| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: that he had acted virtuously and now enjoyed a mostly pleasant life,
dispensing justice and mercy with care and humanity. His only regret
was that he had learned to shoot arrows.
Serendipity
A young man, in the confusion and embarrassment of youth, was walking
across the campus of a great university on the way to his philosophy
class. At the previous meeting, the professor had posed the
question, "If we do not know the purpose of something, how can we
know whether any aspect of it is good or bad?" This question,
together with the problem for the day, "Does man have a purpose?" had
taken complete occupation of the young man's mind, not because of any
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: But is he not very rare?
Oh no: he comes to Devonshire and Cornwall with the mackerel, as
he has come here; and in calm weather he will swim on the top of
the water, and play about, and catch flies, and stand bolt upright
with his long nose in the air; and when the fisher-boys throw him
a stick, he will jump over it again and again, and play with it in
the most ridiculous way.
And what will they do with him?
Cut him up for bait, I suppose, for he is not very good to eat.
Certainly, he does smell very nasty.
Have you only just found out that? Sometimes when I have caught
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: authority of mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall
probably do is to seek to discredit that of philosophy.
Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is nothing but an
affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment, or on that
vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of which in my second
lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so many examples.
It is essentially private and individualistic; it always exceeds
our powers of formulation; and although attempts to pour its
contents into a philosophic mould will probably always go on, men
being what they are, yet these attempts are always secondary
processes which in no way add to the authority, or warrant the
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