| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: between them, without any great discredit.
THEAETETUS: Very good.
STRANGER: Let us enquire, then, how we come to predicate many names of the
same thing.
THEAETETUS: Give an example.
STRANGER: I mean that we speak of man, for example, under many names--that
we attribute to him colours and forms and magnitudes and virtues and vices,
in all of which instances and in ten thousand others we not only speak of
him as a man, but also as good, and having numberless other attributes, and
in the same way anything else which we originally supposed to be one is
described by us as many, and under many names.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Rig Veda: all? what hymn, O Indra?
5 Yea, here were they who, born of old, have served thee, thy
friends
of ancient time, thou active Worker.
Bethink thee now of these, Invoked of many! the midmost and
the
recent, and the youngest.
6 Inquiring after him, thy later servants, Indra, have gained
thy
former old traditions.
Hero, to whom the prayer is brought, we praise thee as great
 The Rig Veda |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Professor by Charlotte Bronte: think, much regret, as it contained little hope or comfort for
her.
"My father's relations took charge of Edward, as they did of me,
till I was nine years old. At that period it chanced that the
representation of an important borough in our county fell vacant;
Mr. Seacombe stood for it. My uncle Crimsworth, an astute
mercantile man, took the opportunity of writing a fierce letter
to the candidate, stating that if he and Lord Tynedale did not
consent to do something towards the support of their sister's
orphan children, he would expose their relentless and malignant
conduct towards that sister, and do his best to turn the
 The Professor |