| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry: are wisest. They are the magi.
End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.
The Gift of the Magi |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: Such act would be robbed of its sadness by its absurdity. Yet, surely,
the bitterest tragedies are those of which the central anguish is lost
amid the dust of surrounding paltriness. If such a thing should happen
here, no one but myself would have seen the lonely figure of John
Mayrant, standing by the window and looking out into the dark quiet of
the wood; his name would be passed down for a little while as the name of
a fool, and then he would be forgotten. "I believe that you will help
your friend." Yes; he had certainly written that, and it now came to me
that I might have said to him one thing more: Had he given Hortense the
chance to know what his feelings to her had become? But he would merely
have answered that here it was the duty of a gentleman to lie. Or, had he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: perplexity only arises out of the confusion of the human faculties; the art
of measuring shows us what is truly great and truly small. Though the just
and good in particular instances may vary, the IDEA of good is eternal and
unchangeable. And the IDEA of good is the source of knowledge and also of
Being, in which all the stages of sense and knowledge are gathered up and
from being hypotheses become realities.
Leaving the comparison with Plato we may now consider the value of this
invention of Hegel. There can be no question of the importance of showing
that two contraries or contradictories may in certain cases be both true.
The silliness of the so-called laws of thought ('All A = A,' or, in the
negative form, 'Nothing can at the same time be both A, and not A') has
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