| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: numberless bad arguments which have been pressed into the service of
theology, they say, like the companions of Socrates, 'What argument can we
ever trust again?' But there is a better and higher spirit to be gathered
from the Phaedo, as well as from the other writings of Plato, which says
that first principles should be most constantly reviewed (Phaedo and
Crat.), and that the highest subjects demand of us the greatest accuracy
(Republic); also that we must not become misologists because arguments are
apt to be deceivers.
2. In former ages there was a customary rather than a reasoned belief in
the immortality of the soul. It was based on the authority of the Church,
on the necessity of such a belief to morality and the order of society, on
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: want of air.'
"We tried. We battened down everything, and still
she smoked. The smoke kept coming out through im-
perceptible crevices; it forced itself through bulkheads
and covers; it oozed here and there and everywhere in
slender threads, in an invisible film, in an incomprehen-
sible manner. It made its way into the cabin, into the
forecastle; it poisoned the sheltered places on the deck,
it could be sniffed as high as the mainyard. It was
clear that if the smoke came out the air came in. This
was disheartening. This combustion refused to be stifled.
Youth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: ambitious tyrants better than benevolent despots, and that, if
once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla
Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only chance
of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy
Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he
believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet
conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing
for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes,
his first exploit must be to sweep the gods and their ordinances
from the path of the heroic will.
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