| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Works of Samuel Johnson by Samuel Johnson: may, perhaps, again change our own opinion: and
what excuse shall we be able to find for aversion and
malignity conceived against him, whom we shall then
find to have committed no fault, and who offended
us only by refusing to follow us into errour?
It may likewise contribute to soften that
resentment which pride naturally raises against
opposition, if we consider, that he who differs from us,
does not always contradict us; he has one view of
an object, and we have another; each describes
what he sees with equal fidelity, and each regulates
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: philosopher. He has no notion of trying an experiment and is hardly
capable of observing the curiosities of nature which are 'tumbling out at
his feet,' or of interpreting even the most obvious of them. He is driven
back from the nearer to the more distant, from particulars to generalities,
from the earth to the stars. He lifts up his eyes to the heavens and seeks
to guide by their motions his erring footsteps. But we neither appreciate
the conditions of knowledge to which he was subjected, nor have the ideas
which fastened upon his imagination the same hold upon us. For he is
hanging between matter and mind; he is under the dominion at the same time
both of sense and of abstractions; his impressions are taken almost at
random from the outside of nature; he sees the light, but not the objects
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Madame Firmiani by Honore de Balzac: gained by a legal trick are equally dishonoring. I will tell you
all. I feel myself degraded by the very love which has hitherto
been all my joy. There rises in my soul a voice which my
tenderness cannot stifle. Ah! I have wept to feel that I have more
conscience than love. Were you to commit a crime I would hide you
in my bosom from human justice, but my devotion could go no
farther. Love, to a woman, means boundless confidence, united to a
need of reverencing, of esteeming, the being to whom she belongs.
I have never conceived of love otherwise than as a fire in which
all noble feelings are purified still more,--a fire which develops
them.
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