| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: change in the position of the fixed stars, in fact, of the whole
celestial system, now known by the name of the precession of the
equinoxes; the first great catalogue of fixed stars, to the number of
1080; attempts to ascertain whether the length of years and days were
constant; with which, with his characteristic love of truth, he seems to
have been hardly satisfied. He too invented the planisphere, or mode of
representing the starry heavens upon a plane, and is the father of true
geography, having formed the happy notion of mapping out the earth, as
well as the heavens, by degrees of latitude and longitude.
Strange it is, and somewhat sad, that we should know nothing of this
great man, should be hardly able to distinguish him from others of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ursula by Honore de Balzac: passed along the Grand'Rue, all the heirs joined the procession, to
get an entrance to the house and see that nothing was abstracted, and
lay their eager hands upon its coveted treasures at the earliest
moment.
When the doctor saw, behind the clergy, the row of kneeling heirs, who
instead of praying were looking at him with eyes that were brighter
than the tapers, he could not restrain a smile. The abbe turned round,
saw them, and continued to say the prayers slowly. The post master was
the first to abandon the kneeling posture; his wife followed him.
Massin, fearing that Zelie and her husband might lay hands on some
ornament, joined them in the salon, where all the heirs were presently
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: apart from the mind, or of the mind apart from them. Soon objects of sense
were merged in sensations and feelings, but feelings and sensations were
still unanalyzed. At last we return to the doctrine attributed by Plato to
Protagoras, that the mind is only a succession of momentary perceptions.
At this point the modern philosophy of experience forms an alliance with
ancient scepticism.
The higher truths of philosophy and religion are very far removed from
sense. Admitting that, like all other knowledge, they are derived from
experience, and that experience is ultimately resolvable into facts which
come to us through the eye and ear, still their origin is a mere accident
which has nothing to do with their true nature. They are universal and
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