| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: held together by the elements of hot and cold, wet and dry, then the soul
is the harmony or due proportionate admixture of them. But if so, whenever
the strings of the body are unduly loosened or overstrained through disease
or other injury, then the soul, though most divine, like other harmonies of
music or of works of art, of course perishes at once, although the material
remains of the body may last for a considerable time, until they are either
decayed or burnt. And if any one maintains that the soul, being the
harmony of the elements of the body, is first to perish in that which is
called death, how shall we answer him?
Socrates looked fixedly at us as his manner was, and said with a smile:
Simmias has reason on his side; and why does not some one of you who is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Symposium by Xenophon: expensive, but I open the storehouse of my soul, and dole them
out.[63] Indeed, as far as pleasure goes, I find it better to await
desire before I suffer meat or drink to pass my lips, than to have
recourse to any of your costly viands, as, for instance, now, when I
have chanced on this fine Thasian wine,[64] and sip it without thirst.
But indeed, the man who makes frugality, not wealth of worldly goods,
his aim, is on the face of it a much more upright person. And why?--
the man who is content with what he has will least of all be prone to
clutch at what is his neighbour's.
[63] Or, "turn to the storehouse of a healthy appetite." See "Apol."
18, the same sentiment "ex ore Socratis."
The Symposium |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his own, or higher
stations;--which, with the many other usurped rights which that part of the
constitution was hourly establishing,--would, in the end, prove fatal to
the monarchical system of domestick government established in the first
creation of things by God.
In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer's opinion, That the
plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of
the world, were, originally, all stolen from that admirable pattern and
prototype of this houshold and paternal power;--which, for a century, he
said, and more, had gradually been degenerating away into a mix'd
government;--the form of which, however desirable in great combinations of
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