| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or
in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider
affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions
fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our
conviction, for indeed it HAS to find them. It amplifies and
defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and
plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure
it.[292]
[292] As regards the secondary character of intellectual
constructions, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in
founding religious beliefs see the striking work of H. Fielding,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: a handful of prickly husks and went on eating the contents.
I noted this with satisfaction, for here at least was a hint for feeding.
I tried him with some other questions, but his chattering, prompt responses
were as often as not quite at cross purposes with my question.
Some few were appropriate, others quite parrot-like.
I was so intent upon these peculiarities that I scarcely noticed the path
we followed. Presently we came to trees, all charred and brown,
and so to a bare place covered with a yellow-white incrustation,
across which a drifting smoke, pungent in whiffs to nose and eyes,
went drifting. On our right, over a shoulder of bare rock, I saw
the level blue of the sea. The path coiled down abruptly into a narrow
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: To make all Stratford 'ware of him. Well, well,
I hope at last he'll have his joy of it,
And all his pigs and sheep and bellowing beeves,
And frogs and owls and unicorns, moreover,
Be less than hell to his attendant ears.
Oh, past a doubt we'll all go down to see him.
He may be wise. With London two days off,
Down there some wind of heaven may yet revive him;
But there's no quickening breath from anywhere
Shall make of him again the poised young faun
From Warwickshire, who'd made, it seems, already
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