| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: most unlike, of friendship. For the poor man is compelled to be the friend
of the rich, and the weak requires the aid of the strong, and the sick man
of the physician; and every one who is ignorant, has to love and court him
who knows.' And indeed he went on to say in grandiloquent language, that
the idea of friendship existing between similars is not the truth, but the
very reverse of the truth, and that the most opposed are the most friendly;
for that everything desires not like but that which is most unlike: for
example, the dry desires the moist, the cold the hot, the bitter the sweet,
the sharp the blunt, the void the full, the full the void, and so of all
other things; for the opposite is the food of the opposite, whereas like
receives nothing from like. And I thought that he who said this was a
Lysis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: "Go to the maitre d'hotel, and tell him I must have salt mackerel for
dinner. And go to Madame de Beaujeu, and let her know that I wish to
dine alone to-day. Do you know, madame," continued the king,
pretending to be slightly angry, "that you neglect me? It is almost
three years since I have seen you. Come, come here, my pretty," he
added, sitting down and holding out his arms to her. "How thin you
have grown! Why have you let her grow so thin?" said the king,
roughly, addressing the Comte de Poitiers.
The jealous husband cast so frightened a look at his wife that she
almost pitied him.
"Happiness, sire!" he stammered.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: It withdraws from the seen that it may dwell in the unseen. The sense only
presents us with a flat and impenetrable surface: the mind takes the world
to pieces and puts it together on a new pattern. The universals which are
detached from sense are reconstructed in science. They and not the mere
impressions of sense are the truth of the world in which we live; and (as
an argument to those who will only believe 'what they can hold in their
hands') we may further observe that they are the source of our power over
it. To say that the outward sense is stronger than the inward is like
saying that the arm of the workman is stronger than the constructing or
directing mind.
Returning to the senses we may briefly consider two questions--first their
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