| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: that out of one thing all the rest may be recovered. The subjective was
converted by him into an objective; the mental phenomenon of the
association of ideas (compare Phaedo) became a real chain of existences.
The germs of two valuable principles of education may also be gathered from
the 'words of priests and priestesses:' (1) that true knowledge is a
knowledge of causes (compare Aristotle's theory of episteme); and (2) that
the process of learning consists not in what is brought to the learner, but
in what is drawn out of him.
Some lesser points of the dialogue may be noted, such as (1) the acute
observation that Meno prefers the familiar definition, which is embellished
with poetical language, to the better and truer one; or (2) the shrewd
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: which turned to every wind. But those dark storms and
whirlwinds haunt the Bosphorus until this day.
But the Argonauts went eastward, and out into the open sea,
which we now call the Black Sea, but it was called the Euxine
then. No Hellen had ever crossed it, and all feared that
dreadful sea, and its rocks, and shoals, and fogs, and bitter
freezing storms; and they told strange stories of it, some
false and some half-true, how it stretched northward to the
ends of the earth, and the sluggish Putrid Sea, and the
everlasting night, and the regions of the dead. So the
heroes trembled, for all their courage, as they came into
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Leads you with devious eyes through mists and poisons
To horrible chaos, or suicide, or crime . . .
And all these others who at your conjuration
Grow pale, feeling the skeleton touch of time,--
Or, laughing sadly, talk of things important,
Or stare at mirrors, startled to see their faces,
Or drown in the waveless vacuum of their days,--
Suddenly, as from sleep, awake, forgetting
This nauseous dream; take up their accustomed ways,
Exhume the ghost of a joke, renew loud laughter,
Forget the moles above their sweethearts' eyebrows,
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