| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: the nature or origin of the mental experience to which I refer.
THEAETETUS: Pray what is it?
SOCRATES: How there can be false opinion--that difficulty still troubles
the eye of my mind; and I am uncertain whether I shall leave the question,
or begin over again in a new way.
THEAETETUS: Begin again, Socrates,--at least if you think that there is
the slightest necessity for doing so. Were not you and Theodorus just now
remarking very truly, that in discussions of this kind we may take our own
time?
SOCRATES: You are quite right, and perhaps there will be no harm in
retracing our steps and beginning again. Better a little which is well
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: wearing a black velvet cap, blue and silver stomacher, pincushion,
bunch of keys, silver buckles, braided hair,--all distinctive signs of
the mistress of a German inn (a costume which has been so often
depicted in colored prints that it is too common to describe here),--
well, this wife of the innkeeper kept the two friends alternately
patient and impatient with remarkable ability.
Little by little the noise decreased, the various travellers retired
to their rooms, the clouds of smoke dispersed. When places were set
for the two young men, and the classic carp of the Rhine appeared upon
the table, eleven o'clock was striking and the room was empty. The
silence of night enabled the young surgeons to hear vaguely the noise
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: full of blood, are immediately rarefied, and dilated by the heat they meet
with. In this way they cause the whole heart to expand, and at the same
time press home and shut the five small valves that are at the entrances
of the two vessels from which they flow, and thus prevent any more blood
from coming down into the heart, and becoming more and more rarefied, they
push open the six small valves that are in the orifices of the other two
vessels, through which they pass out, causing in this way all the branches
of the arterial vein and of the grand artery to expand almost
simultaneously with the heart which immediately thereafter begins to
contract, as do also the arteries, because the blood that has entered them
has cooled, and the six small valves close, and the five of the hollow
Reason Discourse |
