| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: flattering base instincts. The influence they can assert in this
manner may be very great, but it is always ephemeral. The men of
ardent convictions who have stirred the soul of crowds, the Peter
the Hermits, the Luthers, the Savonarolas, the men of the French
Revolution, have only exercised their fascination after having
been themselves fascinated first of all by a creed. They are
then able to call up in the souls of their fellows that
formidable force known as faith, which renders a man the absolute
slave of his dream.
The arousing of faith--whether religious, political, or social,
whether faith in a work, in a person, or an idea--has always been
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: By magic, follow in her train,
Seek for her, tremble, fly again.
The hapless creature thus tormenteth she,
Regardless of his pleasure or his woe;
Ha! oft half-open'd does she leave the door for me,
And sideways looks to learn if I will fly or no.
And I--Oh gods! your hands alone
Can end the spell that's o'er me thrown;
Free me, and gratitude my heart will fill;
And yet from heaven ye send me down no aid--
Not quite in vain doth life my limbs pervade:
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: "Nay, Child of Senzangacona, age has not made me deaf, but my
spirit in these latter days floats far from my body. It is like
a bladder filled with air that a child holds by a string, and
before I can speak I must draw it from the heavens to earth
again. What did you say about the place that I have chosen?
Well, what better place could I choose, seeing that it was here
in this very Vale of Bones that I met the first king of the
Zulus, Chaka the Wild Beast, who was your uncle? Why then should
I not choose it to meet the last king of the Zulus?"
Now I, listening, knew at once that this saying might be
understood in two ways, namely that Cetewayo was the reigning
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