| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Royalty Restored/London Under Charles II by J. Fitzgerald Molloy: the preface to this tragedy he acknowledges his unspeakable
obligations to my lord, who he says made it his business to
establish "Don Carlos" in the good opinion of the king and of his
royal highness the Duke of York. Unwarned by the fate of his
predecessors, and heedless of the fickleness of his patron, he
basked in hope in the present, mercifully unconscious of the
cruel death by starvation which awaited him in the future. Alas!
Rochester not only forsook him, but loaded him with satire in a
poem entitled "Session of the Poets."
In verses which he wrote soon after, entitled "An Allusion to the
Tenth Satire," Rochester likewise attacked Dryden; who, in the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: the suffrages of any company, as he had shown on a recent occasion; he can
only deal with one witness at a time, and that is the person with whom he
is arguing. But he is certain that in the opinion of any man to do is
worse than to suffer evil.
Polus, though he will not admit this, is ready to acknowledge that to do
evil is considered the more foul or dishonourable of the two. But what is
fair and what is foul; whether the terms are applied to bodies, colours,
figures, laws, habits, studies, must they not be defined with reference to
pleasure and utility? Polus assents to this latter doctrine, and is easily
persuaded that the fouler of two things must exceed either in pain or in
hurt. But the doing cannot exceed the suffering of evil in pain, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: first principles of philosophy could be elicited from the analysis of the
proposition, in this respect falling short of Plato. Westphal holds that
there are three stages of language: (1) in which things were characterized
independently, (2) in which they were regarded in relation to human
thought, and (3) in relation to one another. But are not such distinctions
an anachronism? for they imply a growth of abstract ideas which never
existed in early times. Language cannot be explained by Metaphysics; for
it is prior to them and much more nearly allied to sense. It is not likely
that the meaning of the cases is ultimately resolvable into relations of
space and time. Nor can we suppose the conception of cause and effect or
of the finite and infinite or of the same and other to be latent in
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