| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: It feels as if 'twere taking root."
Description would but tire my Muse;
In short, they both were turned to Yews.
Old Goodman Dobson of the green
Remembers he the trees has seen;
He'll talk of them from noon till night,
And goes with folks to show the sight;
On Sundays, after evening prayer,
He gathers all the parish there,
Points out the place of either Yew:
Here Baucis, there Philemon grew,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: he began to sing. He took up the slow strain not quite correctly, and
dropped it, and took it up again, always in cadence with the bell.
[musical score appears here]
At length he heard himself, and, glancing at the belfry, smiled a little.
"It is a pretty tune," he said, "and it always made me sorry for poor Fra
Diavolo. Auber himself confessed to me that he had made it sad and put
the hermitage bell to go with it, because he too was grieved at having to
kill his villain, and wanted him, if possible, to die in a religious
frame of mind. And Auber touched glasses with me and said--how well I
remember it!--'Is it the good Lord, or is it merely the devil, that makes
me always have a weakness for rascals?' I told him it was the devil. I
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: every attempt to overturn Berkeley's reasoning has hitherto
resulted in complete and disastrous failure. In admitting this,
we do not admit the conclusion of Absolute Idealism, that nothing
exists outside of consciousness. What we admit as existing
independently of our own consciousness is the Power that causes
in us those conscious states which we call the perception of
material qualities. We have no reason for regarding this Power as
in itself material: indeed, we cannot do so, since by the theory
material qualities have no existence apart from our minds. I have
elsewhere sought to show that less difficulty is involved in
regarding this Power outside of us as quasi-psychical, or in some
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
