| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: exist, both in the entire heaven and in great provinces of the heaven, only
fairer and purer, this last should not also in that higher sphere have
designed the noblest and fairest things?
PROTARCHUS: Such a supposition is quite unreasonable.
SOCRATES: Then if this be denied, should we not be wise in adopting the
other view and maintaining that there is in the universe a mighty infinite
and an adequate limit, of which we have often spoken, as well as a
presiding cause of no mean power, which orders and arranges years and
seasons and months, and may be justly called wisdom and mind?
PROTARCHUS: Most justly.
SOCRATES: And wisdom and mind cannot exist without soul?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: opening of his "De Jure Regni"--"The fault of some few was charged
upon all; and the common hatred of a particular person did redound
to the whole nation; so that even such as were remote from any
suspicion were inflamed by the infamy of men's crimes." {17}
To vindicate the national honour, and to punish the guilty, as well
as to save themselves from utter anarchy, the great majority of the
Scotch nation had taken measures against Mary which required
explicit justification in the sight of Europe, as Buchanan frankly
confesses in the opening of his "De Jure Regni." The chief authors
of those measures had been summoned, perhaps unwisely and unjustly,
to answer for their conduct to the Queen of England. Queen
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: highest hopes,--in one word, if you have never felt the devil's tail
whisking over the world, the opera of /Robert le Diable/ must be to
you, what the Apocalypse is to those who believe that all things will
end with them. But if, persecuted and wretched, you understand that
Spirit of Evil,--the monstrous ape who is perpetually employed in
destroying the work of God,--if you can conceive of him as having, not
indeed loved, but ravished, an almost divine woman, and achieved
through her the joy of paternity; as so loving his son that he would
rather have him eternally miserable with himself than think of him as
eternally happy with God; if, finally, you can imagine the mother's
soul for ever hovering over the child's head to snatch it from the
Gambara |
