| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 1 by Alexis de Toqueville: legitimate it may be, which is not irksome in their sight.
It has been supposed that the secret instinct which leads
the lower orders to remove their superiors as much as possible
from the direction of public affairs is peculiar to France.
This, however, is an error; the propensity to which I allude is
not inherent in any particular nation, but in democratic
institutions in general; and although it may have been heightened
by peculiar political circumstances, it owes its origin to a
higher cause.
In the United States the people is not disposed to hate the
superior classes of society; but it is not very favorably
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Poems by Oscar Wilde: Who bare the Host across the Esquiline,
And now - those common poppies in the wheat seem twice as fine.
The blue-green beanfields yonder, tremulous
With the last shower, sweeter perfume bring
Through this cool evening than the odorous
Flame-jewelled censers the young deacons swing,
When the grey priest unlocks the curtained shrine,
And makes God's body from the common fruit of corn and vine.
Poor Fra Giovanni bawling at the mass
Were out of tune now, for a small brown bird
Sings overhead, and through the long cool grass
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: stages of thought which have always existed implicitly and unconsciously,
and to which the mind of the world, gradually disengaged from sense, has
become awakened. The present has been the past. The succession in time of
human ideas is also the eternal 'now'; it is historical and also a divine
ideal. The history of philosophy stripped of personality and of the other
accidents of time and place is gathered up into philosophy, and again
philosophy clothed in circumstance expands into history. (iii) Whether
regarded as present or past, under the form of time or of eternity, the
spirit of dialectic is always moving onwards from one determination of
thought to another, receiving each successive system of philosophy and
subordinating it to that which follows--impelled by an irresistible
|
