| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: Then another little girl asked: ``Sister Angela, what were they,
then?''
Sister Angela said: ``They are only just ladies.''
Then always after that Bessie Bell and the other little girls were
glad when Only-Just-Ladies came to see them.
The sun shone nearly always, or it seemed to the little girls that
it nearly always shone, out in that large garden where they could
play the hour in the sand, and where they could spend one hour
eating their cakes with their feet on the gravel, and where they
could walk behind Sister Justina on all the shell-bordered walks
around the beds (but they must not step on the beds)--just one hour.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: the application which he himself makes of them in the latter part of the
dialogue. He then proceeds to explain to him the sort of mental gymnastic
which he should practise. He should consider not only what would follow
from a given hypothesis, but what would follow from the denial of it, to
that which is the subject of the hypothesis, and to all other things.
There is no trace in the Memorabilia of Xenophon of any such method being
attributed to Socrates; nor is the dialectic here spoken of that 'favourite
method' of proceeding by regular divisions, which is described in the
Phaedrus and Philebus, and of which examples are given in the Politicus and
in the Sophist. It is expressly spoken of as the method which Socrates had
heard Zeno practise in the days of his youth (compare Soph.).
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: Arguing from probabilities, I am of opinion that they are one; another,
regarding the question from another point of view, will be of another mind.
But, leaving this enquiry, let us proceed to distribute the elementary
forms, which have now been created in idea, among the four elements.
To earth, then, let us assign the cubical form; for earth is the most
immoveable of the four and the most plastic of all bodies, and that which
has the most stable bases must of necessity be of such a nature. Now, of
the triangles which we assumed at first, that which has two equal sides is
by nature more firmly based than that which has unequal sides; and of the
compound figures which are formed out of either, the plane equilateral
quadrangle has necessarily a more stable basis than the equilateral
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