| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: had time to acquire them. This is proved by an experiment tried on one of
Meno's slaves, from whom Socrates elicits truths of arithmetic and
geometry, which he had never learned in this world. He must therefore have
brought them with him from another.
The notion of a previous state of existence is found in the verses of
Empedocles and in the fragments of Heracleitus. It was the natural answer
to two questions, 'Whence came the soul? What is the origin of evil?' and
prevailed far and wide in the east. It found its way into Hellas probably
through the medium of Orphic and Pythagorean rites and mysteries. It was
easier to think of a former than of a future life, because such a life has
really existed for the race though not for the individual, and all men come
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: beloved as of a god he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being
thought a downright madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the
image of a god; then while he gazes on him there is a sort of reaction, and
the shudder passes into an unusual heat and perspiration; for, as he
receives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he
warms. And as he warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and which
had been hitherto closed and rigid, and had prevented the wing from
shooting forth, are melted, and as nourishment streams upon him, the lower
end of the wing begins to swell and grow from the root upwards; and the
growth extends under the whole soul--for once the whole was winged. During
this process the whole soul is all in a state of ebullition and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Daughter of Eve by Honore de Balzac: press to the theatre, dissipating and scattering his talent, but
believing always in his vein. His fame was therefore not unpublished
like that of so many great minds in extremity, who sustain themselves
only by the thought of work to be done.
Nathan resembled a man of genius; and had he marched to the scaffold,
as he sometimes wished he could have done, he might have struck his
brow with the famous action of Andre Chenier. Seized with political
ambition on seeing the rise to power of a dozen authors, professors,
metaphysicians, and historians, who encrusted themselves, so to speak,
upon the machine during the turmoils of 1830 and 1833, he regretted
that he had not spent his time on political instead of literary
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