| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: neglect of events that had happened in times long past; for mythology and
the enquiry into antiquity are first introduced into cities when they begin
to have leisure (Cp. Arist. Metaphys.), and when they see that the
necessaries of life have already been provided, but not before. And this
is the reason why the names of the ancients have been preserved to us and
not their actions. This I infer because Solon said that the priests in
their narrative of that war mentioned most of the names which are recorded
prior to the time of Theseus, such as Cecrops, and Erechtheus, and
Erichthonius, and Erysichthon, and the names of the women in like manner.
Moreover, since military pursuits were then common to men and women, the
men of those days in accordance with the custom of the time set up a figure
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Old ballads, and wild melodies
Through mist and darkness pouring forth,
Like Elivagar's river flowing
Out of the glaciers of the North.
The instrument on which he played
Was in Cremona's workshops made,
By a great master of the past,
Ere yet was lost the art divine;
Fashioned of maple and of pine,
That in Tyrolian forests vast
Had rocked and wrestled with the blast;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: supposing that we do not know what we know, because we may know in one
sense, i.e. possess, what we do not know in another, i.e. use. But have we
not escaped one difficulty only to encounter a greater? For how can the
exchange of two kinds of knowledge ever become false opinion? As well
might we suppose that ignorance could make a man know, or that blindness
could make him see. Theaetetus suggests that in the aviary there may be
flying about mock birds, or forms of ignorance, and we put forth our hands
and grasp ignorance, when we are intending to grasp knowledge. But how can
he who knows the forms of knowledge and the forms of ignorance imagine one
to be the other? Is there some other form of knowledge which distinguishes
them? and another, and another? Thus we go round and round in a circle and
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