| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: forms the true opinion of anything without rational explanation, you may
say that his mind is truly exercised, but has no knowledge; for he who
cannot give and receive a reason for a thing, has no knowledge of that
thing; but when he adds rational explanation, then, he is perfected in
knowledge and may be all that I have been denying of him. Was that the
form in which the dream appeared to you?
THEAETETUS: Precisely.
SOCRATES: And you allow and maintain that true opinion, combined with
definition or rational explanation, is knowledge?
THEAETETUS: Exactly.
SOCRATES: Then may we assume, Theaetetus, that to-day, and in this casual
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: intellectual tension. Mrs. Austin remembered, in the early days of
the marriage, the three brothers, John, Charles, and Alfred,
marching to and fro, each with his hands behind his back, and
'reasoning high' till morning; and how, like Dr. Johnson, they
would cheer their speculations with as many as fifteen cups of tea.
And though, before the date of Fleeming's visit, the brothers were
separated, Charles long ago retired from the world at Brandeston,
and John already near his end in the 'rambling old house' at
Weybridge, Alfred Austin and his wife were still a centre of much
intellectual society, and still, as indeed they remained until the
last, youthfully alert in mind. There was but one child of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: which this had descended, and were only the latest of our line. We
possessed the instincts of a far, forgotten childhood; I found
myself thinking that we ought to be carrying green branches and
singing as we went. So we came to the thick shaded grove still
silent, and were set in our places by the straight trees that
swayed together and let sunshine through here and there like a
single golden leaf that flickered down, vanishing in the cool
shade.
The grove was so large that the great family looked far
smaller than it had in the open field; there was a thick growth of
dark pines and firs with an occasional maple or oak that gave a
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