| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: philosophy, that having begun (like the Presocratics) with a few general
notions, Descartes first falls absolutely under their influence, and then
quickly discards them. At the same time he is less able to observe facts,
because they are too much magnified by the glasses through which they are
seen. The common logic says 'the greater the extension, the less the
comprehension,' and we may put the same thought in another way and say of
abstract or general ideas, that the greater the abstraction of them, the
less are they capable of being applied to particular and concrete natures.
Not very different from Descartes in his relation to ancient philosophy is
his successor Spinoza, who lived in the following generation. The system
of Spinoza is less personal and also less dualistic than that of Descartes.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ruling Passion by Henry van Dyke: and old-fashioned dwellings, and prim, respectable churches, on the
smooth current of Pierrepont's talk about his new-found picture.
How often a man has cause to return thanks for the enthusiasms of
his friends! They are the little fountains that run down from the
hills to refresh the mental desert of the despondent.
"You remember Falconer," continued Pierrepont, "Temple Falconer,
that modest, quiet, proud fellow who came out of the South a couple
of years ago and carried off the landscape prize at the Academy last
year, and then disappeared? He had no intimate friends here, and no
one knew what had become of him. But now this picture appears, to
show what he has been doing. It is an evening scene, a revelation
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: its banks which are not to be found anywhere else in the wide world.
"There is rosemary, that ‘s for remembrance; and there is pansies,
that ‘s for thoughts!"
One May evening, a couple of years since, I was angling in the
Swiftwater, and came upon Joseph Jefferson, stretched out on a large
rock in midstream, and casting the fly down a long pool. He had
passed the threescore years and ten, but he was as eager and as
happy as a boy in his fishing.
"You here!" I cried. "What good fortune brought you into these
waters?"
"Ah," he answered, "I fished this brook forty-five years ago. It
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