| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: Gate was
infinitely tender as he bent over him.
"Think again, John Weightman. Has there been nothing like that
in
your life?"
"Nothing," he sighed. "If there ever were such things, it must
have been
long ago--they were all crowded out--I have forgotten them."
There was an ineffable smile on the face of the Keeper of the
Gate,
and his hand made the sign of the cross over the bowed head as he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: Here, at the sixth award, let us make an end; all that remains is to set
the crown on our discourse.
PROTARCHUS: True.
SOCRATES: Then let us sum up and reassert what has been said, thus
offering the third libation to the saviour Zeus.
PROTARCHUS: How?
SOCRATES: Philebus affirmed that pleasure was always and absolutely the
good.
PROTARCHUS: I understand; this third libation, Socrates, of which you
spoke, meant a recapitulation.
SOCRATES: Yes, but listen to the sequel; convinced of what I have just
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: Titans sealed heaven, or died of old age, "exhibiting," as Gibbon says
of them, "a deplorable instance of the senility of the human mind?"
Read Proclus, and judge for yourselves: but first contrive to finish
everything else you have to do which can possibly be useful to any human
being. Life is short, and Art--at least the art of obtaining practical
guidance from the last of the Alexandrians--very long.
And yet--if Proclus and his school became gradually unfaithful to the
great root-idea of their philosophy, we must not imitate them. We must
not believe that the last of the Alexandrians was under no divine
teaching, because he had be-systemed himself into confused notions of
what that teaching was like. Yes, there was good in poor old Proclus;
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