| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: could neither be induced by the passion of anger, nor that of
fear. It was the purpose and the act of predetermined revenge,
for which law neither can, will, nor ought to have sympathy or
allowance.
"It is true, we may repeat to ourselves, in alleviation of this
poor man's unhappy action, that his case is a very peculiar one.
The country which he inhabits was, in the days of many now alive,
inaccessible to the laws, not only of England, which have not
even yet penetrated thither, but to those to which our neighbours
of Scotland are subjected, and which must be supposed to be, and
no doubt actually are, founded upon the general principles of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: verified all my predictions, out comes Mr. Partridge's almanack,
disputing the point of his death; so that I am employed, like the
general who was forced to kill his enemies twice over, whom a
necromancer had raised to life. If Mr. Partridge has practised
the same experiment upon himself, and be again alive, long may he
continue so; that does not in the least contradict my veracity:
But I think I have clearly proved, by invincible demonstration,
that he died at farthest within half an hour of the time I
foretold, and not four hours sooner, as the above-mentioned
author, in his letter to a lord, hath maliciously suggested, with
design to blast my credit, by charging me with so gross a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: so-called 'facts of consciousness' are equally evanescent; they are facts
which nobody ever saw, and which can neither be defined nor described. Of
the three laws of thought the first (All A = A) is an identical
proposition--that is to say, a mere word or symbol claiming to be a
proposition: the two others (Nothing can be A and not A, and Everything is
either A or not A) are untrue, because they exclude degrees and also the
mixed modes and double aspects under which truth is so often presented to
us. To assert that man is man is unmeaning; to say that he is free or
necessary and cannot be both is a half truth only. These are a few of the
entanglements which impede the natural course of human thought. Lastly,
there is the fallacy which lies still deeper, of regarding the individual
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