| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: either in the first or second place, and does not, if I may trust my own
mind, attain even to the third.
PROTARCHUS: Truly, Socrates, pleasure appears to me to have had a fall; in
fighting for the palm, she has been smitten by the argument, and is laid
low. I must say that mind would have fallen too, and may therefore be
thought to show discretion in not putting forward a similar claim. And if
pleasure were deprived not only of the first but of the second place, she
would be terribly damaged in the eyes of her admirers, for not even to them
would she still appear as fair as before.
SOCRATES: Well, but had we not better leave her now, and not pain her by
applying the crucial test, and finally detecting her?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare: Was this a lover, or a lecher whether?
Bad in the best, though excellent in neither.
VIII.
If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs, the sister and the brother,
Then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me,
Because thou lovest the one, and I the other.
Dowland to thee is dear, whose heavenly touch
Upon the lute doth ravish human sense;
Spenser to me, whose deep conceit is such
As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: the gases in the two tubes. When one tube was filled with oxygen,
and the other with nitrogen, on the supervention of the magnetic
force, the oxygen was pulled towards the axis, the nitrogen being
pushed out. By turning the torsion-head they could be restored to
their primitive position of equidistance, where it is evident the
action of the glass envelopes was annulled. The amount of torsion
necessary to re-establish equidistance expressed the magnetic
difference of the substances compared.
And then he compared oxygen with oxygen at different pressures.
One of his tubes contained the gas at the pressure of 30 inches of
mercury, another at a pressure of 15 inches of mercury, a third at a
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