| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: sort, a voice call'd out to a girl, to bid her run for the next
notary. - Now the notary being the next, and availing himself of
his situation, walk'd up the passage to the door, and passing
through an old sort of a saloon, was usher'd into a large chamber,
dismantled of everything but a long military pike, - a breastplate,
- a rusty old sword, and bandoleer, hung up, equidistant, in four
different places against the wall.
An old personage who had heretofore been a gentleman, and unless
decay of fortune taints the blood along with it, was a gentleman at
that time, lay supporting his head upon his hand in his bed; a
little table with a taper burning was set close beside it, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: Buddhism from mere force of circumstances.
Further investigation would not shake his opinion. For a far-oriental
career is thoroughly in keeping with these, its typical turning-points.
From one end of its course to the other it is painfully impersonal.
In its regular routine as in its more salient junctures, life
presents itself to these races a totally different affair from what
it seems to us. The cause lies in what is taken to be the basis of
socio-biology, if one may so express it.
In the Far East the social unit, the ultimate molecule of existence,
is not the individual, but the family.
We occidentals think we value family. We even parade our
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: with facts of sense, and passing to the more ideal conceptions of mental
pleasure, happiness, and the like.
2. Pleasure is depreciated as relative, while good is exalted as absolute.
But this distinction seems to arise from an unfair mode of regarding them;
the abstract idea of the one is compared with the concrete experience of
the other. For all pleasure and all knowledge may be viewed either
abstracted from the mind, or in relation to the mind (compare Aristot. Nic.
Ethics). The first is an idea only, which may be conceived as absolute and
unchangeable, and then the abstract idea of pleasure will be equally
unchangeable with that of knowledge. But when we come to view either as
phenomena of consciousness, the same defects are for the most part incident
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