| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: impossibility. All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead
ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and
when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to
re-crystallize about it. We may say that the heat and liveliness
mean only the "motor efficacy," long deferred but now operative,
of the idea; but such talk itself is only circumlocution, for
whence the sudden motor efficacy? And our explanations then get
so vague and general that one realizes all the more the intense
individuality of the whole phenomenon.
In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a
mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master of the World by Jules Verne: That same night he had by force abducted the president and the
secretary of the club, and had taken them, much against their will
upon a voyage in the wonderful air-ship, the "Albatross," which he
had constructed. He meant thus to prove to them beyond argument the
correctness of his assertions. This ship, a hundred feet long, was
upheld in the air by a large number of horizontal screws and was
driven forward by vertical screws at its bow and stern. It was
managed by a crew of at least half a dozen men, who seemed absolutely
devoted to their leader, Robur.
After a voyage almost completely around the world, Mr. Prudent and
Mr. Evans managed to escape from the "Albatross" after a desperate
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: SOCRATES: What was that, Theaetetus?
THEAETETUS: Theodorus was writing out for us something about roots, such
as the roots of three or five, showing that they are incommensurable by the
unit: he selected other examples up to seventeen --there he stopped. Now
as there are innumerable roots, the notion occurred to us of attempting to
include them all under one name or class.
SOCRATES: And did you find such a class?
THEAETETUS: I think that we did; but I should like to have your opinion.
SOCRATES: Let me hear.
THEAETETUS: We divided all numbers into two classes: those which are made
up of equal factors multiplying into one another, which we compared to
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