| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: body and soul feel together, and this feeling is termed consciousness. And
memory is the preservation of consciousness, and reminiscence is the
recovery of consciousness. Now the memory of pleasure, when a man is in
pain, is the memory of the opposite of his actual bodily state, and is
therefore not in the body, but in the mind. And there may be an
intermediate state, in which a person is balanced between pleasure and
pain; in his body there is want which is a cause of pain, but in his mind a
sure hope of replenishment, which is pleasant. (But if the hope be
converted into despair, he has two pains and not a balance of pain and
pleasure.) Another question is raised: May not pleasures, like opinions,
be true and false? In the sense of being real, both must be admitted to be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: but with us it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed
writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans
it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen
and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual
fog which stands for clearness among these people.
For surely it is NOT clearness--it necessarily can't
be clearness. Even a jury would have penetration enough
to discover that. A writer's ideas must be a good
deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence,
when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor's
wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Britain by Washington Irving: events would take place. This strange conjunction, it seems, has
as strangely come to pass. The same architect has been engaged
lately on the repairs of the cupola of the Exchange, and the
steeple of Bow church; and, fearful to relate, the dragon and
the grasshopper actually lie, cheek by jole, in the yard of his
workshop.
"Others," as Mr. Skryme is accustomed to say, "may go star-
gazing, and look for conjunctions in the heavens, but here is a
conjunction on the earth, near at home, and under our own eyes,
which surpasses all the signs and calculations of astrologers."
Since these portentous weathercocks have thus laid their heads
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