| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: now, and then went out again, at the foot of the hill. The light shone
in the windows of an old gray house, he thought. He lay back in his
corner and forgot the commercial traveler altogether. The process of
visualizing Katharine stopped short at the old gray manor-house;
instinct warned him that if he went much further with this process
reality would soon force itself in; he could not altogether neglect
the figure of William Rodney. Since the day when he had heard from
Katharine's lips of her engagement, he had refrained from investing
his dream of her with the details of real life. But the light of the
late afternoon glowed green behind the straight trees, and became a
symbol of her. The light seemed to expand his heart. She brooded over
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: again we catch a glimpse rather of a Socratic or Eristic than of a Sophist
in the ordinary sense of the term. And Plato does not on this ground
reject the claim of the Sophist to be the true philosopher. One more
feature of the Eristic rather than of the Sophist is the tendency of the
troublesome animal to run away into the darkness of Not-being. Upon the
whole, we detect in him a sort of hybrid or double nature, of which, except
perhaps in the Euthydemus of Plato, we find no other trace in Greek
philosophy; he combines the teacher of virtue with the Eristic; while in
his omniscience, in his ignorance of himself, in his arts of deception, and
in his lawyer-like habit of writing and speaking about all things, he is
still the antithesis of Socrates and of the true teacher.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: and advertisements, thou dost not turn unto the Lord with all thy heart,
but forget him who remembered thee in thy distress, and give up thyself
to fallow lust and vanity, surely great will be thy condemnation.--
Against which snare, as well as the temptation of those who may
or do feed thee, and prompt thee to evil, the most excellent and prevalent
remedy will be, to apply thyself to that light of Christ which shineth
in thy conscience, and which neither can, nor will flatter thee,
nor suffer thee to be at ease in thy sins."--Barclay's address to Charles II.]
Ye would not spend your partial invectives against the injured
and the insulted only, but, like faithful ministers, would cry aloud
and SPARE NONE. Say not that ye are persecuted, neither endeavour to make
 Common Sense |