| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more
distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other
hand, that in order to retain them in the memory or embrace an aggregate
of many, I should express them by certain characters the briefest
possible. In this way I believed that I could borrow all that was best
both in geometrical analysis and in algebra, and correct all the defects
of the one by help of the other.
And, in point of fact, the accurate observance of these few precepts gave me,
I take the liberty of saying, such ease in unraveling all the questions
embraced in these two sciences, that in the two or three months
I devoted to their examination, not only did I reach solutions of
Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: great and unqualified readiness. A readiness to what? to
pass over and look beyond the objects of desire and fear, for
something else. And this something else? this something
which is apart from desire and fear, to which all the
kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are
alike indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards
conduct - by what name are we to call it? It may be the love
of God; or it may be an inherited (and certainly well
concealed) instinct to preserve self and propagate the race;
I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory; but it
will save time to call it righteousness. By so doing I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Anabasis by Xenophon: Xenophon the Athenian was born 431 B.C. He was a
pupil of Socrates. He marched with the Spartans,
and was exiled from Athens. Sparta gave him land
and property in Scillus, where he lived for many
years before having to move once more, to settle
in Corinth. He died in 354 B.C.
The Anabasis is his story of the march to Persia
to aid Cyrus, who enlisted Greek help to try and
take the throne from Artaxerxes, and the ensuing
return of the Greeks, in which Xenophon played a
leading role. This occurred between 401 B.C. and
Anabasis |
