity, being sometimes,
as in the Eleatic philosophy, applied to the sensible world, and again used
in the more ordinary sense of opinion. There is no connexion between
sensible appearance and probability, and yet both of them met in the word
doxa, and could hardly be disengaged from one another in the mind of the
Greek living in the fifth or fourth century B.C. To this was often added,
as at the end of the fifth book of the Republic, the idea of relation,
which is equally distinct from either of them; also a fourth notion, the
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