| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: still; and even these inconceivable qualities of space, whether the
infinite or the infinitesimal, may be made the subject of reasoning and
have a certain truth to us.
Whether space exists in the mind or out of it, is a question which has no
meaning. We should rather say that without it the mind is incapable of
conceiving the body, and therefore of conceiving itself. The mind may be
indeed imagined to contain the body, in the same way that Aristotle (partly
following Plato) supposes God to be the outer heaven or circle of the
universe. But how can the individual mind carry about the universe of
space packed up within, or how can separate minds have either a universe of
their own or a common universe? In such conceptions there seems to be a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: water of different strengths, he finds, however the proportion of
acid to water might vary, the same amount of gas to be collected in
all the cells. A crowd of facts of this character forced upon
Faraday's mind the conclusion that the amount of electro-chemical
decomposition depends, not upon the size of the electrodes, not upon
the intensity of the current, not upon the strength of the solution,
but solely upon the quantity of electricity which passes through the
cell. The quantity of electricity he concludes is proportional to
the amount of chemical action. On this law Faraday based the
construction of his celebrated Voltameter, or Measure of Voltaic
electricity.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: passed into the body of the clarionet player.
The fiddle and the flageolet were neither of them interesting; their
faces were of the ordinary type among the blind--earnest, attentive,
and grave. Not so the clarionet player; any artist or philosopher must
have come to a stop at the sight of him.
Picture to yourself a plaster mask of Dante in the red lamplight, with
a forest of silver-white hair above the brows. Blindness intensified
the expression of bitterness and sorrow in that grand face of his; the
dead eyes were lighted up, as it were, by a thought within that broke
forth like a burning flame, lit by one sole insatiable desire, written
large in vigorous characters upon an arching brow scored across with
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