| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: old man had entrusted his small savings to a sharper to be
ventured in a glittering speculation. But that was not
the worst of it: he signed a paper--without reading it.
That is the way with poets and scholars; they always sign
without reading. This cunning paper made him responsible
for heaps of things. The rest was that one night he
found himself in debt to the sharper eight thousand
pieces of gold!--an amount so prodigious that it simply
stupefied him to think of it. It was a night of woe in
that house.
"I must part with my library--I have nothing else.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: house looking down upon them, the odor of apple blossoms and the
hum of bees seemed to make it all the more incongruous. And still
the elderly Quaker skipper talked on and on with hardly an
interruption, till the warm sun slanted to the west and the day
began to decline.
That evening Mainwaring stayed to tea and when he parted from
Lucinda Fairbanks it was after nightfall, with a clear, round
moon shining in the milky sky and a radiance pallid and unreal
enveloping the old house, the blooming apple trees, the sloping
lawn and the shining river beyond. He implored his sweetheart to
let him tell her uncle and aunt of their acknowledged love and to
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: convinced that the many cannot be parts of the one, for the idea of
participation in them he substituted imitation of them. To quote Dr.
Jackson's own expressions,--'whereas in the period of the Republic and the
Phaedo, it was proposed to pass through ontology to the sciences, in the
period of the Parmenides and the Philebus, it is proposed to pass through
the sciences to ontology': or, as he repeats in nearly the same words,--
'whereas in the Republic and in the Phaedo he had dreamt of passing through
ontology to the sciences, he is now content to pass through the sciences to
ontology.'
This theory is supposed to be based on Aristotle's Metaphysics, a passage
containing an account of the ideas, which hitherto scholars have found
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