| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: flowers in every rock-pool - bags of sea-water, without a trace of
bone or stone. You must believe it; for in science, as in higher
matters, he who will walk surely, must "walk by faith and not by
sight."
These are but a few of the wonders which the classification of
marine animals affords; and only drawn from one class of them,
though almost as common among every other family of that submarine
world whereof Spenser sang -
"Oh, what an endless work have I in hand,
To count the sea's abundant progeny!
Whose fruitful seed far passeth those in land,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: has sacrificed to his lusts--but an evil greater far, which is the greatest
and worst of all evils, and one of which he never thinks.
What is it, Socrates? said Cebes.
The evil is that when the feeling of pleasure or pain is most intense,
every soul of man imagines the objects of this intense feeling to be then
plainest and truest: but this is not so, they are really the things of
sight.
Very true.
And is not this the state in which the soul is most enthralled by the body?
How so?
Why, because each pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare: And thou, treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak'st
With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,
'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
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