| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: together sight...And of this kind I spoke as the intelligible...' so far as
the thought contained in it admits of being translated into the terms of
modern philosophy, may be described or explained as follows:--There is a
truth, one and self-existent, to which by the help of a ladder let down
from above, the human intelligence may ascend. This unity is like the sun
in the heavens, the light by which all things are seen, the being by which
they are created and sustained. It is the IDEA of good. And the steps of
the ladder leading up to this highest or universal existence are the
mathematical sciences, which also contain in themselves an element of the
universal. These, too, we see in a new manner when we connect them with
the idea of good. They then cease to be hypotheses or pictures, and become
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Vision Splendid by William MacLeod Raine: "If necessary you had better eliminate Big Tim. Or at least put
him and his gang in the background. Make the machine respectable
so that good citizens can indorse it."
James nodded agreement. "I've been thinking about that. The thing
can be done. A business men's movement from inside the party to
purify it. A reorganization with new men in charge. That sort of
thing."
"Exactly. And how about the state?"
"Things don't look good to me."
"Why not?"
"This initiative and referendum idea is spreading."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: absolute purity of the protagonist raises the entire scheme to a
height of romantic art from which the sufferings of Thebes and
Pelops' line are by their very horror excluded, and shows how wrong
Aristotle was when he said in his treatise on the drama that it
would be impossible to bear the spectacle of one blameless in pain.
Nor in AEschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in
Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the
whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world
is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more
than the life of a flower, is there anything that, for sheer
simplicity of pathos wedded and made one with sublimity of tragic
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